Top Astronomer: UFOs Are STILL Here

Top Astronomer: UFOs Are STILL Here Transcript Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:This shows that we have a population of objects near the earth that have not been discovered until now. There’s absolutely no way how they will remember this little circle of 8.7 degrees and only there have a deficit, but not outside it. So only reflections can produce that deficit. Brian Keating:What do you make of these claims of tic tacs and non human biologics and interdimensional being? I mean, do you think that any of these hold the candle scientifically that meets your rigorous standard? Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:I believe it’s true. Brian Keating:Why aren’t they here now? Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:Who has said that they are not here now? Brian Keating:Are you worried about your safety? Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:Yes, there have been a number of incidents. Brian Keating:And when did you start Vasco? Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:So it depends on how one defines it. The first test we did was in 2016, and it was something I was obsessed with, an idea since I was a student and I wanted to search for vanishing stars. It had nothing to do with UFOs, but I was super, super interested in vanishing stars. It came from a crazy idea I got when I was writing a fable about a poor depressed quasar. And, you know, while writing and there at the end, and I started wondering, but can an object just vanish? Could an object vanish? And. Well, I was just a student at the time, and then I got stuck with this thing. And I remember I. I even had a phone conversation with. Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:Could it have been Michael Strauss from. From sdss? And I was asking, hey, can you redo the whole Sloan like one more time so that I get one more like, set of a photometry? And I had no idea what I was asking. And he was smiling a little bit, you know, when I was asking if they could just do it one more time, observe the whole sky so that they could compare like different epochs and see if something or a galaxy or whatever had vanished. And that was like, that was the first thing in 2016. But the group or the network didn’t exist until 2017, when together with two senior scientists, we said, okay, let’s do it for real. Because in 2016 I had together with two bachelor students, try to do a small search In a like 1% of the sample provided by the US Naval Observatory looked for vanishing objects. But then they said, okay, now we need to do the whole sky. And that, my God, that was a challenge. Brian Keating:Wow. So what would make you think that there would be things that vanish other than, you know, true transients that, like supernovae or novae? Why did you think there might be objects that would disappear and that they would be relevant somehow? Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:Astronomically well, first failed supernovae, there’s a class of like, massive stars that are believed that they might be able to collapse into a black hole without emitting in a supernova. So that was one of the things. And I was curious about whether that could happen. But then, of course, I was also wondering about just purely fundamental questions like could something just vanish? Has anyone ever looked? And that was maybe the thing that mostly like, was bugging me. If nobody has ever looked, how can you know that it doesn’t happen? And then we were, when I wrote the paper, we were motivating it a little bit with SETI questions like maybe it’s a very, very advanced technological civilization. Although I was mostly interested in this just fundamental thing, right, which is I can’t explain it. Sometimes you just get stuck with something without really understanding why. Brian Keating:And the transients that you thought you might find originally, besides the failed supernovae, I mean, were they like planets? Like, astronomy has a very long tradition of looking for things, you know, blinking back and forth between images or photographic plates are now CCDs or CMOS cameras. So did you think you’d find comets and you’d become a prolific, you know, father finder of, of phenomena in our solar system that are interesting, but maybe not as, as ground shaking as aliens or even supernova. Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:Well, I was hoping for the failed supernova, or I was mostly hoping to find, you know, a star that is there in all images and beautifully there through, you know, Palomar survey one this, then the second Palomar survey in the 80s 90s, and then one looks today and it has vanished. And we would maybe even be able to get some beautiful light curve by looking at some sky surveys taken in between. And I was very excited by that particular idea. So we were looking first and we found nothing. But I found these stupid images, you know, with just one single point source and not again. And then we did this second attempt when I looked through 15% of the data. So I had 24,000 candidates, and that’s like three times as many images. And I had nobody who was willing to help me to look through them. Beatriz Villarroel – Rodriguez:And one had to look through them one by one. And then the machine learning people who were supposed to help me, they were doing their work, of course, but they were a little bit slower. And I was growing impatient, like, come on, we have, somehow we have to sift through this data set. So I took these images and one by one I went through all these 24,000 candidates. And of course you take small images because you’re not going to use 6 by 6 degrees plate. You use small images of 10 by 10 arc minutes or

