Episode 146 – Dr. Cliff Pickover – Artificial Intelligence, Futurism, Machine Consciousness

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seeing artificial intelligence one of the most credentialed authors in the industry if you're here listening to this on the YouTube live version with us thank you so much put a lot of planning into these episodes the human experiences in session my name

is Xavier Katana Our Guest for tonight is Dr Clifford pickover Dr Clifford is a researcher scientist and author he received his PhD from Yale University's Department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry he has authored more than 50 books he has also been granted more

than 600 U.S patents his work and his research have been featured on medo Outlets such as CNN wired the New York Times and now he's here with us on The Human Experience Cliff it's a pleasure thank you so much for making the time welcome to hxp

great to be here thanks so Cliffs I mean I'm there's so much I I want to go over tonight I'm really I've been really excited about this interview and covering this book but before we get into the book and artificial intelligence let's tell us a little bit

about yourself you know tell us kind of how you got into this work uh a brief introduction if you will yeah I'm I mean I've been publishing that as you said over 50 books I'm interested in computers and creativity and I've written books on the history of

math and physics and Medicine things of that nature and a lot of some Wilder books we could get into but AI particularly fastened me because you know it's really at the Borderland of Science and science fiction and it makes us question the limits of thought and

the humanities future and what could be more interesting than that yeah for sure I mean I mean how does how does someone go about writing 50 books I mean that's quite a large number right yeah I think it's it's my efficiency you know I don't know how people actually

wrote uh before the age of computers right writing books uh with pencil and paper though that one's have been hard at least in in a way AI has helped me write my books at least a simple form of AI right word processors and spell Checkers and all the internet research I

can do um that's almost like an example of AI simple form of AI being an assistant to me the human uh not taking away from me in any way but augmenting me yeah I mean and then 600 patents I mean writing a patent can't be an easy process right I mean what what compelled

you to sort of start inventing you know patents and writing them yeah that also um I think an example of My overall interest in how to generate create a creative ideas and and creativity in general when I was younger you know I used to play a lot of music

and electronic music I got interested in using the computer as a tool for R and computer graphics with invention it was sort of a natural extension of creativity so in a way I look at the producing inventions and patents almost like you know an artist

would paint a painting or writer would write a poem it's just another example of creativity hmm okay okay fair enough um so let's get into this book you know I was so excited getting this book because we get we get a lot of different books you know here at the studio and

I mean if a book can be sexy this is the sexiest book that I've I've ever received I mean it's it's so nice from the smell when you smell it it smells like vinyl like new vinyl and and then it's Illustrated you know and ordered chronologically I mean how did

you how did you come about the design process for this book I know I know people can't see the book right now but you know just take my word for it yeah that's a format that I've enjoyed for a few books I mean the AI book is my most recent one but I like the idea of

one page of full color photo or figure versus a page of text and that way it makes the subject come alive and you really can't get too bored with that kind of format because if one topic doesn't interest you you flip the page and go to the next and as you said it's

chronological so you can you can start out with ancient times and work your way up to the last entries if this is this year so it gives you an idea of the the range of AI through Humanity's uh thinking about beings that are more powerful than us robots automatons

things of that nature right yeah you know when I think for some people when you mention the word or the words artificial intelligence there's you know like there's a there's a barrier or a signal goes up you know their anxiety increases or something you know it's

like it's like when electricity when people were talking about electricity people were maybe a little bit hesitant you know to talk about this mysterious energy in the wall that you know you're gonna plug stuff into so let's define that I mean like what is what is your

definition of artificial intelligence yeah I think the simplest definition which I use is apparently intelligent behavior in machines so what is intelligence in humans and it usually deals with accomplishing goals problem solving learning so if a machine

can mimic that you know if it it looks like the machine is doing that or some other kind of system we call that artificial intelligence okay so I mean is there does it surprise you that people are worried about this technology are you worried about it

well on the scale of worries that we could have today right there's I would say there's a lot more worries with the planet that we might uh you know put higher than AI you know from even from nuclear weapons to water crises but yes if we drill down to AI itself I think

one of the concerns is what I call brittleness with AI in other words AI can be marvelously effective at detecting all kinds of patterns and having Vision systems and self-driving cars uh and looking at Medical images but at least today it can be fairly

easily deceived confused um it could be confused by a bad person for example putting a sticker on a stop sign that makes a car suddenly think it's a speed limit sign and drive right through it you know even though a human could look at that stop sign with a

little colorful sticker and they you know we know it just stop so time but it's easy to confuse the AIS and researchers are working to make that better but that's a concern that with one you know one concern we can talk about others but I would call that

riddlness hmm okay so it was it was John McCarthy that defined that coined the term in 1955 that was his definition of AI right that's that's who came up with it exactly he's a John McCarthy computer scientist he had a very famous conference at Dartmouth College in New

