Steven Pinker: AI in the Age of Reason

Lex Fridman opens with a multiple-choice question on the meaning of life, listing knowledge (Plato), power (Nietzsche), escaping death (Ernest Becker), propagating genes (Darwin), no meaning (the nihilists), the meaning being beyond our cognition (his reading of Pinker 20 years earlier), or none of the above. Pinker says knowledge comes closest, but amends it to attaining fulfillment more generally: life, health, stimulation and access to the living cultural and social world.

He distinguishes this human meaning from the meaning of our genes, which is to propagate copies of themselves and differs from what the brains they build set for themselves. Knowledge is a large subset of human striving but not all of it, since people also want to interact with others, experience beauty and the richness of nature; understanding what makes the universe tick is, for him, in the top five.

Asked whether reason is fundamental to human nature or something to strive for, Pinker answers both. Homo sapiens is unusual in how much it acquires knowledge and uses it to survive: making tools, striking agreements through language, extracting poisons, predicting animals and understanding plants, which is how the species occupied every niche and drove other animals to extinction. Refining reason in pursuit of wellbeing, health and cultural richness is, he says, our main present challenge.

Fridman cites How the Mind Works, where Pinker conjectured that thought emerges from a massive network of interconnected neurons, and asks whether biological networks are fundamentally more mysterious than artificial ones. Pinker says the one mystery is consciousness in the sense of subjective, first-person, present-tense experience, such as the felt redness of red. Whether an artificial system would experience it he does not know and thinks he cannot know, including for a robot behaviorally indistinguishable from a human.