Can We Predict the Future? with Charles Liu

Gary, I love that topic you selected.

Good.

For a special edition, Predicting the Future.

And getting it wrong most of the time, but when you get it right, it’s good.

We talked about the Jetsons.

Love me some Jetsons.

Come on now, you can’t not like the Jetsons.

I like Jane.

Blade Runner and these visions of the future, some dystopic, others just kind of fun.

Right.

You know?

I think the Jetsons are pretty dystopic.

Did you say you like Jane?

Yes.

The Jetsons.

All right, I didn’t think anybody caught that.

And you take me to task on predictions I made in Starry Messenger.

Well, of course.

Here’s a prediction.

We’re about to do this show.

Coming up, StarTalk.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, special edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

We got a full house today.

First, Gary O’Reilly, Gary.

Hey, Neil.

How you doing, man?

I’m good.

Oh, good.

Chuck Nice, how you doing, man?

I’m doing well, man.

Your hair is looking especially coiffed today.

It’s very crisp today.

Crisp today.

Yes, I actually microwaved it.

And then I put it on.

People don’t realize this is a Steve Harvey wig.

No, no.

They don’t even realize.

Come on, playa.

Anyway.

It’s rocking like a mini version of a 1978.

That’s exactly what I was going for.

I was going for straight up Jim Brown.

Jim Brown, something out of the 70s.

That’s what I was going for.

Step right off the screen.

Yep, yep.

Success.

There you go.

Work on some muscles.

Come back and you can say you’re Jim Brown.

I’m sorry.

I’m Jim Tam.

So we’re going to do predictions about the future, which I think is the only way you can make a prediction.

And there’s some stuff I don’t tackle alone.

I got to go to geek and chief.

Geek and chief.

There’s only one geek and chief.

We know who that is.

That is Charles Liu, friend and colleague Charles.

Neil.

Dude.

Great to see you.

Okay, teen geek.

I also microwaved my hair today.

Just leave your brain out.

So you’re a professor at CUNY Staten Island, City University of New York, which has satellite campuses across the city.

And you’re in Staten Island and you finally no longer have administrative duties there, is that correct?

Ah, were that the case forever.

Is that the same as quiet quitting?

Not the same.

What do you mean you don’t have any administrative duties?

We’re very lucky as professors because we can continually take on positions and leave them and not leave our jobs.

So I could be a department chair for a period of time and leave, I could run an honors program and then leave, I could even serve as an acting dean or other administrator and then leave, and still I’d retain my ability to come back and do the research and the coursework and the teaching that I love.

And each of those, they give you a little bump up in the mood.

One hope.

One hope.

Every place is a little bit different.

So we’ve got you here because you think long and hard and deep about predictions made in sci-fi.

You probably have some predictions of your own.

The accuracy of these predictions and what they might have looked like at the time and what they look like to us with the benefit of hindsight.

So we’re gonna get all in this.

Yeah, I think it’s good, but I think we should first say right away for everybody that-

First say right away that you host a podcast called The Looneyverse.

That’s what we should say right away.

Oh, that’s very sweet.

Thank you.

The Looneyverse, Charles Liu.

You see what he did there?

The Liu.

I didn’t do it.

It was my family members.

Not the Liu the bathroom, we’re talking about Charles Liu.

But he’s Charles Liu, so it’s the Liu-niverse.

No, no, no.

I can’t take any credit for the name.

We talked to scientists who are earlier in their careers.

I talk about people who are doing all the hard work and trying different things, not just necessarily what we think of as a straight up science stuff, but also thinking about the future, thinking about pop science, culture, things that we like to talk about here on StarTalk, but on a level for…

I got you.

And a lot of fresh, unvarnished ideas come out of that first generation company.

We love that.

Some of them can change the world.

Right.

As you know, Neil, the really tough, new, pioneer techniques are always done by our younger colleagues.

We can have great ideas, and we’re like, oh darn it, if only someone had a way, a technology, a tool that could solve these problems.

And then some guy comes along, some lady comes along, says, yeah, I know how to do that.

And they just bring something new, and that’s how changes happen.

It’s no accident that some of the best discoveries, the Nobel Awards, come from people in their 20s and their 30s.

They’re awarded much later.

Well, they made their discoveries in their 20s.

That’s right.

Which, you know, they did a study on that, that we’re more likely to think in a way that will lead to innovation in your late teens and 20s than at any other point in your life.

That’s right, which is why when we hear are talking about predictions, it’s not so much our predictions, but what we’re predicting other people will do in the future.

That’s an important distinction.

Interesting.

And so when we think about it, from a scientific perspective, we don’t want to say so much predictions as models, right?

We are taking what knowledge we have now and modeling it for the future.

And models are always wrong, but sometimes they’re useful.

And therefore we have the opportunity to think about the future in an informed and educated way.

Yes.

Gary, set the stage here.

Okay, so in your book, Starry Messenger, in the chapter at the end of Exploration and Discovery, you kind of go on a fool’s errand and make a raft of predictions for the year 2050.

Did he just call me a fool?

No.

Would you kick his ass over there?

Can it wait?

Okay, a fool’s errand, yes.

So we’re not going to wait 25 years to find out if that’s true.

Let me set that up.

So the whole, a big part of that chapter titled Exploration and Discovery is an exercise in what do people think would be discovered or how differently did they think they’d be living in one era versus one generation later?

And I just, I tightened it to 30 years.

