The Next Privacy Crisis Isn't Your Data - It's Your Thoughts

Jeremy Grater (00:00)
Most people think the problem with AI data is related to their emails and search history. It's not. already recording human intention before conscious thought even happens. And nobody has figured out who owns that yet.

Today we're talking to Bruce AI and quantum practitioner, third level reiki master, and one of the few people asking the uncomfortable questions about what happens when machines start mapping your mind.

This is BroBots, the podcast that tries to help you be a better human by being smarter about how you use technology.

Bruce

thanks so much for being here. I want to start with that curious intersection of Reiki and AI.

Jeremy Grater (00:35)
Where do you see the two worlds intersecting? How do those two things combine for you?

Bruce D. Randall (00:39)
That's a really good question to start because everybody knows Neuralink. And Neuralink has done several brain implants so far. But the first one they did, I pay close attention and they advertised it a lot, promoted it lot. And when Nolan was talking about his experience with the chip, he said, sometimes the cursor moves before I think about it, but it always goes in the right place.

And I thought that was fascinating because it precedes cognitive thought and it moved and it always went to the right place. So that opens up a myriad of things that I talk about in my book because this is not supposed to happen at this point in time, right? We're ahead of our time right now. And when you talk about quantum and everything else coming into play, we're in the fast track, more of a fast track than we've ever been on in anything before.

Jason Haworth (01:28)
So along those lines, I'm not sure our entire audience is completely familiar with what quantum computing is, and I'm probably not the best person to go in and start telling kibbutz and the idea of rotational axes and superposition and all those pieces. ⁓

Jeremy Grater (01:41)
Please,

because plus by the way, if you do, my head will explode. I'll have no idea what you're talking about.

Jason Haworth (01:45)
Well, but what I think would be helpful

is if you could give our audience kind of a brief understanding of what quantum computing means and then how quantum computing actually relates back to AI.

Jeremy Grater (01:56)
And the more that a dummy like me can follow along, the better.

Bruce D. Randall (01:59)
Yeah.

I can give

you a good high level one. So AI is the intelligence that can do a lot of things that we see with LLMs, know, Chad GPT and so forth. And then quantum, a good way to look at quantum is it is the speed in back of AI, but it only works on really complex things. If you're going to do like a your own spreadsheet, it's not going to add value there. It only adds value to really complex calculations. That's why most people won't see it.

but they'll see the effects of it.

Jason Haworth (02:33)
Yeah, no, that's great. yeah, quantum computing is definitely something that I'm interested in. actually met the founder of D-Wave back in the day at Mobile World back in like 2012 or 2013. And we had lots of conversations. He's also an ex-wrestler, much better than I ever was. But a super neat guy. And I actually was talking to him back then about, you know, where's the convergence point between AI and some of these pieces. And he had some very interesting things to say. Where do you see us right now?

Jeremy Grater (02:48)
Thank

Jason Haworth (03:02)
with the convergence of AI running on these quantum computing engines. And how does that correlate back to all this talk about things like GPUs and LPUs and all these things that are actually being used, all the water consumption? Where does quantum computing play into this super hyper infrastructure that people are building these days?

Bruce D. Randall (03:19)
Right, well the biggest issue with quantum is keeping it cool and so forth because it runs hot, because it runs fast. You don't have to keep all quantum cool, first of all. That's something not many people have heard, but that's the truth. I see quantum as being the...

the part that can take many different variables that are changing and can bring it down to a point and AI can look at all the options with that variable and present it to the people. And with the jobs that are changing, I tell people in my podcast and the book that...

What you can do for yourself, and I strongly advise this, is whatever vertical you're in, start to understand what AI is and what it can do in your vertical, because that's going to be the differentiating factor between you and somebody else. And if you do that 15 minutes a day, you'll be the smartest one in the room in a couple weeks.

Jeremy Grater (04:21)
This is one of the things that keeps coming up on the show is the effect on the labor force and work as a thing in general. Everything that I've seen so far says the companies that are augmenting humans with AI are the ones that are successful. The ones that have tried to replace humans with robots have failed spectacularly and had to hire back a bunch of the humans that they've let go. Where does this land for you? I realize I'm asking you look a little bit into a crystal ball, but this thing is moving quickly. Are we on a path to human

Bruce D. Randall (04:46)
That's okay.

Jeremy Grater (04:48)
being replaced in the labor force or will we just see the expansion of the human AI robot augmentation that just makes us more productive alongside the robots rather than being replaced by them so we can just go lay in the grass.