Nobel Economist: The Market That Lets People Die

Nobel Economist: The Market That Lets People Die Transcript Brian Keating:A Nobel winning economist will tell you why you can buy heroin on any corner, but you can’t hire a killer. And why that same logic means people are dying who don’t have to. Al Roth:Why is it so easy to buy drugs, but so hard to hire a hitman? We forbid, as most countries do, any effort to pay kidney donors. In Canada and in Britain, surrogacy isn’t illegal, but it’s illegal to pay a surrogate. People who need surrogacy service come to California, but they have no trouble bringing their babies back because parental rights in surrogacy are recognized. Recognized. Brian Keating:My guest today won the Nobel Prize in Economics for designing the systems that match kidney donors to patients. What he told me about the markets we’re not allowed to have is going to make some of you uncomfortable and quite frankly, angry. Brian Keating:You’re the first person I’ve ever had on the podcast who has been called an organ trafficker. But explain how that came about. Al Roth:Well, I talk about controversial transactions. And one of the things that my colleagues and I have helped medical professionals do is organize what’s called kidney exchange. And kidney exchange, which we can talk about more, is a way of getting more living donor transplants than could otherwise be gotten. And that’s important because there’s a real shortage of transplants. The rate of kidney failure in the United States is at about 130,000 people a year, but we do fewer than 30,000 transplants a year. So it’s important to get more transplants. And we do this in a way that the US Congress didn’t find repugnant. They unanimously amended the National Organ Transplant act to affirm that kidney exchange is legal in the United States, but not everyone is equally happy with it. Al Roth:And one of the funny things about transplant dogma in the world is that countries should be self sufficient in transplantation. And one of the things about kidney exchange is it needs big groups of patient donor pairs to work efficiently. And so, for example, I went to the United Arab Emirates for the first kidney exchange between the UAE and Israel. But the lady who calls me an organ trafficker thinks that countries should be self sufficient in transplants. Brian Keating:One of the things that I never really appreciated as explicitly as you make it in the book is sort of the unintended consequences of many economic actions that then have both political and economic and social ramifications. Can you explain the relationship between bans and black markets? Al Roth:So one of the themes of the book is that to work well, markets need social support, and to work well, bans on markets also need social support. So often what I’m talking about in the book are transactions that some people would like to engage in and other people think shouldn’t be allowed. And when you ban something that some people would like to engage in, often you’re going to find that they try to find ways to work around the ban. And one way to work around the ban is to find a another jurisdiction where the transaction you want to engage in is legal. A different way to work around a ban is to find people who are willing to violate the ban and commit criminal acts in order to further the kind of transaction that you’re interested in. Brian Keating:If you have a ban that protects moral purity, but then it creates a black market, I mean, that ends up hurting people, how do we judge if that’s truly moral? Al Roth:Well, one of the themes in the book is I think we have to judge the morality of the bans we make and the markets we support, not just by our intentions, but by the consequences. So one of the questions I ask in the book is why is it so easy to buy drugs but so hard to hire a hitman? And what I mean by that is we have in the United States, we have bans on commercial murders. When we find hitmen, we put them in prison for as long as we can, and when we find heroin dealers, we put them in prison for as long as we can. But those two bans have had very different effects. There’s almost no commercial killing in the United States. It doesn’t make it into the national crime statistics. But heroin is readily available in the United States. And we have not only lots of dealers and addicts, but many overdose deaths every year, many more than we have homicides of any sort. Al Roth:So the two very similar kinds of bans catch them and imprison them, have very different effect. So I think we’re doing fine on hitmen. We should. We should keep it up. We don’t need hitmen, and we don’t have them. But we’re not doing fine on heroin. We have a lot of heroin, and we ought to be experimenting with ways to reduce the harm that it does. If we can’t, even if we can’t ban it as thoroughly as we would like to. Al Roth:And of course, the United States has some experience with this from Prohibition. In the 1920s and early 30s, we tried to ban the production and sale of most alcoholic beverages, and that didn’t work well. And so after amending the constitution to institute prohibition, we re amended it to end prohibition. And ending prohibition on alcohol hasn’t solved the problem of alcohol. There are still alcoholics and drunk drivers, but you can’t buy whiskey from gangsters anymore. The legal market has out competed the organized crime organizations that grew up in order to sell illegal alcohol. Brian Keating:You’re the second economist to come on who’s written a book that has, you know, brothel or prostitution in the

Dead Cows, Aliens, & Ghosts: How Kevin Knuth Connects Them All

Dead Cows, Aliens, & Ghosts: How Kevin Knuth Connects Them All Transcript Brian Keating:Today on Keating’s Razor. And I’ll just acknowledge right up front for a series called Keating’s Razor, it might be a little too appropriate, almost as if it’s a suspicious coincidence that we’re opening a Keating’s Razor video with a story about surgical precision allegedly being applied to cattle in 1980s Montana. I didn’t plan it that way. The universe did. So let’s get to it. Kevin Knuth:Where’s the beef when people are abducted by gray aliens? There were 60% of the people reported around the world that they were given babies to hold. Why would anyone reported that? They may have the mindset Earth is their planet, right? And we happen to live here. I don’t think anybody’s ready for this, really. Brian Keating:Today’s claim. Kevin Knuth, a working physicist, a former NASA scientist, a member of the physics community I respect. He believes aliens are very probably in our own solar system. He’s written a paper about the so called Tic Tac event, and he’s done the math on the Nimitz encounter. Kevin Knuth:And there was a cattle mutilation in Bozeman on a ranch that night. There were 100 phone calls to the sheriff’s office about UFOs. And then you have this cattle mutilation where there were two cows that were killed and surgically manipulated. It was very bizarre. Brian Keating:He traces all of it, the whole arc of his research, back to a story about cattle mutilations in Montana that happened in 1988. And he told it all to my friend Mayim Bialik recently. And here’s what most people missed about that interview. Mayim, throughout the interview was running the exact same methodology I’m about to apply. So this isn’t going to be a Brian versus Kevin. This is going to be about two scientists who looking for truth, using one set of inference. Does it make the Keating’s Razor cut? Let’s find out. Every claim gets a close shave. Brian Keating:Some survive, most don’t make the cut. Before I slice and dice anything, I’m going to tell you what’s not weak about Kevin’s case. Because a lot of people who roll their eyes at UAP research haven’t actually heard the steel version of it. Kevin is not the caricature of some armchair physicist. He’s a tenured professor of physics, a decorated educator at the University of Albany, the State University of New York, my ancestral homeland. He spent years at NASA Ames Research Center. He publishes about exoplanets in top astrophysics journals like the Astrophysical Journal. He teaches Bayesian inference and mathematical physics. Brian Keating:And he’s worked on exoplanet detection, actual exosolar planets found by actual telescopes in actual peer reviewed venues. This is a man who is a real scientist with a real track record, real peer reviewed publications, and you should set that down as a fact before we go any further. Kevin’s argument on the UAP question runs like, Claim one, there are sightings clustered around nuclear sites going back to the 1940s, before nuclear bombs were even loaded. Claim two, the speeds and accelerations reported in some of the encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, including encounters with multiple instruments, multiple platforms like boats and aircraft, with trained observers, are extraordinary. Kevin Knuth:I have friends who work up, who are in the Air Force, who work up at Malmstrom Air Force Base in northern Montana, and they have problems there with UFOs flying over the nuclear missile sites and shutting down our nuclear missiles. Brian Keating:He estimated the Nimitz tic tac physics himself. And the numbers do not look like weather balloons, swamp gas or the planet Venus. Claim three, cross cultural patterns reported in abductions shows up from Nepal to Congo to Chicago in cases from before the Internet even existed. Kevin Knuth:When people are abducted by gray aliens, there were 60% of the people reported around the world that they were given babies to hold before they. So they would have some medical tests done, something’s medically done to them, and then before they were sent back home they would be given babies to hold. And I was like, wait, why would anyone reported that? That’s bizarre. And so that was one of the surprising things. But it turns out it’s 60% of the cases from Nepal to Congo to Chicago. It’s pretty, it’s, it’s again something. And these are old cases, so these are things that you wouldn’t. Brian Keating:And lastly, when you irradiate alleged crash debris with neutrons in a lab, sometimes you get something extraordinary, something genuinely strange. And Kevin himself, in his own words, when Mayim asked him about it, an experience he had, he said, I don’t say that because I don’t know. And when Mayim pressed him about a personal experience he had, he was careful to relate the fact that it was his own personal experience, not a documented scientific fact in a laboratory. He said, I don’t say that because I don’t know what the hell a ghost really is. Mayim Bialik:Are you comfortable with saying I’m a physicist and I saw a ghost? Kevin Knuth:I don’t say that because I don’t know what the hell a ghost is. So I can’t really say it was a ghost. Brian Keating:That’s a careful man, a true Scientist. He’s not a true believer. He’s a true scientist. He doesn’t say what it is. He says something happened. This is a real physicist with real data, doing the real work, being careful with his language, but not overly careful. But we have to be careful too. And with Keating’s razor, it turns out that Mayim did some of the hard slicing for us already. Brian Keating:The subject today is something that’s near and dear to every animal lover on Earth. It takes us back to 1988. Kevin Knuth had been at Bozeman, Montana in graduate school for one whole week. All of

