Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science | Lex Fridman Podcast #77

The following is a conversation with Alex Garland, writer and director of many imaginative and philosophical films, from the dreamlike exploration of human self destruction in the movie Annihilation to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence raised in the movie Ex Machina, which to me is one of the greatest movies in artificial intelligence ever made. I'm releasing this podcast to coincide with the release of his new series called Devs that will premiere this Thursday, March 5th on Hulu. As part of FX on Hulu, it explores many of the themes this very podcast is about, from quantum mechanics to artificial life to simulation to the modern nature of power in the tech world. I got a chance to watch a preview and loved it. The acting is great, Nick Offerman especially is incredible in it. The cinematography is beautiful and the philosophical and scientific ideas explored are profound and for me as an engineer and scientist were just fun to see brought to life. For example, if you watch the trailer for the series carefully, you'll see there's a programmer with a Russian accent looking at a screen with Python like code on it that appears to be using a library that interfaces with a quantum computer. This attention and technical detail on several levels is impressive and one of the reasons I'm a big fan of how Alex weaves science and philosophy together in his work. Meeting Alex for me was unlikely, but it was life changing in ways I may only be able to articulate in a few years. Just as meeting Spotmania Boston Dynamics for the first time planted a seed of an idea in my mind, so did meeting Alex Garland. He's humble, curious, intelligent, and to me an inspiration. Plus, he's just really a fun person to talk with about the biggest possible questions in our universe. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman spelled F R I D M A N. As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by Cash app, the 1 finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code lexpodcast. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to buy Bitcoin, let me mention that cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating. I recommend Ascent of Money as a great book on this history. Debits and credits on ledgers started 30,000 years ago. The US dollar was created about 200 years ago, and bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency, was released just over 10 years ago. So given that history, cryptocurrency is still very much in its early days of development, but it still is aiming to and just might redefine the nature of money. So again, if you get Cash app from the App Store or Google Play and use Code Lex podcast, you'll get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to the first one of my favorite organizations that is helping advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Alex Garland.

You described the world inside the Shimmer in the movie Annihilation as dreamlike in that it's internally consistent but detached from reality.

That leads me to ask, do you.

Think a philosophical question. I apologize. Do you think we might be living in a dream or in a simulation like the kind that the Shimmer creates, we human beings here today?

Yeah, I want to sort of separate that out into two things. Yes, I think we're living in a dream of sorts. No, I don't think we're living in a simulation. I think we're living on a planet with a very thin layer of atmosphere, and the planet is in a very large space and the space is full of other planets and stars and quasars and stuff like that. And I don't think those physical objects, I don't think the matter in that universe is simulated. I think it's there. We are definitely. It's a whole problem with saying definitely, but in my opinion, I'll just go back to that. I think it seems very like we're living in a dream state. I'm pretty sure we are. And I think that's just to do with the nature of how we experience the world. We experience it in a subjective way. And the thing I've learned most as I've got older in some respects is the degree to which reality is counterintuitive and that the things that are presented to us as objective turn out not to be objective. And quantum mechanics is full of that kind of thing, but actually just day to day life is full of that kind of thing as well. So my understanding of the way the brain works is, is you get some information hit your optic nerve, and then your brain makes its best guess about what it's seeing or what it's saying it's seeing. It may or May not be an accurate best guess, it might be an inaccurate best guess. And that gap, the best guess gap, means that we are essentially living in a subjective state, which means that we're in a dream state. And I think you could enlarge on the dream state in all sorts of ways. So, yes, extreme state, no simulation would be where I'd come down.

So going further deeper into that direction, you've also described that world as psychedelia. So on that topic, I'm curious about that world. On the topic of psychedelic drugs, do you see those kinds of chemicals that modify our perception as a distortion of our perception of reality or a window into another reality?

No, I think what I'd be saying is that we live in a distorted reality and then those kinds of drugs give us a different kind of distorted perspective. Yeah, exactly. They just give an alternate distortion. And I think that what they really do is they give a distorted perception which is a little bit more allied to daydreams or unconscious interests. So if for some reason you're feeling unconsciously anxious at that moment and you take a psychedelic drug, you'll have a, a more pronounced unpleasant experience. And if you're feeling very calm or happy, you might have a good time. But yeah, so if I'm saying we're starting from a premise, our starting point is, or we're already in the slightly psychedelic state, what those drugs do is help you go further down an avenue or maybe a slightly different avenue, but that's all.

