We MUST Save Earth Because We Can’t Live on Mars - Adam Becker - #503

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 What if the future tech billionaires keep promising us isn’t the answer, but part of the problem? In this episode of Into the Impossible, I talk with Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever, about the big dreams coming out of Silicon Valley—especially when it comes to AI and the future of humanity. We take a hard look at the idea that AI is going to fix everything, launch us into space, and solve all our problems along the way. It’s a powerful story, and a lot of very smart, very rich people believe it. But what if they’re getting the science—and the big picture—wrong? Becker argues that people like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen are chasing a future that ignores some pretty basic realities: limits on energy, physics, and even society itself. Instead of creating a better world, their vision might actually make things worse, deepening inequality, spreading bias, and putting even more power into the hands of a few. If you’re excited about AI, curious about space, or just wondering where all this is heading, this is a conversation you’ll want to hear. — Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 00:44 AI boom or AI doom? 03:40 What are tech billionaires wrong about? 06:10 Influence of science fiction on tech billionaires 11:05 Religious parallels in AI and space exploration 15:37 The search for extraterrestrial intelligence 24:16 Effective altruism and long-termism 35:28 Optimism and skepticism about AI 44:46 Judging a book by its cover 47:53 Impact of AI on underrepresented communities — Additional resources: Learn more about Adam: 💻 Website: https://freelanceastrophysicist.com/ 📚 More Everything Forever: https://a.co/d/ajlYHvZ — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! 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

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:59Speaker 02

  They don't see that as the problem. They think, oh, this is the only example of advanced life in the entire universe. And so therefore, it's really, really important that we get off of this planet in order to secure a future out in space. They say it's more important than anything else. It's more important than preserving the environment here. It's more important than democracy. It's more important than civil rights. They also overlook that space is pretty bad for humans to live. This is the best place we've got.

• 1:30Brian Keating?

  We're going to talk a lot about what I call the eschatology, the end times fantasies of tech billionaires, some of whom have been on the show and have talked to in the past, including people like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Let's open with something that's really been a hot topic lately, which is the potential for AI boom or AI doom. In this book, you come down relatively hard on the billionaires that are not only shaping

• 1:55Brian Keating?

  Our economy through their inventions or technology, but also on their desire for control, manipulation, power, and perhaps even, as you call it, a threat to democracy.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04Brian Keating?

  What is going on with AI? How do you see it now? And, and, and what do you really see as the number one danger? The audience would be, you know, keen to pay attention to.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13Brian Keating?

  If not panic, let us know when we should start panicking.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. So, you know, like you said, there's the AI boomers who think that, you know, like a lot of these billionaires who, like Andreessen specifically is a great example, who think that really we just need to make AI go as fast as possible, scale up as big as possible, as quickly as possible, and it will solve all of our problems for us. And then on the other side, you have these AI doomers, people like this guy, Elias Yudkowski, who I think we're probably going to talk about a bit more as we go on, and also the effective altruists, people from, from the same camp as, as like Sam Bankman-Fried, or if we want to pick a currently active tech billionaire Dustin Moskowitz, who believe that AI in all likelihood is going to lead to, you know, total extinction of humanity and the end of the world.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  I think that the evidence for either of these claims is pretty bad because they're, in a lot of ways, are two sides of the same coin. And the reason I say that, even though their claims sound as far apart as possible, is that they're both predicated on this idea that AI is going to inevitably, and in pretty short order, become incredibly powerful and superhuman in not just its abilities, but in its intelligence, and, and just be more powerful and more intelligent and more capable than all of the rest of humanity and human civilization combined.

• 3:38Brian Keating?

  Super intelligent.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And then that will lead to it being able to do whatever it wants with like godlike powers of creation and destruction. I think the arguments in favor of that happening are pretty bad, and the arguments against it are pretty good. So I think both the boomers and the doomers are sort of living in the same fantasy land, and they're both wrong. And that the biggest dangers we have around AI. Are the sort of normal dangers that we have around technology, right? That it'll be used to further concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few without democratic accountability, that it will take existing problems in society and make them worse, existing biases and make them worse. And we're already seeing all of that happen. So I think it's just going to be more of the same faster and faster.

• 4:24Brian Keating?

  Yeah, but more of everything.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:26Brian Keating?

  More of everything, but faster and faster. Past guest Nick Bostrom has this famous thought experiment called the paperclip problem. You talk about it. And I was very, very impressed by the way this is described in the book, because as astrophysicists, you are an astrophysicist, your first book was not even about AI or astrophysics, about quantum mechanics. We'll get to that later. Stay tuned. Those are breadcrumbs for later. But tell us, what are the kind of delusional or perhaps physics uninformed content hot takes of these billionaires, ranging from Elon Musk, who I spoke to very briefly on the podcast a year ago, and people like Nick Bostrom, who don't seem to factor in the so-called limits to growth and things that have been around for a very long time. So what are they missing and that we should be getting or lead us to be either less concerned about doom or more

• 5:11Brian Keating?

  optimistic about boom?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  The most obvious physics uninformed thing that Elon Musk in particular says is basically everything he ever says about Mars. He's just wrong about Mars. But when it comes to AI stuff, I mean, you've got people like boomers like Marc Andreessen, in particular, saying that AI is going to allow us to transcend all limits to growth and just have permanent growth of everything, or you know, more everything forever. Hence the title of the book. And that's just not how physics works, right? We know that there are limits on, on everything that are imposed, if not by anything else, then ultimately by physics, right? Entropy and cosmology force there to be limits. There is only so much stuff in the universe. There's

• 5:57Speaker 02

  only so much energy in the universe. There's only so much free energy in the universe, energy that can be, you know, energy in a useful form that can be used to do stuff before it, you know, reaches a stage. Of maximal entropy. Now, some of these people do recognize that. Bostrom understands that limit. He understands that there's a limit imposed by entropy and limits imposed by cosmology. His response to that is to say, oh, then we need to go out and collect all of that available free energy before we lose it beyond the cosmic horizon. Because otherwise, you know, we'll have lost resources that we could have used to make life better.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  I think not only does that ignore other kinds of physical and biological and scientific limits, but it also is just a really bizarre and unhealthy response to the fact that we live in a limited universe.

