Dream Machines: Physical AI, Robotics, Being Human
00:24:18 · Evan Helda
[00:24:18] S1: Yeah. I'm bringing my own answer. I need to go back and reread this because it's so heady that it doesn't always stick. But let me just read from this. Give me a second. Okay. So let me just read this and see where it takes us. Okay. So understanding the self. For most of us, the self is the main character of our story. It's the feeling of me at the center of experience. A fixed entity who thinks, feels, decides, and acts. It's the pilot living in your head, with a personality, wants, dreams, and desires. This feeling is so intuitive, it's so innate, that questioning it almost feels absurd. Of course, you are you, and I am me. And well, that's just that, end of story. But modern neuroscience offers a different story. According to cognitive scientist Dan Dennett, our sense of self is just a useful fiction. A mere narrative we tell ourselves about ourselves, and to be fair is very useful indeed. I need to think of myself as a father, a husband, a business partner, if only to make it through the week, much less excel at each. As such, it's important to clarify this is not the sense of self worth challenging. What we're targeting is far more fundamental and subtle. It's also the greatest source of suffering. It's the feeling of being a subject internal to our bodies, a mini you behind your eyes. This version of self An ego, to your point, an ego both produced by and identified with thought is where the burden lies. Fortunately, it's also not a solid concrete thing. It's a simulation. Or rather, to draw an eerie parallel to our new AI friends, it's a generative model. Philosopher Thomas Metzinger calls it the phenomenal self-model. A kind of internal avatar your brain assembles to unify experience and track itself in the world, and it works beautifully, stitching sounds, colors, smells, sensations into a coherent tapestry of subject-object, instead of a random chaos of disconnected inputs. Neuroscientists call this sensory integration, and I'm almost done. Let me finish this up here. But here's the uncomfortable part. This model doesn't reflect reality directly. It constructs it. Take color. This part's fun. Take color. There's no green out there in the world. Only light waves bouncing around.
00:26:36 · Evan Helda, Lara Sophie Bothur
Your brain interprets those waves and gives you the feeling of greenness, or what philosophers call qualia, aka the subjective felt qualities of experience, the what it's like aspect of mental states. As for the self, this feeling is what neuroscientists call a controlled hallucination. And it's entirely convincing because it's transparent. We don't see it as a model. We just see it as me. One major reason for this is memory. It convinces us there's a stable me who persists over time. So that idea of green not existing and we just, we invent green. It's not really out there in the world. That's like a really subtle, I guess, analogy to what the self really is, which kind of blows my mind. [00:27:20] S0: You're a good writer. You need to send that. And you need to drop the link, please, in the comments. [00:27:27] S1: Definitely. Will do. [00:27:28] S0: No, really. It feels like my younger me, not being alone with those thoughts, because I was always thinking exactly those things. Also, me is the one behind my eyes, right? And it also feels a bit like this Truman Show, you know? [00:27:51] S1: Yeah.
00:27:51 · Evan Helda, Lara Sophie Bothur
[00:27:51] S1: Yeah. [00:27:52] S0: The Truman Show. The Truman Show. It's like, you know, everyone's just actors around your life, you know, and then there's someone up there staring all of it. I think it's also crazy to understand that everyone is watching their own movie. You hear your thoughts, you see your perspective, and this happens for every individual in the world. And I think it's also crazy when you drive by train and you see all the windows there and everywhere there is an individual story and everyone is experiencing that. That is so crazy to think about. And there is also, you know, Disney is always very good in doing those, you know, grasping those psychological theories. So there is, I need to look it up how, I don't know what's the name in English, but Alles steht Kopf. You need to watch that. I love that. Alles steht Kopf. [00:28:59] S1: Is it a little cartoon or what is it? [00:29:02] S0: Yeah, it's a cartoon thing. Inside Out. [00:29:06] S1: Oh my gosh, Inside Out. Do you know that? Of course. That's the first movie I cried in as an adult. The first one made me cry. And not just tear up, but like, love will cry. It hit me so hard. I don't know why. I guess I have a rich emotional world myself. And then the second one, too, also made me tear up. Just the girl playing the sports and everything she dealt with, you know, trying to make the sports team so relatable. But yeah, that's one of my favorite movies.
