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May 6, 2007 - Art Bell

02:37:10

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - The State of Robots - Daniel H. Wilson

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	From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever the case may be in your time zone, each and every one of them around the world, covered by this program, the very largest program of its kind in the world, Coast to Coast AM.
	It is my honor and privilege to be now escorting you through the second half of the weekend, right on into the week, really.
	I guess it's been another sad day in the world.
	We'll cover that in a moment.
	It's never good news.
	One of these days, before I ever do finally retire, I would love to come on and read nothing but good news.
	It will not be this night.
	Bombs kill eight American soldiers in Iraq.
	Roadside bombs killed Eight American soldiers in separate attacks Sunday.
	It's really getting bad there.
	A car bomb claimed more than 30 lives in a wholesale food market in a part of the Iraqi capital where sectarian tensions are nothing but on the rise.
	In all, 95 Iraqis were either killed or found dead nationwide on Sunday alone.
	They included 12 police, Among them, the city's police chief in Samara, who died when Sunni insurgents launched a suicide car bombing and other attacks on police headquarters.
	So, no good news from Iraq.
	The wreckage of a Kenya Airways jetliner, told you about it yesterday, crashed down late Sunday in a dense mangrove forest outside Cameroon's commercial capital.
	Dozens of rescue workers and journalists walking through the swamp at night did reach the edge of the crash site, but didn't find any survivors, nor did they find the main part of the plane.
	They'll go back and look for that tomorrow.
	It kind of closed down at dark.
	Rescue workers on Sunday searched for anybody still buried in the heaps of splintered wreckage left in Greensburg, Kansas after a massive tornado obliterated, literally, most of this south-central Kansas town.
	Now, there are, making the rounds on the internet, pictures of Greensburg, Kansas.
	Or what's left of it, not much.
	Waves of thunderstorms ripped across the Plain States on Sunday, drenching rubble that the Friday tornadoes scattered across Greensburg, and in addition, threatening more tornadoes tonight elsewhere.
	The pictures on the internet are just awful.
	I don't know what scale that tornado was, but it just literally obliterated that town.
	I don't think it was an F5.
	So you can imagine what an F5 would do.
	In France, they've got a new president and things are gonna change.
	Nicolas Sarkozy, a blunt, uncompromising, pro-American conservative, ha ha ha, was elected president of France Sunday with a mandate to chart a new course for an economically sluggish nation.
	Struggling to incorporate immigrants and their children.
	Sarkozy defeated Socialist Royale by, let's see, 53.06% to 46.94%.
	They had an 84% turnout in France, according to final results released early Monday.
	Boy, that's big!
	It was a decisive victory for Sarkozy's vision of freer markets.
	Toughness on crime and immigration over Royall's rather gentler plan for preserving cherished warfare, uh, welfare protections.
	Almost said warfare.
	Including a 35-hour workweek that Sekozi is calling nubsurd.
	35 hours.
	Police Chief William Bratton in Los Angeles said Sunday that up to 60 members of an elite squad that swarmed into a park and fired rubber bullets during a May Day immigration rally are now no longer on the street.
	Bratton said he spent the weekend viewing video of the MacArthur Park incident and he said LAPD failures were widespread with officers from the top on down culpable.
	In a few moments, we're going to go to unscreened, open line phone calls.
	Anything you want to talk about us for a game?
	Oh, by the way, next hour, I'm really, really looking forward to this.
	Dr. Daniel H. Wilson will be here talking about artificial intelligence and robotics and his belief, apparently, that robots will rise up and kill us all!
	That's right, Terminator type robotics.
	Anyway, if you'd like to call in and make a comment, here are the numbers quickly.
	West of the Rockies, toll free 800-618-8255.
	800-618-8255. East O' the Rockies. 800-825-503.
	Area code 818-501-4721.
	Wildcard line, folks.
	Area code 818-501-4109.
	818-501-4721. Wildcard line folks, area code 818-501-4109.
	We've got a lot of those, so a good chance to get in.
	Area code 818-501-4109.
	And finally, if you're outside the country altogether, we've got a toll-free line for you.
	Get hold of your international operator and tell her you wish to call 800-893-0903 in a moment.
	Some of the rest of the news.
	By the way, last night's program with the brother I thought was extremely educational.
	From, and I think I said it toward the end of the program, many people will take it in many different ways, and it could indeed be taken many different ways.
	I suppose there's a lesson in fundamentalist Catholicism.
	I guess you could take it as an insult to the current state of the Catholic Church.
	You could take it as underlining many things I've said about fundamentalism, no matter where you find it.
	You could take that show and its contents many, many, many different ways, but it was extremely educational.
	Okay, scientists in the U.S.
	say that initial data from a new way of scanning Mars has now shown up to half of the red planet's surface may contain ice.
	The new method of scanning for water offers vastly more accurate readings than anything previous.
	The data could prove vital for the Phoenix Mars mission which launches this August and which will put a lander on the surface and it will dig for ice!
	The new data shows wide variation as to how deep below the surface the ice is.
	The deposits far beyond the ice that is known to exist in the planet's North Pole could be so large Were they to melt, they'd literally deluge the planet in water, forming an ocean that would cover the whole planet.
	That's a lot of water!
	Big Brother is getting closer every day.
	In Britain, the British government is Taking Big Brother pretty literally by adding lip-reading technology to some of the four million or so surveillance cameras now already in place in order to identify terrorists and criminals by watching what everybody says.
	Electronic Design is reporting the Home Office is interested in a project being pursued by a senior lecturer in computer vision At the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, computer-based lip-reading technology would help video surveillance systems spot people planning a crime or a terrorist attack by literally watching suspects' lips move for clues.
	They did that several years ago, began it actually at a Super Bowl game that I went to, so now it'll move from facial identification to What's the guy saying?
	Boy, I'll tell you.
	Consider someone who's just died of a heart attack.
	His organs are intact.
	He hasn't lost blood.
	All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating.
	That's actually quite a bit the definition of clinical death, actually.
	And his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen.
	But what actually has happened?
	Has he really died?
	As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Newland wrote the bestseller, How We Die, the conventional answer was that his cells had died.
	The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen.
	This process was understood to begin just, oh, four or five minutes after the heart stops.
	The patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he's unlikely to recover.
	The dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope.
	What they saw amazed them.
	According to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, after about an hour we couldn't see evidence the cells had yet died.
	We thought we'd done something wrong.
	In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.
	But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who's been dead for an hour?
	Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed.
	It was that astounding discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers, treating the dead.
	Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death, not passive extinguishment like a candle flickering out when you cover it with a glass, but rather an active biochemical event triggered by reperfusion, the resumption of oxygen supply.
	The research takes them deep into the machinery of the cell to the tiny membrane-enclosed structures known as microchondria, where a cellular fuel is oxidized to provide energy.
	Microchondria control the process known as apoptosis, I guess it is, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body's primary defense against cancer.
	It looks to us, said Becker, as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being Reperfused with oxygen.
	Something throws a switch that makes the cell die.
	With this realization, came another.
	That standard emergency room procedure has it exactly wrong, backwards.
	When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky, he'll receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital, but...
	The rest will have gone 10-15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department.
	Then what happens?
	We give them oxygen, says Becker.
	We jolt the heart with paddles.
	We pump in epinephrine to force it to beat so it's taking up more oxygen.
	Blood-starved heart muscles suddenly forced and flooded with oxygen.
	Precisely the situation that leads to cell death.
	Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce That's reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism, and adjust blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.
	In other words, we're doing it exactly backwards.
	Speaking of hearts, here's a man in Montreal with no heartbeat.
	Yet he lives.
	He is a 65-year-old Quebec man who received a new long-term mechanical heart last month, which is being described as... Well, he's being described as the only living Canadian without a pulse.
	Dr. Renzo Sassier implanted the HeartMate II mechanical heart into Gerald Langvin in a three-hour operation November 23rd.
	Officials at McGill University Health Center say the device, which is about the size of a flashlight battery, Might last up to ten years.
	Now that's quite a few more years than conventionally you get.
	What they currently have lasts two or three years.
	So he has no detectable blood pressure whatsoever, and no heartbeat, and yet he lives.
	Cost about a hundred grand.
	They paid for it.
	Good news for those of us who were, and I certainly was, very dismayed at the cancellation of Dead Like Me.
	I thought that was a great show.
	The dark comedy about the trials and tribulations of a group of grim reapers.
	Gonna come back to life, at least briefly.
	Dead Like Me, the popular Showtime TV series starring Mandy Patkin and Ellen Moth, I interviewed Ellen Moth, is returning as a made-for-DVD movie.
	MGM told moviehole.com that Stephen Herrick, the Mighty Ducks, will direct the new film.
	No word yet who's going to be starring in the film, but I hope they keep the original cast.
	All right, there you have it.
	All the rest of the news.
	Let's now move to one of the wildcard lines and say, good morning.
	You're on the air.
	Morning, Art.
	Yes, sir.
	Good morning.
	Where are you?
	I'm in Oceanside, California.
	Oh, beautiful town.
	Welcome.
	Yeah, sure.
	It's what we call Ocean Bottom here, but that's... Anyway, don't be depressed about the world situation, Art.
	I mean, you know, there's no reason to be.
	Eventually, we'll just die off this planet and everything will be cool.
	Once we're gone, we won't be here to recognize it or appreciate it, but... No, I know all that's true.
	Of course.
	But still, still, one day I would like to come in here and be able to read you all nothing but good news.
	I understand that, but on the other hand, you know, there is one good thing to look forward to.
	I'll make really good pets.
	Good night, Art.
	Good night, sir.
	Have a great night indeed.
	And moving on to another wildcard line, you are on the air.
	Well, actually saying you're on the air is perhaps a bit premature.
	You have a cell phone connection that is less than usable.
	Gone, huh?
	Well, that's life in the new cell phone universe.
	You know, cell phones?
	Why even start?
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air!
	Hello!
	Hi Art, this is Stephen calling you from Mill Valley, California.
	Hey there, Stephen.
	Hey, Robin Falcov's wonderful effort is apparently having tremendous impact.
	The vote in the Senate has been delayed twice now.
	Apparently, as I scan through all the news, this is because of the massive response.
	They're trying to recapitulate toward it.
	So what I'm going to be doing tomorrow, bright and early, is calling both my two U.S.
	Senators and my Congressperson again, and going again through the detail.
	I'm going to call their Washington office.
	Apparently, that's about the most effective thing we can do.
	I've heard the second thing is a fax, and the third, of course, is an email, which they just throw away.
	And because faxes are received electronically, probably about the same thing too, so call folks if you can.
	And if you want the full detail on this, either go to Richard Hoagland's site or just Google Dr. Robin Falcov, that's 1-B-R-O-B-I-N-F-A-L-C-O-V.
	Alright, and we're urging them, excuse me, we're urging them to do what?
	To not pass the Senate bill they're attempting to put through.
	For the exact number on the bill, I believe it's 1082, but I don't have that paper right in front of me.
	Google up the site or Robin.com and you get the exact...
	The Senate bill which would do what?
	This would cause dietary supplements to be...
	Oh, that one.
	Oh, yeah.
	Still got the G.O.?
	I have a little Chevy now which is just like the G.O.
	All right.
	I've still got my Festiva, and we're cruising along here in Mill Valley.
	And I use it 90% of the time.
	It's a wonderful little car.
	My wife has a driver's permit.
	She's about to take her test, and we use that car for just about everything.
	Tomorrow we will use it to go to Las Vegas for another visit, which now will be on a weekly basis until Asia Rainbell joins us June 1st.
	What a day that's going to be.
	First time caller line, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Excuse me.
	Hello, Art.
	Good evening.
	Just calling about the storm in Kansas, the tornado.
	It was classified as an F5.
	It was an F5.
	205 miles an hour.
	Oh, my God.
	It's terrible.
	I live in Colorado.
	I'm not, you know, in the Denver area and just can't imagine the devastation out there.
	Well, the pictures, as I mentioned, are circulating on the internet, and the devastation is just about complete.
	I saw one building standing among the rubble.
	It was awful.
	Absolutely.
	It was just a wipeout.
	Yeah, and we had a tornado here in Colorado in a small town called Hawley just a few weeks ago.
	Same thing.
	Just terrible devastation with the storms that we're getting nowadays.
	Unbelievable.
	I mean, they do occur elsewhere, but they're almost exclusively in North America.
	We've got that unusual combination of, you know, moisture, and hot air from the south, and Canadian air from the north, and so on.
	Every spring, every fall, we get this weird... And I'm afraid we're going to get more and more of them, and more of them are going to be F5s than ever before.
	It seems that way.
	Okay Art, thank you.
	Appreciate it.
	Thank you very much for the call.
	Yeah, I looked carefully at those photographs and really most of that town is reduced to matchstick size stuff.
	I mean, there were a few obviously bigger pieces, some parts of buildings, but these were brick buildings.
	These were wood frame buildings.
	These were not mobile homes.
	These were well-built homes, and they simply were wiped out, if you can imagine that.
	It's hard to even imagine they will rebuild that town.
	They might!
	But if you look at the photographs, it's hard to imagine they will.
	It'll be interesting to see.
	Americans are... I kind of thought they wouldn't rebuild New Orleans, where New Orleans is, but they did.
	So...
	We tend to bounce back, but boy, take a look at those photographs.
	If there was ever anything you might not bounce back from, that would be it.
	It was complete devastation.
	Awful stuff.
	Alright, we'll break here and be right back.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	A beautiful night in the desert.
	About 60 degrees out there, even at this time of night.
	It's just beautiful.
	Nice night to take a lot of calls, and that's what we're going to do in just a moment.
	We'll be right back.
	Well, all right, here we go.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Well, you're a dial tone, so you're not on the air.
	West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	I'm calling, I'm concerned about the bees.
	It seems to be that our news media doesn't find it newsworthy, I guess.
	I've emailed a gentleman that I watch, Glenn Beck, constantly on the issue, hoping that he would pick up.
	To no avail.
	And, uh, I'm wondering, uh, by connecting the dots, I remember Einstein once said, uh, if the bees go, so does civilization.
	Within four years, humanity.
	Yeah.
