Art Bell from Manila welcomes AI expert Bart Kosko, who debunks vague claims like psychic phenomena and astrology, citing probability flaws and skull-thick electromagnetic barriers. Kosko predicts Moore’s Law will extend at least 10 years, enabling AI to eventually outpace human innovation but warns of risks in fields like medicine and finance due to misapplied algorithms. While dismissing soul-transfer theories or blood-based intelligence, he acknowledges AI simulations could reveal inconsistencies like stroboscopic glitches, though human perception already filters reality through neural networks. Ultimately, exponential tech progress may redefine cognition—but omniscience remains unattainable, per Cantor’s theorem. [Automatically generated summary]
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 A.M. It is my honor and privilege to be here on this last Sunday of the month there in the U.S., 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 ABEs 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 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, Hafide.
That's hello in Guamese.
Guamese is probably wrong.
I'm sure that's not correct.
But Hafide 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.
And I also got to do an interview at K-57.
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 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.
I'm 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, which is 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 could 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.
All right, 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 L.A. 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.
Glenn County Police Chief Matt Doring identified the victim as 19-year-old Michael Toller.
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.
He thought our economy was in trouble.
Japan's in real trouble, so much trouble economically that it looks as though the opposition party is going to win and rip the election away from those who have held power.
Usually does happen when the pocketbooks 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 four.
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 around 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.
And 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.
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 classed themselves as believers in a study which assessed 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.
And 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 aged 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-in-a-got tipped, it's a really, really, really good feeling.
Well, 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 know, 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, that's not a young lady who does this sort of thing.
It 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.
Now, 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.
High, high.
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, and vaporized water ice at least six miles high.
The whole mess should be easily visible from Earth.
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 Shang'ai, Zetai, Ren County, South County, as well as Yunyang County.
I'm sure I slaughtered those names.
The event occurred on the evening of 20 August, beginning around 8.30 p.m.
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 mainland 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 or anything like that.
All right, we're going to take a break, and then we're going to take some openline, 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 2 o'clock in the afternoon.
Might as well be midnight, though, because I have mini 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 middle of the night.
And also, if you detect something unusual in my voice, I have another cold.
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 on to impossible, but I'm doing what I can.
I am ArtBell 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.
We've got it here now in the Philippines, as you've got it there.
So it's 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.
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.
So 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.
unidentified
Yeah, there hasn't been any uptick as far as people living in Australia or New Zealand, or have you heard anything to that effect?
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?
unidentified
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.
And 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 is definitely different than the regular flu that kills so many people in the United States every year.
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.
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.
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.
unidentified
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.
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.
unidentified
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.
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.
unidentified
Oh, boy.
One instance, my daughter, it looked 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 whispered it, said die in the water.
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.
unidentified
Yeah, it just worries me that they're rushing the production so much, you know, and I don't think they're going to, you know, have enough time to test it.
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.
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 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 wildcard line and say, top of the morning, you're on coast to coast A.M. Hello.
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 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.
And 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.
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 Costco is, my word, brilliant.
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. Costco 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. Costco 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.
God, I've got to get a copy of that.
His latest book is Noise.
It's called Noise and available through Viking Penguin.
So 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 Cosco.
Well, all right.
Professor Costco, welcome back to Coast to Coast AM, my friend.
No, 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 intelligent, 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, which may precede thinking, balance and robotics and those kinds of quote-unquote smart tasks.
The trouble is, when you look at that, it isn't clear what you mean by aware.
It sort of begs the question of what is consciousness, and we're still trying to figure that out.
And a lot of these theories of art, these older theories of mind and brain, rely on what's called the homunculus, the idea that inside the brain there's, in 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.
Of course, I recently re-watched AI, the movie, which I thought was really a good movie.
God, it was good.
Do you ever imagine, Dr. Cusco, 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?
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, op-ed, run around the world and printed in the L.A. Times.
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 Chris 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 brains.
Computer chips operate so much more quickly, are so much more powerful at 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 was more like almost a voodoo doll that was animated.
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 and 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 pre-script kind of thing.
And the idea was World War III in 2030 that had chips and brains and those things.
And we tried quite valiantly to get that thing funded, but at the time we couldn't and the special effects weren't there.
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?
In terms of raw processing, the brain has about 1 to 10 million columns in it, 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, 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 column of a human, one column in 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 sort of thing ought to be possible.
