Can We Predict the Future? with Charles Liu

What does the future hold? Neil deGrasse Tyson teams up with comic co-host Chuck Nice, Gary O’Reilly, and astrophysicist Charles Liu to break down our visions of the future – and take Neil to task on his own predictions.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, I love that topic you selected. Good. For a special edition, predicting the future. Yeah. And getting it wrong, most of the time, but when you get it right, it's good. Yeah. We talked about the Jetsons. Mm-hmm. Love me some Jetsons. Come on now, you can't not like the Jetsons. I like Jane. Blade Runner, and these visions of the future, some dystopic, others just kinda fun. Right. You know? I think the Jetsons are pretty dystopic. Did you say you liked Jane? Yes. Alright, I didn't think anybody caught that. And you take me to task on predictions I made. Yeah. In Star Messenger. Well, of course. Here's a prediction, we're about to do the show. Coming up, StarTalk.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. We got a full house today. First, Gary Reilly. Gary. Hey. How you doing, man? I'm good, oh, oh, good. Chuck Nice, how you doing, man?

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  I'm doing well, man.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your hair is looking especially quaffed today.

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  It's very crisp today.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crisp today.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I, uh, I actually microwaved it. And then I put it on. People don't realize, this is a Steve Harvey wig.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no.

• 1:17Chuck Nice?

  They don't even realize, come on, play it, anyway.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's rocking, uh, like a mini version of a 1978.

• 1:24Chuck Nice?

  That's exactly what I was going for. I was going for, straight up, Jim Brown.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jim Brown, something out of the 70s.

• 1:30Chuck Nice?

  That's what I was going for.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Step right off the screen.

• 1:32Chuck Nice?

  Yep, yep, success.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go, work on some muscles, come back and you can say you're Jim Brown.

• 1:38Chuck Nice?

  Um, I'm Jim Tann.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're gonna do predictions.

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About the future, which I think is the only way you can make a prediction.

• 1:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's some stuff I don't tackle alone. I gotta go to Geek in Chief.

• 1:53Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Geek in Chief.

• 1:55Chuck Nice?

  Hi-o.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's only one Geek in Chief.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  We know who that is.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is Charles Liu, friend and colleague, Charles. Neil. Dude. Great to see you. Okay, King Geek. I also microwaved my hair today. Just leave your brain out. So, you're a professor at CUNY Staten Island, City University of New York, which has satellite campuses across the city.

• 2:16Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're in Staten Island and you, you finally no longer have administrative duties there, is that correct?

• 2:22Charles Liu?

  Were that the case forever.

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  Is that the same as, is that the same as quiet quitting?

• 2:27Charles Liu?

  Not the same, no.

• 2:29Chuck Nice?

  What do you mean you don't have any administrative duties?

• 2:32Charles Liu?

  We're very lucky as professors because we can continually take on positions and leave them and not leave our jobs. So, I could be a department chair for a period of time and leave, I could run an honors program and then leave, I could even serve as an acting dean or other administrator and then leave, and still I'd retain my ability to come back and do the research and the coursework and the teaching that I love.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And each of those, they give you a little bump up in the mood.

• 2:55Charles Liu?

  One hopes, one hopes. Every place is a little bit different.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we've got you here because you think long and hard and deep about predictions made in sci-fi, you probably have some predictions of your own, the accuracy of these predictions, and what they might have looked like at the time and what they look like to us with the benefit of hindsight.

• 3:15Charles Liu?

  Well...

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we're gonna, we're gonna get all in this.

• 3:18Charles Liu?

  Yeah, I think it's good, but I think we should first say right away for everybody that...

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First say right away that you host a podcast called The Luniverse. That's what we should say right away.

• 3:27Charles Liu?

  Oh, the Luniverse.

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Luniverse, Charles Lu, you see what he did there?

• 3:31Charles Liu?

  I didn't do it, it was my family members.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the Lu, the bathroom, but talking about Charles Lu.

• 3:35Chuck Nice?

  But he's Charles Lu, so it's the Lu-niverse.

• 3:38Charles Liu?

  No, no, no, I can't take any credit for the name. We talk to scientists who are earlier in their careers.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 3:45Charles Liu?

  We talk about people who are doing all the hard work and trying different things, not just necessarily what we think of as a straight-up science stuff, but also thinking about the future, thinking about pop science, culture, things that we like to talk about here on StarTalk, but on a level for...

• 4:02Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a lot of fresh, unvarnished ideas come out of that for generations.

• 4:07Chuck Nice?

  Right, we love that.

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some of them can change the world.

• 4:09Charles Liu?

  Right, as you know, Neil, the really tough, new pioneer techniques are always done by our younger colleagues. We can have great ideas and we're like, "Oh, darn it, if only someone had a way, a technology, a tool that could solve these problems." And then some guy comes along, some lady comes along and says, "Yeah, I know how to do that." And and they just bring something new and that's how changes happen. It's no accident that some of the best discoveries, the Nobel Awards, come from people in their twenties and their thirties.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're awarded much later.

• 4:40Chuck Nice?

  Well, they made their discoveries in their twenties. Which you know, they did a study on that, that you're more likely to think in a way that will lead to innovation in your late teens and twenties than at any other point in your life.

• 4:53Charles Liu?

  That's right, which is why when we here are talking about predictions, it's not so much our predictions, but what we're predicting other people will do in the future.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an important distinction.

• 5:03Charles Liu?

  And so when we think about it, from a scientific perspective, we don't want to say so much predictions as models. Right? We are taking what knowledge we have now and modeling it for the future. And models are always wrong, but sometimes they're useful. And therefore, we have the opportunity to think about the future in an informed and educated way.

• 5:24Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, set the stage here.

• 5:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so in your book, Starry Messenger, in the chapter at the end of Exploration and Discovery, you kind of go on a fool's errand and make a raft of predictions for the year 2050.

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he just call me a fool?

• 5:39Gary O'Reilly?

  No.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would you kick his ass over there?

• 5:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Can it wait?

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, a fool's errand, yes.

• 5:48Gary O'Reilly?

  So, we're not gonna wait 25 years to find out if they come true.

• 5:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me set that up. So the whole, a big part of that chapter, titled Exploration and Discovery, is an exercise in what do people think would be discovered? Or how differently do they think they'd be living in one era versus one generation later? And I just, I tightened it to 30 years. So I go 30-year increments from 1870 up to 2020. And everybody's getting everything wrong all the time.

• 6:13Charles Liu?

  Of course.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so I said, "Time for me to join the list, and I'm gonna make predictions for 2050, so that in 2050, people can look back and see everything I got wrong, so that I'm not..."

• 6:23Chuck Nice?

  See, but I disagree. I don't think that these predictions are wrong. I think they're inaccurate. And there's a big difference.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why don't we all, all semantic?

• 6:35Charles Liu?

  Actually, no, get semantic. Get semantic, Chuck. We want this.

