Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: All right, so before we move on with the doomsday question,
Speaker 2: I thought i'd chair something that came into Twitter at
Speaker 2: Deacon Punnet is the my Twitter handle and the interesting comment.
Speaker 2: But they said, you know, I think this is all
Speaker 2: being overblown. A lot of people will say this, right,
Speaker 2: They say that that people are quote majorly over reacting
Speaker 2: to AI. The stupid thing makes arms coming out of
Speaker 2: people's heads and seven misshapen fingers.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Exactly what that means, but here's the here's that line
Speaker 2: from the usual suspects. The greatest trick you ever pulled
Speaker 2: was convincing the world that he didn't exist. And I
Speaker 2: know we're not talking about a sentient AI, like it
Speaker 2: was sitting around thinking about how it was going to
Speaker 2: evade capture. But I do think that there's a parallel here,
Speaker 2: at very least in that you know this, it's wise
Speaker 2: that we think about AI because it's going to be,
Speaker 2: as you said earlier, this is going to become increasingly
Speaker 2: evident as something we're going to have to wrestle with
Speaker 2: in our life for years to come.
Speaker 3: Yes, you asked me about disaster scenarios. Yeah, in this recognition,
Speaker 3: I have something where I call it digital delirium. And
Speaker 3: it started and I was thinking about the Russian invasion
Speaker 3: of Ukraine last year and night. It's a writing for
Speaker 3: USC News service on this. But my argument to start
Speaker 3: at the end would be we need to back up
Speaker 3: things more so we'll have something to compare against in
Speaker 3: the future, because I don't think if we get taken over,
Speaker 3: big or small, it'll be an obvious way. It'll be
Speaker 3: a subtle way you won't really realize. One way to
Speaker 3: do that is check against the past, some kind of system,
Speaker 3: restore point. And I give you our GPS system, the
Speaker 3: thirty one satellites that orbit and control the timing of
Speaker 3: this broadcast of almost all local area networks, of all banking,
Speaker 3: airlines and everything. Now there's a real risk that Russia,
Speaker 3: which we know has penetrated our software systems are grid
Speaker 3: and our GPS could manipulate that. But people may not know,
Speaker 3: believe it or not, we don't have a backup of GPS.
Speaker 3: Russia build its own GPS system, it's backed it up.
Speaker 3: China has its own system, it's backed it up. So
Speaker 3: in an ongoing escalation with Russia. This could happen. I'm
Speaker 3: about to tell you, or say a Taiwanese if the
Speaker 3: Chinese invade Taiwan, and that kind of scenario, which a
Speaker 3: lot of people are wargaming right now, and so a
Speaker 3: digital delirium would go like this each day. Those thirty
Speaker 3: one satellites orbiting the Earth are going so fast in
Speaker 3: the so far away have two different effects due to
Speaker 3: Einstein relativity and special relativity and general relativity, as you recall,
Speaker 3: says that mass bins or curved space and time. So
Speaker 3: these satellites are about twelve thousand plus miles away from
Speaker 3: the surface of the Earth. They only feel about one
Speaker 3: fourth the gravity that you and I feel right now.
Speaker 3: So what that means is they run faster. And so
Speaker 3: you think about it, if you got closer to a black hole,
Speaker 3: time slows down how much faster? About forty five millions
Speaker 3: of a second. And this has to be constantly corrected.
Speaker 3: Right now and as broadcast this is happening. So the
Speaker 3: onboard computer clocks, atomic clocks, maser clocks are speeding up
Speaker 3: and relative to what we have here on Earth because
Speaker 3: of general relativity. But these satellites are going so fast
Speaker 3: about two and a half miles per second, that they
Speaker 3: feel the effects of Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says,
Speaker 3: like in the twin paradox, that time slows down, and
Speaker 3: so they slow down about seven seconds millions of a second.
Speaker 3: So at all times each day we're having a speed
Speaker 3: up of our clocks of about thirty eight millions of
Speaker 3: a second. And if that isn't corrected within minutes, utter
Speaker 3: chaos breaks loose. So a digital delirium would be putting it,
Speaker 3: just sittling with that a little bit, getting it off
Speaker 3: to a few decimal points. It would be the way
Speaker 3: I would do it. And the Russians are great and
Speaker 3: probability in chess, so I don't think they would just
Speaker 3: shut down GPS or blind. It'd be a lot better
Speaker 3: to infiltrate that do something smart, and we may not
Speaker 3: detect that for a very long time, and I think
Speaker 3: the only way to detect that is a backup and
Speaker 3: a comparison. I give you the example of how the
Speaker 3: computer and the Great Stanley Kubrick aren't a Clark movie
Speaker 3: two thousand and one. Remember at the key scene, there's
Speaker 3: a match between the on board nine one thousand series
Speaker 3: or whatever it was, how versus the one land based
Speaker 3: and they didn't match up, and that was the only
Speaker 3: real signal that the astronauts had, the space knots had
Speaker 3: that their computer was an error. And so without that
Speaker 3: we are untethered if we don't have that benchmark, and
Speaker 3: we've got to keep it and we just don't think
Speaker 3: about it, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, think about it.
