Hello, welcome to Sock Talk
with JNab and the Sundance Kid.
We are going to explore the frontiers of
technology, art and the human experience.
Hello welcome to Sock
Talk, episode number six.
Thank you for tuning
in with us this week.
We've got a lot of fun things to talk
about today and to kick
us off we'll pass right
over to John.
Thanks Jamie.
I'm really glad to be
back here with you again.
Today I was hoping we could talk about
something that I witnessed earlier today.
I was virtually attending a seminar over
at the Aarhus Institute
of Advanced Studies where
my friend and colleague Dr. Lucas Esterle
was talking about
trusting machines and the
very excellent group that was hosting him
over at AIS ended up in a discussion more
about the meaning of trust and whether
you can actually trust a
machine or trust a tool.
It was interesting, it was a direction I
don't think Lucas had
anticipated and it certainly
wasn't one I had anticipated
in planning to attend the talk.
But I really wanted to
get your take on that.
Is there a difference between the kind of
trust you have in a
person and the kind of
trust you have in a thing and does a
computer or a robot or an
AI fall more into one camp
than the other?
Well, alright, to start with that
thought, how do you build trust?
I guess it's like anything in reality.
If I'm going to be climbing a tree I'm
going to reach up to
grab a branch, I'm going to
wiggle it a bit, slightly put my weight
on it and if I feel
that actually it's going
to hold my weight then I'll commit to
potentially endangering my
body and life because I'm now
comfortable that it will hold my weight.
And I see that as a methodology it's
probably not too dissimilar
where I put trust in other
things in my life, even with people.
You meet a strange on the street, you can
get a good vibe off
of them but you're not
going to give them your car keys and say
drive my car home or whatever.
You're going to need to build that trust.
And that being said there could be
institutionalized trust so if
I went to a rock climbing wall,
I forget what it's called, bouldering, if
I went bouldering I
would probably just trust
that the safety precautions have been
there and they've got
everything drilled in right
and I'm not going to need to check my
weight every single time.
And you trust my fingers probably because
they're not very
strong but I wouldn't have
the same methodology as a branch.
So that being said in that example with
the car keys, if
there's a valet service at a
very expensive hotel, sure, just straight
away hand that over.
So that's my immediate thoughts.
Now with machines I guess it also comes
with what it is, how many
times I've used it, what
company it is and those levels of
institutionalization, how they operate
and how much I am willing
to firstly know about them, how much do I
know about them, where
does that fall in with
my knowledge and yeah if it's out with my
knowledge I'm going to
do the branch method.
I'm going to slightly put my hand on it,
shiggle it a bit and
see how much I can trust
it.
That makes perfect sense to me and that's
not the direction the
conversation went in
at the seminar this morning.
Yeah, it's an interesting thing and I now
want to start asking more and more people
about this across different fields.
You've established I think long since
that you and I think in
similar ways so maybe it's
no surprise that we agree on this but the
example you gave is
almost identical to the
one that I gave.
I had put up my hand to ask a question
and this wonderful
discussion happened so instead
of asking a question of the speaker, of
Lucas, I asked a question
of the audience which was
are you all sitting on chairs?
Did you verify that they worked before
you decided to trust them?
The response was that's not trust.
Part of it I think was the dynamic of
different understandings of English.
Most of these folks were not English
first language and
there's always the realm of,
I don't want to say teacher error but
language drift across
dialects and across versions
of language.
So there's that possibility but I don't
want to use that to
discount the possibility
that the take that you and I and I think
Lucas had is very
mechanistic and maybe there is
a more interpretive social sort of
experiential version of the
interpretation because the
take that was repeated by several people
was essentially trust
is a feeling and because
a device can't have feelings maybe trust
can't be had from the
device or for the device which
again I have a hard time with the idea.
We trust in devices.
You trust the buttons on your jeans to
stay closed once you close them.
You trust your shoelaces to
stay tied some of the time.
You trust the street you're
driving on not to cave in.
But yeah there seem to be a very strong
impression that trust had
to involve a feeling and it
had to be between people.
And yeah.
Yeah I guess.
It's a tough one.
Yeah it is a tough one.
I mean if I was to strip it back to its
raw components
ultimately I'm looking at it as
confidence in an action a set of inputs a
set of inputs and my
confidence that the outputs
will be what I need them to be.
And it doesn't matter what system that is
if it's a person or a system or a road.
I have an expected outcome and a
confidence level of
what that outcome will be.
To me what it seems to be
if you break it all down.
I agree and I guess the distinction that
people were making or
that a couple of people were
making was that that's reliability.
That's not the same as trust.
And to me the only difference between
reliability and trust is
that reliability is the state
and trust is how you feel about it.
That makes sense to me.
But then suggesting that how you feel
about something means
that it's emotional and has
to involve things with emotions means
that you can't have
feelings about your favorite
car or you can't have feelings about your
favorite apartment or flat.
You can't have feelings about your
favorite color because
they don't have feelings to
have back at you.
That seems silly.
It does doesn't it?
I know it's an argument reductive at
Absurdum but I couldn't get past that.
I wish we could have some of those folks
who were talking that way about it.
To defend their positions that were.
To defend their positions or explain
where I'm misinterpreting
them and my explanation.
I should point out these are people at a
fantastic Institute of Advanced Studies.
These are people I have no doubt that
every single one of them
has better rational skills
than I do.
And I'd love to better
understand what they were saying.
Unfortunately it just wasn't there in the
context of that
discussion at that time to
be able to ask them about it.
I guess I could have been really
challenging and insisted on shouting
through the microphone
but that probably seems
the way to have a discussion.
If I was trying to maybe go on a position
and maybe counter or
think about this in a
different way, trust I guess isn't
completely logical because
you can trust in wrong things
and humans are very good at that.
Placing trust in wrong areas
and dealing with consequences.
So in that way it's not objective and
subject to all of humans' silliness.
Nicely put.
I agree.
False confidence over trusting yourself,
trusting others and then
paying the consequences for
it afterwards.
We've all experienced
those to some degree.
At least I think we have thanks to the
Dunning-Kruger effect.
We know that little period of false
certainty that we've all experienced.
Yeah, like podcasting.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm pretty sure we can do this.
Yeah, we can do this.
Heck yeah.
What do you guys think?
Can we do this?
