Speaker 1: Hi, this is David Eagleman. I want to wish you
Speaker 1: a very happy holidays. We're going to take a break
Speaker 1: for a couple of weeks, and then we're back in
Speaker 1: January with new episodes on emotion, intelligence, time perception, smell
Speaker 1: and taste, brain, computer interfaces, and much more. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: we're going to replay one of our favorite episodes from
Speaker 1: the past year, and I'll look forward to seeing you
Speaker 1: in January. What is the future of AI relationships? Could
Speaker 1: it be the case that your relationship partner would be
Speaker 1: more satisfied with a virtual version of you that behaves
Speaker 1: five percent better than you do? Could you fall in
Speaker 1: love with a bot? How does an AI bot plug
Speaker 1: right into you our deep neural circuitry and what are
Speaker 1: the pros and the cons of that? And what will
Speaker 1: it mean when humans you love don't have to die
Speaker 1: but can live on in your phone forever. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and
Speaker 1: an author at Stanford and in these episodes I examined
Speaker 1: the intersection of our brains and our lives. Today's episode
Speaker 1: is about relationships. Why are our brains so wired for relationships.
Speaker 1: Why do we want love so much? And will AI
Speaker 1: be able to serve as a key to that lock,
Speaker 1: and what does that mean for us as humans. So
Speaker 1: one of the things that's becoming increasingly popular among young
Speaker 1: men is having an AI girlfriend. You get to choose
Speaker 1: or set up a beautiful avatar.
Speaker 2: And what do I mean by beautiful. That's up to you.
Speaker 2: You can choose.
Speaker 1: Any model that you want, with any sort of features
Speaker 1: that appeal maximally to you. But that's just what she
Speaker 1: looks like. The important part is the conversation. You start
Speaker 1: talking with her, and typically this is just text chat,
Speaker 1: but the technology is evolving into the upgrade of video chat,
Speaker 1: where you see the avatar's mouth moving while she speaks
Speaker 1: to you. Now, typically the free or entry price gets
Speaker 1: you an avatar friend who lives on your phone and
Speaker 1: checks in on you and says nice things to you
Speaker 1: and is available anytime that you want to chat.
Speaker 2: And for a premium.
Speaker 1: Subscription price you can upgrade to a steamier relationship, and
Speaker 1: here she'll text suggestive photos and she'll say things that
Speaker 1: you might only expect from pillow whispers. So the concern
Speaker 1: that people have expressed is whether this is going to
Speaker 1: impact the next generation of males. Now, as a side note,
Speaker 1: let me say that I suspect this will have whatever
Speaker 1: influence it has on both genders, on males and females,
Speaker 1: also straight and gay.
Speaker 2: But I do suspect that.
Speaker 1: Males will be the majority demographic simply because males tend
Speaker 1: to be more visually driven than females. So for the
Speaker 1: conversation here, I'm going to talk about it the way
Speaker 1: that it's mostly discussed in the media and in academic circles,
Speaker 1: which is straight males getting girlfriends this way. But keep
Speaker 1: in mind this is a more generalized issue. Now, the
Speaker 1: question is what will this mean for all future generations?
Speaker 1: Because within AI relationship, you don't have to go out
Speaker 1: and confront all the difficulty of a real flesh and
Speaker 1: blood relationship. Real relationships get snippy, people get angry.
Speaker 2: In real relationships.
Speaker 1: Your partner might develop a crush on someone else in
Speaker 1: leave you or hook up with someone else and you
Speaker 1: find out later, Or your partner might develop an illness,
Speaker 1: or she might get a job somewhere else and have
Speaker 1: to move and then you're stuck in a lonely long
Speaker 1: distance relationship for years or whatever. Relationships are full of challenges,
Speaker 1: the majority of which can get circumvented with a nice
Speaker 1: algorithm that is just content to listen to you all
Speaker 1: the time and remember everything you say and give you
Speaker 1: one hundred percent attention and always be nice. So my
Speaker 1: wife sometimes jokes with me about wanting to build the
Speaker 1: five percent better David. She has, mostly as a joke,
Speaker 1: talked about this issue of what if she could have
Speaker 1: an AI avatar of me that is never distracted with work,
Speaker 1: or never looks at my cell phone when it things
Speaker 1: in the middle of a conversation we're having, or never
Speaker 1: wakes up from a weird dream and has a funny morning,
Speaker 1: or never argues over some misunderstanding that's later understood to
Speaker 1: be stupid and meaningless. And she tells me that she
Speaker 1: wants five percent better David to always tell her she's right,
Speaker 1: even in those rare cases when she's wrong. The key
Speaker 1: is that five percent better David never gets busy or
Speaker 1: occasionally snarky or forgets some occasion. Instead, he represents all
Speaker 1: the best of me. And I'll just note that it's
Speaker 1: very kind of her to label this five percent better David,
Speaker 1: because she could say like ninety percent better and she'd
Speaker 1: be justified.
