AGI, Immortality, & Visions of the Future with Adam Becker

Summary

StarTalk Radio: AGI, Immortality & Visions of the Future with Adam Becker

Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Guests: Adam Becker, Chuck Nice, Brian Futterman, Gary O’Reilly
Date: November 28, 2025

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Episode Overview

This StarTalk “Special Edition” episode dives deep into the grand technological dreams shaping our possible futures: AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), immortality, interplanetary civilizations, and the often outsized influence of Silicon Valley’s billionaires. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is joined by science popularizer and physicist Adam Becker (author of "What Is Real?" and "More Everything Forever"), with comic co-host Chuck Nice and the StarTalk crew. The conversation ranges from the technical hurdles of Mars colonization, to philosophical pitfalls of uploading consciousness, to the misunderstood lessons of science fiction, all with comedic wit and critical insight.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Allure & Pitfalls of Technological Utopias

• Introduction of Adam Becker ([04:12])

  • Becker brings a unique perspective: “You’re coming to it from a physicist with a philosophy flavor.” – Chuck Nice.
  • Becker’s latest book, "More Everything Forever," investigates Silicon Valley's visions of AI overlords and humanity’s fate.

• Tech Billionaires and Futurism

  • Becker: “I read a lot of really bad writing by tech CEOs and people defending tech CEOs…” ([08:14])
  • Most tech leaders declined interviews for Becker’s book, knowing he approached with journalistic integrity.

• The Problem with Elevating Tech Leaders as Prophets ([29:44], [41:50])

  • Becker argues many tech billionaires, like Musk and Altman, promote technological fantasies rooted in misunderstood science fiction and "incoherent" ideas about AI and immortality.

Realistic Obstacles to Space Colonization

• Mars by 2050? Highly Unlikely ([10:09]–[13:10])

  • Elon Musk’s dream of a million Martians by 2050 is “definitely not happening… Getting anyone to Mars by 2050 and bringing them back alive… would be incredibly difficult.” – Adam Becker ([10:18])
  • Challenges: radiation (Mars lacks magnetic field/atmosphere), toxic Martian soil, food and oxygen logistics.
  • “If Mark Watney really had to do all the stuff he did in [The Martian], he’d come home and be dead of cancer in a couple of years.” – Becker ([11:43])

• Why the ISS isn’t Mars ([16:04])

  • ISS astronauts are still shielded by Earth's magnetosphere—a key difference.
  • On Mars, communication delays are 8–20 minutes each way; emergencies could require years to resolve or escape.

• Falsities in Sci-Fi Pop-Culture Visions

  • The notion you can “farm poop potatoes on Mars” is undercut by the discovery of perchlorates—“If you tried to farm poop potatoes on Mars, they’d be poisonous.” ([19:19])

Pursuit of Immortality & The Singularity

• Biological vs Digital Immortality ([19:40]–[25:02])

  • Practical hopes: organ replacement, delayed cell aging, healthspan extension.
  • “But you can’t replace the brain.” – Becker ([20:00])
  • Immortality dreams fixate on uploading consciousness (“the end game… is not just an extended lifespan, but real immortality by uploading their consciousness … into computers”).

• Critique of the Singularity ([20:24]–[23:32])

  • Ray Kurzweil’s notion of infinite progress through Moore’s Law is “based on a few really serious, like, flawed ideas. First, this idea that there is this single thing called intelligence. … That’s not really how intelligence works.” – Becker ([21:22])
  • Exponential growth is never a permanent law – “the law of nature about exponential trends is they end.” – Becker ([26:52])

• AGI: Reality Check ([29:19])

  • Sam Altman (OpenAI) claimed AGI might appear within two years and solve climate change.
  • Becker counters: “I’m pretty sure the first thing [an AGI] would do is say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t have built me.’” ([30:12])

Silicon Valley, Wealth, and Power

• The “Evangelical Business Model” & AI Hype ([32:19]–[32:55])

  • “It’s kind of like 21st century snake oil.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • AI is pitched as a universal problem-solver, but real issues like climate change are rooted in human behavior and greed: “We don’t need AI to tell us how to solve [climate change]… The issue is not technological. The issue is primarily… human behavior. It’s greed.” – Becker ([31:01])

• Billionaires Escaping Earth ([33:11])

  • “Are these people looking at us and going, you are completely screwed? … Why are they walking away?” – Tyson to Becker
  • Becker: Some are cynical profiteers, others genuinely believe. By seeking utopias off-Earth, they avoid the “complicated and messy and difficult” task of fixing human problems here.

• Power, Influence, and Hubris ([37:03])

  • “For the billionaires controlling [AGI], it’s like a genie. And for the rest of us, it’s an overlord.” – Becker
  • “Their hubris is their downfall.” – Brian Futterman ([37:14])

• The Problem with Wealth Accumulation ([54:45]–[57:03])

  • “The accumulation of wealth to a very few is always going to be a very bad thing for any society.” – Brian Futterman
  • Chuck Nice and Futterman highlight the disproportionate power money brings—“Money is always… it is straight, hard power.”

• Closing Diagnosis: Wisdom > Brilliance ([58:57]–[61:02])

  • Tyson: “It comes down to… how wise we are in the face of our own creations… Wisdom, I think, is an undervalued factor in all the brilliance people are exhibiting… That is a dose of wisdom coupled with our ingenuity. I’d like to think there’s more of that in our future…” ([58:57])

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Science Fiction: Cautionary Tale or Blueprint?

• Misreading Sci-Fi as Prophecy

  • “Science fiction shouldn’t remain fiction forever.” – Quoting Elon Musk ([47:27])
  • But as Becker notes, much iconic sci-fi is dystopian (Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Metropolis): “When they say that they want to make science fiction into reality, we need to ask, okay, which ones? Cause if you wanna make Neuromancer a reality, man, that’s bad news for everyone who’s not you.” ([49:38])

• Purpose of Sci-Fi ([39:11]–[50:05])

  • “Star Trek was never really about space. It’s about us here now. … It was always an allegory and not even a particularly veiled one.” – Becker
  • Sci-fi’s role is more alarm bell than roadmap: “A lot of [sci-fi] has always been about looking at the world as it is now and saying, okay, if we push that a little bit… maybe we can see it more clearly.” ([50:59])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I got a better title. We’re F’d.” – Brian Futterman, on Adam Becker’s book ([05:03])
• “If Mark Watney really had to do all the stuff he did in that movie, he’d come home and be dead of cancer in a couple of years.” – Becker ([11:43])
• “The law of nature about exponential trends is they end.” – Becker ([26:52])
• “It’s kind of like 21st century snake oil.” – Tyson ([32:31])
• “For the billionaires controlling it, it’s like a genie. And for the rest of us, it’s an overlord.” – Becker ([37:03])
• “Their hubris is their downfall.” – Futterman ([37:14])
• “Star Trek was never really about space. It’s about us here now… It was always an allegory and not even a particularly veiled one.” – Becker ([39:11])
• “We have the future in the palm of our hands. … It comes down to not how advanced the science is, … It has to do with how wise we are in the face of our own creations.” – Tyson’s parting thought ([58:57])

