AGI, Immortality, & Visions of the Future with Adam Becker

Are we making science fiction a reality? Is that a good thing? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, & Gary O’Reilly and guest Adam Becker, science communicator and author of More Everything Forever, discuss sci-fi dreams, tech-bro promises, and the real science shaping our tomorrow.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love me some future talk, but they spook me though with where they take the end of civilization.

• 0:04Gary O'Reilly?

  But we don't know whose hands are on the steering wheel. We don't know who's shaping this future, and that's why there's concern.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I know who's shaping it, and I'm scared to death.

• 0:14Gary O'Reilly?

  It's you.

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's watch Chuck be scared to death as we discuss all the ways tech will be shaping our future. Coming right up, StarTalk, special edition.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist, and when I say special edition, it means I turn to my right, and Gary O'Reilly is sitting there.

• 0:52Gary O'Reilly?

  I know.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary.

• 0:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Hi.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where'd you get your British accent?

• 0:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Stole it.

• 0:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Just a thief.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck. Hey. Otherwise known as Lord Nice, but we can call you Lord of Comedy. Lord of Comedy. Can we do that? Okay. Let's do that. So today, we're gonna explore a vision of the future. And everybody's got their take on the future. Yes. Everybody's got, everybody, but they all have different takes because they're coming from a different place. So you gotta hear it all if you're gonna assimilate it into something that you're gonna take action on. True, yeah. So either make something happen or prevent something else from happening. Yeah. So set us up, Gary.

• 1:31Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so what does the future hold for us? That'll include scientists, science fiction authors, tech CEOs, and the so-called futurists. Everyone has their own idea for the future technologies. Vision of AGI, nuclear fusion, the singularity, transhumanism, living on Mars. We've gotta get to the moon first.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you don't. You go straight to Mars.

• 1:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Do we?

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just don't get me started. Get your ass to Mars.

• 1:59Gary O'Reilly?

  And there you have it. And stuff we talk about all the time on Startalk. And in the face of new technological developments, we're quickly going from science fiction to science reality. But are we headed towards the utopian? Or are we headed towards dystopia? That we'll get into. Are these technologies as close as they claim? Is science fiction always a guiding light? Or can it be a blueprint for those in power? So on that note.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So who do we have today? Adam Becker. Adam, welcome to Startalk.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. You've got a PhD.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In computational cosmology.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it. That was back in 2012.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you wrote a book in 2018.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Called What Is Real?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's audacious. You know, the unfinished quest for the meaning of quantum physics. Sound like there's a little bit of philosophy in there.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or a lot of philosophy.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Oh, there's some.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you just came out with a new book because you've been a writing science popularizer maniac ever since your PhD.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Pretty much.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So here's the title. I love this. More Everything Forever. AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Oh, I got a better title. We're F'd.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you should have had that title.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, we considered it, but we just didn't think that it would really, you know, sell.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my research has told me that we've corresponded before. Because I've only, I've only just met you now.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what?

• 3:45Speaker 02

  So they told you we corresponded, but they didn't tell you. Wow.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what happened?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  So they set me up. That's what happened.

• 3:52Gary O'Reilly?

  So unlike us.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Oh, God. Well, what happened was.

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What happened was.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Exactly. I was a snot-nosed kid in grad school and came to visit the museum and noticed what I thought was a mistake on one of the plaques. And so I emailed just the general astronomy department email here at the Rose Center. And then two weeks later, you wrote back.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 4:22Gary O'Reilly?

  And what did he say?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Well.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sure I would be polite.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Was there a mistake? And did Neil school you if there wasn't?

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether there was a mistake or not was a matter of some debate.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so the question was the size of the universe.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a plaque.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, that's still a debate today.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, that's not in the way that he's describing it.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, ideal and observables. Okay.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As do many practical scientists.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when you speak of what the universe is doing, you speak of what you see it's doing.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we can see galaxies whose light has been traveling for 14 billion years, 13.8. Right, right. And so, we will loosely say, well, it's definitely the age of the universe, but we say, we speak of the size. We can be a little sloppy and say it's 13.8 billion light years to the edge of the universe.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's not strictly accurate. What you have to do is, since then, the universe has been expanding.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where's that galaxy now? It's like 45 billion light years away, but you can't see it. So you have to stick it into a model of the expansion rate of the universe and come out with a number that you cannot observe. So, you're being snot-nosed about that. But that's fine. Tell me I was polite, because I think I'm polite.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  You're polite. You're polite. We had a little back and forth. And eventually, eventually, I think you were getting a little impatient.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, really?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  And you said, uh, why don't you, you know, make a presentation of this to a wide audience in a way that you think is suitable?

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that correspondence now. Okay, okay, I get it.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  You said that.

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  And then I went up and did a podcast about it and sent it to you.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so in your book, Overlord, Space Empire, you just go all out.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're coming to it from a physicist with a philosophy flavor.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're gonna see this in ways pure tech people wouldn't.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or politicians, or just regular, everyday folk walking up and down the street. So, how did you prepare for this book?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  I read a lot of really bad writing by, you know, tech CEOs and people defending tech CEOs online. You know, writing long essays and books about why the future is inevitably going to be all about super intelligent AI, why the future is going to inevitably be about-

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are tech people writing all this.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Some of these things, you know, were ideas that I had the expertise to say, okay, no, that's not true and here's why.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  But some of them were ideas about like, you know, biology or areas of physics that I don't have expertise in, or, you know, other things. And so then I went and interviewed a bunch of people who have expertise in those areas.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you're playing journalist, in that capacity.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, read books on those subjects and, you know, pulled out what I needed and stuff like that. And then I tried to interview, you know, the tech CEOs themselves.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  And almost all of them said no.

• 7:32Chuck Nice?