00:29:06 · Evan Helda, Lara Sophie Bothur
[00:29:06] S1: Oh my gosh, Inside Out. Do you know that? Of course. That's the first movie I cried in as an adult. The first one made me cry. And not just tear up, but like, love will cry. It hit me so hard. I don't know why. I guess I have a rich emotional world myself. And then the second one, too, also made me tear up. Just the girl playing the sports and everything she dealt with, you know, trying to make the sports team so relatable. But yeah, that's one of my favorite movies. [00:29:42] S0: It's like, it's such a beautiful movie. My first movie I cried was Gorilla. No, what is it? Wait, what is that? This big monkey. Oh, sorry. Where this big monkey falls from the high building. And he's living in the jungle with this blonde girl. Do you know the movie? [00:30:09] S1: No. Oh, this one, I don't know. It's not Curious George, is it? [00:30:15] S0: No, I don't know. So what I love about this movie is the simplification of those thoughts that we're having right now. It's not the full description of it because it's more focused on the emotions that are steering your head, but then you also, I also like the idea of the different items in your life, you know, like family and friends and yourself. And, and then this, I think in the, in the down there, there are all the memories and little balls, you know, but yeah, it's, it's a beautiful movie. And how did we get that far?
00:31:01 · Evan Helda
[00:31:01] S1: I thought this would be an AI technology podcast, but we can, we can, we can, we can bring it back there. So, uh, yeah, I guess the last comment there is, um, the takeaway from inside out is there is no one self. There's little micro cells, lots of parts of us that make up this experiential, uh, experience that we're, that we're all having. So, so I think here's a good segue back into technology. So we talked about tech as a mirror, especially AI as a mirror of, of what we Really are and who we really are. I almost call this podcast a white mirror to try to be like the anti black mirror and tell tell more positive stories. What do you think is the best way to, I guess, create a technology that is a white mirror, not a black mirror? So as you mentioned that we have right now is a mirror. Do you have any thesis yourself as to, cause you talk to all these amazing entrepreneurs and CEOs and builders and you see what they're up to. Have you seen any one approach you think, okay, that's the white mirror approach and the white mirror form of thinking towards building?
00:32:12 · Lara Sophie Bothur
[00:32:12] S0: Well, you know what, it's, I think this is a little dream, you know, that is very beautiful. And I also lived that dream because I, Always show good technology. I don't show the bad side of it, but I think it's always when you take a look into our world, there's no good where there's no bad. So you can't talk about a good side when there's not, not, you know, when you talk about a good side, there is a bad side and you can also use an eye. To get your chocolate croissant done in the morning, you can also kill someone with that. The internet is the same thing. You can research, we can't live without the internet anymore, but then also there is a darkness. There is atom energy, you know, to create energy, but then also to create bombs. There is no good without bad. I mean, also us as human beings, we have a good side and we all do have a bad side and we need to control. And there's this inside out control center. Then again, we need to think. What direction do we want to go into? And I mean, also look at drones. They can deliver your pizza or they can shoot people. Of course, there's good and bad. And I think it's about understanding the technology and understanding that also to make a good decision. But it starts with us because for us, technology is just a tool. It accelerates human Capacities and decisions. Um, and it's, it's not, I mean, maybe at some point there is general intelligence. Um, but I think it should not be the case in any, in any future. I think so for me, general intelligence is that there is an AI that is saying no, when you say I press the stop button and then the AI is saying no. I do press the stop button. And that is like autonomous driving level five, where you can't stop the system anymore. And I think this is nothing reachable. Level four, where you can still decide and decision-making, the last decision should always remain human in my opinion. It doesn't mean because some people say decision-making is deeply human. I think it, I mean, I also, you know, Check what AI thinks about my decision. If you're a doctor, you can't look at millions of tumor pictures that an AI can see. And still, I would never leave the conversation of announcing a cancer to an AI, but the last decision should be human. So I think when it comes to good and bad, it's something deeply human that we need to decide. Because there is good and bad.