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July 31, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:56
Edition 561 - Professor Bart Kosko
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope late summer, Northern Hemisphere is being good to you.
I know that it is kind of hot and muggy and sticky here in London Town at the moment and I think many other parts of the UK.
There's been a lot of rainfall in some areas.
Germany, my thoughts are with you for all the flooding and there's been flooding in London too.
Some areas have heat waves.
But whatever the weather is like for you, I hope that you're bearing up and that you're okay.
Summers, not quite as I remember it when I was a kid.
Sometimes it's, I'm not saying it's unbearable, but it's difficult.
Let's put it that way.
Let me know your experience.
If you want to get in touch with me, by the way, thank you for all of the emails that you've been sending in.
You can always email me by going to my website, theunexplained.tv, following the link and you can send me an email from there.
And thank you to Adam for his hard work on the website and also to Haley for booking the guests, including the person you're about to hear now.
Dr. Bart Cosco, the return of, I love speaking with Bart because I never quite know where our conversation is going to range.
Bart, of course, was one of Art Bell's favorite guests and he's become one of my favorite guests too in California.
I'll read you a little bit of his biography.
It's very long so we can't read it all, but Dr. Bart Cosco, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the University of Southern California's Vitaby School of Engineering and a professor of engineering and law in USC's Gould School of Law.
He received bachelor's degree in philosophy and economics from the University of Southern California, master's degree in applied mathematics from the University of California, San Diego.
And so it goes.
He is a uniquely placed guy to talk about not only the science, but also the human aspects of science.
So we're going to talk about everything from brain implants to the internet to questions of modern day morality and ethics and how they meld with the internet age and a lot of other stuff too.
I find him a very cool guest.
So Bart Costco coming up here on The Unexplained on this edition.
Thank you very much for being part of my show and part of my life.
If you have a guest suggestion, anything you'd like to share with me, you know what to do.
Please go to the website theunexplained.tv, follow the link and you can send me a message from there.
The Facebook page is also alive.
Check that out.
It's the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
And if you can make a donation to allow the online work to continue, that will be very gratefully received.
All right.
I'm not going to mess about, not going to delay or dawdle in any way now.
Let's get straight with an eight-hour time gap.
So it's very late at night, very early in the morning, actually, for Bart Costco in California.
And it's breakfast time here in London for me.
So it kind of works out for both of us.
So let's make that connection right now.
Bart Costco, so nice to have you back on my show.
How are you?
I'm fine.
How are you, Howard?
Good, Bart.
I don't know about you.
And I know that the world has generally been affected by strange weather, but here in London, it's humid at the minute.
We've had torrential rain and flooding.
We had boiling hot sunshine.
So we've had some strange stuff this summer.
How about you?
It just rained here in Los Angeles and the mountains outside of Los Angeles.
It does that this time of year, though, because of the monsoon.
But we haven't had that for a couple, three years.
And we just had in the United States the hottest June on record.
And here in California, we're headed back into a drought.
But other than that, we're doing fine.
Well, you know, if you're talking as we will be talking technology, I think somebody needs to work on affordable air conditioning systems for countries where you didn't need air conditioning before.
I've got to tell you that in the heat, for the last couple of years, I bought this air conditioning box on eBay, and it vents out of my bedroom window with a plastic hose that I can just dismantle the whole thing when the heat wave has stopped.
But I now use that regularly.
And sometimes over the last couple of weeks, my bedroom has been the only comfortable room in my apartment.
And that's how we're going.
So somebody, some inventor, needs to come up with a way of chilling the air in buildings that were not designed for high temperatures.
That's true, but it does take a lot of energy.
So absent some breakthrough or speed up in solar panels or some newer and safer nuclear energy, that might be a while, Howard.
Well, that's bad news.
When I get in the news this morning, they're reporting within 10 years, we're going to have sometimes temperatures in London of 40 degrees.
Now, that's the kind of temperature that you would have seen in places like the Indian subcontinent.
You know, you regularly see those temperatures there north of 40 degrees, but not here in London.
So we live in interesting times.
I don't want to get into that debate.
Otherwise, the emails will start, and we don't want to start a debate about that.
I'll talk about that.
We'll talk about it.
Not a debate, but since I do have a new book called Cool Earth, as its name suggests, there is, if you really want to do it, I don't think you do, but there is a way to solve your problem, London's problem, the world's problem.
Just take the Earth, the moon system, and move it ever so slightly away from the sun.
In fact, in my notes for this conversation, I do have Cool Earth at the end of it.
That's your book.
But that was a fictional scenario, wasn't it?
Absolutely.
But there is an engineering principle behind it.
I mean, you can do it.
In theory, you can cool it that way or warm the planet system by going the other way.
The trouble is you got to get it exactly right to many decimal places.
And that's essentially an engineering impossibility.
So you may cool things on average, a degrees Celsius or two, but a lot can bounce around that average.
Things can go terribly wrong and hence the drama.
So, Bob, are you saying that theoretically, and a lot of things we can do theoretically, it would be possible in theory to move Earth in order that we were placed more favorably in relation to the Sun?
You could do it.
You could do it through a reverse gravity catapult in the same way that when we send probes to Mars or other places, we go around a planet and get an assist from it, from its angular momentum and energy.
And if you go in the other direction, you give an assist To the planet.
So, in theory, and this is a big if, but if you were able to grab an appropriate size asteroid from the asteroid belt and torque it and bring it in and have it go around, say, the moon, it could convey, it takes a while, it could convey some of its energy and angular momentum to the Earth-Moon system and move it out a little bit.
I mean, it's very precise engineering, and it might take a very long time.
It depends on how you did it, but it's in theory possible that you can do it.
It's not a tow truck that you're using here, and you're not.
No, it's not a tow truck.
You're not removing your Mustang from the carriageway for some vital repairs.
We sent the first Viking probe.
It got an assist decades ago from Jupiter.
Okay, but there's no free lunch hour.
So what happened?
We actually slowed Jupiter down, maybe one meter per 10 million years or something like that, but there was a trade-off there.
So if you change that, instead of big Jupiter, you have tiny moon.
