Speaker 1: Why is it so hard to define intelligence? And what
Speaker 1: does this have to do with being a fish in
Speaker 1: water trying to describe water? Might we humans possess one
Speaker 1: kind of intelligence in a constellation of many other types?
Speaker 1: And what does this have to do with empathy or
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence or our search for extraterrestrial life. 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 we sail
Speaker 1: deeply into our three pound universe to understand some of
Speaker 1: the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: about minds and whether there might exist very different kinds
Speaker 1: of minds. So I'm going to boot this up with
Speaker 1: a prediction that I made last year. I've always noticed
Speaker 1: that some people feel annoyed when they ask chat GPT
Speaker 1: a question, Let's say a political question like was so
Speaker 1: and so a good president and chat GPT answers with
Speaker 1: something neutral like Some people feel this way. Some people
Speaker 1: feel that way. More discussion and debate is needed here,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people who feel that they hold
Speaker 1: very clear political stances they criticize chat GPT for this.
Speaker 1: They say, look, it feels wishy wash. It's not taking
Speaker 1: a stand on anything. It is stuck in neutral. It's
Speaker 1: not brave enough to take a position. But I feel
Speaker 1: these sorts of answers from lms are the sign that
Speaker 1: we are currently living in the golden era of AI.
Speaker 1: And this golden era is sure to end, just like
Speaker 1: the golden age of the Pax Romana. So the prediction
Speaker 1: i'm year ago on this podcast is that people on
Speaker 1: the far ends of the political spectrum will start getting frustrated.
Speaker 1: How come this AI isn't telling me the true answer,
Speaker 1: the answer that I can so clearly see, and anybody
Speaker 1: who is saying would clearly agree with me. So my
Speaker 1: prediction is that quite soon, as soon as the architectures
Speaker 1: drop in cost for training these models, we're going to
Speaker 1: see the far left progressives training their own model and
Speaker 1: the far right conservatives training their own model, and both
Speaker 1: sides will say, look, we don't want this garbage literature
Speaker 1: to pollute the training data, so we're gonna leave all
Speaker 1: this stuff out and just include the writing that is
Speaker 1: consistent with the truth. And obviously anything we disagree with
Speaker 1: comes from people who are just trolls or obstreperous or
Speaker 1: at minimum are badly misinformed, and if they'll just come
Speaker 1: to read the AI wisdom that we know to be true,
Speaker 1: then they will see the light of our way and
Speaker 1: the error of theirs. So this is my prediction about
Speaker 1: the Balkanization of AI that will come about. But perhaps
Speaker 1: there's a broader way to think about this. Perhaps there
Speaker 1: are indeed different types of artificial intelligence, not just in
Speaker 1: terms of how they're trained up, but more fundamentally about
Speaker 1: their architecture. Perhaps there are very different ways to think.
Speaker 1: In other words, what if there are different types of intelligence,
Speaker 1: not just one artificial intelligence, and also many different types
Speaker 1: of natural intelligence. Now on this topic, there's no one
Speaker 1: better in the world to talk with than my friend
Speaker 1: Kevin Kelly, who's been chewing on this for a while.
Speaker 1: Kevin is one of the fathers of Silicon Valley, not
Speaker 1: because he's a techie, but instead because he's one of
Speaker 1: the deepest philosophers and connoisseurs of technology. He has a
Speaker 1: long and storied history that I'll link on the show notes,
Speaker 1: but I'll just mention for now that he's the founding
Speaker 1: executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor of
Speaker 1: The Whole Earth Review. He's the founder of the cool
Speaker 1: Tools website, and he's one of the founders of the
Speaker 1: Long Now Foundation. He's written multiple best selling books about
Speaker 1: the future of technology, which I'll link. And one of
Speaker 1: the many things that I love about Kevin is that
Speaker 1: he's a radical optimist and an extremely creative thinker. So
Speaker 1: I wrung up Kevin to talk with him about his
Speaker 1: view of intelligences. Does intelligence mean just one thing? Or
Speaker 1: might there be lots of different ways it could manifest? So, Kevin,
Speaker 1: we're all talking about AI, and people are talking about AGI,
Speaker 1: and we're aiming towards these things. But you have a
Speaker 1: very interesting view on it, which is that we can't
Speaker 1: look at AI as one thing, but instead there are
Speaker 1: multiple ais we need to be thinking about. So tell
Speaker 1: us about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I think we should force ourselves to use
Speaker 2: the plural AIS whenever we're talking about this. It's very
Speaker 2: to me, very similar to machines. We have a lot
Speaker 2: of machines in our life, but we don't talk about
Speaker 2: the machine. We don't have a single regulatory apparatus for
Speaker 2: the machine. We don't have a single operating manual. We
Speaker 2: have multiple machines in our lives, and we're going to
Speaker 2: have multiple ais in our lives, and those ais individually
Speaker 2: will have different characters, they'll have different needs, they'll have
Speaker 2: different tasks, they'll have different abilities, they'll be different species.
Speaker 3: Almost.
Speaker 2: We can think of them as different species of mind.
