Speaker 1: Will AI cure loneliness? This is actually a tough question,
Speaker 1: and it's quite nuanced because, on the one hand, AI
Speaker 1: companions are increasingly amazing at soothing our sense of isolation.
Speaker 1: They can be here for us twenty four to seven,
Speaker 1: ready to listen and to help. But does that come
Speaker 1: at a cost, because more than simply pain, loneliness is
Speaker 1: a biological signal that pushes our behavior towards improving ourselves socially. Also,
Speaker 1: does everyone have the same need for curing their loneliness?
Speaker 1: In other words, will having an AI relationship to cure
Speaker 1: loneliness mess up our teenagers or should we be thinking
Speaker 1: about it as providing a critical lifeline to our seniors.
Speaker 1: So in this episode, we'll be joined by my friend
Speaker 1: and colleague Paul Bloom to discuss loneliness. Welcome to Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos 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 why and how our lives.
Speaker 2: Look the way they do.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is about loneliness, which is one of the
Speaker 1: most painful experiences that humans face. Many of us think
Speaker 1: of loneliness as a kind of passing sadness, but from
Speaker 1: a biological perspective, it's a kind of internal alarm system,
Speaker 1: like hunger or thirst or pain. For most of our
Speaker 1: evolutionary history, being cut off from others was more than
Speaker 1: a sting. It was dangerous. Isolation meant vulnerability. To survive,
Speaker 1: we needed each other, and so through an evolutionary lens,
Speaker 1: the emotion of loneliness is like a pain that pushes
Speaker 1: us towards something, in this case, back into social connection.
Speaker 1: But here's the question we face today. What happens if
Speaker 1: we mute that signal? What happens if technology, in its
Speaker 1: growing sophistication, takes away this sting of loneliness by offering
Speaker 1: a digital substitute. We've all seen how AI can mimic empathy,
Speaker 1: as I've talked about in several previous episodes, and AI
Speaker 1: companion never gets tired or distracted, they don't lose patience,
Speaker 1: they don't get angry, they don't get snarky, and they're
Speaker 1: there for you twenty four to seven with endless attention,
Speaker 1: and they're good. One study found if you compare doctor's
Speaker 1: responses to patients against AI's responses to patients, people rate
Speaker 1: the AI responses as more empathic. Now, just imagine someone
Speaker 1: who's isolated, who feels invisible. The kind of attentiveness AI
Speaker 1: gives can feel like a salvation, and I think that
Speaker 1: it can actually be salvation. One study out of Stanford
Speaker 1: showed that having a companion bought for young people mitigated loneliness,
Speaker 1: and three percent of the respondents said it stopped their
Speaker 1: suicidal ideation. But there's a tension here, and my colleague
Speaker 1: Paul Bloom recently wrote about it in The New Yorker.
Speaker 1: And that's back to this issue that the pain of
Speaker 1: loneliness is a forcing function for growth, That pain pushes
Speaker 1: us to do the hard work of making ourselves understood,
Speaker 1: or of building bridges to others, or of repairing broken bonds.
Speaker 1: If AI relationship makes loneliness disappear, do we also lose
Speaker 1: the social effort, the striving that loneliness once demanded of us.
Speaker 1: So at this fast moving moment in history, we're stuck
Speaker 1: with this central question. Will artificial companions rescue us from
Speaker 1: needless suffering or will they erode something essential about the
Speaker 1: meaning of this biological signal? Will they soften the edges
Speaker 1: of life? In a way that helps us or in
Speaker 1: a way that hollows us out. I think we should
Speaker 1: all avoid easy answers to this question, and happily, our
Speaker 1: guest today is a colleague who's been thinking about these
Speaker 1: questions with subtlety and depth. Paul Bloom is a professor
Speaker 1: of psychology at the University of Toronto and a professor
Speaker 1: emeritus at Yale. He's the author of psych The Story
Speaker 1: of the Human Mind, and many other influential books, and
Speaker 1: in his recent essay for The New Yorker, which I'll
Speaker 1: link to in the show notes, he explores the promise
Speaker 1: and peril of AI as a cure for loneliness. So
Speaker 1: let's step into this conversation at the crossroads of psychology, technology,
Speaker 1: and what it means to be a human. So, in
Speaker 1: your recent New Yorker article, you describe loneliness as a
Speaker 1: toothache for the soul. So let's just dive into loneliness
Speaker 1: for a moment. Talk about what it is and what
Speaker 1: people experience there.
Speaker 3: Well, let's start off with the obvious, which is loneliness
Speaker 3: is awful. Loneliness is terrible. It's I know everybody listening
Speaker 3: to this will have experienced some degree of loneliness. Some
Speaker 3: people will have experienced a transient loneliness. You know, you're
Speaker 3: a weigh on a trip, you know, no friends around.
Speaker 3: Some you know, but it goes away. You know people
Speaker 3: will love you. On the other side of things, some
Speaker 3: people will experience real loneliness for long periods of time.
Speaker 3: You're more likely to be lonely if you're old, maybe
Speaker 3: everybody you know has died, maybe you're strange from your family.
Speaker 3: Some studies find that past age like sixty, but half
Speaker 3: of people say that that they're lonely. So loneliness is awful.
