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It's the bunny that you swear you saw on the lawn, even if no one else believes you. Ali ward and here's ologies Hey, am I a real person? Unfortunately? I am am I intelligent. That's up for debate. But this week we are taking a dive into artificial intelligence and brain data with a scholar in the matter. So listen.
The past few months been a little surreal photoshops out there, generating backgrounds to cut your cousin's ex girlfriend out of your wedding photos, chat gpt is, writing obituaries and friendly a lot of horse bucky. There's also groundbreaking labor strikes and the arts, which we covered in the field trip episode from the WGA strike lines. If you haven't heard it, I'll link in the show notes. But I heard about this guest's work and I said, please, please, please talk
to me about how to feel about AI. Are we farting around the portal to a new and potentially shittier way of living? Or will AI say hey, dipshits. I ran some simulations and here's what we have to do to unextinct you in the next century. We're going to find out. So this guest has studied law Dartmouth, Harvard, and Duke, and been a professor at Vanderbilt University and is now at Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.
She recently delivered a TED talk called Your Right to Mental Privacy and the Age of Brain Sensing Tech, and just authored a new book called The Battle for Your Brain, defending the right to think freely in the age of neurotechnology. But before we chat with her, a quick thank you to patrons of the show who support at patreon dot com slash ologies for a book or more a month and submit their questions for the second half. And thank you to everyone in ologies merch dot com, shirts and
hats and such. Of course, you can also support the show just by leaving a review and I may delight you by reading it, such as this one left this week by environmental lawyer Harrison Harrison Harrison, who wrote a review calling Ologies and OUI guy ratituey rip Rarin good time.
So yeah, I read them all. Thank you Harrison for that. Okay, neurotechnology get into this how the brain interacts with technology and also techno neurology, how tech is striving to replicate and surpass human intelligence and what that means for us all.
So let's beat up our way into a talk about texting, scrolling, cheating, brain implants, mental health, doomsday scenarios, congressional hearings, apocalypse, potential medical advances, biometric mining, and why suddenly artificial intelligence is on our minds. With law professor and neurotechnologist, doctor Nita Farhani.
Nita Fahani, she her.
So good to meet you, terrifying to meet you. Are you the scariest person at a dinner party because of how much you know?
I'm not. I'm not a scary person, and I find that people think that it's equal parts fascinating and terrifying. So if anything, I think I'm a great dinner gas right, because they're fascinated.
I definitely should clarify that you are. There's nothing scary about you. The information that you hold is like, no, I know, do I want to look? Do I not want to look? Do I want to look? It's thrilling like a horror film.
Yeah, it's like people can't look away. Yeah, right, And that's good because I don't want them to look away. I want them to know. But at the same time, what I usually get is like, wait, this is real, Like what you're talking about is it actually exists? And people are really using it and employers are really using it and governments are really using it and wait what Yeah?
Do you spend a lot of your time chatting with people trying to warn them or calm them down?
Yes? So On the one hand, I am trying to raise the alarm and to help people understand that this whole area of being able to decode mood and really hack and track the brain is a new frontier and the final frontier of what it means to be human
and privacy and freedom. And at the same time, I don't want to make people have the reactionary approach to technology, which is like, Okay, then let's banmon, because the promise is also extraordinary, and so I am very much equal part like, let me help you understand not only what the promise is and why you're likely to adopt it, but why before you do so, and before we as a society at scale adopt this technology, that we make some really important choices that'll actually make it good for
us and not the most Orwellian, frightening, scary thing possible.
I feel like there's few topics that have this much true ambivalence, of so much good and so much potential for misuse. Did your brain become a lawyer brain because of those sort of like philosophical conundrums. What drew you to this kind of deep deep thought?
Yeah, I've always been driven to the questions that are at the intersection of philosophy and science. Like in high school, I was really interested in the science, but I was a policy debater. In college, I was government minor and science major, and I did in lab stuff, but largely things that were policy.
So Nita got several graduate degrees studying law in science, behavioral genetics and neuroscience, the philosophy of mind, neuroethics, bioethics, and even reproductive rights and policy in Kenya. And she said all her work seems to gravitate towards this intersection of philosophy and law and science because she had fundamental questions like do.
We have free will? And you know, do we have like fundamental autonomy and freedom and how do we put into place the protections. But I've always been fascinated and really interested in the science and the technology itself. I've never been a luttite. I've always been somebody who's an early tech adopter but clearly see what the downsides are.
At the same time, where was tech at when you were getting that roster of graduate degree? Where were we at? Were we at emails? Were we at video calls?
Yeah? So we were not at video calls. We were at emails. The Internet existed, we used it. We all had computers, but we didn't have cell phones. I got my first cell phone after I graduated from college, like the year after, and I had a flip phone, and I thought that was super cool. You know, I could type out a text message one character at a time, oh T nine.
Yeah, I had a gold medal in T nine. I nice could do it without even looking at the phone. Where I found it harder when we had a keyboard.
Yeah, and then I had a palm pilot, like as the precursor to the iPhone. And then I stood in line the first day that the iPhone was being sold, and you know, got one of the first iPhones in my hands. So I've seen the evolution of tech, I guess as I was getting all of those degrees.
And what about in terms of neurotechnology. Have you seen kind of an exponential growth path in terms of technology? Is that growth pattern still valid or have we surpassed it?
Slowly? Over the past decade or two, neurotechnology has been getting better, and the ways in which neurotech has been getting better has largely been kind of hardware based, which is the centers are getting better. Sometimes the software has been getting better, to be able to filter out noise, the algorithms, to be able to pick up brain activity without having muscle twitches or eyeblinks or interference from the environment, to pick up different information. All that's been getting better.
But suddenly we've gone from what was improvements to just the past five years seeing much more rapid advances. Generative AI is making things move in these seismic shifts, like where you suddenly have just a massive leap and capabilities.
Just real quick, before we descend into the abyss of ethics and possible scenarios, what is generative AI? What is AA? And what's just a computer computing? Okay, I look this up for us, and then I took a nap because it was confusing, and then I tried again, and here's
what I suessed out. So artificial means it's coming from a machine or software and intelligence fuck, I mean that depends on who you ask, but broadly it means a capacity for logic, understanding, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and retaining facts. So some examples of AI are googling or search engines, the software that recommends other things you might like to purchase,
navigating via self driving cars. Your Alexa understanding when you scream Alexa stop because she tried to get YouTube subscribe to Amazon Prime Music again. It also includes computers being chess nerds that's AI and generating artwork. And according to some experts, AI can be separated into a few categories, including on the base level, reactive machines and those use existing information but they don't store or learning. Then there's limited memory AI that can use precedent to learn what
choices to make. There's something called theory of mind AI and that can try to figure out the intentions of a user or even acknowledged their feelings, like if you've ever told Alexa to get bent in a lot of other words and then she sassas you back. If you'd like to tell me how I can improve, try saying
I have feedback. There's also a type called self aware AI that reflects on its own actions, and then fully autonomous is kind of the deluxe model of AI, and that just that does its own thing, that sets its own goals, set it and forget it if you can. So when did things start speeding up? When did they start careening toward the future like this, When computers got faster and smaller and better in the last ten but really kind of two or three years. So better hardware
means more processing power. There's also cloud storage, and that adds up to something called deep learning, which kind of sounds creepy like a hypervigilant mannequin, but deep refers to many layers of networks that use what look like these complicated flow charts to decide what actions to take based
on previous learning. So that's kind of what led up to these startlingly human like generative AI outputs and deep fakes where they can just straight up put Keanu Reef's face on your mom and then confuse the the Jesus out of me on TikTok or chat GBT, which is one language model. Chatbot computers are starting to pass bar exams. Maybe they're writing the Quippi flirtations on your dating app. Who knows. Meanwhile, less than one hundred years ago, a
lot of the US didn't have flush toilets. In case you feel weird about how weird this feels, because it is weird. Evolutionarily, our flabby, beautiful little brains can barely handle the shock of a clean river coming out of a garden. Hose let alone some metal and rocks that are computers that we're training to potentially kill us. We don't know how to deal with that.
