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Aug. 30, 2009 - Art Bell

02:36:35

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Artificial Intelligence - Bart Kosko

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	From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippines, Manila, I bid you all good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be in the world.
	We've got you covered.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	It is my honor and privilege to be here on this Last Sunday of the month, there in the US, filling in for I have no idea who it would normally be, but I'm just thankful to be here, honored to be in your presence.
	Let's see.
	All the ABs are just fine.
	In fact, there are some new photographs up on the website, courtesy of this evening's webmaster.
	Actually, four new photographs.
	The first photograph you will see is that of Aaron and myself on the island of Guam.
	Yes, we went to Guam about two weeks ago.
	We went to Guam and stepped on American soil and had a kind of a little vacation when swimming, as you can see in the photograph.
	We're right on the beach.
	A beautiful, beautiful white sand beach.
	And it was absolutely gorgeous and we had a great time.
	Guam is only about 1,500 miles east of Manila, here in the Philippines, so it was an easy little hop.
	and as they advertise in Guam, Hafda.
	That's hello in Guamese.
	Guamese is probably wrong, I'm sure that's not correct, but Hafda is correct.
	And it was kind of a kick, it really was, just seeing yet another place.
	It is America, but it's not America, in a sense.
	Innocence.
	And I also got to do an interview at K57.
	That was the affiliate that did carry the show for a time and hopefully will again up until about six months ago when some network changes were made.
	Then there's a picture of Asia, little ballerina Asia, that's up there.
	And she's now, what, two years and three months?
	So, she's growing, my God, she's growing fast!
	But anyway, that's her little ballerina outfit, couldn't resist.
	And then another photograph, that's Dolly, one of our three cats.
	And Dolly, of course, is a native Filipina cat.
	And she's actually been to the U.S.
	and back to the Philippines.
	So she's done the equivalent of flying around the world.
	And Aaron caught Dolly mid-air.
	Now that's hard to do with a cat.
	You've just got to get lucky when you take a picture.
	And boy did she get lucky!
	That's a mid-air shot of Dolly.
	And then the other shot is here in my little studio.
	You will see Dolly.
	It's hard to keep track of the switches, the buttons, and everything else because, as you can clearly see when you look at the photograph, Dolly, being a Filipina, likes warm stuff.
	And so Dolly comes into the studio and she curls up On my microphone equalizer and my control setup here, and changes, pushes buttons, changes knobs, does all kinds of things, and you can clearly see why in that photograph.
	So there are four new photographs up there for you to see this evening.
	Now, after how many years?
	How many years?
	I have received permission from the administration of the building in which I live, the condominium building, to put an antenna on the roof.
	And so I've ordered the antenna through Bob Crane.
	Thank you, Bob.
	And it is on the way, currently being held, I think, by the National Telecommunications Commission, probably examining it, wondering what the heck it's for.
	But soon, I'm going to be able to put up an amateur radio antenna.
	Vertical antenna, as a matter of fact, and I have high hopes of talking to the United States.
	But, the other big news that I want to report before I even get into the news is from Amateur Radio Newsline.
	This is scary stuff, as I'm sure you've been told by a lot of talk hosts.
	The sunspots are disappearing.
	We have sunspots in an 11-year cycle.
	Let me read you what's written.
	This is scary stuff in Amateur Radio Newsline.
	Are sunspots disappearing for good?
	Two solar researchers, well respected, say indeed it is the case.
	Most Ham users know there is a direct correlation between sunspots and high-frequency propagation conditions.
	In general, the more sunspots there are, the more DX, that means distant stations, you're going to be able to work.
	This usually happens in 11-year cycles with the last solar maximum having taken place in the year 2000.
	Now the current cycle The cycle 24 should peak in roughly next year, 2010.
	Only one problem.
	There have been few sunspots this year and very little easy-to-work DX, meaning distant stations again.
	And now, there may be an answer as to why SpaceWeather.com is reporting that astronomers Bill Livingston and Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona have found that sunspot magnetic fields are definitely waning.
	Not only that, they say that sunspots could completely Disappear within decades.
	What the?
	Livingston and Penn have been measuring solar magnetism since 1992.
	Their technique is based on a complex system called the Zeeman splitting of infrared spectral lines emitted by ion atoms in the vicinity of sunspots.
	Got that?
	They reached their conclusion by extrapolating their already collected data into the future.
	So in other words, they're saying it may be the end of sunspots forever!
	Now, that certainly would have an impact on amateur radio.
	It would have an impact on communications of many sorts across the globe.
	And eventually, I suppose if they completely disappeared, it would simply mean that HF activity, high frequency activity as we understand it, Is toast.
	Forever.
	Forever.
	Now I can understand a solar minimum and a very meek, weak, pathetic solar cycle.
	But to be gone forever?
	My God.
	So I was kind of sad to read that.
	I hope that's not true.
	But they're well respected and they know what they're talking about.
	I guess.
	Alright, a little bit of news.
	California wildfires again this year, as usual.
	Wildfires threatening 12,000 suburban homes.
	Have rained ash on cars as far away as downtown LA on Sunday, spreading in all directions.
	Hot, dry conditions as usual.
	The governor, Schwarzenegger, urging those in the fire's path to get the heck out.
	An eighth person now has died in an attack on a Georgia mobile home.
	Glynn County Police Chief Matt Doering identified the victim as 19-year-old Michael Toler.
	He was one of the two people critically injured in the attacks.
	In Brunswick, along the Georgia coast, a ninth hospitalized.
	Japan's in trouble.
	You thought our economy was in trouble.
	Japan's in real trouble.
	So much trouble, economically, that it looks as though the opposition party's going to win and rip the election away from those who have held power.
	Usually does happen when the pocketbook's hurt.
	The U.S.
	military packing up to leave Iraq what has been deemed the largest movement of manpower and equipment in modern military history.
	Shipping out more than 1.5 million pieces of equipment from tanks to antennas.
	Gosh, guys, if you don't want those anymore, I have a home for them.
	Along with a force the size of a small city.
	Big hurricane, probably going to hit Mexico's coast, Pacific Coast, Sunday.
	That would be a Category 4.
	Look out.
	The President of Colombia has the swine flu.
	And officials are contacting other South American governments, whose leaders attended a summit last week with the Colombian leader.
	He's 57 years old.
	He began feeling symptoms on Friday, same day as the meeting of South American presidents.
	So who knows nearly, well not all, but many of them could also have H1N1.
	Space shuttle Discovery pulled right up and docked at the International Space Station Sunday night, delivering a full load of gear and science experiments.
	The link-up occurred as the spacecraft zoomed in more than 200 miles above the Atlantic and ended a round-the-world chase of nearly two days.
	First thing the shuttle has to do when they get out there is check for damage.
	That's when you know you've got an aging spacecraft, when the first thing they have to do in orbit is look for how many tiles flipped off.
	All right, we've got some other news that I want to get to, and we will do that in a moment.
	I have no idea how to comment on the following article.
	It says, more Brits believe in ghosts and aliens than in God.
	My goodness.
	Um, you know, on the other hand, I thought I had seen...
	Everything, and I thought I had seen that the U.S.
	really believed up in the high 90s or something percent, and maybe it's just the British, but the nation's beliefs are changing.
	The British, that is, according to new research, 58% of Brits stating they believe in aliens and ghosts as compared to 54% who confirmed their belief in a god.
	Shaking off the skeptical stereotype that haunts the nation, it emerged that 51% of Brits class themselves as believers in a study which assessed... Assessed, rather, the UK's views on the paranormal.
	Now, this was done for the X-Files.
	So, I suppose you could think it might be tainted, but it was a nationwide survey.
	And again, 58% of British say they believe in aliens and ghosts, and only 54% believe in God.
	That blows my mind.
	I've always thought, doesn't one suggest the other?
	If you believe in ghosts, then you already believe in some sort of existence after death.
	How could you not believe in God?
	I rolled this around in my mind for a long time, and you should too.
	More people believing In ghosts, goblins and aliens than in God.
	In England.
	Just, how does that happen?
	Here's kind of a breakdown.
	51% of Brits class themselves as believers in something.
	59% support the existence of ghosts and aliens.
	37% of people surveyed put aliens and ghosts at the top of their belief system.
	Men more skeptical than women.
	Good for you guys.
	The biggest believers were those age 21 to 30.
	62%.
	The most skeptical were those over 60.
	Hooray for us.
	45% categorically stating they do not believe in ghosts or aliens.
	The survey conducted by 72 point to coincide with the DVD release of the X-Files, I Want
	to Believe, and 3,000 people in Britain took part.
	I wonder if they were asked if they were X-Files fans first.
	Under the category of I See Dead People, this article.
	On the face of things, Anthony, just a 10-year-old boy from Massachusetts, is like any other well-adjusted American boy.
	Likes to play games with friends, has a quick smile.
	On the football field, appreciates the thrill of a good tackle.
	Behavioral therapist Shannon Simpson tells how Pablo can control his visions.
	If someone's running the ball, he said, or if it's like a throw and it got tipped, it's a really, really, really good feeling.
	About five years ago, the All-American began saying that he was having experiences that set him apart from his peers.
	He began to communicate with people he had never met.
	People he would never meet, in fact.
	Anthony began to communicate, he says, with the dead.
	They kind of show a little bit of what happened and what they used to look like when they were hurt, he said.
	Anthony's mom, Lisa, said he began appearing in their bedroom at night when he was five.
	A lot of kids do that.
	But Anthony said, why, or Anthony's mom said, why don't you want to sleep in your room?
	And she recalled asking him, And getting the same response each time.
	He would say, I don't know mom, I'm hearing voices and people are talking to me.
	It's just kind of loud and noisy in there.
	As unusual as his experience seems, Anthony is not alone.
	Other children and young teens across the U.S.
	say they have had paranormal encounters or psychic powers of some sort, they see phantoms or spirits, and they talk to them.
	Their accounts are so remarkable that the adults around them, skeptical at first as though they may be, become entirely convinced.
	And I am convinced that children, possibly animals, cats, and who knows, dogs, can see spirits.
	I know it sounds crazy, but my own daughter, Asia... This is no joke, I swear to you it's true, folks.
	You know, we'll have her in on the bed in the master bedroom, you know, playing with us.
	You'll play on the bed.
	And she will constantly look up at the ceiling and wave and say, Hi!
	Hi!
	And she's looking up there.
	And I try to divert her attention to something else and no.
	It's not a young lady who does this sort of thing.
	Doesn't have imaginary friends.
	Unless this is a case of that.
	But, whoever they are, whatever they are, they're on the ceiling.
	And she is totally, completely aware of them.
	I'm telling you, she waves and says, Hi!
	Hi!
	And this goes on and on and on, to the point where the hair on the back of your neck begins to stand up.
	Maybe it's something that nearly all children have, and then at some point, as the real world closes in on you, you lose.
	I don't know.
	But what I'm telling you is true.
	And it's really disconcerting to be in there trying to play with her, trying to get her attention, when her attention is instead on the ceiling.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	Yeah.
	So, there's something.
	Shooting the moon.
	The aim is to see whether any traces of water will be revealed by the disruption caused to the planet's surface.
	NASA will analyze the space cloud caused by the explosion for any sign of water or vapor.
	Scientists expect the impact to blast out a huge cloud of dust gas If the search is successful, it could certainly provide vital supplies for a moon base.
	The moon, you know, is mostly dry desert, but ice may be trapped in craters which never see sunlight.
	We're going to find out.
	The Unmanned Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, will fire a Centaur rocket right into the surface at twice the speed of a bullet.
	Boom!
	An accompanying spacecraft will orbit the Moon for a year looking for possible landing sites for astronauts.
	The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will spend at least a year creating the most minutely detailed map of the Moon's surface ever seen.
	Well, if somebody's in there, they're liable to get very upset as we begin firing missiles at the moon.
	By the way, over here in this part of the world, two huge, rotating, glowing, mist-shrouded, mothership-type UFOs have been seen by millions of residents in the Chinese cities and regions of Shanghai, Zhitao, Ren County, South County, as well as Yuanyang County.
	I'm sure I slaughtered those names.
	The event occurred on the evening of 20 August, beginning around 8.30pm.
	You just don't hear about other countries in the United States, do you?
	But I thought you'd enjoy this.
	This is, you know, over here in Asia.
	The UFO crafts hovered above making large circles over the area for about two hours and had locals terrified.
	Police received thousands of calls regarding UFOs and various government authorities have rushed to the area to investigate further.
	Officials have offered explanations, of course.
	What do you think they said?
	What do you think the Chinese said to the Chinese people?
	First they said it was a laser light show.
	Then they said it was a bizarre weather pattern.
	Remember the bizarre weather pattern stories?
	Swamp gas and such?
	Interestingly, China's mainstream media outlets conceded that many witnesses who saw the UFOs were certain it was neither of those things, or for that matter, anything else from Earth the event.
	Has been widely reported by the media within China.
	However, I would kind of bet that you didn't hear anything about it.
	I could be wrong.
	It may be that somebody dug up a fairly obscure item from China and reported it to you on coast to coast.
	But generally, I doubt it made the New York Times.
	Anything like that?
	All right, we're going to take a break and then we're going to take some open line, unscreened calls if the world of electronics will comply.
	It is nothing short of a miracle, in my opinion.
	Remarkable.
	That we're able to do a long-form radio talk show from one side of the world to the other.
	And we really are on opposite sides of the world.
	I mean, and I'm kind of a technological geek, but even I am shocked.
	Surprised pleasantly and just sort of blown away at the fact that I can sit here and chat with you from one side of the world to the other Bear in mind.
	It's afternoon here currently about 25 minutes before two o'clock in the afternoon might as well be midnight though because I you know I have many blinds and I close the curtains and I Set the mood for myself because we really are a nighttime show so for all the world to know in here It's a middle of the night And also, if you detect something unusual in my voice, I have another code.
	I'm sampling all, it happens every time I come to Southeast Asia, I sample all of the Southeast Asian viruses.
	Oh, and one more thing, I still have email.
	You can still get hold of me, and I am doing my dead level best to answer all the emails that are sent.
	Sometimes that's nigh onto impossible, but I'm doing what I can.
	I am Art Bell at MindSpring.com.
	That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at MindSpring, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G dot com.
	So if you are inclined to fire me off a note, I'll do my best to answer it.
	Art Bell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at MindSpring dot com.
	We'll be right back with Open Lines.
	All right.
	Let's do it.
	As promised, unscreened Open Lines coming up now.
	First time caller line.
	If I can press the button correctly.
	Let's see.
	Let's try it again here.
	Yes, you're on the air.
	First time caller line.
	Hello, Art.
	This is Ivo from San Francisco.
	How you doing?
	Oh, pretty good.
	Yourself?
	Oh, fine.
	Hey, I wanted to get your take on the whole H1N1 swine flu thing.
	Yeah.
	Well, it scares me.
	As simple as that.
	We've got it here now in the Philippines, as you've got it there.
	So it's, you know, kind of all over the world now.
	You know, the big fear for everybody, and remember...
	When you have summer there, we're having winter here.
	Yeah.
