“Intelligence is the ability to dream in a very focused way.”

Joscha Bach told me that in June 2022. ChatGPT was still five months away.

Rewatching our conversation now, what strikes me isn’t his prediction. It’s the questions he was already asking. What is a model, really? Do we live in a learnable universe, or did we just get lucky? And if you could ask one question of God, or an Artificial Superintelligence, what would it be?

We also take on the critics of #AI, from Gary Marcus to Marvin Minsky to Noam Chomsky, and then the conversation goes somewhere most tech interviews never dare: evolution, the hive mind, cosmology, the Bible, and the strange line between existence and non-existence.

Joscha is one of the rare minds who can move from #CognitiveScience to theology without changing gears. Two hours, and I’d gladly have taken two more.

Since then, large language models have gone from curiosity to infrastructure. So here’s what I keep wondering: was Joscha describing the machines we were about to build, or the minds we already have?

Watch it and tell me where you land. #Philosophy #FutureOfAI

Full video and audio of my conversation with Joscha Bach: [ https://snglrty.co/4ejzBa5](https://snglrty.co/4ejzBa5)

Joscha Bach is a beautiful mind and a very rewarding interlocutor. No surprise I had so many requests to have him back on my podcast.