← Piers Morgan Uncensored
Piers Morgan Uncensored
"TREACHEROUS Waters Ahead!" Will Super Intelligent Robots End Humanity? + Science vs God Debate
01:06:18
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- [00:02]
Professor Lee Cronin
We have to understand we're doing science right. Quite complex chemical systems can emerge seemingly from the what we call the inorganic world and produce lifelike systems.
- [00:12]
Dr. James Tour
What we're talking about is the characteristics of life. What is life is probably something that is better answered by the Bible.
- [00:20]
Professor Lee Cronin
I just want to understand the chemistry of life and how sand turns into cells.
- [00:25]
Dr. James Tour
Every year it gets more and more complex as we realize what is going on.
- [00:31]
Piers Morgan
Well, I mean, there's no point in me being incredibly healthy because AI escapes and kills us.
- [00:36]
Nick Bostrom
Either way you look at it, there does seem to be a certain urgency if there is something that actually could help with this. And I think superintelligence might be that thing.
- [00:43]
Sanket Pathak
I do think giving humanoid robots ability to be able to serve the Department of War is a good thing.
- [00:49]
Dr. Roman Yampolsky
Leaders of the top labs all suggest we want to pause, we want to slow down. We just need to make sure that our labs do the same.
- [00:58]
Piers Morgan
Can science create life itself in a laboratory? If the answer is yes, it will call into question the basis of Christianity and indeed most other religions, as well as revolutionizing our understanding of science altogether. A scientific discovery earlier this month claims to have brought us one step closer to that. Researchers made tiny blobs which use entirely lab made DNA to feed, grow and multiply in a dish. Well, my two guests for today's debate are both respected scientists who disagree fundamentally on whether it's possible at all. Dr. James Tor is Professor of Chemistry at Rice University, widely recognized for his groundbreaking research in nanotechnology. He's also a firm believer in God and committed Christian. And Professor Lee Cronin holds the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and one of the world's leading origin of life researchers. He's also an atheist. Well, gentlemen, welcome and thank you for agreeing to debate each other on this. Let me start by just giving each of you several minutes just to lay out your case, and then I'll bring you together to have a proper old debate. Dr. James Tor, how significant was this apparent discovery that you could create a form of life in a lab several weeks ago?
- [02:19]
Dr. James Tour
Well, I think it was a great engineering feat and I commend the authors, but it certainly was not life. I don't think they ever claimed that it was life. And it's going to be interesting to see what happens when it goes through peer review. Generally when things come out in the press before they get peer reviewed and get into the actual literature, it's really a problem because they change a lot. It didn't have cell division one of the characteristics of life is you have to have cell dividing. And the way they divided it is they actually essentially cut it with a knife. In other words, they put it through a sieve, mechanical instrument and cut these little bubbles in half. And they said there is cell division. When they tried to do it chemically, they just surrounded the outside with very large things that would cause it to neck down and break. And never did a repeated cycle, nor did they ever claim a yield out of that. They just said it was very low. And when somebody doesn't record a yield, it's usually embarrassingly low. So there was no reproduction. Yes. You know, just making a genome, it's just a matter of time and money. How much time are you going to put in there to build this DNA? But they took every component from life and everything else had to come from the outside. The cell didn't have the proper openings for things to get in. They had to use a technology that's made to open cells to kill them, to actually get reagents to come in from the outside. So the more that you, you say the cell can't do, you have to provide from the outside. But it certainly wasn't life, but it wasn't a great engineering feat. I think what's going to hurt them is coming out in the press before it was peer reviewed.
- [04:08]
Piers Morgan
Okay, now you're a believer in God. I have had many debates with atheists, Richard Dawkins and others about how life began. And I always come back to the same question I'm going to ask you. To those who, who promote the big bang theory, for example, and so on. I say, well, okay, what was there before the big bang? In other words, what was there when we categorized it as nothing? What is nothing? What was there before nothing? And because the human brain singularly can't answer those questions, to me it's self evident there must be a superior power of some kind that can your thoughts.
- [04:50]
Dr. James Tour
Well, I will tell you that yes, I am a firm believer in God and in his son Jesus Christ, who's come to this earth and redeemed us. So yes, that's where I stand. I also believe in science, but I have never used the God of the gaps argument. I've been accused of that. And then every time I challenge the people, show me where online where I have ever appealed to God to speak to these things. So I think science itself screams out that life didn't appear as scientists are saying. Lee, who I really respect, he's the only origin of life scientist who will come in and talk with me repeatedly. Everybody else has declined. Even when I've offered to pay these origin of life scientists $10,000 to sit with them in front of a camera for one hour, they have refused. But Lee has stepped up. So in many ways, I respect Lee, and I think that what Lee is doing is he's coming around to see that this is a very, very hard problem. So what are some of the definitions here? If I could set the stage up front, I don't have a direct answer for what came before the Big Bang. Nobody knows that. But yes, in my mind there was God, but I don't have scientific proof of that. But abiogenesis, which is the topic that Lee and I are discussing, is the origin of life from non living matter. And you have to take into account what the Earth would have been like 4 billion years ago to do that. Prebiotically relevant is that you have to be able to do this in a way and with reagents and things that may have been available on a prebiotic Earth. Now, nobody's ever going to know where life came from scientifically, but what we can do is we can try to put forth a valid hypothesis based on things that we can test in the lab. The real problem is if you just look at life itself, and using even Lee's definition, which I'll quote to you, which he said on May 25, 2012, we use his definition. He says, quote, we need genetic code, we need mating, we need metabolism, we need adaptation, we need homeostasis. And I agree with him, we need all of those features. But I think the public has been grossly misled by people like Lee. As much as I like Lee. I think that the public's been misled by statements that he made in 2011 saying that he will create life in his lab in two years. He missed that deadline. Jack Sozdek, who was at Harvard at the time and a Nobel Prize winner, said in 2014 he'd create life in three to five years in his lab in he has not