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Guaranteed human.

Few words are as heavily loaded as the word singularity.

To AI futurists, it means the moment that AIs can teach themselves

and might accelerate beyond human control. To physicists, it means the moment that AIs can teach themselves and might accelerate beyond

human control.

To physicists, it means a divergence, a divide by zero, a point of nonsense, a failure, a breakdown.

To the broader public, it represents a mystery, an unseen, unknown point at the heart

of black holes, something fascinating and mind-bending.

Something we are a little bit afraid of, but also entranced by, a bizarre extremum that might reveal something deep about

the nature of the universe. To you, our listeners, it means a whole episode dedicated to

demystifying, detoxifying, deconstructing the several subclasses of singularities.

So welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary singular universe.

Hello! Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith.

I study parasites and space, and I'm excited to talk about singularities today.

Hi, I'm Daniel Weitzen.

I'm a particle physicist, but I'm actually not a singularity.

There are other Daniel Whitesons.

How many? I'm not sure I've only ever found one. He's an artist in the UK, and he's quite good if I have to say so myself. Oh, fantastic. It's something in the name, maybe. I don't think there's any other Kelly Weiner-Smith, which is why we picked this name. Have I told you the story about how I ended up with this name? No, tell us the story. All right, so I was working on my master's degree, and I published my first paper on Smallmouth Bass, and there's a lot of papers on Smallmouth Bass. And so I looked to see how hard was it going to be for people to find my first paper by looking up papers by K. Smith.

And there were literally like over 100,000.

Oh, my gosh.

And if you did K.L. Smith, there was like, you know, 80,000 or some, there were still so many that it was going to be really hard to find me.

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