Gazing into the Future with Ray Kurzweil

SEASON PREMIERE: Where is humanity going, and what will we be like when we get there? Explore artificial intelligence and “the Singularity” with Neil Tyson and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Chuck Nice co-hosts, with guest neuroscientist Gary Marcus in studio.

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?

  This is StarTalk and I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And I'm the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, right at the American Museum of Natural History. Today, my co-host Chuck Nice. What's happening Neil? Chuck, always good to have you. Love you, man. Love you too. Love you, man.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Today, we're featuring my interview with inventor, author, futurist, all-around crazy future guy, Ray Kurzweil. And we'll be talking about artificial intelligence, of course. And where does that lead? To discussions of the future of the human race. And our guest today is neuroscientist Dr. Gary Marcus. Gary, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you're Vanna White here. We got Chuck holding up his book, "The Future of the Brain." Gary Marcus, so this is an essay collected together, came out a couple of years ago?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  It came out a year and a half ago. It's about to come out in paperback. It has some Nobel Prize winners from a couple of years ago, Christoph Koch from the Allen Brain Institute, all kinds of top people talking about the future of the brain. How are we going to figure it out? When will we figure it out? What'll it be like? And what is the future of the brain? Really, really hard.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, how we doing?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  How we doing with the brain? The brain is working pretty well, but our projects to understand it are hard.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you founded a company called Geometric Intelligence?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's kind of audacious. You're bringing the math in there. So what is geometric intelligence?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  It's a machine learning company. It's an AI company, basically.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You founded?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  That I founded and co-founded with some friends. And we're inventing new algorithms, trying to learn more efficiently. So you think about deep learning, people are talking about all the time. That's all about big data or really big data. And sometimes you can't get big data. I have two little kids. They learn from small data. So I want to have machines that can learn as efficiently as kids and not.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're basing a machine, you're imagining a future where you can... Uh, create learning inspired by the way kids learn.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's good because, yeah, because you don't do it by the way adults learn because you'll fail.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Even even worse, the way the computers learn, computers are very inefficient, so they can learn like to recognize white males asking search queries in quiet rooms, but then you have somebody else speak into these machines and they don't really recognize.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that news.

• 2:30Chuck Nice?

  That sounds like they've learned pretty well. That's very specific.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  It's a little too specific. That's part of the problem. Kids are much more flexible. That's the mystery of cognitive science is why kids are more flexible than even the best machines that, you know, Google can put together.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Ray Kurzweil, he's perhaps best known for, uh, popularizing the concept of the singularity. I never forgave him for taking one of our words. Singularity from black.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Totally ripping you off, man.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally ripping you off. Day, well, it's real to him and others who follow this line of thinking, that around 2045, when artificial intelligence overtakes the human cognitive capacities, then the world will change irreversibly, like walking through a proscenium through which we can never return.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where the machines.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  That's a good bedtime story.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he was the author of The Singularity Is Near. Does that sound like apocalyptic?

• 3:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Chuck Nice?

  Why don't you just name it Run For Your Life?

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he invented many things, Ray Kurzweil, he invented many things. I I got the list there. Tech scanning, music synthesizers, voice synthesizers, speech recognition technologies. He was director of Google Engineering in 2012. Uh, he worked on the team developing machine intelligence. Uh, he also received the National Medal of Technology under, uh, President Clinton. It's one of the two highest honors that the White House gives. One of them is the National Medal of Science.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I was once on the committee to.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  To award.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To award that under President Bush. So it's a very highly regarded tradition that we now have in the United States. And he's author of seven books, five of which were bestsellers. He's got twenty honorary doctorates and honors from three presidents. So the man, the man.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  He's done some things.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's, he's, he, he.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Makes me feel bad. I I feel like I need a nap just hearing that.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I just want to hear, let's, let's go to my first clip of my interview with him and just find out what exactly does he predict here and now? Let's find out.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Going back to a book I wrote in the 1990s, The Age of Spiritual Machines, I predicted that...

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Age of Spiritual Machines?

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  By 2029, computers would have all of the intellectual and emotional capabilities of humans, and so they would be spiritual machines. And conversely, we are spiritual machines, because our brains are composed of 300 million modules that recognize patterns. Each of those modules has 100 neurons. Those neurons have ion channels and dendrites and axons, and basically you can describe based on physics.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  So our... Each neuron is a machine. Very few people would disagree with that. Well, then, the 30 billion neurons in our neocortex is a machine also. And actually, we can understand it. My most recent book, How to Create a Mind, talks about how that machine works.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds diabolical, "how to create a mind." What's going on in your basement? You can tell me, nobody's looking. Tell me.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Well, we are understanding how human intelligence works. I mean, these things, our brain extends already.

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  We are...

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The smartphone that you point to.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. Our brain is already expanded in the cloud, which is not a physics cloud, it's a computational cloud, but we're smarter as a result. We will directly connect our neocortex in the 2030s to the cloud and expand it. The last time we did that was 2 million years ago, when we went from primates to the humanoid, and we got these large foreheads. And we had the frontal cortex, which is where we do language and art and science and physics and radio shows. No other species does that. But it's not qualitatively different. The frontal cortex is actually... was just an additional quantity of neocortex. The neocortex is organized in a hierarchy, and we took that additional neocortex and

• 6:24Speaker 03

  put it at the top of the hierarchy. And as you go up the hierarchy, things get more abstract. So things like music and poetry exist at the top of the neocortical hierarchy. And we're going to add to it again by connecting our neocortex to the cloud, to synthetic neocortex, and expanding the way we did 2 million years ago, except this time it won't be limited by a fixed enclosure. We'll be able to expand it without limit.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Harry, what, can you summarize for me, what is the difference between high level computing and the human brain? And how is it possible to close that gap? Erase that gap entirely?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think we really know yet. I mean, Ray is talking with a lot of precision. Like he says, there's 300 million modules in the brain. And he says that all these things are at the top of the hierarchy. We don't even know what the number is to count. So there's a lot of precision there that I think is maybe not justified.

