How AI Is Changing the Human Brain

➡ The text discusses the impact of AI on our lives and how it’s changing the way we think and learn. Dr. Jack McCullum, a pediatric neurosurgeon and history teacher, believes AI is the most significant change in human history since the development of speech. He suggests that as AI takes over tasks, humans will start to value creativity, intuition, and human connection more, as these are things computers can’t replicate. The text also highlights the importance of understanding how our brains and values have evolved over time.
➡ The text discusses the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on education and learning. It suggests that AI can be a powerful tool for research and information gathering, but it’s important for students to learn how to use it effectively, rather than relying on it too much. The text also explores the idea that our traditional measures of intelligence, based on factual knowledge, may need to change in an AI-dominated world. Instead, we might need to focus on how well individuals can use information to create unique and original ideas.
➡ The text discusses the relationship between the human brain and artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on how AI can be used as a learning tool. It raises concerns about the current education system’s ability to adapt to rapid technological changes and the potential negative impacts of AI on brain development. The text also explores the idea of using AI to enhance learning, but warns about the potential for misuse and over-reliance on technology. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of human experiences, intuition, and creativity, which AI cannot replicate.
➡ The text discusses the use of AI in writing and fact-checking, but highlights its limitations in creativity and empathy. It emphasizes the importance of human touch in fields like healthcare and the value of original ideas. The text also stresses the importance of teaching children to develop a variety of skills and the value of hard work in mastering these skills. It concludes by stating that brains are trainable and that it’s never too late for adults to learn new skills.
➡ The text discusses the importance of discipline and hard work, even for gifted individuals, to achieve their potential. It also explores the democratization of knowledge and intelligence through technology, such as AI and the internet, making learning more accessible. However, it warns about the risks of misuse of this information, especially when it comes to dual-use technologies that can be used for both civilian and military purposes. The text also touches on the potential of AI in healthcare and the ethical issues surrounding its use.
➡ The text is saying that the situation isn’t as complicated as it seems, and it’s actually quite simple.

The original run through chat GPT was it was Google on steroids. It was way to look stuff up. These kids are beyond that now. Yes, they will use it to look stuff up but they use it as an agent now. They use it to do things. And actually it’s interesting that it may be true. The Chinese are. Yeah. In the, in the making of complex foundational models. They’re way ahead in day to day use of the technology. Welcome to business Game changers and the thrive hour. This one just. I know this is going to be different and I know it’s going to challenge a lot of you but I hope you listen to it.

I have Jack, Dr. Jack McCullum on. He is a pediatric neurosurgeon. He also built an insurance company like an $8 billion insurance company. And then he went on and got his PhD in history and is teaching history now. This guy has done a lot. He’s can’t stay. You know, I always say I don’t stay in my lane. Well, this guy doesn’t stay in his lane. He’s very broad thinker and he, I love talking to him because he’s really thinking about AI and he’s thinking about how it’s affecting our brain. He thinks it’s the most important change that we’ve had in human history aside from us learning how to speak.

He says it’s that profound to how it’s going to change changes and that we need to be paying attention. He said we don’t even know what questions to ask and we don’t even know what the red lines are here. I tell him that I don’t think we have the people even in, you know, there, even in Congress and everywhere to make these decisions. But it’s important that we have these conversations. We don’t just talk about doom and gloom. We talk about kind of the fascinating aspects of how humans are going to start to value human connection.

We’re going to be valuing the right side of the brain more because computers can’t do that. They can’t do it well, if you will, true creativity, intuition, human touch, human experience. Computers can’t do that. So we’re going to be valuing that more. And this conversation talks about how humans value what they value. And with this cross domain of understanding how the brain develops and understanding history, it gives you a fascinating glimpse into what we used to value and how it’s changed over time and how you people’s brains changed over time. Love this conversation. I love and I want to apologize ahead of time Some of this went pretty deep.

