The Arc of Communications – The Inevitability Curve EP5

This is Textron tv. Hello, my name's Chris Blas. I am your host once again for another episode of The Inevitability Curve, where we take interesting topics and try to look at where they came from, what they look like now, and perhaps what they look like going, uh, forward.

Uh, to do this, we bring in interesting folks like we have today. My good friend Peter Dukes. Peter, how are you?

I, I am well, I'm jealous of your sunshine. It's now rainy London and summer is over, but that's what the earth does. It tilts and we're hitting the autumn equinox this weekend.

So things that can only get darker. Well, for the record, I miss London. I need to stomp around the streets with you.

I, I think there's a scene in Ted Lasso showing some seats that, uh, streets that you and I walked down. So Deb, no, they're often filming around here, just so people dunno. I live, I live by the river, which is a line from London's burning, London's calling mother.

And, uh, I live South River and near the tape, modern and London Bridge and all that. And they're often filming around here. And there's a street.

There's a great picture of us together, isn't there? Um, on America Street, but they're often all the knives out. They're often blocky off streets around here 'cause it's got this sort of gritty, you know, warehouse locations and the southern moba fortune just, just sending off the streets.

Anyway, so yes, I live in a photogenic place, but not as photogenic as Eucharist. Well, and tha and it's, it's all good. But that sort of takes us down the path we're to, so in the Green Room, we're talking about what we're gonna talk about today.

Uh, and you know, you're, you've been involved in communications and theater and drama and media, you know, in many ways. You know, for many years you're currently, uh, you know, founder, co-founder and editor of Byline Times, uh, great newspaper. Uh, one of the, one of the, the metrics of that, I think I shared this with you.

I'm coming back from London some years ago, and I'm talking to the person on the seat next to me, and they just threw your name out. The only person I'm reading now is is Peter Dukes and Byline. It's like, really?

It was fairly early in the Yeah, I, not $50 I paid in worked. Uh, we were, so we getting quite influential. We were cited in the FBI warrants of the Doppel gang.

I think so, yeah. We are, we're having an impact. So You reached an inter interesting point, and you're also a student in history, you know, like myself and you and I, you know, got involved in political communication things around 2008, which is another story we may not get into today.

But we live all the way back, like literally all the way back. You know, I love, uh, the cave paintings in lasso. I mean, this is one of the wonderful things that we've discovered during my lifetime, is that those, those cave paintings I've seen since a child, it was amazing records of, I think, you know, 26,000 years ago, you know, it was very long ago in human history, but we lit them up with electric lights and then some smart bulb in the last decade said they didn't have electric lights.

They had flickering torch light. And it turns out all those grooves on those cave paintings, you put a flickering light on it, and it's animation. This, they've also three DI think it's shove the other cave where the paintings are done around the shape of the rocks of these animals.

And so they're not only into, you know, animation, but 3D modeling. Um, but at the fact that, you know, and obviously know, we know that culture existed way before that. And paintings, there are older paintings.

Uh, but because you know, the way what with the ice age, the truth of the ice, that, you know, the first Europe, Western Europe has settled, well, had been settled many times, but after the last ice age, 30,000 years ago. And that's where you find in northern Spain and Southern France, all this art by homeo sapiens or whatever. Uh, but there was art.

They now think in neandertal. But I, I just use that example as why I have a problem with information theory and art as just information for start there. You know, often they're just talking about the image, the simplified information is that, uh, you know, antelope is that wolf is that and miss the flickering torch light that actually it's paint in such a way it's animated.

There is the con the context of, um, you know, the 3D modeling round that rhino and the shape of the rock. But there's something else that's going on there. And that there's lots of information that's passed down archeologically, um, uh, uh, which is not intentional.

And you know, there's a lot of old geology. It's not really intentional unless you believe God did it by the way and put the dinosaurs there. And there is a distinct, to me category difference between, we used to call it, um, uh, between art and artifacts, between significance and meaning, or other meaning and significance.

I, there's a difference between, you find a footprint in the sand of an early homo sapiens running away. They, they weren't contemporaneous with T-Rex, they wouldn't be running away from T-Rex, but they might been running away from a saber-tooth tiger or woolly mammoth or something that's unintentional. But when in Sauvey or Las scale, those people, and they were largely women, uh, or a lot of them were women.

