Fraser McGruer: Hello and welcome to the Cognitive
Engineering podcast, brought to you by Aleph Insights and
produced by me, Fraser McGruer. I'm here with Nick Hare, Chris
Wragg and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. On this podcast, we
look at a wide range of topics, and today we are discussing the
dangers of Mirror Life.
Chris, what on earth is mirror life? I have no idea what we're
talking about.
Chris Wragg: Yeah, this isn't some reference to sort of the,
you know, narcissism of modern culture or something. This is
actually a whole sort of discipline of science, which
involves mirror organisms, such as mirror bacteria that are
constructed from mirror images of molecules that are found in
nature. So if you take our DNA and all the DNA you know on
Earth, it is all what is called right handed so it's helix
spirals in a clockwise direction. And and then, you
know, proteins are all that's because righty tighty lefty
loose. Righty tighty lefty loose. Right handed means it's,
if you're going up a staircase, right, a spiral staircase, and
you would use your right hand on the inner Bannister, you're
going in that direction, right? I think, I think the
Peter Coghill: sprinkle a bit more technical jargon. Yeah,
certain molecules have isomorphism, which means that
you can have it looking one way, or you can get a mirror image of
that,
Nick Hare: an enantiomorph, if we're trying to use Yes,
exactly, yeah, an opposite chiral
Peter Coghill: molecules don't so simple sugars are just
symmetrical in whatever way you look at them. Boring, yeah. Then
some molecules, such as the the protein, the molecules of
makeup, proteins and some sugars, some alcohols, etc, are
handed they you can have one version or a mirror image of
that version, and they can naturally, they can actually
occur.
Nick Hare: But isn't it true that orange, the taste of
orange, is actually caused by a molecule that is the mirror
image of the one that causes the taste of
Peter Coghill: lemon, something like that? Yeah. But it turns
out that all life on planet Earth has, for some reason, sort
of sent that gone towards one handedness. What is always right
handed.
Chris Wragg: The implications
Fraser McGruer: of this being, before you go on, if you can
tuck a little bit further on under or will it not go down
further? No, or There you go. I've got so many, okay, I've got
so many questions, but keep going. Chris, yeah.
Chris Wragg: I mean the key, the key thing, really, never mind
why this occurs. The fact is, it's, it's a phenomenon in
nature, and it applies to all organisms. And the key issue is
that human scientists have been experimenting with the creation
of mirror images of naturally occurring molecules, and in some
cases, starting to consider how you might create a mirror image
bacteria right for various issues. Now what this means is,
right. So there are, you know, some benefits around, you know,
treatment of disease, being able to produce chemicals at scale
and so on. But the potential massive downside to this is that
you create bacteria for which our immune system has no ability
to recognise or contain. You know, if you think about like a
phone charger, you know, our our immune cells are a little bit
like, you know, a phone charger that you're trying to plug into
the to the bacteria, and if you've got the wrong phone
charger, you're a bit buggered. And so we're potentially the
issue is we're potentially creating super bugs, I suppose
that that all organisms have no natural defence against and so
the scientific community itself has, has sort of been
increasingly realising this is probably something it shouldn't
do. And so there was a there was a large sort of paper and a
commentary on it in the Journal of Science last year where
hundreds of scientists came together, you know, Nobel Prize
winning scientists, and they said, Unless compelling evidence
emerges that mirror life would not pose extraordinary dangers,
we believe that mirror bacteria and other mirror organisms, even
those with engineered bio containment measures, should not
be created so effectively trying to Create a moratorium on this
element of science, because they feel it could pose an absolutely
catastrophic risk too.
Fraser McGruer: Okay, look, a couple of things. First of all,
we've done a lot of podcasts together, and I'm often felt
confused during these things, right? I have no idea what we're
talking about.
Peter Coghill: Don't think. It matters, good. I don't think it
matters because I think we're going to treat it as the
biochemistry existential risk equivalent of AI takeover. Fine.
Fraser McGruer: Think that's okay, good. And also, lots of
these words I've never heard of before, and sometimes when stuff
gets explained to you, you understand it more, but
sometimes you understand it less. We've made you stupider.
Yeah, who knew, right, that this?
Peter Coghill: Yeah, tell intelligence without words.