Let us know in the comments unless
they're really vitriolic
in which case keep them to
yourself.
Yeah, anyway I thought it was a fun topic
to get into but maybe
in future SOC talks we'll
have further opinions
about this to share again.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's an interesting one though.
I'm pretty sure we can have feelings
about things that
don't have feelings for us.
For sure, you have 100%.
Especially if you're a child.
You grow up and the world is full of
agents even though they're not agents.
You have a whole repertoire of toys and
Toy Story is a fantastic
film because it is this
subjective experience of children really.
All of these toys have subjective agency
and when you're not
looking they'll run around
and do things but you don't need to be
not looking and your
mind and imagination they
are agents doing real things.
And there's a lot of
emotion for those agents.
You can like some more than others.
You're going to deny childhood then if
you're going to say that
you can't have emotional
feelings for objects.
My first car, I still love my first car.
I've got a lot of fond memories of it.
Exactly.
And I think that's
universal or close to universal.
That's why we name ships.
Yeah, exactly.
Why we name ships, why we have our
favorite knife in the
drawer that we like to use more
than the other knives.
Our favorite seat in the room that we
like to sit in more than the others.
But the fact that it's so obvious to you
and me makes me think
that I misrepresented what
they were saying.
If any of you who are at the talk are
watching this now or
listening to it and feel that
I am misrepresenting you, wonderful.
Reach out and let us know how
wrong I am and in which ways.
Please.
To continue on this
line, trust in things.
There's an element of knowledge that you
need sometimes to feel
comfortable with things.
I don't know.
I'm going on a complete caveat spin here
that my brain just came up with.
There's that element of sometimes a
little bit of knowledge does
more harm than no knowledge
at all.
So a little bit of knowledge is worse
than a lot because what
you're doing then is you're
working on an incomplete mental model.
Yes.
And if we go back to the Dunning-Kruger
curve, the idea of Dunning-Kruger
fallacy, the ability
to believe that you have a complete
mental model built from
a tiny amount, it's like
the story of the five blind men or the
five people in the dark
room who are asked to describe
an elephant.
One feels the trunk and says it's like a
snake and one feels the
ear and says it's like a
screen.
One else says the one feeling the tusk.
A trunk is like a spear.
One feeling the legs as
an elephant is like a tree.
So they all have this
idea of what an elephant is.
If they just spoke with each other, they
could come up with a joint picture.
But the whole point of that story and the
whole point of the
Dunning-Kruger effect is
that you don't do that.
When you have a tiny amount of
information and you imagine
all the rest of the structure,
you almost inevitably create illusions
that you buy into until
reality proves you wrong.
Yes.
I like that little story is also just
investigating reality itself.
All the sciences have their own tools and
methods of
objectively observing things and
then they can hopefully always sometimes
course but you can end up with quite
different interpretations
of the same thing.
Yeah, that's a lovely metaphor.
I feel that way strongly about that story
too because I've heard
versions of that story
from a lot of different places and they
claim that it comes from
this source or from that
source.
Instead of being adamant, why not look at
each other's sources
and see if maybe there
was a common source that's earlier.
Yeah.
There's no...
Okay, to stick with trust, there was...
I remember seeing a talk by the
philosopher Daniel Dennett
and he began the talk with
a phrase written in another language on
the board and he said,
"My friend insists..."
I don't speak this language but he
completely insists that
this phrase means that on the
board here.
I don't speak the language but I am
completely willing to trust
him and say that this here
is what it means.
And his whole point was
about that we can't...
There's a lot of...
Especially now, there's this attitude
that everyone has of do
your own research as though
individuals with a podcast or something
else are going to be
able to go out in the world
and deduce everything and we can't trust
anybody, we can't trust any institutions.
We have to go out and do our own research
which is, I think, very, very damaging to
society when people with large platforms
say, "I did my own
research and I did this and
this and this."
You have a lot of climate change denials,
prime example of
that, people just saying,
"Well, they've been wrong
about this, this or that."
It's like, "You've
not studied the science.
You don't even know where
to start with the science."
And there's that level of professionalism
and institutions
which exists to be trusted
and should be trusted.
Now, there are ways that the institutions
can go wrong and do
make poor decisions which
can lose trust, but ultimately, we still
have to have a
fundamental society where we can
trust academic rigor.
And there are a lot of people throughout
the world that even
don't understand the weight
of what they should be doing has on
society in terms of
academic rigor in general, just
like you should be taking it seriously.
It took us a long time to
establish the scientific method.
We take it for granted now, so much so
that people will abuse
it to justify any decision
that they want rather than being humble
and objective to reality.
And the more people that fully understand
what proper academic
rigor is, the more trust
society can have in the
objective findings of it.
I agree completely.
I was having a conversation last week
with a very intelligent
person, a new acquaintance,
who said to me that one of the problems
with science is that
scientists go out being absolutely
certain about things
and then get proven wrong.
And I had to explain to them that that's
not the perspective of science.
Sciences like you were just saying,
science is humility.
Science is the acknowledgement that we
are all wrong about
everything, but we're building
temporary models that are the best we can
build, and we're using
them with the understanding
that they will be disproven in time,
possibly in the next few minutes,
possibly in the next
few centuries.
But a real scientist goes out with this
idea that I am building
on the knowledge of others,
standing on the shoulder of giants.
And I am doing my best to
establish this and to advance it.
But I will be disproven.
And I think this really surprised the
person I was talking with.
They seem to be quite certain that
scientists were quite certain.
And I thought it was a lovely simile for
that problem, and it
falls into exactly what you
were talking about.
If you haven't been trained in the
scientific method, and most people
haven't now, 50 years
ago, most people were being trained in
the scientific method in
school, now most people
are not.
And even now, when I talk with school
children, when I talk with
undergraduate students, I
find out that they haven't been taught
the right scientific method.
So Karl Popper changed the scientific
method drastically in the
middle of the 20th century,
when he said, "What you have to do is you
have to try to
disprove rather than prove.
Don't take out your ideas
and say, "This is my theory.
I will prove it.
This is my hypothesis.
I will prove it."
Instead, inverse that.
This is my hypothesis, so I will do my
best to disprove it.
And if I fail to disprove it, then maybe
there's something going on here.
So I will publish, not to say to the
world, "Look how clever
I am," but to say to the
world, "I can't disprove this.
Can you?"