• 7:17Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my goodness. Wait a minute. I just, you know, because I'm a very polite person.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  I tried to say that diplomatically.

• 7:22Chuck Nice?

  I'm a very polite person, so I didn't catch that. Precision meant bullshit. Oh, that was, that was cool.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  That was your award, not mine.

• 7:30Chuck Nice?

  There's a lot of...

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be, just to be clear, speaking of excrement, Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Gudel Escherbach. I've loved his writings, and I still do. He was even harsher on it. He said that if, quote, I'm quoting here, if you read Kurzweil's books, what I find is that it's a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement, blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad.

• 8:07Chuck Nice?

  By the way, that's tonight's special at the restaurant I be.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. So, so maybe dog excrement is a mild form of bullshit. I'm just wondering. So, please continue. Go on, go on.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  I don't think I can touch that.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, no.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, I listen to Kurzweil, and I know the famous Hofstadter quote, and I, I see a lot of stuff that's accurate and a lot of stuff where there's this false precision, where he says it's going to be exactly 2029. And as a scientist, I know that we have confidence intervals around everything. We know it could be in this range or this range. There's some kind of statistical uncertainty. Same thing with a number like 300 million. And Kurzweil asserts these things as fact. And then he asserts some things that actually are fact, and he kind of...

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, he's got more inventions. He's got more inventions than you.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  He has way more inventions.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, just, just let the record show. I'm just saying.

• 8:57Chuck Nice?

  But could that not be because he's, you know, he's, one, passionate, two, he's selling books, you know, and that sells books. When you make very...

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't start life saying, "I want to be a bestseller." I, I met the guy. He's, he's really an honest guy.

• 9:10Chuck Nice?

  He's into this.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. He's, he's for real about it. He's not a manic cult leader where you look in their eyes and they want to take over the world. He's really just a regular guy who happens to be really smart. Now, now, now, he goes beyond just what will computers do to match your human brain. He wants to put nanobots in your brain, in your brain. Let's find out where that goes. Okay.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Computers are getting small and smaller. We'll have nano-robots at the size of blood cells that have computers in them. They'll go into the brain through the capillaries and communicate with our neurons. We already know how to do that. You know, people with Parkinson's disease already have computer connections into their brain. So my view is we're going to become a hybrid, partly biological, partly non-biological. However, the non-biological part is subject to what I call the law of accelerating returns. It's going to expand exponentially. The cloud is expanding exponentially. It's getting about twice as powerful every year. Our biological thinking is relatively fixed. I mean, there've been a few genetic changes in the last thousand years, but for the most part,

• 10:16Speaker 03

  it hasn't changed much. And, you know, and it's not going to expand because we have this fixed goal that constrains it. And it actually runs in a very slow substrate that's a million times slower than electronic circuits.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then why invoke the brain-machine connection at that point? Who cares? You got the machine.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Because it's a much faster interface. I mean, our fingers are very slow compared to...

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  We could have, you know, millions of...

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know the world was going too slowly for you. You want to speed it up. Okay.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Well, it is. I mean, how, how long does it take you to read?

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To read and write?

• 10:48Speaker 03

  The Brothers Karamazov. It takes, you know, months.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're suggesting that you can get these nanobots the size of your neurosynapses, let's say, and one will be preloaded with War and Peace, the novel, and would somehow inject it into your neurosynaptic memory banks? And then you're done. You've got it, just like in The Matrix. They would load memory programs into you.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, we will connect to neocortical hierarchies in the cloud. Some of that could have preloaded knowledge. We could communicate with each other more intimately that way. But basically, we'll expand the size of our neocortex.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, do you guys go there in your book?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  We do, actually. Christoph Koch and I, in the epilogue, talk about where neuroscience will be 50 years from now. And we think nanobots probably will be here.

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As part of in the brain?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  In the brain. But at the same time, we think it's a lot harder than Ray might be suggesting. So Ray is right that there are already neural interfaces where you can directly hook up to the brain and read some information. But then he makes the leap so you'll be able to do that in general. Nobody knows how to do that, for example, with language. So nobody knows how to read out a sentence from-

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That never stopped him from making an accurate prediction. He'd say, "Nobody knows how to make a faster computer, but at the rate we're going, it will be faster." And sure enough, it was faster. So why is your argument an argument?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  To the hard-

• 12:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Well, we've-

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounded harsher than I-

• 12:08Speaker 01

  We've made exponential progress in hardware. He's quite right about that. No one would argue it. It's not a law, so it's not guaranteed that- they call it Moore's Law, but it's a trend.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  It's really Moore's-

• 12:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moore's trend, yeah, yeah.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  But in software, it's not really the same. So if you think about AGI, artificial general intelligence, we haven't made exponential progress. They were in chess, we've made exponential progress. AI is basically like idiot savants. We build some very narrow machine, it gets better and better. It's true for chess, true for a lot of things. But general intelligence, like we had Eliza in 1965-

• 12:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember Eliza.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  And you could tell it your problems by-

• 12:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had a conversation with Eliza.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Maybe even you believed it was real.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how old I am. You type back when you had to type, I said, "Eliza, I'm not feeling well." And Eliza would reply, "Why do you think you're not feeling well?" It would be very, sort of turn the question back around.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Now-

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Find the verbs and nouns-

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And make a- and it would be, sound like you're on a shrink.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, she could charge $75 an hour for that. And now, 55 years later, you have Siri, and people have the same kind of conversations with Siri. And Siri is just as fake as Eliza. So Eliza didn't really understand what your problems were, even though Eliza asked you. Are you telling me Siri doesn't know what I'm really saying? Sorry to break it to you. I don't know what to believe anymore, man!