Speaker 2: Something that might be a slow, minimal kind, something that
Speaker 2: might be fast and peculiar, one might be imaginative and
Speaker 2: one dimension, but not others. And so I think the
Speaker 2: fallacy that we have is we imagine intelligence as a
Speaker 2: single dimension, kind of like amplitude or sound decibels kind
Speaker 2: of goes up abup, and there's like a ladder and
Speaker 2: we're kind of climbing up, and we've got the rats
Speaker 2: and you know, the chimp, and then the human, and
Speaker 2: then we've got Ai above us, and that there's this
Speaker 2: this one dimensional thing. But what we're going to discover,
Speaker 2: and we have already with with what we've made so far,
Speaker 2: is that it's multi dimensional. It's a very big space.
Speaker 2: So the space of possible minds is vast, and human
Speaker 2: kind of intelligence we're at the edge. We're an edge species,
Speaker 2: like we're at the edge of the galaxy. We have
Speaker 2: a very peculiar mix of different kind of primitive cognitions
Speaker 2: and we have one species of mind, and the things
Speaker 2: that we're inventing are going to be many other kinds
Speaker 2: of thinking. And the reason why that's important is that
Speaker 2: there may be certain things that we want to do
Speaker 2: and understand that our own kind of intelligence can't by itself,
Speaker 2: but we can understand it with the two step process
Speaker 2: of inventing another kind of intelligence that can work with us,
Speaker 2: so that we can understand or make something that we
Speaker 2: can't do by ourselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, in neuroscience, this has been one of
Speaker 1: the challenges for the last one hundred years, is even
Speaker 1: defining intelligence for humans. So some people think, well, maybe
Speaker 1: it's about being able to squelch distractors, or some people think, well,
Speaker 1: maybe it's about being able to simulate possible futures, or
Speaker 1: you know, there's twenty theories out there about what intelligence is,
Speaker 1: but it's probably one of these words that has too
Speaker 1: much semantic weight on it is trying to incorporate many things.
Speaker 1: And so your take on this is that the way
Speaker 1: to go about this is to think even more broadly
Speaker 1: about what intelligence could be, what we might mean by it,
Speaker 1: and all the ways that we're going to invent different machines,
Speaker 1: forms of AI to get there. So you recently made
Speaker 1: a list, well, actually in your book The Inevitable, right,
Speaker 1: you made a list of possible minds. Yeah, let's start.
Speaker 1: Let's start there, give us a sense of possible minds
Speaker 1: to get us to expand our brains on this.
Speaker 2: Let me just say one of the things that's very
Speaker 2: common when you talk to people about what they imagined
Speaker 2: super intelligence is something that's super beyond human and what
Speaker 2: does that look like or feel like or how do
Speaker 2: we see it? And the most common response is sort
Speaker 2: of like human thinking but faster. Yeah, billion times faster.
Speaker 2: And okay, that's one version anything else. So there's again
Speaker 2: there's this idea of a singular thing. We have this
Speaker 2: thing and we're gonna make it faster, and that's just
Speaker 2: super and then that's it and I don't think so.
Speaker 2: So part of the chore about the challenge about thinking
Speaker 2: about possible minds is to think about things other than
Speaker 2: just this time element, although that's one of them. And
Speaker 2: so one of the first possible minds is something that
Speaker 2: thinks really really slow. You can imagine it's kind of
Speaker 2: mind waves being so slow that we can't even see it.
Speaker 2: We don't even recognize them, they're kind of really really slow,
Speaker 2: and so in a certain weird way, evolution is that
Speaker 2: evolution is a kind of learning that happens on a
Speaker 2: very large time scale, and we can't see it on
Speaker 2: an every day perspective, but we can see it over time,
Speaker 2: and so there could be slow kinds of intelligences that
Speaker 2: may be more powerful in the sense that they're wider,
Speaker 2: but not its early faster.
Speaker 3: So that's just kind of like the first one.
Speaker 2: One of the challenges again, as you mentioned, is that
Speaker 2: we use the word intelligence, and I think it's a
Speaker 2: form of ignorance in the sense that they're probably well,
Speaker 2: I've been reading about the early days of the discovery
Speaker 2: of electricity or the invention of electricity, and it was
Speaker 2: really early interested. And this is way before Tesla. This
Speaker 2: is like at the Faraday in Davies, where they're trying
Speaker 2: to really understand what it was. And it was remarkable
Speaker 2: because a lot of the smartest people in the world,
Speaker 2: Newton and others, were completely wrong. They had these ideas
Speaker 2: of Flakistan and the ether. They just had no idea
Speaker 2: what it was, and they were really struggling. At the
Speaker 2: same time they were trying to figure out what materials were,
Speaker 2: what substances were before we had the idea of a
Speaker 2: periodic table, So there's stuff. Well, then we eventually understood
Speaker 2: that there were elements and the elements were recombined to
Speaker 2: form compounds, and that there was a fixed number of elements,
Speaker 2: and then you could identify the elements and then they
Speaker 2: were pretty distinct and that you made up. Salt was
Speaker 2: not an element, so it was actually a compound. Water
Speaker 2: was a compound. So you have all these compounds made
Speaker 2: from the elements. And what we're trying to do right
Speaker 2: now with intelligence is like, what are the elements that
Speaker 2: make up this compound that we call intelligence? And so
Speaker 2: there are things like maybe logic and deduction or reasoning,
Speaker 2: which may be different, and then there's memory and short
Speaker 2: term memory. There's a bunch of different elements that we
Speaker 2: don't know about that we don't know and haven't identified
Speaker 2: and can't describe, that are probably fundamental to making this
Speaker 2: thing we call intelligence. And so part of this little
Speaker 2: challenge of imagining possible minds is to think about what
Speaker 2: might those elements be and how might one rearrange them
Speaker 2: to make a different compound.
