Physicist Michio Kaku: Science is the Engine of Prosperity!

we're here today with a person who hardly should need any introduction dr. michio kaku dr. Kaku thank you very much for having us as your guests today well not to be a new show fantastic so let's just jump in dr. Kaku I want to begin our question today with with this you're a world-famous physicist who traditionally looks very far away outwards so what is it that make you shift your gaze in the exact opposite direction and look inwards into the future of the mind well if you were to summarize the two greatest unsolved problems in all of science they would be first in outer space that is the creation of the universe what happened before the Big Bang why was there a bang what set off the Big Bang and then the second big question would be from inner space what is the origin of intelligence and consciousness and as a physicist I realized that on one hand I make my living working on the first question that's my day job I work on string theory but I've often been puzzled by exactly how the mind works and physicists have asked this question for decades for example in quantum theory we have a question of the observer and the observed but an observer requires consciousness and we have Nobel Prize winners Nobel laureates like Eugene Wigner Steve Weinberg who differ on the fundamental question of consciousness and so this has been really at the center of debate but we have this black hole and that is whenever you talk about consciousness you get a lot of nice sounding words but almost no content now so what in that cut well tell us perhaps the background story of how that interest arose in it and why was it so important for you well I'm a scientist and when we try to look at something we try to quantify it we try to rank it in terms of levels given numerical male but when you look at consciousness you realize that there over 20,000 papers written on it by theologians and ministers and psychologists never in the history of science have so many devoted so much to produce so little install being a physicist I say well how would a physicist approach a solar system an atom first we describe the electron in space that's the first thing we do try to understand planets and motions in terms of space then we try to understand their relationship to other electrons other planets stars for example creating solar systems and then stage three we go forward in time and we make predictions about the future behavior of planets going around stars and so when you play the same methodology to consciousness you realize that there really are three stages of consciousness consciousness that understands our position in space consciousness which understands our position with respect to other people emotions social hierarchy politeness etiquette and third predicting the future and so I say that there are three levels of consciousness now I give a definition of consciousness something which eludes some of the greatest philosophical works I think I read a number of treatise on consciousness and they never define it I give a definition in one sentence and that is consciousness is the process of creating multiple feedback loops to create a model of yourself in space with regards to others and in time in order to satisfy certain goals alligators for example would be at stage one at level one they understand their position in space with regards to prey the back of our brain for example is the most ancient part of our brain the reptilian brain we not Wade the back of the brain damage Allah the cerebellum balance for example in a car accident you would sustain injury here your sense of balance is thrown now territoriality hunger then the center part of the brain developed when you're an adolescent that's the monkey brain the brain of social hierarchies that's when children have to learn politeness that's when they have to learn social etiquette and this the hierarchy and control their emotions and then the last part of the brain to develop is the front the prefrontal cortex and that is the thinking brain and that differentiates us from the animals animals have level wind consciousness they understand their position in space monkeys have level 2 that is the innocent their relationship to other monkeys but only humans have level 3 consciousness which is understanding tomorrow the future we daydream we scheme we plan animals don't do that it's all instinctual for animals and then the scientist says well the scale is very nice but what is your unit your unit of consciousness my one unit of consciousness is a thermostat one feedback loop that allows you to monitor the temperature in a room because it senses its position with regards to temperature a flower may have ten or so because it has to monitor temperature humidity water sunlight so on and so forth and then by the time you hit a reptile maybe a hundred different kinds of feedback loops but the time you go to a mouse perhaps thousands of feedback loops and then we as humans were the only ones who see tomorrow if you have a pet like a dog or a cat you can teach them any tricks except understanding tomorrow so then where would you put numerically our consciousness and how exactly do you get to that number because you're talking about measuring consciousness in you mentioned those twenty thousand papers most of the or many of them say you cannot really measure consciousness you cannot even identify some of them say the brain structure that it is so it's associated with arguably what what you want to say about that I think we can rank up the scale and measure the consciousness of anything even robots even extraterrestrial intelligence animals dogs cats and pets on the number of feedback loops for example a thermostat would have one unit a flower would have ten units I think of a crocodile frog Crockett has multiple feedback loop because it has to understand its position in space and then its prey understand the behavior the prey and by the time you go to monkeys it's even much larger monkeys have to understand emotions they have to read body language they have to understand their position in a social hierarchy coalition's who's your friend who's your enemy things that are very very complex are involved in monkeys by the time you reach a human the total number of feedback loops involved in predicting the future is enormous yeah I understand that but my concern here is that we kept kind of a relative scale so human relative to a monkey monkey relative to alligator alligator relative to a flower right but do we get an absolute measurement because I mean isn't that what science is all about to have a mathematically precise exact number in the end of the day right so in other words I would give a test to a human to rank their level of consciousness it's not an IQ exam that's the first thing you think of an IQ exam but when you follow people with high IQs over 20-30 years you find a lot of marginal people petty criminals people on the margins of society IQ tests do not strongly correlate with success in life however there is one carrier knows however when you look at a criminal you realize that safecrackers even though they may have low IQs because they flunked grade school they may understand the future of a bank robbery much better than the police they can outwit the police because they can dream up scenarios more realistically than the police can so here's my quote IQ test and that is to put people in strange environments and have them calculate realistic scenarios now the Air Force understood this long time ago the Air Force gave IQ exams and found that they were not very useful for understanding how good pilots are in war they gave another test let's say you're stranded behind enemy lines calculate the total number of escape plans and you can devise and we found that people who have quote low IQs were very good at seeing the future and people with high IQs and I necessarily see many escape plans like the others and I'm saying the number of realistic scenarios you can compute for a given situation being stranded on an island of being stranded behind enemy lines robbing a bank that correlates to me much better with our level of consciousness than an IQ exam and again all of this is measurable we can put this on a scale including robots and my scale is correct then even robots could be ranked by consciousness I would say that robots are at level one the under standard position in space they have the intelligence of a cockroach as ammo one of the most world's advanced robots I interviewed the the creator of Asimov and he admitted that yeah asthma has insect-like intelligence that's an exact quote from the developer of one of the most advanced robots on the planet Earth now at MIT they're trying to develop some emotional robots that would be the beginning of level 2 and maybe even a little bit of level 3 because robots can predict the future in one dimension they can predict for example air flow on an airplane wing but that's about it we can predict the future in multiple scales throw somebody on a deserted island let them survive put them behind enemy lines all of a sudden you realize how you have to have a full complex of common-sense notions about space time and other people in order to escape behind enemy lines mm-hmm so I want to come back to the topic of robots in a little bit later but for now can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the brain on the one hand and