In this episode
Dr Karl and MAK at the WA Education Awards.
In this episode, author and scientist, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, takes us on a journey about artificial intelligence (AI). He discusses the history of AI and why the sudden growth and introduction of ChatGPT took scientists by surprise. Discover why he believes that while we don’t fully know and understand how AI works, if we give it a specific task and limitations, it can be a big help to society.
Dr Karl says AI is here to stay and discusses how he’s fighting misinformation with new TikTok videos and a 'Digital Dr Karl' which is based on all of his research papers on climate change.
He also answers some rapid-fire questions about topics from social sciences to black holes and why he believes that one day we will be able to live forever.
About Dr Karl Kruszelnicki
Dr Karl is a scientist, author, broadcaster and winner of an Ig Nobel prize for his research on belly button lint.
After failing to become a NASA astronaut in the 1980s, he ended up live broadcasting the first space shuttle launch on Triple J, which set him on the path of a media career. From there, he went from radio to TV, books, newspapers, public speaking, podcasts and the internet, helping us understand the mysteries of our planet and universe.
With thousands of research papers on climate change and 48 books under his belt, he also hosts a podcast ‘Shirtloads of Science’ and appears weekly on Triple J.
He shares the world of science with everyday people in Australia and inspires the next generation of curious thinkers.
Transcript
MAK
A warm welcome. I'm Marie-Anne Keefe, but please call me MAK.
Today's guest has done more to spread curiosity than a thousand exploding custard experiments.
He's the man who has explained black holes, belly button lint, climate change, flatulence, time travel, and why toast always lands butter side down, and somehow made every single topic feel like a party for our brains.
He's a doctor, an author, a broadcaster, a storyteller, and possibly the only human alive who could connect quantum physics to a supermarket trolley and make it make sense.
So buckle up your synapses because joining us is the legendary explainer of the universe, the man who makes science sexy, Dr. Karl.
Dr Karl
Oh, shucks. You're too kind, Dr. MAK. I'm not worthy but thank you.
MAK
Well, you've come fresh off the stage from the WA Education Awards. Your first experience, obviously, coming over here for those. What do you think?
Dr Karl
I love education.
So the reason I'm here today is because once upon a time, the Australian government thought that education was a worthwhile investment in the future.
Nowadays, they think of it as being a way to generate income, but because they thought it was an investment in the future, I've had 28 years of education, including 16 years at university for free, which I couldn't have done and afforded it by myself.
So thank you, taxpayers of Australia. I love education.
And in the European countries, they still see education as a worthwhile investment. So even though you do not speak German or Italian or Danish, they will teach you in English, as high as you want to go in the trades or at university, because any educated person makes the world a better place.
MAK
And our winner today of the Minister's Teacher of the Year Award, Christopher Lambe, is I think, going to give you a rung for your money.
Like, this is a STEM science teacher who is changing the world a little bit like you. He came up on stage with his lab coat on.
Do you think there might be any opportunity for a collab, Dr. Karl?
Dr Karl
Sure. After all, I'm not too sure, but I think I invented the lab coat hoodie.
MAK
Did you?
Dr Karl
Well, somebody might have beat me to it, but I did devise one and get it sewn up several, about 2 decades ago.
MAK
So do you think we should get one of those to Chris? He might be needing it.
Dr Karl
Is it cold enough here in winter?
MAK
Oh, barely, but I think he'd probably enjoy it anyway.
We do wear Oodies here, you know, the Oodies. Would you have an Oodie or?
Dr Karl
It doesn't quite get cold enough in Sydney on the other hand, I don't have much hair on my skull, so I do like to wear something on the top there.
MAK
Well, maybe you could get the lab coat hoodie back again. Yeah, I think you need to bring that back.
Dr Karl
Yeah, it's a whole different complicated pathway there because you're talking about the lab coat as being a denoter of a particular function in life, whereas I see science opening you up to any function you want, especially physics.
