WEBVTT 00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:23.839 Picture a dirt road. 00:00:23.839 --> 00:00:26.160 You are walking forward. 00:00:26.160 --> 00:00:28.879 Someone is walking toward you. 00:00:28.879 --> 00:00:31.760 You each have a gun. 00:00:31.760 --> 00:00:34.000 One bullet each. 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:37.600 If you shoot too early, you miss. 00:00:37.600 --> 00:00:41.520 If you wait too long, though, they shoot first. 00:00:41.520 --> 00:00:47.439 In a normal duel, if they fire and miss, you hear it. 00:00:47.439 --> 00:00:48.399 You know. 00:00:48.399 --> 00:00:50.159 You walk forward. 00:00:50.159 --> 00:00:52.799 Take your time and you win. 00:00:52.799 --> 00:00:56.240 But what if the guns make no sound? 00:00:56.240 --> 00:01:02.960 If you fire and miss, they don't know you're empty. 00:01:02.960 --> 00:01:05.280 And you don't know about them. 00:01:05.280 --> 00:01:15.680 You keep walking, step by step, not knowing if the person coming toward you is holding their fire or has already spent their one shot. 00:01:15.680 --> 00:01:27.200 In 2024, the most powerful piece of artificial intelligence hardware ever built was named after the man who spent his life thinking about this problem. 00:01:27.200 --> 00:01:33.840 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Lore in the Machine. 00:01:33.840 --> 00:01:38.640 Santa Monica, California. 00:01:38.640 --> 00:01:41.599 1950. Noon. 00:01:41.599 --> 00:01:50.719 Every day in one office at the Rand Corporation, a group of men sits down to play Kriegsspiel. 00:01:50.719 --> 00:01:54.799 It's chess, but you can't see your opponent's pieces. 00:01:54.799 --> 00:01:58.159 The referee sits between the two boards. 00:01:58.159 --> 00:02:03.519 He tells you only whether a move you want to make is legal or illegal. 00:02:03.519 --> 00:02:04.799 That's all. 00:02:04.799 --> 00:02:06.879 Otherwise, nothing. 00:02:06.879 --> 00:02:15.680 You are playing a game you can only have see against an opponent you cannot read, one decision at a time. 00:02:15.680 --> 00:02:19.039 The man who hosts this game is David Blackwell. 00:02:19.039 --> 00:02:22.560 He is one of the most gifted mathematicians in the country. 00:02:22.560 --> 00:02:26.879 He is also one of very few black men walking these particular halls. 00:02:26.879 --> 00:02:40.240 And he is completely fascinated, not by the weapons being modeled in adjacent offices, but by the shape of not knowing, by what it means to act wisely without full information. 00:02:40.240 --> 00:02:44.240 This is not idle curiosity. 00:02:44.240 --> 00:02:50.560 It is his research, and it leads him eventually to the silent duel. 00:02:50.560 --> 00:02:56.479 The math for a normal duel turns out to be straightforward. 00:02:56.479 --> 00:02:59.759 Blackwell and his colleagues solve it in a day. 00:02:59.759 --> 00:03:09.919 But the silent version, the one where a missed shot is invisible, where you cannot distinguish a patient opponent from an empty one. 00:03:09.919 --> 00:03:12.639 That problem is something else. 00:03:12.639 --> 00:03:16.319 It sits in the middle of everything he cares about. 00:03:16.319 --> 00:03:22.080 How do you make decisions when the signals you need simply don't exist? 00:03:22.080 --> 00:03:25.680 Blackwell knew this problem from the inside. 00:03:25.680 --> 00:03:30.560 He had been the seventh African American to earn a PhD in mathematics. 00:03:30.560 --> 00:03:38.319 Brilliant enough that when a position opened at UC Berkeley, the math department had wanted him and the university president agreed. 00:03:38.319 --> 00:03:44.240 But there was a catch no one said out loud until the offer just quietly disappeared. 