consciousness how does it arise in the brain where exactly and how's that whole process work well historically we had something called dualism where the spirit the soul was different from the body then in the last 50 years we had a little bit of neuroscience we begin to realize that the brain is wetware where that runs software called the mind so we begin a unified theory so that the mind is software running on the wetware of the brain but now we have the next level of evolution and that is the connectome president barack obama and the european union when a dump a billion dollars to create the can a map of all the neural circuitry of the human mind so one day we'll have two disks we'll have a genome and a connectome one which has a map of the genes of our body and the other one all the neural pathways of their mind which contains emotions memories sensations and in some sense we're going back hundreds of years into the past we are now separating the body from the mind by having the genome and the connectome and realize that when you die in some sense the connectome and the genome live on and of course is this does that mean that you are immortal well to paraphrase Bill Clinton it depends on how you define you if you are nothing but what we're running software then when you die hey that's it sorry about that folks you're gone but if your connect home in your genome survived in some sense a part of you live forever mhm I'd like to stay away from the kings nests definitions on my show generally speaking but they're very funny I admit now so tell us a little bit more about what your take is on for example the camera of penrose theory of quantum consciousness because there are many ideas about what consciousness is how it arises where one of them is actually a colleague of yours dr. Sir Roger Penrose very famous physicist together with dr. Stuart Hameroff whom I previously interviewed on this show so their theory is kind of very controversial and ostracized generally in the field in fact during my global future 2045 conference I was kind of surprised to see Ray Kurzweil who is generally very sort of even person kind of come up very strongly against the theory and saying we know that's wrong straight out so what do you think and what do you make of that model well Penrose of course is a very well-known well-established physicist at Oxford University I think he's onto something but perhaps there's less than meets the eye first of all the question is is a computer deterministic that is once you push the button the is known perfectly the answers yes a computer is nothing but a bunch of transistors you push the on button and you get an output then the question is is the human brain deterministic are we program or do we have free will exactly and that goes to the whole question of philosophy religion are you responsible if you are a mass murderer why do we put people in jail why do we punish people our entire society rests on the question of free will if we are a bunch of transistors then there is no free will so in some sense I disagree with the hardcore determinist who say that we are nothing but a bunch of transistors masquerading as neurons that is totally deterministic that one day we can model with a machine I think that we do have some a degree of freewill however the freewill is different from the free will of Penrose and and other individuals that are written about the subject for example if I have a motion picture of a Hollywood movie everything is deterministic I know the beginning I know the end people in the movie could say I have freewill I am the master of my destiny but we know we hit the play button and the play button means that everything is scripted meaning that this conversation is scripted yes that means that the outcome of this conversation is also scripted I don't believe in that for several reasons first of all there is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle yeah if I have two earths and create them four and a half billion years ago and then run the play button four and a half billion years later if I have twin earths will they both evolve humans and the answer is probably no not necessarily probably no because of Heisenberg uncertainty principle so quantum mechanics does play a certain role in the human mind now if you take a look at trying to model a neuron realize that neurons are leaky they're messy they're not digital they're not just on and off sometimes they're they leak they have all sort of deficiencies neurons are not totally deterministic and I think that the narrower a neuron is the more leakage you get and these are quantum mechanical effects so I disagree with Penrose into thinking that that's why we cannot build a robot with human-like intelligence I believe that we will one day create robots with near human-like intelligence that are indistinguishable from humans passing the Turing test so I would disagree with my colleague Roger Penrose I believe that we will one day have a robot that can pass the Turing test however I also believe that there are quantum effects otherwise we are totally deterministic in the brain in the brain neurons leak they have quantum mechanical effects that manifest at the ion level because of course you have the transport of ions across neurons that that enable it to fire these are small effects so for the most part the brain looks deterministic but I think ultimately there is free will ultimately we are masters of our destiny you know there's so many fascinating things that you said there that I'm going to start grabbing one one by one a few of them but first of all let's let's stay with freewill for a second because I'm philosopher and that's very important topic to me right but also I want to push you a little bit more because some of the most famous physicists in the history of physics from Newton join Stein work hardcore determinists right and you kind of break away seriously with that tradition and you're saying that we do have freewill how do you feel about that staying against names like Newton and Einstein well first of all the universe is not deterministic because I had to say Newton Einstein we're wrong on this question we have quantum mechanics which is the most successful theory of all it's successful to one part in ten billion making it the single most successful theory of all time however it is based on uncertainty meaning that things cannot be totally deterministic so this conversation the end of this conversation cannot be totally determined we are not actors acting in a film that is already made and is being shown in a Hollywood movie theater by simply hitting the play button that's not the way reality works and so I think there are quantum effects however I don't think they're huge some people think that because the quantum effects we have free will just like the ancients imagined I don't think so I think to a large degree you can the future behavior of the brain and when some criminal says it's not my fault my brain made me do it I say that well in some sense yes in some sense criminals are blameless I still think we should put them in jail and throw away the key for some of them because they're dangerous people I think there are dangerous people that should be locked up perhaps for the rest of their life but is it their fault no because in some sense their brain is largely deterministic and it means that they it's true their brain made me do it their brain is defective for example you can brain scan people who are serial murderers and pathological killers some of them you can see that their nucleus accumbens their pleasure center lights up when they see images of people being tortured they love the idea of torturing other people but does that mean you put them in jail only if they commit a crime once you once they commit a crime you put them in jail are they at fault no I don't think so because the word fault is a human word that has no scientific justification blame fault these are words that humans have used to describe other people's behavior they don't like even when they're quote not at fault because their brain may then do it mm-hmm you know that that's very fascinating and that kind of connects with my next question on the brain here which is in two parts the first part is do you think that the brain is properly a classical computer than in that sense no it's not a it's not a Turing machine Turing machine you have inputs outputs and a program that massages the inputs however the brain has no windows the brain has no software it has no programming it is no CPU is no Pentium chip it has no subroutines the brain doesn't have any of the standard characteristics of a Turing machine or a digital computer the brain is a very sophisticated neural network it is a learning machine it rewires the resistance of all its connections upon learning any task and that's why for the last 50 years I think we were we were on a wild goose chase trying to create a digital computer that can mimic the human brain the human brain is a learning machine it's quite different from a digital computer and and the next step there is brought to us by the research of dr. Norman Deutsch from the University of Toronto and in a book called the brain that changes itself dr. George speaks about what he calls neuroplasticity and about the fact that in his view the brain is not a machine at all and it has to be understood on its own terms because if you accept the idea of a brain the brain as