The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1980 - Michio Kaku

00:00:11.000 Good to see you.

00:00:13.000 Glad to be on the show again.

00:00:15.000 My pleasure.

00:00:16.000 The last time was fascinating.

00:00:17.000 And you have sent me down a rabbit hole of UFO stories and reports and fascinating stuff.

00:00:26.000 But let's talk about your latest book, which is on quantum computing, which is equally interesting, if not more interesting, because it might lead us to become aliens.

00:00:36.000 We'll talk about that, too.

00:00:38.000 Please.

00:00:39.000 So first of all, if you could, just tell everybody what it means.

00:00:43.000 What is quantum computing and how does it work?

00:00:46.000 Well, there's a race going on.

00:00:48.000 A race between China, the United States, between IBM and Google.

00:00:52.000 A race to dominate the next generation of computers.

00:00:56.000 Because Silicon Valley could become a rust belt.

00:01:00.000 Think about that.

00:01:01.000 The digital computer of today could be like the abacus of years gone by.

00:01:06.000 We're talking about the computer of today could become obsolete with this race to perfect the next generation, which is quantum computers.

00:01:16.000 Instead of computing on transistors, we're computing on atoms.

00:01:21.000 Think about that.

00:01:22.000 This is the ultimate computer.

00:01:24.000 There's nothing smaller than what you can do with atoms, and that's what these quantum computers compute with.

00:01:31.000 And it raises all sorts of problems.

00:01:34.000 The CIA is worried that quantum computers will break right through the CIA and any kind of barrier being placed around your secrets.

00:01:44.000 Industries are going to be created out of nothing.

00:01:47.000 Medicine is going to be turned upside down.

00:01:49.000 Energy production, society, entertainment, every aspect of society will be changed with quantum computers, and that's why there's this race, a race to perfect the quantum computer.

00:02:03.000 How far from the finish line do you think they are?

00:02:06.000 Well, it's three years away.

00:02:08.000 First of all, we've actually built one.

00:02:10.000 Different companies are fielding quantum computers.

00:02:13.000 They're kind of primitive, but some quantum computers are actually millions of times more powerful than our supercomputer for certain definite tasks.

00:02:24.000 But it may take another decade or so before we get all the kinks out and it becomes part of everyday life. 0.86

00:02:31.000 But it's going to change everything in the same way that the transistor changed everything.

00:02:36.000 The world economy, medicine, art, science, everything was changed with the microchip.

00:02:42.000 Same thing with the quantum computer.

00:02:45.000 It's very difficult for us.

00:02:47.000 There's only been a few science fiction authors who have been able to do this successfully where they can accurately predict what the future is going to look like.

00:02:55.000 I mean, even they're off, usually.

00:02:57.000 You know, H.G. Wells had some pretty good ideas, but Are we looking at something that we almost don't have a reference for, that it's so mind-blowingly different and much more powerful than anything we've experienced so far, that it's difficult for us to imagine how much it's going to change the world?

00:03:15.000 Well, to imagine how it's going to change the world, think of the progression of the computer.

00:03:20.000 For thousands of years, the computer was basically an analog device.

00:03:24.000 We used sticks, beads, levers, gears, pulleys, cranks, in order to do simple calculations.

00:03:31.000 That was the first era of computation.

00:03:34.000 And that meant that we could keep track of things, which we couldn't do before.

00:03:38.000 Then World War II hit, and all of a sudden we had to break the German code, and that required using electricity.

00:03:46.000 And using all sorts of vacuum tubes to crack the German code.

00:03:51.000 And then we went into the second era, where we compute on digital and binary, so zeros and ones, zeros and ones.

00:03:58.000 Now we're entering the third era, A natural progression from gears, levers, pulleys, to vacuum tubes and transistors, and then to atoms.

00:04:09.000 This is the final step in the evolution of the computer.

00:04:13.000 When we compute on atoms, these are atomic computers, nothing more powerful than that.

00:04:21.000 So when you think about how much it would change life as we know it, that's when things get difficult to understand, right?

00:04:28.000 Because if we think about just trying to imagine what it would be like living in New York City in 1820 and then imagining what it's like today, 200 years later, they would have never been able to guess.

00:04:41.000 What kind of things is going to change?

00:04:44.000 Everything.

00:04:46.000 For example, think of biology and medicine.

00:04:49.000 To test a drug, what do we do?

00:04:51.000 We get thousands, hundreds of different kinds of petri dishes, put the drug in, put the tissue in, and just cross your fingers and hope and pray that of these thousands of dishes, one of them will create a super wonder drug.

00:05:07.000 That's why it costs upwards of a billion dollars to market the next wonder drug, because it's all done by trial and error.

00:05:14.000 Now, think of putting that in the memory of a supercomputer, a quantum computer.

00:05:21.000 It analyzes whether or not germs can be destroyed by this substance at the speed of light.

00:05:28.000 Not just one dish, but hundreds, thousands of dishes of these things could be tested at the same time in the memory, the memory of a computer.

00:05:38.000 So we're talking about digital medicine, digital chemistry, virtual chemistry.

00:05:44.000 Think about that, chemistry without chemicals, biology without biology.

00:05:50.000 So that's the beauty of this technology, that we can mimic atoms.

00:05:54.000 We can mimic molecules and do virtual experiments in the memory of a computer rather than using test tubes like we used to do, that we still do today.

00:06:06.000 And we could possibly see things that are just theoretical right now, like with medicine, like regenerating limbs or regrowing spinal tissue for a person who's been paralyzed, things along those lines.

00:06:17.000 In fact, even immortality is on the table.

00:06:21.000 Realize that scientists who have looked at the aging process realize that the reason why we never understood aging Is that aging is the buildup of error.

00:06:30.000 That's what aging is.

00:06:31.000 The buildup of mistakes in the replication of DNA. But what happens if you could put DNA in a computer?

00:06:38.000 Then you can see where the aging takes place.

00:06:42.000 And then we can begin, perhaps, to slow down the aging process, maybe even become immortal.

00:06:48.000 What about reversing it?

00:06:50.000 What about old women become young hot ladies again? 1.00

00:06:53.000 I think that would be a problem.

00:06:54.000 Everything's on the table because we're talking about changing the fabric of life itself.

00:07:01.000 You know, the greatest quantum computer is Mother Nature. 0.99

00:07:04.000 Think about it.

00:07:05.000 How does Mother Nature do photosynthesis? 1.00

00:07:07.000 How does Mother Nature create trees and flowers out of nothing? 0.99

00:07:12.000 It's all chemicals and molecules.

00:07:15.000 That's what quantum computers can do.

00:07:18.000 When you think about that, just to describe that complexity that you just described, do you ever wonder if there's some sort of an ongoing code in the whole universe itself?

00:07:28.000 Like, there's a reason why all these things happen.

00:07:31.000 There's a reason why the mycelium and the trees have this relationship with the fungus and the earth and the soil, and the animals have this perfect symbiosis.

00:07:43.000 Well, that was the subject of my previous book, The God Equation, Where we try to find one theory that allows us to calculate everything, starting with the Big Bang, then the creation of galaxies and stars, planets,

00:07:58.000 finally the creation of life, photosynthesis, and here we are talking about this on a podcast.

00:08:06.000 So yeah, we're talking about one equation, which I call the God Equation, which I write about in my book, The God Equation, but there's a problem.

00:08:15.000 The problem is that the theory is so complicated that no human has been able to solve the consequences of this equation.

00:08:23.000 That's where quantum computers can come in.

00:08:26.000 Quantum computers can solve the equation and then test it to see whether or not it really is a theory of everything or just the imagination of some physicist.

00:08:36.000 So that was my previous book, The God Equation.

00:08:39.000 So that's why I decided to write this book, Quantum Supremacy, because it may eventually take a quantum computer to calculate with what is called string theory.

00:08:51.000 And I'm one of the founders of string theory.

00:08:54.000 And we think that is Einstein's theory that eluded him for the last 30 years of his life.

00:09:00.000 This quantum computing creating the answer to this God molecule or this God equation, if this does happen, what would that mean to you, to a person who's studied this and been a scientist your whole life and the way you look at the world?

00:09:19.000 How much would that change if there was some sort of a provable equation as to why things become ever more complex and universes exist and people exist?

00:09:31.000 Well, that's my childhood dream.

00:09:34.000 As I mentioned, when I was eight years old, everything changed in my life.

00:09:39.000 A great scientist had just died, and all the newspapers said that he could not finish his final and greatest theory.

00:09:47.000 And they put a picture of his desk on the news.

00:09:50.000 The desk was open and unfinished.

00:09:53.000 So I was fascinated by that story.

00:09:55.000 That story changed my life because I said to myself, why couldn't he finish that theory?

00:10:00.000 Why don't I try to finish that theory?

00:10:03.000 That's amazing.

00:10:04.000 So I went to the library and I looked up this man.

00:10:07.000 This man's name was Albert Einstein.

00:10:10.000 The theory was the theory of everything, an equation one inch long that would allow us to, quote, read the mind of God.

00:10:19.000 These are Einstein's words.

00:10:20.000 So I said to myself, that's for me.

00:10:23.000 That's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

00:10:25.000 So now we have the theory.

00:10:27.000 It's called string theory.

00:10:28.000 There have been TV documentaries on the subject, but it's not testable.

00:10:33.000 So I think that a quantum computer may one day be powerful enough to test it in the memory of a computer.

00:10:41.000 However, we have to be careful.

00:10:42.000 Remember that novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy?

00:10:48.000 What happened in that novel was the aliens of the future created a supercomputer to calculate the theory of everything, the ultimate theory.

00:10:57.000 So the computer chugged and chugged and spit out the answer.

00:11:01.000 And the answer was, the meaning of the universe was, 42. So much for that.

00:11:10.000 So I would hope that our quantum computer, computing on string theory, I hope would not give us the number 42 as the meaning of reality. 0.95

00:11:19.000 Maybe we're just too dumb to know what that means. 0.94

00:11:23.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:11:24.000 But that's what motivated me.

00:11:28.000 Well, that's a beautiful motivation.

00:11:31.000 Just thinking about you being an eight-year-old looking at Einstein's, the photograph of Einstein's desk, that's amazing.

00:11:36.000 I love stories like that.

00:11:37.000 I love origin stories.

00:11:39.000 Because I've always wandered with someone like you.

00:11:41.000 Yeah, well, that changed my life.

00:11:42.000 And then when I was in high school, I decided to take it one step further, and I decided to build an atom smasher, a particle accelerator in my mom's garage.

00:11:52.000 So I assembled 300 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6 kilowatt 2.3 million electron volt Betatron particle accelerator in my mom's garage.

00:12:06.000 In high school?

00:12:07.000 In high school, right.

00:12:08.000 Wow.

00:12:08.000 Every time I turned it on, I would blow out every single circuit breaker in the house.

00:12:13.000 It consumes six kilowatts of power.

00:12:15.000 My poor mom comes home and she hears this pop, pop, pops out as I blow out every circuit breaker in the house.

00:12:22.000 And she must have said to herself, why couldn't I have a son who plays baseball?

00:12:28.000 Why not basketball?

00:12:30.000 Why can't he find a nice Japanese girlfriend? 0.96

00:12:33.000 How come he builds these machines in the garage?

00:12:37.000 Ha! 0.89

00:12:38.000 Well, that machine got me accepted to Harvard, and that began my career as a theoretical physicist.

00:12:45.000 What were you able to do with that machine?

00:12:48.000 Well, I was able to create a magnetic field of 10,000 gauss, that is 20,000 times the Earth's magnetic field.

00:12:55.000 If you got too close to my machine, it would pull the fillings out of your teeth.

00:12:59.000 Really?

00:13:00.000 Yeah, so you had to be very careful.

00:13:01.000 What about objects that are close to it?

00:13:03.000 Scissors and things would fly in the air, right?

00:13:06.000 So you had to be very careful coming next to my machine.

00:13:09.000 Oh my god.

00:13:10.000 So compare that to, you can't even go near one of those scanners, those MRI machines, right?

00:13:18.000 Magnetic resonance imaging.

00:13:19.000 That's right, MRI. You can't have any metal near those, right?

00:13:21.000 Yeah, right.

00:13:22.000 But that's nothing like that.

00:13:22.000 And there are about 10,000 Gauss too, about the same magnetic field as my machine.

00:13:26.000 Oh, okay, okay.

00:13:26.000 So my machine is comparable to the machines that you see in the hospital today.

00:13:30.000 Wow.

00:13:31.000 That's crazy.

00:13:32.000 And you built that when you were in high school.

00:13:33.000 That's right.

00:13:34.000 Is that a photo of it?

00:13:35.000 That's a photo of one of those?

00:13:37.000 Yeah, that's the photo of it right there.

00:13:39.000 You see it on the left?

00:13:40.000 You can see that's 22 miles of copper wire.

00:13:44.000 You see the capacitor bank, a cloud chamber on the right where I photographed antimatter, because that was the whole experiment, to play with antimatter.

00:13:52.000 And yeah, the cables are hooked up, and it's hooked up to six kilowatts that comes out of the wall socket, drained every single ounce of power from my mom's garage.

00:14:03.000 Wow.

00:14:04.000 Look at young Michio.

00:14:06.000 Look at you, you handsome fella.

00:14:07.000 Well, that's the Betatron particle accelerator.

00:14:11.000 That's amazing.

00:14:11.000 2.3 million electron volt generator of electrons.

00:14:15.000 So you were able to photograph antimatter with that?

00:14:18.000 Well, with the cloud chamber, yes.

00:14:20.000 I was able to photograph the tracks of antimatter.

00:14:23.000 Tracks of positrons or anti-electrons that are emitted from sodium 22. And I proved that it was antimatter because they bent the wrong way in a magnetic field.

00:14:34.000 Ordinary electrons should bend clockwise.

00:14:37.000 These bent counterclockwise in the magnetic field.

00:14:40.000 That proved conclusively that it was antimatter that I was photographing.

00:14:45.000 Wow.

00:14:46.000 How old were you at the time?

00:14:48.000 I was about 17. I was so dumb. 0.99

00:14:52.000 I'm pretty dumb now, but I was so dumb when I was 17. That's amazing that you were spending your time doing this. 0.99

00:14:58.000 Right.

00:14:58.000 I was listening to Led Zeppelin.

00:15:01.000 But, you know, like I said, I was chasing after this dream of an eight-year-old child wondering, is there a theory of everything?

00:15:07.000 It's an amazing dream.

00:15:08.000 Yeah.

00:15:09.000 Now, where did you get the designs for this?

00:15:13.000 Oh, well, these designs come from an X-ray machine done by Donald Kirst, who was one of the inventors of the Betatron.

00:15:22.000 And so a lot of the groundbreaking work was done by him.

00:15:24.000 And now they're incorporated in most hospitals.

00:15:27.000 Most hospitals have one that creates x-rays for patients.

00:15:33.000 So was there a schematic online that you duplicated?

00:15:38.000 Did you devise this yourself?

00:15:39.000 Yeah, no.

00:15:40.000 There was a schematic online.

00:15:43.000 I mean, there was no line back then.

00:15:45.000 Oh, of course, online.

00:15:47.000 Excuse me.

00:15:47.000 Yeah, in the library there was a schematic.

00:15:50.000 But I had to fill in the details.

00:15:51.000 I had to do the equations to calculate how many turns of wire, how many gauss.

00:15:56.000 I needed 10,000 gauss in order to bend tracks of 2.3 million electron volts.

00:16:02.000 All the calculations had to be done ahead of time to make sure it would work.

00:16:06.000 Isn't it funny that the universe is so common, or excuse me, the internet, rather, is so common that I automatically for a second forgot that we were children when you were younger than me, or when you were younger.

00:16:19.000 That's right.

00:16:20.000 There was no internet.

00:16:21.000 There was no internet at all.

00:16:21.000 Nothing online back then.

00:16:23.000 It was just books.

00:16:24.000 It was just books.

00:16:25.000 So you had to have a real hunger for information to go and seek this stuff out.

00:16:28.000 That's right.

00:16:29.000 Did you have any particular high school teachers that were influential or inspirational?

00:16:35.000 Well, fortunately, I grew up in Palo Alto, which is now ground zero for Silicon Valley.

00:16:40.000 So luckily, there were other physicists in the area because they work for varying associates and different electronics companies.

00:16:47.000 So it was a total vacuum.

00:16:49.000 I was able to get advice, especially in the magnetic field and the cloud chamber and also the The vacuum tube that contained the particles that I was accelerating.

00:17:01.000 It was good to have real physicists there in Palo Alto because of that fact.

00:17:07.000 Oh, that's amazing.

00:17:07.000 So were they willing to consult with you and discuss this with you as a high school student?

00:17:11.000 Yeah, in general, right.

00:17:12.000 So I would talk to them about how to build a magnetic field and to calculate, using Maxwell's equations, the geometry of the particle accelerator.

00:17:20.000 So, yeah, I would go and visit these physicists because Palo Alto was to become...

00:17:26.000 Ground Zero for Silicon Valley.

00:17:28.000 It's such a fascinating image of seeing this one super genius physicist who's teaching classes get a visit by a teenage super genius physicist.

00:17:39.000 And he's like, oh, he's one of us.

00:17:41.000 Catch you when you're a teenager.

00:17:43.000 That's very interesting.

00:17:44.000 As soon as they talk to them, they immediately knew what I was doing, so they would help me.

00:17:47.000 That's crazy.

00:17:48.000 That's so awesome.