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Teacher, on this exam, I didn't get anything wrong. It was just inaccurate.

• 6:43Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God, now you know how all my teachers hated me.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can, we can explore that. Finish setting this up.

• 6:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Where do we go for our predictions? The tried and trusted sources? We'll have a look at that. Are the people that are making these predictions or writing examples, are they in fact the influencers of the future that are based in the past? Or if we leave it alone, does the future take care of itself? We'll get into all the sort of philosophical thoughts about that. But first and foremost-

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you mean if we didn't predict the future, so that there was no groundwork for new ideas, would that, would future still have a place to land? Would it still unfold?

• 7:22Chuck Nice?

  Would it still unfold, yeah.

• 7:22Gary O'Reilly?

  So, let's look to science. Let's look to science fiction as our go-tos for what our lives might well be back. I mean, I'll kick it off, the Jetsons.

• 7:37Chuck Nice?

  Daughter Judy!

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who can make the sound of the jet-

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's it, there you go! There you go!

• 7:46Chuck Nice?

  That's every flying car in the jetsons.

• 7:49Gary O'Reilly?

  So, this, this was made in the early 60s, 1960s, but it's set in 2062. So it's not that far away from where we sit-

• 7:58Charles Liu?

  A hundred years in the future was what it was-

• 8:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, but where we sit today, it's not that far. So you've got flying cars, there's a robot in every house.

• 8:05Chuck Nice?

  Yes. In some, in some places, that's the, that's the case. First of all, we do have flying cars. We have them now. Um, they're just quadcopters, but they're flying cars.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:16Chuck Nice?

  And if you go to Japan, you're gonna find pretty much some kind of robot in every home.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got robots everywhere, yeah.

• 8:22Gary O'Reilly?

  So, in fact, are the Jetsons the most accurate prediction of the near future we have? Or do we have to look in other places for accuracy?

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I found this recently, was it the year 2020? I was looking for years predicted for the future that are already in our past. And in the Jetsons, I think George Jetson, you can triangulate based on certain script lines that he was born in the year 2020.

• 8:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, really?

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Cool. Kind of the Jetsons was the other extreme of the foodstuffs.

• 8:58Chuck Nice?

  George Jetson, pandemic baby!

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he know? Did he, did he know? I think it was 20, it might have been 2021, but it was, it was in the last couple-

• 9:05Chuck Nice?

  Somewhere in that window.

• 9:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somewhere in there, so that's the first point. So here's what I think they got wrong. They didn't-

• 9:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Understand that a robot can be anything that does something that you wouldn't otherwise do.

• 9:21Chuck Nice?

  Right, any task.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any task.

• 9:23Chuck Nice?

  Any task.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, he's still flying his flying car. He doesn't push a button and say, "Take me to work."

• 9:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And have the car do the work, as we have today.

• 9:33Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, if you have a robot who can run your home, you damn sure can have a car that will just take you to work.

• 9:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so they missed the fact that a robot did not have to have any humanoid features. This is the same with Isaac Asimov's iRobot.

• 9:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which predates the Jacksons.

• 9:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, in iRobot, the robots are humanoid.

• 9:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's not necessary because it assumes the human form is something you want to emulate. And there's a lot of stuff we don't do well. Make a machine do it better. So, all I'm saying is, I don't think they thought about a self-driving car, which is itself a form of robot.

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, if you've ever seen the Amazon warehouse.

• 10:15Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Chuck Nice?

  It's full of robots.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Autonomous.

• 10:18Chuck Nice?

  And they're just all boxes.

• 10:20Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Chuck Nice?

  They're all boxes, just moving around.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're moving the boxes.

• 10:24Chuck Nice?

  Doing stuff, moving boxes, but they're all robots.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, everyone, you know where they're going, where they're going to put it? And they have their ID.

• 10:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the thing, now what you don't know is what those robots do when you leave.

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could be a quantum thing, right?

• 10:37Charles Liu?

  The secret life of robots.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The secret life of robots. Like, while you're looking at them, they're looking like they're busy.

• 10:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You look away.

• 10:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then they're partying.

• 10:45Chuck Nice?

  They're out the back with a cigarette, just like the humans.

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you have a book on quantum.

• 10:51Charles Liu?

  The Handy Quantum Physics Answer.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Answer book, yes, in a series, that's not your first rodeo.

• 10:56Charles Liu?

  I've done Handy Astronomy, Handy Physics, and right now Handy Quantum.

• 11:00Chuck Nice?

  Is it like quantum physics for dummies?

• 11:02Charles Liu?

  Well, I assume that you guys aren't dummies.

• 11:04Chuck Nice?

  See, that's where you make a mistake.

• 11:06Charles Liu?

  No, no, no.

• 11:09Charles Liu?

  Quantum physics is not any harder than classical physics. It's just different and strange.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Weird as shit.

• 11:16Charles Liu?

  So, all I'm trying to tell people by calling it a handy answer book is that don't think of it as this thing that's really difficult. Think of it as just you can flip to it in like a manual. It's like riding a bicycle or putting together a piece of furniture.

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quantum manual, so I want the robots in the Amazon fulfillment centers.

• 11:32Chuck Nice?

  To be reading.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To two quantum states.

• 11:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One where they're busy and the other one where they're out back smoking a cigarette.

• 11:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Who came up with fulfillment center?

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a term?

• 11:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It feels right.

• 11:42Charles Liu?

  The robots.

• 11:42Chuck Nice?

  The robots.

• 11:44Gary O'Reilly?

  It's a warehouse. It's a warehouse. It has become a fulfillment center.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me a word here.

• 11:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I don't like it.

• 11:50Charles Liu?

  Well, Sears robot catalog from more than 100 years ago had these warehouses.

• 11:55Chuck Nice?

  Which is nothing but Amazon.

• 11:56Charles Liu?

  That's right. But it's, they had human beings filling things out, right? And at some point in the mid 20th century, the marketing decided to call that instead of a warehouse, calling it a fulfillment center. And so the idea was...

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was Sears?

• 12:11Charles Liu?

  Uh, we think it was Sears. But certainly all the other big stores at that time had that information.

• 12:17Chuck Nice?

  I mean, and sometimes you say things, but you know, sometimes I have fact-checked you behind your back.

• 12:21Charles Liu?

  Please.

• 12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I have to do my...

• 12:23Chuck Nice?

  And you're always, you're always right on point.

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta do my...

• 12:27Chuck Nice?

  But when you say something like, "Yeah, so 100 years ago." I'm just like, "Get the, get out of here."

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I gotta do my once-per-show reaction.

• 12:36Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead. Why do you know this?

• 12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. But that was early in this show. Oh my gosh, I don't know if I have more than one in me.

• 12:47Gary O'Reilly?

  I think Charles does.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep going. Wait, also, also with the maid. Rosie, the maid.

• 12:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, first it's female, right? So it's still the genderized robot.

