Nate Soares: We Built Something We Can’t Control | A Warning from Top AI Safety Expert

Nate Soares: We Built Something We Can’t Control | A Warning from Top AI Safety Expert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRjK86hH3IY Transcript Brian Keating People racing to build superhuman AI say it might kill everyone. This is the man who spent a decade trying to stop that. Nate Soares Bad news is we’re in a bus that’s racing towards a cliff edge. The good news is that the driver is asleep. The AI will sometimes find a way to edit the text to say you did it. Sometimes it will cover its tracks. A lot of people think, oh, you know, the AI is a program. That’s not how these AI’s are. We grow them like an organism. Maybe we have ten years, but we only have ten months. Who knows? Brian Keating Nate Soares runs the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and he spent over a decade on just one problem how to build an AI that won’t kill us all that wants what we want. His new book with Eliezer Yudkowsky is called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Not the most important word in that sentence is the first one. Nate, take us through the title. Brian Keating The subtitle, and this somewhat ominous looking cover art, if I’m not mistaken. What was the origin, the genesis of this book? Nate Soares If I remember correctly, Stuart Russell is the one who came up with the word AI alignment when we were brainstorming. The reason some people credit me is that I got into an academic paper first. Brian Keating As an academic, that’s all that matters, right? Nate Soares But we were we were all discussing what to rename friendly AI, because friendly AI sounded a little bit not academic enough. And I think that was his. That was his phrase. So one of the critical things about the book title is it starts with, if, you know, a lot of people come in and say, oh, uh, aren’t you just sort of, uh, bringing pessimism and doom and gloom and telling us we’re all going to die. And it’s like the first word in the title is if when nuclear physicists came and said, hey, we shouldn’t launch all the nuclear weapons because that would cause Armageddon, they weren’t sort of prophets of doom like the Mason Knights, who are saying the end of the world is on this particular day. And in that sense at the time, you know, they were sort of saying, hey, this scientific technology would have these bad geopolitical implications like nuclear Armageddon if we sort of like, do this arms race, we’re going to get into this like really bad situation. The bombs are probably going to be launched one day and then we would die and that would be bad. So we should stop this race, right? The book title is intended to be very similar to that is to say, hey, if we do this, we’re going to die, which is not saying we we are definitely going to do it. And you know, the subtitle of the book, Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. Our publishers actually suggested why superhuman AI will kill us all. They said, you know, that role is better off the tongue, it’s less hedged. And we’re like, no, that’s that completely defeats the purpose here. The point of the book is to sort of warn people that we are on a track that leads to destruction, and we had better change it. And so we we sort of really insisted, despite a fair bit of pushback, that the subtitle needs to indicate that this is avoidable. Brian Keating The concern that I have is whether or not it’s too late for if. And the conversation I had with Roman, you know, made me quite depressed, although I think I did push back on some of his safety concerns in particular, you probably know, but if my audience hasn’t seen the episode yet, you know, his his claim is that AI is fundamentally unpredictable. So if it’s unpredictable, it’s uncontrollable. And if something is super powerful, uncontrollable and unbounded, then it’s essentially a I guarantee that that ASI will kill us all, not would kill us all. And that in his mind, it’s sort of a done deal. Like we’ve we’ve gone too far. He also suggests things that you suggest in the book of AI regulation and international cooperation, which, you know, we all know how easy that is to get, you know, actors to behave in the unilaterally beneficent way to humanity. Is it too late? Nate Soares We’re not at superintelligence yet. And, you know, that’s the thing a lot of people don’t get about this AI situation. The AI companies are racing to build machines that are far smarter than any human at every task, right? These these companies did not start out as chatbot companies. Sam Altman says, you know, we’re turning our eyes to superintelligence, to the true sense of the word. Dario Modi talks about having the equivalent of a country worth of geniuses running in a data center. The founders of DeepMind have been thinking about the sort of like true general intelligence since the beginning. The chatbots are what make money. That’s sort of like surprised a lot of people who sort of stumbled into it. But these companies are all looking to create sort of like the real deal, like the stuff that can’t just exceed individual humans, but can exceed humanity, right? But we’re not there yet. Right. And a lot of people look at the AI’s today, and they’re like, I don’t really see how how fable could kill everybody. I can see how maybe it could, like, empower some hackers to do some extra superhuman level cyber attacks. But I don’t see how it could kill everybody. It’s sometimes hard to convey, like, yeah, we’re talking about where AI is going. You

