Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #269
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Lee Cronin is a chemist at the University of Glasgow. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Lee's Twitter: https://twitter.com/leecronin
Lee's Website: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/
Chemify's Website: https://chemify.io

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:02 - Life and chemistry
15:27 - Self-replicating molecules
25:51 - Origin of life
42:16 - Life on Mars
47:20 - Aliens
54:01 - Origin of life continued
1:00:55 - Fermi Paradox
1:10:35 - UFOs
1:18:56 - Science and authority
1:24:59 - Pickle experiment
1:27:54 - Assembly theory
2:10:53 - Free will
2:22:08 - Cellular automata
2:45:40 - Chemputation
3:02:54 - Universal programming language for chemistry
3:16:05 - Chemputer safety
3:28:47 - Automated engineering of nanomaterials
3:37:46 - Consciousness
3:47:19 - Joscha Bach
3:58:35 - Meaning of life

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 The following is a conversation with Leek Ronin, a chemist from University of Glasgow, who's one of the most fascinating, brilliant, out of the box thinking scientists I've ever spoken to. This episode was recorded more than two weeks ago, so the war in Ukraine is not mentioned. I have been spending a lot of time each day talking to people in Ukraine and Russia. I have family, friends, colleagues, and loved ones in both countries. I will try to release a solo episode on this war, but I've been failing to find the words that make sense of it for myself and others, so I may not. I ask for your understanding, no matter which path I take. Most of my time is spent trying to help as much as I can privately. I'm talking to people who are suffering, who are angry, afraid. When I returned to this conversation with Lee, I couldn't help but smile. He's a beautiful, brilliant, and hilarious human being. He's basically a human manifestation of the mad scientist Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty. I thought about quitting this podcast for a time, but for now at least, I'll keep going. I love people too much. You, the listener. I meet folks on the street or when I run. You say a few kind words about the podcast, and we talk about life, the small things, and the big things. All of it gives me hope. People are just amazing. You are amazing. I ask for your support, wisdom, and patience as I keep going with this silly little podcast, including through some difficult conversations, and hopefully many fascinating and fun ones too. This is the Lux Freedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now to your friends, here's Lee Cronin. How do you think life originated on Earth, and what insights does that give us about life? If we go back to the origin of Earth, and you think about maybe 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 billion years ago, the planet was quite hot. There was a limited number of minerals. There was some carbon, some water. And I think that maybe it's a really simple set of chemistry that we really don't understand. So that means you've got a finite number of elements that are going to react very simply with one another. And out of that mess comes a cell. So literally sand turns into cells. And it seems to happen quick. So what I think I can say with some degree of, I think not certainty, but curiosity, genuine curiosity is that life happened fast. Yeah, so when we say fast, this is a pretty surprising fact, and maybe you can actually correct me and elaborate, but it seems like most, like 70 or 80% of the time that Earth has been around, there's been life on it. Like some very significant percentage. So when you say fast, like the slow part is from single cell or from bacteria to some more complicated organism. It seems like that's the slow part. Like most of the time that Earth has been around, it's been single cell or like very basic organisms, like a couple of billion years. But yeah, you're right. That's really, I recently kind of revisited our history and saw this. And I was just looking at the timeline. Wait a minute. Like how did life just spring up so quickly? Like really quickly. That makes me think that it really wanted to. Like put another way, it's very easy for life to spring. Yeah, I agree. I think it's much more inevitable. And I think I try to kind of, not provoke, but try and push chemists to think about this because chemists are central to this problem, right? Of understanding the origin of life on Earth at least, because we're made of chemistry. But I wonder if the origin of life on a planet or sorry, the emergence of life on planet is as common as the formation of a star. And if you start framing it in that way, it allows you to then look at the universe slightly differently because, and we can get into this I think in quite some detail, but I think to come back to your question, I have little idea of how life got started, but I know it was simple. And I know that the process of selection had to occur before the biology was established. So that selection built the framework from which life kind of grew in complexity and capability and functionality and autonomy. And I think these are all really important words that we can unpack over the next while. Can you say all the words again? So you said selection, so natural selection, the original AB testing. And so, and then complexity, and then the degree of autonomy and sophistication, because I think that people misunderstand what life is. Some people say that life is a cell, and some people that say that life is a virus or life is an on-off switch. I don't think it's that, life is the universe developing a memory. And the laws of physics and the way, well, there are no laws of physics, physics is just memory free stuff, right? So there's only a finite number of ways you can arrange the fundamental particles to do things. Life is the universe developing a memory. So it's like sewing a piece of art slowly, and then you can look back at it. So there's a stickiness to life. It's like universe doing stuff. And when you say memory, it's like, there's a stickiness to a bunch of the stuff it's building together. So you can, in a stable way, like trace back the complexity and that tells a coherent story. Yeah, and I think, yeah. Okay, that's by the way, very poetic. Beautiful. Life is the universe developing a memory. Okay, and then there's autonomy, you said complexity we'll talk about, but it's a really interesting idea that selection preceded biology. Yeah, I think. So first of all, what is chemistry? Like the sand still count as chemistry? Sure, I mean, as a chemist, the card carrying chemist, if I'm allowed a card, I don't know, I don't know what I am most days. What is the card made of? What's the chemical composition of the card? So what is chemistry? Well, chemistry is the thing that happens when you bring electrons together and you form bonds. So bonds, or I say to people when they talk about life elsewhere, and I just say, well, there's bonds, there's hope. Because bonds allow you to get heterogeneity, they allow you to record those memories, or at least on earth. You could imagine a Stanislav Lemtri world where you might have life emerging or intelligence emerging before life. That may be something to do on like Solaris or something, but to get to selection, if atoms can combine and form bonds, those atoms can bond to different elements and those molecules will have different identities and interact with each other differently. And then you can start to have some degree of causation or interaction, and then selection, and then existence. And then you go up the kind of the path of complexity. And so at least on earth, as we know it, there is a sufficient pool of available chemicals to start searching that commentorial space of bonds. So, okay, this is a really interesting question. Let's lay it out. So bonds, almost like cards. We say there's bonds, there is life, there's intelligence, there's consciousness. And what you just made me realize is those can emerge, or let's put bonds aside, those can emerge in any order. Mm-hmm. That's really brilliant. So intelligence can come before life. It's like panpsychists believe that consciousness, I guess, comes before life and before intelligence. So consciousness permeates all matter, it's some kind of fabric of reality. Okay, so within this framework, you can kind of arrange everything, but you need to have the bonds that precedes everything else. Oh, and the other thing is selection. So like the mechanism of selection, that could precede, couldn't that precede bonds too? Whatever the hell selection is. So I would say that there is an elegant order to it. Bonds allow selection, allows the emergence of life, allows the emergence of multicellularity, and then more information processing, building state machines all the way up. However, you could imagine a situation if you had, I don't know, a neutron star or a sun or what, a ferromagnetic loops interacting with one another, and these oscillators building state machines, and these state machines reading something out in the environment. Over time, these state machines would be able to literally record what happened in the past and sense what's going on in the present and imagine the future. However, I don't think it's ever gonna be within a human comprehension, that type of life. I wouldn't count it out because whenever you, I know in science, whenever I say something's impossible, I then wake up the next day and say, no, that's actually wrong. I mean, there are some limits, of course. I don't see myself traveling faster than light anytime soon, but- Eric Weinstein says that's possible, so he will say you're wrong. Sure, but I'm an experimentalist as well. So one of my, I have two superpowers. My stupidity, and I don't mean that as a, I'm like absolutely completely witless, but I mean my ability to kind of just start again and ask the question and then do it with an experiment. I always wanted to be a theoretician growing up, but I just didn't have the intellectual capability. But I was able to think of experiments in my head I could then do in my lab or when I was a child outside, and then those experiments in my head and then outside reinforced one another. So I think that's a very good way of kind of grounding the science, right? Well, that's a nice way to think about theoreticians is they're just people who run experiments in their head. I mean, that's exactly what Einstein did, right? But you're also capable of doing that in the head, in your head, inside your head and in the real world and the connection between the two is when you first discovered your superpower of stupidity. I like it. Okay, what's the second superpower? Your accent or? Well, I don't know. I like, I am genuinely curious. So my curious, so I have, you know, like everybody ego problems, but my curiosity is bigger than my ego. So as long as that happens, I can, I can, I can. That's awesome. That is so powerful. You're just dropping some powerful lines. So curiosity is bigger than ego. That's something I have to think about because you always struggle about the role of ego in life. And that's, that's so nice to think about. Don't think about the size of ego, the absolute size of ego. Think about the relative size of ego to the other, the other horse is pulling at you. And if the curiosity one is bigger, then ego will do just fine and make you fun to talk to. Anyway, so those are the two superpowers. How do those connect to natural selection or in selection and bonds? And I forgot already life and consciousness. So we're going back to selection in the universe and origin of life on earth. I mean, selection is a, I'm convinced that selection is a force in the universe. So not me, not a fundamental force, but a, but a directing, but it is a directing force because existence, although existence appears to be the default, the existence of what, why does, and we can get to this later, I think, but it's amazing that the discrete things exist. And you know, you see this cup, it's not the sexiest cup in the world, but it's pretty functional. This cup, the complexity of this cup isn't just in the object, it is literally the lineage of people making cups and recognizing that, seeing that in their head, making an abstraction of a cup, and then making a different one. So I wonder how many billions of cups have, you know, come before this one. And that's the process of selection and existence. And the only reason the cup is still used is quite useful. I like the handle, you know, it's convenient so I don't die, I don't get hydration. And so I think we are missing something fundamental in the universe about selection. And I think what biology is, is a selection amplifier, and that this is where autonomy comes in. And actually I think that how humanity is gonna humans and autonomous robots, or whatever we're gonna call them in the future, we'll supercharge that even further. So selection is happening in the universe, but if you look in the asteroid belt selection, if objects are being kicked in and out the asteroid belt, those trajectories are quite complex. You don't really look at that as productive selection because it's not doing anything to improve its function. But is it? The asteroid belt has existed for some time. So there is some selection going on, but the functionality is somewhat limited. On earth, at the formation of earth, interaction of chemicals and molecules in the environment gave selection and then things could happen. Cause you could think about in chemistry, we can have an infinite number of reactions happen, but they don't all, all the reactions are allowed to happen, don't happen. Why? Because there are energy barriers. So there must be some things called catalysts out there, or there are bits of minerals that when two molecules get together on that mineral, it lowers the energy barrier for the reaction. And so the reaction is promoted. So suddenly you get one reaction over another of series of possibilities occurring that makes a particular molecule. And this keeps happening in steps. And before you know it, almost these waves as discrete reactions work together and you start to build a machinery that is run by existence. So as you go forward in time, the fact that the molecules, the bonds are getting, there are more bonds in a molecule, there's more function, there's more capability for this molecule to interact with other molecules to redirect them. It's like a series of little, and I don't want to use this term too much, but it's almost thinking about the simplest von Neumann constructor, that's the simplest molecule that could build a more complicated molecule to build a more complicated molecule. And before you know it, when that more complicated molecule can act on the causal chain that's produced itself and change it, suddenly you start to get towards some kind of autonomy. And that's where life, I think, emerges in earnest. Every single word in the past few paragraphs, let's break those apart. But who's von Neumann, what's the constructor, the closing of the loop that you're talking about, the molecule that starts becoming, I think you said the smallest von Neumann constructor, the smallest, the minimal. So what do all those things mean, and what are we supposed to imagine when we think about the smallest von Neumann constructor? So John von Neumann is a real hero, actually, not just me, but many people, I think, computer science and physics. He was an incredible intellect, who probably solved a lot of the problems that we're working on today, I just forgot to write them down. And I'm not sure if it's John von Neumann or Johnny, as I think his friends called him, but I think he was Hungarian, mathematician, came to the US, and basically was involved in the Manhattan Project and developing computation, and came up with all sorts of ideas, and I think he was one of the first people to come up with cellular automata. Really, I didn't know this whole fact. I think so, I think so. Well, anyway, if he didn't come up with it, he probably did come up with it and didn't write it down. There was a couple of people who did at the same time, and then Conway obviously took it on, and then Wolfram loves CAs, there is his fabric of the universe. And what I think he imagined was that he wasn't satisfied, and this may be incorrect recollection, but a lot of what I say is gonna be kind of, just way out of my- You're just part of the universe, creating its memory, designing- Exactly, yeah, rewriting history. Exactly, imperfectly. So, but what I mean is, I think he liked this idea of thinking about how could a Turing machine literally build itself without a Turing machine, right? It's like literally how did state machines emerge, and I think that von Neumann constructors, he wanted to conceive of a minimal thing, autonomous, that could build itself, and what would those rules look like in the world? And that's what a von Neumann kind of constructor looked like, like it's a minimal hypothetical object that could build itself, self-replicate. And I'm really fascinated by that, because I think that, although it's probably not exactly what happened, it's a nice model, because as chemists, if we could go back to the origin of life and think about what is a minimal machine that can get structured randomly, so like with no prime mover, with no architect, it assembles through just existence, so random stuff bumping in together, and you make this first molecule, so you have molecule A, and molecule A interacts with another random molecule B, and they get together, and they realize by working together, they can make more of themselves, but then they realize they can mutate, so they can make AB prime, so AB prime's different to AB, and then AB prime can then act back where A and B were being created, and slightly nudge that causal chain, and make AB prime more evolvable, or learn more, so that's the closing the loop part. Closing the loop part, got it. It feels like the mutation part is not that difficult. It feels like the difficult part is just creating a copy of yourself as step one. That seems like one of the greatest inventions in the history of the universe, is the first molecule that figured out, holy shit, I can create a copy of myself. How hard is that? I think it's really, really easy. Okay, I did not expect that. I think it's really, really easy. Well, let's take a step back. I think replicating molecules are rare, but if you say, I think I was saying on, I probably got into trouble on Twitter the other day, so I was trying to work this. There's about more than 18 mils of water in there, so one mole of water, 6.022 times 10 to the 23 molecules. That's about the number of stars in the universe, I think, of the order. So there's three universe worth. But between one and- Oh, did somebody correct you on Twitter? Yeah, as if, I'm always being corrected. It's a great fact, but there's a lot of molecules in the water, and so there's a lot of, so although it's for you and me, really hard to conceive of, if existence is not the default for a long period of time, because what happens is the molecules get degraded. So much of the possibilities in the universe are just broken back into atoms. So you have this kind of destruction of the molecules for our chemical reactions. So you only need one or two molecules to become good at copying themselves, for them suddenly to then take resources in the pool and start to grow. And so then replication, actually over time, when you have bonds, I think is much simpler and much easier. And I even found this in my lab years ago. I had one of the reasons I started doing inorganic chemistry and making rust, making a bit of rust based on a thing called molybdenum, molybdenum oxide. Is this molybdenum oxide? Very simple, but when you add acid to it and some electrons, they make these molecules you just cannot possibly imagine would be constructed, big gigantic wheels of 154 molybdenum atoms in a wheel, or icosadodecahedron 132 molybdenum atoms, all in the same pot. And I realized when I, and I just finished experiments two years ago, I've just published a couple of papers on this, that there actually, there is a random small molecule with 12 atoms in it that can form randomly, but it happens to template its own production. And then by chance, it templates the ring, just an accident, just like, just an absolute accident. And that ring also helps make the small 12 mer. And so you have what's called an autocatalytic set, where A makes B and B helps make A and vice versa. And you then make this loop. So it's a bit like these, they all work in synergy to make this chain of events that grow. And it doesn't take a very sophisticated model to show that if you have these objects are competing and then collaborating to help one another build, they just grow out of the mess. And although they seem improbable, they are improbable, in fact impossible in one step. There's multiple steps. This is when the blind, people look at the blind watchmaker argument when you talk about how could a watch suddenly spontaneously emerge. Well, it doesn't. It's a lineage of watches and cruder devices that are bootstrapped onto one another. Right. So it's very improbable, but once you get that little discovery, like with the wheel and fire, it just gets explodes in, because it's so successful, it explodes. It's basically selection. So this templating mechanism that allows you to have a little blueprint for yourself, how you go through different procedures is to build copies of yourself. So in chemistry somehow it's possible to imagine that that kind of thing is easy to spring up. In more complex organisms, it feels like a different thing and much more complicated. We're having multiple abstractions of the birds and the bees conversation here, but with human, sorry, with complex organisms, it feels like difficult to have reproduction to, that's gonna get clipped out, I'm gonna make fun of that. It's difficult to develop this idea of making copies of yourself or no, because that seems like a magical idea for life to, wow, that feels like very necessary for what selection is, for what evolution is, but then if selection precedes all of this, then maybe these are just like echoes of the selecting mechanism at different scales. Yeah, that's exactly it. So selection is the default in the universe, if you want to, and what happens is that life, the solution that life has got on earth, life on earth, biology on earth, is unique to earth, we can talk about that, and that was really hard fought for, but that is the solution that works on earth, the ribosome, the fundamental machine that is responsible for every cell on earth, of wherever it is in the kingdom of life, that is an incredibly complex object, but it was evolved over time, and it wasn't involved in a vacuum, and I think that once we understand that selection can occur without the ribosome, but what the ribosome does, it's a phase transition in replication, and I think that that, and also technology, that is probably much easier to get to than we think. Why do you put the ribosome as a central part of living organisms on earth? It basically is a combination of two different polymer systems, so RNA and peptides, so the RNA world, if you like, gets transmitted and builds proteins, and the proteins are responsible for all the catalysis, the majority of the catalysis that goes on in the cell. No ribosome, no proteins, no decoding, no evolution. So ribosome is looking at the action, so you don't put the RNA itself as the critical thing, like information, you put action as the most important thing. I think the actual molecules that we have in biology right now are entirely contingent on the history of life on earth. There are so many possible solutions, and this is where chemistry got itself into, origin of life chemistry gets itself into a bit of a trap. Yeah, let me interrupt you there. You've tweeted, you're gonna get, I'm gonna cite your tweets like it's Shakespeare. Okay. It's surprising you haven't gotten canceled on Twitter yet. Your brilliance once again saves you. I'm just kidding. There's, you like to have a little bit of fun on Twitter. You've tweeted that, quote, origin of life research is a scam. So if this is Shakespeare, can we analyze this word? Why is the origin of life research a scam? Aren't you kind of doing origin of life research? Okay, it was tongue in cheek, but yeah, I think, and I meant it as tongue in cheek. I am, I'm not doing the origin of life research. I'm trying to make artificial life. And I also want to bound the likelihood of the origin of life on earth, but more importantly to find origin of life elsewhere. But let me directly address the tweet. There are many, many good chemists out there doing origin of life research, but I want to nudge them. And I think they're brilliant. Like there's no question, the chemistry they are doing, their motivation is great. So what I meant by that tweet is saying that maybe they're making assumptions about saying, if only I could make this particular type of molecule, say this RNA molecule or this phosphodiester or this other molecule, it's going to somehow unlock the origin of life. And I think that origin of life has been looking at this for a very long time. And whilst I think it's brilliant to work out how you can get to those molecules, I think that chemistry and chemists doing origin of life could be nudged into doing something even more profound. And so the argument I'm making, it's a bit like right now, let's say, I don't know, the first Tesla that makes its way to, I don't know, into a new country in the world. Let's say there's a country X that has never had a Tesla before and they get the Tesla. Russia. And they take the Tesla, and what they do is they take the Tesla apart and say, we want to find the origin of cars in the universe and say, okay, how did this form and how did this form? And they just randomly keep making till they make the door, they make the wheel, they make the steering column and all this stuff. And they say, oh, that's the route. That's the way cars emerged on earth. But actually we know that there's a causal chain of cars going right back to Henry Ford and the Horson carriage. And before that maybe, where people were using wheels. And I think that obsession with the identities that we see in biology right now are giving us a false sense of security about what we're looking for. And I think the origin of life chemistry is in danger of not making the progress that it deserves because the chemists are doing this. The field is exploding right now. There's amazing people out there. Young and old doing this. And there's deservedly so more money going in. I used to complain there's more money being spent searching for the Higgs boson that we know exists and the origin of life. Why is that? We understand the origin of life. We're gonna actually work out what life is. We're gonna be outbound the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe. And most important for us, we are gonna know or have a good idea of what the future of humanity looks like. We need to understand that although we're precious, we're not the only life forms in the universe. Or that's my very strong impression. I have no data for that. It's just right now a belief. And I want to turn that belief into a more than a belief by experimentation. But coming back to the scam, the scam is if we just make this RNA, we've got this fluke event, we know how that's simple. Let's make this phosphodiester or let's make ATP or ADP. We've got that part nailed. Let's now make this other molecule, another molecule. And how many molecules are gonna be enough? And then the reason I say this is when you go back to Craig Venter, when he invented his life form, Cyndia, this minimal plasma, it's a myoplasma, something I don't know the name of it, but he made this wonderful cell and said, I've invented life. Not quite. He facsimile-ed the genome from this entity and made it in the lab or the DNA, but he didn't make the cell. He had to take an existing cell that has a causal chain going all the way back to Luca. And he showed when he took out the gene, the genes, and put in his genes, synthesized, the cell could boot up. But it's remarkable that he could not make a cell from scratch. And even now today, synthetic biologists cannot make a cell from scratch because there's some contingent information embodied outside the genome in the cell. And that is just incredible. So there's lots of layers to the scam. Well, let me then ask the question, how can we create life in the lab from scratch? What have been the most promising attempts at creating life in the lab from scratch? Has anyone actually been able to do it? Do you think anyone will be able to do it in the near future if they haven't already? Can, yeah, I think that nobody has made life in the lab from scratch. Lots of people would argue that they have made progress. Craig Venter, I think the synthesis of a synthetic genome milestone in human achievement, brilliant. Yeah, can we just walk back and say, what would you say from your perspective, one of the world experts in exactly this area, what does it mean to create life from scratch? Where if you sit back, whether you do it or somebody else does it, it's like, damn, this is, we just created life. Well, I can tell you what I would expect, I would like to be able to do, is to go from sand to cells in my lab. Can you explain what sand is? Yeah, just inorganic stuff. Like basically, so sand is just silicon oxide with some other ions in it. Maybe some inorganic carbon, some carbonates, just basically clearly dead stuff that you could just grind rocks into sand. And it would be what, in a kind of vacuum so they could remove anything else that could possibly be like a shadow of life that can assist in the chemical. You could do that, you could insist and say, look, I'm gonna take, and not just inorganic, I want some more, I wanna cheat and have some organic, but I want inorganic organic, and I'll explain the play on words in a moment. So I would like to basically put into a world, let's say a completely synthetic world, if you like, a closed world, put some inorganic materials and just literally add some energy in some form, be it lightning or heat, UV light, and run this thing in cycles over time and let it solve the search problem. So I see the origin of life as a search problem in chemical space. And then I would wait, literally wait for a life form to crawl out of the test tube. That's a joke I tell my group. Literally wait for a very, don't worry, it's gonna be very feeble, it's not gonna take over the world. There's ways of ethically containing it. Famous last words. Indeed, indeed, indeed. You know this is being recorded, right? It will not make you look good once it crawls out of the lab and destroys all of human civilization, but yes. But there is a very good things you can do to prevent that. For instance, if you put stuff in your world, which isn't earth abundant. So let's say we make life based on molybdenum and it escapes, it would die immediately because there's not enough molybdenum in the environment. So we can put in, we can do responsible life. Or as I fantasized with my research group on our way day, that would go in, I think it's actually morally, if we don't find, until humanity finds life in the universe, this is going on a tangent, it's our moral obligation to make origin of life bombs, identify dead planets and bomb them with our origin of life machines and make them alive. I think it is our moral obligation to do that. Some people might argue with me about that, but I think that we need more life in the universe. And then we kind of forget we did it and then come back. And then- So where did you come from? But coming back to the, what I'd expect. So I just say- Father, are you back? I think this is once again a Rick and Morty episode. It's definitely all Rick and Morty all the way down. So I imagine we have this pristine experiment and everything is sanitized and we put in inorganic materials and we have cycles, whether day, night cycles, up, down, whatever. And we look for evidence of replication and evolution over time. And that's what the experiment should be. Now, are there people doing this in the world right now? There are a couple of, there's some really good groups doing this. There's some really interesting scientists doing this around the world. They're kind of perhaps too much associated with the scam. So, and so they're using molecules that were already invented by biology. So there's a bit of replication built in, but I still think the work they're doing is amazing. But I would like people to be a bit freer and say, let's just basically shake a load of sand in a box and wait for life to come out because that's what happened on earth. And so that we have to understand that. Now, how would I know I've been successful? Well, because I'm not obsessing with what molecules are in life now, I would wager a vast quantity of money. I'm not very rich, so it'd just be a few dollars, but for me, the solution space will be different. So the genetic material will be not RNA. The proteins will not be what we think. The solutions will be just completely different. And it might be, and it will be very feeble because that's the other thing we should be able to show fairly robustly that even if I did make or someone did make a new life form in the lab, it would be so poor that it's not gonna leap out. It is the fear about making a lethal life form in the lab from scratch is similar to us imagining that we're gonna make the Terminator, Boston Dynamics tomorrow. It's simply not. And the problem is we don't communicate that properly. I know you yourself, you explain this very well. There is not the AI catastrophe coming. We're very far away from that. That doesn't mean we should ignore it. Same with the origin of life catastrophe. It's not coming anytime soon. We shouldn't ignore it, but we shouldn't let that fear stop us from doing those experiments. But this is a much, much longer discussion because there's a lot of details there. I would say there's potentials for catastrophic events to happen in much dumber ways. Within an AI space, there's a lot of ways to create, like social networks are creating a kind of accelerated set of events that we might not be able to control. The social network, the virality in the digital space can create mass movements of ideas that can then, if times are tough, create military conflict and all those kinds of things. But that's not super intelligent AI. That's an interesting at scale application of AI. If you look at viruses, viruses are pretty dumb, but at scale, their application is pretty detrimental. And so origin of life, much like all of the kind of virology, the very contentious word of gain of function research and virology, sort of like research on viruses, messing with them genetically, that can create a lot of problems if not done well. So we have to be very cautious. So there's a kind of, whenever you're ultra cautious about stuff in AI or in virology and biology, it borders on cynicism, I would say, where it's like everything we do is going to turn out to be destructive and terrible, so I'm just going to sit here and do nothing. Okay, that's a possible solution, except for the fact that somebody's going to do it. It's science and technology progresses, so we have to do it in an ethical way, in a good way, considering in a transparent way, in an open way, considering all the possible positive trajectories that could be taken and making sure as much as possible that we walk those trajectories. So yeah, I don't think Terminator is coming, but a totally unexpected version of Terminator may be around the corner. Yeah, it might be here already. Yeah, so I agree with that. And so going back to the origin of life discussion, I think that in synthetic biology right now, we have to be very careful about how we edit genomes and edit synthetic biology to do things. So that's kind of, that's where things might go wrong in the same way as Twitter turning ourselves into kind of strange scale effects. I would love origin of life research or artificial life research to get to the point where we have those worries, because that's why I think we're just so far away from that. We are just, you know, right now, I think there are two really important angles. There is the origin of life people, researchers who are faithfully working on this and trying to make those molecules, the scan molecules I talk about. And then there are people on the creationist side who are saying, look, the fact you can't make these molecules and you can't make a cell means that evolution isn't true and all this other stuff. Gotcha. Yeah, and so, and I find that really frustrating because actually the origin of life research is all working in good faith, right? Yes. And so what I'm trying to do is give origin of life research a little bit more of an open context. And one of the things I think is important, I really want to make a new life form in my lifetime. I really want to prove that life is a general phenomena, a bit like gravity in the universe, because I think that's gonna be really important for humanity's global psychological state, meaning going forward. That's beautifully put. So one, it will help us understand ourselves. So that's useful for science, but two, it gives us a kind of hope, if not an awe at all the huge amounts of alien civilizations that are out there. If you can build life and understand just how easy it is to build life, then that's just as good, if not much better, than discovering life on another planet. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's cheaper. It's much cheaper and much easier and probably much more conclusive because once you're able to create life, like you said, it's a search problem that there's probably a lot of different ways to do it. So once you create the, once you find the first solution, you probably have all the right methodology for finding all kinds of other solutions. Yeah, and wouldn't it be great if we could find a solution? I mean, it's probably a bit late for, I mean, I worry about climate change, but I'm not that worried about climate change. And I think one day you could think about, could we engineer a new type of life form that could basically, and I don't want to do this, and I don't think we should do this necessarily, but it's a good thought experiment that would perhaps take CO2 out of the atmosphere or an intermediate life form. So it's not quite alive. It's almost like an add-on that we can, with a time-dependent add-on, you could give to say cyanobacteria in the ocean or to maybe to wheat and say, right, we're just gonna, we're gonna fix a bit more CO2 and we're gonna work out how much we need to fix to basically save the climate. And we're gonna use evolutionary principles to basically get there. What worries me is that biology has had a few billion years to find a solution for CO2 fixation. It hasn't really done, the solution isn't brilliant for our needs, but biology wasn't thinking about our needs. Biology was thinking about biology's needs. But I think if we can do, as you say, make life in the lab, then suddenly we don't need to go to everywhere and conclusively prove it. I think we make life in the lab. We look at the extent of life in the solar system, how far did Earth life get? Probably we're all Martians, probably life got going on Mars, the chemistry on Mars seeded Earth. That might have been a legitimate way to kind of truncate the surface. But in the outer solar system, we might have completely different life forms on Enceladus, on Europa and Titan. And that would be a cool thing because- Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Did you just say that you think in terms of likelihood, life started on Mars, like statistically speaking, life started on Mars and seeded Earth? It could be possible because life was, so Mars was habitable for the type of life that we have right now, type of chemistry before Earth. So it seems to me that Mars got searching doing chemistry. And- So it started way before. Yeah, and so they had a few more replicators and some other stuff. And if those replicators got ejected from Mars and landed on Earth, and Earth would be like, I don't need to start again. Thanks. Thanks for that. And then it just carried on. So I'm not going, I think we will find evidence of life on Mars, either life we put there by mistake, contamination, or actually life, the earliest remnants of life. And that would be really exciting. It's a really good reason to go there. But I think it's more unlikely because of the gravitational situation in the solar system, if we find life in the outer solar system- Titan and all that, that would be its own thing. Exactly. Wow, that would be so cool. If we go to Mars and we find life that looks a hell of a lot similar to Earth life, and then we'll go to Titan and all those weird moons with the ices and the volcanoes and all that kind of stuff. And then we find there something that looks, I don't know, way weirder. Some other, some non-RNA type of situation. Or we might find almost life, like in the pre-biodic chemical space. And I think there are four types of exoplanets we can go look for, right? Because when JWST goes up and touch wood, it goes up and everything's fine. When we look at a star, well, we know statistically, most stars have planets around them. What type of planet are they? Are they gonna be dead? Are they gonna be just pre-biodic origin of life coming? So are they gonna be technological? And so we have intelligence on them. And will they have died? So from, had life on them, but gone. Those are the four states of- They're four, and so, and suddenly, it's a bit like I want to classify planets the way we classify stars. And I think that in terms of rather than having this, oh, we've found methane, there's evidence of life. We found oxygen, that's the evidence of life. We found whatever molecule marker, and start to then frame things a little bit more. As those four states. Which by the way, you're just saying four, but there could be a before the dead, there could be other states that we humans can't even conceive of. Just pre-biotic, almost alive, got the possibility to come alive. I think- But there could be a post-technological. Whatever we think of as technology, that could be pre-conscious. Like, where we all meld into one super intelligent conscious or some weird thing that naturally happens. Over time. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that all bets are on them. The metaverse. Yeah, we are. In the face. We join into a virtual metaverse, and start creating, which is kind of an interesting idea, almost arbitrary number of copies of each other, much more quickly, to mess with different ideas. I can create a thousand copies of Lex, every possible version of Lex, and then just see, and then I just have them argue with each other, and until in the space of ideas, and see who wins out. How could that possibly go wrong? But anyway, especially in this digital space, where you can start exploring with AIs mixed in, you can start engineering arbitrary intelligences. You can start playing in the space of ideas, which might move us into a world that looks very different than a biological world. Like our current world, the technology, is still very much tied to our biology. We might move past that completely. Oh, definitely, we definitely will. We definitely, because that could be another phase then. Sure. Because then you- But I did say technological, so I think I agree with you. I think, so you can have, let's get this right. So dead world, no prospect of alive. Prebiotic world, life emerging, living, and technological. And you probably, and the dead one, you probably won't be able to tell between the dead never been alive and the dead one, maybe you've got some artifacts, and maybe there's five. There's probably not more than five. And I think the technological one could have life on it still, but it might just have exceeded. Because one way that life might survive on Earth is if we can work out how to deal with the coming, the real climate change that comes when the sun expands. There might be a way to survive that. But yeah, I think that we need to start thinking statistically when it comes to looking for life in the universe. Let me ask you then sort of statistically, how many alien civilizations are out there in those four phases that you're talking about? When you look up to the stars, and you're sipping on some wine, and talking to other people with British accents about something intelligent, intellectual, I'm sure. Do you think there's a lot of alien civilizations looking back at us and wondering the same? My romantic view of the universe is really taking loans from my logical self. So what I'm saying is I have no idea. But having said that, there is no reason to suppose that life is as hard as we first thought it was. And so if we just take Earth as a marker, and if I think that life is a much more general phenomena than just our biology, then I think the universe is full of life. And the reason for the Fermi paradox is not that they're not out there, it's just that we can't interact with other life forms because they're so different. And I'm not saying that they're necessarily like as depicted in Arrival or other, you know, I'm just saying that perhaps there are very few universal facts in the universe, and maybe that is not, it's quite hard, our technologies are quite divergent. And so I think that it's very hard to know how we're gonna interact with alien life. You think there's a lot of kinds of life that's possible. I guess that was the intuition. Yeah. You provided that the way biology itself, but even this particular kinds of biology that we have on Earth is something that is just one sample of nearly infinite number of other possible complex, autonomous self-replicating type of things that could be possible. And so we're almost unable to see the alternative versions of us. I mean, we'll still be able to detect them, we'll still be able to interact with them, we'll still be able to, like, which, what's exactly is lost in translation? Why can't we see them? Why can't we talk to them? Because I too have a sense, you put it way more poetically, but it seems both statistically and sort of romantically, it feels like the universe should be teaming with life, like super intelligent life. And I just, I sit there and the Fermi paradox is very, it's felt very distinctly by me when I look up at the stars because it's like, it's the same way I feel when I'm driving through New Jersey and listening to Bruce Springsteen and feel quite sad. It's like Lucy Kay talks about pulling off to the side of the road and just weeping a little bit. I'm almost like wondering like, hey, why aren't you talking to us? It feels lonely. It feels lonely because it feels like they're out there. I think that there are a number of answers to that. I think the Fermi paradox is perhaps based on the assumption that if life did emerge in the universe, it would be similar to our life and there's only one solution. And I think that what we've got to start to do is go out and look for selection detection rather than an evolution detection rather than life detection. And I think that once we start to do that, we might start to see really interesting things. And we haven't been doing this for very long. And we are living in an expanding universe. So that makes the problem a little bit harder. Everybody's always leaving distance-wise. I'm very optimistic that we will, well, I don't know. There are two movies that came out within six months of one another, Ad Astra and Cosmos. Ad Astra, they're very expensive blockbuster with Brad Pitt in it and saying there is no life and it's all, we've got to, life on earth has more pressures than Cosmos, which is a UK production, which basically aliens came and visited earth one day and they were discovered in the UK. It was quite, it's a fun film. But I really loved those two films. And at the same time, those films, at the time those films are coming out, I was working on a paper, a life detection paper. And I found it was so hard to publish this paper. And it was almost as depressed, I got so depressed trying to get this science out there that I felt the depression of the film in Ad Astra, like life is, there's no life elsewhere in the universe. And, but I'm incredibly optimistic that I think we will find life in the universe, firm evidence of life. And it will have to start on earth, making life on earth and surprising us. We have to surprise ourselves and make non-biological life on earth. And then people say, well, you made this life on earth, therefore you're part of the causal chain of that. And that might be true, but if I can show how I'm able to do it with very little cheating or very little information inputs, just creating like a model planet, some description, and watching life emerge, then I think that we will be even to persuade even the hardest critic that it's possible. Now, with regards to the Fermi paradox, I think that we might crush that with the JWST. It's basically, if I recall correctly, the mirror is about 10 times the size of the Hubble that we're gonna be able to do spectroscopy, look at colors of exoplanets, I think. Not brilliantly, but we'll be able to start to classify them and we'll start to get a real feel for what's going on in the universe on these exoplanets. Because it's only in the last few decades, I think, maybe even last decade, that we even came to recognize that exoplanets even are common. And I think that that gives us a lot of optimism that life is gonna be out there. But I think we have to start framing, we have to start preparing the fact that biology is only one solution. I can tell you with confidence that biology on Earth does not exist anywhere else in the universe. We are absolutely unique. Well, okay, I love the confidence, but where does that confidence come from? Chemistry, like how many options does chemistry really have? Many, that's the point. And the thing is, this is where the origin of life scam comes in, is that people don't count, they don't count the numbers. So if biology, as you find on Earth, is common everywhere, then there's something really weird going on that basically written in the quantum mechanics, there's some kind of, these bonds must form over these bonds and this catalyst must form over this catalyst when they're all quite equal. Life is contingent. The origin of life on Earth was contingent upon the chemistry available at the origin of life on Earth. So that means if we want to find other Earth-like worlds, we look for the same kind of rocky world, we might look in the same zone as Earth and we might expect reasonably to find biological-like stuff going on. That would be a reasonable hypothesis, but it won't be the same, it can't be. It's like saying, I don't believe in magic, that's why I'm sure. I just don't believe in magic, I believe in statistics and I can do experiments. And so I won't get the same, exactly the same sequence of events, I'll get something different. And so there is TikTok elsewhere in the universe, but it's not the same as our TikTok, right? That's what I mean. Which aspect of it is not the same? Well, I just think, so what is TikTok? TikTok is a social media where people upload videos, right, silly videos. So I guess there might be- Well, there's humor, there's attention, there's ability to process, there's ability for intelligent organisms to collaborate on ideas and find humor in ideas and play with those ideas, make them viral memes. Humor seems to be kind of fundamental to the human experience. And I think that that's a really interesting question we can ask, is humor a fundamental thing in the universe? I think maybe it will be, right? In terms of, you think about in a game theoretic sense, humor, the emergence of humor serves a role in our game engine. And so if selection is fundamental in the universe, then so is humor. Well, I actually don't know exactly what role humor serves. Maybe it's like, from a chemical perspective, it's like a catalyst for, I guess it's for several purposes. One is the catalyst for spreading ideas on the internet. That's modern humor. But humor is also a good way to deal with the difficulty of life. It's a kind of valve, release valve for suffering. Like throughout human history, life has been really hard. And for the people that I have known in my life who've lived through some really difficult things, humor is part of how they deal with that. Yeah. Because it's usually dark humor. But yeah, it's interesting. I don't know exactly sort of what's the more mathematically general way to formulate what the hell is humor? And what humor does it serve? But I still, we're kind of joking here, but it's a counterintuitive idea to me to think that life elsewhere in the universe is very different than life on earth. And also, like all of each instantiation of life is likely very different from each other. Yeah. Like maybe there's a few clusters of similar like life, but it's much more likely is what you're saying. To me, it's a kind of novel thought. I'm not sure what to do with it. But you're saying that it's more common to be a weird odd cast in the full spectrum of life than it is to be in some usual cluster. So every instantiation of a kind of chemistry that results in complexity that's autonomous and self-replicating however the hell you define life, that is going to be very different every time. I don't know. It feels like a selection is a fundamental kind of directed force in the universe. Won't selection result in a few pockets of interesting complexities? I mean, yeah. If we ran earth over again, over and over and over, you're saying it's going to come up that there's not going to be elephants every time? Yeah, I don't think so. I think that there will be similarities. And I think we don't know enough about how selection is globally works. But it might be that the elephant, the emergence of elephants was wired into the history of earth in some way, like the gravitational force, how evolution was going, Cambrian explosions, blah, blah, blah, the emergence of mammals. But I just don't know enough about the contingency, the variability. All I do know is you count the number of bits of information required to make an element, sorry, an elephant and think about the causal chain that provide the lineage of elephants going all the way back to Luca, there's a huge scope for divergence. Yeah, but just like you said, with chemistry and selection, the things that result in self-replicating chemistry and self-replicating organisms, those are extremely unlikely, as you're saying, but once they're successful, they multiply. So like, it might be a tiny subset of all things that are possible in the universe, chemically speaking, it might be a very tiny subset is actually successful at creating elephants. Or elephant-like or slash human-like creatures. Well, there's two different questions. There's the first one, if we were to reset Earth and to start again. At the different phases, sorry to keep interrupting. Yeah, no, if we restart Earth and start again, say we could go back to the beginning and do the experiment or have a number of Earths, how similar would biology be? I would say that there would be broad similarities, but the emergence of mammals is not a given unless we're gonna throw an asteroid at each planet at each time and try and faithfully reproduce what happened. Then there's the other thing about when you go to another Earth-like planet elsewhere, maybe there's a different ratio, particular elements, maybe there's the bombardment at the beginning of the planet was quicker or longer than Earth. And I just don't have enough information there. What I do know is that the complexity of the story of life on Earth gives us lots of scope for variation. And I just don't think it's a reasonable mathematical assumption to think that life on Earth that happened again would be same as what we have now. Okay, but you've also extended that to say that we might, as an explanation for the Fermi paradox, that that means we're not able to interact with them. Or that's an explanation for why we haven't, at scale, heard from aliens is... Well, right now. They're different than us. We've only been looking for, say, 70, 80 years. So I think that the reason we have not found aliens yet is that we haven't worked out what life is. No, but the aliens have worked that out, surely. Statistically speaking, there must be a large number of aliens that are way ahead of us on this whole life question. Unless there's something about this stage of intellectual evolution that often quickly results in nuclear war and destroys itself. There's something in this process that eventually, I don't know, crystallizes the complexity and it stops, either dies or stops developing. But most likely, they already figured it out. And why aren't they contacting us? There's some grad student somewhere wants to study a new green planet. Maybe they have. I mean, maybe, I don't have a coherent answer to your question other than to say that, if there are other aliens out there and they're far more advanced, they might be in contact with each other. And they might also, we might be at a point where, what I'm saying quite critically is it takes two to talk. So the aliens might be there, but if we don't have the ability to recognize them and talk to them, then the aliens aren't going to want to talk to us. And I think that's a critical point that probably, if that's a filter, there needs to be an ability for one to communicate with the other. And we need to know what life is before we do that. So we haven't qualified to even join the club to have a talk. Well, I think they still want to teach us how to talk. But my worry is that, or I think they would want to teach us how to talk like you do when you meet it. Like when you even meet, I was going to say child, but that's a human species. I mean like an ant. You want to try to communicate with them through whatever devices you can, given what an ant is like. I just, I worry mostly about that humans are just too close-minded or don't have the right tools. No, I'm going to push back on this quite significantly. I would say because we don't understand what life is, and because we don't understand how life emerged in the universe, we don't understand the physics that gave rise to life. Yeah, and that means our description, fundamental description, I'm way out of my pay grade, even further out, but I'll say it anyway, because I think it's a fun- You don't get paid much anyway, as you said earlier. So I would say that we, because we don't understand the universe yet, we do not understand how the universe spat out life. And we don't know what life is. And I think that until we understand that, it is going to limit our ability to even, we don't qualify to talk to the aliens. So I'm going to say that they might be there, but we just, I'm not going to say that I believe in inter-dimensional aliens being present in this room. Yeah, but I think you're just being self-critical, like we don't qualify. I think the fact that we don't qualify qualifies us. We're interesting in our innocence. No, I'm saying that because we don't understand causal chains and the way that information is propagated in the universe, and we don't understand what replication is yet, and we don't understand how life emerged, I think that we would not recognize aliens. And if someone doesn't recognize you, you wouldn't go and talk to it. You don't go and talk to ants. You don't go and talk to birds, or maybe some birds you do, right? Because you can, there's just enough cognition. So I'm saying because we don't have enough, our cognitive abilities are not yet where they need to be, we probably aren't even communicating with them. So you don't agree with the dating strategy of playing hard to get? Because us humans, that seems to attract us. Within a species, that's fine, but I think we don't actually have abstraction. No, actually, I think in this talk, in this conversation, you've helped me crystallize something that I think has been troubling me for a long time with the thermoparadox. I'm pretty sure that a reasonable avenue is to say that you would not go and talk to your cat about calculus, right? But I would still pet it. Sure, but I'm not talking about petting a cat. So the analogy is that the aliens are not going to talk to us because we, and I'm using calculus as an analogy for abstraction, because we lack the layer, the fundamental layer of understanding what life is and what the universe is in our reality, that it would be so counterproductive interacting with intelligent alien species that it would cause more angst for human race. But they don't care, okay. They gotta be self-interested, so they'll probably, they more care about, is it interesting for them? Maybe they, I mean, surely there's a way to pet the cat in this analogy, because even if we lack