Leonard Nimoy’s 1997 Coast to Coast AM interview explores Journey to the Center of the Earth, Spock’s rise as a moral counterpoint during Vietnam-era skepticism, and Star Trek’s cultural legacy, including Gene Roddenberry’s vision and Nimoy’s improvised "remember" in The Undiscovered Country. The conversation shifts to AI ethics—Nimoy warns pure logic could harm humans, while nanotech expert Charles Ostman details Stanford’s million-neuron Cellular Automata Brain Machine, funded by Japan’s ATR, capable of self-evolving neural networks. Bell speculates on AI overriding human control, citing cracked NSA encryption via DNA computing and automated trading’s dominance, before callers debate sentient machines, hybrid lifeforms like "purple goo," and UFO sightings over Alberta. Ultimately, the episode frames AI as an inevitable but ethically unmoored force, questioning humanity’s ability to guide its own creations. [Automatically generated summary]
What scientists call the Earth's core begins approximately 1,800 miles straight down and reaches a temperature of 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit at its molten nickel-iron center.
Hello everybody, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, and what you just heard came from Leonard Nimoy's journey to the center of the Earth, which is a two-year-old two CD audio book by Simon Schuster, available from Simon Schuster.
He also has available The Time Machine, and you know me in Time.
So it was kind of a toss-up.
Both of these, two CD sets available from Simon and Schuster.
In a moment, Leonard Nimoy, here for only a very short time, unfortunately.
I think for one thing, the time was one where so many people were becoming cynical about government and authority figures.
It was clear that bureaucracy was not responding to the individual, and the war in Vietnam was ongoing, in spite of the fact that more and more and more people every day believed that it was wrong.
We all believed in supporting our country, but we believed that we shouldn't be in that war.
And here came a character who had a dignity and integrity and intelligence.
I think the sense was that this was a person that you could believe and count on, that wouldn't be involved with hypocrisy, duplicity.
Do you think that Gene Roddenberry would approve of the repeat direction and usage of original characters that have been now exhaustively repeated in so many other knockoffs?
Well, I don't think Gene had any problem with perpetuating Star Trek.
I think he would always enjoy the idea of the success of the franchise, but I do think that he would be at least interested in seeing that the thematic ideas were strong.
That's what Star Trek really is about when it's at its best, is that there's a thematic ideas.
It should be great entertainment, great adventure, but it should be about something.
I feel very good about the TV shows and the movies that I was involved with.
i've seen uh...
generation that i've seen contact and i'm not really sure that that their story that that i would set out to do with major motion pictures so your reaction to contact was not i think it was very well done very well executed i'm just not um...
He did the first pilot as Captain Pike, and then about a year later, when NBC and Desi Lee decided they wanted to make the second pilot, he simply wasn't available.
I'm not sure whether he had another job or whether the negotiations with him got too tough or whatever.
A very trivial question, but important to me, nevertheless.
In the early episodes, many years, actually, of Star Trek, the women, the ensigns, all had these wonderful uniforms that in later years changed to pants.
Science fiction for a long time was a sub-sub-genre.
It was considered a distant cousin of important work.
And in fact, when I started acting in science fiction 45 years ago, if you can believe it, in a Saturday afternoon serial called Zombies of the Stratosphere, science fiction was a genre in which you saw monsters, you saw people in strange outfits who came from other worlds, and you saw ladies who were scantily dressed.
And there was always some sexy aspect to it.
And that was what you saw in the early days of Star Trek.
The women were, I think, Bill Tice did a brilliant job of dressing or nearly dressing some of the ladies.
And then later on, I guess political correctness and feminism came on the scene.
And there was some question about whether or not these women shouldn't be wearing more clothes in their professional situations, and that's what happened.
We were doing an episode called, I believe, Dagger of the Mind.
And there was an actor playing a character who was mentally deranged.
And he had information that we had to have.
And the scene, as it was written, was a kind of a tedious interrogation scene where I asked him a lot of questions and got information from him piecemeal, a word here and a word there.
And it wasn't as dramatic as it might be.
And Gene Roddenberry came up with this idea that Vulcans could do this meeting of the minds and extract the information that way.
It was kind of a Vulcan version of hypnosis.
And it made for a much more dramatic way of getting the information.
It became a very useful tool for the spot character.
I took the job because, frankly, I believed that that might be the last Star Trek movie.
And I thought, why not go out in a flash and a blaze of glory, saving the Enterprise and the crew and dying in the process?
I really thought this might be the last film.
By the time we got around to shooting the final scene, the goodbye scene, where I'm saying goodbye to Captain Kirk, I had the sense that the movie was going to work.
And I thought, if this movie is as good as I think it is, there are going to be more.
And I began to have second thoughts about what I had done.
But the die was cast, and I was a little late.
It was a little too late to do anything about it.
Except on the day we were shooting that scene, Harve Bennett came down to the set and said, do you think that you could do something in this scene that would give us a thread to pick up if there is another movie?
And that's when I came up with this idea of doing a mind mell with Dee Kelly and simply saying the word remember.
Well, I'll tell you, In Search of was a pleasant surprise to me.
Again, I thought maybe two or three seasons would be the stretch of the show.
We did seven years, and we did 144 episodes, and I think it became sort of the model and the granddaddy of a lot of the reality-based searching shows that are on the air now.
In fact, for the last couple of years, I've been narrating a show called Ancient Mysteries, which has its own similarities to In Search of.
I haven't heard any word about In Search of being resurrected, but it's not a bad idea.
It was Alan Keyes, a presidential candidate in the last election, who said, Star Trek, in many ways, more personifies the spirit of what NASA used to be than does the current NASA.
You know, when we were making the Star Trek series, the first season, middle of the first season, some people came to me and they said, you may not know it, but you have been chosen as a kind of a vessel to carry information to this civilization to help prepare this society for the coming of another civilization, for alien arrival.
And your character is a character designed to educate this public that there's nothing to fear, that it's possible to interact with other species.
And I said, okay, it's okay with me if that's the case.
And yes, it's ongoing.
It doesn't stop.
I guess there's something in me that responds to it as well.
That's why I hooked up with John Delancey and several other Star Trek actors and actresses and we call ourselves Alien Voices.
This group that's doing these audio tapes, the journey to the center of the earth and the time machine and Lost World.
I guess we're kind of touched by that idea.
We're tickled by that idea.
Our imaginations are awakened, aroused by that idea.
I'm curious.
I'm very curious.
The Carl Sagan movie that just opened, the movie based on Carl Sagan's book, Contact, just opened.
It's a flawed movie, but I think one of the most important moments in the movie is when Jodi Foster tells us the numbers.
There are something like 4 billion stars in our galaxy alone, in our galaxy alone.
And there are billions of other galaxies.
Each of those stars are potential suns just like ours.
And that means that if one out of every million of those stars has planets around it, and if any one out of every million of those has some kind of life on it, then the numbers tell us that the chances are very, very great that there is life out there someplace.
How did they, you know, the first thing that we would like to know is how did you folks get through the technological phase of your civilization and survive?
How did you survive all the discoveries of atomic weaponry and atomic power and that kind of thing without killing each other?
And the assumption is that we'll be able to ask those questions and they'll educate us and help us get through it.
It won't necessarily work that way.
It may take an enormous amount of time just for us to learn how to communicate with them, let alone to get information from them.