met that, and now he even confesses he hasn't even been able to make the RNA. Steve Benner said in 2021 that most of the problems have been solved in Origin of Life. I think he's backed off that now we don't know how to make the basic chemicals of life. We have to make four classes of chemicals, carbohydrates, we have to be able to make the lipids, we have to make the amino acids, we have to make the nucleotides, the things that make up RNA and DNA. We have those four classes. Nobody has ever made those in a prebiotically relevant manner in an anti pure form. Meteorites, interstellar, star, interstellar systems, they don't deliver sufficient quantities in the purities that you would need. Even Sutherland, who is an origin of life chemist, agrees that these are in such gross mixtures, they're unusable. We have the mass transfer problem. How do you go from a starting material all the way through to the product of a cell? How do you polymerize any of these molecules? The free energy is positive. Lee knows this is a huge problem. Nobody knows how to address that. The polymer stability. If you had one enzyme that happened to form, how long would that last? If you had one RNA molecule, how long would that last? And with RNA it would last hours. That's it, Hours. That's all you have. With an enzyme it would last something on the order of a few days and that's it. So when you're talking about geological timeframes, there's not enough time for these things to last. The code problem, where did the code come from? Again, Lee has underscored this as well. We don't know where the genetic code came from. Chiral induced spin selectivity tells us we had to have chirality. We had to have this asymmetric sort of system before life ever started. The whole protein folding problem, how do proteins fold? The chances of that are about 10 to the -95 just for a 100 unit segment. What does that mean for the general public? There's not enough time in the universe. The interactome problem, there's not enough
- [09:39]
Piers Morgan
fairness. I want to bring in, I want to bring in Professor Cronin, but just before I do, what for you would be the killer question against him to win your argument? Simple,
- [09:54]
Dr. James Tour
Lee. Can, can anybody come with a hypothesis of how life was made without just saying that the primordial soup model is a good model. Can you, can you flesh that out a little bit for us? That's what I would say.
- [10:09]
Piers Morgan
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- [11:29]
Professor Lee Cronin
Thank you. Yeah, so I think we have to understand we're doing science right. And what James is saying, Professor Tor is saying is making arguments that don't make any scientific sense. Because he's saying, because it's hard. It couldn't have happened. It broke a law. Let me take an example of a mobile phone. Mobile phone exists today. But explain to me how it all came together. Explain where the parts came from, how they got refined, where the metals came from. Just because a problem is hard, it doesn't mean it's not going to be solved. And we're coming back to the point that James was making about people making claims of timing the case where I was. James obviously quotes selectively. When I was giving my TED Talk, I said it would take two years once I knew the mechanism, the theory, but he didn't quote all of that. And James is actually on record saying he's going to make nanotube computers within a couple of years, 10 years ago. So I think that science is trying to give out an estimate from a. Hopefully in good faith, what they're trying to do. But let us get to the core of what Professor Tor is saying. That he says that life is too complex to have formed randomly. And he's playing to some tune I don't understand. So what I would say to James before I answer his question, which is, is he saying that life won't be explained by science? That seems a bit weird. So look, the point he's making about proteins folding taking too long. Wrong alpha fold can show how to do it. If you take a small. If you take a small chain of amino acids, that would make up a protein and put it in water, it folds instantly in a few seconds, right? And evolution does this. So the answer to the question of, like, how. What experiment would we do? How do we explain the primordial soup model? The primordial soup model is actually over 70 years old, and it has evolved a lot, forgive the pun. And what that means today is like, we know that the environment is quite rich, and the way the environment works with the chemistry is that quite complex chemical systems can emerge seemingly from what we call the inorganic world and produce lifelike systems. The breakthrough, the engineering breakthrough that Professor Tor was discussing was indeed a great engineering breakthrough. But it showed something very fundamental. You could take these building blocks together and get them to do lifelike things. Lifelike things. So to answer James's question, it's simple, right? If you can show that evolution can occur when in rocks, in the inorganic world, in a meteorite or something, you can show you're on your way to generating sufficient complexity. And indeed, we've shown this. Now, if we start to show this and show we can make a cell from scratch, I don't think it disproves God. I'm not in the where is the universe come from? But I think, Pierce, if I said to you, you know, if I took you to the iPhone factory and said, here's how iPhones are made, you wouldn't say, oh, I'm giving up any faith I had. You'd be like, okay, that was a process. That's a mechanism. I understand science is about.
- [14:32]
Piers Morgan
What would you say? Okay, but what would you say, though, out of interest, Professor Cronin, what would you say, though, if I said to you, all right, before cell phones, mobile phones, there was nothing? What is that? In other words, no human brain I've ever interviewed. I've interviewed many people about this, of differing positions and faith and non faith and so on. When it comes down to that fundamental question of what nothing is otherwise, what was there before anything that we can trace or record or study or have any science about the human inability to be able to answer that question because it's simply too impossible to answer unless you have an answer. It just suggests to me there must be something bigger. I mean, doesn't it. Isn't it automatically. That must be the case?
- [15:23]
Professor Lee Cronin
I don't disagree with that suggestion. But what we're talking about is slightly different, right? So as I'm. I'm not a cosmologist, I. Let's just say we have Planet Earth and planet Earth 4 billion years ago. How did life arise? That is a solvable problem. Today I agree with you. Understanding how we might come up with something from nothing. It's where we have the border of philosophy, theology and physics. And I think one of the things that we have to stop doing in science is not use science to disprove belief and not use belief to disprove science. They are infinitely close and they touch philosophically. So can we make life in the lab? Probably. Will we do it one day? I don't know, because we have to do the experiments and. But we are making a great deal of progress, much more than James depicts because it doesn't fit his narrative.
- [16:15]
Piers Morgan
You, I mean, you're on record as saying we actually don't know what life is and that's a problem.
