The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Astrophysicist Dr. Craig Wheeler - The Path to Singularity (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_756)

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00:01:15.900 Hi everybody, this is Gadsad for the Sad Truth. I don't know what's going on, but I'm getting a lot of

00:01:21.780 astrophysicists and other physicists that are coming on my show. Today, I've got Professor Craig Wheeler,

00:01:28.560 who's an astrophysicist from the University of Texas, Austin. Welcome, Craig. How are you doing?

00:01:34.700 I'm very glad to be here.

00:01:36.720 Thank you. My pleasure. Let me just mention a few of your bio elements. You're the Samuel T. and Fern

00:01:45.900 Yana Gizawa, Regents Professor of Astronomy Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. By the way,

00:01:51.880 I gave a few talks there in May 2022. You're the president. Yeah, it's too bad we didn't get to

00:01:59.260 meet then. I'm sorry, I missed that. Yeah, yeah. I talked about The Parasitic Mind, which is this book

00:02:04.760 right here, and I also talked about how do you apply evolutionary psychology in the behavioral sciences.

00:02:10.260 You were the president of the American Astronomical Society from 2006 to 2008. You were elected as a

00:02:18.840 fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007. And next week, you have your latest book that's

00:02:25.240 coming out, The Path to Singularity, How Technology Will Challenge the Future of Humanity. Anything else

00:02:32.020 you'd like to add to that bio before we get going? No, that's fine. That kind of sums it up.

00:02:37.340 Okay, so- I talked back into that 50 years of being an astrophysicist.

00:02:42.920 Well, if you want, we could start. I did a quick dive into your background. You are an expert

00:02:49.100 in supernova. So maybe before we start on The Path to Singularity, tickle our ears and our intellect

00:02:56.400 with what are supernovas, how do we study them, and so on. Right. Well, supernova is an exploding star.

00:03:02.760 The stars start off with a ball of hydrogen. They get hot. They burn hydrogen into helium and helium into

00:03:08.480 heavier elements. And there's two principal ways the star can blow up. One is to get to a core of iron.

00:03:18.640 And it turns out ordinary iron, in this context, absorbs energy, removes pressure, and the core will

00:03:26.120 collapse down to make either a neutron star or a black hole. So it gets very fascinating very quick.

00:03:31.440 And then there's a rebound of some kind. I shouldn't quite use that word for technical reasons.

00:03:37.340 And you blow the outer parts of the star to smithereens and leave behind this neutron star

00:03:42.400 or black hole. And then there's another type where you activate this in what's called a white dwarf star,

00:03:49.520 which has the mass of the sun about the size of the earth, very dense. And when you start that burning,

00:03:57.200 it explodes completely and blows the whole thing up and leaves nothing behind. No neutron star,

00:04:02.100 no black hole, just a blast going out into space. But this is where all our heavy elements come from.

00:04:07.900 The light elements, hydrogen and helium and a little lithium and boron came out of the Big Bang. But

00:04:14.120 everything else that gives life, calcium, carbon, oxygen, all came out of exploding stars.

00:04:20.580 And so they're critical to the fact that we're here and having this conversation.

00:04:26.160 Is much of the methodology that an astrophysicist is interested in supernova? Is much of the methodology

00:04:34.920 observational? So you have some sort of mathematical model that predicts something,

00:04:40.120 and then you literally just look out into the sky and see whether the observation that you're able to

00:04:46.960 view is congruent with whatever model or hypothesis. Is that the main methodology that you use?

00:04:55.500 Yes. Okay. I've always thought of myself primarily as a theoretical astrophysicist,

00:05:01.420 but I work at the University of Texas. We have our own observatory, McDonald Observatory.

00:05:05.840 And so I have just adopted getting involved with that observatory to make observations.

00:05:12.280 And it's not my expertise exactly, but I've worked with colleagues who are brilliant at the

00:05:17.400 observational side of it. And so you combine the both. I've always thought of myself kind of as an

00:05:23.540 orchestra director, bringing the theory and the observations together.

00:05:28.000 I mean, I ask this because, you know, for example, in the behavioral sciences, there are all sorts of,

00:05:32.900 you know, there's a whole panoply of ways by which we could study a particular hypothesis relevant to

00:05:38.180 human behavior, right? You could administer surveys, right? Large surveys. You can conduct

00:05:44.180 experiments in the laboratory, right? I manipulate something and I watch what the cognitive mechanism

00:05:49.900 that drives your response. I could conduct field experiments. I could do observational studies.

00:05:56.160 And so that's why it's always interesting to me to see how in completely different fields,

00:06:00.560 what might be the full range of possible methodologies that you would apply?

00:06:05.560 It is broad. The only thing we don't do is field trips.

00:06:12.180 Although Elon Musk is trying to solve that one.

00:06:14.760 Well, you know, if we send satellites out into the solar system and monitor what abundances are out

00:06:20.440 there and what amino acids are in meteors and asteroids and stuff, that's kind of a field trip.

00:06:26.760 So I think there are parallels to a lot of what you just said.