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [04:12] – Adam Becker introduction & book discussion
• [10:09] – Mars by 2050: the technical and biological challenges
• [16:04] – ISS vs. Mars: why deep space is categorically different
• [19:40] – Immortality dreams: biology, AI, and the singularity
• [21:22] – Why the singularity and superintelligence are flawed ideas
• [29:19] – Tech leaders’ fixation on AGI; will it really solve everything?
• [32:19] – Are AI and tech promises largely a fundraising hype?
• [33:11] – Billionaires “escaping” Earth: utopias or avoidance?
• [37:03] – The genie and the overlord: power, hubris, and AI control
• [39:11] – Star Trek, sci-fi, and reading fiction as allegory
• [47:27] – Science fiction as both inspiration and cautionary tale
• [54:45] – Problem of wealth concentration and societal power
• [58:57] – Final thoughts: wisdom, ingenuity, and the future

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a wide-ranging, entertaining, and critical look at futuristic dreams—debunking tech solutionism, highlighting the limits of science as literalized from sci-fi, and insisting on wisdom, humility, and a deeper understanding of human nature. Adam Becker underscores the gap between tech billionaires' ambitions and scientific reality, inviting listeners to question who shapes our future and for whose benefit. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s closing reflection presses for the importance of wisdom in directing humanity’s technological power—a cosmic perspective desperately needed as we shape what comes next.

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Adam Becker’s latest book:
“More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity”
[61:08]

Transcript

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Brian Futterman]

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[Chuck Nice]

Talk, but they spook me though with where they take the end of civilization.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But we don't know whose hands are on the steering wheel. We don't know who's shaping this future. And that's why there's concern.

[Brian Futterman]

Well, I know who's shaping it and I'm scared to death.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's you.

[Chuck Nice]

Let's watch Ch Scared to death as we discuss all the ways tech will be shaping our future. Coming right up. StarTalk Special Edition. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil Degrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And when I say special edition, it means I turn to my right and Gary O'Reilly is sitting there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hi, Nick.

[Chuck Nice]

Gary, hi. Where'd you get your British accent?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Stole it. Just a thief.

[Chuck Nice]

Chuck.

[Brian Futterman]

Hey.

[Chuck Nice]

Otherwise known as Lord Nice. But we can call you Lord of Comedy.

[Brian Futterman]

Lord of Comedy.

[Chuck Nice]

Can we do that? Okay, let's do that. So today we're gonna explore a vision of the future. And everybody's got their take on the future. Yes, everybody's Got everybody. But they all have different takes because they coming from a different place. So you gotta hear it all if you're gonna assimilate it into something that you're gonna take action on.

[Brian Futterman]

True. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

To either make something happen or prevent something else from happening.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So set us up, Gary.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, so what does the future hold for us? That'll include scientists, science fiction authors, tech CEOs and the so called futurists. Everyone has their own idea for the future technologies. Vision of AGI, nuclear fusion, the singularity, transhumanism, living on Mars, we've got to get to the moon first stuff.

[Chuck Nice]

No, you don't. You go straight to Mars.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do we?

[Chuck Nice]

Just don't get me started.

[Brian Futterman]

You go as to Mars.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And there you have it. Stuff we talk about all the time on starto. And in the face of new technological developments, we're quickly going from science fiction to science reality. But are we headed towards the utopian or are we headed towards dystopia that will get into? Are these technologies as close as they claim? Is science fiction always a guiding light? Or can it be a blueprint for those in power? So on that note, so who do we have today?

[Chuck Nice]

Adam Becker. Adam, welcome to StarTalk.

[Adam Becker]

Thanks for having me.

[Brian Futterman]

It's good to be here.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, you got a PhD in computational cosmology. Love it. That was back in 2012. And you wrote a book in 2018 called what is Real.

[Brian Futterman]

Yep.

[Chuck Nice]

That's audacious. You know, the Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. Sound like there's a little bit of philosophy in there.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Or a lot of philosophy.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, there's some, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And you just came out with a new book because you've been writing Science Popularizer Maniac ever since your PhD. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. So here's the title. I love this more. Everything Forever. AI overlords, Space empires, and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of Humanity.

[Brian Futterman]

Ooh, I got a better title. We're F'd.

[Chuck Nice]

You know, you should have had that title.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, you know, we considered it, but we just didn't think that it would really sell.

[Chuck Nice]

So my researchers told me that we've corresponded before because I've only just met you now, so what? Yes, that's true.

[Adam Becker]

So they told you we corresponded, but.

[Chuck Nice]

They didn't tell you.

[Brian Futterman]

Wow.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, okay. So what happened?

[Adam Becker]

So they set me up. That's what happened.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's so unlike us.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, God. Well, what happened?

[Chuck Nice]

What happened was exactly, I was a.

[Adam Becker]

Snot nosed kid in grad School and came to visit the museum and noticed what I thought was a mistake on one of the plaques. And so I emailed just the general Astronomy department email here at the Rose center. And then two weeks later, you wrote back. Oh.

[Brian Futterman]

And what did he say? Well, I'm sure I wouldn't polite. Was there a mistake? And did Neil school you if there wasn't?

[Adam Becker]

Whether there was a mistake or not was a matter of some debate.

[Brian Futterman]

Oh, really?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. So the question was the size of the universe.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, it's a plaque. Oh, okay.

[Brian Futterman]

There it is. Yeah, well, that's still a debate today.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, no, not in the way that he's describing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No.

[Brian Futterman]

No, not like this.

[Chuck Nice]

So ideal in observables. Okay.

[Brian Futterman]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

As do many practical scientists.

[Brian Futterman]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

So when you speak of what the universe is doing, you speak of what you see it's doing.

[Brian Futterman]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

And we can see galaxies whose light has been traveling for 14 billion years. 13.8. Right. Right. And so we will loosely say it's definitely the age of the universe, but we speak of the size. We can be a little sloppy and say it's 13.8 billion light years to the edge of the universe, but. But that's not strictly accurate. What you have to do is, since then, the universe has been expanding.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So where's that galaxy now? It's like 45 billion light years away, but you can't see it, so you have to stick it into a model of the expansion rate of the universe and come out with a number that you cannot observe. So you were being snot nosed about that, but that's fine. Tell me I was polite. Cause I think I'm polite.

[Adam Becker]

You were polite. You're polite. We had a little back and forth, and eventually. Eventually, I think you were getting a little impatient.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, really?

[Adam Becker]

And you said, why don't you make a presentation of this to a wide audience in a way that you think is.

[Chuck Nice]

I remember that correspondence now. Okay, okay, I get it.

[Adam Becker]

So you said that.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Adam Becker]

And then I went up and did a podcast about it and sent it to you.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. All right. So in your book, Overlords, Space Empire, you just go all out.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And you're coming to it from a physicist with a philosophy flavor. So you're gonna see this in ways pure tech people wouldn't, or politicians, or just regular everyday folk walking up and down the street. So how did you prepare for this book?

[Adam Becker]

I read a lot of really bad writing by tech CEOs and people defending tech CEOs online, writing long essays and books about why the future is inevitably going to be all about super intelligent AI. Why the future is going to inevitably.