  No, right. Yeah, cuz they're looking at you as somebody who is intellectually honest with some integrity and they're like, "We can't talk to you."

• 7:40Speaker 02

  (laughing)

• 7:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay? Cuz they know they're full of crap.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I, I think that they just didn't see any reason to, right? You know, like, I was very honest. I said, you know, like, "This is a book that's going to take a critical look at your ideas."

• 7:54Chuck Nice?

  That was your problem.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Well, I-

• 7:56Chuck Nice?

  If you had gone in and said, "I'm enamored of the fact that AI is going to be such an integral part of the next chapter in human history and that you guys, and that you guys are the progenitors of this amazing tech." They would've been like, "Come on in, let's talk for a second." I'm like, "No, you don't need an appointment, stop by any time."

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was your first mistake.

• 8:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, but you know, I got journalistic integrity.

• 8:20Chuck Nice?

  Alright, well, good.

• 8:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, look, let's explore some of the scenarios-

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:25Gary O'Reilly?

  -that are going to be potentially the reality of us as a human race.

• 8:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just go right on down the list.

• 8:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, the laundry list, um, okay. Well, let's look at Mars in 2050.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:35Gary O'Reilly?

  How, how, are we saying, "Maybe, maybe not, you're kidding me, oh, that's definitely gonna happen."

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, Elon Musk, he has said he wants to put- A million people on Mars by 2050 to have a self-sustaining civilization that will survive there even if, you know, the rockets from Earth stop coming because there's been an asteroid strike or nuclear war or something here.

• 8:55Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  That's definitely not happening. There are a lot of reasons why that's not happening. Getting anyone to Mars by 2050 and bringing them back alive or just having them live there for a while, that would be incredibly difficult. The challenges just to put boots on Mars, the way that we did on the moon, are enormous, right? Just learning how to keep someone alive in deep space that far away from Earth for as long as it takes to get to Mars, stay on Mars, come back. We do not know how to do that yet.

• 9:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, that's the problem. They want to put boots on Mars instead of sneakers on Mars. Sneaker contract, you'll pay the whole way.

• 9:32Chuck Nice?

  Nike would have, Nike would have been there by now.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  They'd just do it.

• 9:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Excellent.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'd just do it.

• 9:39Chuck Nice?

  Well played.

• 9:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It ain't about boots, it's about sneakers.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  I mean, so the.

• 9:44Chuck Nice?

  What are the biggest challenges of going that far into space? Is it radiation or?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's radiation and that's not just when you're in space, it's also when you're on Mars, right? You know, the two things that primarily protect us from radiation here on Earth are our, you know, the Earth's magnetic field and the thick atmosphere that Earth has. Mars doesn't have either of those things.

• 10:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  So when you're on the surface of Mars, you're getting pretty much the same radiation dose that you do like out in space. And that's not good, right? You know, like the thing that I tell people is, the movie The Martian is science fiction. One of the things that's science fiction about it is if Mark Watney really, you know, had to do all the stuff that he did in that movie, he'd come home and he'd be dead of cancer in a couple of years because he had too much radiation exposure hanging out in Mars.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  I'm Brian Futterman and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 10:51Chuck Nice?

  What about the ISS? If Scott Kelly could stay up there for a year.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the twins.

• 10:55Chuck Nice?

  One of the twins.

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One staying on Earth and one.

• 10:56Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yeah. Why couldn't you just extend that for whatever time necessary to go to Mars? Even if it's not to live there, if it's just to go there and dig a hole and come back?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Right, so there's a couple of things. First of all, on the ISS, they're still in the Earth's magnetic field. They still have a bunch of the shielding.

• 11:15Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wait, and what's that called, Neil? Wait, the field that goes all the way out like that? Oh, yeah. Oh, it's called the, oh. Magnetic field. No, it's not the magnetic, it's the magnetosphere.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you think of X-Men.

• 11:26Chuck Nice?

  Yes, the magnetosphere. Go ahead.

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, it is like the X-Men. Yeah. They've still got that protection. Also, if something goes wrong on the ISS, they'll be back on the surface of the Earth in a matter of hours. Like, they can just abort and come back home, right?

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And most, I mean, you can.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You come out, you're down within a half hour.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 11:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The hours is you want to line up so you don't land in the middle of sharks.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you can get out easy.

• 11:54Chuck Nice?

  Easy.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  And you can also have a real-time conversation with people on the ground.

• 11:57Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Because they're, you know, they're not that high up.

• 12:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  And so the speed of light delay with the conversation doesn't matter. On Mars, you know, it's a minimum of something like, I think, eight minutes each way and a maximum of something like 15 or 20 one way. And so if you send out a message, you are waiting at least 15, 20 minutes to get a message back.

• 12:19Chuck Nice?

  Better be a good message.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:21Chuck Nice?

  It better not be like, "So, how's it going? Over."

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, put some context in there. Put in the message. Or, "Watch out for the cliff."

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the other thing is, like, if you have a problem on the surface of Mars and you want to come back, that's going to take you at least nine months, maybe more, if you happen to be near a launch window where, you know, the Earth and Mars are like in the right.

• 12:45Chuck Nice?

  So, wow.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Positions. If you're not near a launch window, it could be well over a year before you can come home and.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, a full-up round trip mission to Mars with ideal launch and return parameters is multiple years.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. But you can get to the moon and back in a week.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In like a bit in a news cycle.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 13:04Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we overcome the logistics of getting from Earth to Mars.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:07Gary O'Reilly?

  If, big if, where are they gonna live? Because they're not gonna go out there and start building.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:13Gary O'Reilly?

  And.

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And why don't you just build a little sort of half underground thing that shields you from.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 13:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Or do you live in a tent?

