The Next Industrial Revolution w/ J. Storrs Hall: Nuclear Energy, AI and Nanotechnology
I am extremely excited to be talking about the future of technology and the path to mind-blowing progress with nanotech and AI scientist Josh Storrs Hall.
Josh and I talk about a trio of innovations – nanotechnology, nuclear energy, and AI – which together create the next Industrial Revolution (or Second Atomic Age, as Josh dubs it.) We’ve gotten off track of technological progress since the 60s. Let's get it together. (We talk about how Science Fiction can help with this!)
Josh has had an impressive scientific career, with contributions in AI, computer architecture, and nanotechnology, and has published several books including Where Is My Flying Car, which I recently did a solocast on main points of the book.
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Here’s what I learned from the episode:
Anticipated achievements (like space travel) after the 60s are missing. This was not because of a lack of capability but because of a loss of interest (and lack of cheap energy).
Henry Adams was first to recognize the energy growth curve we were on. Energy capacity and use per capita were increasing ~7% every year for hundreds of years -- until flatlining in the 70s.
Energy is the key to driving most new technologies... but energy capabilities have flatlined.
To decrease poverty, decrease the price of energy.
Regulation and activism have both worked to make energy more scarce and expensive in the past 50 years.
The real atomic technology is going to be nanotech, and the possibilities are fantastic.
Bananas are more radioactive than most nuclear waste.
The question is less if we will get nanotech and rather how long it will take, how fast the progress will be, and how much we can focus on it.
With mature nanotech, we could reproduce the entire infrastructure of the US in a week.
Nuclear has been slower to develop than AI and Nanotech because of regulation and anti-energy propaganda.
To make progress we need to overcome the social and economic roadblocks including regulation; the NRC is one of the most problematic agencies.
The business world may be nicer than the academic world -- academia is more zero sum.
Due to the zero-sum politics of Academia, the intended outcome of government funding is often bungled.
Language ability and ethics ability are very similar in human minds, so it is likely that if we can enable AI with language capabilities, we can also program AI with ethics.
Going from the US to London in 20 minutes is physically and technologically possible, just nobody is bothering to do it (yet.)
Learn more about Josh Storrs Hall
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Episode Transcript:
Josh Storrs Hall: Nowadays, nerds are famous for walking around with a pocket protector and a bunch of pens in it. And they pull the pen out and it's a ballpoint pen and they can write with it and then they put it back up and so forth. Once you get to full-fledged capable nano technology, the kind of thing you could build would be that when you pull that pen out, you throw it, and it expands an air, and there's a full-sized humanoid robot. It's still no heavier than the pen was because it doesn't do anything to gain mass, but the body's size, shape, and strength in particular would be essentially equivalent to a human being. But that's roughly the capability of nanotech reduced to a simple, personal scale.
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome. I am extremely excited to be speaking with Josh Storrs Hall today. Josh has had a very distinguished career as a scientist with meaningful contributions in AI, computer architecture, and nanotechnology. His resume is at autogeny.org. It is very long. You are welcome to check it out for yourself. Now he identifies as an independent scientist and author. Most recently he published a book called Where Is My Flying Car, which was just re-published in hardcover by Stripe Press. And I saw it on Twitter. I grabbed a copy of it and just had my mind blown. And I've been looking forward to this interview since the very first chapter I finished. Today, I finally talk to Josh, and I want to share as much of what I learned and dig deeper into the aspects of the book, the biggest being what Josh calls the Second Atomic Age, which is basically another Industrial Revolution in the coming decades. It's a combination of multiple technologies that are mutually accelerating and together could provide 10x or 100x leaps in the productivity of technology and therefore the capabilities of humanity and all of us individually. We could see this in our lifetimes if we get it right. I've been absolutely obsessed with this book since I first started reading it. Like all the best books, it's impossible to summarize, but I did a short solo podcast one episode ago with some of my favorite highlights, thoughts about the book and the future because I was very fired up and it's great prep for this interview. I've bought and gifted at least 10 copies. I still have a stack of them here with me to gift impromptu, and I'm very grateful for the conversations I've had with friends about it already. A special shout out to Max Olson and Sam Hinky for their contributions to making this a great interview. I ask a number of their questions in here. And I hope this turns out to be one of the most important interviews I ever do. I hope this can be one layer of intellectual snowball that continues to gather momentum and affects our current trajectory and guides us back towards a more abundant future. Please enjoy this conversation arriving at your ears right after two quick messages.
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Josh, thanks so much for being here and thanks so much for writing this book. It shook up my life and I'm very excited to have you here to hopefully shake up a few thousand, few hundred thousand more lives.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, when I sign a book, sometimes if I have the time and ambition, I sign it, “I hope you have as much fun reading this as I did writing it.” And that’s the fact. I just really did have a blast doing that. And so, I figured whatever happened, I had a good time, and apparently other people are having a good time reading it, so that's a good thing.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I have the exact same philosophy. It excited me to learn all these things, but it also fired me up and gave me a little bit of, I don't know, it gave me a hunger to change things and anger at the past as well. So, it wasn't all like puppies and rainbows in there. It kind of gave me some sadness about how things have unfolded over the last 50 years, but also a lot of optimism about where we might go in the next 50.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, yeah, to some extent, I share that, but in a slightly longer view, you realize that the Industrial Revolution per se was a major good time in human history. And there's lots of human history where things weren't being even nearly as nice as they are now. So, forward progress or whatever you want to call it. So, to some extent, there was a bit of a reversion to the mean over the past 50 years, everywhere except, for example, computers, communications, and so forth. But all of the stuff that we thought was going to happen coming out of the war of the 40s, the 50s and the 60s, like space travel, just collapsed on us. And it wasn't that it was technologically impossible because look what they're doing now, it was just a loss of interest. And I think there was a loss of interest in a lot of the other things that we expected then and we could've gotten, but people, they went off and wanted to do other things. And a lot of them- I mean, I call it virtue signaling because it's not things I want to do. But I have theories about it. And they are theories – I'm not an expert on how the human race works, but anybody can at least sit there, and a cat can look at a king and take your best shot. And so, some of that's in the book.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, absolutely. I thought it was a very interesting mix of your deep scientific background and sort of some theories about the social movements or social cruft or timeless foibles of humanity that contribute to whether science continues and how it continues and unfolds. And I thought that was some of the really- some of the most interesting stuff, almost psychologically getting out of our own way to let technology sort of do what it can do.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah, well, I was a bit surprised when I was writing that I kept going back to H. G. Wells again and again. He was actually probably not too well remembered anymore, except for The War of the Worlds, but around the front of the- the previous turn of the century, he had just written The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and a long non-fiction book about- it was called Anticipations about how interventions are going to change the 20th century to make it much different from the 19th, which was true. And he was very sharp and really into technology and how it affected people and so forth. And he made a couple of fairly major errors, but of the people going on back then, he was one of the best. And so, as a default, if he said something about it like why are people going to become [floloping nebages 10:19] in the future, I said, okay, well, I'll even just use his word for it, the Eloi, because he had a point. And I found myself starting from that and then proceeding with the differences between what we actually wind up seeing and what he proposed. But he got in the bullseye in the first shot. And so, it was worth listening. Reading that story to begin with, that actually really defined science-fiction to an extent for the 20th century. I mean, you had the cool machines and stuff like that from Jules Verne, but Wells was the first one to really capture what they call the sense of wonder where you just get this feeling of soaking in a much bigger universe than you thought. And so, he was rightfully the most read writer in the English language around 1900.