	So, if it was going to change and suddenly become horrible in the fall, as a lot of people are worried, you know, I've heard talk about that, that it's going to change and in the fall it's going to be horrible, even though it's not killing that many people yet, it is essentially that time of the year here, we call it the rainy season, and that has not happened.
	I don't know.
	What's my take?
	I don't know what's going to happen, but I'll pray for everybody this coming winter.
	There hasn't been any uptick as far as people living in Australia or New Zealand?
	Have you heard anything to that effect?
	No, it's pretty much everywhere, I think, now.
	And as I mentioned to you, unless it goes through a change and becomes very deadly very suddenly.
	And if it does that, I'm hiding.
	How about you?
	Well, I would do the same.
	I mean, I read recently, within the last week, that somewhere in Latin America that they had found the virus in turkeys.
	I guess this thing, I haven't watched much news lately, but it has sort of been in the back of my mind because I know that there's been similar things that are similar to Spanish flu, you know, that it attacks the young people who have really healthy immune systems.
	And while I'm not a scaremonger, I tend to look at that and think, well, that's definitely different than the, you know, regular flu that kills, you know, so many people in the United States.
	Well, let me ask you a question along with everybody else who's listening.
	If this thing morphs into something extremely deadly, you know, I believe that big danger is that there's this storm.
	Your own immune system produces a storm.
	Your lungs fill with liquid and you expire.
	That's how you die.
	If this thing gets loose and starts killing a lot of people, what are you personally going to do?
	Well, uh, I'm not, I'm not exactly sure I would know what to do, but I think, uh, I think, uh, I mean, I live in a big urban area and I think I would need to stay put for quite a long time.
	And if I could work from home, if people are still working at that time, then I would do it.
	But I think, uh, there might be a period of time where people just have to sort of hunker down and be at home for awhile and, uh, and ride it out.
	But, uh, I started wondering about a funny thing, which I'll tell you about a little while ago, and that was this.
	Everybody got scared when the first round of virus made its way, which it's doing right now.
	And, you know, after hiding for a while and thinking, uh-oh, I thought, hey, maybe these people are right and it's going to turn deadly.
	Maybe it's better to get it now and be immune later.
	Maybe.
	I don't know.
	I'm actually curious and I'd like to put this out to your other callers because I was born in 1969 and I understand that there were some other swine flu or other major pandemic outbreaks in the late 50s and I think in 1968 and I'm curious for anybody that lived through that, you know, what they experienced and how they dealt with the situation at that time.
	Okay, very good.
	I was actually alive during that time but I I don't really remember.
	I am told that those who are older, myself now, born in 45, may have some immunity that is left over somehow from the 1918 round of swine flu.
	I don't know if that's true, but I hope it's true.
	All right, let's go to the west of the Rockies line and say good morning.
	You're on Coast to Coast AM.
	Hello?
	Hello?
	Oh, Professor, I thought you were recording.
	No, no, I'm not recording.
	Turn your radio off, though.
	Okay, I'm doing that right now.
	Okay, good.
	Okay.
	Well, I didn't know if Mr. Bell wanted to just talk about only the H1 flu or if he was
	interested in speaking about, he was talking about his daughter looking at someone at the
	ceiling and waving.
	Well, first of all, the temptation is to get you, but I am Mr. Bell.
	Oh, I am sorry.
	Mr. Bell?
	See, I, I directly answered.
	There's no screener or anything.
	I just directly answered the phone.
	So no, you can talk about that.
	Isn't that interesting?
	And a little freaky.
	Um, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, as I told you, my daughter just does it all the time.
	She'll look at the ceiling in the bedroom and say, hi, hi.
	You know, it's like somebody's waving back at her.
	There's just something so mysterious about that and I would be curious to know if any of your listeners would know if anyone had done any really serious study on that or if there was any real good information about that because I always felt that a child had some connection to some other existence that we perhaps have forgotten.
	Well, here's what I think the problem is.
	By the time a child is old enough to have good, flowing communication, they've already forgotten about their little friend on the ceiling, or wherever that friend is.
	And, you know, you change.
	I mean, the child is exposed to the world, and it gets tougher and tougher and tougher, and pretty soon you forget about the things that are supposed to be impossible.
	Right.
	There are barriers apparently set up from all directions.
	They tell me that when I was a child I had an imaginary friend that I spoke to.
	I have no recollection of that whatsoever.
	That's exactly my point.
	Exactly my point.
	So either it's an ability you have when you're young or it's an ability that the harsh world sort of beats out of you by telling you what's impossible.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	But I promise you it was as real as real could be.
	I tried to distract her.
	I tried.
	And it's been day after day after day after day as well.
	Hi.
	Smiling, staring at the ceiling like somebody's making faces back at her and stuff.
	It's weird.
	Oh boy.
	One episode, one instance, my daughter.
	It looks like that, you know, when someone is thinking their eyes appear to be looking inward, you know, and there's no recognition of the outside world.
	And I remember she very slowly and haltingly said, and she couldn't have been more than about two years old.
	She told me very solemnly that her father and then she hesitated.
	And then she said the whole sentence, my father and my brother.
	And then she almost Never could figure that out.
	Wow.
	It stayed with me my whole adult life.
	All right.
	Well, I have no answers for you.
	I very, very much appreciate...
	Your call and your response to it and I'm telling you it is just as strange as strange could be.
	I would bet serious amounts of money that she's really talking to somebody, that she really sees somebody.
	I know how her attention goes and I know when it's real and I know when she's just playing And I absolutely guarantee you she was not playing.
	Let's go east of the Rockies and say good morning.
	You're on the air, Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Proceed.
	Good.
	Is it good afternoon over there?
	It's afternoon, but it doesn't matter.
	All right.
	Hey, how you doing?
	This is Tim Kentucky.
	Hey, Tim.
	Hey, I was wondering if you looked at that preview for that 2012 movie that's coming up.
	Do you know much about that?
	I did see the preview.
	Is that the one where there's a monk up very high on a mountain and the water comes washing in?
	That one?
	I don't know if I saw the same trailer.
	Maybe you may have seen a different one.
	But is it not the same production company that did the Day After Tomorrow?
	Do you know about that?
	It is, yes.
	Roland Emmerich is involved.
	Okay.
	You haven't pre-screened it or previewed it or anything?
	No, I'm here in the Philippines.
	Oh, okay.
	Well, it looks pretty good.
	And if it was as good a production as the day after tomorrow, it ought to be great, you know.
	Well, thank you.
	Roland is very secretive.
	Yeah.
	Well, 2012, that's a pretty interesting topic.
	What's your take on that?
	Okay, so as I mentioned, and I'll mention it one more time, I'm not sure what got through, Roland Emmerich made The Day After Tomorrow from the book that Whitley Strieber and myself wrote, and he was very secretive about the movie and really would not even give us a copy of it.
	I had to go to New York to the premiere to see it.
	There you go.
	That's just the way he is.
	And I don't blame him because in this day and age, movies sort of leak a lot.
	Let's try and go to a wild card line.
	You're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Art, I can't believe I'm talking to you.
	I've been trying to get through for years.
	Well, you have now made it.
	Where are you?
	I'm in Indianapolis, Indiana.
	I just wanted to call about the swine flu.
	Me and my friends have been following it.
	We're kind of young.
	We're in our mid-20s and we all pretty much think that the shot is going to be worse than the flu.
	Yeah, I know.
	I'm seeing a lot of stuff.
	There's a lot of people opposed to immunizations of any kind.
	I'm not one of them.
	I think that for the most part, they protect a lot more people than they hurt.
	That's not to say they don't hurt some people, and there's a downside to everything, but I'm trying not to pay attention to all the scare stuff.
	Yeah, it just worries me that they're rushing the production so much, you know, and I don't think they're going to have enough time to test it.
	It just worries me a little bit.
	Well, so what are you going to do?
	Are you going to refuse?
	Yes, actually.
	I'll take my chances with chicken noodle soup, you know.
	Just try and get through like a normal flu.
	Yeah.
	By the way, is any chicken noodle soup okay?
	I mean Campbell's, that's fine?
	Well, yeah.
	As long as you don't make it with the tap water that's got the fluoride in it, you know.
	There's always something, isn't there?
	I tell you, this swine flu stuff is kind of scary and maybe what you'd want to do is let the first round of vaccinations take place and watch those people very carefully.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Because after all, the general flu vaccinations do seem to work, kind of.
	Well, yeah, the annual flu shots.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I've never gotten any of those, you know.
	I've just always been adverse to those.
	I had a fear of needles as a little kid, and I don't know if that... Have you had the flu?
	Oh, geez.
	Not for years, really.
	And when I get it, it's usually not very bad.
	So, I'm healthy, or good luck.
	I don't know.
	All right, partner.
	Well, good luck to you is all I can say.
	I think that my inclination would be to watch the first round of flu shots, not that that's going to tell you the entire story, because it could be, it could well be that, you know, they won't figure out until, I think, as George Carlin once said, you know, a year or two later, one leg gets shorter than the other.
	Then what?
	Go to this wild card line and say, top of the morning, you're on coast to coast AM.
	Hello.
	Hey, good morning.
	Good morning.
	Where are you, sir?
	I am rolling past Lake Forest Oasis in Chicago, Illinois.
	All right.
	Welcome to the program.
	What's up?
	Well, your comment about your daughter reminded me of an episode from my son.
	He's now three and a half, and about the time he started walking, I suppose about a year, 14 months or so.
	He would make this real high-pitched kind of squeal, little noise when he wanted to grab somebody's attention.
	And my wife was doing the dishes, had her back turned to him, and he had his back turned to him, or to my wife, was turned around and had his arms raised up like he wanted to be picked up.
	And he was making this little noise that he did.
	And my son was born about six months after my mother passed away.
	So, it's always been my thought that my mother is watching over him.
	I think it's entirely possible.
	I guess I don't have a lot of British in me, but, you know, I swear to you, sir, I watch my daughter very carefully, and she's my joy, my absolute joy.
	She's seeing somebody.
	I mean, there's simply no question about it.
	Hear me when I tell you she's seeing somebody.
	Not only is she seeing somebody, but she is continually responding to somebody.
	I have a hard enough time getting her to say hi to me.
	To me!
	Or to Mom!
	But whoever this is, is persistent and repetitive because it's again and again.
	Hi!
	Hi!
	Like that.
	Constantly going on.
	Now, there is something there on the ceiling, other than ceiling dirt.
	So, who knows?
	It's a strange life, isn't it?
	First time caller line, you are on the air, top of the morning, or whatever.
	Good afternoon, Mr. Bell.
	How are you today?
	Just fine, thank you.
	Got a scenario about the swine flu.
	Let's say there's countries in the world that Well, I wouldn't put it past the government to do such a thing, but I would think that there'd be very little point.
	I mean, I don't know what kind of wildlife you lead, but why would the government want to track you?
	I don't believe in wildlife whatsoever.
	It's just being able to be free.
	We don't want to have that kind of power ever.
	I appreciate it.
	You have a great day.
	You have a great day, too.
	Thank you very much.
	Would I put it past the government to do?
	No, I wouldn't.
	Not if they had a good, solid reason in their estimation, but I'd rip mine out.
	We'll be right back.
	Indeed, by the way, here in the Philippines, today is a national holiday.
	Just noting, it is Heroes Day in the Philippines, so it's very quiet.
	The girls have gone off to the mall, and so they're shopping.
	Heaven knows what they're going to return with.
	All right, a real treat coming up here in a moment, Dr. Bart Kosko.
	He's absolutely brilliant, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, and a lawyer licensed in California and the federal courts.
	He holds degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics, electrical engineering, and law Having worked as a law clerk for the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office.
	When did he ever get out of school?
	Dr. Kosko is an elected governor of the International Neural Network Society.
	He's chaired several international conferences on neural and fuzzy systems conferences,
	chairs USC's intellectual property committee through the academic senate,
	sits on the editorial board of several scientific and mathematical journals,
	has published well over 100 scientific papers, and has published several popular essays in venues from
	Scientific American to the New York Times, and is a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the
	Los Angeles Times.
	Dr. Kosko is author of several textbooks, the international bestseller, Fuzzy Thinking, Heaven in a Chip, and the new one, the World War III novel, Nano Time.
	I've got to get a copy of that.
	His latest book is Noise.
	It's called Noise, and available through Viking Penguin.
	I have got to, you know, everything's delayed over here a little bit, and so I'm going to have to figure out a way to get a copy of that.
	Perhaps my producer, if you're listening, Lisa, would be kind enough to fire off a copy of Noise.
	What do you say, Lisa?
	Anyway, in a moment, right back with Dr. Bart Cusco.
	Well, all right, Professor Cusco, welcome back to Coast to Coast AM, my friend.
	Good to be back, Art.
	It really is good to have you.
	Tonight's topic, ostensibly, I guess is artificial intelligence, and that's really got to be one of my favorites.
	So let's talk a little bit about artificial intelligence.
	How does one define when you have achieved true artificial, or maybe I just should ask you to define it.
	What is artificial intelligence?
	No, Art, I don't think there's a hard and fast, non-fuzzy definition.
	We'll recognize it when we see it sort of thing.
	Things that used to be considered artificial intelligence, if you could achieve them, such as being able to do calculus on a computer, have long since been achieved with symbolic computing, for example, or lots of voice recognition or image recognition.
	But in some sense, it's trying to get computers to take on human-like properties, not just of thinking, but of translation of images and which may precede thinking.
	Balance and robotics and those kinds of quote-unquote smart tasks.
	All right, I heard somebody once say that you'll know you've arrived when a machine becomes self-aware.
	Is that one measure?
	That's been said.
	The trouble is when you look at that it isn't clear what you mean by aware.
	Sort of begs the question of what is consciousness and we're still trying to figure that out.
	And a lot of these theories aren't these older theories of mind and Brain rely on what's called the homunculus, the idea that inside the brain there's an effect, a little human being looking at a big movie screen.
	Which is a perfectly good explanation except now you're going to have to open up that little creature's head and find what's inside there and it usually goes all the way down in a regress.
	So I don't think something waking up and being self-aware is a good working or operational definition.
	So you could have artificial intelligence without self-awareness?
	I think that's the idea.
	I don't think A lot of us think that someday you will suddenly cross a line and computers say, I'm here.
	Although a lot of excellent science fiction books and movies have populated that kind of thing, like How the Computer in 2001.
	I think it's incrementalism on all fronts, and just as much the sensory front as it is the cognitive front.
	Of course, and I recently re-watched AI, the movie, which I thought was really a good movie.
	God, it was good.
	Do you ever imagine, Dr. Kosko, that we will arrive at a point where the kind of being that they depicted in AI, you know, with the imprinting and all of that stuff, could actually exist?
	Are we headed there?
	I think we're headed for robots that are very human-like.
	I have to tell you, Art, I think we disagree on this.
	I'm on the record, you can see it on my webpage, an op-ed, run around the world and printed in the LA Times.
	You didn't like the movie?
	I didn't like it.
	And it's all due respect to Mr. Spielberg, who sits on the Board of Trustees of USC.
	My problem with it was it was still based on the idea of an animated doll, which is what a lot of robotics is.
	It's very much like the movie Metropolis from Fritz Long, which is an excellent movie from the 1920s.
