Steve Petersen, ​​From Improv to Philosophy of AI

 

92-150. Steve Petersen

SPEAKERS

Steve Petersen, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report, conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Steve Petersen. Steve, hello, hi, thanks, Steve. Tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Steve Petersen  00:21

Well, first of all, before I forget, I wanted to thank you for doing this, because it’s such a fun idea. And like, I have, I was thinking about that, like I’d heard about this report and and I have weird, like, I don’t know, like, hang ups about self-promotion or pride, or anything that I don’t, I don’t, you know, maybe, but, like, I decided to do it, and then leading up to it, I got more and more, like, excited, looking forward to you. I had these little imaginary interviews in my head and stuff. So, yeah, it’s, it’s just, and I’ve listened, as I was just telling you, I listened to some of your episodes, and those were fun. So yeah, I’m really grateful you’re doing this.

 

Will Bachman  01:00

Well. The pressure’s on me now. I feel I have to live up to your your imaginary interviewer and be Please, yeah.

 

Steve Petersen  01:08

I mean, as it occurs to me, ever since I was a kid, like I would imaginary, well, not that young, like high school, I would imagine, like, David Letterman, you know, I get famous for something or, you know, like, I guess I had fantasies or fame at some point. And yeah, David, we

 

Will Bachman  01:22

could do a top 10 list. We’ll do a top 10 List.

 

Steve Petersen  01:26

I’d rather see. I’d rather you play the like, what’s the name of that comedian who was like, who would just do ridiculous things on his show, like, just guzzle a bottle of cooking oil or whatever? You know, he’s a, can’t think of his name now, but yeah, if you could do that, will that would,

 

Will Bachman  01:43

well, it’s an audio episode, so read it, listen. We’ll have to imagine that part of it. So okay, let’s jump in

 

Steve Petersen  01:50

the journey. Yeah. So I was thinking, Yeah, I like senior year of college. I I was torn. It’s funny to look back on this, but as I remember, I was torn between trying to be an actor and trying to be a philosopher, which, like, so my degree was in philosophy and math, but I was doing like, a lot of theater, like I had done something like 20 shows. What? Yeah. I mean, part of the beauty of Harvard at the time, I guess now they have a major but honestly, part of the reason I went to Harvard was that? I mean, there were obvious reasons. But then also, like, they did not have a theater major, which was appealing to me, because I knew I wanted to keep doing it, but I didn’t. I knew I wasn’t gonna like, or I thought at the time I wasn’t going to major in it, and so I thought, This is good, you know, if I had to, like, compete against theater majors, I wouldn’t get to do any shows. But, yeah, Harvard has, like, you know, 50 shows a semester, or they did in those days, right? And you audition for them all at once in a crazy casting week. And and I love that. So by the time I was a senior, I went in thinking I’d be like, physicist or an academic of some kind. I was just starting to get interested into in, like, math and philosophy. But by the time I was a senior, I was like, Oh, maybe I want to be an actor, and I was genuinely torn about that. And of course, like you can imagine my my parents weren’t super thrilled that my job prospects were between, like, philosopher and actor. But the weird thing is, like, I applied to grad school in both so it was like, I had to go to grad school. I didn’t know in what, but, like, compulsively, I had to say, stay in school, right? And and then I got rejected to all of them. And I knew that, like, I knew that acting grad school was a long shot. I that had been made clear to me, but I did not know that philosophy, grad school was a long shot. I had no I thought that was like, I thought that was one good thing about having a Harvard degree. For one thing is like, is, like, it would get you into grad school. But it turned out they’re about as selective like they they pick, like, that year they were picking like six out of 350 people. So I got rejected everywhere. So then, like, what do you do? So Evan Cohn, who’s in our class, and I and Brad Rouse, I don’t remember whose idea it was initially, but we decided to move to London like we had heard about this job exchange program. So we were just like, well, let’s live in London. Brad rouse was a couple classes behind us, but he took a year off. These were friends from theater, and so I did that. And I’d always been an anglophile, like I’d always been, I don’t know, just I’d always wanted to live in London, essentially. So I got a job, like as an administrative assistant, through literal nepotism, like my aunt worked at Kemper reinsurance, which had a branch in London at the time. And so I had, like, minimum wage job there and and that was, you know, that was really good, like, it was a nice international experience. And I saved up just enough to do the, like, backpacking through Europe for like, a month or two. And it was literally, like, $20 a day budget, including, like, the I slept on trains a lot and stuff. You know, right? And I had friends to stay with, like Jessica bond, who was in our class. She was in Vienna, and I met Elijah Siegler in our class in Greece. He had just finished writing, let’s go Greece and Turkey or editing it. And I had other like, high school friends, and Michelle, Henrietta was in Paris, so yeah, I got to stay on people’s couches a lot, and then, still not knowing what to do with my life, I took a job. Someone had told me, actually someone at Harvard summer school. I was proctoring at Harvard summer school, and like, someone had come from Japan to learn English, and she told me about this, like, Japanese Ministry of Education Program where they’ll pay a fair amount of money just to go out and be a native English speaker, speaking to, like, the public junior high schools, and

 

Will Bachman  05:48

you’re like, I’m qualified for that exactly,

 

Steve Petersen  05:51

although you say that that was another job I almost didn’t get. Like, they made me. So I applied for it from London, and they made me fly back to the Boston consulate for an interview, just for the interview. And I was like, You guys had better be kind of serious about, you know, like, I was still making minimum wage. Like, flying back the Boston was not a trivial thing. And, and then they didn’t offer me the job initially, I got wait listed. So, yeah, that was another sort of, like, the Harvard degree isn’t quite like the door opener I had dreamed it would be or something. Meanwhile, like at Kemper reinsurance, at first, I was like, alphabetizing and stuff, and they were kind of shocked that I was good at alphabetizing. And I’m like, Yeah, I feel like I have skills that I don’t know anyway. By the end, actually, I was, well, anyway, so

 

Will Bachman  06:38

by the end, you were you were doing what?

 

Steve Petersen  06:40

By the end, so that, okay, I don’t know if I’ve, you know, I so by the end, like I was one of the few people. So England was behind us in terms of technological sophistication, like people were still handwriting their college essays and stuff, right? Wow. And so, like, the, I guess, the story I like to tell us, they would, literally, they had these like databases of, you know, reinsurance is just betting, right? It’s just like actuarial stuff. And so they had these giant databases. And once a quarter, they would print out all these giant databases and then manually enter the data into an Excel spreadsheet. They would call all people managers, and everyone would work overtime to manually enter the data from like, this printout of a different database they had. And I was like, You guys, this is just data like, I bet I could write a program that takes this data from here and puts it in the spreadsheet for you. And so I did that, and then I left it. I was only there for like, six months, you know, because that’s was the work permit. So I left detailed instructions about how to do it next time. And I am sure that next quarter they just manually re input the data again. Wow.