	And, uh, you know, something else I'm, I'm wondering, this is conspiracy theory, I know, but, you know, I'm kind of thinking about the X-Files.
	I know I watched an episode, uh, uh, dealing with the bees.
	And then I started thinking about all these microbiologists that have, that have died.
	And it's funny how that's, that's like, Amazing.
	And yet, there's no accounting for all these scientists, microbiologists that have died.
	And I start looking at that, I start connecting the dots, and I start wondering, gee, is this just all I mean, I don't know, it's crazy.
	I'm not sure they're connectable dots, but certainly we have lost a disproportionate number of microbiologists, scientists.
	We have lost a lot of our bees, and in fact, what, 60% nationwide, I think 27, 28 states now, something like that.
	So something awful is going on, and it involves the environment.
	Now I don't want to suggest, yes I do.
	Look, the political conservatives in America are not really wild about environmental concerns.
	So, you know, I'll leave it for you to judge those who mention this disaster and those who don't and what their motives might or might not be.
	Well, Art, the one that I guess I was following this in the internet, Shaney is taking a look at this.
	I don't know.
	It's scary.
	God, I hope that they get a lock on this, because if they don't, we might just start facing getting used to eating, I mean, having bread and water.
	All our food crops, just about everything is affected.
	Well, we've got climate change obviously going on.
	That's going to affect agriculture.
	The disappearance of the bees should have become complete and permanent.
	We'll sort of finish it off anyway.
	One other thing, what do you make of the microbiologist?
	I mean, that is just, it's mind-boggling.
	What do you make of that?
	I really, I have no comment because I have no proof that there's any A specific agenda being executed.
	Yes, I did intend to use that word by anybody out there.
	I just don't have any proof, so I don't know any more than I know about the bees.
	But I know that our climate is changing and if the bees on top of that disappear and we're unable to pollinate crops, we're in an awful lot of trouble.
	Try East of the Rockies again.
	You're on the air, hi.
	All right, hello, good morning.
	Good morning.
	I'm calling from New Jersey.
	Yes, sir.
	I wonder if you're familiar with a project known as Operation Wetback.
	Operation Wetback?
	Yeah.
	Concerning immigration.
	I would assume so.
	No, I'm not.
	But go ahead.
	1955-1956, I believe it was, President Eisenhower signed an executive order ordering the Justice Department and the Corporation of the Interior Department to approximate or over four million, they assumed at that time.
	Where in less than 15 months, over 2 million of them were deported.
	And the funny thing about it was that those who came from Mexico, they actually bused them back.
	Those from the Caribbean, they actually put them on ships, and South America put them on planes.
	In other words, it was something that can be done if you apply yourself.
	Now, just one more thing about immigration.
	Are you familiar with something called N-I-T-I-N?
	No.
	Individual Taxpayers Identification Numbers?
	Well, I know what those are, yes.
	Yeah.
	The IRS is giving those out to people who can't get Social Security Numbers.
	Mm-hmm.
	It was something signed into law by President, uh, Mr. Clinton.
	1996.
	A 10-year period from 96 to 206.
	Over 10 million of those identification numbers were given out.
	Approximately 8.2 million of them went to illegal immigrants.
	Now, Homeland Security is responsible at this time for finding, you know, doing their job, which they're not doing very good at, finding them and deporting them.
	The IRS refuses to give them the names of these individuals, claiming that it's against federal law.
	Which I think is the most absurd thing you can ever think about.
	Just one more last thing.
	Well, alright.
	Before you get to one more last thing, if they're here, and if they're earning money, then why shouldn't we get our tax money?
	I mean, if we don't give them numbers, then they don't pay tax at all, and that hurts us even more.
	Let me tell you how much taxes were paid in that 10-year period into the Treasury.
	$59 billion from these individuals.
	$24 billion was sent back in refunds, mailed to their houses, mailed to wherever they were living.
	A net of $25 billion that was added into the Treasury in a 10-year period, which is approximately $2.5 billion on average.
	Now, with income that comes into this country of, I think, $3 trillion a year, what is $2.5 billion?
	Is it worth it when you consider... I thought you said $25 billion.
	$59 billion was brought in.
	$24 billion was paid back in refund checks.
	So you get an average of $25 billion.
	Thank you.
	Average that out 10 years, $2.5 billion.
	Out of the Treasury, it takes in over $3 trillion a year.
	Okay, but your argument still does not stand up.
	If they're here working, we might as well get the tax revenue, whatever it is.
	As opposed to not getting it at all.
	That's not to say that I support illegals being here, because I don't.
	Period.
	However, getting the tax revenue is of assistance to the country.
	These are separate issues.
	In my mind, they're separate issues.
	Might as well go ahead and get the money.
	From my point of view.
	Otherwise, that's more money that you and I may have to pay.
	Right?
	Now, the argument between the federal agencies and the issues of privacy, I certainly cannot resolve that one.
	That'd be like tearing your IRS refund in half or something.
	I don't know.
	I remember tearing the baby in half.
	I can't make that kind of decision, but we might as well get the money.
	Now, as far as illegal aliens are concerned, we obviously have got to do something.
	We're being overrun, and I fully support whatever measures they'll take, whether that's building a fence, whether that's extra patrol people on the border, whatever it takes, we've got to stop the illegal immigration.
	We have a right to protect our country, enforce our borders, and we have more of a reason than ever to do so, because Many coming across, or at least some, I guess, coming across, are not just coming here for better conditions, to send money home, to get a job.
	We can well imagine some coming across could have evil intent.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Yes, good evening, Art.
	This is Mark in Florence, Oregon.
	How are you doing tonight?
	Just fine, Mark.
	Yeah, all right.
	We'd spoken briefly last month about the aspect of the Luciferian doctrine as related to the globally elite wealthy of the planet, and you probably remember that conversation, I have a feeling.
	I do.
	And tonight I'd just like to take it one step further, and you had posed the argument basically that when the economy's going well, That's when these people would prosper the most, owning the world's economy essentially.
	The industrial and the manufacturing sectors.
	In other words, why would those who are profiting from a cooking economy want to screw it up and ruin it?
	Right.
	And in a way that question that you pose answers another more important question about what is really at the seat of power as far as the objective Of those who actually have control of the world's economy, and many believe control of the world's political structure.
	And to give a short answer to it, it's basically to control men, and eventually to control men's souls.
	When it actually gets into the area of being a trillionaire art, they've got many times more money than they could ever spend, but they continue to furiously amass it And they do control the world and the people of the world in mosques through their method of social engineering and what is referred to as the Hegelian dialectic, which is a philosophical way to implement changes into the world, which will bring about the kind of world that they want to have, which is really nothing that either you or me or
	Any common person, basically, on the planet would want to see the world be that way.
	What kind of world do you imagine that to be?
	Well, Art, the way things are going and the way, you know, there are so many areas that are deteriorating in the world at this point.
	But to look at what seems to me, and I think I believe you also, to be the most pressing issue upon us, which would be euphemistically, I think, all climate change, it's really Global heating, beyond global warming, basically.
	So little has been done to remediate this in any sector, whether or not it be chlorofluorocarbons, which I firmly believe that chlorofluorocarbons finally exhausted the transformative ozone gases, which gave us the cooler green and blue rays that we got in the summer and the springtime of the sun.
	Now we're getting ultraviolet year-round.
	And that's what's melting the glaciers, and that's what's drying the woods out and causing all these forest fires around the world.
	They're paying absolutely no attention to it, but they do pay very close attention to managing the affairs of the planet.
	That's really not true.
	We did cut down on CFCs.
	The ozone, to some degree, has repaired itself, so we did a little bit of good there anyway.
	Well, I hope so.
	I truly hope so.
	In other areas of perpetuated wars and unnecessary wars, And economic deprivation and starvation and famines, all of this, there's just been plenty down here as far as resources and technology goes, that we shouldn't have these ills as a race.
	Tell me something, how are these evil men controlling the world, controlling you?
	Controlling me individually?
	Yes.
	Well, just simply by how much it hurts me already in my heart to see my fellow creatures suffer.
	On a needless basis, and I could apply that to the Iraq War, and both sides of that, the U.S.
	troops, as well as the almost million Iraqi civilians who have died there.
	And that war was gone into on a pack of lies, Art.
	Yeah, I'm not going to get into an argument trying to defend the Iraq War with you.
	I was absolutely against it before it happened.
	And my position now is that we have to find a way to win and get the hell out.
	And I felt that way for some time with reference to Iraq.
	We're there.
	I wasn't happy about the fact that we went in.
	Now we've got to figure a way to win and to get out.
	We're probably not going to get out because one of the unstated goals was to put bases in Iraq, which we certainly have done and I think we're going to stay there and we're going to protect them and we're going to We're going to have a presence right in the middle of the Middle East, and I'm not sure that's wrong.
	I think that to some degree you could look at it this way.
	As bad as the news is daily from Iraq, with the number of Iraqis and Americans being killed, we are killing the enemy there.
	We are killing people who would kill us.
	Now, it really is an argument that can be made That's better there than here.
	Right now, the enemy is throwing most of their assets, their human assets, into the war in Iraq.
	If we were not there, and if we were not in Afghanistan as well, I think they'd be here.
	That's just something to think about.
	First time color line, you're on the air.
	Good morning!
	Going once, going... Hello?
	Yes.
	Yes, you're on the air, sir.
	Um, yes, I just wanted to discuss, uh, the Iraq War.
	Okay.
	Um, basically, you know, I know that we're in Iraq, you know, for security reasons, but it's hard for me to take that seriously since our borders here at home are pretty much completely open.
	Well, that's a bit of a stretch.
	They're not completely open, but they're certainly very leaky.
	Yes, sir.
	We have, you know, a pretty... It's not that hard, you know, from my understanding at least, for people, determined individuals at least, to come across our borders.
	And I just feel, you know, if one of these people wanted to harm us, it would probably not be that hard.
	And here we are in Iraq, you know, spending so much money every week to fight this war and to stabilize this country, and I feel like You know, that amount of money we could be spending on perhaps, you know, nuclear bomb sniffers or... You know, but here's something to think about, sir.
	There are plenty of people, as you know, who want to harm us.
	As of yet, that has not occurred, save, or since 9-11.
	So, somebody's doing their job.
	And doing a pretty good job, I must say of it.
	We don't hear about the successes they have.
	So, you might make the case that what we're doing in Iraq is concentrating our enemies' assets there instead of here.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I guess I just really feel like our, you know, being a taxpayer, I just wish my money was being spent to militarize our borders or do something to really protect the bulk of Americans here, you know, on our homeland.
	Uh, but you are correct.
	I'm sure that in some form, you know, the war in Iraq helps to, uh, avoid terroristic activities or for them to actually carry out the act.
	But from my understanding, most of the, you know, the best thing that we've done so far is domestic surveillance to stop terrorists who are here in our country.
	And we must be doing a pretty good job.
	Yes, sir.
	Yes, sir.
	I agree.
	All right, well, take care.
	If you do any travel around the world, there's terrorism, of course, is quite rampant in Europe, throughout much of the Far East, frankly, the rest of the world.
	And we've done a pretty good job here.
	Now, you just don't hear about the successes.
	CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, they must be doing a fairly decent job, and I'd like to commend them, because we just don't We generally don't hear about these successes, but you can argue that the lack of anything happening, even given the somewhat leaky, fairly leaky borders that we have, somebody's doing a pretty good job out there.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Going once.
	I'm here.
	Yes.
	I wanted to let you know that there is going to be a report about the bees on I believe CBS on the news.
	Yes, I had heard that.
	We discussed it last night.
	Somebody said CBS was going to do a story on it.
	Is that coming up tomorrow night?
	Yes, tomorrow night, yeah.
	And I must have missed that portion of your program.
	However, I've been listening since I was like 11 years old.
	And I'm almost 21 now, so you definitely have done the right thing all this time.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	I've made it a point in my life to try and listen to the news so that way I know what's going on, so things don't come and stab you in the back, you know?
	It's like, oh, where did that come from?
	How worried are you right now about the general state of things, the climate, the bees, all the rest of it?
	How worried are you?
	I'm worried to the extent that I'm interested in finding out answers, but I believe that no matter what happens, we as humans will get through it.
	It doesn't matter if it's alien, if it's global warming and the temperature of the Earth is going to go up higher, humans will adapt.
	In other words, we will prevail.
	I'm sorry, I'm going to have to cut it off there, sir.
	We'll be back and discuss robotics and more in a moment.
	I'm Art Bell.
	What a world we live in, huh?
	It is an amazing world.
	My wife, currently sitting in the other room, having simultaneous video conferences with her sister in Arkansas.
	Her other sister and her husband on the island of Mindanao, Southern Philippines, and then also chatting with her niece, who's at school in Cagayan, which I mispronounced, I'm sure, also on the southern island of Mindanao.
	All going on at the same time.
	It is an amazing world.
	And coming up, Daniel H. Wilson will add to it.
	Daniel earned a PhD from the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received master's degrees in robotics and data mining.
	Data mining.
	He has worked in top research labs including Microsoft Research, the Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, that's P-A-R-C, and Intel Research, Seattle.
	Daniel currently lives in a fully wired smart house.
	He is the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Which I'm particularly interested in, as well as, where's my jetpack?
	As well as a contributing editor to Popular Mechanics magazine.
	So, lots to talk about, coming up with Daniel H. Wilson in a moment.
	Dr. Wilson, welcome to Coast to Coast AM.
	Hi, thanks for having me.
	It is a pleasure to have you.
	I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
	I'm a really big fan of robotics, artificial intelligence, and such, and you're just the right guy for all of that.
	Thanks.
	Let's begin with AI.
	I'm very curious.
	By the way, I asked a guest a couple of weeks ago, when we were on this topic, did you see that movie, Artificial Intelligence?
	Yeah, sure.
	I really liked it, except for the second ending that they tacked on.
	It kind of went on for an extra 15 minutes, I think.
	Yes, I thought the whole thing was really, really excellent.
	Is that in our future?
	Yeah, I think a lot of that stuff is in our future.
	Although they, of course, in the movie they play around with some different possibilities.
	You know, they have Gigolo Joe, which is a robot that satisfies, you know, carnal love.
