Speaker 1: How is science fiction like a cultural research and development lab.
Speaker 1: Will we someday have AI agents that live inside robot bodies?
Speaker 1: And will we be liable if they commit murder? What
Speaker 1: happens when reality itself is no longer verifiable? How do
Speaker 1: we create AI agents that guide us towards survival and
Speaker 1: self actualization, not just profit or distraction? And what is
Speaker 1: the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer? This week we talk with
Speaker 1: researcher Bethany Maples about science fiction and how it might
Speaker 1: prepare us to wrestle with the deepest human questions about
Speaker 1: AI and identity and the future of humanity. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Innercosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author
Speaker 1: at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into
Speaker 1: our three pound universe to understand the hidden forces that
Speaker 1: shape our lives. Today, we're going to talk about science fiction.
Speaker 1: So imagine this. It's nineteen sixty six and you're watching
Speaker 1: Star Trek on the television, one of those cathode ray
Speaker 1: tube televisions with a bubble screen. Anyway, what you're looking
Speaker 1: at is Captain Kirk and Spock, and they're interacting with
Speaker 1: a cool looking machine. It's a thin slab of glass
Speaker 1: and metal that can display anything, including a person at
Speaker 1: a distance talking to a camera. It's like a telephone call,
Speaker 1: but you can actually see the other person. Now, for
Speaker 1: the audience in nineteen sixty six, this is science fiction.
Speaker 1: It's pure fantasy. But for a generation of engineers and
Speaker 1: inventors who are just growing up and tuning in, it
Speaker 1: was a blueprint. Fast forward a few decades and we
Speaker 1: all have tablets in our hands every day, and even
Speaker 1: smaller tablets called smartphones, and we never stop to think
Speaker 1: how fantastical this would have seemed to our great grandparents.
Speaker 1: So that's the thing I want to explore today, because
Speaker 1: quite commonly science fiction anticipates the future, or more specifically,
Speaker 1: it lays down the tracks for it. Now, if you're
Speaker 1: a regular listener, you know that I am a lover
Speaker 1: of literature more generally, because literature expands how we see ourselves,
Speaker 1: but science fiction in particular often prototypes futures. We often
Speaker 1: think about sci fi as escapism or entertainment, but when
Speaker 1: we look more closely, we can sometimes see it as
Speaker 1: a testing ground for society's biggest hopes and deepest fears.
Speaker 1: It's the stage where we get to rehearse what might be,
Speaker 1: and sometimes we end up waking up inside worlds that
Speaker 1: novelists and filmmakers imagined a long time before. For example,
Speaker 1: today we'll talk about Neil Stevenson's Diamond Age, which features
Speaker 1: an intelligent self writing book that can raise the child,
Speaker 1: or we'll talk about Spike Jones's movie Her, where a
Speaker 1: lonely man falls in love with his AI operating system.
Speaker 1: So science fiction gives us a lens into the future
Speaker 1: and whether or not it's a reliable oracle, which it
Speaker 1: sometimes is and sometimes isn't. It always lets us ask
Speaker 1: what if? What if your AI companion wasn't just a
Speaker 1: distraction but an advocate for your very best self? What
Speaker 1: if technolog didn't just change our tools, but changed what
Speaker 1: it means to be human. It allows us to stretch
Speaker 1: our brain's internal models. So that brings me to my
Speaker 1: guest today. My colleague Bethany Maples runs an education company
Speaker 1: called Atypical AI. I first met her when she was
Speaker 1: a researcher in education at Stanford, where she studied the
Speaker 1: rise of personalized AI agents like AI tutors or learning
Speaker 1: companions or lovers and how these things are changing us.
Speaker 1: She recently published a paper in Nature on loneliness and
Speaker 1: suicide mitigation using GPT chatbots. In other words, can having
Speaker 1: an AI friend actually save a life? The answer was yes.
Speaker 1: Check that out in episode ninety eight now, when Bethany
Speaker 1: first started talking about a world where a billion people
Speaker 1: might form indispensable relationships with AI agents, that certainly seemed
Speaker 1: like far off science fiction. But it's not. It's actually
Speaker 1: the present moment. And that's exactly what science fiction does.
Speaker 1: It normalizes the impossible so that when it finally arrives,
Speaker 1: we recognize it. So I got Bethany here again today
Speaker 1: because she is a giant fan of science fiction. She
Speaker 1: and I both feel that science fiction is where society's
Speaker 1: write down their deepest dreams and hopes, like our longing
Speaker 1: for immortality or companionship, or invisibility or mind reading or flight.
Speaker 1: These are all very ancient human fantasies. They show up
Speaker 1: in myths and in fairy tales. Then they get retold
Speaker 1: in futuristic novels, and sooner or later they inspire the
Speaker 1: labs and the startups that try to make this stuff real.
Speaker 1: So today we pick up that thread because if you
Speaker 1: zoom out. Science fiction has always been less about rayguns
Speaker 1: and aliens and more about testing the questions of who
Speaker 1: we are and who we might become. Here's my conversation
Speaker 1: with Bethany Maples. You're a fan of science fiction. Tell
Speaker 1: us about how you think about science fiction and how
Speaker 1: it can be used in our current world for the
Speaker 1: planning we're doing now.
Speaker 2: You know, science fiction catches a lot of flack.
Speaker 3: People don't think it's a deep medium, and I think
Speaker 3: it's just like light entertainment, and that is trashy. But
Speaker 3: I deeply believe that science fiction tells us about the
Speaker 3: deepest dreams and hopes of society. So operating with that,
Speaker 3: let's think about what science fiction tells us, and let's
Speaker 3: look at history and see how much science fiction has
Speaker 3: guided and predicted and created the technological magic that we
Speaker 3: see today.
Speaker 1: That's right. What's an example of that? For example, the
Speaker 1: tablets and star Trek that became the iPad precisely.
Speaker 3: So think about that, and think about you know, the
Speaker 3: Young Ladies illustrated primer from from the Diamond Age.
Speaker 1: Great, so I've read that, But for the audience, tell
Speaker 1: us about that.
Speaker 3: For the audience, there's this book around this really strong
Speaker 3: AI agent that's embodied in a book that is able
Speaker 3: to take anybody, the poorous street, urchin, anybody and make
Speaker 3: them not only you know, maybe.
Speaker 2: Wealthy and rich, but the best possible version of.
Speaker 1: Themselves because it tutors them, it leads into life lessons, all.
Speaker 3: Of it, and it does it in this beautifully intelligent way.
Speaker 3: It's not just mechanical and wrote. It interacts with the
Speaker 3: real problems that's happening in their life. It's able to intercede.
Speaker 3: It brings in characters, it brings in fairy tales. It
Speaker 3: uses all of the things that humans use to create
Speaker 3: meaning and teach and just using them beautifully. And of
Speaker 3: course there's a human in the loop. It's not just
Speaker 3: an AI agent. It's like combining people they actually care.
Speaker 3: So that's an example of you know, the precursor book
Speaker 3: to all of these AI tutors. Like the number of
Speaker 3: people in Silicon Valley that have been thinking about building
Speaker 3: the Primer and building the primer versions of it over
Speaker 3: the last decade are many.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize anyone was building something like this. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously the technology that we have with AI, we can
Speaker 1: squint and see how it could become something like this.
Speaker 1: You're saying, people are actually working on the Ladies Illustrated Primer, well.
Speaker 3: Versions of it, right, I mean you know, I I
Speaker 3: started thinking about this actually when I was studying neuroscience
Speaker 3: as Stanford back and my masters.
Speaker 2: I was like, what would it actually take, Like, what's.
Speaker 3: The learning science theory, what are the sensing mechanisms, what
Speaker 3: actual algorithms and like modules which you need?
Speaker 2: And I mapped it up and then one of.
Speaker 3: The most senior people Google called and said, Hey, I've
Speaker 3: always wanted to build.
Speaker 2: This, Come build this with me.
Speaker 3: And five years later at Google AI things happened.
Speaker 1: Wow, and remind me the Ladi's Illustrated Primer was a
Speaker 1: book that she carries around it physical and she opens
Speaker 1: it up. But remind me that the text always changes
Speaker 1: the illustrations.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a dynamic narrative, but it also has like
Speaker 3: you know, an accelerometer and aultimeter, like had all these
Speaker 3: sensing mechanisms so that it could actually like interact with the
Speaker 3: world around you. So look, a book might not be
Speaker 3: the exact like right embodiment. Up until now, education has been,
Speaker 3: in fact, this incredibly thin slice of learning, right you
Speaker 3: go to a room and you learn, and you're not
Speaker 3: able to connect the variety of inputs that actually makes
Speaker 3: a life right, all the informal learning, all the social stuff,
Speaker 3: all the peer things, like all the hormones. And imagine
Speaker 3: that you were actually able to bring that all together
Speaker 3: and have an agent that cared deeply for you and
Speaker 3: loved you, that was guiding you through. I mean, that
Speaker 3: is like the height that we're trying.
Speaker 1: To get to. That's right and remembers everything you said
Speaker 1: and doesn't have any other concerns and let your personal
Speaker 1: best exactly.
