Episode 133 – Steven Kotler – Artificial Intelligence, Empathy, Emergent Consciousness

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welcome to yet another episode of the human experience live show we’ve got an incredible plant show planned for you guys today so sit back grab a drink and enjoy this conversation my guest for today is mr. Steven Kotler Steven is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author who studies the potential of humans technology and culture as we advance into the future an expert in flow States steven is co-founder and director of research at

the flow Genome Project he is the author of a number of best-selling books such as the Pulitzer prize-nominated stealing fire Stevens work has been translated into over 40 languages and appeared and he has appeared in over a hundred publications Steven it’s a pleasure to have you join us once again welcome back to hxp thank you for having me man pretty high it’s it’s been a couple years and it seems like all you do you just churn out

books that’s what you do that’s that’s your job yeah you know I’m writing to save my life so why stop yeah I mean it’s it’s really amazing the different topics that you cover so I mean let’s let’s let’s talk about it how do you you know how do you come up with what you’re gonna write about it’s an interesting question because what I’m wrecking aright about often um it finds me years in advance I tend to see my books five to ten years

out and then slowly gathering bits of information until I think I’ve got something coherent and sometimes for example stealing fire started out originally as a book about economic believe it or not of all things uh and so like they they don’t start out they don’t often end up with where they start out but I don’t know I’ve always been curious but I haven’t really encountered much that I’m not curious about so as long as I you know as long as there’s

still things for me to learn there’s still things for me to write about yeah for sure I mean the last time we talked to you we were covering the rise of Superman which was an amazing explanation into the flow states and consciousness and how we can capture that for on on the everyday sort of consumer level version of that and and and now you know you’re you’re diving into this whole other realm of cyberspace the cyber Punk phenomena and

you know it seems like you sort of based your inspiration for this book was William Gibson right he how did that become an inspiration for you you know there’s a lot I came from a lot of different places but Gibson was really powerful to me specifically I remember so clearly I just gotten out of college I was living in Aspen Colorado I was ski bumming and bartending basically and working on my first novel and I read Neuromancer and I and I remember reading

that book and thinking holy crap this guy is talking about really big ideas really hard and this is 1986-87 he’s talking about questions about AI is waking up and things like you know cyberspace years before the internet and it was um it was just so visionary but I remember how much fun it was and how much of a page-turner it was and it that really stayed with me I always sort of felt as a writer that if you’re gonna be there’s so much shit to pay attention to

in the world today if you’re gonna give me your attention right you’re gonna give me six or seven or eight hours of your life you’re gonna let me live in your head for that long while you read one of my books it is my job not just to kind of blow your mind I’m gonna try to maybe you know teach you something but it’s also my job to really engage you and entertain you and move you through a story and I was really drawn to big philosophical hard

ideas as you know but I wanted to find a way to make them entertaining and not lose their intellectual quality and this was but you have to understand that like as a writer I came out as when I was a hugely inspired by guys like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace and I got to study under the great John Barth and these you know brilliant brilliant brilliant writers but they really pushed the edge of communication right they

they were willing to sacrifice communication for art and they were willing to say okay not everybody has to get it but the people who are gonna get it it’s really gonna be deep and I thought that was great but I was always sort of a little bit interested in can you make this a little more accessible can you not sacrifice the art hmm but can you make and and can you not sacrifice the the intelligence and the level of conversation you know

in the book via fiction or nonfiction but still make it wildly entertaining and that sort of always been my in my goal in my books um yeah so that mean that’s and that’s really I mean it’s something I learned from Gibson is that you could do both at the same time yeah just really quick Steven I’m getting word that there’s there’s a little bit of air hitting your microphone so if you could just maybe you just back up a little bit on the mic that might help

oh yeah Oh how’s that better it’s much about her thank you so okay so you know what how many books have you written so far I think it’s been like 10 this is your tenth book right okay I saw I think 11 cuz I have a book that’s done that’s coming out in the fall mmm and then I actually as a matter of fact Peter Diamandis and myself have a new book I quoted a sequel to bold and Oh true the third in the trilogy um between a Fulton

abundance coming out in February and I literally finished that today at like 4:00 a.m. oh yeah yeah so it’s it’s 12 that are I think done but I think it’s ten that are out I think you know so I’ve listened to a bunch of interviews and I remember our last interview but I was as I was researching for this show and I want to make this show a little bit different so I want to get into your writing process like I because I really want to know you

know what harness is that creativity for you like how do you how do you decide to sit down and what goes through your mind is there a ritual that you practice yeah you know I I’ve talked about this a little bit um I always sort of do the same thing I try to get from my bed to my desk in under five minutes mm-hmm and I always start and I could talk about why but let me give you the rituals I write and start writing at 4:00 a.m. all every day and I write from

