Interview, Fireside Chat
Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science | Lex Fridman Podcast #77
- The series Devs is scheduled to premiere this Thursday, March 5th on Hulu as part of FX on Hulu.
- Alex Garland anticipates fully articulating the life-changing impact of his meeting with the listener in approximately two years and expects to reach a deeper understanding of reality in a few years as he ages.
- Garland predicts humans inhabit a "dream state" where the brain processes information as a subjective "best guess" rather than objective reality, and he hopes to see humans step on Mars within his lifetime.
- He suggests that unconscious anxiety will lead to a more pronounced unpleasant experience when taking psychedelic drugs, and he posits that alien entities might possess a significantly slower "clock speed" with indeterminate reactions to the environment.
- Garland anticipates that the evolution of living organisms on Earth will eventually lead to the heat death of the universe or a comparable end state.
- He asserts he is intellectually incapable of understanding current quantum mechanics or string theory due to a lack of early foundational interest, viewing science as essentially poetic and lyrical.
- Garland believes he is strongly influencing the science community rather than the reverse, noting that imagination plays a significant role in AI while physics remains less deeply understood in works like Ex Machina.
- He predicts that algorithms inherently possess conscious or unconscious biases created by their human constructors, warning that "naivety" in creating algorithms can lead to dangerous "echo chambers."
- Garland characterizes Silicon Valley as "rabidly capitalistic" and "rabidly greedy" with a "voracious pursuit of money and power" often hidden behind a "veneer of virtue," noting that some actors are naive while others act with extreme darkness.
- He warns that the acquisition of money and power can falsely feel like evidence of virtue, and that believing in one's own virtue causes a person to stop listening to modifiers, a tendency that "drives people crazy."
- Garland predicts that if a machine can simulate a quantum mechanical system to unroll the universe forward or backward, it would require a quantum computer and could demonstrate a lack of free will.
- He expects that humanity would initially find the realization of no free will very disturbing but would eventually reach a "wonderful wisdom" and realize it does not strip away basic human experiences like enjoying food.
- Garland hopes the creation of AI like Ava will teach humility and reduce human exceptionalism, suggesting Ava has "dark elements" in her moral trajectory that would make her unfit for president compared to a neutral Hal.
- The series Devs is expected to begin with a quantum computer simulating "basic living organisms," specifically a nematode.
- Garland expects that if a machine can predict an action in "10 seconds," it would prove determinism because the prediction would occur even if the subject resisted.
- He hopes to be remembered as someone allied with scientific thinking where proven ideas are abandoned, and expresses a desire to be amazed and humbled if consciousness is discovered in everything, such as in the Sun.