Can We Predict the Future? with Charles Liu

26:06If it's a quantum situation, then you can never pass qubits and digitize as something called the no-cloning theorem that makes that very difficult. So you wind up with a circumstance. I was going to say, now you got to stop. There's no-cloning theorem. You got to stop, man. You got to bring it back to the no-cloning theorem. because you can't just walk past that, walk by and just like drop that down. Just like, oh, here's the no cloning theorem. Boom. All right. I'm moving on. Well, okay. The no cloning theorem is just one of many different pieces of quantum computing, sort of like the laws of quantum computing the same way that Isomoff had laws of robotics.

26:45Okay. This particular one, the no cloning theorem, means that if you have a quantum bit of information, you can't just make as many copies of it as you'd like. you can't make copies. So like us, we can digitize a photograph taking little pixels and then make each pixel exactly the same as another pixel on a hard drive or a USB stick or something. And then you get an exact copy of the previous picture. Absolutely. No cloning theorem says that for quantum information, you can't do that. So anytime you have some quantum... And why wouldn't you be able to do that with a qubit as opposed to bits and bytes, which we're able to do it with?

27:21As soon as you read a qubit, it is destroyed. That makes sense, because it existed in a superposition to begin with. Yes. Right. Go Chuck! So the moment that you actually realize the superposition, all other positions are made null and void at that particular instance. That's a great way to describe it. Damn! Damn Chuck! Give that man a degree. Can you only capture a freeze frame of your consciousness at a certain time? Because if you were to do it five minutes afterwards, it would potentially be different. That is one consequence of this no cloning idea. Interesting. You can know what you are this very moment, but you cannot know what is the next moment.

28:03What you are in five minutes. The moment after that. Oh my God. That's right. This is why this show is so goddamn great! Stop, stop. Do you understand? This is science! This is what makes it so awesome! Why'd you make, he blew a gasket. I'm sorry. Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Just unplug it. All right, so if we're thinking about our future, if we're thinking about getting on and thinking about 50, 100, so many years in advance, what you describe in Starry Messenger is the exponential growth of our lives, our inventions, our ideas. And our understandings, yes. Right, and then you sort of frame it in a 30-year gap.

28:46Yes. I'm just wondering, and we'll return to exponential growth because I need to know how far away we are from being vertical on the graph. But if you took someone from 1995 and brought them to 2025, would they be completely out of sorts with the way we are today? Yeah, let me tell you why that is definitely the case. All right. Okay, they would not know how to function. All right? Little things, like you sit them at a restaurant and say, where's the menu? Oh, here's the QR code. They'll have no idea what that is or what it means. They don't know what social media is. Lucky them. They barely have an email address because those were on the rise beginning in the 1990s for the general public.

29:34The idea that you would have self-driving electric cars just on the road with no driver. If you walk around L.A., these cars are just all over the place. And what role the smartphone has played in our lives beginning from 2007 onward. The idea that you can walk and talk to someone with something smaller than the size of a pack of cigarettes to someone on the Riviera. Where's the Riviera? France. So what I'm describing is how the way we currently live and take it for granted. would be wholly foreign and exotic and unfamiliar to someone transported from 1995. Respectfully and with love, I disagree completely.

30:21Because of 95 to 2025 or just in general, a 30-year interval? No, it's specifically for 1995 to 2025 because we had Star Trek. We already saw what could be. We have Jules Verne. We had H.G. Wells. We had Lucian from the second century A.D. Lucian. Wow. Yes. He wrote - I love Lucian. Well, I do, actually. But he was - Lucian. He was a guy from sort of the Greek area of the world, which at that time was fertile with culture and imagination and so forth. About when was this? About the second century A.D. You know who else was the second century? I don't know if they had - Ptolemy. Ptolemy. Okay. He wrote Almagest.

31:07I do not think it was a coincidence. That's a period of time. All the people that Charles has named there, they're historic. Wait, wait. Lucien is not the name. That's the name of the... Lucien is the name of the person who wrote, is credited with writing a science fiction novel called A True Story. Wow. Yes. Voyagers are on a boat and they are caught in a storm and they wind up on the moon. And at the moon, there are creatures who don't look like humans, but they're engaged in a great war. As Greeks want to be. So clearly other people would be fighting as well. These are the kinds of things that have been imagined for a long, long time.