So in that movie, Annihilation, the, the Shimmer, this alternate dreamlike state is created by, I believe, perhaps an alien entity. Of course, everything is up to interpretation, right? But do you think there's, in our world, in our universe, do you think there's intelligent life out there? And if so, how different is it from us humans?

Well, one of the things I was trying to do in Annihilation was to offer up a form of alien life that was actually alien. Because it would often seem to me that in the way we would represent aliens in books or cinema or television or any one of the sort of storytelling mediums is we would always give them very human like qualities. So they wanted to teach us about galactic federations, or they wanted to eat us, or they wanted our resources like our water, or, or they want to enslave us or whatever it happens to be. But all of these are incredibly human like motivations. And I was interested in the idea of an alien that was not in any way like us. It didn't share, maybe it had a completely different Clock speed, maybe its way. So we're talking about, we're looking at each other, we're getting information. Light hits our optic nerve. Our brain makes the best guess of what we're doing. Sometimes it's right. The thing we were talking about before, what if this alien doesn't have an optic nerve? Maybe its way of encountering the space it's in is wholly different. Maybe it has a different relationship with gravity.

The basic laws of physics it operates under might be fundamentally different. It could be a different time scale and so on.

Yeah. Or it could be the same laws, could be the same underlying laws of physics. You know, it's a machine created, or it's a creature created in a quantum mechanical way. It just ends up in a very, very different place to the one we end up in. So part of the preoccupation with annihilation was to come up with an alien that was really alien and didn't give us, and it didn't give us, and we didn't give it any kind of easy connection between human and the alien. Because I think it was to do with the idea that you could have an alien that landed on this planet that wouldn't even know we were here, and we might only glancingly know it was here. There'd just be this strange point where the Venn diagrams connected, where we could sense each other or something like that.

So in the movie, first of all, incredibly original view of what an alien life would be. And it's. In that sense, it's a huge success. Let's go inside your imagination. Did the alien, that alien entity, know anything about humans when it landed?

No.

So the idea is you're both, you're basically an alien life is trying to reach out to anything that might be able to hear its mechanism of communication. Or was it simply, was it just basically their biologist exploring different kinds of stuff they see.

But this is the interesting thing is as soon as you say their biologists, you've done the thing of attributing human type motivations to it. I, I was trying to free myself from anything like that. So all sorts of questions you might answer about this notional alien, I wouldn't be able to answer because I don't know what it was or how it worked. I had some rough ideas, like it had a very, very, very slow clock speed. And I thought maybe the way it is interacting with this environment is a little bit like the way an octopus will change its color forms around the space that it's in. So it's sort of Reacting to what it's in to an extent. But the reason it's reacting in that way is indeterminate.

But it's so. But its clock speed was slower than our human life. Clock speed. But it's faster than evolution. Faster than our, Than our evolution.

Yeah. Given the 4 billion years it took us to get here, then, yes, maybe it started eight.

If you look at the human civilization as a single organism.

Yeah.

In that sense, you know, this evolution could be us. You know, the evolution of living organisms on Earth could be just a single organism. And it's kind of. That's its life is the evolution process that eventually will lead to probably the, the heat death of the universe or something before that. I mean, that's, that's just an incredible idea. So you almost don't know you've created something that you don't even know how it works.

Because anytime I tried to look into how it might work, I would then inevitably be attaching my kind of thought processes into it. And I wanted to try and put a bubble around it where I was saying, no, this is alien in its most alien form. I have no real point of contact.

So unfortunately, I can't talk to Stanley Kubrick. So I'm really fortunate to get a chance to talk to you.

Do you.