 

Will Bachman  07:52

Okay, that probably that kind of thing probably happens surprisingly often. Maybe you’re the management consultant. Will I saw that? Copy and paste. There we go. So you you had traveled around, and then you heard about this program in Japan.

 

Steve Petersen  08:10

Oh, yeah, right, so I did that for three years, and that, of course, was a great experience. Yeah, I did not expect it to be three years, but, you know, it was well paid, and it was a fun experience. It was weirdly exhausting at times, as you may know to like, live in a different culture, but still, it was, yeah, really gratifying, really different experience.

 

Will Bachman  08:30

What are the most common questions you get about that period in your life?

 

Steve Petersen  08:35

One of the most what common question do I get? Oh, well, I don’t know if you remember will, but I’m super tall. I’m like, six foot six. So most people are interested in, like, what was it like to be six foot six in Japan? And actually they were, like, even there was an employer at my local video store who was about my height Japanese. So isn’t that all that? I mean, I think now the Japanese Ministry of Education, particular at the time, they were more careful about making sure everyone got, like, protein and milk. And maybe that had a lot to do with growth stereotypes. But, yeah, I was, I mean, I lived in the countryside, and it like my height in particular, there were, there was at least once where, like, a four year old would look at me and just burst into tears from, like, the scary foreigner.

 

Will Bachman  09:25

And did you end up, you know, learning the language, learning much about the culture, What? What? How did that period impact your life? Yeah,

 

Steve Petersen  09:36

I guess. Well, I mean, so certainly, yeah, I got a better taste of a different culture, which really just helps you triangulate right like I think, to be totally honest, when I had traveled to Europe a little bit and seen countries that were really different, they also felt sort of in some ugly sense, less developed or sophisticated compared to the US. And so it was easy to put the cultural differences. Down to that. But in Japan, that obviously was not the case, like it was just a very different culture, even though, obviously quite sophisticated in terms of, I don’t know whatever metric I was using, and so, yeah, I think I learned that. And it was also interesting that, like, the first few years, you know, the expat community really stuck together and spent a lot of time together. And I think I learned a little bit about that too, how hard it is to be, I mean, you know, it’s weird in Japan, in the countryside of Japan, we were kind of a minority, right? And they were still, like, you know, a lot of apartments wouldn’t rent to foreigners, like, just as a policy, yeah. I mean, that was fairly typical, of course, like, if you’re, if you’re white and American, that’s you’re only a little bit of, like, a suspicious foreigner. But if you’re like Southeast Asian, say that was, like, super suspicious, and in countryside Japan in those days. So I guess, yeah. I mean, it was interesting for in a lot of and then by the I was, you know, my job was to speak English, but I did start, I did try to study, and I did start getting at least I would say conversational in Japanese, like, at my best, I wouldn’t know hard words, like thermostat, but I could easily say, like, the thing on the wall that changes the temperature or whatever. And once I got to that point, like, then I started making more Japanese friends and hanging out more, just like speaking Japanese. But of course, I’ve forgotten most of it since, sadly. And yeah, in a way, it didn’t. It’s not, there aren’t obvious ways it impacted me, although I think it was kind of like a first for me. It was sort of a first step off the achiever track. I mean, like it was my first time to just kind of stop and be and take stock a little bit and and not feel like I had to do something well by some deadline,

 

Will Bachman  11:51

not in business school or law school or med school or consulting or investment banking, hanging out speaking English, right?

 

Steve Petersen  11:58

Hanging out speaking Japanese, speaking was drinking more beer than I had in college, enjoying myself. Yeah, it was. I got to travel more from there and stuff. So, yeah, that was a really good experience, but I was definitely thinking about the future. And it’s crazy to think that even while there, I was still thinking about being an actor, like now, I totally identify as a philosopher. I mean, I still love acting, and I still actually do acting part time, but it’s weird to think that I was seriously considering acting as a career, and I had decided to apply only to philosophy grad schools, partly because I did find I had missed philosophy. I was still like reading it and thinking about it, but partly because, as I remembered recently, my thinking was, well, you need some kind of job while you’re auditioning, and grad school is like a nice, flexible job. So I could do both, was the thought. And then, but then the school I got into Michigan, like, you know, Ann Arbor doesn’t really have a theater scene. I mean, not much of one. It had a little bit, but but. So then, and then, once I went to grad school, like that was a socialization thing where I, like, started to identify with myself more and more as a philosopher.

 

Will Bachman  13:11

So talk to me about you were in Japan, it’s like three years, and you’re saying, Okay, I need to do something with my life. And you started applied to grad school again, right? Why do you think you got in the second time? Had you expanded the list of schools or studied harder, or what?

 

Steve Petersen  13:29

Well, there’s some luck involved. That’s kind of a long story, but basically, a friend hinted to me something about one of my applicant, one of my application, that it’s a long story, and I don’t know, I maybe shouldn’t go into the details, because it was sort, I think it was sort of a violation of confidence in some way or another. It wasn’t a big, I don’t know, yeah, yeah. I suppose statute of limitations has run out for both us, but, but it was sort of luck, but it was also, I think, the fact that I had thought more carefully. I had sort of been rewriting my senior thesis. I had a better writing sample. I’d shown, I think, just the fact that I was applying, not straight out of college, but after having reflected for a while, probably also shown well, and it might have just been market dynamics. I mean, it partly, it’s just, you know, roll of the dice too, right? So, sure.

 

Will Bachman  14:24

Okay, so you apply to various grad schools. You get into Michigan, yep, started there. It sounds like, what around 1996

 

Steve Petersen  14:31

or seven? Oh, great, guess, yeah, 96 Yeah. Okay.

 

Will Bachman  14:35

So tell us about grad school. It was,

 

Steve Petersen  14:38

I was mostly miserable there. I feel

 

Will Bachman  14:42

sorry about that. I mean, actually,

 

Steve Petersen  14:44

it was great. I mean, I look back on it as a really crucial time, because the misery eventually forced me into therapy. Oh, and I found that, like, really helpful. Like, I really look I honestly don’t know I’m torn. So one of the kinds of philosophy I do. Is philosophy of science. And philosophers of science are traditionally a little bit suspicious of psychodynamics, let’s say psychoanalysis. But I have to say, I don’t know. I think just the fact that, like, I was forced to, like, think honestly about how I felt about things, was really good for me. And I feel like I it’s because I did that what felt like work, that I started to make, like, better choices. And like have since I was thinking recently, I guess, in anticipation of this podcast, like, about this sort of shape of how things went. And in a way, I feel like, you know, my family was somewhat dysfunctional, like it wasn’t abusive or anything like that, but my parents divorced when I was young, and they both had their problems, and depression runs in my family, and luckily, I myself I’m not, doesn’t seem I’m clinically depressed, but I was close in grad school. I was considering, like, getting prescriptions and such, but I figured I’d try therapy, and somehow, like, yeah, I feel like having reflected on that enough, I like, now I like, married someone I think is really wise and emotionally stable, and I feel like I have one of those, like, happy families. You know that, like, I’ve never read the book, but you know that Dostoevsky quote about All happy families are the same, and all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways or something. And yeah, I feel like I escaped from what could have been like a cycle of dysfunction into like, into like an actually well functioning and happy family, which is kind of awesome.