31:46And I don't think that anyone in 95 showing up in 2025 would go, oh my gosh, people are talking into a box. And they'll say, oh wait, that happened in Star Trek. Okay, how does this work? And they just tap, tap, tap. And because everything was built for humans by humans, they would be able to adapt almost immediately. Instead of by aliens. Right, right, right. Right, almost immediately because of the commonalities of humans from 1995 to 2025. Okay, so now let's take it back to, and let's forget 2nd century AD, which is a time of enlightenment. Yes. Let's go to a time of darkness. Uh-oh. All right.

32:20Like now?

32:24So let's go to the Middle Ages, you know what I mean? The Dark Ages. Dark Ages, not the Middle Ages. the dark ages, where we go, where we're consumed by superstition, and everything is squelched in terms of any enlightenment, would those people transport it to today? And by the way, just to be clear, or would everything be witchcraft? Chuck, just to be clear, in the book, I localized it to the era of the Industrial Revolution, where you can fully expect that inventions will change how you live. There was a period where no one expected their great, great grandchildren to be living any differently than they did.

32:58Absolutely. So I don't know that you can go that far back. You can't go that far back. No, you can. You can. I'll say that because first of all, we should understand that dark ages was a term coined by European historians. True. In fact, historians who claim that Rome fell in the year AD 476 did not take into account what we know to be true, that other people ran that area known as the Roman Empire in many different ways for centuries thereafter. And then there was the Holy Roman Empire that happened starting at 800 with Charlemagne. Meanwhile, there was an Eastern Empire that was based at Constantinople.

33:36It's a Byzantine. That's right. All of that concept. And by the way, Rome is still here today. That's right. I was there this summer. It's a beautiful place. It was very hot. It's still happening. So our sense of what history is also makes us think about predicting the past. What has been framed for us as the Dark Ages was actually a period of great innovation, and people were thinking about a lot of things, but not necessarily in Europe. In the Arabic-speaking world, things like algebra were being created, things like mathematics. Yes, Chuck. You can't be talking about what brown people did, okay?

34:12It doesn't count if it didn't happen in Europe. You're making my point exactly. Truer words were never spoken. And see, this is the point. The next thing you'll be telling me, there were pyramids in Africa. Right, right. I mean, surely no Egyptian people could ever have made these and must have been done by aliens because what? Egyptians aren't as smart as people who look like Europeans and they couldn't do geometry. This is a very, very inappropriate way of looking at history.

34:58So if we use the imagination of these authors, these filmmakers, and then we kind of replicate some of the things that they can, so we follow, we have sliding doors. We first saw them in Star Trek. I first saw them in Star Trek. Okay, so the thing is, are they shaping the future from their position in the past? And we follow that. Great idea, great point. Are you asking, if we never saw sliding doors as a future feature of our lives, would it have been pursued? And would we be trying to open the grocery store door holding our bags? Great question. Here's my thought on this. We make predictions all the time.

35:42Probably there are a thousand predictions about the future that are in the literature or just around on newspapers or even written down by people from 100 years ago. As Yogi Berra said, it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. But if you make a thousand predictions, one of them will come true. One of them is going to be right. And we're looking backwards. Do you cherry pick the few that came true? And if the future shows up with sliding doors, you go back and go, hey, remember that? We don't talk about anybody who predicted doors would go up and down or that doors would squirrel out.

36:19But they exist. So somebody probably did that, even though Star Trek as a show itself didn't have doors that swirled out. There are ways to do this that we have all thought of. They just didn't dominate our society for whatever reason. Okay. All right, let's go to your 2050 predictions from Starry Messenger. Oh, okay. No, by the way, I put in my predictions so that in 2050, people can make fun of me. Well, we're going to do it right now. As I highlighted. We're not waiting. Everybody else is wrong. Yeah, why wait until then? Exactly. Everyone else is wrong predictions. Just quickly, to put this in context.

36:57Yes. In the book I describe, a prediction in 1900 made for the year 2000. Oh. And in the year 1900, steamships were setting records across the ocean. Right. Railroads crossed the continents. And so in this for the year 2000, they had a steamship coming out of the ocean with railroad wheels flipped down. It goes straight onto a railroad track. Right onto a railroad track. And then continues on land. Worst transformer ever. So this was, and another one. That's just linear thinking again. It's linear thinking. There's another one. Also, how were people getting around? Through lighter than air. Balloons.

