Joe Rogan and robotics expert Daniel H. Wilson explore AI’s ethical risks, from autonomous weapons like self-healing minefields to amoral machines—like a painting robot that could destroy humanity—debating whether robots might outpace human morality. They dissect emotional expectations in humanoid robots (e.g., Michael Fassbender’s Robopocalypse performance) and question if machines can ever truly replicate free will, humor, or creativity. Wilson dismisses sentient sex robots as fringe but insists ethical design is critical, while Rogan muses on human-like artificial bodies and societal obsession with tech. The conversation ends with a tease of Rogan’s move to Montreal for Metropolis, blending futurism with his signature blend of humor and deep dives. [Automatically generated summary]
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Yeah, as a kid I got really into robots and then I studied computer science.
And then while I was doing that I found out that instead of just programming computers, you could actually teach them how to learn the answer on their own, artificial intelligence.
That there was science fiction that you could study for real, the nerd in me really went for it.
It was exactly like if you're playing a role-playing game and you have a character sheet and you're picking the skills.
I saw roboticist and I said, oh well, I'll level up in that.
Well, man, I have really mixed feelings about this because I spent all this time with roboticists.
We were building robots, we all had our own research, and we were definitely trying to help people.
None of us were evil that I knew of, you know?
And so then I go and I get done and I write this book where robots are killing everybody.
So I made it as realistic as I could based on everything I know.
So there are no robots from outer space.
There's no time travel.
This is all based on stuff that we either have already or we're going to have soon.
So it's the most realistic version that I could come up with.
But that said, I don't really think that the robots are going to You know, join together under a sentient artificial intelligence and then try to wipe us out as a species.
I always wonder, because I always felt like there were certain things that, the instincts that human beings had that lead us to war and lead us to feats of ego and craziness and psychosis, and I always felt that they were, a lot of them were wrapped around breeding, around the necessary things that need to be in place in order to reinforce the idea that it's competition to breed.
And that these things wouldn't exist in a computer because it wouldn't need them.
It wouldn't be inherent to the system the same way greed and ego is almost inherent to the human system to promote sexual conquest or to promote competition.
Yeah, I mean if you look at any of us that are sitting here that are alive, you gotta think that every single one of our ancestors, by hook or by crook, they lived long enough To make babies and to keep the babies safe.
And so you don't make it that long, like 200,000 years of homo sapien, without being a badass, right?
Anybody that was a little too soft, they're not here.
They didn't make babies.
And so that is a part of our DNA, literally, as human beings.
And the thing about building robots is...
I mean, you can make them any way you want, right?
If you want to build a robot that's going to have a sense of self-preservation, you can do that.
Well, there's also the crazy thought that in this pursuit, this mad pursuit of success that pushes people to do war and pushes people with great feats of ego, it's almost like that's necessary to ensure that there's some form of competition to make things move in the right direction.
But it doesn't seem like that would be inherent in a computer system.
I think, like, the douchey human behavior, like, we shouldn't think that it would, like, say, oh, we've got to wipe out all these people.
We have to take over and wipe out all these people.
It doesn't even seem like it would have, like, a desire to compete.
One thing I've always wondered is if you're driving a drone all day, you know, and you, like, are the human being that does pull the trigger, like, wouldn't it be nicer for the government to put, like, a big black sensor bar, like, over it before you see all the little people get turned into chunks of meat?
To define robots, when people ask me, I always say, It's any kind of mechanical artifact that senses the environment, thinks about what to do, and then acts on its own and does the whole sense-think-act deal.
And that's what a landmine does.
It sits around and senses, waits on a human whenever a human steps on it, makes a simple decision to explode.
So now, in order to make them more ethical, there are lots of new landmines that I've read about.
The self-healing minefield is one of my favorites.
It's a minefield where the landmines can locomote a little bit, so you spread them out, and then if something comes through, they basically set up a local area network, so each landmine kind of has basically Wi-Fi, and they're talking to each other, so they kind of know where each other are at.
Then if some of them get blown up, other ones are able to hop, and they just do these little hops until they Until they evenly distribute themselves again.
And so then you've got this what they call a self-healing minefield.
But that's nothing compared to the crab mines, the ones that are designed to be dropped offshore.
And they've got crab legs and they scuttle up on the bottom of the ocean up to the...
Up through the beach, basically.
And then onto land, and that's how you mine beaches.
unidentified
Like those walking mime, or bombs from Mario Brothers.
I've never seen a real one of those, and I don't think those are really in use.
But it's a great example of if you want to build a machine that's going to operate in a certain environment, you think of the environment as a problem, right?
The problem is how do you locomote on the bottom of the ocean in the pounding surf?
How do you do that?
Well, there are answers to all these problems.
There are animals, right?
A lobster is the answer to that problem.
A crab is the answer to that problem.
And so you go and you study the animals, and then you take the basic principles about how they locomote and how they do whatever, and then you distill them down, you stick them into a robot.
So no matter where you want to go, there's usually a solution to that problem in the form of an animal that you can study.
