So full disclosure, folks. This week's classic episode was recorded in October of Uh. And how odd do you think it would be, mattin Noell for us to go back to the versions of ourselves to talk about today's question, could robots really run the world? Because I think we're almost there, right, We're dang close. And and really what we're focusing on here are artificial intelligences and versions of artificial intelligence and algorithms that are being used to make crucial decisions about humanity. And come on, guys, well, I mean there's part of me that's like this sounds great. You know, you set the parameters. There's no room for interpretation or like human error or human avarice and greed and uh, you know megalomania. But you know best lay plans, right, So let's see where this takes us. From UFOs two ghosts and government covering histories writtled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to Now, let's kick this pig. Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt and I am Ben, and this is stuff they don't want you to know. And today we're talking about robots, y'all. Yeah, let's go back to uh something that our listeners are probably asking themselves about though, Matt, what what? There are probably a couple of you out there in uh podcast land who say, wait, did Matt just start this episode by saying kick this pig? Yeah, you gotta kick the pig and get it started. Man. Once the pig stars rolling, Uh, you know, it's covered with grease, so you have to first catch up to it, which is incredibly difficult, and then clean your body on top of it in hopes of perhaps wrangling it. I get the feeling that you and are super producer Noel shout out to Noel over there. Uh. I get the feeling that you guys will maybe talking about something else off air or is now is kicked the pig a thing we say? Now? Yeah, that's just that's how we start the podcast. Ben, I've been doing it. Have you not noticed? We do it every week? Perhaps it's my human frailties, Matt. Maybe that's why I'm Maybe I'm slipping a little, you know. Oh no, maybe we should be replaced with robots. No, I hope not. I mean, Null's human, you're human. I'm human most but not all of our listeners are human. Yeah, I do seem to recall an email from a few listeners that I don't know. It didn't come across as human. Yeah, especially you know, if you point out that you are writing in a very human way, then that makes you sound even less human. Guys, it's right up. There was starting a sentence with the phrase not to be creepy, but oh, that's the worst. I do it all the time. I mean people, some people are really into creeping, I guess and creeptitude. I thought that in l made her by the way you do that in the elevator. How do you just if there's just one other person, I'll say something like that, not to be creepy, but I really like your shoes mostly mostly dudes too, now that you're going to try it out when I leave today. So what what we are talking about, Matt, As you said, it's the idea of robots, and the idea that there could be a situation which robots rule the world. Ladies and gentlemen. We're joking mostly, but it is true that uh, Matt and I Noel. Certainly anybody who makes a podcast probably does have an audience that is not entirely human, because there are programs that will listen to your podcast for verification purposes, for sharing purposes, things like that, Um, we haven't, to our knowledge received an email or a tweet from a robot yet not yet. And the same goes for video as well, just checking to see if your content matches any of these other things. Uh, it's kind of interesting how much automation is going on from It's really weird to think of it from a listening and viewing standpoint that something is checking watching or that is not human. That the old hal nine. I'm sorry, Matt, I can't let you do that. And I cannot publish this episode for it contains a scene from the Matrix. So today we're gonna yeah, that's that's happened to us, folks. So today we're going to look at the idea of robots running the world. And to to get to the present day world, we have to start with the origin of the idea of robots, right, that's right. Then it goes all the way back to the ancient world, back to two hundred and seventy b C. When a Greek engineer named Yeah, I don't I had to take a guess of that one as well to sibious tibious. That's it uh C T E s I B I U s uh. He made these organs of that were made with water and clocks and these movable figurines. You can see some of this stuff, uh if you look it up online. Right. We know that humans have been able to build complex movie machines for thousands of years. A great example would be the anti Cathera mechanism. Oh yeah, man that thinks fascinating, isn't weird? It's uh this astronomical calculating machine, you know, entirely mechanical, uh, quite complex from what we can figure in the reconstructions, right that people have attempted to do. So, we know that ancient man was not just smack and rocks together and making up stories about the sun sets. We know that ancient man was capable of building sophisticated uh machines that a lot of people today couldn't build. And we had something like robots philosophically before we had the word robot in the notes, I I did something kind of crappy here and I put many of the ancient know it alls called the concept automata automata, which means just self operating machine. Oh yeah, and they were hugely popular. The hero of Alexandria was famous for his part um for working in this field. And again, if you go online check look up the word automata, it's just it's just auto and then M A T A. And you can see some of these old they are machines, and some of the them are so elaborate, sure, like the court machines where they would have someone who appeared to be pouring tea or playing a violin. Some of those are still around, and I think they're creepy. You know. That's what you say in the elevator, right, you say, not to be creepy, but may I show you my automaton? Oh yeah, I wouldn't want to do that. Yeah, Plus it sounds kind of a euphemism, right in the Hero of Alexandria wasn't the only person doing this. There were also people like the Greek mathematician ark Tas of Tarentum, which I am probably grossly mispronouncing um if I recall correctly, he built a little mechanical bird. Oh excellent. Another example of automata would be do you remember the old Clash of the Titans films with the claymation and stuff in the seventies. Um was it was it that one? Or it was one of the Greek films where they had this magic golden owl. Oh, I know what you're talking about. That, yes, and I can't recall if it's that film or not. Oh man, that was a great that's a great example of the idea of what it would have looked like. UM. So, I don't know if you know us, but we haven't up until this point used the word robot in our research. And that's because it was first used, uh in nineteen twenty one in this play called Rosum's Universal Robots or Are You Are by a check writer named Carol Kapok. Then in nineteen forty one, Isaac Asimov he used the word robotics to describe this kind of same technology, and he is one of the guys that predicted the rise of this robotic industry the world in which we live today. It's it's weird met because we've often talked about UM. I don't know if any of this made on the air, but we've often talked about how much influenced these visionaries, these futurists or science fiction writers can end up having on the world around us. Funny fact, ladies and gentlemen, that not once, but multiple times in US history, the US government has contacted science fiction writers and said, guys, here's your security clearance. Uh hypothetically, how y pathetically