"The Tic Tac videos, balloons, UFOs – they're not aliens," he said. "We're all alone here, it's just us."

For those of us who read Cixin Liu, China's brilliant Sci-Fi author, the notion that we are alone is extremely comforting. Cixin turned me onto the Dark Forest hypothesis, which postulates that while there may be many alien civilizations out there, we see no sign of them because they are silent and paranoid, lest they alert others to their existence and invite invasion, annihilation. 

"What we see is our next generation military technology," continued the intelligence analyst.

"We all see what the Ukrainians did to Russia's military using battlefield technology that we would generally consider obsolete relative to our state of the art," he said. "But America's actual state of the art is one or two generations ahead of what the public sees today," he said, which was simultaneously comforting and terrifying.

"It is not in our interest to show our adversaries how far advanced our capabilities have grown."

"Look carefully at this chart," said the technology investor.

It was the kind of curve I've seen often, an upward sloping trend that accelerates through time. On the vertical axis was the computing power used to train artificial intelligence systems. The horizontal axis was time, going back to the early 1950s. "I know you're thinking you've seen this kind of chart before, it's a classic hockey stick. But here's the thing, it's a logarithmic chart, it should not curve upward. This kind of growth is almost impossible for the human brain to comprehend."