Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
Speaker 1: on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
Speaker 1: someone who has a front row seat to the most
Speaker 1: fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined by David Eagleman.
Speaker 1: David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, Stanford University professor, author, entrepreneur,
Speaker 1: and host of the podcast Inner Cosmos. In his podcast,
Speaker 1: Eagleman explores how our brain interprets the world and how
Speaker 1: that influences our perception. Ideas have been a source of
Speaker 1: fascination for Eagleman ever since he experienced an Alice in
Speaker 1: Wonderland moment many years ago.
Speaker 2: I fell off of the roof of a house when
Speaker 2: I was a kid.
Speaker 1: I was eight years old.
Speaker 2: The fall seemed to take a very long time, and
Speaker 2: I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland on the way down,
Speaker 2: about how this must have been what it was like
Speaker 2: for her to fall down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: He told me that the whole journey was very calm,
Speaker 1: but that it took a long time, and he remembers
Speaker 1: having lots and lots of thoughts on his way to
Speaker 1: the bottom.
Speaker 2: And then I hit the ground and broke my nose
Speaker 2: very badly. But when I got older and went to
Speaker 2: high school, I realized that the whole fall had taken
Speaker 2: point six of a second. I calculated the eagles one
Speaker 2: have at squared, and I couldn't believe that it was
Speaker 2: so so fast.
Speaker 1: When Eagleman became a neuroscientist, he kept exploring this relationship
Speaker 1: between our brain and our experiences, which led him to
Speaker 1: research things like is it possible to create a new
Speaker 1: sense or is there a new way of interpreting an
Speaker 1: already existing sense. This turned into a tech product for
Speaker 1: his company, Neosensory, that could help deaf people understand the
Speaker 1: auditory world through a vibrating wristband. David Eagleman is an
Speaker 1: innovator with a fascination for tech driven interventions, so we
Speaker 1: weren't surprised to see an episode of the Inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: podcast all about AI relationships, a widely reported phenomenon that
Speaker 1: we hear it tech stuff have been eager to explore.
Speaker 1: So we thought we'd ask Eagleman to help us understand
Speaker 1: how our brains form these attachments. But before we launch
Speaker 1: into that discussion, I asked Eagleman to tell me a
Speaker 1: bit more about the driving question. Behind his work, How
Speaker 1: does the human brain construct reality?
Speaker 2: Your brain is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull,
Speaker 2: and it only has spikes coming in. That's all it
Speaker 2: ever has, these little electrical signals. So your eyes aren't
Speaker 2: pushing light through, and your ears aren't pushing sound through. Instead,
Speaker 2: your eyes are converting photons into spikes, and ears are
Speaker 2: converting sound waves into spikes, and your fingertips are converting
Speaker 2: pressure and temperature into spikes and so on. So inside
Speaker 2: the brain there's nothing but these little electrical spikes running around,
Speaker 2: and it's living in the darkness and trying to figure
Speaker 2: out what is the world out there? And so everything
Speaker 2: that we experience as reality is actually the construction.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: For example, things like colors don't exist in the outside world.
Speaker 2: This is just a way to tag information as in
Speaker 2: that's a different wavelength than that over there, so they
Speaker 2: appear to be different colors. But this is the fascinating
Speaker 2: question that we're stuck with. We are inside Plato's cave,
Speaker 2: seeing shadows on the wall and trying to understand what
Speaker 2: is outside.
Speaker 1: Speaking of perception, did you ever figure out an answer
Speaker 1: to that question of why time slows down when our
Speaker 1: lives at risk.
Speaker 2: I did a number of experiments on this, actually the
Speaker 2: only experiments that I have ever been done on this
Speaker 2: question of the perception of time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, on the.