a machine of any kind then that leads to what he calls neurological fatalism which is not able to explain how the brain is actually able to grow and heal itself and then he talks about the sort of the feedback loop between the thoughts that can actually change your brain and also of course the brain changing your thoughts well I think the brain is a machine it's a biological machine very sophisticated and we have not yet been able to even mimic a fraction of the capabilities of the brain but I think the brain is a machine now whether it had plasticity oh yeah it can rewire itself neural networks I change themselves all the time the question is does it have a soul that's an additional question okay a biological machine may have a soul and being a physicist I say that all theories have to be tested had they have to be reproducible and falsifiable so if people believe in soul then we have to measure it and people have tried when people died scientists are trying to measure whether or not the weight of a body changes when you die and we find no visible change so at a certain point the idea of a soul is that in some sense untestable not reproducible not falsifiable not necessarily wrong it just means it's outside the boundaries of science and so of course the brain is a biological machine it's a machine that rewires itself it's a machine that is not a Turing machine the brain is not a standard charge machine the brain has no programming where's the programming where's the windows where's the operating system up there there is no because it does one thing much better than any turning machine and that is it learns by rewiring itself so the brain is a biological machine the question is does it have a soul and my answer is I don't know I'm a physicist I only work with things that are testable falsifiable and reproducible and until someone can give me an experiment that allows me to test and reproduce and falsify a theory of soul I'll say that the jury is out yeah I remember when I was undergrad in philosophy we had this joke because Aristotle I think coined the term psychology which directly translated I think means study of the soul or the science of the soul and therefore the paradox is that it's a science of something that scientifically we cannot prove exists so that was the job from us philosopher to those of our colleagues who are studying psychology the main thing is it has to be testable falsifiable and reproducible look at 40 in psychology for example for many many decades scientists laughed at 40 in psychology as being nothing but all these highfalutin words that mean nothing however now with brain scans looking at blood flow in the brain you can actually see that most of the brains activity is unconscious there is an unconscious mind and the ego the super-ego the libido that Freud talked about there it is the ego our sense of self is right behind our forehead our libido our pleasure Center is a nucleus accumbens located dead center in the brain and the super-ego our conscience is the orbital frontal cortex located right behind our eyeballs you can actually now test aspects of Freudian psychology because of physics physics has revolutionized everything in the last ten years we've learned more about the mind and the brain did and all of human history combined and what was the master stroke that made it all possible physics physics and computers yeah that kind of leads me to the next kind of half joke half serious question about whether at the bottom event everything fundamentally we find mathematics or physics or God or something else what's the underlying underpinning reality of everything physics that's why I became a physicist so the mathematicians are wrong therefore well not necessarily because to describe physics you have to describe physics in the language of mathematics we just realized that physicists in general try to go to the core of what makes things work for example back in the 1950s it was physicists who said or been short injure for example that there has to be a molecule that encodes life and then Francis Crick another physicist and listed a biology a biologist James Watson to actually find the molecule and it's called DNA and then another theoretical physicists Walter Gilbert at Harvard then began the process of reading this whole process all of them on the Nobel Prize all of them were physicists and they founded a huge branch of biology and it was because of physics quantum physics that made it possible yeah but you know what I totally agree with you but here's a funny story that happened to me two hours before I came here on the way I get into the taxi cab and the driver asks me where to and I give him the address and he's asking me very nicely where what are you doing there who are you going to see United Oh him I'm going to see dr. michio kaku so he asked me okay who is dr. Kaku and I tell him well he is one of the founders of string theory string field theory and then he has to be what is this I say well this has to do with sort of the beginning of the universe the Big Bang Theory the multiverses etc and to get to that his response was like some people are crazy so how do you feel about that kind of attitude which seems to be kind of surprisingly prevalent in a large part of our population today in a 21st century advanced world like well and I think New York I think he's right there are crazy people out there because the universe is crazy if form and content if appearance and essence were the same thing there'd be no necessity for science the whole purpose of science is to see the difference between appearance and essence in other words the universe is crazy in fact it is crazier than we can even imagine who would have thought we would have quantum mechanics who would have thought we could have dead cats and live cats existing simultaneously who would have thought that you could be in many places at the same time that's called craziness it's also called modern physics and I love it by the way so what's your biggest dream when we talk about the two most important or kind of Moore's most complicated and interesting things in the universe one being the brain the other the universe itself what's your biggest dream what's your biggest goal what's the thing that's pushing you do your work every day well Einstein once said that when he wakes up in the morning the first thing he does is he tries to create a universe that is if you are God what ingredients would you require to create a universe when you want a universe of space or time or electrons or atoms how would you create a universe and believe it or not when we string theories wake up in the morning that's more or less what we do we want to know gee did quote God have a choice is there only one universe that satisfies all the postulates are there many universes that do this and what ingredients do you want in a universe for example I work on string theory which is a theory defined in ten dimensions but now we realize there's an 11th dimension lurking out there there perhaps our membranes that coexists with strings and we're clueless clueless as to write the fundamental equations of what is called m-theory and so when I wake up in the morning that's what I do I say if I'm God and I can create a universe how would I create it what is the minimum necessary ingredients that I want in a universe because right now everything is up for grabs we don't know what the final equations are of m-theory so does that mean to say let me see if I get this right does it mean to say that you actually want to do one better on e equals mc-squared Oh a lot better we want an equation no more than one is long that would allow us to quote read the mind of God now equals mc-squared unlock the stupidest stars that's why we have sunshine that's why we're here today the energy you see around you came from the Sun because hydrogen turned into energy but Einstein wanted an equation that we must the entire universe the creation of the universe the formation of stars and galaxies and planets maybe even people and love a single formulation that would summarize all of physics now today we can put all the known laws of physics on a sheet of paper believe it or not the standard model plus relativity can be placed on one sheet of paper so we know that the universe is simpler than we thought but it's not enough that sheet of paper only describes 4% of the universe it describes the universe of atoms it does not describe dark matter it does not describe gravity does not describe dark energy which make up 96% of the universe for that you need string theory but here's my concern at this as a philosopher my concern is this if you're able to create that one inch equation that explains everything including love as you said then in my opinion that would mean the end of free will isn't it no if you are watching a chess game and you gradually you don't you don't know how chess is played but you gradually figure out how the pawns move and so on and so forth and eventually you figure out the laws of chess does that make you a grandmaster the answer is no just because you know the laws of chests does not mean you become a grandmaster at chess and that's where we are going we already have a theory of almost everything a theory of 4% we have that theory or percent is far from everything but string theory would give us perhaps a theory of 100 percent dark matter for example will be nothing but the next set of high vibrations are