The Evolution of Personal Technology, with Marques Brownlee

How has personal technology changed our world? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with tech vlogger and YouTube star Marques Brownlee, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and tech journalist Clive Thompson to explore Internet identity, hacking, Moore’s law, self-driving cars, and technological evolution. Image Credit: robypangy/iStock. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/season-premiere-the-evolution-of-personal-technology-with-marques-brownlee/

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and I'm also the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. And I got with me my co-host Chuck Nice.

• 0:34Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Nice Comic tweeting.

• 0:36Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir. Yes, that is indeed correct.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 0:38Chuck Nice?

  @ChuckNiceComic.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was there a Chuck Nice already taken? Is that what happened?

• 0:42Chuck Nice?

  Um, yes, it was me.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or did you?

• 0:44Chuck Nice?

  I actually didn't like myself enough to cancel that, and so I just started a whole new one called, I'm starting all over again, Chuck Nice Comic.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In case you didn't laugh at my tweet, just remember that it's Chuck Nice Comic.

• 0:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how that works.

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're also a host of a spinoff of StarTalk that we're all quite proud of.

• 1:02Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Playing with science.

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  Playing with science.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because what happened was we had, of our guests, the portfolio of our guests, the ones that were professional athletes developed their own following, basically. And we figured, let's spawn that.

• 1:15Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into its own show.

• 1:16Chuck Nice?

  I have spawned with professional athletes. Never thought I'd be able to say those words. Yes.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and your co-host on that is Gary.

• 1:26Chuck Nice?

  Gary O'Reilly, who was a performer, a former professional footballer.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Footballer for the UK.

• 1:31Chuck Nice?

  For the UK, Crystal Palace and.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool.

• 1:33Chuck Nice?

  Top man.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And today, we're talking about the evolution of personal technology.

• 1:38Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Indeed.

• 1:40Chuck Nice?

  That's a, that's a very rapid evolution.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it is. And featuring my interview with YouTube vlogger and all-around sensation in this niche, we have Marques Brownlee, that's featuring my interview.

• 1:54Chuck Nice?

  The kid?

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:56Chuck Nice?

  That kid?

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  Who does all the unboxing and stuff?

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:59Chuck Nice?

  I love that kid.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and he's also known online as what, MKB?

• 2:03Chuck Nice?

  MKBHD.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 2:05Chuck Nice?

  I love that kid.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Featuring my interview with him.

• 2:09Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was fun, just. Because I feel like, you know, okay, go to bed now and say, Pat, you're back. I feel like being his father.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But no, he's got his own world.

• 2:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like create his own world.

• 2:19Chuck Nice?

  He's big stuff.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, since I only have marginal expertise in this, generally, we go out and find the real expertise, as we did today. In studio, we have science and tech writer for the New York Times and other outlets, including Wired, Clive Thompson. Clive, good to be here, my friend. Welcome.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Ah, it's great to be here.

• 2:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, dude. And so you, you, you have a book from a few years ago.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Smarter Than You Think.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For The Better.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:49Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that is so counterintuitive.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you are the only one in the house.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Exactly. I'm the only one holding down that argument.

• 2:55Chuck Nice?

  We ask, you know, everybody else thinks it's making us dumber.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  If you need that book, I, I have one for you.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, all right, all right. Well, we don't, none of us agree with whatever you could have possibly put in there. Um, so in my interview with Marques Brownlee, uh, he runs a YouTube channel, MKBHD.

• 3:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a YouTube channel, uh, five million subscribers, 700 million video views. And he reviews new tech and gadgets that you might think of buying.

• 3:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or that you already bought and then you learned you shouldn't have.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so any idea what makes, makes it so popular? Because I'm not a first adopter, so I don't, I don't have to chase the latest unwrapping.

• 3:39Chuck Nice?

  So popular.

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 3:41Chuck Nice?

  Is what you just said, I'm not a first adopter. He is the first adopter in, in your stead.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody has to be.

• 3:47Chuck Nice?

  Somebody's got to be the first.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first adopter.

• 3:49Chuck Nice?

  And that's what this kid does.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  And also, frankly, I mean.

• 3:51Chuck Nice?

  I gotta stop calling him a kid. He's a grown man. I'm just old.

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay, go ahead, sorry.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  You know, he's, he's, he's also, uh, you know, he, I think he's sort of an exemplar of what's happening at this new generation of, of sort of broadcasters who are growing up not on TV but on, online. And, and they're really, I mean, they're, he's really good at it. You look at it, it's like, it's just beautifully shot. He's just oozing charisma.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in modern times, one perhaps shouldn't even make the distinction between being on TV or being online.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, in a weird way, I mean, YouTube is such a funny old. Phrase, right? Because two, I mean, who actually watching YouTube remembers?

• 4:25Chuck Nice?

  A two.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  A two.

• 4:26Chuck Nice?

  A cathode ray two.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  None of them.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  None of them, yeah. I barely do. It's so like, you know, I've got a couple of young kids in grade school, middle school. And, you know, for them, you know, what they watch, where they learn things from is YouTube. Like, you know, they, they, not, once we got a TV box that hooked up to YouTube, it's just YouTube on TV. Like, there's no actual TV being watched.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or they don't make the distinction.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  That's right. Absolutely true.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. So that's the, that's an emergent fact.

• 4:49Chuck Nice?

  I think it's beyond just not making the distinction, uh, cause I have also an 11 year old. And, um, he is resistant to television.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 5:00Chuck Nice?

  The fact that he has to do it on their time and their schedule.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And sit down in front of a thing attached to the wall.

• 5:08Chuck Nice?

