Jason Bradford
Hi, I’m Jason Bradford.
Asher Miller
I’m Asher Miller.
Rob Dietz
And I’m Rob Dietz. Welcome to Crazy Town where as soon as 2024, nanobots in your sphincter will mean you’ll never have to wipe again.
Melody Allison
Hi, this is Crazy Town producer, Melody Allison. Thanks for listening. Here in Season Five, we’re exploring Phalse Prophets and the dangerous messages they’re so intent on spreading. If you like what you’re hearing, please let some friends know about this episode or the podcast in general. Now on to the show.
Rob Dietz
Hey guys, everybody’s pretty much a fan of Harry Potter, right?
Asher Miller
I think that he embodies evil sorcery.
Jason Bradford
Oh, okay. I loved Harry Potter. I loved the books. It was fascinating.
Asher Miller
Aren’t there like religious groups that see Harry Potter as like. . .
Rob Dietz
Sure, but come on. I mean, I read Harry Potter books to my daughter. I had read a few of them before she was born. So like you, Jason, I kind of like them too. But obviously it’s a worldwide phenomenon. So I wanted to check in with you guys. What is your favorite Harry Potter magical power?
Jason Bradford
I’ll go first. I don’t want him to take mine.
Rob Dietz
I don’t want you to take mine either.
Asher Miller
Okay, take the time.
Jason Bradford
I like the brooms you fly on.
Rob Dietz
Son of a —
Jason Bradford
Who doesn’t? You want to fly. There’s no there’s no doubt. That’s the best.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. You know, everybody always asks, would you rather have flying or invisibility. Like that’s not even a question.
Jason Bradford
Not even a question.
Rob Dietz
Even if you have to have a broomstick chafing you, it’s still better.
Jason Bradford
You just gotta clench.
Asher Miller
I think it is a question. I was gonna say that cloak because it’s pretty cool. You could like sneak around, you could . . .
Rob Dietz
I don’t know. I think you’re just up to no good if you have a cloak.
Asher Miller
Have you met me? Especially when you’re in school. Come on.
Rob Dietz
Look, but the reason I ask is that we got some really good news. I want to share a quote with you guys. This is from our Phalse Prophet of this episode from his 2005 best selling book, “The Singularity Is Near.”
Asher Miller
Was it really best selling?
Rob Dietz
Best selling, yeah. Like a Harry Potter book. So he says essentially all of the Potter magic will be realized through the technologies I will explore in this book. Playing Quidditch and transforming people and objects into other forms will be feasible in full immersion virtual reality environments, as well as in real reality using, wait for it, nanoscale devices.
Jason Bradford
Wow. This is exciting.
Asher Miller
He had me until the real reality part.
Rob Dietz
At first you’re like, so what? Of course we can do this in a virtual reality world.
Asher Miller
I mean, this is what Meta is working on right now.
Rob Dietz
But in real reality . . Like, you know, what’s the thing and Quidditch that they’re chasing after?
Asher Miller
The ball?
Jason Bradford
The snitch. The Quidditch snitch. That thing is awesome.
Rob Dietz
Maybe that thing will become nano size and fulfill all of our dreams.
Asher Miller
I think we should all be nano sized then.
Rob Dietz
Why don’t you tell us Jason. Who’s our Phalse Prophet?
Jason Bradford
Let’s go through this guy. His name is Raymond Kurzweil and he’s an American computer scientist. And let’s just go through a quick view of his history. He was born in 1948 – so he’s a baby boomer – to parents who fled Germany before the Holocaust. So they’re pretty, pretty smart. They got out. Scientific interests were encouraged. He had a family that’s super into it. He’s got an uncle at Bell Labs and he invented a lot of things over the years. So he was his child prodigy. And then he invented something that’s still maybe in use today. It’s called the Kurzweil K 250 music synthesizer. And this was the first sort of synthetic keyboard that could simulate the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.
Rob Dietz
So being like a kid of the 80s, I’ve probably heard his synth music in all kinds of songs.
Jason Bradford
I went to a Jackson Browne concert, and he’s playing a real grand piano. And then I went to another one, and he was playing this and I’m like, “Are you kidding me?”
Rob Dietz
Sound the same?
Jason Bradford
I couldn’t tell the difference. It was incredible.
Rob Dietz
And you may be one of the only people who’s ever gone to two Jackson Browne concerts.
Asher Miller
No come on. He’s very popular these days.
Jason Bradford
This is a digression. But like did this lead to all the MIDI stuff where you could mimic a whole bunch of different instruments? Oh yeah. This thing could mimic all kinds of orchestral instruments.
Asher Miller
I’m kinda into this dude because, as you both know, I’m a huge Grateful Dead fan. And in sort of late 80s, early 90s, Jerry Garcia incorporated this into his guitar so he could make his guitar sound like all kinds of things which is pretty damn cool. So all right, okay, I like this guy. He actually, I’m gonna give him some more credit. He actually became friends with Stevie Wonder in the 70s. And it wasn’t just because he invented this keyboard thing. He also invented a text to speech device.
Jason Bradford
And Stevie Wonder is blind.
Asher Miller
Thank you for telling me. Now. I understand that connection . . .
Rob Dietz
Yeah, that’s pretty cool, benevolent, altruistic idea behind what you’re inventing.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. No, I mean, props. I mean, the guy was pretty amazing. His father died when he was 58 and he was diagnosed with diabetes at 35. And this becomes important later on when we understand what he does. Some of his motivation, yeah.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Currently, he has a job as director of engineering at Google with a large team working for them. And they do a lot of stuff with like, neural net, neural. . . What’s it called? Anyway, they do stuff with computers. Computers and brains it sounds like.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, basically they’re trying to mimic neural processing.
Rob Dietz
Artificial intelligence.
Jason Bradford
Artificial intelligence. Which I need plenty of.
Rob Dietz
Clearly. Well, you could use a little bit of natural intelligence. Oh, got you. Wicked burn.
Jason Bradford
That’s a good one. Ouch.
Asher Miller
There’s 1000 eyes rolling right now.
Rob Dietz
While Kurzweil is a formidable inventor, what he’s best known for, come on, are these predictions about the future of technology and humanity?
Asher Miller
The singularity.
Rob Dietz
Yes, the singularity. Let’s see if we can dive into that topic a little bit.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, sure. I mean, before we get into that in detail, you know, he has written a lot of books many about the singularity, but also about health and longevity. And so, they’re connected. But there’s a new book coming out, probably out before the show is released. It’s called, “The Singularity Is Nearer,” and it’s a follow up to his book “The Singularity Is Near.”
Rob Dietz
How did he come up with that title?
Asher Miller
The next one is, “The Singularity is Nearest,” right?
Rob Dietz
It’s nearly here now in the near and now.
Jason Bradford
Well you know, he feels like we are definitely on the right track. We’re moving according to schedule, etc. on his vision.
Asher Miller
What didn’t he call his book nano something because he seems to dig that word a lot. Dude is into nanobots are nice. He’s like into nanobots the way my kids used to be into Legos. Like big time.