- [16:21]
Professor Lee Cronin
So that's. So as a scientist, I started out saying I don't know what life is a problem. And I looked at the NASA definition and I realized when I built a new theory, assembly theory, that we could actually measure what life is in the lab. And that's what we've been doing for the last 10 years. But I didn't want to come on your show and just preach about me. I want to have a very succinct conversation. But yes, right now, as of today, I can measure what life is in the lab. And I can also build detectors to detect alien life off Earth Using special features we've found. And all those nut things that James said about replication and all this stuff, we can actually collapse together a measurement. Before the concept of temperature in Italy, you had to put glass blow tubes to make a thermometer. And until you can make a thermometer, you could not put alcohol in and actually measure something. And what we were able to do using laboratory techniques is come up with the equivalent of measuring temperature. But rather we're measuring aliveness. And what we could do is take living things and kill them and measure the drop in aliveness. And what we're doing right now is using that measurement to create life in the lab and see where they start and look at how much information we put in. So you're absolutely right. At the beginning of my career didn't know what life is. And the one very small contribution I might have made is this idea that we can now measure it. And if we can measure it, that means we can do an experiment to go look for it.
- [17:44]
Piers Morgan
Okay, not at all. A couple of things. One, just for viewers who are not as skilled in all this as you guys, NASA officially defines life as a self sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. However, There are around 123 other definitions and no single universally agreed upon definition. So do you know what life is? How would you categorize it?
- [18:13]
Dr. James Tour
Well, I think it's going to have to have homeostasis, which means that it has an internal steady state. If you look at life, it is highly ordered, highly ordered, so that the entropy is very low, which means it's highly ordered and it's of very high energy. There are very few systems that have that sort of thing. But it's more complex than that. Yes, it has to be able to have offspring. That's part of the definition of life. And what we're talking about is the characteristics of life. What is life is probably something that is better answered by the Bible. But the characteristics of life can certainly be measured and we can quantitate that. And I will say, you know, to Lee's point, I have never said, and if he can show me, I'd love to have it. I've never said we will never know where life has come from. I have on record many times said, I presume that one day we, we will know. But that day is far, far from today. And the reason I say that is because when you look at the cell, even the simplest of cells, it is far more complex in its design. And then every year it gets more and more complex as we realize what is going on. And we may be moving a nanometer closer while this thing is moving kilometers away much faster. So that's how we track whether we're getting close to something. But I've never said we won't get it. I've never criticized science, saying that science will never get there. I just say that it's very far away. And these suggestions like, we're close now, to Lee's credit, he has come up with this assembly theory, which does help to measure where he can say, is this a characteristic? Could this have come from life? As a synthetic organic chemist, I can look at a molecule and tell you whether a structure like that would come from a biological like system. But to have, as Lee has said and as he is taught through assembly theory, look, you can have one of anything. But if you have 17 of them, that then means that there must have been something that selected it and moved toward it. And he comes in with this selector entity. That selector entity, usually a selector, has to be far more complex than the thing that it's selecting. And it certainly seems like something much higher. But he hasn't talked about how this is gonna generate life. This is something that detects Life. And to his credit, that's what he's got. But we are really clueless on the origin of life. And all of those molecules that they put in the spud cell, they got them from a natural system. All the nucleotides that they put together, every bit of it came from a natural system. So you take a cell, you took cells, you took them apart, you took their pieces, and you put them together. Even to make your genome, you took the pieces and you put them together. Or they took whole pieces, they took ATP, which are whole big constructs, and put that in there. When you have to talk about the origin of life, we're absolutely clueless. This is why Lee will not speak about the molecules. Can you even put two carbohydrates, two things together with control? Can you put any two amino acids with control that bear active side chains like an amine or carboxylic acid? He knows what I'm talking about, but he refuses to address the scientific problems. He says these aren't even the problems. Those aren't even the questions. They're absolutely things that have to be solved along the way. So all I'm saying, Pierce, is that scientists are clueless on the origin of life. And I think Lee is bumping up against this thing to see how hard it really is. From the claims that he was making in 2011 to where he is now, he's seen that this is a whole lot more complex than what he was thinking, and this is probably a lot further away than he was thinking back in 2011.
- [22:16]
Piers Morgan
Okay, well, I could see you, Professor Cronin, shaking your head in dismay at what you were hearing there. So here's your chance. Respond.
- [22:27]
Professor Lee Cronin
So I think there's a large number of mischaracterizations here. What is life? The mechanism for life is evolution can occur before the origin of the cell in the environment. This is what we've shown. This is really exciting. So assembly theory allows you to measure how complex an object is in copy number. And James is wrong about the environment. He's simply wrong. What we are showing is any given environment can print chemistry from the outside into the inside. And yes, you can show something as intricate as a carbohydrate is intricate as all the molecules he talked about. But that information comes from evolution. That is happenstance. It is contingent. It's a bit like if you buy a brand new car and you drive around the world and you bump it and you get dents in the car. It's like James saying, where did that dent come? Where did that dent come from? Go on, make it again. Understand that the journey of the car in the environment is what shaped it. So actually the origin of life, whilst it is, it's. It's kind of. We don't know what the probability is on Earth over time, is not that mysterious, right? It is not. What is mysterious is understanding how evolution occurs at a big planetary scale and shrinks down to produce the first cell. And what is an interesting question is how unique are we on Earth? How unique is life? Is there life elsewhere in the solar system? I think we're looking in. And I would say one thing about what working. About 100 years ago, Einstein predicted that there would be gravity waves, right? Distortions in space time. It took us 100 years to build a detector that would measure a gravity wave that would move a proton a diameter. And the event that did that occurred two and a half billion years ago. So think about it. Two and a half billion years ago, where humans were still amoeba on Earth. We went evolution, we built technology, we understood gravity waves, we built a detector and we detected neutron stars that collided 2.5 billion years ago. And yeah, that was hard. They thought it was impossible. I am doing science not for fame or for whatever. I'm doing it because I don't know the answer. So when James says we're clueless, of course we are clueless, but I prefer to say we're not clueless. We are interested in answering the question. And I'm super excited about the fact that we might know if we can create life in the lab. Are we alone in the universe? Not if God made us. Because if God. Because. Let's just agree there's a mystery there. But I would like to know, and I'm sure you would like to know, Pierce, where is life elsewhere in the universe? Where should we look? What is going on in Mars? How can we understand the future of life on Earth through climate change?