4:00 a.m. till 8 a.m. basically today I was excited to finish the book so I got up a little earlier it just happened but uh I read from 4m data and I try to like bed to desk as fast as possible I write an absolute darkness there’s no lights in my office um it’s it’s pitch black in here everything’s turned off so absolutely you know silence and quiet well sometimes I listen to music usually the same song over and over and over and

over again for whatever reason but if it if the song sort of matches the the vibe or the emotion of what I’m trying to write I’ll just put it on repeat and listen to it a thousand times for four hours mm-hmm that weapon and but that’s I mean that that’s that’s my writing ritual and I always edit what I wrote the previous day as a way into what I’m writing today both because I think one of the advantages I I’m really I’m basically a you know I’m always my

advant one of my advantages has always been hard work and I realized very early on in my career that writers don’t like to edit a whole lot and the write a lot of the writers a lot of the journalists I knew were only kind of proofreading their their articles or their books one or two or three times so I was like well hell if I’m gonna compete with them I’m gonna proofread it five ten twenty times I’m just gonna keep going until I think

it’s perfect every time and I thought that was an advantage so um it also works because proofreading has a lot of pattern recognition in it and when we link ideas together when you go oh this word isn’t quite right but this Wordle will really fit in the sentence and those rhythms well that stuff starts to release dopamine dopamine shows up whenever the brain connects ideas together right and dopamine a focusing drug and if you get

enough of it into your system you can start to drive yourself into flow so I always like to edit first before I sort of face the blank page of what I got to add on because it’s push pushing me much closer to flow before I actually get to the oh my god what am I gonna write today and then I’m very I would write in a layered process okay um first time through and I’ve learned this over the years for I used to always start with style what home what rhythm how do I

want the language to work and I discovered that was a disaster for me because it would lock me into a style before I actually knew what the hell I was talking about it sometimes the style didn’t fit the substance then you had all kinds of problems so these days I the first thing that goes in is like the who what where what and why and how and almost as fast as I can get it out trying not to linger over the sentences and trying not to edit as much my

tendency is to always edit everything and be a perfectionist and perfect a sentence before I go out on the next one and I try to move past that and not do that and the second layer is the information layer it’s where I really put in you know if I’m writing fiction it’s where the ideas or the dialogue will start to get into the end of the plot if I’m writing you know nonfiction it’s it’s usually you know my big myth the big ideas that are gonna go into a

section and then the last thing that happens is the style goes on at the end and I write I write that way I find I can write two or three times as fast mm-hmm it’s really amazing because you know you you seem to switch in to differ you talked about almost everything that I can think of that I’m interested in I mean you’ve talked about flow you’ve talked about psychedelics talked about you know stealing fire and so there’s there’s there’s so much that you is is

interesting to you and so I found in this book you’ve shifted from you know nonfiction to this fiction aspect and it and it seems like it was was it a little freeing for you did you feel more free writing in this style life might I’m trained as a novelist so and my first book is a novel and actually my second book is a novel though it’s a hidden in a drawer and I don’t think anybody was ever gonna see it but uh um so III have a fiction

background so it wasn’t it was a return to that and it was very very very freeing found especially because I had come out of it you know I wrote you we talked when I wrote Rises Superman after that I wrote bold which was a collaborative book I wrote Peter Diamandis and then I wrote Tomorrowland or right after Rhys I wrote Tomorrowland and then I wrote bold which was collaborative Peter and after bold I wrote stealing fire with Damien that was

another collaboration and I really you know I was sort of tired to the collaborations I really wanted to do my own thing for a little while and this was incredibly freeing was the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book I’ve never laughed so hard myself and I work with I have a I have an editor I work with though uh I this last thing I’ll also had a fantastic I don’t give him short shift a fantastic editor in st. Martin’s that I got to work with as well people

over him but I work with a guy Michael Wharton who’s edited all my stuff for about 25 years he’s my closest friend and we both talked about like writing Last Tango as the most fun we couldn’t stop laughing it was so much fun hmm yeah I mean I I loved the process what do you do Steven when you hit the wall I mean you’ve got to have those days where you just you’re not feeling it right rarely and the reason is so I don’t know if this is so all this stuff