Instead of tiny satellite, you had something much bigger asteroid and played with it and got the math right and the celestial mechanics right.
In theory, you could do it.
It's just a matter of partitioning your budget of energy and angular momentum.
I think what would worry me is what would happen while you were doing it, because you couldn't make this shift of trajectory all at once.
You couldn't do it in five minutes.
We're not moving a sofa out of an apartment here.
This would be a long-term thing.
So what would be the effects while you were doing it?
That's the problem.
That's right.
Or if somebody like in the story gets a crazy idea to move it back.
Well, that's the nature of politics at the moment.
Somebody would be bound to say, actually, that's a bad plan, and we're going to vote on this.
And then they decide to reverse it.
And then you're in a whole world of trouble.
Quite literally.
I just say years ago, this idea occurred to me.
I worked out a version of it.
I tell the story in the preface to the book you can see online.
And back and it got it published at a short story venue and sent the galley proofs to the late, great Arthur C. Clarke, who I'd gotten to know after my book Fuzzy Thinking came out.
He'd read that.
And he caught a hole in it after I'd caught a hole in a book he had written called Rendezvous with Rama.
And he quickly pointed that out by facts.
He was in Sri Lanka, and I was able to fix it, which helped the story, and go to the publisher, say, look, it's Arthur C. Clarke, and keep it all within the same paragraph.
We had magazines in those days, Howard, as you'll recall, real paper magazines.
And it came out.
And years later, I thought about it, developed the drama.
And that's why I've dedicated the book, Who Earth, the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
I wish we had, and I don't think we have, you know, we have some people who were prominent in media over here, and they're known worldwide, but we don't seem to have people of the stature, the ability, the communicative heft of Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, and all of those people that I remember when I was a kid.
Now, maybe I'm just kind of looking back and talking about the good old days and loving them, but I just don't think we have those communicators now.
I think you're right.
And I was able to know Carl for the same reason that my book, Fuzzy Thinking, came out.
We were actually on the same lecture circuit together, giving Linus Pauling talks, not together together, but alternated in sequence in the 90s.
And I'd been a big fan of his actually since his earlier book on the Dragons of Eden.
I don't remember that from the 1970s.
That was before it became famous with Cosmos, a magnificent series.
And it was about the speculations, he said, on the evolution of intelligence.
And it was a real eye-opener for me.
Just as an aside, let you know, when I was standing in line to graduate in high school at a farm school, that is to say a town called Lansing, Kansas, they had a sign that said population, 4,000.
But it's right next to Fort Leavenworth and the Leavenworth Officers College for the Army.
And I had a physics teacher or professor I worked with privately who was working on his PhD at the time, but just teaching for fun.
And as I stood in line to graduate, Howard, he walked up to me and said, here, and he hands me a book.
It was Carl Sagan's book, The Dragons of Eden.
And he wrote on there, I still haven't said, in case the need arises, here's food for thought.
And I told that story to Carl later.
He was very pleased.
But the point is, it got me to think for the first time about AI, how brains work, and that connection, not just programming computers, but actually how brains work.
You might remember in those days and in that book and elsewhere, we talked about the inner core of the brain being the reptilian complex.
And there's some evidence for that.
Our inner core of the brain is a lot like the inner core of a crocodile's brain.
And then the outer portion is similar to other animals.
And then the really far-out outer portion, the cortex, which if you could stretch it out would look like a pizza, about a half meter in diameter, and I guess a couple millimeters thick.
But that's where all the action is in our brains.
And the connection between it.
By the way, the usual metaphor here is if you took one cubic millimeter of brain tissue, that outer cortex, which is mainly wires and interconnecting about 100 billion neurons, it would be roughly a billion synapses.
So I'm even thinking about that and the relationships between brains and these computational units, it was a real path here.
I didn't realize at the time it would affect my life because I actually was headed off to the university I'm at now, USC, the University of Southern California, on a full music composition scholarship.
It was music and astrophysics, as I recall.
And I was a composer and writing symphonies.
I came out to write film music and did, and was lucky enough to spend some time then and later training with the great film composer, David Raxon.
Now, here's a test for you.
Remember any David Raxon movies like the old film noir Laura or The Bad and the Beautiful?
The Bad and the Beautiful I'm familiar with.
Yes, a great movie.
I just saw it again on Turner Classic Movie.
And David at the time was head of the Composers Guild.
It was a shattering experience.
I'll tell you why.
I had this kind of Wagner-like view that the composer was at the top of the food chain in Hollywood.
It completely reversed.
The composer, it's always been the case, but especially now, is really at the end of the process of a movie and sits down with the music editor in what's called a spotting session, the director.
And they're watching maybe not the complete movie, the director's cut, some sequences.
The director will say, okay, I want some running music here.
It's usually what's called on-the-nose stuff.
And I want something like the flute from Jethro Tull over here.
Basically mimicry.
And you've got to do that.
And then once you do that, you don't have much time.
You might have four weeks or six weeks to do that.
Then the director comes back and says, well, remember that was 14 seconds.
Now I actually need it to be 10 seconds.
But it's mimicry.
And your best cues are long sequences.
They just overdub sound effects, the Foley effects.
It's very rare.
And the only time the composer gets his or her due, I've just got to say this for your audience.
You know when that is?
It's at the end when the credits run and most people just get up and walk out of the theater or change the channel.
The only time the computer, the composer can let it roll, as it were, and develop those light motives.
So it's a humbling experience, to say the least.
But of course, as you say, it's the point where people are walking out of the cinema.
Of course, in the United Kingdom, I don't think they do it anymore, but when I was a kid, you would sit there, watch the music and the credits roll, and then they would play the national anthem.
No kidding.
And a lot of people would say, you know, including myself, I think when I was a little kid, we'd be standing there.
I'm talking about decades ago now, but they would be playing God Save Our Gracious Queen, and we would be standing up.
I think the world has changed quite substantially.
But talking about our brains and artificial intelligence, there was a story that I wanted to run past you.
I was going to do it a little later, but let's do it now.
This was in the Sun newspaper here, which actually, although it's a popular tabloid newspaper, when it comes to topics to do with the future and to do with aliens and all of those sorts of things, they're doing some very good journalism at the moment.