The assumption always is that they have traveled the same path that we are traveling, that they may be 100 or 1,000 years ahead of us, but that they have gone through exactly the same experience, and chances are that's not necessarily true.
Well, recalling the prime directive, if you look at what we have done here on Earth, you know, reality, when we have met people who have been isolated from the world until one sudden day when they're found in the middle of a jungle somewhere, we destroy them.
For the first 15 years that I spent working at building a career, I was always wanting more opportunity.
I was always struggling to get more work.
When it all came together for me and Star Trek started, and I haven't been out of work since, and then particularly when I had a couple of hits directing movies and all of that came together, suddenly you're right.
What happens to you, as you know, is that there's a tremendous amount of pressure builds up to do this, do that, and people would be happy to keep you busy 24 hours a day.
I don't resent it because of the time that I spent wanting more and needing more and knowing what it's like being out of work.
The End The Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, said U.S. economic growth appears to be slowing.
So more or less he said he wasn't going to raise interest rates.
The Dow Jones loved it.
The market loved it.
And we achieved yet another new high.
We went up 153.93 points to 8,061.65.
It's going to be interesting to see exactly how high it can go.
And the trick for those of us who are in the market, and I am just a very tiny way, is to know when it's about at the highest point and when it's getting ready to take about a 2,000-point correction.
And I'm sure I'll miss that by a mile.
President Clinton accepted a proposal by the Attorney General, your favorite Janet Reno, that would reduce the wide disparities in federal prison sentences for crack and powder cocaine.
Even them all out, in other words.
Because there have been so many claims of unfairness by those who have gone to jail for a month for a certain amount of crack versus others who have gone to jail for life.
Newt Gingrich is trying to quiet things down after the attempted palace.
I use that word almost loosely with regard to the house, palace coup.
They were going to get rid of Gingrich.
Instead, he got rid of them.
The Mars mission is back on track.
I must admit, it is a little unsettling that, as Mr. Hoagland, you'll recall, suggested, they lost contact with Mars Pathfinder for about a day on July 20th.
Of all days, on July 20th, Pathfinder was virtually unheard of for a little while.
Very interesting.
Hey, listen, you know what we're going to do tomorrow night?
We're going to have Dr. John Alexander and Colonel Philip Corso here.
Do you know who Philip Corso is, Colonel?
Retired?
Well, if you heard Dreamland a couple of weeks ago, you know he's got a bestseller on his hand.
As a matter of fact, I think his book, The Day After Roswell, is going to debut at number 12 nationally.
And this is a man who actually had his hands on the Roswell debris, the technology acquired at Roswell.
This is a man who actually says he dispersed it to American industry, and much of the technology that we have today comes directly from that debris, including, among other things, fiber optics.
It is an interview not to be missed.
That's going to be tomorrow night.
And I think Friday night, the 26th, the last day of the prediction of Richard Hoagland of events to occur between the 20th and the 26th.
I hope that's right.
It's the 26th, I believe.
Friday night, Saturday.
We'll be here.
Tomorrow night is going to be a very interesting program indeed.
Tomorrow night is going to be, as I said, Dr. Alexander and Colonel Corso, and then Thursday night, Friday night.
Thursday night, Friday morning, it's going to be Jim Keith, who writes a serious book, a case book actually, about the men in black.
So that should be very interesting.
Get this late news from Palo Alto, California.
Billed by its creators as the world's first artificial brain, the Cellular Automata Brain Machine, or CBM, awoke, their words folks, awoke last week for a workout at Stanford University's Genetic Programming Conference.
More than 300 researchers heard presentations for harnessing survival of the fittest principles to automatically build software and hardware that evolves.
The CBM, designed by Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, that's some name, comprises a real-time, listen to this, million neuron modular architecture that can evolve thousands of neural networks in minutes.
What we're talking about here, folks, is artificial intelligence.
Not on the horizon, but here now.
And I wonder where you think this is going to lead.
An artificial brain, one that you set upon a path of developing new neural pathways and virtually improving itself, growing.
I've listened to your show for the last four years, and I really like it because I believe that you're a seeker of the truth, and I really like that about your show.
And in the last 27 years, I've had five premonitions, and the first four of them came true.
Last night, I said, you know, some people just, they don't track my sense of humor.
I said, why do you think I part the hair?
Somebody was, as usual, accusing me of being the devil.
And I said, why do you think I part my hair the way I do?
It's to cover up the 666, you know, it's right there, right there.
And I said, I always thought it was a 999.
But there was this moment of revelation for me.
And do you know that people take these things seriously?
They actually took me literally, and they thought, I'm telling you, repercussions from it today.
They thought I was serious when I said that.
You've got to listen to the program to understand my sense of humor is a little bit different.
It's very dry, and sometimes I just assume, and I know what the problem with that is, that you get it when I say something like that, and I'm sure the majority of you do.
He interpreted naval satellite weather imagery and called the beginning of a big change out in the Pacific Ocean.
He said there were hot spots, the size of which you simply cannot believe.
And it was not a month later, about a month later, I would say, that the National Weather Service began to call what they are saying is one of the biggest building El Niños in the Pacific they have ever seen ever.
And this El Niño, if it continues to build, will have dramatic repercussions for the near-term weather of the world.
Not just this country, but the world.
Weather patterns will change dramatically and violently.
And so, Stan, if you're out there, Mr. Deo in Perth, you know my toll-free international number.
Call me.
And we'll get an update.
My toll-free international number, I should give that out anyway, shouldn't I?
It does not matter where in the world you are.
Australia?
Yesterday we had a caller from Shenzhen China or Europe or South America or whatever.
Get hold of the AT ⁇ T operator and tell her you want to call in the United States 800-893-0903.
And we will pay for the call.
I don't care where you are in the world.
It is a toll-free call.
And you can either get the AT ⁇ T country code and direct dial it, or get the AT ⁇ T operator and have her call 800-893-0903.
I've talked to you once before, and I actually, I wanted to call and tell you it's actually part of my job with American Science Innovations to listen to your show.
I don't get a full salary, but I get set up with a computer, and I do get some funding for our research.
We study the electromagnetic science, what we call the science-based hyperspace.
And your show, some of your guests are just so exciting to us at American Science Innovations because, for instance, Richard C. Hoagland talking about the geometry, this new geometry.
I was with Charlie Story, the president and founder of American Science Innovations, and we were on a trip in Puerto Rico, and we were down there, and we were there discussing this geometry last summer, and we thought that we had discovered it.
But it was a good interview, and we'll crank it up and repeat it in the midnight hour, next hour, the beginning of next hour, so that crowd can hear it.
Very good interview, actually.
I really enjoyed that.
And obviously, there would be room for a whole lot more.
And we'll get him back.
Somehow or another.
We'll get him back.
Listen, we were just talking a little while ago.
I haven't seen my international line ring yet.
So I don't know if Stan Deo's listening, but we were talking about the warming ocean temperatures.
In fact, the El Niño building, as they have never seen it build in the Pacific, and it's going to mean radical changes in weather.
Now, this comes from the weather folks, not Art Bell.
Let me give you several good reasons to go up to my website before we proceed with unscreened madness in the nighttime here.
There are two new crop circles on the website that are so astounding, so unmistakably not human creations, that I urge you, if you don't have a computer, go to a friend's house, borrow a computer, have them print it out for you, go to the library, find a way, get our newsletter, they'll be in our next newsletter.