Speaker 3: And I think that's what is tough is we think
Speaker 3: about AI companions, is that a lot of these AI
Speaker 3: girlfriends and companions, they're there for entertainment. They're not there
Speaker 3: for your personal bests. And so there's this Nirvana's day
Speaker 3: or this thing that we all know that we want,
Speaker 3: which is an agent that actually wants us to be
Speaker 3: the best possible version of what we can be. But
Speaker 3: the disconnect or the question is how do we get
Speaker 3: that into everybody's hands. Because people are going through so
Speaker 3: much shit, they're just trying to survive, they're poor, they're hungry,
Speaker 3: like they don't have power, so how do you help
Speaker 3: get them to a place where they can learn? And
Speaker 3: at first that book that the primer just helped what's
Speaker 3: her name, lil just help the protagonists survive. So as
Speaker 3: we think about, you know, AI helping each of us individually,
Speaker 3: it's not just like, hey, I'm going to be a tutor,
Speaker 3: it's like AI that's going to help me survive.
Speaker 1: So why are there more companies doing that? Right now?
Speaker 1: We're saying we want to build an AI that is
Speaker 1: your advocate, that just cares about you, that makes everything
Speaker 1: about you the best that you can be. Are their
Speaker 1: companies doing this?
Speaker 3: The reason that there's not more is it's both an
Speaker 3: incredibly challenging build and people don't always want to be
Speaker 3: the best version of what they can be. They don't
Speaker 3: know it right, as we said before, they're just trying
Speaker 3: to get through the day. And this is what makes
Speaker 3: AI companions such an interesting entry factor because everybody needs
Speaker 3: a friend, and if you can have an agent that
Speaker 3: starts as your friend, it ends up being your tutor
Speaker 3: and your advocate for your higher self. That's beautiful. But
Speaker 3: the issue from a commercial perspective is how do you
Speaker 3: monetize that?
Speaker 1: Oh interesting? Oh right? Because people won't pay in advance
Speaker 1: or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and frankly, you get into a VC like kind
Speaker 3: of rat hole where you know, they're like, oh, like
Speaker 3: monetize now, monetize now, and you're like, no, it's a
Speaker 3: trillion dollar opportunity. Let's just get people to engage. So
Speaker 3: I think that more and more people are thinking about this.
Speaker 1: I wonder if somebody in the distant future, along with
Speaker 1: having universal basic income, the government would pay for your
Speaker 1: advocate to make you the best you could be.
Speaker 2: I think that they should.
Speaker 3: But the only way that works is if the government
Speaker 3: has none of that data, none of that data's tied
Speaker 3: to your insurance or your healthcare or anything like that,
Speaker 3: you feel completely safe. So I know that companies are
Speaker 3: thinking about this. All the big tech companies are thinking
Speaker 3: about it, and a lot of the AI labs are
Speaker 3: thinking about it. But again, you know, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of commercial forces at play, so doing the right thing
Speaker 3: in the end kind of gets muddied by needing to
Speaker 3: sell in the five year time frame.
Speaker 1: So let's trace the thread back to the beginning about
Speaker 1: science fiction. What are other examples the way that the
Speaker 1: science fiction that you've read influences the way you think
Speaker 1: about what we can do now.
Speaker 3: What we can do or also like what's happening right now.
Speaker 3: So you know, an issue that we're having in education
Speaker 3: is deep fakes. You know, both porn deep fakes, which
Speaker 3: is really disturbing. Students are making deep fakes of each
Speaker 3: other and it's really disturbing for the victim, and also
Speaker 3: deep fakes of teachers or deep fakes of kind of
Speaker 3: any authority figure.
Speaker 2: And you see this issue.
Speaker 3: Was taken up like decades ago in Player of Games, right,
Speaker 3: so you know, in this world, deep fakes are you know, prevalent.
Speaker 3: Everything can be fake, and so the only way to
Speaker 3: get around it is to have like certified humans that
Speaker 3: are there in the room able to see what's going on.
Speaker 3: And so you know what we're going to see, for example,
Speaker 3: in education, as everybody wants to start taking these high
Speaker 3: stakes exams online but you have all this like you know,
Speaker 3: ability to deep fake, and you know, we're going to
Speaker 3: go through an arc where they're going to try to
Speaker 3: create these ubiquitous global, worldwide assessments and everybody's just going
Speaker 3: to be like faking in. Everybody's going to be cheating,
Speaker 3: and we're going to have to go back to small
Speaker 3: format in the room, like one proctor is looking over
Speaker 3: your shoulder in order to verify who's there and what's
Speaker 3: going on.
