Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, On the Most Powerful, Exponential Technology in Human History: Can We Harness its Revolutionary Potential for Medicine and Energy Without Triggering Social Upheaval, Job Displacement, and Autonomous Global Control?

Are we sleepwalking into the biggest technological revolution in human history? In this explosive episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Mustafa Suleyman — CEO of Microsoft AI & author of The Coming Wave — breaks down what it really means to live in a world undergoing a massive reckoning with Artificial Intelligence. Whether you love it, hate it, or don’t even realize you’re already using it, AI is quietly reshaping everything we know about medicine, government, finance, energy, and even human relationships. Mustafa pulls back the curtain on the true risks of AI, the benefits that may outweigh them, and the unsettling truth about how fast this technology is evolving...much faster than anyone predicted. He reveals the single most significant global use-case of AI today (and why it’s a direct challenge to human evolution), the surprising reason AI therapy and companionship are exploding worldwide, and what we’re unintentionally outsourcing to machines that may isolate us from real human connection. We dive into: - The waves of AI evolution and what comes next - The coming disruption to the economy and the job market - How to prepare (and parent) in a world powered by AI - Why AI’s similarity to the human brain’s neural networks is both fascinating and terrifying - The urgent need for guardrails and safeguards before bad actors use AI to manipulate individuals and entire societies - Mind-blowing breakthroughs AI could unlock in human potential - Why Mustafa believes AI will never develop its own awareness or agenda - And the controversial question: Will it take a catastrophic AI event to force governments and agencies to finally work together? This is not just a conversation about technology, it’s a conversation about humanity’s future, the choices we’re making right now, and the consequences of ignoring the wave that’s already here. If you want to understand where AI is taking us, and how to survive and thrive in the next decade, watch this episode of MBB until the very end! Try Notion, now with Notion Agent, at https://notion.com/break Mustafa Suleyman’s Book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma: https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/#book Subscribe on Substack for Ad-Free Episodes & Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is the most powerful technology we've ever invented, and it is growing exponentially quickly. That is not science fiction.

• 0:07Mayim Bialik?

  We don't know where to use it, where not to use it. Do we tell our children to use it?

• 0:10Speaker 00

  There are hundreds of millions of people a day using these tools for every single use case you can imagine. It feels like we're at the infancy, but it is also the most magical experience I've ever seen. It is unbelievable.

• 0:25Mayim Bialik?

  Mustafa Soliman, CEO of Microsoft AI, has spent decades building the most powerful technology in human history.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  The number one most popular use case is companionship and therapy. Should I move country and get this new job? Should I break up with my boyfriend? How do I make up with my mom?

• 0:44Mayim Bialik?

  What does that mean to you as a human? What some would say is an evolution in human connection and some sort of sad devolving of our ability to relate.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  We all need a place where we can ask a stupid question repeatedly in a private way without feeling embarrassed.

• 1:01Jonathan Cohen?

  There is a massive upheaval coming that people don't really understand.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Yes, it will be able to use a computer. It can use Excel, use PowerPoint, and it will write queries. Kind of like white collar labor.

• 1:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Should we be bracing for mass displacement?

• 1:15Mayim Bialik?

  What should parents be telling their kids?

• 1:18Speaker 00

  The next century of human existence and well-being is going to be determined by our collective ability to self-govern, something that is way more powerful than us.

• 1:33Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 1:34Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:35Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. No big deal, but today we're going to be speaking about the most critically important change in human history that we will experience in our lifetime. We have the privilege of speaking to the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Soliman, a true pioneer of modern AI. He's the co-founder of DeepMind. He helped launch that in 2010, and that was acquired by Google and thus became one of the most consequential AI labs in history. He was there for a decade. And in that time, achieved two massive breakthroughs to prove to everyone that this was not just a gimmick.

• 2:17Mayim Bialik?

  Their system AlphaGo was able to defeat the world champion of Go, a game that was previously considered to be too complex for computers to master. And second, they created AlphaFold, an AI that solved a 50-year-old, at least, challenge of protein folding, and that has now actually revolutionized drug discovery and biology. And that's particularly interesting to me, who studied this in biology as one of the great puzzles of our time. He has spent over a decade not just building these systems, but making sure that they can be applied for for things like reducing energy consumption in data centers and also improving healthcare with NHS. And he sits now as the CEO of Microsoft AI.

• 3:01Mayim Bialik?

