Speaker 1: What exactly is intelligence? And why don't crows invent an Internet?
Speaker 1: And why don't gophers right novels? And what does any
Speaker 1: of this have to do with George Orwell's analysis of
Speaker 1: Adolf Hitler? Or why World War five could involve many
Speaker 1: other species besides Homo sapiens. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me,
Speaker 1: David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University,
Speaker 1: and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between
Speaker 1: how the brain works and how we experience life. On
Speaker 1: today's episode, we're going to explore the future not just
Speaker 1: for humans, but for other species as well. The other day,
Speaker 1: my kids were in the car while I was pumping gas,
Speaker 1: and I was thinking about the future for them, and
Speaker 1: specifically what my kids would look back on in twenty
Speaker 1: years or thirty years or fifty years and think, wow,
Speaker 1: I can't believe we did that. So California has new
Speaker 1: legislation that all new cars will have to be electric
Speaker 1: by twenty thirty five, and so I was realizing that
Speaker 1: when my kids are the age I am now, they'll
Speaker 1: look back in moments like this and think, wow, I
Speaker 1: remember when dad used to pump fossil fuel into his car,
Speaker 1: and they'll see this as a surprising feature of their
Speaker 1: childhoods and not something that exists for them anymore. It's
Speaker 1: analogous to the way that I look back on black
Speaker 1: and white televisions, or pay phones, or cassette tapes or
Speaker 1: walkman's or any of the other things from my childhood
Speaker 1: that we just don't have anymore. So when I got
Speaker 1: back in the car, I asked them to brainstorm about
Speaker 1: things that would be different for them when they're adults,
Speaker 1: and they brought up more things than I expected. We
Speaker 1: were on a road trip and we were passing a
Speaker 1: ranch where we saw thousands of cows grazing, and what
Speaker 1: we ended up talking about was whether they might look
Speaker 1: back strangely in thirty years on raising animals to kill
Speaker 1: them for meat, because we looked at those cows and
Speaker 1: we understood that they would all be dead soon and
Speaker 1: on plates around tables. Now that might change, and not
Speaker 1: necessarily because society drifts towards vegetarianism, and not even necessarily
Speaker 1: because companies develop better and better plant based alternatives to burgers.
Speaker 1: Our bodies, after all, have been clearly carved by evolution
Speaker 1: to eat meat, So I think the more likely scenario
Speaker 1: will be the move toward lab grown meat will pop
Speaker 1: a single cell off a cow and reproducing the lab
Speaker 1: dish to grow the burger or the steak directly from
Speaker 1: that cell, rather than raise the entire animal and feed
Speaker 1: it for years and then slice its throat and process
Speaker 1: it and ship the meat, so we could eat meat
Speaker 1: free of cruelty and with a lot less ranching effort.
Speaker 1: And as time goes on, we'll get better and better
Speaker 1: at growing the proper ratios of fat for marbling and
Speaker 1: blood vessels to carry in the right kinds of nutrition,
Speaker 1: and you'll be able to grow a filet mignon without
Speaker 1: actually having to have thousands of acres and raise and
Speaker 1: slaughter a living being that seems to care about it's
Speaker 1: young and tries to avoid pain and presumably has a
Speaker 1: whole range of emotions. So there are several companies working
Speaker 1: on this already, and with time we'll be able to
Speaker 1: do this at a price that competes with traditional meat,
Speaker 1: and eventually that's far cheaper because you won't have to
Speaker 1: raise the cows and feed them and tend to them
Speaker 1: and shelter them for years. You won't drive your gas
Speaker 1: powered vehicle along the highway and look at these thousands
Speaker 1: of cows waiting for their own murder. And once we
Speaker 1: can grow burgers from single cells, we can enjoy barbecues
Speaker 1: with lion burgers or tiger burgers or elephant burgers or whatever,
Speaker 1: because we're just reproducing cells. Anyhow, as we talked, we
Speaker 1: got into the future of genetic editing, and there are
Speaker 1: tools like crisper Cast nine. This is a molecular tool
Speaker 1: that allows scientists to splice out a well defined section
Speaker 1: of a genome, in other words, a particular sequence of