00:06:30.720 Now, I, so I'm an evolutionist. I apply evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to study human

00:06:36.460 behavior in general, consumer and economic behavior in particular. And so I'm interested in all things

00:06:42.720 that are Darwinian. And at one point I was writing a paper, actually several chapters in a few of my books

00:06:49.020 where I was trying to demonstrate the explanatory power that evolutionary theory can afford us across so

00:06:55.200 many disciplines. And I even came up with a researcher and I, maybe you might even know where I'm going with this

00:07:00.800 with an, with an astrophysicist, theoretical physicist, who's applied evolutionary theory at the highest

00:07:08.440 cosmological level. Do you know who I'm talking about, Craig?

00:07:11.260 Yeah. It's slipping my mind right now, but I know very well, I've got his book on my shelf over here.

00:07:16.320 Lee Smolin.

00:07:17.740 Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Smolin, of course. Lee Smolin.

00:07:19.840 Right. And he argued that there is a Darwinian selection process akin to the one that you might

00:07:26.440 have at the genetic level in selecting across universes and so on. What's the accepted position?

00:07:34.240 I mean, is it, where are we with this theory? Is this kind of speculative theoretical physics stuff,

00:07:39.180 or is there any evidence of that evolutionary explanation?

00:07:42.260 I think you'd sort of have to put it into speculation, but I'm a great fan of speculation.

00:07:46.740 I think you have to speculate, and I've done this a bit in the book, so I'm a little defensive

00:07:52.620 about it. But that's how you get things started. And then you can turn that speculation into an

00:07:59.720 observational program or into a theoretical explanation. But I think you kind of start

00:08:05.400 with speculations.

00:08:07.060 Very interesting. Okay.

00:08:08.200 So I think it's very important to do that.

00:08:09.860 So singularity, again, I was doing a bit of homework prior to us chatting. So of course,

00:08:15.960 there's singularity in the cosmological sense, singularity, black hole, the whole thing. Then

00:08:20.440 there's technological singularity. So that's the segue to your book, which is titled The Path to

00:08:25.700 Singularity. Does one form of singularity in any way inform the other, or you're just using the

00:08:32.580 same term for completely different concepts?

00:08:34.480 Yeah, it's a little bit metaphorical. I think there was a science fiction author,

00:08:40.960 Werner Winge, who first used that word in this context. I mean, so he took it. In mathematics,

00:08:47.780 it basically means you've divided by zero, and the answer is infinite. That's what a singularity is.

00:08:53.020 So you find that at the beginning of the Big Bang, until we get a successful quantum gravity theory.

00:08:58.680 You find it in the centers of black holes, again, until we have a successful theory of quantum

00:09:04.420 gravity. But in this context, in a sociological context, it means that technology advances so fast

00:09:12.740 that computers, artificial intelligence, if you want to think about it that way, becomes capable of

00:09:19.420 doing everything that a human being can doing. And then presumably that computational enterprise

00:09:26.540 will continue to advance, but basically at the speed of light, rather than the speed of biology,

00:09:32.200 which is what human beings function on. So it will take off. I don't know whether it goes somewhere

00:09:38.420 to infinity. That's a different question. But it's a transition into a different class of

00:09:45.160 being alive and having societies. Before that, you can kind of adjust, as we did during the Industrial

00:09:53.000 Revolution, something like that. And one of the things that I contemplate and try to think about

00:10:00.240 is if we make this transition where things happen so fast that individual humans and societies can't

00:10:08.260 adjust to it, that's a brand new way of living on this planet. And I think we're staring that down

00:10:14.000 the throat right now and need to speculate about where it might be going so that we can do something

00:10:20.140 to keep it under control and not lose out to the machines. I don't want to be a Terminator

00:10:29.060 sort of thing, although that's in the rounds of speculation. And it's okay to speculate about

00:10:36.700 Terminators and decide we don't like that. What do we do in terms of regulations and

00:10:41.600 policies and things that will try to keep that under control?

00:10:45.620 Right. I recently had... Are you familiar with who David Deutsch is?

00:10:51.480 I did. I listened to your podcast with David Deutsch.

00:10:54.220 Oh, good. Okay. I hope you enjoyed it.

00:10:56.600 He was a postdoc here at the University of Texas many years ago, but...

00:11:01.020 Oh, no kidding.

00:11:01.680 A white young man on his way up at the time.

00:11:04.360 Yeah, boy, he turned out to be something.

00:11:06.540 Yeah, he did.

00:11:07.660 So anyways, when we were chatting, so I did two parts with him. I just released the second part.

00:11:12.160 The first part was a few weeks ago. And the segue for him from being a quantum physicist

00:11:18.880 to then being into quantum computing is a natural one. You're in the quantum world and then suddenly

00:11:25.580 through whatever, serendipity, whatever it is, then you apply it into the computing world.

00:11:30.960 So in your case, what was the segue that took you from, you know, I'm an astrophysicist who

00:11:37.280 is a specialist in supernova, and now I'm going to take a crack at writing this book about

00:11:41.760 technological singularity?

00:11:43.580 Yeah, kind of two threads there. So one is, as I said, that supernovae create all the elements,

00:11:49.780 except the very lightest ones that we need for life. And that led me in, along with a colleague

00:11:55.900 here at the University of Texas, to have interest in astrobiology and trying to understand how you

00:12:02.020 unite those things together. What is the origin of life? You know, was it just on this planet?