And that's the way I describe the
scientific method to my
students, is we publish in order
to get smart people to try to prove us
wrong, because that's the
only way we can have any
kind of temporary certainty about the
validity of our models and our
expansion of world knowledge.
It's the exact opposite of that certainty
that people think scientists have.
If you'll pardon my being blasphemous for
a moment, I like to say,
"If you want certainty,
then you have to go to religion.
If you want to prove
things, go to mathematics.
If you want to disprove
things, go to science.
And if you want certainty regardless of
being able to prove or
disprove, then either join
a religion or start one."
Yeah.
Beware those that will make objective
claims that are unfalsifiable.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
That falsifiability, man.
That's the key to the whole shebang, if
you'll pardon my technical jargon.
Yeah.
Earlier, you suggested it'd be cool to
talk about space travel.
Yes.
And I like the idea that we are now
struggling with how much we
can trust the systems that
we use, right?
People don't trust the political system,
and that's getting worse
and worse in every country
in the world.
People don't trust mainstream media.
People don't trust the medical
profession, the scientific profession.
And increasingly, the reasons
for that are getting better.
Many years ago, if somebody disagreed
with the standard medical
views on certain things,
you could look up what
they disagreed about.
And really, actually, if you had the
ability, you could do some research,
fundamental research,
improve their ideas right or wrong just
by doing literary
searches in a good medical
library by referring to publications that
are out there to establish facts that are
accepted by more than one laboratory that
are unrelated or even competing with each
other.
You could do that kind of thing.
These days, it's hard because nobody
searches in a library
anymore unless you've trained
them to do it.
Instead, they search on Google.
And when you search on Google, then
you've got an AI for the
last year and a bit that's
interfering with your search.
Now they've even got AI summarizing the
search results for
you, which is terrifying.
Yeah.
And even before then, it was getting
incredibly unuseful because
it was just showing you the
results that had the best
search engine optimization.
Exactly.
So it was showing you the results that
were designed to be recognized in Google.
And it was showing you the
ones that got hit the most often.
The result was that people were finding
things that were at the
top of Google's list, but
not necessarily true.
And I think we've all
seen stories of this.
I've had many experiences of it that I've
documented in, I
think, earlier episodes and
in publications.
Here's the problem.
We want to do big, real world projects.
Driverless cars going to space, going to
the stars, beyond our
own lunar system, beyond
our solar system.
We want to do these great big projects
that are real world and
have real world impact.
And increasingly, we're training our
citizenry to have shorter
and shorter attention spans
and more and more blind faith.
And blind faith and short attention spans
are the opposite of
the thoughtful process
that makes things safe.
Yes.
So I guess you won't be jumping on Elon
Musk's Starship to Mars.
I would love to go to Mars.
I make no secret of the fact that I was
turned down in my astronaut
application for the Canadian
Space Agency.
I'd love to go to Mars.
I'd love to go to the moon.
I would love to go beyond Earth's
atmosphere and see the planet as a whole.
Good.
Well, I'm going to tell
you going to Mars is stupid.
Humans should not go to Mars.
It is the stupidest idea ever.
I think we need to get beyond this.
Try building a colony on Antarctica first
before you start trying to go to Mars.
What are you doing?
People really forget that Mars is four
billion years behind.
It's not just terraforming Mars.
Sure, maybe.
Expect a four billion
year cycle to do that.
Life kick-started on Earth very quickly
after it could on Earth
and it's been going ever
since for four and a
half billion years or so.
And during that time the telomere lengths
have gotten longer and longer of cells.
So there's this legacy of four and a half
billion years and it's not just humans.
Oh, maybe we'll find a
planet with oxygen on it.
No, you won't find anything in the
universe very likely that
you'll be able to step foot
on.
The Earth is completely, we are
completely adapted for the Earth.
We can make small little tin cans that
can keep us alive for a little bit.
Fish bowls, ultimately.
Even just keeping an aquarium, a closed
aquarium with fish in it
alive takes a lot of energy
and resources and you're constantly
putting more elements and
resources into that system
to keep it alive.
Absolutely.
And if anything goes wrong, then you need
to deliver immediate
solutions reliably and
spend whatever energy it takes regardless
of what your energy budget is.
That suddenly is a requirement that you
cannot live without.
And I agree, build communities in the
Sahara, build communities in the deep
sea, build communities
in Antarctica and when they are
functioning flawlessly,
which doesn't mean without flaws,
it means where all of the flaws are
anticipated or corrected instantly.
When you've got that, then let's go build
tunnels on the moon and
stations in the asteroids.
Absolutely.
If we can do it on our planet, which
Project Eden I think was
one specifically where it
was in the UK somewhere where they built
that giant glass dome
and it fell apart within
a few months or so before
they needed to cancel it.
It's a hard thing to do and when you're
building glorified
fireworks that haven't even gone
to orbit yet and you're saying you're
going to be building a
colony on Mars, I'll tell
you one thing about trust.
That's not a system or
a person I trust at all.
I'm with you.
You talked about institutional trust
earlier on in this episode.
If you have that established, whether
it's the institution of
Mr. Musk's programs or
whether it's the institution of the
equipment he's using or the type of
equipment he's using,
any of those institutions would allow you
to have some trust
that you could then build
on it, can bootstrap you to trust the
other things, to use a
term that Lucas was using
this morning.
Having trust in some things allows you to
build up trust in
other things even if you
don't know them directly.
None of that exists right now for Mars.
And it could.
I have some friends who've been involved
in some of the
attempts to prepare astronauts
for living in other atmospheres.
Dr. Butler, if you're
watching this, howdy.
She won't be watching this.
But she's been on a few such adventures.
I've got some friends.
She's Canadian.
I've got some friends in Austria who've
worked on similar things.
I don't think any of them would argue
that we're ready for the
four-year or the 40-year
version of those experiments.
We're just not.
And movies like The Martian are novels, a
great novel, a great movie, a much better
novel.
They give this impression that it would
just take a few things,
right, a determined and
clever person to turn that space into
something you could survive on.
I don't believe that's true.
No, it's a kind of survivalist attitude
that sure on Earth
there's resources everywhere.
But if you look at a picture of the
surface of Mars, you
will see rocks, rocks, dust,
rocks, rocks, dust, rocks, dust, rocks,
maybe a bit of ice on the north.
That's it.