Speaker 1: a's and seas and teas and geese, and replace that
Speaker 1: sequence with a different sequence that they want, so maybe
Speaker 1: it's one that doesn't have a particular genetic mutation or
Speaker 1: that causes a disease or a disorder. Now, this is
Speaker 1: a technology, crisper Cast nine, that started to come into
Speaker 1: dim focus in the mid nineteen nineties, but using it
Speaker 1: to edit genomes in alien cells that wasn't demonstrated until
Speaker 1: twenty twelve, and suddenly the technology blew up and it's
Speaker 1: an every lab around the planet. Now. Now, the idea
Speaker 1: of using that kind of technology on the human germline
Speaker 1: has been an area of really heated ethical debate, and
Speaker 1: it appears to have been used on humans illegally by
Speaker 1: a doctor in China in twenty eighteen, and it's an
Speaker 1: open question where this all goes from here. All countries
Speaker 1: have said this is illegal for human use, but it's
Speaker 1: just a matter of time probably before more examples hit
Speaker 1: the news. And by the way, nowadays, instead of cutting
Speaker 1: and replacing whole chunks of DNA like Crisper does, there
Speaker 1: are methods to change just a single base pair. Molecular
Speaker 1: biologists from MIT and Harvard made a gene editing technique
Speaker 1: that rewrites individual as and seas and teas and g's
Speaker 1: in the genetic code. This is called base editing. But
Speaker 1: what difference would it make if we could edit genomes? Well,
Speaker 1: the thing that interests me today is whether we could
Speaker 1: leverage these advances in genetic engineering to someday allow us
Speaker 1: to boost human intelligence. Now, there are several things to
Speaker 1: unpack about that prospect. The first is that every few
Speaker 1: years in the neuroscience community there's buzz about the possibility
Speaker 1: that someone discovered a noatropic drug, and that just means
Speaker 1: one that's going to boost memory or recall or some
Speaker 1: other cognitive function. But despite the occasional buzz, there's really
Speaker 1: nothing that has changed our cognitive function beyond just drinking
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee. But instead of a drug, could
Speaker 1: we improve intelligence by tweaking the genome? Now, one possibility
Speaker 1: is that nature has already optimized our intelligence and there's
Speaker 1: not too much room to improve it. So let me
Speaker 1: explain that by an analogy. Take life span. There's been
Speaker 1: a lot of research on how to increase human lifespan,
Speaker 1: but the length of a human's lifespan actually has not
Speaker 1: really changed. When we look back to a time before
Speaker 1: modern medicine, we see that people in history we're capable
Speaker 1: of living long lives. Take Benjamin Franklin, who is born
Speaker 1: in seventeen oh six and he died in seventeen ninety
Speaker 1: at age eighty four. That's a very ripe old age,
Speaker 1: especially for a man. So it's not that people couldn't
Speaker 1: live that long. What has changed is the average lifespan,
Speaker 1: which is known as life expectancy. So when researchers talk
Speaker 1: about the massive improvements in human life expectancy, they're talking
Speaker 1: about the average human lifespan. So as we've developed medicine
Speaker 1: and antibiotics and methods for reducing child mortality and even
Speaker 1: reducing from simple things like getting gang green when you
Speaker 1: get a cut. That means that on average, people don't
Speaker 1: die in their childhood or young adult lives anymore. It
Speaker 1: turns out that some of the most important steps in
Speaker 1: reducing mortality where the basic medications introduced last century to
Speaker 1: control diarrhea and vomiting. These were massively important in reducing
Speaker 1: death tolls. So people make it down the road of
Speaker 1: possibility to live until they're old age. So what's been
Speaker 1: improved upon is the average age of death. The point
Speaker 1: I want to draw here is that it's not as
Speaker 1: though any of our researchers said, oh, I got it,
Speaker 1: here's how to make somebody live until they're two hundred
Speaker 1: years old. And this is because the human body, at
Speaker 1: least at this point doesn't appear to be set up
Speaker 1: to live more than about a century. So by analogy,
Speaker 1: it could be the case that human intelligence has been
Speaker 1: carefully shaped by evolutionary pressures and is essentially maxed out.