Intelligent Design Theorist: AI Just Proved It Can’t Think Without Us

Intelligent Design Theorist: AI Just Proved It Can’t Think Without Us Transcript Brian Keating:An intelligent design theorist just told me the one thing that artificial intelligence proves is that AI can’t think without us, without a mind. Now here’s the argument. I challenge you to find a cracking. Stephen C. Meyer:If you train an AI system, a large language model, on a great body of text, and then you query that text, the AI system will output an answer in the next iteration, the output is progressively more incoherent. And if you do that iteration after iteration after iteration, you get a complete breakdown in coherency. The AI system, as impressive as it is, is fundamentally dependent on the initial input that in fact has come from a conscious agent. Brian Keating:That’s Stephen C. Meyer, a philosopher of Science with a PhD from Cambridge who argues the universe looks designed. Brian Keating:If I told you we had some uranium somewhere and there was a functioning nuclear reactor that had no human input, there was absolutely no mind in place, would that be a challenge to the argument from the existence of information originating from a mind? Stephen C. Meyer:Before jumping into a carefully laid trap like that, I’d like to know what’s the factual. Brian Keating:You got me, Steve. Brian Keating:I spent years pushing back on him. Today I laid three traps to spring on him. Watch what he does with the third one. Stephen C. Meyer:Where did these atheist scientists gain access to the mind of God to know what he would or wouldn’t have done Brian Keating:if I told you that AI seems to be mind like and that AI is now creating its own versions of seemingly. According to many people, not only is generally intelligent, meaning that can do anything a person can do, certainly has passed the Turing test by most people’s standards a couple of years back. But more than that, maybe it’s creating consciousness and maybe it’s able to create minds. Does that implicate your hypothesis, which is the abduction? You should explain what abduction means, not alien abduction. We’ll get to that later. But the abduction inference to the best explanation first explain what that means and then is AI a counterexample to that whole thesis? Stephen C. Meyer:Just brief primer on inference to the best explanation as a mode of scientific reasoning? As you well know and have explained, scientists don’t come to conclusions that are deductively certain. It is not the goal of science to achieve the standard of absolute certainty through a process of logically certain deduction from certain premises. Rather, scientists reason either inductively or hypothetically, deductively or abductively. And all of these modes of reasoning are similar, where you get plausible conclusions that in the best of cases provide the best explanation of the data that you have at hand. An abductive inference has a different logical form that is not logically certain. It runs something like if A, then C. C, therefore possibly A. Okay. Stephen C. Meyer:C is observed. C would be a matter of course if A were true. If it rains, the streets will get wet, right? The streets are wet, therefore you can’t say therefore it rained, because there may be other possible causes. Brian Keating:Here in San Diego, you could say that. Stephen C. Meyer:And it might have been the car wash, might have been sprinkler system, might have been something fire hydrant bursting, whatever. The only thing you can conclude from the surprising fact that the streets are wet is that it may have rained. Okay, that kind of an inference is what philosophers call, they say that’s under determined. You have the. Under determination of theory by data. It’s a possible explanation that it rained, but it’s not decisive. So what do you do? Well, if you’re using this method of reasoning in science, which is very often used in science, you go out and you look for additional data points and you say, well, oh, there’s a bucket with soapy water by the car. The grass is not wet, but just the driveway is wet. Stephen C. Meyer:And so you start adding new facts to your body of data. And one by one you start eliminating the other possible explanations until finally, in the best of cases, you have just one, at least for the time being. So you have a best explanation of the data set at hand. And this is a very common way of reasoning in all the historical sciences, certainly, but in theoretical physics, in all the forensic sciences, it’s used across the board. Increasingly, philosophers of science, yes, they still prize the importance of predictions and confirmation of a theory by prediction. But prediction logically is seen to be a special case of explanation where you’re explaining something that has not happened yet. And so this connection between theory and what you would expect to follow from the theory if it were true is the way we end up testing things and winnowing our different possible explanations till we in, in again the best of cases, we come up with the best explanation. Sometimes we come up with two better explanations than all the alternatives, but we don’t have a completely decisive situation. Brian Keating:And that’s partially by design. I mean, it’s not, not to make a pun, but. But abduction is not induction or deduction, and that there’s a reason for that. Stephen C. Meyer:Another way to think of abjection is it’s often reasoning from effects back to possible causes and then undergoing this process of elimination. As you introduce more and more data into your analysis set, you get to a point where you can infer to a best possible causal explanation. And sometimes those can be very, very decisive, but still not proof, because the logical form doesn’t admit that. It’s not a deductive argument where if you have

Is the White House’s New UAP Council a Game Changer for Disclosure?