  It, it upsets him. It's like, how dare you?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  And there's also sort of, I mean, I, I think there's kind of an authenticity that comes, or a parent authenticity. Hard to say how authentic it really is, but from, you know, seeing someone who looks maybe more like someone you might actually know doing this. Like, you know, like my, my kids watch all these Minecraft videos and it's just someone doing Minecraft. And then a little box up in the corner showing them in their crappy little room.

• 5:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what my son does.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  There you go, man.

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My son does. It's how to play that game better.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  So, so, so the, the YouTube feels more authentic and more, you know, like there's a real person there than a very glossy TV show.

• 5:38Chuck Nice?

  And they get like 12 million views.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On how to execute some maneuver in that situation.

• 5:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I sat down with Marquez, uh, so he, he's well known on the web, of course. And I just asked him how he got started on YouTube. So let's check it out.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Marcus, so you, apparently you've been doing this since you were three years old or something, is it?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  For a while, a number of years, more than a majority of my life.

• 6:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The most of your life? Yeah. So more than half your life. And how old are you now?

• 6:09Speaker 03

  So I'm 22.

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're getting old. Yeah. I'll tell you.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll tell you how, how it happens later on. It's just downhill from 22.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so. You're into gadgets?

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, into all kinds of tech. I got into cameras and I got into all the tech around me. And then this sort of merged into making videos about the tech.

• 6:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And on a YouTube channel, that's a hugely popular place for people to go.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Right, and it didn't start that way. It started as just me making videos for like myself, just to have that exist somewhere. And then slowly people started to discover it and then it sort of grew from that.

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't it cost money? To review a gadget, you gotta own the gadget.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or somehow obtain it.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what did you do?

• 6:49Speaker 03

  I was in school, so I was using a laptop for school. So I reviewed the laptop. And I reviewed a bunch of free software on the laptop. And then I started reviewing paid things that I bought. Maybe the cooler for the laptop. That's the kind of stuff that got you off the ground. And then you sort of proceed to check out more elaborate or extravagant things and...

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then people come to depend on you.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  A little bit, a little bit, yeah.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not buying it unless Mark has.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  When it's something you use as daily as like a smartphone, for example, that's the kind of thing you do actually put a lot of research into and watch a whole bunch of videos on before you actually buy it.

• 7:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when did you realize you started having a following?

• 7:26Speaker 03

  I think one of the turning points is a video I did about a web browser when Safari by Apple came to Windows. I made a video about that, woke up the next morning and I had a couple of thousand views from people who weren't subscribed. And that was kind of a light bulb moment, like, oh, people actually kind of care about this timely information.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by then you had just turned five years old.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  I think I was probably about 15, so I'll give myself that.

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same difference.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just wondered, did your parents worry about you? If you're just playing with gadgets, he'll never mount to anything. He's just playing with these toys.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  I gotta guess yes. I don't actually know the answer, but I would guess, yeah.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Such as the... Always the case when the next generation defines what the future will be.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Clive, how would you distinguish your childhood from his? Because you started writing and you cared about the same gadgets and software that he did, but not in that era.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah, I mean, this is like, you know, I grew up in the eighties and then when I get out of college in the nineties, there's no smartphones yet, there's barely an internet, right? There was like a lot of these text BBS.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Gore had to invent it first.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Message boards.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Message board, yeah, that's what it was.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I kind of had them, and like, so I could see the future coming with message boards, I could sort of figure it was happening, right? But yeah, my youth is very, very different, and I think, you know...

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you would have come of age during the earliest cellphones then, correct?

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, I was...

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mid nineties was that?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  No, no, I was well into my twenties when the mobile phones came out, basically.

• 8:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you have a shoulder-mounted one?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah, the ones that you can use to deflect bullets. Yeah, I know.

• 9:04Chuck Nice?

  They're called Mars.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think it was very different, and I think, I think there's some things I would have liked about it, I mean, I look at the online world now and I think, I wish I had some of this stuff. I was in a band in high school, right? So, you know, we make a couple, you know, a small EP of music. Who heard that? No one, right?

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you wish you were born fifteen years later?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's really what you're saying.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  In some respects, yes.

• 9:28Chuck Nice?

  His band would have put the thing out on YouTube and it ended up on Ellen.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:32Chuck Nice?

  Right? Ellen sees it.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ellen would have founded it.

• 9:34Chuck Nice?

  Then before you know it, it's just like, whoa.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so I try to take a cosmic view on these matters.

• 9:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just try to imagine, in twenty years, Marques Brownlee saying, gee, I wish I was born fifteen years later.

• 9:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's something else.

• 9:52Chuck Nice?

  What else would have been?

• 9:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would have made some next generation even more potent.

• 9:56Chuck Nice?

  YouTube of the mind.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the mind, yeah, but yeah, hard, you know, USB into the...

• 10:00Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, you just jack in and you close your eyes, you don't even have to close your eyes.

• 10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, it just sends it to wherever it's got to be, right, right. Implants it in people, and we're looking back in these days as how archaic.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were. Yeah. So, so I'm just curious, the, in terms of YouTube as a site, are there other sites now? As I understand it, Facebook is now a huge access point for videos.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  I would say also Snapchat, actually, or Snap, as they now call it, is a really big deal. Um, there are, like, they started this channel, it's kind of like, you know, where people do like semi-professional videos, but there's people that have just kind of blown up on Snap. I have trouble calling it Snap, on Snapchat. Um, so that's, that's a very, very big video, uh, area for young people now, too. Uh, YouTube is still, you know, the gorilla in the room, but there are others.

• 10:47Chuck Nice?

  So Snapchat, uh, the thing about-

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Snap.

• 10:50Chuck Nice?

  Snap, right, crackle pop, that's what I know when I say Snap. Um, but Snap, the thing is that, uh, it seems like all of their technology, they're, they're quite innovative.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:01Chuck Nice?

  But it seems like all their technology just gets stolen by these other sites.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah.