Speaker 1: That's very good, So tell us give us a sense
Speaker 1: of some other possible minds. Sure, so we can start
Speaker 1: thinking about what the periodic table will look like.
Speaker 2: So I've made a little list and I'm going to
Speaker 2: just use it for the prompt.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 2: One of the elements in our own intelligence is self awareness.
Speaker 2: But it's possible that you could have degrees of intelligence
Speaker 2: without self awareness. So we think somehow self awareness is
Speaker 2: instrumental for high intelligence, but you may be able to
Speaker 2: do a lot of things without any self awareness without
Speaker 2: the entity being a self aware that's what we have now, right, right,
Speaker 2: and vice versa. You might be able to have self
Speaker 2: awareness with very limited intelligence, yeah, okay, and so you
Speaker 2: could have kind of like this thing is really really
Speaker 2: good at doing things, but it's not aware of itself.
Speaker 2: And this thing isn't that capable in other words, but
Speaker 2: it's very aware of itself.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: So self awareness is one of those elements that you
Speaker 2: can kind of conjure with another one would be. One
Speaker 2: of the things about human intelligence is that I think
Speaker 2: we have very deliberately through evolution, restricted our access and
Speaker 2: ability to change ourselves to have access to our operating system.
Speaker 1: Right, because it's really dangerous, that's right. We have almost
Speaker 1: no access to what's happening under the hood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that there's a reason for that.
Speaker 2: But you could have minds that were much more had
Speaker 2: much more access to that mutability, to that changeability, to
Speaker 2: the reprogrammable nature of them. So there could be sophisticated
Speaker 2: compounds that had a reflexive ability to mess with themselves. Okay,
Speaker 2: so that's a different kind of mind. There's also one
Speaker 2: of the things about is like, like, what is the
Speaker 2: smallest possible mind that could accomplish something? This idea of
Speaker 2: like trying to minimize it. We're trying to do that
Speaker 2: with life right now. It's like, what's the smallest possible
Speaker 2: sell you could have and how far could you go?
Speaker 1: I mean, with something like a transistor count if you
Speaker 1: have current here and here, then it opens and otherwise
Speaker 1: it doesn't.
Speaker 2: And it's probably not complex enough because we I don't
Speaker 2: think we would say that it was intelligent. So when
Speaker 2: once we understand what we need to do reasoning, it's like,
Speaker 2: what's the smallest amount that we could do to get
Speaker 2: some reasoning?
Speaker 1: But a transistor does do reasoning in the sense that
Speaker 1: it says, hey, if I've got these two things, then
Speaker 1: I go, and if I don't, then I don't go.
Speaker 2: We haven't yet figured out what reasoning is. I don't
Speaker 2: think we have a good definition of reasoning. And so
Speaker 2: right now we're kind of in this incredibly exciting period
Speaker 2: where we say, some of these lms have some amount
Speaker 2: of reasoning. Can we measure that? Can we can we
Speaker 2: what's the metric? We don't have that yet, but I
Speaker 2: think we will come to understand that there's a difference
Speaker 2: between say, learning and reasoning. And again, this is our idea,
Speaker 2: like we're at the beginning of understanding the periodic table
Speaker 2: of cognition, and so another one would be you could
Speaker 2: have minds that forget things. Forgetting is actually very very
Speaker 2: important in many kinds of cognition.
Speaker 1: As the writer ball Zach said, memories beautify life, but
Speaker 1: only forgetting makes it bearable.
Speaker 2: Right, you could have ais that never forget anything, and
Speaker 2: you could have ais that have learned how to forget
Speaker 2: certain things. For again, we're going to again these are
Speaker 2: being engineered to do different tasks, and so there will
Speaker 2: be certain kind of tests where we want them to forget.
Speaker 2: So there'll be some you know, Nobel prize in the
Speaker 2: future for some AI researchers who figures out how to
Speaker 2: do intentional forgetting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it appears, by the way, that is an aspect
Speaker 1: of our intelligence. We forget most of the things happening
Speaker 1: in our lives. And one hypothesis that Francis Kriik suggested
Speaker 1: is that dreams are our way of taking out the
Speaker 1: garbage at nighttime. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so another aspect of different kinds of possible minds
Speaker 2: or minds that are would be easy to migrate versus
Speaker 2: ones that were difficult to migrate off of the substrate.
Speaker 2: So I am a big believer that the Church Turing
Speaker 2: hypothesis about computation.
Speaker 1: Can you explain that this misunderstood?
Speaker 2: So the Church Turing, how about this is about computation says,
Speaker 2: given enough storage and memory, all forms of computation are equivalent.
Speaker 2: That you can emulate what one computer can do another
Speaker 2: computer can do if you have enough storage and capacity.
Speaker 2: And I think that's the key thing is that in
Speaker 2: real time there isn't equivalency that that it makes a difference.
Speaker 2: It actually makes a difference. What's the substrate you're running on.