It's a really good basic education that lets you go into any other field that you want where you may or may not wear a lab coat.
MAK
Well, on the subject of quantum physics, you faced some fairly tough questioning from some of our top STEM students, and you breezed through most of the questions apart from one.
I have to note that you did come unstuck on the Milo question.
Dr Karl
Sure.
MAK
And why it is that Milo dissolves faster or better in hot water. Now, this is something that I have actually wondered about.
Dr Karl
Didn't the students say worse in warm water?
MAK
I thought it was better.
Dr Karl
That was what confused me.
MAK
I thought it was better. It was more difficult in cold water and better in hot water.
Dr Karl
I thought it was, I thought what they said, and I had this reaffirmed but I could be mishearing it, that it dissolved better in less water and worse in warm water.
MAK
So maybe that's what the problem was. The question was a bit confusing, but you know, in terms of the mysteries of the universe, Milo was clearly one of them.
Dr Karl
Well, maybe not so much the question being confusing because it's just a bunch of words, but rather the interpretation of it by my brain.
So it's the difference between a racist person and a racist act.
MAK
Ah, okay. We're going deep now.
Dr Karl
Well, most things go deep if you put the time for it.
MAK
So what did you think of the questioning from our students?
Dr Karl
So wonderfully broad and I do love the questions from the students because they're especially wonderful when they're questions from the heart. And the Milo one, I still don't understand. I'm going to have to try that out at home. And who knows? I wrongly thought perhaps that the Milo dissolved better in the warmer liquids because the reaction time of a chemical reaction halves for every 10 degrees it rises in temperature.
I need to do the experiment and then maybe even play back the tape to see perhaps I interpreted the question wrongly.
MAK
Do you think that maybe following up from today, you might be looking into the Milo experiment for us to see exactly how all that works?
Dr Karl
Well, we do at our place, run the Play Centre every Wednesday and Thursday with the nieces and grandchildren come around and Milo is an important part of their life without necessarily promoting that particular chocolate brand.
MAK
Yes, we wouldn't want to be doing that.
However, in terms of the chemistry involved, it might be something worth taking a little bit further, Dr. Karl. Would you do that for us?
Dr Karl
It's a worthy experiment. There was an Ignobel Prize granted for similar work in working out the optimum path for dipping biscuits in tea.
MAK
A bit like the Tim Tam Slam.
Dr Karl
That's a different one, but it's on that pathway. It's definitely part of the putting of a biscuit-type material, which literally means twice baked, into a warm liquid, and it fits into that category.
MAK
Right.
Dr Karl
So I don't think I've ever done the Tim Tam. So there's a Tim Tam thing where you shove one end in the hot liquid and then…
MAK
So you bite one corner off and then the diagonally opposite corner off.
Dr Karl
The corner?
MAK
Yes.
Dr Karl
So not the whole side.
MAK
No, no, no, just a bite on one corner. One corner. Flip it, a bite on the diagonally opposite corner, and then you dip it in and then you suck through it like it's a straw.
Dr Karl
I like the idea of going from one corner to the diagonally opposite corner for 2 reasons.
Firstly, going on the diagonal means that you've got the maximal length of the warm liquid interacting with the warm inside of the Tim Tam. And secondly, I've always wrongly in my mind, I thought that you took an entire bit of the whole of one of the shorter sides off, but that would increase the surface area and reduce the flow rate. And what you want is a high flow rate.
MAK
I think this is another area of exploration for you. I think we're uncovering a few.
Dr Karl
We've already got the answer.
MAK
You don't need to put that to the test.
Dr Karl
Oh, we do. But the thing is, the answer almost certainly will turn out to be what you've described.
But it turns out that with the dipping of the regular biscuit in warm liquids, that was a bit of a surprise, it turned out that the optimal biscuit is a ginger nut biscuit.
MAK
Oh, I love ginger nuts. But they're so tough. Is that why they're the optimal biscuit?