This story, last week, taping memories, reading thoughts and controlling what other people see through brain implants may seem like something from a creepy dystopia.
Campaigners, though, are warning this is fast becoming a reality thanks to a well-funded worldwide arms race to develop mind-controlling and mind-bending tech through bizarre experiments on monkeys and other animals.
Cutting to the chase here, scientists fear that tinkering with the mind is a slippery slope and there could be a very real risk these breakthroughs are abused.
There is an organization now that you may have heard of called the Neuro Rights Initiative, who I was going to try and speak with on my radio show, who want to make sure that there are curbs and controls.
What do you think?
You said there may be risks.
I would modify that.
There will certainly be risks and abuses.
And it's in some sense worse than you described in the following sense.
That you know that computer chip densities, the on-off circuits, still doubles almost every two years, maybe not quite as fast, the so-called Moore's Law.
So in just the last few years, computers have gotten much, much more powerful than they were, and certainly much more than they were than back in the 80s and the like.
So what has happened?
Well, not much has happened, though, between the chip interface and flesh, between neurons.
That's still a big bottleneck.
But we're getting closer all the time, Howard, to overcoming that bottleneck, to breaking through the bottleneck.
When that happens, the floodgates will open and they will open fast, much faster than they would have 10 years ago, precisely because Moore's Law has continued.
And it won't be that big of a deal then to download software and all the good and the bad that comes with that into your chip, a partial implant so that you can learn, ideally, courses in calculus or Latin or whatever it is you want to learn.
But we know what's going to happen.
It's going to be entertainment.
It's going to be a lot of pornography, a lot of advertising, and a lot of viruses.
Plus, you've got the prospect, a really scary prospect, of the cancel culture entering that aspect of the brain, not just shutting you down, that sort of thing, but filtering out, shadow banning certain thoughts and you not being aware of it.
Now, again, not to plug a book, but I really did write a book about this called Nanotime.
I mentioned before on your show, but Nanotime tells the story of a selfish young man who makes it to digital heaven by way of World War III.
It began, I told you the story, I got a call from the director, Oliver Stone, who I just booked recently, to compete with Zen movie AI from Stanley Kubrick.
They had competed over, in effect, military movies, Full Metal Jacket and from Oliver Stone Platoon.
He's actually a Vietnam veteran.
And long story short, it led to a 40-page treatment called Black Sun.
Oliver and I couldn't get it made.
This is 94.
Became a novel and had a lot to do with my favorite philosopher, who's a British philosopher, John Stuart Mill.
Once I saw that he was the buddy in it, he's a software ghost.
And off and on, it keeps coming back as a potential film, oddly enough.
I mean, it was laid out for a film.
We couldn't get it made.
They wouldn't have had the money and the budget back then like they do now.
And the book has been re-released by Loom, which is a London publisher, and it's online digitally.
And as recently, as last week, a long discussion with this, still discussion with ongoing discussions with the film producer about that.
And it's about what happens when you get chip implants in the whole hog when you replace essentially all of your brain with a chip.
And you can do that, by the way, in pieces, so you're conscious during the process.
And you would think a lot faster than you do now.
Your time of thought now, Howard, and you're pretty quick, but your time of thought is still limited by how fast those electrons flow down the wet nerves.
Well, I'm getting slower by the day.
We all are.
That's a couple hundred miles per hour.
And if you had a chip, you're thinking on the, and then just orders of magnitude faster.
So a few seconds of our current time that we've inherited from natural selection, and we take that as obvious or standard, that would be easily months, years, maybe even in extreme case, centuries.
And I call that nano time, it's nano-tech and a nano-billionth of a meter, but maybe it may be even more, maybe femto time, radical changes.
And so when you do that, you have an issue about who's in charge, those who think millions of times faster and access to lots of databases versus those still thinking in meat and meat time.
And then along the way, you're going to have a lot of people playing games with that.
I mean, a lot of people.
The international espionage, again, advertisers.
We live in a world, I don't think it's just an America, of increased political ideology.
So your political opponents and just some angry kid in a basement can do that.
Fundamentally, what happens is when you move from atoms to bits, you make it a lot easier to attack than defend.
And that really destabilizes the old model of warfare where somebody would pick up in King Arthur days, pick up the troops and lay siege to another castle.
It was safer usually to be in that castle.
And the guys outside the castle tended to die, my understanding, more from amoebic dysentery than anything else.
But now, as you see with a virus or different things like drones being modified and used to attack and ransomware, it's very difficult to protect against.
Everything can be turned, it seems to me, to malevolence, and we know that.
And if we don't believe that, then we need to change our thinking, I suspect.
But are we not protected here in that in order to have this technology within us, we have to permit that.
We have to permit some kind of operation.
Unless, of course, they develop a way of slipping it into your Dr. Pepper.
But let me say already, before we get to the chips and brains, there's a lot of data you're giving up you may not realize.
We have the ability, different sensors, to pay attention to what your eyes are doing.
And not just biometric sensors, but maybe someone's, in effect, taping you or you're staring into your, like I'm to a computer screen right now and there's a camera.
So based on how you blink the water content of your eye and a lot of other, the retinal response and the pupil diameters and how it varies, that's the sort of thing, by the way, it's just perfect for deep learning, artificial intelligence and matching.
So we can tell whether you had something to drink, maybe your age, gender, a whole bunch of other stuff.
That's right now, just off the correlation matching of the data you're giving to the public.
And as we move to the Internet of Things, you're opening up so many more surfaces for that kind of observation and attack.
Here in the United States, I think it's through around the world, but in our common law system, which we inherited from Britain, we have really not caught up at the digital level with this advance.
We still have the old law, for example, of search and seizure, the Fourth Amendment law in this country, based on British troops ransacking the colonists' homes with what were called general warrants.
If you look at the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments of the U.S. Constitution, you'll see the Fourth Amendment has got the most words in it.
But it's still meant for physical things, for atomic things.
And we're in a big battle now about that.
We have something called the third-party doctrine in the United States, which says if you take something precious to you, your diary or anything else, put it in the trash, set it out on the sidewalk for the trash people to pick up, you've abandoned it.