Yeah. I can't
Chris Wragg: help but feel this is my problem. But the
fundamental question behind it, and also, why are we discussing
this, right? Okay, so essentially, what we're what
we're looking at, is whether or not our demise as a species is
going to be brought about by stuff we do, or some other, some
other means. Are we our own worst enemy?
Fraser McGruer: Okay, gotcha? Sounds good? Well, that's a
nice, nice, happy topic. Who's right answer? Are we the are we?
What was the what was the what was the question? Again, the
simple question, Are we our own worst enemy? Okay, who's gonna
take this So, Peter, are we? Are you your own worst enemy? Are
you
Peter Coghill: Fraser's worst enemy? Yeah, yes, yeah,
definitely. Fraser never, plenty of those. I'm gonna phrase it as
the the Promethean problem. So, you know, we we there's a
paradox of progress in everything that drives our
progress, in in cultural progress, technology progress,
quality of life. Everything is kind of driven by our own
creativity, our ambition, our curiosity, and our sort of
ability to solve problems. But those things, those drivers
ambition, curiosity, problem solving and creativity are
indifferent, inherently indifferent, to moral progress.
You know, we the moral consequence. You know, the moral
consequence is the thing you bolt on kind of afterwards. We
tend to create first and then understand later. So we, we, we
build the bomb, we build an atomic bomb, and then we go, ah,
actually, this kind of changes the whole power dynamic of the
world. Let's, let's, let's now have some accords and some
treaties to try to put a lid on this and and have a whole dog,
dog more about mutual escort, sure destruction, which means
that we won't, we won't use them. So it's sort of we, we
have a tendency, as as a species, to to to open Pandora's
Box, to bring in another clumsy, there's a lot of classical
illusions clumsily bring in another class
Nick Hare: for me, yes, opening a Pandora's box after the horse
is bowled.
Peter Coghill: So the credit the question narcissist earlier,
yeah, we're back up to date. We are. So the question is, are we
Prometheus, you know, getting fire, or are we the fire? That's
the uncontrolled fire spread from a spark like it. Do we have
it? Do we have, do we have a innovation addiction?
Nick Hare: So, I mean, I think if we I think there are two
really quite distinct categories of thing we need to worry about,
because they're caused by different mechanisms. One is the
deliberate destruction of the human species by decisions we
take, and one is the accidental destruction of the human species
unintended because of the side effects of decisions that we
take, right? So, in other words, you know, are we going to cause
our destruction because we want to? Basically, I would put a
nuclear war in that category. You know, we're kind of actually
making the choice to kill everyone. And I think that's a
very different that's there's a whole different set of
mechanisms there to when we worry about accidentally, you
know, creating mirror life, or letting an AI take over the
world, or whatever. And I think Peter's, you know, question
thoughts about, how have we evolved in such a way to make
this intrinsically problematic? Is a good place to start. So if
we take the problem of us deliberately destroying the
world by sort of just by analogy, if you think about
fights, that is actually quite hard to kill someone. Now, I
know you've killed many a person with your bare hands, trained
trade boxer, Yep, yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's actually, it's
actually quite hard. It is somewhat harder than people.
Yeah, attacks with a gun are 30 times more lethal than attacks
with no gun, right? For example. Okay, now, if we'd have evolved,
if we'd have had guns, if we'd evolved with guns built into our
fists, it's entirely plausible to me that we would have evolved
much less of a tendency to get into fights. We would be much
better at standing down, because the risk would be so much higher
getting involved, right? So clearly our we've evolved have a
level of aggression where it's quite hard to cause that much.