Speaker 1: In other words, if you tweaked the brain circuitry, you
Speaker 1: might not be able to squeeze much more juice out
Speaker 1: of the lemon. Nonetheless, even if this is the case,
Speaker 1: we could in theory improve the intelligence expectancy of the
Speaker 1: population by pushing everyone up towards the ceiling. So everyone
Speaker 1: is essentially operating at the level of the best brains
Speaker 1: like Albert Einstein or Tony Morrison, or all the people
Speaker 1: who are super talented and domains like math or music
Speaker 1: or language. Those people are massive outliers from the average.
Speaker 1: So that tells us the possibility that on average, most
Speaker 1: people could get a bit smarter. However we define intelligence now.
Speaker 1: I'll come back to genetic editing in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but first I need to lay another brick in the
Speaker 1: foundation by addressing the issue of what is intelligence? The
Speaker 1: main challenge we have with understanding it. We don't have
Speaker 1: a precise definition for it. The interest in this concept
Speaker 1: of intelligence goes back to at least the time of Plato,
Speaker 1: but just over a century ago people started working on
Speaker 1: how to quantify this, and by nineteen oh four, the
Speaker 1: English psychologist Charles Spearman found that people who scored well
Speaker 1: on one sort of task like verbal skills, also tended
Speaker 1: to perform well on other sorts of tasks like spatial skills,
Speaker 1: so that led Spearman to conclude that intelligence could be
Speaker 1: generalized across tasks, and other researchers then found that this
Speaker 1: seemed to be true. In other words, tasks of different
Speaker 1: abilities tended to have high positive correlations. So what that
Speaker 1: means is a person with a high general intelligence score
Speaker 1: tends to do better at language and memory and tackling
Speaker 1: new sorts of problems and real life activities and so on.
Speaker 1: And in nine twenty three a researcher wrote a famous
Speaker 1: paper in which he concluded tests tested by which he
Speaker 1: meant that whatever the heck intelligence is, there are ways
Speaker 1: to put a number to it. Now, I'll just mention
Speaker 1: this has been an area of debate where people point
Speaker 1: out that there can be cross cultural issues with testing intelligence.
Speaker 1: But that's not the point I'm making here. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about if you have a hundred people from the same
Speaker 1: culture in the same place and they all sit down
Speaker 1: for the test, you'll get a spectrum of scores, and
Speaker 1: these scores generally correlate with success in many domains, including
Speaker 1: how they do later in life. So with these early
Speaker 1: researchers noted is that something is getting captured. But what
Speaker 1: exactly is intelligence. Well, it's proven difficult to nail down
Speaker 1: with a single definition because it's not one thing, and
Speaker 1: it's certainly not defined by any single area in the brain.
Speaker 1: So what do we know about it? Well, first we
Speaker 1: know it's not defined by brain's size. At the end
Speaker 1: of the eighteen nineties, the Spanish neuroscientist Ramoni ca Hall
Speaker 1: was blown away by the fact that an elephant's brain,
Speaker 1: let's say, is so much larger than a mouse's brain,
Speaker 1: and yet they're both equally capable of strategies and clever
Speaker 1: moves and finding mates and so on. So a bigger
Speaker 1: brain is not necessarily any smarter. Or take somebody like
Speaker 1: Andre the Giant. He probably wasn't eight times smarter than you,
Speaker 1: even though his brain may have had eight times the
Speaker 1: volume of yours. So Ramoni ca Hall said, think about
Speaker 1: it like the giant clock tower of Big Ben compared
Speaker 1: to a wristwatch. They both keep time with the same accuracy.
