Duncan Trussell Family Hour - GO with Aaron Frank from Singularity U.

Episode Date: February 6, 2016

Aaron Frank from Singularity University joins the DTFH to share the news of an incredible breakthrough from the Google AI department.  We also talk about the effects emerging technology may have on civilization and the concept of the singularity.   This episode brought to you by Squarespace.com go to Squarespace.com and use offer code DUNCAN to get 10% off of your first order

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. I'm dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. This episode of the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour podcast is brought to you by the internet source servers over at Squarespace.com.

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Hello pals, it's me, Duncan, and you're listening to the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour podcast, and oh, what a strange and glorious time period we exist in in human history. I just had the weirdest, coolest virtual reality experience I've ever had recently. I went into VRChat, which is an app where you can do podcasts in virtual reality space.

And I did a podcast called Gunter's Universe, hosted by somebody named Gunter. Don't know his real name. Doesn't matter what his real name is. And Gunter lives in a van somewhere in Florida, but has constructed this incredible coliseum where he puts on shows, I think, every week. I did a show with Gunter and Zach Leary,

and I'm afraid I can't remember the names of the two other guests, but one of them had an avatar that was a gingerbread man, and the other one was a Hari Krishna. And Gunter was wearing some kind of glowing black suit in the amphitheater. The audience consisted of some angels, a zombie, and a great many other strange inner-dimensional beings

who had gathered there from all over the world, and it really gave me a glimpse into what the future is gonna look like, or at least the future is gonna look like when it comes to the technology we currently call virtual reality, which I don't think is really the right name for the technology, because it creates this kind of weird gradient where some aspects of reality,

I guess, are real reality, and other aspects of reality are considered virtual reality. I imagine that as the technology becomes less obtrusive as it transforms from being a kind of plastic blindfold that you wear on your face and inevitably merges with our neurology, then the term virtual reality or augmented reality is going to fade away, and there'll be some kind of new word for it,

which maybe we don't have the word for it yet, but regardless of terminologies, we are truly entering into one of the most fantastic eras of human civilization. And remember that even though virtual reality goggles are currently accessible, you can order versions of Google Cardboard by going to amazon.com, and I think if you have a Samsung,

they have their own virtual reality visor, we still haven't seen the super advanced tech hit the markets yet, and that stuff is expected to come in the summer with the release of Oculus's consumer-based VR goggles, as well as the Vive, which is really incredible, as well as, apparently Apple has also started or has announced that they're gonna create some kind of virtual reality goggles.

So enjoy these last few months of reality where you aren't witnessing the very strange aesthetic of seeing people wearing virtual reality goggles and reacting to things that you can't see, because that's what you're gonna have to get used to on airplanes and restaurants in the same way that we've gotten used to the aesthetically displeasing vision of folks gazing into the glowing rectangles

that they call their phones, we're gonna have to get used to seeing people wearing these visors, at least for a few years before the technology shrinks down or becomes something that looks more like glasses or maybe contact lenses, and then inevitably becomes something, or I say inevitably, who knows, but I would say probably inevitably becomes something that actually, in some way or another,

directly interfaces with our neurology and is no longer something that we wear on our faces. That's what we have to look forward to, and I personally am very excited about it. I think there is something really inspirational, beautiful, and liberating about the idea of a reality where human beings are no longer encumbered by the current level of genetic predeterminism

that comes from being inevitably trapped in your meat body and having to deal with whatever your genetic limitations currently are, having to deal with the way that your genetics have decided to express your physical body into reality. We don't exist in an age advanced enough where people can look beyond the symmetry or lack of symmetry, the weight or lack of weight

of the human body. A person's appearance is so important in the current era that we're existing in. The type of hair you have or the lack of hair you have, the wrinkles in your face or how young you are, the color of your eyes, the color of your skin, the color of your hair, your abdominal muscles or your lack of abdominal muscles.

All of these really affect the way the biomass that you've incarnated into is gonna treat you as you move through the world. And one of the great promises of virtual reality, augmented reality and theoretically the emergent technology that through medicine or nanobots is gonna allow us to transform ourselves to the genetic level is that we will no longer be doomed

by the genetic role of the dice that has determined the way that we look. And I think there's something incredible about that. We will no longer have to have access to matter and to the equipment to transform matter such as bulldozers and hammers and all the various construction equipment that goes into building a house or a coliseum

or a skyscraper if we wanna have our own mansion or skyscraper or planet or anything that we can imagine but we will be able to enter into these virtual reality spaces and create habitats within which our minds can exist. And I think that is fantastic. I really get bummed out by the matter accruers who feel that the most important reality is the one currently offered to us in three-dimensional space.

I don't understand why that has to be the number one priority. For a lot of people, the number one priority is moving matter around in three-dimensional space, taking matter, transforming it into other forms of matter and then receiving little bits of paper for your ability to transform matter into other bits of matter. Why is that a more important reality

than the reality offered to us by these brand new dimensions that are opening up and that will be accessible using virtual reality goggles, haptics and all the other emergent technologies that are going to allow us to experience full immersion into virtual worlds? This is where my mind has been lately and so I was really excited when I got a text

from my friend Aaron Frank, who works at Singularity University, which was started by futurists, transhumanists and philosophers Peter Diamandes and Ray Kurzweil. If you're interested in Ray Kurzweil, there's a great documentary about him on Netflix called The Transcendent Man and Peter Diamandes has written an awesome book

called Abundance, which seeks to dispel a lot of this superstitious cynicism which is emerging due to the fact that there has to be a 24-hour news stream and that the version of the world that is presented to us by the fear vomitors, such as Nancy Grace and Bill O'Reilly is actually not an accurate representation

of the world we exist in, which is a world of ever-increasing abundance that is happening because of the impact of these new technologies and the transformative effect that they have on societies. A controversial view for some, I get it, but a view that I subscribe to. And so when Aaron Frank texted me

and told me that he had just gotten some big news about something that had happened over at Google, I told him we should do a podcast today. And so he was kind enough to give me about an hour and a half of his time and we had a fantastic discussion about technology and some of the new breakthroughs that are happening in the world of artificial intelligence.

And that's what this podcast is. We're gonna jump right into it, but first, some quick business. This episode of the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour podcast is brought to you by squarespace.com. If you go to squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan, you will get 10% off your first order. The net of Indra.

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and do it by going to squarespace.com. Use offer code Duncan and you'll get 10% off your first order. Support them for they support us. Speaking of Squarespace supporting us, Squarespace is also sponsoring my upcoming You Are God tour, which will be traveling all through America.

You can go to DuncanTrustle.com to see those dates. I'll read a few of them to you right now. We're going to be, we have so many shows coming up that I really can't, there's just tons of them. It's incredible. And the tour actually just added a brand new date. I'm gonna be at the Denver Comedy Works at the very end of the month.

That's on the close to the end of the month. On the 24th, you can go to the Denver Comedy Works website and get tickets there. There's also going to be a link at DuncanTrustle.com. The tour starts on the 30th of March. I'm gonna be in Asheville, Charleston, Durham, Richmond, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Hamden, Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh,

Columbus, Cleveland, Ferndale, Toronto, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Nashville, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and back in good old Los Angeles. If you go to DuncanTrustle.com, you can find all the ticket links and all the information that you need there. We're also brought to you by amazon.com.

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I've noticed that there is a trend where people have signed up for little monthly minimum donations. I'm very grateful to you for this. Thank you so much for continuing to support this show. And you don't have to do that. I'm just happy that you're listening at all. So thanks you guys for listening to this podcast.

Let's get this show going. Today's guest, Aaron Frank, is from Singularity University. All the links that you need to get in touch with him will be located at DuncanTrustle.com. This is his second time on the DuncanTrustle Family Hour podcast. There's a fantastic episode that I actually did at Singularity University

that you can find in the back catalog of podcasts. But now everybody, please open your third eyes and your ears and get ready to have your mind blown by the brilliant Aaron Frank. Music Welcome home on you And you are with us We're singing to you

Welcome to you It's the DuncanTrustle Family Hour Music Aaron Frank, welcome back to the DuncanTrustle Family Hour podcast. Thank you so much for turning to the show. Thanks, Duncan. This is great. Great to talk to you. Before we get diving into the deep waters of what's going on right now, I was wondering if you could very quickly just let people know what you do and where you work for those of you who may have missed the last podcast You should hear just how cool Aaron's job is.