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so then you have other problems, right? You know, there's no air. You gotta bring in oxygen or, you know, do some sort of reaction to make oxygen on the surface, which, yeah, you can do that, but it's not the easiest thing. Uh, you gotta bring in all your food, can't grow it there. The Martian surface, the dirt on Mars is filled with toxic chemicals. You're gonna have a hard time getting it out of stuff because it's very fine. It's not.

• 13:42Chuck Nice?

  It's gonna be, that's gonna be here on Earth soon, too.

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we know you can grow poop potatoes on Mars.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We know that.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Well, but.

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We know that.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, yeah. There was a proof of concept in the movie The Martian, yeah.

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Duh.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  No, but, but actually, it's, it's funny, though. The guy who wrote the book, uh, what's his name?

• 14:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Andy Weir.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Andy Weir, yeah.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, we had him on the show.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's in our archives.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  He has said that, you know, the discovery of these particular poisonous compounds in the Martian surface, uh, called perchlorates, he didn't know about that when he wrote the book because it wasn't widely known. And so now we know if you tried to, you know, farm poop potatoes on Mars, they'd be poisonous.

• 14:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the unknown unknown.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 14:27Gary O'Reilly?

  And that's, that's still out there. Okay, that's not gonna work. We're not, we're not thinking that for some time. Functional immortality.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:34Gary O'Reilly?

  And there's a lot of ways we can get there. I mean.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:36Gary O'Reilly?

  The, the biological immortality of growing organs in pigs and things and then transplanting is one thing, but.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we getting towards singularity?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I mean, the biological replacing organs thing, you know, you can't, you can't replace the brain.

• 14:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, not yet.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, not yet.

• 14:57Chuck Nice?

  I'm never doing it with that attitude.

• 15:01Gary O'Reilly?

  That was more a British approach to things rather than American.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Someone needs a better attitude about things.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  But yeah, this idea of the singularity that like that we're going to get to this point where technology in general and AI in particular gets faster and faster and smarter and smarter until, you know, it like gains godlike powers. It's a science fiction story. What does that have to do with living forever? Well, so the idea is that then you get this godlike AI that like grants us immortality. It has like essentially magic powers or, you know, it finds a way to take. It's just smart enough to figure out how to make us live forever.

• 15:43Chuck Nice?

  It can solve the problem of mortality.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:49Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 15:49Gary O'Reilly?

  But whose mortality problem is it going to solve?

• 15:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Well, it doesn't have one.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  No problems at all.

• 15:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Are there a select few or is this open for everybody?

• 16:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well, we know for a fact that it's going to be for a select few and it's going to be for the people who are the gatekeepers to AI. We're already seeing that now, but go ahead.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Well, but the other thing is that the whole idea is kind of, you know, nonsense to begin with. Like this idea of singularity is, well, it's based on a few really serious, like flawed ideas. First, this idea that there is this like single thing called intelligence. You can just ramp it up or down in a computer and it can just make itself more and more intelligent. That's not really how intelligence works. Intelligence is like a really complicated thing. It's not one number.

• 16:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  And also the usual way talking about the singularity that like the main popularizer of the singularity, Ray Kurzweil has. Who's been on the show? Who's been on the show? In our archives. They do these little commercials. I love that.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  But yeah, Kurzweil, you know, he says it's. He came out with a second book. Yes. The first one was The Singularity Is Near. Yes. You know, the title of his second book? Yeah, The Singularity Is nearer. nearer. Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  No, I tell people that they don't believe me. I'm like, go look it up. Yeah, there it is.

• 17:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. His next book coming out is going to be called Almost There.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  No, he thinks that, you know, Moore's law, this idea that computer chips are just gonna get faster and more powerful and like double in speed every 18 months. He thinks that this is this, you know, specific instance of a more general like law of accelerating returns in technology and in nature, and he says he's traced it all the way back to the beginning of the universe and that it shows that a singularity is coming in like 2045 or something like that.

• 17:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Precisely.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, precisely.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On October 12th.

• 17:47Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, that's, that's sounds to me like the end is near.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, it is.

• 17:50Chuck Nice?

  That sounded to me like the people were like, I don't need a bank account, you know, Jesus is coming back.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, it's funny, the singularity is near, the end is near. That's what he should have.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  No, so it's funny that you say that, right? Because he's got a picture of himself and the singularity is near with one of those like poster boards on him that says the singularity is near.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  And there's an AI research group that's inspired by these ideas of the singularity called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, MIRI. They don't give their employees 401Ks because they think the end is near.

• 18:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's some cheap ass.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, right?

• 18:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, okay, I still wanna get to the immortality thing.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you haven't addressed the fact that right now with or without AI.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a lot of research on not just replacing organs, though that might be an art offing.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But delaying the aging functions of your cells.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Totally. That could work out to extend human lifespan or health span a certain amount.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For a long period. Health span.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good word.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:55Chuck Nice?

  What do the Galapagos, what do they live to be? Like 100 and?

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tortoises?

• 19:00Speaker 02

  The tortoises?

• 19:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, like 200 or something.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  200 and something, buck 80 is there?

• 19:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have AI, so that's.

• 19:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Remember we spoke with Venky Ramakrishnan?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:09Gary O'Reilly?

  He was telling us about the Greenland shark?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Being about 800 years of age.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 19:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is possible that some. You know, biotechnology will be developed that will radically extend human lifespan or health span. Maybe, yeah. But what these guys are talking about with singularity, they're generally not talking about that as the end game. The end game they have in mind is not just an extended lifespan, but real immortality by uploading their consciousness into

• 19:42Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, that's where, that's really where this is going.

• 19:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Before we get

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the immortality. Immortality of your mind.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forget your body.

• 19:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Before we get to that, do we visit transhumanism? Do we get, and how we define

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is transhumanism?

• 19:55Gary O'Reilly?