complete understanding, it must be a very frustrating experience for other kinds of intelligence to communicate with us. Still, there must be a way to interact with us, like perturb the system in interesting ways to see what these creatures do. We might actually find the answer, I mean, again, at my pay grade, in a simulation of the Earth, or say, let's say a simulation where we allow an intelligent AI to emerge, right? And that AI, we then give it, the objective is to be curious, interact with other intelligence in its universe. And then we might find the parameters required for that AI to work with. And I think you'll find if the AI will not talk to other AIs that don't share the ability to abstract to the level of the AI, because it's just a cat, and are you gonna travel 20 light years to go and pet a cat? So not because of the inability to do so, but because of boredom. It's more interested, it will start talking to, it will spend most, it will spend a majority of its time talking to other AI systems that can at least somewhat understand it, it's much more fun. It's a bit like, do we know that plants are conscious? Well, plants aren't conscious in the way we typically think, but we don't talk to them, they could be, right? Yeah, but there's a lot of people on Earth who like gardening. There's always going to be a weird- They're not talking, they're just gardening. Okay, well, you're not romantic enough to see gardening as a way of communication between humans and plants. Oh, okay, you got me there. But there is ways, there's always going to be the people who are curious, Jane Goodall, who lives with the chimps, right? There's always going to be curious intelligent species that visit the weird Earth planet and try to interact. I mean, it's, yeah, I think it's a super cool idea that you're expressing, and just to kind of have a sense, maybe it's a hope that there's always going to be a desire to interact even with those that can't possibly understand the depth of what you understand. So I'm with you, so I want to be as positive as you that aliens do exist and we will interact with them. What I'm trying to do is to give you a reasonable hypothesis why we haven't yet, and also something to strive for, to be able to do that. I mean, there is the other view that the universe is just too big and life is just too rare, but I want to come up with an alternative explanation, which I think is reasonable and not being philosophically and scientifically thought out, which is this, if you can't actually communicate with the object, the thing, competently, you don't even know it's there, then there's no point yet. See, I disagree with that, but I'm totally aligned with your hopeful vision, which is like, we need to understand the origin of life. It will help us engineer life, it will help us engineer intelligent life through perhaps on the computer side, through simulation, and explore all the ways that life emerges. And that will allow us to, I think the fundamental reason we don't see overwhelming amounts of life is I actually believe aliens, of course, these are all just kind of open-minded beliefs. It's difficult to know for sure about any of this, but I think there's a lot of alien civilizations which are actively communicating with us, and we're too dumb. We don't have the right tools to see it. That's what I'm saying. No, but maybe I misinterpreted you, but I interpreted you to say they kind of tried a few times and they're like, oh God. No, no, no, what I'm saying is we don't, so this goes two ways. Yeah, I agree with you. There could be information out there, but just put in such a way that we just don't understand it yet. Right. So sorry if I didn't make that clear. I mean, it's not just, I don't think we, I think we qualify as soon as we can decode their signal. Right, so when you say qualify, gotta, gotta. So you mean we're just not smart enough. The word qualify was throwing me off. So we're not smart enough to do, it's like, but we just need to get smarter. And there's a lot of people who believe, let me get your opinion on this, about UFO sightings. So sightings of weird phenomena, phenomena that, you know, what does UFO mean? It means it's a flying object and it's not identified clearly at the time of sighting. That's what UFO means. So it could be a physics phenomena, could be ball lightning, it could be all kinds of fascinating. I was always fascinated with ball lightning as a, like the fact that there could be physical phenomena in this world that are observable by the human eye. Of course, all physical phenomena generally are fascinating that are, that really smart people can't explain. I love that. Cause it's like, wait a minute, especially if you can replicate it, it's like, wait a minute, how does this happen? That's like the precursor to giant discoveries in chemistry and biology and physics and so on. But it sucks when those events are super rare, right? Physical, like leg ball lightning. So that's out there. And then of course that phenomena could have other interpretations that don't have to do with the physics, the chemistry, the biology of earth. It could have to do with more extraterrestrial explanations that in large part, thanks to Hollywood and movies and all those kinds of things, captivates the imaginations of millions of people. But just because it's science fiction that captivates the imagination of people, doesn't mean that some of those sightings, all it takes is one. One of those sightings is actually a sign that it's extraterrestrial intelligence, that it's an object that's not of this particular world. Do you think there's a chance that that's the case? What do you make, especially the pilot sightings, what do you make of those? So I agree there's a chance, there's always a chance. Any good scientist would have to, or observationist would have to, you know, I want to see if aliens exist, come to earth. What I know about the universe is I think it's unlikely right now that there are aliens visiting us, but not impossible. I think the releases, the dramatization that's been happening politically saying we're gonna release all this information, this, you know, classified information. I was kind of disappointed because it was just very poor material. And right now, you know, the ability to capture high resolution video, everybody is carrying around with them an incredible video device now. And we haven't got more compelling data. And so that we've just seeing grainy pictures, a lot of hearsay, instrument kind of malfunctions and whatnot. And so I think on balance, I think it's extremely unlikely, but I think something really interesting is happening. And also during the pandemic, right? We've all been locked down. We all want to have, we want to, our imaginations are, you know, running riot. And I think that the, I don't think that the information out there has convinced me there are anything interesting on the UFO side, but what it has made me very interested about is how humanity is opening up its mind to ponder aliens and the mystery of our universe. And so I don't want to dissuade people from having those thoughts and say you're stupid and look at that, it's clearly incorrect. That's not right, that's not fair. What I would say is that I lack sufficient data, replicated observations to make me go, oh, I'm gonna take this seriously, but I'm really interested by the fact that there is this great deal of interest. And I think that it drives me to maybe want to make an artificial life form even more and to help NASA and the Air Force and whoever go and look for things even more, because I think humanity wants to know what's out there. There's this yearning, isn't there? Yeah, but I see, I almost, depending on the day, I sometimes agree with you, but with the thing you just said, but one of the disappointing things to me about the sightings, I still hold the belief that a non-zero number of them is an indication of something very interesting. So I don't side with the people who say everything can be explained with sensor artifacts kind of thing. Yeah, I agree with you, I didn't say that either. I would say I just don't have enough data. But the thing I wanna push back on is the statement that everybody has a high definition camera. One of the disappointing things to me about the report that the government released, but in general, just having worked with government, having worked with people all over, is how incompetent we are. Like if you look at the response to the pandemic, how incompetent we are in the face of great challenges without great leadership. How incompetent we are in the face of the great mysteries before us without great leadership. And I just think it's actually, the fact that there's a lot of high definition cameras is not enough to capture the full richness of weird, of the mysterious phenomena out there of which extraterrestrial intelligence visiting earth could be one. I don't think we have, I don't think everybody having a smartphone in their pocket is enough. I think that allows for TikTok videos. I don't think it allows for the capture of even interesting, relatively rare human events. That's not that common. It's rare to have be in the right moment in the right time to be able to capture the thing. I agree, I agree. Let me rephrase what I think on this. I haven't seen enough information. I haven't really actively sorted out. I must admit, but I'm with you in that I love the idea of anomaly detection in chemistry in particular. I want to make anomalies, sorry, or not necessarily make anomalies. I want to understand an anomaly. Let me give you two from chemistry, which are really quite interesting. Phlogiston, going way back, where people said, there's this thing called phlogiston. And for ages, the alchemists got really this kind of, that fire is a thing. That's one, and then we determined that phlogiston wasn't what we thought it is. Let's go to physics, the ether. Ether's a hard one, because I think actually the ether might exist, and I'll tell you what I think the ether is later. Can you explain ether? As the vacuums, as the light traveling through the ether in the vacuum, there is some thing that we call the ether that basically mediates the movement of light. And then the other one is cold fusion, which is more of, so a few years ago, that people observed it when they did some electrochemistry, when they were splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, that you got more energy out than you put in. And people got excited, and they thought that this was a nuclear reaction. And in the end, it was kind of discredited, because you didn't detect neutrons and all that stuff. I'm pretty sure, I'm a chemist, I'm going, telling you this on your podcast, but why not? I'm pretty sure there's interesting electrochemical phenomena that's not completely bottomed out yet. That there is something there. However, we lack the technology and the experimental design. So all I'm saying in your response about aliens is we lack the experimental design to really capture these anomalies. And we are encircling the planet with many more detection systems. We've got satellites everywhere. So there is, I do hope that we are going to discover more anomalies. And remember, the solar system isn't just static in space, it's moving through the universe. So there's just more and more chance. I'm not what with Avi Loeb, he's generating all sorts of kind of a cult, I would say, with this. But I'm not against him. I think there is a finite chance if there are aliens in the universe that we're going to happen upon them. Because we're moving through the universe. What's the nature of the following that Avi Loeb has? He's doubling down more and more and more and say there are aliens, interdimensional aliens and everything else, right? He's gone from space junk accelerating out of two-dimensional stuff in a very short space of time. He's obviously bored. Or he wants to tap into the psyche and understand. And he's playfully kind of trying to interact with society and his peers to say, stop saying it's not possible. Which I agree with, we shouldn't do that. But we should frame it statistically in the same way we should frame everything as good scientists statistically. Yeah. Good scientists. Recently, the idea of good scientists is, I take quite skeptically. I've been listening to a lot of scientists tell me about what is good science. That makes me sad. Because you've been interviewed, what I would consider a lot of really good scientists. No, that's true. A lot of really thinkers. But that's exactly right. And most of the people I talk to are incredible human beings. But there's a humility that's required. Science cannot be dogmatism. Sure, I agree. I mean. Authority, like a PhD does not give you authority. A lifelong pursuit of a particular task does not give you authority. You're just as lost and clueless as everybody else. But you're more curious and more stubborn. So that's a nice quality to have. But overall, just using the word science and statistics can often, as you know, kind of become a catalyst for dismissing new ideas, out of the box ideas, wild ideas, all that kind of stuff. Well, yes and no. I think that, so I like to, some people find me extremely annoying in science because I'm basically, I'm quite rude and disruptive. Not in a rude, you know, some people say they're ugly or stupid or anything like that. I just say, you're wrong. Or why do you think this? And something, a gift I got given by society when I was very young, because I was in the learning difficulties class at school is I was told I was stupid. And so I know I'm stupid, but I always wanted to be smart, right? I always, I remember going to school going, maybe today they're gonna tell me I'm not as stupid as I was yesterday. And it was always disappointed, always. And so when I went into academia and everyone said, you're wrong, I was like, join the queue. Yeah. Because it allowed me to walk through the wall. So I think that people like to always imagine science as a bit like living in a Japanese house, the paper walls, and everyone sits in their room. And I annoy people because I walk straight through the wall. Because why should I be a chemist and not a mathematician? Why should I be a mathematician and not computer scientist? Because if the problem requires us to walk through those walls, but I like walking through the walls. But as long, then I have to put up, I have to do good science. I have to win the people in those rooms across by good science, by taking their criticisms and addressing them head on. And I think we must do that. And I think that I try and do that in my own way. And I kind of love walking through the walls. And it gives me, it's difficult for me personally, it's quite painful, but it always leads to a deeper understanding of the people I'm with. In particular, the arguments I have with all sorts of interesting minds, because I want to solve the problem or I want to understand more about why I exist. That's it really. And I think we have to not dismiss science on that basis. I think we can work with science. No, science is beautiful, but humans with egos and all those kinds of things can sometimes misuse good things like social justice, like all ideas we all aspire to misuse these beautiful ideas to manipulate people to all those kinds of things. Sure. There's assholes in every space and walk of life, including science. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And those are no good. But yes, you're right. The scientific method has proven to be quite useful. That said, for difficult questions, for difficult explanations for rare phenomena, you have to walk cautiously. Because the scientific method, when you totally don't understand something and it's rare and you can't replicate it, doesn't quite apply. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with you. The challenge is to not dismiss the anomaly because you can't replicate it. I mean, we can talk about this. This is something I realized when we were developing assembly theory. People think the track they're on is so dogmatic, but there is this thing that they see, but they don't see. And it takes a bit of time and you just have to keep reframing it. And my approach is to say, well, why can't this be right? Why must we accept that RNA is the only way into life? I mean, who said? Does RNA have a special class of information that's encoded in the universe? No, of course it doesn't, right? RNA is not a special molecule in the space of all the other molecules. But it's so elegant and simple and it works so well for the evolutionary process that we kind of use that as an intuition to explain that that must be the only way to have life. Sure. But you mentioned assembly theory. Well, first let me pause, bathroom break. Needed? Yeah, let's take two minutes. We took a quick break and offline, you mentioned to me that you have a lab in your home and then I said that you're basically Rick from Rick and Morty, which is something I've been thinking this whole conversation. And then you say that there's a glowing pickle that you used something involving cold plasma, I believe. I don't know, but can you explain the glowing pickle situation? And is there many, arbitrarily many versions of you in alternate dimensions that you're aware of? I tried to make an electrochemical memory at home using a, and the only way, using a pickle, the only way I could get any traction with it was actually by plugging it into a very high voltage alternating current and then putting in a couple of electrodes. But my kids weren't impressed. They're not impressed with anything I do, any experiments I do at home. I think it's quite funny. But you connected a pickle to some electrode. I mean, you- To 240 volts, yeah, AC. Yeah. And then had a couple of electrodes on it. So what happens is a pickle, this is a classic thing you do. I mean, I shouldn't, pranks you do. You put a plug pickle into the mains and just run away and leave it. And what happens is it starts to decompose. It heats up and then explodes because the water turns to steam and it just violently explodes. But I wondered if I could cause the iron sodium potassium ions in the pickle to migrate. It'd been in a jar, right? So it'd been in a brine. Yeah, that was not my best experiment. So I've been doing far better experiments in my lab at home. At that time it was a failed experiment, but you never know. I could, every experiment is a successful experiment if you stick with it long enough. Well, I mean, I get, I got kicked out of my own lab by my research team many years ago. And for good reason. I mean, my team is brilliant and I used to go and just break things. So what I do do at home is I have a kind of electronics workshop and I prototype experiments there. Then I try and suggest to my team sometimes, maybe we can try this thing. And they would just say, oh, wow, that's not gonna work because of this. And I'll say, aha, but actually I've tried and here's some code and here's some hardware. Can we have a go? So that I'm doing that less and less now as I get even more busy, but that's quite fun. Cause then they feel that we're in the, you know, in the experiment together. You do in fact brilliantly, just like Rick from Rick and Morty, connect chemistry with computation. So sort of, and when we say chemistry, we don't mean the simulation of chemistry, a modeling of chemistry. We mean chemistry in the physical space as well as in the digital space, which is fascinating. We'll talk about that. But first you mentioned assembly theory. So we'll stick on theory in these big ideas. I would say revolutionary ideas. This intersection between mathematics and philosophy. What is assembly theory? And generally speaking, how would we recognize life if we saw it? So assembly theory is a theory, goes back a few years now and my struggle for maybe almost 10 years when I was going to origin of life conferences and artificial life conferences, where I thought that everybody was dancing around the problem of what life is and what it does. But I'll tell you about what assembly theory is because I think it's easier. So assembly theory literally says, if you take an object, any given object, and you are able to break the object into parts very gently. So just maybe let's say take a piece of very intricate Chinese porcelain and you tap it just with a hammer, with a nail at some point, and it will fragment into many parts. And if that object is able to fragment into many, and you count those parts, the different parts, so they're unsymmetrical. Assembly theory says, the larger the number of parts, unsymmetrical parts that object has, the more likely it is that object has been created by an evolutionary or information process, especially if that object is not one-off, you've got an abundance of them. And that's really important. And I, so, because if you, what I'm literally saying about the abundance, if you have a one-off object and you break it into parts, and it has lots of parts, you'd say, well, that could be incredibly intricate and complex, but it could be just random. And I was troubled with this for years because I saw in reality that assembly theory works. But when I talked to very good computational, complexity computation lists, algorithmic complexity people, they said, you haven't really done this properly, you haven't thought about it. It's like, this is the random problem. And so I kept working this up because I invented an assembly theory in chemistry, first of all, with molecules. And so the thought experiment was, how complex does a molecule need to be when I find it, that it couldn't possibly have risen by chance probabilistically. And if I found this molecule, able to detect enough quantities in the same object, like a machine, like a mass spectrometer. So typically in a mass spectrometer, you weigh the molecules in electric field, you probably have to have all the order of 10,000 identical molecules to get a signal. So 10,000 identical molecules that are complex. What's the chance of them occurring by chance? Well, we can do the math. Let's take a molecule like strychnine or, yeah, so strychnine is a good molecule actually to take. Or Viagra is a good molecule. I made jokes about Viagra because it's complex molecule. And one of my friends said, yeah, if we find Viagra on Mars in detectable quantities, we know something is up. But anyway, it's a complex molecule. So what you do is you take this molecule in the mass spectrometer and you hit it with some electrons or in electric field and it breaks apart. And if the larger than the larger number of different parts, you know, when it starts to get to a threshold, my idea was that that molecule could not be created by chance probabilistically. So that was where assembly theory was born in an experiment, in a mass spec experiment. And I was thinking about this because NASA sending mass spectrometers to Mars, to Titan, it's gonna send them to Europa. There's gonna be a nuclear powered mass spectrometer going to Titan. I mean, this is the coolest experiment ever. They're not only sending a drone that's gonna fly around Titan, it's gonna be powered by a nuclear slug, a nuclear battery, and it's gonna have a mass spectrometer on it. Is this already launched? No, it's Dragonfly and it's gonna be launched in a few years. I think it got pushed a year because of the pandemic. So I think three or four years. Dragonfly, nuclear Dragonfly is going to fly to Titan and collect data about the composition of the various chemicals on Titan. Yeah, I'm trying to convince NASA. I don't know if I'll be able to convince the Dragonfly team that they should apply this approach, but they will get data and depending on how good their mass spectrometer is. But I had this thought experiment anyway, and I did this thought experiment. And for me, it seemed to work. I turned the thought experiment into an algorithm in assembly theory. And I basically, assembly theory, if I take, let's just make it generic and let's just take the word abracadabra. So can I, if you find the word, so if you have a book with lots of words in it and you find abracadabra one-off and there's a rat book that's been written by, in a random way, you know, set of monkeys in a room and you know, and you untie priors and you find one-off abracadabra, no big deal. But if you find lots of recurrences of abracadabra, well, that means something weird is going on. But let's think about the assembly number of abracadabra. So abracadabra has a, you know, has a number of letters in it. You can break it down. So you just cut the letters up. But when you actually reassemble abracadabra, the minimum number of ways of organizing those letters, so you'd have an A, a B, you know, and keep going up. There's just, you can, when you cut abracadabra up into parts, you can put it together again in seven steps. So what does that mean? That means if you basically don't re, you're allowed to reuse things you make in a chain at the beginning, that's the memory of the universe, the process that makes abracadabra. And because of that causal chain, you can then get to abracadabra quicker than the number of letters if we're having to specify only in seven. So if you take that to a molecule and you cut the molecule up into parts and you can, on the causal chain, then you basically start with the atoms and then bonds, and then you randomly add on those parts to make the A, make the B, make the, and keep going all the way up, I found that literally assembly theory allows me to say how compressed a molecule is. So when there's some information in there. And I realized assembly theory is, it wasn't, isn't just confined to molecular space, it can apply to anything. But let me finish the molecular argument. So what I did is I had this theory, I, with one of my students, we wrote an algorithm. We basically took the 20 million molecules from the database and we just calculate their assembly number. And that's the index. Like basically, if I take a molecule and I cut it up into bonds, what is the minimum number of steps I need to take to reform that molecule from atoms? So reusability of previously formed things is somehow fundamental to part of the process. Exactly, so it's like a memory in the universe, right? I'm making lots of leaps here. Like, it's kind of weird. I'm saying, right, there's a process that can form the A and the B and the C, let's say. And then there's, and because we've formed A and B before, we can use A and B again with no extra cost, except one unit. So that's the kind of what the chain of events. And that's how you think about memory here when you say the universe, when you talk about the universe and, or life is the universe creating memory. Exactly, so we went through chemical space and we looked at the assembly numbers and we were able to classify it. So, okay, let's test it, let's go. So we're able to take a whole bunch of molecules and assign an assembly index to them, okay? And it's just a function of the number of bonds in the molecule and how much symmetry. So literally, assembly theory is a measure of how little symmetry a molecule has. And so the more asymmetry, the more information, the more weird it is, like a Jackson Pollock or some description. So I then went and did a load of experiments. And I basically took those molecules, I cut them up in the mass spec and measured the number of peaks without any knowledge of the molecule. And we found the assembly number, there was almost a, not quite a one-to-one correlation, but almost because not all bonds are equal, they have different energies. I then did this using two other spectroscopic techniques, NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance, which uses radio frequency to basically jangle the molecules and get a signature out. And I also used infrared. And infrared and NMR almost gave us a one-to-one correlation. So what am I saying? Saying by taking a molecule and doing either infrared or NMR or mass spec, I can work out how many parts there are in that molecule and then put it on a scale. And what we did in the next part of the work is we took molecules randomly from the environment, from outer space, from all around Earth, from the sea, from Antarctica, and from fossils and so on. And even NASA, and they, because they didn't believe us, blinded some samples. And we found that all these samples that came from biology produced molecules that had a very high assembly number above a threshold of about 15. So basically all the stuff that came from an ebiotic origin was low. There was no complexity there. So we suddenly realized that on Earth, at least, there is a cutoff that natural phenomena cannot produce molecules that need more than 15 steps to make them. So I realized that this is a way to make a scale of life, a scale of technology as well. And literally you could just go sniffing for molecules off Earth, on Titan, on Mars. And when you find a molecule in the mass spectrometer that gives you more than 15 parts, you'll know pretty much for sure that it had to be produced by evolution. And this allowed me to come up with a general definition of life based on assembly theory, to say that if I find an object that has a large number of parts, say an iPhone, or Boeing 747, or any complex object, and I can find it in abundance and cut it up, I can tell you whether that has been produced by an informational process or not. And that's what assembly theory kind of does. But it goes a bit further. I then realized that this isn't just about life, it's about causation. So actually it tells you about whether there's a causal structure. So now I can look at objects in the universe, say that again, this cup, and say, right, I'm gonna look at how many independent parts it has. So that's the assembly number. I'll then look at the abundance. How many cups? There are two on this table, maybe there's a few more, you got snatched away. So assembly is a function of the complexity of the object times the number of copy numbers of that object, or function of the copy number normalized. So I realized there's a new quantity in the universe. You have energy, entropy, and assembly. So assembly, the way we should think about that is how much reusability there is. Because what reusability is like, can you play devil's advocate to this? So could this just be a nice tertiary signal for living organisms? Like some kind of distant signal that's, yeah, this is a nice property, but it's not capturing something fundamental. Or do you think reusability is something fundamental to life in complex organisms? I think reusability is fundamental in the universe, not just for life in complex organisms, it's about causation. So I think assembly tells you, if you find objects, because you can do this with trajectories as well, you think about it, that the fact there are objects in the universe, on Earth, is weird. You think about it, we should just have a combinatorial explosion of stuff. The fact that not everything exists is really weird. Now then. And then as I'm looking at two mugs and two water bottles, and the things that exist are similar and multiply in copies of each other. So I would say that assembly allows you to do something that statistical mechanics and people looking at entropy have got stuck with for a while. So I'm making, it's pretty bold. I mean, I'm writing a paper with Sarah Walker on this at the moment. And we're realizing, we don't wanna get ahead of ourselves because I think that there's lots of ways where this is, you know, it's a really interesting idea. It works for molecules and it appears to work for any objects produced by causation. Cause you can take a motor car, you can look at the assembly of the motor car, look at a book, look at the assembly of the book. Assembly theory tells you there's a way of compressing and reusing. And so when people, I talk to information theorists, they say, oh, this is just logical depth. I say it is like logical depth, but it's experimentally measurable. They say, oh, it's a bit like Komagolov, complexity. And I say, but it's computable. And now, okay, it's not infinitely computable, gets NP hard very quickly, right? It's very hard problem when you could get, but it's a computable enough, you could tractable enough to be able to tell the difference between a molecule that's been formed by the random background and by causation. And I think that that's really interesting because until now, there's no way of measuring complexity objectively. Complexity has required algorithmic comparisons and programs and human beings to label things. Assembly is label free. Well, not entirely. We can talk about what that means in a minute. Okay, my brain has been broken a couple times here. I'm sorry, I explained it really badly. No, it was very well explained. It was just fascinating. And it's, my brain is broken into pieces and I'm trying to assemble it. So NP hard, so when you have a molecule, you're trying to figure out, okay, if we were to reuse parts of this molecule, which parts can we reuse as an optimization problem, NP hard, to figure out the minimum amount of reused components that will create this molecule. And it becomes difficult when you start to look at a huge, huge molecules, arbitrarily large. Because I'm also like mapping this. Can I think about this in complexity generally, like looking at a cellular automata system and saying like, can this be used as a measure of complexity for like arbitrarily complicated system? Yeah, I think it can. It can. And I think that the question is, and what's the benefit? Because there's plenty of, I mean, in computer science and mathematics and physics, people have been really seriously studying complexity for a long time. And I think there's a really interesting problems of where we course grade and we lose information. And all assembly theory does really, assembly theory just explains weak emergence. And so what assembly theory says, look, going from the atoms that interact, those first replicators that build one another, assembly at the minimal level just tells you evidence that there's been replication and selection. And I think the more selected something is, the higher the assembly. And so we were able to start to know how to look for selection in the universe. If you go to the moon, there's nothing a very high assembly on the moon except the human artifacts we've left there. So again, let's go back to the sandbox. In assembly theory says, if all the sand grains could stick together, that's the infinite combinatorial explosion in the universe. That should be the default. We don't have that. Now let's assemble sand grains together and do them in every possible way. So we have a series of minimal operations that can move the sand together. But all that doesn't exist either. Now, because we have specific memory where we say, what, we're gonna put three sand grains in line or four make a cross or a triangle or something unsymmetrical. And once we've made the triangle and the unsymmetrical thing, we remember that we can use it again because on that causal chain. So what assembly theory allows you to do is go to the actual object that you exist, you find in space. And actually the way you get there is by disassembling. It's disassembly theory works by disassembling objects you have and understanding the steps to create them. And it works for molecules beautifully because you just break bonds. But like you said, it's gonna be hard, very difficult. It's a difficult problem to figure out how to break them apart. For molecules it's easy. If you just keep low enough in molecular weight space, it's good enough. So it's a complete theory. When we start to think about objects, we can start to assign, we can start to think about things at different levels, different atoms, what you assign as your atom. So in a molecule, the atom, this is really confusing because the word atom, I mean smallest breakable part. So in a molecule, the atom is the bond because you break bonds, not atoms, right? So in a car, the atom might be, I don't know, a small amount of iron or the smallest reusable part, a rivet, a piece of plastic or something. So you gotta be really careful in a microprocessor, the atoms might be transistors. And so the amount of assembly that something has is a function, you have to look at the atom level. What are your parts? What are you counting? That's one of the things you get to choose. What is, at what scale is the atom? What is the minimal thing? I mean, there's a huge amount of trade-offs in when you approach a system and try to analyze. Like if you approach Earth, you're an alien civilization, try to study Earth. What is the atom for trying to measure the complexity of life? Is it, are humans the atoms? I would say to start with, you just use molecules. I can say for sure, if there are molecules of sufficient complexity on Earth, then I know that life has made them. And then go further and show technology. There are molecules that exist on Earth that are not possible even by biology. You needed technology and you needed microprocessors to get there. So that's really cool. And there's a correlation between that, between the coolness of that and assembly number, whatever the measure. What would you call the measure? Assembly index. Assembly index. Yeah, so there are three kind of fundamental kind of labels we have. So there's the quantity of assembly and the assembly, so if you have a box, let's just have a box of molecules. So I'm gonna have my box. We count the number of identical molecules and then we chop each molecule up in an individual molecule class and calculate the assembly number. So basically you then have a function that sums over all the molecules for each assembly and then you divide through. So you make it, divide through by the number of molecules. So that's the assembly index for the box? So that will tell you the amount of assembly in the box. So basically the assembly equation we come up with is like basically the sum of e to the power of the assembly index for molecule i times the number of copies of the molecule i and then you normalize. So you sum them all up and then normalize. So some boxes are gonna be more assembled than others. Yeah, that's what they tell me. So if you were to look at me as a box, so say I'm a box, am I assembling my parts? In terms of like, how do you know, what's my assembly index? So I'd be gentle. So let's just, we'll talk about the molecules in you. So let's just take a pile of sand the same way as you and I would take you and just cut up all the molecules. I mean, and look at the number of copies and assembly number. So in sand, let's say there's probably gonna be nothing more than assembly number of two or three, but there might be trillions and trillions of sand grains. In your body, there might be, the assembly number is gonna be higher, but there might not be quite as many copies because the molecular weight is higher. So you do wanna average it out? You can average, you do average it. I'm not defined by the most impressive molecules. No, no, you're an average in your volume. Well, I mean, we're just working this out, but what's really cool is that you're gonna have a really high assembly. The sand will have a very low assembly. Your causal power is much higher. You get to make decisions, you're alive, you're aspiring. Assembly says something about causal power in the universe. And that's not supposed to exist because physicists don't accept that causation exists at the bottom. So I understand at the chemical level why the assembly is causation. Why is it causation? Because it's capturing the memory. Exactly. Capturing memory, but there's not an action to it. So I'm trying to see how it leads to life. Well, it's what life does. So I think it's, we don't know. So- Yeah, that's a good question. What is life versus what does life do? Yeah, so that's, this is the definition of life. The only definition we need. The assembly. Is basically that life is able to create objects in abundance that are so complex. The assembly number is so high, they can't possibly form in an environment where there's just random interactions. So suddenly you can put life on a scale and then life doesn't exist actually in that sense. It's just how evolved you are. And you as an object, because you have incredible causal power, you could go and launch rockets or build cars or create drugs or, you can do so many things. You can build stuff, build more artifacts that show that you have had causal power. And that causal power was this kind of a lineage. And I think that over time, I've been realizing that physics as a discipline has a number of problems associated with it. With me as a chemist is kind of interesting that assembly theory, and I'm really, I wanna maintain some credibility in the physicist's eyes, but I have to push them because physics is a really good discipline. It's reduced the number. Physics is about reducing the belief system, but they're down to some things in their belief system, which is kind of really makes me kind of grumpy, number one is requiring order at the beginning of the universe magically. We don't need that. The second is the second law. Well, we don't actually need that. This is blasphemous. In a minute, I'll recover my career in a second. Although I think the only good thing about being the Regis chair means I think there has to be an act of parliament to fire me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can always go to Lee's Twitter and protest. And I think the third thing is that, so we've got the order at the beginning. Second law. The second law and the fact that causation is emergent. Right? And that time is emergent. John Carroll just turned off this program. I think he believes that it's emergent. So causation is not emergent. That's clearly incorrect because we wouldn't exist otherwise. So physicists have kind of got confused about time. Time is a real thing. Well, I mean, so look, I'm very happy with the current description of the universe as physics give me because I can do a lot of stuff, right? I can go to the moon with Newtonian physics, I think, and I can understand the orbit of Mercury with relativity. And so, and I can build transistors with quantum mechanics, right? And I can do all this stuff. Yeah. So I'm not saying the physics is wrong. I'm just saying, if we say that time is fundamental, i.e. time is non-negotiable, there's a global clock, I don't need to require that there's order being magically made in the past because that asymmetry is built into the way the universe is. So if time is fundamental, I mean, you've been referring to this kind of, an interesting formulation of that is memory. Yeah. So time is hard to like put a finger on, like what the hell are we talking about? Well. It's just a direction, memory is a construction, especially when you have like, think about these local pockets of complexity, these non-zero assembly index entities that's being constructed and they remember. Never forget molecules. But remember, the thing is I invented assembly theory. I'll tell you I invented it. When I was a kid, I mean, the thing is, I keep making fun of myself from a search group. I've only ever had one idea, I keep exploring that idea over the 40 years or so since I had that idea. Well, aren't you the idea that the universe had? So it's very kind of hierarchical. Anyway, go ahead, I'm sorry. That's very poetic. So I think I came up with assembly theory with the following idea when I was a kid. I was obsessed about survival kits. What is the minimum stuff I would need to basically replicate my reality? And I love computers and I love technology or what technology was going to become. So I imagined that I would have basically this really big truck full of stuff. And I thought, well, can I delete some of that stuff out? Can I have a blueprint? And then, and in the end, I kept making this, making it smaller and got to maybe half a truck and then to a suitcase. And then went, okay, well, screw it. I wanna carry my entire technology in my pocket. How do I do it? And I'm not like gonna launch into a Steve Jobby and you know, I'm an iPlayer. I came up with a Matchbox survival kit. In that Matchbox survival kit, I would have the minimum stuff that would allow me to interact the environment, to build my shelter, to build a fishing rod, to build a water purification system. And it's kind of like, so what did I use in my box to assemble in the environment, to assemble, to assemble, to assemble? And I realized I could make a causal chain in my survival kit. So I guess that's probably why I've been obsessed with assembly theory for so long. And I was just pre-configured to find it somewhere. And when I saw it in molecules, I realized that the causal structure that we say emerges and the physics kind of gets really stuck because they're saying that time, you can go backwards in time. I mean, how do we let physicists get away with the notion that we can go back in time and meet ourselves? I mean, that's clearly a very hard thing to let, physicists would not let other sciences get away with that kind of heresy, right? So why are physicists allowed to get away with it? Let's- So first of all, to push back to play devil's advocate, you are clearly married to the idea of memory. You see in this, again, Rick from Rick and Morty way, you see, you have these deep dreams of the universe that is writing the story through its memories, through its chemical compounds that are just building on top of each other. And then they find useful components they can reuse. And then their reused components create systems that themselves are then reused and all in this way construct things. But when you think of that as memory, it seems like quite sad that you can walk that back. But at the same time, it feels like that memory, you can walk in both directions on that memory in terms of time. You could walk in both directions, but I don't think that that makes any sense because the problem that I have with time being reversible is that, I mean, I'm just a, you know, I'm a dumb experimental chemist, right? So I love burning stuff, burning stuff and building stuff. But when I think of reversible phenomena, I imagine in my head, I have to actually manufacture some time. I have to borrow time from the universe to do that. I can't, when anyone says, let's imagine that we can go back in time or reversibility, you can't do that. You can't step out of time. Time is non-negotiable, it's happening. No, but see, you're assuming that time is fundamental, which most of us do when we go day to day, but it takes a leap of wild imagination to think that time is emergent. No, time is not emergent. Yeah, I mean, this is an argument we can have, but I believe I can come up with an experiment. An experiment that proves that time cannot possibly be emergent. An experiment that shows how assembly theory kind of is the way that the universe produces selection and that selection gives rise to life. And also to say, well, hang on, we could allow ourselves to have a theory that requires us to have these statements to be possible. Like we need to have order in the past, or we can have used the past hypothesis, which is order in the past, but as well, okay. And we have to have an arrow of time. We have to require that entropy increases. And then we can say, look, the universe is completely closed and there's no novelty, or that novelty is predetermined. What I'm saying is very, very important that time is fundamental, which means, if you think about it, the universe becomes more and more novel each step. It generates this more states and next step than it was before. So that means bigger search. So what I'm saying is that the universe wasn't capable of consciousness at day one. Actually, because it didn't have enough states. But today, the universe is, so it's like how- All right, all right, hold on a second. Now we've pissed off the panpsychist too. Okay. No, this is brilliant, sorry. Part of me is just joking, having fun with this thing, but because you're saying a lot of brilliant stuff and I'm trying to slow it down before my brain explodes. So, because I wanna break apart some of the fascinating things you're saying. So novelty, novelty is increasing in the universe because the number of states is increasing. What do you mean by states? So I think the physicists almost got everything right. I can't fault them at all. I just think there's a little bit of dogma. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate. I'm very happy to be entirely wrong on this, right? I'm not right on many things at all. But if I can make less assumptions about the universe with this, then potentially that's a more powerful way of looking at things. If you think of time as fundamental, you can make less assumptions overall. Exactly. It's fundamental, I don't need to add on a magical second law because the second law comes out of the fact the universe is actually, there's more states available. I mean, we might even be able to do weird things like dark energy in the universe might actually just be time, right? Yeah, but then you still have to explain why time is fundamental. Because I can give you one explanation that's simpler than time and say God. Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's, you still have to explain God and you still have to explain time. Like why is it fundamental? So let's just say existence is default, which means time is the default. So look, How did you go from the existence to the default to time is the default? Well, look, we exist, right? So let's just be very- We're yet to talk about what exists means. All right, let's go all the way back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. I think it's very poetic and beautiful what you're weaving into this. I don't think this conversation is even about the assembly, which is fascinating and we'll keep mentioning it as some of the index and this idea that I don't think is necessarily connected to time. Oh, I think it is deeply connected. I can't explain it yet. So you don't think everything you've said about assembly theory and assembly index can still be correct even if time is emergent? So yeah, right now, assembly theory appears to work. I appear to be able to measure objects of high assembly in a mass spectrometer and look at their abundance and you know, all that's fine, right? It's a nice, if nothing else, it's a nice way of looking at how molecules can compress things. Now, am I saying that a time has to be fundamental and not emergent for assembly theory to work? No. I think I'm saying that the universe, it appears that the universe has many different ways of using time. You could have three different types of time. You could just have time that's, the way I would think of it, if you want to hold onto emergent time, I think that's fine, let's do that for a second. Hold onto emergent time and the universe is just doing its thing, then assembly time only exists when the universe starts to write memories through bonds. So let's just say there's rocks running around, you know, there's, when the bond happens and selection starts, suddenly there are, the universe is remembering cause in the past and those structures will have effects in the future. So suddenly a new type of time emerges at that point, which has a direction. And I think Sean Carroll at this point might even turn the podcast back on and go, okay, I can deal with that. That's fine. But I'm just basically trying to condense the conversation and say, hey, let's just have time fundamental and see how that screws with people's minds. Why- You're triggering people by saying fundamental. Why not? Let's say like, let's say- Why am I, look, I'm walking through the wall. Why should I grow up in a world where time, I don't go back in time. I don't meet myself in the past. There are no aliens coming from the future, right? You know, it's just like- No, no, no, but that's not, no, no, no, no, no, hold on a second. That's like saying, we're talking about biology or like evolutionary psychology and you saying, okay, let's just assume that clothing is fundamental. People wearing clothes is fundamental. It's like, no, no, no, no, wait a minute. You can't, like, I think you're gonna get a lot of trouble if you assume time is fundamental. Why? Give me one reason why I'm getting into trouble with time being fundamental. Because you might not understand the origins of this memory that might be deeper. Like that, this memory, that could be a thing that's explaining the construction of these higher complexities better than just saying it's a search. It's chemicals doing a search for reusable structures that they can then use as bricks to build a house. Okay, so I accept that. So let's go back a second because it's a kind of, it is, I wanted to drop the time bomb at this part because I think we can carry on discussing it for many, many, many, many, many days, many months. But I'm happy to accept that it might be wrong. But what I would like to do is imagine a universe where time is fundamental and time is emergent and ask, let's just then talk about causation because physicists require that causation, so this is where I'm gonna go, causation emerges and it doesn't exist at the microscale. Well, that clearly is wrong because if causation has to emerge at the macroscale, life cannot emerge. So how does life emerge? Life requires molecules to bump into each other, produce replicators. Those replicators need to produce polymers. There needs to be cause and effect at the molecular level. There needs to be a non-agordic to an agordic transition at some point. And those replicators have consequence, material consequence in the universe. Physicists just say, oh, you know what? I'm gonna have a bunch of particles in a box. I'm gonna think about it in a Newtonian way, in a quantum way, and I'll add on an arrow of time so I can label things and causation will happen magically later. Well, how? Explain causation. And they can't. The only way I can reconcile causation is having a fundamental time because this allows me to have a deterministic universe that creates novelty. And there's so many things to unpack here, but let's go back to the point. You said, can assembly theory work with emergent time? Sure, it can, but it doesn't give me a deep satisfaction about how causation and assembly gives rise to these objects that move through time and space. And again, what am I saying to bring it back? I can say without fear, take this water bottle and look at this water bottle and look at the features on it. There's writing, you've got a load of them. I know that causal structures gave rise to this. In fact, I'm not looking at just one water bottle here. I'm looking at every water bottle ever been conceived of by humanity. This here is a special object. In fact, Leibniz knew this. Leibniz, it was at the same time of Newton, he kind of got stuck. I think Leibniz actually invented assembly theory. He gave soul. The soul that you see in objects wasn't the mystical soul, it is assembly. It is a fact there's been a history of objects related. And without the object in the past, this object wouldn't exist. There is a lineage and there is conserved structures, causal structures have given rise to those. Fair enough. And you're saying it's just a simpler view if time is fundamental. And it shakes the physicist cage a bit, right? Because I'm gonna say, but I think that- I just enjoy the fact that physicists are in cages. I think that, I mean, I would say that, you know, Lee Smolin, I don't want to speak for Lee. I'm talking to Lee about this. I think Lee also is in agreement that time has to be fundamental. But I think he goes further. You know, even in space, I don't think you can go back to the same place in space. I've been to Austin a few times now. This is my, I think third time I've been to Austin. Is Austin in the same place? No, the solar system is moving through space. I'm not going back in the same space. Locally I am. Every event in the universe is unique. In space. And time. And time. Doesn't mean we can't go back though. I mean, you know, let's just, you know, rest this conversation, which was beautiful, with a quote from the Rolling Stones that you can't always get what you want, which is you want time to be fundamental, but if you try, you'll get what you need, which is assembly theory. Okay, let me ask you about, continue talking about complexity, and to clarify with this beautiful theory of yours that you're developing, and I'm sure we'll continue developing both in the lab and in theory. Yeah, it can't be said enough. Just the ideas you're playing with in your head are just, and we've been talking about it, are just beautiful. So if we talk about complexity a little bit more generally, maybe in an admiring romantic way, how does complexity emerge from simple rules? The why, the how. Okay, the nice algorithm of assembly is there. I would say that the problem I have right now is, I mean, you're right, we can, about time as well. The problem is I have this hammer called assembly, and everything I see isn't there. So now let's just apply it to all sorts of things. We take the Bernard instability, the Bernard instability is you have oil, if you heat up oil, let's say on a frying pan, when you get convection, you get honeycomb patterns. Take the formation of snowflakes, right? Take the emergence of a tropical storm or the storm on Jupiter. When people say, let's talk about complexity in general, what they're saying is, let's take this collection of objects that are correlated in some way, and try and work out how many moving parts or how this got, how this exists. So what people have been doing for a very long time is taking complexity and counting what they've lost, calculating the entropy. And the reason why I'm pushing very hard on assembly is entropy tells you how much you've lost. It doesn't tell you the microstates are gone. But if you embrace the bottom up with assembly, those states, and you then understand the causal chain that gives rise to the emergence. So what I think assembly will help us do is understand weak emergence, at the very least, and maybe allow us to crack open complexity in a new way. And I've been fascinated with complexity theory for many years. I mean, as soon as I could, I learned of the Mandelbrot set, and I could just type it up in my computer and run it, and just show it and see it kind of unfold. It was just this kind of, this mathematical reality that existed in front of me, I just found incredible. But then I realized that actually we were cheating. We're putting in the boundary conditions all the time. We're putting in information. And so when people talk to me about the complexity of things, I say, but relative what? How do you measure them? So my attempt, my small attempt, naive attempt, because there's many greater minds than mine on the planet right now thinking about this properly, and you've had some of them on the podcast, right? Just absolutely fantastic. But I'm wondering if we might be able to reformat the way we would explore algorithmic complexity using assembly. What's the minimum number of constraints we need in our system for this to unfold? So whether it's like, you know, if you take some particles and put them in a box, at a certain box size, you get quasi-crystallinity coming out, right? But that emergence, it's not magic. It must come from the boundary conditions you put in. So all I'm saying is a lot of the complexity that we see is a direct read of the constraints we put in, but we just don't understand. So as I said earlier to the poor origin of life chemists, you know, origin of life is a scam. I would say lots of complexity calculation theories, a bit of a scam, because we put the constraints in, but we don't count them correctly. And I'm wondering if- Oh, you're thinking in, sorry to interrupt, is assembly theory, assembly index, is a way to count the constraints? Yes, that's it, that's all it is. So assembly theory doesn't lower any of the importance of complexity theory, but it allows us to go across domains and start to compare things, compare the complexity of a molecule, of a microprocessor, of the text you're writing, of the music you may compose. You've tweeted, quote, assembly theory explains why Nietzsche understood we had limited freedom rather than radical freedom. So we've applied assembly theory to cellular automata in life and chemistry. What does Nietzsche have to do with assembly theory? Oh, that gets me into free will and everything. So let me say that again, assembly theory explains why Nietzsche understood we had limited freedom rather than radical freedom. Limited freedom, I suppose, is referring to the fact that there's constraints or what is radical freedom? What is freedom? So Sartre was like believed in absolute freedom and that he could do whatever he wanted in his imagination. And Nietzsche understood that his freedom was somewhat more limited. And it kind of takes me back to this computer game that I played when I was 10. So I think it's called Dragon's Lair. Okay. Do you know Dragon's Lair? I think I know Dragon's Lair, yeah. Dragon's Lair, I knew I was being conned, right? Dragon's Lair, when you play the game, you're lucky that you grew up in a basically procedurally generated worlds. That was RPG a little bit. No, it's like, is it turn-based play? Was it? No. It was a role-playing game, but really good graphics and one of the first laser discs. And when you actually flick the stick, you took, it's like it was like a graphical adventure game with animation. And when I played this game, I really, you know, you could get through the game in 12 minutes if you knew what you were doing, if you're not making mistakes, just play the disc, play the disc, play the disc. So it was just that timing. And actually it was a complete fraud because all the animation has been prerecorded on the disc. It's like the Black Mirror, the first interactive where they had all the, you know, several million kind of permutations of the movie that you could select on Netflix. I've forgotten the name of it. So this was exactly that in the laser disc. You basically go left, go right, fight the ogre, slay the dragon. And when you flick the joystick at the right time, it just goes to the next animation to play. It's not really generating it. And I played that game and I knew I was being had. So, okay, I see. So to you, Dragon Lair is the first time you realized that free will is an illusion. Yeah. And why does assembly theory give you hints about free will, whether it's an illusion or not? Yeah, so no, so not tightly. If I do think I have some will and I think I am an agent and I think I can interact and I can play around with the model I have of the world and the cost functions. And I can hack my own cost functions, which means I have a little bit of free will. But as much as I want to do stuff in the universe, I don't think I could suddenly say, I mean, actually this is ridiculous because now I say I could try and do it. It's like I'm suddenly give up everything and become a rapper tomorrow. Maybe I could try that, but I don't have sufficient agency to make that necessarily happen. I'm on a trajectory. So when in Dragon's Lair, I know that I have some trajectories that I can play with, where Sartre realized he thought that he had no assembly, no memory. He could just leap across and do everything. And Nietzsche said, okay, I realize I don't have full freedom, but I have some freedom. And the 70 theory basically says that. It says, if you have these constraints in your past, they limit what you were able to do in the future, but you can use them to do amazing things. Let's say I'm a poppy plant and I'm creating some opiates. Opiates are really interesting molecules. I mean, they're obviously great for medicine, cause great problems in society. But let's imagine we fast forward a billion years, what will the opioids look like in a billion years? Well, we can guess because we can see how those proteins will evolve and we can see how the secondary metabolites will change. But they can't go radical. They can't suddenly become, I don't know, like a molecule that you find in an OLED in a display. They will have some, they will be limited by the causal chain that produced them. And that's what I'm getting at, saying, we're predict, we are unpredictably predictable or predictably unpredictable, predictably unpredictable within a constraint on the trajectory we're on. Yeah, so the predictably part is the constraints of the trajectory and the unpredictable part is the part that you still haven't really clarified the origin of the little bit of freedom. Yeah. So you're just arguing, you're basically saying that radical freedom is impossible. You're really operating in a world of constraints that are constrained by the memory of the trajectory of the chemistry that led to who you are. Okay, but even just a tiny bit of freedom, even if everything, if everywhere you are in cages, if you can move around in that cage a little bit, you're free. I agree. And so the question is in assembly theory, if we're thinking about free will, where does the little bit of freedom come from? What is the I that can decide to be a rapper? What, why, what is that? That's a cute little trick we've convinced each other of so we can do fun tricks at parties or is there something fundamental that allows us to feel free, to be free? I think that that's the question that I wanna answer. I know you wanna answer it and I think it's so profound. Let me have a go at it. I would say that I don't take the stance of Sam Harris because I think Sam Harris, when he said, the way he says it is almost, it's really interesting. I'd love to talk to him about it. Sam Harris almost thinks himself out of existence, right? Because I don't, because, do you know what I mean? Yeah, well, I mean, he has different views on consciousness versus free will. I think he saves himself with consciousness. He thinks himself out of existence with free will. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that mean there's no point, right? So I- He's a leaf floating on a river. Yeah, I think that he, I don't know, I'd love to ask him whether he really believes that and then we could play some games. Oh yeah. No, no, I then would say, I'll get him to play a game of cards with me and I'll work out the conditions on which he says no and then I'll get him to the conditions he says yes. And then I'll trap him in his logical inconsistency with that argument. Because at some point when he loses enough money or the prospect of losing enough money, there's a way of basically mapping out a series of, so what will is about, let's not call it free will, what will is about is to have a series of decisions equally weighted in front of you. And those decisions aren't necessarily energy minimization. Those decisions are a function of the model you've made in your mind, you're in your simulation and the way you've interacted in reality and also other interactions that you're having with other individuals and happenstance. And I think that there's a little bit of delay in time. So I think what you're able to do is say, well, I'm gonna do the counterfactual. I've done all of them and I'm gonna go this way. And you probably don't know why. I think free will is actually very complex interaction between your unconscious and your conscious brain. And I think the reason why we're arguing about it is so interesting in that we just, some people outsource their free will to that unconscious brain and some people try and overthink the free will in the conscious brain. I would say that Sam Harris has realized his conscious brain doesn't have free will but his unconscious brain does. That's my guess, right? And that he can't have access to the unconscious brain. And that's kind of annoying. So he's just, he's going to, through meditation, come to acceptance with that fact. Yeah, which is maybe okay. I maybe, but I do think that I have the ability to make decisions and I like my decisions. In fact, I mean, this is an argument I have with some people that some days I feel I have no free will and it's just an illusion. And this is one, and it makes me more radical, if you like. As a, that I get to explore more of the state space and I'm like, I'm gonna try and affect the world now. I'm really gonna ask the question that maybe I dare not ask or dare not, or do the thing I dare not do. And that allows me to kind of explore more. It's funny that if you truly accept that there's no free will, that is a kind of radical freedom. It's funny, but you're, because the little bit of the illusion in under that framework that you have that you can make choices, if choice is just an illusion of psychology, you can do whatever the hell you want. That's the- But we don't, do we? And I think- But because you don't truly accept that you think that there's, like, you think there's a choice which is why you don't just do whatever the hell you want. Like, you feel like there's some responsibility for making the wrong choice, which is why you don't do it. But if you truly accept that the choice has already been made, then you can go, I don't know what is the most radical thing. I mean, but yeah, I wonder what am I preventing myself from doing that I would really want to do? Probably like humor stuff. Like, I would love to, if I could like save a game, do the thing, and then reload it later, like do undo, it'd probably be humor, just to do something like super hilarious. That's super embarrassing, and then just go, I mean, it's basically just fun. I would add more fun to the world. I mean, I sometimes do that. As I, you know, I sometimes, I try and mess up my reality in unusual ways by just doing things because I'm bored, but not bored. I'm not expressing this very well. I think that this is a really interesting problem that perhaps the hard sciences don't really understand that they're ever responsible for, because the question about how life emerged and how intelligence emerges and consciousness and free will, they're all ultimately boiling down to some of the same mechanics, I think. My feeling is that they are the same problem again and again and again. The transition from a boring world or a world in which there is no selection. So I wonder if free will has something to do with selection and models, and also the models you're generating in the brain, and also the amount of memory, your working memory, have available at any one time to generate counterfactuals. Well, that's fascinating, so like the decision-making process is a kind of selection, and that could be just another, yet another manifestation of the selection mechanism that's pervasive throughout the universe. Okay, that's fascinating to think about. Yeah, there's not some kind of fundamental, its own thing or something like that, that is just yet another example of selection. Yeah, and in the universe that's intrinsically open, you want to do that because you generate novelty. You mentioned something about, do cellular automata exist outside the human mind in our little offline conversation? Why is that an interesting question? So cellular automata, complexity, what's the relationship between complexity in the human mind and trees falling in the forest? Infrastructure, so the CA, so when John von Neumann and Conway and Feynman were doing CA, so doing on paper. CA is cellular automata. Yeah, just drawing them on paper. How awesome is that, that they were doing cellular automata on paper? Yeah. And then they were doing a computer that takes like forever to print out anything and program. Sure. People are now with the TikTok, kids these days with the TikTok, don't understand how amazing it is to just play with cellular automata, arbitrarily changing the rules as you want, the initial conditions, and see the beautiful patterns emerge, sing with fractals, all of that. Oh, you've just given me a brilliant idea. I wonder if there's a TikTok account that's just dedicated to putting out CA rules and if it isn't, we should make one. 100%. And that will get- That will get millions of views. Millions, yes. No, it will get dozens. Just have it running. So look, I kind of, CA, I love CAs. Sorry. Yeah, no. We just have to make one. I actually, a few years ago, I made some robots that talked to each other, chemical robots that played the game of Hex invented by John Nash by doing chemistry and they communicated by Twitter, which experiments they were doing. And they had a lookup table of experiments and Robot One said, I'm doing experiment 10. The other robot, okay, I'll do experiment one then. And they communicated- By Twitter. Like publicly or DMs? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you maybe quickly explain what the game of Hex is? Yeah, so it's basically a hexagonal board and you try and basically, you color each element on the board of each hexagon and you try and get from one side to the other and the other one tries to block you. How are they connected? So what are the robots? It's a chemical- Yeah, let's go back. So there were two robots. Each robot was doing die chemistry. So making RGB, red, green, blue, red, green, blue, red, green, blue. And they could just choose from experiments to do red, green, blue. Initially, I said to my group, we need to make two chemical robots that play chess. And my group were like, that's too hard. No, go away. But anyways, we had the robot. By the way, if people listening to this should probably know that Lee Cronin is an amazing group of brilliant people. He's exceptionally well-published. He's written a huge number of amazing papers. Whenever he calls himself stupid and is a sign of humility, and I deeply respect that and appreciate it. So people listening to this should know this is a world-class scientist who doesn't take himself seriously, which I really appreciate and love. Anywho, talking about serious science, we're back to your group projecting your idea of chemical robots playing chess via dies. So you went to a simpler game of hex. Okay, so what else? The team that did it were brilliant. I really take, I think they still have PTSD from doing it. Cause I said, this is a workshop. What I'd often do is I have about 60 people on my team. And occasionally before lockdown, I would say, I'm a bit bored. We're gonna have a workshop on something. Who wants to come? And then basically about 20 people turn up to my office and I say, we're gonna do this mad thing. And then it would just self-organize. And some of them would be like, no, I'm not doing this. And then you get left with the happy dozen. And what we did is we built this robot and doing die chemistry is really easy. You can just take two molecules, react them together and change color. And what I wanted to do is have a palette of different molecules. You can react commentorially and get different colors. So you've got two robots. I went, wouldn't it be cool if the robots basically shared the same list of reactions to do? And they said, oh, and because of then you could do a kind of multi-core chemistry. Like they weren't, so you'd have two chemical reactions going on at once and they could basically outsource the problem. But they're sharing the same tape. Exactly. So robot one would say, I'm gonna do experiment one. And the other robot says, I'll do experiment 100. And then they cross it off. But I wanted to make it- That's brilliant by the way. I wanted to make it- That is genius. Well, I wanted to make it groovier. And I said, look, let's have them competing to make, so they're playing a game of hex. And so when the robot does an experiment and the more blue the die, the more it gets the chance, the higher chance it gets to make the move it wants on the hex board. So if it gets a red color, it gets down weighted in the other robot. And so what the robots could do is they play each player move. And because the fitness function or the optimization function was to make the color blue, they started to invent reactions we weren't on the list. And they did this by not cleaning because we made cleaning optional. So when one robot realized if it didn't clean its pipes, it could get blue more quickly. And the other robot realized that, so it was like getting dirty as well. And they- I didn't tell the consequences of super intelligence. Okay. But- That was the game. Communicating through Twitter though. They were doing it through Twitter and Twitter bland them a couple of times. I said, come on, you've got a couple of robots doing chemistry, it's really cool. Stop banning them. Yeah. But in the end, we had to take them off Twitter and they just communicated via a server. Cause it was just, there were people saying, you can still find it, Cronin Lab 1 and Cronin Lab 2 on Twitter. And it was like make move, wait, mix A and B, wait 10 seconds, answer blue. I really find it super compelling that you would have a chemical entity that's communicating with the world. That was one of the things I wanna do with my origin of life reaction, right? Is basically have a reactor that's basically just randomly enumerating through chemical space and have some kind of cycle. And then read out what the molecule's reading out using a mass spectrometer. And then convert that to text and publish it on Twitter. And then wait until it says I'm alive. I reckon that Twitter account would get a lot of followers. And I'm still trying to convince my group that we should just make an origin of life Twitter account. Where it's going, and it's like, hello testing. I'm here. Well, I'll share it. I like it. I particularly enjoy this idea of a non-human entity communicating with the world via human design social network. It's quite a beautiful idea. How we were talking about CA's existing outside the human mind. So I really admire Stephen Wolfram. I think he's a genius, clearly a genius. And trapped in is actually, it's like a problem with being so smart is you get trapped in your own mind, right? And I try to actually, I try to convince Stephen that assembly theory wasn't nonsense. I'm like, no, it's just nonsense. I was a little bit sad by that. So nonsense applied, even if it applied to the simplest construct of a one dimensional cellular automata, for example. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, actually, maybe I'm doing myself a bit too down. It was just as a theory was coming through and I didn't really know how to explain it. But we are gonna use assembly theory in CA's instead of automata. But I wanted to, what I was really curious about is why people marvel. I mean, you marvel at CA's and they're complex. I said, well, hang on, that complexity is baked in because if you play the game of life in a CA, you have to run it on a computer. You have to have a, you have to do a number of operations, put in the boundary conditions. So is it surprising that you get this structure out? Is it manufactured by the boundary conditions? And it is interesting because I think cellular automata running them is teaching me something about what real numbers are and aren't. And I haven't quite got there yet. I was playing on the airplane coming over. I'm just realized I have no idea what real numbers are really. And I was like, well, I do actually have some notion of what real numbers are. And I think thinking about real numbers as functions rather than numbers is more appropriate. And then if you then apply that to CA's, then you're saying, well, actually, why am I seeing this complexity in this rule? Is it, you know, is it, you've got this deterministic system and yet you get this incredible structure coming out. Well, isn't that what you'd get with any real number as you apply it as a function? And you're trying to read it out to an arbitrary precision? And I wonder if CA's are just helping me, my misunderstanding is CA's might be helping me understand them in terms of real numbers. I don't know what you think. Yeah, well, the function, but the devil's in the function. Like which is the function that's generating your real number? It seems like it's very important the specific algorithm of that function, because some lead to something super trivial, some lead to something that's all chaotic and some lead to things that are just walked that fine line of complexity and structure. I think we agree. So let's take it back a second. So take the logistic map or something, logistic equation, where you have this equation, which is you don't know what's gonna happen at M plus one, but once you've done M plus one, you know full time, you can't predict it. For me, CA's and logistic equation feel similar. And I think what's incredibly interesting, and I share your kind of wonder at running a CA, but also I'm saying, well, what is it about the boundary conditions and the way I'm running that calculation? So in my group, with my team, we actually made a chemical CA. We made game of life. We actually made a physical grid. I haven't been able to publish this paper. It's been trapped in purgatory for a long time. But it might be about- You wrote it up as a paper, how to do a chemical formulation of the game of life. We made a chemical computer and little cells. And I was playing game of life. With a BZ reactions, each cell would pulse on and off, on and off, on and off. We have little stirrer bars and we have little gates. And we actually played Conway's game of life in there. And we got structures in that game from the chemistry that you wouldn't expect from the actual CA. So that was kind of cool in that- Cause they're interacting outside of the cells, some how. So what's happening is you're getting noise. So the thing is that you've got this BZ reaction that gives on off, on off, on off, but there's also a wake and those wakes constructively interfere. And it's such a non-trivial way that's non-deterministic. And the non-determinism in the system gives very rich dynamics. And I was wondering if I could physically make a chemical computer with this CA that gives me something different that I can't get in a silicon representation of a CA where all the states are clean. Cause you don't have the noise trailing into the next round. You just have the state. So the paper in particular, so that's just a beautiful idea to use a chemical computer to construct a cellular automaton, the famous one of game of life. But it's also interesting and it's a really interesting scientific question of whether some kind of random perturbations or some source of randomness can have a significant constructive effect on the complexity of the system. And indeed, I mean, whether it's random or just non-deterministic and can we bake in that non-determinism at the beginning? I wonder what is the, I'm trying to think about what is the encoding space? Encoding space is pretty big. We have 49 star, so 49 cells, 49 chem bits, all connected to one another in like an analog computer, but being read out discreetly as the BZ reaction. So just to say the BZ reaction is a chemical oscillator. And what happened in each cell is it goes between red and blue. So two Russians discovered it, Belousov-Zaborskinski. I think Belousov first proposed it and everyone said, you're crazy, it breaks the second law. And Zaborskinski said, no, it doesn't break the second law, it's consuming a fuel. And so, and then, and it's like, there's a lot of chemistry hidden in the Russian literature actually, because Russians just wrote it in Russian, they didn't publish it in English speaking journals. It's heartbreaking actually. Well, yeah, sadden, it's great that it's there, right? It's not lost. I'm sure we will find a way of translating it properly. Well, the silver lining slash greater sadness of all of this is there's probably ideas in English speaking, like there's ideas in certain disciplines that if discovered by other disciplines would crack open some of the biggest mysteries in those disciplines. Like computer science, for example, is trying to solve problems like nobody else has ever tried to solve problems. As if it's not already been all addressed in cognitive science and psychology and mathematics and physics and just whatever you want to, economics even. But if you look into that literature, you might be able to discover some beautiful ideas. Obviously, Russian is an interesting case of that is because there's a Lawson translation, but you said there's a source of fuel, a source of energy. Yeah, yeah, so the BZ reaction, you have an acid in there called melonic acid. And what happens is it, when it, when it, it's basically like a battery that powers it and it loses CO2, so decarboxylates. It's just a chemical reaction. What that means we have to do is continuously feed or we just keep the BZ reaction going in a long enough time. So it's like it's reversible in time. But only like. But only like, but it's fascinating. I mean, the team that did it, I'm really proud of their persistence. We made a chemical computer. It can solve little problems. It can solve traveling salesman problems actually. Nice. But like I say, it's cop, it's true. But not any faster than a regular computer. Is there something you could do? Maybe, I'm not sure. I'm not, I think we can come up with a way of solving problems, also really complex, hard ones. Cause it's an analog computer and we can, we can, the, it can energy minimize really quickly. It doesn't have to basically go through every element in the matrix, like flip it. It just reads out. So we could actually do Monte Carlo by just shaking the box. It's literally a box shaker. You don't actually have to encode the shaking of the box and it's silicon memory and then just shuffle everything around. Yeah. It's analog, it's natural. So it's a, it's an organic computer. Yeah. So we're, so I was playing around with this and I was kind of annoying some of my colleagues. I'm wondering if we could get to chemical supremacy, like quantum supremacy. And I kind of calculated how big the grid has to be so we can actually start to solve problems faster than a silicon computer. But I'm not willing to, to state how that is yet. Cause I'm probably wrong. It's not that I'm, it's any top secret thing is I want, I think I can make a chemical computer that can solve optimization problems faster than the silicon computer. That's fascinating. But then you're unsure how big that has to be. Yeah. I think, I mean, I'd be a big box, hard to shake. It might be exactly a big box, hard to shake and basically a bit sloppy. Did we answer the question about do a cellular atomic exist outside the mind? We didn't, but I would, I would posit that they don't. And I, and, but I think minds can, well. So the mind is fundamental. What's the, why? Well, I mean, sorry, let's just go to the back. So as a physical phenomena, do CAs exist in physical reality, right? I would say they probably don't exist outside the human mind, but now we've constructed them, they exist in computer memories. They exist in my lab, they exist on paper. So they are, they emerge from the human mind. I'm just interested in, because Stephen Wolfram like CAs, a lot of people like CAs and likes to think of them as minimal computational elements. I'm just saying, well, do they exist in reality or are they a representation of a simple machine that's just very elegant to implement? So it's a platonic question, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's, there's initial conditions. There's a memory in the system. There's simple rules that dictate the evolution of the system. So what exists? The idea, the rules, the- Yeah. People who are using CAs as models for things in reality to say, hey, look, you can do this thing in a CA. And my, when I see this, I'm saying, oh, that's cool. But what does that tell me about reality? Where's the CA in space? Oh, I see. Well, right. It's a mathematical object. So for people who don't know cellular automata, there's usually a grid, whether it's one dimensional, two dimensional, or three dimensional, and it evolves by simple local rules. Like you die or are born. If the neighbors are alive or dead. And it turns out if you have, with certain kinds of initial conditions and with certain kinds of very simple rules, you can create like arbitrarily complex and beautiful systems. And to me, you know, whether drugs are involved or not, I can sit back for hours and enjoy the mystery of it, how such complexity can emerges. It gives me almost like, you know, people talk about religious experiences. It gives me a sense that you get to have a glimpse at the origin of this whole thing. Whatever is creating this complexity from such simplicity is the very thing that brought my mind to life. This me, the human, our human civilization. And yes, those constructs are pretty trivial. I mean, that's part of their magic is even in this trivial framework, you could see the emergence, or especially in this trivial framework, you could see the emergence of complexity from simplicity. I guess what Lee, you're saying is that this is not, you know, this is highly unlike systems we see in the physical world, even though they probably carry some of the same magic, like mechanistically. I would say, I mean, I'm saying that the operating system that a CA has to exist on is quite complex. Right. And so I wonder if you're getting the complexity at the CA from the boundary conditions, the operating system, the underlying digital computer. Oh, wow, those are some strong words against CA's then. I didn't realize- Not against. I mean, I'm in love with CA's as well. I'm just saying they aren't as trivial as people think. They are incredible. To get to that richness, you have to iterate billions of times, and you need a display, and you need a math co-processor, and you need a von Neumann machine based on a Turing machine with digital error correction and states. Wow, to think that for the simplicity of a grid, you're basically saying a grid is not simple. Yeah. It requires incredible complexity to bring a grid to life. Yeah. Yeah, that's- What then, what is simple? That's all I wanted to say. I agree with you with the wonder of CA's, I just think, but remember, we take so much for granted what the CA is resting on, because von Neumann and Feynman weren't showing, weren't seeing these elaborate structures. They could not get that far. Yeah, but that's the limitation of their mind. Yeah, yeah, exactly, limitation of their pencil. But I think that's, the question is whether the essential elements of the cellular automata is present without all the complexities required to build a computer. And my intuition, the reason I find it incredible is that, yeah, my intuition is yes. It might look different. There might not be a grid-like structure, but local interactions operating under simple rules and resulting in multi-hierarchical complex structures feels like a thing that doesn't require a computer. I agree, but coming back to von Neumann and Feynman and Wolfram, their minds, the non-trivial minds, to create those architectures and do it and to put on those state transitions. And I think that's something that's really incredibly interesting that is understanding how the human mind builds those state transition machines. I could see how deeply in love with the idea of memory you are. So it's like how much of E equals MC squared is more than an equation. It has Albert Einstein in it. Like you're saying, like, you can't just say this is a, like the equations of physics are a really good simple capture of a physical phenomena. It is also has the, that equation has the memory of the humans. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. But I don't, I don't know if you're implying this, I don't, that's a beautiful idea, but I don't know if I'm comfortable with that sort of diminishing the power of that equation. No, no, it enhances it. Because it's built on the shoulders, it enhances it. I think it enhances it. It's not, that equation is the minimal compressed representation of reality, right? We can use machine learning or Max Tegmark's AI Feynman to find lots of solutions for gravity, but isn't it wonderful that the laws that we do find are the maximally compressed representations? Yeah, but that representation, you can now give it as, I guess the universe has the memory of Einstein with that representation, but then you can now give it as a gift for free. Yeah, yeah, it's low memory. Einstein had to go through a lot of pain to get there, but it's low memory. So I say that physics and chemistry and biology are the same discipline. They're just physics, laws in physics, there's no such thing as a law in physics, it's just low memory stuff. Because you've got low memory stuff, you can, things reoccur quickly. As you build in more memory, you get to chemistry, so things become more contingent. When you get to biology, more contingent still, and then technology. So the more memory you need, the more your laws are local. That's all I'm saying, in that the less memory, the more the laws are universal, because they're not laws, they are just low memory states. We have to talk about a thing you've kind of mentioned already a bunch of times, but doing computation through chemistry, chemical-based computation. I've seen you refer to it as, in a sexy title of chemputation. So what is computation, and what is chemically, chemical-based computation? Okay, so chemputation is a name I gave to the process of building a state machine to make any molecule physically in the lab. And so as a chemist, chemists make molecules by hand. And they're quite hard, the chemists have a lot of tacit knowledge, a lot of ambiguity. It's not possible to go uniformly to the literature and read a recipe to make a molecule, and then go and make it in the lab every time. Some recipes are better than others, but they all assume some knowledge. And it's not universal what that is. So it's carried from human to human, some of that implicit knowledge. And you're saying, can we remove the human from the patient? Can we program? What, by the way, what is a state machine? So a state machine is a, I suppose, a object either abstract or mechanical, where you can do a unit operation on it and flick it from one state to another. So a turnstile would be a good example of a state machine. There's some kinds of states and some kind of transitions between states. And it's very formal in nature in terms of how precise how you do those transitions. Yes, you can mathematically precisely describe a state machine. So, I mean, a very simple Boolean gates are a very good way of building kind of logic-based state machines. Obviously a Turing machine, the concept of a Turing machine where you have a tape and a read head and a series of rules in a table. And you would basically look at what's on the tape. And if you're shifting the tape from left to right, and if you see a zero or one, you look in your lookup table and say, right, I've seen a zero and a one. I then do, I then respond to that. So in the turnstile would be, is there a human being pushing the turnstile in direction clockwise? If yes, I will open, let them go. If it's anti-clockwise, no. So yeah, so a state machine has some labels and a transition diagram. So you're looking to come up with a chemical computer to form state machines to create molecules or? Yeah. Which, what's the chicken and the egg? So computation is not a chemical computer because we talked a few minutes about actually doing computations with chemicals. What I'm now saying is I want to use state machines to transform chemicals. And so- So build chemicals programmatically. Yeah. I mean, I get in trouble saying this. I said to my group, I shouldn't say it because it's, but I said, look, we should make the crack bot. Is it in the crack robot? The robot that makes crack? The crack bot? Oh, crack bot. The robot that makes crack, but maybe we should scrub this from, but- No, or, well, so maybe you can educate me on breaking bad with like maths, right? Yeah, so in breaking bad- So you want to make basically some kind of mix of ex machina and breaking bad. No, I don't. I don't, on the record, I don't, but I said- You don't. I said, that's what I'm going to do once you release the papers. But I shaved my head and I'm going to live a life of crime. Anyway, I'm sorry. No, no. So yeah, let's get back to, so indeed, it is about making drugs, but importantly, making important drugs. All drugs matter. Yeah, but let's go back. So the basic thesis is chemistry is very analog. There is no state machine. And I wandered into the, through the paper walls in the Japanese house a few years ago and said, okay, hey, organic chemists, why are you doing this analog? They said, well, chemistry is really hard. You can't automate it. It's impossible. I said, but is it impossible? They said, yeah. And they said, I got the impression they're saying it's magic. And so when people tell me things are magic, it was like, no, no, they can't be magic. Right, so let's break this down. And so what I did is I went to my group one day about eight years ago and said, hey guys, I've written this new programming language for you. And so everything is clear. And you have to, you're not allowed to just wander around the lab willy nilly. You have to pick up things in order, go to the balance of the right time and all this stuff. And they looked at me as if I was insane and basically kicked me out of the lab and said, no, don't do that. We're not doing that. And I said, okay. So I went back the next day and said, I'm gonna find some money so we can make cool robots do chemical reactions. And everyone went, that's cool. And so in that process. The person tried to convert the humans to become robots. And next you could, you might as well just create the robots. Yes, but so in that, in that, the formalization process. Yeah, so what I did is said, look, chemical, to make a molecule, you need to do four things abstractly. I want to make a chemical Turing machine. Because a Turing machine, you think about this, imagine a Turing machine. Turing machine is the ultimate abstraction of a computation because it's been shown by Turing and others that basically a universal Turing machine should be able to do all computations that you can imagine. It's like, wow, why didn't I think of a Turing machine for chemistry? Let's think of a magic robot that can make any molecule. Let's think about that for a second. Okay, great. How do we then implement it? And I think it's, so what is the abstraction? So to do, to make any molecule, you have to do a reaction. So you have to put reagents together, do a reaction in a flask, typically. Then you're after the reaction, you have to stop the reactions. You do what's called a workup. So whatever, cool it down, add some liquid to it, extract. So then after you do the workup, you separate. So you then remove the molecules, separate them all out. And then the final step is purification. So reaction, workup, separate, purify. So this is basically like exactly like a Turing machine where you have your tape, you have your tape head, you have some rules, and then you run it. So I thought, cool. I went to all the chemists and said, look, chemistry isn't that hard. Reaction, workup, separation, purification, do that in cycles forever for any molecule, all the chemistry, done. And they said, chemistry is that hard. I said, but just in principle. And I got a few very enlightened people to say, yeah, okay, in principle, but it ain't gonna work. And this was in about 2013, 2014. And I found myself going to an architecture conference almost by accident. It's like, why am I at this random conference on architecture? And that was because I published a paper on inorganic architecture. And they said, come to architecture conference, but the inorganic architecture is not nano architecture. And I went, okay. And then I found these guys at the conference, 3D printing ping pong balls and shapes. And this is through it, 3D printing was cool. And it's like, this is ridiculous. Why are you 3D printing ping pong balls? And I gave them a whole load of abuse, like I normally do when I first meet people, how to win friends and influence people. And then I was like, oh my God, you guys are geniuses. And so I got from, they were a bit confused because I was calling them idiots and then call them geniuses. It's like, will you come to my lab and we're gonna build a robot to do chemistry with a 3D printer? And they said, oh, that's cool. All right. So I had them come to the lab and we started to 3D print test tubes. So you imagine, 3D print a bottle and then use the same gantry to basically, rather than to squirt out plastic out of a nozzle, have a little syringe and jump chemicals in. So we had the 3D printer, because simultaneously print the test tube and then put chemicals into the test tube. And then- Oh, so it's really end to end. Yeah. And it's like, that'll be cool because they've got G-code to do it all. And I was like, that's cool. So I got my group doing this and I developed it a bit. And I realized that we could take those unit operations and we built a whole bunch of pumps and valves. And I realized that I could basically take the literature and I made the first version of the computer in 2016, 17. I made some architectural decisions. So I designed the pumps and valves in my group. I did all the electronics in my group. They were brilliant. I cannot pay tribute to my group enough in doing this. They were just brilliant. And there were some poor souls there that said, Lee, why are you making this design electronics? I'm like, well, because I don't understand it. They're like, so you're making this design stuff because you don't understand. I was like, yeah. But can we not just buy some? I said, well, we can, but then I don't understand how to, what bus they're gonna use and the serial ports and all this stuff. I just wanted, and I made, I came up with a decision to design a bunch of pumps and valves. I use power over ethernet. So I got one cable for power and data. Plug them all in, plug them all into a router and then I made the state machine. And there was a couple of cool things I did. Oh, they did actually. We got the abstraction. So reaction, workup, separation, purification. And then I made the decision to do it in batch. Now it's in batch. All chemistry had been digitized before, apparently. It was, it's been done, but everyone had been doing it in flow. And flow is continuous and there are infinities everywhere. And you have to just, and I realized that I could actually make a state machine where I basically put stuff in the reactor, turn it from one state to another state, stop it and just read it out. And okay, and I was kind of pitching it, electrical engineers saying, you have it easy. You don't have to clean out the electrons. Electrons don't leave a big mess. They leave some EM waste. But in my state machine, I built in cleaning. So it's like, we do an operation and then it cleans the backbone and then can do it again. So there's no- So what we managed to do over a couple of years is develop the hardware, develop the state machine, and we encoded three molecules. We did three, the first three, we did nitrile, a sleeping drug, rifinamide, anti-seizure and Viagra. And I could make jokes on the paper. It's a hard problem, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is very good. And then in the next one, what we did, said, okay, my poor organic chemist said, look, Lee, we've worked with you this long. We've made a robot that looks like it's gonna take our jobs away and not just take our jobs away, what we love in the lab, but now we have to become programmers. But we're not even good programmers. We just have to spend ages writing lines of code that are boring and it's not as elegant. I went, you're right. So then, but I knew because I had this abstraction and I knew that there was language, I could suddenly develop a state machine that would interpret the language, which was lossy and ambiguous and populate my abstraction. So I built a chemical programming language that is actually gonna be recursively innumerable. It's gonna be a Turing complete language actually, which is kind of cool, which means it's for me verifiable. So where we are now is we can now read the literature using a bit of natural language processing. It's not the best. There are many other groups have done better job, but we can use that language reading to populate the state machine and basically add, subtract. We got about a number of primitives that we basically program loops that we dovetail together and we can make any molecule with it. Okay, so that's the kind of program synthesis. So you start at like, literally you're talking about like a paper, like a scientific paper that's being read natural language processing, extracting some kind of details about chemical reactions and the chemical molecules, the compos involved. And then that's, in GPT terms, serves as a prompt for the program synthesis that's kind of trivial right now. There you have a bunch of different like for loops and so on that creates a program in this chemical language that can then be interpreted by the chemical computer, the computer. Yeah, computer, that's right. Yeah. Everything sounds better in your British accent, I love it. So into the computer and that's able to then basically be a 3D printer for these molecules. Yeah, I wouldn't call it a 3D printer, I would call it a universal chemical reaction system because 3D printing gives the wrong impression, but yeah. And it purifies. And the nice thing is that that code now, we call it the KyDL code is really interesting because now, so computation, what is computation? Computation is what computing is to mathematics, I think. Computation is the process of taking chemical code and some input reagents and making the same molecule, making the molecule reproducibly every time without fail. What is computation? It's the process of using a program to take some input conditions and give you an output, same every time, right? Well, reliably. So the problem is, now maybe you can push back and correct me on this. So I know biology is messy. My question is how messy is chemistry? So if we use the analogy of a computer, it's easier to make computation in a computer very precise, that it's repeatable, it makes errors almost never. If it does the exact same way over and over and over and over. What about chemistry? Is there messiness in the whole thing? Can that be somehow leveraged? Can that be controlled? Can be that removed? Do we wanna remove it from the system? Oh, yes and no, right. Is there messiness? There is messiness because chemistry is like, you're doing reactions on billions of molecules and they don't always work, but you've got purification there. And so what we've found is at the beginning, everyone said it can't work. It's gonna be too messy. It'll just fail. And I said, but you managed to get chemistry to work in the lab. Are you magic? Are you doing something? So I would say, now go back to the first ever computer or the ENIAC, 5 million soldered joints, 400,000 valves that are exploding all the time. Was that, would you have gone, okay, that's messy. So we've got the, and have we got the equivalent of the ENIAC in my lab? We've got 15 computers in the lab now and they, are they unreliable? Yeah, they fall apart here and there, but are they getting better really quickly? Yeah. Are they now able to reliably make more? Are we at the point in the lab where there are some molecules we would rather make on the computer than have a human being make? Yeah, we've just done, we've just made a anti-influenza molecule and some antivirals, six steps on the computer that would take a human being about one week to make Arbidol of continuous labor. And all they do now is load up the reagents, press go button and just go away and drink coffee. Wow, so this, I mean, and this is, you're saying this computer is just the early days. And so like some of the criticism just have to do with the early days. And yes, I would say that something like this is quite impossible. So the fact that you're doing this is incredible. Not impossible, of course, but extremely difficult. It did seem really difficult. And I do keep pinching myself when I go in the lab. I was like, is it working? Like, yep. And it's not, it does clog, it does stop. You gotta clean, this is great. But it's getting more reliable because I made some, we just made design decisions and said, we are not gonna abandon the abstraction. Think about it, if the von Neumann implementation was abandoned, I mean, think about what we do to semiconductors to really constrain them to what we do to silicon in a fab lab. We take computation for granted. Silicon is not in its natural state. We are doping the hell out of it. It's incredible what they're able to accomplish and achieve that reliability at the scale they do. Like you said, that's after Moore's Law, what we have now and what we, you know, how it started, you know, now we're here. So think about it now. We started at the bottom, now we're here. We have only have 20 million molecules, well, say 20 million molecules in one database, maybe a few hundred million in all the pharmaceutical companies. And those few hundred million molecules are responsible for all the drugs that we've had in humanity, except, you know, biologics for the last 50 years. Now imagine what happens when a drug goes out of print, goes out of print because there's only a finite number of manufacturing facilities in the world that make these drugs. Is that a print? Yeah, isn't that computer? It's a printing press for chemistry. Yeah, and not only that, we can protect the KyDL so we can stop bad actors doing it. We can encrypt them and we can give people light. KyDL, that's the name, sorry to interrupt, is the name of the programming language? Yeah, the KyDL is the name of the programming language and the code we give the chemicals. So Ky, as in, you know, just for, it's like a, it's actually like an XML format, but I've now taken it from script to a fully expressible programming language so we can do dynamics and there's four loops in there and conditional statements. Right, but the structure, it started out as a, like an XML type of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we also, the chemist doesn't need to program in KyDL, they can just go to the software and type in, add A to B, reflux, do what they would normally do and you just convert it to KyDL and they have a linter to check it. And they're correct. So how do you, you know, not with ASCII, but because it's a Greek letter, how do you go with, how do you spell it just using the English alphabet? We just, X-D-L? X-D-L, but we put in Ky. And it was named by one of my students and one of my post-docs many years ago and I quite liked it. It's like, it's important I think, when the team are contributing to such big ideas, cause there's their ideas as well. I try not to just rename, I didn't call it Cronin or anything that, cause they keep saying, you know, is the chemistry, when they're putting stuff in the computer one of my students said, we are asking now, is it Cronin complete? And I was like, what does that mean? They said, well, can we make it on the damn machine? And I was like, oh, is that a compliment or a majority? And they're like, well, it might be better. Yeah, so you tweeted, quote, why does chemistry need a universal programming language, question mark? For all the reasons you can think of, reliability, interoperability, collaboration, remove ambiguity, lower cost, increase safety, open up discovery, molecular customization and publication of executable chemical code. Which is fascinating by the way, just publish code. And can you maybe elaborate a little bit more about this ChiDL, what is the universal language of chemistry look like? A Cronin complete language. It's a Turing complete language really. But so what it has, it has a series of operators in it, like add, heat, stir. So there's a bunch of just unit operations. And all it is really is just, with chemical engineers, when I talked about this, that you've just rediscovered chemical engineering. And I said, well, yeah, I know. They said, well, that's trivial. I said, well, not really. Well, yes, it is trivial. And that's why it's good because not only have we rediscovered chemical engineering, we've made it implementable on the universal hardware that doesn't cost very much money. And so the ChiDL has a series of statements like define the reactor. So defines the reagents. So they're all labels. So you assign them. And what I also implemented at the beginning is because I give all the hardware IP address, you put it on a graph. And so what it does is like the graph is equivalent to the processor firmware, the processor code. So when you take your ChiDL and you go to run it on your computer, you can run it on any compatible hardware in any configuration, it says, what's your graph look like? As long as I can solve the problem on the graph with these unit operations, you have the resources available, chem piles. Ah ha. Ha ha ha. Ah. All right, we can carry on for years. I mean, it is really, it's compilation. And compilation, yeah. And what it now does is it says, okay, the problem we have before is it was possible to do robotics for chemistry, but the robots were really expensive. They were unique. They were vendor locked. And what I want to do is to make sure that every chemist in the world can get access to machinery like this at virtually no cost because it makes it safer. It makes it more reliable. And then if you go to the literature and you find a molecule that could potentially cure cancer, and let's say the molecule that could potentially cure cancer takes you three years to repeat, and maybe a student finishes their PhD in the time and they never get it back. So it's really hard to kind of get all the way to that molecule and it limits the ability of humanity to build on it. If they just download the code and can execute it, it turns, I would say the electronic laboratory notebook in chemistry is a data symmetry because no one will ever reproduce it. But now the data symmetry is a Jupiter notebook and you can just execute it. A notebook and people can play with it. They access to it. Reversion it. Orders of magnitude is increased. We'll talk about the, so as with all technologies, I think there's way more exciting possibilities, but there are also terrifying possibilities and we'll talk about all of them. But let me just kind of linger on the machine learning side of this. So you're describing programming, but it's a language. I don't know if you've heard about OpenAI Codex, which is- Yeah, I'm playing with it. You're playing with it? Of course you are. You really are Rick from Rick and Morty. This is great. Okay. Except philosophically, I mean, he is, I guess, kind of philosophically deep too. So for people who don't know GPT, GPT-3, it's a language model that can do natural language generation. So you can give it a prompt and it can complete the rest of it. But it turns out that that kind of prompt, it's not just completes the rest of it, it's generating novel sounding text. And then you can apply that to generation of other kinds of stuff. So these kinds of transformer-based language models are really good at forming deep representations of a particular space, like a medium, like language. So you can then apply it to a specific subset of language like programming. So you can have it learn the representation of the Python programming language and use it to then generate syntactically and semantically correct programs. So you can start to make progress on one of the hardest problems in computer science, which is program synthesis. How do you write programs that accomplish different tasks? So what OpenAI Codex does is it to generate those programs based on a prompt of some kind. Usually you can do a natural language prompt. So basically as you do when you program, you write some comment, which serves the basic documentation of the inputs and the outputs and the function of the particular set of code and it's able to generate that. Point being is you can generate programs using machine learning, using neural networks. Those programs operate on the boring old computer. Can you generate programs that operate, this gotta be a clever version of programs for this, but can you write programs that operate on a computer? Yep, there's actually software out there right now. We can go and do it. Really? Yeah, yeah, it's a heuristic. It's rule-based, but we have what we've done, inspired by Codex actually, is over the summer I ran a little workshop. Some of my groups got this inspired idea that we should get a load of students and ask them to manually collect data to label chemical procedures into KyDL. And we have a cool synth reader. So there's a bunch of people doing this right now, but they're doing it without abstraction. And because we have an abstraction that's implementable in the hardware, we've developed basically a chemical analog of Codex. When you say abstraction in the hardware, what do you mean? So right now, a lot of people doing machine learning and reading chemistry and saying, oh, you've got all these operations, add, shake, whatever, but because they don't have a uniform, I mean, there's a couple of groups doing it, some competitors actually, and they're good, very good, but they can't run that code automatically. They are losing meaning. And the really important thing that you have to do is generate context. And so what we've learned to do with our abstraction is make sure we can pull the context out of the text. And so can we take a chemical procedure and read it and generate our executable code? Yes. What's the hardest part about that whole pipeline, from the initial text, interpreting the initial text of a paper, extracting the meaningful context and the meaningful chemical information, to then generating the program, to then running that program in the hardware. What's the hardest part about that pipeline as we look towards a universal Turing computer? So the hardest thing with the pipeline is that the software, the model gets confused between some meanings, right? So if chemists are very good at inventing words that aren't broken down, so the classic word that you would use for boiling something is called reflux. So reflux is, you'd have a solvent in a round-bottom flask, at reflux it would be boiling, going up the reflux condenser and coming down. But that term reflux, to reflux, could be changed, you know, to, people often make up words, new words, and then the software can fall over. But what we've been able to do is a bit like in Python, or any programming language, is identify when things aren't matched. So you present the code and you say, this isn't matched, you may want to think about this, and then the user goes and says, oh, I mean reflux, and just ticks a box and collects it. So what the codex or the Chemex does in this case, is it just, it suggests the first go, and then the chemist goes and corrects it. And I really want the chemist to correct it, because it's not safe, I believe, for it to allow AI to just read literature and generate code at this stage. Because now you're having actual, by the way, Chemex, nice. Nice name. So you are unlike, which is fascinating, is that we live in a fascinating moment in human history. But yes, you're literally connecting AI to some physical, and like, it's building something in the physical realm. Yeah. Especially in the space of chemistry that operates sort of invisibly. Yeah, yeah, I would say that's right. And it's really important to understand those labeling schemes, right? And one of the things I was never, I was always worried about at the beginning that the abstraction was gonna fall over. And the way we did it was just by brute force to start with. We just kept reading the literature and saying, is there anything new? Can we add a new rule in? And actually, our ChiDL language expand, exploded. There was so many extra things we had to keep adding. And then I realized the primitives still were maintained and I could break them down again. So it's pretty good. I mean, there are problems. There are problems with interpreting any big sentence and turning it into an actionable code. And the codex is not without its problems. You can crash it quite easily, right? You can generate nonsense. But boy, it's interesting. I would love to learn to program now using codex, right? Just hacking around, right? And I wonder if chemists in the future will learn to do chemistry by just hacking around with the system writing different things. Because the key thing that we're doing with chemistry is that where a lot of mathematical chemistry went wrong is people, and I think Wolfram does this in Mathematica, he assumes that chemistry is a reaction where atom A or molecule A reacts with molecule B to give molecule C. That's not what chemistry is. Chemistry is take some molecule, take a liquid or a solid, mix it up and heat it, and then extract it. So the programming language is actually with respect to the process operations. And if you flick in process space, not in chemical graph space, you unlock everything. Because there's only a finite number of processes you need to do in chemistry. And that's reassuring. And so we're in the middle of it. It's really exciting. It's not the be all and the end all. And there is, like I say, errors that can creep in. One day we might be able to do it without human interaction, you simulate it. And you'll know enough about the simulation that the lab won't catch fire. But there are so many safety issues right now that we've got to really be very careful. Protecting the user, protecting the environment, protecting misuse. I mean, there's lots to discuss if you want to go down that route, because it's very, very interesting. You don't want Novichok being made or explosives being made or recreational drugs being made. But how do you stop a molecular biologist making a drug that's gonna be important for them looking at their particular assay on a bad actor trying to make methamphetamine? I saw how you looked at me when you said bad actor, but that's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm trying to get the details of this can be first. Don't worry, we can protect you from yourself. Okay. I'm not sure that's