In this episode of Audio Signals Podcast, we dive into the fusion of storytelling and technology with author and technologist Guy Morris.
Guest: Guy Morris, Novelist, Guy Morris Books [@guymorrisbooks]
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/guybmorris/
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Host: Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast & Audio Signals Podcast
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli
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Episode Introduction
Welcome to another episode of the Audio Signals Podcast! This time, we're diving into fascinating narratives and the evolving art of storytelling. I'm Marco Ciappelli, and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Guy Morris, an author and technologist whose life experiences and deep dive into AI bring a fresh perspective to storytelling.
The Art of Storytelling: Guy Morris' Journey
We kicked off the conversation by exploring Guy Morris' unique background, packed with diverse life experiences. From being a 13-year-old homeless runaway to earning multiple degrees and embarking on a career in technology, Guy's journey is nothing short of remarkable. He shared, "I started off as a 13-year-old homeless runaway... I ended up with multiple degrees, graduate scholarships... and it led me into a career of technology innovations."
Balancing Creativity and Technology
Guy talked about balancing the creative and analytical sides of his brain, a theme that resonates deeply in his novels. With meticulous research forming the backbone of his storytelling, he ensures the authenticity of the technological aspects within his narratives.
The Spark of AI in Storytelling
We then shifted to one of the most exciting themes in Guy’s work: artificial intelligence. He recounted an intriguing inspiration from an Associated Press article about a program that "escaped" from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. This spark led to years of research, culminating in a story that melds AI with geopolitical corruption and prophecy.
The Complex Dance of Research and Creativity
When asked about balancing planning and creative freedom, Guy revealed his methodical process: "I will do years of research... and then I will start writing. The first draft typically takes around six to eight weeks." This thorough preparation is what enables Guy to weave intricate, plausible scenarios in his thrillers.
Prophecy Meets Technology
A pivotal moment in our discussion was Guy’s exploration of prophecy through the lens of technology and human behavior. He built a computer model to calculate whether we are living in prophetic times, basing his analysis on environmental data and historical patterns. This insightful approach offers a fresh perspective on how technology can help interpret age-old prophecies.
The Future of AI and Society
Towards the end of the podcast, we focused on the future implications of AI. Guy offered a nuanced outlook: "AI is an amazingly powerful, flexible, agile technology that will change the world as we know it... But it's not the technology that’s evil; it's the human misuse of it." He emphasized the economic, social, and existential challenges that AI presents, stressing the need for responsible governance.
Conclusion
Our conversation with Guy Morris is a treasure trove of insights into how life experiences, meticulous research, and cutting-edge technology come together in the art of storytelling. If you're passionate about the intersection of technology and narrative, this episode is a must-listen.
Join Us
Tag along for more fascinating conversations and join us on our journey of exploring the evolving realms of storytelling and technology.
For more episodes, subscribe to the Audio Signals Podcast on YouTube, or listen on your favorite podcast platform. If you enjoyed this episode with Guy Morris, be sure to check out our other discussions on technology and society.
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Resources
SWARM (Book): https://www.guymorrisbooks.com/swarm-landing
The Last Ark (Book): https://www.guymorrisbooks.com/lastark
The Curse of Cortes (Book): What is the website URL for The Curse of Cortes?
https://www.guymorrisbooks.com/cortes-landing
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The Intersection of Real Life, Prophecies, Cutting Edge Technology, and Storytelling | A conversation with Guy Morris | Audio Signals Podcast With Marco Ciappelli
Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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[00:00:00] Marco Ciappelli: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of audio signal podcast. This is the podcast where I like to hear stories and somehow tell stories. It's a story that I tell together with my with my guests. And today, it's actually quite interesting because when I was reading the bio, I'm like, there are so many stories here that I'm not sure where I want to go.
I'm not sure why there isn't a book about your life, uh, already, but maybe, maybe it will come. Maybe you have to write it yourself as being, being an author. Uh, I'm going to cut it short. I'm going to let you introduce yourself and I'm just going to say that this is going to be an interesting conversation where we're going to talk, uh, definitely a little bit about technology, probably touched on AI.
