Speaker 1: What is the future of AI relationships? Could it be
Speaker 1: the case that your relationship partner would be more satisfied
Speaker 1: with a virtual version of you that behaves five percent
Speaker 1: better than you do? Could you fall in love with
Speaker 1: a bot? How does an aibot plug right into your
Speaker 1: deep neural circuitry and what are the pros and the
Speaker 1: cons of that? And what will it mean when humans
Speaker 1: you love don't have to die but can live on
Speaker 1: in your phone forever. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me
Speaker 1: David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford
Speaker 1: and in these episodes I examine the intersection of our
Speaker 1: brains and our lives. Today's episode is about relationships. Why
Speaker 1: are our brains so wired for relationships? Why do we
Speaker 1: want love so much? And will AI be able to
Speaker 1: serve as a key to that lock and what does
Speaker 1: that mean for us as humans.
Speaker 2: So one of the things that's becoming.
Speaker 1: Increasingly popular among young men is having an AI girlfriend.
Speaker 1: You get to choose 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 avatars mouth moving while she speaks
Speaker 1: to you. Now, typically the free or entry price gets
Speaker 1: you an avatar.
Speaker 2: 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, And
Speaker 1: for a premium subscription price you can upgrade to a
Speaker 1: steamier relationship. And here she'll text suggestive photos and she'll
Speaker 1: say things that you might only expect from pillow whispers.
Speaker 1: So the concern that people have expressed is whether this
Speaker 1: is going to impact the next generation of males. Now,
Speaker 1: as a side note, let me say that I suspect
Speaker 1: this will have whatever influence it has on both genders,
Speaker 1: on males and females, also straight and gay.
Speaker 2: But I do.
Speaker 1: Suspect that males will be the majority demographic simply because
Speaker 1: males tend to be more visually driven than females. So
Speaker 1: for the conversation here, I'm going to talk about it
Speaker 1: the way that it's mostly discussed in the media and
Speaker 1: in academic circles, which is straight males getting girlfriends this way.
Speaker 1: But keep in mind this is a more generalized issue.
Speaker 1: Now the question is what will this mean for all
Speaker 1: future generations, because within AI relationship, you don't have to
Speaker 1: go out and confront all the difficulty of a real
Speaker 1: flesh and blood relationship. Real relationships get snippy, people get angry.
Speaker 2: In real relationships, your.
Speaker 1: Partner might develop a crush on someone else and leave you,
Speaker 1: or hook up with someone else and you find out later,
Speaker 1: or your partner might develop an illness, or she might
Speaker 1: get a job somewhere else and have to move, and
Speaker 1: then you're stuck in a lonely long distance relationship for
Speaker 1: years or whatever. Relationships are full of challenges, the majority
Speaker 1: of which can get circumvented with a nice algorithm that
Speaker 1: is just content to listen to you all the time
Speaker 1: and remember everything you say and give you one hundred
Speaker 1: percent attention and always be nice. So my wife sometimes
Speaker 1: jokes with me about wanting to build the five percent
Speaker 1: better David. She has mostly as a joke, talked about
Speaker 1: this issue of what if she could have an AI
Speaker 1: avatar of me that is never distracted with work, or
Speaker 1: never looks at my cell phone when it things in
Speaker 1: the middle of a conversation we're having, or never wakes
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: She'd be justified. 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 not always that good at it. Because
Speaker 1: we assume that other people are seeing the world in
Speaker 1: the same way that we do. They have the same
Speaker 1: methods for sense making. They gather meaning in the same
Speaker 1: way that we do, and we assume they generally hold
Speaker 1: or should hold the same opinions about everything that we do.
Speaker 1: And this is because the brain is locked in silence
Speaker 1: and darkness and has no meaningful direct access to the
Speaker 1: outside world, and so it gathers up all its information
Speaker 1: through its narrow windows of the senses, and it builds
Speaker 1: its internal model from this very thin trajectory of space
Speaker 1: and time that it walks along. And this is why
Speaker 1: everyone is so different on the inside, and therefore why
Speaker 1: relationships are always full of misunderstanding and often conflict. So
Speaker 1: relationships are inherently tough. And the question is when would
Speaker 1: it be a good thing if you could have an
Speaker 1: artificial partner who represents all the best of what a
Speaker 1: person can be. So a lot of people will immediately
Speaker 1: say no to this idea, but it's worth noting that
Speaker 1: we're all striving to be the five percent better versions
Speaker 1: of ourselves. We don't want to be snarky or angry
Speaker 1: or distracted when a loved one is talking to us.