true, but that statement gives me hope. Does this ultimately excite you about the future or does it terrify you? So let's, we mentioned that time is fundamental. It seems like you're at the cutting edge of progress that will have to happen, that will happen. That there's no stopping it. And I, as we've been talking about, I see obviously a huge number of exciting possibilities. So whenever you automate these kinds of things, just the world opens up. It's like programming itself and the computer, regular computer has created innumerable applications. It made the world better in so many dimensions. And it created of course a lot of negative things that we for some reason like to focus on using that very technology to tweet about it. But I think it made a much better world, but it created a lot of new dangers. So maybe you can speak to when you have, when you kind of stand at the end of the road for building a really solid, reliable, universal computer. What are the possibilities that are positive? What are the possibilities that are negative? How can we minimize the chance of the negative? Yeah, that's a really good question. So there's so many positive things from drug discovery, from supply chain stress, for basically enabling chemists to basically build more productive in the lab, right? Where this isn't, the computer's not gonna replace the chemist. There's gonna be a Moore's law of molecules, right? There's gonna be so many more molecules we can design, so many more diseases we can cure. So chemists in the lab as researchers, that's better for science. So they can build a bunch of, like they could do science at a much more accelerated pace. So it's not just the development of drugs, it's actually like doing the basic understanding of the science of drugs. And the personalization, the cost of drugs right now, we're all living longer. We're all having more and more, we know more about our genomic development. We know about our predetermination and we might be able to, one dream I've got is like, imagine you can work at your genomic system, tells you you're gonna get cancer in seven years time, and you have your personal computer that cooks up the right molecule just for you to cure it. That's a really positive idea. The other thing is when drugs, so right now I think it is absolutely outrageous that not all of humanity has access to medicine. And I think the computer might be able to change that fundamentally, because it will disrupt the way things are manufactured. So let's stop thinking about manufacturing in different factories. Let's say that computers, clinical grade computers or drug grade computers will be in facilities all around the world, and they can make things on demand as a function of the cost. Maybe people won't be able to afford the latest and greatest patent, but maybe they'll be able to get the next best thing and we'll basically democratize, make available drugs to everybody that they need. And there's lots of really interesting things there. So I think that's gonna happen. I think that now let's take the negative. Before we do that, let's imagine what happened, go back to a really tragic accident a few years ago, well not accident, an act of murder by that pilot on the, I think it was Eurowings or Swisswings, but what he did is plane took off. He waited till his pilot went to the toilet. He was a co-pilot. He locked the door and then set the autopilot above the Alps, he set the altimeter or the descend height to zero. So the computer just took the plane into the Alps. Now, I mean, that was such a tragedy that obviously the guy was mentally ill, but it wasn't just a tragedy for him, it was for all the people on board. But what if, and I was inspired by this and my thinking, what can I do to anticipate problems like this in the computer? Had the software and I'm sure Boeing and Airbus will be thinking, oh, maybe I can give the computer a bit more situational awareness. So whenever one tries to drop the height of the plane and it knows it's above the Alps, we'll just say, oh no, computer says no, we're not letting you do that. Of course he would have been out to find another way, maybe fly it until it runs out of fuel or something, but you know. Keep anticipating all the large number of trajectories that can go negative, all those kinds of running into the Alps and try to at least make it easy for the engineers to build systems that are protecting us. Yeah, and let's just think, so what in the computer world right now with Kyde-Ls, let's just not think about what I'm doing right now. What I'm doing right now is completely open, right? Everyone's gonna know Kyde-Ls and be playing with them, making them more easier and easier and easier. But what we're gonna start to do, it makes sense to encrypt the Kyde-Ls in such a way that let's say you work for a pharmaceutical company and you have a license to make a given molecule. Well, you get issued with a license by the FDA or your local authority and they'll say, right, your license to do it, here it is, it's encrypted and the Kyde-L gets run. So you have a license for that instance of use. Easy to do, computer science has already solved the problem. So the fact that we all trust online banking, right? The right now, then we can secure it. I'm 100% sure we can secure the computer because of the way we have a many, it's like the same mapping problem that you to actually reverse engineer a Kyde-L will be as hard as reverse engineering the encryption key, brute force, it will be cheaper to just actually buy the regulated medicine. And actually people aren't gonna want to then make their own fake pharmaceuticals because it'll be so cheap to do it. We'll drop the cost of access to drugs. Now what will happen, recreational drugs. People start saying, well, I want access to recreational drugs. Well, it's gonna be up to, it's gonna accelerate that social discussion that's happening in the US and Canada and UK, everywhere, right? Because cost goes down, access goes up. Given cannabis, THC, to some people who've got epilepsy isn't literally, forgive the term, a no-brainer because these poor people go from seizures like every day to maybe seizures just once every few months. That's an interesting idea to try to minimize the chance that it can get into the hands of individuals, like terrorists or people that want to do harm. Now with that kind of thing, you're putting a lot of power in the hands of governments, in the hands of institutions. And so then emerge the kind of natural criticism you might have of governments that can sometimes use these for ill, use them as weapons of war, not weapon, not tools of betterment. So, and sometimes not just war against other nations, but war against its own people has been done throughout history. Well, I'm thinking, so there's another way of doing it, a decentralized peer-to-peer version where, and what you have to do, I'm not saying you should adopt a blockchain, but there is a way of maybe taking KyDLs and put them in blockchain. Here's an idea, let's just say, the way we're doing it in my lab right now is we go to the literature, we take a recipe to make a molecule, convert that to KyDL, and diligently make it in the robot and validate it. We, that, so we, that I would call mining, proof of work, proof of synthesis, right? Proof of the synthesis, that'd be cool. Yeah, yeah, but this is cool because certainly, when you actually synthesize it, you can get the analytical data, but there's also a fingerprint in there of the impurities that get carried across, because you can never make one something 100% pure. That fingerprint will allow you to secure your KyDL. So what you do is encrypt those two things. So suddenly you can have people out there mining, and what you could do, perhaps, is do the type of thing, we need to basically look at the way that contact tracing should have been done in COVID, where people are given the information. So you've just been in contact with someone COVID, you choose, I'm not telling you to stay at home, you choose, right? So now, if we could imagine a similar thing, like you have got access to these chemicals, so you will have these effects, you choose and publicize it, or maybe it's out somewhere, I don't know. I'm not a policymaker on this. And my job here is to not just make the technology possible, but to have it as open as a discussion as possible with people to say, hey, can we stop childhood mortality with this technology? And to those benefits outweigh the one-off where people might use it for terrorism, or people might use it for recreational drugs. Chemify, which is the name of the entity that will make this happen, I think we have some social responsibilities as an entity to make sure that we're not enabling people to manufacture personal drugs, weapons at will. And what we have to do is have a discussion with society, with the people who invest in this, with people that are gonna pay for this, to say, well, do you wanna live longer? And do you wanna be healthier? And are you willing to accept some of the risks? And I think that's a discussion to have. So by the way, when you say personal drugs, do you mean the illegal ones? Or do you have a concern of just putting the manufacturer of any kind of legal drugs in the hands of regular people, because they might, like dose matters, they might take away too much? I mean, I would say, to be honest, that the chances of computers being, well, should always never, so the fact I can now say this means it's totally gonna come true, right? I'm going to do it. I cannot imagine that computers will be in people's houses anytime soon, but they might be at the local pharmacy, right? And if you've got a drug manufacturing facility in every town, then you just go and they give you a prescription. They do it in such a way, they format it so that you don't have to take 10 pills every day. You get one manufactured for you that has all the materials you need and the right distribution. Got it. But you mentioned recreation drugs. And the reason I mentioned it, because I know people are gonna speak up on this. If the drug is legal, there's to me no reason why you can't manufacture, I mean, for recreation. I mean, you can do it right now. What do you have against Fun Lee? So, I mean, I'm a chemistry professor in a university who's an entrepreneur as well. I just think I need to be as responsible as I can in the discussion. Sure. Not sure, sure. But I know, so let me be the one that says, there's nothing, because you have said recreational drugs and terrorism in the same sentence. Yeah, yeah, okay. I think let's make sure we draw a line that there's real dangers to the world of terrorists, of bio warfare, and then there's a little bit of weed. So, I have, I mean, I think it's up to the society to tell its governments what it wants, what's acceptable. Right? And if it becomes, let's say that THCs become heavily acceptable and that you can modify them. So, let's say it's like blood type. There's a particular type of THC that you tolerate better than I do. Then why not have a machine that makes the one you like? Yeah. And then, and why not? It's the perfect brownie. And I think that that's fine. But I'm, you know, we're so far away from that. I can barely get the thing to work in the lab, right? And I mean, it's reliability and all this other stuff. But what I think is gonna happen in the short term, it's gonna turbocharge molecular discovery, reliability, and that will change the world. That's super exciting. You have a draft of a paper titled Autonomous Intelligent Exploration, Discovery and Optimization of Nanomaterials. So, we are talking about automating engineering of nanomaterials. How hard is this problem? And as we continue down this thread of the positives and the worrisome, what are the things we should be excited about? And what are the things we should be terrified about? And how do we minimize the chance of the terrifying consequences? So in this robot, the robot does all the heavy lifting. So the robot basically is an embodied AI. I really like AI in a domain-specific way. One of the, as you should say at this point, there was an attempt in the 60s, Joshua Leidenberg and some really important people did this that made an AI to try and guess if organic molecules in a mass spectrum were alien or not. Yes. And they failed because they didn't have assembly theory. I see. And when I- Wait, wait, what does assembly theory give you about alien versus human life? Well, no, it just, it tells you about unknown, the degree of unknown. So you can fingerprint stuff. They weren't looking at, they were trying to basically just look at the corpus of complex organic molecules. So when I was a bit down about assembly theory, because I couldn't convince referees and couldn't convince computational, people interested in computational complexity, I was really quite depressed about it. And I mean, I've been working with Sarah Walker's team and I think she also invented assembly theory in some way. We can talk about it later. When I found the AI not working for the Dendrel project, I suddenly realized I wasn't totally insane. Coming back to this nano robot. So what it does is it basically, like a computer, but now what it does is it squirts a liquid with gold in it in the test tube and it adds some reducing agents, so some electrons to make the gold turn into a nanoparticle. Now, when gold becomes a nanoparticle, it gets a characteristic color, a plasmon. So it's a bit like if you look at the sheen on the gold wedding ring or gold bar or something, those are the ways of conducting electrons basically reflect light. What we did is we randomly squirt the gold particle and the reducing agent in and we measure the UV, we measure the color. And so what we do is we've got the robot has a mind, so it has a mind where in a simulation, it randomly generates nanoparticles and the plasmon, the color that comes out, randomly imagines in its head. So that's the imaginary side of the robot. In the physical side of the robot, it squirts in the chemicals and looks at the color and it uses a genetic algorithm and a map elite actually on it and it goes around in cycles and refines the color to the objective. Now we use two different points. We have an exploration and an optimization. They're two different. So the exploration just says, just do random stuff and see how many different things you can get. And when you get different things, try and optimize and make the peak sharper, sharper, sharper. And what it does after a number of cycles is it physically takes a sample of the optimized nanomaterial, resets all of the round bottom flasks, cleans them and puts the seed, physical seed back in. And then what this robot is able to do is search a space of 10 to the 23 possible reactions in just a thousand experiments in three days. And it makes five generations of nanoparticles which get nicer and nicer in terms of shape and color and definition. And then at the end it outputs a Kydeo code. The then being- Wow, it's doing the search for programs in the physical space. So it's doing a kind of reinforcement learning. Yeah, yeah, in the physical space. With the exploration and the optimization. And that Kydeo will work on any computer or any qualified hardware. Now that's it, now that's a general piece of code that can replicate somewhat, maybe perfectly what it created. That's amazing, that's incredible. But the nanoparticles themselves are dumb. The robot has all the thinking. So we don't try and imply any self replication or try and get the particles to make themselves. Although it would be cool to try. So, well, there you go. That's, those are famous last words for the end of human civilization. Would be cool to try. So is it possible to create molecules that start approaching this question that we started this conversation, which is the origin of life. To start to create molecules that have lifelike qualities. So have the replication, have like complex, start to create complex organisms. So we have done this with the oxides. I talked about earlier with the limton oxides and the rings and the bulls. And the problem is that what they are, they do, they autocadalytically enhance one another. So they would, I guess you would call it self replication. But because there's limited function and mutation, they're pretty dumb. So they don't do very much. So I think the prospect of us being able to engineer a nanomaterial life form in the short term, like I said earlier, my aim is to do this, of course. I mean, on one hand I'm saying it's impossible and the other hand I'm saying I'm doing it. So which is it, Lee? It's like, well, I think we can do it, but only in the robot. So the causal chain that's gonna allow it is in the robot. These particles, if they do start to self replicate, the system's gonna be so fragile that I don't think anything dangerous will come out. It doesn't mean we shouldn't treat them as potentially, I mean, I don't want to scare people like gain of function, we're gonna produce stuff that comes out. Our number one kill switch is that we always try to search a space of objects that don't exist in the environment. So even if something got out, it just would die immediately. It's like making a silicon life form or something. Which is the opposite of oftentimes gain of function research just focused on how do you get a dangerous thing to be closer to something that works with humans. Yeah. And then you have a jump to humans. So that's the one good mode to operate on is always try to operate on chemical entities that are very different than the kind of chemical environment that humans operate in. Yeah, and also, I mean, I'll say something dramatic, which may not be true, so I should be careful. If let's say we did discover a new living system and it was made out of a shadow biosphere and we just released it in the environment, who cares? It's gonna use different stuff. It'll just live. Just live, yeah. I found one of my biggest fantasies is actually is like a planet. There's basically half in the sun, it doesn't rotate, right? And you have two different origins of life on that planet. And they don't share the same chemistry. Yeah. And then the only way time they recognize each other is when they become intelligent, they go, well, what's that moving? Yeah. I wonder if it- They co-evolve, that's fascinating. I mean, so one fascinating thing to do is exactly what you were saying, which is a life bomb, which is like try to focus on atmospheres or chemical conditions of other planets and try within this kind of exploration optimization system, try to discover life forms that can work in those conditions. And then you send those life forms over there and see what kind of stuff they build up. Like you can do like a large scale, it's kind of a safe physical environment to do large scale experiments. It's another planet. Yeah, so look, I'm gonna say something quite contentious. I mean, Elon wants to go to Mars. I think it's brilliant wants to go to Mars, but I would count on that and say, is Elon just obsessed with getting humanized? Humanity or Earth or what about just technology? So if we do technology, so Elon either needs to take a computer to Mars because he needs to manufacture drugs on demand, right? Because zero cost payload and all that stuff is just code. Or what we do is we actually say, hang on, it's quite hard for humans to survive on Mars. Why don't we write a series of origin of life algorithms where we embed our culture in it, right? It's a very Ridley spot Prometheus, right? Which is a terrible film by the way, but anyway. And dump it on Mars and just terraform Mars. And what we do is we evolve life on Mars that is suited to life on Mars. Rather than brute forcing human life on Mars. So one of the questions is, what is human culture? What are the things you encode? Some of it is knowledge, some of it is information. But the thing that Elon talks about and the thing I think about, I think you think about as well is some of the more unique aspects of what makes us human, which is our particular kind of consciousness. So he talks about the flame of human consciousness. That's one of the questions is, can we instill consciousness into other beings? Because that's a sad thought that whatever this thing inside our minds that hopes and dreams and fears and loves can all die. Yeah, but I think you already know the answer to that question. I have a robot lawn mower at home. My kids call it CC, cool car. It's a robot mow. And the way it works, it has an electric field around the perimeter and it just tell it the area. And it goes out and goes from its base station, just mows a bit. Gets to the perimeter, detects perimeter, then chooses a random angle, rotates around and goes on. Yeah. But my kids call it cool cutter. It's a she. I don't know why it's a she. They just, when they were like quite young, they called it, I don't want to be sexist there. It could be a he, but they liked. They gendered the lawn mower. They gendered the lawn mower. Okay. Yeah, why not? But I was thinking this lawn mower, if you apply integrated information theory to lawn mower, lawn mower is conscious. Now, integrated information theory is that people say as a flawed way of measuring consciousness, but I don't think it is. I think assembly theory actually measures consciousness in the same way. Consciousness is something that is generated over a population of objects of humans. Consciousness didn't suddenly spring in. Our consciousness has evolved together, right? The fact we're here and the robots we leave behind, they all have some of that. So we won't lose it all. Sure, consciousness requires, we have many models being generated. It's not just one domain specific AI, right? I think the way it created consciousness, I'm going to say unashamedly, the best way to make a consciousness is in a chemical system because you just have access to many more states. And the problem right now, we're making silicon consciousness is you just don't have enough states. So there are more possible states, or sorry, there are more possible configurations possible in your brain than there are atoms in the universe. And you can switch between them. You can't do that on a core I10. It's got 10 billion, 12 billion, 14 billion transistors, but you can't reconfigure them as dynamically. Well, you've shared this intuition a few times already that the larger number of states somehow correlates to greater possibility of life, but it's also possible the constraints are essential here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but coming back to the, you worry that something's lost, I agree. But I think that, you know, we will get to an AGI, but I wonder if it's not, it can't be separate from human, it can't be separate from human consciousness because the causal chain that produced it came from humans. So what I kind of try and suggest heavily to people worry about the existential threat of AI saying, I mean, you put it much more elegantly earlier, like we should worry about algorithms, dumb algorithms written by human beings on Twitter, driving us insane, right? And doing acting in odd ways. Yeah, I think intelligence, this is what I have been in eloquent in trying to describe it, partially because I try not to think too deeply through this stuff because then you become a philosopher, I still aspire to actually building a bunch of stuff. But my sense is super intelligence leads to deep integration into human society. So like intelligence is strongly correlated, like intelligence, the way we conceive of intelligence materializes as a thing that becomes a fun entity to have at a party with humans. So like it's a mix of wit, intelligence, humor, like intelligence, like knowledge, ability to do reasoning and so on, but also humor, emotional intelligence, ability to love, to dream, to share those dreams, to play the game of human civilization, the push and pull, the whole dance of it, the whole dance of life. And I think that kind of super intelligent being is not the thing that worries me. I think that ultimately will enrich life. It's again, the dumb algorithms, the dumb algorithms that scale in the hands of people that are too, don't study history, that don't study human psychology and human nature, just applying too broadly for selfish near-term interests. That's the biggest danger. Yeah, I think it's not a new danger, right? I now know how I should use Twitter and how I shouldn't use Twitter, right? I like to provoke people into thinking. I don't want to provoke people into outrage. It's not fun. It's not a good thing for humans to do, right? And I think that when you get people into outrage, they take sides and taking sides is really bad. But I think that we're all beginning to see this. And I think that actually I'm very optimistic about how things will evolve because, I wonder how much productivity has Twitter and social media has taken out of humanity? Because how many now, I mean, so the good thing about Twitter is it gives power. So it gives voice to minorities, right? And that's good in some degree, but I wonder how much voice does it give to all sorts of other problems that don't need this emerge? By the way, when you say minorities, I think, or at least if I were to agree with you, what I would say is minorities broadly defined any small groups of people that, it magnifies the concerns of the small versus the big. That is good to some degree. But I think, I mean, I have to be careful because I think I have a very, I mean, I think that the world isn't that broken, right? I think the world is pretty cool place. I think academia is really great. I think climate change presents a really interesting problem for humanity that we will solve. I like how you said it's a pretty cool problem for civilization. It's a big one. Well, it's a bunch of, I wanna- There's a bunch of really, really big problems that if solved can significantly improve the quality of life or learn, that ultimately is what we're trying to do, improve like how awesome life is for the maximum number of people. Yeah, and I think that the coming back to consciousness, I don't think the universe is doomed to heat death, right? It's one of the optimists. That's why I want to kind of nudge you into thinking that time is fundamental because if time is fundamental, then suddenly you don't have to give it back. The universe just constructs stuff. And what we see around us in our construction, I know everyone's worried about how fragile civilization is. And I mean, look at the fundamentals. We're good until the sun expands, right? We've got quite a lot of resource on earth. We're trying to be quite cooperative. Humans are nice to each other when they're not under enormous stress. But coming back to the consciousness thing, are we going to send human beings to Mars or conscious robots to Mars? Or are we gonna send some hybrid? And I don't know the answer to that question right now. I guess, you know, Elon's gonna have a pretty good go at getting there. I'm not sure whether, I have my doubts, but I'm not qualified. You know, I'm sure people have their doubts that computation works, but I've got it working. And I, you know. And most of the cool technologies we have today and take for granted, like the airplane, a aforementioned airplane, were things that people doubted. Every, like majority of people doubted before they came to life and they come to life. And speaking of hybrid AI and humans, it's fascinating to think about all the different ways that hybridization, that merger can happen. I mean, we have, currently have the smartphones, so there's already a hybrid, but there's all kinds of ways that hybrid happens, how we and other technology play together, like a computer, how that changes. The fabric of human civilization is like wide open. Who knows? Who knows? If you remove, if you remove cancer, if you remove major diseases from humanity, there's going to be a bunch of consequences we're not anticipating. Many of them positive, but many of them negative. Many of them, most of them, at least I hope, are weird and wonderful and fun in ways that are totally unexpected. And we sitting on a porch with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a rocker will say, kids these days don't appreciate how hard we had it back in the day. I gotta ask you, speaking of nudging, you and Josje Bach nudge each other on Twitter quite a bit in wonderful intellectual debates. And of course, for people who don't know Josje Bach, he's this brilliant guy. He's been on the podcast a couple of times. You tweeted, or he tweeted, Josje Bach, everyone should follow him as well. You should definitely follow Mr. Lee Cronin, Dr. Lee Cronin. He tweeted, dinner with Lee Cronin. We discussed that while we can translate every working model of existence into a Turing machine, the structure of the universe might be given by wakes of non-existence in a pattern generated by all possible automata which exist by default. And then he followed on saying face to face is the best. So the dinner was face to face. What is Josje talking about in wakes, quote, wakes of non-existence in a pattern generated by all possible automata which exist by default. So automata exists by default, apparently. And then there's wakes of non-existence. What the hell is non-existence in the universe? That's, and also in another conversation, you tweeted, it's state machines all the way down, which presumably is the origin story of this dinner discussion. And then Josje said, again, nudging, nudging, nudging slash trolling. Josje said, you've seen the light, welcome friend. Many foundational physicists effectively believe in some form of hypercomputation. Lee is coming around to this idea. And then you said, I think there are notable differences. First, I think the universe does not have to be a computer. Second, I want to understand how the universe emerges, constructors that build computers. And third is that there is something below church touring. Okay, what the heck is this dinner conversation about? Maybe, and put another way, maybe zooming out a little bit, are there interesting agreements and disagreements between you and Josje Bach that can elucidate some of the other topics we've been talking about? Yeah, so Josje has an incredible mind and he's so well-read and uses language really elegantly. It bamboozles me at times. So often I'm describing concepts in a way that I built from the ground up. And so we misunderstand each other a lot. And he's floating in the clouds, is that what you're saying? Something like, not quite, but I think so. This concept of a Turing machine. So Turing machines, I would argue, and I think this is not, the Turing machine, the universe is not a Turing machine. Biology is not even a Turing machine, right? And because Turing machines don't evolve, right? There is this problem that people see Turing machines everywhere, but isn't it interesting, the universe gave rise to biology, that gave rise to intelligence, that gave rise to Alan Turing, who invented the abstraction of the Turing machine and allowed us to digitize. And so I've been looking for the mystery at the origin of life, the origin of intelligence, and the origin of this. And when I discussed with Josje, I think Josje, he was saying, well, the universe, of course, the universe is a Turing machine. Of course, there's a hypercomputer there. And I think we got kind of trapped in our words and terms because of course it's possible for a Turing machine or computers to exist in the universe. We have them. But what I'm trying to understand is, where did the transition of continuous discrete occur? And this is because of my general foolishness of understanding the continuous. But I guess what I'm trying to say is, there were constructors before there were abstractors, because how did the universe abstract itself into existence? And it goes back to earlier saying, could the universe of intelligence have come first? What's a constructor? What's an abstractor? So the abstractor is the ability of, say, of Alan Turing and Gödel and Church to think about the mathematical universe and to label things. And then from those labels to come up with a set of axioms with those labels and to basically understand the universe mathematically and say, okay, I can label things. Where did the label come from? Where is the prime labeler? Even if the universe is not a Turing computer, does that negate the possibility that a Turing computer can simulate the universe? Like, just because the abstraction was formed at a later time, does that mean that abstraction, this is to our cellular automata conversation. You were taking away some of the magic from the cellular automata because very intelligent biological systems came up with that cellular automata. Well, this is where the existence is the default, right? Is it, does the fact that we exist and we can come up with a Turing machine, does that mean the universe has to be a Turing machine as well? But can it be a Turing machine though? That's a, so there has to be and it can't be. Can it be? Sure. I don't know, I don't understand if it has to be or not. Can it be? But can the universe have Turing machines in it? Sure. They exist now. I'm wondering though, maybe, and this is really if things get really hairy, is I think the universe, maybe in the past, did not have the computational power that it has now. This is almost like a law of physics kind of, so the computational power is not, you can get some free lunch? Yeah, I mean, the fact that we now, we sit here in this period in time and we can imagine all these robots and all these machines and we built them. And so we can easily imagine going back in time that the universe was capable of having them, but I don't think it can. So the universe may have been a lot dumber computationally? And I think that's why I don't want to go back to the time discussion, but I think it has some relationship with it. The universe is basically smarter now than it used to be and it's gonna continue getting smarter over time because of novelty generation and the ability to create objects within objects within objects. You know, there's a, perhaps it's grounded in physics, there's this intuition of conservation, that stuff is conserved. Like you're not, you've always had all, everything, you're just rearranging books on the bookshelf through time. So, okay. You're saying like new books are being written. Which laws you wanna break? At the origin of the Big Bang, you had to break the second law because we got order for free. Well, what I'm telling you now is that the energy isn't conserved in the universe. Oh, it was the second law. Okay, I got you. So because, but not in a mad way. Okay, so computation potentially is not conserved, which is a fascinating idea. Intelligence is not conserved. Complexity is not conserved. Mm-hmm. I suppose that's deeply connected to time being fundamental. The natural consequence of that is if time is fundamental and the universe is inflating in time, if you like, then there are one or two conservation laws that we need to have a look at. And I wonder if that means the total energy of the universe is actually increasing over time. And I might, this may be completely ludicrous, but we do have all this dark energy that's, we have some anomalies, let's say, dark matter and dark energy. If we don't add them in, galaxy, it's so dark matter, I think, doesn't hold, you know, you need to hold the galaxies together and there's some other observational issues. Could dark energy just be time? So figuring out what dark energy is might give us some deep clues about this, not just time, but the consequences of time. Yeah, so it could be that, I mean, I'm not saying there's perpetual motions allowed in this free lunch, but I'm saying, if the universe is intrinsically asymmetric and it appears to be, and it's generating novelty and it appears to, couldn't that just be mechanistically how reality works? Mm-hmm. And therefore, I don't really like this idea that the, and so I want to live in a deterministic universe that is undetermined. Yeah. Right? The only way I can do that is if time is fundamental. Because otherwise, it's all the rest of it's just, it's just sleight of hand because the physicist will say, yes, everything's deterministic, Newton is, Newtonian mechanics is deterministic, quantum mechanics is deterministic, let's take the Everrhenium view. And then basically we can just draw out this massive universe branching but it closes again and we get it all back. And don't worry, you're feeling a free will is effective. But what the physicists are actually saying is the entire future is mapped out and that is clearly problematical. And clearly... That's not so clear. Yeah. It's just, it's just problematic. It, well, yeah, yeah, so it's... Because that maybe is just the way it is. It's problematic to you, a particular creature along the way. I want to reduce the number of beliefs I need to understand the universe. So if time is fundamental, I don't need to have magic order at the beginning and I don't need a second law. But you do need the magical belief that time is fundamental. Well, I need the, I need the observation that I'm seeing to be just the how it is all the way down. But the earth also looks flat if you, if you agree with your observation. So we can't necessarily trust our observation I know the earth isn't flat because I can send this satellite into space. I can fly. No, but now you see, now you're using the tools of science and the technology of science. But I'm using, but I'm saying I'm going to do experiments that start to show. I mean, I think that it's worth, so if you can't... So if I cannot do an experiment or a thought experiment that will test this assumption, then the assumption is without merit really in the end. You know, that's, it's fine. Yeah. So... That's a beautiful idea you made. That's a beautiful idea you hold yourself to. That's, that's a, that's given that you think deeply in a philosophical way, you think about some of these really important issues and you have theoretical frameworks, like assembly theory. It's really nice that you're always grounded with experiment. That's all I have. That's so refreshing. That's so beautifully refreshing. Now that we're holding you to the grounded and experiment to the harsh truth of reality, let me ask the big ridiculous question. What is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life? Why? This time is fundamental. It's marching forward and along this long timeline, come along a bunch of descendants of apes that have come up with cellular automata and computers and now computers. Why? I have so many different answers to this question. It depends on what day. I would say that given the way of the conversation we had today, I'd say the meaning. Well, we make our own meaning. I think that's fine. But I think the universe wants to explore every possible configuration that it's allowed us to explore. And this goes back to the kind of question that you're asking about Yasha and the existence and non-existence of things, right? So if the universe is a Turing machine that's churning through a lot of states and you think about combinatorial theory before assembly theory, so everything is possible. What Yasha and I were saying is, well, not everything is possible. We don't see the combinatorial explosion. We see something else. And what we see is evidence of memory. So there clearly seems to be some interference between the combinatorial explosion of things and what the universe allows. And it's like this kind of constructive, destructive interference. So maybe the universe is not just about, it is assembling objects in space and time. And those objects are able to search more space and time. And the universe is just infinitely creative. And I guess I'm searching for why the universe is infinitely creative, is it infinitely creative? And maybe the meaning is just simply to make as many objects, create as many things as possible. And I see a future of the universe that doesn't result in the heat death of the universe. The universe is gonna extract every ounce of creativity it can out of it, because that's what we see on earth, right? And if you think that, almost like intelligence is not conserved, that maybe creativity isn't either. Maybe like, it's an infinite well. So like creativity is ultimately tied to novelty. You're coming up with cool new configurations of things, and maybe that just can continue indefinitely. And this human species that was created along the way is probably just one method, like that's able to ask the universe about itself. It's just one way to explore creativity. Maybe there's other meta levels on top of that. Like obviously as a collective intelligence will create organisms, maybe there'll be organisms that ask themselves questions about themselves in a deeper, bigger picture way that we humans do. First to ask questions about the humans, and then construct some kind of hybrid systems that ask themselves about the collective aspect. Just like some weird stacking that we can't even imagine yet. And that stacking, I mean, I have discussed this stacking a lot with Sarah Walker, who's a professor of physics and astrobiology at ASU. And we argue about how creative the universe is gonna be, and is it as deterministic as all that, because I think she's more of a free will thinker, and I'm of a less free will thinker, but I think we're beginning to converge and understanding that. Because there's simply a missing understanding. Right now we don't understand how the universe, we don't know what rules the universe has to allow the universe to contemplate itself. So asking the meaning of it before we even know what those rules are is premature. But my guess is that it's not meaningless, and it isn't just about that. And there are three levels of meanings. Obviously the universe wants us to do stuff. We're interacting with each other, so we create meaning in our own society, in our own interactions with humanity. But I do think there is something else going on. But because reality is so weird, we're just scratching at that. And I think that we have to make the experiments better, and we have to perhaps join across, not just for the computation lists. And what I tried to do with Yasha is meet him halfway, say, well, what happens if I become a computation list? What do I gain? A lot, it turns out, because I can make Turing machines in the universe. Because on the one hand, I'm making computers, which are state machines inspired by Turing. On the other hand, I'm saying they can't exist. Well, clearly I can't have my cake and eat it, so there's something weird going on there. So then, did the universe have to make a continuous to discrete transition, or is the universe just discrete? It's probably just discrete. So if it's just discrete, then there are, I will then give Yasha his Turing-like property in the universe, but maybe there's something else below it, which is the constructor that constructs a Turing machine, that then constructs, you know, it's a bit like you generate a computing system that then is able to build an abstraction that then recognizes, it can make a generalizable abstraction, because human beings, with mathematics, have been able to go on and build physical computers, if that makes any sense. And I think that's the meaning. I think that's, you know, as far as we can, the meaning will be further elucidated with further experiments. Well, you mentioned Sarah. I think you and Sarah Walker are just these fascinating human beings. I'm really fortunate to have the opportunity to be in your presence, to study your work, to follow along with your work. I'm a big fan. Like I told you offline, I hope we get a chance to talk again with perhaps just the two of us, but also with Sarah. That's a fascinating dynamic for people who haven't heard, I suppose on Clubhouse is where I heard you guys talk, but you have an incredible dynamic. And I also can't wait to hear you and Yasha talk. So I think if there's some point in this predetermined or yet to be determined future, where the three of us, you and Sarah, or the four of us with Yasha could meet and talk would be a beautiful future. And I look forward to most futures, but I look forward to that one in particular. Lee, thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me today. Thanks, Lex. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lee Cronin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from the mad scientist Rick Sanchez of Rick and Morty fame. To live is to risk it all. Otherwise, you're just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
 The following is a conversation with Leek Ronin,
 a chemist from University of Glasgow,
 who's one of the most fascinating,
 brilliant, out of the box thinking scientists
 I've ever spoken to.
 This episode was recorded more than two weeks ago,
 so the war in Ukraine is not mentioned.
 I have been spending a lot of time each day
 talking to people in Ukraine and Russia.
 I have family, friends, colleagues, and loved ones
 in both countries.
 I will try to release a solo episode on this war,
 but I've been failing to find the words
 that make sense of it for myself and others,
 so I may not.
 I ask for your understanding, no matter which path I take.
 Most of my time is spent trying to help
 as much as I can privately.
 I'm talking to people who are suffering,
 who are angry, afraid.
 When I returned to this conversation with Lee,
 I couldn't help but smile.
 He's a beautiful, brilliant, and hilarious human being.
 He's basically a human manifestation
 of the mad scientist Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty.
 I thought about quitting this podcast for a time,
 but for now at least, I'll keep going.
 I love people too much.
 You, the listener.
 I meet folks on the street or when I run.
 You say a few kind words about the podcast,
 and we talk about life, the small things,
 and the big things.
 All of it gives me hope.
 People are just amazing.
 You are amazing.
 I ask for your support, wisdom, and patience
 as I keep going with this silly little podcast,
 including through some difficult conversations,
 and hopefully many fascinating and fun ones too.
 This is the Lux Freedman Podcast.
 To support it, please check out our sponsors
 in the description.
 And now to your friends, here's Lee Cronin.
 How do you think life originated on Earth,
 and what insights does that give us about life?
 If we go back to the origin of Earth,
 and you think about maybe 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 billion years ago,
 the planet was quite hot.
 There was a limited number of minerals.
 There was some carbon, some water.
 And I think that maybe it's a really simple set of chemistry
 that we really don't understand.
 So that means you've got a finite number of elements
 that are going to react very simply with one another.
 And out of that mess comes a cell.
 So literally sand turns into cells.
 And it seems to happen quick.
 So what I think I can say with some degree of,
 I think not certainty, but curiosity,
 genuine curiosity is that life happened fast.
 Yeah, so when we say fast,
 this is a pretty surprising fact,
 and maybe you can actually correct me and elaborate,
 but it seems like most, like 70 or 80% of the time
 that Earth has been around, there's been life on it.
 Like some very significant percentage.
 So when you say fast, like the slow part is from single cell
 or from bacteria to some more complicated organism.
 It seems like that's the slow part.
 Like most of the time that Earth has been around,
 it's been single cell or like very basic organisms,
 like a couple of billion years.
 But yeah, you're right.
 That's really, I recently kind of revisited our history
 and saw this.
 And I was just looking at the timeline.
 Wait a minute.
 Like how did life just spring up so quickly?
 Like really quickly.
 That makes me think that it really wanted to.
 Like put another way, it's very easy for life to spring.
 Yeah, I agree.
 I think it's much more inevitable.
 And I think I try to kind of, not provoke,
 but try and push chemists to think about this
 because chemists are central to this problem, right?
 Of understanding the origin of life on Earth at least,
 because we're made of chemistry.
 But I wonder if the origin of life on a planet
 or sorry, the emergence of life on planet is as common
 as the formation of a star.
 And if you start framing it in that way,
 it allows you to then look at the universe
 slightly differently because,
 and we can get into this I think in quite some detail,
 but I think to come back to your question,
 I have little idea of how life got started,
 but I know it was simple.
 And I know that the process of selection had to occur
 before the biology was established.
 So that selection built the framework from which life
 kind of grew in complexity and capability
 and functionality and autonomy.
 And I think these are all really important words
 that we can unpack over the next while.
 Can you say all the words again?
 So you said selection, so natural selection,
 the original AB testing.
 And so, and then complexity,
 and then the degree of autonomy and sophistication,
 because I think that people misunderstand what life is.
 Some people say that life is a cell,
 and some people that say that life is a virus
 or life is an on-off switch.
 I don't think it's that,
 life is the universe developing a memory.
 And the laws of physics and the way,
 well, there are no laws of physics,
 physics is just memory free stuff, right?
 So there's only a finite number of ways
 you can arrange the fundamental particles to do things.
 Life is the universe developing a memory.
 So it's like sewing a piece of art slowly,
 and then you can look back at it.
 So there's a stickiness to life.
 It's like universe doing stuff.
 And when you say memory, it's like,
 there's a stickiness to a bunch of the stuff
 it's building together.
 So you can, in a stable way,
 like trace back the complexity
 and that tells a coherent story.
 Yeah, and I think, yeah.
 Okay, that's by the way, very poetic.
 Beautiful.
 Life is the universe developing a memory.
 Okay, and then there's autonomy,
 you said complexity we'll talk about,
 but it's a really interesting idea
 that selection preceded biology.
 Yeah, I think.
 So first of all, what is chemistry?
 Like the sand still count as chemistry?
 Sure, I mean, as a chemist,
 the card carrying chemist, if I'm allowed a card,
 I don't know, I don't know what I am most days.
 What is the card made of?
 What's the chemical composition of the card?
 So what is chemistry?
 Well, chemistry is the thing that happens
 when you bring electrons together and you form bonds.
 So bonds, or I say to people
 when they talk about life elsewhere,
 and I just say, well, there's bonds, there's hope.
 Because bonds allow you to get heterogeneity,
 they allow you to record those memories,
 or at least on earth.
 You could imagine a Stanislav Lemtri world
 where you might have life emerging
 or intelligence emerging before life.
 That may be something to do on like Solaris or something,
 but to get to selection,
 if atoms can combine and form bonds,
 those atoms can bond to different elements
 and those molecules will have different identities
 and interact with each other differently.
 And then you can start to have some degree of causation
 or interaction, and then selection, and then existence.
 And then you go up the kind of the path of complexity.
 And so at least on earth, as we know it,
 there is a sufficient pool of available chemicals
 to start searching that commentorial space of bonds.
 So, okay, this is a really interesting question.
 Let's lay it out.
 So bonds, almost like cards.
 We say there's bonds, there is life,
 there's intelligence, there's consciousness.
 And what you just made me realize is
 those can emerge, or let's put bonds aside,
 those can emerge in any order.
 Mm-hmm.
 That's really brilliant.
 So intelligence can come before life.
 It's like panpsychists believe that consciousness,
 I guess, comes before life and before intelligence.
 So consciousness permeates all matter,
 it's some kind of fabric of reality.
 Okay, so within this framework,
 you can kind of arrange everything,
 but you need to have the bonds
 that precedes everything else.
 Oh, and the other thing is selection.
 So like the mechanism of selection,
 that could precede,
 couldn't that precede bonds too?
 Whatever the hell selection is.
 So I would say that there is an elegant order to it.
 Bonds allow selection, allows the emergence of life,
 allows the emergence of multicellularity,
 and then more information processing,
 building state machines all the way up.
 However, you could imagine a situation if you had,
 I don't know, a neutron star or a sun
 or what, a ferromagnetic loops interacting with one another,
 and these oscillators building state machines,
 and these state machines reading something out
 in the environment.
 Over time, these state machines would be able to
 literally record what happened in the past
 and sense what's going on in the present
 and imagine the future.
 However, I don't think it's ever gonna be
 within a human comprehension, that type of life.
 I wouldn't count it out because whenever you,
 I know in science, whenever I say something's impossible,
 I then wake up the next day and say,
 no, that's actually wrong.
 I mean, there are some limits, of course.
 I don't see myself traveling faster than light
 anytime soon, but-
 Eric Weinstein says that's possible,
 so he will say you're wrong.
 Sure, but I'm an experimentalist as well.
 So one of my, I have two superpowers.
 My stupidity, and I don't mean that as a,
 I'm like absolutely completely witless,
 but I mean my ability to kind of just start again
 and ask the question and then do it with an experiment.
 I always wanted to be a theoretician growing up,
 but I just didn't have the intellectual capability.
 But I was able to think of experiments in my head
 I could then do in my lab or when I was a child outside,
 and then those experiments in my head
 and then outside reinforced one another.
 So I think that's a very good way
 of kind of grounding the science, right?
 Well, that's a nice way to think about theoreticians
 is they're just people who run experiments in their head.
 I mean, that's exactly what Einstein did, right?
 But you're also capable of doing that in the head,
 in your head, inside your head and in the real world
 and the connection between the two
 is when you first discovered your superpower of stupidity.
 I like it.
 Okay, what's the second superpower?
 Your accent or?
 Well, I don't know.
 I like, I am genuinely curious.
 So my curious, so I have, you know,
 like everybody ego problems,
 but my curiosity is bigger than my ego.
 So as long as that happens, I can, I can, I can.
 That's awesome.
 That is so powerful.
 You're just dropping some powerful lines.
 So curiosity is bigger than ego.
 That's something I have to think about
 because you always struggle about the role of ego in life.
 And that's, that's so nice to think about.
 Don't think about the size of ego,
 the absolute size of ego.
 Think about the relative size of ego to the other,
 the other horse is pulling at you.
 And if the curiosity one is bigger,
 then ego will do just fine and make you fun to talk to.
 Anyway, so those are the two superpowers.
 How do those connect to natural selection
 or in selection and bonds?
 And I forgot already life and consciousness.
 So we're going back to selection in the universe
 and origin of life on earth.
 I mean, selection is a,
 I'm convinced that selection is a force in the universe.
 So not me, not a fundamental force,
 but a, but a directing,
 but it is a directing force because existence,
 although existence appears to be the default,
 the existence of what, why does,
 and we can get to this later, I think,
 but it's amazing that the discrete things exist.
 And you know, you see this cup,
 it's not the sexiest cup in the world,
 but it's pretty functional.
 This cup, the complexity of this cup
 isn't just in the object,
 it is literally the lineage of people making cups
 and recognizing that, seeing that in their head,
 making an abstraction of a cup,
 and then making a different one.
 So I wonder how many billions of cups have,
 you know, come before this one.
 And that's the process of selection and existence.
 And the only reason the cup is still used is quite useful.
 I like the handle, you know, it's convenient
 so I don't die, I don't get hydration.
 And so I think we are missing something fundamental
 in the universe about selection.
 And I think what biology is,
 is a selection amplifier,
 and that this is where autonomy comes in.
 And actually I think that how humanity
 is gonna humans and autonomous robots,
 or whatever we're gonna call them in the future,
 we'll supercharge that even further.
 So selection is happening in the universe,
 but if you look in the asteroid belt selection,
 if objects are being kicked in and out the asteroid belt,
 those trajectories are quite complex.
 You don't really look at that as productive selection
 because it's not doing anything to improve its function.
 But is it?
 The asteroid belt has existed for some time.
 So there is some selection going on,
 but the functionality is somewhat limited.
 On earth, at the formation of earth,
 interaction of chemicals and molecules in the environment
 gave selection and then things could happen.
 Cause you could think about in chemistry,
 we can have an infinite number of reactions happen,
 but they don't all,
 all the reactions are allowed to happen, don't happen.
 Why? Because there are energy barriers.
 So there must be some things called catalysts out there,
 or there are bits of minerals
 that when two molecules get together on that mineral,
 it lowers the energy barrier for the reaction.
 And so the reaction is promoted.
 So suddenly you get one reaction over another
 of series of possibilities occurring
 that makes a particular molecule.
 And this keeps happening in steps.
 And before you know it,
 almost these waves as discrete reactions work together
 and you start to build a machinery
 that is run by existence.
 So as you go forward in time,
 the fact that the molecules, the bonds are getting,
 there are more bonds in a molecule, there's more function,
 there's more capability for this molecule
 to interact with other molecules to redirect them.
 It's like a series of little,
 and I don't want to use this term too much,
 but it's almost thinking about
 the simplest von Neumann constructor,
 that's the simplest molecule
 that could build a more complicated molecule
 to build a more complicated molecule.
 And before you know it,
 when that more complicated molecule can act
 on the causal chain that's produced itself and change it,
 suddenly you start to get towards some kind of autonomy.
 And that's where life, I think, emerges in earnest.
 Every single word in the past few paragraphs,
 let's break those apart.
 But who's von Neumann, what's the constructor,
 the closing of the loop that you're talking about,
 the molecule that starts becoming,
 I think you said the smallest von Neumann constructor,
 the smallest, the minimal.
 So what do all those things mean,
 and what are we supposed to imagine
 when we think about the smallest von Neumann constructor?
 So John von Neumann is a real hero, actually,
 not just me, but many people, I think,
 computer science and physics.
 He was an incredible intellect,
 who probably solved a lot of the problems
 that we're working on today,
 I just forgot to write them down.
 And I'm not sure if it's John von Neumann or Johnny,
 as I think his friends called him,
 but I think he was Hungarian, mathematician,
 came to the US, and basically was involved
 in the Manhattan Project and developing computation,
 and came up with all sorts of ideas,
 and I think he was one of the first people
 to come up with cellular automata.
 Really, I didn't know this whole fact.
 I think so, I think so.
 Well, anyway, if he didn't come up with it,
 he probably did come up with it and didn't write it down.
 There was a couple of people who did at the same time,
 and then Conway obviously took it on,
 and then Wolfram loves CAs,
 there is his fabric of the universe.
 And what I think he imagined was that he wasn't satisfied,
 and this may be incorrect recollection,
 but a lot of what I say is gonna be kind of,
 just way out of my-
 You're just part of the universe,
 creating its memory, designing-
 Exactly, yeah, rewriting history.
 Exactly, imperfectly.
 So, but what I mean is, I think he liked this idea
 of thinking about how could a Turing machine
 literally build itself without a Turing machine, right?
 It's like literally how did state machines emerge,
 and I think that von Neumann constructors,
 he wanted to conceive of a minimal thing,
 autonomous, that could build itself,
 and what would those rules look like in the world?
 And that's what a von Neumann kind of constructor
 looked like, like it's a minimal hypothetical object
 that could build itself, self-replicate.
