Where do you I is it okay here? Yep. Close to my
We we're already getting sound, so Okay. That's fine. And the only
question is for the camera, it may be too big. No?
No. No. It will be fine. It's okay? Or on the tie, would you
prefer? No. I think there is better. It's better. Have it on the tie. It
will make noise. On the shirt. Yep. Okay. Sounds great. As
long as you are happy, I'm happy. We
stick exactly to the questions that I've sent you. Only,
upfront a little introduction. Oh, okay. I think you can
introduce yourself. Right? You you've done that. Yeah. If you want me, I
can, okay. So
in terms of the questions, I mean, you can choose whatever you like.
If you feel that you want to ask another follow-up question.
I need to draw at least a slight, slight, curtains. Yeah.
Too much light. But then you don't see the river.
Well Is it okay if I sit
here? Unfortunately, I only
see a negative picture of you. Just like the outline.
My camera doesn't work like that. It's sorry? Can you move a little
bit over here to your right? Or we can close this curtain.
Yeah. We could try. We could try. We can try.
Yeah. As long as you don't need the river, it should be
Yeah. But then do you have enough light or we need to turn on some
light for you? That that one would be great. Yeah. That should
totally do it. Yeah. The the other thing we can do in the post production,
so we have enough light. We have enough sun from you.
Okay. And so we can You think it's okay? How
about the chair? Is it, sufficiently high? I'll
adjust my camera. Don't worry about that. You can lower it.
Yeah. Okay. Does that look
good? I think so. I'll get a little bit
closer. Did you change the height of this or no? No, no. Because that can
also, we can change that also.
I lost just one of the screws here in my tripod when I
was traveling with the train here, so I always have to make sure it doesn't
fall off the other side. But the the
is it stable? It's okay. At least so, yeah. Just make
sure that it's straight, because it looks a little tilted.
Yeah, exactly. Better? Now it's better, I think.
Yeah. You have a good eye for that. Well, you're a physicist, right?
Now we also do have a recording.
Looks good? Looks amazing.
Okay. And now I'll send my piece. Hello. In terms
of the light, is it good this way or you want it close, in this
direction? A little bit more too too. Yeah. You can tilt it. Yeah.
It's up I don't know how it looks. I
can actually turn it around. You see here? Ah.
But then there is some light on top of me. Where is that coming
from? I think from the curtains, from the view, between the
curtains. Because that doesn't look good, actually.
Okay. So if we do that
Okay. Maybe now it's better.
Yeah. Now now it's better. Definitely. I'm okay. Excellent.
Okay. Let me do one clap.
That's the sign where I can synchronize it. Hello
and welcome everybody to another episode of Stalowave. Io.
Today, we are attending Curis 2024, and
we just got an amazing interview guest, professor
Alfi Loeb from Harvard University. Very welcome
to Startuprate.l. Can you briefly introduce
yourself? It's a great pleasure to join you. My name
is Avi Loeb. Fundamentally, I'm a curious farm
boy. I was born on a farm and was connected to
nature since a young age and became a scientist
so that I can answer questions about nature without
needing to listen to the adults in the room telling me the answers,
telling me their opinions. And I
was chair of the astronomy department at Harvard for 9 years,
the longest serving chair. I also served as the
founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, and I'm
the current director of Harvard's Institute For Theory and
Computation. I worked primarily on
theoretical astrophysics, studies of black
holes, the first stars in the universe, and most recently
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence because we don't find it
here on earth. That's already
pretty exciting. Since you are a
scientist, what do you believe are the most exciting
future avenues for scientific research? Well,
there are some fundamental questions that we don't have the answer to.
I call these the known unknowns. In other
words, these are things we know that we don't know.
For example, what most of the matter in the universe is,
85% of the matter is of a substance that
we never identified, never detected. And
so we are still in the dark, and it's called dark matter.
There is also the substance that makes up the
vacuum. You might think the vacuum is empty, but
in fact not so. It turns out that there is some energy
per unit volume and that is called dark
energy. And we know that it exists because the universe is not just
expanding, but, its expansion is accelerating
over time. And, that means that there is a
repulsive gravity pushing the universe apart.
And the question is, what is the origin of this dark
energy? Why is it there? Why isn't the vacuum
completely empty, for example?
