Coast to Coast - November 16 2017 - Future Technology - Search For ETI.nfo
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Coast to Coast - November 16 2017 - Future Technology - Search For ETI
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General Information
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More Info............: https://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2017/11/16
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Release Notes
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DATE: Thursday - November 16, 2017
HOST: George Noory
GUESTS: Annalee Newitz, Seth Shostak
Journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction, Annalee Newitz,
is the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT and has
written for Popular Science, Wired, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and is
Tech Culture Editor at the site Ars Technica. In the first half, she discussed
the most exciting developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, (AI) and
how they will change how we live. She has just written her first fiction novel
about life 125 years into the future and interviewed scientists and other tech
innovators about what forms artificial intelligence might take, as well as
questions like "how do we ethically treat artificial beings?" The story is about
a society where robots are owned for 10 years, and then given a key to control
their own destinies, keep others from telling them what to do, or from viewing
their private thoughts and memories.
Contrary to what others such as Elon Musk have predicted, Newitz does not
believe that we will ever have an AI that will surpass us or become a real
threat to humanity, although she does think that many jobs will be made
obsolete, up to and including medical doctors and surgeons. George asked if
robots will ever have what we think of as a "soul." Newitz said that she
believes that "any kind of life that we think of as a companion may just have a
robot soul" although It would be a different kind of soul than our present
definition. She also predicts that robots will be able to lie to us, since we
already have online bots that repeat bad information or erroneously extrapolate
in order to spread a story. Conversely, although she predicts that you cannot
teach compassion to a robot, you could program ethics into it, since it would
essentially be a set of instructions.
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In the second half, astronomer Seth Shostak spoke about his continued work in
the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI); the importance of new
planet discoveries; the nature of alien life and all things astronomy and life
in space. Shostak and his colleagues have been looking for evidence of ET life
with radio telescopes for decades, but has yet to detect anything he considers
evidence of another civilization. He is interested to see if any space probes
can detect the signature of life on other planets (or moons) of the solar system
(even if it on the level of bacteria) since if even simple life has managed to
gain a foothold in our neighborhood, it increases the chance that it has thrived
elsewhere. He does not "find the evidence very compelling" for alien visitation
Shostak mentioned that the class of red dwarf stars are "in vogue" as likely
targets for alien civilizations because they are long-lived, giving any
civilizations which orbit them more time to develop. He also commented on the
controversial story of a group of Spanish scientists who sent a signal into
there is no way to tell what sort of beings will hear you. Shostak believes that
any sufficiently advanced civilization that could find the signal would have
already heard the millions of others we have been sending out since about the
mid-20th century. He also declared that the discovery of any definitive signal
from space would probably indicate a civilization that could send out radio
signals must be successful over a long period, since it would increase our
chances of finding it.
News segment guests: Howard Bloom / Peter Breggin
WEBSITE(S):
techsploitation.com
seti.org
seti.org/seticam
seth-shostak.squarespace.com
BOOK(S):
Autonomous
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture
Confessions of An Alien Hunter
Cosmic Company
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