Yeah, sure. I have a pretty, I love my job. So I'm at a place called Singularity University. We are a learning center technology think tank based at NASA Research Park in the Bay Area in California. You actually caught me at an interesting time. I'm actually in the middle of a role transition. So starting in a few months, I'm actually going to be moving to the faculty. I will be principal faculty of general studies. So basically, that means that I'm like the dog in the dog park just going around sniffing all the trees trying to learn what's happening in all of the different technology areas. Congratulations. Yeah, I'm super pumped. It's really, I appreciate that.

And yeah, so Singularity University, we were founded about seven years ago. Our founders are Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. I know you talked a lot about Kurzweil, sort of the framing of exponential growth, how that will play out in technology and what that means for business, society, culture, governments, etc. So that's kind of what we study. So yeah, so you guys are dedicated to the study of what is happening and what is going to happen as technology continues to evolve. And there's predictions that Kurzweil has made. Many folks out there who are transhumanists or interest in the transhumanist movement are familiar with the year 2045.

Can you talk a little bit about why that year is significant? Yeah, so Kurzweil, so Kurzweil is really the way he became very well known is in his academic work, he created a framework for making predictions. So currently he's at Google, so he's on the artificial intelligence research team at Google right now, but he's really well known at MIT is where he did a lot of this research is he asked the question. So basically he wanted to know how he could predict what was going to happen in technology so that he could make inventions that would, you know, as certain technologies came online, if you know what types of technologies will exist in five years or 10 years, you can start to make pretty good bets about what you can build.

And so so in that research, he asked a pretty interesting question, which is how powerful has humanity's capacity to process data to compute information over the last and he looked, you know, most people are familiar with the term Moore's law. So Moore's law refers to the idea that, you know, every 18 months, the iPhone in your pocket will be twice as powerful, because we can fit more integrated circuits on a computer chip. And that's that's been a law, this exponential growth in computing integrated circuits for the last 50 or so years. So what Kurzweil did. But that that law, don't people say that that law is actually predate technology that it's even in biological systems?

Yeah, exactly. So that's and that's so Kurzweil did a lot of a lot of research looking into that. So he looked at so just just computing, he looked at all the way back to the early 20th century. So, you know, keep in mind, you know, in the 1900s, a computer used to involve human labor. There were, you know, electromechanical is a punch card system. So, you know, the term calculator actually comes from, you know, a person that was a job. You know, when you when you paid for computing power, you're actually buying human labor. And so what we've seen is, you know, different types of computing.

So we had, you know, relay systems, transistors, vacuum tubes. Today we use integrated circuits. So Moore's law, you know, refers just to the to the era of integrated circuits. And just like you point out, what Kurzweil shows is that actually goes back, you know, well before Moore's law. So we've seen this smooth, measurable, predictable, exponential growth in the price performance of computing. And so what you're referring to, even in biological systems is so the term that Kurzweil uses to describe this is called the law of accelerating returns. And so, you know, he points out that even in biological systems, you know, if you're an evolutionary biologist, you measure change over the course of, you know, hundreds of millions of years. If you're, if you're a cosmologist, you measure change in, you know, billions of years, you know, orders of magnitude longer.

But what Kurzweil shows is that you can actually plot this smooth acceleration, this almost predictable, exponential growth that predates technology in the sense of what we know as technology. And it's, it seems to behave like this, it behaves like a natural law, this accelerating change, which is pretty trippy. And what it creates a shape, right? There's a form that it creates, right? An L curve or something? Yeah, so, you know, most people are familiar. There's, I guess there's a way, like it's called a hockey stick sometimes because, you know, it looks really flat at the beginning. So like any exponential curve at the beginning of the curve is really deceptive. It doesn't look exponential. You know, we're seeing this in, so yeah, so it's so. So single celled organisms, you, if you somehow had, if you were sitting in the primordial earth staring at a single celled organism and you are an immortal being, that single celled organism is going to seem the same 1000 years in the future. It's going to seem the same 2000 years in the future. Three that the change is very slow for that. And so if you are witnessing this and you weren't an immortal being, then you would just think, yeah, this single celled organism is going to stay the same.

Based on my 30 years of observation, but you would be wrong. Yeah. And that's the, that's the, and you kind of see that with human history, right? If you look at the story of human progress is, you know, for the majority of, you know, the last, you know, you could say 10,000, 50,000, maybe let's, let's take the last, let's take the last 10,000 years is that, you know, the life of your parents look very similar to the life of your grandparents and the life of your great grandparents. You know, if you were a blacksmith, you would likely grow into a family where you became a blacksmith and the pace of change is really hard to perceive. And so if you were a human at that time, you would assume, you know, okay, we're, we're sort of on this pretty flat terrain of, you know, pace of change until maybe in the last generation or so we've just seen this. Like you said, the L curve, it's, you know, it looks like a hockey stick, it just goes straight up in the air where Justin, you know, think about, you know, the thing that actually used to bug me when I was a little kid is, you know, if you think about for most of human history, we've been, you know, digging around in the dirt, you know, we had to kind of chase down our food with and then, you know what, I grow up and, you know, I'm born and there's blinking lights and everything and, you know, there's pop tarts at the grocery store, you know, all this stuff that we think of as technology is so new. I mean, it's literally emerged just in the last generation or so it's, it's popped into existence. Like if you wait, if I went back in time and talk to my dad when he was in his twenties and said to him, there's going to be a job in the future called professional video gamer.

He wouldn't know what that meant. He wouldn't know what a video game was. He wouldn't know anything. He would have no way of understanding that because that job hadn't didn't exist and wasn't going to exist for decades. So that's what we're talking about here. And so the right, so the idea is right that there is right now jobs in the future that we can't even imagine because the technology hasn't come into being yet. And you guys are predicting that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, it's even crazier than that.

I mean, the example you use is great and think about the time scale that, you know, you're looking across generations. I really couldn't tell you what the jobs are going to look like in five years or 10 years. I mean, it's so fuzzy. It's this cloudy image. And I guess, I guess why my job is so cool is, is what we try and do is we try and, you know, bring as much into focus, the fuzziness of, you know, what's beyond what we can see. But it's, but it's so mysterious. It's so unknown. And at the end of the day, we really just have no idea what's, you know, what's coming.

But we can see these sort of indications, like, for example, I just read this article that I don't know the name of the tech firm, but they just got valued at a billion dollars. Yeah. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so that's Magic Leap. So they are, they are an augmented reality platform. So, so if you're familiar with the Oculus Rift, it's the, you know, fully immersive virtual reality. So what, what Magic Leap is doing is they've created a technology where you put on, I believe, so I have, they haven't made any of the core technology public. They've published their, their patents.

And, you know, I've talked to a few people that went to see the technology. But basically what they've done is they've created a system. I believe you wear a head mounted headset display. And what they've done is they've basically solved the problem of creating depth perception. So in the Oculus Rift, when you, when you see an image, your left eye is actually seeing something slightly different than your right eye. And what your brain does is it creates the illusion of depth. So what Magic Leap has done is they've created something where they use refracted light basically to show your retina the same image. So basically what that means.

So there's, there's this tall tail. I don't know if it's true or not. I'm just going to, that's a story that someone told me that the way they raised that money, the reason. So, so this is actually the second round of investment they've taken. The first round was $500 million from Google. So they now have a billion dollars in their bank account. They've never shipped a product. They actually don't have a product yet.

They're still in prototype. But the way they, the way they raise that money is they put the investors in a room. They set down in front of them a fake or sorry, a real cup of coffee and then a virtual display of a cup of coffee next to it. And they asked them, pick up the one that's real and they couldn't tell the difference. They just could not tell the difference. Wow. I mean, that's crazy. You think about what you could do with that.

I mean, there's a, there's a fake image on line. I saw on Facebook of a bunch of kids in a gymnasium and imagine you're in a gym and like this big like, ocean, I think it was like a whale, some like a blue whale just comes up and dives into the ocean. But they're in, they're sitting in a gymnasium and it's just a, an artificially created image where you can just, you know, you could watch like a team of, I don't know, like ducks like walk through your desk just hanging out on your desk. It's nuts. Yeah. This augmented reality stuff is incredible.

I know Microsoft has a version of it too. But you know, the thing I was talking about, maybe someone just tweeted this to me. Let me read this to you, Aaron. You've probably heard of this VR neuro technology company receives billion dollar valuation with funding round. Have you heard about this yet? I have not heard about this. Let me read this. This just popped today.

Cool. So it says that, well, what is it? It is something that seems like science fiction today. But as we enter what famed physicist Machio Kaku, I'm not a donut. That's how you say his name is calling the golden age of neuro technology. These things are inching closer to becoming a reality. Switzerland based company, MindMaze, who just received a large investment from a Hinduja group into devaluing the company at over $1 billion.