Rob Dietz
It’s too bad he wasn’t into go-bots or transformers. No, he’s into nano bots. Okay, Well, let’s look at the singularity a little bit, alright. Give the simplest definition to the simpleton. That’s me, not Jason. The simplest definition is the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human native intelligence. But that’s just step one, right? You guys know that we’ve got some more interesting ideas for the singularity. So if we take it a little bit further – Let me just use his words. He says that, “Following the singularity is going to be a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” So you can overcome all the limitations of mind, body, spirit, what have you.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. And basically, the way he envisions this happening is through this fusion of genetics, nanotechnology, and robots, which often gets abbreviated as GNR.
Rob Dietz
Is that a reference to Guns N Roses? GNR?
Jason Bradford
I hope so. Oh man.
Rob Dietz
“Welcome to the Jungle.”
Asher Miller
“Welcome to the Singularity.” I can’t go as high as you.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, don’t hurt yourself. Don’t hurt me.
Rob Dietz
Don’t hurt our listeners. Can we just stop the hurt and the pain?
Jason Bradford
So this is how we get to immortality, right? The guy had an early death of his father, and he’s a little worried of his own health. And also, the eventual spread of some nano cyborgian form of humans, whatever you might call them, to colonize the stars. So it goes way out there.
Asher Miller
And that’s I have to say, when I become familiar with the concept of singularity, I think that’s what I always understood singularity to be. The definition you gave Rob, where like, basically, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. Like to me that was never what it was about. It was really more about like, this fusion of the human and technology. The singularity is like we’re like this one thing now.
Rob Dietz
I guess I always thought upload your mind to the computer cloud or whatever. Like you go on forever.
Jason Bradford
Right. Basically, you know, though, it’s not just your mind’s uploaded to some cloud while your corporal body is still around, or before you die. It’s that there is no distinction anymore in his mind between sort of computers, the cloud, and being a human being. So here’s what he says: “The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction post-singularity between human and machine, or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what would remain unequivocally human in such a world, it is simply this quality. Ours is a species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.” So I think what we’re getting at is that once computers or AI reaches this general intelligence that at least equals humanity’s, it will have an accelerated learning, and then it will produce all this for us at some point.
Asher Miller
Yeah, so it’s like, not only can artificial intelligence achieve knowledge that maybe we’re incapable of achieving with our limited computational ability in our brains. It will be able to do things that allow us in a sense to live forever, or something past the limitations of our bodies or whatever. Nothing could go wrong with that I don’t think.
Rob Dietz
What’s not to love about that?
Jason Bradford
This is just a standard leap you’d make.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Technology works every time. Every time.
Asher Miller
I think we should touch on the key component of this, which is how this sort of singularity happens and the dimensions of it. So here’s another quote of his: “What I see is quite different than what a lot of people see because I think a major failing of even some very thoughtful observers is the real implications of the acceleration of technological change. I call this the “intuitive linear view” versus the “historical exponential view.” People assume that in the next 50 years we’ll see 50 years of progress at today’s rate of progress. I’ve been studying this. I have models of it. That means the 21st century will not be 100 years of progress, it will be 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress.” He’s got models.
Rob Dietz
That’s very confusing.
Jason Bradford
Well, I mean, of course, I can’t imagine 20,000 years of progress at today’s rates occurring within the next 50 to 100 years. Who could imagine that?
Asher Miller
I feel like it’s kind of a specious argument a little bit because he’s right to say, look, the rate of change that’s happening is not linear when you have got these technological advances. Especially when you think about like computer technology. The rate of change is is profound, right? It’s much faster. It’s not like, you know, every single year you get this like 1% incremental change or something like that, right? But he’s just extrapolating from what we’ve seen with computing technology to say that everything is going to change at this incredible exponential rate. 20,000 years? I mean, 10,000 years ago, you know, or a little longer than that, we were a hunter-gatherers.
Rob Dietz
Well, it’s also interesting just to think about, maybe I’m just one of these horribly limited humans who stuck in a linear whatever you called it, an intuitive linear view. But I’ve lived for 50 years, and there’s been a lot of so-called progress over that time. There’s also been a lot of a shit show, you know. What could you possibly be referring to? Well, exactly. I mean, the technologies that we’ve introduced have not exactly been all about progress. There’s been a lot of setbacks along the way as well.
Asher Miller
Do you know how many cat videos and like, fail videos that I can watch now, anytime I want.
Jason Bradford
That is one of the greatest things that’s come out of it is the videos.
Asher Miller
I mean, what are you talking about?
Rob Dietz
Utter progress. Well, he takes this even further because first of all, it’s a little specious. I got the big college words today.
Asher Miller
I said it first.
Rob Dietz
To call it the Law of Accelerating Returns. . . I get to make laws. But let’s humor him. So he has this other quote, where he says, “the Law of Accelerating Returns will continue until non-biological intelligence comes close to saturating the matter and energy in our vicinity of the Universe with our human machine intelligence.” And he goes on, “blah blah.” To me, this is like gibberish on a paper. Like what? Right. It’s all in the cloud. It actually kinda reminds me, do you guys remember the early 80s Magician, Doug Henning? He had the world’s best mullet mustache combination.
Jason Bradford
It’s not on paper. He looked like Gallagher but he was magician.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, exactly Well I remember, I’d watch him on TV and he’d say, “It’s all possible in the world of illusion.” Kurzweil would agree.
Asher Miller
So you’re saying he’s a magician, basically?
Jason Bradford
Can we play some of it?
Rob Dietz
Yes. Let me get you a clip. Here, listen to this:
Jason Bradford
You get this on the internet right now.
Doug Henning
And welcome to my world of magic where the incredible is credible. The unimaginable is imaginable. And of course, the impossible is not only possible, it’s probable.
Rob Dietz
So. . .
Asher Miller
See, progress right there. We got to listen to that. We got to go in a time machine back to our childhood where we see people wearing the most insane fucking clothes.
Jason Bradford
I got to see Ricky Schroder. He was cute.
Rob Dietz
I think Kurzweil, though, and Doug Henning have a lot in common.
Asher Miller
Can I just circle back for one second? You’re just saying it’s a lot of gibberish, basically, what he’s spouting in terms of saturating the universe.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, what does that mean?
Asher Miller
Strange fucking word, saturating the universe.
Rob Dietz
I picture like liquefied humans gooing and oozing out over the vacuum of space.
Asher Miller
Now, anybody who understands sort of physics at all, or cosmology, you know, astrophysics, you know, how the universe works thinks, “Well, isn’t the universe expanding right now? “Speed of Light. Like, how are we going to?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, nanobots and wormholes, baby.
Asher Miller
Nanobots and wormholes.
Rob Dietz
Well, and he also thinks that the current setup that we all were born into, he thinks it’s dumb, simple machine-like forces ruling the celestial mechanic.
Asher Miller
I’m really glad we’re spending some time on this stuff, because I think we’re gonna be talking about some other Phalse Prophets later this season. And you could sort of see building blocks, right? Like, in some ways, Kurzweil, you know, we talked about Steven Pinker . . . I’m not gonna say Kurzweil is building off of the work of Pinker, but in terms of a philosophy of thinking about progress, you could see how one sort of leads to the other. And we’re going to talk about some crazy shit later in the season that will have a real call back to the stuff that Kurzweil is talking about here in terms of like expanding throughout the universe, you know?
