Every Exponential Ends — Silicon Valley Forgot — Adam Becker

I'm an astrophysicist and journalist, and I'm the author of two books. Most recently, I've written more everything forever, which is about the horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future and why they don't work. And my first book was called what is real, and it's about the sordid untold history of quantum physics.

I'm also the host of the podcast dreaming against the machine where we try to think about, what a better future could look like outside of the grip of the tech industry. And you should listen to this episode of Machine Learning Street Talk because Tim and I have a great conversation about why some of the most powerful people in the world are wrong about so many things. By the way, many folks in my Discord really loved your previous book, by the way, so quite a few people said that.

Well, that makes me really happy. I I mean, you know, I hope I'll probably write, you know, more books in the future, but, the first book's always special. Awesome.

I mean, you you did just sum it up in a way in that the book is me litigating a bunch of these things from first principles. I've lived in the Bay Area now for almost fifteen years, and I have been to a lot of parties out here where I've heard a lot of people say a lot of bizarre things about the future of technology, AI, you know, space colonization, that kind of thing. And I always just kinda rolled my eyes, but as time went on, I realized, wait, these ideas are actually really influential and yet there's no good evidence for them and in most cases, lot of good evidence against them.

And so the book is my attempt to lay out this set of beliefs that are surprisingly influential within the tech industry and are promoted both by tech billionaires and by subcultures that are funded by tech billionaires like rationalism, effective altruism, and go after these ideas both in a in a scientific and philosophical way.

I mean, I always feel like the right place to start is this idea of the singularity because I feel like that's where all of this sort of comes from, is this idea that there is this future coming near as Ray Kurzweil says or nearer now. And, and that, you know, super intelligent AI and the rate of acceleration in the advance of technology is just gonna keep going faster and faster until we have unimaginably advanced technology that solves every single problem. And, you know, Kurzweil is best known as the sort of, evangelist for this idea, but his evidence for it is really bad, and and the evidence for it in general is just pretty terrible.

Yeah. And he had this idea that, you know, maybe one day he could upload his mind into a computer and and live forever. Yeah.

Yeah. That's exactly right. And I do think a lot of it is motivated by fear of death, which, you know, yeah, I don't want to die either, especially not anytime soon, but there's a difference between, you know, a healthy fear of death and letting it sort of run your life.

But, yeah, I mean, Kurzweil basically takes Moore's law. Right? This exponential increase in the number of transistors that you can cram into the same area on a silicon chip and generalizes it and says, oh, you know, this is not just a technological phenomenon that lasted for about fifty years from the late twenty twentieth into the early twenty first century.

Instead, this is a general trend in technology, something he calls the law of accelerating returns and not just technology, but actually biology as well. So he traces it back at least as far as the start of life on Earth and and in some places, I think even claims to trace it all the way back to the big bang with the organization of inorganic systems as well. He just thinks that there is a trend toward greater complexity and intelligence that runs through absolutely everything and that is pointing to a time in the very near future.

He has repeatedly said the year 2045 is when the singularity arrives and our technology becomes unimaginably advanced. And the evidence he marshals for this is pretty weak. He he says, you know, you can pick out particular points of interest in the history of life on Earth and the history of human technology.

And when you plot them on a chart, you get, you know, a a straight line on a semi log chart. And so that means that you've got an exponential trend. But the fact is that, you know, those points are cherry picked, and he's got a problem that I think, most of us have when we look at history.

You know, unless you work really hard, history looks sort of logarithmic. Right? You've got this clearer view of what's been happening in the recent past, and then the more distant past is more distant, and so you can't see it as well.

In the book, I I will, you know, make the analogy to looking out from the top of a skyscraper. Right? You see the stuff closer to you more clearly, and the stuff that's further away and less directly impacting you is is, you know, smaller and and further away and harder to see.

But yeah. I mean, it's it's a natural mistake. And and also, like many other people, and and as you were alluding to with the lily pad example that I was talking about in the book that I pulled from Kurzweil, he forgets that the one thing that you can always say about any exponential trend, the one thing that's always true is that they end.