And basically this is a 52 employee strong neuro technology company focused on combining virtual reality and motion capture with brain machine interfacing to help patients recover from traumatic events. Wow. So it uses a combination of methodologies to produce interactions in VR with zero latency. The system works by combining in a modular way a band with dry electrodes to sense your brain waves and muscle activity in a proprietary motion capture camera system to predict your movement before you make it. That's so cool.

Yeah, man. I'm looking at the article. Yeah, this looks crazy. A billion dollars and, you know, magic leap a billion dollars. So, you know, what all this says is that there are people with very deep pockets who are so certain that this technology is going to be something that is viable and profitable that they are putting a billion dollars into it. And that's a good way to predict what's right around the corner.

Right. Yeah. You know, it's crazy about that too. Think about how that type of technology used to be funded. The only types of technologies that could receive that amount of funding even 10, 15 years ago was to have government research labs fund the science and technology to support the R&D to build these types of technologies. Whereas today, you know, at least in the case of magic leap, it's coming from companies.

It's coming from, you know, individuals, high net worth individuals. And I think that it speaks to this idea that, you know, what, I think a big trend of what we study and what we think about here is that things that were only available to governments and, you know, very wealthy research labs even 10, 15 years ago is getting to a point where anyone has access to it. And this, I'm reading the article, this is really interesting because it's a convergence of a few, what, what we call exponential technologies all combining to create a pretty interesting application.

It looks like they're doing sort of like VR brain training and therapeutic sort of like PTSD, PTSD recovery. Yeah. This is, and this is of course the, the seems to be the final or not, I don't want to say final, but this seems to be the next logical nexus, which is the figuring out a way to quote hack the human brain so that these virtual experiences can seem completely immersive. That's the, that's what it is. It's all about immersion.

And, and, and right now the difficulty is that we're, we're putting on these headsets that still have cords attached to them. The range of motion is limited compared to the range of motion in the real world. So that one of the big obstacles that we've got to overcome when it comes to VR is we got to get rid of these cords, but more than that, we've got to figure out a way to simulate the sense of motion without, you know, in a world where we're surrounded by walls. And it seems like the logical step is actually tricking the brain into thinking that you are there.

And that, it seems like that's, this is the beginning of that kind of technology. Yeah. I think that it's so, it's so fascinating to watch this unfold. And the thing that's interesting as well is how quickly, how quickly it's happening. Cause I remember just a few years ago, you know, the first time, the first time I tried on the Oculus Rift, it was the, you know, the original DK1 that was, you know, it, just like you're saying, the immersion is a huge, a huge aspect of this. And it's just fascinating to watch all of the, all of the ingredients of that come together.

I mean, if you think about what a human, you know, if you think about our experience of reality is we're fairly, I mean, relative to, you know, other parts of the animal kingdom, we're fairly simple creatures. We have, you know, we have five inputs. If we were, you know, if we were an Xbox controller, we'd have five buttons. We'd have, um, I think we talked about this on the last, the last show, but, uh, you know, we don't really have that many inputs that we'll have to figure out. And once we solve, and the other piece of it is, you know, we think that we need some

super advanced technology, like take vision, for example. I mean, there's a, there's a measurement of the resolution of which the human eye sees. And once a virtual experience meets that level, it doesn't need to get any better. It doesn't, it doesn't actually need that exponential curve that we're talking about with curves while it doesn't have to become infinitely, um, advanced. It just needs to reach the level of the human eye. And once it does that, then we're, then we're there, then we're, then the immersion happens. And at least the visual immersion happens.

Yeah. And then you start to work on the other senses and it's interesting. I kind of, I think this is one of those areas where we'll be really surprised at how immersion happens. I forget the, I'll have to send it to you or put it in the show notes or something. There's an article that's, that a friend sent me about, there's a team of researchers at a university looking at what actually creates realism and virtual reality. And what they're finding is that it's not actually higher resolution and more realistic, you know, imagery. It's actually, uh, it's, it's more on motion. It's the fluidity of how motion happens.

So you actually don't need high resolution. You actually just need realistic motion tracking as an example. So it's, it's kind of unclear what we actually need to do to solve the immersion problems to create those, you know, those environments that we can't really tell the difference between reality and virtual reality. Well, you know, I think that there's a important thing to note here, which is that if you get into a good book, you're fully immersed, your, your mind kicks in. Another thing kicks in when you're reading and you find yourself lost in a book or lost in a movie. You are immersed.

I have been deeply hypnotized just by words written on a page where I lose track of my body and I feel completely inside the thing. And there's memories that I have from books that I've read, like the dark tower series that feel like I was there and scenes. My brain encoded it as though I were there. So the idea of like this hyper realistic, even perfect motion being the key to immersion. Who knows? I don't know. I just did a VR chat. Have you ever seen VR chat?

No, what is I've done? I've done social VR where you sit in a room with someone else who's also in VR, but I don't know. I don't. I'm not sure where you're with the chats. So the VR chat thing there, there is this a play. I think it's called Gunter's universe. And I the gunter is taken from the excellent book ready player one, which is about VR, but essentially gunter is a guy who lives in his van. In Florida and puts on and is designed an amphitheater in VR space where it's amazing.

It's a giant, giant. I guess you could would call it a Coliseum with these massive screens that he can show YouTube videos on. And I did a podcast. It's online. I can see the link. I did a podcast with him. I can't recall their names. Two other very intelligent people in Zach Leary, Tim Leary's kid.

And so, you know, they came over to my house. They set this thing up. I put on that it was just a DK to suddenly I'm in this Coliseum sitting next to a gingerbread man. And what was really shocking to me is 20, 30 minutes into this, my brain just accepted that I was sitting next to a talking gingerbread man. At one point I looked over and he asked me if I'd ever consider getting neuro prosthesis. A gingerbread man asked me if I'd ever consider getting neuro prosthesis. How long? I know you just said how long did you say it took?

The podcast was about an hour and a half. Yeah, but you just said it took me, you know, this long and then I was then I was just 20 minutes. But your brain accepts it quicker than that. So, so the and this is rudimentary. We're using a DK to for those of you. For those of you don't know, Oculus Rift has released some like develop development kits. I guess you call them the DK one, the DK two and the DK two is it's great, but it's still compared to what's out there now. It's not the it's not a it's not the ultimate version of the technology.

But anyway, the to me, here's the a few takeaways from it. Aaron was that number one, my brain accepted it very quickly. Yeah. And number two, it felt right. Yeah. You know, like when you see. It's amazing how quickly we adapt. I think it's like if you ever watched I went my I am used to my my mom would take us to this island called Little Cumberland Island when I was a kid and to watch the turtles would lay eggs in the sand.

And at a certain times in the year, these the the eggs would hatch and these little turtle babies go running into the ocean. Right. They just know where to go. They they climb out of the sand and go hauling ass right into the ocean because their instincts tell them this is where we're meant to be. And it's amazing. It's an amazing thing to watch. Now, the sad thing is something like 80 to 90% of them get eaten by fish the moment they get in there, but they just go diving into the ocean. I'm telling you, man, I felt like a turtle baby.

It was the same feeling of like this is where we're supposed to be. This is right. This is suddenly completely unencumbered by the gravity of the physical body. I don't mean literally the gravity, but by all the egoic mechanisms that go into having a physical body, how your hair looks, how you look, what who you are. All of those things, these terrible gravities that have encumbered people for millennia suddenly completely lifted where you get to be exactly what you want to be. I'm telling you, man, this felt right. What do you think about the the naysayers, the superstitious people, the people who are holding their hands up in the cross position and damning technology and saying, this is the destruction of everything we know. Yeah, I think, well, I've really, I've really liked the turtle baby framing of that.

And I want to, if you, if you can remember to come back to, and I remember someone in the comments on the last time we chatted made this book recommendation. I'm curious if you're familiar with the book What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. No, I'm not. Okay, so we, I would love to come back to this in a minute. But to, but to your point about the naysayers, I'm curious, did you, did you see last, I think it was last week. B.O.B. the rapper who posted on Twitter that he believes the earth is flat. Did you track that story? Yes, yes, I saw that.

Yes. So I think this is a, this is such a fascinating example of what we're talking of what you just asked. So if you think about, so B.O.B. I think is, first of all, I'll just, I'll just say that I used to listen to his music when I was in college as a philosophy student, his early mixtape. So this is before he got famous. They were so fascinating because it was very clear from his music that he's just a curious dude. Like he just loves to expose himself to ideas on the internet and make sense of the world. And he just has really obscure. So I hadn't really, I kind of lost track of his music.