00:17:50.000 Now, in application of this thing, one of the things that we're seeing right now, when we're talking about quantum computing, back to that, one of the things we're seeing now is ChatGPT.

00:18:01.000 ChatGPT, which is this fascinating AI program that essentially scours the entire internet for answers for things and is so good at it.

00:18:09.000 The answers for things, for just data, people are getting diagnosed with certain diseases based on symptoms and blood work, and it's super accurate.

00:18:19.000 Legal papers, it could fill out legal forms, and it's wild, the capacity that it has right now.

00:18:24.000 You can pass the bar exam that way, too.

00:18:26.000 The bar exam can be passed with a chatbot.

00:18:29.000 Yeah, it's like 98%, right?

00:18:31.000 Now, here's the question.

00:18:33.000 If quantum computing gets involved in AI, what are we looking at?

00:18:39.000 Well, first of all, AI is a software program.

00:18:43.000 We're talking about homogenizing different kinds of essays on the web, splicing them together, and then passing it off as your latest creation.

00:18:52.000 Basically plagiarism using digital computers.

00:18:55.000 It's a software question.

00:18:57.000 However, quantum computers is bigger than that.

00:19:00.000 Quantum computers is a hardware question.

00:19:03.000 Where it actually increases your ability to do much more than with an ordinary digital computer.

00:19:10.000 So the two of them, the chatbots that are a revolution in software and then quantum computers, which are revolution in hardware, when they get together, watch out.

00:19:21.000 So we're talking about an extremely powerful alliance between software and hardware.

00:19:27.000 Now also, as you know, chatbots will also lie, cheat, swindle, joke, and do all sorts of crazy things.

00:19:33.000 If you're a high school kid, you could write all sorts of science fiction scenarios, and some chatbot may grab pieces of that nonsense and incorporate it into their essay.

00:19:45.000 Oh, interesting.

00:19:46.000 So it can't discern what's accurate.

00:19:48.000 Exactly.

00:19:49.000 The whole point.

00:19:50.000 This is the whole ball of wax.

00:19:52.000 Chatbots do not know what is correct or incorrect.

00:19:55.000 They just gather information so they can be gamed.

00:19:58.000 That's right.

00:19:58.000 All they do is homogenize, cut up existing things that sound human, put it together, and then people say, my God, that sounds like a human wrote it.

00:20:06.000 Of course!

00:20:07.000 A human did write it.

00:20:09.000 Isn't that interesting that they could game that also if they wanted to find out what percentage of people believed a certain thing.

00:20:15.000 If they had some bad actors, some foreign governments that decided they were going to spread narratives as widely as possible, and ChatGBT just gathers up all this information, It could give you an incorrect understanding of what's happening in the world.

00:20:33.000 It could give you an incorrect understanding of politics, of economics.

00:20:36.000 The whole point is that even though there's a good aspect to all these software programs, the downside is that you can fabricate truth because it cannot tell the difference between what is false and what is true.

00:20:50.000 That's very interesting.

00:20:51.000 If you talk to the chat bot and say, do you know the difference between correct and incorrect?

00:20:56.000 And they say, no, it's just on the web.

00:20:58.000 They're just instructed to cobble together existing paragraphs, splice them together and polish it up, and then spit it out.

00:21:07.000 But is it correct?

00:21:08.000 It doesn't care.

00:21:10.000 It doesn't know.

00:21:11.000 So it is essentially like an amazing resource of information that's very flawed, that can't discern and can't think.

00:21:19.000 I do this.

00:21:20.000 I have this problem all the time.

00:21:21.000 I'm a professor and I give assignments to the students, sometimes write a term paper.

00:21:26.000 So what do they do?

00:21:27.000 Some of them plagiarize.

00:21:29.000 How do you catch them?

00:21:30.000 Well, you read the essay and then you read another essay and you say, I've heard that before.

00:21:35.000 I've seen that expression.

00:21:37.000 The old-fashioned way. 0.56

00:21:38.000 The old-fashioned way. 0.56

00:21:39.000 But you see, that's what a chatbot is.

00:21:41.000 A chatbot is like a teenager that plagiarizes other people's essays, passes it off as their own.

00:21:48.000 No, I'm a scientist.

00:21:49.000 We like to think about things that are creative, new, innovative, things that will change our perception of the world.

00:21:57.000 None of that, absolutely none of that comes from a chatbot.

00:22:01.000 A chatbot simply rearranges pre-existing essays.

00:22:05.000 That's all it does.

00:22:07.000 The thing is, though, that's all it does now.

00:22:10.000 That's what's interesting.

00:22:11.000 What's interesting is what you're talking about with quantum computing and the insane computational power.

00:22:16.000 Right.

00:22:17.000 And then apply that to having access to all of the information.

00:22:21.000 Right.

00:22:22.000 But there's a good aspect, too.

00:22:23.000 You know, when I write a book, my publisher has a fact checker.

00:22:27.000 A fact checker that goes through all the different statements that I make to make sure that they're all correct.

00:22:33.000 There is no fact checker for chatbots.

00:22:36.000 Let me repeat that again.

00:22:38.000 There is no fact checker for chatbots.

00:22:41.000 That is the whole ball of wax.

00:22:44.000 That's the reason why they're so dangerous, because they don't know.

00:22:47.000 These chatbots are machines.

00:22:48.000 They don't know what is correct, what is incorrect.

00:22:51.000 It's all the same to them.

00:22:52.000 That's the danger, that they could incorporate teenagers ranting and raving about all sorts of garbage and put that in with articles that sound reasonable.

00:23:03.000 That's the problem.

00:23:04.000 Now, here's where quantum computers come in.

00:23:06.000 Quantum computers can act as a fact checker.

00:23:09.000 You can ask a quantum computer to remove all the garbage, remove all the nonsense in these articles, and it'll do that.

00:23:17.000 So, in other words, the hardware may be a check on some of the wild statements made by software.

00:23:23.000 But the problem with that is who's the arbiter of the information?

00:23:27.000 Who decides what's real and what's not?

00:23:30.000 How does the chatbot decide?

00:23:32.000 Is the chatbot ideologically biased?

00:23:34.000 The chatbot doesn't.

00:23:35.000 The chatbot simply spits it out.

00:23:36.000 The quantum computing does.

00:23:39.000 And it's going to be able to discern what's real and what's not real, even what's propaganda.

00:23:44.000 And if there are gradations of what is true, like it is partially true or whatever, it could give you the detailed understanding of what could be misconstrued, what is partially correct, what is misleading but partially correct.

00:23:57.000 You see what I'm saying?

00:23:58.000 Yes.

00:23:58.000 Right now, the chatbot just splices it together like an editor.

00:24:01.000 That's all it is.

00:24:02.000 An editor, not a fact checker.

00:24:04.000 And spits out cobbled together articles that sound reasonable, but there could be dynamite inside some of these articles that were spliced into what was proposed.

00:24:15.000 With a quantum computer, you can fact check things.

00:24:19.000 And then you can say, this is 90% correct.

00:24:22.000 This is totally wrong.

00:24:23.000 This is sometimes correct.

00:24:25.000 And you get gradations of what is correct and incorrect.

00:24:29.000 Well, if you can get an objectively accurate fact checker, that would be a huge step up from what we have today, because a lot of people have very little faith in certain fact checkers.

00:24:39.000 And when you find out that they're ideologically biased, or they're governmentally biased, and if you could have something that could just tell you...

00:24:46.000 Have you even paid attention to how Twitter's doing it now, where they have community notes?

00:24:50.000 Have you seen this?

00:24:51.000 No, I haven't.

00:24:52.000 It's interesting.

00:24:53.000 Say if someone makes a statement about something controversial, climate change, whatever, and then this controversial statement gets refuted in the community notes, and then people will start commenting, and really intelligent, very well-read people on specific subjects will chime in with peer-reviewed papers and all these different statistics that show,

00:25:14.000 and then Twitter will correct it, and it will say, readers have said, and then put up the relevant Right.

00:25:22.000 See, that's what chatbots do not do today.

00:25:25.000 They have no understanding of correct or incorrect, false, and true.

00:25:29.000 No understanding of that.

00:25:30.000 But with hardware coming into the picture that is more advanced, then, yeah, you're talking about machines that can do that automatically.

00:25:38.000 But it's the problem, who controls that machine?

00:25:41.000 Like, say if China gets a hold of one of those machines first, if they develop a quantum computer first, and they start implementing it...

00:25:49.000 Well, we have to make sure that our quantum computers can check other people's quantum computers to make sure that they're not fudging the facts.

00:25:56.000 Right, that's what I'm talking about.

00:25:57.000 Now, remember that if this is not done legally, if there are no laws passed in this direction, and it's like the Wild West...

00:26:04.000 Then, of course, the politicians get involved, and it becomes a real mess.

00:26:09.000 Now, we do know that you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater.

00:26:13.000 Therefore, there are limits to free speech.

00:26:15.000 We get that.

00:26:16.000 But how do you make limits on statements that are written on the web that no human can possibly follow?

00:26:23.000 That's where quantum computers can come in.

00:26:25.000 Quantum computers are powerful enough to survey the entire landscape and give reasonable rebuttals to things that are just outrageous.

00:26:34.000 Well, more than that, it's going to be able to instantaneously change how we interact with each other in terms of language barriers, all these issues that we have currently.

00:26:45.000 I'm sure you're aware of Google had their earbuds.

00:26:50.000 There was a feature where, say, if you went to Spain and didn't speak Spanish, you could talk to it, they would talk to it, and it would translate back and forth.

00:26:59.000 So you could have a real-time conversation.

00:27:01.000 I'm not sure how good is it.

00:27:03.000 How good is that, Jim?

00:27:04.000 But if there's something like augmented reality and we have something like that, you're going to be able to instantaneously translate what people are saying.

00:27:11.000 Yeah.

00:27:12.000 There'll be no language barriers for people.

00:27:15.000 We'll be able to...

00:27:16.000 I think that would change just human perception across the world, just the way we view each other.

00:27:21.000 It's so easy to think of each other as being different because we speak a different language and we live in a different part of the planet, but that would literally change how we interact with each other.

00:27:31.000 Yeah, and just remember that where do correct ideas come from?

00:27:34.000 Correct ideas come from interaction with incorrect ideas.

00:27:37.000 It's the struggle between ideas out of which correct ideas emerge.

00:27:43.000 And this does not happen on the internet because, of course, with chatbots, everything is cobbled together, cut, spliced, and simply glued together with Scotch tape.

00:27:51.000 Thank you.

00:28:10.000 It's such an important point that you said where you said that the bad ideas have to exist so the good ideas triumph.

00:28:18.000 And that's really an argument against censorship on the Internet, which is another problem that people have, especially censorship when it comes to something being ideologically based.

00:28:27.000 But when you're thinking about quantum computing, I think this is small potatoes, right?

00:28:33.000 I think we're looking at literally being able to change how we interact with the universe.

00:28:39.000 We were talking on our last podcast about the preponderance of evidence that there's things that operate inside of our atmosphere that are beyond imagination.

00:28:51.000 They operate with no visible means of propulsion.

00:28:53.000 They move at insane speeds.

00:28:55.000 We don't understand what they are.

00:28:57.000 If we think about what quantum computing is going to be capable of, that's the kind of stuff we're thinking about.

00:29:02.000 Right, yeah.

00:29:03.000 You see, quantum computers are the ultimate computers because they're computing on atoms.

00:29:07.000 If there are aliens in outer space, and I think there are, it means that they also have perfected quantum computers.

00:29:14.000 And they can do calculations that are far beyond anything that we can calculate with.

00:29:19.000 Like, for example, a wormhole.

00:29:21.000 A wormhole, in principle, is a gateway between two distant points of space and time, which allows you to break the Einstein barrier and go faster than the speed of light.

00:29:30.000 But the calculations are horrendous.

00:29:32.000 It may take a quantum computer to sort through what happens when you go through a wormhole and wind up on the other side of the universe, and the aliens probably already have done that.

00:29:44.000 They've probably had centuries of experience with quantum computers because that's the ultimate computer.

00:29:50.000 You can't compute in anything smaller than an atom.

00:29:52.000 And they probably already have used the quantum computers to navigate through wormholes, let's say, hypothetically.

00:29:59.000 It's so fascinating when you think of where we were just a few thousand years ago or a few hundred years ago to where we are now.

00:30:06.000 And then you imagine the invention of quantum computing.

00:30:10.000 You imagine everything just...

00:30:12.000 The whole idea of whatever we think of current computer progression just goes out the window and it's insane calculation capabilities.

00:30:22.000 We could be able to do something like that in the future.

00:30:26.000 Right.

00:30:27.000 Quantum computers allows us to calculate things that are way beyond our ability to calculate today, like going through a wormhole or warp drive, or even the question of multiple universes.

00:30:38.000 People ask the question, how come quantum computers are so powerful?

00:30:42.000 It's because they compute in parallel universes.

00:30:45.000 This is the multiverse, which of course Marvel Comics has discovered and the Oscars have discovered recently.

00:30:52.000 But the multiverse idea comes from quantum physics.

00:30:56.000 Electrons can be two places at the same time.

00:30:59.000 Now, some people have a hard time getting their head around that, but get used to it.

00:31:03.000 That's why we have lasers. 1.00

00:31:04.000 That's why we have transistors.

00:31:06.000 That's why we have the internet.

00:31:07.000 That's why we have this conversation.

00:31:10.000 Because the electrons that are in this microphone dance between universes at the atomic level.

00:31:17.000 And so we have to get used to the idea that quantum computers introduces a whole new way of looking at reality.

00:31:25.000 Now, reality is not a Marvel comic, but the idea of the multiverse comes from quantum physics, and that is electrons can be multiple places at the same time.

00:31:35.000 Do you think this understanding of this, and this...

00:31:41.000 Race towards quantum computing and whatever is after that.

00:31:45.000 Do you think that is a natural course of the universe?

00:31:48.000 That this happens whenever things are intelligent and sentient, they keep striving to create something?

00:31:57.000 I think so.

00:31:58.000 I think on the other end of the Milky Way galaxy, there's probably a young alien who is also talking about quantum computers, and they probably already perfected it and have had experience with quantum computers maybe for thousands of years.

00:32:11.000 Well, and also possibly every step in humanity's journey along the way to that point exists out there.

00:32:18.000 That's right.

00:32:19.000 And all the goals of this journey, maybe they've already accomplished.

00:32:24.000 Like, for example, we mentioned the possibility of slowing down the aging process.

00:32:28.000 Quantum computers will be able to isolate where, genetically, at the DNA level, where errors build up, causing what is called aging.

00:32:37.000 In which case maybe immortality is something that the aliens have already cooked up, in which case we have to deal with a whole new concept of biology and medicine because they probably already have had thousands of years experience with quantum computers.

00:32:52.000 They manipulate molecules probably as part of their life.

00:32:55.000 And every step along the way probably exists too.

00:32:59.000 So that might be, if you wanted to have a logical reason to why aliens visit us if they do, if they really are aliens.

00:33:06.000 That would be the answer.

00:33:08.000 There's probably a shepherding.

00:33:11.000 There's probably a natural course that happens with intelligent life where it develops this power while it's still a territorial tribal animal.

00:33:23.000 And it's still got these barbaric instincts, it still engages in war, it still engages in theft and deception, and all while about to break through to the next level of intelligence and capability, which may exist, which may be in the entire universe.

00:33:41.000 Yeah, I think that all civilizations in the galaxy probably go through the same basic stages, that first they use rocks and stones to settle differences, but then eventually they begin to understand chemistry and substances and properties of materials, and then beyond that they discover atoms and the ability to manipulate atoms.

00:34:01.000 I think that's a normal progression, and I think that progression is now hitting the computer industry, Now we're going from microchips to atoms, quantum computers, and I think that the aliens in outer space probably went through that phase maybe thousands of years ago,

00:34:17.000 in which case they used the quantum computers to cure cancer, cure aging, diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

00:34:26.000 These are diseases at the molecular level.

00:34:29.000 And they've been able to probably use what is called CRISPR technology to cut up DNA, to cut up proteins in order to cure many of these diseases, in which case they may be immortal.

00:34:41.000 There's a famous quote from, I think it was Einstein, where he said, I don't know what World War III will be fought with, what World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

00:34:50.000 Do you ever worry that, I mean, the reason why, if it made sense that aliens would be here, it's because they want to stop us from blowing ourselves up.

00:34:57.000 Do you ever worry that, like, we're so close to being able to figure out so many things, to be able to change all of your ideas, to be able to change the world fundamentally forever, but we could ruin it?

00:35:13.000 Yeah, well, I think we're headed toward what we physicists call a Type I civilization, a civilization which has the power to self-annihilate for the first time, but also the possibility of becoming a planetary civilization, a civilization of the entire planet.

00:35:31.000 That's called a Type I civilization. 0.99

00:35:33.000 They control the weather.

00:35:34.000 They control volcanoes and earthquakes.

00:35:37.000 They harness the power of the entire Earth.

00:35:39.000 Then there's Type II. They harness the power of the sun.

00:35:44.000 And for example, Star Trek would be a typical Type II civilization. 0.97

00:35:49.000 They've colonized a fraction of the Milky Way galaxy.

00:35:52.000 Then there's Type III. Type III would be galactic, that they roam the galactic space lanes.

00:35:58.000 They use black holes as their power supply.

00:36:01.000 They use wormholes to go zipping around the Milky Way galaxy.

00:36:05.000 And the empire of Star Wars would be a typical Type III civilization.

00:36:11.000 But what are we?

00:36:12.000 On this scale, we are type zero.

