Ep68 "What if our brains worked a trillion times faster?"

growths that don't really do much of anything. And we the astronauts, we stay there for a month, we take a lot of measurements, and finally we blast off when we go home. So two planets, one with an active society and the other with nothing but tree like things. Now imagine that these two descriptions are of the same planet. What we have stumbled on is a society of creatures that operate at a very different time scale from us. They move so slowly that we just can't see it.

They have an active society, it just operates a trillion times slower than ours. And the question is, would we ever even notice that these tree people have a society happening in what we would think of as super slow motion. A conversation over a cup of coffee for them takes eons for us. So would we ever decode their language? Would we ever even have an opportunity to discover that there's a whole world going on there, but at a different temporal scale. So that's what today's episode is about.

Hidden landscapes, parts of the time domain that are totally invisible to us. Now you've heard me talk in other episodes about all the information in the world that we just don't see. So is one example. We only see a small fraction of the light that is out there, and that little slice we call visible light. That's what we think of as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. And it seems like that's all the light that's out there. You open your eyes, you see reds and greens and

blues and golds, and you think, okay, that's everything. And so it came as a surprise when scientists eventually realized that all these other signals that had been detected, things that are totally invisible to us, like infrared light or radio waves or X rays or ultraviolet or microwaves, all of these are light. They're exactly the same thing, is what we call visible light. It's just that we don't have the receptors in our eyes to pick up on them,

and so they're totally invisible to us. And it turns out that what we call visible light is a very tiny part of the light spectrum. It's less than a ten trillionth of it. And once we understood this, we started to build technologies to burrow into those other parts of the spectrum. For example, we make little machines that sit in the dashboards of our cars, and these see in exactly the frequency that we call radio waves, and

so we can transmit information in that frequency. Or we build night vision security cameras which see in the infrared range, so that we can detect in that frequency outside of what we can naturally see. And we build X ray machines and telescope dishes, and these all pick up on other frequencies that are invisible to us. We build all kinds of devices to see what we can't naturally see, and this has been the gen of scientific development over

the last few hundred years. It's the understanding that the reality we inhabit is actually just a small fraction of what is out there, and there are many other things that can be taken advantage of. So we're very used to communicating in landscapes that are outside our biology. Our biology allows us to detect something like visible light, and then we figure out from there that there are other flavors of light that are beyond our biology, and we.

capture moments that were otherwise totally invisible to us. So he froze ultrafast events using a quick strobe light and ultra high speed photography. One of his most famous photographs was taken in the nineteen sixties and you may have seen this. It shows a bullet piercing an apple. The image captures the exact moment of impact with the apple exploding into fragments, and the exposure time for images like

this it was less than a microsecond. Another one of his iconic images is the milk drop coronet that shows a drop of milk hitting a surface and forming this crown like splash, and the detail in this splash, frozen in time, gave all kinds of insights into flu with dynamics and surface tension. So the temporal resolution of these photos allowed everyone to study and to appreciate the beauty

and the complexity of fast phenomenon. So he could freeze the motion of bullets in flight or splashing milk drops, and these images revealed details that were previously hidden to us due to the limitations of our very slow perception. And he also did this not just with still shots, but a series of still shots, so you get a little time lapse film. And in this way he could expand super brief events into viewable sequences. This was great for science and for art, and also for military applications

like studying the behavior of bombs. So with these techniques he led us into new time domains which we suspected might exist, but which no human had ever actually seen. So he opened a window into a world of fleeting moments, capturing events that occur too quickly for our eyes to see, and reveling in a hidden beauty that we didn't even

have the mental tools to imagine correctly. So the point is we can take advantage of these other timescales that we don't know much about, and we can do this by building the right kind of machinery.

smaller than we can see. So we invent tell scopes and microscopes. We invent ways of seeing into other parts of the visible spectrum, like radios or X ray machines, or devices in the infrared or ultraviolet, and all over the place. We burrow into spaces that we can't see with our eyes, but we extrapolate that they must exist. And I suggest the prefrontal cortex is what allows us to extrapolate in the time domain. So here's an example.