• 6:52Brian Keating?

  There are those, though, that say that, you know, you're not being optimistic enough, Adam. You're saying things like the past, people would speculate, we're all going to be eating, you know, soil and green. There's a population explosion. Actually, the problem we should be worried about is overpopulation. Now, it seems like underpopulation, according to some people. I take it from the exasperated side that you don't believe in that. But I want to take us back to the influence of science fiction.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 7:17Brian Keating?

  On all these billionaires, all these, and some are not billionaires, right? I don't think you got, well, Yekowski, he might be a billionaire by now, or he certainly may.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yekowski's not a billionaire.

• 7:25Brian Keating?

  On the way, possibly, to being on. But there are many other people in the book that you mentioned that aren't, you know, Vern Arvindji, who was a graduate, proud graduate of UC San Diego, Kim Stanley Robinson. These are not billionaires, they're comfortable, but their visions do inform, you know, a lot of the techno-optimistic future. And I'm, you know, I wouldn't say friends with Peter Thiel, but we are, you know, we've been in touch in a couple of conferences that, that he's graciously hosted. A bunch of thinkers from different, you know, sides of the political aisle, so we say.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 7:51Brian Keating?

  But the question that I always have is, you know, where, where else do we get inspiration? If not science fiction, I mean, think about the fact that we're in the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, or this is what it used to be, we have monoliths on our desk. We have a picture on your Keating Medal for Nobel Pursuits in Literature that I give to all my wonderful guests who come here in person. That's a, that's a request for more in-person guests, because I love to be in person. But these are people that shaped the future through imagination. And the future was actually outpaced by their imaginations, because Not one of them had the internet in 1962.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:25Brian Keating?

  And so if they really were soothsayers, they would have caught it. So where should we get our inspiration? And what is wrong with kind of this Star Trek versus Star Wars kind of ideological battle that you talk about Peter Thiel kind of suffering with or wrestling with in the book?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  I don't want to bash away at science fiction, right? I am a huge science fiction fan.

• 8:44Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's clear.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  I think I make that clear in the book. Yeah, I was raised on science fiction. I was raised reading Arthur Z Clark, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, you know, Ray Bradbury, all of the greats, Alfred Bester, and then, you know, more recent stuff as well.

• 8:57Brian Keating?

  Ursula Gwynn, she was here for this. Yeah, we used to do the, a lot of things with the speculative futures and science fiction. She spent a lot of time on this campus.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  She's one of my favorite writers in any genre. She's amazing. But, you know, she also said, you know, science fiction authors are not futurists, right? The job of science fiction is not to predict the future. And that she is a science fiction author and, and, you know, she took on the brave task of trying to speak for all science fiction authors. It's not, you know, her job or the job of science fiction to predict the future. Right? And that doesn't mean that science fiction can't be a source of inspiration. And it can be, it clearly is, and sometimes that's a good thing. But it's a question of what we take as inspiration from science fiction and how we see science fiction, right? Because science fiction is not a roadmap for the future, even if it can serve as a source of inspiration, right?

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Because sure, you can, you can look at Star Trek and say, oh, you know, I want those communicators. And now we have stuff that's essentially like the communicators, at least from, you know, the original series. But you can also look at Star Trek and say, oh, I want to live in a world where, you know, people work together to solve problems in that way. I want to live in a world where racial inequality is not an issue. I want to live in a world where, you know, gender discrimination doesn't exist. You know, especially for the original series of Star Trek and The Next Generation. Star Trek is sort of very, very clearly. A kind of morality play, right?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  It's and, and, and as I talk about in the book, it's, it's not particularly subtle. And that can be a good thing, but you know, like there are people who watch Star Trek and think, oh, Star Trek's about warp drive. Like buddy, go back and look at, uh, just to, to, to both pick an episode at random and show like the deep level of nerdity that I have and love for Star Trek. There's an episode from the original series. I'm pretty sure it's called, let that be your last battlefield. And it famously has, uh, I'm blanking on his name, but the guy who played, I think the Riddler on the original Batman TV series.

• 10:59Brian Keating?

  Okay.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  As one of the guest stars, he's got these two guest stars. Uh, and one of them, half his face is white and half his face is black. And the other one, this half of his face is black and this half is white. So it's the same, but swapped. And one of them claims that the other one is like racially inferior and is chasing him around the galaxy until their planet burns. And this episode aired in 1968 in this country, you know, a year of great, you know, civil strife. Yeah. And, and racial unrest in this country. That episode was not about warp drive. That episode was about the, the dangers of racism and division. And, and so, you know, Star Trek and science fiction, absolutely a source of inspiration,

• 11:44Speaker 02

  but it's a question of, you know, okay, but what is this actually saying? Right?

• 11:48Brian Keating?

  I see now a lot of parallels ironically between a lot of these techno futurists, techno optimists who are, as I say, ironically very secular in most of their practices or lack thereof, very much either self-professed atheist or agnostics at best, you know, so to speak. And then this almost messianic, as I call it, you know, scatological notion of AI as sort of the godhead figure and this, this, this notion that it's almost the Messiah that's going to lead us into the promised land. And where is the promised land? It's the great beyond. It's the final frontier. It's space. Talk about these, these weird parallels that, that are almost religious in nature, both from the characters you mentioned, you know, these, these founding, you know, kind

• 12:29Brian Keating?

  of, uh, figures, the, the, the prophets and also the apostates, the people that are kind of pushing back on them may have a little less financial firepower to go along with it. But talk about the battle between the religious fervor and the cult, almost cult-like notions that some of these communities are taking on.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is definitely a parallel here, right? The the idea that the job of AI companies like OpenAI or Anthropic is to essentially build a god, right? Some of them actually talk about it as such in those words. The idea that, you know, the goal is to have that god take us all to space so we can live forever. You know, this is this, this just looks inextricably like going to heaven to live forever with God. Right? And and that parallel, I think, is not at all a coincidence, right?