You're not, like I say, there's that four
and a half billion
years of legacy of resources
around us on this planet that just don't
exist anywhere else.
And even if they do exist anywhere else,
they're likely to be
dissimilar to us that it's not
going to work.
Even if you went a couple of million
years ago on our
planet, you wouldn't fit.
Even our own planet.
The dinosaurs were roaming around.
The atmosphere was a lot denser, I
believe, and it was a lot hotter
everywhere, more around.
Even you wouldn't really fit in there.
We don't even know if your biology would
work to eat the other animals.
That's an interesting point, right, that
is always missed in science fiction.
I shouldn't say missed.
It's almost always deliberately ignored
in order to be able to
frame a story that works.
But the truth is, on most planets, if you
tried to, as they did
in the Martian, this
is not me being particularly fetishy or
weird, if you tried to
mix your feces with the soil
in order to sprout potatoes and have food
to eat, there's nothing in that soil that
could provide nutrients.
There's nothing in that soil that would
combine with your
feces to provide nutrients.
Chemically, some of the chemicals are
there, but the
biochemistry, the more complex compounds
probably don't exist on Mars.
I'm not sure how they could in a way that
would be compatible
with your digestive needs,
with the sensitivity of
your flesh around digestion.
It's a very weird thing.
And I don't think anybody sat down and
really thought about what
it would mean to be there
on that planet.
Sure, everyone has a vision of the glory.
I'm there.
I'm on Mars.
I'm on this planet.
And I have stories we've told ourselves
about how great it would be.
But if you thought about the reality of
the day, it would be
absolute hell, very close
to a literal hell.
There might be some
other humans around you.
You're stuck in a closed catarim, you
want to go for a walk.
Maybe you can, but you're gonna have to
put on this lumpy suit
that's basically a spacecraft.
And then you can walk and
go see dust, rubber's dust.
And when you choose to do that, because
you need to get away from these other
people, after all hell is other people,
when you choose to do that,
you're using resources that belong to
everyone. So really
everyone should be able to vote
on whether you get to go for a walk or
it's someone else's turn and
no one gets to go for a walk
because the recycler isn't working
particularly well. Yeah, I agree the
complexity is strong, but I disagree that
no one's thought about it.
Oh, yeah, for sure. I don't
say no one's thought about it.
And I'm not saying that there are ways
that we could do it and
that we shouldn't do it.
But what I would argue for is what NASA
has been doing already.
We shouldn't be spending so much energy
lumping around our mass and life support
systems to go do space exploration.
We don't need to and especially now as
we're getting building better and better
smaller and smaller systems
like drones,
various sorts of drones with
sophisticated
input devices
and
as we can remotely control
these better and better, the
obviously light speed is a time problem.
The future I see eventually,
what I'm ultimately about to propose is
that we shouldn't lump around all our
mass. If we can all we really care about
is consciousness and
sure, there's a hard problem here. It
might not be possible, but if we can get
our consciousness onto separate devices,
smaller devices, silicon devices that
don't require anything other than some
electrons in the battery, boom, fire them
off, expose the universe.
A lot less mass and
funnily enough, we had a
comment to talk about the Bob Ivers
from Colin. That is exactly what happens
in that book series.
Basically,
gentleman's consciousness
is uploaded into a probe and
his goal is to use a, it's a von Neumann
probe to specifically
self replicate and spread
humanity out across the galaxy.
That's probably where we need to go, but
we've done it already. You can go and
explore the surface of Mars. I think this
is another way I was looking at it.
Maybe we don't need to go
everywhere. We can bring
everywhere to us. So if we can
realistically scan surfaces
of other planets and get it
almost as good as the real thing, you can
probably just turn that on and you
probably go, okay, cool.
Yeah, on the surface of Mars. You hang
out there and go, this is cool for about
five minutes and you'll be bored.
Because all the
interesting stuff is here.
Okay, I agree and I disagree. Yeah.
Von Neumann probe, cool. Yeah.
Expanding human consciousness throughout
the universe eventually throughout the
planetary system immediately. Lovely. As
soon as we can do it,
we should be doing that.
I think that's wonderful.
Before you go anywhere, just let me
caveat that sometimes
I will take positions
I don't completely agree with just for
the sake of it. I'm slightly
doing that here. Okay, cool.
So my problem is this.
What we should be doing and what we are
doing are completely unrelated and
almost always have been and almost always
will be and I'll stand by that.
I think it is a human
drive. I think it's part of what
caused us to evolve is the fact that we
want to look over the next horizon.
We want to go where the wild geese may
have gone. To go where no man has gone
before. If you don't mind
paraphrasing Vannevar Bush's
text to the president in 1957.
Yeah, I think it was also
used on a television series.
If you're not sure what I'm talking
about, ask me sometime.
Or go to episode four.
The thing is
people want to explore. People want to go
beyond what's there. Not everyone, but a
significant portion of the human
population want to do that.
Those folks who want to do that will be
inspired to do that.
That's not what most corporations want.
They don't care. That's not what most
governments want. They don't care.
It might be what NASA wants and I hope so
as well as some other space agencies.
But what the corporations want, whether
it's Elon Musk or
someone else, is profit.
There are sure signs of profit out there.
If whoever first gets a
probe or some kind of vehicle
onto an asteroid that can do some mining
there is going to totally,
if you'll pardon the phrase,
disrupt the world economy. As soon as
they find more gold somewhere or more
diamonds somewhere or more
plutonium somewhere or more
Frankium. Anything that's rare and
unstable in Earth's atmosphere that can
be stable or less rare in space,
as soon as they find a way to extract it
and bring it here, the
world's economy is disrupted.
So there are folks who want to do that.
There are folks who want to control the
way that's done by others.
There's a lot of pressure from that
that's making people
want to get out into space.
My own desire wouldn't be met by the
virtual reality you propose because I
want to go and see our world as a marble.
I want that. I want to go and see what
the stars look like when there's no
atmosphere in the way and
looking at images
through Hubble is beautiful.
But it's not the same when you can turn
your head and actually see them.
Will I be satisfied when I can see that?
I think I'll be thrilled, but I won't be
satisfied if I can spend
enough time living that way.
I want to see more and I'm sure other
people are the same.
But that's not the drive that's driving
space exploration for the most part.
