Michael Nielsen on Collaboration, Quantum Computing, and Civilization's Fragility

This episode explores the intersection of quantum computing, collaboration, and the broader impacts on civilization.

1. Quantum Computing's Progress: Nielsen discusses the significant strides in quantum computing, highlighting the ongoing challenges and the future potential of this technology in solving complex problems.
2. Collaboration in Science: He emphasizes the importance of collaboration in scientific endeavors and how diverse perspectives enhance the discovery process.
3. Civilization's Fragility: The discussion touches on the vulnerabilities of civilization to technological developments, particularly the risks associated with quantum technologies and AI.
4. Interdisciplinary Insights: Nielsen shares his interdisciplinary approach, blending physics, philosophy, and technology, which provides a comprehensive understanding of the topics discussed.
5. Impact of Quantum Computing on Society: He speculates on the societal changes that quantum computing could bring, including its implications for security and economics.

1. Introduction

Tyler Cowen introduces Michael Nielsen, highlighting his contributions to quantum computing and open science. The chapter sets the stage for a deep dive into the complexities of modern scientific challenges.

• Michael Nielsen: "Quantum computing is not just about technology; it's about the fundamental understanding of the universe."

2. Quantum Computing and Its Future

Nielsen elaborates on the current state of quantum computing, its challenges, and its potential to revolutionize various fields by enabling complex simulations.

• Michael Nielsen: "The future of quantum computing is bright, albeit filled with technical hurdles that we are gradually overcoming."

3. Collaboration and Scientific Progress

This chapter discusses the critical role of collaboration in scientific progress and how it has shaped Nielsen's career and research.

• Michael Nielsen: "Collaboration is not just about sharing ideas; it's about challenging and enhancing each other's understanding."

4. Civilization's Vulnerabilities

Nielsen and Cowen explore the broader implications of technological advances, particularly how they might expose civilization to new risks.

• Michael Nielsen: "As we advance technologically, we must also be cautious of the vulnerabilities we create."

5. Concluding Thoughts

The episode wraps up with reflections on the conversation and thoughts on the continuous interaction between science, technology, and society.

• Michael Nielsen: "Every technological advance brings new challenges, but also new opportunities to improve our world."

1. Engage with diverse disciplines: As demonstrated by Nielsen, engaging with concepts from various fields can enrich one’s understanding and creativity.
2. Stay informed about technological advances: Understanding the basics of quantum computing and its developments can be crucial as its impact on society grows.
3. Cultivate collaboration: Actively seek collaborative opportunities as they can lead to significant breakthroughs and innovation.
4. Consider the ethical implications of technology: Reflect on how technological advancements can affect society and take steps to mitigate potential risks.
5. Foster a culture of continuous learning: The rapid pace of technological change necessitates a commitment to lifelong learning and adaptability.

Michael Nielsen is a scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He's worked at Y Combinator, co-authored on scientific progress with Patrick Collison, and is a prolific writer, reader, commentator, and mentor.

He joined Tyler to discuss why the universe is so beautiful to human eyes (but not ears), how to find good collaborators, the influence of Simone Weil, where Olaf Stapledon's understand of the social word went wrong, potential applications of quantum computing, the (rising) status of linear algebra, what makes for physicists who age well, finding young mentors, why some scientific fields have pre-print platforms and others don't, how so many crummy journals survive, the threat of cheap nukes, the many unknowns of Mars colonization, techniques for paying closer attention, what you learn when visiting the USS Midway, why he changed his mind about Emergent Ventures, why he didn't join OpenAI in 2015, what he'll learn next, and more.

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Michael Nielsen, Tyler Cowen

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Tyler Cowen
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hello, everyone, and welcome back to conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here in San Francisco chatting with Michael Nielsen. Michael is hard to introduce and also difficult to prepare for because he knows and has done so many different things. He's from Australia, has a PhD in physics, has written what is perhaps the best known text, or co authored it on quantum computing, is one of the leaders of the open science movement, has co authored with Patrick Collison on progress in science, has worked at Y Combinator, is an extraordinarily prolific writer, reader, commentator, tweeter, mentor to others, mentee, and many other things, and currently is thinking about the fragility of civilization and much more. Michael, welcome.

Michael Nielsen
Thank you so much, Tyler. So you were saying there should have been a metaculus on the opening question, why is the universe beautiful to human eyes? Is it selection? I have no idea. I mean, selection is a very attractive kind of an idea.

I mean, kind of to think, not just instinctively, but yeah, I don't know. Why are there simple rules? Why do we have simple rules governing the universe? In fact, why is simplicity, and arguably truth, somehow associated to beauty? Physicists tend to assert that this is the case, but I don't think anybody really knows the reason why.

Tyler Cowen
How beautiful do we in fact think the universe is? So people don't buy paintings of the universe. People like you might. Right. But it's.

Michael Nielsen
Oh, I have a painting. I have the Hubble deep field on my wall, of course. But the most expensive paintings are not of the universe. They're of people. They're of boating scenes.

Tyler Cowen
Right? I don't think that's really true. I mean, the James Webb space telescope was about, I think was $10 billion. Yes. And is arguably a machine for producing that kind of image.

Michael Nielsen
It's got to be one of the most important sort of image factories and most expensive image factories ever made. So I'm not sure I buy that. What's the most beautiful image of the universe? The image of. We have a sort of a sequence of improved images of the three degree microwave background.

Is, I don't know, is it the most beautiful? It's maybe the most extraordinary. It really is sort of a photograph of the universe as a whole. You can look at that and it says something about structure out in creation. Why do the sounds of the universe not appeal to us so much?

Tyler Cowen
Right. So it's beautiful visually, but orally, we create very complicated things which we call music, which are beautiful. Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know why music is beautiful. People have made attempts.

Michael Nielsen
There's things like sort of chirp sounds that might be produced near a black hole and sort of ideas like this. And you're right, they tend not to be all that, all that beautiful. The only ones that I can think of that sort of offhand, it's being produced by evolution. Birdsong is beautiful, but we're actually quite closely related to birds. So it's maybe not so surprising if I think about things like what's his name?

Ron Sexsmith, I think his name is. A composer in Toronto, has made these musical pieces based on the different periods in the solar system. So the time that the earth takes the one year to go around the sun, but also then Mars and Jupiter and all these, and they are noticeably not particularly attractive musical pieces. So, yeah, that's a good question. I wonder if the beauty of light isn't part of the reason for the beauty of the universe.

Tyler Cowen
So as human beings, maybe we're evolved to be attracted to light. It gives you an integrated theory of the beauty of the universe and beauty of paintings. Vermeer, a great painter, he's very attractive to people because of how he uses light. When you look at the universe, you're typically seeing signatures of light. In many cases, you look at the Milky Way.

Right. It's pretty strange. I mean, we see in such a tiny band of wavelengths, we're really not seeing almost anything. We're not seeing into the infrared and the radio. We're not seeing into the ultraviolet and the x ray.

