George Dyson on Why Your Work Matters: Darwin, Machines, & The Future We're Building

This is just a chance for me to actually meet you. And I've got to say that I am just so pleased to have you because you have influenced. My thinking for decades. I have had Darwin among the machines on my bedside table for most of the years of my adult life. I and and your essay turing's Cathedral 2005, which was on edge dot-org absolutely changed my thinking and was something that

As needed by me and really changed how I move through the world and I wanted to thank you for that. And you know, the reason I wanted to have you on the podcast today's we've got early-stage technologists early-stage Founders and I felt like when I read your books and your essays, I was given a great gift which was to sort of fill in a you know, Joseph Campbell Ian creation myth a sense of direction and purpose and context for what I was doing every day. Like I as a Founder was running

Brad worrying about officers or W-2s or calendars or venture capital and in the chaos of all that and the frenetic - of that. What is the meaning? What is the purpose of what we're doing? What is the context in what we're doing in you provided that to me with your writing. So thank you so much. And today I'm hoping to do a podcast with you that allows me to bring that to the other Founders who might not have read your stuff who might not have heard him away and I can if I can give them chills the way I got chills reading your stuff. That would be a great outcome for me in this. So thank you for being here, Georgia. Really? Appreciate

Yeah, well, thank you. I mean if writer like me just you know sort of exists in a vacuum and you sort of construct these worlds. It's like a novel but it's you know, it's the past and so to find an audience is just great.

Oh, absolutely. So I'd like to you know set the stage for second because we're going to get back to the content of turing's cathedral in a second. But in the title, you're referring of course to Alan Turing who with John Von Neumann invented the first digital computer and could you go take us back and explain to us how the Digital Universe?

Sort

of began to explode after World War

II. Yes, and you have to be careful of saying first because obviously it was not the first digital computer to wear lots of digital computers going back very long time. What you can say was first was the Von Neumann computer was one of the first to have a memory that worked at the speed of light rather than the speed of sound that was the big transition that suddenly things were you could calculate the speed of light rather than the speed of sound that made that made all the difference and touring was

Act logician mean you came from the world. In fact by father told me you know, he read that paper when it came out in the 1930s and thought it had no connection to reality at all and it was interesting piece of mathematics, but would never one would never ever expected it to completely change our tangible day-to-day world

and it did that's where we started to move into digital computers that moved at the speed of light and so we have the atomic bomb. We have World War II and then things start to accelerate.

Yes. So what touring did was produced which

Magicians like to do sort of a toy model. So he produced this one-dimensional model of digital Computing that you had a not infinite but an unbounded a finite but unbounded length of paper tape just a string of bits and you can move this string back and forth, but you can't to get to any point hundred feet ahead. You have to go through all 99 feet of tape. And so that was very impractical but it was very interesting and then by series of accidents and touring ended up in the middle of World War II as everyone did

and that then became a real problem because you had the Germans were using digital codes to communicate with a u-bolt fleet. And this question of could one machine imitate the behavior of another machine became a very influential and saving England and the rest of us during the war when I was working on the other side during was working on decoding messages. Von Neumann was in America. He came to America 1930 and he was working on the atomic bomb problem where you need it to compute hydrodynamics radiation hydrodynamics and

And what he did which now seems entirely obvious but he sort of made turing's one-dimensional model to die mentioned producing which we now absolutely take for granted that you have an address Matrix where you give two coordinates like a chessboard and that gives you a location a memory location sort of everything changed after that. Once you had this original addresses Matrix in the version that he built was 32 bits by 32 bits by 40 bits. So it was like this little array of memory and if you add that all up it's by our modern.

Sure, it's 5 kilobytes. So the number that sort of always stuck in my mind was born in 1953 and in 1953. They were 53 kilobytes of this high-speed memory on the entire planet just exploded from there.

