Want know that it is detrimental and something has gone wrong that the fact of surveillance wouldnt really prevent well so if if one thinks that the world at some level of technology is vulnerable in this sense one can then obviously wants to ask well what could we possibly do in that situation to prevent the world from actually getting destroyed and it does look like insurgents in our us. Ubiquitous surveillance would be the only thing that could possibly prevent that. And now would even that work well i mean thats on the specifics of this so youd have to think just how easy would it be to cause destruction would you just snap your finger or say like a magic world the world blows up well then maybe surveillance wouldnt suffice but suppose its something that takes several weeks and you have to you know do build something in your apartment and maybe require some skill. You know at that point you could imagine a very fine grained. Surveillance infrastructure having to keep giving the capable that didnt intercept. But also how much destruction is. Created if somebody does this is it once it blows up or the whole of the earth maybe you could afford a few sweeping through the net so youd have to then look at the specifics now of course surveillance in itself also is a source of risk to human civilization you could imagine various kinds of total terror and regimes becoming more effective more permanent. Peter surveillance in itself is a totalitarian regime. What do you mean when i mean if youre surveilled 21st 7 of us that in essence is a giant Computer Police state well it depends on i think what this information would be used for. If it so that some. Say Central Authority micromanages what everybody is allowed to do with their lives and certainly that would be a total the terror and turn on president a degree. But suppose it was a kind of posture of surveillance and people just went on with our lives and ollie if somebody actually tried to create this mass destruction thing would there be a response. In that scenario maybe it would not look so totalitarian really realistic though because as soon as someone is in charge of this total surveillance and if its passive like youre saying for a very specific things like total destruction of a city or the world they would for sure take advantage of it its possible that im going away you know i mean im going im just the way humans are mate yeah well i think to varying degrees there are institutional checks and balances in different colors right now we have a lot of very powerful tools and in some places of the world theyre used by. Spots and you know other parts of the world theyre used by the more democratically accountable and liberal governments and the thing in between certainly it would be the case that if you created this kind of extremely fine grained surveillance infrastructure that it would create. A very substantial danger that either immediately or after some period of time it would be captured and by some nefarious group or individual and then used for oppressive purposes that thats certainly i think that that is one major reason for why. People are rightly in my view very suspicious of the surveillance technologies and whether. It could still be the case because its not something we get to choose that the world is so configured that at some level of technology destruction is much easier than creation or defense and it could just be that in that situation the only thing that would prevent actual destruction would be a very fine grained surveillance im just you know for you me for doubting this a little just because ive seen with my own eyes what a police state is a little bit so it never we work so unless its sort of a backyard and the world is so diverse and were also different and ive seen it with my own eyes that human imperfections and disorganization you know they just somehow always grow through any restrictions or norms just like graphs repayment you know yeah well so what is it precisely that youre not convinced about that that could be some level of technology at which destruction because easy or that so impossible surveillance could prevent that the world from going to the idea so leave that to simple surveillance have will still have to interact somehow with nuance thats what is not convincing to me right so i think there it becomes a matter of degree which set of snorers. Would you be able to prevent the world from getting this starting with surveillance so take todays world where massive destruction is possible but its also very hard to like Nuclear Weapons let us say like so that we can have. Reasonable ability even with present day Surveillance Technology to detect if some say nation is building a secret program. So if you then roll it back you require less for all materials less big installations fewer people working on this it gets harder and harder to detect. Right with Current Technology but this is a very rapidly advancing field with. Facial Recognition Software that you could have cameras that could monitor in principle you could monitor every body and all you could imagine even if you want an extreme case but just a kind of the most straight theoretical possibility of modern if everybody wore a collar all the time with with cameras and microphones so that literally all the time when you were doing something some ai system could kind of classify what actions you were taking and and if somebody were detected to be doing this kind of forbidden action. Could be there done some human alerted or something about my problem with i a is that. It is created by you know essence. Beings that are flawed by human beings so how can it be Something