the string we are the lowest vibrations of a tiny rubberband that's vibrating but the rubber band has higher vibrations including dark matter and so the subatomic particles including dark matter are nothing but musical notes on string physics is nothing but the harmonies you can write on vibrating strings chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on strings the universe is a symphony of strings and the mind of God that Albert Einstein wrote about for the last thirty years of his life the mind of God is cosmic music resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace and that's very beautifully musically set but then I Stine also said that God will not play dice with universe well I'm sorry I'll be wrong with that one yeah right so we have to take everything with a grain of salt I think even if it comes from Einstein but let us zoom back on a smaller project than the universe and which is your most recent book which is the future of the mind the scientific quest to understand enhance and empower the mind so dr. Kaku would you be so kind to tell us the future of the mind please well we are going to be able to do things that are in science fiction telepathy reading minds telekinesis moving objects with the mind recording memories uploading memories like in the matrix and even photographing dreams like in the movie Inception in fact we can do all of the above already on a primitive level we can photograph dreams now we can actually photograph thoughts inside the mind we can transfer these spots from brain to brain these are things that are done in the laboratory today for example recording a memory in mice you can actually record the impulses across the hippocampus which is the gateway to memory of the brain insert it back into the mouse's brain after it forgot that memory and it remembers we can record memories now and so the future of the internet will be brain net that is will send emotions and feelings across the Internet that's the future of the movies instead of looking at a flat screen with sound we'll have full immersion entertainment will feel will have the memories will have the sensations and emotions of the actors and actresses in a film and I also think that's the future of the human race when we get into science fiction now everything up to now we can do in the laboratory but we'll begin to science fiction realize that once we have the connectome we could put that on a laser beam and shoot that laser beam into outer space at the speed of light to go to the moon would require one second to go to the moon by firing the Kinect onto the moon where there's a relay station that then downloads the connectome into an avatar and there you are as a superhuman perhaps yeah you are now a superhuman robot walking on the surface of the Moon with all the memories and sensations of a human this is the most economical the safest and the most efficient way to explore the galaxy at the speed of light light beams encoding the connectome of our consciousness exploring the universe and who knows maybe aliens and outer space have already done this we are only maybe a hundred 200 years away from this capability of creating a network of consciousness throughout the galaxy I mean to what our local sector and then of course out to the entire galaxy maybe aliens have already done it maybe they already explored the universe at the speed of light forget flying saucers and forget landing on the White House lawn with that with a alien device light beams that could be the way to explore the universe and that's fascinating especially if we can free right on those relay stations that the aliens hope we have already established but if there weren't no such relay stations then how do we establish them because let's say some star is like five thousand light-years away we need to have that relay station to accept the signal and reproduce your re-upload you into an avatar body so how do we create it there in the first place well these this way is the first generation the first generation has to actually physically go to Alpha Centauri space set up a relay station right however there is a way that I didn't mention in the book that's more speculative if light can be slowed down we can slow down light in the laboratory that means a light beam may be able to go to a distance star slow down and then materialized on a moon and then use the materials of the moon to create a machine that can then download other light beams into the future that of course is pushing the limits of what we can do with optics but we can't slow down light beams in which case we might be able to materialize on a planet without having to even have a relay station at all mm-hmm dr. Kaku you talk a lot about what we already are able to do in the labs today with the human mind and some of the future potential future technologies coming down the pipe let me ask you this very personal question would you consider yourself enhancing your own brain in one way or another well if you were available hopefully you'd be available for everyone because prices go down because of Moore's law and mass production and so on and so forth then why not why not be able to master aspects of let's say mathematics that I don't have time for there are whole branches of science that cannot be assimilated by one person so why not have a data bank just like we have CDs of different kinds of music and things why not have a databank of memories in fact why not have a library of souls so when you go to the library instead of simply taking a textbook out why don't you take out the CD of your ancestors why not have a conversation with Winston Churchill or Albert Einstein because their thoughts memories are encoded on a disk that you can simply take up from a library this could be possible one day you'll be able to chat with your ancestors so it seemed that you're not only open to enhancing your own brain as it is in the physical in the physical substance of it but you're also open to uploading your consciousness into a computer um why not and again I don't think this is going to be possible for many decades to come perhaps later in this century we'll have a very good connect home but at the present time we can barely get the connective of a mouse okay let alone a human being let's talk a little bit about that though because of course you have all kinds of people and experts for example on my show I have interview doctor around kuna who told me that mind uploading is not science fiction anymore and he he doesn't think it's impossible that we might have this technology in a couple of decades even google recently made news by hiring dr. Ray Kurzweil who wrote a book how to build a mind so and now of course dr. Henry Markram in Europe got a hundred million dollars for ten years or really was the billion dollars right from the European Union so apparently people are putting a lot of money and effort and good reputations are put on the line so perhaps that timeline especially when you back it up with Moore's law in our ability to store more and more data on a smaller and smaller devices wouldn't that kind of speed things up perhaps um not necessarily first of all with blue genie one of our most advanced computer is located at the weapons laboratory in Livermore California we can simulate a mouse brain for about a minute or so and a mouse brain is about 1% 1% of the neural activity of a human brain so we have a long ways to go before we can model a human brain and that's just modeling the the frontal cortex and the the other parts of the motor cortex not the complete brain at all and we can only do that for about a minute or so and so we have a long ways to go before we can model the entire brain and remember that just because we have the human genome does not mean that we can create imaginary life forms out of out of nothing like like like in the gods we cannot create Pegasus we cannot create flying pigs even if we have the genome of pigs and the genome of cattle and horses so having the connectome is not enough it may take many more decades to understand how the connectome is is put together now the people who work with the blue gene computer in Lemoore National Laboratory say that a Blue Gene computer that can mimic the brain will be the size of a city block one city block the energy necessary to fire it up will be about a trillion watts the output of a nuclear power plant and it would take a river a river to cool it down now our brain operates at 20 watts so in other words when someone calls you a dim bulb that's a compliment it's a compliment 20 watts can do more than one city blog care about weary of blue-jean computers energized by a nuclear power blast so you see that we have a long ways to go before we can map the connectome and then understand how to connect on fist together yeah but with let me question that math again a little bit sure because that's the math with today's technology but in 30 years from now that like size factor would shrink exponentially I mean Ray Kurzweil often talks about how when he was a student in MIT computer to computing now because you know today you often give the example it in our cell phones today we have more computing power than NASA ket when they land it on the moon that's right right so wouldn't that shrink again substantially we're talking about 20 to 30 or so that one block computer would probably fit on a desk well there are problems first of all Moore's law is slowing down now is