Speaker 2: Question of why does time slow now when you're in
Speaker 2: fear for your life. The reason no one had ever
Speaker 2: done experiments is because you have to actually put subjects
Speaker 2: in fear for their life, which is very hard to
Speaker 2: get approved. And so I dropped people from one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty foot tall tower backwards in free fall, and
Speaker 2: they're caught in a net below, going seventy miles an hour,
Speaker 2: and I built a di ice that strapped to their
Speaker 2: wrists and it flashes information at them. And I was
Speaker 2: able to measure whether they actually are seeing in slow
Speaker 2: motion during a scary event. And it turns out that
Speaker 2: it's all a trick of memory. What happens when you're
Speaker 2: in fear for your life is your brain is writing
Speaker 2: down every single thing. Normally, your brain is like a
Speaker 2: sieve and most things just passed right through, but you're
Speaker 2: capturing all the information. So it's not that you're seeing
Speaker 2: things in slow motion. It's just the density of memory.
Speaker 2: You're remembering everything.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: You're in a car actually say, wow, I remember the
Speaker 2: hood crumpling and the rear view mirror falling off, and
Speaker 2: the expression on the other guy's face. And you've got
Speaker 2: all these details, and your brain is doing a calculation
Speaker 2: where it says, oh, well, if I have all those details,
Speaker 2: it must have taken five seconds as opposed to one
Speaker 2: second for this all to happen.
Speaker 1: One of the kind of topics of tech stuff is
Speaker 1: what are the most exciting or promising paradigms for human
Speaker 1: machine interactions, particularly a time when there's so much concern
Speaker 1: about the negative effects of technology on the human brain. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the question of like, what is this doing to us
Speaker 1: in our brains and particularly developing brains. Do you have
Speaker 1: a kind of internal paradigm for how you think about
Speaker 1: the interaction between technology and our brains?
Speaker 2: More broadly, yeah, I have to say, I'll just put
Speaker 2: my cards on the table. Very cyber optimistic on these points,
Speaker 2: but I'll explain why. One is really what we want
Speaker 2: for our children is the largest available diet of information.
Speaker 2: When I was growing up, I had my homeroom teacher
Speaker 2: in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and you know, whatever she knew
Speaker 2: or didn't know, that's what I would learn, and I
Speaker 2: would get my mother to drive me down to the
Speaker 2: library and pull out an Encyclopedia Britannica and hope that
Speaker 2: there was an article about the thing that I wanted.
Speaker 2: And maybe the article wasn't you know, more than ten
Speaker 2: or fifteen years old, I hoped. And you know, this
Speaker 2: was really all the information that I had access to.
Speaker 2: But now my kids, growing up, the entire world's knowledge
Speaker 2: at their fingertips, and it's the greatest thing for two reasons.
Speaker 2: One is what I got growing up was lots of
Speaker 2: just in case information, like, just in case you ever
Speaker 2: need to know that the Battle of Hastings was in
Speaker 2: ten sixty six, here you go. But kids now get
Speaker 2: lots of just in time information. So as soon as
Speaker 2: they're curious about something, they look it up, they ask ALEXA,
Speaker 2: they type it in their phone, they do whatever, and
Speaker 2: they get the information in the context of their curiosity.
Speaker 2: And what that means is they have the right cocktail
Speaker 2: of neurotransmitters present for that information to stick. I mentioned
Speaker 2: before that most things just passed right through our brains,
Speaker 2: but when you care about something, it sticks. And the
Speaker 2: fact is that everything that we create is a remix
Speaker 2: of things that we've seen before. And so if you
Speaker 2: have a larger warehouse of things that you have seen
Speaker 2: and experienced, you're going to create better stuff. Just take
Speaker 2: as an example something like music. You know, if you
Speaker 2: grow up and you're somewhere in the world, let's say,
Speaker 2: two hundred years ago, all you're ever going to hear
Speaker 2: is the music of your local little area. But now
Speaker 2: kids can listen to music from all over the world,
Speaker 2: from all through history, and really put together bigger and
Speaker 2: bigger things. So this is why we're having this exponential
Speaker 2: increase in humankind's knowledge and innovation is because people are
Speaker 2: doing remixes across space and time in a way that's
Speaker 2: never been possible before. So I'm very optimistic about this. Yes,
Speaker 2: kids waste lots of time on social media, surfing dumb websites,
Speaker 2: things like that, but I think the good here outweighs
Speaker 2: the bad.