Speaker 2: They're not equivalent because there's a matter of time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if you have an infinite space. But no computer has
Speaker 2: infinite tape. You have you're always finite. That's reality, your finite.
Speaker 2: You have finite time, you have to make a decision.
Speaker 2: If you emilate it, you're going slower. And so those
Speaker 2: make the difference when we come to intelligence, and so
Speaker 2: that the kinds of ais that we make on silicon
Speaker 2: will always behave differently than one running on wetwear on tissue. Okay,
Speaker 2: So one of the other hypotheses about the possible mind
Speaker 2: landscape is that a lot of those varieties come from
Speaker 2: operating on different substrates on different brains, that the brains.
Speaker 2: It's not like the materialists where it doesn't matter what
Speaker 2: the brain is made out of. I'm saying it absolutely
Speaker 2: does matter what the brain is made out of, because
Speaker 2: you will get a different compound from that, because there
Speaker 2: is a spatial element that makes a difference in the
Speaker 2: actual output of this. And so one of the things
Speaker 2: that the possible mind landscape would say is that all
Speaker 2: the minds that we're making are alien.
Speaker 3: They're not human. They're not human like.
Speaker 2: The only way we can make human like intelligence is
Speaker 2: to have a human like brain. We could make artificial
Speaker 2: minds that are based on cells, and the more cellular
Speaker 2: and gray matter or like they would be, the more
Speaker 2: that compound intelligence would resemble ours. But when we're making
Speaker 2: them on silicon, there are going to be alien intelligences,
Speaker 2: which doesn't mean that they're stupid. They could be very,
Speaker 2: very smart. It's just that they're different. They have a
Speaker 2: different character, they have a different personality, they're different. They're
Speaker 2: different in the way that Spack a Star Trek is
Speaker 2: different than Kirk, and that difference.
Speaker 3: Is actually their benefit. It's the fact that they're not
Speaker 3: thinking like we think.
Speaker 1: Right in the sense that a show like Westworld, there's
Speaker 1: an amusement park that's made, and we build robots that
Speaker 1: look just like humans so we can interact with them.
Speaker 1: But I've often thought that we probably are never going
Speaker 1: to build robots that look just like humans, because there's
Speaker 1: no point. We already have humans. Humans are easy enough
Speaker 1: to make, and what we do with our machine means
Speaker 1: in general is build things that do things that we
Speaker 1: are different. Yeah, exactly right, right.
Speaker 2: I think we will make humanoid robots because that's the interface,
Speaker 2: because we want them operating in our world, and we're
Speaker 2: comfortable with that scale. We're comfortable with the emotional connection,
Speaker 2: and so there are a lot of reasons to make
Speaker 2: them humanoid, but there's no reason to make them look
Speaker 2: like exactly like us. Okay, that they will be alien,
Speaker 2: and that's good because we need the alien intelligences to
Speaker 2: do the things that we can't do by ourselves. We
Speaker 2: can make another human in nine months, so we want
Speaker 2: to make other kinds of minds, and all those minds
Speaker 2: are going to be aliens to us in the sense
Speaker 2: that because they're running on a different substrate, they can
Speaker 2: fake a lot of human behavior, and they will because
Speaker 2: we're going to be comfortable with it, but they won't
Speaker 2: be exactly like this because they're running on a different substrate.
Speaker 1: Now, can you imagine a scenario where a system is
Speaker 1: built such that it's just call it a bigger a
Speaker 1: much bigger brain than we are, and it can emulate
Speaker 1: our intelligence on part of its hardware.
Speaker 2: It will imitate a lot of it, but because it's
Speaker 2: running on a different substrate, it cannot do exactly what
Speaker 2: we're doing. So my hypothesis is that this brain makes
Speaker 2: a difference to the mind. Okay, that they're not equivalent
Speaker 2: if you take into account the fact that they're that
Speaker 2: they're limited by time and space. Doing the conversation that
Speaker 2: we do in our brains is will give a different
Speaker 2: quality and maybe different answers to something that's done on silicon.
Speaker 1: Okay, And so so that we can keep stretching our
Speaker 1: minds here give us some other possibilities.
Speaker 2: So one is I think we could imagine minds that
Speaker 2: are very very specialized in working with individual peoples. It's like,
Speaker 2: not quite a clone to me, but a dedicated, very
Speaker 2: personalized AIS, very very personalized to my specific need and
Speaker 2: personality in my own brain that would be different from
Speaker 2: other humans.
Speaker 3: And they're pairing.
Speaker 2: So it's sort of like a paired mind, a mind
Speaker 2: that is built to be paired with my mind to
Speaker 2: work with my mind, and that's its only job, and
Speaker 2: it's really good at that. It's not good at anything else,
Speaker 2: and it's not good with working with you. So this
Speaker 2: idea of a paired intelligence.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's cool. So right now people are doing that,
Speaker 1: of course, with AI that learned your stuff, maybe reads
Speaker 1: all your emails and song. But you're saying, instead of
Speaker 1: a general AI that learns learns me, one that actually is.
Speaker 2: Built, right, It's constructed, its programmed, it's the weights, it's
Speaker 2: trained on me, so that it is unusable by somebody else.