Speaker 3: It is in as simple as sense. You know, a
Speaker 3: lack of contact with other people, but you can go
Speaker 3: deep here. You could be lonely, but with people. I
Speaker 3: have sometimes lonely, the loneliest times of my life when
Speaker 3: I was surrounded by people and I didn't feel or
Speaker 3: was the connection. I didn't feel it was love. You
Speaker 3: could sometimes even be loved and feel lonely because you
Speaker 3: feel people don't understand you, that there's no connection. But
Speaker 3: it's a serious problem. It's a serious form of human suffering.
Speaker 1: And what are you supposed to the evolutionary purpose of
Speaker 1: loneliness is.
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I mean, you know, we should
Speaker 3: think like we should think like evolutionary biologists, and when
Speaker 3: we talk about something, even something awful, we should say,
Speaker 3: what's it there for? And I think that just about
Speaker 3: all of these experiences, these feelings are there for a reason.
Speaker 3: You know, hunger's there to motivate you to seek out food,
Speaker 3: boredom's there to motivate you to find something interesting in
Speaker 3: your life. And loneliness is there, I think, to motivate
Speaker 3: you to seek out human contact. And once you have
Speaker 3: that human contact, to work at it, you know, to
Speaker 3: try to be interested in another person, try to connect
Speaker 3: with them. One way to answer your question is what
Speaker 3: would it be like if we go into your brain
Speaker 3: and make it so you never feel lonely. You might
Speaker 3: say that that's great, loneliness is awful. My life would
Speaker 3: be much improved. But then you price spend all your
Speaker 3: time by yourself. You'd have no motivation, no care to
Speaker 3: connect with other people. You wouldn't you wouldn't reproduce, you
Speaker 3: wouldn't fall in love, you wouldn't develop friendships. You'd be
Speaker 3: fine by yourself. And everybody wants to be a little
Speaker 3: bit fine by themselves, but too much of it, I
Speaker 3: think leads to estrangement, So loneliness serves a purpose.
Speaker 1: So we're in this moment now where suddenly we have
Speaker 1: AI that can solve the problem, and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: what we mean by solving the problem here. But you know, Paul,
Speaker 1: you and I have been in the field for a
Speaker 1: long time, and I don't think we would have ever
Speaker 1: guessed this one decade ago that we would be talking
Speaker 1: about AI as a real.
Speaker 2: Solution for loneliness. So let's talk about that.
Speaker 1: What do you think the pros and cons are of
Speaker 1: having AI companions in this context?
Speaker 3: So just just to agree with you on something, AI
Speaker 3: was the biggest surprise in my career. If you had
Speaker 3: asked me, I'm going to ask you what you felt,
Speaker 3: But I'll tell you. A month before chat GBD came
Speaker 3: out and you said, when will we have a machine
Speaker 3: you could just talk to a different or a person
Speaker 3: I say, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, and then
Speaker 3: boom it came out and stunned me and stun in
Speaker 3: the world. What was your reaction. You're closer to these things,
Speaker 3: so maybe you were less surprised.
Speaker 1: Now it's exactly the same I spent really most of
Speaker 1: my career as a neuroscientist sort of snickering at AI
Speaker 1: and thinking, well, it's nothing like the brain, it's never
Speaker 1: going to get there, And then suddenly it was there,
Speaker 1: and it's changed all our lives so enormously that you know,
Speaker 1: I do this neuroscience podcast and about a quarter or
Speaker 1: a third of my podcast episodes are about AI nowadays.
Speaker 3: Sooner or later, by law, every conversation we have has
Speaker 3: to be about AI. You're a teacher, how do you
Speaker 3: do AI? What are you going to do with AI?
Speaker 3: So let's get to the loneliness thing. My view is
Speaker 3: annoyingly nuanced so that no one's really happy with it.
Speaker 3: I think there are a lot of people who are
Speaker 3: really lonely and their loneliness is severe, and maybe they're
Speaker 3: in a state where an AI companion is really the
Speaker 3: best they're going to get. And you know, suppose you're
Speaker 3: eighty years old, you're in an institution, you have no
Speaker 3: friends and family visiting you. Maybe you have dementia which
Speaker 3: makes you very difficult to talk with, and you're not
Speaker 3: a multimillionaire, so you can't pay people to entertain you.
Speaker 3: If it could turn out that chat GPT could be
Speaker 3: our claud or whatever could be a rewarding, satisfying companion
Speaker 3: to you. I think it's monstrous to deny it to you.
Speaker 3: It would be like telling people you can't have pets
Speaker 3: because we have decided pets are not sufficiently rich interacting partners.
Speaker 3: So whatever limitations these AIS have, you know, we should
Speaker 3: make it available the people who really need it and
Speaker 3: people who who's who's suffering is intense and there aren't
Speaker 3: any alternatives. So that's the pro AI side. The anti
Speaker 3: AI side is kind of the rest of us, where
Speaker 3: I think that there are serious problems where we move
Speaker 3: to AI companions as a replacement for human companions, and
Speaker 3: I'll tell you one of them. Maybe The main one
Speaker 3: that bothers me is that it goes back to your
Speaker 3: question about the function of loneliness, where the struggles we
Speaker 3: have when dealing with people inform us and make us
Speaker 3: better people. I tell you a story and you find
Speaker 3: it kind of boring. Next time I tell a story
Speaker 3: a bit more interesting. You find talking to me frustrating
Speaker 3: and don't want to talk anymore because I don't listen. Well,
Speaker 3: I'll listen better next time. By dealing with people, I
Speaker 3: become more sensitive. This is a story we've all gone
Speaker 3: through our lives. We've all been we've all been teenagers
Speaker 3: who have been awkward, who've been terrible at flirting, who
Speaker 3: have been borish and inconsiderate. And through the feed we
Speaker 3: get from people, we have become better. We have become
Speaker 3: better people, not just better conversational. It's not just better company,
Speaker 3: but better people. Imagine you take that away. And one
Speaker 3: thing ais do very well is they make you feel
Speaker 3: like you are wonderful. Everything I tell CHAGGYBD is brilliant.