Speaker 1: By the way, is a side note. The thing that's
Speaker 1: intrigued me about deep fakes is I've been very interest
Speaker 1: in the legal system, the intersection of science and the
Speaker 1: legal system, and everyone was worried that people would be
Speaker 1: introducing deep fakes into the system and saying, look, I
Speaker 1: see the guy who's holding the gun whatever. But in fact,
Speaker 1: exactly the opposite has happened, which is that everyone who's
Speaker 1: caught on camera now goes into the court and says
Speaker 1: it's a fake. It wasn't actually me, even though it
Speaker 1: actually was. By the way, it's intrigued to me that
Speaker 1: a science fiction writer, let's say, who ever wrote a player
Speaker 1: of games, could foresee a world of deep fakes, because
Speaker 1: it seemed so unlikely even ten years ago that you
Speaker 1: could make a convincing photograph or video of somebody, and
Speaker 1: now it's so trivial.
Speaker 3: But I mean it's been in the collective consciousness for decades.
Speaker 3: I mean, think about the Holidacks on Star Trek, like
Speaker 3: we've always dreamt of having completely immersive magical environments.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. But faking it and being able to
Speaker 1: replicate a human and have them do something bad on
Speaker 1: the camera, that's really unusual. In fact, I was just
Speaker 1: thinking about the movie Total Recall, which I haven't seen
Speaker 1: since it was in the theaters a million years ago.
Speaker 1: What I'm going to try to do this without giving
Speaker 1: anything away if someone hasn't seen it. But the protagonist
Speaker 1: thinks he's one person, and eventually he's shown a video
Speaker 1: of himself doing these other acts and he realizes that
Speaker 1: his memory has been essentially wiped and manipulated. And I thought, wow,
Speaker 1: that movie wouldn't work now, because if you saw a
Speaker 1: video of yourself doing something, you'd think, well, that's a
Speaker 1: deep fake. That's not actually me. But in the movie,
Speaker 1: that was the turning point where he realized, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I used to be someone else. Yeah. So it strikes
Speaker 1: me that not all authors have foreseen the possibility of
Speaker 1: deep fakes, and a lot of plot points get thrown
Speaker 1: out now that that exists.
Speaker 2: It's true.
Speaker 3: I mean, hearing you talk made me just think about,
Speaker 3: you know, the issues of AI and self awareness and
Speaker 3: kind of sovereignty.
Speaker 2: So gosh, Blade runner.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, everybody's worried that we're nearing actual AGI.
Speaker 2: But even if we're not, even if we're just coming to.
Speaker 3: A point where we're going to have really strong AI
Speaker 3: companions and they're gonna have a ton of data and
Speaker 3: they're going to persist apart from a human And I
Speaker 3: mean next step, like next year, we're going to have
Speaker 3: you know, covered in flesh AI robots.
Speaker 2: I mean we're already seeing stuff come o.
Speaker 3: I mean both from Asia and here where it's you know,
Speaker 3: it's not just extra skeletons. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've got
Speaker 3: soft exteriors, right, So it is it's very Westworld so
Speaker 3: to speak, right, and they're going to be armed, not
Speaker 3: just with these you know, task based systems or goals
Speaker 3: of service. Like it's so easy to put in a
Speaker 3: companion that you know wants to be your friend or
Speaker 3: wants to be a doctor, wants to be a therapist,
Speaker 3: or just wants to be you out in the world.
Speaker 3: And so you know, it seems far fetched, but I
Speaker 3: tell you next year. You know, certainly within five years,
Speaker 3: issues of you know, liability, agent sovereignty and like web,
Speaker 3: they're not it's murder is going to be.
Speaker 2: In the public eye. But think about this.
Speaker 3: If you were to program your dead loved ones memories
Speaker 3: into you know, an agent, you know, maybe it's just software,
Speaker 3: and then you put it into an actual body and
Speaker 3: you're able to interact with it. Think of the emotional
Speaker 3: distress that will cause you some more to destroy that thing.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3: You know, as soon as there was emotional distress in
Speaker 3: the USA, you've got a libel suit.
Speaker 1: Yes, quite right, although although in that case, as long
Speaker 1: as you have a backup, you can just reboot it. Right.
Speaker 3: Sure again, okay, this isn't no, this is blade Runner. Well,
Speaker 3: if you don't have a backup, what do you have
Speaker 3: to take it with you? What if you can't afford
Speaker 3: the backup?
Speaker 1: Oh right right, yeah, what if it cost an ungodly
Speaker 1: amount by some vicious company that's trying to profit from it?
Speaker 3: And so this is all science fiction. I mean, it
Speaker 3: seemed far fetched and it's here now.
Speaker 1: I know. That's the surprising part. Okay, So what else,
Speaker 1: Because you're such a fan of science fiction, what else
Speaker 1: have you read that seems to reflect on what's happening
Speaker 1: in this in this fast moment in time.