it that is another point you can talk to any physicist who works in the field I've talked to physicists at IBM in Zurich Switzerland and they say yeah they can see it now it's slowing down and the reason is obvious you're eventually going to bump up against the fact that silicon is incapable of sustaining these calculations at the molecular level your laptop computer today may have a layer about 20 items across that's not the limit of what we can do with computers today but 20 atoms in 10 15 years it'll be down to 5 atoms at that point it leaks the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes in heat generated and lost through leakage is enough to kill you and that's the reason why we have to go beyond silicon the silicon era is coming to a close just like the test-tube Europe came to a close in the 50s we're coming to a close on the age of silicon silicon valley could become a Rust Belt the next generation of computers maybe molecular computers quantum computers atomic computers DNA computers protein computers in quantum dot computers photons or three dimensional photonic computers none of them are ready for primetime for example molecular computers is perhaps the best bed but we don't know how to mass-produce so we don't know how to wire them I mean their molecules after all all right quantum computers are even worse if someone were to sneeze hundreds of feet away that sneeze will be enough to vibrate the atoms so they're no longer in synchronization and you lose coherence decoherence is the major problem for quantum computers that's why the NSA that's what the US government has basically said that it's not realistic at the present time to build quantum computers and yet I have interviewed dr. George eros from D wave who has sold quantum computers to Google - I think University of California maybe was it McDonnell Douglas so I think they've sold three of those so far well I'll have to look at the equations in the blueprints but I have my doubts I think that what they have is not what they claim to have what they have does not live up to the hype and the propaganda because of the decoherence problem the world's record for a quantum computer calculation is 3 times 5 is 15 IBM set that world's record now that doesn't sound like much but go home tonight is a homework problem take five atoms five atoms and multiply three times five is fifteen and now you begin to realize how hard it is to build a quantum computer I really doubt they have done that well we had a two and a half hours interview with dr. George eros where we addressed every single point of that which was submitted except the main point decoherence that's the killer question we physicists we need to we need vats of liquid helium to even get five atoms to resonate correctly and someone's going to sell this commercially and again I have not seen the blueprints I have not seen the equations but I have my doubts and I respect that very much and I don't know much about quantum physics so I'm not an expert in physics and I tell you it's a but then the question to me as an observer would be why would companies like Google like the University of California or mcdonnell-douglas I can't remember if it's McDonnell Douglas or one of the other airplane makers but anyway by those machines if they don't do what they say they do because there are thirty twenty thirty million dollars apiece well I trust the NSA because of course documents from the NSA are being released by and that mr. Snowden recently he released another set of documents about quantum computers and yes the CIA the NSA they've all been interested in quantum computers and they all came to the same conclusions nope not not in the coming decades I trust the the evaluation the CIA and the NSA more than a purchase agent at Google and yet I am a little skeptical myself on NSA and its trust work trustworthiness and I think we do have history of much were they just can't keep takes the NSA is very trustworthy it just can't keep their secrets secret that's all and they want to go into our own but that's it and again I have not seen the equations I'm not seeing the blueprints yes but when I do see them I would suspect that I will find a flaw in that one characteristic which is the killer decoherence mm-hmm that is these atoms basically fall out of phase someone sneezing a mile away can disturb your coherence and it goes out the window mm-hmm that's why we don't have quantum computers today why doesn't the CIA buy these things if Google buys them why doesn't the CIA buy these things if they bought them would we know about it well maybe not but like I said why do we have a gold rush we're talking about Nobel Prizes at stake we're talking would be the next Thomas Edison right yes I don't see that happening yeah okay and in my field quantum physics we laugh at these at these statements mm-hmm well let us let us go back to the brain and let me ask you this so what is in your opinion the biggest misconception about the human brain that kind of works you maybe a little bit anyway make sure you go just like what you just said about quantum physics and the fact that they're not those computers are not likely to exist right now what's the biggest misconception about the brain well you know back in the 1950s the CIA and the government was very worried about brainwashing and during the Korean War we saw American GIs denounce the United States so we thought that the Communists came up with a new way of manipulating the brain drugs and hypnosis and power of suggestion and all sorts of cockamamie ideas were tried by the CIA and it came out as a program called MKULTRA a multi-million dollar program enlisting physicists chemists psychics anybody who claimed to be able to locate Soviet subs anyone who claimed to be able to understand what's happening in the minds of Gustav and other people we're listed by the CIA I've seen some of these documents out of all this what came out of it nothing absolutely nothing mind-reading trying to understand the inner workings of the mind trying to locate Soviet submarines because there is this misconception this misconception is that maybe the mind by itself has these psychic powers that we can move objects with the mind no penis I don't see any of evidence of this but now in the laboratory that's what we do we hook the mind to an exoskeleton and you can actually move like Iron Man with the natural skeleton with with XO arms and legs more powerful than ordinary arms or legs we can connect the human brain to the Internet we can send impulses across the internet and drive robots on the other side of the earth this has been done from Duke University to Japan have a monkey controlled by the Internet another robot on the other side of the planet Earth so telepathy telekinesis recording memories photographing dreams these are things that are being done in the laboratory today and so the common misconception is the brain has somehow these super powers that can do this wrong but with physics we can now do all of the above the laboratory and that's that's fascinating of course now let me ask you this dough and how is that connecting towards the quest of creating artificial intelligence because there's this debate Ray Curto for example has gone on the record very clearly to state that he believes that sort of reverse engineering the human brain what helped us very much on food is very close to words realizing artificial intelligence it seems that Google is accepting that argument because they've hired him to be their chief engineer there's other people who have criticized ray and have said that you know just like for example we don't imitate the way birds fly we have airplanes which fly in a very different way we do not necessarily need to reverse engineer the human brain to create artificial intelligence and there's evolutionary approaches which seem to be working perhaps the best so far what about do you stand on this about the connection between reverse engineering the brain and artificial intelligence my attitude is all of the above that is we don't have the Royal Road to consciousness now it's not dreams as Sigmund Freud thought there are many approaches and I hate my attitude is let's pursue all of them in fact if you take a look at the split between the European Union and President Barack Obama you realize that there are two different paradigms being pursued the Europeans are trying to create a computer model a model with blue gene for example brain simulation right so using the repetition of modules in a computer program to simulate the prefrontal cortex and the occipital load and the parietal lobe that's what they're trying to do in Switzerland while in the United States it's more a question of pathways neural pathways of the brain so we're here we have two separate approaches my attitude is let a thousand flowers bloom because we don't know which one is going to eventually pan out it's why I think we should do both and the short term goal by the way is very realistic and I think it's very powerful and that is to cure mental illness as a professor Markham said we're clueless about mental illness even though the financial damage that the mental illness creates is many many times his own budget and almost no research is being done on the wiring of the brain itself we now realize for example the schizophrenia when they hear voices schizophrenics is because the left temporal lobe does not communicate with the prefrontal