Speaker 1: And so it goes with brains big and small. It's
Speaker 1: not the amount of stuff, but the al rhythms that
Speaker 1: are running on it. It may be that what we
Speaker 1: call intelligence is about how many things you could hold
Speaker 1: in your short term memory at one time, or maybe
Speaker 1: it's the idea that you can store stronger associations between facts,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's the ability to resolve cognitive conflict, or
Speaker 1: maybe it's about being able to better squelch distractors. So
Speaker 1: all these things have been suggested as the basis of intelligence,
Speaker 1: but it's going to involve all of these in some
Speaker 1: degree or another, and probably a bunch of other things,
Speaker 1: like whether you can better structure the information that you've stored,
Speaker 1: or do more parallel processing, or i'll talk about this
Speaker 1: in the future episode, whether you're better at simulating possible futures. Okay,
Speaker 1: So all this is to say that intelligence doesn't represent
Speaker 1: a simple single thing that we can point to in
Speaker 1: the brain. Instead, in eligence is one of those words
Speaker 1: that carries a lot of semantic weight, meaning there are
Speaker 1: all kinds of things that are being lumped together in
Speaker 1: that one word. But whatever intelligence is, it sits at
Speaker 1: the heart of what is special about Homo sapiens. Other
Speaker 1: species seem to come out more hardwired to solve particular problems,
Speaker 1: but we are more live wired, which means our brains adapt.
Speaker 1: So when we drop into the world, we can in
Speaker 1: our first several years learn all the most important things
Speaker 1: that our species has figured out before us, and then
Speaker 1: we can springboard from there. And that means we can
Speaker 1: solve open ended problems, and that can be surviving in
Speaker 1: the Arctic Circle or surviving at the equator, whether that's
Speaker 1: figuring out quantum physics or how to distill nitrogen from
Speaker 1: the air for fertilizer or whatever. Other species do smart things,
Speaker 1: but none can even come close to our capacity to
Speaker 1: tackle abstract, open ended problems. And all of this leads
Speaker 1: me to the main point of today's podcast, which is
Speaker 1: one of the most interesting possibilities for how the world
Speaker 1: could be different for our children. They've grown up with
Speaker 1: Homo sapiens being the only intelligent species that is doing
Speaker 1: anything remarkable on this planet. And that's not to say
Speaker 1: other animals aren't intelligent in their own ways, but they
Speaker 1: are not as far as we know, building an internet,
Speaker 1: or vaccines or quantum computation, or certainly not building satellites
Speaker 1: and rocketships and getting off the planet. For example, did
Speaker 1: you know that at any given moment in time, there
Speaker 1: are approximately one million Homo sapiens up in the atmosphere
Speaker 1: above the clouds, sitting in comfortable leather chairs. So we
Speaker 1: might argue about animal intelligence, but what's clear is that
Speaker 1: other animals are not building airplanes, or for that matter,
Speaker 1: fleets of electric vehicles, or neutron bombs or smartphones. And
Speaker 1: it's an interesting question, right, why don't we find wolves
Speaker 1: constructing great libraries, or kangaroo's building hospital systems, or just
Speaker 1: universities where say, Koalas from all over the world come
Speaker 1: loping over and they spend four years to learn everything
Speaker 1: about Kowala history and the future and new technologies, and
Speaker 1: they study all night to take Koala qualifications to make
Speaker 1: them experts in law or medicine, or study their own
Speaker 1: Koala brains. So what I want to consider is whether
Speaker 1: we will be able to leverage our growing knowledge of
Speaker 1: genetics to uplift other animal species. That means, to help them,
Speaker 1: presumably genetically, to have much higher levels of intelligence. The
Speaker 1: idea is that as we better understand genetics, will be