Michael Nielsen
So a lot of what we view as beautiful locally, I mean, it's got this sort of evolutionary explanation, again, why the large scale structure is beautiful.

Okay. I can maybe attempt to sort of. I partially believe this explanation, which is that we do seem to be sort of programmed to recognize and find attractive instinctively. Novelty, which is associated to structure somehow. And so we look and we see spiral galaxies or things like that.

It's reflecting something which is interesting. We don't necessarily know quite what, but maybe there's kind of an evolutionary explanation for why that is attractive, at least. But I can apply that explanation to your question about sound. It's equally as good, and unfortunately, it just doesn't seem to hold there. So I'd be.

I'm not that confident. Now, you've written that in the first half of your life, you typically were the youngest person in your circle, and that in the second half of your life, which is probably now, you're typically the oldest person in your circle. How would you model that as a claim about you? I hope I'm in the first 5% of my life, but it's sadly unlikely. You're 50 now, and you live to 100.

Tyler Cowen
Right. Which is plausible. Which is plausible. You would now be in the second half of your life. Yeah, I mean, I can give shallow reasons.

Michael Nielsen
I can't give good reasons. The good reason in the first half was so much of the work I was doing was kind of new fields of science, and those tend to be dominated essentially for sort of almost sunk cost reasons. People who don't have any sunk costs tend to be younger. They go into these fields. So this kind of early days of quantum computing, early days of open science, they were dominated by people in their twenties, and then they'd sort of go off and become faculty members.

They'd be the youngest person on the faculty. Now, maybe it's just because I found San Francisco and it's such an interesting cultural institution or sort of achievement of civilization. We've got this amplifier for 25 year olds that lets them make dreams in the world, and that's for me, anyway, for a person with my personality, very attractive for many of the same reasons. Let's say you had a theory of your collaborators, and other than, yes, they're smart, they work hard, but trying to pin down in as few dimensions as possible, who's likely to become a collaborator of yours? After taking into account the obvious, what's your theory of your own collaborators?

They're all extremely open to experience. They're all extremely curious, they're all extremely parasocial, they're all extremely ambitious, they're all extremely imaginative. And do you think that ends up pairing you with collaborators who are more different than you? So a lot of collaborators are very similar, and then other types are very different. So almost always, as well, I will select for somebody who has at least one very strong skill, which I do not have.

And that's sort of enough diversity from my point of view, and that may. Account for some of the age differences throughout your life. But also, then there's also just this local selection effect. When I live in the Bay Area, there's a lot of really amazing 29 year olds around. It's just incredible.

Tyler Cowen
I was told to ask, what's the influence of Simone Weil on you? Oh, what an interesting question. She's one of maybe the best examples of sincerity that I know of. The fact that she wrote what she wrote for herself, she wasn't attempting to get published. It was just this deep internal colloquy that was going on, and it's reflected in every aspect of her life.

Michael Nielsen
You know, she went off to fight in Spain at a time when women did not go off to fight in Spain. Everything that she did, she did it at 500 miles an hour. She's remarkable as kind of. She's an extreme, very extreme type of a human being in a way that I find very interesting. If you and she collaborated, what would it be on?

I don't think. Gosh, I'm sure she was a difficult person, although her brother, Andre Weil, was a very great mathematician. And you can sort of see in some of the stories about the two of them that she must have quite liked the sort of scientist types. Maybe we would have found something to collaborate on. Why is Charles Sanders Peirce still an important thinker?

I don't know enough about Pierce to be able to answer that question. You and I were both fans of Olaf Stapleton, who wrote the duel classics last and first men and star maker. What's the biggest analytical mistake he made in those narratives? So a lot of implausible things happen, right? But those are too simple to point to.

Tyler Cowen
Where is his understanding of the social world going wrong? You know, he was both certainly to some degree, a socialist and certainly a. Pacifist, though in world War Two, he switched out of pacifist. He did, as did many people. I find myself, as I read those books, actually becoming a little bit more sympathetic.

Michael Nielsen
I'm not a priori particularly sympathetic to them. And I start to think he has this very long view of history, I mean, much longer than most people who say they have a long view of history. And I think he sort of. He sees some of his pacifism in that light. It's kind of questions about what's actually good for a species, or in fact, not even a single species, but across multiple species.

Is it good to be pacifist? And that's a really interesting point of view. It's hard to reconcile with kind of a selfish gender kind of a point of view. But of course, this is an ongoing problem in evolutionary biology. It actually seems like group selection doesn't quite work, but something at that level has to be a little bit true.

So if you take that seriously, then maybe his pacifism, which just seems like sort of an outright mistake, maybe it's actually justifiable in some way. Actually, I'm not answering what I've answered, the inverse of your question, which is to justify the bits that I, a priori, find most implausible. But yeah, I think those are mistakes. I worry that he too quickly assumes collective action problems are solved, which is close to your answer. So he thinks the League of Nations can be effective for a long period of time, which I suspect was not really contingently possible.

Tyler Cowen
And he has this hegelian sense. What Hegel would call a national spirit for him is a civilizational or certain stage of man spirit that so shapes how people think. And I hang out with a lot of economists, I think that's much stronger than the economists believe. Your overall view of the world and what's important, but I don't think it's nearly as strong as Stapleton believed. So the way in which collective spirit rules millions, billions or trillions of beings, I feel he's overestimating the efficacy of that.

Michael Nielsen
The comment about the League of Nations is really interesting. I think there's this spirit. At the time, lots of people wanted this idea to work. Lots of his friends would have wanted it. I think it's a shallow kind of, of a mistake that he made there, that your comment about collective action problems seems much more to the heart of it.

I think he didn't really believe in them or actually sort of understand just how difficult they are to solve, how difficult it is to supply public goods and these kind of things. He always does away with it sort of narratively, and it's just assumed away without really a mechanism being given. And he assumes a lot away in those books when the problems are interesting, he usually doesn't, and that problem is interesting, and he still assumes it away. I'm not very sympathetic to that at. All, but I'm not sure how big a mistake league of nations was.

Tyler Cowen
So clearly it didn't work, and I just criticized him for it. But if you think about 1815 up through the first world war almost a century. You have an unprecedented degree of peace in much, not all of Europe, and everyone has just lived through that, and they maybe thought that was not possible, and maybe that is itself still a bit of a mystery. And then there's world war one, and you feel you can get back to some version of what you had, and the League of Nations appears to be the closest path to doing that, and it might have been more plausible at the time. I'm just saying there's a gap between aspiration and what actually happened with the league, and then later with the United Nations.

Michael Nielsen
I think you had the hopes, and then you had what actually happened, and there's a very large gap, although, I mean, of course, as prototypes over the next few centuries. Maybe these things are terrific. Maybe we learn a lot from them. Things like, I don't know whether the Montreal protocol have been possible without the United nations. Probably not.