  That's what I'm just saying.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's this, it's this idea that you can use technology to transcend, like, the limits of human biology and physics.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Aren't we kind of already doing that, which is why we live twice as long as people 150 years ago?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, there's, there's definitely

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're kind of already, if we tell them what we're doing, we know about nutrition, vitamins, they'll say, what's a vitamin?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:16Chuck Nice?

  We've got vaccines.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got this, we got, what's a vaccine? We got, right? Aren't we already transhuman? Compared to what the age nature would require us to be dead at?

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Totally, yeah. Like, look, I, I think that we have used technology to make many things much better about being alive. Like, that's, that's just true. The question is, does that trend continue indefinitely?

• 20:43Chuck Nice?

  No, because RFK is gonna make sure to when we live as long as we do now. That's what's happening.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Let's be clear, that's RFK Junior.

• 20:55Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 20:55Gary O'Reilly?

  So if, if we go to this uploaded consciousness, and, and that, that becomes reality, that just doesn't exist without a power source.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Right. The thing about

• 21:11Speaker 02

  The singularity and like Kurzweil's idea about like this accelerating returns and Moore's law just going on forever. And you know, this power source thing, right? The idea that it would need increasing levels of power as well. And so this leads to this sort of exponential drive for materials and power. And the thing that Kurzweil forget is exponential trends are not like laws of nature. The law of nature about exponential trends is they end.

• 21:39Chuck Nice?

  They have to end.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  They have to end.

• 21:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  And so, and it's because ultimately limited resources like energy.

• 21:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Right? And so.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Although.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we talk about how much longer a charge in our computer lasts.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Today compared with the early days of laptops.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Part of that is better batteries, but also part of that is more efficient chips.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when we get to quantum computing, where much more computing happens in much less, with much less of an energy draw.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It could be that we're coming at it from the other side.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where the energy needs.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are dropping, thereby not requiring the power supplies necessary. How long, oh, in my memory, not your memory, I got, I got a few years on you. A room this size was necessary.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To cool a computer. Otherwise, a computer would overheat and the computer's doing like four function mathematics. So the efficiencies matter. All these tubes that had to be kept cool.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not obvious that it's a linear exponential. Can I say that?

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where the exponential is just going to hit a limit because you can come at it from other directions.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:52Chuck Nice?

  However, the other thing is though, in nature, the exponential acceleration, it's more like the law of diminishing returns.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:02Chuck Nice?

  Is more likely than the law of exponential acceleration.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Well, no, that's actually exactly right. Yeah. Because there's, you know, if you look at the history of Moore's law, like how it is that the semiconductor industry.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Named for.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Named for Gordon Moore.

• 23:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gordon Moore.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Co-founder of Intel.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  And if you look at, at how. Intel and other semiconductor companies actually made the chips smaller and faster over that time. You know, it's not a law of nature. It's a decision, a business decision that these companies made. And in order to keep that trend going, they had to invest more and more and more money just to keep the same sort of level of doubling, to keep that exponential trend going. And eventually, it did stop, right? Moore's law is done. It's over. Because you can't make silicon transistors smaller than an atom of silicon.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yeah, and what they're doing now is just adding more chips.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the more powerful computers are not smaller and denser, they're just bigger now.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they're putting them on top.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're stacking them, yeah, right.

• 24:05Gary O'Reilly?

  So the solution in the minds of these tech billionaires is to arrive at a superintelligence, to get an AGI?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:16Gary O'Reilly?

  And they, I mean, Sam Altman is saying within the next two years.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, two or four, I think he said, yeah.

• 24:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, so they're looking at that as being a solution to this problem where we're saying we're not sure if it will be exponential. We're not sure where the end point is.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  They're looking at it as the solution to every problem.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  None of the tech bros

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  have a degree in physics the way you do.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what are you bringing to the table that they don't see?

• 24:41Speaker 02

  I mean, they believe that AGI, I mean, Altman has said that AGI is going to solve every problem, including like global warming, which is crazy.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is it crazy?

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Well, because...

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's smarter than you and you can't solve it, why is it crazy to think it could solve it?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, the artificial intelligence systems that they're building now are just drawing more and more and more energy. If you did build one that could solve global warming and you turn it on and said, "How do you solve global warming?" I'm pretty sure the first thing it would do is say, "Well, you shouldn't have built me."

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it'd turn me off.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'd turn me off. Turn me off.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'll help.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a good test of its own self-preservation.

• 25:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a you are causing most of our global warming. What's the best solution? Does it turn yourself off?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  But I mean, the other thing is that we don't need AI to tell us how to solve it. We already know what the solution is. The issue is not like that insufficient intelligence has been thrown at the problem. The issue is primarily not even a technological problem at all at this point, aside from carbon capture. The main issue is, yeah, it's human behavior.

• 25:48Chuck Nice?

  It's greed.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's greed. Yeah, it's greed.

• 25:50Chuck Nice?

  It's greed.

• 25:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, greed is good.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. But the, yeah, the other thing is, is just that when Altman talks about, you know, he's talked about things like, oh, AI means that in 10 years, college graduates are going to be getting, you know, cool jobs exploring the solar system. Right? And I can just look at that and say, well, that's bullshit. Or, you know, he says, AI is gonna, you know, discover new laws of physics and that's gonna remove limitations that we have in the world today. And like, well, discovering new laws of physics, I mean, putting aside whether or not the AI can do that, that does not always remove limitations. Sometimes new laws of physics, in fact, a lot of times.

• 26:34Chuck Nice?

  Create a limitation.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Create a limitation. Exactly. Einstein, with relativity, discovered a limitation in the speed of light. Right? Newton didn't know that there was any such limitation.

• 26:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:46Chuck Nice?

  So is it possible?

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:47Chuck Nice?

  That all of these, I'll, I'll call them postulates, because they're not, that they're making, right? Are just a means of hyping up what they're doing to keep the revenue stream coming to them. Like, let's be honest. If I tell you this thing is gonna solve everything, right?

