Inside DARPA: Sci-Fi Meets National Defense

Explore the intersection of science fiction and national defense inside the high-tech government agency developing America’s top-secret weapons of the future with Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-host Chuck Nice, former DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar, journalist Sharon Weinberger, and roboticist Hod Lipson. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/inside-darpa-sci-fi-meets-national-defense/ Photo Credit: J. Krohn, courtesy of JPL-Caltech.

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.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the hall of the universe. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astro physicist. Tonight, we will explore the intersection of science fiction and national defense. Inside the high-tech government agency developing America's top-secret weapons of the future. So let's do this.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got with me, of course Chuck Nice.

• 0:51Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil, how are ya?

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chucky Baby.

• 0:53Chuck Nice?

  Good to see ya buddy.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Feeling good?

• 0:55Chuck Nice?

  Always, always.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got your "Let's Make America Smart Again" shirt?

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  This is my "Let's Make America Smart Again" shirt, which quite frankly is a very cool shirt.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we got with us tonight Sharon Weinberger. Hello Sharon.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you're the author of this fat... Do people still write and read fat books?

• 1:20Speaker 02

  They write them, I hope they read them.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is "The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA. The Pentagon Agency That Changed the World." So DARPA stands for what? What is DARPA?

• 1:33Speaker 02

  DARPA stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, you're a journalist, you follow this industry for a long time?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been writing about Pentagon-funded science and technology for about the past seventeen years.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, oh, okay.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  And this book is the product of about five years of interviews, research, and writing.

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, you must do it well because you're still alive.

• 1:55Chuck Nice?

  Just saying, just saying.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, she was undercover until this moment.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ready to go public. So, tonight we're featuring my interview with the former head of DARPA, Arati Prabhakar. And we met during her tenure as chief of DARPA in Washington DC. So, let's check it out. Growing up, to me DARPA was always this mysterious, you know, what are they doing there? I don't know. But it's really cool. One day we'll find out, maybe.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the mission statement? Did I just capture that?

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Oh, well, as long as it moves the needle, as long as it really changes the world and especially national security, then yeah, that's what we do. DARPA is an agency that is very, very small. We're 200 government employees, right? And all of us are here in this office building in Arlington, Virginia.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The office is right above my head.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Right above our heads. We don't have labs, we don't have any fixed infrastructure. We are critically dependent on all the places and people that do.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I looked up your budget, it's about 3 billion.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  About 3 billion.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About 3 billion a year. And you just give away all that money?

• 3:00Speaker 03

  No. No, by the way, give and money just don't make sense together in a sentence, just to be clear. What we do is we bring in program managers, really smart people in their fields. They come in for typically about 3 to 5 years.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A tour of duty, kind of.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Tour of duty, they are here for a short time. What they come in to do is to craft a program. It might be, can I make a ship that can sail without any sailors onboard? It might be something about a next generation of artificial intelligence. It might be about biological technologies, whatever area. They want to know, what are all the really creative, what are the crazy sort of mind bending ideas? And, you know, they listen to all of that. They go out and they'll talk to the user community and the DOD, for example, and especially. But between thinking about where the big problems are and where the science and technology could take you, that listening is a key part of how they come up with that vision. So, we are very interested in people's big new ideas.

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I got my list here. Okay, I want a wormhole.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Okay. Big national security implications for that one.

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want a transporter.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't we all?

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, the flying car.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when are we gonna get these things?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  A few more years.

• 4:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, a few more.

• 4:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  There was a DARPA project called the Hundred Year Starship that looked at wormhole travel, so...

• 4:24Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Hundred years, maybe. That's optimistic.

• 4:27Chuck Nice?

  That's certainly not a waste of money.

• 4:31Chuck Nice?

  And I like the way you put it, a hundred years, so none of us will be here to bitch about it.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay, you also had robotic soldiers in there, and like, force fields and mind control? Crazy stuff.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  These things...

• 4:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That could be right.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  They could, and the ideas come back again every few decades. The idea of a force field that can protect the planet, the idea of mind control, all of these things.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is part of the reputation?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The spooky, mysterious reputation that DARPA has sustained over all these decades?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, spooky, a lot of its work has been secret, has been classified. It's also at times sort of touted itself, or touted by others as a science fiction agency, some of which is overblown, but some of which is true.

• 5:18Chuck Nice?

  So you're Men in Black, basically. That's what you are, okay?

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what are the origins of DARPA?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  DARPA dates back to 1958, and basically in the fall of 1957, the Soviet...

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was an important year. I mean, NASA got funded, that was the geophysical year, a lot of science, tech stuff was coming together.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  It was coming together, and a lot of it was prompted by the October 1957 launch of Sputnik. This was the Soviet Union's launch of the first artificial satellite. And it's hard to imagine now, but it was sort of a 9/11 moment. It was this, created this real political panic in the country, that we were losing the space race, the Soviet Union would have intercontinental ballistic missiles that would reach the United States.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, we said, "All right, let's fund this agency with what's the mission statement?"

