Noam Chomsky: Language, Cognition, and Deep Learning

Lex Fridman introduces Noam Chomsky as one of the great minds of our time and one of the most cited scholars in history, with over 60 years at MIT and a recent move to the University of Arizona, where the conversation took place. He recalls first meeting Chomsky at MIT about four and a half years earlier, when they found themselves alone in an elevator at the Stata Center.

He explains that he flew to Arizona just for this conversation, but after setup and testing the camera was moved and the record button accidentally pressed, stopping the recording. He therefore has good audio of both speakers but no video of Chomsky, and only footage of himself.

Fridman describes the podcast as a side project to his main goal of building AI systems that do good, says he has begun placing one or two minutes of ads at the end of the introduction and none mid-conversation, and reads a sponsor message for Cash App that mentions fractional stock purchases and a donation to the FIRST robotics and LEGO competition organization.

Asked whether an alien species could share a communication protocol with us, Chomsky cites an experiment by Marvin Minsky and his student Dan Bobrow, who ran the simplest possible Turing machines. Most crashed or looped; the few that persisted produced something like arithmetic. Minsky concluded that any species with higher intelligence would at least have arithmetic. Chomsky adds that the core principles of natural language are based on operations that yield something like arithmetic in the limiting case, so communication based on shared core properties is conceivable.