So I as I’m recording this intro I think I’m going to take part of it and put it on Substack because it might be a little bit more for the Die Hards and I’ll keep kind of the, the stuff that’s not as intense here for that’s a public on my public platforms. And if you want to see the rest of this, you go to sarah westall.substack.com or sarahwestall.com and sign up for my newsletter there or you’ll see how to get to Substack as well there. And I do have other exclusives that I’ve been putting up. I just did a chat with my friend Marjorie that I have for my subscribers up on Substack so sure to do that.

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So again, sarah wessel.com under shop or use the links below. Okay, let’s get into this very awesome conversation that I have with Dr. Jack McCollum. Hi Jack. Welcome back to the program. Well, it’s very good to be back. Thank you. You were one of my favorite interviews and I was telling you that before you came on because you got me thinking differently. You got me thinking differently about how the brain changes and what we’re going to value in society. And it just got me thinking structurally differently. And you, as we started, you were talking about how you didn’t get booed.

You just did a commencement speech, and they didn’t boo you off the stage. Well, can you talk about what. I think it’s pretty profound, what you were talking about. So I think the issue right now, if you’re a student or if you’re an educator and you’re trying to figure out what to do with AI, part of the risk for the kids, for the people who are being educated, is that you can get a workaround for an awful lot that makes it look like education and isn’t. You know, there’s the part about when you get information into your head, it goes to your temporal lobes, and it makes some changes in the chemicals in those neurons.

And in a couple of days, the cha. The chemicals go back where they came from, the changes stop, and you’re no different than you were. But for a little while, it feels like you actually learned something. That’s the risk. The. What you have to do is do the concentration, the repetition, the hard cognitive work that moves that stuff from your hippocampus to places deeper in your brain, and instead of just chemical changes, makes anatomic changes. You grow new connections for those neurons, and that’s permanent. But that’s never easy. That takes work. And the risk for the kids is they conduct the work.

And the AIs, The AIs make it easier, right? Yeah. It gives you a way. It gives you a way to. To feel like you’ve done something when you haven’t. And that’s the problem for educators, is to convince kids that you don’t go to the gym and sit on the bench and watch other people work out and get stronger. That’s right. Well, we talked about this last time, and I. I brought up my daughter, how she’s out of college now, but how she wrote her own paper, got a B, and then she’s like, just, I’ll have chat GPT do it, and she gets an A.

So it wasn’t. Not only was it, she was doing it right and had to compete against AI and ended up getting a B. And. But she was learning more and then realized that I need this A, and they were incenting her wrong. And we talked about how you can change the process of learning, teaching kids how to write, and still incorporate the AI into that process. You can. You know, the problem is the, the upside of the AI is that it’s a research tool that’s better than any research tool’s ever been. You can get access to more information in a usable way than any human has ever been able to.

And, and there’s an immense upside to that. But you also have to create. You have to train your brain to be able to use it to. To be able to use that information in an appropriate way. And that’s hard. That just takes work. It does take work. And I noticed that with my own writing, because I write a lot. I write up the paragraph, I want these things included. And then I have it rewrite it, and then I fix it again because it never comes up with what I want. I mean, I’m. I’ve got to the point where I’ve been able to tell it the subject areas and it’ll come up when you do the research, it’ll come up with different subject areas.

And then I’ve known how to. I’ve just gotten better at it. Right. But that’s the process that kids need to learn in order to get better at it. I can’t remember if we talked about this before or not, but I have a good friend who’s just a marvelous educator and his solution to the problem. And this is really hard if you’re a professor. His solution was to have the kids write a draft and grade it. Have the kids run the draft through AI and grade it again. And have the kids do a finished product using the first two and put a third grade on it.

As an educator, that’s a phenomenal amount of work. But those kids came out of that class understanding how to use it as a tool rather than as a crutch. That’s right. It’s a. It’s a huge difference. And the job for educators that, that they really haven’t come to terms with yet is that you have to figure out how to teach kids that you don’t really have to teach them information. Semantic stuff. It’s there. You have to teach them how to train their brains to use it. They. We used to think it was the facts that were important.