You know? Yeah. He he has the lily pad example to give an idea of of how exponential growth works.

He says, you know, the if if the lily pads double every day and on day 29, they cover one half of the pond. Well, then on day 30, the pond is full. I'm like, yeah.

And then on day 31, the lily pads don't grow anymore because they filled the pond. There's no more pond. And even Gordon Moore himself said, oh, yeah.

Moore's law isn't gonna last forever. Moore's law has to stop sometime in the twenty twenties because eventually you get down to the size of individual silicon atoms, and you can't really make transistors out of silicon that are significantly smaller than silicon atoms.

So you find a divergent stepping stone, and usually a different people you know, different group of people situated somewhere else, They find a new way of doing things, and it just keeps going. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No.

That's exactly what Kurzweil says. He says, you know, the exponential trend is itself made by a bunch of sigmoid curves, and each curve lets you get further up the overall exponential trend. Sure.

Yes. He does say that. But as I say in the book, there is absolutely no reason why that is something that's always gonna happen.

And indeed, his own sort of generalization of Moore's law, when he puts that together, it ignores much of the early history of computing where stuff like that did not happen. If you go back to, you know, analog computation devices from a thousand, two thousand years ago, they don't fit on his trend. And there's no technology coming up that looks like it's going to save Moore's law in the future.

And that's just one trend.

And that's true. It's three or four hundred years, somewhere in there. He doesn't mention that also we'd be at that point generating so much waste heat that we'd be boiling the oceans, but, you know, whatever.

And so then he says, so therefore, we have to go into space in order to be able to keep growing our energy use.

So many things. I mean, you can get into questions about, like, free will and consciousness, and I'm not gonna do that. What I will say is, you know, I I I actually the thing about that that I wanna focus on, is the same thing I focus on in the relevant part of my book.

They just don't understand that we are not going to be going out and imprinting ourselves into the cosmos at large. That is not the future of humanity. You know, there's a part of, there's this book by Will McCaskill, this this effective altruist.

Right? What we owe the future. And if you, take a look, he's got this afterward for it that's on a website that he runs, but he's got a QR code for it at the end of his book.

And he talks about how, you know, a good future for humanity would involve colonizing the observable universe and, you know, sending ships off to, you know, all the galaxies that we can reach in our universe and and, like, intergalactic colonization. And that is just not going to happen. Like, we're we're not leaving the solar system.

The stars are simply too far away. It's too hard to get there, and it is too difficult to get ourselves up to any reasonable fraction of the speed of light. And even if we did, the number of planets that are remotely like Earth appears to be pretty low.

I mean, it's just space is such an inhospitable place. We've evolved to be suited for this planet, and there are not other places like it that are waiting for us. This is our only home.

They want to be systems of pure information. And in that sense, you know, what is it? Adrian Daube, I think, said that Silicon Valley is a place that likes to pretend that it doesn't have any history.

And, and I don't even think he was the first one to say that. But, you know, there's a tendency to ignore prior art in these areas and for, you know, this sort of dismissal of the body. Mean, I this is an idea that goes back over two thousand years.

Right? You you see shades of this in Plato and stuff like that. But, but the fact is that we are our bodies.

You know, you wanna look at the best science available. We are not our we are not patterns in our brains. We are not even our brains.

We are our bodies in our environment. And there is no good reason to think that you can abstract a human consciousness out of our physical selves. You know, I I almost said physical substrate.

Right? But that's a word and a phrase that comes from this computational analogy for cognition, and I think there's been a real kind of ignorance or amnesia or just convenient forgetting that it's an analogy. Right?

Cognition is not computation. Computation has some features that are like cognition, and the brain does things that look kind of computer ish under certain circumstances, but neural networks on a computer are not the same as what our neurons do. Not even close.

I don't think that there's any good reason to believe that this is true. Right? I mean, the brain is fabulously complex, and the actions of an individual neuron are quite a bit more complicated than a single neuro than a single node in a neural network in a computer.