It starts to grow in a sort of geometric pattern which is slowly at first, but then it starts to accelerate with metcalfe's law and we had a lot more compute lot more storage and 1997. You came out with this book about Darwin among the machines and in it you go through

The history of how we got here how we get to 1997. And what's the motion as the intelligence of the planet creates life the intelligence of the life creates language and culture and that is now producing this Digital silicon-based Life and we are in the midst of this moment and that nature itself is sort of birthing these machines to life even though they don't seem like life to us. They really are and you know Hans moravec and others like you were talking about various forms of AI so I got a chance to read that.

Book and it really set a tone for me about where we were in our journey and then in 2005 you come up with the turing's cathedral where you having finished a talk about the future in Google are asked by one of the young Engineers. Why is everyone so upset that we're digitizing the books and violating their publishing revenues don't they understand? We're not digitizing the books for people were digitizing them for the coming AI. So the AI can become intelligent by reading everything that we've written.

And at that moment you realize that here is a group of people who fundamentally already believe in what you had written about 8 years earlier that we are in this movement, you know, and at the same time second life is coming and we've got Virtual Worlds. I was on the board of that company for five years at that time. And you start to see this pattern. You see this this turing's Cathedral article that you wrote. What was it like feeling at that moment for you to sort of encounter a group of people who are so in the midst of this process. What inspired

You to write that article

in a way. It was a revelation for engineer who I talked to you at, you know at that time. Google is very secretive and not supposed to be quoted almost lost his job for saying that to me now the title came out of that at me that afternoon. I came out of Google and Southern and San Francisco Bay there and see when touring was he sort of in advance. He answered the critics. He wrote a paper. Why are you trying to create intelligent machines own? You know only you're gonna get in trouble only God can create intelligent machines and his answer was that

We are no more requests for goes further is are you going to create artificial souls and his answer was that we are no more creating intelligent machines than humans are when we create children we all and so his exact words. Are we are only creating mansions for the souls that only God Only He Capital H can create and it was when I walked out of there I said, oh this isn't turing's Mansion. This is turing's Cathedral what Google is doing at that

time? It's a brilliant title it really

Captures the sort of religiousness of it right sort of like Joseph Campbell would say with the hero with a thousand faces. This is another moment at which the hero is born. It might be an AI hero, but it's coming to be

born. Yes. It captures the also the group effort in the sense that if old Cathedrals are were built over hundreds of years were nobody really laid claim to any part of it spend your life working on one corner of a tower and someone else spend their life working on the floor and you know, after a few hundred years it was finished

as I read it I felt

I was one of the stonemasons who wasn't at Google but I felt like what you were saying was that Google might be in the end of the biggest company, but it can't be the only company and and it might be based in Silicon Valley, but eventually the Google employees will span the globe as they do today and it wasn't just people in Silicon Valley or a Google but it was everybody who is reading and contributing to Edge dot-org the wonderful place where you publish that's inside that whole community of Minds was Bertha.

In this together,

right? Yes. Yeah lots. Yeah, lots of people been thinking about this for a long time. So I went I was at a part of a conference a couple months ago. It was canceled. So they did it, you know, of course online and part of it was on second life. I didn't even know I had no idea II like still

existed they have indeed survived. Yeah. So that's quite remarkable. I mean, it's it is remarkable. It's the most unlikely about comes it was either going to get bigger. It was going to crash and burn and it didn't either. Yeah. It just had a steady state of a half a million people and just stays

It's like one of these little little island that's a thousand miles from isolated species

and have you visited Google since you wrote turing's Cathedral

2005. Yes, quite a number of times and then I part of this Google hosts a science conference every year that I've always gone to which again was canceled this year. So that's a chance but it's of course it's changed enormously Google sort of went from nothing garage to IBM in 10 years. I mean, it's a very different

world you feel as if the progress that we've seen in the last 15 years is

Is about what you are expecting or something surprised

you well, what's surprising to me is how little things change how we sort of, you know, during environment developed this model and it worked and we've just been stuck in it ever since I mean everything still more or less exists in this two-dimensional address matrix. It's just expanded but it's still every bit in the Digital Universe hasn't a fun moment address and now that's that is finally starting to change finally starting to see shifts away from that model, but no one has sort of come forward like

Ring and really given us a sort of formal description of what this new model will be or just sort of stumbling around discovering it

blindly. So we've got a lot of people publishing ideas about what a new sort of system would be but nothing has really coalesced

yet. Not yet. Maybe it is coalescing. We just don't see it. But and of course, I'm not that's not formally my field but really I see as an outside Observer. It's it's just remarkable how much we're doing by just expanding the old system

for 70 years into the digital Revolution.