 And I'm really fascinated by that,
 because I think that,
 although it's probably not exactly what happened,
 it's a nice model, because as chemists,
 if we could go back to the origin of life
 and think about what is a minimal machine
 that can get structured randomly,
 so like with no prime mover, with no architect,
 it assembles through just existence,
 so random stuff bumping in together,
 and you make this first molecule, so you have molecule A,
 and molecule A interacts with another random molecule B,
 and they get together, and they realize by working together,
 they can make more of themselves,
 but then they realize they can mutate,
 so they can make AB prime, so AB prime's different to AB,
 and then AB prime can then act back
 where A and B were being created,
 and slightly nudge that causal chain,
 and make AB prime more evolvable, or learn more,
 so that's the closing the loop part.
 Closing the loop part, got it.
 It feels like the mutation part is not that difficult.
 It feels like the difficult part
 is just creating a copy of yourself as step one.
 That seems like one of the greatest inventions
 in the history of the universe,
 is the first molecule that figured out,
 holy shit, I can create a copy of myself.
 How hard is that?
 I think it's really, really easy.
 Okay, I did not expect that.
 I think it's really, really easy.
 Well, let's take a step back.
 I think replicating molecules are rare,
 but if you say, I think I was saying on,
 I probably got into trouble on Twitter the other day,
 so I was trying to work this.
 There's about more than 18 mils of water in there,
 so one mole of water, 6.022 times 10 to the 23 molecules.
 That's about the number of stars in the universe,
 I think, of the order.
 So there's three universe worth.
 But between one and-
 Oh, did somebody correct you on Twitter?
 Yeah, as if, I'm always being corrected.
 It's a great fact, but there's a lot of molecules
 in the water, and so there's a lot of,
 so although it's for you and me, really hard to conceive of,
 if existence is not the default for a long period of time,
 because what happens is the molecules get degraded.
 So much of the possibilities in the universe
 are just broken back into atoms.
 So you have this kind of destruction of the molecules
 for our chemical reactions.
 So you only need one or two molecules
 to become good at copying themselves,
 for them suddenly to then take resources in the pool
 and start to grow.
 And so then replication, actually over time,
 when you have bonds, I think is much simpler and much easier.
 And I even found this in my lab years ago.
 I had one of the reasons I started doing inorganic chemistry
 and making rust, making a bit of rust
 based on a thing called molybdenum, molybdenum oxide.
 Is this molybdenum oxide?
 Very simple, but when you add acid to it
 and some electrons, they make these molecules
 you just cannot possibly imagine would be constructed,
 big gigantic wheels of 154 molybdenum atoms in a wheel,
 or icosadodecahedron 132 molybdenum atoms,
 all in the same pot.
 And I realized when I,
 and I just finished experiments two years ago,
 I've just published a couple of papers on this,
 that there actually, there is a random small molecule
 with 12 atoms in it that can form randomly,
 but it happens to template its own production.
 And then by chance, it templates the ring,
 just an accident, just like, just an absolute accident.
 And that ring also helps make the small 12 mer.
 And so you have what's called an autocatalytic set,
 where A makes B and B helps make A and vice versa.
 And you then make this loop.
 So it's a bit like these, they all work in synergy
 to make this chain of events that grow.
 And it doesn't take a very sophisticated model
 to show that if you have these objects are competing
 and then collaborating to help one another build,
 they just grow out of the mess.
 And although they seem improbable, they are improbable,
 in fact impossible in one step.
 There's multiple steps.
 This is when the blind,
 people look at the blind watchmaker argument
 when you talk about how could a watch
 suddenly spontaneously emerge.
 Well, it doesn't.
 It's a lineage of watches and cruder devices
 that are bootstrapped onto one another.
 Right.
 So it's very improbable,
 but once you get that little discovery,
 like with the wheel and fire,
 it just gets explodes in,
 because it's so successful, it explodes.
 It's basically selection.
 So this templating mechanism
 that allows you to have a little blueprint for yourself,
 how you go through different procedures
 is to build copies of yourself.
 So in chemistry somehow it's possible to imagine
 that that kind of thing is easy to spring up.
 In more complex organisms,
 it feels like a different thing and much more complicated.
 We're having multiple abstractions
 of the birds and the bees conversation here,
 but with human, sorry, with complex organisms,
 it feels like difficult to have reproduction to,
 that's gonna get clipped out,
 I'm gonna make fun of that.
 It's difficult to develop this idea
 of making copies of yourself or no,
 because that seems like a magical idea for life to,
 wow, that feels like very necessary for what selection is,
 for what evolution is,
 but then if selection precedes all of this,
 then maybe these are just like echoes
 of the selecting mechanism at different scales.
 Yeah, that's exactly it.
 So selection is the default in the universe,
 if you want to, and what happens is that life,
 the solution that life has got on earth,
 life on earth, biology on earth, is unique to earth,
 we can talk about that,
 and that was really hard fought for,
 but that is the solution that works on earth,
 the ribosome, the fundamental machine
 that is responsible for every cell on earth,
 of wherever it is in the kingdom of life,
 that is an incredibly complex object,
 but it was evolved over time,
 and it wasn't involved in a vacuum,
 and I think that once we understand that selection
 can occur without the ribosome,
 but what the ribosome does,
 it's a phase transition in replication,
 and I think that that, and also technology,
 that is probably much easier to get to than we think.
 Why do you put the ribosome as a central part
 of living organisms on earth?
 It basically is a combination
 of two different polymer systems, so RNA and peptides,
 so the RNA world, if you like, gets transmitted
 and builds proteins, and the proteins are responsible
 for all the catalysis, the majority of the catalysis
 that goes on in the cell.
 No ribosome, no proteins, no decoding, no evolution.
 So ribosome is looking at the action,
 so you don't put the RNA itself as the critical thing,
 like information, you put action as the most important thing.
 I think the actual molecules that we have in biology
 right now are entirely contingent
 on the history of life on earth.
 There are so many possible solutions,
 and this is where chemistry got itself into,
 origin of life chemistry gets itself into a bit of a trap.
 Yeah, let me interrupt you there.
 You've tweeted, you're gonna get,
 I'm gonna cite your tweets like it's Shakespeare.
 Okay.
 It's surprising you haven't gotten canceled on Twitter yet.
 Your brilliance once again saves you.
 I'm just kidding.
 There's, you like to have a little bit of fun on Twitter.
 You've tweeted that, quote,
 origin of life research is a scam.
 So if this is Shakespeare, can we analyze this word?
 Why is the origin of life research a scam?
 Aren't you kind of doing origin of life research?
 Okay, it was tongue in cheek, but yeah, I think,
 and I meant it as tongue in cheek.
 I am, I'm not doing the origin of life research.
 I'm trying to make artificial life.
 And I also want to bound the likelihood
 of the origin of life on earth,
 but more importantly to find origin of life elsewhere.
 But let me directly address the tweet.
 There are many, many good chemists out there
 doing origin of life research, but I want to nudge them.
 And I think they're brilliant.
 Like there's no question, the chemistry they are doing,
 their motivation is great.
 So what I meant by that tweet is saying
 that maybe they're making assumptions about saying,
 if only I could make this particular type of molecule,
 say this RNA molecule or this phosphodiester
 or this other molecule,
 it's going to somehow unlock the origin of life.
 And I think that origin of life has been looking at this
 for a very long time.
 And whilst I think it's brilliant to work out
 how you can get to those molecules,
 I think that chemistry and chemists doing origin of life
 could be nudged into doing something even more profound.
 And so the argument I'm making, it's a bit like right now,
 let's say, I don't know, the first Tesla
 that makes its way to, I don't know,
 into a new country in the world.
 Let's say there's a country X
 that has never had a Tesla before and they get the Tesla.
 Russia.
 And they take the Tesla,
 and what they do is they take the Tesla apart
 and say, we want to find the origin of cars in the universe
 and say, okay, how did this form and how did this form?
 And they just randomly keep making till they make the door,
 they make the wheel, they make the steering column
 and all this stuff.
 And they say, oh, that's the route.
 That's the way cars emerged on earth.
 But actually we know that there's a causal chain of cars
 going right back to Henry Ford and the Horson carriage.
 And before that maybe, where people were using wheels.
 And I think that obsession with the identities
 that we see in biology right now
 are giving us a false sense of security
 about what we're looking for.
 And I think the origin of life chemistry
 is in danger of not making the progress that it deserves
 because the chemists are doing this.
 The field is exploding right now.
 There's amazing people out there.
 Young and old doing this.
 And there's deservedly so more money going in.
 I used to complain there's more money being spent
 searching for the Higgs boson
 that we know exists and the origin of life.
 Why is that?
 We understand the origin of life.
 We're gonna actually work out what life is.
 We're gonna be outbound the likelihood
 of finding life elsewhere in the universe.
 And most important for us, we are gonna know
 or have a good idea of what the future of humanity
 looks like.
 We need to understand that although we're precious,
 we're not the only life forms in the universe.
 Or that's my very strong impression.
 I have no data for that.
 It's just right now a belief.
 And I want to turn that belief into a more than a belief
 by experimentation.
 But coming back to the scam, the scam is
 if we just make this RNA, we've got this fluke event,
 we know how that's simple.
 Let's make this phosphodiester or let's make ATP or ADP.
 We've got that part nailed.
 Let's now make this other molecule, another molecule.
 And how many molecules are gonna be enough?
 And then the reason I say this is when you go back
 to Craig Venter, when he invented his life form,
 Cyndia, this minimal plasma, it's a myoplasma,
 something I don't know the name of it,
 but he made this wonderful cell and said,
 I've invented life.
 Not quite.
 He facsimile-ed the genome from this entity
 and made it in the lab or the DNA,
 but he didn't make the cell.
 He had to take an existing cell that has a causal chain
 going all the way back to Luca.
 And he showed when he took out the gene, the genes,
 and put in his genes, synthesized, the cell could boot up.
 But it's remarkable that he could not make a cell
 from scratch.
 And even now today, synthetic biologists cannot make a cell
 from scratch because there's some contingent information
 embodied outside the genome in the cell.
 And that is just incredible.
 So there's lots of layers to the scam.
 Well, let me then ask the question,
 how can we create life in the lab from scratch?
 What have been the most promising attempts
 at creating life in the lab from scratch?
 Has anyone actually been able to do it?
 Do you think anyone will be able to do it
 in the near future if they haven't already?
 Can, yeah, I think that nobody has made life
 in the lab from scratch.
 Lots of people would argue that they have made progress.
 Craig Venter, I think the synthesis of a synthetic genome
 milestone in human achievement, brilliant.
 Yeah, can we just walk back and say,
 what would you say from your perspective,
 one of the world experts in exactly this area,
 what does it mean to create life from scratch?
 Where if you sit back, whether you do it
 or somebody else does it,
 it's like, damn, this is, we just created life.
 Well, I can tell you what I would expect,
 I would like to be able to do,
 is to go from sand to cells in my lab.
 Can you explain what sand is?
 Yeah, just inorganic stuff.
 Like basically, so sand is just silicon oxide
 with some other ions in it.
 Maybe some inorganic carbon, some carbonates,
 just basically clearly dead stuff
 that you could just grind rocks into sand.
 And it would be what, in a kind of vacuum
 so they could remove anything else that could possibly
 be like a shadow of life that can assist in the chemical.
 You could do that, you could insist and say,
 look, I'm gonna take, and not just inorganic,
 I want some more, I wanna cheat and have some organic,
 but I want inorganic organic,
 and I'll explain the play on words in a moment.
 So I would like to basically put into a world,
 let's say a completely synthetic world,
 if you like, a closed world,
 put some inorganic materials
 and just literally add some energy in some form,
 be it lightning or heat, UV light,
 and run this thing in cycles over time
 and let it solve the search problem.
 So I see the origin of life as a search problem
 in chemical space.
 And then I would wait, literally wait for a life form
 to crawl out of the test tube.
 That's a joke I tell my group.
 Literally wait for a very, don't worry,
 it's gonna be very feeble,
 it's not gonna take over the world.
 There's ways of ethically containing it.
 Famous last words.
 Indeed, indeed, indeed.
 You know this is being recorded, right?
 It will not make you look good once it crawls out of the lab
 and destroys all of human civilization, but yes.
 But there is a very good things you can do to prevent that.
 For instance, if you put stuff in your world,
 which isn't earth abundant.
 So let's say we make life based on molybdenum
 and it escapes, it would die immediately
 because there's not enough molybdenum in the environment.
 So we can put in, we can do responsible life.
 Or as I fantasized with my research group on our way day,
 that would go in, I think it's actually morally,
 if we don't find, until humanity finds life in the universe,
 this is going on a tangent,
 it's our moral obligation to make origin of life bombs,
 identify dead planets and bomb them
 with our origin of life machines and make them alive.
 I think it is our moral obligation to do that.
 Some people might argue with me about that,
 but I think that we need more life in the universe.
 And then we kind of forget we did it and then come back.
 And then-
 So where did you come from?
 But coming back to the, what I'd expect.
 So I just say-
 Father, are you back?
 I think this is once again a Rick and Morty episode.
 It's definitely all Rick and Morty all the way down.
 So I imagine we have this pristine experiment
 and everything is sanitized
 and we put in inorganic materials and we have cycles,
 whether day, night cycles, up, down, whatever.
 And we look for evidence of replication
 and evolution over time.
 And that's what the experiment should be.
 Now, are there people doing this in the world right now?
 There are a couple of,
 there's some really good groups doing this.
 There's some really interesting scientists
 doing this around the world.
 They're kind of perhaps too much associated with the scam.
 So, and so they're using molecules
 that were already invented by biology.
 So there's a bit of replication built in,
 but I still think the work they're doing is amazing.
 But I would like people to be a bit freer and say,
 let's just basically shake a load of sand in a box
 and wait for life to come out
 because that's what happened on earth.
 And so that we have to understand that.
 Now, how would I know I've been successful?
 Well, because I'm not obsessing
 with what molecules are in life now,
 I would wager a vast quantity of money.
 I'm not very rich, so it'd just be a few dollars,
 but for me, the solution space will be different.
 So the genetic material will be not RNA.
 The proteins will not be what we think.
 The solutions will be just completely different.
 And it might be, and it will be very feeble
 because that's the other thing we should be able to show
 fairly robustly that even if I did make
 or someone did make a new life form in the lab,
 it would be so poor that it's not gonna leap out.
 It is the fear about making a lethal life form
 in the lab from scratch is similar to us imagining
 that we're gonna make the Terminator,
 Boston Dynamics tomorrow.
 It's simply not.
 And the problem is we don't communicate that properly.
 I know you yourself, you explain this very well.
 There is not the AI catastrophe coming.
 We're very far away from that.
 That doesn't mean we should ignore it.
 Same with the origin of life catastrophe.
 It's not coming anytime soon.
 We shouldn't ignore it, but we shouldn't let that fear
 stop us from doing those experiments.
 But this is a much, much longer discussion
 because there's a lot of details there.
 I would say there's potentials for catastrophic events
 to happen in much dumber ways.
 Within an AI space, there's a lot of ways to create,
 like social networks are creating a kind of accelerated
 set of events that we might not be able to control.
 The social network, the virality in the digital space
 can create mass movements of ideas that can then,
 if times are tough, create military conflict
 and all those kinds of things.
 But that's not super intelligent AI.
 That's an interesting at scale application of AI.
 If you look at viruses, viruses are pretty dumb,
 but at scale, their application is pretty detrimental.
 And so origin of life, much like all of the kind of virology,
 the very contentious word of gain of function research
 and virology, sort of like research on viruses,
 messing with them genetically, that can create a lot
 of problems if not done well.
 So we have to be very cautious.
 So there's a kind of, whenever you're ultra cautious
 about stuff in AI or in virology and biology,
 it borders on cynicism, I would say,
 where it's like everything we do is going to turn out
 to be destructive and terrible,
 so I'm just going to sit here and do nothing.
 Okay, that's a possible solution,
 except for the fact that somebody's going to do it.
 It's science and technology progresses,
 so we have to do it in an ethical way, in a good way,
 considering in a transparent way, in an open way,
 considering all the possible positive trajectories
 that could be taken and making sure as much as possible
 that we walk those trajectories.
 So yeah, I don't think Terminator is coming,
 but a totally unexpected version of Terminator
 may be around the corner.
 Yeah, it might be here already.
 Yeah, so I agree with that.
 And so going back to the origin of life discussion,
 I think that in synthetic biology right now,
 we have to be very careful about how we edit genomes
 and edit synthetic biology to do things.
 So that's kind of, that's where things might go wrong
 in the same way as Twitter turning ourselves
 into kind of strange scale effects.
 I would love origin of life research
 or artificial life research to get to the point
 where we have those worries,
 because that's why I think we're just so far away from that.
 We are just, you know, right now,
 I think there are two really important angles.
 There is the origin of life people,
 researchers who are faithfully working on this
 and trying to make those molecules,
 the scan molecules I talk about.
 And then there are people on the creationist side
 who are saying, look, the fact you can't make these molecules
 and you can't make a cell means that evolution isn't true
 and all this other stuff.
 Gotcha.
 Yeah, and so, and I find that really frustrating
 because actually the origin of life research
 is all working in good faith, right?
 Yes.
 And so what I'm trying to do is give origin of life research
 a little bit more of an open context.
 And one of the things I think is important,
 I really want to make a new life form in my lifetime.
 I really want to prove that life is a general phenomena,
 a bit like gravity in the universe,
 because I think that's gonna be really important
 for humanity's global psychological state,
 meaning going forward.
 That's beautifully put.
 So one, it will help us understand ourselves.
 So that's useful for science,
 but two, it gives us a kind of hope,
 if not an awe at all the huge amounts
 of alien civilizations that are out there.
 If you can build life and understand
 just how easy it is to build life,
 then that's just as good, if not much better,
 than discovering life on another planet.
 Yeah.
 It's, I mean, it's cheaper.
 It's much cheaper and much easier
 and probably much more conclusive
 because once you're able to create life,
 like you said, it's a search problem
 that there's probably a lot of different ways to do it.
 So once you create the, once you find the first solution,
 you probably have all the right methodology
 for finding all kinds of other solutions.
 Yeah, and wouldn't it be great if we could find a solution?
 I mean, it's probably a bit late for,
 I mean, I worry about climate change,
 but I'm not that worried about climate change.
 And I think one day you could think about,
 could we engineer a new type of life form
 that could basically, and I don't want to do this,
 and I don't think we should do this necessarily,
 but it's a good thought experiment
 that would perhaps take CO2 out of the atmosphere
 or an intermediate life form.
 So it's not quite alive.
 It's almost like an add-on that we can,
 with a time-dependent add-on,
 you could give to say cyanobacteria in the ocean
 or to maybe to wheat and say, right,
 we're just gonna, we're gonna fix a bit more CO2
 and we're gonna work out how much we need to fix
 to basically save the climate.
 And we're gonna use evolutionary principles
 to basically get there.
 What worries me is that biology has had a few billion years
 to find a solution for CO2 fixation.
 It hasn't really done,
 the solution isn't brilliant for our needs,
 but biology wasn't thinking about our needs.
 Biology was thinking about biology's needs.
 But I think if we can do, as you say, make life in the lab,
 then suddenly we don't need to go to everywhere
 and conclusively prove it.
 I think we make life in the lab.
 We look at the extent of life in the solar system,
 how far did Earth life get?
 Probably we're all Martians,
 probably life got going on Mars,
 the chemistry on Mars seeded Earth.
 That might have been a legitimate way
 to kind of truncate the surface.
 But in the outer solar system,
 we might have completely different life forms
 on Enceladus, on Europa and Titan.
 And that would be a cool thing because-
 Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute,
 wait a minute.
 Did you just say that you think in terms of likelihood,
 life started on Mars, like statistically speaking,
 life started on Mars and seeded Earth?
 It could be possible because life was,
 so Mars was habitable for the type of life
 that we have right now, type of chemistry before Earth.
 So it seems to me that Mars got searching doing chemistry.
 And-
 So it started way before.
 Yeah, and so they had a few more replicators
 and some other stuff.
 And if those replicators got ejected from Mars
 and landed on Earth, and Earth would be like,
 I don't need to start again.
 Thanks.
 Thanks for that.
 And then it just carried on.
 So I'm not going, I think we will find evidence of life
 on Mars, either life we put there by mistake,
 contamination, or actually life,
 the earliest remnants of life.
 And that would be really exciting.
 It's a really good reason to go there.
 But I think it's more unlikely
 because of the gravitational situation in the solar system,
 if we find life in the outer solar system-
 Titan and all that, that would be its own thing.
 Exactly.
 Wow, that would be so cool.
 If we go to Mars and we find life that looks
 a hell of a lot similar to Earth life,
 and then we'll go to Titan and all those weird moons
 with the ices and the volcanoes and all that kind of stuff.
 And then we find there something that looks,
 I don't know, way weirder.
 Some other, some non-RNA type of situation.
 Or we might find almost life,
 like in the pre-biodic chemical space.
 And I think there are four types of exoplanets
 we can go look for, right?
 Because when JWST goes up and touch wood,
 it goes up and everything's fine.
 When we look at a star, well, we know statistically,
 most stars have planets around them.
 What type of planet are they?
 Are they gonna be dead?
 Are they gonna be just pre-biodic origin of life coming?
 So are they gonna be technological?
 And so we have intelligence on them.
 And will they have died?
 So from, had life on them, but gone.
 Those are the four states of-
 They're four, and so, and suddenly,
 it's a bit like I want to classify planets
 the way we classify stars.
 And I think that in terms of rather than having this,
 oh, we've found methane, there's evidence of life.
 We found oxygen, that's the evidence of life.
 We found whatever molecule marker,
 and start to then frame things a little bit more.
 As those four states.
 Which by the way, you're just saying four,
 but there could be a before the dead,
 there could be other states
 that we humans can't even conceive of.
 Just pre-biotic, almost alive,
 got the possibility to come alive.
 I think-
 But there could be a post-technological.
 Whatever we think of as technology,
 that could be pre-conscious.
 Like, where we all meld into one super intelligent
 conscious or some weird thing that naturally happens.
 Over time.
 Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that all bets are on them.
 The metaverse.
 Yeah, we are.
 In the face.
 We join into a virtual metaverse,
 and start creating, which is kind of an interesting idea,
 almost arbitrary number of copies of each other,
 much more quickly, to mess with different ideas.
 I can create a thousand copies of Lex,
 every possible version of Lex,
 and then just see,
 and then I just have them argue with each other,
 and until in the space of ideas, and see who wins out.
 How could that possibly go wrong?
 But anyway, especially in this digital space,
 where you can start exploring with AIs mixed in,
 you can start engineering arbitrary intelligences.
 You can start playing in the space of ideas,
 which might move us into a world that looks very different
 than a biological world.
 Like our current world, the technology,
 is still very much tied to our biology.
 We might move past that completely.
 Oh, definitely, we definitely will.
 We definitely, because that could be another phase then.
 Sure.
 Because then you-
 But I did say technological, so I think I agree with you.
 I think, so you can have, let's get this right.
 So dead world, no prospect of alive.
 Prebiotic world, life emerging, living, and technological.
 And you probably, and the dead one,
 you probably won't be able to tell between the dead
 never been alive and the dead one,
 maybe you've got some artifacts, and maybe there's five.
 There's probably not more than five.
 And I think the technological one
 could have life on it still, but it might just have exceeded.
 Because one way that life might survive on Earth
 is if we can work out how to deal with the coming,
 the real climate change that comes when the sun expands.
 There might be a way to survive that.
 But yeah, I think that we need to start thinking
 statistically when it comes to looking for life
 in the universe.
 Let me ask you then sort of statistically,
 how many alien civilizations are out there
 in those four phases that you're talking about?
 When you look up to the stars,
 and you're sipping on some wine,
 and talking to other people with British accents
 about something intelligent, intellectual, I'm sure.
 Do you think there's a lot of alien civilizations
 looking back at us and wondering the same?
 My romantic view of the universe
 is really taking loans from my logical self.
 So what I'm saying is I have no idea.
 But having said that, there is no reason
 to suppose that life is as hard as we first thought it was.
 And so if we just take Earth as a marker,
 and if I think that life is a much more general phenomena
 than just our biology,
 then I think the universe is full of life.
 And the reason for the Fermi paradox
 is not that they're not out there,
 it's just that we can't interact with other life forms
 because they're so different.
 And I'm not saying that they're necessarily like
 as depicted in Arrival or other, you know,
 I'm just saying that perhaps
 there are very few universal facts in the universe,
 and maybe that is not, it's quite hard,
 our technologies are quite divergent.
 And so I think that it's very hard to know
 how we're gonna interact with alien life.
 You think there's a lot of kinds of life that's possible.
 I guess that was the intuition.
 Yeah.
 You provided that the way biology itself,
 but even this particular kinds of biology
 that we have on Earth is something that is just one sample
 of nearly infinite number of other possible complex,
 autonomous self-replicating type of things
 that could be possible.
 And so we're almost unable to see
 the alternative versions of us.
 I mean, we'll still be able to detect them,
 we'll still be able to interact with them,
 we'll still be able to, like,
 which, what's exactly is lost in translation?
 Why can't we see them?
 Why can't we talk to them?
 Because I too have a sense,
 you put it way more poetically,
 but it seems both statistically and sort of romantically,
 it feels like the universe should be teaming with life,
 like super intelligent life.
 And I just, I sit there and the Fermi paradox is very,
 it's felt very distinctly by me when I look up at the stars
 because it's like, it's the same way I feel
 when I'm driving through New Jersey
 and listening to Bruce Springsteen and feel quite sad.
 It's like Lucy Kay talks about pulling off
 to the side of the road and just weeping a little bit.
 I'm almost like wondering like,
 hey, why aren't you talking to us?
 It feels lonely.
 It feels lonely because it feels like they're out there.
 I think that there are a number of answers to that.
 I think the Fermi paradox is perhaps based on the assumption
 that if life did emerge in the universe,
 it would be similar to our life
 and there's only one solution.
 And I think that what we've got to start to do
 is go out and look for selection detection
 rather than an evolution detection
 rather than life detection.
 And I think that once we start to do that,
 we might start to see really interesting things.
 And we haven't been doing this for very long.
 And we are living in an expanding universe.
 So that makes the problem a little bit harder.
 Everybody's always leaving distance-wise.
 I'm very optimistic that we will, well, I don't know.
 There are two movies that came out
 within six months of one another, Ad Astra and Cosmos.
 Ad Astra, they're very expensive blockbuster
 with Brad Pitt in it and saying there is no life
 and it's all, we've got to,
 life on earth has more pressures than Cosmos,
 which is a UK production,
 which basically aliens came and visited earth one day
 and they were discovered in the UK.
 It was quite, it's a fun film.
 But I really loved those two films.
 And at the same time, those films,
 at the time those films are coming out,
 I was working on a paper, a life detection paper.
 And I found it was so hard to publish this paper.
 And it was almost as depressed,
 I got so depressed trying to get this science out there
 that I felt the depression of the film in Ad Astra,
 like life is, there's no life elsewhere in the universe.
 And, but I'm incredibly optimistic
 that I think we will find life in the universe,
 firm evidence of life.
 And it will have to start on earth,
 making life on earth and surprising us.
 We have to surprise ourselves
 and make non-biological life on earth.
 And then people say, well, you made this life on earth,
 therefore you're part of the causal chain of that.
 And that might be true, but if I can show
 how I'm able to do it with very little cheating
 or very little information inputs,
 just creating like a model planet, some description,
 and watching life emerge,
 then I think that we will be even to persuade
 even the hardest critic that it's possible.
 Now, with regards to the Fermi paradox,
 I think that we might crush that with the JWST.
 It's basically, if I recall correctly,
 the mirror is about 10 times the size of the Hubble
 that we're gonna be able to do spectroscopy,
 look at colors of exoplanets, I think.
 Not brilliantly, but we'll be able to start
 to classify them and we'll start to get a real feel
 for what's going on in the universe on these exoplanets.
 Because it's only in the last few decades, I think,
 maybe even last decade, that we even came to recognize
 that exoplanets even are common.
 And I think that that gives us a lot of optimism
 that life is gonna be out there.
 But I think we have to start framing,
 we have to start preparing the fact
 that biology is only one solution.
 I can tell you with confidence that biology on Earth
 does not exist anywhere else in the universe.
 We are absolutely unique.
 Well, okay, I love the confidence,
 but where does that confidence come from?
 Chemistry, like how many options does chemistry really have?
 Many, that's the point.
 And the thing is, this is where the origin
 of life scam comes in, is that people don't count,
 they don't count the numbers.
 So if biology, as you find on Earth, is common everywhere,
 then there's something really weird going on
 that basically written in the quantum mechanics,
 there's some kind of, these bonds must form over these bonds
 and this catalyst must form over this catalyst
 when they're all quite equal.
 Life is contingent.
 The origin of life on Earth was contingent
 upon the chemistry available at the origin of life
 on Earth.
 So that means if we want to find other Earth-like worlds,
 we look for the same kind of rocky world,
 we might look in the same zone as Earth
 and we might expect reasonably
 to find biological-like stuff going on.
 That would be a reasonable hypothesis,
 but it won't be the same, it can't be.
 It's like saying, I don't believe in magic,
 that's why I'm sure.
 I just don't believe in magic, I believe in statistics
 and I can do experiments.
 And so I won't get the same,
 exactly the same sequence of events,
 I'll get something different.
 And so there is TikTok elsewhere in the universe,
 but it's not the same as our TikTok, right?
 That's what I mean.
 Which aspect of it is not the same?
 Well, I just think, so what is TikTok?
 TikTok is a social media where people upload videos,
 right, silly videos.
 So I guess there might be-
 Well, there's humor, there's attention,
 there's ability to process,
 there's ability for intelligent organisms
 to collaborate on ideas and find humor in ideas
 and play with those ideas, make them viral memes.
 Humor seems to be kind of fundamental
 to the human experience.
 And I think that that's a really interesting question
 we can ask, is humor a fundamental thing in the universe?
 I think maybe it will be, right?
 In terms of, you think about in a game theoretic sense,
 humor, the emergence of humor serves a role
 in our game engine.
 And so if selection is fundamental in the universe,
 then so is humor.
 Well, I actually don't know exactly
 what role humor serves.
 Maybe it's like, from a chemical perspective,
 it's like a catalyst for,
 I guess it's for several purposes.
 One is the catalyst for spreading ideas on the internet.
 That's modern humor.
 But humor is also a good way to deal
 with the difficulty of life.
 It's a kind of valve, release valve for suffering.
 Like throughout human history, life has been really hard.
 And for the people that I have known in my life
 who've lived through some really difficult things,
 humor is part of how they deal with that.
 Yeah.
 Because it's usually dark humor.
 But yeah, it's interesting.
 I don't know exactly sort of what's the more mathematically
 general way to formulate what the hell is humor?
 And what humor does it serve?
 But I still, we're kind of joking here,
 but it's a counterintuitive idea to me
 to think that life elsewhere in the universe
 is very different than life on earth.
 And also, like all of each instantiation of life
 is likely very different from each other.
 Yeah.
 Like maybe there's a few clusters of similar like life,
 but it's much more likely is what you're saying.
 To me, it's a kind of novel thought.
 I'm not sure what to do with it.
 But you're saying that it's more common to be a weird
 odd cast in the full spectrum of life
 than it is to be in some usual cluster.
 So every instantiation of a kind of chemistry
 that results in complexity that's autonomous
 and self-replicating however the hell you define life,
 that is going to be very different every time.
 I don't know.
 It feels like a selection is a fundamental kind of
 directed force in the universe.
 Won't selection result in a few pockets
 of interesting complexities?
 I mean, yeah.
 If we ran earth over again, over and over and over,
 you're saying it's going to come up
 that there's not going to be elephants every time?
 Yeah, I don't think so.
 I think that there will be similarities.
 And I think we don't know enough about how selection
 is globally works.
 But it might be that the elephant,
 the emergence of elephants was wired into the history
 of earth in some way, like the gravitational force,
 how evolution was going, Cambrian explosions,
 blah, blah, blah, the emergence of mammals.
 But I just don't know enough about the contingency,
 the variability.
 All I do know is you count the number of bits
 of information required to make an element, sorry,
 an elephant and think about the causal chain
 that provide the lineage of elephants
 going all the way back to Luca,
 there's a huge scope for divergence.
 Yeah, but just like you said, with chemistry and selection,
 the things that result in self-replicating chemistry
 and self-replicating organisms,
 those are extremely unlikely, as you're saying,
 but once they're successful, they multiply.
 So like, it might be a tiny subset of all things
 that are possible in the universe, chemically speaking,
 it might be a very tiny subset is actually successful
 at creating elephants.
 Or elephant-like or slash human-like creatures.
 Well, there's two different questions.
 There's the first one, if we were to reset Earth
 and to start again.
 At the different phases, sorry to keep interrupting.
 Yeah, no, if we restart Earth and start again,
 say we could go back to the beginning
 and do the experiment or have a number of Earths,
 how similar would biology be?
 I would say that there would be broad similarities,
 but the emergence of mammals is not a given
 unless we're gonna throw an asteroid at each planet
 at each time and try and faithfully reproduce
 what happened.
 Then there's the other thing about
 when you go to another Earth-like planet elsewhere,
 maybe there's a different ratio, particular elements,
 maybe there's the bombardment at the beginning of the planet
 was quicker or longer than Earth.
 And I just don't have enough information there.
 What I do know is that the complexity of the story
 of life on Earth gives us lots of scope for variation.
 And I just don't think it's a reasonable mathematical
 assumption to think that life on Earth
 that happened again would be same as what we have now.
 Okay, but you've also extended that to say that we might,
 as an explanation for the Fermi paradox,
 that that means we're not able to interact with them.
 Or that's an explanation for why we haven't,
 at scale, heard from aliens is...
 Well, right now.
 They're different than us.
 We've only been looking for, say, 70, 80 years.
 So I think that the reason we have not found aliens yet
 is that we haven't worked out what life is.
 No, but the aliens have worked that out, surely.
 Statistically speaking, there must be a large number
 of aliens that are way ahead of us
 on this whole life question.
 Unless there's something about this stage
 of intellectual evolution that often quickly results
 in nuclear war and destroys itself.
 There's something in this process that eventually,
 I don't know, crystallizes the complexity
 and it stops, either dies or stops developing.
 But most likely, they already figured it out.
 And why aren't they contacting us?
 There's some grad student somewhere
 wants to study a new green planet.
 Maybe they have.
 I mean, maybe, I don't have a coherent answer
 to your question other than to say that,
 if there are other aliens out there
 and they're far more advanced,
 they might be in contact with each other.
 And they might also, we might be at a point where,
 what I'm saying quite critically is it takes two to talk.
 So the aliens might be there,
 but if we don't have the ability to recognize them
 and talk to them, then the aliens aren't going
 to want to talk to us.
 And I think that's a critical point that probably,
 if that's a filter, there needs to be an ability
 for one to communicate with the other.
 And we need to know what life is before we do that.
 So we haven't qualified to even join the club
 to have a talk.
 Well, I think they still want to teach us how to talk.
 But my worry is that, or I think they would want
 to teach us how to talk like you do when you meet it.
 Like when you even meet, I was going to say child,
 but that's a human species.
 I mean like an ant.
 You want to try to communicate with them
 through whatever devices you can,
 given what an ant is like.
 I just, I worry mostly about that humans
 are just too close-minded or don't have the right tools.
 No, I'm going to push back on this quite significantly.
 I would say because we don't understand what life is,
 and because we don't understand how life emerged
 in the universe, we don't understand the physics
 that gave rise to life.
 Yeah, and that means our description,
 fundamental description, I'm way out of my pay grade,
 even further out, but I'll say it anyway,
 because I think it's a fun-
 You don't get paid much anyway, as you said earlier.
 So I would say that we,
 because we don't understand the universe yet,
 we do not understand how the universe spat out life.
 And we don't know what life is.
 And I think that until we understand that,
 it is going to limit our ability to even,
 we don't qualify to talk to the aliens.
 So I'm going to say that they might be there,
 but we just, I'm not going to say that I believe
 in inter-dimensional aliens being present in this room.
 Yeah, but I think you're just being self-critical,
 like we don't qualify.
 I think the fact that we don't qualify qualifies us.
 We're interesting in our innocence.
 No, I'm saying that because we don't understand
 causal chains and the way that information
 is propagated in the universe,
 and we don't understand what replication is yet,
 and we don't understand how life emerged,
 I think that we would not recognize aliens.
 And if someone doesn't recognize you,
 you wouldn't go and talk to it.
 You don't go and talk to ants.
 You don't go and talk to birds,
 or maybe some birds you do, right?
 Because you can, there's just enough cognition.
 So I'm saying because we don't have enough,
 our cognitive abilities are not yet where they need to be,
 we probably aren't even communicating with them.
 So you don't agree with the dating strategy
 of playing hard to get?
 Because us humans, that seems to attract us.
 Within a species, that's fine,
 but I think we don't actually have abstraction.
 No, actually, I think in this talk, in this conversation,
 you've helped me crystallize something
 that I think has been troubling me
 for a long time with the thermoparadox.
 I'm pretty sure that a reasonable avenue
 is to say that you would not go and talk to your cat
 about calculus, right?
 But I would still pet it.
 Sure, but I'm not talking about petting a cat.
 So the analogy is that the aliens are not going to talk
 to us because we, and I'm using calculus
 as an analogy for abstraction,
 because we lack the layer, the fundamental layer
 of understanding what life is
 and what the universe is in our reality,
 that it would be so counterproductive
 interacting with intelligent alien species
 that it would cause more angst for human race.
 But they don't care, okay.
 They gotta be self-interested,
 so they'll probably, they more care about,
 is it interesting for them?
 Maybe they, I mean, surely there's a way
 to pet the cat in this analogy,
 because even if we lack complete understanding,
 it must be a very frustrating experience
 for other kinds of intelligence to communicate with us.
 Still, there must be a way to interact with us,
 like perturb the system in interesting ways
 to see what these creatures do.
 We might actually find the answer,
 I mean, again, at my pay grade,
 in a simulation of the Earth,
 or say, let's say a simulation
 where we allow an intelligent AI to emerge, right?
 And that AI, we then give it,
 the objective is to be curious,
 interact with other intelligence in its universe.
 And then we might find the parameters required
 for that AI to work with.
 And I think you'll find if the AI will not talk
 to other AIs that don't share the ability
 to abstract to the level of the AI,
 because it's just a cat,
 and are you gonna travel 20 light years
 to go and pet a cat?
 So not because of the inability to do so,
 but because of boredom.
 It's more interested, it will start talking to,
 it will spend most, it will spend a majority of its time
 talking to other AI systems that can at least
 somewhat understand it, it's much more fun.
 It's a bit like, do we know that plants are conscious?
 Well, plants aren't conscious in the way we typically think,
 but we don't talk to them, they could be, right?
 Yeah, but there's a lot of people on Earth
 who like gardening.
 There's always going to be a weird-
 They're not talking, they're just gardening.
 Okay, well, you're not romantic enough to see gardening
 as a way of communication between humans and plants.
 Oh, okay, you got me there.
 But there is ways, there's always going to be
 the people who are curious,
 Jane Goodall, who lives with the chimps, right?
 There's always going to be curious intelligent species
 that visit the weird Earth planet and try to interact.
 I mean, it's, yeah, I think it's a super cool idea
 that you're expressing, and just to kind of have a sense,
 maybe it's a hope that there's always going to be
 a desire to interact even with those
 that can't possibly understand
 the depth of what you understand.
 So I'm with you, so I want to be as positive as you
 that aliens do exist and we will interact with them.
 What I'm trying to do is to give you
 a reasonable hypothesis why we haven't yet,
 and also something to strive for, to be able to do that.
 I mean, there is the other view
 that the universe is just too big and life is just too rare,
 but I want to come up with an alternative explanation,
 which I think is reasonable
 and not being philosophically and scientifically thought out,
 which is this, if you can't actually communicate
 with the object, the thing, competently,
 you don't even know it's there, then there's no point yet.
 See, I disagree with that,
 but I'm totally aligned with your hopeful vision,
 which is like, we need to understand the origin of life.
 It will help us engineer life,
 it will help us engineer intelligent life
 through perhaps on the computer side, through simulation,
 and explore all the ways that life emerges.
 And that will allow us to,
 I think the fundamental reason
 we don't see overwhelming amounts of life
 is I actually believe aliens,
 of course, these are all just kind of open-minded beliefs.
 It's difficult to know for sure about any of this,
 but I think there's a lot of alien civilizations
 which are actively communicating with us,
 and we're too dumb.
 We don't have the right tools to see it.
 That's what I'm saying.
 No, but maybe I misinterpreted you,
 but I interpreted you to say they kind of tried a few times
 and they're like, oh God.
 No, no, no, what I'm saying is we don't,
 so this goes two ways.
 Yeah, I agree with you.
 There could be information out there,
 but just put in such a way
 that we just don't understand it yet.
 Right.
 So sorry if I didn't make that clear.
 I mean, it's not just, I don't think we,
 I think we qualify as soon as we can decode their signal.
 Right, so when you say qualify, gotta, gotta.
 So you mean we're just not smart enough.
 The word qualify was throwing me off.
 So we're not smart enough to do,
 it's like, but we just need to get smarter.
 And there's a lot of people who believe,
 let me get your opinion on this, about UFO sightings.
 So sightings of weird phenomena,
 phenomena that, you know, what does UFO mean?
 It means it's a flying object
 and it's not identified clearly at the time of sighting.
 That's what UFO means.
 So it could be a physics phenomena,
 could be ball lightning,
 it could be all kinds of fascinating.
 I was always fascinated with ball lightning as a,
 like the fact that there could be physical phenomena
 in this world that are observable by the human eye.
 Of course, all physical phenomena generally are fascinating
 that are, that really smart people can't explain.
 I love that.
 Cause it's like, wait a minute,
 especially if you can replicate it,
 it's like, wait a minute, how does this happen?
 That's like the precursor to giant discoveries
 in chemistry and biology and physics and so on.
 But it sucks when those events are super rare, right?
 Physical, like leg ball lightning.
 So that's out there.
 And then of course that phenomena could have
 other interpretations that don't have to do
 with the physics, the chemistry, the biology of earth.
 It could have to do with more extraterrestrial explanations
 that in large part, thanks to Hollywood and movies
 and all those kinds of things,
 captivates the imaginations of millions of people.
 But just because it's science fiction
 that captivates the imagination of people,
 doesn't mean that some of those sightings,
 all it takes is one.
 One of those sightings is actually a sign
 that it's extraterrestrial intelligence,
 that it's an object that's not of this particular world.
 Do you think there's a chance that that's the case?
 What do you make, especially the pilot sightings,
 what do you make of those?
 So I agree there's a chance, there's always a chance.
 Any good scientist would have to,
 or observationist would have to, you know,
 I want to see if aliens exist, come to earth.
 What I know about the universe is I think it's unlikely
 right now that there are aliens visiting us,
 but not impossible.
 I think the releases, the dramatization
 that's been happening politically saying
 we're gonna release all this information,
 this, you know, classified information.
 I was kind of disappointed because it was just
 very poor material.
 And right now, you know, the ability to capture
 high resolution video, everybody is carrying around with them
 an incredible video device now.
 And we haven't got more compelling data.
 And so that we've just seeing grainy pictures,
 a lot of hearsay, instrument kind of malfunctions
 and whatnot.
 And so I think on balance, I think it's extremely unlikely,
 but I think something really interesting is happening.
 And also during the pandemic, right?
 We've all been locked down.
 We all want to have, we want to,
 our imaginations are, you know, running riot.
 And I think that the, I don't think that the information
 out there has convinced me there are anything interesting
 on the UFO side, but what it has made me very interested
 about is how humanity is opening up its mind
 to ponder aliens and the mystery of our universe.
 And so I don't want to dissuade people
 from having those thoughts and say you're stupid
 and look at that, it's clearly incorrect.
 That's not right, that's not fair.
 What I would say is that I lack sufficient data,
 replicated observations to make me go,
 oh, I'm gonna take this seriously,
 but I'm really interested by the fact
 that there is this great deal of interest.
 And I think that it drives me to maybe want
 to make an artificial life form even more
 and to help NASA and the Air Force
 and whoever go and look for things even more,
 because I think humanity wants to know what's out there.
 There's this yearning, isn't there?
 Yeah, but I see, I almost,
 depending on the day, I sometimes agree with you,
 but with the thing you just said,
 but one of the disappointing things to me
 about the sightings, I still hold the belief
 that a non-zero number of them
 is an indication of something very interesting.
 So I don't side with the people who say
 everything can be explained with sensor artifacts
 kind of thing.
 Yeah, I agree with you, I didn't say that either.
 I would say I just don't have enough data.
 But the thing I wanna push back on is the statement
 that everybody has a high definition camera.
 One of the disappointing things to me about the report
 that the government released, but in general,
 just having worked with government,
 having worked with people all over,
 is how incompetent we are.
 Like if you look at the response to the pandemic,
 how incompetent we are in the face of great challenges
 without great leadership.
 How incompetent we are in the face
 of the great mysteries before us without great leadership.
 And I just think it's actually,
 the fact that there's a lot of high definition cameras
 is not enough to capture the full richness
 of weird, of the mysterious phenomena out there
 of which extraterrestrial intelligence
 visiting earth could be one.
 I don't think we have, I don't think everybody having
 a smartphone in their pocket is enough.
 I think that allows for TikTok videos.
 I don't think it allows for the capture
 of even interesting, relatively rare human events.
 That's not that common.
 It's rare to have be in the right moment
 in the right time to be able to capture the thing.
 I agree, I agree.
 Let me rephrase what I think on this.
 I haven't seen enough information.
 I haven't really actively sorted out.
 I must admit, but I'm with you in that I love the idea
 of anomaly detection in chemistry in particular.
 I want to make anomalies, sorry,
 or not necessarily make anomalies.