So pattern recognition using machine learning algorithms has really pushed things forward rapidly, like a lot of brain data that happens in characteristic patterns and those associations between like what does a person seeing or hearing or thinking? How are they feeling? Are they tired, are they happy? Are they sad? Or are they stressed? Those things have been correlated with huge data sets and processed using machine learning algorithms in ways that weren't.
Possible before I can read your mind.
Then you have generative AI and chat GBT that enters the scene in November, and all of a sudden, the papers that are coming out are jaw dropping. Data that's being processed by generative AI to reconstruct what a person is thinking or hearing or imagining or seeing. Is next level, right, I mean, you know, my book came out March fourteenth,
twenty twenty three. All of a sudden, what was happening was continuous language decoding from the in like really really high resolution using GPT one, not even the most advanced GPT four visual reconstruction of images that a person is seeing in ways that were much more precise than anything that we had seen previously. And that's happening at this clip.
That is just, I think extraordinary. It's just so much faster than I even I would have imagined, and even I could have anticipated, even having written a book about the topic, that was.
Literally going to be my next question, because when a person writes a book that doesn't happen every night. Even working on this book, probably for a couple of years, did you have any idea that your book would be so closely timed to such a giant leap in terms of public perception and awareness of AI. I mean, couldn't have timed it better? Well?
I mean, of course, I'm a futurist. I was predicting it perfectly right now, No, I mean I wish right In truth, my book is like a year and a half late from when I was supposed to turn it into the editor and to the publisher. But you know, there was a global pandemic that got in the way
and a bunch of other things. But I'm grateful that it didn't happen sooner, because I was both able to be part of what is a growing conversation about the capabilities of AI, and to see when you say to a person like, oh yeah, also AI can decode your brain.
You know, that really puts a fine point on it for people to understand how quickly these advances are coming and to see how it's changing everything in society, not just how people are writing essays or writing emails, but fundamentally unlocking the mysteries of the mind that people never thought before possible, and the risk that that opens up, and the possibilities of mental manipulation and hacking and tracking.
Those are dangers that I think a year ago, before people really woke up to the risks of AI, they would not have been having the conversation in the same way that they are around the book. And now they are having that conversation seeing the broader context and seeing the alarm bells everywhere. Right, oh wait, we really do need to regulate or recognize them rights or do something.
So futurists are urging some foresight. Congressional panels have aired on c SPAN and there seems to be this kind of collective side eye and like a hope someone's on top of this, right.
So I mean, I think people are looking for some guidance and to have somebody come at it from a balanced perspective, like, wait a minute, there's a lot of good here, and there's some serious risks, and here's a
potential pathway forward. I think, you know, instead of like pause, which everybody says like of course, we can't just pause, or you know, a doomsday scenario without any positive like oh, let's regulate AI, I think we need voices at the table who are thinking about it both in a balanced way, but also are coming forward with like here's some concrete things we could do right now that would actually help the problem.
So we know a few types of AI, from googling a source for a research paper or digitally removing your cousins X from your wedding photos. But about technology that's gathering data from our brains.
Let me give you the spectrum. There's medical grade neurotechnology. This is technology that people might imagine in a doctor's office where somebody puts on an EEG electro encepholography cap that has a bunch of different wires coming out of it and a bunch of gel that's applied to their head, and a bunch of sensors. That's picking up electrical activity, which we'll get back to in a minute. Then there's the clunky giant machine, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine
which can peer deeply into the brain. And somebody might have already undergone an fMRI test for something like a brain tumor to kind of look more deeply into the brain. And what that's picking up is changes in blood flow across the brain, which tells us something about different areas that are activated anyto particular time and what those patterns might mean.
So if you've never had an MRI, I guess, congratulations, that's probably good. But this is magnetic resonance imaging and it's pretty exciting how these strong as magnets all line up the hydrogen atoms in your body to go one direction and then they release them and from that they can see inside of your boudet. Now, an fMRI is a functional MRI, and to put it in super simple terms, it's kind of like animation instead of a still picture,
but it's of your brain. So when you see imaging examples of how someone's melon illuminates like a Christmas tree to a certain stimuli, that's fMRI technology tracking blood flow to different regions of the brain. And this fMRI technology is used in a lot of neuro and psychology research.
And then there's something like functional near infrared spectroscopy, which is more portable and it's also measuring changes in the brain, but it's using optical and infrared lights in order to do so.
And that functional near infrared spectroscopy looks for changes in
oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin in the brain. It might not matter to you right now as you're cleaning your shower grout or your carpooling, but in clinical settings it comes in handy for patients with strokes, or learning about Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, or even anxiety or a traumatic brain injury, which my brain would like you to know I've had, and I will link the traumatic brain injury or the neuropathology episode about my hell and Narnar concussion I got last year
in the show notes. But yes, there are a lot of ways to get data from a brain, including T scans and PET scans with radioactive tracers. But what about non medical uses? Do they exist? Oh?
Boy, how do you do they? If you then look at what's happening in the consumer space. And the consumer space, you take the sixty four one hundred and twenty electrodes that are in a big cap, and then you have a couple of them that are put into a forehead band or a baseball cap, or increasingly, what's coming is
brain sensors that are embedded in everyday technology. So you and I are both wearing headphones, and the soft cups that go around our ears are being packed with sensors that can pick up brain activity by reading the electrical
activity through our scalp. You want my tinfoil hat, or if we were wearing earbuds inside of our ears, instead embedding brain sensors inside of those that can pick up electrical activity in our brain activity as we're thinking or doing anything, and those become much more familiar and much
more commonplace very quickly. So there's just a few of those products that are on the market, but that's where most of the big tech companies are going, is to embed brain sensors into everyday devices like earbuds and headphones and even watches that pick up brain activity from your brain down your arm to your wrist and picks up your intention to move or to type or to swipe or something like that.
So to use like a medical analogy. You know, continuous glucose monitors. These are a powerful tool for diabetics to monitor their blood sugar levels and their insulin needs, and we cover those in the two part Dibetology episode with doctor Mike Natter. But now continuous glucose monitors are starting to become available to people without diabetes just to better understand their metabolisms and their dietary responses, their mood and energy.