Most definitely talking about storytelling and, uh, and books. If you're watching the video, you can see two of the latest book, uh, that Guy wrote. So, ladies and gentlemen, here's Guy Morris. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:05] Guy Morris: Marco, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
[00:01:08] Marco Ciappelli: I am very excited to have you. So, I was joking, but I wasn't joking.
I mean, you're, Your bio, it's a, it's a, it's already an incredible story. So I'm not going to ask you to tell me the whole story. It will be the entire episode. I didn't really
[00:01:22] Guy Morris: think about it too much until I started writing and I had to do things like write bios and do podcasts. And then I started kind of hearing that same comment.
Um, I, I have had an interesting life, but it's certainly been exciting and, and, uh, adventurous and, and, um, not boring. Um, I started off as a 13 year old homeless runaway. And so I, I wasn't really set up well, um, but I won't go into all the details, but I was able to go to college. I ended up with multiple degrees, um, graduates scholarships for building a macro economic model that outperformed the federal reserve and changed how we do economic modeling.
And it led me into a career of technology innovations with fortune 500 companies and, and a number of things, writing songs for Disney, doing, uh, uh, Eight billion dollar corporate restructurings and mergers and acquisitions and a number of things. For my books, what led me into my books, I was always fascinated with having a balanced brain.
I wanted to have the creative side of me to balance out the analytical anal side of me, so I wouldn't become too One sided and boring. I used to go to parties and I would talk to guys and all they could talk about was either sports or work. Those were the only two topics they knew and that got, I didn't want to be that guy.
Um, I got into, there was a number of things, every one of my books requires some spark of inspiration that's typically followed up with years of obsessive research to try and understand that spark better. And, um, you mentioned my two books in a, the two latest books, um, all books, my books have won an awards, but the two latest deal with, there's three themes in the book, in the book series, um, artificial intelligence, geopolitical corruption, and, uh, how that's changing the world and prophecy.
And, and believe it or not, they tie together relatively well. But the initial spark, one of the, the, one of the initial sparks that came for, for the AI book, um, came when I, Stumbled onto an Associated Press article that was published years and years ago. And the article simply said, it was just one of those little tiny blurbs that you get in the back of a magazine.
It wasn't even a full article. It was just like maybe three sentences or four sentences. And it said that a program. Literally said that a program had escaped the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories at Sandia and if, um, the audience knew anything, they should contact either a named FBI agent or a named associate professor at the, um, laboratory.
And I cut that article out. I was stunned with what it said. And I thought, my first thought was, ah, this is just a stupid typo. They didn't mean escaped. They meant that the program was lost. They meant the program was stolen or the program malfunctioned. That has to be a typo. But there was something inside my head that said, Are you sure?
Do you want to be sure? So I spent almost the following year, I cut that article out, I taped it onto my monitor, and every time I had spare time, which wasn't as often as I would have liked, but I would go do research to try and answer two questions. How could a program escape? How did it have to be architected in order to do that?
What did that mean? Escape. And then why would they design it that way? Well, after I was done, I thought, well, this is a pretty cool story. And I thought, well, I didn't know I was right, but I had a friend who was a film producer. And so we said, well, let's, we talked about it. We thought this was really exciting.
We talked about doing. Pilot scripts for television or film script for tv and we ultimately decided for a number of reasons that we wanted to produce a Short series webisode series based on the this program and and the story that we kind of created around the program Um after it had escaped and We won a number of awards, about 20 25 web awards.
We were optioned by one of the film studios and two weeks before the option for the studio comes due, two FBI agents show up. Now, they were not happy at all that I had, not only that I had figured out their top secret missing program, but I had the audacity to talk about it online and, and, and, um, and write about it.
But what bothered them more than anything else Snarky attitude. I was like, yes, yes, yes. I did it. I figured it out. You guys wouldn't be here if I was wrong. This is so amazing. This is so cool. I'm so glad you're here. Hey, show me those badges again. So after a few minutes of me being giddy. They kind of went a little pale, gave each other a weird look like, what do we do with this guy now?
