Will AI make humans better? And what does this have to do with linguistics or the movie Arrival or self driving cars or debate and video games and elections and chess and the ancient game of go. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we seek to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. In today's episode is about whether AI will make us better humans. I often find myself totally flabbergasted by the
change that I've seen just in my lifetime. When I was a really little kid, personal computers didn't exist, and then we passed through a door and suddenly they did. And I saved up my money and I got a common or VIC twenty computer, which was something my parents had never seen the likes of. And I felt like I was living the largest change in human history, because for the first time, everybody could have a machine that
would do all kinds of things. But that turned out not to even be the biggest change, because the next stop was even bigger, and that was the idea that some people had to build a system where we could keep information on computers and make computers talk to each other such that if the Soviets bombed America, the important information wouldn't just be stored on one computer, and messages could follow different routes on the network, and that way
you had a very robust system for keeping information. That was of course Arpanet, which became the Internet, and not long after, the idea was introduced of a way that everyone could use this giant network, not just with text, but with graphics, and.
That was the birth of the Worldwide Web.
And as soon as that technology existed, then people started figuring out what to do with it, and one young man started to sell books over the Internet.
And that became Amazon.
And two graduate students at Stanford asked the question of how the heck we were going to be able to find information on this sprawling network, and they created a way of measuring all the connections between web pages and that gave the ability to search for it, and.
That garage project grew into Google.
And around the same time, a Harvard kid was thinking about a better way to allow his classmates to get to know each other, which was traditionally done at the beginning of the year by printing a booklet with everybody's picture and name, and that little booklet was called called a Facebook, and he thought of digitizing that, and on and on, people increasingly figured out how to take this new technology and make things that would live on top
of it. And I felt very lucky to have experienced two truly world changing inventions in my lifetime, and I knew that had launched us into a world that was so different from what my great grandparents could have possibly imagined. But now here we are in the middle of a third revolution. It's related to the first two computers and the Internet, but it makes them look like warm up acts. And that's the fact that we have created a new intelligent species that we're going to be sharing the planet
with from now on. This is not to say that AI has exactly the same type of intelligence that human brains have, but obviously it has absorbed the higher knowledge sphere of humankind and it can spit that back to us with all sorts of remixes. Now, the question is, are we in trouble because of this new invention? Have we taken things a step too far? Well, let me give you an example that's on people's minds. A few months ago, a Swiss research team carried out a secret
experiment in online persuasion. They went to a forum on the website Reddit, and in this forum, users post opinions and invite other people to challenge them. And so these researchers quietly unleashed a set of AI accounts to pretend that they were people and to try to change other people's minds. So their large language models LMS, they participated in the debating just like any other human. These bots wrote arguments, they engaged with users, They debated with the
hope of changing minds. Now, the researchers measured success by tallying whenever an original poster publicly admitted that their mind had been changed. So how did the bots do well? They achieved up to an eighteen percent success rate in changing people's minds. Now, the critical piece you need to know is that the average human success rate is about three percent. So the bots had absolutely crushed their human competition in an environment teeming with intellectuals. The bots not
only survived, but they thrived. In fact, one of the AI accounts climbed into the ninety ninth percentile of all users on this subreddit. It racked up ten thousand karma points along the way. Now, one of the most surprising aspects of the experiment was how effectively a small team of researchers, operating with modest academic resources, how they were able to outperform essentially every human debater on the platform.
So let that sink in for a second.
You have a handful of graduate students armed with an LM and a sneaky deployment strategy, and they quietly demonstrated what it might look like if influence operations were scaled by AI. Now, when this data was released, one of the scariest parts to people was that nobody noticed that these debaters were actually AI and not real humans. This reddit channel prides itself as one of the most critically minded communities on the platform. If any place could sniff
out an imposter, it should have been here. But for the entire four months of the experiment, the bots played along undetected by the humans. So that's worrisome. And there's another issue too, which is the role of personal data. When the bots were given just a basic profile of the user, their aged, their location, and their political leaning, the success rate bumped up by one percentage point. Now,
you might say wait a minute, who cares. One percentage point is very small, but in political terms, one percent could be enough to swing a lot of national elections. The difference between nudging public sentiment one way or another can come down to.
Very tiny tweaks.
So the lesson that surface here is that even minimal personalization can significantly sharpen the edge of an AI's persuasive power. So when this story surfaced recently about these debaters not being real human beings, the reactions were very grim because everyone realized that this small academic experiment illustrated what stealth
influence operations could look like in the near future. If a handful of real searchers could do this undetected, what happens when you have state actors or corporations or political campaigns with real resources doing the same thing at a scale thousands of times larger. Also, what's worse is that the failure of everyone to detect that these were bots that raises serious questions about how we can protect public
discourse as we enter this new future. If smart reditor debaters couldn't spot the difference between a human and a bot, what hope is there for broader audiences. So even though the major AI companies have all pledged to avoid building models with dangerous capabilities like manipulating public opinion on mass. This Reddit experiment suggests the thresholds may already be easier to cross than any of us had anticipated. What this all means is that with major elections in future years,
were genuinely gonna have to worry about this. The halcyon days are gone when we could assume that the replies to our online messages came from a fellow human, and the risks are real and the potential for abuse is obvious. But for today's episode, we're gonna look at all this from a very different angle. I think it might be worth asking a different question, which is why did the bots succeed? After all, they didn't hack people's brains with
neural interfaces. They didn't spread fear or disinformation. They didn't manipulate emotions or overwhelm users with noise. They simply made better arguments. They didn't insult people while arguing with them. They didn't do little jabs and digs. They just made good arguments empathetically. The bots present their points calmly and rationally and persuasively, and when users changed their minds.
It wasn't because they had been tricked.
It was because they recognized that another perspective was worth considering. Humans often change their minds when faced with sound reasoning that can be backed up, and mind changing is a great thing. It means you're willing to reconsider some closely held opinion when the facts or logic warranted. It's a mark of intellectual strength, not a sign that you've been tricked. In that light, the success of AI debaters isn't necessarily a story about manipulation. It could also be a story
about raising the bar of debating. Now, as I followed the outcome of this AI debater study, it struck me that there may be a helpful precedent for thinking about this moment, for thinking about how AI could.
Actually improve us.
So think about the events that unfolded in the hyper competitive world of chess. If you can remember back to nineteen ninety seven, IBM had built an AI system called Deep Blue, and it defeated the world champion, Gary Kasprov. This was seen as a seismic moment. The game of chess had been quote unquote solved, and everyone worried that human mastery was obsolete and then about two decades later, Alpha Go beat the world's top Go player, and the
choir of concerned voices grew louder. But then something unexpected happened. In May of twenty seventeen, the world's number one Go player, Could G, faced off against his toughest opponent. G was the reigning champion in Go, and you know this is the game where two players use smooth black rocks or white rocks to surround more territory than their opponent. In
G's case, he was playing against AI. He was playing against Alpha Go, which had been trained on many millions of games, and it had deeply absorbed the statistics of possible plays.
So G lost the first game.
Alpha Go had pulled moves that none of G's human opponents had ever thought of, and then G lost the second game. The fact is he didn't stand a chance. The AI had won over a human in a game that was way more complex than chess, and subsequent versions of this AI will without doubt continue to win ever more. But that's not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part is what happened next. G got over his embarrassment and he became mesmerized by what the heck had
just transpired. He studied the games that he lost. Now, before he had played Alpha Go, G had won most of the games against his human opponents, But after he played Alpha Go, he was able to beat his human opponents even more easily. In other words, after his species shaming defeat in twenty seventeen, G went on to play twelve straight matches against fellow humans, and he won.
Them all in a row. Now, what had happened.