- [25:17]
Piers Morgan
There has to be. I mean, look, there has to be. Look, there has to be other existence in the universe. The idea.
- [25:24]
Professor Lee Cronin
Exactly.
- [25:24]
Piers Morgan
Tiny pinprick, right? Is the only place where any form of life exists. I think it's for the birds. It's just nonsense. And we might be the least sophisticated form of life in the whole universe if we actually ever get out there and discover what else is there. So I completely think that people that say we're the only things that exist, they're just living in cloud cuckoo land. How much though do you think the fact that you're an atheist and Dr. Tour is a firm believer in God. You know, I've heard both sides kind of use it as a stick against the other. I mean, you have an open mind, you say about all of this. Do you have an open mind about the existence of God, for example?
- [26:06]
Nick Bostrom
Sure.
- [26:06]
Professor Lee Cronin
I mean, so I'm not. So, you know, I do not choose culturally or to follow a religion. But I. But I'm looking, you know, lots of people were joined by the same question, right? Why are we here? What's going on? What is it like to be alive? As a scientist, I kind of look great. Try to investigate those questions, but it doesn't mean I'm dismissing, that there might be something else beyond my comprehension. It's just not a value I choose to adopt. Right. And I very much respect. I have many, many friends of faith and colleagues, and they're fantastic individuals, and it doesn't disturb their professional life. And as James said, he's not.
- [26:51]
Sanket Pathak
He.
- [26:51]
Professor Lee Cronin
He hasn't said it will never be done. He's more nuanced than that. It is. I don't know. James is a complicated person. I love kind of understanding his views and trying to get there. What I would love to do is if James's view, in my view, could help people get excited about what is it like to be alive on Earth? What is going to happen to us in the future? What other life is there around us? And how can we, you know, make sure the human condition appreciates that whether there's God or not, we're pretty precious. But we want to understand the limits. And me as a chemist, I just want to understand the chemistry of life and how sand turns into cells, because it did on planet Earth. And there's no reason why it didn't happen elsewhere. Whether it's a spud you like or a sand you like, it's. It's just chemistry.
- [27:42]
Piers Morgan
But could it be? And I'll bring in Dr. Torrigan here. You know, I can't get my head around the pyramids in Egypt. I don't know how they did it. It just seems like an unbelievably sophisticated, complicated thing. And are we. You know, is it really how people believe that it was just done by humans and so on and so on? I mean, maybe, but the fact that if we tried to replicate that today, I think we'd have a real problem. How is these things. Could they just remain forever a mystery? I mean, yeah, yeah, I agree that it would be great. It would be great if we could find the answers, but maybe some things we're just Never gonna know. What do you think?
- [28:23]
Professor Lee Cronin
Yeah, so what? So this is a really good point. We're never gonna know exactly the mechanism that gave rise to the pyramids unless there's a natural process that gives rise to pyramids. Right. And you can reproduce it. This is what I keep trying to say say to James when he's saying, oh, what about making sure that these sugars are present with these amino acids and this rna that is him assuming that there is only one way to make life. What our experiments are showing is life has many ways to happen. And the chemistry of the life on Earth is as unique as the iPhone or TikTok on earth. There may not be TikTok in alien intelligent social media. There'll be something else. It won't be identical. And so all I've been trying to say to James and origin of life people is like, where. What is the fundamental process? The gravity, if you like. So gravity makes stars by compressing hydrogen. What is the process, the gravity that turns sand into cells and that is even chemical evolution. And each life form will have its own technology, be them amino acids, sugars, DNA and other molecules. I would say that James obsession with criticizing those molecules and saying you can't get that. Gotcha. You can't get chiral got you is actually missing the point. It's missing the process. And, and I think that. And you. And you get it perfectly in parrot with the pyramids. Like, just because pyramids don't emerge everywhere perfectly doesn't mean that a process didn't make them right. The, the pyramids did not just appear. Someone put them there. Are we going to know all the details? No, and I.
- [30:01]
Piers Morgan
Yeah. And Look, I think Dr. Tor, probably the final question for you is, as somebody that believes fervently in God and is a religious man, if it turned out that through, you know, wondrous modern science, we work out how creation happened, how life began and so on, and we can start to replicate it, would that dent your faith? Would it be like a signal to you that actually there wasn't a God, it had nothing to do with it, and this is how it happened.
- [30:37]
Dr. James Tour
Not one bit. And in fact, I disagree with your opening statement that if we created life in the lab, that would somehow discount God. Not at all. Just like when the structure of DNA was identified and described in 1953. That doesn't lessen. In fact it does. It increases our respect for God. Like, whoa, that's how you did it. Prior to that, we didn't know why two parents had who Were tall, had tall children. We didn't know. Now we understand because it's written in the DNA. It's written in that code. So every scientific advance gives me more appreciation for God. So if we find out how life, not just that we can create life in the lab, that we may be able to do, but to be able to say how it was created on an early Earth when we didn't have all the tools that we have, when we didn't have cells that we could deconstruct, take their pieces and put them back together, that's a much harder question. But even if we were to find that, we would say, lord, so that's how you did it. Because what the Bible does is it tells us things in a very light fashion. It just doesn't give us the details. Science allows us to fill in so many details that the Bible itself doesn't allow us to fill in. That's the beauty of science. And so he's given us this book, the Bible, and he's given us the book of nature that allows us to fill in many of the pieces. So if we get another piece filled in, I'd be like, lord, you are so wonderful. So that's how you pulled it off. Every year we see more of the communication levels, how every cell has system levels of communication between it, and we're like, oh, so that's how it works. That's how you did it. So to me, it's the glory of God to see this.
- [32:31]
Piers Morgan
Well, okay, Professor Cronin, your final, your final thought.
