Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

The real AI alignment problem is not technical. It is moral. You cannot align a superintelligence to human values if humans cannot agree on what those values are, and you cannot get that agreement without a level of global cooperation we have never managed before. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

The Tower of Babel is the AI parable nobody is reading. Technology that outpaces wisdom fragments the people building it. The Fermi paradox offers the grimmer version: civilizations that reach the capacity to blow themselves up typically do. Robert Wright has been watching this longer than almost anyone, he was reporting on neural networks in 1983, and his conclusion is not that the machines will fail the test. It is that we will.

Wright’s book argues that superintelligence is not the danger and AI alignment is not the solution unless it comes with a moral advance. Passing the God test requires something no lab can ship.

What you’ll hear:

-Why Wright thinks p(doom) fails as a scientific concept

-What the binding of Isaac and the Tower of Babel have in common as moral tests

-Why global cooperation is the only thing that can actually slow AI down

-What Lee Smolin’s cosmological natural selection has to do with the Fermi paradox

-What Wright thinks Eastern and Western enlightenment have in common and why it matters now

-Whether there is a role for humanity inside the global brain or only for the machines

“We face the kind of test that God would give.” — Robert Wright

CHAPTERS

00:00 The man who interviewed Hinton in 1983

05:04 The God test and its two meanings

08:36 Religious faith in technological progress

14:10 Hinton then versus Hinton now

19:38 Why slowing AI down requires international cooperation

26:02 How LLMs reverse-engineer the meaning of words

32:08 Brian's Einstein test: can Claude have a happy thought?

40:06 AGI is impossible. Here is why Brian thinks that.

47:04 The Fermi paradox as a moral filter

51:10 What passing the God test actually looks like

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Enter the debate: briankeating.com/ai

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Featured Guest:

The God Test (book): https://thegodtest.net

Robert Wright on Twitter/X: https://x.com/RWrighter

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#RobertWright #AIalignment #superintelligence #FermiParadox #briankeating #intotheimpossible #AI
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A physics professor ran the energy budget on the Nimitz tic-tac. The maneuver needs about a thousand gigawatts, more than ten times every nuclear plant in the United States combined.

Nothing we build survives its own waste heat at that scale. So what was flying?

Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics at the University at Albany and a former NASA scientist who now applies Bayesian statistics to UAP sensor data.

We cover: why a 5,400 g maneuver would turn a pilot into soup, where the energy went when the object stopped and no explosion followed, the 1954 radar measurements nobody wants to talk about, the New Zealand frigate that went dark and adrift in three seconds, and why the records from that deployment stay classified until 2062.

Knuth says the power numbers alone rule out human technology. I push back on whether the sensors agree.

Newsletter, full transcript, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: briankeating.com/aliens

CHAPTERS

00:00 Why this field needs gatekeepers
03:50 How anomalous is anomalous?
06:40 The UFO photo that was a seagull
10:40 Radar clocked them at 19 km/s in 1954
15:00 5,400 g and a body weighing 227 tonnes
19:00 The radar return problem he had not considered
21:45 A gigawatt of waste heat and nowhere to put it
24:30 The 747 chased by something carrier sized
29:00 Why a number without an error bar is worthless
34:30 The NASA job he was not qualified for
37:00 Proxima Centauri in a day and a half
41:00 The warship that lost all power in 3 seconds
46:30 Pushing a column of water that cannot compress
48:45 The light that burned bark off the trees
53:00 What the power numbers rule out
56:00 The 95 percent problem
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This episode is sponsored by Abacus AI agent: agent.abacus.ai/keating

I fed it Carlo's recent papers and asked for the argument, the counterargument, and the evidence that would support or refute each side. Some of the questions and animations in this interview came out of that. It runs the top frontier models in one place, turns a dense PDF into a research report or a presentation with charts, builds interactive dashboards off a spreadsheet, and takes API access if you want it wired into your own tools.

Plans start at $10 a month. My link gets you the first month for $7: agent.abacus.ai/keating

The physicist who built loop quantum gravity says the second law does not say what you were taught it says, and that freedom does not require breaking a single law of nature. Order builds itself. Your head is older than your feet. And neither one is the strangest thing here.

Carlo Rovelli founded the loop quantum gravity program and wrote the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics.

We cover: why oil separating from water is not a violation of entropy, what Galileo got wrong about the one discovery he is most famous for, the paper Einstein published denying gravitational waves, why a chess program that deliberates tells you what your own freedom actually is, and what Rovelli would build with ten years and unlimited money.

“To imagine that to be free you have to violate the laws of nature is stupid.” — Carlo Rovelli

CHAPTERS

00:00 Your head is older than your feet

00:48 Things left alone get ordered. Who ordered them?

07:00 Low entropy might be about you, not the universe

08:38 You can be in two cities at once, just not to you

11:02 Why start with Galileo when Einstein knew more?

