What Makes Something Alive? Assembly Theory and the Origins of Life (Sara Walker, Theoretical Physicist)

Speaker A: It's almost a different order of magnitude level of ambition, or perhaps several, to say, I'm going to try and rethink the very laws of physics and spend my life figuring out what the origins of life are. Speaker B: I think that we need new descriptions of how the world works to really understand what's happening around us now. And for me, that is associated with the physics of life and mind and intelligence and these sort of missing areas where we just don't have any fundamental description to help anchor our understanding of what's happening around us.

Speaker A: An LLM to me is something that in some ways is a compression of all of human history and also every prompt you do is doing this massive scouring of all information across time. It makes me wonder how to think about that. Speaker B: We think when we build computational algorithms, they can know everything and they can encode everything. I don't think computation can capture reality in totality. We don't live in a computational universe, and I think we're confusing it right now because the technologies we build are so powerful.

Speaker A: I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. As the saying goes, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Each week I sit down with the founders, investors, and thinkers— we're living in the future— to help you see what's coming next and understand it more clearly. Speaker C: Today I'm speaking with Sarah Walker, a theoretical physicist who studies the origins of life. Speaker A: Sarah is one of the most provocative and original thinkers in science today. And the author of the excellent book "Life as No One Knows It."