So all of these neuroimaging and all this data was just used in clinical and research settings by people in crisp coats carrying metal clipboards, but it's starting to pop up in the market. Now. This is great news, right understanding your brain? Yeah yeah, But not all the research in consumer applications is solid, and some make some wild
claims of efficacy. Others argue that if a device can enhance our moods and sharpen us cognitively but cost some serious cash, doesn't that just widen a privileged gap even further? But I guess so does college. I don't know. In the US, you need a GoFundMe to pay for chemo, so we've got a lot of pretty large systemic fish to fry. But if you've got money, you can buy EEG headsets that track your mood and emotions and stress for a few grand. There's others that track your heart
rate and brain waves for sleep and meditation. There are VR gaming sets that track brain waves, and even a matel game called mind Flex you can buy for like one hundred and twenty bucks.
But Nita says, all of those consumer based technologies pick up a little bit of like kind of low resolution information right now. They pick up if you're stressed, if you're happy, or if you're sad, if you're tired, like it maybe picks up that your mind is wandering and you're you know, kind of like dozing off. And the things like fMRI pick up much more precise information. Now
that could just be a matter of time. It could be that as machine learning algorithms and gender tove AI gets up and get applied to the electrical activity in the brain, that it'll get better and better and better. And it's interesting because in a way you could think about AI as being the convergence between computer science and neuroscience. So computer scientists have been designing algorithms that can process information in very narrow ways and they're very good at
doing specific tasks. So, for example, a doctor or a pathologist who's looking at many different samples of tissue to figure out if it looks cancerous or not can only see so many samples in a lifetime, and so they've marked them and labeled the data, and a machine learning algorithm can be trained on that data, which is like, here's thousands of images that are cancer and not cancer.
Now here are new images predict whether or not they have cancer, And they become very very good because they can process millions and millions of images and see far more images and get much better at being able to do that specific task of identify if something as cancerous.
So those tasks are relatively simple for machines to learn and execute. Computers are like child's play, but.
The human brain isn't so narrow in task specific and neuroscience has long understood that the connections that the brain makes are much more multifaceted, they're much more complex, and so the modern types of AI are built on how the brain works. They're built on what are called neural networks.
So this is a deep learning model which is instead of that very specific task of like do this, do that, it's meant to take a huge amount of information to learn from that information and then do what we do, which is to predict the next thing, or to kind of understand where that's going, or to make inferences from more of a deep learning perspective.
So it's more than machine learning like the pathology example she gave. So remember deep learning. So neural networks are modeled after biological brains, and they have nodes like neurons that consume input that they learn from, and then it's processed in several layers or tiers, aka it's deep to come up with a result or an action. And things like chatbox or facial recognition or typing dog into your phone's photo album to see what goodness comes up, we're
speech to text. Those are all done by neural networks and AI that we're already using, and they seem commonplace after having them for just a few years. But since late last year, we're seeing them create more like how the human brain might.
And those insights about the brain and neural networks have informed this new class of AI, which is generative AI. Generative AI is different in that it is both built on a different model and it has much greater flexibility in what it can do. And it's trying to not say like this is cancer, that isn't cancer, but to take a bunch of information and then be asked a question and to respond or to generate much more like the human brain reasons or thinks or comes up with
the next solution. And that's exciting and terrifying.
Also, what about the that say, the artistic AI is getting are they scrubbing that from existing art And in the case of say the writers strike, where you see writers saying you cannot take my scripts and write a
sequel on something, yeah, without me. And if you're curious about what is up with these strikes, what is going on in the entertainment industry, including the WGA or the Writers Skilled of America strike which started on May Day this year and it was joined in recent weeks on the picket lines by sag Aftra, which is a screen actor skilled And again we did a whole episode explaining what is going on. It's called Field Trip WGA Strike
that'll be linked to the show notes. So if you watch TV or movies or you ever have listened to that episode because it affects us all, and these entertainment labor unions are known as the tip of the spear for other labor sectors. Your industry may be affected or might be next.
I'm really interested in what happens in this space, just because of the writers themselves and hoping that they managed to succeed in actually getting fair appropriate treatment, but also because it's going to be incredibly telling for every industry as what happens when workers demand better conditions and better terms, and the result is greater experimentation. We generative AI to replace them.
But why is this such a sudden concern? Why does it feel like AI has just darkened the horizon and thundered into view and we're all cowering at its advance? Is this the first act of a horror film?
So how where does it come from? They're not totally transparent. We don't know all of the answers to that, right, But we do know that these models have been trained, meaning there's been billions potentially trying as we don't know right the exact number of parameters. That is prior data which has been used.
Meaning the material that the machines learned from.
And that could be prior scripts, it could be prior books. It includes a bunch of self published books apparently that are part of it, prior music, prior art, potentially a whole lot of copyrighted material that has been used to inform the models. Once the models learn, they're not drawing
from that information anymore. Right, that information was used to train them, but in the same way that you don't retain everything you've ever read or listened to, and your creativity may be inspired by lots of things that you've been exposed to. The models are similar and that they've been trained on these prior parameters, but they're not storing or drawing from or returning to them. It's as if
they have read and digested all of that information. And I was talking with an IP scholar who I like and respect very much, and his perspective was, how is that different than what you do? Right? You write a book and you read tons of information, and there's tons of information you cite, and there's also tons of information that you learned from that inspired you, that shaped how
you write and think that you don't actually cite. And is that actually unfair or violating the intellectual property or somehow, you know, not giving a fair shake to every source that you have ever learned from or every input that you've ever learned from. I mean, it's an interesting and different perspective, right, I don't have the answers to it yet. I'm really interested to see how this particular debate evolves.
What do other people think who aren't me? So a recent study reported that about fifty percent of AI experts think there's a ten percent chance of unchecked AI causing the extinction of our species, with AI getting into a little sneaky elf on the shelf shenanigans like playing god or establishing a political dictatorship. And the Center for AI
Safety issued a statement. It was signed by dozens of leaders in computer science and tech, including the CEO of Google's Deep Mind and Bill Gates and the guy who started jat GPT and the director of a center on Strategic Weapons and Strategic Risks. And this statement said, very simply quote, mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. So that's a pretty big statement.
And other experts draw parallels between humans and chimps but where the chimps and AI is us? So guess who's making who wear diapers and live with Michael Jackson. Yeah, although, of course there are computer scientists saying that we need to calm our collective boobies and that AI isn't advanced enough to threaten us yet Yet I love yet?
Yet?
Is so comfy? Yet? Is the space between the alarm clock and the panic of racing out the door because you'll be laid to a job interview?
Ah?
Yet? Yummy? Just fuck it.
I think from a governance perspective, in society we have near term risk that we need to be safeguarding against. And this is near term risk like bias and discrimination and inaccuracies. I don't know if you saw the story recently about a lawyer who filed a brief in a case before a federal judge that the pleading for the case had been entirely written by CHATTEBT, which included a whole bunch of invented cases, and the invented cases like he hadn't gone and site checked them or read them.
In fact, he has this dialogue where he's asking chatbt if the cases are real or not.
It's rather than like and he was not doing this to prove a point.
No, straight up, just like straight up dumbass, just did it, I mean, and like then the other side comes back and says like, hey, judge, we can't find any of
these cases. And the judge says, like, you have to produce it, and apparently he produces the full citations of the made up cases and anyway, it finally goes back with the lawyer that admitting like, I'm so sorry, this is all apparently, you know, fabricated, and it's fabricated, not intentionally, but it's fabricated because I generated at all using chat GPT.