And we also know that, if we go back in time, there
was a beginning to the universe, the big bang,
and we don't know what happened before the big bang. These
are fundamental questions that we don't have answers to. We also
don't know what happens inside the black hole.
Where does the matter that falls into a black hole, where does it
collect? Does it collect at the center or
does it go somewhere else? Like water going down the
sewer of our homes.
So these are just some fundamental questions about the universe, but there
are many more that I can mention.
And I think the most fundamental in my mind is
where did we come from? What was there before the Big Bang?
And in particular, I'm curious to know whether the
Big Bang was created artificially by a scientist.
Because if we ever understand how to unify quantum mechanics and
gravity, we might have quantum gravity engineers
that would have the recipe for creating a baby
universe in the laboratory. That are
all very interesting avenues for future research.
What emerging technologies do you think will have the
greatest impact on scientific advancement in the next few years?
Talking about the instruments you can use for research.
Well, in terms of instruments, of course, the most
important is computers, if you call it
instruments. I mean, that improves our cognitive
abilities, and artificial intelligence, machine learning
are entering into the scientific study of large data
sets and
also going through data that the
human brain is unable to
process and that already starts
entering physics and biology.
But I see a great future ahead for artificial
intelligence machine learning. There is an interesting
question of whether those computer
programs will be able to identify
trends in data and figure out new laws of
nature that we have never figured out before. So will they
behave like scientists? And if they do, will
I be out of a job? For the near
future, I don't think so. I still think that
at least many people complain that AI systems are hallucinating.
I wouldn't hold that against them because I have a lot of summer
interns that are hallucinating, but, they are
not at the level where they can innovate, the way scientists,
human scientists do, but perhaps in the future they will.
And, I'm open minded about that. I think that will be the biggest breakthrough
when science will be done,
with, the aid of AI. And then the question is who to give the
Nobel prize? It's already a good question right now
because there
was a
major problem in biology that was resolved
by AI. And, you know,
the question is who should be rewarded for
that.
Now, maybe you remember, but it was
what's the name of this British AI company that
solved
the structure of
proteins. The protein folding problem, yeah. That
was it. I mean, I can say it if you want.
Protein folding, it was solved by,
a company, an AI company in England.
But I forgot the name of the company.
Protein Folding.
Here it says deep mind? Yes, deep mind. Exactly. Deep mind.
So I can just say it and then you can. Yeah.
For example, there is already a precedent of the DeepMind
company being able to solve the
protein folding challenge
that was really very difficult to solve for
human scientists, but this AI code
that they developed went through so many configurations that it
was able to figure out how
proteins fold when they have very big
molecules. So that's just one example where a major
challenge in science was resolved by AI already.
And, we're talking about research, research instruments,
and of course everybody here is interested in startups who are listening to
this. Where would you see the role in startups and how they
can contribute? You've already hinted at AI. Do do you
see a big potential there? Yeah. The most important
thing about the innovation is that one should,
take risks because very often the most important
breakthroughs are not recognized ahead of time. Otherwise they would
be accomplished quickly. And so you need to explore
territories that are unknown and very often you
fail. But you do that because there is a chance that you will be
successful. And if you do you are successful, it would be a
major advance. And so having startups is
one way of exploring the land of the unknown,
where, people with innovative ideas
try to materialize them and make them real and,
very often they fail. But it's part of the process
of arriving at important breakthroughs. And that's
why startups are so important. The same is true about
the science. I do think that funding should be given, a small
fraction of funding should be given to risky propositions that
are not proven and, nevertheless, could
change the landscape of scientific discovery.
So startups play this role in the commercial sector where they
explore opportunities and I'm
very much in the view of letting many flowers bloom
because you never know which would be the most beautiful flower ever
seen. Mhmm. You kind of,
hit already next 2 questions that I had on my list.
We talked about startups and working together in scientific
research. What are the main challenges that startups face when
trying to contribute to scientific research?
Surprisingly, there is a lot of conservatism
in science, even though it's supposed to be
open minded endeavor with blue sky
research in the sense that it's not supposed to be applied.
But what happens is that there is another
factor that enters the calculation, and that's the human
ego, which is very prominent in academia.
