cover of episode #404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe

#404 – Lee Cronin: Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe

2023/12/9
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Lex Fridman Podcast

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Lee Cronin explains Assembly Theory, which quantifies the complexity of objects by the number of steps it took to create them and determines if they were built by a process akin to evolution by looking at the number of copies.
  • Assembly Theory quantifies complexity by the minimum number of steps to create an object.
  • The theory uses assembly index and copy number to identify objects produced by evolutionary processes.
  • Assembly Theory can be applied to molecules, emojis, and potentially other objects.

Shownotes Transcript

Lee Cronin is a chemist at University of Glasgow. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/lee-cronin-3-transcript

EPISODE LINKS: Lee's Twitter: https://twitter.com/leecronin Lee's Website: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/ Nature Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9 Chemify's Website: https://chemify.io

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OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (09:37) - Assembly theory paper (30:06) - Assembly equation (43:19) - Discovering alien life (1:01:38) - Evolution of life on Earth (1:09:34) - Response to criticism (1:27:12) - Kolmogorov complexity (1:39:02) - Nature review process (1:59:56) - Time and free will (2:06:21) - Communication with aliens (2:28:19) - Cellular automata (2:32:48) - AGI (2:49:36) - Nuclear weapons (2:55:22) - Chem Machina (3:08:16) - GPT for electron density (3:17:46) - God