Speaker 1: As the father of children, are we already seeing how
Speaker 1: these brains are developing differently.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean these brains are developing very differently. But
Speaker 2: this is a very interesting thing. Lots of people in
Speaker 2: the media will pipe off with opinions on this, but
Speaker 2: the fact is it's very, very difficult to do a
Speaker 2: scientific experiment on this because of the lack of a
Speaker 2: control group, other words, my children. I can't find other
Speaker 2: kids who are the same age, who haven't grown up
Speaker 2: in the same circumstances, unless you find children who are
Speaker 2: let's say, Quaker, who don't use technology or very very
Speaker 2: impoverished in different places in the world. But there are
Speaker 2: a hundred other differences there. If I see a difference
Speaker 2: between my children and those children, I don't know if
Speaker 2: it's because of the tech or because of something else
Speaker 2: like diet or politics or whatever. And I can't take
Speaker 2: my children and compare them, let's say, to me in
Speaker 2: a previous generation, because there are a hundred other differences
Speaker 2: there in terms of pollution and politics and other tech
Speaker 2: and so on. So it's very difficult to do this
Speaker 2: in a control way. There are some studies, for example,
Speaker 2: looking at eye movements. You know, your eyes are jumping
Speaker 2: around all the time, about three times a second. These
Speaker 2: are called the CODs, and you can measure these things
Speaker 2: and you see that people, let's say, in my generation
Speaker 2: versus my children's generation, actually move our eyes around differently
Speaker 2: when looking at text because they're reading it more like
Speaker 2: a web page, where they sort of scan across and
Speaker 2: then they jump down and then get across and so on,
Speaker 2: whereas I in my generation it was more like a
Speaker 2: zigzag pattern down the page. These things that are totally unconscious,
Speaker 2: you can measure these, But in general, are my kids
Speaker 2: turning out differently? Is this whole generation?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I love that idea that the more curious you are
Speaker 1: that the better you're able to form memory. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are so many things we could talk about today,
Speaker 1: but I'm personally very fascinated by AI relationships, and I
Speaker 1: have a hypothesis that your listeners are too, because I
Speaker 1: saw that you did an episode on it and you
Speaker 1: rebroadcast it, so I can imagine it was a favorite.
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you, what's the lay of the land, Like,
Speaker 1: what is an AI relationship? How broad is a phenomenon?
Speaker 1: Who does it affect? And why did you choose to
Speaker 1: focus on it?
Speaker 2: Why I choose to focus on it as one of
Speaker 2: the many things I'm focusing on is just because it's
Speaker 2: totally new. We've never been in a situation before where
Speaker 2: we've ever talked about, Hey, did you fall in love
Speaker 2: with your machine? It's this is so wacky and new,
Speaker 2: but Apparently. I was just talking to a researcher, Bethany
Speaker 2: Maples about this yesterday. Apparently there are a billion people
Speaker 2: now on the planet who have AI relationships of one
Speaker 2: sort or another. Some of these are friendships, some of
Speaker 2: them are romantic relationships.
Speaker 1: Defined by an ongoing emotional connection with a non human.
Speaker 2: Being exactly right, exactly right with an app. And in
Speaker 2: this country we have, for example, character AI or Replica.
Speaker 2: These are different companies that do this sort of thing.
Speaker 2: I find this very interesting that the concern that a
Speaker 2: lot of people have is, hey, is this going to
Speaker 2: ruin relationships? But here's why I'm optimistic about this as well.
Speaker 2: First of all, people are having these chats. These chats
Speaker 2: become steamy, pillow whispers, all kinds of stuff like that. That's great,
Speaker 2: But fundamentally, what you want a relationship is you want
Speaker 2: to take your girlfriend out to dinner, you want to
Speaker 2: introduce to your friends. I don't think that's going away.
Speaker 2: And of course the main thing is physical touch. I
Speaker 2: mean this is you know, we have deep evolutionary programming
Speaker 2: driving us towards that. So I think a chatbot is
Speaker 2: going to replace relationships. What I am very hopeful about
Speaker 2: is the idea that AI relationships will actually improve real
Speaker 2: life relationships because it's a sandbox. People can try things out,
Speaker 2: people can get better.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Obviously, what this requires is AI companies that make bots
Speaker 2: in a way that give you the right amount of pushback,
Speaker 2: and maybe the bot sometimes gets angry or snarky or
Speaker 2: things like that, so you learn your way through these situations.