Eric Jorgenson: Wow. I didn't realize that. I mean, I really appreciated how much, as a lover of sci-fi myself, how much of the book sort of comes from- you did this very thorough analysis even of like all of the predictions of the sci-fi writers kind of prior to post-Industrial Revolution, even post Atomic Age and what they thought we would have by the year 2020. That was a very interesting piece and sort of revealing, I think, as you say, as to what expectations we lived up to and exceeded and which we missed entirely.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah, that list of 40 predictions were from people in the 50s and 60s. I didn't actually put any Wells in there because I was trying to capture the anticipations of people who had already seen nuclear power, who had already seen jets, who had already seen all this sort of stuff. And basically, if you draw a straight line through what they got from say the Wright brothers, the line doesn't keep going straight, and the line just takes a right turn and flat lines. And that was something needing an explanation.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I’ll say, and hopefully some rectification, which I feel like part of the mission that we're on here, I try not to come into too many podcasts with an agenda, but I have one here. I hope we can take some small steps between us and everybody listening to hopefully get back on the Henry Adams Curve. Most of the people, the people listening probably are familiar with Moore's law and the sort of technology that comes to the forefront there, but showing us Henry Adams Curve and hopefully getting us back on the Moore's law for energy of the Henry Adams Curve. Could you take us through sort of the history of that and where we fell off of it and how we might get back on?
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah, well, I tack that name onto it because it's a delightful book to read. Henry Adams who's the grandson of John Adams, the second president, and his father was another, John Quincy. So, he was right in there and he was sort of a man about town of the US and Europe, which is basically where the action was in those days. And around 1910, he wrote his autobiography, and looking back over his life, he says, wow, every year we turn around and we get more energy to use. He called it force, but that's what he meant. And he talked about the amount of coal you could burn for how much money and how many horsepower there were in a steam ship, and all this sort of stuff. And it was just fabulously more than had been there when he was born or a century before, whatever. And he was the first one who really seemed to capture the notion that this is a glorious curve that we're on. And so, I named it after him, but there he was, and other people have seen this. And in fact, up until the 70s, the Henry Adams Curve was the law basically; that's how things worked. We use more and more energy, our life got better and better. We went from having the Wright brothers’ model B airplane where two guys sit on this contraption that looks like an oversized box kite and does 50 miles an hour in the air to 727s. And that's just 50 years is that much of a jump. And when you get on an airplane today, 60 years after that, you get something that looks almost exactly like that 727. It's a little bigger, it goes a little slower, and it's cheaper per passenger, but that's the progress in the past 60 years.
Eric Jorgenson: How do you separate sort of the- I think that's incredibly true for the commercial flights, but we do have some insane innovations in flight maybe only in the military. But maybe why aren't some of those more distributed or how do you separate sort of the innovations that get widely used versus those that don’t?
Josh Storrs Hall: I think, again, what's happened is something of a regression to the mean. If you look back at history, almost always the major technological developments were in weaponry. And so, the military is going to have whatever the best thing out there is. And I mean, the fact is that I was talking to the London Futurists a week or two ago, and I was pointing out that if we had wanted to, and you look at the technology of the SpaceX rockets right now, one of those would get me to London in the same amount of time it took to set up for the Zoom call. So, I mean, the point basically is that it's not a case of technology being incapable or physics not allowing for the sort of things we're thinking of. The case actually is we just didn't do it. So, if you want to get to London in 20 minutes, it's not only physically possible, it's technologically possible. I mean, just imagine a SpaceX Falcon with a mercury capsule on top. And boom, there you are. But we didn't. And nobody is doing that. I mean, not just not the average person, it’s not the military. They're talking about it. Actually, of course, they all have a different desiderata for their machines then we do. I mean, the military is never going to invent the family car. But they do enough things that you can look at what they do and say, okay, this is at least a guide to what's technologically possible. But when I went back and looked at things like that in the book, for example, the spin capacities of passenger airliners, there are some sets in which you really need to compare apples to apples. And so, I was comparing airliners to airliners. And it went up to basically the 60s where the speeds hit the optimal range that's basically just transonic, just a few percent below the speed of sound. And as you go through the speed of sound, it becomes really tough. And then once you get over it, you get nice, smooth flying again, except that you're using three times as much energy per mile. And it was the energy, turns out to have been, the key to the whole business. I mean, all of the technologies that we didn't get. You remember from the book, I plotted them out across a big graph, and I expected when I made up that graph, I wrote the predictions down. And so, there's 40 dots on the page. I expected to have sort of a cluster, a two-dimensional bell curve cluster of stuff, and I expected it to be slightly tilted, so you could see that the more energy something used, the less likely it was to have been achieved. But I was flabbergasted when I actually plotted that out. I just fed the numbers I had assigned to the predictions in a program, plotted them out, and boom, you got the bottom left half all populated with dots. And the top left half was completely empty as if somebody had chopped the top right half off with a machete.
Eric Jorgenson: And that represented basically every innovation that had high energy intensity that we just didn't manage to achieve any of them because we were lacking in an increase- We fell off that Henry Adams Curve, which is the energy utilization of the civilization, right?
Josh Storrs Hall: Yes, absolutely. That was- I just have to keep going back to that because it was such a startling thing that I hadn't even- I expected something like it, but not anywhere near that stark. So, if you want to know the difference between now and what the Jetsons expected, that's it. I mean, the big thing is energy. Now, of course, once you do that, you have to look and say why is energy falling off? What happened? What contributed to that? And then we get back to the Eloi and all the other social and economic things that I was talking about.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And we'll come back to the social piece sort of a little later. I think it is very interesting to note, as you do, that the only areas we have made progress are those in software and sort of computation, which are not very energy intensive, like the lack of cheap energy doesn't constrain growth in those. But let's talk about what we have to do in order to sort of regain our energy growth rate, like to get back on the Henry Adams Curve. And I think by way of definition, that's energy consumed by the species, right? It's not availability, but it is like how many watts all of humanity uses collectively.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah, well, the way I drew it, it was per capita, but it amounts to the same thing. There's a 2% growth curve in energy per capita, and there's another 2% in people, and then there's another 2% roughly in energy efficiency. So, the effective amount of energy that the human race uses is going- was going up at 6%. And now the per capita has just really tightly flat-lined and is going slightly down in places like America, although it's going up in China. But I mean, that component of the curve is what the typical person sees, and that's a hard flat line.
Eric Jorgenson: And you and others have pointed out that energy usage is probably a much better measure of quality of life than dollars consumed or available or earned, right? Like more energy generally equals a better and safer and more comfortable life, all other things being equal.
Josh Storrs Hall: Absolutely. Yeah, there's this great line from Bill Gates, who is probably the foremost philanthro- good deed doer of the world right now. And what he says is, “If there was one thing that you could reduce the price of to decrease poverty, it would be energy.” And you look at that and you think, well, if there was one thing you could increase the price of to increase poverty, it would be energy, by the exact same token. I mean, it's just looking at the same thing from the other side. And yet, since the 60s and the zeitgeist has been a war on energy. And there's been all sorts of excuses for the reasons, but when push comes to shove, the people who are out in the front of this are basically saying energy is horrible, we can't do it. People need to ride bicycles instead of having cars, no matter how clean the cars are, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That was maybe the most shocking thing to me is sort of the revelation that green activists or ag or conservationists are actually anti energy. They're not pro clean energy. They're not- they're just anti energy because they're anti-impact. And I had never considered that before. And I found that quite disturbing actually because that functionally means they are pro poverty.
Josh Storrs Hall: Absolutely.