00:03:44.240 --> 00:03:52.080 The department head's wife hosted faculty dinners, and she refused to have a black man in her home. 00:03:52.080 --> 00:04:04.719 David Blackwell spent his career making high-stakes moves in a game where the rules were hidden, where the obstacles were invisible until the moment they stopped him. 00:04:04.719 --> 00:04:13.280 He understood in a way that was not abstract at all what it meant to walk forward without knowing where the shots were coming from. 00:04:13.280 --> 00:04:18.480 He also had an unusual relationship with the work that he'd been hired to do. 00:04:18.480 --> 00:04:31.600 He had grown up in Centralia, Illinois, with a picture of hand-to-hand combat on his uncle's wall, listening to his father and uncle describe what the First World War had actually cost them. 00:04:31.600 --> 00:04:38.000 He believed quietly and without apology that war was stupid. 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:47.920 He once stopped an entire line of research, just abandoned it completely, when he realized the math could lead somewhere harmful. 00:04:47.920 --> 00:04:53.680 One afternoon, an economist comes to his office. 00:04:53.680 --> 00:04:55.759 He needs a number. 00:04:55.759 --> 00:04:59.839 The probability of a major war in the next five years. 00:04:59.839 --> 00:05:02.000 And he explains why. 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:05.519 Long-term resource allocation. 00:05:05.519 --> 00:05:08.240 The question is entirely reasonable. 00:05:08.240 --> 00:05:11.120 Blackwell gives a textbook answer. 00:05:11.120 --> 00:05:14.399 Probability only applies to repeatable events. 00:05:14.399 --> 00:05:16.560 A war is not repeatable. 00:05:16.560 --> 00:05:20.879 You can't run the next five years a thousand times and track the outcomes. 00:05:20.879 --> 00:05:25.600 The probability is either zero or one, and we won't know for five years. 00:05:25.600 --> 00:05:27.920 The economist thanks him and leaves. 00:05:27.920 --> 00:05:34.000 He mentions on his way out that every statistician he'd spoken to gave him exactly the same answer. 00:05:34.000 --> 00:05:38.160 Blackwell is left alone with that. 00:05:38.160 --> 00:05:42.639 And it gets worse the longer he thinks about it. 00:05:42.639 --> 00:05:49.360 A man had come to him with perhaps the most important question in the world at that moment. 00:05:49.360 --> 00:05:53.680 A reasonable question asked in good faith. 00:05:53.680 --> 00:06:02.160 Every mathematician Blackwell knew had handed him the same useless, technically correct, but completely unhelpful answer. 00:06:02.160 --> 00:06:05.360 The field had failed him. 00:06:05.360 --> 00:06:07.519 And so had Blackwell. 00:06:07.519 --> 00:06:12.079 A few weeks later, a mathematician named Jimmy Savage comes through Rand. 00:06:12.079 --> 00:06:18.000 Blackwell tells him about the economist, and Savage shows him something. 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:22.240 Probability does not have to be a frequency. 00:06:22.240 --> 00:06:24.480 It can be a degree of belief. 00:06:24.480 --> 00:06:31.360 A best current guess, held loosely, revised as new information arrives. 00:06:31.360 --> 00:06:34.079 This changes everything. 00:06:34.079 --> 00:06:35.759 Not gradually. 00:06:35.759 --> 00:06:37.759 Like opening a door. 00:06:37.759 --> 00:06:41.600 Because this is how people actually navigate the world. 00:06:41.600 --> 00:06:45.920 You don't wait for enough information to draw a frequency distribution. 00:06:45.920 --> 00:06:50.000 You walk into a situation with everything you currently know. 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:51.600 You make your best call. 00:06:51.600 --> 00:06:54.319 And when something changes, you update. 00:06:54.319 --> 00:06:56.240 Keep walking. 00:06:56.240 --> 00:07:01.120 This is what the silent duel had been about all along. 00:07:01.120 --> 00:07:07.920 In 1956, Blackwell published a paper that would eventually find its way into machine learning textbooks. 