Hampshire he put out the call in 1955 to send out invitations and that's where he used the term artificial intelligence and a year later they had this conference and he used a different definition similar to the one I gave you know it's machines he says the machine

solving the kinds of problems now reserved for humans it's improving themselves and so if you see a machine behaving in a way we would call intention if a human were doing it he would call that artificial intelligence okay okay okay so you know in the book I

mean like I said you you address this chronologically I mean so what is the first record of humans sort of connecting with machines even if it's in a sort of organic way I mean how how like you you bring up this tic-tac-toe machine that or game is how does

tic-tac-toe you know relate to artificial intelligence I mean how do we how do we get to the point from point A to point B I guess right that's a surprise was tic-tac-toe doing the book but one of the biggest surprises I had while writing the book

is we think of AI you know today the computer age robots you know movies Terminators that's AI but actually Legends of AI in the form of uh uh ancient robots they didn't call them robots but robot-like beings goes back to the ancient Greeks there was some

creature called Talos in ancient Greek 400 BC that circled the island of Crete but it was like a robot and protecting the island back to tic-tac-toe that goes back even further to about 1300 BC with three in a row games you know tic-tac-toe you put three

things in a row and try to try to succeed they that those type of games date back at least to ancient Egypt and the reason why I start the book with tic-tac-toe because it's an easy game with easy rules it spins um subject to a student studying it

through game trees which are like pathways through all the moves you know how hard is it to make a computer that beats uh beats well or at least ties anyone in tic-tac-toe it's not so hard but it's a good start and then I mentioned well what about tic-tac-toe

playing in 3D in higher dimensions and in the 60s there was a great example of a creative streak where someone said let me build a tic-tac-toe playing machine just with these little match boxes with beads and every time this collection of boxes it was like

over 300 boxes it made the correct move in a sense you reward it by putting the right color beads and you can punish it by removing beads and just by putting beads in boxes it was almost like a simple form of AI that learned to play Tic-tac-toe so it's it's more of it's

more of a game process less than you know like binary establishing binary initially yeah it's an example very simple challenge that people have addressed in you know interesting ways we wouldn't really call it AI today so much because usually we what we call AI

once something becomes very common like talking to your Amazon Echo well that's AI but now we say ah talking to a device is is so routine that's not Ai and you move on to the next thing computers can't do so you know what we really think of as AI keeps changing through

the years but even with tic-tac-toe I remember someone made a tic-tac-toe playing machine out of ten thousand Tinker toy pieces you know those little toys that kids played with play with so you can make machines I play Tic-Tac-Toe in different ways and that's a good

kickoff for the book where I saw I saw a three-dimensional tic-tac-toe with with beads on Raw odds and we sort of work up from there I mean games have often been tests of uh Ai and you many people probably have heard of the the deep blue Chess Championship where sure yeah so

games have been and of course chess is much more difficult than tic-tac-toe but you can work your way up through history through different games that the computer has been become able to do through time and that's that's a form of AI we're gonna go back into history but

I mean when you look at the the problem of Consciousness when when we're sort of you know looking at the human brain it's hard for us as now in in modern times just to understand you know how the brain generates Consciousness so you know is it possible that we could inject

Consciousness into a machine have it think have itself have it self-aware enough to sort of process and and exist you know it's kind of mind-boggling yeah that's a big question we can call these things intelligent in many ways because they can solve problems and play

chess and all that but then you're raising a good question are these really Consciousness conscious you know and what does Consciousness mean usually when we say conscious we mean more than just solving problems we mean uh an entity that has feelings and can reflect

on itself but I have various entries in the book that touch on these philosophical topics one is called the Consciousness Mill that goes back to the 17 1714 where philosopher was talking about you know imagine a factor a mill that could had so many parts it could

act you could think it's thinking right but if you went inside the mill you just see Parts rubbing and moving we're moving against each other you wouldn't actually see the thought and so that got the philosophers thinking but if we think that Consciousness is the result

of uh the patterns of the brain cells in our brain and their interrelationships and the signals they're sending then I could conceive of Consciousness existing in other Hardware we in a way where machines running on the wet Hardware of our brain I could see it running in

electronic or other kinds of devices in fact if you want to stretch your audience's thinking you could imagine a conscious entity just made out of bicycle parts because if you think of brain cells communicating bicycle parts can communicate of course a brain made

out of bicycle parts that's thinking and conscious would have to be huge to get the complexity of a human brain but that's the way some scientists think that well if you're running on Hardware now Maybe not today but in the future you'll be able to run something so intricate

and a complex that you would call it thinking and conscious hmm it's it's fascinating this whole subject is so interesting to me I was looking through your book and I I found out that I mean I guess Da Vinci had his hands in literally everything that you can

imagine he's probably one of the smartest people to ever exist and I guess he created a robotic night I mean you've Illustrated this he has you know these gears and levers in which the Knight kind of moves automatically am I interpreting this correctly yeah not too

many people know about this around 1495 Da Vinci actually designed a robot night as you said I put a picture in the book no one knows if he actually went all the way and perfectly created it but he left designs for it and it sat up open and

closed its arm and move its head it was driven by cables it was it had armor and it actually inspired other people a little bit later in the Middle Ages to create mechanical or automatons again they didn't have the word robot back then but mechanical either animals or