• 6:01Speaker 02

  To do whatever the Secretary of Defense directs it to do. It was very vague, except it was supposed to take on space programs. It was before NASA, it was the nation's first space agency.

• 6:11Chuck Nice?

  And that's not a scary mission statement at all.

• 6:15Chuck Nice?

  Not at all. Hey, whatever the Defense Secretary says do, we should do.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, it's also, some have considered DARPA the place where mad scientists go and are given free rein. So, what are some of the craziest, maddest things to come out of there?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  So, one of the original mad scientists of DARPA was a scientist, a Greek scientist named Nick Christoflis, who had these like fantastic ideas.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He would be an immigrant?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  He was.

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Exactly. And he was genius, and scientists loved him, DARPA loved him. So one of his first ideas was a force field. You know, we were worried about Soviet missiles attacking the United States. So he said, "What if you launched a bunch of nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere that would release killer electrons and fry anything coming through it? It would be a planetary force field." That was one idea.

• 7:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's, that's, that's great!

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:04Chuck Nice?

  What could go wrong with that? Let's nuke the sky!

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  To create a force field.

• 7:10Chuck Nice?

  To create a force field.

• 7:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, what could go wrong? Yes.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  He had another fascinating idea of creating a particle beam weapon. Same thing, to take down Soviet missiles. You would just need to drain the Great Lakes to power it. All at once, by, um...

• 7:23Chuck Nice?

  Who needs them?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. You would put nuclear weapons under the Great Lakes to drain them, to power the particle beam.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are, these are out-of-the-box ideas?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  They were very out of the box.

• 7:32Chuck Nice?

  You know, I'm starting to believe that DARPA might stand for "Drugs are really pretty awesome."

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, uh, another in my list here, how about a Project Pandora? What is that?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  So, Project Pandora was a top-secret project.

• 7:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We should be cautious of anything called Project Pandora.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, they chose that name appropriately. So in the 1960s, um, the CIA discovered that the US Embassy in Moscow was being irradiated. They were sending low-level pulsed microwaves. And this was the time when there was a...

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who was radiating who?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  The Soviets, the Russians, irradiating us, the Americans.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With microwaves?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  In our embassy in Moscow, yes, with microwaves. And this was a time a lot of literature was coming out that maybe pulsed microwaves could alter human behavior, affect the mind. So the CIA said, "Oh my God, the Soviets are trying to control our diplomats' minds." And so they...

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we didn't know better.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  We, we didn't know better.

• 8:23Chuck Nice?

  Well, really, they were just slow-cooking us.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, they... So they assigned DARPA to test this. You know, could microwaves be a mind-control weapon?

• 8:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So those things didn't quite pan out as, as people had perhaps...

• 8:36Speaker 02

  We lack psychic superweapons, yes.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or do we?

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but other programs have panned out, famously, and are responsible for some of our most sophisticated military innovations. So I asked the DARPA head about the intersection of technology and the military and what role that plays. So let's check it out.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  There are two sides of DARPA because, again, our job is for national security. So, one facet of it is these core underlying technologies like networking that you have to have if you're going to build sophisticated military capability. And the other is military systems that we demonstrate, like this thing called stealth aircraft, which also started as a DARPA project. And the whole idea of precision strike, where instead of using massive weapons that wipe out everything, you develop the very sophisticated ability to find a very specific target, communicate back, and deliver a missile to precisely that location.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rendering nuclear weapons completely absurd in the face of that ability.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Well, everything up to and including nuclear weapons was about greater mass and greater destructive power. Precision said, "We want to hit exactly what we want to hit and we can be..." Really, it was driven out of the idea that, again, back to the Soviets. The Soviets, we knew had more forces and they had tactical nuclear weapons, and we said there has to be a different way to fight that kind of fight.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So stealth and precision weaponry, somebody has to think that up and decide that that's a thing to do. So what prompted DARPA to go there?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Well, ironically, it grew out of our most failed war effort, which was Vietnam. DARPA had been very heavily involved in Vietnam in developing things like a quiet aircraft in Vietnam for counterinsurgency, precision weapons for bombing targets. And when the Vietnam War ended, the Soviets had been modernizing. We hadn't, and DARPA figured out a way to sort of repackage it for the European battlefield.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sharon, we have an image of the first practical stealth aircraft developed by DARPA back in the 70s. Let's check it out. Yeah. So the whole concept is whatever radio signal goes forward and hits it, it should deflect somewhere but not back from where the signal came. And that way, it's as though nothing is there. Because you only know something is there not by the signal you send out, but by the strength of the signal that comes back. And if you angle all the sides in such a way that it disperses the signal, you can make this thing look as small as a bumblebee on a radar return image.

• 11:11Chuck Nice?

  You just explained why my children do not listen to me.

• 11:15Chuck Nice?

  Just deflect them everywhere.

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every which way. But you know what happened? So that was with the 70s? When was the first stuff?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  That was in the 1970s.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In 1970s. So our computing power was pretty low then relative to later on.