 

Will Bachman  16:36

That’s That’s awesome. What can you share? What were the insights that you got from therapy, like, what was making you miserable in grad school, and what was the insight that helped you get past that or through that, around it? Yeah, I

 

Steve Petersen  16:51

don’t know. I mean, I don’t even really know that it’s due to therapy. I think partly it was just practicing, like, noticing how I honestly felt okay, but roughly the like, what I thought I was depressed about was this woman I had a huge crush on, you know, she, at first it looked like she was really interested in me, but she was kind of seeing this other guy, you know, what, etc, etc. And early on, in the, in the I was with this, like, amateur therapist, because it was cheaper, you know, he was like, in training, okay? And early on, he was like, oh, you know, this sounds like it’s really about your dad. Maybe we should talk about your dad. And I kind of, like, rolled my eyes, like, Okay. Dr, Freud, like, yeah, okay, it’s really and then, like, a year later, I was thinking about this and that, and my dissertation advisor and trying to, you know, a lot of it, of course, was about the pressure of, like, a dissertation, and feeling like this defines who you are and whether you’re a talent or not, or, you know something about I was a tying achievement with, with, with my self esteem, right? And, and, like, a year later, I was like, oh, you know, I guess this is a lot. This is really about my relationship with my dad. Oh, like, oh, he the therapist. It was obvious to him all the whole time, I guess. But he had to wait like, a year or more for me to see that. Like, maybe my dad was relevant to the story. Okay? So I think it was just thing. I mean, again, my dad wasn’t, like, abusive or anything like that, in any straightforward way. But I think there was a lot of like things I came to realize that helped me, sort of, I don’t know, frame, put a narrative over my life that I don’t know gave me more, I want to say agency or something, I guess, all right, yeah. I think before that, for example, I was dating largely to like for how well that person would reflect on me, not consciously, of course. But I think, like, I was making sort of bad dating choices, among other things, and and then I started making healthier ones, all right,

 

Will Bachman  18:48

so keep going with the story. Okay.

 

Steve Petersen  18:53

Well, so grad school, so I did finish. I it was, it was touch and go, whether I’d finish. Because, like, you know, it was like, I mean, the Michigan philosophy department at the time. So Michigan at the time, and I think still is a step up from Harvard and philosophy, it was a prestigious school and and they were jealously, in those days, jealously guarding their prestige. So, like, they would kick people out without like, you know, you could have all A’s and all your classes, and they’d be like, No, you’re not cut out for this program. And it was like, Yeah. And it was an attrition rate of over 66% and they weren’t worried about the attrition rate. They were worried that it came too late. They were like, we have to kick more people out early instead of late. Wow, yeah. And it was just like, the morale was bad, and, and, and, yeah, it wasn’t clear whether I was and I had a dissertation advisor with whom I still sort of have, like, Stockholm Syndrome, like he’s he’s not particularly famous, which was a problem, you know, career wise, but he was super smart, and he gave me, like, three hours a week of individualized time. But it was three hours a week of like, you’re wrong about this, and you’re wrong about that, and you’re wrong about this other thing. And. Yeah, so that, you know, wasn’t super conducive to, like, finishing a dissertation, but I did eventually finish, thanks in part to therapy, maybe, and thanks in part to, like, I got a good cop thesis advisor as well, and that helped. And then, you know, job market, of course, is rough for philosophy. I didn’t I got a postdoc. I lived for two years in Kalamazoo, Michigan, teaching at Kalamazoo College, which was super fun. This, like the students were really good. It was a liberal arts, little liberal arts school, and I joined in. I’ve been doing improv, like I did improv in college, and I formed my own improv group in grad school, which was with therapy, another lifesaver, like just having that separate source of self esteem, and, of course, like being able to laugh like and, you know, shrug off some some stress. And so I kept doing improv in Kalamazoo. We did, we actually did a movie that ended up premiering in Hollywood at the AFI festival. It was like this mockumentary style, you know, improv we shot for like, 50 bucks, and somebody at AFI Film Festival liked it. What’s the name of the movie? It’s called comic evangelists. Okay, so my group, Western Michigan is very religious, and in particular my group, many of them had grown up fairly religious. And then there was one guy who was just like, very like flamboyantly gay, I guess, and had grown up in this traditionally religious, you know, and he had to struggle with growing up in this religious community. And so, in a way that it’s about a religious our improv group was not religious, but they all had, almost all of them had religious roots. And I was a pretty dyed mobile atheist by this point, and still am, but so I played the atheist who was dragged along on this, like road trip with these, like super cheerful evangelist. Improvisers, is

 

Will Bachman  21:54

this film available on YouTube or Vimeo or somewhere? Yeah, I

 

Steve Petersen  21:59

think you can see it for free on YouTube. Now I’m not sure they Yeah, it’s called comic evangelists. I It’s fun. You know, it’s a mockumentary.

 

Will Bachman  22:06

Okay, well, we’ll see if we can find a link for it.

 

Steve Petersen  22:11

So, yeah, I did that for two years, and then I got a tenure track job here in Buffalo, where I live now, Niagara University. And I hadn’t heard of Niagara University at the time, and I was still, like, Michigan was very much like, Look, you need a research job or nothing. And Niagara was not a research job. And so there was, like, I was still struggling with this kind of, like, shame about that, you might say. And actually, and meanwhile, so I, since we’re, since I’m being open about so I continued therapy for a bit in Buffalo, yeah, and, and I was saying to my therapist, like, you know, I always had this. I had this, like, one bottle of scotch someone gave me, actually, I think it was my my roommate, Tim crochet, gave me this nice old bottle of scotch because I was I went to his wedding, and I’m not particularly a whiskey drinker, but I knew it was a fit. And I was like, saving it for a big moment. And at first I thought I would save it for my dissertation, but then my dissertation felt like this, barely scraping by failure. So then I was like, Okay, I’m gonna save this bottle of scotch for when I get a tenure from when I get a job. But then I got this, like, two year job that didn’t feel like a big success. So I was like, Okay, I’ll save it for a tenure track job. And then I got this tenure track job, but that didn’t feel like a big success. And I was telling this to my therapist, and then later in the same session, I was talking about how much I like my co workers, and how it’s nice not to have all this research pressure and blah, blah, blah, and, you know, I’ve been using this phrase about with the whiskey, like, oh, once I’ve made it, I’ll have this whiskey. And, and she was like, when I was describing how much I liked my current circumstances, she was like, huh, sounds like, you’ve made it. And I was like, Oh. Like, that was a moment where the scales kind of felt like, Oh, I could think of this as having made it, yeah, and, and, you know, I think that, like, has really, I basically the deal I made with myself was, well, let’s see how much I like writing. And if I really publish a ton because I love it, then maybe I’ll get a fancier job elsewhere. And if I don’t publish a ton, maybe that’s because I’m pretty happy where I am