Speaker 1: able to tweak the circuitry to optimize things. After all,
Speaker 1: the important part is that every single organism on the
Speaker 1: Earth is made of exactly the same letters ACTG, and
Speaker 1: there's something just slightly different about the way that our
Speaker 1: letters structure the human brain, so that we not only
Speaker 1: have bipedal walking in hairless faces and acne and really
Speaker 1: useful thumbs, but also we have this massive intelligence. Could
Speaker 1: we crack the code on that part and give intelligence
Speaker 1: to our animal cousins. Now that might sound like pure fantasy,
Speaker 1: but in fact, there have been a growing number of
Speaker 1: experiments that make this easier to envision. For example, there's
Speaker 1: a gene called fox P two, which is thought to
Speaker 1: have something to do with the sudden explosion of speech
Speaker 1: and language in humans. Now, the interpretation about fox P
Speaker 1: two is a bit controversial, but the thing I want
Speaker 1: to point out is that colleagues in mt took a
Speaker 1: version of this gene that was like the human gene,
Speaker 1: and they put it into mice and they were able
Speaker 1: to show that the mice could learn mazes faster than
Speaker 1: normal mice. Now, there's still a long way to go,
Speaker 1: and it won't just be this gene, but hundreds of
Speaker 1: other genes that will be required to make cells in
Speaker 1: the brain hook up in the right ways, and it
Speaker 1: probably won't happen in our lifetime. But the point is,
Speaker 1: animal uplift is a possibility in the distant future, and
Speaker 1: It's something that's important to start thinking about now. As
Speaker 1: Charles Joy said in a recent Scientific American blog, if
Speaker 1: we cannot find aliens in the stars, we might create
Speaker 1: alien intelligences on Earth. Imagine our children looking back on
Speaker 1: this time and saying, Wow, that was the time before
Speaker 1: dogs could get elected as senators, or crows ran certain
Speaker 1: university courses, or zebras were winning the Nobel Prize. What
Speaker 1: a world we might be heading into now, as you
Speaker 1: might imagine these sorts of studies and the imagination that
Speaker 1: gets opened about animal uplift. This sparks massive debate among
Speaker 1: bioethicists and philosophers. The idea is, possibly we will get
Speaker 1: to the point where we can uplift in animal species,
Speaker 1: but should we The author David Brynn, who writes great
Speaker 1: science fiction, wrote a series of novels called the Uplift Series,
Speaker 1: and he explores this idea. And in these books we
Speaker 1: come to live with all kinds of intelligent animals who
Speaker 1: live among us, and they're working parts of society. And
Speaker 1: in a interview, Brynn pointed out that he felt the
Speaker 1: benefits of animal uplift could be amazing and really change
Speaker 1: the planet. And in fact, others argue that it is
Speaker 1: a moral imperative, meaning we're obligated to do this. We're
Speaker 1: like the first ones to get up the ladder onto
Speaker 1: the roof, and we need to extend our hands down
Speaker 1: and lift up all our cousin species who happen to
Speaker 1: be behind us. I think if it, like if my
Speaker 1: dog hurts her leg, I will use human discoveries to
Speaker 1: help her, like antibiotics in a cast, and if she
Speaker 1: gets cancer, I'm going to use imaging technology like MRI
Speaker 1: and oncogenic drugs. My colleague George Davorski, who's a futurist
Speaker 1: and an ethicist, he said in an interview with The
Speaker 1: Boston Globe, quote, there are other creatures on this planet
Speaker 1: that may be in need or deserving of also getting
Speaker 1: these sorts of interventions. We should always be considering the
Speaker 1: larger family of sentient organisms on this planet, not just
Speaker 1: human beings. And in fact, Dvorski argues that if you
Speaker 1: deny this future technology of making a brain better, if
Speaker 1: you deny this to an animal species, it's just as
Speaker 1: unethical as if you deny the education as some group
Speaker 1: of people based on their nationality or race or whatever.