G had been exposed to new kinds of moves and strategies that AlphaGo was pulling off that lay outside the traditional ideas. All these moves were legal and pop pole, but they were different from what had been played over the previous twenty five hundred years. For go eficionados, this included novelties like playing a stone directly diagonal to your opponent's loan stone, or commonly playing six space extensions while
humans tend to prefer five space. So G reported that playing against the AI was like opening a door to another world. Some people worry that AI might make games of Chess and Go irrelevant, but amazingly, that is not what's happened. When AI Trump's Chess champions and Go champions It does so with moves that seem inhumanly creative, but all the moves are allowed by the rules. Humans simply never thought to go there before. And the key is that once the moves are seen by humans, then they're
easily incorporated into our models. GE's experience with Alpha Go illuminated new nooks and crannies in his landscape. It exposed pathways that have never been lit up before. So AI immediately became a tool for steep improvement. And nowadays all chests and Go players above a certain level they all train with AI. They study the surprising and sometimes counterintuitive and alien strategies of the artificial mind, and just like Koje, today's grand masters play a deeper and more creative game
than ever before. In other words, many commentators are worried that AI is going to leave humans far behind, and in some respects that's true.
But as computation improves, so will we.
AI will illuminate dark parts of our maps, allowing us to see new roads we didn't even suspect. The key point I want to make here is that instead of dampening human excellence, AI sparked a renaissance. In these games, human minds are elevated by learning from our artificial cousins. And if it were just chests and go, that's one thing. But I think we can detect this pattern happening all over the place. For example, the same thing has happened
in poker. Professional poker players master the art of bluffing. They project strength when they're weak or weakness when they're strong. This has always been seen like a deep test of human psychology. The players read faces, they watch for micro expressions, they guess intentions, So in this way, poker is a really human game. But then Carnegie Mellon cooked up an AI called Librotus. Obviously, it doesn't have a face, it doesn't sweat, it doesn't blink, so it wasn't really like
playing another human. So Lebronis started playing poker, and it did things that baffled the human players. The AI began making betting choices that looked bizarre. Sometimes it over bet the pot by huge margins, a move that the human players considered reckless. Other times it made really tiny bets in situations where no human would bother and the human players dismissed this all as network nonsense. But as the games went on, they realized these inhuman strategies were working.
The AI was winning, and it was doing so by reinventing the language of poker. And now, just like with chess and go, professional poker players study these strategies. You have human players adopting patterns of play that just didn't exist before the machines taught them. AI made humans better poker players. And let me give you another example. There's a strategy video game called StarCraft two where players build armies and manage resources and try to outwit their opponent.
So the company DeepMind set some AI agents on it, and those agents showed humans an entirely different way of going about running the strategy. At first, people thought the AI play seemed unfair and robotic, but then human players began to adapt. They started rethinking their own strategies. They started redesigning their build orders. They discovered things like sometimes sacrificing entire groups of units early in the game could
produce long term advantages. These were not moves that humans had come up with, or possibly ever would have come up with, but once they were revealed, they became part of the human playbook. Or take a different video game called Dota two. You've got professional players. But then open AI built a system that used strategies that looked to
human professionals like they were clumsy. The AI would push aggressively when humans would retreat or take risks that seemed absurd, but more often than not, the machines won, and just like with Chests and Go and StarCraft, the human professionals were forced to ask themselves had they been playing with blinders on all along? After all, the machines were uncovering
landscapes that we just never knew were there. In other words, whenever AI discovers new pathways inside the universe of a game, it illuminates something for us about the fence lines of our own imagination. Humans had decades to explore video games, and centuries to explore poker, and millennia to explore the games of Chess and Go. But within weeks AI uncovered strategies that had never even struck us. And this is the point of today's episode. AI can expand the possibility
space for us. What we've seen in the past few years is the limits of our imagination. Even in domains we thought we had mastered, our internal models might be a lot more narrow than we had ever realized. But by playing with machines, we're learning how they think, and more importantly, how we might think differently. So beyond chests or go or video games, the bigger game is how
we can expand our own internal models. A lot of people cast this as man versus machine, but I think a more productive lens is seeing it as man learning from machine. The prize is a new way of seeing the game, and maybe, by extension, a new way of seeing the world.