Damage. Now we can't that level of aggression extended to the to
the levels of, you know, at the country level, is, is, therefore
becomes extremely problematic when you've invented, you know,
AI drones and nuclear bombs and, you know, bio weapons. So, so
that, I think is sort of thinking about it from an
evolutionary point of view, that what Peter is talking about on
the kind of deliberate destruction side, you know, is
that we have an urge to destroy things where our which is way
out of line with our capacity to actually destroy things, like
our urge to destroy things. It's almost like our technology for
destruction is catching up with our urge, and I, and I sort of
think, well, you know, if there was, if everyone had access,
well, okay, so why haven't we destroyed the world? You might
say, Well, why are we, why are we all still? Why is the murder
rate going down? Why is there less war? Which is a good
question. But if, if I said, you know, well, actually, we're
gonna give everyone in the world a button, and if anyone presses
it, everyone dies, right? You know perfectly well, some, some
idiot, would press that button, right? So it sort of feels to me
like, well, we know that someone out there would do it if they
could, just for long, right? So feel so actually, there really
is. It's not like, well, we can rest assured that this won't
happen. All we're saying is, well, it's just at the moment
sufficiently hard for someone to do it. And if it gets to some
level of where a man in a shed can create a global killing
thing and decide to just do it, I think we can all assume
someone would right. So that's the problem, I think, is that,
you know, there is nothing in us that stops it from happening. Is
what I'm saying. We get to the correct level of destructiveness
if it becomes cheap enough to destroy the world, some wanker
is going to do it well.
Chris Wragg: And if you, if you take the scale down in terms of
scale of lethality, if you, if you look at it's a boring topic,
but it's relevant here the idea of gun control that you know, if
you give enough guns to people, some of them are going to go
berserk and go and shoot lots of people. Now, if you scale that
up to, you know, large scale lethality. If everybody had,
like, you say, a nuclear bomb, then we already know the, you
know, going, going into a school and shooting lots of people is
already a pretty, pretty high threshold for for sort of
destructive, destructiveness.
Nick Hare: Or you've got people like, you know, Andreas Lubitz,
who was that German wings pilot who crashed the plane exactly
when you think, well, if he'd have been able to crash a plane
with a million people on it, probably wouldn't have changed
his if anything, he might have been more up, you know. So,
yeah, yeah,
Peter Coghill: I think, I think it doesn't really hinge on it
being deliberate destruction, though. I think it's, I think
that I think there may be a tendency, even though, you know,
accidental disruption. So when we were, when we built the
atomic bomb and then the hydrogen bomb, we we, we weren't
deliberately setting out to try to put ourselves in a position
that we could destroy the world. They were, they were sort of
tactically, at the time, rational things to do. It's
like, this is, this is a world, and at that time, this is a war
ending weapon. So we need to get that, and that will cause Japan
to surrender. Then it became, because the technology then
existed, it became a sort of race to produce more and more
and more than we and they are, over a decade or so, we got to
the point where actually this was a, this was a world ending
weapon. But before that point, it was a, sort of, it was a
rational thing to do.
Nick Hare: Yeah, I'm not saying that's partly the problem. Yeah,
you know is that it gets not, there's not, it's not, in a
sense, it is rational because we do want to kill people. We want
to have the technology to kill people, so it makes sense to
invent it. What I'm saying is that the methods you would use
to stop it happening, the regime that you would have to impose to
stop it from happening, just looks very different if you're
worrying about a deliberate choice to kill people versus
accidentally killing everyone in the world. They're different
kinds of mechanisms. And I think, you know, you can deter
people in a different way, right? You need to impose
different mechanisms, I think, on but, but I'm just saying are
one, one key mechanism of deliberately destroying the
world is that, what we can't deny is we definitely, some
people do want
Peter Coghill: to do that. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. Yeah.
Fraser McGruer: I think you might be getting close to what I
want to ask, right? Which is, okay, do we contain the seeds of
our own destruction? Right? More or less, that's the question we
want to ask, right? And I can see that it's interesting. But
why are we discussing this? What's the value? What's the
what's Well,
Nick Hare: what do we do about it? Right? Because, because the
problem is that. That destructive technology is going
to get worse, and I think on a large scale, obviously, well,
nuclear weapons technology haven't, hasn't really. It's
certainly not become super cheap. And in fact, you know,
you look at the data, and there's fewer nuclear weapons
around now than there were, you know, 30 years ago, killing
people has become easier. We've got murder drones, and yet
murder rates and rates of deaths in war have fallen right, see?