And the government doesn't need a warrant to look at it.
The Supreme Court in the United States used an analogy to say, well, that pretty much applies to what's happening with your bank statements.
And now with a lot of you, or not all, but a lot of the stuff you put online through your internet service, you've effectively abandoned it because you've given it to a, quote, third party.
The Supreme Court came close in the United States three years ago to taking that head on, but they didn't.
So we're in an odd position.
If your listeners are interested, the case is called Carpenter versus the United States, which had to do with whether the United States government needs to get a search warrant to find out your cell tower locations.
Your cell phone is always ratting you out, as we say.
I don't know if you're aware of that.
It's sending signals all the time, whether you realize it or not, back to the tower.
And that information can be quite useful, obviously, for advertisers.
And companies do apparently sell or trade that information.
But the government can get that to see, as in this case, how close you were to the scene of the crime.
I think it was a robbery in that case.
It turned out that the Supreme Court, on a kind of a technicality and five to four decision three years ago in the Carpenter case, said, it isn't enough merely to assert in Patriot Act post-9-11 style that getting this information of the cell towers is, quote, relevant and material, unquote, to some ongoing investigation.
You've got to have real probable cause.
In other words, something like a warrant.
But we left open, for example, exactly what is a search?
What is a search?
United States, since the late 1960s, we said it's not what we think it is, which is a physical trespass, but it is a government intrusion on a reasonable expectation of privacy.
And no one really knows what that means.
And the idea was that the judges would look to the population of what a reasonable expectation of privacy is.
But in fact, a lot of people in the populace look to judges to tell them what it is.
And so in a circle we go.
That's just one example.
We don't have that.
Well, you know, I just want to bring you back to the point of us having abandoned our data.
You know, I've never really given any thought to that.
But if it could be determined by a smart lawyer that by giving up your data to a third party, you have effectively disowned it and it's not your data anymore, then aren't we in a world where we have severely compromised our rights?
We absolutely have.
And it's not just that we've compromised and we did that without a negotiation, which is normally part of it.
It was just done kind of by default.
Like I said, In this country, we simply had judges arguing by analogy with earlier systems.
We were undergoing something very similar, by the way, in challenging the big tech companies and to the extent to which they can censor or quasi-censor you.
Are they state actors, partial state actors?
That is an act, I mean, you have the former president of the United States will be bringing a class action lawsuit a couple, three weeks ago.
And whether that goes anywhere, we'll see.
But it reflects the tension here.
Yeah, we can't have that.
So what I have proposed, and I think others as well, but I've been arguing this since the 90s.
And you can see it in my book, Heaven and a Chip and elsewhere.
Heaven and a Chip, by the way, is the nonfiction book, the analog of the novel Nano Time, is that we need a kind of digital rights act.
But we also need something else.
If you can just indulge me on this.
In our common law tradition that the United States shares with Britain, we have privileges.
Most legal systems do, but we have in particular.
And these privileges like the attorney-client privilege or the doctor-patient privilege or the priest-penitent privilege, they protect what we think societally are sacrosanct relationships, but they give up very important information, not just for criminal prosecutions, but for civil cases.
It's highly probative information.
It may be dispositive information, but willing to pay that price.
I think what we need, Howard, is what I call a chip brain privilege.
And it ought to be essentially absolute, not just in the criminal case, but also in the civil case.
And the problem, I think, is this creep that takes place that we don't think about.
So, for example, again, I'm going to use the legal system of the United States where I'm a lawyer and also a law professor.
But it's very similar to Britain and most other countries, even the non-common law countries.
And that is, you get sued and you have a long process of discovery before you come to court.
It's John versus Jack in the civil case.
I'm not talking criminal.
And in the United States, at least, the laws of discovery are very loose.
Lawyers can ask you things that the government typically couldn't.
They can ask you intrusive things, often about your sex life and your finances, just a lot of stuff.
And it's one of the ways lawyers make money.
So in the course of that, if you've been involved in a car wreck, for example, and one of the issues is whether you were negligent or reckless when you ran down John or you hit John's car, if you had information, a backup on your chip that could give us insight moments before the accident, after the accident, that might be highly probative.
And I can assure you, at least in the United States, what we call e-discovery, lawyers would ask for it.
Like right now, you get all the email correspondence and a lot of other stuff.
So you could set an easy precedent right now with pulling out, and a judge may have to block out non-pertinent parts, pulling out of your chip information relevant to the proceeding.
And it's a small step from there to using the same kind of information in a criminal proceeding.
And once that happens, it's real tough to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Because that is something that's so hard to regulate.
You know, there may be people wanting to do that for the best of reasons, to try and get behind the motivations and the activities of a felon.
But we know that that kind of technology soon spreads to other things.
So that's a whole minefield.
And that explains, to bring us back to the beginning of this part of the conversation, why these people, the Muro Rights Initiative, which I think was started by a guy at Columbia, what it wants is to protect the inside of our minds rather like we protect Yosemite National Park.
That's exactly right.
And I want to stress, we're able to do just fine right now in civil law and criminal law without access to your mind.
But man, if I could get access to your mind, I could, for example, come up with an intent argument.
And so why that's important in the civil law, at least in the United States, but I think in most countries, you can take ordinary damages and multiply them to what we call punitive damage.
There's just too many perverse incentives.
We've done just fine with our species without being able to literally read each other's minds.
I think we want to keep it that way, absent something really, really big, like you know where the ticking, the clock is ticking and you know where the nuclear bomb is buried or something.
And maybe there's a special kind of emergency warrant you could get for that.
But otherwise, it could become far too routine.
And we've also noticed that people, especially young people, seem not to be as concerned about private.
Well, they don't.
They don't seem to be awake to a lot of these issues, which is kind of worrying because they've grown up in societies where this technology gave them games, gave them fulfillment on so many levels they never had before.
So they regard all of it, and I worry madly about this.
They regard all of it as good.
And it isn't.
But your assumption here and your requirement for some kind of legal constraints assumes that most people will become chipped in the end.
So is your assumption that most of us are going to avail ourselves of the market?