The drive that's driving space
exploration for the most part is
this desire to get at the asteroids, to
get at Mars, to clean land on the moon,
to do these capitalist things,
these capital-oriented things that aren't
necessarily going to serve anyone well.
That's just unfortunately, I guess, the
story of things and reasons why we go and
explore in the first place.
Do you think about our whole period of
colonization, the Europeans colonization,
was always funded for the
whole reason of profiting,
profiteering in many ways.
And they even going to the
moon was there before the Soviets.
Surely from a weapons standpoint.
Now, have you ever seen
for all mankind TV series?
No, I have.
Do you know the premise of it?
I do.
Yeah, it's such a fun premise.
It's a TV series.
I think Apple, Apple produced it.
And essentially the premise of the whole
show is that the Soviets got to the moon
first and from there,
the space race never ends.
And because of that, it gets to the 80s
and we've got moon colonies and they're
about to get to Mars.
And essentially that this competitiveness
never ended and it caused
us to get to space faster.
The way that we all thought we would.
Yeah, no, it's another
one of those great S.F.
speculative ideas, right?
What if this one thing changed and let's
imagine the future that way?
Yeah, it's a series I'll watch when I
start watching more series where you
could take out the word more.
So one thing I'd like to say with that
two groups of people, well, there's not
essentially two groups of people, but the
way I see it throughout whole history.
This is my the way I describe why you
have progressive people
and conservative people.
And I think we've evolved to have a
balance of both because it seems as a
system, high level system
productive to have both.
Because if you just think about tribes, a
small tribe goes into a location.
If it's great and everything's going
well, you want a bunch of people there to
be conservative and
say, hey, things are good.
This is all great.
But you also want a group of people to
say, no, this doesn't quite do it for me.
I want to go over there
and see what's over there.
Then you spread out the people who are
progressive and can go away to a new
place, can walk into a level field and
everything's horrible.
And they all die.
And the conservative people could say,
look, we were right.
They shouldn't have gone over there.
Or the progress people walk over and go
to somewhere else could have a new Lush
Eden and a volcano erupts
where the people stayed.
So just as a high level system, it makes
sense to have baked into us progressive
and conservative people.
I agree.
Do you know Dawkins' selfish gene theory?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is from a book of that name, The
Selfish Gene from 78 or something by
Richard Dawkins before he
became a political figure.
And as a geneticist, he was arguing that
our genetic structure is
actually what's in charge.
And these little unconscious bits of our
cellular structure are what
are driving everything we do.
And we're just a continuation of the
primordial sea for them to live in.
And all of our consciousness and all of
our efforts in that are just helping to
promote the continued survival of that
fishbowl to use your earlier video.
I like that.
And I think you've tied it neatly into
Darwin's idea of the tidal
pools that he witnessed, right?
So the fish are here and then they split
into different tidal pools and maybe one
pool dries up or the original pool dries
up or maybe they both maintain.
And you end up with different
characteristics in the two pools and
that's how you end up with
eventually different species.
So I love the way you
described that just now.
I kind of hope, and it's a purely science
fictional idea, I kind of hope that we
can do that on planets.
I kind of hope that there's a future for
humanity that goes so far beyond Earth
that Earth becomes a myth
and exists only that way.
Yeah, so many great science
fiction stories have that.
The stainless steel rat for one Harry
Harris and stainless steel rat, which
occasionally refers to mud or dirt or
something like that, the planet we all
supposedly came from.
Great series for other reasons as well,
but that's just kind of a
little bit of a background.
I think for people who dream the way I
dream, I think that's a necessary dream
to believe that the
boundaries aren't here.
While we're waiting to be able to survive
beyond the boundaries that we currently
experience, and I agree we haven't
reached that point, but while we're
waiting to do that, we
should, like you said,
push the boundaries here. There was a
period in the 70s after the moon had been
reached when it really looked like all of
the same research drive was going to
shift to exploring the seas.
There was a brief period there when that
was really the focus. Cousteau had
successfully developed scuba.
A number of astronauts were campaigning
for the same degree of exploration focus
to go into understanding the bottom of
the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans.
I don't understand why that's not
happening. The only reason I can see is
the same twofold reason
that we've been talking about.
They haven't caused people to dream about
it, the people who dream. That ability to
dream about that hasn't been stirred in
people because it's impractical and it's
gross and you can just watch it on TV.
And the people who are waiting to exploit
the capital don't
understand how much capital is there.
Yes, or there are eccentric billionaires
who cut corners and
things go terribly wrong.
Yeah, unfortunately this continues to
happen as we are no doubt
in the process of witnessing.
Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see
how much space travel or observation even
is possible if we continue to throw
satellites up around the planet.
One of my first contracts was to make
animations for a local diving company.
I sat down with the director for a while
and he was talking to me about how all
these saturation systems work.
Getting deep to the bottom of the ocean,
they have the capsules that the divers go
down and live in for two
weeks while they do work.
So on the bottom of oil rigs and such. He
was explaining to me how the system
works, the bell going down, going into
these high pressurized cylinders.
I remember one thing
he said stuck with me.
He said it's easier to get people back
from the moon than it is there.
And that also terrified me.
The thinking of being so close but so far
away just in terms of
pressure differences.
Because I think when they're down there
they increase the pressure to something
about twice the normal
atmospheric pressure.
So I forget the reasons why but it's high
pressure, saturated pressure down there.
It's actually much more than twice. I
think when you go about six feet down
you're reaching, I
think that's a constant.
Yeah, no, it's for the
actual habitats that they have.
And in there it's not, yeah, it's very
close to the same pressure as the outside
water so they can just get in and out.
But being that deep, when you breathe in
all of that air, the fun way of thinking
about it is, I'm going to butcher the
mathematics of all of this.
But you take a compressed breath of air
in. When you go back up to normal
pressure it's going to
expand outwards at pressure.
Because when you're deep in the bum of
the ocean and you take a breath of air in
you have tons and tons and tons of water
pressing down on you.
And that is helping your lungs contain
that high pressurized air. When you come
back up it will expand.
And you also don't just have it in your
lungs, you have it in your blood and then
that's what the Benz is.
Yeah, exactly. The Benz is because
nitrogen gets into your blood
in place of some of the oxygen.
I believe that's it. Gosh, I feel
terrible about this.
Butch-ering these elements.
