Artificial Intelligence - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 2/24/23

or consciousness. There was a New York Times technology columnist who reported a couple of weeks ago being deeply unsettled after a chat bot that's part of Microsoft's upgraded BING search engine repeatedly urged him in a conversation to leave his wife's as if this chatbot had fallen in love with him. And there was another instance the bing chat bought reportedly threatened to steal nuclear codes and unleasha virus. I mean this to me sounds like the beginning of

the AI singularity. What do you think, Well, lots to unpact there. And of course we have, of course, primarily science fiction to inform us when it comes to these kinds of questions. By that, I mean this, Yeah, a lot of us have gone out there and we've experimented with chat GPT. I have to and I'll give you

a quick report on that here at a moment. But when we think about what could happen, right, the kinds of things that might occur on down the road in the years I had most of us, of course, have seen films, and this is one of the problems as we move into a future where technology is beginning to mirror the kinds of things that for decades we've all

been familiar with from science fiction. Yeah, we expect to see the kinds of things that we've only had experience with on the silver screen, and so that can be problematic because I think it instills a lot of fear on the more hopeful side of things. I saw a recent demonstration of chat GPT. Actually it was my brother over the holidays a few months back who was showing me this. It had just come out and he was Caleb, my brother was really excited and said, look at all

the stuff that chat GPT can do. It could write songs, I mean on the fly, It could pull up information, historical information by the way, about for instance, UFO incidents, and so I thought, well, this could be interesting, this could perhaps be a research tool. What else could it do apart from maybe helping college students cheat on their homework. So after going home and experimenting a little bit myself, you know, I was, and I don't want to say

I was entirely underwhelmed. I recognized the potential, I recognized the capabilities, but I also started asking some questions of not just that particular program, but actually a lot of the different AI programs. I thought, I'm going to kind of compare and contrast between a few of them, and I started asking questions like, tell me about Aria, if you won, tell me about you, all kinds of different things related to topics that I guess Coast to coast

listeners would be very familiar with. And what I found, Richard initially was that, first of all, there was a lot of non factual information, I mean, incorrect, frankly, just completely fabricated information that these chatbots will give you back. And there are articles you'll read online that have talked about this. We've covered it a bit over there at

the debrief as well. That a lot of the time these AI are designed to provide seemingly authoritative information even if it's wrong, And so we aren't to a point yet where really, first of all, these computers can be trusted to give us valid information. So for those who are saying that they've had experiences with these chatbots advising that they leave their spouse or partner or things like that, I'm not too worried yet, given the level of accuracy

that they seem to display. But going forward, I mean, should we be concerned if these chatbots in these early iterations are already making references to things like stealing nuclear codes and doing things that could be potentially not just destructive but also could be globally cataclysmic if taken to the absolute worst extreme. I mean, that's not exactly settling. And again, unfortunately we're informed mostly by what we've seen

in movies. So I hope that the real life counterparts in the years ahead are something that are quite different from what we see in films. And it's all the more reason why right now, and again, of course, leading AI ethicists, they're saying, we've got to make very careful, informed and ethical decisions as we design these sorts of machines that are more and increasingly more so with time, capable of thinking very much like humans do. But does it not sound as if they are developing self awareness

or consciousness? And if they are, it's almost as if they constitute a new species. That's an interesting one. What do we call that homo mechanicists? I don't know. I mean, this is a interesting idea. And again I've talked with a lot of people about this. You know, one AI expert, Benjamin Gertzel, PhD. I spoke with him a couple of times, many many years ago. A question I had for him, Richard, was what if there were a sort of consciousness that emerged and it was not necessarily in a place that

we expected. For instance, we look at these chatbots, and we look at AI systems that are developed with the intention of trying to create a computer algorithm that can right now, not actually think right now. The best that they can do is they can mimic human behaviors. But it's still mimicry. It's not actual intelligence thought like what occurs in our biological brains. Right. But I asked doctor Gertzel, what if, for instance, we had a for instance, just