Not only that, I think it'll be as fast as people got smartphones.
It'll just be something that's not going to be.
It'll be sold to us.
Right, I've got you.
I'm sorry to jump in.
It'll be sold to us like smartphones, which by and large have been.
Everyone else will have the chip, will have access to, for example, different foreign languages.
And if you want to learn the latest in particle physics, whatever your topic is, you can get it what I call in cooler shallow knowledge.
I mean, as soon as you take the program off, you forget it.
Just like if people go searching Wikipedia for information, they forget it when they look away from the screen.
But you'll have it while it lasts.
It'll be hard, if other people are doing that, not to do that too, especially if it's essentially free.
It'll be cool.
It'll have cachet.
In nanotime, I just say at the end, in the end of the second act, the point of no return, the young hero loses his mind, literally.
It's like the worst thing that could happen.
He gets debrained and replaced with a chip.
Really, it's not the worst thing because he finds, like, man, I've got godlike powers.
And that's the finale of the—I think it will come quite fast.
If you've put something out there and someone comes back to say, Howard, before we cancel you, do you still, the point would be, do you still stand by what you posted eight years ago or beyond?
If it's more than five years, I think you have to be asked that at least.
And we have so many kids, I mean, like children, using Facebook and other devices, putting stuff out there that can, and you have to assume, will be used against you for the rest of your life.
But where do you set the bar?
We've had cases like this in the papers in the last week or two in the UK.
Where do you set the bar, though?
There must surely be some things that you can never have that five-year gate on.
You know, things like, well, you know, all sorts of illegal activity, racism of the most extreme kind, and the whole legal gamut.
You can't forgive those in five years.
Well, let me just bear with me.
If you draw a line, anytime you draw, and this is a classic fuzzy thing, fuzzy shades of gray, and if you draw a line saying it's black or it's white and it's really gray, you'll always commit two statistical errors.
In statistics, type one and type two, you'll commit a false alarm to some degree, and you'll commit a miss.
And you have to, you accept that whenever you draw a line.
Literally, engineering is based on it.
The smartphone you're using does that.
Is that blob of energy coming in a one or is it a minus one?
Is that bump on your neck?
Is it a tumor or not?
Whenever you draw those lines, you have that.
So I would put it, the stakes are so high.
I would still say the five-year window.
And I would appeal, again, to my favorite philosopher, not just British philosopher, and the hero of Nanotime, John Stuart Mill.
And I would really urge people who haven't to read his wonderful book on liberty.
And he talks about not just the liberty aspects and self-defense, but he's talking about the, he gives a substantive argument for freedom of speech and free culture as an error correction device.
And a lot of people seem to miss that.
There's an assumption that somewhere we have the truth written down and we can just look it up and, well, maybe the Google gods have it or something.
And they can tell us what it is, but we don't have that.
As Mill said, even if the whole world is on one side of an opinion, you still want to have someone on the other, if nothing else, just to keep the main opinion from evolving, calcifying into dogma, and to help people start thinking about the basis for their convictions.
So I would stand the hazard of the die here, draw the line at five years and say, if anything, so again, if someone has posted something really nasty and obscene or whatever it is five, 10, 20 years ago, do you stand by it?
If they say, no, I've evolved, okay, you know, we have a kind of forgiveness.
But if they're not going to be able to do it, if they might.
No, I still stand by it or a version of it.
Well, there you have it.
Now it's right between the ends.
But what happens, you know, not everybody is legal, decent, honest, and truthful.
If they say, you know, five years ago, I made a statement that everybody called Bart was a fool.
Five years have gone by, and I now completely rebut what I said.
It was completely wrong.
I don't know what I was thinking.
And please forgive me for that.
Erase it from the record.
So it gets erased from the record.
And then a week down the track.
I didn't say erase it.
What do you do with it?
I said forgive it.
Now, it'd still be on the record.
It could be a blockchain basically forever.
So what's the point?
And that could be used if you're talking about someone arguing in bad faith here.
And that would come out.
Then you'd say, you know, but you've gone right back to it or we don't buy it.
Again, there are going to be false alarms and there's going to be misses and the trade-offs between those.
But the overwhelming number of cases, Howard, would be people who've changed their minds or posted stuff they weren't thinking about.
There's a really good essay I saw just over a month ago from Edward Snowden, who's still in exile in Moscow, on this very topic that we never anticipated when we set up the internet and all the free software that people posted, mainly in good faith or some advertising, that this would be used against us this way, that in effect, like in the worst case of politics, everything you've written can be the basis of opposition research.
And we have an entire generation now of children growing up doing that.
They may never know why they didn't get the job offer or whatever it was later in life because of something they said or viewed out of context or concatenated with some other statements every three years used against them.
So just like in a court of law, evidence goes stale very quickly.
Same thing here.
And all you got to do, Howard, is come back.
If you really want to hurt somebody, and you may want to do that based on what they said X many years ago where X is bigger than five, then ask them.
Do you stand by it?
Or have you modified it?
If so, what grounds?
I'm willing to first order to try that.
Because right now, if we don't have something like that that just becomes a cultural norm, I don't think it'll be legally enforced, then it's going to be everything used against you, and you'll never beat the algorithms.
And you will self-censor.
Well, you might self-censor.
There are a lot of crazy people in this world who don't self-censor.
I would worry that this would be whatever purity your motives have, and I know that your motives are ultimately pure, not everybody's like that.
And this kind of five-year forgiveness thing could be used by some people as a fruit for us to say whatever they want.
Let me make clear what I'm saying here.
We're trying to figure out, we talk to a human being right now at a particular time, what their stance is, what their position is.
And you can simply ask them, they can tell you.
But then if you go back, but wait a minute, you said this 30 years ago or 18 years ago, whatever it is, it's okay.
I think you should bring that up.
But then what the forgiveness is, is you ask them, do you still stand by it?
That's the crucial difference.
There isn't an automatic imputation that you said something back then and it holds with equal weight, that we apply an engineering talk, what we call an exponential window, a fading window.
Actually, we do that in law, depending upon the bodies of rule of evidence.
We don't accept certain things, even much older convictions in other cases.