I've done the training for scuba. I've
been through the lessons, I've done the
math, we had to
calculate how deep you could go.
We learned the shelf at which you have to
pause to allow your blood to come back to
normal before you go
the rest of the way up.
And definitely the deeper you go and the
longer you stay the more your body
acclimatizes to that pressure.
In the Conrad Stargard books by the late
Leo Frankowski, there's a lovely bit
where a 20th century engineer is trying
to explain to a medieval knight how
atmospheric pressure works.
And he's trying to explain that there are
a certain number of metric tons of air
sitting on top of
your shoulders right now.
And if that's the case,
wouldn't it squash me flat?
Well, no, no, because you've got the same
number of tons
pushing you from all sides.
If you were to go and walk under the sea,
however, and here the
guy gets very upset.
Okay, first you're saying I'm going to be
crushed by the air and now you're saying
I can walk under the sea?
Yeah.
It becomes a fun argument.
Yeah, and that's the other reason why you
can't go out into a vacuum is also
because your body's structured rigidly
for one atmosphere of
pressure when you go into a vacuum.
Turns out your structure wants to press
out against itself
much more than you think.
Yeah, vacuum does that.
The differences in temperature in space
when you don't have an insulating
atmosphere around you do that.
If you're facing the sun on one side and
the cold away from the sun on the other
side, the dimorphism can be horrible.
Zero gravity is really bad for humans.
I remember reading about this a couple of
decades ago and thinking it would be
really cool to develop an exercise
routine for the small unconsciously
controlled stabilizing muscles in our
joints, including our hips and our spine,
to try and help keep those muscles from
atrophying when the
person is not under gravity.
Because everyone who spends a prolonged
period of time in orbit suffers from
this. They suffer from a loss of bone
density, but a loss of muscular acuity,
muscular density as well.
Yeah, we're not made for it.
No.
And a silicon chip would be much better
in space than a human would
as per your earlier state.
Yes, but I do love a lot of the sci-fi
stories where humans kind of
evolve to adapt into space.
I can't remember what series it is, but
there's these kind of monkey people where
we evolve hands back on our feet because
it's very useful to move around.
June, I guess, has the
spacing guild and the navigators.
The navigators are basically giant brains
hooked up on space that float around in
zero-g and navigate between the stars.
Yeah, now navigation between the stars is
another thing that just fascinates me.
Science fiction always tries to find
shortcuts to it, ways to explain it.
Imagine going at any speed and hitting
the smallest fragment of something as
hard as the shell you're in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is another thing
that, yeah, interstellar travel is, yeah.
It's just a bit of a contrast.
There's many things about it.
This is why the realistic ships that make
sense in sci-fi, or not sci-fi, but
people are proposing and talked about,
you can't have interstellar travel
without a massive shield
on the front of the ship.
Whether the shield is something you
generate, which we can do a little bit
now but not very well, or whether the
shield is something that's generated by
your movement, right?
Or it's just a literal piece of metal
really, really thick
in front of your ship.
Which slows you down and causes all kinds
of impacts on the Newtonian physics of
trying to move through space.
But you have to have something, right?
Then you get the, what is it called,
straw in a hurricane problem, where a
blade of straw, a dried grass straw, not
drinking straw, can be embedded in the
trunk of a tree by a hurricane.
Well, if you want to travel between
stars, you're going to have to move a lot
faster than the wind in a hurricane.
So anything striking you is going to
strike you like that. Even the smallest
thing becomes a bullet.
Well, this reminds me of, you know the
Apollo astronauts, when they were
travelling to the moon, they
kept seeing bright flashes?
Yeah.
They all reported it, but none of them
mentioned it to each other until they got
back and they kind of felt brave enough
to talk about seeing these
weird bright flashes in space.
And it turned out they were interstellar
particles that were penetrating the ship
and hitting their retina such that it
made a flash, a perceivable flash.
Amazing.
And they didn't figure out what that was.
There was a proposal about that was.
They didn't figure it out until they
could get electron microscopes and look
at the hull of the ships,
but also their spacesuits.
And on the visor, they could see this
massive spike of where this particle had
penetrated and gone
through the spacesuit.
That's astounding.
The actual spike there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The physical spike. You
can see it's just this physical broken
in, which is fun. Everyone forgets about
the, that's another thing.
Radiation. You're protected by lots of
things on the earth. It's atmosphere, but
also it's magnetic field, which
completely protects you from that giant
fusion reactor in the sky.
Mostly protects you.
Mostly protects you. Put sunscreen on.
We still get skin cancer. Yes, do put
sunscreen on. You ever
read the Fantastic Four?
I'm waiting for the new Marvel movie. I'm
looking forward to Fantastic Four were
among my heroes when I was a kid because
they were scientists and they were
interested in each other as humans,
primarily, and helping others primarily.
I thought all that was cool, the idea of
a family of adventurers. Lovely idea. But
they got their powers by trying to be the
first ones in space and
getting bombarded with radiation.
I'm willing to pay that price.
Or I missed Fantastic Four.
I don't even care if I end up as the
thing. Some people would say it wouldn't
be much of a change.
If my ability to go to space means that I
have to spend the rest of my life as a
superhero, I'm willing to do it. I will
make that sacrifice.
Well, my point was going more to how
difficult space travel really would be.
Oh, oh, the real, not the fiction of.
I am. Just in terms of the radiation,
even on Mars as well, you're going to be
bombarded with a lot more
radiation than you should.
It turns out, though, to actually protect
yourself properly, I think you only need
a thin layer of water and you're all
right in space if you have a thin layer
of water in your hull of your ship.
Just because it diffracts the radiation?
It just absorbs radiation very well. So
you'll see in nuclear power plants, they
have the core that's
sitting at the bottom.
And I saw the What If guy, that's KCD,
was explaining, he got asked a question,
what if you swam in
the pool of those places?
And it turns out you'd be absolutely
fine. You could swim down even quite a
bit. And it's only because it's an
exponential drop off.
So where the core, those high radiated
cores are, it's an exponential drop off.
So only like a meter or so away from it
when you're fine in water,
because water absorbs so much.
I mean, you think about how dense it is
and that is like, it makes sense.
Is it Daniel Monroe?
I think so, yes.
Sorry if it's not
fantastic. That's from a What If.
Yeah, or it was a YouTube
video recently, at least.