• 11:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so to get the perfect shape that doesn't reflect anything back forward

• 11:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  required formula fitting and calculating that the computers of the day were incapable of solving.

• 11:41Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so as computers got more powerful, you could take these flat surfaces, they create a perfectly curved surface where every spot knows exactly how to reflect it so that nothing comes back this way. And that gets you the B2 bomber right here.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, so...

• 11:59Chuck Nice?

  I see what you're saying.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is still to me the bat plane.

• 12:02Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So each of those surfaces, there's no surface that'll reflect a radio signal back to where you're coming from. So not all DARPA projects are weapons. Even if they wanted to be conceived as such or any... Not all become weapons. Some become other stuff, right? This is a fascinating feature of this. And of course DARPA research laid the foundations of some of the most valuable non-military technology that influences civilization today. And I asked the former head of DARPA all about this. Get me a rundown of the greatest hits of non-military successes. Let's check it out.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  We're in the late 60s. Think about what computers were like, right? I mean, these huge mainframes and punch cards.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  We've been there, right?

• 12:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't get me started.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  But even in that time, people were imagining what might be possible if you could connect computers together and they could share information and programs and tools to do our work.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw that movie, it's called Terminator.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Well, in the 60s, you know, think about vacuum tube computers and going to punch out your cards, imagine being able to think about that. That was really the spark. In the late 60s, ARPA at that time began a program called the ARPANet and the challenge that they threw out to the community was let's connect some computers together, see if we can actually get them to communicate so that you could start sharing information.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how to get them to know what the protocols are for the communication.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Right, and so the Internet protocols, TCP/IP, which is how this massive scaled up Internet still works today, those were invented by someone who was a program manager at DARPA. You know, it was just, those were the baby steps and look how far that baby has gone.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  So let's move into the 80s and 90s. I came to DARPA as a young program manager 30 years ago in 1986.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got genetic connections here.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got to start my career here, pretty much, and that was totally awesome. So what, some of the things that we did in that period, so if you think about what's inside your smartphone, think about those.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have a lot of photographs.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's good. So those are possible because you have very sophisticated integrated circuits and some of the early roots of that trace back to DARPA. When your cellphone talks to the cellphone tower, it's using a chip made out of gallium arsenide. It's a radio semiconductor component that comes directly out of major DARPA programs that we started because DOD needs radio communications and radar systems. Siri traces back to a DARPA project that got spun out of SRI as a company called Siri that got acquired by Apple and became the product. So all of those technologies, but you know, this is the magic, right, is public dollars

• 14:58Speaker 03

  sparked all of those technologies that, you know, changed how we live and work.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sharon, she's taking credit for the internet, smartphones, and Siri.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that, is that, is she all that?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Almost all of that.

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  So, the biggest one in what cemented DARPA's reputation was network computers, the ARPANET, which was fully and wholly a DARPA innovation which went directly into the internet.

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  Well, let, thank God they changed the name from ARPANET, because that sounds like the internet for really old people.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ARP?

• 15:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. I ain't worthless!

• 15:35Speaker 02

  She's absolutely right that Siri also came directly out of a DARPA program. It turned out the military wasn't interested, so they spun it off. Apple bought it, it's in your iPhone.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sharon, what are the actual origins of ARPANET within DARPA? Because I read that it had something to do with linking together the few survivors after nuclear holocaust. So is that, is that true?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  It's mostly untrue.

• 15:58Chuck Nice?

  Mostly?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Well, no, I mean...

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, this is for Armageddon, which is mostly not true.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Well, the other myth was that ARPANET had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. It was just scientists that wanted computers to talk to each other. And that's a little bit of a myth, too. So what it was, was the Pentagon was worried about command and control of nuclear weapons. So they asked DARPA, can you look at this issue? Command and control of nuclear weapons? DARPA hired a scientist who didn't care about nuclear weapons, he wanted computers to talk to each other. So it was both coming together.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, coming up next, we're going to explore how DARPA stepped into my world, my world of space. And we're going to see how they had a project to try to protect America's national security in space when StarTalk returns.

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. We're featuring my interview with the former head of DARPA, America's Advanced Defense Technology Agency. Let's check it out. What's this about, Space Surveillance Telescope? What are you cooking up there?

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Well, the Defense Department cares about space a lot.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which oven is that in that you're baking?

