SGU Episode 949

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SGU Episode 949
September 16th 2023
Sci-fi futuristic robot Artist: Pickgameru
SGU 948                      SGU 950
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
CH: Christian Hubicki, professor of Robotics
Quote of the Week
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
Isaac Asimov, American writer
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Guest Rogue

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, September 13^th, 2023, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: Evan Bernstein...

E: Hello, everyone.

S: And we have a special guest, Christian Hubecky. Christian, welcome to the SGU.

CH: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

S: This is actually in podcast time. This is your third time doing a show with them, although this is your first actual presence on the show. So this week's episode is mainly going to be a one-hour live show that we recorded with you as a guest at DragonCon. They only gave us an hour, and we figured we need more than that for a full show. So you agreed to give a virtual interview with us after the facts. Now it's like a week after DragonCon. This is the week that the show is going to come out. We're just going to have a little preamble discussion before we go to the live DragonCon show. For those who don't know, you'll hear again in a bit, but Christian, you are an alum of the Survivor TV show.

CH: That's right. That's right.

S: Yep. We talk a little bit about that on the show. And you are a professor of robotics at the Florida State University as well.

CH: That's right. That's right. And I got to say, as a professor, I'm not used to being cut off after an hour. The students stay until I'm done.

S: That's right. You leave when I say you leave.

CH: That's right.

J: It was fun. So when we got together with Christian at DragonCon, we had never met in person before. We emailed each other a few years ago, I think. But we had really good discussions over a couple of meals during DragonCon.

B: Oh, yeah.

J: Because we're all super into it. Of course, we're all super fans of robotics, and we like artificial intelligence, and we're really getting into it. I'm like, damn, these conversations were really good. We should have recorded them because we asked a lot of wacky questions, too. Because we'll ask anything when we're at dinner, we're like, so what are sex robots going to be like?

CH: That was not recorded, thankfully, for my tenure back, and I'm glad for that. But otherwise, it was fantastic. No, that was good stuff.

J: Christian's like, I've got 15 of them. They're awesome.

B: And don't forget, guys, guys, don't forget, Liz and Courtney, they watch Survivor every season. And they were very, they were very psyched.

S: Yeah, they were big fans.

CH: But I'd say what relevant to discuss that speaking of sex robots, Jay, then it was something that came up in casting interviews when you're interviewed before you go on the show. And so I was prepared that I was to be interviewed by like a Hollywood casting person. I tried to prepare myself. What are the stereotypical questions that people are going to ask you? And one of them, of course, would be about sex robots. So I had some pre-canned jokes. So I, of course, had, I didn't study sex robots in robot school. That was one of them that deployed.

S: It wasn't a course.

CH: No, I didn't know. It was capped out. I couldn't get in. But yeah, I would, though, recommend the reality casting process to anyone trying to go on a job interview, because there's probably no harder job interview than whatever curveballs they try to throw you in order to see how you'll react on a reality show. So highly recommended for at least the experience.

Dragon Con reflections (3:25)

S: This is our first time back to DragonCon since the before time, right? The pre-pandemic. What did you guys think about it? Did you guys have a good time?

J: Well, I made an observation and I talked to several people at DragonCon. I did notice that the overall quality of the costuming was not at the level that it's always been at for all the DragonCons we've been to.

S: There were some standouts, but it was a little underwhelming this year.

J: And I thought about it and I talked to some people at DragonCon who made similar observations and they were saying that they noticed that this happened post-pandemic. This is a post-pandemic thing that's happening at DragonCon. And we were surmising it's probably because people are financially strapped and they don't have like the five grand it probably takes them to build some of these costumes, some of the more outrageous ones.

E: Or invest the one thousand hours it takes over the year to build the costume you're going to make.

S: I know for us, because we had some really good costume ideas percolating and we back burned them all. And then even though we went this year, we decided late and so you didn't have as much time to invest in it because it was up in the air. You didn't know what was going to be going on with the pandemic and everything. But it's bouncing back. The numbers haven't completely bounced back yet to pre-pandemic levels.

B: Christian, this was your first DragonCon. What's your take on it?