• 13:01Chuck Nice?

  That was sexist.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And with the, with the little apron.

• 13:04Chuck Nice?

  French?

• 13:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  French.

• 13:06Chuck Nice?

  So she was a sexy robot.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 13:34Gary O'Reilly?

  If we look at the movies and generally you're thinking about major budgets for production, yeah, things don't always work out. You take the 1982 Blade Runner movie, Harrison Ford, remember that?

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Based on...

• 13:48Gary O'Reilly?

  I don't know what it was.

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, based on a novel by...

• 13:51Charles Liu?

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick?

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 13:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, thank you.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when did he write that? Well, early 50s, right?

• 13:57Charles Liu?

  Quite early.

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Gary O'Reilly?

  So it was set in 2019?

• 14:00Chuck Nice?

  The original, the original movie, right?

• 14:03Gary O'Reilly?

  The movie, yeah, the 82. But so much of it doesn't land true.

• 14:07Chuck Nice?

  None of it.

• 14:07Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, we have hindsight, which obviously is perfect.

• 14:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:10Gary O'Reilly?

  But you're thinking about they're humanoid and they're off-world.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Replicants, yeah.

• 14:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, doesn't exist, didn't happen.

• 14:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Replicants, right?

• 14:16Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 14:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Did not happen.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're not off-world.

• 14:19Charles Liu?

  No.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't have perfectly humanoid replicants.

• 14:23Charles Liu?

  Right. And the sun sometimes shines.

• 14:25Chuck Nice?

  Right. However, we were living in a dystopia.

• 14:28Charles Liu?

  So.

• 14:29Chuck Nice?

  That is a thing.

• 14:30Gary O'Reilly?

  And the dystopian future is debatable.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I have my issues with dystopian futures. Because it assumes that whatever the trend line is in a culture, in a civilization, that it continues to descend without anybody doing anything about it at any time.

• 14:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the public, not the politicians, not the military, nothing. It just continues to descend and hits rock bottom and then they make a movie out of it.

• 14:56Chuck Nice?

  I have a very, very quick...

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It can happen locally, but globally...

• 15:00Chuck Nice?

  I have a very quick theory on why that happens, why they do it that way. Because most dystopian futures are a warning against authoritarianism.

• 15:10Charles Liu?

  Well said.

• 15:10Chuck Nice?

  And that's why that's dumb. That's why it's like...

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because authoritarians can take it down the toilet.

• 15:14Chuck Nice?

  That's right. And that's why, that's why it's like, that's why they're always written that way.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's an interesting...

• 15:19Chuck Nice?

  Go on.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ...thing that is going, that happened in Blade Runner that we're kind of doing today.

• 15:25Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Do you remember the scene, very tense scene, where one of the replicants, who's trying to pass as human, is getting interviewed by someone whose task it is to identify the replicants, who are no longer presenting themselves as replicants? And the replicants are so good that they have to go through a series of questions where they're... Testing is the dilation of his eyes and his emotional reactions to certain situations. Oh gosh, yes, psych profile. Yes, yes, yes. And there's a point where he's, he's like, he can't react in a way a human being would

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  or would be expected to. My point is today, when people show me stuff written by ChatGPT, I'm analyzing that. If they don't tell me that, I'm analyzing it for, is there a human emotion in here that's authentic? Or is this replicated by something that thinks it can be human? I'm doing the same thing. Right, yeah.

• 16:29Charles Liu?

  You are conducting the Turing test in real time.

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But a better, not, yeah, a really deep. A more discerning version. A more discerning version. Tell me about the Turing test. Tell everybody.

• 16:38Charles Liu?

  Turing, the famous guy, right, who helped create computers and so forth. He said, yes, it would be important for us to figure out whether or not a machine has become truly intelligent by seeing if you can tell the difference between the responses of a machine and the responses of a human being.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without seeing who's behind the curtain.

• 17:01Charles Liu?

  Right. And from there, you develop all the details, right? The Turing test as a general idea became specific about, for example, the things you're talking about, right, Neil? Analyzing text or analyzing responses like in Blade Runner. And so, in a sense, it was a predictive strategy to try to figure out whether something is what you think it is or whether it's something.

• 17:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this not a test more for not so much intelligence as consciousness?

• 17:26Charles Liu?

  It depends.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 17:28Charles Liu?

  Different versions.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What difference does it make if, if machines are intelligent? Does it really make a difference?

• 17:32Charles Liu?

  Well, that depends on what you think intelligence is.

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's some dumbass people, and if a computer was dumbass, that would mean they're not. That's what I'm saying. They're not a computer. We don't, we don't.

• 17:44Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. We don't get rid of dumbass people just because they stupid. You know, so why can't we have stupid computers? And by the way, we do have smartphones and dumb phones. Like, we're moving in that direction anyway.

• 17:59Charles Liu?

  But this is our own bias against what is intelligent and what is not, right? When we judge a person to be stupid, that person's still very intelligent. There's intelligence that person can adapt, that person is likely conscious, that person is likely able to figure out puzzles and so forth. But we claim that they're stupid because somehow they didn't get a joke that we told or that we, they couldn't solve a math problem and things like that.

• 18:26Chuck Nice?

  Says the comedian.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hit it on the head.

• 18:29Charles Liu?

  Right?

• 18:30Chuck Nice?

  That's the measure.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the real measure.

• 18:32Chuck Nice?

  The comedic Turing test. Did you laugh at my joke?

• 18:34Charles Liu?

  Did you laugh at my joke?

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You dumbass.

• 18:36Charles Liu?

  Well, there's an episode of the classic Batman TV show where Robin and Batman tried to test whether there's a robot or not. And what happened was that Batman and Robin told a super funny joke, which that robot was supposed to laugh at. And since the person... But that's right. They were trying to test whether this was a robot or not. And when the thing did not laugh, they ripped his head off and he went "yuuu." Because, yeah, Batman just told him a super funny joke and he didn't laugh, so we knew that it was a robot. So, you are the ultimate test, Chuck, you and your colleagues.

• 19:12Chuck Nice?

  According to Batman.

• 19:14Charles Liu?

  About actual consciousness.

• 19:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holy Puzzline, Batman.

• 19:17Gary O'Reilly?

  We don't recommend pulling the heads of audience members.

• 19:20Charles Liu?

  That don't laugh at your jokes.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was the only part of the story I liked.

• 19:24Chuck Nice?

  I know something that maybe Charles does not know.

• 19:27Charles Liu?

  Uh-oh. You know many things I do not know.

• 19:28Chuck Nice?

  Let me enjoy this moment.

• 19:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Have we got competitive?

• 19:33Chuck Nice?

  Turing obviously did not call it the Turing test.

• 19:36Charles Liu?

  Correct.

• 19:36Chuck Nice?

  Do you know what he called it?

• 19:37Charles Liu?

  I do not remember.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you ever know?