Speaker 2: That's how dedicated it is. It's it's it's paired in
Speaker 2: that sense. Another one would be so so we can imagine,
Speaker 2: of course I had this, I had this kind of
Speaker 2: a grid of like the four possible directions of humanity
Speaker 2: with just two axises. One is, we can imagine a
Speaker 2: future of humanity that has many species of humans and
Speaker 2: many minds. Okay, so we speciate, yes, over time, we
Speaker 2: could imagine. Another one is we have many species of
Speaker 2: humans and one mind. Well, like, okay, where we are
Speaker 2: telepathy just does we're connected so much, even though we're
Speaker 2: different species, we're all in tune, and we create kind
Speaker 2: of a single borg intelligence on the planet.
Speaker 1: Then you can imagine before we move on to what
Speaker 1: degree do we have something moving in that direction with us,
Speaker 1: say the Internet? Yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker 2: So that's just to kind of indicate that there's a
Speaker 2: there's a there's a cold class of minds, that these
Speaker 2: are kind of superminds, these these aggregated minds made up
Speaker 2: of many many humans, and so we have we have
Speaker 2: the mind of all humans working together.
Speaker 3: If we had some kind of.
Speaker 2: Technologies that would allow us to telepathically connect to each other.
Speaker 2: It was like a neuralink, right, So you had a
Speaker 2: neuralink that kind of works at the large scale, and
Speaker 2: we're connected to others and we are we're creating some
Speaker 2: kind of superhuman mind at the skill of literally having humans,
Speaker 2: billions of them connected together. That would be a mind.
Speaker 2: That's the possible mind that we don't know very much about.
Speaker 2: So that's a possible mind. Then there's the possible mind
Speaker 2: of all the little ais linked up together. You have
Speaker 2: a thousand different species of ais and they are also connected,
Speaker 2: forming another level of AI that's operating much different dimension.
Speaker 1: And so, in a sense, is what everyone's going for
Speaker 1: with agentic AI. Where you have agents, you have lots
Speaker 1: and lots of agents going out and doing things, and
Speaker 1: presumably you get an emergent property out of the top.
Speaker 2: So you have this emergent one of all the a's,
Speaker 2: and then you have this other one of the emergent
Speaker 2: superhuman and the emergent AI, and together they form another
Speaker 2: huge thing of all the humans connect together and all
Speaker 2: the Ais connect together, and that makes something else that's
Speaker 2: another possible mind.
Speaker 1: So let me just double click on this because it
Speaker 1: feels like there's a real sense in which many of
Speaker 1: these are already happening, which is to say, we have
Speaker 1: emergent properties. Right, Yeah, so for example, just having the
Speaker 1: Internet and having agents on the Internet, we're already sort
Speaker 1: of doing that where there's stuff happening at a different
Speaker 1: level that maybe we can't even see.
Speaker 2: Yes, so we're talking about this like especially to the fantasy,
Speaker 2: but it is actually already happening. The part of the problem,
Speaker 2: the challenges we don't have the vocabulary. We're not calling
Speaker 2: it that. We want to have the better vocabulary. We
Speaker 2: want to have a better understanding of what these nuances
Speaker 2: and differences are in types of cognition and types of
Speaker 2: intelligence that we can actually map it and say this
Speaker 2: kind of aggregate emergent intelligence does X and y. But yes,
Speaker 2: we are making these very large emergent things, and we
Speaker 2: can actually describe the substrate. I mean, you know, I've
Speaker 2: done these calculations. Imagine the Internet was one machine and
Speaker 2: it was like at a refresherrate of you know, twenty
Speaker 2: exhibits per second. It's got to you know, how many
Speaker 2: floating operations systems that does per second as a whole,
Speaker 2: It's just like insane and so we can specify the
Speaker 2: actual specifications of this as a machine, and it's and
Speaker 2: it's a very very large machine. We have a lot
Speaker 2: more difficulty in talking about the actual the intelligence because
Speaker 2: of what we said earlier that we don't have very
Speaker 2: good concepts about what intelligence is, what self awareness is,
Speaker 2: what consciousness is, what even how we measure this, what
Speaker 2: the elemental particles are of So we're really constrained there.
Speaker 2: But I think we're going. What I'm suggesting is we
Speaker 2: should work on that.
Speaker 1: You know, I remember about eight years ago you and
Speaker 1: I had a long hiking conversation about the search for
Speaker 1: Internet intelligence. It's analogous to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which
Speaker 1: was just hypothesizing what if this giant machine of the
Speaker 1: Internet has developed its own kind of intelligence? How would
Speaker 1: you how would you take as an example of the
Speaker 1: tools of neuroscience where we stick electrodes in and we
Speaker 1: look at things, How could you do that on the
Speaker 1: scale of the Internet.
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And so when I was thinking about the analog the
Speaker 2: first thing I did was go to the SETI search
Speaker 2: and say, well, how do they recognize intelligence? Well, the
Speaker 2: answer is that they have no idea. They aren't even
Speaker 2: searching for intelligence. They're only searching for anonymous signals, little
Speaker 2: signals that appear to me not map on natural that's all.
Speaker 1: They have no.
Speaker 2: Metric, they have no threshold, they have no criteria for intelligence.
Speaker 1: And so although wait just to challenge it, it does seem
Speaker 1: like that's a pretty good metric, just as an analogy,
Speaker 1: when people are searching for extraterrestrial life, the smartest way
Speaker 1: to do that is just looking for things that wouldn't
Speaker 1: happen by chance, molecular combinations that seem unlikely.