00:12:06.300 Was it on other planets? Was it on Mars? And it got here indirectly some way. And the particular

00:12:12.800 thing we pursued was the radiation that comes out of supernovae. And is that useful for promoting life,

00:12:21.100 kickstarting it, or is it completely destructive?

00:12:23.640 So we wrote several papers on supernovae and gamma rays and how they might affect life on various

00:12:30.780 planets. And that got me into that game of thinking about it. And then I was on a committee

00:12:38.360 of the National Academy of Sciences that I chaired, along with a fellow who won a Nobel Prize for

00:12:46.380 telomeres.

00:12:47.140 Oh, right. Is this the woman from UC Berkeley or Stanford?

00:12:53.860 Oh, no, that's Jennifer Doudna.

00:12:55.680 Yeah, right.

00:12:57.120 Jack Shostak.

00:12:58.520 Okay.

00:12:59.680 Was it, still is at Harvard, I guess. But it was just fascinating. Every time we had a meeting of this

00:13:05.720 committee, it was very interdisciplinary, and people would bring ideas from all over the place.

00:13:10.440 And everybody was a mode to think, let me try to understand how I can take my science and connect

00:13:16.580 it to what you're doing. Really interesting stuff. So I got into that for a while. My colleague and I

00:13:22.960 tried to get some NASA funding to start a center to do that here at the University of Texas. And we tried

00:13:29.120 three times, and we failed three times. And I guess why you failed me, before you go on.

00:13:36.140 Yes, you can't.

00:13:37.180 It's hard, because you can't just take your piece of science and put it in a proposal. You need to

00:13:43.480 take science in this interdisciplinary way through your whole campus and other campuses and stitch it

00:13:50.540 into a coherent whole.

00:13:52.260 Well, and I think so.

00:13:53.400 It turns out to be difficult. People have done it, but we weren't able to pull it off.

00:13:58.220 What I was going to say is that I've tried, I mean, my career has been defined by very,

00:14:04.180 very staunch interdisciplinarity. I've published in a while.

00:14:06.720 Yeah, no, I admire that.

00:14:08.340 Right? But to your point, when I tried to set up a program that looked at how evolutionary theory

00:14:16.760 can be applied across all faculties, suddenly every dean became incredibly territorial about this.

00:14:24.800 So from this side of the mouth, we say that we want to be interdisciplinary. And then from this

00:14:29.540 side of the mouth, we do exactly the opposite. So I suspect that's probably what you went up against.

00:14:34.900 God, been there, done that.

00:14:37.540 Is there a way for us to break through that so that we can truly have the ethos of interdisciplinarity

00:14:42.600 across the university?

00:14:43.480 Oh, I hope so. I think it's really important to be interdisciplinary. But it's hard for those

00:14:49.180 reasons. We do reductionist science. We work in a pipeline, a stovepipe, and that's a very

00:14:57.140 effective way to do science. But then you've got this other stovepipe just next to you that might

00:15:02.600 be really fascinating to connect with. And so it's a challenge.

00:15:06.760 Right. So in the book...

00:15:08.480 Sorry, go ahead.

00:15:09.120 Yeah. No, no. Let me just segue from that. So this got me into being interested in astrobiology.

00:15:15.200 And I was reading along at some point, I don't remember what the context was, but I read

00:15:20.400 about a preacher, a Protestant preacher, who said, I believe in evolution. I think, you know,

00:15:30.800 that we're precursors to Homo sapiens and we've come along and here we are now. But Homo sapiens

00:15:38.120 is the peak. This is... We are it.

00:15:42.640 I see where you're going with this. Yes.

00:15:44.440 I thought about this a bit and realized, well, I had never really thought about it before,

00:15:48.780 but I realized that as soon as I learned about biology in, you know, junior high, high school,

00:15:56.240 I don't remember a long time ago, I just assumed that Homo sapiens was evolving. And so to have

00:16:02.080 this attitude that, yes, I had laue, evolution, but declare that it's now stopped, just that stuck

00:16:09.620 in my craw, I guess. So we also have another program here at the University of Texas for...

00:16:17.400 There's an Academy of Distinguished Teachers, of which I happen to be a member, very proud to

00:16:22.860 be. And the program is that a professor will pick a book and suggest it to incoming freshmen at the

00:16:32.300 start of the year and then meet with them the day before classes start, talk about this book just as

00:16:38.840 a way of getting incoming students integrated into the... I call it the enormous state university. I

00:16:45.900 don't know how big Concordia is, but we've got 50 some odd thousand students.

00:16:49.680 We're almost as big, yeah.

00:16:50.740 Are you? Okay. So you kind of know the deal. So I did that in one year. I enjoyed this every year. I did

00:16:57.600 it many years. I thought, I'm going to pick up on what this preacher said and talk about it with

00:17:08.180 these students. And so I just had them read Darwin, which I had read before, but not for a long time.

00:17:14.720 I'd forgotten that I'd read Darwin, but I had. And so we had this discussion for like an hour or so

00:17:20.860 in the late morning, the day before classes. And the fascinating thing to me was the students,

00:17:28.940 of course, they knew Darwin. They wouldn't have signed up for it otherwise, I guess. But there were

00:17:33.380 many of them, many of them, this is like, I don't know, a dozen, 15 students, something like that,

00:17:40.240 that were already aware that we were on the verge of affecting our own evolution because we now

00:17:48.300 understand DNA. At the time I did this, CRISPR and Jennifer Doudna had not become famous people.