• 17:17Speaker 03

  That's one that's pretty baked. We just handed it off to the Air Force.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not half-baked, it's fully baked.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  That one's, well, for DARPA, it's fully baked. You'd have to ask the Air Force, but I think it's making a real difference. The DOD issue for space is the following: We can do nothing without space. We need it to communicate, we need it to navigate with GPS, we need it to be able to see what's going on around the world. It's essential to us. But space is a very complicated domain. It's not like the 50s and 60s and 70s where we were the only ones doing anything.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The only players, yeah. So, these are sensitive telescopes on Earth looking up that can monitor all the activity at 23,000 miles up, geosynchronous.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  And there's a lot of commercial activity, which is wonderful. There are other nations are getting active, unfortunately not always in a constructive way. So, we're in a time when, instead of orbital catalog maintenance, where you just have a catalog and you know what's on orbit and you sort of pay attention once in a while, now, in real time, you have to be able to see and know what's happening on orbit. And the vastness of that job is hard to imagine, right? I mean, think about several hundred thousand times the volume of all the Earth's oceans. That's what you have to be able to look at and see what's going on.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sharon, how many satellites are up there? Spy satellites?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Oh, so that's classified. I think there have been 276 missions total, which include spy satellites, some which are no longer active. I think that we know that there are about maybe half a dozen spy satellite constellations, but the exact number is classified.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So, and how about other things that are space-based, like the X-37?

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plane? Tell us about that.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yes, so it looks.

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell us what you can about that.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  So it is a very classified project. It's the X-37B orbital test vehicle. And it looks a lot like the shuttle. You know, the manned shuttle, like a mini shuttle, mini Mia, the shuttle. And it has flown in space for up to 700 days. And the Air Force and the military has never acknowledged exactly what it's being used for.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somehow. But just to be clear, just to be clear. And a satellite, once it's in orbit, that's the orbit it has forever. Until you put it somewhere else with whatever fuel you have.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Two Ks.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas a space plane.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  A space plane can maneuver. You could put it over different spots of the earth on command.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha. Up next, I ask the former head of DARPA about the future of robotics and AI when StarTalk returns.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We're talking about America's advanced defense technology programs. And joining us to help us in this conversation is AI and robotics expert, Hod Lipson. Hod, welcome.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're professor of mechanical engineering. And you make machines that create. Is that a fair characterization?

• 20:28Speaker 04

  That's right. Machines that are creative. Trying to make, break that myth that machines can't actually be creative.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are self-aware robots?

• 20:39Speaker 04

  To some extent, yeah.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That scares the hell out of me. Okay. Well, as you know, I sat down with former head of America's Advanced Defense Technology Agency, DARPA, and I asked her where we're headed with the future of robotics and AI. So we'll get her take on it. We'll come back to you. Let's check it out.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  I think for a lot of people, the word "robot" conjures up a humanoid robot. And I think that's a little bit different.

• 21:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I try to disavow people of that. Because human body, why, there's nothing, doesn't, why?

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Right, we're, we're, we can do that stuff.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're not, we're not some model of anything, right? Do better, do a better job.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  And different. Because when, when machines do things that humans can't do, that's when we can do things together that are really, really amazing. But artificial intelligence, as you know very well, I think people are very aware now, it's having this resurgence in this, this new wave of artificial intelligence with machine learning at its core. Now this idea that machines can take, you know, look at a million images and start figuring out how to label them and do it better than humans because of how they've been trained.

• 21:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Once they beat us at chess and then at Jeopardy, you know, we should just give up.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Right, and go. Well, I, we might give up on those things. There are a lot of things that they are now we're close to, so we're, we're good.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really? Because after we beat them at Jeopardy, I said, "There's nothing left. We're, we're done. Let's just move to Mars." And I'm looking at my photo sorter on my computer. And you give it face recognition, some hints, and give it a few photos to train on. One of these photos found me when I was 11.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Isn't that amazing?

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I was 11.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  I bet, I could picture, I could picture the 11-year-old you.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I kind of, I might resemble myself, of course, but still.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  That's pretty amazing.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It says, "We think this is you. Please confirm." It's like, "Yeah, it's me. It's a fuzzy photo taken on a Kodak Instamatic."

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  So that's what this learning era of AI is really all about. It's in everything that we are doing.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Hadi, you're an AI roboticist. What is that?

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Well, robotics is this merger of AI and the physical world. The mechanics, the embodiment of a machine. And so you need to sort of understand both the mechanics and the AI to make a physical smart system.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what do you create in your lab?

• 23:02Speaker 04

  We try.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love asking that of anybody who's got a lab. What do you create? What's happening in your lab?

• 23:10Speaker 04

  What's happening? So we're trying to, uh, to look at sort of, uh, next generation robotics. We're trying to look at what, you know, how can we take this from program machines to machines that can learn, that can learn fast, that can learn things that, that we haven't taught them. And, you know, do things that we normally don't think robots can do, like self-replicate, be creative, things like that.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could they have self-awareness?

• 23:33Speaker 04

  You know, that's, self-awareness is one of these, uh, these, uh, holy grails, I would say, of, of, uh, robotics. It's gonna take a while, but we're on that path.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a robot on this, there's some creature on this table.

• 23:45Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a little creepy.

• 23:46Chuck Nice?

  It is.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, so what, what is this?

• 23:49Speaker 04

  So this is one of our platforms, one of our robots where we study self-awareness. We develop our algorithms for self-awareness. We put them on this robot and we see how well they do and we...

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you upload?

• 24:00Speaker 04

  We upload it and, uh, we see, you know, can this robot sort of become self-aware? In, in a very primitive sense, but can it sort of understand what it is?