Nita says, who knows what will happen if and when more people start using bots to kind of cut corners and know in fact checks it. And around juneteenth, I saw a viral tweet about chat GPT not acknowledging that the Texas and Oklahoma border was in fact influenced by
Texas desiring to stay a slave state. I told my husband, Jared, your pod mom didn't believe it could get things so wrong, And then he proceeded to have like an hour long fight and discussion with chat GPT, hoping to teach chat GPT that it has a responsibility to deliver accurate information. I was like, dude, you're fighting a good fight, and
I wish you luck. Now. As for this lawyer that Nita mentioned, according to a May twenty twenty three New York Times piece about it titled Here's what happens when your lawyer uses chat GPT, the lawyer in question pleaded his own case within the case, telling a rightfully miffed off judge that it was his first foray with a chatbot and that he was quote therefore unaware of the
possibility that its content could be false. And The New York Times explains that chatchbt generates realistic responses by making guesses about which fragments of text should follow other sequences, based on a statistical model that has ingested billions of examples of text pulled from all over the Internet. So chatgbt is your friend at the party who knows everything, and then you find out that they're full of shit and they're very drunk, and maybe they stole your wallet
and they could kill your dog. Will they shit in the pool? It's anyone's guess. But wow, they are spicing up the vibe. This is not a boring party at all.
It raises this complex question about you know, who is responsible, and we've generally said the attorney is responsible, right. The attorney is the one who is licensed to practice law. They're responsible for making sure all of the work that they certify under their name. Is there any liability for generative AI models? Now? CHATGBT says like, I'm not here to provide legal advice and it's prone to hallucinations. Is that enough to disclaim any liability for chat GBT?
Just a chacouzie of hallucinating chatbots saying whatever sentence they think you want to hear. Maybe pooping in there too. So what happened to that Laurie though? Did he get so disbarred? Did he have to grow a beard and move to Greenland? Does he make felted hats out of goat for now? No? No, he's fine. He kept his job. He was just fined five grand, which if he build for the research hours that a chatbot really did, he
maybe still turned to profit on that deal. But the lessons those are invaluable now if you appreciate nothing else today, I just want you to stare off at the horizon for even thirty seconds and just say, what a time we're living in hundreds of thousands of years of people and boners and falling in love made me a person standing on a planet at a time when there's plumbing, antibiotics, electricity, there's domesticated cats, and I have a front row seat
to some real madness. What an era as for what we do? I don't know. Aren't we being watched all the time anyway? What are the watchers doing about this? Well, forgive the patriarchal caricatures, but where are big brother and Uncle Sam? Are they working together on this? Is there any incentive from like a governance perspective to say to step in and say, like, we don't know how far this should go? Or does it just generate kind of more income for maybe big corporations that can misuse it?
So like m hard to fight against that.
So you know, it's hard to know, right. There have been hearings that have been held recently by the government to try to look into sort of both questions that you're asking, which is Uncle Sam and Big Brother. So there were hearings looking at whether or not to regulate private corporation use of generative AI models, and it was very public hearing where Sam Altman from open Ai calls for regulation.
If you're wondering why this is a big deal. So Sam Altman is the CEO of open Ai, which invented chat GPT, and he spoke at the Senate Judiciary sub Committee on Privacy, Technology and the Law hearing which was called Oversight of AI Rules for Artificial Intelligence that was in May of this year. He also signed that statement about trying to mitigate the risk of extinction, and he told the committee that AI could quote cause significant.
Harm to the world.
Papa chat GPD.
Himself, my worst fears are that we cause significant we the field, the technology, the industry caused significant harm to the world. I think that could happen in a lot of different ways. I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vol cool about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.
And ultimately Sam urged the committee to help establish a new framework for this new technology.
It was a surprisingly collaborative tone for most of the federal officials who were questioning him, very differently than in social media context of the past.
But meanwhile, in a different building.
That same day, a different hearing was happening which most people weren't aware of, which was federal use of AI, and a lot of the discussion in that context was about how the federal government needs to be innovating, to use more AI in a lot of what they do, and to be monetizing.
What's happening today, we'll be discussing how AI has the potential to help government serve better serve the American people.
Okay, so tonally, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, which was called Artificial Intelligence and Government, was a little bit more optimistic, like, I give me some of that.
And that would include things like Uncle Sam, right, improving the IRS system, and you know what does filing of taxes look like? And are there ways to ease the burden? Are there are ways to modernize and have different parts of the government talking to each other, and hopefully those
conversations will converge. We won't be looking at like how do we regulate and limit the rests of generative AI and then infuse it throughout all of the federal government at the same time, right, and hopefully like you have the left hand talking to the right hand, so that we actually come up with a sensible strategy and a road ahead.
A road ahead, But which one are you feeling confused right now? Because you should be the inventors and the backers of a billion dollar technology swore under oath something to the tune of, yeah, man, this shit could kill us. And everyone's freaking out because it's already taking over jobs because it's so smart. But at the same time, it's worse at googling than your ten year old niece with
a book report. And while this is going on, the government is holding two simultaneous hearings on the same day, and one is Oppenheimer flavored and the other is Barbieland so if you are confused by all of this and you don't know how to feel, the answer is, yes, that's correct.
But it's happening so quickly that it's not going to be law alone that does anything to rein it in. We're going to need a lot of cooperation between governments, between tech companies. And you know, if you look in the US, the US has not been good at regulating tech companies, right. I mean, it has had lots of talk about it, lots of very contentious Senate hearings.
I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here.
And then they have so much money and so much power and so much lobbying influence that you know the result is nothing happens. And that just can't be the case. Now, we can't go into this era leaving it up to tech companies to decide the fate of humanity.
Right, what do you do if you're mad as hellan you're not going to take it anymore? What is an average person who does not own a forty billion dollar tech company say when they're like, don't scrub my brain data through my headphones, I'd stop simulating art. Let some people make some art. Have you seen that meme about how, somehow we've gotten to a place where human beings are still laboring at wages that don't increase, that are not liveable,
and yet computers get to write poetry and make art. No, but that sounds right, that's such a heartbreaking way to look at it, where no one can afford to be an artist. So the exact words from Twitter user Carl Cherrow read humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted. So that tweet was shared thirty five thousand times because it's true and it hurts my soul.
You know, I haven't seen that meme and now I'm reeling from thinking about it, which is like, oh my god, that's so true. Suddenly we've like we've outsourced all the things that we like and we're now doing all of the grunt work still, and like, how horrible is that? Going to send like generative AI to the beach next weekend and so you know, like what we like, stay home and toil and pay for it, right, Yeah, I mean,
you know. The problem is that on the one hand, we could say like, oh, it's all happening so quickly and so we can't do anything about it. On the other hand, that's just the nature of emerging tech. It happens quickly, and so it's not as if there have not been proposals about what agile governance looks like or what adaptive regulations look like that actually change based on changes in milestones and technology, and it would not be
impossible to put some of those things into place. There have been people who've been writing about and thinking about and proposing these models for a long time.