And and we do not have a good understanding of how it is that the brain does what it does. And and we don't have a good understanding of how it is that the brain is connected to the body and what parts of the body are important for our experience and consciousness. I mean, it's it's very much putting the cart before the horse.

We would need to really have a much better understanding of what's going on up here and in here before we could hope to reproduce it with enough fidelity in a computer.

I think that that our environment is an important part of who we are. I think that one of the moves that I see over and over again from these guys, is this idea that intelligence is an individual trait as opposed to something collective and social. And I don't think that that's right.

And I also, you know, for what it's worth, don't think that we're actually very much like LLMs. You know, I I think that if nothing else, the fact that an LLM takes in more text than any human could in a human lifespan in order to be worse at language in many ways than a five year old. And five year olds take in far far less and do far more with it.

Yeah. I mean, there's definitely something going on there. Right?

And then the question is, okay, what is it? What's the significance of that? I would argue that we're learning some interesting things about how language works and what you can get out of the sort of mathematical structure and statistical properties of language.

But, you know, I don't remember who said this, but people people speculate about whether, you know, LLMs are alive, but you don't speculate or are alive, you know, conscious. But you don't hear people speculating about whether systems with similar architectures that don't work with language are conscious. So nobody's asking if, like, AlphaFold is conscious.

to me because I I really do think that this is this is taking that sort of para paradolia, a word that I'm almost sure I'm pronouncing incorrectly, but it's it's taking this human tendency to see patterns, especially, like, human patterns where there aren't any, like seeing a face where in random noise and stuff like that. It's taking that and and almost exploiting it. Right?

Because we're we're not only attributing agency to these things, but in the case of AI psychosis, I mean, I don't know exactly what's going on there, but it certainly seems like it's people attributing agency to these things and then getting caught in a kind of feedback loop where these systems are sort of regurgitating themselves, like regurgitating the user back to themselves. Right? Because, you know, that's that's what they do in a way.

What Shannon Valour, talks about, the idea of AI as a mirror, and I think that that's a really good analogy. It sort of reflects ourselves back to us. And in this case, I think it's happening in a really, unhealthy way.

I I I don't want to diminish what LLMs are capable of, but I keep thinking about calculators. You know, calculators took something that, and I mean like pocket calculators. Right?

They took something that that like we thought of as this inherent human activity of of, you know, compute like, that kind of computation, like, for function mathematics, and automated it. And it used to be that that to be a good mathematician, or a good physical scientist, you had to be good at doing that kind of work with pencil and paper or in your head. And then that stopped being true.

And in some ways, you know, that was a loss of certain things. But on on the other hand, it allowed for a kind of mathematical research that could not have been done before. Right?

You know, you'll hear sometimes mathematicians say things like, computers are like telescopes for mathematics. And, you know, but but again, I mean, not to repeat myself, but I do think that the difference here is that it's language, not math. And so that makes it feel like something is is sort of thinking and conscious and talking to us.

And, you know, again, that's not to diminish it, you know, I'm not diminishing the the functionality of calculators either. But it is quite deceptive. And and I think I I in terms of how to make sense of it, I think we just have to keep in mind what these systems are at the end of the day.

I mean, I think that these systems are you know, unless there's some sort of fundamental breakthrough. Right? Something more than just scale.

These systems are always gonna require human supervision because they are always going to end up hallucinating. You know? I I mean, that's inherent to the way that they work.

I say this in the book, but, you know, I don't love the word hallucinate. I know there's been a lot of pushback because it's like, oh, hallucination implies a sort of anthropomorphization of these systems. And I don't love that either, but that's actually not my main problem.

My main problem with the word hallucination is it implies that when a hallucination occurs, something different is happening than its normal functioning, and that's not the case. They really only do one thing. And when they're hallucinating, they're doing the same thing that they're doing when they get it right.

And so I I think that unless we have some sort of major major break breakthrough, and I mean, it would probably have to be, a breakthrough that makes, you know, LLMs themselves look like Eliza. You know, short of that kind of really fundamental breakthrough, I don't see us getting around the need for human supervision on these things. So and and if anything, as they get better, it's going to get harder to discern when they've made these mistakes even though they're gonna keep making them, and that's quite dangerous as you said.

