Films and talks

Automatically transcribed; corrections are welcome.

across the wire or over the air, and it was what it was.

There were no changes, there was no influence,

there was no feedback.

And yet, this system would allow me to do things

and cause shapes and colors and characters

to change on screen.

So that blew my mind.

I didn't remember much else at that age,

but this I didn't forget.

That this is a device that makes what is fixed fungible.

The second thing that happened was that the application that

was running on the Commodore at the time was Hangman.

And we were all familiar with Hangman, hopefully.

At the time, though, my sister and I

were exposed to Hangman for the first time.

And I told you she was smart.

So what she started doing was she started using vowels.

And nobody had told us to do this.

And I think it was my aunt who was with us.

She said, oh look, what a smart little girl

she's using vowels.

And that also, and of course, there

was a little bit of sibling rivalry going on as well.

She had been called smart, and I was sitting here

in the corner stewing a little bit.

But that told me that there are smart ways to solve problems.

There are these things called heuristics,

and there are these things called algorithms.

And in one evening, I'd been introduced

to two supremely powerful concepts, programmability,

Automatically transcribed; corrections are welcome.

is a conceptual framework.

It has nothing to do with this monitor, and that CD-ROM,

and this keyboard.

It's a way of thinking.

And when you think this way, you start

to grapple with notions of what is discrete,

and what is continuous, and what is infinite,

and what is uncountably infinite, and is that even a thing.

And so I started wondering about all of these things.

And I also realized, because I had gotten

so interested in all of this, that, in fact,

Ed Fredkin wasn't the first who came up with this idea.

Konrad Zuse had asked the same question.

And then in the early 2000s, Stephen Wolfram

wrote his famous book, A New Kind of Science,

where he talked about some of these things.

And even after that, Max Tegmark, a physicist,

wrote his book, A Mathematical Universe,

and he explored some of these concepts.

But of course, along with all these great minds,

my mediocre mind was also thinking about these things.

And right around the time I was leaving UT,

this would be back in 1999, I wrote this.

I just was obsessed.

I came back home one day and I said, you know what?

I'm just going to write this all down.

I've been thinking about it for three years.

I've got to put it all down.

I wrote this long essay on my exploration

of whether the universe is a computer.

And I thought about things like pointers, abstractions

like pointers, and whether they could

explain phenomena like action at a distance.

And all these wild and crazy things.

But to me.

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that is titled Warfare and AI.

Join me for a thought experiment,

originally published in the US Naval Institute's

Proceedings Journal, and conceived of by my friend

and collaborator, General John Allen,

of the United States Marine Corps,

a four-star general and past deputy commander

of US Central Command.

It is January 2, 2018, and a captain is contemplating

damage to his ship after a surprise attack.

This, however, was no ordinary attack.

He is about to discover that this was a massive,

widespread strategic surprise.

Our captain and his crew had not anticipated

the incoming swarm because neither he nor his ship

recognized that their systems were under cyber attack.

The undetected cyber activity not only compromised

the sensors but locked out defensive systems,

leaving the ship almost entirely helpless.

The kinetic strikes came in waves as a complex swarm

of drones tore into the ship.

It was attacked by a cloud of autonomous systems

moving together with purpose,

yet also dynamically reacting to one another

and to the ship.

More than anything, the speed of the attack

stunned an overwhelming...

Automatically transcribed; corrections are welcome.

Well, one thing we know pretty well is that, you know, our brain fits into a relatively

small cranium and consumes about 20 watts.

It's very, very efficient.

It has a very large number of neurons.

It has a very large number of connections.

But for all of its efficiency and size, et cetera, it's not really substantially going

to consume more than 20 watts in its present form.

Well, we don't have a computer that's as efficient as a brain yet.

We do know that our computers can consume much more than 20 watts.

They don't have to sit inside a physical cranium that's the size of ours.

Perfect recall, which is that, and this is interesting because, you know, we tend to

sort of live in the moment, we get what we need from that experience, and we tend to

forget.

And in many ways, this is good for us.

It's good for us, actually, because it avoids overload.

And this is common with another thing that we do, which is very aggressive pruning.

So we tend to go down certain solutions, and we tend to discard things that sound ridiculous

to us.

So the reason why that move that Lee Sedol and others found so magical, even all the commentators

that were great practitioners of go, was because it just was one of those things that they

were willing to discard.

Nobody's done this before.

I've never done this before.

In this situation, why the hell would you ever do this before?