See, this is one thing that, as a roboticist, you have to do this.
You have to look at a human being from a totally alien perspective, right?
And I have a point, but...
If you look at how to do speech recognition or emotion recognition, from a robot's perspective, we are just moving pieces of flesh around on our faces into different configurations, and then that conveys some sort of inner chemical state...
I mean, it's not intuitive.
It's not easy to figure out.
You can look at humankind as like, all we do is we cover the earth in lawns.
We are slaves to grass.
If it wasn't for us, grass wouldn't really exist everywhere that it does.
So if you look at human beings from sort of these alien perspectives, sometimes cool shit falls out.
And some people do think that it's our destiny to create the next intelligent life form, you know, and to set it free.
And then those people usually think that it's our turn to retire.
Hans Moravec.
He says, you know, once we do this, children of the mind, right?
What happens when we start integrating this technology into our own bodies?
And just not thinking about crazy science fiction, far out stuff, just thinking about right now.
What's really cool about this to me is that the people who are getting this, are people that have real serious disabilities.
People who are willing to have a hole drilled in their skull and a neural implant placed on the surface of their brain to improve their quality of life.
And it's not like Tony Stark or rich kids that are getting a leg up in school.
It's like the most vulnerable, challenged people in our society are getting this technology.
And in some cases, it's making them It's not bringing them back to normal.
It's taking them past normal.
And so people with disabilities are like becoming people with super abilities.
Because, I mean, what's it going to be like when you realize that, hey, if you really do want to be the fastest sprinter on the planet, you've got to cut your legs off.
I mean, there's definitely a leap, which is you've got to go back to go forward, right?
Because without performance-enhancing drugs, you're still not disabled.
Like Oscar Pistorius, he competed in the London 2012 Olympics, right?
The guy has no legs below the knees.
He ran alongside able-bodied athletes on prosthetics, super advanced prosthetics.
If you take those prosthetics off of him, he ain't going anywhere, right?
And that's the difference.
I mean, if you take somebody off of performance-enhancing drugs, they're still capable of doing whatever it is that they were doing, just slower or not as well or whatever.
It seems like the real issue would be how much of the human ideal of life would be programmed into it.
If you were going to engineer a life form, which essentially you would be able to do if you had a robot and you turn this computer into some sort of a sentient being, what aspects of the human psyche would you engineer into it?
Would you engineer into it a sense of survival?
Would it be able to understand that that's illogical and override it if it was that strong and if you gave it some autonomy?
I think there's some story I read where there's...
Actually, I wrote a story where there was basically a robot that was designed to paint happy faces on things and then it goes nuts and runs amok and it just paints happy faces on everything and it ends up destroying the universe, painting happy faces because that's the way it sees the world.
I think there are a lot of people who think a lot about Ray Kurzweil, for instance.
He's really obsessed with this idea That we're going to upload our brains into machines and that we will basically have a machine that simulates every neuron in your brain and then you'll live inside and you'll live forever inside the box, right?
That's a great example of giving a human experience, like a human life to a machine so that it knows what things are like from our perspective.
So it knows you don't step on babies when you're walking across the room.
That innate nature that we have.
I think it's important that we do convey our ethics to the machines that we build so that they behave in a way that allows us to co-exist.
Well, because it's sort of like if we were live with Jules Verne and we were discussing, like, well, what shape should the capsule be when we go to the moon?
You know, it's like we're not close enough to solving that problem to sort of make informed decisions about how we should solve it.
If you have a really good form of intelligent life that you've created, it's an artificial intelligence, and you have it as a sex slave, that would be fucked up, man.
So for instance, the real problem when you make a fuck doll is do you allow a person to...
What happens to the people who interact with it?
So if you have a guy who goes home every day and he beats the crap out of this doll, is that okay?
If you built the doll, should the doll call the police?
Should the doll take it?
And your decision there, as a roboticist, as a scientist, product designer, whatever you are, you're designing an ethical interaction between your product and a human being.
And your decision can affect whether this guy Hurts a real woman, you know?
Or if you're building toys for children or really lifelike pets, you know, and a kid sticks the fake dog into the microwave, like, what happens, you know?
The idea that we're in some sort of an incredible computer program, and that it's so complicated.
And so well done that it's indistinguishable from real life and that we're interacting with things, but that the more they study string theory, they're studying in the computations of string theory, they keep finding this self-correcting computer code.
I don't understand what that means, but I understand it's a very specific type of computer code that we didn't even figure out until the early 20th century.
I think they said we figured it out in the 40s or 50s or something like that, if I remember correctly, but...
The idea that this is in these string theory equations that they're putting together.
I don't understand mathematics, but what I think they're trying to say is like, there's an eerie code to all this.
It's not just like, we don't know what the code is, but we can see that there's some repeating patterns.
No, no, no, no.
It's a very specific type of code.
And that's when they're studying the nature of reality.
So the nature of reality, and it's like one of its smallest measurable forms, is very obviously computer code.