So I go 30 year increments from 1870 up to 2020.

And everybody’s getting everything wrong all the time.

Of course.

Okay, and so I said, time for me to join the list and I’m going to make predictions for 2050 so that in 2050 people can look back and see everything I got wrong so that I’m not.

But I disagree.

I don’t think that these predictions are wrong.

I think they’re inaccurate.

And there’s a big difference.

Well, don’t get all semantic.

Actually, no, get semantic, get semantic, Chuck.

We want this.

The teacher on this exam, I didn’t get anything wrong.

It was just inaccurate.

Oh my God, now you know how all my teachers hated me.

We can explore that, finish setting this up.

Where do we go for our predictions, the tried and trusted sources?

We’ll have a look at that.

Are the people that are making these predictions or writing examples, are they in fact the influences of the future that are based in the past?

Or if we leave it alone, does the future take care of itself?

We’ll get into all the sort of philosophical thoughts about that, but first and foremost-

What do you mean, if we didn’t predict the future, so that there was no groundwork for new ideas, would future still have a place to land?

Would it still unfold?

Would it still unfold, yeah.

So, let’s look to science, let’s look to science fiction, as our go-to’s for what our lives might well be back.

I mean, I’ll kick it off, the Jetsons.

Ba-dum-bum-bum-bum!

Who can make the sound of the…

That’s it, there you go!

That’s every flying car in the Jetsons.

So this was made in the early 60s, 1960s, but it’s set in 2062.

So it’s not that far away from where we sit.

100 years in the future was what it was set at.

Yeah, but where we sit today, it’s not that far.

So you’ve got flying cars.

There’s a robot in every house.

Yes.

And in some places, that’s the case.

First of all, we do have flying cars.

We have them now.

They’re just quadcopters, but they’re flying cars.

And if you go to Japan, you’re gonna find pretty much some kind of robot in every home.

They got robots everywhere.

So in fact, are the Jetsons the most accurate prediction of the near future we have, or do we have to look in other places for accuracy?

So I found this recently.

Was it the year 2020?

I was looking for years predicted for the future that are already in our past.

And in the Jetsons, I think George Jetson, you can triangulate based on certain script lines that he was born in the year 2020.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Okay.

Cool.

Kind of the Jetsons was the other extreme of it.

He’s a pandemic baby.

George Jetson, pandemic baby.

Did he know?

Did he?

Did he know?

I think it was 20.

It might have been 2021, but it was in the last couple of…

Somewhere in that window.

Somewhere in there.

So that’s the first point.

So here’s what I think they got wrong.

They didn’t understand that a robot can be anything that does something that you wouldn’t otherwise do.

Any task.

Any task.

Any task.

So he’s still flying his flying car.

He doesn’t push a button and say, take me to work and have the car do the work, as we have today.

By the way, if you have a robot who can run your home, you dare go as sure as to have a car that will just take you to work.

Right.

So they missed the fact that a robot did not have to have any humanoid features.

This is the same with Isaac Asimov’s iRobot, which predates the Jetsons.

Yeah.

Okay.

An iRobot, the robots are humanoid.

And that’s not necessary because it assumes the human form is something you want to emulate.

And there’s a lot of stuff we don’t do well.

Make a machine do it better.

So all I’m saying is, I don’t think they thought about a self-driving car, which is itself a form of robot.

Yeah, if you’ve ever seen the Amazon warehouse, it’s full of robots.

Of autonomous.

And they’re just all boxes.

Yeah.

They’re all boxes, just moving around.

They’re moving the boxes.

Doing stuff, moving boxes.

But they’re all robots.

Right.

Everyone, you know where they’re going, they know where they’re gonna put it, and they have their ID, and their thing.

Now, what you don’t know is what those robots do when you leave.

It could be a quantum thing, right?

The secret life of robots.

The secret life of robots.

Like, while you’re looking at them, they’re looking like they’re busy.

You look away, then they’re partying.

They’re out the back with a cigarette, just like the Femindos.

Oh, I love that.

But you have a book on quantum.

The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book.

Answer book.

Yes, yes.

In a series.

That’s not your first rodeo.

I’ve done handy astronomy, handy physics, and right now, handy quantum physics.

Is it like quantum physics for dummies?

Well, I assume that you guys aren’t dummies.

See, that’s where you make a mistake.

No, no, no.

That’s your biggest mistake.

Quantum physics is not any harder than classical physics.

It’s just different and strange.

So all I’m trying to tell people by calling it an handy answer book is that don’t think of it as this thing that’s really difficult.

Think of it as just you can flip to it like a manual.

It’s like riding a bicycle and putting together a piece of furniture.

A quantum manual, so I want the robots in the Amazon fulfillment centers to have to two quantum states.

One where they’re busy and the other one where they’re out back smoking a cigarette.

Who came up with fulfillment center?

As a term?

It feels right.

That came from a long time ago.

The robots.

It’s a warehouse.

It’s a warehouse.

It has become a fulfillment state.

The robot said give me a word here.

I want a word.

Well Sears robot catalog from more than 100 years ago had these warehouses.

Which is nothing but Amazon.

That’s right.

But it’s they had human beings filling things out, right?

And at some point in the mid 20th century, the marketing decided to call that instead of a warehouse calling in a fulfillment center.

And so the idea was…

That was Sears?

We think it was Sears.

But certainly all the other big stores at that time had that information.