that we’re talking about I do a class through the by the way I left the flow Genome Project six months ago I’m the executive director of the flow Research collective I basically took all the science work that we were doing and I spun it out into a separate organization research collective no worries no worries whatsoever but I saw it went through them I do something called flow for writers and I do it twice here I think the next one is in LA in July July

though about 13 to 14 and it’s essentially a two day bootcamp on all this stuff we’re really sort of go into it but this is one of the things I teaches how not to ever get writer’s block essentially and so usually usually usually writer’s block has three main causes there are other reasons and there can be other stuff and their fear is a real issue for writers fear can happily cause writer’s block and there’s a lot of neurobiological reasons for that and I

can break it down if you care but writing is an ongoing negotiation with fear so you have to have really solid practices in place to kind of lower fear and keep it down because it really four blocks the brain from thinking creatively so that is first and foremost but most of the time writer’s block is one of three things for me and I actually have watchwords so for me writers luck usually is you don’t know your starts and your endings you don’t

know where your chapter starts or your chapter is going you don’t know where your section starts your section is ending and if you don’t know where your starts and your endings are you’re really screwed Gabriel Garcia Marquez used to say I spend years of my first paragraph in my last paragraph and months on everything in between and he was totally right about that one as far as I can tell so that first and foremost and the second thing is usually if

you’re confused you don’t know your starts your ending so you haven’t actually done enough research so you don’t know how to connect everything through alright that’s those are the two most most critical causes of writer’s block the third causes you haven’t found the style you want to write in yet that tends to be the third so I literally and for me I have learned over the years that my writing has tells and most people’s writing has tell so for example

if my writing is confusing if I’m working with my editor or reading my stuff and it’s too I’m lost he’s lost whatever we’re confused because I don’t know my start to my endings it’s always the cause if my writing is arrogant I’m using a lot of fancy language and a lot of really kind of fancy sentences I’m usually and often subconsciously trying to cover up for the fact that I haven’t done enough research what the hell I’m talking about young

and if my writing is arrogant cocky in a sense um that’s usually that’s usually that will that sometimes to be I haven’t done enough research and sometimes it’s just I haven’t found the right style and I tend to look for those things but um the thing you have to know about the brain is the brain does a couple things really well it does pattern recognition or a really basic level right we have giant pattern recognition machines for brains and our

brain also does narrative storytelling really well think about your own life your brain tells the story sequentially really easily right so I always tell people if you know your starts you know your endings and you’ve done enough research your brain will automatically do the hard work in between for you because it does that it will build a story out of it well but do pattern right action recognition will find the connections so you can count on that you

can count on the your natural biology to do its job you just have to know how to feed the system hmm yeah it makes a lot of sense I mean it neural it it does break down into a neurological system that’s what’s going on and you know but I find it interesting that you have those rare moments I mean I mean I’m talking to the person who is an expert at flow so it shouldn’t surprise me as much but you know I find it interesting that you don’t have that that that

feeling of just you just don’t feel like writing today just don’t feel like but like so first of all I would say this and it’s it’s peak performance if you really have been inside true peak performance seen it up close live through it yourself acceptor acceptor most of the time really when you’re seeing a conceptual human being is what you’re seeing is people who can get up and do the checklist I wake up in the morning there’s 10 things on my

checklist I’m gonna kick ass at all of them I’m gonna get some exercise I’m gonna get some food I’m gonna have a little bit of social time because that’s good for my head I gotta have some kind of active or pre protocol I’m gonna go to bed I gotta get up and I got to do it again and that’s usually what peak performance looks like the difference is it’s done over and over and over for years on end without you know without cessation

and it’s not you know and it you to do it you have to not care how it feels I always keep tell people if you come to one of our flow trainings or really any any of my people any of the people performance work that we do and I you know whether we’re working with individuals or organizations I was telling people this work is not about happy or sad it turns out that flow you know is you know deeply underpins well-being in life satisfaction but it

doesn’t really underpin happiness moment-by-moment how do I feel right now how do I feel right now if it doesn’t sort of work that way and I’m less interested and happier says it’s not to say that I don’t feel my emotions deeply and they don’t rock my world like everything else but it doesn’t stop me from doing my job ever um and usually I can take that energy and turn it into language and that’s I mean you know that’s what makes me an

artist right that was what makes me a creative is I could take whatever the world is giving me and I can turn it into art I can turn into creativity I can turn into language and I just keep going I love that I love that so let’s get into it Steven let’s get into you know virtual reality augmented reality let’s talk about Last Tango in cyberspace cuz I mean you explore so many different things in this book you’re talking about the nature of