• 13:26Speaker 02

  If you if you dive into the historical origins of these ideas of things like transhumanism, things like this, you know, drive to take humanity to space as the next step. A lot of these ideas originally started out as religiously informed ideas, often from Christian movements. You get someone like Nikolai Fedorov saying that it's the common task of humanity to bring about a paradise in space through technology back in the late 1800s. You get someone like Théardot de Chardin saying that you're going to have a self reinforcing cycle of technology, leading to humanity having godlike powers and eventually, you know, bringing about a kind of paradise on earth and joining with God.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  These notions ended up becoming very influential, you know, Fedorov influenced Silkowsky, one of the pioneers of rocketry. And his ideas, his cosmist inflected ideas that that came from, among other people, Fedorov, ended up influencing Arthur C. Clarke. It was Silkowsky who said that, you know, Earth is the cradle, but you can't stay in the cradle forever. And then it was Clark who wrote Childhood's End, right? Book that Infancy's End would have been more appropriate. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The title, the title is a direct reference to that. And he even talks about Silkowsky explicitly in a different book, Rendezvous with Rama. It was Théardot de Chardin who

• 14:53Speaker 02

  You know, first took the word transhumanist and sort of brought it into this context of technological apotheosis, you know, and an eschatology of technology. And, and it was his friend, Julian Huxley, who grabbed that idea and brought it into a more secular context. But this idea is at its heart, I think, inextricably religious. And I think it's not a coincidence that a lot of these people come from, like a lot of the, the leaders in these communities come from a deeply religious background and then, you know, found atheism.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  But now I'm going to get real pretentious and also engage in some really irresponsible, you know, guessing about what's going on in other people's brains, but.

• 15:43Brian Keating?

  That's fine. It's your speculative future.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. There was a Nietzsche quote that I didn't use in my book that I, I thought about using, but ultimately couldn't find a way to do it. And it's something like, you know, yeah, God's dead, but we're going to try to find some way of putting something, yeah, putting something into that God-shaped hole in our society, finding something else to call God. And I think this is a lot of that, you know, this is, this is, oh, wouldn't it be nice if there were some omnipotent omniscient being that could take care of us? And that's not going to happen.

• 16:20Brian Keating?

  I want to parlay this eventually into a connection between a topic that I, you know, think dovetails nicely, although you don't mention in the book, but it's impossible for me to imagine you don't have an opinion about alien life and UAPs in the universe. It's not in this book, but the kind of, again, eschatological and messianic and cult-like behavior and religious fervor and supplement surrogate replacement of God, of religion with advanced civilizations that exist that are visiting us to do what, know, who knows what. But do you see parallels there? Is, is there, you know, between these different communities, these different kind of cult-like structures as I see them?

• 16:59Speaker 02

  So it's interesting because aliens do show up in the book a little bit, right? Mostly in that a lot of these people don't believe in them.

• 17:05Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Right? And I don't mean they don't believe aliens have come here and visited us and given us advanced technology. I don't believe that either. These guys. Don't believe that aliens exist anywhere.

• 17:16Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  We're it. Yeah, exactly. Like, maybe there are bacteria somewhere, but they don't believe that there's anything like, you know, an advanced.

• 17:23Brian Keating?

  SETI.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. An alien civilization. And, and it's very interesting that they sort of go out and take that very strong position, which I, I think is, I don't think that that's true. The argument that they give for it, I think is ludicrous. The argument they give is, well, inevitably, a technological civilization is going to undergo something like a singularity and is going to go out and try to colonize the universe. And so the fact that we haven't seen any evidence of that, that we haven't seen evidence of Dyson spheres up in the sky, that we haven't seen, you know, alien autonomous probes showing up here in our solar system.

• 18:02Brian Keating?

  Time travelers.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, exactly. That means that we're alone. And therefore, the universe is here for the taking. And so I, I do think that there is something sort of religious about that in the idea that, oh, that means it's our universe, it's here for us.

• 18:21Brian Keating?

  God so loved us, he gave us his only son, but we're his only son and there's nothing else in the universe.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 18:26Brian Keating?

  And the reason I, I brought that up is I share a very similar viewpoint. I'm open to it. I don't like to use the word believe, as you did, but, but I say, I think there's no evidence. And I think that's basically what you meant. I want to take that in a parallel track right now and talk about, um, kind of the day after aliens. So if you remember the, the great book and movie Contact by Carl Sagan and his wife, who was past guest on the show, Andrea, very proud of that, um, had her on way back when when I first started, and Freeman Dyson, he was my first guest, by the way.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Amazing. He was a lovely man. I met him when I was in college.

• 18:56Brian Keating?

  Oh, you did? Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's too bad you didn't get to spend more time with him when you were here last. Uh, he's no longer with us, as they say. I had a conversation with Lex Friedman about that very scene in Contact where Bill Clinton is, it's a realistic scene. It's not CGI like most of the movie. Bill Clinton's on the White House lawn saying, if this discovery of this meteorite, he doesn't say the meteorite, but he says, if this discovery of alien, you know, microbes or whatever, if that is proven and verified to be true, that will mark a new. Dawn for humanity, basically. And so that was actually true. As far as people knew, that was a meteorite discovered in our that had come from the planet Mars. This is your meteorite for being a guest. This comes from Argentina.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Amazing. Thank you.

• 19:35Brian Keating?