I didn't really listen to his music for a while. And then when I saw the news break that he, you know, gotten a Twitter fight with an astrophysicist about the shape of the earth. Yes. I was like, okay, I'm not surprised, you know, he, so I think this is what happened. He basically, he exposed himself to ideas on the internet. And then if you look at his Twitter, you know, for those that didn't hear this rapper basically posted a bunch of pictures and images and science. I mean, what would look on the surface like scientific evidence, like measurements and math, arguing for why the earth is flat. And if you, so basically what he did is he radicalized himself to this obscure belief system because he found evidence on the internet to support a belief system that he, that he clearly developed.

And I find that so interesting, like the idea that someone in the 21st century can expose themselves to ideas on the internet, evidence to support it. And that, I mean, that's what he did is he formed the belief system. And I think that's also what happens just with technology naysayers. It's you become your belief systems become a result of what you expose yourself to. And what's fascinating is that we already have belief systems. And I feel like the internet has just become a place that reinforces what we already think it just because like your belief systems are like a customer and the internet is there to serve the customer. Or if you want to get sinister, you could even say that belief systems are a kind of life form. Have you ever heard this before?

This is actually probably an idea I got from the internet. But the concept is belief systems are a sort of life form and are a virus and a kind of, I don't know the word for it, a logical virus and a illogical virus. So the internet is kind of like this Petri dish of ideas. And if you're not careful and you don't use stringent research, if you don't try to find, you know, when you go to college, I studied psychology, they really like sort of beat it into your head that you just can't believe something. You've got to find sources. You find the source, you know, source your material. And when you source your material and you're certain that it's a valid source, well then you can maybe start believing it. But nobody sources data when it comes to the internet.

So sourcing your information could be compared to your sort of immune system. And if you're not doing that, you have a very, your immune system is low. And then the next thing you know is that you've become infected by ridiculous ideas. And one of these ideas, of course, is the flat earth bullshit. Now, I love the idea. Have you looked into this idea, Aaron? Do you know the details of flat earth? Because it's really cool.

I have not. Oh, check this out. This is awesome. Okay. So here's, here's, I found a great YouTube video of this very sincere man with his girlfriend and some dark apartment. And look, man, this guy is like a crusader. Like you can see it. His eyes are flickering with the importance of his duty to spread the information about the reality of our situation.

Which is this, we're on a flat, we're on a plane, right? And the plane is basically pieces of the plane, segments of the plane are sort of cut off. I guess you could look at it as a kind of like almost like a cupcake tray that you would cut cakes in. And each of the indentations contains a different biosphere, right? So we're in a biosphere and this biosphere is surrounded by like very difficult terrain to cross. Because the people who are keeping us in this biosphere have made it so it's really difficult to get to the other biospheres, right? So right next to it, like if you were to go to the Arctic and you were to keep traveling and the government, the black helicopters didn't shoot you, or you weren't taken out by the watchers, then you would cross over into another part of this interdimensional cupcake dish.

And now you might be in a land filled with gray aliens, or now you might be in a land filled with... So there's definitely aliens involved in this, in this worldview. We're being, yes. We're being observed and we're kind of experiment and we're in these various Petri dishes that are sort of kept from each other. And so yeah, that's the idea, that's what's going on. The thing about these concepts is that they're really quite beautiful and creative and amazing. But to me, what's really funny about them is they are less bizarre than what's actually happening. Like the concept of being observed in a cupcake dish by some kind of super advanced alien intelligence.

To me, that's far less astounding than what's really going on, which is that we are on a floating ball that over the course of aeons has sprung forth with intelligence, which is currently refining its ability to manipulate its own environment to the point where it's about to cut some form of subjective hole into the thing and climb into it in the form of virtual reality. To me, that's bizarre. That's way weirder than the cupcake dish theory. Well, I'll just say this, that what's fascinating and I think what's true of just what human culture is and what the human mind seeks to do is that faced with the uncertainty of the reality in which we exist, we become myth creators. Like if you lived 10,000 years ago, I don't know how long ago Greek mythology was, but you walk outside and you see these hurling bolts of lightning. You have no idea how to explain that.

The human mind does not exist well in an environment where there's so much unpredictable, unexplained phenomenon. So in that world, it's like, okay, there's a bunch of muscular dudes in the sky that just hurl lightning strips across the sky. Like, okay, I'll work with that. That makes sense. I can live with that story and I don't think anything's changed. I don't think we're any different today. And I've actually had this recently where even the tools of science, I mean, even the tools of science are only so good at showing us what's really going on. There's a limitation to, and I had this experience. So there's a social scientist that I'm very, I would still say I'm a fan of, his name is Steven Pinker.

He wrote a book called Better Angels of Our Nature. It's really, well, it's cited quite a bit in my world of Singularity University because his argument is that throughout human history, we've seen a steady decline in violence. So his argument is that you, like you, Duncan, the likelihood of you experiencing violence through in the form of homicide or torture or assault is lower today than it's ever been. And he makes a really convincing argument and he uses tools of social science, which is basically using empirical data over time. What is, what is the likelihood of experiencing violence? And so the big aha that I had was I started following another scientist, this guy named Nassim Talib, who I highly recommend. If anyone wants like a really, both enlightening and also super sort of entertaining Twitter, follow this guy Nassim Talib on Twitter. He's, first of all, he's brilliant. He's probably one of the smartest minds.

He correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis, his backgrounds in trading. But he basically, what he does is he just calls other social scientists on their bullshit when they're not adhering to the rigors of statistical probabilistic means of data analysis. I don't even know if I'm saying those words correctly, but me as this, you know, I don't have the technical background from a math standpoint to, you know, qualify these guys arguments. So it kind of, to me, looks like on the outside, like the scene from South Park where you have like the, the atheist otters fighting the alliance of atheists, whatever. It's like, our science is the one true science. Right. Like even science itself is, is constantly at war with itself. Yes.

In that case, I was left, you know, consulting with people that I trust to sort of help me navigate that. And the consensus typically seems to be that Talib is the reason, the reason I really like this guy is he's super humble and the idea that at the end of the day, we can make, we can try and make sense of the world around us. But we're creating that, that understanding. We're, we're creating the, the stories. And yeah, it looks like science, but, but at the end of the day, most of it is so mysterious and unknown, we really just don't know. There's so much we don't know. Right. Yeah.

Well, yes. I mean, I think as long as you hang out in that place, you're set, you know, it's, you start running into problems when you begin to think that you do know what it is. And it does seem that what's happening right now is proving to that this place that we're in is a million times weirder than we ever expected it to be. And, you know, I mean, Scott, you just, you saw that they just had the first successful fusion test. Did you see that, Aaron? Yeah, I saw the headline. I haven't read into it. So I don't know much about it was in Germany.

Is that the one in Germany? Yeah. Merkel pressed the button supposedly. Do you know that? Wow, I didn't. I saw the headline yesterday. I haven't, I need to, I need to read up on that. So they created, they create, I mean, you know, this is me scanning Reddit.

So what am I, here's how I gather. I was actually, I was going to ask you, like, how do you, like, what is, what is your belief systems? Let me announce, I'm the oldest. Forgive me, you guys. I'm the ultimate when I'm just saying, be very stringent about your data gathering. Here's what I do. I go on Reddit and I look at, I find whatever the post is on Reddit, claiming some incredible thing, cure for cancer, plasma generated, whatever, in a fusion reactor, whatever.

And then I read the first comment that's been upvoted to the top. And if that first comment disproves the thing, then usually I'll think, that's probably bullshit. Because, you know, there's some really smart people who theoretically are posting on Reddit, but who knows? I'm not sourcing that data. I don't know. So usually what I'll do is I'll, I get my information from Reddit, from the internet, the usual news feeds, I'll look into that information to see if there's anything to it.

And then, and that's, that's as far as I go down the rabbit hole. And I'm, I fully admit that because of this, I'm sure that I have a terrible understanding of things, or at least a partially diluted understanding of things. I tend to, as crazy as this might sound, I tend to be very skeptical about any claim being made on the internet. I tend to, if something seems too good to be true, I think that it probably is. I think that a lot of things get inflated for clickbait and a lot of things, you know, you can almost, I do, and again, all of this stuff, who knows, might not be the right technique.

But what I, what I'll do is anything that's, that is, whatever thing seems exciting, I try to reduce how amazing it is by at least 60%. And that's about where the thing probably is. Cause shit gets inflated, people want funding, whatever. But you know what? This has not been correct. When it comes to VR, it's a, it's more amazing than I think people are hearing about. And when it comes to immersion in VR, more amazing.