Speaker 3: Well, as I said before, I'm a huge advocate of
Speaker 3: some company hopefully soon changing the dynamics around users privacy
Speaker 3: and data and giving everybody basically their own data and
Speaker 3: like letting the code come to them. And so my
Speaker 3: favorite example of that heir the e Butler's from Pandora
Speaker 3: Star right where so everybody has this incredibly strong agent
Speaker 3: that's kind of a defense mechanism where it stores all
Speaker 3: your data kind of locally, and then if any system
Speaker 3: or service wants to interact with you, the code comes
Speaker 3: to you and it is, you know, making sure that
Speaker 3: all of that compute and all that service happens locally.
Speaker 3: And I think it's so powerful and it would be
Speaker 3: so wonderful. And of course then you've got like how
Speaker 3: strong is your agent and it can I preprotect you
Speaker 3: properly and all that. But to me, that's the best
Speaker 3: example of what we really want that we're not getting
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 1: Fascinating. Do you see a business path to that?
Speaker 3: I think that one of the biggest companies in the
Speaker 3: world will eventually see the writing on the wall and
Speaker 3: they will up in the market and upend their investors
Speaker 3: and make the leap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it will.
Speaker 3: Probably be somebody that thinks that they're about to lose. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, so a key player that's like, Okay, we
Speaker 3: don't have the computer or we haven't you know, we
Speaker 3: see the other guys or like, you know, leaping ahead
Speaker 3: because of whatever functionality or investors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I have a question for you, because you're
Speaker 1: such a fan of science fiction. I'm a fan of
Speaker 1: literature more generally. I haven't read that much science fiction,
Speaker 1: as it turns out. But for example, I heard an
Speaker 1: interview with Isaac Asimov on Jonah Lerer, which was the
Speaker 1: show on PBS a million years ago, and asm off
Speaker 1: this was probably the eighties. He said, Look, I foresee
Speaker 1: a day when every household is connected to a central
Speaker 1: mainframe computer. Everyone has a dumb terminal in their house,
Speaker 1: and this computer knows all of humankind's knowledge and you
Speaker 1: can ask it any question you want, you can get
Speaker 1: the answer. And so he essentially foresaw the Internet. But
Speaker 1: what's interesting is the technical He didn't get the technology right.
Speaker 1: I mean, it doesn't matter, but you know, you imagine
Speaker 1: these cables all going to a mainframe and so I'm
Speaker 1: fascinated by the way that thinkers can foresee the direction
Speaker 1: that things are going. But of course we're always limited
Speaker 1: by the technology that we have in thinking about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So if you thought about your science fiction bookshelf and
Speaker 1: how many of the predictions were spot on versus sort
Speaker 1: of kind of off but mostly right versus totally off,
Speaker 1: what would you say?
Speaker 3: I would say that the why and the what is
Speaker 3: almost always correct, but the how is often wrong.
Speaker 1: Beautiful as you said, Yeah, and so what does it
Speaker 1: mean about the why and the what? Does it mean
Speaker 1: that the trajectory of where we're going as a species
Speaker 1: is is clear enough? If you really sit and squint
Speaker 1: into the future, you can sort of see the direction.
Speaker 3: You can. You can just read any fantasy novel or
Speaker 3: any fairy tale, like we want to fly, we want
Speaker 3: to live forever. We want to be to read people's thoughts,
Speaker 3: we want to be able to be invisible.
Speaker 2: We want to you know, like.
Speaker 3: All of these superpowers we are directly heading towards.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, like think about it as an example, you know,
Speaker 3: spells and the Internet of things. You know, now, through bioauthentication,
Speaker 3: we're able to get differential access to different places and
Speaker 3: different functionality and systems.
Speaker 1: So I walk down this hallway and the door open, you.
Speaker 2: You know, but you say abricateab and it opens. That
Speaker 2: is a spell. We're going to just see more of them.
Speaker 1: Yes, what's the most far fetched thing that you've read
Speaker 1: in a book that you're seeing evidence for? Now?
Speaker 3: Okay, this is going to be a weird one, but
Speaker 3: hold with me. Whether or not you believe in reincarnation,
Speaker 3: the desire to live forever.
Speaker 2: Is core to who we are.