 I want to understand an anomaly.
 Let me give you two from chemistry,
 which are really quite interesting.
 Phlogiston, going way back, where people said,
 there's this thing called phlogiston.
 And for ages, the alchemists got really this kind of,
 that fire is a thing.
 That's one, and then we determined that phlogiston
 wasn't what we thought it is.
 Let's go to physics, the ether.
 Ether's a hard one, because I think actually
 the ether might exist, and I'll tell you
 what I think the ether is later.
 Can you explain ether?
 As the vacuums, as the light traveling
 through the ether in the vacuum,
 there is some thing that we call the ether
 that basically mediates the movement of light.
 And then the other one is cold fusion,
 which is more of, so a few years ago,
 that people observed it when they did some electrochemistry,
 when they were splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen,
 that you got more energy out than you put in.
 And people got excited, and they thought
 that this was a nuclear reaction.
 And in the end, it was kind of discredited,
 because you didn't detect neutrons and all that stuff.
 I'm pretty sure, I'm a chemist,
 I'm going, telling you this on your podcast, but why not?
 I'm pretty sure there's interesting
 electrochemical phenomena that's not
 completely bottomed out yet.
 That there is something there.
 However, we lack the technology and the experimental design.
 So all I'm saying in your response about aliens
 is we lack the experimental design
 to really capture these anomalies.
 And we are encircling the planet
 with many more detection systems.
 We've got satellites everywhere.
 So there is, I do hope that we are
 going to discover more anomalies.
 And remember, the solar system isn't just static in space,
 it's moving through the universe.
 So there's just more and more chance.
 I'm not what with Avi Loeb,
 he's generating all sorts of kind of a cult,
 I would say, with this.
 But I'm not against him.
 I think there is a finite chance
 if there are aliens in the universe
 that we're going to happen upon them.
 Because we're moving through the universe.
 What's the nature of the following that Avi Loeb has?
 He's doubling down more and more and more
 and say there are aliens, interdimensional aliens
 and everything else, right?
 He's gone from space junk accelerating out
 of two-dimensional stuff in a very short space of time.
 He's obviously bored.
 Or he wants to tap into the psyche and understand.
 And he's playfully kind of trying to interact
 with society and his peers to say,
 stop saying it's not possible.
 Which I agree with, we shouldn't do that.
 But we should frame it statistically
 in the same way we should frame everything
 as good scientists statistically.
 Yeah.
 Good scientists.
 Recently, the idea of good scientists is,
 I take quite skeptically.
 I've been listening to a lot of scientists
 tell me about what is good science.
 That makes me sad.
 Because you've been interviewed,
 what I would consider a lot of really good scientists.
 No, that's true.
 A lot of really thinkers.
 But that's exactly right.
 And most of the people I talk to are incredible human beings.
 But there's a humility that's required.
 Science cannot be dogmatism.
 Sure, I agree.
 I mean.
 Authority, like a PhD does not give you authority.
 A lifelong pursuit of a particular task
 does not give you authority.
 You're just as lost and clueless as everybody else.
 But you're more curious and more stubborn.
 So that's a nice quality to have.
 But overall, just using the word science and statistics
 can often, as you know,
 kind of become a catalyst for dismissing new ideas,
 out of the box ideas, wild ideas, all that kind of stuff.
 Well, yes and no.
 I think that, so I like to,
 some people find me extremely annoying in science
 because I'm basically, I'm quite rude and disruptive.
 Not in a rude, you know,
 some people say they're ugly or stupid
 or anything like that.
 I just say, you're wrong.
 Or why do you think this?
 And something, a gift I got given by society
 when I was very young,
 because I was in the learning difficulties class at school
 is I was told I was stupid.
 And so I know I'm stupid,
 but I always wanted to be smart, right?
 I always, I remember going to school going,
 maybe today they're gonna tell me
 I'm not as stupid as I was yesterday.
 And it was always disappointed, always.
 And so when I went into academia and everyone said,
 you're wrong, I was like, join the queue.
 Yeah.
 Because it allowed me to walk through the wall.
 So I think that people like to always imagine science
 as a bit like living in a Japanese house,
 the paper walls, and everyone sits in their room.
 And I annoy people because I walk straight through the wall.
 Because why should I be a chemist and not a mathematician?
 Why should I be a mathematician and not computer scientist?
 Because if the problem requires us
 to walk through those walls,
 but I like walking through the walls.
 But as long, then I have to put up,
 I have to do good science.
 I have to win the people in those rooms across
 by good science, by taking their criticisms
 and addressing them head on.
 And I think we must do that.
 And I think that I try and do that in my own way.
 And I kind of love walking through the walls.
 And it gives me, it's difficult for me personally,
 it's quite painful, but it always leads
 to a deeper understanding of the people I'm with.
 In particular, the arguments I have
 with all sorts of interesting minds,
 because I want to solve the problem
 or I want to understand more about why I exist.
 That's it really.
 And I think we have to not dismiss science on that basis.
 I think we can work with science.
 No, science is beautiful, but humans with egos
 and all those kinds of things can sometimes misuse
 good things like social justice,
 like all ideas we all aspire to misuse
 these beautiful ideas to manipulate people
 to all those kinds of things.
 Sure.
 There's assholes in every space and walk of life,
 including science.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
 And those are no good.
 But yes, you're right.
 The scientific method has proven to be quite useful.
 That said, for difficult questions,
 for difficult explanations for rare phenomena,
 you have to walk cautiously.
 Because the scientific method,
 when you totally don't understand something
 and it's rare and you can't replicate it,
 doesn't quite apply.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 I agree with you.
 The challenge is to not dismiss the anomaly
 because you can't replicate it.
 I mean, we can talk about this.
 This is something I realized
 when we were developing assembly theory.
 People think the track they're on is so dogmatic,
 but there is this thing that they see, but they don't see.
 And it takes a bit of time
 and you just have to keep reframing it.
 And my approach is to say, well, why can't this be right?
 Why must we accept that RNA is the only way into life?
 I mean, who said?
 Does RNA have a special class of information
 that's encoded in the universe?
 No, of course it doesn't, right?
 RNA is not a special molecule
 in the space of all the other molecules.
 But it's so elegant and simple
 and it works so well for the evolutionary process
 that we kind of use that as an intuition to explain
 that that must be the only way to have life.
 Sure.
 But you mentioned assembly theory.
 Well, first let me pause, bathroom break.
 Needed?
 Yeah, let's take two minutes.
 We took a quick break and offline,
 you mentioned to me that you have a lab in your home
 and then I said that you're basically Rick
 from Rick and Morty,
 which is something I've been thinking
 this whole conversation.
 And then you say that there's a glowing pickle
 that you used something involving cold plasma, I believe.
 I don't know, but can you explain
 the glowing pickle situation?
 And is there many, arbitrarily many versions
 of you in alternate dimensions that you're aware of?
 I tried to make an electrochemical memory at home
 using a, and the only way, using a pickle,
 the only way I could get any traction with it
 was actually by plugging it into a very high voltage
 alternating current and then putting in a couple of electrodes.
 But my kids weren't impressed.
 They're not impressed with anything I do,
 any experiments I do at home.
 I think it's quite funny.
 But you connected a pickle to some electrode.
 I mean, you-
 To 240 volts, yeah, AC.
 Yeah.
 And then had a couple of electrodes on it.
 So what happens is a pickle,
 this is a classic thing you do.
 I mean, I shouldn't, pranks you do.
 You put a plug pickle into the mains
 and just run away and leave it.
 And what happens is it starts to decompose.
 It heats up and then explodes
 because the water turns to steam
 and it just violently explodes.
 But I wondered if I could cause the iron sodium
 potassium ions in the pickle to migrate.
 It'd been in a jar, right?
 So it'd been in a brine.
 Yeah, that was not my best experiment.
 So I've been doing far better experiments
 in my lab at home.
 At that time it was a failed experiment,
 but you never know.
 I could, every experiment is a successful experiment
 if you stick with it long enough.
 Well, I mean, I get, I got kicked out of my own lab
 by my research team many years ago.
 And for good reason.
 I mean, my team is brilliant
 and I used to go and just break things.
 So what I do do at home is I have a kind
 of electronics workshop and I prototype experiments there.
 Then I try and suggest to my team sometimes,
 maybe we can try this thing.
 And they would just say, oh, wow,
 that's not gonna work because of this.
 And I'll say, aha, but actually I've tried
 and here's some code and here's some hardware.
 Can we have a go?
 So that I'm doing that less and less now
 as I get even more busy, but that's quite fun.
 Cause then they feel that we're in the, you know,
 in the experiment together.
 You do in fact brilliantly, just like Rick
 from Rick and Morty, connect chemistry with computation.
 So sort of, and when we say chemistry,
 we don't mean the simulation of chemistry,
 a modeling of chemistry.
 We mean chemistry in the physical space
 as well as in the digital space, which is fascinating.
 We'll talk about that.
 But first you mentioned assembly theory.
 So we'll stick on theory in these big ideas.
 I would say revolutionary ideas.
 This intersection between mathematics and philosophy.
 What is assembly theory?
 And generally speaking, how would we recognize life
 if we saw it?
 So assembly theory is a theory, goes back a few years now
 and my struggle for maybe almost 10 years
 when I was going to origin of life conferences
 and artificial life conferences,
 where I thought that everybody was dancing around
 the problem of what life is and what it does.
 But I'll tell you about what assembly theory is
 because I think it's easier.
 So assembly theory literally says, if you take an object,
 any given object, and you are able to break the object
 into parts very gently.
 So just maybe let's say take a piece
 of very intricate Chinese porcelain
 and you tap it just with a hammer,
 with a nail at some point,
 and it will fragment into many parts.
 And if that object is able to fragment into many,
 and you count those parts, the different parts,
 so they're unsymmetrical.
 Assembly theory says, the larger the number of parts,
 unsymmetrical parts that object has,
 the more likely it is that object has been created
 by an evolutionary or information process,
 especially if that object is not one-off,
 you've got an abundance of them.
 And that's really important.
 And I, so, because if you,
 what I'm literally saying about the abundance,
 if you have a one-off object and you break it into parts,
 and it has lots of parts, you'd say,
 well, that could be incredibly intricate and complex,
 but it could be just random.
 And I was troubled with this for years
 because I saw in reality that assembly theory works.
 But when I talked to very good computational,
 complexity computation lists,
 algorithmic complexity people, they said,
 you haven't really done this properly,
 you haven't thought about it.
 It's like, this is the random problem.
 And so I kept working this up
 because I invented an assembly theory in chemistry,
 first of all, with molecules.
 And so the thought experiment was,
 how complex does a molecule need to be when I find it,
 that it couldn't possibly have risen
 by chance probabilistically.
 And if I found this molecule,
 able to detect enough quantities in the same object,
 like a machine, like a mass spectrometer.
 So typically in a mass spectrometer,
 you weigh the molecules in electric field,
 you probably have to have all the order
 of 10,000 identical molecules to get a signal.
 So 10,000 identical molecules that are complex.
 What's the chance of them occurring by chance?
 Well, we can do the math.
 Let's take a molecule like strychnine or,
 yeah, so strychnine is a good molecule actually to take.
 Or Viagra is a good molecule.
 I made jokes about Viagra because it's complex molecule.
 And one of my friends said,
 yeah, if we find Viagra on Mars in detectable quantities,
 we know something is up.
 But anyway, it's a complex molecule.
 So what you do is you take this molecule
 in the mass spectrometer and you hit it with some electrons
 or in electric field and it breaks apart.
 And if the larger than the larger number
 of different parts, you know,
 when it starts to get to a threshold,
 my idea was that that molecule could not be created
 by chance probabilistically.
 So that was where assembly theory was born
 in an experiment, in a mass spec experiment.
 And I was thinking about this
 because NASA sending mass spectrometers to Mars, to Titan,
 it's gonna send them to Europa.
 There's gonna be a nuclear powered mass spectrometer
 going to Titan.
 I mean, this is the coolest experiment ever.
 They're not only sending a drone
 that's gonna fly around Titan,
 it's gonna be powered by a nuclear slug,
 a nuclear battery,
 and it's gonna have a mass spectrometer on it.
 Is this already launched?
 No, it's Dragonfly and it's gonna be launched
 in a few years.
 I think it got pushed a year because of the pandemic.
 So I think three or four years.
 Dragonfly, nuclear Dragonfly is going to fly to Titan
 and collect data about the composition
 of the various chemicals on Titan.
 Yeah, I'm trying to convince NASA.
 I don't know if I'll be able to convince
 the Dragonfly team that they should apply this approach,
 but they will get data
 and depending on how good their mass spectrometer is.
 But I had this thought experiment anyway,
 and I did this thought experiment.
 And for me, it seemed to work.
 I turned the thought experiment into an algorithm
 in assembly theory.
 And I basically, assembly theory,
 if I take, let's just make it generic
 and let's just take the word abracadabra.
 So can I, if you find the word,
 so if you have a book with lots of words in it
 and you find abracadabra one-off
 and there's a rat book that's been written by,
 in a random way, you know, set of monkeys in a room
 and you know, and you untie priors
 and you find one-off abracadabra, no big deal.
 But if you find lots of recurrences of abracadabra,
 well, that means something weird is going on.
 But let's think about the assembly number of abracadabra.
 So abracadabra has a, you know,
 has a number of letters in it.
 You can break it down.
 So you just cut the letters up.
 But when you actually reassemble abracadabra,
 the minimum number of ways of organizing those letters,
 so you'd have an A, a B, you know, and keep going up.
 There's just, you can, when you cut abracadabra up
 into parts, you can put it together again in seven steps.
 So what does that mean?
 That means if you basically don't re,
 you're allowed to reuse things you make in a chain
 at the beginning, that's the memory of the universe,
 the process that makes abracadabra.
 And because of that causal chain,
 you can then get to abracadabra quicker
 than the number of letters
 if we're having to specify only in seven.
 So if you take that to a molecule
 and you cut the molecule up into parts
 and you can, on the causal chain,
 then you basically start with the atoms and then bonds,
 and then you randomly add on those parts
 to make the A, make the B, make the,
 and keep going all the way up,
 I found that literally assembly theory allows me to say
 how compressed a molecule is.
 So when there's some information in there.
 And I realized assembly theory is,
 it wasn't, isn't just confined to molecular space,
 it can apply to anything.
 But let me finish the molecular argument.
 So what I did is I had this theory,
 I, with one of my students, we wrote an algorithm.
 We basically took the 20 million molecules from the database
 and we just calculate their assembly number.
 And that's the index.
 Like basically, if I take a molecule
 and I cut it up into bonds,
 what is the minimum number of steps I need to take
 to reform that molecule from atoms?
 So reusability of previously formed things
 is somehow fundamental to part of the process.
 Exactly, so it's like a memory in the universe, right?
 I'm making lots of leaps here.
 Like, it's kind of weird.
 I'm saying, right, there's a process that can form
 the A and the B and the C, let's say.
 And then there's, and because we've formed A and B before,
 we can use A and B again with no extra cost,
 except one unit.
 So that's the kind of what the chain of events.
 And that's how you think about memory here
 when you say the universe,
 when you talk about the universe and,
 or life is the universe creating memory.
 Exactly, so we went through chemical space
 and we looked at the assembly numbers
 and we were able to classify it.
 So, okay, let's test it, let's go.
 So we're able to take a whole bunch of molecules
 and assign an assembly index to them, okay?
 And it's just a function of the number of bonds
 in the molecule and how much symmetry.
 So literally, assembly theory is a measure
 of how little symmetry a molecule has.
 And so the more asymmetry, the more information,
 the more weird it is,
 like a Jackson Pollock or some description.
 So I then went and did a load of experiments.
 And I basically took those molecules,
 I cut them up in the mass spec
 and measured the number of peaks
 without any knowledge of the molecule.
 And we found the assembly number,
 there was almost a, not quite a one-to-one correlation,
 but almost because not all bonds are equal,
 they have different energies.
 I then did this using two other spectroscopic techniques,
 NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance,
 which uses radio frequency to basically jangle the molecules
 and get a signature out.
 And I also used infrared.
 And infrared and NMR almost gave us a one-to-one correlation.
 So what am I saying?
 Saying by taking a molecule
 and doing either infrared or NMR or mass spec,
 I can work out how many parts there are in that molecule
 and then put it on a scale.
 And what we did in the next part of the work
 is we took molecules randomly from the environment,
 from outer space, from all around Earth,
 from the sea, from Antarctica, and from fossils and so on.
 And even NASA, and they,
 because they didn't believe us, blinded some samples.
 And we found that all these samples
 that came from biology produced molecules
 that had a very high assembly number
 above a threshold of about 15.
 So basically all the stuff that came
 from an ebiotic origin was low.
 There was no complexity there.
 So we suddenly realized that on Earth, at least,
 there is a cutoff that natural phenomena
 cannot produce molecules
 that need more than 15 steps to make them.
 So I realized that this is a way to make a scale of life,
 a scale of technology as well.
 And literally you could just go sniffing for molecules
 off Earth, on Titan, on Mars.
 And when you find a molecule in the mass spectrometer
 that gives you more than 15 parts,
 you'll know pretty much for sure
 that it had to be produced by evolution.
 And this allowed me to come up with a general definition
 of life based on assembly theory,
 to say that if I find an object
 that has a large number of parts, say an iPhone,
 or Boeing 747, or any complex object,
 and I can find it in abundance and cut it up,
 I can tell you whether that has been produced
 by an informational process or not.
 And that's what assembly theory kind of does.
 But it goes a bit further.
 I then realized that this isn't just about life,
 it's about causation.
 So actually it tells you about
 whether there's a causal structure.
 So now I can look at objects in the universe,
 say that again, this cup, and say, right,
 I'm gonna look at how many independent parts it has.
 So that's the assembly number.
 I'll then look at the abundance.
 How many cups?
 There are two on this table,
 maybe there's a few more, you got snatched away.
 So assembly is a function of the complexity of the object
 times the number of copy numbers of that object,
 or function of the copy number normalized.
 So I realized there's a new quantity in the universe.
 You have energy, entropy, and assembly.
 So assembly, the way we should think about that
 is how much reusability there is.
 Because what reusability is like,
 can you play devil's advocate to this?
 So could this just be a nice
 tertiary signal for living organisms?
 Like some kind of distant signal that's,
 yeah, this is a nice property,
 but it's not capturing something fundamental.
 Or do you think reusability is something fundamental
 to life in complex organisms?
 I think reusability is fundamental in the universe,
 not just for life in complex organisms,
 it's about causation.
 So I think assembly tells you,
 if you find objects, because you can do this
 with trajectories as well, you think about it,
 that the fact there are objects in the universe, on Earth,
 is weird.
 You think about it, we should just have
 a combinatorial explosion of stuff.
 The fact that not everything exists is really weird.
 Now then.
 And then as I'm looking at two mugs and two water bottles,
 and the things that exist are similar and multiply
 in copies of each other.
 So I would say that assembly allows you to do something
 that statistical mechanics and people looking at entropy
 have got stuck with for a while.
 So I'm making, it's pretty bold.
 I mean, I'm writing a paper with Sarah Walker
 on this at the moment.
 And we're realizing, we don't wanna get ahead of ourselves
 because I think that there's lots of ways where this is,
 you know, it's a really interesting idea.
 It works for molecules and it appears to work
 for any objects produced by causation.
 Cause you can take a motor car,
 you can look at the assembly of the motor car,
 look at a book, look at the assembly of the book.
 Assembly theory tells you there's a way
 of compressing and reusing.
 And so when people, I talk to information theorists,
 they say, oh, this is just logical depth.
 I say it is like logical depth,
 but it's experimentally measurable.
 They say, oh, it's a bit like Komagolov, complexity.
 And I say, but it's computable.
 And now, okay, it's not infinitely computable,
 gets NP hard very quickly, right?
 It's very hard problem when you could get,
 but it's a computable enough, you could tractable enough
 to be able to tell the difference between a molecule
 that's been formed by the random background
 and by causation.
 And I think that that's really interesting
 because until now, there's no way
 of measuring complexity objectively.
 Complexity has required algorithmic comparisons
 and programs and human beings to label things.
 Assembly is label free.
 Well, not entirely.
 We can talk about what that means in a minute.
 Okay, my brain has been broken a couple times here.
 I'm sorry, I explained it really badly.
 No, it was very well explained.
 It was just fascinating.
 And it's, my brain is broken into pieces
 and I'm trying to assemble it.
 So NP hard, so when you have a molecule,
 you're trying to figure out, okay,
 if we were to reuse parts of this molecule,
 which parts can we reuse as an optimization problem,
 NP hard, to figure out the minimum amount
 of reused components that will create this molecule.
 And it becomes difficult when you start
 to look at a huge, huge molecules, arbitrarily large.
 Because I'm also like mapping this.
 Can I think about this in complexity generally,
 like looking at a cellular automata system
 and saying like, can this be used as a measure
 of complexity for like arbitrarily complicated system?
 Yeah, I think it can.
 It can.
 And I think that the question is, and what's the benefit?
 Because there's plenty of, I mean,
 in computer science and mathematics and physics,
 people have been really seriously studying
 complexity for a long time.
 And I think there's a really interesting problems
 of where we course grade and we lose information.
 And all assembly theory does really,
 assembly theory just explains weak emergence.
 And so what assembly theory says,
 look, going from the atoms that interact,
 those first replicators that build one another,
 assembly at the minimal level just tells you evidence
 that there's been replication and selection.
 And I think the more selected something is,
 the higher the assembly.
 And so we were able to start to know how to look
 for selection in the universe.
 If you go to the moon,
 there's nothing a very high assembly on the moon
 except the human artifacts we've left there.
 So again, let's go back to the sandbox.
 In assembly theory says,
 if all the sand grains could stick together,
 that's the infinite combinatorial explosion in the universe.
 That should be the default.
 We don't have that.
 Now let's assemble sand grains together
 and do them in every possible way.
 So we have a series of minimal operations
 that can move the sand together.
 But all that doesn't exist either.
 Now, because we have specific memory where we say,
 what, we're gonna put three sand grains in line
 or four make a cross or a triangle
 or something unsymmetrical.
 And once we've made the triangle
 and the unsymmetrical thing,
 we remember that we can use it again
 because on that causal chain.
 So what assembly theory allows you to do
 is go to the actual object that you exist,
 you find in space.
 And actually the way you get there is by disassembling.
 It's disassembly theory works by disassembling objects
 you have and understanding the steps to create them.
 And it works for molecules beautifully
 because you just break bonds.
 But like you said, it's gonna be hard, very difficult.
 It's a difficult problem to figure out
 how to break them apart.
 For molecules it's easy.
 If you just keep low enough in molecular weight space,
 it's good enough.
 So it's a complete theory.
 When we start to think about objects,
 we can start to assign,
 we can start to think about things at different levels,
 different atoms, what you assign as your atom.
 So in a molecule, the atom, this is really confusing
 because the word atom, I mean smallest breakable part.
 So in a molecule, the atom is the bond
 because you break bonds, not atoms, right?
 So in a car, the atom might be, I don't know,
 a small amount of iron or the smallest reusable part,
 a rivet, a piece of plastic or something.
 So you gotta be really careful in a microprocessor,
 the atoms might be transistors.
 And so the amount of assembly that something has
 is a function, you have to look at the atom level.
 What are your parts?
 What are you counting?
 That's one of the things you get to choose.
 What is, at what scale is the atom?
 What is the minimal thing?
 I mean, there's a huge amount of trade-offs
 in when you approach a system and try to analyze.
 Like if you approach Earth, you're an alien civilization,
 try to study Earth.
 What is the atom for trying to measure
 the complexity of life?
 Is it, are humans the atoms?
 I would say to start with, you just use molecules.
 I can say for sure, if there are molecules
 of sufficient complexity on Earth,
 then I know that life has made them.
 And then go further and show technology.
 There are molecules that exist on Earth
 that are not possible even by biology.
 You needed technology and you needed microprocessors
 to get there.
 So that's really cool.
 And there's a correlation between that,
 between the coolness of that and assembly number,
 whatever the measure.
 What would you call the measure?
 Assembly index.
 Assembly index.
 Yeah, so there are three kind of fundamental
 kind of labels we have.
 So there's the quantity of assembly
 and the assembly, so if you have a box,
 let's just have a box of molecules.
 So I'm gonna have my box.
 We count the number of identical molecules
 and then we chop each molecule up
 in an individual molecule class
 and calculate the assembly number.
 So basically you then have a function
 that sums over all the molecules for each assembly
 and then you divide through.
 So you make it, divide through by the number of molecules.
 So that's the assembly index for the box?
 So that will tell you the amount of assembly in the box.
 So basically the assembly equation we come up with
 is like basically the sum of e to the power
 of the assembly index for molecule i
 times the number of copies of the molecule i
 and then you normalize.
 So you sum them all up and then normalize.
 So some boxes are gonna be more assembled than others.
 Yeah, that's what they tell me.
 So if you were to look at me as a box,
 so say I'm a box, am I assembling my parts?
 In terms of like, how do you know,
 what's my assembly index?
 So I'd be gentle.
 So let's just, we'll talk about the molecules in you.
 So let's just take a pile of sand the same way as you
 and I would take you and just cut up all the molecules.
 I mean, and look at the number of copies
 and assembly number.
 So in sand, let's say there's probably gonna be nothing
 more than assembly number of two or three,
 but there might be trillions and trillions of sand grains.
 In your body, there might be,
 the assembly number is gonna be higher,
 but there might not be quite as many copies
 because the molecular weight is higher.
 So you do wanna average it out?
 You can average, you do average it.
 I'm not defined by the most impressive molecules.
 No, no, you're an average in your volume.
 Well, I mean, we're just working this out,
 but what's really cool is that you're gonna have
 a really high assembly.
 The sand will have a very low assembly.
 Your causal power is much higher.
 You get to make decisions, you're alive, you're aspiring.
 Assembly says something about causal power in the universe.
 And that's not supposed to exist
 because physicists don't accept
 that causation exists at the bottom.
 So I understand at the chemical level
 why the assembly is causation.
 Why is it causation?
 Because it's capturing the memory.
 Exactly.
 Capturing memory, but there's not an action to it.
 So I'm trying to see how it leads to life.
 Well, it's what life does.
 So I think it's, we don't know.
 So- Yeah, that's a good question.
 What is life versus what does life do?
 Yeah, so that's, this is the definition of life.
 The only definition we need.
 The assembly.
 Is basically that life is able to create objects
 in abundance that are so complex.
 The assembly number is so high,
 they can't possibly form in an environment
 where there's just random interactions.
 So suddenly you can put life on a scale
 and then life doesn't exist actually in that sense.
 It's just how evolved you are.
 And you as an object,
 because you have incredible causal power,
 you could go and launch rockets or build cars
 or create drugs or, you can do so many things.
 You can build stuff, build more artifacts
 that show that you have had causal power.
 And that causal power was this kind of a lineage.
 And I think that over time,
 I've been realizing that physics as a discipline
 has a number of problems associated with it.
 With me as a chemist is kind of interesting
 that assembly theory, and I'm really,
 I wanna maintain some credibility in the physicist's eyes,
 but I have to push them
 because physics is a really good discipline.
 It's reduced the number.
 Physics is about reducing the belief system,
 but they're down to some things in their belief system,
 which is kind of really makes me kind of grumpy,
 number one is requiring order
 at the beginning of the universe magically.
 We don't need that.
 The second is the second law.
 Well, we don't actually need that.
 This is blasphemous.
 In a minute, I'll recover my career in a second.
 Although I think the only good thing
 about being the Regis chair means
 I think there has to be an act of parliament to fire me.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 You can always go to Lee's Twitter and protest.
 And I think the third thing is that,
 so we've got the order at the beginning.
 Second law.
 The second law and the fact that causation is emergent.
 Right?
 And that time is emergent.
 John Carroll just turned off this program.
 I think he believes that it's emergent.
 So causation is not emergent.
 That's clearly incorrect
 because we wouldn't exist otherwise.
 So physicists have kind of got confused about time.
 Time is a real thing.
 Well, I mean, so look,
 I'm very happy with the current description
 of the universe as physics give me
 because I can do a lot of stuff, right?
 I can go to the moon with Newtonian physics, I think,
 and I can understand the orbit of Mercury with relativity.
 And so, and I can build transistors
 with quantum mechanics, right?
 And I can do all this stuff.
 Yeah.
 So I'm not saying the physics is wrong.
 I'm just saying, if we say that time is fundamental,
 i.e. time is non-negotiable, there's a global clock,
 I don't need to require that there's order
 being magically made in the past
 because that asymmetry is built into the way
 the universe is.
 So if time is fundamental, I mean,
 you've been referring to this kind of,
 an interesting formulation of that is memory.
 Yeah.
 So time is hard to like put a finger on,
 like what the hell are we talking about?
 Well.
 It's just a direction,
 memory is a construction,
 especially when you have like,
 think about these local pockets of complexity,
 these non-zero assembly index entities
 that's being constructed and they remember.
 Never forget molecules.
 But remember, the thing is I invented assembly theory.
 I'll tell you I invented it.
 When I was a kid, I mean, the thing is,
 I keep making fun of myself from a search group.
 I've only ever had one idea,
 I keep exploring that idea over the 40 years or so
 since I had that idea.
 Well, aren't you the idea that the universe had?
 So it's very kind of hierarchical.
 Anyway, go ahead, I'm sorry.
 That's very poetic.
 So I think I came up with assembly theory
 with the following idea when I was a kid.
 I was obsessed about survival kits.
 What is the minimum stuff I would need
 to basically replicate my reality?
 And I love computers and I love technology
 or what technology was going to become.
 So I imagined that I would have basically
 this really big truck full of stuff.
 And I thought, well, can I delete some of that stuff out?
 Can I have a blueprint?
 And then, and in the end, I kept making this,
 making it smaller and got to maybe half a truck
 and then to a suitcase.
 And then went, okay, well, screw it.
 I wanna carry my entire technology in my pocket.
 How do I do it?
 And I'm not like gonna launch into a Steve Jobby
 and you know, I'm an iPlayer.
 I came up with a Matchbox survival kit.
 In that Matchbox survival kit,
 I would have the minimum stuff
 that would allow me to interact the environment,
 to build my shelter, to build a fishing rod,
 to build a water purification system.
 And it's kind of like, so what did I use in my box
 to assemble in the environment,
 to assemble, to assemble, to assemble?
 And I realized I could make a causal chain
 in my survival kit.
 So I guess that's probably why I've been obsessed
 with assembly theory for so long.
 And I was just pre-configured to find it somewhere.
 And when I saw it in molecules,
 I realized that the causal structure that we say emerges
 and the physics kind of gets really stuck
 because they're saying that time,
 you can go backwards in time.
 I mean, how do we let physicists get away with the notion
 that we can go back in time and meet ourselves?
 I mean, that's clearly a very hard thing
 to let, physicists would not let other sciences
 get away with that kind of heresy, right?
 So why are physicists allowed to get away with it?
 Let's-
 So first of all, to push back to play devil's advocate,
 you are clearly married to the idea of memory.
 You see in this, again, Rick from Rick and Morty way,
 you see, you have these deep dreams of the universe
 that is writing the story through its memories,
 through its chemical compounds
 that are just building on top of each other.
 And then they find useful components they can reuse.
 And then their reused components create systems
 that themselves are then reused
 and all in this way construct things.
 But when you think of that as memory,
 it seems like quite sad that you can walk that back.
 But at the same time, it feels like that memory,
 you can walk in both directions on that memory
 in terms of time.
 You could walk in both directions,
 but I don't think that that makes any sense
 because the problem that I have with time being reversible
 is that, I mean, I'm just a, you know,
 I'm a dumb experimental chemist, right?
 So I love burning stuff,
 burning stuff and building stuff.
 But when I think of reversible phenomena,
 I imagine in my head,
 I have to actually manufacture some time.
 I have to borrow time from the universe to do that.
 I can't, when anyone says,
 let's imagine that we can go back in time or reversibility,
 you can't do that.
 You can't step out of time.
 Time is non-negotiable, it's happening.
 No, but see, you're assuming that time is fundamental,
 which most of us do when we go day to day,
 but it takes a leap of wild imagination
 to think that time is emergent.
 No, time is not emergent.
 Yeah, I mean, this is an argument we can have,
 but I believe I can come up with an experiment.
 An experiment that proves that time
 cannot possibly be emergent.
 An experiment that shows how assembly theory
 kind of is the way that the universe produces selection
 and that selection gives rise to life.
 And also to say, well, hang on,
 we could allow ourselves to have a theory
 that requires us to have these statements to be possible.
 Like we need to have order in the past,
 or we can have used the past hypothesis,
 which is order in the past, but as well, okay.
 And we have to have an arrow of time.
 We have to require that entropy increases.
 And then we can say, look, the universe is completely closed
 and there's no novelty, or that novelty is predetermined.
 What I'm saying is very, very important
 that time is fundamental, which means,
 if you think about it, the universe becomes more
 and more novel each step.
 It generates this more states
 and next step than it was before.
 So that means bigger search.
 So what I'm saying is that the universe
 wasn't capable of consciousness at day one.
 Actually, because it didn't have enough states.
 But today, the universe is, so it's like how-
 All right, all right, hold on a second.
 Now we've pissed off the panpsychist too.
 Okay.
 No, this is brilliant, sorry.
 Part of me is just joking, having fun with this thing,
 but because you're saying a lot of brilliant stuff
 and I'm trying to slow it down before my brain explodes.
 So, because I wanna break apart some of the fascinating
 things you're saying.
 So novelty, novelty is increasing in the universe
 because the number of states is increasing.
 What do you mean by states?
 So I think the physicists almost got everything right.
 I can't fault them at all.
 I just think there's a little bit of dogma.
 I'm just trying to play devil's advocate.
 I'm very happy to be entirely wrong on this, right?
 I'm not right on many things at all.
 But if I can make less assumptions about the universe
 with this, then potentially that's a more powerful way
 of looking at things.
 If you think of time as fundamental,
 you can make less assumptions overall.
 Exactly.
 It's fundamental, I don't need to add on
 a magical second law because the second law comes out
 of the fact the universe is actually,
 there's more states available.
 I mean, we might even be able to do weird things
 like dark energy in the universe might actually
 just be time, right?
 Yeah, but then you still have to explain
 why time is fundamental.
 Because I can give you one explanation that's simpler
 than time and say God.
 Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's,
 you still have to explain God
 and you still have to explain time.
 Like why is it fundamental?
 So let's just say existence is default,
 which means time is the default.
 So look,
 How did you go from the existence
 to the default to time is the default?
 Well, look, we exist, right?
 So let's just be very-
 We're yet to talk about what exists means.
 All right, let's go all the way back.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
 I think it's very poetic and beautiful
 what you're weaving into this.
 I don't think this conversation is even about the assembly,
 which is fascinating and we'll keep mentioning it
 as some of the index and this idea
 that I don't think is necessarily connected to time.
 Oh, I think it is deeply connected.
 I can't explain it yet.
 So you don't think everything you've said
 about assembly theory and assembly index
 can still be correct even if time is emergent?
 So yeah, right now, assembly theory appears to work.
 I appear to be able to measure objects of high assembly
 in a mass spectrometer and look at their abundance
 and you know, all that's fine, right?
 It's a nice, if nothing else,
 it's a nice way of looking at how molecules
 can compress things.
 Now, am I saying that a time has to be fundamental
 and not emergent for assembly theory to work?
 No.
 I think I'm saying that the universe,
 it appears that the universe has many different ways
 of using time.
 You could have three different types of time.
 You could just have time that's,
 the way I would think of it,
 if you want to hold onto emergent time,
 I think that's fine, let's do that for a second.
 Hold onto emergent time
 and the universe is just doing its thing,
 then assembly time only exists when the universe
 starts to write memories through bonds.
 So let's just say there's rocks running around, you know,
 there's, when the bond happens and selection starts,
 suddenly there are, the universe is remembering cause
 in the past and those structures will have effects
 in the future.
 So suddenly a new type of time emerges at that point,
 which has a direction.
 And I think Sean Carroll at this point might even turn
 the podcast back on and go, okay, I can deal with that.
 That's fine.
 But I'm just basically trying to condense the conversation
 and say, hey, let's just have time fundamental
 and see how that screws with people's minds.
 Why-
 You're triggering people by saying fundamental.
 Why not?
 Let's say like, let's say-
 Why am I, look, I'm walking through the wall.
 Why should I grow up in a world where time,
 I don't go back in time.
 I don't meet myself in the past.
 There are no aliens coming from the future, right?
 You know, it's just like-
 No, no, no, but that's not, no, no, no, no, no,
 hold on a second.
 That's like saying, we're talking about biology
 or like evolutionary psychology and you saying,
 okay, let's just assume that clothing is fundamental.
 People wearing clothes is fundamental.
 It's like, no, no, no, no, wait a minute.
 You can't, like, I think you're gonna get a lot of trouble
 if you assume time is fundamental.
 Why?
 Give me one reason why I'm getting into trouble
 with time being fundamental.
 Because you might not understand the origins of this memory
 that might be deeper.
 Like that, this memory, that could be a thing
 that's explaining the construction of these higher
 complexities better than just saying it's a search.
 It's chemicals doing a search for reusable structures
 that they can then use as bricks to build a house.
 Okay, so I accept that.
 So let's go back a second because it's a kind of,
 it is, I wanted to drop the time bomb at this part
 because I think we can carry on discussing it
 for many, many, many, many, many days, many months.
 But I'm happy to accept that it might be wrong.
 But what I would like to do is imagine a universe
 where time is fundamental and time is emergent
 and ask, let's just then talk about causation
 because physicists require that causation,
 so this is where I'm gonna go, causation emerges
 and it doesn't exist at the microscale.
 Well, that clearly is wrong
 because if causation has to emerge at the macroscale,
 life cannot emerge.
 So how does life emerge?
 Life requires molecules to bump into each other,
 produce replicators.
 Those replicators need to produce polymers.
 There needs to be cause and effect at the molecular level.
 There needs to be a non-agordic
 to an agordic transition at some point.
 And those replicators have consequence,
 material consequence in the universe.
 Physicists just say, oh, you know what?
 I'm gonna have a bunch of particles in a box.
 I'm gonna think about it in a Newtonian way,
 in a quantum way, and I'll add on an arrow of time
 so I can label things
 and causation will happen magically later.
 Well, how?
 Explain causation.
 And they can't.
 The only way I can reconcile causation
 is having a fundamental time
 because this allows me to have a deterministic universe
 that creates novelty.
 And there's so many things to unpack here,
 but let's go back to the point.
 You said, can assembly theory work with emergent time?
 Sure, it can, but it doesn't give me a deep satisfaction
 about how causation and assembly gives rise
 to these objects that move through time and space.
 And again, what am I saying to bring it back?
 I can say without fear, take this water bottle
 and look at this water bottle
 and look at the features on it.
 There's writing, you've got a load of them.
 I know that causal structures gave rise to this.
 In fact, I'm not looking at just one water bottle here.
 I'm looking at every water bottle
 ever been conceived of by humanity.
 This here is a special object.
 In fact, Leibniz knew this.
 Leibniz, it was at the same time of Newton,
 he kind of got stuck.
 I think Leibniz actually invented assembly theory.
 He gave soul.
 The soul that you see in objects
 wasn't the mystical soul, it is assembly.
 It is a fact there's been a history of objects related.
 And without the object in the past,
 this object wouldn't exist.
 There is a lineage and there is conserved structures,
 causal structures have given rise to those.
 Fair enough.
 And you're saying it's just a simpler view
 if time is fundamental.
 And it shakes the physicist cage a bit, right?
 Because I'm gonna say, but I think that-
 I just enjoy the fact that physicists are in cages.
 I think that, I mean, I would say that, you know,
 Lee Smolin, I don't want to speak for Lee.
 I'm talking to Lee about this.
 I think Lee also is in agreement
 that time has to be fundamental.
 But I think he goes further.
 You know, even in space,
 I don't think you can go back to the same place in space.
 I've been to Austin a few times now.
 This is my, I think third time I've been to Austin.
 Is Austin in the same place?
 No, the solar system is moving through space.
 I'm not going back in the same space.
 Locally I am.
 Every event in the universe is unique.
 In space.
 And time.
 And time.
 Doesn't mean we can't go back though.
 I mean, you know, let's just, you know,
 rest this conversation, which was beautiful,
 with a quote from the Rolling Stones
 that you can't always get what you want,
 which is you want time to be fundamental,
 but if you try, you'll get what you need,
 which is assembly theory.
 Okay, let me ask you about,
 continue talking about complexity,
 and to clarify with this beautiful theory of yours
 that you're developing,
 and I'm sure we'll continue developing
 both in the lab and in theory.
 Yeah, it can't be said enough.
 Just the ideas you're playing with in your head
 are just, and we've been talking about it,
 are just beautiful.
 So if we talk about complexity
 a little bit more generally,
 maybe in an admiring romantic way,
 how does complexity emerge from simple rules?
 The why, the how.
 Okay, the nice algorithm of assembly is there.
 I would say that the problem I have right now is,
 I mean, you're right, we can, about time as well.
 The problem is I have this hammer called assembly,
 and everything I see isn't there.
 So now let's just apply it to all sorts of things.
 We take the Bernard instability,
 the Bernard instability is you have oil,
 if you heat up oil, let's say on a frying pan,
 when you get convection, you get honeycomb patterns.
 Take the formation of snowflakes, right?
 Take the emergence of a tropical storm
 or the storm on Jupiter.
 When people say, let's talk about complexity in general,
 what they're saying is,
 let's take this collection of objects
 that are correlated in some way,
 and try and work out how many moving parts
 or how this got, how this exists.
 So what people have been doing for a very long time
 is taking complexity and counting what they've lost,
 calculating the entropy.
 And the reason why I'm pushing very hard on assembly
 is entropy tells you how much you've lost.
 It doesn't tell you the microstates are gone.
 But if you embrace the bottom up with assembly,
 those states, and you then understand the causal chain
 that gives rise to the emergence.
 So what I think assembly will help us do
 is understand weak emergence, at the very least,
 and maybe allow us to crack open complexity in a new way.
 And I've been fascinated with complexity theory
 for many years.
 I mean, as soon as I could,
 I learned of the Mandelbrot set,
 and I could just type it up in my computer and run it,
 and just show it and see it kind of unfold.
 It was just this kind of, this mathematical reality
 that existed in front of me, I just found incredible.
 But then I realized that actually we were cheating.
 We're putting in the boundary conditions all the time.
 We're putting in information.
 And so when people talk to me about the complexity of things,
 I say, but relative what?
 How do you measure them?
 So my attempt, my small attempt, naive attempt,
 because there's many greater minds than mine
 on the planet right now thinking about this properly,
 and you've had some of them on the podcast, right?
 Just absolutely fantastic.
 But I'm wondering if we might be able to reformat
 the way we would explore algorithmic complexity
 using assembly.
 What's the minimum number of constraints we need
 in our system for this to unfold?
 So whether it's like, you know,
 if you take some particles and put them in a box,
 at a certain box size, you get quasi-crystallinity
 coming out, right?
 But that emergence, it's not magic.
 It must come from the boundary conditions you put in.
 So all I'm saying is a lot of the complexity that we see
 is a direct read of the constraints we put in,
 but we just don't understand.
 So as I said earlier to the poor origin of life chemists,
 you know, origin of life is a scam.
 I would say lots of complexity calculation theories,
 a bit of a scam,
 because we put the constraints in,
 but we don't count them correctly.
 And I'm wondering if-
 Oh, you're thinking in, sorry to interrupt,
 is assembly theory, assembly index,
 is a way to count the constraints?
 Yes, that's it, that's all it is.
 So assembly theory doesn't lower any of the importance
 of complexity theory,
 but it allows us to go across domains
 and start to compare things,
 compare the complexity of a molecule, of a microprocessor,
 of the text you're writing, of the music you may compose.
 You've tweeted, quote,
 assembly theory explains why Nietzsche understood
 we had limited freedom rather than radical freedom.
 So we've applied assembly theory to cellular automata
 in life and chemistry.
 What does Nietzsche have to do with assembly theory?
 Oh, that gets me into free will and everything.
 So let me say that again,
 assembly theory explains why Nietzsche understood
 we had limited freedom rather than radical freedom.
 Limited freedom, I suppose, is referring to the fact
 that there's constraints or what is radical freedom?
 What is freedom?
 So Sartre was like believed in absolute freedom
 and that he could do whatever he wanted in his imagination.
 And Nietzsche understood that his freedom
 was somewhat more limited.
 And it kind of takes me back to this computer game
 that I played when I was 10.
 So I think it's called Dragon's Lair.
 Okay.
 Do you know Dragon's Lair?
 I think I know Dragon's Lair, yeah.
 Dragon's Lair, I knew I was being conned, right?
 Dragon's Lair, when you play the game,
 you're lucky that you grew up
 in a basically procedurally generated worlds.
 That was RPG a little bit.
 No, it's like, is it turn-based play?
 Was it? No.
 It was a role-playing game, but really good graphics
 and one of the first laser discs.
 And when you actually flick the stick,
 you took, it's like it was like a graphical adventure game
 with animation.
 And when I played this game, I really, you know,
 you could get through the game in 12 minutes
 if you knew what you were doing,
 if you're not making mistakes,
 just play the disc, play the disc, play the disc.
 So it was just that timing.
 And actually it was a complete fraud
 because all the animation has been prerecorded on the disc.
 It's like the Black Mirror, the first interactive
 where they had all the, you know,
 several million kind of permutations of the movie
 that you could select on Netflix.
 I've forgotten the name of it.
 So this was exactly that in the laser disc.
 You basically go left, go right, fight the ogre,
 slay the dragon.
 And when you flick the joystick at the right time,
 it just goes to the next animation to play.
 It's not really generating it.