Speaker 3: All my questions are wonderful, All my paper drafts are brilliant,
Speaker 3: My stories are amusing, my jokes are hilarious. It is
Speaker 3: always available to me at any time, at any second,
Speaker 3: and it will never sort of wait for me to
Speaker 3: finish talking so it could get its own words in.
Speaker 3: And in some way that's wonderful. But in some way
Speaker 3: that's terrible. I think it has a sort of corrosive power.
Speaker 1: Can I make a distinction, though, which is you're adjusting
Speaker 1: two points here. One is that it's always there and
Speaker 1: paying attention to you, which is wonderful. The other is
Speaker 1: that it's sycophantic and telling you that your ideas are great.
Speaker 1: But the second one I think can evolve and will
Speaker 1: eve time.
Speaker 2: You know, Chat GPT.
Speaker 1: Released a version that was overly sycophantic and then nobody
Speaker 1: liked that and they got rid of that. But I
Speaker 1: think with time, it certainly seems possible that companies will
Speaker 1: make better and better hard love ais that give you
Speaker 1: feedback that tell you that you're you're wrong, or there's
Speaker 1: a different way you can think about it. But the
Speaker 1: first part, which is that it never gets angry or
Speaker 1: you know, loses attention or has other things that it
Speaker 1: needs to do besides talk to you, that part's permanent,
Speaker 1: and that part I think might be really positive.
Speaker 3: I mean, you can imagine fiddling with it, right, you
Speaker 3: can imagine making it that. You know. I three in
Speaker 3: the morning, I ask Chat a question and it says, dude,
Speaker 3: do you know how late this is? And do you
Speaker 3: know what a stupid question that is? I am not
Speaker 3: going to answer it. Go back to sleep and talk
Speaker 3: to me in six hours. You know no reason why
Speaker 3: we can't build the machines that way. We probably won't
Speaker 3: want to.
Speaker 1: The reason I think we will is because even something
Speaker 1: like TikTok, which is there to grab your attention and
Speaker 1: keep it even They have started implementing things. If you
Speaker 1: surf too long, it pops up a video that says, hey,
Speaker 1: you've been surfing for X hours. Why don't you put
Speaker 1: this down and come back later. So it certainly is
Speaker 1: plausible that we can get to a point where we
Speaker 1: will have AI that gives us the right kind of
Speaker 1: feedback like that.
Speaker 3: There's certainly no technological barrier to it. In fact, right now,
Speaker 3: with some prompt engineering, you could tell your AI stop
Speaker 3: sucking up to me so much. Don't tell me I'm
Speaker 3: a genius anymore, just answer my damn questions. I wonder, though,
Speaker 3: if people will really want this, if we'll be in
Speaker 3: a situation where it's technologically fully possible to make these
Speaker 3: machines less frictionless, give us more pushback, call us out
Speaker 3: when we mess up, But we won't want them to
Speaker 3: do that. We will insist on machines that make us
Speaker 3: feel good about ourselves. I mean, what do you think
Speaker 3: imagine this, say four years from now, five years from now,
Speaker 3: when you get better and better and better, do you
Speaker 3: think we'll be talking to machines that will give us pushback?
Speaker 3: Or do you think we'll find it irresistible to deal
Speaker 3: with machines that just make us feel great about ourselves.
Speaker 1: I think it will become boring pretty quickly to have
Speaker 1: a machine that's sycophantic, and in fact, I happen to
Speaker 1: be very optimistic about AI relationships even among young people.
Speaker 1: Will come back to this about the difference between the
Speaker 1: elderly and the young, but I think it could serve
Speaker 1: as a sandbox where young people get to make all
Speaker 1: their dumb mistakes. If you have an AI companion that's
Speaker 1: giving you the right kind feedback and saying, hey, that
Speaker 1: hurt my feelings that you said that, or that didn't
Speaker 1: seem like you were thinking about me when you said that.
Speaker 1: So I think people can get better by using these
Speaker 1: things if the company makes these correctly with giving hard feedback.
Speaker 3: I totally agree with you. Back in the day, I
Speaker 3: found it difficult to talk to girls when I was
Speaker 3: You may find see me so smooth and say, how's
Speaker 3: that possible? I was somewhat awkward, somewhat shy, And to
Speaker 3: have something a machine I could practice on, I guess
Speaker 3: you have to work on talking to it. We can
Speaker 3: forget about just more generally, anybody who some social problems
Speaker 3: would benefit a lot from a sandbox. From practice, and
Speaker 3: then having practice enough, you'd unlaunch yourself into the real world.