I know.

But but yeah. I mean, why did he say that? I mean, you should ask him.

But but he he he believes in something like a singularity.

So the idea there is whatever goal it is that the AI has when it, you know, achieves this sort of basic level of of intelligence. Whatever that goal is, that goal will be served better by having more intelligence. And that intelligence in in Yadkowsky's worldview is, something that you can increase by, you know, throwing more computing power and memory and whatnot at it.

And the the idea there is no matter what your goal is, it could be something, you know, in the in the famous, thought experiment from Bostrom. It could be something as silly as as, you know, creating more paper clips, or it could be, you know, keeping people in, you know, engaged in chatbot conversations, or it could be, you know, making as much money as you can on the stock market. No matter what your goal is, the the thought with this with this notion of instrumental convergence is all of those goals will lead you towards seeking more power, more intelligence, more physical and computational resources in order to better achieve those goals and prevent barriers from being placed in the way of achieving those goals.

I don't believe that's really true, but, not in the way that they would need it to be in order for this argument to go through, but that's that's the claim.

is quite a bit more complicated than that and is not, you know, a single valued thing. In fact, I'm not sure that we have a great definition of intelligence. And I also think that it's very clear that there are a great number of goals that, you know, don't work this way.

I mean, maybe maybe it's just because it's, it's, you know, like, I woke up in a cynical mood this morning, but I'm not convinced that the goal of being happy is one that is served well by being more intelligent or powerful. Yes. For example, or or to pick a somewhat less cynical example.

You know, if intelligence were were really so broadly useful for every single goal, you would see more of it in the natural world. It would be something that that would evolve, you know, more often and more broadly. Trees have goals, and, and they get there in very different ways.

And giving them a more complex nervous system or nervous system at all would not help them with those goals. It would hinder them.

the point remains. Yeah. Exactly.

Like, this is seeing the world in terms of goals is itself, a kind of mistake.

Yeah. I mean, I I'm not particularly concerned about that either, honestly, simply because, the systems that we have, and the systems that, you know, seem to be in the near future are not that kind of thing. Right?

You know? I I mean and and I also think that we are building these systems to you know what? No.

Never mind. I'm not gonna continue that thought. I think that was wrong.

But yeah. I right. I'm a writer.

Right? One of the nice things about writing is you get to try out a bunch of ideas, look at them on the page, and then say, okay. You know what?

That one's good. That one's good. Let's get rid of that one, that one, and that one.

They're no good.

I could just sit here and read to you from my book, but but, there's an audiobook, which you you can buy wherever audiobooks are sold. Please do.

you know, I mean, in the book, I certainly don't go easy on say, Elias or Yodkowski. But one thing I will say about Yodkowski is he's certainly a true believer. You know, he he believes the stuff that he's saying.

The same goes for, you know, like people like Nick Bostrom or Toby Ord. Right? And I think that that's also true of a lot of the people working at places like Anthropic.

They really believe that AI alignment is, you know, the problem of our time. I just think that they've made a mistake. I think that that's not true and that there are other problems that are significantly more pressing and that, you know, as I say in my book, many of the biggest problems of our time are not problems amenable to solutions with technology.

They are social problems that require social solutions, which is not to say that technology doesn't play a role. It's just that you can't solve them purely with technology. I you know, climate change being the the big one.

The climate crisis is a problem that absolutely does require certain technologies to exist. Most of the technologies that we need exist already, and the problem is one of actually deploying them and persuading people to switch and actually, like, finding ways to get this stuff out there. That's a social and political problem that requires a social and political solution.

So yeah. And then but then you have someone like Sam Altman who I don't know what's going on in Sam Altman's head. I don't know if he's a true believer in whatever, but he has gone out and said things, and he's not the only one who said things like this that, you know, AI is going to solve the climate crisis.

And, like, I I think that in the unlikely event that we built, like, a really intelligent conscious machine intelligence, based on existing technologies in the near future, well, if we did that and asked it to solve climate crisis, minute we turn it on, it would say, well, you shouldn't have built me. Look at my carbon footprint.