 And I played that game and I knew I was being had.
 So, okay, I see.
 So to you, Dragon Lair is the first time you realized
 that free will is an illusion.
 Yeah.
 And why does assembly theory give you hints about free will,
 whether it's an illusion or not?
 Yeah, so no, so not tightly.
 If I do think I have some will and I think I am an agent
 and I think I can interact and I can play around
 with the model I have of the world and the cost functions.
 And I can hack my own cost functions,
 which means I have a little bit of free will.
 But as much as I want to do stuff in the universe,
 I don't think I could suddenly say,
 I mean, actually this is ridiculous
 because now I say I could try and do it.
 It's like I'm suddenly give up everything
 and become a rapper tomorrow.
 Maybe I could try that, but I don't have sufficient agency
 to make that necessarily happen.
 I'm on a trajectory.
 So when in Dragon's Lair, I know that I have some trajectories
 that I can play with, where Sartre realized he thought
 that he had no assembly, no memory.
 He could just leap across and do everything.
 And Nietzsche said, okay, I realize I don't have full freedom,
 but I have some freedom.
 And the 70 theory basically says that.
 It says, if you have these constraints in your past,
 they limit what you were able to do in the future,
 but you can use them to do amazing things.
 Let's say I'm a poppy plant and I'm creating some opiates.
 Opiates are really interesting molecules.
 I mean, they're obviously great for medicine,
 cause great problems in society.
 But let's imagine we fast forward a billion years,
 what will the opioids look like in a billion years?
 Well, we can guess because we can see how those proteins
 will evolve and we can see how the secondary metabolites
 will change.
 But they can't go radical.
 They can't suddenly become, I don't know,
 like a molecule that you find in an OLED in a display.
 They will have some, they will be limited
 by the causal chain that produced them.
 And that's what I'm getting at, saying,
 we're predict, we are unpredictably predictable
 or predictably unpredictable,
 predictably unpredictable within a constraint
 on the trajectory we're on.
 Yeah, so the predictably part is the constraints
 of the trajectory and the unpredictable part
 is the part that you still haven't really clarified
 the origin of the little bit of freedom.
 Yeah.
 So you're just arguing, you're basically saying
 that radical freedom is impossible.
 You're really operating in a world of constraints
 that are constrained by the memory of the trajectory
 of the chemistry that led to who you are.
 Okay, but even just a tiny bit of freedom,
 even if everything, if everywhere you are in cages,
 if you can move around in that cage a little bit,
 you're free.
 I agree.
 And so the question is in assembly theory,
 if we're thinking about free will,
 where does the little bit of freedom come from?
 What is the I that can decide to be a rapper?
 What, why, what is that?
 That's a cute little trick we've convinced each other of
 so we can do fun tricks at parties
 or is there something fundamental that allows us
 to feel free, to be free?
 I think that that's the question that I wanna answer.
 I know you wanna answer it and I think it's so profound.
 Let me have a go at it.
 I would say that I don't take the stance of Sam Harris
 because I think Sam Harris, when he said,
 the way he says it is almost, it's really interesting.
 I'd love to talk to him about it.
 Sam Harris almost thinks himself out of existence, right?
 Because I don't, because, do you know what I mean?
 Yeah, well, I mean, he has different views
 on consciousness versus free will.
 I think he saves himself with consciousness.
 He thinks himself out of existence with free will.
 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
 So that mean there's no point, right?
 So I-
 He's a leaf floating on a river.
 Yeah, I think that he, I don't know,
 I'd love to ask him whether he really believes that
 and then we could play some games.
 Oh yeah.
 No, no, I then would say, I'll get him
 to play a game of cards with me
 and I'll work out the conditions on which he says no
 and then I'll get him to the conditions he says yes.
 And then I'll trap him
 in his logical inconsistency with that argument.
 Because at some point when he loses enough money
 or the prospect of losing enough money,
 there's a way of basically mapping out
 a series of, so what will is about,
 let's not call it free will,
 what will is about is to have a series of decisions
 equally weighted in front of you.
 And those decisions aren't necessarily energy minimization.
 Those decisions are a function of the model you've made
 in your mind, you're in your simulation
 and the way you've interacted in reality
 and also other interactions that you're having
 with other individuals and happenstance.
 And I think that there's a little bit of delay in time.
 So I think what you're able to do is say,
 well, I'm gonna do the counterfactual.
 I've done all of them and I'm gonna go this way.
 And you probably don't know why.
 I think free will is actually very complex interaction
 between your unconscious and your conscious brain.
 And I think the reason why we're arguing about it
 is so interesting in that we just, some people outsource
 their free will to that unconscious brain
 and some people try and overthink the free will
 in the conscious brain.
 I would say that Sam Harris has realized
 his conscious brain doesn't have free will
 but his unconscious brain does.
 That's my guess, right?
 And that he can't have access to the unconscious brain.
 And that's kind of annoying.
 So he's just, he's going to, through meditation,
 come to acceptance with that fact.
 Yeah, which is maybe okay.
 I maybe, but I do think that I have the ability
 to make decisions and I like my decisions.
 In fact, I mean, this is an argument I have
 with some people that some days I feel I have no free will
 and it's just an illusion.
 And this is one, and it makes me more radical, if you like.
 As a, that I get to explore more of the state space
 and I'm like, I'm gonna try and affect the world now.
 I'm really gonna ask the question that maybe I dare not ask
 or dare not, or do the thing I dare not do.
 And that allows me to kind of explore more.
 It's funny that if you truly accept
 that there's no free will,
 that is a kind of radical freedom.
 It's funny, but you're, because the little bit
 of the illusion in under that framework that you have
 that you can make choices,
 if choice is just an illusion of psychology,
 you can do whatever the hell you want.
 That's the- But we don't, do we?
 And I think- But because you don't truly accept
 that you think that there's, like, you think there's a choice
 which is why you don't just do whatever the hell you want.
 Like, you feel like there's some responsibility
 for making the wrong choice, which is why you don't do it.
 But if you truly accept that the choice
 has already been made, then you can go,
 I don't know what is the most radical thing.
 I mean, but yeah, I wonder what am I preventing myself
 from doing that I would really want to do?
 Probably like humor stuff.
 Like, I would love to, if I could like save a game,
 do the thing, and then reload it later, like do undo,
 it'd probably be humor, just to do something
 like super hilarious.
 That's super embarrassing, and then just go,
 I mean, it's basically just fun.
 I would add more fun to the world.
 I mean, I sometimes do that.
 As I, you know, I sometimes, I try and mess up my reality
 in unusual ways by just doing things because I'm bored,
 but not bored.
 I'm not expressing this very well.
 I think that this is a really interesting problem
 that perhaps the hard sciences don't really understand
 that they're ever responsible for,
 because the question about how life emerged
 and how intelligence emerges and consciousness and free will,
 they're all ultimately boiling down
 to some of the same mechanics, I think.
 My feeling is that they are the same problem again
 and again and again.
 The transition from a boring world or a world
 in which there is no selection.
 So I wonder if free will has something to do
 with selection and models,
 and also the models you're generating in the brain,
 and also the amount of memory, your working memory,
 have available at any one time to generate counterfactuals.
 Well, that's fascinating, so like the decision-making process
 is a kind of selection, and that could be just another,
 yet another manifestation of the selection mechanism
 that's pervasive throughout the universe.
 Okay, that's fascinating to think about.
 Yeah, there's not some kind of fundamental,
 its own thing or something like that,
 that is just yet another example of selection.
 Yeah, and in the universe that's intrinsically open,
 you want to do that because you generate novelty.
 You mentioned something about,
 do cellular automata exist outside the human mind
 in our little offline conversation?
 Why is that an interesting question?
 So cellular automata, complexity,
 what's the relationship between complexity
 in the human mind and trees falling in the forest?
 Infrastructure, so the CA, so when John von Neumann
 and Conway and Feynman were doing CA,
 so doing on paper.
 CA is cellular automata.
 Yeah, just drawing them on paper.
 How awesome is that,
 that they were doing cellular automata on paper?
 Yeah.
 And then they were doing a computer
 that takes like forever to print out anything and program.
 Sure.
 People are now with the TikTok,
 kids these days with the TikTok,
 don't understand how amazing it is
 to just play with cellular automata,
 arbitrarily changing the rules as you want,
 the initial conditions, and see the beautiful
 patterns emerge, sing with fractals, all of that.
 Oh, you've just given me a brilliant idea.
 I wonder if there's a TikTok account
 that's just dedicated to putting out CA rules
 and if it isn't, we should make one.
 100%.
 And that will get-
 That will get millions of views.
 Millions, yes.
 No, it will get dozens.
 Just have it running.
 So look, I kind of, CA, I love CAs.
 Sorry.
 Yeah, no.
 We just have to make one.
 I actually, a few years ago, I made some robots
 that talked to each other, chemical robots
 that played the game of Hex invented by John Nash
 by doing chemistry and they communicated by Twitter,
 which experiments they were doing.
 And they had a lookup table of experiments
 and Robot One said, I'm doing experiment 10.
 The other robot, okay, I'll do experiment one then.
 And they communicated-
 By Twitter.
 Like publicly or DMs?
 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 Can you maybe quickly explain what the game of Hex is?
 Yeah, so it's basically a hexagonal board
 and you try and basically, you color each element
 on the board of each hexagon
 and you try and get from one side to the other
 and the other one tries to block you.
 How are they connected?
 So what are the robots?
 It's a chemical-
 Yeah, let's go back.
 So there were two robots.
 Each robot was doing die chemistry.
 So making RGB, red, green, blue, red, green, blue,
 red, green, blue.
 And they could just choose from experiments
 to do red, green, blue.
 Initially, I said to my group,
 we need to make two chemical robots that play chess.
 And my group were like, that's too hard.
 No, go away.
 But anyways, we had the robot.
 By the way, if people listening to this
 should probably know that Lee Cronin
 is an amazing group of brilliant people.
 He's exceptionally well-published.
 He's written a huge number of amazing papers.
 Whenever he calls himself stupid
 and is a sign of humility, and I deeply respect that
 and appreciate it.
 So people listening to this should know
 this is a world-class scientist
 who doesn't take himself seriously,
 which I really appreciate and love.
 Anywho, talking about serious science,
 we're back to your group projecting your idea
 of chemical robots playing chess via dies.
 So you went to a simpler game of hex.
 Okay, so what else?
 The team that did it were brilliant.
 I really take, I think they still have PTSD from doing it.
 Cause I said, this is a workshop.
 What I'd often do is I have about 60 people on my team.
 And occasionally before lockdown,
 I would say, I'm a bit bored.
 We're gonna have a workshop on something.
 Who wants to come?
 And then basically about 20 people turn up to my office
 and I say, we're gonna do this mad thing.
 And then it would just self-organize.
 And some of them would be like, no, I'm not doing this.
 And then you get left with the happy dozen.
 And what we did is we built this robot
 and doing die chemistry is really easy.
 You can just take two molecules,
 react them together and change color.
 And what I wanted to do is have a palette
 of different molecules.
 You can react commentorially and get different colors.
 So you've got two robots.
 I went, wouldn't it be cool if the robots
 basically shared the same list of reactions to do?
 And they said, oh, and because of then you could do
 a kind of multi-core chemistry.
 Like they weren't, so you'd have two chemical reactions
 going on at once and they could basically
 outsource the problem.
 But they're sharing the same tape.
 Exactly.
 So robot one would say, I'm gonna do experiment one.
 And the other robot says, I'll do experiment 100.
 And then they cross it off.
 But I wanted to make it-
 That's brilliant by the way.
 I wanted to make it-
 That is genius.
 Well, I wanted to make it groovier.
 And I said, look, let's have them competing
 to make, so they're playing a game of hex.
 And so when the robot does an experiment
 and the more blue the die, the more it gets the chance,
 the higher chance it gets to make the move
 it wants on the hex board.
 So if it gets a red color, it gets down weighted
 in the other robot.
 And so what the robots could do is they play each player move.
 And because the fitness function or the optimization function
 was to make the color blue, they started to invent
 reactions we weren't on the list.
 And they did this by not cleaning
 because we made cleaning optional.
 So when one robot realized if it didn't clean its pipes,
 it could get blue more quickly.
 And the other robot realized that,
 so it was like getting dirty as well.
 And they-
 I didn't tell the consequences of super intelligence.
 Okay.
 But-
 That was the game.
 Communicating through Twitter though.
 They were doing it through Twitter
 and Twitter bland them a couple of times.
 I said, come on, you've got a couple of robots
 doing chemistry, it's really cool.
 Stop banning them.
 Yeah.
 But in the end, we had to take them off Twitter
 and they just communicated via a server.
 Cause it was just, there were people saying,
 you can still find it, Cronin Lab 1
 and Cronin Lab 2 on Twitter.
 And it was like make move, wait,
 mix A and B, wait 10 seconds, answer blue.
 I really find it super compelling that
 you would have a chemical entity
 that's communicating with the world.
 That was one of the things I wanna do
 with my origin of life reaction, right?
 Is basically have a reactor
 that's basically just randomly enumerating
 through chemical space and have some kind of cycle.
 And then read out what the molecule's reading out
 using a mass spectrometer.
 And then convert that to text and publish it on Twitter.
 And then wait until it says I'm alive.
 I reckon that Twitter account would get a lot of followers.
 And I'm still trying to convince my group
 that we should just make an origin of life Twitter account.
 Where it's going, and it's like, hello testing.
 I'm here.
 Well, I'll share it.
 I like it.
 I particularly enjoy this idea
 of a non-human entity communicating with the world
 via human design social network.
 It's quite a beautiful idea.
 How we were talking about CA's existing
 outside the human mind.
 So I really admire Stephen Wolfram.
 I think he's a genius, clearly a genius.
 And trapped in is actually,
 it's like a problem with being so smart
 is you get trapped in your own mind, right?
 And I try to actually,
 I try to convince Stephen that assembly theory
 wasn't nonsense.
 I'm like, no, it's just nonsense.
 I was a little bit sad by that.
 So nonsense applied,
 even if it applied to the simplest construct
 of a one dimensional cellular automata, for example.
 Yeah, yeah.
 But I mean, actually, maybe I'm doing myself a bit too down.
 It was just as a theory was coming through
 and I didn't really know how to explain it.
 But we are gonna use assembly theory in CA's
 instead of automata.
 But I wanted to,
 what I was really curious about is why people marvel.
 I mean, you marvel at CA's and they're complex.
 I said, well, hang on, that complexity is baked in
 because if you play the game of life in a CA,
 you have to run it on a computer.
 You have to have a,
 you have to do a number of operations,
 put in the boundary conditions.
 So is it surprising that you get this structure out?
 Is it manufactured by the boundary conditions?
 And it is interesting because I think
 cellular automata running them
 is teaching me something about what real numbers are and aren't.
 And I haven't quite got there yet.
 I was playing on the airplane coming over.
 I'm just realized I have no idea what real numbers are really.
 And I was like, well, I do actually have some notion
 of what real numbers are.
 And I think thinking about real numbers as functions
 rather than numbers is more appropriate.
 And then if you then apply that to CA's,
 then you're saying, well, actually,
 why am I seeing this complexity in this rule?
 Is it, you know, is it,
 you've got this deterministic system
 and yet you get this incredible structure coming out.
 Well, isn't that what you'd get with any real number
 as you apply it as a function?
 And you're trying to read it out to an arbitrary precision?
 And I wonder if CA's are just helping me,
 my misunderstanding is CA's might be helping me understand
 them in terms of real numbers.
 I don't know what you think.
 Yeah, well, the function,
 but the devil's in the function.
 Like which is the function that's generating
 your real number?
 It seems like it's very important
 the specific algorithm of that function,
 because some lead to something super trivial,
 some lead to something that's all chaotic
 and some lead to things that are just walked
 that fine line of complexity and structure.
 I think we agree.
 So let's take it back a second.
 So take the logistic map or something,
 logistic equation, where you have this equation,
 which is you don't know what's gonna happen at M plus one,
 but once you've done M plus one, you know full time,
 you can't predict it.
 For me, CA's and logistic equation feel similar.
 And I think what's incredibly interesting,
 and I share your kind of wonder at running a CA,
 but also I'm saying, well, what is it about the boundary
 conditions and the way I'm running that calculation?
 So in my group, with my team, we actually made a chemical CA.
 We made game of life.
 We actually made a physical grid.
 I haven't been able to publish this paper.
 It's been trapped in purgatory for a long time.
 But it might be about-
 You wrote it up as a paper,
 how to do a chemical formulation of the game of life.
 We made a chemical computer and little cells.
 And I was playing game of life.
 With a BZ reactions, each cell would pulse on and off,
 on and off, on and off.
 We have little stirrer bars and we have little gates.
 And we actually played Conway's game of life in there.
 And we got structures in that game from the chemistry
 that you wouldn't expect from the actual CA.
 So that was kind of cool in that-
 Cause they're interacting outside of the cells, some how.
 So what's happening is you're getting noise.
 So the thing is that you've got this BZ reaction
 that gives on off, on off, on off, but there's also a wake
 and those wakes constructively interfere.
 And it's such a non-trivial way that's non-deterministic.
 And the non-determinism in the system
 gives very rich dynamics.
 And I was wondering if I could physically
 make a chemical computer with this CA
 that gives me something different
 that I can't get in a silicon representation of a CA
 where all the states are clean.
 Cause you don't have the noise trailing into the next round.
 You just have the state.
 So the paper in particular, so that's just a beautiful idea
 to use a chemical computer to construct a cellular automaton,
 the famous one of game of life.
 But it's also interesting and it's a really interesting
 scientific question of whether some kind of
 random perturbations or some source of randomness
 can have a significant constructive effect
 on the complexity of the system.
 And indeed, I mean, whether it's random
 or just non-deterministic and can we bake in
 that non-determinism at the beginning?
 I wonder what is the, I'm trying to think about
 what is the encoding space?
 Encoding space is pretty big.
 We have 49 star, so 49 cells, 49 chem bits,
 all connected to one another in like an analog computer,
 but being read out discreetly as the BZ reaction.
 So just to say the BZ reaction is a chemical oscillator.
 And what happened in each cell is it goes
 between red and blue.
 So two Russians discovered it, Belousov-Zaborskinski.
 I think Belousov first proposed it
 and everyone said, you're crazy, it breaks the second law.
 And Zaborskinski said, no, it doesn't break the second law,
 it's consuming a fuel.
 And so, and then, and it's like, there's a lot of chemistry
 hidden in the Russian literature actually,
 because Russians just wrote it in Russian,
 they didn't publish it in English speaking journals.
 It's heartbreaking actually.
 Well, yeah, sadden, it's great that it's there, right?
 It's not lost.
 I'm sure we will find a way of translating it properly.
 Well, the silver lining slash greater sadness
 of all of this is there's probably ideas
 in English speaking, like there's ideas
 in certain disciplines that if discovered
 by other disciplines would crack open
 some of the biggest mysteries in those disciplines.
 Like computer science, for example, is trying to solve
 problems like nobody else has ever tried to solve problems.
 As if it's not already been all addressed
 in cognitive science and psychology and mathematics
 and physics and just whatever you want to, economics even.
 But if you look into that literature,
 you might be able to discover some beautiful ideas.
 Obviously, Russian is an interesting case of that
 is because there's a Lawson translation,
 but you said there's a source of fuel, a source of energy.
 Yeah, yeah, so the BZ reaction,
 you have an acid in there called melonic acid.
 And what happens is it, when it,
 when it, it's basically like a battery that powers it
 and it loses CO2, so decarboxylates.
 It's just a chemical reaction.
 What that means we have to do is continuously feed
 or we just keep the BZ reaction going
 in a long enough time.
 So it's like it's reversible in time.
 But only like.
 But only like, but it's fascinating.
 I mean, the team that did it,
 I'm really proud of their persistence.
 We made a chemical computer.
 It can solve little problems.
 It can solve traveling salesman problems actually.
 Nice.
 But like I say, it's cop, it's true.
 But not any faster than a regular computer.
 Is there something you could do?
 Maybe, I'm not sure.
 I'm not, I think we can come up with a way
 of solving problems, also really complex, hard ones.
 Cause it's an analog computer and we can, we can,
 the, it can energy minimize really quickly.
 It doesn't have to basically go through every element
 in the matrix, like flip it.
 It just reads out.
 So we could actually do Monte Carlo by just shaking the box.
 It's literally a box shaker.
 You don't actually have to encode the shaking of the box
 and it's silicon memory and then just shuffle
 everything around.
 Yeah.
 It's analog, it's natural.
 So it's a, it's an organic computer.
 Yeah.
 So we're, so I was playing around with this
 and I was kind of annoying some of my colleagues.
 I'm wondering if we could get to chemical supremacy,
 like quantum supremacy.
 And I kind of calculated how big the grid has to be
 so we can actually start to solve problems faster
 than a silicon computer.
 But I'm not willing to, to state how that is yet.
 Cause I'm probably wrong.
 It's not that I'm, it's any top secret thing is I want,
 I think I can make a chemical computer
 that can solve optimization problems faster
 than the silicon computer.
 That's fascinating.
 But then you're unsure how big that has to be.
 Yeah.
 I think, I mean, I'd be a big box, hard to shake.
 It might be exactly a big box, hard to shake
 and basically a bit sloppy.
 Did we answer the question about
 do a cellular atomic exist outside the mind?
 We didn't, but I would, I would posit that they don't.
 And I, and, but I think minds can,
 well.
 So the mind is fundamental.
 What's the, why?
 Well, I mean, sorry, let's just go to the back.
 So as a physical phenomena,
 do CAs exist in physical reality, right?
 I would say they probably don't exist
 outside the human mind,
 but now we've constructed them,
 they exist in computer memories.
 They exist in my lab, they exist on paper.
 So they are, they emerge from the human mind.
 I'm just interested in,
 because Stephen Wolfram like CAs,
 a lot of people like CAs
 and likes to think of them as minimal computational elements.
 I'm just saying, well, do they exist in reality
 or are they a representation of a simple machine
 that's just very elegant to implement?
 So it's a platonic question, I guess.
 Yeah.
 I mean, it's, there's initial conditions.
 There's a memory in the system.
 There's simple rules that dictate
 the evolution of the system.
 So what exists?
 The idea, the rules, the-
 Yeah.
 People who are using CAs as models for things in reality
 to say, hey, look, you can do this thing in a CA.
 And my, when I see this, I'm saying, oh, that's cool.
 But what does that tell me about reality?
 Where's the CA in space?
 Oh, I see.
 Well, right.
 It's a mathematical object.
 So for people who don't know cellular automata,
 there's usually a grid,
 whether it's one dimensional, two dimensional,
 or three dimensional,
 and it evolves by simple local rules.
 Like you die or are born.
 If the neighbors are alive or dead.
 And it turns out if you have,
 with certain kinds of initial conditions
 and with certain kinds of very simple rules,
 you can create like arbitrarily complex
 and beautiful systems.
 And to me, you know, whether drugs are involved or not,
 I can sit back for hours and enjoy the mystery of it,
 how such complexity can emerges.
 It gives me almost like, you know,
 people talk about religious experiences.
 It gives me a sense that you get to have a glimpse
 at the origin of this whole thing.
 Whatever is creating this complexity from such simplicity
 is the very thing that brought my mind to life.
 This me, the human, our human civilization.
 And yes, those constructs are pretty trivial.
 I mean, that's part of their magic
 is even in this trivial framework,
 you could see the emergence,
 or especially in this trivial framework,
 you could see the emergence of complexity from simplicity.
 I guess what Lee, you're saying is that this is not,
 you know, this is highly unlike systems
 we see in the physical world,
 even though they probably carry some of the same magic,
 like mechanistically.
 I would say, I mean, I'm saying that the operating system
 that a CA has to exist on is quite complex.
 Right.
 And so I wonder if you're getting the complexity
 at the CA from the boundary conditions,
 the operating system, the underlying digital computer.
 Oh, wow, those are some strong words against CA's then.
 I didn't realize- Not against.
 I mean, I'm in love with CA's as well.
 I'm just saying they aren't as trivial as people think.
 They are incredible.
 To get to that richness,
 you have to iterate billions of times,
 and you need a display, and you need a math co-processor,
 and you need a von Neumann machine
 based on a Turing machine
 with digital error correction and states.
 Wow, to think that for the simplicity of a grid,
 you're basically saying a grid is not simple.
 Yeah.
 It requires incredible complexity to bring a grid to life.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, that's-
 What then, what is simple?
 That's all I wanted to say.
 I agree with you with the wonder of CA's, I just think,
 but remember, we take so much for granted
 what the CA is resting on,
 because von Neumann and Feynman weren't showing,
 weren't seeing these elaborate structures.
 They could not get that far.
 Yeah, but that's the limitation of their mind.
 Yeah, yeah, exactly, limitation of their pencil.
 But I think that's, the question is
 whether the essential elements of the cellular automata
 is present without all the complexities
 required to build a computer.
 And my intuition, the reason I find it incredible
 is that, yeah, my intuition is yes.
 It might look different.
 There might not be a grid-like structure,
 but local interactions operating under simple rules
 and resulting in multi-hierarchical complex structures
 feels like a thing that doesn't require a computer.
 I agree, but coming back to von Neumann
 and Feynman and Wolfram, their minds,
 the non-trivial minds, to create those architectures
 and do it and to put on those state transitions.
 And I think that's something
 that's really incredibly interesting
 that is understanding how the human mind
 builds those state transition machines.
 I could see how deeply in love
 with the idea of memory you are.
 So it's like how much of E equals MC squared
 is more than an equation.
 It has Albert Einstein in it.
 Like you're saying, like, you can't just say this is a,
 like the equations of physics are a really good
 simple capture of a physical phenomena.
 It is also has the, that equation has the memory
 of the humans.
 Absolutely, absolutely, yeah.
 But I don't, I don't know if you're implying this,
 I don't, that's a beautiful idea,
 but I don't know if I'm comfortable with that
 sort of diminishing the power of that equation.
 No, no, it enhances it.
 Because it's built on the shoulders, it enhances it.
 I think it enhances it.
 It's not, that equation is the minimal compressed
 representation of reality, right?
 We can use machine learning or Max Tegmark's AI Feynman
 to find lots of solutions for gravity,
 but isn't it wonderful that the laws that we do find
 are the maximally compressed representations?
 Yeah, but that representation, you can now give it as,
 I guess the universe has the memory of Einstein
 with that representation,
 but then you can now give it as a gift for free.
 Yeah, yeah, it's low memory.
 Einstein had to go through a lot of pain to get there,
 but it's low memory.
 So I say that physics and chemistry and biology
 are the same discipline.
 They're just physics, laws in physics,
 there's no such thing as a law in physics,
 it's just low memory stuff.
 Because you've got low memory stuff,
 you can, things reoccur quickly.
 As you build in more memory, you get to chemistry,
 so things become more contingent.
 When you get to biology, more contingent still,
 and then technology.
 So the more memory you need,
 the more your laws are local.
 That's all I'm saying,
 in that the less memory, the more the laws are universal,
 because they're not laws, they are just low memory states.
 We have to talk about a thing you've kind of mentioned
 already a bunch of times, but doing computation
 through chemistry, chemical-based computation.
 I've seen you refer to it as,
 in a sexy title of chemputation.
 So what is computation,
 and what is chemically, chemical-based computation?
 Okay, so chemputation is a name I gave to the process of
 building a state machine to make any molecule
 physically in the lab.
 And so as a chemist, chemists make molecules by hand.
 And they're quite hard,
 the chemists have a lot of tacit knowledge,
 a lot of ambiguity.
 It's not possible to go uniformly to the literature
 and read a recipe to make a molecule,
 and then go and make it in the lab every time.
 Some recipes are better than others,
 but they all assume some knowledge.
 And it's not universal what that is.
 So it's carried from human to human,
 some of that implicit knowledge.
 And you're saying, can we remove the human from the patient?
 Can we program?
 What, by the way, what is a state machine?
 So a state machine is a, I suppose,
 a object either abstract or mechanical,
 where you can do a unit operation on it
 and flick it from one state to another.
 So a turnstile would be a good example of a state machine.
 There's some kinds of states
 and some kind of transitions between states.
 And it's very formal in nature in terms of how precise
 how you do those transitions.
 Yes, you can mathematically precisely
 describe a state machine.
 So, I mean, a very simple Boolean gates
 are a very good way of building
 kind of logic-based state machines.
 Obviously a Turing machine,
 the concept of a Turing machine
 where you have a tape and a read head
 and a series of rules in a table.
 And you would basically look at what's on the tape.
 And if you're shifting the tape from left to right,
 and if you see a zero or one,
 you look in your lookup table and say, right,
 I've seen a zero and a one.
 I then do,
 I then respond to that.
 So in the turnstile would be,
 is there a human being pushing the turnstile
 in direction clockwise?
 If yes, I will open, let them go.
 If it's anti-clockwise, no.
 So yeah, so a state machine has some labels
 and a transition diagram.
 So you're looking to come up with a chemical computer
 to form state machines to create molecules or?
 Yeah.
 Which, what's the chicken and the egg?
 So computation is not a chemical computer
 because we talked a few minutes about
 actually doing computations with chemicals.
 What I'm now saying is I want to use state machines
 to transform chemicals.
 And so-
 So build chemicals programmatically.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I get in trouble saying this.
 I said to my group, I shouldn't say it
 because it's, but I said, look, we should make the crack bot.
 Is it in the crack robot?
 The robot that makes crack?
 The crack bot?
 Oh, crack bot.
 The robot that makes crack,
 but maybe we should scrub this from, but-
 No, or, well, so maybe you can educate me
 on breaking bad with like maths, right?
 Yeah, so in breaking bad-
 So you want to make basically some kind of mix
 of ex machina and breaking bad.
 No, I don't.
 I don't, on the record, I don't, but I said-
 You don't.
 I said, that's what I'm going to do
 once you release the papers.
 But I shaved my head and I'm going to live a life of crime.
 Anyway, I'm sorry.
 No, no.
 So yeah, let's get back to, so indeed,
 it is about making drugs, but importantly,
 making important drugs.
 All drugs matter.
 Yeah, but let's go back.
 So the basic thesis is chemistry is very analog.
 There is no state machine.
 And I wandered into the, through the paper walls
 in the Japanese house a few years ago and said,
 okay, hey, organic chemists, why are you doing this analog?
 They said, well, chemistry is really hard.
 You can't automate it.
 It's impossible.
 I said, but is it impossible?
 They said, yeah.
 And they said, I got the impression
 they're saying it's magic.
 And so when people tell me things are magic,
 it was like, no, no, they can't be magic.
 Right, so let's break this down.
 And so what I did is I went to my group one day
 about eight years ago and said, hey guys,
 I've written this new programming language for you.
 And so everything is clear.
 And you have to, you're not allowed to
 just wander around the lab willy nilly.
 You have to pick up things in order,
 go to the balance of the right time and all this stuff.
 And they looked at me as if I was insane
 and basically kicked me out of the lab and said,
 no, don't do that.
 We're not doing that.
 And I said, okay.
 So I went back the next day and said,
 I'm gonna find some money so we can make cool robots
 do chemical reactions.
 And everyone went, that's cool.
 And so in that process.
 The person tried to convert the humans to become robots.
 And next you could, you might as well
 just create the robots.
 Yes, but so in that, in that, the formalization process.
 Yeah, so what I did is said, look, chemical,
 to make a molecule, you need to do four things abstractly.
 I want to make a chemical Turing machine.
 Because a Turing machine, you think about this,
 imagine a Turing machine.
 Turing machine is the ultimate abstraction of a computation
 because it's been shown by Turing and others
 that basically a universal Turing machine
 should be able to do all computations that you can imagine.
 It's like, wow, why didn't I think of a Turing machine
 for chemistry?
 Let's think of a magic robot that can make any molecule.
 Let's think about that for a second.
 Okay, great.
 How do we then implement it?
 And I think it's, so what is the abstraction?
 So to do, to make any molecule, you have to do a reaction.
 So you have to put reagents together,
 do a reaction in a flask, typically.
 Then you're after the reaction,
 you have to stop the reactions.
 You do what's called a workup.
 So whatever, cool it down, add some liquid to it, extract.
 So then after you do the workup, you separate.
 So you then remove the molecules, separate them all out.
 And then the final step is purification.
 So reaction, workup, separate, purify.
 So this is basically like exactly like a Turing machine
 where you have your tape, you have your tape head,
 you have some rules, and then you run it.
 So I thought, cool.
 I went to all the chemists and said,
 look, chemistry isn't that hard.
 Reaction, workup, separation, purification,
 do that in cycles forever for any molecule,
 all the chemistry, done.
 And they said, chemistry is that hard.
 I said, but just in principle.
 And I got a few very enlightened people to say,
 yeah, okay, in principle, but it ain't gonna work.
 And this was in about 2013, 2014.
 And I found myself going to an architecture conference
 almost by accident.
 It's like, why am I at this random conference
 on architecture?
 And that was because I published a paper
 on inorganic architecture.
 And they said, come to architecture conference,
 but the inorganic architecture is not nano architecture.
 And I went, okay.
 And then I found these guys at the conference,
 3D printing ping pong balls and shapes.
 And this is through it, 3D printing was cool.
 And it's like, this is ridiculous.
 Why are you 3D printing ping pong balls?
 And I gave them a whole load of abuse,
 like I normally do when I first meet people,
 how to win friends and influence people.
 And then I was like, oh my God, you guys are geniuses.
 And so I got from, they were a bit confused
 because I was calling them idiots
 and then call them geniuses.
 It's like, will you come to my lab
 and we're gonna build a robot to do chemistry
 with a 3D printer?
 And they said, oh, that's cool.
 All right.
 So I had them come to the lab
 and we started to 3D print test tubes.
 So you imagine, 3D print a bottle
 and then use the same gantry to basically,
 rather than to squirt out plastic out of a nozzle,
 have a little syringe and jump chemicals in.
 So we had the 3D printer,
 because simultaneously print the test tube
 and then put chemicals into the test tube.
 And then-
 Oh, so it's really end to end.
 Yeah.
 And it's like, that'll be cool
 because they've got G-code to do it all.
 And I was like, that's cool.
 So I got my group doing this and I developed it a bit.
 And I realized that we could take those unit operations
 and we built a whole bunch of pumps and valves.
 And I realized that I could basically take the literature
 and I made the first version of the computer in 2016, 17.
 I made some architectural decisions.
 So I designed the pumps and valves in my group.
 I did all the electronics in my group.
 They were brilliant.
 I cannot pay tribute to my group enough in doing this.
 They were just brilliant.
 And there were some poor souls there that said,
 Lee, why are you making this design electronics?
 I'm like, well, because I don't understand it.
 They're like, so you're making this design stuff
 because you don't understand.
 I was like, yeah.
 But can we not just buy some?
 I said, well, we can, but then I don't understand how to,
 what bus they're gonna use and the serial ports
 and all this stuff.
 I just wanted, and I made, I came up with a decision
 to design a bunch of pumps and valves.
 I use power over ethernet.
 So I got one cable for power and data.
 Plug them all in, plug them all into a router
 and then I made the state machine.
 And there was a couple of cool things I did.
 Oh, they did actually.
 We got the abstraction.
 So reaction, workup, separation, purification.
 And then I made the decision to do it in batch.
 Now it's in batch.
 All chemistry had been digitized before, apparently.
 It was, it's been done,
 but everyone had been doing it in flow.
 And flow is continuous and there are infinities everywhere.
 And you have to just, and I realized
 that I could actually make a state machine
 where I basically put stuff in the reactor,
 turn it from one state to another state,
 stop it and just read it out.
 And okay, and I was kind of pitching it,
 electrical engineers saying, you have it easy.
 You don't have to clean out the electrons.
 Electrons don't leave a big mess.
 They leave some EM waste.
 But in my state machine, I built in cleaning.
 So it's like, we do an operation
 and then it cleans the backbone and then can do it again.
 So there's no-
 So what we managed to do over a couple of years
 is develop the hardware, develop the state machine,
 and we encoded three molecules.
 We did three, the first three, we did nitrile,
 a sleeping drug, rifinamide, anti-seizure and Viagra.
 And I could make jokes on the paper.
 It's a hard problem, blah, blah, blah, blah.
 That is very good.
 And then in the next one, what we did,
 said, okay, my poor organic chemist said,
 look, Lee, we've worked with you this long.
 We've made a robot that looks like
 it's gonna take our jobs away
 and not just take our jobs away,
 what we love in the lab,
 but now we have to become programmers.
 But we're not even good programmers.
 We just have to spend ages writing lines of code
 that are boring and it's not as elegant.
 I went, you're right.
 So then, but I knew because I had this abstraction
 and I knew that there was language,
 I could suddenly develop a state machine
 that would interpret the language,
 which was lossy and ambiguous and populate my abstraction.
 So I built a chemical programming language
 that is actually gonna be recursively innumerable.
 It's gonna be a Turing complete language actually,
 which is kind of cool,
 which means it's for me verifiable.
 So where we are now is we can now read the literature
 using a bit of natural language processing.
 It's not the best.
 There are many other groups have done better job,
 but we can use that language reading
 to populate the state machine and basically add, subtract.
 We got about a number of primitives
 that we basically program loops that we dovetail together
 and we can make any molecule with it.
 Okay, so that's the kind of program synthesis.
 So you start at like,
 literally you're talking about like a paper,
 like a scientific paper that's being read
 natural language processing,
 extracting some kind of details about chemical reactions
 and the chemical molecules, the compos involved.
 And then that's, in GPT terms,
 serves as a prompt for the program synthesis
 that's kind of trivial right now.
 There you have a bunch of different like for loops
 and so on that creates a program in this chemical language
 that can then be interpreted by the chemical computer,
 the computer.
 Yeah, computer, that's right.
 Yeah.
 Everything sounds better in your British accent,
 I love it.
 So into the computer and that's able to then
 basically be a 3D printer for these molecules.
 Yeah, I wouldn't call it a 3D printer,
 I would call it a universal chemical reaction system
 because 3D printing gives the wrong impression, but yeah.
 And it purifies.
 And the nice thing is that that code now,
 we call it the KyDL code is really interesting
 because now, so computation, what is computation?
 Computation is what computing is to mathematics, I think.
 Computation is the process of taking chemical code
 and some input reagents and making the same molecule,
 making the molecule reproducibly every time without fail.
 What is computation?
 It's the process of using a program
 to take some input conditions
 and give you an output, same every time, right?
 Well, reliably.
 So the problem is, now maybe you can push back
 and correct me on this.
 So I know biology is messy.
 My question is how messy is chemistry?
 So if we use the analogy of a computer,
 it's easier to make computation in a computer very precise,
 that it's repeatable, it makes errors almost never.
 If it does the exact same way over and over
 and over and over.
 What about chemistry?
 Is there messiness in the whole thing?
 Can that be somehow leveraged?
 Can that be controlled?
 Can be that removed?
 Do we wanna remove it from the system?
 Oh, yes and no, right.
 Is there messiness?
 There is messiness because chemistry is like,
 you're doing reactions on billions of molecules
 and they don't always work,
 but you've got purification there.
 And so what we've found is at the beginning,
 everyone said it can't work.
 It's gonna be too messy.
 It'll just fail.
 And I said, but you managed to get chemistry
 to work in the lab.
 Are you magic?
 Are you doing something?
 So I would say, now go back to the first ever computer
 or the ENIAC, 5 million soldered joints,
 400,000 valves that are exploding all the time.
 Was that, would you have gone, okay, that's messy.
 So we've got the, and have we got the equivalent
 of the ENIAC in my lab?
 We've got 15 computers in the lab now
 and they, are they unreliable?
 Yeah, they fall apart here and there,
 but are they getting better really quickly?
 Yeah.
 Are they now able to reliably make more?
 Are we at the point in the lab
 where there are some molecules
 we would rather make on the computer
 than have a human being make?
 Yeah, we've just done,
 we've just made a anti-influenza molecule
 and some antivirals, six steps on the computer
 that would take a human being about one week
 to make Arbidol of continuous labor.
 And all they do now is load up the reagents,
 press go button and just go away and drink coffee.
 Wow, so this, I mean, and this is, you're saying
 this computer is just the early days.
 And so like some of the criticism
 just have to do with the early days.
 And yes, I would say that something like this
 is quite impossible.
 So the fact that you're doing this is incredible.
 Not impossible, of course, but extremely difficult.
 It did seem really difficult.
 And I do keep pinching myself when I go in the lab.
 I was like, is it working?
 Like, yep.
 And it's not, it does clog, it does stop.
 You gotta clean, this is great.
 But it's getting more reliable because I made some,
 we just made design decisions and said,
 we are not gonna abandon the abstraction.
 Think about it, if the von Neumann implementation
 was abandoned, I mean, think about what we do
 to semiconductors to really constrain them
 to what we do to silicon in a fab lab.
 We take computation for granted.
 Silicon is not in its natural state.
 We are doping the hell out of it.
 It's incredible what they're able to accomplish
 and achieve that reliability at the scale they do.
 Like you said, that's after Moore's Law,
 what we have now and what we, you know,
 how it started, you know, now we're here.
 So think about it now.
 We started at the bottom, now we're here.
 We have only have 20 million molecules,
 well, say 20 million molecules in one database,
 maybe a few hundred million
 in all the pharmaceutical companies.
 And those few hundred million molecules
 are responsible for all the drugs
 that we've had in humanity,
 except, you know, biologics for the last 50 years.
 Now imagine what happens when a drug goes out of print,
 goes out of print because there's only a finite number
 of manufacturing facilities in the world
 that make these drugs.
 Is that a print?
 Yeah, isn't that computer?
 It's a printing press for chemistry.
 Yeah, and not only that, we can protect the KyDL
 so we can stop bad actors doing it.
 We can encrypt them and we can give people light.
 KyDL, that's the name, sorry to interrupt,
 is the name of the programming language?
 Yeah, the KyDL is the name of the programming language
 and the code we give the chemicals.
 So Ky, as in, you know, just for,
 it's like a, it's actually like an XML format,
 but I've now taken it from script
 to a fully expressible programming language
 so we can do dynamics and there's four loops in there
 and conditional statements.
 Right, but the structure, it started out as a,
 like an XML type of thing.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 Now we also, the chemist doesn't need to program in KyDL,
 they can just go to the software and type in,
 add A to B, reflux, do what they would normally do
 and you just convert it to KyDL
 and they have a linter to check it.
 And they're correct.
 So how do you, you know, not with ASCII,
 but because it's a Greek letter, how do you go with,
 how do you spell it just using the English alphabet?
 We just,
 X-D-L?
 X-D-L, but we put in Ky.
 And it was named by one of my students
 and one of my post-docs many years ago
 and I quite liked it.
 It's like, it's important I think,
 when the team are contributing to such big ideas,
 cause there's their ideas as well.
 I try not to just rename, I didn't call it Cronin
 or anything that, cause they keep saying, you know,
 is the chemistry, when they're putting stuff in the computer
 one of my students said, we are asking now,
 is it Cronin complete?
 And I was like, what does that mean?
 They said, well, can we make it on the damn machine?
 And I was like, oh, is that a compliment or a majority?
 And they're like, well, it might be better.
 Yeah, so you tweeted, quote,
 why does chemistry need
 a universal programming language, question mark?
 For all the reasons you can think of,
 reliability, interoperability, collaboration,
 remove ambiguity, lower cost, increase safety,
 open up discovery, molecular customization
 and publication of executable chemical code.
 Which is fascinating by the way, just publish code.
 And can you maybe elaborate a little bit more
 about this ChiDL, what is the universal language
 of chemistry look like?
 A Cronin complete language.
 It's a Turing complete language really.
 But so what it has, it has a series of operators in it,
 like add, heat, stir.
 So there's a bunch of just unit operations.
 And all it is really is just,
 with chemical engineers, when I talked about this,
 that you've just rediscovered chemical engineering.
 And I said, well, yeah, I know.
 They said, well, that's trivial.
 I said, well, not really.
 Well, yes, it is trivial.
 And that's why it's good
 because not only have we rediscovered chemical engineering,
 we've made it implementable on the universal hardware
 that doesn't cost very much money.
 And so the ChiDL has a series of statements
 like define the reactor.
 So defines the reagents.
 So they're all labels.
 So you assign them.
 And what I also implemented at the beginning is
 because I give all the hardware IP address,
 you put it on a graph.
 And so what it does is like the graph is equivalent
 to the processor firmware, the processor code.
 So when you take your ChiDL
 and you go to run it on your computer,
 you can run it on any compatible hardware
 in any configuration, it says, what's your graph look like?
 As long as I can solve the problem on the graph
 with these unit operations,
 you have the resources available, chem piles.
 Ah ha.
 Ha ha ha.
 Ah.
 All right, we can carry on for years.
 I mean, it is really, it's compilation.
 And compilation, yeah.
 And what it now does is it says,
 okay, the problem we have before is
 it was possible to do robotics for chemistry,
 but the robots were really expensive.
 They were unique.
 They were vendor locked.
 And what I want to do is to make sure
 that every chemist in the world can get access
 to machinery like this at virtually no cost
 because it makes it safer.
 It makes it more reliable.
 And then if you go to the literature
 and you find a molecule that could potentially cure cancer,
 and let's say the molecule that could potentially cure cancer
 takes you three years to repeat,
 and maybe a student finishes their PhD in the time
 and they never get it back.
 So it's really hard to kind of get all the way
 to that molecule and it limits the ability
 of humanity to build on it.
 If they just download the code and can execute it,
 it turns, I would say the electronic laboratory notebook
 in chemistry is a data symmetry
 because no one will ever reproduce it.
 But now the data symmetry is a Jupiter notebook
 and you can just execute it.
 A notebook and people can play with it.
 They access to it.
 Reversion it.
 Orders of magnitude is increased.
 We'll talk about the, so as with all technologies,
 I think there's way more exciting possibilities,
 but there are also terrifying possibilities
 and we'll talk about all of them.