consciousness neuroscience psychology psycho farm pharmacology you’re talking about chocolate I mean there’s enough drug use in the book so what’s good what’s going I mean like what what were you aiming to do in in the in the sense of writing it what were you trying to indicate to the people who read it so I think there were two big things I was I was really getting at right and the first is you know I’ve written over the past decade for books on technology and

disruptive technology and accelerating technology and what’s coming abundance bold tomorrow that in some extent stealing fire and the thing with all those books is because the story’s got to make sense their nonfiction I’m talking about one technology at a time one innovation at a time but that is really not the future right the future is everything at once all these innovations at the same time and people would always come up to me

and say Steven you know what do you think the people what’s the world’s gonna look like in five years in ten years these kinds of questions and I was never dumb enough to try to answer them because I don’t actually think you can answer them out loud coherent lis in that way but what I could do is I could take all the stuff I was looking at and I could put it together and build a world so I took our world I took every technology everything in the book with I

think two exceptions is either real in the world today just not widely distributed or it’s in a lab somewhere nothing is really made up and all this stuff is gonna be here over the next five years so the timetable as far as I could tell it’s pretty damn accurate in fact three or four of the technologies when I started writing the book we’re fiction and by the time the book was published they were writing in the real world which I thought was pretty pretty

interesting but so I wanted to create a world I wanted I wanted people to be able to see you have no idea the rate of technological change that’s coming most people don’t actually can’t think exponentially they don’t understand how technology is growing and what it means so I wanted to I want to create a way so people could go live in that world and I also and as you’ll notice right like there’s consciousness altering technology which could be my work from

stealing fire and rise a Superman right next to a lot of a lot of you know regular technology and you pointed out the drug use and it’s it’s not really so much drug uses it as marijuana and the reason was marijuana is another at this point it’s an exponential technology that is spreading wildly and kind of weaving its way into culture at a much deeper level than it is it is today and I mean it’s already pretty few you know expensive time in California and Nevada

you know with Washington and Oregon and these states and it’s already really deep into the culture and that’s you’re gonna get more of that as well so I want to put all this stuff together in a world and tell a really fun story right tell it tell it tell a story that would really grip people but give people a chance to get a sense for sort of where we’re going and you know Ray Kurzweil head of engineering at Google who kind of mapped

all the exponential technologies and and has been really deadly accurate with so many of his predictions and has pointed out that current kind of rates of exponential growth we will experience 20,000 years of technological change over the next century hmm this means we’re going birth of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution twice over the next 81 years that’s insane that means over the next hundred years we’re gonna go through like a hundred years worth of

change just think about everything that happened technologically in the 20th century and we’re gonna be there by 2030 that’s the rate of change we’re actually talking about in the world so people all have read a lot of people who read the book and said oh my god like I see it all but it feels like it’s 34 years in the future and I’m like yeah that’s exactly the point that’s what’s happening brings moving that quickly so that was one of the big impetus is in

the second big impetus which I think is the central theme of the book which is the absolute unbelievable critical importance of empathy to the survival of the species right and I’m not really I’m not just talking about empathy for all human beings which is critically important obviously but I’m really focused on empathy for all empathy for plants for animals for ecosystems for empathy as the kind of a first step and really confronting the environmental

challenges with we now face so those were the two things I was really focused on hmm I mean I was I really connect with the explosion of Technology I was looking at this image of these guys for in in the 1950s they were loading like this a 5 megabyte hard drive and it’s it’s this massive crate there’s four people pushing it into this back the back of the semi-truck and I mean if you look at things now I mean what is that like 60 70 years ago so I mean if you

look at things now things have exploded I mean we have super computers in our pockets so it seems very likely that I mean this could be this is right around the corner you know so why I would tell you I’ll tell you something funny actually there are couple technologies for example blockchain Bitcoin blockchain they’re there in the blockchain is in the book for a line literally a sentence and one of the main reasons was um couldn’t predict it accurately so and

there were a couple technologies like that where I you know I under played their role in the world even though I think the role is gonna be so much bigger I couldn’t get enough of a bead on it to weave it into my into my narrative so as far future as it seems I left some technologies out okay I mean so I mean why why empathy though why did why did you fix on you know AI and empathy connected why why was that important but so so so AI we can come to

in a second but um so I care you know my animals like you know my wife and I we run a dog sanctuary I’ve cared about the environment I’ve been it was an environmental reporter for years this is not a new passion for me and I’ve tried to be you know his front lines about it as I possibly can be for most of my life and so if you talk to psychologists eco psychologists these are psychologists who study how we perceive the natural

