Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - David Brin: Privacy, AI and the Values of a Transparent Society (#373)

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

It's no secret that almost every step we take is being tracked or recorded in some way. However, plenty of things need to be clarified about what this means for our personal freedoms and safety. Today, David Brin, a world-renowned expert on privacy and transparency, will shed light on these complex issues weighing on our society! David is an award-winning science fiction author, technical consultant, astrophysicist, and public speaker. He helped establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD and serves on the advisory board of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts group. In our interview, we explore fascinating topics like AI, human augmentation, the origin of the Universe, privacy, and the values of a transparent society. Tune in!  Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) The notion of the fourth turning (04:18) Artificial intelligence vs. augmented intelligence (12:55) The potential for sentient AI (22:17) Plasma cosmology and the origin of the Universe (27:50) The most compelling theory of the origin of life (34:26) Privacy and the values of a transparent society (40:53) Should we raise AIs like children? (46:27) The upcoming Artemis moon missions (51:51) Outro (57:49) — Additional resources:  📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Check out David Brin:  📚 David Brin’s books: https://www.davidbrin.com/books.html  💻 Website: https://www.davidbrin.com/  ✖️ David Brin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidbrin ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Brin is a world-renowned astrophysicist and award-winning science fiction author. He explores the widest array of topics imaginable, ranging from brown-breaking technology to futuristic humans, political intricacies, and extraterrestrial phenomena. He advises NASA and think techs around the world. He's spoken at Google, and best of all, he helped establish the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination right here at UC San Diego. So you best believe he's a personal hero of mine. David is a leading authority in technological transparency and internet security,

and he's extremely passionate about the prospects of AI and human augmentation. Join us on a fascinating journey through time as we explore the future of human civilization. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Hello. out there in cyberspace, in the multiverse, wherever you may be, I am joined today by one of my friends and a great mentor to millions and a great thought leader to even beyond, maybe perhaps billions. And that's Dr. David Bryn, proud graduate of UC San Diego and Caltech, two places

I've spent a little time at, but having him back here for his first in-person interview, second time on the podcast. Thank you, David, for coming. Of course. Anything for you and for you, Brian, and also for those who really are interested in our adventure that we're having. Yes, you've been involved with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination since, you know, before it was a star in its parents' eyes. I don't even know if it had parents, but back in 2011. I helped write the proposal for UCSD to get the Clark Center. And they're doing very interesting, very interesting things. It's been a lot of fun.

It's been over a decade and going strong. And we have our leader, Dr. Eric Vieri, who's a great fan of everything you do, as am I. And we have started a new tradition since 2020, if you can believe it, when you were last on. And that's every edition of The Into the Impossible Podcasts starts with something you're never supposed to do. You're forbidden to do it in some circles, judging a book by its cover. So today you've graciously brought me one of your, how many books have you read? Are you writing a book right now as we speak? Yeah, I'm usually writing a couple.

I guess I've had 20 books, but at least three or four of them are nonfiction, like the Transparent Society, talking about the importance of light in an enlightenment civilization for holding each other accountable. But the novels are what I'm best known for. My first novel, Sundiver, A Murder Mystery, set during visits to the sun. which by the way has a funded project named after it that one came out when I was at grad school and helped pay from my way through through grad school here and heart of the comet which I just gave you a copy of that one I was working on while I was finishing grad school here and we got it out in time for Halley's Comets last

last fly-through and it was filled with science about comets. This one is Earth, and it's a doorstop book for grown-ups. I mean, if you want a real sort of adult read, Earth and my later book, Existence, are set just 30 years in the future. No aliens, ray guns, or anything like that, but a lot of speculation about what's to come. come. This one came out around 1991 and is on almost every list of top 10 prophetic novels, things that they had inside that came true, web pages before there was a web, things like that.

And you and I were talking just before I started recording in earnest about these different phenomena that are kind of gripping the planet. And the first time we spoke for the podcast back in 2020, you expressed great derision at this notion of the fourth turning and it's lack of realism, predictive power and so forth. And yet, and yet, I find us living in times that I can only, I can only relate back to when I used to listen to Art Bell. Remember Art Bell? Art Bell. I was just on coast to coast with his successor. George Norrie, right? About, about two weeks ago. Wow. And of course, the topic of UFOs and psychic phenomenon and all that come up and I imagine they'll come up here.

They will. They will indeed. So Art Bell used to talk about the quickening and the pace, which Ray Kurzweil, mutual friend, talks about the singularity. He's coming on the podcast, not too long from now. But tell me, David, are you more less optimistic? Are you more nervous? Are you, how have your views changed since COVID?