people that moved in life-like ways and da Vinci was one of the early starts for that hmm okay so was there a single person that you would classify as the most important in regards to Paving the way towards artificial intelligence well in ancient days I mean we could

talk about these really cool and some almost funny machines but you you probably you know that look like ducks or look like other animals or looked like people and did amazing things but if we if we don't want to say that's really Ai and uh you know thinking right

you know which which is kind of simple I mean one of the famous people along the pathway was Alan Turing who uh thought quite a bit about the philosophy of intelligence and thinking and he said how would you how would you test if a computer is really thinking and he was

in in uh you know around the 1950s that he did a lot of his work and then later uh many researchers design worked on neural networks which are uh artificial they're not like brain neural networks but they're artificial uh constructs that have a little resemblance to what

goes on in your brain and that's what is today driving near Miracles with AI detecting patterns you know one example is you can give an AI an x-ray of the lung and it can diagnose pneumonia as good as a radiologist maybe even better in some cases that's done through these

things called neural networks which give the computer eyes or vision and looks at patterns hmm okay so we're kind of modeling you know this this machine off after our own brain then what's not to say that it will or won't have you know our our same

sort of you know failures or pitfalls yes well that's one of the ways is the brittleness like we were talking about um in fact there's one entry called adversarial patches just to illustrate it researchers have trained uh as just an example the computer to recognize a

banana but if you put this one little psychedelic patch next to it all of a sudden it says with a hundred percent Clarity no that's a toaster that's you know you said pitfalls this is an example of the pitfalls today that uh we have to be careful of because

we're going to be turning more and more of our decision making over to Ai and you know I think scientists will get a lot of The Kinks out but I think we'll also become brittle right already we use GPS and cars to help us get around and we're probably losing map making map

Reading and their sense of direction uh to some extent so humans are losing some of their skills I think for the most part it's okay because the AIS are marvelous helpers but I'm sure we're going to lose a little bit as we turn more of the decision making to AIS

I mean what do you think would shock people the most to I mean in in the study of history that you've done I mean there's there's been a few there was a defecating robot duck a lot of people what was tell us about that yeah that was from 1738. that's a this is I think

make your audience smile a little bit but it's a good example of even in the 1700s how people were looking at the line between the living and the mechanical so a French watchmaker he created this doc it had hundreds of moving Parts people from all over came

to see it and it moved in very lifelike ways you know it it moved its head it played with water with a spill flaptic swing it it Wings it quack it gulp food but here's the funny part after eating the uh the remains of digested food were eliminated uh out the back of the duck

you know I thought that was that was kind of funny um Okay so but again it has a serious part that there was interest in it that they could create such a thing and the French watchmaker who created this duck he went on to create a flute player

that played the flute that looked human uh went on to create weaving machines that would weave and of course the human townspeople didn't like that one bit and started throwing stones at him all right that that could take away some jobs but

that that's an example entry a very curious thing in in the book in the history of AI because it was very simple form of something that seemed a little bit intelligence intelligent uh even back then hmm okay okay so you know something I noticed about your book and I think this

is the interesting I mean do you do you believe that there is some sort of you know technological sort of explosion that's happening within the last you know 300 years or so because a tenth of your book is based on you know the 1400s and earlier but then the rest of your

book is in the 1800s and 1960s and onwards so it seems like we're getting closer and closer to kind of you know solving this paradox yes I think that's that definitely true it all took off relatively recently because of the computer and as the

computers get faster and faster and faster that's enabling the the AIS to do more and more amazing things because sometimes to train Aya train AIS it takes a lot of power and you know Millions thousands millions of examples to to train an AI to do something and

that's be as you're seeing that's due to the rise of the computer and some people uh predict that as the AIS get better and better right there we're going to put them to the task of well can you help us design an AI that's even a little better than

yourself because now the AI is becoming pretty intelligent and uh that can lead to recursive self-improvement and that's called the super intelligence explosion and some people are worried about that where some people if they're not worried

they're speculating what that might mean if computers get to be um generally intelligent right right now they're very intelligent for specific tasks like playing chat chess and go so they're not really like a human in in their human's General capacity but what

if they do become like that and people you know that's uh people talk about that and have some concerns right yeah I mean I could see why that would be a concern so I mean Cliff do you believe in you know something like the soul do you believe in that

and yeah well the that also gets to about God right and I think the closest I get to to that is um there are facets of the universe we can never understand right if you if you look at a monkey's brain and a human brain well they're not all that much

different but think of how much more we can understand and contemplate than a monkey you know monkey can't understand poetry and black holes and symbolic logic uh and calculus right and we can you know at least some humans can think about that that leads me to

believe there's so much more to the universe we can't understand because we're shielded by this three pounds of wet matter in our in our skull and it's that it's on that line between what was Noble what we might never know did this sort of essential mystery like that

can get you very close to the feeling of the Divine this feeling of the soul and Alan Turing the great the great computer scientist he even speculated that uh if there were a soul uh some of his colleagues were saying wouldn't AI kind of go get against that right he said no