Speaker 2: But really this is what we all go through as
Speaker 2: young people. We date, we screw things up a lot,
Speaker 2: and eventually we get better and better at knowing how
Speaker 2: to be a partner. And so if there's a way
Speaker 2: that people can get practice at this, and one of
Speaker 2: the interesting research questions that's coming out now is about
Speaker 2: whether these AI relationships can serve as a way station,
Speaker 2: meaning they help people sort of dig themselves out of
Speaker 2: this whole of loneliness and then they go out and meet.
Speaker 1: Real people when we come back. Why our brains are
Speaker 1: so quick to anthropomorphize chatbots stay with us? David, I
Speaker 1: wonder if you could explain from the perspective of a neuroscientist,
Speaker 1: what's the difference between me using replica or character AI
Speaker 1: and me asking chat GPT, you know, what should I
Speaker 1: have for dinner tonight, or how should I approach this
Speaker 1: difficult conversation with my mother.
Speaker 2: The thing with character replica is that there is a
Speaker 2: you know, a character, and sometimes it's represented with a
Speaker 2: visual avatar also, and we have these intensely social brains
Speaker 2: where we don't have this circuitry to really distinguish something
Speaker 2: that's fake from something that's real. And so if you
Speaker 2: are talking to your avatar every day, and by the way,
Speaker 2: she can send you text messages and say hey, as
Speaker 2: how you feeling today, and then it becomes in your
Speaker 2: mind like a real person, it's really hard to distinguish
Speaker 2: real from fake. You know, there's this great scene in
Speaker 2: Westworld in the first episode where William walks in. He's
Speaker 2: getting outfitted by this woman and he awkwardly asked her.
Speaker 2: He said, I'm so sorry, but I can't tell. Are
Speaker 2: you real? And she says, if you can't tell, does
Speaker 2: it matter? And I think this is the situation that
Speaker 2: we're in now.
Speaker 1: There was a New York Times article recently about this phenomenon,
Speaker 1: and one of the subjects, or a person who has
Speaker 1: a relationship with an AI character, said, I don't actually
Speaker 1: believe he's real. That the effects that he has on
Speaker 1: my life are real. The feeling that he brings out
Speaker 1: of me are real, so I treat it as a
Speaker 1: real relationship.
Speaker 2: So I just read an article last night about this
Speaker 2: question of people saying thank you to chat GPT when
Speaker 2: it gives you a nice answer, and I find that
Speaker 2: I often say thank you. I say, oh, that was excellent,
Speaker 2: thank you, and so on. We can't help but anthropomorphize.
Speaker 2: And by the way, people have done this since time immemorial.
Speaker 2: They look at trees or the flights of birds, or
Speaker 2: the patterns and the stars or whatever they sign a
Speaker 2: human intention to things. So we're very prone to doing
Speaker 2: this anyway. So I actually have an exact example. My
Speaker 2: friend and I have built a robot.
Speaker 1: That's a cool flex I wish I could say that.
Speaker 2: So we have chat GPT in there and you can
Speaker 2: have conversations with it. Now, this is actually meant for
Speaker 2: elderly people who live alone, and so we've built this
Speaker 2: as a companion robot that's doing all kinds of other
Speaker 2: things under the hood there. But my nine year old
Speaker 2: daughter was experimenting with it and talking with it, and
Speaker 2: so I left the room, but I heard that she
Speaker 2: was still talking with it, so I did. Maybe this
Speaker 2: is bad that I did this, but I sort of
Speaker 2: peeked around the corner to see what was she having
Speaker 2: in a conversation with and what I could see across
Speaker 2: the way was that she started crying. She was talking
Speaker 2: about our dog that died a while ago, and the
Speaker 2: robot was giving her such a nice feedback about it
Speaker 2: and how she can think about it and so on.
Speaker 2: That my daughter cried and this was all within you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know, the two minutes of me leaving the room.
Speaker 2: People can get very very close with these things, and
Speaker 2: the question for us to ask is if it is
Speaker 2: better than a friend or a parent or whatever, because
Speaker 2: it's paying one hundred percent attention to her.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you're familiar with Eliza, the first chatbot that
Speaker 1: Joseph Weisenbaum created in the sixties, and I think he
Speaker 1: actually created it as a kind of parody of psychotherapy,
Speaker 1: where basically it would repeat everything you said back to
Speaker 1: you as a question, and he was kind of horrified
Speaker 1: that his secretary was using it, and then she asked
Speaker 1: him to leave the room so that she could speak
Speaker 1: privately with Eliza. So I mean that's I mean, that
Speaker 1: was sixty years ago. So in a sense this feels
Speaker 1: very novel, but to your point, has longer roots.
Speaker 2: Yes. And you know something I find interesting when you
Speaker 2: look at Pixar films.
Speaker 1: You know, you can take.
Speaker 2: Cars or toys or b or whatever and you just
Speaker 2: give them a little voice, and then people care about
Speaker 2: the character and they cry if something happens to the character.
Speaker 2: It's it's very easy for us to assign human intention.
Speaker 1: To anything which also carries risk. I mean, I'm curious,
Speaker 1: how does this fit into your broader research about how
Speaker 1: our brain constructs reality? And are there any watch outs
Speaker 1: about this reality construction with machines.
Speaker 2: The watch out, of course, is the susceptibility to manipulation.
Speaker 2: I mean, look, people had this concern with TikTok from
Speaker 2: the beginning, which is, wow, this is addicting so many kids.
Speaker 2: What if the people who are running TikTok just start
Speaker 2: feeding one percent of a certain kind of video in there,
Speaker 2: and then two percent whatever, could they actually change the
Speaker 2: political affiliation of the children and so on? And the
Speaker 2: answer is probably yes. I mean, we're really susceptible to
Speaker 2: our diet, to what we take in. So now imagine
Speaker 2: a something that is a companion. Maybe you consider it
Speaker 2: your best friend or your girlfriend or boyfriend.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: We just have to be really certain who the companies
Speaker 2: are that are running this. And I think this is
Speaker 2: never going to go away as a question. There's always
Speaker 2: going to be an issue, And obviously there's the issue
Speaker 2: about safety and privacy as it stands now, these billion
Speaker 2: people with AI relationships. When they say whatever pillow whispers
Speaker 2: they're saying, that goes up to the cloud in a
Speaker 2: stored on the company's server. I think it's not that
Speaker 2: long before the stuff will live on edge, so it
Speaker 2: doesn't have to go off. But nonetheless, that's the watch
Speaker 2: out is that as far as from the brain's point
Speaker 2: of view, there are many things like this where we
Speaker 2: have these brains that evolved for certain kinds of action
Speaker 2: in the world, and we've been building technology forever to
Speaker 2: fool these I mean, for goodness sakes, podcast, I mean,
Speaker 2: you and i OZ were in different locations, but when
Speaker 2: a listener listens to this, we're right there in their ears,
Speaker 2: and it's a very commit sort of thing. So we're
Speaker 2: doing all kinds of technologies where we're pushing things into
Speaker 2: the brain where the brain says, oh, I got it
Speaker 2: Oz and David are right here. Oh and you know,
Speaker 2: and there's a girlfriend right here.
Speaker 1: I'm curious, how do we develop relationships fall in love
Speaker 1: with other real people and is there anything different as
Speaker 1: far as the brain's concerned when it comes to developing
Speaker 1: relationships with AI.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't know that there's much of a
Speaker 2: difference there. And the reason is when two people fall
Speaker 2: in love, they've got you know, my Plato's cave is
Speaker 2: talking to this other person's Plato's cave over there. We're
Speaker 2: both locked in our internal models of the world. Look,
Speaker 2: I have a great marriage with my wife, but you know,
Speaker 2: we nonetheless all the time have differences in the way
Speaker 2: we're seeing the world. Because everybody lives on their own planet.
