May 9, 2024 • 16 mins
George Noory and futurist Robert Sawyer discuss the frontiers of technology and artificial intelligence, how AI continues to learn and advance so quickly, and how humans are losing their abilities to retain knowledge and complete tasks due to our overdependence on technology.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Norriy with you,
Robert Sawyer with us. His latest book is called The Downloaded.
What are the chances of this becoming a movie?
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Robert, Well, you know, we are really trying to do that.
I do have the film and TV rights to it,
and of course if Brendan Fraser would agree to start
in the movie, I think it'd be greenlit overnight.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Obviously start in the audiobook version. But my Hollywood agent
and I are hard at work trying to get this
set up. We both think it would make a really
fine feature film. And as you may recall, I had
a TV series on ABC a while ago, Flash Forward,
based on my novel of the same name. So you know,
it's always a long shot to get something made, but
I had something made in the past. We're hoping that
(00:46):
The Downloaded will become a movie as well.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Would Brendan become one of the Astronauts or one of
the games, he would.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Be the main prisoner actually is the character you played
the main ex convict in the audio version, and tumble
guy who made some bad decisions in life. It is
trying to redeem himself. And you know, we all make mistakes.
His was more catastrophic than most of us have are
making our life. But he also trying to redeem himself,
(01:12):
and he did it with such heart, such an emotion.
You know, sometimes Brendan doesn't get the credit that he deserves.
I mean he does now that he's an Academy Award winner.
But we think of George of the Jungle, we think
of Encino Man, we think of the Mummy movies, and
we don't necessarily think of a subtle, complicated performance. But
he brought that very much to the audiobook version of
(01:34):
the Downloaded.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
So the Book of Course has to do with an
incredible possibilities of science fiction in the future. How realistic
do you think that is?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
I for me, now this isn't true for all science
fiction writers, but for me, it has to be realistic.
It has to be plausible. If it's not plausible, then
it's fantasy. It's not science fiction. And I think all
the things that I talk about in the Book of Course,
we've already mentioned the cryonic suspension, the freezing of bodies
for eventual thawing out reanimating of formerly dead people. Absolutely,
(02:10):
I think that technology is very near at hand. The
book also talks enormously about artificial intelligence, and I mean
that's galloping ahead, as you well know, George, where every
time we turn around there's some new breakthrough, new level
of sophistication in what AI can do. And so that
absolutely I think is also in the cards. And the
(02:32):
third technology in the downloaded is intertellar travel, not by
going faster than the speed of light with a Star
Trek style warp drive, but the kind of technology that
we have or will have very soon. We take a
long time to get to say proximate century close to
star other than the Sun to Earth, but that doesn't
mean we couldn't do it, and I suspect we will
(02:54):
do it this century.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Robert, we were talking about Larry Knivin, the great sci
fi writer, and Heat partnered up with the lady Jerry Pronell.
Did you know Jerry at all?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I knew Jerry very well. I was so sad when
Jerry passed. You know, we had differing politics, we had
differing personalities, but we were friends. And what a lesson
you know that you can have people on different ends
of the political spectrum, different different belief systems. That Jerry
was Roman Catholic and I'm, you know, a person of
(03:23):
no faith and still be friends that have civil debate.
I miss him, and I miss that whole ethos that
used to be so prevalent in the world and seems
so rare today.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
He would have liked the download it.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
I think he really would have. I think he would have.
He was, you know, and that pleases me because he
and Larry as mitched Larry him, Jerry Pronell. They wrote
what Robert A. Heinlein, the great dean of American science fiction, called,
you know, the finest science fiction novel he ever read,
The Moten God's Eye, a wonderful book, good people.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
So without giving away the book, we don't want to
do that. Something happens at the end dramatically, doesn't it. Oh?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Absolutely, And you're always leading up to that. I mean,
you ask people to give of their time, and of
course they're buying the book some of their money, but
you're taking a portion of a person's life. If you're
an author and you have to give a payoff at
the end, you have to, you know, if they're going
to invest whatever number of hours it takes to read
the book or listen to it. If you listen to it,
(04:25):
it's about six hours in the audiobook version. I owe
it to you, any author owes it to you that
in the end there's a payoff that makes it worthwhile.
And I really do think it is there in the download.