not at all because even if you could create an AI that was on par with humans it wouldn't be taking away from God's power because the AI would be the home for the soul he called them mansions for the soul just like if we produce a child the child is a home for

the soul so people have talked about that and though though my book you know gets into some of the technology and the ancient legends it does talk about some of this interesting philosophy as well sure yeah yeah it does and I find it interesting because you know it could

machines have the neural capacity to have a connection to the Divine and if we are you know the mothers and fathers of of these this new race of you know machine beings then you know do we give do we transfer that into them do we transfer that is it a concept or is it a

measurable thing I mean these are are interesting questions I think that are more in the line of the philosophical understanding of what artificial intelligence could or couldn't be yes you're touching on lots of interesting topics and along with what you just said there's

one entry called the leak proof AI box and it gets gets about this concept of runaway AI growth growth yes in terms of Consciousness and intelligence uh you know many people say well obviously they're going to surpass us you weak a debate if it's in 30 years is it in 100

years but at some point the they're you know they probably will I I at least that's what my my thinking is so people say well what if it became dangerous as runaway AI growth where they surpassed Us in all things and then could create presumably create even

better AIS could if we ever created uh one of these super intelligent AI or an AI you know helped us create these this soup would would it be prudent to confine it to a box where you know in other words you don't hook it up to the Internet because you don't want it to

escape you want to study it yeah and that the entry on leak-proof AI box talks all about that could you read really confined such a super intelligence and if you want to talk about there's just some fun things like there's going to be human Gatekeepers

for the AI right wouldn't the AI try to bribe them you can say look I can cure diseases I can give you amazing Melodies and videos um if you say well we're not gonna we're gonna cut off all communication you know maybe you could use uh you know

change the fan speed of the hardware and Community communicate through code that way and of course you wouldn't cut it off totally because it what good would be the AI if humans couldn't interact or learn from it at all so people have talked about could you confine Ai and

many have come to the conclusion is you really couldn't because if you made something that thought a million times faster than humans eventually you could figure out a way to like get out and get you know Escape yeah I'm kind of more worried about

runaway humans at this point I mean it feels like our the ecologically it's a nightmare out there I mean we still struggle with poverty disease I mean we there's there's a conflict happening right now in Syria I mean there's there's all these different

things happening with humans that you know it I don't know it becomes problematic I think but I mean there are benefits but there was this experiment where they released these two computer programs and they started I guess they were learning from social media and they

started talking to each other right you've heard about this right yeah and I've seen there's also been some fascinating movies with the computers start linking up and talking to each other so I mean okay there was there was a couple different

experiments that came out with this but there was one of them was a robot that became Like A Nazi like she was is like this crazy Nazi just learning through social media and then in the other experiment there were two I guess two programs that started talking to each

other in a secret language right yeah I'm trying to think of the exact um example I remember that from a movie and I'm sure it's conceivable now but you said you're right they uh a company released a chatbot onto the web to learn and just through learning through

people's Badness it became sexist uh uh Nazi anti-semitic and they had to like pull it down in a day because they didn't I don't know why but they didn't realize that it would pick up all the um Badness of humans and people pranking it probably and so immediately they had to

take it down but you know you're getting onto a good topics of the ethics of AI because uh you don't normally think about ethical considerations but there's so much we have to think about with the ethics of AI and one one neat example is with self-driving cars right if you if

we ever make a perfectly autonomous car where you can just sit back relax it doesn't even need a steering wheel it's eventually going to have to make ethical decisions and one example is if a collision is inevitable let's say there's a a kid in the road and it's

either going to hit the kid The Pedestrian or it's gonna so it could save The Pedestrian or save the human that's an ethical decision when I say save the human I mean save the passenger in the car right it's going to have to make that choice someone's gonna have to

program that in in some sense or it's going to have to learn it or would it kill you know five elderly persons more so than three young people I mean it sounds funny but if if collisions are enabled uh and inevitable which you know they will be not everything you can

avoid um it's going to make those decisions and then you know going beyond that you know do you want judges or therapists to be AIS I mean there's pros and cons right they say judges human judges right before lunch they render different verges because they're hungry you know

then right then then you would think well an AI doesn't get emotional it doesn't get hungry but you'd probably be a little nervous giving giving the decisions to an AI other examples are lethal autonomous weapons like drones right now at least

for the America there's always a human in the loop before drone in war makes a kill some human has to sort of say go for the final shoot right but it wouldn't be hard for a country to make it fully autonomous you know you give it facial recognition so it knows a person it

recognize the person and it decides to kill without a human right now we're saying don't do it that's unethical but I don't know if that's going to stay that way forever particularly what we can say that for all countries in the world and it sounds terrible now but

what if what if for some reason giving in the AI the decision the final decision actually reduced casualties because it could be more more accurate than waiting for you know a kid who's tired to give the the command and you know to kill um would you then say it's okay that's

very ethically fraught with you know uh discussion problematic yeah it's problematic I mean problematic yeah I mean it gets it it touches on you know some moral so ethical grounds that you know we really have to look at before we press the power on button you know on