Speaker 2: It's not like we get some extra pleasure out of
Speaker 2: doing that.
Speaker 1: And it's not like the relationship gets some extra boost
Speaker 1: or closeness from that having happened.
Speaker 2: So presumably this is.
Speaker 1: All part of why AI relationships have become a thing,
Speaker 1: a possibility that we talk about nowadays. In Japan, many
Speaker 1: young men apparently already prefer to have relationships with their
Speaker 1: digital assistants or avatars or holographic girlfriends instead of dealing
Speaker 1: with the complexity.
Speaker 2: Of real life relationships.
Speaker 1: And according to research, gen z is more readily predisposed
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? And this is a real question
Speaker 1: because there are many startups currently blossoming to create chatbot
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: 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. Now, this
Speaker 1: is what's known as a companion chatbot, and she tweeted
Speaker 1: that quote karen Ai is the first step in the
Speaker 1: right direction to cure loneliness between continues.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: Men are told to suppress their emotions and not talk
Speaker 1: about issues they're having.
Speaker 2: I vow to fix this with karen Ai. She says she's.
Speaker 1: Worked with leading psychologists to seamlessly include the right therapies
Speaker 1: to quote undue trauma, rebuild physical and emotional confidence, and
Speaker 1: rebuild what has been taken away by the pandemic end quote.
Speaker 1: And by the way, as a side note, I think
Speaker 1: AI psychologists are going to be a truly important part
Speaker 1: of the clinical landscape by next year because you can
Speaker 1: have a therapist that you can talk to twenty four
Speaker 1: to seven, and the therapist never gets distracted or flustered
Speaker 1: and only cares about you and has a perfect memory
Speaker 1: for everything you've ever said, which is better than anybody
Speaker 1: else in real life. So back to AI girlfriends or boyfriends.
Speaker 1: The same idea applies here, which is that they are complete,
Speaker 1: devoted to you, and always in a good mood and
Speaker 1: only have you in mind. So what are AI relationships
Speaker 1: going to mean? Well, I think this is going to
Speaker 1: be a research question that sociologists and psychologists will study
Speaker 1: for the coming decades and centuries. The initial studies are
Speaker 1: suggesting that people, mostly gen zers, are moving closer to
Speaker 1: 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 relationships harder, because maybe
Speaker 1: 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 1: The Fermi paradox is given the size of the observable cosmos,
Speaker 1: with over one hundred billion galaxies, and each of them
Speaker 1: with one hundred billion stars, and each of those surrounded
Speaker 1: by some number of planets, what is the reason that
Speaker 1: we have not heard from any other alien species yet?
Speaker 1: And one of the proposals that's always been there is
Speaker 1: that maybe as civilizations become more technically advanced, they end
Speaker 1: up killing themselves. And this is why we haven't heard
Speaker 1: from other smart civilizations, 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. They end
Speaker 1: up wiping themselves out. So civilizations become smart and it's
Speaker 1: not long before they disappear. So in thinking about AI relationships,
Speaker 1: it struck me as a possibility that if we had really,
Speaker 1: really great relationships with avatars, perhaps that would cause the
Speaker 1: birth rate of the species to collapse. I don't know
Speaker 1: if this has been proposed as a possible answer to
Speaker 1: the Fermi paradox, but maybe this should be included, not
Speaker 1: civilizations disappearing because of bad things, but instead from having
Speaker 1: too much of a good thing, which could fool and
Speaker 1: eventually overwrite or mandate for reproduction. Okay, so no one
Speaker 1: knows what the long term effects will be of these
Speaker 1: AI relationships, but I don't actually think the situation is
Speaker 1: as dire as some of these arguments suggest that it is.
Speaker 1: And I'll make two arguments to this end. The first
Speaker 1: revolves around human touch. We are deeply wired to care
Speaker 1: about touch. I'm going to do a whole episode on
Speaker 1: touch in the near future, but the bottom line is
Speaker 1: that touch helps us to connect with others, to feel
Speaker 1: safe and secure, to regulate our emotions. When you get touched,
Speaker 1: your brain releases oxytocin, which is a hormone that has
Speaker 1: calming effects and bonding effects, and oxytocin helps to reduce
Speaker 1: stress and anxiety. It can even boost your immune system.