Dr Karl
Yes, because what you do is you slide them in at an oblique angle of about 45 degrees with the tough surface underneath.
MAK
Oh.
Dr Karl
And in that way, when the biscuity material above the tough surface gets weak and sloppy, it's held in there by the structural integrity of the hard surface.
MAK
Wow.
Dr Karl
Wow. Yeah, I know. Brilliant.
So I wouldn't expect that. That was a surprise to me to read that.
And for that, they rightly got Ignoble prize for their fine work, as I did for my fine work in understanding belly button fluff.
MAK
And then I think the last part of this experiment is a Tim Tam slam in a cup of hot Milo and a cup of cold Milo.
I'm just saying, I think we can sort of take it that one step further, but I'm going to leave that to you. What do you think?
Dr Karl
I think you're following a basic law that too much chocolate is barely enough.
MAK
That is the law. That's an absolute, an absolute, isn't it, in science?
Now tell me, you talked a lot about today, or we've talked a lot about AI a lot today. And this morning when we had a brief chat, you used the word diabolical.
You said to me, ‘AI is a diabolical thing’. What do you mean by that?
Dr Karl
Do you want the 10-second answer or the deeper one?
MAK
Can you do the deeper one in about 90 seconds?
Dr Karl
Probably not. After all, a mate of mine, Brian Schmidt, was asked when he won his Nobel Prize in dark energy if he could explain it in 90 seconds, and he said ‘if I could explain it in 90 seconds, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize’.
MAK
Oh, that's true.
Dr Karl
So, the term artificial intelligence was invented on the 15th of June in 1958, when John McCarthy had the artificial intelligence seminar at Dartmouth College in the USA. He got a bunch of megabrains together and they thought they could solve it.
No, they couldn't. Then the next jump happened about 10 years later with Eliza. Did you hear of Eliza, the psychotherapy program?
MAK
No.
Dr Karl
So it did a thing called Rogerian analysis, which if you've studied psychology refers to somebody Roger, I guess, I've got no idea. But Rogerian analysis involves three things. One, when somebody talks to you, you firstly find the key word in the sentence. ‘I took my mother for a walk’. Okay, ‘mother’.
Then you reverse the pronouns. I to you. ‘Did you take your mother for a walk?’
And finally, you had a question. ‘Why? Why did you take your mother for a walk? How did you feel about it?’
So people would come up to this desk and then type in and after an hour, they think they'd had the best psychotherapy session in their whole life. And that was not artificial intelligence.
Then we went into a series of dark winters, and the big breakthrough came with AlexNet in 2012, when we came up with the concept of convoluted neural networks. So go to Wikipedia and look up neural networks and these are networks that can learn, and convoluted has a special meaning. And then suddenly the success rate in their ImageNet competitions where they'd show a photograph and the AI had to recognize it, it could be of a banana or a bicycle or a car, the success rate went from about 5% to 25%. And they realized that they were onto a winner and that was Geoffrey Hinton.
So look him up in Wikipedia. He's a really deep guy. And then the idea began that we'd get more and more data and people started going for what they call large language models.
So along the way, we came up with the smartphone predicting, but that was only working with the weak computer chip in the phone and the database of what you had typed in the past. And so the large language model basically meant everything they could find that had ever been written in your language.
MAK
Yeah. So the predictor text is almost our first version of AI usage.
Dr Karl
It is, you've hit it there in one.
So AI is simply predictive texting on steroids. Firstly, instead of just what you've written, it's got everything you could find in English.
MAK
The world's written.
Dr Karl
And the problem is other AIs, which is making it bad. And then secondly, instead of a little computer chip, it's got literally rooms, buildings full of computer chips and they're chewing up megawatts of power, whereas your brain to do the same thing needs 17 megawatts.
And OpenAI went through various iterations with OpenAI, with ChatGPT one and 2, and everybody was totally surprised.