if a happened, what would we do? Oh? Yeah, sure, you need the visionary You can't. You can't accomplish anything unless you have someone thinking of the ideas. Yeah, and as mov as it turns out, was right, he called it. And we live in a real life version of some science fiction e stories. Right. We have robots everywhere, not as widespread as advertisements yet and on a widely differing scales of robotics, from the very very simple to the extremely complex. But robots. If you're going to be called a robot, you've got to have a few things in common, or a few things that make you a robot. Oh yeah, yeah, like they all have. What what's an example, Well, you gotta have some kind of moving apparatus, moving body surnts of articulation and things like that. Yeah. And the second main thing is some kind of power source so that whatever it is, whatever you are as a robot can function by yourself. That makes sense too. Nope, when we talk about robotics and when we talk about robots running the world, what we're really talking about is artificial intelligence, right. Um, this this is the idea of a sentience of some sort made by human beings or maybe just made by throwing a bunch of math together in one conceptual pool, the same way that a bunch of proteins or amino acids or whatever we're thrown together in some primordial ooze, and that from this somehow will arrive a version of life self awareness, and that that is the key. Right At what point the scary thing is when the machine goes, oh, I'm a machine and I can do X. Yeah. Or there was a story that you and I talked about which there's a spoil alert. Um, there's a moment in this story where somebody's searching on the net for something and instead of asking if she spelled it correctly, the the thing on the other side of the search engine asked her why she she's searching for it? Yeah, uh, yeah, that one's a little weird. We like sci fi as well too, But so what what we know here is that in some ways. Artificial intelligence can already outthink human beings, but not in always the way that a root robot would end up ruling the world quote unquote is if there were AI of some sort that was across the board outperforming human beings bar none and Matt. Let's talk about what robots in their less corporeal sibling artificial intelligence do today. But first we have a word from our sponsor, and this one is for all you mechanical listeners out there. One zero zero, one zero zero zero one one one zero, one zero, one zero, one zero zero zero, one one one zero zero zero, one zero, one zero, one zero, one zero zero one zero, one one one one zero, zero, one one zero, one one one zero, one zero, one one zero, one zero, one zero, one zero, one one zer one one one two zero, one zero, one one one one zero zero, one one zero, one one one zero zero zero one one one one zero, one zero, one one one zero, one zero, one zero zero zero A division of illumination global unlimited. Huh you know, it's uh, it's weird. It's not for our demographic. I guess, yeah, I something was lost in translation for me at least. Um, Yeah, somebody got something out of it. Sure, yeah, was it a product? The computer got really excited? You know, I think it was because it sounded like that was legally eads at the end. That's what I thought I heard. At least it went really fast. Well, Illumination Global Unlimited has rarely led us wrong, so we'll just have to trust them on that one. Uh. And now that we're back, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for us to talk about robots today. What do they actually do? Well? Probably more than you would expect. Well, maybe let's talk about a couple of things. How about housekeeping, house cleaning? Who cleans up your house when you leave? Oh wait, it's my little room. Ba oh man, I love room bas I want one so bad, and I want to hack it to some remote controls and then strap stuff to it. And dude, you know, see, I have two dogs, and I'm worried about how they would react to a room by going around during the day when I'm not home, That's right, I'm afraid I would come home and find a dead room. Ba uh. But I don't know, maybe not. Maybe they make a extreme room bus, or maybe they form an alliance and then they just my smaller dog just rids in the room, but around which, like our mention of the mathematician who is building automata in the ancient world, that reference with animals and machines working together is going to come back into play. But we also know, of course, everybody knows that robots are huge and manufacturing. Oh yeah, they're making all your big things, all your cars. I'm trying to think of something else, in particular doors. I would say that door frames, a lot of woodworking has some kind of mechanical process to it. High end electronics as well. Uh. There are other places where we use robots because they are dangerous. Uh, they're dangerous situations for human being. That would be something like bomb disposal. Oh yeah, you've seen you've seen those. And even swat teams now in the US have robots. Some of them do which can They Admittedly they look kind of goofy, but they get the job done. Yeah, they're not built to look cool while they're doing. Yeah, you just replace an arm if one of them gets shot off. We also use robots for navigation, or maybe that's more likely that we use AI for sure of some sort. Yeah, I remember that we're talking about both of those together. And sometimes separately in this episode. Then you've got unmanned vehicles, which are a fun combination of both. In some cases, usually it's just an automated machine that's then controlled by human like the Uh well, not like that one. I was going to say, like the Predator drones or you know, something like the unmanned aerial vehicles. Yeah, which is I guess in a way, a robot. It's got a moving missile system. It's not quite the same. Well yeah, but it's it's got an engine and it has a computer on board capable of making calculations. Uh, it has moving parts. So but then you've got things like that that have AI in them, like the X thirty seven B that we've talked about before, the automated space Shuttle. It's uh, it's self controlled. It's automated. Um secret uh uh yeah. But then of course the drones that we spoke about. I gotta say, I love the idea of the X thirty seven B. What's it doing up there? You know? It's like the It's like when we found out about the Corona satellite program and we started you guys, we didn't get in trouble for this one, but we weren't sure if we would get away clean because Matt and I of a while back, we found some evidence that you can teach yourself to track spy satellites, and there was a bit of a pushback by certain government agencies when they found out that that could happen, not against us, but against the people who had figured out how to. We would never Yeah, but you can't classify the sky. Looking at the sky is something that everyone can do at this point, not yet been not yet until wait till there's a security clear it's so high that you cannot be organic to have it, and then uh god, okay, so let's let's come back down to Earth. Back down there. There are also automated other vehicles that drive on roads. Oh, autonomous cars. Good call, and your show car Stuff has talked about that a few times. Yeah, we've talked about We've been tracing the evolution of autonomous cars for the length of the show at this point. And we also, uh, let's see Scott, my co host, and car Stuff teamed up with Jonathan on Tech Stuff to talk a little bit more about autonomous cars and whether or not you're a fan of it. Ladies and gentlemen, and probably is coming to a highway near you. Do you think it's gonna be the new system of private automobiles