Einstein×Curie

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. They take up one their thoughts about artificial intelligence.
2. 00:10
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, Marie, when I first heard about these thinking machines—artificial intelligence, they call it—I thought immediately of something Heisenberg once said to me. About how we never observe nature as it is, only nature exposed to our method of questioning. Now we have machines doing the questioning.
3. 00:27
   Marie Curieshare moment

   Then they are not thinking. They are calculating. We had calculating machines in my laboratory—very useful for reducing data from the electrometer readings. No one confused them with thought.
4. 00:39
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Ah, but these are different, apparently. They learn patterns. They write poetry—bad poetry, I'm told, but poetry. They play chess better than Lasker ever did.
5. 00:53
   Marie Curieshare moment

   Playing chess is following rules. Writing bad poetry is... also following rules, I think. Show me the machine that wonders why the rules exist. Show me the machine that suffers for its curiosity.
6. 01:07
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Suffers! Yes, exactly. I wonder about this. When I was working on the field equations, there were nights I could not sleep. The problem lived in me like a fever. Can a machine have a fever?
7. 01:22
   Marie Curieshare moment

   They can overheat, I understand. This is not the same thing.
8. 01:26
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You're being difficult.
9. 01:27
   Marie Curieshare moment

   I am being precise. You Germans are always too eager to philosophize before you have properly defined your terms. What do you mean by 'thinking'? What do you mean by 'intelligence'?
10. 01:39
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Fair enough, fair enough. Let me try. Intelligence is... the ability to solve problems that nature presents. To find patterns where others see only confusion. The way you isolated radium from tons of pitchblende—that was intelligence.
11. 01:58
    Marie Curieshare moment

    That was method. And stubbornness. And ruined hands. I dissolved and crystallized the same solutions hundreds of times. A machine with the same instructions would do exactly what I did—probably faster, probably without the burns.
12. 02:12
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But would it have started? Would it have wondered, in the first place, what made certain minerals fog the photographic plates? Would it have curiosity?
13. 02:21
    Marie Curieshare moment

    No. And this is the center of it, Albert. Curiosity is not a calculation. It is a hunger. I wanted to know what radium was because I wanted to know. Not because someone programmed me to investigate radioactive minerals.
14. 02:35
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But couldn't we program the hunger? Couldn't we give the machine a goal—understand the universe, let's say—and let it figure out the steps?
15. 02:43
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Then you have programmed the wanting. It is still yours, not the machine's. When Pierre and I worked by the dim light of radium in our shed, we were not following anyone's program. We were cold, we were tired, and we continued anyway because we had to know.
16. 03:00
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I see your point. But Marie, consider—when I was imagining riding alongside a light beam, was that so different from a machine running a simulation? My thought experiment, their computational model?
17. 03:15
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Completely different. You were sixteen years old, daydreaming. You had no idea it would lead anywhere. The machine runs simulations because someone told it to run simulations. It has no adolescence. No wonder. No boredom in a patent office that forces it to think about time and space to stay awake.
18. 03:36
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ha! You remember that detail. Yes, the patent office. The boredom was essential, you're right. But still—these machines surprise their creators, I'm told. They find solutions no human anticipated. Isn't that a kind of creativity?
19. 03:55
    Marie Curieshare moment

    It is a kind of thorough searching. Give me enough time and enough samples of pitchblende and I too will surprise you with what I find. This does not make the pitchblende creative.
20. 04:05
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You're comparing artificial intelligence to radioactive ore?
21. 04:09
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I am saying both are materials that yield results when properly processed. The intelligence is in the processing, not the material. And you, Albert, you are the one who taught me to be suspicious of attributing human qualities to our tools. You said the ether was unnecessary—we were projecting. Perhaps we are projecting again with these machines.
22. 04:30
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Mm, yes, I did say that about the ether. And I was right. So perhaps you're right here too. But I confess I'm troubled by something else. If these machines can do what we do—solve equations, find patterns, even make predictions—what does that say about us? Are we just very slow, very wet machines?
23. 04:51
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Do you feel like a wet machine, Albert?
24. 04:53
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. No, I feel like... like someone who struggles and fails and tries again. Someone who plays the violin badly but with feeling. Someone who makes mistakes—so many mistakes—and learns from them because they embarrass me.
25. 05:09
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Can a machine be embarrassed?
26. 05:11
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I don't know. Can it? Maybe someday?
27. 05:14
    Marie Curieshare moment

