Sometimes it takes a rocket scientist with Dr. Pamela Nenges.
Hi, this is Dr. Pamela Nenges with Sometimes It Takes a Rocket Scientist and Dr. Bart Bartholomew
is joining us today for part two.
Enjoy.
One of the things I mentioned to you earlier, and this is a concern I have, and I assume
that a lot of people do, that our key high-level government agencies seem to be losing their
cultural foundations in terms of their structure and leadership.
I think this is a significant, I'm not going to say threat, I'm going to say challenge
to the way we do things in the U.S.
I would like to see more emphasis on knowledge management and respect for the history and
the foundations for what the agencies have done and what they need to do.
Absolutely.
And knowledge management, I'm glad you brought up that term.
At my age, by the way, this is joking, okay, people come to me for wisdom.
Whenever you get white here, you've been around a long time, you haven't been shot yet, or
something, they go, hey, tell me about the old, like you are, tell me about the old days,
what did you guys do?
Knowledge management is absolutely a form of wisdom, okay?
And it's no longer hard to do.
I mean, my gosh, look at what we got.
And the other day, I simulated using CHAT GPT, a simple AI system, okay, a dialogue
between 10 people that we crafted, created, okay?
And these were like, could be you, I interviewed these people, I talked about their personal
characteristics, their lives, their history, and their technology.
And then we had a CHAT GPT session on a particular subject, okay?
Now the subject has to be pretty well defined, otherwise, you know, within one hour, we had
another session, which built on the first session, and we were coming up with phenomenal
answers.
And we never involved the human being in the entire thing.
Now if we involve real human beings, let's say I put you in CHAT GPT, you go find everything
about you, you know, including the speeches you gave in your podcasts, they not only simulate
your knowledge, they simulate your behavior too, like, oh, she's a pushy gal, or you know,
she's a quiet gal, or whatever.
They'll be able to do that without bothering too many people.
And that really is knowledge management to some extent, that's based on the past, but
we can use it to look at where do you go?
You know, one question we asked is, what do you think the most crucial technology developments
are needed to do, we were talking about, and I hate this term, the global power conflict,
this is our new term, GPC, I think, global powers conflict.
I hate the word conflict, because I truly would rather see the global powers collaboration.
Now that's a hard thing to get, China, Russia, India, United States, you know, how do you
get them to collaborate?
But we're using CHAT GPT and AI to simulate sessions between leaders in those countries,
to see where the problems are, see where it breaks down, you know, see where China walks
away from the table and stuff like that.
Now it's not real, but it's a simulation, you know, and you used AI before anybody,
and now we're using it, you know, with the capability.
Well, there were other people using AI.
Well, not much.
Harvey and Drexler and Drexler.
Oh, yeah, well, of course.
Yeah.
But I had a different approach.
And it's interesting, there's a guy at MIT now calling it liquid neurons.
And of course, if you look back and looked at my work, you go, oh, she was kind of doing
that 25 years ago.
You were, you were, you were ahead of the curve, for sure.
Yeah.
Now, the other part of this is that you're talking about, you know, global stuff.
Number one, you're talking about creating basically a digital dossier on how people
function.
So we're looking and this is an important thing that people don't understand is AI is
being used to study respondent behavior.
In other words, how they respond to things.
Exactly.
And that's a concern for me, because where it's highly productive for us to say, we're
going to look at a concept in battle management for dealing with world powers.
Yeah.
But also, there are some human rights issues.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
And that's, that's, that's, I think, a concern.
But from a bigger concern is we need to find a way to get, what's the term, world leaders
to behave like adults again.
Exactly.
Yes.
They're like little kids in the playground, fighting each other.
You know, I'll nuke you if you, if you're not happy with me, you know, that is, frankly,
Pam, I'm worried.
Now I'm old and maybe it's the time to get worried before you, you know, you go away.
But I don't like what I see.
I see more division in this country, more division in the world, more and more rogues.
And that scares the living daylight out of me.
You know, Korea, even Iran, you know, I mean, I, I, I don't, I don't know how bad they are,
but it worries me.
And a lot of these guys have a nuclear program.
Oh, yeah.
Everybody does.
But you have to understand North Korea has a nuclear program because Russia has been
helping them.
Oh, I know.
I know.
Yeah.
But so we have issues of proliferation.
We have issues with people like Vladimir Putin, who are using nuclear menacing as a tool,
which I find I just.
Absolutely.
And we, but we don't seem to have the ability to respond to this kind of behavior.
What I find really extraordinary that we don't have people standing up in the West going,
you just cut it out.
We're not going to do this.
Right, right.
Exactly.
No, I mean, it seems so logical in our personal lives.