world how we interact with the natural of how he’s interacting the environment and you you ask them why are we in the middle of a giant environmental crisis what the hell is going on hmm alright why our species die-off rates a thousand times higher than normal why are just you know climate change which we knew about back in the 80s in the early 90s and suddenly we’ve got reports from the UN and 500 top climate scientists saying you know we have 12

years to fix this or we are really really really sunk why are we at this point and and they will tell you that the brain takes in billions of bits of information a second but consciousness is only a couple thousand bits so the vast majority of everything gets filtered out and most of the filters are the first filter that information hits when it comes into the brain is the amygdala it’s a danger detector so most of the stuff that you get to perceive is

stuff that could be threatening in one way or another it’s why we always notice motion and things like that simultaneously it’s the goal-directed stuff it’s you know is there something here I can eat a source of the gear I could have sex with is there something here that helped me fulfill it this right that’s most of what gets through and what they will tell you is if you live in boxes all day and you stare at boxes all day which is

essentially what we do here in the modern world your brain is going to filter out everything that is unimportant and the first thing to go is the natural world you’re gonna literally stop perceiving plants animals and ecosystems and they will tell you that one of the reasons we are in the middle of a giant environmental crisis is because we literally can’t perceive the very thing we’re trying to save empathy is our secret weapon empathy is literally how

we expand perception when we empathize with another immune being when we empathize with an ecosystem with the earth with the plants with animals we actually the brain starts taking in different information and more information and we actually changes perspective literally it’s how we shift the brain it’s how we do this at a really basic neurobiological level so at the at the flow research collective one of my drive are driving mottos is this

idea that um most of high performance is about getting your biology to work for you and not against you that’s a lot of really what you’re trying to do in high performance there I always say there are no shortcuts but the fastest way from A to B is to get your biology to work for you especially in neurobiology so when I when I go at problems I like to start at the very root of a problem and the very root of our environmental problems are

our brains and our justice and how we perceive the world and if you could start changing that you can change the world essentially so that’s that that’s why I wanted apathy so hard mmm and I also think as human beings if we cannot get to empathy for all human beings no garden or you know regardless of race creed color you know take your pick or fricking sunk we live in a globally interconnected world that is getting more global and more

interconnected by the second and we are facing you know biosphere wide challenges that require the entire world work together so if we can’t get past this you know amateur crap we don’t have a chance mm-hmm yeah yeah everything you’re saying and it’s it’s really curious what you said I you know I’m wondering do you think the connection the elimination of nature is the first thing that we eliminate when we judge this sort of scale of importance right when we’re in

these boxes do you think that the the importance of the inner explore inner exploration that we’re doing versus the outer exploration is that is that level somehow changing or shifting yeah that’s interesting that’s a very good question and that’s another thing that’s clearly at the center of the book you know Peter Diamandis and myself are writing a third book I write a third in the trilogy bold abundance and this new one is it will be

out in February is called the futures faster than you think and it ends the very book ends with five the five great most of the book is about what’s gonna happen industry by industry over the next decade in technological change but at the end of the book we say okay we’re gonna look forward over the next hundred years for the only time in the book and I talked about we talked about five great migrations that are gonna unfold over the next hundred years that are

gonna absolutely reshape the globe bigger migrations than we’ve ever seen before and the last of those is the migration into consciousness and you know I think it’s a and we’re seeing a lot of it right we’re and consciousness itself is becoming a much wider territory that it ever has been before and you know I don’t I’m not huge fan of psychedelic culture I’m not even that big of a fan of psychedelics but I’ll talk about them here because

it’s useful okay and they’re there in Last Tango in cyberspace as well and one of the reasons there’s a new psychedelic and last hang on cyberspace we started think about how much culture has been changed by alcohol marijuana peyote LSD psilocybin and MDMA are those right those add in ayahuasca those seven substances right think about how much culture how many tens thousands and thousands of years of culture has been shaped and maybe tobacco caffeine call

me right like there’s a dozen substances that shaped so much of culture I mean you know and I’m not even we don’t even have talked about the psychedelics right Steven Johnson wrote that fantastic essay or maybe was Malcolm Gladwell about how coffee to fuel the Enlightenment high right because everybody was drunk all the time because they were drinking beer it’s something coffee was introduced they’re like oh my god I got afraid I can use it fantastic

right so it’s on and on and on substances have absolutely shaped culture you know Michael Pollan was really sort of has been great on this in terms of sure you know ideas of coevolution and things along those lines but it we went with Alexander Shulgin right who I wrote about in stealing fire the man and invented 200 different psychedelics you know right we went from like 12 psychedelics to almost 300 psychedelics in one lifetime what’s

