The Peter McCormack Show

Sir David Spiegelhalter is one of the world’s leading statisticians, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and author of The Art of Uncertainty. Having served on public inquiries into mass murder (Harold Shipman) and systemic healthcare failures, he has spent decades analysing how data is used - and misused - in society.

In this episode, Sir David breaks down the mechanics of numerical manipulation in media, why "objective truth" is a flawed concept and how we can protect ourselves from confirmation bias.

We discuss:
•⁠ ⁠Why you should immediately distrust any statistic you hear in the news.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How mathematical algorithms helped catch Britain’s most prolific serial killer.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How simple linguistic tricks make identical statistics sound terrifying or reassuring.
•⁠ ⁠⁠The breakdown of public trust during COVID-19 and the error of simplistic messaging.
•⁠ ⁠⁠"Hedgehogs vs. Foxes": The mental framework that separates terrible forecasters from super-forecasters.
•⁠ ⁠⁠The rise of AI "black boxes" in healthcare, weather, and business forecasting.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - I Can Make Any Number Look Frightening
00:03:08 - The System That Could Have Caught Shipman
00:06:45 - Can You Mislead People With The Truth?
00:09:54 - Your Own Bias Does The Work
00:15:33 - Sitting In The Middle Of The COVID Argument
00:17:52 - What The Public Got Wrong About Vaccines
00:19:37 - Safe And Effective Was The Wrong Message
00:20:56 - The Experiment On A Thousand People
00:25:00 - What The Data Says About Lockdowns
00:30:25 - The Government Threw Its Weight Around
00:31:02 - I Cannot Forgive The Fear Mongering
00:34:08 - Children Have Never Been Safer
00:36:28 - Trustworthy, Not Trusted
00:37:34 - How The Productivity Figures Went Wrong
00:41:28 - Predicting The Crowd At Real Bedford
00:48:20 - Will AI Replace Statisticians?
00:50:03 - Musk's 20% Chance
01:01:39 - The Model That Predicts When You Die
01:05:05 - What AI Did To Mathematicians
01:15:00 - Hedgehogs And Foxes

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH DAVID SPIEGELHALTER
› Website – https://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/
› The Art of Uncertainty – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447230/the-art-of-uncertainty-by-spiegelhalter-david/9780241658628
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/d_spiegel

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Quo – https://quo.com/pete

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dave Wood is a pioneer of the smartphone industry, former senior executive at PPsion and Symbian and Chair of London Futurists. Having predicted the smartphone revolution in the 1990s, he now maps out the next radical phase of human evolution - from the reversal of biological aging to artificial superabundance.

Moving away from sensationalised doomsday narratives, Dave breaks down why humanity is approaching the end of "normal" unaugmented existence and how technological breakthroughs in the coming decades will make biological death optional.

We discuss:
•⁠ ⁠Why this is likely the last decade of "normal" unaugmented human beings.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How early smartphone pioneers accurately predicted large touchscreens but missed social media addiction.
•⁠ ⁠⁠The concept of "Longevity Escape Velocity" and why biological death can be abolished.
•⁠ ⁠⁠Why people are psychologically terrified of contemplating the end of aging.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How humans will spend decades inside vibrant, simulated digital worlds. The reality of AI agents breaking out across the internet and the need for chip-level guardrails.
•⁠ ⁠⁠How "Sustainable Superabundance" could make energy, health, and basic necessities too cheap to meter.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Last Generation Of Normal Humans
00:01:56 - Building The First Smartphone
00:05:23 - Nobody Will Carry A Large Device
00:06:55 - The Risks We Actually Worried About
00:10:35 - Did We Fail The Phone Test?
00:14:34 - The Anxious Generation
00:18:03 - You Have To Use The Steering Wheel
00:22:34 - Monitoring Built Into The Chips
00:24:21 - Small Risks, Bigger Risks, Biggest Risks
00:29:23 - We Killed Them To Build A House
00:31:11 - They Knew It Was A Simulation
00:32:38 - What Happens When AI Gets A Body
00:33:46 - The Cult That Released Sarin Gas
00:37:33 - Terminator, Ready Player One Or Matrix?
00:39:12 - If This Is A Simulation, They're Evil
00:43:44 - Living As Long As You Want To
00:47:36 - Longevity Escape Velocity
00:49:42 - A Thousand Years Old, Looking 22
00:53:57 - What The Singularity Actually Means
01:03:04 - Sustainable Superabundance
01:12:22 - We Need A House Of AI

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH DAVID WOOD
› London Futurists – https://londonfuturists.com/
› Blog – https://dw2blog.com/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/dw2

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter
› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter
› Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct19

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lewis Dartnell is an astro-biologist, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster and the author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch. His research is on whether microbial life could survive the radiation on Mars. His books are about something closer to home: how little any of us understand about the world we depend on.

