Space Mafia: How orbital AI changes everything

WEBVTT - Space Mafia: How orbital AI changes everything I'm Peter Griffin and on the Business of Tech. This week, we're talking about something that feels a little bit science fiction e but is already happening above our heads. Artificial intelligence in orbit, the machines, the chips, and soon the data centers that will be built into satellites and constellations that could reshape industry, defense, and global governance. My guest is Andreas Hamburger, a Wellington based enterprise architect, AI governance specialist and author of the new book Space Mafia.

Andreas argues that we're at a fork between what he calls the Heaven vector and the Skynet vector, a future where orbital AI amplifies human well being, or a future where capability outruns oversight and power becomes unaccountable. In this conversation, we examine why companies want to put computing capacity in space, the engineering and legal realities off those aspirations, and for real world case studies. Andreas outlines from corporate data centers on satellites, to human genome work, tsunami and climate monitoring, and the military uses that really make this an urgent concern.

Andreas has also thought deeply about the accountability and regulatory gaps that come with orbital AI. It's basically the wild West up there at the moment, which suits the companies trying to exploit space just fine. No copyright law, no IP law in space, No gambling or piracy laws to worry about when you have a server floating in space. So stay with us.

This was a fascinating chat. Andreas is super smart. He's got a series of books out on these issues where tech and philosophy meet. This is thought provoked looking stuff.

I think you'll enjoy the discussion about Andreas's new book, Space Mafia. Here's my chat with Andreas Hamburger. Andreas, Welcome to the business of tech. How are you doing.

Thank you, Peter doing very well. Thank you, Sunny Dan Wellington. It's beautiful Saturday morning and Wellington, thanks for coming around to my place. And this is a fascinating topic.

You've got a book out called Space Mafia. It's been out a couple of weeks now, and it's unlike anything I've read because it's tackling an area that is really developing by the day, this idea of artificial intelligence in space, orbital AI and how that's changing the face of AI. So we're going to get into that and some of the big names and that are dominating space we will talk about. But first of all, a little bit about you.

You're an enterprise architect. You've sort of gone between government departments tech companies like data Com. You've been a consultant to yourself over the last sort of thirty years or so. You're in a government department at the moment, sort of working on things like cybersecurity, AI enterprise tech strategy.

Which is a world away it seems from Orbital. AI really interested in if you tell us a little bit about your background and how you really got interested in this particular topic for your first book. I give you a bit of an arc originally from Italy, so the mafia arc is I guess from a little bit a connector to that, but mostly then in a German speaking part of Italy. So I went to university in Berlin after the war, came down and published there also and studied philosophy of logic and artificial intelligence there.

I decided to come to New Zealand in ninety six and since then I've been here. I've worked for internet service providers in those days and a starting industry, so I've always been very much in that area of the tech, you know, the first tech advancements that was at Iconstant and that extra and then I jumped into open source for many years and implemented so many open source systems. So that really ties in with with my journey professionally. And last year I was diagnosed with cancer and the surgeon after the surgery told me that a robot actually performed the surgery on me.

I mean, I knew it, but he said the robot did most of the work. And that got me started thinking about from the fact that obviously having cancer makes you think what you what do you want to do? What's your You know, if I have only a year. Left or two or three or ten in what is it that I really want to do?

And I wanted to connect back to me writing obviously, and and the topic because our family is from from viral we straight look look at Mahia and our family also has a lot of holiday there. The whole space situation certainly is part of our journey. And I then started researching it and really found that all that connecting back to the fact that there's something happening up in space and and and that's basically data centers being built there and first compute engines being launched last year, and so while I was researching that that really connected back to my ethical studies.

Going well, hold on a second, this is space is a is a legal you know, free space. There is no governance up there, and being a governance architect, that really connected. So it's it's really unusual, I guess, having an enterprise architect. What does an enterprise arctive to do with space tech?

Well, it's mostly about AI, right, so this isn't I'm not a space tech expert. I'm an artificial intelligent and logician. So from that perspective, this is really the most advanced place you can put AI in and where it also connects really very much with sci fi. But it's a real sci fi.