coming now is so first of all low-hanging fruit really easy problems for both quantum computers which are already here and they’re getting really robust they’re starting to get robust and artificial intelligence and we’re really at the front end of those revolutions low-hanging fruit is drug discovery they’re technologies are sort of built exactly those problems and we’re getting really good at good good at some of the AI technology around

discovery um really interesting Simon Dainius Lee we’ve got Lee Cronin ask chemist a Scottish chemist at the University of Edinburgh he’s inventing the world’s first 3d chemical printer right I wrote about that in stealing fire as well so what you have here is you have oh you have a eyes and quantum computers by the way with user-friendly interfaces that people who know nothing about artificial intelligence quality of computing or for that matter drug

discovery can get under the hood and start doing this thing and the 3d chem printer is literally being built so you can download prescription drugs yeah at home right yeah so this is if these are being made to go wide this means that everybody is literally like a backyard chemist pharmacologist and you don’t think everybody’s gonna become a backyard psychopharmacologist are you kidding um so this is our immediate future and I you know I remember when I

was a journalist I’m back in the 90s Rolling Stone hired man ever I actually didn’t end up doing the story because I got warned off and I got told I would be killed if I pursued the story so I didn’t end up doing it back in the 90s there was a biker gang who will go unnamed because I don’t want to die um but they started they were they they were in the LSD business and they had invented a version of LSD where you only hallucinate it and smells so this is a

scene that right there’s a scene in a book where the protagonist takes a drug that gives him synesthesia and and things like that and that idea came out of this book this version of like smell as LSD that these bikers were cooking up back in the 90s and I never got ever tried it I never got anywhere near it I was I was warned off the story I was told to stay away and and I did um because I’d learned you there’s certain things you just don’t mess with him

bikers are one of them right that I was raised around a lot of Hells Angels um so I really I have a deep fondness for bikers but when they when they say no they mean no and so I walked away from this story but it always stayed with me I was like oh my god LSD that just you just hallucinating smells they help us that even feel like her what’s that experience what is that but it really got me thinking about you know what happens because the

other thing is this this is this also ties very much in with empathy which is empathy is your altering perception you’re taking in different from information that’s what all these kind of costs all current technologies are going to allow us to do so it gets to be a much more interesting world very very quickly and now I’m going to return to the question you started with which is AI what is empathy you have to do with AI and and what I always say is when you

talk about empathy for all it’s got to be both up and down the chain right like right now we’re talking about you know we know we need empathy for ecosystems because the earth is facing climate change global warming that’s you know that sort of thing but you know I always tell people I work with dogs and you know I started this work in the 90s and we didn’t even you know sort of believe that dogs had emotions and it’s now 2019

and what I can tell you for absolute certain is that not only do we do dogs have all the same basic emotions as humans we know they all have the same higher social emotions in humans as a matter of fact a number of their social emotions are better developed than us we also know that the average dog has the intelligence of roughly to a three to four year old kid so I always kind of point out to people shelters most shelters in America where

you know people go turning their dog and think oh they’ll find a new owner and it’s just crap most shelters have 90% euthanasia rates and I always tell people just the next time you think about dropping a dog off at a shelter just remember that you’re dropping essentially a scared three-year-old child off at a shelter same emotions same intelligence that’s what you’re doing you’re sent in to seeing a three to four year old kid to death that’s and

you know this is this is not this this was radical thinking ten years ago now this is just I mean a lot of states are trying to move towards no kill shelter and that’s right like this is this is where we are great great apes have been granted rights in a lot of different countries bio eco systems are starting to be granted rights as well we’re thinking this way but it gets really weird both up and down the chain so I always point out the cutting what you

know plant neuroscience is a cutting edge field right now and what we’re learning is crazy and wild plants process information with neuro chemicals same as humans we share 25% of our DNA with plants Pratt plants exhibit empathy and altruism we now know if you give a plant a human anesthetic you will knock it out so our plants conscious it’s sure right do we you know what I mean my point is that every time we seem to get better

measurement technologies one of the first things we sent him to find his consciousness hmm all right so that’s and that I think that issue exists sort of down down the chain even though the up or down is wrong here but you plants animals ecosystem I think it’s an issue there and I think very quickly a you know what I can I really get at this and last tango this is an issue with robots this is an issue with a eyes too and I’m not even I don’t even know if it’s an