 

Will Bachman  24:23

revealed. Preference,

 

Steve Petersen  24:24

yeah, yeah. Well, put Yeah. And meanwhile, like, Buffalo is just the right size for me to continue my acting hobby. It turned out okay, it’s big enough to pay actors, but it’s not so big that, like, I’m actually competing with full time actors. So I’ve gotten to do both. I got to do philosophy and acting.

 

Will Bachman  24:43

Tell us about, tell us about both. About your career in Buffalo, about your was to hear about your acting career.

 

Steve Petersen  24:51

Acting, well, so I, you know, I didn’t do it for some time. I did do some acting in Ann Arbor, well, the improv group for one thing, but I also had my first professional gig there with a children’s theater. Company, and I really enjoyed that, and that gave me a taste for it. And then here in Buffalo, it’s kind of like everyone knows everybody. They often call you if they are, often like, have someone in mind for the role, because it’s a kind of a closed community, so I had trouble breaking in. But they have a Shakespeare in the park that’s apparently the second biggest Shakespeare in the park. They get, like 1000 people a night over a summer, and they had open calls. And so I got cast for that. And then that first one, I played Slender and Merry Wives of Windsor, okay? And then I think it was the next year, I played Sebastian in The Tempest. And then a couple years, and then I did, I did, like, actually, kind of a fun story, a classmate. No, not a classmate. Ian Lithgow was a class behind us, and his wife was from Buffalo, and so he lived in Buffalo for a while, and he and I did a Tom Stoppard play together, where we played old college friends, all right, so that was fun. I’ve done a couple other shows here and there, but it’s been mostly a hobby, and I haven’t done it much since my two kids. I now have two kids, one nine and 111

 

Will Bachman  26:15

Wonderful, wonderful. And when did you end up meeting your wife.

 

Steve Petersen  26:23

2009 I just finished doing the Tempest, and I drove all night to Chicago to do, like a summer intensive improv thing, and she reached out to me on matchdotcom It was kind of a good yeah, I guess now online dating is kind of crummy, but in those days, it seems to have worked, at least sometimes. And yeah, she reached out. And I had already kind of almost given up on dating in Buffalo, but I was like, okay, partly because I was in Chicago. I was like, well, it was easy to say from a distance, like, Sure, let’s meet when I get back. But then when I met her, I thought she was really awesome, and so we started hanging out more, and got married shortly after.

 

Will Bachman  27:04

Tell us a little bit about your specialty in philosophy. What do you you said you do his philosophy of science?

 

Steve Petersen  27:14

What philosophy science is? So there’s two sort of main things. So I was like, you know, I do the mathy kind of philosophy, right? Which means, like, very sort of techie and and not, you know, a lot of the people, philosophers that people have heard of, like post con, like Derrida Foucault, or that’s all what we call continental philosophy, which is, like, I haven’t read any of it. It’s just this weird. There’s this weird schism, like, every culture has its subculture, right? And in philosophy, there’s this analytic versus continental distinction. And analytic is very sort of mathy and very sort of precise questions that you try to answer precisely. And it’s what’s done in most English speaking philosophy departments. But if you go to english speaking anthropology department or an English speaking English department, you’ll you’ll do what we call continental philosophy.

 

Will Bachman  28:04

So what sort of questions do you work on?

 

Steve Petersen  28:07

Well, so this is another thing that’s that I really enjoyed, even in grad I like to think I was into AI before it was cool in grad school. I did when I was in grad school, I call the computational epistemology, which is like a version of so formal epistemology. Epistemology knows like the study of knowledge, like, how do we know this? Or what’s what’s a good or bad belief? And it turns out they’re useful mathematical tools for getting better and worse beliefs and so on, and measuring whether beliefs are better or worse, in particular, like Bayesianism, if you’ve heard of that kind of approach. And then computational epistemology just means that we want to make sure it’s like, easily, easily instantiated on a computer. And so the real interest in the background was philosophy of AI. But I couldn’t, you couldn’t really say that in those days. And like, one of my early papers was on the ethics of AI in 2006 I did like this paper about whether it be okay to design an AI that’s both, like, more has moral status as a person like you or me, but that wants to, like, serve us. And that’s an interesting question, it turns out, I think, but at the time, it was sort of like a blot on my resume, like people were like, Why would you think about AI? Like, what? That’s weird thing. But because of that, I got early papers, you know, I was asked to review some of the early papers about, like, maybe you’ve heard of the superintelligence worry, like this, worry that here, yeah, okay, I honestly don’t know how widespread that worry is, but it’s basically obsessed me for the past or so, yeah. So, because I got these early papers, I thought I had a good response. I was most familiar with the version from Nick Bostrom, who’s a philosopher who wrote a book super intelligence. And so I thought I had a good response. So I wrote a paper that, and as I was trying to write the paper in response, I realized that he had already thought of all my objections and sort of blocked them off. And so then I got more worried. And. So yeah, now I’m one of those so called Doomers who, like, is genuinely concerned about racing to get super intelligent AI before it’s before we know how to align it to our own interests. So that’s been really rewarding. It’s been like, an amazing combination of like, intrinsically fascinating, like, what is it? What is agency? What is representation? What you know, there’s all these issues and fundamental philosophy of mind that, like the technical AI alignment, people are turning to philosophers because they realize, like, math alone isn’t going to solve this, right? So you need sort of this bridge between math and philosophy, which is where I sit. So part it’s intrinsically fascinating. Partly I do feel sort of like maybe I’m helping. It feels like I’m connected to this bigger mission, you know, where, like maybe I’m helping prevent an apocalypse of sorts, although progress is very slow. And then it also, like, just happens to be funded by, like, the Effective Altruism type movements. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, but, you know, they take very seriously the idea of existential risk, and they think AI is one of the biggest existential risks. And so, you know, I don’t get a lot of funding, but for a philosopher, it’s nice I get, like, they buy course reductions for me so that I can do more research time. Okay? And I’m really enjoying that.