00:17:55.920 That happened a little later, but they were very much into this idea that we could affect our own

00:18:03.500 evolution. And I thought, well, now that's interesting. So I proposed after doing that,

00:18:11.100 I proposed teaching a course on kind of that kind of thing, the nature of the universe, the origin of

00:18:18.640 life, five billion year old planet. We've come along, we've developed technology that can challenge

00:18:24.440 us. Where does it go from here? So kind of a futuristic look, which I'd always had an itch to

00:18:31.080 do futurism, I guess, looking back on it. And so I taught this course for five years. And the first

00:18:38.740 year I did it, I'm a pretty good teacher. I enjoyed teaching, but this was the most fun teaching I'd ever

00:18:44.920 had. It just brought me into new ideas all the time. I was constantly reading literature and quoting

00:18:51.400 things and getting the students to bring in examples of how technology was advancing away on us very

00:18:57.380 rapidly. It was just an amazing intellectual kick. So I did that for about five years. And then I

00:19:03.480 retired and I thought, well, let me see if I can turn that into a book. And that took some time,

00:19:09.060 but that's how we got here. It all started from this preacher saying that for human beings,

00:19:14.260 evolution has stopped. Isn't that amazing? Well, I hope that he is somehow acknowledged or thanked

00:19:20.040 in your book for having served as a genesis. I mentioned him, but I do not know the man's

00:19:25.820 name. Oh, I do. I do tell the anecdote that I just rattle off to you in excess length. Right. But

00:19:34.460 I don't remember who he was. Well, hopefully he'll read it wherever he is. But yeah, but so we'll come

00:19:44.480 back to the specifics of the book in a second. But as I was reading your bio, I mean, frankly,

00:19:49.900 I was looking at your Wikipedia page and I noticed that, okay, most of your books have been technical.

00:19:55.180 This is your first trade book. Is that true? No, I've written a couple of trade books on astronomy.

00:20:01.180 Okay. But you also wrote science fiction books. That's where I was going to go with this.

00:20:05.900 I see. Yes, I did. I have. I aspire to do some more.

00:20:09.480 Okay. So then maybe, so my next question is going to be, or is going to be, what are the similarities

00:20:16.980 and differences? So I've, you know, I've written many academic papers and both academic books and

00:20:22.640 trade books, but I've never written fiction. And so I don't necessarily know how to engage that process.

00:20:28.480 So for someone who has done both, what are the similarities and key differences between those

00:20:33.020 two processes? I guess the driver behind it all is I love to write. I think I get a dopamine

00:20:39.460 rush out of writing and arranging words. And it could be proposals or it could be books or it

00:20:46.680 could be scientific papers that a lot of my colleagues love to do the research and just

00:20:52.080 can't stand to do the writing. And I recognize already as a sophomore at MIT that I kind of like

00:21:01.560 the humanities courses. I like the writing courses, even though I, at that point, I was dedicated to

00:21:06.520 becoming some kind of a scientist. And, and that this differentiated me from a lot of my classmates

00:21:11.340 and, and it's been true kind of through my career and getting back to it again,

00:21:15.400 as a retirement project to write the book, just, you know, I get up every morning, not five o'clock

00:21:21.120 in the morning. I get up at eight o'clock in the morning and I write for a while. And, and it's just

00:21:25.860 deeply satisfying to arrange those words on paper and then rearrange them and then rearrange them.

00:21:31.740 Well, I love the way you've described this. Yeah. I love the way you said that because I sometimes

00:21:39.080 tell people that my desire to communicate, whether it be through the written form, which, you know,

00:21:44.660 I've done a lot of, or by creating this content, having a conversation with you, or just opening up

00:21:49.840 the laptop and, and venting about something that's, that I'm interested in that pros, that desire to

00:21:56.200 create is as visceral as needing to drink water or eat or go to the bathroom. And the way you've

00:22:03.880 described it, it feels like you, you have that exact same sentiment. Yeah, I think so, except

00:22:09.640 it's really focused on, I mean, I'm delighted to have this conversation. I'm enjoying it very much.

00:22:14.020 I'm sure I'll enjoy the rest of it, but it's not quite the same thing as sitting down and composing

00:22:20.020 and rearranging and perfecting. If I could aspire to that, the written word. And I, so it, that gets

00:22:26.800 to me a little deeper than, than these other aspects of communicating you're talking about.

00:22:31.540 Are you, my head is wired, I guess. Are you a book collector?

00:22:37.080 I, at some level, I've got a bunch of, you know, books signed by authors of various kinds. And it's,

00:22:44.620 it's a pretty ragtag that I won't try to show it to you. And I've got it behind this drop cloth.