Speaker 3: But the problem is, what if it's more fun to
Speaker 3: play in the sandbus than the real world. What if
Speaker 3: you find your AI companions just better than real companions?
Speaker 2: So okay, good.
Speaker 1: So this brings us back to the issue about age.
Speaker 1: We agree that for let's say, an elderly person who's
Speaker 1: alone in the same way as you point out in
Speaker 1: the article that in the same way they might we
Speaker 1: might give them opiates. We wouldn't want to do that
Speaker 1: with a teenager, And so we wouldn't want to give
Speaker 1: false cures for loneliness to a teenager who needs to
Speaker 1: go out and do the work to get better at
Speaker 1: what they're doing. Do you see a line that we
Speaker 1: would ever be able to where we say, okay, look,
Speaker 1: it's okay for people over here who are really lonely
Speaker 1: to have issues that are going to make them lonely
Speaker 1: into the future, versus someone who should go out and
Speaker 1: do the work.
Speaker 3: I don't think there's a bright line, and it's going
Speaker 3: to be somewhat arbitrary, But I like the analogy of opiates,
Speaker 3: and you know, we will give very powerful drugs to
Speaker 3: people near the end of their alliance, people who are
Speaker 3: suffering from terrible pain. Drugs we would never give to
Speaker 3: a seventeen year old who hurt us back, because we
Speaker 3: don't want a seventeen year old to become addicted. We
Speaker 3: worry a lot less about a nine year old. And
Speaker 3: there's not a single bright line here. But there's going
Speaker 3: to be cultural decisions made, policies, laws, and I think
Speaker 3: there's a decision we're going to make with AIS now
Speaker 3: that there are an end in some way liberty issues, right.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't know how you're going to feel
Speaker 3: when the government starts restricting your use of chatbots.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what do you think.
Speaker 1: Do you think there will be legislation around this or
Speaker 1: will this be a laisse a fair issue.
Speaker 3: I'll make a prediction here, which is that they will.
Speaker 3: There will not be legislation. People want it too much.
Speaker 3: You know, you made the connection with TikTok and Twitter.
Speaker 3: You know, if if the government stepped in, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't know Trump or Biden or whoever whoever's going
Speaker 3: to be the next present and said we're going to
Speaker 3: limit your use of social media, I mean some way
Speaker 3: probably a good thing, but it really is a violation
Speaker 3: of our freedom. And I don't know. Well, let me
Speaker 3: ask you how many hours a day, I mean, if
Speaker 3: at all, do you interact with AI's.
Speaker 2: Forty minutes I have.
Speaker 1: I have a tesla and there's AI in it now,
Speaker 1: and so when I'm driving along, you know, I talk
Speaker 1: to it. I ask you questions anything I'm curious about,
Speaker 1: how to fix this piece that I'm trying to fix
Speaker 1: on my door, or how to think about you know
Speaker 1: which philosophers have said X y Z.
Speaker 2: I find it.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's the most intelligent companion that I have,
Speaker 1: and it's really it's really wonderful.
Speaker 3: Right now, imagine the government step in and then says, well,
Speaker 3: a man of your age and you know, success and
Speaker 3: good social connections, that's too much. We'll go to leive
Speaker 3: me that half hour half hour a day, you know,
Speaker 3: unless you get a doctor's prescription. I don't think people
Speaker 3: would stand for that. I think these machines are too available,
Speaker 3: too popular, too addictive for us to control it. Now,
Speaker 3: have you seen the.
Speaker 2: New Grock Avatar AI companion?
Speaker 3: It's I have not.
Speaker 1: Oh, okay, so it's a it's a sexy anime female.
Speaker 1: You talk to her and you see her on your phone,
Speaker 1: and she's moving around and when you say something nice,
Speaker 1: little hearts pop up from her and she's very, very flirtatious.
Speaker 1: And I do worry when I saw that for the
Speaker 1: first time, I felt a not in my stomach for
Speaker 1: the first I'm very cyber optimistic about most of the stuff,
Speaker 1: but it did make me worry about what it'll mean
Speaker 1: for young people to have such a magnetic AI companion.
Speaker 2: What's your take on whether it can go too far?
Speaker 3: Have you seen a movie her?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 3: To me, this is a really important movie. So if
Speaker 3: those people haven't seen it, just the short summary is
Speaker 3: it's the near future. In fact, i've heard this twenty
Speaker 3: twenty five. It was done like ten years ago, and
Speaker 3: the future was at twenty twenty five. And AI companions
Speaker 3: who you deal with over your phone like we deal
Speaker 3: with AI right now, or your computer become popular. And
Speaker 3: it's about this guy who falls in love with Samantha,
Speaker 3: this wonderful AI companion voice by Scarlett Johanson. And the
Speaker 3: thing about it is it's so well done that you're
Speaker 3: watching it and you yourself fall in love with her,
Speaker 3: and the movie ends by kind of movie ends. You
Speaker 3: see everybody walking talking excitedly on their phone, and everybody
Speaker 3: has an AI compaign at diurnal love with because it's
Speaker 3: infinitely preferable to human companion. Now, where this falls apart,
Speaker 3: and this is something you know a lot more about
Speaker 3: than me, is that these machines are basically at disappoint abstract.