Lucian things bigger but not fundamentally different yet, but we would expect them to change student. One of the things I think you've said is that we have all this digital infrastructure lying around and we're putting it all together and then we're building analog

computers, right? That's of course my personal theory of what's going on how there's this big fundamental shift at the moment, but it's not very explicit The Way We Were explicit about digital

Computing. Did you unpack that for me about what you mean by we're now building in a lot of computers with the digital infrastructure

the fundamental difference between analog.

In digital computer, it's not it's not what you use to compute you can have digital computers made out of wood and you can have analog computers made out of silicon but digital Computing. The information is in the logical sequences of bits every bit has an exact meaning and in analog Computing your so digitally using discrete functions and analog Computing your Computing with continuous functions are using sort of the general differences in frequency and in nature. We see this very very clearly divided.

That nature has learned to use digital Computing is very good for error correction. We use digital Computing in our genetic systems because they correct the errors from one generation to the next or introduce the errors that lead to Improvement but in nature all real-time control is done with analog Computing because it's much more adaptable and robust. There is no programming. There's no algorithm. So what happened was after World War Two we had all this analog equipment lying around War Surplus back.

In tubes and radar screens and so on and this very small group of oddballs for what turing's Cathedral is about put that equipment together and built realize turing's vision of digital computers. And now I see the exact this is where Gone full circle in the reverse is happening. We have all this infinite amount of digital Computing its effectively free and a lot of companies and if a few individuals are starting to work trying to assemble that equipment into big analog

Shooters where these meaning and the information is in the sort of continuous functions rather than discrete functions means or the if you look at like the on the YouTube network doesn't care what the bits actually say. It just cares about the sort of the magnitude of the stream of bits and the frequency at which things connect information is in topology of the network rather than the actual meaning of the code and that and for the same reason it works. So well in nature works very well in these large systems. We're seeing like Google or Amazon or Facebook

Carter. So what they care about is how many

People are watching that video and how frequently they don't really care what the bits are

right and you build exactly start building circuits the way we built circuits with vacuum tubes the streams of electrons are treated just as a continuous function and we're doing that now we're sort of treating streams of bits or treated like vacuum tubes treated streams of

electrons and you would see that not as positive or negative just as

interesting just as the next stage in evolution. I mean Evolution never stopped you had the digital Revolution to get where we are, but it's not going

To stay that

could we talk about AI for bed? So if we look at terrain and you know his paper Computing machinery and intelligence, which you've called a founding document of the Quest for True AI what do you think? Most people are still getting wrong about AI?

Well their answer for more fising it the same way. We the other big sort of this is a search for AI and then there's the search which is a big part of my childhood to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And I think we sort of have both of those things wrong and then

Personal third angle on that is the search for other intelligent creatures on Earth. I spent a lot of time in the on the northwest coast among killer. Whales who I firmly believe are highly intelligent. It's a nonhuman intelligence. We have trouble communicating with it. So there's a we tend to assume that the other intelligence is going to be like us and we look for language and things like that. I think that's a dead end other kinds of intelligence. Are you going to be other kinds of intelligence? They're not we're getting very good at building sort of imitations of our own intelligence.

It's sort of captive systems. I'm much more interested myself. And wild AI that it will evolve on its own and be very different from

us and be adapted to

it. I'm a up may operate on a completely different time scale. There's no reason that other intelligence have to operate on our time scale that could be operating much faster or much

slower or operating in non-carbon.