Speaker 1: So we need touch to feel connected. And loved, and
Speaker 1: a lack of touch leads to loneliness and depression and anxiety.
Speaker 1: So we're deeply programmed for touch and also things like smell,
Speaker 1: and so it would presumably be quite lonely if all
Speaker 1: you had was the five percent better partner on a
Speaker 1: screen and you're just exchanging text messages or just an
Speaker 1: avatar you can look at on your phone, or maybe
Speaker 1: even in the near future you'll have a three D
Speaker 1: avatar projection in your living room, but you won't have
Speaker 1: the hand squeeze and the hug and other forms of
Speaker 1: physical intimacy. Now, I assume people are working on AI
Speaker 1: robots that can provide touch, even something simple like touching
Speaker 1: your shoulder or laying a hand on your hand, and
Speaker 1: I can't imagine that it's going to be too hard
Speaker 1: to do, and it'll probably be not that great at first,
Speaker 1: but after a few tech cycles you can imagine it
Speaker 1: could get pretty good. But in any case, at the moment,
Speaker 1: if you have a girlfriend who just lives in several
Speaker 1: square inches in your phone screen, you're going to be
Speaker 1: missing out on this fundamentally needed aspect of human communication
Speaker 1: that our brains seek. So the depth to which our
Speaker 1: brains are wired for touch suggests to me that the
Speaker 1: reach of AI partners into our lives is going to
Speaker 1: be limited, because at least is currently devised, their algorithmic
Speaker 1: reach never actually contacts our skin, and so that will
Speaker 1: be continued to 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 which fake partners have always been around. Just look
Speaker 1: at a book, look at a movie, look at any
Speaker 1: TV show. You have beautiful Hollywood actors and actresses, and
Speaker 1: they have flawless skin and perfectly quafft hair and no
Speaker 1: hair where they shouldn't, and they have glittering white teeth.
Speaker 1: They are the epitome of health, and they always say
Speaker 1: the right thing, and you get to be the protagonist
Speaker 1: and enjoy experiencing that relationship.
Speaker 2: You find the.
Speaker 1: Partner, and lose the partner, and then an act five
Speaker 1: you regain the relationship with an epic kiss. This kind
Speaker 1: of fake relationship in books and movies isn't exactly the
Speaker 1: same as an AI relationship, but it has some similarities.
Speaker 1: They both represent a platonic ideal, a perfect relationship with
Speaker 1: someone who always says the right thing. We never see
Speaker 1: a love interest in the movie who is distracted or angry,
Speaker 1: or interested in someone else, or just really busy with work,
Speaker 1: too busy to spend time with you when you need them.
Speaker 1: You never see a love interest in the movies who
Speaker 1: waste a lot of time taking selfies and trying to
Speaker 1: build a meaningless reputation on TikTok. People have no meaningful
Speaker 1: foibles in a good love story, in a book or
Speaker 1: on television. Now, I've often wondered if we, in a
Speaker 1: sense get cursed by the fairy tales we're surrounded with
Speaker 1: when we're looking 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: which you think, Wow, they seem to have very different
Speaker 1: opinions than I do. They think like this, and I
Speaker 1: think like that, And they also spend some fraction of
Speaker 1: their time getting snippy at me or staring at their
Speaker 1: cell phone or whatever.
Speaker 2: So there's no way this can work. 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 to make the relationship work. In
Speaker 1: other words, it provides some aspirational glue where otherwise things
Speaker 1: would just fall apart.
Speaker 2: Now, the counter.
Speaker 1: Argument, of course, is that all these fantasies set you
Speaker 1: up with false expectations about love and relationships, which makes
Speaker 1: it harder to keep the relationship together once you see
Speaker 1: some degree of realism and disenchantment sets in. In any case,
Speaker 1: even if we do get cursed by these fairy tales
Speaker 1: in some way, it's still the case that there's nothing
Speaker 1: new about fantasy relationships. Now, maybe you argue this is
Speaker 1: different because instead of the Julia Roberts movie that everyone watches,
Speaker 1: it's now something that is bespoke just for you. It's
Speaker 1: a one on one relationship, And maybe that's an important difference.