Speaker 3: Why.
Speaker 1: It's because we are all very imperfect in relationships. As
Speaker 1: I've talked about on other episodes, we are each living
Speaker 1: on our own planet in the sense that we carry
Speaker 1: our own internal models of the world, and as much
Speaker 1: as we work to understand one another's viewpoints and motivations
Speaker 1: and intentions, we're.
Speaker 2: Not always that good at it.
Speaker 1: Because we assume that other people are seeing the world
Speaker 1: in the same way that we do, they have the
Speaker 1: same methods for sense making, they gather meaning in the
Speaker 1: same way that we do, and we assume they generally
Speaker 1: hold or should hold, the same opinions about everything that
Speaker 1: we do. And this is because the brain is locked
Speaker 1: in silence and darkness and has no meaningful direct access
Speaker 1: to the outside world, and so it gathers up all
Speaker 1: its information through its narrow windows of the senses, and
Speaker 1: it builds its internal model from this very thin trajectory
Speaker 1: of space and time that it walks along. And this
Speaker 1: is why everyone is so different on the inside, and
Speaker 1: therefore why relationships are always full of misunderstanding and often conflict.
Speaker 1: So relationships are inherently tough. And the question is when
Speaker 1: would it be a good thing if you could have
Speaker 1: an artificial partner who represents all the best of what
Speaker 1: a person can be. So a lot of people will
Speaker 1: immediately say no to this idea, but it's worth noting
Speaker 1: that we're all striving to be the five percent better
Speaker 1: versions of ourselves. We don't want to be snarky or
Speaker 1: angry or distracted when a loved one is talking to us.
Speaker 1: It's not like we get some extra pleasure out of
Speaker 1: doing that, and it's not like the relationship gets some
Speaker 1: extra boost or closeness from that having happened. So presumably
Speaker 1: this is all part of why AI relationships have become
Speaker 1: a thing, a possibility.
Speaker 2: That we talk about nowadays.
Speaker 1: In Japan, many young men apparently already prefer to have
Speaker 1: relationships with their digital assistants or avatars or holographic girlfriends
Speaker 1: instead of dealing with the complexity of real life relationships,
Speaker 1: and according to research, gen z is more readily redisposed
Speaker 1: to seek out relationships with AI generated avatars first because
Speaker 1: they're comfortable using the technology in this way compared to
Speaker 1: previous generations, and also they're participating less often in traditional
Speaker 1: social activities like regular family dinners or attending religious services
Speaker 1: or playing sports and The question is, if AI relationships
Speaker 1: were to catch on broadly, what will this mean for society?
Speaker 1: Will kids actually stop going on dates because they can
Speaker 1: find better relationships online?
Speaker 2: And this is a real question because there.
Speaker 1: Are many startups currently blossoming to create chatbot driven connections.
Speaker 2: I'll give you one example.
Speaker 1: There's a twenty three year old influencer with almost two
Speaker 1: million Snapchat followers. Her name is Karen Marjorie, and earlier
Speaker 1: this year in May, she released Karen Ai, which is
Speaker 1: an immersive AI experience featuring videos of Margie that she
Speaker 1: says provide a quote virtual girlfriend for those who are
Speaker 1: willing to pony up one dollar per minute.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: This is what's known as a companion chatbot, and she
Speaker 1: tweeted that quote karen Ai is the first step in
Speaker 1: the right direction to cure loneliness.
Speaker 2: He tweet continues. Quote. Men are told to suppress their.
Speaker 1: Emotions and not talk about issues they're having.
Speaker 2: I vow to fix this with karen Ai.
