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You are listening to Coast to Coast AM. Connie willis here and join the music right there along with you. I'm glad that you do like what we've got going on. Again, Thanks for all the texting and the tweeting and all that you do. I really do appreciate it. You are
very very kind. Just a reminder too, when I was on last weekend for Richard Serett and prayer still going to him and his family, I wanted we had on the air Douglas James Cottrell and he he had website problems, so he was talking about a class that he had for fifty bucks you can learn about him and what you can do and what he can do and all that good stuff, which is an incredible price. So definitely
go to it. But I just wanted to clear up the site to go to because a lot of you contacted me on that, and it would be just go to the store that he has, which would be Douglas James Kytrell and that co O T, T R, E L L store dot com and then right there on the front it's got for his class. So I just wanted to make that clear because he was having problems with the site. So that's where you want to go.
Make sure it's the store, okay. Also, those of you to go that go to Connie Willis dot com to my site and join my shows, or even if you just go to the email list, always make sure afterwards, specially if you get involved in the email list and put your name in and your your email address, what happens is you should get an email right back directly. So make sure you go immediately after you sign in, you know, within a minute or so, and make sure that you get the email that says thank you, we've
got you included. Because a lot of times these servers will well say it's spam, and you know you got
to give it permissions to accept it. So if you do go to Connie Willis dot com and say I want to get on your email list, Connie, make sure after you sign in, just go to your mail Okay, just give it a minute or so and go in there and if you don't see anything, check your trash, junk, spam, whatever you have your mailing system, and if you see it there, it will say do you trust this or it'll ask you that and just say yes so you can start getting Otherwise you'll miss all the good stuff.
And I don't want you to do that. I don't want you to do that. So open lines.
We've got.
Our guest is going to stick around with us, Doctor Eric Castletein that has done so many things in his life, and he's going to continue on because he is just that man. You know, one day you know it all, you know, we meet our maker. You're going to be working and having fun and smiling and inventing and doing all this until that last second. I just know you're one of them. I'm with you, and doctor Chris is the same. And I appreciate that in you. I appreciate that in you.
Well. Thanks. Like I say, I sometimes tell people I'm Eric hazlteen PhD ADHD.
That's true. So before we hit the phones, I do have a question that came to me that they won't be able to call in, so I want to ask you here. This is Tom Hill from Grain Valley, Missouri, and he says he's got a question for you. He said, how much of a voice sample would be needed to recreate someone's voice? And he said, due to cancer surgery and the follow up radiation treatment. I have lost my voice and would love to have it back, even if artificial.
And it's interesting because you're saying, hey, there's so much good and what a great reason why.
Yeah, well, it depends on what it is you wanted to say and so forth. But generally, about ten minutes is you need and the more variety there is, the better. But I've seen people do a credible job with just ten minutes. Some are less than that. They give you specific words they want you to say. But I think it would be definitely possible for him to if he
had samples of his voice from before. There are AI platforms where you could train it up and then he could just type in what he wants it to say and it would come out in his voice.
Amazing that. You know, there's so much amazing things that can't come out of this, Like you were saying that we can't. I don't even think we can battle what's out there. But I am concerned myself about the values and the ethic part of it. Got to figure all that out in all the laws, and I'm sure there'll be some battles for that along the way. So let's go to Wildcard line number one. Linn out of Orange County, California. Lynn, Welcome, you're on coast to cos A in Yes, the doctor.
Said the past hour that we didn't have to worry about AIS and emotions unless they were connected biologically to sell that would create emotions, and then we'd have to worry about that. But that could happen. It seems like you should have said it has happened, because we've heard all over the news already that they have cloned an embryo. Don't worry. It doesn't have a brain and it doesn't have a heart. But technically an AI doesn't need a
heart and it comes with its own brain. So technically, if we're saying that now, we can pretty much be guaranteed they've already created what would be equal to a terminator, whether it's a robot with skin like embryo skin, it's out there. So that's in the present tense. That's not future tents could be. That's a present tense.
I don't think we're there yet. Yes, they have cloned pretty significantly sized mammals like sheep, and there are rumors of human cloning in Asian countries, but that's not the same as giving them an AI. But I do think you have a point, caller in that neuroprosthetics are a big deal now where we have very sophisticated electrode implants in the brain, primarily for diseases like parkinsonism, and they
both record and they stimulate. And I know a neurosurgeon at Mayo Clinic who has an app on his phone where he monitors the brain activity of patients he's implanted. And I think it's certain that you're going to see AIS connected to neuroprosthetics. And already we have neuroprosthetics that can move artificial limbs, and you can transmit crude thoughts over the Internet by thinking something and then it shows up in someone else's brain. These experiments have already been done.
And so I think where you're going to see, what you're talking about, is the interface between AI, neuroprosthetics and the brain and what happens when an AI that has no biological tissue is now plugged into a real brain. It's that could start to generate things like emotions.
Interesting, very interesting, Lenn, Thanks for the call. Walkard line number two. I think it's my ed out of new York.
Yes, good morning, great program and great bump and music always.
Connie, thanks so much.