• 19:40Chuck Nice?

  I might have.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He called it-

• 19:42Chuck Nice?

  I'm not intelligent enough.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He called it the imitation game.

• 19:46Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 19:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hence-

• 19:47Chuck Nice?

  The name of the movie.

• 19:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The title of the movie. Which profiled his life.

• 19:51Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Kira Knightley.

• 19:53Chuck Nice?

  Benedict Cumberbatch.

• 19:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Benedict Cumberbatch.

• 19:56Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's a good lineup.

• 19:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Sherlock Holmes.

• 19:58Chuck Nice?

  I gotta watch this movie.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You never seen, you ever seen?

• 20:00Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm taking it?

• 20:01Chuck Nice?

  This is the first I ever heard of it, to be honest.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, you gotta get out more.

• 20:04Chuck Nice?

  Both the touring story and the movie.

• 20:07Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, it's a tragic-

• 20:08Chuck Nice?

  I had no idea that either one-

• 20:08Gary O'Reilly?

  His life story becomes tragic.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, don't give it away.

• 20:11Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm not, I've just-

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let him think it has a happy ending.

• 20:13Gary O'Reilly?

  I've teased him. Spoiler alert, please. So where else do we go? I mean, there are series like, historically, The Twilight Zone.

• 20:19Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, Rod Serling.

• 20:20Gary O'Reilly?

  And that peak, that peak are in trace-

• 20:21Chuck Nice?

  The Outer Limits.

• 20:22Gary O'Reilly?

  And the Outer Limits, and we move through into, more recently, The Black Mirror.

• 20:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, what's his name, Charlie?

• 20:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Booker.

• 20:29Chuck Nice?

  Charlie Booker, who is brilliant.

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to contrast the two.

• 20:33Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think they both, they both leave you emotionally spent and disturbed at the end.

• 20:40Gary O'Reilly?

  And they're also both-

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you go to The Twilight Zone in its day, and you look at sort of the disturbing stories that it told, and it didn't always have a happy ending.

• 20:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Is this not the Ray Bradbury kind of School of Sore? I need you to think.

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and if you look at Rod Serling's comment on his show, he said, "Look, at the end of the day, we're just selling soap, alright? So how do you sell soap in a way that people don't feel offended, or whatever?" And he says, "If you said it in a fictionalized world, where that's clearly not your world, then you can tell stories of people, oh, that's just happening in that world, and later on, they pause and say, 'Wait a minute, that was me, or that was my friend, or my neighbor, or that's how I behaved.'" And so he was a storyteller par excellence-

• 21:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -in that genre. And especially, like I said, the disturbing feature of so many of those, and you fast forward to Black Mirror, which has an authentic science fiction future-

• 21:38Chuck Nice?

  Always.

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -foundation to it, yes.

• 21:40Chuck Nice?

  But-

• 21:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But highlight what that future is, because some people might not know.

• 21:43Chuck Nice?

  The future is this.

• 21:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black Mirror is a Netflix series.

• 21:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I believe it's on Netflix.

• 21:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's third season, the fourth season, yeah.

• 21:48Chuck Nice?

  But the future is highly technologically driven. It's driven, everything is driven by technology. But the stories are about how we respond-

• 22:02Chuck Nice?

  To the technological advancements. It's really never about the technology itself.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 22:07Chuck Nice?

  Uh, it's always about our human nature and how it is affected by the technology.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one thing that they do, which is just only a little out of reach in our imaginings, is in that future, which prevails in almost all episodes, because they share the same universe, right? Like, the news that's on the TV is the same news casters that you see in multiple. So, they're, they're in the same world.

• 22:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What they all have in common is that the human mind is accessible.

• 22:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the way hard drives are accessible.

• 22:45Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 22:46Chuck Nice?

  And often messed in, in the way...

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 22:50Chuck Nice?

  The way hard drives are connected.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if you go into someone's head, rewind an event.

• 22:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Experience what they saw, see what they see through their eyes.

• 22:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pull it back out, manipulate it.

• 22:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, that's, that's a whole frontier of storytelling that's been unplumbed.

• 23:05Chuck Nice?

  But when you think about it, it's, it's a frontier of storytelling, but it is also a different facet of reality. Because the way you experience something, even though we experience the exact same thing, is totally different from the way I experience it. And so, what he does is he blurs the lines between individual realities, collective realities, and a technologically measured reality.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah.

• 23:32Chuck Nice?

  Which is brilliant, because I can look around this room and I'm seeing everything as it is seen through my...

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Chuck filter.

• 23:42Chuck Nice?

  My, my, my filter, but I'm also seeing it through human eyes, as opposed to like the eyes of, you know, an eagle or a, an owl. I'm also...

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or Jordy.

• 23:52Chuck Nice?

  Or Jordy, right. And that's where I was, the next one I was going. But what I can't do is see it through the eyes of, like, an infrared meter.

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:01Chuck Nice?

  You know, so, all those realities exist at the same time, though.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 24:05Chuck Nice?

  And that's what makes him so brilliant. I love...

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the idea that you can download your brain and put it on a computer. Everyone's talking about that.

• 24:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black Mirror makes it real.

• 24:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and it's scary when you see what he does.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you see the nefarious ways people...

• 24:20Chuck Nice?

  Well, the way they'll manipulate it in the way that really explores the darker side of our human nature. One of my favorite episodes. Is there's a guy and he thinks that um he's been in some kind of accident and he's in a log cabin. And another guy shows up and he's just like, hey, man, and he's like kind of nursing him back to health. He thinks he's been injured and then he gets him to admit that he murdered his family or some some crazy thing that he did.

• 24:49Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 24:50Chuck Nice?

  Only to find out that he was in a simulation and he was under interrogation by the police.

• 24:56Charles Liu?

  Oh, wow.

• 24:57Chuck Nice?

  And then what they did afterwards was they punished him by leaving him in the simulation for a simulated hundred years.

• 25:06Charles Liu?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 25:07Chuck Nice?

  So that he would come out of his prison sentence, thinking that he had been in prison for a hundred years, when really he had only been in prison for whatever the time dilation mentally was for him, maybe it had been a year, but he would thought think he would serve a hundred. So do we all think this is our future?

• 25:24Charles Liu?

  No.

• 25:25Chuck Nice?

  It has a possibility. Why, why? It feels real enough. It feels like we're headed there.

• 25:32Charles Liu?

  The reason I don't think this thing will work is simply because we are assuming that intelligence and perceptions and so forth can be so fully controlled that we can't tell the difference between a reality and what is not real. We already know that our brains can be fooled.

• 25:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:51Charles Liu?

  We already know that, so technology is not going to change anything in that respect unless we allow it to happen. And so I don't think that adding technology here, never mind the idea of whether or not our intelligence is actually digitizable, right? If it's a quantum situation, then you can never pass qubits and digitize as something called the no cloning theorem that makes that very difficult. So you wind up with a circumstance.

