March 21, 2015 10:07 am

Sunday: Explore the Future with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

And it’s not coming from luddites who think the Internet is a series of tubes.

Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk: each of them has publicly expressed their concerns over artificial super intelligence, and none of them could ever be considered technologically illiterate.

Sunday night, Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews one of them – Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who some have called a “real life Tony Stark.” Elon began programming at 9 or 10, teaching himself how to program in Basic on his Commodore VIC-20. He is a child of the computer age, and one of its greatest success stories. He’s not just the CEO of SpaceX – he’s the chief designer. He’s also the CEO of Tesla Motors, the electric car company that has revolutionized the automobile industry, and his new venture, Solar City, could do the same for renewable energy.

And yet, the thing that keeps him up at night, the thing that Elon Musk fears more than anything else, is artificial super intelligence. Even more dangerous, he warns Neil, than nuclear weapons.

Those fears aren’t shared back in the studio, where Neil, Bill Nye, and Chuck Nice have their own take on whether our future could end up like the one in Colossus: The Forbin Project. (Yes. That one. 3 of you reading this just thought to yourself, “Cool.”)

There’s more to this show, and to the discussion of the future of humanity, than just talk of War Games.

This Sunday, you’ll also get plenty of flying cars, hover boards, the human exploration of space, the colonization of Mars, sustainable production and consumption of energy, climate change (and Bill’s next book, Unbounded), and even some talk of the “Singularity.”

Of course, all that’s not until the future… or tomorrow at 7:00 PM EDT, whichever comes first.

Join us Sunday, March 22 on our website, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn and SoundCloud.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Jeffrey Simons