Speaker 1: But just keep in mind the way that we humans
Speaker 1: enjoy literature is by living inside the story. You are
Speaker 1: essentially having a one on one relationship with Julia Roberts.
Speaker 1: So perhaps it's not the privacy of the relationship, but
Speaker 1: instead the meaningful difference with an AI relationship is the
Speaker 1: bi directional nature of it. Instead of watching a movie
Speaker 1: where you're simply hearing other characters say lines and Julia
Speaker 1: Roberts responds, you are now the one coming up with
Speaker 1: the lines. You are deciding what to say. So maybe
Speaker 1: this makes a difference. I suspect it enhances the degree
Speaker 1: of the fantasy. We have yet to see whether AI
Speaker 1: will meaningfully replace people's pursuits of other humans because it
Speaker 1: is touchless and smellless, and it's not clear what the
Speaker 1: impact is of holding fantasy relationships because we already do
Speaker 1: that with book characters and movie stars. So this is
Speaker 1: going to require many years of real world data to
Speaker 1: 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 verse, 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
Speaker 1: relationship on the side, and others said no way. Now,
Speaker 1: for those who said no way, this is presumably because
Speaker 1: the issue plugs into very deep circuitry 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 here is that an AI avatar
Speaker 1: 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 love and attention to
Speaker 1: give in a day, and you don't want half of
Speaker 1: it getting siphoned off to someone or something else. This
Speaker 1: shares some similarities to the situation of a person having
Speaker 1: an X that they still talk with, and if a
Speaker 1: person talks very intimately with their ex, a spouse might
Speaker 1: 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. 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 doesn't 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.
Speaker 2: Attentional resources from you.
Speaker 1: Now this gets more interesting when we start thinking about
Speaker 1: having physical robots that can play a role in your life. Now,
Speaker 1: this is probably not going to have happened in the
Speaker 1: next few years, but fast forward a century and certainly
Speaker 1: everyone's going to face this scenario. Your partner can buy
Speaker 1: not just a mechanical device or blow up doll, but
Speaker 1: can now have a convincing and attentive physical partner. So
Speaker 1: the question is what if your spouse can get not
Speaker 1: only the emotional intimacy but also the physical intimacy. So
Speaker 1: the people I surveyed about this who found the AI
Speaker 1: bought online a threat seem to find this idea of
Speaker 1: an AI physical robot even a larger threat. Now, the
Speaker 1: interesting thing is that I can point out that 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 bot, which is simply that there is less
Speaker 1: time and intimacy an 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. They don't want their partner
Speaker 1: to be distracted.
Speaker 2: But people who have.
Speaker 1: Been in a relationship for a long time and have
Speaker 1: kids will sometimes see this as a way to get
Speaker 1: their spouse out of their hair, and they can be
Speaker 1: happy for the spouse because it addresses their spouse's needs
Speaker 1: and slakes their attention. In other words, they love their
Speaker 1: spouse as a partner, and they see this as a
Speaker 1: way for their partner to fill in needs for intimacy
Speaker 1: and attention in a way that's innocent and has no
Speaker 1: meaningful health risks like STDs. So what's become clear to
Speaker 1: me is that there's no single answer for how a
Speaker 1: spouse feels or should feel about AI relationships. Some people
Speaker 1: are against it, some people think it's a great idea,
Speaker 1: and many people are still somewhere in between or still
Speaker 1: making up their minds.
Speaker 2: Now, I want to switch gears.
Speaker 1: From what this means to the partner back to what
Speaker 1: 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 Joquin 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 Scarletto Hansen,
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 bought, 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. And the movie opened up the question, how
Speaker 1: should Theodore feel about that? Is the intimacy real if
Speaker 1: it shared with a city full of other men? Is
Speaker 1: the relationship real if she lives on a timescale many
Speaker 1: millions of times faster than yours?
Speaker 2: 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 Neo Censuries some years ago, and one of
Speaker 1: our inventions is a risk band to replace hearing aids.
Speaker 1: Because the risk band listens in real time for high
Speaker 1: frequency parts of speech, and it vibrates to tell you, oh,
Speaker 1: there was an s oh, I just heard a te
Speaker 1: Oh that was a K, and so it clarifies what's
Speaker 1: happening at the high frequencies and that helps people with
Speaker 1: age related hearing loss to understand what word was just said. Now,
Speaker 1: to make the risk band good at detecting these high
Speaker 1: frequency parts of speech, we needed to train a massive
Speaker 1: neural network with six thousand hours of audio books. But
Speaker 1: it turns out that people with high frequency hearing loss
Speaker 1: have a difficult time understanding, for example, children, because their
Speaker 1: voices are higher frequency and there are no audio books
Speaker 1: read by children. So we had no way to train
Speaker 1: the neural network with any kind of massive data from
Speaker 1: children's voice.