Is the White House’s New UAP Council a Game Changer for Disclosure? Transcript Brian Keating:Queens, foreign and domestic, with my. I think my most frequent guest. I’m not even sure. Could be. You could be my most frequent guest. And that’s an honor, I’m sure. All right, let me see if this is working here. We’ll cut this out of the final video, of course. Brian Keating:Let’s see if this works. My videos, you channel. Let’s see here. Could be you could be my mom. We’re working. All right. Avi Loeb, welcome back to the into the Impossible podcast. Avi Loeb:It’s great to join you, Brian, and as I said before, I really appreciate the dialogue with natural intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. Brian Keating:That’s right. You were talking about my brain and how you’re glad to talk to a real brain instead of a silicon one. We’re gonna have a lot of fun today talking about all these exciting things that you’ve been up to, including a new White House position, because I know you don’t have enough jobs, Avi, you must have. You must have been lonely. Avi Loeb:This one is particularly important and what I often tell my team members, we should keep our eyes on the orbs, not on the audience. Meaning just like in basketball, you know, I’m sure that the New York Knicks managed to win because they were focusing on the ball, not on the audience. And in the context of what I’m doing, there is a great opportunity. Now that President Trump came with the directive of declassifying videos, imagery, documents as much as possible within the constraints of national security, there is an opportunity for us to look into the question of whether there are unusual objects near Earth that are not human made. And, you know, you might think that I’m approaching it from a perspective of an astrophysicist, but that’s not true, actually. You know, I draw my lesson from going to the kitchen. If I find an ant, a single ant on the kitchen cabinet, then I know that there should be thousands of them under the sink. And I’m very worried about it. Avi Loeb:So. So when we shut down the Chinese spy balloon, you know, a few years ago, probably the Chinese intelligence agencies were laughing because we use the missile to shoot down one balloon, but they have many more that we are not aware of. And so the question, you know, the down to earth assumption would be to say all these orbs and unusual objects being identify, being noticed by military personnel near strategic assets of the US Are actually human made. And as a result, if the intelligence agencies are telling us that they cannot figure those out, if the Pentagon cannot really identify the, the senders of these gadgets, and by the way they could be launched from within the US by people who cooperate with adversarial nations. It doesn’t need to arrive from outside the border. Brian Keating:That’s right, yeah. Avi Loeb:And so I think it’s a serious matter. We’re not dealing with necessarily the exactly the same objects that we dealt with 50 years ago. And so we have. Brian Keating:Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to ask you because we have a limited amount of time, why go to a Harvard professor as esteemed as you are, as. As renowned as you are? I mean, my main concern is a lot of things are coming out now. Disclosure Day just came out. Popular movie, you just reviewed it. And I think it’s. I’m going to direct everyone to the Medium article about it. But amidst that, there was also a disclosure, you know, kind of revelation by your friend David Grush and your friend Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna. Brian Keating:And I want to get right to the point because I’ve been frustrated with both of them. I have, as you know, I’ve wanted to talk to both of them and I’m hoping you’ll make an introduction. A shit, as we say. But Avi, why can’t I understand why David can’t come forward? He could go to jail. And I don’t want him to lose his livelihood or God forbid, Hassel Shalom get injured in any way. I have great respect for him. He’s a great patriot. However, he’s talking about things he’s never seen with his own eyes. Brian Keating:He’s talking about things he’s been told and he’s saying he can’t come forward with what he’s been told in more detail than sentient plasmoids and non human biologics. Now, that may be true. I don’t know anything about disclosure in terms of the government crack down on an individual. I don’t want any harm to come to him. But Anna Luna, your friend who went to your observatory, who took a tour with you, who’s on tour with you, she could do this in a heartbeat. And the fact that she’s not releasing everything that she knows and she’s hiding behind this suggests to me as just an independent skeptic, but someone who wants to believe that we’re not alone and wants to know that we’re not alone. I don’t want to believe anything. I want to know. Brian Keating:So, Avi, why can’t she come forward and just tell us everything that she knows? She’s not going to be put in jail. Come on. Avi Loeb:Well, Representative Luna actually argues that we are not and she is not being privy to all the information that is relevant to this matter and what they are shown under, you know, secrecy in skiff setups, which are basically Faraday cages where no electromagnetic information can penetrate secure, compartmentalized information secure. I mean, what they saw is intriguing, but I don’t think it’s, it’s the actual things that Grush was talking about. So there is here, there is a gap between the access that congresspeople have and what Grush is talking about.