[Chuck Nice]

Be about these are tech people writing all this?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. Some of these things were ideas that I had the expertise to say, okay, no, that's not true, and here's why. But some of them were ideas about like, you know, biology or areas of physics that I don't have expertise in or, you know, other things. And so then I went and interviewed a bunch of people who have expertise in those areas.

[Chuck Nice]

Now you're playing journalist in that capacity?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like read books on those subjects and, you know, pulled out what I needed and stuff like that. And then I tried to interview, you know, the tech CEOs themselves and almost all of them said no.

[Chuck Nice]

Right?

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah. Because they're looking at you as somebody who is intellectually honest with some integrity and they're like, we can't talk to you.

[Adam Becker]

Okay.

[Brian Futterman]

Because they know they're full of crap.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, well, I think that they just didn't see any reason to. Right. You know, like, I was very honest. I said, you know, like, this is a book that's going to take a critical look at you.

[Brian Futterman]

That was your problem. Well, if you had gone in and said, I'm enamored of the fact that AI is going to be such an integral part of the next chapter in human history and that you guys, you guys are the progenitors of this amazing tech, they would have been like, come on in, let's talk for a second.

[Chuck Nice]

No, you don't meet an appointment. Stop by any time. That was your first mistake.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, man.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, well, but you know, I got journalistic integrity.

[Brian Futterman]

All right, well good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well look, let's explore some of the scenarios, okay, that are going to be potentially the reality of us as a human race.

[Chuck Nice]

Just go right on down the list.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, the laundry list. Okay, well, let's look at Mars in 2050.

[Brian Futterman]

Oh yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How are we saying maybe, maybe not? You're kidding me. Oh, that's definitely going to happen.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Elon Musk, he has said he wants to put a million people on Mars by 2050 to have a self sustaining civilization that will survive there even if, you know, the rockets from Earth stop coming because there's been an asteroid strike or nuclear war or something here. That's definitely not happening. There are a lot of reasons why that's not happening. Getting anyone to Mars by 2050 and bringing them back alive or just having them live there for a while, that would be incredibly difficult. The challenge is just to put boots On Mars the way that we did on the moon are enormous. Right. Just learning how to keep someone alive in deep space that far away from Earth for as long as it takes to get to Mars, stay on Mars, come back. We do not know how to do that yet, Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

That's the problem. They want to put boots on Mars instead of sneakers on Mars. Sneaker contract. They'll pay the whole way.

[Brian Futterman]

Nike would have put. Nike would have been there by now.

[Adam Becker]

They just do it.

[Brian Futterman]

Just do it. Well, please.

[Chuck Nice]

It ain't about boots. It's about sneakers.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, I mean, so what are the biggest challenges of going that far into space? Is it radiation or.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, there's radiation. And that's not just when you're in space, it's also when you're on Mars. Right. You know, the two things that primarily protect us from radiation here on Earth are our, you know, the Earth's magnetic field and the thick atmosphere that Earth has. Mars doesn't have either of those things.

[Brian Futterman]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

So when you're on the surface of Mars, you're getting pretty much the same radiation dose that you do like out in space. And that's not good. Right. You know, like the thing that I tell people is the movie the Martian is science fiction. One of the things that's science fiction about it is if Mark Watney really, you know, had to do all the stuff that he did in that movie, he'd come home and he'd be dead of cancer in a couple of years because he had too much radiation exposure.

[Chuck Nice]

Hanging out on Mars.

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Brian Futterman]

I'm Brian Futterman and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

[Adam Becker]

This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Brian Futterman]

What about the iss? If Scott Kelly could stay up there.

[Chuck Nice]

For a year, One of the twins. One of the twins. One stayed on Earth and one.

[Adam Becker]

Right, yeah.

[Brian Futterman]

Why couldn't you just extend that for whatever time necessary to go to Mars? Even if it's not to live there, if it's just to go there and dig a hole and come back.

[Adam Becker]

Right. So there's a couple of things. First of all, on the iss, they're still in the Earth's magnetic field. They still have a bunch of the shielding.

[Brian Futterman]

Oh wait, and what's that called, Neil? Wait, the field that goes all the way out like that?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah.

[Brian Futterman]

Oh, it's called the magnetic field. No, it's not the magnetic. It's the magnetosphere.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah. Think of X Men.

[Brian Futterman]

Yes, the magnetosphere. Go ahead.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. It is like the X Men. Yeah, They've still got that protection. Also, if something goes wrong on the iss, they'll be back on the surface of the Earth in a matter of hours. Like they can just abort and come back home. Right.

[Chuck Nice]

At most, I mean, you can, you come out, you're down within a half hour.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

The hours is you want to line up so you don't land in the middle of sharks.

[Adam Becker]

Right, right, exactly, yeah, yeah. So you can get out easy. And you can also have a real time conversation with people on the ground because they're, you know, they're not that high up. And so the speed of light delay with the conversation doesn't matter. On Mars, you know, it's a minimum of something like, I think eight minutes each way and a maximum of something like 15 or 21 way. And so if you send out a message, you are waiting at least 15, 20 minutes to get a message back.

[Brian Futterman]

Maybe a good message.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Brian Futterman]

It better not be like, so how's it going over.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah, put some content in there or watch out for the cliff.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly, yeah. And the other thing is like, if you have a problem on the surface of Mars and you want to come back, that's going to take you at least nine months, maybe more. If you happen to be near a launch window where, you know, the Earth and Mars are like, wow positions. If you're not near launch window, it could be well over a year before you can come Home.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. A full up round trip mission to Mars with ideal launch and return parameters is multiple years.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. But you can get to the moon and back in a week in a news cycle.

[Brian Futterman]

Yep.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So if we overcome the logistics of getting from Earth to Mars. If, big, big if. Where are they gonna live? Cause they're not gonna go out there and start building.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And why don't you just build a little sort of half underground thing that shields you from.

[Adam Becker]

Sure, yeah. Well, so then you have other problems. Right. You know, there's no air. You got to bring in oxygen or, you know, do some sort of reaction to make oxygen on the surface, which. Yeah, you can do that, but it's not the easiest thing. You got to bring in all your food. Can't grow it there. The Martian surface, the dirt on Mars is filled with toxic chemicals. You're going to have a hard time getting it out of stuff because it's very fine. It's not.

[Brian Futterman]

It's going to be. That's going to be here on Earth soon too. Let's be for real.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, but we know you can grow poop potatoes on Mars. Yes, we know that.

[Adam Becker]

Yes, exactly. Yeah. There was a proof of concept in the movie the Martian.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, duh.

[Adam Becker]

No, but actually it's funny though, the guy who wrote the book, what's his name?

[Chuck Nice]

Andy Weir.

[Adam Becker]

Andy Weir, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

In fact, we had him on the show. Yeah, he's in our archives.

[Adam Becker]

He has said that the discovery of these particular poisonous compounds in the Martian surface called perchlorates. He didn't know about that when he wrote the book because it wasn't widely known. And so now we know if you tried to, you know, farm poop potatoes on Mars, they'd be poisonous.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So that's the unknown. Unknown.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Yeah, right, right, exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that's, that's still out there. Okay, that's not going to work. We're not, we're not thinking that for some time. Functional immortality. And there's a lot of ways we can get there. I mean, right. The, the biological immortality of growing organs in pigs and things and then transplanting is one thing, but are we getting towards singularity?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, so, I mean, the biological replacing organs thing, you know, you can't, you can't replace the brain.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, not yet.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

I mean, not yet.