Great resource that guy is. Hilarious and
knowledgeable and willing to learn things
in order to share them.
Just as a premise, as a book as well.
Take on the most ridiculous
questions and run them through.
Yeah, such a great idea. If you haven't
read those books, I suggest it. If you
haven't seen those
cartoons, I suggest it.
Both are well worth it.
So, Randall?
Sorry, Randall.
Randall, Randall.
Not Daniel, Randall, Randall.
Obviously, the problem with bringing up
water as a shield, as good as a shield it
is, it has a lot of mass.
But could it double as you're drinking
water? Probably. At least
for cool and washing things.
Yeah, I don't know. But it's not a bad
premise to work from that. If we know
that works, then maybe it should be scuba
divers we're sending to space.
Maybe. That's another, I remember in the
Culture series, I talked about the
Culture series specifically,
there was one interstellar ship, massive,
massive ship with a
whole civilization on it.
And the majority of it was all
water-based conscious life. So this
person had to like rearrange his cells
and everything so he could fit in,
and floating around in this
giant, massive water ship.
Isn't that cool? I mentioned David Brin,
who wrote the practice effect about the
dimension where entropy doesn't work and
instead practice makes perfect.
I think it was his work as well. I think
it was the Sun Diver series, but I could
be wrong, where he has humans going to
space with dolphins.
Yeah, cool.
Yeah, and the dolphins are just better at
navigating and things
like that than we ever...
Oh, and deep
three-dimensional space. Yeah, that's good.
So this is a world where they've had a
chance to develop extended communications
and eventually partnerships.
Yeah, so you get on board one of these
particular vessels and it's salt water.
And that's how you live while you're
there because it's their environment.
It's creative for that.
That reminds me, here's a fun fact. Do
you know that this is my what-if
questions I asked myself one day.
I mean, I've already talked to you about
it, but I just one day was thinking about
dolphins and whales and like, "Hold on,
they're mammals. What do they drink?"
Well, they're in the water. They must
just drink seawater. And then it's like,
"But they can't drink seawater." So I
Googled it and nobody knows.
Nobody's quite sure what cetaceans drink
and where and if they
just drink salt water or not.
Where then?
What?
Yeah, you think that's
something we'd care about. Yeah.
They've got a method of intaking salt
water and excreting enough salt that it
doesn't kill them or make them sick or
damage their internal
organs. That would be cool.
It would be cool. So another theory is
that they just go to the miles of rivers
and drink and head off. It turns out
manatees actually do that. People in
Florida will leave hoses in the water and
they'll come up and
they'll drink the fresh water.
But manatees live next to freshwater
sources. Yeah. Yeah. Whales and dolphins
live everywhere. They do. Well, I don't
know about everywhere, but
they live over a vast area.
Interesting. But we don't know the exact
answer. Yeah. There's so much we don't
know about the sea. We should be
exploring the sea. Yeah. I kind of wish
I'd focused on that instead of
astronauts. Maybe I'd be doing it now.
Probably not. I was
rejected for good reason.
Yeah. It is strange though. There's so
much going on. And yes, there's vast
areas of the planet we've never looked
at. There's vast areas of the planet we
can't see directly. We can't experience
directly. Yeah. That's true. But there
are animals who go there
all the time and come back.
And have conscious experience for sure. I
completely disagree. Anybody who says
that other animals don't have a conscious
experience, I think that's completely
ludicrous and I will fight anyone on
that. So what I really want to know is
what on earth is it like to be a whale?
Echo location being in just this vast
void space, but being able to talk to
other entities miles and miles away
through sub frequency and being able to
experience your three dimensional
surroundings through sonar. Yeah. And
dolphins specifically have larger
cerebellums than we do, which we know is
related to what I think.
Okay. No, we don't. We don't. We think
maybe a lot of people think that having a
larger brain means more intelligent. No,
no. Specifically a cerebellum, not brain
in general. The part of the brain that we
think is more related to social. I'm not
a neurosurgeon. I'm not going to. I'm not
a neurosurgeon either. Neuroscientists.
I'm on television. The cerebellum is sort
of where all your muscle memory is going
on. Right. That's where the reflexes
you've learned to use together as
patterns can be triggered from there. And
so it seems to me from my studies, and
I'm probably out of date and I'm probably
wrong and it wouldn't be the first time
today. But it seems to me that what's
going on there is that's the place where
the patterns are stored.
Okay. So what I would say is, forget the
brain. Let's not even talk about the
brain. You can just look at a dolphin and
look at its behavior and you can probably
see that this is a smart being. You see
the fact that they love the wakes on the
front of the ships and they have no
reason to do it other than it looks like
they're having hell of a time.
Yeah, absolutely. And you can see the
same thing with crows. And I don't know
if I've told you before about the lovely
study that was trying to count cod
numbers. Did I tell you about that? So
they put a little food trap. And
basically if you swam against it, it
released a bit of food. And then what
they wanted to do was they wanted to
count the fish swimming against it and
get an idea of the number of
cod in that region of the sea.
What they found instead was that the cod
formed a circle and swam against it and
the next one ate the food and swam
against it and the next one ate the food
and it circled around and feed each other
continually until the trap
was empty or they got bored.
That kind of play type behavior goes on
all the time in so many creatures. And I
don't know about advanced intelligence. I
don't know if they're clever enough to
put themselves in mortgage slavery.
I never said intelligence.
I'm playing devil's advocate as well
here. But I do believe that the ability
to play is a sign of intelligence. I
believe that. I believe that the ability
and desire to play because it shows an
intent, conscious or otherwise, to learn
to develop new skill. And I think that's
foundational in pretty much every animal.
I can't speak about
mollusks. I don't know if...
Spiders? Do spiders play?
I don't know. I don't know. I know that
they eat ladybugs and ladybugs eat them.
But what they get up to in
their own time is up to them.
Yeah, and I guess if they were playing it
would be too far removed from us for us
to just intuitively tell that it's
playing. With mammals we're close enough
we can intuitively immediately tell when
an animal's playing.
You look at any young animals, a goat
jumping around all giddy,
it's playing. A puppy...
And then a group of them doing it
together and chasing each other and
coming up with new games on the spot.
It looks exactly the same as children
playing. So that's close enough to us
where we can intuitively
just go, "They're playing."