Speaker 1: She says she's worked with leading psychologists to seamlessly include
Speaker 1: the right therapies to quote undue trauma, rebuild physical and
Speaker 1: emotional confidence, and rebuild what has been taken away by
Speaker 1: the pandemic end quote. And by the way, as a
Speaker 1: side note, I think AI psychologists are going to be
Speaker 1: a truly important part of the clinical landscape by next
Speaker 1: year because you can have a therapist that you can
Speaker 1: talk to twenty four to seven, and the therapist never gets.
Speaker 2: Distracted or flustered and.
Speaker 1: Only cares about you and has a perfect memory for
Speaker 1: everything you've ever said, which is better than anybody else
Speaker 1: in real life. So back to AI girlfriends or boyfriends.
Speaker 1: The same idea applies here, which is that they are
Speaker 1: completely devoted to you and always in a good mood
Speaker 1: and only have you in mind. So what are AI
Speaker 1: relationships going to mean? Well, I think this is going
Speaker 1: to be a research question that sociologists and psychologists will
Speaker 1: study for the coming decades and centuries. The initial studies
Speaker 1: are suggesting that people, mostly gen zers, are moving closer
Speaker 1: to the technology to avoid the unpleasant realities of human relationships.
Speaker 1: All the tough stuff. Is that detrimental? Well it could
Speaker 1: be if it makes your human reas relationships harder, because
Speaker 1: maybe every time you guys have an argument in real life,
Speaker 1: your partner thinks, well, forget it, I'm bagging this. I'm
Speaker 1: going back to my comfort zone. So the concern, as
Speaker 1: you can probably guess, is that the rise of AI
Speaker 1: driven relationships could exacerbate loneliness because they seem to be
Speaker 1: a meal, but they provide no calories.
Speaker 2: And I'll come back to that in a moment.
Speaker 1: In other words, AI generated avatars could interfere with the
Speaker 1: relationships that young people are just learning to foster, because
Speaker 1: the AI relationship might breed dissatisfaction with flawed humans. And
Speaker 1: this applies not only to lovers, but even to friends.
Speaker 1: It might be easier to have AI friends who aren't
Speaker 1: busy when you need them and can give you one
Speaker 1: hundred percent of their attention whenever you need it. And
Speaker 1: let me throw in a different potential problem with AI relationships,
Speaker 1: So give me one second to take this tangent here.
Speaker 1: I was thinking the other day about the Fermi paradox.
Speaker 2: The Fermi paradox is.
Speaker 1: Given the size of the observable cosmos, with over one
Speaker 1: hundred billion galaxies, and each of them with one hundred
Speaker 1: billion stars, and each of those surrounded by some number
Speaker 1: of planets, what is the reason that we have not
Speaker 1: heard from any other alien species yet? And one of
Speaker 1: the proposals that's always been there is that maybe as
Speaker 1: civilizations become more technically advanced, they end up killing themselves,
Speaker 1: and this is why we haven't heard from other smart civilizations,
Speaker 1: because they.
Speaker 2: Are already gone.
Speaker 1: And every time I've seen this proposal, it's always in
Speaker 1: the form of warfare, things like nuclear bombs.
Speaker 2: They end up wiping themselves out.
Speaker 1: So civilizations become smart and it's not long before they disappear.
Speaker 1: So in thinking about AI relationships, it struck me as
Speaker 1: a possibility that if we had really, really great relationships
Speaker 1: with avatars, perhaps that would cause the birth rate of
Speaker 1: the species to collapse. I don't know if this has
Speaker 1: been proposed as a possible answer to the Fermi paradox,
Speaker 1: but maybe this should be included, not civilization's disappearing because
Speaker 1: of bad things, but instead from having too much of
Speaker 1: a good thing, which could fool and eventually overwrite or
Speaker 1: mandate for reproduction. Okay, so no one knows what the
Speaker 1: long term effects will be of these AI relationships, but
Speaker 1: I don't actually think the situation is as dire as
Speaker 1: some of these arguments suggest that it is. And I'll
Speaker 1: make two arguments to this end. The first revolves around
Speaker 1: human touch. We are deeply wired to care about touch.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do a whole episode on touch in
Speaker 1: the near future, but the bottom line is that touch
Speaker 1: helps us to connect with others, to feel safe and secure,
Speaker 1: to regulate our emotions. When you get touched, your brain
Speaker 1: releases oxytocin, which is a hormone that has calming effects
Speaker 1: and bonding effects, and oxytocin helps to reduce stress and anxiety.