I mean Google, right, a search engine? What if we had something that's out there that is a tool that everybody uses every day, but which is constantly being fed information, and it's also something that by virtue of the way that the Worldwide Web works, it has access essentially to all information that humans have placed on the Internet. What if autonomous AI actually erupted out of something like the

Internet itself and that search engines essentially enabled that. Again, this is an idea once again that we find in science fiction. Robert Heinlan and the book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. We had a computer system on the Moon that was fed constant information to the point that all of a sudden it just kind of click wakes up. And I asked doctor Gertzel, and he said, I mean, maybe it's not impossible. Some would argue already that the Worldwide Web displays aspects of what some would like into

intelligence or consciousness. Maybe we're not quite to the point yet where it is the mother brain, so to speak. But again, maybe that option isn't off or shouldn't be

off the table yet. I am a nephew who reviews and books for a literary publication up here in Canada, and I can't remember the name of the author, but recently wrote a book talking about the emergence of artificial intelligence and robots with self awareness and how we now have to start thinking about at some point in the future, almost a charter of rights for well, what did you call them, homeless mechanicists or something, because if they evolved

to that level, and there I am using the word evolve, but if they do develop consciousness and self awareness, then we may have to start thinking about those lines. As strange as that may sound, a charter of rights for robots, well it may sound strange right now, but you know, I'm reminded of a TEDx talk that was given by the legendary computer scientist and actually a guy who we have in part to thank for the development of the

Worldwide Web, and that's none other than doctor Jacques Vallet. Again, you and I know him best for his legendary involvement in research into the UAP topic, but he also was one of the innovators behind our pannette, which was an early predecessor to the Internet. But when he was talking about that back in I think it was about twenty thirteen, he gave this TED talk, Doctor Valet, who I've thanks

to my colleague at the debrief, Chrissy Newton. I've had the opportunity to get to know and speak with doctor Valet a bit over the last year, and that was one thing I mentioned to him. I said, in twenty thirteen, you were talking about impossible futures and things that have happened that at one time in human history would have seemed impossible, but that with new technologies become a part of our reality. AI and things like this are of

course the first to come to mind. But during that talk, doctor Valet said, and this is very it seems prescient, but it makes a lot of sense now that we know a degree about his involvement in the construction of a particular database that was associated with the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program, which was a da program that looked at UFOs and the Capella database, which was a

UFO database he built. But during that talk he mentioned that in the years ahead, people will they be surprised if they find that fast moving oval objects have been moving to our sky and that the Pentagon had been collecting information about them. This is a good example, I think of the kind of thing that might seem absurd to people if we go back to the early two thousands, of the late nineteen nineties, but which today everybody's very familiar with and we hear about all the time, how

the military's tracking unusual objects. What are they? Are they ours? Are they for an ever series or could they be something more exotic? Back to your point there, it might sound absurd to say we need a bill of rights for all artificial intelligence today, but again, ten years from now, is that going to be the case? History continues to show us, Richard, that things that seem impossible today in the world of tomorrow become a reality. We should be

aware of that. Yeah, maybe I'm just getting as I get older. You know, I understand change. The only constant is change, and I try to embrace change. But that kind of change, the speed of the technological change that's coming, I don't know that I'm equipped to handle that. I don't know that I want to live long enough to in a world that's run and managed largely by autonomous robots and artificial intelligence that has consciousness. I don't think I want to be around for that. It just depends

on which direction things go. Right. If we have autonomous systems that are thinking carrying machines or that a very least that are capable of mimicking that kind of thinking and carrying behavior, and they maybe even are more carrying in some ways than humans are. Right, we finally have a an AI supercomputer that is capable of, you know, a very good mimicking of or a replication of human

thought processes. But you take out the kinds of evolutionary drives, you know, sex, hunger, things like this, and this machine looks at humans and says, what are you guys doing? What are you up too? You know, love is the answer, camaraderie, companionship. These are the things you guys should be focusing on, not war, not the destructive kinds of potential that humans have led with for centuries. One would hope that that

would be the outcome. You know, here's one thing that in the near term I think that could be helpful about AI, for instance, and I think about this a lot. Could AI, as it improves, help us unravel the mystery of UFOs. I mean, I imagine again, and this might seem almost more like something you expect and sci fi, but an AI algorithm that we finally give the UFO project or problem to and we say, solve this for us. We've been working on this for decades. What are these things?