CH: Indeed it was. I'll tell you, I was overwhelmed. I actually showed up on Thursday because I was giving a talk at Morehouse College in Atlanta just for general robotics purposes. So I jumped over to the conference just to get my badge and everything. I was just swept away by just the wild amount of costumes. I had no baseline and I got to see the big Zelda Korok protest, the Korok rights protest, which is probably the best thing I've ever seen. So I got to say, I enjoyed it. And I guess I was also taking in the fact that I had to give two full hour long talks. So I think I was overwhelmed by that as well. But I had a great time. I know me and Emily had a wonderful time hanging out with you guys and also just running around the conference scene and what happened.

S: Yeah, I agree. I think a lot of the best costumes I saw this year were ones I've seen in previous years. And so they don't have the same impact. It's like, oh yeah, there's the guy from Lord of the Rings, yep, saw him. For you, it's the first time. It's like, oh my god, that's amazing.

CH: Yeah, there was a Mark Hamill, which I double take that was really close to a Mark Hamill. That was crazy.

E: I remember, yes. Last Jedi, Mark Hamill.

S: I saw him and it's a double take. Wait, is that really him? No, no, it's not him. But for a half a second, you think it's him. There are some people, there's a couple of people who lean into the fact that they look like a celebrity and then dress like them. There's also every year there's an older Scotty from Star Trek walking around, like the movie version of Scotty who's a dead ringer. Yeah, but that, the Mark Hamill.

B: Yeah, it was a double take for sure too. Christian, what about you? Did you see any stars, any celebrities?

CH: Honestly, I didn't. I missed the whole celebrity thing. The only times that I've met a real superstar celebrity, I remember almost nothing from the interaction. They could have been speaking the Charlie Brown adult voice as far as I was concerned. I just remember the experience that I was in their presence. I said things. Hopefully they weren't overly embarrassing and then they kicked me out of their house and we're done.

E: They slammed the door on me.

J: There is something about it. There is really something about charisma and that type of human interaction. When you're meeting someone that's famous, because we've met lots of famous people throughout the years and you realize everybody's just people, right? They're all people. But every once in a while, when I met Prince, I had the opportunity to meet Prince. And my God, wow. That was not a normal meeting of a famous person where you're like, oh cool, I'm seeing this famous person. That guy had charisma that was palpable. And it was surreal. Plus, he's so incredibly famous. When I met him, he was unbelievably famous. So it was just very strange. So it is a pretty interesting experience. There is something mammalian about it. It's hardwired into us.

Steve on the UFO panel (7:43)

S: Yeah, I was busy doing a bunch of panels. The most surprising panel to me was the UFO panel.

J: Yeah, I saw that. Bob and I saw that. Well, Christian and I were there too. Yeah, we saw that.

E: You were finally convinced, Steve, right?

S: Well, no, it's just that I saw all the panels I was going to be on. Really, UFOs? Isn't this like, didn't we beat this dead horse already? But it was one of the most popular panels that I did. It's very hard to predict what people are going to want.

J: It's because of how in the news it's been.

S: I know. And even among skeptics, there is something a little bit different, I think, about this, what's happening now with the UFOs. And I think because the UFO community has managed to really snooker the government into lending them credibility, that people are like, whoa, whoa, this is before Congress and this is the Pentagon. Something's got to be going on. Even though it's the same crap as we've been seeing over the last 30, 40 years.

E: They've got NASA tied into it too, Steve. Talk about legitimacy.

S: After the panel, the next day, somebody recognizes me on the street and wanted to talk to me about the panel. Meanwhile, I'm late for another panel that I'm going to.

CH: You have like six panels, Steve. It's ridiculous.

S: Well, it was always the whole, yeah, but did you see this video? You know that? So listen, I'm late for a panel, email it to me and I'll take a look at it. I gave them the info at email and I never got it. I don't know if I remember or whatever. But the one thing that really, I mean, I knew this, but like it was really central to the discussion was the fact that, because we are always trying to talk about like how silly the conspiracy theories are, et cetera. But one of the problems that we have is that the government does hide things and especially surrounding the UFO phenomenon. Like for example, there's a lot of UFO sightings around military bases. And it's we know from now historical records that a lot of them were, oh yeah, that was the, they were testing the spy plane whatever. Of course, the government's not going to come out and say explain the UFO sightings as secret military testing. And so there is a layer of secrecy that's built into the whole thing, you know what I mean? And so it makes our task very difficult because we have to say, yeah, the government is not telling you the whole story, but not in the way that you think. And that's a challenging sell, you know?