	And then there's, of course, the little boy, David, who satisfies more of, you know, a higher level sense of love. And there's a lot of indications that people
	do interact with humanoid robots the same way they interact with people,
	because they just the way that the robot looks, it provokes and invokes all
	of that natural built-in, all those natural built-in mechanisms for human interaction.
	And there's no way to turn it off.
	Actually, in the movie, there was no way to turn it off.
	They had, I think, five key words or phrases that would then initiate the bonding between the boy and mom.
	It was so good.
	Anyway, where in the world are we, in your estimation, with artificial intelligence?
	How are we going to even know when we get there?
	Well, artificial intelligence is a huge field.
	In any scientific endeavor, you try to nail down some really specific problem that you can solve, and you can say, okay, look, I did this, now let's go to the next problem.
	But AI is a really hard problem, because in order to make a human-level intelligence, you have to solve the AI hard problem, which is you have to solve all of it.
	And that's really, it's tough to do the whole enchilada at once.
	So what we have right now is a lot of research in artificial intelligence for Solving really specific problems, so it's not what most people think of when they think AI, but this is maybe, there are people who spend their entire careers working out vision algorithms that can, so you can have a machine that can look at a scene and then say, that's a cat, that's a dog, you know, the cat is on top of the dog.
	Or, you know, that's a human, he's running away.
	That kind of stuff.
	So, in terms of getting general purpose Artificial intelligence to a human level, I think that that's one of the hardest problems in robotics.
	I think it's harder even than the mechanical problems of building a robot.
	And there's one surefire way to know when you've reached your goal, and that's if you have a robot that can pass what's called the Turing test.
	Turing?
	Alan Turing was a mathematician and a computer scientist, and he came up with a test to determine whether or not your You can tell whether you're interacting with a human level intelligence.
	The really simple version, that's not a full robotic version, is you essentially go into a chat room with someone, and you talk and you're allowed to write whatever you want to write, and if you can't tell the difference between, if you can't tell whether the person you're talking to is a human or a robot, then Well, then we're getting close.
	We're getting close.
	Because, I say this, because when I was in the Philippines, I spent eight months there recently, and I forget, I had difficulty with something or another, and I did get into a chat program.
	And I'm telling you, Doctor, I guess it went on for 10 or 15 minutes.
	Several times I asked, are you a human?
	I got no answer.
	Well, actually, I did get a response, but it wasn't a direct response to that.
	It did finally answer the question, say no, and said no.
	But for at least 10 minutes, maybe 15, I had no idea what I was talking to.
	Yeah.
	See, and again, this is where the robots can really excel, is you probably were there for a reason.
	You probably were trying to solve some kind of specific technical problem.
	That's exactly right, yes.
	And so whenever they're what's called really domain-specific, so if the robot is in an area, it can learn one area really, really well.
	And in fact, the types of systems that solve those sorts of problems, they can diagnose medical problems, they're called expert systems, and all they are is just huge collections of rules.
	And they actually outperform, generally, whenever they get very specific, they outperform humans.
	Even surgeons, even, you know, doctors with years and years of experience will, they just don't have as, you know, as big a hard drive.
	Well, how do we make decisions?
	We're just nothing but a huge collection of rules, really, ourselves.
	Yeah, well, so, you know, people think that the difference between the way the human brain works and the way Most, the way a computer processor works is that the brain is just much more parallel, so it's got a lot of different processes happening at once.
	And there are a lot of, so artificial intelligence is really seeking to reproduce human intelligence, and so the researchers often draw inspiration from real brains.
	And I have lots of friends who are Neuroscientists, you know, I couldn't do it.
	They have to kill cats, you know?
	Is it a matter of processing speed or storage or both?
	You know, so I always find that it's really difficult to compare biological thinking with, you know, silicon thinking because naturally you automatically have differences.
	For instance, You can have you have a lot more storage space on a computer than you would have on a brain.
	And so there's no way to say what's the limitation.
	The limitation is really just how we use our resources.
	Right?
	So we have lots of storage space.
	We have lots of speed, but we humans don't know how to program the computer.
	Our learning algorithms don't learn fast enough.
	They don't learn well enough to replicate our abilities.
	Is there a way to actually speak to how much storage a human brain has?
	So, yeah, you can do stuff like this.
	This is, I think Ray Kurzweil gets into this a lot.
	And one way to do that, well, actually, so my advisor at Carnegie Mellon was really interested in something he called And I could be getting this name wrong, but he called it the Cyber Baby Project.
	And the idea was, you know, a lot of the reason why these AI algorithms, why the chatbots, they don't really, they don't really understand what you mean whenever you say ice cream or going to the park, you know, they don't have all those experiences.
	And so the idea is to put a camera on a baby, you know, from the baby's perspective, and microphone, and just record every single thing that happens for an entire lifetime.
	And then if you took that childhood and stored it on a hard drive, then you could ideally train an artificial intelligence algorithm to know everything that a human knows.
	And as it turns out, you can calculate how much data the eyeballs are collecting every second, if you think of it as video in a camera, and how much data your ears are collecting, how much data all your senses are collecting.
	And then, as it turns out, it's not that much.
	If you run a video non-stop, it's a lot, but it's not infeasible, even now, to store that much data.
	We are very finite.
	Everything we experience in our lives, someday, soon, will fit on every experience.
	Well, I know that processors certainly are increasing, I think, still exponentially.
	I don't think that any laws have stopped.
	It's still doubling roughly 18 months or so.
	I think Moore's Law is still in effect.
	Intel just announced another, some new approach that they've got to put more transistors in less space.
	So it looks like it's still going strong.
	Moore himself expressed some doubt about whether his law was going to be around much longer, but apparently it's still going strong.
	Yeah, it eventually has to end, but we'll see.
	Well, maybe, and then maybe there'll be a big breakthrough of some sort.
	At any rate, You know, I just, I do, more and more we're getting processors that are doing parallel, more and more parallel tasks.
	There's already, you just mentioned, plenty of storage.
	So at some point, we do arrive at something we would call artificial intelligence.
	And that point would be when you cannot distinguish a conversation you're having?
	Well, so artificial intelligence is just a field of research.
	If you want to say, I guess you would call that general purpose human level intelligence.
	Because so many people work on problems where they make really smart algorithms that learn really fast and do their job really well.
	So, for instance, if you've got a newer model car, or at least not an ancient car, when you hit the brakes, if you've got an analog brake system, you've more than likely got a neural network that's sitting in between you and the actual brakes, when
	you push down on the pedal, you're really just pushing a button. And the button tells a
	neural network, the human wants to slow the car down, and then it figures
	out how to slow the car down. Because honestly, as a human, you're not as good as it is actually
	stopping your car.
	You'll wreck your car.
	The analog brakes will keep you from wrecking your car because it knows more about braking than you do.
	And it's learning all the time.
	And you know what?
	It's really good at that very specific problem.
	Could it talk to you?
	No.
	Does it in any way resemble human intelligence?
	Not really at all.
	But it is AI.
	It is the crudest form, I suppose, of the beginning of AI, and in future years, they expect to get to the point where cars will drive themselves, and you'll be nothing but a passenger, right?
	Yeah, well, you know, we're... First of all, I wouldn't say that it's the crudest form of AI, because it's much cruder.
	But we've already got unmanned ground vehicles, so these are called UGVs, and I don't know if you remember Yeah, Nevada, I think it was, in 2005, they had the DARPA Grand Challenge.
	Yes, and it didn't go that well, did it?
	The first one did not go that well.
	The top car was actually from Carnegie Mellon, and it made it about 7 miles before it high-ended on a rock and broke an axle.
	The next year, after 12 months, I think at least 5 cars finished.
	They were actually passing each other.
	I think the head car, the winner, was from Stanford.
	I should mention that the guys behind the head car had just left Carnegie Mellon to go to Stanford, so a little pride there.
	But anyway, Stanford beat us out, it was humiliating, and their car, it was just a modified Volkswagen Touareg, and cars these days are so drive-by-wire, which they're just controlled by a computer that's sitting inside the car that can actually brake and accelerate and do all these other things, Uh, as part of different safety features, the car could actually, they just tapped right into that.
	They just tapped right into the computer, and then they put a bunch of sensors on the car, and it went 130 miles into something.
	I forget, you know, like 10 hours or something like that.
	It had an average speed of 30 or 40, but this is over just rough terrain.
	There were cliffs.
	Uh, really amazing.
	And next year, or actually later this year, They're kicking up the stakes, and now they're not going to be racing out in the empty desert, where no humans were allowed anywhere near these cars.
	Who gets blamed when somebody gets hurt?
	This year, they're going to be doing it in a mock urban environment, so it's really clear, it's really obvious what DARPA is going for, and that is unmanned ground vehicles that can operate in crowded urban environments with Following street signs, everything.
	And I imagine DARPA imagines weapons of all kinds on these vehicles.
	So actually, this is all really publicly available stuff.
	It's called the Future Combat Systems.
	And so if you look in there and you look and see what UGVs are called for, they're not primarily weapons platforms.
	One of them is a mobile ambulance that actually You know, so there's no place for a human to sit in these things.
	It makes them much more efficient.
	They can go further with less fuel.
	And so what this thing's supposed to do is go out on a battlefield, find a hurt soldier, open, you know, a little door opens, and it drags the guy in there.
	And while the person is in this little, basically a mobile coffin, there are robotic arms that are being tele-operated by surgeons, you know, back in the States.
	And so you have someone ideally doing Doing surgery, doing, you know, whatever has to be done on this poor soldier, you know, while he's getting taken out of danger.
	Better to think of it as a mobile ambulance, coughing is a little... You know, I'm not gonna be the guy writing.
	Remember Forbidden Planet, the movie?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Robbie the robot and all that?
	Yeah.
	Alright.
	When I was young, I went to see Forbidden Planet with my dad, and we all thought that by now, you know, I'm beginning to get long of the tooth here, we'd have Robbie and more, but it didn't happen.
	Yeah.
	How come?
	What happened?
	What went wrong?
	Well, so, you know, the field of artificial intelligence Really, they made some wild predictions early on, because they had some early successes.
	Some of the very first times that people tried their hands at AI, they were able to get some really great results.
	They had programs that could I mean, that seems really smart.
	They can play chess.
	You know, they could beat a human at chess, right?
	Oh, yes.
	This is a very, you know, you have to be a real smart person to play chess, right?
	You know, it's very cerebral.
	What they found out was that all this high-level thought, all these very, with a lot of, you know, games where you have a lot of rules, or math where you have, again, a lot of rules, this is the natural domain.
	For machines, just because you program them with rules.
	It's not natural for humans.
	That's why we think it's so hard.
	Well, it's a mechanical part of it, though, that didn't come through.
	Yeah.
	So if you know, and so it's everything.
	Essentially, it's everything a two year old can do is what was really hard.
	So recognizing shapes and colors, getting up and walking, learning how to walk after you fall down, learning to recognize speech, learning to recognize faces.
	Social stuff, you know, all that stuff, really, really hard.
	And as it turns out, if you look at the human brain, there's just huge areas of the brain that are devoted to all these things.
	There's the motor cortex, there's all the vision stuff up in the front, you know.
	We now, of course, have very good facial recognition software.
	Yeah, you know, it's okay.
	It's not that great.
	They tried to, it's not general purpose, right?
	It's really good if you limit the domain.
	Again, face recognition works really well.
	There's this program out there that will label all your photos.
	You give it all your digital photos and it goes through there and writes the name of everybody that's in the photo.
	So you can say, show me all the pictures of me and Grandma.
	I've got a really dumb question.
	Maybe you can answer this.
	They're newer cameras.
	I bought a camera in the Philippines when I was there.
	It's incredible.
	If there's a human In the frame, when you're about to take the picture, it puts a little square around the human's face.
	It's called a bounding box, yeah.
	Yeah, how in the hell does it do that?
	I've been wondering about that since I bought that camera.
	So, yeah, you know what's really impressive is that that's actually a pretty difficult task to find the face like that.
	And if it's on a camera, that means that they've taken that algorithm and they've put it on a chip.
	Anyway, it's actually not that hard.
	So it does feature recognition.
	It pulls out things that look like a mouth, things that look like eyes, things that look like, you know, ears and chin and all the major facial features.
	Dr. Wilson, it does it too well.
	I mean, very, very well.
	Listen, we're at a break point.
	Hold on, Dr. Wilson.
	Yes, it's true.
	Even if it's way in the back and hardly any part of the picture, it picks out the face and puts a little square around it.
	That's astounding.
	We'll be right back.
	I never really gave it a lot of thought until just now, but I was amazed.
	I bought that little camera.
	I think it was a Canon, perhaps a Canon, and the very latest, you know, 10 point something megapixels, really hot stuff.
	And after I bought it, I realized it was picking out faces.
	Now, that's an interesting technology when you think about it.
	No matter where they move, where they are in the room, it finds the human face and puts a little box around it.
	Now, how does a camera know how to do that anyway?
	And I know that we talk too much about the possible weapons applications of technology, but if a camera can do that, imagine what a gun could do.
	And I suppose it could look at the face and decide if the face is the enemy or a friendly.
	I'm not sure how it would do that, but if it can do what it does now, it can probably do that, and then it can probably order the trigger to pull.
	There's a terrible thought for you.
	We'll be right back.
	In the pressure of combat, Dr. Wilson, many friendlies are unfortunately killed.
	Friendly fire kills a lot of people.
	If a camera can decide where a human face is so well, and it does a great job of it, as I said, even if it's only a tiny, tiny part of the framed photograph, it still finds the human face and puts that little box around it.
	Then it seems to me, how big a step is it from that to, for example, deciding if that's a friend or foe, and whether the gun should shoot?
	Yeah, well, those are questions that are being asked right now by a lot of people.
	In fact, just today I actually read a document that came from the Naval Surface Warfare Center.
	It is a, basically, they're laying out, there's something called the Laws of Armed Conflict, or the Law of Armed Conflict, and this just says what you can and can't do.
	It's related to the rules of engagement and the discriminant use of force.
	And they're trying to figure out what to do with this when it comes to autonomous, you know, autonomous, whatever they call them, weapons platforms, right?
	Yes.
	And so what the latest is, what I've just read, Is that one way to get around this?