	But it misses the idea that, in effect, we're going to be more like computer chips and trying to make brains more like, or rather chips more like brains.
	Computer chips operate so much more quickly or so much more powerful the tasks they do.
	And that little robot kid in that movie would, in effect, see the world around him as frozen for maybe hundreds or thousands of years until somebody moved a micron.
	And it just didn't come across that way.
	It's more like almost a voodoo doll that was animated.
	Well, he was designed to love, right?
	Unconditionally.
	And in particular, it had the Pinocchio complex.
	I must admit, I had to watch the movie a couple times before I figured out the ending.
	But it had some nice moments, but in terms of the technology, I don't think it was at all accurate.
	Well, I mean, that's movies, but it was still, I thought it was a pretty cool story anyway.
	You obviously don't.
	That's all right.
	Well, I have to, it's an odd thing, because my novel, Nanotime, that you mentioned, grew out of, in effect, a rival film effort, so I'm biased here.
	Many, many years ago, the director, Oliver Stone, had read my book, Fuzzy Thinking, got to know him, and he called me up and asked me to write a treatment, because he heard that Stanley Kubrick was making the movie AI, and he wanted to consider doing a rival machine intelligence movie, and he asked me to design a treatment, a basic Prescript kind of thing and the idea was the World War three in 2030 that had chips and brains and those things and We tried quite violently to get that thing funded, but at the time we couldn't in a special-effects weren't there So I wrote it as a novel so I am biased in that regard Okay, well that answers that I mean otherwise it was great movie So AI in
	Computer science, this is different than AI and engineering, yes?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	In fact, I would have called the movie MI for machine intelligence, not for Mission Impossible.
	And in AI and computer science, it's based more on programming of software.
	AI in engineering and the harder sciences is based more on numbers.
	So, for example, you get computer chips and control algorithms and neural networks and fuzzy things.
	In AI, you get often very powerful software.
	Search trees, for example, diagnostic trees, what's wrong with the car engine, what's wrong with you.
	If you go to a doctor, they can look this up.
	But that's the big difference.
	And you can only go so far with software.
	You can't bring to bear the real power of modern mathematics on most symbols, whereas you can do that with numbers.
	And so we've had a big split for at least 20 years in that regard.
	If you look at this from an engineering perspective and you compare today's cutting-edge computer technology, wherever it is we are right now, I'm not even sure myself, and you compare that to the human brain, how far away are we or are you unable to make such a comparison?
	We're pretty far away.
	In terms of raw processing, the brain has about One to ten million columns, as it's called.
	They're stacked up neurons.
	They're stacked about a couple of millimeters high and about half a millimeter thick.
	And they may have 10,000 to 100,000 neurons per stack.
	And the argument is that we differ from a rat, in large measure, by simply the number of such stacks that we have.
	Not qualitatively, but how the neurons function.
	And to simulate that, there's a lot of efforts afoot.
	There's a big one in Switzerland, backed by IBM, and it takes the full power of their Computers to work away to just approximate the the column of a human one column and a human or rat And it's still a long way from achieving that if you try to do that right now for the entire brain it would take many football fields of such IBM supercomputers, but because that computing power is Speeding up exponentially in time that more thing ought to be possible.
	Yeah Moore's law now Sure, if if Moore's law Remains in effect, in other words, if Moore, I think Moore himself fairly recently suggested that his own law may break down and may break down pretty soon.
	What do you know about that?
	I think he has quite rightly and cautiously said that, as they say, every 10 years.
	People say that.
	I have a bet with a colleague that it will go on at least 10 more years.
	For the last 30 years, I recall people saying it won't last 30 years.
	But I think you could say it won't last with respect to today's technology.
	But when you look at the alternatives coming down the pipeline, different kinds of molecular engineering, nano engineering, and even a little farther out, quantum computing, there's lots of alternatives.
	There's a massive, there's a large patent race, for example, to try to capture that in advance as best they can with modern patent law.
	So I think that there's a lot of reasons to believe that that will continue at least 10 years.
	I would think 20 or 30.
	Some people argue much further than that.
	For those who don't know what Moore's Law is, explain it.
	It says it's an empirical trend that the number of circuits or logic switches in effect on a chip doubles about every two years.
	And it's been doing that at least since Moore first published about this in 1965.
	So we've just crossed the 44-year anniversary of Moore's Law.
	Wow.
	You're in and you're out.
	And the thing there, Art, is most of us think more naturally about things increasing in a linear way, not doubling every two years.
	And so in a decade, things increase 30-fold.
	In 20 years, 1,000-fold.
	In 40 years, that's more than a million-fold, as opposed just to a 40-fold increase or a 10-fold increase.
	So you think it can hold for another 10 years?
	Oh, I think it'll be far beyond 10 years.
	In fact, if we really cross over properly into nanotechnology and quantum computing in different ways, it could easily become more like doubling every year.
	But I don't see an end in sight Frankly, in our lifetime.
	I may well be wrong.
	And if it did, it'd likely just slow down to every three or four years.
	Okay, you're suggesting that to continue or even beat Moore's Law, we're going to have to cross over to nanotechnology.
	How soon will we have to do that?
	We're doing it right now.
	There's many, many designs on the board.
	Every issue of Nature almost has some latest finding, either from nanotechnology or quantum computing.
	A lot of that's theoretical, but increasingly new devices are coming out, and there's, again, a real gold rush among scientists and engineers there.
	And eventually, I think, there'll be a more corporate structure behind it.
	So, the exact pathway, nobody knows.
	But it's just like the early days of neural networks, and frankly, the early days of computation, I think.
	No one really knew the direction of personal computers, for example.
	That's amazing.
	I don't know why in my mind.
	I thought we were kind of stuck with nanotechnology in the sense that they were able to manipulate, you know, a little bit and we've done some cutesy little things and I know what IBM did and all the rest of it, but we're actually moving past that you're suggesting and we're moving into applications now and it's full speed ahead with nanotechnology or is there a hitch?
	Well, there's always hitches.
	It is full.
	It's all of the above.
	It's certainly full speed ahead.
	That's a big field.
	And the more we look at it, the more things we find as we rethink the periodic table.
	And we really haven't explored that that well in terms of devices and various properties.
	Most of them have just had very simple computer simulations.
	And then again, things like quantum computing, which kind of get around the problems of manipulating molecules to the extent that they do.
	That's just taking off.
	I mean, it's becoming standardized.
	There are textbooks available on these things.
	Are several conferences per year around the world all the best laboratories and universities.
	The infrastructure has come into place substantially in the last five years.
	I'm hearing that there are quite a few applications now in the nanotechnological world that are possibly even available right now.
	You know, a paint, for example, I think we've talked about this before, that produces electricity when painted on a home.
	Pants that do, and shirts that do various things.
	Nanoman.
	Nanoman.
	Shirts that might stop bullets, that kind of thing.
	That's something a lot of us have looked at.
	I have a paper to my website of trying to design a smarter nano-based, well, possibly nano-based, bulletproof vest, but that is something more science fiction-ish for the moment, but it's certainly in theory possible to do that.
	Lots of gadgets from tennis balls to clothes that are self-cleaning.
	Some clothes have recently apparently been developed for the Army to protect against biological warfare.
	And kill bacteria and the usual properties of water beating off or whatever the mess is.
	That sort of thing is there.
	And what we haven't yet gotten, I think we will, is much smarter clothes, where we have real sensory apparatus built into that and signal processing capability.
	There's lots of gadgets out there.
	There's also a thicket of patents about how to use different types of nanotubes and other devices for circuits, for logic circuits.
	And that's, again, part of the gold rush.
	All right.
	I'd be interested in the following.
	Most of us have personal computers.
	I try and stay, you know, pretty much up on the latest.
	It's very expensive to do so with Moore's Law chugging along.
	But if nanotechnology doesn't develop, and you know it might not, I mean, after all, 30 years ago, we were predicting by now we'd have robots in the house, serving our every need, and that never came to pass.
	So, if nanotechnology doesn't develop as you hope, then what?
	Because it really will stop, won't it?
	Future, you know, big jumps in, well, it'll stop Moore's Law.
	It'll slow it down.
	You know, we're talking just about the rate at which it doubles.
	These things always double.
	In the worst case, maybe it's every 10 years.
	And one good thing about that, as people have pointed out, it would give software a chance to catch up and other devices.
	Your computer now is largely hollow.
	It just sits there, unlike what it was 15, 20 years ago.
	It's because of Moore's Law.
	And it's, in effect, shrinking, getting smaller and smaller.
	And that's why you can put more and more computing power in tinier and tinier devices.
	What's going to be the hitch, even by today's standards?
	Is it this computational speed, or is it the amount of storage, or both?
	Those things, there are noise factors, a lot of heat, things are very different at that tiny level, at the quantum level, and various attempts to use carbon, for example, carbon nanotubes usually have had problems with excess heat or controllability.
	A lot of electrons flow where you don't want them to flow, but there's all sorts of alternatives to fix that engineering problem.
	So heat's a problem, inherent noise and randomness effects are a problem, and at the same time, We're increasingly using those sorts of things as part of the computation.
	I published a paper, it's on my webpage, in the IEEE Transactions of Nanotechnology in 2006, where we used a nanotube, a very tiny piece of carbon, looks like a, if you zoomed in, a hundred thousandth the size of a hair, but looks like chicken wire rolled up, used it to detect signals and show that the inherent noise in that world actually helps it detect better.
	It's like a little tiny antenna.
	And a small patch of those would have trillions of those antennas and have massive signal processing capability.
	We're going to talk about fuzzy logic and I would like a good explanation, and I'm sure many people would, about what it seems to contradict itself.
	Fuzzy logic.
	What is it?
	Fuzzy Logic is thinking in shades of gray.
	It is thinking more like humans.
	And in particular, allowing software and computers to use that power.
	You will certainly have a device that has Fuzzy Logic in it.
	Whether it's a camcorder or your microwave oven or many, several of the chips in your car have Fuzzy Logic programmed into it.
	Give me an example of thinking in shades of gray as opposed to black or white.
	Are you a friend or an enemy?
	Are you with us or against us?
	These kind of yes-no questions.
	Is it a recession or not?
	Are you in or out?
	These questions, if you cast them in terms of probability, we usually like to cast them as black or white.
	But in fact, most things are somewhere in between.
	If we have a pink rose and ask, is it red or not?
	We can go either way on that.
	In the fuzzy approach, it might be 80% red and 20% not red.
	That's very different than the binary logic that comes straight out of ancient Greece from Aristotle.
	The binary logic of either or.
	The logic of a switch, in particular.
	Okay.
	Are home computers now capable of fuzzy thinking?
	They can do fuzzy reasoning on a limited basis.
	Just as your car, if it has a fuzzy cruise control, can use it in that capacity.
	Various cars have improved automatic transmission with a little fuzzy expert in there.
	But it's just a tiny piece of cognition.
	We don't have a big, massive fuzzy computer because they, too, have their problems.
	But for isolated problems that have often not been amenable to mathematical analysis or required a human, we can often capture that quite quickly and effectively with fuzzy logic.
	All right.
	Very quickly, what is the difference between the fastest or best home computer you can get right now and the best that you think our government has?
	Well, I think it's quantity.
	The government has, for example, Fort Meade, something like 27 underground acres of computers.
	The best computers running full time to process lots of Intel data and who knows what else.
	As Lennon apparently said, quantity has the quality all its own.
	I think that's the difference.
	The sheer number of the things.
	So, when it comes time to replace their computers, when they get outdated, it's one hell of a big expense, right?
	Yes, and I think it's done piecewise every day.
	All right, very good.
	Hold tight, Dr. Kosko, and we'll be right back.
	From Manila in the Philippines, here in Southeast Asia, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
	It is indeed.
	All the way from Manila in the Philippines.
	Bernard says, and I'll give Professor Kosko a minute to think about this, the brain does not function without the soul.
	Tis the soul that has the intelligence.
	The brain is only a receptor, as are the eyes, fingers, tongue and heart.
	Artificial intelligence is impossible.
	Scientists are idiots.
	You knew you'd get a few like that, right?
	So, it'll be fun to see how he responds to it.
	Listen, for those who are asking, I'm getting some fast blasts, and yes, I read them.
	Erin's visa is all taken care of.
	She has her green card, so we're in good shape in that area.
	So, all those who helped, if you missed it, I did announce it on the last show, but apparently a number of people missed it.
	That's all taken care of.
	All is well.
	Dr. Kosko, back in a moment.
	Well, alright.
	I guess you would want to be polite to Bernard, Professor, who says the brain doesn't function without the soul.
	But go ahead and respond if you would like.
	I think the soul is a very convenient figure of speech, Art.
	And this is a lot like saying when you look at a watch and it stops moving, where did the motion go?
	When someone dies, where did the soul go?
	Natural language can only take us so far.
	If you could see, for example, we talked about those cortical neurons stacked up 10,000 or 100,000.
	Again, we have millions of those in the brain.
	You could see the simulations of just one and how when you present a stimulus like a picture of a flower, electricity literally flows in certain patterns.
	That's kind of like the soul at that moment moving.
	It's the music played by the brain.
	So in that sense, fine.
	But to take it literally, to endow it with special properties as pre-scientific people did for hundreds if not thousands of years, that I think is a category mistake.
	Mike in San Francisco says, why can't AI algorithms evolve to self-awareness by starting with a basic seed program and just let it run?
	We might not even recognize the result.
	That's right.
	But again, we don't know what counts as the red light going off saying, hey, I'm self-aware.
	But there are, by the way, algorithms that do that, algorithms that create other algorithms, called genetic algorithms.
	And they work with randomizations and different kinds of directed randomness and different kinds of seeds.
	They take us, in effect, they take us to small corners of a very big box, because the set of all mathematical possibilities is staggeringly large, vastly bigger than the universe.
	In fact, the universe doesn't come close to the complexities, the mathematical possibilities in that.
	And so when you just have random search walking off, you almost certainly will get a dead end.
	Well, have we have we had any intriguing results from experiments of that sort?
	I think we have.
	I think a lot of algorithms have yielded up structure.
	They're few and far between.
	The great moments of science have come out of a lot of work in artificial intelligence.
	They were driven by computation.
	Now they turn around and drive computation itself.
	It's hard to point to a particular application.
	They affect so many, like, for example, finance, whether you're creditworthy, for example, which maybe banks played with some of the parameters.
	It's a very fuzzy concept, a very complicated concept, and a lot of artificial intelligence, neural style algorithms were and still are used to estimate whether you're creditworthy.
	So the bank person can tell you yes or no, or they really can't give you the audit trail.
	Why?
	Because it has to do with how a lot of other people behave in similar circumstances.
	How do you define a pattern for a computer?
	from all that data. A general pattern and sees you as a particular part of that
	pattern, either worthy or not to some degree. How do you define a pattern for a
	computer? In other words, how do neural networks differ from fuzzy logic systems
	from traditional AI expert systems, search trees? And I want to ask a Google
	question too. Okay, a pattern, what is the pattern?
	Something we can identify with our own neural networks, like a pattern of a face or a flower.
	But if you try to define a flower for a computer, you'll see that's just about impossible to do.
	And people tried for years.
	That was the classical computer science, software-based approach.