On this particular notion. I'd like to ask it a bunch of different ways, and we'll explore in different ways. But do you ever consider human imagination, your imagination, as a window into a possible future? And that what you're doing, you're putting that imagination on paper as a writer and then on screen as a director. And that plants the seeds in the minds of millions of future and current scientists. And so your imagination, you putting it down, actually makes it as a reality. So it's almost like a first step of the scientific method. Like you imagining what's possible in your new series with Ex Machina is actually inspiring. You know, thousands of 12 year olds, millions of scientists, and actually creating the future you've imagined.

Well, all I could say is that from my point of view, it's almost exactly the reverse, because I, I see that pretty much everything I do is a reaction to what scientists are doing. I, I'm, I'm an interested layperson, and I feel this individual. I feel that the most interesting area that humans are involved in is science. I think art is very, very interesting. But the most interesting is science. And science is in a weird place because maybe around the time Newton was alive, if a very, very interested layperson said to themselves, I want to really understand what Newton is saying about the way the world works. With a few years of dedicated thinking, they would be able to understand the sort of principles he was laying out. And I don't think that's true anymore. I think that's stopped being true now. So I'm pretty smart guy. And if I said to myself, I want to really, really understand what is currently the state of quantum mechanics or string theory or any of the sort of branching areas of it, I wouldn't be able to. I'd be intellectually incapable of doing it. Because to work in those fields at the moment is a bit like being an athlete. I suspect you need to start when you're 12, you know, and if you start in your mid-20s, start trying to understand in your mid-20s, then you're just never going to catch up. That's the way it feels to me. So, so what I do is I try to make myself open so the people that you're implying maybe I would influence, to me it's exactly the other way around. These people are strongly influencing me. I'm thinking they're doing something fascinating. I'm concentrating and working as hard as I can to try and understand the implications of what they say. And in some ways, often what I'm trying to do is disseminate their ideas into a means by which it can enter a public conversation. So Ex Machina contains lots of name checks, all sorts of existing thought experiments, shadows on Plato's cave and Mary in the black and white room, and all sorts of different long standing thought processes about sentience or consciousness or subjectivity or, or gender or whatever it happens to be. And then, and then I'm trying to marshal that into a narrative to say, look, this stuff is interesting and it's also relevant and this is my best shot at it. So, so I'm the one being influenced in my construction.

That's fascinating. Of course you would say that because you're not even aware of your own. That's probably what Kubrick would say too. Right. Is in describing why HAL 9000 is created. The way how 9000 is created is you're just studying what's but the reality when it, when the specifics of the knowledge passes through your imagination. I would argue that you're incorrect in thinking that you're just disseminating knowledge. That the very act of your imagination consuming that science, it creates something. It creates the next step, potentially creates the next step. I, I certainly think that's true with 2001 A Space Odyssey. I think at its best and if it fails, it's true of that.

Yeah, it's true of that. Definitely.

At its best it plans something. It's hard to describe, but it inspires the, the next generation and, and it could be field dependent. So your new series is more a connection to physics. Quantum physics, Quantum quantum mechanics, quantum computing. And yet Ex Machina is more artificial intelligence. I, I know more about AI. My sense that AI is much, much earlier in its, in the depth of its understanding. I would argue nobody understands anything to the depth that physicists do about physics in AI. Nobody understands AI. That there is a lot of importance and role for imagination which I think, you know, we're in that we're. Freud imagined the subconscious. We're in that stage of, of AI where there's a lot of imagination needed thinking outside the box.

Yeah, it's interesting. The, the, the, the spread of discussions and the spread of anxieties that exist about AI fascinate me. The way in which some people are, some people seem terrified about it whilst also pursuing it. And I've never shared that fear about AI personally. But the way in which it agitates people and also the people who it agitates I find kind of fascinating.

Are you afraid? Are you excited? Are you sad by the possibility. Let's take the existential risk of artificial intelligence by the possibility an artificial intelligence system becomes our offspring and makes us obsolete.