And I tried very very hard to give people not
just value for your money, of course that's what we
all want to do for in some kind of business,
but value for the time that we took out of
(04:46):
somebody's life to pursue whatever piece of art or creativity
we've created.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
How realistic is the book based on the future.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
I think it's very realistic. I, honest to God, believe
that artificial intelligence, truly self aware artificial intelligence, not just
chad GBT that throws back at you, you know, things
have scraped that other people have created on the web,
but true AI intelligence. Yes, I think that's very plausible,
very likely, and very near in the future. All the
(05:16):
other technology I talked about absolutely, yeah, I think there
were at such a threshold of new technologies and breakthroughs.
I'm going to be if I do make it to
be ninety nine years old. As we alluded to in
the earlier segment, I expect to see all of these technologies.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Robert Sara's website is linked up with Coast tocosdam dot com.
He was on with me about a year ago. We
were talked about The Oppenheimer Alternative. Did you see that movie?
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Of course I did, yeh three hours. I must say
I saw the movie and at the fay I endured it.
That was a long movie that could have been all
due respect to Chrisivern Nolan, the director, could have been
a shorter movie. But it was certainly you know, the
definitive date at least screen treatment of the Oppenheimer's story.
(06:04):
My novel, as you know, The Oppenheimer Alternative was an
alternate history novel that I wrote and published before it
was even announced that Christopher Nolan was making making his movie.
So it wasn't me cashing in. But his movie certainly
helped my book sales, so I can't complain.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
And Oppenheimer had regrets.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Many regrets, you know. He was like many of our scientists.
He was given an interesting puzzle. He called it. It
was his favorite adjective sweet, A sweet problem in science.
You don't split the atom and make all kinds of
energy and big explosion. And he didn't even think about
(06:46):
the moral ramifications of what he was doing until after,
really after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, the
one that was dropped on Nagasaki. The first one, you know,
there were arguments pro and con about whether it was
necessary in order to end the war World War two.
But the second one he felt was overkilled, the first
(07:08):
time that word had ever been used, overkill, excessive, and
that was when he started to have real regrets about
what he had made possible.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
I think that Japanese should have surrendered though immediately after.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Well totally. But the problem was that, you know, the
telegraph lines were down, the radio stations in Hiroshima had
been destroyed. It takes days on foot or by. The
railways were broken to get to Tokyo, where the high
command was. We bombed them a second time, seventy two
(07:39):
hours after the first time. And today we think, of course,
I just go on social media, I'll just you know,
tweet at President Biden and say, hey, surrender. He yeah,
girl's render. That kind of instantaneous communication just did not
exist in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Closer, though, you have your study in twenty fifty nine.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
How close are we to that kind of scenario? Oh?
Speaker 3 (08:05):
I think you know, you play a game when you
pick a date for a science fiction novel, just like
as I mentioned earlier two thousand and one a space odyssey.
Well that they didn't turn out to be right. We
did not have a city on the Moon, we did
not have orbiting hotels, we did not have interplanetary crewe dimissions,
we didn't have true artificial intelligence, we didn't have critogonic suspension.
(08:28):
All of those things are in two thousand and one,
here just twenty three years later. Oops, they got the
date wrong. But we every time we miss one of
these predictions, we hone our ability. I don't mean just me,
but all of us who play this game of futurism
to get closer and closer to being accurate in just
how far down the road things are. And I think
(08:49):
twenty fifty nine is a very plausible date for the
technologies that I talk about in my novel That Downloaded.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
I've always wondered if the terrorists from nine to eleven
pick that year based on the movie.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
That's an interesting question, quite you know, I suspect they
simply did it as soon as they possibly could do it.
I don't think the subtleties of symbolism, well, symbolism for sure,
I mean going after the Pentagon, going after the World
Trade Center. Obviously they understood that level of symbolism. But
I don't think they were buying large, subtle, sophisticated thinkers.
(09:23):
They were thugs, and we still reel from the incredible
carnage that they wrought for no good reason.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
We're going to take calls with Robert Sawyer next hour
here on coast to coast and jump in and check
in on artificial intelligence and give us your thoughts on that.
It seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
AI.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Don't you feel out one hundred percent?
Speaker 3 (09:48):
I was just talking to some of my writing colleagues
over the last couple of days. We're all very worried
about our jobs. George. You know, we write books and
it takes us months or sometimes years to write a book,
and an AI can crank out a book in minutes
or seconds. I, you know, very lucky.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Can I write it though, just as creatively as you could?
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Not?
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Today? It can't, but it can do it, can do
it as good as me in eighteen months from now,
maybe not thirty six months. I'm starting to worry. Seventy
two months from now, I suspect it we'll be able
to do it, not just better than me, but better
than William Shakespeare, better than the best writers ever in
human history.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Fascinating. How does it get to be able to do that?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Well? It has one advantage. You know, many writers go
to university and do a four year degree, say in
English literature, and during that four years they might read
fifty or sixty really good novels that have been, you know,
considered to be the most important ones. Maybe it's Smoby Dick,
maybe it's To Kill a Mockingbird, You name your favorites.
The AI has read everything. When it was revealed last
(10:58):
year what chat gpt he had scraped to use the
sources for, you know, its the ability to mimic human text,
twenty four out of twenty five of my novels were
in that group that they'd scraped. They've read it read
everything I ever wrote, everything, Stephen King every wrote, every
writer you never heard of, ever wrote. And you get
(11:19):
to be very good when you've got lots and lots
of examples of what's good and what's bad. The most
interesting thing in some ways is that Amazon owns not
just all the books that you know are on Kindle
and so forth, but owns all the reviews of all
those books. So the AI gets to look and say, oh, well,
people don't really like it when there's an ending that
(11:42):
it's just a dream. Oh the butler having done it,
that's a cliche. Well I better not do that, and
so on and so forth. It's got an enormous database
not just of what people have created, but what others
have done. Is the reactions to what people have created.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Bills today, Robert with my phone and oh yeah, and
I'm amazed at how that apparatus can remember your user
name and password for the various sites you go to
to pay bills or something like that. Right, Absolutely unbelievable,
and in.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Theory remember them securely. But yes, absolutely, it is astonishing
because you know, when I was in university, and I'm
sure when you were going to school and so forth,
so much of it was memorization. You had to memorize,
you know, whether it was chemical formulas if you're saying chemistry,
or the capitals of the states, or the presidents or
whatever it was. We don't memorize anything anymore. We just
(12:42):
have to ask for the information. We have offloaded whole
parts of our intellectual process to machines, the biggest one
being are detailed memory. We no longer require one. We
simply ask and are given the information, and we hope
that the information and is accurate that is given to us.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
The beginning of artificial intelligence, I think, occurred at electronic
cash machines cash registers, where young people no longer have
to do mathematics in their head. They let the machine
do it.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Absolutely yes. And it's interesting because I used to be
really good at mental math, and now I'm going to
have a practice of it because there's not much call
in my day to day life to work out, you know,
the percentage of a tip, or to add up a
series of numbers. And when I do it, and now
in my head, I actually double check it, and I
(13:38):
never used to it. I used to have confidence in
my basic, innate mathematical abilities that most human beings who
were you know, born in the let's say, pre internet
era had, And now we're saying I better just double
check that because I'm not in practice for what used
to be a fundamental basic human.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Skill without a calculator, without something like that, that kind
of device, how many young people today can do adding
and subtracting and division in their heads exactly.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
I mean, you know, I'm old enough, as I say
in an earlier segment here, I'm sixty four years old.
Now I'm old enough to remember when pocket calculators there
was the debate. It was when I was in grade
seven was when the debate was, well, well, we let
the students bring a calculator into math class.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Texas Instruments, Texas.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
I had the Texas Instrument thirty five, the TI thirty
five exactly, with not an LCD screen but an LED screen,
the red glowing digits, and it took a nine volt battery,
but a wonderful machine. And ultimately where I was in Toronto, Canada,
the jurisdiction after jurisdiction came to the same conclusion that yeah,
students should be able to use calculators, because there was
(14:55):
no conceivable reality when those devices would not be available
to them. And the people who say, yeah, well what
happens when you know they run out of batteries, and
of course Texas Instruments and Cassio responded, will make them
solar powered, and you can buy a solar powered calculator,
which means it'll run forever for five bucks at Staples
or any other office supply store.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
That's so true, Robert Sawyer with us, We're going to
take your calls next hour about science fiction, about artificial intelligence.
Jump on bout just how far can you think, Robert,
artificial intelligence will go. I mean, it's diagnosing diseases, it's
helping doctors. Like you say, it could be a writer
(15:37):
one day, it could be a talk show host.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Well, I fear for us both, George, I have to
say that. You know, we were talking about the fact
that Brendan Fraser narrates the audio version by the downloaded.
But right now I just saw an article from Bloomberg
that forty thousand audiobooks are available now on Audible that
are narrated by AI that aren't hited by so actors,
(16:01):
you sere losing their jobs. They're the first to go.