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Well, okay, Let’s talk about how influential this guy is. Because we’re not going to cover Phalse Prophets unless they’ve got a following, right. Otherwise, why bother? So this guy has been on the cover of Time Magazine.
Rob Dietz
Back when it used to mean something. Before progress eliminated Time Magazine.
Jason Bradford
Yes. When there was a physical copy of it. And of course, he has a prestigious job at one of the most important companies in the world at Google. And he claims that he has many rule leaders on speed dial.
Rob Dietz
Just like Pinker.
Asher Miller
Yeah. Maybe there’s a common thread here.
Rob Dietz
How many world leaders do you guys have on speed dial? What is speed dial? Isn’t that an ancient technology?
Asher Miller
I don’t have to have them on speed dial. I just think thoughts about them and they’re like, “Hey Asher! What’s up?” Just connect.
Rob Dietz
Unbelievable.
Asher Miller
Yeah, and just to help spread these ideas, they have actually started a thing called Singularity University. So they train and evangelize the singularity worldview by bringing entrepreneurs and investors and executives in, you know, to this university. They have a lot of shit online. Maybe they’ve surpassed the physical form already.
Jason Bradford
Oh no. They meet in person in the Bay Area. And you’re a Bay Area guy. You haven’t taken any classes there? I mean. . .
Asher Miller
They wouldn’t let me in.
Jason Bradford
You spend a lot of time in that area.
Asher Miller
I know. I know. They wouldn’t let me in.
Jason Bradford
Why? What’s wrong? The GPA too low or something like that?
Asher Miller
It’s because I was dressed like Doug Henning.
Jason Bradford
You gotta see the Doug Henning video, people.
Rob Dietz
So, we got to be careful this whole season with Phalse Prophets. We know we like to poke fun, but it’s not our intent to malign these guys. At least, well, it’s not my intent. Asher, I don’t think you can stop yourself.
Asher Miller
I gotta say, it’s really tough.
Rob Dietz
I’m gonna out you. When you were reading Alana’s research on this, I thought you were gonna have an aneurysm. It’s like, you ever been sitting next to someone reading something and they’re just like, “Oh my God. What the. . . This guy!”
Jason Bradford
It’s toned down a lot. We’ve settled. We’ve incorporated.
Asher Miller
We are sparing poor listeners. Because we actually consume this information, dig into these folks, process it a little bit, do some deep breathing, and then we can be more calm. Seriously, you know. We might go on tirades sometimes when we’re recording, but you should see us when we’re prepping.
Rob Dietz
Well, one of the things about Kurzweil is you can kind of understand why these ideas are spreading and why people take it seriously. And it’s because of all the computing advances and things that are happening, right? Like there’s an AI wave that’s hitting us right now with chat GPT. Jason, you’re a profoundly happy user of that.
Jason Bradford
Oh my god. I don’t do anything anymore. Except to cook dinner still. For God’s sakes.
Asher Miller
We’re working on that.
Rob Dietz
The nanobots will take care of that soon.
Jason Bradford
I know. Hurry up. I have to do dishes for God’s sakes. And laundry?
Rob Dietz
Well, but you’ve also got all these advances happening in the manipulation of genes and all this genetic technology. You’ve got robotics coming online and replacing human labor.
Asher Miller
Yeah, progress, baby.
Rob Dietz
But I’m just saying, you can look at these tech trends, in information technology, you can monitor your body on smartphones, blah, blah, blah. Like, there’s a lot of things happening in the tech world that would lend at least an on ramp to thinking like Kurzweil.
Jason Bradford
Totally. I mean, yeah, I can kind of see how people can get caught up in this because it is also, it’s kind of exciting. It sounds just amazing. It sounds like the Doug Henning magic show.
Rob Dietz
I don’t know. Maybe. It kind of sounds a little dystopian to me..
Jason Bradford
From our perspective, yes. But I could see how people could get caught up.
Asher Miller
But there are, I mean, there are real applications of this stuff. And I’m sure that a lot of the folks who are working on AI and some of the people that are worried about AI, you know, there’s stuff that’s happening there that are real advances in that technology.
Jason Bradford
Sure. And for health implications, like rapid production of the vaccines and stuff like that.
Asher Miller
So we have to be careful about dismissing the whole cloth. But as we’ll get into with him, we’ll see how far he’s taken some of this this extrapolation.
Jason Bradford
Well, as everybody knows by now, if you’re a dedicated listener, I do have a taxonomic treatment of our Phalse Prophets. And this is the part of the show where I go through the classification system.
Rob Dietz
You meticulously work your way through the dichotomous key to figure out what kind of species we’re dealing with.
Jason Bradford
Exactly. And this one is a really easy one to pull out. This one is like one of those birds that is just like –
Rob Dietz
Like an ostrich.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, like an ostrich. Or glowing orange, or whatever. I mean, you know exactly what it is when you see it. He is what’s known as the species Cyborgian. And these are sort of part of the evolve or go extinct crowd with a heavy dose of electronics.
Asher Miller
Synth music.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. And nanobots are involved, of course. So this is the only one of the Phalse Prophet species that I’m aware of – I do say on my paper that there could be other Phalse Prophets out there in other parts of the world that I haven’t studied yet – He’s the only one to predict that humanity fuses with robots and nanobots in particular. All the other Phalse Prophets believe we do remain biological organisms. So he is quite special.
Rob Dietz
A really far-reaching branch of the evolutionary tree.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, yeah, definitely. He’s definitely I don’t know.
Asher Miller
He’s 20,000 years ahead of us.
Jason Bradford
He’s on his own lineage.
Rob Dietz
Well, but it only took him 50 years to get 20,000 years ahead of us.
Jason Bradford
Oh, yeah. Accelerated rate of mutation. Okay, but here’s what we need to do though. Because one of the problems we have with this show is that there’s such a rich, you know, treasure trove. Did I say that right, treasure trove?
Rob Dietz
Sure. Yeah. We’ll take that. I think rich was redundant because a treasure trove is gonna be . . . but that’s okay. Go on, please. Everybody loves to be corrected. Right?
Jason Bradford
I do. Just ask my wife. Anyhow, we all get to pick because there’s so many quotes. We’ve riddled you with quotes so far. But there’s so many. And we were struggling with what to do. So what we allowed ourselves to do, each of us gets a favorite Kurzweil quote, and you just get to let it out. Okay?
Rob Dietz
Can I go first? Okay, this is a 2016 interview with Playboy magazine. Another defunct glossy magazine. In this interview, Kurzweil is predicting that the future of romance will not only allow us to have romantic encounters by people in different locations.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, you don’t have to be in the same spot anymore.
Rob Dietz
But here’s the quote part: “You’ll have the ability to change who you are and who your partner is. In virtual reality, you don’t have to inhabit the same body you have in actual reality. A couple could become each other, for example, and experience the relationship from the other person’s perspective.
Asher Miller
Who wouldn’t want that?
Jason Bradford
I mean, perspective taking is really important.
Asher Miller
Yeah, I want to see my own sweaty face.
Rob Dietz
You want to you want to have sex with yourself is really –
Asher Miller
Is really what this comes down to.
Rob Dietz
No thanks. I’m good. I’ll pass.