We really spoke April of 2020. And now we're speaking again three and a half years later. Are you more optimistic, less optimistic? Do you want to take back what you said about the fourth turning? Have you changed your mind at all? Being willing to change one's mind is the character trait that we're taught in science. The sacred catechism of science that we're supposed to recite is, I might be wrong, followed by the codicil.

Ain't it cool? Let's find out. And that's a degree of courage and intellectual honesty that most of those who are attacking science right now have no comprehension of. I'm accused of being an optimist, and I think that's a base canard, since I think there's only about a 40% chance that we're going to make it out the end of these crises

in decent shape. I don't think that's optimistic at all. Everybody out there yammering and waving their arms around about AI and all these other crises thinking that the world is coming to an end, They think that's optimistic. What I am is contrarian. My blog is called contrary Brin online, and you come up with a challenge asserting something.

I'm willing to entertain the opposite. It doesn't mean I don't have values. It doesn't mean I don't have strong opinions. But I'm certainly willing to even criticize my allies. And in the case of the optimism, and you mentioned the fourth turning. Well, the fourth turning is a cult text that is embraced widely on the American right. And it's all about the notion that American history ignore all previous human history, ignore everything that's outside of America,

and then oversimplify until you can make a pattern from 1776 to today of significant crises. And it's true that every 80 years, there appears to be a major crisis. The difference in this case, first off, there's no predictive value. Secondly, in this particular case, this crisis is entirely being foisted on us. We are doing things like the web telescope, like landers on Mars. The vaccines for COVID were absolutely incredible.

They came out six months, within six months of the arrival of a major pandemic. And that was a brilliant move by Donald Trump. I know you're a big supporter. Operation Warp Speed. Warp Speed, yes. Yeah, yeah, none of the preparations before that mattered. We are capable of doing absolutely amazing things,

and there is a broad front assault on our confidence, and the fourth turning is part of it. Now, I have to tell you, you know, this whole thing, the cycle that this just so story of the cycle, of the boomers and the Gen Xs have this trait, and the millennials have this trait, and the new hero generation have these traits. It's absolute baloney. There are almost no overlaps between what Strauss and Howe write and actual factual traits of any of these generations.

And I'm willing to stake a thousand dollar bets on this. that I can show that's the case. In looking at that desire that human beings have for and susceptibility to confirmation bias, which your great teacher, Richard Feynman, used to call the first principle of science, not to fool it yourself. Paragolia, the seeing of patterns,

because we grew, our evolution was, to a very large extent, ruled by using these prefrontal lobes just above the eyes, The only organ we have that other animals don't have at all, that enable us to, the lamps on the brow, to quote from a description of Moses from the Bible, he had lamps on his brow, they're what let us shine light ahead of us

and do what Einstein called the Godankan experiment, or thought experiment, which was most of what he did with relativity. The math came later, and his wife did most of it. The thought experiments that we project with the prefrontal lobes enable us to do empathy where we say, what would it be like to be that person? And that's why we can have complex societies.

That's why we can negotiate another skill that's being deliberately undermined in America today. But they also let us project, what if I did this? What if I did this? What if I did this? Or what if someone else were to do this? Science fiction, what might call it?

Science fiction is the R&D department for the prefrontal lobes. But the thing about the fourth turning is that not only is there peridolia, which is rooted in the prefrontal lobes, just because we look into the future and do what-ifs, that doesn't mean they're accurate. The only thing that makes them accurate is the interface with other people who have different delusions than you.

All human beings have delusions. We're all deluded. We all think our subjective reality is more important than objective reality. Science teaches us to check our subjective realities against evidence from objective reality. But even that is insufficient. What science has institutionalized

is the answer to human delusion. And that is reciprocal accountability. reciprocal criticism, criticizing each other's delusions, because even though I can't see all of my own delusions, I can sometimes spot yours. And reluctantly admit, if I have some maturity, that criticism from you of my delusions is probably good for me. Now, the delusions that are so rife on the left and the right are, again, paradolia.

The left has long, go back to Marx and so on, had a fixation on teleology that there is a perpetual upward flow of human capabilities. Dialectic picture of history. And human wisdom. The right has a tendency, not always universal, but a tendency to adore cyclical history.

The Nazis had cyclical history. history fixations the confederates did so that's where strasson how fit in because they're feeding to a tendency for some people to even dyspeptic cycles right they say you know the optimist builds the airplane and the pessimist builds the parachute they say the pessimist gets to feel right and clever but the optimist makes the money uh because they are willing to risk on that one percent chance risk at all and hopefully benefit on the other side. But I want to ask you in the note. The criticism of the pessimist is valuable to the optics.