00:22:52.080 I've got a huge collection. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a hoarder of books. I probably have about 700 books

00:22:57.320 in my library that I've yet to read. And I just keep, I just keep collecting more and more with

00:23:02.940 the hope that one day I'll have the necessary time to read through all of them. All right, let's,

00:23:07.860 let's jump into the, the, the, the. Good luck, my friend. Good luck. Thank you. Hopefully I'll have a long

00:23:13.480 life so that I can, I can. I certainly hope that. Thank you, sir. All right. Let's talk about what

00:23:19.180 are some things. So you went in, in the book, I was looking at the, I haven't had a chance to read

00:23:23.000 it yet. I only received it a few days ago, but I'm, you know, you go into, you know, the economy,

00:23:27.640 into democracy, into, you know, other, other disciplines. What are some places where you went

00:23:35.560 into that ecosystem and you were uniquely surprised by the implications of technology within that

00:23:42.960 ecosystem? Yeah, I, I think I'd been thinking about aspects of this just as a, an aware human being

00:23:51.260 for, for quite a while. The, the democracy and the capitalism, two, two chapters in the book came

00:23:58.940 because when I taught the class for these five years, I used Kurzweil's, the singularity is near.

00:24:06.860 Right. And so we, we went through that book and, and talked about it as, you know, how he handled the

00:24:14.360 written word as well as the ideas. And it's full of a lot of really interesting ideas. But as I taught

00:24:21.060 the class and we went through the book, I realized, I mean, it's full of interesting ideas, but he didn't

00:24:26.880 say anything about how the technology is going to affect our economic enterprise and capitalism.

00:24:32.520 He didn't say anything about how it's going to affect democracy and related issues.

00:24:41.620 Sorry, I got a spam call on my phone. I hope you can't hear that.

00:24:44.580 No, I heard of it, but that's fine. Don't worry about it.

00:24:47.220 So he, he, he, he didn't do those things. And so I felt compelled to think about them. And, and I,

00:24:56.880 I'd always been troubled by the idea that, that economic principles are stitched around growth.

00:25:05.520 Because to my mind, growth has a limit and you can't just grow infinitely large in terms of your,

00:25:14.480 you know, business enterprises or human enterprises on a finite planet with finite resources. So it's big,

00:25:23.520 but I think we're finding that, that we're coming to some limits and, and one needs to speak to that.

00:25:30.420 And so I'm getting a little bit Wile E. Coyote off the Mesa to talk about that. I'm certainly not an

00:25:37.460 expert in either economics or democracy, although I voted. But I think there, there are things to be

00:25:47.680 thought about there in terms of what the impact is of technology, artificial intelligence, things that,

00:25:53.660 that I just, I had, I had fretted about the economics and the limits of growth sort of thing for a long

00:25:59.200 time, just as a private person. And, and that just came out naturally while I was dealing with these

00:26:05.720 things and thought that that's worth writing about.

00:26:07.880 You know, so in my undergrads in mathematics and computer science, and in 1985, I had taken a

00:26:16.700 artificial intelligence course with one of the guys who was involved, his name is Monty Newborn.

00:26:22.840 He was involved with Deep Blue, the original programs that were meant to, you know, play chess and

00:26:28.640 beat the grandmaster, the human grandmaster. 0.51

00:26:30.140 IBM's program.

00:26:31.920 IBM's program, exactly. And at the time, you know, as someone who was both interested in cognition and

00:26:37.560 computer science, you know, I was thinking, you know, maybe, maybe I'll go on and pursue a, you know,

00:26:41.560 PhD in computer science. And then even in my PhD, when I was studying psychology, decision making, I had

00:26:46.760 studied artificial neural networks, and so on. But, but that early promise that I saw in 1985, it seemed as

00:26:55.400 though AI went out of the radar for the next 35 years, I don't know what happened. And then in the last 10

00:27:01.580 years, it's come back with a furor. Is it right for me to be saying this, that there was kind of a

00:27:07.540 lull where we never heard AI? And now you can't turn without, you know, throwing a stone and hitting

00:27:12.340 something that says AI on it, right?

00:27:14.780 Yeah, well, two things. One is, it's got a name, the AI Winter. And it just turned out nobody quite

00:27:22.000 knew how to take that early AI and neural networks and do something really effective with it. And the

00:27:28.440 solution came from people like your countryman, Jeffrey Hinton, who, you know, in a technical way,

00:27:35.360 found out ways to speed up that whole process, partly dependent on computers, and computers had been

00:27:41.840 growing exponentially in capacity over that time to where you could start to implement some of these

00:27:47.300 things. So yeah, so you're absolutely right. It went through a long period where it just wasn't very

00:27:51.820 productive. And the people were beavering away the whole time. And I was just about through with a book. And here,

00:28:00.740 open AI drops chat GPT on the world. So I had to go back and interpolate some things. And Kurtzweil's

00:28:08.600 written a new book saying the singularity is near. And I looked at it specifically, and I could see where

00:28:14.020 he had to go back also, and stitch in comments about chat GPT, because he was also through with his book

00:28:20.800 with that. I didn't know that term. I didn't. Maybe it's, it's my ignorance, but I didn't know that there was an

00:28:27.620 actual term called the AI winter. I'm glad that no AI people use it commonly. Okay, very interesting. So two of the

00:28:36.320 people that I'm, I consider to be intellectual heroes to our earlier point about interdisciplinary, precisely because

00:28:43.620 they're polymaths, are, you know, I don't know if you know, Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in 1978.