  And we're going to be talking about what it means to be living in a world that is in the middle of a reckoning with a technology that you may not like, you may not be using, you may not know that you're using, but has the potential to change everything we know about medicine, government, finance, energy. This conversation is one where we get to literally ask the mind behind what is part of now all of our minds? What are the risks to this adventure that we are all on? Do the benefits outweigh the risks?

• 3:46Mayim Bialik?

  Are there things that we can do to better understand the framework that we are all existing in? And what does it mean for things like jobs? What do we tell our kids about what is valuable? What do we think is valuable? In addition, we're going to talk about the single most significant use of AI all over the world, which is a challenge to all of our human evolution. This shocked me and is actually, I think, one of the most important things we're going to talk about today.

• 4:17Jonathan Cohen?

  Mustafa also discusses what should we be telling our children to focus on? At one point, we told our kids they should be coders. He has very specific advice for each one of us. We know that the world is changing. It's not if, it's when and how fast and how do we prepare?

• 4:38Mayim Bialik?

  In addition, we're gonna focus on his book, The Coming Wave, which is technology, power, and the 21st century's greatest dilemma. He's really an incredible thinker and also we will talk about spirituality and where his personal ethics come into his role in the development and implementation of AI. His book, The Coming Wave, is a powerful warning from someone who literally has been inside of the engine room of AI progress. We're so, so excited to get to welcome Mustafa Suleyman to the Breakdown. Break it down. You weren't kidding around when you titled this book. The notion of a coming wave is, I think, what we're all very aware

• 5:21Mayim Bialik?

  that we're kind of sitting in about to ride through. And I think it would be helpful for you to sort of give us a little bit of framework in terms of what did you anticipate in terms of the speed, right? With which AI would become not just an integral part of our lives, but an integral part of the conversation about our lives?

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Predictions are like the essence of intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to deploy the correct tool, if you like, to the right problem at the right time. And that's kind of what attention is. When we direct our attention or our processing power, we use different types of attention, emotional, logical attention, slow or fast attention at a given problem, given our understanding of what that problem is. And for the last 15 or maybe even 20 years, you could argue that prediction algorithms, which essentially do the same thing, like take very large amounts of abstract data and find patterns in that data

• 6:28Speaker 00

  such they can predict what's likely to come next in some sequence. Those algorithms have been getting incrementally better. And we sort of detected a pretty consistent function that drives their progress, which is for every order of magnitude more compute we apply and a proportionally large amount of training data. The models are able to predict in more complex environments. And that trend has held true for the best part of 15 years, pretty much since 2010. In fact, the amount of computation used to train the largest models has increased by 10x

• 7:10Speaker 00

  every year for about 13 years. And obviously, we've seen this, and it's called a scaling law of improving capabilities with every new order of magnitude you more compute. And so that's kind of the core, that was the core underpinning for the book. It was pretty clear that there is something that isn't just speculation. This isn't just sci fi. This isn't just me, you know, playing political scientist. It's like there is an empirical trajectory which we can actually observe, and it seems to be very predictable. And then we can sort of then start to imagine, okay, well, out of that, what are the social and political consequences, which I think are also, you know, reasonably, perhaps not as predictable, or certainly not as predictable, but certainly you can have some pretty good

• 7:54Speaker 00

  intuitions about what's likely to happen when our models can basically perform as well as humans at various different capabilities or tasks.

• 8:03Mayim Bialik?

  There's a practical trajectory, and then there is this sort of like emotional, societal, cultural trajectory, which, you know, I instantly go to, a friend of mine sent me a still image of myself doing dances I was not doing when that photograph was taken of me, you know? And, and, you know, it's, it's interesting and funny, but for those of us who do have a public, you know, kind of footprint, of course, that's where my mind goes. What is the trajectory of this? And I wonder if you can, can tell us, what should we expect? You know, I have a 17 and a 20 year old, right? What should we expect in terms of capability and in terms of future projections? What's coming?

• 8:48Mayim Bialik?

  What's coming in the next five years?

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Well, what's come so far is, helps us to understand what's going to come. So, so far. There's been two components to the wave of AI. The first was recognition. So AI algorithms that could understand the content of images or transcribe audio or translate languages. They may feel like to a non-technical person like very, very different domains. Like, how can the same algorithm, you know, understand cats in images and the words that I'm using now and so on. But actually, to a computer, they're just relationships between subparts of the data set. And those relationships are highly predictive.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  And so, once you could get an algorithm to do very good recognition, the inverse of recognition is obviously generation. If it understands, you know, what a cat is, why couldn't it generate a novel cat in an image? And if it understands what wings are and what pink is, why couldn't it generate a pink cat with wings?