He's, this isn't the response where we normally get when we show up at somebody's door. Um, and they gave me the, we are not amused speech. And I went, uh, you know, you know, what are you going to do? You can't bust me for being a smart ass. And then my wife came home. And she pulls me aside and she gave me the, why are there two FBI agents in my dining room speech?
And this better be a good story, buddy. At that point, that very night I knew in my head, I said, okay, they went, they actually went to the studio and killed the film deal. So that kind of, I lost some money and I tucked my tail between my legs and I went to get a real job. I think it was at Oracle at that point.
It might've been at startup, but I never forgot that incident. And what stuck with me, um, as much as anything else was I had been implementing technologies into businesses for years. Always thinking in terms of the business application, the commercial application, the operational efficiency or application.
I'd suddenly started to become aware in my own mind as new technologies would come out and as I would see new things developing, how would I be using this technology if I were in a spy organization or the military or the government? How are they using these technologies that we're using in different ways that they, how are they using it?
And that really put me in touch with some of the risks, some of the um, less Commercial applications, and for years after that, I continued to research. So when I retired Microsoft in 2018, One of it was a pretty clear decision in my mind that what I wanted to do in retirement as my third act career was to become an author and to write about this is just one incident, but the very, the multiple experiences I've had over the years that I wanted to write about.
And so I did. And so my books, now I'm a thriller writer. Um, most often the industry has compared me to Dan Brown. They've also compared me to Michael Crichton, Robert Bludnum, Orester Hansen. Um, and so, you know, as a thriller writer, I'm not writing the utopia. Right? I'm trying to explore what could plausibly go wrong and build that scenario.
And so my books do a really good job at that, but I'm always projecting two or three, four years ahead of the technology so that by the time the book is written, edited, published and out on the market, it's happening concurrently with some of these things that I know are going to happen. And I get that feedback from my readers all the time.
I was reading your book and then I was watching the news and it's almost like you're a, you're a fortune teller.
[00:09:04] Marco Ciappelli: And let me, let me step in. I mean, obviously you, you can talk and I could just do an easy podcast where I just let you go for 30 minutes. And I don't know, but you said a lot of things actually that sparked my interest.
As people know, I love technology and society. My background is sociological communication, political science. So for me, when you start talking about cyber warfare and all the things that technology can do and is doing, I mean, it's, it's, it's real. A lot of stuff is real. Um, and when, then when you're going to write about it, I look at the, Uh, the Asimov or, you know, the, the sci fi writer of the past, but there were also experts, physicists, people that knew what they were talking about.
[00:09:52] Guy Morris: Exactly. And
[00:09:52] Marco Ciappelli: they get to the point where they're like, okay, now I'm going to switch The creative side of the brain and and I'm gonna go wherever I want to go How do you control that in your in your process? I mean, do you just go with it? Or or it's everything carefully planned
[00:10:18] Guy Morris: Um carefully planned I will do years of research
[00:10:21] Marco Ciappelli: to
[00:10:23] Guy Morris: try and come up with the premise, to try and come up with the themes, to try and come up with the subplots, and then I will research.
Well, what's the reality? Where's the technology really going? How much, you know, the government's always secretive about what they're doing, but there's certain things that you can find out. Um, that gives you clues and give you an indication and then you can use your imagination. I tell my, my, my readers, I put on my best Q mentality, right?
I try to be, you know, James Bond Q. What would Q do? And, and I use my imagination and it turns out that people in government have imaginations too, right? So if I said, if I was charged with using this technology to spy on my enemies, how would I do it? Um, and so there's a little bit of trying to understand the technology, trying to understand where the lab work is going, trying to read up on where companies are saying they're going to go in another couple of years to try and, um, understand all of the aspects of the, of the technology, the political environment, the social issues involved.
Uh, and I will do, and I have. Hundreds of documents short stored on my research folder. Uh, I I one of the reasons I have a poster behind me is because my desk is just stacked with papers Um, and I didn't want to look like the mad scientist right off the bat And
[00:11:44] Marco Ciappelli: so we look at that later
[00:11:47] Guy Morris: but There's an element there, um, but then I will try and say well this Ultimately this has to be a good story It has to be an entertaining story.