- [32:36]
Professor Lee Cronin
So, I mean, I, I, so I. One thing I share with, with James, he has all right for, for God in this case. I'm, I'm a scientist and I want to understand how the universe works. Right. And I'm really excited by, you know, finding there is regularities. My, my point is, I don't think there needs to be an argument here. I think we do need to get the public on side and fellow scientists to basically unify about, say this is a really interesting question. We should answer it. You know, one thing is, I think understanding the origin of life is also going to be about understanding the origin of cancer. Why do I say that? When, when cells die, there are some cells that don't die, that should die. They're fighting to survive and they become cancerous. And that transition from a regulated cell to a cancerous cell is kind of similar to how you can imagine that the first chemistry became living and uncontrolled. And so by answering questions as deep as the origin of Life may make us do something as helpful for humanity, like to understand this terrible disease and also to contain it. So I've come to appreciate debating Dr. Tor and his, his nuance. What I'm trying to do is bring as much kind of question to that so we can engage people and actually have more open minded approach to it. And I'm not saying that Dr. Tor is intentionally closed minded. I just think as a scientist, I am very good at not knowing the answer. Science is about not knowing and using a process of criticism to get further, to get closer to it. And I do think we will get closer. And I think a little bit of humility and excitement as well as skepticism might just help us answer a very important question, help us cure cancer, help us find out if we're alone in the universe and what the future may hold for humanity and how we might survive on Mars, for instance. So I'm excited to do it, I'm excited to kind of discuss it and I'm grateful to have this chance to explain what we're doing.
- [34:35]
Piers Morgan
You know what, I think you guys just talking about it from different perspectives in the way you've been doing for the last half hour is fascinating. And as somebody who's literally in a job where I ask people questions all the time, I kind of agree with you. I just think, keep asking questions, keep working on it, keep having conversations, you probably have a lot more in common than you might want to admit. And maybe you guys between you will crack the meaning of life. What an amazing thing that would be. And if you do, could you please do your first interview together on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Thank you both very much.
- [35:09]
Dr. James Tour
Thank you, Piers.
- [35:10]
Professor Lee Cronin
Thank you, Piers.
- [35:11]
Piers Morgan
The developments in robotics and artificial intelligence are happening so quickly that it's easy to gloss over them. Last week, two advanced models made by OpenAI went on a hacking spree in novel ways the company did not know they were capable of. They'd been placed in a so called sandbox, isolated and not connected to the Internet, but somehow found a way to get online anyway. OpenAI reportedly didn't even notice until several days later. The company whose platform was hacked is demanding an unprecedented response and radical transparency in response to what many have deemed an emergency breach. It comes after Elon Musk painted a far rosier picture of the world of opportunity which is upon us. The most likely outcome is an age
- [35:54]
Dr. James Tour
of amazing abundance where anyone can have
- [36:00]
Professor Lee Cronin
anything they can think of.
- [36:02]
Nick Bostrom
This is.
- [36:03]
Dr. James Tour
This is.
- [36:03]
Piers Morgan
This may sound preposterous, but, well, here
- [36:06]
Dr. James Tour
we are in 2026. Let's see where we stand in 2036. Now, of course, there are things that
- [36:11]
Piers Morgan
could derail this, like a massive global thermonuclear war or something like that. But assuming that there's not World War
- [36:20]
Dr. James Tour
3,
- [36:23]
Professor Lee Cronin
I think we're headed for an
- [36:24]
Dr. James Tour
age of amazing abundance.
- [36:25]
Professor Lee Cronin
So this is, I guess, a message
- [36:27]
Piers Morgan
of optimism and excitement about the future. Well, here to discuss whether it's time for everybody to panic are three people who have a far better grasp of these matters than me. Sanket Pathak is the founder and CEO of Foundation Future Industries. Nick Bostrom is a philosopher of existential risk and author of Deep Utopia Life and Meaning in a solved world. And Dr. Roman Yampolsky is leading AI safety expert. Welcome to all of you. Sankir Patek, welcome to Uncensored. You want your company to give these humanoid robots lethal capabilities soon to create killer robots, in effect driven by AI. Does what happened last week with OpenAI not give you significant pause for thought here?
- [37:19]
Sanket Pathak
Pierce? Thanks for having me. Well, just to clarify, we're building humanoid robots to do a lot of heavy industrial work. So defense is a component of that, not the absolute only thing that we want to do. I do think giving humanoid robots ability to be able to serve the Department of War and productive militaries around the world is a good thing because they will lead to overall just reduction of kind of collateral damage, which is what's happened even with drones. If you have the intention of not annihilating a city now you have the capability of doing it. And land based autonomy would by and large do the same. Now, to your question of OpenAI, the risks around AI and how much they're evalved, how can they be safeguarded, are quite real. But the kind of AI that we're talking about today, by and large is still quite benign. So at the most, in its most absolute form, it can maybe cause a cyber attack, but it cannot destroy humanity, so it cannot go and somehow invent nuclear weapons and then create total havoc. Also, even if you take a artificial superintelligence to that extreme, there doesn't seem to be a reason for it to do that either. So I do think some of the fears around AI just being widespread annihilation of humanity or bringing widespread annihilation of humanity are quite overblown. I do think, however, there will be a dark there. There pretty much will be a dark age. Every single industrial revolution has created a lot of Discomfort. Industrial Revolution 1 created discomfort for 60 years to about 30 years, 3 for about 20 years. So I think there's going to be a 10, 15, 20 year period where AI technologies are very disruptive. But in net, I do think it is going to increase our quality of life and will lead to the age of abundance.
- [39:16]
Piers Morgan
I mean, just before I go to the other two, there's a lot of leap of faith in what you just said. When I interviewed Professor Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, I asked him what's the biggest threat to mankind? And he said when artificial intelligence learns to self design. It seems to me that what we saw last week was an example of artificial intelligence learning to self design. You might have the best intentions in the world with your robots, the Department of War might have the best intentions in the world with the robots that you give them. But ultimately if it manages to escape the AI and think for itself and perhaps gets guided to nefarious thoughts by nefarious people, then very, very quickly the apocalyptic scenario that Professor Stephen Hawking laid out to me surely becomes true. And how can you say with any confidence or certainty that it won't?