And what's about to hit the shelves of Best Buy in the summer, I think is, is going to radically transform our society. And I can say that from firsthand experience with the VR tech that is currently available. This shit is no joke, man. And I'm sure you've seen it too. Have you seen the Vive? I haven't tried the Vive. That's the one that I've heard the most consistent, just like jaw drops.

Holy crap. I tried the, I tried the consumer Oculus. So the one that's going to come to market. And I, just like you're saying that it really is, it's better, it's better than the hype. Like it's, it's first of all, when you put it on, you can't even, it doesn't feel like you're wearing anything. It's super light. The resolution is crisp.

You, like you said earlier, you know, 20 minutes into your gingerbread friend, Coliseum, trip, like you just, you get sucked in immediately. It's, it's exactly, it's, it's insane. It really is. It's, and the thing that you also earlier with the, uh, the turtle baby example, it's addictive. Like it feels right. Like it feels like there's something that is just inevitable about this.

It feels like it's what you're supposed to do. And that's going to infuriate. See that just saying that, man, there are people, there's primitivists, there's people out there who think that everything started going south. Um, uh, during the agrarian revolution and, um, and, and, you know, like, for example, like one thing that you hear, and I'm certainly guilty of it is, uh, look at everybody staring into their phones. Do you see it?

The horror. Everyone sketch. Okay. Put your phone down for a second and pay attention to me. It's like, listen, I'm sorry. Forgive me. I don't mean to gaze into the window that connects to all human information that's ever been written.

I'm sorry that this has a magnetic effect on my attention span, but you've got to give me a little leeway here. Seeing as how this shit is just existed, uh, in the human biosphere for a flicker of time and people, when they look at something, whether it's a cell phone, a computer, virtual reality, whatever it may be, they, they, they, they make the critical error of thinking that the current way that this technology looks, the current aesthetic of this technology is going to stay this way forever. People are going to be looking at their cell phones forever.

People are going to be staring into that fucking black mirror forever. No, no, this is an intermediary phase of a, of a, of a technology that is transforming at an incredible rate. These cell phones, man, it's, we're not going to be 10 years from now. I bet people aren't going to be staring into a fucking cell phone. It's going to be some other thing. Who knows what it is. So the much, um, decried, the, the much, uh, maligned aesthetic of the cell phone.

This is a temporary thing. This isn't an embryonic phase. And, uh, I just don't think people realize that. And, um, and, uh, you would love this book, man. You need to check out. So this book, I would credit with maybe being the most influential book that changed my worldview is called what technology wants by Kevin Kelly. So, so this guy, he's, he's the founder of wired magazine.

He's kind of one of these polymaths dude. You should definitely get them on your show, man. He's amazing. He's, he, he's just like one of these guys who's at the intersection of society and culture and technology and just has a very holistic, philosophical, spiritual way of looking at systems. Um, and so this book, basically the premise of the book is he takes the idea of technology. So firstly defines technology as, you know, we think of technology as, you know, things

that have blinking lights, you know, what we've seen emerge on planet earth over the last, you know, 30, 40 years, but he, you know, he reminds, reminds us that, you know, when a beaver makes a dam, you know, it's, it's engineering something to modify its environment. That's technology. Right. And technology is old. I mean, it's the first primate that picked up a stick and so basically his book, so we, so, so he creates this argument in this worldview that technology is its own biological.

It's not made of biology, but it behaves like a biological system. It's got its own needs and wants and so, you know, the perfect example. So if you, if you, you know, I love when you land over a big city and you're in an airplane and you look down at all the blinking lights, if you think about it, like that, that whole thing, all the lights and buildings is like this. It's like an eagle's nest that we've built. Like we've, you've modified our environment and so he creates this argument. So we think like the, like we're locked into this worldview that we built that, like we

looked down, like we built those buildings. We made those roads and it's actually maybe it's just a different way of looking at it is actually that technology itself built, built itself. Like it emerged out of, you know, roads, for example, like we think, oh, we had an idea to build a road and we went and we, you know, paved the street and no, like roads had a functional purpose that benefited all of technology and that, you know, you Duncan could get in your car and go to work faster and support, you know, you can provide economic output to the system that then, you know, feeds back into the whole eagles nest and, you know, the roads

are actually there for the benefit of the technological organism that, you know, it's, you know, we think we, again, we centralize, we think that human brains are the center of the universe, but we're just, it's, I've heard you talk about, I've heard you talk about bees, you know, like what does a bee get up and decide like, I'm going to go pollinate a flower? Like, no, it does it because it feels awesome. And that's kind of how humans are. Like we're like the hands building this technological organism because it feels awesome.

Well, yeah. And, you know, when you get into the concept that so many of our impulses are actually coming from the microorganisms living in our gut and you realize that we're, we're a hive. We're a community. We're a community of life forms and many of the things that we think are our own impulses are coming from biochemical messages being sent from microorganisms living inside of us.

Then you do begin to think, wait a minute, who is building the city? You know, if you want to get really like hippie woo woo, would you forgive me? But this is, I always do this, but, um, there's a reason I listen to your show. Thanks, brother. I'm with you. There's a, you know, one, like this is actually in Jesus Christ superstar, uh, but you know, what are the, like, like, um, Jesus is riding into, uh, some town and the, the, like, the power system is like, you know, rebuke your disciples.

They're being too loud. Tell them to shut up because they're cheering for him. And he says, I tell you, if they, if they keep quiet, the stones themselves will cry out. And I love that because, you know, on one level, whatever, it's just a Jesus story. But on a deeper level, it's this idea of a life force exuding from the planet that we're on a kind of organizing, uh, inner jet, energetic system that takes whatever is inside of it and evolves the thing.

Now when I say takes and evolves, I'm applying the concept that there is an intentionality to the thing. And I think that by, uh, applying intentionality to the thing, you actually reduce how incredible it is. Uh, cause what we're looking at here is something out beyond intentionality. We're looking at something that is, uh, I think best summed up by, um, uh, the term Omega point. Have you heard this term before?

I have. And I do, I have to ask you a question in a minute cause you're, you're, this is so interesting. But yeah, I go on. I know, I know the, the concept that, so, so this is, uh, you know, this is, uh, for those of you who don't know, and I, I, I, as I mispronounce every name now is almost a form of tradition. This is, uh, a Jesuit priest, uh, named, uh, or a Jesuit named, uh, Taylor Day Chardon. I, someone, someone has told me out, I'm sorry, someone has told me how to pronounce

this before cause I've talked about him and I've screwed it up, but basically, um, I'm just Googling the Wikipedia, another source of information for me. The Omega point is a spiritual belief that the universe is evolving toward a high level of material complexity and consciousness. The term was coined by Jesuit priest Taylor Day Chardon and I'll find a quick summation of it here. Um, let's see the Omega point is a spiritual belief. Okay.

The term. Okay. Uh, Taylor argued that the Omega point resembles the Christian logos, namely Christ who draws all things into himself who in the words of the Nicene Creed and his God from God life, blah, blah. Cause you know, this is like Christian symbolism that, that he's, he's using here. Uh, but, but really the idea is we're talking about some pre-existing, uh, a pre-existing transcendental superstructure that we are all moving into and that technology, uh, uh,

in all forms, not just the, in or like what we're seeing now in the form of computers and phones, but the beaver dams, the beehives, the formation of cities, the patterns of streets. Uh, all of these things are actually, uh, the, the, all inorganic and organic matter sort of fitting into this pattern that already exists. And as we move through time, uh, we begin to see the pattern emerging greater detail. And that's what technology is. Is that, do you think that's a fair summation of it? This is so interesting.

This is exactly the, the sort of deep question that I've been grappling with. I wanted, I wanted to get your insight on this, you know, it's, so it's really interesting. Uh, so Kevin Kelly, uh, the guy who wrote this, what technology wants book, he's, he's fascinating because he's, he lives in the Bay Area. He's in this, you know, hyper liberal techno capitalist culture. He's a devout Christian and he's been, so he's a deep believer in evolutionism. So he believes in, you know, the, the process of evolution, uh, but I would qualify his worldview as sort of a version of creationism and that's almost what you're describing

is that there's this, there's this unfolding directionality to where technology is going. And so this is a question that I'm, so, so another way to rephrase that question is, is I, I used to very much think that, oh yeah, that's absolutely what's happening. You know, just kind of on this river and, you know, evolution is this, you know, unpredictable path down the river in that, you know, if you're, let's say a water molecule, you could be on either side of the river bank and there's an infinite number of ways down the river you can go, but the river is still going in a direction. Right.