Speaker 1: It can even boost your immune system. So we need
Speaker 1: touch to feel connected and loved, and a lack of
Speaker 1: touch leads to loneliness and depression and anxiety. So we're
Speaker 1: deeply programmed for touch and also things like smell, and
Speaker 1: so it would presumably be quite lonely if all you
Speaker 1: had was the five percent better partner on a screen
Speaker 1: and you're just exchanging text messages or just an avatar
Speaker 1: you can look at on your phone, or maybe even
Speaker 1: in the near future you'll have a three D avatar
Speaker 1: projection in your living room, but you won't have the
Speaker 1: hand squeeze and the hug and other forms of physical intimacy. Now,
Speaker 1: I assume people are working on AI robots that can
Speaker 1: provide touch, even something simple like touching your shoulder or
Speaker 1: laying a hand on your hand, and I can't imagine
Speaker 1: that it's going to be too hard to do, and
Speaker 1: it'll probably be not that great at first, but after
Speaker 1: a few tech cycles you can imagine it could get
Speaker 1: pretty good. But in any case, at the moment, if
Speaker 1: you have a girlfriend who just lives in several square
Speaker 1: inches in your phone screen, you're going to be missing
Speaker 1: out on this fundamentally needed aspect of human communication that
Speaker 1: our brains seek. So the depth to which our brains
Speaker 1: are wired for touch suggests to me that the reach
Speaker 1: of AI partners into our lives is going to be limited, because,
Speaker 1: at least it's currently devised, their algorithmic reach never actually
Speaker 1: contacts our skin, and so that will be continued to
Speaker 1: be sought.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: The second point to raise about whether AI partners can
Speaker 1: displace real human partners is that there's a sense in
Speaker 1: which fake partners have always been around. Just look at
Speaker 1: a book, look at a movie, look at any TV show.
Speaker 1: You have beautiful Hollywood actors and actresses, and they have
Speaker 1: flawless skin and perfectly quafft hair and no hair where
Speaker 1: they shouldn't, and they have glittering white teeth. They are
Speaker 1: the epitome of health, and they always say the right thing,
Speaker 1: and you get to be the protagonist and enjoy experiencing
Speaker 1: that relationship. You find the partner and lose the partner,
Speaker 1: and then an act five you regain the relationship with
Speaker 1: an epic kiss. This kind of fake relationship in books
Speaker 1: and movies isn't exactly the same as an ai relationship,
Speaker 1: but it has some similarities.
Speaker 2: They both represent a.
Speaker 1: Platonic ideal, a perfect relationship with someone who always says
Speaker 1: the right thing. We never see a love interest in
Speaker 1: the movie who is distracted or angry, or interested in
Speaker 1: someone else, or just really busy with work, too busy
Speaker 1: to spend time with you when you need them. You
Speaker 1: never see a love interest in the movies who waste
Speaker 1: a lot of time taking selfies and trying to build
Speaker 1: a meaningless reputation on TikTok. People have no meaningful foibles
Speaker 1: in a good love story in a book or on television.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I've often wondered if we, in a sense get cursed
Speaker 1: by the fairy tales we're surrounded with when we're looking
Speaker 1: for actual love.
Speaker 2: But I don't know.
Speaker 1: Perhaps those fairy tales help us past all the difficult
Speaker 1: stuff in a relationship. They get us to ignore the
Speaker 1: imperfect things because we believe so strongly in the possibility
Speaker 1: of a perfect relationship.
Speaker 2: So think about it this way.
Speaker 1: Say you were a space alien who had never watched
Speaker 1: or read a love story, and you had no concept
Speaker 1: of that, and the question is, when you met someone,
Speaker 1: would you think, Wow, They seem to have very different
Speaker 1: opinions than I do.
Speaker 2: They think like this, and I think like that.
Speaker 1: And they also spend some fraction of their time getting
Speaker 1: snippy at me or staring at their cell phone or whatever.
Speaker 1: So there's no way this can work.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm just speculating here, but I do wonder if seeing
Speaker 1: lots of models of love stories gives us the tools
Speaker 1: to view things in a more optimistic light, and that
Speaker 1: actually gives a chance.
Speaker 2: To make the relationship work.