00:28:52.840 He was, he was at Carnegie Mellon, which is a big, you know, computer science school. So he was one of the guys that I

00:28:59.700 really admired. I actually had the honor of meeting him when I was a doctoral student at Cornell. And then the other

00:29:05.540 gentleman is John von Neumann, who is very much a polymath, and maybe less of a polymath, but equally

00:29:14.700 intelligent, if not even more so, is Alan Turing, which of course, you reference. So you don't, you don't

00:29:21.580 seem to know much about Herb Simon. What are your views on those two other guys? Wouldn't it be amazing

00:29:25.760 if all intellectuals were trained to have such broad views of the world as these guys?

00:29:30.800 Yeah, I don't know about training. I think von Neumann and Turing were born with something

00:29:36.600 special. Your conversation with David Deutsch, I only listened to the first one, but

00:29:40.220 I brought it out pretty clearly how special Turing was. I, or Einstein, I, you know, there's just some

00:29:48.960 people that just can get out beyond the boundaries at some level. I don't consider myself one of them.

00:29:55.060 I'm, you know, tagging along in the tail end and trying to make sense of things as they come along.

00:30:00.980 Very interesting. Yeah. Okay. So by the way, Prometheus books, I don't know if it's still the

00:30:07.580 same one. I'm guessing they, they were bought out by someone. This book right here, the red one,

00:30:13.600 which was my first trade book, it's called The Consuming Instinct, was published by Prometheus

00:30:19.220 books. So we are siblings, at least when it comes to...

00:30:22.060 I appreciate that. A further irony is, of course, Prometheus brought the technology of fire

00:30:28.520 and suffered for it. And I'm now talking about avoiding potential suffering of technology. So

00:30:36.180 it's a, it's a Promethean moment at some level to publish with a publisher named Prometheus just

00:30:42.740 amuses me.

00:30:43.460 Very nice. I had a gentleman on, I think, Craig, it was maybe two years ago. I'd love to tell you

00:30:50.700 the story while you're here, because it's, I think it's going to resonate with you. So this was his

00:30:55.080 name, I think is Manfred Steiner. If I remember, I'm going off the top of my head. He's a, you would,

00:31:00.040 I don't think you would know who he is. Now this is a, but you'll see how it's relevant to you as a

00:31:05.420 physicist. So he was, he's a gentleman who got his MD in 1955, I think, because, because his parents

00:31:16.880 had said, well, he was very interested in physics. That was his love in life. But yeah, come on,

00:31:22.820 do something practical, do something like a professional thing. And so he went to medical

00:31:28.400 school, got his MD, then went on, trained to be a hematologist and on the way, picked up a PhD in

00:31:35.480 biochemistry in 1967 at MIT. You mentioned that you were an undergrad at MIT. So then he finishes his

00:31:42.560 career, Craig, around the year 2000 and decides, I want to go back and pursue my original love. Now

00:31:50.740 that I'm done, I've had this long career as a, as a physician and so on. So he goes back, starts taking

00:31:56.100 courses and then graduates with a PhD from Brown university at the age of 89 with a PhD in physics.

00:32:06.580 Right. And so, and so, so the way I'm setting up the question, you'll see why I'm setting it up.

00:32:12.200 I, I mentioned that story. And so in my last, my latest book, it was a book on, you know, happiness.

00:32:18.740 And I talk about, you know, the one who at the end of their lives looks back and has as few regrets

00:32:24.560 as possible as someone who's likely lived a good life. And so that for many things in life,

00:32:29.240 it's really never too late. And then I give the example of this gentleman who's getting his PhD

00:32:33.220 in physics at 89. So having set that up for you, are there any things, and hopefully you've got many,

00:32:40.440 many more years of life in you, but looking back at your life, are there things that you regret either

00:32:46.140 because you didn't do and you wish you had done or things that you did and you wish you hadn't done?

00:32:51.280 Yeah. I, I think perhaps one of the major regrets I have looking back on it is a question of

00:32:59.320 work-life balance. That, that phrase wasn't around when, when I was a young scientist striving away

00:33:07.820 and astrophysics is a game that is filled with brilliant, competent people. And, and so you,

00:33:18.120 you, you strive to kind of compete. And I didn't think that I was quite up to that top level. And so

00:33:26.120 I think emotionally, I was saying, okay, let me put in more time to, to compensate at some level.

00:33:33.840 And, and looking back on it now, I can see that that puts some stresses on my family that I very

00:33:38.840 much regret. You know, it's funny you say this because I, I, we're, we're fine, but it's still,

00:33:43.640 it's still a regret. I asked that I, it's become a tradition for me to ask this question, many of my

00:33:50.160 illustrious guests. And, and I had an almost exact answer as the one that you just gave by a recent

00:33:58.420 guest, who's a, uh, pediat, not pediatric, uh, pancreatic, uh, surgeon. His name is Marty Macri.