The facts aren’t necessarily important. It’s the process of understanding how to get to the facts that’s important. Yeah. Since printing became available in 1454, we valued. We’ve measured intelligence by facts, by how much semantic knowledge you have mastered. Prior to that, interestingly enough, new ideas were. Were looked at a scans. They were not trusted. You, your intelligence was measured solely on how many books you’d memorized. St. Augustine was said to have had thousands of them in his head. And that made you smart. Printing came along and that wasn’t necessary anymore. So you were measured by how well you did math, how well you, how well you could break down something you’d read and understand it.

The things that an IQ test measured became the things we valued. Those things are the things that the machine does spectacularly well. We probably are going to have to stop measuring intelligence by that. We may have to measure intelligence by how well you’ve trained your brain to use that information to come up with something that’s unique and original. That’s, that’s a hard problem. Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. And, and the interesting thing is we’ve sort of taught that stuff in, in some parts of, of academia that sort of is the core of liberal arts is that kind of thinking.

And we’re centuries. We put more value on things that were more semantic. We currently, we’re putting, we put the value on stem, on stem subjects, on science, technology, math. We probably are going to have to shift away from that. We probably are going to have to. And here’s the interesting thing about brains. Every time we’ve changed how we handle information, from memorizing books to doing calculus, every time we’ve changed, we’ve changed the things we’ve trained our brain to do. We’ve trained our brains to do something different. And that’s where we are right now. We’re going to have to train our brains to do something different than what we valued for the last couple of hundred years.

And that’s going to be a real interesting challenge for the academics that got their PhD in the old stuff. It’s going to change society quite a bit, isn’t it? And are we, are we already seeing the actual formation of, of someone’s brain changing now because of, because of all this? Well, not in this yet, I don’t think. But, but there are some, oh, there are some, some lovely examples of how training changes brains the most. I can’t remember we talked about this before, but the one that gets cited all the time is the London cabbies. Cab.

Being a cab driver in London is very hard. There are thousands and thousands of addresses and streets that you have to know and they all have to take a test. Wow, I didn’t know that. And the failure rate on the test is astronomically high. It’s like a, it’s like a, this number will be wrong, but something like a 10 pass rate of people who pass what’s called the knowledge. The interesting study is that if you do brain scans, MRI scans. Before and after people have mastered the knowledge, their dominant side hippocampus gets bigger. Wow. They actually train new neurons and new connections in that part of their brain that has to do with that kind of memorization.

We know that we can train brains. We know that we can decide what to train them to do. What we, what we’ve trained them to do for a very long time is pretty well patterned. And that may not be what’s appropriate to the AI world. Well, I’ve been working a lot on intuition and trying to understand that part. And quantum physics and study of consciousness is telling us that there’s a lot more to us than we realize and that even developing our ability for that intuition is like developing an athletic skill. It’s amazing as you try to do it how much you’re.

You can. Have you studied the brain as it changes. I just, it’s so fascinating. I. No one probably is doing this yet how the brain changes as you start diving into more abstract creative topics versus the left brain stuff. The short answer to that is no. One of my great. One of the great comments I’ve heard several times is you’re not allowed to discuss consciousness until you’ve got tenure. You said that last time. But so many people are now. Quantum physics is not. Is being studied significantly well. And, and it has a great deal to do with AI because one of the ongoing arguments is.

Is ever going to be possible to create conscious AI and under some definitions of consciousness, it’s already been done. It depends on the definition of consciousness. Does it. That are involved in. In AI in the. You know, that, that brings up the question we, I don’t think we’ve heard ever really talked about, but we haven’t figured out how as a society or even a government how to deal with that. Do you, do you go to Dario Amodi and say, gosh, you’re a pretty good guy, you clearly are pretty well intentioned. We’ll let you make these decisions.

Well, okay. No, this is really great that you’re bringing that up because I think that we have a class of politicians, if you will, without bashing on people. But it’s true that are kind of living in a world from 25 years ago. We, we need more people that are in tuned with this because I think the technology and where we’re going is, is further along than the society is able to manage it. And if we don’t get people in there, like you were saying, get people in there who can actually start answering these questions. And protecting us really.