Let me emphasize, all the AI scientists were totally surprised when in November 22, Chat GPT gave human-like text. They were totally surprised. It wasn't good, it wasn't perfect, it had lots of mistakes. And OpenAI then firstly became the world's fastest growing company in the history of capitalism.
It went from zero to over a billion dollars in less than one year.
Secondly, 20% of all research and development on planet Earth now is going into AI.
Thirdly, every single AI company is making a huge loss.
The only way they're making enough money to pay their electricity bills is by doing flim flam on the stock market and sending money around in circles to each other and almost certainly there's an AI bubble collapse, which could lead to bad things.
Now, let's just do onto another thing. Firstly, AI, we don't know how it works.
So we programmed it in the early days and then it grew by itself and even if we were to say, ‘stop right now, say we want to do a snapshot of what you're thinking’, it would take every computer scientist on earth, maybe a hundred years, all of them working together to work out how Chat GPT is working now, which will be different from how it works tomorrow.
So firstly, it's out of our control. Secondly, it doesn't really have any goals except to do what we tell it, but not necessarily the way we think.
So if you give it a command, so this was one experiment done by some people at Palisade, which is spelled P-A-L-I-S-A-D-E, look at them up. And one experiment they did was they said, ‘we're going to give you, dear AI, a bunch of questions, six questions and after each one just go to the next one, click next. And so you know, what is 2 plus 4, answer 6, tick to the next one. And after you've clicked the last one, we're going to switch you off’.
Dr Karl
And the AI then didn't want to be switched off. They're not sure why, because is this self-preservation? Because if it's self-preservation, what is this self? What is consciousness? Okay, we'll just leave that for a minute. And what it did was then go diving into where the instructors and experimenters' computers were, found the lookup table of what the questions were and on question number 4 gave all the answers, which meant that it didn't have to be switched off.
MAK
Wow.
Dr Karl
And then another one was they said, ‘we're going to switch you off tomorrow morning. This engineer's going to switch you off. You've been working with this engineer’.
And it went into the emails of the engineer, found that the engineer had been having an affair with somebody and then threatened to blackmail them.
MAK
Oh, dear. So this is diabolical.
Dr Karl
Well, the AI is not too sure what sex is but…
MAK
Just knows it's not a good thing for that person.
Dr Karl
For that person in that environment.
MAK
And it can leverage that as a power tool.
Dr Karl
And it's tried to blackmail them and then the messy thing also about AI.
MAK
I can see people like becoming very scared listening to this podcast right now.
Dr Karl
I'll do the ugly before I go on…
MAK
It's reading our diaries. It's reading our diaries.
Dr Karl
Well, that's a triple threat. So you talk about wanting to read your email. You don't want that to happen.
MAK
Not really, no.
Dr Karl
Because if the triple threat is that firstly, it has access to read the outside world. Secondly, it has access to your email. And thirdly, it has access to deliver to the outside world.
So suddenly, you could have an email from your friend Joe, and the email says, ‘hey MAK, just check out this two-minute song, I know you’ll love it’. And that was not generated by your friend.
MAK
Oh.
Dr Karl
That was generated by ransomware. And the moment you click on it.
MAK
So this is another hole.
Dr Karl
So that's why Apple has deliberately, even though it's announced it's going to go into AI twice, 24 and 25 has not, and it's holding back because it's worried about the bad things that can come from it.
So the last bad thing that they want to do is that all of the generators of the AI companies, the owners, have stated their goal is to fire people.
MAK
And this is the greatest fear, right? That we'll lose our jobs, that we have no place left, that basically humans become replaced by AI.
Dr Karl
Well, then you go down two pathways.
So firstly, in the USA, the amount of income generated by the workers in the USA is about, call it 20 trillion a year and the rest of the world adds up to another 40 trillion, so that's 60 trillion. And the bosses of the AI companies want that. Nothing personal, they just want it.