Asher Miller
Wow. Huh. Interesting.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Let’s just stop there. Give us a better quote.
Asher Miller
Here we go, alright? “So in the 2020s” – By the way, guys, we are in 2023 right now – “By the 2020s,” he said the, “intertwined revolutions of GNR,” remember?
Jason Bradford
Welcome to the jungle!
Asher Miller
Exactly. They’re gonna be a major comeback. Axel and Slash, or whatever the guy’s name is.
Jason Bradford
Let’s hashtag them on our social media watching.
Asher Miller
So GNR are gonna do a major reunion come back tour, and we’ll “transform our frail version 1.0 human bodies into their far more durable and capable version 2.0 counterparts.”
Jason Bradford
This is so great.
Asher Miller
“Billions” – I want to channel Carl Sagan here – “Billions and billions of nanobots will travel through the bloodstream in our bodies and brains. In our bodies, it will destroy pathogens. It’ll correct DNA errors, eliminate toxins, and perform many other tasks to enhance our physical well being. As a result, we will be able to live indefinitely without aging.” By the way, this is supposed to happen this decade. Get ready guys. It’s comin’.
Rob Dietz
Oh, isn’t it already happening for you guys? I’m on it. I’ve been listening to GNR as much as I can so I can stay young..
Asher Miller
Some people believe that actually the COVID vaccine, this is what this is.
Jason Bradford
Oh. God, I want to reverse aging, not just stop it. I’m 53 For God’s sake. Can you put me back a couple of decades? Oh my God maybe I would.
Rob Dietz
Tennis serve, we’re talking about, right?
Asher Miller
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean your serve will be what? You’ll max out above 120, right?
Jason Bradford
I mean, I always dream if I really had played tennis at a younger age, what it could be like now. It’s good, but – Yeah, you could be slightly above average tennis player. Stop it. Jesus. Okay well, those are pretty good. But I think I have the ultimate quote.
Rob Dietz
Okay, alright. Let’s lay it on us. Come on.
Jason Bradford
This was, actually he had a quote, he was at a Q&A session in December of 2022. So this is fresh material. And someone was asking him about like space travel and what he thought about that. And he kind of poo-pooed the idea of going other planets, because and here we go, quote, “I think it’s going to be a future era beyond the singularity. When we actually have kind of exhausted the ability of here on earth to create more intelligence. At some point, our ability to actually create more computation will come to an end because he really won’t have more materials to do that with. I talk about computronium, which was actually pioneered by Eric Drexel, as to how much computation you can create, if you were to actually organize all the atoms in an optimal way.”
Asher Miller
God screwed this whole thing up. Totally suboptimal.
Jason Bradford
“It’s pretty fantastic. You can basically match all the intelligence of all humanity with sort of one liter of computronium”
Rob Dietz
It is pretty fantastic. I’ll give him that.
Asher Miller
1 liter?
Jason Bradford
“And we’ll get to a point where we’ve used up all the materials on Earth to computronium. Then we will have to move to another planet.” And this is where you get, earlier, we talked about nanobots and wormholes. And so the idea being that the mass of the Earth is just completely reformed as computronium. Because that’s naturally what we want to do. And then we’re like, “Okay, we need to go somewhere else.” And then we just start sending nanobots through wormholes and then we saturate the universe.
Rob Dietz
Look, I can make up words, too.
Asher Miller
What is computronium? What the fuck is this thing?
Jason Bradford
It’s a theoretical construct of potential information quantity of matter. And so, if you were to organize matter in a state that could give you zeros and ones and bits, or whatever you’re talking about, like what’s the least amount of matter that would be allow you to do that?
Asher Miller
But you’re saying we have to use up all of the materials on Earth to create this.
Jason Bradford
Well, eventually. You gotta grow. It’s about growth. So first you take over all human bodies in terms of the cyborgs. That’s step 1.
Asher Miller
Right, check.
Jason Bradford
And then of course, you obliterate all the surface of the planet. And then you have to start going deep down through the entire planet through its core making computronium. Then you’ve exhausted that. The planet is one ball of computronium. And then of course, you’re like –
Rob Dietz
It’s not a ball of computronium. It’s a computronium of computronium.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. And then you’re saturating the universe. Now it’s gonna take like 1- or 2 – hundred years maybe to totally create an entire computronium world. So the biodiversity crisis is really just getting started.
Rob Dietz
Can we combine your quote, your reading of a quote Jason with yours, Asher, and assume that computronium will appear on the periodic table of elements by the end of this decade?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, probably in a couple years.
Asher Miller
My brain is having a really hard time with this. And it’s obviously, because I’m limited. I’m stupid.
Rob Dietz
Like me, you’re an intuitive linear thinker. You’re not computronistic enough.
Asher Miller
So this gets to, you know, why are we talking about Kurzweil? Why do we see this as a dangerous sort of false profiteering, right? And I think he’s not actually a profits seeker. P-R-O-F-I-T-S.
Jason Bradford
Right. You don’t need money in this future of compotroniums.
Asher Miller
That doesn’t seem to be his motivation. But, you know, what are the actually the implications of this stuff. Which, you know, it’s easy for us to look at this and say, this is bananas.
Jason Bradford
It is easy.
Rob Dietz
That’s what I’m saying. You could replace computronium with the word bananas. It’s like the same.
Asher Miller
So people like us, you know, the Debbie downers out there who actually look at the world around us and think, first of all, is the thing that we ultimately want to achieve the greatest computational capacity. That’s the that’s the ultimate goal for existence? And you talked about biodiversity, like, so those of us who are worried if we extend lifespans, that might lead to overpopulation, and we might run out of materials. Whether we’re just doing that because we’re fucking around or we’re doing computronium. In response to these concerns, he just dismisses them. He says, quote, “This argument ignores compatibly radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology based manufacturing devices in the 2020s – ”
Jason Bradford
Soon.
Asher Miller
Really soon, guys. “Will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information. So you know, another one of these guys is just like –
Jason Bradford
3D printers, baby.
Rob Dietz
I think you’re maybe late because those quotes probably come from the “Singularity is Near,” right? So the “Singularity is Nearer” comes out –
Asher Miller
Yeah, we don’t have the update to this.
Rob Dietz
It happened in 2010. It already happened. We’re just not in tune enough to know about it.
Asher Miller
But again, so why does this matter? I mean, this is this idea that there are no limits, right? There are no limits to material resources.
Jason Bradford
And it’d be irresponsible for us to even put any barriers in place. That’s kinda the thing.
Rob Dietz
Well, one of the biggest dangers I think is that these technology gurus, they’re doing these extrapolations based on what happened with computer processing. And they do not look at the broader physical world. There’s no thinking about ecosystems, there’s no thinking about kind of the physical reality that surrounds us. They’re pretty much ignorant of it. It’s like it’s all in the computer realm. And he applies this to other sectors like energy or food or whatever. And one of the problems with Kurzweil is it’s very hard to refute anything he says because it’s all about magical God-like nanotechnology.
Jason Bradford
And Harry Potter.
Rob Dietz
But I think when you drill into some of these sectors, you can do quite a bit of refuting. So Jason, when we first started looking at Kurzweil, I know you did a little bit of a dive into the cryonics
Jason Bradford
Okay, so one of his major anxieties is that, and he says this, just, you know, anytime he’s asked. He’s worried about dying before the singularity and all this technology. So he’s got a backup plan.