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So-

• 13:20Speaker 01

  So we haven't made as much progress there. So some things are exponential and some are like closer to linear. And Ray's not really-

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but when I talk to Siri, I say, "Siri, where's the nearest Starbucks?" It's gonna find a coordinate grid, it's gonna get an address, it's gonna hand it to me.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So don't tell me it's not thinking. You don't wanna call it thinking, but if Siri showed up-

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Narrow thinking.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  40 years ago, your mind would explode, right? But, so here's a point that he made, sort of, you know, when I was just chilling with Ray, it was that- Every time there's a new kind of AI, people say, oh, it's not really AI. The real AI is that. Whereas anything we're talking about would have blown away anyone's concept of AI decades ago. So I think we have a moving baseline for how we're judging.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a familiar argument. People say if it doesn't work, then it's AI. When it finally works, it's just engineering. And I think AI researchers have a right to complain about that. But I still think if you're talking about general purpose AI, we just haven't made the progress. So yeah, you can ask a few things. Like every time Apple rolls out a new OS, there's a new category of things you can ask. Sports scores, Starbucks, and so forth. But imagine if you have a kid, I have a three-year-old kid. Imagine if it was like every six months, he rolled out a new conversational topic and really stuck to, you know, three others. Like I would take him to a speech pathologist or a neurologist. I'd be really worried.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, maybe some of it is just it's missing the emotion. So what I really wanted to know is how does Ray get his precision? And how he's calculating when the singularity happens, when we become slaves to robots? That's what I really wanted to know. He told me. Check it out.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  There's one thing that's surprisingly predictable, which is the pace of the exponential growth of information technology. The price performance and capacity of information technologies like computation, communication, now biological technologies like sequencing and also simulating biological processes. The amount of data we're getting on the brain, many different measures, not of everything, but of information technology, follow amazingly precise trajectories and they're exponential. So I started with the common wisdom that you cannot predict the future. And I made a surprising discovery. Lots of things are unpredictable, but if you look at the price, performance and capacity of information technology,

• 15:37Speaker 03

  it follows an amazingly predictable trajectory, going back to the 1890 American census.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  And one of the reasons you might be skeptical is it's not intuitive. Our intuition is linear. And a linear progression, that's our intuition, goes one, two, three. An exponential one, that's the reality of information technology, is one, two, four. Doesn't sound that different. Except by the time you get to step thirty, the linear progression, our intuition is at thirty. The exponential one is at a billion.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're right on the curve as time goes on. This gives you confidence in your modeling. And so now you say, twenty twenty-nine, what happens?

• 16:14Speaker 03

  So at twenty twenty-nine, we'll be able to match you in intelligence in a computer. As we go through the twenty thirties, we'll be able to multiply our intelligence, you know, some number fold. You get to twenty forty-five, and according to my calculations, we'll be able to multiply our capacity for thinking a billion fold. That's such a profound transformation. It's such a singular transformation that we borrow this term from you guys. Uh, thank you very much.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's really all I wanted out of it, was to thank the astrophysicists for handing you this term.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  It actually came from, you borrowed it from math. And it's an infinite level. But the most significant thing about a black hole in physics and singularity in physics is the event horizon. Going past the event horizon is a little mysterious. So there's a certain amount of mystery about going beyond the event horizon. And that's the same, that's the, really, the metaphor.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Going past that event horizon is hard to predict because it's so transformative.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, this, this precise talk, it's very apocalyptic. And it's, and it's influenced people in exactly the way cult leaders influence people, saying the world, the end of the world is near.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, Ray takes a positive, uh, view of it. I mean, he thinks this is gonna be great. He thinks it's nerd rapture, we're all gonna ascend.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just the nerds.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So, so, I mean...

• 17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can be honorary nerd with us, because you do the show with me.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate that, because I'm, I'm ready to go. Okay. I mean, we'll all want to ascend when we get the chance, I guess. But, um, I mean, again, there's the kind of false precision. So, so, and first of all, Moore's law is, is, um... Goes back to before Ray was on the scene talking about these things. It's been around for a long time. But second of all, you can you can get seduced.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Said since the 1890 census.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  There's data going back there. I mean, question about where the idea came from. But anyway, you could look at something like cloning. And if you were, you know, in 1995, you'd say it's going to be here tomorrow. We've got Dolly and and then the next thing you know, like, it's not really a practical technique. All the clones, you know, died early and so forth.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll do more of that when we come back from the break. But also, we're going to find out what Ray Kurzweil thought of the movie Transcendence. And what he has to say about the existential risks associated with AI.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm with Chuck Nice, co-host.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  That's right. Yes.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leading a Chuck Nice comment.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  I love when you say professional. I can't. I do get paid for this. I'm stealing money. I am.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Happy to have my money stolen by you.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Well, not not from you. I'm saying when I when I do comedy.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And to help us out here, because we're talking about Ray Kurzweil and concept of artificial intelligence and the brain and the future and computers and the fate of the human race. We have Gary Marcus, who's a neuroscientist at New York University. Thanks for being.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On StarTalk. And so, you know, Ray's views reminded me of the movie Transcendence. I don't know if you saw that. That's the one that had Johnny Depp.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't know how many.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Was a kind of a takeoff on Lawn Mower Man.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, is that right?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, which was the Keanu Reeves version of Transcendence.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right. You analyzing these way on a level that I.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  I know. It's, you know, it's so weird that I don't have a life.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I brought up the movie just to get his reaction to it. Let's find out where he goes.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the film Transcendence, that's what I imagined your scenario would describe. Just for people to remember, in Transcendence, Johnny Depp, the lead character, lifts his mind into. The network of the world's computers and that becomes his life and his body's gone at that point.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  And it becomes dangerous. And that's a typical dystopian view of these technologies. I mean, that's not how these things happen. Did mobile phones or the web or the cloud just leap overnight? It starts out at a point where it doesn't really work and it's kind of very flaky and people dismiss it because that doesn't really work. By the time it works, it's been around for a long time and we get used to it.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so let it be that, but now let's assume we get to that point. Is that a natural progression of the scenario that you have predicted?