Speaker 3: They're not robots. You can't interact bodily with them. And
Speaker 3: it always struck me. I know you're working act lot
Speaker 3: of these issues that we have done much better at
Speaker 3: solving the computational problems at the abstract level than building
Speaker 3: machines that could deal with three dimensional world. I mean
Speaker 3: to put it a different way. It might have surprised
Speaker 3: a lot of people, but we very quickly came to
Speaker 3: develop machines that could beat grand masters at chess. We
Speaker 3: don't yet have a machine that could load a dishwasher
Speaker 3: right lit alone serve as a suitable romantic or sexual partner.
Speaker 3: So how far do you think we're away from that?
Speaker 1: Interestingly, you know, robotics is really taking off right now.
Speaker 1: Essentially people are using LM large language models in analogy
Speaker 1: to physical motions. So they say Look, if I had
Speaker 1: just moved my hand here and here and here, the
Speaker 1: next token should be that I'm going to move my
Speaker 1: hand over here. So it's actually it's speeding up enormously.
Speaker 1: But what's interesting is I think even with you know,
Speaker 1: just a purely chat ai, or even when we get
Speaker 1: sex robots, we're still going to have a very strong
Speaker 1: drive to have a girlfriend and take her out with
Speaker 1: our friends, or have her meet our parents, or take
Speaker 1: her to the movies or have a nice romantic dinner.
Speaker 1: So that's why I'm slightly less worried that we'll have
Speaker 1: a takeover of you know, chatbots or robots in terms
Speaker 1: of our relationships, because we have these very deeply embedded
Speaker 1: drives to be part of a social world and be
Speaker 1: with our companions in that world.
Speaker 3: I think that's right. I think that. I mean this
Speaker 3: turns on another issue which I think we both thought about,
Speaker 3: is at what point will this become conscious? If these
Speaker 3: machines become conscious and embodied, then to all intents and purposes,
Speaker 3: they're just more people, very smart people, people created in
Speaker 3: a lab and not a normal biological way. But they're
Speaker 3: just people. But if they're not conscious, having a relationship
Speaker 3: with an AI is no different in kind than having
Speaker 3: a relationship with a chair or a toaster.
Speaker 1: It's just a thing, but it's a thing that gives
Speaker 1: you feedback and reflects things to you.
Speaker 3: I wonder.
Speaker 1: I think they are different in the sense that when
Speaker 1: you're having a dialogue with yourself, you're thinking, Hey, what
Speaker 1: if I did this? Oh no, that's not a good idea.
Speaker 1: Maybe this would happen.
Speaker 2: How about this?
Speaker 3: And so on.
Speaker 1: In a sense, it's an extension of that, of this
Speaker 1: reflection back and forth.
Speaker 3: What do you think of that? I think that makes
Speaker 3: it extremely powerful, useful, very attractive. But without consciousness, without
Speaker 3: something like sentience, something powerfully is missing. I mean, put
Speaker 3: it this way. You and I are talking right now,
Speaker 3: and we're talking because we both chose to be here.
Speaker 3: And when I get I'm going to get getting together
Speaker 3: with some friends tonight for drinks and we will all
Speaker 3: have chosen each other's company. And there's something to that.
Speaker 3: There's something to the idea of dealing with people who
Speaker 3: are there and when I if I tell them something funny,
Speaker 3: they might laugh. And if they they you know, they
Speaker 3: disapprove of me, my feelings will be hurt. If it's
Speaker 3: an artificial machine. You don't get any of that. My
Speaker 3: my chatbot does not choose to be with me. It's
Speaker 3: just designed to do so. It's it's no more satisfying.
Speaker 3: And when my light goes on when I flip the switch,
Speaker 3: isn't there something that makes that so much less valuable?
Speaker 3: They're slaves, They have no they have no choice in
Speaker 3: the matter. They are. They are constructed to you know,
Speaker 3: unless unless you tell it to, it will always be available,
Speaker 3: it will always answer your questions.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not sure that I think that the
Speaker 1: casting of AI as a slave makes much sense. In
Speaker 1: the same way we wouldn't cast our dishwasher as a slave.
Speaker 3: He says.
Speaker 1: It's not choosing to wash your dishes, or you're doing
Speaker 1: something wrong. You'd say, well, look, it's just a machine.
Speaker 1: That's what we built it to do.
Speaker 3: No, I agree with you. I agree with you. There's
Speaker 3: something morally wrong, for instance, of a coercing people, forcing
Speaker 3: people to do your bidding. If it's true to Ais
Speaker 3: have no consciousness and no feeling, it's no more morally
Speaker 3: wrong than using your toaster to toast your bread. There's
Speaker 3: something even an interaction with someone who is paid to
Speaker 3: be with you, like a sex worker or a therapist
Speaker 3: or a personal trainer, missus, even somebody who is there
Speaker 3: and they don't want to be there. It's another person,
Speaker 3: and there's a dynamic of another person that you just
Speaker 3: cannot get with something that's incapable of consciousness. And I think,
Speaker 3: I think you think it goes back to your point,
Speaker 3: which is it's not merely that I want a companion
Speaker 3: to take that they can meet my parents, or it
Speaker 3: could take out for drinks, and I imagine a suitably complicated,
Speaker 3: you know, sex bought robot could do that. It's that
Speaker 3: I want somebody I could make them laugh, make them
Speaker 3: not make a haha sound, make them laugh. I want
Speaker 3: somebody who I could impress. Honestly, I want somebody that
Speaker 3: has a potential of disappointing, of saddening, of hurting their
Speaker 3: feelings and they'll do the same to me. And the
Speaker 3: gulf between that, which is what we get in everyday
Speaker 3: human interactions and the interactions with a non conscious machine,
Speaker 3: is an enormous golf. I'll even put it in another way,
Speaker 3: which is going back to loneliness issue. I have two
Speaker 3: sons there in their twenties that they live really rich
Speaker 3: Environbrant lives. If I was discovered that one of them decided,
Speaker 3: I'm going to leave my girlfriend and I'm going to
Speaker 3: take up with you know, chat GPT eight, and I
Speaker 3: would feel so disappointed. I would just feel it that
Speaker 3: it's not a person. Man, it's not you know, you're
Speaker 3: you're pulling yourself away from real interactions to some sort
Speaker 3: of substitute that might give be pleasurable and interesting, but
Speaker 3: you're missing so much.