 

Will Bachman  31:26

And what, what’s your current take? I mean, it’s a big question, the ethics of creating this sort of, you know, do they does it have a moral being status, like, what if you turn it off? Right? Is that like killing a being so forth. I mean, what’s your current thinking? I mean, this has become broadly relevant, which might very, very theoretical when you wrote it 20 years ago, but it’s super Yeah,

 

Steve Petersen  31:55

I have to say I’m haunted like Nick Bostrom. I think his last chapter of his book is called philosophy with a deadline. And that’s a terrifying phrase, right? Like, when you think, like, look, we have not, it’s not like we’ve solved much philosophy in the last 3000 years, at least not. We like to think we’ve made progress, and then we spin it off into other disciplines. You know what I mean? Like, cognitive science, for that matter, psychology used to be philosophy, and then once you get a better grip on it, it just spins off into a better just into a separate discipline, but still, like, yeah, the thought of philosophy of the deadline is terrifying, and yeah, I think it’s, I’m scared it’s hard. I don’t, I guess. So there’s two separate questions. One is like, will it have moral status? And basically, so I’m with a group that includes Nick Bostrom that meets every couple of weeks to talk about what digital minds and moral status in AI would look like. And basically, it’s a super Vex question, like there isn’t any consensus among us. I’m pretty convinced that some kind of computer could have moral status, like some kind of AI, I’m no longer as convinced as I used to be that just instantiating a program, like just just being a certain kind of sophisticated program, what a philosopher might call computational functionalism, is enough to have moral status. I would have said that for sure a few years ago. And basically llms kind of changed my mind on a lot of things. I mean, llms were kind of a shock to everybody. You know, that these generative models could do what they can do. And I’m kind of sympathetic to the idea that they don’t have real goals, in a certain sense, I think. But this is all very uncertain. So that’s yeah, one. I definitely think it’s possible for an AI to have moral standing, but it might be farther off than than others think. And I don’t think that current models have have moral standing will be

 

Will Bachman  33:53

the will be the red line for you. I mean, if I mean chat GPT five is pretty good, if chat GPT six or seven or eight is self aware, and right? I mean, I don’t know if we can, you know theory of mine. I don’t know if you know if you are, you know, self aware, like you say that you are not very good, I tell you that I am. But I mean, other than the Turing test, you know, if it says, Yeah, I’m self aware. I have my own goals, and I want my life, and I enjoy giving people answers to their questions and stuff, and then you just say, Well, I’m going to turn you off. Right? Is that? Like, is that, you know, is that murder? Is that a moral heinous crime to do that?

 

Steve Petersen  34:35

I don’t think it is. Now, I don’t think we can take self reports as the only kind of evidence of sentience, like, obviously you can train, obviously you can train a language model, just complete sentences that express that they’re conscious or morally, morally valuable and so on. So I don’t think we can take that at face value, although it can be some evidence, excuse me. But basically, yeah, it’s a very hard Vex question, right? I’m more concerned these days with the sort of flip side, like. A concern for us like so when I wrote that paper in 2006 I was concerned about the future robots. Yeah, my moral standing. But now I’m, I’m like, let’s just navigate the part where we get to survive.

 

Will Bachman  35:12

What specifically are you worried about? What’s, what’s the specific concerns? So

 

Steve Petersen  35:16

the super intelligence concern is basically that we might get real, what I would call agentic and super intelligent. So right now, I don’t think the generative models are all that agentic. They don’t have much in the way of desires, real goals, so to speak, except sort of text completion. They have a lot of knowledge, I’d be willing to say. But they don’t like one philosopher, Keith Frankish, says they’re cognitively rich and conatively bankrupt. Conative is a philosopher’s word for, like, the desire side of things. Okay, I’m pretty sympathetic to that idea, but so I don’t think the current ones have that. But if they get more agentic, like, more have have more of their own goals, and have like, the kind of intelligence that we associate with being able to achieve your goals in a wide range of circumstances. Like, then, yeah, then we’re just then, then we’re going to be in big trouble, because those goals are very unlikely to align with humans continued flourishing, just as a matter of like, I mean, I don’t know I could go on it, but, but the case is made better in Bostrom super intelligence. Or you might have heard like just a few weeks ago, there’s a new book called, if anyone builds it, everyone dies, sure, sure. And yeah, I’m pretty sympathy. Basically, I’m only, I don’t know, two thirds of the way through that book, but I’m pretty sympathetic. That’s that lays out the case pretty well. And I think I’m not quite the Doomer that Eliezer yukowski is. And actually I’m on. You can watch a video of me on a panel with Yudkowsky and some others like trying to discuss this when I was first getting into this 10 years ago. But, but I think he’s, I think his arguments are generally good, and he’s, he’s he’s had a lot of practice over the years of persuading people, and in particular, talking them out of what feel like easy responses to this worry. And as I say, that’s what happened to me. Like I thought I had an easy response to vostroms worry, and then the more I looked into it, the more I was like, Oh crap,

 

Will Bachman  37:17

yeah, but we’re not, like, able to really stop it at this point. I mean, you could make a law. You could shut it down the US, but, you know, other countries are going to continue

 

Steve Petersen  37:28

building, yeah. Well, so yukowski wants, like, yeah, an international treaty where we, like, bomb GPU centers who don’t conform. Okay? He’s pretty serious about that. I don’t know. I so that’s what we call the governance side, like, given that we’re not going to solve the alignment problem. So I’m on what’s called the alignment side, which is the technical question of, like, how would we make an AI smart and friendly to us at the same time, basically, and that that’s what turns out distressingly hard. Like, the longer you’ve worked on that, the more depressed you are about whether it’s going to work in time, which is part of why Yudkowsky has become the Doomer he is. He started working on that alignment problem. So Yudkowsky and others have pivoted to what we call the governance problem, which is given that we’re not going to solve this in time, how do we stop humanity from barreling towards a cliff, right? How do we how do we do the governance things necessary? And yeah, that also turns out to be a hard problem, but maybe in an easier

 

Will Bachman  38:24

way, interesting. Yeah, I guess I’ve been following this, you know, obviously just very in a very amateur way. And I mean, it seems that if there was only one AI, you know, only open AI was developing it more of a concern. But then, since there’s such a plethora of different ones, it almost seems that if one of them gets super intelligent, the other ones probably will be also, and they’ll kind of, you know, cancel battle against each other, right?

 

Steve Petersen  38:55

They might battle against each other, but the like little humans, you know, think of like the humans battling against each other. And what happens to the ants on the battleground? Like we get to play the role of the ants, right? It’s, it’s not at all clear. So there’s so called unipolar and multipolar scenarios where, yeah, there’s one AI that sees the other nascent ones and is smart enough to knock them off first, or somehow they all arise at roughly the same time, in which case, yeah, they fight with each other, or they coordinate with each other and cooperate. But either way, it looks bad for the humans in those scenarios.