Speaker 3: How much would it cost to backup? Yeah, apparently only
Speaker 3: a couple three billion dollars and we still haven't done it.
Speaker 3: Stunning Well, that's an exact level. You and I are
Speaker 3: vulnerable at the personal.
Speaker 2: Level, right, But I mean we even just to go
Speaker 2: with what you mentioned there, then it would require us
Speaker 2: to back it up on an analog system, wouldn't it
Speaker 2: a localized analog system not not replicate the problem by
Speaker 2: giving it digital access to somebody with sophisticated hackery like
Speaker 2: the Russians.
Speaker 3: That's true, but one way around that is redundancy. So
Speaker 3: we did, with enough effort, back up enough of it,
Speaker 3: and it might be we erase it after period of time.
Speaker 3: But I don't see how you could correct a large
Speaker 3: scale AI corruption without some benchmark, without some ground truths,
Speaker 3: and that ground truth is changing very fast, and that
Speaker 3: means also that you're going to have to build some
Speaker 3: of these very large, billion trillion parameter systems, if nothing else,
Speaker 3: just to keep track of it. And we're raising ahead
Speaker 3: without thinking about any of this stuff. And when we
Speaker 3: put up a GPS, I remember going up to UC
Speaker 3: Berkeley in nineteen ninety one, Communism was about to fall,
Speaker 3: and we thought, well, this will really open a system
Speaker 3: for smart cars, that we would have smart car platoons
Speaker 3: on the freeway. By the way, discussed this in the book,
Speaker 3: because you're thinking, we did some testing on I fifteen
Speaker 3: of this and that we would have the system pulsing down,
Speaker 3: and we were thinking about that, but people weren't thinking
Speaker 3: about some opponents not just undermining it, but in a
Speaker 3: very subtle way undermining it, like you're putting us in
Speaker 3: a kind of kind of delirium. But it's a very
Speaker 3: tough problem even if things weren't changing as fast as
Speaker 3: they are, and they're changing it at a truly unprecedented.
Speaker 2: Cliff so, but again, analog local network, at least some
Speaker 2: of it could be digitized and duplicated. But there is
Speaker 2: something to be said for kind of old systems, including
Speaker 2: old satellites that if we're going to use a satellite,
Speaker 2: then would behoove us to not use a modern digital
Speaker 2: based satellite. That we should be able to access older
Speaker 2: satellites which would be impervious to digital hacking.
Speaker 3: You know, it would be impervious to some sorts of hacking,
Speaker 3: but you could still interfere with this handlog processing. Really,
Speaker 3: I don't think that would buy you much, and I
Speaker 3: don't think the satellites are pretty discrete entities out there
Speaker 3: quite exposed. Plus, for example, the Chinese seemed to have
Speaker 3: perfected kinetic weapons and others that just wouldn't care about
Speaker 3: in a conflict. Care about the programming aspects, but I'm
Speaker 3: talking about just land based systems and our own items
Speaker 3: and hostile actors in no one really knows who are
Speaker 3: what here, but the potential for manipulation of an aisystem
Speaker 3: in a subtle way, which I think could be more
Speaker 3: probable in some gross way. Look, we just had a
Speaker 3: system failure of a fiber optic cable, as you said,
Speaker 3: just probably through the noise effects and the raw maxim
Speaker 3: equations physics. So that's difficult enough to deal with. But
Speaker 3: it's the change in these systems and it comes back
Speaker 3: to the fact again, this is not AI. This is
Speaker 3: black box AI an important subset, but it's a subset
Speaker 3: of AI, and as it gets bigger, the black box
Speaker 3: problem only gets worse. And you say, well, how do
Speaker 3: we solve it? Well, if you try to ask at
Speaker 3: all possible questions and swore the answers. First off, it's
Speaker 3: too many questions answer pairs. But if you could, you
Speaker 3: wouldn't need the system. But you can't do that. And
Speaker 3: it's learning new things, so it's forgetting old things, but
Speaker 3: we don't know what it's forgotten when we teach it
Speaker 3: something new. It's an inherent problem of a black box problem,
Speaker 3: and I sually just going to get a lot worse
Speaker 3: as we go our own black boxes. There are other
Speaker 3: ways potentially to corrupt the training of our systems by
Speaker 3: the introduction of different kinds of data. So the sinister
Speaker 3: aspects of this, besides sky net type takeovers whatever's happened
Speaker 3: in the new Mission of Right, are really unlimited here.