First off, what does agile governance look like and what does adaptive regulations mean? I don't know. I'm not a law professor. I'm a podcast host who's jealous of a circuit board that gets to a watercolor. So I asked my robot machine Google and agile governance means a process that brings the most value by focusing on what matters. Okay, But adaptive regulation I think mean like, watch this space, keep making laws if shit seems like it's getting out
of hand now. In June, the European Union overwhelmingly passed the EUAI Act, which classifies different types of AI into risk categories. There's unacceptable, there's high risk, there's generative AI, and limited risk. What is in these buckets, you're wondering. So the unacceptable bucket includes cognitive behavioral manipulation and social scoring a LA Black mirror, and biometric identification like real
time public facial recognition. High risk involves more biometric uses, but after the fact, with a few exceptions for law enforcement. But it curbs AI snitching on employees and doing emotional spying from one together. Generative AI would have to disclose that is generative, and the makers need to come clean on what copyrighted material they're using to teach generative neural networks. Now, that's it the EU. As for America, we have not
gotten that far yet. I mean that is, if everyone could even agree on what needs to happen, then they'd have to agree on voting for that thing to be actually enacted, which is it's a beautiful dream that I'm generating with my human imagination.
The problem has been, I think, the political will to do anything about it and to figure out, like, why should we care about the cognitive liberty of individuals, Why should we care about leisure and flourishing of humanity? Let's just maximize productivity and minimize human enjoyment in life. That just can't be what the answer is in the digital age anymore, right, I mean, we need an updated understanding
of what flourishing means. And it can't be that it is generative AI making art and writing poetry while we
toil away, Right, that can't be the case. Like I'm a philosopher, right, I'm going to go back to We have all of these philosophical conceptions, lots of perspectives on what flourishing is none of those perspective if you go back and look at them, contemplated a world in which our brains and mental experiences could so easily be hacked and manipulated, and the idea of happiness being the primary concept of human flourishing, Like, what is synthetic happiness? Is
that really happiness? If it's generated by dopamine hits from being on a predictive algorithm that's sending you little notifications, it's just the right time to make your brain addicted
and staying in place that looks like happiness. But I don't think that's happiness, right, right, So, given that all of these presupposed world in which we actually had cognitive freedom, we need to realize we don't anymore, right, And if we don't anymore, we need to create a space in which we do so that human flourishing in the digital age is what we're actually after and trying to make happen.
That we could put some human rights in place for it, We could put some systems in place that we're actually creating incentives to maximize cognitive freedom as the precursor to all other forms of flourishing, and hopefully that cognitive freedom would be the right to create art without having it appropriated, the right to write scripts and poetry without having it used to train models without our permission and without us
being part of it. That then make us irrelevant, so that the models can play while we work.
So in her book The Battle for Your Brain, Needa writes that we must establish the right to cognitive liberty to protect our freedom of thought and rumination, mental privacy, and self determination over our brains and mental experiences. This is the bundle of rights that makes up a new right to cognitive liberty, which can and should be recognized as part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which creates powerful norms. They guide corporations and nations on the
ethical use of neurotechnology. Neurotechnology has an unprecedented power to either empower or oppress us. The choice is ours end quote. And one liberty I've taken is never using chat GPT. Kind of like my high school's football rallies. I I just don't want to participate, and I don't like what it's all about, even though literally no one cares. That is stinky drama student with dyed black hair embraces as boycotting.
Nobody misses me I've always been a little bit creeped out and hesitant, like I've never tried chat GPT, and I have this absolutely incorrect illusion that if I don't use chatgept, it won't get smarter, and therefore I, single handedly by abstaining, have somehow taken down an entire industry of AI. It's not true.
Well, it's not true, but there is something to this idea that we're not helpless and that there is a demand side to technology, just as there is a supply side to technology, and there is a sense in which consumers and individuals feel like they're helpless. It's the same way you see with voting, Well, what's the point of voting? Because my state always goes this way or that way or and that kind of apathy means that a lot of times elections are decided by everybody else, and you
know that you don't have an effect. But this is even more so, like collectively, if we don't like the terms of service, why are we all still on the platforms? And you're right, the models are going to continue to be trained with or without you.
Yeah, no, Like it's not that radical an act for just me to abstain.
Well, but that idea that collectively we could act differently. If we could motivate and actually work collectively to act differently, we could act differently. One individual person silently protesting against chat GPT isn't going to do it right, but loudly protesting against it and saying like, look, the models train based on human interaction, and the more human interaction there is, the more it is trained, and so do you want
to continue to feed into that model? That's a worthwhile societal conversation to have, you.
Know, I was talking to my husband this morning about how many brilliant engineers end up working for bomb companies because they're going to have the best benefits, They're going to have the most stable employment. Right. How many people in the legal field do you feel like get kind of scooped up by tech companies because it's just an easier way to live. Do tech companies just have more pull to get the best lawyers to advocate for them instead of, for say, greater humanity.
I think it's not just law right. If I look at some of the best tech ethicists, many of them have gone in house to a lot of companies that are not actually that invested in tech ethics, and many of them got laid off, and the major tech layoffs that have happened from twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three because a lot of tech companies I think have put lip service to being serious about ethics, but they
haven't as seriously grappled with it. And the money and the power that these corporations have and the influence on society they have, I think both makes it hard for some people to resist saying no. But also this idea that like, if you're at a tech company where the transformation of humanity is happening, maybe you can steer it in the ways that you think are better for humanity.
Are there any nonprofits or organizations that you feel like are doing a good job.
There are a lot. I mean, I couldn't even begin to name them all. Like I would say, first, I admire what UNESCO is doing. So.
UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural organization, and on their Ethics of Artificial Intelligence web page, it states UNESCO has delivered global standards to maximize the benefits of scientific discoveries while minimizing the downside risks, ensuring they contribute to a more inclusive sustainable and peaceful world. And
it's also identified challenges and the ethics of neurotechnology. So as a result, their recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence was adopted by one hundred and ninety three member states at UNESCO's General Conference way back in the olden times of November twenty twenty one.
They're really trying to get out ahead of a lot of issues and to thoughtfully provide a lot of ethical guidance on a lot of different issues. I think the OECD is trying to be a useful and balanced organization to bring important information to bear.
The OECD, I had to look this up, is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and it's headquartered in France but involves thirty eight countries. So what are they doing. The OECD principles on Artificial Intelligence promote AI that's innovative and trustworthy and that respects human rights and democratic values. And then of course there's the EU.
I think the EU is acting in ways that are really pushing the conversations forward around the regulation of AI and how to do it and how to respect everything for mental privacy, to safeguard against manipulation, and you know, they get lambasted for like going too far or not going far enough, and those conversations were better than putting nothing on the table, which is what's happening a lot
of times in the US. I think the Biden administration has put out a lot of different principles that have been helpful, and that those kinds of principles are things around like an AI Bill of rights.
I went and took a gander at this dock, and the blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights sets forth five principles which I will now read to you. You should be protected from unsafe or ineffective systems. You should not face discrimination by algorithms. You should be protected from abuse of data practices, and you should have agency over how data about you is used. You should know that an automated system is being used and understand how and
why it contributes to outcomes that impact you. And finally, you should be able to opt out where appropriate and have access to a person who can quickly consider and remedy problems you encounter. I don't know if that means a helpline. I have no idea, but that five point framework is accompanied by a handbook called From Principles to practice, and it's guidance for anyone who wants to incorporate those protections into policy. So that's what the White House is
put out. They're like, y'all, we should really like be cool and nice about all this. And it's so sweet, and I appreciate it. My grandma had eleven children and really just dozens of grandkids, and she still remembered all her birthdays and would send a letter with one dollar in it, and that dollar meant a lot, even if it didn't get you far in the world. But I appreciated it in the same way I appreciate that AI Bill of Rights. It's very sweet. I don't know what to do with that.
There's a lot of different people coming at the problem from a lot of different perspectives. If anything, there are so many voices at the table that it's in many ways becoming noisy where we're not necessarily like moving ahead in a really constructive and productive way. And there's a lot of replication of efforts. But that's better than having too little activity at the table.
So yeah, I think that a lot of us on the outside of it think there's a tumble weed blowing through a boardroom and nobody cares, so it's really good to hear.
Yeah, I will tell you that. Like, I just feel like there are conversations happening in every corner you can imagine right now, and I'd like to see those conversations be turned into useful and practical pathways forward, like calling for governance. If you're a major tech company and saying, like these technologies that I'm creating create existential risk for humanity,
please regulate it. Or if you think that they present existential risk for humanity, don't just rush ahead, and you know, like come forward with something positive rather than saying my job is just to create the technology, your job is to govern it. Like that's not the pathway forward either. I have questions from listeners who know you're coming on. Oh great, yeah, please, But before.
We do, we'll donate to a relevant cause. And this week it's going to Human Rights Watch, which is a group of experts, lawyers, and journalists who investigate and report on abuses happening in all corners of the world, and then they direct their advocacy toward governments, armed groups, and businesses. And you can find out more at HRW dot org. And we will link that in the show notes and thanks to sponsors of the show who make that donation possible.
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Okay Onto questions written by actual human listeners made of meat and water. Let's start with something optimistic. A ton of people. Lena Brotsky, Anina Evesy, Chris Blackthorn, Megsie, Alexandra Catoule, Adam Silk, Kata mccaffee, Madison Piper, and Will Mack want to know. Can we use AI for good? Rye of the Tiger wants to know what will AI's role look
like in the fight against climate change, for example? Or should we be using AI for the toils like meal planning and trip planning and things like that.
Yeah, so I think we can absolutely use AI for good. And first, I would say a friend of mine, Orly Lobul, wrote a book recently called The Equality Machine, and it's all about using AI to achieve better equality in society and gives kind of example after example of both how it could be done and how it is being done
in some context. I think recognizing that there is this terrifying narrative about A but that actually AI is already making our lives better in many, many ways, is an important thing to look at and that we can put it to solving some of the biggest problems in society, right from climate change and trying to generate novel ideas to testing and identifying and this is already happening novel compounds that could be used to solve some of the worst diseases, to being used to identify the causes of
different diseases, to identifying better patterns that help us to address everything from neurological disease and suffering to the existential threats to humanity like climate change. So I absolutely think it can be used for good. It is being used for good, it could be used for more good. We have to better align the tech companies with the overall
ways of human flourishing, right. I mean, if you were to use AI to improve brain health instead of to addict andish brains, that would be phenomenal, and it could be used to do that. It can be used for mental health treatment and for solving neurological disease and suffering, or it can be used to addict people and keep them stuck on technology. We need to figure out a way to align the incentives of tech companies with these ideas of AI for good.
It'll be so interesting to see if they are getting a lot of feedback from our brains. Any mental health challenges or speaking as someone who has anxiety and is neurodivergent, Hello, Hi, Things like ADHD autism, those have been so overlooked in some populations. It would be interesting to see people getting a better understanding of their own brains that maybe medicine has overlooked because of demographics for a long time.
You know, Yeah, I have a TED talk that just came out that the first half of the TED talk actually focuses on all of the positive ways that neurotechnology can be used and all of the hope that it offers, Like us tracking our everyday brain activity could help us better understand what stress this is out. You know, the earliest stages of glioblastoma, the worst and most threatening form of aggressive brain cancer, is the earliest stages of Parkinson's
and Alzheimer's disease. Better solutions for ADHD and trauma, you know, everything from like understanding the impact of technology on our brains to impact the understanding the impact of having that glass of wine or that cup of coffee on the brain and how it reacts to it. Gaining insight into our own brain activity could be the key to unlocking much better mental health and well being. And I think if it's put in the hands of individuals and used
to empower them, that will be tremendous and phenomenal. So long as we don't overshadow those benefits or outweigh those benefits with the dystopian misuses of the technology, which are very real and very possible right of using in the same way that companies are using all kinds of algorithms to predict our purchasing behavior or to nudge us to do things like watch the tenth episode in a row of a show and rather than breaking free and getting
some sleep, which is important for brain health. If the companies don't use brain data to commodify it to inform a more orwellian workplace, get back to it. If governments don't use it to try to surveil brains and to intrude on freedom of thought, but instead it's used by individuals to have greater power over their own health and well being in their own brains, it will be tremendous. We just have to really worry about those misuses and how we safeguard against them.
So the day before this interview, a TED talk featuring Nita went live, and in it she discusses the loss of her daughter and the grief that overwhelmed her, and she tells of how using biofeedback to understand her own sorrow and trauma from the experience helped her so much.
But how individual's brain data should be protected and this wrenching personal story that she tells, plus her long backgrounds in ethics and science and philosophy, make her very uniquely suited to see this issue from a lot of angles, and a lot of patrons had questions about surveillance and brain data and even neural hardware, including Katie mccaffee, Ryan Marlowe, and Sandy Green, who asked about things like medical devices like brain implants being used for surveilling or for commerce.
I was curious, so were some listeners to PAVCA thirty four Aminik David and Alex Htman's words, if we were to implant chips into human brains, what would they most likely be capable of? Would they be more in the realm of modulating real inputs, or would they be capable of generating new thoughts? Alex says it seems far fetched, but also the truth can be strange to the fiction. So is that a really big leap philosophically and legally and technologically.
I think it might be easier to interrupt thoughts than to create new thoughts. However, I guess philosophically that is creating new thoughts if you're interrupting thoughts right because you're letting other thoughts happen. But implanted neurotechnology right now is very limited. It's very difficult to get neurotechnology into people's brains, and there are forty people who are part of clinical trials that have implanted neurotechnology right now. It's a tiny
number of people. If neuralink, you know, and Elon Musk has his way, there will be far more people who are part of that. But implanted neurotechnology is limited. What it primarily is being used to do is to get signals out of the brain, that is, to listen to intention to move or to form speech, and to translate that in ways that then can be used to operate other technology.
If you're like, what is neuralink again? It sounds like a commuter train, but this is actually a side hustle of Twitter owner and Tesla guy and tunnel maker Elon Musk and he described this cosmetically undetectable, coin sized brain accessory as a wireless implanted chip that would enable someone who is quadriplegic or tetraplegic to control a computer or mouse, or their phone or really any device just by thinking. And he likened it to a fitbit in your skull
with tiny wires that go to your brain. So a robot surgeon, also invented by Neuralink, sows sixty four threads with over one thousand electrodes into the brain matter, which allows the recipient to control devices or robotic arms or
a screen using telepathic typing, which sounds pretty cool. And in early twenty twenty two, it came to light that roughly fifteen hundred animals had been killed in the testing process since twenty eighteen, some from human errors like incorrect placement on pig spines or wrong surgical glue used in primate test subjects, and some former employees reported that the work there was often rushed and that the vibe was
just high key stressful. But nevertheless, Neuralink announced just a few months ago that they got the green light from the FDA to launch their human trials and if you're like, hey, I am always losing the TV remote, so wire me up, musk, please cool your jets. Because they added that recruitment is not yet opened for their first clinical trial. More on that as it develops. But I guess when I said that we could become bubbles of chimp, that was really on the optimistic side of things.
What is possible, though, and this is one of the things I talk about in my TED talk, is it's possible to use neurostimulation in the brain. So I describe, for example, the case of Sarah, where she had intractable depression and through the use of implanted electrodes, was able to reset her brain activity.
This side note was conducted at the University of California and Servirascote, where neuroscientists implanted what's called a BCI, or brain computer interface, which was initially developed for epilepsy patients, into someone with treatment resistant depression, and one surgeon on the team said, when we turned this treatment off on our patient's depression, symptoms dissolved and in a remarkably small time she went into remission and the patient, Sarah, reported
laughing and having a joyous feeling. Wash over her that lasted at least a year after this implantation.
So this specific pattern of neural activity that was happening when she was the most symptomatic was traced using the implanted technology, and then, like a pacemaker for the brain, those signals were interrupted and reset each time she was experiencing them. That doesn't create a new thought. What it does is interrupt an existing thought. But philosophically you could say that creates a new thought. It creates for her an experience of being able to have a more typical
range of emotions. I think specific thoughts would be very hard to encode into the brain. I won't say never.
So brain hacking and hacking into your brain may radically change the way that we think and feel, if we don't blow up the planet first, which is not an intelligent thing to do. Speaking of intelligence, many patrons wanted to know what is in a name. Alexis will Clark Zombot, who proposed the term OI or organic intelligence for human thinking and history buff Connie Brooks. They all had questions about AI and the term AI. Is it intelligent? Is it artificial? Are they ever going to do a rebrand
on that? Does it give people the wrong idea of what it is.
Yeah. So I mean a lot of the technologists out there were computer scientists saying this isn't artificial intelligence because that assumes that there's intelligence. These aren't intelligent. They are task specific algorithms that are designed to do particular things, and that if we ever get to the point where you start to see more generalized intelligence, then that's the point at which it makes more sense to talk about artificial intelligence.
But not everyone is so casual about that assessment.
Interestingly, Eric Korvitz, who is the chief Science officer at Microsoft who has partnered with open Ai for CHATBT, he just published his essay on this AI Athology series and he talks about how his experience with GPT four was to see a lot of threads of intelligence, of what we think of as intelligence, and you see increasingly a
lot of examples of reasoning more like humans. I think one of the examples I've seen out there is giving GPT four a question of like, okay, you have some eggs a laptop, it's like five or six items, how
would you stack them? And then comes out and explains how you would stack them, and like you would put the book on the bottom, and then you would put a set of eggs that were spread out so that they could be stable, and then you would put the laptop in a particular configuration and blah blah blah, And why that kind of reasoning was more like human intelligence than it is like an algorithm. And those are really
interesting to think about. Like what is intelligence? Is really the fundamental question I think when somebody is saying is it really artificial intelligence? It is to have a particular perspective on what intelligence is and means and then to say, well, that isn't intelligence. Or if a generative AI model says it's happy, that it can't really be because that's not an authentic emotion because it's never experienced the world and
it doesn't have sensory input and sensory output. Or if a generative AI model says, here's what the ratings of wine are and what an excellent wine is, it can't possibly know because it's never tasted wine, you know, And then there's a question of like is that kind of intelligence what you need, which is experiential knowledge and not
just knowledge built on knowledge. There are some forms of intelligence, like emotional intelligence, which you might think really requires experiencing the world to authentically have that kind of intelligence.
I don't know shit about wine and sometimes I'm bad at my own emotions. Oh well, we can learn. Speaking of learning, many patrons who are students had thoughts and questions like Handy Dandy, Mister Mandy, Natalie Jones, Josie Chase, and Slayer, as well as educators including Nina Brodsky, Julie Vallmer, Leah Anderson, Jenna Congden, Theodore Visian Hudson Ansley, and Nina eve Z. There were several teachers who wrote in with questions.
Katie Bauer says, I'm a middle school teacher and I just started having students use AI tools to write essays
for them. Help talk me down. How do we embrace new tech but also teach students how to navigate this new landscape with solid ethics and an understanding of the need to develop skills that don't provolve around AI technology and Liz Park first time question asker their teacher and they feel that teaching, along with a lot of other jobs, just can't be handed off to AI and expected to have the same impact because machines, no matter how advanced,
won't be able to individualize education and provide warmth and et cetera.
Well, you know it's funny because I hear that almost the same question in both, Right, what is the role of education and human to human education in a world of generative AI? And I think that's a great question
to be asking. And I would say, first, I'm so glad that they were giving their students the assignment of working with CHATCHYBT and trying to understand it, because I think there are skills that you can't learn from generative AI, and if you don't learn them, we will not be able to interact well with them and use them well.
And these are critical thinking skills. And if the same old assignments are how we're trying to teach students, then yeah, students are just going to go to chat GYBT and say here's the book, generate a thesis statement for me, and write my essay, right, But they will have lost out on the ability to generate a thesis statement and what that critical thinking skill is, and lost out on the ability to build an argument and how you do so, lost out on the ability to write and understand what
good writing is, and they won't be able to interrogate the systems well, because they won't have any of the skills necessary to be able to tell fact from fiction and what is good writing or anything else? So then
the question is what you do? And it's the teachers and higher education and K through twelve education needs to be thinking about, Okay, what are the fundamental skills of reasoning and critical thinking and empathy and emotional intelligence and mental agility that we think are essential and that we have been teaching all along, But we've been teaching by task that now can be outsourced. And then how do we shift our teaching to be able to teach those skills?
And you know, if you go back to like the Socratic dialogues, there's an art to asking the question to seeking truth, and there is an art to asking the question of generative AI models in seeking the truth or and seeking good outputs. And we have to be teaching those skills if we want to move ahead.
I wasn't sure what the Socratic method of questioning was, so I asked the literature via computer, and I found that it involves a series of focused, yet open questions meant to to unravel thoughts as you go. And according to one article, Instead of a wise person lecturing, the teacher acts as though ignorant of the subject, and one quote attributed to Socrates reads, the highest form of human
excellence is to question oneself and others. So don't trust my wine recommendations, but do cut bangs if you want text a crush, ask a smart person a not smart question, because worms are going to eat us all one day. But yeah, the point of education isn't to get a good grade, but to develop skills that in the future are going to get you out of a jam. So many jams.
And I think your other person talking about that they can never replace human empathy, that's right, But don't be blind to the fact that they can make very powerful personal tutors as well. And they may not be able to tell when a student is struggling, or when they need emotional support, or when they may be experiencing abuse at home and need the support of the school to be able to intervene, for example, but they can go
beyond a teacher can go. A teacher doesn't have the capability to sit down with every student for hours and help them work through ten different ways of explaining the same issue to somebody. And so you help them learn how to ask the questions, and then they could spend all night long say Okay, well I didn't understand that explanation. Can you try explaining it to me a different way? Can you try explaining it to me as if you were telling my grandmother, I don't understand what that word means.