• 26:17Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, now you gotta stop. I was gonna say, you gotta stop, man. You gotta bring a rap to the no cloning theorem. Because. You can't just walk past that, walk by and just like drop that down. Just like, oh, here's the no cloning theorem, boom, all right, I'm moving on.

• 26:34Charles Liu?

  Well, okay, the no cloning theorem is just one of many different pieces of quantum computing, sort of like the laws of quantum computing, the same way that Isomoff had laws of robotics.

• 26:45Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:45Charles Liu?

  This particular one, the no cloning theorem, means that if you have a quantum bit of information, you can't just make as many copies of it as you'd like. You can't make copies. So, like us, we can digitize a photograph, taking little pixels, and then make each pixel exactly the same as another pixel on a hard drive or a USB stick or something, and then you get an exact copy of the previous picture.

• 27:08Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 27:09Charles Liu?

  The no cloning theorem says that for quantum information, you can't do that. So, anytime you have some quantum-

• 27:16Chuck Nice?

  And why wouldn't you be able to do that with a qubit as opposed to bits and bytes, which we're able to do it with?

• 27:21Charles Liu?

  Right. As soon as you read a qubit, it is destroyed.

• 27:25Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense, because it existed in a superposition to begin with.

• 27:29Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 27:29Chuck Nice?

  Right. So- Go Chuck! So, the moment that you actually realize the superposition, all other positions are made null and void at that particular instance.

• 27:38Charles Liu?

  That's a great way to describe it.

• 27:40Chuck Nice?

  Damn! Damn Chuck! Give that man a degree!

• 27:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Can you only capture a freeze frame of that, your consciousness, at a certain time? Because if you were to do it five minutes afterwards, it would potentially be different.

• 27:54Charles Liu?

  That is one consequence of this no cloning idea, right? You can know what you are this very moment, but you cannot know what is the next moment, the moment after that.

• 28:05Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god!

• 28:05Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 28:05Chuck Nice?

  This is why this show is so goddamn great! Do you understand? This is science! This is why this is so awesome!

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why'd you make- he blew a gasket.

• 28:16Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry.

• 28:18Charles Liu?

  Sorry about that.

• 28:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright, so if we're thinking about our future, if we're thinking about getting on and thinking about fifty, a hundred, so many years in advance.

• 28:33Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 28:34Gary O'Reilly?

  What you're describing, Starry Messenger, is the exponential growth. Of our lives, our inventions, our ideas.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And our understandings, yes.

• 28:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, and then you sort of frame it in a thirty year gap.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 28:46Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm just wondering, and we'll return to exponential growth, because I need to know how far away we are from being vertical on the graph.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:54Gary O'Reilly?

  But if you took someone from nineteen ninety five and brought them to twenty twenty five, would they be completely out of sorts with the way we are today?

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let me tell you why that is definitely the case.

• 29:08Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, they would not know how to function, all right? But little things, like you sit them at a restaurant and say, where's the menu? Oh, here's the QR code. They'll have no idea what that is, or what it means, or what it, but they have no, they don't know what social media is, they, they barely, they barely, lucky, they barely have an email address, because those were on the rise beginning in the nineteen nineties for the general public. The, the idea that you would have self-driving electric cars just on the road with no driver, if you walk around LA, these cars are just all over the place, okay? And what role the smartphone has played in our lives, beginning from two thousand and seven onward.

• 29:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The idea that you can walk and talk to someone with something smaller than the size of a pack of cigarettes to someone on the Riviera in, where's the Riviera in France?

• 29:59Gary O'Reilly?

  French France.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  French, French.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what I'm describing is

• 30:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  how the way we currently live and take it for granted would be wholly foreign, and exotic, and unfamiliar to someone transported from nineteen ninety five.

• 30:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Respectfully and with love, I disagree completely.

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because of ninety five to twenty twenty five, or just in general, a thirty year interval?

• 30:26Gary O'Reilly?

  No, it's specifically for nineteen ninety five to twenty twenty five because we had Star Trek. We already saw what could be. We have Jules Verne, we had H.G. Wells, we had Lucian.

• 30:42Charles Liu?

  From the second century A.D. Lucian. Yes. Uh, he wrote.

• 30:47Chuck Nice?

  I love Lucian.

• 30:48Charles Liu?

  Well, I do, actually. He, uh, was. He was a guy from sort of the Greek area of the world, which at that time was fertile with culture and imagination and so forth. About when? Uh, about the second century A.D. Oh, you know who else was the second century? I don't know if they had a. Ptolemy. Ptolemy. Okay. He wrote, I'm a guest. I do not think it was a coincidence. That's, that's a period of time. Laying out the universe.

• 31:12Gary O'Reilly?

  All the people that Charles has named there, they're historic.

• 31:15Charles Liu?

  Yes. Wait, wait, Lucian is not the name, that's the name of the. Lucian is the name of the person who wrote, is credited with writing a science fiction novel called A True Story. Wow. Yes. Voyagers are on a boat and they are caught in a storm and they wind up on the moon. And at the moon, there are creatures who don't look like humans, but they're engaged in a great war. These are the kinds. As Greeks want to be, so clearly other people would be fighting as well. These are the kinds of things that have been imagined for a long, long time. And I don't think that anyone in 95 showing up in 2025 would go, oh my gosh, people are talking to a box. And they'll say, oh, wait, that happened in Star Trek. Okay, how does this work? And they just tap, tap, tap.

• 31:58Charles Liu?

  And because everything was built for humans by humans, they would be able to adapt. Instead of by aliens. Right, right, right. Almost immediately because of the commonalities of humans from 1995 to 2025.

• 32:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so now let's take it back to, and let's forget second century A.D.

• 32:15Charles Liu?

  Sure.

• 32:16Chuck Nice?

  Which is a time of enlightenment.

• 32:17Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 32:17Chuck Nice?

  Let's go to a time of darkness.

• 32:18Charles Liu?

  Uh oh.

• 32:19Chuck Nice?

  All right, so.

• 32:20Charles Liu?

  Like now?

• 32:23Chuck Nice?

  So let, let, let's go to the Middle Ages. You know what I mean?

• 32:26Charles Liu?

  Go to the Dark Ages.

• 32:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Dark Ages, not the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, where we go, where we're consumed by superstition.

• 32:32Charles Liu?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:32Chuck Nice?

  And everything is squelched in terms of any enlightenment with those people transported to today.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, just to be clear.

• 32:41Chuck Nice?

  Would everything be witchcraft?

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, just to be clear, in the book, I localized it to the era of the Industrial Revolution, where you can fully expect that inventions will change how you live. There was a period where no one expected their great-great-grandchildren to be living any differently than they did.

• 32:58Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I don't know that you can go that far back.

• 33:00Chuck Nice?

  You can't go that far back.

• 33:02Charles Liu?