	There's a grand approach called the Psyche Project.
	That's an encyclopedia from AI theorist Doug Linnet.
	And it says, we'll just add enough binary rules of common sense until we get a database with several hundred thousands of strings of knowledge.
	Hopefully, it can process things efficiently.
	But nowhere in there is a face defined, is almost any pattern of interest a mountain defined, for example.
	Now, in contrast, you would teach what a face is or what a mountain is to a brain or to a neural network by giving it lots of examples.
	In particular, you might supervise those examples, as you might with a child.
	Say, this is an image with a mountain in it.
	This is an image without a mountain.
	The more you present Along the way, the neural networks modify their own structure, their own parameters, as your brain does, with every image, with every sensory input, until it learns to recognize that.
	And we know, mathematically, that the neural network builds internal pictures, usually called internal representations, of patterns that we can't define or articulate.
	And we have every good reason to believe that the brain is doing the same thing.
	That's what you and I do.
	Fuzzy logic would try to do that Slightly differently, although it might use a neural network, it would try to capture a pattern like cool air in what's called a fuzzy set, and that would be a continuum of degrees of coolness, but that's still part of a rule.
	So it's sort of like the AI case, but you might have something in a control system, an air conditioner, that says if the air is cool, then turn the air conditioner down.
	If, as it is here in Los Angeles, if it's hot, then turn it up very high.
	Concepts like high and not high are patterns, and they're fuzzy patterns.
	They don't have clear boundaries.
	and you can put that right into the fuzzy computer and you may very well put it in and tune it with the neural network.
	But if you had to do it the old-fashioned AI way and say precisely this is where cool begins, this is where cool
	ends, you'll come to naught. Nobody works that way. Computers don't
	work that way.
	All right.
	I'm a big fan of Google, and I think Google's getting smarter.
	Now, you can ask it all kinds of questions and get really intriguing, amazing results.
	Google, of course, is very, very large.
	I guess they've got quite a system of servers, and I have no idea what the real lash-up is with Google, but it appears to be getting smarter.
	Is it?
	I think it's getting smarter in the sense of having a better associative memory, which is very much a neural type thing, but the difference is it is achieved with strings, more like a classical AI.
	That is, if you put in Art Bell or Art Bell at Home or some facts about you, it'll match against that content in a lot of databases.
	That is the kind of content-based search that is classical neural-like search.
	And how it does it, I don't think everyone's completely clear, but you're right.
	As it gets more bases and more links and more pages, And the algorithms simply get refined.
	I think that it is getting more effective in that sense.
	We're still a long way from real artificial intelligence, but it's smarter.
	I must also say, there's been a lot of complaints, especially from us professors, that we are not, I think, quite as smart.
	We're doing what's called info-snacking.
	A lot of people are looking at little snatches on the internet rather than reading the whole thing.
	And frankly, it looks like people are reading fewer books than ever.
	It doesn't bode well to the book industry.
	My colleagues in the book industry are almost terrified about the future of books.
	There doesn't seem to be one.
	Well, I think it's the end of encyclopedia salesmen.
	That's a given, yes.
	Yeah, there's not been a knock on my door in a long, long time.
	And anyway, perhaps Google or something like Google will be the place where suddenly some sort of artificial, if artificial intelligence is going to suddenly, and I understand you don't think that's the way it's going to happen, but if it's going to suddenly appear, might it be with a Google or something monstrous like Google, you think?
	One problem I have with that is that we associate very human-like properties with intelligence that we're not putting into computers, and those properties have to do with emotions, with will, the will to power, greed, these kinds of things.
	They're tied to the hormone system.
	In theory, I guess we could start programming computers to emulate hormone systems.
	But I don't see that, and I don't see that kind of aggressiveness, the concept of the software computer that someone becomes a tyrant or a slave.
	We don't build them that way.
	They don't build themselves that way when they have the code.
	I guess it's always possible in that mathematical space I mentioned with so many outcomes.
	I don't see anything, any precedent for that at all.
	I may be wildly optimistic with that, but I really don't.
	I don't see it in particular in Google.
	And I think it's not that simple.
	I think there also are countervailing effects.
	When networks get bigger and bigger, there's lots of costs, noise-type costs, entropy-type costs.
	It's harder when you bring up various keywords on Google.
	You've got a lot more stuff to search through than you did before.
	It's not a very small change in a parameter.
	An algorithm may make a big difference between item 20 and 50, for example, and you have
	no idea what that's based on.
	Is that going to get better with time?
	I don't think so.
	I think you'll simply have a bigger gap.
	It'll be between 20 and 500 or 20 and 5,000 items.
	So there's an overwhelming of the information there.
	You need a kind of second order system to filter through it, at least to prioritize
	that.
	Well, clearly there are many things that computers do better than we do right now.
	Oh yeah, like the adding machine.
	Ummm...
	Well yes, I mean there really truly are things that computers do better than humans do already.
	So will AI systems eventually replace human experts in various fields like, for example, medicine or aviation, finance, law?
	You were a Bar Certified Law Clerk, I think, working for the Los Angeles DA's office.
	What was it like when you were prosecuting felony preliminary hearings?
	And couldn't an AI system, or for that matter, even a computer today, couldn't a computer do that?
	Or have I insulted you?
	Well, first off, Art, it was not like TV or the movies.
	Among other things, the criminals don't Look or talk like Brad Pitt or George Clooney.
	That's my experience.
	And I was stunned by the sheer caseload and frankly the brutality.
	And this is the Los Angeles system.
	I'm sure it's similar in large cities around the world.
	The sheer brutality of crimes that go through the system.
	I don't think the media in any way is an accurate portrayal.
	And I didn't realize that.
	My sympathies had always been with the other side of the bench, the defense bench.
	But it's very human, very human elements are required there in real time if If you have a witness on the stand, you'd say something like, and then what?
	And the witness says, then John said, the other side will say, objection, hearsay.
	And there are about 30 acceptable exceptions to hearsay in California law and similar in the federal law.
	Excited utterance, that sort of thing.
	Very good, Art.
	Very good.
	Excited utterance.
	precisely because the common law recognized that you'll word something out without
	putting a cognitive filter.
	But that's very difficult to come up with. If you get it wrong, it can have catastrophic
	consequences for the whole case and the criminal can walk in effect.
	Very difficult to do, and it depends on so many factors
	that are intangible, that are something that a neural network might capture in part,
	and maybe a sufficiently powerful one could do in a lot of rule-based systems. On the other hand, it
	certainly wouldn't hurt in real time to have an intelligent assistant
	in the pocket that you could run through and check that with.
	So far we don't have that. In medicine, increasingly the move towards what's called evidence-based
	medicine.
	I see a lot of my colleagues, and I support them on this, has been as much as possible to tie things to quantitative diagnoses, in some sense diminishing the role of the diagnostician, though it's still a very important factor, and try to capture the diagnostician's judgment, the best human judgment, and often what's called a Bayesian model or subjective model.
	But increasingly, the movement is towards what the blood panel says or what the biopsy says or that kind of thing.
	And you can run that through a complicated stored logic tree, impartial matches and lots of probabilistic reasoning.
	I don't think you'll move someone out completely in that case because of the legal risk.
	But to fully remove the human, you would take out the human innovation at this point.
	Once humans yield that property, once computers can innovate more effectively than computers can, then I think we're in a new era.
	Do you watch House with Hugh Laurie?
	I don't, but I've heard of it.
	It's one of the best shows on TV, you've got to check it out.
	He is a genius, you know, brilliant in diagnostic medicine.
	But it does seem to me that a computer programmed to accept all of the various symptoms could do as good a job as a human being could do, unless educated from the gut guesses really are that important.
	For medical diagnostics.
	There's a famous study about how badly physicians reason with what's called Bayes' Theorem, which is a basic rule that's been around for a couple 300 years on how to update your beliefs given new evidence.
	The upshot is most of us don't update our beliefs.
	Usually the smarter you are, the better you are at coming up with excuses for maintaining your beliefs.
	But even if you do update them, you don't update them 75% It's only, you might get it 60%.
	Very tricky stuff.
	And one study, he even mentioned the economist a few years back, found that diagnosing cancers and things like that, that something like 19 out of 20 physicians got it wrong.
	So even getting a second opinion wouldn't help.
	And that's why, by the way, I've noticed, I've seen in some printouts, a lot of diagnosticians at the bottom of the sheet, they look at a number that says what the Bayesian plot would be or the Bayesian probability.
	So it's very easy to get that wrong.
	And that's for a relatively simple set of parameters.
	And the best human experts do a good job, but at the same time, they're subject to biases, fatigue, and we simply make mistakes.
	So for a long time, we'll just have assistance, diagnostic assistance, and turning things over to the evidence.
	But my experience also has been with physicians.
	I had the pleasure of working with some stroke experts.
	And when they would argue among themselves, it was very different than when I saw judges argue.
	Judges would come back with, in effect, the law.
	Whoever cited the law most clearly and forcefully would tend to prevail in the argument.
	Whereas among the physicians who are experts in strokes was who had the most experience.
	After all, one said there is a stroke here, the other said looking at an image, the other said there's not.
	And it was very difficult to articulate an audit trail, the kind of thing that a computer might want to see.
	Okay.
	Let's talk about aviation.
	I mean, without computers separating the air traffic over our major cities right now, I suspect we'd have collisions all over the place.
	We would indeed.
	Of course, we have wonderful autopilots.
	And so that's a good example where the physics were fairly well understood and we could bring to bear control theory.
	And there was a lot of debate in, I think, the 60s about whether the field of control should use that name.
	Computer scientists use the much more romantic name of robotics for often a similar kind of thing.
	And control has a negative connotation, like control freak, but automatic control is very effective.
	And it has, in particular, helped a great deal in flying helicopters, in subsystems of helicopters that you might not think about, vibration control and balance, as well as jet aircraft and the many subsystems aboard something like an F-22.
	So there we have a high level of automation.
	We still need the best humans in there to determine in a glance whether or not that's an enemy aircraft or a goose flying at you.
	And the very subtle neural patterns of whether a roll a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left to evade.
	So, here's one way to think about it.
	For something like medicine, you've got to have some fuzz.
	Perhaps that would apply to finance as well, but not so much, not as much fuzz is required for computers taking care of aviation.
	Yes?
	That's right.
	It seems to be.
	It's subject to such well-behaved physical dynamics, fluid flow.
	For example, it's not an easy thing to explain how an airplane flies.
	A lot of the explanations are specious.
	It requires the explanation that I've seen, something called complex integration theory, something called the Kutov-Joukowsky theorem.
	And that's not what you're going to see in an elementary book on that.
	But that's a very beautiful mathematical theory.
	It's worked out well in effect since the 19th century.
	And fortunately, the principles of physics fit quite neatly here with the actual atmospheric effects to a large degree.
	Likewise, spatial aircraft.
	We've got a man to the moon and back, after all, and believe me, we didn't have the computers really to do that.
	It was based on a lot of algorithms and updates and such, but that's very different than something as complicated as the human body and something as complicated as a real-time fight between trained litigants and the law.
	Or finance.
	I don't know, how would we do, how would it, where would you put finance in all of this?
	Sort of in the middle.
	If you can get from the user, the investor, for example, what his or her preferences really are, and that's difficult to do, because most people don't really know what their risk profiles are, and you lay that out, and there's a big universe of alternatives, but the computer can work through that.
	There have been a lot of successful systems, usually working in the aggregate investment systems, and also systematically screwing things up because they got the mathematics wrong.
	Spectacularly so, recently in the economic crisis.
	But even at the personal finance level.
	So it's the first order.
	It's a very smart thing.
	I think you should not be a day trader.
	The evidence doesn't support that.
	And we tend to kid ourselves all the time about our successes.
	I mean, after all, the number one tourist attraction remains Las Vegas, where every bet in the house is negative.
	I remember recently there was something in the headlines about somebody getting hold of, I think it was Goldman Sachs software or something like that.
	Do you hear anything about that?
	No, that could be a violation of trade secrets.
	They were very upset about it.
	I'm pretty sure it was Goldman Sachs.
	I guess that was their trading software perhaps.
	Is software and computational computers, are they Yes, they are in the very short term, Art, because the models we have in the market are based on what's called the Brownian motion.
	And we have something called, we can modify that Levy motion, but if you look at it real quick in the next few seconds, you can approximate that pretty well.
	For the average investor, you can't possibly get close to that.
	But the big houses have, I understand, computing access right there on the floor.
	Professor, hold tight, we're right up against a break.
	Professor Bart Kosko is my guest.
	We'll be right back.
	From the other side of the world, good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever, everybody.
	Professor Kosko is my guest, Bart Kosko, and we're discussing artificial intelligence and kind of a whole raft of things actually.
	It's fascinating and there'll be more of it in a moment.
	Once again, Professor Kosko.
	Very interesting question, Professor.
	What is the curse of dimensionality?
	How does it affect physics, chemistry, computers?
	How does it affect expert systems or fuzzy logic systems?
	And I'm surprised at the question at all.
	The curse of dimensionality?
	It's an interesting term.
	It came from Richard Bellman, who used to be at Rand Corporation in USC, the founder of something called dynamic programming.
	refers to the fact that as you add more variables to a system to try to make it more realistic, to explain more real observations and real factors, that the complexity blows up exponentially.
	And so the number of variables is considered the dimensionality of the system, and this is the so-called curse.
	And it's built into the nature of things.
	In fact, all nonlinear systems, when we try to model them, have this problem that when you put more than two or three things together, they get extremely complex.
	A classic example is gravity.
	Modeling that in terms of the Moon, the Earth, and the Sun, we still don't have a closed form for that.
	We have to approximate it with computers, aircraft, or spacecraft, have to update their estimates all the time, but it's not worked out.
	There's not an equation that says this is how it works.
	That's just a three-body problem.
	When you put in other factors for gravity, other planets for example, Jupiter perhaps, or whatever else you wanted to add, The complexity is even worse.
	The curse is even stronger.
	So the curse is always there.
	It's very bad in physics.
	It means, for example, in our models of the electron, there's a lot of faking going on, because those electrons repulse each other.
	Remember, they have the same charge.
	And if you go farther out in the periodic table, those are estimates.
	We really don't know the electron-electron interaction, because it's a many-body problem, because the curse of dimensionality is so powerful.
	In the case of a fuzzy system, which tries to model a system with rules, and we have
	theorems that say mathematically, if you had enough rules, it could do it perfectly.
	The trouble is the number of rules you need blows up exponentially if you have a rule
	explosion.
	Similarly, with neural network, the number of neurons you would need in many cases blows
	up as the complexity of the problem gets bigger and right down the line.
	So it's always the limit of any smart system, any attempt to model anything, really.
	But on the other hand, and we talked about Moore's Law.
	We keep pushing it back a little farther each day.
	We'll never conquer it, but it's like a dragon.
	It's always there, but we push it back a little farther.
	I want to ask you about yourself very quickly.
	I mean, holding degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics, electrical engineering, and a law degree, that seems, I don't know, it seems as though you sort of decided to, I don't know, take a different path every now and then.
	What possessed you to They're so diverse.
	I mean, electrical engineering, it's mathematics.
	These are both very non-fuzzy type things for the most part.