Yes, yeah are in completely different ways. Perhaps not using language the way we use language at all tend to equate intelligence with

language, right? And so we're making progress with alphago and other forms.

Of human intelligence mimicry both in task and in speed and approach but that's only one sliver may be akin to the amount of visible light spectrum we can see with our

eyebrows. I mean awful go is interesting because go you watch a couple really good go players. They're sort of almost non-human. Anyway, I mean really is alien sort of way of operating and so, you know getting machine that can do that is in a very interesting

step and just saying so you think it's starting to be a quite a different flavor of intelligence right on the edge of what humans naturally

Ali do

right that's what I think and also personally, I mean that paper of turing's is famous for what we are what we call the Turing test, which is this idea that you can determine whether a machine is intelligent by having a conversation with it. And I I believe exactly the opposite the test of a real true AI would be intelligent enough not to reveal its intelligence to us. So the fact that we don't have machines that passed the Turing test is no, you know is no proof that there are not intelligent

machines when you say that there are intelligent machines somewhere you're saying somewhere in our Von.

Sort of digital landscape that we've built over the last 40 years 50 years. There is some form of intelligence potentially lurking out there that is operating and not lurking because that sounds nefarious. That's what you mean when you say there's no proof. There's no intelligence.

It could be I mean doesn't necessarily I'm a huge skeptic about sort of discrete artificial intelligence that we will ever have service system in a box that you can put in your car that do everything or but in terms of the distributed artificial intelligence. I'm a Believer

with a distributed system you have an opportunity for evolution for it to find itself and to

learn on its own

without. I'd love to read something quickly hear something you wrote if you'll permit me because I found it so fascinating and I want to quote it for our listeners before I asked you about it. You wrote quote for 30 years. I've been wondering what indication of his existence might we expect from a true AI certainly not any explicit Revelation which might spark a movement to pull the plug on anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign or an unquenchable thirst for raw information storage space and process.

Cycles or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted autonomous power supply but the real sign I suspect would be a circle of cheerful contented intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. So my question is that what we have today, is that what Silicon Valley and the extended connectivity of the that group and Bellingham Washington and whatnot is that it is a circle of cheerful contented intellectually nourished people nourishing this potential AI. Is that where we are.

Yes, of course.

That that paragraph is dated by that was written after that visit to Google where I was it just was like a Magical Kingdom at that time. I mean people were getting their hair cut swimming in pools on the campus and to me it was just incredible sense of here's this machine that is absolutely making life Paradise for the people who take care of it making them wealthy and keeping them healthy taking care of their, you know, there's a daycare taking care of the children of means to me that would be exactly what the other going to have a real AI That's how people who take care of it would be taken.

Not in this is again in 2005 when you saw that and you go back now and it's similar in many respects and certainly in that respect.

Yes, right the problem now is it now it has a little bit of the edge of a little bit of a darker side to it. Now, I think I mean at that time it really seemed like this unbelievable Pappy plate which of course was maybe scary in its own way. Whereas now you really you really do get a sense of it to sort of rules and regulations are very thinly below the surface

when you say that rules and regulations imposed by Google on itself or

Bye-bye. Or if I Google running up against the laws of the land

no by the regulations that regulate the company. I'm no expert on Google but I think now it's become much more organized has to be I mean to be that side you kind of can't have that happy playground that they had, you know at that time. It really was a horizontal rather than vertical company and everybody was in contact with each other

smaller and worth a lot less. And when you mention a dark side, could you talk to me about that? What sort of dark side are we experiencing as we move through this next phase of the development of the AI,

of course now that

It's very popular and fashionable to talk about that. But just the fact that people's lives are being increasingly controlled and regulated and you know generally often in a positive way, but it's very easy for that to shift. The other

way. We one of the things I feel that as dramatically shift since 2005 is really a focus on sort of money, right? So I think you know Amazon is now worth 1.5 trillion dollars or something and you've got Facebook at 650 in Google just passed the trillion of its value and apple as well and 15 years ago. None of this was true.