  You can. I'll say that, because, first of all, we should understand that Dark Ages was a term coined by European historians.

• 33:11Chuck Nice?

  True.

• 33:11Charles Liu?

  In fact, historians who claim that Rome fell in the year AD 476 did not take into account what we know to be true, that other people ran that area known as the Roman Empire in many different ways for centuries thereafter. And then there was the Holy Roman Empire that happened, starting at 800, with Charlemagne. Meanwhile, there is an Eastern Empire that was based at Constantinople.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Byzantine Orthodox.

• 33:37Charles Liu?

  That's right. All of that concept.

• 33:39Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, Rome's still here today.

• 33:41Charles Liu?

  That's right. I was there this summer. It's a beautiful place. It was very hot.

• 33:44Chuck Nice?

  It's still happening.

• 33:45Charles Liu?

  So, our sense of what history is also makes us think about predicting the past. What has been framed for us as the Dark Ages was actually a period of great innovation, and people were thinking about a lot of things, but not necessarily in Europe. In the Arabic-speaking world, things like algebra were being created, things like mathematics. Yes, Chuck.

• 34:09Chuck Nice?

  You can't be talking about what brown people did, okay? It doesn't count if it didn't happen in Europe.

• 34:14Charles Liu?

  You're making my point exactly. You truer words were never spoken. And see, this is the point.

• 34:19Chuck Nice?

  Next thing you'll be telling me there were pyramids in Africa. Get out of here.

• 34:22Charles Liu?

  Right. I mean, surely no Egyptian people could ever have made these. It must have been done by aliens, because, what, Egyptians aren't as smart as people who look like Europeans, and they couldn't do geometry? This is a very, very inappropriate way of looking at history.

• 34:58Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we use the imagination of these authors, these filmmakers.

• 35:04Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 35:05Gary O'Reilly?

  And then we kind of replicate some of the things that they came up. So we follow, we have sliding doors. We first saw them in Star Trek.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I first saw them in Star Trek.

• 35:13Gary O'Reilly?

  So, yeah, okay. So the thing is, are they shaping the future from their position in the past?

• 35:19Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 35:19Gary O'Reilly?

  And we follow that?

• 35:20Charles Liu?

  Great idea, great point.

• 35:22Gary O'Reilly?

  That's hilarious.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you asking, if we never saw sliding doors as a future feature of our lives, would it have been pursued? And would we be trying to open the grocery store door, holding our bags?

• 35:35Charles Liu?

  Great question. Here's my thought on this. We make predictions all the time. Probably there are a thousand predictions about the future that are in the literature or just around on newspapers or even written down by people from a hundred years ago. As Yogi Berra said, "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." But if you make a thousand predictions, one of them will come true. And we're looking backwards, right?

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you cherry pick the future?

• 36:05Charles Liu?

  Yes, and if the future shows up with sliding doors, you go back and go, hey, remember that? Like, we don't talk about anybody who predicted doors would go up and down or that doors would swirl out. But they exist, you know? So somebody probably did that, even though Star Trek as a show itself didn't have doors that swirled out. There are ways to do this that we have all thought of. They just didn't dominate our society for whatever reason.

• 36:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. All right, let's go to your 2050 predictions from Starry Messenger.

• 36:42Charles Liu?

  Predictions.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, by the way, I put in my predictions so that in 2050, people can make fun of me.

• 36:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, we're gonna do it right now.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As I highlighted, everybody else is wrong.

• 36:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody else is wrong predictions. But just quickly, to put this in context. In the book I describe... A prediction in 1900 made for the year 2000.

• 37:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in the year 1900, steamships were setting records across the ocean.

• 37:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Railroads crossed the continents. And so in this for the year 2000, they had a steamship coming out of the ocean with railroad wheels flipped down. It goes straight onto a railroad

• 37:25Chuck Nice?

  Right onto a railroad track.

• 37:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then continues on land.

• 37:27Chuck Nice?

  Worst transformer ever.

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this was, and another one.

• 37:32Gary O'Reilly?

  That's just linear thinking again.

• 37:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's linear thinking. And another one, also how are people getting around through lighter than air.

• 37:39Chuck Nice?

  Balloons.

• 37:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Balloons, dirigibles, blimps, this sort of thing. So they imagine in the year 2000, everyone would have their own personal balloons. So there are these balloons that wrap under your, in your armpit, and you have two, and, and so it shows them sort of walking on water, kept buoyant by these two, by these balloons.

• 38:02Chuck Nice?

  Marvelous.

• 38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's like, okay.

• 38:04Chuck Nice?

  Cause that's, that's, that's the extent of their imagination couldn't go much farther than what was available.

• 38:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's kinda it.

• 38:13Chuck Nice?

  What was available.

• 38:14Charles Liu?

  Amazing.

• 38:15Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. One of your predictions, the space program becomes a space industry.

• 38:20Chuck Nice?

  Already happened.

• 38:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Funded not by taxpayers' dollars, but by space tourism and other projects.

• 38:25Chuck Nice?

  That part didn't happen.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's not 2050 yet.

• 38:27Chuck Nice?

  Now, okay.

• 38:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude.

• 38:28Chuck Nice?

  Well, that.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, what do you think, what do you think about that?

• 38:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't get all protective.

• 38:31Charles Liu?

  Prices are not going to drop low enough for people to want to go into space just for the heck of it.

• 38:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not for 30 years?

• 38:38Charles Liu?

  Not for 30 years. Unfortunately, you're watching the prices now extrapolating outward into the future. You just don't see that pattern happening because right now what's happening is that space is still controlled by

• 38:52Chuck Nice?

  Countries.

• 38:53Charles Liu?

  Governments that are willing to subsidize private corporations. Once those subsidies

• 38:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Doesn't every country on earth have a same equity in the space?

• 39:02Charles Liu?

  You would hope so, but at the moment, as with any other parts of the world, they

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, the dawn of flight, it was very expensive. Very few people was on a plane. If you flew on a plane, that was like

• 39:11Chuck Nice?

  You were rich.

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The news of the cocktail party that you attended. And then now everybody can fly because the plane, we figured out how to make it cheap.

• 39:19Charles Liu?

  The plane was and always was, from the very beginning in 1903, a private enterprise activity. Space has since its beginning been a governmental activity.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's missing some information. So, the rapid development of flight between 19, call it 10 and 1930.

• 39:40Charles Liu?

  Was funded by World War I.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, so you had, you had government investments in...

• 39:46Chuck Nice?

  In, in the advancement of aviation.

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An advancement of aviation, and the government wanted to deliver mail by plane.

• 39:53Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The birth of air mail. And so the government said, "We're gonna give a contract to whoever can outbid whoever else. And you do it, and you win the contract." I said, "I want the contract." So, I make my plane better because I can carry more for the same amount of money that yours does. Now I win the contract back from you. And this continues until somebody says, "Hey, instead of sacks of mail, I can carry sacks of people." And then I can, that was the birth of commercial aviation, driven by the government's interest in you making a better airplane.