	But philosophy, economics, and law?
	They go together like bacon and eggs.
	Philosophy is a classic prerequisite for law, or pre-training for law.
	So that's a natural thing.
	And really what law is, is mathematical-type proofs, but with words.
	It's trying to reason.
	It may not be what's on TV, but in a real legal argument, and trying to match facts to the legal structure.
	The legal structure looks a lot like a set of theorems or a set of logical propositions.
	And I was always curious about how that works.
	At a broader level, the law is the set of the rules of the game of society.
	You really want to know that as best you can.
	Likewise, in mathematics, Art, if you're interested in how science or engineering works, that's the language of mathematics.
	And you can bounce around.
	Electrical engineering is a misnomer.
	It might have been about that a hundred years ago in the days of Bell Labs, but today it's really information engineering.
	I don't think most of my colleagues have anything to do with electricity.
	Some do, but not in a way before.
	And for that matter, I actually started out at USC in music.
	And it's very similar to mathematics.
	It's just I was so absorbed by these other topics.
	And the minute you learn a little bit about one, you realize how little you know.
	Then an economic kind of question for you, and that is, I look at the current recession, they call it, and I wonder how we're going to come out of it.
	And maybe you can answer this question.
	We don't make things in the United States so much anymore.
	We make things over here where I am, but we don't make things in the United States very much tall anymore.
	And so I ask myself, how are we going to ultimately, truly come out of this recession?
	People are out there and I suppose we can encourage people to buy things and to some degree that consumers will level things off for at least a while but in the long run how in God's name are we going to come out of this recession and will we come out of it and actually I've got a whole raft of questions about the recession but can we come out of this recession you know just based on information technology which we are heavily in?
	I think the answer is yes, and the answer to your question is we will innovate our way out of it.
	That is what America does best.
	We've been the leaders in this.
	I think we'll continue to be for quite some time.
	It's not as clear, maybe, in the cases of biology, given the efforts of other countries, and frankly, I think a lot of efforts by our own government to limit, initially, for example, stem cell research, and a lot of other ways where we tie our own hands.
	But we innovate in a way that no one else in the world does.
	Our university system, post-high school now, is the best in the world.
	The best minds in the world come.
	I have the privilege in training them.
	They come here.
	We don't go over there.
	Now, it's not true of K through 12, kindergarten through 12.
	Unfortunately, quite the contrary.
	And that, I think, that creates the bulwark for innovation.
	We have the world's biggest set and almost only set of real venture capital.
	Somewhat at risk currently, but we create companies in a way that no one else does.
	Europe Well, I had the privilege to visit recently.
	It's a great place to visit, great food, but they don't really innovate like we do.
	They don't have venture capital startups like we do.
	Well, while what you're saying is true, Professor, so many times, more times than not, it seems as though we do the innovation and then the actual, I don't know, production of whatever the widget is goes to China, Japan, or elsewhere.
	That's right.
	And that's an entirely efficient thing to do.
	It's a division of labor.
	After all, except for the recent bump we've had, which I think is a very unique thing in history because of the financial derivatives.
	But other than that, we've been growing at an exponential pace.
	We haven't lost the jobs that people have repeatedly said we would do through automation.
	And it is true, as you say, that Japan produces most consumer electronics.
	They take often ideas that we have.
	For example, Fuzzy Logic was developed over here, but largely applied in Japan and Korea because they produce most such gadgets.
	And that's quite efficient.
	We also have stakes in those things, and we have licensing agreements and extremely complicated sub-licensing agreements.
	So we work out the IP, the intellectual property, and that's increasingly what we do, what companies have.
	Coca-Cola has a secret formula kept in a vault in Atlanta.
	They have done quite well with that secret.
	It was an innovation from the 1880s, though.
	And so now, with carbon nanotubes, for example, and different ways of splitting them open and computing with them, we have a lot of people applying for patents, and I assume some will get them.
	And eventually out of that will be some radical breakthroughs in computation, almost certainly grounded here, as everything has been, at least since World War I, if not before.
	Almost every major breakthrough of the modern world comes out of the United States in its intellectual property.
	I'm quite bullish in that sense.
	Our property system is not what it once was.
	We have a lot of competitors.
	But I don't see a problem in the near term with that.
	Okay.
	If you look back at the Great Depression, there was, you know, a big tank and then things kind of got better and people talked about green shoots and all that sort of thing for a while and then kaboom, down she went again.
	Are we going to avoid that?
	I wish I knew.
	I mean, I'm very skeptical of government power in general and governments attempt to solve problems It doesn't have a very good track record.
	The argument in favor of the recent stimulus package, for example, is based on a notion from Lord Maynard Keynes called the multiplier.
	And the argument was, there are certain moments, I think it's called liquidity trap, very rare, but sometimes for every dollar the government would invest, it'd get back a dollar and a half, or more than a dollar, there'd be a multiplier.
	The evidence for that is remarkably thin, but the political calls for that, clearly ideologically driven, were deafening.
	And we had a stimulus package passed that wasn't, I think, very well crafted.
	The key economists, as I understand it, even in the President's administration, weren't part of it, wasn't timely, wasn't targeted, this sort of thing.
	And it didn't achieve its stated goals.
	And it's not clear that the government can do that.
	Maybe it can, but again, the evidence is way for thin in favor of that kind of government stimulation.
	On the other hand, looking back at the Great Depression, a variety of analyses, there's a lot of evidence, Art, that The government, especially in the FDR age, scared business.
	There's evidence based apparently on fluctuations in the bond market.
	There were so many takeovers taking place of regulations.
	The movie The Aviator, for example, talked about how close we were to having a government-run airline industry in this country.
	Communism was still considered a viable experiment in Russia.
	We're not doing anything like that now, but we do have a level of government intrusion in the economy that I've never seen in my lifetime.
	And it's hard to see how that favors green shoots.
	Yeah.
	You don't think the Obama administration is scaring business?
	I personally think it is.
	I think I speak to entrepreneurs quite often.
	They're quite concerned.
	They see themselves ineffective, demonized.
	That's just not our system.
	The government does some very good things.
	It protects rights, property rights, including intellectual property rights, but doesn't really make anything.
	And the companies that do that are largely small companies.
	And these high-risk types who participate in venture capital, my understanding was that Mr. Geithner thought that venture capital needs to be regulated now because of quote-unquote structural risk it may impose.
	That's a very frightening concept and something symptomatic, I think, of a new level of ideologically driven experimentation.
	A little bit of experimentation is fine.
	I don't think what's happening here is based on science alone.
	The bumper music that we had a little while ago, War, what is it good for?
	Absolutely nothing.
	Well, conventional wisdom says it's good for the economy.
	You wrote a book about World War III that would occur in 2030, right?
	Correct.
	Do you think that we're looking at the possibility, Professor, of another world war?
	I think it's possible, and in that world war, it had a lot of factors, but it did have to do with finally switching away from oil, and as a consequence, the jihadists were more fired up than ever, so to speak.
	Also, conflicts of an ever more powerful China, for example, in that novel, China invades Siberia and simply takes it, and there isn't a heck of a lot Russia can do about it.
	And some other factors.
	Now, hopefully that won't happen in the near term, but there are new conflicts out there than before.
	But I don't think it's the case, Art, that war is profitable for the economy as a whole, certainly for some industries called profiteers.
	But it's usually a malallocation of capital.
	On the other hand, we had some great innovation, frankly, coming out of World War II, from radar to nuclear technology.
	There are people predicting, knowledgeable people, predicting oil at $300 a barrel.
	Can we get to $300 a barrel or past and not have a war?
	I think you could have a big terrorist hit, for example, of a Ramco or someone in Saudi Arabia.
	I think it would spike up that high.
	That would just be double what it was last summer.
	So that's certainly feasible, I think.
	Just be double?
	Just be double?
	Well, look what happened last summer.
	I mean, into the tank we all went.
	It would cripple the airline industry, for example.
	It's a factor of production in most corporations.
	Yeah, it would have a horrific effect, but it's admissible in terms of the probability, the reasonable fluctuations that you could see in the modern world, given how politicized oil is.
	That in the short term, I think, quite easily happened, unfortunately, short of a war.
	There's every reason to believe, and even Warren Buffett, who's a staunch Democrat and supporter of President Obama, wrote an op-ed a couple weeks ago in the New York Times, worrying about simply printing too many dollars, having a kind of pollution effect on world currency, not just ours.
	Inevitably, that means inflation, and the effect of inflation, as you'll recall from the 70s, is banks saying, look, I don't want to be paid in inflated dollars by you debtors, therefore I'm raising interest rates.
	So in the short term, it seems to lower rates, but in fact, the rates go up.
	And as those rates go up, commodity prices go up and oil may go up with a lot of other things.
	$300 or whatever the high rate is.
	Just the effect of the inflation we've created set in motion today.
	Well, unless we have moved away from oil in some way, I can't, I just can't imagine how we could sustain $300 oil, how we could possibly sustain $300 oil prices without the economy going a lot further south than it did here recently.
	It would be a big hit.
	It would be, you mean buying gas here, it would be like buying it in Europe.
	So your gas purchases would be affected and the average U.S.
	commuter would take it quite hard, as would again the airline industry.
	I think we would adapt.
	It would also become much more efficient, and it would favor alternative fuels.
	It would cripple it.
	I don't think it would kill the economy.
	But the bigger concern, I think, is not war.
	It's just the slow-motion effect, Art, of debauching the currency, as Keynes famously phrased it.
	We may have done that.
	We may have done it reasonably.
	It may be the case that we needed to do it, but the evidence is not at all clear.
	They talk of quantitative easing, I think.
	Has that begun?
	I'm not sure what that would mean, how you'd measure something like that.
	Well, I guess it's kind of, in essence, taking some of the money back, isn't it?
	In other words, they flood it with dollars, and then somehow they take it back.
	I don't know how that happens.
	The open market operations of the Fed can do it each day, but I think that's a very gradual trend, and my understanding is the amount that we have borrowed is so high, and this is Buffett's point, In fact, he called it greenback emissions, like greenhouse emissions.
	That absence of monstrous tax increase, that is not likely.
	There's really no alternative but some level of inflation.
	These quantitative easings may lessen that, but I think it's pretty clear.
	Again, the argument would be, and the argument is from several people in the government, that we had to do this.
	If we hadn't taken the actions that we had taken, we'd have gone off a cliff.
	I think I agree with that.
	I really do agree with that.
	I guess the big question is whether there's another cliff sort of directly ahead, and you're not sure.
	If there was a cliff, we should be able to see the evidence for it, and that would help us predict the next one.
	But I and a lot of my colleagues have really looked, and I just can't find it.
	I realize I don't have access to the same things that Chief Ben Bernanke has, but the only parameter I saw really shooting up in the fall before markets were spooked Was what's called LIBOR, which is the International London Bank Rate, and that jumped from 1% to 4%, and banks stopped loaning, but they had an incentive.
	First off, they were scared.
	Second, they knew the bigger ones, if they held off, they might get bailed out, and in fact, they did.
	But it may well be that there was some disaster around the corner, and Bernanke saw it.
	I didn't see it, and I would thought by now we would see, enough time has passed, some evidence of that.
	It's also at the peak of an election time.
	It was very, to me, suspect.
	The evidence may well have been there, but if you remember, just under the Bush administration, the Paulson two-page proposed takeover from the banking industry.
	It was quite shocking, and we never quite knew what the reason was for that.
	We trusted the people who had access to the data, and maybe they did, but also in the law, there was something called the elephant whistle.
	And that is, the child who blows the whistle, and you say, why are you blowing that?
	To keep the elephants away.
	There are no elephants, and he says, well, see, it's working.
	It's working, yes.
	This is always a concern with these kinds of measures.
	So, you used the word suspicion.
	You are somewhat suspicious of all that went on, or a great deal of what went on?
	I'm suspicious because it was during a highly contested election.
	That's always something, as I was, as the published op-eds on my webpage show, during The 2004 election.
	I think the Republicans, for example, exploited the threat of terrorism.
	It was a real threat, but it wasn't as big, I think, as alleged.
	And I think events have proven that.
	I may be wrong.
	Maybe we really prevented things we don't know about.
	There was that effect.
	And it was also the deep self-interest of people on Wall Street who favored bailouts and things like that.
	And you can't discount that.
	So it's very hard at this point to find out where the truth lies.
	The economists, I think, put it well, that if we would have allowed more of these bailed-out banks to fail, we would have had a real autopsy on them.
	And we could have better estimated the real truth, the real value of their derivatives and other assets.
	Maybe it was the case.
	They were so toxic they needed to be bailed out.
	But it doesn't seem to be.
	For example, we don't hear a lot about the toxic assets anymore.
	Well, of course, they allowed Lehman to fall.
	And I think, you know, I mean, they're humans.
	These guys who set monetary policy and economic policy are human.
	And what happened after Lehman fell scared the hell out of them.
	I'm sure, and I've heard arguments that was a big mistake, and maybe it was, but the earlier one wasn't, back in the previous February, and some of the other banks could have been allowed to go and didn't, and we could have opened up the books.
	My understanding is it takes about a year for lawyers and accountants to go through methodically and estimate these things.
	We didn't do that, and so we still don't really know how sick the patients were, and we created this so-called moral hazard.
	Make you more likely that big institutions will take bigger risks, knowing that they're simply too big to fail and be bailed out.
	Did the stress testing tell us how sick the banks are?
	It was supposed to.
	I never got enough facts on that.
	I didn't spend all my time looking at it, but you would hope that it would, but it's not clear, Art.
	I know.
	It's not clear is right.
	All right, we're at yet another break point here, Professor.
	Fascinating stuff, no question, so sit tight.
	From Manila in the Philippines, here in Southeast Asia, on Heroes Day in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell, and of course, you're listening to the show that owns the night.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	Stay right where you are.
	Welcome back.
	Professor Kosko is here with us and he's got a new book called Noise.
	Now, I want to hear about it, Professor.
	In a moment, we're going to discuss noise and why you even called it noise.
	So, everybody stay right where you are.
	We'll be right back.
	Noise.
	Noise is the name of the professor's new book.
	It says, your new book, Noise, discusses your 2006 journal paper in the IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology that shows a single nanotube could perform nano-signal processing, detecting transmitting signals and using noise to improve The detection, what might nano AI look like?
	And the reason, it doesn't make sense to me, how do you use noise to improve detection?
	Noise turns out to energize many types of detection art, and what looked to be at first a rare exception, an interesting oddity that popped up from a variety of places in the sciences, turned out to be as often as the case the general rule.
	A noise like fuzz has a lot of good applications, And a lot of people like me, working in signal processing, spend a good deal of their time trying to kill noise, to get rid of it, because it does cause problems.
	That's why I say, it seems counterintuitive.
	And if you go back, Art, look at your own training in that, I think you'll see most of the models were like Ohm's Law, were simple linear approximations, that the world was modeled by a straight line.
	Well, it's not like that.
	It bends.
	And if it bends, it's likely that it can benefit from noise.
	And there's a variety of cases, as we illustrated, for example, with the nanotube, where that's true.
	But it turns out that the neuron can.