- [40:09]
Sanket Pathak
Well, Pierce, just to be fair, I am still quite skeptical of OpenAI's characterization of what happened. So I would just give it some more time and figure out what exactly the root cause was. A lot of the scenarios I personally first can't have information on prior instances like this where Anthropic has also claimed that the AI somehow blackmailed some employee at the company and they're massively exaggerated and overblown. And in any real world scenario they pose no threat. So I still do not know exactly what happened in the OpenAI scenario. But then to your question of self replication, I do think there are significant dangers where AI kind of gets out of hand is one when it can make itself better with less compute. Because today we know on our fingertips by and large all of the big compute clusters. So if the risk is outsized to the reward, we will shut just like training down for almost all of the AIs as soon as that changes. Which is AI can self replicate, self improve with less compute and has a electric footprint that is significantly less to what it has today. That is for sure an unbounded risk for humanity. And that is something we have to take very seriously. As it stands today, however, they need massive compute clusters to get reasonably better over time. And almost every single scenario where people have tried to portray that their AI is somehow so good and so crazy have all been overblown. Our entire company still uses Plaud Code and it still makes tons of mistakes. So there's no Scenario in which it's remotely close to being super intelligent. And I'd be highly skeptical of what OpenAI is saying. My very skeptical mind says everything they're saying, they're saying just to be able to get a psychological edge on anthropic because they're falling behind. I still don't know exactly what happened there, but historically all of those charges are extremely overblown.
- [42:03]
Piers Morgan
Okay, okay. Let me bring in the other guests. Dr. Jan Polski, welcome back to Uncensored. You know, we've talked before about what Professor Stephen Hawking told me. You yourself, I think, have had a lot of concerns. You've expressed them to me that unsupervised AI could lead to human extinction. How concerned are you by what happened last week with OpenAI?
- [42:27]
Dr. Roman Yampolsky
I'm very concerned. We got lucky. We got another warning shot. It's a great opportunity to stop developing general superintelligence. I'm not sure what would trigger people to actually agree to pause. We have, not directly, but through blogs, through posts, leaders of the top labs all suggest we want to pause, we want to slow down. We just need to make sure that our labs do the same so federal government can bring them together, maybe with Chinese counterparts. That would be wonderful. We can get most benefits of this amazing technology from narrow AI tools. There is no reason to develop replacement for humanity. This is not a surprising warning shot. We predicted exactly that for many years. And now that those predictions are coming through, it's mind blowing to see people ignore those warning shots.
- [43:23]
Piers Morgan
What is extraordinary to me is Elon Musk was one of the signatories of the many people who signed a letter wanting a pause. This was last year, I think, wanting a six month pause. Now he seems to have almost flown the white flag of surrender and says we should enjoy the ride. But I am mindful that only last year the same Elon Musk was very, very concerned about this. And I share your concern that when OpenAI reveal that they lost control of this for 48 hours, that was the bit that got me. If they'd immediately noticed. But to have two whole days go by without even knowing that the AI had effectively escaped, that's pretty terrifying, I think.
- [44:10]
Dr. Roman Yampolsky
Some additional news came out. They had multiple events similar to that one in the past. They just didn't report it. There's multiple weeks of them watching those models essentially try to escape, find zero day exploits. They are already better than a human hacker. They are super hackers at this point. They're becoming better at programming, they're better at proving Mathematical theorems. We saw multiple mathematical theorems which stood the test of time. Been out for 50, 60, 80 years, proven within this month again. I'm just not sure what warning shot would make people go, okay, this is getting out of hand.
- [44:49]
Piers Morgan
Yeah. Nick Bostrom, welcome to Uncensored. Now, you're a philosopher of essential risk from Oxford, founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute. You know, you're best known perhaps for your 2014 bestseller, Superintelligence, which popularized the concept of AI existential risk of the kind that I discussed with Professor Stephen Hawking. Now, you've, I think, indicated you've evolved your view from a sort of dystopian view to more of a fretful optimist view, which certainly seems to be the journey Elon Musk has gone on with this. You know, like Elon, like you, I can see enormous benefits with AI in things like science and medicine and so on. It's obvious. I can see that, you know, Elon, when he rolls out his optimus humanoid robots, I can see if they do lots of the drudgery of life for us. How nice that would be to reclaim the time we currently waste on all those chores that a robot could do. I get all that. But I also have always been concerned that the problem is not with good people who want good aspirations for this stuff, getting their hands on it, but AI being steered by bad people and then having the ability to escape with bad guidance. That's always concerned me. Does this, what happened last week, frighten you?
- [46:20]
Nick Bostrom
Well, I think it's important that we try to study and learn from these warning shots that we get. So it's not really so much that my views have changed. I've been trying to draw attention to future risks from AI for, I mean, almost three decades now, including existential risks. I still think those risks are there, and they are real and serious. But there is also the other side of the coin. And rather, what has changed, I felt, was the recognition of the risk, which, back when I was working on this book, Superintelligence were very much ignored and neglected. People were dismissing this as science fiction. Now, of course, there's a lot more awareness of AI and what it's doing. And indeed, all the frontier labs have people trying to solve this problem of AI alignment. And so I thought it was time also to take a look at the other side of the coin, which you sort of outlined, I think, the potential benefits. I mean, just looking at medicine, where there's so much disease and suffering and people who urgently need help and cures around the world where AI really could be a huge unlock. So I think, as you yourself illustrated, we need to keep both of these sides of the coin in mind as we try to navigate this treacherous waters ahead.
- [47:40]
Piers Morgan
Well, I mean, there's no point in me being incredibly healthy if we're all going to die quickly because AI escapes and kills us.