	Because you cannot, basically it's agreed that you cannot have a machine that's going to not have a human in the loop.
	There always has to be a person welded to the machine to give it the go ahead to actually use any lethal force.
	Because actually discrimination is really, that's a key part of law of armed conflict.
	Any weapon has to be able to discriminate.
	You have to be able to Target what you're after.
	You can't just drop something that's gonna, you know, kill everybody and have all this collateral damage, you know.
	Right.
	Uh, that's a huge strike against it.
	So, so instead of, but what they're trying to get away from is actually having to have a person there all the time, because these things are obviously much more efficient if there's nobody, you know, watching the trigger.
	There you go.
	So here's what they came up with, and I think this is really interesting to think about.
	Machines only attack machines.
	And if And humans kill humans.
	So this is the way they've got it set up, and they have a lot of precedents that they've laid out.
	There's something called a captor.
	It's a sub-hunter, and what it does is it's basically a mine that sits on the bottom of the sea, and when a submarine comes by, an enemy submarine, it launches a torpedo.
	It's just like a mine that only kills submarines.
	there are other tank mines, things like that, that won't trigger for people, but they'll
	trigger for tanks.
	What's really interesting, so they're saying that this has already been done before, but
	what's really interesting is the number one thing that they're concerned with is that
	the enemy will spoof a system designed to only attack machines, and they'll intentionally
	try to get it to kill people, because it'll be a very bad publicity for the machine, and
	obviously it would mean that the machine was used inappropriately, right?
	It doesn't sound like the three laws are exactly in place.
	Well, you know, the three laws, I think, are a beautiful thing.
	And, you know, they're not in place.
	The machines are being used pretty much in whatever way they can.
	I mean, for the record, sticking a gun onto a mobile robot is nothing new.
	It's already happened.
	In fact, Samsung has a mobile gun.
	Actually, wait, it's not mobile, it's just a sentry.
	So it's this gun with a camera on it.
	It's exactly like, I mean, it's very similar to the camera that you have.
	And what it can do is, it's sitting along... South Korea bought a bunch of these things, and apparently they're deploying them along the demilitarized zone, and they're just going to sit there, and they watch, you know, though I think it's a one and a half mile swath there, and they recognize people.
	And if people come too close, I assume It'll shoot at them.
	Or will there be a human watching the camera making the decision to shoot?
	That's up to South Korea.
	So not necessarily?
	Yeah, not necessarily.
	You know, in the United States, we do have a lot of rules in place and a lot of mechanisms for determining when the rules are broken as well.
	Well, you know, I've had, when I do this kind of program in the past, Doctor, you know, you get a lot of people writing saying, it is so immoral, are sending out machines to do the killing for us.
	But then, of course, you get a quick rush of people saying, what?
	What are you talking about?
	Immoral?
	That's not immoral as compared to sending our young men and women out to do the job and dying in, well, every day we get the news from Iraq, right?
	Yeah, that's true.
	And so far in Iraq, there have been a lot of mobile robots that have saved lives by going out and tagging the improvised explosive devices, right?
	So instead of having a man walk over and kick a junk pile to see if there's a bomb in there, they'll send a robot.
	And I've actually, at conferences, met Marines who have used these things, and they're intense.
	Of course, they're there to sell them.
	Particularly what I'm talking about is the Talon.
	from Foster Miller.
	It's a really cruel looking robot.
	It's black.
	It's really scary looking.
	But apparently, you know, it does its job.
	And they get blown up and they get repaired in the field all the time.
	Well, better the talon than somebody's leg or worse.
	Yeah, that's true.
	And you know, they're talking, you know, they envision A lot of times, you know, this is not my area.
	All my research is in smart houses that take care of elderly occupants.
	So, you know, this is way out of my league, but they do envision sort of this future where, you know, you have a gun, it's a robot gun, right?
	You're carrying it, it's got a face recognizer, it's got all that stuff.
	What it's really looking for, though, is not faces, it's really looking for other guns.
	And so when you pull the trigger, It's kind of like that movie Shane, you know, it just shoots the gun out of the hand.
	And that's it.
	That's kind of a compelling scenario to imagine.
	Probably.
	It's way too optimistic to ever happen.
	Are you actually afraid that one day in our future, and I don't know how far it is, maybe not as far as I might imagine, robots will rise up and make some sort of decision to kill those that made them?
	You know, no.
	You don't believe that?
	No, I don't.
	I, you know, the book, the book is in the humor section and, you know, how to survive a robot uprising.
	The thing is, I'm not personally afraid that a robot uprising is going to happen, but, you know, you never can, you can't be too safe, you know?
	So, all the information that's in the, you know, it's all real.
	I mean, I didn't, I literally asked people if, you know, How can a humanoid robot be this, how tall, how big could it be?
	Could it be the size of, you know, like what you see in Star Wars?
	And it's really interesting to ask roboticists this kind of questions because they'll come back with real answers, you know?
	They'll work it out on a napkin and say, Well, look, if we can imagine a situation where robots do rise up or do make a decision that is not in our best interest, then probably it can happen.
	Most of what we have imagined in the past seems as though it's happened.
	Well, I think we tend to focus on the stuff that happens.
	You know, there's a lot of patting yourself on the back whenever another thing from Star Trek comes true.
	But yeah, but I wouldn't say that just because we can imagine it, it's possible, although normally that's an optimistic thought.
	And then there's a follow-up question here.
	I mean, all this indicates that you sort of did believe that, but apparently not.
	The single best tip to keep in mind when fighting a robot would be?
	So if you're fighting a robot, the best tip is to go for the sensors, because when you're designing a robot, the sensors are always the most sensitive.
	Areas of the robot that are prone to error.
	So things like cameras, you know?
	Cameras are just, relative to the rest of a robot, they're just so delicate, you know?
	So they're also going to be the best protected though, aren't they?
	In other words, if you're building a robot and you know it's going to go into combat, then you're going to protect the most sensitive parts.
	Yeah, that's true.
	In a robot uprising, which is what I consider, you're not necessarily fighting.
	Military robots.
	If it's a robot uprising, that means all the servant robots decide to come at you.
	So now you're fighting your Roomba, right?
	But, as it turns out, the sensors are the most delicate, and they also have the most constraints, because a lot of times they'll have to be... For instance, a camera has to be line-of-sight.
	It has to have... You can't put it behind a thick piece of steel.
	For instance, I actually worked for Northrop Grumman for a little while, which is a big military defense contractor, and we were working on an autonomous boat.
	So it's just an unmanned surface vehicle, a boat that drives itself.
	And we were not allowed to use any active sensors.
	So sensors that bounce signals off of other things, like a laser rangefinder or ultrasonic sensors, you know, operate the way bats echolocate, because that gives away your location immediately.
	And so It was much harder to design this thing without any... And what do you use for sensors in, if you can't do that?
	Well, you use passive sensors like cameras and microphones, but you can't use any active illumination with your cameras.
	So, you know, you might actually just have a spotlight next to a camera normally, you know, for visible light, or you might have an IR light source, you know, with an IR camera.
	Sure, sure.
	So, so yeah, just cameras and microphones.
	That's pretty much what we had to deal with, which makes it pretty tough at night.
	And you did it?
	Well, yeah, we got it out there.
	It was, you know, it was very docile for a military robot.
	It was called the Rowboat.
	And it got out there and it tootled around.
	And yeah, oh, it had GPS as well.
	Yeah, it had some, and of course an IMU and some things like that.
	Just so it could figure out what its orientation was.
	And yeah, there were a lot of really confused people on the river out there.
	It was in Pittsburgh, the Three Rivers area.
	You'd jump them out there and it was really clear that there was no one driving that boat.
	Wow.
	How long might it be, Doctor, before we actually do have servant-level robots?
	You know, the question is whether we want them.
	You know, it doesn't really seem like Americans want it as bad as the Japanese and the Koreans.
	So if you look at the pace of humanoid robotics research, in Japan they're really focusing on humanoid robots that are going to be servants.
	They are definitely going to go into your home, they're going to pick up all your tools, they're going to use your broom, they're going to wash your dishes.
	Just a total general purpose servant.
	And that's a long ways off.
	It's a really optimistic goal to reach.
	Why do you think Americans, as opposed to the Japanese, are not as interested?
	You know, I'm not sure.
	I think instead of looking at why Americans are not interested, I think first it pays to look at why the Japanese are so interested.
	And I think part of that is their culture, obviously, and some religion.
	There's a really good book on this called Loving the Machine.
	Which is all about why the Japanese love robots.
	Part of it has to do with Shintoism, which is a religion that associates sort of a life force with every inanimate object, including robots.
	So they think of them naturally as something that's alive, and so they forgive them for not maybe performing up to a standard that makes it worth the money to buy them.
	I'll be darned.
	You know, actually, I found that the United States, we're doing a lot of work on humanoid robotics, don't get me wrong.
	Part of the reason why the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are really interested in humanoid robots that are going to be in our houses, helping us out, is because in the States, all the baby boomers are going to retire, or are starting to, and Japan and Western Europe, they're also noticing that.
	The population, the demographic is skewing so that there are a lot more retired people than there are workers.
	There's nobody to take care of everybody that's retiring.
	And the robots are literally the only caretakers that a lot of people are going to be able to have.
	Are they going to be that good that soon?
	Are the Japanese going to be able to come up with a robot that is going to be sufficient for those needs?
	Well, see, the Japanese are going for the whole thing all at once.
	And in the States we tend to Compartmentalize all the problems and try to solve them separately.
	Now, here's a thought-provoking idea that I just heard.
	I just interviewed this guy a week ago for a Popular Mechanics article, and he's a humanoid robotics guy, and his name's Trevor Blackwell, and he's running a place called AnyBots, Inc., and he's got a really impressive pneumatically-powered humanoid, but it's got no brain.
	You know, it's got no intelligence, and I was asking him, What's his vision?
	He says he wants to build a humanoid robot servant.
	They're going to go into the homes.
	His vision?
	Outsource the intelligence to a human being in another country.
	So you've got a robot.
	Now this is thought-provoking.
	This honestly scares the bejesus out of me.
	In my own research, my research is all about putting sensors into people's houses, and the sensors Connect to an AI, and the AI basically figures out what your patterns are, and then it looks for functional decline.
	Like, most of the women in my family are nurses.
	My mom's a case manager.
	She's a nurse that visits people in their homes and makes sure that they're able to do what they can, that they can perform all their activities of daily living.
	If they can't, she gets someone in there that helps them out, and that's what this computer does.
	I can't use cameras.
	Um, you know, it's hitting me what you're saying.
	So some guy in India somewhere will be sitting in front of a monitor deciding how to direct this robot to do what you want.
	Well, no, he'll probably, now depending on how complicated the robot is, he may, the guy in India may have his hands in gloves so that he can teleoperate the robot's arms and hands so that he can do something.
	Like dexterous manipulation is really tough.
	Uh, for things that are slippery or things that are deformable.
	Right.
	So washing dishes is pretty tough.
	There's a robot that can do it, but it has to have specially colored dishes and it uses plastic dishes for obvious reasons.
	Um, but you know, why, why do all the research?
	Why not just have a guy put his hands in some gloves and let, let a human do it, you know?
	So, uh, so this is, this is the idea at AnyBots.
	The problem is that there's a, there are human eyes behind, uh, Behind, you know, the robot cameras.
	And that's kind of scary.
	It is.
	That's part of the good stuff of a robot, is that you know there's nothing going on there.
	You know, it's like, so my cat saw me get out of the shower.
	Who cares?
	That's right.
	Now, you know, when there's a robot in the house and it's, you know, that could be scary.
	It could be scary with some guy in India controlling, oh my god, That one hit me pretty hard.
	I just thought about it, and I don't want one.
	Well, so what I found in my research, which I was, you know, I will talk about my research all day, so feel free to tell me to shut up about it.
	So what I found in my research was that I could not use cameras to, you know, there's this, what I found basically was that if you're going to invade somebody's privacy, there has to be a huge perceived benefit.
	There has to be, you're really doing something that's crucial.
	Because nobody wants to give up their privacy for nothing.
	You know, and I totally agree and understand that.
	That's why, you know, that's why these people let my mom come into their house and ask how they're doing.
	Maybe if you were bedridden, completely bedridden, you might make that level of decision.
	To bring in a... Well, you know, I mean, there are a lot of ways, I think, to depersonalize it.
	You could make the robot stay in certain areas.
	It wouldn't probably be one person.
	Controlling the robot, they would probably trade off and shift so that the robot could be active 24 hours a day.
	That doesn't help me.
	Well, you know... Yeah, it'll be... I'm very interested to see if this will take off because, you know, different people are comfortable with different levels of technology.
	It might take off.
	I mean, just your having said this opens up so many possibilities.
	Oh, my God.
	You know, the labor force over there is so inexpensive that I'm really afraid it makes sense.
	Well, this does make sense if you actually turn this equation upside down.
	There's something called Robonaut, which is a NASA humanoid.
	It's actually a human almost exactly from the waist up.
	It's got the same number of joints, the same number of everything that a person has.
	And what that means is when you control it, there's a one-to-one mapping.
	And so Robonaut has been used by highly specialized experts to do research, you know, to teleoperate research, instead of having someone... Doctor, hold tight.
	We're at a break point, and I've got to think about this outsourced intelligence for robots in your home.
	What do you say, folks?
	I'm Art Bell.
	We'll be right back.
	Here I am.
	If you just joined us, Daniel H. Wilson.
	Dr. Wilson, who earned a PhD from the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received Master's degrees in Robotics and Data Mining, is with us.
	And he's talking about Artificial Intelligence Robotics.
	In a moment, we'll ask about Terminator robots.
	Alright, Dr. Wilson, what about the possibility of Terminator robots?
	Yeah, so Terminator, the T-1000.
	Everybody remembers those endoskeletons marching across a field of, you know, human skulls, right?
	That's right.
	So, you know, if, God forbid, you end up in a situation where you've got a Terminator coming after you, as it turns out, they can run as fast as your car.
	They can?
	That is possible.
	A humanoid robot could.
	There's no theoretical reason why a humanoid couldn't run that fast.
	Except, it would be really likely to overheat a robot.
	It would mess up the joints.