Michael Shermer: 95% of UFO Sightings Have Boring Explanations

Michael Shermer: 95% of UFO Sightings Have Boring Explanations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR2WVOVuq_I Transcript Michael Shermer:I have a bet with Avi, $1,000, by December 31st, 2030, we won’t find aliens. He says we will. I hope he wins. Brian Keating:You were just named, as I’m reading this now, just last week to this new White House panel council on alien and UFO and UAP task force, okay? Now leave aside that, you know, Avi Loeb is a mutual friend of ours. You’ve been on the Galileo Project for a while. There are some, you know, characters on this committee alongside, you know, that have legitimate credentials. Dr. Gary Nolan, professor at Stanford, he’s another member who, you know, in his spare time, uh, scans the brains of abductees for a biomarker and claims to have evidence of alien, you know, uh, metallurgical isotope ratios that are anomalous. What happened, Michael? Did they get a big bag of Harvard money? Michael Shermer:And no, there’s no money. No, there’s— this is all voluntary. There’s no money at all. Same thing with the Galileo Project. I’ve been on it since the beginning, and I just do it because I’m interested in the topic. I think Avi strikes the right balance between open-mindedness and gullibility. Don’t be gullible, but be open-minded, but also be skeptical. And their emphasis on data and evidence, not stories, right? I mean, we just had our first meeting today. Michael Shermer:Avi started right off, no more stories about people who know people that touch the aliens or whatever. We’ve all heard these, okay? And no new physics, right? So you’ll appreciate this because you’re a physicist, right? I mean, it’s like people are always talking— this is Avi— people are always telling me about the, you know, the aliens are going to give us new physics. No, there’s no new physics, okay? So forget that. I mean, maybe they do, but you know, that’s just too far off the radar here. But I’m not the enemy. I mean, I, I have a bet with Avi, $1,000, right? Uh, by 20— December 31st, 2030, we won’t find aliens. He says we will. Okay, I hope he wins. Michael Shermer:I would like it to be true. The aliens are probably out there somewhere in the cosmos. Run the numbers in the Drake Equation, it’s like, yeah, okay, they’re probably out there. But have they come here? Okay, so I think that’s a, uh, that’s a far less probable proposition. We don’t know for sure. Let’s see the evidence. Okay, so when Abby puts together this team, you know, it’s like, yeah, sure, I’ll do it. He described me as the advocatus diaboli, that is the Catholic Church’s version of the devil’s advocate, which they employed to debunk all the miracle claims in the Middle Ages. Michael Shermer:Everybody had a piece of the True Cross, every, you know, these were holy relics. Everybody had the blood of this saint and this other person and so on. Okay, they know most of this is just bullshit, and they debunked it themselves. The Catholic Church was the primary skeptical debunker of miracle claims. Now, they, they still hold out, but there was this one, you know, so we’re going to give Mother Teresa the, you know, her sainthood, that kind of thing. But for the most part, they’re as skeptical as I am. So that’s my job on the team, is really just to be a good skeptic. And of course, any good scientist is a good skeptic. Michael Shermer:We start with the null hypothesis, that is, your claim about something is not true until you prove otherwise. The burden of proof is not on scientists and skeptics to debunk every particular claim, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. I have a theory of everything. I think Einstein was wrong, and Newton was wrong, and Hawking was wrong, and here’s my theory of everything for physics. Well, you’re not going to go, okay, and then, then I guess I have to disprove it and you’re right. No, you’re going to say, I don’t believe it, but go ahead, make your case. And, uh, and we’re having a conference next week, and all the top physicists will be there. Why don’t you come and present your case for us, and we’ll We’ll judge how well you did. Michael Shermer:In the same way that all the people that made a claim that they had a miracle cure for COVID, you know, the FDA doesn’t just hand out approvals of new drugs. You actually have to present the FDA your evidence. How do you know this actually works? And you can’t just say, well, my Aunt Mary had it and she took it and she felt better. Sorry, that’s not evidence, right? That’s not enough to refute the null hypothesis. That is, reject the null hypothesis at some level of statistical significance, as they say. That’s all we’re after there. So, and the more extraordinary the claim, the more evidence you better have for it. Brian Keating:A lot of these could be, could be actual claims, you know, based on truth and facts and reality, but just complete misinterpretation, right? I mean, one, one man’s drone, you know, array in the dark could be another person’s unidentified aerial phenomena. So, but when you see people that talk about things like Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, interdimensional beings and non-human biologics and now bipedal life forms on a spectrum. You know, ever go to Facebook and sign up for a new account and there’s, you know, 46 different selections for your gender and your pronouns and, and the University of California. I mean, oh my gosh, it’s even, even more, more impressive array. But apparently there’s a spectrum, a continuum to sentient plasmoids to bipedalism, which is, you know, the insectoids, the multidimensional beings. Michael Shermer:Yeah. There’s 4 different alien species. Yeah, I’ve heard all this.

400K Subscribers Asked Me Anything. The Answers Got Weird.