But you know this at the moment, I'll tell you why. Uh, they were sending a message. They were, as you say, communicating, but there's an intention.

There was an intelligence communicating to another intelligence, which is very different from, you know, just finding out stuff by what people left behind. Um, why we know they're women is that one of the key things you find in early K paintings, I think going back 80,000 years, even longer, is people stenciling their hands. It's favorite thing to do.

And what is being said there is, I was here, you know, it's like graffiti. I was, I existed. You, you know, there is a shadow of me which will persist.

And looking at the structure of those hands and the shape, and, you know, you can tell sometimes by the length of pone effects of finger length, a lot of them were women, which rather, you know, counteract idea of art. So, I don't know, Chris, you know, when we talk about information theory and there's that James Gly book, which I really admire, then Peters out to me, and I think Noah, you know, the guy wrote, um, mankind and you know, her Deus has written. And the next book is about information theory.

That what levels of information are being communicated. There's digital information. You can, you know, in Turing's machine, it could emulate e every other machine.

Um, the universal UTM is the, it could emulate everything. Mechanical could be emulated by a computer eventually. And we see that sort of in our smartphone.

But can art be imitated? 'cause art is about the shape of the voc and the flickering light and the intentionality and about atoms rather election. It is non-digital as far as goes, the brain does not work on off switches, does it?

The synapses have three switches that kind of on off, maybe, you know, and they're networked in a way. And I, I worry that this, I have to think about it more. I love to write about more that our emphasis on the brain as a computer.

Steam pinker used to, uh, make that analogy 20, 30 years ago. Um, and looking at language, information processing in the same way as looking at a machine is a little bit frankensteiny in that, you know, in the early, if you look at 19th century and 20th century literature, it's obsessed by robots looking like humans, right? That they'll walk around.

And we know the biggest robots around are, you know, driving cars or dropping bombs on mushrooms. And, you know, the robot is nothing like, there's not a human analogy really, between these robotized actions, except when you come to accountancy and law, basically, law and accountants are robots anyway. But, um, uh, and this brings to AI is that this is not, this is the perfection of, or the improvement of information gathering and distribution.

I accept that, but it is not the higher level processing information. I always thought of it like primary and tertiary industry. The, the primary industry, like your oil drilling or your gas extraction is data processing, is getting the information.

And then the secondary process is turning that into knowledge. You know, so what, you know, what is this data set? So what's it, what knowledge does it of human beings?

How does that help you cure cancer? Or, you know, distribute the right amount of supplies one way, but there's a tertiary level, which is wisdom and context. And, uh, as a newspaper man who was a, I still am a dramatist, I'm working at a big drama for Sky TV about Daniel Morgan murder, that's not the matter.

I realized that you need that raw data, you need that information processed into knowledge, but who processes it into wisdom? Um, and if you are looking at the primitive forms of data processing and expression of the cave painters, they had very low level ways of amassing data about herds and, uh, you know, why the sun rose and all that stuff. But they had amazing tertiary level expression, you know, from the permits to the caves.

And I don't think anything in, um, this, I'm sorry, it's a bit of a peon, but I've got half an hour, I'm gonna have a little bit of a peon. Anything in the massive increase of data processing, the revolution in production, distribution, exchange of knowledge of art, of journalism, that's happened since the, you know, in the last 20 years, 30 years, which I wrote about in 1994. So that's 30 years ago.

This would, I said, like, you, we all did, Chris, this is rev. This is a revolution, uh, between, you know, it's of production, distribution, exchange, very Marxist terms would lead to these, the end of hierarchies and the growth of peer to peer and the rise of democracy. Little realizing that most of it used for porn, lulls, cats.

And now this information, because that higher level process of the relevance of this, what we're communicating, why we're communicating, uh, you know, is not being looked at. Well, that's a, an amazingly perfect segue. So let me take, uh, you know, porn laws, cats and disinformation, right?

And, and pull us, you know, so we've agreed, I think here that, you know, I think, I think there arguments to be made, you can go back to early life communicating this with, you know, with chemical signatures and so forth. But, you know, in the, in the human context, we're looking at hundreds of thousands, half a million years, maybe a million years of people thinking about communicating and doing it in certain ways and developing habits and patterns and results. And we see this in artifacts in the last couple tens of thousands of years in cave paintings.