00:07:07.920 --> 00:07:10.079 The core idea is this. In a repeated game, you don't need a perfect strategy. You measure the distance between where you are and where you want to be. 00:07:10.079 --> 00:07:23.360 You correct your next move to close the gap. 00:07:23.360 --> 00:07:25.600 Over time you converge. 00:07:25.600 --> 00:07:31.839 Not by knowing the answer in advance, but by never stopping the process of adjustment. 00:07:31.839 --> 00:07:34.079 Sit with that for a moment. 00:07:34.079 --> 00:07:42.959 Not certainty, not omniscience, just a method for moving through a game you can only half see. 00:07:42.959 --> 00:07:51.040 In 2024, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, stands on a stage and announces their newest chip architecture. 00:07:51.040 --> 00:07:53.759 208 billion transistors. 00:07:53.759 --> 00:07:58.399 The most powerful piece of AI hardware they had ever built. 00:07:58.399 --> 00:08:00.720 They named it Blackwell. 00:08:00.720 --> 00:08:13.360 These systems, the ones now woven into search engines and writing tools and medical diagnostics, are not programmed with answers. 00:08:13.360 --> 00:08:15.839 They are trained on human writing. 00:08:15.839 --> 00:08:23.759 Enormous quantities of it, until they develop something that functions like intuition about what comes next. 00:08:23.759 --> 00:08:28.319 Not knowledge, just pattern, probability. 00:08:28.319 --> 00:08:30.639 Best current guess. 00:08:30.639 --> 00:08:39.200 Which means every time an LLM generates a response, it is doing what Blackwell described in that RAND office. 00:08:39.200 --> 00:08:50.159 Walking forward with everything it currently knows, measuring the gap between where it is and where it needs to be, adjusting and advancing. 00:08:50.159 --> 00:08:52.639 It doesn't know what it doesn't know. 00:08:52.639 --> 00:08:55.120 It can't see the whole board. 00:08:55.120 --> 00:08:56.879 And neither can we. 00:08:56.879 --> 00:09:07.360 We have spent years arguing about whether these systems are on a path towards something that surpasses us, some kind of intelligence that transcends human limits. 00:09:07.360 --> 00:09:11.679 We talk about them as if they arrived from somewhere else. 00:09:11.679 --> 00:09:14.720 As if they are a different kind of thing entirely. 00:09:14.720 --> 00:09:16.639 But they come from us. 00:09:16.639 --> 00:09:32.159 From the full written record of everything we have ever said online, from all of our digitized documents, every argument and letter and explanation and story, they move through uncertainty exactly the way we do. 00:09:32.159 --> 00:09:35.519 Just at a scale we can't hold in our heads. 00:09:35.519 --> 00:09:38.240 Blackwell formalized this. 00:09:38.240 --> 00:09:41.360 He built his entire life's work on top of it. 00:09:41.360 --> 00:09:51.200 Not a puzzle he encountered in a book, but as something he had lived in a game where the rules were hidden and the obstacles were invisible until the moment they stopped him. 00:09:51.200 --> 00:09:54.399 He could not have known what he was describing. 00:09:54.399 --> 00:09:56.320 He could not have seen it. 00:09:56.320 --> 00:09:59.440 He spent his life walking the silent duel. 00:09:59.440 --> 00:10:05.279 And then, without knowing it, he taught us how to build things that walk it too. 00:10:05.279 --> 00:10:08.879 We didn't build an oracle. 00:10:08.879 --> 00:10:16.080 We built a mirror. And then we were surprised when it couldn't see what we couldn't see. 00:10:16.080 --> 00:10:22.399 The guns are still silent, and we're all still walking. 00:10:22.399 --> 00:10:26.799 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Lore in the Machine. 00:10:26.799 --> 00:10:38.559 Now this is the point where the music usually starts playing, but I haven't done the thing yet that seems obvious, and that's to ask you to rate and subscribe to this podcast if you enjoy it. 00:10:38.559 --> 00:10:43.519 It'll really help others find the show, and it'll give me something to smile about too. 00:10:43.519 --> 00:10:44.879 Thanks for listening.