And, on the one hand you have scientists who
are driven by their ego to get honors, awards, recognition,
and are building echo chambers around them of students and
postdocs. But at the same time they are
pushing back against the new ideas because they
got their stature, their position, their status, their
recognition based on past knowledge. And so when
they see new knowledge emerging, for example, when they
see anomalies, deviations, outliers
from what is known, they often dismiss it or shove it under the
rug or say the uncertainties are too big. They
basically raise enough dust in the air to claim that they
don't see anything new. And they do it because they
protect their territory of past knowledge.
And unfortunately that has the negative
effect of suppressing innovation because when young people see
that, they worry about their careers, their job
opportunities, and and as a result, they don't take risks.
They don't pay attention to anomalies. They don't explore
ideas that deviate from what the senior established
people already, announced as valid
areas of research. And it gets to a point where the
theoretical physics community, for example, has been working
for 50 years on, how to unify
quantum mechanics and gravity in the form of string theory, which
is a theory that is mathematically
very sophisticated, but has not been demonstrated
to be true by any experiment. And doing that for
50 years means that the entire community is
basically driven by societal forces. What
by some leaders that say this is interesting for us to
explore without any experimental verification. We know from the history of
science that you always need evidence to guide you and you may be going
in the wrong direction. Nobody would have forecasted quantum mechanics to be
real, unless experiments would lead us in that direction.
We still don't understand quantum mechanics. So my point is that
we really need to be humble, in physics and let
experiments guide us. And we can have a lot of ideas,
but at the same time we should allow
them to be ruled out by experiments and then move on. And if experiments
are not available, there is, we should let
other ideas, appear. And
that's not the case in theoretical physics at the moment. There is only one
mainstream even though it didn't get support from data.
And so I see that as driven
by intellectual gymnastics, by people trying to show off, just
show that they are smart by societal forces, not
the raw curiosity about nature that is supposed to lead
science. And it's not just in theoretical
physics, it's in many other areas where,
progress was suppressed. I mean, even when,
Alfred Wegener realized in 1910
that the continents perhaps were all
together based on the fact
that they match like a jigsaw puzzle. His theory was
ridiculed by experts for decades and he died
in the thirties thinking that it will never be
accepted. But then in the 19 fifties, evidence about
rocks and about vegetation confirmed it. That's a
classic example where the progress was delayed by 40
years. And the same is true in many other frontiers,
where the correct ideas were simply ridiculed by
experts that wanted to maintain their,
intellectual turf. Mhmm. Talk about
investments in research here. How important is investment in
technology and science for the future of research? Technology,
goes hand in hand with science because fundamental science,
allows us to understand nature. And then once we understand
nature we can use it for our
purposes. And, the know how
of how to use nature for what we want to accomplish comes
from fundamental science and therefore technology always
makes use of fundamental science and, that's
why science and technology should be funded.
Now technology is using what we know about science for
the benefit of humanity. That's extremely important,
because once, for example, we developed the
computer after understanding how to make transistors,
then, and that came from understanding quantum mechanics,
you know, so everything is entangled, but the new technologies
that were developed allow science to progress
much more because those technologies can be used in
sensors that are taking data,
and they allow us to do computations, meaning processing
of the data. So I think it's extremely important to support
both fundamental science and technology
because they progress hand in hand. The strange
thing is that so much money was made in the
commercial sector that you might find that innovation,
actually happens more routinely in companies these days
than in academia, or maybe they sort of go
at similar levels in the case of
quantum computers or in the case of AI,
whereas it was supposed to be the responsibility
of academia to really promote innovation
much more than people who are aiming to make
money. Talking about the
impact on society, how do you envision new
scientific advancements impacting everyday life and
society as a whole? I think,
science and technology is what makes us look like an
intelligent civilization because if you read the news
every day, you realize, you know, we are doing a lot of foolish
things. We invest $2,400,000,000,000
every year worldwide in military
budgets, meaning in conflicts, in trying to kill each
other. That makes very little sense.
We engage routinely in zero sum games,
conflicts over territories,
whether, you know, these are just territories on the rock that was left
over from the formation of the sun. It's a tiny real estate
that we are focusing on. There is so much more real estate in
interstellar space if we were to look up.