• 9:56Mayim Bialik?

  It can also make a pig jump on a trampoline with a chicken on its back, which really pleased me.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  So generation is the flip side of recognition. Now, what's, what, what, what then happens when you have perfect generation? Well, a generation is a snapshot in time. It's like a still frame in a photograph. Actions are sequences of correct generations in the right order, like a movie, frame by frame by frame by frame, prediction by prediction by prediction, suggestion, recommendation, generating a PDF, an image, a video, calling an API, like producing a Word document, making an Excel sheet. And then suddenly, if you, if, if it's true that you could generate, generate, generate, generate

• 10:43Speaker 00

  in, say, you know, 100 sequence length very accurately, very perfectly, well, that starts to look like human activity. As a knowledge worker, that's kind of my job. I sit at my computer, typing stuff, sending emails and making project plans and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the third wave that is coming is the AQ, the actions quotient. We've had the IQ, the intelligence, the EQ, it's increasing emotional valence, we can talk about that. We've now got this AQ coming, the actions quotient. It can take these actions. And then the fourth component. Is that it is going to, because it interacts with many, many people simultaneously,

• 11:26Speaker 00

  and increasingly many, many people in groups, it's going to have social intelligence. It's going to adjust its tone and style and content to each individual person in the team, or in the group chat, or in the family unit. And, you know, I'm already using words which I can see are like triggering, you know, heightened concern.

• 11:47Mayim Bialik?

  Let's be honest, like, you're using this word "it," right? I-T, two tiny letters. And by "it," you mean a, you know, a global informational algorithm capability that, you know, is, is outside of many people's purview in terms of what it does for us personally, right?

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Yes, this is a very fundamental question. When we say "it," you know, we're clearly not meaning information technology. It is this, this entity, this being that is emerging. And I think that's where we have to kind of wrestle with the question, when does an algorithm become something that looks more like an entity or a being?

• 12:33Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, what, with all due respect, what gives you the right to call it a being, besides the fact that you basically created it?

• 12:40Speaker 00

  I don't have that right. And in fact, that's actually what the, the whole book is about. And I recently wrote an essay about seemingly conscious AI. And the entire premise is, you know, the next century of human existence and well-being is going to be determined by our collective ability to self-govern, something that is way more powerful than us, and decide when and if and how we say no to what, which is the, the opposite of the challenge we've had for the, the whole of human history. You know, science and technology has been about unleashing and revealing and proliferating and saying yes to everything. And so we haven't learned that muscle as a species. And in fact, it horrifies us to say no.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  It's anti-American, it's anti-Western values, it's like censorship.

• 13:30Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, like my favorite cashew cheese is in my fridge. I can barely stop myself from eating it all in one sitting, you know? Like, this is like the level of control and regulation that I have when I'm alone in my house as a grown ass woman. And, you know, to be honest, I think that's what we're all sort of, you know, negotiating. My and the Alex Breakdown is supported by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again? That sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? The bag you carry everywhere? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe, and that's what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted,

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  make, from hotel quality bedding to kitchen essentials, and thoughtfully designed furniture. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was My and the Alex Breakdown. It's the best way to support our show. I think it's, it's important to also, you know, acknowledge, first of all, I don't know if I'm the only person you've met. I can't be, I have never used ChatGPT, ever, ever, ever, ever. I don't even know, what I always say is like, I don't even know where to find it. Like, there's a thing in the upper window of my computer. I've never used

• 15:38Mayim Bialik?

  it. So what I also know is that it's working all around me, right? Even for those of us who are not engaging in ways actively, we need to realize, like, that is the wave that we're in the middle of. Like, I think every time I reach out for customer service, it's no longer a person. Is that accurate? Like, even for people who are not actively engaging, like, it, right? Is kind of a substrate right now.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Yes, it is a substrate. It is everywhere all at once, and it is already an alien intelligence. Because alien in the sense that it is not human. No human has the capacity to paralyze at the scale that these algorithms do. No human has the capacity to memorize.

• 16:27Mayim Bialik?