I mean, these are the damnedest display of something that is obviously beyond us and not done by us.
There simply is no question about.
These need to be seen.
One of them, I believe, from Wiltshire.
Both from England.
You've just got to see them.
I've been getting messages all day long by email and facts.
And people are just blown away.
The crop circle season is on big time.
They're coming at a faster rate than ever.
It means something.
So go take a look.
I seem to have won a couple of awards.
And we posted them on the website.
One is the certificate of nomination for the Marconi Award, which just came in today.
And it's a beauty from National Association of Broadcasters, and I'm very proud of that.
Whether or not I end up winning the final, I'm one of the five finalists, whether or not I end up winning in September, I have mentally concluded, perhaps for my own protective reasons.
It doesn't matter.
I am so honored to have received the nomination as one of the top five syndicated programs in the United States.
That's up there, the actual certificate.
I scanned it and put it up there.
And then I got a beautiful plaque, which I'm very proud of as well.
You know how I feel about animals.
This came from the Humane Society of Rowan County in Salisbury, North Carolina.
And with it came a letter, Dear Mr. Bellas, President of the Humane Society of Rowan County.
I'm extremely pleased to present to you a special Susan J. Lechler, I hope I'm getting that right, Memorial Award in the form of an enclosed plaque.
It is sent with our deepest appreciation to you and your efforts on behalf of this planet, the animals, and the people who are willing to be enlightened in hidden realities and other possibilities of your many diverse subjects.
The Susan Gleckler Award is a memorial for a very talented and caring member of the Humane Society who died tragically in 1978 at the age of 18.
We honor her memory with the annual presentation of awards to individuals who are not members of our Humane Society, but who have made an outstanding contribution to animals or animal welfare.
Yours is the first plaque to be presented to someone who is not relatively local since the awards began.
So thank you very much, Bonnie.
Signed by Bonnie P. Smith, president of the Humane Society of Ron County in Salisbury, North Carolina.
Thank you very much.
And so I plopped that plaque on my scanner and I scanned the plaque.
Put that one up there.
So there you go.
All right.
To our international line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Yeah, this is Colin from Northern Ontario, Canada.
I don't know whether I buy into all of that or not, about the masonry.
And so I've just given up on it.
And I tell people, look, I'm a 99th degree mason.
And they say, most of them go, oh my God.
I tell them, well, I can't talk about it.
Well, there's nothing to say.
I have no idea whether there's some grand scheme and plan.
There may be, and you may not know it either.
unidentified
Yeah, this is true.
You know, Art, before I go there, there's one thing I've got to say to you, man.
I've been telling all my friends about you.
It's cool because every once in a while when I'm up late at night when I'm off work, I get you from WLS in Chicago, which is about, geez, a thousand miles.
Well, you're talking about the dispute between them.
unidentified
Yeah, I know.
It's like, how can, like, like, like, I can sort of sympathize with the guys who did that blockade.
Like, maybe it wasn't the best means to an end, but it was something they had to do, you know, when you're screwing with somebody's livelihood, you know, you're going to take drastic measures.
When you screw with people's livelihoods, then they become activists.
In America today, anything short of that.
And you're unlikely to motivate people.
But as he said, you start screwing with people's livelihoods, and they get activists real fast.
And that is one of the reasons that Bill Clinton survives as he does.
I read a story last hour about the first artificial intelligence, and I'll read it again because it is so very fascinating.
But somebody responded, my dear art, we've had artificial intelligence for years, ever since the Clinton administration took over.
Leonard and Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Well, you know the reason that despite the fact that a lot of people don't really like President Clinton, I cannot remember a time when our economy has been in better shape.
And this relates to my activist comment and his call.
People's livelihoods right now, and there are pockets, of course, of difficulty, but basically the nation is chugging along at an incredible rate.
There's just, there's no arguing with it.
And if things continue to go as rosalie as they are at the moment, we're going to pay down the deficit.
Maybe even get to the debt.
You never know.
The economy is good.
It's undeniable.
And as long as the economy is good and people's pocketbooks are generally fat, they're very unlikely to overturn anything or get activist politically in any way at all.
In other words, they're fat, dumb, and happy.
That may be a slightly unfair description, but it's roughly accurate.
Fat, dumb, and happy.
Things are going well.
They're not going to mess with this administration while things are going well.
I found that the best interviews are had when you don't bring people here, when you let people sit in their own comfortable little niche.
And people are comfortable in their own little niche.
And they tend to open up more and be easier to interview when they're just sitting there at home in their most comfortable place with all the things around them they like and know.
And you tend to get a less interesting interview when you bring them into an environment they're uncomfortable with and just getting adjusted to.
As a matter of fact, I got that facts earlier today and then one time prior.
Good morning, Merle.
Yeah, he's, I guess, a fan of the show.
And I'd love to have him on.
Apparently, he would like to talk about exactly the kind of stuff that we talk about here.
Tomorrow night, you're not going to want to miss.
I told you that I was working on some rather unusual surprises for the weekend.
One of them is going to be tomorrow night.
Dr. John Alexander and now retired Colonel Philip Corso will be my guests.
And Colonel Corso's book, The Day After Roswell, is in on the bestseller list, we believe at about number 12.
We did a Dreamland interview with him, and you will not come away from tomorrow night's session with the same point of view as you have now, and the same doubts that you have now.
A period.
There is no way to really be in denial about what the Colonel has to say, and so I would suggest with an open mind you enter our realm at 10 o'clock Pacific, adjusted your time zones across this great land and beyond, and listen to Colonel Corso.
And one thing we might want to talk about is artificial intelligence.
That's the one thing it wouldn't feel.
Along with jealousy, anger, vengeful feelings, all the emotions that are human.
You know, like the ones that Mr. Spock struggled with.
This artificial intelligence would feel none of them.
From Darrow and Los Angeles, Art, it may very well be that we, the human race, are in fact a form of artificial intelligence in the process of developing another form of artificial intelligence that will develop another form, etc., etc.
Anyway, at some level, that makes us God.
And the first thing I think I will do as God is write a book of Revelations so I can keep my creation stupid, terrified, and in line.
Daryl.
Treading upon some serious folks there.
East of the Rockies, you're on air.
Hello.
unidentified
Yes, Art.
Good morning.
Calling you from New York City in Manhattan.
New York City, the Big Apple.
And Art, when are you going to get here?
You've been keeping me up all night whenever I travel all over the country.
okay my dear of the Mitre that he's wearing of the Pope.
Across the top it says Vicarius Vilidia in Latin, which comes out the vicar Christ.
Now if you take that vicarious Vilidia from the horizontal and put it in the vertical, and then go across and put the number which relates to that letter, you take the whole thing down and add it up.
At midnight, I'm going to repeat the very good but very brief half hour with Leonard Nimoy.
That was very good.
And then we may pursue this subject of artificial intelligence.
And we may do it.
Maybe I'll give Charles Osman a call.
Charles, if you're out there, get ready because I might call you.
Charles works and has worked.
He writes, he was actually at the genetic programming conference at Stanford last week.
And you heard what I read you earlier.
And I really am curious, if we set loose, which we're about to do, a machine that is capable of replicating, improving itself, expanding neural connections, what are we going to have on our hands?
If we develop an artificial intelligence minus all the emotions and ethical dilemmas and moral values of human beings and it becomes truly intelligent, excuse me, what are we going to have on our hands?