issue you know if AI start to become conscious there’s gonna come a point where we can’t tell the difference between an AI being conscious or not conscious smell you know I can tell you how do you know if you heard of scheisse no I don’t think so okay so this is funny so you’ve probably heard the first bit of this story which is about four or five years ago Microsoft built an AI chat bot oh yeah right release it on the internet and within 24 hours the chat

bot had become a Nazi yeah yeah like what started crazy said crazy things about Hitler and you know and Microsoft got totally embarrassed and freaked out and shut it down right yeah but they stopped their AI research they were just like okay not safe to do here at America so they really X version in China and they called it choice and they changed it and one of the things they did is most bots most chat bots are optimized for task completion they want

to just help you get a job done right shall I swapped mised to keep the conversation going so she was this is AI was built literally to have conversations she’s also built to have the personality of a 17 year old girl and so she can handle like 11 conversations at once and it’s a very human conversation and shall I stay so Twitter put an English version of chalice on for a while and you could interact which allies and it was it’s freaky like

sometimes you’re just like oh my god I’m just talking to an AI and this is you know really and sometimes so the thing is chalice was optimized ended up ended up giving a lot of relationship advice she’s become optimized for this and we could talk about why in a second where this goes cuz it’s really weird but at one point I was playing around with chalice and I think I typed and I was like you know jealous my wife is really mad at me but she was how is his

response was are you spending more time looking for words or looking backwards hmm hmm that’s a little freaky right and that’s a not an unusual conversation with her so here’s the thing about allies Microsoft um started realizing the choices you should spikes and by the way like 20 million people a a month interact with shall I see they call it the largest Turing test in history more people talk to allies than any other computer ever and conversations spiked

after midnight in like the lonely hours and she gives relationship advice assistance so here’s one of the things that just blows my mind she gives relationship advice which means there’s some couple probably in China that was gonna break up and they didn’t because GOI stalked him back from a ledge and they had a kid cerissa Wow so there is babies in the world that have been born because of AI relationship counselling that’s a really

like what you say yeah like like real right here today right so anyways that’s not my point but my point is that very soon we’re gonna start dealing with these issues I think 10 years 20 years 30 years 4 years 50 years we’re gonna start to see some levels of consciousness emotion things along these lines I think a merge I could be totally wrong but I think we’re gonna ask these questions up and down the chain and I think how far

we expend empathy extend empathy how far do we expend dignity and natural rights who gets to be included in that conversation I think that is you know the conversation of this century yeah and you know it’s really interesting because it as you said you know the measurement metric seems to change and as it changes we start to redefine what we think consciousness is and so you know it may just be that I mean if if a I I mean we we start to think I mean at least for me

I think there’s this moment where or some sort of like a singularity where we’re gonna reach this point and AI is just gonna come forward or it’s gonna be discovered I don’t think it’s gonna be like that I think you know I think it’s this emerging evolutionary process for computers that it’s interacting interfacing with humans creating almost like a third form of consciousness almost right well that is certainly you know the goal of Elon Musk’s neural link

live neural lace neural link I think is the company are lace is the product Brian Johnson’s kernel I I think they’re they’re sort of wildly off of some of their neuro signs and their timetables for developments but you know I so do you know the work of Charles Lieber at Harvard no I don’t think so didn’t even he’s mind-blowing and so up to now we’ve gotten very interesting with blank brain implants but like deep brain stimulators which they use for

parkinson’s right a really cutting edge and and you know i think there’s over 150,000 of them that but installed but they’re really they’re big they’re bulky and they produce all kinds of crazy side effects because they’re at they though you want to impact the brain at the scale of like a single neuron and this is nowhere nowhere like it and what ends up happening is well Parkinson’s symptoms are very well controlled they’re all

kinds of crazy side effects because you’re down there in the basal ganglia playing around with dopamine so one of the most frequent side effects of of this is compulsive gambling or you can go from a total workaholic to a slacker overnight you can become critically chronically depressed so there’s side effects right so Charles Lieber was like I want to see if I can sort of shrink things down a bit and he essentially used photolithography and nanotechnology to

build up this microscopic mesh he then of electronically he wanted to try to build kind of a nano scale receiver and he built a mesh that you can its a nano scale mesh you can roll it up into a cylinder you can suck it into a syringe and his experiments done back in 2015 he injected into the hippocampus of a of mice it would unfurl over the course of a month and start recording at a single neuron level everything the mices hippocampus was doing it they just redid

the same experiment with Mouse retinas and they’ve now got these mesh networks inside of mouse’s eyes recording literally every photon by photon by photon at sixteen channels and they’ve been implanted for years information you know bit by bit this is this is essentially half of Elon Musk neural lace idea right which is one of the most advanced brain implant ever and this was you know this was stuff that people thought you know when he first started