And I think what we need is solidarity talk show hosts, writers, actors,
visual artists. As a theatrical artists, you know, stage play artists,
all of us have to stick together and remind the
audience that art is supposed to be a human exercise,
not something that's machine generated.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Norriy with you,
Robert Sawyer with us. His latest book is called The Downloaded.
What are the chances of this becoming a movie?
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Robert, Well, you know, we are really trying to do that.
I do have the film and TV rights to it,
and of course if Brendan Fraser would agree to start
in the movie, I think it'd be greenlit overnight.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Obviously start in the audiobook version. But my Hollywood agent
and I are hard at work trying to get this
set up. We both think it would make a really
fine feature film. And as you may recall, I had
a TV series on ABC a while ago, Flash Forward,
based on my novel of the same name. So you know,
it's always a long shot to get something made, but
I had something made in the past. We're hoping that
(00:46):
The Downloaded will become a movie as well.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Would Brendan become one of the Astronauts or one of
the games, he would.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Be the main prisoner actually is the character you played
the main ex convict in the audio version, and tumble
guy who made some bad decisions in life. It is
trying to redeem himself. And you know, we all make mistakes.
His was more catastrophic than most of us have are
making our life. But he also trying to redeem himself,
(01:12):
and he did it with such heart, such an emotion.
You know, sometimes Brendan doesn't get the credit that he deserves.
I mean he does now that he's an Academy Award winner.
But we think of George of the Jungle, we think
of Encino Man, we think of the Mummy movies, and
we don't necessarily think of a subtle, complicated performance. But
he brought that very much to the audiobook version of
(01:34):
the Downloaded.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
So the Book of Course has to do with an
incredible possibilities of science fiction in the future. How realistic
do you think that is?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
I for me, now this isn't true for all science
fiction writers, but for me, it has to be realistic.
It has to be plausible. If it's not plausible, then
it's fantasy. It's not science fiction. And I think all
the things that I talk about in the Book of Course,
we've already mentioned the cryonic suspension, the freezing of bodies
for eventual thawing out reanimating of formerly dead people. Absolutely,
(02:10):
I think that technology is very near at hand. The
book also talks enormously about artificial intelligence, and I mean
that's galloping ahead, as you well know, George, where every
time we turn around there's some new breakthrough, new level
of sophistication in what AI can do. And so that
absolutely I think is also in the cards. And the
(02:32):
third technology in the downloaded is intertellar travel, not by
going faster than the speed of light with a Star
Trek style warp drive, but the kind of technology that
we have or will have very soon. We take a
long time to get to say proximate century close to
star other than the Sun to Earth, but that doesn't
mean we couldn't do it, and I suspect we will
(02:54):
do it this century.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Robert, we were talking about Larry Knivin, the great sci
fi writer, and Heat partnered up with the lady Jerry Pronell.
Did you know Jerry at all?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I knew Jerry very well. I was so sad when
Jerry passed. You know, we had differing politics, we had
differing personalities, but we were friends. And what a lesson
you know that you can have people on different ends
of the political spectrum, different different belief systems. That Jerry
was Roman Catholic and I'm, you know, a person of
(03:23):
no faith and still be friends that have civil debate.
I miss him, and I miss that whole ethos that
used to be so prevalent in the world and seems
so rare today.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
He would have liked the download it.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
I think he really would have. I think he would have.
He was, you know, and that pleases me because he
and Larry as mitched Larry him, Jerry Pronell. They wrote
what Robert A. Heinlein, the great dean of American science fiction, called,
you know, the finest science fiction novel he ever read,
The Moten God's Eye, a wonderful book, good people.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
So without giving away the book, we don't want to
do that. Something happens at the end dramatically, doesn't it. Oh?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Absolutely, And you're always leading up to that. I mean,
you ask people to give of their time, and of
course they're buying the book some of their money, but
you're taking a portion of a person's life. If you're
an author and you have to give a payoff at
the end, you have to, you know, if they're going
to invest whatever number of hours it takes to read
the book or listen to it. If you listen to it,
(04:25):
it's about six hours in the audiobook version. I owe
it to you, any author owes it to you that
in the end there's a payoff that makes it worthwhile.
And I really do think it is there in the download.
And I tried very very hard to give people not
just value for your money, of course that's what we
all want to do for in some kind of business,
but value for the time that we took out of
(04:46):
somebody's life to pursue whatever piece of art or creativity
we've created.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
How realistic is the book based on the future.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
I think it's very realistic. I, honest to God, believe
that artificial intelligence, truly self aware artificial intelligence, not just
chad GBT that throws back at you, you know, things
have scraped that other people have created on the web,
but true AI intelligence. Yes, I think that's very plausible,
very likely, and very near in the future. All the
(05:16):
other technology I talked about absolutely, yeah, I think there
were at such a threshold of new technologies and breakthroughs.