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll give you my money.

• 27:06Chuck Nice?

  You give me, right. You give me some money.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:09Chuck Nice?

  I mean, it's kind of like.

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just me, the government will give you.

• 27:11Chuck Nice?

  No, that's what I'm saying. Everybody, everybody's gonna give you money. It's kind of like.

• 27:16Gary O'Reilly?

  It's 21st century snake oil. Is that what you're telling me?

• 27:18Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say something different. I was going to say. It's kind of the evangelical business model of a television evangelist.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:28Chuck Nice?

  Like, the whole idea is, hey, you got problems. And these problems can be addressed, they can be solved. All you gotta do is send me some money. That's all you gotta do. And I'm gonna send you this little blessing cloth and, you know.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck was a preacher in his earlier career.

• 27:45Gary O'Reilly?

  If he isn't, he will be in the future.

• 27:48Chuck Nice?

  One day I made the wrong decision.

• 27:52Chuck Nice?

  Reason is good money.

• 27:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Everything we've discussed has been about being somewhere else.

• 27:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Gary O'Reilly?

  About not solving problems here.

• 28:01Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 28:02Gary O'Reilly?

  So are these people looking at us and going, you are completely screwed?

• 28:05Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 28:06Gary O'Reilly?

  We're out of here and we're the ones that can afford it and we're the ones with the tech to be able to achieve it. Why are they walking away? What's in their mind? What's their thinking about turning their back and moving?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Well, they think that-

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they didn't grant you an interview.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, they didn't grant you-

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you don't really know what's on their mind.

• 28:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you can read enough of their stuff to have a chance to know what's on their mind.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, they've given other people interviews who were nicer to them.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  I can be a nice guy.

• 28:31Chuck Nice?

  You were charming enough, okay?

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Apparently not. I mean, I just sent an email. A couple of them were almost willing to do it and then they changed their minds probably because, you know, they they read the email again, they're like, oh, he's going to disagree with us. Why should we talk to him? But whatever. Some of them are being very cynical, like the way that you were talking about, right? Um, and saying, oh, you know, uh, I can just do this. And this is, you know, I can claim that all of these things are coming in the future. And this is a way of, you know, generating more profit and getting people to give me more money. Some of them, I think, genuinely believe it. The idea that the future has to be elsewhere. I think some of it is just from this sense that they have that things are bad here on earth.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  And that trying to solve problems here on earth would be complicated and messy and difficult. And that somehow going to space would give them a fresh start, which is not true. You can't escape, you know, politics. You can't escape-

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're still human.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Human nature. Exactly. You can't escape human nature. Exactly.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how does an AI overlord plug into this, these scenarios?

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Well, the idea is that they they build a sort of AI god and it just does whatever they want.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This would be AGI.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, artificial general intelligence.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when we normally think of AI, we think of a task-driven-

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  AI. It can drive a car.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It can make a perfect cup of coffee.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll, it can fly an airplane.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But AGI transcends all of that.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It could just learn about anything and might even be-

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Achieve consciousness.

• 30:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, it would.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like Skynet.

• 30:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, absolutely, because it's, we are AGI. That's what we are. Yeah, we are just, you know, the equivalent of what they want as AGI. Are we AGI point one oh? Yeah, one point one oh.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, zero point one.

• 30:24Chuck Nice?

  Zero point one, yeah, okay, sure.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  So, yeah, no, that's, that's right, I mean.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but the point is, whatever we are, AGI, so how long it take you to go to school? To open up all your textbooks and learn from them and get an exam? AGI will do what?

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's supposed to be able to do all of that much faster.

• 30:42Chuck Nice?

  Twenty minutes.

• 30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, twenty minutes.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, great.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll get your college degree in twenty minutes.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Well, and the other thing is, like, those AI systems, all the things that you mentioned, right? Make a perfect cup of coffee, fly an airplane, drive a car. The AI systems we have right now can't do any of those things without human supervision. Right? Even those self-driving cars that are all over the streets of San Francisco, there's actually a human remotely supervising and intervening pretty frequently.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they tell you.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You talking about the Waymos?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, and so.

• 31:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A Waymo is Google, if I remember correctly.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, yeah, that's right. And so AGI is supposed to be able to do all of these things, like, independently, right? And then get smarter and smarter and.

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the human is not even in the equation.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Human's not in the equation, and you can just make it go, you can have it do all the things that a human does, but you can, like, overclock it, make it go faster, think faster than a human, and then the idea is it gets smarter and smarter and achieves these, like, superhuman, superintelligent powers. The idea then is that for the billionaires controlling it, it's like a genie. And for the rest of us, it's an overlord.

• 31:49Chuck Nice?

  It's an overlord. But this is where they're so stupid, and this is where all really rich.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're so stupid, they have hundreds of billions of dollars and you don't.

• 31:57Chuck Nice?

  No, but that's what makes them so stupid. I agree. I'm serious.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:02Chuck Nice?

  It's the fact that they have all this money, and they've convinced themselves that they can transcend anything.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's evidence of their own genius.

• 32:11Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah. So it's, it's, they're hubris is their downfall.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:16Chuck Nice?

  It's like, the first dictator, the very first dictator, was a guy, a little guy by the name of Julius Caesar, but Julius Caesar was the very first dictator. You know how he became dictator? They said, all right, how about you be dictator, but you do it for a year?

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  If you create a godlike being, whether it's artificial general intelligence or whatever.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:40Chuck Nice?

  And you think that you're going to control it.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:43Chuck Nice?

  It is not a god at that point.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:45Chuck Nice?

  You are the god, and that's really what they're saying.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:49Chuck Nice?