But there's got to be a sense here, Howard, of some kind of statute limitations.
Well, sometimes I think it's too much of it.
Then you give license to lose thinking.
I can always go back and forgive it.
I'm not saying they get it, forgive it, but you have to come back if the older, you've got to ask them.
Do you still stand?
I think that's a burden worth carrying.
But some of it is responsibility.
Look, there are many things that I could write about experiences that I've had, people I've known who've done me down.
I would love to be able to make public those reflections because people need to know some of these things.
And I pull myself back every time.
I just think, okay, Howard, you're bigger than that.
Let's not write that.
Let's not put that down in a form that everybody can see forever.
Let's just move on in the way that we used to before we had technology.
So what I'm saying basically is that I think people need to just exercise, and that's only my thought, they need to exercise ultimate judgment.
They need to count to 10 before they publish stuff.
They need to kind of assess the state of their sobriety when they're considering to do stuff.
And that's the answer.
So I'm not sure about the five-year forgiveness.
I think it might help in some circumstances.
Hold on, but you and I have an advantage that the young people today don't have.
We grew up in an era, especially childhood, the teenage years, our 20s and so forth, where what we said just vanished, vanished pretty much without a trace.
Essentially, almost everything in a public setting is going to be recorded.
And we haven't thought that one through.
And if you can just go back and grab something from the past or stitch together, lawyers are really good at doing this, by the way, stitch together with a clever algorithm, several things to shade it to make on this occasion Howard look one way based on what he said versus others, it looks like we've impeached them.
But the real impeachment we want to see in general is when you're sitting on the stand, when it comes out of your mouth while you're on the stand, intrinsic impeachment, or fairly recently in the past.
If it goes too far back, you have a chance to change.
So soon it's going to be and be this way forever, that everything, essentially everything you say, this is independent of the chip and the head, just these sensors out there that are growing, is going to be recorded.
And you don't have something that is implied in all of our traditions and cultures that it just, you say something and it just walks away.
It's spacetime.
Get what you're saying here in that, my God, I know this, that all of us are fallible in many ways.
Some people less fallible than others, but fallible we remain.
And if you live in a society that is essentially a journal of record where everything that you think and speak and do is recorded in some way, then everybody's going to fall foul of that eventually.
So we need to have some safeguards.
Now, I get that.
Yeah.
And it's great for if you're China, I'm talking the People's Republic of China and you want a social credit system or the old Soviet Union, this sort of thing.
That's not the world anybody wants to live in in general.
We don't want that.
We want to have some freedom and just to be human.
There will certainly be self-editing and beyond.
But I'm especially worried again, Howard, about the young people.
And they've grown up with things like Facebook.
They post stuff.
In the United States, I assume it's similar.
But everything you put out to the public, again, you've essentially abandoned, can be used against you in any civil or criminal proceeding in the future, let alone other cultural things.
You've got to be careful.
And the kids don't know that.
There has to be, as you say, responsibility.
They have to be able to defend that.
But I don't think it's a question of whether it's a five-year window, just whether it's a window, but whether it's the number five, it could be something else.
There's got to be something.
We have to say when the evidence is stale and people have evolved.
It's like a statute of limitation.
I'm glad you mentioned Facebook because, as you will know, a few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg, according to a report by the BBC and others, laid out his vision for Facebook, transforming it into a metaverse company within five years.
That's an embodied internet where instead of just viewing content, you're actually in it.
You know, part of me says, hey, that sounds good.
And part of me says, I'm worried about that.
What do you think?
Same thing.
But I'm worried about it because right now, I think Facebook in the United States, we're having this debate, as I said, has entered into something it shouldn't have, the culture wars.
Whatever your positions on that, what is Facebook doing that?
What a lot of us want to see, and I think it's going to be the evolving neutral position here, is that Facebook and Google and Twitter and whatever the next thing is like that, should be like the phone company.
And it'd be so easy, Howard, for a phone company, maybe it does in China, but not that we have here in England, to set up algorithms that the minute you start saying something that the algorithm designers don't like, you get cut off or fined or whatever the case is.
That's not what we have.
In the United States, we have a tradition that grew out of the telegraph, literally from the Samuel Morris days, 1840s, 50s, and 60s, that we, in effect, don't interfere with the content.
So what a lot of us want to see, one way or another, is to see the social media companies just stay out of the culture war, stay out of the politics, don't play those games, as tempting as it may be for some young 25-year-old social warriors to do so, but just be like the phone company and keep it neutral.
If you could do that, and maybe that'll happen, then that kind of immersion may well be worth it.
So what does that mean?
Does that mean portals and platforms like Facebook banning political content or allowing all political content?
Which side of the pendulum is this swinging?
I think if you think about the telegraph or telephone analogy, it's a pretty good analogy because these are digital transmissions we're talking about now.
It would admit a lot more.
Now, it is not a perfect analogy, so there are still exceptions.
And if you're in, because you have an amplification factor with Facebook that you don't, and that's why things like defamation can take on a multiplier effect and a few others.
I mean, I doubt somebody Will want the fine details of the H-bomb broadcast.
I hope not, and things like that.
But for the great majority of cases, I think it'll be laissez-faire.
I think it'll be hands-off, pretty much like the early days of the internet.
But there's been way too much intervention on this, I think.
And in the United States, at least, it's really roiled the waters.
And the extreme case was with our late President Trump.
Whatever you think of the man, he got canceled.
He got kicked off Facebook.
And it's kind of an extraordinary thing, and it's perfectly understandable, I think, why he was kicked off Facebook.
The fact is, the former President of the United States has been banned and has now brought, as I mentioned, class actions lawsuit over this.
And the Supreme Court has opened the door in a case called Biden versus Knight.
Actually, it was from Justice Thomas in a concurrence to a dismissal of a case, kind of laying out these doctrines of the common carrier or even accomplice liability.
But the bigger picture is to say to the tech overlords, just don't take sides.
There might be some boundaries we can all agree upon and things that can harm others in terms of torts.
Whether it's one's purported feelings, it's a different matter.
I mean, look, I'm a great guy for free speech.
You know, free speech is, well, I wouldn't have been a journalist if I hadn't believed that.
