AI Is the New Tower of Babel (And Its Builders Know It)

The new Tower of Babel, and its builders are becoming like gods to us. The bigger threat isn't killer robots; it's how much of your own mind you've already handed over. I joined Mike Slater on Politics By Faith (The First) to talk about AI, faith, and the people building it. We cover: why Babel is always the city AND the tower, how the same AI that discovers drugs can build super viruses, what I'm seeing in my own classroom as term begins, why cognitive offloading scares me more than Terminators, and the one thing AI still can't do without us. AI belongs in your hands as a thinking partner, never the primary creator. Chapters: 00:00 Mike Slater introduces Brian Keating (cosmologist, not cosmetologist) 00:37 Why AI is the Tower of Babel — the city and the tower 02:05 The double-edged sword: new drugs vs. super viruses 02:57 Altman, Amodei, Musk — "they become like gods to us" 03:42 "Regulate us, take us over" — who really wants that 04:23 A scientist weighs progress: "I'm an accelerationist" 05:19 AI as a curiosity amplifier, not a shortcut 06:04 First day of class at UC San Diego — the war over AI 07:22 Thinking partner, not primary creator — and the nuclear analogy 08:20 Cognitive offloading — how many phone numbers do you remember? 09:17 The worldview of the people running AI 10:35 Why I'm not a doomer — and what to actually do (local models) ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M. A. G. I. C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeatin... 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M. A. G. I. C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: / drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: / @drbriankeating 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: /briankeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  The wheel had roads. Electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com slash AI to learn more.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Want to go to a very smart person, Dr. Brian Keating. He is an experimental, I want to say, cosmetologist, but that's because I'm not a smart person. He's a cosmologist at UC San Diego, and he's a host of the show, Into the Impossible with Brian Keating. Dr. Keating, how do you do, sir?

• 1:02Brian Keating?

  Very well. It's good to be with you. And you could say cosmetology. You look very handsome, and you have good hair. Cosmetologists do. But actually, yeah, they do.

• 1:14Brian Keating?

  They have a prefix.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, what percentage of people call you a cosmetologist?

• 1:18Brian Keating?

  More than call me an astrologer, which I'm also not.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Okay. Fair enough. Well, let's chat about AI. You made a reference earlier that AI is like the Tower of Babel. Say more. What are their similarities?

• 1:35Brian Keating?

  Well, you know what's interesting? In the Torah and the Old Testament and the Bible, the Tower of Babel is a very famous story, but it's always mentioned without mentioning that in the actual Hebrew, in the original, it's actually always the city and the Tower of Babel. In other words, there's an association between the technology and the inhabitants and the population, both the population that creates it, that desires it, that seeks to, actually, as it says, make war with God, to be as one with one voice, et cetera, and the city, the inhabitants. And the Bible is quite skeptical of cities. There are good things that come from cities, but there are a lot of bad things that come from cities.

• 2:18Brian Keating?

  And I think one of them is this sensation that you can sort of divorce yourself from the rest of the world, the real people, in sort of, you know, flyover country. I always hate that term. But living here in the coast in San Diego, we have, you know, sort of inflated ego about our importance. And I think that's sort of what's happening. We see that with the creation of artificial intelligence, which is both, also as the Bible says, is a double-edged sword. So I often joke, you know, where are the single-edged swords that only do good? But in this case, it's a double-edged sword. It can do good. It can do wonderful things. It can discover drugs. It can help your kids with their homework. But it can do awful things, too. It can create superviruses. It could create, you know,

• 3:02Brian Keating?

  incredible weapons and technology that could be used for destruction. And it could teach your kids to fall in love with an AI avatar that doesn't exist and in some cases, allegedly be contributing to their propensity for suicide. So how do we monitor this as parents, as, you know, members of cities, of society in America, when we can't divorce ourselves from the other countries that are also striving to create this technology? And what I see now is a very terrifying juxtaposition of these two forces, the two sides of the sword, the two edges, in that you have the creators, the progenitors, the ones that are responsible for that. And by the way, they have these interesting names

• 3:43Brian Keating?

  like Sam Altman, like an alternative man. And then Dario Amode, which means lover of God or love of God, right? Amo, like amateur. De means God in Latin. And then Elon Musk, I don't know. Maybe he's got a nice smell or something like that. But there are these names that are associated, and they've become like gods to us, right? They can do superhuman things. It used to be if you had a question, who do you go to? You go to your priest. You go to your rabbi. You go to your minister. You go to your preacher. Now you tell things that you would never tell to them, to the AIs, to get answers, to get the hive mind, the brain, the global brain, working, coordinating with the sum total of human knowledge, which is both beautiful and it's terrifying.