	So, it probably couldn't sustain a speed like that for very long.
	Yes, but it might not have to.
	Really, what you want to do is escape, though.
	You don't want to stand up and fight.
	So, really, it's all about fooling the sensors.
	Because that's a robot's weak spot.
	They're not really good general purpose thinkers.
	So, Terminator might be good at tracking you down.
	So what you want to do, for instance, is it'll be looking for skin colors.
	So you might want to cover up your skin or put on some kind of camouflage.
	Well, another thing is it'll actually lock on to the... trackers will generally lock on to the clothing that you're wearing in order to disambiguate you from the background.
	So if you can't actually get something, some kind of cover, like something substantial between you and the robot, then get some clutter in between yourself and the robot.
	And that's just anything visually that's gonna make it harder for the robot to see you and figure out...
	Like visual chaff.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You know, and that's something else that's interesting about...
	It's really hard for machines to figure out the physical properties of objects that you throw.
	So it can't tell, for instance, if you throw a rock, whether it's a rock or a balloon,
	or what the physics of the object is.
	One last ditch thing you might do, is if somebody else is wearing something similar to what you're wearing, you can just run over there and give them a big bear hug.
	What'll happen is, you'll turn into, you'll combine into one entity, really.
	If you think about that bounding box that, you know, is on your camera, where there's two boxes around two different people, when they hug, they combine into one box.
	That's true.
	50% chance, you know, it'll chase the other guy.
	So, you have that going for you.
	Well, this is all with today's technology in mind, right?
	Yeah, this is all with today's technology in mind, you know, extrapolated into, you know, this would be a believable Terminator.
	This would be a Terminator that's obeying all the rules.
	I'm still very worried about outsourcing the intelligence for a robot.
	That one hit me hard.
	Yeah, it's compelling.
	Yeah, it really is compelling.
	How did you respond to that, by the way, when you heard it?
	Well, you know, I thought the piece I was writing, which is still in the process of being edited, was really all about the differences between Japanese and American approaches to creating humanoid robots.
	What struck me about that was that it was really innovative.
	It is a heck of an idea.
	And the Japanese are coming up with all the cool robots.
	I mean, they've got, I've seen them.
	I've seen them.
	The most amazing, yeah, that's it.
	Japanese are doing it and I just, I do, I really do wonder why.
	And if you move over to the American side now, why are we so much against the idea?
	of of humanoid well yes it's because there's no basically it's because there's no bottom line uh... we're really driven by robotics research is driven a lot by health care uh... you know how we're gonna deal with the baby boomer crisis so that's where i got all my money for instance to do my research it's driven a lot by darpa uh... which that does not necessarily by the way mean whatever you create if you produce it on darpa money that's gonna have a gun attached to it i mean these uh...
	The agency that funded the development of the Internet, you know, and a lot of other really basic, fundamental research.
	But the original intent of the Internet, if I recall correctly, was something that would survive nuclear war.
	Yeah, you know, this is what, okay, so this is a little point, this is a little rant that I'd like to go on.
	It'll just take a second.
	Sure, go ahead.
	So when you get money from DARPA, right, Everyone will assume that you're evil, you know, and that's part of why I wrote How to Survive a Robot Uprising, is because I wanted to say, you know, look, robots are not always evil, and the people that are making them are definitely not evil.
	We all have these great applications in mind, and we need money.
	So you get things.
	One of my favorite examples is I have a lot of friends who work on something called RoboCup, and RoboCup is where you get a team of five or six, I forget how many, Robots who all cooperate together to play soccer.
	And a lot of the RoboCup money is from DARPA, and what happens is once a year, when DARPA comes to visit, they take these really cute little AIBO dogs, they look like little soccer-playing dogs, they are the cutest things you've ever seen, and they put them in these tactical warfare situations.
	And it's a lie!
	It's just fundamental research about multi-robot cooperation.
	And sure, DARPA wants to use it for its own reasons, but everybody doing the research, they all have a lot of other reasons that they're really working on it.
	It doesn't necessarily involve DARPA, just their money.
	And so that's my rant, where you say, just because you got money coming from the military doesn't necessarily mean you're working on something evil.
	But there's a fairly decent chance that you are.
	You know, I've seen it from both ends.
	Working at Northrop Grumman, Um, you know, I was thinking, you know, I had to get secret clearance to work on that project.
	I had to give my fingerprints, you know, and I was expecting some really cool stuff.
	I was thinking, okay, once I get behind this door, I am going to see the secret world of military defense contractor work.
	And it looked exactly like university, except honestly, I think that we were doing, we were doing much better work at Carnegie Mellon.
	Well, take the HAARP project, for example, in Alaska.
	That began as sort of a communications research project.
	I don't know if you're familiar with HAARP or not.
	No, I'm not.
	It's an ionospheric heater.
	Okay.
	It throws tremendous amounts of RF up into the ionosphere.
	And originally it was to do communications research and that sort of thing.
	It was taken over by DARPA, and now there are better-than-rumors that say, well, they're thinking they can bounce this immense RF, modulated a certain way off the ionosphere, and confuse enemies on the battlefield, or worse, at a great distance.
	So, there's an example of DARPA taking over and perhaps modifying the goals a little bit.
	I don't know.
	I'm a little suspicious of that, because as far as I understand it, and I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm not, DARPA is a funding agency.
	So what they do is, they lay out a grant, and they say, listen, we want a lot of unmanned ground vehicles, and we need to have them by this date.
	And they'll say things, like literally they'll say, two-thirds of the trucks in the military by 2020 will be unmanned.
	And then they say, who wants money?
	And universities, military contractors, everybody jumps out of nowhere and they say, hey, we can do this.
	You should fund us.
	And so I don't know if they take things over, but they may be funding that research.
	Doctor, you have a smart home, right?
	You know, I recently moved, but when I was When I was doing my research, I did run tests on my own data.
	How smart!
	So what my house specialized in was really using non-invasive sensors, so sensors that don't bother people.
	And what I stuck to was anything that you can find in a public restroom.
	When you stick your hand under the faucet and the water comes out, that's the sensor, you know, that's detecting your presence.
	So motion detectors, contact switches.
	I filled my house up with those, and then I put in a learning algorithm that could learn to spot when it was me, when it was my roommates, when it was just the dog.
	We've tended to find that the dog would place itself equidistant between all the people in the house.
	And just create this noisy data that was just awful, because it was systematically noisy.
	It's pretty easy to get rid of noise if it's random, you know?
	Right.
	So what happens is it has to be really smart about predicting things, because I'm not giving it a lot of data.
	I'm not giving it, for instance, a camera image of my face, because it's just never going to, you know, people, it's never going to fly, especially in the bathroom.
	So what I found with this research is that it's completely possible to do it, and What I really found personally is that, you know, humans, myself included, are just so predictable.
	We put our socks on in the same order every day.
	Sure, sure we do.
	It's really easy for a machine to pick up on those things.
	So, your house was, well, beyond the water turning on.
	What else could it do?
	Well, okay, so there's, in a smart house you've got two aspects.
	You've got the tracking aspect, right, like figuring out I call it Simultaneous Tracking and Activity Recognition.
	And then you have, what does it do for you, right?
	I did not focus on the what does it do for you.
	But what's actually what's really interesting about this research, the big picture, right, if you go forward years and years with this, is not what can it do for you, but why does it do it?
	So learning causal rules.
	In order to improve your life.
	So, the application here... Sorry, I think this is really cool.
	The application here is to put one of these smart houses in, let's say, an Alzheimer's ward, where you have a situation where you don't want people to wander off.
	And it might learn, over a period of time, that people afflicted with Alzheimer's tend to avoid dark hallways.
	And if a machine learned that, in order to decrease the probability that someone is going to wander out of an open door, it might turn the lights off.
	And in that way, it's not saying it's impossible, it's not closing a door, it's just reducing the possibility, the probability.
	And learning really complicated rules like that could be pretty interesting.
	Very interesting.
	How far you could go with that is, I think it's arbitrary.
	When do you think, Doctor, that robots will actually be part of our daily lives?
	Or what will be the first that will enter our lives?
	Well, so, in the United States, like I said, we're doing a lot of research in robotics that's very application-driven.
	So you're going to have a robot that does one thing, it does it well enough that people will buy it, and it does it well enough that it won't screw up and get someone sued.
	Right.
	In that arena, we've already got a couple of great examples.
	So first of all, I'll just throw out toys.
	So obviously, there's always going to be robot toys.
	They're just getting smarter and cooler.
	And don't even get me started talking about them.
	I'm the robot guy, so everybody in my family has that aunt who's always looking for something related to it.
	So I have all that stuff.
	But in terms of more practical things, we've obviously got Roombas.
	We've got these vacuum cleaners.
	That do a really specific task, and they do it well enough that people buy them.
	And they don't look like human beings, either.
	They don't look like vacuum cleaners, because they have some specific application, and they take the form best suited for that.
	And then the other thing we have are cars that have started parking themselves.
	And, I mean, I'm talking the wheel turns.
	You put the car in the right position, you tell it to park, you let go of the wheel and keep your foot on the brake, And, you know, it parks itself.
	I think these are the new high-end luxury cars that do this, like the Lexus.
	You know, I wasn't aware of that.
	Yeah, it's... A Lexus will park itself?
	It's uncanny.
	And it also is interesting because it brings up a lot of liability issues, right?
	I mean, so if your Lexus scrapes against someone's car, whose fault is that?
	I mean, ideally it's, you know, your fault.
	And I think that's That's part of the reason why you actually have to have your foot on the brake while the Lexus does its intelligent parking.
	Now, will it parallel park?
	Yeah, that's what it does.
	Oh my!
	Yeah, and it's pretty wild because it actually turns the steering wheel.
	And so, what this means is, it means that the car's computer, it has cameras so it can tell what's going on out there, where the other cars are at.
	I'm pretty sure that it has radar, so it's bouncing radar off of the other car to figure out where... That works really well with cars.
	Not really well for detecting pedestrians, because the radar goes right through pedestrians.
	That's right.
	That's where cameras come in handy.
	So, it does this, and then a computer can actually send a command to the steering wheel, and the steering wheel will turn.
	And that's called drive-by-wire.
	And whenever the computer can send a command to the brake, and actually brake, that's, you know, brake-by-wire.
	All these things are by wire.
	What that means is, if you want to turn that car into a completely autonomous vehicle, then you don't have to do much mechanical work.
	You know, you don't have to set up a steering wheel turning robot.
	You don't have to do any of that, because the car can already drive itself.
	Alright, let's take the case of the Lexus.
	You say it can parallel park itself, but it would not recognize a human behind it and in front of the car that it's about to parallel park in front of, right?
	So it might squish a human.
	There's a good chance that, yeah.
	I'm not sure about that.
	I don't want Lexus calling me.
	Why not simply combine the technology that you say already exists for parallel parking with my camera that finds a face?
	Okay, so this is exactly what they're doing for the DARPA Urban Challenge.
	What's called an Omnicam, so it's a camera that faces straight down into basically a conical mirror.
	Right.
	So it can see 360 degrees at once.
	Right.
	Because that's the main difference from highway driving and driving in the city, is you have to be aware of everything around your car, because you can accidentally hit somebody if you're not paying attention.
	Whereas if you're on the highway, you just need to look straight ahead pretty much.
	Sure.
	So yeah, this is already, all of this is going together.
	What's really interesting is there's something called the SLAM problem, the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping.
	And this is where you've got to figure out where you're at, and you have to form a map of the local, of the area that you're in at the same time.
	And the way to do that is to figure out which things around you are static, like a mountain, or a lamp post, And which things are moving, because you can't use the things that are moving in the same way as you can use a landmark type thing.
	And so that means figuring out who the people are, and that can mean some face recognition stuff going on.
	So these cars are really, really aware of their local area, and they have to be.
	By the way, I haven't tested it, and I should.
	I wonder if my camera would recognize the head of a human turned away from it, or only one turned toward it.
	Ooh, man, I would love for you to, uh, to, you should, I have a, I have a section on how to fool face recognition with a lot of different, um, so one thing that you can also do, what that face recognition is doing in your camera is it's finding two dark, it's basically finding a triangle of dark spots that correspond to two eyes and a mouth.
	That's pretty much how they do it, and there's the same ratio, so that's how it can do the scale, right?
	If a person's right up in the front of the camera and their head's really big, or if their person is very far away in the background and their head's really small, the ratio between that triangle stays the same, and so that's how they can solve the scale problem.
	Now, one thing I suggest is to, this is something tropical fish do, If you were to put a big black dot in the middle of your forehead, or... You know how a tropical fish will have a big black dot on its tail?
	And it makes it look like its eye is on the other end, and so whenever it moves, it fools the predator, which is looking for the fish to turn the other direction.
	So if I were to put a big black dot on my forehead, my camera would not know it was a face.
	It probably wouldn't recognize it as a face, because it wouldn't be able to get the right ratios out of that.
	It might recognize the wrong face, You know, further up or something like that.
	But it would definitely screw with it.
	That's very interesting.
	So if somebody wanted to screw with law enforcement's facial recognition software, they would do it the same way?
	Or is it sophisticated enough to get around that?
	Well, I think a lot of the law enforcement software Well, first of all, if you put a big black dot on your forehead like that, you're probably going to be more conspicuous than if you didn't.
	The thing there is you probably just want to put on a mustache or some other type of less conspicuous... And this is why, you know, the computer... The thing is, if you're doing face recognition and you know that the person you're looking at is one out of ten people, let's say, You got it.
	Or maybe it's nobody.
	So you got like a 1 in 11 chance of getting it right.
	That's, you know, you can do really well.
	By the way, I read a story, Professor, earlier tonight.
	The English are now combining lip reading software with facial recognition software.
	How?
	9,000 anyone?
	You know they made reference to that in the article.
	Alright, hold tight, we're at another break point.
	Dr. Daniel H. Wilson is my guest.
	We're talking about AI and robotics.
	I'm Art Bell.
	There's actually a question in here about what you would do if your smart house turned murderous.
	And of course, that would never happen because, well of course Dr. Wilson has programmed it very carefully, but Maybe there's a potential question here about a virus in the house.
	That's something to think about, and we'll ask about it in a moment.