It has to, it can't be too dystopic because you don't want people to fall into that trap. You can't be overly, um, um, you can't gloss over the real issues, um, either because people will tell, can tell if you're not being authentic. Um, I believe that readers can, can, Pick out very quickly those who are authentic in terms of their writing, whether they're making stuff up off out of the blue or whether there's actually based on something.
And then I will go through a process for several, sometimes several months of outlining every chapter, every character. What are the character arcs? What are the characters going to go through? What's the human issue that we have to address? What's the technology issue? Which character is going to own which side of the argument?
Um, um, what are the key technology issues that I'm going to focus on in this book or the key social issues relative to the technology that I'm going to focus on? And I will spend months just trying to map that out to make sure that I have at least a, a good beginning, middle, and end, uh, with The right crises at the right points and, and, but then I'll start writing now.
Typically, the first draft will take me six weeks, eight weeks. Once I have that outline fairly quick, but then I polish, I'm never, ever, ever happy with the first draft. And so, um, And Stephen King said, first drafts always suck. So then I go back and I try and fill in more research. I said, well, this is, I'm kind of thin on this area right here or I'm talking about this right here, but I'm not even sure I know what I'm talking about.
I need to go do more research or I need to understand that location better. So I will constantly be writing and researching through the rest of the book. And so, for example, the book that I'm working on right now, I'm on, I'm just about ready to finish version 11 and I'll probably do another three to five versions before I give it to my editor.
It will deal with Some sophisticated issues such as, um, CERN experiments into creating a black hole in order to prove a fifth dimension. Um, fifth dimension brings in the issues of consciousness relative to quantum theory, uh, and what does consciousness look like in humans versus consciousness that we could expect in machines.
What is the path for machine intelligence to move from its current state to superintelligence and then to sentient superintelligence? Uh, and so I'm dealing with some fairly sophisticated issues, and right now, and also the, from a social perspective, The push from the World Economic Forum to re reset, um, the financial governance model for the world to be based on digital currencies managed by AI.
And they're looking for a major global crisis in order to Facilitate the the chaos in that chaos and in that reset to basically reset that financial crisis And so they've already announced parts of it The IMF announced last year that they're producing a new digital currency called the unicorn. It's actually called the UMU and Fiction affectionately called by some the unicorn.
Um, they're looking for AI components. Ukraine war might feed into that. The Israeli war might feed into that. And so we're, we're, I'm looking at these elements that are happening in society and how they connect together. Um, but yeah, it's a long process and I, I would rather. I'm always interested in writing a book that I'm extremely proud of and I think will get people to not only open their eyes, but get them to think about some of these real issues in a productive way.
And I'm less interested in producing books fast as producing them well.
[00:15:49] Marco Ciappelli: So why are you doing this long process? It's not like writing a short story, like, Hey, I have an idea. Let me just put it down. Sounds good enough. Looks good enough. I'm going to go for it. I mean, you have all these months of research and preparation.
Does it ever happen that you get to the point where you're like, you know, with all the research I've done, it kind of make me change my entire, my entire idea. Or maybe I don't want to go there anymore. Cause it's like when you write an article. Uh, about technology and society, which I do quite a bit. It's, it's a self reflection and, and it's a, you're thinking with yourself when you're writing.
Yeah. And so, you know, like tell me maybe a couple. Yeah, I
[00:16:36] Guy Morris: just sometimes have ideas of how I think that the story will go. And then I do more research and find out something I didn't know. And that takes it into a completely different direction. And that's happens almost every book.
[00:16:50] Marco Ciappelli: Is it a moment that you like or is the moment that you're like, oh damn it Now I gotta start again.
[00:16:57] Guy Morris: It's a little bit of both. There's the, aha, wow, that is so freaking cool. I cannot leave that out. And then you stop and think, oh man, that's, that's weeks worth of work. Why do I make this hard on myself? Why don't I just write the story and nobody else is going to know? Um, but yeah, that has happened on almost every book.