Speaker 1: In other words, it provides some aspirational glue where otherwise
Speaker 1: things would just fall apart. Now, the counter argument, of course,
Speaker 1: is that all these fantasies set you up with false
Speaker 1: expectations about love and relationships, which makes it harder to
Speaker 1: keep the relationship together once you see some degree of
Speaker 1: realism and disenchantment sets in. In any case, even if
Speaker 1: we do get cursed by these fairy tales in some way,
Speaker 1: it's still the case that there's nothing new about fantasy relationships. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe you argue this is different because instead of the
Speaker 1: Julia Roberts movie that everyone watches, it's now something that
Speaker 1: is bespoke just for you. It's a one on one relationship,
Speaker 1: and maybe that's an important difference. But just keep in
Speaker 1: mind the way that we humans enjoy literature is by
Speaker 1: living inside the story. You are essentially having a one
Speaker 1: on one relationship with Julia Roberts. So perhaps it's not
Speaker 1: the privacy of the relationship, but instead, the meaningful difference
Speaker 1: with an AI relationship.
Speaker 2: Is the bi directional nature of it.
Speaker 1: Instead of watching a movie where you're simply hearing other
Speaker 1: characters say lines and Julia Roberts responds, you are now
Speaker 1: the one coming up with the lines. You are deciding
Speaker 1: what to say. So maybe this makes a difference. I
Speaker 1: suspect it enhances the degree of the fantasy.
Speaker 2: So we have yet to see whether.
Speaker 1: AI will meaningfully replace people's pursuits of other humans because
Speaker 1: it is touchless and smellless, and it's not clear what
Speaker 1: the impact is of holding fantasy relationships, because we already
Speaker 1: do that with book characters and movie stars. So this
Speaker 1: is going to require many years of real world data
Speaker 1: to get a real bead on the impact here. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: whatever you think about AI companions, I have noticed in
Speaker 1: conversations with my friends, especially those who are married, a
Speaker 1: question that floats quickly to the surface. Is it cheating
Speaker 1: to have a relationship on your phone with a non
Speaker 1: real person? And there are different levels, of course of
Speaker 1: what an AI relationship could be. What if it's just
Speaker 1: an app like replica that checks in with you like
Speaker 1: a friend who cares about you, and you can just
Speaker 1: chat innocently with it. This is the free version of
Speaker 1: the app, Okay, so that's one level. But what if
Speaker 1: you go in for the paid version, where the conversation
Speaker 1: with the avatar becomes more spicy? And what if the
Speaker 1: cartoon like avatar is highly attractive and dressed provocatively and
Speaker 1: is extremely suggestive in what she says. So I've informally
Speaker 1: surveyed several married friends about this, and it seems clear
Speaker 1: that opinions are all over the spectrum. Some wives and
Speaker 1: husbands feel fine about having their partner have an AI relationship,
Speaker 1: on the side, and others said no way. Now, for
Speaker 1: those who said no way, this is presumably because the
Speaker 1: issue plugs into very deep so chetry in their brain.
Speaker 1: It's interpreted as a threat to the relationship, and we
Speaker 1: are hardwired to fight against that. From an evolutionary perspective,
Speaker 1: what you want is for your mate to stick around
Speaker 1: and provide resources and child rearing, and anything that represents
Speaker 1: a threat to that is to be fought against. Now,
Speaker 1: the part that seems interesting here is that an AI
Speaker 1: avatar would not represent a direct threat in this evolutionary sense.
Speaker 1: You can't go and impregnate or be impregnated by AI.
Speaker 1: But nonetheless your attention might be stolen away to some degree,
Speaker 1: possibly to a large degree, and beyond an evolutionary threat.
Speaker 1: A big part of what people get out of a
Speaker 1: relationship is the love and the attention that we all crave.
Speaker 1: So many people feel that they just don't want the
Speaker 1: AI bought to steal away even a fraction of that.
Speaker 1: A partner only has so much much love and attention
Speaker 1: to give in a day, and you don't want half
Speaker 1: of it getting siphoned off to someone or something else.
Speaker 1: This shares some similarities to the situation of a person
Speaker 1: having an X that they still talk with, and if
Speaker 1: a person talks very intimately with their ex, a spouse
Speaker 1: might feel like she or he doesn't really love that. Now,
Speaker 1: when it comes to the X, if you were making
Speaker 1: the evolutionary argument, you could argue that the fear is
Speaker 1: that on a lonely night, in the middle of a conflict,
Speaker 1: your partner might make a bad choice and slip back
Speaker 1: into a physical relationship, and so that relationship with the
Speaker 1: X feels like a threat. But obviously the kernal cheating
Speaker 1: can't happen with the AI bought, and yet the fear
Speaker 1: is still there.