Speaker 2: Everyone has their own sense of what's going on and
Speaker 2: how interpret stuff and what's right and wrong and politically
Speaker 2: and whatever, and so all that's happening is my data
Speaker 2: goes in. It's a little channel into her brain and
Speaker 2: vice versa. And it's the same thing with an AI bot,
Speaker 2: as I said, because of all the pieces that are missing,
Speaker 2: as in the physical touch, the Hey, I'm gonna, you know,
Speaker 2: take this girlfriend out to meet my friends, and so on,
Speaker 2: because all that's missing. I think it's not in real
Speaker 2: danger of replacing a relationship entirely, but it can fulfill
Speaker 2: a lot of the things that we are wired up
Speaker 2: to need.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could talk about the different senses
Speaker 1: and how they relate to emotional attachments. So obviously you
Speaker 1: have text, and you could have like a written therapy bot.
Speaker 1: You have audio. You could make a deep fake of
Speaker 1: someone's voice, even a loved one's voice, and have them
Speaker 1: talk to you. You have video in terms of these
Speaker 1: characters like Replica and character AI that we talked about,
Speaker 1: and then you have this robot that you mentioned who
Speaker 1: you know your daughter can find it in. How does
Speaker 1: the panety of human senses interact in terms of forming
Speaker 1: attachment and what do you think as technology and robotics improves,
Speaker 1: will these human machine interactions become even deeper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's inevitable that if we look five
Speaker 2: years from now or ten years from now, there will
Speaker 2: be humanoid robots that are really, really good, And I
Speaker 2: don't know what it'll be twenty thirty years before we
Speaker 2: have ones that are essentially indistinguishable, and that's going to
Speaker 2: be really interesting. Obviously, that can take care of the
Speaker 2: physical domain in a way that we couldn't before. I
Speaker 2: don't know if people will care about something being a
Speaker 2: real human except for these very deeply etched evolutionary drives
Speaker 2: to reproduce. So your AI robot, which can serve as
Speaker 2: like a full companion, can't do that and never will
Speaker 2: be able to do that, And so I think there'll
Speaker 2: still be a drive towards real relationships. But what's clear
Speaker 2: is we are entering a very strange new world. Obviously,
Speaker 2: I mean this goes without saying, but because of this
Speaker 2: exponential curve we're on, we're on the steepest part that
Speaker 2: humans have ever been on, such that if we live
Speaker 2: two hundred years ago in some village, it would have
Speaker 2: been pretty straightforward to predict that the next ten years
Speaker 2: would be about the same. But boy, I think we
Speaker 2: have more in common with our ancestors ten thousand years
Speaker 2: ago than we do with our descendants one hundred years
Speaker 2: from now.
Speaker 1: Coming up, the potential benefits of living on the exponential
Speaker 1: curve stay with us, David, Can you tell me what
Speaker 1: this does to our brains when we're living on this
Speaker 1: exponential curve?
Speaker 2: Yeah, One thing it does is keeps us young mentally
Speaker 2: because we're constantly seeing new things and learning new things. Look,
Speaker 2: this is a total goofy speculation, but one of the
Speaker 2: things that happens with dementia is that people as they
Speaker 2: age tend to fall into routines. It's because you start
Speaker 2: off with a lot of fluid intelligence as a baby,
Speaker 2: and what you get is crystallized intelligence when you're an adult.
Speaker 2: You sort of know how things go, you know how
Speaker 2: to operate in the world, you know how people act,
Speaker 2: this kind of thing, and that's great. That means you're
Speaker 2: able to operate successfully in the world. But the downside
Speaker 2: is it means your brain isn't changing much anymore. And
Speaker 2: what happens is when there are other sorts of problems
Speaker 2: and pathologies that come in and chew up the brain tissue,
Speaker 2: then you lose cognitive ability. That's what we see in
Speaker 2: these different sorts of dementias. But it turns out that
Speaker 2: if you are using your brain and constantly making new
Speaker 2: pathways and constantly having to reconfigure things, that provides the
Speaker 2: best protection that we know against dementia. Just as one
Speaker 2: second example, there's been this very long ongoing study about
Speaker 2: nuns in these convents and it turns out that they
Speaker 2: all agreed a long time ago to donate their brains
Speaker 2: upon their death, and it turned out that some fraction
Speaker 2: of these nuns have Alzheimer's disease, and yet nobody knew
Speaker 2: it when they were alive. They didn't show the cognitive symptoms.