Asher Miller
Well, that’s why he wants it to happen in the 2020s.
Jason Bradford
Oh yeah. He’s got some motivating reasons.
Asher Miller
It’s gotta happen now.
Jason Bradford
He’s in his mid 70s now.
Asher Miller
Oh, is he that’s old?
Jason Bradford
He was born in 1940.
Asher Miller
Yeah, yeah. Let’s get on it people.
Jason Bradford
He’s got diabetes since 35 so I think he’s got some anxiety going on. But his plan B is to be frozen, like in liquid nitrogen essentially. And it’s called cryonics. And you can look it up on Wikipedia. And I did some advanced searching like that and study. But the problem, of course, is that we are not tardigrades. And there are certain organisms that have the ability to protect themselves, their cells from being basically like shredded by being so cold. And there’s a whole field called cryobiology which looks at the biology of being very cold. And there’s both interesting research like, “Oh my God, how do tardigrades live in space, “or whatever. “They’re desiccated and come back in 100 years.” But then there’s also things like, you know, you want to do an organ transplant, you’ve got to make something cold. But how do you not destroy it? And how do you heat it up right? So there’s a whole society –
Asher Miller
Heat it up, right?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, carefully warm it back up so you can put it back in the body. Anyway, there’s a society for cryobiology. And they have this warning about like, do not do cryonics. There’s no way this is helpful. And so anyway, basically his idea is he’s gonna have to freeze his body and then it basically makes it impossible for you to revive. And that’s obvious to anyone who actually looks into this. Well, and you’re trusting that whoever is selling you your liquid nitrogen chambers is going to last till the singularity happens. And what happens if that company goes out of business? So far a bunch of bunch of bodies have been defrosted.
Rob Dietz
Just take it back to the family. Here’s your grandpa, sorry. Went out of business.
Asher Miller
He just thawed a little.
Rob Dietz
If you get them into a into a chest freezer quick enough. I mean, you might be able to salvage – I don’t know. It’s your problem now.
Asher Miller
Just maybe the left side of the brain is a little damaged, but it’s okay. But I guess he just thinks that singularity will still happen pretty quickly. You know, if he dies before, and he’s gotta like, do this cryogenic shit, it’s just for like five years or so. It won’t be too big of a deal.
Jason Bradford
The nanobots will sort it out.
Asher Miller
So along these lines of looking at some of the assumptions that he’s making, or the statements he makes, I get more into the world that we might be better able to respond to in critique. He was asked in an interview with a website called Lifearchitect.ai, he was asked this question, quote, “AI comes with large energy resource demands and rare mineral material needs to build the hardware. How do you see these international global tensions, especially the interaction, pervasive AI in the climate?
Rob Dietz
Nanobots, nanobots. It’s gotta be the nanobots. Come on, am I right?
Asher Miller
So his answer to that is, “I mean, computers don’t use that much energy. In fact, that’s the least of our energy needs. And that’s a whole other issue we didn’t get into – the creation of renewable energy sources is on an exponential. I have a very good chart that shows all of the renewable energies, and it’s on an exponential. And if you follow that out, we’ll be able to provide all our energy needs on a renewable basis in 10 years.” Amazing.
Jason Bradford
That’s great. This was in December 2022?
Asher Miller
Yep.
Jason Bradford
So by the early 2030s.
Asher Miller
I think Jason, maybe you need to do a bet with Kurzweil.
Jason Bradford
Oh, I should do one of those.
Asher Miller
I’m going to do a bet with him. 10 years from now.
Rob Dietz
Haven’t we learned from our buddy Paul?
Asher Miller
I’m feeling pretty good about the odds.
Jason Bradford
Yes, this one I think we’ve got.
Asher Miller
All of our energy needs on a renewable basis in 10 years. Maybe, because the rest of our economy collapses.
Rob Dietz
Actually, losing that bet would be fine, because who cares? We’re on this utopian path then.
Asher Miller
It’s a win either way. So he says at that point, we’ll be using one part out of every 5,000 parts of the sunlight that hits the earth. So we’ll have plenty of headroom in that. So we’ll actually be able to deal with climate change through renewable energy sources, in terms of what we’re using computers for, not that expensive.
Jason Bradford
What about those Bitcoin mining? Haven’t people been tearing out their hair and trying to shut down Bitcoin operations just because of that one use of computers.
Rob Dietz
When they’re like using the same energy as a nation state.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, like Chile, or whatever. I mean, wow. Don’t these server platforms always try to set up somewhere near hydroelectric plants?
Asher Miller
But how do you dimiss that you actually need physical things to build all of these, you know, solar panels and –
Rob Dietz
Hey, hey. The nanobots are gonna take care of it.
Asher Miller
He’s talking about in 10 fucking years.
Jason Bradford
In 10 years, right. I know.
Asher Miller
10 years. I mean, whatever. I think our listeners know why we would be highly skeptical.
Jason Bradford
Let’s just send him one of the Richard and Fridley books and see what he thinks.
Asher Miller
Let’s have him talk to Tom Murphy.
Rob Dietz
There’s one more sector that we got to look at, which is food. And this is from 2014. He said the next major food revolution.
Asher Miller
We don’t need food.
Rob Dietz
Well, that’s probably more like him. But no, he says the next one will be vertical agriculture.
Asher Miller
Oh great.
Rob Dietz
In which we grow food in AI controlled vertical buildings rather than horizontal land. Blah, blah, whatever.
Asher Miller
Wait, wait. Where are the nanobots in that? Are they the ones who are planting the seeds on the sides?
Rob Dietz
Seeds? Who need seeds? We’ll have nanobots planting, what’d you call it? Computronium.
Jason Bradford
But he says the 2020s will be the decade of the vertical agricultural revolution.
Asher Miller
You’re seeing that, right? Everywhere.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, I’m seeing vertical farming going out of business everywhere.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, that’s why they built up Dubai like that. So they could turn all those skyscrapers into farms.
Asher Miller
Exactly. Just to feed their people.
Jason Bradford
I mean, it’s true. There was a huge flux of investment into vertical farming right around 2014. And they’ve kind of shot that and are all failing. There’s a few places growing parsley and arugula still in New York City, or whatever.
Rob Dietz
I once took a live chicken up an elevator. Does that count as vertical farming?
Asher Miller
You held it out the window.
Jason Bradford
But have you ever been in one of these things?
Rob Dietz
Well, I mean, all you got to do is look at a CAFO and the complexity there and all the problems we have with that. Now, try to do this on some kind of skyscraper scale.
Asher Miller
You have mountain goats haven’t you?
Rob Dietz
Yeah.
Asher Miller
They are really amazing at being able to go up really, really steep surfaces. So we can have mountain goats on the sides of buildings. It’s no problem.
Jason Bradford
But it’s all about energy, energy energy. We keep coming back to that. Sunlight is so powerful in terms of how its light is. And if you try to recreate that, even with our LEDs, in the tight chamber, this vertical chamber – they go horizontal – and suddenly the heat that’s building up. . . So all these fans and stuff, air conditioning out the wazoo.