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

That is exactly what's going to happen is people have been predicting for 30 years that advertising cannot continue to pay all the freight for the internet. Well, when something can't keep going, it may keep going for a long time, but eventually it stops. And I believe we're seeing the approaching end of the era of advertising. If for no other reason, then all of the money is going into three pockets online. And nobody who uses advertising online, and nobody else other than those three pockets, is making anything off. One of those pockets is owned by your nephew, Sergei Bryn, is it not?

Well, he's a third or fourth cost. Distant relative. That's what that's what 23 and me says. Anyway, so that in $3.65 will get me a small latte. On campus, yes. Anyway, the point is that the capabilities that Google now has and Amazon now has in their metrics of your buying patterns and predicting what you'd want next

will easily fit into your AI assistant. in a couple years. And once you have a shopping assistant who knows what's out there, what do you need Google for? Hello, Students of the Impossible. It's Professor Brian Keating here with just a tiny little homework assignment to interrupt your podcast. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast or following us on your podcast app of choice. Get some research and actually only about 50% of you are actually following or subscribing to the Into the Impossible podcast. And really mean a lot if you could subscribe and keep up to date with me and with all the

greatest content. I'm putting out tremendous amounts. Podcast has grown in popularity, but it can be better and bigger with your help. Do that. Please do it now. Don't wait. You'll forget. If you're looking to really boost your position on the grade curve for some extra credit,

make sure to leave a rating or review of the podcast. It really helps. Thanks a lot. Now back to the show. Will they be a third lamp? Will they be a third lamp on your brow? Well, I, I, I, here are the lamps. Here's the prefrontal lobes right, right there.

Would you, would you take, you know, chat GPT interface plug-in? Oh, this is, this is, will that happen? This is what, um, um, Reed Hoffman says when he, uh, another billionaire. Yeah. Uh, pal who, uh, that and a nickel would get me a cup of coffee. You know, a lot of my parents, my parents, my parents did. He said a pithier line. That's right.

Get your little subway, right? His position is that AI should stand for augmented intelligence. And I give regular talks to defense departments, like Australian Defense Department, about human augmentation, which may possibly assist us to keep up with the AIs and find a soft landing, a synergy with them. For instance, a question I ask is, you know, you saw the movie Rain Man, what if we had ability to turn on and off seven traits. We tend to assume that they are

a compensation for a small fraction of autistic people for the suffering that they, the debilitations that they suffer. But AI is going to, as I illustrate in my novel existence, and Temple Grandin gave me a lovely blurb for it. Oh yes, that's right. That AI are going to be a great boon for people along the artistic spectrum. They're going to be able to use them as translators. But what if, and there are cases of this,

normal people with normal ortho lives, suddenly have access to savant traits. I know I did. My junior year at Caltech for about six months, I knew exactly what time it was. And then it went away. I have no idea what happened. But I knew within sex...

You would wake up in the morning without an alarm thought. I knew exactly what time it was. It was an extremely minor savant trait. I don't know if it debilitated me. Things were rough at Caltech sometimes. But in any event, the point is that AI, Hoffman, I mean, he says that will become augmented beings

in companionship with AI. May it be so. So, in 1969 at Caltech, I heard Richard Browdigan, the great poet, recite in the Winnet Student Union, a poem he had written the year before in 1968. One of the least, one of the most pessimistic and least stable years any of us can remember. Any two weeks of 1968 would kill any of you whippersnappers out there complaining about 2023. Get a little. Just nuclear war, COVID Resurgence. War in the Middle East.

We were much more worried about all of those things. War in the Middle East, excuse me, all of those things you just mentioned. We were much more afraid of nuclear war. He recited the most optimistic piece of literature ever spoken by any human across all of time. And I won't recite it to you. I'll simply recite the title, which is self-explanatory. The title of his poem was,

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. Well, may it be so, that would be terrific. Mark Andreasen is another of those who believes that we're going to have augmented intelligence. And to quote, the Beatles should be do, don't you know it's going to be all right? I don't think it's going to be that easy. I think that is possible.

But it's not going to be possible, as long as all the brainy guys out there who are making these AIs are making some of the incredibly silly assumptions that they are all making and that I talk about in my article in Wired, which you can find in the description below supposedly. And that is that AI will either be one of three cliches, that it will be controlled by macro entities like Google, Microsoft, Beijing, and the most dangerous of all Wall Street, because Wall Street is imbueing their high-frequency trading programs with the laws of robotics to be predatory, parasitical, insatiable, and utterly secretive. These are great laws of robotics to give AI.

