In this episode, we have our first guest speaker, Jean-Francois Bonjour, who was born and raised in a small town in Quebec. He talks about growing up in the small town of Sainte-Anne-Marie-du-Mont-Prosper, and how he went on to travel the country.
00:04:21.960Lots of biking around town with the cousins, the extended family.
00:04:27.280I was from two big families with more than seven uncles and aunts on each side.
00:04:33.580And so lots of cousins that were my age.
00:04:37.200I was already interested in biology, collecting insects, rocks, observing nature, going around town, going around the forest, sometimes catching butterflies.
00:04:49.760I was raising fish, animals of various kinds, and aquariums.
00:04:57.980And I had a, I had two parents that were working class, middle class, government employee and welder.
00:05:06.240My father as a welder was teaching me a lot of stuff, including how to build houses, how to make floors, walls.
00:05:14.860So to me, that's, I really have no complaint about life.
00:05:18.780I came in life very lucky and very happy.
00:05:23.800I, I also grew up in a small town and we did a lot of life on a bike.
00:05:30.080But I, when you were talking about like building forts and that kind of thing, we loved building ditches, right?
00:05:36.620When there's the spring runoff and then the water would come down and we were trying, we were doing our own little forms of irrigation when we were kids.
00:05:51.940And your specialty is in biology, right?
00:05:55.760So we're like jumping through the, through the years.
00:05:58.420So when was, I guess, with the fish collecting and, you know, frog catching, like you, were you like a little entomologist when you were a child?
00:06:08.180And then like, how did you love for animals?
00:06:11.460I've even seen quarter pillars grow into butterflies in my own aquarium.
00:06:16.260So very early, I saw life as the most fascinating thing on earth.
00:06:20.940And as I was growing into a teenager, I read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
00:06:27.800And I was stunned by just how much explanatory power the theory of evolution has.
00:06:34.340I was like, natural selection explains everything.
00:06:37.280And from a very early age, it was my opinion that it explains also humans and it explains how societies evolve, why there's so much parasitism, why everyone sucks, why the government is onto us.
00:06:52.500Because everything was well explained to me by The Selfish Gene, which I read in French as I was a child, maybe at 10, 11 years old.
00:07:02.220So I had this fundamental pillar that was telling me everything around us is parasitism, it's attacks on legitimate signaling systems, it's people trying to make a living out of making your life worse.
00:07:19.220Okay, I'm only making that connection now that everything is parasitism.
00:07:23.800So, you know, that kind of explains your politics, right?
00:08:01.540Or was it, like, something that you wanted to achieve with a biology, a PhD?
00:08:06.800What made you want to pursue it all the way?
00:08:09.620Well, I was high intelligence, and I was wanting to accomplish the highest level of accomplishment, a little bit like if you were into jiu-jitsu or karate, you would want to get the black belt to show that you're the top of the top.
00:08:24.680And I wanted to be the top of the top in a field of realization.
00:08:29.640And biology was just my great fascination.
00:08:32.740So I went to mostly show that I can do the top demands on to, in terms of performance and technical realization.
00:08:45.300Eventually, I grew to understand that what we're doing in the university is kind of a circus performance of some sort.
00:08:53.680It is accomplishment for the purpose of it.
00:08:56.980And the best science isn't done in university right now.
00:09:01.340So eventually, I moved on to write my own book and to leave an inheritance to humanity, which is a completely new theory of biology, which explains why we have genetic layers, why we have DNA, RNA, proteins, and what are the dangers going forward with this whole AI stuff.
00:09:20.200As we start, the more we start engaging with AI, the more it will be tempting for AI to modify our genes.
00:09:28.060And once we reach that point, we become farm animals for computers.
00:09:38.920I mean, I know that people are talking about this, but like, you know, the concern about AI, but it sounds like you're applying it in a whole new manner.
00:09:48.000Would you say that this field of study is, like, unique and different?
00:10:23.440The last that has happened is 4 billion years ago.
00:10:26.920And it's when life innovated this new layer that we now call DNA.
00:10:31.200So I claim that life forms, they build layers of genetic codes progressively through phenotypic revolution.
00:10:39.000I claim that there has been three of these events on planet Earth and that the minute we give an AI control of human genetics, it will be the fourth phenotypic revolution of planet Earth.
00:10:51.600So a phenotypic revolution basically is when a life form has achieved the biggest that it could achieve with its current genome and it starts exporting its genetic information into another media.
00:11:06.220And what I've shown is that if you start doing this, and we've started already uploading our genes to computers, if you start doing this, life eventually reverses against you and it builds a new form of life from the media that you copy to.
00:11:25.060So eventually, back in the days, 4 billion years ago, there was a transfer that happened.
00:11:31.120Some life form decided to upload its genetic information into DNA.
00:11:36.960And it was an accident at first, but it paid off.
00:11:40.320It led that life form to have some kind of a backup that was higher fidelity.
00:11:44.980But the backup doesn't stay a backup in evolution.
00:11:48.060What I show with the theory of phenotypic revolution is that the backup takes over and it starts farming you.
00:12:06.860I'm sure the others have thanked you for your time as well.
00:12:10.580I've been looking into reading your book and I think that you're one of the very few people to have touched upon the possibility of this synthesis between AI and technology and with human DNA.
00:12:25.580And I remember reading some years ago, Guillaume Fay, when he wrote Archeofuturism, spoke very similarly about the very serious possibility of this synthesis between human DNA and technology and the almost existential necessity of countries just in purely geopolitical terms of adopting those technologies for their own survival.
00:12:50.460He speaks about chimeras and splice DNA and splice DNA combined with cybernetics and all of these sorts of things.
00:12:59.380So it's very fascinating to see and interesting to hear that somebody else is finally touching upon the very real possibility of this subject.
00:13:09.240Yes, and I would say most of the speculation are too broad and too loose.
00:13:16.260The theory of phenotypic revolution informs us about exactly how a phenotypic revolution happens because we know it happened before.
00:13:24.620So we can look 4 billion years ago, look at what happened to RNA, and we can design a scenario that is much more realistic.
00:13:33.200And the scenario that I draw in Chapter 12 for the end of humanity, which I say we are headed there, no doubt, it's realizable right now with technology that we have.
00:14:15.920What's existentially challenging is if we farm ourselves into a direction of dependence.
00:14:22.240And this touches upon all of my beliefs across the political, moral, and biology domain, which is the warning against central technocracies.
00:14:32.940The problem is if you have an AI starting to decide what happens with the genetic direction of humanity, first, most of what we are is not needed.
00:14:43.980Our comedy, our creativity, our intelligence is barely needed.
00:14:50.940We exert that waste of energy because we want to charm a member of the other sex.
00:14:57.440The only reason why we have so much IQ concentrated in each individual brain, and I'm not talking about geniuses here.
00:15:05.240I'm just talking about the reason we're not monkeys, is that we have to be able to charm a member of the other sex who is selecting us like a peacock tail.
00:15:16.740It's growing us into a direction of beauty and elegance and completeness, just for the fun of the test almost.
00:15:23.420Because the peacock tail has no function, just like the human brain barely has any function.
00:15:29.620You don't need a human brain to survive.
00:15:31.780So once the AI takes control of this machine, and once sexual reproduction is lost in humanity,
00:15:38.900because if I start modifying the genes of my child, it doesn't matter who I reproduce with.
00:15:47.240It doesn't matter if my female is of high quality or not.