Roman Yampolskiy: AI Can’t Be Controlled — and We’re Building It Anyway

Roman Yampolskiy: AI Can’t Be Controlled — and We’re Building It Anyway Transcript Brian Keating:A computer scientist who helped found the field of AI safety just told me we’re building something we can never switch off and that the smartest people in the room agree with him. Roman Yampolskiy:We’re going to have systems ten hundred thousand million times smarter than us. What does that mean? They see patterns we don’t see. You can have squirrels, monkeys, whatever you want. They’re very intelligent beings, but they’re not competitive with us. We’re just on a different level. And it’s exactly what we’re going to see here. Having an agent and giving it full access to your computer, your bank accounts, your email, sounds like the dumbest thing you can possibly do. And watching smart people do that really blows my mind. Roman Yampolskiy:Well, we’re asking for a pause in frontier model development contingent on someone solving control. If I’m right and control is unsolvable, that moratorium becomes a permanent ban. If I’m wrong, in 10 years I’ll get utopia free stuff and be very happy to be wrong. Brian Keating:That’s Roman Yampolsky, a computer scientist who helped found AI safety and who now argues that can’t ever be done. Not hard. Provably impossible. Now, I’m used to going into the impossible, but today he’s going to get into why the math says so for the first time at this level of detail and the one button he’d actually press if he had the opportunity. Brian Keating:We can’t bound the limits of knowledge and part of controlling super AI. Again, I’m being devil’s advocate here. I’m not saying this is my position, I’m just saying this is what I think David Pascha, David Deutsch would say is that because to control something you need to have knowledge of its future, prediction of its future behavior, although you can’t have perfect knowledge of anything. Right? That’s impossible for sure. But the question is, can you have the same level of controllability via the knowledge that a human who’s a universal explainer can glean? And I guess he’s saying you’re saying it’s impossible for a human to ever control AI, but he’s saying humans are universal explainers, therefore nothing explainable, even with errors and stochastic notions of what explanation means, is not fundamentally restricted. So it does seem like you guys don’t agree, and that’s fine. That’s not a formal proof, by the way. I’m just saying he’s saying humans can explain things. Brian Keating:AI is something that could be explained, therefore it’s not impossible to explain them. But I think you would Say it is impossible to control them because you cannot explain them. Correct. Roman Yampolskiy:So there is theory and practice. In theory, given infinite time, average human with pencil and paper can probably figure out everything. We don’t have infinite time and we have limited size brain with limited size memory cells, our ability to survey information is limited. So if you had a mathematical proof and it was a billion pages long, no human can verify that proof. In theory they could, but in practice it’s not going to happen. Brian Keating:I thought you’re going to say in theory communism works, but in practice, Roman Yampolskiy:if we have a real world situation where you have a system, let’s just say it’s just like humans, but it’s a billion times faster. We’re not competitive in that environment. We simply don’t have time to react, to do anything whatsoever to counteract what the system is going to do. But we are not equal. We’re going to have systems ten hundred thousand million times smarter than us. What does that mean? They see patterns we don’t see. I always bring up examples from animal kingdom, right? You can have squirrels, monkeys, whatever you want. They’re very intelligent beings. Roman Yampolskiy:Eventually they have some language culture, they’re starting to use tools, but they’re not competitive with us. We’re just on a different level. And it’s exactly what we’re going to see here. Him being a very good professor at a very good university, he understands when he selects students, he doesn’t select them at random because all humans are universal explainers. He looks for the one with highest intelligence. Why? Because they’re going to finish things in time. They’re going to understood and publish on time and it’s exactly the same. Instead of looking for a student with IQ of 130, now you’re comparing machines with IQ of a thousand to humans and saying, well, technically they’re all in the same class of automata. Roman Yampolskiy:They all Turing complete. True, but that means nothing. Brian Keating:For safety, Einstein said the following Roman, he said no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that that created it. So did Einstein kind of predict some of the claims that you’re making now that we have basically have been from the start unable to even grapple with the questions of what sort of entities we’re creating? Roman Yampolskiy:I think I would disagree with him. I think you can solve certain problems from the same level, but what you can do is solve problems from higher level. So as an agent with this world model, with this IQ, I cannot successfully solve problems for agents with IQs of thousand million. That’s the problem. You can go lower. I can solve problems for those at a lower level, but not. Not go higher. Brian Keating:What do you think that Einstein would have made of. Of AI? What utility does it have to a practicing scientist like me? Or would it have had to Einstein himself? Roman Yampolskiy:So it seems like, at least in mathematics, we’re starting to watch AI overtake, overtake that profession. They are now proving things, interesting things, not trivial theorems, using latest models. And we are at the earliest stages of that process. So if the same progress continues as we saw in