You know, free speech allows you to put wrongdoing out into the sunshine, let people see and experience it, which I think is a good thing.
But that's allowing the fact that people are discerning, they can understand what they read.
And we know with conspiracy, some conspiracy theories and other stuff, a lot of people buy into things that logically cannot be true.
And those things get equal weighting on social media and other places.
So what I'm saying is that when we were kids, if Walter Cronkite said it, then it was true.
These days, if something appears in beautiful, multicolored reality in front of you on a screen, even if it isn't true, because of the nature of the medium, you think it might be.
There's some of that, but if you allow, like John Stuart Mill said, way back in, I guess, 1850s, 60s, if you allow the conspiracy theorists or whoever it is, just throwing something out, unfounded claim, which is very common, to make it, then it gets rebutted, and that's an effect on a kind of digital record.
And for a lot of us, that's better to see rather than having us self-edited down.
We don't get to hear the case.
But it is a kind of error correction.
And even our most cherished beliefs are going to change as circumstances change, at least change somewhat.
So we leave that out.
But you mentioned free speech, and I've said this before to you and to many other my friends in the UK.
Wonderful country.
The United States is the child legally of the UK.
But sometimes the child can teach the parent something.
And my recommendation, Howard, not everyone will follow it, is you guys need a First Amendment.
And for that, you really need a binding Constitution.
I know the UK has set up something like a Supreme Court, but it doesn't have what we call the power of judicial review.
It doesn't have to be a unwritten constitution.
Pardon me?
We have an unwritten constitution.
I understand that.
I understand that.
So exactly what I'm saying is either by writing one, which at some point is worth considering, or empowering, which I think will be inevitable with the evolving Supreme Court, that it takes on the power of judicial review, that it can invalidate laws of parliament.
But if you have a First Amendment, as we do in the United States, deeply cherished, it lets a lot of garbage through.
There's just no question about that.
That you guys don't.
And so that's some benefit.
But I think, again, in terms of drawing the line between type 1 and type 2 errors, between false alarms and misses, I think on balance, it's still a good thing to have.
And there's a reason that it's first among the amendments.
And it was based on a lot of folks like Thomas Jefferson and many others looking at the British experience and back and forth with it to have that open in this million, John Stuart Mill is not part of it, but spirit of the truth will out, especially when it deals with politics.
Well, politics is something I try not to discuss on this program because politics has become, and it, you know, I mean, I studied politics at university, you know, before I studied journalism.
So, you know, I have a degree in politics for what that's worth.
But politics has changed into something now that has been weaponized.
When I was studying at university, we had a guy who was a lecturer in American politics who'd actually worked in Washington.
He'd worked for the U.S. government.
He knew his stuff.
I think his name was Dr. Morgan.
He was fantastic.
He British guy, but he'd worked in the U.S. at the highest levels, and he knew his material.
And we had experts on German politics and French politics and, you know, British politics.
It was a great bit, but it was all about debate.
It was about reasoned debate.
And what's happened as I've grown up and as you've got older, we've both got older, you know, everything has become weaponized.
And that's what worries me.
But I wanted to bring you to this because, you know, we're- We say tribalized too, yes.
Yeah, but we've, you know, we've also got to a stage where we are dependent upon these wonderful electronic media that we have.
You know, I could not exist without the internet.
I was introduced to it at a radio station in 1995.
Have a look at this.
And I immediately, and I think I might have been the first in London to start using the internet as a news gathering tool.
You know, when there was a famous crime in the United States that was developing minute by minute.
And I was bringing reports of how this crime was developing based on not the wire services that we traditionally used, but based on stuff that I was actually gleaning from local radio stations in the American city where this stuff was happening.
So, you know, that's how things have changed for me.
I couldn't do without it.
But we've been learning lately that the internet, this wonderful communications tool, is a fragile thing.
We've had a couple of outages recently.
I'm holding a story in my hand here from one of the news agencies in the UK.
And this was not particularly reported in the UK.
I turn on radio news bulletins just to see what they're doing and if they're on their toes.
And they didn't really mention this.
But, quotes, many popular websites fell offline last Thursday in a widespread global outage of service.
Visitors attempting to reach some sites got DNS errors, meaning their requests could not reach the websites.
There were big organizations affected, HSBC, UPS, British Airways, Airbnb, apparently, according to this report.
And it was a very short-term issue.
But we have grown up, and the kids have grown up, with pretty much a bulletproof, we thought, internet.
We thought it was a connected web of technology that would always keep us connected.
So it's a great big shock to see it go down occasionally.
It can go down.
It's brittle.
It has human error.
And then we have the problem, our proximity to the sun, which is very important.
But we have an increase in solar intensity.
I think it's going to peak out in around June, July of 2025.
We had the Carrington event in the 1850s, I think it was.
But just when the sun's plasma goes up, as we make electronics more powerful, we make it smaller, more accessible to burnout.
And then we have something we worry about a lot in this country, the grid problem, especially if there's a political conflict, or just the inherent instability of a grid, how easy it is to bring down an electrical grid, to burn things out and things like that.
So no question you want to have a backup, and that is a problem.
We also have that, you use the word fragile, here in California, we have earthquakes way overdue for the big one, could hit it anytime.
And over the years, for example, we've made our stores more efficient, grocery stores with just-in-time inventory.
But the minute a quake hits, you know, there's really nothing in the back storage room, and the trucks may be on the other side.
We switched a lot of copper cables to fiber optics, which is great, but it breaks in a quake.
And we find ourselves even more prone to a severe response to the damage of an earthquake.
That's just in the local net.
But overall, that's true, and it's going to be the case here, that our electronics, we've become accustomed to this Moore's law effect of getting smaller and denser and cheaper and more powerful.
But it's easier to burn out and just have inherent flaws in the electrical system.
What has not really changed much, Howard, are the four laws of Maxwell, that electromagnetics, the fluid that control all this stuff.
Right.
So, you know, there are some immutables, and we're tending to forget those.
And you bring up what I think is a very important point, and I've been boring people with this point for years.
You know, here in the United Kingdom, we are busily switching off AM radio services.