these machines I think and I think I think the biggest concern lately you know and and not necessarily with artificial intelligence but in the movement towards the push of our artificial intelligence has been just computers and how they've been taking

away jobs from from humans right I mean I was I was at the store the other night I was at the grocery store the night and I had never experienced this before I've never seen this before but there was this automated you know like mop mopping

robot and it could sense where I was like I tried testing it because it was like my first contact with one of these machines and it you know it was able to judge kind of where I was and and it stopped when I got in its way so you know there wasn't a human behind that

and I think people are worried about you know it's it's a I think it's a logical concern to think about you know where are the jobs where is the money going to go for these yes that's an excellent questions uh obviously jobs are going to be affected

if you go back in time I have these photos of of uh Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1900 if they're interesting photos you see it's all nothing about horses and you know horse-drawn carriages and then 1913 it's nothing but cars except for maybe like one horse so

in that short span of time we went from horses to cars now that naturally affected the jobs of all the people who took care of horses and that was a problem but you could say horses on the streets cause problems you know so what's it going to mean for for

uh humans today I think initially we're going to see jobs where AI is part of the job we were working with AI we'll start replacing jobs where where you're not working with AI I mean Physicians already will probably start using AI tools like we're talking about for

X-rays and looking at heart cardiograms uh looking at skin possible skin cancers um already the the AIS are very helpful but they don't replace the physician because it's sort of a Synergy between the two but you're right jobs are eventually going to change currently

it's hard for the AIS to deal with non-routine tests or the unexpected and most jobs do have unexpected Parts no matter how routine you know but eventually you know it's going to keep changing and changing do I mean do you think that it could go in either

direction do you think that you know there's on on one side like there's two roads that maybe that it goes down on one side you know we go down this road and robots live alongside humans in this you know utopian sort of you know place that is a better world or we go the

other direction with that you know where we've weaponized these machines they've you know to the point of them taking over and they consider humans a threat in some way to the Earth or to them I mean I think do you do you think one is more likely than the other I mean

generally I think most people would like to think that you know okay robots and artificial intelligence it's going to make my life better you know like Tesla and they're driving cars you know that's making the world a better place right it's more convenient right right it'll

make driving safer we already have all sorts of assists in the modern cars you know when you're drifting out of the lane and gonna or you're about to hit something it's going to help medicine be better in terms of disease detection and diagnosing things

um so right now I'm not worried about like the movie The Terminator where they just take over the world I'm working I'm more concerned with things like they're they're all they're going to change if they haven't already done that are what's real we won't know what's

real already right with news and photos you know you don't know it's fake but they're getting better and better about creating video where anyone can be made to be look like they're saying anything and the audio will be perfect and this video will be perfect we won't know

what's real anymore you can see starts to that already and you I you know I predict a new job called a reality certifier these these people and maybe other A's will tell you or try to tell you what's real or not but then they're going to have to be certified because

you know you don't know if they're being tricked so there are there are various concerns like what's real the jobs on the whole I'm thinking it's going to be marvelous for Humanity they're going to help us in many many ways Inspire us they're

inspiring us because they can tell us things that we have no idea how they came to the conclusion uh and that's very mysterious but that's a little dangerous but to me it inspires us because then we'll be inspired to learn my favorite example is if you can

show the retina in other words the back of the eye with the blood vessels to an AI and it can tell you things about the person that the trained ophthalmologist can never tell you one example is um you can tell if you're just by looking at the red the blood vessels if

you're a man or a woman no of course yeah that's funny you can look at a person kind of tell that but no an ophthalmologist ophthalmologist can't look at the blood vessels in your eye and tell you that but the AIS can with startling accuracy and no one knows how

they do it isn't that interesting it's like it's like you know if you've ever got interested in the topic of divination these are where people Through the Ages have looked at patterns in the sky and you know they sacrificed animals and looked at patterns on the

liver to predict the future and make forecasts in a way the AI is a a modern diviner sometimes in an inscrutable way telling us things and um some people say well Cliff you can't rely on AIS if you don't understand how they're doing it and that that's a point but I think the

most important thing is to just to test them for accuracy in other words if I told you this is going to gonna be 99 accurate diagnosis and your doctor will be 50 but we're not so sure how it's doing it you still might go with the AI if it's tested in it and it's like 100

accurate even even though you don't know exactly how it's doing it right I mean there was there's a there's a person that you brought up in your book that I really connected with and resonated with I'm not sure why uh his name is Samuel Butler and I get I mean this this guy

was existing in 1863 and writing about this he wrote a book called Darwin among the machines and there's a quote that you cite in in your book and it says we Samuel Butler says this and he says quote we ourselves are creating our own successors in the course of Ages we will

find ourselves the inferior race yeah and back in 1863 imagine that was before wow before our modern computers yeah that was Darwin among the machines and he gave some early insights into the future he thought about self-improving machines and how they'd become more and

more intelligent and he said for those people who say well it could never be conscious you know he said his example was look at a modulus you know a clam or something like that that doesn't appear to have much Consciousness does it but yet Through the Ages Through the Ages

that through Evolution Consciousness did evolve he said similarly with machines Consciousness will evolve right right and then I mean if we jump forward a little bit further than that I mean you bring up uh Nikola Tesla and I've read about this experiment which he called