00:34:05.400 You might've seen him on TV at times. He's, he's one of the guys who sort of was questioning some of

00:34:10.400 the, you know, draconian COVID lockdowns and so on. And he said something, not using quite your,

00:34:16.340 your same words, but something to the effect of when you start off in your career, you just get on

00:34:21.220 that, on that treadmill. And then, you know, you realize you're losing a lot of time, not striking

00:34:27.020 that balance that you mentioned. I suspect probably most high functioning academics would,

00:34:32.800 would probably say the exact same thing. Right. Um, I, I don't know. I look around at my young

00:34:38.120 colleagues and, and now the, the work-life balance is, is an issue that is just talked about frequently

00:34:45.560 and they seem to be doing a pretty good job, you know, raising kids and going to soccer games with

00:34:51.800 them and baseball games. And I, I don't know. I, I admire them. Uh, now that you're sort of out

00:34:59.620 on the circuit to promote your book, have you found a new, new found love for that process?

00:35:08.640 Or is it, I mean, I I'm putting you on the spot. I'm not trying to ask you if you're enjoying my

00:35:12.980 conversation, but you know, in general, is this, but I am, you're welcome to it. I am. Oh, you're

00:35:17.580 very kind. Uh, is this like, are you saying, Hey, geez, what, why didn't I do more of this? Uh,

00:35:23.420 you know, 40 years ago, or is it sort of generally speaking, part of the drudgery of having to do

00:35:29.820 what you have to do to, to get people interested in your book? Well, it's, you know, it's,

00:35:36.060 I wouldn't call it drudgery, but it is demanding at some level. I've got 10, 12 podcasts scheduled in

00:35:44.160 November. It's, it's going to keep me busy. And, and I, I, uh, I, there were things I wanted to

00:35:51.360 write this current book and, and another, uh, biography of my father. Oh, it worked on some

00:35:57.360 amazing technology. It's kind of related to this technology, but we worked on, uh, early guided

00:36:04.340 missiles. He, he worked on the first hydrogen bomb actually went to in a week talk and watched it 0.62

00:36:09.780 explode. Um, he, he worked on what was proposed to be a nuclear airplane that could effectively fly

00:36:16.120 forever, uh, and ended up, uh, segwaying into the space program and ended up working on the Apollo

00:36:22.580 program. Wow. And was associated with Apollo 13 when it blew up. He knew why it blew up. And, and, uh,

00:36:32.380 I, I just thought that was a fascinating story. And besides he was a wonderful father to me.

00:36:36.740 And I wanted to write that for like 20 or 30 years. And, and so that was, uh, kind of the first

00:36:43.700 on my retirement. Let me write about that list, but it just turned out that this book from the

00:36:48.500 course I was teaching just came together earlier. So I finished that one and I'm working on the

00:36:55.040 biography now. Oh, wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Now are there, I mean, I forgive me for asking, but I'm assuming

00:37:02.120 your, your father has passed away, uh, are there other, you know, brothers, sisters, someone who may

00:37:10.140 be alive to see this ultimate homage that you might be granting your dad? Well, my sister is still

00:37:17.960 around. I'm, I'm happy to say, and, uh, there, I've got some cousins and, and then there's, you know,

00:37:24.060 the next generation that, uh, I hope will be somewhat interested in it. But, you know, what I really

00:37:29.880 aspire to is to write a book as a biography that is interested, interesting to people who are

00:37:37.560 interested in biographies. That is not people that just personally knew my father. Yes. I, I hope I

00:37:44.880 can attract a wider audience now, whether I can or not, it's, it's, it's a challenge and, and I'm,

00:37:51.420 I'm having fun with it, but you know, until I finished that and try to put it out on the market,

00:37:55.320 I won't know. I actually fully understand what you mean by, you know, people who are interested

00:38:01.460 in biographies, because I actually have, and you remember, I was mentioning earlier that I've got

00:38:05.660 this huge personal library. I've got a pretty impressive, uh, list of biographies, a few

00:38:12.720 autobiographies, but actually I just finished a biography here. I shall show it to you. I just

00:38:17.660 finished, I just finished this biography. Yeah. Yeah. Steve Biko. Steve Biko. Now the, the, the,

00:38:24.140 well, first I, I love that you're, you know who that is. Uh, I first heard of Steve Biko in 1987

00:38:31.440 when the movie Cry Freedom came out, which recounted the friendship between the, uh, editor of a newspaper,

00:38:41.660 a white South African and Biko and how they developed this really intimate friendship. And

00:38:47.260 that got me really interested in Biko. So I started devouring the stuff that he was writing. One of

00:38:52.720 which was this book, this short, small book called I write what I like, which was what I call it a

00:39:00.600 honey badger mindset, right? You know, you're not going to stop me from saying what I'm going to say.

00:39:05.840 And of course, as it turns out, my career has been very much shaped by someone who is quite irreverent

00:39:11.900 to nonsense, who, you know, has, you know, I've written the parasitic mind, which is a big indictment on

00:39:17.020 some of the nonsense that goes on in academia. And so Biko really resonated with me, you know,

00:39:22.480 35 plus years ago. Now we were, my wife and I were visiting this book antiquarian friend of ours,

00:39:28.660 and she shows up with this book. She finds it. She goes, Oh my God, look what I found for you.

00:39:34.080 I know you love Biko. And so, so I really do appreciate, uh, your, your love of biographies.

00:39:39.820 And, uh, when you do end up writing that book, please make sure to send me a physical copy of

00:39:44.720 that book signed. Um, I, I don't read biographies. Never. Rarely. Why is that? I just not intrinsically

00:39:55.840 interesting to me, I guess, which is why it's an interesting experiment to try to write one.