Speaker 2: So I went to see and there have been a
Speaker 2: couple of examples of things in the Internet that aren't
Speaker 2: explained that nobody can explain. There was a flash crash
Speaker 2: right some stock market some ten years ago. Nobody has
Speaker 2: ever had any explanation about there. There was a couple
Speaker 2: other little people who are looking at these anonymous signals
Speaker 2: that don't have any source that they can find. And
Speaker 2: so there are these signals that are hard to explain.
Speaker 2: And so is that enough for us to deduce this
Speaker 2: intelligent Oh?
Speaker 1: I see right, But right, probably not, because simply because
Speaker 1: we can't explain it doesn't necessitate some other thing. But
Speaker 1: it's certainly something to sniff after R right, it's it's
Speaker 1: the first step.
Speaker 2: So other kinds of possible minds are we could We
Speaker 2: could imagine minds that are very very smart intelligence by
Speaker 2: almost any measure that we have, but they're incapable of
Speaker 2: making something smarter than itself. In fact, we might even
Speaker 2: if we know about it, we might even design some
Speaker 2: ais like that, or of course we could make ais
Speaker 2: that had that even ability beyond what we have. It
Speaker 2: may be that our own minds, or that kind of
Speaker 2: a mind, it may be that our own minds are
Speaker 2: not capable of making a mind smarter than it self,
Speaker 2: but we might be able to make a different kind
Speaker 2: of mind that's not smarter ourselves, but to the other
Speaker 2: of the two of us can make something that's smarter
Speaker 2: than itself. And so there's a whole bunch of things
Speaker 2: about this ability of kind of bootstrapping and its abilities
Speaker 2: and whether we have So there's a bunch of different
Speaker 2: possible minds that would have capabilities of bootstrapping and others
Speaker 2: that don't have that, or others that require multiple kinds
Speaker 2: of like a complex or ecosystem of minds to produce it.
Speaker 2: So that's another threshold. In fact, I actually think a
Speaker 2: kind of a mind that we could make that could
Speaker 2: imagine a greater mind itself by not being able to capable.
Speaker 3: Of making it that and we might have that kind
Speaker 3: of mind.
Speaker 2: And then one of the primitives that I think are
Speaker 2: going to be that we're going to discover is the
Speaker 2: primitives of emotion. I think the next big shock is
Speaker 2: when we give emotions to these AIS, human emotions, real emotions.
Speaker 2: I mean, again, we have real intelligence. It's like synthetic
Speaker 2: intelligent emotion.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 2: We have this idea that when I was growing up
Speaker 2: that sort of like that emotions was something you had
Speaker 2: on you got after you were intelligent. But emotions are
Speaker 2: very very primitive, very primitive, very foundational, very fundamental, and
Speaker 2: as we begin to employ them in the AIS, it
Speaker 2: really changes the nature of those relationships and the power
Speaker 2: of what we think. And so here's a couple of
Speaker 2: things about emotions. One is that first of all, they're
Speaker 2: real emotions that we synthesize. Secondly, as possible that we
Speaker 2: could uncover new emotions, okay, devise new kinds of emotions
Speaker 2: with words and names. As we try to give them
Speaker 2: different kinds of emotions.
Speaker 1: Would it be purely academic for us as in its
Speaker 1: feeling this, or would we be able to learn how
Speaker 1: to experience the emotion ourselves.
Speaker 3: That's a good question.
Speaker 2: There may be people who were able to mirror those
Speaker 2: new kind of emotions. And by the way, the same
Speaker 2: thing's happening with AI and intelligences. Again, the way that
Speaker 2: AI's play chess is they play it differently than humans do,
Speaker 2: and even though they can beat humans, world class chess
Speaker 2: players are learning to play chess differently from watching how
Speaker 2: the AIS play chess.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right.
Speaker 2: And so it's possible that you could have new kinds
Speaker 2: of emotions and some people who are very sympathetic to
Speaker 2: it could maybe begin to have a different kind of
Speaker 2: emotion that normal humans don't have. That's very possible, it
Speaker 2: seems right.
Speaker 1: And of course we use vocabulary words to distinguish emotions,
Speaker 1: and as you, as you have your passage and dematuration,
Speaker 1: you realize the different shades and subtleties of emotions, and
Speaker 1: so maybe AI will be able to help us along
Speaker 1: with that. And as you're pointing out moving to different
Speaker 1: spaces where we hadn't even realized that that was the
Speaker 1: thing that we feel sometimes exactly right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, as we imagine the possible minds, one of
Speaker 2: their elements will be emotional component, which will vary tremendously.
Speaker 2: So we might want to have We can say, we
Speaker 2: can have some kind of AI that doesn't ever get depressed,
Speaker 2: or ones that had, you know, were constitutionally very optimistic,
Speaker 2: or other things. And so again, this will be somewhere
Speaker 2: we will be programming for particular purposes different elements of
Speaker 2: the emotional spectrum onto these AIS to accomplish certain things,
Speaker 2: and other kinds of emotions will be emergent from the
Speaker 2: other components. And it's like it, but again we will
Speaker 2: take an engineering approach to it.