And the intelligent thing to do is
actually for us to work together, to collaborate, not to engage
in conflicts because science is an infinite
sum game. It's not a zero sum game. If we
gain knowledge, everyone benefits from it.
So what I argue for is science and technology
are much better than politics, Because politics is
very often a zero sum game, whereas science and technology
are infinite sum games.
Coming close to the end. Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs
looking to enter the tech and science startup scene?
My advice is follow your passion and do
not do not listen to the adults in the room
because the adults in the room first may not have
good ideas about the future, and secondly,
they may not understand how innovative your
ideas are. And so take the future in
your hands and shape it to be
better than the past. And that is the approach of a
kid that, is independent.
And, you know, that's the approach that I like. Being
62 years old, I'm still the kid that I was
early on in my life, I realized
that it's much better to do the right
thing than to listen to people in the room telling you
what is right to do. And I very much encourage
young people to stay young in spirit and
follow their passion and shape the world to be better because there is
a lot of room for improvement.
I would just need to
start another video because there's a limit of 20 minutes per
recording. Okay. We just go to the last question. Mhmm.
Looking ahead, in your opinion, what will be the most significant
scientific breakthrough in the next decade and how can
startups position themselves to be part of it?
In my mind, the most important development
in the future would be artificial intelligence taking over our
life.
And perhaps augmenting human intelligence.
If we have a way of connecting the human
brain to a computer chip. I
call it putting a chip on our shoulder. It's already being
done, but in the future it might
be even more common.
And so the question is, what will it do? And
artificial intelligence, at some point will have enough parameters
to, have more capacity
than the human brain. We have a 100,000,000,000
neurons in our brain and about
10,000 times more synapses that connect the neurons.
And artificial intelligence systems as of
now have somewhat less than that, but they grow in
the number of neurons in the artificial neural networks.
They grow exponentially with characteristic
doubling time of less than a couple of years. And
so within the next 10, 20 years, there
is a good chance that AI systems will
have more parameters than the human brain, than the number
of synapses in the human brain. So at that point,
phenomena that we attribute to humans such as,
consciousness or free will, might
be visible when we interact with those AI systems.
The other thing is that, if you go to graveyards,
what you see, the tradition, is putting a
tombstone, above the grave of a
person. And if you think about it, that's a very primitive approach.
Basically, a stone on which you engrave in a
few words what the person was about. And so the
entire lifetime of a person is summarized in a few words. And there
are 2 problems with that. 1 is that this message is static. The
amount of information in it is not
changing, and also that it's very little information.
Now granted there were a 117,000,000,000
people on earth in the last 10000000 years
and information was not a priority. I mean, we know that because
some traditions burn the bodies of dead people.
And that is basically an act of destroying the genetic information
about the person. So, for example, the new
horizons spacecraft that went to visit,
Pluto included a small box with the ashes
of Clyde Tombaugh, the person who discovered
Pluto. And if extraterrestrials were to find this box,
they would really wonder about the barbaric
act of our civilization in destroying any
information about the discoverer that it wants to commemorate.
It there would be much more information in a hair
taken from Tan Bao's body because it will have the DNA information
there than in the box of ashes. So that was not an intelligent
thing to do, to put a box full of no information about the person
you want to commemorate. But if you think about it,
in the future, tombstones might be replaced
by AI avatars, meaning, there will
be an AI system training on all the
digital information that we leave behind. Voice,
text, videos, And once a person
dies, this AI system could represent the
person and imitate the person in interaction with
living people. So in my mind, an AI avatar
of this type would be much better than a tombstone to
have over my grave. And in fact, there is a CEO of a
startup that contacted me recently and
asked if I'm allowing his new company
to make a replica of me. And, of
course, there are risks in allowing that, but I agreed
because I see it as an AI avatar that
if I'm asked in the future to participate in podcasts like
this one, I could send my avatar to answer all the questions.
If it's good enough, it will do a good job, And that would save
me time. Especially if
I die, this avatar would give a much better representation
of my body of work than a tombstone.
It was such a pleasure having you here. And the next time you send
your avatar, I send my avatar, and then make a recording together. Okay?
Thank you very much, professor Loeb. Thanks for having me.
Tada. We're good. Okay. Excellent. Thank you very
much. That went