• 11:05Chuck Nice?

  How are they gonna stay in business?

• 11:07Speaker 02

  I don't know, yeah, because Facebook, basically Instagram essentially copied everything they did. And now it turns out that Instagram's blowing up because people are doing that kind of quick viral video thing on Instagram. I, I, that's a good question, I don't know.

• 11:18Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay.

• 11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you don't know, who, what, who, who, give me the guy who does know.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Exactly. Wheel him in.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so with, you know, phones coming out, the next generation of phones look pretty expensive, the next iPhone is gonna be up there. How influential do you think those reviews are in people's buying, buying decisions?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Oh, I think they're awfully big. I mean, like, uh, when I talk to people and ask them how they learn about things. Uh, like, I'll ask them and they're like, "Yeah, it's all YouTube, all YouTube." Like, they immediately go there to try and figure out what something looks like, what it feels like, what it works like, and whether or not they should spend money on it. So YouTube has become the conduit for learning about something before you buy it.

• 11:56Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I asked Marquez to just sort of reflect on how technology has evolved over his short number of years.

• 12:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reviewing it, so let's check it out.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're 22 now?

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in your long career as reviewer,

• 12:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  what would you say has changed most since you were 15, let's say? Or that has impressed you most?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For what has changed?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  I'll give two things. One, I talk about a lot of handheld electronics like smartphones, tablets, laptops. Displays have impressed me a lot and...

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The quality and resolution.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  The quality, the detail, the crispness, all that stuff. A lot in the last couple of years. And also more recently, cameras. Cameras in smartphones, cameras in laptops, the front-facing cameras. But especially in smartphones, it's gotten a lot better. But the number one thing I'd say is the displays.

• 12:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And quality of displays has enabled a whole industry to land in that medium. Isn't that correct?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just making what you saw previously better.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is opening up entire new industries. Is that a fair statement?

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Virtual reality is an example. Where you wouldn't have a super-high-resolution display right up against your face with a lens to focus on it to put you in another world. That would not be possible with the displays four or five years ago.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that close to your face, the lower resolution would be unsolvable to you. Is that a fair...

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So we've crossed certain thresholds of device innovation.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Apple might use the term retina display to describe a display where the pixel density is so great that your eye cannot discern individual pixels. Pretty much every phone has a retina display at this point, where five years ago, that was not the case. And even the photos you take with the cameras getting so detailed and such high resolution that, again, the type of images you can take out of a camera on your smartphone are often better than something you get from a dedicated camera like seven, eight years ago.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Clive, what, can you explain why this is happening?

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's just demand and supply, right? So once-

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I didn't know the demand stuff that I'm buying now.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  I mean-

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like, oh my gosh, I guess that's kinda cool.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Once people started, once iPhone came out and people realized that they wanted-

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ten years back in-

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Ten years ago, right, iPhone comes out and they don't want a little flip phone anymore, they want something with a screen on it, right? So that produces an enormous demand for those screens. And over in, you know, Asia, the factories start working and working and working and working. The price drops dramatically. And so the high end is always chasing more and more pixels and more resolution and greater brightness. But even that has dropped and dropped and dropped and dropped to the point where like, you know, it's an expensive part of the phone, but it's amazing how cheap you can get really nice screens now over in Asia.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, all right, now I have a nice screen, but like I said, this, I never would have imagined using my cellphone saying, gee, I wanna take a picture with my cellphone.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Oh, I see what you mean.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was not an urge.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think anybody had that urge.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Nope, nope.

• 15:10Chuck Nice?

  I think what might have driven that-

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, I thought they were forcing it on me initially.

• 15:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they did. They were, if you remember. And I think what did it was, believe it or not, apps. What, the advent of apps and these photo apps that allows you to do your own little like photoshopping and to manipulate images-

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you became a participant in it.

• 15:30Chuck Nice?

  And then post them, you, it's like-

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think in many ways a tipping point was probably Instagram, right? So that was the first, first thing where you could take a picture and you could do, you put a filter on it and make it look prettier than what you did, right? And this was an intentional thing that Kevin Systrom, the guy that invented it, was talking about with his girlfriend when he was designing it, about sharing photos. And she said to him, they were talking about it, and she was like, the problem is I don't wanna share my photos, they don't look as good as yours. He's a big, you know, analog camera guy. And, and he said, well, that's because I'm using all these, these films that produce these lovely filtering effects. He said, well, you need to put some filters in that thing. Lo and behold, that's exactly what worked because you could take pictures, make them look pretty, instantly share them, that took off.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are we gonna go up against, is there some Moore's Law of personal technology?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is.

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And is that gonna end? Is that gonna level off?

• 16:15Chuck Nice?

  Well, first of all, guys, let me just say- That there are some people who may not be familiar with what Moore's Law is. I mean, I know what it is.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other people might not know.

• 16:23Chuck Nice?

  Those other people listen may not. But what is Moore's Law?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  In brief, Moore's Law is the observation, you know, several decades ago that computer chips were getting basically twice as fast every 18 months, right? And that's because they could make the components smaller and smaller and smaller. They are now at the atomic level. Those wires are so tiny, you can't make them any smaller. That is what's called the end of Moore's Law. So will the devices stop getting faster?

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is Gordon Moore.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Gordon Moore, that's right, yeah.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the founders of Hewlett Packard, I think.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, yeah, oh, boy. You're putting me on the spot here. Was it either that?

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mr. Tech Journalist.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Or Fairchild Semiconductor. I'm, I'm, I'm lying from here. Anyway, the point being that the question is, you know.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you know, you know, the issue. When the wires are so small and they reach atomic distances.

• 17:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then quantum effects between wires start taking over.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 17:11Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is sweet.

• 17:12Chuck Nice?

  That is awesome.