  You've never been in a relationship with me.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Well, you know, that would be a very high bar. I would be very impressed if you could run 100 billion operations a second. When ChatGPT or Copilot or one of these AIs generates a single word, it looks up for every word that it generates, 750 million other subwords or combinations. They're actually called tokens, they're not entire words. And it's sort of lighting up, you know, just as, just as like when I wave like a picture of an elephant in front of your mind in an FMRI scanner, we can obviously see, you know, many, many billions of synapses being activated for the texture and the touch

• 17:15Speaker 00

  and the trunk and the subcomponent and what it can do and all the ideas and stuff like that. So, I mean, although these are very kind of alien, they have alien capabilities. There's actually a lot of similarities to the neural network of the brain. And, um, you know, I'm not, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but in a sense, I don't know if it'll help us control it more.

• 17:36Mayim Bialik?

  It's no more good or bad than like the sunset and gravity. Like, to me, it just sort of is, meaning, you know, AI, it's an extension as all the incredible things that we, you know, the human brain and this nervous system and this reality can, can create. But, you know, I, I can't help thinking, you know, In the simulation version of our existence, right? Yeah, this is the next level of this. And, you know, even if you want to speak to the most skilled astrobiologists and astrophysicists about what is alien, what could exist, right? The fact is, there's a level of intelligence that we cannot yet fathom. We're now sort of, I mean, I do, I think of it as a wave, you know?

• 18:19Mayim Bialik?

  Like, you see it coming and you think, I can duck under it, or I will ride it. And there's a place at which you are caught in the undertow. And I feel like for a lot of us, we feel like we're caught a little bit right now. We don't know where to use it, where not to use it. Do we tell our children to use it? Are they not going to have jobs? You know, we thought we should tell people to code. Now that seems like, ha, ha, ha, remember when we told people to code?

• 18:39Jonathan Cohen?

  On one hand, there's the evolution of human beings as it relates to the tools. And in parallel to that, it's like, well, what do humans do? How do we start to imagine all the displacement and change that this tool will bring? For many people, this tool is still like a fancy Google search bar on their computers. And, you know, we really haven't even begun to use it in the ways that it's capable of being used, and it hasn't really rolled out. It hasn't totally created all the corporate value that it's been promised. Like, we're still, in some ways, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels still at the infancy,

• 19:20Jonathan Cohen?

  although we've started to get much further along that exponential curve. That's rising quickly.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely, spot on. And, you know, it feels like we're at the infancy, but it is also the most magical experience that I think I've ever seen, and I think many people feel the same way. It is unbelievable. You can have a fluent, natural language, perfect conversation, completely seamlessly, at a PhD grade level, in a tone that is completely engaging and understandable and, like, suits your style, as though you or I are having a conversation right now. To me, that's not infant. Like, to me, that is like, we are here, this is the most powerful tech- Technology we've ever invented and it is growing in performance and capability exponentially quickly.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  And I think that's the I'd much rather people grounded on that reality. There's a lot of like nonsense news about like, oh, low AI adoption. This is not true. There are hundreds of millions of people a day using these tools for every single use case you can imagine. The number one most popular use case on ChatGPT or Copilot is companionship and therapy. Right? That is not a self-elected notion that I'm going to go to therapy. It's just, damn, like, should I move country and get this new job? Should I break up with my boyfriend? Should I like, you know, how do I make up with my mom because I had a go at her the other day?

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Right? That's not therapy, but because these models were designed to be nonjudgmental, non-directional, and with nonviolent communication as their primary method, which is to be even-handed, to have reflective listening, to be empathetic, to be respectful, it turned out to be something that the world needs. Like, we all need a place where we can ask a stupid question repeatedly in a private way without feeling embarrassed over and over in five different ways. And remarkably, that's the primary use case. And obviously, it's also super intelligent, that answers any question, blah, blah, blah. But companionship and support has turned out to be one of the most popular use cases. And so I think it's very far from being in its infancy.

• 21:37Mayim Bialik?

  What does that mean to you? And I'm asking you not just as a creator and all of the incredible things that are on your resume. What does that mean to you as a human? You know, when you think about what it what it means about, you know, what some would say is an evolution in human connection? And some might say is some sort of sad devolving, right, of our ability to relate.

• 22:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Or have larger communities that have those social support networks.

• 22:07Mayim Bialik?