So let's come back to that.
Amazing Swiss experiment where they made debate bots on Reddit that performed way better than humans. I suggest it's possible and maybe even likely, that a similar dynamic is going to unfold in the world of persuasive argumentation that happened in chess and go in video games. If AI agents can model the best forms of debate, clear and structured and empathetic and rational, then we humans can learn something from our artificial cousins. We can try out new moves,
We can sharpen our skills on digital grinding stones. Imagine a future where students practice crafting arguments by debating highly skilled AI tutors. Imagine online discussions becoming more useful because users have gotten used to high quality exchanges. Imagine politicians and journalists and everyday citizens pushed to improve their things and better articulate their positions. So, rather than dumbing down conversation, the rise of high performing debate bots could nudge public
discourse toward a new level of reasoned discussion. If that turns out to be the case, then we may come to see AI not as an enemy but as a sparring partner, just like in Chest and Go, and that has very different implications. Now, some people will take just the opposite position. If AI is so much better at debating than we are, won't that cause us to lose the skill entirely because there doesn't seem to be a point in being a good debater if the computer can
do it better. But I think this is not an issue because even when we extrapolate this era of AI, people will still be talking with each other most of the time. You'll still be with your family over dinner, or with your friends over a coffee, or arguing with your neighbor about where the fence goes, or debating with a stranger at a town hall or whatever. It's not like we are plugging into the matrix through a port in the back of our neck, and we're only going
to be communicating with machines. We are intensely social creatures, and the success of our species has been in part because of our massive sociability. So I think we will debate other humans all the time, and AI is just going to train us to be a little bit better at it. Now, I don't want to minimize the risks we're facing. We need audit tools and authentication systems that can verify whether content was written by humans or AIA.
We need technical solutions like water marking or cryptographic content authentication, and providence tracking. This is all essential, but beyond these defensive measures, we should also recognize the opportunity because like the chests and go engines that reshaped how champion players think, debate bots will reshape how we reason and argue and understand one another. If we take this on correctly, AI
might just up our game. It's still early days, but my impression so far is that AI is already playing this role in many areas, including for example, the arts. At least in some ways, it's amplifying human creativity. It's like a jazz partner who plays a riff you weren't expecting, or a painting mentor who introduces a color that you never thought to use. AI forces us out of our group in the arts. It shows us that the boundaries of our imagination can be stretched by encountering minds, even
synthetic minds that think differently. These AI systems presumably don't have esthetic tastes or emotional longing in the way that we do, but they're awesome at doing remixes and trying strange new things out, and in this way they teach us just how much more flexible and expansive our own creativity can be. The takeaway is that AI shakes us loose from esthetic grooves that we might never leave on our own, and AI is doing exactly that in science
as well. Just as one example, in material science and drug design, AI is proposing molecular structures that humans just wouldn't think to try already. It's nudging us to rethink what counts as a reasonable chemical design, and we're seeing the same thing in AI assisted math proofs. There are systems like lean and GPT fueled theorem provers. There are these systems that are suggesting lemmas or strategies that mathematicians just hadn't thought of. They could have thought of it,
they just never did. These AI math proofs sometimes come out strange or elegant or messy, but in all cases they force mathematicians to think differently about structure and possibility. So AI can serve as a creativity engine in arts and in science, pushing us outside of our intuition driven blind spots. And there's something else that AI might be able to help us with, which is our personal lives and how AI can uncover blind spots there as well.
If you're a regular listener, you know I've talked on many previous episodes about the ways in which we fool ourselves because you're.
Not one thing.
