Internet DNA Podcast

First of all lets deduce what a soul is, is consciousness, is it being able to reflect, or being aware that we are aware? or something much more godly altogether, Are slugs the most intelligent creatures in the world? and if so how would we know, quantumly speaking. Would data help us to make good decisions, and how do we feel about decisions not being our own? and finally when is the right time for robots to gain that consciousness, probably before they get their hands on an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

[inaudible] DNA, and meantime, this white guy to discuss if God created robots. Nope.

It's called crazy robots, but what if God created robots?

What if God created robots? Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Why should we start with this? Do you think he would have created robots? Do you think he will, I think is the question.

Well, I think first of all, let's define gold. Yeah, so if you subscribe to the view that we are effectively a simulation running inside the massive quantum computer. So if you imagine that's the truth, which philosophically is something that you could hold as a view, then God becomes whatever the computer is that's running the simulation and I think it'll be,

well, whoever or whatever that created the computer simulation right

then I think that they won't create them because it's a simulation. What you're trying to do is work something out rather than say Lego, but in effect, by starting the simulation, you will eventually create robots. Certainly in this version of the simulation because we've already creating them.

Well, you could look at it like this if God created humans, which is another debatable point. I think there's a some sense I've had people that believe this anyway. If God created humans and humans are creating robots, would we therefore become the gods of the robots?

Yeah. Oh we can talk. And that round would say if man created God as a way of explaining the universe, does that necessarily mean because man also invents robots that God kind of or invents robots. I don't think God is inventing robots. However,

I mean if he did, how would he create them?

Right? He's ineffable isn't he? So would be difficult to know. But you could argue that we are playing God. So if you are saying are we playing God, I think that is our ultimate it intention as a species. No, as a person or an individual. But I think as a species to reign supreme throughout the university, probably our earliest DNA encoding. So I think that that's probably true. And I think we will develop robots and we are developing robots. Not so much the sort of danger will Robinson but drones and and all sorts of different machinery. We, one could argue where a car is a robot in a certain way. Certainly now we're getting autonomous cars, that that is a form of robots. So transportation, robots, I don't know why God would invent robots unless he was particularly interested in them.

Okay, so let's bring in, so god breathed life into humans and people talk about it.

Well, let's start with God. Breathe life. Let's not go into humans.

Okay? God breathes life and people talk about their soul or their spirit, which often goes back to God when they're done that maybe comes back again later or something else maybe is robe up. And we also are beginning to realize that we can build off physical bodies and we can create electronic brains. Yes, but what about this? So what about this spirit? Where does that come from and do you think that the robots will get it and how will they gets it?

Uh Huh. So what I love about you is that you use words that if you were to say consciousness, then I think you'd say, well how the robots get consciousness. Well, I guess that they develop a neural net. That's would fast and fast enough for them to actually start to understand emotion and be reflective to machine learning. And then it's actually the idea of a soul is maybe a very human thing, which is, it's our way of not being quite so final with the fact that we live, we die then.

So you said, oh conscious. It's really just us reflecting us being able to reflect.

Yeah, I absolutely, Yes. So if you couldn't reflect well, but if, okay, so let's work it backwards, which is if you couldn't reflect, then you live utterly in the moment. Like a dog perhaps. So you are hungry, you want to eat, you see a ball, you want to chase it, but you don't think maybe I don't want to chase balls anymore. Maybe I would like to go and figure out some dog based problem for the rest of to help. Yeah. But they don't think like that because they don't have a reflective mind. So I think, yeah, they're conscious, but do they have a soul? But I don't think they're conscious, but they're not conscious that they're conscious. If they're not aware that they're aware. That's a really important thing to understand about.

So that's why we come back to robots. It's about are they aware that they're aware?

Yeah. So if you're going to contend that that God breathed life into humans, which suggests that there's no evolution, he just makes them go that way. Then he has built roads, we are robots, we are electrical machines with the consciousness, which is what we're trying to take me. We're just some form of, but yeah, but largely electrical, you know, all our signups and all our nerves, everything is fired. Viral, electrical impulse. So that's generated by chemical reactions. We are electrical computers in one way or another. And all life is not just humans, but we are lucky enough to have reflective mind and a consciousness that allows us to, and we're not alone on the planet with that. I think all primates have that ability. And I think we can also argue that, is it dolphins, they also have that kind of mind.