  That meteorite was thought for many years, more than two decades, to be actually harboring signs of extraterrestrial life that originated on Mars, microbial respiratory byproducts, perhaps, or microbes themselves. And I submit that 99% of the people that did know about that, saw the press conference or whatnot. They don't know that that was never verified. In fact, it was refuted in some cases.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:58Brian Keating?

  And second of all, they haven't changed their opinion on the existence of aliens one bit. In other words, it wasn't a big deal. And, and if you really care about, you know, life in the universe, there's only one example. We can go down to the Pacific Ocean here, scoop up some water and you get 10 to the, you know, 25th examples of life. And yet we don't seem to be putting as much effort into, you know, the search for protecting life on Earth as we do for searching in life in the universe.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Now, yeah.

• 20:21Brian Keating?

  People like Jill Tarter will say that's idiotic statement. So, but let's, let's turn our astrophysical, you know, eyes to that. The parallels between the, the search out there, because we may be it. That's the part I think it.

• 20:33Speaker 00

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• 21:02Brian Keating?

  Burges in the AI and accelerationist and EA community in that they're, they're sort of stipulating we're it.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:07Brian Keating?

  Whereas the alien, you know, maximalist are saying, no, no, no, we can't be it because as Sagan said, it's an awful waste of space. How do those two things get reconciled? I mean, the notion that life, you know, could be, should be so abundant, and yet these accelerationists aren't taking as much care of the Earth, at least from the perspective I gleaned from you.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:25Brian Keating?

  In the book, as they could, or humanity or democracy. So talk about that. How do they overlook that if this is the only example of life in a universe of 10 to the 23rd possible planets?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  It's a good question. They don't see that as the problem, right? They, they think, oh, this is the only example of life, or at least, you know, advanced life. In the entire universe. And so therefore, it's really, really important. It's more important than anything else that we get off of this planet in order to secure a future out in space. And there's a lot of problems with that, right? You know, they say it's more important than anything else. It's more important than preserving the environment here. It's more important than democracy. It's more important than civil rights. They also overlook that space is pretty bad, right? That for for humans to live, this is the best place we've got.

• 22:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  And there really isn't anywhere else. There is no planet B, as the saying goes, right?

• 22:25Brian Keating?

  Proxima Centauri B.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Right, there's Proxima Centauri. Yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  But yeah, you know, like Musk wants to go to Mars. Mars is terrible, right? There's no.

• 22:34Brian Keating?

  Zach Weiner Smith was on last year. City on Mars basically says it's impossible. And even if it were possible, you point this out in the book too. I just want to parenthetically, we're not going to spend much time on it. But yeah, but we, he talks about the fact that, yeah, you might want to go to Mars. But does your great grandson want to be born on Mars? You know, and did you psychologically vet them? No, you didn't, because they weren't born when you took off with their future. And my, anyway, go on.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And Zach and Kelly's book is amazing and I cite it in mine. It's, it's a very good book. And yeah, Mars is terrible. There's nowhere in the solar system that we could go to, except right here. To like really live and work and build communities.

• 23:06Brian Keating?

  Why do you think they don't focus on, sorry to interrupt, but why do you think they don't focus on the habitable? Known to be habitable, known to be supporting life, get life sustaining places. I've been to, you know, at least one of them, the South Pole, you know, which, uh, which is not too dissimilar from where you spent your PhD year. Once again, I was in Wisconsin for part of my time, so I can make fun of that. But the South Pole, you know, there are 45 people there right now in the middle of, of winter, coming up in the middle of winter for them. And, and, um, or the oceans. I mean, we have 70% of the planet, right? And there's obviously abundant life there even. And there's an almost infinite parameter space of life. Why is there zero? I mean, I know Schmidt, Eric Schmidt has spent some effort on this, but I think it's to get his mega yacht out there. Yeah. Some tax deductions.

• 23:49Brian Keating?

  Eric, if you're out there, I'd love to talk to you, but Adam wouldn't because he doesn't think billionaires should exist. But anyway, let's talk about under the ocean and on the polar ice caps while they last, right?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, and you do see other things like, you know, the Sea Steading Institute people who want to go out there. But like, yeah, by and large, there's not nearly as much interest. And I think part of it is just like, it doesn't sound as sexy.

• 24:11Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Right? Like, there's something cool about space that is less cool about like, sea lab. And

• 24:17Brian Keating?

  Do you think it's partially militaristic? I mean, what would be a better psy op or better covert op than to say, oh, we're going to get, you know, Starlink satellites and Blue Origin Kuipers out there? But really, it's a cover for weaponizing space.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't think that it's a deliberate psy op. There are certainly people who are interested in weaponizing space. And I'm sure they're very comfortable with this way of talking about space as a cover for that. But I don't think that that's what, say, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, like, I don't think that that's what their ultimate goals are, right? They've been very, very clear that they want to go out into space to, you know, save and secure the future of humanity. You know, this is weird because space is awful, but, um, but yeah, I mean, I, they, it's very, very difficult to understand why anyone would think that space is the inevitable future of humanity when you actually look at how awful it is

• 25:14Speaker 02

  and how difficult it would be to leave the solar system and go somewhere else where there might be a better, more habitable planet than the ones that aren't Earth here. But even those planets probably already have their own biospheres. And if they don't, they're still going to be very difficult to live on.

• 25:29Brian Keating?

  I guess the pushback might be, you know, from an Elon, you know, again, I've talked to him very briefly. His mom kind of bailed him out at the end when I said, well, which one of your kids, of your 14 kids that we know about? Are you going to say goodbye to, or, you know, which ones are you going to take with you? Which ones are going to say goodbye because they're not all going to come and would you want to bring a three year old to Mars? I don't think that's a very good plan. And his mother just, you know, kind of interrupted the conversation. Let's not talk about unpleasant things. You know, so Mama May, she she bailed it out. But when, you know, when we think about, you know, kind of the the ultimate goal in going into space, again, it's it's this theme that runs throughout the book that's so rich is is long termism.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:04Brian Keating?