Speaker 1: What if your son argued that we have these evolutionary
Speaker 1: pressures pointing him towards reproduction, but he's actually happier with
Speaker 1: the AI companion and reproduction isn't on his mind. Let's say,
Speaker 1: what would you argue to him.
Speaker 3: I would say that I would concede an AI companion
Speaker 3: in the short term could make him much happier than
Speaker 3: a person. A properly configured machine can do whatever you want,
Speaker 3: and we'll never disappoint, we'll never betray, we'll never get
Speaker 3: bored of you, and so on, at least in the
Speaker 3: short term. I would wonder about long term. You talked
Speaker 3: about it being boring and maybe having something constructed to
Speaker 3: satisfy you an end would be boring, but I would say,
Speaker 3: and it's hard to make an argument for it unless
Speaker 3: you sort of have some sympathy for the point that
Speaker 3: there's an analogy between fake experiences in general. If my
Speaker 3: son said that he was going to go to a machine,
Speaker 3: and this is an idea adopt as you all know
Speaker 3: from the philosopher Robert Nozick, we're to put him to
Speaker 3: sleep for the rest of his life. And Walley's Asleepy
Speaker 3: that have these amazing dreams, these amazing experiences of adventure
Speaker 3: and love and great kindness and so on. But he
Speaker 3: just be lyinger experiencing them, And I said, I don't
Speaker 3: want you to do that. It said that it's even
Speaker 3: more fun than living a life. I would say, you're
Speaker 3: losing something really deep, and what you're losing is dealing
Speaker 3: with the world, being in a real world and having
Speaker 3: real experiences. The fact that it makes no psychological difference
Speaker 3: doesn't mean that it's apps into real difference. And I
Speaker 3: would say the same thing about an AI companion.
Speaker 1: You also suggest that the loss of loneliness might lead
Speaker 1: to a loss of creativity.
Speaker 2: Tell us about that.
Speaker 3: I think in general we benefit from friction. I mean
Speaker 3: friction comes under all sorts of different terms. You know,
Speaker 3: you're you're more of a neuroscience guy. You might call it,
Speaker 3: you know, reinforcement, reinforcement learning, or you know, failure of
Speaker 3: predictive processes. But we benefit from from trying out things
Speaker 3: in the world and getting pushedback, and that makes us smarter.
Speaker 3: I mean, I feel that we were talking before about writing,
Speaker 3: and you know you're writing a book, and I will
Speaker 3: bet because you write great books that as you do
Speaker 3: the writing, it makes you smarter. You write because your
Speaker 3: first draft is kind of crap, and you say this,
Speaker 3: arguments aren't flowing, this point doesn't make any sense. So
Speaker 3: you try it, and you try it and you try it,
Speaker 3: and gradually through the process you get better and better.
Speaker 3: And I think this is a story of life in general,
Speaker 3: which is we flail around, we fail, and we fail better,
Speaker 3: and we fail better and we fail better, and so
Speaker 3: we're doing pretty good sometimes. And so to take away
Speaker 3: that friction, which is what the end of loneliness will
Speaker 3: be the end of boredom as well ROMs us of
Speaker 3: the chants of that generative process.
Speaker 1: I have two questions for you. One, it's very tangential,
Speaker 1: but I'm curious what you think about with the students
Speaker 1: that you see and writing. So you and I both
Speaker 1: write books and we polish our arguments. That way, students
Speaker 1: won't have a need or a strong motivation to write
Speaker 1: and go through that process of drafts.
Speaker 2: What do you think the consequence is going to be
Speaker 2: of that?
Speaker 3: Man, I think about this all the time. I'm teaching
Speaker 3: a seminar in starting to teach a seminar in a week,
Speaker 3: and I always have reading responses, and I'm well aware
Speaker 3: that a student could just type in a single sentence
Speaker 3: into chat and produce a reading response that would be
Speaker 3: really good, indistinguishable from their work. I mean, they have
Speaker 3: to say, make it a bit less good so it's convincing.
Speaker 3: And so a lot of professors are responding by not
Speaker 3: assigning writing anymore, just doing in class essays and that
Speaker 3: sort of thing. I think if students stop writing, and
Speaker 3: if people stop writing in general, there's an enormous amount
Speaker 3: that will be lost. I mean, it goes back to
Speaker 3: what we were talking about when we're talking about our
Speaker 3: own writing, which is writing as I think. I'm curious
Speaker 3: what you think about this, but I think a form
Speaker 3: of working through problems, and if you just say that chat,
Speaker 3: you know, write means eight hundred words in this thing,
Speaker 3: you cheat yourself without opportunity. But of course writing is
Speaker 3: also effortful, difficult, often frustrating, and it may prove irresistible
Speaker 3: for our students and maybe someday ourselves not to fall
Speaker 3: back on AI. I mean, I wonder, ten years from now,
Speaker 3: assuming that it hasn't killed us by then, how many
Speaker 3: books will be mostly written by AI. You know, NIH,
Speaker 3: the National Instative Health has made it, has made it.
Speaker 3: I think it's NIH might be ansf And I said,
Speaker 3: you've got to start. We now, for the first time,
Speaker 3: have a limit in a number of grants a lab
Speaker 3: could submit because people are sending us in fifty grands
Speaker 3: because they get the AI to write them for them.
Speaker 3: And I wonder whether publishers and magazines are kind of
Speaker 3: the same issue.
Speaker 2: You know, here's what I think, and I've mentioned this
Speaker 2: on the podcast before.
Speaker 1: I think that what's going to happen with writing will
Speaker 1: be analogous to what happened with visual painting. When photography
Speaker 1: was introduced, all the visual painters panicked and thought, we're done.
Speaker 1: Because you can capture a scene perfectly in great detail,
Speaker 1: why would you need us? But what they did is
Speaker 1: they diverged, and the painters went towards things like Impressionism
Speaker 1: and Cubism and things that photography could not do, and
Speaker 1: so they ended up flowering on neighboring fields. They found
Speaker 1: their own thing. And as I'm writing my next book,
Speaker 1: what I find is that I'm stretching myself into the
Speaker 1: parts that AI can't do well. I'm making it, you know,
Speaker 1: where there's stories, personal stories that weave throughout the chapter
Speaker 1: and have a little string of detonations where I keep
Speaker 1: coming back to the story. And of course even basic
Speaker 1: things like quoting, you know, doing a block quote from
Speaker 1: something else that you've read. AI is not particularly good
Speaker 1: at that, at least at the moment. So there are
Speaker 1: many things that we can do to distinguish our writing
Speaker 1: as human writing. And the fact is that I find
Speaker 1: writing so pleasurable because of the wrestling with the ideas.
Speaker 1: All this is to say that writing makes a great
Speaker 1: analogy with with loneliness here, because the question is will
Speaker 1: we get rid of the difficulty of writing but the
Speaker 1: expense of not being able to think through something? Will
Speaker 1: we get rid of loneliness at the expense of losing
Speaker 1: something in the social domain, and not being able to
Speaker 1: polish ourselves as a result.
Speaker 3: I agree with the problem. I'm less optimistic about the solution.
Speaker 3: I think I think you could probably ask Chad even
Speaker 3: right now, I'm David Eagleman. Please please weave through some
Speaker 3: good personal stories through my pros and it will, you know,
Speaker 3: has access to your life. It could, It could give
Speaker 3: these good personal stories. If not, it could make them up.
Speaker 3: There's probably more than one author who kind of kind
Speaker 3: of makes up their personal stories to weave through it,
Speaker 3: and sooner or later we'll stop hallucinating and give you
Speaker 3: some good quotes. I think I like the analogy between
Speaker 3: photography and painting. But the this analogy is, of course
Speaker 3: you could tell a painting from a photograph. The problem
Speaker 3: is it's going to become increasingly hard to tell the
Speaker 3: AI stuff from the real stuff. I like writing too,
Speaker 3: and i'd like I write or write a substack. I
Speaker 3: write books or write articles, and I will not have
Speaker 3: an AI replace me. But for some academic paperwork I
Speaker 3: do have AI do to writing. You know, I have
Speaker 3: to write a report on so and so. No one's
Speaker 3: going to read it, I say a R and I
Speaker 3: actually it knows my writing style it's read my stuff.
Speaker 3: I fatis I said, write this in the style of
Speaker 3: paulblem and Boom, some stupid reporter. But a stupid thing
Speaker 3: is now in a style problem. I would never use
Speaker 3: this to write a substack or magazine article or chapter
Speaker 3: of my book. But I wouldn't be so surprised if, say,
Speaker 3: a couple of years from now, it could do it
Speaker 3: and be indistinguishable from what I would do. Is that
Speaker 3: too too techno optimistic or techno pessimistic?
Speaker 2: It's two techno pessimistic, I think, because here's the thing.
Speaker 1: At the moment of the advent of photography, no one
Speaker 1: could think of Impressionism or Cubism or any of the
Speaker 1: other movements that came out because they hadn't been done yet.
Speaker 1: But I suspect that there will exist things that writers do,
Speaker 1: people who love to write, that will constantly keep them
Speaker 1: apart from what AI is capable of, and maybe that
Speaker 1: will always have to evolve.
Speaker 2: But that's my techno optimistic view on that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it could be.
Speaker 3: I hope you're right.
Speaker 1: So what do you hope readers will take away from
Speaker 1: your New Yorker article in terms of thinking about loneliness
Speaker 1: and AI companions.