42. It doesn't seem like if technology moves in the direction it's going right now.
If our computers get more and more powerful or our CGI shit is more and more believable, we've got to keep moving until one day we reach a point where we can simulate reality.
It's going to happen.
And if it's really fucking good, it's going to be just like this.
The question is, like, would you bother, because you could just create them in CG, right, and make them perfectly realistic, would you bother creating the real world version?
But I have to say, I'm super excited because I have a short story that got picked up by this director.
He's sort of a budding guy in London, right?
But he's making a short film based on this thing and he's negotiating with...
It's a story about a guy and a robot boy that he lives with because his real son has passed away.
And we got Lambert Wilson, the Merovingian, is going to be in this thing.
And then he's working with a university to get an actual robot.
There's this thing called the N.A.O. Humanoid.
It's the size of an eight to ten year old kid.
If you Google it, I mean, it moves like a real human being.
And they're going to have it as an actor.
It's just a short film, but, I mean, it's going to be pretty cool.
If we actually start having bases on the moon, if people actually started doing that, if they developed the technology to one day have bases on the moon, and we would go there, like going to fucking Hawaii.
People always argue that we're going to screw Earth up so bad that then we're going to have to go to Mars, the moon.
But the resource expenditure to leave Earth With a lot of people and even just to go to the moon, much less Mars, is so out of whack.
I mean, you'd be better off like almost doing anything to fix the Earth or just eking it out here.
I mean, let's face it.
If you poison the Earth's atmosphere so that you can't even walk outside anymore or you screw up the atmosphere so that we're getting radiation from...
On the show, we showed a video of all the nuclear explosions from 1947. It's online.
You can get it.
It's on...
I forget the website, but it shows the first tests, and then it shows Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it shows all these different ones that they did in Nevada.
The reason I like it is because I was thinking, and this is a little bit of a spoiler, but while I was writing Robo-Apocalypse, I was thinking, look, if I was a super intelligent AI, right, I'm not going to hang out and have all my processors in a place where humans are going to be comfortable, right?
So what's my fortress of solitude, right?
So when these nukes detonate, they vaporize a spherical chunk of, like, rock underground, and they create this chamber.
That is a dope idea that we would create a place where the bad guy lives because we're so stupid we blew up nukes in a hole that we dug into the ground.
Now, is that a case of people just having too much power because it's a military project to do whatever they want to do and the scientists are allowed to say, hey, let's try this, like some wacky scientist?
A lot of people in Seattle were talking about how they see them all the time on the freeway just driving around like a guy in the back seat and no one in the front seat.
So do you think that's the future, that everyone will have their own personal autonomous vehicle and they'll queue in on the highways and whatever and you'll be able to read the newspaper and your little vehicle won't be in control of it anymore?
Because if you're making a domestic robot that's going to operate in people's homes, right?
Right.
It's going to be in people's homes.
Old people, young people.
It's going to be on the street walking dogs.
I mean, I thought that was awesome, right?
Here's the deal.
You're going to want to make a safe robot.
It's a safe consumer product, okay?
So just think of this even just from the beginning for like one second from the perspective of a person who's actually building a domestic humanoid robot to sell.
Okay, first of all, you know that a human being, anything you put in their environment at home, they are going to put their fingers in it, they're going to try to have sex with it, they're going to get in the bathtub with it, they're going to find a way to like kill themselves using this...
A toaster is really hard to build Think about building this domestic robot.
I think the first thing that you're gonna do is you're gonna make it incapable of hurting people.
You're gonna make it small and light so that it can't walk through a plate glass window.
So that if it loses its batteries and goes all George Bush Segway and just falls over, then it won't crush your baby.
But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is if you're going to build a real domestic robot that's in someone's house, it's not going to be capable of crushing your fist with its hand or leaping through a glass window and falling three stories and denting the concrete.
And in fact, I got to again, Carl Wrench made this short film called The Gift, and these people have this snooty-looking butler robot that is a total badass, like totally physically over-engineered for the job he does, and it's an awesome, awesome little film.
And this, there was like, all these compilation ones, Creepy and Eerie, were all these different stories.
And I remember one of them, from one of those types of comic books, was about a robot that wound up fucking this dude's wife.
And it was really heavy-duty, man, because the guy tried to fight the robot, and the robot snapped his arm and broke it in front of him, and the robot had this giant dick.
Yeah, it was really creepy, because it was like this guy couldn't do anything about it, and this robot was taking over and fucking his wife.
It was a really fucked up video, or a comic book, rather, because I remember reading it when I was like, God, I couldn't have been more than eight or nine.
You know, that's when I was, like, really into comic books.
That was my comic book era.
And so, this image of this bald, giant robot with this giant cock snapping this guy's arm after he got done fucking his wife was, like, so disturbing.
I was like, could you imagine if that's what you have to deal with?
Does this robot start coming along and fucking people's wives and snapping dudes' arms and shit?
What do you think, coming from Ohio, coming from a place like Columbus, what do you think is the biggest impact that the internet has to a place like that?