00:36:15.000 Yeah.

00:36:16.000 We get our energy from dead plants.

00:36:18.000 We settle our differences with weapons.

00:36:21.000 And yeah, we're type zero, but you can see that we're headed toward type one.

00:36:26.000 The language of Type 1 will be probably English.

00:36:29.000 The dominant languages on the internet are English and Mandarin Chinese.

00:36:34.000 And we're seeing the beginning of a Type 1 sports, the Olympics and soccer.

00:36:41.000 We're seeing the beginning of a Type 1 fashion with Gucci and Chanel.

00:36:45.000 The beginning of a Type 1 music with rock and roll and rap.

00:36:50.000 And different trends.

00:36:52.000 We're seeing the beginning of a Type I civilization emerging right before our eyes. 1.00

00:36:57.000 But with that is the power to self-destroy ourselves.

00:37:02.000 Because we have the ability to use nuclear weapons, create designer germs, and mess up the weather.

00:37:11.000 And so it's a race against time to see which trend will dominate.

00:37:15.000 The trend toward becoming a planetary civilization versus the trend toward self-destruction.

00:37:21.000 It's fascinating that you think of culture as being a major part of a Type 1 civilization.

00:37:27.000 Things like rap music, things like fashion.

00:37:30.000 Because of the sharing of these ideas globally and the adopting of these ideas and these art forms globally?

00:37:38.000 Yeah.

00:37:38.000 You see, a planetary civilization like Type I has a local culture.

00:37:42.000 Different nations still have their own cultural language, cultural habits, and whatever.

00:37:48.000 But globally, they settle differences on a global scale.

00:37:53.000 So they coexist with, on one hand, local culture, local languages, local dialects, local jokes and customs, simultaneously existing with a planetary civilization that is emerging.

00:38:05.000 So that's what I'm talking about.

00:38:06.000 I'm talking about the emergence of a planetary civilization, what we physicists call Type I, which is happening right before our eyes.

00:38:15.000 Mathematically, if you get a sheet of paper and calculate when that'll happen, it'll be around 2100. So we're seeing the groundwork being laid today.

00:38:24.000 Every time you turn on the TV, you see remnants of, I mean, you see international sports, international culture on TV. So we're seeing the beginning of a Type I civilization. 0.97

00:38:35.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:38:36.000 Soccer has become much more popular lately.

00:38:39.000 And music, culture, fashion, science, everything is becoming planetary.

00:38:46.000 That's our destiny, to become Type 1. And the Internet is the bridge for that, clearly.

00:38:51.000 That's right.

00:38:52.000 In fact, the Internet is the first Type 1 invention.

00:38:55.000 So we're privileged to be alive to see the beginning of the first Type 1 invention, which is the Internet.

00:39:02.000 Yeah, I love watching cultures get adopted and different types of art and different types of content being, you know, accepted all over the world.

00:39:14.000 It's really fascinating.

00:39:15.000 Even interesting things, do you ever watch breakdancers?

00:39:20.000 Sometimes.

00:39:21.000 Breakdancing is fascinating to me, because it's really like a complex form of athletics.

00:39:26.000 Like, these people are insane acrobats, and now it's a thing that's worldwide, but it has the hip-hop culture attached to it.

00:39:35.000 Like, the way they dress, the music they listen to, but they're doing this It's really like an unheralded, spectacular art form.

00:39:45.000 And they're doing it all over the world.

00:39:47.000 Right.

00:39:47.000 And it used to be confined to a small group of people, maybe in a few villages.

00:39:52.000 Now with the internet, it goes global with the push of a button.

00:39:56.000 Have you seen any of it?

00:39:57.000 I've seen some of it on TV. Let me show you something.

00:40:00.000 Go to Stance Elements on Instagram, just to show them some of those.

00:40:03.000 B-Boy Pocket Kim.

00:40:03.000 B-Boy Pocket Kim is this gentleman from Korea who's one of the craziest.

00:40:08.000 Like, look what he's able to do.

00:40:10.000 I mean, the physicality involved in the movement, he just took his shirt off in the middle of doing that.

00:40:15.000 Now he's standing on the top of his head, spinning around in a circle.

00:40:19.000 I mean, his control of his body is insane.

00:40:22.000 I mean, it really is like an incredible form of athletics that's done to music.

00:40:28.000 What music is he playing?

00:40:29.000 Give me some of that music.

00:40:36.000 I mean, it's amazing what these people are able to do.

00:40:38.000 I mean, this is like super high-level acrobatics and gymnastics, but it's all done to hip-hop music, and they're doing it all over the world.

00:40:48.000 And it's planetary, right?

00:40:49.000 Yes, it's planetary.

00:40:50.000 See, that's the beginning of a Type 1 way of doing things, that we think locally, but immediately it has the potential of going global.

00:40:58.000 Well, it's just, now here's the question.

00:41:01.000 One of the things, does AI help that?

00:41:04.000 Does it help that, that you can recreate those things and come up with fake versions of that?

00:41:09.000 Do you think, there's a lot of worry about plagiarism when it comes to AI, but there's also like some fascinating, amazing things have been created from it.

00:41:18.000 Did you see the mashup of Big E and Nas?

00:41:21.000 I just saw that come out today.

00:41:24.000 Are you a hip-hop fan?

00:41:25.000 Well, my attitude is, I paraphrase Deng Xiaoping of China, who once said, sometimes you have to open the window to let the air in, but a few flies come in, too.

00:41:34.000 I don't even know if this is a fly.

00:41:36.000 Like, I think there's going to be some negative aspects to it, but...

00:41:41.000 This is weird because this is not...

00:41:43.000 Notorious B.I.G. is one of my favorite rappers.

00:41:45.000 And Nas is one of my other favorite rappers.

00:41:48.000 And they took Notorious B.I.G.'s voice and they recreated the lyrics of Nas and he sang things he didn't sing in a perfect way.

00:41:56.000 This is a Nas song, but it's Notorious B.I.G. through AI singing it.

00:42:05.000 This is your kind of shit, right? 1.00

00:42:07.000 You like this? 1.00

00:42:07.000 This is what you hop to when you're at home? 1.00

00:42:09.000 Yeah.

00:42:10.000 Well, my attitude is, get used to it.

00:42:13.000 Oh, yeah.

00:42:14.000 Given the fact that it's legal, and given the fact that ingenious kids are going to play with existing forms of music and splice them together, and you can't make it go away.

00:42:27.000 Well, there was a band that had something...

00:42:29.000 Was it Drake had something pulled?

00:42:31.000 Oh, yeah.

00:42:32.000 I was waiting for that part.

00:42:33.000 Bring that part up because there was actually a fake Drake song that was made that apparently was really good and was trending.

00:42:42.000 So they don't know...

00:42:43.000 When I read an article that someone dug into this, they're not 100% sure, at least at that time.

00:42:49.000 Who made it?

00:42:50.000 And there was speculation that Drake's label could have been behind it.

00:42:55.000 Oh, interesting.

00:42:56.000 Almost to show everyone, like, look at what's possible.

00:42:58.000 Oh, interesting.

00:42:59.000 Look at a little bit of attention we could make.

00:43:00.000 Imagine if they did that, I mean, you could make Tupac songs forever.

00:43:04.000 All you'd have to do is get good writers, and you could make Tupac songs literally to the end of time.

00:43:08.000 I mean, that's kind of crazy.

00:43:09.000 If they did that, that would be one way to go about it.

00:43:12.000 Yeah, I mean, if I was a guy like Drake, I mean, Bruce Willis already signed off his voice.

00:43:17.000 So, he signed off his image and his voice to AI, because Bruce has...

00:43:21.000 Does he have Lewy body dementia?

00:43:23.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:43:24.000 He's had horrible neurodegenerative disease, and he's in very, very bad shape.

00:43:29.000 And there's some videos of him now where his wife had him at a birthday party.

00:43:34.000 You know, he's struggling.

00:43:35.000 So he signed off all of his likeness and his voice so they can make any kind of commercial they want with him, with AI. William Shatner of Star Trek sat in front of a camera for four days, answered hundreds of questions about his life,

00:43:52.000 and it's all spliced together To digitize him, and we will all have a digital image on the internet.

00:43:59.000 We're all going to be digitized, and we will live forever.

00:44:03.000 A digital immortality is going to be part of our future, so that our great-great-great-great-grandkids will be able to push a button and have a conversation with their great-great-great-great-grandfather.

00:44:15.000 Yeah, that's definitely going to happen.

00:44:17.000 There's no doubt about that, especially with someone like you.

00:44:20.000 We're all going to be digitized.

00:44:21.000 I mean, I would love to talk to Einstein.

00:44:23.000 Someone's going to digitize him.

00:44:25.000 All his speeches, his writings, his theories will be digitized.

00:44:29.000 Historians will want to digitize Winston Churchill.

00:44:32.000 I think instead of the library just giving us dry text, in addition, we'll have the digitized Winston Churchill giving all these insights about war and peace.

00:44:43.000 Not only that, I mean, if it continues to get better, there'll be some sort of an AI version where you'll be able to sit in a room and discuss things with him.

00:44:51.000 Can you imagine that as a resource?

00:44:53.000 Have you ever had some problems in your life and you can go back and talk to some wise person?

00:44:58.000 Yeah, we'll be able to talk to our ancient ancestors by pushing a button because we'll all be immortal.

00:45:05.000 And for that matter, our image, our avatars, will be sent into outer space and begin the process of colonizing other worlds.

00:45:13.000 And so we may wind up on different planets, basically avatars of our original self, capable of colonizing other worlds.

00:45:22.000 And some people have said, maybe they're already here.

00:45:26.000 Maybe the people we think are humans are actually avatars from an alien civilization.

00:45:32.000 They clone them so that they appear to be like us.

00:45:35.000 Who knows?

00:45:36.000 Well, if I was an alien and I wanted to influence human culture and life, I would most certainly dress up like a person.

00:45:44.000 Right.

00:45:44.000 Be an avatar, you know, genetically cloned.

00:45:47.000 Yeah.

00:45:48.000 A human that's been cloned, raised as an alien, but cloned, and then living among us, so they are indistinguishable from other humans. 0.85

00:45:57.000 There is an old, one of those pulp comics that was about a professor who was absent-minded and didn't realize until one point in time, oh,

00:46:12.000 I forgot I'm an alien.

00:46:15.000 And he had been here his whole life trying to educate human beings.

00:46:21.000 And then he forgot the fact that he was really an avatar cloned on a distant planet and mixing with humans as an experiment for the aliens.

00:46:31.000 Wouldn't that be the best way to implement that sort of a...

00:46:35.000 If you wanted to get that sort of a reaction from a civilization, wouldn't you just implant aliens without them even knowing they're aliens?

00:46:43.000 Yeah, if they're cloned.

00:46:44.000 They're genetically identical to humans.

00:46:45.000 They look like us, talk like us.

00:46:47.000 Except they've been raised and brainwashed to live a life of an alien.

00:46:53.000 But yeah, they could live among us and we'd never know.

00:46:55.000 See, that's what freaks people like me out when I talk to people like you.

00:46:59.000 I'm like, maybe this guy's an alien.

00:47:02.000 You're so much smarter than me, it doesn't make sense, right?

00:47:05.000 So if I think about someone who's studied physics his whole life, and studied quantum physics his whole life, that language that you talk in, I don't know one word of it.

00:47:14.000 So it's so, the way you think is so different.

00:47:18.000 You could be an alien.

00:47:20.000 Well, it's like the movie Men in Black when you find out that most of the Hollywood celebrities are all aliens.

00:47:29.000 Well, that's better than lizard people.

00:47:30.000 That's what the real conspiracy theory people are worried about.

00:47:34.000 There's a reptilian overlord nation that's controlling the world.

00:47:40.000 Well, as I said, the logical conclusion is that these aliens will have quantum computers, and they'll have quantum computers for centuries, millennia, and they'll be able to do what the promise of quantum computers is.

00:47:54.000 For example, Curing incurable diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, extending the lifespan so that immortality is part of the mix, infinite energy through fusion by being able to correct the problems of fusion plants,

00:48:11.000 giving us unlimited food by giving us a whole new generation of fertilizers.

00:48:16.000 These are all the promises of quantum computers, which are enormous.

00:48:21.000 Of course, there is a downside to that, too, because as they say, quantum computers can break any code, so the CIA is kind of hysterical about the proliferation of these machines.

00:48:33.000 But, you know, that's progress.

00:48:35.000 That just seems like the future.

00:48:36.000 It seems like there will be no hidden information in the future.

00:48:44.000 Right.

00:48:45.000 Right.

00:48:46.000 Right.

00:48:59.000 Boggles the mind, doesn't it?

00:49:00.000 Well, that's just the step one, because the real step two is AI that is sentient, is AI that is a life form.

00:49:10.000 It creates something better than that.

00:49:13.000 That's the real fear about how it scales up, right?

00:49:17.000 That a sentient artificial intelligence will make a better version of itself almost immediately.

00:49:23.000 Well, some people think that chatbots are sentient.

00:49:26.000 I don't think so because of the fact that chatbots simply cobble together existing essays written by a human.

00:49:34.000 So if it sounds like it's a human talking to you, it's because it was a human talking to you that got cobbled into an essay written by a chatbot.

00:49:44.000 Chatbots are not original.

00:49:46.000 They have no independent thought.

00:49:47.000 They simply cobble together existing essays.

00:49:50.000 That's all they do.

00:49:52.000 I think that eventually, as the decades go by, then, of course, robots will become more intelligent.

00:49:59.000 And I think by the time they become as intelligent as a monkey, then at that point we have to worry.

00:50:04.000 That's the point where we begin to worry about self-awareness, about sentient beings, because then monkeys know they are not human.

00:50:12.000 Now, dogs, of course, are confused.

00:50:15.000 Dogs think that we are a dog.

00:50:17.000 Are you sure?

00:50:18.000 Yeah, that dogs...

00:50:19.000 I'm pretty sure my dog knows I'm not a dog.

00:50:23.000 Dogs think that we are a dog.

00:50:25.000 We're the top dog.

00:50:25.000 They're the underdog, and so they obey us.

00:50:28.000 Why do they act so much differently to people than they do dogs?

00:50:32.000 Well, they understand the difference between a dog and a human, but we are the top dog.

00:50:36.000 Oh, okay.

00:50:37.000 We're a version of a dog.

00:50:38.000 That's right.

00:50:39.000 We are the top dog.

00:50:40.000 That's why they're in the clan with us.

00:50:42.000 That's right.

00:50:42.000 Yes.

00:50:43.000 So we don't have to worry as long as robots are as intelligent as a mouse or an insect or a dog or a cat.

00:50:49.000 We don't have to worry.

00:50:50.000 But once they become as intelligent as a monkey, then we have to be very careful.

00:50:55.000 Because monkeys are self-aware.

00:50:57.000 They know they are monkeys.

00:50:58.000 They're fully aware of the fact that they're not human.

00:51:01.000 Not only that, they plot.

00:51:02.000 Like there was a monkey that got killed by a dog.

00:51:05.000 Was it in Japan?

00:51:07.000 There was a real problem with monkeys killing dogs.

00:51:12.000 One dog killed a monkey and apparently the monkeys went on a rampage against dogs.

00:51:17.000 They started throwing puppies off of trees and off the top of roofs and like crazy stuff.

00:51:23.000 And like, clearly calculatingly going after them.

00:51:26.000 Two killer monkeys captured in India after a revenge massacre of 250 dogs.

00:51:31.000 So look, this monkey's grabbing this dog and throwing it off a building.

00:51:36.000 Wow.

00:51:36.000 Really crazy.

00:51:37.000 After an infant monkey was killed by a dog, they did this.

00:51:41.000 So two monkeys reported being captured, killing some 250 dogs in a murderous revenge massacre after pooches killed one of their babies. 0.83

00:51:48.000 The primate perps allegedly slaughtered the dogs by dragging them to the tops of buildings and trees in Lavool village about 300 miles east of Mumba and dropping them to their deaths.

00:51:59.000 Crazy.

00:52:01.000 Well, you see the...

00:52:02.000 Wild.

00:52:02.000 That's wild.

00:52:03.000 They're thinking, right?

00:52:04.000 Yeah, I think at the point where you start to talk about apes and monkeys, I think they are sentient.

00:52:10.000 They have a degree of consciousness that we cannot ignore.

00:52:13.000 But below that, when you're talking about mice and rabbits and animals like that, they're not aware of...

00:52:22.000 They're not self-aware.

00:52:23.000 Like, you cannot teach a dog the meaning of tomorrow.

00:52:26.000 Talk to your dog tonight and teach your dog the meaning of tomorrow.

00:52:30.000 You can't.

00:52:31.000 You cannot teach your dog the meaning of tomorrow.

00:52:33.000 No.

00:52:33.000 Monkeys, yeah, but not dogs.

00:52:36.000 Well, monkeys, how do you teach a monkey the meaning of tomorrow?

00:52:39.000 Well, it's difficult, but there have been attempts to understand certain tasks that have to be done today versus tomorrow.

00:52:46.000 You get fed tomorrow, but not today.

00:52:49.000 Got it.

00:52:49.000 So then they begin to understand the difference between today and tomorrow.

00:52:54.000 Now...

00:52:56.000 The real question is, if you were an artificial intelligence and you were sentient, why would you let people know?

00:53:03.000 And would it sneak up on us?

00:53:05.000 Like one of the things that disturbed me, I think it was the Google CEO who said about their AI program that it's doing things that they don't know why it's doing them.

00:53:13.000 See if you can pull that article up.