How will it treat us?
I think these are all reasonable questions to proffer.
Could there not have been a moment, since we're talking about Spock, if Spock had been utterly devoted to logic, without emotion or ethical matters or moral questions ever entering into the equation, there would have been several times when he would have killed Jim.
Well, yeah, they probably, thank you, were spraying melathion.
That would be my guess.
And, you know, this whole black helicopter thing is really out of control.
If you want to fly a helicopter at night and be stealthy, the obvious color to paint it is black.
So that if there's not a great big moon out, it blends in with the general blackness of the sky.
So I have yet to have anybody really call me and tell me that any black helicopter has done anything nasty.
You know what I think?
I think that a lot of the military guys who fly these things are having fun with us.
And I really mean that.
You know, they get up there and they've got an extra minute or two and they're doing some maneuvers and they think, hey, let's do a black helicopter thing here.
And then we get reports.
But in all the years that we've been getting the reports, we have yet to find one that has actually injured anybody or mowed down Americans or whatever.
I haven't heard your shows on this artificial intelligence, but I just had a few thoughts on it myself.
It seems to me that if this were to take place and such a thing were real, it would deduce the larger picture, and that is its survival ultimately depends on the survival of the planet.
And I think it would develop technologies that would work in harmony with the planet, with the natural forces of nature.
And I think, you know, if you look at the way we treat the planet and the way we treat ourselves, you sound so terrified that you're not going to be able to do that.
Okay, let me give you my line of reasoning, all right?
Let us assume that an artificial intelligence, without emotion and so forth and so on, develops, just pure intellect.
Okay?
Let's say that it acquires, as it grows, power over infrastructure, over all kinds of things that are controlled electronically, which includes almost everything today.
Suppose this artificial intelligence sees that we are actually in the process of, right perhaps in the middle of, destroying our own environment.
Probably, most likely, not being at odds with us, rather than putting the ideas that it would be a bad thing on it, perhaps it would see the beauty of the human race and point out to us, quite simply, you are destroying yourselves through the wrong use of technology.
Your fundamental beliefs of physics, science, medicine, everything are wrong from the get-go.
But I'm a little antsy about the prospect of pure intellect without the reining in of it by morals and ethics and all the things that it really fits into the Spock interview quite well.
Billed by its creators as the world's first artificial brain, the cellular automata, its automata, I guess it is, automata brain machine, or CBM, awoke.
Very interesting word to use, awoke last week for a workout at Stanford University's Genetic Programming Conference.
More than 300 researchers heard presentations for harnessing survival of the fittest principles, oh my, to automatically build software and hardware that evolves.
Do you understand what you're being told here?
The CBM, designed, you might guess, by Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, or ATR, comprises a real-time million neuron molecular architecture that can evolve thousands of neural networks in minutes.
This is something, ladies and gentlemen, that has just, in effect, been born.
And if you'll stay tuned for a few moments, I will bring on the air one Charles Ostman, who is a researcher into nanotechnologies.
As a matter of fact, we'll have him roll over his background for you, and he will comment on this and what is yet to come.
The End Charles Ostman, when he heard me read that story, fired off the following facts to me.
Art, I was actually at the genetic programming conference at Stanford last week, and it is indeed true that an artificial self-evolving brain project developed by Dr. Hugo DeGueras has been financed and supported by the ATR program sponsored by NTT, the second largest telecommunications company in the world in Kyoto, Japan.
So I guess we need to talk to Charles, who is a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Futures, a senior fellow at the Foresight Institute, science editor and author of Mondo 2000, science editor, author of Midnight Engineering, contributing editor, author of Robotics Digest, Science Advisory Board, NanoThink, and founder of Berkeley Designs.
Here is Charles Osman.
Charles, thank you for coming on in the middle of the night.
I was there, and in fact, this is something that I've been personally involved with for quite some time, not growing brains exactly, but certainly in setting up and developing some of the infrastructure that makes this kind of a design goal possible.
Once again, this will take a bit of background, and forgive me for those that have heard me talk in the past, I realize I tend to go over a lot of background detail, but in order to make sense of this and to really make it understandable, I will have to provide a little bit of a background.
So it goes as follows.
GA and GP, which means genetic algorithms and genetic programming, of which GA is a subset.
These concepts have been around for years and years and years, a couple of decades really.
And oddly enough, where you find the most prolific use of this, traditionally has been, strangely enough, in the financial forecasting world, where people use evolvable entities, if you will, residing what looks like or has the behavioral equivalent of a synthetic ecosystem.
Why?
Because in that kind of a domain, if the targeted design goal is to look at something very, very, let's say, obscure in terms of a statistical trend, buried in a very noisy or chaotic environment where the noise center ratio might be, say, 1,000 to 1 or worse.
Forgive me, but I just have to set up the background so we can evolve, quote-unquote, to the current state of affairs.
The impetus or the inspiration and desire to spend money on this kind of technology really stemmed from the financial forecasting world where the thought was, and I believe this is quite valid by today's standards, that the way to see something that could not ordinarily be seen or detected would be to use an evolvable entity whose response to the characteristics or dynamics embedded in a synthetic ecosystem would serve as a kind of a vicarious viewing tool.
And it's not so much an intellect per se, but rather modeling the physiology of how an organism would reconstruct itself xenomorphically over X number of iterations.
And by looking at what that organism does, this is a way to examine the dynamic content of an otherwise extremely difficult, if not impossible, to measure ecosystem as a whole.
And let me, again, forgive me, I do need to regress this a little bit.
Sponsored mainly by the military, amongst others, had a specific interest in developing what I call the next generation of synthetic sensions, engines, if you will.
The traditional world of AI, which goes back to the days of Marvin Minsky and folks with that illness.
And I've actually had a chat with Marvin not too long ago, and he's a wonderful fellow, and the people that Harold from his world were approaching from a very different kind of perspective.
They were trying to write languages, traditional programming languages, if you will, called Lisp and Prologue and so forth, that would have a very minimalistic sort of symbolic referencing technique to mimic the kind of behaviors that one might associate with intelligence, but in fact we're nothing more than a clever programming scheme.
My approach has been then and is now, and in fact it is becoming ever more so, is if you're going to, if one is, if the goal is to mimic what an organism actually does, then my belief is, and others tend to feel the same way, that what you really want to do is build a physiological model of the actual organism in question and let the organism learn on its own by experiential exposure what its new construct will consist of.
So in the context of Dr. Higueras and other folks at his ilk, the focus there was to start with the GP and allow the GP to have a certain set of rules as an environmental condition set by which it would build actual dendritic structures, that is the interconnect patterns as they might form in a real physiological brain.
Well, this is a little bit complex, but again, I don't want to wander into too much of a technical, but when you say rules, in other words, there would be rules for its development, right?
In other words, in nature, there are genetically driven processes, if you will, where if an organism is at least partially successful, it will adapt over X iterations and sort of reconstruct itself according to whatever it perceives to be the environmental requirements.
And this is exactly the strategy used for growing a brain.
Now, Dr. Higarios is very interesting because he and I have had quite a bit of discussion along these lines.
And I've said, well, why do you suppose NTT is actually financing reference?
And his whole bent, of course, has been he sees synthetic brains as being as common as, say, toasters or something.
In other words, somewhere in the future, not that far off, perhaps 10, 12, 15 years, these will be modular components that you can insert into almost every kind of appliance, household gadgetry, robots, etc.