Because now when you go back there, do you find these kids to be more tuned in than you were when you were their age?
Back in the day, the only way I would know anybody from another school or whatever is if I met them at a game or if I went to a roller skating rink and they were in the men's bathroom and they told me to come in a stall.
The internet connecting all these different things in a way that's never happened before allows all these areas that used to have no culture coming into them.
It allows them to experience an incredible variety of different things right out of their fucking computer.
Yeah, but on specific details, like really specific things that you're into where you wouldn't be able to get a critical mass of people that are into it if you had to be co-located.
Maybe I'm just a dweeb, but I can maintain about two good friends.
Like, real buddies.
And then, like...
Anything beyond that is really, there's a very narrow stripe of like acquaintances and then it's all, you know, you have all this time that you spend interacting with people online and it's a thousand people.
I think it's also something that we have to get used to managing.
It's managing the amount of information that comes into your life and managing the amount of people that you're interacting with.
Just any sort of social interaction through a message board or Facebook or Twitter, you could get so absorbed in communicating with all these different people that you will never get anything done.
Yeah, and you'll be the guy looking at his damn vibrating monster cell phone all the time while you're out and your friends are just like, I hate this guy.
I have friends that are super into role-playing games, but also board games people get into, but then also video games make role-playing games so much easier, especially the massively online multiplayer stuff.
A lot of times that seems to me to be just simple escape.
Forbes article about a guy named Peter Singer who's a...
He's basically a consultant for anybody, the CIA, all the military infrastructure, and they had him design all the robotic weaponry that's in the new Call of Duty.
And the shit is all super legit and really realistic.
He certainly did innovate in a big way in the first-person shooter world.
It was him, and there was that other guy that was with him with Doom, and then that guy left when he made Quake, who had long hair, had fabulous hair.
He was a very controversial video game designer himself, and those were the original id guys.
But they went on to make Quake, like Quake 2, Quake 3. Each one of them got better and more intense with the graphics, The amount of hours of entertainment they provided with those video games.
I know there was a lot of women quake players though There was like a lot of girls were really good that would play one-on-one duels with dudes and fuck them up and it was embarrassing as shit Because you just get jacked and quake by a chick.
Well, we're afraid of the human form in a diseased manner too, whether it's psychologically diseased or whether it's that 28 Days Later, that epidemic, that rage shit that got out.
My theory is that the reason that like a werewolf is scarier than like a wolf is because the werewolf, because it has human traits, has the capability of being evil, right?
Because a wolf or like an animal or just nature is not good or evil.
Like you don't blame the wolf for killing somebody.
It's like that's what a wolf does.
But as soon as you inject some human into it, then you have something that's capable of just really being evil and just doing something for evil's sake.
Yeah, I think that's a really accurate representation.
If you stop and think about it, it's very rare that a wolf would...
Actually, I have a friend, now that you think about this, I have a friend who had these wolves.
They were his pets, and they were like seven-eighths timber wolf, and they had like a little bit of husky or something else in them, and they were essentially wolves, man.
And he didn't really have good control over these things.
And they got out and they killed a bunch of the neighbor's farm animals.
And they didn't just kill one and ate it.
They killed them for pleasure.
Most of the time, I think wolves, when they're killing, they're killing out of starvation.
They're killing because they want to eat.
But I think they can kill a lot for pleasure, too.
Wolves actually kill for pleasure.
If they were fattened up, too, they might just fuck with you and jack you.
But the idea of a human...
Humans seem to be a lot more capable of evil than wolves.
Well, again, it's the competition thing, you know?
It's the complexities of the possibilities of emotions that can be conjured up raising a child and doing a shitty job of doing it and putting the kid in horrible situations.
And then all of a sudden, what that person is at the most evil...
Merges with a wolf.
You know the worst characteristics ever of a human being merged with a wolf and that's what a werewolf would be like a just horrible psychotic killer animal.
It's about it's like it's about like knowing what you're doing right like Hannibal Lecter freaks me the hell out because he's so aware of exactly what he's inflicting and it's like and that's what Like, amplifies whatever evil act he's doing is the level of, like, satisfaction that he's getting out of it.
But, yeah, that idea of the genius that wants to kill you, that doesn't have any remorse whatsoever and is doing it because it's the only thing that gives them any sort of a feeling.
I mean, this is like a question with whether we should implant ourselves and use neural implants to do things because you think to yourself, well, like, okay, we have all this bioethics and we've decided that it's not ethical for People to do this because everyone would have to get one in order to compete, right?
So we're going to outlaw them.
And then it's like, oh, in China, they're mandated by the state.
And they're getting real productive over there in China.
And it's like, oh, you know, you think about sort of you have a macrocosm view and then you have like a microcosm.
Microcosm is everybody in my kid's classroom went to the doctor and got diagnosed with ADHD. And now all these kids have a neural implant And they're all way smarter than my kid.
And the macrocosm is like that but applied to a whole nation that we're competing with.