19:34 Galileo misunderstood his own discovery

22:32 Einstein published a paper denying gravitational waves

25:08 The definition of time that explains nothing

26:50 Two clocks, two metres apart, two answers

31:06 Nothing gets recorded without something being lost

33:12 The chess program deliberates. So do you.

37:06 Can a machine have Einstein’s happiest thought?

39:52 Thirty minutes versus a month

44:10 Dark matter made of black holes the size of a hair

51:10 Ten years, unlimited money, a room full of junctions

Rovelli told me the second law does not say what I was taught it says. Order builds itself.
Transcript, bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Three moments worth the rewatch:
07:00 The entropy you were taught is a point of view
26:50 Why your head is older than your feet
39:52 The thing Claude did in 30 minutes

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Featured Guest:
Carlo Rovelli website: https://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/

The Relational Universe (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735216118

Carlo Rovelli on Twitter/X: https://x.com/carlorovelli

My books:
Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating
Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com
Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#CarloRovelli #freewill #entropy #physics #quantumgravity #briankeating #intotheimpossible

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They Built the Quietest Place on Earth to Find Dark Matter

One event in 220 days. That is what the search for dark matter looks like right now.

In this episode I talk with Rick Gaitskell, professor of physics at Brown University and a leader on the LZ dark matter experiment, about what it takes to build a detector that can see almost nothing at all: seven tonnes of liquid xenon, a mile of rock in an old gold mine, and shielding so careful that the radon seeping out of ordinary concrete counts as a serious enemy. We get into why the field spent decades hunting the WIMP, what happens to a 3.4 sigma result when you look at it honestly, and why a single event, however beautiful, cannot tell you what you want it to tell you.

We also talk about the human side of a project like this. The grad student who waited nine years for data. The physicist who walked away from investment banking. The uncomfortable fact that something like ninety-five percent of research does not work out, and what keeps people going anyway.

And the line that sits under all of it: we only get one damn universe, and nature does not care whether your theory is beautiful.

Chapters

00:00 One event in 220 days

06:00 Why they named it a WIMP

13:00 Ninety-five percent of research fails

20:00 He left investment banking for this

23:00 You are less than five percent of the universe

30:00 The fifty-year-old idea nobody can kill

45:00 The grad student who waited nine years

58:00 A gold mine and the quietest place on Earth

1:06:00 The radon in your basement is the enemy

1:21:00 The assumption that was hiding the signal

1:32:00 The event, and why they will not call it blinded

1:40:00 How 3.4 sigma becomes 2.6

1:49:00 The fog nobody can scrub

1:56:00 The dark matter we detected in 1956

My books

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir)

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner

Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook)

Socials

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #RickGaitskell #darkmatter #physics #AI #emergence #podcast
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For 50 years I taught my students that dark matter surrounds the Milky Way in a giant halo, or that Newton’s laws break down at low accelerations. The Gaia satellite just measured something that makes both of those answers uncomfortable. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Gaia has measured over a billion stars. What its third data release shows is that the outer rotation curve of our own galaxy appears to decline in a Keplerian fashion. That should not happen if a dark matter halo is doing what we think it does. It also should not happen if MOND is right, because MOND produces flat curves for isolated galaxies. Both camps predicted something flatter. Neither got it.

I walk you through the physics from Kepler to Vera Rubin to Gaia DR3, show you why systematic errors from asymmetric drift, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy matter enormously before anyone draws a conclusion, and lay out the three scenarios that still survive. The most interesting question here is not which side lost. It is why both sides were expecting the wrong curve from our own galaxy.

What you’ll hear:

-Why the neutrino technically counts as dark matter and why that still leaves most of the problem unsolved

-What Kepler’s first law of fatherhood has to do with galactic dynamics

-Why Stacy McGaugh and Mordehai Milgrom might be celebrating too soon

-What Cepheids, stellar streams, and globular clusters could tell us that Gaia cannot

-Whether the Milky Way is too messy to ever give us a clean answer

“The question is not which camp won, but why we were both expecting the wrong curve.” — Brian Keating

CHAPTERS

00:00 Two solutions. One problem. Neither wins.

02:12 What Vera Rubin actually found

03:18 We're inside the galaxy. That's the problem.

04:24 The asymmetric drift problem

05:04 What Gaia DR3 actually shows

06:34 Why the mass estimate is model-dependent

08:04 MOND: no radius, no problem. Until now.

08:56 Gaia may be saying both sides are wrong

09:24 Flaws lead to new laws

10:22 LMC, Sagittarius, and the galactic warp

12:28 Three viable explanations

12:42 Dark matter adjusts. MOND adjusts. But is that enough?

13:14 What could settle this

14:04 Are we expecting the wrong curve?

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Related episodes:

Stacy McGaugh episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnpyFk2WlME

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#darkmatter #MOND #MilkyWay #cosmology #briankeating #intotheimpossible #physics
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