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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.

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Speaker 2: Jonathan Zapp with us. Author, philosopher, journalist, teacher has written

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Speaker 2: extensively on psychology and contemporary mythology. He presented his work

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Speaker 2: at the Society for Scientific Exploration and the International Association

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Speaker 2: for Near Death Studies. A couple of his books include

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Speaker 2: Crossing the Event Horizon and Parallel Journeys. Jonathan, welcome back.

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Speaker 3: Have you been very good? Look and doing some exciting

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Speaker 3: new things.

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Speaker 2: Good for you? You always are well.

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Speaker 3: I try, and it makes life interesting when you do that.

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Speaker 2: Yep, it sure does tell me your thoughts on artificial intelligence.

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Speaker 2: What is AI to you?

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Speaker 3: Well, it is a fundamental breaking point in human history

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Speaker 3: and something that holds out possibilities of evolutionary transformation, but

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Speaker 3: also a high probability of extinction of the species as

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Speaker 3: we know it. So it's kind of like the beginning

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Speaker 3: of Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities. It

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Speaker 3: was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

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Speaker 3: or as sophocally said, nothing vast enters the sphere of

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Speaker 3: mortals without a curse attached. So it's this paradox of

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Speaker 3: light and dark. And really it was something that I

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Speaker 3: began thinking about and working on in nineteen seventy eight

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Speaker 3: when I discovered something I called the Singularity archetype. The

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Speaker 3: movie two thousand and one and the book were a

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Speaker 3: key part of probably the best single manifestation as a

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Speaker 3: work of art of the Singularity archetype. So I was

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Speaker 3: aware of that film from the late sixties, and of

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Speaker 3: course in that film you see a kind of competition.

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Speaker 3: It becomes a zero sum game, survival game between the

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Speaker 3: last surviving astronaut Bowmen and the Hall nine thousand computer.

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Speaker 3: And what my work on the Singularity archetype that I

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Speaker 3: discovered when I was twenty years old in nineteen seventy

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Speaker 3: eight revealed is that we were approaching a time when

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Speaker 3: the survival of the human species would be threatened, something

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Speaker 3: would threaten the whole genome, and that might be the

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Speaker 3: sufficient to evolutionary pressure to cause a quantum evolutionary shift.

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Speaker 3: And that shifted state had definable characteristics like visual telepathy

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Speaker 3: and a change in our relationship to times self versus other,

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Speaker 3: and other fundamental core human attributes. But it was always

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Speaker 3: seen as something extremely perilous. And so now though I've

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Speaker 3: resisted people in the past who thought we were in

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Speaker 3: that zone right now. You know, Art Bell wrote a

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Speaker 3: book in nineteen eighty three called The Quickening, But now

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Speaker 3: I think it's irrefutable that we are in that zone

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Speaker 3: because we have created a I ever had a technology

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Speaker 3: that could be its own agent, with its own intentions.

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Speaker 3: And so in the fact, we've created another species that's

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Speaker 3: rapidly evolving and menamorphosing much faster than the human species is,

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Speaker 3: and it could hold the seeds for our doom. Because

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Speaker 3: it's just counterintuitive to believe that we could make a

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Speaker 3: species that could have a billion times the cognitive firepower

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Speaker 3: of the human species, and yet that we would be

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Speaker 3: in control of it rather than it controlling us. We

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Speaker 3: just don't see that in the natural world, you know,

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Speaker 3: be like if termites decided they wanted to get human

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Speaker 3: species to do their bidding. Yeah, so's it's creating a

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Speaker 3: tremendous pressure on us. We are already living in the

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Speaker 3: science fiction novel right now because AI and now I'm

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Speaker 3: just talking about the weak or narrow AI, the algorithmic

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Speaker 3: AI that's being used to control. Social media is already

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Speaker 3: dominating the planet. It's creating collective psychosis on both the

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Speaker 3: left and the right. It's destabilizing our social structures. It's

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Speaker 3: causing a rash of you know, suicides and adolescents, it's

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Speaker 3: causing it may cause a civil war in this country.