Eric Jorgenson: And there's a few contributors, we talked about there's definitely a social zeitgeist, as you say, around that, and I'd like to pull that apart a little later. I'd like to get into regulation. But I want to sort of hear your path forward. I think the common connotation is more energy equals more pollution or equals more negative impact or is harmful in other ways. But I feel like there's a very clean, scientific, beautiful path forward. What do you see evolving? What is the happy path towards more energy for all?
Josh Storrs Hall: As I pointed out in the book, I'm nowhere near as worried about things like climate change as many people seem to be. But at the same token, we're not going to settle a solar system by burning fossil fuels in earth’s atmosphere as just there's not enough fossil fuels and there's not enough atmosphere. So, we need to be able to get energy that you can use on the moon, that you can use on the moons of Jupiter, that you can use in deep space. And the bottom line there is essentially it's either solar power, which is nuclear, or it's nuclear. And the sun puts out a lot of energy, but basically because it's very, very big, I mean, the amount of energy produced per pound of sun is less than produced by a pile of garbage just slowly rotting way. So, it's really big and it produces really a lot of energy, and we may as well use it. But once we get the scientific understanding of how to, A, recreate that or, B, do it better, the problem of energy just vanishes. I mean, for most of humanity's lifetime, the problem is going to be matter, not energy. We're going to know how to produce energy so spectacularly that it's not going to be anywhere near the sort of problem that we think of it as being.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think the way you put that in the book was too cheap to meter, which is, I don’t know, maybe a little cheeky, but it's the way we think of bandwidth today, right?
Josh Storrs Hall: Oh yeah. I just, I live in a far rural sort of place, which is great for a writer and it's a beautiful spot. I look out over the Chesapeake Bay and can see the sunset. But the thing is that up until a couple of years ago, I had a DSL line that could on a good day get three megabits. And they just put in fiber, so I have 400 megabits, and all of a sudden, I don't have to kick my wife off when I want to watch something. So, it's an embarrassment of riches almost.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And I'm excited about a vision of the future where energy is that same thing. And it sort of boggles the mind when you start to think about what you would do with a functionally limitless source of energy and all the other things that that unlocks. And I think that's where you start to get your vision that you've kind of put forward as this next Industrial Revolution, which is this combination of abundant energy probably driven by nuclear, AI, and nanotech, and like the synergies, for lack of a better word, I'm sure you have perhaps a more scientific word for it. But I'd love if you show us sort of how those three fit together and what they can accomplish in concert.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah. Well, synergy is a pretty good word. So yeah, I just called it the Second Atomic Age and it was a pun. The pun is they used to talk about atomic energy and now we call it nuclear. But the fact is that the real atomic technology is going to be nanotech. When you get to the point of designing and building machines, an atom at a time, each atom in its place and so forth, the step up in capabilities when you get to that point is just fantastical. And although that is not actually going to allow you to do what we call nuclear processes directly, it's going to make our ability to provide the conditions so much better, easier, and easier to fix when something happens, i.e., isotopic separation, both for producing new nuclear fuels and for cleaning up irradiated stuff. If you wear a pair of gloves in a lab where there happens to be a sample of nuclear waste and you throw the gloves out, they're considered nuclear waste simply because they will have been slightly irradiated and it's detectable, but it's actually less radiation coming from that than a [inaudible 28:41] style watch. And yet, that when people go on about, oh, the horrible nuclear waste problem, what they're doing is they talk about the really nasty stuff, which is the actual spent fuel where the uranium atoms have broken down into these highly radioactive daughter products. But that's tiny. And the actual huge amount of so-called waste is this stuff, the gloves that somebody had on, which are only just detectably more radioactive than they were before and probably less radioactive than a banana. So, bananas contain enough extra, more potassium than ordinary stuff. And potassium has enough potassium 40, which is radioactive, that a banana is detectably more radioactive than the background. So, if your nuclear waste is less radioactive than bananas, then you're just making up scare stories.
Eric Jorgenson: I think that's a really- all of the rebuttals to common concerns around nuclear I think are really important and valuable in this book. And I think you do a pretty thorough job of like look, these things are not going to spontaneously combust, having a nuclear power plant in your backyard is not dangerous, our understanding of what's radioactive and what's dangerous is like wildly out of touch with reality, the cost is massively lower, you can't weaponize the fuel, and there are very, very few actually dangerous waste products, which I think are like the main things that people get wrong. But did I miss any in there, or did I understate the absurdity of any of our common concerns about nuclear that you'd like to rectify?
Josh Storrs Hall: No, I think you have a pretty good handle on it there. The other thing is that, for example, as far as radioactivity is concerned and you pointed this out, people are overly scared of radioactivity. And if you look at the physiological harm that's done by people worrying about things, in particular worrying about things that they can’t help or fix, it's actually a lot worse for them than radiation. So, the people who are spreading the scare stories are actually doing more damage to people than radiation itself. But one more point here. Now this differs with people and it differs with actual types of radiation and exposures and so forth. It's a complicated subject. But there's a substantial segment of this phenomenon where radiation at reasonably low levels is actually good for you. It's called hormesis. And the easy example of that is going out and getting some sun. It actually enhances the amount of vitamin D your body produces. If you live say in Northern Sweden and you don't go out all winter long, and you don't use a sun lamp or take vitamin D or something like that, that's as bad for you as being a chain smoker as far as your health is concerned. So going out and getting radiation in the sun activates the body's repair and defense mechanisms, and you're better off with a certain amount – not too much, but not too little either. And that's what the hormesis phenomenon actually is. And again, I will caution that it is complex and it's different for different people, especially different people at different times of life and different kinds of radiation. And so, you have to know a lot about what's actually going on there. But the notion that you can blanket say no radiation at all is actually harmful.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. Okay. Could you give us a step or a snapshot of where we are in nanotech right now? I know this is the area you spent most of your career in, and it was the newest to me and feels like the farthest out of sort of the three pillars of the next Industrial Revolution. But where is nanotech right now? Is it mostly in the lab? Is it starting to get sort of commercialized? Like what are the first use cases that we'll see? Maybe that sort of overview.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, people are beginning to do the stuff. About 10 years ago, I was president of the Foresight Institute, which is the thing that Drexler founded to try and help nanotech come along. And I said, look, instead of just sitting around waiting, why don't we try the scheme that Feynman came up with around 1960, start with a machine shop, and understand the architecture you need to build another machine shop smaller. And that's not easy because the new machine shop has to have higher tolerances, tighter tolerances in the machines, and smoother surfaces. And it just has to be better than the machine that made it, and it's not obviously easy. In fact, it's very hard, but that's what actually happened over the course of the Industrial Revolution. We started out with blacksmiths and we got to hyper fine machinery with sub-micron tolerances, and every one of them was made by an earlier machine. So that happens and it can work. And if you sit down and try to do it specifically, you ought to be able to do it faster than the Industrial Revolution. But even if you don't, that's what the Industrial Revolution has done and is doing and will continue to do. So, the question is not whether we are going to get to nano technology where we are designing things atom by atom, it's how long it's going to take to get there and how fast the progress is going to be and how focused it is. And if I had to sit down and talk about the whole business, I would say that progress has really been a continuation of the Industrial Revolution trend rather than having been a focused moonshot or Manhattan Project to get nanotech. And that's a shame because if it had been the- we would have a bunch of this stuff now, and I might live forever, but in fact, chances are I won't, but that's just a personal thing. So anyways, technology does advance and I'm alive because of it. So, more than one case. So, maybe I'll continue to be lucky. But so, we're somewhere between just what would have happened anyway and taking advantage of the insights of the great minds that came up with this. And in the book, I talk about Heinlein, Feynman, and Drexler because they were the three that hit on the specific thing that we are talking about. But to make just a general sort of description of the problem is that we do have an atomically precise technology right now. It's life. It's just how cells work. And all of the mechanisms inside of a cell are made of protein and RNA and all that sort of stuff are, in fact, designed and manufactured atom for atom. You have a place for every atom and every atom in its place. And that gives it properties that big clunky machines just don't have. And so, imagine something like life only with the power densities and speeds of mechanical machines, because life uses a fairly slow design process that is best for evolvability. Whereas if I were going to build a machine to do something, I wouldn’t care whether it evolved. I want it to do the one thing, and I would design a hard high temperature, fast design that could not evolve because I don't want it to, and you're looking at a completely different phase of technology there.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That's probably the most mind-boggling thing is the stuff that unlocks when what you're describing, sort of something that's as fast and smart and replicable as we want it to be really goes, like that is where sci-fi turns reality. And what are some of the things that you see that might enter our practical lives when we sort of unlock that next nanotechnology-?