Bruce D. Randall (05:02)
Yeah, and Elon and I disagree with this because he's replacing the Tesla plants with robot plants. But what I see is I see jobs transitioning. They're changing. They're not all going away, but they're transitioning. And the people that are doing digital work right now, that's more likely going to be taken over by AI. And I can give you some stories about that. The people that do hand work and things that require

Jeremy Grater (05:09)
Sure.

Bruce D. Randall (05:32)
movement and so forth and thought these people are going to be the ones that going to have more opportunities to have the jobs and this is happening in all the way from the Gen Z's all the way up to the baby boomers and it's universal and people are going to have to are having to adjust with this. I've done this at my age right I've done this I build apps in eight weeks I bought a functional app I built a functional app and I've never built one before in my life.

I'm writing books about it. It's one of these situations. I use love of...

Jason Haworth (05:59)
What'd you use to build your app?

Yeah, lovable is great. The Swedes have done a really fantastic job of making that thing.

Bruce D. Randall (06:07)
Yeah, and it was good because mine wasn't all complex, but other people that were doing complex were on, they were having integration issues. ⁓ yeah. Yeah, it does. So I hope that answered your question.

Jason Haworth (06:15)
It gets very expensive very fast, the higher degrees of complexity. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, does actually. real quick, it's an interesting intersection point to talk about Reiki and then how Reiki intersects with AI and with quantum computing. And what I really like is if you can give folks a basic understanding of what Reiki is and then also talk about it in the context of how you've worked with it and then maybe expand a little bit into how it is it's effective to work with AI and quantum.

Bruce D. Randall (06:47)
Sure, well Reiki is universal energy which is everywhere. I'm just a conduit and being a third level Reiki person, my conduit's a little bit bigger so I can have more energy come through me.

And by doing that, I can put energy into people that helps heal them. I've healed myself twice on things that top doctors said I'd never be able to heal and I did. And they're functioning fine now. And so that's what I've been able to do. since I've done it, I can speak as an expert on it. And it works. Now with AI, when we talk about AI, we start talking about

brain-computer interfaces. And now we talk about thoughts and messages in brain hives and so forth. And you start asking, who owns the data? Are your thoughts your own? And we're not there yet, but we're not that far away from it also.

Jeremy Grater (07:43)
Can you say more about that? me more about what you mean by our thoughts on our own.

Bruce D. Randall (07:47)
Sure, well in a hive mind, you've got people like Nolan who had the chip with Neuralink, and you get most of those people and they can communicate via telekinesis amongst each other. So if they can communicate and you're in what's called a hive mind, which means everybody communicates through a mode, then at that point in time the question remains, who owns the thoughts that are coming out? Because they're being recorded somewhere or put somewhere and are those your thoughts?

When your thoughts come out, do you have enough time, which it doesn't appear you do, to put your emotions with those thoughts? Are they just thoughts? So now you've got separation there and you have to, we're going to have to address it at some point. And I'm doing the work now because I'm analytical and it fascinates me on where we can go with this. And there's two sides to it. There's the really positive side and there's the other side, like in everything else.

And who owns the data really is going to be the fact of who controls the game.

Jason Haworth (08:48)
So I'm going to get super dorky here and I apologize

for everyone that hasn't gone through all the technical bullshit training that I have. But when you look at something like artificial intelligence, a lot of people are able to go through and upload enough data to create a reasonable facsimile of someone's personality. And if you can create this reasonable facsimile of somebody's personality and you have the ability to know

longer require a physical medium like airwaves to transmit information to actually communicate because now you can do these things all digital and you get into the idea of using quantum computing functions to go through and start understanding not just the neural mapping functions but also the capability of understanding the predictive way in which you can actually try to understand a complex problem which for those of you that don't know quantum computing it's well worth looking up the

concept of it and what it really is, is it's a prediction engine that goes through and creates these peaks and valleys and probabilities. And if your answers are at the bottom of the probability chain and ones that are closer towards the bottom are more likely to be probable. And sometimes that might be, you know, two or three answers. Sometimes it might be 500. But the idea is you've had really big numbers made them really small. And people are trying to use this right now to break quantum or to break cryptography because most of the cryptography algorithms out there are a combination of taking

large prime numbers and multiplying them together to give you these really, really big keys. If you start looking at human consciousness and you start looking at the way that we communicate and you start looking at the idea that most of what we have is actually energy and what we're doing is we're transmitting energy from our physical mediums, our bodies and our brains, and our brains are essentially energy conduits that make energy.

and then we use that to affect our nervous system, which then translates into us doing certain things and pushing things out into the physical world. How long is it until my personality winds up uploaded to a computer without me knowing it? And there's just a virtual version of me and all of my employers like, fuck him. We don't need to pay him a dime. Let's use his virtual avatar. And can I start charging for my virtual avatar?