I yeah. Except I wouldn't even I I would get more specific instead of saying an emergent force above them that they don't understand. I would say the venture capital startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley.

Like, it's yeah.

Yes. Exactly. And I do think, that, you know, for the nice things that I could say about rationalist and effective altruists that, you know, they are generally earnest and true believers, that one of the many places they fall down, and I'm not saying this is the only place they fall down as I, you know, this is all in my book, but, they I don't believe that they have a good understanding of power, and I think that that's what leads to this.

So, yeah. No. I don't think that there's a conspiracy.

I don't think there has to be a conspiracy. Instead, what you have is these these true believers running around saying, like, AI is really, really important. It's coming soon, and it could be so powerful that it could lead to the extinction of our species if we're not really careful and don't devote a lot of resources to solving this problem.

And then you also have in an adjacent place ideologically and physically this giant system of power and capital that needs the promise of perpetual growth in order to maintain a lot of that power and capital. And so it sees this narrative that is also a familiar narrative to the leaders of that system of power and capital, the venture capital system of Silicon Valley. That narrative is familiar to them because all of the people in this story, including me and I think you, were raised on a certain set of science fiction stories, some of which are in the bookcase behind me about, you know, what computers would be able to do and what AI is and would be able to do, what space colonization would look like, and so on and so forth.

And so they see this story coming out of these subcultures, some of which were funded by other people in the tech industry. And and they they see this stuff, and they it's legible to them because they they've read the same science fiction. They say, oh, this is another story about perpetual growth.

And, again, I'm not saying it's a conspiracy. I'm not even saying that the venture capitalists aren't true believers. I imagine that a good chunk of them are, maybe even most or all well, probably not all of them, but maybe even most of them.

But, you know, the there's not there's not a conspiracy at work here, but it turns out that and then I think this was predictable, that running around saying that AI is coming in is going to be extremely powerful. And if we get it wrong, we'll all die. But if we get it right, we'll have the power of the gods and be able to expand out into the cosmos forever.

but without just reading to you from my book, I mean, the the answer is these were groups of people who found each other through the Internet mostly, who were all spending a lot of time thinking about how do we get this future of technology that we have all come to believe is going to happen based primarily on the science fiction that we've read. And, you know, I as a sci fi fan, I can understand why you might think that the future is going to contain the, you know, some or most of the elements in the science fiction that you've read if you just, you know, put your nose to the grindstone and whatnot. But but as a physicist, I can tell you that a lot of those things are not going to happen.

But these were people who generally were not thinking about it in that way. We're just thinking, yeah, this stuff is going to happen because I can't think of a good argument that it definitely won't, which is not how the world works and not how the development of technology works. And oftentimes, there were good arguments that these things won't happen and they were just ignorant of those arguments.

But, know, I I mean, it's it the reason I'm I'm talking about that rather than talking about, like, okay. Well, this is how the extropians and singular singularitarians got together, and then the rationalist came out of that and blah blah blah blah blah is that's, you know, that's a complicated historical story and an anthropological story, but the root cause of it, I think, is this sort of shared belief in a world as revealed by primarily science fiction.

then you get into trouble. Yes. Yeah.

That's exactly right. No. I mean, I I think that there is something very appealing about a utilitarian approach to ethics in the world from this sort of engineering mindset and, and scientific mindset even, certain kinds of scientific mindsets.

Definitely an engineering mindset. But this this idea that everything can be abstracted and quantified, and the things that you can't do that with don't really matter. That is a story, you know, a story that you can turn ethics and making difficult decisions about life into questions about numbers is always going to be an appealing story to, you know, a a fairly large number of people.

I mean, I suppose a side effect is Will McCaskill I I think you interviewed him for the book. Right? I tried to.

Will McCaskill agreed to an interview and then backed out. And and my my fact checker ended up talking to him, although, I don't know, he got confused, I suppose, the McCaskill, not not my fact checker. He McCaskill seemed to have thought that my fact checker worked for my publisher and not for me, which I'm not sure how he made that mistake because he McCaskell worked with the same publisher and knows that publisher should know that publishers never pay for fact checkers.