400K Subscribers Asked Me Anything. The Answers Got Weird. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOWGITl1cpE Transcript Brian Keating:Okay, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast, a very special episode featuring my favorite guest, me, Brian Keating, celebrating 400,000 of you multiversal minds that traverse the cosmos from consciousness to astrobiology, there and back. When I started the podcast, I assumed that maybe a few dozen nerds would somehow watch, but we built a community that hundreds of thousands of people are listening to or watching. Over 500K when you include the audio versions, which I hope that you will also enjoy. And whether we’re talking about inflation or artificial intelligence or aliens or black holes, I think that you’re getting something here that you get nowhere else, and that’s access to the greatest minds in the universe, some deep dives. I never pull punches, I never hold back, and I just love, uh, the fact that I get to do this all. And most of what I provide to you is kind of a hobby. I don’t do this for the money. I certainly don’t make money on the podcast. Brian Keating:And it’s just been such a delight. So you’ll hear this in the second half. I’m going to answer some questions that were dropped on YouTube, and you can join my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, or my secondary YouTube channel where I do these deep dive explainers into the hottest topics in physics and astronomy, cosmology, artificial intelligence. Those are solo episodes. I do some debunking episodes now called Keating’s Razors, and I also do a lot of very fascinating as I said, solo deep dives on things ranging from negative mass neutrinos all the way up to the solution to the Fermi paradox that I am thinking about working on myself in my other spare time for my side hustle. I need a side hustle. So that other channel is called Keating Experiments. Brian Keating:You can find that link below as well. Brian Keating:Okay, let’s get on to some of the questions. Brian Keating:So let’s go. 400K, Austin Howell, thank you so much. I’m so glad you’re part of the multiverse of minds. And then next question, number 2. Has time ticked at the same pace since the early universe? Brian Keating:No. Brian Keating:So this is subtle. In general relativity, time can depend on gravity. Gravity depends on matter, and matter in motion also can affect the spacetime metric. So the universe is much hotter and denser than it was in the early universe than it was now. So an atom in the early universe wouldn’t actually notice this because clocks tick locally in the same rate that they do for us in the locally low gravitational environment. Now it is true clocks do tick slightly slower for us nearer to the center of the Earth than for an astronaut orbiting on the International Space Station. But locally, that’s a small effect. And so locally, Einstein realized, and as part of his equivalence principle, that you could basically make a freely falling reference frame where anything would perceive the same spacetime dynamics as if there were no gravity. Brian Keating:So flat spacetime is the local approximation, just like a flat Earth is a local approximation for any infinitesimal patch of a highly curved surface, whether it’s positively curved or negatively curved, whether that curvature is coming, you know, kind of built into the universe or from large gravitational fields or distortions. So an atom in the early universe wouldn’t notice anything. And redshift is not caused by time itself changing, it’s caused by the spatial expansion of the universe that stretches wavelength of light and these waves of light as they travel. So this would not change things. So there’s a distinction between gravitational time dilation which is the slowing and changing of clock rates, which is a true effect that’s also responsible for corrections made to the GPS satellite that you and I use to get around in our— using our phones or our cars’ GPS. So that’s different from cosmological redshift, which stretches light because the universe is expanding. So they’re related, but they’re not identical. Brian Keating:Great question. Brian Keating:Is every location the center of the Big Bang? Yes, this is a very good way to think about it. If every part of the universe is the center of the universe, then no part is the center of the universe. Brian Keating:It’s like, where’s the center of the surface of the Earth? Brian Keating:There is no center of the surface of the Earth, so all points are equivalent. So the Big Bang was not an explosion into space, it was the expansion of space itself. Brian Keating:So we often use these analogies. Brian Keating:None of them are perfect because we’re, you know, 3-dimensional beings trying to visualize a 4-dimensional universe, making 2-dimensional analogies that I’m about to make, which is a classic one of the balloon that has dots, you printed on it in the shape of galaxies, if you like. And if you blow that balloon up, it’s expanding into the room, so that makes it a little bit less good of an analogy. But every dot would see every other dot moving away, and I can insert here a visualization that I made on redshift and the wavelength distortion that occurs due to the expanding of spacetime. And each galaxy sees every other galaxy moving away from it. In 3 dimensions, you could have a raisin bread that has raisins inside it, you’re cooking it, it’s expanding, every raisin is moving away from every other raisin, so each raisin could say, Hey, I’m the center of the bread. But of course, if an infinite raisin bread, they’re not— it’s not possible for any of them to be the center. They’re all the center, therefore none of them are the center. So the observable universe does appear to be homogeneous. Brian Keating:That means it’s sort of the

Top Astronomer: UFOs Are STILL Here

Top Astronomer: UFOs Are STILL Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4jvdrN-FQw 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

Nobel Economist: The Market That Lets People Die

Nobel Economist: The Market That Lets People Die https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq5rnlW72Ak 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

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

Dead Cows, Aliens, & Ghosts: How Kevin Knuth Connects Them All https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZmnSR4al0A 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

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

Intelligent Design Theorist: AI Just Proved It Can’t Think Without Us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPka0_lkbBY 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

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ4PaUbhdhs 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

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN6z0dRd9qo 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