Um, uh, with AI, with the AI book, it's happened when I discovered, when I stumbled onto some of the lethal weapons development that's going on in America and elsewhere. In 2018, there was a treaty called the LAWS Treaty. It stands for Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems. 140 countries signed the LAWS Treaty.
The United States, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Israel did not. Which means that each one of these countries are working on lethal autonomous weapons. Now, a lethal autonomous weapon is a weapon system that can identify you as a target, but then also has the power to pull the trigger. And the Laws Treaty says, now, Currently, most of our drones don't do that.
There's a human involved in making that kill decision. And that's what we want. We want to have a human accountability for that, for anything that takes life. These laws, these lethal weapons, these laws weapons don't do that. And so there's examples of Israeli sniper AI weapons that basically can kill somebody based on a, um, uh, An image profile.
There's a drone. Much swarm is based on a drone swarming technology that DARPA is working on right now. The Nevada desert. China is working on some similar systems and robotic systems. And so these are this is sort of the more of the dystopic end of where AI can go. Whenever you're dealing with something that's intentionally designed to take life.
That's pretty, that's pretty. Serious. And I had to change that. I also had to change for, in my book, The Last Ark. Now, one of the other themes that runs in through the series is, deals with prophecy. And whenever you say prophecy, there's always a part of everybody's mind that goes, uh oh, crazy town, right?
Crazy town coming. This guy's a kook. He's a religious fanatic. He's kind of crazy. But the way I approached it, now, I did study prophecy for a number of years. And in my mind, many of the prophecy teachers were in error based on biases. I heard all kinds of religious biases and political biases and cultural biases.
And they try to use prophecy to predict the future rather than interpret the present. You know, something as it occurs. And they, when they do that, they almost always get it wrong. And then they get this idea of what it means in their head. And when the real events happen, they completely miss it. And, but I wanted to say there has to be a more objective way to validate, you know, every, I hear a lot of people say we're living in prophetic times, because the world is changing very rapidly, very fast, and not always in a good way.
And it's scary. There's a lot of people that are nervous. So I said, well, let's, let's see, I want us to know if I can figure out a way to either dismiss that idea or confirm it. And I was open to either one. And so I actually, I was reading a National Geographic article and the article was about fish stocks around the world.
And, um, I was in, when I was with the oil company for a number of years, I was involved in the environmental studies and environmental protection and our compliance to the EPA, which I believe in by the way, um, and. What struck me about this article is that they were saying that in China, the U. S., every, every fish stocks, all fishing ground all over the world, the fish stocks were down by 30 percent or more.
And I remembered a prophecy called the seven trumpets that, that, um, in revelations that said that a flaming rock was, the allegory was that a flaming rock would fall from the sky and land in the ocean. The attributes or the outcomes, the, the things that we should be able to understand is that a third of the fish of the sea die.
Third of the birds of the air die, third of the beasts of the land die, and two thirds of the rivers of the earth are too polluted to drink from. Well, we know that a flaming rock didn't fall from the sky, land, and the ocean, but I can show a number of environmental studies around the sixth extinction that confirms that all of those other attributes have already come to pass.
So it starts the, I, it starts to create the conversation that well maybe prophecy is less about how some god is going to come and destroy humanity as much as a warning about how we might be doing that to ourselves. And so I realized that I could actually calculate that. I could take prophecy.
Prophecies and I could find their attributes. I could match those attributes to an event in modern times and or could I match that attribute to event in modern times to get a hundred percent correlation between the attributes in the event, and then I could calculate the probability of that event to all to relative known hist human history and geologic history.
Well. As it turns out, some of these things are really, really, really astoundingly rare. Our last extinction in America was 12, 000 years ago. The last global extinction 65 million years ago. And so we realized that there's, we can calculate whether or not we were living in prophetic times. So actually I built a computer model.
I actually designed this. I was, I had access to, I was with the oil company. I had access to hundreds of millions of years of geologic data. I was able to get access to, you know, Tons of environmental studies on species loss and habitat loss and a number of these other things. And I built, I loaded the data into the model and I started running probability analysis and algorithms.