  And that if you don't think that way, you are an obstructionist, you're a decelerationist, you're a pessimist, or what have you. And you trace it in the very beginning of the book to this notion of what, you know, what is called, I think it's very hubristic, if that's a word, to say that they're effective altruists.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:21Brian Keating?

  This notion is like the French Enlightenment.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 26:55Brian Keating?

  Calling themselves the Enlightenment as they caught off the heads of Lavoisier and great, greatest of minds of their generation, rolled into a basket, as it was said. Talk about this, the notion that they know better and and we should be listening to them because you're not doing effective altruism when you give, you know, charity, Sadaka, you know, tithing or whatever. We're going to tell you how to do it. And it's really just a cover word for code word for we know what's best because we're we are these superhuman brainiacs. So talk about effective altruism and the repugnant conclusions I claim it has for this movement that that may come to dominate technology and democracy.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  There are a lot of weird names in this space, right? That that sort of have that same flavor, right? There's the effective altruists. My favorite is the rationalists. It's like, oh, yeah, we're going to call ourselves like the correctists.

• 27:40Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, there's, uh, one of my favorite TV shows is, um, Parks and Rec.

• 27:45Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  And there's this group, this cult on Parks and Rec called the Reasonableists. And I just always think of them. I think of the rationalist, but yeah, the effective altruist, you know, it is one of these things that sounds unobjectionable on the face of it, right? Like, oh, we're going to find the most effective ways to do the most good. But, but the devil is always is in the details, right? What do you mean by effective? What do you mean by good? What do you mean by the most good? And, and this leads you sort of inexorably to this idea of long-termism that, well, if you're, if you want to do the most good, you need to help the most people. Where are the most people? Well, they're in the future, right? They're the future generations that will come after us.

• 28:25Brian Keating?

  Not only separated in space, but separated in time.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 28:28Brian Keating?

  A lot more separate in time than in space.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Right. Or there could be, at least. Yeah.

• 28:32Brian Keating?

  10 to the 23rd.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. They have these absurd calculations. And, and that gets to the heart of it, right? Because we don't know what the future holds. And we don't know what future people will need. It's very, very hard to make accurate estimations about like what generations, even 10 generations down the line, much less, you know, 1,000 generations down the line, will need, you know, if and when they're scattered across space. And to the effective altruist, you know, this repugnant conclusion that they come to is this idea that, you know, more people, as long as their lives are at least barely worth living, is always better, makes the world and the universe a better place. And so this creates what one very prominent effective altruist, Will McCaskill, calls a moral case for space settlement.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  But again, space is terrible. There is no moral case for, for space settlement. And you can't do that to your descendants, right? But there's also the bigger problem of like, well, why, why is that what they want? Why do they think that a better world is just one that has more people, you know, almost no matter what? I think a smaller population living happier lives is better. And this is like a well-known paradox in philosophy that, you know, people have sort of bashed their heads against for years. And there's a reason that it's, you know, a paradox. It's very difficult to sort of.

• 29:55Brian Keating?

  Sign utility function.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:57Brian Keating?

  Optimize for, right.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:59Brian Keating?

  They attempt to bring their, their, you know, engineering kind of credentials to it.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. It's this idea that you can quantify absolutely everything. And I just don't believe that that's true. Right? Like, if you want to defend this, then you got to have this way of determining like, okay, what is good?

• 30:16Speaker 02

  And what is good across an entire population? How do you evaluate different kinds of happiness within one person and then across different people, across all populations, across all generations, literally until the heat death of the universe? If you have a way that you think of doing that, that you think works, even in principle, I'm just not going to believe you.

• 30:35Brian Keating?

  I see it as kind of an analog of the Drake equation, you know, that which is, which is highly speculative and filled with, you know, errors and the biggest errors that there's no errors assigned to any of the terms in the, in the equation. And so it becomes just a framework, but so forth. And then people use it and they make these calculations of similar types of figures. As 20, as Adam Frank, another past Adam astrophysicist has said on the show, you know, there could be 20, you know, 10 to the 24th Avogadro's number of planets, right? Okay. In the history of the observable universe, okay, I care about those within 100 light years of me, right? So we can at least plausibly have communicated once, at least in one direction. But, uh, but there are these parallels and, and I think that again, it's, there is a, there's this, this cord of escape and I can't help thinking, you know, I'm a, I'm a, you

• 31:18Brian Keating?

  know, I call myself a devout practicing agnostic, you know, where I think a scientist could be open to, you know, being swayed, but never should say that they believe in something without evidence. I think that's problematic for a scientist to say. And nevertheless, you know, to be open, to be completely closed off to it, I find as a person in my personal life and my children, my family to be more infused with meaning, so to speak. So I practice, but you know, the level of which belief comes in is, is another matter. But these people, I think they are trying to replace this, you know, either God sized hole or, or something that's missing in their life. And now we could psychoanalyze, I don't think that's important, but I do think it's, it's interesting to consider, you know, so Mark Andreessen follows me on, on X Twitter where you are rarely seen nowadays. I tried to post to you, but you're protected and blocked.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry.

• 32:02Brian Keating?

  Everything else, but that's all good. Um, we can find you on Blue Sky.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:06Brian Keating?

  Or Mastodon.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Have you been to Mastodon? I have, although it's, it's a little quieter. I'm mostly using Blue Sky these days.

• 32:11Brian Keating?