	Every neuron in your body, every neuron in your brain can benefit, and almost certainly does, in terms of its overall transmission efficiency, in the sense that it's trying to detect a yes or a no.
	And the signals tend to be very faint.
	And a little bit of background noise, which can be the effect of the 10,000 other nearby neurons, for example, that will boost that signal up.
	Too much noise will screw it up.
	And this defect is often called SR, or stochastic resonance.
	Awkward term.
	But noise benefits.
	And it was sort of natural for me, working in fuzz again, which is a trash can technology, so to speak, to realize that noise had these properties.
	And since nobody looked there, including in radar systems and places like that, my colleagues and I are on our own little gold rush here.
	We're finding things you just wouldn't have thought to have looked to detect, for example, whether That measurement is cancer or not, anything like that.
	This cell phone, the cell phone you're using, almost certainly has a lot of binary decisions being made several times per second, based on very simplistic probability models.
	And even in those cases, often, not always, we can show that there are certain kinds of noise that will improve that, and people are designing around it.
	And as you get in the quantum level, and before that the nano level, that's a very noisy world down there, Art.
	And that noise is just a signal you don't like, it's just free energy.
	Nature seems to have adapted to it, and as I argue at the end of the book, because it is to me to be all-encompassing discussion of noise.
	Physical effects, legal effects, and the various sciences behind it.
	But it arguably is the secret of life.
	How do you get animation or movement?
	It seems to be that a simple protein formed and hitched a ride on the quantum froth, on the wiggling Brownian motion out there.
	It's not a complete free lunch.
	And every time these proteins move, they have to burn an energy molecule called ATP or dimethyl triphosphate, but
	it's a pretty darn good theory of what life is at that level. I sure wish I understood.
	A lot of what you're saying makes sense to me, but when you suggest that noise actually assists in some way, I can't imagine what it is.
	For example, in amateur radio, when I'm listening to a signal, whatever kind of signal it is, noise is the enemy.
	You mentioned radar.
	Noise would be the enemy of any return you're trying to discern.
	In what way would noise Let's stick with radar.
	In what way would noise help radar?
	It would depend on the detection algorithm you're using.
	If the detection algorithm is ultimately, as so many of them are logically, if you go back and really open up the guts of them, if the detection algorithm of yes or no, is it a one or zero, is based on a statistical model, usually called the Neyman-Pearson Lemma, or what's called a likelihood ratio test.
	In those cases, Because you're making a threshold decision, up or down, just like a neuron, either emits a signal or not, in that case, first off, it is the case, and we have the exact conditions for a neuron when it will benefit from noise, at least for the model neuron.
	But the reason it seems to work, again, is that a lot of signals are subthreshold.
	And the noise boosts them above threshold.
	Otherwise, too much noise would be too much.
	See, that doesn't make sense to me.
	If you're talking about a noise threshold and a signal that you're trying to detect or intelligence you're trying to rip out of this, the noise is an enemy to that.
	I can't... Well, just a minute.
	If the threshold's a bar, like a high jump bar, and suppose the signal and its opposite, we would call that A and minus A, are both beneath that.
	Then if you could boost them up energetically, you could raise A up just above the high jump bar and keep not A beneath it, and it would separate that.
	So in that case, the noise would have helped separate the A from the not A. And in that way, and in fact, if you look at nature, most signals tend to be very faint.
	That's certainly the case with a lot of radar signals and others.
	Very faint signals in a background of noise.
	And it is ironic.
	But in those cases, we're using nonlinear processing, which is a general case.
	Noise usually can have an effect.
	Now, whether it's substantial, we don't know.
	For example, in May, my colleague, PhD student Ashok Patel, presented a talk on a paper from my website, the Transaction Signal Processing, and one of the physicists in the audience jumped up and literally jumped up at the end and said, you know, we could use this possibly to detect gravitational waves because they're so faint.
	That's a big international effort to do so.
	But there's many cases.
	But more than that, Art, if you go to my webpage, A lot of the papers are a noise, you can click on them.
	And often the first image will be an image that we have stripped a lot of the structure out of and then show in successive images by adding random pixel noise, the face gets better and better.
	But adding too much noise, it gets worse and worse.
	That's also in the book Noise.
	We can visually show you the improvement of the image by adding pixel noise.
	All right, well I'm going to need to read the book.
	Simple as that.
	Let's jump to Heaven in a Chip because this has always fascinated me and I think it will the audience as well.
	Is there a possibility, Professor, that as we get older we all tend to get diseases of one sort or another because we all eventually die, that at some point after the diagnosis of you've got three or four months, Mr. Bell or whatever, Our brains could, in effect, be downloaded to a computer and we would continue to live, if not physically, in a body.
	We would continue to live and be aware inside a computer, inside a chip.
	I think the answer is yes.
	It's not today, but it's coming soon.
	First with chip implants that simply boost that decaying brain and then eventually that replace it outright.
	I don't think you want to wait until the end here.
	I think immediately what you'd like to do right now is back up your brain, just like you back up a computer.
	A bump on the head, a stroke tomorrow, and your past is gone for you.
	That shouldn't be that way.
	That's a fundamental design flaw of nature, and there's lots of them in the design of the brain.
	And so the first order we can back things up, but once we get that kind of technology, and that's a consequence of Moore's Law that we talked about, and a lot of efforts including at USC, but around the world, what's called porting technology to get neurons to talk to silicon.
	It's a bottleneck, but we're overcoming it.
	Once we can do that, eventually we can do what I call in Heaven in a Chip and illustrate in a novel nanotime, chipping away at your brain.
	Consider this, if we were to open your brain, take your skull off, and take out a small chunk of your brain and replace it with its functional equivalent, some kind of tiny chip of the future, maybe 10, 20, 50 years from now.
	You would still be alert while the operation goes on, and we'd take another chunk Another chip, so to speak, from your brain somewhere else, and keep doing it as a chip at a time.
	You never lose alertness, but when you're done, you've fully uploaded it to the chip, and what was your brain is floating in pieces of formaldehyde.
	You've crossed over without ever losing consciousness, so there's no question about something waking up in a chip that's not you, and you never in that sense died.
	That's the kind of fuzzy bridge over.
	It isn't just all or none, chip or not, although you may have that as a backup, but I think you could do this when you're consciously awake and at least have the thing available.
	are sitting up there in cortex somewhere at the backup.
	So in other words, you would be in the chip, you would be conscious, and you would be self-aware.
	You would be you.
	Exactly.
	Whatever properties we have now that we describe with those terms, they would now be describing
	patterns of patterns in the bit stream.
	But exactly.
	But once we can do that, Professor, we have AI.
	I would think we have AI at that point, or is the human brain so unique with some unique property that it would only be conscious when transferred as opposed to creating consciousness in the machine?
	I think you're right in the sense that once you have that kind of entity in the chip, assuming we could verify this in a legal chain of custody, it'll make sure we secure all legal rights for that person.
	And there's complications because, of course, you can make copies of that and you can steal it and manipulate it in a variety of ways.
	But the key thing is that you don't die, that there is a backup.
	You don't live forever because energy won't last forever in this universe, but you do a pretty good engineering approximation of that.
	Wait a minute, copies.
	So each copy would be self-aware and conscious?
	Yeah, that's the problem.
	That's very confusing.
	It is confusing.
	Something in upcoming work I exploit in fiction, but that's certainly possible.
	That existence is one thing, as we say, and uniqueness is another.
	You would still exist, but it doesn't mean you would be the only such art bill that would exist.
	That could be a prophecy.
	It'd be like an information thread, a clone, in effect.
	That's why I said if you did it while you were alert, the chip in your brain, it overcomes that as you transfer into the chip.
	But the fact is, once you're in that chip, the technology would be relatively trivial, I would think, to back up the bit stream and its other properties that are there.
	And then what we make of those are very different matters.
	And you, at this point, can't predict what the properties of that copy would really be, can you?
	Yeah, I would think it'd be identical to the properties of you and the chip that you crossed over in broad daylight, so to speak.
	Yikes!
	They would have the same memories and the same will, such as we could capture that in an information medium.
	Again, the brain is what?
	It's a three-pound meat computer.
	It consists, again, of about 1 million to 10 million of these cortical columns of neurons.
	Nature seems to work with those big functional chunks.
	We'll probably, my guess is, approximate it that way.
	There's an effort now to do that through simulation, but outright, sometimes, through sampling techniques, very high-speed signal processing devices, and then replicating that a column at a time, if necessary.
	But the effect should be you, the first approximation, in, very possibly, filling this out of dead tissue, which is why those of us who are not confident that we'll see the computer technology achieve that are willing to Do something like cryonic suspension to keep that basic synaptic material intact, as imperfect as that is, to freeze it or vitrify it in liquid nitrogen.
	But that's just a very crude backup until the inevitable Morse technology catches up to the porting or takes over.
	In fact, that bridge that takes you from meat to chip.
	Is it is the technology now to freeze and preserve as best we're able to with today's technology cryonically?
	Are these people crazy or is there really a substantial chance that they could wake up one day in a chip?
	That word, substantial, is a great legal fuzzy weasel word.
	We could argue about that forever.
	I think as a betting man, so to speak, it's a fighting chance with today's technology.
	But the thing is, once you've got that tissue suspended, once you're doing time in the bottle of liquid nitrogen, as we say, it doesn't matter.
	You can wait it out, whether it's likely a century or a millennium, or a bunch of millennia.
	At some point, The trajectory of science and the efficiencies of the economies of the future as such is trivial to resurrect you.
	And there are various organizations set up to bring that about.
	But the key thing is, every day 150,000 people on this planet die.
	And the total number of people who've gone through the complicated, relatively complicated procedure to sign up for this is about 1,000.
	And fewer than 100 actually suspended, despite what you'd see in a movie or hear about.
	That's a hell of a ratio.
	100 in suspension versus 150,000 dying every day with, so far as we can see, no scientific chance whatsoever of a second bite at the apple.
	Would a person want a second bite at the apple if, in fact, the apple is a chip with no physical properties beyond the ability to hold the consciousness and the memories and everything that you are other than physical?
	It seems a little affirming to live in a chip, but we can say, look, you're living in one right now.
	Again, it's just made of three pounds of meat.
	The other hand, if you really wanted the body, I would think That technology wouldn't be that hard to back load it into some re-grown tissue, as long as we have some kind of DNA sample from you, and give you back that slow speed processing that you currently think of as realistic and modern.
	But I would think, given the alternative of utter nothingness versus... Well, how do you know?
	Wait, wait, wait.
	How do you know that's the alternative?
	We don't know.
	But just so far, the evidence says there is no alternative.
	We have yet to see a ghost.
	We have yet to see Any soul?
	I'd love to see evidence to the contrary.
	And we don't see any mechanism for that.
	The problem with concepts like the soul is, what do you do with them?
	Are they lawless, or are they governed by scientific law?
	Do they have some kind of information coding property that would get them from the body to outside the body?
	Where do they go?
	Is there noise corruption in the transmission?
	These questions were not even thought of, I think, by the pre-scientific people who started using these terms.
	And frankly, it looks like wishful thinking.
	It's understandable wishful thinking.
	But in theory we can do better.
	Maybe not in our lifetimes.
	I think quite likely in our grandchildren's lifetime we can do better.
	And at least we can enhance things and slow it down with the addition of computer implants.
	Why do you call it heaven in a chip?
	What aspect of it would you describe as heaven?
	Nanotime is computer time, which is millions or billions of times faster than neural time.
	Right now, like I had my Arms measured recently how fast they transmit neural information about 50 meters per second.
	Instead of living in a scheme where information is transmitted in your body at 50 meters per second, you're going at the fastest processors, much faster than today in the clock cycle.
	So a few seconds of our time could be a year, could be a century.
	And in that time, you have god-like powers, or at least angel-like powers, or a lot of powers to access all the databases to create worlds simply by thinking about them.
	After all, it's how you experience things.
	You experience things now, in your brain, based on the signals that come from the 12 cranial nerves, up to the brain.
	So it comes close to the old notion of a heaven, a place where souls go.
	And here it is, digital entities, or infomorphs, where they go.
	And I think, looking deep down the road, that's frankly the inevitable next step of human evolution.
	The payoff is so big, and the alternative is so bleak, to stay in flesh, to die, versus to go to that world and the potential mind net that that opens up, to know everything, in effect, that's ever been known, have imaginative powers and cognitive skills that are way beyond what would be like comparing us to an ant or maybe very different.
	And that, I think, will be irresistible for future generations.
	But you use the word soul, and you don't necessarily really believe that we have one.
	You use the term heaven, and you don't necessarily really believe that there is one beyond physical death, correct?
	That's right.
	I think terms like heaven and soul came from what we would today call science fiction writers, very creative people of the deep past.
	And as you know, increasingly with science, we make real science fiction.
	And I think we're going to do that with a lot of religious concepts.
	In particular, extending life, obviously medicine has done that, but much beyond it.
	Beyond this system, again, of a brain without backup, it's like a car that you buy or given, and once it breaks down, that's it.
	You can't do other than a few repairs, but you can't trade it in, or like a computer.
	We'll do that, and I think the old religions of the past will guide us at first, in terms of what we're shooting for.
	I also think they won't have come close to the real possibilities, but that's a frontier that another generation will have to explore.
	And you also use the word God, but don't necessarily believe in one, right?
	I have an essay on my webpage called In Defense of God.
	I think the issue of God is very separate from the issue of religion.
	The arguments I've heard against God and the philosophy student, I think I've heard most of them, are pretty weak.
	They're usually arguments against religion or criticisms about people who believe in creationism and that sort of thing.
	It's very difficult to rule out some prime mover.
	We don't know quite what that would be.
	And we get logical paradoxes when we think about all these things, and that to me is evidence that maybe our brains just aren't big enough.
	But we wouldn't expect, for example, a dog's brain to comprehend God.
	We certainly wouldn't expect an ant's brain to comprehend it.
	Would three pounds of meat really be able to comprehend something that creates or modifies or manipulates the universe?
	I don't think so.
	Not special meat, though.
	Anyway, so in other words, there is a defense.
	of God.
	There is some reason to believe that there is a maker, or a controller, or a whatever.
	Yes?
	Yeah, I advance two, I think, new arguments.
	One based on neural networks.
	You can't, as most philosophers have, dismiss God, simply because you can't define him.
	It's a pattern you can recognize.
	Alright, but if God is there, then why a difficulty with the soul and the heaven part?
	Is that related to God at all?
	Those are two very different things.
	All right.
	All right.
	When we come back, we're going to open the phone lines and I expect we're going to get a lot of action.
	Professor, stay right where you are from Southeast Asia, capital city of the Philippines, Manila.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Noise, noise, noise, noise.
	I'm really having a difficult time with that one.
	In amateur radio we deal with noise all the time.
	We have digital modes that are capable of detection of signals that are actually below the noise floor.
	We have spread spectrum, we have all kinds of wonderful things but they all Are digital modes designed to dig into the noise and discern the signal from the noise?
	Now, if the noise wasn't there in the first place, we would require no such digital magic.
	So, obviously, I'm going to have to read the professor's latest book called Noise and try to come to an understanding of all this.
	It's your turn, and I've had them for quite a while now, though we didn't cover everything by a long shot, so if you'd like to get in on this and ask a question, if something's been bothering you or something you want to ask, pick up the phone and join us.