It's happening right now. So a lot of people don't realize that even Starling version three satellites already contain AI chips. That and other companies like Google some catcher already up there in axioms. So there is an active field of inference in space already happening.

That connects with military use of course as usual, And so that started the journey right about from using artificial intelligence at work, implementing it for my job and so on, which I am doing anyway. So that's really, you know, a long stretch, but not really if you think, what do you want to do, what do you want to do, and where is the most advanced place where artificial intelligence is happening right now? I wanted to connect to that most advanced place and did this space.

Yeah, and look, probably late last year, you know, Elon Musk sort of famously sort of came out and said. I'm sort of I'm more interested in the Moon these days than Mars. That was a bit of a pivot. But the other thing he started talking about in depth last year was putting data centers in space, and obviously he has the capacity to do that with SpaceX stylink.

He's launching lots of satellites, some of them have compute on them. But if you start putting these high capacity AI processes, what you can then do He's looking towards the listing of SpaceX that could be one of the biggest IPOs in history, and he sees this as being integral to the business model. You said it in your book. What we're facing here with official intelligence in space is sort of a what you describe as a Skynit versus Heaven scenario.

Skynet obviously a reference to the Terminator movies. You say, the Heaven future is one in which orbital AI becomes an engine of capability and equity, and the Skynit future is one in which it becomes a tool of unaccountable power. So we're sort of at a fork in the road here. We have very little regulation in space and so they can basically it's the wild West.

They can do what they want. So we'll get into that, but lay the groundwork for us about what AI in space actually is and what is going on. Now, we're going to talk about four particular case studies that you outline in the book. Yeah, So the four case studies, I'll go quickly through them.

I'll start with the paradigm that I'm drawing in with the pirate radio in the sixties and the UK, where pirate radio used this legal free space of having a ship out in the middle of the ocean and broadcast their signals and broadcast line licensed music, corporated music onto onto the shores, and that changed the law. It changed. It changed also the way music was was seen by the youth in those days, the pop youth. And it's the parallel stop because now obviously these companies aren't cute little teenagers that are sitting out there on a boat broadcasting their signals and and playing music.

Those are the biggest corporations in the world. So, and one of them is space X, as you mentioned the IPO that they are planning, and the merger between X and space x is one hundred percent playing. The background of that is to get the funding to send up to a million satellites up into space and doing exactly that, a mesh of data centers up there. How that would look from Earth.

That's you know, the esthetics, let's leave them aside. But what it certainly would allow SpaceX in that particular case to do is to use any sort of copyrighted material, any privacy doesn't exist up there, any sort of personal data that they may have who may want to have up there. It's a completely legal, free space. It's more than all they need is a place with how to send data up there.

And there's plenty of places around the world that again are also in the Pacific, some islands, they can just they're doing it right now, right, So and you know, some people say, oh, it's all controlled by the FCC and by this and that, but it all depends where the data goes up there, right, And they're already court cases happening at the moment where basically courts outside it's completely outside the limit of courts. And so that's one of them. Another one is Google Sun Catch.

Those are the two big ones, I guess, and Google themselves are putting the loads up there. There is Axiom Space, which is a more smaller startup company that gets quite a lot of funding already, and they are they are what they're doing at the moment is doing human genome tasting up there for Singaporean company. Again, right, can you do human genome inference and training on Earth? Most countries probably not?

Right, there's loads. Against that, and so up there you're allowed to do it. And we're in the in this moment where where these companies are sending chips ship use up there. As I mentioned, Space Access definitely the most advanced because they've got CPUs already up there that they're using effectually.

And and so it's not science fiction. It's definitely not science fiction. And it comes together with what's happening also in the autonomy weapon space, where if we have developed weapons that can autonomously decide who to kill and where to kill on the planet, the missing link, I guess, is that space infrastructure to do that finding of that sort of human right, And that's kind of that area where sky Net isn't just. You know, a movie.

Fantasy, but it becomes extremely real that potential future. Now, I'm not necessarily writing this book or I haven't written this book to warn people. I've written it to describe a situation. So there's very little as far as looking into the future.

It's really just describing where we're at and where we're at alone. That is pretty pretty scary in a certain way, right, Why from New Zealand? Right because obviously we are one of the I guess four nations in the world that has actually space capacity where we launch capacities happening, and you know, we're definitely punching above our weight in a lot of ways right with rocket Lane. But at the same time, we also have now found an act that actually does regulates space and we are literally the only ones in the world that have an act that just now been an act that months ago where we do have some regulation that protects peoples privacy even on the land above New Zealand.

Right, so it's a whole new view of even the land above. Our tailor rower. Part of the tiory theory is our tail rower in space. So it's a very different view than the rest of the world has.

I'm really proud of that right that we are. We are on this sort of unique space. So that's why it actually connects quite important. Right, it's to New Zealand, and we'll talk about the regulation and the regular void in many ways.

In space. Let's just look at the case for why you would put AI in space. You've talked about these companies SpaceX with its version of three satellites, star Clouds another one that has I think n video chips in space running AI workloads. The narrative has been over the last year.

If we want. AI to be sustainable, we can't do it on Earth. We'll run out of capacity in terms of cooling capacity, so electricity and water. So to do this ethically we have to do it off Earth.

So if we put these in space, we can get virtually limited energy from the Sun to power these high capacity processes. Is that the real motivator here. The marketing department is definitely working or put down down because the engineering challenges the facto in space heat cooling. It may be.

Cold up there, but because there is weightlessness and because there is no atmosphere, heat also doesn't dissipate, right, So you can't cool just because it's cool. Air out there. You still need that sort of heat. Exchange, and so the engineering challenges are real.

Also because of the derrigation up there. The variation is so strong that that chips fry. It's basically literally like putting it into microwave. That's how some of those engineers that are building these systems.

So there's some real challenges there and the real costs extreme costs of there. Also, the amount of solar panels that would be required to power such a data center are so massive, right that they would be spaning massive football fields. We could see it on Earth. And that's for a small capacity, right.

So it's in a real sense that's marketing because the reality is that the data centers up there will not be as big as the Earth data centers, but the type of data they can actually infer up there, that's the gold, right. So not being regulated around copyright not being regulated, regulated around privacy laws not being regulated, around what. Type of calculations you can do. Really, yeah, kill lists, right, So in a certain way, those killsts exist, but in a lot of countries obviously there's rules around having a kill list, even as a government, right, And up there there is no rule, right, there is no rule that that can restrict them.

So the reality from an engineering perspective is that it is so expensive to shield to do these things up there. But the upside of it from a commercial perspective, just like the book printing, if you compare that, right, created a whole new paradigm in In this way, also the having inference in space will create a whole new paradigm because it's it's a legal space, just like the book printing was a legal free space in the fourteen hundreds, right, and created issues because of that it needed to be regulated and so on and copyright laws.

And so you mentioned copyright there, and there have been sort of lawsuits surround us. There's been some settlements with Anthropic, multi billion dollar settlements to payback owners of material that was used in the training of their large language models. I guess in theory, if you're training in space. Who do you go to?

Who do you serve? That's right? So if the headquarter of the company is in one country, you're you're another company that creates the space equipment is another country, and you're sending the data up in another country in four five different countries. Who in what quart are you going to go?

Right? And this is the fact of the this is this is the goal mind that they're sitting on. And so I don't necessarily think all of it is nefarious, right, It's more like the freedom of complete freedom of regulation, which from a corporate perspective is always a driver, right, And given how volatile the world is at the moment and geopolitically, being the company that has a complete legal free space in space from an influenced perspective, right, like look at what's happening with Entropic and the Pentagon lawsuit at the moment, right where the Pentagon has used Claude to create killists and bombing lists in Iran and has acted upon it quite efficiently with autonomous strikes.

If you look at that, you know and that they then would run these systems in space. Normal lawsuits. They can do what they want. There are if they can do this.

It's I'm sure it will be expensive in that and there'll be a lot of trial and error. But say they do get these high capacity chips working in constellations, there are some other benefits, right, I mean latency you think is an issue in space, but it could actually be an advantage for certain types of processing. You talk in the book, for instance, about things like tsunami alerts. If you have sensors around the Pacific Ocean constantly beaming data up to a satellite that is AI enabled, it could be a much more efficient way to process tsunami warnings than actually sending it to a central location terrestrially.

And so that's the other site. Obviously, if you look at Google suncatch or they are really actively going after these positive effects where we've got that haven backdoor into place, or helping humanity to create a better planet where we're also take a climate change where we know who to be pollutica around the world, being able to have capacity or up there to do this automatically and give us alerts and who is polluting right now right as opposed to finding out three years. Ten years later when the cancer rates are going up.

So so those this is the obviously haven't having vector And this is the a in a philosophical sense without getting too philosophical, this is the thesis and anti thesis from the German philosopher Hegel. Coming into that. So that's what's behind it really and and and his view that the that the the synthesis is the one where where you have progress and in a certain way, these two edge cases right will will help to create progress and both both on the positive and on that negative and under quotation side of things.

So there's plenty or low low LEO so low Earth orbit is not that far away, right, So just like the styling LEO satellites talking about thirty to sixty milliseconds, that's okay, right, that's just like US gamers gaming into Australia. It's a normal ping, right, So it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not necessarily a hindrance. Also, what they're planning at the moment aren't necessarily massive big data centers because they're really expensive.

And really we're talking about maybe modules for the ISS that's one of the companies does that, or most of them talk about the Mesh network, so have lots of small capacity inferences in smaller satellites that also you can move around, because now it's getting quite. Crowded up there. So the so called crash clock is reducing the amount of time where a crash could happen. They have to move to satellites around, so the gain AI is being used to move these satellites around, and that's why they actually put chips on it also to be able to move these satellites around.

So we're talking more about the Mesh network and inferenced MASH network up there. And yes, the upside is certainly there, right, the upside having a global intelligence that helps us to achieve those positive goals for humanity that we seek and are certainly there. So other dangerous Yeah, we. Haven't talked about the Chinese.

They have their own initiatives in orbital AI, the three body computer constellation named after the sci Fi novels and the TV series, which is quite interesting. But what do we know about what they're doing. From my perspective there, it's very little, right because obviously from my perspective, China is obviously a country which always keeps themselves very covered because it's certainly it's certainly probably also more on the military side of things, right, So it's about protecting their interests also in China, so relatively little.

They're a fairly new player, right, and. I would expect them, given the fact that we've got so much open source software coming out of China in the AI space, that we will find out more on that over the next while. But I suspect or people suspect us more on the military side at the moment, right, as you would expect given the global situation. Yeah, so let's talk about the AI and defense.

You know, as we sit here in a rocket Lab share price, you just sid one hundred and five dollars on the back of its results. But what was mentioned in its results is. That it has done a deal with Anderill, a defense tech company in the US, for it will launch Aneral's hypersonic devices, which it's supplying to the US military. Anderil is an AI company, so presumer they're putting hypersonic if not missiles devices that will be put up there at short notice that has AI inference built into them.

So that's I think part of the bump is at there's excitement about this. We've heard about the Trump Administration's Golden Dome where they. Want something similar to the Iron Dome in Israel. They want full capability to not only for offensive but defensive capability in space to take out any ballistic missiles that are coming at the US, a vastly expensive undertaking.

Presumably, artificial intelligence is crucial to doing this at scale, and therefore you need to have AI not only built into satellites, but built into hypersonic missiles and other observation devices that are being put up by the US military. From It's really interesting that you asked that, because that's currently where I'm doing most of my research. Not necessarily, it's what's happening with the conflicts at the moment, really, and when it comes to drones in Ukraine and with and DEI, the autonomous weapons also that have been used in Lebanon and in Gaza and so on.

So it's a very it's a very difficult topic. It's a very interesting, difficult topic because obviously, as from a geopolitical sense, I have to be as a public servants, I have to be extremely careful what I say, and I'm saying just out loud here, so again I can only I can only describe right in a very even manner without judgment. Right and so from from that perspective, clearly there's a few there is aspirational goals happening. How realistic they are, Let the listeners judge.

Given the fact that the United States is a bit larger than Israel, and even Israel has troubles with big swarms to stop big swarms of drones. I think the step up that we've seen the last two years, which are really overwhelming any sort of planning, are the fact that we have swarms of thousand Shahi drones happening, and more different types of drones right, lansets and straits and on. So it's a whole new. Level where you need where you again need artificial intelligence to counter it partly, but you need a whole lot of of it, right, Like some of the look.

Of some of the. Launches that Russia did over the last few years. The September last year was a really big one. Was up to thousand devices in one wave and in different locations, and that completely overwhelms even the Ukraine, right, And so building a dome is all great for the defense industry, right, there's a lot of money being spent.

And I'm no judge, no judge here. My question is only where how what the value of it is given, where the fact of the technology is developing is more in a decentralized, small cost device that is very similar to the V one rocket in a certain way that the Nazis is built, right, very cheap, low cost a V one rocket of the current world, right, and where you can you can produce three hundred six hundred thousand a year, That's what Russia is doing, right, And just imagine and those production scales right, what you could send in case of war to a country like American even any one of those small heedrons could potentially.

Have a small nuclear warhead on technical nuke. So it's now I'm not a military expert, right, I look at it from an ethical perspective and from an AI ethics perspective. The gap between what we are, the accountability gap is massive. It's the same as in space.

And this is what interests me. Right Also from a governance and from a company perspective, how do you have to structure AI governance in a company, in a business so that you don't necessarily have that accountability gap, Because ultimately you run a business, you're still responsible right as a director, as a board member, you're responsible more so in the future less so obviously and apparently if you're in the military, and what it shows to me though the military I and what's happening.

There also the. Accountability gap around the amount of money that is being spent on things that are not necessarily strategy of strategic value. See so the things you mentioned, I will think they sound good. In the use headline, right o, Golden Dome and this and that, but the reality is different on the ground.

And so and what I'd like to do is explore that accountability gap and find practical solutions for companies to be able to implement their on guidelines, not necessarily when it comes to weapons or when it comes to space, but also when it comes to just implementing an eichatbot in customer service for example. Yeah, so you know, so. Let's explore that gap there. So at the moment, when it comes to space, we have really see the out of Space Treaty ninety sixty seven I think that was brought into effect.

That doesn't cover autonomous systems, which is very important when it comes to AI, but we do have this treaty there and it's been some loose agreements about sure there's lots more satellites going in, but. Countries cooperate around. We try to position them so. That they don't interfere with each other, that they're not going to cause collisions.

And there is this thing you write about in the book, which is a very scary thing, the Kesler syndrome, where we could have a situation the more and more satellites we put up there, if one of them does spin out of control hits another satellite, the debris that alone, well, it could have a cascading effect that could destroy everything up there. So there is some there's a loose treaty there to try and prevent that's not in anyone's interests. But that's really about it, isn't it.

Apart from as you said, New Zealand has specific regulation that means that the government gets to vet anything that's launched from the Nahia Peninsula or from anywhere in New Zealand and can vet that, can monitor it on an ongoing basis and do orders does for instances. In US have that in place. DFEC has some regulation around the transmission of radio waves, but. Not in this not that on this level.

Right, So to the point where you know, like you mentioned the treaty in nineteen sixty seven that was done between the United States and the Soviet Junior. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, so the only treaty partner of that treaty is the United States, and they certainly don't have to follow a. Treaty where the other it doesn't exist anymore. And so the factor the facto about from these radio wave roles that every country has and the spectrum rules around around what you can do can cannot do.

But there's plenty of places in the world which which are legal free spaces, and they a little satellite dish and some fiber would allow you to now send data through that direction. That's that's the fact of what's happening. And so there isn't and there is no regulation to to vat any of that or or to actually the collaboration they do up there in space is basically because it's a necessity. It's more of an engineering necessity, going, hey, we need to make sure we don't have a cascade happening, the Kestler cascade happening, because we don't want to lose all this capacity up there.

And so that's why they're also putting you know, AI chips on the starting three three satellites before they thought, hey, we can use these chips for something else, right, and so so, and a lot of it has certainly to do with the why it's in the news, has certainly to do with the space X and x IPO that's coming up, where they want to you know, connect back to these massive investment in space and these opportunities and how it's good for the planet and how it's going to save a lot of power and things like that.

That the fact of marketing and often be these organizations, right, But the reality is for or what does it mean for a New Zealand organization? Right? For most New Zealand organizations that don't have set like connectivity. It means relatively nothing, right.

But for organizations that do have set light connectivity, for example, our new actor GIBSI has has provisions that you need to be also following the privacy law and so on. So I wish the whole world would have something like that, right obviously, you know, something like the antarcticaulturity where we agree to have really agreed to share space, not just first come, first serve. Right now, whoever comes first shoots as many satellites up there as possible pluses the globe with satellites around the globe wins.

That's surely, you know, that's but that's how it is, right, this is what's happening right now, as opposed to collaborating and going This is for should be for all humanity, the plan all of us, and. It seems like it should be something that for instance, United Nations governs. There is a UN convention for instance, against autonomous weapons, which. The USA and China I don't think are Party two.

So it just sort of shows the weaknesses they. Were about the two. But they have they've certainly behaved in an interesting maner to slow down the process. And it's been going on since two fourteen that those negotiations, and the United States was all for it until recently, and now they're also on that of the block that says, you know, our laws are fine, we're okay with it and so on, and so that's the right.

So it's the big blocks at the moment are certainly not helping. They want this sort of next level of artificial intelligence within the the the a military space, so not much as a small player like New Zealand can do. No so the weaponization of space is actually a national security priority now for the US, for China, for Russia and other nations as well. There are a few efforts to try and bring some accord here.

The Artemis Accords, for instance, what are they. The Atomist Accord wasn't attempt especially around the around you know, stopping weaponization in space. But again it's it's when it's the factor happening. The Atomist Accord is also quite quite old, and so it wins the effect of happening, you know, and we are in this new global situation, then people will just militaries will just do what they do, right, they don't necessarily you know, they're using Cloude, for example, to create these kill lists, and then Clode goes, now you're not allowed to do that, and then they're calling Cloude the enemy of the state.

You see. So we're in this situation where it's really it's also difficult for me. It's I'm just describing how it is. I'm not necessarily making a judgment.

Obviously, I want to make sure of that. Because we are part of the Five Country Council as such, right the so called Five Eyes, and as such, we are part of that group of nations that up protecting freedom in my view and coming from an area of the world where freedom means a lot really because we thought, you know, we got liberated by those five countries and the Allies and those that were standing behind it. And I'm really proud of that, to be honest, and so that that's happened, right, and so that's why I'm also in New Zealand and I certainly I'm all for it.

But things how they progress when it comes to space is certainly interconnection with military eye. It's just very fast, and that's why I'm writing these books. It's where the advancement hits and where the governance. The boundaries are there and very clear.

And so if the boundaries are clear, then we can also look at what could we do practically, and you know, on an everyday perspective to maybe make it better and make the treaties that work. But the like, you know, it's interesting with the anthropic situation, that intersection between the two things that you're really interested in technology and philosophy, and you had the management of that of that very successful company saying we're there's red lines here philosophically, morally, maybe legally, we might be obliged to do this, but we're out, We're not doing it.

We can't live with this. So there's a bit of that I think going on and lots of areas of technology at the moment. And then there's the companies that are the end users of artificial intelligence and increasingly saying we're not comfortable about using content that was stolen to train your large language models. And I wonder if that's the answer to this.

All the end users of all of this stuff ultimately are still back on Earth. Do they really want online casinos floating on a satellite, sending their services to underprivileged communities and scooping up all of their money. I think there will be a lot of pushback against this sort of stuff when it comes to theft of IP, theft of copyright, illegal content, dark web stuff that is existing outside of legal jurisdictions. Ultimately, we have to just I morally if we want to use these services.

So I call myself a humanist because for me, you know, being the human should still be in the same town and we shouldn't live in a robot world. There is a you know, we should be in a world that also has human values. And ethics and morals with that. But then I'm also a philosophically trained person, right, and so from a company perspective, the value is there, and so you know, when it comes to customer service, having better customer service for organizations, the tool is great, it's fantastic.

It also allows where I'm really you know, this is the Heaven vector helping and playing, is that it allows people who probably a year or two ago, weren't able to create a new business, the entrepreneur entrepreneurship right where where you don't necessarily have the skills to do every a whole new business, but now you do because you're able to to to use artificial intelligent tools in areas that you're not really good at. And so I think this new entrepreneurship, this new human value human in the center helping us to create a farm more independent world.

That's where the real value is. And that's where where you know, again the thesis the Heaven vector comes into play and where we well, let's not forget that, right like it really also for a small country like New Zealand, this is really can help us to continue punching above our weight, right, and as we do right and things that are happening also within the agricultural space, right, and with robotics helping us there, because obviously we've got such a large agricultural space, and robots will help us to fill those voids so that we don't necessarily have to underpay humans and let them live in horrible conditions badly right, picking fruit and so on.

So I think it's a good thing. Right. Technology has always helped humanity to a case to have more people on the planet and help to feed more people on the planet, and it should continue to do that. That's the positive side of technology, right which.

You listen to Sam Altman, the co founder of open Ai alongside Elon Musk, you know, just listened to podcasts in the last couple of weeks from both of them, and they're talking about the error of abundance. They're not talking about, you know, we're going to need a universal basic income because jobs are displaced by AI. They're talking about a u HI, a universally high income. They're basically saying we're all going to be rich and have lots of leisure time because artificial intelligence is going to be so pervasive, and orbital AI is central to that.

Do you buy into that at all, that heavenly sort of version of that utopia that they say. I find it interesting that the rhetoric mirrors on what marks picture of the world to become is a world of abundance and the world where you work a few hours a day. In the rest of their day you go fishing and read books and so on. Now, I find it extremely hard to believe that the richest people on the planet are suddenly becoming Marxists, right, So it is certainly again just like building these huge data centers up in space because we are saving the planet, and we are you know, the power is abundant up there, and cooling is not a problem.

Well, the fact of power is not necessarily abundant and cooling is a problem up there, So. We shall see. Yes, I think the opportunities are there. They're using it because the facto there is certainly a lot to it that the as I just mentioned, right, the positive effect of it that that we are creating a world where abundance is potentially a possibility.

Right, But you know, employment still is an important thing. People still need to get paid. I look at the discussions in Germany at the moment around there what they called the bilger Gelt or the citizen money that they've introduced a few years back. That is the facto unpayable right where they give every person a base income.

The fact that they've tried it, it really is not working, so they have to adapt it again more to a social you know, like a you know, doll payment level. But tho's other countries that have tried it. It's it's a very difficult discussion because productivity goes down to the bottom layer. That's what's clearly showing outs in Germany.

Right when you give people free money, where's prodactivity going? So I think the entrepreneurship has a lot to do with people wanting to work hard. And I'm one of those people who works extremely hard. I like working hard.

It's my parts VI heritage talking, and so I don't necessarily think a world of abundance where people don't live a life of leisure is very much a good world. I think it's again one of those pseudo marxistream worlds that they put out there as marketing. And I may be a cynic in that perspective. Well, when I listen to those podcasts and those sort of utopian views that these multi billionaires you know Mosca is on is way to becoming a trillionaire, are putting forward.

Is not you know, if there's value that's going to be captured, it's going to be captured by a very small group of people. But just to finish Andreas, you know, where do you see this going in the next couple of years. This is advancing so quickly, not only the AI stuff here on Earth and the march towards artificial general intelligence, but you've got this orbital AI stuff coming. Do you think we can do anything to get cooperation about what should be done and will be done in space or is it going to be a free for all?

Do you think for the next few years. I'm not a futurist. I also don't necessarily want to navel gays, because certainly it could be either way. I think it needs a lot of will of individual governments to decide that things are going to be discussed internationally.

