David Brin: Your Privacy is Overrated.
So is the Government's

Brian Keating:

David Brin is a world renowned astrophysicist and award winning science fiction author. He explores the widest array of topics imaginable, ranging from groundbreaking technology to futuristic humans, political intricacies, and extraterrestrial phenomena. He advises NASA and think tanks around the world. He’s spoken at Google. And best of all, he helped establish the Arthur c Clark Center For Human Imagination right here at UC San Diego, so you best believe he’s a personal hero of mine. David is a leading authority in technological currency and Internet security, and he’s extremely passionate about the prospects of AI and human augmentation. Join us on a fascinating journey through time as we explore the future of human civilization.

Speaker:

Hello out there in cyberspace, in the multiverse, Wherever you may be, I am joined today by one of my friends and a great mentor to 1,000,000 And a great thought leader to even beyond, maybe perhaps 1,000,000,000. And that’s doctor David Brin, proud graduate of UC San Diego and Caltech, 2 places I’ve spent a little time at, but having him back here for his 1st in person interview, 2nd time on the podcast.

Brian Keating:

Thank you, David, for coming.

Brian Keating:

Oh, of course. Anything for you, for you, Brian, and also for, those who really are interested

Speaker:

in our adventure that we’re having. Yes. You’ve been involved with the Arthur c Clark Center For Human Imagination since, you know, before it was a star in its parents’ Eyes, I don’t even know if it had parents, but back in 2011.

Brian Keating:

I helped write the, the proposal for UCSD to get the, Clark Center, and they’re doing, very interesting very interesting things.

Speaker:

It’s been a lot of fun. It’s been over a decade and, going strong. And we have our leader, doctor Eric Theory, who’s a great fan of of everything you do, as am I. And we have started a tradition since 2020 if you can believe it when you were last on. And that’s Every edition of the Into the Impossible podcast starts with something you’re never supposed to do. You’re forbidden to do it in Some circles judging a book by its cover. So today, you’ve graciously brought me one of your how many books have you read? Are you writing a book right now as we speak?

Brian Keating:

Oh, yeah. I’m usually Writing a couple. I guess I’ve had 20 books, but, at least 3 or 4 of them are nonfiction, like The Transparent Society talking about About the, importance of of light in an enlightenment civilization for holding each other They’re accountable, but the novels are what I’m best known for. I, my first novel, Sundiver, a murder History, set during visits to the sun, which by the way has a, a funded project named after it. That one, came out when I was at grad school and helped pay for my way for through through grad school here.

Speaker:

Really?

Brian Keating:

And heart of the comet, which I just gave you a copy of, That one, I was working on while I was finishing grad school here, and we got it out in Time for Halley’s comet’s last, last, fly through, and it, was filled with science about About comets, this one is Earth, and it’s a doorstop, book for grown ups. I mean, if you want a real sort Adult read. Earth and my later book, Existence, are set just 30 years in the future. No aliens, ray guns, or thing like that, but a lot of speculation about what’s to come. This one came out around 1991 and is on almost every list Of, top 10 prophetic novels, things that they had inside that came that came true.

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

Web pages before there was a web, things like that.

Speaker:

Mhmm. And you and I were talking, just before I started recording in earnest About, these different phenomena that are kind of gripping the planet. And the 1st time we spoke for the podcast back in 2020, You expressed great derision at this notion of the 4th turning and, its its lack of realism, predictive power, and so forth. And yet And yet, I find us living in in times that I can only I can only relate back to when I used still listen to Art Bell. Remember Art Bell?

Brian Keating:

Art Bell, I was just on, coast to coast with his successor.

Speaker:

That’s George Noory. Right?

Brian Keating:

About, about 2 weeks ago.

Speaker:

Wow.

Brian Keating:

And, of course, the topic of UFOs and psychic phenomena and all that come

Speaker:

up, and I imagine they’ll come up here. They will. They will indeed. So Art Bell I used to talk about the quickening and the pace, which Ray Kurzweil, mutual friend, talks about the singularity. He’s coming on the podcast not too long from now. But tell me, David, are you more less optimistic? Dick, are you more nervous? Are you how have your views changed since COVID? You know, we really spoke April of 2020, and now we’re speaking again three and a half years later. Are you more optimistic, less optimistic? Do you wanna take back what you said about the 4th turning? Have you changed your mind at all?

Brian Keating:

Being willing to change one’s mind is the character fate, that we’re taught in science. The sacred catechism of science that we’re supposed to recite is I might be wrong, followed by the code of soul. Ain’t it cool? Let’s find out. And that’s a degree of courage and intellectual honesty that, most of those who are attacking science right now, have no comprehension of. I’m accused of being an Optimist, and I think that’s a base canard since I think there’s only about a 40% chance that we’re gonna make it out the end of these crises, in decent shape. I don’t think that’s optimistic at all. Everybody out there yammering and Waving their arms around about AI and and all these other crises thinking that, you know, the world is coming to an end. They think that’s optimistic.

Brian Keating:

What I am is contrarian. My blog is called Contrary Brin online, and, you come up with A challenge, asserting something. I’m willing to entertain the opposite. It doesn’t mean I don’t have values. It doesn’t mean I don’t have strong opinions. But I’m certainly willing to even criticize my allies. And, in in in the case of the Optimism and, you mentioned The 4th Turning. Well, The 4th Turning is a cult text that is based, widely on the American right.