And the ultimate cumulative effect of all of these things back then, and that was only with about 20 or 25 of the easiest to document prophecies, I'll just put it that way, Was 1. 4 trillion to one that we were living in prophetic times. Now, at the time, my thought was, well, maybe I did a math error. Maybe I built the model wrong.
Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I did data input. I put in a number and added too many zeros. I said, or. If not, this is an astounding number and it started changing my thinking, not only of technology, but of the world and how to view it. Can you define
[00:23:37] Marco Ciappelli: prophetic time? What do you mean exactly by that?
[00:23:40] Guy Morris: Um, A number of different traditions and faiths, um, Hindu, um, Christian, um, Judi Judaism, uh, Muslim, uh, Hopi, Maya, um, all of them have, uh, prophecies of a, either a cycle of dis uh, creation and destruction, uh, or a end time cycle of some form that predicts certain types of events.
And I, and, and for most people, they, They either think that that's totally baloney, fair enough, uh, or they're, they see it in this hyper religious way that only one side wins and the other side loses. It's me against you, us against them kind of mentality, which is also wrong. Um, and, but they have these, these prophecies and a lot of people really believe in them.
And, uh, As I said, I was really trying to, to validate in my own mind whether it was Hocum or whether there was something to it that I needed to pay attention to.
[00:24:36] Marco Ciappelli: Well, the reason, sorry, that I ask you that is because when you're bringing the example of the computer, it makes me think about simulation.
Like, you know, you put enough data into a software, as you did. And especially now with AI, you can probably correlate a lot of things. So you're, you're not really predicting the future because you are a shaman or a magician, or you're going to look at the levers, right? I mean, I'm trying to understand
[00:25:04] Guy Morris: the present in a mathematical correlation,
[00:25:06] Marco Ciappelli: right?
It's, it's an understanding of what could the future be based on the knowledge that I have and based on, you know, What's the chance that this is actually going to happen? And obviously now with the with computers and again AI We we can correlate a lot of things so I think prophecy in reality what i'm thinking is we're always living in prophetic time because Somebody could have predict Where, where we are now?
[00:25:37] Guy Morris: Possible except that the statistical anomalies were just way too large for me. Um, even if I was off by a factor of a thousand, that was just a pretty big number for me to ignore. Um,
[00:25:47] Marco Ciappelli: it's a quantity to bring it to.
[00:25:50] Guy Morris: It's the quantity and the level of Oh my gosh, that's never happened in history, right? We don't have any correlations of that.
I'd have to go back, for example, the sixth extinction. I got to go back 65 million years to find a correlation. And, and that starts to get my attention to say, what's so unique about this time? How are the dynamics of the, now I built world, I built complex systems models. So my thinking was always, how does one piece of the puzzle Connect and interact and change another piece of the model.
And so I started thinking in terms of a system model, uh, kind of framework. And so narratively in the stories, I give the AI the ability to decode prophecy because it also allows me by giving it to an AI, I can avoid issues of topics of bias and dogma and doctrine and things of that nature and just focus on the correlations and the probabilities and what does that mean with what's going on, right?
And so One of the things that in my second book, uh, that you see the last arc, there's prophecies about a third temple. And so one of the things that I said, well, let me go research that. Let me find out what that means. Let me find out who's thinking about it. Who's working on it. What are the What are the things that would need to go into that?
Um, the Ark of the Covenant was obviously part of that. Originally, that's disappeared. And we all know from Indiana Jones, you know, the Nazis got it. Or, you know,
[00:27:18] Marco Ciappelli: but I started It melts your face.
[00:27:21] Guy Morris: Yeah. And I was actually astounded by what I discovered. And so, yes, every time I write a book, I Think I have an idea of where it's going to go and the research always deviates me from that path.
Um, I wasn't planning on talking about the CERN experiments into creating a black hole when I started the next, my latest book, but I found, I discovered it. It was so amazing to me. It changed my view of a certain things and I had, I felt like I needed to incorporate it. So yes, I do. It is an aha moment. It is a pain in the butt.
