“There’s no realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity. It’s like a mix of sci-fi.” — Richard Socher
Eighteen months ago, when he last came on the show, the German-born but San Francisco-based AI whizz kid Richard Socher was running You.com. He’s now also the co-founder of Recursive, a $4 billion start-up with fewer than thirty employees, focused on self-improving superintelligence that automates the scientific method. As if that isn’t enough, he has a new book out this week, The Eureka Machine, which argues that AI is the key to unlocking an era of scientific discoveries equal to a combination of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
The tech entrepreneur sleeps, he confesses, about seven hours a night and works up to a hundred hours a week. Not a lot of time, I suspect, for fun. But then for Socher, his real fun seems to lie in the AI Eureka Machine that will, he promises, generate such magical products as plastic-eating bacteria, fusion reactors, and cures for cancer.
So what about the imminent apocalypse feared by the AI pessimists? Socher patiently dismantles the doom scenarios — everything from the paperclip machine that somehow never notices nobody is buying paperclips, to the engineered virus that would need a Wi-Fi switch inside a protein, to the robot factory with magical supply chains. Rather than an AI doomsday, he promises, we are only a few years away from the most profound scientific revolution in human history. Richard Socher better get some sleep now. Apocalypse or Renaissance, the AI maven is going to be seriously busy in the future.
Five Takeaways
• A Century in a Decade. AI is to biology what calculus was to physics — plastic-eating bacteria, new battery materials, fusion plasma, cancer precursors. And the billionaire and the teenager carry the same phone.
• Recursive. Fewer than thirty employees, over $4 billion, built to automate the scientific method itself. Computing climbed from assembler to English; the next layer up is science. A cheat code, he calls it.
• Taking the Doom Apart. The paperclip machine that never notices nobody’s buying; the virus that needs a Wi-Fi switch inside a protein. And Hinton, an optimist who overshot and will backpedal again.
• Can It Think? We have definitions for the outcomes of thinking, not for thinking. The danger is in subgoals — tell an AI to raise satisfaction scores and it builds a million bots to rate itself.
• A Gym for the Mind. He used to favour UBI and no longer does. Half of education should be a gym for the mind: you can have a robot lift the weights, but you don’t get the muscle.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
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Buy The Eureka Machine: hachettebookgroup.com
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: eighteen months, two companies and a book
00:02:48 Recursive: automating the scientific method
00:03:48 Couldn’t you be more ambitious?
00:04:45 Coal, Chernobyl and the cost of fear
00:05:30 A century of breakthroughs in a decade
00:07:45 Has the zeitgeist shifted against optimists?
00:09:05 Geoffrey Hinton, and the optimism that overshot
00:11:33 Bernie Sanders, Steve Bannon and the Overton window
00:13:20 Is Silicon Valley explaining AI badly?
00:15:56 Regulatory capture and the safety researchers
00:16:38 Paperclips, viruses and magical supply chains
00:21:16 Can AI think for itself?
00:22:15 Subgoals: the million bots and the gift certificates
00:25:14 Why we can’t define thinking
00:26:52 Why write a book?
00:27:47 AIX Ventures, organoids and animal lives
00:30:09 Why is America so pessimistic?
00:31:21 The next five years: cancer, plastics, fusion
00:36:57 What becomes of scientists?
00:37:47 From assembler to English — and beyond
00:40:01 Marx, UBI and the meaning of work
00:44:08 A gym for the mind
00:44:49 Paramotoring, photography and forest bathing
00:46:03 Why he won’t go back to Germany