I think what's going on there is the same
process. Their brain is growing and
they're trying to figure out patterns of
things. And the way you figure out
patterns of things is by repeating
actions and predicting what change
happens and then learning from
the change you didn't predict.
So you're getting reinforcement and
you're learning where the reinforcement
doesn't work, getting negative
reinforcement there.
Building connections.
I guess my point there though was that we
can immediately just glance at mammals
and tell where they're playing. But then
I guess we wouldn't understand what a
small spider would be doing to play.
I guess, I don't know, I haven't spent
enough time with spiders.
At least intuitively, just to glance.
It's foreign to us. I'm sure there are
people who have studied their behavior a
lot and could immediately tell us.
We have pretty good information that
octopods play. And we have pretty good
information that sharks
play and killer whales.
I think a lot of different creatures
play. It's possible that worms play. I
don't know. I don't know
what they have in terms of...
My hunch is that for some reason I feel
like it's less likely to.
I think less likely is a really good way
to say it. Just because of the density
and number of neurons involved.
So that's where now a certain... I'll
certainly say consciousness, I think runs
deep in likely a lot of animals.
Where is the cut off? Is there a cut off?
Is there a diffuse ramp of experience
that kind of drops off to the point where
certainly for lumps of matter, probably a
rock doesn't have consciousness.
But a fly? I mean you could look at a fly
as a complete mechanized system. There is
a wee animal, I think we completely
explained some worm.
We understand all of its neurons and
everything and we've kind
of made a complete system.
What job I'm at, I think.
We can look at it and we can completely
explain that system. Does it have
consciousness? I don't know.
We cannot measure it.
Consciousness, a lot of people get
confused and say "What are you talking
about?" No, I'm not talking about
intelligence. I'm talking about
experience. Is it
something to be like that thing?
Not that it thinks
well, but that it thinks.
And what would the most basic level of
conscious experience be like? Maybe it
would just be bright. Bright, nice,
bright, cool. Dark, dark, dark, dark.
People talk about plants that way, right?
If a plant moves towards light, moves
away from too much light. Absorbs water
as necessity, but too much water will
kill it and so it reacts.
It shrinks in places, it grows in places,
it responds to its
environment and to the things around it.
Hard to see that as not being
consciousness. You can go back to the
ancient Greeks and see
versions of that, right?
Where they talk about plant consciousness
versus human consciousness. I think it
was Aristophanes. I think
it was Plato who said that.
I'm not sure of Tomoe.
Neither am I. Could be wrong, wouldn't be
the first time today. But they talked
about that idea of plant consciousness
versus animal consciousness.
So it also gets down to panpsychism,
which is a fun foundational proposal of
what goes on. Because the way we
currently and generally think is that
consciousness at some
point pops up for the right.
When you have some sort of sophisticated
information processing system,
consciousness appears. Which is just a
leap of faith in a jump as maybe
consciousness is fundamental to the
universe and it builds up
when you have the right systems.
Either way, it's a religious belief, it's
not a scientific belief.
And the weird question is, could it ever
be a scientific belief? Could it ever be
scientific? And this is a
hard problem of consciousness.
Is that the qualia of experience is very
hard to objectively observe. Because you
can't. You can't objectively observe
experience, qualia experience. What it
actually feels like.
We can measure the results of experience,
but we can never really measure or
observe direct experience of somebody
else. Now your own experience is the one
thing you can do. It's what
Descartes ultimately said.
I think therefore I am. The ultimate
truth, the ground truth that you know is
that you have experience. And everything
else could be a demon deceiving you, but
you know that you have experience.
The hard part is you can never experience
anything that anybody else has. Except
art. That is where I come from. I think
art is our attempts at making other
humans experience what you experience.
Lovely. I think that's a great
interpretation and a great definition.
The idea that you can't experience what
other people experience otherwise. Or
that you can't quantify
quality of experience.
There we are.
That's what I mean. No experience because
we can all go see a film and feel
probably something similar whilst we
watch it. But what I mean here is
objectively observe that experience. You
can observe its results.
One of those results, it's impact. So yes
you can't directly observe experience in
other people. You can directly observe
your own experience, but you can't
directly observe experience
in other conscious beings.
So that's my point of the heart. That's
not my point, but that is the hard
problem of consciousness. We might not
ever be able to do that. But like I say,
I think art is our attempt at making a
point about what it is to be you.
I think art is that. Art is trying to
make other conscious beings
experience your experience.
Very nice. I like that idea very much. I
would use that. I think that's good. I
don't know if there's others. I don't
know which kind of art works better for
some people than for others.
But I do know that the model I built when
trying to model interaction of humans
with the world rather than being based on
how the brain works is based on how we
interact, the measurable things that we
do. And precisely for that reason.
We don't have an idea of where learning
takes place. We don't have an idea of
where thought happens. We don't know what
a thought is or how to measure it. But we
can measure the speed at which people
react. We can measure the ways in which
they react. The different cognitive
processes they can use at different
speeds. So that's what those
models for me are based on.
I'm sure there's other experiential
things that could be modeled in similar
ways. But try as I might. I cannot find a
way to bring that back to space travel.
Well, it's trust originally.
Well, trust makes perfect sense. If you
cannot experience the actual thoughts of
someone else, how do you know
whether or not to trust them?
So why do we have social sciences at all?
Because we have a lot of trust. And the
behaviors we're observing and the answers
that people are giving, we can trust
them. We have to. Because we can't
directly observe them.
That idea that we have to trust one
another is beautiful. I think that's
what's going to get us to the stars. It's
the ability to trust one another. The
inability to do so. As you said earlier,
this idea of the rugged individual.
That's how you die. That's how you die
alone. The ability to continue and
survive in weird environments only comes
if you're working with weird people.
Yes. So let's reach out for that branch
on the stars. Give it a little shiggle.
See if our spaceships are not going to
explode on takeoff. That'd be nice.
I'm still feeling like personally that
branch is a little wobbly for me. I'm
probably not going to be jumping in any
of those spacecraft anytime soon. I'll
let some other people jump on those
branches first before I go anywhere.
But if you have trusted us enough to
listen this long, we greatly appreciate
it as always. Thank you for coming on
this fun ride of tangents as usual. But
we hope you got something out of it. And
we will see you next time.
Take care, folks. Bye-bye.
Salk Talk is a production from the Robert
Gordon University School of Computing.
Today's episode was brought to you by the
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