Asher Miller
Those don’t need materials to run or, you know, electricity.
Rob Dietz
This is why it’s dangerous, right? Because you just, with a wave of the hand ignore all of the physical realities.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, he has no clue whatsoever what it takes to do any of this.
Asher Miller
But the problem is that people listening to him have no clue either. And the people, the devotees that go to Singularity University, they’re all in the same world of seeing, you know, all these advances in computing technology and just inferring that on the rest of the world, the natural world.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. You know, what I look at is I look at all these super complex technologies, and I put them through our lens. Have we mentioned Joseph Tainter on the show? We probably have.
Asher Miller
I’m sure we have.
Rob Dietz
Oh yeah.
Jason Bradford
The collapse of complex societies, you know. There’s a diminishing return to complexity. There’s not a Law of Accelerating Returns to complexity.
Asher Miller
There isn’t?
Jason Bradford
It’s diminishing return to complexity. And you worry about, we’re solving problems created by our past technologies by doubling down on new technologies. It’s like the recipe for failure throughout history. And then you say, okay, that’s our plan right now. That’s the plan for climate change. It’s the plan for agriculture. It’s the plan for cities and all the other problems. It’s the plan. And then you say, wait a second, the energy rug is about to be pulled out from under all these advanced technologies. And you just go like, how much of these can survive both the diminishing returns and then the energy rug being pulled out?
Asher Miller
The way you survive is by ignoring the reality of both of the two things you said. We don’t have diminishing returns. We have accelerating returns. And there is no energetic basis for anything, right?
Rob Dietz
Well you can get ahead of it by freezing your body now. Just do it right now. Look, the thing that’s scariest to me is that there’s you know, you’re talking about disregarding complexity, disregarding energy limits, but how about disregarding nature?
Asher Miller
I know there’s like no. . .
Rob Dietz
There’s no view whatsoever that there’s a place for nature. It’s all about the human-techno-computronistic.
Asher Miller
Yeah, the purpose of existence is to increase computational capacity. That’s it. That’s it. That’s all it is.
Rob Dietz
Just like no reverence. . . And there’s a there’s a side dish here too of we, as humans become all powerful and soak up more power, and wield more power. And you know, we just came off, in the last couple of years, our colleague, Richard Heinberg, wrote the book, “Power.” We did the podcast, you should check that out, “Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival.” And really, the main message there is we need to learn how to live with restraint and not try to grab as much power as we can. And this Kurzweil philosophy is the exact opposite of that. It’s like we need to live forever. We need to occupy every nanoliter of space.
Jason Bradford
Every atom in the universe is about us? It’s sad. It’s amazing.
Asher Miller
It’s incredible. And it’s like it is sort of the extrapolation, in some ways the logical extrapolation, of the path that we have been on really for centuries. Where we’ve seen nature as a resource to exploit. Right? And so, of course we wouldn’t consider anything, we would have no regard for its intrinsic other species intrinsic rights to exist. And what’s interesting is he does point out that there’s dangerous. This is what’s fascinating. He’s aware of dangerous technologies. Yeah. But the problem is, and you find this a lot, which is, you know, and it’s actually fascinating, a lot of the people that are that are expressing a lot of concerns about AI run amok, are the ones who are actually investing heavily in AI. You know what I mean? And he talks about that. He tries to address it. And he basically says, if we’re worried about this, especially when it comes to AI having more computational capacity than we do, running circles around us, or something, we can have measures in place.
Jason Bradford
Regulation.
Asher Miller
Regulation. He talks about blue goo in police nanobots. I’m not fucking making this up.
Jason Bradford
Gray goo is what’s good. Let’s say the nanobots get mean and they start trying to kill us instead of helping us.
Asher Miller
We need good nanobots.
Jason Bradford
Then you have the blue nanobots going after the gray nanobots.
Asher Miller
People, we didn’t make this up. Jason and I didn’t make this up.
Rob Dietz
This is a movie that’s coming out soon. It’s called Terminator vs Smurfs, right?
Jason Bradford
This is what’s incredible. It’s that you got all these far libertarian folks in the Bay Area who are just saying, “Get off our back, government. You do not understand technology. You’re gonna hold us back. We need to be out in front of this. This is a competitive, you know, intellectual landscape, and you stay in your lane. Leave us alone. And then they’re going, we might kill everybody so come back and help us regulate this.” I mean, what the hell?
Asher Miller
Yeah, and their philosophy is also move fast and break things.
Jason Bradford
Well, what’s a tell is that Kurzweil has a name for the people who follow him. A Singulatarian.
Asher Miller
Jesus Christ.
Rob Dietz
His particular brand would be a Kurzweilian Singulatarian.
Asher Miller
The Branch Kurzweilians
Jason Bradford
Branch Kurzweilians. Oh, that’s good. Anyway, our star researcher, Elana, she had a great comment, you know. She’ll sometimes put comments in our head of the notes that we’re going through to help put together episodes. I think it was perfect. That this whole mindset, the Singularity University. This is in the genre of what we talked about last season and the new thought gurus, positive thinkers. You know, the Mary Baker Eddy and . . .
Asher Miller
Quinby.
Rob Dietz
The Secret, right?
Jason Bradford
Yeah, Christian Science and The Secret. A lot of that is in the Bay Area, too, right? The Secret and all that. And it’s al this with abundance and moonshot mindsets and the promises for health and longevity, but it gets wrapped into the Silicon Valley lingo to give this veil of credibility and legitimacy. And then they speak of things that are so beyond what any normal human can understand that you end up having to just sort of have an article faith that they know what they’re talking about. And it reminds me of that, remember, the movie, “Don’t Look Up?” There was the character that was sort of the Guru that walked around and had that funny voice and gray hair. You know, I think Kurzweil is in that character, for sure.
Asher Miller
It’d be interesting to talk to like Adam McKay to see if that was like an influence.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, I would love to interview him. Especially because I want to talk about the movie, “Step Brothers.” But also about his more activist movies. Well look, like I said before, like a religion, you can’t refute any of this stuff, right? Because anytime you come up with some reality based things, there’s “but the nanobots!”
Asher Miller
Nanobots will take care of that. Computronium!
Jason Bradford
Yeah, 20,000 years of progress in the next 50 years. You can’t understand what I’m talking about.
Asher Miller
I got to say, you know, putting aside all that fantastical shit, it really just boils down to, isn’t this just fear of death, death anxiety, like Moore’s law? You know, it’s like you’re talking about these as like cults, right? And it’s just a new flavor of this thing where you’re promising eternity, all your worries can go away. They just happened to be getting solved by this technology. And in the they’re taking Moore’s law, right, which there has been unprecedented rapid exponential growth and computational capacity and all. And it’s lead to life transforming technological change, right? The fact that we’re doing this, we’re recording this, we’re putting it up on the cloud for people to download.
Rob Dietz
Watching Doug Henning videos.
Asher Miller
Exactly. I mean, it doesn’t it doesn’t remove us from our bodies, the fact that the three of us are gonna die at some point, and then after we record this we have to go eat some food.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, I can’t wait.
Asher Miller
But you know, it’s just this sort of simplistic like, “Yeah, I’m scared to die,” and “Oh, look at what’s happening with my iPhone. It gets keeps getting better and the camera gets better every year. Let’s put these two things together.” Problem solved.