Speaker 3: I mean, every time we have a new digital device,
Speaker 3: we open up the what's called the threat frontier for
Speaker 3: hackers and a bunch of other male actors going on.
Speaker 3: But these system it's a whole different game. I think
Speaker 3: about that if you can manipulate your programming, like we
Speaker 3: can introduce what are called hints hi and ts hints
Speaker 3: into the programming, and somebody could do that, do just
Speaker 3: kind of as we say, rotate your axis or gets
Speaker 3: you to think a little more this way towards my
Speaker 3: political opinion or away from the other and very subtle effect.
Speaker 3: Extremely difficult to detect something like that.
Speaker 2: So the and that would let's hope that you're right
Speaker 2: that it becomes extremely difficult. That black box feature was
Speaker 2: part of the new Mission Impossible movie, and that's the
Speaker 2: whole mcguffin that they're pursuing, is that they're coming after
Speaker 2: they're trying to find out where that black box is
Speaker 2: because to have the black boxes to control of the world.
Speaker 2: I'm not giving away anything for people who haven't seen
Speaker 2: the movie yet, I strongly encourage them to. Is a
Speaker 2: lot of fun. Okay, So, but then did we everything
Speaker 2: that we talked about there? Does that adequately address your concerns?
Speaker 2: What do your worst case scenarios are a sort of
Speaker 2: a doomsday scenario for AI and for that matter, any
Speaker 2: type of self teaching system.
Speaker 3: Not at all. I mean not in the least. There's
Speaker 3: so many problems when you combine this with nano issues
Speaker 3: and warfare and something else I talked about in the
Speaker 3: books I've mentioned before, when you start backing up the
Speaker 3: human brain, which we're going to be doing, likely in
Speaker 3: our children's lifetime, possibly in hours, the ability to have
Speaker 3: explore this in the novel Nano Time, where that the
Speaker 3: very name refers to the speed up in time when
Speaker 3: you're on a private or chip time at billion times
Speaker 3: per second. But the protagonist finds out that his brain
Speaker 3: has been circumscribed by those who thinks are his friends
Speaker 3: to various ends, and you just wouldn't know that if
Speaker 3: it had happened, and if you didn't have them, if
Speaker 3: you are in a digital system, you can be shut down.
Speaker 3: This is the legitimate concern I hear about moving to
Speaker 3: a digital currency in our current political atmosphere, that it's
Speaker 3: just too easy to say, okay, Ian, we don't think
Speaker 3: you should be purchasing these kind of things today, or
Speaker 3: based on which you've done a kind of social credit
Speaker 3: system like the Chinese already implementing anything digital has that
Speaker 3: and you can just something the Orwellian gods could only
Speaker 3: have dreamt of shut somebody completely off, put them in
Speaker 3: a kind of digital prison, and we're just not thinking
Speaker 3: that through let alone the privacy invasions that we've had
Speaker 3: and we've talked about. For example, since I last talked
Speaker 3: to you, the Federal Court is revealed that the FBI
Speaker 3: has abused the Foreign Intelligence Services Act Surveillance Act almost
Speaker 3: two hundred and seventy thousand times in the last four years.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: And that's up by the way session seven oh two
Speaker 3: for renewal at the end of the year. We'll see
Speaker 3: if that provision gets renewed. But just that kind of
Speaker 3: thing our own government and the rapidly expanding surveillance state.
Speaker 3: And one other point there is once we have a
Speaker 3: surveillance state setup, we have it. It was greatly expanded
Speaker 3: because the Patriot Act, in the nine to eleven attack,
Speaker 3: the advantage goes completely to the surveillance date because it
Speaker 3: gets to take advantage of all these rises and technology
Speaker 3: without passing any new laws, asking any judges to interpret
Speaker 3: old laws, updating the software, just updating the hardware, plugging
Speaker 3: the new modules. That's very difficult to deal with. And
Speaker 3: you know, we're seeing a lot of testimony now about
Speaker 3: in terms about interaction between the FBI and maybe Twitter
Speaker 3: files if you follow it, which you're also broken, and
Speaker 3: that's our own side doing that. You know, imagine hostile
Speaker 3: actors or something that could evolve on its own in
Speaker 3: the sky. Neet kind of scenario is possible too. A
Speaker 3: lot of the algorithms use, as I myself have patented,
Speaker 3: use noise to inject a form of creativity into these
Speaker 3: systems to help them with what's called hill climbing and
Speaker 3: other things. Well, it's entirely possible that you could get
Speaker 3: the system to break off on its own. It may
Speaker 3: not be consciously aware in the sense that would satisfy
Speaker 3: as psychologists, but enough to continue doing its own actions
Speaker 3: to be very hard to fight. It could make copies
Speaker 3: of itself, billions of copies in a couple of seconds,
Speaker 3: and so I don't see an easy way to deal
Speaker 3: with that. In I do have to credit the big
Speaker 3: social media companies and I companies this week working with
Speaker 3: the Biden administration to at least put forth a kind
Speaker 3: of aspirational four page document. I just read it yesterday
Speaker 3: about we're going to try to make these systems safer.