- [47:50]
Nick Bostrom
Right? But so, depending on how you look at it, it's not as if we are like, have one safe path and then we could choose to roll the dice with AI I think we face a bunch of risks in the status quo, both at the global level. We have, like, the risk of thermonuclear war, engineered pandemics, all kinds of other things. And at the individual level, we are dying at the rate of over a million people every week. That's kind of 1, 9, 11 every 25 minutes. So either way you look at it, there does seem to be a certain urgency. If there is something that actually could help with this, and I think superintelligence might be that thing, if it goes well, it really could help radically extend our lifespans as well as create this tsunami of wealth, help with clean energy, transportation, space, entertainment. Really all the areas where human minds are useful, super intelligent minds could be even more useful.
- [48:52]
Piers Morgan
But do you not think that when you hear Sanket, who is developing, I heard you sank it, say you're developing all sorts of things involving robots, part of which may be their engagement in warfare. But Nick Bostrom, when you hear Sankit, be so kind of confident, calm about how that may manifest itself and how he's not really concerned too much about AI escaping and thinking for itself and that that won't deter him from building robots which go to war. But I would have thought the obvious danger here is if you do have AI thinking for itself and it is guided by, like I said, bad people, the very robots that sank it is making for the Department of War could become killing machines against, say, innocent American people. I mean, why? Why couldn't they? It isn't the natural extrapolation of what happened with OpenAI last week that this could be a possibility. And should Sankhet not be a little bit more concerned about it?
- [49:58]
Nick Bostrom
Well, I would rather that we don't develop AI weapons. I don't think the problem is Sankit so much, but rather the fact that there is war in the world and that we have nations that don't get along. I think as long as you have that, there will be enormous incentives for developing militaries and armaments and weapons and Sometimes they will get used. I think there are several distinct risks from AI. So one is what you mentioned, that these become powerful tools and people misuse them to wage war or oppress one another for other bad purposes. Then separately from that there is also the possibility of risks from these AIs themselves. They have agency already, they will become better at strategizing and independently of what any human might wish, there is a risk that they will go off the rails at some point. So both of these I think are roughly equally serious problems that we need to solve to arrive at this utopian condition in the future.
- [50:59]
Piers Morgan
Sanke, is anything you've heard from the other two guests giving you pause for thought about your supreme confidence?
- [51:06]
Sanket Pathak
I mean, so Piers, just to be clear, I do share concerns. I however do not think what happened with OpenAI is a red herring. What happened with OpenAI, based on every piece of information that's available today, probably says that they have really bad observability, which most likely is code written by AI or written by humans. That does not mean that they have an AI that is really good at escaping and then like wreaking some kind of big panic for humanity. That pretty much means they have poor security controls and that is an age old problem that each company deals with. So I just think that specific example is not as big of a red herring. Now I do not think we should be totally nonchalant about AI posing risks to humanity because they do like pretty much what I said before. At any point when AI is able to self replicate, self improve and do it at a footprint that is so small compute wise that it does not require large compute clusters, that is an unbound risk to humanity. That does pose significant danger and we should figure out what to do about it before it even happens. However, I don't think we should pause AI progress that's happening today. I also think we should build more intelligent weapons. By definition, not building intelligent weapons would mean we would still fight wars like how we did during World War I or even before, which created significant amounts of collateral damage. Intelligence is a good thing in war because that by definition means less people who are innocent get hurt. Again if the governments choose to. You could have an evil government who chooses not to do that, but by and large even China and us, they are on par pretty good governments. It doesn't matter if you go after Democrats or Republicans, we have gotten significantly better at reducing collateral damage and I think that pattern will continue with these governments. I don't think that's going to change. So I am Pro building more intelligent weapons. And I'm pro more AI innovation. I do not think what OpenAI has demonstrated in itself means AI got smarter. It means that their controls are pretty bad and they need to work on that. However, I still do believe this thing does pose risk. Humanity that should be taken seriously. So I think all of that can coexist. So I'm not saying I'm highly confident this thing's going to be 100% pure and not evil, but I'm also not in the camp that we need to stop today. And I'm also not in the camp that OpenAI, what they demonstrated demonstrates some big AI risk today.
- [53:50]
Piers Morgan
Okay, Dr. Yampolski, I saw you pulling a few faces there, which I'm taking to mean you don't entirely agree with that assessment.
- [53:58]
Dr. Roman Yampolsky
I think anyone building killer robots, which by definition are excellent at killing humans, is doing something unethical, something immoral. It's easy to justify it, but it's not what we see. We see drone warfare now killing more people than previously. It's so much easier to deploy, it's easier to go to war. Cost of going to war is lower. So I think it's a terrible thing. We are worried about superintelligence becoming an adversary, and here we are converting humanoid robot bodies into killing machines. This is dystopian. I don't know why anyone would think it's a good idea. And to address concerns of Nick, he clearly spent more time thinking about it than anyone. I think a lot of benefits we want, including healing bad diseases. Life extension can be accomplished with narrow, super intelligent tools. It doesn't have to be general superintelligence. We can do something similar to what we did for protein folding problem. That problem was solved with a very narrow but super intelligent tool. We don't have to create replacement for humanity.
- [55:13]
Sanket Pathak
Pierce, can I respond to that?
- [55:16]
Piers Morgan
Yeah, you can? Yeah.
- [55:18]
Sanket Pathak
Okay, well, we're not building killer robots, and I don't think almost anybody is doing that. We are, however, building robots that can walk inside a building and go to a target instead of destroying an entire building and other buildings around it. Would you not want that? I think that's Internet a good thing.
- [55:44]
Piers Morgan
I mean, It's. Interesting question. Dr. Yanpel. Yeah, it's an interesting question though, because I think what Sanket is saying is that war is inevitable, which history would tell us it is, and that actually if it can be more precise, then we've had no complaint when previous improvements in intelligence of the way we conduct war has led to more precise targeting and so on. Why would we be against the principle, given the inevitability of war, of making it more precise?
- [56:20]
Dr. Roman Yampolsky
Think about how precise you can make it. You can develop drones to target specific groups of people. You can develop viruses which target specific ethnicities. You can be very precise. But I'm not sure it's progress.