Is right now a good time to do that? I don't know, It's not up to me. And also, as a public servant, I don't necessarily want to comment on government's policies. And I'm more philosophically viewing the now right and describing it and have the reader or the viewer of my YouTube channel or the listener of this podcast make their ownlind up right.

And but what certainly is important is that this is just like the book printing was a democraticization of knowledge that will allowed everybody, right, everybody to acquire knowledge and acquire a book, read, learn, and not just a few priests. It changed the world. It made the world into an amazing scientific place of knowledge and of a lot of books, right. They wouldn't.

I would have had to be a monk back then and not have a large family if I wanted access to those amount of books. And in a similar way, AI is now the next level where knowledge isn't just democratized expel, this is democratized a whole new level, right. And in a similar way, this is this is just the Internet on steroids in a lot of ways, right. And my professor at university with the Internet already said this is what's going to happen, and then you'll have AI.

His's date by now, but he predicted it. He very much said, this is this is going to be the direction, and we'll have the Internet and then artificial intelligence happening, and he certainly mentioned it a little bit differently, but but you know, it's certainly thirty years later, it certainly is happening. And now with quantum as you mentor we discussed before, there's a whole new level of AI possibly coming right. And the quantument space.

Yeah, that's right. So we have the opportunity here to create a revolution of knowledge and expertise where everybody. Can do things. It makes a normal human, it's a superhuman, right, And I find myselves busier And if you really use these tools, they don't necessarily make you less busy.

They make you busier, but you're able to do so much more than you were even two or ten years ago. Well on that point, just to finish, you know, you've got Space, Matthew, the book out. You used AI extensively to. Write that.

You've got another book out, the manifest of the Humanist Party. Similarly, you've got a documentary out, so you're using AI tools for that. So you've really gone deep on using these and your productivity is improved as a result. So I've written.

Obviously, I'm a software developer too, so I've written a software that creates that helps me to create content out of original text of mind, so that starts, and then. Put research on top of it and so on. So it's I don't want to go to technical, but it's basically a whole pipeline, a digital assembly line where I create what's articles on LinkedIn and then YouTube all automated, and my lovely wife can then can then do the publishing and the marketing because I've got a day job.

And uh, and it's it's really also to push myself right and to and to also show what can be done, I guess, and and that does not necessarily slop, even if it is AI And you know, just like pop art was seen as slop backed in when Andy Warhol came out with this new way of doing out and Pollog Jackson Pollock in that same way. Uh, you know, this is new pop part So in the certainly these books don't write themselves. I'm the author and I'm the ultimate decider. These are my ideas, these are my moral judgments.

This is my accountability, and and I stand behind and in front of it. And so with the military eyebook coming, that kind of is the tryad of these, these these three books looking at the different the thesis the anti thesis and then the the more philosophical pamphlet style in then there's you know, people can follow me on YouTube if they want to, and. Yeah, yeah, when we'll put links to all all of those and the documentary which is out now, which is really fascinating as well.

So well, what a great conversation, Thanks so much andres for being on the business. Of take Thank you so much, Peter. It was a pleasure. So Andreas Hamburger, what an interesting guy.

Some really thought provoking stuff there. If you want to dive deeper ahead to the Hamburger Report dot com for Andreas's books, his documentary which is out now, and the YouTube videos he's creating. I'll put a link in. The show notes to where you can find all of his stuff.

The orbital AI issue is going to come to the floor with the looming IPO of SpaceX which now owns of course Elon Musk's other business XAI. He brought them together with this aim in mind data centers in space and now has the vertically integrated operation to launch AI computing capacity into space, which he can. Then use to run AI workloads for XAI. So that's where a lot of the value supposedly from this IPO is going to come justifying you a trillion dollar plus valuation.

So we will watch this space and see where it goes. I'll catch you next week where Elon Musk looms large once again. Satellite broadband we've taken to starlink in this country like nowhere else. We love the service, but our wireless internet providers that specialize in serving hard to reach rural communities are struggling as a result.

What does that mean for the country. Tune in next Thursday to find out in another episode of the Business of Tech, and I'll catch you then.