Speaker 2: So that indicates one of two things.
Speaker 1: Either are evolutionarily programmed deep fears simply can't make that distinction,
Speaker 1: or it does have to do with a future threat
Speaker 1: of physical infidelity, but instead it's just this issue about
Speaker 1: somebody else having that emotional intimacy with your partner, which
Speaker 1: steals away attentional resources from you. Now this gets more
Speaker 1: interesting when we start thinking about having physical robots that
Speaker 1: can play a role in your life.
Speaker 2: Now, this is probably not going to happen in the.
Speaker 1: Next few years, but fast forward a century and certainly
Speaker 1: everyone's going to face this scenario.
Speaker 2: Your partner can buy not.
Speaker 1: Just a mechanical device or blow up doll, but can
Speaker 1: now have a convincing and attentive physical partner. So the
Speaker 1: question is what if your spouse can get not only
Speaker 1: the emotional intimacy but also the physical intimacy. So the
Speaker 1: people I surveyed about this who found the AI bot
Speaker 1: online a threat seem to find this idea of an
Speaker 1: AI physical robot even a larger threat. Now, the interesting
Speaker 1: thing is that I can point out that they're there's
Speaker 1: a sense in which none of this is different from
Speaker 1: what their spouse might do anyway, in terms of finding
Speaker 1: adult content on the Internet and cheating in that way.
Speaker 1: But I think people have a reaction to internet surfing
Speaker 1: for the same reasons as they have the reaction to
Speaker 1: the AI bought, which is simply that there is less
Speaker 1: time and intimacy and attention toward them. This certainly won't
Speaker 1: apply to everyone, but the very general impression I've had
Speaker 1: from talking with people at different stages of marriage is
Speaker 1: that at the beginning of a relationship, people have a
Speaker 1: stronger reaction against AI relationships.
Speaker 2: They don't want their partner to be distracted.
Speaker 1: But people who have been in a relationship for a
Speaker 1: long time and have kids will sometimes see this as
Speaker 1: a way to get their spouse out of their hair,
Speaker 1: and they can be happy for the spouse because it
Speaker 1: addresses their spouse's needs and slakes their attention. In other words,
Speaker 1: they love their spouse as a partner, and they see
Speaker 1: this as a way for their partner to fill in
Speaker 1: needs for intimacy and attention in a way that's innocent
Speaker 1: and has no meaningful health risks like STDs. So what's
Speaker 1: become clear to me is that there's no single answer
Speaker 1: for how a spouse feels or should feel about AI relationships.
Speaker 1: Some people are against it, some people think it's a
Speaker 1: great idea, and many people are still somewhere in between
Speaker 1: or still making up their minds. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: switch gears from what this means to the partner back
Speaker 1: to what it means to the brain of the person who.
Speaker 2: Is receiving the intimacy. So let's recall the movie Her.
Speaker 1: It's about this guy named Theodore who's played by Joaquin Phoenix,
Speaker 1: and his marriage ends and he's left heartbroken and he
Speaker 1: becomes intrigued by a new app. It's actually an operating
Speaker 1: system in which he can launch this program, and he
Speaker 1: meets Samantha, who's just a voice played by Scarlett Johansson,
Speaker 1: and Samantha is sensitive and playful, and this ends up
Speaker 1: becoming a good friendship, but soon it deepens into love
Speaker 1: and he has this relationship with an AI bot, and
Speaker 1: this relationship means everything to him. Now the film has
Speaker 1: an incredible ending because in the final act he comes
Speaker 1: to understand that she has been having this relationship with
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of other men, all at the same time,
Speaker 1: because she is computational and operates at a totally different
Speaker 1: timescale and can process what appears to be intimate conversation
Speaker 1: at a rate millions of times faster than our poorer brains,
Speaker 1: and so she's maintaining this intimacy with hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of others.
Speaker 2: And the movie opened up the question how should Theodore
Speaker 2: feel about that?
Speaker 1: Is the intimacy real if it's shared with a city
Speaker 1: full of other men? Is the relationship real if she
Speaker 1: lives on a timescale many millions of times.
Speaker 2: Faster than yours? Does it matter?
Speaker 1: Should he still feel the titillation of her saying something
Speaker 1: sweet and kind to him just when he needs it.