[Brian Futterman]

I'll never do it with that attitude, Sonny.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That was more a British approach to.

[Adam Becker]

Things rather than America.

[Chuck Nice]

Someone needs a better attitude about things.

[Adam Becker]

But yeah, this idea of the singularity, that like that we're gonna get to this Point where technology in general, and AI in particular gets faster and faster and smarter and smarter until, you know, it, like, gains godlike powers. It's a science fiction story, but what.

[Chuck Nice]

Does it have to do with living forever?

[Adam Becker]

Well, so the idea is that then you get this godlike AI that grants us immortality. It has, like, essentially magic powers, or it finds a way to take humanity.

[Chuck Nice]

Smart enough to figure out how to make us live forever.

[Brian Futterman]

Of mortality. I gotcha.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But whose mortality problem is it going to solve?

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, well, it doesn't have one.

[Chuck Nice]

No problems at all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Are there a select few or is this open for everybody?

[Brian Futterman]

Oh, well, we know for a fact that it's going to be for a select few and it's going to be for the people who are the gatekeepers to AI. We're already seeing that now, but go ahead.

[Adam Becker]

Well, but the other thing is that the whole idea is kind of, you know, nonsense to begin with. Like, this idea of singularity is. Well, it's based on a few really serious, like, flawed ideas. First, this idea that there is this, like, single thing called intelligence. You can just ramp it up or down in a computer, and it can just make itself more and more intelligent. That's not really how intelligence works. Intelligence is, like a really complicated thing. It's not one number. And also the usual way, talking about the singularity, that the main popularizer of the singularity, Ray Kurzweil, has.

[Chuck Nice]

Who's been on the show. Who's been on the show in our archives, these little commercials. I love that. Okay, go on.

[Adam Becker]

But, yeah, Kurzweil, you know, he says it's.

[Chuck Nice]

And he came out with a second book. Yes, the first one was A Singularity Is Near.

[Adam Becker]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

You know the title of his second book.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. The Singularity is Nearer. Nearer. Yeah. No, I tell people that, they don't believe me. I'm like, go, look it up.

[Chuck Nice]

It's out there. It is.

[Brian Futterman]

His next book coming out is going to be called Almost There. Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

No, he thinks that Moore's Law, this idea that computer chips are just going to get faster and more powerful and double in speed every 18 months. He thinks that this is this specific instance of a more general law of accelerating returns in technology and in nature. And he says he's traced it all the way back to the beginning of the universe and that it shows that a singularity is coming in, like, 2045 or something like that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Precisely.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, precisely on October 12th.

[Brian Futterman]

Oh, man, that's. That sounds to me like the end is near.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I know it is.

[Brian Futterman]

It's telling me, like, the people are like, I don't need a bank account. You know, Jesus is coming back next.

[Chuck Nice]

You know, Larry's near.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The.

[Chuck Nice]

The end is near. That's what he should have made.

[Brian Futterman]

No.

[Adam Becker]

So it's funny that you say that. Right. Because he's got a picture of himself and the singularity is near with one of those poster boards on him that says the singularity is near. And there's an AI research group that's inspired by these ideas. A singularity called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Miri, they don't give their employees 401ks because they think the end is near.

[Chuck Nice]

That's some cheap ass.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I know, right?

[Brian Futterman]

Wow.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. I still wanna get to the immortality. Because you haven't addressed the fact that right now, with or without AI, there's a lot of research on not just replacing organs, though that might be an awful thing, but delaying the aging functions of your cells.

[Adam Becker]

Totally. That could work out to extend human lifespan or health span a certain amount, period.

[Chuck Nice]

I like the health span. That's a good word.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Brian Futterman]

What do the Galapagos. What do they live to be, like.

[Chuck Nice]

100 and the tortoises. The tortoises.

[Adam Becker]

Tortoises, yeah. Like 100 or 200 and something.

[Brian Futterman]

80.

[Chuck Nice]

They have AI. So that's the.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Remember we spoke with Venki Ramakrishnan.

[Brian Futterman]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

He was telling us about the Greenland shark.

[Brian Futterman]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Being about 800 years. 800 years?

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

That's crazy. Yeah. It is possible that some biotechnology will be developed that will radically extend human lifespan or health. Spanish, maybe.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

But what these guys are talking about with singularity, they're generally not talking about that as the end game. The end game they have in mind is not just an extended lifespan, but real immortality by uploading their consciousness into.

[Brian Futterman]

I was gonna say that's what. That's really where this is going before we get to.

[Chuck Nice]

That's the immortality.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

The immortality of your mind. Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

But forget your body before we get to.

[Brian Futterman]

To that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do we visit transhumanism? Do we get. And how are we.

[Chuck Nice]

What is transhumanism?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's what I'm just saying.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

It's this idea that you can use technology to transcend, like, the limits of human biology and physics.

[Chuck Nice]

Aren't we kind of already doing that? Which is why we live twice as long as people 150 years ago.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, there's. There's definitely so much.

[Chuck Nice]

If we told them what we're doing, we know about nutrition, vitamins, will say, what's a vitamin. We got vaccines, we got this, we got. What's a vaccine we got, right. Aren't we already transhuman compared to what the age nature would require us to be dead at?

[Adam Becker]

Totally. Yeah. Like, look, I think that we have used technology to make many things much better about being alive. Like, that's just true. The question is, does that trend continue indefinitely?

[Chuck Nice]

Right?

[Brian Futterman]

No, because RFK is gonna make sure we go back to when we lived half as long as we did. That's what's happening.

[Adam Becker]

Let's be clear. That's RFK Jr. Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So if we go to this uploaded consciousness and that becomes reality, that just doesn't exist without a power source.

[Brian Futterman]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

The thing about the singularity and like Kurzweil's idea about like this accelerating returns in Moore's Law just going on forever and you know, this power source thing, Right. The idea that it would need increasing levels of power as well. And so this leads to this sort of exponential drive for materials and power. And the thing that Kurzweil forgets is exponential trends are not like laws of nature. The law of nature about exponential trends is they end.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right?

[Chuck Nice]

They have to end.

[Brian Futterman]

They have to end.

[Adam Becker]

Right. And it's because ultimately limited resources like energy. Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Although when we talk about how much longer a charge in our computer lasts today compared with the early days of laptops, part of that is better batteries, but also part of that is more efficient chips. And when we get to quantum computing, where much more computing happens with much less of an energy draw, it could be that we're coming at it from the other side, where the energy needs are dropping, thereby not requiring the power supplies necessary. How long? Well, in my memory. Not your memory. I got a few years on you. A room this size was necessary to cool a computer, otherwise a computer would overheat and the computer's doing like four function mathematics, so the efficiencies matter. All these tubes that had to be kept cool. So it's not obvious that it's a linear exponential. Can I say that? Where the exponential is just going to hit a limit because you can come at it from other directions.

[Brian Futterman]

However, the other thing is, though, in nature, the exponential acceleration, it's more like the law of diminishing returns is more likely than the law of exponential acceleration.