I mean, and sometimes you say things, but you know, sometimes I have fact-checked you behind your back.

Please.

No, no, I have to do my…

And you’re always right on point.

I gotta do my per show.

Yeah, so 100 years ago.

I’m just like, hey, get the, get out of here.

Wait, Chuck, I gotta do my once per show reaction.

Go ahead.

Why do you know this?

Okay.

But that was early in this show.

Oh my gosh.

I don’t know if I have more than one in me.

I think Charles does.

All right, keep going.

Also with the maid, Rosie, the maid.

Yeah.

Right, first it’s female, right?

So there’s still the genderized robot.

That was sexist.

And with the little apron.

French apron.

So she was a sexy robot.

If we look at the movies, and generally, you’re thinking about major budgets for production, yeah, things don’t always work out.

You take the 1982 Blade Runner movie, Harrison Ford, remember that?

Based on?

I don’t know what it was.

Yes, based on a novel by?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K.

Dick.

Yep.

Well, thank you.

And when did he write that?

Early, 50s, right?

Quite early.

So, it was set in 2019.

The original.

The original movie, right?

The movie, yeah.

So much of it doesn’t land true.

None of it.

I mean, we have hindsight, which obviously is perfect, but you’re thinking about their humanoid and their off-world.

The replicants, yeah.

Doesn’t exist, didn’t happen.

The replicants, right?

Yes.

Did not happen.

So, we’re not off-world.

No.

We don’t have perfectly humanoid replicants.

Right.

And the sun sometimes shines.

Right.

However, we’re living in a dystopia.

So.

That is the thing.

And the dystopian future is debatable.

Yeah, I have my issues with dystopian futures.

Because it assumes that whatever the trend line is in a culture, in a civilization, that it continues to descend.

Descend.

Without anybody doing anything about it at any time.

Right.

Not the public, not the politicians, not the military, nothing.

It just continues to descend and hits rock bottom, and then they make a movie out of it.

I have a very, very quick.

It can happen locally?

I have a very quick theory on why that happens, why they do it that way.

Because most dystopian futures are a warning against authoritarianism.

Well said.

And that’s why that’s done.

That’s why it’s like that.

Because authoritarians can take it down the toilet.

That’s right.

And that’s why it’s like, that’s why they’re always written that way.

Here’s an interesting thing that happened in Blade Runner that we’re kind of doing today.

Oh, right.

All right.

Do you remember the scene, very tense scene, where one of the replicants who’s trying to pass as human is getting interviewed by someone whose task it is to identify the replicants, who are no longer presenting themselves as replicants.

And the replicants are so good that they have to go through a series of questions where they’re testing his, the dilation of his eyes and his emotional reactions to certain situations.

Oh gosh, it’s a psych profile.

Yes, yes, yes.

And there’s a point where he’s like he can’t react in a way a human being would be expected to.

My point is today, when people show me stuff written by ChatGBT, I’m analyzing that.

If they don’t tell me that, I’m analyzing it for, is there a human emotion in here that’s authentic?

Or is this replicated by something that thinks it can be human?

I’m doing the same thing.

Right, yeah.

You are conducting the Turing test in real time.

But a better, not, yeah, a really deep version.

A more discerning version.

A more discerning version.

Tell me about the Turing test, tell everybody.

Turing, the famous guy, right, who helped create computers and so forth, he said.

Alan Turing, yeah.

Yes.

It would be important for us to figure out whether or not a machine has become truly intelligent by seeing if you can tell the difference between the responses of a machine and the responses of a human being.

Without seeing who’s behind the curtain.

Right.

And from there, you develop all the details, right?

The Turing test as a general idea became specific about, for example, the things you’re talking about, right, Neil?

Analyzing text or analyzing responses like in Blade Runner.

And so, in a sense, it was a predictive strategy to try to figure out whether something is what you think it is.

Is this not a test more for not so much intelligence as consciousness?

It depends.

Yeah, I was going to say, what difference does it make if machines are intelligent?

Does it really make a difference?

Well, that depends on what you think intelligence is.

There’s some dumbass people, and if a computer was dumbass, that would mean they’re not a computer.

We don’t get rid of dumbass people just because they’re stupid.

So why can’t we have stupid computers?

And by the way, we do have smartphones and dumb phones.

We’re moving in that direction anyway.

But this is our own bias against what is intelligent and what is not.

When we judge a person to be stupid, that person is still very intelligent.

There’s intelligence that person can adapt.

That person is likely conscious.

That person is likely able to figure out puzzles and so forth.

But we claim that they’re stupid because somehow they didn’t get a joke that we told or that they couldn’t solve a math problem or things like that.

Says the comedian.

Hit it on the head.

Right?

That’s the measure of the comedic Turing test.

Did you laugh at my joke?

Did you laugh at my joke?

You dumbass.

Well, there’s an episode of the classic Batman TV show where Robin and Batman tried to test whether there’s a robot or not.

And what happened was that Batman and Robin told a super funny joke which that robot was supposed to laugh at.

But he didn’t know the robot.

But that’s right.

They were trying to test whether this was a robot or not.

And when the thing did not laugh, they ripped his head off and he went, whew, because Batman just told him a super funny joke and he didn’t laugh, so we knew that it was a robot.

So, you are the ultimate test, Chuck, you and your colleagues.

According to Batman.

About intelligence.

According to Batman.

About actual consciousness.

Hold the puzzle in, Batman.

We don’t recommend pulling the heads of audience members.