I mean, ideally, these are tools for us to flourish, not the other way around. Yeah, right. And the, in the, the terrible problem with this right now is this moves so fast. It we’re seeing. You know, I think I told you before, I’m working on this book. I can’t keep up. I can’t do rewrites fast enough to keep up with what’s going on in the world. Well, and then that gets to the point where maybe the book has to zoom out a bit. Kind of like where we started before about the pattern instead of the specific.

Well, and the other part is that the part that I’ve really become the most interested in is the part that’s not moving very fast. And, and that is how you understand the relationship between the brain and AI. The, the ideas for that haven’t changed a great deal. The questions haven’t changed a great deal. And that’s in, in the. And the fact that we know brains are trainable. What is it we’re supposed to train them to be in this, in this brand new world. And that’s not moving as fast as the, as the machines are moving. Well.

Or we aren’t sure. How much do you think? Because I get concerned that the current group of children that are going through this, like your commencement speech is right on target. Like you might not be developing your brain. For a while there, I was on this kick that I was saying that we might be losing entire generations from. For developing their brain because we’re not paying attention to this. I mean, I don’t know if it’s that dire, but there is some truth to that. Well, I think there’s a good deal of truth to that. The. Forgive me, because I can’t remember if we talked about this either, but, but the problem is that this is moving so fast that the people who are in senior positions in education, particularly in university education, graduate school education, trained 20 years ago, they weren’t trained to this.

They in large numbers don’t want to think about it because this really is a direct threat to their body of knowledge. That’s right. And I think that’s what we’re seeing right now, isn’t it? It is kind of people really clashing with that. And it’s a. And it’s a hard problem. I mean, the. How you get. My, my. The commencement address I gave, it’s interesting. I found, I found out that as I, as I was going through the speech, I was talking to the faculty. I wasn’t talking as much to the Students as to the educators, did they, did they come up to you and talk to you afterwards? They did, they did.

And this is, this, this was a pretty good faculty and they, they had an active interest in where this is all going. So there’s some. It’s certainly not a hopeless situation, but it’s a challenging one. It’s not hopeless, but it, it, the universities are important and so are the high schools and grade schools for sure. Maybe more important than the universities. The high school may be where you can change them. I think so too. Or even the elementaries, I mean because some. Somebody asked me at a conference what I thought whether kids they were working with elementary and high school, you know, students and faculty members and they asked me whether I thought that they should incorporate AI or what age should they even start using it.

And I said well I think you should have a class maybe in it, but integrated completely into a thing in elementary school. I don’t even think you should other than getting familiar with it. It shouldn’t. I personally don’t think that you should incorporate it big time until they get a little older because you want that brain to develop. Am I wrong though? Maybe I’m seeing it wrong. I don’t know. The question I guess really is can you use AI as a training tool? That that’d be different and in my gut feeling about that is that yes you can.

That that in fact it can be a pretty powerful training tool. But it had to be, it would have to be written for that purpose. Like you can’t have them use chat GPT or something like that because it’s not, it’s not written for that purpose. You have to have an AI that does iterative learning with you and challenges you constantly. Otherwise you’re not, you’re. It’s the crutch that you were talking about and we’re fast. You know the, the original, the original run through Chat GPT was, it was Google on steroids. It was a way to look stuff up.

These kids are beyond that now. Yes, they will use it to look stuff up but they use it as an agent now. They use it to do things. And actually it’s interesting that it may be true. The Chinese are in the, in the making of complex foundational models. They’re way ahead in day to day use of the technology. A quick break to share with you this wonderful product called Masterpiece. It is proven to taking out graphene oxide, aluminums, heavy metals, microplastics. They also are looking at these Mac addresses and there’s more and More research and there’s studies coming out.