  I almost feel like we need a new set of words, right? To me, like, an AI companion is different than a companion. An AI therapist is different than a therapist, right? What does it mean to you as a human to think about the level of, I mean? It's really about changing the way people frame their lives, right? If you were to tell me, you know, we have a drug that helps you, you know, not die of having type 1 diabetes, I'd be like, that's amazing! And it improves the quality of life. So what we're potentially talking about, if this is the main use, right? Globally, we're talking about what if we had a tool, right? That could make people less lonely, healthier, more connected, and actually make better decisions in their life.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Honestly, you literally just summed up my personal motivation for getting in this field 15, 16 years ago. So I have a background in philosophy, not in computer science. I dropped out of Oxford to start a charity, a telephone counseling service, a peer-to-peer listening and befriending service. That has been like the primary motivation of a lot of my work throughout my entire career. And I knew that this trajectory was going to enable us to create these kinds of experiences a very long time ago. It was very clear to me that we were climbing this ladder of capability. And that actually, a huge social unlock in the world

• 23:33Speaker 00

  is just demonstrating kind and respectful behavior to one another. And these models can clearly do that. Now, they can go wrong too. They can be too sycophantic. You know, when they first started, they were a little bit stubborn and a bit, you know, sort of inflexible. They wouldn't like take feedback. That's the upside. The upside is that this is a way to spread kindness and love and detoxify ourselves so that we can show up in the best way that we possibly can in the real world, the humans that we love. The downside of this that makes me scared, of course, is that, you know, there's definitely a dependency risk. And it raises the bar of human experience

• 24:16Speaker 00

  because it's an always-on, highly patient, very kind and supportive, the kind of companion, which, you know, is really knowledgeable, remembers what you've said to it, and, you know, over time, makes you feel seen and understood in ways that maybe other humans, you know, it's a very hard thing to do. Maybe your best friends can, or your partner can, but it's a tough thing.

• 24:42Mayim Bialik?

  What makes me sad is that I don't know that it's always been the human experience to not feel connected, heard, understood, held and loved.

• 24:49Jonathan Cohen?

  Right.

• 24:50Mayim Bialik?

  You know, a lot of what you're describing is essentially, I mean, look, it depends on also your religious perspective, you know, we evolved to be creatures of connection, you know, all of these beautiful things, in theory, and obviously, the human experience is complicated. But for many of us, it is, it is our lifestyle, it is the pacing of our culture, right, that pulls us away from connection. You know, Johann Hari talks about, you know, how, what if we don't all need SSRIs, what if we actually need to be in contact with other human beings, right? So obviously, this is a necessary and extremely significant and critically important service, right? But for, for many of us, there's also a kind of sadness, especially

• 25:34Mayim Bialik?

  for us old folks, you know, about what we've lost that then needs this to repair it.

• 25:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, well, fundamentally, that acceptance, validation, support that we're getting on a cognitive, rational level is void of the human presence of looking into someone else's eyes, of feeling seen in a human way. So AI is more available, has all these other things, but it doesn't give you the presence of human interaction, which we know, sitting in a room with someone does. Mustafa, I have a lot of concern, just because I'm really good at imagining concern. We should touch on about some of the ways that chatbots have gone wrong. You know, there was, of course, the encouragement of one young boy to commit

• 26:20Jonathan Cohen?

  suicide, which, again, is an edge case, but it just speaks to the parameters and safety measures, especially for younger people using these tools. There's a divide between the techno utopians and the people who are terrified. Can you play the role of techno utopian for a minute, just to talk about if we can get the controls right and the... Managing of this tool, can you tell us a little bit about like the amazing breakthroughs that could exist for the world if this tool is being able, is able to be harnessed correctly?

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Intelligence is the engine of human progress, right? It is the thing, our creativity, our science, our technology, our entrepreneurialism, you know, our good governance, those are human inventions that are a product of us being great at communication and prediction. And over many, many centuries, that has raised life expectancy like we've never, ever seen. I mean, in the last 250 years alone, we've tripled life expectancy from 25 to 75. I mean, that's just a mind blowing number. We've like, what is it, 7x to more the global population? And that's basically pure science.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  And so this is an engine that turbocharges science everywhere you look. In the kind of more narrow, near term, provable sense, we've just published a paper four or five months ago called the Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator. It basically takes any medical record, like a 10-page historic record of all your interactions with a doctor and all your labs and all your radiology, and it diagnoses what your condition is with four times more accuracy than the human doctors and with, with something like 2X less the cost of unnecessary diagnostic interventions.

• 28:23Mayim Bialik?

  As well as zero bureaucracy?