B: And they're happy to let the whole UFO phenomenon take take control.

S: Yeah, it's good cover.

E: Yeah, oh absolutely.

B: It's great cover.

E: That's the margin in which they exist almost entirely, frankly.

S: And also like, yeah, there, there, like, there is a deep state, you know what I mean? Like, of course there is. There's a bureaucracy. There are people, there are career people who like, they work for the government from administration to administration. And the oversight of these entities is complicated and imperfect, but that's still different than we've been breaking the law for 50 years, right? I mean, it's like an order of magnitude different than what the UFO people are claiming, but it's not a clean narrative on our side either, because it's like, yeah, there is that kind of stuff going on. It's just not at the level that you're claiming.

CH: n a way that makes it more of an important skeptical lesson that just because there's not a cleanliness of narrative, it still doesn't change the underlying state of the evidence and what you can support with the evidence, what you can believe. What bothers me slightly about the current phenomenon, and I actually got contacted through my work email.

B: By an alien?

E: First contact.

CH: We're not supposed to talk about that, Bob. It was a survey intended toward academics and it was, it is seeming to probe attitudes of academics toward UAP research and yes, it said UAP, not UFO, and I was like, okay, this is starting to send off my antenna a little bit, my little alien antenna, as to what's going on. So I took the survey and what it did is it presented me with a bunch of academic articles about UFOs and asked if this changed my opinion of the literature. My answer was no. You're not going to hand me three studies and expect me to change my opinion on this overall phenomenon, and I kind of might have left some flaming comments at the end of that survey. After it was done, I was like, wait, why didn't I save what those articles were? I went and found some of the articles and some were published by the editor-in-chief of the journal that they were published in, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's just like, this is like your gold standard of evidence, and it was like in a journal that had nothing to do nominally with aerodynamics, it was like in a journal on entropy, and I was like, okay, how much is this being pushed into the academic sphere? It's hard to tell. That's one thing that I would worry about is if enough academics get snookered, it becomes a little subfield. Now, I think like all of them, they'd probably eventually deflate over time like a flan in a cupboard, but that is one thing I thought was interesting. Then he mentioned NASA. I remember I saw a talk by the current NASA administrator, and in the talk he was giving to kids, he was talking about one of the big reasons NASA should go out into the space is so that we can meet aliens out there instead of down here, where we're seeing all these alien contacts, all these alien contacts, and it's the same talking point, Steve, where these airplanes are locking on with radar and getting a range and confirming, we know these things are happening, and then they're going off at an impossible speed, the same old same old, but I was like, wow, so this is high level, again, these are administrator-level people at NASA, not necessarily the rank-and-file scientists, but that's the thing I worry about, that basically, it's the next generation of, wow, there's really something to this UFO thing.

S: Yeah. Meanwhile, it's a giant nothing burger. I mean, literally, when you dig down.

B: There's not even any ketchup on it.

S: This is the same stories they've been shopping around for 30, 40 years, sometimes literally the same ones, and the quality of evidence is abysmal, and it's more blurry photos or dots of light or things that are indistinct.

B: And the fact that we keep going back to it, the fact that with the proliferation of high-quality cameras in everybody's hands, we're still not seeing those videos, those good videos, and there's no reason why you wouldn't have four or five different videos of the same event from different perspectives, which definitely lead credence to it, right? If you saw five videos, each from a subtly different angle, like, whoa, that would take some work to fake. The thing about-

B: Not one. I've never seen them come across anything like it.

S: As cameras and videos have become more common, we're seeing more blurry photos, but we're not seeing better quality data. We're not seeing, oh my god, that's really something. That's not a plane. You know what I mean? We're not seeing that. The other thing is-

B: They live in the blur.

S: The evidence is the blur. If you think about the government, and just one point that I think is important to emphasize is, remember what they're alleging? They're covering up the biggest story in human history of all time without even anything close to this story, and they've been doing it for decades, and it's an international conspiracy, and yet they've managed to keep any smoking gun from getting to the press. No way. That's impossible. Think about the Vietnam War. How long was it before the Pentagon Papers were released? Information like that where no one's denying that they're real, no one denied that the Pentagon Papers were legitimate. They were verified. They were released to the freaking New York Times. You know what I mean? Why isn't there a Pentagon Papers of the UFO movement, and no of the MJ-12 documents are not real, those that have been completely debunked? You know what I mean? There's the alien autopsy video, and that turns out to be crap. It always craps out.