If we had a family that was dysfunctional or, you know, or just friends or whatever, we
do that, right?
We'd say, wait a minute here.
This is not where to go.
You know, we got to start.
What do we have in common?
What, you know, what is it?
Now of course, in common is survival, right?
Because on the nuclear issue, I don't know if you read it.
It's called nuclear war.
I just came out.
I don't know if you can see it, but the name of the book is nuclear war.
I just bought it.
And in the first chapter, which is about five pages long, the world goes away because of
one errant hydrogen bomb hit in the Pentagon.
Okay.
Errant being, you know, some nut, let it off.
The world goes away and about, well, it doesn't go away, but you know, it collapses very,
very quickly.
So the nucleus threat is terrifying to me because there are some crazy people that may
have access to one.
All it takes is one, you know?
Well, we have a proliferation issue right now and largely is due to the lack of leadership
in the Western world and our ability to collaborate with other partners.
And obviously the Middle East is a significant issue.
Absolutely.
And Iran has every intention of acquiring a nuclear warhead.
And we make a mistake of not making them friends, which we should have done 20 years ago.
Absolutely.
Because they're an educated, competent, highly sophisticated society.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And now, and now, which is God smacking to me, they're now friends with Saudi Arabia,
who had been their arch enemy for 25 years.
And the United States fought a surrogate war against their people in Saudi Arabia.
I mean, to me, it's just stunning that we don't seem to have people.
It's like Washington is half asleep.
Yeah.
And I don't know how we fix that.
We need to figure out.
I was just going to say, I was going to say the opposite of that.
I really do credit Ronald Reagan for saying, look, we don't want a nuclear war with the
Soviet unions.
What can we do to prevent that?
And of course, some of it was strength, but some of it was compromise to some extent.
You know, yeah, the NASC program was part of Star Wars.
And you know, he wanted to show, you know, we could do it.
But on the other hand, it was like, you know, the olive branch and the weapon, you know,
he was offering Gorbachev an olive branch too.
Carrot is thick.
Carrot is thick, yeah.
So I'm worried too, Carrot.
You got more years to live than me, but I'm worried too.
Well, here's what I want to say very quickly, because you don't hear about this in like
CNN.
This Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars, trained a whole generation of scientists and
engineers.
Yeah.
It basically funded the infrastructures we currently have.
Yeah.
And my generation benefited tremendously from it.
Now we don't see that with the millennials and the Z's.
We don't see these great programs.
We don't see these great efforts.
We have people from Wall Street to IBM deciding what technology is in this country, and we
can't do that.
We have to have leadership that recognizes the importance of technology in the structure
of our economy, our security, our defense, and what benefits our society.
And the other part of this, I think, and I just want to say, amen to that.
Damn.
I completely agree with what you said.
And the other part of this is that I'm a weirdo aerospace engineer because I'm actually an
engineering physicist.
And I've been to nuclear weapons school.
I was trained by Dr. William Highland Chambers as well as you.
He founded the Nuclear Emergency Search Team.
I worked in the intelligence community.
And most Americans today, including some listening to this now, don't realize the Department
of Energy, they're not the guys who put the stars on your refrigerators.
They're a defense and intelligence agency.
Yes, yes, right.
And apparently someone needs to tell Congress.
Yeah.
You know, we're so, I think part of that is a symptom of the bigger issue of how divided
we are.
You know, the reason they're asleep, I do believe that part of the reason that they're
asleep is they spend so much time fighting each other that very little collaboration
is there.
Now, I know there are good people in Congress.
I know some people that are wonderful people.
But then when you get to the top of the pile and you get one party just screaming, the
other guys are a bunch of nuts and vice versa, it's kind of hard to get anything done.
It would be like a marriage that is completely dysfunctional.
And usually that ends up in divorce.
But in America, we can't afford a divorce.
You know, we have to what I don't know what it's going to take.
I really don't.
And here we get this upcoming election.
I don't want to get into that.
But you know, and there's no difference from what happened four years ago or eight years
ago.
We haven't learned a lesson yet.
We're still mad at each other, you know?
Well, I'm concerned when they're saying, oh, it's the end of democracy.
It's the end of the country.
No, it's not.
Yeah, and the United States is not going to come to an end because we got another president
who may or may not be terribly competent.
It's not the issue.
We are a country that is fairly substantial internationally still.
We're still one of the probably two superpowers on the planet.
The United States is not going to come to an end.
We've got to stop this pre adolescent crap.
Yeah, it is.
It's childish.
It's absolutely childish.
Yeah, or very old age.
It's like childish behavior with old people, you know, or something like that.
Join us next time on Sometimes It Takes a Rocket Scientist.
For part three of Dr. Pamela Mendes' interview with Dr. Bart Bartholay.