• 20:29Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that's part of the human experience. We're already a human technological society.

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but in that case, he's not even a body. He has an existence in neurosynaptic.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, we are going to be able to project our minds into virtual environments. We're already starting with virtual reality that's a little crude today, but it'll become very realistic. It'll ultimately actually go inside the nervous system so that we could, a couple could...

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'd be like Total Recall. In Total Recall, you, your vacation was just what they embedded in your mind.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  A couple could become each other. You can inhabit fantastic virtual environments. You can have a different body in a virtual environment. So, we're, we're already separating, you know, physical reality from its consequences. And we're going to increasingly do that.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what, so, so, so Gary, tell, where do you brain people take all this? Where are you going with this? Or not?

• 21:26Speaker 01

  I had a friend who said that all neuroscientists are closet upload people, which is to say that all neuroscientists want to achieve immortality by uploading their brains to the web. But none of the neuroscientists...

• 21:36Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we knew that.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  None of the neuroscientists I know really want to do that. All the neuroscientists I know think it's wildly unrealistic. It's like 50, 100, 200 years away. They're gonna have to...

• 21:44Chuck Nice?

  Well, now, wait a minute, because when you think about it, is, are we, without these little electronic impulses inside of us, these little synaptic jumps of electricity between nerve endings, you know, outside of that, that really determines everything that we think and...

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's it.

• 22:02Chuck Nice?

  And touch. And so, if we can...

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An experience.

• 22:04Chuck Nice?

  If we can take that and recreate it artificially.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is that 200 years away?

• 22:09Chuck Nice?

  Why, why wouldn't that be the same as being who we are right here? Just, I'm feeling this, but I'm just not actually doing it physically.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  I gave you a confidence interval. I said 50, 100, 200 years away. I mean, I think it's somewhere in between. I do think it's possible to upload brains. I mean, if your brain is uploaded, that's a copy of you, not you.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really weasely error bars there.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Well, it's not.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somewhere between 50 and 1,000 years.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Actually, I wrote, I wrote a letter to the Times, actually.

• 22:32Chuck Nice?

  It's like, we'll be there, so it's between, uh, 8 and 5 P M. Tuesday and Friday.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  It is like cable. That's the point. It's like waiting for the cable guy. We don't know exactly when he's gonna come.

• 22:43Chuck Nice?

  Wait for the cable guy.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Go around saying he's gonna come at 4 o'clock. We're misleading people. That's the point.

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You must agree that if it goes the way he describes, there's tremendous utility to this. You agree?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it makes a copy of you and it depends on how narcissistic you are for whether you want a lot of copies of you, uh, floating around in the cloud. It's not actually gonna make you immortal.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but fine, but let there be copies, but I'm also talking about, there are a lot of brain disorders that brain people study. If we can map your brain, can't we find out where stuff goes wrong?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  That's one of the things we talk about in the, in the epilogue to this book, The Future of the Brain, is the difference between, for example, if you have a brain injury, maybe I can make a backup of your brain before the injury. Do regular backups of your brain. I'll be able to restore the backup.

• 23:28Chuck Nice?

  Like a time machine for the brain.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  That's pretty cool. But on the other hand, a congenital disorder.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apple product that you just plugged there.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Yes, I did. I wanna cut.

• 23:36Chuck Nice?

  You know, I just realized that I did that. I was like, oh, like everybody knows Apple Time Machine is your backup.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time machine pre-exist as a thing.

• 23:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scenario, right?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  There's gonna be some problems with the Ethernet. It's not always gonna work, right? Sometimes they're gonna restore the wrong version, but at least it's possible in principle. On the other hand, like if you have a congenital disorder, maybe we won't know how to fix that because we don't understand enough about how the brain works. So even if you didn't understand the operation of the brain, if you simulated every molecule, et cetera, then maybe, maybe you could at least do a restore. And maybe that'll be one of the, the first applications.

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this, is this the first step to immortality?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  It's the immortality of a copy of you. You know the Woody Allen line about preferring to live on in his apartment rather than through his work? I mean, it's another way of living on through your work.

• 24:19Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm saying, but it's a pretty cool copy of you because it's like you, you're like a sim now. So you can upload yourself.

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your own avatar.

• 24:27Chuck Nice?

  Your own avatar. I can upload myself and I'm still there, like if you're able to actually upload the consciousness.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  You'll be able to do roughly that long before then with VR. And you won't be able to do it at the neuron by neuron level, but you'll be able to make a pretty faithful avatar. It'll get all the motion caption stuff, get your voice right and so forth.

