Stuart Russell

Yeah, so you could take what I'm saying and replace it with pretty much anything else you wanted me to be saying.

And even it would change my lips and facial expressions to fit.

And there's actually not much in the way of real legal protection against that.

I think in the commercial area, you could say, yeah, you're using my brand and so on.

There are rules about that.

But in the political sphere, I think at the moment, anything goes.

Or do you have faith that... I hope not, but I mean, I think we do have to look at history.

And, you know, so the two examples you gave, nuclear weapons and nuclear power, are very, very interesting because...

Nuclear weapons, we knew in the early years of the 20th century that atoms contained a huge amount of energy.

We had E equals mc squared, we knew the mass differences between the different atoms and their components, and we knew that

you might be able to make an incredibly powerful explosive.

So H.G.

Wells wrote a science fiction book, I think in 1912.

Frederick Soddy, who was the guy who discovered isotopes, is a Nobel Prize winner.

He gave a speech in 1915 saying that,

You know, one pound of this new explosive would be the equivalent of 150 tons of dynamite, which turns out to be about right.

And, you know, this was in World War I, right?

So he was imagining how much worse the world war would be if we were using that kind of explosive.

But the physics establishment simply refused to believe that these things could be made.

Well, so they were doing the nuclear physics.