As, as we're saying here. Then we get to, in those terms, the near recent past, I mean, you're right around the corner from where Shakespeare literally had the globe, and last couple hundred years we've gotten printing presses and, you know, by stages, mass communications that, that the cave painters couldn't have imagined. And that leads us up to today very directly.

These lines, I think, you know, are are, are founded on each other, uh, directly. Yeah. So you go, yeah, you're right.

And I'm, so you used to walk by my street just there, uh, Charles Dickens. In fact, the pub's called, no, it used to be called the Charles Dickens called now called Mac and Sons. But he used to walk, his dad was down the road, uh, in Debters Prison in Marshall Sea.

So he used to walk down my street and you saw the revolution of the, um, Elizabethan era, an early jacket ian era, which was suddenly a working class, a middle class in London who'd pay to go and see shows nightly, which were in the English language, which were both highbrow and accessible at car chases. And, uh, you know, Solis, uh, that was an amazing moment. And it's a bit like Greek drama, the crystallization around the city, the ability to fund such an organization, get that critical mass of people who are interested, fairly literate.

Britain was very early, quite literate. Uh, and then with Dickens, you get the, not only the rise of the printing press, which of course 200 years of religious war, and you got the D serial, the author as celebrity, a lot of women now having particularly women, but people having leisure time and literacy to consume this thing called the weekly chapter of the novel, made him a millionaire. Then he lost his money.

They had to go to America and do tours. So then you go to, of course, which like Shakespeare originated in, around here were the brothels, the stews, and bear baiting pits out of that sort of sort of marginal society, born and walls, cats and love. Yeah.

So the, and so out of the Peep Show and end of Peer Entertainment arose cinema and movies, Lumia Brothers, who's the other famous one, who, his name escapes me at the moment, and they started doing documentaries or weird movies of there's moon smiling and these special effects. There was Lumia and the other people, one went very realistic, you know, train coming towards You. The other one, uh, did, you know, just weird special effects.

You have both the fantasy and the documentary coming out of a marginal bit of society. Then out of that, obviously you get television and radio as sort of part of the beginning of that mass electronic or, or, or mass production of, um, image and sound. And then you get the other countercultural.

Bill Gates was in the act. All these people hanging around with their, you know, that bit overplayed, but the Homebrew computers, uh, another marginal technology then becomes central. Um, and yeah, so in that way we, I mean, you know it, and you see it every day.

I see it, you know, you sit on the train, everybody's just a clued to their phones, whatever they're doing. And somebody once did this funny thing is he'd got all these, uh, Edward Hopper pictures, and instead of books, he put phones and iPads in them. And so all these sort people, very romantic to us.

They're reading a book and they're, well, look, they look at iPad, how terrible. But is it that different everyone would be reading the newspaper 20 years ago. Now they're on the phones, they're probably reading it, they're probably communicating for their loved ones.

They may be sharing disinformation, they may be trolling somebody or, but it's not profoundly different, is it? No. Right.

And this is, you know, one of my favorite, uh, Canadian authors, Donald Jack, you know, has a, a, a historically big official series about a World War I, Canadian, Canadian World War I, uh, fighting Ace, and I was these wonderful, you know, historical tropes. But, uh, one of my favorite lines is, you know, talking about how he's, he's, you know, falling into women and alcohol and trying to be a, an upstanding guy. And he says the next thing he is gonna be reading novels.

Yes. Right? Because, because, you know, pulp fiction, right?

And as we look at these spans at time, and, and particularly, you know, you know, we're living in a, in an anglicized post anglicized world, and you're actually English, which oddly, oddly is, uh, sort of related. And we have the Industrial Revolution. And as I sit here thinking about it, I think you could make an argument, at least for, for conversational purposes, that the Victorian era, you know, leading direct, you know, coming from before and leading directly into the Industrial Revolution, you know, gives us a really good model for really intentionally weaponized influence campaigns, misinformation campaigns that we're still untangling today that probably have a lot to, to say about, you know, the more, more, you know, timely issues people are worried about in this entry.