  You know, Marc Andreessen, if I had to channel him, I might think that he would say something like, "Look, Becker, you're in the elite of the elite, 0.10001% of population, educated, Western institutions, conversant with technology, the finest education, background pedigree, you're living this comfortable life." And so you're criticizing the very people that, in his case, developing Netscape, Mozilla, leading to at least the commercialization, popularization, which led to his great wealth, by the way, of the internet through the World Wide Web browser, which was, you know, we can talk about its origins. But what would you say to him? He might criticize this. I mean, he comes off as, if there is a villain, there's not really a villain in the book,

• 32:53Brian Keating?

  but he comes off kind of the most deserving of the most opprobrium, at least as you dish it out in the book. And Thiel's Musk is a very, very close second. Maybe Topps, who knows? You'll have to say. But what would he say about this critique? I mean, if we could channel him, steel man, his argument, "Look how much it's given you." I mean, you personally, I mean, you flew down here on an airline, you know, you'll stay in a chain hotel, you'll eat the finest food that the campus can deliver, techno, we communicated via email over the web, you publish in a major publishing house book. I listened to it in audio, read it in print. These are all things done Bezos, and we can talk about Google and the Brins and the pages, etc. But talk about what they'll say, like, you're now kind of coming down with this harsh critique

• 33:37Brian Keating?

  of the very abundant future, which you were given. You say in the book, "They didn't earn it completely." They might say the same to you. How would you react to that?

• 33:44Speaker 02

  You know, I think like any good millennial, there are some internet memes that just live in my head rent-free and probably just will forever, right? And the one that's coming to mind right now is this sort of one-panel cartoon of like a medieval-looking peasant doing backbreaking labor and, you know, like literally hunched over with like a big pile of wood on their back in a cap covered in mud, saying, "We should improve society somewhat." And then over on the side of the panel, someone dressed in like modern clothing is sort of sticking their head up out of a well, saying, "Ah, but you participate in society. Curious, I am very smart."

• 34:25Brian Keating?

  The human version of the meme where the wolves come upon a campfire and they say, "Oh, we should really investigate that campfire to themselves." Fast forward 10,000 years and there's a teacup poodle inside of Paris Hilton.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:37Brian Keating?

  So it's the human version of that.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Kind of, yeah. It is absolutely true that I participate in society, right? And that this is a society shaped in large part by the decisions made by the tech billionaires that I criticize in the book. The fact that I participate in that society and have benefited from various things in that society does not mean that I don't get to criticize it, right? It means that I should be aware of the ways in which I have benefited from living in this society. And I am, you know, I know that I have been very lucky. I was lucky to be born to the parents that I was born to. I was lucky to be able to go to the schools that I went to. I was lucky to get my first book deal and my second book deal.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  That doesn't mean that everything is great, right? Just because I have been able to benefit from certain things in society doesn't mean that, you know, therefore I cannot possibly criticize society. It just means like there are, you know, there are problems and I think it would be better if we address those problems. And would addressing some of those problems possibly make my life a little bit worse than it is right now? Maybe that's possible. I'm okay with that because I think that it would be better if we lived in a more just world where more people had the chance to, you know, not even live the kind of life that the billionaires live, but just the kind of life that I live.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Because, you know, one of the things I thought about doing before the book came out was I thought about making a bingo card of different reactions I figured I would get to the book. And one of the reactions I knew would show up in an internet forum somewhere. And I want to be really clear, this is not what you're saying. It's not even what you're saying Mark Andreessen would say, right? But one of the criticisms I knew would show up somewhere was, oh, you know, Becker's just trying to profit off of, you know, these, these crazy things that these people say he's just a grifter and like. Buddy, if you say that, you have no idea how book publishing works. Like, this is not a money-making endeavor for me.

• 36:39Brian Keating?

  Had a door broke slowly.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I was, I was just talking with someone last night and said, oh, yeah, after I did my PhD, I went into science journalism because I thought, you know what? Academics make too much money. I want to do something that makes less money than that.

• 36:52Brian Keating?

  Too spoiled by riches.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I am fully open to and have accepted that, yeah, absolutely. I have benefited from living in the society that we live in. That doesn't mean that I don't get to say, hey, I think we should change this. I think it'd be better if this were different.

• 37:10Brian Keating?

  Yeah, and it's a very different book than the other books that I've read or, you know, participated in. Max Tegmark, obviously, is a, is sort of a doomer, as people call him, and gets criticized for that. And then Jan Le Cun, and I had them battling each other. It's pretty funny to watch them, you know, at least by remotely, by text message. But at the end of the day, you know, what really feeds this, I see is sort of a cycle, you know, where you've got these, you know, tech unicorns that fuel, you know, kind of this epistemic, you know, kind of conceit that they have solved something and are worth a billion dollars, so they should be, they're really smart, right? So, so we should listen to whatever they say. And then that includes extracting, you know, both resources, monetary resources.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 38:17Brian Keating?

  But also political power from, which is possible in a democracy. And I see this loop, or, you know, could be a doom loop. But I want to ask you kind of a flip side of that. What are you optimistic about in this future? I mean, AI has transformed the way I do research, the way I teach. Has it done as much as the internet? You know, as, as I think Chen Li said about the French Revolution, 1972, it's too soon to tell, you know? Will it, will it, you know, really supersede, but, you know? We're just at the very nascent beginning of it. We're, you know, I haven't even brought in my autonomous robot, you know, to replace my, my job as a professor. But what are you optimistic about? It could be in education. I mean, you're, you're very familiar conversion with educational system. And what are you optimistic about the AI that's not doom related that you're, that you actually think is going to be a net benefit?

• 39:01Brian Keating?