If Moore's Law remains in effect, in other words, I think Moore himself fairly recently suggested that his own law may break down and may break down pretty soon.
Art, 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.
And 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, nanoengineering, and even a little farther out, quantum computing, there's lots of alternatives.
There's a massive, there's a large passive 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.
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 lifetimes.
I may well be wrong.
And if it did, it'd likely just slow down to every three or four years.
I thought we were kind of stuck with nanotechnology in the sense that they were able to manipulate 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?
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 various things.
Nanoman, shirts that might stop bullets, that kind of thing?
Well, 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 a nano-based bulletproof vest, but that is something more science fiction-ish for the moment, but it's certainly in theory impossible to do that.
Lots of gadgets from tennis balls to clothes that are self-cleaning, some clothes that 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, it's 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.
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 big jumps in, well, it'll stop Moore's Law.
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, it's a hundred thousandths the size of a hair, but it 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.
Act like a little tiny antenna.
And a small patch of those would have trillions of those antennas and have massive signal processing capability.
It is thinking more like humans, and in particular, allowing software and computers to use that power.
You almost 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.
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 have required a human, we can often capture that quite quickly and effectively with fuzzy logic.
The government has, for example, at Fort Meade, something like 27 acres, underground acres of computers, of the best computers running full-time to process lots of Intel data and who knows what else.
The sheer, as Lennon apparently said, quantity has a quality all its own.
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 our brain.
If 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.
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, 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.
I think a lot of algorithms have yielded up structure.
They're few and far between.
They're the great moments of science.
They've 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, just finance, whether you're credit worthy, 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 artificially intelligent neural-style algorithms were and still are used to estimate whether you're credit worthy.
So the bank person can tell you yes or no.
They really can't give you the audit trail why, because it has to do with how a lot of other people behaved in similar circumstances.
And the neural network has abstracted from all that data a general pattern and sees you as a particular part of that pattern, either worthy or not to some degree.
Something we can identify with our own neural networks, like the 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 Psych Project as an encyclopedia from AI service Doug Lennett.
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, and 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.
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, and computers don't work that way.
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 a 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 smart.
I must also say, Art, there's been a lot of complaints, especially from us professors, that we are not, I think, quite as smart because we are 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.
And it doesn't bode well to the book industry.
My colleagues in the book industry are almost terrified about the future of books.
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?
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?
Precisely because the common law recognizes that you'll work 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 a 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 with 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.
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.
Now, 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%.
You might get it 60%.
It's very tricky stuff.
And one study, Stephen 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, experts in strokes, it was who had the most experience.
Because 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.
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 a much more romantic name of robotics, often a similar kind of thing.
And control has, well, negative connotation, like control freak, but automatic control is very effective.
And it has, in particular, helped a great deal in flying helicopters and 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.
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 explanations I've seen, something called complex integration theory, something called the Kuta-Jakowski theorem.
And that's not what you're going to see in an elementary book on that.
But that's a very beautiful mathematical series that 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.
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 get the mathematics wrong, spectacularly so recently in the economic crisis.
But even at the personal finance level.
So it's a 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 a house is negative.
It came from Richard Bellman, who used to be at RAND Corporation and USC, the founder of something called dynamic programming.
It 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 a dimensionality of a system, and this is a so-called curse.
And it's built into the nature of things.
In effect, 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, our 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.
And 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.
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 cursive 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.
You have a rule explosion.
Similarly with a 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 just like a dragon.
It's always there, but we push it back a little farther.
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 at all anymore.
And so I ask myself, how are we going to ultimately, truly, come out of this recession?
Sure, 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 just based on information technology, which we are heavily in?
And the answer to your question is we will innovate our way out of it.
That is what America does best.
And 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.
We innovate in a way that no one else in the world does art.
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 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, where 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.
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.
After all, except for the recent bump we've had, which I think is a very unique thing in history because of 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 really has 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, 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've 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.
So 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 art.
If you look back at the Great Depression, there was 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.
I mean, I'm skeptical of government power in general, and government's attempts to solve problems 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 of 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.
It wasn't timely.
It 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 wafer 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 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.
It would cripple the airline industry, for example.
It's the factor of production of 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 happen, unfortunately, short of a war.
Further, there's every reason to believe, and even Warren Buffett, who's a staunch Democrat 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 in world currency, not just ours.
Inevitably, that means inflation.