• 17:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so the wire cannot no longer know that it's independent of the wire sitting next to it.

• 17:19Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the wave function talks to them both.

• 17:22Chuck Nice?

  Dude, that's amazing. I love it. Ooh, look at physics, this [bleep] technology. I'm sorry.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so they're essentially having to figure out how to make things faster without making them smaller.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, fine, so even if you do level off at Moore's Law, are there, fine. But presumably, design can change. Are there, are there other limits? Price, cultural?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, design?

• 17:51Speaker 02

  At the moment, actually, weirdly, one of the big limits is how fast can you get data to that device from like a cellphone tower? Right, you know? Like, like, that's almost a bigger limit now than the speed of the phone.

• 18:00Chuck Nice?

  It's like cable TV.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 18:02Chuck Nice?

  You know what I mean? Like, they talk about how great your cable is, and we have this fiber optic and whatever. And it's like, yeah, I still got copper running into my house. Who gives a damn? Like, I actually fell for that crap. And I was just like, this is the exact same cable I had before.

• 18:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, can we think of the smartphones as?

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Augmenting our human physiology.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely, sure. I mean, every technology we've had has, to a certain extent, as Marshall McLuhan put it, been an extension of man, right? You know, so TV extended our vision, the phone extended our ability to speak and talk. These things are the strongest extensions of humanity that we've ever had. And I would say that you could think of them as almost like a sense apparatus. They're like a form of ESP by which we tap into what-

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not ESPN.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, not ESPN, exactly.

• 18:50Chuck Nice?

  Da-da-da, da-da-da, okay. But a form of ESP.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could think of them as a form of ESP by which we sense what other people are thinking and talking about and doing like all the time, for good and for ill, right? Because on the one hand, wow, you learn a lot of great things. On the other hand, it's almost like having telepathy and being able to shut, being unable to shut other people's voices off in your head.

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, when I tweet and I look at the responses to that, I usually tweet something educational. That's my intent. And I try to add a little funny in it if I can, just a little, you know.

• 19:20Chuck Nice?

  You do a good job, I'm gonna say.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry?

• 19:22Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna blow smoke.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I could be plus, I could be plus.

• 19:25Chuck Nice?

  I could be a B+.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I look at the response to it, and that informs, I see that as a neurosynaptic snapshot of the instantaneous reaction to words I use, to phrases I compose, to ideas I put out there. And then when I give a public talk, I fold those in, and I'm way better communicator because of it. So that's my ESP in a sense.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Getting inside the head of, you know, a million people.

• 19:49Chuck Nice?

  I just figured out, I'm doing Twitter all wrong.

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so, coming up, more of my interview with Marquez, and it's, and all, and his capacity to tell us what's going down in the technology spectrum when he starts off preparing.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Co-host Chuck Nice. In-studio guest today, Clive Thompson. A tech writer for The New York Times and Wired and other venues. A few others. A few others. We feature my interview with Marques Brownlee. He's a 20-something, early 20s reviewer of tech devices that you might think of getting. He does this on the internet, has millions of followers. And so, I got here sort of an interesting sort of perspective, okay? On what role these portable technologies might play today. So I just had to ask him what that relationship was. Cool.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Between these technologies and our lives. Let's check it out.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've only really ever known the internet as a thing in your life. Rather than having to have transitioned from walking to the library to get information and data.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, to you, your life is practically defined, enabled, by information you get on the internet, what those apps do for you as you conduct your life. So there's a certain amount of trust that you place in this information, in the integrity of this information.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. I have an app on my phone called Google Now. And if I go to class enough times with my phone in my pocket, it knows that I go there every day. So it puts that down as where I work, but it knows I go there every day. And if it's far enough away that I drive there every day, it'll start to show me a card in the morning of when I should leave based on traffic to get there on time, because I go there the same time every day. So now it's helping me get there on time because it knows where I go every day. If there's an accident, it'll wake me up earlier to tell me, "You should head out earlier."

• 22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's an accident on the road there.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Because there's an accident on the road you're about to take to get to the place you're about to go.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're okay with all this?

• 22:17Speaker 03

  I'm okay with all of it because it's helping me. If they're, you know, people don't like to think that, you know, Google knows all this about us, they're going to use this information. Or even the machines that are collecting the information can turn and use it. I feel like if they're giving back this information to help me in this way, that's actually really useful, I'm okay with it.

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm the senior citizen among the three of us. In my day, privacy was paramount.

• 22:42Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't know that this next generation gives a rat's ass about privacy.

• 22:47Chuck Nice?

  Not at all.

• 22:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All their stuff is on internet, what, you know, their height, their weight, their sexual preference, their, their gender pronoun. And can you just offer some reflections

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  on the meaning of privacy in the era of, quote, helpful apps?

• 23:04Chuck Nice?

  Helpful apps.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  It's definitely changed a lot for exactly the reasons we've been talking about. It is sort of impossible, if you're young right now, to have a social life without participating in, you know, all these apps, you know, you're, if you-

• 23:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Social apps.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Social apps, exactly. Like whether that's Snapchat or Facebook or whatever, you're kind of off the grid. And there are, there are abstainers. It's kind of funny. You will find young people who are like, I will have no truck with this. But they're the ones who are like, kind of the iconoclasts, who don't really care about, you know, about having, you know, a big, a big group of friends. So I think one of the problems young people have is that like they're, it's not, it's not even necessarily that they have a fundamentally different attitude towards privacy, but they have no choice but to do these types of things. In the same way that maybe for us, when we were younger, you know, not getting a driver's license was sort of basically a vow of, I'm never going anywhere that the cool kids are going, right? You know? You could have said, hey, I think-

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I grew up in New York City.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. I grew up in suburban Toronto, so you needed to drive, yeah. And so, you know, if you, back then, that, if you opted out from that technology, you had a real social trouble, right?