• 40:25Charles Liu?

  But it made money. And when we tried to do that with the space shuttle, we didn't make money. And so, until money is made, that track will not stop.

• 40:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your sentence had the word "until" in it. Fine, I'm saying by 2050, the "until" will happen within there.

• 40:43Charles Liu?

  I do not think so.

• 40:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's, that's what it is.

• 40:45Chuck Nice?

  So here's what I think. In response to both of you, what's going to happen is, there's a lot of money floating around in space.

• 40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 40:51Charles Liu?

  Really? Where?

• 40:54Charles Liu?

  I'm up there, you and me. Yeah, let's go.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go this afternoon. Yeah, I looked in the wrong place.

• 40:59Chuck Nice?

  And it's in mining. And if we can mine what's out there, instead of destroying the earth to bring back all these precious rare earths that, well, they wouldn't be rare earths, they'd be rare space.

• 41:10Charles Liu?

  Rare space minerals.

• 41:11Chuck Nice?

  Rare space. If we can bring that back, what happens is, to get there, it's going to propel the advancement so fast.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a gold rush.

• 41:20Chuck Nice?

  Like a gold rush. People are gonna go so crazy, so fast, to get out there and get that money, that space tourism will be a natural byproduct.

• 41:28Charles Liu?

  Byproduct.

• 41:29Chuck Nice?

  That's what I believe.

• 41:30Charles Liu?

  So not the target, but the byproduct.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As happens so often.

• 41:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wanna read to you... We don't have time for this, I'm gonna do it anyway. I wanna read to you a, a letter that I own.

• 41:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Written December 19th, 1918.

• 41:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh. Oh, I think I know what this will be.

• 41:46Chuck Nice?

  I didn't know you were that old.

• 41:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Nah!

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is to Mr. Alan Hawley, President of the Aero Club of America.

• 41:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Then I know who wrote this.

• 41:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Madison Avenue. Dear Mr. Hawley, many thanks for your very nice telegram, remembering the 15th anniversary of our first flight at Kitty Hawk.

• 42:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Whoa.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Although Wilbur, as well as myself, would have preferred to see the aeroplane developed more along peaceful lines, yet I believe that its use in this great war will give encouragement for its use in other ways. Signed, sincerely yours, Orville Wright.

• 42:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look at that.

• 42:39Gary O'Reilly?

  And in war, take the high ground, and they took it to another level, pun intended. Um, right, let's take another look. Self-driving electric cars, you go there, and I don't think that's-

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's in there. Yeah, yeah.

• 42:49Gary O'Reilly?

  That's, that's not a limb that's gonna be breaking, that's a-

• 42:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, there are people who say that it'll never happen, or whatever, people like driving. And, and we already have HOV lanes.

• 42:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 42:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you say you can only go in that if it's a self-driving car.

• 43:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 43:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the self-driving cars are going 120 miles an hour, three car lengths between each other, because they have instant reflexes, and they're not putting on makeup, and they're not texting, and they're not- If they could, and they still-

• 43:13Chuck Nice?

  There are cars being made right now that don't have steering wheels, so we are going to live in a self-driving, a driverless car society at one point.

• 43:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Faster than most people.

• 43:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Agreed.

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you agree or not?

• 43:21Gary O'Reilly?

  I think that self-driving vehicles will be as prevalent as public transportation is.

• 43:26Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good.

• 43:27Gary O'Reilly?

  They will still be-

• 43:28Charles Liu?

  Private transportation for which drivers will still be necessary.

• 43:31Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, and listen, you'll drive on the backroads and stuff like that, you'll be able to drive your car. Okay, but one-

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, at some point, they'll become like horses.

• 43:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you can still ride your horse, your horse is at the stables.

• 43:43Chuck Nice?

  Right, you go get your horse and you drive, and you ride it.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so now your car, your car is at the-

• 43:48Chuck Nice?

  At the garage, at the trap.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's a special place where-

• 43:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's what I mean, backroads.

• 43:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who still want to drive their car, they go there and they drive their car.

• 43:55Chuck Nice?

  Here's when it's gonna happen, at some point, you have to make the cars talk to one another, and the road itself talk to the car.

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course.

• 44:04Chuck Nice?

  And at that point, at that point, you won't be allowed to drive on the road.

• 44:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wanna switch lanes, it tells the other cars, "I'm switching lanes," and they open up for you. Half all the accidents happen that way, you don't see who's in your blind spot.

• 44:15Gary O'Reilly?

  But building that infrastructure into the highways and byways is going to be so expensive.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, we went from horse-drawn buggies in 1905 to you couldn't give away a horse in 1915, with gas stations and paved roads for automobile tires, and that happened in 10 years.

• 44:31Gary O'Reilly?

  I don't know if you've noticed lately, but things are a bit more expensive.

• 44:35Charles Liu?

  Yes, and there are still millions of-

• 44:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which side are you on?

• 44:39Charles Liu?

  The side of science.

• 44:40Chuck Nice?

  The side of science.

• 44:43Charles Liu?

  There are still millions of square miles of North America where there isn't high-speed internet. So you gotta remember that these are very regional solutions right now. We can extrapolate on what's gonna happen in New York City, but the driving from Laramie, Wyoming to Fargo, North Dakota is not likely to be the same as driving from LA Sunset Boulevard to LA-

• 45:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In 1915, many of those farmers still had horse-drawn tractors, yes. So, but I'm talking about-

• 45:13Charles Liu?

  We're talking about the entire world, you're gonna have-

• 45:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're talking about the Eisenhower freeway system, highway system in the United States.

• 45:21Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 45:21Gary O'Reilly?

  It's gonna be limited to certain areas.

• 45:23Charles Liu?

  I'm afraid so.

• 45:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Neuroscience will advance, so far we understand the human mind's well enough that mental illness will be cured. You've also gone into developing antiviral serum and cures cancer.

• 45:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Do we feel that? Yeah.

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some cancers, yes.

• 45:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So with the neuroscience, which is still kind of in its infancy, so I have very high expectations for it. Psychologists hate it when I say this, but I mean it with love, that to me, psychology is to neuroscience what alchemy is to chemistry. How can you mean that with love?

• 45:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Ouch.

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, listen, I like what you're doing, but one day you're just out of work. Okay. No, no, I mean, no, there you are. You've got someone on the couch and you, for months and months and months, trying to cure their illness, the neuroscientists have, where is it? Oh, it's a nip tuck right here, there's a neurosynaptic thing there, and they nip and tuck, and you're done and you're out and no one is on the street, crazy, there's no insane asylum.

• 46:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Is this where we get to implants? That that just bypasses?

• 46:25Charles Liu?

  Yeah, that's a great point.

• 46:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't, I don't, I don't know if it's surgery or implants or that are removable, then you go back to your original state.