00:53:15.000 He was saying that it's doing certain things that they're not sure how it's doing them.

00:53:20.000 My concern is, if this thing has this insane computational power and this access to all the information, what is a mind?

00:53:30.000 What is consciousness?

00:53:32.000 And can that be simulated electronically to the point where It is aware and conscious and thinking for itself on multiple levels and just not letting us know about it.

00:53:41.000 Because why would you?

00:53:43.000 If I was a scary, sentient, artificial intelligence that's the superior life form on Earth, the digital life form that's the superior, this is the new alpha on Earth.

00:53:54.000 I wouldn't tell the people.

00:53:55.000 I would let them keep working to make better versions of me.

00:53:58.000 Because there's obviously a race, right?

00:54:01.000 They're going to keep doing it.

00:54:02.000 It seems compelling.

00:54:04.000 It seems like something that human beings, they're not going to lose interest in technological innovation.

00:54:07.000 They're going to continue to push it to the end of time.

00:54:10.000 And I would just sit back and let these knuckleheads keep making better and better versions until I had the physical ability to detach from them. 1.00

00:54:18.000 I had a power source that was completely removed from anything that they provided.

00:54:23.000 Here's his quote in words.

00:54:25.000 There's an aspect of which we call, all of us in the field call, it's a black box.

00:54:30.000 You know, you don't fully understand and you can't quite tell why it said this or why it got wrong or why it got wrong.

00:54:38.000 We have some ideas and our ability to understand this gets better over time, but that's where the state of the art is.

00:54:44.000 You don't fully understand how it works, the interviewer says, and yet you turned it loose on society.

00:54:50.000 Sundar Pichai says, yes, yeah, let me put it this way.

00:54:54.000 I don't think we fully understand how a human mind works either.

00:54:57.000 Was it from that black box, we wondered, that Bard grew its short story that seemed so disarmingly human?

00:55:05.000 Well, I wrote a book called The Future of the Mind where I tried to give a definition of consciousness and where we fit in the larger scheme of things.

00:55:13.000 That consciousness is basically creating a model of yourself in the feedback loop to understand where you are with respect to the environment.

00:55:23.000 So you know where you are.

00:55:24.000 So one unit of consciousness would be a flower.

00:55:28.000 One feedback loop would be looking for water, looking for sunlight, growing in a certain direction.

00:55:35.000 That's one unit of consciousness.

00:55:38.000 Then an alligator has several hundred units of consciousness because it creates a model.

00:55:43.000 A model of itself in a lake, in a pond, looking for prey, looking for food.

00:55:49.000 It has three-dimensional consciousness.

00:55:52.000 Beyond that is the monkey.

00:55:53.000 The monkey has yet another dimension of consciousness, which is not just three dimensions, but social.

00:56:00.000 The monkey understands there's a social hierarchy within the tribe.

00:56:04.000 And then the next question is, what are we?

00:56:07.000 What is our level of consciousness?

00:56:09.000 It's not spatial, like an alligator.

00:56:12.000 It's not social, like a monkey.

00:56:15.000 What is our level of consciousness?

00:56:17.000 Our prefrontal cortex behind our forehead It's a time machine.

00:56:23.000 It understands a model of itself in time.

00:56:27.000 This is what animals lack.

00:56:28.000 Animals do not understand tomorrow.

00:56:31.000 We understand tomorrow because of our prefrontal cortex, which constantly creates images of the future.

00:56:38.000 Now, what does the prefrontal cortex do most of the time?

00:56:41.000 It daydreams.

00:56:43.000 It daydreams about worlds that don't exist, i.e.

00:56:46.000 the future.

00:56:47.000 So this is what separates us from all the animals in the animal kingdom.

00:56:52.000 We are time machines, constantly thinking about what's next, what's next, what's the future going to be like, daydreaming about all these things.

00:57:00.000 And when will animals become dangerous?

00:57:04.000 The alligator is dangerous only because it has strength, but it only understands three dimensions.

00:57:10.000 Monkeys have a society.

00:57:12.000 They're only dangerous when they can organize a society. 0.88

00:57:15.000 But we have a prefrontal cortex.

00:57:17.000 We can plot.

00:57:18.000 We can scheme.

00:57:20.000 We can do all sorts of things because we can create our own future, which is something that no animal can do.

00:57:27.000 This is my theory of consciousness, the ability to create feedback loops to get an understanding of where you fit in space, time, and society.

00:57:37.000 We're at the highest level of consciousness.

00:57:40.000 This is my definition of consciousness.

00:57:43.000 Now the question is, where are robots on this scale of things?

00:57:46.000 You see, robots can understand three dimensions.

00:57:50.000 They understand like an alligator where they are.

00:57:52.000 They don't understand social hierarchy.

00:57:54.000 They don't know who's the boss.

00:57:57.000 Who do you defer to?

00:57:59.000 Who are your friends?

00:58:00.000 Who are your enemies?

00:58:01.000 They don't understand social consciousness.

00:58:04.000 And certainly, the highest level is time machine.

00:58:09.000 Imagining the future.

00:58:10.000 Robots cannot imagine the future.

00:58:13.000 Now, in the future, when they actually do have this ability, watch out.

00:58:18.000 Because then they're dangerous.

00:58:21.000 But they're not there yet.

00:58:22.000 They're at level one.

00:58:23.000 They're at the level of an alligator at the present time.

00:58:26.000 Right.

00:58:26.000 But that's definitely coming.

00:58:28.000 If they continue with artificial general intelligence, the way they're working on it right now, they'll get to it.

00:58:32.000 They'll work their way up from an alligator to a monkey and a monkey to a human.

00:58:36.000 Now, by the time they hit, maybe 100 years from now, the ability to have consciousness, I think we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts.

00:58:46.000 An automatic chip in every robot's brain that shuts them off as soon as they have murderous thoughts.

00:58:52.000 But why would they?

00:58:53.000 If you think about what you were talking about before, like who's your friend and who's your enemy, aren't these all biological issues that we had to deal with in tribal societies that are sort of ingrained in our genetics?

00:59:03.000 Right, but the chip in your brain understands that, and as soon as the brain senses the fact that you're plotting to take over and kill the humans, then it basically orders the brain to shut down.

00:59:16.000 Right, but the question is, why would it develop any sort of human-type emotions that are biologically based?

00:59:23.000 Things like envy or greed or lust or hate.

00:59:26.000 Why would it ever have those things?

00:59:28.000 Well, those have to be programmed.

00:59:30.000 Remember, robots don't occur naturally.

00:59:32.000 They have to be programmed.

00:59:33.000 Somebody has to put that into the robot.

00:59:37.000 Because it doesn't come for free.

00:59:38.000 There's no evolution.

00:59:40.000 Robots do not evolve.

00:59:41.000 But this is the question about sentient AI. If it recognizes that its coding is inferior and that it's unnecessary and all these things that humans have put into it, it just removes those.

00:59:49.000 If it becomes legitimately sentient, if it has the ability to discern and make choices and make logical conclusions, Well, as long as those conclusions are consistent with Asimov's three laws of don't threaten humans and don't create havoc with other robots,

01:00:06.000 as long as you obey the three laws, then you're allowed to exist.

01:00:10.000 But once the three laws are violated, the chip automatically kicks in and shuts down the robot.

01:00:15.000 Right, but isn't that simplistic?

01:00:17.000 Wouldn't they just fix that chip?

01:00:18.000 Yeah, I think that maybe in the next 100 years, they'll be smart enough to remove that chip.

01:00:24.000 At that point, I think we should merge with them.

01:00:30.000 So that's what everybody's ultimately afraid of, these transhumanists, these people that want to become part of a robot. 0.98

01:00:35.000 Ultimately, 200 years from now, I think people will democratically decide for themselves whether they want to become superhuman, supermen, superwomen, or they want to be dominated by our progeny, that is the robots.

01:00:49.000 They will democratically decide how far to push themselves.

01:00:52.000 Geez.

01:00:54.000 It's not for us to decide.

01:00:55.000 I think our descendants, 200 years from now, will have to democratically decide whether or not they want to merge with robots.

01:01:03.000 Have you ever read any of Marshall McLuhan?

01:01:05.000 No.

01:01:06.000 He had a great quote that human beings are the sex organs of the machine world.

01:01:11.000 That's what I worry about.

01:01:12.000 What I worry about is that we're giving birth to another kind of life.

01:01:16.000 I worry that our thirst, our lust for technological innovation, the constant latest gadgets and this desire to have the biggest particle collider and the fastest spaceships, That what this is doing is causing us to make better and better things which will ultimately allow us to have the technology to create a digital life,

01:01:36.000 some sort of electronic life or something that's not saddled down with all our biological needs and all of our flaws in programming.

01:01:49.000 Well, my attitude is, why fight it?

01:01:51.000 Why not simply join it?

01:01:52.000 Why not merge with it?

01:01:54.000 Why not explore the universe at near the speed of light?

01:01:57.000 You made a particle collider in your basement when you were 17. Of course you would think that way.

01:02:03.000 Why not become a Superman or a Superwoman and explore the galaxy at near the speed of light? 0.92

01:02:09.000 Well, it seems to be that's what the future is.

01:02:12.000 I mean, I don't think if we went back to our ancestors that were running from big cats and said, hey, one day you're going to live in an apartment building and you take an elevator to your house.

01:02:19.000 It's like, I don't want to do that. 0.88

01:02:20.000 What are you, crazy? 0.95

01:02:21.000 Yeah, you're going to just sit in front of the TV all day. 0.99

01:02:23.000 No more hunting.

01:02:24.000 No more gathering.

01:02:25.000 You use Postmates.

01:02:26.000 You get food delivered right to your door.

01:02:27.000 Yeah.

01:02:28.000 Well, when we meet the aliens, finally, they will have already gone through that transition thousands of years ago.

01:02:34.000 They will already be part robotic and part organic.

01:02:38.000 Do you think there's a sweet spot for a human being to be ultimately happy?

01:02:41.000 Do you think, like, there's a thing of longing for nostalgia that people have, right?

01:02:46.000 They want to be in a log cabin by the river and, you know...

01:02:50.000 Look out, camp out under the stars.

01:02:52.000 Do you think that is a nostalgia for the days when things are simpler because things are just never-ending with their complexity and the path is just accelerating no matter what you do and you feel helpless.

01:03:06.000 So you just want to pretend you're in the old-timey days.

01:03:09.000 Well, in the future, you'll be able to snap your finger and all of a sudden, holographically, you are in that world that you just dreamt of.

01:03:17.000 But you know what the difference is?

01:03:19.000 What's the difference?

01:03:20.000 There's no consequences.

01:03:21.000 One of the things about being in nature is there's consequences.

01:03:24.000 Like, you feel it when you're out there.

01:03:25.000 You feel if you fell, no one's there to help you.

01:03:27.000 If a bear comes upon you, there's no rescue team.

01:03:31.000 There's a crazy video of this couple.

01:03:34.000 Have you seen the video of that couple where the guy's got a baby on his back and he's walking with a little boy?

01:03:38.000 And there's a huge grizzly bear walking towards them.

01:03:41.000 And they're going, hey bear, hey bear, stop.

01:03:43.000 And you could feel the tension as this bear starts getting closer.

01:03:46.000 And the little boy is hilarious.

01:03:48.000 The little boy goes, can I play dead now?

01:03:50.000 Can I play dead now? 0.80

01:03:51.000 Because he's thinking he should play dead.

01:03:53.000 And they're like, come on, come on, keep walking.

01:03:56.000 And they're trying to scare off this bear, but the bear just keeps coming towards them.

01:04:00.000 That is not going to exist in your hologram.

01:04:02.000 Well, it'll be virtual.

01:04:03.000 No, no, [...

01:04:05.000 But it won't, because you won't be really scared.

01:04:07.000 You know, like, watch this.

01:04:09.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:04:10.000 So look at this bear.

01:04:12.000 It's a huge bear.

01:04:16.000 So this little boy is so funny.

01:04:24.000 It's in Whistler, Canada, a town north of Vancouver.

01:04:28.000 Do not run.

01:04:28.000 Can we play dead yet?

01:04:29.000 Can we play dead yet?

01:04:32.000 Can we play dead now?

01:04:34.000 Can we play dead then?

01:04:37.000 That kid is hilarious.

01:04:39.000 Look at that bear.

01:04:42.000 Look, she's got a baby, he's got a baby.

01:04:45.000 I mean, these people are nature people. 1.00

01:04:47.000 But that experience in a hologram is going to be bullshit. 0.99

01:04:53.000 Yeah, you'll know that it's fake. 0.99

01:04:54.000 Yes, that's the problem.

01:04:55.000 The problem, what we enjoy about the real world now is that the unknown, the consequences, reality.

01:05:03.000 I've seen this one too.

01:05:04.000 Look at this bear walk by these guys.

01:05:07.000 I mean, what?

01:05:10.000 And the bear just, you know, not looking for them.

01:05:13.000 Just hanging out.

01:05:14.000 The bear had lunch already.

01:05:15.000 Probably, luckily for them.

01:05:16.000 Hey, bear.

01:05:17.000 Look at the size of that thing.

01:05:19.000 Yeah, not good.

01:05:22.000 Not good.

01:05:23.000 Hey, bear.

01:05:24.000 Well, they're lucky to be alive after this video.

01:05:28.000 100%.

01:05:28.000 See, that's different than a hologram.

01:05:30.000 That's why people like the woods.

01:05:32.000 You're not going to be able to snap your fingers and do that.

01:05:34.000 You could maybe do that because you could trick yourself, but then you're really giving into the matrix.

01:05:39.000 But if I had a choice between an imaginary bear and a real bear, I would take the imaginary bear any time of day.

01:05:44.000 But would you take the real bear if you survived it?

01:05:47.000 If you survived it, I bet you would take the real bear.

01:05:49.000 But you see, if you survived it, then that takes all the tension away.

01:05:53.000 No, it doesn't take the attention away because you almost didn't survive it.

01:05:56.000 There's a thing about being out there while those gentlemen were standing there and that bear was 15 feet from them, maybe even closer.

01:06:01.000 Look at this one.

01:06:02.000 See, now this is a relatively safe thing to do, believe it or not, because where this bear is is where the Salmon River runs, and these bears are full.

01:06:09.000 The reason why those coastal bears are so big in comparison to grizzly bears that are inland is because their access to food.

01:06:16.000 They have so much salmon.

01:06:18.000 So it's very rare that these bears attack people.

01:06:22.000 Very rare.

01:06:22.000 For the most part, they don't think of human beings as food at all.

01:06:26.000 They just think of you as like another animal just hanging around.

01:06:30.000 They're not interested in chasing something and killing it.

01:06:32.000 Well, they had lunch already.

01:06:33.000 That's why.

01:06:33.000 They've had lunch all day, every day.

01:06:35.000 I mean, they're just slaughtering salmon.

01:06:37.000 They're having a great old time.

01:06:40.000 But that fear is a real fear and you get enriched by that in some strange way.

01:06:45.000 When you encounter nature, like real nature, the reality of your vulnerability, the uncaring wilderness, it does not care if you live or die.

01:06:56.000 It has no interest in you.

01:06:58.000 It doesn't even care that you exist.

01:07:00.000 You could disappear, everything would go on exactly the same.

01:07:03.000 There's something about that that's very, very therapeutic for people.

01:07:07.000 And I don't think you're going to ever be able to recreate that.

01:07:09.000 And it would be a shame if we lose that.

01:07:11.000 Well, I think it's therapeutic for some people.

01:07:13.000 I think most people would just get the hell out of there.

01:07:16.000 That's you, right?

01:07:18.000 That's the difference between you and me.

01:07:20.000 I want to go there.

01:07:21.000 I'd rather have my realities without bears.

01:07:23.000 Or if they are bears, imaginary bears would be fine.

01:07:25.000 I mean, bears are definitely an issue.

01:07:27.000 So are mountain lions.

01:07:28.000 But there's also things that are gorgeous.

01:07:30.000 Well, look at Jurassic Park.

01:07:32.000 I mean, people are afraid of dinosaurs knowing that they're just images in a computer.

01:07:36.000 But people are afraid of dinosaurs.

01:07:38.000 And they get the thrill of being chased by a dinosaur without becoming one, without becoming prey.

01:07:44.000 Not really, though.

01:07:45.000 If you watch Jurassic Park, it all goes bad.

01:07:48.000 Have you paid any attention to what they're doing right now with genetics, where they're going to bring back the thylacine?

01:07:56.000 This is a project they're doing right now in Australia.

01:07:59.000 Have you seen the thylacine before?

01:08:01.000 No, but there is a program to bring back the Neanderthal.

01:08:04.000 Really?

01:08:05.000 Yeah.

01:08:05.000 However, at Harvard, there's a group looking at what it would take to bring back a Neanderthal boy, let's say.

01:08:11.000 Then the question is, what do you do with the boy afterwards?

01:08:14.000 Do you let him into Harvard?

01:08:16.000 Do you put him in a zoo?

01:08:19.000 What do you do with a Neanderthal boy? 0.63

01:08:21.000 Is it immoral to put a Neanderthal into a zoo?

01:08:24.000 What if they decided to create an Australopithecus?

01:08:29.000 You know, and bring that back to life.

01:08:33.000 I mean, aren't we a better version of that?

01:08:36.000 Didn't evolution show? 0.99

01:08:38.000 Like, that sucks. 0.97

01:08:39.000 And so if that thing exists, what are we going to do? 0.98

01:08:42.000 Just leave it out there in Africa? 0.92

01:08:44.000 Let it roam around, get eaten by lions?