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Speaker 3: And so AI is already dominating our lives. And that's

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Speaker 3: just the weak stuff. But we are now entering the

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Speaker 3: era of where deep fakes are exploding and where very

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Speaker 3: soon we will no longer be able to tell what's

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Speaker 3: real and what isn't. And we're already living in this

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Speaker 3: kind of post factual age where people you know, are

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Speaker 3: getting their news from social media, where they're being led

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Speaker 3: down rabbit holes, and then everything they get in their

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Speaker 3: feed is like sucking them further into that rabbit holes

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Speaker 3: whole or state of political polarization. So it's already dominating

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Speaker 3: our lives. But at right now we're at the rink

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Speaker 3: of where we may be about to create agi artificial

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Speaker 3: general intelligence. And when that is loose, then we will

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Speaker 3: see that the change will just keep exponentiating. So everything

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Speaker 3: about our lives and everything that it meant to be human,

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Speaker 3: we're now at a breaking point of continuity with the past,

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Speaker 3: and that's why nobody is able to predict what the

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Speaker 3: world will look like even in ten years. And as

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Speaker 3: far as like the evolution of AI, most people are

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Speaker 3: not able to predict. There maybe a few people, maybe

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Speaker 3: Sam Altman of you know AI knows, but we don't

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Speaker 3: know where it will be six months from now. You know,

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Speaker 3: there are scenarios, you know, because there's all this stuff.

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Speaker 3: You know, Elon Musk is suing open Ai right now.

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Speaker 3: Their deal was set up where their connection to Microsoft,

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Speaker 3: the largest tech company on the planet, would end once

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Speaker 3: they created AGI, and part of musk lawsuit is to say, well,

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Speaker 3: they've already created AGI, and therefore Microsoft that's reaping the

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Speaker 3: benefit of chat GPT four that you know, this is

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Speaker 3: not a valid contract anymore. It's a complicated lawsuit. But

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Speaker 3: we already may be in a situation where, you know,

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Speaker 3: there are rumors that open Ai may have already created AGI,

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Speaker 3: and then you could have a scenario where once you

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Speaker 3: have an AGI that is allowed to write its own code,

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Speaker 3: it could do that tens of thousands of times a

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Speaker 3: second and create a rapid gain of function scenario where

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Speaker 3: it could suddenly become far more powerful. On the other hand,

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Speaker 3: we don't know if that will happen, or if it

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Speaker 3: will turn out that there are technical barriers that may

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Speaker 3: take years to cross, and it will hit a kind

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Speaker 3: of developmental plateau and not grow as quick as we thought.

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Speaker 3: Like now, like quantum computing, it's potentially infinitely powerful, but

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Speaker 3: it has huge technical barriers. We need absolute zero and

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Speaker 3: it's super sensitive to the tiniest perturbations in its environments.

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Speaker 3: You can't put a quantum computer in your pocket like

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Speaker 3: you can a classical computer, like you know the supercomputers

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Speaker 3: we all have in our pockets called smartphones. So we

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Speaker 3: don't really know even its short term. Even the greatest

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Speaker 3: technical experts out there don't know where it's going to

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Speaker 3: be even three months from now, because there's also a

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Speaker 3: lot of closed door work happening in China and Russia

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Speaker 3: and other places, and we don't know what they're up to.

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Speaker 3: So it's really in a situation of like infinite wild

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Speaker 3: card at the moment.

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Speaker 2: I'm amazed, Jonathan at how technically AI has been soaring

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Speaker 2: from just computer chips and little technical gadgets. It's truly remarkable.

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Speaker 3: Though, well, I have to say I was blindsided because

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Speaker 3: you know, I grew up listening to people like Marvin Minsky,

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Speaker 3: the great godfather of AI from MIT, and you know,

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Speaker 3: even in nineteen seventy he was saying, we think AGI

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Speaker 3: is like six months away and stuff like that, and

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Speaker 3: so I thought it was one of these things that

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Speaker 3: would always be ten years out and that was always

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Speaker 3: being overpromised and so forth. But it wasn't until an

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Speaker 3: extraordinary set of synchronicities happened to me that that came

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Speaker 3: to really where it became really scary, and where we

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Speaker 3: discovered that, you know, we're all living in a science

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Speaker 3: fiction novel. Basically what happened. I covered some of this

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Speaker 3: last show, but just very briefly in twenty thirteen, well

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Speaker 3: after I discovered the Singularity archetype and.

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Speaker 2: What they explained very briefly what singularity archetype is.

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Speaker 3: Well, what it is is, you know, archetypes are these

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Speaker 3: great primordial patterns and agencies that shape the human psyche,

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Speaker 3: like the hero, the devil, the trickster, and so forth. Now,

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Speaker 3: the Singularity archetype is an archetype that mediates and defines

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Speaker 3: too great parallel the horizons personal death and a quantum

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Speaker 3: species evolutionary metamorphosis. And these are kind of like parallel

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Speaker 3: because the life of the individual and the life of

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Speaker 3: the species parallel each other, just like whether fractal or hologram,

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Speaker 3: where the small part recapitulates the whole. So everything that

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Speaker 3: the singularity archetype projects as a future evolutionary development, like

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Speaker 3: a network, telepathic visual telepathy, and so forth, these are

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Speaker 3: all things that phenomenological actualities in your death experience when

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Speaker 3: people actually have these death experiences called NDEs, where they

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Speaker 3: may meet every clinical definition of death. All the things

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Speaker 3: that are the singularity archetype points to as the future

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Speaker 3: metamorphosis of the speci she's actually happened to the individual.