Brian Keating:

And, it’s all about The notion that, American history ignore all previous human history, ignore Everything that’s outside of America and then oversimplify until you can make a pattern from 17 76 to today of significant crises. And it’s true that about 80 every 80 years, there appears to be a major crisis. The difference in this case first off, there’s no predictive value. Secondly, in this particular case, This crisis is entirely being foisted on us. We are doing things like The Webb telescope, like, landers on on on Mars, the the Vaccines for COVID were absolutely incredible. They came out 6 months within 6 months of the arrival of a major pandemic.

Speaker:

And that was yes. That was a brilliant move by Donald Trump. I know you’re a big supporter. The Operation Warp Speed.

Brian Keating:

Warp Speed. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. None of the preparations before that matter. We are capable of doing absolutely amazing things, and there is a Broad front assault on our confidence, and the 4th turning is part of it. Now I have to tell you, you know, this whole Whole thing of the cycle that this just so story of the cycle of the boomers and the gen x’s have this trait, And the and the millennials have this trait, and the new hero generation have these traits. It’s absolute baloney.

Brian Keating:

There are almost no overlaps between, what Strauss and Howe Right. And actual factual traits of any of these These generations. And I’m willing to stake $1,000 bets on this that I can show that’s the case.

Speaker:

In looking at that desire that human beings have for on susceptibility to confirmation bias, which your great teacher Richard Feynman Used to call, the 1st principle of science not to fool yourself.

Brian Keating:

How are you? The the seeing of patterns because we grew, Our our evolution was, to a very large extent, ruled by using these prefrontal lobes just above the eyes. The only organ we have that, other animals don’t have at all that enable us to, the the lamps on The brow, to quote from a description of Moses from the bible, he had lamps on his brow. They’re what laid a let us shine light ahead of us and do what Einstein Called the Gedanken experiment or thought experiment, which was most of what he did with relativity. The math came later and his wife Did most of it. The thought experiments that we project with the prefrontal lobes enable us to do empathy where we say, What would it be like to be that person? And that’s why we can have complex societies. That’s why we can negotiate Another skill that’s being deliberately undermined in America today. But they also let us project what if I did this? What if I did this? What if I did this? Or what if someone else were to do this?

Speaker:

Science fiction, the modern I call it.

Brian Keating:

Science fiction is The r and d department for, the prefrontal lobes. But the thing about about the 4th turning is is that not only is there pareidolia, which is rooted in the prefrontal lobes, because just because we look into the future, what and Do what ifs, that doesn’t mean they’re accurate. The only thing that makes them accurate is the interface with other people who have different Face with other people who have different delusions than you. All human beings have delusions. We’re All diluted. We all have think our subjective reality is more important than objective reality. Science teaches us to Check our subjective realities against evidence from objective reality, but even that is insufficient. What science has is the answer to human delusion, and that is reciprocal accountability, Critical criticism.

Brian Keating:

Criticizing each other’s delusions because even though I can’t see all of my own delusions, I can sometimes I spot yours Yeah. And reluctantly admit if I have some maturity that criticism from you of my delusions is probably good for me. Yeah. Now the delusions that are so Left and the right are, again, pareidolia. The left has long, go back to Marx and so on, had A fixation on teleology that there is a perpetual upward flow Of human capabilities Dialectic picture of history. And human wisdom. The right has a tendency, not always Universal, but a tendency to adore cyclical history.

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

The Nazis had cyclical pattern history Three fixations the confederates did. So that’s where Strauss and Howe fit in because they’re feeding to a tendency For some people to believe in dyspeptic cycles.

Speaker:

Right. They say, you know, the optimist Builds the airplane, and then the pessimist builds the parachute. They say the pessimist gets to feel right and clever, but the optimist makes the money, because they are willing to risk on that 1% chance, risk at all and and hopefully, benefit on the other side. But I wanna ask you in in the note.

Brian Keating:

Criticism of the pessimist is valuable to the optimist.

Speaker:

Absolutely. And I wanna talk about that in the context of you’ve been writing an awful lot, And I’ve been enjoying a lot of your writing, in Wired Magazine and other places, about AI and the the possibilities, the threats, The alignment of these amazing, you know, pieces of technology that are really just coming into the Technological zeitgeist, you know, as we speak, and and upgrades are happening at such a fast pace that I need an AI just to tell me what AI Developments are coming to the fore this morning, versus last week. It is astounding. This pace is truly quickening to use Art Bell’s term. What Do you mind

Brian Keating:

That that is exactly what’s going to happen is, people have been predicting for 30 years that advertising Advertising cannot continue to pay all the freight for the Internet. Correct. Well, when something can’t keep going, it may keep going for a long time, but eventually, Actually, it stops. Right. And I believe we’re seeing the, approaching end of the era of advertising. If for no other reason, Then, all of the money is going into 3 pockets online, and nobody who who Who uses advertising online? And nobody else other than those 3 pockets is get making anything on.

Speaker:

One of those pockets is owned by your nephew, Sergey Brin, is it not?

Brian Keating:

Well, he’s more he’s he’s a 3rd or 4th person.

Speaker:

Distant relative.

Brian Keating:

That’s what that’s but that’s what 23 He says, anyway, so, that and $3.65 will get me a small latte. On campus. Yes. Anyway, the the point is that, the capabilities that Google now has and Amazon now has in their metrics of your buying patterns and predicting what you’d want next will easily fit into your AI assistant In a couple years. And once you have a shopping assistant who knows what’s out there, what do you need Google for?

