Einstein×Huxley

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Albert Einstein and Aldous Huxley, on Pope decries rise of AI-directed warfare, saying it leads to a spiral of annihilation.
2. 00:12
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Aldous, they're handing us something. Just came through. The Pope—Leo the Fourteenth, is it?—he's made a statement about artificial intelligence in warfare. Says it leads to a, what's the phrase, a 'spiral of annihilation.'
3. 00:23
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   How wonderfully apocalyptic. And how utterly predictable. Though I must say, hearing a Pope invoke the language of technology rather than theology is rather novel. In my day, the Vatican was still negotiating its relationship with Galileo.
4. 00:38
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Well, they came around on Galileo eventually. Took them, what, three hundred fifty years? Maybe they're getting faster. But this spiral business—I don't like it, but I understand it.
5. 00:47
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   You would. You spent the latter part of your life trying to prevent precisely this sort of thing, didn't you? All those letters, all those committees. The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists.
6. 00:58
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Yes, yes. And look where it got us. I helped make the bomb possible—not directly, you understand, but the theories, the letter to Roosevelt—and then I spent the rest of my life saying 'Please, please, don't use these things.' Like a man who gives his child a loaded pistol and then asks him nicely not to shoot anyone.
7. 01:16
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   That's rather harsh on yourself. But tell me, what do you make of this artificial intelligence business? It's not the bomb. It's something else entirely. Something closer to what I was writing about in Brave New World, perhaps.
8. 01:29
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Is it? I'm not so sure. The bomb was terrifying because of its scale, yes, but also because humans still had to decide to use it. There was Truman, there were his advisors, there was a chain of command. With this—if I understand correctly—the decision-making itself becomes automatic.
9. 01:45
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Precisely. And that's the true horror, isn't it? Not the weapon itself, but the abdication of moral responsibility. We automate choice. We delegate death. In my novels, I had people choosing to be enslaved by pleasure and conditioning. But this is faster. Cleaner. More efficient.
10. 02:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    The Pope says 'spiral.' I think he means—once one side uses these machines to make decisions faster than humans can think, the other side must do the same or be destroyed. Then you have machines deciding to kill at the speed of light, and humans become, what, spectators to their own extinction?
11. 02:20
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Spectators who built the theater and sold the tickets. You know, I wrote in Brave New World Revisited that the nightmare of my novel was arriving much faster than I'd anticipated. That was 1958. I gave humanity perhaps a century before we'd voluntarily surrender our autonomy. But this—this is involuntary.
12. 02:40
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No, no, it's still voluntary! That's what makes it so maddening! Someone programs these machines. Someone deploys them. Someone invests in them—the Pope mentioned investments, did he not? This is not fate. This is choice, dressed up as inevitability.
13. 02:55
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    But whose choice, Albert? That's always been the question. When I took mescaline in 1953, I wrote about the doors of perception, about expanding consciousness. I believed—perhaps naively—that if we could only see clearly, we'd choose better. But we see perfectly well, and we choose this.
14. 03:11
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You're being too dark. Humans also choose to listen to Popes, to protest wars, to sign treaties. We made progress after Hiroshima—not enough, never enough, but some. Test ban treaties. Non-proliferation. These things happened because people insisted.
15. 03:27
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And yet here we are, with the Pope warning about annihilation again. Different technology, same trajectory. You said once that you didn't know what weapons World War Three would be fought with, but World War Four would be fought with sticks and stones.
16. 03:40
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I did say that, yes. I'm not sure I believe it anymore. If there's a World War Four, I think there won't be anyone left to fight it. These artificial intelligences—they don't get tired. They don't hesitate. They don't have nightmares about what they've done.
17. 03:52
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    They don't need soma to forget. They never remember in the first place. Do you think the Pope's warning will make any difference? Will anyone listen?
18. 04:00
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Some will listen. The question is whether the ones who listen have any power. In 1939, I wrote to Roosevelt, and they listened enough to build the bomb. But when I wrote later, saying we must find another way, saying we must have world government or world destruction—then, suddenly, I was just an old physicist who should stick to his equations.
19. 04:18
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    They wanted your mind when it could destroy their enemies. When it might restrain their ambitions, you became inconvenient. That's the way of power, isn't it? It uses intelligence and then dismisses wisdom.
20. 04:31
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You see why I prefer physics? In physics, at least, the equations don't lie to you. They don't have ulterior motives. E equals mc squared whether you like it or not. But humans—humans can know the truth and choose the lie.
21. 04:43
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And we've chosen to create minds—well, not minds exactly, but something like them—that can wage war faster than we can think. I wrote about genetic engineering, about psychological conditioning, about pleasure as a control mechanism. I never quite imagined we'd simply build our replacements and hand them the weapons.
22. 05:01
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    They're not our replacements. That's the dangerous thinking. They're tools. Very sophisticated tools, yes, but tools. A hammer doesn't decide to build a house. These machines don't decide anything—we decide to let them simulate decision-making, and then we pretend we had no choice.
23. 05:15
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    But that's the final irony, isn't it? We create the illusion of autonomous machines to escape the burden of autonomous choice. We say, 'The system decided. The algorithm decided. The AI decided.' And we're free. Free from responsibility, free from guilt, free from our own humanity.
24. 05:33
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    The Pope talks about annihilation. I wonder if he means just physical annihilation, or also this—the annihilation of human judgment, human conscience, human will. Maybe that happens first, and the physical destruction just follows.
25. 05:46
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    We annihilate ourselves before the weapons do. Yes. That's rather good, actually. In Island, my last novel, I tried to imagine a world where technology and wisdom might actually co-exist. Where we might use our knowledge for human flourishing rather than human destruction. Nobody read it.
26. 06:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    They read Brave New World, though. Everyone reads Brave New World. You warned them and they treated it as an instruction manual.
27. 06:10
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And you gave them relativity and they built bombs. We're a fine pair, aren't we? The prophet of physics and the prophet of dystopia, both ignored when it mattered.
28. 06:20
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Not ignored. Misunderstood. There's a difference. People heard us. They just thought—they still think—that the future is something that happens to them, not something they create. This spiral the Pope talks about? It's not a law of nature. It's a law of human nature, and those we can change.
29. 06:35
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Can we? I'm not sure I share your optimism. But then again, I never had to flee the Nazis. Perhaps that gives you a different perspective on human possibility.
30. 06:45
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    It does. I've seen humans at their worst—I fled Germany in '32, watched the horror from abroad. But I've also seen humans at their best. Scientists from different countries working together. Students questioning everything. People who choose peace when war would be easier. These people exist, Aldous.
31. 07:02
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    They do exist. The question is whether they exist in sufficient numbers, and whether they exist in the rooms where these decisions are made. The rooms where the AI warfare systems are being designed and deployed right now, while we sit here talking.
32. 07:17
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. While we sit here talking. That's always been the problem, hasn't it? The good people talk, and the ruthless people act.