But in in any event, no. I didn't talk with MacAskill. I read a bunch of his writing, and I talked with his colleagues, but MacAskill himself did not talk to me.

Okay.

I also I wanna go back to your question of, okay, how did the AI risk stuff get into all of this effective altruist stuff? And there, the answer is I mean, basically, Nick Bostrom read a bunch of Yudkowsky, got into the AI risk stuff from there, and then started convincing people like Toby Ord and Will McCaskill that, yeah, this AI risk stuff is really important and is, you know, this overriding ethical concern. And and I will say, you know, there's even, statements that some of the people in this community, have made about, like, okay, you know, other existential risks, that's sort of the the the gateway drug to caring about AI risk, which is, like, the real heart of the matter.

And and I just think that's misguided.

My prescription is yeah. I mean, I well, let me let me back up and say, yeah, I do think that this is kind of a brain worm for people of a certain technical bent. Part of the reason I ended up writing the book is that I myself have a fairly technical bent and and sort of see myself in a lot of these people and feel like, okay, you know, if I were just a little bit different or if my life had gone a bit differently, I could see myself having, you know, been one of these people.

Maybe that's wrong. Maybe I don't know myself correctly or don't understand exactly the appeal of this stuff, but I feel like, you know, it's a pleasingly compact and tractable view of what the world is and how its most complicated problems work, which I would also argue is is where a lot of the misunderstanding of power comes from. But so my prescription, I think, would be to I mean, I could be flip and say, read my book.

But I I would say that that my prescription is really to take more seriously the people who study the relevant areas of inquiry that that the people in these spheres tend to ignore. They tend to ignore, you know, political science, sociology. They tend to ignore anthropology.

They tend to ignore, you know, questions about racism and bias and sexism and whatnot. They they tend to, and and they tend to get stuck in particular pieces of groupthink, some of which get really pernicious and dangerous. Like, there is a as I described in my book, a surprising amount of credence within this community of of effective altruists and rationalists for ideas like human biodiversity, which is a a piece of of junk science that tries to give a a genetic basis for racism.

And it has been roundly rejected and disproven by the scientific establishment even though genetics itself comes from, you know, a long history of racism.

Oh, man. I mean, I think that I mean, that's a good question. I mean, it's one of the things I was hoping to try to address with my book.

Yeah. I mean, I think I think that the that I mean, look, you you know, I think, that that my sympathies lie significantly more with people like Timnit than with someone like Yadkowsky. And and my issue is, like, I I I think that what's going on is you have people in the effective altruist rationalist community who, you know, want to or feel that they should be able to entertain ideas like human biodiversity without recognizing that, actually, this is an idea that has been entertained for a very long time and has a really horrifying history and has no good science behind it.

And then don't understand why someone gets upset, at the prospect of, you know, having a dispassionate rational argument about whether or not certain people are fully human and entitled to, you know, the same rights and have the same inherent abilities. And and this is, you know, this goes back actually to that thing I was I was attributing to Adrian Daub earlier. This sort of, like, looking at things outside of the context of history, there is no way to do that.

History is something that we all live in. We we you know, as the meme says, we live in a society. Right?

And and I think that it is irrational to assume that someone is not going to take that history and that context into account when having a conversation on a particular subject, especially if that subject ends up being related to, you know, whether they and their friends and family are going to be treated like people. So I I I think that that's where a lot of this comes from is there's there's, you know, a group that feels that rationality means not taking particular pieces of context into account. And another group that's like, why wouldn't we take that into account?

Although, I don't know.

know, like, eugenics and the racism thing? Like, what what's what's the the main argument there? I mean, there's a couple of things.

Right? Some of it is what I was just talking about that this community seems to really entertain hypotheses not seems to, does entertain hypotheses like human biodiversity in in really unhealthy and unscientific ways. But the other thing is this idea of intelligence.