I was in Germany a little while ago, and I was transfixed watching a river flowing through a very deep valley, and it was pretty effortless to look at the valley walls and think about this at the scale at which geologists look at a landscape. This exact moment of the river flowing had been happening for millions of years, and if I sped up the film in my head, that's how you get a valley of that depth. Now, to be clear, I wasn't imagining millions of years. I was

imagining a film at my human speed. I just took the concept of huge time scales and squished them down to something that I could understand. This is the same way that someone using a microscope doesn't stare at the bacterium at the scale of a micron. Instead, she uses the machine, the microscope, to push the image up to a large size that her brain can handle. And this is all we ever do. We take things from different domains and translate them into something that we can understand.

Now we're very good at that. Here's an example on the flip side of the river carving the valley. Open any book on let's say, molecular biology, and you'll see two strands of DNA unzipping and proteins buying to those strands and walk along it and this gets transcribed to RNA, and then that gets translated into little amino acids, and you can walk yourself through all the steps of transcription and translation. But all this takes place at a timescale

that's faster than you can possibly conceive. It's about twenty amino acids get translated every second, and it's hard to picture that in real time, But no problem.

But in your imagination, you couldn't perceive it directly. So in this way, You are like the biblical story of Moses, who leads his people through the desert but never gets to enter the Holy Land himself. You are the temporal Moses, knowing about these timescales, knowing about these other temporal worlds, but you are never able to enter the territory directly. Just think about the best theories of the beginning of the universe. The best models for this suggest that there

was cosmic inflation where everything got bigger. There was this exponential expansion of space, and we say this all happened

in the early universe. And when we look at the models, there was the Plank Epic, where physics were dominated by the quantum effects of gravity, and then that got followed by the Grand Unification Epic, and that was followed by the inflationary epic, in which the universe expanded by trillions and trillions of times, and then the electroweek Epic, and the quark Epic and the hadron epic and so on.

And oh, by the way, that happened by the first microsecond one millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and then nuclear fusion began, and that was a ten milliseconds after the start of the universe, or one one hundredth of a second. No, how do people even put together theories like this, Well, you can't even run experiments at those temperatures or densities. But you can do is extrapolate the known physical laws to extremely high temperatures, and you get a picture of what was likely to have

happened there. And again, this is something that we can never experience directly, but we can extrapolate our local understanding of time to imagine it. Presumably, the squirrels running around in your backyard simply don't have the neural capacity to imagine time at any scale other than their own. So a squirrel is never going to come up with the

Plank epic. Now, what I want to talk about is the way that we do these extra appellations, and then we build technologies to get us there, like Doc Edgerton at MIT did and translating things into something useful for our pitifully slow time scales. So I'll give you an

example of this. I was in Shanghai a few years ago, and on the edge of the river where a lot of tourists walk around, they had this terrific display where it was like a big plant wall, and from a distance you could see these beautiful, slowly flapping butterflies on the wall. But when you go up close and really examine this, you see that each butterfly is actually an illusion produced from a rapidly spinning bar of led lights.

So the bar is attached at one end to a motor and it spins around and around in a circle very quickly.

the other. The bar is in this position, and then the next moment it's displaying it slightly differently one degree away, and then differently again when it ticks.

Now here's the key. If you could see faster, if you could see what is actually happening out there, you'd see a little bar spinning in a circle and changing color as it does so. But that's not what you see. You see a butterfly in the air, you see a cartoon character, you see a flag waving. But here's the

thing to appreciate. The speed at which the rod needs to spin is very fast, and therefore the speed at which the lights need to know precisely when to turn on and off is even faster, and all of this is computed at rocket ship speed, and you just look at it and appreciate that there's a nice butterfly out there. So on the one hand, you have lightning fast calculations on the level of sub millisecond, and on the other level we get a nice picture.

has to get done in the next sixtieth of a second. Now, the genius of coming up with the technology like that is realizing that you can do something very very fast with a machine, and that the person at the receiving end is incredibly slow and has a sluggish brain and can't understand anything at these millisecond time scales and instead

just blends everything together. And that's how you tell stories about James Cagney or Fat Albert or the family in Bonanza, and the sluggish humans on the receiving end are simply registering the emotion of the story instead of seeing the invisibly fast mechanics that are zipping along in their own timescale range, painting the screen over and over sixty times every second in a way that is completely invisible to us.