So what are we getting right? Is the is the question, because we
want to be doing more of that like and I think what we haven't
we've only really just started seeing what the impact of, say,
drones are, but actually being able to kill a million people
with drones might turn out to be much easier and cheaper than
killing a million people with a nuclear bomb, and more efficient
and more efficient. And in fact, you can, just then you can, you
get the whole city, whereas
Fraser McGruer: it could be morally superior. Well,
Nick Hare: we're not even worrying about that. The point
is, you know, it's a new it's the latest thing to have to
worry about, what do we do? What did we get right with nuclear
weapons or with any other technology, which means that we,
you know, actually all of the trends in violence are positive,
like despite the fact that destruction is easier and
cheaper than it was in the past. What have we got right that
makes it that's that has been. Is that a question
Fraser McGruer: you want to answer right now? Yeah.
Nick Hare: Well, yeah. Why not? Are you proposing this as a
question? Well, I'm just at what we I think that's why you said,
Why are we asking the question? And the answer is, because
we've, I don't know about you phrase, but I don't want
everyone in the world to be killed. So the question is, what
should we do about
Peter Coghill: it? Just select people, yeah,
Fraser McGruer: yeah, okay, where do we go with this? Who's
next?
Peter Coghill: I mean, I before we do that. I mean, I thought
occurred to me, I came to sort of extend this a little bit
further, that perhaps our innate capacity and our innate drive to
produce ever more dangerous technologies is actually a
potential solution to the Fermi Paradox. I think maybe that.
Maybe it's the case that any sufficiently complex
intelligence that evolves must necessarily have curiosity, risk
taking and competitiveness that causes it to be dangerous and
cause it to eventually, there's a sort of an technological
determinism means that you eventually strike upon atomic
weapons and biochemistry, bio weapons and things, and that
will lead event, on average, will lead, lead to extinction Of
the species. Yeah. So I think there's
Nick Hare: a tragedy of the commons kind of argument that,
yeah, we just, you know, the possibility of cooperation is
just too hard and unsustainable, and affection is always going to
be better. And hey, Preston's
Peter Coghill: dilemma, because, yeah, that's but it's hard for
the innate kind, the kind of the kind of intelligent intelligence
that will win out in a bio, sort of crude biological evolutionary
world, if you could prod it differently, and you could have
more peaceful beings because they had guns on their arms,
then maybe they find cooperation and coordination much easier,
but it's just that in the biological world, because of the
limited amount of damage you can do person on person, that just
doesn't scale very well as you get more and more complex.
Nick Hare: Yeah, and there's also the problem that humans are
quite like we have a small number of children, which
doesn't sound like terribly like relevant, but actually it means
that we're not we are incentivized to cooperate
intrinsically with quite a small number of people. Yeah, so we're
only really related to a very small number of people, and
hence we only really care about and do things altruistically for
a small number of people, because, you know, we have got a
lot of investment in our own offspring. Yeah, whereas, if you
take bees, they've all got one mum, all bees have got one mum,
and they're all sisters, except for the drones, who, it doesn't
matter. They just their only job is to mate with the queen and
then die, right? So a whole beehive can all work together
individually, because they're all essentially the same.
They're all invested in the same set of genes. So option number
one is we just have one we like Queen Camilla, or whatever she
is, like a random having all the children. And, you know, we
genetically engineer things so that we're all just, you know,
we're basically like bees. You know. Well, I mean, you know.
But if, if we have enough bio technology to engineer, you
know, to engineer bio weapons, yeah, I mean, I think we could
re engineer human.
Peter Coghill: I mean, I think, I think there are ways doing it
without, directly bio without turning into. Please. Yeah, and
I think, I think the counter argument to the the fact that
intelligence is is the problem, but intelligence could also be
the antidote to the problem, because we are capable of moral
reasoning and an empathy and things we are capable of it. So
maybe what we need to do is train ourselves to be better at
doing those things. So and so we know. So we know we can move
away from the constraints of the biological intelligence we have.