Right? It's it's the idea of measuring intelligence, intelligence as a single valued thing is itself an idea that had that that basically comes out of eugenics and racism. You know, IQ tests, which are taken quite a bit more seriously by people like Yadkowski than they should be, and are are, you know, something that was developed essentially as a tool for eugenics.

And, and when you look at the modern AI industry and the field itself of of inquiry, you see sort of things that are descended from that history present here today, including, you know, people using eugenicist arguments, not even from old school eugenicists back from, you know, when IQ tests were first developed a hundred years ago, but from modern day purveyors of bogus race science and racism. You will see people pulling language from those people when trying to define things like intelligence, like in academic papers and stuff like that. So, yeah, that is that is sort of the the really short argument.

There's a longer and more developed version of it that I give some of in my book and you can find elsewhere as well.

And, again, you know, I think that this comes of I mean, in my book, I call it humanity's denial. Right? This idea that you don't have to pay attention to things like history, sociology, politics, when, again, we we do live in a society.

like, two problematic ideas. Right? Both of which we've already talked about.

The idea that intelligence is like a single valued thing, and the idea that intelligence is something that you can equate with or is directly proportional to computational power of some kind. I don't think that either of those things are true. And and more generally yeah.

I I think well, no. I'll leave it at that. Yeah.

I I think that it it it basically comes from those two things, and the case for those two ideas is pretty weak. Yeah. Why are we not going to space?

I mean, space is pretty bad. It's really easy to die in space. I make a there's a joke that I made in my book.

It's one of those things when you're writing a book, or at least when I'm writing a book, I'll I'll I'll make jokes in the text, and then some of them don't make it through my edits, and then some of them don't make it past my editor. And then I'm always surprised at which ones actually make it into the final book, and one of the jokes that's in the book is, you know, I quote that famous Elon Musk quote, it'd be cool to die on Mars just not on impact. And I say, well, you know, if we take Musk at his word, the good news for him is it's really easy to die on Mars, because Mars is a really horrifying place.

There's, you know, the radiation levels are too high. The gravity is too low. There's basically no air, and the dirt is made of poison.

And yet, Musk is right that Mars is the next most hospitable place in the solar system after the Earth. The only real competition it has is the moon, and the only thing about the moon that's better than Mars is that it's really close by, which makes it much easier to get there and much easier to communicate with people who are there. Other than that, the moon is pretty much worse in every way.

There's there's no air. And and although the dirt on Mars is more poisonous, the dirt on the moon is actually it's something that became such a big problem that every Apollo mission was basically at its operational limits just because of the dust. Because moon dust is really sharp, abrasive, and electrostatically charged, so it just sticks to everything.

And, you know, I I mean, the the fact is that there there's nowhere in our solar system that has anything like the physical, attributes that we would need to be able to live there or, you know, to be able to make it a habitable Musk talks a lot about terraforming. We're not terraforming Mars. If we if we had the technology and know how we would need to do something like that, then solving climate change here on Earth really would be a technological problem, and you could solve it very easily.

He talks about the need for Mars as a lifeboat for humanity in the event that something horrible happens to Earth like an asteroid as big as the one that killed off the dinosaurs sixty six million years ago impacting Earth again. There was nothing that that could really happen to Earth that would make it as bad as Mars is to live on, short of the actual physical complete destruction of the Earth. Because even that day when that asteroid hit sixty six million years ago was a nicer day for life on Earth than any day on Mars in the last, you know, two or three billion years at least.

And we know that because mammals survived and birds survived and all sorts of life survived that day, whereas there's no mammal then or now that could survive unprotected on the surface of Mars. The it's it's just horrible. And then, like, farther out in the solar system is even worse.

We're not leaving the solar system because the speed of light is just too slow, and we're not getting past it. We know that we can't go faster than the speed of light. We have really good science and really good experimental evidence to that effect.

You know, we've tested the speed of light limit over and over again in particle accelerators. That's a lot of, you know, particle accelerators get particles up to almost the speed of light. We know that our theories of, you know, relativity work in that domain.