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What it is in itself?

• 24:10Speaker 04

  In itself.

• 24:11Chuck Nice?

  And how, how, how exactly could it understand what it is? Because what is it?

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we don't know what it is.

• 24:18Chuck Nice?

  Look at it.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Well, you know, so it, it starts off, but if you, if you press the button, you can see how it works.

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Press the green button.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Press the green button.

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Green is, is good, right? If it's green, that's a good button.

• 24:27Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it is, Morpheus.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Press the green button or the red button? Just press this.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  You sure?

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, you, you told me to press it.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  Go ahead.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  Alright, so it's gonna take a while.

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's making a noise right now.

• 24:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  It's gonna take a while, but what it does is that it begins to, uh, uh, it begins to sort of, uh, will soon start moving and, uh, having actuations and sensations, gonna have all kinds of, uh, sensations about itself and it's gonna start forming, uh, what we call a self-image. It's gonna, in a very primitive way, begin to learn that it has...

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gonna learn that I'm an ugly...

• 25:10Speaker 04

  This robot is actually blind. It has no ability to look at...

• 25:15Chuck Nice?

  Alrighty.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  It's sufficiently creepy.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  It has...

• 25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's happening?

• 25:22Speaker 04

  So what's happening, it's moving around and it's sensing all kinds of things about itself. About how it moves, how it accelerates, what are the torques in its motors.

• 25:31Chuck Nice?

  Can it sense that it's on a table and a few feet off the ground?

• 25:34Speaker 04

  It doesn't know that, no.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if one of the tips goes over the edge, will it pull it back off the edge?

• 25:39Speaker 04

  No, it doesn't know that anything. It's like a baby, starting to learn what its body is. And, you know, it takes it about four days.

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like it's dancing now.

• 25:49Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say, I'm not a roboticist, but it looks horny.

• 25:53Chuck Nice?

  It's throbbing. I'm just saying. I'm pretty sure it's aware of something, right now.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so what happens four days from now?

• 26:02Speaker 04

  For four days from now, if you look inside...

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pulls it all hostage? Pulls up the gun.

• 26:05Chuck Nice?

  It takes over the world.

• 26:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's the off button?

• 26:11Chuck Nice?

  Right. Oh, you just killed it.

• 26:15Chuck Nice?

  Oh, don't go to sleep.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just creeping me out on the table here.

• 26:19Chuck Nice?

  That's only because it's coming to get you later.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, go on, sorry.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  So, you know, you want to have, for some applications, you want robots that look like humans so that they can interact with humans, or that, so that they can use human tools, the tools designed for humans.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, why would you do that? For example, I can imagine forty years ago, we would have thought, how would we have a self-driving car? You wouldn't. You would have a robot that drove in the car the way a human would drive the car. No one is thinking, let's have the car drive its own damn self.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  Right, it's actually, when you look at a lot of science fiction movies, they still have a robot driving the car.

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, exactly. So, clearly, we can just bypass the middleman.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  Absolutely, we can.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so to say, design a robot to use tools the way a human does, isn't that, once again, not bypassing the middleman?

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Aren't we the weak link?

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Sometimes, we want a robot to communicate with a human. A human really needs to communicate with something that looks like another human.

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sharon at DARPA, have they been thinking about humanoid robots? Is that a thing?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, they've been thinking about artificial intelligence going back to the 1980s. And then, a couple of years ago, they did this contest of sort of humanoid rescue robots to make them seem a little bit friendlier.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was this the robotics challenge?

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, we've got a demo clip of one of the teams doing some testing with one of their sort of humanoid robots. Let's see if we bring that up.

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So hot, if I were that robot, I would be pissed off. I would come around and be ready to kick this guy's ass.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  You see, it's not self-aware yet.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, if you keep it from being self-aware...

• 28:40Speaker 04

  It's just a machine.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, this is in Boston, that's why I used a hockey stick to poke him.

• 28:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all I know, it is hockey in Boston.

• 28:46Chuck Nice?

  And where can I get one of these, uh, kick'em robots? Cause you know, I got a lot of pent-up frustration.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ones that are not self-aware?

• 28:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I don't want a self-aware one.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know that come around... Wait, wait, wait, so why are they abusing this robot? Cause we were feeling for the robot. Even though it's not human, we were kinda like, that's not nice. Even though that's a complete machine.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  You know, one of the things we did with our robots is chop off its leg, and we watched what happened. And we could see that after a while, it sort of learns that it has no legs, and it begins to limp. And it's a, it's a, it's a way of testing.

• 29:23Chuck Nice?

  Testing what, what a dick you are?

• 29:29Chuck Nice?

  Kind of test its neck!

• 29:34Speaker 04

  We test, you know, we test how well, how well the robot can sort of understand what's happening, can remodel itself.

• 29:42Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  How resilient is it?

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is, is this, so you would, you, so DARPA, the military might deploy this in a kind of disaster response situation, right? Might, might you equip that with a gun? Although it's hands where there are these rubber pads. Presumably, if it could, you see how, how, the penash with which it stood back up?