Speaker 1: In other words, we're morally obligated to help. Now. On
Speaker 1: the other side of the argument, philosophers argue that the
Speaker 1: problem is that our long line of experiments to make
Speaker 1: this happen in animals won't be instant because it never is,
Speaker 1: and this will lead to lots of suffering among the
Speaker 1: animal species while we try to uplift them but don't
Speaker 1: quite get it right, and especially if we make them
Speaker 1: smarter but we don't get the rest of the thing
Speaker 1: perfect right away, such that they have meant illness and
Speaker 1: are smart enough to know it, or they have a
Speaker 1: ticking clock of a short lifespan and they're smart enough
Speaker 1: to know it, and this could get really terrible if
Speaker 1: we have to keep experimenting on them once they are
Speaker 1: cognitively enhanced like us. The difficulty is that uplift seems
Speaker 1: like an easy task. Perhaps we just make an animal's
Speaker 1: brain bigger, but it's going to be way harder than that.
Speaker 1: One quick example, in Sweden, some researchers tried to breed
Speaker 1: bigger brains in guppies, these little fish. So they took
Speaker 1: the ones with the biggest brains and kept breeding them
Speaker 1: together for several generations, and they did the same with
Speaker 1: the smallest brains too. Now, this sort of artificial selection
Speaker 1: is what agriculturalists and dog breeders and horse breeders have
Speaker 1: been doing forever. So eventually they had two lines with
Speaker 1: a nine percent size difference in their brains, and they
Speaker 1: were able to show that the bigger brained guppies could
Speaker 1: perform a little better on some simple cognitive tasks. So
Speaker 1: that seemed great, But it turned out the fish with
Speaker 1: the big brains were incapable of producing as many offspring,
Speaker 1: and they had smaller guts. So brains are massively energy
Speaker 1: hungry engines. And the conclusion the scienceists came to is
Speaker 1: that if you want bigger brains, the body needs to
Speaker 1: scale back somewhere else. In other words, big brains come
Speaker 1: with a cost. Now, the study doesn't really tell us
Speaker 1: much about intelligence anyway, because we already saw that brain
Speaker 1: size is almost entirely uncorrelated with intelligence. So there are
Speaker 1: far better studies that need to be done on this.
Speaker 1: But I just want to make a single point here.
Speaker 1: Changes in biology never come by themselves. They're always tied
Speaker 1: to the rest of the functioning of the machinery. So
Speaker 1: if you make a heart bigger or legs longer, or
Speaker 1: a head bigger than other. Things change as well, So
Speaker 1: when the con text of uplifting animals, it might mean
Speaker 1: that we need to figure out genetic changes not only
Speaker 1: to the brain, but to all kinds of aspects of
Speaker 1: their body, which could make the whole endeavor more challenging
Speaker 1: than we thought it was when we were just looking
Speaker 1: at the brain. And again, we know it won't just
Speaker 1: be about making brains bigger. For example, horses have brains
Speaker 1: as big as humans, but they're not discovering mathematics. Presumably
Speaker 1: the issue is that they're not running the same algorithms
Speaker 1: in their forests of neurons, or if you look at
Speaker 1: the great apes are nearest neighbors, they seem to have
Speaker 1: everything that you would need, but they're not building the
Speaker 1: Internet and writing novels and doing molecular biology. Why not, Well,
Speaker 1: it's true their brains are a little smaller, but presumably
Speaker 1: the issue is a more microscopic detail than that. It's
Speaker 1: almost certainly something in the algorithms that are getting run
Speaker 1: by the billions of neurons, So it's more than size.
Speaker 1: It's what programs are running, and there are decades of
Speaker 1: work ahead of us to even scratch the surface of
Speaker 1: that scientific problem. And there's another challenge here. Typically, when
Speaker 1: we think about animal uplift, we picture an animal speaking
Speaker 1: English and having a conversation with us. But it's possible
Speaker 1: that it's going to be very difficult to do animal
Speaker 1: uplift because the intelligence of our species is so tied
Speaker 1: to other things like our opposable thumbs or our larynx,
Speaker 1: which allows us to do things like make podcasts and
Speaker 1: sing songs. And so the argument is, if you give
Speaker 1: a squirrel a better brain or the right algorithms to run,
Speaker 1: it still won't be able to play a flute. And
Speaker 1: even if it can think of some new solution to
Speaker 1: quantum electrodynamics, it can't simply tell it to you because
Speaker 1: it doesn't have a larynx to produce language. So there
Speaker 1: are a whole series of things that may need to
Speaker 1: be put into place so that we can translate languages.