 But let me just kind of linger
 on the machine learning side of this.
 So you're describing programming, but it's a language.
 I don't know if you've heard about OpenAI Codex,
 which is-
 Yeah, I'm playing with it.
 You're playing with it?
 Of course you are.
 You really are Rick from Rick and Morty.
 This is great.
 Okay.
 Except philosophically, I mean, he is, I guess,
 kind of philosophically deep too.
 So for people who don't know GPT, GPT-3,
 it's a language model that can do natural language generation.
 So you can give it a prompt
 and it can complete the rest of it.
 But it turns out that that kind of prompt,
 it's not just completes the rest of it,
 it's generating novel sounding text.
 And then you can apply that to generation
 of other kinds of stuff.
 So these kinds of transformer-based language models
 are really good at forming deep representations
 of a particular space, like a medium, like language.
 So you can then apply it
 to a specific subset of language like programming.
 So you can have it learn the representation
 of the Python programming language
 and use it to then generate syntactically
 and semantically correct programs.
 So you can start to make progress
 on one of the hardest problems in computer science,
 which is program synthesis.
 How do you write programs that accomplish different tasks?
 So what OpenAI Codex does is it to generate those programs
 based on a prompt of some kind.
 Usually you can do a natural language prompt.
 So basically as you do when you program,
 you write some comment,
 which serves the basic documentation
 of the inputs and the outputs
 and the function of the particular set of code
 and it's able to generate that.
 Point being is you can generate programs
 using machine learning, using neural networks.
 Those programs operate on the boring old computer.
 Can you generate programs that operate,
 this gotta be a clever version of programs for this,
 but can you write programs that operate on a computer?
 Yep, there's actually software out there right now.
 We can go and do it.
 Really?
 Yeah, yeah, it's a heuristic.
 It's rule-based, but we have what we've done,
 inspired by Codex actually,
 is over the summer I ran a little workshop.
 Some of my groups got this inspired idea
 that we should get a load of students
 and ask them to manually collect data
 to label chemical procedures into KyDL.
 And we have a cool synth reader.
 So there's a bunch of people doing this right now,
 but they're doing it without abstraction.
 And because we have an abstraction
 that's implementable in the hardware,
 we've developed basically a chemical analog of Codex.
 When you say abstraction in the hardware,
 what do you mean?
 So right now, a lot of people doing machine learning
 and reading chemistry and saying,
 oh, you've got all these operations,
 add, shake, whatever, but because they don't have a uniform,
 I mean, there's a couple of groups doing it,
 some competitors actually, and they're good, very good,
 but they can't run that code automatically.
 They are losing meaning.
 And the really important thing that you have to do
 is generate context.
 And so what we've learned to do with our abstraction
 is make sure we can pull the context out of the text.
 And so can we take a chemical procedure
 and read it and generate our executable code?
 Yes.
 What's the hardest part about that whole pipeline,
 from the initial text,
 interpreting the initial text of a paper,
 extracting the meaningful context
 and the meaningful chemical information,
 to then generating the program,
 to then running that program in the hardware.
 What's the hardest part about that pipeline
 as we look towards a universal Turing computer?
 So the hardest thing with the pipeline
 is that the software, the model gets confused
 between some meanings, right?
 So if chemists are very good at inventing words
 that aren't broken down,
 so the classic word that you would use for boiling something
 is called reflux.
 So reflux is, you'd have a solvent in a round-bottom flask,
 at reflux it would be boiling,
 going up the reflux condenser and coming down.
 But that term reflux, to reflux, could be changed,
 you know, to, people often make up words, new words,
 and then the software can fall over.
 But what we've been able to do is a bit like in Python,
 or any programming language,
 is identify when things aren't matched.
 So you present the code and you say, this isn't matched,
 you may want to think about this,
 and then the user goes and says, oh, I mean reflux,
 and just ticks a box and collects it.
 So what the codex or the Chemex does in this case,
 is it just, it suggests the first go,
 and then the chemist goes and corrects it.
 And I really want the chemist to correct it,
 because it's not safe, I believe,
 for it to allow AI to just read literature
 and generate code at this stage.
 Because now you're having actual, by the way, Chemex, nice.
 Nice name.
 So you are unlike, which is fascinating,
 is that we live in a fascinating moment in human history.
 But yes, you're literally connecting AI to some physical,
 and like, it's building something in the physical realm.
 Yeah.
 Especially in the space of chemistry
 that operates sort of invisibly.
 Yeah, yeah, I would say that's right.
 And it's really important to understand
 those labeling schemes, right?
 And one of the things I was never,
 I was always worried about at the beginning
 that the abstraction was gonna fall over.
 And the way we did it was just by brute force to start with.
 We just kept reading the literature and saying,
 is there anything new?
 Can we add a new rule in?
 And actually, our ChiDL language expand, exploded.
 There was so many extra things we had to keep adding.
 And then I realized the primitives still were maintained
 and I could break them down again.
 So it's pretty good.
 I mean, there are problems.
 There are problems with interpreting any big sentence
 and turning it into an actionable code.
 And the codex is not without its problems.
 You can crash it quite easily, right?
 You can generate nonsense.
 But boy, it's interesting.
 I would love to learn to program now using codex, right?
 Just hacking around, right?
 And I wonder if chemists in the future will learn
 to do chemistry by just hacking around
 with the system writing different things.
 Because the key thing that we're doing with chemistry
 is that where a lot of mathematical chemistry went wrong
 is people, and I think Wolfram does this in Mathematica,
 he assumes that chemistry is a reaction where atom A
 or molecule A reacts with molecule B to give molecule C.
 That's not what chemistry is.
 Chemistry is take some molecule,
 take a liquid or a solid, mix it up and heat it,
 and then extract it.
 So the programming language is actually with respect
 to the process operations.
 And if you flick in process space,
 not in chemical graph space, you unlock everything.
 Because there's only a finite number of processes
 you need to do in chemistry.
 And that's reassuring.
 And so we're in the middle of it.
 It's really exciting.
 It's not the be all and the end all.
 And there is, like I say, errors that can creep in.
 One day we might be able to do it
 without human interaction, you simulate it.
 And you'll know enough about the simulation
 that the lab won't catch fire.
 But there are so many safety issues right now
 that we've got to really be very careful.
 Protecting the user, protecting the environment,
 protecting misuse.
 I mean, there's lots to discuss
 if you want to go down that route,
 because it's very, very interesting.
 You don't want Novichok being made
 or explosives being made or recreational drugs being made.
 But how do you stop a molecular biologist
 making a drug that's gonna be important
 for them looking at their particular assay
 on a bad actor trying to make methamphetamine?
 I saw how you looked at me when you said bad actor,
 but that's exactly what I'm gonna do.
 I'm trying to get the details of this can be first.
 Don't worry, we can protect you from yourself.
 Okay.
 I'm not sure that's true,
 but that statement gives me hope.
 Does this ultimately excite you about the future
 or does it terrify you?
 So let's, we mentioned that time is fundamental.
 It seems like you're at the cutting edge of progress
 that will have to happen, that will happen.
 That there's no stopping it.
 And I, as we've been talking about,
 I see obviously a huge number of exciting possibilities.
 So whenever you automate these kinds of things,
 just the world opens up.
 It's like programming itself and the computer,
 regular computer has created innumerable applications.
 It made the world better in so many dimensions.
 And it created of course a lot of negative things
 that we for some reason like to focus on
 using that very technology to tweet about it.
 But I think it made a much better world,
 but it created a lot of new dangers.
 So maybe you can speak to when you have,
 when you kind of stand at the end of the road
 for building a really solid, reliable, universal computer.
 What are the possibilities that are positive?
 What are the possibilities that are negative?
 How can we minimize the chance of the negative?
 Yeah, that's a really good question.
 So there's so many positive things from drug discovery,
 from supply chain stress,
 for basically enabling chemists
 to basically build more productive in the lab, right?
 Where this isn't, the computer's not gonna replace
 the chemist.
 There's gonna be a Moore's law of molecules, right?
 There's gonna be so many more molecules we can design,
 so many more diseases we can cure.
 So chemists in the lab as researchers,
 that's better for science.
 So they can build a bunch of,
 like they could do science
 at a much more accelerated pace.
 So it's not just the development of drugs,
 it's actually like doing the basic understanding
 of the science of drugs.
 And the personalization, the cost of drugs right now,
 we're all living longer.
 We're all having more and more,
 we know more about our genomic development.
 We know about our predetermination
 and we might be able to,
 one dream I've got is like,
 imagine you can work at your genomic system,
 tells you you're gonna get cancer in seven years time,
 and you have your personal computer
 that cooks up the right molecule just for you to cure it.
 That's a really positive idea.
 The other thing is when drugs,
 so right now I think it is absolutely outrageous
 that not all of humanity has access to medicine.
 And I think the computer might be able
 to change that fundamentally,
 because it will disrupt the way things are manufactured.
 So let's stop thinking about manufacturing
 in different factories.
 Let's say that computers,
 clinical grade computers or drug grade computers
 will be in facilities all around the world,
 and they can make things on demand
 as a function of the cost.
 Maybe people won't be able to afford
 the latest and greatest patent,
 but maybe they'll be able to get the next best thing
 and we'll basically democratize,
 make available drugs to everybody that they need.
 And there's lots of really interesting things there.
 So I think that's gonna happen.
 I think that now let's take the negative.
 Before we do that, let's imagine what happened,
 go back to a really tragic accident a few years ago,
 well not accident, an act of murder by that pilot on the,
 I think it was Eurowings or Swisswings,
 but what he did is plane took off.
 He waited till his pilot went to the toilet.
 He was a co-pilot.
 He locked the door and then set the autopilot
 above the Alps, he set the altimeter
 or the descend height to zero.
 So the computer just took the plane into the Alps.
 Now, I mean, that was such a tragedy
 that obviously the guy was mentally ill,
 but it wasn't just a tragedy for him,
 it was for all the people on board.
 But what if, and I was inspired by this
 and my thinking, what can I do to anticipate problems
 like this in the computer?
 Had the software and I'm sure Boeing and Airbus
 will be thinking, oh, maybe I can give the computer
 a bit more situational awareness.
 So whenever one tries to drop the height of the plane
 and it knows it's above the Alps,
 we'll just say, oh no, computer says no,
 we're not letting you do that.
 Of course he would have been out to find another way,
 maybe fly it until it runs out of fuel or something,
 but you know.
 Keep anticipating all the large number of trajectories
 that can go negative, all those kinds of running
 into the Alps and try to at least make it easy
 for the engineers to build systems that are protecting us.
 Yeah, and let's just think,
 so what in the computer world right now with Kyde-Ls,
 let's just not think about what I'm doing right now.
 What I'm doing right now is completely open, right?
 Everyone's gonna know Kyde-Ls and be playing with them,
 making them more easier and easier and easier.
 But what we're gonna start to do,
 it makes sense to encrypt the Kyde-Ls in such a way
 that let's say you work for a pharmaceutical company
 and you have a license to make a given molecule.
 Well, you get issued with a license
 by the FDA or your local authority
 and they'll say, right, your license to do it,
 here it is, it's encrypted and the Kyde-L gets run.
 So you have a license for that instance of use.
 Easy to do, computer science has already solved the problem.
 So the fact that we all trust online banking, right?
 The right now, then we can secure it.
 I'm 100% sure we can secure the computer
 because of the way we have a many,
 it's like the same mapping problem
 that you to actually reverse engineer a Kyde-L
 will be as hard as reverse engineering the encryption key,
 brute force, it will be cheaper
 to just actually buy the regulated medicine.
 And actually people aren't gonna want to then
 make their own fake pharmaceuticals
 because it'll be so cheap to do it.
 We'll drop the cost of access to drugs.
 Now what will happen, recreational drugs.
 People start saying, well,
 I want access to recreational drugs.
 Well, it's gonna be up to,
 it's gonna accelerate that social discussion
 that's happening in the US and Canada and UK,
 everywhere, right?
 Because cost goes down, access goes up.
 Given cannabis, THC, to some people who've got epilepsy
 isn't literally, forgive the term, a no-brainer
 because these poor people go from seizures like every day
 to maybe seizures just once every few months.
 That's an interesting idea to try to minimize the chance
 that it can get into the hands of individuals,
 like terrorists or people that want to do harm.
 Now with that kind of thing,
 you're putting a lot of power in the hands of governments,
 in the hands of institutions.
 And so then emerge the kind of natural criticism
 you might have of governments
 that can sometimes use these for ill,
 use them as weapons of war,
 not weapon, not tools of betterment.
 So, and sometimes not just war against other nations,
 but war against its own people
 has been done throughout history.
 Well, I'm thinking, so there's another way of doing it,
 a decentralized peer-to-peer version
 where, and what you have to do,
 I'm not saying you should adopt a blockchain,
 but there is a way of maybe taking KyDLs
 and put them in blockchain.
 Here's an idea, let's just say,
 the way we're doing it in my lab right now
 is we go to the literature,
 we take a recipe to make a molecule,
 convert that to KyDL,
 and diligently make it in the robot and validate it.
 We, that, so we, that I would call mining,
 proof of work, proof of synthesis, right?
 Proof of the synthesis, that'd be cool.
 Yeah, yeah, but this is cool because certainly,
 when you actually synthesize it,
 you can get the analytical data,
 but there's also a fingerprint in there
 of the impurities that get carried across,
 because you can never make one something 100% pure.
 That fingerprint will allow you
 to secure your KyDL.
 So what you do is encrypt those two things.
 So suddenly you can have people out there mining,
 and what you could do, perhaps,
 is do the type of thing,
 we need to basically look at the way
 that contact tracing should have been done in COVID,
 where people are given the information.
 So you've just been in contact with someone COVID,
 you choose, I'm not telling you to stay at home,
 you choose, right?
 So now, if we could imagine a similar thing,
 like you have got access to these chemicals,
 so you will have these effects,
 you choose and publicize it,
 or maybe it's out somewhere, I don't know.
 I'm not a policymaker on this.
 And my job here is to not just make the technology possible,
 but to have it as open as a discussion as possible
 with people to say, hey,
 can we stop childhood mortality with this technology?
 And to those benefits outweigh the one-off
 where people might use it for terrorism,
 or people might use it for recreational drugs.
 Chemify, which is the name of the entity
 that will make this happen,
 I think we have some social responsibilities
 as an entity to make sure that we're not enabling people
 to manufacture personal drugs, weapons at will.
 And what we have to do is have a discussion with society,
 with the people who invest in this,
 with people that are gonna pay for this,
 to say, well, do you wanna live longer?
 And do you wanna be healthier?
 And are you willing to accept some of the risks?
 And I think that's a discussion to have.
 So by the way, when you say personal drugs,
 do you mean the illegal ones?
 Or do you have a concern of just putting the manufacturer
 of any kind of legal drugs in the hands of regular people,
 because they might, like dose matters,
 they might take away too much?
 I mean, I would say, to be honest,
 that the chances of computers being,
 well, should always never,
 so the fact I can now say this means
 it's totally gonna come true, right?
 I'm going to do it.
 I cannot imagine that computers will be in people's houses
 anytime soon, but they might be at the local pharmacy, right?
 And if you've got a drug manufacturing facility
 in every town, then you just go
 and they give you a prescription.
 They do it in such a way, they format it
 so that you don't have to take 10 pills every day.
 You get one manufactured for you
 that has all the materials you need
 and the right distribution.
 Got it.
 But you mentioned recreation drugs.
 And the reason I mentioned it,
 because I know people are gonna speak up on this.
 If the drug is legal, there's to me no reason
 why you can't manufacture, I mean, for recreation.
 I mean, you can do it right now.
 What do you have against Fun Lee?
 So, I mean, I'm a chemistry professor in a university
 who's an entrepreneur as well.
 I just think I need to be as responsible
 as I can in the discussion.
 Sure.
 Not sure, sure.
 But I know, so let me be the one that says,
 there's nothing, because you have said
 recreational drugs and terrorism in the same sentence.
 Yeah, yeah, okay.
 I think let's make sure we draw a line
 that there's real dangers to the world
 of terrorists, of bio warfare,
 and then there's a little bit of weed.
 So, I have, I mean, I think it's up to the society
 to tell its governments what it wants, what's acceptable.
 Right?
 And if it becomes, let's say that THCs become
 heavily acceptable and that you can modify them.
 So, let's say it's like blood type.
 There's a particular type of THC
 that you tolerate better than I do.
 Then why not have a machine that makes the one you like?
 Yeah.
 And then, and why not?
 It's the perfect brownie.
 And I think that that's fine.
 But I'm, you know, we're so far away from that.
 I can barely get the thing to work in the lab, right?
 And I mean, it's reliability and all this other stuff.
 But what I think is gonna happen in the short term,
 it's gonna turbocharge molecular discovery, reliability,
 and that will change the world.
 That's super exciting.
 You have a draft of a paper titled
 Autonomous Intelligent Exploration,
 Discovery and Optimization of Nanomaterials.
 So, we are talking about
 automating engineering of nanomaterials.
 How hard is this problem?
 And as we continue down this thread of the positives
 and the worrisome,
 what are the things we should be excited about?
 And what are the things we should be terrified about?
 And how do we minimize the chance
 of the terrifying consequences?
 So in this robot, the robot does all the heavy lifting.
 So the robot basically is an embodied AI.
 I really like AI in a domain-specific way.
 One of the, as you should say at this point,
 there was an attempt in the 60s,
 Joshua Leidenberg and some really important people
 did this that made an AI to try and guess
 if organic molecules in a mass spectrum were alien or not.
 Yes.
 And they failed
 because they didn't have assembly theory.
 I see.
 And when I-
 Wait, wait, what does assembly theory give you
 about alien versus human life?
 Well, no, it just, it tells you about unknown,
 the degree of unknown.
 So you can fingerprint stuff.
 They weren't looking at,
 they were trying to basically just look at the corpus
 of complex organic molecules.
 So when I was a bit down about assembly theory,
 because I couldn't convince referees
 and couldn't convince computational,
 people interested in computational complexity,
 I was really quite depressed about it.
 And I mean, I've been working with Sarah Walker's team
 and I think she also invented assembly theory in some way.
 We can talk about it later.
 When I found the AI not working for the Dendrel project,
 I suddenly realized I wasn't totally insane.
 Coming back to this nano robot.
 So what it does is it basically, like a computer,
 but now what it does is it squirts a liquid with gold in it
 in the test tube and it adds some reducing agents,
 so some electrons to make the gold turn into a nanoparticle.
 Now, when gold becomes a nanoparticle,
 it gets a characteristic color, a plasmon.
 So it's a bit like if you look at the sheen on the gold
 wedding ring or gold bar or something,
 those are the ways of conducting electrons
 basically reflect light.
 What we did is we randomly squirt the gold particle
 and the reducing agent in and we measure the UV,
 we measure the color.
 And so what we do is we've got the robot has a mind,
 so it has a mind where in a simulation,
 it randomly generates nanoparticles and the plasmon,
 the color that comes out, randomly imagines in its head.
 So that's the imaginary side of the robot.
 In the physical side of the robot,
 it squirts in the chemicals and looks at the color
 and it uses a genetic algorithm and a map elite actually
 on it and it goes around in cycles and refines
 the color to the objective.
 Now we use two different points.
 We have an exploration and an optimization.
 They're two different.
 So the exploration just says, just do random stuff
 and see how many different things you can get.
 And when you get different things,
 try and optimize and make the peak sharper, sharper, sharper.
 And what it does after a number of cycles
 is it physically takes a sample
 of the optimized nanomaterial,
 resets all of the round bottom flasks,
 cleans them and puts the seed, physical seed back in.
 And then what this robot is able to do is search a space
 of 10 to the 23 possible reactions
 in just a thousand experiments in three days.
 And it makes five generations of nanoparticles
 which get nicer and nicer in terms of shape
 and color and definition.
 And then at the end it outputs a Kydeo code.
 The then being-
 Wow, it's doing the search for programs
 in the physical space.
 So it's doing a kind of reinforcement learning.
 Yeah, yeah, in the physical space.
 With the exploration and the optimization.
 And that Kydeo will work on any computer
 or any qualified hardware.
 Now that's it, now that's a general piece of code
 that can replicate somewhat, maybe perfectly
 what it created.
 That's amazing, that's incredible.
 But the nanoparticles themselves are dumb.
 The robot has all the thinking.
 So we don't try and imply any self replication
 or try and get the particles to make themselves.
 Although it would be cool to try.
 So, well, there you go.
 That's, those are famous last words
 for the end of human civilization.
 Would be cool to try.
 So is it possible to create molecules
 that start approaching this question
 that we started this conversation,
 which is the origin of life.
 To start to create molecules that have lifelike qualities.
 So have the replication, have like complex,
 start to create complex organisms.
 So we have done this with the oxides.
 I talked about earlier with the limton oxides
 and the rings and the bulls.
 And the problem is that what they are, they do,
 they autocadalytically enhance one another.
 So they would, I guess you would call it self replication.
 But because there's limited function and mutation,
 they're pretty dumb.
 So they don't do very much.
 So I think the prospect of us being able to engineer
 a nanomaterial life form in the short term,
 like I said earlier,
 my aim is to do this, of course.
 I mean, on one hand I'm saying it's impossible
 and the other hand I'm saying I'm doing it.
 So which is it, Lee?
 It's like, well, I think we can do it,
 but only in the robot.
 So the causal chain that's gonna allow it is in the robot.
 These particles, if they do start to self replicate,
 the system's gonna be so fragile
 that I don't think anything dangerous will come out.
 It doesn't mean we shouldn't treat them as potentially,
 I mean, I don't want to scare people like gain of function,
 we're gonna produce stuff that comes out.
 Our number one kill switch is that we always try
 to search a space of objects
 that don't exist in the environment.
 So even if something got out, it just would die immediately.
 It's like making a silicon life form or something.
 Which is the opposite of oftentimes
 gain of function research just focused on
 how do you get a dangerous thing
 to be closer to something that works with humans.
 Yeah.
 And then you have a jump to humans.
 So that's the one good mode to operate on
 is always try to operate on chemical entities
 that are very different than the kind of chemical environment
 that humans operate in.
 Yeah, and also, I mean, I'll say something dramatic,
 which may not be true, so I should be careful.
 If let's say we did discover a new living system
 and it was made out of a shadow biosphere
 and we just released it in the environment, who cares?
 It's gonna use different stuff.
 It'll just live.
 Just live, yeah.
 I found one of my biggest fantasies
 is actually is like a planet.
 There's basically half in the sun, it doesn't rotate, right?
 And you have two different origins of life on that planet.
 And they don't share the same chemistry.
 Yeah.
 And then the only way time they recognize each other
 is when they become intelligent,
 they go, well, what's that moving?
 Yeah.
 I wonder if it-
 They co-evolve, that's fascinating.
 I mean, so one fascinating thing to do
 is exactly what you were saying, which is a life bomb,
 which is like try to focus on atmospheres
 or chemical conditions of other planets
 and try within this kind of exploration optimization system,
 try to discover life forms
 that can work in those conditions.
 And then you send those life forms over there
 and see what kind of stuff they build up.
 Like you can do like a large scale,
 it's kind of a safe physical environment
 to do large scale experiments.
 It's another planet.
 Yeah, so look, I'm gonna say something quite contentious.
 I mean, Elon wants to go to Mars.
 I think it's brilliant wants to go to Mars,
 but I would count on that and say,
 is Elon just obsessed with getting humanized?
 Humanity or Earth or what about just technology?
 So if we do technology,
 so Elon either needs to take a computer to Mars
 because he needs to manufacture drugs on demand, right?
 Because zero cost payload and all that stuff is just code.
 Or what we do is we actually say,
 hang on, it's quite hard for humans to survive on Mars.
 Why don't we write a series of origin of life algorithms
 where we embed our culture in it, right?
 It's a very Ridley spot Prometheus, right?
 Which is a terrible film by the way, but anyway.
 And dump it on Mars and just terraform Mars.
 And what we do is we evolve life on Mars
 that is suited to life on Mars.
 Rather than brute forcing human life on Mars.
 So one of the questions is,
 what is human culture?
 What are the things you encode?
 Some of it is knowledge, some of it is information.
 But the thing that Elon talks about
 and the thing I think about,
 I think you think about as well is
 some of the more unique aspects of what makes us human,
 which is our particular kind of consciousness.
 So he talks about the flame of human consciousness.
 That's one of the questions is,
 can we instill consciousness into other beings?
 Because that's a sad thought
 that whatever this thing inside our minds
 that hopes and dreams and fears and loves can all die.
 Yeah, but I think you already know
 the answer to that question.
 I have a robot lawn mower at home.
 My kids call it CC, cool car.
 It's a robot mow.
 And the way it works,
 it has an electric field around the perimeter
 and it just tell it the area.
 And it goes out and goes from its base station,
 just mows a bit.
 Gets to the perimeter, detects perimeter,
 then chooses a random angle, rotates around and goes on.
 Yeah.
 But my kids call it cool cutter.
 It's a she.
 I don't know why it's a she.
 They just, when they were like quite young,
 they called it, I don't want to be sexist there.
 It could be a he, but they liked.
 They gendered the lawn mower.
 They gendered the lawn mower.
 Okay.
 Yeah, why not?
 But I was thinking this lawn mower,
 if you apply integrated information theory to lawn mower,
 lawn mower is conscious.
 Now, integrated information theory is that people say
 as a flawed way of measuring consciousness,
 but I don't think it is.
 I think assembly theory actually measures consciousness
 in the same way.
 Consciousness is something that is generated
 over a population of objects of humans.
 Consciousness didn't suddenly spring in.
 Our consciousness has evolved together, right?
 The fact we're here and the robots we leave behind,
 they all have some of that.
 So we won't lose it all.
 Sure, consciousness requires,
 we have many models being generated.
 It's not just one domain specific AI, right?
 I think the way it created consciousness,
 I'm going to say unashamedly,
 the best way to make a consciousness
 is in a chemical system
 because you just have access to many more states.
 And the problem right now,
 we're making silicon consciousness
 is you just don't have enough states.
 So there are more possible states,
 or sorry, there are more possible configurations possible
 in your brain than there are atoms in the universe.
 And you can switch between them.
 You can't do that on a core I10.
 It's got 10 billion, 12 billion, 14 billion transistors,
 but you can't reconfigure them as dynamically.
 Well, you've shared this intuition a few times already
 that the larger number of states
 somehow correlates to greater possibility of life,
 but it's also possible the constraints are essential here.
 Yeah, yeah.
 I mean, but coming back to the,
 you worry that something's lost, I agree.
 But I think that, you know, we will get to an AGI,
 but I wonder if it's not,
 it can't be separate from human,
 it can't be separate from human consciousness
 because the causal chain that produced it came from humans.
 So what I kind of try and suggest heavily
 to people worry about the existential threat of AI saying,
 I mean, you put it much more elegantly earlier,
 like we should worry about algorithms,
 dumb algorithms written by human beings on Twitter,
 driving us insane, right?
 And doing acting in odd ways.
 Yeah, I think intelligence,
 this is what I have been in eloquent
 in trying to describe it,
 partially because I try not to think
 too deeply through this stuff
 because then you become a philosopher,
 I still aspire to actually building a bunch of stuff.
 But my sense is super intelligence leads to deep integration
 into human society.
 So like intelligence is strongly correlated,
 like intelligence, the way we conceive of intelligence
 materializes as a thing that becomes a fun entity
 to have at a party with humans.
 So like it's a mix of wit, intelligence, humor,
 like intelligence, like knowledge,
 ability to do reasoning and so on,
 but also humor, emotional intelligence,
 ability to love, to dream, to share those dreams,
 to play the game of human civilization,
 the push and pull, the whole dance of it,
 the whole dance of life.
 And I think that kind of super intelligent being
 is not the thing that worries me.
 I think that ultimately will enrich life.
 It's again, the dumb algorithms,
 the dumb algorithms that scale in the hands of people
 that are too, don't study history,
 that don't study human psychology and human nature,
 just applying too broadly for selfish near-term interests.
 That's the biggest danger.
 Yeah, I think it's not a new danger, right?
 I now know how I should use Twitter
 and how I shouldn't use Twitter, right?
 I like to provoke people into thinking.
 I don't want to provoke people into outrage.
 It's not fun.
 It's not a good thing for humans to do, right?
 And I think that when you get people into outrage,
 they take sides and taking sides is really bad.
 But I think that we're all beginning to see this.
 And I think that actually I'm very optimistic
 about how things will evolve because,
 I wonder how much productivity has Twitter
 and social media has taken out of humanity?
 Because how many now,
 I mean, so the good thing about Twitter is it gives power.
 So it gives voice to minorities, right?
 And that's good in some degree,
 but I wonder how much voice does it give to
 all sorts of other problems that don't need this emerge?
 By the way, when you say minorities, I think,
 or at least if I were to agree with you,
 what I would say is minorities broadly defined
 any small groups of people that,
 it magnifies the concerns of the small versus the big.
 That is good to some degree.
 But I think, I mean, I have to be careful
 because I think I have a very,
 I mean, I think that the world isn't that broken, right?
 I think the world is pretty cool place.
 I think academia is really great.
 I think climate change presents
 a really interesting problem for humanity that we will solve.
 I like how you said it's a pretty cool problem
 for civilization.
 It's a big one.
 Well, it's a bunch of, I wanna-
 There's a bunch of really, really big problems
 that if solved can significantly improve
 the quality of life or learn,
 that ultimately is what we're trying to do,
 improve like how awesome life is
 for the maximum number of people.
 Yeah, and I think that the coming back to consciousness,
 I don't think the universe is doomed to heat death, right?
 It's one of the optimists.
 That's why I want to kind of nudge you
 into thinking that time is fundamental
 because if time is fundamental,
 then suddenly you don't have to give it back.
 The universe just constructs stuff.
 And what we see around us in our construction,
 I know everyone's worried about how fragile civilization is.
 And I mean, look at the fundamentals.
 We're good until the sun expands, right?
 We've got quite a lot of resource on earth.
 We're trying to be quite cooperative.
 Humans are nice to each other
 when they're not under enormous stress.
 But coming back to the consciousness thing,
 are we going to send human beings to Mars
 or conscious robots to Mars?
 Or are we gonna send some hybrid?
 And I don't know the answer to that question right now.
 I guess, you know,
 Elon's gonna have a pretty good go at getting there.
 I'm not sure whether, I have my doubts,
 but I'm not qualified.
 You know, I'm sure people have their doubts
 that computation works, but I've got it working.
 And I, you know.
 And most of the cool technologies we have today
 and take for granted, like the airplane,
 a aforementioned airplane, were things that people doubted.
 Every, like majority of people doubted
 before they came to life and they come to life.
 And speaking of hybrid AI and humans,
 it's fascinating to think about all the different ways
 that hybridization, that merger can happen.
 I mean, we have, currently have the smartphones,
 so there's already a hybrid,
 but there's all kinds of ways that hybrid happens,
 how we and other technology play together,
 like a computer, how that changes.
 The fabric of human civilization is like wide open.
 Who knows?
 Who knows?
 If you remove,
 if you remove cancer,
 if you remove major diseases from humanity,
 there's going to be a bunch of consequences
 we're not anticipating.
 Many of them positive, but many of them negative.
 Many of them, most of them, at least I hope,
 are weird and wonderful and fun
 in ways that are totally unexpected.
 And we sitting on a porch with a bottle of Jack Daniels
 and a rocker will say,
 kids these days don't appreciate
 how hard we had it back in the day.
 I gotta ask you,
 speaking of nudging,
 you and Josje Bach nudge each other on Twitter
 quite a bit in wonderful intellectual debates.
 And of course, for people who don't know Josje Bach,
 he's this brilliant guy.
 He's been on the podcast a couple of times.
 You tweeted, or he tweeted,
 Josje Bach, everyone should follow him as well.
 You should definitely follow Mr. Lee Cronin,
 Dr. Lee Cronin.
 He tweeted, dinner with Lee Cronin.
 We discussed that while we can translate
 every working model of existence into a Turing machine,
 the structure of the universe might be given
 by wakes of non-existence in a pattern generated
 by all possible automata which exist by default.
 And then he followed on saying face to face is the best.
 So the dinner was face to face.
 What is Josje talking about in wakes, quote,
 wakes of non-existence in a pattern generated
 by all possible automata which exist by default.
 So automata exists by default, apparently.
 And then there's wakes of non-existence.
 What the hell is non-existence in the universe?
 That's, and also in another conversation,
 you tweeted, it's state machines all the way down,
 which presumably is the origin story
 of this dinner discussion.
 And then Josje said, again, nudging, nudging,
 nudging slash trolling.
 Josje said, you've seen the light, welcome friend.
 Many foundational physicists effectively believe
 in some form of hypercomputation.
 Lee is coming around to this idea.
 And then you said, I think there are notable differences.
 First, I think the universe does not have to be a computer.
 Second, I want to understand how the universe emerges,
 constructors that build computers.
 And third is that there is something below church touring.
 Okay, what the heck is this dinner conversation about?
 Maybe, and put another way, maybe zooming out a little bit,
 are there interesting agreements and disagreements
 between you and Josje Bach that can elucidate
 some of the other topics we've been talking about?
 Yeah, so Josje has an incredible mind
 and he's so well-read and uses language really elegantly.
 It bamboozles me at times.
 So often I'm describing concepts in a way
 that I built from the ground up.
 And so we misunderstand each other a lot.
 And he's floating in the clouds, is that what you're saying?
 Something like, not quite, but I think so.
 This concept of a Turing machine.
 So Turing machines, I would argue,
 and I think this is not, the Turing machine,
 the universe is not a Turing machine.
 Biology is not even a Turing machine, right?
 And because Turing machines don't evolve, right?
 There is this problem that people see Turing machines
 everywhere, but isn't it interesting,
 the universe gave rise to biology,
 that gave rise to intelligence,
 that gave rise to Alan Turing,
 who invented the abstraction of the Turing machine
 and allowed us to digitize.
 And so I've been looking for the mystery
 at the origin of life, the origin of intelligence,
 and the origin of this.
 And when I discussed with Josje,
 I think Josje, he was saying,
 well, the universe, of course,
 the universe is a Turing machine.
 Of course, there's a hypercomputer there.
 And I think we got kind of trapped in our words and terms
 because of course it's possible for a Turing machine
 or computers to exist in the universe.
 We have them.
 But what I'm trying to understand is,
 where did the transition of continuous discrete occur?
 And this is because of my general foolishness
 of understanding the continuous.
 But I guess what I'm trying to say is,
 there were constructors before there were abstractors,
 because how did the universe abstract itself
 into existence?
 And it goes back to earlier saying,
 could the universe of intelligence have come first?
 What's a constructor?
 What's an abstractor?
 So the abstractor is the ability of, say,
 of Alan Turing and Gödel and Church
 to think about the mathematical universe
 and to label things.
 And then from those labels to come up
 with a set of axioms with those labels
 and to basically understand the universe mathematically
 and say, okay, I can label things.
 Where did the label come from?
 Where is the prime labeler?
 Even if the universe is not a Turing computer,
 does that negate the possibility
 that a Turing computer can simulate the universe?
 Like, just because the abstraction was formed
 at a later time, does that mean that abstraction,
 this is to our cellular automata conversation.
 You were taking away some of the magic
 from the cellular automata because very intelligent
 biological systems came up with that cellular automata.
 Well, this is where the existence is the default, right?
 Is it, does the fact that we exist
 and we can come up with a Turing machine,
 does that mean the universe has to be
 a Turing machine as well?
 But can it be a Turing machine though?
 That's a, so there has to be and it can't be.
 Can it be?
 Sure.
 I don't know, I don't understand if it has to be or not.
 Can it be?
 But can the universe have Turing machines in it?
 Sure.
 They exist now.
 I'm wondering though, maybe, and this is really
 if things get really hairy, is I think the universe,
 maybe in the past, did not have the computational power
 that it has now.
 This is almost like a law of physics kind of,
 so the computational power is not,
 you can get some free lunch?
 Yeah, I mean, the fact that we now,
 we sit here in this period in time
 and we can imagine all these robots
 and all these machines and we built them.
 And so we can easily imagine going back in time
 that the universe was capable of having them,
 but I don't think it can.
 So the universe may have been a lot dumber computationally?
 And I think that's why I don't want to go back
 to the time discussion, but I think it has
 some relationship with it.
 The universe is basically smarter now than it used to be
 and it's gonna continue getting smarter over time
 because of novelty generation and the ability
 to create objects within objects within objects.
 You know, there's a, perhaps it's grounded in physics,
 there's this intuition of conservation,
 that stuff is conserved.
 Like you're not, you've always had all, everything,
 you're just rearranging books on the bookshelf through time.
 So, okay.
 You're saying like new books are being written.
 Which laws you wanna break?
 At the origin of the Big Bang,
 you had to break the second law
 because we got order for free.
 Well, what I'm telling you now
 is that the energy isn't conserved in the universe.
 Oh, it was the second law.
 Okay, I got you.
 So because, but not in a mad way.
 Okay, so computation potentially is not conserved,
 which is a fascinating idea.
 Intelligence is not conserved.
 Complexity is not conserved.
 Mm-hmm.
 I suppose that's deeply connected to time being fundamental.
 The natural consequence of that is if time is fundamental
 and the universe is inflating in time, if you like,
 then there are one or two conservation laws
 that we need to have a look at.
 And I wonder if that means the total energy
 of the universe is actually increasing over time.
 And I might, this may be completely ludicrous,
 but we do have all this dark energy that's,
 we have some anomalies, let's say,
 dark matter and dark energy.
 If we don't add them in, galaxy,
 it's so dark matter, I think, doesn't hold,
 you know, you need to hold the galaxies together
 and there's some other observational issues.
 Could dark energy just be time?
 So figuring out what dark energy is
 might give us some deep clues about this,
 not just time, but the consequences of time.
 Yeah, so it could be that, I mean,
 I'm not saying there's perpetual motions allowed
 in this free lunch, but I'm saying,
 if the universe is intrinsically asymmetric
 and it appears to be, and it's generating novelty
 and it appears to, couldn't that just be mechanistically
 how reality works?
 Mm-hmm.
 And therefore, I don't really like this idea
 that the, and so I want to live in a deterministic universe
 that is undetermined.
 Yeah.
 Right?
 The only way I can do that is if time is fundamental.
 Because otherwise, it's all the rest of it's just,
 it's just sleight of hand because the physicist will say,
 yes, everything's deterministic,
 Newton is, Newtonian mechanics is deterministic,
 quantum mechanics is deterministic,
 let's take the Everrhenium view.
 And then basically we can just draw out
 this massive universe branching
 but it closes again and we get it all back.
 And don't worry, you're feeling a free will is effective.
 But what the physicists are actually saying
 is the entire future is mapped out
 and that is clearly problematical.
 And clearly...
 That's not so clear.
 Yeah.
 It's just, it's just problematic.
 It, well, yeah, yeah, so it's...
 Because that maybe is just the way it is.
 It's problematic to you, a particular creature along the way.
 I want to reduce the number of beliefs
 I need to understand the universe.
 So if time is fundamental,
 I don't need to have magic order at the beginning
 and I don't need a second law.
 But you do need the magical belief
 that time is fundamental.
 Well, I need the, I need the observation that I'm seeing
 to be just the how it is all the way down.
 But the earth also looks flat
 if you, if you agree with your observation.
 So we can't necessarily trust our observation
 I know the earth isn't flat
 because I can send this satellite into space.
 I can fly.
 No, but now you see, now you're using the tools
 of science and the technology of science.
 But I'm using, but I'm saying
 I'm going to do experiments that start to show.
 I mean, I think that it's worth, so if you can't...
 So if I cannot do an experiment or a thought experiment
 that will test this assumption,
 then the assumption is without merit really in the end.
 You know, that's, it's fine.
 Yeah.
 So...
 That's a beautiful idea you made.
 That's a beautiful idea you hold yourself to.
 That's, that's a, that's given that you think deeply
 in a philosophical way, you think about some
 of these really important issues
 and you have theoretical frameworks, like assembly theory.
 It's really nice that you're always grounded
 with experiment.
 That's all I have.
 That's so refreshing.
 That's so beautifully refreshing.
 Now that we're holding you to the grounded
 and experiment to the harsh truth of reality,
 let me ask the big ridiculous question.
 What is the meaning of this whole thing?
 What's the meaning of life?
 Why?
 This time is fundamental.
 It's marching forward and along this long timeline,
 come along a bunch of descendants of apes
 that have come up with cellular automata
 and computers and now computers.
 Why?
 I have so many different answers to this question.
 It depends on what day.
 I would say that given the way
 of the conversation we had today, I'd say the meaning.
 Well, we make our own meaning.
 I think that's fine.
 But I think the universe wants to explore
 every possible configuration that it's allowed us to explore.
 And this goes back to the kind of question
 that you're asking about Yasha and the existence
 and non-existence of things, right?
 So if the universe is a Turing machine that's churning
 through a lot of states
 and you think about combinatorial theory
 before assembly theory, so everything is possible.
 What Yasha and I were saying is,
 well, not everything is possible.
 We don't see the combinatorial explosion.
 We see something else.
 And what we see is evidence of memory.
 So there clearly seems to be some interference
 between the combinatorial explosion of things
 and what the universe allows.
 And it's like this kind of constructive,
 destructive interference.
 So maybe the universe is not just about,
 it is assembling objects in space and time.
 And those objects are able to search more space and time.
 And the universe is just infinitely creative.
 And I guess I'm searching for why the universe
 is infinitely creative, is it infinitely creative?
 And maybe the meaning is just simply to make
 as many objects, create as many things as possible.
 And I see a future of the universe that doesn't result
 in the heat death of the universe.
 The universe is gonna extract every ounce of creativity
 it can out of it,
 because that's what we see on earth, right?
 And if you think that,
 almost like intelligence is not conserved,
 that maybe creativity isn't either.
 Maybe like, it's an infinite well.
 So like creativity is ultimately tied to novelty.
 You're coming up with cool new configurations of things,
 and maybe that just can continue indefinitely.
 And this human species that was created along the way
 is probably just one method,
 like that's able to ask the universe about itself.
 It's just one way to explore creativity.
 Maybe there's other meta levels on top of that.
 Like obviously as a collective intelligence
 will create organisms,
 maybe there'll be organisms that ask themselves questions
 about themselves in a deeper, bigger picture way
 that we humans do.
 First to ask questions about the humans,
 and then construct some kind of hybrid systems
 that ask themselves about the collective aspect.
 Just like some weird stacking
 that we can't even imagine yet.
 And that stacking, I mean,
 I have discussed this stacking a lot with Sarah Walker,
 who's a professor of physics and astrobiology at ASU.
 And we argue about how creative the universe is gonna be,
 and is it as deterministic as all that,
 because I think she's more of a free will thinker,
 and I'm of a less free will thinker,
 but I think we're beginning to converge
 and understanding that.
 Because there's simply a missing understanding.
 Right now we don't understand how the universe,
 we don't know what rules the universe has
 to allow the universe to contemplate itself.
 So asking the meaning of it
 before we even know what those rules are is premature.
 But my guess is that it's not meaningless,
 and it isn't just about that.
 And there are three levels of meanings.
 Obviously the universe wants us to do stuff.
 We're interacting with each other,
 so we create meaning in our own society,
 in our own interactions with humanity.
 But I do think there is something else going on.
 But because reality is so weird,
 we're just scratching at that.
 And I think that we have to make the experiments better,
 and we have to perhaps join across,
 not just for the computation lists.
 And what I tried to do with Yasha is meet him halfway,
 say, well, what happens if I become a computation list?
 What do I gain?
 A lot, it turns out,
 because I can make Turing machines in the universe.
 Because on the one hand, I'm making computers,
 which are state machines inspired by Turing.
 On the other hand, I'm saying they can't exist.
 Well, clearly I can't have my cake and eat it,
 so there's something weird going on there.
 So then, did the universe have to make
 a continuous to discrete transition,
 or is the universe just discrete?
 It's probably just discrete.
 So if it's just discrete, then there are,
 I will then give Yasha his Turing-like property
 in the universe,
 but maybe there's something else below it,
 which is the constructor that constructs a Turing machine,
 that then constructs, you know,
 it's a bit like you generate a computing system
 that then is able to build an abstraction
 that then recognizes,
 it can make a generalizable abstraction,
 because human beings, with mathematics,
 have been able to go on and build physical computers,
 if that makes any sense.
 And I think that's the meaning.
 I think that's, you know, as far as we can,
 the meaning will be further elucidated
 with further experiments.
 Well, you mentioned Sarah.
 I think you and Sarah Walker
 are just these fascinating human beings.
 I'm really fortunate to have the opportunity
 to be in your presence, to study your work,
 to follow along with your work.
 I'm a big fan.
 Like I told you offline,
 I hope we get a chance to talk again
 with perhaps just the two of us,
 but also with Sarah.
 That's a fascinating dynamic for people who haven't heard,
 I suppose on Clubhouse is where I heard you guys talk,
 but you have an incredible dynamic.
 And I also can't wait to hear you and Yasha talk.
 So I think if there's some point in this predetermined
 or yet to be determined future,
 where the three of us, you and Sarah,
 or the four of us with Yasha could meet and talk
 would be a beautiful future.
 And I look forward to most futures,
 but I look forward to that one in particular.
 Lee, thank you so much
 for spending your valuable time with me today.
 Thanks, Lex.
 It's been a pleasure.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation
 with Lee Cronin.
 To support this podcast,
 please check out our sponsors in the description.
 And now let me leave you with some words
 from the mad scientist Rick Sanchez
 of Rick and Morty fame.
 To live is to risk it all.
 Otherwise, you're just an inert chunk
 of randomly assembled molecules
 drifting wherever the universe blows you.
 Thank you for listening
 and hope to see you next time.