  They're saying we're gods.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the thing is, like, that's true. If they somehow did achieve it, who would be controlling it? But also, it's an incoherent idea. Like, it's not... The good news for the rest of us is that it's not like something that's actually coming, because it doesn't make any sense.

• 33:07Chuck Nice?

  That's funny. It's like, these guys are hanging their hat, and you're just like, yeah, man, it's just a dumb idea.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, incoherent sounds way more of a beat down.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your idea is incoherent. You're dunking on somebody right there.

• 33:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Is this a misconception of the science? The misconception of science fiction?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the ideas, right, and this is, this goes back to like, why are they like trying to go somewhere else? I think they just get these ideas from science fiction, and they just take it way too literally. They don't read it well, right? Like, my favorite science fiction, the science fiction I grew up with was Star Trek, right? And the thing about Star Trek is, yeah, okay, they're on the starship Enterprise, they're out there, you know, exploring strange new worlds, new life, new civilizations, all that jazz, right?

• 33:54Chuck Nice?

  Finish it.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  To boldly go where no one has gone before.

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  But...

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not to go boldly.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, not to go boldly. No, we can split the infinity.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Split that infinity.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, hell yeah. But, um, the thing is, though, Star Trek was never really about space.

• 34:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  It's about like us, here and now, right? And it was, it was always an allegory and not even a particularly veiled one, right? I seem to recall an episode where Kirk and Spock were literally punching Nazis with swastikas, right? Uh, and then there was also, right, and there was also the episode with like the two dudes, and one of them, like, the left half of his face was white, and the right half was black, and the other one, it was switched.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Frank Gorshin.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, Frank Gorshin, yeah.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He played the Riddler.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Batman.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So...

• 34:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's obvious why we persecute them. They're black on their right side.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're black on their left side. That was kind of, kind of blunt.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But Star Trek is always blunt.

• 34:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Right? And that's kind of... Part of the fun.

• 34:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Right?

• 34:51Chuck Nice?

  It is.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  But these guys watch Star Trek and they're like, oh yeah, warp drive is cool. Let's do that. And like, do not.

• 34:58Chuck Nice?

  And miss the whole point of Star Trek in the process.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:02Chuck Nice?

  Right. Cause Star Trek is utopian ideals in a galaxy that's descending towards dystopia. And they're fighting, fighting it every step of the way.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could it be that to become a tech bro in the first place?

• 35:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You had to be really focused on a level to the exclusion of your social life and possibly even your personal hygiene. As a result, you achieve these, these places and part of your life's training did not include the emotions and feelings of others. Or how people think about the world or what their desires are. And you think that your, what you accomplish is for their best interest, even though you have no idea who they are.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Oh, well.

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that a fair, is that a?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  I think that's right. Right? Like, uh, the way I like to talk about it is, you know, for someone who claims to care about humanity so much, Elon Musk doesn't really seem to care very much about humans.

• 35:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:00Chuck Nice?

  And isn't he the guy who said empathy is a bad thing?

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. And, and, but he's also said, I'm gonna save humanity. Yeah, he did. And he, but he's also said, I'm gonna save humanity by taking us to Mars. And like, buddy, first of all, no. And second, like, I don't think that you actually care that much about other humans. And I think that what you said is exactly right. Uh, except you also have to add in, they think that the fact that they succeeded in business, which a lot of that's just luck, is proof.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And government contracts.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Right. And government contracts. Exactly.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Subs, subsidies. Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the car business as well as the, the rocket business.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely. But like Musk and others, right? Like, uh, like Altman and Andreessen and these other people, they all think that this is proof that they are like the smartest people who've ever lived. They're the richest people who've ever lived. And that's just not how anything works.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just remind me, Altman is OpenAI?

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sam Altman is CEO of OpenAI.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Just let's go down that list.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and Marc Andreessen is the head of Andreessen Horowitz, the biggest tech venture capital firm.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you need that to get the confusions.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So OpenAI is what gives us ChatGPT.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Got it, got it.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, we all know Elon. Is Branson a player?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Branson is less of a player in Silicon Valley.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What role in the tech sector does Bezos play?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, he's-

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got his own rockets.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's got his own rockets. He's also like owns most of the infrastructure of the World Wide Web. This I think is something-

• 37:32Chuck Nice?

  AWS.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, AWS. I think most people don't recognize this. Amazon Web Services. Basically, most of the cloud, most of the cloud, most of the actual computers that compose the cloud belong to Jeff Bezos.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So amazon.com is like window dressing on a whole other operation-

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That matters to him.

• 37:51Chuck Nice?

  The real operation.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why he doesn't have to make a buck selling you a- He's gonna sell you a book-

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For eighty percent off or something.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Right. Well, after this, I'll be lucky if he sells my book at all.

• 38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, we're going there, Eric. Yeah?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  But I'll say these guys-

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get the title of the book back in here. Just give us the title again.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's More Everything Forever. AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate a Few Days.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. That's what we're talking about.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, okay.

• 38:41Gary O'Reilly?

  So when we think about the science fiction, and I think Neil's point about the isolation of these people growing up. If we think about the science fiction and you think about certain parts of Star Trek, then maybe Matrix or Blade Runner, and you go through the laundry list.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:56Gary O'Reilly?

  How have they co-opted these and kind of bolted this to that and that to this?

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think they were influenced by sci-fi?

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, Elon Musk tweeted that science fiction shouldn't remain fiction forever.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  And, yeah, I sort of understand like what he means, but which science fiction, right? Like Blade Runner's a dystopia.

• 39:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Right? And then he comes out and says that the Cybertruck, that ugly piece of crap, looks like something that Blade Runner would drive, which Blade Runner is not the name of any character in Blade Runner, but we can put that aside.

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a profession in Blade Runner.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 39:34Chuck Nice?

  That's great.

• 39:37Gary O'Reilly?

  But there's a number of dystopians, like.