Tyler Cowen
I have a very concrete question for you, and this is to clear up a confusion of mine. So I've asked experts in quantum computing, what's the status of quantum computing right now? Some of them say we already have it. Some of them say, the others will tell you we already have it, but we don't. Others will say we're on the verge of having it.

And there's two or three other answers. I hear often people who nominally would seem to know what they're talking about. So let me ask you, Michael, what is actually the status of quantum computing right now? I am the wrong person. I am determinedly very agnostic about this.

Michael Nielsen
I stopped, I worked on it from 1992 to 2007, and actually I do keep up with friends. In fact, I'm going to have coffee after this with somebody who's still on the quantum train. It's very impressive progress each year. It is an extremely difficult problem. It's not solved.

There's no way. It's definitely not solved. But the fact that there's sort of order 100 qubit systems, which you can apparently manipulate as you will, suggests to me we just wait. It's going to happen. We don't know what it will mean.

Tyler Cowen
What's your maximum likelihood estimate for the first year when it will do something. Useful, useful to me or useful to civilization? Useful to anyone? The most interesting thing would be to discover that quantum mechanics was wrong from my point of view. The other most interesting thing is probably discovery of new materials.

How would it discover new materials? Just by being able to do simulations very, very rapidly. It's very hard to do simulations of stuff down at the quantum scale. The ways that we have are pretty terrible and often produce wrong results. The fact that we may actually have a very high throughput way of doing lots and lots of simulations which give correct results.

Michael Nielsen
It's like being able to do 1000 times as many experiments as before. That will just speed things up insofar as there's anything to discover. I can't tell you what we'll discover. Will there be quantum money? Will all money be quantum money in this world whenever it comes?

I actually don't know. I mean, there's this old idea of Stephen Wiesner, which he called quantum money. It's meant to be uncounterfitable. I don't know. But isn't everything else counterfeitable if quantum computing is up and running?

Tyler Cowen
And thus you need a quantum money to protect against just sheer counterfeiting? Most of the 19th century monies, they were often counterfeit. We don't know the exact percentage, but we believe it was quite high. Yeah, well, it's still true in the world today. Never mind the 19th century as we've talked about before, I won't be surprised if we end up with systems like that.

Michael Nielsen
It's hard to make it stable. That's the issue. But my guess is that in the long run, we actually will find ways of making quantum systems surprisingly stable. That's speculation on my part. But if I come back in 100 years time, and that's true, we may just have quantum coherence everywhere.

Tyler Cowen
Do you think that leads to a mass privatization of a lot of social activity? So something like AI, we're in San Francisco, the private sector does it? No, government is really close to doing it. Right. You have to pay high salaries, hire the most talented people.

So if AI and quantum computing are done by the private sector, what is government in that world? I don't know. I mean, it's an interesting fact that work on nuclear weapons was actually nationalized in, I think, 1948 or something like that. So potentially that's just one answer, right? Sort of contingently.

But that seems more of a brute force thing. Sure. Than what to say. OpenAI is done. I'm just saying that's a potential outcome, I think quite a plausible potential outcome.

Michael Nielsen
I don't think it's likely, but it's not 99% unlikely either. Yeah, I mean, that's certainly. It's kind of a very Neil postman point of view. You have this basically, you almost. Larry Lessig code is law.

You just keep building more and more sort of governance infrastructure into the technology, and you're moving it out of the hands of the population and into the technology. And that seems to be certainly the story of the last hundred years. And very likely the story of the next hundred years. Is the status of linear algebra rising? That's a great question.

It probably has, yeah. It's prominent in quantum, right? It's prominent in AI. Google is built on matrix multiplication. It's prominent for a lot of reasons.

Tyler Cowen
What should we infer from that about the whole nature of the world? So if differential equations were rising in status to a similar degree, we might infer one set of things. But linear algebra, you almost feel a bit more grounded, don't you? Yeah, because when I took that class, I felt I understood it. I never quite know what your status questions mean, Tyler.

Michael Nielsen
I don't know what it means for something to rise in status. Well, AI now seems more important than it did five years ago, and matrix multiplication is a big part of that. If quantum computing happens as you're predicting it will, well, that, I think, would also make matrix algebra rise in status. Like, oh, this is a really important tool. It's behind all our quantum money.

Do you mean it's going to have more money? Go to it. More power? Go to it. More glamour?

Go to it. Are people going to regard this as sexy or what? But you would revise your ideas about the fundamental nature of the universe, just like our current understanding of quantum mechanics. It might be incorrect, but at least in the short run, it seems like probability theory is somehow more important than Einstein might have thought. And as you know, he famously asserted, God is not playing dice with the universe, perhaps incorrectly.

I mean, the people who remake this understanding are very good at ignoring status, but others aren't. But others aren't, I think I'm inclined to think. I mean, maybe I don't care. I actually just don't care that much. I mean, if you're searching for comparative advantage and doing creative work, you want to know where status is, but mostly so you can avoid it.

Tyler Cowen
Yeah, absolutely. Be short. Status as Peter. That's well put. Yeah.

Is there any chance Roger Penrose is right and the human brain is some kind of quantum computer? I would love it if he was right. I think the answer, unfortunately, is not really. No. It's only possible that there's some very interesting structure in there that is quantum mechanical in some really interesting way.

Michael Nielsen
I mean, lots of structure in there is quantum mechanical. The reason why atoms are stable has to do with quantum mechanical, all these sorts of things. But an interesting, unsuspected way that would be terrific, and I think is not completely out of the question, but it probably doesnt affect anything about consciousness or anything like that. I would be very surprised if that were the case. How are we going to make progress toward a theory of quantum gravity, a general understanding of everything?

Tyler Cowen
We seem to be stuck. Many people hate string theory. Many people hate Everett. Many worlds. Those seem to be two major contenders.

Where are we at and what's going to happen next? One fun reason for working on quantum computing is you're trying to build the most, the largest scale, fully quantum coherent systems that have ever been built. Whenever you push on into a new regime like that, there's some chance that things break down. If something was to break down there, that would be fantastic. Because we'd learn a lot.

Michael Nielsen
Because we'd learn a lot. And that's kind of what the problem in some ways in physics has been, that the fundamental theories have been just too successful for the last 50 years. Yes, you're right again, is very attractive for sort of a few years, but over 50 or, or 60 years, it's terrible. And I think that's certainly part of the issue with quantum gravity. Does it bother you that so many people hate string theory?

Tyler Cowen
Think it's now low status, think it's not aesthetic, think it's unintuitive? Does that carry any weight with you, or do you want to be short status again on this one? I mean, there's the question of inside and outside. Well, there's the question of inside and outside the profession. There's also the question of inside and outside the group of people who know something, and those two are not exactly the same group, but there's a lot of overlap.

Michael Nielsen
So, I mean, outside, it affects funding a little bit. Well, actually maybe quite a bit. And so in that sense, it matters. But internally, I think I'm more interested in the question of just how much diversity of opinion is there. Are people pursuing lots of different ideas.