• 30:04Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's like, like, I'm ready for you. So, you know, we all remember the movie Robocop.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  The military isn't really a rescue machine. I mean, yeah, I think that eventually robo-soldiers is the eventual idea.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because, no, it can go into a dangerous situation and bring out, bring out fellow soldiers, for example.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  It could, yes.

• 30:24Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's cool.

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 30:26Chuck Nice?

  They're bringing out fellow soldiers.

• 30:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It brings some guns that'll spin, you know, put in its holster, that kind of thing. But again, this would be guns that a human would use. But why train a robot to use a human gun when you can just build a gun into the chassis itself, right?

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, he, I, I don't, he's lab, I don't know what he's got.

• 30:47Chuck Nice?

  I'll tell you what he's got in his lab, a bunch of one-legged robots who are pissed the hell off.

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're just waiting around, I can't wait till I gain consciousness. I can't wait. They got a, they got like a plug in the internet, ready for some upload, some firmware upgrade, where they go, come out. It's so, so, the robot's standing up again, it reminded me of the scenes in The Terminator, where you think the Terminator's dead, but then it just keeps coming back up.

• 31:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's what, that's all I could think of in that.

• 31:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, this, this all makes sense now, because when you talk about the rescue, you talk about artificial intelligence, it really seems like video games are nothing more than a training mechanism for the soldiers of tomorrow.

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 31:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that brings us to a part of our show called, exiting quickly as possible, to a part of the show called Cosmic Queries. Yes.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had fans that have their own questions about robotics and AI. But Chuck, what's the first question?

• 31:53Chuck Nice?

  Here we are, from Wesley Green, coming from Facebook. "Will AI-operated spacecraft be how we explore the outer reaches of the cosmos?"

• 32:03Speaker 04

  Hmm. I think that's the only way to do it.

• 32:06Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  We're not gonna send people there.

• 32:08Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Uh, and, uh...

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're not gonna send people, because people wanna come back.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Because people wanna go...

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But suppose you build AI so that it has self-awareness, and it wants to come back.

• 32:18Chuck Nice?

  Well, it won't wanna come back to him, because it's gonna get his legs cut off.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I mean, this is a moral, ethical frontier. If you put enough AI into a robot, that it becomes as inquisitive as a human, and therefore you send them instead of humans, what moral obligation do we have that we just created a consciousness?

• 32:37Speaker 04

  That's a great question. But before that happens, there is, you know, there's value in sending a machine that's not quite as intelligent as a human, that it wants to come back, and yet, it can, let's say, detect life forms in ways that, uh, you know, machines can't today.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  And that's, that's valuable.

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you withhold from it a certain level of intelligence?

• 32:56Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 32:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we don't have feelings for it, or vice versa?

• 32:59Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, next question.

• 33:00Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on, just... There, next question.

• 33:03Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is Sir Maxfield from Instagram, who wants to know this. "What are your thoughts on human/robot sexual relations?"

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Hod?

• 33:15Speaker 04

  Well, that's, uh...

• 33:16Chuck Nice?

  First of all, Hod, what's going on in the lab?

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Uh, it's definitely gonna be a big piece of the market for humanoid robots.

• 33:25Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  No, no doubt about it.

• 33:27Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question. Okay, go.

• 33:33Chuck Nice?

  This is Daniel Fridland from Twitter, who wants to know this. "Will AI robots eventually steal astrophysicists and comedians' jobs?" What? Woo! Will they? Will they be able to, uh...

• 33:48Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First, he's busting the legs of robots.

• 33:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, he's gonna make a replacement robot for you and me?

• 33:55Chuck Nice?

  I know, man. I'm telling you right now, we should pull his legs off.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before it's too late.

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, coming up next on StarTalk, we're going to discuss the present, the origin, and the future of self-driving cars when we return.

• 34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. And we're talking about future technology with the former head of DARPA, America's Defense Research Agency. We discuss why tech competitions have been so successful at sparking innovation. So let's check it out. You can put up prize money.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then have competing communities invest their own money just to get the prize money. And then the total amount of money invested is 10 times the value of the prize money. Am I correct?

• 34:58Speaker 03

  The first competition we did, that was a self-driving vehicle challenge. Do you remember those?

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  And here's what's cool is the first time we asked people, we said, you know, put together a vehicle, no driver, that can complete a course. You don't get to see the course in advance. Zero cars finished the course. And then a year later, when we did the competition again, a few cars actually completed the course. And that's how fast we're able to accelerate that technology, that autonomous vehicle technology. And by the way, if you want to find the people who won in those various competitions, all the competitors, you can find, they are the people that are driving self-driving cars out in, you know, Google and Toyota and Ford.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it could ultimately save 30,000 lives a year.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  That would be a big deal.

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Hod, you wrote a book, Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead.

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you actually compete in that challenge?