Josh Storrs Hall: One of the things that will give you a kind of a cute example of the sort of technology’s capability is that nowadays nerds are famous for walking around with a pocket protector and a bunch of pens in it. And they pull the pen out and it's a ballpoint pen and they can write with it and then they put it back up and so forth. Once you get to full fledge capable nanotechnology, the kind of thing you could build would be that when you pull that pen out, you throw it and it expands in the air and it's a full-sized humanoid robot. It's still no heavier than the pen was because it doesn't do anything to gain mass, but the body size, shape, and strength in particular would be essentially equivalent to a human being. And then it does its job and then it folds itself back up and you stick it in your pocket and walk off. But I mean, that's roughly the capability of nanotech reduced to a simple, personal scale thing. I mean, if you want to take the opposite end, you take the little conversation I had with Rob [Dreitis 39:15] a couple of decades ago when we were trying to figure out how quickly it could reproduce the entire capital stock of the United States. And we sat down and diddled in our books and calculated and so forth and looked back up at each other and right in unison said about a week. That means replace every single machine and building and road and ship and tower and transmission line and everything out there. Everything that we have built could be rebuilt in a week if we had mature nanotech.
Eric Jorgenson: Blowing my mind. So, to have that level of nanotech, we certainly need that abundant nuclear energy that we've talked about. What else sort of- what other breakthroughs do we need to have, either in the lab or outside, in order to kind of inch us towards that future?
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, the three legs on my three legged stool that I call the Second Atomic Age are the nanotech for the physical manipulation, the nuclear for the energy, which is made much easier and more likely to happen by the nanotech not only for the machines that you need to make it work, but for the machines that you need to do the science and understand what's going on and that sort of thing. So, you have science to go in nuclear and then you have the- We pretty much understand everything you need to do in nanotech. We just haven't gotten around to doing it. We don't know everything you need to do in nuclear, but we have science, we have the tools, and nanotech will give us much better tools. And so, once we have a decent nanotech technology, you ought to be able to start improving your nuclear usage. I mean, and ultimately, I'm talking into this century, or maybe even later, you'll get to a point where any energy that's available, according to the physics, can be captured and used. And at that point, you can take ordinary nitrogen, the major component of the air that's just an inert gas, fuse the two nitrogen atoms and a nitrogen molecule, get a silicon atom out and lots of energy. So, I mean, just plain empty air is your fuel. So, I mean, as I say, that's probably a century off, but all you have to do is just look at the chart of the nuclides as sort of the nuclear version of the periodic table and just do the math. There's the energy; it's just sitting there. So, the third leg of our triad here is intelligence. And that is often called artificial intelligence today, but it requires a better understanding of decision-making processes, a better use of feedback in the situations where we actually need to do decision-making, and ultimately, the ability to program those into a machine and have something that has got the sort of smarts and common sense of a human being. And we've made enormous strides. In fact, of all the technologies that we have right now, AI is the one that is most on the track that people back in the 60s thought it was going to be. Isaac Asimov had a very good notion of just how far robots would be nowadays. And he got it just about right. So, to understand how much we need that, go back to we can replace the entire capital stock of the United States in a week. How long is it going to take you to get construction permits?
Eric Jorgenson: And draw blueprints.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah. So, I mean, design it and do it legally. It turns out that that is by far the worst part of it. Even with today's technology, if you're trying to do anything that you're not already licensed to do, well, the really worst example is build a nuclear power plant, but I'm talking about putting a wing on my house. That is the hardest part of the whole process.
Eric Jorgenson: The AI was a very interesting sort of component. I was surprised to hear that we are actually, to your eyes, farther ahead in nanotech than we are in nuclear. I think just sort of in the ether, way more people talk about nuclear and we've had nuclear for longer than we've had nanotech. So, I just kind of assumed that we were- that nanotech was the furthest behind and that nuclear was- But if we are the farthest behind on nuclear, but we need nuclear to power the nanotech, the feedback loop between those two, that gets us into those sort of small, self-powered devices, that is very interesting.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, right now, the best we can do as far as nuclear is concerned is have a giant critical mass, big reactor and with cores and coolings and containment domes and all that sort of stuff. And you really can't make it smaller than that. If you're a lab and you're just- there have been sort of nuclear that would fit in a phone booth, but there's no basic technology base for doing that. And the best way to do it is nowhere near understood. The difference is, and you got this exactly right, the difference is that since the 60s, chemistry didn't stop, and in particular, biology didn't stop. People have been learning by leaps and bounds cool molecular biology stuff, getting all the way up to CRISPR and the ability to say, okay, I want my DNA to say this, let's just make it that way. It's almost like a printer for DNA, and all you have to do now is know what to print. Well, on the other hand, nuclear physics and nuclear engineering didn't just flat line in the 70s, they cratered, and it went down to virtually nothing. And so, you were right, nuclear has actually been by far the slowest of the technologies to develop.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, which is upsetting. And we'll come back to a little bit of that and the regulation and the incentives in a moment here. But I want to tie up the three pillars that you took us through. So, of all the people I gifted this book, as I said before we started recording, to 10 people, I still have a stack of them in my closet. I want to give them away to everybody. I want everyone on the planet to read this book and in particular, the more sort of prone they are to helping usher in this future, the more I want them to read it.
Josh Storrs Hall: I’m going to need a bigger camera because my head is swelling here.
Eric Jorgenson: By far the most common question, and I talked with a few friends sort of in the lead up to this interview and just said I'm finally interviewing the author. I'm very excited about it. What do you want to know? And probably half of all their questions were basically like resource allocation questions all kind of in this general vein of like how do we make this happen? So, I'll give you a few of these and let's see sort of what we can all do to help bring this forward. But if you were in charge of allocating $10 billion in philanthropy with no restrictions, where would you put it? The benevolent worker placement problem for helping to move these technologies forward.