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are cultural, social forces operating.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you're in the middle of it, you don't even know that there was another option.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:12Chuck Nice?

  But my problem is that there, you heard in his statement was resident a certain amount of trust in the responsibility that Google has for all this information.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he's trusting these companies.

• 24:21Chuck Nice?

  He was very trusting.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you trust, what's your trust level?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Wow, um, you know, it-

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't trust anybody.

• 24:28Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not, not in a conspiracy way.

• 24:31Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want you knowing this about me.

• 24:33Chuck Nice?

  Because it's power and we all know power corrupts. That's what I'm saying.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Knowledge is, knowledge about you is power over you.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  That's right. See, you know, Franklin Ford-

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We sound like old people on the board.

• 24:44Chuck Nice?

  I know. I was about to say, let me tell you something. The only way this could have got worse. Here's, here's Google, okay, especially in the black community. Here's Google, if it had been invented 25 years ago, Google in the black community. Why don't you mind your damn business?

• 25:01Speaker 02

  That's basically, that's the response, but go ahead. So Franklin Ford just came up with a book, he talks about big tech, right? And he means the great, big, huge companies that have massive amounts of power, you know? Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google. And he makes a distinction between that and like kind of smaller tech, which are companies that you might actually know and trust. And I think that's a good distinction because, you know, what you guys are worried about- No, but all those big ones used to be little, don't tell me that. No, no, no, yeah, no, I completely- They're just big now. I agree, but like, so the problem we have- They were poor and big. The problem we have, but there's small tech you can completely trust, like, you know, open source stuff like the Tor project, right? Their whole point is to try and make it easier for you to have privacy online. And it's open source and it's a, it's like a, you know, run for nonprofit civic minded hackers.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  There is technology out there that you can trust. It's not the stuff that is big and is, you know, rewarded heavily by the, by the, by the market.

• 25:52Chuck Nice?

  By commerce, by commercial entities.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  There you go, exactly.

• 25:54Chuck Nice?

  It's all about the commercial entities.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Advertising.

• 25:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there anything out there that you've said?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, that crosses the line.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, sure.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, give me an example.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  I'll give you an example, like, so there was, I came home from a summer vacation and I opened up my Android phone and Google said, hey, you know, we just put together a slideshow of photos and like points on a map of all that I'd done the last two weeks, just because we thought you might like it. And it was so creepy, right? It was super creepy.

• 26:23Chuck Nice?

  And, and I always turn my locations off.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:25Chuck Nice?

  Okay, but sometimes you forget.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:28Chuck Nice?

  And I got that same dog on slideshow and it freaked me out.

• 26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't matter, I'll tell you why.

• 26:33Chuck Nice?

  Why?

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll tell you why.

• 26:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh no.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As, as I understand it.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, can't Google now, if you put your picture up in the cloud, it can do an image recognition of your surroundings.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Compare it with all their satellite data and say, oh, was this in the Plaza de Piazza of the, and shall we ID it that way?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Absolutely, in fact, actually, if you ask me-

• 26:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He said it like, like, of course.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  If, if you ask me for the technology right now that most unsettles me, it's the galloping rollout of face recognition technology into everything.

• 27:05Chuck Nice?

  Into everything.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  And so I'm like, you know, I don't want my microwave, you know, recognizing- Recognizing my face, you know, I don't, I don't want omnipresent face recognition all over the place. But it's getting so easy to do.

• 27:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  That you, I mean, just the other day, Google helpfully said, hey, guys, we just made TensorFlow, our AI framework, so it can run on like basically a Raspberry Pi.

• 27:24Chuck Nice?

  Ah, that's crazy. That's insane, by the way. And let me tell you something else, this, here's what really scares me about the facial recognition.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:33Chuck Nice?

  Aside from the fact that I don't, like you said, I don't want my microwave recognizing my face, you know, is the fact that once somebody learns how to hack that and make my face there, like face off, okay? Now they can just walk around and be me.

• 27:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, as I understand it.

• 27:48Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just, it's better than what you would think, it's better than how you would do, thinking that you're looking at yourself. Because it's actually measuring ratios of dimensions of your face that are extremely hard to duplicate.

• 28:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh, no, I'm not talking about the, I'm talking about going beyond the actual facial recognition, where that I go in and tell the software that, so I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I hack it and say, so now everywhere Neil deGrasse, where everywhere I go.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're Neil deGrasse.

• 28:20Chuck Nice?

  I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You hacked it to think that.

• 28:22Chuck Nice?

  You know what I'm saying? That's what scares me.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Well, so, so. That will happen.

• 28:25Chuck Nice?

  And that's going to happen, you know?

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This brings us to, because you can't outprogram it, you can just hack it in the backend.

• 28:31Chuck Nice?

  Always go around.

• 28:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this brings me to the concept of internet identity.

• 28:35Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, who are you on the internet and how, and privacy breaches, this sort of thing? And so, uh, so I had to ask him, Marques Brownlee, just, is the internet not only helping us, but now defining us? Defining our identities and what is kind of do, let's, let's check out the interview. So is your life being defined by what, all the ways the internet inserts its way into your, into your routine?

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because in my generation, it's still this, it's a luxury, it's a convenience, it's a tool. It is not me.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has it become you?

• 29:18Speaker 03

  So I would say yes. I would say the internet is part of our life, and always has been, in a way that other generations exist alongside the internet and may go over and use it once in a while. Everything we do now, whether it's communication, or sharing anything with anyone, whether it's someone I know or just posting something for the world, all of it goes through the internet. The convenience stuff, like I said, where a normal going-to-work routine would have no internet involved in it in 1990. Today, it's relying upon Google Maps and my alarm clock on my phone and everything telling me when to wake up and when to leave and how to get there. So in that way, I do think we are completely tuned into the internet in a way that's

• 30:03Speaker 03

  not the same as any other generation, yeah.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But can I say, it's not that so much you're tuned into the internet, the internet's tuned into you.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  That also is true.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have an identity outside of how you are represented on the internet? You've got a Facebook page, this is what I am, this is how I want the world to see?