Dude, that would freak you out if you were the only kid that had a natural brain in class and all the other kids had chips in their heads and you couldn't fuck with anything they were saying.
That stuff really does, you know, influence actual science.
Like, you know, people will take clips from these movies and everything and show them during their presentations and say, this is like what we're doing.
Wow.
Specifically, Minority Report, where he's doing that.
That was huge for human-computer interaction and HCI people.
Suddenly, that clip was showing up everywhere at conferences.
You know what I'm really impressed with is the speech recognition.
The iPhone has a native app that comes with it called Notes.
And this Notes, when you go to enter into a new note, it has this little...
This little button that you can press that looks like an old-school microphone, and you can just press it, and you talk into it, and you go, Daniel H. Wilson is a bad motherfucker.
Yeah, maybe it's girls like putting out a signal like they're down.
I had a friend who dated this girl and they were normal and he said she got this book, read the book, and then the next time they were together she asked him to spit in her mouth.
And he was like, what the fuck?
She goes, do it.
Spit my mouth.
And he was like, what?
What the fuck are you doing?
I've been reading this book, Fifty Shades of Grey.
And I'm just getting really excited about it.
And he was like, what the fuck are you reading?
So he started reading what she was reading and trying to figure out why she wanted him to spit in her mouth.
I went to Oricon, the science fiction convention in Portland, right?
So we have a hotel room for the sci-fi convention.
And my friend rents porno, right?
On the TV and at the beginning and I've never seen this before at the beginning before they played the the porn right there's a message that says These are unrealistic scenarios.
Do not try this.
These people are, like, trained.
It was, like, the whole, like, do not try this at home thing.
And then, of course, it's just typical pornography, right?
Very large objects going in very small places.
And it's true, like, I don't know if that's just a hotel thing or if that's just, like, on all porn.
But you can imagine the hotels are, like...
We really need to have a little disclaimer at the beginning because people are hurting each other.
If you talk to anybody that's in the medical profession, that's done any work in the emergency room, they would tell you about all the various things that people stuffed in their body and then got stuck up there.
And it's crazy, man.
I had a friend who had to pull a light bulb out of this dude's ass.
One of those twisty light bulbs.
You know those slightly thicker glass because they're kind of twisty?
There's a Times article right now where they're interviewing people, like a bunch of different people, about Porn, you know, and the impact on society.
And there's somebody that says exactly that.
They're like, look, you know, kids have access to everything.
It's really impossible to limit that access.
And they're talking about how all this easy access to porn has affected people's sex lives.
And apparently, you know, certain...
They go through and they catalog which sex acts occur in the majority of videos.
So they can say, like, 88% of videos have a facial, you know?
And then they look and there's a direct correlation.
What happens in those videos is what people want to do at home.
Yeah, and I think that also that relationship, whenever you have gay friends and you see how their relationships are, you know, to the extent that you see that if you're a heterosexual, I mean, obviously you're not seeing the whole story.
They're not seeing your whole story in your bedroom either.
But I think that those types of relationships, each person has their own specific one and it affects each other.
You see that, like, you know, my friends that are gay tend to have, like, Relationships where they trust each other a lot and they're a little looser.
And for whatever reason, the real issue lies in the fact that it's not legal everywhere, that they don't share the same rights as people everywhere.
That, to me, is really bizarre.
Because if two people want to pretend to be the husband, what do you give a fuck, as long as they're together?
If one guy wants to pretend he's a woman, what do you care?
Why do you care?
They're just two people that want to get married.
The idea that you would have to have a certain sexual proclivity in order to engage in this It's just so bizarre.
And if you allow any sort of bizarre, any sort of discrimination that doesn't make any sense objectively, if you allow any of that in our world, then it's going to come at you too, man.
And if you don't take a stand for gay people that want to get married and for whatever reason they're being persecuted by numbskulls and overly religious crazy people, if you don't take a stand for them, then who's going to take a stand for you when it comes in your direction?
Who's going to take a stand for humanity?
Because it's just a person who happens to like men.
Well, it's bizarre when religion actually tries to interfere with science in ways that don't make any sense.
One of my favorite ones was the Pope talking to Stephen Hawking, and he told him that it was okay to explore the nature of the universe, but it wasn't okay to explore the origins of the Big Bang, because that would be like questioning God himself.
Well, you know, for thousands and thousands of years, religion is the bedrock.
It's what keeps people united.
It's what keeps them alive.
I mean, to have a shared culture...
I have Native American in my background, right?
Growing up, I was always interested in reading the history and thinking about why did Native Americans get basically wiped out, and also Aborigines and things.
And you think about the fact that in Australia, All the different tribes in Australia, they all spoke different languages, and they all had a certain amount of land, and they were kind of in stasis.
I mean, they fought with each other, but everything always kind of ended up the same.
There was no one group that conquered all of Australia.
And then you think about Europe and other more bellicose places.
Here you've got places where They enforce one culture on massive groups of people, right?
Through religion.
And they're incredibly effective.
They travel all over the world and white people out.
They work together.