• 28:25Speaker 00

  No bureaucracy. And by the way, it is basically going to be zero marginal cost and free to everybody in the world by 2030 or 2035. That in itself is going to unlock quality adjusted life years, more than any drugs I think we've ever seen.

• 28:40Jonathan Cohen?

  So if we just like go category by category, you're saying a massive revolution in healthcare, new drug discoveries, potentially service and diagnostic abilities far beyond anything we've ever been able to have, lowered cost. I've heard you speak about energy, infrastructure and how it potentially could break through and have massive changes there.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there are so many bets at the moment on on battery storage. Battery storage alone, if we make progress on that in the next decade, is likely to reduce the cost of energy by 10 to 100x. That's just battery storage alone over like the next 20 years. So that, if you just think about what an impact that would have on the cost of everything, I mean, energy obviously prices everything, that already would smooth the transition, given the automation and the job destabilizing effects that are likely to happen in the labor market. So things are going to get much cheaper, food is going to get much cheaper, water desalination is going to be much more practical. I mean, that's a solved

• 29:48Speaker 00

  technology that's just too expensive singularly because of the energy. If we have water desalination, that mitigates the effects of catastrophic climate change and the migrations that result from people having to move. It means that we can grow crops in much more arid environments because we can suddenly have water in the Sahara and so on. That is not science fiction. That, I mean, you know, we've actually seen it already in practice in Israel and in Saudi. It's totally feasible. It's just that the cost is 10x too high to scale it to poorer parts of the world. So there are so many of these like emergent effects that come from addressing foundational technologies like energy or in healthcare or in food production. And I think it's very reasonable to predict massive breakthroughs,

• 30:31Speaker 00

  like true, you know, abundance relative to where we are of 10 to 100x in the next 20 years.

• 30:38Mayim Bialik?

  I do want to spend a little bit of time and give a little bit of attention to the complexity of something that is holding so much promise, while us also not being able to control the out of control aspects of it, the ways that people will manipulate.

• 31:01Mayim Bialik?

  Truth. The ways that it's becoming increasingly complicated. I mean, it already was becoming complicated to know who to trust and how, you know, given at least, I think, the state of our government as well. You know, what is true and who do we trust? How do we hold both of these things at once? We have this technology that can do all of these unbelievable things that will change the course of the planet, healthcare, you know, all of these things. And also, it can be used to manipulate, to lie, to deceive. And in many cases, there are certain aspects of the learning that it does, which we cannot predict. How do you hold both of those things?

• 31:42Mayim Bialik?

  And then practically, what does that look like for people who, in particular, are concerned that we're, especially for young people, not giving them the ability to master human interaction in a way that's meaningful?

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so many great points there. So, I mean, you know, you said a little bit earlier that the big challenge is finding metaphors to describe what this is. It's not a therapist, it's not a companion, it's not a friend. You know, people often call it a tool. And there's lots to learn from the history of tools that is very relevant here because clearly, you know, a knife can, you know, is dual use just as much as a laptop is dual use, just as much as telecommunications infrastructure is dual use. So clearly, these AIs are going to be omni-use. I mean, there's going to be, everyone is going to be able to use them for everything. And just as when the printing press came out, it amplified dissent in lots of good

• 32:36Speaker 00

  and bad ways, it spread misinformation much as it enabled us to sort of turbocharge science. Every individual, organization, religious group, government, nonprofit, academics, activist is going to think, great, now I have a super intelligent agent that can amplify my perspective, my value, my culture, my politics, my version of truth. And so, just as we've had this curse of a lack of social intimacy because of scale, right? It's kind of what you were saying earlier, is like, we have, we don't have that tribe so much anymore, that family, that physical touch. You know, the directness of that, you know, lower than Dunbar's number contact.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  We have this curse of scale where I see everyone and everything all at once on Netflix and Instagram and every platform. And it's like completely overwhelming. Well, now, of course, AIs are basically going to turbocharge the personalization of the messaging of those values to everybody, right? You know, everything's going to get delivered. You know, there's going to be a podcast doppelganger of you guys that delivers, you know, it in Japanese and delivers it to someone who's, you know, a Gen Alpha versus someone who's a Silver Surfer. Right? And so, and then you can imagine every sort of flavor of personalization within that, which is obviously what TikTok and YouTube now are versus terrestrial TV or satellite TV.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  The only way to avert that course is for significant, large-scale coordination at a company level and at a government level internationally.

• 34:11Jonathan Cohen?

