Roger Penrose

So intelligence requires consciousness, which AI does not have.

And if we go to the likes of Sir Roger Penrose, who is a Nobel laureate from Oxford University, he taught Stephen Hawking and mentored Stephen Hawking.

He absolutely agrees with this approach, that consciousness is fundamental and therefore AI is not an intelligence.

It's a form of, he calls it cleverness.

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In 1969, Roger Penrose was thinking about what physics you could actually do inside the ergosphere, and he realized something remarkable.

Because objects in there are forced to co-rotate with the black hole, and because that forced co-rotation carries energy, you can in principle extract some of that energy and take it with you.

Here's all you have to do.

All we need is a black hole and some empty pizza boxes and we're done.

Now, I mean, don't get too excited, there isn't-- this isn't exactly an efficient process.

A single Penrose event is fantastically inefficient.

Real analyses show you'd extract only a percent or two per go of the energy of the object you kick, of your payload.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society, a CBE, a recipient of the Institute of Physics Dirac Gold Medal, and a lead author of the IPCC.

He did his PhD in general relativity at Oxford, partly under Roger Penrose.

He then spent most of his career at the UK Met Office and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, where he pioneered the probabilistic ensemble forecasting methods that are now standard in operational weather prediction worldwide.

That is a lot of biography, and I mention it very much on purpose because I think it's particularly relevant here.

Um, you know, maybe I should just take a few seconds to just talk a little bit about my background.

Um, I, you know, you can probably tell from my accent I'm from the UK.

I did my PhD at, at Oxford in general relativity theory, actually, um, under a cosmologist called Dennis Sciama and, uh, and also under Roger Penrose, who you probably have heard about.

Um, and, uh, uh, you know, I guess I started to get, um...

And when it was discovered, his reaction was nothing shook my atheism like that discovery.

Now Sir Roger Penrose is one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the world, worked with Stephen Hawking and so on.

And he has an analogy in his book where he says, if you want a universe with the second law of thermodynamics, where even your Cadillac will rust, everything is running down.

The Creator's aim, and those are His words.

He had to be patient and wait till they reached their fullest, most elaborate form.

And Roger Penrose, who was Stephen Hawking's best pal with him, you know, made great advances in understanding black holes.

He is another of these mathematics driven physicists and he described, he has the same experiences as Dirac and he describes these mathematical patterns coming to him as being like an explorer coming across a range of mountains that no one has ever seen before.

So that pattern has existed before humans discovered it.

It's perhaps existed before the creation of the material universe.

And Penrose would see, I mean, the esoteric way of looking at this would be to see that these evolving patterns are thought beings.

And that a thought being swims into the mental space of Roger Penrose.

And his job is to kind of throw a net over it and pull it into the human realm and when he does that he's doing the same thing that great religious leaders and saints and mystics and artists have done through the ages he is to use your phrase downloading something for the human spirit something to make our lives more wonderful And I think, you know, it's interesting to speculate.