Don’t laugh at your jokes.

That was the only part of the story I liked.

Running around, ripping them off.

I know something that maybe Charles does not know.

Uh-oh.

You know many things I do not know.

No, let me enjoy this moment.

If we got competitive.

Turing obviously did not call it the Turing test.

Correct.

Do you know what he called it?

I do not remember.

Did you ever know?

I might have.

He called it.

I’m not intelligent enough.

He called it the Imitation Game.

Hence, the name of the movie.

The title of the movie, which profiled his life.

That’s awesome.

With Keira Knightley.

Benedict Cumberbatch.

Benedict Cumberbatch.

It’s a good line up.

Sherlock Holmes.

I gotta watch this movie.

You ever seen it?

No.

This is the first I ever heard of it to be honest.

Dude, you gotta get out more.

Both the touring story and the movie.

I mean, it’s tragic.

His life story becomes tragic.

Don’t give it away.

I’m not.

Let him think it has a happy ending.

Spoiler alert, please.

So where else do we go?

I mean, there are series like, historically, The Twilight Zone.

Absolutely.

Rob Sterling.

That peak are interesting.

The outer limits.

And we move through into, more recently, The Black Mirror.

What’s his name?

Charlie Booker, who is brilliant.

So just to contrast the two, I think they both, they both leave you emotionally spent and disturbed at the end.

And if you go to The Twilight Zone in its day, and you look at sort of the disturbing stories that it told, and it didn’t always have a happy ending.

It’s not the Ray Bradbury kind of school of thought.

I need you to think.

Yes, and if you look at Rod Serling’s comment on his show, he said, look, at the end of the day, we’re just selling soap, all right?

So how do you sell soap in a way that people don’t feel offended or whatever?

And he says, if you set it in a fictionalized world, where that’s clearly not your world, then you can tell stories of people’s, oh, that’s just happening in that world.

And later on, they pause and say, wait a minute, that was me, or that was my friend or my neighbor, or that’s how I behaved.

And so he was a storyteller par excellence in that genre.

And especially, like I said, the disturbing feature of so many of those, and you fast forward to Black Mirror, which has an authentic science fiction future foundation to it.

But highlight what that future is, because some people might not know.

The future is this.

Black Mirror is a Netflix series.

I believe it’s on Netflix.

The third season, the fourth season, yeah.

The future is highly technologically driven.

It’s driven, everything is driven by technology.

But the stories are about how we respond to the technological advancements.

It’s really never about the technology itself.

Very good.

It’s always about our human nature and how it is affected by the technology.

And one thing that they do, which is just only a little out of reach in our imaginings, is in that future, which prevails in almost all episodes, because they share the same universe, right?

Like the news that’s on the TV is the same newscasters that you see in multiple.

So they’re in the same world.

What they all have in common is that the human mind is accessible in the way hard drives are accessible.

Exactly.

And often meshed in the way hard drives are connected.

So if you go into someone’s head, rewind an event, experience what they saw, see what they see through their eyes, pull it back out, manipulate it, that’s a whole frontier of storytelling that’s been unplumbed.

But when you think about it, it’s a frontier of storytelling, but it is also a different facet of reality.

Because the way you experience something, even though we experience the exact same thing, is totally different from the way I experience it.

And so what he does is he blurs the lines between individual realities, collective realities, and a technologically measured reality, which is brilliant, because I can look around this room and I’m seeing everything as it is seen through my…

The Chuck filter.

My filter, but I’m also seeing it through human eyes, as opposed to like the eyes of an eagle or an owl.

I’m also…

Or Geordi.

Or Geordi, right, and that’s where I was going.

But what I can’t do is see it through the eyes of like an infrared meter, you know?

So all those realities exist at the same time, though.

And that’s what makes them so brilliant.

I love it.

So the idea that you can download your brain and put it on a computer, everyone’s talking about that.

Black Mirror makes it real.

Yeah, and it’s scary when you see what he does.

And you see the nefarious ways people…

Well, the way they’ll manipulate it and the way that really explores the darker side of our human nature.

One of my favorite episodes is there’s a guy and he thinks that he’s been in some kind of accident and he’s in a log cabin.

And another guy shows up and he’s just like, hey man, and he’s like kind of nursing him back to health.

He thinks he’s been injured.

And then he gets him to admit that he murdered his family or some crazy thing that he did.

Only to find out that he was in a simulation and he was under interrogation by the police.

Oh wow.

And then what they did afterwards was they punished him by leaving him in the simulation for a simulated 100 years.

Oh my goodness.

So that he would come out of his prison sentence thinking that he had been in prison for 100 years when really he had only been in prison for whatever the time dilation mentally was for him.

Maybe in a year.

But he would think he served 100 years.

So do we all think this is our future?

No.

It has a possibility.

Why?

It feels real enough.

It feels like we’re headed there.

The reason I don’t think this thing will work is simply because we are assuming that intelligence and perceptions and so forth can be so fully controlled that we can’t tell the difference between a reality and what is not real.

We already know that our brains can be fooled.

We already know that.

So technology is not going to change anything in that respect unless we allow it to happen.

And so I don’t think that adding technology here, never mind the idea of whether or not our intelligence is actually digitizable, right?

If it’s a quantum situation, then you can never pass qubits and digitize as something called a no cloning theorem that makes that very difficult.

So you wind up with a circumstance.

I was going to say, now you got to stop.