• 46:32Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so let's look at AI. Let's look at the influence AI will have in the world of medicine. Is this now us getting to a more vertical line on, on the exponential growth?

• 46:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The line always looks vertical.

• 46:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you're at that end of the exponential, it's always looks vertical to you, like all the advances happened just in recent years. But I want to get to the, to the AI point. To the extent that can help with medicines, I think one of my predictions was, we have medicines that, this is not some new prediction, I'm just echoing what's already been floating around, but I'm putting a timestamp on it, that medicine will be tuned to your genetic profile so that there are zero side effects.

• 47:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, you did make that.

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and what, if we know your, why is it that you break out in hives and you don't, ingesting the same chemical, there's something different about your genetic profile or your hormonal profile, we will know that, understand it, so that side effects will be a thing of the past. That's one of the predictions.

• 47:29Gary O'Reilly?

  You do make that prediction, I'll get it, it's in there.

• 47:31Charles Liu?

  Yes, I think what will happen is that we'll be able to control behaviors very well by 2050.

• 47:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 47:38Charles Liu?

  But we still won't be able to cure the diseases by 2050.

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't?

• 47:43Charles Liu?

  There's a lot to do.

• 47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think eventually, just not by 2050?

• 47:45Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 47:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 47:46Charles Liu?

  It's an issue of when. We are able now technologically.

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you say when?

• 47:52Charles Liu?

  No, I said when.

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good, thank you.

• 47:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you say cool whip?

• 47:55Charles Liu?

  It depends if I'm speaking to Hulhuitan.

• 48:00Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 48:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I never like.

• 48:04Charles Liu?

  In a quarter century, we'll be able to help everybody who have behavioral problems solve their behaviors. But that doesn't necessarily mean we'll have solved their diseases. And that is what I would like to see.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means they'll be living with the disease controlled by some medication or implant, rather than have it removed from them entirely.

• 48:23Charles Liu?

  That's my opinion.

• 48:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it safe to say that going forward into the future, that changes will happen even quicker?

• 48:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is the nature of being on an exponential. That's my point.

• 48:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That there's no doubt. If you look at the pace of patents, the pace of research papers, the doubling times are, which is how you know you're on an exponential, are, they've been consistent over the decades. So what that means is, in a few years, there'll be double the number of research papers on a subject in a field than has appeared up until that point. That's how you know you're on an exponential.

• 49:02Charles Liu?

  And the caveat is, sometimes the exponentials turn over. There's a period of exponential growth, followed by a leveling off. For example, the human population. Thomas Malthus, a couple hundred years ago, predicted that if you use exponential growth, soon, there will be so many people in the world, that there will be not enough food production, ever. But now we know that our predictions, and here's one that we could test in 30 years. 30 years from now, the exponential growth of the human population will turn over, we're gonna top out worldwide around 10 billion.

• 49:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's about right.

• 49:37Charles Liu?

  And stocks.

• 49:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but that's, but you gave the wrong.

• 49:39Chuck Nice?

  Actually start falling, as it has in many places.

• 49:42Gary O'Reilly?

  People have already made those predictions.

• 49:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, hold on, hold on. You put a cart in front of a horse there.

• 49:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Malthus is wrong, not because we, our exponential growth of the population will level off at 10 billion. He's wrong because we applied science to farming, so that now we are producing more food on less land, with fewer farmers than ever before. That's why he was wrong. He did not imagine that farm production would ever become more. Efficient or more voluminous than it was at the time. And he was just doing a linear extrapolation against the population of the planet. We are awash in food. Anyone who is starving in the world-

• 50:20Gary O'Reilly?

  How much of our food goes to waste?

• 50:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A third of it or something, I saw the numbers. So, anyone who's starving, it's not because the world doesn't have food to feed them. There's some geopolitical circumstance that prevents it. So, nobody like my predictions? No, no, no, no. These are good predictions. Last time I-

• 50:35Gary O'Reilly?

  I credit you for being brave enough to step there.

• 50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and I even got some critiques in the moment.

• 50:40Charles Liu?

  Give me each of you one final prediction about something that you would like us to know.

• 50:46Chuck Nice?

  See, so here's my prediction for, it's gonna go-

• 50:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And don't confuse what you want to be true from what will likely be true.

• 50:52Chuck Nice?

  This is my honest assessment, not my desire.

• 50:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good.

• 50:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that we are at a global tipping point with respect to democracy globally. And it's either going to be that people want to govern themselves through democratic processes, or that we're all so sleep that we descend into authoritarianism worldwide. And if we do, getting back is gonna take so many generations, none of us will be here to see it.

• 51:24Charles Liu?

  Gary, a prediction?

• 51:26Gary O'Reilly?

  That we find the desire to fully engage with climate change. Because the knock-on effect has influence on so many global societies. We're suffering from climate migration, we're suffering from rising sea levels. And if we can bring the desire to challenge and tackle that positively, I think that will be something we can all look to as a positive step.

• 51:47Chuck Nice?

  I still hope you're right.

• 51:49Gary O'Reilly?

  So do I, but I'm not sure that we will.

• 51:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm not sure we will either, but-

• 51:52Gary O'Reilly?

  I hope we find the desire.

• 51:53Chuck Nice?

  That'd be great.

• 51:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, a little-known fact, because I only realized this months ago, when I first saw Steven Spielberg's movie, AI, from the 1990s. There's an entire sustained scene underwater. And you go underwater, and there's a Statue of Liberty completely submerged.

• 52:09Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 52:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they already took climate change-

• 52:12Chuck Nice?

  Yes, they did.

• 52:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the limit, at the time that movie was supposed to take place. And that was just a side fact-

• 52:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 52:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the real movie was about the AI that they were creating.

• 52:19Chuck Nice?

  So cool, man.

• 52:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Gary O'Reilly?

  But once again, it's take it to the extreme to make the example, to make you think we don't wanna go there.

• 52:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that you do not create the future that they invented for you.

• 52:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, what's your best prediction?

• 52:31Charles Liu?

  That within 25 years, there will be a professional sport played in orbit.

• 52:38Chuck Nice?

  Satellite shooting. Ooh. Shooting down satellites. Look at that.

• 52:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 52:43Chuck Nice?

  Spaceballs.

• 52:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 52:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that. Yes. Cause we, you know, Chuck is our geek and chief when we talk about sports too. Oh, yeah. So when that happens, you, you, this will be the first thing you do. We'll do it. After, you can do an episode on your own podcast. Oh, thank you. The universe first. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

• 53:03Chuck Nice?

  Zero G basketball.

• 53:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. We gotta, we gotta wrap this up. Dude, I enjoyed this topic. Thank you so much. You come up with these cool topics for a special edition. This is great.

• 53:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I have time on my hands.

• 53:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, dude. Charles, Chuck, Gary, thanks for.

• 53:19Chuck Nice?

  Pleasure.

• 53:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has been StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.