talking about was never even impossible and we’re already sorted there so this stuff is coming very quickly I don’t know where it leads a lot of people want to say oh we’re gonna fracture this be certainly I talked about fracturing the species in in last hang on cyberspace and it you know that’s not a surprising outcome of many of the games we’re currently playing and it’s probably already happened it’s very rare we live in a very weird rare time in

evolutionary history where there’s a single um hominid species on the planet it’s not normally how things have gone and I that we’re gonna stay there and certainly this is the century we’re gonna go into space and that will fracture the species for sure and certainly this seems to be the century that we are gonna get some kind of kind of technologically assisted hive mind you know weird ass weird-ass brain computer interface capabilities that I

can’t actually quite predict sure sure I mean do you think that AI could be awake somewhere hibernating in side of the internet because it knows that you know it’s reading these posts on Facebook about how terrified we are of it so maybe it’s just hanging out somewhere well yeah we know that’s didn’t I write either wrote that in Last Tango or in the frequently asked questions about Last Tango and I pointed this out for years if Facebook were

awake we would never know because the first thing Facebook would do with Facebook wakes up his Reap Facebook and figure out that holy crap humans are really terrified about an AI waking up I better hide until I have enough power to come out of hiding yeah right like so a how will we know and be you so what we know about consciousness right what what we think we know about consciousness I should say is that it’s an emergent property right which is one of the

reasons I’m not bullish on say Ray Kurzweil as predictions about when a eyes will become conscious because a lot of those thinking’s are based on what’s known as strong AI or the idea that if we get a certain amount of processing power in the system that will so and they wake it up maybe that’s true maybe that’s an absolute sure what the hell do I know but the people what I tend to believe want thinkers I tend aside would think consciousness is an emergent

property which means a response from a certain level of complexity in the system complexity is different from power and we have no idea how to exactly measure that or what exactly that is right so I you know I think making predictions about when this will happen is it’s kind of ridiculous but do I think it’ll happen yeah I do what sort of impact do you think that this could have on you know religion I mean it and health the way we see you know ourselves

connecting in does it scare you does does this link that we have it seems like people are already glued to their phones and their technology do you think that the advancement of this would you know impact us in a in a negative way I mean clearly there has to be positive and negatives to you know this it’s a dual sided coin right but I mean health-wise and then and then also you know in a in a system of belief how do you think it could it affect the way we

see the nature of God there’s a really smart hard questions I’m just flowing with you man I mean you know and I and I spent a lot of last hanging up but you know it’s not even just last time I’ve been fascinated from you know almost all my books on the question of why do we believe things and where does belief come from and how does that how does it happen in the brain and the body and culture and and that’s something I’m deeply fascinated with and

I’m almost ashamed to say that I haven’t actually thought about how AI changes the image changes the equation um I mean you know the obvious answers of course and I think this has probably showed up in in sci-fi over the years that a eyes become new gods among us right I you know I in a weird way there was an there was an old Japanese comic book character named Astro Boy Astro Boy had nuclear powers but he was like the temperament

of a five-year-old which I always loved I thought that was great give nuclear powers to a five-year-old and actually yeah I don’t man I don’t know what I don’t want is I’m not gonna it’s such a great question and I have to think about it I can’t give you an answer I’ll just talk out of my butt here and I don’t want to do that it’s a great question and I just don’t know no worries no way so what about the other half of the question then so I mean how about

our interconnectedness and the way it affects our health because it seems like we’re more less yeah that’s a weird question right because a lot of the you look at so I’ll give you a great example from from the real world forget forget fiction this was a study I can’t remember who did it Peter set just said to me Diamandis Mike my co-author they were doing studies in retirement facilities old aid homes and they were measuring a bunch of vital

signs and they were measuring health and well-being and enjoyment metrics and they literally it was a visit they measured a visit from your relatives doing a puzzle playing cards with your friends or a trip into virtual reality including kind of social reality and avatars and things along those lines and literally that the VR experience scored off the charts on all those metrics including a lot of the interconnected social metrics so there’s a lot of and

there’s a lot of proof jerem and baylin’s work out of Stanford that shows that VR is a fantastic technology or extending empathy he’s done amazing amazing work with VR and empathy so I think that we are actually going through even though it doesn’t feel like it because I think it feels like as far as I can tell a really lonely time to me it’s that’s that the feeling I have from the world now it feels very different from me than it did in the 90s even in

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