Right. These were small companies relative to the rest of the economy the rest of wealth generation and as the wealth has increased their sort of the focus on the philosophy, which is where I would see, you know, your great role being played here George it tends to get pushed to the background and I feel like in 2005 there was more are there was more oxygen and more attention being paid to the philosophy. Am I wrong about that?

No, you're very right that time. There was still a connection to this, you know, the

Admit that you're so interested in. I mean the fact that apple in particular. I mean, it was easy to imagine Apple becoming a big computer company to imagine that they would become a big company in the sense of bigger than any company in the world is Unthinkable, but at that time even in turn of the century, there were still and still are a very few. I mean were people at Apple who were there from the beginning. I mean who had been you know, academic mathematical logicians playing with computer may be doing the odd database for the government or something and nowhere near turning any of that into a consumer.

Product and that all happened so quickly the same in Google and Google came out of academic

world. It's almost as if the personality of those working on the AI has been shifting a bit from the sort of cheerful hobbyist, you know technical cheerful hobbyists of more of a sort of a driven purposeful money conscious type of professional as the whole thing has gotten bigger and vat and in terms of the money on the people at touches and seems as if that's means we're moving into a new phase

here. Yes, the cycle is very much faster. I mean if you build any sort of

Academic AI group within a within what used to be sort of the Ivory Tower that kind of talent touring world now in no time at all. It usually gets acquired or spun out as a either as a company or as part of one of these existing companies, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something to you know to be careful

of yeah, it's definitely a shift and is there anything that you'd love for, you know, some of the early Founders and their 20s and early 30s who are embarking on startups are

are some things that you hope that they are cognizant of as they move

forward one of my careers the one that brings me years and I'm a historian. So I sort of dig around in the past. It's like looking for fossils you find these things and you show them to people and that's why I put those stories in my books because I think if you work in this field today those creation myths are really important. Look at Computing it sort of has an Old Testament and New Testament. The Old Testament was the these allegations and philosophers and then in the New Testament,

Became real if people start building machines and that sort of moment between those two era is where it all comes from. And if I think people who work in the field, it's a good thing to go back and look at you know, what the people wrote and said at that time and people of course during and don't know man, but there were many others and also the engineer who get always so little credit the engineers who actually build the things and get them to work and have to understand things just as much if not more than the scientists but somehow the scientists get the voice and the engineers usually

Yeah, because you've mentioned that while digital computers were formalized by touring and delivered by Von Neumann. It was actually Julian Bigelow who was the engineer there and he doesn't seem to get much

credit know he's sort of the missing link. It had an unbelievably prophetic clear view of what was wrong with the fun enjoyment system and how it should be improved and he was just not listen to he would have been Generations ahead.

And this was back in the 50s as this one

that yeah, so he's he started working with Norbert wiener and World War Two.

On anti-aircraft fire control button. So when fine Diamond needed engineer Bigelow was the guy but he immediately I mean the mission was to build this machine to do the hydrogen bomb calculations, but they wanted to build a second machine sword machine and you wanted to make them completely different. He saw the huge flaws in this fun moment architecture that only used fraction of a percent of the power of the machine, but we got stuck in only beginning. I mean only a few of our processors used for graphics gpus and so on Earth

a slightly beginning to escape from that sort of fun enjoyment and fun. I mean himself. He only ever took out one patent was for a method of non Von Neumann Computing

so feels as if we have the Philosopher's in the logicians, we've got the engineers and now we've got the financiers and this sort of these three groups of people and you empathize more with one the idea person the execution person.