  Both not necessarily of the people in the book. You can compliment them all you like, but what are you optimistic about in terms of, you know, both education, economics and, and perhaps, you know, more broadly, you know, kind of technology in the future?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  I'm going to go for the last part of that first, right? Like, I think that there's all sorts of wonderful things to be optimistic about regarding technology in general. Right? I have a cousin who's a cancer researcher and there have been amazing leaps and bounds in cancer research in the last like decade due to this sort of new direction of cancer research having to do with like, getting cancer patients own immune systems to learn how to fight the cancers that they have. I'm very optimistic about that because I've, you know, talked with my cousin and other experts on this and came to the conclusion like, yeah, this, this sounds really great. Or rather they came to that conclusion and convinced me, you know, because they know what they're talking about. That sounds amazing.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  You know, I think I, I don't want to say it looks like the cure to cancer is within reach because I don't know about that. But like, but we're definitely going to be able to treat cancers that were previously untreatable and are already able to do that. That's amazing. Right? That's really great. I think that there's amazing applications for mRNA vaccines, right? They're not just for COVID. I think that, you know, it's in a way too soon to tell what's going to happen with that. But it's looking pretty good. So yeah, all sorts of amazing biomedical advances. I am optimistic about green technology. You know, it's just been getting cheaper and cheaper. That's amazing. I think that if we decide as a civilization

• 40:41Speaker 02

  that we are finally ready to make that transition to renewable energy as a primary energy source. That's just way more possible than it was even. Ten years ago. Yeah. Right? That's incredible. You know, I am still really, really worried about global warming, but it makes me less concerned about us having the tools, the technological tools that we need to address it. Now that we have most of them, it's primarily a political and social problem rather than a technological one. And that's great. There's any number of other things that I'm optimistic about regarding technology and the way that it can be applied. AI, these machine learning tools that we have now, um, there are all sorts of wonderful applications.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  This isn't generative AI, which I'll get to in a second, but I didn't use any generative AI in the writing of either of my books, except for one paragraph in the new book where I say, here is a thing that I got chat GPT to say, right? Where like very clearly that's generative AI. The rest of it is not, right? So unless I'm quoting chat GPT, it's all me. Right. But non-generative AI, right? Like audio transcription, it's incredible. You know, as a journalist, I use that quite a bit because it's really, really helpful to have a first pass at a transcript of what somebody said to me. And is the transcript perfect? No. Is it ever gonna be perfect? I don't know. Maybe there's a lot of different ways that people speak, but it doesn't need to be.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  I just need to be able to get a few key words so I can find the spot in the hour-long transcript where they say the one thing that I, that summarizes the thing they spent the last 20 minutes saying. And so I can use that in the article or the book or whatever it is that I'm writing. It's incredibly useful for that and has, has made it much easier for me to do my job. Although that is also an example of somebody losing a job because of AI, right? I, I previously hired someone for my first book. I, I hired a dear friend of mine who was looking for work. I said, well, look, you know, I have this grant to work on this book. I can give you some of that money if you transcribe these interviews. And so she did that. For the new book, I didn't have to do that. I just had to sign up for the subscription, which was even cheaper.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  But nonetheless, you know, like as with most other technologies, yeah, okay, some jobs go away, but then new jobs are created, right? And I think a lot of, we're going to see a lot of that with AI. Generative AI is a trickier case, right? Because there are costs there that don't exist in the same way, or at least at the same scale as there are in other AI systems, right? There's environmental costs, right? The carbon cost. The the cost of the water that's being used to cool the the systems, the resources that are extracted in order to build the systems in the first place. There's the intellectual property that was used in ways that are allegedly theft

• 43:29Speaker 02

  to train these systems, right? And I find it quite rich that you get people like Sam Altman or Nick Clegg saying, oh, but you know, but if we had to pay for the intellectual property rights, then these AI systems wouldn't be profitable. I'm like, okay, two things. First of all, they're still not profitable, like opening eyes never turn to profit. And second, yeah, that's a problem. Like that's, but but not the way that you think it is. It means that these systems, you should have maybe talked to somebody before building these things. And then there's also the human cost, the labor that's being exploited to train these systems out of producing dangerous content, which first of all, it's not, you know, even completely successful, right? You can still get these systems to produce dangerous content or content that looks dangerous

• 44:13Speaker 02

  and and by virtue of looking dangerous becomes dangerous, like, you know, giving you instructions for what it claims is like a medicine, but instead if you take it, you know, it'll poison you or something like that. But or, you know, fake bomb making instructions that will blow up in your face if you try to build them or or something like that. But, you know, they trained it out of or tried to train it out of producing like child sexual material, which is very important for them to train it out of doing because they they can't have it put it out on the internet. But in order to do that, they had to hire people at very, very low wages, usually in the developing world, to be exposed to some of the very, very worst of the worst of what

• 44:56Speaker 02

  the internet can produce, because these things speak with kind of this smeared out averaged voice of the internet. And so if you ask them to do horrible things, they will produce things a lot like the worst things that anyone's ever put on the internet. And it's caused real psychological trauma for the people who've done this. Karen Howe, who has a great new book out called Empire of AI, she documented this really, really well, I believe in her new book, which I haven't read, but also definitely in her reporting for the Wall Street Journal and MIT Technology Review and whatnot. These are real human costs and, you know.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  If you want to have these systems out on the internet without having them produce easily such content, either you need to not have them on the internet, or you need to harm these workers. And the choice that these companies have made is to harm these workers. And so with all of those harms, and this is also putting aside the harms that are coming from the people using these systems, right? The AI induced psychosis cases that are being seen and the, yeah, exactly. And the de-skilling that, that people are like undergoing as they, as they rely on it more and more to do things that they themselves used to do. Even putting those things aside, it makes it very hard for me to say that it's okay

• 46:42Speaker 02

  to use these generative AI systems, or at least to use them widely. Because it's, it's really, it's really like very hard to defend ethically what these companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have had to do along the way to producing these things.

• 47:00Brian Keating?

  They left out LAM on Meta's products, which are open source.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. Yeah.

• 47:05Brian Keating?

  Are they less problematic?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  I'm not sure that they are. I know less about them, and that's why I let them, left them out. I know that at the very least, they probably had to train on, you know, similar corpuses of, of intellectual property and probably using similar.