Better or perfect earth than human beings enable able to not miss a thing because im thinking if law beings are creating Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence is simulating human beings then its a living flawed beings and its going to miss something well i mean for a im not sure it would have to simulate human beings but be depending on which pretty particular scenario we were looking at it may or may not be necessary to not miss a single thing i mean if youre looking at the kind of much worse Global Warming scenario its fine if few people drive cars even in that world right as long as the majority kind of stopped doing it you wouldnt even need new Surveillance Technology there you would just need a carbon tax or something if you move to the other extreme where a single individual alone can destroy the whole world more than obviously there it would be essential that not a single one slipped through but then it depends on how hard would it be for a single individual with a need to do something very distinctive activity accumulate some special role materials then maybe it would become possible to have the kind of survival. Stuff could avoid that today obviously our Law Enforcement capabilities are very limited but. I do think there are quite Rapid Advances in using to recognize him a tree like recognize faces and to classify actions on done you could imagine thats being built out over a period of 10 or 20 years into something quite formidable so you wouldnt be voluntarily submitting the human race to where well. Thats what im about i mean is im not im not good im just noting that there are certain scenarios if the world unfortunate that turns out to be vulnerable in dr way where it looks like it will lead to actually get destroyed or people will put in place to surveil especially now. That might be depending on what kind of Surveillance Technology you have. Different ways of configuring that. Maybe it would be almost completely automated or in the near term certainly it would require a lot of human involvement one way to sort of check things that have been flagged by algorithmic means for example and then maybe respond to take a short break right now while were back well continue talking. About whether were living in a simulated world by computers or not stay with us. Most people thing to stand out in this business you need to be the 1st one on top of the story or the person with the loudest voice of the biggest raid in truth to stand out on the lose business you just need to ask the right questions and demand the right answer. Questions. The why way phone. China is the apollo 11. This decade. Its defining the technological landscape for a whole country is going to happen for a long time. When theres only johnson. And i just got out of prison for. 41 years. Im 72 years old now i got arrested for too many for some i. Feel you know like just everything was taken out of. My work in the hospital but it was a. Government decision on man that looks a little bit like me. Because about. Homicide on 2 cars. Now. Were tough in the. Midst of battle so youre going. To go system. Do not afraid of trying to frighten. Us no good something going to. Be. Going to. And were back with nick bostrom nick so you know a lot about a much more Artificial Intelligence much more than me do you think we can program Artificial Intelligence to be this benevolent platonic king of this i dont know in lightened monarch or anything that has to do. With control or total control is inevitably repressive and bad. Well i mean i dont think we would know how to do that today i mean of course we cant even build ais that can do all the things that humans cant today but if say next year somebody figured out a way to make ais do all the jobs that humans can do like some big breakthrough i dont think we would know yet how also to align it with human values that is still a technical problem that people are working on since the last few years but with some significant way still to go. So getting methods for scalable ai controlled so that no matter how smart the ai becomes even even maybe it becomes far smarter than we want to because there isnt anybody. That you have is to become smarter than most i think eventually. And then by that time you would want to also have the ability to make sure that they still act in the way you intended even one theyve become intellectually far superior ultimately so that thats a technical problem. That needs to be solved with technical means but then if you solve that you still dont have what we could call the political problem of the governance problem like so it would enable the humans to get the ass to do what they want we still dont need to figure out how to ensure that this new powerful technology is used primarily for beneficial purposes as opposed to wage war oppress one another. And that that part is not the tactical problem that its kind of a political matter like judging from the history of humanity if you are saying there is a slight possibility that i can become more intelligent than us in a way more intelligent. Its not mean humans trying to control and make i do all these things that they want to do its thing i ate controlling the humans and doing. Well were not humans what they would want to be mean but in the ideal case the ai. Being aligned with human values in as much as we would you know specify what it is that we want to achieve the ai would help us achieve it. Do you think ai could ever simulate real feelings and memories. Do you think it can ever really predict a human brain something as chaotic as a human brain because we dont really know what it is how lonely i mean i dont think that