Maybe we, you know, maybe when we start uploading our brains to
computers, or maybe just drilling hard and home, the
moral reasoning is a thing you must do from an earlier age. You
know, we were then capable of sort of, sort of meta
revolution, that we're then able to drive our evolution in a
cognitive space, rather than in a you're
Nick Hare: saying, why the solution is, why can't we all
just get along? Why Can't We? Well, actually, I mean, the
thing is that, Stephen, I mean, Steven Pinker's argument in the
better angels of our nature is that, you know, because the fact
that the trends in violence and all sorts of other indicators
are all what we would regard as positive, suggests that our kind
of political and social technology is outpacing our
destructive technology development. And his his view is
that, you know, our ability to have a say, a strong state, to
punish people, to reliably detect and punish wrongdoers,
has has actually outpaced, you know, the ability of those
wrongdoers to cause death and mayhem. And I find that quite
plausible. And in fact, you know, if you think about, well,
what technology does that rely on? It relies on a certain
amount of ability to, you know, centralise power, but also to be
able to detect things, to be able to identify that this
person did that wrong thing, or that they're going to, you know,
that we kind of detect that someone's acquired the
precursors to a bio weapon
Peter Coghill: we've seen We've got a like our social
technologies, our institutions and things we have now are way
more complicated and way more capable than our little You
know, when we were people living on the planes, travelling around
for scraps and bonking the heads of each other with mallets and
things, we didn't need anything like that. It's amazing that we
have got big state institutions and international treaties and
things.
Chris Wragg: Yeah, I just, I just worry that the this idea
that the the instinct to be peaceable and survive alongside
one another, is going quicker than our ability to invent
things to kill one another, and our drive to kill each other At
some point, like with, for example, mutually assured
destruction, you only get one go, right? So, so, like guns
scale, you know? And it's like, okay, well, back in the day, we
used to have lots of fist fights. Now we have far fewer
gun fights, right? That works. But when you get to the stage of
cataclysmic risk. You only, you only need to get it. What wrong?
Once, right? So how, how can you outpace that? You can't.
Nick Hare: But then, if you look at what we actually did, it was
things like, you know, you'd make these commitments, but then
they'd be monitored. You know that you would actually count is
this person you know, either have they decommissioned these
weapons, and then you know that you're, you're monitoring
where's the nuclear material, and there's kind of
sophisticated global system of trying to make sure people
aren't doing that. And you could imagine doing a similar thing
for, you know, for kind of AI drones, you could say, well, you
know, we're gonna have a limit on the number of of drones that
each country is allowed to have. And it feels a long way away
that we could imagine that happening now, but I think all
it would take is the equivalent of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki
committed by drones to make people go or we should do
something right.
Peter Coghill: My concern with the the social technologies
we've got for controlling it is they feel fragile. They feel
much more fragile than our drive to find ever more unpleasant
ways to kill each other.
Fraser McGruer: Go and see what you're going to say. Well, I was
Chris Wragg: just going to say, thus far we've only, we've only
touched on deliberate, yeah. Well, I was all. I was just
going to bridge into that by saying, well, well, I I'm not
quite, I'm not so sure it's totally binary, like that, that
there are things we do to kill one another, and there are
things we do by accident. I sort of feel like, although nuclear
bombs, obviously, you know, have a purpose, and guns have a
purpose, something like a knife is multi purpose. And you know,
if I throw a knife at you in order to wound you, but it hits
you in the heart and I kill you. I go, Oh, dear, you know, oops.
That was a that was manslaughter, not murder or
something. So I'm not quite so sure that we've got this really
clear distinction. So AI being an example, you might generate
AI and use it in a variety of sort. Circumstances. Some of
those might be lethal. Some of those might not be lethal. Some
of them might be sort of intended to be, like policing
robots or something that suddenly become, you know, fully
lethal killing machines. That it's isn't the distinction
between what we accidentally do to kill one another and what we
deliberately neglect, I suppose, yeah, is not quite so clear cut,
yeah, although, I mean, I think there's a different set of
things you would want to do. Let's imagine that we could
solve we were absolutely guaranteed that nobody would
want to destroy the world. So we'll put that on a shelf and
pretend that we've solved the problem of people wanting to
destroy the world. Well, then we have the next category of thing
to worry about, which is, what about accidentally doing it?
Yeah. How do we stop that?
Fraser McGruer: Okay, so that's we're going to move on to next,
right? Am I right? Like, how do we stop this stuff accidentally
happening?