• 47:20Brian Keating?

  Facebook.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so I, I am skeptical that they're okay. Um, I don't, I don't know as much about them.

• 47:29Brian Keating?

  Well, one of our favorite traditions on this podcast is to do what you're not supposed to do, which is to pass judgment on a book by solely looking at its cover. So we call this judging books by its cover. We even have a little jingle, which we'll start now.

• 47:53Brian Keating?

  So Adam, what we like to do is have an author take us through the title, the subtitle.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Yup.

• 47:59Brian Keating?

  And the beautiful, you're not known for it. That's the only shortcoming I'll say of the book. So walk us through the title, subtitle, and the, at least the stellar background on this book. And then the next episode, we'll talk about this one.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  The title of the book, More Everything Forever, is sort of what came first out of all the things on the cover, aside from my own name, which I was not responsible in the choosing of my name. But so about halfway through the time that I spent working on the book, it sort of pivoted to being about something a little different than it had been about when I initially, you know, suggested it to my publisher. And they, you know, took the proposal and gave me a book deal. And when I made that change, a lot of things that had been floating around in my head that I knew had to go into the book, but I wasn't sure how to make them go in the book, just kind of clicked and fell into place. And I found myself finally writing a draft that I liked of a chapter

• 48:55Speaker 02

  that ultimately ended up becoming chapter one of the book. And not very far into that chapter, I realized, oh, you know, what would make a good title for this book is more, comma, forever. And so originally, that was the title. And then I finished writing a very early, very rough draft of chapter one, and then sent it to a dear friend of mine, who's also a writer, and said, hey, what do you think of this? I think this is where I'm taking the book. And I'd already sent that to my editor, my editor liked it. But this friend of mine is one of the very few people I was also showing drafts of the work to at various points. And he read it and he said, I think this is great. Obviously, it's an early draft and it needs some work. I also think your title isn't more forever. I think your title is more everything forever.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  And I said, oh, damn it, you're right.

• 49:42Brian Keating?

  It's like Facebook was originally the Facebook.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 49:45Brian Keating?

  From the social network.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah, yeah, I was like that. I just, I saw, you know, I saw what he said and I'm like, oh damn, that's right, isn't it?

• 49:51Brian Keating?

  It's good.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  No, it's very good.

• 49:53Brian Keating?

  Better get that feedback early.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And so I took that to my editor and he said, oh yeah, that's just absolutely correct. And so we had the title and then the subtitle, we knew had to involve AI and space because the title of the book is good, but it doesn't really give you a sense of like what the book's about.

• 50:10Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  And so, you know, we kicked around a few different ideas for a while. And then finally, once we had a fully like finished. And, you know, stable draft of the book. Once I'd finished that, I sat down with my publisher and then, well, yeah, with my editor and then his boss, the publisher, and ultimately, kicked around a few ideas. And then finally, we said, okay, let's do this one more time. And one of the first things that I think I was the one who wrote it down and not one of them, but I'd have to go back and confirm, was this subtitle. And, and my editor's boss saw it and she said, yeah, that's it.

• 50:47Brian Keating?

  You received the most prized possession in all of San Diego County, which is to get the Keating Medal. Now, this is loosely modeled on the Nobel Prize. And in the book, you talk about the repository for germinal choice, although you call it by its more common name, the Nobel Prize sperm bank.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:04Brian Keating?

  Which was actually here in Escondido, which is north San Diego County. Yeah, we can go take a, you know, make a deposit. No, I'm just kidding. We don't have the Nobel Prize. So it was actually shut down. So this was actually developed in part by, by many of the kind of Silicon Valley Nobel laureates, including William Shockley, who had reportedly had the maybe distinction or maybe humiliation of being ranked one of the lower IQ candidates that won the Nobel Prize. But nevertheless, he did win the Nobel Prize. So we have to give it to him. But he was a big proponent of eugenics. And, and many of the people that were early pioneers were at least eugenics adjacent, shall we say. How is AI, you know,

• 51:46Brian Keating?

  perhaps impacting underrepresented communities, racism, you know, playing into it? Is that just amplifying what's latent in society? Or is it something that's generative in the worst possible sense of the word?

• 51:58Speaker 02

  I think it's a little of both. It's definitely amplifying stuff that's already there, right? It's taking these existing biases and just, you know, making it possible to automate them. Because it just takes existing data, which, you know, reflects these biases, and then says, oh, okay, I guess that's, you know, if that's the goal, then this is what we're gonna do. And that's not even restricted to generative AI. That's something you'll see in almost any machine learning system that's been, you know, trained on human behavior, right? But there's also sort of a deeper philosophical tie as well, which I talk about in the book, which is the idea that intelligence is this single number that you can sort of dial up or dial down. Is historically something that is strongly

• 52:42Speaker 02

  associated with eugenics, right? Even IQ testing is strongly associated with eugenics. It's part of why the IQ test was developed. And so it's not particularly surprising to see that, you know, in communities that have formed around the idea of AI and super intelligent AI, where you just dial that knob all the way to the right, that there's not just this sort of historical philosophical connection with eugenics, but that a fair number of people in these communities actually advocate for various forms of eugenics, right? And this is something, like I said, I talk about this in the book. There are people in the effective altruist and rationalist communities, which is where a lot of this modern thinking about AI and AGI came from,

• 53:25Speaker 02

  who are very comfortable and advocates for a kind of racist pseudoscience called human biodiversity, which is something I went and talked with a fair number of geneticists, and I think it's the longest endnote in the book, actually. It's two or three pages long, where I talked to them and they said, oh yeah, that's nonsense. That is not science. And yet there are full throated defenses of it made by some prominent people in these communities. And I don't think it's a coincidence. Yeah.

• 53:55Speaker 04

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