Astrophysicist Dr. Craig Wheeler - The Path to Singularity (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_756)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
170.2611
Summary
In this episode, astrophysicist Craig Wheeler joins me to talk about supernovas and their impact on our understanding of the universe. He also talks about his new book, The Path to Singularity: How Technology Will Challenge the Future of Humanity.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
With great excitement, I introduce you to Northwood University, a truly exceptional institution in
00:00:06.400
American higher education. Since 1959, this private, accredited university has been a vibrant
00:00:13.640
bastion of free thought and enterprise, standing out among the thousands of other schools in the
00:00:20.760
U.S. Known as America's free enterprise university, Northwood is dedicated to nurturing the next
00:00:27.760
generation of leaders who drive global, social, and economic progress. At the heart of Northwood
00:00:35.300
lies the Northwood idea, a philosophy that celebrates individual freedom, responsibility,
00:00:42.040
and the importance of moral law and free enterprise. This entrepreneurial spirit is evident in that
00:00:49.020
one-third of Northwood alumni own businesses. Northwood is more than an institution. It's a
00:00:55.520
movement that empowers students to think critically and champion liberty. It is a rare gem in today's
00:01:03.040
academic world. If you're passionate about supporting a university that values intellectual
00:01:08.520
growth and free enterprise, or to learn more about its academic programs, visit northwood.edu.
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?
00:01:36.720
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.
00:07:17.740
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
00:08:09.860
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
00:08:34.480
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.
00:10:56.600
He was a postdoc here at the University of Texas many years ago, but...
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
00:11:43.580
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
00:12:47.140
Oh, right. Is this the woman from UC Berkeley or Stanford?
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.
00:13:37.180
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
00:13:53.400
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.
00:14:08.340
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.
00:14:37.540
Is there a way for us to break through that so that we can truly have the ethos of interdisciplinarity
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.
00:15:09.120
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
00:15:44.440
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.
00:16:50.740
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
00:26:31.920
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
00:27:14.780
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
00:30:43.460
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
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.
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.