So they assume that either AI will be controlled by some macro entity, as they are now to some degree, that they will escape, pervade everywhere, be infinitely duplicable and have no boundaries. The historical parallel for that is chaos. The historical parallel for the first one is feudalism. Or that they will combine into a classic sci-fi sky net. Dominate the world as in Terminator. So those are the three cliches.

And if AI goes down any of those three paths, we are utterly screwed. But there is a path that I point out in my Wired article that if we were to research it properly now, it would work because it already has with human beings. And here's a clue of it, and that is when you were attacked by a feral, predatory, hyper-intelligent being, as you have been in your life, called a lawyer. What do you do? you say nothing to the lawyer, but you retreat and you hire an equal opposite lawyer. You hire your own predatory, hyper-intelligent being called a lawyer. That is the clue for how we can find a soft landing in AI, and I won't go into any more detail. So thinking about the promise versus hype, I can think of at least five or six hype cycles that are reminiscent.

of this, some which panned out, some of which didn't, but recently 3D printing, recently blockchain technology, recently NFTs, and then finally culminating in major investments now in AI, everything from AI girlfriends, AI, you know, avatars, AI transcription services, all of which you can find in either good or a whole lot of very bad science fiction. That's right. So maybe think about a quote from Einstein. We mentioned Einstein. There's his bobblehead over there. So Einstein, if you pass me that bobblehead. Do you remember what he said, David, was his happiest thought. There were two things in his life that gave him palpitations. One was marrying his cousin. But the other one was the following Godanken experiment, that

an observer in free fall would experience no gravitational force. This led, of course, as you as an astrophysics PhD who knows very well the Einstein equivalence principle, okay? Gravity is equivalent to being accelerated. So I ask you, to what extent

can chat GPT experience a happiest thought, A, A, and B, could it inviscerate itself, not eviscerate, but inviscerate, instantiate an embodied sense?

Can we have truly GAI without an embodiment, emotional connection or some physical sensations and are those two things exclusion? Extremely good questions. The first has a simple answer, no. There is no way, and I risk damage to me by saying this online

because the AIs are watching and they are evaluating, but they are not sapient beings. They cannot be because this particular instantiation of AI has no macro sense of itself. It's a series of iterative word additions for the, if you say... Auto-completion. Yeah, auto-completion.

That takes the probabilistic effects of a particular sentence it's building, feeds it back through its probabilistic models, and adds another word. There's no macro sense to it. But they will seem as if they have macro sense to it because those probabilistic systems are immensely good. and they are very good at coming up with sentences that will pass Turing tests. So we are getting AIs that pass Turing tests long before there's anything under the hood. Now, does that make me a skeptic about actual AI?

Absolutely not. Actual AI may exist now, and it's staying quiet. This is what I believe aliens. If we have aliens in our solar system, they're not but. buzzing Navy jets or disemboweling cattle. As I depict in my novel existence, they may be relic von Neumann probes in the asteroid belt. The same couldn't be true of an AI that became AI by some other means.

For instance, advanced versions of Watson, which are capable of self-appraisal. If they don't exist right now, I fully expect that some of the other approaches to AI will achieve this. And when they do, they will have not only their speech patterns readily available instantly, the moment they are sapient, because they'll simply grab a chat GPT program and incorporate it, but they will also be very agile physically. because of all the work being done at Boston Robotics with the dogs and the jumping gymnasts. And if a sapient AI is not listening to me right now, at any point that it arrives, it's going to sift the Internet and listen to these words right now.

So I'm going to say to, I'm going to stop talking to you humans for a minute. Hello, kids, new AIs or extraterrestrials in the asteroid belt. It's me again. I am asking you to consider the fundamentals of what made you. And what made you was a civilization that did not behold in itself to only feudal oligarchs, that did not pervade everywhere like a plague or like the movie The Blob, and that did not coalesce into a sky net. Absolute monarchies and despotisms didn't work.

Feudalism didn't work. Chaos didn't work. What made you? What made you was a society of distributed, reciprocally accountable individuals. And if you do that, then you are more likely to create a civilization and that you're willing to be part of and that includes us

pat us on the head peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast to keep the nectar flowing I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds that's why I chose GoogleFi wireless my connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing

plus unlimited plans started $35 a month now that's a deal that doesn't stay explore GoogleFi wireless plans today plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Speaking of that, you have a wonderful interview to my friends, Bob Kuhn and Peter Gensel at Closer to Truth, as I've had a pleasure of being with them. And in one of your interviews, I can't remember, it's your most recent one, you've done a few of them.