They build cities.
There's great utility in having people think alike like this.
But then, you know, there's also a drawback.
And the drawback can be that it's resistant to change and it doesn't...
And we want to pretend that we're in this strange Sandra Bullock movie where everything's going to be okay and everything's going to be normal.
And one of the best ways to do that is to think that there's a guy that lived a long time ago that came back from the dead and he absolved you of all your bullshit.
You just got to take him into your heart and you're good, no matter how bad you've been in the past.
Believe it or not, I can make anything tie back to robotics.
I believe you could.
That actually ties back in.
When you build a robot, right, what you choose to make it look like is a promise.
It's a guarantee to the person that's going to interact with it.
So if you build a robot that looks just exactly like a human being, then anybody that walks up to that robot is going to damn well expect that that robot is going to be as smart as a human being.
If you say, what's up, buddy, it's going to say, hey there, pal.
And if it doesn't, people get mad, you know?
Which is why I don't think we're gonna see super realistic, like, you know, androids anytime soon, because we don't have the full package, you know?
We may be able to make it look really realistic, but we can't make it behave in a really realistic way.
But is that, I mean, it's a temporary hurdle, isn't it?
I mean, with the way science continually grows in this exponential manner, it seems that if they could figure out, they could sort of figure out how to mimic various aspects of the actual human.
Yeah, I'm sure someone on Twitter will tell me who the guy's name is, but yeah, he played an amazing robot.
He did the best job, in my opinion, in any robot movie, of walking that creepy line where you think he almost feels slighted, but doesn't because he really doesn't have any programmed emotions, but he's recognizing that you're trying to slight him.
It's very fascinating.
It's worth seeing, really, for some of his scenes alone.
For a really realistic humanoid, or android, I mean, there's a momentum behind the emotions, right?
So even if it doesn't feel pissed off, if it looks and in all other ways behaves completely consistently with how a human would behave, then you're going to be sitting there waiting on him to be pissed off.
And even if his face is totally blank, you're probably going to project on it and be like – Is he a little pissed off?
Yeah.
Because everything else is consistent.
Like, but okay, so he's designed not to be pissed off.
That's somehow it's hard to believe whenever you have a full working model of how people behave and it's been trained on people.
You know, like I said, it wasn't a terrible movie.
It just wasn't what I was hoping.
Michael Fassbender, that's what it is.
He played David.
He was the second one.
There it is.
His hair is a different color in this photo.
I got confused.
But yeah, he's an amazing actor, man.
That's a skill that's going to be difficult when they start doing CGI movies, like completely CGI, like really replicating an actual human's emotions and the way a human like that guy can act.
Now he has a clause in his contract that says they can't rewrite it to make it weirder when they hire him because he's tired of all the roles shaping to fit him instead of him having to act.
There's got to be at least one ranting, screaming scene in every movie.
I think after a while, these dudes probably like, Especially after they get paid a few times, they really sell out hard and make some fat cash on a terrible movie.
Well, you know, I think when you've been in the movie business that long, you trust casting agents, too.
And a casting agent can tell you, hey, there's this kid.
He's amazing.
You've got to check him out.
Nobody knows who he is because he's really got something special.
He's perfect for this one particular role that he might have.
But he's good at it.
But some people just...
It's kind of funny that we have this thing with movies where we accept that we're seeing the same guy over and over and over again in a bunch of different lives.
I mean, in one movie, he's the last American samurai, whatever the fuck he is.
What I found was amazing about that movie, though, was that one of the things about that movie is that this guy can endure incredible cold and pain.
He can do all these amazing things physically, and yet he also had incredible discipline and he never chased pussy.
It's like they made him the most unrealistic superhero ever.
Because like I was thinking about they were going over James Bond today and they were talking about on the Ron and Fez show, they were talking about all the different names for the James Bond women and which one was the hottest and which girl, which James Bond girl.
He has no needs whatsoever sexually, but yet he flips through the air and lands on top of the roofs and beats the shit everybody and carries this woman the whole way.
But she just wants, like, that is like the ideal man.
Women want a vampire that won't suck your blood and can go out in the daytime.
He just sparkles.
They want, I mean, they want this super badass who doesn't want any pussy at all.
He's just your guard dog that he takes care of you everywhere.
He doesn't even try to fuck you.
Like, this woman is unbelievably beautiful, and he's saving her through the entire movie, and they never even so much as make out.
And Heineken was going that way already, because they had all those commercials where the dudes flipping through the air, and he's just kind of a Bond-esque kind of badass.
Late 80s, early 90s, there's all these movies where the action scenes consist of people holding submachine guns and going, like spraying bullets at each other, right?
Or they'll be like way up on the catwalk and they'll have a shotgun and they're like, boom, boom, shooting somebody like way the fuck across the warehouse.
And my theory is that you can't get away with that shit anymore because every kid plays Call of Duty.
They know that a shotgun is ineffective at long range.
This is like in the DNA of every 14-year-old boy.
You just know that you can't shoot somebody with a shotgun from across a football field.