You got to stop, man.

You got to bring it back to the no cloning theorem.

Because you can’t just walk past that, walk by and just drop that down.

Just like, here’s the no cloning theorem.

All right.

I’m moving on.

Well, okay.

The no cloning theorem is just one of many different pieces of quantum computing, sort of like the laws of quantum computing, the same way that Isomoff had laws of robotics.

Okay.

This particular one, the no cloning theorem means that if you have a quantum bit of information, you can’t just make as many copies of it as you’d like.

You can’t make copies.

So like us, we can digitize a photograph, taking little pixels.

Exactly.

And then make each pixel exactly the same as another pixel on a hard drive or a USB stick or something.

And then you get an exact copy of the previous picture.

Absolutely.

Right.

No cloning theorem says that for quantum information, you can’t do that.

So any time you have some quantum…

And why wouldn’t you be able to do that with a qubit as opposed to bits and bytes, which we’re able to do it with?

Right.

As soon as you read a qubit, it is destroyed.

That makes sense, because it existed in a superposition to begin with.

Yes.

Right.

Go Chuck.

So the moment that you actually realize the superposition, all other positions are made null and void at that particular instance.

That’s a great way to describe it.

Damn, Chuck.

Give that man a degree or something.

Can you only capture a freeze frame of that, your consciousness at a certain time, because if you were to do it five minutes afterwards, it would potentially be different.

That is one consequence of this no-cloning idea, right?

You can know what you are this very moment, but you cannot know what is the next moment.

What you are in five minutes.

The moment after that.

Oh, my God.

This is why this show is so god damn great.

Do you understand?

This is science.

This is what makes it so awesome.

Why did you make…

He blew a gasket.

I’m sorry.

Just unplug it.

All right.

So if we’re thinking about our future, if we’re thinking about getting on and thinking about 50, 100, so many years in advance, what you describe in Starry Messenger is the exponential growth of our lives, our inventions, our ideas.

And our understandings, yes.

Right.

And then you sort of frame it in a 30-year gap.

I’m just wondering, and we’ll return to exponential growth, because I need to know how far away we are from being vertical on the graph, but if you took someone from 1995 and brought them to 2025, would they be completely out of sorts with the way we are today?

Yeah, let me tell you why that is definitely the case.

All right.

They would not know how to function.

All right?

Little things, like you sit them at a restaurant, and say, where’s the menu?

Here’s the QR code.

They’ll have no idea what that is, or what it means, or what it, but they don’t know what social media is, they barely have an email address, because those were on the rise, beginning in the 1990s for the general public.

The idea that you would have self-driving electric cars just on the road with no driver, if you walk around LA, these cars are just all over the place, okay?

And what role the smartphone has played in our lives, beginning from 2007 onward, the idea that you can walk and talk to someone with something smaller than the size of a pack of cigarettes, to someone on the Riviera in, where’s the Riviera in?

French France.

So what I’m describing is how the way we currently live and take it for granted would be wholly foreign and exotic and unfamiliar to someone transported from 1995.

Respectfully and with love, I disagree completely.

Because of 95 to 2025 or just in general, a 30 year interval?

No, it’s specifically for 1995 to 2025 because we had Star Trek.

We already saw what could be.

We have Jules Verne.

We had HG.

Wells.

We had Lucien from the second century AD.

Lucien.

Wow.

Yes.

He wrote.

I love Lucien.

Well, I do, actually, but he was.

He was a guy from sort of the Greek area of the world, which at that time was fertile with culture and imagination and so forth.

About when was this?

About the second century AD.

You know who else was the second century?

I don’t know if they have it.

Ptolemy.

Ptolemy.

Okay.

And he wrote, I’m a guest.

I do not think it was a coincidence.

That’s a period of time.

Because that’s laying out the universe.

All of the people that Charles has named there, they’re historic.

Yes.

Wait, wait, Lucien is not the name.

That’s the name of the.

Lucien is the name of the person who wrote, is credited with writing a science fiction novel called A True Story.

Yes.

Voyagers are on a boat and they are caught in a storm and they wind up on the moon.

And at the moon there are creatures who don’t look like humans, but they’re engaged in a great war.

These are the kinds.

As Greeks want to be.

So clearly other people would be fighting as well.

These are the kinds of things that have been imagined for a long, long time.

And I don’t think that anyone in 95 showing up in 2025 would go, Oh my gosh, people are talking to a box.

And they’ll say, Oh wait, that happened in Star Trek.

Okay, how does this work?

And they just tap, tap, tap.

And because everything was built for humans by humans, they would be able to adapt almost immediately.

Right, right.

Almost immediately because of the commonalities of humans from 1995 to 2025.

Okay, so now let’s take it back to and let’s forget 2nd Century AD, which is a time of enlightenment.

Yes.

Let’s go to a time of darkness.

All right.

So.

Like now?

Let’s go to the Middle Ages, you know what I mean?

The Dark Ages.

Dark Ages, not the Middle Ages.

The Dark Ages, where we go, where we’re consumed by superstition and everything is squelched in terms of any enlightenment, would those people transport it to today?

And by the way, just to be clear.

Or would everything be witchcraft?

Chuck, just to be clear, in the book, I localized it to the era of the Industrial Revolution, where you can fully expect that inventions will change how you live.

There was a period where no one expected their great, great grandchildren to be living any differently than they did.

Absolutely.

So I don’t know that you can go that far back.

So you can’t go that far back.