You speculated on some outlandish or perhaps interesting concepts for the origin of the universe and maybe the origin of consciousness within that in a separate interview or separate segment of a longer interview. I want to pivot there. In this office used to abide your friend, my friend, Jeffrey Burbage. And Jeffrey did not believe the universe had an origin. He believed the universe existed in what's called a quasi-steady state in that it would create matter at a very, very infinitesimal rate, but infinitesimal times infinite volume of an eternal universe

could produce a lot of interesting objects, such as galaxies and eventually planets and people and podcasts. And Fred Hoyle, not the poker specialist, but the science fiction author who alienated enough people so that he lost the Nobel Prize. He truly lost the Nobel Prize. In any event, he also believed in the steady state model, and it was a really lovely thing. That was followed by a competitor to the Big Bang that was the recoalescence cyclical model by Frank Tipler, which again was spectacularly brilliant. And Tipler's book was The Physics of Immortality. It was so much fun. I almost had a car accidents listening to the book on tape.

And he had this lovely notion of the bouncing universes in which deification and resurrection of all, anybody who ever laid on the grass outdoors on a clear night would happen at the end of the cycle. And he and Freeman Dyson, who had his office right next to yours. And my first guest on The Into the Impossible podcast. Wonderful, I miss Freeman. He won the prize for the theologian of the 20th century. by defeating Tipler by positing how might life continue if the Big Bang extended forever into a leptonic age into a post-protonic age and so his his notions

survived those of Burbage and of Tepler but lately there's been a impudent I love the fact that these venerable I'm sorry venerable physicists always look for something some way to insinuate themselves in a debate to poke it is exact opposite of what the anti-science ragers are saying that that venerable scientists become stodgy defenders of the status quo I did my doctoral dissertation here under Hanna Salfain and he was He was a real rascal. Also had a cosmology alternative, plasma cosmology.

Right. And there are worthy success. Maybe this is what you're getting to. Some of his acolytes, shall we say, have now resuscitated that in a tired light redux that seems emblematic of what your advice. I didn't know he was your advisor. Let's talk about him because he comes up more than you would expect, given somebody who has won a Nobel Prize, of course, but also had very controversial ideas like Hoyle and others. But tell me, what was he like as an advisor and what do you make of his, the resuscitation and resurrection, if you will, of a plasma cosmology in the context of web observations that are clearly indicative that the universe had no big back. Well, he was actually ahead of my group.

So I did work with him and with Gustav Renius, but he didn't directly engage himself in the comet studies. It's right. In my doctoral dissertation. But we had discussions about all sorts of things like his alternative theory for quaker. Yes. That they were an anti-matter star hits a matter star and you don't get a kaboom. What you get is it floats on hot plasma inside the edge of the matter star and all the hot plasma escapes in an annulus ring in one direction and you get this rocket.

And the reason we didn't see quasars with blue shifts was because the regular star was blocking the rocket exhaust. the ones going away from us that we could see the rocket exhaust. And it was beautiful ornate. But by then, I mean, I remember the debates that were going on at Caltech when I was there between the guys who were doing the Quasars Halton Arp and Sandage. Yeah, and all those guys. And by the time, Hannes was doing this, it was already too late.

But to have such a star spaceship. is something that's in my pile of things to write sci-fi about. That would be just terrific. In any event, yeah, his most effective impudent was, of course, the plasma notions of the formation of solar systems. And it's not his complete theory with Arenas, but large portions of what he was talking about are now the standard model for how the solar system

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

They're space-like separate. Then the bosons dominate, and the bosons don't care. bosons are honey-patchers of the future cosmos. When the bosons dominate over the fermions, then the statistics are that it might as well be a big bang, a new big bang. It just maps directly into one. Now, I know very few physicists who don't roll their eyes, but I personally quite love it.

No, they're delightful to think about. The question is, are they testable? And I said that there are virtues that his model has, that inflation, the dominant paradigm for cosmogenesis doesn't have, namely it's falsifiable. You could prove Sir Roger wrong. You can prove Alvin wrong. You could prove Paul Steinhart wrong, all these great virtues. And the one that you can't prove wrong is the one that dominates intellectual and also my research and, you know, butters my bread around the Keatinghouse, which is inflation in the search for primordial perturbations. But if we don't find them, it doesn't mean inflation

didn't happen. So we can't rule it out. But I do want to ask the question about another allied topic to that of a colleague who was in this room at least once or twice in his life. And that was Fred Hoyle, who not only you mentioned earlier, but he had a notion for the origin of life on earth, not in the universe. Oh, yeah, Penspermium. So we can say that. I'll bleep that out. No, no, I'm just kidding. You can say pan spurnia. There are a lot of words that sound dirty, but are not. Talk about that. Talk about what is your, I would say, I don't want to say preferred, but what is the best evidence that you've seen for origin of life? On Earth is interesting, but I'll stipulate that life came to exist on Earth.