One of the things that I've noticed over many years is I just, I find mathematicians when I talk to them, it's such a healthy culture because each mathematician is really, well, a lot of them are very unique. They've got their own sort of particular path and their set of beliefs. Physics, theoretical physics, often seems just a little bit more monotone. They can sum themselves up in a few words when they're talking to their professional colleagues, and that's not so healthy. So I'm really not so interested in the question you asked.

I'm much more interested in the question of how do you generate that kind of diversity. And do you feel that ultimately the final theory of a universe or metaverse ought to be simple? Who's declaring ought here? But when someone presents a theory to you, do you ever say, no, that's too complicated. It might be an intermediate theory at some level, but it's not going to be the final theory, because I hear this from many people.

Tyler Cowen
A lack of satisfaction. You want surprise. It's the same when I've, you know, the little tiny pieces of economics I've learned. When I hear about, I don't know, ricardian comparative advantage or something like this. There's just a nice little element of surprise.

Michael Nielsen
You're getting a free lunch somehow. So I'm more interested in that than I am maybe in the question of simplicity. What makes for physicists who age well?

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this as actually in my late twenties, and went to look and see what seemed to distinguish older physicists who had aged well and older physicists who had maybe gotten a bit too complacent. As far as I could tell, having younger mentors was really the key. And why is that important? I don't know. I mean, I have theories.

This was an empirical observation. Yeah, but what's your best theory? What I think is probably the case. It's almost a network effect, basically, if there is some slight sort of downhill slide and most of your friends are not quite at the edge anymore, that's going to infect you. But if you still have mentors who are 25, 28, extremely active, and they're active in the latest ways, you get to partake of the positive network effects.

And that's why it's very important not to have people who work for you. Lots of 70 year old physicists have 23 year old students, but actually to have 23 year olds, 28 year olds who you really learn from and you regard as your mentors and holding constant. Your degree of power and influence, what's the best way to attract younger mentors? Find people whose work you admire and befriend them. And you think that works pretty well?

Yeah. And just being nice.

I'm not sure being nice is the right. You have a lot of younger mentors. You're known famously for being very nice. Right. This is partly a question about your own self awareness, but has you being very nice helped you get more younger mentors or are they attracted to other aspects of you?

I am extremely disagreeable, but in a polite way, I hope, and a kind way, hopefully. So you are very nice then well. People often find people who are disagreeable actually quite difficult. But if you look at all of the younger mentors I've had in the last, say, seven or eight years, they're all people who enjoy disagreement. They say the thing that they think is obvious and you say, here's another way of looking at it.

And they're like, oh, they want to engage. Some people get insulted or they get threatened or they get annoyed when you do that. And those people are not going to be, they're not going to be good collaborators, they're not going to be a match. As the years pass, do you think your probability for God existing is going up or down? Which type of God are you referring to here?

Are you referring to the abrahamic God or what? Not a particular religion, but some explanation that would seem to stand prior to and outside of what we call physics and would be mystical in some way. That hasn't changed since I was seven years old. But that's weird that it hasn't changed, right. Why shouldn't you've learned a lot?

Tyler Cowen
Why shouldn't it change in whichever direction? I suppose I learned had explained to me three basic theories of cosmology when I was seven, one of which was the big bang, and then there were two others, which the steady state theory, and a third whose name I don't even remember anymore. And they leave some questions unanswered. Why is there anything? But as far as I can tell, we haven't made any progress on those things in the 40 odd years since.

Michael Nielsen
Yeah, it's frustrating actually, that that's the case. I mean, I think you're correct to say you've learned a lot. Why haven't you changed? And my response to that is I've learned a lot. Gosh, it's really annoying that it hasn't impacted that question more.

Tyler Cowen
I think my pe has gone up a modest amount over time. So when I was, say, in my young twenties, I thought physics was going to make more progress than it has at fundamental theoretical levels. And the fact that it hasnt, it nudges me a bit to wonder. Well, these other types of explanations that I was not so keen on, maybe theyre a bit more important than I had thought. That hasnt happened with you.

Michael Nielsen
No, the thing thats an interesting. It hasnt really. I just dont think 40 years is very long. If it had been 100,000 years, but. Its all ive got, in a sense.

I know Im going to have a. Bit more, but hopefully, yes, my opinion time span is going to be 40 plus something. I think my appreciation for God has gone way up. I appreciate the construction of the religions far more than I did. What notions of God do for people, vastly more appreciative.

But my probability, I don't think, has really changed. And what about evolutionary frameworks where there's some darwinian process, some kinds of universe is within a broader metaverse, they reproduce at greater frequencies. That shapes the properties of what we live in. Isn't that a kind of substitute for a good explanation? And that rises in probability just a bit?

No, I mean, why not? You're relabeling what you mean by universe. If you just sort of use a term that means everything that is, then that hasn't changed. Our model of what it might be has potentially changed quite a bit over the last few decades. But maybe there's a simple theory for the metaverse, but we can never ever see it.

Tyler Cowen
It's like gnostic religion and then our own universe. There's not a simple theory, but we do know the parameter values we got are enough to drag it across the finish line. And that takes some of the burden off physics in a way, just like, well, the platypus. It seems an unlikely creature, but it has in fact survived. Okay, you're just sort of saying that the universe seems arbitrary, and being a.

Good australian, you appreciate the platypus, right? Platypus? Quite a bit. It's good for fooling visiting Americans about whether or not this animal can exist or not. Yes.

Michael Nielsen
I still don't find that compelling. I think because there's always, we've always known that there seem likely to be fairly contingent facts about the universe. I mean, it shifts the level at which they are. It's more interesting if the value of the fine structure constant is actually a contingent fact that is interesting, or if some of the other coupling constants are changing over time, or sort of models like this. But it's not particularly.

It's still not getting at the essential question from my point of view, which is, why is there something rather than. Nothing that I've long thought is an impossible question? So we might have theories of parameter values, or be able to predict how things interact or what happened a long time ago. But the heideggerian question, I don't think it's a meaningful question at all, because the word why is already embedded in some context, which it sends a self undercutting query open science. Why do some fields have pre print platforms and others not?

Tyler Cowen
Is there an actual regularity, or is that random and path dependent. I think a lot of that probably comes down to individuals. One of my favorite things, years ago, before they'd started to spread in biology, I would often ask physicists and biologists this question, and why is there preprints in physics but not in biology? And the biologists would say, well, biology is so much more competitive than physics that we can't possibly bear to share our results too early. And the physicists would say, physics is so much more competitive than biology that we have to share them as rapidly as possible to get the word out.

But with COVID didn't biology go the route? At least some parts of biology go the route of physics. And it just seems like it's just a cultural problem. It turns out it's a little bit more like fashion or something like that. It does need to be solved.