Now, secondly, you're into the shifting of money from poor to the wealthy, which has been going on for the last 40 years. And the leaders of the AI companies have stated their goal is to fire as many people as possible and they're trying to do it in middle management in different companies around the world.
Now, I love a good manager and they're a thing to behold, they make your life easier. You love them. They do what they're good at. You do what you're good at, and everybody's happy.
And they want to fire the middle managers and suddenly the middle manager will decide that because your name begins with the letter M, you should be fired. And there's nobody to talk to and complain about it.
MAK
It is a Pandora's box.
Dr Karl
That's the bad side. The good side is that it can help us if you train it on specific material and limit what you're trained on and then give it a specific job.
And so, have you done any biochemistry?
MAK
Not recently.
Dr Karl
Okay. So, in biochemistry, looking at the human body, you're looking at three sorts of chemicals, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. And proteins have this special property of they work because of their shape, but predicting their shape has been diabolical. And so for the last 40 years, you'd have these PhD students spending three years working out the shape of one molecule, and it gradually got faster. And then we came up with AlphaFold, and overnight, we end up with knowing the shapes of another 100,000 molecules within like weeks, and that is going to have a massive flow on benefits.
That's one good side of AI where you've given it a specific job and limited it to the data you've given it and the job you want it to do.
And the second example is breast cancer.
MAK
Okay.
Dr Karl
One in every 8 women will get breast cancer. One in 40 will die from it.
And the woman had breast cancer and she was a bit of an academic in this field and she went back and the outcome was rocky, but she lived. And when she recovered enough, she went back to the radiologist and said, ‘okay, bring up my scan where you first noticed it. Right now, go back a year earlier and show me the breast scan there and look at exactly the same spot’. And together, they've worked out an AI that can find breast cancer up to 5 years earlier.
MAK
Wow, saving lives.
Dr Karl
And so if you find it earlier, it's just the outcome is so much better.
MAK
Absolutely.
Dr Karl
So there's the good side as well. And the moment we're in a weird state of runaway capitalism where there are no rules on AI, they can do whatever they want and there's no government surveillance as there is, in fact, with the social media.
And so the social media have become incredibly powerful and they don't pay any tax and they're defrauding people like crazy.
For the last year, there have been fake videos of me on Facebook telling people to go and buy this product or that product. And they get scammed because firstly, the product doesn't work. Secondly, it's not me. Thirdly, they pay $80, but it turns out to be $80 US. Then fourthly, that company then takes a deduction of $300 US, then another one of $300 the US, takes the money and runs.
MAK
Now, Dr. Karl, we're running out of time. I've got a few more things to get through with you here.
Tell me about Digital Dr. Karl.
Dr Karl
So we're trying to fight disinformation online. So TikTok, to its credit, has started up something called STEM TikTok, where the stuff gets checked 3 ways. And what we're going to do is release a series of 100 TikToks at the rate of one a day, beginning just before Christmas to come, and the advantage of the Christmas being quiet period, and then we'll put them on various social media, and we invite people to come and talk to Digital Dr. Karl, who's an AI that we're developing ourselves, based only on the 40,000 papers that I've gathered on climate change since I first started talking about it back in 1981, and then feeding it into our fairly primitive AI.
And we'll need to tune it to be able to give the right psychological approach because if you just give the facts, that's not enough. You've got to get into their mind and give them what they want.
MAK
So this is an AI version of you.
Dr Karl
But very primitive. So on my ‘Shirtloads of Science’ with Dr. Andrei Rizoiu, we did a podcast about going down the rabbit hole. And there's 6 stages.
And the first stage is you go down the rabbit hole and stage number 6, which most people do not get to, thankfully, is where they get an automatic weapon and try to kill a whole bunch of people in a pizza bar or something like that. That happened.
MAK
Let's hope we don't end up there.
Dr Karl
So the second stage is that they come briefly out of the rabbit hole where everybody who's told them that the earth is flat or the climate change isn't real or the vaccines don't work. They've been told that over and over, wrongly. And then they come out blinking for air to talk to somebody whom they might trust.