I'm going to be if I do make it to
be ninety nine years old. As we alluded to in
the earlier segment, I expect to see all of these technologies.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Robert Sara's website is linked up with Coast tocosdam dot com.
He was on with me about a year ago. We
were talked about The Oppenheimer Alternative. Did you see that movie?
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Of course I did, yeh three hours. I must say
I saw the movie and at the fay I endured it.
That was a long movie that could have been all
due respect to Chrisivern Nolan, the director, could have been
a shorter movie. But it was certainly you know, the
definitive date at least screen treatment of the Oppenheimer's story.
(06:04):
My novel, as you know, The Oppenheimer Alternative was an
alternate history novel that I wrote and published before it
was even announced that Christopher Nolan was making making his movie.
So it wasn't me cashing in. But his movie certainly
helped my book sales, so I can't complain.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
And Oppenheimer had regrets.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Many regrets, you know. He was like many of our scientists.
He was given an interesting puzzle. He called it. It
was his favorite adjective sweet, A sweet problem in science.
You don't split the atom and make all kinds of
energy and big explosion. And he didn't even think about
(06:46):
the moral ramifications of what he was doing until after,
really after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, the
one that was dropped on Nagasaki. The first one, you know,
there were arguments pro and con about whether it was
necessary in order to end the war World War two.
But the second one he felt was overkilled, the first
(07:08):
time that word had ever been used, overkill, excessive, and
that was when he started to have real regrets about
what he had made possible.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
I think that Japanese should have surrendered though immediately after.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Well totally. But the problem was that, you know, the
telegraph lines were down, the radio stations in Hiroshima had
been destroyed. It takes days on foot or by. The
railways were broken to get to Tokyo, where the high
command was. We bombed them a second time, seventy two
(07:39):
hours after the first time. And today we think, of course,
I just go on social media, I'll just you know,
tweet at President Biden and say, hey, surrender. He yeah,
girl's render. That kind of instantaneous communication just did not
exist in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Closer, though, you have your study in twenty fifty nine.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
How close are we to that kind of scenario? Oh?
Speaker 3 (08:05):
I think you know, you play a game when you
pick a date for a science fiction novel, just like
as I mentioned earlier two thousand and one a space odyssey.
Well that they didn't turn out to be right. We
did not have a city on the Moon, we did
not have orbiting hotels, we did not have interplanetary crewe dimissions,
we didn't have true artificial intelligence, we didn't have critogonic suspension.
(08:28):
All of those things are in two thousand and one,
here just twenty three years later. Oops, they got the
date wrong. But we every time we miss one of
these predictions, we hone our ability. I don't mean just me,
but all of us who play this game of futurism
to get closer and closer to being accurate in just
how far down the road things are. And I think
(08:49):
twenty fifty nine is a very plausible date for the
technologies that I talk about in my novel That Downloaded.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
I've always wondered if the terrorists from nine to eleven
pick that year based on the movie.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
That's an interesting question, quite you know, I suspect they
simply did it as soon as they possibly could do it.
I don't think the subtleties of symbolism, well, symbolism for sure,
I mean going after the Pentagon, going after the World
Trade Center. Obviously they understood that level of symbolism. But
I don't think they were buying large, subtle, sophisticated thinkers.
(09:23):
They were thugs, and we still reel from the incredible
carnage that they wrought for no good reason.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
We're going to take calls with Robert Sawyer next hour
here on coast to coast and jump in and check
in on artificial intelligence and give us your thoughts on that.
It seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
AI.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Don't you feel out one hundred percent?
Speaker 3 (09:48):
I was just talking to some of my writing colleagues
over the last couple of days. We're all very worried
about our jobs. George. You know, we write books and
it takes us months or sometimes years to write a book,
and an AI can crank out a book in minutes
or seconds. I, you know, very lucky.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Can I write it though, just as creatively as you could?
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Not?
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Today? It can't, but it can do it, can do
it as good as me in eighteen months from now,
maybe not thirty six months. I'm starting to worry. Seventy
two months from now, I suspect it we'll be able
to do it, not just better than me, but better
than William Shakespeare, better than the best writers ever in
human history.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Fascinating. How does it get to be able to do that?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Well? It has one advantage. You know, many writers go
to university and do a four year degree, say in
English literature, and during that four years they might read
fifty or sixty really good novels that have been, you know,
considered to be the most important ones. Maybe it's Smoby Dick,
maybe it's To Kill a Mockingbird, You name your favorites.