eventually? Yeah? Wow, yeah, eventually, Um, for numerous reasons. But we've got some other stuff that happened. I think in two thousand ten, the first self replicating robot was built at Cornell University. Um. Then we have another even cooler, the coolest perhaps, I think a robot that you know, goes to Mars and then hangs out on Mars for a long period of time and take selfies. Okay, yeah, but it also vaporizes material to figure out the chemical compounds that are in there. It's really awesome. And then there are dark Robots Soldiers where one of my friends is scared of robots, Matt, and so what I like to do is every so often I'll send him a YouTube video of outdated DARPA robots taste, you know, the big dogs and all that. Yeah, the big dog which looks like some weird puppetry thing and it still doesn't fall over at surprising. And then that man is still the scariest I think. Yeah, yeah, pet man is scary because it looks more human. Well, it's like it looks a lot like a terminator. Man. They must not watch films. I don't understand. It's really scary. And by the way, we made a collaboration with All Time Conspiracies on that subject on some of the DARPA robots and killer robots. So if you get a chance, check that out All Time Conspiracies. I think it's called do Killer Robots Exist? Spoiler alert? Uh yeah, but we love working with All Time And if you, for some reason haven't checked out their show yet, then uh, please check them out. Uh. There's another thing we'll explore here, as you said, Matt, and that is the of artificial intelligence today. Not to bury the lead, but in some ways artificial intelligence has already surpassed the abilities of most human beings. Yeah, there are several examples here. Um. One is Deep Blue, which is an AI that went up against a chess master. Forget the year that that happened, and there was Casper of them. Yeah, and did he win? Uh. They had a series of games, Yeah, more than one game, and we know that Deep Blue did win. Uh, like it did really well. I think they went to a draw than they It was neck and neck. It was definitely John Henry moment, and then we remember IBMS Watson computer. Uh, just destroyed it on Jeopardy. No, you'd say he went hard on the paint on Jeopardy, right, got the no the Noel, not the fabled prize Noel not. Uh. There's another idea here with AI, and it's the idea of intelligent agents. This be a little bit simpler. It's it's a modular system where where in the program just perceives its environment and it just takes actions to increase its chances for success. However, success is to find, so it could be really simple. And what we're finding is that today professional roboticists are working much more closely with mathematicians, just like the guys in the ancient world, to solve some of the most difficult problems for robots, by which we mean both the physical stuff and the mental stuff. And and we have a list of the kind of things that robots at present stink at doing. Yeah. Well, the biggest one is the thing that we call common sense, um, and that's just reasoning and qualification of problems. So uh, it's basically listing all the possible preconditions for success for any given thing, any given task. Oh yeah, that's the qualification problem, Like how and you if if a robot or an AI program does exactly what it's told to do, uh, then how can you list all of the conditions that it will ever run into. I was watching a video and it was on this program that was learning how to play old, old, old video games. And what it did is analyze the pixels on the screen and basically you would have to just watch the video game play out and die like the character that it was playing would just die over and over and over until it realized, oh, this pixel needs to be here and over here, and I need to avoid when this this color pixel comes through. And it started to master fairly simple games like Breakout, but it could it figured out how to and again, this is an AI that's just running and learning. It figured out how to master Breakout to where it would send the little ball up to the top and knock out all of the um all of the little tiles that way. And then it started playing games like the little shooter games where you're flying in an airplane, but it mastered them where it wouldn't die, it could beat the game. It would just go through and win. And that is the potential we can do here. That's one of the things that can be difficult for robots as well, is to acquire new skills. But the idea of acquiring new skills can be a little deceptive. It's a rabbit hole, it's a bunch of Matroshka dolls or whatever. Because if your skill that you are programmed to do is to learn to play games based on positions of pixels, then are you really acquiring a new skill or are you simply following that kind of programming? Right, yeah, exactly, And uh, I think that's a that's an interesting thing. Another thing that we're doing that is difficult for robot is that you and I and you out there listeners are holding conversations of sorts. Do you remember when clever Bot first came out? Dude, I still spend some time on clever but every once in a while. Clever but has become, uh, just so much nicer in a lot of ways. Originally clever bot was sort of agitated. Well, yeah, when it was really popular and it was just a little kids in there just railing curse words at it and insulting it. What is clever but clever Bot is? I guess it's just a program that you type in a little text asking a question perhaps, and it responds to you. And it responds to you with a combination of things that have been given to it and put into it. So it's pretty interesting what you can get out. And it doesn't a lot of times it's it doesn't respond to the question that you're asking in the way that you would expect at all. Right, Yeah, and it used to be very, very combative, but it's become a little bit nicer as it has as it gathers more data. Right, I want to see clever bot when it's in its eighties, you know. Yeah, oh, the outdated slang alone lets hacking. It only just doesn't want to do anything anymore. It's kind of tired. He just doesn't want and he's like, he's so cranky. Every answer will be yolo. So clever bot was built to pass the Turing test, which we have we have talked about in some other shows as well. Another thing that robots and AI have a difficult time doing is lying deceiving effectively. Um. But that, along with the next one I think will be uh, will not be weak points of AI pretty soon. Uh. The big example we have here is the ability to anticipate human actions. You know, humans being at times irrational, given to outbursts of joy and sorrow and violence and kindness, we can be kind of tough to reed for, you know, your average every day Joe Sho, Joshmo robot. Yeah, but to be fair, we do follow patterns pretty pretty closely a lot of times. And that, my friend, is the big, big point, right, because what we're learning with the arrival of big data and the coalation methods and the smarter and smarter and more sophisticated models for sorting all that crap, is that this might one day be the deciding factor for robotic or artificial intelligence superiority because they may just be able to predict the future so much so that it appears to be magic. Oh yeah, especially if you have enough data point points on every single individual the way we're beginning to gather data points on every human. Just take the the new Apple watch that's coming out. All the different data points that are gonna be gathered on you. That's uh m hmm, I don't know, but I like it. Matt. You are visibly a comfortable talking about the Apple Watch. Let's go ahead, and you know, at some point we need to bust the myth about l O as well. What we'll see how that works out forward to the future. That's where we're going. Will Moore's law hold up anyone who's not familiar with Moore's law, that's the one that states, uh, computer capacity will double every eighteen months, and so it's exponential, right. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and fast. And it seems like it's getting faster and faster because it's doubling, right, So will that happen with the growth of artificial intelligence? I love that pixel example, because that robot teaching itself right to navigate through this world based on pixel position. It dies all the time. It starts off really slow and then quickly becomes flawless, you know, god mode, video game player, breakout and stuff. This leads us to um an interesting comparison because a lot of stuff that we read now you know, Matt, you and I. Originally we're going to spend just a week on the stock market, but because a high frequency trading, we made it two weeks. And uh that that's something that we don't always do. But what we discovered while we were looking into this question, will robots run the stock market? Will they rule the world? We found that what's much more likely to happen is not just robots ruling the world, but some sort of cybernetic symbiosis yeah, where an algorithm is run um somehow by a human agent of some sort, but all the bulk of the work will be done and kind of already is right now, being done by math, by algorithms, but a machine and a computer that just can do it with such speed that a human never could, right, And then having a human there as point person for the decisions that robots can't do so well. Yet it's it's uh, it's interesting because it reminds me of the story about mitochondria, and there's a there's a really strange thing that mitochondria can I guess, at least figuratively or anecdotally, uh, tell us about the relationship between people and machines, or the potential relationship with people machines in the future. Mitochondria, according to some pretty compelling research, wasn't always part of your cells or my cells. Originally mitochondria, argue several experts, it was a free living bacteria and it just got buddy Buddy with cells, So buddy, buddy, in fact that now it's in all your cells, and it's a good thing. It's there. It's spruced up the neighborhood, and it's providing power for each year cells. It's not a freeloader. Right. Uh, there's some biosis there. And I wonder how if it all that can inform our ideas about how robots and humans will interact. Will humans become the mitochondria in the cell? Will robots? One day there's going to be a podcast where there are two AI systems having a conversation together and they're going to be going. Humans weren't always a part of the robotic or I don't know, brains, um neurons were not always a part of the robotic mother. But now blah blah blah. Right, yeah, I'm sure. I I hope that they still make the same bad jokes that we do. Uh, but they're probably better than us at bad jokes. They're highly calculated. They're highly calculated. Well, we don't have that going on, and but what we do have here is um an interesting thing that we wanted just to take some more time to look at. And I know that we haven't really been talking that much about conspiracy theories right here, because what we're talking about is very strange and surprisingly possible future where in human evolution changes because we have the tools that we have created, become dependent on This started dependent on us, but then we become a new thing together. To me, that is mind blowing in a little bit frightening, and it brings us to uh today's news story? Oh yeah, yeah, can we get some news story music. A new study suggests that there may be a small amount of life after death, now, Matt. This comes via the Telegraph. They reported that the University of Southampton examined over two thousand people who suffered cardiac arrest in the United Kingdom, the US and Austria. People that were studied death experiences and if you had near death experiences three thirty They interviewed a hundred and forty of them and what they found was that these people describe some kind of awareness during the time they were clinically dead and before their hearts had restarted. And here's the craziest part. One of the patients recalled leaving his body watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room and described the stuff accurately after his brain activity had ceased, and they resuscitate him. Brain kicks back in, heart kicks back in. It's a miracle. And this stuff was apparently independently verified, this enormously controversial study. We just got news about it today. But Matt, what if there's life after death? H great, awesome, Yea, finally I've been wanting to know the answer to that question my whole life, ever since I came into this weird dimension. Are you a robot? Well? No, no, no, all right, no, alright, I've got an eye on you here. Uh. You know, Noel made an interesting comparison about this too earlier when he said, uh, when he said, maybe it's similar to being decapitated, right, with the idea that you still have some sort of consciousness for time after your head is lopped off. Maybe this is some sort of intangible version of that, right, Yeah, But with no brain activity, it just seems impossible. And we mentioned this when we were talking earlier. What did you say It was two percent of the people could accurately Yeah, yeah, two percent. To me, I'm gonna be skeptical at this point. Okay, two percent had what they would call vivid recollection. Okay, Okay, wow, that's really interesting. But I guess just what I was saying earlier was that you know a lot of people watch stuff on television where you kind of see what resuscitation looks like. Good point clear. Yeah, so maybe you could accurately with quotes there. That's an interesting word. Accurately um, But yeah, I mean maybe you would just know what it looked like. But still that they had that memory if if they're being truthful, um, because as we know, humans can lie. Um, that's amazing dude. And what do you think, listeners? Let us know about this latest piece of news. Is it bunk? Does it add up? Will it change the world or just make a good week for the papers reporting it, which both are possibilities. So hey, yeah, we heard what some of you said, and we've got a particular piece of mail that we'd like to read really fast, if that's cool with you. This message comes from Dan c. He wrote to us via email. Thanks Dan, He says, Hi, I recently discovered your podcast two weeks ago and I love it. I decided to write to you for two reasons. The first is to thank you for all the great shows. You're welcome, sir, and thank you for thinking they're great. I mean, that's really kind. We have our ups and downs, that's how we view it, but we appreciate it very much, so Dan. The second is to ask you if you're interested in a true story about an astral projection experiment that went wrong and some of the conclusions that can be drawn from that. And he puts in here just as a caveat, no drugs were used during the experiment. Well, Dan, I'm certainly interested. Ben, are you interested? I'm into it? But what don't you think we should check with the listeners? Yeah? Hey, guys, do you want to know more about Dan's experiment that went wrong with astral projection? Have you, guys, ever tried astral projection? Um? I would admit here that I have attempted UH several times, along with some lucid dreaming experiments that didn't go wrong, but they just weren't are effective for me. And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three std w y t K. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