Speaker 3: There's no mention by the way the effects of hallucination,
Speaker 3: but at least acknowledging the problem. My understanding is that
Speaker 3: the President is preparing an executive order on that just
Speaker 3: to draw attention to it. But it's going way too fast.
Speaker 2: But that idea of hallucination that would be again, it
Speaker 2: goes back to a couple of the things that we've
Speaker 2: already talked about. But so are you and you mentioned
Speaker 2: and I think this is you know, a fair point.
Speaker 2: Are you of the belief though, that there will be
Speaker 2: a kind of sort of divine status that is given
Speaker 2: to these systems once they go online or they develop
Speaker 2: sophistication enough that people will turn to them and get
Speaker 2: a direct, audible and or physical answer, something which often
Speaker 2: eludes people after prayer where they will pray for something
Speaker 2: and they don't have any sense, any better sense afterward
Speaker 2: or what they were supposed to do. But do you
Speaker 2: think that's what this could be?
Speaker 3: Easily? There was an early version that is the Spielberg
Speaker 3: Kubrick movie called Ai.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: If you remember that the kid is asking about his
Speaker 3: mother and he gets an answer and he takes that.
Speaker 3: But it reminds me of a colleague of mine who
Speaker 3: asked a question years ago. We're talking about the singularity,
Speaker 3: where machines get so smart we can't see beyond a
Speaker 3: certain black hole like threshold. And he said, if you
Speaker 3: speed it up a dog sprain, a dog has well
Speaker 3: over a billion neurons, A sp it has almost ten billion,
Speaker 3: I guess, and we have about one hundred billion neurons.
Speaker 3: And comparison in a cockroach has a million a million
Speaker 3: neurons and a good owl has a billion. But if
Speaker 3: we speed up a dog spring and ask a question,
Speaker 3: would we really care about what a dog has to say?
Speaker 1: I doubt it.
Speaker 3: Contrariwise, I think if we are the dog, which happens
Speaker 3: in this kind of comparison on just neuron capacity, not
Speaker 3: just so, I don't think the AI system would care
Speaker 3: a lot about us and would hurt our stories too
Speaker 3: many times to get much new out of it. But
Speaker 3: I think we will come when the error rates fall,
Speaker 3: and right now they're still pretty high. But like I said,
Speaker 3: we already have some of these large language mark's getting
Speaker 3: ninety percent on the uniform bar exam. I mean, that's
Speaker 3: not an easy thing to do. And when it starts
Speaker 3: getting ninety nine percent all the time, and at some
Speaker 3: point courts will begin. The rules of evidence will I
Speaker 3: think eventually be modified. I don't say courts to allow
Speaker 3: this to enter. And there will be challenge, you know,
Speaker 3: in order to introduce that, you know, in court, any
Speaker 3: piece of evidence that there's a big fight that takes
Speaker 3: plus usually don't see it on TV. But I think
Speaker 3: it'd be like getting an expert admitted to court. They'll
Speaker 3: be come back and forth questioning, and they'll admit them
Speaker 3: in and and a lot of questions of fact will
Speaker 3: initially come in an advisory away from the computer system,
Speaker 3: the decision support system what we currently call it. But
Speaker 3: I think as a practical matter, clearly ten twenty fifty,
Speaker 3: one hundred years from now, I mean, if we continue
Speaker 3: anything like the current right, we're likely to take that
Speaker 3: as an effective digital gospel right.
Speaker 2: And this concept of breaded circuss too that if a
Speaker 2: system understood, really began to understand what it is that
Speaker 2: motivates human beings, they might it might anticipate that and
Speaker 2: give us give certain areas of the country a tax break.
Speaker 2: They may give other areas. They may change the laws.
Speaker 2: And this is where it's a Republican or Democrat that
Speaker 2: they could they could it could become so troublesome that
Speaker 2: it would be it would become very when it became
Speaker 2: very likable. And that's what it doesn't have right now.
Speaker 2: It seems to be very cold. The idea of AI.
Speaker 2: There is not a friendly face on it. It doesn't smile,
Speaker 2: it doesn't have a dog, you know, it doesn't wear
Speaker 2: a hat. It's just whatever it is. It is, and
Speaker 2: most people when they don't understand what something is, they
Speaker 2: merely sort of push away from the table and say, well,
Speaker 2: I'll never understand that. Wake me when you get into
Speaker 2: bite sized chunks, and maybe I'll.
Speaker 3: Take some of it. Let's call it digital sugar. Sugar
Speaker 3: programs our brains inside there, rubbing our teeth and causing
Speaker 3: all kinds of problems.
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