[Adam Becker]

Well, no, that's actually exactly right. Yeah. Because there's, you know, if you look at the history of Moore's Law, like how it is that the semiconductor industry name for. Oh yeah, named for Gordon Moore.

[Chuck Nice]

Gordon Moore, co founder of Intel Yes.

[Adam Becker]

And if you look at how intel and other semiconductor companies actually made the chip smaller and faster over that time, it's not a law of nature, it's a decision, a business decision that these companies made. And in order to keep that trend going, they had to invest more and more and more money just to keep the same sort of space level of doubling to keep that exponential trend going. And eventually it did stop. Right. Moore's Law is done. It's over. Because you can't make silicon transistors smaller than an atom of silicon.

[Brian Futterman]

Right?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. And what they're doing now is just adding more chips. So the more powerful computers are not smaller and denser, they're just bigger now.

[Adam Becker]

Yep.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. And they're putting them on top.

[Chuck Nice]

You're stacking them bits. Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So the, the solution in the minds of these tech billionaires is to arrive at a superintelligence to get at an AGI.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I mean, Sam Altman is saying within the next two years, that would be achievable.

[Adam Becker]

That's the reason I think he said, yeah, right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So they're looking at that as being the solution to this problem where we're saying we're not sure if it will be exponential. We're not sure where the end point is.

[Adam Becker]

They're looking at it as the solution to every problem.

[Chuck Nice]

None of the tech bros have a degree in physics the way you do. So what are you bringing to the table that they don't see?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, they believe that AGI, I mean, Altman has said that AGI is gonna solve every problem, including global warming, which is crazy.

[Chuck Nice]

Why it's crazy? Well, because if it's smarter than you and you can't solve it, why is it crazy to think it could solve it?

[Adam Becker]

Well, first of all, the artificial intelligence systems that they're building now are just drawing more and more and more energy. If you did build one that could solve global warming and you turn it on and said, how do you solve global warming? I'm pretty sure the first thing it would do is say, well, you shouldn't have built me.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, turn me off. That'll help.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

That would be a good test of its own self preservation. You are causing most of our global warming. What's the best solution? Does it turn yourself off?

[Adam Becker]

But I mean, the other thing is that we don't need AI to tell us how to solve it. We already know what the solution is. The issue is not like that insufficient intelligence has been thrown at the problem. The issue is primarily not even a technological problem at all at this point, Aside from carbon capture, the main issue is human behavior.

[Brian Futterman]

It's greed.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly. Yeah, it's greed.

[Brian Futterman]

It's greed, Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

Greed is good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, God.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. But yeah, the other thing is just. Just that when Altman talks about. He's talked about things like, oh, AI means that in 10 years, college graduates are going to be getting cool jobs exploring the solar system. Right. And I can just look at that and say, well, that's bullshit. Or he says, AI is going to discover new laws of physics and that's going to remove limitations that we have in the world today. And I'm like, well, discovering new laws of physics. I mean, putting aside whether or not the AI can do that, that does not always remove limitations. Sometimes new laws of physics, in fact.

[Brian Futterman]

A lot of times create a limitation.

[Adam Becker]

Create a limitation, exactly. Einstein, with relativity, discovered a limitation in the speed of light. Right. Newton didn't know that there was any such limitation.

[Brian Futterman]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Brian Futterman]

So is it possible that all of these. I'll call them postulates, because they're not. That they're making. Right. Are just a means of hyping up what they're doing to keep the revenue stream coming to them? Like, let's be honest, if I tell you this thing is going to solve everything. Right.

[Chuck Nice]

I give you my money, you give me.

[Brian Futterman]

Right? Yeah, you give me some money.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Brian Futterman]

I mean, it's kind of like, not.

[Chuck Nice]

Just me, the government will give you.

[Brian Futterman]

No, that's what I'm saying. Everybody's going to give you money. It's kind of like 21st century snake oil.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is that what you're telling me?

[Brian Futterman]

Something different?

[Chuck Nice]

I was.

[Brian Futterman]

It's kind of the evangelical business model of a television evangelist. Like, the whole idea is, hey, you got problems and these problems can be addressed. They can be solved. All you gotta do is send me some money. That's all you gotta do. And I'm sending you this little blessing cloth.

[Chuck Nice]

And you know, Chuck was a preacher in his earlier career, and if he.

[Brian Futterman]

Isn'T, he will be in the same one day. I made the wrong decision. Preaching is good money.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Everything we've discussed has been about being somewhere else.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

About not solving problems here.

[Brian Futterman]

Yep.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So are these people looking at us and going, you are completely screwed? Yeah, we're out of here. And we're the ones that can afford it, and we're the ones with the tech to be able to achieve it. Why are they walking away? What's in their mind? What's their thinking about turning their back and moving?

[Adam Becker]

Well, they Think that.

[Chuck Nice]

But they didn't grant you an interview.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, they didn't grant you.

[Chuck Nice]

So you don't really know what's on their mind.

[Brian Futterman]

Oh, you can read enough of their.

[Adam Becker]

Stuff to have an interview.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, I was gonna say, what's going on? All right.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. They've given other people interviews who are nicer to them.

[Chuck Nice]

You weren't charming enough.

[Adam Becker]

Apparently not. I mean, I just, I sent an email, a couple of them were almost willing to do it and then they changed their minds. Probably because, you know, they, they read the email again. They're like, oh, he's going to disagree with us. Why should we talk to him? But whatever. Some of them are being very cynical, like the way that you were talking about.

[Brian Futterman]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

And saying, oh, you know, I can just do this. And this is, you know, I can claim that all of these things are coming in the future and this is a way of, you know, generating more profit and getting people to give me more money. Some of them, I think, genuinely believe it. The idea that the future has to be elsewhere. I think some of it is just from this sense that they have that things are bad here on Earth and that trying to solve problems here on Earth would be complicated and messy and difficult and that somehow going to space would give them a fresh start, which is not true. You can't escape, you know, politics. You can't escape.

[Chuck Nice]

We're still human nature.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly. You can't escape human nature. Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

So how does an AI overlord plug into these scenarios?

[Adam Becker]

Well, the idea is that they build a sort of AI God, and it just does whatever they want.

[Chuck Nice]

And this would be an AGI? Yeah, yeah. Artificial General intelligence.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So when we normally think of AI, we think of a task driven AI. It can drive a car, it can make a perfect cup of coffee, it can fly an airplane. But AGI transcends all of that. Yeah, it can just learn about anything and might even be achieve consciousness.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, well, it would.

[Chuck Nice]

Like Skynet.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, absolutely. Because it's. We are AGI. That's what we are. We are just, you know, the equivalent of what they want as AGI.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

AGI. 0.10.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, we're 0.10.

[Chuck Nice]

No, 0.1. 0.1.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

So, yeah, no, that's right.

[Chuck Nice]

I mean, no, no, but, but the point is. Yeah, whatever. We are AGI. So how long it take you to go to school to open up all your textbooks and learn from them and get an exam? AGI will do what?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, it's supposed to be able to do all that much faster.

[Brian Futterman]

20 minutes.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, 20 minutes.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, exactly right.