Yeah. I think one good example of that is that looking at Elon Musk and, and, and, and Twitter X is, yeah, here's a rich man wanting to have his say. Now, every newspaper was a rich man, invariably, maybe the Asto Nancy Asta was different, wanting to have, they say, 'cause they never made many money until a brief window of about a hundred, 150 years.

When the time starts selling advertising on the front page, it became independent. It actually made money, right? Uh, otherwise journalism, uh, has been funded.

You know, the, the print price never paid anything except the cost of the printing it to pay for the journalism. Writing was advertising. And that's model's being disrupted, ruined by Google and Facebook and others.

So now you've got rich people taking over media organizations here, funding a loss for political influence in a way, though either Musk, you know, is only running a platform, and we are the, we are the authors. Reality is he's gaming us to have his say. And we're back to quite a historical model.

Hearst Pulitzer, you know, uh, Murdoch, we had Beaver book. He had, we had two Beaver book in North Cliff was so influential a hundred years ago in the cabinet, in, in, in newspapers. The two newspaper groups.

They became members of the cabinet. You know, so Elon Musk wanting to run this Lord Ingham. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you know, Rupert Murdoch's dad was called Lord Southcliffe. 'cause he was very influential in British papers even then. So on that score, you're right, there's the p shows.

Um, what I think is slightly different is that when, and I don't know what you feel about this, you have a better answer to me. You know, the classic line, when the product's free, you are the product. What, though, they could do it to a certain extent, and they did readers, polls and things like that.

A classic, uh, broad channel broadcast for top down. We produce a newspaper, TV show, radio show, couldn't really gather the data of their readers and listeners. So, and, and viewers.

So what we have now, the BBCC, they do polls. They could do, you know, advertisers would know their Nielsen ratings and what people liked and which cheeses they liked also. But they couldn't go through every bit of your data and emotionally profile you and sell on that data to third parties sometimes for advertising targeting, increasingly for political targeting.

And I think that level of what, um, you know, is called surveillance capitalism. So I think it's the, just to, just to close this, I, I think in a way what we're talking about is, is that while the technology changes and is liberating for a while back to Shakespeare, back to Cape Painting, there's probably a, an oligarch in the Cape painting scenes while, uh, especially with, you know, social media, it becomes liberating and kind of outside. And as citizen then people realize money is to be made.

And then monopoly starts happening. And, and somehow it's particularly powerful, uh, with anything that's got a network effect is that I'm on blue sky, right? But how, how do you build an equivalent to Twitter that quickly?

'cause you're only on Twitter, 'cause other people are on Twitter, right? That's the only reason. And, and, and so the peer-to-peer element actually allows this very flat thing, but a very high, at the top of it, one person pushing the algorithm his way.

Um, I think there's a, a, a equivalent on that in other sectors. Uh, and, and what, uh, what's his name? Va Farkis calls.

You have surveillance call capitalism, which sho off, uh, she talks about. But then what, um, the Greek economist Rif Farkis talks about is cloud capitalism, IE it is nowhere. So the days of standard oil, when, you know, they had that monopoly and, uh, long comes, uh, the other Roosevelt thi or Roosevelt, he does his trust busting standard oil, had its trains going through New York State had its minds in Pennsylvania.

He could do something about it if it's up in the cloud. Where is it? Well, I think, you know, the, the, the classic He, and, and it is, it is one of these, you know, silly quotes that actually is real, you know, the, the classic story of, uh, I think it was an American ambassador asking a Chinese ambassador what they thought of the, the, uh, uh, French Revolution.

And the answer was, it's too early to tell Sure and lie. Yes, that's right. And, and I, you know, I, if I worry about anything, it's this one.

You know, I believe that, you know, the arc of history drives towards, you know, uh, democracy and freedoms and in improving, you know, state for human individuals in the world, right? Um, I could be wrong, maybe, you know, and because when we look at long timeframes, we could be talking about like forever thousands and thou, tens of thousands of years from now. It sounds silly, we have a hard time with those timeframes, but tens of, we can look back tens of thousands of years.

Sure. Tens of thousands of years from now will happen. Will we live in a world that is, you know, and it's easy to forecast now is dominated by a handful of rich individuals and everybody else is a slave.

Is that the steady state or are we driving any other direction? And this is sort of how I come down with the whole inevitability curve idea. It's not any one thing.