cortex therefore you hear voices without your permission so a miss wiring of the brain creates classic madness madness is when you hear voices without your permission we now know it bad this is a miss wiring of the brain and so why not understand the complete wiring of the brain I think that's a very realistic short-term goal you know I totally think it's it's worthy but I was shocked when I interviewed dr. Marvin Minsky who is by many accounts the father of artificial intelligence and he told me that he thinks that that's a complete waste of time what money we should've up both of them both the the human brain project in Europe and the American project because in his view they lacked the theory of mind and in fact not only that look he went one further he said that it may be so bad that to lead to what he call a nuclear winter in the field of artificial intelligence because you see in his view that's going to be a lot of money wasted basically and then people would naturally turn away and back from it and would not be willing to spend and invest again in the field well I think this nuclear winter thing has been taken very seriously because unfortunately artificial intelligence has gone to a lot of fads and fancies we're in the third one right now the first one was in the 50s but we had chess playing machines everyone thought that ah we can play chess now with computers therefore we have robots in our house very very soon that went to a nuclear winter in the 60s and 70s and then in the 80s we talked about smart cars and we talked about the military spending billions of dollars on a smart soldier that all went when it could put in the 1990s and now we're in the third one because we have Moore's law because we have all these chips and gadgets and stuff like that we're in the third phase and the question is is there going to be another bust well it could happen so I understand where professor Minsky is coming from there's been two busts before two of them and the question is are we now on the third one I don't think so and I think that perhaps we've learned something and we now have a new way of looking at things through the lens of the the brain initiative take a look for example at a biotechnology in the 80s there was a huge boom billions of dollars was spent by Wall Street entrepreneurs in biotechnology of the 80s what came out of that a few drugs but not much because we didn't have the Human Genome Project now we have the Human Genome Project now we know what we're doing when we do biotechnology but in the 80s that boom was premature it really was premature billions were wasted and now however if we have the connectome I think it'll be like the genome we all know what we are doing when we undergo this process but the funny thing is that norm Chomsky kind of very much agreed with with Marvin Minsky and kind of almost for even the same reasons in a way and the thing is that the lack of that sort of unifying theory of mind which would contextualize and allow us to interpret which would be the starting hypothesis if you will where we make sense of the data that we gather during that well you see that's why I came up with my theory of consciousness as a first step toward getting a more unified comprehensive theory of mine that's why I can rank robots I can rank extraterrestrial intelligence because it's a theory of consciousness when one day when we meet extraterrestrials we find out their quotes smarter than us what does that mean to be smarter than us it means they see the future better it means they can model future scenarios with more complexity with more realism than we can and why don't we have robots precisely for that reason they cannot construct realistic models of what's around them for example what are the big stumbling blocks of robots is common sense we know that water is wet we know that when you die you don't come back the next day we know that mothers are older than their daughters we know that when you pull on a string you can pull but you cannot push on a string we also know that sticks can push but sticks cannot pull now let me ask you a question how did you know that how did you know that water is wet that mothers are old in their daughters because of experience but that's what robots don't have and so common sense is a huge deficit in the area of artificial intelligence but how does that then correlate with my theory of consciousness because to predict the future what do you have to know common sense if you want to predict the future of mothers you have to know that they're older than their children which is not obvious it's not obvious that parents have to be older than their children right and so what I'm saying is something simple the deficits of artificial intelligence are precisely can be mapped into my theory of consciousness and that's why we don't have robots that can simulate the human brain robots are a level one we are at level three yeah and speaking of ranking the other bomb that dr. Minsky through during that interview with me was that in his view the Turing test was a joke so is that right that's what he said that's a director also could you elaborate well I mean I did the interview what maybe a year and a half ago but basically I think his argument was that it was not really intended to be a proper test from the get-go but secondly doesn't take into account so many things that it probably should like well you're putting me on the spot here for to answer for dr. Minsky's well let me tell you this that Turing did not come up with the Turing test as a scientific barometer as I said more or less by the way yeah he made a prediction that by the year 2000 so-and-so will have certain capabilities yeah and so it was not meant to be a scientific criteria because what do you mean by human intelligence how do you define human intelligence other than saying is the intelligence of a human which is circular right and so Tory being a scientist did not mention the Turing test as a quantifiable rigorous statement right what I'm saying is I am trying to do this I am trying to give a numerical scale a number you can associate or a collection of numbers you can associate with different levels of intelligence so perhaps dr. Minsky will be much more inclined to embrace yours well who knows is the first step I think in that direction trying to quantify intelligence and consciousness rather than waxing eloquent and citing poetry absolutely okay so the next step up from artificial intelligence or perhaps the next sort of macro issue would be the one relating to the technological singularity would you mind telling us what's your take on the technological singularity well again it's like what Clinton says it depends how you define technological singularity some people say it's when robots become smarter than humans other people say is when robots reproduce themselves to create ever-increasing generations of smart robots other people say is when you can upload a human mind into a computer and so the question is which singularity you're talking about well in your opinion what's the proper definition of the singularity well if you take a look at where the words thinking a really comes from first of all it comes from physics because we have singularities otherwise known as black holes and ethics and also john von neumann one of the founders of artificial intelligence with remarking to another scientist rule arise that yes senator Willem one of the fathers are the hydrogen bomb about a coming exponential coming exponential rise in computer power but they didn't specifically say exactly what that was so I think we should take each of them separately okay first what do we can upload our mind into a computer and I think the answer is yes we'll be able to do it again perhaps later in this century I don't think we're going to do it anytime soon because we always underestimate the complexity of the brain and we will have to have these theological philosophical debates about consciousness so who are we we can upload ourselves but it's giving a process it's not going to happen all at once no one's good when now no one's announced that on 2050 and March first we've uploaded the human mind into a computer I think it's going to be a process we will asymptotically get closer and closer and closer and then it'll probably be silicon consciousness it won't quite be our consciousness it'll be a silicon consciousness that we can upload into a computer but I think yeah it's coming for example 2045 I'm not going to give any days because of course I could be wrong for example I could take a look at your credit card records if I get all your credit card and online records I will know the champagne that you like if you buy champagne I won't know what kind of movies you go to I will have a very good understanding of your buying habits and so what in one-dimension I know quote who you are much better than a biographer who may not know what kind of champagne you like or what kind of movies you like okay and so I think as time goes by more and more of our life will be online including our personality quirks our experiences and so just on the Internet forget artificial intelligence just by looking at the internet you'll get a fairly good approximation of your personality and then I think by interviewing your friends and relatives and putting them on a scale they'll know on a scale of one to ten whether you're quick to anger whether you have very sociable whether you make