• 30:20Speaker 03

  It's almost like a pair of identities, where you have your social life, but you have your social media life as well. And sometimes they're different. You'd be surprised how different they are with a single person having an online life versus an offline life, which is kind of weird.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, how close are the two for you?

• 30:37Speaker 03

  For me, I'm the same person.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll be the judge. We'll be the judge.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  You can look it up, I'm out there, it's all the same.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I wonder if, one of my favorite comics from, it was 1990's New Yorker, there's a dog at the computer, you know the one I'm talking about. And he says to the dog next to him, "Good thing about the internet, no one knows you're a dog."

• 31:03Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty awesome, yeah.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, what does it mean and how real is it for people to just have a dual identity? The internet identity and then their actual selves?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Well, I'll bite that off first. I mean, we've always had multiple identities. In fact, you know, in the, in the early 20th century, in late 19th century, you had a migration of people from small towns to cities. And one of the things I loved about it was in the, in the small town, everyone knew your business and it was sort of impossible to reinvent yourself or to discover other sides of yourself. Because everyone's like, no, that's not who you really are. I know who you are, Clive Thompson, right? You go to the big city and suddenly it was like, lo and behold, wow, I could be someone different. Or I could be a couple of different people. I'm one person at work and then I go off and I do my thing with my crab.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a quick thing, there are people who say, "The city is so crowded. I want to go out into a rural suburban area where no one will know me."

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's the opposite.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. They will figure you out in 15 minutes.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, whereas in a city, no one gives a...

• 32:03Chuck Nice?

  Nobody cares.

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, there are too many people to care. Nobody cares to know you. Yeah, right, right.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  So I think having multiple identities is actually healthy and, and a good thing, frankly.

• 32:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just said, "Repeat that."

• 32:13Speaker 02

  I think having multiple identities, you know, as long as they're not, you know, sociopathic and you have like a different postal box where you, where you sort of, you know, order...

• 32:22Chuck Nice?

  Chuck, for a moment I thought I was getting approval.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  So, anyway, that's healthy and, and there's an extent to which I think you see people trying to do that online and kind of failing because large corporations don't want you to have that. They want to know everything about you, they want to assemble it all in one place so they can target ads at you. Like, in, you know, this is Mark Zuckerberg's original statement of Facebook, you know, "Having different selves is a sign of inauthenticity." And of course, he's going to say that because he wants to have everything about you so he can target ads at you.

• 32:56Chuck Nice?

  Right. And, but, but what he's, where he's, I was about to say failing miserably, but then I thought, "This is who I am and I'm saying that he's failing, so that doesn't make sense." But, I think what he's not taking into account is the fact that when you do have your different selves, they can also be authentic.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Sure, absolutely.

• 33:18Chuck Nice?

  You can have different selves that are authentic selves.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  That's my point. See, like, so I play in, I play in bands and I'm a journalist. Often those two crowds have no idea about the other part of me, right? Like, when I go and hang with musicians, some of them don't read the stuff I do, they're just, "That's Clive the Guitar Player," right?

• 33:32Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So ultimately, are there legal ramifications to access to your private information?

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's a good question. I'm not a lawyer.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, who reads the, you know?

• 33:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, the disclaimer, the legal disclaimer that when you, and I always thought that when you click, "Yes, I agree," that some type of really weird thing should happen, like you hear a knock on the door and somebody's like, "Yeah, we're here for your wife." And you're like, "What? Yeah, man, when you clicked, I agree."

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Oh, that's crazy stuff. I mean, so I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to give you a good legal answer. But it's definitely true that I think one of the big issues right now is like, you know, what protections, legal protections do we have for the way our data is used? Right now, over in Europe, they actually have a much different view, Germany particularly, because they have the Stasi, right? So they have a lot of laws and Google runs against these and hates them and lobbies against them. You know, I think we probably need much, much better protections in this country.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can and should an employer hold your social media life against you?

• 34:35Speaker 02

  I don't think they should, no. I really don't think they should most of the time, particularly at the hiring level, right?

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. At the level of hiring, okay.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they say, what have they posted and what drunken pictures?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  I don't think, I don't think, I don't think that they should be doing that stuff because that's tantamount to, in the pre-internet era, say, "Hey, can we come home and just rummage around your house?" You know, and that was, that was considered unreasonable back then. It should be similarly considered unreasonable now.

• 35:00Chuck Nice?

  That's why I'm a comedian today, because all my stuff on social media, I can't get a job.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell jokes about it.

• 35:08Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got to take a break, but coming up, more on the future of technology with StarTalk.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk and I've got my expert guest, Wired Magazine and New York Times columnist, Clive Thompson. Hey, there. We're talking about the future of technology, Chuck Nice. That's right, sir. So we're not experts at this, but we have strong opinions on it. Yes. And he's got expertise, so we're good. And we're featuring my interview with Marques Brownlee. He's the 20-something-year-old who's been reviewing technology for everybody on the internet. So I had to ask him, where does he think technology is headed? Let's check it out.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what are you gonna be telling your kids? And you say, "Back in my day, when I was 22, look what we had to do. Oh my gosh, can I have sympathy, please?"

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Honestly, I'm thinking cars. I'm hoping cars. How we drive cars today and we...

• 36:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, those would be really big gadgets. Does that count as something you would...

