- The Edge of Wonder presents Contact in the Desert 2018.
(electronic music)
Special guests featuring Adam Curry.
- Hey guys, I'm with Adam Curry,
who's a Consciousness Researcher,
and here at Contact in the Desert.
So Adam, I was listening to what you were talking about,
and I was just really blown away,
but someone, you're like, can I say this?
Almost like a up-and-coming Elon Musk (laughs).
By the things that you knew and what you were talking about.
But really though, you just seemed to have
a lot of knowledge about AI, and what is going on,
and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit
about that, and what you know.
- Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of fear
about artificial intelligence,
and I have to say that I'm a bit of a skeptic about it.
Well, not a skeptic about the fear necessarily,
but I'm a skeptic about the way
that some of the fear is promulgated.
Artificial intelligence is not artificial consciousness.
So artificial intelligence is more like
a sophisticated software program that does recursive loops
and calibrates its performance based on its feedback.
Artificial consciousness,
we don't understand normal consciousness.
We've been trying for decades
to understand normal consciousness,
and it fails, completely.
I mean, we need nothing short of a paradigm change
to address the real difficult problems in consciousness.
- What do you want to see happen?
Not necessarily what could happen,
but what would you like to see happen?
- Well, I wanna see hoverboards and flying cars.
- Dude, that would be awesome (laughs)!
I'd be one of the first people,
Rob and I definitely would be the first people to buy
a hoverboard, for sure.
- Yeah, we'd all have one.
They'd all be like little stocking stuffers.
And I think we're getting there, too.
- So yesterday, you said something really interesting.
You were talking about the Concorde,
and how this technology came out, and yet,
it's like we're not, it somehow got degraded
instead of progressing further.
I was just wondering if you could kind of touch on that
a little bit more, 'cause I found that really fascinating.
If you can kind of repeat that a little bit.
- Well somebody made a comment about how,
if we were to look at the progress of our society,
and you were to measure it by
how fast it takes us to get from A to B.
To go from A to B on the planet has been shrinking.
The time that it takes has been shrinking.
So you go from walking, to horses, to automobiles,
to jet aircraft,
and in reality, what's happened is, it hasn't just peaked,
but it's actually been on the decline,
so the fastest A to B travel on the planet
has been the Concorde.
But the Concorde was decommissioned 10 or 15 years ago.
And so from that point of view,
the curve of, the upward trend of
progress measured in this way is actually on the decline,
which would indicate
that we're a technologically regressive society.
And I mean, I think that's a contrarian opinion,
but that's true.
People talk about how the,
how the world is becoming increasingly technological.
And actually, I would say that, no, it's becoming,
we're not too technological.
We're not technological enough.
And we have, more or less, abandoned real innovation,
which is the only way that we're going to solve the problems
that face our world.
And so where I've kind of positioned myself,
in terms of trying to get really innovative,
is looking at anomalies.
So that's looking at things in science
that are either unexplained, or people aren't looking at,
or that don't fit the standard model,
and a lot of that stuff is nonsense,
but some of it isn't, and some of it is real,
and we need that.
We need to look at those unexplained things
as an area that's going to see the new discoveries
in technology.
That's going to be where we're gonna get
free energy, the zero point stuff, new types of travel,
something other than rockets to get around in space.
We're looking at consciousness,
mystery surrounding consciousness.
When you understand that, we reframe our picture of reality.
We can understand medicine in a new way,
and the list goes on and on.
And for those people, those enterprising people,
scientists, and technologists, and entrepreneurs,
who are willing to look at the unconventional areas,
and be able to sort the wheat from the chaff,
they're gonna be hugely rewarded,
because these are the people
that are gonna be creating the future.
(electronic music)
- So we're making, we're creating these quantum computers,
these AI machines, and it's like,
are humans really messing with something
that they shouldn't be?
Or do they know what they're doing?
Or could a lot of negative factors get into it?
Or is it more benevolent factors that are on the side?
What's your understanding of that aspect?
- Yeah.
So there is a danger with AI,
but that danger is that we rely too heavily on software
to control things that are critical to our survival,
and software eventually breaks.
Software eventually does stuff that we wouldn't do
if there was a human being on board,
and that is increasingly,
as time goes on, that's more of a risk,
because more and more things are being controlled by
sophisticated recursive software,
and we're deploying it in ways that
we haven't really tested before.
I think there's potentially a danger
in thinking that you've created AI,
because you don't understand what consciousness is,
and then deploying this system to control things
that we need in our lives,
supply chains, and that kind of thing,
or weapon systems, God forbid.
And it's not like us.
We think it's like us,
and so it ends up making decisions,
or executing programs that are distinctly non-human,
and that are not in our interest, that make no sense.
And so supplanting human wisdom, and sort of, if you will,
the compassion, and the real understanding of the situation,
I think, is also a risk.
Yeah, you don't want supply chains and weapon systems
too strongly controlled
by something that you don't even understand.
- I completely agree, yeah, yeah.
So is there any last comments you would like to say?
Or anything that you wanna wrap up?
Or anything you wanna tell our viewers?
- I think one of the things that's gonna characterize
the next 20 years is that we look at mysteries fresh,
especially mysteries in science,
and things that have been regarded as not true or...
- Only the tangible things, it sounds like.
If it's intangible, it's like,
oh, we don't, that's not science.
We don't recognize that, right?
- I think that there's something really profound
in what you just said, and that has to do with,
we're in this paradigm
that is like a materialistic paradigm,
or it's this idea that anything is real
is explainable by reducing it
to the known properties of physical matter.
And then anything that can't be explained
by the known properties of physical matter
in the current standard model is, by definition, not real.
And I think that's pretty quickly being overturned,
and that's going to open up a lot of new things
that were off-limits for science and technology to explore,
that now are gonna be on again.
It'll be game on for a lot of really cool stuff.
This is exciting,
because it's making science exciting again.
I think it's re-enchanting science in a way that is
extremely needed, especially if we're gonna create
the tech that's gonna save us.
- I mean, I was blown away by what you were talking about
on stage the other day.
It's just like, wow, here's someone so young,
and who's achieved so much,
and has so much understanding of consciousness.
And I see you as kind of like a hope for the future
of a lot of the young people out there.
It's just like we don't have to follow
this rigid science way that we've been taught.
It's like we're forced to think only inside the box.
You're really helping elevate a lot of people, I feel.
- Oh, thanks very much.
That means a lot to me,
and I hope to live up to that (laughs).
Let's put it that way.
- That's great, that's great.
Well thank you so much, Adam, for joining us.
So I think with that, any final last words at all?
- No, that's all.
- Okay, great.
Thank you so much.
So this is Ben, and Adam Curry at Contact in the Desert.
Thanks so much for joining, you guys.
It's been an awesome conversation, Adam.
And until next time, see you guys out on The Edge.
(electronic music)
- Thank you for joining us
for another edition of The Edge of Wonder.
Be sure to hit like and subscribe,
and click that notification bell,
so you don't miss a single episode
from The Edge of Wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét