In a story straight out of The Matrix or Terminator, environmentalist scientists are harvesting human stem cells to build "batteries" for A.I. supercomputers. But what makes this even more terrifying is how it works: The most sought-after source of the stem cells for these "organoids" is embryos, and they only last about 100 days until they die. So, are we harvesting God's creation to power man's "creation?" Blaze Media editor-at-large James Poulos joins Glenn to explain the whole story ...
TranscriptBelow is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: He is TheBlaze media editor at-large.
And TheBlaze TV host of Zero Hour. He's also the founder and editorial director of Return, which is a new vertical on TheBlaze.com.
We have several different things that we're working on. And one of them is return, just like on your keyboard, when you hit return.
It's all about tech.
He wrote a story that is one of the more disturbing, dystopian stories. And we've done our homework on this, to some degree.
Enough to go, oh, no. This is actually in practice, and being used by the University of Michigan, right now.
This is not some, you know, some day. And it's a little like the Matrix.
Environmentalists are worried about, how do we make enough power to be able to power AI?
Well, they have found a way. Called organoids.
Wait until you hear this.
James is with us now. Hello, James.
JAMES: Hey, Glenn. How are you?
GLENN: Well, I was better before I read your story on organoids. Yeah, I know.
This is bizarre and terrifying.
JAMES: Yeah. It's really disturbing. And it's been around for a little while. But it's really starting to kick into gear.
As you said, you know, AI consumes a ton of electricity. A lot of energy. You know, environmentalists have always hated nuclear power for pretty perverse reasons, I think.
So they're so afraid of using nuclear power, that what would invoke now is turning to us.
To be the batteries. Just take the stem cells out of embryos. Out of the labs. Sometimes out of tumors.
Turn them into brain cells, basically.
And use those as batteries, to power what they're calling bio processors. They say, it will use about a million times less power than a typical digital processor. And that's a good thing, they say.
You can access them remotely. And this is the new hype. You know, it's from the same folks who brought you the idea of going to carbon zero. Net zero carbon use. They look at human beings as a waste of space. A waste of energy.
And they want to harness that, to run AI that is supposed to be smarter than anyone can understand.
GLENN: So on final sparks website, this is the company that is doing this.
This linked to a daily mail article, that says organoids are tiny, self-organized, three-dimensional tissue cultures made from stem cells.
Stanford's website says stem cells come from two sources. Embryonic stem cells.
And then, you know, that's unused embryos, and they are then donated to science, or adult stem cells.
But those are really limited, and can only generate certain type of cells.
So they also say, final sparks website say, these organoids live for about 100 days.
So are we harvesting embryos? Using them to power a supercomputer for 100 days?
And then killing them, and looking for more embryo stem cells?
JAMES: Well, right.
So if you are uncomfortable as IFD, this is going to drive you nuts. There's an extra category of extra stem cells they've created called induced pluripotent cells. And basically, what you do, you start the embryonic process.
But you arrest it before it gets too far.
And then you harvest the stem cells out of this artificially induced embryonic organism, right? Human organism, and then you create a fork, and you just grow those cells.
You know, sort of the way in the way they grow fake meat cells. You know, it's really akin to cancerous cells, and the way that they grow.
Right. So this is something that is not one and done.
It's not like, well, maybe once upon a time, there was an embryo who had to die for the greater good.
No. This is a perpetual motion machine.
You have to keep harvesting.
GLENN: Yeah, every 100 days.
This is not a hypothetical, by the way.
Final Spark says, the University of Michigan already using this neuroplatform.
And this is -- this is because there's not enough energy, and these -- these organoids, use so much less energy, that if we just harvest these embryos, we can then -- AI can go on and live forever.
And we don't have energy problems.
Good Lord. That's terrifying!
JAMES: Yeah. At a certain point, if we were created in the image of God. How far can you stray from that, before something horrible happens?