• 24:45Chuck Nice?

  That's actually scary because you know there's going to be some guy who's going to make an avatar of himself as a girl. And then go into virtual reality chat rooms and.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  That's already happening.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right. Yeah. Isn't that kind of already happening?

• 24:56Chuck Nice?

  Is that happening?

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, why do you know so much detail about that that can happen?

• 25:00Chuck Nice?

  I have an active imagination.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Well, okay, so whether it's AI taking over us or we controlling AI for evil nefarious purposes. There, no doubt that there are existential threats that this technology can bring. And I asked Ray, of course, I had to ask Ray about this. Check it out.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Technology's been a double edged sword ever since.

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's ever been.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Fire, I mean, fire kept us warm, but burned down our houses. And every technology can be used for creative and destructive purposes. We have an actually, a new technology that has an existential risk already, which is biotechnology. The existential risk from artificial intelligence or nanotechnology is off in the future. And we can debate, is it 10 years away or 50 years away, but it's not here yet. But the ability for someone to take a benign virus, like a cold virus, and turn it into a super weapon that make it more deadly, more communicable, more stealthy, exists right now. That could be done in a biotechnology lab probably a few blocks from here. So that was recognized actually 30 years ago.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  I had a conference called the Asilomar Conference to come up with guidelines. How can we keep this safe and reap the promise without the peril? And they came up with the Asilomar guidelines. Those have been made more sophisticated over time, and they've worked very well. We're now reaping the benefits of biotechnology. The number of incidents, either intentional or accidental, where there's been harm from biotechnology so far is-

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's near zero.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  It's zero.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Now, that doesn't mean we can cross it off our worry list because the technology keeps getting more sophisticated, but nonetheless, it's actually a good model for how to keep these technologies safe.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, plus, you know, when we know that fire exists, and so we have fire codes, right? This is how you build a stairwell, and this is how you escape, and this is how-

• 26:52Speaker 03

  And we have a moral imperative to use fire, or artificial intelligence, or biotechnology to overcome the problems, you know, that humans have. There's still a lot of human suffering, and we're using AI to diagnose disease and come up with new cures and clean up the environment to reduce poverty, and we have a moral imperative to continue that way while we, you know, have ethical guidelines to keep the technologies as safe as possible.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, you're quite prolific on this topic in the popular media, even not only professionally. So, one of your articles for The New Yorker decided why we should think about the threat of artificial intelligence. So, this sounds very la-ditic.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  I'm no la-dit. In fact, I'm just launching an organization called ai4good.org, which is about what positive outcomes we can get from AI. But there are also risks too, and it's a trade-off, right?

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But are ethical guidelines enough to just guide this? Because we have ethical guidelines for everything else that could possibly kill us.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Probably need regulation too. I mean-

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, regulation, but we do that. We don't say, "Let's not have airplanes because they could crash." We have regulations to make them as safe as possible, and they still crash, but we accept that risk, so-

• 28:06Speaker 01

  That's right, and, I mean, we do some kind of calculus to decide whether it's worth it, and maybe that 200 years from now, people look at us and like, "Why did they use cars before they had computers in them to make them safe? They've lost so many people." And so people may look back at us now and say, "The ways in which we handled AI in the, you know, in 2150, in their early days, we're really pretty poor." And so- I don't know what the regulations are gonna be. It's probably gonna be iterative. One of the things that I think we all worry about is that the pace could be fast and we don't have enough time to take care of it.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you share the total concern that the famous, you know, trinity of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking have shared?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  No, I have a milder view. I mean, I think that real strong AI is-

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To be clear, they, they, they're like freaking out.

• 28:52Chuck Nice?

  Right. They think, uh, basically machines are gonna take over and kill us all.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kill us all. And then the future of the world is a machine, a world of machines.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  A world of machines.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 28:59Chuck Nice?

  I don't think-

• 29:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Honest truth-

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Terminator.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  The machines, they're coming. The, the honest truth is that Skynet is not, not gonna be here tomorrow.

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have an Austrian accent.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  All the machines will have an Austrian accent. Look at this, I'm going to kill you.

• 29:19Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  I don't think that the, the Schwarzenegger version of it's gonna be here anytime soon. I don't think the computers care about us so far. You get, computers are exponentially smarter at playing chess and they don't give a shit about us at all. I don't know if I can say that on the air. Um, but at the same time, I still think we need to be worried. As computers get more and more embedded in our lives, they have more and more power to change things. So they're gonna start driving our cars, for example. And if the AI isn't right, then there's a risk there.

• 29:44Chuck Nice?

  So it's really not about them taking over. It's about the risk of failure. Like, I, I see the real risk is, okay, all the cars are being driven by computers, and then all of a sudden we have some kind of magnetic pulse, and boom, everybody crashes all at once. More than they're just gonna be like, yo, man, I'm not taking you where you wanna go.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 30:01Chuck Nice?

  I don't care where you wanna go. I'm tired.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An ornery car.

• 30:04Chuck Nice?

  Ornery car, just like-

• 30:05Speaker 01

  I would not worry about the ornery car, but I worry about security and programmability. So if you've ever programmed anything, it's gonna always work.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, security, programmability, we got that. But what of this quote from Nick Bostrom? Are you familiar with, with his writings? And he says here, that the creation of AI with human-level intelligence will be followed immediately by an almost omnipotent superintelligence with the consequences that would be disastrous.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  We've had human level intelligence without omnipotence for a long time. I mean, it's not, the word immediate is particularly perplexing.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I put median in here, probably. That's, sorry, that's my word in here. Followed by, followed soon after, yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  And nobody knows how soon, nobody really knows what's gonna happen. I think it's worth spending.