The AI has read everything. When it was revealed last
(10:58):
year what chat gpt he had scraped to use the
sources for, you know, its the ability to mimic human text,
twenty four out of twenty five of my novels were
in that group that they'd scraped. They've read it read
everything I ever wrote, everything, Stephen King every wrote, every
writer you never heard of, ever wrote. And you get
(11:19):
to be very good when you've got lots and lots
of examples of what's good and what's bad. The most
interesting thing in some ways is that Amazon owns not
just all the books that you know are on Kindle
and so forth, but owns all the reviews of all
those books. So the AI gets to look and say, oh, well,
people don't really like it when there's an ending that
(11:42):
it's just a dream. Oh the butler having done it,
that's a cliche. Well I better not do that, and
so on and so forth. It's got an enormous database
not just of what people have created, but what others
have done. Is the reactions to what people have created.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Bills today, Robert with my phone and oh yeah, and
I'm amazed at how that apparatus can remember your user
name and password for the various sites you go to
to pay bills or something like that. Right, Absolutely unbelievable,
and in.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Theory remember them securely. But yes, absolutely, it is astonishing
because you know, when I was in university, and I'm
sure when you were going to school and so forth,
so much of it was memorization. You had to memorize,
you know, whether it was chemical formulas if you're saying chemistry,
or the capitals of the states, or the presidents or
whatever it was. We don't memorize anything anymore. We just
(12:42):
have to ask for the information. We have offloaded whole
parts of our intellectual process to machines, the biggest one
being are detailed memory. We no longer require one. We
simply ask and are given the information, and we hope
that the information and is accurate that is given to us.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
The beginning of artificial intelligence, I think, occurred at electronic
cash machines cash registers, where young people no longer have
to do mathematics in their head. They let the machine
do it.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Absolutely yes. And it's interesting because I used to be
really good at mental math, and now I'm going to
have a practice of it because there's not much call
in my day to day life to work out, you know,
the percentage of a tip, or to add up a
series of numbers. And when I do it, and now
in my head, I actually double check it, and I
(13:38):
never used to it. I used to have confidence in
my basic, innate mathematical abilities that most human beings who
were you know, born in the let's say, pre internet
era had, And now we're saying I better just double
check that because I'm not in practice for what used
to be a fundamental basic human.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Skill without a calculator, without something like that, that kind
of device, how many young people today can do adding
and subtracting and division in their heads exactly.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
I mean, you know, I'm old enough, as I say
in an earlier segment here, I'm sixty four years old.
Now I'm old enough to remember when pocket calculators there
was the debate. It was when I was in grade
seven was when the debate was, well, well, we let
the students bring a calculator into math class.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Texas Instruments, Texas.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
I had the Texas Instrument thirty five, the TI thirty
five exactly, with not an LCD screen but an LED screen,
the red glowing digits, and it took a nine volt battery,
but a wonderful machine. And ultimately where I was in Toronto, Canada,
the jurisdiction after jurisdiction came to the same conclusion that yeah,
students should be able to use calculators, because there was
(14:55):
no conceivable reality when those devices would not be available
to them. And the people who say, yeah, well what
happens when you know they run out of batteries, and
of course Texas Instruments and Cassio responded, will make them
solar powered, and you can buy a solar powered calculator,
which means it'll run forever for five bucks at Staples
or any other office supply store.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
That's so true, Robert Sawyer with us, We're going to
take your calls next hour about science fiction, about artificial intelligence.
Jump on bout just how far can you think, Robert,
artificial intelligence will go. I mean, it's diagnosing diseases, it's
helping doctors. Like you say, it could be a writer
(15:37):
one day, it could be a talk show host.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Well, I fear for us both, George, I have to
say that. You know, we were talking about the fact
that Brendan Fraser narrates the audio version by the downloaded.
But right now I just saw an article from Bloomberg
that forty thousand audiobooks are available now on Audible that
are narrated by AI that aren't hited by so actors,
(16:01):
you sere losing their jobs. They're the first to go.
And I think what we need is solidarity talk show hosts, writers, actors,
visual artists. As a theatrical artists, you know, stage play artists,
all of us have to stick together and remind the
audience that art is supposed to be a human exercise,
not something that's machine generated.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
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