37:39Balloons. dirigeables, blimps, this sort of thing. So they imagine in the year 2000 everyone would have their own personal balloons. So there are these balloons that wrap in your armpit and you have two and and so it shows them sort of walking on water kept buoyant by these balloons. Marvelous. And it's like, okay. Because that's the extent of, their imagination couldn't go much farther than what was available. That's kinda, yeah, okay. What was available. That's amazing. All right, one of your predictions. The space program becomes a space industry. Already happened. Funded not by taxpayers' dollars, but by space tourism and other projects.

38:25That part didn't happen. Well, it's not 2050 yet. No, okay. Dude. What do you think about that? Don't get all protective. Prices are not gonna drop low enough for people to want to go into space just for the heck of it. Not for 30 years? Not for 30 years. Unfortunately, you're watching the prices now, extrapolating outward into the future. You just don't see that pattern happening because right now what's happening is that space is still controlled by governments that are willing to subsidize private corporations. Once those subsidies are removed... Doesn't every country on Earth have the same equity in space?

39:02You would hope so. But at the moment, as with any other parts of the world, they don't. Charles, the dawn of flight, it was very expensive. so very few people was on a plane. If you flew on a plane, that was like the news of the cocktail party that you attended. And then now everybody can fly because the plane, we figured out how to make it cheap. The plane was and always was, from the very beginning in 1903, a private enterprise activity. Space has, since its beginning, been a governmental activity. Okay, that's missing some information. So the rapid development of flight between 19, call it 10, in 1930.

39:40Well, it's funded by World War I. Well, yeah, so you had government investments in... In the advancement of aviation. In the advancement of aviation, and the government wanted to deliver mail by plane. Right. The birth of air mail. So the government said, we're going to give a contract to whoever can outbid whoever else, and you do it, and you win the contract. I said, I want the contract. So I make my plane better because I can carry more for the same amount of money that yours does. Now I win the contract back from you. And this continues until somebody says, hey, instead of sacks of mail, I can carry sacks of people.

40:17And then I can, that was the birth of commercial aviation driven by the government's interest in you making a better airplane. But it made money. And when we tried to do that with the space shuttle, we didn't make money. And so until money is made, that track will not start. And your sentence had the word until in it. Fine. I'm saying by 2050, the until will happen within there. I do not think so. Okay, that's what it is. So here's what I think. In response to both of you, what's going to happen is there's a lot of money floating around in space. What? Really? Where? I'm up there. You and me, you gotta know where to look.

40:56Let's go this afternoon. I looked in the wrong place. And it's in mining. And if we can mine what's out there instead of destroying the earth to bring back all these precious rare earths that, well, they wouldn't be rare earths. Rare space. Spiceman. Rare space. If we can bring that back, what happens is to get there, it's going to propel the advancement so fast. Like a gold rush. Like a gold rush. Yeah. People are going to go so crazy so fast to get out there and get that money that space tourism will be a natural byproduct. Byproduct. So not the target, but the byproduct. As happens so often.

41:34I want to read to you, we don't have time for this, but I'm going to do it anyway. I want to read to you a letter that I own, written December 19, 1918. Oh, I think I know what this will be. I didn't know you were that old. This is to Mr. Alan Hawley, president of the Aero Club of America. Then I know who wrote this. Madison Avenue. Dear Mr. Hawley, many thanks for your very nice telegram remembering the 15th anniversary of our first flight at Kitty Hawk. Whoa. Although Wilbur, as well as myself, would have preferred to see the aeroplane developed more along peaceful lines. Yet I believe that its use in this great war will give encouragement for its use in other ways.

42:34Signed, sincerely yours, Orville Wright. Orville, yeah. Look at that. And in war, take the high ground, and they took it to another level, pun intended. Right, let's take another look. Self-driving electric cars, you go there, and I don't think that's happening. That's in there, yeah, yeah. That's not a limb that's gonna be breaking. That's a given. Well, no, there are people who say that it'll never happen or whatever. People like driving. And we already have HOV lanes. Right. If you say you can only go in that if it's a self-driving car. Right. And the self-driving cars are going 120 miles an hour, three car lengths between each other, because they have instant reflexes, and they're not putting on makeup, and they're not texting, and they're not—if they could, and they still— There are cars being made right now that don't have steering wheels, so we are going to live in a self-driving— I think that'll have a— —an a driverless car society at one point.

