Hod Lipson - Beyond Biology: AGI Minds in Competition (Worthy Successor, Episode 32)

This is Daniel Fagella. You're tuned into The Trajectory, and this is the 32nd episode of our Worthy Successor series, where we think about the permutations of life that we'd hope to be able to bloom beyond humanity when we're long gone. We've had many different speakers with different backgrounds here, from a Mike Eleven in biology and an Ed Boyden in neuroscience to a... Nick Bostrom is more of a philosopher. Yashua Bengio, many, many an interesting speaker. Robotics hasn't been a main push for guests on this series. I suspect that'll change over time. But in this particular episode, we go right to a leading thinker in robotics who's been for decades pushing the limits on what robots can do. And in my opinion, has some of the most sharp ideas. ideas around where robotics and AI are ultimately going to take us, and that is Hod Lipson. Hod is a leading thinker in the domain of robotics and even artificial life. He is also the director for the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, where he's taught for a great many years. In this particular episode, we go in with Hod and get his conception of sort of where AI is taking us and what kinds of life he would hope to kind of blossom beyond us. He brings up an interesting quote that'll sort of open the doors for us here, that if we expect to sort of wake up AI and tell it to solve for cancer and solve for energy, but not really care for its own needs or solve any of its own unique problems, that that's probably an untenable position. And that almost certainly the conjuring of what we are going to conjure will force us rather rapidly to co-evolve with it as there really won't be any other choice. A remarkable degree of frankness from someone who has an academic position. Not everybody's as frank as he is. I enjoyed this episode a lot. I hope you will as well. I'm going to save my comments as usual to the end of this episode. So stick around for that. Without further ado, let's dive in. This is Hod Lipson here on The Trajectory. Sohad, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack with your thought. And before we dive into the worthy successor questions, I sort of want to unpack the way that you think about intelligence. I think what separated your work from a lot of other thinkers in my book is sort of a grounded grasp of like what intelligence is as sort of an expanding process. And so I'd love to have you maybe open us up with when you think about intelligence itself, how How do you explain it conceptually? And then maybe we can get into some of the subcomponents here before diving into the bigger worthy successor questions.

All right. Well, that's a very, very big question that you just asked. There's a lot going on under this umbrella of intelligence. But for me, there's a couple of interesting aspects. The first one I would say is the fact that intelligence is not just one thing. It's not that we're trying to build a chat GPT or this or that. It's a whole kingdom, right? It's a new kingdom of life that has different forms of intelligence, just like life on Earth right now has intelligence in lots of different forms. So that's one thing, and we can talk about