Josh Storrs Hall: I would have the biggest yacht you ever saw in your life. Seriously, it's a hard problem and I'm unlikely to come close to getting it right with a toss off answer. But basically, I would say, first, just figure some way of getting some of it into nuclear. I mean, Bill Gates did that. And having known the problem with this energy and poverty and so forth, he tries to put money into nuclear and the NRC stepped on him and said you can't do that here. So, he went to China and started because they're much more into high power technology than we are nowadays. And they were saying sure. And then the administration stepped on him again saying, no, you can't give this stuff to the Chinese. So anyway, I don't know. Maybe you would just have to hire a lot of lawyers first. But that unfortunately seems to be where we're sitting. So as far as- I mean, I'm a technologist, so I tend to look at the problems and say, okay, it's how do you invent this, and how do you build that, and so forth. And then, I kind of look up and notice that there are people out there that make their living keeping you from doing it. And it was sort of my reaction to that that caused the book to come the way it did. But unfortunately, there's been this notion that we don't have flying cars because you can't make flying cars. It would be impossible for the average person to own one or to fly one or all that sort of stuff. And so, one of the main things of the book was I just wanted to look at that and say is that really true? And of course, it's not. The real reason we don't have flying cars has a lot to do with economics. First off, nobody's going to buy a flying car if it's not worth more than the ground car because they already have a ground car, they're used to them. You want a flying car that can do more things better than your ground car, and so you have to have some kind of extra push there. Well, it turns out that one of the big extra pushes about flying machines is that they get you there faster. So, I went and looked up the travel literature, travel theory, and basically worked out how much value there was to being able to get places fast. And so when you build a flying car, I can tell you, at least at a first cut, I mean, this is by no means a PhD in economics, but as a first cut, I can tell you that if you have a thing that can take off from your driveway and go at roughly airliner speeds to where you're going and then land in the other driveway, it would be worth seven times as much as a ground car. And yeah, that may be ten, it might be five, but that's the number I got. And so, the first thing is here you have at least the other side of the equation. Everybody who I've seen who has looked at flying cars say how much does it cost to build this and what can you get away with, blah, blah, blah. But the other half of the equation is how much is it worth? Because if it costs less to build it then it is worth, people will build it. And if it costs more, then they won't. And there's other reasons for having a flying car. I mean, if I had one that was only three times as valuable as my car or even as valuable as my car, since I'm an early adopting techno freak, I would get one, if I could possibly manage to afford it, but the average person wouldn’t.
Eric Jorgenson: And you did get a plane and a pilot's license as you researched this book. So, in a way you have.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah, as a matter of fact, not only that we, my wife and I got a gyro and both learned to fly that. So, we will do that. I mean, somebody will, and the kinks will get worked out one way or the other and so forth. But the bottom line is that to build a flying car that does that, I mean, you have to go for not only the high-speed but the driveway. And to build a car like that, it has to have a megawatt engine, a thousand horsepower, and that runs instantly afoul of the collapse of the Henry Adams Curve. And that's why we don't have flying cars. Because the collapse of energy per capita leaves us without being able to build high value flying cars.
Eric Jorgenson: And that back to that, energy is upstream of absolutely everything. So, as we think about how we invest – a lot of the people listening I think are investors and I love investing in early-stage technology, I think it is a contribution to bringing more of it about – we've seen a lot of money go into, not even a lot of money really, go into transportation, but I rarely hear about nanotech startups getting funded. Like how do you see that process of these technologies get commercialized and get investment? Like where do you expect this to sort of enter the world economy and expand from there?
Josh Storrs Hall: I can give you a good example, and it is one I predicted 10 years ago in an earlier book, which was about artificial intelligence. And I said all these people saying this is what we need to do to produce AI, this is this other thing, we're going to build an AI that's going to be so smart it's going to write AI all by itself, even though, you figure, well, how's it going to write itself if it doesn't exist yet. But anyway, there's all this sort of stuff that people had all sorts of schemes for producing AI. And I said, no, that's not going to be the way it works. What's going to happen is people are going to keep plugging away, and at some point, the latest developments are going to start being promising and people are going to do them and they're going to start using them and they're going to work. And once they start noticeably working and doing stuff that people didn't quite realize or didn’t expect that they were going to be capable of, the watershed in Google translate, overnight, all of a sudden, they swapped in the neural net version, and boom, it started working so much better, right overnight. And once something like that happened, and it happened in more than one place, then all of a sudden, the VCs are going to come around and say, oh, it looks like something is going on here, and they're going to start putting money into it. And once the money starts going into it, then you're going to have the resources to take all the new developments and push them. And there's going to be a self-accelerating process. And that's exactly what happened. And that's the AI boom we have today. So, for nanotech, I think that's basically all you need. I think that people keep plugging along and a few more “good ideas” show up and some of them start working and doing things that used to be expensive cheaply or better or whatever. And you're going to have the same- It's probably going to happen in this decade. That's been predicted before, but well, it's complicated. But anyway, I think that there's probably a decent chance that it will happen in this decade, and if not, in the next. But it's going to look like the AI boom. People are just going to say, oh, look, this is working better than we thought, let's put some money into it and that will accelerate and Bob's your uncle. So that leaves you with nuclear. And that's a completely different animal. You've got a whole bunch of roadblocks in your way, and you have 60 years of neglected science. So, it's going to be a harder sell and a harder catch up to do, but at least there's a possibility that people, because they're so worried about fossil fuels, are going to begin to start looking at this again, and at least start filling in the science gap. And you can never tell what regulation is going to do, and I wouldn't even take a guess. But it is possible for something like that to happen, even with the roadblocks.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's very interesting how different those are going to evolve, as you say, the difference in what you expect the next step to look like in nanotech versus nuclear. It seems that pre VC, pre the boom you're sort of talking about where something really starts to work and commercial money comes in, that it's mostly- is it true that most of this is sort of funded by the government? Most of this early nanotech research comes from limited grants and stuff from central funding sources?
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, that's actually part of the problem was that nanotech research was going on in the funded university and military complex. I was in that myself. And so, what happens is you have to go and find some guy in DARPA or NSF who likes what it is you're doing. And the further you get from the military and the closer you get to the NSF in the science world, the more politics is involved. So, DARPA can fund something just because one guy likes it. But you’ve got all sorts of peer review and plenty of chances for people to play politics and trip you up the closer you get over to the science side of things. So, what happened was that when they did the National Nanotechnology Initiative, they didn't actually put any extra money in it for nanotechnology. What they did was they just stole money from a whole bunch of other budgets of places that were doing things like macromolecular chemistry and surface science and that kind of stuff, all of which could be thought of as being relevant to nanotechnology and vice versa. And they said, okay, now this money is in the National Nanotech Initiative. And all the people who have been getting this money said, oh no you don't. And so, there was a huge political backlash and it kind of clobbered the research in nanotech that wasn't the sort of stuff that people had already been doing. And I was there, and I watched that happen and I don't think that's going to happen again, because I think that the process I'm describing, the one with the model in the AI world, is going to be private money. And people are going to be doing it because they see it working as opposed to people trying to stop it because they were already doing something differently and didn't want that money going to nano. So yeah, the process is probably going to be like the AI one. Now, the heyday of government funding for artificial intelligence was the 60s and 70s. And I was there too, as it turns out. And it went on and it went on and then, sometime in the 80s, they got tired of it because people had been promising them all this wonderful stuff, and it didn't happen. And so, the people in the field call it the AI winter, after nuclear winter, but it was basically this big funding crash. And then AI kind of muddled along. And the reason that AI got better and better over all of those years was simply purely because computers got faster and faster and had more memory. And there were things that simply isn't possible to do with a small program on a small computer, no matter how ingenious it is, you have to use brute force.
Eric Jorgenson: So, in some of these funding methods, if nanotech is in this sort of dark period between centralized funding sort of failed for all the reasons that you just described, and we're not quite at this influx of VC money, what are the alternatives to either government money or private money? How do we help sort of bridge the gap between to get these technologies into clearly the space of commercialization and that feedback loop of invention and product and return on capital?
Josh Storrs Hall: Oh, my goodness.