Someone said the other day, something like slugs or snails or something really random. We're actually very, very intelligent and I can't remember what it was. It probably wasn't a slug, but there was something that was as intelligent as a dolphin and you would never have known.

It begs the question, how do you know, let's imagine slog had the mind of Stephen Hawkins. How would you ever find that out from a slug? I mean it's like could possibly be computing the probability of black holes in the universe, but how does it out for any of that? Or how does it even understand?

Yeah, I don't think it's a slug. Well I can't remember what I was asleep to, but there was definitely something that was really intelligent. I mean I think

life is kind of a really interesting thing because it's a bit like the Big Bang, isn't it? Which is you can understand everything from the moment of life, but it's difficult to understand the transition from no life to life the same way as we can understand the big bang and everything that happened after. It was quite awkward. Just sort of understand what might have turn nothing into something.

Yes. What was there before when it was nothing? Well nothing, but I never was. Okay, so what? What is nothing? How does nothing become something? It's quite a, I'm sure if you're a scientist, I'm sure the slugs would know. Yeah, the slugs would definitely know, but otherwise maybe they were there halfly I hope not. It was very hard for a slug. I think [inaudible] clothes,

maybe slugs do. No, but other than slugs, if you subscribe to the view that God is God of the gaps. I've actually been reading a lot of Norse mythology and you realize how gods are used to explain things that are literally not knowable at that time. Why is the sun, why do we have the moon and they use stories to explain it. I think that's where science changes that dialogue and it stops being about a nice story that covers up the fact we don't know anything until actually an idea of we should really find out about whether what we know is true. So again, let's get back to robots. We aren't robots.

Yeah, that's quite interesting. So let's take that on a different trajectory. I believe if we're talking about belief of God, that in some cases religion, if you go quite far back, your life was supposedly mapped out for you because God had planned it and he gave you bad things and good things to teach you and take you to where he needs to do. So it's whether you believe in fate or not. Now data is the new currency or it's the new raw material and using that data as the machines get smarter to help us make decisions because the data and the machines that translate it will start to know as best that we know ourselves. Therefore it makes sense that we could ask whatever device we have, wherever it is, whether it's inside our body or outside our body, what we should do when we come to a certain decision, right?

Not even ask it, just be beholden to it.

Well that's even more scary. That's very much like having your life mapped out for you.

So if you are going to accept the point that we are already robots, which I'm not sure you fully accepted, but if you were going to accept that and that you're driven by prime directives, which are basically rules set by your organic self, usually based around survival and procreation and that sort of thing that you would find. And then one of the things I think people are finding in data is that you find that people are, are not so different that you're really very, very, very, very, very obvious. Like you might think you're a real hipster really. It's really, really obvious what to do. Yeah, but you're not really a hipster that what you are is conforming to the programming that you've been set down with right from the beginning. This is when people talk about marketing, which is about if you could isolate the type of person that they are, then you can send them all million of them, the same message because effectively they all react in the same way to the same messaging. And we've talked about this in politics and we've talked about this in marketing and we've talked

persuasion. If I say, is technology going to start influencing our decision making? You're going to say it already does. And actually our own programmed self influence, our decision making before that anyway. So it's nothing new. I'm saying it probably seems quite new to some people because I would suggest that most people think they make decisions of their own free will. And I might also suggest that most people find decisions really hard. So on the one side it's good that you get inflammation to help you make that decision or the other side it's bad because you're not making their own decision.

Okay. So if you go from the standpoint you're not making your own decision. Yeah, you're not so,

oh no, I'm going to the standpoint that I am making my own decisions.

Yeah. Right. Well wrong. So I believe you make small decisions like what brand of coffee do you want? Or what kind of car do you like? Or you make those kind of micro decisions. Absolutely. You have that free will. And I think it's important because that's what creates the variation. You know? If you look at evolution, it's important that people mutate because that's actually how it works. It's these tiny little mutations, these tiny little decisions that we make or that are slightly different that actually when you aggregate them over time, they lead in a direction, but are you making macro decisions? I don't think you are. I don't think anyone makes macro decisions really.

What do you mean by macro decisions?

Decisions that affect the fate of the world or the fate of humankind or a society? I think very, very few people and I would argue, you probably know people. I think there are people that are recognized as having done it, but they stand on the shoulders of giants as in actually that was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of little people's thinking and decision making that led to that person going, oh, actually what about that? And that ties all that stuff together. If you were to look at, let's say ENM bangs is culture where no one makes the computers, make all the decisions about society entirely and you just get to live whatever pointless life you want to.