• 36:10Speaker 03

  I count that. I count that. I say anything with an on button is game. Technically, not every car has an on button, but if you look at some of the more high-end cars today, they've got electric systems galore, plenty of high-tech. I feel like a lot of the stuff we have now that's inside of a car that you have to control, like the steering wheel, even if you're in a self-driving car, they still want you at the controls in case something might go wrong, because it's a computer and it's a system.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's funny, because the fact that you say that implies that something would go wrong with the machine that the human can correct, rather than something going wrong with a human that the machine needs to correct.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because last I checked, all those accidents on the street are humans messing up.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  For sure. But even the system's getting to the point where everyone has a car that is capable of driving itself. No one even needs that space of a steering wheel in the car. You just kind of sit down. It's maybe a bench facing another bench and you just kind of ride along to your destination. I feel like that's way down the road, where we're at the point where a car is sort of fusing into the next generation of vehicle at this point.

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if cars do all the driving on the road, then in principle, you can up the speed limit?

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Absolutely.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? Because you're not at risk of reaction time.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm imagining you go 150, 200 miles an hour, driving down the road.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  No problem. And they'll just weave seamlessly within each other in a way that would be scary if a human was trying to do it, but it'll just be totally normal.

• 37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, because if all the cars are going 200, any high speed, then... It's a moving coordinate system so that a car can move in and out of that.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  That's the other thing, all the cars are sort of talking to each other as points in the matrix.

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know about that.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  And they can all sort of avoid each other because they already know if car all the way on the right lane with a bunch of stuff in between it knows it wants to go to the left. And car all the way on the left knows it wants to go to the right. And they can tell the cars around it, I'm trying to go to the right, I'm trying to go to the left. Human couldn't do that with another car on the other side of the road.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you can hurt.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  But I mean, you can try, you can try, but those machines can work with each other much more efficiently.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never considered that.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a ballet on the freeway.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  It's a symphony.

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Symphony.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  It's beautiful.

• 38:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful. That's really beautiful.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Clive, what is, you know, why do we get software updates? Because there are bugs that are found by the many users that often the testing is just, let's put it out there and see what comes back, right? So self-driving cars where lives are at risk. What is the risk of there being some kind of bug where it kills people? Or on top of that, what's the risk of hacking into a car to create the accident in the first place?

• 38:56Speaker 02

  I think the hacking might be a bigger risk than the bugs. I mean, regulatorily, it's going to be tricky for them to get those cars on the road because cars are pretty tightly regulated unless they can demonstrate, you know, pretty persuasively there isn't a lot of bugs. Now, hacking is a different thing because now you've got a human person that's trying actively to break something, right? And that's a much more volatile risk. There's already been situations where cars are out there and, you know, Wired hired a couple of hackers to literally take over a car while it's going on the highway. And they did it, no problem. And they did it. Yes, they did. So I think, I've driven in self-driving cars.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the diabolical division.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah, yeah. No, I've ridden in Google's self-driving cars. Felt pretty comfortable. They're actually, in a weird way, they're almost sort of cautious drivers. Like, it's like being there with your grandmother at the wheel right now. Could get faster, as you point out, but overall, you know, if I were to compare it to the dangers of humans driving cars, I'm probably okay, you know, with the self-driving cars if it's well-regulated. That's the big if, right?

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the future.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah. I mean, I, I think it might be, it might take longer than we think. You're getting these rosy predictions of five years.

• 40:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I don't see five years.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 40:07Chuck Nice?

  But the fact is that they are on the road right now. They do work, which I forget the trucking company.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Auto.

• 40:13Chuck Nice?

  Auto.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:14Chuck Nice?

  So now Auto has gone cross-country, traversed the country several times with their, with their semi. And the only thing the human being is doing is monitoring. They have a guy that sits there and monitors. That's it.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  And you could also, I mean frankly, the other reason I'm kind of in favor of it is it, it has potentially great environmental benefits, right? Because you get way less idling, you get way less jackrabbit starts. These are the things that burn huge amounts of CO2.

• 40:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's a jackrabbit start?

• 40:38Speaker 02

  You know, when you're just, you're, you're at rest and you suddenly burst off, right? Because humans, humans want to accelerate fast. Robot cars are like, no, I'm just gonna ease forward.

• 40:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boy humans. Testosterone. Testosterone infused boy humans.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  There's that, yeah.

• 40:53Chuck Nice?

  That's so true.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't learn how to drive until I was 25. And that's after the, the boy human testosterone forces.

• 41:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have dissipated.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Oh, nicely done.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. It was very, and, and you get lower.

• 41:05Chuck Nice?

  All boys should not be able to do anything until they're 25.

• 41:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly right.

• 41:09Chuck Nice?

  That's, we're, we're three men sitting here. We know the deal.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We know, right, right.

• 41:12Chuck Nice?

  If you're under 25 and you have a penis, you're effing crazy. That's all there is to it, okay? There's something deeply wrong with you. You need help. You should talk to somebody. Okay, I'm sorry.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every single one of you.

• 41:25Chuck Nice?

  Every one of you, okay?

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what intrigues me is when you have a self-driving car and it's talking to other cars. There are signals, there's, I just learned that the Tesla is, talks to other Teslas. So if you come onto a bumpy road and then you make the adjustment to change your suspension, which of course you can do, that information goes to the next Tesla. Any other Tesla that will be on that road and it'll pre-adjust the suspension before it enters the, the bumpy part of the road.

• 41:54Chuck Nice?

  See, this is where the stuff just gets creepy, man. This is what I'm talking about.

• 41:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't you want your car to, to know?

• 42:00Chuck Nice?

  I don't want my car talking to no other cars, okay? Do not talk to any other cars. How many times do I have to tell you? Don't talk to strangers' car, okay? Stranger danger. I don't want that Tesla just like.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't you want to know if there's a hazard in, in the road?

• 42:14Chuck Nice?