CH: It's interesting you bring this up, Steve, because you're talking about the extreme end of the massive conspiracy, where you have the whole government in it. I remember in the past you've covered actual academic studies people have done on the numerics of how likely a conspiracy is to fall apart when it's so big. It's kind of funny, like on Survivor, I got to experience the extreme opposite of that. For those who don't know, the format of the show is Survivor. Basically you vote each other off the island. Basically, if you're going to get voted off, there's a tiny conspiracy that's launched against you that you have to uncover in order for you to find out, oh, they're coming for me. I've got to make sure that it's not me. It's only a handful of people. The conspiracy may last a few days or perhaps a few hours or even minutes. Literally, it was five people who got together in a conversation around camp when you weren't there and said, hey, let's vote out that person. Even there, there were times where we were going to make sure that we don't hatch the plan a few hours too early, because what's going to happen? It's going to leak. It was interesting, kind of from a skeptical perspective, to want to have to try to ferret out real conspiracies on a short timeline. It was also the other end of the spectrum of the massive, now to the tiny conspiracy, which was highly plausible.

S: Absolutely. There are conspiracies all the time. We don't deny that. People get confused. You don't think there are conspiracies?

CH: Of course.

S: No. We're talking about grand conspiracies. It's all about the size and the duration. How many people would have to be involved across how many institutions for how long? It just gets exponentially more difficult to maintain a conspiracy the larger and longer you have to maintain it. And again, the academics have showed this mathematically, that these things just implode at some point. There's just no way the biggest story in human history has been covered up for 50 years without one good photo getting out, especially now that everyone has access to digital information. Somebody would like the Snowden thing. He blew up that conspiracy pretty quickly. There's no way that they would be able to keep this under wraps for this long.

CH: And not to labor this issue for too long with you guys, but the one thing I noticed as a person who doesn't deal with this day in and day out like you all do, when I sort of checked in on this whole UAP thing, that's when I found Mick West. I know you know Mick West.

E: Oh, sure.

S: Yeah, we interviewed him.

CH: He would take some of the famous recent videos such as the Gimbal UFO and just break it down in such phenomenal detail to the point where it's just like, oh, what else could it be other than this? And you can't always do that, of course. Sometimes you're in that low information zone. You just have no information to know what it could be. But sometimes just seeing such a calm and academic breakdown of a thing without any sort of bombast is, at least to me, so convincing. Maybe not everybody, but to me who was catching up on this, I thought it was incredibly compelling.

S: His videos are very compelling and he basically deconstructs the narrative, right? Because he demonstrates like, no, these pilots actually did get their angle of attack wrong. They got the geometry wrong and he proves it. He really demonstrates how they got it wrong. So the appeal to the expertise of the military pilots is flawed. They make the same kind of mistakes everybody make. They make errors of thinking, errors of perception, etc.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

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• Champion-level drone racing using deep reinforcement learning 

Settling Mars (1:16:59)

• Just 22 people are needed to colonize Mars — as long as they are the right personality type, study claims 

Stress Patches (1:27:32)

• Is Meghan Markle's stress patch legit? Here's what experts say. 

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Science or Fiction (1:32:39)

Theme: Robotics Item #1: According to the International Federation of Robotics, in 2023 there are 35 million industrial robots, and 43 million service robots worldwide.*  Item #2: The first robot-assisted surgery was in Vancouver in 1984, with the Arthrobot, which assisted in arthroscopic procedures. Item #3: Arguably the oldest robots include water-powered, clock-driven figurines dating from 3,000 BCE, and a steam-powered pigeon that could actually fly, dating from 400 BCE. * The shownotes page for this episode on the SGU website did not have a link for any article to be referenced for this item.

Answer	Item
Fiction	35/43M robots worldwide
Science	Robot-assisted surgery
Science	Oldest robots

Host	Result
Steve	sweep

Rogue	Guess
Evan	Robot-assisted surgery
Jay	Robot-assisted surgery
Bob	Oldest robots
Christian	Robot-assisted surgery

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:40:12)

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.  – Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), American writer and professor of biochemistry

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

(applause)

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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