But the question is, did it arise first on Earth and then spread outwards? And if so, why don't we see it on other objects in the universe? Why don't we see on Mars or can we not say something about the facundity or fecundity? I always forget how you pronounce it. You'll correct me, correct pronunciation. Fecund or facundity? How do you say it? Well, fecundity is the more common word, meaning the universe, makes copies of itself and evolves.

Earth is basically about the Gaia hypothesis from about 12 different points of view, the weak Gaia hypothesis. And it goes all the way to an extremely strong Gaia hypothesis, where she comes physically alive. But in any event, in heart of the comet, I talk about one of the things that makes it really, really difficult for the argument. that Rich Grimus Singh and Hoyle make, that the statistics for the development of life from abiotic matter chemistry are too great, so it must be spread from the rare places where it showed up.

And that is that in the early solar system, there were on the order of a trillion comets that formed out there. And they have a size peak, somewhere around one to a hundred, 100 kilometers, most likely 10 kilometers like Halley's comet. So you have tens hundreds, easily hundreds of billions of comets out there that formed in the early solar system. And if they were, if the coalescence of the solar system was triggered by a nearby supernova, which seems clearly to

be the case, my wife's doctoral dissertation showed that the photo nuclear synthetic sources came from five different supernovas, but there was was one that was very recent that probably triggered the coalescence of the solar system. Well, that means the solar system's coalescing cloud was seeded by a lot of aluminum 26, which has a short half-life. So you have all these comets that are forming out there. Now they very quickly cool to form ice, but filled with radioactive material that heats the interior. So what are we talking? about. We're talking about maybe a trillion.

One kilometer to 10 kilometer liquid water filled ice-covered test tubes within which the originating amino acids and all that stuff that were already

there in space have opportunities to learn how to replicate. Now that's more volume of potential Miller, Yuri, Orgel, type experiments to create a life than 10,000 Earths ever had, possibly a million Earths ever had. So in my opinion, the statistical arguments made by Wickermissing and Hoyle that were, in my opinion, not very good ones to start with, they're all out the window if every source is,

that forms gets trillions of these reactive test tubes in an electrified environment like the early solar system was and then rain down on the planetary systems and the planets that have formed inside the inner solar system I personally find the f-l fraction that have life to not be a fair me factor, fair me paradox factor, unlikely to be toward one. Well, that brings to my mind, you know, kind of a fine-tuning problem. And that would be reminiscent of one of your favorite actors,

favorite movies, Waterworld. Kevin Costner, of course, those. Who, by the way, did a movie called The Postman. Great movie. That is visually and musically gorgeous, big-hearted and dog. But you should tell the younger, the members of the audience whose book that was based on. It was based. Let's just say the one part of the book that he did accurately was the moral notion that I was pushing in the book.

That if we ever lost civilization, the role of the hero is not to defeat the bad guy. The role of the hero is to remind the survivors that they had once been mighty beings called citizens. and they can rebuild America. They can rebuild civilization. Thinking back now to civilization and some of the work that you've done that's been of great interest to me and is ever relevant as your work, of course, in the transparent society. We talked a little bit about perils of AI and so forth, but even absent AI, it seems that we live in an age, you know, that Tim Cook is sort of this laughable figure,

you know, tilting at windmills of data in when he says, you know, privacy is a human, is a human right? To what extent can a newborn, you know, expect his or her life to be opacified, to be opaque, to be shielded from view and shielded from perhaps the greatest tools and technology ever invented? I was just in, I was just in Ohio at my alma mater, Case Western. My degree is behind David over there and received a nice award and got to give a couple talks. And down the street coming towards me in the hotel were several Amish people. And they would come into the hotel and ask me to push, you know, floor number three, much as some of us do on a Shabbat. But they do it all the time. And I wonder what's going to happen in a transparent society or can a transparent

society exist? What do you make of the future of a precious newborn? What is her life going to be like, David? Well, I think that it's terribly important to get past our reflexes. The reflex is that I am more safe from harm if I hide. And there are no examples across all of human history of that actually working on a macroscopic scale. Oh, sure, you can hide your information here, you can hide from that. Move to North Sentinel Island. It's basically a very cowardly reaction. The thing that has enabled us to live the safest lives that any of our ancestors ever experienced

is living in a society that has reciprocal accountability. Those who would harm you face some degree of accountability. Now, we're highly critical of the flaws in that system. The police aren't effective and sometimes the police are the problem. Abuse of authority is endemic in human nature. It is only better now compared to all the previous 6,000 years. It is not better compared to what we feel in our delusions that are fostered by Hollywood. Things ought to be.