• 35:55Speaker 04

  So I was a-

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard rumors to this.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  So, uh, we had a team at Cornell University at the time that competed. It was of the, one of the teams that did not win.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  But, uh, it was a fascinating experience in how machine learning is really the way to move these things forward. So a lot of the teams that didn't make it in the first round were using sort of old fashioned AI. But in the second round, it's really the machine learning that made, made this.

• 36:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me again what machine learning is. Am I just dense or what?

• 36:23Speaker 04

  So, so in, in, uh, sort of in the, in the field of artificial intelligence, there's been these two sort of schools of thought on how to build it. One was you design a clever algorithm with rules and logic. And the second one is just you teach it. You show the machine example and it figures out statistically what's right and what's wrong. And you can teach a computer to do anything using these statistical methods.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It can glean knowledge of its experience that you as a programmer had no clue it would learn.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's learning on the fly.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  That's right. And, and there are things that you can program explicitly, like playing chess, like doing taxes.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those are rules.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  There's rules. But to drive a car, distinguishing what's drivable, what's not drivable, nobody can write rules for that. It's too abstract.

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sharon, why would DARPA engage in self-driving cars? What's the motivation?

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Well, the motivation is going back to its work in artificial intelligence back to the 1980s. Around the time that this first driverless car race was started, there were convoys in Afghanistan and Iraq being hit by improvised explosive devices. If you take the people out, it's a, you know, you, you reduce deaths.

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So that's one of these cases where it has a direct and very purposeful military application, but the value to the rest of the world is incalculable.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, we still haven't gotten there for the military. I think the civilian world has benefited much more from this so far.

• 37:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, you're our senior sidewalk science correspondent.

• 37:51Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You knew this. That was your title we gave you.

• 37:53Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay. So what, you have a dispatch for today?

• 37:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, as a matter of fact, I went out to Washington Square Park here in New York City to find out-

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's like your, your spot.

• 38:01Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Washington Square, okay.

• 38:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and, uh, and, uh, just wanted to find out what people thought about driverless cars in the city where most people don't drive.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 38:11Chuck Nice?

  How do you feel about the idea of driverless cars? Ugh. Why not? Why not? Famous last words. Why not? Would you drive or ride in a driverless car? No. No? Don't trust them? Don't trust it. Don't trust them at all? Nah. Driving? You're in the back of a driverless car. It has a fender bender with another driverless car. What do you do? I start cussing.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Run.

• 38:37Chuck Nice?

  So now you guys have student debt because you just graduated. Would you throw yourself in front of a driverless car to get that sweet guaranteed settlement money? Yes. Boom! Spoken like a true musician.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Jack.

• 38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, next, we will explore the dark side of defense technology when StarTalk returns.

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk at the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York. We're talking about future technology with the former head of America's Defense Research Agency. I ask what they got cooking in the emergent field of neurotechnology. Let's check it out.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  This little bit of the human body, the human brain, that we barely understand today, it's finally giving up its secrets. We're just starting now to be able, for example, to get the precise neural signals from specific regions of the brain to translate them in real time, to figure out what they're trying to tell the rest of your body to do. And we're starting now to take that basic science and turn it into technological capability. And for us, that journey started with a program called Revolutionizing Prosthetics. We knew we had to have a better standard of care for our wounded warriors than the really simple hook that was the upper limb prosthetic we've had forever and ever now.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Luke Project is related to this?

• 40:22Speaker 03

  And our Luke Project, one part of it...

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Luke?

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Luke, isn't that the perfect name for this, for an advanced prosthetic hand?

• 40:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  So that, we just delivered to Walter Reed, the first production unit, it's been through FDA trials.

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Walter Reed Medical Center.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Yep, to give to our first wounded warriors. Those are arms that will give them, it's the weight and now approaching the dexterity of your natural arm. Big advance. The other branch of that project was to understand motor signaling, signaling from your motor cortex, and then the signals that go into your sensory cortex, that give you, you know, not just motor control, but then feedback.

• 40:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which I think is how, in principle, we expected that to have happened in Star Wars. So if there's a full back and forth communication.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, remember when his hand gets repaired, when Luke's hand gets repaired?

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sort of open up the hatch.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. That's what we're dreaming about.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Hot, how's this technology work? This brain-machine interface? What's going on there?

• 41:21Speaker 04

  Well, there's a lot of it has to do with sort of detecting signals through electrodes, interpreting those signals, understanding what signals correspond to what actions, and then translating those actions into pre-programmed hand gestures.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So at DARPA, you're developing this, is it for primarily wounded warriors? Or is it there's some other nefarious?

• 41:44Speaker 02

  That's been, the current iteration of the program, the very public statements have been neuroprosthetics, but when the work sort of was jump-started back in the early 2000s, the DARPA director talked about, you know, controlling drones or robots with the human mind. So this has gone through some evolution.

• 42:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is the difference between controlling a drone or a robot with your human mind, and just having some interface with a joystick? Is that the same thing? My mind is controlling a joystick that's controlling the drone.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  But if you could have sort of finer controls, I mean, a joystick, you go left, right, up, center, I mean, what you do, you know, the way you move your hand or your foot has much more complexity to it.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  Like the movie Avatar. And the guy controls the dragon and they become one.