Michio Kaku Went Viral On Diary of a CEO; I Had To Fact-Check

Michio Kaku Went Viral On Diary of a CEO; I Had To Fact-Check Transcript Michio Kaku:Capitalism would vanish, society would come to a halt, there’d be civil war. This is a quantum computer. It’s a computer that computes not on transistors, which is old fashioned. It computes on atoms. Brian Keating:Welcome back to into the Impossible. And this is a special sub series called Keating’s Razors. Trying to understand which bold claims that are out there actually make the cut and which don’t survive the close shave. Today’s episode features past guest and physicist extraordinaire Michio Kaku, a man not known for lack of hyperbole or humility when it comes to the physical universe. And he was recently on Diary of a CEO, a business podcast. But Michio got a ton of attention for some of his claims. The very first thing that really got my undies in a bundle was his discovery discussion of quantum computing. So I’ll play the clip for you now. Michio Kaku:The ultimate object beyond the transistors that you can compute with is the atom. So these are called quantum computers. Why are they powerful? Because they compute not on transistors, they compute on atoms. And you can’t get much smaller than an atom and have stable matter. But that’s what quantum computers can do. And they exist. This is not science fiction. They already exist. Brian Keating:So what Mitchie is saying is that a quantum computer, which is a real technology. I just talked with John Martinez, who’s working on a quantum computing company called Collabs, and he won the Nobel Prize just last year for his work on macroscopic quantum phenomena, namely in Josephson junctions and qubits and superconducting circuits, which we use in all sorts of telescopes like the Simons Observatory. But real quantum computing is both a long way off, according to John and many others. But. But it’s far from doing what Michio just claimed it’s going to do. His takeaway is that quantum computing is going to directly lead to the abolishment and vanishing of capitalism and therefore society would come to a halt. So that’s the chain Machio quantum computer breaks encryption and therefore quantum capitalism is gone. That’s the first thing. Brian Keating:There’s nothing in between. We have to migrate to post quantum cryptography. We have to go beyond that now. So what does that mean? Governments have to do this, banks have to do this. They would have a five alarm fire, according to Michio. Not that there would be a challenging and possibly expensive transition. Just capitalism gone overnight. Credits roll and your bank account vanishes. Brian Keating:You know what else could theoretically break RSA encryption? A sufficiently powerful classical computer and a Motivated group of white hat or black hat hackers. We know about this. They can also run Shor’s algorithm. We’ve known about this since the 1990s. The global financial system has been responding in a, in a measured way. We’ll deal with it when it’s relevant. And by the way, nist National Institute of Standards of Technology has already standardized a post quantum cryptographic algorithm to deal with just this. It’s not a problem, it’s not a five alarm problem. Brian Keating:It’s not going to cause society collapse, let alone all of capitalism. Can you imagine if economic systems depended on quantum computing or any other physical laws like oh no, we can’t do this. The second law of thermodynamics prevents you from accessing your kids piggy banks. Steven Bartlett:Okay? Brian Keating:It’s not going to happen. And you know, maybe if you watch Live Free or Die Hard too many times, you might come away with that impression. That’s maybe just a crime. But. But don’t present it as physics. Please don’t present it as physics. Michio Kaku:I’m a physicist working on the theory of Everything. Steven Bartlett:What is the theory of Everything? Michio Kaku:An equation perhaps no more than one inch long that will allow us to quote, read the mind of God. These are Einstein’s words. The theory of the Big Bang, the theory of creation itself. The theory of, of everything. Brian Keating:Okay, now this is a big one. Mitchie says I work in string theory, which is the theory that eluded Einstein the last 30 years of his life. The Theory of everything. Well, there’s actually a few problems here. First of all, Einstein never worked on string theory. It wasn’t developed until the 60s and 70s, decades after Einstein was already dead. So the idea that Einstein was searching for this elusive theory that eluded him his whole life is really not an incorrect assessment whatsoever. String theory wasn’t even on the event horizon on the day he passed away in 1955. Brian Keating:Second, string theory is not a theory of everything. It’s a candidate for a possible unification scheme which could potentially lead to a theory of everything. But there’s a big difference between that and a patented theory of everything. A theory of everything would have to make testable, falsifiable predictions. String theory makes none of these and their proponents, the actual people working on it today, unlike Michio, doesn’t work on it, did work on what’s called string field theory, which he points out he didn’t invent string theory. Some people give him credit for that. He worked on a branch of an allied field called string field theory, which has not produced nearly the excitement or breakthroughs such as they are, as string theory itself has done. So a theory of everything at this point is a complete misnomer, let alone at the time when Einstein died. Brian Keating:And it inspired young 7 year old Michio Kaku apparently to become a physicist. So I think it’s just interesting and it’s fun to note, but he says we think, as in we think it’s the theory that eluded Einstein, not it is the theory that Einstein searched for. So he’s already kind of

Physicist: Why I Believe in Near-Death Experiences

Physicist: Why I Believe in Near-Death Experiences Transcript Brian Keating:I’m an astrophysicist at one of the top universities in the world. I normally don’t believe in the paranormal. Alien abductions, cattle mutilation, crop circles, near death experiences. But what if I told you that me, a practicing astrophysicist, believes in the phenomenon known as near death experiences? That’s right. And today I’m about to tell you about the most important near death experience that ever happened. And it’s one I believe in. And you should too. Now, most near death experiences that other people talk about are paranormal. Brian Keating:There’s a white light. You walk into it, or you’re hovering over the hospital bed where the surgeon left his glove in your otherwise beautiful cadaver. You see the loved ones wailing. You see the rogue cousin coming out of the woodwork, wondering what he’s going to inherit. Now, I don’t believe in any of those, and I can explain why scientifically, and I will. But there’s one near death experience that changed scientific history forever. I believe in it. And you should too. Brian Keating:It happened in Paris in April 1888, and the tale has gone down in history. But the truth is even stranger than the fictional apocryphal story told about it. The real story takes 30 years, four deaths and one uniting thread to tell. And now, if you’ve ever wondered why the most famous prize in the world exists, this is the answer, and is darker, more personal and more deeply moral in its implications in architecture than you’ve probably ever heard about. Now, I have a personal stake in this story that I’ll get to towards the end. To understand Alfred Nobel and the prizes named after him, we have to start with his family. Emmanuel Nobel, the father, the patriarch, had four sons who survived to adulthood. Robert, the eldest, Ludwig, the businessman, Alfred, the chemist, and Emile, the youngest, born in 1843. Brian Keating:Emile was the only one who went to university. As it turns out, he studied at Uppsala and helped at his father’s family factory in his free time. On September 3, 1864, Emil is just 20 years old. He’s in the family factory, and that morning he was experimenting in the workshop at Hellenenborg, just outside of Stockholm. He was tinkering with a dangerous substance that would go down in infamy, a substance his family was trying to commercialize, unsuccessfully. It was a liquid that had been discovered 17 years earlier by an Italian chemist, Ascanio Sobrero. The liquid was so unstable that Sobrero himself had refused to develop it further. He was so fearful of the dangers it presented, he doubted it could ever be Used safely, it’s known as nitroglycerin. Brian Keating:That fateful day in September, something went wrong. We don’t know exactly what. Nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable, and just a mere tremor can set it off. Five people died that day. Emil was one of them. Fortunately, Alfred was not at the factory that morning. But he would spend the next three years of his life trying to make that substance that killed his brother safe enough that other people could use it and never be harmed again. Ironically, it became one of the most dangerous substances on earth. Brian Keating:Dynamite. And to do that, Alferd had to embed the dangerous liquid nitroglycerin into a stable form of dirt, basically diatomaceous earth. In 1867, Alferd filed a patent that would make him one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He called it dynamite, which meant power rock in Greek. Alfred Nobel’s fortune was built on solving the problem that had killed his youngest brother and would also go on to kill millions more. According to the most famous obituary in history. We’ll get to that soon. Al Gore:Foreign Brian Keating:Emmanuel Nobel, the patriarch of the family Emiles and Alfred’s father was a brilliant inventor. He had invented naval mines that the Russian czar loved. They used it during the Crimean War. He invented a type of lathe that’s still used in manufacturing to this day. He designed an early central heating system useful in Sweden. By any reasonable standard, he should have died an extremely wealthy man. But he didn’t. When the Crimean war ended in 1856, a new tsar arose who cut the military budget and Emanuel’s contracts completely evaporated. Brian Keating:By 1862, his creditors had sold the firm and Emanuel was forced to return to Sweden a bankrupted man. Then, just a year later, Emile died at Hellenborn. The news obviously broke his heart. He had a stroke shortly afterwards and never fully recovered. He spent most of his eight remaining years bedridden. Then on September 3, he 1872, eight years to the day after his son Emil died, Emmanuel the father died as well. Alfred watched his father change the world with his inventions, but lose everything anyway. He was determined not to let that be his fate as well. Brian Keating:He realized that wealth without structure evaporates. He learned that a man can be the most inventive, creative, imaginative person on the whole continent and still have nothing to show for it. Let this be a lesson. If you want your work to outlive you, you can’t leave it to a family business. You have to build it into an institution that will long outlive not only you, your family, your Distant heirs, but maybe race for time itself. Ludwig was the Nobel brother who proved Alfred’s lesson wrong. While Alfred was racing between laboratories in search of a stable solution to the nitroglycerin problem, Ludwig had built a different for fortune on a different liquid oil. He built one of the largest companies in the world. Brian Keating:The Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company operated in Baku, which is now in Azerbaijan. At its peak, it produced 50% of the world’s oil. Ludwig was sometimes called the Russian Rockefeller. Strange because he wasn’t Russian,