The Borrowed mind can you tell us about that yeah Nikola Tesla was a very interesting and quirky individual but he's in the book because he did some something that people would thought about as an early step in Ai and way way back about 1898

he made a radio-controlled boat which he could he made a big demonstration in a pool he put the boat in it now we say well what's a big deal about a radio-controlled boat but back then people saw that and you know screamed they thought it was magic or telepathy

some people said was a trained monkey was somehow involved guiding in the boat but he said no this is the first race of automatons to work for humans and he said like you said it was a borrowed mind it took his mind his intention and the boat followed it so he in some sense

started thinking that that even humans were kind of automatons that responded to signals um so he even got into the idea even in 1898 about in the future uh we're kind of like machines and this would develop just like Darwin among their scenes it

will eventually evolve hmm I mean it seems like you know it seems like a good idea with all the best intentions you know I mean like when you have when when you have intentions for something and they're good it seems great but then you know

later down the road you're like oh okay this was a huge turning point in human history you probably should have prevented this I mean I was looking I was watching a interview with Elon Musk and he's been a huge proponent of you know anti-artificial intelligence and I'm

sure you know about this and he's been sort of I mean I think in the interview that I saw he was like it's too late you know I I warned Humanity I warned Society it's too late now we're kind of in in it I mean and he touches on being in a simulation and I know you touch on

this as well I mean let's talk about that a little bit you know could we be existing in a computer simulation right now yeah that's a that's a fascinating topic and uh first of all some people will be very skeptical and say well what did how

could we be living the stimulation but think about in a way we're already being simulated on the neural Hardware of our brain at least many scientists would say that where the brain is giving rise to you know our thoughts we can't have these thoughts without the brain at

least and if we can if we can someday create true AIS these will be like thinking beings that live in simulated spaces so now the next question is could we already be in living in a simulation you know already scientists are creating very lifelike patterns based on very

simple rules in a computer and these creatures which are nothing but little mathematical patterns right they explore they evolve they multiply they interact with the environment if an advanced civilization could take this type of thing further and further and

further the idea is that they might create a simulation may not be perfect but they might create a simulated world and then if they create several simulated worlds that means for every Advanced civilization in the real world there'd be many simulations and just

probabilistically that would lead you to believe possibly if you believe what the premise that is possible that we're in the simulation and that's like the movie The Matrix where other movies have gone into this but there are scientists who take this

including Elon Musk right take take this concept very seriously that at least the possibility hmm okay very succinct succinct with that response answer I mean I again you know the it's interesting to me the idea of you know sort of you know just

contemplating this idea that perhaps we are in a simulation right now I mean it's a good thought experiment if you haven't done that if you haven't conducted that for yourself it's interesting so let's get into transhumanism you touch on this a little

bit and you know we've had transhumanists on the show we've had people who you know study technology they're they're hyped about this they love this idea of transferring their own Consciousness into a machine so that you know for the the goal of acquiring

immortality yes let's let's talk about transhumanism the term actually is kind of old it was kind of coined in 1957 by biologist Julian Huxley but today when people talk about transhumanism they usually mean any kind of technology to enhance the

mental and physical capacities of humans and I believe I think along with others that biologists will soon understand the the biology of Aging in totally to understand it and once you understand something like that the next step wouldn't be that hard to prevent aging

so in this Century we'd probably have the ability to become immortal and that raises all sorts of concerns um you know and also if you know I like to talk about the uh maybe your audience would like this the philosophy philosophical consequences of this if

you could survive indefinitely let's say a thousand years would you you know you actually persist persist in other words we change a little every day so you you tomorrow afternoon but imagine the changes will enter right in a thousand years you would perhaps be

totally different so the U of you today would not it'd be like a sand castle the ocean keeps wearing it down eventually you would not be persisting and you'd be something else if you if you really had a thousand year capacity I mean we're talking about so oh sorry I

thought you were finished no it's an interesting thought experience yes I mean so yeah of course there's going to be an evolution in you know your thinking and your thinking process if you're living for that long and you know we've we've had authors on the show that

talk about you know if you if you look at the human body the the telomeres in the body and DNA it's you know instructing the human body to age and get older and and one of the authors that we had on the show he thinks that you know the ultimate disease for human

beings is getting old aging yes I mean and then many diseases associated with aging which we surely want to cure like Alzheimer's and and cancer basically you know right your age is the biggest predictor for all these uh uh things later if it's time we

can't even talk about how the computers can predict when you'll die but um yes so that's it that's interesting that there's already people looking through nanotechnology and robots and biology of Aging uh manipulation of the telomeres like you're talking about has

ways of understanding and at least putting off aging another idea transhumanists may get into it touches on the simulations like we were talking about if you know virtual realities are getting better and better um uh here's a question if you if you