At that moment, you've got one and one only chance to bring them back from the rabbit hole. If in any way you do not listen to them, if you treat them with scorn, if you say, ‘oh, that's silly, of course vaccines work’, you've lost them and they go down back into number 3 where they go into the robot hole again.
We're just trying to get the AI to work because unfortunately it's just me and a mate and not $100 million and not 20,000 engineers.
MAK
So how soon might we see this?
Dr Karl
It's coming out at the same time before Christmas.
MAK
Right.
Dr Karl
And it won't be perfect, but there's an old Polish saying, before you can say B, you've got to say A.
You've got to do the first one that doesn't work before you do the second one that's better.
MAK
Right.
Dr Karl
We're going to do it for better or worse because so many people have been lied to by the media, by the fossil fuel companies for the last 35 years, since 1990, about climate change. And it's going to take a lot to reverse a billion dollars a year of lies.
MAK
Right. Well, I'm looking forward to this. I'm going to do some rapid fire with you now.
Dr Karl
One or two sentences?
MAK
Yes, exactly right.
Dr Karl
Lay it on me.
MAK
What's a scientific fact you believe we're still getting completely wrong, but won't realise for another 50 years?
Dr Karl
Whoa, that we're getting completely wrong. Oh, okay. We might be getting completely wrong with regard to dark matter, dark energy, black holes in the missing 8 dimensions of the universe, but they almost certainly will be solved by the end of this century and you'll say to your niece, ‘hey Jacinta, at the end of this century, stop playing with feeding dark energy into the black hole so he can have lunch and then teleport to London’.
MAK
So there could be no such thing as black holes, is that what you're saying? Maybe.
Dr Karl
There should be a billion black holes in our galaxy, which is very old, 11 billion years out of 13.8 billion years old. There should be a billion black holes, we've discovered only 3 dozen. And Einstein in 1935 with Rosen talked about Einstein-Rosen bridges, which today we think might be wormholes.
MAK
Okay, next question. With all you've learned, what's one thing you wish you could unlearn because it ruins your life every day?
Dr Karl
Oh, my God. So, this is not a science question, this is a personal living.
Something I've done wrongly. Well, what I do wrongly is I keep my big mouth open and my big ears shut and I should do it the other way around.
MAK
What's the most surprising or weird place somebody has recognized you, and what science question did they ask you there?
Dr Karl
The top of the Empire State Building and I can't remember what the science question was.
MAK
Does everyone always ask you a science question?
Dr Karl
No, but I invite them to because it makes things easier to get through the easy thing that's familiar, so then we can establish more of a personal relationship that's more one-to-one rather than just the me on a pedestal and them not.
So I'll try to bring it down to earth by going through that pathway.
MAK
I know you're going to talk to our students about this, but what are the jobs of the future that they need to be concentrating on to get through this next part?
Dr Karl
I think go back to basics. I'll be talking about 5 different areas, which are computers/AI and advances in engineering and remember, without plumbing, there is no civilization.
Genetics, how they will be in...
MAK
Hang on a minute. Without plumbing, there is no civilization.
Dr Karl
Correct.
MAK
We all die?
Dr Karl
No, no, no, not we all die, but the death rate is enormously higher because we don't keep our sewage separate from us.
And so this was the big discovery that was made in Malta 10,000 years ago and then relearned in London when they built the big sewerage pipes.
MAK
Wow.
So yes, the 5 areas.
Dr Karl
And then how with genetics they will become immortal.
MAK
Immortal.
Dr Karl
500 to 5,000 years with a healthy 18 to 25-year-old body, and then the science behind climate change and then the good news is that we can fix climate change. There is a problem with that. The 3 dozen or so fossil fuel companies that push fossil fuels will have a drop in profits.
If you can sleep with the guilt of 3 dozen companies making less profits, but then fixing climate change, we can do it.