Speaker 1: How are we going to be smart enough to know
Speaker 1: what kind of combinations we want? Because you know, you
Speaker 1: get certain kinds of thoughts and ideas out of a
Speaker 1: person with depression and out of a person with media
Speaker 1: and so on.
Speaker 2: So here's the weird thing about AI as a studies
Speaker 2: as a as a as a research area, which is
Speaker 2: that it is one of those things that we can
Speaker 2: only discover or learn by doing. We're at the point
Speaker 2: where we can't think about these and have advances just
Speaker 2: by thinking about things anymore. So we actually have to
Speaker 2: do all these things, try all these things, make the mistakes,
Speaker 2: and that's the only way we're going to learn about it.
Speaker 2: We are at the limits of how far we can
Speaker 2: get just by thinking about these things. Part of that is,
Speaker 2: and let me also to say is that I think
Speaker 2: we as a society over estimate the value of intelligence.
Speaker 2: I think IQ is just one component of what makes
Speaker 2: a successful human I think intelligence is only one component
Speaker 2: we'll make successful civilization. You need lots of other qualities.
Speaker 2: It's not the smartest person in the room who necessarily
Speaker 2: is the one who's going to accomplish what needs to
Speaker 2: be done. And so right now, a lot of middle
Speaker 2: aged guys who like to think will tell you that
Speaker 2: thinking is the most important thing in the world and
Speaker 2: that if you have really intelligence, that's all that matters.
Speaker 2: And so my little joke is, you know, but Einstein
Speaker 2: and a tiger in a cage who lives, it's not
Speaker 2: the smartest one. You need other qualities.
Speaker 1: Give me an example of other qualities that you're thinking about.
Speaker 2: Determination, perseverance, ability to cooperate with other, cooperation, collaboration, empathy,
Speaker 2: There's so many other things that are necessary to actually
Speaker 2: make change. Happen in the world that those are things
Speaker 2: that we were also, you know, as we generate these
Speaker 2: agents and other beings and other kinds of intelligence, we
Speaker 2: want to just keep in mind that IQ is overrated
Speaker 2: by us, and you need other qualities, and so as
Speaker 2: we make these machines, these other qualities will often be
Speaker 2: more important. It's kind of like, you know, pixel peeping.
Speaker 2: It's like there was a moment where people are saying resolution,
Speaker 2: the number of pixels and a camera that was the
Speaker 2: most important thing. There's just so many other things that
Speaker 2: are important in a great photograph other than this resolution. Okay,
Speaker 2: other than the IQ.
Speaker 1: What else do you have on your list?
Speaker 3: Two other things?
Speaker 2: One is I mentioned the necessity of how the brain
Speaker 2: is important to the mind, and so I think there
Speaker 2: will be attempts.
Speaker 3: To use.
Speaker 2: Tissue to make ais, to make some kind of biological computer,
Speaker 2: to use neurons, wet neurons, to actually make minds, and
Speaker 2: those minds will also have qualities, including the usual forebos
Speaker 2: of sickness and illness and other aspects that any kind
Speaker 2: of a wet.
Speaker 3: Biological being would.
Speaker 2: But that means that there is the prospect of kind
Speaker 2: of cyborg like things as well where where we we
Speaker 2: could have things in our own brains or next to
Speaker 2: our brains, or along with our brains. And so I
Speaker 2: don't know if I could describe what the minds would be,
Speaker 2: but I'm just suggesting maybe another route to making a
Speaker 2: different kind of mind is one that we not just
Speaker 2: have the AI and silicon, but we have cyb actual cyborgs,
Speaker 2: or trying to make a grill or a monkey mind
Speaker 2: smarter in a different way. So we have something that
Speaker 2: you're kind of genetically altering or ampling up, and you
Speaker 2: have a biological brain that's doing a different kind of competition.
Speaker 1: So can I can I just jump in with my
Speaker 1: fantasy of what that could look like, which is instead
Speaker 1: of having machinery that plugs in because that's very tough,
Speaker 1: you need to plug in electroc Yeah, there's all kinds
Speaker 1: of infection prompts. You know what if in one hundred
Speaker 1: years you could actually grow more neurons in there, and
Speaker 1: maybe I mean this is bizarre, but maybe you have
Speaker 1: you store them on the outside of your skull and
Speaker 1: you put sort of another skull on top of that.
Speaker 1: But what you have is just more brain tissue twice
Speaker 1: twice as much brain tissue as you have. I know
Speaker 1: this sounds creepy and insane, but yeah, maybe if a
Speaker 1: podcast listener is listening to this in two hundred years,
Speaker 1: they'll say, yeah, of course we got that already. But
Speaker 1: your question is what would the what would the mind
Speaker 1: be like? What would you what would your daily experience
Speaker 1: be if you had a core text that was twice
Speaker 1: as large as what you have now.
Speaker 2: Right, or even things like if you modified in some
Speaker 2: way so we didn't forget as much, you know, biologically
Speaker 2: so so so. So that's one thing. And the last
Speaker 2: idea in terms of the possible minds I just want
Speaker 2: to mention is quantum quantum computing. You know, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of people who believe that kind of that's the
Speaker 2: next thresholding and we get quantum and then it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like a singularity. We're into another realm entirely.