So we build machines to leverage the fact that the visual brain integrates what it sees over a little window of time. So if two or more images arrive within a window of about a tenth of a second, they're smeared together. And by the way, building devices to take advantage of that isn't even so new. We've been building primitive things for centuries. For example, think of that little toy known as a thaumatrope. It's a flat disc with

a picture on each side. So you might have a picture of a bird on one side of the disk and a picture of a tree branch on the other. And what you do is you wind up the disk with a piece of string, and when you pull the string tight, the disc spins rapidly so that both sides are seen in rapid alternation. You see the bird, you see the branch. You see the bird, you see the branch, and the bird appears to be sitting on the branch. The images fuse. This is an example of an old

technology taking advantage of the slowness of our brains. Now I find all this credible, from the butterflies to the fact that movies move, to the fact that television works. But with modern electronics, combined with the slowness of our visual systems, we can build these kinds of devices to paint pictures for us. Our machines can be fast, a lot faster than our poor little brains. Now, if you were the machine, you would think, what am I doing? I'm just changing the colors of the light as I spin.

Surely no one out there is falling for this. And this is the thing I really want to dig into today, the difference in the time worlds between us and our machines. So the best place to start is with our computers, which perform a certain number of floating point operations per second. This measure is called flops floating point operations per second. Now, don't worry about the details, except to say a floating point operation is a calculation like adding two.

doing that a billion times every second. Then in this century, computers hit terraflops that's one trillion floating point operations in a second. And then it wasn't long before computers hit petaflops, which is a thousand terraflops. In other words, a thousand trillion or a quadrillion operations person second. Nvidia just released a new chip that clocks in at twenty petaflops, So just imagine how long it would take you to do

twenty thousand trillion calculations. It does that a second. The current record is the US supercomputer called Frontier, which does eleven hundred petaflops or one point one exaFLOPS. These numbers are so mind boggling to think about. Just imagine a machine performing one quintillion floating point operations per second. That's a one followed by eighteen zeros. That's a lot faster than all the humans in the world could do if they all sat with paper and pencil and worked on

calculations for a million years. That's what gets accomplished in one second by a computer like that. We are living on completely different time domains, and this is what allows you to enjoy a song or YouTube video or an Inner Cosmos podcast. Now, something I think is quite stunning is to consider what it is like.

it's going to sound like this to us inside the computer. Now, let's keep talking and we'll see when the next keystroke arrives. Imagine that this human is typing relatively fast, like sixty words per minute, which is about three hundred keystrokes per minute, or a keystroke every two hundred milliseconds from our point

of view from inside the computer. The next key will not even get hit until about the end of this podcast, And that's why the software routine that monitors the keyboard goes to sleep while it waits for the next key to be struck. And I'll tell you something else fascinating about our computers and our interaction with them. You remember capture, which is how at the beginning of the Internet you could try to tell if it was a real human doing something versus a computer, because you could say, hey,

what are these funny shaped letters spelling out? And a computer just couldn't figure that out, but a human could. Now eventually this evolved to what are now known as recapture boxes. So you know these little tests when you're let's say, making a purchase on a website and you have to click a little box that says I am not a robot, and you check that box because you are in fact a human. Now, if you thought about this, you know that this is because AI can't figure this

out and click the box. Wait, what AI has read everything written on the planet. It can do extraordinary things, so why can't it click the box. Well, of course it can click the box. It's absolutely trivial for any large language model to read that text and check the box. There's no problem at all, So, why are companies still using this as a way to distinguish humans from computers. There's a remarkable story here. It turns out the reason you can still use this to make the distinction is

because of the time domain. Humans check the box at their slow human speed.