For a lot of work, but for me, I'm always looking for what's the most plausible, authentic, um, realistic scenario that I can paint, um, around these things that will not only excite people, really, Impact them because it is, right? And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to really impact people, not as much as entertainment.
[00:28:24] Marco Ciappelli: So I love that you said that because as we're getting to the end of this, although we could go for a long time, one of the things that I love to do with my other podcasts and this too, I always at the end say, I hope you have more questions now than when we started. Because I want to make people think.
And the way you describe your books and all the reflection and research and thinking that goes into it, you have the scientific mind, but also the philosophical view of things, the sociological aspects. I was just thinking about that, about the reader. In May, if he's open enough, and I think you need to be an open mind person to read that kind of book anyway, you probably do a self reflection on, you know, maybe your beliefs, maybe your vision of what's going on in the world right now.
And so my question for you, I went all the way around, is All this writing, all your technology knowledge and your past and the present of researcher and writer, what's your vision on, uh, what's your prophecy on society and AI, uh, in a nutshell? Are you one of those? POSITIVE. Are you negative about the way we're using or we will be using
[00:29:44] Guy Morris: AI?
Here's what I say about AI. AI, and I've seen this, AI is an amazingly powerful, um, flexible, agile, um, technology that will change the world as we know it. It will bring good things and bad things. Um, I, first off, I believe that a, the, the, the path to AI and AI superintelligence is already in place. It's where there's no stopping it at this point.
It's a given. Uh, and what's driving that is greed. Uh, for the most part, uh, rather greed is a way more bigger motivator in this model than, um, the, Improvement to the human condition, but we will do some things that will improve the human condition. You'll see it mostly in medical advances pharmaceutical advances, materials and material sciences advances, nanotechnologies, physics, education, there's a number of Very creativity.
There's a number of extremely powerful potential good things that could come out of artificial intelligence, but I, I tell people that there's a 200, right now, there's roughly $200 billion or more invested in ai. The um, um, price Waterhouse Coopers anticipates that by 2030 AI will add as much as $15 trillion to the global economy, which is more than most nations on the earth.
And by also that time frame, the IMF predicts that we will be displacing estimates from anywhere from 300 million to 40 or 50 percent of the global workforce. Now, that is an extremely powerful displacement. That's, I mean, that, what that's going to do is shift the to the top one tenth of one percent or one tenth of one tenth of one percent.
Um, that's going to create incredible social disruptions. It's going to create chaos and havoc with global and national balances and budgets because you're not taking away the lowest wage earners, you're basically going to be hitting strong core middle class jobs, management techniques, legal, medical, uh, administration, sciences, um, coding, um, technical sciences.
There's going to be a number of, of broad displacements that are going to happen and not, there's no country on earth that's really prepared for this level of disruption in part because our bets, you know, Levels are already so high post COVID, and we've got these wars going on that are going to not, that aren't looking like they're going to end anytime soon, and that's going to add to the problem as well.
So ultimately AI, and if you look at the documents from the World Economic Forum, they're anticipating this to be a world changing technology in their favor. And so it will do some good things. It will also produce some bad results. And as I mentioned earlier, nations, there's a number of nations that are looking at using this to advance their ability to wage war and do surveillance on civilians, manage social media.
This could be used, depending upon how you use the technology, it could be disastrous. So I see it's not the technology AI is evil. It's not that it's benign, although I explore some of those issues when I talk about what does AI consciousness mean. Um, and if AI is learning from patterns, Do we really think that an AI has already learned to deceive and lie because we deceive and lie?
What are the other patterns of human behavior that AI will emulate? And what happens if we take this extremely world changing powerful technology and we put it in the hands of a dictator, a warlord? A crime lord, a drug lord, um, or a sociopathic billionaire. We all can name probably at least one. Um, we're dealing with a global crisis of humanity.
And so it's not that the technology is bad, it's that we We already have today. Get rid of AI. We already have today the technologies, the human resources, the financial resources to solve every problem, major problem facing the world today from hunger to housing to water shortages, food shortages, education, employment.