Jeremy Grater (11:02)
Hahaha!

Jason Haworth (11:03)
It's a personally selfish question, know, but I would actually like to know your thoughts on this. And if you're working on an energy company, is it safe to say that the energy company might in fact have something to do with some of the areas in which I've just spoken?

Jeremy Grater (11:06)
Hahaha!

you

Bruce D. Randall (11:17)
Well, the areas you've spoken, for the energy, is not too close to that. However, your avatar, it depends who you ask. If you ask Kurtz, well, he's going to say we're not far off, right? And if you ask a few other people, they say, well, we can back your brain up before you die, and we can have you on a, you can be virtual. And, you know, we don't know the answer. That's what it comes down to, because we've never done it. We're just projecting what we think we can do, and nobody really knows.

It's a great question though.

Jason Haworth (11:44)
Yeah, well, and kind of carrying on with that thought process. If if I start looking at the ways in which human beings have traditionally interacted with computational devices. So we went from, you know, I'm going to use a mouse and a keyboard. Actually, I take that back from punch cards to a keyboard to a graphical user interface, the mouse to smartphones, to virtual reality, to headsets that have augmented reality functions.

Bruce D. Randall (12:00)
Yeah.

Jason Haworth (12:12)
and you kind of look at this transition path, like we've already augmented the human experience substantially. And since we've already augmented the human experience substantially and we're consistently collecting information via social media platforms, because they're using it to really sell us ads for, know, boner pills and hair replacement for me. Thank you very much, Facebook for targeting me that way. Does the collection of this information from these sources?

even though I don't necessarily trust them to do what's right with that information. But do you think this is actually a public good that they're doing? Because ultimately speaking, we are going to need AI to be a bit more empathetic. And we are going to need it to be, for lack of a better term, funny with how it is it interacts with people. Because that's the sign that we use for

letting down our guard, feeling like we're connected with people, like it's humor, it's empathy, it's making these connections. If they're collecting all this information about me and they're using it to be able to make connections with other folks, and even though I don't like that these corporations are taking my information without my permission to make these things happen, do you see this as something that's an eventual good or is this going to be a matter of it's in the eye of the beholder, you know, depending on which end of the stick that you're on?

Bruce D. Randall (13:07)
Yeah.

Jason Haworth (13:31)
for this particular collection of information.

Bruce D. Randall (13:35)
Well, I think for the most part that's going to be, it's going to be better for what they're trying to get you into. Whether it's better for you, you'll have to determine that.

But I don't really think that them taking all that data is a positive thing because the more they know about us, you know, the less protection we have or guard that we have that we're not going to go into something that, you know, we may not want to go into. And I just, I feel that the data should be somewhat locked down. Cognitive, when they figure that out, that will be decided.

But I don't like sending all my data and I don't use a lot of things because of that, because I'd just rather not be out there. I think because I have global entry when I come into the country and so forth, I mean my biometrics are all over the place anyway. So at this point, it doesn't matter. I just don't want the messages coming to me. That's really what I'm down to.

Jason Haworth (14:22)
same.

I don't think I've shown my

password to a physical human being in like four years. Like I just walk there and they take a picture of my face and they're like, yeah, good enough.

Bruce D. Randall (14:31)
Yeah.

Are you looking in the eyeball and they say, it's you.

Jason Haworth (14:36)
Yes, exactly.

sorry, Jeremy.

Jeremy Grater (14:38)
we're often described as a bit of doomsdayers when it comes to AI because it does seem like we're in a speeding car going that's headed straight for a cliff and so far the ride is good but when we get to the cliff how bad is it gonna be? Where do you come down on that? You seem like somebody who's pretty hopeful, you seem pretty optimistic about where we're going with this. Are we headed toward a better future?

Bruce D. Randall (14:58)
Well, we don't know is really the answer to that right now. We just don't know because in the past we moved slowly to where we're going. Now we're in a bullet train moving and we have hardly enough time to think about what we have and we're 10 steps ahead. So it's their gaps. And I'm comfortable with where we are.

But I'm not real comfortable with the people making the decisions that have all the data. That's the concern. And that's really why I start writing my cognitive data, because that's the important data, more important than the data that they're getting right now. And we've got to figure this out, because we're not far away from it.