friends easily or not and then get a series of numbers a series of numbers on a scale of one to ten in each category how you would react to certain situations and then I would put all this information into a robot and then put it into a strange situation you at a party with all these unknown people somebody challenging you at a lecture and the robot will give a very good approximation to who you are so even without having advanced science and technology I think we can already get a pretty good understanding of who you are because of your buying habits your online characteristics load that into a computer along with interviews with your friends and relatives and have a robot give a very good approximation to who you are with today's technology a coalmine file right now extrapolate that into the coming decades then you begin to realize we're going to get asymptotically closer and closer and closer to you as an individual is it really you well it's not you as wetware and software of your human body it's not you but it's a very good approximation to the you are so I'm not going to set any dates but I would say by the end of the century we'll get things that are pretty much indistinguishable from the real you it will react to emergencies it'll react to unexpected situations and a very close approximation to the way you would react that would come I think later this century then the question is the other singularity is when machines become smarter than us right now robots have the intelligence of a cockroach they can barely navigate in a room that's level one consciousness understanding space but hey time goes by we'll eventually have robots as smart as a mouse then as smart as a rat than a rabbit then eventually a dog or a cat and finally a monkey at that point they could become dangerous monkeys have a sense of awareness they have their own goals they have their own agenda and we should put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts so I think that even before they become smarter than us we should definitely take safeguards now is it going to happen all at once no this can happen over decades we're going to have decades warning for example Rodney Brooks at MIT puts it this way no one's going to announce that they've suddenly built a Boeing 747 at their garage it's a process it takes time so you cannot simply announce the creation of a 747 in the same way you cannot suddenly announced the creation of a machine as smart as us is it going to happen probably yes what is going to happen we don't know but it's a process it's not going to happen all at once and they can they have then children that are smarter than them well maybe maybe not because at the present time no one is demonstrated then you can have a Turing machine that can create another Turing machine more advanced in the first generation the ones that were demonstrated that yet why no one tried we still don't know where the Turing machines can self-replicate to create other Turing machines more more sophisticated than the original Turing machine that's because humans don't fit the definition of being Turing machines right yeah Technic speaking were not permitting even though Turing machines can of course mimic neural networks we are neural networks I think and we we belong on a different scale that digital computers mm-hmm doctor cackle unfortunately time is advancing so we're going to have to close our interview in the next couple of minutes but let me just give you just one here random question perhaps out of number that I have from my audience and this has to do with cryonics so Christine Gasper is asking please ask dr. Michio Kaku about dr. Moore's challenge to visit him at Alcor you mean freezing the body and living forever in that sense I think there's a danger in that in the sense that you create ice crystals for example if you take a look at a fish or a frog there can be frozen solid of a wintertime and springtime you thought am i there they are they've been frozen solid and yet they can still swim and jump why we know the answer glucose glucose is an antifreeze and because these are these animals create lots of glucose in their blood they're still liquid when the surrounding environment is totally solid you could freeze a fish in solid ice and it still comes out because inside the metabolic processes are slowly taking place we do not have this antifreeze the level of glucose necessary for us to be in suspended animation would kill us and so the very process of freezing you have to worry about ice crystals ice crystals form inside a cell as they grow they rupture the cell wall that is a big problem facing anyone who is going to be put in liquid nitrogen formation of ice crystals look how about this proof of concept right we have the process of vitrification and I think it's been I don't know six or seven years when we had I think it was I can't remember if it was the kidney of a rabbit that was vitrified under this process of the trophic ation stored for two or three months then thought re-implanted or transplanted into a rabbit and the rabbit survived with it for a few months so isn't that a proof of concept that we can perhaps scale up eventually to the human level and eventually to the brain level well I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying that a naive version of it doesn't work the naive version is simply free something and then thought them out and off they go if you if you had tried other kinds of processes like Richard vacation and others that have been suggested you realize that we're only talking about simple organs realize that more complex organs may not survive the process because of all these secondary problems and as a consequence they may not survive to create a human being that can think and act just like they were when they were young so personally I think that if you freeze yourself one possibility to extract DNA from you and so maybe you can clone somebody after they've died because some of their cells have been frozen but as far as bringing back the person especially the person's been decapitated in many of these cryonic advertisers you see that the head has been cut off alright even if your thought-out as a normal person you cut off the head you can't bring them back to life forget freezing even an ordinary person who's has been cut off cannot be cannot spring back to life and so I think that people who believe in this are going off the deep end again that's not to say it can't be done at some point but we don't have the technology there's an alternative Avenue of pursuing that goal with what's called chemical brain preservation dr. ken Hayworth talks about that and it's a whole other potentiality of locking in the brain the neurons as close as they are in reality and then very finely scanning them and sort of creating an app lock but that will take decades in decades we can barely do that with fruit flies in fly brains it takes a whole room full of cd-rom the whole room of CDs just to slice and dice the brain of a fruit fly which is about that big that's a fruit fly a human brain sliced and diced this way would have a KERS years of CDs in order to reproduce all the wirings of the image brain and again I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying that we don't have the technology yeah and we top soon if you agree on that yes so dr. Kaku unfortunately the second last question that I will ask you today would be what's the best place for people to learn more about you and your work well one thing is you can do is you can read the books that I've written on some people ask me well why but write all these books when I was a child I was fascinated by the story of Albert Einstein that he could not finish his greatest work and I said to myself well why couldn't he finish it the greatest scientists of our time right what was the problem so into the library and they found out nothing absolutely nothing about the work of Einstein the unified field theory a lot of articles about his life but what about his theories and nothing about the unified field theory and so I said when I grow up and I become a research theoretical physicist I want to write books that I would have loved to have read as a young kid wondering about these things and that's one reason why I write these books to introduce young people to the very forefront of research if you are packings physicist you know exactly what's possible what is implausible and what is possible most people are clueless as to the boundary line and that's why Hollywood scares the pants off you because people don't know what the boundary line is so I write these books so people know exactly where it is the cutting edge where is the limit of human knowledge and where we get into the realm of the impossible but exactly right because the the that boundary line shifts in time right and exactly Archer Clark says the only way you can find how but if something is possible if is if you venture a little bit beyond the possible into the impossible and that's how that line moves in time right and I found out something fascinating I made a list of all the things that were impossible the things that violate the laws of physics I thought it would be very large but I found out that they're only two that I can think of one is the conservation of matter and energy getting something for nothing and the other one is you know seeing the future other than that watching a Harry Potter movie for example I can imagine