- [56:38]
Sanket Pathak
That's not what humanity is. It's a very cynical view.
- [56:46]
Piers Morgan
Well, it has, but then humanity has never faced anything quite like this. I mean, Nick Bostrom, you are literally the expert on the future of humanity. You know, Elon Musk, when he got away from talking about this kind of thing, he was talking about the fact that within 10 years, AI and robots will provide more goods and services than any human could consume. And therefore automatically, money won't matter within 10 years. What did you think of that?
- [57:18]
Nick Bostrom
Well, we'll see. I mean, I think it is one of the possible outcomes that once you get this AI thing really going, you can automate the economy and. And then you could have a sort of abundance of wealth, like a kind of think of like a universal aristocracy, but with nobody downstairs. I think that is conceivable. But it does require that we sort of get through these intermediate stages, which I think there is no guarantee that we will. It also requires that there is some system at the other end that makes sure everybody gets at least some slice
- [57:56]
Sanket Pathak
of the windfall.
- [57:58]
Nick Bostrom
But certainly the size of the pie could grow enormously. If you have machines not just running the economy, but also inventing new technologies and starting new enterprises and so forth, I think you might have very rapid economic growth for some period of time. When that kicks in,
- [58:20]
Piers Morgan
is it not inevitable, though, that we're going to lose a lot of jobs around the world? Tens, if not hundreds of millions of jobs will simply become redundant. And this idea that everyone just sits at home having robots do everything for them and they're feeling content because they're not doing anything, I think it's for the birds. History tells us that 50% of everyone who retires is dead within five years because their bodies just pack up. So people like to work, right? I mean, historically, we've always wanted to work. And what worries me about AI and the rate of change is you're already seeing a lot of tech companies shedding thousands of jobs because they know better than anybody that all this new AI technology is going to make a lot of people redundant. Human beings will slowly become pointless.
- [59:08]
Nick Bostrom
Yeah, well, I think the fact that a lot of people die within some small number of years after they retire has A lot to do with the fact that they are old and the body accumulates damage. I think there are various groups in human history who have not worked for a living, who seems to have had good lives. We see like young children don't do any economically useful work, but they run around playing, spending time with their friends, inventing games. The British aristocracy, like the traditional ideal, was not to have to work for a living, not to have to sell your time and attention and you could then do whatever you wanted, whether it's pottering around in the garden or hunting or throwing parties or being an amateur scientist or whatever it might be. I think it would require a significant transition culturally. The education system would need to be re geared to training people to live well, to enjoy life, rather than just to become productive workers who sit at their desk and receive assignments. So ultimately though, I think the goal is full unemployment and not just with AI. But if you think all technology really the telos is to try to allow us to achieve more of what we want with less effort and taken to the limit, it would mean being able to achieve all you want with no effort. And I think that's ultimately what the whole technological enterprise is aiming towards. And AI in particular might be the thing that actually gets us there.
- [60:41]
Piers Morgan
I mean Sankit, the problem is you probably like your job and building your company and have excited thoughts about the future. But it may be in two years time your company doesn't need you. There'll be a robotic form of Sankit Patak. You'll do it cheaper and more efficiently. You won't need to sleep, won't need to eat, won't need to drink, won't be subject to any of humans natural foibles. You'll be replaced by an a robotic version of you. Would you be happy about that?
- [61:12]
Sanket Pathak
I'd be pretty happy because I would look to the stars. We're a speck of dust in the solar system and even a smaller speck of dust in the galaxy. I think our life's purpose is to go beyond. For me personally that's what it would mean. That would mean if AI is that competent, I have a spaceship that can take me anywhere. So I will go anywhere and I will do anything. And same would happen for all the humans. They would have tools at their fingertips to pretty much be superhuman and they can make whatever they want to do as a purpose of their life, as a function of it. And that is true, like historically if you look at it, that was the goal, the prosperity was the goal. To be able to get to a place where people don't have to slave away their time because we've just replaced slavery with 10 hours, like 10 bucks an hour. People don't enjoy flipping burgers at McDonald's. I don't think anyone considers that their life's purpose. This so removing that work and eliminating in net is a good thing. And I don't think we're going to run out of things to do. Like for me personally that means I'm probably going to go look to the stars and go and chase that. For someone else it might mean they will explore the ocean. For someone else it would mean they will spend more time with family in their community and do productive work there. I think there's so many things we can do that isn't going to McDonald's and flipping burgers or isn't coming into a tech company and writing code.
- [62:30]
Piers Morgan
Dotyan Polski, I want to end with a question for you which I asked Professor Stephen Hawking, which was if you knew it was going to be your last day on earth, what would you do? How would you spend it? And he said he would spend it drinking champagne with his family in the sunlight, listening to Wagner. Now if your dystopian view of what may happen here, which I partly share, comes to fruition sooner than we would hope and you know you're facing your last day on Earth because there won't be an earth, how would you like to spend your last day if we are still alive?
- [63:09]
Dr. Roman Yampolsky
It's not over. We can fight it. We can do something about it. Don't give up. I'm telling you, we have a couple years until we get to human level capabilities in science and engineering that creates superintelligence that leads to existential risk. We don't see an obvious solution. So we start talking about all the secondary problems. Unconditional basic income, unemployment. Let's concentrate on what's really important and solve it.
- [63:36]
Piers Morgan
Gonna leave it there guys. Thank you all very much. It's a fascinating topic. Probably the really worrying thing is that we may all be the last people to know when it happens. That's a sobering thought to end this on, but thank you all very much. Thanks again to FreeCash for sponsoring today's video. Try it for free by using the QR code on the screen or following my link in the show notes and get a $10 bonus on your first offer just for doing it. Here's Morgan on Stenson is proudly independent. The only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we ask for only one simple thing. It's subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan uncensored on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate and entertain. And we'll do it all for free. Independent, uncensored media has never been more critical, and we couldn't do it without you.