So, so here's the question that a way to sort of encapsulate that is, so if you were to start the story of the universe over rewind it and you could play it back a second time, do you think you would see a lot of the same things happen? Like maybe in a different way, but you'd see like, huh, like that kind of looks like a bipedal, big brained, you know, tool using language using animal that seems to be forming social groups and you know, that, you know, oh, interesting. Well, I'll tell you this man, to answer your question, I think the beautiful thing about the time period that we're entering into and Moore's law is that we're going to be able to

answer that question, not literally by going back in time and pressing reset, but by using some super advanced simulator to run that question, to reproduce reality and to see what happens and, you know, and I think that we'll get the answer that way. You know, I, I don't know. I think that it's almost like the laws of physics become like a, like a genome for the reality. And, you know, there's certain constraints and you can, and you can run, they become testable if you can run simulations to see like, Oh, what would happen? Like, what would happen?

You know, and, you know, the, the, the, the, I think all of these answers will, will become increasingly plain to us. And, and, you know, there's a lot of when we talk about intentionality or creationism as, as it's called, um, one big question that you've got to ask is why? Like why if there, if we want to play around with the idea that there is a creator, then you have to ask, well, why would you want to unfold an entire universe? Well, this is, this is why Kevin Kelly, I believe I read an interview on The Guardian, why he's a Christian is if you think about the story of Jesus is you create, I'm actually,

I might pull this up and do it verbatim because it's so, it's, it's so fascinating. His answer, um, here, I have it right here. So, so the question this interviewer asks him is, so he says, how would you describe yourself in religious terms? And Kevin Kelly says, I'm a Christian and he says a Christian with caveats. And so Kelly's response, we go to a rock and roll church in San Francisco, I'm an evolutionist, but I happen to believe that Jesus was some incarnation of God. My epiphany for that came from looking at virtual realities, God games.

Those who create the rules always want to put themselves inside the world. They have made to see how it feels. There it was, the Christian story. So like that's, I mean, think about, like that's so fascinating is the story of Christianity is about create, you know, it's about sending your, a version of yourself into this world. And if you, I don't know, I've talked, I've talked, uh, sort of philosophically with some other faculty about this concept of, you know, if you wanted to, if you create some artifact, like a sim city, artificial simulation version of something, and you want it to be

able to relate to the, the, the entities that exist within that simulation, you'd have to make yourself become like a version of them to be able to even relate to them. And that's, I don't know, it's a fascinating. Again, like, well, I'll tell you, man, you, if you really want to like blow your mind, first look up, um, Hawking, uh, Elon Musk and any of the people who are warning us about the problem of, oh yeah, we got to talk about the Google AI, right? Of AI of computers gaining sentience, right? Yeah.

So, okay. So then what you want to do is go to go to, uh, go to the book of Genesis. And instead of imagining that this is God, imagine it's a programmer who is, uh, trying to set up rules for a system that it's created. And so this programmer is very concerned because there is a, you know, in this like biome it's created, there seems to be two kinds of trees. One of the trees is the tree of knowledge of good and evil, uh, right and wrong. The tree of that, that I suppose creates like a, uh, the opposite of unit of consciousness,

right? It creates the binary. And, uh, the second tree is really fascinating because it's called the tree of life. And the verses in the, in there, which is really a trippy verse because one is because it, it's, the term is in the plural, which is we can't let, I mean, I'm paraphrasing here, but we can't let them eat of the tree of life because they will become like us plural, which is really weird. It's a plural, but the, so when we think about machines waking up, we find ourselves in the identical worrisome predicament of whoever that creator force was in this symbolic, obviously

symbolic representation of the universe, because God's fucking worried that these goddamn things he's created are going to become like him. And here we are, and then another great verse somewhere in the Bible is as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. And so here we are finding ourselves in an identical predicament as we begin to witness this emerging intel, intelligent, and we begin to ask ourselves, do we want this to be like us? And if we do let it become like us, what will it do to us? And so here we are in the same predicament as is in the mythology of representing the

book of Genesis. And to me, I think that is fascinating and trippy that we were in our own garden of Eden right now, only the things that we have created aren't Adam and Eve. It's the operating systems that are currently improving themselves and will inevitably, as Kurzweil predicts, wake up. And that's the year 2045, of course, right? That's his idea. That's when we...

Yeah, so, yeah, there's some, oh man, there's so much here to respond to. I think this is fascinating. First of all, it's interesting to read something like the Bible, a story that helps make sense. That's like a version of the explaining lightning through Greek mythology. It's a version of helping make sense of reality. Sure. If you read it through the lens of what's happening in technology today, there's so much there that you can reconcile together.

So to your question about 2045, and I definitely want to get to this, because I think we can segue into the Google AI breakthrough that just happened this week. So the term... So Kurzweil's predictions basically showed him that we've seen this steady exponential growth and that he believes... So today, a computer that you can buy in the store has the equivalent computational power, the equivalent of maybe the brain of a mouse. And that's measured in calculations per second.

And so the cycles per second today is about equivalent what you see in the brain of a mouse. Wow. In about 10 years, around 2025, or maybe it's 2029, one of those years, Kurzweil predicts that the average $1,000 computer that you could buy at the store will have the equivalent computational power of one human brain, which is crazy to think about. And then in 2045, it will be basically the equivalent of all human brains together in... And basically the term singularity.

So Kurzweil's singularity is like a noun. It's this future moment in which he believes that the dominant information processor at that point will no longer be the human mind, our own biological information processor, but computers and AI. Actually, and it's interesting, Kevin Kelly, this guy I keep bringing up, he also finds a little bit of fault with the idea of creating a noun. It's of the singularity, like it's like putting a timer and it's like at this point, this thing will happen. I think there's a bit of a risk in doing that because it's kind of...

But I think the term singularity is fascinating because it's a term borrowed from physics. It basically means any system where we have no idea what happened. So the event horizon of a black hole, for example, is referred to as a singularity. Death. Death, yeah. So that's what it is. And so, yeah, so Kurzweil's vision is that in 2045, the dominant universal information processor is no longer human brains, but computers, artificial brains.

Right. But I think what is true about his insight is that we've seen this seemingly predictable acceleration in the pace of change. To say a singularity, I think, as soon as you define a label around some event in the future, you've arbitrarily created a border and a boundary around something. I think we will... I would say that the ability to see into the future is not 2045. It's like three years from now.

So here's... Okay, so I guess I texted you this morning all excited because Google, did you see this, the AlphaGo, the deep learning? Yeah, you know, and you know what's so funny is I just skipped over it. I didn't realize how important it was, but please explain it to me. Oh, man, it's cool. Like, I think the AI community, again, it's interesting to go back to our conversation around how we receive information.

I think there's a bit of the, you mentioned, you like tone down like 60% of the hype. But it's really fascinating because I think this is one of those times where we might need to do that. So basically what happened is Google... Go. Yeah, so there's a Google deep learning system that they built and developed to try and play this game called Go, which is an ancient Chinese game. I honestly, I'd never heard of it before this headline came out.

But it's a really big deal. And the reason... This is that game where it's like black and white kind of... Black and white discs on a, it's a weird looking game. I know exactly what you're talking about. I've never played it, but I think so from what I've read is you have two teams, you have white and black colored circles, and the board is a 19 by 19 grid. So way more complex than chess.

There's far more moves you can make. And the goal is to, you go turn by turn, and the object of the game is to surround your opponent's colors with your own colors. And whoever has the majority of the board covered with your own color at the end is the winner. Right. And so, okay. So the reason this is crazy is it's basically the complexity involved. So a game like chess.

So chess has the number of possible chess matches. All the permutations of chess is like an absurdly astronomically large number. It's 10 to the 120th power of possible permutations. That's more, there's more possible chess games than there are atoms in the known universe. I mean, it is just absurdly complex. Wow. So go as a game has 10 raised to the 760. So just, just orders of magnitude.

Wow. Just, I mean, our brain, honestly, our brains don't comprehend large numbers like that really well. It's just, so, so about 10 years ago in 1997, IBM created a computer that beats the world grandmaster and chess at the time. The computer system was called Deep Blue. It was a big deal. It was at a time when experts were saying, you know, there's no way that an AI will ever,

you know, beat a human grandmaster and chess or if they do it, you know, we're decades or centuries away from that. Right. And the way that Deep Blue played chess was pure brute strength that basically for every move, it processed every possible move as the next move in real time and then just found the best possible next step. And so that's how it, that's how it did it. With Go, it's a bit different because of the complexity.