We don't. And the reason we don't is because of the cancer of greed, hubris, and pride that has always, um, and lust for power that has always plagued humanity. And until we can resolve those diseases, The technology won't lead us to a utopia. Um, it might eventually, it could, uh, Mogadot, who was the former chief business officer of Google, um, believes that it could eventually lead to utopia, but it will probably, we'll have to go through a dystopic stage before we can get there.
[00:34:41] Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. And I feel like it's going to repeat. Repeating history, but with a much larger repercussion because of a much powerful technology. I'm thinking about the Industrial Revolution. I mean, I always think about that. It brought a lot of positive things, but it also disrupt a lot of situation and repercussions.
Pretty much put us in the position that we're now with, uh, with climate change and the way that we do business and the way we do commercialization and, uh, and unfortunately, as you said, uh, you can't just squeeze it out and, and, and Put a cap on the tube again. Uh, but we, we need to be much more smarter and educated in to be more prepared to it.
So
[00:35:25] Guy Morris: I would agree, but then I asked, are we in a position to be smarter? I mean, I looked at the politics in the United States. We're completely dysfunctional right now. We can't even pass a budget.
[00:35:33] Marco Ciappelli: I try to be positive, but then there is the, you know, the, I, I'm the realist and I'm trying to say what's the realism of it.
And, and, and yeah, I can say that
[00:35:44] Guy Morris: in war and peace that I, I actually quoted my next book. Um, no one was prepared for the war. Everyone knew was coming. And I believe that we're kind of in that state right now. We're in a state of suspended animation. We want to believe it's going to work out. We want to believe that the powers that be are going to not going to let this happen to us.
You know, we saw the tobacco industry snow the entire world for decades that cigarettes didn't cause. lung cancer. The oil industry tried to snow the world for decades that oil was not the problem of climate change and they're still working on it and they've convinced a lot of people.
[00:36:24] Marco Ciappelli: For
[00:36:24] Guy Morris: decades the social media companies said that this is only goodness here there's no no no bad side effects to social media and we're going to be dealing with the same thing with AI but we don't have decades because AI is moving at such a fast pace that by the end of 2025 we'll have computers that are smarter than most humans on the planet.
And by the, I believe that by the end of 2027 or 2030, we'll have a conscious super intelligence. And the fact is there's not a single person on earth, no executive of an AI company. There's nobody around. There's no preacher. There's nobody that really understands what that's going to mean because we've never had that experience before where we were not.
The smartest thing on the planet.
[00:37:08] Marco Ciappelli: And
[00:37:08] Guy Morris: so this is going to be a, this is going to test us as a species, as a humanity, as governance, as people of a spiritual value, this is going to put us to the test, um, because it's so unique to what we've ever experienced.
[00:37:23] Marco Ciappelli: Great, great. I love that we touched on this as well because it connects with my, with my other podcast.
So, um, like I said, we could keep talking for a long time, especially now that we touch society and technology, which I'm very passionate about it. But I want to thank you. Uh, I want to invite everybody to look at the notes on either you're watching the video or you're listening to the audio of the podcast, there'll be linked to, uh, your books, your website and your social media so people can get in touch with you.
And I truly enjoy this conversation. It's. I'm one of those geeks that love to talk about this stuff, and uh, and I also love to talk about storytelling, and I can see, um, a lot, a lot of more stories where this comes from, because you're passionate about it, and I keep reading quantum AI prophecy in the back of your And I'm like, I wanted to go there, but I'm not going to.
Maybe I'll invite you back so we can talk about quantum and AI together, which kind of like, make my brain explode right now.
[00:38:28] Guy Morris: My brain's been exploding with research for a couple of years. I'm starting to finally get my head around it. Um, I think it was Stephen Hawking said that if you think you understand quantum computing, you don't understand
[00:38:40] Marco Ciappelli: quantum computing.
You don't understand quantum
[00:38:42] Guy Morris: computing.
[00:38:43] Marco Ciappelli: Yeah, and with that quote and uh, you know of a great man, we're gonna say goodbye everybody Be sure to subscribe to the youtube channel and to listen to all the other podcast episode that I have And hopefully you'll love this one as much as I love talking with guy.
So thank you so much. so much Bye everybody