I mean, it's a huge, it's a huge subject to talk about, I suppose. But one of the things I think is that humans are actually very experienced at creating new life forms because that's why you and I are both here and it's why everyone on the planet is here. And so something in the process of having a living thing that exists that didn't exist previously is very much encoded into the structures of our life and the structures of our societies. Doesn't mean we always get it right, but it does mean we've learned quite a lot about that. We've learned quite a lot about what the dangers are of allowing things to be unchecked. And it's why we then create systems of checks and balances in our government and so on and so forth. I mean, that's not to say the other thing is it seems like there's all sorts of things that you could put into a machine that you would not be. So with us, we sort of roughly try to give some rules to live by and some of us then live by those rules and some don't. And with a machine it feels like you could enforce those things. So, so partly because of our previous experience and partly because of the different nature of a machine, I just don't feel anxious about it. I, I, I more I just see all the good that, you know, broadly speaking, the good that can come from it. But that, that's just my, that's just where I am on that anxiety spectrum.

You know, it's kind of, there's a sadness. So we as humans give birth to other humans, right. But there's in, there's generations and there's often in the older generation a sadness about what the world has become now. I mean that's kind of.

Yeah, there is, but there's a counterpoint as well, which is that most parents would wish for a better life for their children. So there may be a regret about some things about the past, but broadly speaking, what people really want is that things will be better for the future generations, not worse. And so, and then it's a question about what constitutes a future generation. A future generation could involve people, it also could involve machines and it could involve a sort of cross pollinated version of the two or any. But, but none of those things make me feel anxious.

It doesn't give you anxiety, it doesn't.

Excite you like anything that's new, not anything that's new. I, I don't think, for example I've got, I, I, my anxieties relate to things like social media, that, that, that, so I've got plenty of anxieties about.

That which is also driven by artificial intelligence in the sense that there's too much information to be able to, an algorithm has to filter that information and present to you. So ultimately the algorithm, a simple, oftentimes simple algorithm is controlling the flow of information on social media. So that's another form of AI, but.

At least my sense of it, I might be wrong, but my sense of it is that the algorithms have an either conscious or unconscious bias which is created by the people who are making the algorithms and, and sort of delineating the areas to which those algorithms are going to lean. And so for example, the kind of thing I'd be worried about is that it hasn't been thought about enough how dangerous it is to allow algorithms to create echo chambers, say. But that doesn't seem to me to be about the AI or the algorithm. It's the naivety of the people who are constructing the algorithms to do that thing, if you see what I mean.

Yes. So in your new series devs, and we could speak more broadly, there's a, let's talk about the people constructing those algorithms which in our modern society, Silicon Valley, those algorithms happen to be a source of a lot of income because of advertisements. So let me ask sort of a question about those people. Are there are current concerns and failures on social media? Their naivety, I can't pronounce that word well. Are they naive? Are they, I use that word carefully. But evil in intent or misaligned in intent? I think that's a. Do they mean well and just go have a unintended consequence or is there something dark in them that, that results in them creating a company results in that super competitive drive to be successful and those are people that will end up controlling the algorithms.

At a guess, I'd say there are instances of all those things. So sometimes I think it's naivety, sometimes I think it's extremely dark, and sometimes I think people are not being naive or dark. And then in those instances are sometimes generating things that are very benign and other times generating things that despite their best intentions, are not very benign. It's something, I think the reason why I don't get anxious about AI in terms of, or at least AIs that have, I don't know, a relationship with some sort of relationship with humans is that I think that's the stuff we're quite well equipped to understand how to mitigate the problem is issues that relate actually to the power of humans or the wealth of humans. And that's where it's dangerous here and now. So what I see, I'll tell you what I sometimes feel about Silicon Valley is that it's like Wall street in the 80s, it's rabidly capitalistic, absolutely rabidly capitalistic. And it's rabidly greedy. But Whereas in the 80s, the sense one had of wall street was that these people kind of knew they were sharks and in a way relished in being sharks and dressed in sharp suits and kind of lorded over other people and felt good about doing it. Silicon Valley has managed to hide its voracious Wall street, like capitalism behind hipster T shirts and you know, cool cafes in the place where they set up there. And so that obfuscates what's really going on. And what's really going on is the absolute voracious pursuit of money and power. So that's where it gets shaky for me.

So that veneer, and you explore that brilliantly, that veneer of virtue that Silicon.

Valley has, which they believe themselves, I'm sure.

Okay, I, I hope to be one of those people.