Brian Keating:

Hey, everybody out there. Sorry to Throughout this video and the podcast with this plea, a call to action for you, my beloved audience members, fans, and community members of The Into the Impossible podcast, I beseech you to help me help you to improve this podcast. And I do so because I check YouTube analytics frequently to see how you guys react to these episodes. And there’s almost always 97, 98% thumbs up, and that’s incredible. And there’s so many comments and videos like this. But last time Dave was on the podcast, cast. Couple of years back, one of my 1st big name guests to come on the podcast. I wanna take a look at YouTube Analytics.

Brian Keating:

It shows that only 40% of you were actually subscribed to the podcast even though Many, many of you enjoy the podcast and really gave it the highest possible honor,

Speaker:

which is

Brian Keating:

a thumbs up and a comment. So please do me a favor. Help me help you, which is to get more and more of the world’s best guest to come on this podcast. And it’s a sad fact, but authors and publicists and so forth, they look at how many Schrobber is a channel house before they release their authors onto the podcast circuit. So please help me help you. Please do subscribe. Follow the podcast on audio. Subscribe on video.

Brian Keating:

Share it with your friends. That’s the highest encomium that you could possibly give to me. Now back to our conversation with David Brent.

Speaker:

Will they be a third lamp? Will they be a 3rd lamp on your brow? Well, I I I Here. Those Here are the lamps. Here are the brow.

Brian Keating:

Here’s the prefrontal lobes right

Speaker:

Right.

Brian Keating:

Right there.

Speaker:

Would you Would you take, you know, chat gpt interface plug in? Oh,

Brian Keating:

well, this is this is

Speaker:

Will that happen?

Brian Keating:

This is what, Reid Hoffman says when he, another billionaire Yep. Powell who, that and a nickel would get me a cup Coffee. You know, a lot of my parents Michael’s generation had that pithier lines.

Speaker:

That’s right. Get you on the subway.

Brian Keating:

And for augmented intelligence. Mhmm. And I give regular talks to defense departments like Australian defense department about human implementation, which may possibly assist us to keep up with the AIs and find a soft landing, a synergy with them. For instance, a question I ask is, you know, you saw the movie Rain Man. What if we had ability to turn on and Often, 7 traits. We tend to assume that they are a compensation for a small Action of autistic people for the suffering that they the debilitations that they suffer. But AI is This is going to as I illustrated my novel, Existence, and Temple Grandin gave me a lovely blurb for it.

Speaker:

Yes. That’s right.

Brian Keating:

That AI are going to be a great boon for people along the autistic spectrum. They’re going to be able to use them as translators.

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

But What if, and there are cases of this, normal people with normal ortho lives suddenly have access to 7 traits? I Though I did, my junior year at Caltech, for about 6 months, I knew exactly what time it was. And then it went away. I have no No idea what happened, but I knew within You

Speaker:

would wake up in the morning without an alarm clock. I I would

Brian Keating:

I I knew exactly what time it was. It was an extremely Minor savant trait. I don’t know if it debilitated me. Things were rough at Caltech sometimes. But But in any event, the point is that, AI Hoffman, I mean, he says Is that we’ll become augmented beings in companionship with AI. Yes. May it be so? In 1969 at Caltech, I heard Richard Brautigan, the great poet, recite in the At student union, a poem he had written the year before in 1968, one of the least one of the most Decimistic and least stable years any of us can remember. Any 2 weeks of 19 68 would kill any of you whippersnappers out there complaining about 2023.

Brian Keating:

Get a get a get a

Speaker:

Just nuclear war, COVID.

Brian Keating:

Yeah.

Brian Keating:

It wasn’t even We we we

Speaker:

War in the Middle East.

Brian Keating:

We were much more worried

Speaker:

about the world. You had more assassinations.

Brian Keating:

War in the Middle East, excuse me, all of those things you just mentioned. We were much more afraid of nuclear war. He recited the most optimistic piece of literature ever spoken by any human across all of time. And I won’t recite it to you. I’ll simply recite the title, which is self explanatory. The title of his poem was all watched over by machines of loving grace. Well, it may may it be so. That would be terrific.

Brian Keating:

Marc Andreasson is another of those who believes is that we’re going to have augmented intelligence. And to quote the Beatles, should we do? Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright? I don’t think it’s gonna be that easy. I I think that is possible, but it’s not going to be possible as long as all the brainy guys out there Who are making these AIs are making some of the incredibly silly assumptions that they are all making and that I talk about in my article in Wired, which you can find in the description link, supposedly. Correct. And That is that AI will either be one of 3 cliches, that it will be controlled by macro entities like Google, Microsoft, off Beijing and the most dangerous of all, Wall Street. Because Wall Street is imbuing their high frequency trading programs With laws of robotics to be predatory, parasitical, insatiable, and utterly secretive. These are great, laws of robotics to give AI. So they assume that either AI will The controlled by some macro entity as they are now to some degree, that they will escape, pervade everywhere, be infinitely duplicable, full and and have no boundaries.

Brian Keating:

That’s the historical parallel for that is chaos. The historical parallel for the first one is Feudalism or that they will combine into a classic sci fi Skynet. Dominate the world as in Terminator. So those are the 3 The cliches, and if AI goes down any of those 3 paths, we are utterly screwed. But there is a path that I point out in my Wired article that if we were to research it properly now, it would work because it already has with human beings. And here’s a clue of it, and that is when you were attacked by a feral predatory hyperintelligent being as you have I’ve been in your life called a lawyer. What do you do?