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And look for the link below where you can buy masterpiece yourself. It’ll provide you a discount. Or you can go to sarah westall.com under shop. Well, let me ask you because they have some models where the iterative. I got my daughter. So I, I would agree with you on, on that. I, I got my daughter. It was, it was one of the first ones I found where it helped her get better at taking the college entrance exam because was a precursor to all this where it was process and it would. You. It would know what you needed to work on so you could raise your score.

Right, right. And it was really effective and I was really impressed by it. We didn’t have any of that when we were younger, but. So I would agree with you. And the Chinese are using all of that. But my what, what I’ve also seen is they’re having like sensors. They watch to see if the child’s eye is not paying attention and they get in trouble or they, they’re like micromanaging their behavior so that they can focus and they’ll learn more. But at what point is it become destructive? I think that’s a real good question that I don’t know the answer to.

But you’re right. There’s. There’s certainly that problem exists. The, the fact that you can, that you can use as much data as you can collect is kind of threatening. It’s never really quite been in the process. You know, 10 years ago we were collecting way more data than we could possibly use. We couldn’t get to it, we couldn’t organize it. We couldn’t really use all of it if we tried. That’s no longer true because of the power of the computing. But. Okay. But as a kid, if you. It almost could develop a sort of PTSD kind of thing or some other like perfectionism kind of issues.

Yeah. I think, I think you could make it pretty threatening to kids. I think One of the odd, one of the odd things about. Well, so here’s the question. Here’s, here’s the, the core question that I am still struggling with. Try to think about what are the things that your brain can do that the machine cannot or that the machine cannot do as well? Well, the easy answer is anything that has to do with experience. I mean, you’ve been out in the world. You see, hear, smell, touch, feel things. The machine only has the reflection of what other people have sensed out in the world.

It has no personal experience. So you could say, well, gee, anything that involves personal experience, we got a big edge. And I sort of like that answer. Until you get to the fact. Until you get to a robot that can see and hear and has a pretty good sense of touch, and then that, then that margin gets a little bit fuzzy. Yeah, well, that’s a. It. They won’t have intuition. I don’t think maybe we could develop it. That’ll be scary if you can do a combination, you know, that’s, that’s where things get scary. But they don’t have the intuition.

They don’t necessarily have the experience and the pattern recognition with the experience and the intuition and the creativity. Right. And actually, I think what you really just described is a whole lot of. Right. Brain stuff. Yes, yes. In my, my guess, and it’s purely a guess, is that those things are going to be more important because those are the things that we can do that the machine, in fact can’t do. I think it was the Times Today had an editorial that dealt with. Somebody had done three, had looked at 375 or 370,000 college essays that had been written since Chat GPT was available.

And at one level, the language was better, the grammar was better, they were more pleasant to read, and in fact, they tended to get graded as better work. Yep. Until people went back and looked and they were very smooth rehashes of not original ideas. There was, there was not. They lacked creativity, they lack creativity and they, they lacks. It’s like a, it’s a. Doesn’t have the depth and that. I, I was using AI for a while more than I am now to do it, because I can just say, oh, this is an AI written thing. It’s just not as good, you know.

And yes, I’ll use AI when I write, I’ll use AI as a fact checker. I’ll write something and then run it through AI to see if I’ve missed anything. But I’m also very careful to go back and look at the references. If it’s something that I, that it says I missed, I’ll look up their source and make sure that in fact the source is being quoted accurately. I use AI for that. The other thing I’ll tell you that I cheat with AI is I’m terrible at metaphors. I just don’t come up with metaphors. And AI in fact, is pretty good at coming up with metaphors.

Yep, yep. Well, it’s a memory stuff, but. So, yeah, there is a crutch that you can use with all of that stuff. But let’s use the medical field. I like this one is a great example. I think the human touch. We have energy, right. We sense people around us. And having humans around us, it has a, a healing ability for some reason. And nature has a healing ability. There’s. This is the right brain stuff that we’re talking about. And I think we’re going to value, whether it’s nurses or health professionals that nurture people and help people that way.