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause he had a USB ponytail that he connected to the... So then what is the goal then, the DARPA goal ultimately?

• 42:34Speaker 03

  DARPA is a research agency. It depends what the military's goal is. The military will use it for whatever purpose it is. Right now it needs to help wounded warriors. Um, but it may also have, will also have weapons applications in the future. The military fights wars.

• 42:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I asked the former head of DARPA, Arati Prabhakar, what's next in their plans to merge human minds and machines? Just to see if they had something up their sleeve. Let's check it out. So in 10 years, it'll just be a brain in the middle of this building.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  And then the rest of the world around it, right?

• 43:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, everything will be plugged in. DARPA takes control.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't know about that, but, but I...

• 43:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  DARPA achieves consciousness. DARPA net. I know what you're cooking up behind... What's behind that curtain over there?

• 43:23Speaker 03

  So you're... So this is the point, right, about every one of our powerful technologies is... All of us who are scientists and engineers, we're pursuing these things because we think they have the potential to elevate humanity. And we know that every one of those powerful technologies is gonna have a dark side as well. And so those are the issues that I think, the society has to wrestle with those, but those of us who are in this business...

• 43:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As we always have.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sharon, what, give me some dark side here that she's talking about. And is there some of that in your book?

• 43:54Speaker 02

  There's some of that in my book. Um, one dark side...

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Imagineers of War. Yes, okay.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Um, one serious dark side is I asked the DARPA official in charge of those neuroscience programs...

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you interviewed multiple people for the background of this.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Many people.

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, uh-huh.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  And I asked this official, would you ever classify work in the neuroscience, make it secret? And I expected him to say, oh, absolutely not. And he said, well, if we found something in our research that gave the military a strategic advantage, then we would. So imagine that classified neuroscience work of what that, and what that means and the implications of it.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that what she means when she says dark side? Cause I'm thinking she means like Darth Vader dark side kinda thing.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  I think classified military neuroscience research is pretty dark.

• 44:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, dark as in no one can see it because it's done behind... Uh, done secretly.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Well, dark because it's the very essence of what makes it human. So the idea of doing anything classified, human testing, brain related is a little science fictiony dark.

• 44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just thinking, when I hear say dark side, I'm thinking you could take this discovery and, and somehow disrupt the world.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's also what she means, and that's the idea.

• 45:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That just slipped out of her. Oh yeah, that's also what she means, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Well, there have been these sort of like war gaming studies over the years in the Pentagon that, you know, suppose someone else got ahead in brain science and neuroscience and created some sort of weapons. We need to have a strategic, you know, sort of, you know, you could have a missile gap of neuroscience.

• 45:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay, so, so Ha, do you ever worry or wonder whether the robots you create could be used for evil, if not by yourself, by others?

• 45:30Speaker 04

  I do, and we do it nevertheless. Oh, that's a great answer.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  Because the benefits outweigh the risks in, in such a, you know, overwhelming fashion. Just imagine, just recently you saw these, uh, these, uh, new, this new AI system that can detect disease better than the best team of, of, of, uh, of doctors, uh, in, in cancer, in skin cancer. I mean, just imagine the future where, where people have access to that, where people have access to education at a personal level. So, yes, there are bad things that can happen, but the, the benefits are just, uh, are, are there to, to be had.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Parting thoughts, Sharon?

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Um, I, I think humans will outlive artificial intelligence for a while.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  For a while?

• 46:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For a while?

• 46:19Speaker 04

  So encouraging.

• 46:21Chuck Nice?

  That's where you go.

• 46:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, if I may offer some final reflections. I am a scientist and I value pure research into anything at all, if it is a frontier.

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Between what is known and unknown in the natural world. So to prejudge what is will be used for good or for evil. That is really up to society. And how wise are we as a society to even receive such discoveries? So I think alongside such research, there should be so maybe a tandem agency. That is thinking about the morality, the dangers, the abuse that could unfold. So that we can sort of march together into this future. And by the way, DARPA, I don't know why you guys don't have a much higher budget than you do.

• 47:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or maybe instead, there could be a DARPA type agency in every branch of the human culture. Because at DARPA, they take risks, risks that other sources of money do not take. Well, the day you stop making mistakes. Is the day you can be sure you are not on the frontier. Because you're doing things that are safe. Things that you already know are gonna work. So I'm just delighted that DARPA exists. I like the fact that we got some robots that might take over some of our tasks. Because there's too much work that I'm doing that I don't want to do. Let a robot take it over and maybe there'll still be stuff humans can do.

• 48:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if not, we just sit at the beach and enjoy our lives while robots take over the world. I'm cool with that. Chuck, you cool with that? No.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a cosmic perspective. I'm Neil Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I want to thank Sharon Weinberger, Todd Lipson, Chuck Nice, always. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, keep looking up.