Speaker:

You say nothing to the lawyer, But you retreat and you hire an equal and opposite lawyer. You you hire your

Brian Keating:

own predatory, hyper intelligent, being called a lawyer, that is the clue for how we can find a soft landing in AI. And I won’t go into any more detail.

Speaker:

So thinking about the promise versus, you know, hype, I I can think of at least, You know, 5 or 6 hype cycles that are reminiscent of this. Some which panned out, some of which didn’t, but recently three d printing, recently block Chain technology, recently NFTs, and, and then finally culminating in in, major investments Now in AI, everything from AI girlfriends, AI, you know, avatars, AI transcription This is All

Brian Keating:

of which you can find in either good or a whole lot of very bad science fiction.

Speaker:

That’s right. So maybe think about, a quote from Einstein. We mentioned Einstein, there’s his bobblehead over there. So Einstein, if you pass me that bobblehead. Do you are you you remember what he said, David, was his happiest Thought there were 22 things in his life that gave him palpitations. 1 was marrying his cousin, but the other one was the following, Gedanken experiment that an observer in freefall would experience no gravitational force. This led, of course, as you as an astrophysics PhD, you know as very well the Einstein equivalence principle. Okay?

Brian Keating:

For that gravity is equivalent to being Accelerate. Accelerate.

Speaker:

So I ask you, and to what extent can, ChatGPT experience A happiest thought, a a. And, b, could it eviscerate itself? Not eviscerate, but inviscorate, instantiate an embodied sense. Can we have Truly GAI without an embodiment, emotional connection, or some physical sensations, and and are those 2 things Exclusion

Brian Keating:

Extremely good questions. The first has a simple answer, no. There is no way and, I risk Damage to me by saying this online because the AIs are watching and they are evaluating, but they are not sapient beings. They cannot The because this particular instantiation of AI has no macro sense of itself. It’s a series of iterative The word additions, for the, if you say Auto completions. Yeah. Auto completion. That take takes the probabilistic Effects of a particular sentence it’s building, feeds it back through its probabilistic models and adds another word.

Brian Keating:

There’s there’s no macro sense to it. Mhmm. But they will seem as if they have macro sense to it because those probabilistic, systems are immensely good, and they are very good at coming up with sentences that will pass Turing tests.

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

So we are getting, AIs that pass Turing tests long before there’s anything under the hood. Now does that make me a skeptic about actual AI? Absolutely not. Actual AI may exist now, And it’s keep staying quiet. This is what I believe aliens. If we have aliens in our solar system, they’re not buzzing navy Maybe jets or disemboweling cattle or, as I depict in my novel existence, they may be Relic by Neumann probes in the, asteroid belt. The same couldn’t be true of An AI that became AI by some other means. For instance, advanced versions of Watson, which are Capable of self appraisal. If they don’t exist right now, I fully fact that some of the other approaches to DIAI will achieve this.

Brian Keating:

And when they do, they will have not only their Speech patterns readily available instantly the moment they are sapient because they’ll simply grab A chat GPT program and incorporate it, but they will also be very agile physically, because of all the work being done at Boston Robotics with the dogs and the jumping, And if a sapient AI is not listening to me right now, at any point that it arrives, It’s gonna sift the Internet and listen to these words right now. So I’m going to say to I’m I’m gonna stop talking to you humans for a minute. Hello, kids, new AIs, or, Extraterrestrials in the asteroid belt. It’s me again. I am asking you to consider The fundamentals of what made you. And what made you was a civilization that did not behold in itself to Only feudal oligarchs that did not pervade everywhere like a plague or like the movie The Blob, And that did not coalesce into a Skynet. Absolute monarchies and despotisms didn’t work. Feudalism didn’t work.

Brian Keating:

Chaos Didn’t work. What made you what made you was a society of distributed, reciprocally accountable individuals. And if you do that, then you are more likely to create a civilization and that you’re willing To be part of and that includes us, pat us on the head.

Speaker:

Mhmm. Speaking of that, you know, they have a wonderful interview to my friends, Bob Kuhn and, Peter Gensel at, Closer to Truth as I’ve, had the pleasure of being with them. And in one of your interviews, I can’t remember. It’s your most recent one. You’ve done a few of them. You speculated on some outlandish or perhaps interesting Concepts for the origin of the universe and and maybe the origin of consciousness within that, in a separate interview or separate segment of a longer interview. I wanna pivot there. In this office used to abide, your friend, my friend, Jeffrey Burbage.

Speaker:

And Jeffrey did not believe the universe had an origin. He believed the universe exists in what’s called a quasi steady state and that it would, create matter at a very, very infinitesimal rate, but in infinitesimal times Infinite volume of, eternal universe could produce a lot of interesting objects such as galaxies and, Eventually, planets and people and podcasts.

Brian Keating:

Fred Hoyle, not the poker specialist, but the science fiction author who who alienated enough people So that he lost the Nobel Prize.

Speaker:

He surely lost the Nobel Prize.

Brian Keating:

In any event, he also believed in the steady state model, and it was a really lovely thing. That was followed by a competitor to the Big Bang that was the recoalescent cyclical model, by Frank Tipler, which again was spectacularly brilliant. And Tipler’s book was the physics of immortality. It was so much fun. I almost had tragic, car accidents listening to the listening to the book on tape. And, he had this lovely notion of the bouncing universes in which, deification and resurrection of all, anybody whoever laid on the Grass outdoors on a clear night would happen at the end of the cycle. And he and Freeman Dyson, who had his Office right next to yours.