 

Will Bachman  39:25

Okay, so You sound pretty like, no, no, clear, easy answers, right here today,

 

Steve Petersen  39:32

right? Yeah, I’m genuinely concerned about it. I have to say. I mean, it’s weird. It doesn’t, you know, I don’t know if climate researchers are like this. It rarely sinks viscerally in, like, I rarely think about in terms of my kids future. Mostly it’s like, most of the time it’s like this interesting math problem, in a way. But then, yeah, like when the spring after chat GPT came out, and it looked like Sam Altman was on, like this. Like. Do or die, I’m just going to be the first to get there that I was like, that’s as down as I’ve been since grad school. I think I was pretty that I felt much more viscerally since then, I have a little more hope, partly because of this thinking in terms of agency and again. But of course, that could be wishful thinking, like it’s very convenient that my reflections on agency make me think that actually, we have better timelines than I feared before.

 

Will Bachman  40:24

I guess I’m more concerned about the even more near term thing. Forget about super intelligence. Just having an LLM that’s good enough that gives a terrorist a nice recipe for smallpox, or basically, yeah,

 

Steve Petersen  40:40

for sure. Those are bad too, and I think those are worth thinking about too. I think it’s sort of like, you know, you might, you might think about immediate social justice concerns, and then you might also think about climate change, right? Like, where are we going with the future? And do we care about future? And I don’t think those are, you know, I guess so. As it happens, I donate to, like, immediate concerns, and then I work on these long term concerns. But I, I guess I am sort of sympathetic to the idea that the long term concerns have some trumping power, if, if the if humanity’s potential just gets, like, totally cut off.

 

Will Bachman  41:17

Yeah, okay, before I turn to the question that I do kind of about that question I want to ask you. You said that you imagined like various scenarios and stuff that you might talk about with, you know, before we so now’s your chance. What were some of the questions that you kind of went through that of how you might respond? Let’s, let’s, let’s do those.

 

Steve Petersen  41:41

I can’t. So this, it was before you started recording, right, that I told you that I Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  41:46

tell me like you had thought about this, you know, you know, kind of rehearse, rehearse some answers, or thought about what you

 

Steve Petersen  41:51

Well, I wouldn’t, I mean, I guess I didn’t exactly rehearse this, but I, although I had listened to some of your podcasts and enjoyed them, and and I’ve been thinking about it all week, like, yeah, what? And I also, what I shared was that, like, even in high school or whatever, I’d have these fantasies of, like, David Letterman interviewing me because I was a famous something,

 

Will Bachman  42:09

oh, you’re Yeah, you’re famous AI philosopher, right? Yeah, exactly, yeah.

 

Steve Petersen  42:16

But, you know, it was very specific to the to those were very specific to the whatever scenario I was imagining I was famous for, I think, or like, worth having on the talk show for. And I can’t, and I can’t pretend, like even I don’t know, yeah, every once while I’m listening to a podcast, I find myself where one person is interviewing someone else. I find myself imagining myself in that same scenario, like, Oh, wishing I could be part of this conversation.

 

Steve Petersen  42:45

But that’s like, those tend to be sort of like, you know, academic like, like, talking shop, I guess.

 

Steve Petersen  42:55

And so, yeah, I’m afraid I can’t think of, you know, what I think it was just sort of this fantasy of being a sparkling wit. I remember like in high school being there was, have you ever heard Spalding Gray, sure.

 

Will Bachman  43:06

Oh, I got to see him once in person in Hartford. In Hartford,

 

Steve Petersen  43:09

really? He actually came to Harvard. He came to Radcliffe, quad. And I thought, and I went thinking like no one else has heard of him. I don’t know why. Gosh, you kidding me? Well, now I know, but at the time I don’t know he, no one had talked to, said his name or anything. And so I showed up at the Radcliffe theater, or whatever was called and, like, it was packed. And I was like, oh, man, I’m not going to get to but, yeah, I saw him once on David Letterman or something. And I was like, This guy is fascinating. Who is this guy? And then I learned that his job is basically to be fascinating. Like, that’s just what he’s good at. Well,

 

Will Bachman  43:40

he would do these monologs, right? And I saw him do a different thing, because he had swimming to Cambodia, and he had these different models. I saw him do interviews with the audience at in Hartford, and he would just, sort of, he would mingle with the crowd before the show and pick a few people, and then he would bring them up on stage and do live interviews just of random members of the audience. And I can’t

 

Steve Petersen  44:11

help ask if that influenced what you’re doing with this project here.

 

Will Bachman  44:15

It probably did. It probably did. I mean, you know, that was probably one influence. I also read working by Studs Terkel when I was a kid. Came out in the 70s, and I there was just a copy around my house. I read it when I was seven or eight years old or nine years old or something. That was so cool, asking people about their job, but yeah, Spaulding Gray, I read all his books. And anyway, you were telling him, Okay, what about Spalding Gray?

 

Steve Petersen  44:39

Well, just, I think you were asking, like, what’s my fantasy? Like, when people and I guess it’s just yeah, the fantasy is, it’s different every time, but I basically involves me being a sparkling wit of some kind, which, like, yeah, it hasn’t, you know, hasn’t exactly come to pass. I guess you’ve

 

Will Bachman  44:56

been sparkling. This has been fascinating. I mean this, I mean it’s so. Cool that you were kind of interested in this AI stuff, which in 2006 I would have thought, man, Steve, that is super, like, irrelevant. I mean, wow, that’s like science fiction, but it’s totally come to pass the stuff that you were studying 20 years ago.

 

Steve Petersen  45:16

Yeah, weird, right? Yeah. I also mined Bitcoin when it first came out on my laptop. What I didn’t make? I mean, then I sold most of it for like, $400 but still, I’ve done well. I mean, not, you know, it’s not like retirement money, but I guess my point is like, yeah, I guess I’ve had a better future thinking person. You might say future man. All right, okay, let me say as a future thinking person, yeah, the future is weirder than you might have thought. Like, that’s generally a good heuristic. And one of the ways it might be weirder is having really powerful, scary. Ai, all

 

Will Bachman  45:45

right, so what are some other weird things? So you’re thinking ahead, you are ahead of the curve. I I did not mind Bitcoin ever. What are, what are some other future thinking, things that you’re thinking about? Well,

 