Peter Coghill: Yeah, before we how do we foresee consequences
that we didn't foresee, which kind
Fraser McGruer: of leads, which sort of connects to something
I've been thinking about and I've not been able to stop
thinking about the last 10 minutes, right? Which I can't
get off the bees, right? Bees, yeah. And the reason why is,
let's say they've got this system which works really well,
and it means they don't do sort of mad things like kill them,
keep sharks. They're all related, but I feel really bad
for them, because they live on a planet with a bunch of people
who, who they're going to get killed because of us, right? And
it's something outside of their control, please? Yeah, the bees
have figured it all out, but then these sort of highly
evolved monkeys that have come along and then, and then we, we
destroy the plant, we destroy the bees along with us. And I
just feel bad because, you know, the bees have figured it out,
and, you know, they get sort of done in.
Peter Coghill: There's a great deal more moral weight than just
our own species. We have a sort of moral responsibility for the
rest of the world, and not only the rest of the world, but all
the potential species that might come about after we've gone,
yeah. So we can't, we mustn't snuff out life completely. We
mustn't, yes, no,
Unknown: fish, fish, yeah, yes. And there are all the other
Peter Coghill: we have to respect our piece to peace
accord with the fish that we've settled upon podcast.
Fraser McGruer: And we did do that, yeah, but it also, I'm
sure, that
Nick Hare: this fragile cease fire, Twix Twixt, land and sea
Exactly, exactly.
Fraser McGruer: And I'm sure in our sort of discussions, you
know, logically, external for this just fits into really, you
know, stuff, external forces over which have no control.
That's what we are to the bees, right? Anyway, I've diverted us.
Nick, oh no, so was it you? Peter, who was going to come in
Peter Coghill: with some Yeah. So I think it boils down to
like, it's unforced. It's unforeseen, so unforeseen
consequences that we want to be able to foresee, isn't it? So
when we create a new technology, everything's, oh, great,
brilliant. We've got, we've got, we've got nuclear power.
Brilliant, this is we're getting into unknown, unknowns. This is
what we're talking about. This sort of is a bit, yeah, gone.
But it's like we go because we make a new technology, but it's
only, Only later did, but does it become apparent, perhaps,
through, you know, nuclear weapons, they were okay, not
great things, but they were okay, if, as long as they were
only a very small number in the world, they were quite useful as
a tactical weapon of war. But when you get several, when you
get so many that you can destroy everything on the earth several
times over, and not only that, but extinguish any hope of life
regaining a foothold. That the case is the same for AI, mirror
life and various other existential risks, that that's
that that's that's a problem. But we didn't at the time
foresee that that was a problem. It's only when we started to
scale up did people go Hold on this situation now means that
this could occur.
Nick Hare: Yeah, and I think this is by analogy with, you
know, our aggression levels being misaligned to our
technology, our capability to destroy things. I think our
levels of scare, of fear. What we're scared of is also, you
know, misaligned to how scary things actually are. You know,
because we've really only evolved to be scared of snakes
and things. Yeah, we haven't really, yeah, we haven't really,
we haven't really evolved the means the correct level of sort
of scaredness of things like, you know, cars than we are, are
much less scared of snakes.
Chris Wragg: Yeah, although they do kill up to 75,000 people per
Nick Hare: year, snakes still not as many as hippos or as
cars, as many as cars, more than hippos. Wow. Anyway, seems like
we should all be really scared of snakes all of a sudden, but,
but the point is that, you know, and particularly when it comes
to these sort of abstract risks, like, you know, the kind of AI
takeover problem, which you have to explain to someone. You've
got to sit down and tell them a story about how this could
happen. And then at the end, they'll go, yeah, that's not
gonna happen. Come on, you know? And I think at least nuclear
bombs come free with an enormous, terrifying fireball.
But AI takeover doesn't really look like anything scary until
it's way too late. And so, you know, it is those kinds of
risks. And same with mirror life. It's like, well, nothing
looks that scary to us. It's a bacterium. We're not
intrinsically scared. I mean, nuclear weapons are
intrinsically scary, but a lot of these things that could just
kill us all just they're picture in a magazine, aren't they?