There's no teacher on earth who has either the patience for that or the time or is paid well enough to do that for every student, and so I think it can be an extraordinary equalizer. You know, right now, like wealthier parents are able to give private tutors to their kids, Okay, now you can have a generative AI model serve as a private tutor that can be customized
every student based on how they learn. That doesn't mean we don't need teachers to be able to be empathetic and to help students learn how to engage with the mom models and learn critical thinking skills, or to create a social environment to help develop their emotional intelligence and their digital intelligence. But it does mean that there is this additional tool that could actually be incredibly beneficial and can augment how we're teaching.
Okay, but outside the classroom and into your screens folks had questions, including Michael Hiker, Kevin Glover, Andrea Devlin, Genna Congden, Grandit, State of Mind, Chris Blackthorne, R. J. Deutge, and one big question a lot of listeners had is Rebecca new Part says, what's your favorite or least favorite portrayal of AI and media? Chris Whitman wants to know what is your favorite AI storyline based movie and why is it? Ex Machina? Someone else said Missus Davis? Should we turn
off Missus Davis? If we could? How do we prevent Terminator two? Whether or not you watch Black Mirror, anything that you feel like pop culturally written by humans that you've loved or hated.
I love Minority Report. It's an oldie but goody, but it really informs a lot of my work, and I think it's great.
I'm placing you under arrest with future Murder of Sarah Marx, you to manent the.
Future can be seen.
I think that some of the modern shows that I like, like Severance, Altered Carbon I thought was a great series, Black Mirror, Yes, you know, all of those I think are terrific and creepy. I appreciate those stories and really raising consciousness about some of the existential threats. But I would like to see stories that give us some more
balanced perspective. Sometimes I guess that doesn't make for good film, But you know, look the fears of like we don't fully understand consciousness, let alone how emergent properties of the human brain happen, let alone how emergent properties could happen
an incredibly intelligent system that we are creating. I share those fears, like I don't know where all of this is going, and I worry about it, and I don't think anybody has an answer about how to safeguard against those existential threats, And we should be doing things to try to identify them and to identify the points and identify what the solutions would be if we actually start to see those emergent properties, and those emergent properties are threatening,
Like we need monitoring systems, we also, in the meantime need to be looking at the good and figuring out how to better distribute the good, how to better educate people, how to change our education systems to catch up with it, how to recognize that the right answer for the writer's strike isn't to outsource its to chat GBT and there's something uniquely human about the writing of stories and the sharing of stories and the creation of art, and that that's part of the beauty of what it means to
be human. And so those conversations about the role in our lives and how to put it to uses that are good and still preserve human flourishing. Like that, I feel like is what we need to be doing in the meantime, right before it actually tortures us.
All that is great advice. And the last questions I always ask is always like, what's the worst part about your job? A lot of people say might be jetlag, meetings, emails, But I will outsource that to the patrons who wanted to know are we fucked? So we wanted to know are we fucked?
So?
What is the most fucked thing about what you do or learn?
So?
I mean, we're fucked if we let ourselves be, and I fear that we will, right, I mean, so I can tell people until I turned blue in the face about the potential promise of AI and certainly the promise of neurotechnology if we put it to good use, and if we safeguard against the Orwellian misuses of it in society.
But like we seem to always go there. We seem to always like go to the Orwellian and do the worst thing and put it to the worst applications and be driven just by profit and not by human flourishing. And so if we keep doing that, then yeah, we're kind of fucked. And if we actually like heed the wake up call and do something about it, like put into place not only a human right to cognitive liberty, but also the systems, the governance, the practices, the technologies
that help cultivated in society. I mean, if we invest in that, we have a bright and happy future ahead. If we don't, you know, it's not good.
What about to be such a globally recognized, trusted voice on this. Obviously, I was so pumped to interview you, Like I came straight out of the gate being like, I'm terrified I'm talking to you. What is it about your work that gets you excited? What kind of keeps you motivated?
I guess I'm also fascinated and terrified, right, I mean, so like it's almost like the horror show where you can't look away, And so I'm just motivated to continue to look and to learn and to research and then I guess at the end of the day, I am an eternal optimist. Like I just I believe in humanity.
I believe we can actually find a pathway forward, and that if I just try hard enough, right, if I just like get the message out there and work with enough other incredibly thoughtful people who care about humanity, that we will find a good pathway forward. So I'm driven by the hope and the fascination. I'm driven to continuously learn more, and I'm just grateful that people seem to respond. I'm encouraged that in this moment, people seem to really
get it. They really seem to be interested in working together collectively to find a better pathway forward.
I feel like you walking into a rum or a conversation is like have you ever seen a piece of chicken thrown into piranhas? All of us are just like the rest of us are like intellectual piranhas, being like, please don't be everything you don't. I'm gonna huggle You're out of thank you.
Well, that's the good thing is I can have hugs too, right, And so I'm also a mom. At the end of the day, I have two wonderful little girls at home who keep me grounded and see the world full of curiosity and kind of brilliance, of all kinds of possibility. And I want to help them continue to see the world as this kind of magical place. I want it to still be that place for them as they grow up.
So ask actual intelligent people some analog questions, because the one thing that we can agree on is that there is some power in learning, whether you're a person or a machine. And now that you know some basics, you can keep up with some of the headlines, but honestly, take news breaks, go outside, smell a tree, play pickleball or something, or go read Nita's book. It's called The Battle for Your Brain, Defending the right to think freely
in the Age of Neurotechnology. Will link that and her social media handles in the show notes, as well as so much more on our website at aliward dot com slash ologies slash neurotechnology well also smologies are kid friendly and Shure episodes. Those are up at aliward dot com slash Smologies linked to the show notes. Thank you, Zeegredriguez, Thomas and Shared Sleeper of Mindsham Media, and Mercedes Maitland
of Maitland Audio for working on those. We are at ologies on Instagram and Twitter, and I'm Ali Ward on both Just one L and Ali. Thank you patrons at patroon dot com for such great questions. You can join for a dollar a month if you like. Ologies Merch is for sale at reasonable prices at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Susan Hale for handling that among all of her many responsibilities as managing producer. Noel Dilworth schedules for us.
Aaron Talbert admin Zoologies podcast Facebook group with this syst from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon feltis also Happy birthday to my sister Celeste, who has a great brain. Emily White of the wordery xr professional transcripts and those are at alliwar dot com, slash Ologies Dash extras for free. Kelly R. Dwyer does our website. She can do yours too. Mark David Christiansen assistant edited this and lead editor and alarmingly smart Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio pulls it all together
for us each week. Nick Thorpe wrote and performed the theme music. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret and I'm going to treat this space like a confessional booth if you don't mind. Okay, So once I ran into this guy that I had dated who had dumped me, and he was with his lovely new girlfriend, and I pretended like I didn't hear his new girlfriend's name, right, I was like, what is it is? If I hadn't been six years deep in her Facebook like the day they
became official. And I still feel guilty about that. But I'm telling you that because computers, Wow, they've changed our lives. And also humans were so goofy and flawed. But you know, everyone's code has bugs, and we just keep upgrading our software until things work well enough. Okay, go enjoy the outdoors if you can.
For bye, pacadermatology, homeology, crypto, zoology, lithologyechology, meteorology, factology, anthology, seriologyology. I am now telling the computer exactly what you can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate.
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