Michael Nielsen
Like, if you look at what was done in the early days of the physics preprint server, some very clever things, actually, things which are reflected in some of my favorite economists. Some of their ideas were done by Paul Ginsberg when he was starting up the preprint server. He went very narrow. He didn't try and solve the problem all across all the fields. And he went and kind of twisted the arms at some level of some very high status, high profile physicists to say, I would like you to use this service.

Send me your best paper. So on the first day, what's his name? Andy Strominger, who I think is at Harvard, was on the preprint server, and Ed Witten showed up very quickly. So these are very prominent people, and you get this sort of just. It's a tiny community, but then you can agglomerate, you can start to attach other communities.

But that was just, you know, that's a very contingent fact about history. It could have happened in some sub discipline of biology as well. Why do so many crummy journals survive? And they can be quite expensive. You might also have to pay to publish in them.

Tyler Cowen
They seem terrible that if a good piece were in them, the journal would not certify the piece. If anything, the piece would help certify the journal. Why can't we get out of that? Yeah, I mean, there's a complicated set of things going on. One is that libraries pay, not individuals, usually, for subscriptions.

Michael Nielsen
So they're not actually really the. The person getting the utility is not the same as the person making the buying decision. That's always bad. There's also the fact that since the 1990s and the rise of the Internet, we get economies of scale. You don't subscribe.

Libraries don't subscribe to individual journals. For the most part, they subscribe to all these giant bundles, which is actually a terrific idea at some level. It's a way of passing on economies of scale in publication to the customers. But it does go some way to explaining why these crummy journals persist. But you think, in part, libraries are inefficient at capturing rents for themselves, that they get this budget, they spend it on bad journals.

Tyler Cowen
It might be better for the world if they just took the money home and bought ice cream or did whatever. Yeah, there's many other things that could be done with that money. It's difficult for them to reason about it. Having talked to many librarians, they will do things like they will use impact factor. I mean, that's the differentiator that they tend to use.

Michael Nielsen
So they'll try and get all impact factor, whatever it is, and above journals. That's the way they seem to think. They're just using very imperfect proxy. They understand as well as anybody that their proxy is imperfect, but they don't have anything better to do. As far as I can tell, it's a very unfortunate situation.

Tyler Cowen
And right now, how high are the marginal returns to greater openness? So put aside terrorists manufacturing new pathogens, put aside people figuring out how to make their own nuclear weapons, AI problems. So putting aside the very negative, just if the good stuff were more open, how much more rapidly would science progress, openness per se? I mean, that's a very weak word. You need to be sort of much more specific.

Michael Nielsen
If you look at, say, the culture around Jupyter notebooks in machine learning, I think having those very openly available and widely available really has driven a lot of progress. You can just write your Jupyter notebook with your experiment. You make it available to other people, and that can really drive a lot of progress. It's not the same as making your journal article open and available. It's a much more active kind of a material.

Like, do I think that that is an important component in really significantly speeding up science? Yes, but it's not, it's not going. To be two x. I think that. There'S much larger than two x possible, and this is a small, this is a piece of that.

Tyler Cowen
Yeah, but it's not two x on its own. No, it's actually, it's too undefined a term. Openness is always with respect to what platform, with respect to what set of institutions, with respect to what set of norms, with the current sets of norms and institutions that we have. It buys you a little bit. I don't think it buys you that much.

Michael Nielsen
But the norms and institutions, they're going to change in response. The way in which people work will change in response. The Jupyter notebook example I gave is, I think, a good example of that. Why are science textbooks so expensive? Is it marginal cost?

Tyler Cowen
Is it third party payment problems? Is it something else? I don't know. Is it instructor lock in because the notes are geared to texts they've worked with for 15 years? Yeah.

Michael Nielsen
Very few professors make that much money from the textbooks that they write, but they're often very protective. I see people complaining on Twitter that they're not going to get the $400 check next year for their textbook under a new open access policy, and they're really up in arms about this dollar 400. That's interesting. It's hard for me to empathise with psychologically. I don't understand.

I mean, a priori, I wrote this neural nets textbook, which I put online for free, and that massively, that's really made a really large difference to the impact which it's had. In fact, even if I just think purely financially, I wasn't doing it, thinking, oh, financially, this will be better off. But the greater impact has actually benefited me much more financially than any amount of royalties ever would. You mean like giving talks or being invited? Yeah.

And just in general, people know who you are, what you've done, what you're interested in, and they're much more likely to provide all sorts of different opportunities, including jobs. I think from the point of view of the authors, it really actually doesn't make that much sense. From the point of view of the publishers, though, it might make more sense. The textbook market is not huge, but it is multibillions. You have a well known article with Patrick Collison on progress in science slowing down, and it's published at a point, say, right before mRNA vaccines, right before GPT, four other developments.

Tyler Cowen
How well can we know the progress of science at any point in time? Isn't there often an everything all at once effect? And in fact, those years we were building up and investing in things that very suddenly then flourished. Yeah, it's amusing to think about different points at time at which you could try and write the same article. Probably the years before the principia, you would have been able to do the same thing.

Michael Nielsen
There is some question about what certain types of institution make possible, actually, I don't know. I think really the hiatus bit in my response is going to be something like, I just think, AI is not yet 100% clear, but I think it's very likely to drive a lot of scientific progress over the next few years. And that's just a case of we're moving all of our. So much of our cognition and eventually also the actuators, the way we operate in the world, out into these devices, where all of a sudden it becomes much more mutable, hopefully improvable. Do you think the private sector wages of scientists are a good proxy for progress in science?

Tyler Cowen
If science is declining in value, you would think scientists would be paid less and less. But over the last 40 years, mostly those wages haven't fallen. I don't think it's a good. Isaac Newton wasn't the richest person to ever live, but he probably did more for human understanding than any. But there's more of a market now.

The Isaac Newton of today would probably be pretty wealthy. Einstein could have been wealthy had he done more media. Right? But he wouldn't have been wealthy for what he did. Well, he would have been, but still.

His wage would have reflected his fame. He could have endorsed, you know, ski boots. And famously, he was it. He asked for $3,000 a year when he moved to the ias and they gave him 15. I think he wasn't very good at negotiating, but just say that the wages.

For private sector pharma scientists, they seemed to go up for quite a while when the drug pipeline seemed slow. Should we have inferred from that? Well, we're building up to some big things, some blockbusters or not. Yeah. This is a question for you, Tyler.

Michael Nielsen
It's not a question for me. Well, I'm asking. Good reason to do so. I think. I'm inclined to think there's always this interesting balance.

Actually, AI is a really interesting example at this point in time. There's this theory, which has become widely believed by almost everybody, that scaling is very important. Scaling is a very capital friendly story. So it actually moves some of the power, the negotiating power, from individual researchers, I think, to centres of capital. But it is just a story.

I think it's quite interesting that it in some sense, gives the individual researchers less negotiating power. Whether or not this is going to eventually result in a diminished ability to build personal brands and then capture value from that, I don't know. I'm really interested, actually, to see what will happen over the next few years. It used to be that the big companies published a lot of papers very openly, and that is gradually going away. And as that goes away, it damages the individual researchers because they're not able to build their brands publicly in that way.

