In the first half, Cyrus A. Parsa, the founder, and CEO of The AI Organization and The Social Programming Institute, warned over emerging and future threats of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Unbeknownst to consumers, biometric data from addictive devices like smartphones are culled, and can be used to imperceptibly re-program the user's thoughts, he suggested, by connecting to their nervous systems. "You'll be programmed by the AI system itself," he declared, through biases built-in in the engineering and social media content. And this effect will be amplified even more with the coming of 5G networks, he continued, to the point where people's immune systems and ability to think freely will be heavily compromised.
Parsa has brought a massive lawsuit against the tech giants, which charges "complicity in cultural genocide in the US for introduction of cybernetics and bioengineering," and physical genocide in China for surveillance techniques used to hunt and imprison dissidents and non-conformers. Using "Big Tech," China plans to extract the biometrics and family data of its population of billions and feed it into a quantum machine that will create our "first superintelligence," he further cautioned. He also expressed concern over misuses of robotics and drones, such as cybernetic and bionic insects designed for surveillance and weaponry.
------------------------
In the latter half, professor of theoretical physics, author, and BBC presenter, James Al-Khalili, talked about the importance of physics and why he believes it provides a profound adventure of seeking truth in the universe. Physics, he said, "is the fundamental way of understanding the true nature of reality." At the deepest level that you drill down into physical phenomena and matter, you find the physics of it, he explained. The search for the unified theory of everything continues, he noted-- trying to unite the two most prominent ideas in physics-- quantum mechanics (the very small) and Einstein's relativity (the very large).
Superstring theory failed to unite the two, he reported, and the "theory of quantum gravity" is still the holy grail that beckons. He spoke about the discovery of wormholes, and how Einstein and the physicist Nathan Rosen proposed in the 1950s that inside a black hole is a tunnel or bridge that can lead to somewhere else (which became known as the Einstein-Rosen bridge). Al-Khalili is optimistic that life exists beyond Earth, but in our own solar system, he suspects it will be on a microbial level, such as under the ice on moons of Saturn and Jupiter. He also expounded on the concept of an expanding universe, and how space itself is stretching.
News segment guests: Dr. Gary Ridenour, Lauren Weinstein, Steve Kates