Chris Wragg: Yeah. I mean, I think it's quite interesting the
extent to which awareness in the public consciousness is a is a
deterrent to us developing technologies. So, so you know,
if you, if you talk to most people about the threat of AI,
they think of Skynet, right and terminators to get scary robots,
right? Exactly, but, but, or how right, you know, but, but
psychotic robots. Psychotic robots. But the the role of
science fiction, dystopian post apocalyptic fiction is to, is to
basically tell that story in a way that sticks in in people's
minds. If, and if you look at there, I would say there is a
large portion of popular resistance to the development of
AI that is based on this idea of killer weapon systems and, you
know, Robocop and all that kind of stuff. But if you always so
mirror life, like very few, it's not in anybody's public
consciousness, right? Nobody's written a novel about it. Hasn't
been a blockbuster film about it. But if you look at something
like cloning, human cloning, and the the way, quite quickly,
people were weirded out and thought, you know, that should
be a sight, Whoa, don't. Don't go there. That's there's
something partly, it's in the public consciousness. Partly,
it's like, you say, inherently creepy. Creepy, right, exactly.
Fraser McGruer: And pregnancy, too. It feels like a couple of
things I want to say we need to draw to a conclusion soon, but
it feels like we're talking about something we've talked
about before, which is perception of risk, maybe, which
is, you know, I'm probably more scared of sharks and guns. Four
people a year, really killed by sharks, exactly. That's
terrifying, right? Yeah, and I should probably be more scared
of of of cheeseburgers, right? That's actually more people die
of choking on a cheeseburger. Well, I hadn't even thought of
cheese, but I was just thinking
Chris Wragg: of sharks die from choking on humans.
Fraser McGruer: Yeah, and no one talks about that. I'm glad you
brought that up. But the second thing, it's all, it's all very
human centric and Earth centric, you know, because us worrying
about, you know, the destruction of our planet, Earth and so on.
But the universe doesn't, kind of doesn't really care, right?
And it's, I don't know, it just occurs to me, you know, the
Nick Hare: only the kind of nihilist who pressed the red
button, yeah, yeah, universe out. There's probably some other
aliens. They'll be all
Fraser McGruer: right, yeah. Now, to be fair, I get it. It's
what we've got. All we've got is ourselves, our lives, our
planet, etc. But, you know, it's sort of, ultimately, it's true,
though, isn't it? Depressingly, it kind of doesn't really
matter. But then, yes, well, if that doesn't matter, then
nothing does. Exactly, that's why I'm an honest why I'm
honest. So So look, we do need to finish off. So I go to Peter
first, and then, you know, we need to wrap this up.
Peter Coghill: Yeah, so just picking up on Chris's point that
considering exercise at risk is not in the public sort of
discourse. I don't think it's nearly enough. It needs to be
much more in the public discourse. The fact Fraser
hadn't heard of mirror life is damning indictment of Fraser
sort of awareness of important, important things in the world.
Nick Hare: So the fact, luckily, he's got absolutely no power to
do
Fraser McGruer: anything if a
Unknown: mirror Fraser was
Peter Coghill: no one person does, but as your population
gets more aware of this as a problem, then things start to
change. So like the the fact that everyone now worries about
recycling and global warming is starting to shift the perception
and the and the expectation on our political leaders. So the
fact that it's an existential risk. Basically means, if it
come, if it happens, the cost is infinite. The cost of that
catastrophe is infinite, which means, if the probability is at
all, non zero, which is because it could happen, then it must,
then it should, dominate all other discussions,
Unknown: Pascal's Wager
Peter Coghill: style, yeah, so it's like the fam, whereas now,
yeah, we still, we still worry about who's going to be the next
Nick Hare: trivial, actually infinite, because we're not
going to devote an infinite amount of resources to stopping
it. So, you know, it has to be bounded. The existence of life
still has. A bounded value. We're not really agreed on what
that is. Well, nothing, according to Fraser, yeah, zero,
according to him, but and, but somewhere between zero and
infinity. So we pinned it down quite nicely. Yeah?
Fraser McGruer: Okay, that feels like a very satisfying, nice
conclusion there. Yeah, nailed it. Okay, look, I got a
question, yeah, let's do it from fiction. Probably doesn't have
to be necessarily favourite existential risk, or, I suppose,
favourite apocalypse.
Chris Wragg: Yeah, I guess I'll go with Douglas Adams and the
idea that we're a sort of traffic, or rather, we're
roadworks being being performed to clear, clear a path through
the through the universe?