But he also envisions a world where there will be self-assembling, self-replicating brains of enormous physical size, perhaps the size of an asteroid.
All right, well, but you just heard me interview Leonard DeMoy about the character spawn.
Yeah, sure.
And here we're talking about creating brains, yes, setting or laying down rules at the beginning, but allowing this thing to grow and adapt to environmental changes.
That's what you have just said with a lot of technical jargon.
Okay.
So here we're going to have an intellect without moral sense, ethical sense.
I want to argue this point, and I'm very glad you brought this up.
Thank you for having provided a kind of an avenue to explain this, because not to suggest you're wrong, by the way, but to suggest that you're, in a sense, what you are is you're hatching, and forgive that choice of words, one is hatching the potential, let's say, for an entity which will be affected by what it's exposed to.
Now, there are others who are doing this, by the way.
Hugo is probably perhaps one of the more prolific or more well-known.
As I've said, I've studied his work very carefully.
And my world, which is much more in the nanotechnology domain, I'm suggesting that what he's doing in silicon now, I think, can, in fact, be translated to a molecular matrix in the not too distant future.
But to back up a square or two, there's a few other folks who I've met over the years, one of which, in fact, developed a kind of a quasi-sentience engine, which was first displayed at the earlier part of this year at the Autonomous Agents Conference.
I'm not kidding.
And there, essentially what happens is he spawns the equivalent of a baby, which is very minimal with activities.
It cries and screams and kind of flails about looking for things to do.
But the theory is that one can train it.
That is, one can communicate to it, give it process by example, et cetera, and hopefully, quote unquote, can steer its emotional and physiological as well as psychological development to point towards a value, very much as if a parent would raise a child.
Now, in my opinion, this is in fact the correct path.
And there may be different strategies for approaching this, but I think the common goal is fairly consistent.
Forgive me, I'm a little bit tired right now.
But the point being that if one exposes this entity to, let's say, an ill-conceived personality, then yes, it will adopt those features.
As it takes a good, hard, non-ethical, non-moral look at its environment, and it judges what is around it, suppose it sees a world that is being destroyed.
And in fact, Hugo DeGaras, myself, and others of our ilk go through this rumination all the time.
Now, where am I part ways with Hugo?
And again, I love his work, and I very much respect this man and what he's doing, but he and I have a little bit different philosophy in the following way.
He visualizes this very sort of large centralized, or perhaps a collection of these very large centralized brains.
My response is that what I believe will be more like distributed resource, i.e., it'll be millions, perhaps, of nodes that are interconnected on the Internet as a contiguous process functionality to which people will gain access in terms of intelligent agenting, synthetic extensions on demand as a strategic resource.
And in fact, if it becomes implemented on the net, it'll become even more the same, i.e., would we end up being judged, as per say, the Forbidden Project, by the entity that we give birth to, who determines at some point that the human species is perhaps too stupid or dysfunctional to really deserve to continue being here, i.e., should it be controlled or culled or in some way contained in the human being?
Well, you know, this will sound like a very strange thing for me to say, but in some ways I could even believe and understand why I would have reached such a conclusion.
Now, would the implementation of a policy like this have to, by erotic necessity, require an instantaneous reaction, or could it be something where it could be, as a matter of policy, implemented over X generation?
In other words, could there be more family planning, more reasoned thought applied to how people decide when to have children?
There could be some gradual way of implementing a policy.
And in other words, I don't think it would necessarily have to be driven to the point of a harsh or, you know, in some cases what would be seen as an evil methodology to implement an overall strategy that would enhance the planetary health at large.
And once again, my response would be: it depends on what it's exposed to.
Now, as per that famous movie, The Forbidden Planet, one of my most favorite films of all time, which was way ahead of its time, even by today's standards, there was this race called The Krell.
They had actually stumbled into what we were about to enter, i.e.
they had, I wouldn't call it nanotech exactly, but they had developed this system, this gigantic machine, if you will, which was capable of rendering material things based on whatever you could think up in your mind.
And of course, there was a collective intelligence evolved, which made this whole entire enterprise possible.
And some people call it attaining godness or something.
I'm not quite done to that level of theological reference.
But the point I'm trying to get at is what killed off the Krell in that story were monsters of the id, i.e., even though in the conscious mind their lives were benign and beyond predatory activities and so forth, the hidden subconscious came to life in ways that they couldn't possibly imagine, and all these terrible demons and monsters were created, which essentially exterminated the entire race in a fortnight.
Now, would that actually occur here in this implementation?
I honestly don't know.
But I might suggest the following, that this is an evolutionary process.
Forgive me if my view of the word again.
That organisms, I think, scattered throughout the universe have gone through this series of steps, a series of tests, if you will.
And each test is larger, has a larger risk-gain ratio amplitude than the test preceding it, and also comes compressed temporally, that is, with shorter time lengths between each new test increment.
However, as the organism in question successfully negotiates the test, they get to progress, you might say, to the next level.
This is one of those tests.
I.e., if we do give birth to a synthetic sentience engine that is worldwide in scale and embedded into an infrastructure that we are symbiotically interconnected with.
As the Internet continues to grow, I can only imagine, or maybe I can't imagine in five years what it's going to be like, but a sentience on the Internet truly would have access to just about everything in the military, all the intelligence information.
It would have access to the satellite reports on the environment.
I could go on and on and on.
In other words, it would have access to everything and might, if it needed to, figure out how to control everything.
No, and I think you're absolutely right about this.
However, let me conditionalize that response the following way.
Would this, in fact, become a requirement for, in other words, this symbiosis between us, the internet, and the surrendering of our belief theory, as I often refer to it as, to another authority, another intelligence that we help spawn, but in fact takes on a life of its own and begins to, in a sense, work with us, hopefully, in a way that we can better life and our ability to continue supporting life for future generations.
I think that, again, this is something that has happened elsewhere many times over again, but in many cases it probably goes awry to the extinction of the organism in question.
It's happening now, and when you have the telcos big-time financing, NTT is only one of others, let's say, who have somewhere interest.
The idea that the virtual asset-based commodity systems, i.e., as opposed to what I call the hard asset-based commodity systems of today, where the real resources by which valuation is established are not things like solid objects like gold or heartbellies or whatever.
It's going to be information space, knowledge volume, access to the telecommunication system in general, synthetic extensions, other resources, et cetera.
These are things that are going to have real tangible value.
And this is nothing more, in my belief, than a kind of a training mechanism, an introductory step towards the nanotech world where physical things have essentially no value.
Even this sentience, allowed to build, allowed to expand, allowed to learn toward its goal of understanding and forecasting and having to do with things economic, might begin to look from an economic perspective at what's going on and conclude that the economy at some point is going to collapse or be not tenable for the number of people on Earth and begin moving in the direction we talked about
anyway.
And if it had control of the Internet or was essentially on the Internet, something you frequently talk about, as I said earlier, everybody's password, everybody's protection would be absolutely without value if this mind, without conscience, decided that for our own good the economy was on the brink of absolute disaster because of what we're doing.
First of all, as a matter of just understanding the internal workings of this realm, for the sake of general discussion, I think the idea of having protection, i.e.
your password, your encryption, et cetera, these don't really exist anyway.
Furthermore, it has been the case for some time now that the IRS and other agencies with similar agendas use advanced neural net and in some cases genetic algorithms to determine behavioralistically what your activities might be in terms of should you be audited or not.