They're not as easily able to say, I am the person who did. But this is a small city. Doesn't everyone know? I had dinner with a bunch of AI researchers last night. They all seem to know each other's relative importance.

Yeah. I mean, and you look at their salary, so there's rumors they're doing fine. Top researchers can be offered five to $10 million a year. Those must be some of the highest science salaries ever. And you're saying AI is such a big thing?

Tyler Cowen
You seem to be coming down on the side of the wages, predicting something. I think so much money is going in, and it's going in on the basis of brand to some extent. We've hired such and such a person who did such and such a thing. And if that can make your company valuation go up by a few hundred million dollars, then offering them another extra million dollars a year makes sense. But I don't have a grand.

Michael Nielsen
And this is all local storytelling. It's not grand theory of what's actually going on. I haven't thought it through in enough detail to have any confidence there. Now you're working on what I think you call the vulnerable world hypothesis. Yes.

Dick Bostrom, that's his term, what do. You think is the cost at which a nuclear weapon could destroy a city? So if that costs only $50,000, it seems to me the world's in big, big trouble pretty quickly. What's that cost level where you get very, very nervous? So if it's $10 billion, maybe things are fairly safe.

Tyler Cowen
If it's 50k, we're done for. What's the threshold, the cost and expertise? But let's say the expertise is comparable. So somebody who has 50k is probably able to get the expertise as well. Right?

Michael Nielsen
Yeah, that's not great. That's my fundamental worry, with or without AI, that just, that cost becomes lower, honestly. I mean, there's some question about what exactly you mean by nuclear weapon. Like, is it portable? Is it.

Tyler Cowen
It would render a mid sized city uninhabitable for a few decades, at the. Very least, sort of a multi megaton, but not. It would make the headlines. It would make the headlines. A very small nuclear bomb will make the headlines if detonated.

Michael Nielsen
Yeah. I mean, if we're getting down to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The thing is, the issue is. The issue is, right, nuclear weapons are terrible, but they're not civilization threatening directly. Sure.

Tyler Cowen
But enough of the. If enough of these go off, they can be destabilizing. They can certainly be destabilizing. It'd be like the fall of the Roman Empire, maybe worse. Yeah, that's what it starts to seem like.

But in what year do you think that the cost will be low enough that that happens? I mean, at this point, I don't have a good sense, I suppose. I'm actually more concerned about other threats. But if this is a sea safety. Is the obvious thing, I wouldn't call.

It a certain threat. But if you simply think technology will advance. Here's the thing. The nuclear non proliferation treaty means that we actually have a lot of controls of the ability to produce fissile material. That's like League of Nations, right?

Ultimately, yeah. I mean, it is. Yeah. It's really coming out of that same sort of, we have this cartel of whatever it is, ten countries or something. It'll fail.

When the cost is low, it will. Eventually fail, but that's many decades away. But you have reason to think we're going to last a thousand years in a civilized state. Not every person dead, but I think. Getting off planet Earth and establishing a civilization elsewhere is very, very important.

Michael Nielsen
Yeah. Very hard for economic reasons, but utterly crucial. Robots, in a sense, make it harder because you could send robots to Mars to do whatever might be economically useful. Means you never work hard on having humans do it. Yeah, that's true.

I mean, we're pretty curious, but the. Robot will take perfect footage. Whatever is there, the robot will send back to us. You'll have your whatever is the current version of Apple vision Pro. Right.

Tyler Cowen
It will seem very realistic. You're an economist. I'm a romantic. I think might be the difference, but. We'D have to settle them at scale.

So 20 people on Mars limping along. Oh, talk about like a million people, not 20 people. But if we can do a million, we can do a billion, I would think. Sure, sure. I'm saying you want to get.

Michael Nielsen
It's still not going to be. It's not going to be self. What's the right term? It's not going to be an autarchy or whatever the right term is. It's not going to be completely self sustaining.

Yeah, sustaining, but at a million people, it's doing a lot of the, it has a lot of the civilizational infrastructure. And so I think that's the right sort of scale. Casey Hanma has a nice book. I think it's how to build a city of a million people on Mars or something like that, which I think is way too optimistic in many of its assumptions, but he's got the right scale. Economics aside, what's the main scientific constraint that has to be overcome?

Tyler Cowen
Is it gravity? Is it effective radiation on the human body? Is it water? I mean, to some extent we're not going to know until we go. There was this great experiment done a few years ago where there was a pair of twins.

Michael Nielsen
One went up into space for a year, the other one stayed on earth. So that was the first time we actually got to do a controlled. Well, somewhat controlled study where we see what the impact of being in space for a long period of time does to a human body. Just discovered so many things. This is still below the van Allen belts as well.

So we don't. I mean, we just don't. We just don't know the answer to those questions. What's going to. There's a whole bunch of problems.

The regolith on Mars is terrible for human beings. I'm sure that the low gravity is going to be bad for them. What else is there? There's shortages of. There's nitrogen, fortunately, which we don't really have on the moon.

Tyler Cowen
So you're making me think civilization as we know it won't last a thousand years. No. I also have a lot of faith in long run economic growth. Basically, at the moment. For us to go to Mars is very, very, very expensive, given the return, or to establish a permanent human presence in space.

Michael Nielsen
If we continue to have economic growth, the relative cost is just going to keep going down. At some point, it's actually not going to be that difficult. Does a vulnerable world mean near universal surveillance? Unfortunately, I think probably yes. Doesn't that then become the great point of vulnerability?

Oh, absolutely, yeah. If you could ban universal surveillance from here on out, forever, would you press that button? No, I mean, I think the history of justice, to some extent, the term surveillance, it's funny, it has negative connotations. People, they think of Bentham and the panopticon and the Gulag archipelago and the stasi and all these things. But in fact, our ability to supply justice is dependent upon having a good understanding of what has occurred in the present and in the past.

So to the extent. But maybe it needs opaqueness as well. It's this optimal mix of surveillance and opaqueness that you actually have some latitude to break certain laws, to misbehave, that keeps the system stable, limits the abuses of power, limits how much power the powerful have over us.

Yeah. There has to be some sort of madisonian point of view where you're bringing the powerful institutions into conflict. With each other. We do that very imperfectly. At the moment, ideas like search warrants and things like this, they're supposed to be checks and balances, but it seems like the organisations which do the surveillance are too powerful.

They don't have a strong enough checks on them. I don't know whether, just as a practical matter, the United States is capable of doing this. Well, I'd be much more comfortable if it was certain other countries and a strong AI future. Where do the economies of scale lie? Say, within your lifetime, not 500 years from now, there'll be one company.

What are you pointing to? Well, we're all trying to figure out how AI will shape the future. Right. So one model is, everything is supplied competitively. Maybe a bit like fast food today.