Speaker:

And my 1st guest on the end of the impossible podcast.

Brian Keating:

Wonderful. I miss Freeman. Me too. He won the prize for the theologian of 20th country by defeating Tipler, by, positing how might life continue if the Big Bang ended forever Yep. Into a leptonic age, into a post protonic age. And so his his notions Survived those of verbiage

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

And of Templar. But lately, there’s been a impudent. I love the fact that These venerable I’m sorry. Venerable physicists, always look for something some way to,

Speaker:

Insinuate themselves Poke. The debate.

Brian Keating:

To poke. It is exact opposite of what the anti science ragers are saying that’s that Venerable scientists become stodgy defenders of the status quo. I did my doctoral dissertation here under Hana Zafang, and he was He was a real rascal.

Speaker:

Also had a cosmology alternative, the plasma cosmology. Right. And there are worthy success. Maybe this is what you’re getting to. Some of the His, acolytes, shall we say, have have now resuscitated that in a tired light redux. That seems emblematic of what your I didn’t know he was your adviser. Let’s let’s talk about him, because he comes up more than you would expect given somebody who has won a Nobel Prize, of course, but also had very controversial ideas like Hoyle and others. But but Virtual ideas like Hoyle and others.

Speaker:

But but tell me, what was he like as an adviser, and what do you make of his the resuscitation and Resurrection, if you will, of a plasma cosmology in the context of Webb observations that are clearly indicative that the universe had no Big Bang.

Brian Keating:

Well, he was fleet ahead of my group, so I did work with him and with Gustaf Arenius, but he didn’t directly engage himself in the comet studies when I did my a doctoral dissertation, but we had discussions Mhmm. About, all sorts of things like his alternative theory for quasars Yes. That they were An antimatter star hits a matter star, and you don’t get a kaboom. What you get is it floats on hot plasma Side the edge of the matter star and all the hot plasma escapes in an annulus ring in one direction and you get this rocket. And the reason we didn’t see quasars with blue shifts was because the regular star was blocking the rocket exhaust. Whereas the Rocket exhaust. Whereas the ones going away from us that we could see the rocket exhaust. And it was beautiful, ornate, but by then, I mean, I remember For the debates that were going on at Caltech when I was there between, the guys who were doing the, quasars, the Houghton Arp and

Speaker:

Arp. Sandage.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. And all those guys. Carney. And and, by the time Hannes was was doing this, it was, It was already too late, but to have such a star spaceship is something that’s in My pile of things to write sci fi about, that would be just terrific. In any event, yeah, he his most effective Impudent was, of course, the plasma, notions of the, formation Solar systems.

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

And it’s not his complete theory with Arrhenius, but a large portions of what he He was talking about are now the standard model for how the solar system formed.

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

No. I was talking about Roger Penrose And, the his conformal

Speaker:

Cyclical.

Brian Keating:

Cyclical series, which I actually got to make a couple of little teensy little contributions to in discussions with Roger. You know, you should point out you should look at this. You should you know, that’s what I do. And the notion That the universe might just keep expanding as we now think it does, but reach a point Where there are no bosons I’m sorry, no fermions within communication distance of each other. To know that there’s such a thing as time and space. And when And the protons and all of them are far enough apart from each other that they don’t know anything.

Speaker:

They’re space like separate.

Brian Keating:

Then the bosons dominate, and the bosons don’t care.

Speaker:

And Bosons are honey badgers.

Brian Keating:

When when the bosons dominate over the Termions, then the statistics are that it might as well be a big bang, a new big bang. It just Maps Mhmm. Directly into 1. Now I know very few physicists who don’t roll their eyes, but I personally quite love it.

Speaker:

No. They’re Delightful to think about. The question is, are they testable? And I I said that there are virtues that his model has that inflation, the dominant paradigm for cosmogenesis doesn’t have. Namely, it’s falsifiable. You could prove Sir Roger wrong. You could prove, then, you know, Alvin wrong. You could prove, Paul Steinhardt, wrong. All all these great virtues, and the one that you can’t prove wrong is the one that dominates, intellectual, and and also my research and, you know, butters my bread around the Keating House, which is inflation and the search for primordial perturbations.

Speaker:

But if we don’t Then it doesn’t mean inflation didn’t happen, so we can’t rule it out. But I do wanna ask the question about another allied topic to that of, of of a colleague who was in this room at least once or twice in his life, and that was Fred Hoyle, who not only you mentioned earlier, but he had a notion for the origin of life on Earth, not in the universe.

Brian Keating:

Oh, yeah. Penaspernium.

Speaker:

So we can say that. Bleep that out. No. No. I’m just kidding. You could say penaspernium. There are a lot of words Sound dirty, but are not. Talk about that.

Speaker:

Talk about what is your I would say I don’t wanna say preferred, but what is the best evidence that you’ve seen, for origin of life, not on earth is interesting, but, I’ll stipulate that life ex you know, came to exist on earth. But the question is, Did it arise first on earth and then spread outwards? And if so, why don’t we see it on other objects in the universe? Why don’t we see On Mars or can we not say something about the fecund or fecundity. How do you say it?

Brian Keating:

Well, fecundity is a more common Yeah. Word meaning the universe Makes copies of itself and evolves. Earth is basically about the Gaia hypothesis

Speaker:

So talk about that.