• 4:27Brian Keating?

  And these models have gotten incredibly powerful, and there's no slowing them down. And the leaders, the Amodees, the Altman's, they're now saying that we need to slow down our own technology because it's so dangerous and you need to regulate us. And by the way, you may need to take us over. And I think that is the ultimate goal. They want the government to subsidize them. They want the government to be responsible, to shepherd them as they plague on themselves. And I think that's quite dangerous, unprecedented. And I'm quite excited, but I'm also worried. As somebody who uses this every day for his teaching, for his own kids, I use it, I thrive on it. But you have to be very careful with it. It's a very powerful technology.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  I agree with everything you said. Now we go back to the Tower Bible. The point we made earlier was that they made bricks. So this is a technological advancement. Like, wow, we're now able to make these bricks and this bitumen and stuff. We're able to build taller than ever before. I love your city point as well. But it's like anything with these double-edged swords, right? Who was it who said that fire can be a good master but a terrible slave or however that goes, right? And you can use a knife to cut your food and you can use a knife to murder someone. So as a scientist, how do you think about technological progress? How do you think about a scientific advancement and weigh the good and the bad? From a scientific mind, how do you do that?

• 5:52Brian Keating?

  Yeah. Purely scientifically, I'm an accelerationist. I would love to see nothing more than the solutions to age-old problems that I've wondered about, simply because it would allow me to do something that's uniquely human, which is to have my curiosity stoked to investigate the questions that then I prompt the artificial intelligence with. I think that's the healthiest, the safest way to use it. Use it as a curiosity amplifier. You know, I have graduate students. They're made of flesh and bone. They're the smartest people, you know, I'll ever know. And I'm entrusted with them by their parents, by the university, et cetera. And we have deep relationships. We, I go to their weddings, I, you know, counsel them, and they, they're wonderful. They're almost like children. But, you know, of course, it's separate from my actual children.

• 6:36Brian Keating?

  But I feel responsible for them. I get to interact with them and stimulate their young minds to become the future leaders of science. I worry about them in the age of AI. But currently, I'm trying to make them AI-native. Right now, there's a battle in the university. We start teaching today. Classes open at UC San Diego. And there's a war between the people that, the professors that know how to use AI, that want to use AI, and the students who want to use it, who use it for good. And then there's also the double-edged sword. Again, you cannot escape this analogy. The double-edged sword is that they use it to do their homework, to solve their problems, to bypass the thought process themselves. You know, when I was a kid in the 90s in college, we had this cartoon in our student newspaper,

• 7:20Brian Keating?

  and it was first day of class, professor standing up on stage, a room full of students staring up at the professor in wide-eyed amazement. And then the next day, the students get replaced by tape recorders. Remember those? I don't know. You might be young. You might not remember tape recorders. Tape recorders, recording the professor speaking. And then the last scene is now the professor's replaced by a tape recorder, playing that lecture to the students who are listening on their tape recorder. It was crazy. Now we have exactly that. You know, my students don't use Instagram in class anymore. They're using AI. It could be great. It could enhance their understanding. I'm not the best educator. I often want to take classes with Albert Einstein. I'm too young. I can't do that, unfortunately. But I have all of his collected works.

• 8:02Brian Keating?