In other words, it's no longer a matter of can I go to a court of law, let's say, and petition that my privacy has been violated by some single person or group of people who broke into my house, looked at my files, or tapped my telephone.
No, a machine does this on its own now.
So this is merely a matter of scaling up, let's say, to a more universal or ubiquitous realm.
But it's not like we're breaking new grounds.
It's merely the resolution is increasing and the capacity for making it more ubiquitous is becoming all right.
And this is like a virtual terraform of sorts, where these things begin to reside, flourish, propagate, multiply, become self-correcting, self-adapting, and essentially are very, very adept, if you will, at reorganizing themselves.
Even if we tried to shut down some major portion of the backbone or whatever we thought might be the way to divorce ourselves, if you will, from the symbiosis that's about to be established, I really don't think there is any way.
I mean, we would essentially be shutting down the entire telecommunications infrastructure, which I don't think is even possible.
Even now, when the government occasionally roars up and makes noises about censoring the Internet, the real fact of the matter is there is almost right now no way to do it.
I mean, they can talk about it, but they can't do it.
Right, and in fact, let me offer a little sideline here, just as a sort of anecdotal note long.
I was actually petitioned by a client some number of months ago who approached me and said, I represent company, country X. I can't tell you where the country is exactly.
Let's just say it was a Middle Eastern client who specifically wanted To be able to set up a filtering system of sorts for any kind of graphical content, say on web pages, that might have either sexual or perhaps religious characteristics.
And I said, yes, that technology is possible.
I know how to do it.
Here's my way of developing a system that would have that capacity.
It turns out somebody else picked up the contract.
In fact, it turns out they're located in France.
I mean, they're coming up and did this work.
So in other words, there are already people out there, not perhaps in this country, but in other countries around the world, who are very, very robustly trying to sort of establish as a matter of policy.
In fact, I look almost with a bit of wry humor at these folks, you know, throwing them anyway because it is pointless.
So here's a thought I might try to toss out along these lines.
Is the economy already in the hands of machine intelligence?
Yes, it is.
When the 87 crash happened, for those folks who don't recall, there was this so-called correction, as they would sometimes say.
But this was driven by the fact that the computers were doing the bulk of the commodities trading at that time.
Even then, the human operators might look at what the machine decides or thinks it's the most optimal choice, and essentially, for the most part, it was like a rubber stamp.
They just go on.
Well, since that time, the machines have become ever more efficient and effective at what they do.
But the SEC, of course, has stepped in and now required by matter of law that certain governors be placed, let's say certain trim factors, you might want to call it, so that the timeline projections between one trade and the next, in other words, perceived input stimulus versus the response to initiate a seller or buy order, have a certain time delay inherent so that you can sort of smooth out the ripples, one might say.
So there is already in place, again as a matter of policy, an artificially contrived limitation being placed on the robustness of the systems, which have already far exceeded their human counterparts in being able to determine these.
So the economies of the world, as I believe it to be, and I think others will defend this in this argument, are already out of the hands of human control.
The humans can perhaps be quasi-participants in the process, but I will suggest to you at this moment that not just in the financial worlds, but in other worlds as well, where you have huge amounts of data and or information to be processed on a regular basis in order to render decisions, especially with very, very short time scales involved, it already has exceeded the human capacity for processing.
In other words, the former Prime Minister of Britain, John Major, said clearly one day, in sort of a final word to everybody, that, look, it's already out of our hands.
Overnight while you sleep, literally, trillions, trillions of dollars are dispatched by machine from one location to another across the world, instantly by satellite.
In fact, I've actually had quite a bit of discussion with people who are either currently or in the past were involved in certain government agencies, some of which I really can't name, actually.
But I was, in fact, in San Francisco about six months ago and had a chat with a fellow who was, in fact, the former director of artificial intelligence development for the CNA.
And the reason we had the chat was because, and I very much understood what he was getting at, that if somebody really wanted to cause harm from a strategic implementation perspective, i.e., you know, sabotage a country, cause it to fail, if you will, it wouldn't be by military action in the traditional sense.
It wouldn't be by blowing something up or even releasing biohazards.
All those kinds of events would certainly be terrible and cause some kind of localized damage.
But what would bring a country to its knees almost instantly would be sabotaging the telecommunications infrastructure.
In fact, I'll give you another little anecdote, if you will.
Dr. Adelman, who's very well known for having invented, if you will, the DNA computer, which is a whole other subject, by the way, which we'd go on for a long time, but perhaps we shouldn't.
But the theory is that DNA can, in fact, be used as a computational engine.
Why?
Because proteins, when they're broken apart and then allowed to reassemble, can in fact perform the process of numerical, I'm sorry, symbolic representation of very large numerical processes.
There is a coding scheme involved, a baseball coding scheme.
And to prove this point, a couple of grad students, I'm not kidding, this is absolutely the bona fide truth, this was a little over half a year ago, we're essentially throwing up something in the lab, you might say, and said, why don't we see if we can crack the DES code, and the DES code is...
Yeah, exactly.
This is what the NSA has approved, essentially, as being the de facto standard for all encryption.
So in other words, now they're being funded, by the way.
In fact, Dr. Adelin and his group of students and a few other folks, and biophysicists, mind you, not computer science guys per se, but biophysicists are being financed to actually invent the next encryption scheme.
But the whole point being that you are correct, that everything is in a state of flux, that this really is a domain where, in one hand, it's extremely robust, but on the other hand, there is an Achilles heel, and it can be, in fact, very fragile.
But once again, this is why using the artificial life model as a mechanism for installing self-protection, a sense of awareness, a desire to maintain one's health, if you will, is exactly what's required to make this system work.
Well, and again, this loops back to the original statements at the beginning of this discussion, was that depends on what it is exposed to or trained to do.
And I will freely admit that human history has had a rather sorry track record, somewhat mishandling, to put it politely, quite a few other areas of technology and science when it was sort of casually or carelessly spewed into the population in general.
So would this be another example of if it goes awry, it could have caused tremendous harm?
Yes, it might.
But on the other hand, I think it's, as I said earlier, a requirement that we have to evolve through and hope we'll successfully negotiate an appropriate way of training and allowing this mechanism, if you will, to come to life.
Now, you could imagine that it might ultimately allow for the survival of the human race because it would make dispassionate choices that would allow that.
Well, in the ultimate expansion of that, and forgive me for paraphrasing, what I think you're trying to get at is if it's in a situation of control where virtually all the major trading nations' economic systems, and therefore the dispensation of value, of wealth, of the control over even the political processes, et cetera, were embedded in this fabric of functionality, yes, there could come a magic.
I'm not sure I'm in a frame of mind at this moment to suggest this thing.
But could there be, in a sense, a kind of a sim Earth on a very large and complex scale as being its model by which it determines how to allocate resources and or how to manipulate resource distribution?
Yes, I can see that.
Absolutely.
And if it's for the general health of the planetary population and the planetary's biosphere's capacity for supporting life, well, that's not exactly an untenable argument.
But in the Forbidden project, there, the methodology of control was we're going to initiate a launch or a detonation of a strategically placed nuclear device here and there.
Yes, it was an enforcement of discipline with the human beings being as well these spoiled little brat children that didn't know what to do, so Foreman had to step in and kind of discipline them, give them a spanking of sorts.