Speaker 1: And I'm not talking about English to Chinese like I
Speaker 1: have on my Google Translate app, but human to dolphin
Speaker 1: or gopher to human, which takes into account the evolutionary
Speaker 1: history of the species and things that would have meaning
Speaker 1: to that animal. For example, a dolphin lives in a
Speaker 1: three dimensional world of movements and patterns, and so it's
Speaker 1: picking up on different things, and it presumably cares about
Speaker 1: different things. And that's what Google Translate may look like
Speaker 1: a century from now, figuring out how to communicate the
Speaker 1: needs and desires and insights of one species to another.
Speaker 1: Now there's one other thing to consider, and this one
Speaker 1: we can't ignore. So I'm going to take a tangent
Speaker 1: here for just a few moments. Many years ago, when
Speaker 1: the European Union was first getting put together, I wrote
Speaker 1: an article about the possible problems that such a union
Speaker 1: might confront in the future, and I quoted George Orwell,
Speaker 1: who wrote a deeply insightful essay about Adolf Hitler in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty and Orwell pointed out the following, and I quote,
Speaker 1: Hitler knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety,
Speaker 1: short working hours, hygiene, birth control, and in general common sense,
Speaker 1: they also, at least intermittently want struggle and self sacrifice,
Speaker 1: not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades. I used
Speaker 1: Orwell's quotation to illustrate something that could end up being
Speaker 1: the Achilles heel of the European Union, which is that
Speaker 1: eventually neighbors will fight one another, just as in America
Speaker 1: the North and South did in the Civil War. People
Speaker 1: don't just want peace. Sometimes they want to bang their
Speaker 1: drums and wave their flags. If you look at the
Speaker 1: history of our species, this is the standard. It's very
Speaker 1: hard to get groups to form a union forever or
Speaker 1: even for very long, and that's because of identity politics
Speaker 1: and our desire to show that we are different from
Speaker 1: and usually better than our neighbors. So just look at
Speaker 1: the entire history of the twentieth century to see how
Speaker 1: easily groups will foamen genocide against other people they're living with.
Speaker 1: Whether that's the Communists in the USSR or the Hutu
Speaker 1: in Rwanda, or Hitler telling the Germans that they deserve
Speaker 1: the entirety of Europe around them. It is shockingly easy
Speaker 1: to get groups to orient against other groups that they
Speaker 1: used to be fine with, they used to be neighbors with.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to do another episode about empathy and
Speaker 1: how people view one another and why we as a
Speaker 1: species so easily slip into war. But in today's context,
Speaker 1: you can guess my reason for mentioning all this will
Speaker 1: and uplifted animal species at some point want to beat
Speaker 1: its own drums and fly its own flags and have
Speaker 1: its own loyalty parades. In other words, what happens when
Speaker 1: we get our dogs to communicate with us and work
Speaker 1: with us? Are they always going to put up with us?
Speaker 1: Or do they at some point say, I don't want
Speaker 1: you to put me outside. I don't want you to
Speaker 1: hit me on the nose when I pee in the house.
Speaker 1: I think that all of our problems stem from our
Speaker 1: historical relationship with you, and it's time for us to
Speaker 1: shed our callers and bear our fangs and bite you
Speaker 1: right in the juggular in the name of freedom and dignity. Now,
Speaker 1: this is similar to the situation that was portrayed in
Speaker 1: the New Planet of the Apes movies. Humans genetically engineer
Speaker 1: the apes to uplift them, and then things devolve into
Speaker 1: a war between the species. So this is one worry
Speaker 1: about the future of animal uplift. If human intelligence is
Speaker 1: any guide, and it's really the only guide we have,
Speaker 1: then the introduction of intelligence will probably open the door
Speaker 1: to the horrors not of a civil war, but of
Speaker 1: a species war. And what's interesting is you could extrapolate
Speaker 1: from what happened in previous world wars where unlikely countries
Speaker 1: banded together, like in World War Two, where the United
Speaker 1: States banded with their unlikely bedfellow Stalin and the USSR,
Speaker 1: or for that matter, Germany linked arms with Japan. Everyone
Speaker 1: collaborates where they see the most benefit in the political sphere.