And the effect of inflation, as you'll recall from the 70s, is banks say, look, I don't want to be paid in inflated dollars by you, debtor, 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 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.
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 Fed 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 or London bank rate.
And that jumped from 1% to 4%.
And banks stopped loaning, but they had an incentive.
First off, they were scared.
And 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 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 of some of the banking industry was quite shocking.
And we never quite knew what the reason was for that.
We trusted these 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?
And I've heard arguments that 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, making it more likely that big institutions will take bigger risks knowing that they're simply too big to fail and we bailed out.
All right, we're at yet another breakpoint 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 Mark Bell.
And of course, you're listening to the show that owns the night.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. Stay right where you are.
Welcome back.
Professor Costco 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.
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.
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, turns out to be as often as the case the general rule.
The 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 problem.
And if you go back, Art, and look at your own training in that, I think you'll see most of the models were like Ohm's law where 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 effect 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, and 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 adapt it to it.
And as I argue at the end of the book, because it is mean 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 simple proteins 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 innocent triphosphate.
But it's a pretty darn good theory of what life is at that level.
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 sub-threshold, and the noise boosts them above threshold.
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.
Well, before just a minute, if the threshold is 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, as 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 papers on my website, the transaction of signal processing, and one of the physicists in the audience jumped up and literally jumped up at me and said, you know, we could use this possibly to detect gravitational waves because they're so faint.
And it'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 on 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.
Let's jump to heaven and 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.
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.
But, Art, my proviso would be: I don't think you want to wait till the end here.
I think immediately what you'd like to do right now would 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 UFC 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 and 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 take another chunk, another chip, so to speak, from your brain somewhere else and keep doing this a chip at a time.
You never lose alertness, but when you're done, you fully upload it into the chip.
And what was your brain is floating in pieces in formaldehyde.
You've crossed over without ever losing consciousness.
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 saying available or sitting up there in cortex somewhere as a backup.
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 this sense that once you have that kind of entity in the chip, assuming we could verify this in a legal chain of custody, you'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.
Something in an 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 belt that would exist.
And that could be a problem.
It'd be like an information threat, a clone, in effect.
That's why I said if you did it while you were alert, the chipping raise your brain, it overcomes that because 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.
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.
Well, probably, my guess is approximate it that way.
That's the efforts now to do that through simulations, 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, and very possibly doing 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 Morris technology catches up to supporting or takes over, in effect, that bridge that takes you from meat to chip.
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?
Oh, Mark, 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 is such it's 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 died.
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.
So 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 stirring 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 backload it into some regrown 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 a human being.
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.
And after all, that's how 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 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.
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.
When we get beyond this system of, again, of a brain without backups, 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.
Yeah, I advance two, I think, new arguments, one based on neural networks, that you can't, as most philosophers have, dismiss God simply because you can't define him.
I actually hold the co-holders of the first fuzzy patent on spread spectrum, and I discuss that concept in the fifth chapter of the book, Noise.
The Spread Spectrum is a 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.
And I tell the story in the book that it was the first patent on this from the early 1940s was by actress Hedi Lamar, who, as you know, played in Samson and Delilah.
And in fact, 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.
But that's just one of many examples.
And as we look into nonlinear world of signal processing where there's a noise benefit, but I mean specifically art.
The benefit is we're able to hide, but you're not when you despread it, when you receive that signal, you're still detecting whether it's present or not.
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 that's what 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.
Nonlinear systems improve if you add a little bit of noise in general, whereas linear systems can never improve.
You know, this computer technology seems quite complicated, but something that's always been in my mind is the translator, an instant translator of 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 y'all carry on the conversation.
That 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.
A very smart student was translating English to Farsi, which is the Persian language of Iran.
And in fact, 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.
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 Costco.
unidentified
Hi.
Good evening, Art and Professor Costco.
Hi.
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 microwires in a computer chip?
And with organic chips, couldn't we grow them like what we hear how UFOs are manufactured?
Well, 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 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.
It's usually the ratio, the brain to the body mass.
Like an elephant has a big brain, also a big body, also the convolutions, which really comes down, again, to the count of the number of those cortical columns.
And I don't, off the top of my head, know what it is for an elephant or a whale.
I suspect they're a lot more intelligent than we think that they are.
Yeah, it's great to hear you talk about this whole noise thing because when I was in college, I had a couple of Russian buddies that used to go off about this.