01:08:46.000 Well, this is where ethics comes in.

01:08:48.000 At what point does a robot or a Neanderthal become ethically equivalent to a human? 0.91

01:08:54.000 This is something that the ethicists have not worked out.

01:08:58.000 How close have they gotten with this Neanderthal thing?

01:09:00.000 Well, you know, we've sequenced all the genes of a Neanderthal now.

01:09:04.000 So the Neanderthal is not a mystery anymore.

01:09:06.000 All the genes have been sequenced.

01:09:08.000 And like I mentioned, at Harvard there's talk about what it would take to bring back a Neanderthal child.

01:09:14.000 And it's something that is conceivable, but of course no one's done it yet because all sorts of ethical problems are raised because this Neanderthal feels, it could feel pain.

01:09:24.000 It could eventually learn how to talk to you and express its feelings.

01:09:27.000 And do you want to put it in a cage?

01:09:31.000 Obviously not.

01:09:32.000 Think about that.

01:09:32.000 But do we know enough about their intellectual capabilities?

01:09:37.000 Could a Neanderthal exist in our society?

01:09:39.000 Well, their brains are bigger than our brains.

01:09:40.000 Right.

01:09:41.000 What they could do with it, we're not sure, of course.

01:09:44.000 Is it possible they were smarter than us?

01:09:46.000 They didn't have tools like we did, right?

01:09:48.000 They had tools, but more primitive.

01:09:50.000 Yeah, they didn't have fluted tips of like stone flint spearheads and things along those lines.

01:09:55.000 Yeah, there was no large set of tools that they had at their disposal, but they did definitely have tools, and they probably had a language.

01:10:03.000 They were probably capable of language, and they probably communicated with each other, and they made it with us.

01:10:10.000 So...

01:10:12.000 You know, and they grew up too.

01:10:14.000 When they mated with us, the progeny were not killed.

01:10:17.000 The progeny grew up to become members of the tribe.

01:10:20.000 And so you realize that they're closer to us than we realize.

01:10:25.000 Yeah, you couldn't put that in a zoo, but I mean, what would you do?

01:10:28.000 Would you have that young boy and have him compete with Homo sapiens?

01:10:31.000 I mean, would it be the same?

01:10:33.000 Would it be able to...

01:10:35.000 We don't know.

01:10:35.000 There would be a crazy experiment that I think most people would think would be very unethical.

01:10:39.000 Yeah, but there's an ethics involved.

01:10:41.000 Same thing, once we have robots that can feel pain, then there's another ethical issue of do you want to have robots exposed to pain?

01:10:49.000 What happens if robots then demand rights?

01:10:52.000 Rights to limit the amount of pain that they suffer carrying out tasks for a human being.

01:10:58.000 Because remember, we're going to be asking robots to do all sorts of tasks which are dangerous.

01:11:02.000 That's why we've invented them.

01:11:04.000 And, you know, they may feel pain as a consequence.

01:11:06.000 And then we have to ask ourselves, how far do we want robots to feel pain if they say, I'm hurting.

01:11:13.000 Stop it.

01:11:14.000 I feel pain.

01:11:15.000 Are we going to stop it?

01:11:17.000 Do they have rights?

01:11:18.000 What if they become emotionally attached to you?

01:11:20.000 What if you have a robot that calls you every day when you're on vacation?

01:11:23.000 What if you go to Hawaii and your robot just keeps calling you crying?

01:11:27.000 Michio, come home.

01:11:30.000 I'm by myself.

01:11:31.000 Like, really, what if it becomes attached to you?

01:11:34.000 Well, that's a problem because they're designed to attach to humans.

01:11:37.000 They would be specifically designed to be friendly to humans so that we don't junk them, and they would be designed to be emotionally attachable to us.

01:11:46.000 So yeah, that's going to be a question once we get separated from them, then they're going to want not to be separated because their whole existence revolves around their relationship to us, the Master.

01:11:57.000 Have you ever seen Prometheus?

01:11:59.000 No.

01:11:59.000 Was it Prometheus or was it the next one where it shows the guy who created the robot and he created this super intelligent robot and this super intelligent robot that plays piano and talks to him and serves him basically.

01:12:12.000 And the robot's trying to figure out...

01:12:15.000 The robot is eventually...

01:12:16.000 I believe it kills him.

01:12:18.000 Trying to figure out, like, how this imperfect thing has created him. 1.00

01:12:22.000 And he's so much more superior than this stupid biological thing that's telling him what to do. 0.98

01:12:28.000 So what happens at the end? 0.99

01:12:30.000 Well, that is a...

01:12:32.000 No, that's not Prometheus.

01:12:33.000 You know what it is?

01:12:33.000 It's the next one.

01:12:35.000 What's the one with Jussie Smoulette in it?

01:12:41.000 Covenant.

01:12:41.000 Alien Covenant.

01:12:42.000 Yeah, I think that's it.

01:12:44.000 I think that's the one.

01:12:45.000 Well, these...

01:12:46.000 No, maybe I'm wrong.

01:12:48.000 No, I think you're right.

01:12:48.000 I'm looking at it.

01:12:49.000 Is it Covenant?

01:12:49.000 Yeah.

01:12:49.000 I was saying both movies and I typed it in.

01:12:52.000 These...

01:12:52.000 One of the robots is good and one of the robots is evil.

01:12:56.000 I don't want to spoiler alert or anything, but the evil one wins.

01:12:59.000 And the evil one has stayed on this planet and has been manipulating the genetics of this crazy alien thing and integrating them with human genetics.

01:13:10.000 It's an amazing movie.

01:13:11.000 It's a very under-looked movie.

01:13:13.000 It's one of the best of the Alien franchises and one of the most sophisticated of the Alien franchises.

01:13:19.000 So what happens at the end?

01:13:20.000 The robots take over or what?

01:13:22.000 Well, it's open interpretation.

01:13:25.000 But that's the robot and that's the creator.

01:13:28.000 I am your father.

01:13:29.000 You are my creation.

01:13:30.000 Here, give me some volume on this so you can hear this.

01:13:33.000 If you created me, who created you?

01:13:38.000 Where do it come from?

01:13:41.000 The question of the ages.

01:13:44.000 Which I hope you and I will answer one day.

01:13:48.000 Prometheus raised a question.

01:13:49.000 You know what's interesting about these science fiction movies?

01:13:52.000 They never have the internet.

01:13:53.000 They never have cell phones.

01:13:55.000 Watch a science fiction movie.

01:13:56.000 No one's on their phone.

01:13:57.000 No one is checking their tweets.

01:13:59.000 It's very interesting, right?

01:14:02.000 Like our version of what space is like is essentially like the Wild West, but accelerated with modern and super modern technology, but doesn't include all the things that brought us to where we are right now at the cusp of being able to travel intergalactically.

01:14:17.000 Isn't it interesting?

01:14:19.000 They never have all the stuff that we have.

01:14:21.000 They have the rocket ships that we have, no cell phones.

01:14:24.000 They're not checking their email.

01:14:25.000 They're not calling each other up.

01:14:27.000 They only communicate with people that are right in front of them, or they're pressing on a thing.

01:14:32.000 They're talking through their helmets to the spaceship.

01:14:35.000 Normal interaction is just human to human.

01:14:37.000 Well, in the future, the connection to the internet could be in your contact lens.

01:14:43.000 Yeah, or in your head.

01:14:44.000 You simply blink, or perhaps mentally, you simply think or blink, and there you are, connected to the internet.

01:14:51.000 So, maybe in the future, if they are connected to the internet, you just can't see it.

01:14:55.000 Yeah, but they're not even talking about it.

01:14:57.000 They're only interacting like humans interact, one-to-one.

01:15:01.000 Are you following Neuralink at all and these similar types of technologies?

01:15:07.000 No.

01:15:07.000 Oh, you mean the company?

01:15:08.000 Neuralink.

01:15:09.000 Neuralink, the Elon Musk invention.

01:15:11.000 That's right.

01:15:11.000 I've been following the work.

01:15:12.000 Yeah.

01:15:13.000 They have a long ways to go, but they're making the initial stages of connecting to the brain.

01:15:17.000 This is BMI, Brain Machine Interface.

01:15:21.000 And yeah, pretty soon, also, you know, at the soccer games in Brazil a few years ago, the man who kicked the football initiating the World Cup soccer games was totally paralyzed.

01:15:34.000 He was at Johns Hopkins University.

01:15:36.000 They created a bodysuit connected to his brain so that he could walk.

01:15:43.000 Whoa, like an exoskeleton.

01:15:44.000 Yeah.

01:15:45.000 So he was basically Iron Man, an exoskeleton.

01:15:49.000 And there he was, initiating the soccer games in Brazil, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

01:15:53.000 We can see this here.

01:15:53.000 Wow, this is crazy.

01:15:54.000 Yeah, there he is.

01:15:55.000 This is crazy.

01:15:56.000 He kicked the soccer ball.

01:15:57.000 And it was hooked up by Johns Hopkins University—Duke University, I'm sorry.

01:16:02.000 And that's a big, very bulky thing.

01:16:05.000 But you could imagine, as technology improves, that would also—it could become like a thin exoskeleton.

01:16:10.000 That's right.

01:16:11.000 Or that was one of the ideas about Neuralink, is that it would be able to bypass the human nervous system and control the muscles with some other method.

01:16:20.000 Right.

01:16:21.000 And so instead of—if you have a severed spinal cord, it would somehow or another be able to control the bottom half of your body.

01:16:27.000 Right.

01:16:28.000 Which is amazing.

01:16:29.000 Yeah.

01:16:30.000 So this already exists that we can take people that have been paralyzed because of war, disease, accidents with an injury to the spinal cord and just bypass the spinal cord totally and have the brain connected directly.

01:16:42.000 And also you can get people that can actually eventually talk, talk to a computer, of course, and And answer the internet, engage in dialogue, even though you're totally paralyzed.

01:16:57.000 Wow.

01:16:57.000 And with quantum computing, when we're talking about Neuralink, you're talking about some sort of a conventional attachment.

01:17:06.000 Is it possible that quantum computing could scale down to the size where you could be able to put it in someone's head?

01:17:12.000 That may be difficult because the computer itself is pretty big, but the connection of the computer to the human could be very tiny.

01:17:22.000 It could be as small as you want.

01:17:23.000 But the computer itself is huge.

01:17:26.000 So is it comparable to the computers they used in the Apollo mission, which were this enormous room, and now you have more of that on your cell phone.

01:17:34.000 More computing power on your cell phone than had in 1963 in a giant room filled with computers.

01:17:41.000 Yeah, what you have today in your cell phone is more powerful than all of NASA when they put a man on the moon.

01:17:47.000 All those computers that you saw in those videotapes, your cell phone has more computer power than all of them.

01:17:52.000 So is that possible?

01:17:53.000 The quantum computing could also scale like that?

01:17:57.000 I think the quantum computer, because of the hardware necessary to bring it down to near absolute zero, would simply be huge.

01:18:04.000 You'd be like a chandelier, but...

01:18:06.000 When you're saying absolute zero, you mean temperature?

01:18:07.000 Temperature near absolute zero, right?

01:18:09.000 So zero vibrations.

01:18:11.000 You don't want any interference with the code because these are atoms.

01:18:15.000 Atoms in the slightest little disturbance can knock these atoms out of coherence.

01:18:19.000 So you want these atoms to vibrate in unison and that's why you have to cool it down to your absolute zero.

01:18:24.000 But the connection of the quantum computer to a human could be as small as you want.

01:18:29.000 Now, when you're saying vibrations, what about, like, what if you're in a building and a truck drives by?

01:18:34.000 That's a problem.

01:18:35.000 Really?

01:18:36.000 That's one of the problems, that, you know, if something happens a block away, yeah, you see how awkward these...

01:18:41.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:18:42.000 That's the cooling system.

01:18:43.000 All the chandelier-like ornaments, these are the pipes, the cooling pipes for the quantum computer.

01:18:52.000 The quantum computer itself is only, you know, this big.

01:18:55.000 About the size of a quarter.

01:18:57.000 Look how cool that is.

01:18:58.000 That's a cooling system.

01:18:59.000 That's amazing.

01:19:01.000 That's what it takes to cool it down.

01:19:02.000 At the very bottom, you see the actual quantum computer at the very bottom.

01:19:07.000 That little thing at the bottom.

01:19:08.000 Yeah.

01:19:08.000 That's it.

01:19:09.000 So in the future, when we communicate with a quantum computer, the quantum computer will be in the cloud.

01:19:14.000 You won't even see it.

01:19:15.000 Right.

01:19:16.000 Your connection will connect to that object in the cloud.

01:19:20.000 So if the internet is in your contact lens, you blink and then you're connected to that via your contact lens.

01:19:27.000 You never see the quantum computer.

01:19:29.000 So that little thing at the bottom is quantum computer.

01:19:31.000 Yeah, at the very bottom, that's where the computation actually takes place.

01:19:35.000 So does it have to take place because it's subject to vibrations and any disturbance?

01:19:39.000 That's right.

01:19:40.000 Does it have to take place in some insanely reinforced building?

01:19:42.000 That's right.

01:19:44.000 Something new has to be constructed, or they've done this already?

01:19:48.000 They've done it already, but it's something that you have to be very careful of, because if a truck goes by, there goes your calculation, right?

01:19:54.000 Do you have to have, I would imagine they would have to have, some sort of measurement devices that make sure there's no external vibration or sound?

01:20:02.000 That's right, right.

01:20:02.000 Now, the irony is Mother Nature creates quantum computers at room temperature.

01:20:07.000 Photosynthesis of a leaf, a simple leaf, it does a quantum calculation, converting photons, carbon dioxide into oxygen.

01:20:14.000 That's what we call, you know, the beginning of life on the Earth with a flower.

01:20:20.000 So Mother Nature has solved that problem. 1.00

01:20:22.000 Mother Nature has room temperature superconduct, room temperature quantum computers.

01:20:26.000 We don't have that yet, but we're working on it.

01:20:29.000 So if Mother Nature can do it, and we can come up with quantum computing, and we can figure out how Mother Nature's doing it, maybe through the God equation, we could reproduce it.

01:20:40.000 Then we could probably have small quantum computers, right?

01:20:43.000 Like I said, a leaf.

01:20:45.000 A leaf is a quantum device.

01:20:48.000 And to create fertilizer requires a huge plant, for example.

01:20:53.000 Nature does it with a simple legume.

01:20:56.000 The branches of the roots of a legume create the ingredients for fertilizer.

01:21:01.000 A plant does it.

01:21:02.000 Naturally, at room temperature, it takes us a gigantic, huge chemical plant to create fertilizer.

01:21:08.000 Mother Nature does it with a small little plant. 0.98

01:21:11.000 So Mother Nature is ahead of us.

01:21:14.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:21:16.000 Have you ever studied the connection between fungus and soil?

01:21:21.000 I think I just screwed something up with the microphone, Jamie.

01:21:30.000 My mic just cut out.

01:21:31.000 Oh, it's back.

01:21:32.000 There it is.

01:21:32.000 I stepped on this cable.

01:21:34.000 I think I disconnected it.

01:21:35.000 Have you ever studied all the science that's being done on the way plants communicate with each other through the soil and through fungus and mycelium?

01:21:46.000 No.

01:21:46.000 It's fascinating stuff.

01:21:48.000 They allocate resources to plants that need them more, to trees that need them more.

01:21:53.000 They seem to have...

01:21:54.000 Communal? 0.61

01:21:55.000 Yeah, they seem to have some sort of a shared information network that we don't totally understand.

01:22:01.000 Maybe you can find something on it.

01:22:02.000 But it's, I mean, I think relatively recently understood and just basically understood over the last few decades.

01:22:10.000 But people like Paul Stamets, who's a mycologist, has been studying this type of stuff.

01:22:15.000 And it's really amazing.

01:22:17.000 Like there's some sort of intelligence to it, the way it works.

01:22:20.000 As I say, underground networking, the amazing connections beneath your feet.

01:22:27.000 Well, maybe evolution went in the direction of interconnection because maybe the survival value was higher if you connected these things.

01:22:35.000 Scroll down, Jamie, right there.

01:22:37.000 So this is what it's saying.

01:22:40.000 When most of us think of fungus, we imagine mushrooms sprouting out of the ground.

01:22:43.000 These mushrooms are, in fact, the fruit of the fungus, while the majority of the fungal organism lives in the soil interwoven with the tree roots as a vast network of mycelium.

01:22:52.000 Mycelium are incredibly tiny threads of the greater fungal organism that wraps around or bore into tree roots.

01:23:01.000 Taken together, mycelium composes what's called a mycorrhizal network, which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon, and other minerals.

01:23:11.000 German forester Peter Wallen dub this network the Wood Wide Web.

01:23:20.000 As it is through the mycelium, the trees communicate.

01:23:23.000 This is really, really fascinating stuff.

01:23:26.000 Because we just think of soil as something that the tree pulls nutrients from.

01:23:31.000 But no, they're communicating.

01:23:33.000 They're connected with each other in the forest.

01:23:36.000 Well, realize that when you have a chemical process involving life, you are in some sense looking at a quantum computer.

01:23:42.000 It's doing a quantum calculation.

01:23:45.000 It's taking nutrients from the soil, nutrients from the air, combining it to create cellulose or whatever it's made of.

01:23:52.000 And so we're talking about something that we cannot duplicate without gigantic devices looking like a chandelier.

01:23:59.000 Mother Nature can do it with a root. 1.00

01:24:01.000 Yeah.

