Uploaded April 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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Dr. Philip Ball is a freelance science writer. He just wrote a book called "How Life Works", discussing the how the science of Biology has advanced in the last 20 years. We focus on the concept of Agency in particular.

He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford, and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He worked previously at Nature for over 20 years, first as an editor for physical sciences and then as a consultant editor. His writings on science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from cosmology to the future of molecular biology.

Philip is the author of many popular books on science, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books, while Serving the Reich was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Science Book Prize in 2014.

This is one of Tim's personal favourite MLST shows, so we have designated it a special edition. Enjoy!

Buy Philip's book "How Life Works" here: amzn.to/3vSmNqp

TOC:
00:00:00 Outside interview
00:09:17 Nativism / capacities
00:11:50 Generative AI
00:17:59 Inscrutability and agency
00:22:06 Agency on creativity
00:26:38 Could we make an agential GPT-4?
00:31:06 If it agential if you tell the agents what to do
00:35:40 What is agency?
00:44:29 Are agents real
00:48:32 Causality and agency
00:54:40 Ghost in the machine / intelligibility
01:00:11 Multi scale / organisation view
01:04:05 Collective intelligence
01:09:00 Canalisation
01:13:36 Intelligence is specialised
01:16:29 No free lunch
01:18:19 Super intelligence
01:22:05 Mind is flat / confabulated goals
01:25:07 Is planning/goals explicit?
01:30:17 Sentience in LLMs
01:34:56 Are LLMs simulators?
01:40:04 Could LLMs feel?
01:49:33 Digital physics view
01:51:46 Agential vs nonagential AI
01:54:02 Bostrom thinks goals and intelligence are separate
02:05:41 Simulation sharing

AI Transcript: docs.google.com/document/d/164FMAswgS9jAqxAaB5fkUtrJKMdq8rW7b94XgibvQ7Q/edit?usp=sharing

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