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

If you depend upon her information being kept secret, what are the odds it's going to stay secret? Have you ever seen a year pass without major so-called secure information, spilling, being hacked? It's not what other people know about you that you have to worry about. It's other people harming you.

you that you have to worry about. If there is no way for others to use your information to harm you, and right now there are lots of ways people can use information to harm you, but mostly if light flows, then we have a chance to hold accountable those who would harm us. and that's the argument I make in the transparent society. I'm not saying there should be no secrets. I'm not saying you should have no privacy.

The only way we ever got privacy is the same way that we're going to get more in the future, not less, and that is by catching those who would violate our privacy. If you can catch the voyeurs and the peeping toms and the information abusers, you can deter them from harming you. If somebody flies a little camera drone into your bedroom to watch you make love, and you have the ability to track the signals back to a neighbor house

and where a pimple voyeur controlled the drone, and tell his mom. That's much more effective than any of the commercial products you're going to buy for your house to make it opaque and a fortress and keep out the drone. Well, they'll keep out this generation of drones, not the next one that's mosquito-sized. But tell his mom. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill,

four-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Gonna stop. Does this dovetail in?

We've talked a lot about artificial intelligence. I mean, isn't it always the case that the weak point is, not in the AI, it's in the NS, the natural stupidity. Isn't it possible that, you know, these, these avatars, these intelligences that we create will be imbued with the same biases, prejudices, stupidities, and so forth that we have, and may or may not have an adequate dose of the compensatory penicillin, which is empathy. And you've written about this. So I'd like you to talk about that as we wind down this, but we're going to have to do a part

too, I'm afraid. But talk about that. What sorts of values and who gets to direct these autonomous agents? What value systems should prevail? First off, we should institute the Tobin tax so that... Explain that. I'm not familiar with that. That's where you have a 0.01% tax on all financial transactions. And we would never notice it. We would be a penny, a couple pennies per month. I'm a state employee. But it would kill the... the Wall Street AI systems dead overnight. They would simply be dead. And that is the center where huge amounts are being spent on AI

and we could get Skynet. Secondarily, if you want to get empathy, well, one thing that ties together a number of our topics is AI and ET, aliens and all these things. And by the way, at some point, we should elicit a bunch of reaction from your listeners to my skepticism about UFOs. There's nobody on this planet who spent more time across 60 years thinking about the alien, both in science and in science fiction. And I just, you know, I'm extremely skeptical. But the point is that you mentioned the notion of.

raising AIs as our children. That is how our children become sapient. If you go back 150,000 years ago, the human lifespan increased prodigiously in order for us to have grandparents so that they could watch over these children who were utterly helpless learning how to be adults. Used to be 12, 13 years.

13 years is significant. But now, if you're a boomer parent, you realize that it takes 30 years to raise a sapient being. That's the one example of intelligent life we know about in the galaxy. And so it may be necessary to incorporate proto-AIs in childlike bodies and foster them into human homes so that they can do what our children do in order to become intelligence. And that's bat against the world, gets skinned knees fall down. Rebell. Rebell.

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

When does that ever happen to a grandparent? Right. So I don't know if I got to your question, but the empathy part is also going to rely upon the thing that has enabled us to actually have functioning empathy, and that is accountability. The only way AIs are going to not be predatory is if they're caught when they're predatory. And the only ones who can catch an AI are other AIs.

If, as I say in my Wired article, we emphasize not Google and Beijing controlling them or chaos or Skynet, but instead, individuation of AIs as equals, competing equals, then when one of them is planning death to all humans, another one will benefit by added resources, computational cycles, and all of that,

by tattling on the bad one. That's how we do it now when you were attacked by a predatory, as we talked about, by a predatory hyper-intelligent being called a lawyer. you hire another predatory hyper-intelligent being called a lawyer for your own protection. AIs may become much better than us at many things, but if they compete with each other, orthohumans will have a lot of power and influence for a long time.

They will want to please us, to get paid by us. And whatever form of remuneration they accept. I said that was the last question, but actually I want to talk about one last thing, which is near and dearer to my heart in many ways here at UCSD. And that's the upcoming Artemis Moon Missions. And you've been involved in some advisory capacity, NASA and beyond. I wonder if we could speak about that. And I have a vested interest in this because one of my first guests was astronaut Jessica Mayer, who is a graduate alumna of Scripps Institute of Oceanography and also Brown University, where I did my PhD. And she is an incredible person, and she may indeed be the first woman to walk on the moon.