Speaker 2: I actually have a heretical stance where I think that
Speaker 2: quantum computer is inherently not going to be good for computation.
Speaker 1: Why it doesn't seem.
Speaker 2: To want to do computation, That's how I would put it.
Speaker 2: It doesn't it doesn't want to do computation. But I
Speaker 2: think it's going to be among the most amazing technologies
Speaker 2: because it's going to do other things in the quantum
Speaker 2: realm that we can't even imagine, but not computation. So
Speaker 2: I think computation is it's sort of it doesn't really want.
Speaker 3: To do competition. It wants to do other things.
Speaker 2: So it could have like a very different way of
Speaker 2: thinking that is not computationally based as our ais are,
Speaker 2: and it does something weirdly different that we don't even
Speaker 2: have words for it. I don't even know how to
Speaker 2: describe that, other than to say I think there can
Speaker 2: be possible minds with with quantum computing or quantum but
Speaker 2: they aren't going to be computational based.
Speaker 3: That's just a hypothesis.
Speaker 1: And that goes along with your hypothesis that we're going
Speaker 1: to have to try lots of things out in order
Speaker 1: to gather the data to make the theories about things.
Speaker 1: There's so much that's beyond what we can see right now.
Speaker 1: And this is, by the way, of course, a general
Speaker 1: thing in science, which is that sometimes we're at a
Speaker 1: moment where you can make a theoretical leap and say,
Speaker 1: here's what I think the periodic table would look like,
Speaker 1: and other times you just need to gather the data
Speaker 1: for a long time before you can get there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think we're in this realm of what
Speaker 2: I call the third culture. The first two cultures, being
Speaker 2: the humanities, was kind of one culture. Then there was
Speaker 2: the science that was Cpiece snows observation that we have
Speaker 2: two kinds of cultures and can you just double clicks?
Speaker 2: So yeah, CPS I had this idea there there's two cultures.
Speaker 2: There's the humanists and the humanities the arts and what
Speaker 2: they did was they kind of explored the human situation
Speaker 2: through creativity introspection, by reflecting kind of the human condition
Speaker 2: and something that people made. Then there was the scientists
Speaker 2: who explored the human addition by probes, by doing experiments,
Speaker 2: by testing reality. I think we're in the third We
Speaker 2: have a third culture we've made in the last thirty
Speaker 2: or fifty years, which is called what I call the
Speaker 2: nerd culture. The third culture is this idea that we
Speaker 2: explore the human condition by making alternatives to it, by
Speaker 2: making synthetic versions of it. We explore life by trying
Speaker 2: to make artificial life. We explore democracy by trying to
Speaker 2: do simulated worlds. We explore intelligence by trying to make intelligence,
Speaker 2: and I think we're going to actually learn more by
Speaker 2: making intelligence that don't work. We'll learn more about the
Speaker 2: human mind than one hundred years of neurobiology will teach us.
Speaker 1: That was my interview with Kevin Kelly, thinker and technologist.
Speaker 1: I love this approach to thinking about different kinds of
Speaker 1: intelligence because when we shine a flashlight around the possibility
Speaker 1: space and illuminate what things could look like, it clarifies
Speaker 1: our view about the things right in front of us,
Speaker 1: and this is the key to understanding anything in science.
Speaker 1: Otherwise we are like the proverbial fish in water trying
Speaker 1: to describe water. We've never seen anything but water, and
Speaker 1: therefore we don't have any way to describe it because
Speaker 1: we have no way to distinguish it from anything else.
Speaker 1: But happily, our species makes scientific progress because Homo sapiens
Speaker 1: developed an enormous prefrontal cortex, and this is fundamentally the
Speaker 1: brain structure that allows us to think about the what
Speaker 1: ifs that are beyond our daily experience. What ifs are
Speaker 1: the thing that drive our understanding of everything. When Einstein
Speaker 1: thought about what it would be like to ride on
Speaker 1: top of a beam of light, that opened up a
Speaker 1: new world for him that led to the special theory
Speaker 1: of relativity. When Charles Darwin looked around and thought, what
Speaker 1: species aren't here now but once might have existed? That
Speaker 1: ushered him down the path of understanding evolution by natural selection.
Speaker 1: And so it will have to be with our understanding
Speaker 1: of what intelligence is. We are the fish stuck in
Speaker 1: the water, with nothing to compare water against and therefore
Speaker 1: no way to make distinctions. That as we move forward,
Speaker 1: will increasingly build and study many different flavors of intelligence,
Speaker 1: and those other minds will be like things other than water.
Speaker 1: We'll see a bubble rise up past us, and we'll
Speaker 1: think what is that. We'll swim near an island and
Speaker 1: we'll see dirt and we'll think what is that. We'll
Speaker 1: dive down and circle a thermal vent and we'll think
Speaker 1: what is that? And with each new discovery we'll make
Speaker 1: new distinctions and get a better understanding of water. It
Speaker 1: will allow us for the first time to see what
Speaker 1: we've been swimming in the whole time. Go to eagleman
Speaker 1: dot com slash podcasts for more information and to find
Speaker 1: further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman
Speaker 1: dot com. With questions or discussion, and check out and
Speaker 1: subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each
Speaker 1: episode and to leave comments. Until next time, I'm David
Speaker 1: Eagleman and this is in Earth Cosmos