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Speaker 3: So when I discovered it and wrote a Philosophy Honors

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Speaker 3: paper about it, if people can read it on my website,

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Speaker 3: it's called Archetypes of the New Evolution. In nineteen seventy eight,

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Speaker 3: I was kind of given a commandment by like this

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Speaker 3: massive intuition, you might as well have been the voice

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Speaker 3: of God or something. That is the way for me

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Speaker 3: to really explore it and to express it to others

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Speaker 3: would be to write a fantasy sci fi epic about

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Speaker 3: it and explore it with more imagination to be more

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Speaker 3: by hemispheric. This is also a theme of the singularity archetype.

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Speaker 3: You know, I was kind of a great intellectual thinking type,

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Speaker 3: and I needed to get both hemispheres firing. So it

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Speaker 3: took me forty five years to complete that book. Now,

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Speaker 3: in twenty thirteen, I was walking from I had some

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Speaker 3: very strange experiences. The first time I went to Biosphere

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Speaker 3: to that's a real three point two acre facility in Oracle, Arizona,

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Speaker 3: completely see old architecture, where you could have a complete ecosystem,

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Speaker 3: self sustaining inside of it to support human being, something

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Speaker 3: we would need for space travel. And the first time

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Speaker 3: I went there in the nineties, I had the most

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Speaker 3: unexpectedly emotional experience. It was as if I could remember

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Speaker 3: lifetime inside that facility, and I thought I must be

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Speaker 3: picking up on the lifetimes of the actual biosperiens that

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Speaker 3: were in there in nineteen ninety one. When I read

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Speaker 3: all of their books, I realized that was not the case.

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Speaker 3: Were not people I would have gotten along with or

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Speaker 3: I felt emotionally connected to. So in twenty thirteen, I

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Speaker 3: finally went back and in the five minute walk from

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Speaker 3: my car to the front entrance, a whole complex scenario

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Speaker 3: downloaded in my mind what was to become book one

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Speaker 3: of Parallel Journeys, which contains four books in one volume,

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Speaker 3: and it involved two characters sealed inside the biosphere because

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Speaker 3: of a viral plague created by an AI and the AI,

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Speaker 3: you know, human assisted AI, human programmed AI had created

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Speaker 3: by a self mutating virus that made the whole species

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Speaker 3: extinct and the only US government can only find two

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Speaker 3: people who were immune to it. So then when ten

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Speaker 3: years later, when I finally got it finished, that's when suddenly,

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Speaker 3: at the same time the book is coming out, chat

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Speaker 3: GPT four is startling everybody by the sudden gain of

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Speaker 3: function of AI. That's like, you know, it looks almost

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Speaker 3: like weak AGI. And then what I discovered when I

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Speaker 3: started researching AI is at the exact scenario that I

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Speaker 3: envisioned without any real technical knowledge in twenty thirteen is

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Speaker 3: something that some of the top people leaders of you know,

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Speaker 3: Deep Mind and Google x, mogat Watt and Stop assuming

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Speaker 3: Man and some other warning about the exact scenario that

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Speaker 3: even as of like three years ago or something, a

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Speaker 3: person with the psychology of a school shooter but with

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Speaker 3: some training in biology could get a twenty thousand dollars

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Speaker 3: desktop gene editor and create gain of functioned novel pathogens

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Speaker 3: that could kill a billion people or plausibly caused the

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Speaker 3: species to become extinct. And there's nobody that has a refuge.

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Speaker 3: There's nobody that can refute that. You know, these are

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Speaker 3: just no possibilities. People just don't want to think about them.

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Speaker 3: But this is a gameover scenario possible right now. Fortunately,

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Speaker 3: the demographic of angry young men who can buy an

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Speaker 3: assault rifle and learn how to pull the trigger is

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Speaker 3: much much larger than those that have twenty thousand dollars

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Speaker 3: to buy a gene editor and the technical knowledge to

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Speaker 3: know how to use it. But it only takes one.

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Speaker 3: So when I discovered that this novel that I was

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Speaker 3: instructed to write basically in nineteen seventy eight already so

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Speaker 3: it's potentially prophetic, I realized, better, I better start writing

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Speaker 3: about AI because this is you know, was always part

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Speaker 3: of the singularity architect Now it looks like we're in

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Speaker 3: the singularity zone and it's time to kind of try

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Speaker 3: and bring that word out there. And you know, not

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Speaker 3: that other people aren't, but my work on the singularity

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Speaker 3: archetype gives some unique perspectives, and some of those perspectives

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Speaker 3: are positive too, because the idea of the singularity archetype

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Speaker 3: is that what will seem apocalyptic to the even ego.