	Professor Kosko back in a moment.
	Well, all right, Professor Kosko, we have many people who want a chance to speak with you and ask you a question.
	Art, before that, can I make a comment about your comment?
	You certainly may.
	I actually hold the co-holders of the first fuzzy patent on spread spectrum.
	I discuss that concept in the fifth chapter of the book Noise.
	The spread spectrum is the classic example of using noise as a benefit.
	In this case, you hide a signal by classical frequency hopping, by jumping the signal into several different frequencies.
	So to an eavesdropper, it sounds like very faint white noise.
	I tell the story in the book that it was the first patent on this from the early 1940s was by actress Hedy Lamarr who you know played in Samson and Delilah and in fact that's a very interesting story of how she came up with that or how she apparently came up with that patent and I cited in my own work in that but that's just one of many examples and as we look in the nonlinear world of signal processing where there's a noise benefit but I mean specifically are adding noise to systems.
	No, sorry, I still don't grasp it.
	Yes, we are able to hide the signal by spreading it around in the noise.
	And yes, it sounds kind of like just more noise.
	You know, you're never going to hear it.
	But there we're not getting a benefit from noise.
	Not of the kind of benefit you're talking about.
	The benefit is we're able to hide.
	But you're not getting it.
	When you de-spread it, when you receive that signal, you're still detecting whether it's present or not.
	Right.
	And that is typically a non-linear decision, a threshold decision.
	And there, quite often, depending upon some technical characteristics, there will be a noise benefit.
	So you can actually do better by adding a little bit of noise.
	And this we even add to various kinds of signal processing and A to D converters, for example.
	This has been going on for quite some time.
	Non-linear systems improve Yeah, a little bit of noise in general, where linear systems can never improve.
	They can only get worse with noise.
	But the only benefit you're getting, Professor, from spread spectrum is hiding.
	I understand that.
	I'm talking post-spread spectrum.
	I mentioned spread spectrum as the historical forerunner of a noise benefit.
	But when you actually use spread spectrum, you still have to detect the spread signal hidden in noise.
	And even there, in pulling it out, you can benefit from noise.
	We improved the signal-to-noise ratio.
	We improved what's called the mutual information.
	We improved the error detection probability.
	And these are theorems.
	You can go to my webpage and the very first few pages there are papers listed.
	Mathematically prove this.
	When and only when that benefit occurs.
	It's simply been missed for decades.
	All right, I've got a reach book.
	That's all there is to it.
	Let's go to Monroe, Louisiana, finds Ricky.
	Ricky, good morning.
	You're on with Professor Kusko.
	I love the show.
	I do too.
	My question is this.
	This computer technology seems quite complicated, but something that's always been in my mind is the Translator, instant translator, all the major languages that we have in a device the size of a cell phone, whereas you're in France and the person speaks to you, it goes through the device, it comes back in English, you speak back into it, it comes back in French, and you all carry on a conversation.
	It seems like that would be a very easy technology.
	And it doesn't seem to be catching on.
	I saw it on a TV show recently, where they actually had a device that did that.
	And I said, aha!
	You know, maybe it is out there.
	Is that something that people are working with?
	Oh, Ricky, there are teams of people around the world.
	That's called natural language translation.
	I was just on a PhD committee a few months ago.
	A very smart student was translating English to Farsi, which is the Persian language.
	So I ran in the back.
	The way it usually works is you have a big library of words, stored words, and then you have to work out the probability that one word tends to follow another.
	And there's a lot of complicated models that do that.
	They're usually called HMMs or Hidden Markov Models, and they sometimes use a neural network.
	And what happens is you can do it pretty well.
	You can get maybe 80 or 90%, but going from 90% to 95 or 95 to 97 that you would need for real commercial transactions, that's still a research boundary.
	But there's a lot of people working on this.
	Well, I'd be happy with 90%.
	In some cases, with a small enough dictionary, and depending on how the language is spoken, and one user versus several, and these sorts of things, you can do quite well.
	But wide open translation?
	Very difficult.
	But it brings to bear the best techniques from software-based artificial intelligence, from numerical-based techniques like neural and fuzzy techniques, and good old-fashioned statistical processing.
	It's still a huge problem with the complexities involved.
	Well, if you get something at 90% for Tegalog, send it along.
	Okay, Mike in Cleveland, Ohio.
	Your turn with Professor Kosko.
	Good evening, Art and Professor Kosko.
	Bart, my understanding is our brain's size is limited by our skull's size.
	Wouldn't computer chips becoming organic allow us to overcome The leakage that occurs with the electron running through the micro wires in a computer chip and with organic chips, couldn't we grow them like what we hear how UFOs are manufactured?
	The first point, you're right, the skulls are the big limitation.
	And there's lots of problems with having a skull.
	The heat problems in particular that come with that, maintaining it.
	But fundamentally, the skulls limit our brains.
	Fortunately, the brains don't have bone in them.
	That makes a lot of other processing easier.
	But the kinds of chips we're talking about even now for basic implants, and certainly those coming down the road, I don't think they need to be organic other than being made of carbon.
	They don't need to be They've grown other than made through standard techniques.
	They can be so tiny, given, again, the effects of Moore's Law, they can pretty well do what we need them to do.
	I would suspect in a few decades, if Moore's Law continues to grow at least at some rate, maybe not every two years, but doubling every four or five, that your brain and much, much beyond would be something at the tip of a pin in terms of the chip size.
	Wow, that's incredible.
	There are, it seems to me, there is one mammal with a brain larger than ours, isn't there?
	I think whale brains are pretty big, aren't they?
	Whale brains, yeah, okay.
	So, in other words, the size of the brain is not necessarily, doesn't necessarily dictate the level of intelligence?
	Yeah, I think it's sheer volume, it's usually the ratio.
	We were the brain to the body method an elephant has a big brain also a big body also the convolution
	which really comes down again to the count of the number of those cortical columns and
	And I don't I've got my head know what but it is for an elephant or a whale
	I suspect a lot more intelligent than we think that they are certainly certainly whales are
	But it isn't just the raw mass So in other words one day we may discover that
	That's whales for example are smarter than we are They're smart and in some ways it
	They're complicated songs and behavior and a lot of us talked about, I talk about in Chapter 6 of Heaven in a Chip about boosting intelligence of whales, for example.
	You might want to do that, at least some of them.
	It would be interesting to have that interface and kind of see a whale's view of the world directly from their own mouth, so to speak.
	Boy, it sure would.
	Let's go to the International Line, Vancouver, BC.
	Vinny, you're on the air.
	Hey, Art.
	Hi.
	Uh, yeah, it's great to hear you talk about this whole noise thing, because, um, when I was in college, I had a couple of Russian buddies that used to go off about this.
	Um, this is a good 10 years ago.
	Uh, but the question I had for you is, um, rather than actually using the noise as, say, a threshold, have you spent much time looking at, say, the source of the noise itself?
	Because I just remember what they used to talk about was that, You can make use of the noise, but you always get unexpected sort of things happening, and it's more a matter of whether you can trust that noise is actually a signal that you think it is, or it's simply just some random fluctuation or, you know, alpha flux.
	Random fluctuation, that's the key word there.
	Yeah.
	A lot is hidden in those two words, the adjective random and the noun fluctuation.
	Yeah.
	This is something Art and I touched on earlier about the economic problems with the models The trouble is most noise models use very simplistic curves of probability, in particular the so-called bell curve of probability.
	And the trouble with that bell curve, and I discussed this in length of noise and elsewhere, is that the tails are too skinny.
	And they say that those bell curves will tell you that rare events, big noise fluctuations, would be so infrequent as not to worry about.
	It turns out there's lots of alternatives, an entire infinity, in fact, of bell curves and non-bell curves that have thicker tails.
	And you really need to fit it for the problem.
	And that one of the big problems, just tie it back to economics, that happened in the last five years in financial engineering, and this is something I teach sometimes, is that the models used to model risk and the risk-reward ratio of these complicated financial instruments, which in theory are fine, were not properly modeled with the best probability curve.
	So they underestimated the risk and, in effect, overestimated the reward.
	and a lot more people and institutions bought them than otherwise would.
	In effect, they got the noise wrong.
	So yeah, we do think about that a lot.
	And what we find increasingly is that the real structure of the world and of a problem is in the noise,
	whereas in the old books of science and engineering, noise is stuck on as a fudge factor.
	We've got a simple linear model plus noise.
	But the real nonlinear structure of that universe is coming at you from that noise source.
	Can I ask just a follow-up question?
	Sure.
	So as far as – because I'm actually an electronics guy myself,
	and I try to play with embedded stuff whenever I can.
	In your opinion, I guess, for a fellow geek, you know, if you're going to try to make use of this design perspective, is it more a function of, you know, being smart about your algorithm or simply taking more measurements at any given time?
	In other words, is it more of a software approach?
	Or more of a hardware as far as being redundant in your real-time measurements.
	Using noise?
	Yeah.
	It depends.
	Some problems, if you have an inherent noise source, like with the carbon nanotube, you really want to design the tube around that noise source so as to maximize the noise benefit, if any.
	In other cases, maybe a radar case or a medical detection case, you have to check something a little technical here called the ROC, the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve, and look for what's called convexities.
	And that's more of a software thing and you can manipulate it accordingly.
	But it really is problem dependent.
	This book, Noise, is this a new book or has this been available for a while?
	It's been available for a couple of years.
	Oh, okay.
	Available at a fine store near you or online.
	Great.
	All right, good.
	Thank you very much and have a good day part, whatever your day part is.
	Let's see.
	Let's go to the first time caller line.
	Would be John in Florida somewhere.
	Hi, John.
	Hi Art, it's a pleasure to talk to you and Professor Kosko.
	I have a question based on the soul issue that he was talking about.
	Back in ancient Greek mythology, the story is that they had mermaids and mermen creating creatures in order that later on when they died off, they could transfer their souls into the bodies of these creatures.
	that they had created, including humans.
	And we see this in effect when grandparents are named, grandchildren are named after their grandparents
	or great-grandparents as sort of an invocation into the bloodline or the bloodstream of the DNA
	of that particular family.
	So we see souls existing through time and through death because once they're invocated into a body,
	through the DNA they can remember back to who they used to be.
	John, I think your evidence argues in a different direction.
	I think you've argued for genetic continuity, not for spiritual continuity.
	Grandfather to grandchild, even with a mermaid.
	And even if it were spiritual continuity, it still isn't clear what the X is.
	What is the X taken out of the person and put into the mermaid?
	And how is that done?
	And how is it stored?
	Is it something physical?
	Does it have energy?
	Does it obey equals MC squared, for example?
	And if not, then how could it get from one point to the other?
	Okay.
	All right.
	To David in Sherman Oaks, California.
	Hi, David.
	You're on the air.
	Okay.
	Nice to hear your voice, Art.
	And this is one of your most intelligent guests.
	Yes, indeed.
	And, oh, this is something that I've been thinking about for quite some time.
	And this is an Art Bell type of question, actually.
	As we know, that we've heard time and time again, that a person commits suicide or dies in a prison, and he donates his organs.
	And then the recipient dies the same way.
	Let's say, just last year we heard somebody committing suicide, and they donated the organ, and the person who got the recipient's organ killed themselves the same way under the same circumstance.
	And then we have people who donate organs from prison and they were a
	murderer and they killed people this way and the person who received the organ
	killed somebody the same way. Now those are pretty drastic acts.
	There are examples that are better than that.
	I mean, a woman who receives a heart-lung transplant, that sort of thing, and then ends up knowing the name of the donor when she was not told, ends up with the same food habits as the donor, knows things about the donor she couldn't possibly know, that sort of thing?
	Exactly.
	What I'm getting at here is I believe the human brain, I like to see what the professors say, but the human brain is like the memory of the human brain.
	The mind is within the blood.
	Now, think about this.
	The blood has iron in it, right?
	And as we know, if you take iron and you spray a mist on a plastic film, that's called audio or videotape.
	We can embed video or audio messages on magnetic tape and run it through across the video head or an audio head.
	Absolutely.
	I disagree on all counts.
	First off, if that were true, David, then every time you had a blood transfusion, you ought to have some kind of Vulcan-style mind melt.
	I don't think that happens.
	it like a tape or videotape and this which gives our memory and our intelligence.
	Well, remember iron is a good conductor, Professor.
	Absolutely, I disagree on all counts. First off, if that were true, David, then every time you had a blood transfusion,
	you ought to have some kind of Vulcan-style mind melt. I don't think that happens.
	It is true that iron is a good conductor. There's many others, and in fact, at the level of neurons, it's all
	about the local conduction.
	It's called the ionic channels that go back and forth.
	But I would argue that this is an instance of what psychologists call omission neglect.
	Sure, there are these cases you pointed to, but there is a great number, I would argue, almost certainly have to be the overwhelming majority, where this sort of thing didn't occur, didn't get news media or news reportage, and we neglect it.
	It's called omission neglect.
	And this is the same reason a lot of people believe astrology columns.
	It says you'll meet an interesting stranger today and and you think about that besides how vague it is and you don't think about all the other strangers you didn't meet that day.
	I think if you tabulate that in a fair matrix, that you'd find the odds are pretty much that
	due to chance.
	Oh, so basically what you're saying is, like the probability, it's like if you are thinking
	about seeing like 11-11 on the clock, your mind looks at it and you say, oh, I'm seeing
	it so many times.
	It's just that you're looking at, that's, you're basically remembering that.
	And basically what you say, we're just not really adding all the information together.
	Right, the missing effect.
	This is a very common effect.
	Professor Daniel Kahneman was given a Nobel Prize a few years ago in this field of just how irrational we are in terms of probability, and this is one of many things we do.
	Availability heuristics are another.
	We tend to overestimate the risk of sharks and things that we can picture versus the danger of just the water, which usually kills a lot more people.
	Well, what's not something provable?
	Let's say, like, psychic phenomenon.
	We know this happens a lot between mother and child, and this is a real thing.
	Now, if you know about the human mind, if you look, I've looked at some cutaway drawings near the earlobe.
	There's actually, I mean, if you know anything about electronics, there is a RFID pattern biological antenna near the inner ear, near the brain.
	And what do you think about psychic or, you know, phenomena between, you know, even animals?
	From what I've looked at, the evidence is not convincing at all.
	But in terms of electric fields between brains, and potentially there could be some, but they'd be so faint because the brain's a 20-watt instrument.
	That big, thick skull we talked about, and that's between two separate, two skulls with two different brains and air gaps between them.
	That's pretty thin.
	It's possible in a science fiction Novel, I talked about how to manipulate that with spread spectrum so people, if they got close enough, could talk.
	But as it is now, I think we're designed so as not to electromagnetically interfere with each other.
	20 watts, huh?
	Dim bulb.
	All right, Professor, hold it right there.
	We've got one more segment to go and lots of people waiting.
	From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	Good morning, everybody, or whatever day part you're in.
	I am Art Bell from the Philippines, from Manila, and we've got Dr. Bart Kosko here and lots of you awaiting an answer.
	So, in a moment.
	Professor Kosko, Mike in Jupiter, Florida sends me a computer message past blast.