No, you can, you can.

I’ll say that, because first of all, we should understand that Dark Ages was a term coined by a European historian.

True.

In fact, historians who claim that Rome fell in the year AD 476 did not take into account what we know to be true, that other people ran that area known as the Roman Empire in many different ways for centuries thereafter.

And then there was the Holy Roman Empire that happened starting at 800 with Charlemagne.

Meanwhile, there is an Eastern Empire that was based at Constantinople.

That’s right, all of that concept.

And by the way, Rome is still here today.

That’s right.

I was there this summer.

It’s a beautiful place.

It was very hot.

It’s still happening.

Right.

So our sense of what history is also makes us think about predicting the past.

What has been framed for us as the Dark Ages was actually a period of great innovation and people were thinking about a lot of things, but not necessarily in Europe.

In the Arabic-speaking world, things like algebra were being created, things like mathematics.

Chuck.

Yes, Chuck.

You can’t be talking about what brown people did.

Okay.

It doesn’t count if it didn’t happen in Europe.

You’re making my point exactly.

You sure words were never spoken.

And see, this is the point.

Next thing you’ll be telling me, there were pyramids in Africa.

Get out of here.

Right.

I mean, surely no Egyptian people could ever have made these and it must have been done by aliens because, what, Egyptians aren’t as smart as people who look like Europeans and they couldn’t do geometry.

This is a very, very inappropriate way of looking at history.

So, if we use the imagination of these authors, these filmmakers, and then we kind of replicate some of the things that they came up, so we follow, we have sliding doors, we first saw them in Star Trek.

I first saw them in Star Trek.

Okay, so the thing is, are they shaping the future from their position in the past?

Oh.

And we follow that.

Great idea, great point.

That’s a really.

Are you asking, if we never saw sliding doors as a future feature of our lives, would it have been pursued?

And would we be trying to open the grocery store door holding our bags?

Great question.

Here’s my thought on this.

We make predictions all the time.

Probably there are a thousand predictions about the future that are in the literature or just around on newspapers or even written down by people from 100 years ago.

As Yogi Berra said, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future, right?

But if you make a thousand predictions, one of them will come true.

And we’re looking backwards.

Do you cherry pick the future?

Yes, and if the future shows up with sliding doors, you go back and go, hey, remember that people?

We don’t talk about anybody who predicted doors would go up and down or that doors would squirrel out, but they exist, you know?

So somebody probably did that, even though Star Trek as a show itself didn’t have doors that swirled out.

There are ways to do this that we have all thought of.

They just didn’t dominate our society for whatever reason.

Okay.

All right, let’s go to your 2050 predictions from Starry Messenger.

Predictions.

No, no, by the way, I put in my predictions so that in 2050 people can make fun of me.

Well, we’re going to do it right now.

As I highlighted, everybody else’s wrong predictions.

Just quickly, to put this in context, in the book I describe, a prediction in 1900 made for the year 2000.

And in the year 1900, steam ships were setting records across the ocean, railroads crossed the continents, and so in this for the year 2000, they had a steam ship coming out of the ocean with railroad wheels flipped down, it goes straight onto a railroad track.

Right onto a railroad track.

And then continues on land.

Worst transformer ever.

So this was, and another one.

That’s just linear thinking again.

It’s linear thinking.

There’s another one.

Also, how are people getting around?

Through lighter-than-air balloons, derigibles, blimps, this sort of thing.

So they imagine in the year 2000, everyone would have their own personal balloons.

So there are these balloons that wrap under your armpit, and you have two, and, and so it shows them sort of walking on water, kept buoyant by these two, by these balloons.

Marvelous.

And it’s like, okay.

Because that’s, that’s, that’s the extent of, their imagination couldn’t go much farther than what was available.

That’s kind of, yeah.

What was available.

It’s amazing.

All right.

One of your predictions, the space program becomes a space industry.

Already happened.

Funded not by taxpayers’ dollars, but by space tourism and other projects.

That part didn’t happen.

Well, it’s not 2050 yet.

Now, okay.

Dude.

Well, that, what do you think?

What do you think about that?

Don’t get all protective.

Prices are not going to drop low enough for people to want to go into space just for the heck of it.

Not for 30 years?

Not for 30 years.

Unfortunately, you’re watching the prices now, extrapolating outward into the future.

You just don’t see that pattern happening because right now what’s happening is that space is still controlled by governments that are willing to subsidize private corporations.

Once those subsidies are removed.

Does the country on Earth have the same equity in space?

You would hope so, but at the moment, as with any other parts of the world, they don’t.

Charles, the dawn of flight, it was very expensive.

Very few people was on a plane.

If you flew on a plane, that was like the news of the cocktail party that you attended.

And then now everybody can fly because the plane, we figured out how to make it cheap.

The plane was and always was, from the very beginning in 1903, a private enterprise activity.

Space has, since its beginning, been a governmental activity.

Okay, that’s missing some information.

So, the rapid development of flight between 19, call it 10, and 1930.

Was funded by World War I.

Well, yeah, so you had government investments in…

In the advancement of aviation.

In the advancement of aviation.

And the government wanted to deliver mail by plane.

The birth of air mail.

So the government said, we’re gonna give a contract to whoever can outbid whoever else.

And you do it, and you win the contract.

So I want the contract.

So I make my plane better, because I can carry more for the same amount of money that yours does, now I win the contract back from you.

