AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics
00:37:16 · David Eagleman
[00:37:16] S0: certainly hope so. Yeah. Oh, I totally hope so. Otherwise otherwise, what are we doing? Yeah. So so... And by the way, I think we've got to do that in the brain before we can answer this question that everyone's asking, which is, are LLMs conscious? Because who the hell knows? I mean, everyone's coming out with their... Oh, I think LMs are conscious. No way. They're not conscious, but who knows? Right? What we need to do is understand what's happening biologically, as in, Ah, okay, you put together these recursive loops and you have this and that and the other, that equals consciousness. Once we figure that out, then we can look at the AI and say, okay. Got it. That's got it. That doesn't have it, so that should Yeah. Be Exactly. We should be able to to actually know instead of just give our impressions of whether we feel like it's conscious. Is there a two through 10? How in how in the world are there two Actually, now that's funny you would ask that because I wrote an article in Discover Magazine called 10 unsolved questions of neuroscience. Now here's the thing. I wrote that article in 2006, and nine and a half of them are still unanswered. One of the questions was why do brains sleep and dream, and I think I've answered the dreaming question now. But, otherwise, they're still totally unanswered. One of them is cautious. One of them is, you know, what is intelligence? Like, we we don't even know. Everyone's got their way of describing what intelligence is. You know, maybe it's the capacity to simulate possible futures. Maybe it's the capacity to squelch distractors. There's all kinds of ways of thinking about intelligence, but it's not like as a field we have a definition that we agree on. There's so many things. There's questions about emotions and you know, what emotions are. We often tend to think about emotions as being one end of the spectrum and reason as being the other end of the spectrum or maybe two different categories. But but it might be... Yeah. It might be that they're the same thing, reason and emotion. It's just with kind of a a wider camera lens. Meaning, if I'm, you know, trying to think of a chess move, then I'm doing something very specific. But if I'm just experiencing, like, oh, is this a good or a bad situation? Should I run or should I go towards that? Should I... You know, am I in danger or not?
00:39:39 · David Eagleman, Dan Turchin
That's sort of a wide angle lens where I'm taking lots of data to put that together. Anyway, all these things, there's a lot of lot of unanswered questions in neuroscience. I'm so enthusiastic about AI for many reasons, but perhaps the main reason is that it's gonna help us speed up science. All the things that I and my students have been doing all the things that I and my students have been doing for decades and before me, for centuries. It just takes a long time to get progress, to figure things out, and the idea that AI is going to speed that up in a way such that when we're sitting here in 2036, say, Oh yeah, you know that list of 10 things I was talking about in 2026? They're all solved, and thanks to AI, like, that would be my dream. [00:40:25] S2: On behalf of humanity, it's so encouraging to see someone who's at the forefront of where these breakthroughs might come from be so enthusiastic. Not not about the dehumanization that's gonna take place because of AI, but because problems that have held us back as a species were right on the cusp of addressing. And I can't wait to have more versions of this conversation. And it's not gonna take, I don't think, a decade to be talking about knocking off some of the the the nine and a half remaining things from your 2006 list. [00:41:01] S0: That's right. Let's do let's do a mid a mid decade check-in on this. [00:41:06] S2: It's been such a pleasure. Likewise, Dan. Thanks. Just genuinely really enjoyed it. Where can the listeners learn more about you and some of this work that you do? [00:41:13] S0: Eagleman.com is my website.
00:41:13 · David Eagleman, Dan Turchin, S1
[00:41:13] S0: Eagleman.com is my website. [00:41:16] S2: Brilliant. Oh, gosh. That, this intense conversation. I'm glad we did have a face to face. That is, all the time we have for this week on AI and the Future of Work. As always, I'm your host, Dan Turchin from PeopleReign. And, of course, we're back next week with another fascinating guest. [00:41:33] S1: Yo. It's the end of the show. Time to power it down. AI's the sis, but humans wear the crown. Team human in the house got the vibe so clever. Dan Turchin from people. Rain making us better. We learned about AI for humans. We're ready to conquer the future that's all for now. See you next time.