Eric Jorgenson: I am just putting all the world's problems on your back in this interview, you are our only hope, Josh.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, I mean, basically, if you say it's not government and it's not private, you're looking for angels and aliens here. But I think there's enough private money that is feasible to do, especially in nanotech. And as we know, there's private money to do nuclear. We have Gates. We have the fusion reactor coming out of MIT, which is much more likely to succeed than the gigantic European ITER project. If you know what that is, it's this really monstrous thing that they're trying to build a token back with 10-, 15-year-old magnet technology, because it's a government project. And that's when the design was started. And so, chances are, by 2035, they're going to reach breakeven in the actual reactor itself. But by that time, there is going to be commercial fusion from the 20 odd different fusion startups out there right now. So, there is private money going into nuclear. It's mostly fusion because everybody thinks that fission is old fashioned and so forth. There are still some interesting other pathways into nuclear. I mean, there's this massive thing where it's kind of a mush of coal fusion and a particle accelerator, where they take metals and load them with deuterium the way you would in a coal fusion experiment. And then they shove it in front of a particle accelerator and, boom, fusion happens, and it's obvious it's happening, and they can turn it on and off at will and all that kind of stuff. And that's going on at NASA right now. And I believe the Navy is into it and some other people. But there's lots of projects like that. And not all of them will work, maybe not even most of them will work, but some of them will. And so, I think the new magnetic confinement fusion thing that’s gotten well over a billion in private funding, it's an MIT spinoff, is likely to produce breakeven energy. I don't know, I have no clue actually, whether it's going to be commercially feasible or not. But if it actually works and somebody looks at and says, well, we can do this this way, and it will be half as expensive, you're still talking 2030s, but weld fusion power. And like I say, there's at least 20 different companies like that, some better and some less better funded, but they're all out there swinging.
Eric Jorgenson: That's extremely encouraging. It's sounds like more progress than not, at least in some small sort of distributed experiments. I'm glad to hear that the regulatory veil isn't stifling absolutely everything before it at least gets a chance to walk. There's a number of questions around that actually, too. So, maybe look at what were some of the most damaging regulatory either laws or agencies that you saw towards some of these innovations. If you could remove one, one or two, or how do you think we can best sort of advocate and move policymakers towards something slightly more sane when it comes to energy and nuclear in particular.
Josh Storrs Hall: I think the NRC is probably the worst if you pick a single particular agency. The FAA is a huge stumbling block to private aviation. If you want to talk about private aviation, the trial lawyers, the ambulance chasers for lack of a better term, are what actually destroyed the light aircraft industry. And that was back around 1980. There was a shift in the interpretation of the law that allowed- say you're a pilot, and you get drunk and you have this 40 year old airplane and you fly into somebody's house and you die and the house burns down. And everybody is a victim because the people in the house and all your relatives and so forth. Who do they sue? They sue the manufacturer of the airplane. Even though it was built 40 years ago, and you should never have been flying it in the first place. But that's the way it works. And that completely destroyed the private aircraft industry. And so basically there's two kinds of airplanes out there, small private ones, and they are 40 years old and homemade.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. And the commercial, I mean the regulatory burden on the commercial airline industry, enormous and expensive as well. And I think I was listening to one of your other interviews and you said there was a nuclear project that had basically raised a billion dollars and spent all of it on lawyers before making really any tangible progress in the real world towards energy generation. What was the name of that?
Josh Storrs Hall: New Scale. I was flabbergasted how much money it costs them just to file an application to build and run an experimental reactor in their design.
Eric Jorgenson: So, yeah, abolish the NRC is a reasonable step we can maybe take. And there's probably a perception war as well, knowing that politicians are probably a reflection of the whoever's winning the meme war of any given technology at a current time. They're just reflecting our own policies back to us.
Josh Storrs Hall: There is a lot of truth to that, there really is.
Eric Jorgenson: I hope that this podcast is one small spear in a wall of anti-propaganda and pro-technology propaganda.
Josh Storrs Hall: Pull a finger out of the dyke and hope the trickle gets bigger and bigger.
Eric Jorgenson: The regulatory- as I was reading the book and thinking about the regulatory challenges that you talked about in there and how much that's hampered the growth of nuclear and energy in general, one of the good things about that is there's a lot of governments on earth. And I have to imagine that somewhere there's someone who is hungry or governments compete for tax dollars and positions. And I imagine there's some governments that have to be or become pretty quickly friendly towards experimenting with nuclear, especially with some of the political challenges that come with relying on fossil fuels that we see now. But are there, in your experience, governments or places that are aggressively experimenting with this, that dollars or talent will flow over time and we'll see some countries sort of take the forefront in this?
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, I certainly hope so. And the problem with that is basically what I call the Machiavelli effect, where it's between countries as well as individuals and bureaucracies. And the bottom line is that, if you're a little country, suppose you are say Estonia, where actually they do a lot of cool experimentation and progressive stuff, and they certainly started a fast-advancing nuclear program. They would quickly be accused of trying to build nuclear weapons and get stepped on. Yeah, so just think of all the other little countries that are trying to do that. So, it's not just as simple as somebody being out from under and getting to try this stuff. There's still a fair thicket of brambles that you have navigate through to get there. But I think that the closer we get to something that really starts working, I mean, right now, things like the fusion reactors I was talking about, which are the sort of things you can build, because it's licensed more like a scientific instrument than a nuclear power plant. And so that's where a lot of the money is going in what you would call nuclear experimentation. Nowadays, as soon as people begin to find ways of doing things that are not billion-dollar projects but million-dollar projects, then you'll start to see a thousand flowers bloom and more progress, sort of just like AI. Right now, the kind of computer that you can get and put on your desk is literally hundreds of times more powerful than Cray-1, which costed millions of dollars back in the day. And back in the early heyday of AI, the PDB 10s at MIT that they were doing all the classic AI list programing on had a million words of memory, ran 1 million instructions per second and cost a million dollars. And that's, I mean, you can get a single board computer you can put in your pocket much less your cell phone has way more than that and something that a hobbyist can afford and do real serious AI experimentation is still- like the computer you always wanted is $5,000. That's the same from way back when. So, yeah, and almost anybody can do that if that's what's really important to them.
Eric Jorgenson: That is an interesting thing about studying sort of the history of science and technology and discoveries is how many of them come from these decentralized experimental routes and how few really come from the institutions that you might expect are making these breakthroughs. I think in part due to just the incentives of who's working on what and who has reason to. Like there's all these energy companies and oil companies running sort of propaganda campaigns about what they support in terms of clean energy and renewables and things like that. Do you buy that? Or do you essentially think that-
Josh Storrs Hall: I think that there's examples in the business world, without even getting into the science and technology, which is all the new growth ideas and new jobs and all that sort of stuff come from the startups. And then, you found a startup and it grows and grows and then you sell it. And you either, depending on just how happy you are, you found another one and do it again, or you buy a yacht. But all your listeners who are in the business world know that. And all I have to say really is the scientific engineering technological world is just the same way.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I think this was from one of your other interviews, talking about something that I hadn't been aware of being outside that world of academia and science, is the biases and incentives within that are just as varied, sundry, and dangerous as the ones in the business world or the political world. Us outside of science, we have this view that there is a body of science and everyone's just trying to sort of find the truth. And you broke down sort of all of the various incentives that various scientists might have that might influence their work or their resources and how they allocate their things, let alone sort of the outcomes that they arrive at and the views that they support.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah. Well, and having had lots of personal experience in the scientific world and some experience, most of it from my wife who was in the business world, I would have said that the business world is slightly nicer than the academic or science world. It's a little more cutthroat on the academic side.
Eric Jorgenson: Because it's a little more zero sum?