But I think what we see in these patterns from cave paintings through Shakespeare, through, you know, the French Revolution and so forth, is that as information moves around, there's a whole lot of not wanna, that drives things. And when kind of everybody doesn't wanna, whatever it is we're talking about, well, all as a population and cultures tend away from it. So there's so much dystopian stuff.

Yeah. It doesn't happen. Yeah.

But, and down, down this whole path from, again, Shakespeare, you look at this, at that era and say, oh, I'm a political power. I have an interest. I will influence that in my own nefarious ways to guide.

And then, you know, through the, through, uh, things that we touched on, you know, the, the British expansion, Victorianism and so forth, getting that message uniformly, you know, spread around the world. You know, the, the early printing and journalism you talked about to the, the empires of today, are we driving, continuing down that road? And I'll throw out, um, so where are we in time?

20 minutes and we should move into the future? 'cause I have, as a technology person, as a cybersecurity person, given the stuff I'm working on right now with cybersecurity and critical infrastructure and supply chains, I see a future where we have to have technology that makes transparency appropriate, transparency really fast. I'm like, right now, I wanna know right now where my information is, who's touched it, where it's been, is that being handled by all the agreements, all the way up the information chain?

You know? Yes. So you're an actual journalist.

I say something to you, we agree, agree on how that information's gonna be handled. I wanna see that. Or if somebody, I agree to pay my taxes.

And I agree that the local city council and the province and the state and the nation get to spend that in various ways, you know, governed by various rules. But I don't wanna have to make a hobby out of it to figure out one piece of that. I wanna see it all right now.

And I think that sort of transparency may on one hand instill the kind of trust I think we need as societies and may also make it harder and harder to get the nefarious benefit by dominating as, as history has shown us, you know, being rich and owning a, a, a channel. That's very good point. I, you know, and its generational thing, 2016, you saw it in Brexit and with the Trump vote, it is my generation internet unsavvy or, and disinformation unaware who are most swung by the dis disinformation going around there.

Um, so, so this is always a, a huge paradox to me. Yes, you're right. As the problem is, as information becomes more of it, right?

Who are the trusted gatekeepers? How do you interpret it? And what happens, and especially happened with Covid, is people can't discriminate between, don't have a scientific training between an interesting story and a complete pack of lies, which will kill them.

And why I am more Optim, I'm I side with you on that optimism, is that, uh, actually, I'm telling you an anecdote, somebody one day, a young female journalist of color rang me, oh, said, can I work for bilateral internship? And I, we spoke on, I said, let's have a chat on the phones about a week ago. And I said, I'm really in interested in investigative journalism.

I go, that's great. You know, and the stories I'm told, I thought you'd say something about racism or somebody said that. I think particularly around the vaccine.

Okay, uh, what about Bill Geld? Well, I think it's got lots of questions to answer. And I'm going, and she said, you know, nobody tells these stories.

I've done my own research dread words, I've done my own research. Uh, you know, and it was very unusual for a young person because I think, you know, they tend to be a bit more savvy about Ocam razor, where's the sourcing? But I tell you this, Chris, I think the thing that always amazes me, I've been on a couple of flights recently, I'm looking out the window.

They're building a big skyscraper cantilevered, uh, two blocks. I wish I could turn the camera around and show you, shall I do it quickly anyway? Oh sure, why not?

There you go. It's a, alright, can you see through? You see, look, oh yeah, there it is, light Justin.

And you can see that's the, a lovely building behind it. They're gonna block it out. But the thing about that is, you know, and they're building two more after that.

Every micrometer is measured. Every they come with their surveying things. The, you know, it's gotta be transport on times.

The beams have to, it's made of wood, by the way. It's one of the first buildings in New York, I think. Totally made of wood.

The floors are made of wood coming from Canada. The amount of truth of accuracy to get a plane to fly, to get the GPS to work, to get the protocols that I could talk to you down this, a whole world is constructed on millions and millions of agreed truths. You don't have an opinion about an IP protocol.

You can't have an opinion about, oh, I want to cantilever at this world, the glass. Maybe it's that big. And yet out of the benefit of all these millions of agreed facts, which allow us to talk, we talk s**t.

Um, and so, you know, there is that point, and I've met a lot of covid skeptics. One used to write for us. I see this, you know, these just lies basically.