Steve Petersen  45:57

I don’t, I mean, yeah, mostly. AI, of course, these days, that seems like the winner take all type. You know that’s gonna, if that comes to pass the way people imagine, that’s gonna fundamentally change things for forever. But even in the short term, I don’t know. Here, I’m working with this guy named Sahil, this really interesting character who, like, has really interesting ideas about just a kind of near term future where intelligence is not agentic in the way that’s worrisome, but it’s ubiquitous and cheap, so that, like, for example, you know, I mean, one example that’s kind of more prosaic is like, you and I could tailor a novel or a textbook. Let’s say to like, you know, you happen to be interested in military history or whatever. So like, Please give me this statistics textbook. But like, make it, make it about military history. And I say, give me the statistics textbook, but make it about improv, or, I don’t know what you know and like and and everything is sort of highly contextualized. And so even like math could work this way, where instead of writing down permanently one theorem that’s in a certain kind of notation, like if you if you approach you can just express the insight, and a decently intelligent AI in the middle can, like, translate that into different, you know, schemes, like, whether you’re doing this in topology, or whether you’re doing this in algebra, whether you’re doing this in category theory. Or it could just translate the insight on the fly and give you the proof on the fly, and then, like, what’s the theory anymore? And similarly, like, web programs already, I’m kind of enjoying vibe coding where, like, I wish something did that. I wish I had software that did this, and then I can just be like, Oh, now I’ve got software that did that. Like, all I did do is ask for it. Like, these days, it’s not that simple. I have to spend hours tweaking it, yeah, but yeah, it’ll be a weird future when you can just be like, I wish there was automation for this. And then there is,

 

Will Bachman  47:50

I think it shifts the balance to asking questions versus knowing the answers.

 

Steve Petersen  47:57

Yeah, yeah. That’s a nice way to put it. And I think that’s part of what, yeah, it’s it shifts the balance to, like, certain kinds of insights and certain kinds of creativity, and away from the sort of grinding willingness to spell out the details, like let, let the subservient AI take care of that work on the insights and the, what my Sahil calls relevance, like work on what you care about and what, what the ends are, and let the the sort of minion AI that he’s he’s imagining that are like, not really agentic, yeah, fill out the do the grunt work. In effect,

 

Will Bachman  48:39

do you? Do you think that, what are your other thoughts about the intermediate to near term future? You’re thinking about this a lot. I’m curious.

 

Steve Petersen  48:50

Gosh. I mean, yeah, I don’t I mean, it’s sort of weird. I so I’m a little more. I think about the fact that, like, so I think about the fact that we still, some industries, still fax things to each other like so I kind of think that it won’t this kind of intelligence won’t be that ubiquitous, that fast. I think humans are just slow to see we leave a lot of $20 bills on the ground where we’re just slow to see efficiencies that I mean again, you’re the marketing you’re the management consultant. You I don’t know if this is your experience or not. I don’t know what it’s like

 

Will Bachman  49:24

to be I just had to send a fax this weekend. Actually, I don’t mean that. I mean

 

Steve Petersen  49:27

you must go into places and see like these crazy inefficiencies, like typing out, typing a data book, a book of data into a different computer, or whatever.

 

Will Bachman  49:37

Well, Brian Potter talks about this a little bit in his book, The origins of efficiency, which I just interviewed him for my my other podcast, and he tells the story, oh, I guess Noah Smith also talks about this, where electricity, almost the developments of electricity came out in the late 19th century, motors. Eric. Conditioning and so forth. But it took almost a generation, until the 1920s for factories to really become much more efficient, because they were designed for steam, and they were these vertical factories designed for Steam, where all the machines were running off the main central steam engine, and you could swap in electric motor. But that didn’t really get you much efficiency. It wasn’t until they started designing the building to be horizontal and have individual motors for individual pieces of equipment that you started really getting big efficiency gains and energy savings. And yeah, so I think it’s going to be very similar, where there’ll be some sectors of the economy that are unregulated or less regulated that are, there’s less sort of regulatory or procedural barriers, but a lot of areas like health care, education, where we’re, you know, kind of Stuck based on regulations or just sort of contingency makes it difficult to adopt things right quickly, even if they exist, right? You know, like I had to send a fax this weekend, or some insurance audit or something. They said, fax, give me a break. So, yeah, that’s what it’s seeming like, that’s as a consultant, that’s kind of what I’m seeing is that it’s, there’s a lot of human barriers in the way of implementation.

 

Steve Petersen  51:30

Yeah, I kind of hope so, because I’d like slower timelines in general, although it could be that the short term. So one kind of hope is that the short term AI boost will give us better leverage on solving the harder problems, including, like, surviving.

 

Will Bachman  51:48

I mean, Tyler Cowen makes a point, like, you don’t like artificial intelligence. Would you rather have artificial stupidity? I mean,

 

Steve Petersen  51:55

well, so, I mean, well, I’ve, I mean, I like Tyler Cohen, from what I know of his stuff, but I think that’s like, what you want is intelligent. So intelligent just means being good at achieving your goal. And you don’t want someone who’s super good at achieving a goal that is not in line, that does not include your continued flourishing. Yeah, true.

 

Will Bachman  52:15

So, yeah. I mean, what are Are there any one or two other things that you’ve been thinking about, worrying about, about AI specific things you know you’re here, spending all this time imagining the AI future. What? What are the things are you wrestling with that maybe haven’t come to the fore for us civilians?

 

Steve Petersen  52:37

Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I guess, honestly, like, I don’t. So I’m not really on the ground like, it’s very much like, as you might imagine, from a philosopher, like, very theoretical. And so it’s very much about, like, what would it count as a moral patient, and what kinds of beings are the kind of beings that are actually sort of pursuing goals for their own sake? And what does that mean, and, and so I can’t say that I have a lot of, like, specific thoughts about what we call timelines. Like, you know, how fast will AI arrive, and where that I can’t I mean, I’ve just shared my sort of general feel, from what I can tell. But, yeah, I don’t have, I’m to be honest, I’m like, less interested in the particular implementation details of the near term and so, so, yeah, I don’t have anything like actionable to like, to like, I don’t know, bet on in the stock market, for example. Although I will say a lot of people in the community have started buying what like way out of the money 10 year calls on, like, the S and P, okay, they’re like, this is a great leverage bet on, like, AI is going to take off and really change the economy. Okay? As I looked at it more, I was like, I’m not so sure I’m ready. I’m just sticking in my boring mutual funds, or whatever it looked it wasn’t a clear what to me, it wasn’t a clear bet. But I guess, for what it’s worth, there are people in the in this, if you’ve heard of the rationalist community, but they’re closely tied to the to the alignment community and the Effective Altruism community. And I’ve become kind of an anthropologist among, among the rationalist community, and and, yeah, they, a lot of them are, are, seem pretty convinced that it’s a good bet to buy a buy long term, long dated, long dated, out of the money S, P futures calls on the

 

Will Bachman  54:29

oh, I would think the reverse. Like, if you’re a Doomer and you think that it’s going to destroy the world, then you should be selling the market short, right?