Well, I'm first thing. I'm on the side of the engineers because that's just the way I was as a child. I just was fascinated by nuts and bolts and wrenches and tools and

His mother was sort of a philosopher and logician side. So I have a soft spot for that world to and then you had these sort of unique people who like to do both and they were very

important. How do you think we could do a better job of listening to these Engineers

Elevate their voice in their status? I mean, that's a good thing about the Silicon Valley ecosystem that it does. A lot of these companies are built by engineers and funded because they have some some engineering Innovation. So that's changed but in the academic world, it was always the other way around that if you sort of were

age it if you did any engineering you were no longer a pure

Sciences interesting. It was almost shun to do the hard work to do the work by hand was lower

status, right? You know wartime that's I think one of the reasons this all happened after World War II wartime had it wonderful way of breaking down those barriers where suddenly the physicists were allowed to work with high explosives and the mathematicians were allowed to work with electronics.

I'd love to chat with you about also are evolving relationship with technology at one point when you were younger than you are now you really rejected. Hi.

I cried. I mean you were canoeing or kayaking for months at a time. You were living in a treehouse for years 90 feet above the ground and up in the Pacific Northwest there. And what was the Catalyst for that? How are you thinking about life at that point? You are in your early 20s, I

guess. Yes. I moved to Canada when I was 17. So a big part of it was just escaping from the deadly boredom of you know, I dropped out of high school and I found Princeton to be the most boring place in the world and try to get as far away as I could and our family, you know.

My sister Esther we have a mixed up extended family with a bunch of siblings. But Esther and I are the only Sim, you know, we have the same mother in the same father and that sort of this unique Bond think nature. Does that for a reason? I mean sort of your two kids and they're just completely different because I think I think nature is somehow hardwired that it's a good survival strategy to not have both your kids, you know do the same things Esther when and I Tech world and I went under 80 degrees the other way off to the Canadian wilderness and not against technology. I mean, I don't know I love chainsaws and diesel engines electronics and so on.

But just get away from the from the centers of civilization you

talk about a separate from the world of man.

Yeah. I spent a lot of time out out in the wild with nothing but animals and Forest and trees and oceans and boats me. My passion was

boat you typically do that alone, or do you do that with small groups

or I did that mostly alone. But I love being in groups. Like when I would, you know work on a fishing boat or a tug boat with a crew. I found that just great lot of the stuff. I did completely

alone. So you doing that and then what brought you back into this Society?

If analysis what brought you back to the world of

man, that's actually it's pretty much Esters to her credit or her fault or whatever, but she was very generous about you know, she back then in the late 1980s. She was running this computer conference it sort of became the computer conference for the for the growing personal committee started out as a semiconductor conference and and she invited me my girlfriend at the time was a photographer. So she hired girlfriend who married and so we would get to

Her conference every year. So I just say just was like brought out of the woods into the beginning of that that whole world and found it fascinating to watch and observe. But that's definitely otherwise, I think I would never have got into that world at all.

That's fascinating that that's how you came back. It's you know, and I've been to that conference many times and it was indeed The Tech Conference of the year and in this country for sure and it was it was interesting because it was the conference most things happen there and so it kept everyone on the same page in a way now, it's Industries become much more.

Are flowing it's a little bit harder to keep all the edges together to take a scope of what it all is but okay, I see how you came back through that. That makes sense.

Yeah Esther had a very extremely sensible policy of encouraging families for having family activities and stuff. So you try and avoid the you know, sort of CEOs who come just for the afternoon give their talking leave. It was like you wanted to go to that conference for the whole three days.

That's right. There was a Humanity to it. There was a feeling to it in the same way that you must have had that feeling at Google this special sort of happy intellectually well-nourished.

People who are actually connecting both physically and emotionally intellectually. They're interesting. So how do you think we are doing we humans with our relationship to technology today?

I think we're completely disoriented and sort of lost her, you know, when they lost our bearings but we're Flying Blind would be the metaphor something we were moving so fast, we don't really can't really see where we're going is just it's just rushing forward and particularly not just the technology side, but the biotechnology

Side, which everyone talks about just same way we talk about Computing. All this stuff is going to happen. But it at now is happening real sort of full scale ability to edit genetic information. So it opens entirely New World in the sort of the language of genetics and the Machine language of cells and the Machine language of computers are much closer to each other than to human language. So

now it's true. We we have a podcast with Trevor Martin who's the CEO of Mammoth biosciences, which is now the largest IP repository of crispr Ip in the

And we were talking with him about this newfound ability to Simply and inexpensively at it jeans is going to unleash a whole risk a whole set of new risks as well as the opportunities that that everyone can see we should tread carefully for sure.

