I'm this episode of Skeptico.

Show about cold comfort.

Words are cold comfort when a young life is cut so short.

At least I have the comfort of knowing you're all safe on English soil.

And why we should never settle for it.

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception.

That is, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis.

These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas.

Oh, how we would like to discredit them. Unfortunately, the statistical

evidence is overwhelming. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain

workable in spite of clashing with ESP, but the fact we can get along nicely if we forget

about ESP is cold comfort.

So that clip you just heard was from Alan Turing.

Of course, it's AI generated, but you get the idea.

And it's from a very famous paper he wrote in 1950s, which we're going to talk a lot about today.

Now, if you remember, this topic of the Turing test came up last episode, and it's come up

in a number of these dialogues I've been doing with the AI bots, which, by the way,

these dialogues are turning into a book, a book that I'm writing.

It's going to be out next month. It's titled

Why AI is Smartest, is Dangerous, is Divine. So I'm quite excited about it, and I'm excited

about sharing more and more of these dialogues and some of the thoughts that are going in behind

it. So this dialogue is definitely going to be included in the book. But like I just said,

...