at some point in the future we will have the technology that makes Harry Potter possible magic may become a possibility once we have nanotechnology for example and so I began to realize that very few things actually violate the laws of physics and only to that I can think of that are talked about you know something for nothing and seeing the future yeah that's why we live in such a fascinating universe and it's so much fun to be here I think personally because anything is possible in the long run but dr. Kaku we've been talking today for an hour or more and I would like to ask you what in your opinion should be the most important message that our viewers and listeners should take from this conversation with you today well this gets us in a territory that we didn't cover but I think that people have to understand that science is the engine of prosperity everything we see around us the wealth we see around is a byproduct of science take a look at physics alone physicists invented the television the embedded radio radar microwaves games a GPS system transistors the world wide web GPS satellite the space program MRI machines and tests just from physics and so the wealth we see around us comes from science however politicians don't know this politicians are in the main former lawyers and in law everything's a zero-sum game you sue Peter to pay Paul that is the essence of law suing Peter to pay Paul it's a zero-sum game protecting private investments then when politicians when lawyers become politicians they tax Peter to pay Paul the same world outlook cutting the pie thinner and thinner and thinner except now you tax Peter to pay Paul and physicists are the ones who grow the pie I say we want a bigger pie because science is all about creating wealth not rearranging wealth or massaging wealth and then let me tell you a story that's kind of scary I once had lunch with Freeman Dyson I was on sabbatical at Princeton and he told me that when he was a young man in the 30s in Cambridge he saw the decline of the Empire he saw the best minds of Cambridge going into massaging money rather than creating money instead of going into chemicals and utilities and physics and engineering the best minds are going into Investment Banking and massaging other people's money rather than creating wealth and who are the great minds of the 1800's versus the great minds of the 1900s in the 1800's they're all British we're talking about Maxwell we're talking about Faraday the Giants of physics and in the next century who are the Giants plunk Einstein Heisenberg they're all German or Germanic okay he saw the decline of the Empire and then he said in the second time of his life he's seen it again at Princeton he sees the finest young minds not going into physics engineering and chemicals going into Investment Banking whilst massaging other people's money instead of creating wealth managing other people's wealth and he said that's not good for the second time in his lifetime he's seen it happen the decline of an empire now you may say to yourself well what about the Large Hadron Collider we're making inroads into physics right yes but where is it based it should be based in Dallas Texas the super collider was much bigger than this peashooter called the Large Hadron Collider a fraction of the size of the Large Hadron Collider but nope the Vatican of physics is not Dallas Texas the Vatican physics is Geneva Switzerland my colleagues are leaving the United States because that's where the action is and fusion research who's Lee diffusion research the French who will who will attain breakeven with the French for the first reactor that's thermonuclear the French probably at the ITER in the year 2020 watch for announcement in the newspapers that fusion has arrived not in the United States but in France and stem cell technology stem cell technology a lot of it's done overseas because of restrictions on federal funding of stem cell research and the space program we've pretty much thrown that away the manned space program in 2025 expect a chinese astronaut to put a chinese flag on the moon and then people going to say who lost the moon well we never had them one to begin with the point is you pay a price you make decisions you pay a price and one of the decisions is to shortchange science the engine of prosperity now you may say to yourself well we have Silicon Valley right the envy of the world but who are the people in Silicon Valley 50% foreign-born you go right beneath the layer the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs and what do you find young bright and champa nerds from India from China 50% foreign-born in the United States today 50% of PhD physicists are foreign-born 50% at my university CUNY City University New York 100% 100% of our young physicists are foreign-born so why doesn't our scientific establishment collapse because we do have a secret weapon for all the ills I mention the United States has a secret weapon it's called h-1b it is the genius visa if you are a PhD in physics one write to Silicon Valley and here's some startup money to create your own company right there's a brain drain into the United States but it can't last forever I think it's reversing too long fortunately many of them are going back yes and realize that American students as good as they are scored dead last dead last in almost all the scores all the tests in semantics and science we graduate many young people to live in the world of 1950 they can function quite well in the world of 1950 the problem is we don't live in 1950 okay and that's a fundamental problem with our educational program we're generating we're graduating large alumni of college graduates into the unemployment line because even in times today but as unemployment there are plenty of jobs out there plenty of jobs you can simply look at the one as in physics today in other journals there are a lot of jobs out there but they require more education and that's the problem and so again if you read the newspaper is this roaring debate tax the rich text before eat the rich eat the poor whatever right who is the blame what I'm saying is the economy is changing when I read this article the New York Times here's a two-page spread about inequality and I kept waiting for the answer why after reading two solid pages of the New York Times describing yes yes incomes are rising incomes are lowering and so and so forth there was one paragraph that said oh by the way one of the main reasons for this is technology and then on to the next sob story and I said to myself this is a sign of the decline of the Empire well the Empire doesn't even know that it's declining talking about inequality without understanding why the economy is changing is becoming more technological it's making the transition from commodity capitalism to intellectual capitalism as Tony Blair likes to say England the rise more revenue from rock and roll than it does the coal mining industry because coal mining is a commodity industry it's time as coming on in many places but rock and roll hey you know people will spend money on intellectual capital movies science books technology intellectual capital that's the shift that we're seeing in the world economy and so the nations of the future that will be rich our nation understand the link between commodity capital and intellectual capital unfortunately many nations don't understand this many nations are only agricultural but this morning you had breakfast that the King of England could not have had a hundred years ago think of what you had for breakfast delicacies from around the world seasonings that Columbus did yes definitely he didn't have it they didn't have that hundred years ago and that's the declining cost of agricultural products and food while intellectual capital becomes more precious as time goes by but yet no one talks about this everyone talks about its tax policy everyone says we got a text too rich or text to poor or rearrange our priorities rearranging the chairs on the Titanic as a Titanic sinks that's what we're talking about rather than saying hey let's plug the hole and let's let's refloat the Titanic so what I'm saying is that's where physics comes in let me give you two inventions from quantum physics that have changed the world some people say to me well you're a quantum physicist what have you done for me what have you done for me lately they say have you given me better color television have you given me better internet reception well let me give you two inventions from quantum physics the transistor and the laser and what have they changed everything everything a good chunk of the world economy depends upon transistors and lasers and where do they come from quantum physics okay the lesson here is you can ignore science as much as you want but look at all the empires that have fallen look at all the empires that once had glorious technology that are no longer here to talk about dr. Kaku you have given us so much to ponder today and I just want to say thank you very much for your time it's been an absolute pleasure and complete honor to be here with you today thank you thank you very much thank you security Oh

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Rating: 4.8408284 out of 5

Keywords: Michio Kaku, technological singularity, ai, artificial intelligence, the future of the mind

Id: AAEB-5GOCJ4

Length: 82min 17sec (4937 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 06 2014