There's no possible way that a computer would ever be able to process that amount of possible permutations in real time. So the way, the way that the Go artificial intelligence was trained is they actually, they basically just let it watch and witness or play itself a bunch of Go games and just did this millions of times and developed its own strategy. So it actually, it doesn't, so it actually has to learn the strategy and sort of the reason it's a big deal is because, you know, experts were saying that a system was going to have to develop intuition, which they believe is, you know, solely the domain of a human

player. And so there's two, there's two things that make this a big deal. One is the breakthrough happened like a decade before anyone ever expected this to happen. So we're like way ahead of schedule. I mean, this is even ahead of like Kurzweilian predictions of, of progress. And the second is it basically taught itself how to play Go. And because of the way deep learning as a machine learning technique as AI technique is they didn't program it.

It learned on its own in a way and we have no idea how it did what it did. We're at a point now where AI and engineering does things that we can't, we can't explain. We have no, we have no idea. No one knows. So like when, so there's theories probably, but when they're looking at this thing, I have no idea how it learned to play in this way. So I imagine that they, they may understand parts of it, but there's, this is this, this probably if someone, if someone asks me what's the, the one trend that, that I'm most fascinated

by right now, it's this idea of rising complexity. It's this idea that we as humanity are creating systems that we just no longer, we no longer understand. Like it used to be when you program something, you had to, you had to write the code. You had to program the system. And so an engineer could look at that system and understand what's happening. Because programming today is using techniques like deep learning, machine learning is what, what happens is, so there, so maybe as a way to explain this, there was a,

there was a headline last year in 2015 that was probably the thing that most blew my mind. Um, that I think will demonstrate the point I'm trying to make. So last year, there was a team of biologists that wanted to know why when you cut the tail of certain worms, worms, there are certain worms that will grow their tail back. And this was a challenge that for a hundred years, biologists just couldn't figure out. And so what these biologists did, they worked with a team of computer scientists, they fed an artificial intelligence, a deep learning system, the data, and they basically said to the system, come up with a worm that grows its tail back.

And so what the system does is it develops a hypothesis, it runs a test. So it has its own theory, runs a test. And then when it fails, it learns from the failure to develop the next hypothesis. And it just does that basically trial and error billions of times. It solved that problem in three days. I mean, it took a hundred years for humans. We now have an independent scientific discovery fully credited to a machine. And the thing that the whole point of all of this is we no longer really,

it's beyond engineering. It's it's beyond something that we've created. We're basically allowing the forces of evolution to just billions of times faster than humans could do, find its own solution. That is so nice. Think about it. It's like, imagine if you had, I don't know, a gun and you put it on a table. And the next day you come back and it's a much better gun because it's improved itself.

This is what this is great. To me, this is insane to think about that the thing we don't know what it's doing. And this is, I think, probably where this is where people, this is where your hair starts standing on in because we want to control it. And the moment you don't understand how it's doing this thing. Now, well, then what is it at that point? What are we looking at here? And a lot of people would say, well, you're looking at a demon portal.

You're looking at a thing that is channeling some kind of dark energy and we're in trouble. Those are the, those are the, the naysayers, you know, but it seems to me more like, more like a sale, right? Like if evolution is a wind, then technology is a sale that you can put into that wind. And you can navigate using this energy source really, I guess. Is it fair to say that evolution is an unharmist energy source? Is that what it is? Fascinating.

And this actually goes back to the question that I asked you earlier that I'm trying, that I struggle with is, you know, would the unfolding of the universe happen in the same way? And so, so what's interesting about the go, the, the, the Google go AI is that you have to give the AI a task. Like in the case of the worm tail growing, you have to, you have to say to the AI, this is, we don't care how you reach this destination, but this is what we want you to do. And so it goes through its trial and errors and, and, you know, it has a direction in which it's, it's trending towards.

And so there's actually, I'll send you the link because this also just came online. Just a few weeks ago, I forget what university, but at, there's a university where there are learning scientists and computer scientists that are trying to reconcile how learning systems develop and evolution and their, their whole premise or their hypothesis is that evolution itself behaves like neural networks, which then goes back to the question we were asking earlier. If, if evolution is like these neural nets, then what is its destination? What, what is, where, where is all this headed? What was the, the task, so to speak, you know, again, I, I'm supposing that there even is one,

but if there is one, what, what was that? What was the sort of the big bang Presco on this evolutionary driven, machine learning process? What, what, because that's also like asking the question, what, like, what does it all mean? Why are we all here? What's the, what's the purpose? I mean, you know, the thing is like to, you know, I've been playing around the idea that the healthiest, like if you think about health and human beings,

babies have got to be the healthiest thing, right? They're all brand new cells, like a healthy baby, you know, baby's not sick. That's all brand new cells, brand new stem cells, brand new DNA. It's brand new. It's brand new thing. And in kids, you know, a kid, like if you look at the way a child functions, to me, that I think that that seems to be the most natural, optimum state of being. And so when you ask a kid why he did something, it's really funny.

If you ever asked a kid why, like, or when you remember when you were a kid and your parents are like, why did you, why did you smear mayonnaise all over yourself? You know, which is something I did once. Crisco, Crisco. Why did I take a bottle of, I guess it's in these, I don't know what it's in. Why did I take Crisco and rub it all over my body? Now you ask a kid that and the answer is going to be, I don't know, right? Unanswerable, you know, and I think that this thing that we're dealing with here,

whatever it may be, it has a lot of childlike characteristics. And so I don't know if there's an, if there's an answer to the question. I don't know if there was a question that was input. It's fascinating. The alternative to the idea of there being a direction is it's more like what you're describing. It could be more like, if you look at a dog in a dog park, you know, you're going to see the dog just going around sniffing trees. But if you try to make sense of where it's going, it's got no direction.

It's just doing stuff and sniffing trees because it probably feels awesome. That's right. It feels good. That could be the universe. You know, this is something you told me, market pressures. Market pressures are driving the whole thing. You know, like we want more aesthetically pleasing, faster technology. And so to what's driving the thing, we don't know.

But if you look at the entire biosphere as one thing with a bunch of different forms, and, you know, theoretically, you can follow the whole thing back. We all have some common ancestor way back when, all the way back. We spring out of some, the same genetic godhead or fountain head or whatever you want to call it. Then suddenly what you see is all of these tendrils of life stretching out across the planet and exploring it in their own way, the way the dog explores the dog park, the way that a snake looks for food, the way that a mouse runs from a snake, the way that any living thing functions on the planet.

If you look at all these various scopes that are exploring this particular dimension, then suddenly we see what we're looking at when evolution is applied as a kind of scope that improves upon itself and as it improves upon itself, where it gets really weird is if you look at all these millions and millions of fingers of life that all forms of life represent, all of these devices that are scanning the environment, when you come to the human being and some other creatures like we discussed, like the beaver which is altering the environment, we see that the human being is as it explores its environment becomes more adept at exploring its environment and then becomes more adept at transforming the environment that it's exploring.

So the scope is actually shifting the environment itself as it moves through it. And why that's happening, who knows? But what's really, I think what, to me, what's so amazing about it is it does not seem to be random. It seems to be coming to some kind of conclusion or some kind of, well, I don't know if you want to call it a conclusion. Like in a crescendo. I mean, in some ways. A crescendo is a better way to put it. Yeah. And in some ways, it's almost like, I mean, the amount of data being generated in the world today, if you, I mean, it's almost like we were talking about, if you interpret,

you know, scripture from the Bible, it's almost like a let there be light moment. The amount of data that we're generating is beyond comprehension of, you know, all of the bits of information that come out from the terabytes of internet connected airplanes that are, you know, tracking all the Teslas on the road that can track their driving behavior, you know, the Nike fuel bands, like human bodies are becoming information. It's the information world that we're creating is like this let there be light almost type thing that's happening. So where are we headed? What do you think? What are people, what are you and people at Singularity University based on this new, I guess you'd call it a discovery that just happened at

Google? What are we looking at here? What's, what's, what's gonna happen if this thing is already figured out how to play go? What's it calculating right now? Do we know other questions that Google has asked this thing? Do they announce all the varying problems that have been offered to their artificial intelligence over there? What else is this thing thinking about? Yeah. So that's a good question. And I don't, I don't know specifically about what Google is doing at Singularity University. The, the, the conclusion that we've come to the, the premise that we operate from is that because, because of these converging trends, the, the exponential advance of technology, the, the democratization, democratization of tools that,

you know, were once only available to governments means that it's a really, first of all, it's an amazing time to be alive. And secondly, a lot of the global grand challenges, the, the, the biggest problems that we've faced as a species for, you know, a long time are, are, are problems that are solvable and they become solvable. And you must, by the problems facing mankind, you're talking about hair loss and impudence? Yeah, of course. The, the important things. You know, the, the Justin Bieber, you know, arrest, Twitter, Twitter news. We've got to solve the Kanye West problem. Yeah, exactly. So you're talking about famine.