  I can create an AI AE, an artificial Einstein. That's the good news. The bad news is that it can completely shortcut the process that not only are these kids dedicating four hard years of their lives to, but they're also, their parents can be spending at a private school. I teach at a public university. But a private school's quarter million, half a million dollars. That, to me, is insane. And it's not what this technology is best used for. So I caution people to use it as a thinking partner, as a sounding board. It's a wonderful editor, but it cannot be used for primary creation. And recently, I had an article that I wrote in my newsletter, my website, briankeating.com. And it has to do with the double-edged feature of nuclear power.

• 8:46Brian Keating?

  Nuclear, as you said, fire was a powerful weapon. It could be used. It could be harmful. It could be helpful. Nuclear technology is the better analogy. Nuclear technology is used to end World War II, but now it's threatening America as well.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  I worry about this cognitive offloading. If we do that for a generation or so, will we even know what to think or how to think? Or can we unload that cognitive thinking process again? Or have we just totally uploaded it to the cloud and now it's gone forever? I worry about that.

• 9:16Brian Keating?

  Yeah. How many phone numbers do you remember?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  I guess my last quote.

• 9:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Please go ahead.

• 9:20Brian Keating?

  No, I was gonna say, as an illustration of the danger that you just mentioned, how many phone numbers do you remember? I mean, I know my, my mother-in-law, my mother, my wife, in case they're listening. But, but besides that, I don't, I don't even know some of my kids' phone numbers. I can't remember them. And that's what we've done. We cognitively offloaded, offshored, just like we're doing with jobs with, with our manufacturing. That has nothing but, you know, at least caution signs that should be flashing in your mind.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Hmm. I, I can remember my high school friend's phone numbers. How about that? I can remember phone numbers from when I was 13 and I wanted to go to Ben's house, but I don't remember, I don't know anyone else's cell phone now. I love that analogy. What do you say about the people who are running this? I mean, you mentioned their names and that's, that's very interesting. What is their worldview that maybe we should be concerned about as the people who are going to be controlling this technology?

• 10:13Brian Keating?

  I'm very dismayed by them, to be honest with you. Some of them are, you know, one degree separation friends of mine, friends of friends of mine. Very scary. When you hear things like Sam Altman, when asked in, in, in front of Congress about these effects and then considering in the comparison that he made, was to, well, don't look at how much energy and data center usage my models use to train, to do these, these queries and responses. Look at how much it costs to train your child till he's 18. And I thought, you know, a child is a precious gift of God. And, and an AI is a, is a piece of silicon electrified and, you know, processed, you know, in, in data centers around the world using tremendous amounts of resources that will never be able to capture back.

• 10:58Brian Keating?

  And so I, I worry about this. I worry what they do with your data. I don't trust it with, with personal stuff. There's ways to anonymize it. I'm going to be writing about that on my newsletter. How do you do safe searching? How do you get, extract the most out of the technology? But keep your private data. It's the most valuable commodity that you have. Cause it's the one thing like that they cannot do. They have to train on what humans have done. Which is, by the way, one of the reasons I'm not as terrified as many of my doomer friends are, that it's going to create a hyper advanced, you know, a species of Terminator 9000s. Because it has to train on what humans do. It is not generative ab initio. It cannot start from scratch and come up with the Brandenburg concertos

• 11:42Brian Keating?

  or come up with Shakespeare or, you know, anything, God forbid, anything like the Torah, the Old Testament or the New Testament. It's, it's, it's lame. It's impotent. It needs us. It needs the prophets. It needs the minds. It needs human, uh, human intuition. It can't have that, so it won't be what we're worried about. But it can do a lot of damage in the meantime, and it can do a lot of good. And I, I urge people to, to, you know, pay attention, to learn about this, to play around with it. Don't expose private secrets, your medical stuff, your, your accounting, financial stuff. Make sure you trust what you're doing. There's types of AI called local models, which I write about on my website. How do you run it on your own computer?

• 12:21Brian Keating?

  So it never goes to Sam Altman's house and used by that alternative man named Sam.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Dr. Brian Keating, experimental cosmologist, UC San Diego. Go watch Into the Impossible with Brian Keating. And then you said the newsletter, briankeating.com. Brian, great to talk to you, sir. Thank you.

• 12:42Brian Keating?

  Great. Thank you so much, guys.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 13:14Speaker 04

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