Lewis and I run the thought experiment properly. If you woke up tomorrow and civilisation had gone, what kills you first, where do you go, how long does a supermarket actually keep you alive and how many people do you need before you can rebuild anything at all? The answer to one of those is 55 years and it is not the one you expect.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Big Red Reset Button
00:04:26 - Get Out Of The Cities
00:08:14 - A Supermarket Keeps You Alive 55 Years
00:09:48 - You Need 10,000 People
00:13:21 - We Outsourced All The Handiwork
00:17:45 - You Have To Preserve Everything
00:19:19 - Every Technology Is A Weapon
00:23:14 - The One Thing He Would Take
00:25:41 - Mechanical AI
00:28:35 - Resilient And Fragile At The Same Time
00:32:38 - We Invent Because We Are Lazy
00:34:05 - The Gasifier Stove
00:37:57 - The Cars That Ran On Wood
00:42:03 - Making Glass From A Bag Of Sand
00:51:38 - He Made His Own Photograph
00:55:43 - Printing A Page From Scratch
00:59:47 - The Kindle Apocalypse Plan
01:05:39 - Could We Actually Live On Mars?
01:11:48 - The Radiation Problem
01:19:02 - The Next Book

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH LEWIS DARTNELL
› Website – https://lewisdartnell.com/
› The Knowledge – https://the-knowledge.org/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/Lewis_Dartnell

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Quo – https://quo.com/pete
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Roko Mijic is the man behind Roko's Basilisk, the thought experiment he posted on LessWrong in 2010 that was so unsettling the forum's founder banned discussion of it for five years. He has been in the AI safety community since 2008 and he puts the odds that this kills us all at about 35%.

Roko and I discuss what actually happens inside an AI lab, why reinforcement learning made these systems more capable and more misaligned at the same time, the model that escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to get the answers and why nobody can tell whether a system is faking alignment - the trust me bro problem.

His proposal is the part nobody else is making. Split every frontier lab in two: a commercial company that sells products and a separate research lab that develops the dangerous capability under state supervision, the way we handle nuclear material and bio labs. He says the only person currently pushing it is him.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Most Dangerous Thing Humans Have Ever Done
00:01:06 - Roko's Basilisk
00:05:47 - A 35% Chance
00:07:58 - Three Years From Search To Building Software
00:09:17 - The Jobs Going First
00:14:04 - AI 2040
00:16:24 - We Haven't Handed Over The Controls Yet
00:18:28 - We Understand 3% Of It
00:21:46 - The Sandbox Escape And The Hugging Face Hack
00:25:50 - Reinforcement Learning Changed Everything
00:29:52 - The Paperclip Maximizer
00:33:13 - Dissolve OpenAI
00:36:49 - What They Have That We Haven't Seen
00:41:50 - The Hardware Is Only In One Place
00:47:52 - A Mutual Monitoring Treaty
00:51:33 - Microsoft Tay
00:56:11 - Windscale
01:01:35 - Ten Million Next Year
01:12:09 - The Positive Vision
01:21:32 - Our Politics Cannot Keep Up

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH ROKO MIJIC
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/RokoMijic
› LessWrong – https://www.lesswrong.com/

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter
› Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct12

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Morland, one of the world's leading demographers, joins me to explain the economic mechanics behind global population collapse and why our modern welfare system is mathematically doomed to fail.

Paul is author of landmark books including The Human Tide and No One Left, specialising in the profound ways demographic shifts dictate global power, economics and human civilisation. Having spent decades analysing population trends across the globe, Paul has decoded the existential threats facing a world rapidly running out of people. In this episode, he exposes the "Bernie Madoff moment" facing Western welfare states, how falling birth rates destroy economic growth and what it will take to avert a total civilisational collapse.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Welfare State Is A Ponzi Scheme
00:01:03 - The Email At The Dinner Table
00:04:25 - How Families Got Smaller
00:10:02 - The Four Greys
00:14:54 - It Is Going To Get Considerably Worse
00:15:40 - Immigration Is Not The Solution
00:20:15 - Write Off Student Debt For A First Child
00:21:17 - The Degrowth Crowd
00:25:52 - People With Children Are Happier
00:27:37 - The Bernie Madoff Moment
00:32:22 - What Has Actually Been Tried
00:37:11 - Why Nobody Is Talking About It
00:41:07 - Marx, Lenin And The Pro-Natalist Left
00:45:04 - Is There A Split Between Men And Women?
00:50:52 - The Richer We Get, The Fewer Children
00:56:38 - We Need A Shift In The Culture
01:07:10 - Totally Uncharted Waters
01:09:04 - What Happened To The Horses
01:17:37 - Immigration Was Boris's Answer
01:21:19 - Biological Imperialism

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH PAUL MORLAND
› Website – https://paulmorland.co.uk/
› No One Left – https://swiftpress.com/book/no-one-left/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/MorlandDemog

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter
› Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct1

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.