Speaker 1: So just imagine what could happen when we enter not
Speaker 1: just a world war, but a multi species world war
Speaker 1: where humans have to fight against dolphins and camels and
Speaker 1: hippos who have all linked up with one another. Or
Speaker 1: maybe in the more distant future, as the world gets
Speaker 1: used to having multiple species, things will get complex in
Speaker 1: the way they always do, where some dolphins collaborate with
Speaker 1: some humans and they ride the waves as a unit,
Speaker 1: and other dolphins and other humans are finding on the
Speaker 1: other side, So you have species that are split down
Speaker 1: the middle, like families in a civil war. Or maybe,
Speaker 1: just maybe this all happens in a different way and
Speaker 1: they are smart enough or just different from us enough
Speaker 1: to bring us peace or at least lock us into
Speaker 1: non aggression. And we learn the meaning of humanity from
Speaker 1: non humans. So let's wrap up. When my children are
Speaker 1: my age and they're thinking about how they used to
Speaker 1: eat animals and pump gas. The way that we look
Speaker 1: back now on physicians promoting cigarettes or babies being in
Speaker 1: the car without seat belts. My children might also look
Speaker 1: backward and think about the time when they were this
Speaker 1: single species on Earth, building durable knowledge and making discoveries
Speaker 1: about our cosmos. And maybe this will be our grandkids
Speaker 1: or our great grandkids. But when I try to imagine
Speaker 1: what their experiences are like, I wonder if it'll be
Speaker 1: like the way we travel around and are always surprised
Speaker 1: and impressed with other cultures, Like when the Spaniards first
Speaker 1: stepped foot on the shores of what we now call
Speaker 1: North America and discovered entire empires built by the Aztec
Speaker 1: and the Inca and the Maya, complete with buildings and
Speaker 1: communities and zigarots and other forms of writing such as
Speaker 1: tying knots and strings, and completely different religions with their
Speaker 1: own deities and stories of creation. I wonder whether it'll
Speaker 1: be like this when we stumble on animal communities that
Speaker 1: we've uplifted, let's say, gophers, and discovering entire mythologies that
Speaker 1: the gophers have written, and whole types of architecture and
Speaker 1: technologies we simply wouldn't have thought of because of differences
Speaker 1: in our needs or imaginations. Just like different cultures invent
Speaker 1: different technologies based on their local needs, so will different species.
Speaker 1: In any case, someday after I'm long gone and my
Speaker 1: podcast exist on some medium that we can't even imagine,
Speaker 1: I hope that you, dear listener of the future, will
Speaker 1: really picture me pulling up to a gas station and
Speaker 1: having to buy gas to get from place to place.
Speaker 1: And maybe, listener, you are a member of an animal
Speaker 1: species that in my day had very little cognitive power.
Speaker 1: So I dedicate this podcast to you, especially if you've
Speaker 1: joined our ranks as being fascinated by not only where
Speaker 1: we are, but you also simulate possible paths to where
Speaker 1: we could go, and then you leverage the scientific method
Speaker 1: to build pathways to get there. To find out more
Speaker 1: and to share your thoughts, head over to eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcasts. I have links there for further reading
Speaker 1: about Animal Uplift, and I also have that incredible George
Speaker 1: Orwell essay about Hitler, and I recommend reading it as
Speaker 1: one of the most insightful political essays I know. Even
Speaker 1: after seven decades, it is as relevant as ever until
Speaker 1: next time, I'm David Eagleman and thank you for joining
Speaker 1: me in the inner cosmos.