Where are they from? Are we being visited? Are these something from here? Are they something even more complex than that? And the AI looked at it and says one of two things, How have you guys not figured this out yet? The answer is simple? Or the AI looked at it and says, now, this is an interesting problem. I often wonder how AI might be able to help us, But in the more near term, we're already using algorithms to

more intelligently collect and also processed data on identified objects. Again, I presumed that this is probably also part of what the All Domain Anomally Resolution Office that the d OD is doing, and that could be hopeful because in the near term it may actually help reveal some things about questions that have really proven to be almost unplumbable when it comes to the limitations of humans. Well, think about this.

Maybe we'll send these robots, fully autonomous robots with artificial intelligence that have a degree maybe of self awareness, send them out into the cosmos looking for life on other planets. And maybe that's what the gray aliens are. Maybe some because they've been described as being somewhat robotic. Maybe some other civilization millions of years ago sent the gray aliens out into the cosmos looking for intelligence. Look, I wouldn't

rule anything out. To paraphrase what General Van Hirk said during the Big Game the other night when they hold that Pentagon press conference, and New York Times Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper asked about the possibility of extraterrestrials, the general said, I'm not ruling anything out. So when it comes to what kind of intelligence might be behind some of these UAP,

I'm certainly open to those possibilities. Again, as a student of the history, I've looked back at famous cases, many of which do involve sightings of the purported occupants, and I feel that as much to the UFO subject has been stigmatized in years past, right now it seems that people have an aversion to talking about the historic cases that do involve the apparent occupants or the controllers, those

who are the operators of these anomalous aerial vehicles. That's something that eventually we are going to have to talk about, as well as their potential intentions. But coming back to the AI question, I wrote about this a number of years ago, and in recent days, of course, I've been somewhat pleased to see that of thinkers like Ave Loebe, former Harvard astronomer and someone with the Galileo project who's very involved in trying to get to the bottom of

the UAP question. He and many others have raised questions about, hey, look, if we're developing AI here on Earth, and we will use that and we will probably eventually send that AI out there to aid in our space exploration, why in the world what another intelligent civilization, with the likelihood that they too will develop AI of their own, why wouldn't

they send that AI? And some even think it's more possible that the UAP that we see, if they were from any place else other than Earth, that they would be more likely to be artificial intelligence than biological entities traveling here. Again, we can't rule anything out, but that is a prospect that we're hearing more and more and a whole lot of discussion about it as this UAP

situation continues to evolve. Right, That was sort of I think Nigel Kerner's the late Nigel Kerner's view of the graves, that they were synthetic biological units that would certainly explain how if the if they are artificial intelligence or robots essentially, how they could withstand the incredible g force with these crafts that are doing, you know, these maneuvers that are

just otherworldly, absolutely, Richard. You know, I remember years ago watching the Transformer films right and thinking to myself, I mean, just having this aha moment. If indeed artificial intelligence were the ones traveling throughout space, traversing the cosmos and interstellar space, they probably wouldn't be as encumbered by the limitations of space travel, the effects it has on human bodies or any kind of biological organisms, you know, the atrophy of

muscle age of course being an issue. Indeed, if you had intelligent machines that could traverse the cosmos, they could probably get around, and they could last longer, and they could probably do things in spacecraft or aircraft that humans or other biology biological organisms couldn't do. So again, I remember watching those Transformer films is entertainment, but of course thinking huh, you know, maybe there could be some truth to that, and indeed there are a lot of conjectures

that have been put forward. Again, this kind of gets into the area where it's the more speculative side of UFOs, but I find that fun, and I also think that sometimes informed speculation can be helpful. I mean, it very well may be more likely that what we are looking at our drones or autonomous AI probes that are carrying out tasks here on Earth. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one a m. Eastern, and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more