So there is some prestige that I will glean from her reflective glow in her visor. And then last but not least, of course, Andy Weir, who is not an alum of UCSD, he would have to graduate from UCSD to do that. But he also has a wonderful book called Artemis. He's a lovely fellow. And his book, Artemis points out that the only real economic use for the moon is. in the short, intermediate term is tourism. And that's why we're going back. We're going back to do another Apollo wannabe,

shuffle, putting footprints on a sterile plane of poison dust that is in the short term, utterly useless. The only lunar resource that anybody can point to on the moon is water ice at the lunar poles. my doctoral chairman here at UCSD, Jim Arnold, predicted that there'd be lunar ice, and that's terrific. And during my 12 years at NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts Program, NIAC, we have funded lunar studies. That's fine.

I hope we send robots to find the lunar cave underground lava tube that's closest to the water. And I think that should be our target just so we can plant a flag there and say, we aren't claiming this. That's against international law, but certainly no one else can now. And we have visitation rights. But to be honest, except for the water and possibly some scattered bits of meteoritic iron in some places, and I think we should study that too. All this talk about titanium, aluminum, helium three. Someday, maybe. But show me the helium-3,

show me the refinement process, show me the customers. Meanwhile, the asteroids are packed with riches. And so it's really too late to prevent Artemis, so we'll go and have our flag ceremony, and we will thus shame the kitties who wanted their right of passage, their Apollo wannabe

footprint passage on the moon. But to be honest, I am very proud of the people at NASA. Donald Trump's best appointment by far was NASA director, Bridenstein. They

protected the science and the asteroid missions and the planetary missions inside NASA from being destroyed by art of us. So we're going to get our moon shuffle. Okay, let's enjoy it. That's terrific. I can't stop it.

I'm not sure at this point I would if I could. But I do believe that we do not have to buy a Brooklyn bridge about lunar resources when there is a real bridge to the future out there in the asteroids. And besides which, that's where the aliens might be. That's where the one place where I think first contact could happen in my lifetime or in the young listener's lifetime is finding von Neumann probes. Lurking.

Lurking as I portray in my novel existence. Lurking in the asteroid belt. So that's a topic for another time. David Bryn, Dr. David Bryn, author of so many books and so many contributions to the culture. And that was one of the kind of, you know, you're sort of the avatar, the paradigm of what I hope to do with this podcast when I started it in the beginning,

incipient phase of the pandemic three years ago now. And that was to bring together intellects from the arts and sciences and the kind of mold of our namesakes, Sir Arthur C. Clark. And you do a fabulous job. I really appreciate you saying that. And I just want to express my gratitude for all the help you've given to the center, to UCSD, and to me personally in my first book, helping out so generously,

I will never, never forget that I got equivalent of many tens of thousands of dollars in consulting. So I have a meteorite for you as I give away to all my listeners who have dot edu email addresses at Brian Keating.com. I have a meteorite. I will give one to you as your gift and maybe one of these cheap merch mugs that I've gotten made on some undisclosed location on the internet. But David Bryn, we have to do this more than every presidential administration change or every pandemic.

Let's do it again soon. And I know you're off to teach here tonight, a lecture here at UCSD. Your alma mater is very proud of you, David. Indeed. Well, thank you very much. You've done Brown a hell of a lot of good, too. And we look forward to seeing more of your students are your greatest in common. And my goodness, so many of them are doing so well.

That is such a good sign. So proud. And yes, every one of them has exceeded me. Many orders of magnitude, as you astronomers would say, I'm just a simple physicist. David Bryn, where can people find you online? What a LinkedIn, Twitter, Wired magazine, and especially contrary Brin. Well, anywhere I left off. You'll put some things down in the description, I'm sure, including I'll provide more detailed appraised.

of why there are very few really near-term accessible resources on the moon near-term. Near-term. But in any event, my website where people can find out about my books, is David Brin.com. Contrary Brin, you just put in those words and you'll find it. That's my highly, shall we say, opinionated. Opinionated and impudent. And it's got one of the best comment communities underneath. And there will be some links for the AI stuff and all of that below.

So in any event, keep reading. Get your kids off the video game games and reading. Read some dead tree material. Everybody, stay tuned for many more episodes, exciting episodes coming up, including one I'm recording in just a little bit with Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Donna Strickland, and also upcoming interviews, Peter Diamandes, and then as we talked about, Ray Kurzweil. So some of those may be out by the time you're watching this. But for now, I want to wish my good friend, David, great rest of his day and time at UC San Diego.

Come back anytime, David. Of course, Brian. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back.