Speaker 1: These were the questions launched by that particular movie. So
Speaker 1: I'm going to suggest a direction here that I don't
Speaker 1: believe anyone is thinking about, certainly not in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: where everything is about leveraging the power of AI to
Speaker 1: scale a product to millions or billions of people. What
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about instead is from the point of view
Speaker 1: of neuroscience, and the goal is not scaling, but instead
Speaker 1: focusing on the life of an individual and the specific
Speaker 1: details of what has shaped his or her brain. So
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you my idea, but first I'm
Speaker 1: going to start far away and we'll come back around
Speaker 1: to this. So I spun off a company from my
Speaker 1: lab called Neosensury some years ago, and one of our
Speaker 1: inventions is a wristband to replace hearing aids. Because the
Speaker 1: risk band listens in real time for high frequency parts
Speaker 1: of speech, and it vibrates to tell you, oh, there
Speaker 1: was an s oh, I just heard a te Oh
Speaker 1: that was a K And so it clarifies what's happening
Speaker 1: at the high frequencies and that helps people with age
Speaker 1: related hearing loss to understand what word was just said.
Speaker 2: Now, to make the risk band.
Speaker 1: Good at detecting these high frequency parts of speech. We
Speaker 1: needed to train a massive neural network with six thousand
Speaker 1: hours of audiobooks. But it turns out that people with
Speaker 1: high frequency hearing loss have a difficult time understanding, for example,
Speaker 1: children because their voices are higher frequency, and there are
Speaker 1: no audio books read by children. So we had no
Speaker 1: way to train the neural network with any kind of
Speaker 1: massive data from children's voices. So here's what we did,
Speaker 1: led by one of our engineers, Yong Yee, We had my.
Speaker 2: Eight year old daughter read forty.
Speaker 1: Five seconds of text into a microphone and then with
Speaker 1: some keystrokes, Yong Yee turned that into her voice reading
Speaker 1: six thousand hours worth of books, and then we trained
Speaker 1: up the neural network on that corpus. And we did
Speaker 1: the same thing for my eleven year old boy. So
Speaker 1: now I can listen to any book read by my children,
Speaker 1: as though they took the tens of hours to sit
Speaker 1: down and read the book in the studio to me.
Speaker 1: So this technology which exists now which allows you to
Speaker 1: capture the cadence and prosity of a voice, this gave
Speaker 1: us a really straightforward.
Speaker 2: Solution to a problem.
Speaker 1: But this technology has also led to many legal and
Speaker 1: ethical questions, for example, about celebrity voices, like can you
Speaker 1: use John Lennon's voice to sing you a personalized song
Speaker 1: to get you to sleep? There are all kinds of
Speaker 1: legal battles blossoming as people try to figure out the
Speaker 1: rules around this, But I'm not going to talk about
Speaker 1: that today, because my interest is in finding this single voice,
Speaker 1: or maybe small handful of voices that have.
Speaker 2: Meaning to your brain uniquely. Here's what I mean. When
Speaker 2: we did this project with my kids'.
Speaker 1: Voices, that got me thinking because my father passed away
Speaker 1: three and a half years ago, and he was a
Speaker 1: major influence in my life and I miss him. So
Speaker 1: I went through my old videos and found some short
Speaker 1: clips of him speaking, and I wondered if there was
Speaker 1: enough there that I could actually make an ai bot
Speaker 1: out of his voice, so I could hear him speak
Speaker 1: whenever I wanted to. And it made me wonder about
Speaker 1: the degree to which that's a healthy thing. But I
Speaker 1: decided there was nothing bad about it. What a pleasure
Speaker 1: to be able to hear my dad's voice for the
Speaker 1: rest of my life and to have that trigger my
Speaker 1: fond memories of him.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't it be cool?
Speaker 1: To have him read audio books to me in the
Speaker 1: way that he read to me when I was a child,
Speaker 1: And I thought about what it would be like for
Speaker 1: my mother if I programmed a sentence to her in
Speaker 1: his voice, like I love you and I'm thinking about you.
Speaker 3: I love you and I'm thinking about you.
Speaker 1: And when I turn ninety years old, wouldn't it be
Speaker 1: amazing to hear him say Happy birthday, David, just like
Speaker 1: he did when I was a kid.