I might have mentioned this before here.
And, you know, AM radio is still a big thing in the U.S. because you were able to find a way of piggybacking digital radio onto that.
We didn't do that here.
We launched digital radio, which has given us more choice.
It's based on cell phone style technology of nets and networks of transmission devices and not great big masts in fields that serve hundreds of thousands of people.
So, but you know, that's fine.
That's fragile technology.
If you start turning off your AI, and radio and communication is just one example.
But if you ignore the older technology and dump it completely and then start to rely on one thing that may be more fragile, I think you have a problem.
If we had, I'm not saying we're going to, but, you know, we had a big flooding in London, you know, 24 hours or so ago from when I'm recording this.
It only takes that to ramp up a gear to us to have a major problem where perhaps some communications go down.
How do you, if the, if the digital systems that are communicating with you, that you get your information from, if they are fragile enough to, albeit temporarily, go down, so you can't get your information, what do you do?
Because you've turned off AM radio.
People can't go to that for a big, chunky, solid, broad coverage area communications medium.
And that, I'm sure, just like you talked about fiber optics versus copper cables, we're forgetting because we've lived in a safe world, we're forgetting what life can be like when it gets a bit unsafe.
So, Howard, I would recommend everyone do what we do in California for earthquake preparation.
Have a crank radio.
It's not a big deal.
And maybe even take something like that or another device that's electrical and create an improvised, or you can buy online what's called a Faraday cage.
I'm just more concerned about the sun and its fluctuations.
Electronics gets more delicate.
But a slight pulse there above average can be disastrous.
And then there are the human effects that can take place, not just people bringing down parts of the web, like we have seen in the United States with ransomware.
But for the classic case, I don't even like bringing this up, but I have to, is you can have a country, I won't name it, recently getting the H-bomb and getting a missile to go along with it and shrinking the H-bomb, which happens inevitably, and putting it in the nose cone of the missile and detonating.
And we say, well, no one's going to do that and start World War III.
But what can happen is just to shoot that way up into the stratosphere and detonate it.
And then you get that electromagnetic pulse, that EMP effect.
It can be quite catastrophic.
We in the United States did some, actually, with the help of the British on Jackson Island in 1962, we had Starfish Prime, the detonation, I think it was two megaton in outer space.
President Kennedy did because he saw that was the only way to knock out a Soviet missile coming.
And things are very different, and it creates a much bigger fireball out there.
It lasts for a long time.
Back then, in the early 1960s, there weren't the kind of electronics we had today, essentially no digital electronics.
It still knocked out phone lines and stopped lights and many other things in Hawaii and Oahu.
But that's something that could happen.
And the potential for that creates a Blackmail potential, among many other things.
But I'm just making the point that our electric grid is highly vulnerable.
It has to be watched, it has to be policed, it has to be modified, and it has to be hardened, not just in the United States, but in general in other countries, and they're interdependent.
Now, that's a problem, isn't it?
It takes money to fix.
That's a huge problem.
If you look at some countries in this world, like we know that South Africa has had its travails and problems in recent weeks, they have a creaking electricity infrastructure.
They still have, I think, my South African listeners could tell me, but they have rolling blackouts there because of the capacity issue.
So some areas have to be turned out for a few hours.
You know how it works.
We had that during industrial troubles in the United Kingdom in the 1970s where we had rolling electricity blackouts.
So if you've got old infrastructure, plus you have the possibility maybe of a solar event that stresses that infrastructure, you have a problem.
A real problem.
Problems with hospitals and just daily life.
So we haven't had one of these big events, and we're going to have one.
It's just a question of wind, likely through solar fluctuations, which are normal.
It's part of the solar cycle.
But what's new here is this intense electronic web we've created.
After that, after the disaster and that'll be the biggest event of the day, then I think we'll have taken on some other strategy.
But boy, that first time we go through it, it's going to be rough, as we say.
So the Brits, just as we end this conversation, a lot of the Brits have a sneaking chuckle, you know, in a friendly way with our American cousins who are perhaps exercising preparedness, having a little kit at home for a rainy day.
Maybe you guys have got something, and we have to start thinking, you know, it probably won't happen.
It may not happen, but it might.
And the chances that something disruptive may happen are much greater now, I would say, than they've ever been.
So maybe we all have to start thinking about how do we prepare for maybe just a period when life isn't quite as cozy and comfortable as we expect it to be.
Well, as I live here in the mountains, they always tell, the government tells us, have at least two weeks of food and for earthquake, maybe beyond, have some kind of communication, like say a crank radio.
You can get these for $10 online or $20.
It's worth having.
And maybe some kind of plan to meet.
But I think you have to look what happened recently in 2021 in the United States with the ransomware, with our power grid in the East Coast.
We don't know all the facts.
It's not being released, but we were basically blackmailed.
You can also plant logic bombs.
We're completely vulnerable to that sort of thing.
So I wouldn't laugh too hard, my friends.
I would get the crank radio.
And if you have to toss some old food once in a while to rotate it, it's worth it.
But the usual models that I've seen is when a disaster hits like that, an earthquake being an example here in California, but you get real societal unrest just after three days.
And that's a corollary, a knock-on effect of the main event.
And that's something that I'm sure maybe in the midst of everything else our politicians have to wrestle with.
I'm hoping that they're kind of considering those things.
But it's not just them who should be thinking about these things.
It's all of us, I would say.
But it's always a pleasure to speak with you.
I never do a ton of preparation for these conversations because it's always more interesting to see where they go.
And I think we've done that again.
Great to speak with you.
And I'm amazed that, you know, here we are.
I'm early morning in the UK.
You're late at night in the US.
Yes.
And here we are using that digital technology to speak.
We are indeed.
It's been fun, Howard.
And like he said, Bart Costco will return.
Somebody I love having conversations with.
And, you know, in your life, there may have been people at times, maybe a teacher or somebody like that.
And you know that you can talk with them about anything.
You know, I have some good friends who I can phone, and I know that I can run anything past them.
Bart Cosco is one of those people, I think.
He is able to hold an interesting conversation about pretty much anything.
What do you think?
Your thoughts always welcome.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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