Tyler Cowen
I suspect that's not true, but it could be true. There's the oligopoly model. There's the one company races ahead of the others, and then its own AI does R and D at an accelerated pace, and they stay ahead forever. Or there's one country, one company, you want something, controls all the chips. Where do you see the monopoly power evolving?

Because it's essential, I think, the predictions of the model. I mean, when I talk to people who know much more than I do, they all point at ASML as having been surprisingly hard to duplicate. Just the ability to sometimes do the lithography, but do the lithography at scale, which seems to be very, very high. So we should belong Netherlands, probably. Yeah.

Yeah. That would be an amazing conclusion. It would be an amazing conclusion. Return to the Dutch Renaissance. So it's like agriculture and lithography, drawing.

Michael Nielsen
On 17 human services, maybe? That's right, yeah. The return of. Yeah, yeah. What do you think of the Netherlands as a country?

Oh, I love it. I've never spent. Well, actually, I spent a month there. Who am I kidding? That's a lot of time.

That's a fair amount of time in Leiden, actually. It's a lovely place. It has many problems, of course. I mean, their altitude is not great in some ways, actually, in some ways it's good. An interesting sort of a test case.

They show what a strong, determined civilization can do in response to nature. Yeah, I like the flatness of it. I like the water being everywhere. Not everywhere, but most parts at least, of western Netherlands. I find that very attractive.

There's this stereotype I sometimes encounter. People sort of view it as being a little orderly. I've heard people say it's dull, but actually, I think some of the most interesting experiences of my life were there I went to a. It was like a jamboree in the field a week, was it five days long, called hacking at random in 2011, where some people from anonymous spoke, a whole bunch of cryptographers spoke. It was really sort of hacker culture, and it was just intellectually wild in the most interesting way.

And it really grew out of dutch hacker culture. I think there's a lot of that spirit of the Dutch Renaissance is still visible. How would you describe the quality of those conversations? What were they like? Different than what's in San Francisco.

Tyler Cowen
Oh, yeah, different.

Michael Nielsen
They're not captured by capital to the same extent. Conversations in San Francisco, particularly with younger people, tend to be extremely idealistic and often very pro social. But then later there's this sort of negotiation that goes on where they need access to capital to make their dreams come true. A certain amount of compromise is made, although they also often keep a lot of their original, sort of pro social and idealistic character in the Netherlands, in those particular events, there had been less of that. They also had less access to capital.

Tyler Cowen
Yeah. If someone's going to travel to the Netherlands, they have a tech background, like, what should they do? Or what advice do you have? How should they try to learn more from the Netherlands? It's been years since I've been there, so I'm not the right person.

But since you have good memory through spaced repetition. Yeah, maybe. I mean, yeah, I love going to the museums in Amsterdam, just partially. Rembrandt is maybe my favourite painter. That's.

Michael Nielsen
Yeah. It's hard, actually, to think of anything else when I think of the Netherlands, other than Rembrandt's late self portraits, which I think are some of the most extraordinary things ever done. Let's say we all had better memories. How big is the social gain there? Is there any social gain at all?

Tyler Cowen
So you've been an advocate of spaced repetition for improving your memory? It works for medical students, it probably works for languages. But are there social gains, especially with AI coming? I'm not, actually. I wouldn't say I was an advocate.

But you do it? I do it. And you teach other people how to do it. I get benefits from it and some other people get benefits from it, and I'm very enthusiastic if they do. And if they don't, lots of people try it and are like, this isn't working for me.

Michael Nielsen
Well, stop doing it. Same as, you know, if you listen to Bach and don't like it, stop listening to Bach. To what extent do I think there are these interesting. There's a long sequence of papers, sort of trying to elucidate the connection between deep sort of practical expertise and the role of. Of memory, I suppose.

Most famously, people like Herb Simon and Anders Eriksen and people like this have tried to understand what relationship, if any, it's a little bit murky. They all make very strong claims about an expert is somebody who's acquired sort of 50,000 chunks of information and things like this. They're nice stories. They certainly seem to be borne out, but I don't know what the causal thing is. If I talk to you about economics, you can tell me, actually not just an astounding number of things about economics, but about a lot of different things.

But I don't know, are you an expert because you know those things, or is it downstream of something? Is it really downstream of something else? I'm sure it's part of it. If you had a magic memory, it might help you a little bit, but I suspect actually it's downstream of something else. Your determination, curiosity, something like that.

Tyler Cowen
There's some evidence that students learn better when they take notes of what's being said. Do you feel there's something for some people with memory a bit similar, that until they have memorized, it's less real for them? I don't just mean that they remember it more, but the initial impact somehow is created or defined by the later act of memorization. Like people who take trips, and until they photograph something, they don't feel they've seen it. Yeah.

Michael Nielsen
In fact, they probably didn't. They very likely didn't see it, perhaps. Yeah, certainly. It's part of the reason why I take photos. I will look more closely.

That seems to be part of the reason I will take notes. It is part of the reason why I displaced repetition. It provides me with another way of paying attention to the one world. Those things are very valuable. Right.

Like any general purpose strategy you have which will cause you to pay attention to the world is incredibly valuable. And so I collect things like that. Why did I say yes to coming on the podcast? A huge part of it is because I know it's going to make me pay attention in different ways. I know that you're going to ask me questions that nobody else is going to ask me.

And so for me, like, the reason I displaced repetition and the reason I will come on a podcast with somebody like you who asks very interesting questions, it's kind of the same, but in. Some other ways, you're a fan of non legibility, as am I at other margins, and there's some tension because when you take the photo, when you remember something, when you write it down, there's less legibility. There's no tension at all there. You're constantly expanding the legible. And when you do that, there's this sort of penumbra of illegibility that surrounds it, that moves, but it gives you access to those other spaces.

You go to the Netherlands, you travel in general, you make more of the world's culture much more legible to yourself. But that expands what you're able to see as well at the edge of that. That's part of the reason for doing it. That's part of the reason for wanting to make things legible. What's underrated about travel other than that?

Oh, my God, almost everything. You denied saying this, but somebody once said to me that travel is the only education. And it's really stayed with me as expressing some deep truth. I think mostly just the world is so incredibly deep. Absolutely.

Whatever. There's 8 billion people. It's the only way to see that depth and breadth. Yeah. And it's just unbelievable.

I mean, you pick almost a random person anywhere, you could spend a great year with them just learning things. And you can't, unfortunately, do that 8 billion times. Yes. It's very, very underrated. It's been very underrated in my life.

I haven't traveled nearly as much as I should. Why is the. Was it the midway aircraft carrier? Why is that so interesting? There are many reasons.

Tyler Cowen
That's in San Diego, right? It is, yeah. So for about ten years, it was probably the most dangerous object in the world. It carried nuclear weapons, I believe, having 5000 people on it. Basically you have.

Michael Nielsen
People have been making objects like that for, well, centuries, many centuries. They keep getting better at it. There's so much sort of built knowledge built into that environment. It expresses so much very deep expertise. And then you have four, four and a half thousand people all completely dedicated to a single purpose.