could upload yourself you know this month and be guaranteed A Thousand Years of Living in a simulation perfect health Adventures Beyond imagination romance uh creativity uh very real no pain no worries but not boredom either that's a hard thing to

turn down if that ever became possible you might say you might say Cliff I'm never going to leave the real world and of course we might not now because we care about our loved ones and I wouldn't want to live loved ones behind but let's say let's say you were alone and you you

know you're 80 90 whatever age you are and someone says you can leave this world and go into the simulation that that'd be something hard to turn down I don't I don't know man I'm just I like to stay skeptical I guess you know so let's let's get into aliens let's get

into alien contact and what that would look like because this is something that you cover in the book and I'm curious about you know what would that what would that appear as because if if there's if there are other civilizations out there and let's just

buy a sheer math alone let's just presume that that is a possible plausible scenario right I mean do you think even if they have a thousand years ahead of us you know in evolution technologically I mean surely they've created machines and you know machines

don't get tired they don't require sleep they don't require food so I mean there's there's so many advantages to using a machine for space exploration so do you think that if we were to make contact with some sort of you know off-world species that it would happen

through a machine yes that's interesting let's first talk about what's the possibility of alien life outside of the Earth right my thinking is that life is probably pretty common given given the immensity of the galaxies in the universe because we've

seen on on Earth it has evolved in the most bizarre environments it can live in boiling water it can live in ice and complete darkness so I believe life is probably common but the question is is intelligence and space-faring life common the answer to that is it might

not be so common it might be quite rare because if you look at life on Earth maybe 50 billion species arose only one acquired technology right us and mammals like us are not necessarily the most successful because 95 percent of the species are

invertebrates so intelligence is not guaranteed but let's go beyond it let's say you could you have intelligent life forms that actually have technology I think what you touched on is a good point that our first Contact and first signals would possibly or be likely be

from machines because they're not physically constrained and there's another reason there's one idea is that the organic life like us it's just a thin layer of the evolution of life and the next layer that extends forever is the computer mechanical life form the AIS so

if we receive signals it's very possible it's actually alien AIS that we're getting the signals from I mean it makes a lot of sense and it it poses a lot of questions I mean there's I mean we send we do this ourselves I mean we put you know Curiosities

NASA's Curiosity on Mars it's the Rover you know so so we're sending robots into space you know why not why not the other way around as well right and even Curiosity has some simple forms of AI in um like 2015 they uploaded a new new software to it this

is that little wheeled Rover that's running around Mars and they gave an AI so it could on its own select rocks that look interesting by some criteria and then study them analyze them it has lasers that zap them and do things to study them and I think AI is going to be

more and more a part of these robot explorers like the Curiosity Rover because there's going to be times where the AIS or even out of contact with Humanity right when when Mars rotates it's on the other side you know it can't necessarily wait for humans if something

very interesting popped up so we're already putting AI even though it's simple but we're putting AI on other planets right now I mean it's it's really intriguing and I think it you know it poses a lot of different questions for us to ask ourselves as far as you know what do we

Define as life and you know how how do we define consciousness is it something that's local to the brain is it a neurological mechanism could we reflect that into a machine could we create a circuit that mimics Consciousness could we give this Consciousness a regard to

the Divine and Divinity and these are Big questions that I think it's going to be an interesting you know 100 200 500 years yes you like that answer yes the the uh but what you're saying is right one line of thinking is that if if you believe in

you know a mechanical universe is where we we evolved we're we're made out of physical matter we're made of brain cells but that if we could evolve on you know using the laws of physics and atoms and molecules and that uh there's no reason you couldn't embody everything in

another kind of physical form and that when I say anything I mean intelligence creativity uh if you want to talk about souls Souls too because it would finally get to the level of complexity where it would be doing things like we're we're doing of course sometimes you don't know

if you're talking to a zombie that's just simulating Consciousness and feelings or if it really does have feelings in Consciousness I mean that's a big feeling of a area of debate but over hundreds of years you know I think something along these lines will evolve

I'm sure I've had contact with those zombies on Twitter sometimes they tweeted us um right so you know I I want to switch gears a little bit because I feel like somehow these things are connected but I'm not exactly sure how but I know you I mean you've written so many books on

so many different topics and one of those topics happens to be DMT and I mean I'm not sure what it is about DMT we've had Rick Strassman on the show a couple times and I mean it does seem to be this sort of spiritual molecule that you know opens

this sort of Gateway into a hyper reality a hyperdimensional reality so I mean something that is larger than our you know current awareness and Consciousness whatever we're picking up now so I mean what is I mean you wrote about this what are what's your take on

DMT yes I and I actually met uh Dr Rick Strassman he did a lot of clinical studies of DMT and I have probably the weirdest title book that I've written and I have a lot of strange titles the one that covers the DMT is called sex drugs Einstein and elves

but I talk about the science and the Legends and everything of DMT DMT is dimethyltryptamine and it causes visions that users experience and it's as if the users enter a completely different universe and they do so quickly with no cessation of