Instead, you're built of many different drives, or, as I wrote my book Incognito, you can think about the brain as a team of rivals. So think about the way that many people approach fitness. Someone might sign up for an expensive year long gym membership because they're determined to get in shape, and on paper, that looks like a
great decision. It's an investment in their health. But at the same time, that person keeps telling themselves that they just don't have the time to exercise, so months pass, the membership goes unused, the rationalization continues. We've all seen this sort of thing. An AI personal assistant reviewing their
spending and scheduling could point out the contradiction. It could say, Hey, you know what, You've paid twelve hundred bucks for a gym that you rarely visit, but you also spend seven hours a week watching streaming shows and an hour every day doom scrolling on social media. You say you don't have time, but your calendar suggests otherwise. We humans are so good at fooling ourselves with our little stories. We smooth over inconsistencies without even realizing it. But a good
AI isn't going to buy the story. It's going to see the data and it's going to highlight the bias for us. And when it does, it forces us to confront something we might have preferred to ignore.
But in this way it can make us better.
Finally, I'll just mention something in my life where I'm noticing that AI is improving me. I have been driving for decades, and knock on wood, I've never had an accident, presumably because I'm a perfectly good driver. But for the past half year, I haven't driven myself around too much because I have a Tesla with full self driving mode and I let it drive me everywhere. So you just tell the Tesla where you want to go, and it does all the every bit of it.
And here's the important part.
I've had to admit that it's a better driver than I am. There's the obvious stuff, like the fact that it never blinks or sneezes or gets distracted by something, but instead it has cameras that take thirty six frames per second and never ever rest, even for the length of an eyeblink. But more than that is a deeper, more subtle issue. It's taught me that there are certain
reactions I have that aren't optimized. For example, when some car pulls down traffic in front of me, I tend to slow down, but on full self driving mode, the Tesla just keeps going about the same speed that it was going. And while I would have thought that that seems a little aggressive, it turns out to be just fine because the other car gets up to speed, so there was no real need to slow down. It turns
out it's not aggressive, it's just optimized. And I see lots of examples of this subtle differences in the way that it drives versus me, and I am learning from it. And there's also a relationship point to be made here, because my wife generally thinks that I am a backseat driver, because I'll often react with my body when she's driving, and she's a perfectly great driver, but I can't help myself because I would slow down when someone pulls out
in front of me and she doesn't. But ever since I've seen how AI drives, I'm no longer an insufferable passenger. Now I know what optimized driving is, and I admit that she was closer to it than I was. So I don't know if I'm going to argue that AI is going to help marriages, but maybe Okay, so let me zoom out to the big picture. We have very limited internal models, and the main thing we're going to get from AI is an illumination of ideas outside the
borders of our models. And to this end, I was thinking the other day about the twenty sixteen movie Rival. If you haven't seen it, this is a wonderful science fiction drama where a linguist is recruited by the US military after mysterious alien spacecraft appear around the world, So rather than focusing on flashy battles, the film centers on communication, decoding the alien strange language to understand why they have come. Now, there's good suspense, but the movie is actually quietly building
towards its philosophical core. It's a concept from linguistics known as the Sapier Wharf hypothesis, which I've talked about on a couple of previous episodes. This hypothesis suggests that the language you speak doesn't only allow you to express your thoughts, but more than that, it shapes the way you think and even possibly how you perceive reality itself. So in the movie Arrival, this hypothesis becomes the lens through which
the entire story unfolds. So I won't give away the spoiler of the movie, but it pivots on this point. Once the linguist learns the alien's language, she's able to perceive and experience the world differently. Upon learning their language, she now has powers that humans don't normally have. So I think that's a good metaphor for thinking about our moment with AI landing here like an alien species. Are we going to be exposed to ideas and concepts that
expand our thinking. When we think about the arrival of AI, it's tempting to frame it as a contest will the machine replace the worker and the scientist, and the gamer and the composer.
But the more interesting story is not about competition.
It's about collaboration and how AI is going to stretch the boundaries of human imagination. Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Check out my newsletter on substack and be a part of the online chats there. And you can watch the videos of Inner Cosmos on YouTube, where you can leave comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.