So full disclosure, folks. This week's classic episode was recorded in October of Uh. And how odd do you think it would be, mattin Noell for us to go back to the versions of ourselves to talk about today's question, could robots really run the world? Because I think we're almost there, right, We're dang close. And and really what we're focusing on here are artificial intelligences and versions of artificial intelligence and algorithms that are being used to make crucial decisions about humanity. And come on, guys, well, I mean there's part of me that's like this sounds great. You know, you set the parameters. There's no room for interpretation or like human error or human avarice and greed and uh, you know megalomania. But you know best lay plans, right, So let's see where this takes us. From UFOs two ghosts and government covering histories writtled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to Now, let's kick this pig. Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt and I am Ben, and this is stuff they don't want you to know. And today we're talking about robots, y'all. Yeah, let's go back to uh something that our listeners are probably asking themselves about though, Matt, what what? There are probably a couple of you out there in uh podcast land who say, wait, did Matt just start this episode by saying kick this pig? Yeah, you gotta kick the pig and get it started. Man. Once the pig stars rolling, Uh, you know, it's covered with grease, so you have to first catch up to it, which is incredibly difficult, and then clean your body on top of it in hopes of perhaps wrangling it. I get the feeling that you and are super producer Noel shout out to Noel over there. Uh. I get the feeling that you guys will maybe talking about something else off air or is now is kicked the pig a thing we say? Now? Yeah, that's just that's how we start the podcast. Ben, I've been doing it. Have you not noticed? We do it every week? Perhaps it's my human frailties, Matt. Maybe that's why I'm Maybe I'm slipping a little, you know. Oh no, maybe we should be replaced with robots. No, I hope not. I mean, Null's human, you're human. I'm human most but not all of our listeners are human. Yeah, I do seem to recall an email from a few listeners that I don't know. It didn't come across as human. Yeah, especially you know, if you point out that you are writing in a very human way, then that makes you sound even less human. Guys, it's right up. There was starting a sentence with the phrase not to be creepy, but oh, that's the worst. I do it all the time. I mean people, some people are really into creeping, I guess and creeptitude. I thought that in l made her by the way you do that in the elevator. How do you just if there's just one other person, I'll say something like that, not to be creepy, but I really like your shoes mostly mostly dudes too, now that you're going to try it out when I leave today. So what what we are talking about, Matt, As you said, it's the idea of robots, and the idea that there could be a situation which robots rule the world. Ladies and gentlemen. We're joking mostly, but it is true that uh, Matt and I Noel. Certainly anybody who makes a podcast probably does have an audience that is not entirely human, because there are programs that will listen to your podcast for verification purposes, for sharing purposes, things like that, Um, we haven't, to our knowledge received an email or a tweet from a robot yet not yet. And the same goes for video as well, just checking to see if your content matches any of these other things. Uh, it's kind of interesting how much automation is going on from It's really weird to think of it from a listening and viewing standpoint that something is checking watching or that is not human. That the old hal nine. I'm sorry, Matt, I can't let you do that. And I cannot publish this episode for it contains a scene from the Matrix. So today we're gonna yeah, that's that's happened to us, folks. So today we're going to look at the idea of robots running the world. And to to get to the present day world, we have to start with the origin of the idea of robots, right, that's right. Then it goes all the way back to the ancient world, back to two hundred and seventy b C. When a Greek engineer named Yeah, I don't I had to take a guess of that one as well to sibious tibious. That's it uh C T E s I B I U s uh. He made these organs of that were made with water and clocks and these movable figurines. You can see some of this stuff, uh if you look it up online. Right. We know that humans have been able to build complex movie machines for thousands of years. A great example would be the anti Cathera mechanism. Oh yeah, man that thinks fascinating, isn't weird? It's uh this astronomical calculating machine, you know, entirely mechanical, uh, quite complex from what we can figure in the reconstructions, right that people have attempted to do. So, we know that ancient man was not just smack and rocks together and making up stories about the sun sets. We know that ancient man was capable of building sophisticated uh machines that a lot of people today couldn't build. And we had something like robots philosophically before we had the word robot in the notes, I I did something kind of crappy here and I put many of the ancient know it alls called the concept automata automata, which means just self operating machine. Oh yeah, and they were hugely popular. The hero of Alexandria was famous for his part um for working in this field. And again, if you go online check look up the word automata, it's just it's just auto and then M A T A. And you can see some of these old they are machines, and some of the them are so elaborate, sure, like the court machines where they would have someone who appeared to be pouring tea or playing a violin. Some of those are still around, and I think they're creepy. You know. That's what you say in the elevator, right, you say, not to be creepy, but may I show you my automaton? Oh yeah, I wouldn't want to do that. Yeah, Plus it sounds kind of a euphemism, right in the Hero of Alexandria wasn't the only person doing this. There were also people like the Greek mathematician ark Tas of Tarentum, which I am probably grossly mispronouncing um if I recall correctly, he built a little mechanical bird. Oh excellent. Another example of automata would be do you remember the old Clash of the Titans films with the claymation and stuff in the seventies. Um was it was it that one? Or it was one of the Greek films where they had this magic golden owl. Oh, I know what you're talking about. That, yes, and I can't recall if it's that film or not. Oh man, that was a great that's a great example of the idea of what it would have looked like. UM. So, I don't know if you know us, but we haven't up until this point used the word robot in our research. And that's because it was first used, uh in nineteen twenty one in this play called Rosum's Universal Robots or Are You Are by a check writer named Carol Kapok. Then in nineteen forty one, Isaac Asimov he used the word robotics to describe this kind of same technology, and he is one of the guys that predicted the rise of this robotic industry the world in which we live today. It's it's weird met because we've often talked about UM. I don't know if any of this made on the air, but we've often talked about how much influenced these visionaries, these futurists or science fiction writers can end up having on the world around us. Funny fact, ladies and gentlemen, that not once, but multiple times in US history, the US government has contacted science fiction writers and said, guys, here's your security clearance. Uh hypothetically, how y pathetically