Yeah, the other way to look at it is that that sort of life has done this already. It's very good at it. I mean we had cells that were reproducing very well. I mean Earth was recovered and slimy life but didn't didn't have replication really since it's my belief and then you know

Chirp sort of figured out how to adopt these self-replicating almost viruses to you know to build our genetic system and I think life will just do that. Again. That's a sort of technological systems. We were building for replicating and distributing genetic information or it's one way of looking at is a we are using life and we're sort of building these bio Technologies and other way to look at it. Is that the other exactly the opposite way around its life using our Technologies to sort of build better more distributed forms of

life. I think that's right, and I remember the

That we did not cultivate wheat, but that we cultivated us to serve its own purpose exactly and you believe that we're going to continue to accelerate this rapidly. I mean, I would agree that we are disoriented at this point given the speed of change of our own Technologies and it's growing exponentially now, we're sort of getting into the steeper part of the curve. I would say in the last 20 years 30 years. And do you think it's going to continue for the next says curves wheel and Singularity University people say to be so that it will eventually be unrecognizable to us.

Sore or do you think there's going to need to be a shift down shift? If you will?

Well, it was actually time to ask that question. We first of all I strongly disagree with Ray Kurzweil the things he is hoping for terrify me and the things he's afraid of don't scare me at all. But yeah, I think we're on a very different trajectory and then your question about limits. Of course. We're in the middle of this very interesting Black Swan case where we thought everything is just rushing forward and then suddenly we hit this Limit Oh what if there's actually just a good old-fashioned, you know?

Novel virus that you know the problem there is that whatever you argue about the origins of this virus. It's a bat virus that has learned to live and adapt and survive among bats. Who are these call mammals that live by the millions in caves and it's that's how we live. What we need to do is stop acting like bats get out of the caves and but we're not I mean across the street from you is a bar and I mean a bar is full now of people do just flying back into their dark cave from a technology point of view. This may be a really positive inflection points.

Or reset or reboot you can see things. I've course Amazon is doing great Cirque systems are adapting to this very well and then in other institutions like your local bar or not not going to do well but it's a huge unexpected shift

resetter a slowing of the curve could come in one form or another but it might just accelerate different parts of the curve is this all sort of mathematically plays out as the intelligence that we represent is going to be part of bringing the next intelligences around as well. So what are you working on now,

Georgia, I just

State new book that took me seven years turing's Cathedral took about ten

and I came out in 2012 about seven years after the initial

article. Yes. So that seems to be what about what it takes me. I mean the remarkable thing about turing's Cathedral is that you know that group of people who I so admire the Julian Bigelow group with fun diamond and they conceived of the project found the money built their own work benches built the machines built the computer and solve these nuclear weapons.

Problems and start working on climate and weather and everything. They did all that in less time than it took me to write about it, which is the other mess, you know message for the today's entrepreneurs and stuff is just that's the reason to look back at these sort of heroic efforts. And and that's where of course the current the pandemic crisis the same thing. I mean, it's going to push biotechnology the same way World War II pushed physics everybody's working on this biological problem in that that in the end will have all sorts of secondary effects. Okay, so I finished

The new book and it's be out in a few weeks. I was wondering whether they would delay or not, but it's on schedule and a Loggia and it's in some ways a sequel to turing's Cathedral but in a very strange very very odd book. I mean it opens with Russians coming to Alaska in opens with leibnitz and trying to take over the world with digital computers and then come convinces Peter the Great to go to America. And so it's a book of stories. It's written much more is a narrative to chapter about the war against the Apaches and then I some