They all care an enormous amount about this purpose. They don't suffer like large organizations have all kinds of bloat and all kinds of problems. So many of those problems are gone away there partially because when you're on a boat, it's not so easy to empire build. Like, there's real reasons to trim fat. You have amazing sort of unity of purpose.

What the captain or what the admiral, there was both on the boat. Say that goes. You're not arguing about what the right corporate strategy is. So you have incredible clarity. You have incredible belief in this purpose.

It actually is a high purpose in their case, talking to some of the sailors, they felt very strongly that they were protecting a civilisation that they cared about a great deal. They speak with so much pride about it. So it's almost sort of the perfect floating civilization in some regards. It's just immensely interesting. Here's something you once wrote, and I quote, the great talent identifiers I know or know of all seem very idiosyncratic.

Tyler Cowen
They're rather like Michelin chefs. This is getting us back to the tension between the opaque and the legible. Why do you think that's true, that they're idiosyncratic?

Michael Nielsen
Partially. It's just because the boundaries of knowledge at any given time tend to be idiosyncratic almost by definition. Like they haven't been commoditized yet. There is a best person at making superconducting circuits in the world. There is a best person, I think Thomas Schelling, I think, was your PhD supervisor.

When you read Schelling, you realize that some of the things he did, he did very well. And it must have been remarkable to talk to him. But he's a little bit illegible. That's right. Even though he's a very, very.

Tyler Cowen
And he was when you would speak to him as well. I bet he was. Yeah. That's part of the value. You're like, oh, this person is actually out on the edge of civilization.

Michael Nielsen
And I think that people who are good at identifying people who are able to expand boundaries like that, they need to have some sense of that edge. And here's a question you wanted me to ask you. You initially were skeptical of emergent ventures, but you've changed your mind and become enthusiastic about it. What caused the switch and what would you change about emergent ventures? I mean, the biggest single thing is just empirical.

I've met a bunch of ev grantees. I've encouraged a bunch of people to apply, some of whom you've given grants to, and they're great. Also, you haven't funded in the way I might have expected. I was talking to somebody. I've actually forgotten who it is.

And they clearly had some sort of socialist, quite anti libertarian ideas, and you've given them a grant. And I thought it might have been. A mistake, of course. So typically Tyler, like, he's trying to figure out, do they actually believe in this idea? Do they actually really care?

And then you don't mind. They're certainly not coming to the Mercatus Centre to carry forward the libertarian flag. And somehow I think seeing so many people, people who are doing very worthwhile things which have no, or very little institutional chance of support being amplified, that I care about a great deal. And I mean, it seems like EV is one of the places that is doing the best that really. Yeah.

Tyler Cowen
What do you think we can do to attract more non legible but excellent people? Find other people like yourself? Well, they're going to be like you in this abstract way, but actually very unlike you in other ways. I think about, I don't know, people like Stuart brand and people like that sort of in the past, who've just been wonderful at talent identification, but they're not identifying the same kind of talent as you. To some extent, they become human marketplaces as well.

Michael Nielsen
Like, they're actually, they're at a crossroads. They're connecting people to opportunities. That's a very special type of a person. I maybe met five to ten people in my life who seem like that, well, really strongly. Here's something else you wrote, and I quote, I internalized a lot of Ivan Ilyich, John Holt as Neil, and Paulo Freyher as a kid.

Tyler Cowen
What did you mean? You were talking, I think, in the context of agency. But how did that shape you at. The time as a twelve or 13 year old? It mostly probably made me insufferable to my parents because I couldn't, you know, I hated school already.

Michael Nielsen
That's a good thing, right, a real way of expressing that. And they dealt with me very patiently, I think, over the long term. The most important of those was for many years I would have said illich, maybe still say illich. And basically his point is about the question. It's about the question of what's the relationship between human beings and institutions, and how paternalistic are those institutions towards the humans.

So in de schooling society, he really makes the point that, in fact, schools do, do not treat children as human to some extent at all. It denies some of the most basic kinds of agency. And just thinking about that kind of a relationship, what relationship should our institutions have to individuals? Was very, very important to me as a teenager, and then sort of, I mean, through my entire life. Is it why you didn't join OpenAI in 2015?

No. And do you regret that decision? Yeah, I suppose I did consider going as they were getting started. It would have been an interesting life choice. I had a lot of doubts about the wisdom of pursuing artificial general intelligence, which were, I mean, not at all resolved then.

They were just fears. Yeah. So that was part of the reason, honestly, really the main reason at that point, though, it's this point about comparative advantage. It was like, oh, AI is happening. It's become very fashionable.

If you kind of wake up in the morning and it turns out that some institution is mad keen to pay you to do whatever it is you're doing, you should actually think about whether or not you're in the right line of business. I tend to think, unfortunately for creative work, there's an anti correlation between how valuable what you're doing is and what you're being paid often. Well, it's kind of the anti economist point of view. It's not right, but there's a simple model in which that is right, actually very much kind of an economist's model. So I have felt for more than a decade that AI was.

It'd become sort of around 2011, 2012, when I decided to start writing my book about neural nets, it had become sort of this unstoppable force in the world, or very difficult to. To stop. It was clear it was going to attract more and more capital, more and more people. And so also, to some extent, I just felt like I should go and do something else. If that's the case, in the next 20 years, what do you think your comparative advantage will be?

I'll tell you after 20 years. But you face a year coming up now, right? Yeah. The problem is a step before you. The problem is, of course, it's very helpful for motivational reasons, to have answers to that.

But your answers never turn out to be what the correct answer was. Probably my ability to. To write. And your Twitter biography says, and I quote, searching for the numinous. What does that mean with respect to you?

Just trying to find the deepest possible experiences in the world in people and things and ideas and places. And final question, what do you think it is that you will learn about next? You love to ask this question. I've heard you ask it before. I will learn more, much more deeply about religion than I have in the past.

Tyler Cowen
And that involves travel, going to church, reading books, talking to people. All of those things. It involves all of those things, yeah. I'm going to see the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul in the near future. That's gorgeous.

Michael Nielsen
I've wanted to see for almost all my adult life, and I have never been. Have you been to Amritsar? No. That, to me, is the most religious feeling sight I've ever visited. So I would recommend going there.

Tyler Cowen
And it's not a hard trip in any way at all. I've never been to India. So you must go to Amritsar. And the old cliche, something like, when it comes to religion, every Indian is a millionaire. It's not really true, but I still think India is the best place to go to think about religion.

Michael Nielsen
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I'd love to go to Jerusalem as well, I think for somewhat similar reasons. But there you think about tension. Yeah.

Tyler Cowen
The religious aspects of tension, but I think more about tension than about religion per se, and it's very useful for that. Michael Nielsen, thank you very much. Thanks so much, Tyler.

Thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show on Twitter. I'm Tylercowen and the show is at Cowan convos.

Until next time, please keep listening and learning.