• 39:39Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they're all dystopic.

• 39:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Ready Player One, isn't that another one?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Some of them are, I mean, right, there's aspirational science fiction like Star Trek, right?

• 39:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  But like.

• 39:49Chuck Nice?

  But even that is, like I said, in.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  There can be.

• 39:51Chuck Nice?

  They're the bright spot.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, they.

• 39:53Chuck Nice?

  The Federation's the bright spot.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  The Federation's definitely the bright spot.

• 39:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  No, no, that's true, but like, there's a tweet that lives rent free in my head about a thing called the torment nexus. This is actually in my book at the very beginning.

• 40:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The torment nexus.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  The torment nexus.

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm afraid to ask what this is.

• 40:10Gary O'Reilly?

  We're going there.

• 40:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're going there.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  We're going there, we're going there.

• 40:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's do it.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  So the tweet goes like this. Science fiction author, in my book, I created the torment nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech billionaire, at long last, we've created the torment nexus from classic sci fi novel, don't create the torment nexus.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  This is what these guys are doing, right?

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like Skynet.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, right, there's Skynet, but also, like, if you go back and look at, like, the classic cyberpunk novels by somebody like, say, William Gibson, right, who I think is a great novelist, a lot of those novels, like Neuromancer, are about, like, the concentration of wealth and power and the way that the wealthy can and will use technology to remove themselves from the rest of us.

• 40:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  And accumulate wealth and power while insulating themselves from the consequences. And that's exactly what we see happening. And so when they say that they want to make science fiction, you know, into reality, we need to ask, okay, which ones? Because if you want to make Neuromancer reality, man, that's bad news for everyone who's not you.

• 41:15Gary O'Reilly?

  So how much of science fiction has always been a silent alarm call? A silent warning?

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 41:22Gary O'Reilly?

  We go back to Fritz Lang and Metropolis back in 1927.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Metropolis is very much like a movie about the need to keep emotional intelligence with pace with technology, right?

• 41:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't get that out of it, but I believe you, I'm just saying, that's a deep read. To me, it was just a weird alien box.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a weird movie.

• 41:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  For sure. But like, at the end, they say, the heart and the hand must work together, or something like that, right?

• 41:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  And so that's, that's how I read that, at least. Like, I think that science fiction, a lot of it, has always been like about looking at the world as it is now and saying, okay, if we push that a little bit. If we wanna take a look at this situation in a different context and understand it in a different way by removing it from all of the sort of social and cultural connotations that a particular thing has here and now, we put it somewhere else and maybe we can see it more clearly, right? It's what Star Trek does. It's what like, oh, my favorite science fiction author Ursula Le Guin, right? She did this over and over again, looking at, you know, poverty, inequality, capitalism,

• 42:32Speaker 02

  gender, you name it, right?

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Rod Serling, back in 1959?

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's interviewed about this new show called Twilight Zone.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he says it, he said, "Look, there's stories I'm telling that you could not tell in just a dramatic way. It has to be set at a time and a place that is not you and now. Otherwise, I couldn't get away with these stories."

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And only then do people say, "Wait, might that be me?"

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it's blatant and in your face, you reject it. And he said, "In the end, we're just trying to sell soap." He understood the situation, but tell an entertaining story, but set it in another place.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just, I just looked up when Skynet achieved consciousness.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Uh-oh.

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. It was 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29th, 1997.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 43:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause the movie was 1984 or?

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, the first one, I think, was 84.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah, so that was, that was only 13 years in the future.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. I hate when they do that. Go far enough where...

• 43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I have a whole list!

• 43:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, that was the whole thing with Star Trek. It was set something like 200 years in the future.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that was well, safely in the future. I got a whole list!

• 43:42Speaker 02

  I'm saying, go, go safely into the future.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know, uh, Soylent Green was 2022?

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Oh, God. Well, that's why I'm eating people now.

• 43:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's people!

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Everybody doesn't realize, uh, that's what the pandemic was about, guys.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause it happened.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Enjoy that burger!

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what else is in your laundry list here?

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Basically, I think that what they want, this vision that they have, is this idea of going to space and living forever. Right? And so a lot of it is really about space colonization, going out and expanding to take over the universe. That's like, because they don't want to just stop with Mars. They want to put Dyson spheres around every single star in the observable universe. And like, collect all of that energy. And that's, I, I, that's not gonna happen, man.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There'll be a Kardashian scale five, I think.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you control all the energy output of all stars in the known universe.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But doesn't the Borg have some

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Similar energy?

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, the Borg wanna assimilate everything and, uh, what was it, the phrase? They want to, uh, take your cultural and, and political distinctiveness and make it part of our own, like?

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Speaking as a scientist, I kinda like what science brings society.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And shouldn't that be enough? Why, why does everyone go to science fiction?

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there some morbid fascination with science gone bad? And is that, that's, isn't that a problem with us? Not with the storytellers themselves?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't think that science fiction is in and of itself the problem, right? Like, I'm a

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm getting at.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I'm a huge sci-fi fan. I'm also a scientist by training, at least. The reason people find science fiction more compelling than science has a lot to do with the fact that it's not really about the future. That it's, you know, sort of these interesting what-if scenarios that reflect on where we are right now, right? If you tried to make a very realistic, you know, TV show about what life could actually be like a hundred years from now and made it as realistic as possible, people probably wouldn't watch it because it would involve so much slang that doesn't make any sense to us right now. And like shifts in language.

• 45:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OMG!

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. Right?

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  WTF!

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, but this is like, like, and so many little things like that, right? It's not meant to be a realistic depiction of the future. So, I mean, Part of me wants to say, you know, the problem isn't science fiction. The problem isn't science. The problem is like critical reading comprehension skills.

• 46:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Chuck Nice?

  And money.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 46:21Chuck Nice?

