An excerpt has surfaced from the AI2027 podcast with siskind and the ex AI researcher, where the dear doctor makes the case for how an AGI could build an army of terminators in a year if it wanted.
It goes something like: OpenAI is worth as much as all US car companies (except tesla) combined, so it could buy up every car factory and convert it to a murderbot factory, because that's kind of like what the US gov did in WW2 to build bombers, reaching peak capacity in three years, and AGI would obviously be more efficient than a US wartime gov so let's say one year, generally a completely unassailable syllogism from very serious people.
Even /r/ssc commenters are calling him out about the whole AI doomer thing getting more noticeably culty than usual edit: The thread even features a rare heavily downvoted siskind post, -10 at the time of this edit.
The latter part of the clip is the interviewer pointing out that there might be technological bottlenecks that could require upending our entire economic model before stuff like curing cancer could be achieved, positing that if we somehow had AGI-like tech in the 1960s it would probably have to use its limited means to invent the entire tech tree that leads to late 2020s GPUs out of thin air, international supply chains and all, before starting on the road to becoming really useful.
Siskind then goes "nuh-uh!" and ultimately proceeds to give Elon's metaphorical asshole a tongue bath of unprecedented depth and rigor, all but claiming that what's keeping modern technology down is the inability to extract more man hours from Grimes' ex, and that's how we should view the eventual AGI-LLMs, like wittle Elons that don't need sleep. And didn't you know, having non-experts micromanage everything in a project is cool and awesome actually.
There's a bit more to Penrose's ideas than that.
For example, his version of gravity-driven wavefunction collapse was motivated by Hawking's argument for information loss in black hole evaporation. In the era of string theory, it seems a majority of quantum gravity theorists think that information is conserved, but back in the day Hawking's position was a serious one, and Penrose had the ingenious idea that information gain in wavefunction collapse could in some sense balance information loss in quantum gravity, for a net conservation of phase space volume.
Another example - that a quantum-gravitational process could be noncomputable - actually makes sense, since the path integral involves 4-manifolds and some properties of 4-manifolds are actually undecidable. I agree that there's something wrong with his argument that metamathematical thought must supervene on some kind of trans-Turing computation, since it rests on humans having unlimited metamathematical knowledge rather than just belief. But you can't really hope to disentangle all the issues here without having some theory of intentionality and how material states even manage to be about anything, and he doesn't go there.
As for the microtubules, neuronal microtubules do have some distinctive properties, e.g. they line up with the axon. It's tempting to suppose that there's an electromagnetic interaction between the membrane action potential and electronic states in the microtubule. There are a handful of people who work on topics like this, but it would be enormously difficult to demonstrate such an interaction, if the debate over quantum speedups in photosynthesis is any guide.
Fashionable biophysical speculation seems to have moved on to the ideas of Karl Friston and Michael Levin, but I still esteem Penrose's speculations. I sometimes think of it as a science-fictional anticipation of what the actual truth will be, the way that Einstein worked on a unified field theory a few decades before the mainstream started talking about a theory of everything.