Lex Fridman: Best Way to Understand the Mind is to Build It
00:00:00.000 | - Hello Lex, I'm wondering if you recall
00:00:02.840 | what was the initial spark or inspiration
00:00:05.880 | that drove you towards work in AI?
00:00:07.840 | Was it when you were pretty young
00:00:10.160 | or was it in more recent years?
00:00:11.960 | - So I wanted to become a psychiatrist.
00:00:14.480 | I wanted to, I thought of it as kind of engineering
00:00:18.440 | the human mind by sort of manipulating it.
00:00:22.200 | I thought that's what I thought of psychiatry
00:00:23.800 | is by using words to sort of explore the depths of the mind
00:00:29.320 | and be able to adjust it.
00:00:30.680 | But then I realized that psychiatry can't actually do that.
00:00:33.960 | And modern psychiatry is more about
00:00:36.080 | sort of bioengineering is drugs.
00:00:38.680 | And so sort of, I thought that the way to really
00:00:42.720 | explore the engineering of the mind
00:00:44.560 | is the other side is to build it.
00:00:46.240 | And that's also when C++ really became the cool hot thing.
00:00:53.160 | So I learned to program at 12 and then never look back
00:00:57.440 | hundreds of thousands of lines later.
00:00:59.520 | Just, I love program.
00:01:00.560 | I love building.
00:01:01.400 | And that's to me is the best way
00:01:03.480 | to understand the mind is to build it.
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