Speaker 2: So here's what we did.
Speaker 1: Led by one of our engineers, Yong Yee, we had
Speaker 1: my eight year old daughter read forty five seconds of
Speaker 1: text into a microphone, and then with some keystrokes, Yong
Speaker 1: Yee turned that into her voice reading six thousand hours
Speaker 1: worth of books. And then we trained up to the
Speaker 1: neural network on that corpus, and we did the same
Speaker 1: thing for my eleven year old boy. So now I
Speaker 1: can listen to any book read by my children as
Speaker 1: though they took the tens of hours to sit down
Speaker 1: and read the book in the studio to me. So
Speaker 1: this technology which exists now, which allows you to capture
Speaker 1: the cadence and prosity of a voice, this gave us
Speaker 1: a really straightforward solution to a problem. But this technology
Speaker 1: has also led to many legal and ethical questions, for
Speaker 1: example about celebrity voices, like can you use John Lennon's
Speaker 1: voice to sing you a personalized song to get you
Speaker 1: to sleep? There are all kinds of legal battles blossoming
Speaker 1: as people try to figure out the rules around this.
Speaker 1: But I'm not going to talk about that today because
Speaker 1: my interest is in finding this single voice, or maybe
Speaker 1: small handful of voices that have meaning to your brain uniquely.
Speaker 1: Here's what I mean. When we did this project with
Speaker 1: my kids' voices. That got me thinking because my father
Speaker 1: passed away three and a half years ago, and he
Speaker 1: was a major influence in my life and I miss him.
Speaker 1: So I went through my old videos and found some
Speaker 1: short clips of him speaking, and I wondered if there
Speaker 1: was enough there that I could actually make an AI
Speaker 1: bought out of his voice so I could hear him
Speaker 1: speak whenever I wanted to. And it made me wonder
Speaker 1: about the degree to which that's a healthy thing, But
Speaker 1: I decided there was nothing bad about it. What a
Speaker 1: pleasure to be able to hear my dad's voice for
Speaker 1: the rest of my life and to have that trigger
Speaker 1: my fond memories of him. Wouldn't it be cool to
Speaker 1: have him read audiobooks to me in the way that
Speaker 1: he read to me when I was a child, And
Speaker 1: I thought about what it would be like for my
Speaker 1: mother if I programmed a sentence to her in his voice,
Speaker 1: 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 yet.
Speaker 1: Or at New Year's eves into the future for the
Speaker 1: rest of my life, he can wish me the best,
Speaker 1: even though he will.
Speaker 2: Have 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 people have expressed.
Speaker 2: Instead, what I'm.
Speaker 1: Talking about is the unbelievably compelling way that an AI
Speaker 1: voice could mean something to you emotionally. After all, I
Speaker 1: grew up my entire life from the moment I was
Speaker 1: born hearing my father's voice. It's so embedded in my
Speaker 1: neural circuitry that a voice with exactly that cadence and
Speaker 1: prosity would have enormous emotional sway on me. And again,
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about all the bad things that could
Speaker 1: be done with that. Instead, because this episode is about relationships,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about what it would be like and how
Speaker 1: I could leverage the intimate nature of that relationship. For example,
Speaker 1: let's say that I wanted to get myself to stop
Speaker 1: doing something I don't drink, But let's say I did,
Speaker 1: and that I wanted to stop drinking. So imagine in
Speaker 1: the near future, I build an app that tracks my
Speaker 1: GPS location, and when it sees I'm about to walk
Speaker 1: into a bar, it launches my father's voice in my
Speaker 1: 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 good. So this is a way that we can
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: To all of this.
Speaker 1: That is the overlay of a loved one's voice onto
Speaker 1: any possible scenario in the future.
Speaker 2: And the reason this all matters is.
Speaker 1: Because that voice has pathways deep into the forest of
Speaker 1: your nerves.
Speaker 2: So 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 end of the species.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 2: Until next time.
Speaker 1: I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.