And this continues until somebody says, hey, instead of sacks of mail, I can carry sacks of people.

And then I can, that was the birth of commercial aviation, driven by the government’s interest in you making a better airplane.

But it made money.

And when we tried to do that with the space shuttle, we didn’t make money.

So until money is made, that track will not stop.

And your sentence had the word until in it.

Fine, I’m saying by 2050, the until will happen within there.

I do not think so.

Okay, that’s what it is.

So here’s what I think.

In response to both of you, what’s going to happen is there’s a lot of money floating around in space.

And it’s gonna be-

What, really?

I’m up there, you and me, you gotta know where to look.

Let’s go this afternoon.

I’ve looked in the wrong place.

And it’s in mining.

And if we can mine what’s out there instead of destroying the earth to bring back all these precious rare earths that, well, they wouldn’t be rare earths, they’d be rare space.

Spice minerals.

Rare space.

If we can bring that back, what happens is to get there, it’s going to propel the advancement so fast.

Like a gold rush.

Like a gold rush.

People are gonna go so crazy, so fast, to get out there and get that money, that space tourism will be a natural byproduct.

Byproduct.

So not the target, but the byproduct.

Byproduct.

Not the target.

As happens so often.

I wanna read to you, we don’t have time for this, but I’m gonna do it anyway.

I wanna read to you a letter that I own.

All right.

Written December 19th, 1918.

Oh.

Oh, I think I know what this will be.

I didn’t know you were that old.

No!

Ha!

This is to Mr.

Alan Hawley, President of the Aero Club of America.

Oh, then I know who wrote this.

Madison Avenue.

Dear Mr.

Hawley, many thanks for your very nice telegram remembering the 15th anniversary of our first flight at Kitty Hawk.

Whoa.

Although Wilbur, as well as myself, would have preferred to see the aeroplane developed more along peaceful lines, yet I believe that its use in this great war will give encouragement for its use in other ways.

Signed sincerely yours, Orville Knight.

Orville, yeah.

Look at that.

And in war, take the high ground, and they took it to another level, pun intended.

Right, let’s take another look.

Self-driving electric cars, you go there, and I don’t think that’s happening.

That’s in there.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s not a limb that’s gonna be breaking.

That’s a given.

Well, no, there are people who say that it’ll never happen, or whatever, that people like driving, and we already have HOV lanes.

If you say you can only go in that if it’s a self-driving car, and the self-driving cars are going 120 miles an hour, three car lengths between each other, because they have instant reflexes, and they’re not putting on makeup, and they’re not texting, and they’re not, if they could, and they still break.

There are cars being made right now that don’t have steering wheels, so we are going to live in a driverless car society at one point.

I think that would happen faster than most people.

Do you agree or not?

I think that self-driving vehicles will be as prevalent as public transportation is today.

There will still be private transportation for which drivers will still be necessary.

And listen, you’ll drive on the back roads and stuff like that.

You’ll be able to drive your car.

At some point, they’ll become like horses.

You can still ride your horses at the stables.

You go get your horse and you ride it.

So now your car is at the track.

At the garage, at the track.

No, it’s a special place.

That’s what I mean, back roads.

People who still want to drive their car, they go there and they drive their car.

Here’s when it’s going to happen.

At some point, you have to make the cars talk to one another and the road itself talk to the cars.

At that point, you won’t be allowed to drive on the road.

You want to switch lanes.

It tells the other cars, I’m switching lanes, and they open up for it.

Half all the accidents happen that way.

You don’t see who’s in your blind spot.

Building that infrastructure into the highways and byways is going to be so expensive.

We went from horse drawn buggies in 1905 to you couldn’t give away a horse in 1915 with gas stations and paved roads for automobile tires.

And that happened in 10 years.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but things are a bit more expensive.

Yes.

And there are still millions of…

The side of you want?

The side of science.

The side of science.

There are still millions of square miles of North America where there isn’t high-speed internet.

So you got to remember that these are very regional solutions right now.

We can extrapolate on what’s going to happen in New York City.

But the driving from Laramie, Wyoming to Fargo, North Dakota is not likely to be the same as driving from LA Sunset Boulevard to LA.

Many of those farmers still had horse-drawn tractors.

Yes.

But I’m talking about…

We’re talking about the entire world.

You’re going to have an area.

We’re talking about the Eisenhower highway system in the United States.

It’s going to be limited to certain areas.

I’m afraid so.

Neuroscience will advance so far we understand the human minds well enough that mental illness will be cured.

You’ve also gone into developing antiviral serum and cures cancer.

Do we feel that?

Some cancers, yes.

Absolutely.

So with the neuroscience, which is still kind of in its infancy, so I have very high expectations for it.

Psychologists hate it when I say this, but I mean it with love, that to me, psychology is to neuroscience what alchemy is to chemistry.

How can you mean that with love?

Hey, listen, I like what you’re doing, but one day, you’re just out of work, okay?

Just know this.

Do you know you got someone on the couch and you, for months and months and months, trying to cure their illness, the neuroscientist said, where is it?

Oh, it’s a nip-tuck right here.

There’s a neurosynaptic thing there, and they nip and tuck, and you’re done and you’re out, and no one is on the street, crazy.

There’s no insane asylums.

Is this where we get to implants, that just bypasses the fractured?

I don’t know if it’s surgery or implants that are removable, then you go back to your original state.

So let’s look at AI.

Let’s look at the influence AI will have in the world of medicine.