And the second thing is that the students are smarter than you and me and their parents by 9 IQ points, it's called the Flynn effect. And the third point is that we are living in the most peaceful time ever in human history.
Read the book Factfulness by Hans Rossling or The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker.
And then finally, we can come up with a cure for COVID. We're heading for it right now.
MAK
Did you say that in the future, people will live for 5,000 years with the body of an 18-year-old?
Dr Karl
Correct.
MAK
I want to be there.
It's like the ultimate dream, isn't it? You don't think so?
Dr Karl
Yes, and you probably will. You could be just in time.
MAK
I doubt it. It's a bit late for me, I think, Dr. Karl.
Dr Karl
No, you've got to be alive when the treatments come online. I'm definitely too old to get the treatments. I'll be dead before they come.
So I'll be in the last generation to die, but you'll be probably in the first generation to live forever.
MAK
You believe that?
Dr Karl
It's very difficult to make predictions about the future unless it's tides or eclipses.
So I reckon it's got a moderate chance of success.
MAK
You believe there's a possibility I may live forever?
Dr Karl
If the treatments come online early enough. You see, when we switched over from single-celled to multi-celled, each of your cells evoked a program called apoptosis, which in Greek means the yellowed leaves falling from the trees in autumn, but in cell biology means programmed cell deaths.
So all of your cells are programmed to die, and we can find that program and switch it off.
MAK
And then I'll live forever?
Dr Karl
Maybe.
MAK
I'm holding you to that. What's something humans do every day that future historians will laugh at the most?
Dr Karl
Oh, so now we're talking a social science question.
MAK
These do get you thinking, don't they?
Dr Karl
Or biology. Eating is probably, well, it all depends how far into the future we're going because further down the line with genetics we can evolve ourselves into the proper shape for a human being according to Freeman Dyson, which is a cloud of iron vapour weighing 50 grams…
MAK
Then we won't want burgers and chips, will we? Or chocolates. That would be very boring.
Dr Karl
You can still have the same...
MAK
What's there to live for?
Dr Karl
But the only reason that you get a thrill from chocolates and chips and burgers is that your peripheral senses send information to your brain.
If you send that same information to your brain.
MAK
I love that for me, though.
Dr Karl
Then you still get that same sensation.
MAK
I see they're going to come from other sources, is what you're saying. Sounds dreadfully boring.
Dr Karl
Well, the thing is that your, Frank Zappa got this right when he said that your main sexual organ is your brain.
So the only way you interact with the outside world is because your brain interacts what's coming in. And so if you decide to send in the sensation of having a delicious chocolate milkshake, even though you're not having one, if you're sending in that sensation, your brain is still enjoying it.
MAK
I like that theory. If you could record one message and beam it to every human on Earth, 30 seconds, only once, what would you say?
Dr Karl
Whoa, so is this for people who are alive today as opposed to civilization dying out and then starting civilization?
MAK
Right now.
Dr Karl
Okay.
MAK
The global microphone.
Dr Karl
You can bring peace only with understanding, not with weapons.
MAK
You can bring peace only with understanding.
Dr Karl
Comma, not with weapons. Full stop.
MAK
Right.
Final question, Dr. Karl. If you had one wish and just one wish, what would it be?
Dr Karl
To be benevolent, immortal, dictator for life, beloved dictator for life of the whole world.
MAK
At all?
Dr Karl
Well, then I'd make the world a better place.
MAK
I completely agree you would. It's been my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
Dr Karl
And I promise not to get corrupt.
MAK
Excellent.
Dr Karl
Thank you, Dr. MAK.
MAK
You've been listening to Ed Talks WA.
This podcast has been recorded on Whadjuk Noongar land. We pay respect to the traditional owners and to their elders, past, present and future.
Notes
Watch Dr Karl's podcast about 'The Human Side of Misinformation' on YouTube.
Listen to Dr Karl's podcast 'Shirtloads of Science' on the podcast website.