I want to briefly comment on Lyn's point because we heard a headline from George about not using the gammys, which are the over uh and the uh uh single sperm, but creation of life. So I just wanna say, yay, yay, len you you brought up an excellent, interesting point, but a point of clarification and a main question. And I listen over the air. I understand Chris does mind body books, but I didn't get the uh title of at least say her latest book. And the main question happens to
deal with some news. I was here in on public radio again. I heard it when it first happened some time ago, but through facial recognition, it seems that, you know, we live kind of in a cast system, and a Robert Williams in front of his wife and two young daughters got arrested behind this facial recognition. A black man spent like thirty hours on some crazy not even a bed, and without any clean water, and of course it was a mistake. So I'd like to know whether either one
of you have looked into that. And it seems like there's gonna be sort of like a Scisifian type of struggle because of the society that we live in. And if my question, I'll listen over the air.
Thank you so much, Connie, Thanks man.
Very insightful question. I appreciate both of them. Well, first of all, the book is The Listening Cure, and it's the story of an unconventional doctor, and doctor Chris is the main author and I'm a very small sub author
and talking about the brain. But getting to the point of racially neutral facial recognition, this is a big problem because most of the original face recognition systems were done on Caucasians and so they didn't perform as well on African Americans, and so they were more prone to missus and false positives. And this is a known problem and it stems from what we talked about earlier in the show, where the AI is only as good as the data you feed it, and if there's cultural bias in that,
then there will be cultural bias in the AI. And so it's a very important point that's been brought up, and the industry is trying to correct that weakness. I can't say that they're one hundred percent yet, but they're very aware of it.
Interesting question. Wild card line number three, Charles out of California. Is it sebastible?
What is it?
I'm sorry? Oh, okay, there you go.
Welcome.
You're on a show.
Confusing. So one of the topic I spent many years in AI myself. In fact, in the late nineties, I was president to call the Virtual Humans Conference, and at that time we're talking about things like existence, sovereignty, that's sort of thing. How do you determine the boundaries of who you are versus sometimes representing you? And we always thought in theoretical turns that now we're here, I mean,
this is the real thing. But the thing I wanted to ask you about now is in political elections and campaigns. In other words, right now, we have thousands and thousands of comments and all kinds of blogs and various websites either being pro putin or claiming that Ukraine attacked Prussia or just you know, crazy stuff like that. Yeah, people believe it. They actually started to go along with this idea.
I mean, it's kind of scary actually, So I'm kind of wondering how many of those comments are actually coming from Russian AI bots that sort of thing numbers I see over them where people's opinions can be heavily slaved, but it's kind of fake opinions being driven emotions that turn out to reflect in elections. Do you see that sort of happening in the.
Oh, absolutely, it has happened. It happened starting in twenty sixteen. And the Russians, by the way, are really good at computer science, really good and so absolutely, and I've read that in some cases the majority of material on certain social media sites was by these trolling bots, and they're just going to get better and better, and quantity does matter.
Stalin himself said, quantity has its own quality. So if you have zillions of these things and they're cheap and basically free to spawn, you can sway opinion on social media sites. And it actually has happened, and it's just going to get worse because the bots are going to get smarter and smarter and know how to work around the AI detectors that are trying to weed them out. It says I said in Arms Race, Charles, are you still there with us?
By gentle though, I think I am okay there?
What you said that you are in AI a long time ago? What what were you involved in?
Oh my goodness, well, uh, this is a little more esoteric. One of the things I was actually involved with something called evolutionary computing, and that is where you used genetic algorithms to actually design or make something come come to pass they would otherwise be able to do naturally. There was something called the how I says, the Evolvable Hardware conference, where we used genetic algorithms to construct really complex objects like antennas, for instance, which is a from an art
form itself. And I was at Pasadena actually of one time. It was a few years ago, and they showed an example of an antenna that was being designed for a spacecraft, you know, very beautiful orthogonos structure. Then they showed when I was designed by the evolutionary computer or the EC platform. The EC platform worked much better. It looks like a bird's nest, but nobody explaining why it actually weren't.
Over I've designed optics that way that came out way better than I could have done, and the computer did it. But we call those evolutionary neural nets, for example, and they're really good at creating art and they're different in many respects from supervised learning in that they don't have to be trained by a human in the same way and they can produce pretty amazing results.
Good stuff, Charles, thanks for calling in. Let's yeah, yeah, Let's see if we can do one more here before the break. Wild Card line number four Carl out of Boston.
You're on the air by Connie. I haven't go on with you for months, but I always missed the spot. I knway I got a good I mean, Lynn kind of hit on it earlier. I think it was their name.
But my question basically is is it possible now that we have quantum computing computers size of atoms to implement things like serotonin in dopamine into computers and something of that nature to make them beal emotions or I know they're not your wonderful call screen or Donna told me that's not possible, but I was just wondering from a brain doctor, is that even the possibility that you could interject or maybe an AI could detect a certain level
of serotonin or dopamine or whatever neurochemical reaction to make up their mind and how to react towards you.
Thank you well. I think it would depend on the actual physical structure of the AI computer if it's silicon microchips as it is today, I think the answer is no, although I wouldn't rule out the possibility that you couldn't come up with a digital virtual equivalent of stimulant and
neurotransmitter that would change the mood. But I think that there is a fast growing field of biological computing where biological tissue, neural tissue and other things are used for computation and also self assembling biological systems that do automation and things like that. There's nothing that says a computer has to be made of silicon. We have an existence proof that you can make it of neurve cells, for example, and there's some interesting experiments working in that direction. So
I'll just repeat what I said before. It's an opinion. It's not based on any data because nobody really knows what the substrate of emotion is. But my opinion is that the underlying computer would have to itself be biological.
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