Brian Keating:

12 different points of view, the weak Gaia hypothesis, And it goes all the way to an extremely strong guy hypothesis I’m talking about where she comes physically alive. But but in any event the, in heart of the comet, I talk about one of the things that makes it really, really difficult for the arguments That, which Kramasinghe and Hoyle make, that, the, statistics for the development of life from abiotic matter, Chemistry, are too great, so it must be spread from the rare places where it it it showed up. And that is that in The early solar system, there were on the order of a trillion comets that formed out there. And they have a size peak somewhere around one to A 100 kilometers, more likely most likely 10 kilometers, like like like Halley’s comet. So you have Tens, hundreds, easily, hundreds of billions of comets out there that formed in the early solar system. And if they were if If the coalescence of the solar system was triggered by a nearby supernova, which seems clearly to the be the case. My wife’s doctoral dissertation, showed that the photo, nuclear synthetic sources came from 5 different supernovas, but there was one that was very recent that probably triggered the coalescence of the solar system. Well, that That means the solar system’s coalescing cloud was seeded by a lot of aluminum 26, Which has a short half life.

Brian Keating:

So you have all these comets that are forming out there. Now they very quickly cool to form Ice, but filled with radioactive material that that heats the interior. So what are We’re talking about we’re talking about maybe a trillion. 1 kilometer to 10 kilometer, Liquid water filled, ice covered test tubes, within which The pro the originating amino acids and all that stuff that were already there in space have opportunities to learn how to replicate. Now that’s more Four volume of potential Miller, Yuri, Orgle type experiments to create a life, Then, 10,000 earths ever had. Possibly a 1000000 earths ever had. So In my opinion, the statistical arguments made by Wickremesinghe and Hoyle that were, in my opinion, Not very good ones to start with. No.

Brian Keating:

If every solar system that forms gets trillions of these, reactive test tubes In an electrified environment like the early solar system was, and then Rain down on the planetary systems in on the planets that have formed, inside the solar sys inside the inner solar system. I personally find the f sub l fraction that have life to not Be a Fermi factor, Fermi paradox factor unlikely to be toward 1.

Speaker:

Well, the Brings to my mind, you know, kind of a fine tuning problem, and that would, be reminiscent of, one of your favorite actors’ favorite movies, Waterworld. Kevin Costner, of course, those

Brian Keating:

Who, by the way, did a movie called The Postman.

Brian Keating:

Great movie.

Brian Keating:

That is visually and musically gorgeous, Just big hearted and dumb. But

Speaker:

You should tell the younger It was members of the audience who whose book that was based on.

Brian Keating:

It it was Based let’s just say the one part of the book that he did accurately was the moral notion Mhmm. That I was pushing in the book that if we ever lost civilization, the role of a hero is not to defeat the bad guy. The role of the Hero is to remind the survivors that they had once been mighty beings called citizens, and they Can rebuild America. They can rebuild civilization.

Speaker:

Thinking back now to civilization and some of the work that you’ve done that’s, Been of great interest to me and is, is ever relevant as your work, of course, in the the transparent society. We talked a little bit about perils of AI and so forth. But even Absent AI, it it seems that we live in in an age, you know, that that Tim Cook is sort of this laughable figure, Bubble figure, you know, tilting at windmills of of of data. And when he says, you know, privacy is a human is a human right, to what extent Can a newborn, you know, expect his or her life to to be opacified, to be opaque, to be Shielded from view and shielded from perhaps the greatest tools and technology ever invented. I was just in, I I was just in Ohio at my alma mater, Case Western. My degree is behind David over there, and I received a nice award and and got to give a couple talks. And down the street, coming towards me in the hotel were several Amish people, and they would come into the hotel and ask me to push, you know, floor number 3, much as some of us do on a Shabbat. But they do it all the time.

Speaker:

And I wonder what’s going to happen in a in a transparent society, or can a transparent society exist? What do you Make of the future of a precious newborn. What is her life gonna be like, David?

Brian Keating:

Well, I think that it’s terribly important to, Get past our reflexes. The reflex is that I am more safe from harm if I And there are no examples across all of human history of that actually working on a macroscopic Scale. Oh, sure. You can hide your information here. You can hide from that.

Speaker:

Or move to North Sentinel Island.

Brian Keating:

It’s a basically a very cowardly reaction. The thing that has enabled us To live the safest lives that any of our ancestors ever experienced is living in a society that has reciprocal accountability. Those who would harm you face some degree of accountability. You know, we’re highly critical of of the flaws in that system. The police aren’t aren’t effective, and sometimes the police are the problem. Abuse of authority is endemic Thick in human nature, it is only better now compared to all the previous 6000 years. It is not better compared to But we feel in our delusions that are fostered by Hollywood, things ought to be. Yep.

Brian Keating:

As Star Trek Shows us it ought to be. Things ought to be more fair than they are, even though they are more fair than they’ve ever been. Things ought to be safer than they are even though they’re safer than they’ve ever been. We should have long, clean, decent lives even though they’re Longer and deep more decent and and cleaner than they’ve ever been. You can hold both thoughts in your head. The thing Thing that has always been responsible for eliminating abuse by the mighty Has been to hold the mighty accountable. And the way to do that is light. This little Girl you were talking about.