[Chuck Nice]

You'll get your college degree in 20 minutes.

[Adam Becker]

Well, and the other thing is like those AI systems, all the things that you mentioned, right. Make a perfect cup of coffee, fly an airplane, drive a car. The AI systems we have right now can't do any of those things without human supervision. Right. Even those self driving cars that are all over the streets of San Francisco, there's actually a human remotely supervising and intervening pretty frequently.

[Chuck Nice]

So they tell you.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, that's funny.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Waymo is Google, if I remember correctly.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, that's right. And so AGI is supposed to be able to do all of these things like independently. Right. And then get smarter and smarter.

[Chuck Nice]

And the human is not even in the equation.

[Adam Becker]

Human's not in the equation. And you can just make it go, you can have it do all the things that a human does, but you can overclock it, make it go faster, think faster than a human. And then the idea is it gets smarter and smarter and achieves these like superhuman super intelligent powers. The idea then is that for the billionaires controlling it, it's like a genie. And for the rest of us, it's an overlord.

[Brian Futterman]

It's an overlord. But this is where they're so stupid. And this is where all really rich.

[Chuck Nice]

People, they're so stupid, they have hundreds of billions of dollars and you don't.

[Brian Futterman]

No, but that's what makes them so stupid.

[Chuck Nice]

I agree.

[Brian Futterman]

I'm serious. It's the fact that they have all this money and they've convinced themselves that they can transcend anything. Yep.

[Chuck Nice]

It's evidence of their own genius, right?

[Brian Futterman]

Yes. It's their hubris is their downfall. It's like the first dictator, the very first dictator was a guy, a little guy by the name of Julius Caesar. But Julius Caesar was the very first dictator. You know how he became dictator? They said, all right, how about you be dictator? But you do it for a year. If you create a godlike being, whether it's artificial general intelligence or whatever.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Brian Futterman]

And you think that you're going to control is not a God at that point. Yeah, you are the God. And that's really what they're saying. Yeah, they're saying we're God.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

And the thing is like, that's true. If they somehow did achieve it, who would be controlling it? But also it's an incoherent idea. Like it's not. The good news for the rest of us is that it's not like something that's Actually coming because it doesn't make any sense.

[Brian Futterman]

That's funny. It's like these guys are hanging their hat and you're just like, yeah, man, it's just a dumb idea.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, it is.

[Chuck Nice]

No, no, no. Incoherent. Sounds way more of a beat down. Your idea is incoherent. That's dunking on somebody right there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Is this a misconception of the science. The misconception of science fiction?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the ideas. And this goes back to, like, why are they trying to go somewhere else? I think they just get these ideas from science fiction and they just take it way too literally. They don't read it well. Right. Like. Like my favorite science fiction, the science fiction I grew up with was Star Trek. Right. The thing about Star Trek is. Yeah, okay, they're on the starship Enterprise. They're out there exploring strange new worlds, new life, new civilizations. All that jazz, Right? Finish it. To boldly go where no one has gone before.

[Chuck Nice]

Thank you. Not to go boldly.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Not to go boldly.

[Brian Futterman]

No.

[Adam Becker]

We can split the infinity.

[Chuck Nice]

Split that infinity, yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Hell yeah. But the thing is though, Star Trek was never really about space. It's about like us here now. Right. And it was. It was always an allegory and not even a particularly veiled one. Right. I seem to recall an episode where Kirk and Spock were literally punching Nazis with swastikas. Right. And then there was also.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

And there was also the episode with, like, the two dudes and one of them, like, the left half of his face was white and the right half was black and the other one, it was switched.

[Chuck Nice]

Frank Gorshin. Gorshin.

[Adam Becker]

Frank Gorshin, yes.

[Chuck Nice]

He played the riddler. Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

So it's obvious why we persecute them. They're black on their right side, we're black on their left side. That was kind of blunt.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. But Star Trek is always blunt, Right. And that's kind of part of the fun, right?

[Brian Futterman]

It is.

[Adam Becker]

But these guys watch Star Trek and they're like, oh, yeah, warp drive's cool, let's do that.

[Brian Futterman]

And miss the whole point of Star Trek in the process Because Star Trek is utopian ideals in a galaxy that's descending towards dystopia and they're fighting, fighting it every step of the way.

[Chuck Nice]

Could it be that to become a tech bro in the first place.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

You had to be really focused on a level to the exclusion of your social life and possibly even your personal hygiene. As a result, you achieve these Places. And part of your life's training did not include the emotions and feelings of others or how people think about the world or what their desires are. And you think that what you accomplish is for their best interest, even though you have no idea who they are.

[Brian Futterman]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Is that a fair.

[Adam Becker]

Is that a. I think that's right. Right. Like, the way I like to talk about it is, you know, for someone who claims to care about humanity so much, Elon Musk doesn't really seem to care very much about. About humans. Right. Yeah.

[Brian Futterman]

And isn't he the guy who said empathy is a bad thing?

[Adam Becker]

Right. Yeah. But he's also said I'm save humanity. Yeah, he did. But he's also said I'm going to save humanity by taking us to Mars. And like, buddy, first of all, no. And second, I don't think that you actually care that much about other humans. And I think that what you said is exactly right. Except you also have to add in. They think that the fact that they succeeded in business, which a lot of that's just luck is proven.

[Chuck Nice]

And government contracts.

[Adam Becker]

Right, and government contracts.

[Chuck Nice]

Such subsidies. Yeah. For the car business as well as the rocket business.

[Adam Becker]

Absolutely. But like Musk and others. Right. Like Altman and Andreessen and these other people, they all think that this is proof that they are, like, the smartest people who've ever lived. These are the richest people who've ever lived. Lived. And that's just not how anything works.

[Chuck Nice]

Just remind me, Altman is OpenAI.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Sam Altman is CEO of OpenAI.

[Chuck Nice]

Let's go down that list.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, absolutely. And Marc Andreessen is the head of Andreessen Horowitz, the biggest tech venture capital firm.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, so you need that to get the confusions. So OpenAI is what gives us chatgpt. Got it. Got it.

[Adam Becker]

That's right.

[Chuck Nice]

And then, of course, we all know Elon is Branson a player.

[Adam Becker]

Branson is less of a player in Silicon Valley.

[Chuck Nice]

What role in the tech sector does Bezos play? I mean, you know, he's got his own rockets.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, he's got his own rockets. He's also, like, owns most of the infrastructure of the World Wide Web.

[Brian Futterman]

This idea. Aws. Yeah, aws.

[Chuck Nice]

Most people don't realize. Which stands for what?

[Adam Becker]

Stands for what? Amazon Web Services. Basically, most of the clouds. Most of the cloud. Most of the actual computers that compose the cloud belong to Jeff Bezos.

[Chuck Nice]

So Amazon.com is like window dressing on a whole other operation.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

That matters to him.

[Brian Futterman]

The real operation.

[Chuck Nice]

That's why? He doesn't have to make a buck selling you a. He's going to sell you a book for 80% off or something, right?

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Well, after this, I'll be lucky if he sells my book at all.

[Chuck Nice]

No, no, no, we're going good here. Yeah, let me remind you.

[Brian Futterman]

But I'll say these guys.