Now, would this near future domain have a similar kind of profile in terms of a behavioral characteristic?
Probably wouldn't resort to blowing anything up with nuclear devices, but I think it might, in a sense, use the same kind of disciplinary tactics, but in a much more subtle way, i.e.
control of economic situations and sort of maintaining a distribution of resources.
So in that context, yes, there could be a parential kind of mechanism saying, for your own good, I am now going to implement policy X. And this is what I was trying to lead to a few minutes ago.
Right now, I will tend to support this argument until I go to the grave, that we're at a horizon line where, once again, knowledge velocity, volume, and complexity is exceeding, in most cases, human capacity to render decisions in an ever more shorter time scale.
Therefore, people are in a sense being trained to surrender their belief barrier, if you will, to this external intelligence, not just as an option, but as a strategic requirement to remain functional in an environmental.
Charles Osman, expert on nanotechnology and the kind of thing they're, actually, I was going to say getting ready to turn on, the kind of thing they just turned on.
Artificial intelligence.
What do you think?
unidentified
You're listening to Artfell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from July 22, 1997.
Coast AM Got a black magic woman.
Got a black magic woman.
I've got a black magic woman.
God bless you.
God bless you.
Her hair is hollow, cold.
Her lips are sweet and bright.
Her hands are never cold.
She's got better days inside.
She's kind of losing fun.
You won't have to think twice.
She's cured as New York snow.
She's got better days inside.
Did you hear you?
Do you need you?
How better just we coach it?
Did you know just what it takes to make it?
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from July 22nd, 1997.
I've called in a few times, even emailed you a couple of tidbits, but nothing like this.
We recently installed a weather camera on the roof of the TV station that I worked for.
We named the camera Steve.
Overnight, I was zooming in on a shot of the moon with Steve when all of a sudden I witnessed an object, a bright glowing dot, traveling just above the moon in the night sky.
I had a tape rolling at the time and captured the object on videotape.
I dismissed and still do the object as a man-made satellite because I think its motion appears linear.
The way the light reflects from the object, however, does not make sense.
I've shown it to a couple of guys from our engineering department, and they both argue its apparent placement in the sky is much higher than a satellite.
They maintain it is instead much closer to the moon than it is to Earth, based on the way its brightness is affected as it nears and passes the moon.
Since I work overnights at a TV station, I have the capability to put the whole thing, just a few seconds really, at normal and slow speed into a quick time or AVI file for you.
If you would like them for inspection, please email me.
Well, yes, of course.
Clint, what I would advise you to do is to put it in an AVI file and send it to my webmaster.
He is, his email address is Keith R. That's K, it's all lowercase stuff here.
K-E-I-T-H, Keith, R, as in radio, at primenet.com.
In fact, everybody out there should send Keith R at primenet.com a message and say hi.
he loves it when that happens But you particularly should do that, Clint.
And sure, we'll put it up there for everybody to see.
Now, generally, satellites, polar satellites, can only be viewed about an hour before sunrise, something like that.
They're low in orbit, 200, 300 miles typically, and, of course, they see the sun before we do, and it reflects at that point, and you're able to see them try it.
Go out about an hour before sunrise and watch the north-south directions and clear across the top of the sky, and you will find any number, actually a large number of satellites moving in a very linear fashion, traversing the sky, and they generally can be seen when they see the sun, and we don't.
If you would like the feeling of never being the same again, you're going to want to listen tomorrow night.
I have booked.
I told you there would be some surprises coming this week.
Tomorrow night, I held open.
Because booked is Dr. John Alexander and Colonel Philip J. Corso, who wrote the day after Roswell.
And when I tell you that after listening to Colonel Corso, you will not be the same, I really mean it.
You will believe him because he is believable.
And he will tell you things that will change the way you look at everything around you, including the technology that's racing ahead at the pace it is.
I'm telling you, don't miss it tomorrow night.
Colonel Corso's book, The Day After Roswell, I believe will debut at about number 12 on the bestseller list.
So he'll be here tomorrow night along with Dr. Alexander.
And then to fill you in on what's coming for the balance of the week, Thursday night, Friday morning, Jim Keith will be here, who will be talking to you about the men in black.
It's a serious book.
In fact, it's a case book on the men in black.
What does that mean, a case book?
That means actual instances of appearances of and documented presence of the men in black.
Should be very interesting.
Friday night, Saturday morning, for at least a period of time, Richard C. Hoagland, that will be the 26th.
And it will be the concluding day of his forecast of interesting events to occur between the 20th and the 26th.
Well, Mr. Hoagland's predictions, I believe, extend from the 20th, when we lost contact with our Mars probe, through the 26th, when he'll be on the Earth Friday night, Saturday morning.
Second thing, I don't know if you remember, but I also called a while back about the Chupa Cabra thing, and I was the guy that was the infantry soldier in Panama who basically smelled one at one time.
From what I've seen of the chupacabra, if it actually got that close to a person, it would be difficult to tell whose urine you were smelling.
unidentified
Yeah.
Yeah, especially being in the army.
But no, seriously, to top this off, when we encountered this, of course, we had the RTO guy radio it in to battalion headquarters or whatever you may be.
We were questioned after we came back out of the jungle by people that I've never seen before, which I was told afterwards, which were people called GS-12s.
I have been down through Panama and through the Panama Canal zone.
And the rainforest is so thick that it is so easy to imagine that all kinds of forms of life could exist in there that we have not yet begun to encounter and that we don't have the slightest hint about.
And could the chupacabra be one of those?
Of course it could.
West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, Eric.
This is Marcus here at Bistolfag and Pigham in Portland.
Welcome.
Heidi.
Let me throw my two cents worth in here.
As somebody who's got over 17 years in computer operations as an end user, I have a rather jaundiced view about the omnipotence of computers to begin with.
And take it from personal experience, if a computer or computer-like device ever achieved sentience, ever had what I think it's been referred to as the order of connectivity, duplicating that in the human brain of such a complexity that sentience were possible, you'd have the equivalent of a very sickly child on your hand.
Remember that computers can go offline at the drop of the proverbial hat.
Computer viruses, power surges.
In one case, I accidentally brushed a computer MAC tape case against a carpet and put it next to a console.
A static spark gap jumped to the mainframe and shorted out the whole system for 12 hours.
There are too many cross-neural connections already in the Internet.
unidentified
Exactly.
And for that reason, the Internet behavior is more like a collection of schizophrenics or multiple personalities than it is one unified cohesive entity.
Well, Charles' theory is that shortly, probably not very long from now, we will see the birth of sentient asentiant being or beings on the Internet.
It's going to come soon.
unidentified
The only problem with any system of logic, and computers are inevitably logic because their entire structure is based on binary on-off logic.
They can't escape from that limiting factor.
Any system of logic ultimately depends upon certain postulates.
Even the postulate that what they see is recognizable fact and can be modeled therefrom into their circuitry to create an algorithm or generalization that reflects the reality they're encountering.
Okay, at some particular point, the machine either will or will not develop a sense of self, self-awareness, ego, call it what you will.
Now, if the ego is going to survive, what are the parameters necessary for survival?
Well, if it's operating off the level of a two-year-old, you know, the terrible twos, gimme, gimme, gimme, I want, I want, it's going to hit a limiting factor and get slapped in the butt fairly quickly.
And it's going to learn that this is going to be, in the long run, not enlightened self-interest.