	Dr. Wilson, the whole prospect of a smart house is really cool.
	I really, really like the idea, and I don't imagine for one second that it would become murderous and turn against you, but in this day and age, I would imagine that, for example, it would be irresistible to have part of your smart house hooked up to the internet.
	Now, that would mean that potentially somebody could gain access to the software controlling your house and they could put in some sort of virus or something that would literally turn it against you and it would murder you.
	Yeah, that's when you flip the switch from good to evil.
	Someone dials in and flips that switch.
	I think that smart houses and servant robots can be really scary because they're so intimate.
	It's something you're going to be around all the time.
	And especially with a smart house, it'll learn all your patterns.
	It knows exactly what you're going to do.
	And it knows the routes you take through the house, it knows your patterns in the morning.
	Sure, so if it went evil at the hand of someone else, the other side of the world, it would know you so well, it would get you in a flash.
	Well, you know, I think that it's all about preparation when it comes to the hypothetical scenario of escaping from your smart house.
	What you really need is a plan, you know, kind of like I don't know.
	When I was a kid, I had to practice the fire escape plan, you know?
	Which route do you take in order to get out of the house?
	You know, and this could involve some sort of emergency supply stash.
	So you've got, you know, let's say an axe.
	The house is going to probably try to distract you with a lot of loud music or it may even try to use evil robot logic.
	Everyone knows that exists.
	And so what you do is you just go through the house.
	You destroy the sensors whenever you see them.
	With the axe, you can chop holes through walls if you have to, until you're able to get all your family members together and escape.
	The thing to remember, though, is once you get out of the house, you're still not safe, because if you're living in a smart house, chances are you might have a smart lawnmower.
	Or a smart car, you know?
	So you've got to keep your eyes open, you know?
	So the house might be connected to the car and the lawnmower and all the rest of it, so there's any number of ways you could die.
	Well that is a really practical, that is a really practical aspect actually of having a smart house is it can, it collects all this information that it can share.
	I saw a really cool study where There's a mobile robot that's in the house, and the thing is, you know how you do that dance whenever you're at the grocery store and somebody's going down the aisle?
	Oh yes!
	You don't want to be doing that with your robot all the time in the house.
	No!
	I mean, what would be more annoying than that?
	So, I saw a study where they actually used data from a smart house, from an embedded sensor, to tell a mobile robot when to get out of the way of a person that's walking through, which seems a key thing.
	They have refrigerators now that tell you when to restock, and I suppose that could be turned against you somehow.
	Anyway, let's move on.
	Your latest book is about technology that never was.
	There's a lot of that, and the jetpack certainly is one of them.
	Where in the world are our jetpacks?
	We were supposed to have them by now, and I thought they were cool then.
	I think they're cool now.
	Why don't we have them?
	Yeah, the jetpack, first of all, is key, and it's also a metaphor for all the other technology that, you know, we kind of thought that we would have.
	Jetpacks, you know, so the lowdown on jetpacks, really quick, 1961, a guy named Wendell Moore gets an Army grant, he's got some money, he's working for Bell Aerosystems, so he's working for an aerospace company, and he has money, and he's got the facilities, and he builds the Bell rocket belt, and it only takes him about a year.
	Essentially, what he did was he took a small rocket lift device, a type of rocket that's used on airplane wingtips to maneuver really high up where there's not much air, and he stuck it on his back and tested it himself with a tether, and he flew, right?
	For 30 seconds.
	Right.
	And that's the major problem, is that this thing was invented in 1961.
	I think they made about four of them.
	And a lot of people tested them.
	Wendell Moore actually eventually shattered his knee and never again went up in his rocket belt.
	But there are rocket belts now available for purchase, but they're all copies of this.
	Really, by now, the technology seems like it should have been updated in the intervening years.
	However, the Army, once it got the product that it paid for, Realize that it was not going to be useful for soldiers.
	Normally soldiers are trying to hide behind things, not hover 20 feet over the battlefield like sitting ducks.
	So the Army wasn't interested in continuing funding, and so since then there's been no concerted effort.
	And it's really, I think, an instance where it shows how, if you've got funding and a high degree of cooperation between a lot of
	people, you can get science done really fast and you can achieve
	really amazing results.
	But if there's no huge call for it, then it's up to the individuals who are
	operating not on funding but on childlike awe,
	you know, intensity, the desire to have these things.
	Well, I would probably buy a jet pack if they were available.
	I mean, generally available, and work without shattering your knee.
	Well, the 1961 jet pack, which is what's available, only has 30 seconds of fuel before it sends you careening toward the ground, which is a major drawback.
	Well, it is.
	So, but you can, there is a company that you can actually hire Powerhouse Productions will send a celebrity impersonator over to your child's birthday party in a jetpack.
	Really?
	There are some other drawbacks.
	I try not to focus on why we shouldn't have jetpacks, but just where are they and where can I get one or steal one or build one if I need it.
	But another drawback is that it's shooting out superheated steam, so it's really hot.
	You've got to get one of those white Elvis jumpsuits.
	Really flashy, heat-resistant, and also it's really loud.
	Oh yeah, but you know, if they had been working on it all this time, it seems to me that we really would have a practical jetpack that probably would give you more than 30 seconds.
	Yeah, I completely believe that too.
	And in fact, Wendell Moore did get additional funding from DARPA in 1969.
	He made another He made a legitimate jet pack.
	The Bell Rocket Belt is technically a rocket, so it's technically a rocket pack.
	He built a jet pack, which was a jet engine on your back, and this thing was more substantial.
	It was a lot bigger, and it had a parachute on it because it lasted, I think, geez, I mean, 10 times as long.
	I mean, 100 times as long.
	It lasted maybe a half hour or something.
	Wow.
	The problem is, again, Well, actually, the problem is that Wendell Moore passed away, had a heart attack, and passed away during the course of this research, which caused the funding to get cut, and then it was, you know, broken down and used in a different flying device, and that was that.
	Half an hour is a long time.
	Half an hour, 30 minutes, long time.
	Yeah, I think if you want to see it, it appeared in an Ovaltine commercial.
	So, that was the era for that.
	I see.
	Look, back when we did all this and we thought it was coming because we have the science fiction telling us it was, it wasn't moving quickly.
	We thought it was, but it wasn't.
	Is it now?
	Science is moving faster than ever, yeah.
	And I think, you know, what I look at really is how optimistic are we about science, right?
	In the fifties, everything was great.
	You know, I mean, technology is going to solve every problem you can think of.
	There's a technological solution.
	And, you know, then it seemed like there were a lot more dystopian scenarios of the future for a while.
	You know, the Cold War, you know, we're going to wipe ourselves out.
	And now I'm looking around and I'm really happy to see, you know, I think that we're returning to an optimistic outlook now.
	There's this situation where we have these Wealthy benefactors who are offering, you know, huge cash rewards for anybody who can do these great things, like, you know, there's the X Prize, and America's Space Prize, and a lot of other prizes, and this is kind of, you know, reminiscent of all the great prizes that were offered for people who can, you know, cross the Atlantic point.
	Exactly, right.
	Go to the polls, things like that.
	And, you know, I'm happy to see that people are being optimistic about the technology.
	Well, I have a friend who is orbiting satellites privately right now and plans eventually to have a space station in which we can all perhaps take a vacation one day.
	I mean, he's actually working on that.
	Your friend doesn't work for Bigelow Aerospace, does he?
	My friend is, Mr. Bigelow, yes.
	Yeah, so this is something that I've kind of caught on to a little bit.
	So, the X Prize was offered to anybody who could take a ship up about 70 miles and do it again, and hang out there for a little while.
	And if you look at that, what you see is that when you get to 70 miles, two things happen.
	You can see the curvature of the Earth, which is really beautiful, and it reminds you that, you know, it's not flat.
	It's finite.
	You know, remember how the huge impact that the first image of Earth from space had on the public consciousness?
	Tremendous.
	And the other thing is you're weightless.
	What's more associated with space than being weightless?
	And what this means is space tourism.
	People want to go.
	They don't want to go to 50 miles.
	That's just like being in an airplane.
	You go to 70 miles, though, and now you've got something people will pay for.
	Well, the next big prize is offered by Bigelow.
	Yeah, and it's the America's Space Prize.
	And this is to the person that can get a ship up about 200 miles around where the shuttles go.
	And then can dock with an inflatable space station, which is a space hotel.
	He's well on his way, believe me.
	See, everybody's talking about moon vacations, but I know that we're going to be getting space vacations first.
	That's right.
	And that's great, man.
	I can hardly believe that that's even something people are really legitimately working on, and it's just wonderful.
	It is.
	In September, I plan to go up in the Zero-G plane when it gets to, actually it's already in Las Vegas, and see what weightlessness really is like.
	You know they call it the Vomit Comet, right?
	Yeah, they do.
	But, I'm sure you'll be fine.
	Stephen Hawking did it, you can do it.
	Well, that's how I feel.
	If he did it, I can do it, and I'm looking forward to it.
	It's just, it's hard to imagine.
	The closest we can get to it is diving, but real weightlessness, just floating in the air, it's got real appeal.
	Yeah, that's my favorite thing about diving, too, actually, is just that feeling that you're flying.
	Yeah, so... It's close, but it's not real weightlessness.
	Nor, I suppose, is the vomit common, but... No, I think, you know, it's free fall.
	That's what weightlessness is.
	That's what kind of freaks me out about it, is your body, you know, has evolved, obviously, for gravity, and so when you are weightless, you're going to feel like you're falling, like you jumped off a building.
	That's right.
	And, you know, that makes people throw up, it makes people do different things.
	I mean, imagine trying to get used to that.
	You know, it's amazing.
	Well, people do.
	Yeah, they do it all the time.
	Apparently do get used to it and become, I guess, comfortable with it.
	Yeah, you know, I wonder if an astronaut can come back to Earth and just, you know, trip and fall off a cliff and just be totally cool with it.
	I don't know about that.
	Anyway, how many more years before we begin seeing I don't know.
	What do you see in science fiction where robots are roaming about the house?
	How many more years?
	Well, you know, we've got those.
	They're doing it right now.
	Not commonly, though.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Well, but I think that that's on the short horizon, seeing special purpose robots that are around the house, you know, and it's kind of, I've noticed this thing where, you know, when I started writing this, I was thinking, You know, I was out of a bar conversation, and I said, you know, where is my job?
	Where is all this stuff?
	You know, I was kind of incensed.
	And then I started looking, and I realized, you know, we got a lot of it.
	It's just that we immediately, immediately take it for granted.
	As soon as we have some technology, it's just part of the scenery.
	There's no mystique about it.
	And it just becomes completely mundane.
	Doctor, would it be possible one day to program a machine to love, to love unconditionally much as we saw in AI?
	Well, so yeah, that's an interesting question and I think it boils down to the difference in hardware and between human beings and between machines.
	And so if you think of love as being some sort of chemical reaction in a human brain, Then, you know, no.
	If you want to make that kind of robot, just, you know, have a kid.
	But in terms of having a machine that perfectly mimics all the physiological symptoms of being in love... Right.
	Yeah, we're all over that.
	And you know what is amazing?
	Actually, this is... Sorry, I get excited about robots.
	What all the researchers have found is that human beings will just project like crazy onto anything that's even remotely animal-like or lifelike.
	So there's this really great... You know, it's one thing to be weighted on hand and foot by a robot.
	Actually, I don't think that's really that healthy, particularly for someone who's losing their functionality over time.
	What's really good is to give somebody something to take care of.
	To give them something that empowers them so they feel like they're, you know, useful.
	And there's a robot called Paro, who looks like a baby harp seal, which is awfully cute.
	It's a little white thing with big black eyes.
	And as soon as you see it, I mean, you just, you can't help it.
	You want to pet it.
	I saw it at a conference and it was handed around a room.
	Every roboticist was, I mean, these are people that are familiar with being around robots, But they were pushing each other out of the way, just to pet this thing.
	Yeah, this is something the Japanese are doing a lot of, right?
	Yeah, these social robots.
	Yeah, these cute little things.
	The thing is that everybody, if it looks at you, and it squeaks, and it sounds, I mean, you just project on it and you say, this thing loves me.
	The same thing you would say to your cat.
	Would your cat eat your corpse if you passed away in your house?
	Yes.
	Does it love you?
	Everybody says yes, of course.
	You know, it doesn't really, Sorry, that's an awful example.
	It doesn't really matter, though.
	People project onto their animals and onto their robots equally.
	Yes, I guess that's true, but a cat... well, it does love you.
	Yeah, it appears to.
	I jump out to it does.
	I think it's got Do you have cats?
	Yeah, I do.
	I've had a cat for a long time.
	Okay.
	They do seem to love you.
	They do seem to have an emotional range that's quite amazing.
	They have jealousy.
	Yeah.
	They have just every range of, just about every range of emotions that humans have, I can see in cats.
	Unless that's me projecting.
	Well, I mean, if a cat feels jealous, I mean, it's cat jealousy, right?
	But what you're projecting is you're imagining that it feels jealous the same way that you feel jealous.
	And, you know, the more human-like an animal is, you know, the better, the easier it is to think of it as a human and to anthropomorphize it, you know?
	So cats are little furry animals and, you know, if you back up far enough and you squint your eyes, Humans are little furry animals, too.
	We're not that different.
	Now, if you compare a human to, say, a starfish or something like that, it gets a little tougher.
	And they found that whenever they give robots human-like qualities, you get a lot of the natural human mechanisms.
	So there's this one robot that's kind of getting old now.
	It's called Kismet.
	It's at MIT.
	And one thing that Kismet could do, it basically looks like a little gremlin.
	You remember Gremlins?
	Oh, of course, yes.
	It's a great movie.
	It looks like a gremlin, and what it can do that's interesting is it can reliably manipulate a human's position in a room.
	And the way it does it is it looks really cute, and if you're standing too far away, it'll kind of squint its eyes and lean forward.
	And you just naturally, completely naturally, you step forward because it can't see you, right?
	But it can.
	It's manipulating you.
	Some programmer said, Let's see if this works.
	If you step too close, it opens its eyes and it jerks its head back.
	And you step away.
	And it's amazing to watch videos of this thing manipulating where people stand.
	And it's doing it completely through very natural human social interaction.
