Brian Cox
speaker
1,719 appearances
13 recordings
8 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 16 Jun
Brian Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
There's nothing magical in there. It is connected to a body, and so there are these sensations. But it doesn't seem to me impossible that a silicon-based life form or whatever it is, obviously it has sensors, it has access to the environment, it exists, it thinks. I don't see any fundamental difference between an intelligence,
based on silicon, let's say, or a quantum computer or whatever it is, and this intelligence here. So I know that many researchers in this area do say that it's not a brain. They call it a brain in a jar, don't they? And say, well, that's not right. It needs to be connected to all this. This is part of our intelligence. And that's surely true as well. Sure. So it's a very good question.
But I suppose if you say it's not obvious to me that a different kind of intelligence in a different structure running on a computer or whatever it is, would necessarily have different motivations to us.
I mean, you could equally well argue that these motivations to survive and curiosity, those ideas, the desire to explore, you could argue those are fundamental properties of intelligence and not of biology.
It's a wonderful argument, isn't it, that our humanity... Because part of the thing that you described, this desire to create things and build things and explore and expand, is almost the definition of being human, isn't it? Yes. And so the idea that if you remove all threat and you essentially become immortal... Yes. then you're almost saying, what's the point? It's my T-shirt. It's existence.
What does it matter, right? By the way, this T-shirt, I've got to say, was designed by a friend of mine, Peter Saville, who's a great designer who designed the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures album cover, amongst other things. Oh, wow. That's cool. That's a great shirt. It's a Joy Division.
It probably is, but I'm not going to do that because it's vulgar, isn't it? No, no, no.
That's why I asked. He made it for, we did these gigs, I talk about them later, called Symphonic Horizons, which were the, shows with cosmology, but also symphony orchestra. And he was exploring these issues, actually. But most of the music was Strauss's Zarathustra, which is based on Nietzsche's book. So it's kind of exploring these questions, actually, of what's the point of existence.
And I do have some sympathy with that idea that A great deal of our humanity comes from our fragility. And so your question, I think, is fascinating. What happens when you become godlike? You said it earlier.
If you acquire so much knowledge that you're essentially a god by any description and so much power and you become effectively immortal, which is what our descendants in the far future could be, as you said, these AI descendants. Right. What's the point of living?
I mean, I thought this a while ago. I remembered I was talking to someone and they said, yeah, I'm not worried about this. I'm not worried about the fact that AI could become more intelligent than us. What was it going to be like when we're not the smartest things on the planet? This might be just a few years.
And I again, I might be quite relieved because I'm not sure they could fuck it up. The level that we are backing it up.
Honestly, I've had the same thought. That's the utopian view. Yeah. And so I have thought, how could it be worse? In fact, it could be significantly better. Yeah.
You can decide exactly... And as you said, the definition of what is best is a moral decision that we make.
Well, that's one of the arguments. I spoke to Robert Zubrin, who wrote these wonderful books about colonizing space. And so he's a fascinating character. And I spoke to him once, and he made this very simple argument that, as you said, one of the problems we have is competition for resources. And of course, the competition for resources is now so extreme that it's not only wars that
that it creates and always has. But it's also, of course, we damage the planet if we over-exploit the resources and so on, right? So you've got this problem about resources. And he's right. He would say this is the number one motivation for going up because there are, in fact, infinite resources out there. And so once you begin to have access to the asteroids and access to Mars and beyond...
You can imagine a world where you alleviate that pressure.
Yeah, and I think it's Neptune or Uranus that we think has diamonds in it. Oh, my goodness.
They're good for drill bits as well. But we can make them for jewelry.
No, they want the real ones.
Showing 1421–1440 of 1,719 · page 72 of 86
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