Consciousness Consciousness or quality of awareness of course what they see can sometimes defy you know verbal and visual description but what I find most about the DMT experience is that there are some common themes about what people see not

everyone but many they sometimes see jeweled City cities and sparkling palaces there's a lot of examples of temples and objects of glittering gold and then there's entities some some of these entities are called machine elves some look like insects and praying

mantises and the fact that many people without coaching you know from different walks of life see these different Visions but similar themes lead you to believe that there's something very interesting going on some people say it's entering a real

reality some people say it's telling us something about the structure of the brain either way even if it's just telling us something about how brains are engineered I think that's fascinated because maybe brains were engineered and maybe the reason we like creating

palaces and temples and we're delighted by sparkling gold it says something about our brains I mean even insects and birds sometimes create these very ornate uh well birds can create these ornate nests with fairies and shells and berries they look beautiful

um there's something and of course there's survival value and some of this stuff but you know there might be something about the brains of evolving creatures particularly human humans that are inclined to see these visions and do certain things it's really an amazing

area of research okay thank you thank you for covering that I'm really glad that you did I mean that that's kind of the end of my line of questioning so we've got some questions here from the audience and the first question is uh are we programming AI with our data are

we teaching AI now as we use the internet as we speak on social media could could that data be harvested and used to program artificial intelligence yes that's the way AI does its thing it learns from data and typically for an AI to be accurate it leads needs lots of

data that's one of the reasons why fancy AIS didn't exist there are several reasons one is you know we have better computer hardware now but one of one of the other reasons is we have lots of data today so to for an AI to be smart it needs lots of data you might be

getting at your or your the audience might be getting at is it is it a risk I mean yes there's a privacy risk right different countries have different laws about what data is accessible you know face recognition people it might be nervous in America you know that the AI

cameras are everywhere and they can immediately tell who you are and if you're doing anything wrong maybe in other countries like China they're more comfortable with the idea of AI and face recognition being everywhere and it can be good things it can prevent crime it's

safety I mean it's not not necessarily bad but there are privacy concerns I mean based on the protests that are happening in China I'm not sure how happy they are with being facially recognized like everywhere they go I mean having having this social sort of

voting mechanism social ranks you know based on sort of your behavior it's it's a bit strange to me it's it seems orwellian to me um so moving on I apologize uh moving on is there a way that we can keep AI transparent another question and I think that gets at the uh the

inscrutability the mystery of it that yes that's one area of active research trying to have the AIS tell you how they're making their decisions right um I got into the example of looking at the back of the eye looking at blood vessels and we we said it could see if you're a

man or woman but it can do many other things in addition with diseases but we can't tell for sure why so scientists are looking at ways for the AI to explain it to you so the question is do you have to wait for it to explain it to you because I think it

won't it won't always be possible the AIS will be thinking like alien life forms alien entities in ways we don't think so if you say it must be able to explain how it's doing it it'll the AI because the highest performing systems might be the least explainable

so it's both a concern but I think it's also something inspirational because if it makes a decision and it's 100 right it'll Inspire humans maybe to work with the AIS to try to learn what it's thinking and how it's doing the magic okay now Cliff we've covered so much

tonight I think we've been all over the map with this and hopefully it was organized enough to direct people to the at least the end of this point like and get if you made it to this point in the conversation thank you so much um Cliff is there or anything that we

could have covered that you felt I should have brought up that I didn't Maybe I think one thing if if your listeners have any questions or want samples of anything or images or any Jay can they can contact me at my website pickover.com and that links to all my

books tells you how to get them um and feel free to ask me questions well you know after we we get off through the weeks I'd be happy at least to try to you know briefly answer them or Point readers uh listeners in different directions and I think we

covered as you said so much I think the biggest surprise for me or one of them is the mysterious thinking of the AIS but how far back in time humans have thought about you know magical beings robot-like entities they've made parks that have you know robot monkeys robot

animals you know you wouldn't people don't really I think are not aware of how how fascinating humans have been with the line between the living and the artificial and so I don't neglect that in the book I start working up through the Legends and go to the most high-tech

topics on neural networks and AI death predictors and all sorts of all sorts of interesting topics I mean I I really loved this book it it's it's a really great read and I highly recommend it to anyone listening and interested in in this I mean I it's probably one of the

most well-designed books that I've I've read I've had my hands on without exaggeration so um so how can people find your website Cliff please I just think if they pick over is my last name the good thing about having a strange last name is you're easy to find right

so if you just go to pickover.com then they have links and you know tells tells more about me and and my interest and all about the books okay guys we're gonna wrap this up wow what an amazing episode uh if you made it to this point like I said thank you so much my guest for this

evening Dr Clifford a pickover and the book is called artificial intelligence and Illustrated history phenomenal read it's it's such a nice book I I didn't know that creating books this nice was a thing um it was it's seriously I I mean that

um go pick this up and you know if you're listening to this on the podcast on YouTube that's where we do this live every week on Thursdays every Thursday night um if you also if you guys can get over to iTunes leave us a review that would be really meaningful and I would be very

thankful for that so thank you guys so much for listening your presence makes this show possible we will see you guys next week thank you so much