 

Steve Petersen  54:37

Then, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s right, exactly. And so yeah. And in fact, Tyler Cohn makes this point like, Hey, if you’re so Doomer, how come you have an retirement account or whatever, right? It’s a good point. I mean, I think there’s this kind of like, I mean, I don’t know. I guess it’s like, well, if it goes badly, it goes badly, and there’s not much, you know, I guess you could benefit some short term for now. But if it goes well, or if it goes well in the short term. Year in short term means, like, 10 years, roughly, maybe. So I guess that’s the reasoning. I don’t know. But as I say, I wasn’t convinced of it enough to invest myself.

 

Will Bachman  55:10

Okay, so let me ask you. Let me turn back in time and ask about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you.

 

Steve Petersen  55:21

Yeah, I so I was kind of prepared for this, because I, as I say, I listened to some of your podcasts. And it’s funny that, like, they all mentioned, it’s funny how, like, my math and philosophy courses felt like vocational training, sort of like they just like, Yeah, well, I just studied these things, although, of course, like math 25 that was life altering in just being, like, kicking my butt and learning that I wasn’t the hotshot I might have thought I was, once upon a time, coming from Wisconsin, you know, and then suddenly being put in a classroom like that, that was pretty intense. And it really, it really, that was also sort of a Stockholm syndrome where now I just really love math, even though not a prodigy at it, and I still get to do it, so that’s fun. But outside of that, the ones that first occurred to me are like, Yeah, my, my, what do we call them? Course, like Jazz, Jazz course, one of my favorites was so I took, of course, some acting classes. And one summer school, I was in an acting class with our classmate, Dina Martin and some other like, random people on clown style improv. And that was amazing. That was like church and an early version of therapy and and and acting all rolled into one. I feel like I learned more about I don’t know what accepting failure, in a way, it was at the core of that class, like, there’s this famous exercise you do called the Ring of Fire. So you’re a clown, like, sort of like a Charlie Chaplin type clown, okay? And you’re called on to save the show. So you come out and the lead clowns like, Oh, I hear you’re gonna give us the the solo from Marriage of Figaro or whatever. And the clown just has to figure out something to do, but you’re not allowed to sit down until everyone in the audience laughs. It’s called the Ring of Fire, and it becomes very obvious, like some people like it would drive people to tears because it’s can be humiliating because you fail and fail to make people laugh. And it became obvious that, like, what worked was when you didn’t have a plan, and we’re trying to manipulate the audience, but when you did something that, like, surprised yourself and like and was just sort of joyful and spontaneous and in the moment, that almost always worked, huh? But like thinking ahead of time, like, I’m going to do this funny thing, like, just would flop.

 

Will Bachman  57:40

So interesting. Can you can you think of one specific time that you surprised yourself? Like, what was the thing? I mean, over and

 

Steve Petersen  57:46

over, I don’t know. Like, that’s just improv. That’s part of what I love about improv. It’s like, I mean, I don’t know. I remember once being called for that specific exercise. I actually took this class twice. I took it again in summer, when I came back to proctor summer school in like, 97 after Japan, and before I had a place, or No, I guess it was 96 was before I started grad school. And I loved the class, so I took it again. Jane. Jane Nichols was the instructor. She was really fun. And I don’t know, she was like, this time, she was like, Oh, I understand you’re going to give us an impersonation of a bat. And I don’t know, I just started squealing or whatever, but it was just, I mean, you know, it’s not the kind of thing that’s easy to cap. That’s easy to capture after the fact, but I guess the way I approached it was just, I had fun with it. It was just ridiculous, you know? And it was just funny to me. Yeah, I don’t know. There’s this improv game called the serious game, and I used to use it when I would audition people, because, in my experience, so the serious game, like it’s a group game, but then if you laugh, you’re out. And in my experience, some improvisers play that to win, like they try to make other people laugh, but some improvisers is just being ridiculous, and they, half the time they take themselves out by laughing first. You know what I mean? Because they just tickled by their own idea. And always, those are the improvisers I wanted to improvise with. Those were the good improvisers.

 

Will Bachman  59:04

Where do you think those ideas come from? I mean, as a philosopher, how do we end up surprising ourself? Where? Where does that come from? Yeah,

 

Steve Petersen  59:14

it’s amazing, isn’t it? I mean, you know, I’m pretty committed to the idea that we’re that our minds are just, you know, really complicated neural nets. And so I think one good way, and now we have a much better grip on what a skill is, like riding a bike, like language production is a skill like that, and now we have a better idea of how to do it. It’s just like, it’s basically an algorithm, but it’s such a crazy, complicated algorithm that the only way to get it to work is to grow it, instead of, like, write it in ahead of time. And so I think it’s just this weird skill that you can train in a way that, like riding a bike, that you can’t articulate, that lets you listen to these weird parts. I mean, actually, I just, so, I just started getting back into improv, and I read, if people are interested, the book The by the Upright Citizens. Gate is surprisingly good, and the audio book is even better because they have improvisers illustrating and doing it, and they’re fun. And they talk about, like, one thing that where creativity sometimes comes from an improv is what they call the flash. I’ve never heard that term before, but I definitely experienced it where, like, another great book about improv is by Keith Johnstone. It’s called impro, and he has an example there. It’s something like, you know, I start telling a story, like, oh, a guy walks up to the steps holding a to the to a doorstep, holding a bouquet of flowers. Like, What’s he wearing? Was he wearing? Like, some people answer that, but you have, instantly, you already know, there’s a part of your brain that’s already, I mean, so basically, actually, to tie this to my own work, like, we’re essentially prediction machines, like intelligences are prediction machines, and so your brain can’t help but, like, predict what comes next, even when it’s pulling sort of out of thin air, like it just did for you. And that’s like, where creativity comes from is just like this crazy prediction background that you have over a wide variety of possibilities. That’s my take.

 

Will Bachman  1:01:06

But Steve, where can listeners go online to find out more about what you’re doing? Keep track of you. Is there a good faculty page or social media account. Where would you send people?

 

Steve Petersen  1:01:22

Well, I guess my website so long ago, I made a vanity website when I was trying to get a job, and now I just keep it up, just because. So it’s Steve Petersen, P, e, t, r, s, e n.net, all right, and that has contact information. And, I mean, you know, it’s I don’t, I don’t update it very often, but, but people are also welcome to email me or contact me if they’re interested in these

 

Will Bachman  1:01:44

things. Fabulous. All right. Well, we will include that link in the show notes. Steve, thanks. Thank you so much for joining today. This is a lot of fun.

 

Steve Petersen  1:01:52

Great. Thanks. I had a great time. Bye.