Is this now us getting to a more vertical line on the exponential gross?

The line always looks vertical when you’re at that end of the exponential.

It’s always looks vertical to you.

Like all the advances happened just in recent years.

But I want to get to the AI point.

To the extent that can help with medicines, I think one of my predictions was we have medicines that, this is not some new prediction.

I’m just echoing what’s already been floating around, but I’m putting a time stamp on it, that medicine will be tuned to your genetic profile so that there are zero side effects.

Yes, you did make that.

Yes, and if we know your, why is it that you break out in hives and you don’t, ingesting the same chemical, there’s something different about your genetic profile or your hormonal profile.

We will know that, understand it, so that side effects will be a thing of the past.

That’s one of the predictions.

You do make that prediction.

I’ll get you, it’s in there.

Yes, I think what will happen is that we’ll be able to control behaviors very well by 2050, but we still won’t be able to cure the diseases by 2050.

There’s a lot to do.

You think eventually just not by 2050?

Yes, it’s an issue of when.

We are able now technologically.

Did you say when?

No, I said when.

Good, thank you.

Did you say cool whipp?

It depends if I’m speaking to cool whittening.

That’s okay.

Shh.

And I never like cool whipp.

In a quarter century, we’ll be able to help everybody who have behavioral problems solve their behaviors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll have solved their diseases, and that is what I would like to see.

That means they’ll be living with the disease controlled by some medication or implant, rather than have it removed from them entirely.

That’s my opinion.

Is it safe to say that going forward into the future, the changes will happen even quicker?

That is the nature of being on an exponential.

That’s my point.

Yeah.

That there’s no doubt.

If you look at the pace of patents, the pace of research papers, the doubling times are, which is how you know you’re on an exponential, they’ve been consistent over the decades.

So what that means is in a few years, there’ll be double the number of research papers on a subject, in a field, than has appeared up until that point.

That’s how you know you’re on an exponential.

And the caveat is sometimes the exponentials turn over.

There’s a period of exponential growth followed by a leveling off.

For example, the human population.

Thomas Malthus, a couple hundred years ago, predicted that if you use exponential growth, soon there will be so many people in the world that there will be not enough food production ever.

But now we know that our predictions, and here’s one that we could test in 30 years, 30 years from now, the exponential growth of the human population will turn over.

We’re gonna top out worldwide around 10 billion and stock.

Yeah, but you gave the wrong…

Actually start falling, as it has in many places.

People have already made those predictions.

You put a cart in front of a horse there, okay?

Malthus is wrong not because our exponential growth of the population will level off at 10 billion.

He’s wrong because we applied science to farming so that now we are producing more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before.

That’s why he was wrong.

He did not imagine that farm production would ever become more efficient or more voluminous than it was at the time.

And he was just doing a linear extrapolation against the population of the planet.

We are awash in food.

Anyone who is starving in the world.

How much of our food goes to waste?

A third of it or something.

I saw the numbers.

So anyone who’s starving, it’s not because the world doesn’t have food to feed them.

There’s some geopolitical circumstance that prevents it.

So nobody like my predictions?

No, no, no, no.

No, these are good predictions.

Last time I…

I credit you for being brave enough to step there.

Yeah, and I even got some critiques in the moment.

Give me each of you one final prediction about something that you would like us to know.

See, so here’s my prediction for, it’s gonna go…

Don’t confuse what you want to be true from what will likely be true.

This is my honest assessment, not my desire.

Good.

Okay, that we are at a global tipping point with respect to democracy, globally.

And it’s either going to be that people want to govern themselves through democratic processes, or that we’re all so asleep that we descend into authoritarianism worldwide.

And if we do, getting back is gonna take so many generations, none of us will be here to see it.

Gary, a prediction.

That we find the desire to fully engage with climate change, because the knock-on effect has influence on so many global societies.

We’re suffering from climate migration, we’re suffering from rising sea levels.

And if we can bring the desire to challenge and tackle that positively, I think that will be something we can all look to as the positive step.

I so hope you’re right.

So do I.

But I’m not sure that we will.

But it is a hope.

I hope we find the desire.

That would be great.

By the way, a little-known fact, because I only realized this months ago, when I first saw Steven Spielberg’s movie AI from the 1990s, there’s an entire sustained scene underwater.

And you go underwater and there’s a Statue of Liberty completely submerged.

So they already took climate change to the limit at the time that movie was supposed to take place.

And that was just a side fact, because the real movie was about the AI that they were creating.

So cool, man.

But once again, it’s take it to the extreme to make the example, to make you think so that you do not create the future that they invented for you.

What’s your best prediction?

That within 25 years, there will be a professional sport played in orbit.

Satellite shooting.

Look at that.

Spaceballs.

There you go.

I like that.

Yes.

Because we, you know, Chuck is our geeking chief when we talk about sports too.

Oh yeah.

He’s done it.

When that happens, this will be the first thing you do.

We’ll do it.

After you can do an episode on your own podcast.

Oh, thank you.

It’s the zero, I appreciate that.

Thank you so much.

It’s the zero G basketball, yeah.

All right, we gotta wrap this up.

Dude, I enjoyed this topic.

Thank you so much.

And you come up with these cool topics for a special edition.

This was great.

Yeah, I have time on my hands.

All right, dude.

Charles, Chuck, Gary, thanks for coming.

Pleasure.

This has been StarTalk Special Edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep hooking up.