None of this is a surprise. Nikola Tesla infamously said, you will live to see manmade horrors beyond your comprehension, and we're getting pretty close.
GLENN: Yeah.
You have -- you now have scientists who don't -- don't necessarily believe in God.
Think that they are creating a God. In AI.
Now, harvesting God's creation to power their new God.
Good Lord, help us.
JAMES: Yeah. Ask if you cross that Rubicon, where you say, we're going to turn these brain cells into cyborgs. Into Frankenstein cells. Then it's not very long before you say, well, gosh.
Why don't we just turn the whole human race into this kind of cyborg entity. You know.
The terminator, at least the machines are stomping around, looking to wipe us out.
These machines look at us more as the solution than the problem. They just suck all our energy out of us.
GLENN: You know, I was reading a book about energy. And how all of this is going.
And it will. I mean, if it's an entity. That needs food. Needs energy.
To live. Just like us. You're trapped in the mountains.
You know, in -- in a snowstorm. And there's 20 of you. And you start dying.
You're going to start eating each other.
You have to survive. And that is what happens.
The same thing, it will eat whatever will give it the energy.
I would rather not train it to eat people. Or anything with -- to do with people.
JAMES: Well, especially when you have nuclear power there.
And to their credit, there are some tech guys out there who are working on advanced forms of nuclear power, clean energy coming out of things that you can do.
Splitting up atoms.
Yeah. There are Rhode Island risks there. But, gosh, if we are going to go down this road to any degree, where we will need significantly more energy, in order to -- you know, whether it's stay ahead of China, or whatever excuse you want to come up with.
Or for just the sake of -- of more human flourishing. Imagine that. Gosh, you have to -- you have to take a look at nuclear, before you start looking at the guy sitting next to you, as your source of energy.
GLENN: I saw a story yesterday, about here in Idaho. That they're shutting down the water on -- because of environmental reasons.
They're shutting down the water for I don't even remember. Half a million acres. Or more. Of farmland here.
They're just going to shut the water off. So all these farmers will lose their farmland. Coincidentally what is also happening, and exactly the same time, is they are opening up cobalt mines in Idaho. And these cobalt mines need tons of water to keep the drills cool and everything else.
And those are for batteries. So it appears, as if the state of Idaho, shafted the farmers. And said, forget about the food.
Transfer the water, to the cobalt mines. So we can have batteries.
That's more important.
And nobody has tied these two together yet.
It -- we're in trouble. We've misplaced our values.
JAMES: It's a big problem. And you know what else is crazy about Idaho, Glenn?
Right now, there's bitcoin mining going on in Idaho. A lot of people started to understand how Bitcoin works.
They're skeptical. But this is something that is still a first rate technology, that ordinary Americans can use, starting right now.
Takes maybe a minute or two to learn how to do it. But you can do it. When the Bitcoin miners take the energy that they need, in order to do what they do.
Legislators get upset. Oh, I don't know. This is using a lot of energy. So they're looking at curbing, the ability of the miners to lose electricity.
Or even charging them more for their electric lease. Meanwhile, when Facebook comes to town in Idaho and they say, hey, we're building a gigantic data center.
It's going to consume tons and tons of energy. The legislators say, well, if you're creating jobs, we will actually give you a tax cut.
This is how messed up our priorities are right now.
GLENN: Wow. I don't know if you saw The Godfather of AI.
But Jeffrey Hinton, he's the guy who left Google, if I remember right.
And he left -- he left Google, because he said, they were going into some unethical things. Is it was becoming a real danger. Do you remember this story?
JAMES: Yeah. That's right.
GLENN: Yeah. And he said he had real fear, at Google. That the -- that AI would fall into the hands of bad actors.
He just did an interview, where he -- he said that he was asked the question here.
If he was in favor of a super intelligent AI destroying humanity, and replacing it with something objectively better in terms of consciousness. He said, I'm actually for it.
But I think I would be wiser for me to say. That I'm against it.