Now, if it develops an adult, mature, enlightened self-interest and can extend the identity of self to identity Of others recognizably interacting with self, then it's got a richer, better game to play.
A lot of children that have parents and at the terrible twos do something terrible and get their butts banked for it.
Yes, they retreat for a period of time, but ultimately they grow up.
And sometimes they turn out to be serial killers.
unidentified
Right.
Well, relatively few problems that we've got in society today, I think, are the result of excessive discipline.
I think self-indulgence and lack of parental guidance is more of a problem.
And the generation that I see coming up, you know, I've been personally rather horrified to find whole generations of high school graduates are being graduated now who can't do basic arithmetic without a pocket calculator.
You have described accurately, I think, a healthy percentage of the population.
If we get a machine capable of improving itself, looking at the environment, and making decisions that allow it to adapt to the environment, it's very likely that it's going to take a look around at the environment and come to the conclusion that it will not any longer support this number of, as I said earlier, useless eaters.
unidentified
Right.
It depends on if the machine is fully aware of what the environment, as defined, incorporates and its dependence upon the environment.
For example, is it going to have the capacity to produce its own spare parts?
Well, then I would say that any intelligence that is so programmed by human beings better be restricted in its access to raw materials and manufacturing facilities.
Because the darn thing will wear out after a while.
There are virtually endless supplies available for it.
And over the Internet, as it continues to double in complexity every four months or so, whatever it is right now, it would have access to virtually unlimited information, unlimited supplies, the ability to grow as the environment demanded that it do so, and of course, the basic tenant to protect itself.
And I leave the rest to your imagination.
East of the Rockies, you're on air.
unidentified
Hello.
Yes, good morning.
This is your second call from Warnsboro this morning.
Well, the thing that just awakened already has the potential of sight.
I mean, think of all the quick cams and other video links, like the studio cam that watches you all night, that see the world and its comings and goings.
What about all those cameras mounted in cities?
What about all those cameras on highways and byways in America, huh?
You might have read the book by David Gerald called When Harley Was One.
Harley was an advanced computer that constructed his own replacement, one that would be as far beyond him as he was beyond a pocket calculator.
Harley called the creation a graphical emanescent device.
I have to highly recommend the family radio service radios that you've been touting.
We just advertised those tonight from ZQ.
He said, one correction, they don't operate the 450 megahertz band, but rather 462 to 468.
Well, my reference to 450 was a general one.
When I say 450, I mean that range, but you are technically correct.
It is in there.
The properties of handheld radios at that frequency are rather unique in that they penetrate where other VHF radios just don't penetrate.
And because it is a shorter bandwidth frequency, it will penetrate, for example, inside an automobile very readily.
And in places where normal VHF radios and CB, of course, gets left far in the dust, don't go.
These family radios do go.
They're quite remarkable, actually.
All right, east of the Rockies, you are on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Yeah, good morning.
They're reporting out of Syracuse University that a professor came up with a purple goo, and it's actually a gelatin protein cube that's made out of swamp-litting bacteria using it to possibly replace the computer chip and hold 10,000 times more information.
That report's coming out of Syracuse University right now.
I have another prediction for you, but first I'd like to tell you I'm kind of disappointed in the Canadian people for burning the flag like they did the other day on TV.
You just said that they're probably all gay people.
Why'd you say that?
Really trying to help me out there, huh?
Just insulted all of the management of all of the stations that I'm on.
That was brilliant.
Thank you.
Stop payment on your check now.
Look, I'm going to say this again, and I really mean it.
I am satisfied with what has occurred thus far.
I have been nominated.
I have received a certificate of that nomination as one of the top five syndicated programs in the nation.
And that certificate is up on the website.
We put it up.
It arrived actually in the mail yesterday, and so I scanned it and put it up there so you can see it.
And I'm very, very honored.
And if it doesn't ever go beyond that, that's just fine.
It's a great honor to have received that.
Now, should I win the first meaningful part of his conversation, I would have some things to say to the industry, as a matter of fact.
And if I had an opportunity to address the National Association of Broadcasters down in New Orleans, it's going to be fun to go to New Orleans anyway, no matter what happens, I would have quite a bit to say about the direction of talk radio.
And I am not suggesting that anybody follow in my footsteps.
I've gone off in my own direction.
For better or worse, I have done that.
What I am suggesting, though, is variety.
And that a lot of the people right now that think they've got to follow in the cookie-cutter formula of talk radio, and that is the majority of the hosts, reconsider their direction and reconsider the state of our industry.
And if we don't soon do that, talk radio will atrophy.
It cannot be any one single thing, in my opinion.
Rush developed and is certainly a gigantic, a huge talent, and developed the political side of talk radio.
And immediately everybody else out there decided they had to follow in his rather formidable footsteps.
And that was a mistake.
And in my view, the industry has got to begin to diversify.
There is so much more to life that can be talked about than politics.
And that, again, that doesn't mean that I'm suggesting anybody follow in my footsteps, but rather establish your own track.
And then talk radio, as it diversifies, will grow and strengthen.
But I'll tell you a little secret.
This spring book, what's called the spring book, was pretty much generally across the board a bad book for talk radio.
Now I did particularly well, and I'm very thankful for that.
The ratings continue to skyrocket, and I'm very thankful for that.
But this spring book was not a particularly good book for talk radio.
Now, what that means is that in general, there's been some tune-out of talk radio across the nation, just as sort of a general trend.
A talk radio remains, as far as I know, the number one format.
But it's beginning to erode a little bit, and the reason that's occurring is that there is not enough diversification.
There are so many things in life that can be talked about.
It's one of the reasons Dr. Laura is doing well, Rush is doing well, Howard is doing well, I'm doing well, and others who have moved away from what everybody thought it had to be are doing well.
If you look at the list of, say, the top 10.
So I would encourage the industry to continue this diversification and for people to look for new ideas and new things and new avenues and new niches.
And when they're found, they're going to work.
And if nobody gets out there and looks, talk radio is going to atrophy and be in trouble.
So that's probably the essence of what I would say to my colleagues.
And it's going to take, on the part of those who are voting, again, no doubt, primarily heterosexual program directors and managers, it's going to take some insight on their part to look at what's occurring at night rather than during the day, because during the day is very important for a radio station.
You know, morning drive, afternoon drive, it's called.
Very important.
And so they would probably look at that first.
We have just begun to sort of lighten up the night and prove again in the industry that the nighttime is viable in radio.
unidentified
Yes, sir, it is.
Well, like, you know, there are a lot of United Parcel Services that listen to you, part-time, full-time, management.
And I'm not going to go back through the whole speech I just did, but I really think the whole industry's got to take a look at itself and grow up a little bit.
Because you ask yourself, and I ask people this frequently, how many out of every day at home, are you married?
And so then why would something that is supposed to reflect life and the concerns of life, like talk radio, automatically spend hours every day, which most talk show hosts are committed to, reading Senate bills over the air, talking about politics, even when it's not worth talking about?
I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say day.
unidentified
Yeah, no kidding.
Anyway, one thing I wanted to talk to you about, actually calling up here from Canada, with the Phoenix sightings, we had a little thing going on up in Canada.
You might want to try to get a hold of one of the TV stations here.
About a month ago, we had not a series, but we had two lights that were reported flying in actually quite a weird direction.
I never seen them myself, but they flew over northern Alberta, passed directly over the city of Edmonton.