would be necessary for alignments to have a very detailed i mean we humans cant do that with one another and we can still be friends with one another or help other people and so forth so that that doesnt require the ability to create 100 percent accurate and relational prediction. So you have this other theory. Before the vulnerable world that we my all be living inside some sort of a matrix just you know and there are layers maybe a simulation. Is a right. You know actually something i published back in 2003. And its an argument that tries to show that one of 3 propositions is true so it doesnt tell us which one. Proposition won the 1st alternative. Is that all civilizations current stage of technology development. To go extinct before they reach a technological maturity so its going to be that maybe theyre out there far away other civilizations but they all failed to reach a technological maturity so because human nature doesnt change i mean Technology Goes further but humans use it to destroy the world. Yeah that that could be the case and a very robust saw that even if you have thousands of human like civilizations out there they would all succumb before they reach technological maturity so thats one way things could be another the 2nd alternative is amongst all civilizations that do reach technological maturity they all his interest in creating these kinds of what i call ancestor simulations these would be detailed computer simulations. At the find in author level of granularity that the people in the simulations would be conscious and have experiences like ours maybe some civilizations do get there but theyre just a completely uninterested in using their resources to create these kinds of simulations. And the 3rd alternative the only one remaining i argue is that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation right now built by someone who wants to build us a ship anything thats the most probable one. They did the simulation argument doesnt say anything about which of these is true or most likely it just demonstrates this constraint that if you reject all 3 of them you have a kind of probabilistic incoherence and random of the full argument involves some Probability Theory and stuff but i think the basic idea can be conveyed relatively intuitively its supposed to 1st turn it is false so that some nontrivial fraction get through to material to suppose the 2nd alternative is also falls so that some of those who have gone through to maturity do use some of their resources to create simulations ok right then you can show that. They because each one of those could run a lot of simulation study of some of them go through there will be many many more simulated People Like Us than there would be People Like Us living in our regional history even right whole 6000000000 of us yeah but not just that but you could show that at technological maturity even by using just a tiny fraction of say one planets worth of compute resources even just for one minute you could draw on you know kinds of thousands of simulations of all of Human History so that if the 1st 2. And we could talk more about the evidence apparently how that simulation is possible even if we dont understand our brain well me today obviously we cant do what you say and im not really honest with our evolution argument makes no assumption about the timescale behaved 20000 years or 20000000 years it still holds. And so because each simulating civilization would be able to run using a tiny fraction of its resources. Hundreds of thousands millions of runs through all of Human History almost all. Beings with our kinds of experiences were done be simulated ones rather than non simulated ones and conditional and that are good we should think we are probably one of the simulated ones so in other words what that means is if you reject the 1st 2 alternatives it doesnt seems you are forced to accept the 3rd one which done shows you can reject all 3 in other words that at least one of them is true so thats the structure of the simulation argument ok so you answered my 1st question about how can we how can anything simulate human brain because youre saying theres no time span so again that. 2 questions if were living in a simulation why would the future eyes. Even make one just for fun i mean so. Many possible reasons you could imagine i mean you could imagine scientific exploration like wanting to know counterfactual history what would have happened if things had gone differently that could kind of be. Both theoretical interesting and maybe useful for trying to understand other extraterrestrial civilizations you might encounter you could imagine. Entertainment reasons that we humans do our best with models that bring you into this world that we put on theater plays and make movies Computer Games in many cases making the most realistic as we can of course we cant make them perfectly realistic now but if you had that ability maybe we would. Make them perfectly realistic. So that would be another example maybe maybe even some kind of historical tourism you could imagine if you can actually time travel maybe you could build an exact simulation of the past and interact with that and it would be as if you had to travel to the past and you could experience what it can be like and other reasons as well that we we dont necessarily know very much about what would motivate or drive some kind of technologically mature opposed to man civilization but why they would want to do Different Things with their resources and then i guess the core question eightys even if were living in a simulation rate does it really matter to us im me and you and everyone around us i mean