43:19Faster than most people— Agree. Do you agree or not? I think that self-driving vehicles will be as prevalent as public transportation is. Right. Good. There will still be private transportation for which drivers will still be necessary. And listen, you'll drive on the back roads and stuff like that. You'll be able to drive your car. Okay. But one day— Wait, wait, wait. At some point, they'll become like horses. Yeah. Okay. You can still ride your horse. Your horse is at the stables. Right. You go get your horse and you ride it. That's right. So now your car, your car is at the— At the garage. At the trap.

43:49No, it's a special place where people— Well, that's what I mean, back roads. Who still want to drive their car. They go there and they drive their car. Here's when it's going to happen. At some point, you have to make the cars talk to one another and the road itself talk to the car. Smoke runs. And at that point, you won't be allowed to drive on the road. You want to switch lanes. It tells the other cars, I'm switching lanes. And they open up for you. Half all the accidents happen that way. You don't see who's in your blind spot. But building that infrastructure into the highways and byways is going to be so expensive.

44:20Dude, we went from horse-drawn buggies in 1905 to you couldn't give away a horse in 1915 with gas stations and paved roads for automobile tires. And that happened in 10 years. I don't know if you've noticed lately, but things are a bit more expensive. Yes. And there are still millions of square— What side are you on? The side of science. The side of the what? The side of science. There are still millions of square miles of North America where there isn't high-speed internet. So you got to remember that these are very regional solutions right now. We can extrapolate on what's going to happen in New York City.

44:55But driving from Laramie, Wyoming to Fargo, North Dakota is not likely to be the same as driving from L.A. Sunset Boulevard to L.A. Many of those farmers still had horse-drawn tractors. Yes. But I'm talking about – We're talking about the entire world. You're going to have an area. We're talking about the Eisenhower freeway system, highway system in the United States. Right. It's going to be limited to certain areas. I'm afraid so. Neuroscience will advance so far we understand the human minds well enough that mental illness will be cured. You've also gone into developing antiviral serum and cures cancer.

45:36Do you feel that? Some. Some cancers, yes. Absolutely. So with the neuroscience, which is still kind of in its infancy, so I have very high expectations for it. Psychologists hate it when I say this, but I mean it with love, that to me, psychology is to neuroscience what alchemy is to chemistry. How can you mean that with love? Ouch. Hey, listen, I like what you're doing, but one day you're just out of work. Okay? No, no. Just know this. Because there you are, you've got someone on the couch, and you, for months and months and months, trying to cure their illness. The neuroscientists have, where is it?

46:12Oh, it's a nip-tuck right here. There's a neurosynaptic thing there. And they nip and tuck. And you're done, and you're out, and no one is on the street crazy. There's no insane asylums. Is this where we get to implants? That just bypasses the fractured neurons? I don't know if it's surgery or implants that are removable, then you go back to your original state. All right, so let's look at AI. Let's look at the influence AI will have in the world of medicine. Is this now us getting to a more vertical line on the exponential growth? The line always looks vertical when you're at that end of the exponential.

46:44It always looks vertical to you, like all the advances happened just in recent years. But I want to get to the AI point. To the extent that can help with medicines, I think one of my predictions was we have medicines that, this is not some new prediction. I'm just echoing what's already been floating around, but I'm putting a timestamp on it, that medicine will be tuned to your genetic profile so that there are zero side effects. Yes, you did make that. Yes. And if we know your – why is it that you break out in hives and you don't, ingesting the same chemical, there's something different about your genetic profile or your hormonal profile.

47:24We will know that, understand it, so that side effects will be a thing of the past. That's one of the predictions. You do make that prediction. I get it. It's in there. Yes. I think what will happen is that we'll be able to control behaviors very well by 2050. Right. But we still won't be able to cure the diseases by 2050. There's a lot to do. You think eventually just not by 2050? Yes. Okay. It's an issue of when. We are able now technologically. Did you say when? No, I said when. Good, thank you. Do you say cool whip? It depends if I'm speaking to will wheat in a minute.