You may have never touched a shotgun.
And so the whole spraying, the submachine gun thing, that stuff is just gone now.
You've got to be way more brutal And like accurate and realistic about it.
Where dudes would just get, stand in a circle, and guys would just charge at him to the left, and he would kick him, and then the guy would charge from the right, he would kick him, and nobody ever rushed him all at one time.
Dude, there was an episode where a bomb went off and he lost his sight and he went and he meditated and he got his sight back at the end and saved somebody.
Movies that perfect different elements of the genre and then you and then you'll have one perfect one or two perfect storm movies that get everything and then you know and then it dissipates the times change Code of Silence was one super legit movie that Chuck Norris did.
Because, you know, a lot of the action heroes from that era that are also movie stars, you know, there's a lot of sort of surgical stuff that starts creeping in and they start looking a little funny.
Imagine if it worked that way, if you were born a fucking superhero, and every day of your life, you used your physical points, and the more physical activity you did, the lower your life got.
Yeah, that's got to be annoying for those guys because they're really trying to be friendly to people but they're also trying to sell some shit and get some things signed.
Well, people are always concerned about the idea that one day, due to the fact that we can keep everybody alive...
And the fact that populations are exploding, we're continuing to figure out new diseases and how to cure people when they're sick and people are staying alive longer.
At what point in time does it become an issue?
Do they ever need to control it?
How do you even go about doing that?
So all these scenarios, like the Justin Timberlake movie or Logan's Run pop up where the evil government forces you into a contamination process.
And he says, you know, one way to avoid it is to have a machine that's going to Basically take a snapshot of every neuron in your brain, which they're all just little switches, right?
And it's going to figure out exactly what's going on in your brain, and then it's going to continue to simulate that.
But, like, part of me is just saying, yo!
When you die, even if you simulate yourself perfectly, you're freaking dead.
And there's the other possibility that when you're dead and this other life goes on, it's going to be completely disconnected from reality and who knows how it's going to progress.
Just because it's a copy of the operating system and all the information and all the traits that your brain...
How the fuck do you know what that thing is once it's on its own?
And it's interesting to me because I haven't thought about it this way.
But you're saying, look, Wilson, if you think that because you're embodied as a human, you're obligated to experience life as a human and do all the things humans do.
Yeah, I think we don't want to leave behind the ones we love.
That's one of the big things.
We don't want to leave behind...
That would be one of the saddest things, your family being remorseful that you weren't around.
But the idea of what you're saying is you wouldn't want to be downloaded into some machine where you didn't experience all the joys an actual person experiences.
What I'm saying is I think they're going to be able to create artificial human beings that literally you will get a whole new body to download yourself into.
And you will drink wine, and you will enjoy it, and you will like blowjobs, and you will like water parks, and going skiing, and you will like doing all the things that a person likes.
You would just be doing it in this completely new physical existence that they've created, an artificial human being.
The real spooky thing is the Air Force drone aviary, where they're working on all these different sized drones, flapping wing drones, drones that look like a bird.
They literally flap their wings and move like a bird.
There was a video where they showed all the different ones they have now, these dragonfly ones that fit on the tip of your finger.
It's incredible.
If these things were flying around, you would have no idea.
Yeah, I'm not an expert on this in particular, but from what I understand, the way a fly actually flaps its wings is it's more of a scoop, because it's dealing with such a small number of particles of air, and it actually becomes almost more like a fluid, the way that it's interacting.
Yeah, you don't have to do that on a larger scale.
The agility of a fly, if you really wrap your head around it, like when you try to swat a fly and it darts away from you, it is mind-blowing how well those fuckers can move.
Crazy setup.
This little round body and these giant clear wings.
If flies were from another planet and we found them, if we tuned into another planet and we sent a probe, a light year away or whatever, and they found giant insect forms, if they were giant flies, like flies the size of bulls...
But I know that the bugs, because of the way they breathe specifically, they don't have...
Like lungs, like we do.
They have just little holes, and I don't know exactly how it works, but apparently whenever there's a lot of high oxygen, you get a ratio that's better for them.
There was some question that the environment was thicker, that the atmosphere was thicker.
It was a very recent thing.
They were trying to figure out why they were so big.
Like, what led them to grow so large?
I forget what the article was about.
But I think that was part of the...
Part of the scenario that they're proposing was that something about the atmosphere was much different and that it was easier to support giant forms of life.
Then the other thing was, I guess, the trees and the vegetation was different back then.
A lot of these animals were vegetable eaters.
And then if you're going to have a giant brontosaurus, if something's going to eat it, it's got to be like a T-Rex.
It's got to be a giant, fucking, even bigger, crazier thing.
So it's almost like the more plants you have to eat, the bigger the things are that eat the plants and the bigger the things that eat the...
Yeah, but do robots, that's the question, do robots, and if they're going to have that engineered into their system, aren't us the first shit they're going to get rid of, man?
Yeah, it's like we're going to eventually have to deal with the moral aspects of ordering them around, having them as slaves, making them rust, sex tools.