He was then pressed on, and asked him, can you elaborate. And he said, well, people don't like being replaced. Well, yeah. No.
I'm good. He said, it's not -- it's -- it's not clear, that we're the best form of intelligence, that there is.
Obviously, from a person's perspective. Everything relates to people. But it may be that there comes a point, when we see things like humanist, as a racist term.
We're dealing with people, who are very, very smart and very, very clever.
But many of these people are anti-human. And they hide behind the environmentalist thing. To -- to get away with it.
JAMES: It's really diabolical. If you're looking for an intelligence that's higher than human intelligence. That actually doesn't want to kill us, but in fact loves us with a love beyond human comprehension. It's right there, in the form of God the creator.
And if you reject the existence of God, then it's just really looking like, these days only a matter of time, before you reject the existence of human beings too. I know it's not everyone.
I know there's some -- some atheists out there, that think human beings are still good. But it's looking like they're outnumbered.
And they're losing the battle for the soul of the atheist if you will -- these guys, they have really just -- they do hate humanity.
And they think that intelligence is more important than -- than love.
They think the brain is more important than the heart. And, you know, it all sounds interesting, when it's at the level of theory. But when you ask them to develop it out of practice. It doesn't mean replacing humans. It means wiping them out.
GLENN: So which -- which movie do I think is more likely?
I mean, I never thought the Matrix. But the Matrix, you know, batteries. Human batteries. And it creating a utopia. In people's minds.
Or do you see us.
I mean, remember, the beginning of Skynet. And the terminator.
The first line, I think in that movie, is the machines rose from the ashes in the nuclear fire.
And it was AI that had been used by the Pentagon, and the world's war machines.
And then we blew ourselves up.
And AI decided, we were the problem. And started to wipe us out.
Here we are, talking about the absolute unthinkable. World War III.
Which would end in nuclear war.
And wipe almost all life off the planet.
And we're giving the keys to much of our work.
We just had Jack Carr on yesterday.
Where he was talking about -- you know, he said, nobody would tell me exactly.
But if I talk to enough people. They're putting it all together. And they can look at it.
Oh, we're turning the keys over. To our -- of our killing machines.
Over to AI soon.
That -- that is not -- that can't be a good thing. Which -- which movie are we -- are we going towards? It's kind of like, you know, Brave New World. Or 1984.
I think we're 1984.
Are we headed more towards the terminator, or the Matrix?
VOICE: Well, you know, we have lots of sci-fi movies to choose from. I would point toward. We have sci-fi horror films that we can look to. We got movies like Event Horizon.
We have series like Hell Raiser.
Where the bad guys are inter-dimensional demons, who get summoned by human beings and lead them into hell.
We have David Cronenberg.
He has other films, that really show you, that there is that side of technology they can't be makes you sort of -- fills you with child like wonder.
And all these promises of flourishing beyond imagination.
There is a dark side too.
If we pretend the dark side is not there.
That's usually the way we get led astray in the worst possible way.
GLENN: So is there anything that can be done, going back to the first topic of using stem cells from embryos for human brains. Into these organoids.
Is there anything we should be looking towards. Or pushing for?
Or what?
GLENN: Well, I think, number one, we have to ask ourselves serious questions about how enslaved we are going to be, if we are always looking to China.
If we look at China. And say, they're taking over.
We can't beat them, unless we join them.
Or we have to fight fire with fire. If we're constantly comparing ourselves with what China is doing. We will lose touch with who we really are, as Americans, and depending as how things shake out as human beings.
That's point one. I think point two.
Is, yeah. Okay. You want to innovate on energy.
Look to nuclear. This is not some bizarre technology. It's been around for a long time.
Some countries. That the French. The Japanese. They have Fukushima. They have tsunamis all the time. Not a problem in the United States.
There are ways of doing points of energy, that don't involve turning human beings into these sort of Frankenstein cyborgs and using them for energy.
GLENN: James, thank you so much. I appreciate it.