David Eagleman, Neuroscientist and Author, on the Brain as a Neural Parliament, AI Hallucinations, and Rethinking Democracy with AI

00:23:18 · David EaglemanPlay from here

Then your agent and my agent and 350,000,000 other agents converge, and you get this thing that actually represents all of us and what we actually want. I mean, just as a side note, one of the things that I looked up when I was preparing that talk was how many write in votes happen. There are millions of write in votes every year. Mickey Mouse still is the winner, but Bart Simpson, Darth Vader, all this stuff. People are expressing their frustration when they do these write in votes. But I think we would get a lot less frustration because when people talk with AI, they do so with much more genuineness and honesty than they do with their fellow human. For ex... There's been lots of studies on this so far. You know, for example, if I'm debating something with a fellow human, I don't wanna look stupid. If I realize I'm getting cornered or whatever, maybe I make an excuse or whatever. I mean, everybody does this, but when you're talking with an AI and the AI brings something up, you say, oh, wow. I never thought about it that way. So we're much more likely to listen to AI and speak honestly with AI. We don't have to express frustration by doing silly things with AI. We can really have our agent get to know what our political opinions are. The way I think about this is I think we should have a big meeting with our agent once every six months or a year, but you can always check-in anytime. If you have a conversation with someone and change your mind, just come home and you tell your agent, Hey, by the way, I changed my mind on this point. I feel differently about abortion than I did, or gun control than I did. Great. Then it's representing that. Now imagine you have this system that's not trying to get reelected and please donors and not, you know, do public mistakes or whatever, and it just actually implements some sort of utilitarianism, which is trying to seek the maximum good for the most people, and you have a certain pedestal that you've put in place to make sure that it can't do any harm to people and it, you know, it keeps... You know, there's certain thresholds at the bottom that it has to maintain, and after that, it just tries to maximize things for everyone.

00:25:34 · Dan Turchin, David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:25:34] S2: Over the last year, we've seen bots granted citizenship and various kinds of PR stunts essentially. [00:25:39] S0: Yeah. [00:25:41] S2: All revolve... All relating to tricking humans into thinking that, you know, bots are... And those are kind of creepy and dystopian and just kind of silly. What I can tell all the listeners who weren't, you know, in attendance is this was a thoughtful talk that wasn't about advocating rule of law to bots. It was really about thinking about what society expects from elected officials and just a well researched... As far as I could tell, also, fairly unrehearsed. You got up there with, like, a cell phone, and for forty minutes, this was a very interesting talk. But it really made it made me think a lot, and I wanted to personally say thank you, and I I hope more people have the opportunity to hear you talk about this topic.

00:26:26 · David Eagleman, Dan TurchinPlay from here

[00:26:26] S0: Thank you. I'm actually going to do a podcast of my... An episode of my Inner Cosmos podcast on this topic because I'm now obsessed with it, and, you know, so much would have to change. For example, you know, constitutionally, it has to be a person born in The United States. What happens when it's not even a person anymore? There's going to have to be all kinds of constitutional changes. Obviously, one of the big things is, who controls this AI? My answer to that, I think, is it's got to be open source and transparent, meaning anybody can look at the weights, anybody can ask it any question they want, and we really have to have an emphasis on explainability. So it says, Look, here's this piece of legislation that I'm putting into place, and here's why. Here's a bunch of graphs and charts. I've done 2,000,000 simulations on this. This one ends up being optimal, keeping, you know, the economy healthy while preserving security, while blah blah blah blah blah, 50 other things, and here's all the data. [00:27:21] S2: And that's so much more transparent and and consistent with our values than what happens when we elect a human with an ego and a... And an agenda and and deep pocketed lobby it. Right? I mean, there... There's so many reasons why it right, is not a sensationalist idea.

00:27:21 · Dan Turchin, David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:27:21] S2: And that's so much more transparent and and consistent with our values than what happens when we elect a human with an ego and a... And an agenda and and deep pocketed lobby it. Right? I mean, there... There's so many reasons why it right, is not a sensationalist idea. [00:27:41] S0: Exactly. I mean, imagine that any citizen could ask Donald Trump, like, hey. Why did you make that decision? And and he gave a a well reasoned explanation for everything. I mean, first of all, he probably couldn't give a well reasoned explanation for everything. I'm saying anything about Trump except to say that he's a human. He's not gonna have a well reasoned explanation. Are probably lots of levels of of of reasons why he does stuff that maybe he doesn't even have access to. But, you know, also, who's got... What president has time to talk to anyone who wants to ask a question? It just seems so obvious to me that this is where we have to go. Now a gentleman at the conference came up to me and said something so interesting that I hadn't thought of, which is I suggested in my talk that this would be twenty years off, and he said, I think this could happen much sooner if you get someone like Taylor Swift to run for president and say, Look, I don't know anything about politics, but I've got this great AI here, and I'm the face. Just elect me because I'm beautiful and popular, and I'll use this AI. And I thought that was a really great idea because that's how we could, you know, sneak this in much faster.

00:28:48 · Dan TurchinPlay from here

[00:28:48] S2: The next version of this podcast, maybe it will be David and Dan in Taylor Swift Headquarters. Right? Taping signs or knocking on doors or something because that's a... It's it's very astute whoever said that. When we were just getting to each other before starting the recording, we've kind of gone through kind of run a show stuff. I'd sent you a bunch of topics. And you said, had this epiphany. I think I know why we dream. And you recently recorded an amazing conversation with Sam Harris, so you pretended to ask my permission, but I was like, Oh my gosh, yes?

00:29:29 · David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:29:29] S0: Great. Well, we were just talking about talk topics. Yes. Explain. Okay. Great. So about six years ago, I published a book called Livewired, which is about brain plasticity, and one of the things that strikes me so amazing about the brain is that, for example, if you go blind, the other senses take over the visual part of your brain, the visual cortex in the back of your head. And so it's not really the visual cortex. It's just the part of the cortex that happens to be used for vision as long as your eyes are working. And if they're not working, the brain doesn't let any territory lie fallow. It takes it over. Okay. Now the surprise was, to me, in 2013, some of my colleagues at Harvard did a study where they blindfolded people and put them in the brain scanner, and then they would make noises or touch the person on the hand, and and they were looking at the signals. But to their surprise, what they found out is that after about sixty minutes, the visual cortex would start to respond to sound and touch. Now that was mind blowing because how could this takeover start happening after just sixty minutes? And what I realized, my student and I were talking about this, and we realized that because our planet rotates into the darkness for half of the time, your visual system is at a unique disadvantage because in the dark, you can still hear and smell and taste and touch, but you can't see. And, obviously, I'm talking about evolutionary time before we made electric lights. Okay. So, I mean, it was really dark, and you can't see, and that means that that that vision is disadvantaged compared to the other senses. Meaning, all night long, your visual system is at risk of getting taken over. You're essentially blind. I mean, especially when you sleep. There are many hypotheses for why we sleep, but one of them is that it's just to stay out of trouble. You curl up in the corner of a cave, and you shut down and restore energy and stuff like that. Anyway, you know, even when you're asleep, you can feel if something crawls on your skin, you can hear a noise, things like that, but but you can't see. So what we realized was that dreams are the brain's way of defending the visual territory at nighttime.