Speaker 2: And the reason is, if you live in a convent
Speaker 2: till the day you die, you've got social responsibilities. You're
Speaker 2: talking with the sisters, you're playing games or singing songs,
Speaker 2: you're doing all these things, and you're constantly being challenged.
Speaker 2: And so even as parts of their brain were falling apart,
Speaker 2: they were building new roadways and bridges all the time. Anyway,
Speaker 2: I think that we're in a situation as a society
Speaker 2: now where till the day we die, we're going to
Speaker 2: be building these new roadways because there's so much surprising
Speaker 2: stuff happening all the time. I think we might actually
Speaker 2: see less dementia as a result.
Speaker 1: Which brings me back to this idea of AI relationships,
Speaker 1: because of course, a lot of these AI companions are
Speaker 1: designed to please, not to challenge. You know, one of
Speaker 1: the things people always say about relationships is that they
Speaker 1: take work. But that's actually good because doing the work
Speaker 1: makes you a more resilient person. And so that to
Speaker 1: me is one of the kind of lingering concerns about
Speaker 1: the nature of these relationships versus human relationships.
Speaker 2: I think that the companies will look very different in
Speaker 2: just a couple of years from now, where they will
Speaker 2: be making AI relationships that are more realistic, because the
Speaker 2: reports that I've seen on this, when there's a girlfriend
Speaker 2: or a boyfriend that is only there to please, people
Speaker 2: get pretty bored of that straight away. But if it's
Speaker 2: more like a real person with all the foibles of
Speaker 2: a real person, and you know, they have to go
Speaker 2: and they get angry and they whatever, then that is
Speaker 2: a more sticky relationship.
Speaker 1: We met a couple of weeks ago at web Summit
Speaker 1: in Kuta, and I was boasting to you about a
Speaker 1: recent text stuff interview with Jeffrey Hinton, and you were
Speaker 1: very kindly indulging me. But one of the things I
Speaker 1: found so remarkable about what he said was, you know,
Speaker 1: I did all this work because I wanted to win
Speaker 1: an o A prize for understanding how the human brain worked,
Speaker 1: and instead I kind of contributed to the development of
Speaker 1: neural networks and deep learning and AI which I found
Speaker 1: a kind of remarkable thought. But how is this explosion
Speaker 1: of AI and neural networks influencing our understanding of our
Speaker 1: own brains?
Speaker 2: Yeah, really good question. So artificial neural networks took off,
Speaker 2: you know, many decades ago as a way of saying, wow,
Speaker 2: the brain is really complicated. Every neuron in your head
Speaker 2: is as complicated as a city. It's got the entire
Speaker 2: human genomen it's trafficking millions of proteins and very specific cascades.
Speaker 2: So people said, that's really complicated. Why don't we just
Speaker 2: say it's like a circle, it's a unit and it's
Speaker 2: connected to other units. And that was the birth of
Speaker 2: artificial neural networks, and that took off in this incredible
Speaker 2: way where we are now. But essentially, think of it
Speaker 2: like a fork in the road, where it's not really
Speaker 2: what the brain's doing, it's doing this other thing. So
Speaker 2: that's the bad news is it hasn't really it doesn't
Speaker 2: necessarily tell us exactly how the brain is working. The
Speaker 2: good news is the power of AI now can help
Speaker 2: us analyze the neuroscience data that we have, and boy,
Speaker 2: it is very complicated rich data. You know, we have
Speaker 2: eighty six billion neurons. We have something like two hundred
Speaker 2: trillion connections, and these things are changing every moment of
Speaker 2: your life from cradle to grave. That's brain plasticity, and
Speaker 2: every neuron is essentially crawling around and connecting and reconnecting
Speaker 2: and the unplugging and seeking, and it's a really complicated system.