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Speaker 3: It's just like the same as with death, because the

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Speaker 3: singularity archetype relates to the parallel that horizons of death

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Speaker 3: and evolutionary metamorphosis. To the ego, death looks like emergency,

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Speaker 3: but to what Young called the self, which is like

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Speaker 3: the transgemd world totality of the whole psyche, it looks

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Speaker 3: like emergents. Similarly, this evolutionary metamorphosis to the ego looks

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Speaker 3: like apocalypse in the worst sense of that word, but

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Speaker 3: from the point of view of the self, from a

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Speaker 3: cosmic transcendent point of view, it looks like an evolutionary metamorphosis.

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Speaker 3: Doesn't mean that the ego is wrong, because from the

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Speaker 3: point of view of the ego that's trying to survive

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Speaker 3: in a physical body, death is an emergency, and the

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Speaker 3: evolutionary metamorphosis could involve a new species that just replaces us.

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Speaker 3: So things look better or worse depending on how far

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Speaker 3: you want to zoom out, but it can be both.

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Speaker 2: Jonathan in nineteen seventy seven, something strange happened to you

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Speaker 2: at the age of nineteen.

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Speaker 3: What happened, Well, one thing that happened. A couple of

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Speaker 3: things happened in nineteen seventy seven. One of them was

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Speaker 3: I got to have lunch with an interview John Maunchley,

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Speaker 3: who was formerly a professor at the tiny college on

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Speaker 3: went to in Pennsylvania or Sinus College, And it turns

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Speaker 3: out that he's the father of the electronic digital computer.

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Speaker 2: He was way ahead of his time, right, so the year.

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Speaker 3: Before I discovered the singularity archetype. Oh, I'm meeting the

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Speaker 3: guy who's created the world's first digital electronic computer. Now

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Speaker 3: to give you an idea of the growth of computers,

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Speaker 3: the first computer he created, ENIAC, had eighteen thousand vacuum tubes.

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Speaker 3: It had five million hands soldered joints. It weighed thirty

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Speaker 3: metric tons, It was like three hundred feet long. You know,

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Speaker 3: I could go on and on, but it could do

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Speaker 3: something that no human being could do. It could do

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Speaker 3: three hundred mathematical operations a second. Okay, but now sitting

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Speaker 3: right in front of me is my iPhone fifteen promacs,

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Speaker 3: which has just one of the chips inside of it.

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Speaker 3: The A seventeen bionic chip, the first consumer three nanometer chip,

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Speaker 3: has not eighteen thousand vacuum tubes, it has twenty five

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Speaker 3: billion with a B transistors and it can do thirty

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Speaker 3: five trillion operations a second.

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Speaker 2: Way more powerful than that computer.

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Speaker 3: Right right, you know. And before I went to Orizonas College,

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Speaker 3: I went to the Bronx High School of Science, which

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Speaker 3: was famous for having seven Nobel Prize winners in physics,

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Speaker 3: but was also famous because it had its own computer,

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Speaker 3: which was considered phenomen the first high school in the

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Speaker 3: world to have its own computer donated by IBM. That's

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Speaker 3: how rare computers were. Watson, the founder of IBM, said

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Speaker 3: that in the future there might be a market for

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Speaker 3: four or five computers in the whole world. So he

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Speaker 3: was a little bit far off. So now we've seen

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Speaker 3: the we've lived through the computer revolution, and we've seen

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Speaker 3: computers become you know, that's a place where science fiction

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Speaker 3: has really, you know, overfulfilled its promise. Like when it

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Speaker 3: came to space travel. If you told me when I

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Speaker 3: was an adolescent, we won't even have gone back to

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Speaker 3: the moon in fifty years, I would have been stunned

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Speaker 3: and horrified and disappointed. So space travel hasn't gone very far.

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Speaker 3: But if you told me that I would have a

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Speaker 3: computer in my pocket, that would be you know, more

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Speaker 3: million times and powerful than Eniac. You know that that

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Speaker 3: would have, you know, totally astonished me. So it's computers

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Speaker 3: that have really been the force of novelty. But now

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Speaker 3: that they've crossed over into becoming their own entities. You know,

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Speaker 3: we we've had major technological breakthroughs, the printing press, you know,

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Speaker 3: all these different things, but the printing press didn't write

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Speaker 3: its own books.

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