  No, what I don't want is that other Tesla saying, you know your owner doesn't love you.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 42:18Chuck Nice?

  Okay, and.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  And the interesting point's gonna be, will there come a point when the government decides that the self-driving cars are so much safer?

• 42:26Chuck Nice?

  That it's illegal for a human to drive a car.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They could surely do that, however, I've thought about this.

• 42:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not, you cannot take a horse on the interstate.

• 42:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even though there's a day when horses were the only things that brought you around.

• 42:39Chuck Nice?

  Good point, good point.

• 42:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, if you like horses, you go to a stables.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you can now ride a horse.

• 42:44Chuck Nice?

  So there's a place for you to, so we'll have racetracks.

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll have racetracks. Where then if you're still a sports car collector.

• 42:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you wanna control your own car, you take it to the sports, you have a berth at the sports track.

• 42:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the, at the driving track, and that's where you drive and you get your thrills, just like the horseback riders do.

• 43:01Chuck Nice?

  So the Mustang will just be just like a real Mustang. You gotta go to the ranch.

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:08Chuck Nice?

  You gotta go to the stables and pull your Mustang out of the garage and take it for a ride.

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Giddy up.

• 43:13Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man.

• 43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just, I asked Marquez, is there any, any other future of technology that he's excited about or intrigued by? Let's check it out.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you're the ripe old age of thirty-two, how do you wanna be living life? What, what technology do you wanna be surrounding you?

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Well, ten years from now, let's see, I hope, I hope car tech is on another level. I hope that's the most exciting part.

• 43:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's the right horizon for this to kick in, if it's gonna do it. Alright.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  I hope the, the handheld devices we have are no longer handheld. And that's pretty ambitious for ten years, I think, but the communication. Well, someone would argue they're like in your arm or like on attached. You've seen wearable tech, smartwatches, they kinda shrink down and, and end up on your wrist or on your ear or on your neck or something like that.

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But how about the biology, technology interface?

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Interfusion?

• 44:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  It's.

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little USB thing right here.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, right in your neck and.

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They kinda did that in, in, no one called it that, but they were, they were USB ponytails in, in Avatar.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Oh, oh.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remember that? Right, they, they, they, they take their hair and they plug it into the plant. Yeah, yeah, and they, they would communicate with one another.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the kinda thing I see, though, is like a, a much more portable but complete version of your, your digital self to just exist and be able to move around.

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Clive, is this, how real is this interface of biology and technology? And I ask because do I need my iPhone neurologically attached to me when it's sitting at my fingertips to begin with? Isn't that the same thing?

• 44:54Speaker 02

  It's awfully intimate right now, right? It's right there.

• 44:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, they talk about wearable technology. We already have wearable technology. We've all, we're all carrying phones with us, right?

• 45:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in my pocket.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  You know, but there's people working on, you know, Google's working on these, you know, like contact lenses that have like technology, display technology in them. They're working on that quite seriously.

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So any ethical frontiers here that we don't know about yet? Bioethical?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  I mean, the bioethical frontiers, concerns are always, do you produce something that's great for intelligence, performance, and ability, but is so expensive that only rich people get it, right? That, that's, that tends to be the...

• 45:28Chuck Nice?

  The answer is yes.

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I heard a rebuttal to that from Ray Kurzweil, because we had him on StarTalk. Alright? He said, "No, that's not a problem. The haves and the haves nots." And I said, "Why?" He said, "Because when it first comes out, it never works well anyway, and it's stupendously expensive, and it's not..." And, and so, yes, only a few people have it, but only when it becomes mass market, does it become truly functional.

• 45:50Chuck Nice?

  That's true.

• 45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah?

• 45:52Chuck Nice?

  No, he's right.

• 45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's right.

• 45:54Chuck Nice?

  When phones first came out, you know, you had to be pretty rich to get a phone.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  The first computers are pretty useless.

• 45:58Chuck Nice?

  First computers.

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're useless, and the first phones are completely useless. And the ones that are mass market are the ones that are most... So that's why I don't see that as a problem.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I hope he's right, shall we say?

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Clive, some great having you.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been great being on. Good conversation, guys.

• 46:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we gotta bring you back. We'll surely find some other excuse.

• 46:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you're much better than the other writers.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  You call... I appreciate it.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, cool. Chuck, any, any final thoughts here?

• 46:25Chuck Nice?

  No, I just think that this is a very scary time, if you're, if you're somebody...

• 46:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm in happy thoughts, Chuck.

• 46:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Technology is wonderful, and I'm so happy that we have it, yes. And I think the human race is so much better off now that we're all, have our faces stuck in some stupid phone instead of talking to one another.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I think, I think we don't, I think we are still in our infancy. Do you know, it took multiple centuries after the printing press before anyone figured out that you could make something called a newspaper?

• 46:54Chuck Nice?

  True.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it was, you had broadsheets and things, but a routinely produced newspaper? A daily. That was, took like 400 years, 300 something years. So here we are at the dawn of the internet. Even though it's 10, 15, 20 years old, I think we don't yet know, we're still playing with ourselves. Right? And I don't think we have, we have, I, I think there's a level of maturity of how to use the power of this technology that we have yet to attain. I just love that you said level of maturity after you said playing with yourself and I'm standing, I'm sitting here like, I can't help it! No comment. By the way, the number one thing that the internet causes.

• 47:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People playing with themselves. So I just think there's, there's a level of technological maturity that we have yet to achieve. And I don't know when, is it 50 years, is it 100 years, 150 years? I don't know, but only then can we really say that it doesn't own us, we own it. Nice. You've been watching and probably more likely listening to StarTalk and I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck, thanks for being here. Always a pleasure. Live. Good to be here also. And I publicly thank Marques Brownlee for agreeing to that interview. And until next time, as always, I bid you to keep looking up.