them instantaneously. Just as a side note, like all capture tests, this will be short lived before it has to evolve again, because computers will soon imitate not only the right answer, but the right timing. Going to sleep for a long nap to impersonate our pitifully slow timescales. And it's no surprise that we're increasingly surrounded by machines that operate in different time domains. A typical modern self driving car is ringed with cameras and radar, and it generates something like

six gigabytes of data every thirty seconds. The key again is that this is not at all what a human can do. These cars, which are all around us on the road now, they capture vision on multiple cameras that ten to thirty frames per second, sometimes more. And by the way, these cameras aren't just in the visible range, but they can include infrared cameras, and all this data is combined and digested rapidly into a picture of the

world out there. And these cameras never blink or lose attention or get sleepy, and they will only continue to get faster. Although they appear to be accomplishing the same tasks that we are, they're doing it at a totally different timescale. And by the way, in commercial airliners there are computer chips which auto correct the flight of the airplane one hundred thousand times a second, which keeps the rides smooth and good and infinitely better than the best

human pilot could manage. And this is all just the beginning. Take something that underlies our entire economy. I'm always interested to discover that not everyone realizes what's going on with high frequency stock market trading. This is where computers use algorithms to trade instead of humans doing the trading, so the computer can ingest an enormous amount of information and make a decision about buying or selling stocks on microsecond

time scales. And the part that often comes as a surprise is that sixty percent of all trades on the US stock market are done by computer.

trash can. And he was in and understanding whether he could use that past data, which no one really cared about anymore, to make really good algorithms to predict what happens in the next second or eventually the next millisecond or eventually the next microsecond. So he rented physical office space just on the other side of the wall from the New York Stock Exchange, because when you're talking about signals at this speed, you have to worry about the

transmission time from your computer to the exchange floor. And pretty soon everyone was getting real estate physically right next to the stock floor, because microseconds really matter if your computer is trying to beat the next guy's computer to a trade. So the key is that all these computers are competing against one another, but human traders aren't even in that race. They are orders of magnitudes slower, literally

millions of times slower in making their decisions. So the computers capitalize on short term price movement, some arbitrage opportunities that are impossible for human traders to exploit because those timescales are invisible to the Homo sapien. So when I put all this together and think about where this goes, I'm reminded of a dream I had some years ago.

In this dream, I was standing over a giant valley below me, and I was standing on a column that was coming straight up from the earth like a stalagmite, and I stepped out into the void, and as soon as I did, a new stalagmite shot up instantly from the ground way below and provided a perfect landing spot for my foot. Then I put my other foot out into the void, and right when I was about to put my weight down, the next lag might shot up in milliseconds and net my foot right where a floor

would be. So no matter which way I stepped or at what pace, a stepping surface would shoot up to meet me. It was an incredible dream, and I woke up flooded with emotion. It didn't feel like I just experienced magic. It felt like I had just experienced AI technology, but at a level we don't have now. There's no reason we wouldn't have this kind of thing in the next century. So I felt like I had just experienced a bit of twenty second century technology that had dropped

into the dream of a twenty first century sleeper. So when I woke up, I started thinking about this and calling this physical AI. Just imagine a world where we can build intelligent machines that physically move so much faster than us on a totally different timescale that we just get to enjoy moving physically however we want, like stepping off a cliff and being certain that it will be there essentially instantly as far as we're concerned to catch us.