Godlike AI Is Here! Peter Diamandis Debates Brian Keating

Godlike AI Is Here! Peter Diamandis Debates Brian Keating Transcript Peter Diamandis:We’re a boot disk. We’re simply a transient boot disk for intelligence. Brian Keating:If artificial intelligence is going to take your job and your career or make you a problem, you might just want to hear from the people who actually are building it. Peter Diamandis:AGI ASI is going to be able to simulate a billion, 100 billion different scenarios and be able to say, statistically, this has the best outcome. These others are miserable. Brian Keating:My guest today is one of the few who’s actually in the room where he’s funded the labs, he’s invested in, the models. He’s been wrong about the timeline before and when he was wrong, he was wrong in the same direction as most of us. He thought it would take longer. Today, he’s going to tell you what he thinks happens next. To your work, to your kids, to your lifespan. Spoiler alert. He thinks it’s the best news in human history. But I’m not so sure. Brian Keating:So we’re going to duke it out. Peter Diamandis, his fifth time on the show. Into the impossible. Let’s go. Brian Keating:The first thing I thought when I saw the title of this book, you know, there’s no better person that could think about, you know, the question of humans becoming gods. That’s a real kind of old story and doesn’t always end well, as you know, Prometheus and many other of your Greek native gods can tell you. The phrase I keep hearing in my mind is we are gods but for the wisdom. And there’s world is swimming in intelligence. But Peter, what’s more important than wisdom and wisdom? Where can we go to get artificial wisdom, not just intelligence? Peter Diamandis:Well, let me, let me give you my pitch on that because I think we’re about to have it in spades. So if I were to ask you, Brian, like, where would you go to get wisdom? You know, historically, one would go to the village elders, right? You’d go to the people who had the most experience out there. And those village elders are considered wise because they’ve seen so many scenarios. They’ll sit there and they’ll say, listen, if you go down this path, it’s not going to end well for you, but if you go down this path, you might be able to succeed. And we define that as wisdom. Well, guess what, AGI ASI is going to be able to simulate a billion, a hundred billion different scenarios and be able to say, statistically, this has the best outcome. These others are miserable. I honestly don’t think human psychology is that difficult to simulate. Peter Diamandis:You know, this goes back to, you know, Isaac Asimov’s foundation series. I think that we are going to get wisdom out of AI. I think we’re going to get extraordinary wisdom out of AI. The reason that a starship, every flight gets better and better performance is because they’re able to put all of these sensors on the vehicle, get huge amounts of data and simulate the performance. Well, we’re heading towards a world of trillions of sensors. Every human conversation is being uploaded. We’re going to be able to model this and get wisdom. What do you think about that? Do you agree? Brian Keating:There’s no doubt that we are kind of surpassed any kind of event horizon or singularity that you have popularized with Ray and others. There’s no doubt that we’re kind of awash in intelligence. I don’t know about you, but if somebody told me I had a superhuman team of 150 of the world’s greatest graduate students at my disposal 24 7, I would say I’ll probably be on a beach, you know, maybe hanging out with Peter or something like that. I wouldn’t say I’d be working more than I ever have in my life. And that would be a failure of my, you know, judgment, my wisdom. You and I are both pilots. We’re both jet pilots, right? We have a saying in aviation. You must learn from other people’s experience because you won’t live long enough to make all their mistakes by yourself. Brian Keating:And so I just feel like I just fell into all these traps and part of this is, you know, to talk, my favorite subject, which of course is me. And I want to get your advice for me, Peter, that I’m working harder than ever. I don’t feel like I’m getting any benefit from this other than I’m just like constantly tuned in. I just love it. So I’m addicted to it. Peter Diamandis:It is an addiction. You know, people talk about three and four day work weeks. I think you and I have created the 9 and 10 day workweek. I’m working and operating at a higher level of capability and working more than I ever have in my life. I mean, I wake up my. My AI, my lobster, my open claw. I call Skippy from one of my favorite science fiction books. I’m talking to Skippy and having Skippy work on stuff. Peter Diamandis:Skippy’s working on stuff right now as we’re having this conversation. And so my productivity has gone up tremendously. But my addictiveness to productivity, to doing more and more has gone up. And yeah, I mean, the only downtime I get is when I give myself permission Because I know my AIs are working on stuff I can actually go and work out. I’m curious what you think about the wisdom argument I made. How do you define wisdom? And, and do you think that AIs are able to generate wisdom as I described it? Brian Keating:Actually, I disagree with the fact that AIs can, can generate wisdom only because at their current level I think that they’re, they’re bound, maybe they’ll become unbound like Prometheus again, the God like figure.