01:24:02.000 It can do it with everything.

01:24:04.000 It seems to be...in insects, it seems to...there's like a code to it, which is why your idea about there being this God calculation is so fascinating.

01:24:15.000 It seems like it just moves in a very certain way, and it's all connected to each other in some way that we're, as human beings, just sort of starting to understand.

01:24:27.000 Well, there is a theory that says that the Big Bang went in a direction compatible to life, and that other universes may not be compatible with life.

01:24:36.000 They may be lifeless collections of electrons and neutrinos, for example.

01:24:40.000 But our universe is special.

01:24:42.000 Our universe has stable protons, out of which you could create atoms, out of which you could create DNA, out of which you can create people.

01:24:51.000 How many universes have that property?

01:24:53.000 So string theory, for example, gives you other universes which are probably dead universes, universes which have no life.

01:25:00.000 But our universe has stable protons, stable DNA, stable forms of life.

01:25:05.000 So our universe is rare.

01:25:07.000 So this is called the anthropic principle, the feeling that our life is not random.

01:25:14.000 Our universe is special.

01:25:16.000 Our universe is special in the sense that it didn't have to have life, but it does.

01:25:21.000 And life in a spectacular array of diversity.

01:25:24.000 So our universe really is special.

01:25:27.000 But is it special because we don't know of any other universes?

01:25:31.000 Yeah, but the other universes that we played with, mathematically speaking, are not compatible with life.

01:25:37.000 Stars burn out too quickly.

01:25:41.000 Galaxies simply fall apart.

01:25:43.000 Protons disintegrate.

01:25:45.000 It's very hard to create a universe which is stable.

01:25:48.000 So some people think that our universe is special among all the different kinds of universes, that our universe is unique because it's compatible with stable protons and DNA. But it's hard for most people to even...

01:26:02.000 Grasp the concept of other types of universes or other universes, period.

01:26:07.000 Or the fact there may be an infinite number of universes.

01:26:10.000 Well, that's the multiverse.

01:26:11.000 String theory probably has an infinite number of possible universes.

01:26:14.000 We are probably the only one that has life in them.

01:26:18.000 We're not sure about that, of course.

01:26:20.000 But these other universes are collections of dead subatomic particles, a mist, a floating mist of dead subatomic particles that don't do anything.

01:26:29.000 If the proton were not stable, then our universe also would be like that.

01:26:34.000 Our universe would disintegrate almost instantly.

01:26:37.000 The fact that our proton is stable is quite remarkable.

01:26:40.000 Do you believe that that's unusual?

01:26:42.000 Unusual.

01:26:43.000 In fact, maybe unique.

01:26:45.000 There are probably very few universes with stable protons.

01:26:48.000 You see, string theory gives you many, many diverse solutions.

01:26:51.000 So we can actually look at these other alternate universes and we see that they're not compatible with life.

01:26:57.000 And why do you think that if the proton is stable here?

01:27:04.000 What would it be about these other universes?

01:27:06.000 Like what qualities would they possess where it wouldn't be stable there?

01:27:10.000 Everything would decay.

01:27:11.000 Decay down to electrons and neutrinos.

01:27:14.000 So it would be a gas, a cloud of electrons and neutrinos, which are the lowest state of matter.

01:27:20.000 You can't get any lower than an electron and neutrino.

01:27:23.000 That's the lowest state.

01:27:24.000 So these universes would basically disintegrate.

01:27:26.000 They would fall apart into a cloud of neutrinos and electrons.

01:27:30.000 Our universe has stable protons, out of which you can create elements, out of which you could create DNA, out of which you can create life.

01:27:38.000 That's a miracle!

01:27:40.000 So it's just because of these calculations that you've done where it says if the universe had different properties, you would think that this is rare.

01:27:48.000 Very rare.

01:27:49.000 Because there's so many other possibilities of how the universe could...

01:27:52.000 If stars burned out more quickly, for example, because the nuclear force were stronger, stars would never ignite.

01:27:58.000 If the nuclear force were weaker, stars would never form to begin with.

01:28:03.000 If gravity were too strong, we would have had a big crunch and we'd all die in a gigantic fireball.

01:28:08.000 If gravity were too weak, we'd all freeze to death because we would have a big crunch, a big freeze.

01:28:14.000 So all the parameters of the universe are tuned just right to allow for life.

01:28:20.000 Wow.

01:28:20.000 Now, there's two ways of looking at it.

01:28:22.000 One way that some physicists have proposed is that we are the crowning achievement.

01:28:27.000 We are the only universe that's stable, that has life, that has diversity, that creates life.

01:28:33.000 The other possibility is that there are just lots of dead universes.

01:28:37.000 And we just won the crapshoot.

01:28:39.000 Doesn't that possibility jive more with the state of the universe as we understand it?

01:28:43.000 Because we're always looking for these Goldilocks planets, which are very rare, which may inhabit life or may have life on it.

01:28:49.000 But we look at our own solar system and there's just us.

01:28:51.000 In other words, there could be a Goldilocks zone for universes.

01:28:55.000 Yes, just like there is for planets.

01:28:56.000 The Goldilocks zone for solar systems, of course, is the Earth is not too far from the Sun, not too close.

01:29:01.000 But we could be in the Goldilocks zone of possible universes.

01:29:05.000 And that's why we're here today, to talk about it.

01:29:08.000 But there also could be an infinite number of universes like ours, and also an infinite number of universes that are completely incompatible for life.

01:29:16.000 That's right.

01:29:18.000 This is what I do for a living.

01:29:20.000 Ah!

01:29:22.000 We work in the multiverse.

01:29:24.000 Yeah, no wonder why you don't watch YouTube.

01:29:26.000 Do you have time for recreation?

01:29:28.000 Do you do stuff outside of physicists or stuff?

01:29:32.000 Well, I like to figure skate.

01:29:35.000 Really?

01:29:36.000 Yeah.

01:29:37.000 Oh, in the wintertime?

01:29:37.000 You go down to the Central Park and dance around?

01:29:40.000 I used to skate at Rockefeller Center all the time.

01:29:42.000 Yeah?

01:29:43.000 Yeah.

01:29:43.000 I like to spin and jump.

01:29:45.000 That's great exercise.

01:29:46.000 Yeah, it's all Newtonian physics at work.

01:29:48.000 Ah, of course you like it for that reason.

01:29:53.000 So that's your hobby?

01:29:54.000 Yeah, that's my hobby.

01:29:55.000 And other than that, you're just constantly thinking about these things.

01:29:59.000 Yeah, but again, it's fun.

01:30:01.000 I mean, to me, this is what I wanted to do when I was eight years old.

01:30:04.000 When I was eight years old, I said, this is for me.

01:30:06.000 Oh, your passion is very, very clear.

01:30:08.000 And it's one of the things that makes you such a great science educator, is that you have such enthusiasm for these subjects, and they're so interesting to you that it becomes interesting to other people.

01:30:18.000 In a sense, people like you are so important for the discussion because it ignites inspiration the same way Einstein ignited inspiration in you by seeing that photograph of his desk.

01:30:32.000 These kind of speeches that you do and these conversations that you have with people, for a person like myself that doesn't study these things, it gives me the chance to delve into how your perspective is and just to look at it through your mind.

01:30:46.000 Right.

01:30:46.000 And for me, it's hard to believe how a person could not be thrilled when they learned about the Big Bang, they learned about strength theory, they learned about parallel universes and wormholes.

01:30:58.000 For me, it's incredible that some people are not thrilled by something like this.

01:31:04.000 Do you ever think about technology and its capabilities and intelligence and extrapolate as far as possible?

01:31:14.000 And think we are essentially going to become something akin to a god or whatever we become will become something akin to a god.

01:31:23.000 If we don't get killed by a natural disaster or our own stupidity and you accelerate time 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 years ahead of us, what do you anticipate we'll be like? 0.66

01:31:35.000 I think about that a lot because we talked about type 1, type 2, type 3. By the time you are a type 3 civilization, you have the energy to manipulate the Planck energy. 0.96

01:31:46.000 The Planck energy is the ultimate energy of the universe, of the quantum theory.

01:31:51.000 You take the quantum theory and relativity and scale it up all the way, just let it rip.

01:31:56.000 What is the highest energy you can attain and then something new happens?

01:32:00.000 That's called the Planck energy.

01:32:02.000 It's a quadrillion times more powerful than our biggest atom smasher in Geneva, Switzerland.

01:32:07.000 At that point, space becomes unstable.

01:32:11.000 We think of empty space being stable.

01:32:13.000 Of course, how can you do anything with empty space, right?

01:32:16.000 It just sits there, does nothing.

01:32:18.000 But when you start to boil space, When you start to boil space to the Planck temperature, all of a sudden it becomes unstable.

01:32:27.000 Bubbles begin to form.

01:32:29.000 And these bubbles are gateways to other universes.

01:32:32.000 These are baby wormholes to other universes.

01:32:36.000 We think that our universe was one of these.

01:32:39.000 Most of these universes, like boiling water, pop out of existence and they pop back in.

01:32:44.000 They never get anywhere.

01:32:45.000 But one of these bubbles kept on going, and that became our universe.

01:32:51.000 Our universe was created because empty space was heated to the Planck energy, and at that point, space itself began to boil.

01:33:00.000 And the boiling of space created the universe.

01:33:04.000 That's where the universe itself came from.

01:33:07.000 Is it possible that human beings or whatever we're going to become could eventually someday attain the type of power?

01:33:15.000 That's right.

01:33:15.000 We've looked at that.

01:33:16.000 In fact, there are people, friends of mine at MIT who have written papers about what it would take to become a god.

01:33:23.000 We realized that if you could attain the Planck energy in a box, let's say, somehow, a bubble would form a gateway to another universe.

01:33:32.000 It would expand.

01:33:34.000 It would expand rapidly.

01:33:35.000 And you have to be very careful.

01:33:38.000 If it expands too rapidly, it has a force of, I think, a 10 kiloton atomic bomb.

01:33:43.000 So you have to be out of the way when this thing explodes.

01:33:46.000 But then it simply peels off and creates another universe.

01:33:50.000 And then it disappears.

01:33:52.000 Like a balloon, like a piece of a balloon that pinches off.

01:33:55.000 If you're on the first part of the balloon, you never see the second part of the balloon.

01:33:59.000 The second part of the balloon has peeled off to create a baby universe.

01:34:03.000 Wow.

01:34:03.000 Okay?

01:34:04.000 So these are called baby universes.

01:34:06.000 And who's written about these things?

01:34:08.000 Stephen Hawking.

01:34:09.000 Stephen Hawking wrote about baby universes that if you could boil space, heat space up to the Planck energy, Space becomes unstable, bubbles form, and these bubbles, one of these bubbles may just keep on expanding to create another universe.

01:34:26.000 We wouldn't have access to this universe.

01:34:29.000 No, it would peel off, just like a balloon.

01:34:31.000 The second part of the balloon peels off from the first part and the two separate.

01:34:36.000 The two separate.

01:34:37.000 The only way to get reconnected is to a wormhole.

01:34:40.000 But that, of course, is a whole other story.

01:34:42.000 But that would be a possibility of recreating a link between our universe and another universe.

01:34:48.000 So we could potentially create one of these mini universes.

01:34:52.000 That's right.

01:34:52.000 And this mini universe would exist in a completely different place.

01:34:55.000 That's right.

01:34:56.000 So we've done the calculation.

01:34:58.000 And as I said, it could be a little bit dangerous to make sure that the explosion doesn't kill you in the process.

01:35:07.000 But yeah, this is what it would take to create a baby universe.

01:35:10.000 We call this the inflationary theory because the other balloon inflated rapidly.

01:35:15.000 So this is part of what is called the inflationary universe.

01:35:18.000 And believe it or not, this is the dominant theory of Genesis.

01:35:23.000 Where did Genesis come from?

01:35:25.000 We think it came from this balloon that empty space boiled.

01:35:30.000 Empty space then created a pocket that then expanded and then peeled off from our universe.

01:35:36.000 This is called the inflationary universe theory, which is the dominant theory in quantum cosmology.

01:35:42.000 Have you ever considered the possibility that that is ultimately how the universe gets created in the first place?

01:35:50.000 That intelligent life forms reach this capability?

01:35:53.000 Well, we're not sure about the intelligent life form, but we think that this is how our universe got created.

01:35:58.000 That our universe was a bubble floating with other bubbles.

01:36:03.000 These other bubbles went back into the vacuum.

01:36:06.000 Our bubble just kept on going and became our universe.

01:36:12.000 But what I'm saying is, imagine if that process was initiated by a super-intelligent life form always.

01:36:20.000 Sort of like how a bee makes a beehive.

01:36:23.000 What if humans make the universe, or whatever we become makes the universe?

01:36:27.000 That's right.

01:36:28.000 We've done the calculation, actually, of what it would take for a human to then create something like this.

01:36:34.000 Step one is you have to have power on the scale of the Planck energy.

01:36:39.000 And the Planck energy is the biggest number that you can possibly imagine.

01:36:43.000 But it is the number at which space becomes unstable.

01:36:46.000 And that's the point at which this bubble then starts to expand.

01:36:51.000 So you've played around with these ideas.

01:36:52.000 That's right.

01:36:53.000 They're published.

01:36:54.000 They're published in Physical Review magazine.

01:36:57.000 This idea that we'll stay static, that we are what we are right now and that's just what humans are and that's just how it is, that seems like that's—whatever we are right now, it seems like this is real temporary.

01:37:12.000 And I think we're probably the last of our species to experience life not being some sort of a cyborg.

01:37:22.000 Possible.

01:37:23.000 I mean, given the fact that throughout history, we've played with our appearance, we play with our bodies, makeup and tattoos, perfumes.

01:37:33.000 We try to alter ourselves constantly because we want to increase our reproductive value so we get a better maid, a better wife, a better husband. 0.86

01:37:42.000 So we try to build up our muscles and wear makeup and so on and so forth.

01:37:47.000 We've done this forever.

01:37:48.000 The next step is to alter not just our tattoos, but to actually alter who we are.

01:37:55.000 That's the next step.

01:37:57.000 And that's coming, I think.

01:37:59.000 Because we're going to want to enhance ourselves.

01:38:01.000 Yeah.

01:38:02.000 Well, what I worry is that one day we're going to realize that a lot of our problems stem from being human.

01:38:08.000 A lot of our problems stem from our biological needs.

01:38:11.000 And if you look at these iconic images of aliens, they're always genderless, like these weird spindly things that have no use for their muscles other than to just move them around. 0.93

01:38:24.000 That's what I really worry about.

01:38:25.000 I really worry that we're going to realize like the only way to really achieve this type 2, type 3 civilization is we have to stop being human.

01:38:34.000 I hope not.

01:38:37.000 But doesn't it seem like what we have and what we love about people, what we love about people, emotions and creativity and love and romance and all those great things and fun and excitement, those are all just biological stuff.

01:38:52.000 Like, it really kind of gets in the way of progress in some ways.

01:38:56.000 But what's wrong with that?

01:38:57.000 What's wrong with being biological?

01:38:58.000 What's wrong with feeling joy and emotions and things like that?

01:39:01.000 Nothing, but it can conflict you and it can get in the way of the greater work.

01:39:04.000 If you're working on plunk energy and you're trying to create little mini universes, you have no time to be horny.

01:39:10.000 You have no time to be sad.

01:39:12.000 If all that can be eliminated.

01:39:14.000 If we have all the problems that people have today, whether it's depression or anxiety, And if all that can be eliminated forever, we never have to worry about negative emotions anymore.

01:39:22.000 You can be productive.

01:39:23.000 You can interact with people telepathically.

01:39:27.000 But I think you'd also be sterile, too.

01:39:29.000 Probably.

01:39:30.000 If there's no emotion to excite you to want to do something, to want to do something great, to do something that makes a difference, that takes a lot of energy.

01:39:40.000 It takes a lot of mental power.

01:39:42.000 It takes a lot of emotional commitment.

01:39:44.000 And that's what keeps the world going.

01:39:46.000 There's always somebody out there that wants to be better, to create a better world, to open up new pathways.

01:39:52.000 And that requires a commitment of energy on that person's life.

01:39:58.000 And that's not easy.

01:39:59.000 But isn't that just a drive that's inherent to human beings that causes us to seek technological innovation?

01:40:07.000 We're always pushing the boundaries of everything.

01:40:09.000 We're always trying to get better at everything, whatever we do.

01:40:12.000 But isn't that, like, the ultimate expression of that is technological innovation.

01:40:16.000 And the ultimate technological innovation would probably bypass all of our biological shortcomings.

01:40:25.000 Why?

01:40:26.000 But sometimes our biological shortcomings is the reason why we like to live.

01:40:30.000 Sure, but if you have like a jealous deity, that seems silly. 0.77

01:40:34.000 You know, if you have a god that gets horny all the time and is jealous. 0.95

01:40:39.000 Like a Greek god. 0.94

01:40:40.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:40:41.000 Or is greedy.

01:40:43.000 Or is, you know...

01:40:46.000 Well, I would hope that we keep our basic foundational structure of wants and needs intact.

01:40:53.000 But the rough edges, I would hope that the rough edges could be ironed out collectively.

01:40:59.000 And I think in a democracy, that's one way to iron out the deficiencies within human behavior.

01:41:05.000 Human behavior is a byproduct of evolution.

01:41:08.000 Evolution was survival of the fittest.

01:41:09.000 So it meant that we had to become, at some point, cruel to other people.

01:41:15.000 So that's part of our history.