• 30:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I could just unplug the damn machine.

• 30:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, like, well, you know.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  People think about that.

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's my thirty ought six? That's the end of the machine like that.

• 30:53Chuck Nice?

  How about that? One, it's, one, uh.

• 30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look, we shoot each other for less.

• 30:56Chuck Nice?

  We have a tremendous capacity for violence.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  We do.

• 31:01Chuck Nice?

  Scenes don't, they don't know who they are screwing with, man. Are you kidding me? I will bust you.

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bust a cap in your, in your silicon wafers.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, compute this, mother.

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, wait, get to, get back to my interview with Ray Kurzweil. I, I had to ask him, what did he think was the most realistic AI film? Just, he thinks about this. We all think about it. Let me get like the experts view on that. Let's check it out. Of all the films that project sort of AI in the future, which would you say was the most realistic?

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Well, I liked her because there wasn't one AI. Like, everybody had their OS, their operating system. And Theodore's human girlfriend also had a relationship with her operating system. And so that's more realistic. I thought it was unrealistic that Samantha didn't have a body, because I think it'd actually be easier to provide her with a virtual body than to provide her with her human level mind. By the time we have Samantha's mind, we'll have, you know, virtual reality with, and she'll have a body.

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the sex market will completely drive that.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  I mean, the, the sex market does.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It drives the bandwidth today on the internet. Isn't half the bandwidth of the internet is porn?

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Videotape and even books. Goodenbrooke's first book was the Bible, but then there followed a century of more period material, so.

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Period.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, where in the future of the brain, we should not be surprised that sex drives decision-making.

• 32:42Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm. It's not gonna change.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, uh, so in early, in another StarTalk, we interviewed Dan Savage, and he made it very clear, something we all knew, but I hadn't quite put it that way, that sex predates humans by half a billion years. So...

• 32:55Chuck Nice?

  Kind of the most powerful force on the planet.

• 32:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a force of nature unto itself. So, how much of that is driving what the neurosynapses are in the first place, plus what will do with the power over the brain in the second place?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Well, I think all of, of evolution is shaped by sex in part. I mean, there's no question about that.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I think that in terms of, are we gonna have sex bots and things like that, for sure? And are we gonna have...

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Chuck! Chuck goes double thumbs up on that one.

• 33:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my god, yes!

• 33:22Speaker 01

  It's actually an interesting question, like, what's gonna happen to society as sex bots become, you know, more and more, um, authentic in some way?

• 33:28Chuck Nice?

  Fine with me, as long as they program them not to get jealous, 'cause I plan on having three.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, but, but here's...

• 33:34Speaker 01

  This is a polyamorous roboticist.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Is that a sentence?

• 33:38Chuck Nice?

  That's a robot.

• 33:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Polyamorous.

• 33:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow!

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, but, but I can tell you this. Whatever goes on, you don't want any, you don't wanna catch a computer virus. That's the worst kind.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Well, you don't, you want, you don't want these things to cross worlds.

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying, you cross species.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just fixed the gonorrhea, now I got a computer virus I gotta deal with. So, uh, but it's, I don't know if it's a centerpiece of your conversations or not. I mean, I'd look at efforts that are going on here, uh, in my notes, there's a, a campaign launched in 2015 for a ban on the development of sex robots. Now, why?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  I think that's silly.

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay, good, gotcha.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  I think we should get rid of all the vibrators, too, like, why?

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they're called vibrators, yeah.

• 34:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, we just don't have them for men, so why are they trying to shut us out? I mean, come on, equal time, people, equal time.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a company, I got a true companion, a company, uh, which is designed what they call the first sex robot called Roxy.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Roxy with three X's, triple X, Roxy.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's got three X's.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, look at that, that's so clever.

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, a male sex robot, also in development.

• 34:48Chuck Nice?

  That totally useless, male sex robot, completely useless. Every man is a male sex robot. We are programmed to want sex and to have it no matter what, and you will never have to beg us for it, or, yeah.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, suppose you program a sex drive into AI, because then that's just making it more human, that'd be honest, right?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Well, I guess there's a question about what it means to program a sex drive into an AI, like, do you mean you're gonna proba- program the robot to have sex with people? Or to actually want it?

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want it.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  I mean, probably nobody-

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you wanna be a real person, you program it to want it.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Probably nobody's gonna bother with that, it's, it's easier just to program it to do certain actions and so forth, like, I don't know if you need that level of conscious reflection.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, here it is, you program it to like it.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  That's what's interesting about her, though.

• 35:32Chuck Nice?

  Like or want, it's, see, you got it, that's it, because here's the thing, otherwise, you're just going through the motions, and that's called marriage, nobody needs that.

• 35:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, there's a subtle, there's a subtle distinction here, there's a subtle distinction. So, one of them is, you, it likes it.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it happens to it.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it wants it, then it could be waiting for you on the street corner.

• 35:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, you're right, you know what?

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Talking about your tight ass.

• 35:55Chuck Nice?

  I will not be ignored.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  I'm still here. I think I've calibrated the language now, the, the real lesson of the Turing test, the famous Turing test, is that people are very easily fooled, you don't have to go to great lengths in order to fool a person, that a machine is taking interest in them and so forth, and so, it's not a growth industry in that growth industry to, to solve these finer points, you, you can get away with easier, easier stuff.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, the, the movie Ex Machina was basically how to use sex-

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -as a force in anything that happened in the storytelling.