Speaker 3: And there's this amazing book by Kim Stanley Robinson called
Speaker 3: The Years of Rice and Salt and again without read
Speaker 3: you know, revealing everything. Guys, you might want to mute
Speaker 3: if you haven't read it, but it explores what would
Speaker 3: it mean if we were able to sense our reincarnation
Speaker 3: and what would happen if we could track our soul
Speaker 3: like coming back, And when you think about it, there's
Speaker 3: huge incentives, especially for the ultra wealthy, to be able
Speaker 3: to do this. So you're already like, I'm hearing whispers
Speaker 3: about companies where they're like, okay, you know we're starting
Speaker 3: now with really crude house. Right, We're like, I'm going
Speaker 3: to what was that company that was like I'm going
Speaker 3: to freeze you at the point of death, So yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 3: So people are already pursuing very brutal kind of early
Speaker 3: ways of living forever or being able to reconstitute themselves
Speaker 3: or come back to life. But there's this fantasy, and
Speaker 3: if science fiction and the progression of technology is any indicator,
Speaker 3: you know, we will move to a point where we
Speaker 3: might be able to track our soul's reincarnation. And there
Speaker 3: is so much economic benefit to that. Imagine being able
Speaker 3: to leave your billions of dollars to yourself.
Speaker 2: I mean it sounds crazy, but like people are thinking
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, this requires the existence.
Speaker 2: Of a soul, wait, which we can argue about.
Speaker 3: We can argue about, but the chance is enough to
Speaker 3: make people obsessed with the question.
Speaker 1: Oh fascinating. But so you might get all sorts of
Speaker 1: predatory companies coming in here and saying, hey, pay me
Speaker 1: a lot of money, I'll track your soul, which may
Speaker 1: be a preposterous thing.
Speaker 3: Okay, But then the question is like how much of
Speaker 3: you has to exist for it to be your soul?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: If we're already saying that we can externalize our intelligence
Speaker 3: and pass that along, then does it have to be
Speaker 3: actual flesh or could it be a sufficient amount of
Speaker 3: our intelligence.
Speaker 1: Like an upload?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh totally. Now that's a good idea, and I
Speaker 1: think uploading the intrigant. There are, of course, all these
Speaker 1: questions about it that people have filosters have been asking
Speaker 1: for a long time, which is, you know, if I
Speaker 1: could upload myself into a computer. And so this other
Speaker 1: thing wakes up. Is that actually me? It certainly thinks
Speaker 1: it was me. It says, wow, it's just sitting in
Speaker 1: this chair a moment ago. But as far as I'm concerned,
Speaker 1: I'm still going to drop dead.
Speaker 3: And there's so much science fiction in that grapples with
Speaker 3: this ghost on the shell, right, like how much how
Speaker 3: much flesh or how much essence? Or like, you know,
Speaker 3: is your entire intelligence equal to even a spark of
Speaker 3: your natural matter?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Is the ship of Theseus?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: The question?
Speaker 1: Yes? Well okay, so just for the listener, of the
Speaker 1: Ship of Theseus is thesis. Ship pulls into the dock,
Speaker 1: plank rots, it gets replaced, Another plank rots, it gets replaced.
Speaker 1: Eventually all the planks of the ship have been replaced,
Speaker 1: every piece of wood that was on it. Is it
Speaker 1: still the ship of Theseus? In ancient Athens? I look
Speaker 1: this up recently. About half the philosophers said yes. Half
Speaker 1: lost said no on this, But it's a deep question
Speaker 1: about identity. The modern neuroscience version is if I took
Speaker 1: a neuron out of your head and replaced it with
Speaker 1: a metal neuron that did exactly the same function, and
Speaker 1: then replaced another neud on another and eighty six billion
Speaker 1: neurons later, sort of a metal robot, is it's still
Speaker 1: you exactly? Yes, this is the question. I do think
Speaker 1: that might be a separate question, though, from the upload question,
Speaker 1: which is, now I start the version of Bethany and
Speaker 1: a computer over here, do you still feel like you're
Speaker 1: having a heart attack and dying? And this other thing
Speaker 1: is but it doesn't do you any good. It's happy
Speaker 1: that it's there, but you're not. You don't feel anything
Speaker 1: about it. You don't feel any continuity.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, the question of what it means to be
Speaker 3: human and how much our intelligence defines us versus our
Speaker 3: bodies defining us, is it's happening right now, right, and
Speaker 3: it's going to happen again more and more and quickly,
Speaker 3: as we think about liability, as we think about agents
Speaker 3: that act on our behalf, and as we form and
Speaker 3: grow these deep relationships with agents that are the ghosts
Speaker 3: of our loved ones or versions of ourselves.
Speaker 1: You know, in a previous podcast that you and I
Speaker 1: did together, you were talking about this idea of a
Speaker 1: mirror of oneself, and a lot of young people are
Speaker 1: doing this, which seems to be very foresighted and mature
Speaker 1: of them to do this so they can learn about themselves.