Jeremy Grater (15:22)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jason Haworth (15:36)
Yeah. and I think you're right. mean, with some TPUs are getting to the point now that they're so cheap that, you know, you're going to wind up with the equivalent of Raspberry Pi, like cost and functional capabilities with TPUs. The programming languages are so good, something like Claude, you know, that I can go through and I can have Claude make me a PRD and an MRD and then say now of somebody else's product and then say,

Now go make a personalized version of that for me with a different language and slightly different pieces that I get busted for IP infringement. The accessibility, the things that were hard in the digital space to make these things work, those barriers are going away very, very quickly. And because they're going away so fast, the data that's collected is not just training data. It's modeling data that I can use for different purposes and repurpose for different functions. Do you see a time

Bruce D. Randall (16:08)
in.

Jason Haworth (16:30)
sometime in the near future where I can actually have the modeling data that's me on a chip or a thumb drive and turn around and be able to use that across multiple different smaller tensor units or something else out there to make those pieces work at scale and to be able to go through and have this type of personification of self that I can drop into different scenarios but still maintain control.

Bruce D. Randall (16:56)
I think that's, I don't think that's that far off the maintaining control is the trick there. Because you can have it and put it out there, but how are you going to maintain control? don't think we know how yet, but I think when we get there we'll know how to do that.

Jason Haworth (17:09)
Yeah, and I kind of wonder if, I mean, we use cryptocurrency and ledger systems to go through and try to lock information down to make it so it's immutable and difficult to actually be able to drift across different locations. And I can see a point in time where these things start to converge. I can also see a point in time where you start using quantum computing to go through and actually create essentially quantum, quantum cryptography functions that make it really difficult for you to break these things that quantum computers can't even crack that.

I just wonder how many electrons I have to throw at this problem. And as the CEO of a future energy, or future CEO of an energy company, energy obviously becomes a massive problem here. And we start looking at things like fusion reaction and everything else from a future tense perspective and trying to pull this stuff in. Where the hell does the electricity come from? Where does the fresh water come from? How do we make this stuff actually work if we're going to try to take ourselves in this meat space where we are big chemical computers and chemical batteries?

and turn them into hard physical assets that can actually be used in the virtual reality world.

Bruce D. Randall (18:09)
I can tell you that in the future the energy that you're going to use is going to be no problem whatsoever. And I can say that from a point of confidence right now. And I can say that if you want to be autonomous in the middle of the jungle and do it, you can because that's all you need. All right? So the energy is not the issue at this point. The real issue is, you know, how do we put this together in a way that we can manage?

and make it so that everybody has somewhat of an equal shot about utilizing this. Because the internet is for everybody. Quantum and AI, if it's done the way I think it's going to be done, it should be available to everybody at the level that they can utilize that. But I think we're further out on that. We have to figure out how to do it first, and we're taking steps, you know, big steps there right now.

And I can tell you a couple of things that we've figured out with what I'm doing that would blow your mind. just can't say it OK? So in two of the things you mentioned, there's no problem at all with my perspective on it. But nobody knows it. So what can I say?

Jeremy Grater (19:07)
And we'll invite you back when you can.

Jason Haworth (19:09)
Yeah.

Jeremy Grater (19:19)
Sure, fair enough.

Jason Haworth (19:19)
Well, if you can make

energy powerful enough that it can be used for these different use cases and portable enough that it don't require that the power grid to actually transmute electrons, let's have that tomorrow because like we lose power all the time because we have we have basically too much energy drifting across, you know, transistors and everything else that are just too old and they blow circuits.

Jeremy Grater (19:31)
Yeah.

Bruce D. Randall (19:41)
Yeah, those days are quickly coming to an end. Yeah.

Jason Haworth (19:44)
That's exciting. Yeah.

Jeremy Grater (19:46)
We have just a minute or so left. So sort of along the lines of you were talking about sort of democratizing these tools for everybody and making them usable at everybody's level. What is one, maybe two things that you wish people understood about this technology and about the path that we're on that they could start to sort of dive into now to get a better handle on it to set themselves up for the future?

Bruce D. Randall (20:05)
You know, I go back to what I said earlier. And people need to spend time to understand AI in the vertical or in the area that they're working because that's where it all began. It begins there and once they're conversational with it, then we can take it from there. But until they're conversational with it, there's nothing you can do. You just have to get to that first step and then you can start learning.

Jeremy Grater (20:27)
Our thanks to Bruce Randall for being on the show with us today. can find out more about him and his podcast and all the things he's up to, including his book that is due out this spring. You can do that at his the AI human paradox.com that is linked in the description for this episode at our website, robots.me. And that's where you'll find a new episode from us next Monday morning. Thanks so much for listening.