• 36:25Chuck Nice?

  He taught her too well. You saw that movie, he taught her far too well.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Taught her real good.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Spoiler alert.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More of my interview with Ray Kurzweil, when StarTalk returns.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm with my co-host Chuck Nice. That's right. And our guest, neuroscientist Gary Marcus. And this is a tweeting neuroscientist, apparently. You're tweeting @GaryMarcus. That's true. M-A-R-C-U-S. So now I know you're out there, I'm gonna find out what you gotta say in the Twitter-verse. We're featuring my interview with the inventor, futurist, all-around, deep-thinking dude, Ray Kurzweil. And so far, we've been talking about AI and robots, but I also brought up the topic of 3D printing during that interview. And what he thinks about where that technology is headed, because if you can 3D print stuff, maybe one day we can 3D print organs or physiological forms.

• 37:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's just find out where he thinks this will go. Check it out. Cool. What's the distant future of 3D printing? Are we gonna be able to one day just print a human being and then...

• 37:38Speaker 03

  We're in the hype phase now, kind of like where the internet was in the 1990s. If you remember, if you had the URL dog.com, you were a billionaire. And then the year 2000, people realized, wait a second, you can't make money on these internet companies. We had the internet crash, it almost took down the world economy. And now we actually do have internet companies like Google and Apple and Microsoft that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It's gonna be a similar story with 3D printing. Right now, we're in the hype phase. There's interesting niche applications. The exciting applications, I believe, will be in the early 2020s. You'll be able to print out clothing. We need sub-micron resolutions, we'll be there. Then, you'll have millions of free, cool designs that are open source. You can download for free and print out for pennies per pound.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  You'll also have a proprietary market. People are already... I'm involved with a company where we're printing out organs, human organs, and successfully installing them with some limitations in animal models. Within 10 years, I believe, you'll be able to print out human organs.

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Frankenstein.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Well, you know.

• 38:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you say that so casually?

• 38:45Speaker 03

  If you need a new lung.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you print a brain? Is that in the future?

• 38:50Speaker 03

  You probably don't want to do that because I think it makes more sense to emulate thinking non-biologically because that's really what we're working on. But, you know, if you need a new kidney and new lung, you'll be very happy to be able to print it out on a 3D printer. Ultimately, we'll be able to print out most of the physical things we need as we go through the 2020s and it will revolutionize manufacturing.

• 39:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, you wrote an article for The New Yorker on growing brain parts. That's equivalent perhaps to 3D printing a body part. Where did you land on that?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  I mean, it's something that's going to happen here. I agree with Ray. The only differences I have with Ray are usually about dates. I mean, he says these things with certitude. It's going to be in the 2020s and we don't know because there's all kinds of complications about infection and.

• 39:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Practically every clip we've played for you, you say, yeah, I agree with him there. But we began with you like totally saying he had.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  No, I disagreed on the neuroscience. I disagree on the structure of the mind and I disagree on the dates. I do agree we're going to be able to print brain parts and other body parts. I mean, that's already happening. It's not to, you know, production level stuff that you can ship, but.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just go to the local hardware store.

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  It's going to be in vending machines.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  It will.

• 40:00Chuck Nice?

  Look at that, lost an ear somehow.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  It's going to have to.

• 40:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mike Tyson bit off my ear. Let me replace it.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Drop of blood so they can like customize it to you or something like that. But, yeah, I think that will happen someday, not as soon as Ray thinks, but sure. I mean, the real question is not when is this going to happen? What's the world going to be like after all these things do happen? You know, I think maybe it takes 50 years for things he says take 20 years, but the world is going to be different.

• 40:25Chuck Nice?

  So what are some of the unintended consequences of these advancements? Because this is the thing that kills me about all of these technological, you know, forays that we make is that we go there and then we go, oh, wait a minute. I didn't realize that this was going to happen. So, you know.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  You did what?

• 40:42Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly, you know.

• 40:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My favorite line, I forgot where I got this. It was the last words ever spoken by humans ever is.

• 40:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's try the experiment the other way.

• 40:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's it. End of all simulations.

• 40:59Chuck Nice?

  I like that.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  We don't want those to be our last words.

• 41:01Chuck Nice?

  That was the end of the world.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  End of the world. Let's wire it the other way and see what happens.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Right. We don't want oops to be our last words. I think that's right. And so, I mean, I think a lot of the things that are on the table in discussion now are science fiction. They're not going to happen, but we don't know which ones are science fiction, which ones we need to watch out for. And so I do think it's worth investing real money.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got some data here. What was it? Printed body parts brought in nearly half a billion dollars in 2014, up 30% from the previous year, according to an article in Nature News in April 2015. It's already a thing.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, not printing brain parts. There's an old joke about brain transplants are the one thing where you want to be the donor rather than the recipient. And that's, you know, a little bit more complicated, right?

• 41:40Chuck Nice?

  And let me tell you something. I tell you where you can go get your money for that is the NFL.

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 41:45Chuck Nice?

  They will gladly fund that research.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  They are. The NFL is, you know, funding.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just play NFL with head bucking and then when you get out, you just get a new brain.

• 41:54Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 41:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  It's more like people want to figure out how to repair your brain after a concussion. And that's, that is in fact a big industry and people are making progress on it.