Josh Storrs Hall: Absolutely. That would be exactly, if I were going to draw a reason for it, that's what I would say.
Eric Jorgenson: So, what are the incentives? I mean, are scientists acting to support their industries? Are they supporting their core thesis? Are they just kind of trying to protect their career in many cases? And how do you separate who is a trustworthy sort of upholder of the true definition of science versus someone who's credentialed but really supporting their own agenda?
Josh Storrs Hall: Basically, all of the above. I mean, if you want to be able to pick out who are the good guys and the bad guys, I can't tell you, to go watch Game of Thrones.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm not sure there were any redeeming characters in that one. I'm hoping there are in this cast.
Josh Storrs Hall: Oh boy. Well, I got to say, basically, they filmed at some really spectacularly beautiful locations. I can't say so much to the people.
Eric Jorgenson: Who do you look to in this world? Like, how do you- I know that your bio starts with an independent scientist and author. I think that's a very deliberate choice to identify yourself that way. And who else would you recommend that we look to that might not have this conflict?
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, if I knew a really good big one, I would be doing it. But at the moment, like I worked at Rutgers mostly for federal money for most of the- part of the 20th century that I was in there doing that kind of thing. And interestingly enough, just to hit another point that we've talked about before, I started out in artificial intelligence in a big way and did a lot of studying of that and so forth, and ultimately came to the conclusion that what we really needed was not more ingenious algorithms but faster machines. And so, I shifted from AI to architecture, designing massively parallel machines and that kind of thing. And surely by luck, I guess, shifted from a sinking ship to a moving one and finished out my career there doing that kind of thing. And then basically got into nanotech and thought it was so cool that I just hop, skipped and jumped. So I was president of the Foresight Institute for a while and was a startup scientist at an Nanorex, which was trying to build a molecular CAD system, which it's a good thing and somebody will have to go back and do that again. But we actually had a really nice little piece of software that you could use to design molecular machines and that kind of thing. So, once I got out of that, I just started writing books since my business world wife was easily capable of supporting us for much more than I would have ever gotten in the academic world. So, that's my career.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And I'm very glad that you have shifted to book writing. I hope that this has a wide ranging and massive impact. I heard you describe you set out to, as many authors including myself do, set out on what you think is a two-year project and then find out it's much more than that. And you've sort of, I think paraphrasing, but accidentally written your technical memoirs in this, which is something I really appreciate. I think you bring a lot of personality to it. It's very wide ranging. It covers a lot of ground. It's fascinating, like scientifically and economically. And it gives me great dreams for the future.
Josh Storrs Hall: And you're swelling my head again.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'll do it a few more times if you give me the chance. As a science fiction fan, I appreciate that, one, you reference a lot of science fiction. You're clearly motivated by a lot of it, and I think you almost end the book with a call to science fiction to sort of get back to what it does best, which is let us dream, dream big dreams for the future and get greedy for an incredible next sort of huge thing.
Josh Storrs Hall: It's what we can do. And the current zeitgeist of just lying around and waiting for the world to end and going, oh, is just- I can't see that. We had a glorious future before us in the 60s and we still do. All we have to do is actually realize it and go do it.
Eric Jorgenson: What do you see as some of the most inspiring stuff that's been created recently from a science-fiction perspective?
Josh Storrs Hall: Boy. Actually, I haven't read that much of currently produced science fiction. And so, I probably would do a bad job trying to pick and choose among the people writing right now. I'd say that the one author that I'm really fond of that does not get the sort of cache among the golden age guys, even though he was, is, let's see, he was the author of Little Fuzzy and he is known for that. And that is correct. But he wrote a whole bunch of other stuff. In fact, the best of the- he called it Paratime, which is a universe where all the possible time streams have- you're able to travel back and forth between them. But he had a perspective on science fiction that most of the other writers didn't have. And the reason is that they were things like Esme was a chemist and Heinlein was a Naval officer, and that sort of thing. Well, he was a policeman. Piper was a private railroad policeman. And if you read his stuff knowing that, it just jumps out at you. He knows a lot more about that kind of thing. And one of the things about literature in general is that the things that really grab us in literature and that we will remember it for is not the grand heroes and all that sort of stuff, it's the evil guys, it's the villains and the crooks and all that sort of stuff. And so, if you have much more graphically drawn, believably drawn villains, then you're going to write a much more compelling book. And so, that's one of the things he does.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And I'm just on his Wikipedia page, self-educated, very interesting guy. Cool, I'll have to check some of those out. Andy Weir is a more contemporary author that I've enjoyed. He wrote The Martian and more recently Project Hail Mary, which I like, and at least in attempts to involve and does a quite a rigorous job, I think, of involving the actual scientific method and some reasonably appropriate math. But it's not the hundred years out stuff.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah, it's a tough, a really tough job to get that scientifically accurate and get a hundred years out. You just can't do it.
Eric Jorgenson: But it's fun to try. And when every generation grows up reading about the dreams of the previous one, it does sort of continue to cascade things. We're seeing everybody work on VR now sort of guided by Ernest Cline in Ready Player One, a software version. But yeah, I think we underestimate the power of sci-fi to show us what's possible and what we should strive for.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah. Or Neal Stephenson in, what was the one with the- the deliberator where he is the pizza delivery guy.
Eric Jorgenson: Snow Crash.
Josh Storrs Hall: Snow Crash, yeah, that's the one. He has a VR world overlying really interestingly fractured remains of the United States.
Eric Jorgenson: And that was 30 years ago, I think, that he published that.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, the interesting thing is that idea, I mean, not that idea, the Snow Crash idea, the one that there can be a computer virus that will invade a human mind, was in the zeitgeist of the science fiction writers. And three different books came out that year making that- and that was one of them. I think the other one was Hogan’s Giant Star, and I've forgotten the name of the other one. But there were the three books that year that had that as a premise. I was like what? How does that happen all at once?
Eric Jorgenson: Well, yeah, we see the same thing in movies sometimes, I guess. I don't know how that happens. But competitive interests, maybe, the Machiavelli effect again.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, that and conversion evolution.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I've got a few- I would love to keep you all day, but I I'm sure you have somewhere else to be. So, I've got a few closing questions for you, if you're up for a few more. Okay. So, I would be very curious sort of where you- how you look at where you were coming into this book, what your priors were, and some of the things that you maybe changed your mind on in the course of your eight years working on this.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, I would say the big one is I came in with a bunch of questions, like is a flying car actually going to be technologically feasible and what happened and all that sort of stuff. And then I've described how I realized that there was a problem with energy, but I had not realized just how clean cut and critical it was and ran into things like the Henry Adams Curve and so forth. So, the other things, I mean, the Machiavelli effect, that came from Machiavelli 500 years ago. So that's always been there.
Eric Jorgenson: It is still plaguing us, we haven’t solved that one yet.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah, that's nothing new. But the notion that the population came over some kind of a watershed to make them into the Eloi and the Eloi Agonistes in the 60s and 70s took form as I was doing the writing and the analysis. And then the other really neat thing was travel theory. And most of the really cool stuff in the book, I didn't intend all this stuff, I read a lot, but the notion that you could actually sit down and calculate how much a flying car would be worth, also, was a cool sort of a new thing I think.
Eric Jorgenson: That was a very interesting discovery to me, too, the theory that basically humans travel an hour-ish a day, regardless of the technology that they use to travel. So, if you're walking, you walk an hour a day and you only travel so far. If you've got a car, you get a flying car. I thought that was very interesting.