[Chuck Nice]

Let's get the title of the book back in here. Just give us the title again.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, it's more Everything Forever AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humans.

[Chuck Nice]

There it is. That's what we're talking about. Yeah. Damn. Okay.

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[Brian Futterman]

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So when we think about the science fiction and I think Neil's point about the isolation of these people growing up, if we think about the science fiction and you think about certain parts with Star Trek, then maybe Matrix or Blade Runner and you go through the laundry list.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How have they co opted these and kind of bolted this to that and that to this.

[Chuck Nice]

You think they come up with influence by sci fi?

[Adam Becker]

Oh yeah, totally. I mean, Elon Musk tweeted that science fiction shouldn't remain fiction forever.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, that's fair. I'm doing that.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I sort of understand like what he means, but which science fiction.

[Brian Futterman]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

Blade Runner's a dystopia. Right. And then he comes out and says that the cybertruck, that ugly piece of crap looks like something that Blade Runner would drive. Which Blade Runner is not the name of any character in Blade Runner, but we can put that aside.

[Chuck Nice]

He's a professional in Blade Runner.

[Adam Becker]

Yes, exactly. That's great.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But there's a number of dystopian so.

[Chuck Nice]

Like oh yeah, but they're all ready.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Player one, is that they're all on this topic.

[Brian Futterman]

Some of them are.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, right, there's. There's aspirational science fiction, like Star Trek. Right, right.

[Brian Futterman]

But like, even that is, like I said, and there can be. They're the bright spot.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, they.

[Brian Futterman]

The Federation is the bright spot.

[Adam Becker]

The Federation's definitely the bright spot. Yeah, no, no, that's true. But like, there's a tweet that lives rent free in my head about a thing called the Torment Nexus. This is actually in my book at the very beginning.

[Chuck Nice]

The Torment Nexus.

[Adam Becker]

The Torment Nexus.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm afraid to ask what this is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're going there.

[Chuck Nice]

We're going there.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, we're going there. We're going there.

[Chuck Nice]

Let's do it.

[Adam Becker]

So the tweet goes like this. Science fiction author in my book, I created the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale tech billionaire. At long last, we've created the Torment Nexus. From classic sci fi novel. Don't create the Torment Nexus. This is what these guys are doing. Right, Right.

[Chuck Nice]

They're Skynet.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, right, they're Skynet. But also, if you go back and look at the classic cyberpunk novels by somebody like say, William Gibson. Gibson, right. Who I think is a great novelist, a lot of those novels, like Neuromancer are about the concentration of wealth and power and the way that the wealthy can and will use technology to remove themselves from the rest of us and accumulate wealth and power while insulating themselves from their consequences. And that's exactly what we see happening. And so when they say that they want to make science fiction into reality, we need to ask, okay, which ones? Cause if you wanna make Neuromance a reality, man, that's bad news for everyone who's not you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So how much of science fiction has always been a silent alarm call, A silent warning?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I mean, go back to Fritz Lang and Metropolis back in 1927.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Metropolis is very much like a movie about the need to keep emotional intelligence with pace with technology.

[Chuck Nice]

I didn't get that at it, but I believe you. I'm just saying that's a deep read. To me, it was just a weird alien bots.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, it's a weird movie for sure. Like at the end they say the heart and the hand must work together or something like that. Right. And so that's how I read that. At least I think that science fiction, a lot of it has always been about looking at the world as it is now and saying, okay, if we push that That a little bit. If we want to take a look at this situation in a different context and understand it in a different way by removing it from all of the sort of social and cultural connotations that a particular thing has here and now we put it somewhere else and maybe we can see it more clearly. Right. It's what Star Trek does. It's what like, oh, my favorite science fiction author, Ursula, the goal. She did this over and over again. Looking at poverty, inequality, capitalism, gender, you name it. Right.

[Chuck Nice]

So Rod serling back in 1959.

[Adam Becker]

Sure. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

He's interviewed about this new show called Twilight Zone. And he says it, he said, look, there's stories I'm telling that you could not tell in just a dramatic way. It has to be set at a time and a place that is not. Not you. And now, otherwise I couldn't get away with these stories. And only then do people say, wait, might that be me? But if it's blatant and in your face, you reject it. And he said in the end, we just trying to sell soap. He understood the situation, but tell an entertaining story, but said it in another place. I just looked up when Skynet achieved consciousness, it was 214am Eastern Time, August 29, 1997.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, wow.

[Brian Futterman]

Oh, wow.

[Chuck Nice]

Because the movie was 1984.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, the movie, I think was 84.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah. So that was. That was only 13 years in the future.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, I hate when they do that. Go far enough. Where?

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, I have a whole list.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, that was the whole thing with Star Trek. It was set something like 200 years.

[Chuck Nice]

I got a whole list.

[Brian Futterman]

I'm saying go safely into the future.

[Chuck Nice]

Do you know? So Soylent Green was 2022.

[Adam Becker]

Oh God.

[Brian Futterman]

Well, that's why I'm eating people now.

[Chuck Nice]

It's people.

[Brian Futterman]

Everybody doesn't realize. That's what the pandemic was about, guys.

[Chuck Nice]

Cause it happened.

[Brian Futterman]

Enjoy that burger.

[Chuck Nice]

So what else is in your laundry list here?

[Adam Becker]

Basically, I think that what they want, this vision that they have is this idea of going to space and living for forever, right? And so a lot of it is really about space colonization, going out and expanding to take over the universe. That's like. Because they don't want to just stop with Mars. They want to put Dyson spheres around every single star in the observable universe and like collect all of that energy. And that's. That's not going to happen, man.

[Chuck Nice]

That would be a Kardashian scale five, I think.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Where you control all the energy up of all stars in the Known universe. But doesn't the Borg have some similar energy?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Does the Borg want to assimilate everything? And what was it the phrase? They want to take your cultural and political distinctiveness and make it part of our own.

[Chuck Nice]

Speaking as a scientist, I kind of like what science brings society. And shouldn't that be enough? Why does everyone go to science fiction? Is there some morbid fascination with science gone bad? And isn't that a problem with us, not with the storytellers themselves?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, I don't think that science fiction is in and of itself the problem. Right, that's what I'm getting at here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I'm a huge sci fi fan. I'm also a scientist by training at least. The reason people find science fiction more compelling than science has a lot to do with the fact that it's not really about the future, that it's sort of these interesting what if scenarios that reflect on where we are right now. Right. If you tried to make a very realistic TV show about what life could actually be like 100 years from now and made it as realistic as possible, people probably wouldn't watch it because it would involve so much slang that doesn't make any sense to us right now. And, like, shifts in language.

[Chuck Nice]

Omg, Right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Right?

[Chuck Nice]

Wtf.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, but this is like. And so many little things like that, Right. It's not meant to be a realistic depiction of the future. So, I mean, part of me wants to say, you know, the problem isn't science fiction. The problem isn't science. The problem is, like, critical reading comprehension skills and money. Yeah, exactly.

[Brian Futterman]

So the accumulation of wealth to a very few is always going to be. Be a very bad thing for any society. But right now, unfortunately, there's a global society of billionaires that has popped up and they're.

[Chuck Nice]

When did you become Marxist?

