SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Sometimes the daily rigmarole of life gives us little time to contemplate big questions. And I mean really big questions. Like, how does consciousness work? What happens if you fall into a black hole? What would happen if we brought back extinct species? The video podcast, "Particles Of Thought," by NOVA and GBH, tackles these often complicated, abstract topics and many more with some of the world's leading scientists. Its host, Hakeem Oluseyi, is with me in the studio to talk about a sampling of all this. Welcome, and thanks for coming in.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
PFEIFFER: You are an astrophysicist, yes?
OLUSEYI: Yes. That is correct.
PFEIFFER: Why start a video podcast?
OLUSEYI: Well, as they say, you know, smile and the world smiles with you. I love nature. I love the universe. I love the nerds who create the new knowledge.
PFEIFFER: (Laughter).
OLUSEYI: So if I'm able to share my love with the world - I feel like people have always said to me, Hakeem, I thought I was dumb until I met you, right (laughter)?
PFEIFFER: Well, I've read that you like to say, quote, "I love being the dumbest guy in the room."
OLUSEYI: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: Explain what you mean by that.
OLUSEYI: Yeah. I love to learn. I love to learn from other people. I love to be in a room where there are people full of knowledge, and I can just question them. And quite often, you know, if it's an expert, it fires them up to see someone who's enthusiastic about the stuff that they study. These are conversations on the very cutting edge.
PFEIFFER: Well, you love your job for the same reason I love my job.
OLUSEYI: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: But you're science-focused.
OLUSEYI: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: And your pod is just a few months old, but you've covered a wide range of things so far. Why do we get deja vu? Why do we get goose bumps? What's the effect of meditation? Mars, microbes - artificial intelligence is a...
OLUSEYI: Yes.
PFEIFFER: ...Frequent theme of your podcast. I want to play a clip of a conversation you had with a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information named Hany Farid, who researches and who authenticates digital media.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "PARTICLES OF THOUGHT")
HANY FARID: I can generate a video of me saying and doing things I never did.
OLUSEYI: Yeah.
FARID: And you can clearly see the power of that technology...
OLUSEYI: Oh, yeah.
FARID: ...From a creative perspective. If you and I are having a conversation, and in post, we said something we didn't mean to, we can just fill it in with AI now.
OLUSEYI: Well, here's the thing that makes me - you just mentioned how we're only two, three years into this. So...
FARID: Yeah.
OLUSEYI: ...However good it is now...
FARID: Yeah. Yeah.
OLUSEYI: ...This is going to be...
FARID: This is the worst it will ever be.
PFEIFFER: Right. So - and he's talking about how AI is only going to get more sophisticated and better at mimicking people than it is now, and it's already quite good.
OLUSEYI: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: So for that particular episode, what's the future of AI that...
OLUSEYI: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: ...He sees happening?
OLUSEYI: Well, oh, man, where do we start? Like, there's so much. You know, AI is one of these technologies like many technologies before it that has built in the capacity for great good, but also, you know, things can go wrong in the hands of, you know, particular players. The thing about AI is that when it goes wrong, it has a catastrophe potential that's right up there with nuclear weapons, right?
PFEIFFER: Correct.
OLUSEYI: It could go really wrong. But what he does, as a person who identifies fakes - you know, the context that he spoke on was the human context, right? As an astrophysicist, I run an organization, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, that is our oldest national astronomy organization in the U.S., and we do a lot of science education. And what we've noticed is that that AI presentation of what the universe is doing has made it to the airwaves. And unlike humans, people don't have a reference point.
PFEIFFER: Interesting.
OLUSEYI: In the human context, you have to worry about things like politics, right? You know, you have a...
PFEIFFER: Fakes of politicians saying things they didn't say. Is that what you mean?
OLUSEYI: Exactly. Exactly. It's almost like the story in newspapers, right? They could print something in the old days that was an error. People get up in arms. They discover that it's an error, and they print a retraction. But by that point, it's too late, right? It's already made it into people's minds.
PFEIFFER: The bad information is out there, and few people might see the correction.
OLUSEYI: Exactly. So how do we get certification for the type of stuff that Hany Farid does? And, you know, where does that responsibility lie? That's some of the questions we have to ask ourselves.
PFEIFFER: That's interesting. I mean, and you say it can pick out clues that tells you a video is fake, but many people can't even do that in the human context. So you can imagine how difficult in the scientific context it really is.
OLUSEYI: Absolutely.
PFEIFFER: Each episode of your pod is about an hour long.
OLUSEYI: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: They go really deep. At a time when there's a push for shorter and simpler content, why did you decide on the longer format?
OLUSEYI: You know, I do my science communication using what I call the Parliament-Funkadelic philosophy.
PFEIFFER: Parliament-Funkadelic?
OLUSEYI: That's right. Make my funk the P funk.
PFEIFFER: (Laughter).
OLUSEYI: I like my funk uncut. That was the lyrics from Parliament-Funkadelic. I'm bringing the uncut funk. You know, if I'm going to get a deep conversation with a scientist, let's get deep.
PFEIFFER: How accessible is your podcast to kids or younger people, and how much is it more sort of high-level geared to adults?
OLUSEYI: You know, I am from very humble circumstances, right? Neither of my parents graduated high school. My older siblings did not. You know, I'm from a rural Mississippi community. And the way I speak, you know, some people call it folksy, but I don't speak in jargon. And, you know, people have often said to me, oh, thank you for dumbing it down for us. And I go, no, you misunderstand. I'm dumb.
(LAUGHTER)
OLUSEYI: I speak it the way I understand it. So it's not like, you know, if your expectation is that you're going to be listening to two Harvard professors in a stuffy, you know - in big leather chairs with a pipe and, you know, elbow pads on their jacket, you know, that's not the conversation. Imagine if, you know, Chris Rock had a Ph.D. in physics, you know?
(LAUGHTER)
PFEIFFER: Could a high schooler follow along?
OLUSEYI: Oh, absolutely. And they do, and they reach out to me. And they talk to me about it, and they get it.
PFEIFFER: That is Hakeem Oluseyi of the podcast, "Particles Of Thought." We're glad to have you on.
OLUSEYI: Thank you.
PFEIFFER: Thanks for coming.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOTHERSHIP CONNECTION")
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