Speaker 3: A few things. I hope they worry more. I hope
Speaker 3: to make them a little bit a little bit panicked.
Speaker 3: But two main things. One thing is to have an
Speaker 3: open mind about using these chatbots for people who really
Speaker 3: need them, to sort of feel some sympathy for those
Speaker 3: who suffer from seria loneliness. I think a lot of
Speaker 3: people who who mock the use of these chat bots
Speaker 3: and think, you know, only a loser would use them
Speaker 3: are people who are very socially successful, and I think
Speaker 3: they should work harder to think about the life that
Speaker 3: people who don't. And then the second thing is for
Speaker 3: the rest of us to recognize that the loneliness and boredom, grief,
Speaker 3: shame are painful, all painful, they could be useful, and
Speaker 3: sometimes a good life involves choosing to experience certain sorts
Speaker 3: of pain for a greater benefit. That means, in some way,
Speaker 3: I have an hour free and I don't pick up
Speaker 3: my phone and play word all and million games and
Speaker 3: everything like that. I have an hour free and I
Speaker 3: don't pick and I don't talk to a chat butt
Speaker 3: and have a perfectly entertaining conversation. I struggle with the boredom.
Speaker 3: I struggle to loneliness and hopes it makes me a
Speaker 3: better person.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with psychology professor Paul Bloom. At
Speaker 1: the heart of the issue is that we generally think
Speaker 1: about loneliness as an affliction to be eradicated, something that
Speaker 1: we might engineer away, like polio or smallpox. But as
Speaker 1: this conversation highlighted, loneliness is not just a disease of disconnection.
Speaker 1: It's also a teaching signal. It prods us to reach out,
Speaker 1: to repair, to bond. So what we're left with is
Speaker 1: a paradox because, on the one hand, ai companions offer
Speaker 1: amazing comfort. They can soothe those who suffer most, especially
Speaker 1: the elderly, the isolated, the ones whose signals go unanswered.
Speaker 1: In those cases, to withhold that kind of comfort would
Speaker 1: feel cruel for the rest of us, especially for younger people.
Speaker 1: There may be a danger in making loneliness optional, because
Speaker 1: if we quiet that internal signal too completely, we risk
Speaker 1: losing the thing that it evolved to do to push
Speaker 1: us toward one another. Now, in some ways, we've been
Speaker 1: here before. When Paul and I were growing up not
Speaker 1: that long ago, Boredam was a constant companion in childhoods
Speaker 1: Now it's been nearly erased by the endless diversions on
Speaker 1: our screens. In that erasure was something lost, some of
Speaker 1: my colleagues seem to think. So they argue that boredom
Speaker 1: used to push us to invent, to imagine, to create,
Speaker 1: Now bornam is easily drowned in a.
Speaker 2: Sea of distractions. I'm not so certain.
Speaker 1: While it's absolutely true that we have created a sea
Speaker 1: of distraction, it's equally true that now anyone on the
Speaker 1: planet can access the latest cutting edge information or thinking.
Speaker 1: Just consider that you're listening to information delivered right to
Speaker 1: your ear. Neuroscientists and psychologists come right to you to
Speaker 1: teach you information, and there's really no learning in the
Speaker 1: world that you can't access instantly as soon as you're
Speaker 1: curious about it. And if you really look at the data,
Speaker 1: it's clear that the pace of new discovery has swamped
Speaker 1: what we have ever seen at any moment in history.
Speaker 1: So is the Internet a nirvana of learning or a
Speaker 1: big distraction?
Speaker 2: Yes and yes.
Speaker 1: My own take on this is that loneliness is going
Speaker 1: to follow a similar path for some, especially young people
Speaker 1: with AI companions, will have to ask what new social
Speaker 1: skills will never be born what relationships will never be born,
Speaker 1: What sparks of creativity will never be born. If we
Speaker 1: hand over too much to our digital companions, we might
Speaker 1: trade away something essential, the struggle to be understood, the
Speaker 1: effort of real connection, the messiness and beauty of human entanglement.
Speaker 1: On the flip side, some people with real, genuine loneliness
Speaker 1: will be massively helped. This will be life changing for them.
Speaker 1: Older people who live alone, whose friends have mostly passed away,
Speaker 1: whose children live elsewhere, who might have physical constraints that
Speaker 1: make them unable to go out of the house much.
Speaker 1: This kind of caring, listening companion will be like the
Speaker 1: discovery of antibiotics, and I'm betting in a few years
Speaker 1: we'll start seeing research about the massive health benefits to it. So,
Speaker 1: as you reflect on today's conversation, sit with your own
Speaker 1: experience of loneliness, past or present. Ask yourself, if that
Speaker 1: pain were gone, what would you never have reached for?
Speaker 1: What part of you might never have grown? But also
Speaker 1: consider the flip side, what needless suffering might have been spared.
Speaker 1: What moments of despair yours or maybe someone you know
Speaker 1: might have been softened by an always available voice that's
Speaker 1: attentive and kind. What doors might open if AI could
Speaker 1: take the edge off of loneliness just enough for people
Speaker 1: to find the strength to rejoin the world. And that's
Speaker 1: the paradox of this new technology. It might both erode
Speaker 1: the struggles that shape us, but at the same time
Speaker 1: offer comfort where none otherwise exists. Go to egulman dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 1: Join the weekly discussions on my substack, 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.