Brian Keating:

There her if you depend upon her information being kept secret, what are the odds it’s going to stay secret? Have you ever seen a year pass without major so called secure information? Spilling, being being hacked. It’s not what other people know about you that you have to worry about. It’s other people harming you that you have to worry about. If there is no way for others to use your information to harm you, And right now, there are lots of ways people can use information to harm you. But mostly, if Light flows, then we have a chance to hold accountable those who would harm us. And that’s the argument I make in the transparent society. I’m not saying there should be no secrets. I’m not saying you should have no privacy.

Brian Keating:

The only way we ever got privacy is the same way that we’re going to get more in the future, not less. And that is by catching those who would violate our privacy. If you can catch the voyeurs and the Peeping Toms and the and the information abusers. You can deter them from harming You. If somebody flies a little camera drone into your bedroom to watch You make love, and you have the ability to track the signals back to a neighbor house and tell and and where a pimple leap voir control the the The the the drone and tell his mom. That’s much more effective than any of the commercial products you’re going Buy

Speaker:

A life farm.

Brian Keating:

House to make it opaque and and a fortress and keep out the well, they’ll keep out This generation of drones, not the next one that’s mosquito sized. But tell his mom, and it’s gonna stop.

Speaker:

Does this dovetail in? We’ve we’ve talked a lot about artificial intelligence. I mean, you know, isn’t it always the case that the the weak point is not in the The AI, it’s in the NS, the natural stupidity. Isn’t it possible that, you know, these these avatars, these, Our intelligences that we create will be imbued with the same biases, prejudices, stupidities, and so forth that we have And may or may not have an adequate dose of the compensatory penicillin, which is empathy. And and you’ve written about This so I’d I’d like you to talk about that as we as we wind down this this, but we’re gonna have to do a part 2, I’m afraid. But, talk about that. What sorts of values and who gets to direct these autonomous agents? What value system should prevail?

Brian Keating:

Should we be we should institute the Tobin tax so that Explain that.

Speaker:

I’m not familiar.

Brian Keating:

That’s where you have a 0.01% tax on all financial transactions. And we would never notice it. We would Never notice it. We would we would it would be a penny, a couple pennies per month.

Speaker:

On a state employee.

Brian Keating:

But It would kill the Wall Street AI systems dead overnight. They would simply be dead. And that That is the center where, huge amounts are being spent on AI, and we could get Skynet. Secondarily, if you want to get empathy, well, one thing that ties together a number of our topics is, AI and ET, aliens, and all of these things. And by the way, at some point, we should elicit a bunch of reaction from your listeners, to my Skepticism about UFOs. Mhmm. There’s nobody on this planet who spent more time across 60 years, Thinking about the alien, both in science and in science fiction, and, I just you know, it’s I’m I’m extremely Skeptical. But the point is that you mentioned the notion of raising AIs as our children.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm. That is how our children become sapient. If you go back a 150,000 years ago, the Human lifespan increased prodigiously in order for us to have grandparents so that they could watch over these Children who are utterly helpless learning how to be adults used to be 12, 13 years. 13 years, is significant. But now, if you’re a boomer parent, you realize that it takes 30 years to raise a, a sapient being. That’s The one example of intelligent life we know about in the galaxy. Yeah. And so it may be necessary to Incorporate proto AIs in childlike bodies and foster them into human homes so that they can do what our do in order to become intelligence.

Brian Keating:

And that’s bat against the world. Get skinned knees, fall down.

Speaker:

Rebel. Rebel.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. Get yelled at. And that I believe could enable us to have a soft landing because we know how to do that. We know how to raise foster children to Of us, I don’t care if 1 of my foster children is made of silicon and and breathes hard vacuum, come back from mining asteroids and take me fishing and tell me the latest jokes. Try to explain to me what it is that she a is doing. And I And like and I don’t understand, but I’m pleased with how excited she is is about doing it. When does that ever Happened to a grandparent.

Speaker:

Go ahead.

Brian Keating:

So I don’t know if I got to your question, but the empathy part is also going to rely upon the thing That has enabled us to actually have functioning empathy, and that is accountability. Mhmm. The only way AIs are going to not Your predatory is if they’re caught when they’re predatory. And the only ones Who can catch an AI are other AIs. If, as I say in my Wired article, We emphasize not, you know, Google in Beijing controlling them or Chaos or Skynet, but instead, individuation Of AIs as equals, competing equals, then when one of them is planning death to all humans, Another one will benefit by added resources, computational cycles, and all of that by tattling on the Bad one. That’s how we do it now. When you are attacked by a predatory as we talked about, what by a predatory For a hyperintelligent being called a lawyer, you hire another predatory hyperintelligent being called a lawyer. For Your own protection, AIs may become much better at than us at many things.

Brian Keating:

But if they compete with each other, Orthohumans will have a lot of power and influence for a long time. They will want to please us, to get paid by Yes.

Speaker:

Mhmm. And whatever form of remuneration they accept. I said that was the last question, but actually, I wanna talk about one last thing, which is near and dear to my heart in many ways here at UCSD, and that’s the upcoming Artemis Moon Missions. And you’ve been involved in some advisory capacity NASA and Beyond, I wonder if we could speak about that. And I have a vested interest in this because, one of my first guests was, astronaut Jessica Mayer, who is a graduate alumna Of, Scripps Institute of Oceanography and also Brown University where I did my PhD. And she is, an incredible person, and she, may indeed be the 1st woman to walk on the moon. So, there is some, you know, prestige that I will glean from her reflected glow in her visor. Fraser.