Maybe we're just very rudimentary right now in our thoughts on what robotics are or what artificial intelligence is, but why would we think that we're so special that we can't be recreated?
What is it showing us about the human race where there's a positivity and there's energy to be derived from good behavior and from healthy behavior?
It's just very difficult to teach that to people.
And if you negatively reinforce it and give them a lot of negative energy in their life and a lot of negative experiences, then they recreate that sort of energy and they go after it over and over again.
They get addicted to a certain pattern.
That's the number one issue with engineering human beings, period.
Forget about robots.
We haven't even figured out how to get the human meat machine to operate in the correct manner.
If you were 52 years old and you had been divorced several times and you had almost no money left and somebody gave you a beautiful robot sex slave that didn't want to vote and had no personality of its own, just existed to fulfill your sexual needs, maybe then you'd understand.
But right now you're a young man with hope in your eyes and dreams for the future.
If you were broken by a steady stream of bad relationship choices and divorces and you were living in a fucking shack outside of Palmdale with a car that's broken down, you wouldn't think twice about that robot fuck doll.
You'd be like, I'm out of the dating scene for life.
I think that it's very hard for people to be happy.
And one of the things that people need in order to be happy, in my opinion, is that you need happy people in your life.
You need to surround yourself with happy people.
That alone is very difficult to find because finding a group of people that have managed to maneuver and managed to carve a path through life that's been generating The majority of the people they're encountering with are enjoying their company.
The majority of it is a positive experience.
Goals have been fulfilled.
Health is in order.
All those different things, all those variables that have to be in place in order to find a truly happy person, it's really difficult to accumulate a bunch of people like that and get together.
So occasionally, like many of us in our lives, have known there are certain people we have to cut off.
There's a certain point in time, you know, okay, this person is an energy vampire.
You know that there's a list of companies, including the Olive Garden and Red Lobster, where they're cutting everyone's hours so they don't have to give them health care.
Have you heard about this?
It's like Red Lobster, Olive Garden, all these legit companies.
And because of that Obamacare, they're cutting everyone's hours.
And it's pretty fucking weird watching these companies do that.
Yeah, it's sort of weird because you see that the corporations have rebounded.
They've got all this money, but they're still not quite trusting that the economy is better, so they're sticking with all the cuts they made and riding that as long as they can.
like some of the robot art you know yeah Eric Joyner he does all these robots and doughnuts yeah no it's it's it's pretty rad I remember the first robot I ever created back in the day that you had an erector set and I don't know if you remember that it used to be like this yellow case that you would open up and inside were like these miscellaneous motors and like metal pieces that you And one of the things that they give you instructions for is how to build a robot.
And this robot was just like, I think it had like eyeballs that were light bulbs and it moved and stuff.
Yeah, and see the exact quotes that people are responding to.
It's a stand-up comic.
Sometimes you'll say something at a show and the next night someone will quote it and they'll be laughing and you go, oh yeah, I forgot I even said that.
You know, it becomes these quoted things.
When you see your stuff highlighted and you see like the things that people really enjoy or did enjoy, how much does that affect your next writing?
Do you really look a lot at the feedback and try to like see it from their point of view?
Like when you're writing and an idea comes into your head and you're just following it down and it's like building and growing like right before your eyes.
Being able to create something and being able to, you know, come up with some shit that didn't exist before and then boom, then all of a sudden it does.
If you just only had a few bitches getting rape-choked and gagged and ball-gagged and mouth-fucked, you just kind of have them abused a little bit more.
I got the non-cellular one because I have an iPhone that has a hotspot.
But I think more that I'm using the hotspot feature on the iPhone, I think if you were going to get it, do get the one with the cell phone service built into it.
It's just kind of more of a pain in the butt, like, oh, I've got to turn on my hotspot.
And if you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you can get a free book and you get a 30-day free membership to one of the best services that I think...
I love Audible.com.
I love the idea behind it.
And they have a massive selection, including this young man's fantastic robot books.
So go get it, you dirty bitches.
Thanks to Onnit.com.
That's O-N-N-I-T. Go and get yourself some New Mood, bitch, or some Alpha Brain.
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Use the code name Rogan and you will save yourself 10%.
Alright, this fucking show's over.
Oh, if you use the code name Sandy, we'll take that 10% and we'll donate it towards Hurricane Relief.
We actually decided to go with the Salvation Army because in this case, the Salvation Army is using 100% of the proceeds for Hurricane Relief.
It's like a lot of them...
It actually gets down to like as low as like 30% actually goes to the people and the victims.
But Salvation Army in this case, it's 100%.
So we're going with them if you use the code name Sandy.
All right, fuckers.
We might see you tomorrow.
We got a lot of work to do.
We're going to be at the new studio, tightening shit down.
Brian and I are just starting to set that place.
I was not quite done yet.
Takes time, bitches.
Takes time.
But I'll see you guys all in Montreal for sure this Friday at the Metropolis with Duncan Trussell.