Imagine being able to trip on something and fall without fear because you know you will get cushioned before you hit the ground. In a sense, this would be like the airbag in a car, which deploys in twenty milliseconds, faster than the blink of an eye, but you would have this with you in all ways, in all situations. It's very difficult for us, as twenty first century minds, to imagine what this will be like or what it

will translate to socially. All we can be certain of is that we don't have the capacity to make a meaningful model of what life will be like in a century from now. The idea of physical AI seems so foreign to us, but just like the keyboards or the high frequency trading, this is where we're heading with technology. The technology becomes very useful to us because it lives on a totally different timescale, and it also becomes more

and more foreign to us. By operating so inconceivably fast, it comes to provide the firm ground that we step on, but it also becomes something like magic that we no longer understand, and this leads us into our final act about our relationship with machines that operate on a different timescale. Sometimes we need things to operate, or specifically to pretend to operate at our own time scales. So, for example, think about the movie Her. There's this guy who's played

by Joaquin Phoenix. His marriage ends, he's left heartbroken. He becomes intrigued with a new operating system in which he meets an AI named Samantha who's played by Scarlett Johansson, and this AI is sensitive and playful, and their friendship soon deepens into love and his relationationship with the AI

bought means everything to him. Now, this film has an incredible ending because at the end he comes to understand that she, the AI, is having this same kind of relationship with hundreds of thousands of other men, all at the same time, because she is computational and operates in a different time domain and processes what appears to be intimate conversation at a rate millions of times faster than our poor brains, and so she is maintaining this intimacy

with all of these others. She's doing a million things in between his pillow whispers, just like your keyboard goes to sleep in between your keystrokes.

it all the time. For example, when user experienced designers work to create good impressions on people, they learn that good design is about shaving off confusing messages and getting rid of bugs, and they're traditionally taught to remove any unnecessary delays. But often a delay is exactly what's called for.

the result. Now, apparently these coinstar machines can do their work very quickly, like in a second or two, but that speed made customers feel nervous that maybe the counting wasn't happening correctly. So Coinstar inserted pre recorded noise of change moving through the machine clink clink, clink clink, And even though the machine comes to its conclusions rapidly, like you have seven dollars and thirty six cents, it purposefully

delays its output so that the counting seems slower. And this is an interesting form of theater, one which our machines perform in the time domain, and this is not uncommon. Apparently ATM machines insert an artificial delay for a similar reason. You stick in your card and you say you want one hundred bucks, and the machine words and clicks and

turns for a while. There's no necessity, like a computational or mechanical necessity, for ATM machines to be so slow, but apparently customers are more satisfied when the money doesn't come out instantly, and software designers increasingly have to deal with inserting artificial delays because of the speed of computation. So there was one company that builds software that creates an online blog for you with the design and the

title page and templates for your blog posts. And what they found was that when users got to the end of their inputs and clicked to the button that said create my blog, the blog appeared for the user instantly, and users felt confused. They weren't sure if something was

wrong or if something had broken. So after some testing, the software company added a page in the middle that said creating your blog and had a spinning wheel, and then after about seven seconds, it would send users to their newly minted blog page, and users felt much more satisfied just based on the delay, just based on things happening at a timescale that they were comfortable with. Now, why are users of coinstar and ATM machines and blog

software happier with a delay? Sometimes designers will point out that a user might have anxiety about it service, like is the coinstar counting all my coins correctly? Or is the ATM giving me the right amount of money? Or building a blog must be a really complicated thing, and so the best strategy is to address this anxiety by convincing them that everything is running at a careful pace.

I think that's a pretty good hypothesis, but I think there might be something else going on here, and it's not just about anxiety.

took more effort. And in the same way, the coinstar or the ATM machine or the blog post can give you the illusion that it has just put in a lot of effort. It's just pulling a sleight of hand in the time domain, but it's enough to align with your human expectations of what hard work looks like. It lines up better with your internal model of how hard it would be for you to count a bunch of coins or bills, or program a blog template from scratch.

And so it's fascinating that if the machine or the software it doesn't give you this false delay, that actually diminishes how much you think the service is worth. And this becomes like a temporal touring test. You remember, the touring test is whether you can tell if a conversation partner is a human or a computer. And I think increasingly our computers and our devices will have to be sensitive to the temporal aspect and slow way down if

they hope to fool us. Okay, so let's wrap up. Ah, there's the next keystroke by the human who was typing.

moving at that slow pace. So here we are in the twenty first century, giving birth to a new species. We're sparking new machines into existence and to our electronic progeny.