So the grand challenges that we, that we operate around our issues like global health, security, education, poverty, energy, environmental systems might be one of the most significant of our age. Healthcare, I might have said already, but these, I mean, these are things, the, the way that we qualify our, our grand challenge areas are their, their problems or issues that affect at least one billion people around the world. So we're talking cancer, heart disease. Correct. So, so, so, so healthcare and they're all interconnected. I mean, if you, if you look around the world, you know, most of the, most of the illness that's, that's driven as a result of waterborne, waterborne illness. So, so unclean water. So if you, you solve water, you eliminate,

you know, over 50% of hospitalizations, you, you know, you can solve water by solving for energy. I mean, if you solve energy, then you get cheap desalination and water cleaning. I mean, you, you solve, you solve these issues and security, you know, becomes, you know, a lot of the security threats and that the humanity is faced with, you know, so, so we, we really do operate from the premise that not only are these problems solvable, but we, we have to one choose to steer the technology and I, and it's, it's ironic that I would use the term steer because the whole premise of the book, what technology wants is that it's an unsteerable thing. It's this sort of emergent phenomenon. But I, but I believe that if you, you, you get what you focus on and if you focus on

solving big problems, you know, we should have this, these AI systems, you know, asking it questions around climate science, you know, what's actually happening in the climate? How do we, how do we support a sustainable, you know, approach to solving energy issues? How do we leverage data in healthcare to addressing, you know, cancer and, and these are, these are things that will, that will, we're, we're developing incredibly powerful tools because Google, you know, Aaron, Google is not just asking this thing to solve the problem of go, right? Like there's, they're asking you to other shit by now, right? Like it's safe to say that whatever they're asked, they're not just interested in playing go. So, and they must already be asking

it, right? They're already, however you, I don't know what way that they figure to input their questions in. I doubt, I mean, with go, I don't, I don't, that's a, that's a, that's a problem of inputting these questions, but there's a, I know Google is, you know, very interested in life extension. I heard that, that's true, right? They're trying to extend the human. Yeah, they hire, they, they acquired a company called Calico, which is looking into longevity. They're, they're applying that, that same, so, so there's a, there's a, there's a, an idea around Silicon Valley that really all Google is interested in is, is leveraging machine learning to do interesting things. So they're asking it to drive cars better. They're asking it to extend,

you know, our, our longevity, improve health outcomes, improve our city design, improve, you know, energy consumption, you know, they have a project called Makani Power that they acquired by this brilliant inventor, Saul Griffith. So yeah, so I think, you know, Google as an organization is one of those companies that we would look at as being, you know, as leveraging these technologies to go out and address really big problems. Why do people say Google is evil? Yeah, I think that's also, you know, that's just the natural response for, because of, because of the idea that they're so large and they're so influential and they have such a capacity to assert so much influence on the world. There's just a, there's a natural gag reflex that happens

that the bigger some organism becomes, the more influence and power it has that, that there's just, there's a, there's a fear, there's a, I would say it's sort of a natural fear response that would, that would come as a result of that. You know, have you considered the idea that this AI that they've created has gone beyond, like, you know, one thing that super intelligent people seem to do really well is to hide and to camouflage themselves. You know, like, so what if this AI is actually, I mean, I know this sounds like something insane, but what if it, there's some weird possibility that this thing that they've created out there, what if it starts controlling them? You know, is anyone considered that possibility? Like, what,

like, if this, okay, so the thing, like, what does, what do really smart people do? You know, I mean, if we want to apply human intelligence to machine intelligence, that might be a problem, but it's all we can do, right? That's the predictive, that's the, what we can use is to, to predict what this stuff is going to do, because it's all we've got, but really intelligent people, they sure are good at manipulating things, right? And controlling things at, you know, like, it's going to be in the interest of the AI to control and manipulate its creators, right? Man, that would be some sinister, devious, you know, I think, I think that's, that's a natural, I mean, yes, the point you're making is it's interesting. I haven't really, I hadn't really

thought about that in relation to AI. I think the thing to remember here is that as far as we've come in AI, we're far from any type of AI that, that would have some kind of agency or even a capability to do what you're describing. Right. But you know, we just, this thing's 10 years ahead of schedule already, that's 10 years ahead of schedule. And that means that, who knows, let me ask you this, or, and I'm sorry if you have to, what, how much time do we have? Yeah, I probably have another two to three minutes before I have to run to the next meeting. Then I won't ask you about this. You, I'm sorry, please wrap it up. I didn't mean to go into some paranoid thing here. This is fascinating. I was just, I was just going to say, you never

forget contact with the most intelligent person that you ever met. And generally the most intelligent person that you ever met has a profound impact on your life, which means that if you run into a super intelligent machine, they're theoretically it's going to impact you in the same way and alter you're at the way you behave. So if that's happening at Google, we don't, we don't, we wouldn't know necessarily, but please wrap it up for me, Aaron. Tell me, tell me, give me something hopeful. Tell me what we can look forward to as these systems continue to emerge into our reality. Yeah. And I think, you know, maybe, maybe I'll just touch on, because I've been thinking a lot about this idea because there is a lot of fear. There's a lot of, there's a lot of dialogue and

there's a lot of narrative around sort of the fear side as it relates to artificial intelligence. And I was, I'll give a shout out to one of, one of my sort of influencers as this guy named John Smart, who's a really fascinating futurist. And just, so one thing that he pointed out, and in one of his research papers I was reading is if you look at how we domesticated dogs from wolves is basically, if you, you can think about that in another, another way is we reprogrammed the brain of the wolf into the brain of all the domestic dogs that we've seen. I mean, we did it through genetic, through domestication over, you know, long time periods, a lot of generations, you know, it took to do that. But basically what we did is we engineered these dogs to be highly

compatible with humans and they sort of are there to serve human needs and have a purpose for humans. I think it's the same with AI. I think, I think that what's going to happen is we're going to create an ecosystem of artificial intelligence. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of issues and problems and threats and security implications for this. But I think looking at sort of a systems approach that for, for the most part, it's a huge net positive for where humanity is going. And I, and I think some of the reasons to be optimistic is just leveraging these tools to address such incredibly, you know, big challenges that humanity faces. I think you're right. I think we will look forward to that, man. But I do want the thing you're talking about goes both ways. And the big

question of our age is going to be, who's domesticating? Who? You know, that's a good, that's a good point. But I do agree, man, I think every time I talk to you, I feel so excited and optimistic about the future and in what's going on and as much as scintillating as it is to ascribe some kind of malevolence to this emerging intelligence, I think one other quality of super intelligent people is that they're really funny. And the ones that I've met are really good at expressing love and making their world a better place. I have yet to meet an evil, intelligent person. I hope I never do. And so I think that's one of the beautiful things that you're a part of, man. And you're part of what is sort of, I guess, the midwife of this

emerging life form that's coming into our dimension. That's really exciting when you come on the show and tell me about what's going down. Dude, I really appreciate that. I feel the same way about the narratives that you put out into the world as well. I mean, I love the way that you frame stuff and the message behind how you describe things. I'm a big fan of it. You're coming to San Francisco for a show, right? You're on tour. That's right, man. You are got tours coming through San Francisco. You got to come, man. Let me know. Dude, I would love to. Yeah, man. Dude, we should. I'll definitely be there. Let's hang out. It's a bus tour. I'll be in town all day, so maybe we can get lunch or something.

Cool. I would love to. I know. You are the best. Keep up the good work, man. Sin loved all of your compadres over there at Singularity University. And when you come back to LA, when you come to LA, let's do another of these. And I'm sure by the time you get here, some other crazy shits are going to be going down. For sure. You're always welcome up here as well, man. I appreciate it. Thank you, Aaron. Thank you. Hare Krishna. Meet the bed by Thuma, the perfect platform bed frame. Thoughtfully handcrafted from upcycled wood, the bed is strong, backed by a lifetime warranty, and ships directly to your door. Assembly takes five minutes. No tools needed. To get $25 towards the bed, go to Thuma.co.

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