This is a good 10 years ago.
But the question I had for you was 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 just remembering 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 alpha flux or something like that.
A lot is hidden in those two words, the adjective random and the noun fluctuation.
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 at length in noise 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-backed 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 inferior 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.
unidentified
So 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, if you're going to try to make use of this design perspective, is it more a function of 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?
Some problems, if you have an inherent noise source, like with a 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.
unidentified
This book, Noise, is this a new book, or has this been available for a while?
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.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
I'm Professor Costco.
I have a question based on the soul issue that he was talking about.
And 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 souls or 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.
And oh, this is something that I've been thinking about for quite some time.
And this is an Art Bell type 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 organ killed themselves the same way under the same circumstance.
And then we have people who donate the 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.
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.
unidentified
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 and receive data.
Now if our blood is iron and it could record magnetically be recorded information, then the blood passing to our bloodstream has a receptor somewhere in our body that's playing it like a tape or videotape, and this which gives our memory and our intelligence.
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 conductions.
They're 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's a great number, I would argue, almost certainly has 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, that it says you'll meet an interesting stranger today, and you think about that, decides how vague it is, and you don't think about all the other strangers you didn't meet that day.
So if you tabulate that in a fair matrix, that you'd find the odds are pretty much that due to chance.
unidentified
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, you're basically remembering that.
And basically what you say, we're just not really adding all the 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 risks of sharks and things that we can picture versus the danger of just the water, which usually kills a lot more people.
unidentified
Well, what about 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 ear lobe.
There's actually, I mean, if you know anything about electronics, there is a like an RFID pattern, biological antenna, near the inner ear near the brain.
And what do you think about psychic or phenomena between even animals?
And from what I've looked at it, 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 whiff spread spectrum so that 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.
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 Costco here, and lots of you awaiting an answer.
So in a moment.
Professor Costco, Mike in Jupiter, Florida sends me a computer message past blast.
We get them while we're on there.
It says, please ask Dr. Costco about his article on the overblown state of terrorism, one you wrote apparently for the L.A. 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 at, oh, my 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 Zaif or his guys, it's very, very safe here.
Now, if you read the State Department warnings about the Philippines, it would 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.
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, well, 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.
Terrible thing, but substantially fewer than dying 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 to 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 used the example of the Simbian Lebanese army.
We thought, wow, the 77th 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.
All right, 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 an artificial intelligence that we sort of sprung up from.
At least that's what I 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 the 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.
And I addressed it in one place in the book Noise, and there was an interview with me and 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 us or computer chips.
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 seem to move backwards.
That's called aliasing.
So the sampling might not be at a sufficiently 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 godlike 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.
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 who 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, I think, that bothers a lot of us.
First thing after the cells, when I lecture that I did on Friday, is all cell phones off, and people do that more in public and movie theaters and places like that.
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 transformation.
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 rage within.
As I understand, it's a fairly low-margin business.
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.
unidentified
Okay, 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 this 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 the closet because we talked all afternoon about airplanes.
Okay, and then the next thing is I have encountered several artificial intelligent aliens, and they uniformly lack the common sense that it takes to 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.
For you personally, I've gone through your back problems and everything else, and I've been with you.
I have, 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, can't speak anymore if they're not a good moderator.
Bart's up to you.
I have three questions, basically, real simple ones.
One is, I've read Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near, and I was pretty blown away by it because 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, this is a statement question.
My third question is that I think Einstein left that one letter in his equation, E equals M C squared, and that's I for information.
He and I actually had the same editor for my book.
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 of 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.
Yeah, I think that would have been achieved in the first step in the door.
Well, with all due respect to Einstein, I think you would agree if you 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 entered 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 meld, or 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.
Houston and Doug, you're on with Professor Costco High.
unidentified
Hey, I'm in Houston here, longtime 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 soul, that might not be.
Would that loss still happen, do you think, if we were all chips?
And that rises so many questions about, I guess, identity theft in a totally new level.
The security of a chip, the power, I mean, if you think the government has power over you now, what would happen if all a 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 prosaic ways to explain any loss in mass or tissue.
It's a good question because 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 that 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 is 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 the point that I'd do other than correct a few typos.
Yeah, one neat idea, I think, in the book we call a chip-head terrorist, that you take someone and 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 with some spectacular powers 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 improvise cruise missiles and things like that from off-the-shelf devices.
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.