00:39:59.980 No, I've, I've read some, but it's just not, not a medium that I, that I turned to particularly.

00:40:06.420 Oh, I see. Okay. So you've got, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to keep, uh, be mindful of the time.

00:40:12.320 I know that you, you have a hard stop in three o'clock. Uh, what are some of your next projects?

00:40:18.580 So you said the biography of your dad, are there other things that you'd like to discuss

00:40:24.460 and use this platform to promote, take it away, professor wheel? Uh, well, how much time do you

00:40:30.700 have? Seriously size it in five minutes. Uh, coming back to the, uh, the science fiction. I, I, I wrote a

00:40:39.160 novel when I was on the faculty at Harvard, I was sitting up listening to a colloquium and this idea

00:40:45.120 just popped into my head. It took me about 10 years to write it. Uh, and, uh, then my son and I

00:40:50.920 wrote a screenplay and made a movie out of it. I'm still trying to flog at some level. It's called

00:40:55.880 the crone experiment for anybody who wants to explore it. And then I wrote a sequel to that

00:41:01.160 and I don't want to give away what the basic story is because it's a bit of a mystery story

00:41:07.480 and figuring it out. But, but I left it hanging after the second book and I would really like to

00:41:13.840 write the third book in the series. So if I finish, when I finished this biography of my father,

00:41:19.920 that's going to be the next thing I turn to is back to fiction again. And my mother

00:41:24.920 led an interesting life and she might do it. I could write an autobiography. Uh, I've got,

00:41:32.020 I've got some other quasi fictional stories about a neutron star black hole buddies who sail through

00:41:41.200 the galaxy that I drafted at one point and never finished. So I, this will keep me occupied for a

00:41:48.200 long time. Are you a consumer of science fiction movies as a result of what you're talking about

00:41:55.620 now in terms of your, I enjoy science fiction movies. Uh, my wife and I have been streaming

00:42:01.620 lots of things in this streaming era, but science fiction is certainly on the list. I've read quite

00:42:06.800 a bit of science fiction. I'm not as widely read as true science fiction nuts are, but, but I,

00:42:14.260 I, I like it and I enjoyed trying to write what, what I wrote, uh, was not sort of space cowboy stuff,

00:42:21.040 but more hard science fiction and contemporary is what these two novels.

00:42:26.760 Right. Well, you may appreciate the story. I don't, I'm not sure if I've ever said it publicly. So I was

00:42:32.000 speaking at a, this big venue in Mexico, uh, where they brought all sorts of professors from many

00:42:38.980 different disciplines. And at one point we were going to this event from the hotel and I caught a

00:42:44.020 cab that was waiting at the hotel lobby. And there was already someone in the cab who was another

00:42:48.920 speaker. I get in there, I start chatting with him. I didn't recognize who he was to later.

00:42:57.040 It's a, it's a physicist who's done stuff in the science fiction realm who won a big award recently.

00:43:04.620 Can you guess who that might be? Recently? I don't know. Was it David Brin? Kip Thorne. Oh,

00:43:12.740 Kip. Oh, so. Oh yeah. No, man. There's an amazing career. So, so, so listen to this, Craig.

00:43:19.720 So essential scientist. And then he, you know, he comes up with interstellar and makes a movie out

00:43:25.200 of it and then wins the Nobel prize. And I was, I was so ashamed after the fact, because I was telling

00:43:30.940 someone that story and they looked at me like, why are you saying it so matter of fact? And I said,

00:43:35.780 I have no idea who the guy is. You were in a cab with Kip Thorne. So, so only after the fact that I

00:43:42.760 realized that I was in the presence of greatness. Uh, you were in the presence of greatness. Yes,

00:43:47.940 you were. Oh, wow. That's well, I'm, I'm, I'm sure that that also holds true for you. Listen,

00:43:52.880 what I'm, I'm, I'm not in Kip's league either as a writer or as a scientist. 0.98

00:43:58.580 Well, you're, you're very modest. Uh, listen, it was such a pleasure to

00:44:02.580 e-meet you and hopefully I get a chance to meet you. And are you still in Austin?

00:44:08.000 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll be coming to Austin to speak at the university of Austin, not

00:44:13.460 university. Oh, interesting enterprise. Yeah, exactly. And so, uh, I'm coming to speak there

00:44:20.000 either in January or February. And so hopefully our paths will cross. Thank you so much for coming.

00:44:27.280 Yeah. If you have the initiative to let me know when that is, I'd appreciate that,

00:44:32.380 but I'll keep an eye for it for sure. Wonderful. I just want to read the title of your book one more

00:44:37.020 time and, uh, get you people can pre-order it now. And I think it comes out on November 19th,

00:44:43.060 the path to singularity, how technology will challenge the future of humanity. What a pleasure

00:44:48.680 it is to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on, Craig.

00:44:50.520 My pleasure. The books available in any bookstore, Amazon, Barnes and Noble should be Walmart for

00:44:57.060 crying out loud. Stay on the lines and we could say goodbye offline. Thank you so much for coming.

00:45:01.820 All right. Thank you very much.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 18, 2024

Astrophysicist Dr. Craig Wheeler - The Path to Singularity (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_756)

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