Jason Bradford
Have you read about his way to stay young regime?
Asher Miller
Oh, how does he do that?
Rob Dietz
No.
Jason Bradford
250 supplement pills a day.
Asher Miller
Jesus Christ. You have to spend all day long taking pills.
Jason Bradford
I know. Imagine how much swallowing he does.
Asher Miller
No wonder he wants to be connected to the –
Jason Bradford
Okay, okay. There’s more. And a half dozen IV therapies a week.
Asher Miller
What?
Jason Bradford
A half dozen IV every week. He takes Sunday off, or Saturday. I don’t know. Which is Sabbath or whatever?
Rob Dietz
Look that explains it.
Jason Bradford
Does he have a Sabbath?
Asher Miller
I don’t know. I doubt he’s a religious dude. So he doesn’t have to do this shit all the time.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, what is the Sabbath of Singularitians? That’s why he wants nanobots in his body. So he doesn’t have to keep sticking his veins.
Jason Bradford
I know. It’s a lot of work. Let the nanobots do it. But he does predict that by 2029, medical technologies will allow us to add one additional year for every year to our lives. So basically, you just start breaking even.
Asher Miller
Wait, I’ve gt to say something about this. So we have seen now a number of years, year over year, starting before COVID, that the age of people living has gone down.
Jason Bradford
I know, the average.
Rob Dietz
Life expectancies are falling.
Asher Miller
So, life expectancy has gone down, okay. And I think that there’s a real correlation here. There are deaths of despair. You know, we’ve got people dying from drug overdoses. And that is not disconnected from the fact that we are increasingly living these isolated, there are all these studies done about the health impacts on people from not belonging, from feeling isolated. And technology has absolutely, you wanna talk about exponential impact, that has had a deleterious effect on people’s well being. It’s like the fucking opposite, dude, of what are you’re talking about here.
Rob Dietz
Well, that or recall Pinker’s statistical anomaly.
Asher Miller
Oh right. Coincidence. It’s coincidence.
Jason Bradford
Okay so, kinda at the end of a rant here, this season, we’re going to do the insufferable sufferability coefficient. I’m gonna keep it PG.
Rob Dietz
Okay, yeah. I was lobbying for the insufferability index. You wanted to call it the douchebag coefficient.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. We’re trying to be nice. Okay?
Rob Dietz
So what’s the scale here? Let’s remind our listeners.
Jason Bradford
Okay. Remember, it’s a 0 to 10 and you’ve got to look at his intentions, his personality, and his ideas. Okay? So if he’s malevolent and power hungry, it’s a 3. If he’s a really nice, wonderful human being with good awareness of the broader world that’s a 0.
Rob Dietz
So, wait. Let’s stick with Harry Potter for a sec. So a score of 1, he’s a Harry Potter or a Hermione Granger. Yeah. Score of 10, he is Voldemort.
Jason Bradford
Exactly. That’s a perfect example. Oh my gosh, yeah. Neville’s is down there, a 1, 0. Like a 2, maybe. I like Neville. Anyway, I think he was a Hufflepuff. Was Neville a Hufflepuff?
Asher Miller
You guys have lost me.
Jason Bradford
Alright. So who wants to go? I’m gonna add it up in my head.
Asher Miller
Wait, so what are the things again?
Jason Bradford
Intention. Is he a malevolent power-hungry guy?
Asher Miller
I think his intentions are pretty good.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, he seems like a kindhearted person to me.
Jason Bradford
Okay. Personality. Is he like clearly a jerk, a narcissists? Is he a nice enough person?
Asher Miller
Seems pretty nice. Although the whole thing like, “I’ve got people on speed dial.” You know, like important people. Yeah, like important people.
Jason Bradford
His ideas. Is he a complete Wackadoodle?
Asher Miller
Okay, yes.
Rob Dietz
He just went up a few points on the scale.
Asher Miller
Exponential growth right there, buddy.
Jason Bradford
Okay, who wants to go first?
Rob Dietz
I want to go. Hee’s gonna be low for me. I know some of the other characters we’re looking at this season. I think he’s like a 3 for me, or maybe 3.5. Kind of that territory.
Asher Miller
I’m gonna say, as we as the season moves along, I think we might have to think about sort of like how we’re scoring these things. Can I just do a small digression for a second?
Jason Bradford
Wow. Why not?
Asher Miller
In my car, my car has a way of like, giving you an eco-score.
Jason Bradford
Yeah, good.
Rob Dietz
It’s just constantly saying, “You suck. Ride a bike you asshole.”
Asher Miller
Kinda. It’s constantly recalibrating, right? And it’s got three criteria that it uses. Your start, okay? And then how you’re driving. Basically, your cruising. Okay? And then your stop.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. Nice.
Asher Miller
And you could go on a four-hour drive, okay, but it scores those things equally. Which always drives me crazy because –
Rob Dietz
You’re not starting and stopping much on a 4-hour drive.
Asher Miller
Right. So those should not be valued as high.
Rob Dietz
So you’re saying the wackadoodle belief is gonna –
Asher Miller
I’m saying the impact of what their ideas are in the world probably should matter more than how nice or how much of a douchebag they ae.
Jason Bradford
Well, these are on a 0-3 but there is a score is bias. So you can add an extra point. Okay?
Asher Miller
Okay. So I’m gonna go . . . I’m gonna go . . . I’m gonna go . . . 5. I’m gonna add some extra points here because I think his ideas are extremely dangerous and are unfortunately not fringe enough. They’re just not. They have seeped into the minds of actually a number of other Phalse Prophets we’re going to talk about this season.
Jason Bradford
You know, I’m gonna give him a 6 and that’s because when I look at the intentions, you know, it’s about how power hungry and selfish are you. And you know, this is the most power-hungry sort of selfish philosophy I can think of.
Asher Miller
Not him necessarily as an individual, but the idea.
Jason Bradford
No, not as an individual. So I didn’t give him a 3, I gave him a two on that. Because you can see how as an individual he does nice indentions and stuff, and he’s not trying to be the richest person in the world or anything like that.
Asher Miller
That’s so tricky. Some of these guys are actually probably good people.
Rob Dietz
I also don’t know if this is allowed, but I want to give him a score that is my impression based on Asher reading Alana notes. He would get like a 12 on a 10 point scale.
Asher Miller
So, I actually think that the longevity of my life has gone down just reading about this dude because I was having almost an aneurysm.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. You were bleeding out of your ears.
Asher Miller
I was kind of losing it. I will admit.
Jason Bradford
I know. The nanobots can clean that up.
Asher Miller
Thank God.
Melody Allison
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George Costanza
Every decision I’ve ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.
Rob Dietz
So for the do the opposite. I dove into the Singularity University a little bit. I didn’t sign up and take the course.
Asher Miller
I’m glad you came back. You’re in one piece.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, one piece they emphasize four mindsets, okay. And I thought we’d kind of take each one and then look at what is the opposite of what they’re teaching at the Singularity University. So, the first one is the abundance mindset. Then you got exponential mindset, moonshot mindset, and longevity mindset. So in the abundance mindset at the Singularity University, they’re saying, if you got a pie and more and more people are coming over for dinner, it’s not that you have to keep slicing up the pie. No, you just make more pie.