And, and then we’re going to value the opposite side too. And that’s the, the novel ideas, the moving the entire field forward with new experiments and new ideas. The two extremes are going to be more valued than what the middle was. I think there’s probably a lot of truth in that. I’ll, I’ll go with both of those. When you said that, the thing that dawned on that, that ran through my mind was that almost everything that gets discovered is a, is a combination of old discoveries put together in a new way. If you really want to find totally original ideas, you almost have to go to Einstein.

Well, you’re right. Most ideas are linear. It’s very difficult to go from here and then make a major leap. You go through like this. But can the AI make the little incremental leaps? I don’t know if they’re good at synthesizing leaps. I think humans are better at it. I think humans are better at it. I’m a little bit pressed to figure out why they’re better at it. Now. The interpersonal relations things, the things that have to do with empathy and human connection, those have a value. Those, those really do have a value. The fact that at least in our world, if you do something which the machines can, the machines can do a lot of things, but in the end, somebody has to take responsibility and it isn’t going to be the machine.

I mean, machines can read X rays very, very well, but a human still has to sign off on it and, and take responsibility for, for the report and for the recommendations. So the. The machines are not going to do that stuff. What? The machine. Oh, go ahead. No, keep going. No, go back. I just got. I just dropped the thought. Okay. Sorry about that. Well, what is. If you were to look at. How can people. You know, people are trying to figure out how kids can develop better. I mean, I think your commencement speech, that was really good about talking about how to do this and teachers, it’s like we need to train all of the teachers differently now.

But if you had a. If you had kids, you have your grandkids, what would you be getting them involved with to prepare for this new. The way the world is going, the future, I have a hunch that it’s not ever going to be training them to do one thing. I think there’s an immense value in having kids train their brains to do a lot of things. I think that really has. One of my favorite. One of my favorite characters is Claude Shannon. You might have run across the anthropic version of Chat Dupt. It’s called Claude. Okay.

Yeah. Named for him. Shannon. Shannon wrote the definitive paper on how information works. It’s called the most. The most valuable, the most important master’s thesis ever written. He also got interested in gambling, and he bought a roulette wheel. And he figured out that tiny tilts in the roulette wheel changed the odds. And he was busy getting rich in Vegas until they invited him to leave the casinos. He got interested in the market, and he wrote trading algorithms. And he outperformed every financial advisor in the United States, including Warren Buffett, except one. And he almost got him.

And he got rich in the market. He was also famous for riding around the halls of Bell Labs in New Jersey on his unicycle, juggling oranges, because he was trying to get his brain to do different things. He just learned to do different things. And there’s an immense value for kids in having multiple skills. Once they understand that you can’t be it just because you want to be takes work. It takes work. You’ve got to train your brain, but you can train your brain to do a lot of things. When I interviewed from a neurosurgery residency, my future chief did not ask me how much neuroanatomy I knew.

He asked me what musical instrument I played. He was a banjo player in a New Orleans jazz band. He didn’t care. He could teach me neurosurgery. He wanted to know if I knew other stuff that’s excellent. Like my. My daughter, you know, she’s she can play the violin. She was really good at sports. She knows Chinese, you know, that kind of stuff. You really get them going. And my son’s like that too. You get them going in all different directions. Once you get over the. The problem for the kids is, and this is really a generational problem very much right now, there’s so much of an impetus in the kids to say, gosh, I want to be a guitar player, so I am.

And there’s a hesitance to put in to understand that it takes hours and hours and hours of work to train your brain to do something. But it’s worth doing the work, and brains are trainable. You just have to decide to go do it. And once the kids understand that, once the kids understand that they can train themselves with work to do a lot of things, then their brains become really valuable, and then they’re good users of the tool. There’s a story when I used to coach hockey and soccer, I coached for a long time. And there’s a story when I was learning the 10,000 hour rule of how you trained your muscles to be really, really good at something.