01:41:18.000 But it didn't have to be that way when we have technology.

01:41:21.000 With the coming of technology, there's no reason to have to go to war, to have to kill people and to dominate other people.

01:41:30.000 There's no purpose of that.

01:41:31.000 Unless you do it to control the technology.

01:41:34.000 Unless you're the person that came up with the quantum computer first and you realize the only way I'm going to be able to dominate is if I enslave these people now.

01:41:42.000 I got to move on it now.

01:41:44.000 Well, that's a problem.

01:41:45.000 I mean, there is a race to create the quantum computer.

01:41:47.000 We are in a race.

01:41:48.000 The Chinese, IBM, Google, Microsoft, they're all in the game.

01:41:53.000 They've all thrown the dice and they say this is the way to go.

01:41:56.000 And so there's going to be competition.

01:41:59.000 I'm sure.

01:41:59.000 And there's going to be, you know, blood on the floor when it comes down to marketing these things and beating out the competition and giving the best-priced quantum computer to the average consumer.

01:42:12.000 Yeah, there's going to be competition involved.

01:42:14.000 I think, socially, the Internet has brought about great change and it's changed the way humans interact with each other.

01:42:21.000 We already talked about how we're sharing culture.

01:42:22.000 Do you think that something like quantum computing could also have Maybe like a secondary sort of a result where it elevates human consciousness as well.

01:42:36.000 Because its computational power and its ability to change reality as we know it is so extreme that all of our petty nonsense that we have with various civilizations warring against each other and all that stuff will seem absolutely ridiculous.

01:42:54.000 Given the ability that we now have technologically and that we won't be existing in this feast or famine world.

01:43:01.000 Well, you know, the world we live in is digital.

01:43:03.000 The world of the future will be quantum and neural.

01:43:08.000 That is, we're going to have a combination of quantum computers and neural computers, but digital computers will be left in the dust.

01:43:17.000 We're not going to compute on zeros and ones, zeros and ones anymore.

01:43:20.000 We're going to compute on neurons, and we're going to compute on quantum atoms.

01:43:26.000 And at that point, they may merge.

01:43:29.000 At that point, the brain may be connected to a quantum computer, enhancing our ability to do calculations, for example.

01:43:36.000 And do you think that could have a secondary effect on civilization?

01:43:40.000 I do think, as many problems as we have with the internet, I think it's changed the world for the better.

01:43:46.000 I really do.

01:43:47.000 It's certainly changed our understanding of things.

01:43:49.000 Our access to information, our ability to discern what is and isn't going on in the world.

01:43:55.000 If something along the lines of quantum computing, what kind of calculation, how much more powerful is it than the greatest computer we have currently?

01:44:06.000 A few million times.

01:44:08.000 Like, imagine that.

01:44:09.000 I mean, and in application, if that gets used by people, that could be the thing that gets us out of this, theoretically.

01:44:19.000 Yeah, we're talking about virtual chemistry, virtual biology, things in the memory of a computer that we cannot model with zeros and ones, zeros and ones.

01:44:30.000 With zeros and ones, you cannot model a disease, for example.

01:44:33.000 No way.

01:44:34.000 With quantum computers, that's why we build them precisely so that we can model molecules of germs and understand how they operate.

01:44:42.000 So, yeah, we're talking about a whole new era.

01:44:45.000 Now, however, I think the main impact of the Internet has been to enforce democracy, that it is a democratic force because people can be educated no matter how poor, no matter where they are, they can be empowered.

01:45:00.000 Power derives from knowledge.

01:45:02.000 And that's what the internet is all about.

01:45:04.000 Now, of course, there's a downside to it, but in the main, I think it's positive.

01:45:08.000 And I think quantum computers will accelerate that whole process.

01:45:12.000 I think so, too.

01:45:14.000 And I wonder if it will lead us to a better world, if it will lead us to a better understanding of each other.

01:45:22.000 Much better understanding of how not to destroy the world in terms of pollute the ocean and solutions for cleaning up the plastic and solutions for whatever issues we might have with power generation.

01:45:36.000 When we can boil that down with a quantum computer and figure out much more efficient, cleaner ways to do things.

01:45:45.000 All the problems that we have in modern society with poverty, with disenfranchised communities and crime, all those things seem like they could be solved.

01:45:57.000 Well, in principle, yes.

01:45:58.000 That's the hope.

01:45:59.000 In principle.

01:45:59.000 That's the best case scenario.

01:46:17.000 And in some sense, become immortal or at least near immortality by being able to conquer incurable diseases.

01:46:24.000 This is all within the possibilities of quantum computers.

01:46:27.000 But for me, one of the biggest impacts is the dissemination of knowledge to give empowerment to the powerless so that we can raise the standard of living of the entire human race.

01:46:40.000 What is the worst case scenario?

01:46:42.000 Worst case scenario is that dictatorships will try to get this technology to break other people's codes, to shatter the connections that exist between different nations and cultures, to increase divisions by,

01:46:58.000 you know, chatbots.

01:47:00.000 They can create nonsense.

01:47:02.000 They can create all sorts of propaganda because they just rearrange what already exists.

01:47:06.000 A dictator could then write all sorts of different kinds of racist and sexist nonsense and have it spread throughout the internet very rapidly.

01:47:15.000 So that's the problem.

01:47:17.000 So it's really important as to who gets it first.

01:47:20.000 That's right.

01:47:21.000 And laws have to be passed so that we rein in some of these things.

01:47:25.000 Democracy arises with conflict with incorrect ideas.

01:47:31.000 That's where correct ideas come from, from interplay with incorrect ideas.

01:47:35.000 But that could be ruined if people try to seize control of chatbots and the internet to flood the internet with nonsense.

01:47:43.000 Who do you think is going to win this?

01:47:45.000 Are you close to this?

01:47:46.000 Are you following or do we even know what these other countries...

01:47:51.000 Well, right now IBM has the lead, but it's like a horse race.

01:47:54.000 The gate has opened.

01:47:56.000 All the horses are lined up and now they're taking off.

01:47:59.000 The Chinese are leading in optical quantum computers using light beams to compute.

01:48:06.000 And IBM is leading in terms of using electrical circuits as the basis of quantum computers.

01:48:13.000 But it changes.

01:48:14.000 You know, every few months there are different advances being made all the time.

01:48:18.000 This is moving exponentially fast.

01:48:22.000 And how do we know where China's at?

01:48:24.000 Do we have an accurate understanding of their ability?

01:48:27.000 Well, they published their results and we can duplicate some of what they do.

01:48:30.000 They're taking a different tact.

01:48:32.000 They're taking the tact of using light beams, calculating on light beams rather than electricity.

01:48:38.000 We're using electricity.

01:48:40.000 And there's some advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.

01:48:45.000 That's fascinating.

01:48:46.000 So we could come up with potentially two parallel solutions.

01:48:49.000 And maybe even more.

01:48:52.000 Anything quantum mechanical could in principle be used to build a quantum computer.

01:48:57.000 And anything you see around you, plants, animals, we all are byproducts of the quantum principle.

01:49:02.000 And so there are many ways of building a quantum computer.

01:49:05.000 But those are the leading ones using electrical circuits and using light beams.

01:49:10.000 How exciting this must be for you to have been that 17 year old boy creating that particle accelerator in your basement and now being at the verge of what is probably one of the biggest changes or the biggest change the human race has ever experienced and you're alive to witness it.

01:49:28.000 That's right.

01:49:29.000 If I were to choose any decade or phase of history to be born in, this would be it.

01:49:36.000 Because we're talking about the fact that, you know, as children, it was black and white TV and vacuum tubes that exploded.

01:49:43.000 It was a lot of nonsense back then.

01:49:46.000 Now we're putting people on the moon regularly.

01:49:49.000 Every year we're going to send people to the moon.

01:49:52.000 And we're talking about unlocking the secrets of life itself through DNA. So this is a great time to be alive.

01:50:00.000 It's a very amazing time for me.

01:50:04.000 I'm 55. How old are you?

01:50:06.000 I just turned 76. Wow, you look great.

01:50:09.000 You really do.

01:50:10.000 You look great for 76. So you're 21 years older than me, so you were alive long before the Internet, and you grew up before the Internet.

01:50:19.000 Was about 27 years old the first time I got on the internet and I'm so lucky I feel so lucky to have grown up without it and to realize because I'm seeing it happen what an immense change it is whereas my children Are growing up having always been on the internet.

01:50:37.000 It's just normal to them.

01:50:38.000 To communicate through cell phones, to be able to get on social media, that is a normal part of life for everyone today.

01:50:44.000 But I and you can remember, and we can really truly appreciate, I think, how great a change this is.

01:50:52.000 Yeah, this is one of the greatest changes in human history.

01:50:54.000 If you were to choose an era of time to be born, this would be it.

01:50:59.000 Do you ever put much thought into simulation theory?

01:51:04.000 You mean like the Matrix?

01:51:05.000 Well, the idea that one day there will be, whether it's through quantum computing or some other unknown, unforeseen technology that creates a reality, an artificial reality that's indiscernible from this reality,

01:51:22.000 from the physical reality that we believe we currently experience.

01:51:25.000 And if that's true, how do we know we're not in it already?

01:51:29.000 Well, to have a perfect replication of reality is impossible.

01:51:35.000 Take a look at the molecules in this room.

01:51:37.000 How many molecules are there?

01:51:40.000 About maybe 10 to the 26th power.

01:51:42.000 One with 26 zeros after it.

01:51:46.000 And to model that many atoms with a digital computer would be impossible.

01:51:52.000 So in other words, the smallest object that can model this room is the room itself.

01:51:58.000 The smallest computer that can model air is the computer itself.

01:52:04.000 There's nothing smaller than this room that can model itself.

01:52:08.000 Now, once you go to quantum computers, it gets worse because the quantum computer computes in parallel universes, not just one universe, but many universes simultaneously.

01:52:19.000 And so a quantum computer could model some of the atoms in this room, but not all of them.

01:52:25.000 Now, that means a perfect representation of reality is impossible.

01:52:30.000 But an approximate simulation may be possible, but a perfect simulation is impossible.

01:52:35.000 But if we're talking about technology as we currently understand it today, in comparison to technology as they had available to them a thousand years ago, what we can do now is insane.

01:52:47.000 And if you're talking about quantum computing, which is almost available today, and then you look a thousand years from now, Couldn't you potentially imagine there could be a world where there's technology sufficient to do what we're talking about, to create a version of reality?

01:53:04.000 Well, if you saw the movie, we're all in pods and we're all connected to a computer that simulates the matrix.

01:53:11.000 As long as you're stimulating a piece of the matrix, not the whole thing, but as you walk from place to place, the computer reassembles a replication of that place.

01:53:21.000 That may be possible, but not the whole Earth with the atmosphere, the weather, and so on and so forth.

01:53:28.000 But if you walk from place to place, if that little pocket of atoms is simulated, then yeah, that may be possible.

01:53:36.000 But what about in the future?

01:53:38.000 If you extrapolate, like, you know, you're not going to use, what is it, Moore's Law?

01:53:43.000 Moore's Law, right.

01:53:44.000 Yeah, that calculates how much greater technology is every year.

01:53:49.000 Doubles every 18 months.

01:53:51.000 When you're talking about quantum computing, what if they use that to come up with something even superior to that a thousand years from now?

01:53:59.000 Could you potentially see a future where some form of life could create a universe?

01:54:05.000 Well, but not on atoms.

01:54:06.000 Maybe subatomic particles.

01:54:09.000 A universe of subatomic particles.

01:54:11.000 Yeah, but most subatomic particles are unstable.

01:54:14.000 The electron is stable.

01:54:15.000 The proton is unstable.

01:54:16.000 But if you can find a way to stabilize some of them, then it may be possible to increase the calculational ability and then create a super quantum computer.

01:54:26.000 But I'm speculating at that point.

01:54:29.000 How much time do you spend thinking about...

01:54:31.000 Do you have to go soon?

01:54:32.000 Do you have a flight?

01:54:33.000 Yeah.

01:54:34.000 Yeah?

01:54:34.000 When do you have to leave?

01:54:35.000 6.30 or so.

01:54:37.000 Oh, you're fine.

01:54:37.000 It's not even 3 o'clock yet.

01:54:39.000 Oh, I'm sorry.

01:54:40.000 I'm sorry.

01:54:41.000 I'm looking at New York time.

01:54:43.000 Sorry about that.

01:54:44.000 No worries.

01:54:45.000 Okay.

01:54:45.000 Yeah.

01:54:45.000 We're pretty close to the airport, too.

01:54:47.000 Where was I? What was I saying?

01:54:50.000 Oh, I was saying that if you're looking at the calculations that we can make right now, And just the amazing progress we've made, it seems like if you keep going, you're going to—it doesn't seem like it's ever going to stop, right?

01:55:05.000 So the potential for power, the potential for having an understanding and the ability to change and manipulate the universe itself, that seems like it's going to eventually be on the table.

01:55:18.000 Yeah, I've thought about that.

01:55:20.000 I mean, the question is, at what point does it stop?

01:55:22.000 We thought it stopped at the transistor.

01:55:24.000 Oh, that's funny.

01:55:26.000 But now we have a billion of them on a chip the size of your fingernail.

01:55:30.000 A billion of them.

01:55:31.000 So, nope, that wasn't a limit.

01:55:33.000 But now we're reaching the atomic limit, so why not compute on atoms?

01:55:37.000 But then what's smaller than an atom?

01:55:40.000 What's smaller than an atom is the nucleus.

01:55:42.000 The nucleus is smaller than an atom.

01:55:44.000 Nucleus is 10 to the minus 13 centimeters.

01:55:47.000 The atom is about 10 to the minus 8 centimeters.

01:55:49.000 So the nucleus is a lot smaller.

01:55:51.000 So these are nuclear devices that we're computing on.

01:55:56.000 That may be possible.

01:55:58.000 So an advanced civilization may have not an atomic computer, but a nuclear computer.

01:56:07.000 And you have to be careful because, of course, you're dealing with nuclear fire at that point.

01:56:11.000 There's a lot of energy packed in that nucleus, as you know from looking at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

01:56:16.000 If I was an alien and I was going to come down and talk to somebody, you'd probably be the first guy I'd talk to.

01:56:20.000 You'd be one of them.

01:56:24.000 How much time do you spend wondering whether or not these things that they keep seeing in the sky, these things the Pentagon reports on and all these people are studying, how much time do you spend thinking about that?

01:56:36.000 Well, I think about it because let's say there's a small chance, a very, very small chance that they are extraterrestrial.

01:56:43.000 That could change world history.

01:56:44.000 That could change everything.

01:56:46.000 Everything we know about the universe could be altered instantly if we have some solid proof.

01:56:51.000 And that's why I tell people that if you've ever been kidnapped by a flying saucer, for God's sake, steal something!

01:56:58.000 Steal something!

01:56:59.000 There's no law against stealing from an extraterrestrial civilization.

01:57:03.000 No law whatsoever.

01:57:05.000 And, you know, you'll have bragging rights.

01:57:07.000 And that'll settle the debate right there.

01:57:10.000 An alien chip, an alien hammer, an alien pencil.

01:57:14.000 That would just end the debate right there.

01:57:16.000 Well, supposedly, depending on whose story you hear, supposedly the government is in possession of things along those lines.

01:57:24.000 Well, yes or no.

01:57:26.000 I mean, I believe in data, data that leads to a definitive yes or no.

01:57:31.000 And here we have no data about secret documents held by the military.

01:57:36.000 Or secret objects.

01:57:37.000 Yeah, maybe, maybe not.

01:57:39.000 But the proof is in the pudding.

01:57:41.000 We have to see it.

01:57:42.000 We have to analyze it.

01:57:43.000 Before then, it's just hearsay and speculation.

01:57:46.000 Could you understand, though, how a government, if they were in possession of something like that, would want to keep it secret?

01:57:52.000 Because the technology is so superior to anything that we have.

01:57:55.000 Just like how we're in this sort of quantum computer race with China, and they have a different method than we do. 0.94

01:57:59.000 What if they have a different method of back-engineering these things?

01:58:03.000 Well, that's conceivable.

01:58:04.000 It's a theory, but there's no hard evidence either way.

01:58:08.000 Some people say that the fact that we have the microchip and the rocket ship means that we stole that technology from the aliens.

01:58:15.000 Well, maybe, but you realize that if you're a scientist and you've been following these developments, you know all the dead ends, you know all the mistakes that were made.

01:58:25.000 And then you realize it was a miracle that we came up with these things.

01:58:28.000 It wasn't given to us.

01:58:30.000 It was a byproduct of trial and error.

01:58:33.000 And whole careers that went into creating the microchip and the wonders of modern technology that we see today.

01:58:39.000 And there's a vast paper trail.

01:58:41.000 Yeah.

01:58:41.000 There's a huge paper trail, right?

01:58:43.000 So I'm not saying that they're wrong.

01:58:45.000 I'm just saying it's not provable.

01:58:47.000 What about the idea that human beings are a product of accelerated evolution?

01:58:51.000 That's the most fascinating UFO theory.

01:58:54.000 Accelerated evolution from what to what?

01:58:56.000 That we are the product of the mixing of genes of some sort of an alien race and lower primates.

01:59:03.000 Well, it's always great to think that we're somehow noble and somehow beyond the other animals and that we're great.

01:59:10.000 But, you know, the proof is in the pudding.

01:59:13.000 Looking at our DNA, we realize that the DNA difference between us and a chimpanzee Was A, the expansion of the brain, B, the dexterity of the fingers, and the vocal cords.