if a happened, what would we do? Oh? Yeah, sure, you need the visionary You can't. You can't accomplish anything unless you have someone thinking of the ideas. Yeah, and as mov as it turns out, was right, he called it. And we live in a real life version of some science fiction e stories. Right. We have robots everywhere, not as widespread as advertisements yet and on a widely differing scales of robotics, from the very very simple to the extremely complex. But robots. If you're going to be called a robot, you've got to have a few things in common, or a few things that make you a robot. Oh yeah, yeah, like they all have. What what's an example, Well, you gotta have some kind of moving apparatus, moving body surnts of articulation and things like that. Yeah. And the second main thing is some kind of power source so that whatever it is, whatever you are as a robot can function by yourself. That makes sense too. Nope, when we talk about robotics and when we talk about robots running the world, what we're really talking about is artificial intelligence, right. Um, this this is the idea of a sentience of some sort made by human beings or maybe just made by throwing a bunch of math together in one conceptual pool, the same way that a bunch of proteins or amino acids or whatever we're thrown together in some primordial ooze, and that from this somehow will arrive a version of life self awareness, and that that is the key. Right At what point the scary thing is when the machine goes, oh, I'm a machine and I can do X. Yeah. Or there was a story that you and I talked about which there's a spoil alert. Um, there's a moment in this story where somebody's searching on the net for something and instead of asking if she spelled it correctly, the the thing on the other side of the search engine asked her why she she's searching for it? Yeah, uh, yeah, that one's a little weird. We like sci fi as well too, But so what what we know here is that in some ways. Artificial intelligence can already outthink human beings, but not in always the way that a root robot would end up ruling the world quote unquote is if there were AI of some sort that was across the board outperforming human beings bar none and Matt. Let's talk about what robots in their less corporeal sibling artificial intelligence do today. But first we have a word from our sponsor, and this one is for all you mechanical listeners out there. One zero zero, one zero zero zero one one one zero, one zero, one zero, one zero zero zero, one one one zero zero zero, one zero, one zero, one zero, one zero zero one zero, one one one one zero, zero, one one zero, one one one zero, one zero, one one zero, one zero, one zero, one zero, one one zer one one one two zero, one zero, one one one one zero zero, one one zero, one one one zero zero zero one one one one zero, one zero, one one one zero, one zero, one zero zero zero A division of illumination global unlimited. Huh you know, it's uh, it's weird. It's not for our demographic. I guess, yeah, I something was lost in translation for me at least. Um, Yeah, somebody got something out of it. Sure, yeah, was it a product? The computer got really excited? You know, I think it was because it sounded like that was legally eads at the end. That's what I thought I heard. At least it went really fast. Well, Illumination Global Unlimited has rarely led us wrong, so we'll just have to trust them on that one. Uh. And now that we're back, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for us to talk about robots today. What do they actually do? Well? Probably more than you would expect. Well, maybe let's talk about a couple of things. How about housekeeping, house cleaning? Who cleans up your house when you leave? Oh wait, it's my little room. Ba oh man, I love room bas I want one so bad, and I want to hack it to some remote controls and then strap stuff to it. And dude, you know, see, I have two dogs, and I'm worried about how they would react to a room by going around during the day when I'm not home, That's right, I'm afraid I would come home and find a dead room. Ba uh. But I don't know, maybe not. Maybe they make a extreme room bus, or maybe they form an alliance and then they just my smaller dog just rids in the room, but around which, like our mention of the mathematician who is building automata in the ancient world, that reference with animals and machines working together is going to come back into play. But we also know, of course, everybody knows that robots are huge and manufacturing. Oh yeah, they're making all your big things, all your cars. I'm trying to think of something else, in particular doors. I would say that door frames, a lot of woodworking has some kind of mechanical process to it. High end electronics as well. Uh. There are other places where we use robots because they are dangerous. Uh, they're dangerous situations for human being. That would be something like bomb disposal. Oh yeah, you've seen you've seen those. And even swat teams now in the US have robots. Some of them do which can They Admittedly they look kind of goofy, but they get the job done. Yeah, they're not built to look cool while they're doing. Yeah, you just replace an arm if one of them gets shot off. We also use robots for navigation, or maybe that's more likely that we use AI for sure of some sort. Yeah, I remember that we're talking about both of those together. And sometimes separately in this episode. Then you've got unmanned vehicles, which are a fun combination of both. In some cases, usually it's just an automated machine that's then controlled by human like the Uh well, not like that one. I was going to say, like the Predator drones or you know, something like the unmanned aerial vehicles. Yeah, which is I guess in a way, a robot. It's got a moving missile system. It's not quite the same. Well yeah, but it's it's got an engine and it has a computer on board capable of making calculations. Uh, it has moving parts. So but then you've got things like that that have AI in them, like the X thirty seven B that we've talked about before, the automated space Shuttle. It's uh, it's self controlled. It's automated. Um secret uh uh yeah. But then of course the drones that we spoke about. I gotta say, I love the idea of the X thirty seven B. What's it doing up there? You know? It's like the It's like when we found out about the Corona satellite program and we started you guys, we didn't get in trouble for this one, but we weren't sure if we would get away clean because Matt and I of a while back, we found some evidence that you can teach yourself to track spy satellites, and there was a bit of a pushback by certain government agencies when they found out that that could happen, not against us, but against the people who had figured out how to. We would never Yeah, but you can't classify the sky. Looking at the sky is something that everyone can do at this point, not yet been not yet until wait till there's a security clear it's so high that you cannot be organic to have it, and then uh god, okay, so let's let's come back down to Earth. Back down there. There are also automated other vehicles that drive on roads. Oh, autonomous cars. Good call, and your show car Stuff has talked about that a few times. Yeah, we've talked about We've been tracing the evolution of autonomous cars for the length of the show at this point. And we also, uh, let's see Scott, my co host, and car Stuff teamed up with Jonathan on Tech Stuff to talk a little bit more about autonomous cars and whether or not you're a fan of it. Ladies and gentlemen, and probably is coming to a highway near you. Do you think it's gonna be the new system of private automobiles