Josh Storrs Hall: And I hadn't known that either, but there it is. I mean, it's right there in the literature.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Like the induced demand of you make a bigger freeway and more people take it and ends up just as clogged and it takes just as long. Now that you've dropped the Eloi Agonistes, you're going to have to treat us to a definition of that for those who haven't read the book yet.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, basically the Eloi are the degenerated remains of humanity in the H. D. Wells novel The Time Machine. And he figured that hundreds of centuries down the road, once you had civilization, people are not going to need their strength and their aggression and all the other things that, especially back in his day, were considered the manly virtues. And so, people would just lose them, and they would all become sort of big children basically and just run around like chickens and be scared of everything and so forth. But you look at the real world and that's not exactly how people are. In fact, they're worse now than they were before, because they all think they have to do something horribly important to save the world. And again, I'm not the first person to come up with this idea, but the idea is that as you move up the scale of the Maslow hierarchy of needs, where you're not- well, one of the ways I like to put it is at roughly $30,000 per person income, you quit worrying about how to make ends meet, and you start worrying about how to keep your friends from eating me. And that's basically the kind of concerns that our grandparents had are just not the concerns we have because we take the grandparents' concerns for granted, and that’s kind of what changed the zeitgeist in the 60s and 70s.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. We spend more time in sort of this social strata, which is a zero-sum game, than we do in the pursuit of just feeding ourselves and staying alive. And to your point, these are related. I think in the book you say like the world in which we stop innovating and stop growing becomes very zero sum and becomes very contentious and politically and socially savage. If we do not have a collective mission to continue to sort of grow and expand, then we just start eating each other. And history shows us that. And if there's a more compelling reason to continue to work on technology and innovation and growth and continue to expand our purview and get back to supporting population growth and supporting energy growth, it's understanding that the other path is crabs in a bucket and us all trying to scuttle over each other because that is the default of human nature without a continuously growing pie.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yes, absolutely. And I mean, just look out there. I mean, this is a tiny grain of sand in the solar system, much less the universe. And if we just sit here and keep giving up any chance we have of building a capable technology, the next big asteroid that comes along or the next big solar flare or the next nearby supernova, it's goodbye. And so, if you believe in the value of humanity as a thing in itself, which I do, we need to get out there.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, there's the humanity species level loyalty, but there's a little even closer to home. If it's hard to abstract that, to care about the whole species, just think if your kids are the most important thing to you and you want them to have a good life and if their kids are the most important thing to them, you may not care about your own great, great, great, great, great grandchildren, but this chain of leaving a slightly better world for the people that you care about the most is unbroken and the closest thing we have to lining with our genetic drives and our sort of built in motives. We can all do well to see this as the playbook for winning that game.
Josh Storrs Hall: Yeah, if you're a drop of water in the Mississippi River, you don't know where you're going, but you just keep going to the next spot, and ultimately, you get there, and that's what it is like to be a human being. You know a direction, but you don't know a destination.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Okay, so you've got a number of other books, which now that I've read this, I plan to go read those, mostly focused on nanotechnology I believe.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, actually one is nanotech and the other one is AI and robotics. And the AI robotics one was actually the first book to address the question of are the robots going to wake up and take us over and wipe us out or something. And I called it ethics for machines, and they wouldn't let me use that title, but we came up with a title. Anyway, it's called Beyond AI. But it was the first book in what's now considered the field of AI safety. And I was way ahead of my time. For 10 years, nobody thought about it, talked about it, read the book, anything, and all of a sudden, it is big. So, don't write a book that's that far ahead of its time. But nowadays- well, there's two reasons. One is that nobody's going to read it. And the other one is once you finally do get around to read it, you'll find that I spend the first third of the book trying to convince the reader that AI is in fact possible because the readership will have changed in their back underlying beliefs. So, yeah. So, it's a kind of a cool little history of AI to start the book off.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Are you concerned now with the risk of general AI?
Josh Storrs Hall: I don't think so. I think basically AI is going to be like any other powerful technology, and it's clear that if you set out to do something dangerous with it, like any other technology, you can do something very dangerous and so forth, but the technology itself is kind of neutral the same way that other technologies are. And in fact, AI is the first one that actually has the possibility of being net good and actually good on its own. If we build AIs that that can have what we would consider good morals, then they will be a force for good in the world. And I came to the conclusion when I was writing the book that it's probably the case that if we actually can produce AIs that are intelligent, they have common sense, that can use language the way we do, all this sort of stuff, then it's not going to be that hard to put in the conscious. Because there's a whole bunch of things that we need to understand, but over the course of the 20th century, moral philosophers ultimately came to the conclusion, and this is just the standard way of seeing things now, that the language ability and the ethics ability are very similar in human minds. And so, if you can do language, you can do ethics and vice versa.
Eric Jorgenson: Fascinating. Okay. Yeah, I will be reading that. I'll read your nanotech book. Are there other, I don't know, authors or resources? Like where else would you point someone like me who is hungry for more things, thinkers, and people like you who have this sort of optimistic, technologically driven view of the future and show us all that’s possible?
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, there's a kind of a new field that calls itself progress studies. And I think the word came from Tyler Cowen, the economist, and some various things that he's been supporting. So, if you just sort of search around and look for that, you'll find most of the people that I would be able to point you at.
Eric Jorgenson: Last question then. A dangerous question for an author, but I'd love to know what else you're working on or what's next for you and what we can look forward to.
Josh Storrs Hall: Well, I don't know if you can look forward to it. I'm trying to write a science fiction story. Heaven only knows if I am anywhere close to competent at that because I've not tried it before.
Eric Jorgenson: I have a wild hair to do that myself someday. So, I sympathize with the feeling of entering a new field, but it's an exciting one. I look forward to reading it. I'm sure many more people do. Thank you so much, Josh, for taking the time to talk with us and share the book. And really, I can't encourage people to read it highly enough. I hope it puts a dent in the trajectory of our future, and I think it very well could. So, thank you for all your contributions.
Josh Storrs Hall: Thank you for having me. It's been a blast and see you around.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned as much there as I did and enjoyed it. Josh is hilarious and font of knowledge, very, very lucky that he shared that time with all of us. If you liked this episode, you will love the previous episode that's a solo cast recapping the highlights of the book, dives deeper into many of the lessons. Another episode might be Cliff Kuang, the author of User Friendly. It was kind of a similar interview about underappreciated ideas that can have a massive impact on everybody. In that case, it was user experience design, the design of everyday things and some of those. A little call to action to wrap this up, I get really fired up thinking about what becomes possible if we can get this stuff right. So, please buy Josh's book, Where Is My Flying Car. Read it. Support nuclear energy, refute the arguments of brainwashed anti-energy activists. Let's do what we can to reduce regulation, find a nano-tech researcher and give them a hug, write some cool sci-fi, invest in early-stage tech companies. Let's dream big. Let's work hard to deserve the glorious future of abundance that is within our grasp. The future can be so, so cool. And it's really, we are not far from reaching impossible things and that inspires all of us and living a life surrounded by wonder that comes from a place of science and a truly vast future is a very, very exciting thing and a healthy thing and increases our safety and our excitement and quality of life. So, it's not just about the science, but about the subjective human experience and that improves it for everybody. Please, don't forget to check out our sponsors in the show notes, the Founders Podcast, and think about investing with us at Rolling Fun. But thank you so much for listening. And if you want to be a part of this movement, you know where to find us, ejorgenson.com. I can't wait to keep writing about and sharing more of these exciting early-stage ideas and learning more and more about nuclear, nanotech, AI, and this next industrial revolution. Thanks for joining and being part of it. I appreciate you.