Fraser McGruer: Yes, so you're picking up on my that's like, on
the sort of spectrum of where I am,
Chris Wragg: I like, I like the idea that we sit here and we
consider all of these serious type risks, and that in the end,
we might be wiped out by something very trivial and
amusing.
Fraser McGruer: Maybe it's embarrassing. Maybe, yeah, like
road works through our part of the solar system, galaxy, or
someone forgetting not firing all the telephone cleaners or
something like that, right? Good one.
Peter Coghill: Chris, I just realised how, how normally try
to keep it light at the end. This is not the likeness of
Fraser McGruer: question, be fair. It's a pretty heavy
subject to start with, but yeah,
Peter Coghill: my favourite? Well, my not my favourite, not
the one I worry the most about, either one that occupies the
most time in my head, but the one I kind of think is
potentially quite lols. Is the way if humanity were to evolve
into a less brainy, more fertile version of ourselves, kind of
imagine the
Unknown: Idiocracy, yeah.
Peter Coghill: Movie, yeah. And, or the or there is kind of like,
wall e the movie. The Wall e the movie where everything's every
ever we've advanced our technologies, where all of our
requirements are kind of taken care of automatically for us,
which means we can just sit around watching, yeah,
Nick Hare: that's like the kind of Brave New World type of
dystopia where everyone's actually really happy, but it's
dystopian,
Peter Coghill: sometimes called a dysgenic situation. But yeah,
we're but, and maybe AI will will facilitate Yeah, for us, we
can just sit around eating and
Chris Wragg: fucking Yeah. So it doesn't, it doesn't, doesn't
kill us by actually killing us. It just makes us Yeah,
Peter Coghill: it puts us in a little box, makes us dumb.
Fraser McGruer: Sounds, all right, yeah, Nick,
Nick Hare: I think my fact, because this actually mirror
life, made me think of this. I think it's really imaginative.
Is ice nine, which I think is Ray. Is it Ray Bradbury, or, I
can't remember if it's him or but it's a story about a new
type of water molecule that is kind of ice at kind of room
temperature. Basically, it's a Okay, and so. So all of the
water in the entire world just freezes, because this one
molecule kind of ends up converting all the other water
into itself. So, yeah, ice nine gradually. So obviously all the
water in your body freezes, everything the earth just turns
into a great big, you know, Ice Cube made of ice nine. I think
it's very cool idea, but it's not unlike the mirror life
thing.
Peter Coghill: There is a, there is a version of that. There's a
good, great cooker video that that's actually physically
plausible.
Unknown: Oh, okay, we should start worrying about
Peter Coghill: matter, which is something to do with the
configuration of the subatomic particles inside the quarks,
which mean you can get a special kind of quark, or too many of
the special kind of quarks together. And if the problem
with that is that any other protons and neutrons that that
that proton, that weird proton, interacts with, get converted to
the same sort
Nick Hare: so we've got to keep an eye on these quarks to stop
them all getting together in the same
Peter Coghill: try and dig it out for the show notes. Yeah,
worth of view. But, yeah, there's a sort of version of
that. So it's like, it becomes, like the Midas touch, that
anything a particle of that touches, turns into more of
that.
Nick Hare: Okay, yeah, well, it's like those prions. They're
another thing that calls kreutzfeldt Jakob disease, you
know, Mad Cow Disease. Okay? They're basically a, I think
they either a mirror image or just a particular kind of
protein or something that that your body can ingest but can't
then process or deal with, yeah? But they also, they're kind of
self replicating, which is why they're so scary. If they get
into the food chain, then they start spreading everywhere,
which is why you shouldn't do that.
Fraser McGruer: That's why they're not a good thing. Yeah,
prawns are bad. Yeah. So I have to say, I mean, I don't really
have one beyond what we've talked about. But I don't like
the sound of everything turning to ice. I like the sound of
that. I have to say, I did quite like the sound of Peter's one,
like just the eating and being caught in a box. Yeah? Patient,
yeah, that sounded All right. So I'll go with that one. Pretty
much your life at the moment. Well, that's why I try. Is what
I aim for. Yeah? Okay, so we're. Stop there. You've been
listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast, brought to
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If you haven't already, please like and subscribe. We try to
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