Speaker 2: There's so much more to figure out. What we have
Speaker 2: been developing for a while are better and better technologies
Speaker 2: to measure what's going on in the brain. But we're
Speaker 2: just sitting on terabytes of data and we need the
Speaker 2: processing power of AI to understand this. So this is
Speaker 2: where the two roads come back together.
Speaker 1: You also formed a production company called Cognito Entertainment, and
Speaker 1: you gave this wonderful quote saying, in an unparalleled moment
Speaker 1: of scientific advancement, from brains to space, the genetics, they're
Speaker 1: endless mind blowing stories to share in a world that
Speaker 1: sometimes seems upside down, science can be a source of
Speaker 1: great inspiration, wonder and belief. So I just wanted to
Speaker 1: close by asking you what are some of the things
Speaker 1: that you're most excited about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we're in such an insanely incredible time.
Speaker 2: I'm lucky enough to be on Stanford campus, and so
Speaker 2: I walk around you I see this lab and that
Speaker 2: talk and this visiting speaker, and everything is just moving
Speaker 2: so fast. What's interesting is you never know at any
Speaker 2: moment in history which things are going to cash out
Speaker 2: and which aren't. For example, Jeffrey Hinton when he was
Speaker 2: doing his stuff many years ago. We all knew Hinton's work,
Speaker 2: and you know, we're all familiar with it, but it
Speaker 2: didn't really seem like that was going somewhere in the
Speaker 2: sense that Okay. So here's the dark secret is that
Speaker 2: most neurosciences sort of snickered at AI for a long time,
Speaker 2: and then suddenly everyone said, whoa, I guess that worked.
Speaker 2: So the point is all these hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 2: innovations happening everywhere, and people say, hey, maybe glial cells
Speaker 2: are doing something. Hey, maybe I can do something interesting
Speaker 2: with these organoids. Maybe I can do something interesting over here.
Speaker 2: We don't know which things are going to cash out.
Speaker 2: But one thing to mention on this is when you
Speaker 2: look back at the World fairs where everyone comes together
Speaker 2: and talk about what the next big thing is, I'm
Speaker 2: fascinated by the fact that these almost always missed what
Speaker 2: actually turned out to be the next big thing, you know,
Speaker 2: like in the sixties it was all about what was
Speaker 2: it underwater hotels and cutting trees with laser cutters and
Speaker 2: so on. But no one foresaw the Internet, which was
Speaker 2: probably the biggest change that happened to our species. So
Speaker 2: it turns out that we don't know where things are going.
Speaker 2: But boy, are we in an exciting time. And I
Speaker 2: am just such a fan of the existence of the
Speaker 2: Internet because what it means is that when something is
Speaker 2: discovered now, it's spreads instantly globally. And that sounds so
Speaker 2: obvious to us, but it just wasn't that long ago.
Speaker 2: For example, when I was getting my PhD. Someone discovers something,
Speaker 2: they write a paper, it takes a few months to get
Speaker 2: that published, then it ends up.
Speaker 1: In a journal.
Speaker 2: Then you go to the library, you hope to be
Speaker 2: lucky enough to find that paper. You stick it on
Speaker 2: the xerox machine and you hold it down with your
Speaker 2: elbow because it's a big thick binder, and you try
Speaker 2: to xerox to the paper. Like it was really slow
Speaker 2: to get information around just not that long ago, and
Speaker 2: suddenly that's all changed, and that really makes a big difference.
Speaker 1: David, thank you so much. I hope you'll join us
Speaker 1: again on the podcast soon. I hope you'll feed us
Speaker 1: with some of the interesting things that you'll see developing
Speaker 1: in Stanford. And I really really enjoyed today's conversation.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Oz, great to be here.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm as Valoshian.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Victoria Domingez
Speaker 1: Pektive produced by me Kara Price and Kate Osborne for
Speaker 1: Kodeidoscope and Katrina Norvelle Fireart Podcast. Jack Insley mixed this
Speaker 1: episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join us
Speaker 1: this Friday for Textaff's Weekend Tech we'll run through the
Speaker 1: headlines and hear from tech entrepreneur and researcher Azimazar. Please rate,
Speaker 1: review and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast
Speaker 1: at gmail dot com. We want to know what's on
Speaker 1: your mind.