Welcome to the Afteron Podcast. I'm your host Rob Reed bringing you conversations

with thinkers, founders, and scientists.

They're in depth and unhurried,

and are structured to bring you up

to a top percentile understanding of something important.

So, whether you're into startups or ideas, a techie or a lit major, take your time, engage your mind, and you'll be glad you did.

This is a monologue and a thought experiment about AI.

Specifically an eerie relationship we may soon enter with a powerful and quite mysterious AI.

A relationship we may in fact have already entered.

But before I get to that, a quick word about

Asteroids, which may sound like a bit of a tangent,

but you'll see the connection in a moment.

America's awesomely named Planetary Defense Budget provides about $150 million a year

for asteroid detection, in hopes of spotting deadly asteroids before they smash into us

to give us some shot at diverting them.

If that sounds like a lot to spend, let's do some back of the envelope math.

150 million a year is about 1.9 cents per living person.

Asteroids with a 5 kilometer

tend to hit us about once every 20 million years,

according to a model developed at Imperial College London and Purdue University.

Crashing into one of those would pretty much be the end of us, given that just a one

kilometer asteroid would strike with the energy of six and a half

...