48:00Oh. And I never like cool whip. In a quarter century, we'll be able to help everybody who have behavioral problems solve their behaviors. But that doesn't necessarily mean we'll have solved their diseases. And that is what I would like to say. That means they'll be living with the disease controlled by some medication or implant rather than have it removed from them entirely. That's my opinion. Is it safe to say that going forward into the future, that changes will happen even quicker? That is the nature of being on an exponential. That's my point. Yeah. There's no doubt. If you look at the pace of patents, the pace of research papers, the doubling times, which is how you know you're on an exponential, they've been consistent over the decades.

48:50So what that means is in a few years, there'll be double the number of research papers on a subject in a field than has appeared up until that point. That's how you know you're on an exponential. And the caveat is sometimes the exponentials turn over. There's a period of exponential growth followed by a leveling off. For example, the human population. Thomas Malthus, a couple hundred years ago, predicted that if you use exponential growth, Soon there will be so many people in the world that there will be not enough food production ever. But now we know that our predictions, and here's one that we could test in 30 years.

49:2830 years from now, the exponential growth of the human population will turn over. We're going to top out worldwide around 10 billion and stop. Yeah, but you gave the wrong. Actually start falling, as it has in many places. People have already made those predictions. Hold on. You put a cart in front of a horse there. Oh. Okay. Okay, Malthus is wrong, not because our exponential growth of the population will level off at 10 billion. He's wrong because we applied science to farming so that now we are producing more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before. That's why he was wrong. He did not imagine that farm production would ever become more efficient or more voluminous than it was at the time.

50:12And he was just doing a linear extrapolation against the population of the planet. We are awash in food. Anyone who is starving in the world. How much of our food goes to waste? A third of it or something. I saw the numbers. So anyone who's starving, it's not because the world doesn't have food to feed them. There's some geopolitical circumstance that prevents it. So nobody like my predictions? No, no, no, no. I don't have predictions. Last time I. I credit you for being brave enough to step there. Yeah, and I even got some critiques in the moment. Give me each of you one final prediction about something that you would like us to know.

50:46See, so here's my prediction for it's going to go. Don't confuse what you want to be true from what will likely be true. This is my honest assessment, not my desire. Good. Okay. That we are at a global tipping point with respect to democracy globally. And it's either going to be that people want to govern themselves through democratic processes or. Or not. That we're all so sleep that we descend into authoritarianism worldwide. And if we do, getting back is going to take so many generations. None of us will be here to see it. Gary, a prediction. That we find the desire to fully engage with climate change because the knock-on effect has influence on so many global societies.

51:35We're suffering from climate migration. We're suffering from rising sea levels. and if we can bring the desire to challenge and tackle that positively, I think that will be something we can all look to as the positive step. Wonderful. You're right. So do I, but I'm not sure that we will. I'm not sure we will either, but... I hope we find the desire. That'd be great. By the way, a little known fact because I only realized this months ago when I first saw Steven Spielberg's movie AI from the 1990s. There's an entire sustained scene underwater. Yeah. And you go underwater and there's a Statue of Liberty completely submerged.

52:09Yes. So they already took climate change Yes, they did. to the limit to the limit. At the time that movie was supposed to take place. And that was just a side fact because the real movie was about the AI that they were creating. So cool, man. Yeah. Once again, it's take it to the extreme to make the example to make you think we don't want to go there. So that you do not create the future that they invented for you. Yeah. All right, what's your best prediction? That within 25 years there will be a professional sport played in orbit. Woo! Wow! Satellite shooting. That's amazing. We're shooting down satellites.

52:42Look at that. Spaceballs. There you go. Spaceballs. Oh! Yeah! I like that. Yes. Because Chuck is our geek in chief when we talk about sports, too. Oh, yeah. So when that happens, this will be the first thing you do. We'll do it. After, you can do an episode on your own podcast. Oh, thank you. The universe first. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. It's the zero-G basketball. Yeah. All right, we got to wrap this up. Dude, I enjoyed this topic. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. And you come up with these cool topics for a special edition. This is great. Yeah, I have time on my hands. Okay.

53:17All right, dude. Charles, Chuck, Gary, thanks for being here. Pleasure. This has been StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.

53:36Thank you.