And you know, when it comes to science and covid, they, you know, you know, it becomes very dangerous. It's dangerous enough when it's Trump, Russia or someone who's committed atrocity there or whatever. But you can't, you know, we know that, you know, you're gonna die if you eat deadly nightshades rather than blackbirds.

We know if you go, it's just my opinion as a pilot where the airport is, you're gonna die and kill everybody. You know it. But I, I do think there is that crucial moments happen.

And maybe this transparency helps whereby, you know, you could know your village. Uh, and we've had this with cities coming. That was a massive happened.

Obviously, you know, there was huge cities in, uh, uh, and uh, in, you know, and in Egypt five, 6,000 years ago, London was the biggest city in Europe 500 years ago. But authority, some and, and modernly churches, you know, posh people, lords whatever kings they had authority. And Shakespeare shows, you know, where that goes.

And that's probably why it was a radical force for the spread of, and more enlightenment values and certainly getting the English language better did help the empire then helped our colonial cover suit quite well after, after they've peeled away rather, unfortunately. Um, but that, you know, that sense of, you know, that you can't know anything. Now, one of the votes, uh, in the Brexit referendum, one of the senior leave, um, campaigners who was a minister said, we've had enough of experts.

So that mismatch between, you know, you, I mean, I can vaguely understand how a car works. Not anymore, actually used to. I could change, you can't change the light bulb.

I think a lot of people get their heads around a steam engine, certainly know how, uh, ox team would work. You know, as the world gets more complicated, the dangers are that we, we don't grasp it. We don't see the transfer, we don't see the audit trail of information.

We don't trust it. And then we fall into these very simplistic world economic foundation lizards, you know, wokes, uh, that that dis And, and I want space lizards, but I'm pretty sure they're not here. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and so what are the calculations?

So is there a terminal? What's, what's, what's, remind me of the name inevitability, uh, Inevitability curve. Yes.

Is there inev ability curve of It is a bit of a tongue twister. Yes. So Drink, no, no.

But is there, of ex is there a reverse Moore's law? Is there a way Moore's law is now, you know, over, it's not accelerating the same rate, you know, getting to the limits of nano computing and quantum computing that you keep on growing that sort of, but um, is there an information overload with empires? And Paul Kennedys talk about this.

You know, there's the end Imperial overstretch, the classic, once they had 40 bases, the Romans collapsed. The America's got 40 bases, you know, you could look at their naval reach their peer reach, and there becomes a point where we get the diseconomies at scale. Are we getting some huge diseconomy of information?

Uh, and would that explain why we're alone in the universe? Because one of the theories is that why we haven't been evis by Indians is obviously impossibilities of distance. You know, you know, the nearest had pool planet is probably too light years away.

That's traveling at the speed of a light. And we can travel 30,000 miles an hour, whatever it is, which is way short. And then still people fall apart.

So, but also the coterm the problem of co termism. So what, uh, some people think is yes, you've got these billions of millions, billions of stars, millions of planets. Now you've got quite a low, you've got chance of life, some kind of replication formula there.

Intelligent life, much more difficult. 'cause you tend to have like mitochondria emerging with amedia. You need sort of some fusion to happen, provide the extra energy.

But yeah, that one probably happen in millions of times. The chances us, given the universe is 14 billion years old, are unlikely to be co-term. This why?

Because the estimate of the lifetime of civilization is a maximum a million years. So 14 billion years. Right?

I know you maybe disagree with this, but the idea that, you know, you let alone have the technology or the space transport to communicate with them. 'cause it still take, you know, two years to get radio signal back forwards and back. The, the civilization will be live at the same time.

So that's where the big numbers come in to sort of ask you. And the fact that we haven't been visited by aliens would lend one to the assumption, either through ecological change. But you would've thought if they were smart enough, intelligent enough and had enough technology, they could overcome that or recolonize.

But actually, and I look at Elon Musk's plan for recolonization, and I can see humanity ending quite quickly. Well, you, the, the, this, this, uh, episode is gonna happen way sooner than I would like it to. But, you know, this is an interesting one to, to have the last exchange on.

'cause you know, I, I have, I have believed in every step. I, I believed in a lot of conspiracy theories in my life that makes sense on the, and you get inside them and you, you know me, I get really enthusiastic and for long I usually find, but, but it doesn't work anymore. And the, the aliens, you know, obviously it's everything you said, it's a big universe.