• 42:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, and repairing the brain, right. Why get a new brain if you can just go in there and repair it? Yeah, yeah. It's just a few neuro synapses that have been damaged.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  You want to keep your ideas, your personality, your memories and so forth.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got that in the chip. You know, get with the program here, right? We already got that on my USB chip.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  That's, that's where Ray is confused about reality and possible future.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I know from NASA, we, I hosted a panel with some NASA representatives where they're printing machine parts that you might not be able to get at the local hardware store when you're on Mars, right? On a, on a long trip and you gotta make a bolt or a fan blade or something, you just print it. And those of course are just sort of dumb instruments. They don't have the complexity of an organ, a human organ, but I can imagine.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Damon should have said in The Martian, "I'm going to 3D print the shit out of this."

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in the future, in the future, maybe it's not about sending a medical doctor to, to help your body repair its own wounds. It's about sending.

• 43:03Chuck Nice?

  Healed Packard.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Philip Packard is very big in 3D printing.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A machine, and you just replace stuff that breaks. And kind of the way they did in Star Wars, Luke's hand. They just, you know, you pick him up in the next scene. Testing the fingers and he's good to go.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Right. I think that will happen.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not even a thing. So are you? So you don't fear the future of 3D printing? That's not a scary plight for you?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  The version of it that does scare me a bit is 3D bioprinting. Which is also, I mean, we were talking about a piece of it now. People are going to be able to 3D print, you know, viruses and things like that.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  I worry about, what do they, we call them unpleasant actors, to put it diplomatically. Trying to do those kinds of things.

• 43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I asked Ray, you know, as our conversation drew to a close. And all of this stuff is on the table. I had to ask him, what are the best and the worst possible outcomes? See where he goes.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  The best, and I think one that is, we are actually following. Although people don't necessarily agree with this, is that life is getting better. We will, I believe by, you know, mid, late 2020s, eliminate poverty. To get to 2030s, we'll eliminate disease. We're going to dramatically expand human life expectancy. People say, oh, we're going to run out of energy and other resources. We have 10,000 times more sunlight than we need for free. That to meet all of our energy needs, and there's lots of other resources. We have lots of water, but it's, you know, it's dirty or salinated. But if you have inexpensive energy, we know how to clean up water. Vertical agriculture, where we grow food.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  In vertical buildings controlled by artificial intelligence, we'll produce where inexpensive, high-quality food, hydroponic plants.

• 44:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is already really happening. We have inexpensive, high-calorie food. Compared to 50 years ago.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Absolutely. But basically.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  It's moving towards, you know, greater prosperity.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the downside?

• 45:05Speaker 03

  The downside is, I mean, there's lots of movies about the downside.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't need you to tell me about what the movies do, all right.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  You know, the AI is trying to destroy humanity and it's the humans against the artificial intelligence of the robots. Or it's two groups of humans fighting for control of the AI. One thing that gives me comfort is we don't have one or two AIs in the world. We have two or three billion AIs. I mean, a smartphone is an artificial intelligence. It's in fact very intelligent and accesses the cloud and makes it even more intelligent. And it's in billions of hands.

• 45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, what are your reflective thoughts on this as we, as we wind down here?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  I think the thing that he left out is, is income inequality. So I think that it's certainly the case that these new technologies, other things being equal, are going to make a more productive world. There's going to be more resources tapped more efficiently. But what he leaves out is, is that the data is very concentrated in a few players. And so are some of the best AI techniques, patents and things like that are locked up in a small number of companies.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an early problem that possibly could be resolved later because so many people have smartphones now. And even poor people have smartphones, right?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  It could be, but I, I think there's a whole issue about employment we didn't talk about today, but.

• 46:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a homeless guy. Call me.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Cell phones are going to become essentially free.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  But, but jobs are going to become scarce and, and that, that's an issue that Ray didn't touch on. And then the other issue is what is the real probability of some risky scenario where they, machines turn us into paperclips? I think it's very small, but it's probably not zero. And it behooves us as a species to make sure it comes as close to zero as we can possibly make it.

• 46:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that's a rosy outlook. I like it.

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you got any?

• 46:49Chuck Nice?

  We're good to go. Listen, I, you guys had me at sex robot.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Let's see if we can hook you up.

• 46:56Chuck Nice?

  It's all headed as far as I'm concerned.

• 46:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the right direction.

• 46:59Chuck Nice?

  It will go to sex robot and everything from, will go from there. It will branch out.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  We will never see you again.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, where? Anyone saw Chuck?

• 47:11Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God, I wish that wasn't true.

• 47:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I, I went in as his biggest skeptic because I, you know, don't tell me that the world is gonna be, you know, everyone always says the world's gonna be different because of something they thought up. And I, I do a lot of the reading of history, so does he, of course. And in a, when I finally confronted him, just to see how, how sort of sane he was and how straight he was. And, and, and when he makes a prediction, it's based on a calculation. It's not just some dreamy stuff he thought up in an armchair, you know, in his lazy boy armchair. And so, so I gained a level of respect that I didn't know was possible within me to grant to him. And so whether or not he's right, I mean, futurists don't have to always be right. If you're right one out of five times, that's an awesome

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  track record. And he, I think he's right a little more than one out of five times.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  This is a coin and you're flipping and, you know, one of the two would be better, but.

• 48:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's true. But if you have many, many, many predictions and you'd see how they, how they play out.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  There's actually interesting stuff on Wikipedia that talks about his track record. If people are interested in the data.

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, excellent, excellent. But I'd say I'm gonna lean his way more than I was before. And I'm glad somebody is at least thinking about it, because I certainly wasn't before I chatted with him. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. Gary, thanks for being on the show.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Future of the Brain. I'm gonna pick one of these up and find out where you guys are coming from. And Chuck, this might be the last show we have of you because you'll be sexbotting for all the future time. So that's our show. As always, I've been your personal astrophysicist. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.