	We get him while we're on the air.
	It says, please ask Dr. Kosko about his article on the overblown state of terrorism, one you wrote apparently for the LA Times.
	And I want to add very quickly before you answer that, as you know, I'm living here in the Philippines and a lot of Americans write to me and say, oh Mike, God, it's dangerous there.
	You're going to get your head cut off and on and on and on and on.
	Frankly, it's safer here than an awful lot of American cities.
	And unless you intentionally travel to the southernmost island of Mindanao or Jolo, down in that area, and stick your tongue out at Abu Sayyaf or his guys, it's very, very safe here.
	Now, if you read the State Department warnings about the Philippines, it will scare the hell out of you.
	But, in my opinion, if the State Department began writing warnings about Chicago, New York, and L.A., that would scare the hell out of you.
	They don't write them about those cities, though.
	Professor?
	I think you hit it on the head.
	What I mentioned before the break, that there are these factors of the brain that we call the availability heuristic, that we tend to overestimate risks that we can picture real well, like a shark, like a mushroom cloud, and certainly like a terrorist with a bomb.
	And we ignore the evidence to the contrary.
	The safety, like you said, of Manila and so many other places.
	If we look at that, and the initial reasonable fear there was after 9-11, and then how it petered down and then it spiked up again before the 2004 election, there were a lot of concerns.
	The evidence worldwide from the State Department's own data was only about 1,000 people a year died from terrorism.
	It's a terrible thing, but substantially fewer than dying in car wrecks in this country, even though there's a great risk of an occasional nuclear catastrophe or something like that.
	But there's a kind of what's called Nash Equilibrium here, between politicians on the one hand, in this country and others, and terrorists.
	And they both have an incentive to exaggerate the risk.
	And that's what's terrible about this.
	The politicians who play the safety card, so to speak, and frankly, to be safe.
	It's better to be safe than sorry in their eyes.
	And the terrorists, of course, to exaggerate their power.
	And I use the example of the Symbian-Lebanese Army.
	We thought, wow, in the 70s that was a big army.
	It was, I don't know, 10 guys or something.
	And that goes back and forth, and so when I first published that, and it ran around the world, and I was attacked for months afterwards, and I think it was borne out by subsequent events.
	It was a serious risk.
	We did exaggerate it, as I personally think we are exaggerating the risk of economic collapse now.
	Maybe wrong in both cases, but I'm skeptical given what data I've seen.
	I hope you're right.
	All right, here comes Steve in Phoenix, Arizona.
	Steve, you're on with Professor Kosko.
	Good morning.
	Professor, it's delightful to speak with you.
	I'd like to make some comments on AI and possibly ask a question.
	From a philosophical point of view, the movie The Matrix alludes to this world, sort of a world based on AI, artificial intelligence, and it's just really a fascinating sort of idea that the world that we currently examine these thoughts from may be a world of artificial intelligence even in and of itself.
	And even the Bible, the story of the Garden of Eden, seems to point to the Tree of Knowledge, and that could possibly even be interpreted as artificial intelligence that we've sort of sprung up from, at least that's what I've thought.
	So, you know, reality may be more like science fiction than the reality people think of it as, which has already been touched upon tonight, but I guess one question is, is there evidence That we are currently living in some sort of created AI.
	Even the thing that's thinking through us, examining, talking about these subjects, is there... I mean, again, it's perhaps maybe a little etheric, maybe a little out there, but... No, it's a good question, and I addressed it in one place in the book, Noise, and there was an interview with New Wired Magazine you can find online, and I point out that one of the ways you could detect whether you're living in an AI This is known in philosophy as the brain in a vat problem.
	We all may just be brains floating in a vat somewhere with a bunch of tubes and wires connected to a computer chip.
	You really can't disprove that.
	You can just cite the evidence as strong as you can.
	But one way would be if the simulation you were in were not real effective, there would be certain stroboscopic effects.
	Like when you looked at wagon wheels in a movie, they seemed to move backwards.
	That's called aliasing.
	So the sampling might not be at an especially high rate.
	There'd be little clues like that.
	You look at a distance and the futural filling in wasn't real good.
	But otherwise, you really can't be sure.
	And there's this other sense that I mentioned that what we think of as reality out there is wildly processed through our neurons.
	For example, even vision runs through the thalamus.
	We don't get a raw image and it goes through several layers of neural networks.
	It gets reconstructed in the back of the head.
	The other inputs to the brain come from the 12 cranial nerves.
	And they suffer all kinds of problems, especially as you age.
	So we have a sense, when we're children, I think, that we're God-like, and we directly sense the universe out there.
	But we blink and we see that's not the case.
	What we see is just images, light images reflected, and it's kind of an illusion, again, built up in the back of the brain.
	But if the bitstream was fast enough and there was no aliasing, you... You couldn't detect it.
	You wouldn't know.
	So it's always a viable hypothesis.
	Maybe not high probability, But you technically can't completely throw it out.
	Do you have any comments on the current state of cell phone technology?
	The world is switching over almost entirely to cell phones, and I hate them.
	From a talk show host's point of view, they may be able to hear a pin drop, but it sounds like a fuzzy plop on the other end of a cell phone.
	As a professor, it's the noise pollution effect that I think bothers a lot of us.
	The first thing I have to tell someone in a lecture that I do on Friday is, all cell phones off.
	And people do that more in public and movie theaters and places like that.
	Now, there's always the ongoing question of whether putting something that energetic so close to your brain for so many years might have some effect, including... I don't care.
	I don't care about that.
	I just want it to sound good.
	Okay.
	Fidelity level.
	That's right.
	Yeah, I think the desire to get things cheaper and smaller has been a factor.
	And I know with a lot of the algorithms that I've seen out there, the companies that control cell phones are relatively cheap in how they distribute the energy.
	They have some very clever adaptive techniques, but they're cutting that range within.
	As I understand it, it's a fairly low margin business.
	I think that's why.
	I just had to get my shot in.
	I'm so sick of cell phones.
	You know, I have one and I use it, but they sound like crap, to be honest with you.
	And it seems to me if they want to innovate something, they can let us actually hear a pin drop sounding like a pin drop.
	Seattle brings Tom.
	You're on the air, Tom.
	I have a couple of outrageous statements to make, which will be followed by my question.
	Please bear with me.
	When I was eight, I was gathered up and abducted by an alien flying saucer that was collecting biological samples, and it turned out that inside this machine was an alien who had lived his 400 years and died, and was allowed to go on in the service of his government as an explorer in this machine.
	So I had some first-hand experience with the Artificially intelligent conversion of human to machine.
	And this guy behaved a lot like an old man locked up in a closet because we talked all afternoon about airplanes.
	Okay, and then the next thing is, uh, I've encountered several artificial, uh, intelligent aliens, uh, and they uniformly lack the common sense that it takes to, uh, to, uh, get by in the human world.
	For example, one asked me to explain what nostalgia meant, and on like that.
	And I'm wondering how much of this technology we're doing nowadays relates to Philip Corso's book, The Day After Roswell, where we're disseminating alien technology into our civilization.
	And unless you have some questions, I'll listen off the air.
	No, I don't think I have any questions, nor do I have any answers.
	How about you, Professor?
	Tom, I just wish you could have brought us a hard artifact from that alien encounter.
	Anything at all, right?
	Okay.
	Steve, in Upland, California, you're on the air with Professor Acosco.
	Hi.
	Hi, hi.
	Hey, Art.
	I've been with you for 20 years, ever since you've been blasting out of Las Vegas and driving home in that little car at night.
	It's been a while.
	It's been a wild ride.
	Yes, it has.
	For you personally, I've gone through your back problems and everything else, and I've been with you.
	Oh, by the way, I've been waiting 20 years for Bart to be on your show.
	Bart, I've seen you here and there and so forth, and every time I've seen someone moderate you, they sort of fall off their chair and say they can't speak anymore if they're not a good moderator.
	Art's up to you.
	I have three questions, basically.
	Real simple ones.
	One is, I read Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near, and I was pretty blown away by it.
	He was pretty factual, but he couldn't get too detailed in a book that was 5,000 pages.
	Well, 500 pages.
	But I was wondering, number one, what you thought about Ray Kurzweil's estimate that we will achieve immortality by 2050.
	Number two, the Sufis think that, and this is what I think is true too, that God had no reason to create anything Because God doesn't have to have a reason for anything.
	But he did have a whim, just a whim, to know himself.
	And he said, Who am I?
	And that caused the entire explosion of what we now know as the knowable universe.
	And we are in the process now of becoming, and supposed to becoming, knowledgeable of being one with God or God.
	Ourselves, and that takes a long time.
	And my third question, actually, that's a statement question.
	My third question is that I think Einstein left out one letter in his equation, E equals MC squared, and that's I for information.
	So there's my three questions.
	What do you think?
	Well, first off, I'm a big fan of Ray Kurzweil.
	He and I actually had the same editor for my book.
	Oh, really?
	The year 2050, I personally think, is optimistic.
	But I agree with him structurally.
	There are exponential changes coming.
	More laws, more than one Moore's Law, will likely bring that about.
	We just argue, I think, about the parameters.
	I'm not as confident as he is, but I think the basic argument is right.
	And I think he and I agree on what to do as an alternative.
	As for God knowing things, I have a problem with this.
	The notion of omniscience has been challenged, I think quite forcefully by logicians, that it turns out that it's not possible, logically, For there to be what's called a set of all truths, if there were, there's the subset of all those subsets, and that's even bigger.
	And that's called Cantor's Theorem.
	So it looks like omniscience is impossible.
	And it raises the question whether God is subject to the dictates of logic.
	I don't know.
	And I also have a hard time with the idea of a sort of a navel-gazing God.
	I would think that information would come with even semi-omniscience.
	As for information and energy, there are a lot of links to those, and I discussed one of them in Heaven in a Chip in particular, namely between energy and matter on the one hand, and taking that matter, throwing it into a black hole, and estimating the information content by the size of the black hole as it expands.
	That's a pretty active area of physics.
	You mentioned Einstein.
	If we go back to the concept of having a chip or one of us in a chip, or I guess our grandchildren, because it probably won't be until then, what would happen to the brain, Professor, given the opportunity, no doubt by then, for unlimited storage and processing?
	Would the brain not only remain healthy, but would continue to grow, get to Einstein and beyond, well beyond?
	You mean the cognitive power of the chip?
	Yes, yes, yes.
	I think that would be achieved in the first step in the door.
	Well, with all due respect to Einstein, he would agree if he were to see these facts.
	The sheer amount of data processing, access to databases, the infallible reasoning, for example, all those things that you would have The first moment you enter that world of nanotime, the effects that you would have over time, remember that's a lot of time, because a year of our time is eons inside of a chip, and there's a lot of years to go, and you have the effect of combining in a kind of mind melder, not internet, but mind net, with so many other minds.
	I just don't think we can foresee what those kinds of states of mind would be.
	I've argued that they would have certain equilibria structure like neural networks, But that's just an abstract argument.
	Again, I think it would be like us appreciating complex music and trying to explain that to an ant.
	I just don't think we can wrap our little three pounds of meat around that.
	Okay.
	Houston, and Doug, you're on with Professor Costco.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	I'm in Houston here.
	Long-time listener.
	Run a paper route so I get a lot of time to think.
	First off, I was thinking on the noise problem.
	You were trying to figure out how more noise could help.
	If you remember way, way back in the day when you bought cereal and you get that little color decoder that would show red, and when you look through it, certain letters would pop out.
	Well, the red and the off-red and the different colors were what shaped the letters.
	So in other words, you would just have a void red you were looking at without some kind of noise or disturbance there.
	Two, I was curious, the weight that a body loses when it passes on.
	You know, some people think, hey, that might be the troll, that might not be.
	Would that loss still happen, do you think, if we were all chipped?
	And that rises so many questions about, I guess, identity theft in a totally new level.
	Well, the identity theft question is the big one.
	The security of a chip, the power.
	I mean, if you think the government has power over you now, what would happen if all or part of your mind and being were in a chip?
	Just the power source alone would give a lot of power.
	A huge problem, along with the huge benefits here.
	The business about a loss in weight, I think if you speak to an undertaker, and I have, and better still if you ever get a chance to witness that kind of activity, I think it will dispel such notions.
	I think there's a lot of other more cosaic ways to explain any loss in mass or tissue.
	There were some interesting experiments that were done.
	They did measure, I think, three ounces.
	Something like that, yes.
	Something like three ounces.
	All right.
	Dennis in Meridian, Mississippi.
	Your turn.
	It's a pleasure to talk to you, Art and Mr. Costco.
	Yes.
	I'm holding your novel, Nano Time.
	Good for you.
	And I'm about halfway through with it.
	Hard to put down.
	Thank you.
	I was wondering, based on your, how you view the future in this book, just how far you think we're coming along or possibly reaching that?
	It's a good question.
	The book came out in 97 and it talks about what a World War III might look like.
	Again, this was based on a plan of a big movie with Oliver Stone to compete with Kubrick's, then-Kubrick's movie, AI.
	And a lot of time has passed since then.
	And it looks like, in terms of the battles we see over oil, of course, that was a pre-9-11 book, a little ahead of its time.
	I wouldn't change a heck of a lot in there.
	There's a few things.
	And the basic arguments about Moore's Law and what happens when terrorists get their hands, which is the idea, the terrorists get their hands on some of this chip technology.
	I think it's still unfortunately a viable question, and other issues like the growing tension between China and Russia.
	So, I would like to do a second edition someday, but it's still not at the point that I'd do other than correct a few typos.
	So, should the terrorists get their hands on something like that, your concerns about terrorism then would rise?
	Yeah, one neat idea I think in the book, we call it chip head terrorists, that you take You think it's your friend, but they have that chip in their head, and they're programmed, truly brainwashed, because their brain is that chip.
	And maybe there's some spectacular powers at the boot.
	And the novel begins with literally a big bang that way, and some other techniques.
	But yeah, that's a problem.
	And unfortunately, since so much of the technology we're talking about is off-the-shelf technology, it's in principle possible that terrorists could do this, in the same way they could make and do make improvised cruise missiles and things like that from off-the-shelf devices.
	Mm-hmm.
	So, once you've got somebody willing to give their life to take yours and many others, it depends, I guess, on how much technology they can get their hands on.
	And if they get their hands on something that'll end it all, it'll all end.
	That's right.
	And here also, even if someone's not willing to give up their life, they're forcibly used as a tool, is a concern.
	It creates a kind of espionage.
	All right, listen, I don't know what happens to the time.
	I do these shows and it just goes.
	It has been such a pleasure having you on the air, Professor.
	Your latest book is Noise, and I'm obviously going to have to read it, so I'm going to have to find a way to lay my hands on it over here.
	It will eventually make it, but I don't know that I can wait.
	It has been, as I said, a pleasure having you on the air with me, and I hope you will come back and do it again.
	I'd love to.
	Take care, my friend.
	All right, that is Professor Bart Kosko, obviously a very brilliant man.
	It has been my pleasure this night being with you, and we'll do it again soon, I hope.
	I come when they ask, so I trust it will be fairly soon.
	From Manila in the Philippines, kind of a shiny place in Southeast Asia.

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