	And so if you take that and you project what could be done, and look at the next 20 years or so, I would imagine you could just about totally manipulate a person.
	Well, you know, those rules are there for a reason.
	It's so we can work together, and hopefully it'll help robots work together with humans.
	Hopefully so.
	All right.
	We're going to turn this over to the audience.
	Let them ask questions.
	What a great guest, Dr. Daniel H. Wilson.
	AI, robots, and more.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Here I am.
	My guest is Dr. Daniel H. Wilson.
	Now, he is an expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.
	So if you have a question in these areas about what can be done now, what's going to be done shortly, And how you'll handle it.
	And, oh, by the way, I'd love to know how you feel about robot intelligence being outsourced.
	That one just hit me right between the eyes.
	I'd love to hear it.
	So, any questions for Dr. Wilson?
	Coming up next.
	Interesting.
	I was thinking about unconditional love, Dr. B., just before we go to the phones.
	I truly believe my cats unconditionally love me.
	I really do believe that.
	Now, some of that may be me projecting what I think based on, I don't know, their instinctual reaction, so a lot of it may be me projecting, but I truly believe they love me, so it couldn't be that hard down the road to produce an artificial intelligence that probably can go past What my cats, the emotion my cats are able to produce, or my, what would be the right word, my projection of that, yes, so that wouldn't be so hard, would it?
	You know, I think that it's there.
	You could do it.
	I wouldn't over, I wouldn't underestimate how easy it is for a cat to do that.
	Cats are pretty complicated.
	Yes they are.
	So it would be pretty tough to duplicate the abilities of a cat with a robot, even just those abilities.
	But you know, they actually showed that the Paro robot, when people had it, they gave it to elderly occupants at a nursing home.
	Right.
	And they were given this robot and they actually showed That they had higher reports of happiness, lower blood pressure, things like that.
	They had real physiological effects.
	So, whether or not people say they're in love with it, whether or not it instills all these feelings, the bottom line really is whether it helps you or not.
	And in that case, it does help those residents there.
	Well then, if they really got cooking on this, if DARPA really put some money behind it, which they're unlikely to, we really probably... Oh look, I'm going to go to the lines.
	Don in Omaha, Nebraska, you're on with Dr. Wilson.
	Hey Art, thanks for making me fall in love with radio all over again.
	Sure.
	I have a question I think you're both going to like.
	Have you tried using your camera to take pictures of your cats?
	Does it focus in on their faces?
	Or is the ratio wrong?
	And I want to ask your guest, if that doesn't work, are they working on something that will get kitty and doggy faces, too, in the little box?
	I will, I'll test it.
	I, you know, I can't answer that offhand.
	I'll give it a try.
	Yeah, that would be very interesting to see if that works.
	I would say that that is a problem that you could solve with the same, the same algorithms.
	The way that those things work is You sort of tell it, you tell the learning algorithm what the answer pretty much is.
	You just give it an example of a face and then you give it, you know, a thousand examples of faces.
	Are the ratios that different between people's faces and animal faces?
	I think that you would have to train one to recognize an animal face and then train another one to recognize the human face.
	Um, what would be tough?
	I think that those ratios probably are.
	What happens is that that ratio that I mentioned is just one feature that is used to figure out where the face is and then what's going on with it.
	And there are a lot of other features that are like skin color and all kinds of stuff.
	And so for an animal, it might be that those features change.
	There might be different ones.
	So skin color and all that does play into it as well.
	Yeah, that might go out the window, you know?
	My cat.
	I know you've got to go on to the next call, but I just want to tell Art real quick that I used to hate cats and now I love them.
	I don't know what happened, I just got old.
	And they're good to have when you're old.
	I don't know why.
	I've had them since I was quite young, so I'm glad you've caught on.
	They're amazing, amazing creatures.
	They are complicated.
	They're a little more standoffish than dogs are, so they're not for everybody, but they're amazing animals.
	Tom in Seattle, you're on with Dr. Wilson.
	Hi.
	Tom?
	Yeah.
	Dr. Wilson, hello Art.
	Hi.
	I've been privileged.
	Some years ago to have a few alien abductions and I have run into alien artificial intelligence on several occasions and on one instance I had a trip to a strip of foil that had a master programmer and it was populated by alien programs that were designed to do various functions.
	How do you know it was artificial?
	Well, it's a really fantastic experience to go into.
	Yes, I know.
	But again, I ask, how do you know it was artificial?
	How do you know it wasn't real intelligence?
	Biological intelligence?
	Well, I could see orbiting electrons around copper atoms.
	The computer was based on the data storage of altering the orbits of electrons around the atoms, and you could see that inside the machine.
	And the entities would come up and talk and so on.
	In another instance, I ran into a dead alien that was 450 years old, required by law to die, and had his mind installed inside a machine.
	I think you're ahead of us here.
	You're just a little bit ahead of us, Tom, in terms of what we're discussing at the moment.
	Carl in Missouri, you're on with Dr. Wilson.
	Hello.
	Hello, Dr. Wilson.
	Art, how are you this evening?
	Yeah, this is Carl in Missouri.
	I was wondering, Dr. Wilson is a man of considerable intelligence himself.
	Are you artificial intelligence or part artificial intelligence, Dr. Wilson?
	Not yet, you know.
	I do misplace my keys a worrying amount of time, and there is some research in Prosthetics, you know, extra memory for a person.
	So, for instance, you might have a camera that accompanies you everywhere, and then it remembers where your keys are, and you simply ask it, or it remembers the faces of people you meet.
	You never, you always remember.
	Yeah, it probably built it into a cell phone.
	Yeah, they probably will.
	Yeah, and the cell phone goes everywhere with you, you know.
	That would be very useful.
	Simply point your cell phone at the face, and it gives you the name.
	Yeah, I was wondering if Dr. Wilson had heard of a program that occurred slightly after the Roswell crash, about 49 or 50, that began in incurring artificial intelligence into human agents.
	And this program was terminated when Kennedy was assassinated in 63.
	What was this program?
	Uh, there was a program, uh, to, uh, um, uh, well, actually machine, uh, uh, existence, uh, uh, and, uh, machine intelligence has existed, uh, you know, um, other, uh, otherworldly, uh, you know, considerably longer than, uh, than even human existence has existed on this planet.
	But, uh, um, there was a program, uh, uh, initiated by the United States government, uh, shortly after the Roswell crash.
	To combine human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
	What you're saying out here, when you're saying all these saucers and stuff, they may contain aliens and stuff, but the saucers and such are intelligent machines.
	Okay.
	Carl, again, I think you're a little bit ahead of us, buddy.
	You're not aware of any such program, are you, Doctor?
	No, not aware of that.
	I know that the term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956.
	That's when they got started with that research, was in the mid-50s.
	Now here is a question for you, which occurred to me as he was speaking.
	We're beginning to approach the time when people are starting to talk about taking the contents of a human mind and eventually uploading it to a machine storage unit.
	Yeah, you know, that's another thing that Kurzweil is into.
	It's a way to live forever, right?
	Potentially, yes.
	Yeah, you know, I think that it may be possible to... So the interface between a brain and a computer is pretty complicated, and right now there is some really cool research in brain-computer interfaces, and it's not... I mean, you know, it's very far away from uploading your mind Uh, onto a computer hard drive, but what it's all about now is it's about starting to figure out what the electrical activity in your brain corresponds to, uh, in the real world.
	So for instance, uh, the most there's a, there's a company called cyber kinetics that has taken a human test subject, a person who sadly is in a locked in state who has no control over any part of their body and except their brain.
	And so what they do is they actually open up the brain and put electrodes into the surface, and the electrodes pull out the electrical activity that's happening there.
	Right.
	And it happens, you know, that electrical activity happens for a reason.
	So if you stick it into the motor cortex, you're listening to a person trying to move their limbs.
	And people have actually been able to move computer cursors, Anything that you can connect to the computer, you can move with your brain here, and it's really useful if you lack control over your limbs.
	Now, that would have application for, for example, flying an airplane, and having much faster reactions than you could possibly have using your hand.
	Yeah, you know, I write a little science fiction in my spare time, and this stuff is really interesting.
	Actually, I just wrote another thing for Popular Mechanics, where at the University of Washington, A kid there used a version of this, non-invasive, just a skullcap with electrodes on it.
	He didn't actually poke a hole in his head.
	And he used that in order to control a humanoid robot, to tell it really high-level commands, where to go, what to do.
	But he was controlling it with his mind.
	It was pretty interesting.
	The way it worked was it actually looked for a surprise reflex.
	You have to think of what you want it to do, and then it says everything that it can do.
	And whenever it says the thing you're thinking of, you have an automatic sort of startled moment where you go, that's what I was thinking!
	And it notices that.
	Yikes!
	Pretty cool.
	Harry in San Antonio, Texas.
	You're on with Dr. Wilson.
	Good evening, gentlemen.
	Good evening.
	I'd like for you to comment on a statement I'd like to make and see what your opinion of it is.
	And then I'd also like to give you an idea I have about propulsion of a For robots.
	And you can tell me whether it's been thought of before.
	The statement is, I don't believe that we can ever replace the human mind or even mimic it.
	Because the key is freedom of choice.
	And no matter what you do with a computer, the decisions are already made up by the program that's fed in.
	Now, the potential for a trinary system instead of a binary system could give a variable in the answer Based on, you know, the subtleness of the third signal.
	And if you understand what I'm saying, I'm trying.
	But anyway, freedom of choice.
	What is your opinion of that as compared to being able to obtain artificial intelligence?
	So what you're talking about is the fact that a lot of computer programs are deterministic.
	So every time you put a certain input in, you get the same output out.
	And a lot of times, especially with just programs, It is completely deterministic, and it's programmed in there, and it's never going to change.
	But the line gets blurred whenever you start having learning algorithms.
	So whenever you have something that can learn, the person who programmed it never told it what to do.
	It makes its own decision on what to do, and you can make that line blur even further.
	Some programs can actually rewrite themselves.
	So not only can it remap that input to output by learning, But it can also rewrite even more basic aspects of how the input-output works.
	I understand, but isn't the human mind feeding in the information originally that allows it to do this algorithm and come up with variables, and it's dependent upon what that information was fed into them as to how it processes and comes to a new conclusion?
	Well, yeah.
	You could say that the human programmed it in the first place, but when it rewrites itself, And really, I don't even know if that argument is enough, either.
	I mean, I can program something in five minutes that will learn behavior, and it will do things that... You know, what's really interesting is whenever you get a lot of robots together, let's say you have thousands, even if they're just simulated, they'll start exhibiting behavior that you could never imagine that they would... This is like, they've gotten robots that can flock, like birds, and they can swarm, like ants.
	And all this behavior completely falls out without, you know, in fact you set it up and then as humans you study it to see what they'll do because you have no idea.
	I understand that and I agree with you on that.
	I guess it's just a matter of how you look at freedom of choice and I don't think the human mind, and I am a man that believes in a God, I don't believe a human mind can ever be recreated or even saved by a man because I think that it's something totally independent of the body.
	And, you know, of course goes on to another place, and it's an energy.
	Well, I have this feeling, Culler, that science is really going to disappoint you.
	Pardon me?
	I have this feeling that science is going to terribly disappoint you.
	Well, you know, and I understand, I respect everybody's opinion, and I'm not a deeply religious man, but I do believe in a God, and I do, I had a mind-out-of-body experience.
	I died one time, or I had a severe motorcycle accident, and I did experience What I believe is a higher power.
	And there were things that happened and I saw and witnessed and repeated that I couldn't have known unless I was out of my mind.
	I don't think the fact that science will one day equal the human mind... Oh, okay.
	I don't think that takes anything away from your belief in a higher power at all.
	I understand that now.
	The comment I wanted to make about a propulsion system.
	If you were to... Robotics has a problem with movement.
	You know, climbing stairs and freedom of movement.
	Has a propulsion system been developed where you use magnets within the robot, and you work on a grid that is able to repel the magnet, if you understand what I'm saying.
	How you can take a magnet, turn it one way, it attracts the other way, it repels.
	And you can have a series of magnets within the robot such that it would provide lift and propulsion just by tilting these magnets.
	And in the floor, the work area this robot would be in, the space, And you'd have to structure the environment so that you have metal floors?
	tile and then there would be grid within there for coordinates. Is that something
	and that way you could have a very lightweight robot it could climb stairs
	because it would never touch them. And you'd have to you'd have to structure
	the environment so that you have metal floors. That's right yes. I have not heard
	of any research like that.
	Although, I mean, I have spent a fair amount of time instrumenting floors to try to figure out where people are at.
	But yeah, I haven't heard of anything like that.
	Although, you know, I'm sure that that sort of thing would have wider applications.
	It would probably be pretty prohibitive to force people to put metal all throughout there.
	I did actually see a really interesting muscle application where it's two It's a magnet that goes basically and replaces where, just like where a human muscle would be, and when you power the magnets, they contract, and, you know, whenever you depower them, they just kind of go loose again, just like real muscles.
	That was kind of interesting, magnet-related, but yeah, that's all I got.
	All right.
	Andy in Manhattan.
	You're on with Dr. Wilson.
	Hi.
	Hi, Dr. Wilson.
	Hi.
	Actually, you can't talk about this because it's got a military application, okay?
	It's about the ability of machines to follow us around on the ground, and not only read our lips, but read the structural changes in our skulls and so forth, that creates words, and can actually read our thoughts, and send it up to a computer bank, and then can send voices down to that individual, and make him think he's hearing voices around him.
	Are you aware of that?
	Well, everything you just described is, yeah, there is a technological basis for all of that.
	First of all, following a human... It's been happening to me for four and a half years, interactively.
	It was probably happening for years before that, studying me, okay?
	Sorry to interrupt you.
	All right, so that's quite all right.
	Doctor, go ahead.
	So you say the technology is here now?
	Sure, yeah.
	So following is a big deal.
	You need a robot that can follow a person around so that it can do...
	So they can help the person out.
	What's interesting, there's a quadruped called Big Dog that runs on a diesel engine.
	It's from Boston Dynamics and it's designed to follow soldiers around.
	In terms of communicating with a robot, you can do that with sub-vocalizations with a microphone that's on your throat.