[Brian Futterman]

What's that?

[Chuck Nice]

When did you become Marxist?

[Brian Futterman]

Believe me, I. I'm pretty cool with capitalism. I'm just all about guardrails. And I also believe that $2 billion is all you get to have. Okay, now that was pretty Marxist.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I think that was in Das Capitol. We can have $2 billion.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So basically you're saying not enough pure science education, but a hell of a lot of money is a bad part of the equation.

[Adam Becker]

And I agree completely.

[Chuck Nice]

So give us the takeaway thesis of your book.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, I mean, I actually do end the book saying that we should limit the amount of money that people should be able to.

[Chuck Nice]

To have. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Did Carl. Did Karl Marx write the F. I.

[Chuck Nice]

Don'T think you meant that. I don't think you meant that. What you mean is, yeah, we should limit how much power.

[Brian Futterman]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

The people who have money have.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Brian Futterman]

The problem with that is the more money you have. Money is always. And they call it soft power. It's not. It is straight, hard power because you are able to. To influence every corridor of power that there is when you have enough money.

[Chuck Nice]

No, this is great, man.

[Adam Becker]

You should follow me around and just say the stuff better.

[Chuck Nice]

Plenty of rich people.

[Brian Futterman]

But what you need to do is this is where progressive tax is a good thing. And we found that out under FDR back in the day, where basically you got to a certain amount of money and they were like, yeah, we going to take 90% of that.

[Adam Becker]

That.

[Brian Futterman]

Okay. And we're going to take it and we're going to do stuff. Because you wouldn't have been able to get that much money without all the things that we want to now support with the money that we helped you make. But you get to keep up until that point all, pretty much all your money. But when you get to this level, you going to give us that. Give you. Give me your. Give me that money.

[Adam Becker]

But yeah, no, I think that we as a society, like, because it's not just the billionaires, it's also that we as a society buy into this idea that the ultra wealthy know what they're talking about when it comes to something other than the ins and outs of having.

[Chuck Nice]

And they could be complete dumbasses.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, exactly.

[Brian Futterman]

No, you know what they're good at? They're good at rigging the game for them to make more money. Yep. That's what they're good at. And everybody thinks they're going to be rich one day. Yep. Okay. And so I did this, the calculation for a billionaire, what it takes just to make a billion dollars. And I think I used $500 an hour, which is a very good amount of money. $500 an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And I think it came out to like, you'd have to work 2304 or 4000 years or 2300 years. It's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous amount of money. That's what I'm saying.

[Adam Becker]

Well, you want to know what makes it even more ridiculous? Turn it around. You have a billion dollars. You want to get rid of it. You spend $500 an hour, 24 hours, and it takes you many times longer than a human life. What do you need more than a billion dollars for?

[Brian Futterman]

That's my point.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Brian Futterman]

So you get $2 billion and that's it.

[Chuck Nice]

I did that calculation with Elon Musk's wealth.

[Brian Futterman]

Oh, did you?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Yeah. You turn all of his money into hundred dollar bills.

[Brian Futterman]

Right.

[Chuck Nice]

And lay them end to end. And you ask how far does it go around the Earth? Well, you can go several times around the Earth with hundred dollar bills. Okay. And then there's some leftover money. Tape them together to a ribbon and you'll have enough leftover to go to the moon and back.

[Brian Futterman]

Yeah, see, that's ridiculous. At my point, that's fricking ridiculous. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So now we feel like we have.

[Brian Futterman]

To protect these people. This is what I don't understand the issue.

[Chuck Nice]

Their outsized power they have over laws, legislation, politicians.

[Brian Futterman]

Absolutely.

[Chuck Nice]

And the rest of us, I don't mind rich people, provided they're not trying to control my life.

[Brian Futterman]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, yeah, no, I agree.

[Brian Futterman]

I'm with you.

[Chuck Nice]

We gotta land this plane.

[Brian Futterman]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

I think I figured out what's going on here. A lot of smart people, a lot of wealthy people, a lot of people with influence trying to figure out what kind of future we will have, what kind of future we should have. And we all know that future will pivot on advances in science and technology, as civilization has always pivoted on science and technology. And so. But we're at a point now, and maybe we've been at this point before. So is this really any different? I don't know. But it seems like we have the future in the palm of our hands. And in the end, it comes down to not how advanced the science is, not how clever anybody is, not how it's not related to any of that. It has to do with how wise we are in the face of our own creations. And wisdom, I think, is an undervalued factor in all the brilliance people are exhibiting in their creations, in their discoveries, in their forces operating what the future of civilization will be. So if I may appeal to what it is to not only think about how great your inventions and discoveries are, but think about how you might harness. Harness it as you harness a horse. An unharnessed horse runs wild. You don't know what it's going to do next. A harness horse is still a horse, but it gets to do exactly what you need it to do and what you want it to do. And that is a dose of wisdom coupled with our ingenuity. I'd like to think there's more of that in our future. Maybe we'll avoid the disaster that the science fiction writers always portray, and that is a cosmic perspective. Dude, thank you for being on StarTalk.

[Adam Becker]

Thanks for having me.

[Chuck Nice]

This has been a lot of fun. Good luck with the book. Thank you. Give me the title of the book again.

[Adam Becker]

More Everything Forever. AI Overlords, Space empires and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity.

[Chuck Nice]

You got it right. He did it right. Well. He did right. All right, back to Berkeley you go.

[Adam Becker]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And.

[Chuck Nice]

And keep us thinking about the future.

[Adam Becker]

I will.

[Chuck Nice]

There's not enough of that going on.

[Adam Becker]

Thank you.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Be happy to come back anytime.

[Chuck Nice]

All right. This has been StarTalk Special Edition. You put together another one with your peeps.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Lane Unsworth as well. Take a large slice of credit.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Brian Futterman]

All right, Chuck, always a pleasure.

[Chuck Nice]

We're all good here. Neil Degrasse Tyson for StarTalk Special Edition, bidding you to keep looking up.

[Adam Becker]

He's Kenny Maine, the funny guy from espn.

[Chuck Nice]

Formerly, he's Cooper Manning, the more intelligent and handsome of the Manning brothers. And he's Brian Baumgartner.

[Adam Becker]

But to me, he'll always be Kevin from the office.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, you and everybody else together.

[Adam Becker]

We're the hosts of the new comedy golf podcast, we need a fourth from.

[Chuck Nice]

Smartless Media and SiriusXM.

[Brian Futterman]

It's like a cold beer after a round.

[Chuck Nice]

You hear the strangest and most bizarre.

[Brian Futterman]

Golf stories from our friends, athletes, celebrities and comedians.

[Chuck Nice]

It's all about how much we love golf and how. How much we hate golf. New episodes are out every week. Listen now and subscribe wherever you get your podcast could just be anywhere. Just on a couch. Doesn't matter. In Walmart's Huluville. Everyone ready their cart? Amazing Black Friday deals are about to start online and in the app. Such great deals to explore. Everything you love from tech, toys and more. The days to save and the ones to remember. It's only the 25th to the 30th of November. Set your alarms. Don't miss out. These deals are epic. Without a doubt, the who's are already. But are you? Walmart Black Friday deals await. Who knew.