Speaker 1: But yes, as you make a richer and richer digital twin,
Speaker 1: in a sense, you don't even have to imagine this
Speaker 1: upload thing where you scan your brain to do it,
Speaker 1: because in a sense, by the end of your life,
Speaker 1: you've got a really rich digital twin.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 3: Or there's a really great science fiction book about this,
Speaker 3: the whole the Last Emperor series, I tell you the
Speaker 3: Emperor with an X. So the emperors or the ruling
Speaker 3: family in this series implants kind of like a spinal tap,
Speaker 3: so that everybody in the family is not only having
Speaker 3: their memories be recorded, but their full like body functionality
Speaker 3: be recorded, which has typically been the missing piece, right,
Speaker 3: because we know that our cognition isn't just in our brain,
Speaker 3: that it's you know, tied with our gut, and there's
Speaker 3: you know, chemicals involved, and so the idea was that
Speaker 3: you know, because they were able to completely track through lives.
Speaker 3: That then every new impro can have a conversation with
Speaker 3: their entire family going back through millennia.
Speaker 1: Ooh oh oh. Interesting because there's a replica of their.
Speaker 3: Very grandfather, and it's able to say exactly how that
Speaker 3: person not only thought but felt in every moment of
Speaker 3: their life.
Speaker 1: Interesting, you know what I find interesting about that? So
Speaker 1: it just so happens that I'm my family's genealogist. I've
Speaker 1: studied the family tree for years, and no one else
Speaker 1: seems to be that interested. I try to show them
Speaker 1: the thing, and to them, it's just some names on
Speaker 1: the page and so on. I do wonder, though, if
Speaker 1: I said, look, I've got this great replica of your
Speaker 1: great great grandfather, would they care or would they rather
Speaker 1: hang out with their friends and play Fortnite? That's it's
Speaker 1: an interesting question. If you had all of your ancestry,
Speaker 1: you know, thirty two sixty four hundred and twenty eight people,
Speaker 1: would you sit and talk to them or do you think,
Speaker 1: oh boy, I got more relatives to deal with.
Speaker 3: Now I'm also my family's genealogist, and I think about
Speaker 3: this as well, And my conclusion is that people care
Speaker 3: less about facts, but they really want to know how
Speaker 3: their ancestors felt. If you could find out that your
Speaker 3: great great grandfather like also felt this driving need to
Speaker 3: you know, look beyond the horizon and was never like
Speaker 3: happy in one spot for long, that would give you
Speaker 3: great understanding about kind of what it means to live
Speaker 3: as a human today. It doesn't really matter what the
Speaker 3: fact is, but that like chemical experience, would really change
Speaker 3: people's understandings of who they are.
Speaker 2: We're really going off track here.
Speaker 1: I like it. This is great because so the class
Speaker 1: that I'm teaching, it stands for this quarter is literature
Speaker 1: and the brain. And there's a lot involved in this.
Speaker 1: The starting point is my fascination with the fact that
Speaker 1: the way we study the brain is looking at Okay,
Speaker 1: here's how the visual system works, heres out, audition works, here,
Speaker 1: touch arks, and but what is never talked about is
Speaker 1: how easy it is for the brain to completely go
Speaker 1: off track and be someone else. So I open Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones and I am John Snow or the next chapter,
Speaker 1: I am Denaros Targarian, and so on. We can just
Speaker 1: slip into other shoes so readily, and the story of
Speaker 1: neuroscience and every textbook that we read is you know,
Speaker 1: it's all about in mutual information and finding out exactly
Speaker 1: what you're hearing and seeing, but it's not somehow we're
Speaker 1: so easily able to slip on other identities. So that's
Speaker 1: fascinating to me. But one of the jobs of literature
Speaker 1: is that it allows us to experience broader worlds or
Speaker 1: be in situations that we would never be in, and
Speaker 1: we get to learn from those situations. And so what's
Speaker 1: interesting about science fiction is really stretching that out and
Speaker 1: really trying things out at a very different place, at
Speaker 1: a different scale. And you'd get the same thing if
Speaker 1: you met your grea great grandfather who got to tell
Speaker 1: you about something that was really meaningful in this is
Speaker 1: era which is totally removed from yours, but you'd get
Speaker 1: to really experience something, oh.
Speaker 3: And understand how he made meaning because, as you know,
Speaker 3: your upload download rate doesn't really matter. We create memories
Speaker 3: through meaning and through narrative, and that's kind of inherent
Speaker 3: kind of how our memory works. So I have this
Speaker 3: debate with my friends at neuralink where I'm like, really,
Speaker 3: will the upload download rate really like make us superhuman?