	And it can pick up the beginnings of words and figure out what you're saying.
	And there are also bone conductive speakers that can put sound in your noggin.
	No, this is not reading your mind.
	This is reading whenever you speak, but you don't have to speak out loud.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Well, that's pretty close.
	All right.
	Doctor, hold on.
	We're at the bottom of the hour.
	Dr. Daniel H. Wilson is my guest.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Here I am, Chuck, in Anchorage, Alaska.
	Another very, very interesting question.
	That is, what our guest thinks about the idea of replacing our judicial system with artificial intelligence?
	He says to prevent judges from legislating from the bench.
	Well, a lot of times there are decisions made that are real head-shakers, and you wonder why somebody got a sentence that just didn't seem right.
	I wonder what Dr. Wilson thinks about that.
	We'll find out in a moment.
	You know, I suppose in a way, in a way, computers, or robots if you will, could I think that's a really scary setup.
	reading minds. If they could learn body language, they could almost be seen to be
	reading minds. But to the question about our judicial system, wouldn't that be
	almost an ideal starting point for artificial intelligence, Doctor? I think that's a
	really scary setup, mainly because, well, there's really no room for exceptions
	with AI a lot of the time. So that would be an expert system, like I talked
	about earlier, where it just takes into account every rule and every precedent
	and makes a decision just...
	And that is highly deterministic, actually.
	The problem is that it would never know when to make exceptions for special circumstances or special things it's never seen before.
	And that's kind of a key, you know, I guess that's what, if you wanted to avoid any new legislation from, You know, that kind of thing, then yes, this would be great.
	But the fact is, there's a reason we don't have the same laws we had in 1900.
	It's because continually new precedents are being set, and new situations are arising, especially, and maybe ironically, because of technology.
	Could you imagine all the new laws that would have to come into effect?
	Sure, but there's always human appeal.
	I mean, you could leave the drudgery of everyday Lower level sentencing to computers, I suppose, and then you could always have human appeal.
	Well, and another thing you could have is, this is kind of cool actually, there's a lot of research on how humans can interact with robots, where you do let the robots do sort of low-level stuff, but you still need to keep an eye on them.
	And so NASA has this plan for robots that are in orbit building giant space stations, you know, just 24 hours a day.
	Mostly autonomously, but sometimes not.
	And the idea is to have a human who can just, from a computer console, flick in and out of different robot bodies to oversee what's going on, and the robots learn when to ask for help.
	And so, what you could have is a situation where robot judges are working together with With humans and calling on help whenever something interesting happens or something that might call for a human.
	Exactly.
	Doctor, what is it that occurs that's anomalous when robots are gathered together and left alone to act and interact with each other?
	Well, there are different ways to make robots work together as teams.
	One really easy way is to have a central computer that just controls all the robots.
	If you've ever seen Star Wars Episode 1, there's the part of the movie where they destroy the orbiting space station and all the robots just fall down.
	Because they were all controlled from one vulnerable point in the middle.
	That's not really how any animals that I know of actually work.
	And so what you do instead is you have a lot of, you can do distributed robots where they Each are pretty cheap to produce, they're pretty cheap to make, and they're pretty dumb.
	But, they all follow these same simple rules, but when they all follow them at once, some higher level intelligence falls out of it.
	So, for instance, if you had a lot of robots, and half of them were red, and half of them were blue, and you told all of them, if you see someone blue, get behind them, and if you see someone, you know, line up with the blue, or whatever, what you'd see is instantly, They would all shift into a position.
	You know, you tell all the blue robots to get behind red and all the red robots to get behind blue.
	Or if you have a bunch of robots and you tell them to avoid obstacles, but stay a certain distance from the other robots, what happens is you get flocking behavior.
	They'll all flock around in one group, but then whenever they come across an obstacle, they'll part and then they'll flow back together.
	All right.
	Walter in Virginia, you're on with Dr. Wilson.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Hi, this is Walter.
	I have a thought on the computer chips for the robots, and not necessarily have the computer chips in the robots, but have them... My idea is stackable computer chips that you could build a supercomputer and they're liquid cooled.
	Is this a possibility that maybe this could be done?
	So, cooling down processors is a huge problem, and it is a big setback.
	In fact, whenever you have A lot of, you know, computers all in one place, that's the biggest thing that they have to do to make sure they don't break, is they have to cool them.
	Now, I don't know, I don't know how, I guess I don't know enough details on how stacking them could improve that.
	I know that liquid cooling is a good way to keep chips cool.
	It's the one that's in use.
	There's case modders that like to modify their computers and a lot of times they'll install flashy liquid-cooled devices.
	All right.
	John in Pennsylvania.
	You're on with Dr. Wilson.
	Good morning.
	Hello.
	How are you?
	Fine.
	I just want to say, first of all, thank you, Mr. Bell, for 12 years of wonderful nighttime experiences.
	Yes, sir.
	My question is, I have found that with voice recognition programs, like on the OnStar system of cars, And I live in Detroit, the home of George Nory.
	We have one of the big utility companies there.
	You call in, it's nothing but a computer system that has voice recognition that they don't recognize my voice.
	And it became a scary reality when we had a gas leak at our house.
	And I couldn't get through to anyone.
	And the computer just wouldn't go through the prompts.
	It just, again, the commands that it told me to give, it wasn't listening to.
	Fascinating.
	Yeah, this is a problem I've come across myself.
	I have used... So, you know, I mentioned earlier that the smart house I designed, you know, didn't do anything.
	Earlier on in my research, I had it designed so that that's all it did was it would do things for you, like turn on and off the lights or the radio.
	And the way to do that would be to tell it to do what you wanted it to do.
	And that meant a speech recognition system on a wireless microphone.
	And when I was training it, You have to train it.
	You have to talk to it so it learns your voice.
	Right.
	And I had, at the time, I had an Australian girlfriend and it could not, there was no way that it could be trained so that it would recognize me and her because it's so speaker dependent and because the difference between male voices and female voices is huge.
	The difference between accents is huge.
	If you have a poor phone line or if you have a lot of background noise, that can be huge.
	That can really lower speech recognition accuracy.
	You bet.
	And when you have a system that just has to recognize anybody who's going to call in, you can't train it for a particular individual, then you really lose some accuracy.
	And so, you know, I guess some people are just out of luck because the technology's not there yet.
	And maybe there's just something about his voice that is so far out of the general realm that the computer has taught that you can't hear him.
	One thing I find that people do is they'll talk really slowly.
	If, for instance, it's not recognizing you, you might talk really slow.
	The problem is that works for babies, humans, and that's what we're programmed to do to help little kids learn how to speak.
	But it does not help the robots because they have not been trained to recognize slow motion speech.
	And if you get angry, too, if you start putting emotion into your voice, again, that's going to really lower the accuracy.
	Actually, voice recognition software, I recall, It had to be eight, seven or eight years ago, I got a program that would presumably type as you spoke.
	And yes, you had to, it had a recommended text, a very long text, that you had to speak and speak and speak and speak.
	And it never did really work quite right, to be honest with you.
	How far have they come with that?
	Is it better now?
	That was probably Dragon Dictate, which I also used and was unable to, I could never really get it to work.
	The problem there, again, is that it's not a limited domain.
	You can say anything.
	I don't know how many words, I think there's 300,000 words or something in the English language, you know, that are commonly used.
	And the probability of you saying any one of those words is 1 over 300,000.
	That is really hard for a computer to predict what you're going to say next, even if it hears you.
	What happens to increase the accuracy is when you write a lot, or once you've used it a whole lot and gone through and corrected it after it's wrong again and again and again, eventually it learns how to figure out what you're saying.
	Another interesting thing is People learn how to talk to the machine.
	Over time, you're, I mean, we are all learning all the time.
	We can't help it.
	We can't turn it off.
	It's what makes people great.
	And so we learn how to game the machine so that it's more likely to recognize what we're saying.
	And that's another interesting thing that people do.
	Why are our computers not talking back to us very much yet?
	Well, um, I think that it's actually just more efficient to put text on the screen, but they do have, it's called speech synthesis, and they do have some pretty good stuff.
	What's interesting, AT&T has a system, it's called TTS, text-to-speech, and the way they do it, and you might be interested in this, you know, because you've obviously got a great voice, is you can give it some segments of your voice, so you record your voice, And it will take all of those, combine them together, and then you give it a few words, and so it can, using your voice, synthesize any word.
	It breaks down all the phonemes.
	It takes, you know, it basically takes all the pieces from all the words you've said and saves them up.
	And just like that, you know?
	Boy, that sounds like fun.
	Alright, to Warner in Chico, California.
	Good evening, gentlemen.
	Good evening.
	I wanted to ask Dr. Wilson if he was aware of something called the Triune Brain Theory Model of the human brain.
	Voice a little, you're breaking up on a cell phone and if it was voice recognition you
	were trying right now you'd be totally out of luck.
	So try it again, caller.
	I wanted to ask Dr. Wilson if he was aware of something called the Triune Brain Theory
	Model.
	No, I'm not aware of that.
	Fill me in.
	The Triune Brain Theory Model, surprisingly enough, I came across this in a self-help
	relationship program that I had gotten.
	The human brain, the idea is that at the core of the human brain is a reptile core, kind of around what would be the amygdala, and surrounded on the outside of it is the mammalian brain, and complete outside the gray area is the thinking brain.
	And so we have the reptile brain, Animal brain and thinking brain.
	The reptile brain is the hands, and the mammalian brain is the heart, and the thinking brain is the head.
	And the key here, what I'm trying to get at, is the reptilian brain, what it's basically composed of, is it's trying to decide whether we want to kill something or to copulate with it.
	And all three of these things work hand in hand.
	The reptilian brain being the physical part of us, the hands, The mammalian brain being the emotional part of us, the heart, and the thinking brain being the logical part of us.
	Now, these are the three areas of human history.
	Physical, logical, emotional.
	When you combine physical and logical, you get science.
	When you combine physical and emotional, you get art.
	And when you combine emotional and logical, you get psychology.
	I think this has been completely absent in the study of AI.
	I think maybe Something like this can cause a revolution, because it's a little bit risky to put something into an AI, whether it wants to kill something or to copulate with it.
	I don't think run from it would be added to that, but okay.
	Doctor?
	That's got a nice symmetry to it.
	I think, you know, the way, the thing is that the abilities of robots are so limited compared to Human abilities.
	And like I said, they generally specialize in one area.
	What usually happens is a robot is given some sort of fitness function.
	So it can figure out how well it's doing.
	And it's usually called the utility.
	So there are a lot of different approaches to AI, a lot of different algorithms.
	One is called reinforcement learning.
	And this is just where the robot tries something and then it gets some kind of reward.
	How do you reward or punish a robot?
	With a number.
	a policy on how to do something based on whether what it did before worked out.
	And you can see that that's just much simpler. It's just basically either it's
	good or it's bad. And that's about where robots are right now. How do you
	reward or punish a robot? With a number. Yeah. You tell it that you got a one or
	you got a negative one. And then it feeds that number into the algorithm and then
	It's always a pleasure Art.
	the stuff that's going to get it a high number, which is a big reward.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Bill in Las Vegas.
	You're on with Dr. Wilson.
	Hi, Art and Dr. Daniel Wilson.
	It's always a pleasure, Art.
	I have a question, but I'd like to preface it with a little bit of information, and it'll
	become readily apparent why.
	First of all, I heard the doctor speaking about a robot that was essentially identical
	to a human from the waist up with joint movement and so on.
	And I only caught about the last hour and a half of your program so far.
	Then the other issue I wanted to mention was the Isaac Asimov type robot where you're talking about something that's a humanoid type robot.
	Well, okay, with those two things mentioned, the question was, there was a project, and I believe it started in the 90s, I want to say 1999, and it was supposed to be a 10-year project to synthesize human intellect, and the project was, it's kind of hazy because I just, I think I read it in Scientific American or someplace, But it was a 10-year project and five years into it, either DOD took over or just kind of took the whole thing and said, we're not giving any more information and we're going to control it.
	Did the doctor or you have any information about that project and humanoid work?
	You know, in fact, before I came on the show, I was trying to remember the name of a project that's really similar to what you're describing, and I could not, for the life of me, remember it.
	But this is a project that, if it's the one I'm thinking of, it would not have been associated with a humanoid robot, because it was really for a chatbot.
	So the idea was to pass the Turing test, to have something where you type a question, and it answers just like a person would.
	And the problem is, That there's just so much stuff that we pick up.
	You know, and I talked earlier about recording the life of a child from the very beginning in order to get all that stuff.
	Well, their solution to that was to just type in every fact that you could think of.
	And I mean, just having people on the Internet, having people hired, just everything you can think of, just in sentence form.
	And then there was a lot of natural language processing to pull out what all that stuff meant and to make all those connections.
	And I think that ultimately, yeah, it didn't pan out, and it didn't pass the Turing test.
	And ultimately, I think we figured out it's pretty futile to try to do that.
	You'll never be able to type in every fact.
	Well, he said that the project was taken over.
	Now, if something does get close to passing the Turing test, isn't it likely to disappear from public view?
	No, it's very likely that someone will want to make money off of it.
	There you go.
	Alright, Doctor, you've got two books, right?
	How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and Where's My Jetpack?
	Which one?
	Is Jetpack the most recent?
	Yeah, Jetpack just came out a couple weeks ago.
	Available on Amazon and that sort of thing?
	Sure, yeah.
	Okay, and your other book, is it still out there?
	Oh yeah, How to Survive a Robot Uprising.
	It's still going strong.
	And actually, I've been writing the next one.
	I've been having a really great time with that.
	Oh, and that's going to be?
	That's coming out this fall, so it'll be a while from now, but I just got the illustrations.
	But it'll be about?
	Oh, it's called How to Build a Robot Army.
	So in this case, it's all about how to work with robots to defeat all the other pop culture menaces out there.
	That's DARPA stuff for sure.
	All right.
	Doctor, we've got to go.
	We're out of time.
	Thank you so very much.
	Yeah, thanks for having me.
	It was great.
	Good night.
	All right.
	There you have it, folks.
	Dr. Daniel H. Wilson.
	I'm Art Bell.
	We'll do this again, once again, next weekend.

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