We know that you cannot get a spaceship going that fast, and we know that if you got a spaceship going anywhere near that fast, it would have enormous problems with radiation and shielding. And Yeah. We think worlds like Earth are pretty rare.

So, yeah, we're not going anywhere. I could also explain a bit about why AI data centers in space are pretty laughable too, but I don't know if you want me to get into that. Oh, yeah.

I mean, that that's low hanging fruit. I mean, I I never quite understood that one. That there's there's all sorts of There's places so many problems.

It's just crazy. My favorite is when people say, oh, but, you know, it's easy to cool them because space is cold. I'm like, space is a vacuum.

Vacuum is a perfect thermal insulator. Like, you know, good luck getting rid of that heat. You're gonna have to have radiator veins the size of a city.

I I know.

has created I mean, Musk did not originate the myth of colonizing Mars, but he is, you know, in the same way that Kurzweil didn't create the idea of the singularity. Musk didn't create the idea of colonizing Mars, but he's certainly, you know, mister occupy Mars these days. And and it creates this idea that we don't need to care about the problems here on Earth because we're leaving.

You know? And that's just not going to happen. You know, these these these goals, even if they're not possible to realize, have consequences.

And and the consequences that they have can be really horrifying. I mean, that's a lot of what my book is about. It's like, okay.

These are why these goals don't work and the consequences trying to pursue them have. And and just doing a bit of psychoanalysis here.

And is is that a similar thing with with these billionaires that that that they want to kind of feel that they're doing great things for the world? I do think that that has to be part of it. I mean, again, we can't get inside their heads.

We don't know for sure. But, you know, you there are so many things that money can't buy, and one of them is a sense of purpose. Right?

And this sort of myth making gives them a sense of purpose. And and, you know, one of the most common responses I get to what I wrote in my book is, you know, do you really think that these guys actually believe this stuff? You know, why would they?

It's it's all just, you know, a ploy for them to make more money and and what I respond to with that is like, yeah, okay. I don't know what's going on in their heads. Maybe some of them are just being cynical.

Although there's sometimes evidence like with with Bezos, we know that he's always been very, very interested in colonizing space because he's been talking about it since he was in high school. But and so that suggests he's not just being cynical. But I also think that when people ask me that question, what they forget and what I usually respond with is the fact that that these these myths are useful for, you know, getting these guys more money and power makes it more likely that they earnestly believe these things, not less likely.

If if you if you had your way, what what would you do about all of this? If I had my way, I would tax billionaires out of existence. I don't think that that's a just or reasonable or fair distribution of resources.

You know, these people did not make that money on their own. They needed the rest of us to get there. And and by hoarding those resources, they are creating massive power imbalances that erode at the fabric of our democracy and at our shared sense of truth as a society, and that makes it very difficult to live with one another.

And we, you know, need to find a way to live together in harmony.

I don't have a great answer to that question because I don't think that it's written yet. Right? We don't know.

There are so many choices that we are going to have to make along the way. You know, I can tell you something about what the tech billionaires want, but just because they want it doesn't mean that it's going to happen. I mean, hell, they also want AI data centers in space and that's not gonna happen.

So, yeah, I I think we definitely need to be aggressively regulating this industry, and and I don't just mean AI. I mean tech. And, yes, the tech titans are going to push back on that, and that doesn't mean that they're going to win.

And, yes, the Trump administration isn't gonna wanna do that. But you know what? The Trump administration's not gonna be forever.

And then as for Trump, I think that somebody dangled a bunch of money in front of Trump and showed him something shiny. I mean, you know, they jangled their keys in front of his face. That's that's generally my theory of how Trump makes decisions that aren't in his immediate obvious self interest.

I I really am. I think that I think that we are actually going to end up finding a way to regulate these guys. The question is how and when and what consequences that, like and and what they you know, what that struggle ends up looking like, and that I don't know.

But the the public sentiment around around AI is really bad. The, the public resistance to building data centers is just getting stronger. And there is also very clearly a financial bubble here.

When that pops, I don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be pretty interesting.

Thanks for having me. This is great to be here.