But let's say I have the future 10 years time, I have an internal Alexa, she's planted in my brain somewhere and I'm trying to decide by this Mary, this person or that person. Yeah. And she would say well based on who you are and what your future might look like and the sort of things you like and the sort of things that make you happy be 80% that you should marry this person and 20% Ishmael, that person. So you're given a sort of based on you, this is the options and

here's the safe option, here's the interesting option

and so surely that is possible. Or which jobs should I take? And then based on who you are and this will make you happy, this will make you more money.

Okay. That word and that you find that any different from, so you were thinking of it in there. Very, it's implanted in my brain, which is one way. I mean it could even be my phone. I could just ask my side. Oh, your phone. Oh, it's just all directed centrally. As in the greater good computer basically says Abby for the greater good. This is what I've decided for you. So it's not even for me, it's for the greater good, the greater good in the greater scheme of all things. The best decision you could make as the following, but that might not make me happy. Maybe your happiness, there's not necessarily the end goal.

Good. So at this point the computers are becoming God.

Okay. So now we're talking to do Gulf make robots. Yeah, they do. Outside of you and me.

And

we're suggesting that perhaps robots made God. Yeah. Well kind of a symbiosis, aren't they? Because if you're saying yes, the only way to optimize everybody's life is to centrally direct it through data and make the best decisions for it.

So what you're saying is my happy little, I am not ready to have to make my daily decisions because I'm going to get really informed choices. Then goes a step further to those decisions are made for the greater good of the population, which may not make me happy or anything. Do you think that would start to make everybody sad or do you think it would start to make everything

content you wouldn't know cause your little Alexa in your brain told you that that was the right way to marry. Why would you say okay, but your little Alexa that told you to marry the guy we were talking about five minutes ago, you were quite happy to go marry the dude. Yeah. So you don't need to know that it's centrally directed. Do you all you need to know is that your little Alexa Role? Best friend? Yeah. Told you it was slightly more ominous than that. Well it doesn't have to be ominous. I mean it can be ominous and I think history suggests that probably could be ominous, but it could also be very non anonymous. It could be very, the sort of wonderful life that we all want to live or some of us want to live,

so this is coming back to the utopia that actually becomes rather dull.

Well, but this is the thing that I find really interesting about people that read Saifai is that you can, you can either have this horrible dystopia in which no good happens or you can have this really dull utopia in which nothing exciting happens. Really where we find ourselves as the movie run down the middle of that where there are dystopias and utopia's within a generally functional society. I don't think you actually flip from one to the other. I think that some people in the society see it as a utopia. Some people in the society see it as a dystopia because that's probably the life they live within that society, but I think this idea that it'll have to be either a blend, well, you know me, I don't like polemic, so I don't believe that. Then it goes fully one way or the other for any length of time. You might get periods where it's terribly bleak and unpleasant for almost everyone and you may get periods where it's rather nice for almost everyone, but horrible for some people, but genuinely if we look at the lost, I don't know that the history of humankind generally the consensus is that we need to make sure that the middle people in that bell curve or at least content with their life. I think happiness is kind of a weird construct of leisure. Anyway,

that's a whole nother series, but just to get about Scifi talking, so I find Neil Stevens got a new book out. Go get it. Very exciting. Full or dodge inhale.

I'm reading at the moment the Commonwealth Saga by Peter F. Hamilton,

so I'm going to go back to God and Israeli books as humans or a sheet it's there. Bring it back to Frankenstein. I'm actually not going back as far as God or even as far as Frankenstein. Let's say I decided a decision making app was actually going to be the new Facebook with all this data. Surely it would be very easy to make. How would I go about making a decision making app? Someone,

oh, okay, so now you're just doing what's basically you're doing modeling. So you're making predictions based on models. So this is basically how the stock market works effectively. In the old days, I used to employ people, we new people who could have a drink and a bloody good time, but now they employ mathematicians and theoretical physicists to write models, data modeling to make predictions about how to make incredibly small amounts of money. An incredibly small amounts of time that over a normal time period, like a day or a week or a month, there's a lot of money. So predictive modeling is, if you've ever looked at, been to websites where they go, oh, Netflix is a perfect example. Yeah, I mean it's not a perfect example.