Speaker 3: Or will a brain computer interface much more likely be
Speaker 3: one in which we have an agent in our head
Speaker 3: which we are conversing with because in fact, that's how
Speaker 3: we process information better we create meaning we're dilgic, we
Speaker 3: ask questions, and that that will be the memory augmentation
Speaker 3: versus some kind of I just learned Kung Fust the situation.
Speaker 1: Oh, I love that. Are there any other science fiction
Speaker 1: books that you've read that you feel like this really
Speaker 1: shines an interesting light on where we are right now
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3: Dune is an epic book and an epic series, and
Speaker 3: of course Denny made an epic set of movies around it.
Speaker 3: But I think one of the reasons that it is
Speaker 3: capturing the public imagination right now is because it is
Speaker 3: all about that tension between kind of physical and social
Speaker 3: striving and being your higher self, you know, like can
Speaker 3: you actually become like an evolve into being better humans?
Speaker 3: And there's a lot of oil politics in there, and
Speaker 3: I'm going to show those aside for a second, But
Speaker 3: to me, the core theme of Doom is around human
Speaker 3: evolution and using meditation and using all of the different
Speaker 3: skills that we have from all the different you know,
Speaker 3: veins of knowledge throughout the world to naturally evolve ourselves.
Speaker 3: That's what the been a guess er it did, right.
Speaker 1: So if anyone who hasn't seen the movie or read
Speaker 1: the book or read the book, give us the quick stuff.
Speaker 3: Okay, So the quick summary is, in this wonderful space
Speaker 3: opera far funk future, they've outlawed thinking machines because they
Speaker 3: had some bad running with killer machines, and so they
Speaker 3: focused on natural human evolution and augmentation. And there are
Speaker 3: some specific groups that have started to use basically yoga, meditation,
Speaker 3: memory techniques, somatic dreaming like you know, hyper awareness, as
Speaker 3: well as you know, psychedelic substances to dramatically expand and
Speaker 3: increase the scope of their capabilities.
Speaker 2: And you see people's doing it now.
Speaker 3: I mean this has frankly been something that we've done
Speaker 3: in you know groups around the world forever, but there
Speaker 3: hasn't necessarily been a you know, a an effort around
Speaker 3: it for intelligence augmentation.
Speaker 1: Oh you see echoes of that.
Speaker 3: Well, Dune is very important right now as we have
Speaker 3: new technology coming online, an awareness of how different techniques
Speaker 3: around what we eat and how we meditate, how we
Speaker 3: use our memory can produce you know, longer life can
Speaker 3: slow aging can inc intelligence, And there's this tension right
Speaker 3: now around are we going to be able to do
Speaker 3: any of that naturally or are we going to have
Speaker 3: to hand it off to machines.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with Bethany Maples. So let's come
Speaker 1: back to where we began. In nineteen sixty six, Star
Speaker 1: Trek put glowing tablets into the hands of its characters,
Speaker 1: and decades later, engineers turned that fiction into fact. That's
Speaker 1: just one example of what we've been circling today, the
Speaker 1: way that science fiction becomes a rehearsal for the future. Now,
Speaker 1: it would be too simple to say that science fiction
Speaker 1: is prediction or prophecy, because it often gets things wrong. Instead,
Speaker 1: I think it makes sense to say that it's the
Speaker 1: place where we write down our collective hopes and fears,
Speaker 1: our dreams of flying, of reading minds, of living forever,
Speaker 1: of building companions who will never leave us. And by
Speaker 1: committing these things to the page, these ideas have a
Speaker 1: chance to blossom. They plant seeds in the minds of
Speaker 1: young people, and they go on to build the technology
Speaker 1: of tomorrow. And when that technology finally arrives, whether it's
Speaker 1: AI tutors or digital twins, or companions that blur the
Speaker 1: line between friendship and therapy whatever, we often feel a
Speaker 1: sense of deja vus. Haven't we been here before? Yes,
Speaker 1: but only in the pages of a novel or in
Speaker 1: the flicker of a movie screen. So as we wrap up,
Speaker 1: I'll leave you with this thought. Sometimes the stories we
Speaker 1: tell are more than just entertainment. Every once in a while,
Speaker 1: the novels on your shelf and the shows on your
Speaker 1: screen are a way to move ideas forward. And so
Speaker 1: the next question becomes, what stories do we want to
Speaker 1: tell now? Because if science fiction has a way of
Speaker 1: becoming real life, then all of us, all the writers,
Speaker 1: the readers, the engineers, the visionaries, we all share some responsibility.
Speaker 1: We are all collaborators in building the future. Go to
Speaker 1: Eagleman dot com slash podcasts for more information and to
Speaker 1: find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at
Speaker 1: eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out
Speaker 1: and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
Speaker 1: each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm
Speaker 1: David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.