Should A.I. Move to Space? - Freakonomics
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Episode Transcript
Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. Let’s start with a puzzle. I’m going to name some industries, some varied industries, and you have to figure out what they all have in common. Okay? Here’s the list: agriculture, ride-share services, global banking, meteorology, military communication, insurance, shipping logistics, disaster management, broadcasting. So what do they all have in common? All of these industries, and many more, are heavily reliant on infrastructure that is based in space. Which means that space-based infrastructure is an industry of its own. Here is Will Marshall :
Will MARSHALL: Everything from the rockets, the satellites, communications is a big one. You add all of that up, it’s around 300 billion a year.
Marshall got his Ph.D. in physics at Oxford, where he conducted experiments in quantum superposition under Dirk Bouwmeester and future Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose. But Marshall’s true love was space. So he went to work for NASA at its research center in Mountain View, California. Among other things, NASA has been developing and managing satellites for decades.
MARSHALL: We actually started a project called PhoneSat because my colleague at NASA kept on holding up his phone, because it was pretty new at the time, first iPhone had come out, and they were like, these new smartphones have a lot of what you need in a satellite. They have batteries, and they have sensors, and they have cameras, and they have fast processors. They even have GPS to know where they are. They are kind of incredible, and it’s all stuffed in a little box, and it costs $500 bucks.
This led Marshall to ask himself an obvious question:
MARSHALL: Why are we spending $500 million on satellites? What are the extra six zeros doing for us?
Marshall eventually left NASA to help run a startup that made small, inexpensive satellites, which they called “doves.” They had thin rectangular wings and a big central camera for an eye. Like any good startup, they made their first prototype in a garage. Or, if you are Will Marshall, in a garage:
MARSHALL: Literally in a garage, We leveraged smartphones. And we plonked the satellite down on the desk of the venture capitalist that we went to see as opposed to have any PowerPoint deck. That was certainly a shock to people. And enough people were crazy enough to give us a check.
Those checks helped fund what became Planet Labs, a publicly traded company that is today worth around $10 billion. Their vast array of tiny satellites constantly scan the Earth’s surface and provide data for all sorts of public agencies and private firms. So that has been a success for Will Marshall, but he wants to go way beyond that. He thinks the next frontier for space technology is to provide computing power for A.I. Today on Freakonomics Radio: my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt explores how a breakthrough technology is entering its space age. That’s in four, three, two, one, liftoff.
Hi, I’m Steve Levitt. From 2020 to 2025, I had my own podcast on the Freakonomics Network called People I (Mostly) Admire. And I had a guest on my show in 2024 who changed the way I thought about artificial intelligence. Since then, A.I. has only become more relevant — and so has this guest’s work.
Blaise AGÜERA Y ARCAS: I’m Blaise Aguera y Arcas . I am a vice president and fellow at Google and the C.T.O. of technology and society. So just this morning I’ve been using A.I. to work on some artificial life simulations that I have been playing with, so it’s a combination of coding and paper writing.
Blaise has had an unusual life. Let me give you one example. One of his first jobs was with a U.S. Navy research center, where he reprogrammed the software that stabilizes aircraft carriers to reduce the seasickness of the crew. At the time, he was only 14 years old. When I talked to him in 2024, we had a conversation about how you can know if AI is truly intelligent.
AGÜERA Y ARCAS from PIMA ep. 128: The moment you start to have something that behaves intelligent, the question, like, “Well, but is it really intelligent?” is an interesting one to ask. A lot of philosophers talk about this as the philosophical zombie problem. Could it be that something could behave like a person, but is dead on the inside, has no inner life? There’s no there there; there’s nobody home. Is that meaningful? But the trouble with the whole philosophical zombie question is that it’s almost like a frontal attack on the whole idea of doing science. And this is one of the things that led Alan Turing to propose the Turing test. He was basically saying, look, if all of the tests check out, then that is your answer. And I’m kind of with Turing on that one. It can be a shock. Maybe intelligence is this much more general accessible faculty. It doesn’t have to depend...