Asher Miller
That sounds like our modern economic theory.
Rob Dietz
Yeah. Well, so that’s a good segue to my view on this. I mean, abundance versus scarcity. That is the realm of economics. And as much as we’ve critiqued mainstream economics, I don’t know any economist who calls for the faux dream of some Law of Accelerating Returns. It’s all about the Law of Diminishing Returns, right? I mean, we all know it. It’s obvious from looking at how the world works that if you have more and more and more and more, it becomes less, less, less valuable. So the key is when you hear this stuff, it’s not that thinking abundantly is bad. It’s just, approach it with skepticism, compared to the reality out there. Why don’t you take us, Jason, to the opposite on exponential mindset?
Jason Bradford
Sure. There’s a lot we could say about this. And there’s some great work that’s been done. The late Al Bartlett, he did hundreds of hundreds of lectures. And he had this, you know, viral video back in the day when that was a new thing. And he’s an old physics professor with the Colorado.
Rob Dietz
Yeah, all about limits to growth type stuff.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. And he basically, he had a quote, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function..” And so it’s interesting, it’s ironic. You know, that’s also what Kurzweil is talking about. But Barley was about how quickly we can run into limits.
Rob Dietz
And how abrupt it is.
Jason Bradford
How abrupt it is. You know, everyone knows, like the Lily Pond thing. And then suddenly, like, on the 29th day of the month, how full is the Lily Pond? And it’s only half full, but it doubles the next day. And so this is the kind of things that people that generally study exponential growth worry about.
Asher Miller
It would have been amazing to put the two of those guys in a room together. I mean what would poor Al Bartlett have done?
Jason Bradford
He would have died a lot younger.
Asher Miller
You believe in exponential growth? I believe in it too!
Jason Bradford
Let’s be friends! Let’s play in a sandbox.
Asher Miller
Wait you think it’s a good thing?
Rob Dietz
Suddenly, Al rips out his bolo tie and starts strangling Kurzweil with it.
Jason Bradford
He bites him.
Rob Dietz
Just elbows him in the face. He has an MMA background. He’s like rear-naked-choking him.
Asher Miller
You’re into superheroes. His arch nemesis would have been Kurzweil.
Rob Dietz
That’s a great book. I read that too.
Jason Bradford
Like Mike Tyson taking on Evander Holyfield here. That was awesome. And then of course, you know, we’ve had Tom Murphy and other physicists on the show. And he discusses exponential growth, but it’s all about, we really need think about constraints and dialing it back, our consumption. So anyway, if you want to study exponential functions, maybe look at some other guys. Also, the mindset of the idea that we have all this technology, or we need all this technology, I want to bring up this guy, Eric Brende who I actually interviewed about his book, “Better off Flipping the Switch on Technology.” A great book.
Rob Dietz
I really enjoyed it.
Jason Bradford
And I interviewed him, gosh, I don’t know maybe back in 2005, or something.
Asher Miller
That was before the nanobots were around.
Jason Bradford
Yeah. So anyway, great perspective on really how removing technology from his life actually led him to have a healthier, happier, more fulfilled life in relationships with other people, in nature, and him farm, etc, etc,
Asher Miller
Which I think it’s to sort of the voluntary simplicity movement. Which I think we could talk about a ,part of this sort of moonshot mindset which is part of the Singularity University, right? A moonshot means going 10 times bigger while the rest of the world is still stuck in the mindset of incremental change. And like, there’s such hubris in that.
Rob Dietz
They have their place. Like every once in a while, maybe you all team up and go for a moonshot. But to think like, all the time, everything is a moonshot. That’s, yeah, a total lack of humility.
Asher Miller
Yeah, there’s just something in that mindset of like, almost going to the moon, that everyone else is sort of stuck on the ground living this life. But back to the Eric Bende thing, it’s like, living more simply, downshifting, rejecting consumerism, rejecting this idea of accumulation of things, that is the opposite. And this idea of this abundance, state of mind too. Where it’s not about the simplicity movement, there’s some great resources, if you look at the simplicity collective, for example. And our dear friend, Vicki Robin, has been part of this movement for a very long time. She wrote a great book called, “Your Money or Your Life. In that movement, they talk about abundance being a state of mind, right? Not a quantity of consumer products, or wealth, or riches, or whatever, right? So, keeping our feet firmly on the ground, not necessarily trying to get to the moon.
Rob Dietz
Isn’t that interesting to compare that notion of abundance to Kurzweil’s notion of abundance. Or the Singularity University notion of it. It’s almost the opposite. It’s like, abundance thinking is to almost have gratitude for what we’ve been given. Not to, “I’m gonna take everything that I can.”
Asher Miller
And I don’t think, Kurzweil doesn’t strike me as the guy who’s like all about the abundance of material wealth, necessarily. But he wants an abundance of what he sees as knowledge. And that puts you sort of on this quest of like, we’ve got these limits, our brains can only do so much. We need artificial intelligence to to surpass our limit of our potential knowledge that we could gain. But what about abundance of wisdom? There probably isn’t a limit in this. I mean, I’ve talked to my boys about this before. Like, because I love one of you does not mean that when our second son was born, I love you less. Do you know what I mean? Like, there is more. There’s more love to give. I’m glad to hear that. I was worried about that. They were glad to hear it too. I had to repeat it a few times. But you get my point, right. It doesn’t mean we need to suddenly fuse with the borg in order to get more knowledge. We can just have an abundance of gratitude.
Rob Dietz
Well, and then the final mindset is the longevity mindset, which at the Singularity University is how long you live is a function of how you think. Aging is a disease, a disease that can be cured. Which I think is something Sylvester Stallone said in the movie, “Cobra.”
Jason Bradford
How do you know this stuff?
Asher Miller
A philosopher, that guy.
Rob Dietz
But anyway, look, we did a whole episode on terror management theory and the psychology of your own death. And look, instead of sitting here thinking about. “I’m aging and that’s a disease and I gotta cure it.” How about enjoy your life, live it to the fullest, and then die peacefully so that others may live? How about that?
Jason Bradford
Not bad.
Asher Miller
And they would say, “You start first, man.”
Melody Allison
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Jason Bradford
And now for a message from our show sponsor, Singularity Syndicate.
Asher Miller
Wait, didn’t they do an add with us before?
Rob Dietz
Yeah, they’re my second favorite behind the Plastic Wrapping Alliance.
Asher Miller
Oh yeah.
Rob Dietz
I love the Singularity Syndicate.
Jason Bradford
Okay, okay, guys. Yeah, they’re back and they’re not that happy you’ll see. Excuse me, I gotta read this verbatim. Look, you got a hold it together. The nanobots are not ready for primetime just yet but geez oh Pete, the Singularity Is Nearer. I swear. So come on, really. We have so much in store. Just quit the bad shit going on and calm the fuck down. Many of us are getting old and the tech is so fucking close. Immortality man. Get with the program. Stay in your seats. And in the blink of a God’s eye, via wormhole faster than light transport, the universe will become a stale vessel for untold quadrillions of computronium versions of nano-cyborgian beings. Don’t fuck it up! Singularity now!