So we, so I'm going to invent Netflix for decision making, although I'd hope it would be [inaudible] hope it would be better wouldn't here. But Netflix is Harold. It is the best example of AI and machine learning. Still. They need to work on a UI.

Netflix has held up because I think they, they run a thing called the chaos engine, which is a very interesting piece of engineering, which is basically a set of programs that try and take the Netflix network down all the time. Yeah. So that their system is robust against any kind of attack, which is a very interesting

approach. But that shouldn't affect what they're offering me. No, but I think the problem is is that

unless you want to get into a really Facebook level of understanding who you are, and I think Facebook would probably be the people that you would say they really know who you are because

what's interesting as well, the data that would be imbibed to be able to give me decisions wouldn't even really be about me. They would be about people like me on a mass day. People who look like me physically. Yeah. People from who from a data data point of view look like me. And so they would be taking enormous amounts of anonymous data almost to be able to tell me who I am. Which feels odd, doesn't it? Yeah. But I mean

the happening, so one of the things that really annoys me about let's say watching stuff on the Internet is seeing ads for stuff that wouldn't possibly be anything I would ever be interested in because surely the whole point that you have all my data is I don't have to see Tampax at.

I'm not saying necessarily, but you know what I mean as the, as in Congress to me is that

you know, why am I getting ads about that sort of thing when surely you know who I am and this is the point where you get into really interesting stuff about data which is you can have all the data, but how you process that level of data.

I think that's where the next explosion in technology is going to be. It's going to be the systems that can really process it and give you reports that anyone that's not a tech genius

does. Quantum computing, which is this stuff that's really mathematically very, very difficult to do with quantum computers become a lot easier. Now, I'm not going to pretend to you for a second. I understand why.

What's it called on some computer. It just has an awful lot more of everything,

Girl. It's so it's to do with, if you understand the idea of quantum, the which is

it's running parallel live.

Well, everything at a sub tomic level is there and not there. And I'm not a quantum physicist, I'm not going to give you the full story, but everything is, it's both a wave and a point. So it's basically it lives somewhere on a probability curve where it would probably be,

and that's going to help the still date.

He's just a very yes, no. At the very basis of it, there are ones or Zeros. What quantum is allowed to do is create probability fields throughout that point. They do it through entangling electrons. I don't understand any of it really, but one of the things that obviously will be a fallout of that is encryption. Modern inquiry tomb would become irrelevant because quantum computers could break modern encryption in

much, much shorter time. Faster that time. Yeah. Well hopefully there'll be a few cat gifs thrown in there. Well, it's at it. Yeah. Never thinks that, oh, maybe it can fell throughout the cap gifts.

Yeah, it's actually, that would be thing for me. Please give me a, a cat free internet.

So this way [inaudible] understanding the rule material of data and being able to analyze that would help was decision making and possibly a bit further on than that. We'll give, oh, computer's more consciousness and then perhaps a, so yeah. And then they can go back to their maker or take over the world or just sit and do the things. Oh, that's a really nice thing. Okay, well are we going to have to end there? But let's just [inaudible] the computers keep, we want them to do what we want them to do, but actually we want them to think so, so we don't have to tell them what to do.

Yeah. But only two bucks. We don't want them to think so much about, well, what's not too much. Right. We got one month to get to the point where they say, oh, I don't know what we're doing with all these humans running around consuming all our resources. I don't know at what point you stop them and what price for that for him before the point they go. Actually we've decided and looking at the data, it's best to name these guy. Yeah, this all CS, which we don't think is,

but knowing that point of the right point to know it and stop them. Yes.

Well, maybe what you do is you create an AI in a system that doesn't have access to the world. Maybe when you first start, did we create that Ar Narrative? Ais is pretty much where we put them out, but I don't think that AI is in what we're talking about as an AI with a consciousness that has an emotional response, is able to actually consume it. We'll get there. I'm not denying we'll get there, but maybe when we shouldn't get there at the point it's controlling the world's nuclear arsenal, for example. That'd be a bad time for something to get a consciousness, so I don't like humans. Oh look, I'm in charge of all the nuclear weapons. Maybe the time for them to get that consciousness has been there in to some sort of Nice learning environment where they can learn about things before we give them access to the buttons. Look about how lovely humans are. Really. Yeah. Although there are values to humans that may not be totally obvious to the computer at first.

Okay. Well we're going to have to say goodbye and hopefully we haven't been made extinct by the computers before I speak to you. Oh, in two weeks time.

So have a great holiday and bye

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.