  The accumulation of wealth to a very few is always going to be a very bad thing for any society. But right now, unfortunately, there's a global society of billionaires that has popped up.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:33Chuck Nice?

  And they're.

• 46:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When did you become Marxist?

• 46:35Chuck Nice?

  What's that?

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When did you become?

• 46:36Chuck Nice?

  I'm not a Marxist, believe me. I'm pretty cool with capitalism. I'm just all about guardrails. And I also believe that $2 billion is all you get to have, okay? Now, that was pretty Marxist.

• 46:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I think that was in Dusk and Hotel. We can have, you know, $2 billion.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Karl Marx said. $2 billion, no more.

• 46:58Chuck Nice?

  So, no.

• 46:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so.

• 47:00Gary O'Reilly?

  So, basically, you're saying not enough pure science education, but a hell of a lot of money. Is a bad part of the equation.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I agree completely.

• 47:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, give us the takeaway thesis of your book.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, I actually do end the book saying that we should, you know, limit the amount of money that people should be able to have.

• 47:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Did Karl Marx write the fuel forward?

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think you meant that. I don't think you meant that. What you mean is.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We should limit how much power.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The people who have money have.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 47:37Chuck Nice?

  The problem with that is the more money you have, money is always, and they call it soft power. It's not. It is straight hard power. Because you are able to influence every corridor of power that there is when you have enough money.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  No, this is good, man. You should follow me around and just say the stuff that I'm gonna say, but better.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, there are plenty of rich people.

• 47:59Chuck Nice?

  But what you need to do is, this is where progressive tax is a good thing. And we found that out under FDR back in the day where basically you got to a certain amount of money. And they were like, yeah, we're gonna take 90% of that, okay? And we're gonna take it and we're gonna do stuff because you wouldn't have been able to get that much money without all the things that we want to now support with the money that we helped you make. But you get to keep up until that point, pretty much all your money. But when you get to this level, you're gonna give us some of that money. Give me that money.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  But yeah, no, I think that we as a society, like, cause it's not just the billionaires. It's also that we as a society buy into this idea that the ultra wealthy know what they're talking about when it comes to something other than the ins and outs of having

• 48:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they could be complete dumbasses.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:56Chuck Nice?

  No, you know what they're good at? They're good at rigging the game for them to make more money.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:00Chuck Nice?

  That's what they're good at.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:02Chuck Nice?

  And everybody thinks they're gonna be rich one day.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:04Chuck Nice?

  Okay? And so I did this, the calculation for a billionaire.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:09Chuck Nice?

  What it takes just to make a billion dollars.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:11Chuck Nice?

  And I think I used $500 an hour, which is a very good amount of money. $500 an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And I think it came out to like, you'd have to work 2,304 or 4,000 years or 2,300 years. It's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous amount of money. That's what I'm saying.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Well, you wanna know what makes it even more ridiculous? Turn it around. You have a billion dollars, you wanna get rid of it. You spend $500 an hour, 24 hours.

• 49:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  And it takes you many times longer than a human life. What do you need more than a billion dollars for?

• 49:46Chuck Nice?

  That's my point.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:47Chuck Nice?

  So you get $2 billion and that's it.

• 49:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did that calculation with Elon Musk's wealth.

• 49:52Chuck Nice?

  Oh, did you?

• 49:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. You turn all of his money into $100 bills.

• 49:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And lay them end to end. And you ask, how far does it go around the earth? We can go several times around the earth with $100 bills. Okay? And then there's some leftover money. Tape them together to a ribbon and you'll have enough leftover to go to the moon and back.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. See, that's ridiculous. That's my point. That's fricking ridiculous. Somehow we feel like we have to protect these people. This is what I don't understand.

• 50:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The issue is their outsized power they have over laws, legislation, politicians.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 50:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the rest of us. I don't mind rich people, provided they're not trying to control my life.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 50:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:30Chuck Nice?

  No, I agree.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  I'm with you on that.

• 50:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta land this plane.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think I figured out what's going on here. Lot of smart people, lot of wealthy people, lot of people with influence, trying to figure out what kind of future we will have. What kind of future we should have. And we all know that future will pivot on advances in science and technology. As civilization has always pivoted on science and technology. And so, but we're at a point now, and maybe we've been at this point before. So is this really any different? I don't know. But it seems like we have the future in the palm of our hands.

• 51:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in the end, it comes down to not how advanced the science is, not how clever anybody is, not how. It's not related to any of that. It has to do with how wise we are in the face of our own creations. And wisdom, I think, is an undervalued factor in all the brilliance people are exhibiting in their creations, in their discoveries, in their forces operating, what the future of civilization will be. So if I may appeal to what it is to not only think about how great

• 51:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  your inventions and discoveries are, but think about how you might harness it. As you harness a horse, an unharnessed horse runs wild. You don't know what it's going to do next. A harnessed horse is still a horse, but it gets to do exactly what you need it to do and what you want it to do. And that is a dose of wisdom, coupled with our ingenuity. I'd like to think there's more of that in our future. Maybe we'll avoid the disasters that the science fiction writers always portray. And that is a cosmic perspective. Dude, thank you for being on StarTalk.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. This has been a lot of fun.

• 52:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good luck with the book.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 52:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me the title of the book again.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it right. He did it right.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Well, he did right.

• 52:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, back to Berkeley you go. Yes. And, and keep us thinking about the future. I will. There's not enough of that going on. Thank you, yeah, I'd be happy to come back anytime. All right, this has been StarTalk Special Edition. Yeah. You've put together another one with your peeps.

• 53:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Lane Unsworth as well, take a large slice of credit.

• 53:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. All right, Chuck. Always a pleasure. We're all good here. Neil deGrasse Tyson for StarTalk Special Edition. Yep. Bidding you to keep looking up.