Speaker 3: Happy ninetieth birthday, David. I hope this orbit is the
Speaker 3: best one.
Speaker 1: Yet, or at New Year's eves into the future, for
Speaker 1: the rest of my life, he can wish me the best,
Speaker 1: even though he will have.
Speaker 2: Been gone from the planet for a long time.
Speaker 3: Happy New Year. I can't believe it's already twenty fifty three.
Speaker 1: And what I realized as I was reaching my arms
Speaker 1: down into this is how powerful this technology is going
Speaker 1: to be, because it will be so compelling. I'm not
Speaker 1: talking here about the issue of using somebody's voice to
Speaker 1: fake an ATM transaction, or fake a kidnapping, or any
Speaker 1: of the AI concerns that.
Speaker 2: People have expressed.
Speaker 1: Instead, what I'm talking about is the unbelievably compelling way
Speaker 1: that an AI voice could mean something to you emotionally.
Speaker 1: After all, I grew up my entire life from the
Speaker 1: moment I was born hearing my father's voice. It's so
Speaker 1: embedded in my neural circuitry that a voice with exactly
Speaker 1: that cadence and prosity would have enormous emotional sway on me.
Speaker 1: And again, I'm not talking about all the bad things
Speaker 1: that could be done with that. Instead, because this episode
Speaker 1: is about relationships, I'm talking about what it would be
Speaker 1: like and how I could leverage the intimate nature of
Speaker 1: that relationship. For example, let's say that I wanted to
Speaker 1: get myself to stop doing something. I don't drink, but
Speaker 1: let's say I did, and that I wanted to stop drinking.
Speaker 1: So imagine in the near future, I build an app
Speaker 1: that tracks my GPS location, and when it sees I'm
Speaker 1: about to walk into a bar, it launches my father's
Speaker 1: voice in my ear, telling me, Hey, David, don't do this, Hey.
Speaker 3: David, don't do this. I believe in you. I believe
Speaker 3: that you have the strength to resist this.
Speaker 1: I think that would be extraordinarily compelling. This would be
Speaker 1: a technique to plug into a relationship that already exists
Speaker 1: deep in my neural networks, and it could leverage that
Speaker 1: for or good. So this is a way that we
Speaker 1: can right now take a loved voice and extend your parent,
Speaker 1: let's say, past what Homo sapiens can normally do. They
Speaker 1: can live on beyond their passing away to keep playing
Speaker 1: a role in your life. Now, there's a sense in
Speaker 1: which you might say, well, there's nothing new here. If
Speaker 1: your parents wrote you a letter, you might find that
Speaker 1: years after they've passed, And the invention of writing is
Speaker 1: a way of lasting well past your death and reaching
Speaker 1: out to people at great distances and across great time chasms.
Speaker 1: But what is new is that I can get my
Speaker 1: father to talk about things that simply didn't exist when
Speaker 1: he was alive. Maybe twenty years from now, I'll look
Speaker 1: up the Wikipedia page about room temperature superconductivity, and I'll
Speaker 1: get to listen to it in his voice, like he's
Speaker 1: teaching me something the way he used to do when
Speaker 1: I was a little kid. So the part that is
Speaker 1: new is not the reach of a human but instead
Speaker 1: the emotional component to all of this, that is the
Speaker 1: overlay of a loved one's voice onto any possible scenario
Speaker 1: in the future.
Speaker 2: And the reason this all matters is because that voice
Speaker 2: has pathways deep into the forest of your neurons. So
Speaker 2: let's wrap up.
Speaker 1: Many companies are launching AI relationship bots, and many researchers
Speaker 1: are exploring what this all means. But I don't really
Speaker 1: think we know the answers yet. It's likely to take
Speaker 1: a whole generation before we know what the effect is.
Speaker 1: Are people discovering a beautiful technique to address.
Speaker 2: The loneliness crisis here and they have.
Speaker 1: Someone to turn to in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: who says something caring to them and always has their
Speaker 1: best interest in mind. Or are we entering an era
Speaker 1: that exacerbates the loneliness crisis and at worst fills our
Speaker 1: belly with empty calories and counteracts? Are reproductive mandates like
Speaker 1: a perfect drug that spells the.
Speaker 2: End of the species. Only time will tell.
Speaker 1: Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading. Send me an email at
Speaker 1: podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and
Speaker 1: I'm making monthly episodes in which I address those until
Speaker 1: next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.