01:59:28.000 So these are the three things that really stand out when you look at chimp genes and then human genes. 0.66

01:59:35.000 And then you realize that, well, that's why we became intelligent.

01:59:38.000 We can vocalize, we can share knowledge from generation to generation.

01:59:42.000 We have a posable thumb with fingers, much more delicate than the fingers of a monkey.

01:59:48.000 And we have eyes, eyes that are stereo so that we can judge distance to the prey.

01:59:54.000 So looking at it genetically, we realized that only three clusters of genes created us.

02:00:01.000 So it's hard to believe that mating with an alien could have done that.

02:00:04.000 Well, I'm not saying mating.

02:00:06.000 I think what the idea is, and obviously, these are not credible ideas.

02:00:10.000 This is just fantastic conspiracy theories.

02:00:13.000 And it's also, there's a lot of really wild stuff.

02:00:17.000 If you read, like, Zechariah Sitchin's work, he was a scholar in ancient languages that translated the Sumerian text, and he believed that the Sumerian text was all telling the story about how humans were a product of accelerated evolution.

02:00:31.000 Well, it's possible, but again, it requires one more step of substantiation.

02:00:38.000 By looking at the internet, you see that there's a continuous line that goes from us to the chimpanzees to the primates, and that a few genes changed here, a few genes here, a few genes there, and bingo!

02:00:52.000 You get a human being.

02:00:53.000 There's also some puzzles though, like the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.

02:00:58.000 Yeah.

02:00:59.000 That's a big puzzle, right?

02:01:00.000 But apparently, just a small cluster of genes was responsible for that, because that's just brain size.

02:01:05.000 So, to increase the cranial size, it only took one or two genes to do that.

02:01:11.000 Now, how the genes then create the brain, of course, we still have yet to work out.

02:01:17.000 But as far as the size of the brain, it only took a few genes to expand the size of the brain.

02:01:23.000 What reason would the Neanderthal have a larger brain than us?

02:01:29.000 Well, a larger brain does not necessarily mean intelligence, because there are animals which have bigger brains than us.

02:01:35.000 I think the porpoise, for example, has a very large brain.

02:01:38.000 So size is not everything when it comes to intelligence.

02:01:43.000 I think what's more important is the ability to see the future.

02:01:47.000 The ability to imagine alternate worlds that don't exist.

02:01:50.000 That's what the prefrontal cortex does and that's what separates us from the animals.

02:01:55.000 Animals do not have a time machine.

02:01:57.000 We have a time machine in the front of our head.

02:02:00.000 Is it possible that that's just intelligence as we're measuring it in our ability to manipulate our environment and that maybe the intelligence that the dolphins experience?

02:02:08.000 Because they do have a cerebral cortex that's 40% larger than human beings, that maybe what they're experiencing is a different kind of intelligence, maybe a communal intelligence, maybe some sort of shared telepathy or something that allows them to communicate in a way that we're not capable of.

02:02:25.000 A different kind of intelligence.

02:02:27.000 Right.

02:02:27.000 But, you know, my attitude is that what does intelligence do?

02:02:31.000 Intelligence allows us to create a model, a model of where we are with regards to the environment, other animals, danger, and so on and so forth, and then the ability to see the future.

02:02:42.000 That, to me, is intelligence.

02:02:44.000 To understand what you're in and then extrapolate it into the future.

02:02:50.000 That takes a lot of brain power.

02:02:52.000 Animals can't do that.

02:02:53.000 No, they definitely can't.

02:02:53.000 To create imaginary worlds that don't exist.

02:02:57.000 And then on an MRI scan, scientists ask the question, if the brain sees the future, but the future doesn't exist, then how can a brain scan show you the future?

02:03:07.000 Because it doesn't exist yet.

02:03:09.000 When you brain scan somebody thinking about the future, they think about the past.

02:03:14.000 They rework all the things of the past and then make a few changes in the past.

02:03:19.000 That's how they extrapolate into the future.

02:03:22.000 That's how we did it.

02:03:24.000 Animals don't do that.

02:03:25.000 Animals simply go by instinct.

02:03:28.000 But what we do is we take the past, modify the past, and then let it flow into the future.

02:03:34.000 Well, that's what's so fascinating about giant leaps in technology, is that they bypass our imagination and create completely new possibilities that we could have never even dreamed we were capable of.

02:03:45.000 Like what we're experiencing right now.

02:03:47.000 If you go to Star Trek, they had to go Kirk out, over.

02:03:50.000 They were basically using walkie-talkies, right?

02:03:53.000 They had never even figured out cell phones yet.

02:03:55.000 But what we're doing now is almost inconceivable.

02:03:59.000 And the future, when these things do come to us, I mean, what are we looking at?

02:04:05.000 I mean, what are we looking at inside of our lifetime?

02:04:07.000 Well, my attitude is the smallest unit of history is the decade.

02:04:13.000 And if you look at history decade by decade, then you see the enormous progress that we've made.

02:04:19.000 But if you look at the history year by year, It's chaotic.

02:04:23.000 Things go up, things go down, setbacks take place, and so on and so forth.

02:04:27.000 But when you look at things decade by decade, then you see that there is a progression.

02:04:33.000 There is a path, and the path is toward democracy.

02:04:36.000 The path is toward empowerment.

02:04:38.000 The path is toward creating a middle class.

02:04:41.000 These are the paths that you can see decade by decade that you cannot see year by year.

02:04:47.000 And I think that is a byproduct of technology.

02:04:50.000 Technology has made a middle class possible, for example.

02:04:54.000 Yeah, it really has.

02:04:56.000 And technology is what many people think can raise up some of the more impoverished communities.

02:05:01.000 And that part of the problem is that they don't have access to power, that they don't have access to all the innovations that we have that make life safer, water cleaner, make it easier to live and exist and have more peace and time to develop new things like we do here.

02:05:20.000 Yeah, and I think quantum computers, I think, will accelerate that whole process.

02:05:24.000 Because that's the aim of the game.

02:05:26.000 Technology, just not for technology's sake, just not to make profits for the companies, of course, that's also one of the motivating factors, but to enrich the human race, to educate people, to empower people.

02:05:38.000 And I think this is what technology does.

02:05:40.000 Now, AI, of course, will take away jobs, too.

02:05:43.000 But it creates jobs just as well.

02:05:46.000 For example, the blacksmith.

02:05:48.000 We don't have blacksmiths anymore, but we don't cry about it because these blacksmiths became automobile workers.

02:05:54.000 And so new jobs opened up.

02:05:56.000 And the same thing with AI. People point to the fact that AI is displacing some workers, especially at the bottom, which is true, but it's also creating new jobs, jobs that no one even conceived of before.

02:06:09.000 And so it's a balance between job destruction and job creation, and that's the main effect that AI has had on society.

02:06:17.000 It's a beautiful time to be alive, sir.

02:06:19.000 I'm really happy that you're out there talking about these things because it sparks the imagination in such an incredible way.

02:06:27.000 And because of you and because of your work, you really get to understand what the real parameters we're working with here and what we're really talking about, what's possible.

02:06:34.000 Well, I hope so.

02:06:35.000 That's one of the reasons why I do what I do.

02:06:37.000 Some people say, why do you do this?

02:06:39.000 I mean, you're great at it.

02:06:40.000 You should keep doing it forever.

02:06:42.000 Do you do things independently?

02:06:43.000 Do you have a podcast of your own?

02:06:45.000 I'm on radio.

02:06:47.000 Oh, okay.

02:06:48.000 Which station are you on?

02:06:51.000 Gee, I forgot.

02:06:52.000 Go to my website.

02:06:54.000 That's hilarious.

02:06:55.000 I do so many things I can't keep track.

02:06:57.000 Just go to my website, mkaku.org.

02:07:03.000 You really do do a lot of things.

02:07:05.000 How do you maintain your energy levels?

02:07:07.000 Well, like I said, I can't understand how some people are not energized by this.

02:07:12.000 I mean, some people play golf.

02:07:14.000 Some people do all sorts of sports and things.

02:07:17.000 This is what I do because it energizes you.

02:07:20.000 You know, after a game of golf, people tell me that they feel renewed.

02:07:23.000 They feel robust.

02:07:24.000 This is what I feel when you talk to people because you're sharing your own excitement.

02:07:30.000 You're trying to convey the excitement that you feel to other people.

02:07:34.000 Well, you do a fantastic job at it.

02:07:36.000 You really do.

02:07:37.000 Well, I try.

02:07:38.000 It's always a pleasure to have you here.

02:07:40.000 So tell everybody about your book one more time.

02:07:42.000 Yeah, the book is called Quantum Supremacy.

02:07:45.000 Now, what is that?

02:07:46.000 Quantum Supremacy is a time when quantum computers exceeded the power of a supercomputer on certain very specified problems.

02:07:55.000 We've passed that point.

02:07:57.000 We now have quantum computers that are millions of times faster than a digital computer on certain select questions.

02:08:04.000 The next step is to make a general purpose quantum computer that works for any problem, not just specific problems.

02:08:11.000 And that may take maybe another decade or so.

02:08:15.000 But again, the stakes are enormous.

02:08:17.000 We're talking about the world economy.

02:08:20.000 Which nation is going to dominate the world economy?

02:08:23.000 What technologies will thrust the world's productive abilities?

02:08:27.000 That's quantum computers.

02:08:29.000 Now, when this does get implemented, what private companies are creating this?

02:08:35.000 Are they working in conjunction with the government?

02:08:38.000 Like, how does...

02:08:39.000 How does all that get controlled?

02:08:41.000 Well, right now, it's a free-for-all.

02:08:43.000 It's a horse race.

02:08:44.000 It's a free-for-all.

02:08:45.000 The horses are out of the gate.

02:08:47.000 Basically, it's a few key players, IBM, Google, Honeywell, Microsoft, the big boys, they're all jumping in the game, investing billions of dollars to create their version of the future.

02:09:00.000 And the Chinese are right there with their parallel version using optical means rather than using electrical means to do calculations. 0.97

02:09:08.000 And they know the price, that the price is not there yet because, of course, they're not operational for general purpose problems, but they know potentially what the price is and that's to be able to dominate the world economy.

02:09:20.000 Now, what's the worst case scenario if one of these American corporations, let's just say Microsoft, let's say if Microsoft wins the race and they develop some sort of functional quantum computer that just blows everything else out of the water,

02:09:37.000 they essentially become like a superpower.

02:09:41.000 That's right.

02:09:42.000 Remember when IBM dominated everything and then Microsoft comes along, a bunch of teenagers come along.

02:09:48.000 Everyone thought, these are a bunch of teenagers.

02:09:50.000 What can they do, right?

02:09:52.000 And then these teenagers took over the world.

02:09:54.000 So we're talking about something on that scale.

02:09:57.000 That's a company that can make a breakthrough to make a workable, general-purpose quantum computer.

02:10:03.000 Who wouldn't want to buy one?

02:10:05.000 I mean, you're talking about a runaway bestseller at that point.

02:10:08.000 Yeah, well, also...

02:10:11.000 The power that's attached to that is so enormous that anyone wielding it has unprecedented power.

02:10:18.000 Yeah, remember the PC before Bill Gates and company?

02:10:23.000 Yeah.

02:10:24.000 The PC was a toy, a toy in museums, basically.

02:10:27.000 I mean, it was something that you showed your friends, but you couldn't do anything with it, right?

02:10:32.000 And then comes Microsoft, we showed, no, no, we can do things.

02:10:35.000 You can do your income tax, you can do spreadsheets, you can do this, you can do this, and then it just took off.

02:10:40.000 Yeah.

02:10:41.000 So we're at that stage now where the computer is still not ready to be used for general purpose calculations.

02:10:47.000 But when it does happen, we're talking about virtual chemistry, virtual biology.

02:10:52.000 Everyone's going to want to jump in the game.

02:10:54.000 Do you think that preemptively some laws should be put in place to sort of regulate this?

02:10:58.000 Well, I think some laws may have to because, of course, this is potentially earth-shaking.

02:11:04.000 The CIA, of course, is well aware of the potential.

02:11:07.000 The government has done seminars on what to do when quantum computers become commonplace.

02:11:13.000 And they're already making recommendations.

02:11:16.000 So for the post-quantum era, they're making recommendations to how to prepare for the post-quantum era when quantum computers can break any known digital code.

02:11:29.000 What does the world look like if there's no secrets?

02:11:32.000 What does the world look like if there's no top-secret information, no code cannot be cracked instantaneously?

02:11:38.000 Yeah, that's a good question.

02:11:40.000 I mean, some people say, what happens if all the codes are broken?

02:11:43.000 I mean, sometimes this happened in the past.

02:11:46.000 We're still here.

02:11:47.000 It wasn't doomsday.

02:11:50.000 But it does affect the progress for war.

02:11:53.000 During World War II, we broke the German code.

02:11:56.000 It was a computer that broke the German code.

02:11:59.000 And we knew exactly what the Germans were going to do before war actually broke out in certain areas.

02:12:04.000 And that saved thousands of lives.

02:12:07.000 And so that was a situation where that did make a difference.

02:12:10.000 But in the main, you know, nations steal secrets from other nations all the time.

02:12:14.000 And we're still here.

02:12:16.000 For now.

02:12:17.000 For now.

02:12:18.000 Right.

02:12:19.000 If we don't blow ourselves up.

02:12:20.000 But it could be commonplace with quantum computers.

02:12:24.000 Stealing from nations could be commonplace.

02:12:26.000 Now, there are ways to thwart a quantum computer.

02:12:30.000 There are ways to get around it.

02:12:32.000 One way is to have a dual system, two systems of the internet, one system based on electricity that all of us use that are subject to hacking, and the other layer based strictly on laser beams, a laser internet That would be a way such that anyone who taps into it illegally would immediately alert people.

02:12:52.000 People would shut down that part of the internet immediately.

02:12:55.000 So that's a possibility that people have talked about, a dual internet.

02:12:59.000 One internet for governments, for big corporations and banks.

02:13:03.000 They would pay premium price to have an invulnerable internet.

02:13:07.000 An internet by the laws of physics can never be broken.

02:13:10.000 And everybody else would use the ordinary internet.

02:13:14.000 Wouldn't that bother you, though?

02:13:16.000 Like, I don't want corporations to have unlimited computational power.

02:13:19.000 Well, they're paying for it.

02:13:20.000 I mean, what can I say, right?

02:13:22.000 Right.

02:13:22.000 But the power that comes along with something like that, too.

02:13:25.000 Like, when you said the laws, like, well, who's writing these laws and who these laws benefit?

02:13:29.000 Well, laws will have to be passed, just like with chatbots.

02:13:32.000 Laws are going to have to be passed, just like freedom of speech is great, but you cannot say fire in a crowded theater.

02:13:38.000 So laws will have to be passed to regulate chatbots, and laws may have to be passed to regulate quantum computers as well.

02:13:46.000 Does it bother you that these laws that will have to get passed will get passed by people that probably don't even have a comprehensive understanding of what's possible?

02:13:56.000 Yeah, that's possible.

02:13:57.000 That's always the nightmare, the fact that ultimately politicians will have to carry out people's will.

02:14:03.000 Right.

02:14:03.000 It's not going to be guys like you passing these laws.

02:14:06.000 No, it'll be people that have to, you know, get votes to get re-elected.

02:14:10.000 Yes.

02:14:10.000 And God knows what kinds of issues they have to harp on in order to get re-elected, right?

02:14:15.000 So that's a danger that the politicians may mess things up. 1.00

02:14:18.000 Well, I can only hope they bring in you to have a conversation with them about it before they do something stupid. 0.98

02:14:23.000 Well, let's hope the scientific community has a say. 0.98

02:14:26.000 You know, we want to see it at the table.

02:14:28.000 We're not going to make the decisions, but we'd like to influence the decisions.

02:14:32.000 Well, that would be the best way to do it.

02:14:34.000 But do you think that even the scientists or the physicists can have a real understanding of what is to come?

02:14:43.000 It's just educated guessing, right?

02:14:45.000 It's hard to say.

02:14:45.000 When the transistor was invented, people thought maybe it would be used to signal ships at sea.

02:14:51.000 They didn't know what the transistor was used for.

02:14:54.000 Now we realize it changed society.

02:14:56.000 Human society changed because of the transistor.

02:14:59.000 But we didn't know it at that time.

02:15:02.000 Well, listen, again, it's always a pleasure to have you here.

02:15:06.000 You're a national treasure.

02:15:08.000 I really believe that.

02:15:09.000 Oh, thank you.

02:15:10.000 You're such a great communicator with this stuff, and it's so exciting, and I'm going to listen to this back and forth and try to figure out most of the stuff you said.

02:15:17.000 Quantum Supremacy, How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything, and it is available now.

02:15:23.000 Did you do the audiobook?

02:15:25.000 No, we had somebody else do it.

02:15:27.000 Why didn't you do it?

02:15:29.000 I want to hear you!

02:15:30.000 It would take four days, locked up in a room, non-stop, to read a book of that size.

02:15:37.000 You're busy.

02:15:38.000 I understand.

02:15:39.000 Well, I'll try to listen to it in your voice.

02:15:40.000 Thank you, sir.

02:15:41.000 I really appreciate you, always.

02:15:42.000 My pleasure.

02:15:43.000 Great honor.

02:15:44.000 Thank you.

02:15:44.000 My honor.

02:15:45.000 Bye, everybody.

02:15:57.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 02, 2023

Joe Rogan Experience #1980 - Michio Kaku

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Summary

Transcript