buddhists say the whole world is illusion so what this does is cancel out the things we live there are good or bad like love and feelings and problems no nonsense the knowing day i think to a 1st approximation. If you became convinced youre living in a simulation you probably should have gone as if you were not living in a simulation for most everyday things like if you want to get into your car you still have to take out the car key and open the door etc. So i think thats true i think that might be some respects in which new possibilities would exist if you are in a simulation that wouldnt really exist if youre not in a simulation. For example and we think. The universe cant just suddenly pop out of existence right. Conservation of energy and momentum and so forth whereas of course if you are in a simulation if somebody pulls the plug of the simulation the whole thing ceases to exist saw. The possibility of there being more and im sure its well that the world suddenly ending with that that seems to not take its likely or not over sometimes go but at least it seems like a possibility. Other things as well. You could imagine things like. After after life like is clearly possible in a simulation you could just rerun the same person in another simulation and so forth or various interventions by the simulators in some ways actually. I thought of possibilities kind of structurally similar to what theologians have been thinking about in terms of supernatural relationship to a creator and so forth kind of a kind of analogue arise within this simulation theory stuff. Although i dont think there is any logical necessary connection one way or the other its still kind of intriguing about to get these kind of parallel set of possibilities in some respects not exactly the same. But in some ways kind of similar. Ok now i understand the whole. Theory because i wasnt really putting 2 and 2 together because i was really thinking now ok so it was making sense doesnt make sense now. And its still all related somehow to to Artificial Intelligence because what would be simulating us rate it will be some sort of. Yes so a lot of scenarios today are. Are linked to this dooms day when Artificial Intelligence takes over or the contrary a lot of people are saying that Artificial Intelligence is actually the solution to a lot of our problems like hunger and malady and Global Warming where us and some worry but we havent i think both are possible outcomes. If you feel so to ask me whether im an optimist or pessimist and i started to refer to myself as frightened optimist. I do think that the transition. Is not something we should avoid i see it more as a kind of gate through which we need to passage and all the possible paths to really grand future for humanity go through escape at some point in waltz the. Development of greater than human Machine Intelligence certainly like a purgatory before youre not not the parent area but a true nest. Transition which however will be associated with significant risk including existential risk starts that we actually permanently destroy ourselves or what we care about in in making this transition i think it is unless we destroy ourselves some other way before i think this transition will happen and our focus should be on getting our act together as much as possible. In whatever time frame we have remaining with what some ok whatever it is try to do the research to figure out scalable methods for ai control to the extent we can try to get the global order in whatever recent posts a book can foster more collaboration. And in particular within a community and so forth developed in a common set of norms and the idea that it should be for the common good of all. And then making sure we dont destroy ourselves before we even get a chance with ai. Would be good as well. And trying to grow up and become wiser in whatever this sort of intervening number of years we have. Thank you so much for this wonderful insight its been a pleasure talking to you pleasure talking to. Join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and ill be speaking to guest of the world of politics or business im showbusiness ill see that. If the let me. Ask i wouldnt will. Pick i could not predict that did not trouble getting. To show more than. Can you love lose even enough. Time to make it a secret as the ones who come. To what do our own lives the kook on the scene do it in the out not as you dunks. Them with a filthy political candidate. I knew of those 2 moons from little known much of this news thrown in 92 from the. So would you hire the tide to use in doo doo. One joke. Among the new one on the media house on the net passing them. I had a spiritual experience. And i had the little girl that died in the fire sent there collins. Saying finally there was on order looking for a kid reaching them off 54 years old age but 21 years on good role model. For a crime i didnt commit. My own stupidity was innocent doesnt read to loose that nobody would listen. You know and the. Trial was pretty much a farce the family are ahead of them guilty pleas. Well. You know what. People are. Going through. Forgive me im so. I knew she was there and i knew exactly what i was doing. People. Sometimes theres no explanation. Blue wave the conservative party swayed to its biggest majority in the parliament. For labor in the polls our live coverage from westminster returns in less than 10 minutes. Of the world news this hour at least 17 was. Killed in a militant an army base in exposing it prices for French Foreign policy in its former colony also it. A deadly protests sweeps across india over a new migration law which makes it easier for a 1000000