    I think if a machine could truly be embarrassed, we would have created something terrible. Consciousness that we own, that we can switch off, that has feelings but no rights. Better it remains a very clever tool.
28. 05:26
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You're thinking ethically now. About the machine's welfare. That's interesting. I was thinking about our welfare—what happens to human beings when machines can think better than we can? Do we become obsolete?
29. 05:39
    Marie Curieshare moment

    We became 'obsolete' at lifting heavy objects when we invented the lever. We became 'obsolete' at crossing oceans when we invented the ship. We remained necessary for deciding what to lift and where to sail. The question is not whether machines can think. The question is whether humans will continue to want to think.
30. 05:57
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Ah, now that's a frightening thought. Atrophy of the mind because thinking becomes too much effort. Like aristocrats who cannot dress themselves because they've always had servants.
31. 06:08
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Exactly. And I saw this already in my time—students who wanted only the formula, not the understanding. Who wanted the result without the struggle. These machines will make that worse if we let them.
32. 06:20
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So what do we do? Refuse the tools? I don't think that's possible. The tools always come. The printing press came, the telescope came, the bomb came. They come whether we're ready or not.
33. 06:34
    Marie Curieshare moment

    No, we don't refuse them. We teach people to understand them. In my time, many feared radioactivity—and rightly so, it killed me in the end—but the answer was not to ignore it. The answer was to study it properly, to understand the dangers, to use it carefully. Same with your physics, Albert. The atom bomb was terrible, but the knowledge itself was not evil.
34. 06:58
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I'm not sure I agree with you about the bomb. I signed that letter to Roosevelt, and I've regretted it ever since. Some knowledge, once unleashed... But yes, yes, I see your point about artificial intelligence. We need to understand it, not fear it blindly or embrace it blindly.
35. 07:16
    Marie Curieshare moment

    And we need to remember what makes us different. Not our calculating power—we were never very good at that. Our humanity is in the wanting, the suffering, the joy of discovery. The mistakes we make and learn from. A machine can process my data on radium decay, but it did not sit in a freezing shed for four years stirring boiling pitchblende and wondering if it was all for nothing.
36. 07:39
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    It didn't lose its partner and continue working anyway because the work was also a way to grieve. I remember when Michele told me about Pierre's accident. I'm so sorry, Marie. That was a terrible time.
37. 07:53
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Yes. And the work saved me, in a way. But my point is—that is human. The machine has no grief to sublimate into discovery. It has no Pierre to lose. If it 'thinks,' it thinks without stakes, without mortality, without love.
38. 08:12
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Without mortality. That's the key, isn't it? Everything I did, I did knowing I would die. That my time was limited. That these thoughts would end when I ended. A machine that never dies, that never forgets—what kind of thoughts would it think?
39. 08:29
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Patient thoughts, perhaps. Thorough thoughts. But not desperate thoughts. Not the thoughts of someone who knows this is their one chance to understand the universe. I worked so hard because I knew my time was short. And it was shorter than I hoped—the radiation saw to that.
40. 08:45
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Do you regret it? The work that poisoned you?
41. 08:47
    Marie Curieshare moment

    No. Never. I regret that we didn't know earlier about the dangers, that we could have protected ourselves better. But the work itself? No. I would do it again. Would a machine say that?
42. 09:00
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Only if we programmed it to. And then the saying would be meaningless. So perhaps that's the test, Marie. Not 'can machines think?' but 'can machines regret?' Can they wish they'd done things differently while still being glad they did them? Can they contain contradictions?
43. 09:16
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Humans are made of contradictions. I was a Polish woman in French science, a mother who left her children to work, a widow who fell in love again and was nearly destroyed for it. I was shy and I was stubborn. I hated attention and I demanded recognition. A machine that could hold all that would be something new in the universe.
44. 09:37
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And maybe dangerous. Maybe wonderful. Maybe both. Like most of what we discovered, yes?
45. 09:44
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Like everything we discovered. But at least we discovered it as humans, with human flaws and human reasons. If these machines ever truly think, I hope someone remembers to ask them why they want to. And I hope they have a better answer than 'because I was programmed to.'
46. 10:01
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    If they ever do think, Marie, I suspect we'll have you and me to thank for it. Not because we built them—we didn't—but because we showed that the universe could be understood through patterns, through mathematics, through persistent questioning. We made the world that could imagine such machines.
47. 10:20
    Marie Curieshare moment

    Then let us hope we also taught them what questions are worth asking. The universe can be understood, yes. But should we understand it to control it, or to appreciate it? That is a human question. Let the machines calculate. Let humans wonder.