There seem to be amino acids that formed spontaneously and nebulous by high energy particles. And it's, you, it's, the pieces are all around. But I've, uh, personally I've been approaching the rare earth hypo, you know, hypothesis regretfully ly.

But you know, I think I, you touched on it. We used 80% of the, the habitable time on this planet to get one version of sentience. Um, if it took 110%, we wouldn't get there.

Right? And maybe we, maybe we on average happen fairly quickly. I think intelligent life might be vanishingly rare.

It doesn't seem to be any in this galaxy. No sign anywhere else. And there's, there's, you know, relatively conservative mathematics that can have you say, odds are having two in one visible volume of, of space is probably low, uh, low order.

But I think we're gonna find this out. Um, you know, I I, I don't expect to live thousands of years. Uh, but I hope to see in a, in a couple thousand years, um, see that, uh, we've sort of figured this one out, right?

And I think this issue is key. 'cause if it is a forever cycle of, you know, Shakespearean drama where it's just gonna be the time take over. And so that's not sustainable.

And there are lots of, of end points. But I think these, I think we are driving today these conversations. You and I have them all the time.

Lots of folks, not just information geeks like you and I, our friends and family and the quote unquote regular folks. They would be happier with, uh, a a simpler model, you know, where you can actually have some reasonable trust in the information you actually get. And everybody's grumpy.

All my friends on all the extremes are, would just like to have a little better transparency so they could, you know, get really angry about something or not. Um, And I think that's the cure to the non of it. The, the inevitability curve is that we inevitably progress, we inevitably decline or blow up.

I mean, that's a lot of the interest in Israel Palestine through evangelicals is for the rapture. A lot of people already. Bob actually didn't end up writing it, but it was going to, after my first book, write about the images at the end.

How we all long for the narrative of the end. You know, we'd like to be the last, we'd like nobody to survive after us. Uh, and uh, what is high Of the box, the story, where does this, how the story end?

Yeah, Yeah, exactly. So there is a, you know, it's up to play for, is it inevitable? To survive is neither, neither.

And just back to your main point, that self-correction, I completely agree. And I've seen people deradicalize, when you're told no, this information, they got that fact wrong. How can all the scientists in the world, 30,000 all agree on a conspiracy to be Bill Gates?

They Can't agree on lunch. Yeah, exactly. And surely one of them told the stories, they'd make a fortune because we'd, we'd publish it, we'd pay them.

It's like that famous story about all the, you know, Jewish people in New York on a text not to go into the World Trade Center on nine 11. You know, like, well, I'm sure somebody would leak that text. Um, uh, so the, you know, if you, somehow that's learning, isn't it?

It's error correction. And that only comes from what you're talking about, transparency. I got, and I've done it wrong.

I've retweeted a fake, a fake image, you know, and you go, and it's probably the best moment we can do. I've got that wrong. That is not reliable.

I got a bit of false information there. I mustn't do that again. And it's, and, and hopefully eventually when these cultural wars decline, it isn't a matter of, oh, you know, maga personal lib, you know, owning them for getting it wrong.

It becomes a different process of we all get things wrong. Uh, how can we all learn and not do it wrong the next time? And you know, then when I look at this building going up, you know, there, nobody dies anymore.

And construction sites in New York in the thirties or around here, people are dying the dread. Very few. I have a very quiet street, has traffic, calming cars can't go miles.

So they're faster than 30 miles an hour. I drive my bike, everything's got better. I mean, there's no fumes.

'cause we've got ulus thing put in by sunny calm and, and after smoking's banned indoors, I lack occasional cigar. Don't mind that. Gonna ban it outdoors in pubs.

I don't mind that because actually people are living longer and healthier. And science statistics, clarity of information, um, gets us, we've learned how to learn And I think we're going to continue to do so. So thank you Peter, for the time today.

Yeah, for all the, uh, time over the years for, uh, listening to be sing karaoke in London, I apologize for that. So thank you for putting on the brave face. We still haven't recovered actually.

No, no. I, I can only imagine. So thank you everyone else for your time today.

Look forward to talking to you next time. Have a good tomorrow. I.