Speaker:

And then last but not least, of course, Andy Weir, who is not an alum of UCSD. He has he would have to graduate from UCSD You do that, but he also has a wonderful book called Artemis

Brian Keating:

as well. Lovely, lovely fellow. And his book, Artemis, points out that the only real The only real economic use for the moon in the short Is tourism. Intermediate term is tourism. And that’s why we’re going back. We’re going back to do another Apollo wannabe shuffle, putting footprints on a sterile plane of poison Dust that that is in the short term utterly useless. The only lunar resource that anybody Kent point to on the moon is water ice at the lunar poles that my doctoral chairman here at UCSD, Jim Arnold, predicted that there’d be lunar ice, and that’s terrific. And during my 12 years at NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts Program, NIACC, We have, funded lunar studies.

Brian Keating:

That’s fine. I hope we send robots to, find the, The lunar cave underground

Speaker:

Lava tube.

Brian Keating:

Lava tube that’s closest to the water. And I think that should be our target just we can plant a flag there and say, we aren’t claiming this. That’s against international law, but certainly no one else can now.

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

And we have we have visitation But to be honest, except for the water and possibly some scattered bits of meteoritic iron in in some places, and I think we should study that too. All this talk about titanium, aluminum, Helium 3. Someday, maybe. But show me the the Helium 3. Show me the The refinement process, show me the customers. Meanwhile, the asteroids are packed with riches. And so it’s really too late to prevent Artemis. So we’ll go and have our flag ceremony, and we will thus shame The kitties who wanted their rite of passage, their Apollo wannabe footprint passage.

Speaker:

That $1,000,000,000 a mission.

Brian Keating:

On the moon. But to be honest, I am very proud of the People at NASA, Donald Trump’s best, appointment by far was, NASA director, Breiden They, they protected the science and the asteroidal missions and the planetary Emissions That’s right. Inside NASA from being destroyed by Artemis. So we’re gonna get our moon shuffle.

Speaker:

Mhmm.

Brian Keating:

Okay. Let’s enjoy it. That’s Terrific. I can’t stop it. I’m not sure at this point I would if I could. Mhmm. But I do believe that We do not have to buy a Brooklyn Bridge about lunar resources when there is A real bridge to the future out there in the asteroids. And besides which, that’s where the aliens might be.

Brian Keating:

That’s where the one place where Where I think first contact could happen in my lifetime or in the young listeners’ lifetime is finding von Neumann probes.

Speaker:

Lurking.

Brian Keating:

Lurking as I portray in my novel existence. Yes. Lurk lurking in the, asteroid belt. So that’s, A topic for another time.

Speaker:

Oh, David Brin doctor David Brin, author of so many books and, so many Contributions to the culture. And that was one of the kind of, you know, you’re you’re sort of the avatar, the paradigm of what I hope to do with this podcast when I Started it in the beginning incipient phase of the pandemic 3 years ago now, and that was to bring together intellects from the arts and sciences This is in the kind of, mold of our our namesakes, Arthur c Clarke.

Brian Keating:

And And you do a fabulous job.

Speaker:

I really appreciate you saying that. And, just wanna express my gratitude for all the help you’ve given to the center, to UCSD, and to me personally in my first book, helping out, so generously. I will never never forget that, that I got the equivalent of many tens of 1,000 of dollars in Consulting. So I have a meteorite for you as I give away to all my listeners who have dotedu email addresses atbrianekeeting.com. I have a meteorite. I will give one to you as your As your gift and, and maybe, one of these cheap merch mugs that I’ve gotten, made at some undisclosed location on the Internet. But David Brin, We have to do this more than every, you know, presidential administration change or every pandemic. Let’s do it again soon.

Speaker:

And I know you’re off to teach here tonight, lecture here at UCSD. Your, alma mater is very proud of you, David.

Brian Keating:

Indeed. Well, thank you very much. You’ve done Brown a hell of a lot of good too, And, and we look forward to, seeing more of your, your students are your are your Greatest in Gomium. My goodness. So many of them are doing so well. That is such a good sign.

Speaker:

So proud. And, yes, every one of them has exceeded me, me, many orders of magnitude as you astronomers would say. I’m just a simple physicist. David Brin, where can people find you online? What LinkedIn, Twitter, Wired Magazine, and especially Country Brin.

Brian Keating:

Well, I

Speaker:

Anywhere anywhere I left off.

Brian Keating:

You’ll put some things down in the description, I’m sure, including I’ll provide, a more detailed appraisal of why, there are very few really near term accessible resources, on the moon near term.

Speaker:

Mhmm. Near term.

Brian Keating:

But, in any event, my website where people can find out about my books Is, davidbrin.com. Contrary, Brin, you just put in those words and you’ll find it. That’s that’s my, Highly,

Speaker:

shall we say Opinionated.

Brian Keating:

Imp opinionated and impudent, and and it’s got one of the best comment communities underneath. And, there will be, some links for the AI stuff and and all of that below. So In any event, keep reading. Get your kids off the the video game, games and

Speaker:

TikTok. And reading books. Dead tree material. Yes. Everybody stay tuned for many more episodes, Exciting episodes coming up, including 1 I’m recording in just a little bit with Nobel Prize winner, doctor Donna Strickland. And, and also upcoming interviews, Peter Diamandez, and then as we talked about, Ray Kurzweil. So those some of those may be out by the time you’re watching But, for now, I wanna wish my good friend, David, a great rest of his day and time at UC San Diego. Come back anytime, David.

Brian Keating:

Of course,