It’s a. You train your muscles and you work really hard at it. But in the book that I was written, it’s something I remembered ever since I read the book when I was learning and teaching myself how to coach. And there’s a story of a. Of a young girl learning how to play the saxophone. And she struggled on. She was teaching herself, going over a practice segment, and she would play it and didn’t sound right, and she’d struggle and play it again. And for like seven minutes, she was just really working hard at perfecting it and doing it again and making it better.

And then, you know, really until she got it right. And then after about seven minutes, she got bored of it and just plowed through and just played it straight on and didn’t care. Most people just play it straight on and don’t care and then don’t really get good at it. It was that seven minutes that was like hours in comparison. And I think that’s what you’re getting to if you really want to teach kids the most important thing about education, the most important thing is they’re carrying around £3 worth of neurons in their head that are trainable.

It doesn’t happen just on one exposure. You got to do the work to get the training. But you can make brains better at a lot of things if you put the work into doing it. And the hard part about education for kids, nobody Wants to work hard. You know, cognitive work is hard. It’s hard. It’s not very much fun until you get the reward. But teaching the kids to do the work, to become expert at whatever, is a real valuable gift to the kids. And once a kid figures that out, it’s really valuable. And adults can learn it too, right? I mean, adults.

I always said that my worst thing is things came too easy to me when I was younger. And so I didn’t just, I didn’t develop the discipline. And if you have a kid that’s, that’s gifted, if you will, it’s important to pressure them and have them work harder because they, that it’s that discipline that matters because then they can do anything. But if they don’t develop that discipline, discipline, then they’re going to have to figure that out. I will never be. I’ve got, I’ve got friends who are, who are concert musicians. I will never, ever be able to do that.

But I can work hard enough to be adequate and to have fun at it. I can make my brain learn to do those things. I’ll never be a terrific athlete, but I can get better at it. I can, if I put in the effort, take the time, I can change the way my brain is structured. And the good news now is that I have access to training tools that nobody ever had. I don’t have to go to some library. If I want to learn the Opening rifts, the Stairway to Heaven, there must be 20 versions on YouTube that will teach me to do that.

And 20 years ago, that, that didn’t exist. You didn’t have that opportunity. So do you think, see, this is a huge equalizer, or do you think like Sam Altman was saying, like them or not, a lot of people don’t like them. That intelligence, you can purchase intelligence like you will be buying the AI, or do you think it will democratize and knowledge and intelligence? It’s a good question. The thing that came to mind was that when people first learned to write, it was difficult and it took a lot of training. And only a very small part of society ever learned, ever became literate.

And then Gutenberg invented the printing press and they cranked out 8 million volumes in Europe in a year. I mean, within 50 years, in a population of 2 billion people, the yes, they had to buy the books, but they got cheap enough that everybody could get to them. And I think that in terms of access to information, oh, it’ll happen, it’ll have a cost, but it’s never going to be very High. Never again. It’s, it’s ridiculously cheaper now for me to get on Google, go to J Store and access a book that’s only available in New York, somewhere that it used to be to fly to New York to see the book.

That’s right. Because of digitizing everything. But you, you see that the backlash came. I think it’s, I think the walls are going to come down when there was too much information where people were learning things in industries that were threatening industries. Right. Like you just said, you couldn’t talk about consciousness without having tenure. Like, you know, you laugh about that, but those walls are all coming down. And we had, you know, the, like you were saying, people are protective of their knowledge and what they. And so they wanted to create censorship everywhere. Right. I almost think that was the part of the panic was they wanted to control that information and you couldn’t talk about certain things.

I think that’s part of what’s thawing. I mean, we’re seeing more of that and less of that at the same time. On one side of that argument, you could say that professional licensing is a guild system that keeps the knowledge of how to be a doctor all locked up in a small group of people that became doctors. And you, you hold that information and use of it tightly so everybody can’t have it. You can take that point of view and certainly there is some part of protecting your own little turf body of knowledge. On the other hand, it’s that risk we talked about.