eventually? Yeah? Wow, yeah, eventually, Um, for numerous reasons. But we've got some other stuff that happened. I think in two thousand ten, the first self replicating robot was built at Cornell University. Um. Then we have another even cooler, the coolest perhaps, I think a robot that you know, goes to Mars and then hangs out on Mars for a long period of time and take selfies. Okay, yeah, but it also vaporizes material to figure out the chemical compounds that are in there. It's really awesome. And then there are dark Robots Soldiers where one of my friends is scared of robots, Matt, and so what I like to do is every so often I'll send him a YouTube video of outdated DARPA robots taste, you know, the big dogs and all that. Yeah, the big dog which looks like some weird puppetry thing and it still doesn't fall over at surprising. And then that man is still the scariest I think. Yeah, yeah, pet man is scary because it looks more human. Well, it's like it looks a lot like a terminator. Man. They must not watch films. I don't understand. It's really scary. And by the way, we made a collaboration with All Time Conspiracies on that subject on some of the DARPA robots and killer robots. So if you get a chance, check that out All Time Conspiracies. I think it's called do Killer Robots Exist? Spoiler alert? Uh yeah, but we love working with All Time And if you, for some reason haven't checked out their show yet, then uh, please check them out. Uh. There's another thing we'll explore here, as you said, Matt, and that is the of artificial intelligence today. Not to bury the lead, but in some ways artificial intelligence has already surpassed the abilities of most human beings. Yeah, there are several examples here. Um. One is Deep Blue, which is an AI that went up against a chess master. Forget the year that that happened, and there was Casper of them. Yeah, and did he win? Uh. They had a series of games, Yeah, more than one game, and we know that Deep Blue did win. Uh, like it did really well. I think they went to a draw than they It was neck and neck. It was definitely John Henry moment, and then we remember IBMS Watson computer. Uh, just destroyed it on Jeopardy. No, you'd say he went hard on the paint on Jeopardy, right, got the no the Noel, not the fabled prize Noel not. Uh. There's another idea here with AI, and it's the idea of intelligent agents. This be a little bit simpler. It's it's a modular system where where in the program just perceives its environment and it just takes actions to increase its chances for success. However, success is to find, so it could be really simple. And what we're finding is that today professional roboticists are working much more closely with mathematicians, just like the guys in the ancient world, to solve some of the most difficult problems for robots, by which we mean both the physical stuff and the mental stuff. And and we have a list of the kind of things that robots at present stink at doing. Yeah. Well, the biggest one is the thing that we call common sense, um, and that's just reasoning and qualification of problems. So uh, it's basically listing all the possible preconditions for success for any given thing, any given task. Oh yeah, that's the qualification problem, Like how and you if if a robot or an AI program does exactly what it's told to do, uh, then how can you list all of the conditions that it will ever run into. I was watching a video and it was on this program that was learning how to play old, old, old video games. And what it did is analyze the pixels on the screen and basically you would have to just watch the video game play out and die like the character that it was playing would just die over and over and over until it realized, oh, this pixel needs to be here and over here, and I need to avoid when this this color pixel comes through. And it started to master fairly simple games like Breakout, but it could it figured out how to and again, this is an AI that's just running and learning. It figured out how to master Breakout to where it would send the little ball up to the top and knock out all of the um all of the little tiles that way. And then it started playing games like the little shooter games where you're flying in an airplane, but it mastered them where it wouldn't die, it could beat the game. It would just go through and win. And that is the potential we can do here. That's one of the things that can be difficult for robots as well, is to acquire new skills. But the idea of acquiring new skills can be a little deceptive. It's a rabbit hole, it's a bunch of Matroshka dolls or whatever. Because if your skill that you are programmed to do is to learn to play games based on positions of pixels, then are you really acquiring a new skill or are you simply following that kind of programming? Right, yeah, exactly, And uh, I think that's a that's an interesting thing. Another thing that we're doing that is difficult for robot is that you and I and you out there listeners are holding conversations of sorts. Do you remember when clever Bot first came out? Dude, I still spend some time on clever but every once in a while. Clever but has become, uh, just so much nicer in a lot of ways. Originally clever bot was sort of agitated. Well, yeah, when it was really popular and it was just a little kids in there just railing curse words at it and insulting it. What is clever but clever Bot is? I guess it's just a program that you type in a little text asking a question perhaps, and it responds to you. And it responds to you with a combination of things that have been given to it and put into it. So it's pretty interesting what you can get out. And it doesn't a lot of times it's it doesn't respond to the question that you're asking in the way that you would expect at all. Right, Yeah, and it used to be very, very combative, but it's become a little bit nicer as it has as it gathers more data. Right, I want to see clever bot when it's in its eighties, you know. Yeah, oh, the outdated slang alone lets hacking. It only just doesn't want to do anything anymore. It's kind of tired. He just doesn't want and he's like, he's so cranky. Every answer will be yolo. So clever bot was built to pass the Turing test, which we have we have talked about in some other shows as well. Another thing that robots and AI have a difficult time doing is lying deceiving effectively. Um. But that, along with the next one I think will be uh, will not be weak points of AI pretty soon. Uh. The big example we have here is the ability to anticipate human actions. You know, humans being at times irrational, given to outbursts of joy and sorrow and violence and kindness, we can be kind of tough to reed for, you know, your average every day Joe Sho, Joshmo robot. Yeah, but to be fair, we do follow patterns pretty pretty closely a lot of times. And that, my friend, is the big, big point, right, because what we're learning with the arrival of big data and the coalation methods and the smarter and smarter and more sophisticated models for sorting all that crap, is that this might one day be the deciding factor for robotic or artificial intelligence superiority because they may just be able to predict the future so much so that it appears to be magic. Oh yeah, especially if you have enough data point points on every single individual the way we're beginning to gather data points on every human. Just take the the new Apple watch that's coming out. All the different data points that are gonna be gathered on you. That's uh m hmm, I don't know, but I like it. Matt. You are visibly a comfortable talking about the Apple Watch. Let's go ahead, and you know, at some point we need to bust the myth about l O as well. What we'll see how that works out forward to the future. That's where we're going. Will Moore's law hold up anyone who's not familiar with Moore's law, that's the one that states, uh, computer capacity will double every eighteen months, and so it's exponential, right. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and fast. And it seems like it's getting faster and faster because it's doubling, right, So will that happen with the growth of artificial intelligence? I love that pixel example, because that robot teaching itself right to navigate through this world based on pixel position. It dies all the time. It starts off really slow and then quickly becomes flawless, you know, god mode, video game player, breakout and stuff. This leads us to um an interesting comparison because a lot of stuff that we read now you know, Matt, you and I. Originally we're going to spend just a week on the stock market, but because a high frequency trading, we made it two weeks. And uh that that's something that we don't always do. But what we discovered while we were looking into this question, will robots run the stock market? Will they rule the world? We found that what's much more likely to happen is not just robots ruling the world, but some sort of cybernetic symbiosis yeah, where an algorithm is run um somehow by a human agent of some sort, but all the bulk of the work will be done and kind of already is right now, being done by math, by algorithms, but a machine and a computer that just can do it with such speed that a human never could, right, And then having a human there as point person for the decisions that robots can't do so well. Yet it's it's uh, it's interesting because it reminds me of the story about mitochondria, and there's a there's a really strange thing that mitochondria can I guess, at least figuratively or anecdotally, uh, tell us about the relationship between people and machines, or the potential relationship with people machines in the future. Mitochondria, according to some pretty compelling research, wasn't always part of your cells or my cells. Originally mitochondria, argue several experts, it was a free living bacteria and it just got buddy Buddy with cells, So buddy, buddy, in fact that now it's in all your cells, and it's a good thing. It's there. It's spruced up the neighborhood, and it's providing power for each year cells. It's not a freeloader. Right. Uh, there's some biosis there. And I wonder how if it all that can inform our ideas about how robots and humans will interact. Will humans become the mitochondria in the cell? Will robots? One day there's going to be a podcast where there are two AI systems having a conversation together and they're going to be going. Humans weren't always a part of the robotic or I don't know, brains, um neurons were not always a part of the robotic mother. But now blah blah blah. Right, yeah, I'm sure. I I hope that they still make the same bad jokes that we do. Uh, but they're probably better than us at bad jokes. They're highly calculated. They're highly calculated. Well, we don't have that going on, and but what we do have here is um an interesting thing that we wanted just to take some more time to look at. And I know that we haven't really been talking that much about conspiracy theories right here, because what we're talking about is very strange and surprisingly possible future where in human evolution changes because we have the tools that we have created, become dependent on This started dependent on us, but then we become a new thing together. To me, that is mind blowing in a little bit frightening, and it brings us to uh today's news story? Oh yeah, yeah, can we get some news story music. A new study suggests that there may be a small amount of life after death, now, Matt. This comes via the Telegraph. They reported that the University of Southampton examined over two thousand people who suffered cardiac arrest in the United Kingdom, the US and Austria. People that were studied death experiences and if you had near death experiences three thirty They interviewed a hundred and forty of them and what they found was that these people describe some kind of awareness during the time they were clinically dead and before their hearts had restarted. And here's the craziest part. One of the patients recalled leaving his body watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room and described the stuff accurately after his brain activity had ceased, and they resuscitate him. Brain kicks back in, heart kicks back in. It's a miracle. And this stuff was apparently independently verified, this enormously controversial study. We just got news about it today. But Matt, what if there's life after death? H great, awesome, Yea, finally I've been wanting to know the answer to that question my whole life, ever since I came into this weird dimension. Are you a robot? Well? No, no, no, all right, no, alright, I've got an eye on you here. Uh. You know, Noel made an interesting comparison about this too earlier when he said, uh, when he said, maybe it's similar to being decapitated, right, with the idea that you still have some sort of consciousness for time after your head is lopped off. Maybe this is some sort of intangible version of that, right, Yeah, But with no brain activity, it just seems impossible. And we mentioned this when we were talking earlier. What did you say It was two percent of the people could accurately Yeah, yeah, two percent. To me, I'm gonna be skeptical at this point. Okay, two percent had what they would call vivid recollection. Okay, Okay, wow, that's really interesting. But I guess just what I was saying earlier was that you know a lot of people watch stuff on television where you kind of see what resuscitation looks like. Good point clear. Yeah, so maybe you could accurately with quotes there. That's an interesting word. Accurately um, But yeah, I mean maybe you would just know what it looked like. But still that they had that memory if if they're being truthful, um, because as we know, humans can lie. Um, that's amazing dude. And what do you think, listeners? Let us know about this latest piece of news. Is it bunk? Does it add up? Will it change the world or just make a good week for the papers reporting it, which both are possibilities. So hey, yeah, we heard what some of you said, and we've got a particular piece of mail that we'd like to read really fast, if that's cool with you. This message comes from Dan c. He wrote to us via email. Thanks Dan, He says, Hi, I recently discovered your podcast two weeks ago and I love it. I decided to write to you for two reasons. The first is to thank you for all the great shows. You're welcome, sir, and thank you for thinking they're great. I mean, that's really kind. We have our ups and downs, that's how we view it, but we appreciate it very much, so Dan. The second is to ask you if you're interested in a true story about an astral projection experiment that went wrong and some of the conclusions that can be drawn from that. And he puts in here just as a caveat, no drugs were used during the experiment. Well, Dan, I'm certainly interested. Ben, are you interested? I'm into it? But what don't you think we should check with the listeners? Yeah? Hey, guys, do you want to know more about Dan's experiment that went wrong with astral projection? Have you, guys, ever tried astral projection? Um? I would admit here that I have attempted UH several times, along with some lucid dreaming experiments that didn't go wrong, but they just weren't are effective for me. And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three std w y t K. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.