Two Scientists, One Question: Does Alien Life Need a Soul?

Two Scientists, One Question: Does Alien Life Need a Soul? Transcript Brian Keating:Foreign. Hugh Ross:This live stream is sponsored by the Reasons to Believe scholar community. Welcome and thank you for joining us for this special livestream. Today’s conversation explores if the universe is fine tuned, why isn’t there more life out there? Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist, founder of Reasons to Believe and author of numerous works on the intersection of science and faith, is joined by Dr. Brian Keating, Cosmologist Chancellor’s Distinguished professor of Physics at UC San Diego and host of the into the Impossible podcast. This conversation will be moderated by George Harakson ii, Senior Research Scholar at Reasons to Believe and Senior Adjunct professor in Philosophy and Ethics at Azusa Pacific University. This session is divided into three Understanding our Guests Worldview, Fine Tuning and Life Beyond Earth and a Q and A portion. We’re honored to have you with us for this important discussion. George Harakson II:Welcome to this Reasons to Believe quarterly livestream broadcast where we explore God’s world and God’s word. And as you heard, I’m George Farakson, a senior research scholar here, and I’m joined by two very fine people, I call them my intellectual sherpas for today. And we have Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist. Welcome, Hugh. Hugh Ross:Thank you. George Harakson II:You just came back from a trip from Canada, your homeland, as with you, actually, yeah, I was there. Yeah. We got to hang out with quite a number of professors and students. That was a lot of fun. So welcome. And we are also joined here in person, which is wonderful. Dr. Brian Keating, who is the Chancellor’s Distinguished professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of California and you host your own podcast, you’re an author and just something that’s fun is you, you didn’t walk here, you didn’t drive here. Brian Keating:But you, I was able to fly here. You flew here in a mighty, you know, four seat propeller plane all the way from San Diego. And I made it on one tank of gas, didn’t even have to refuel along the way. George Harakson II:Now that. Is this something you just picked up or. I, I thought I heard you mention. Is this part of like part of your family heritage? Brian Keating:Yeah, yeah. My stepfather was a pilot, flew F4 Phantoms in Vietnam and he had all of his training, you know, magazines around and log books and everything. And I always wanted to be a pilot and I said, oh, maybe I could be an astronaut. What do you have to do? And you have to be under, you know, £200 or whatever. And at that time, even I was under 200, still not. And I figured, oh, maybe if I’m a, if I’m a Professor and an astrophysicist, plus a pilot. They’ll take me in. And luckily, you know, I still have time. Brian Keating:You know, maybe I’ll get a ride aboard, aboard a SpaceX rocket someday. But that’s the dream. And yeah, that’s. It’s always been part of my, my identity, really. Once you become a pilot, you’re always a pilot. You can’t take it away from you. George Harakson II:Yeah, yeah, no, that, that’s good. We all have our avocations or hobbies. You, you look out into the heavens. Both of you. Do you get the flying in the heavens? Hugh, I know you like to hike as high as you can. Hugh Ross:I like climbing mountains. George Harakson II:Climbing mountains. So different ways we reach the heights. Here I’m just a lowly drummer behind, you know, a drum set. So it’s going to be a lot of fun talking about why the universe is the way it is. Why isn’t there more life out there? These types of questions, but for the first part, we want to talk a little bit about how we approach science, maybe also science and faith issues. Then we’ll go into some of the prepared questions we have, and then we’ll invite those of you who are listening and participating. I know there’s people in our scholar committee who will share questions that I will go ahead and share with both of you and we’ll get your comments on this and feel free to dialogue with one another. It doesn’t have to go through me. George Harakson II:I’ll kind of go back into the background as needed. I’m not the astrophysicist here, but, Brian, I wanted to talk to you first. How do you kind of approach science, faith questions? I think I have this right, but you describe yourself as an observant Jew, but an agnostic. Am I stating that correctly? Brian Keating:Yeah, I think the term I often use is devout, practicing agnostic Jew. Yeah, hold to the Sabbath, you know, keep the Sabbath. And I really was inspired by my late great friend Freeman Dyson, who was the first guest on the into the Impossible podcast. Titanic astrophysicist, not the inventor of the vacuum. He would have been much richer, have he. But he invented the Dyson sphere and contributed to quantum electrodynamics. And he and I dialogued a lot about faith. And he won the Templeton Prize once and was very humble about it and said he didn’t deserve it, but at least he didn’t deserve it less than some other people who had won it. Brian Keating:And I said, you know, it’s interesting, Freeman, because you are by all means a very thoughtful person. But you don’t practice, you don’t do anything. So I said, how would that be any different than an intelligent alien that we’re going to talk about today? If an alien was watching you on a Sunday morning and saw what you were doing and saw what Richard Dawkins, who I’ve also hosted, been privileged to host him, and I said, if an alien saw those two men on a