It’s the risk of having easy access to all of that information without having had to do the work to understand it. And there’s a risk in that. Yes, there is. And if I had to, if I had to measure the two risks and make a guess, I would guess the risk of the second is greater than the risk of the first. So you would. You are saying that we need to tread lightly at allowing everyday people to have access to something, that it could be dangerous in the hands of people who don’t take it seriously. It may not be so much having access to the information as having the ability to use it.

I guess the great example is anthropic and now OpenAI’s versions of finding holes in written code, finding vulnerabilities in written code. We learned how to, we learned how to make machines great coders. And along the way they learned how to go out and find and find the, the ways into previously written code, the flaws of previously written code, which is everywhere. These aren’t created machines, they’re grown. But what really blew them away was a month later, the growth rate was astronomical. The highest growth rate was in Japan. And they had no idea the chat GPT could communicate in Japanese.

They didn’t. They had no idea. It just did. Wow. I mean. Yeah, yeah. We don’t understand what’s going on. These are, this is a different, this is a different kind of, of a process. Okay, now let me ask you. They’re working on, on biological. Combining the brain with the AI. If they did that, I mean, is that essentially what they’re trying to solve? I mean, because that’s scary. And, and do we. Is that what they’re trying to solve? Let’s start with that. Well, I don’t really know. At the, at the current level, at the neural link level, all they’re trying to do is basically connect thoughts to movement.

You can. At the neural link level, they put electrode arrays inside the brain and people. The great example is the. Is the patient with ALS who couldn’t move or speak. But with the electrode array running through, AI first could make letters come up on a screen and then could make things and then could play chess. See, I think there’s something good with that. I think that’s just phenomenal. They can, they can help people see who couldn’t see before. They can help people walk who couldn’t walk before. I mean, they can solve all those. That’s a phenomenal use.

That’s a perfect example of how this technology is going to be great. Now, the flip side is. Go ahead, go ahead. I was going to say the flip side is, is once you have that capabilities, we can’t seem as humans to separate out civilian use and military use. They always drool at the military use of this. Come back to that in a minute. The, Where I was going with the other is that the current versions of connecting brains through AI are really sort of basically are pretty simple. I mean, it’s not simple to think speech and have speech come out, but it’s a lot simpler than to have ideas, if that makes sense.

No, that makes sense. Yes. I think there’s a, There’s a possibility that you could connect a machine to your brain, use its immense collection of data and information and use your ability to create schemes for how the world works. Draw on that ability, on this, on the machine rather than on your left brain, and create, create a vision of the world out of your own brain. I think that’s a possibility. And that’s a hell of a lot more complicated. That’s, That’s a very complicated process. Yeah, that makes sense. The business with, with dual use technologies. It’s a problem with any dual, with any advanced technology.

Almost all of them have the potential for dual use. I mean, airplanes for dual use technology. Oh, sure. The question with the military issues and the one that, that is really causing Dario Amodia a lot of trouble right now is whether you allow the machines to be autonomous. If, if you use the machines to do things like look at satellite photos and pick out the important stuff out of a million satellite photos. Well, that is, that’s a dual use technology, but you can sort of understand how that works. Yeah, that’s not terribly threatening. If you put 25 drones with a single fighter plane, take them to a battlefield and turn them loose and say, go kill something, that’s a lot more bothersome.

Well, if you, you can say, you can say, okay, identify everybody with red hair and go take them out. You know, I’m just come up with something arbitrary. That’s the kind of things they can do. It is the kind of things they can do. You want to, you want to get really goofy. I think when he was in one of the visits with Trump, at a dinner, Decision pings people as soon as he finished eating, collected up all the dishes and took them away. So nobody would get Xi Jinping’s DNA and potentially create an organism that would kill Xi Jinping.

Oh, geez. I suppose that makes sense. It makes perfect sense. And that’s, that’s a different kind of, that’s a different kind of an issue. Or create something that would attack only blonde haired, Caucasian females and that is potentially possible. And then just turn it loose and say, go have a ball. That’s actually not even that complex. It’s not even that, that’s a simple one. It’s not that hard, Sam.
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