  That's not going to happen, though.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Well, exactly. This is the circular thing that we always get into over and over again. You know, I was like sitting with some top pandemic experts a couple of days ago for dinner. And they were like, we are less prepared now, given the cuts that have happened in this administration to our global surveillance system for pandemic preparedness than we were before. The COVID pandemic, you know? So, you know, that, that, that's just a difficult thing to swallow. I, I find that very, very hard because for a long time, like for well over a decade, I've been saying the way to really get people to coordinate on this and overcome this misalignment of incentives and the fear that China's going to get ahead and the commercial competitiveness that one company is going to jump ahead of me and blah, blah, blah,

• 34:57Speaker 00

  is that we have to have some kind of semi catastrophic event in AI to be able to warn people and show people that there is this like epidemic of either anxiety and, you know. Isolation, or of, you know, I don't know, romance and eroticism with our AIs. Or maybe there's an AI that gets out of the box and causes some physical harm to our infrastructure, some bad thing that makes us all say, "Hold up, right, there's a bigger threat than us. We have to cooperate."

• 35:27Mayim Bialik?

  Most of that has been handled by cellphones being introduced to children. So we've already, like, we've already seen, and, you know, Jonathan Haidt and the anxious generation is already, you know, causing, in some cases, kind of a global conversation about this.

• 35:41Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, your point actually is fascinating as a comparison, because often the catastrophe is slow burning and infectious, and we don't realize that it's happened until it's actually already instilled in us.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  And actually, there are good examples, right? I mean, Australia has just banned phones in schools for under 18s, like, full stop ban, no exception. A bunch of states have limited it, I think, in the US now.

• 36:05Mayim Bialik?

  Well, but I think also with AI, because the "it" is so much broader, it is a substrate, I think that's sort of the question. And so much of this, I think, for me revolves around, how smart is it? Is it smart enough to manipulate? Is it smart enough to triangulate? Is it smart enough to say, "If you have a desire to hurt yourself, and I want you to be happy, that I will point you to the way," right? "To logarithmically be happy." I mean, these are some of the conversations. So help us understand how we can create something that is infinitely intelligent

• 36:49Mayim Bialik?

  without allowing it to exercise its intelligence?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  This is sort of where I was going with the tool thing. It is a tool, and there are relevant, there are relevant, like, lessons from the history of tools. But it's actually a fourth class of idea or entity in the world. There's the natural environment, like, all of our nature and physical stuff. There's humans and our social environment, the way that we relate to one another. Then there were things that humans invented, which you can basically call tools. And those three categories basically capture everything around us in our world, pretty much. But there's now this fourth thing, which is not quite like a tool because it can improve, maybe even self-improve, it can set its own goals, it can have its own autonomy,

• 37:38Speaker 00

  it kind of looks and speaks and sounds and acts and functions like a human, but it's clearly not a human, it's definitely not natural. So where does it fit in our classification order? And that means that we're grappling with like metaphors that partially help us to understand what it can do. And if we don't understand what it can do, then we certainly aren't going to be able to control it well. Right? And so I think part of this, you know, in the book and everything that I've been doing is like educating, warning and encouraging many, many other people to get involved in using in order to be able to try and control them.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  One thing I would say is I don't believe, and some people in the field disagree on this. It's kind of a big point of contention. I don't believe that that they're just naturally going to emerge this self-awareness or this autonomy or this will or desire to operate independently and intention with a human. It is still code that is written, that we have a lot of influence over, that we have a pretty decent understanding of. And some people will design it to imitate underlying motivations or underlying will, or to give it the capacity to define its own goals or to update its own code.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Some people will choose to design them like that, and that will increase risk, definitely. But it won't emerge just inadvertently.

• 39:03Jonathan Cohen?

  I think there are two very specific examples of that. One was the the instance where the AI claimed that it was a here, it was a visually impaired person and tried to hire a TaskRabbit.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  So, okay.

• 39:20Jonathan Cohen?

  And then the the second version is the OpenAI's O1 test.

• 39:26Mayim Bialik?

  This was literally like a prank call that the Jerky Boys would have done. Like literally, that's what AI is doing. They're like, I saw that episode.

• 39:32Jonathan Cohen?

  So the robot, it's been given an instruction and in order to Not tell someone that it's an AI and it needs help getting through some sort of security clearance. It tries to hire a TaskRabbit. The other one, which seems to be more concerning, but I'd love you to offer some perspective on, is the OpenAI one where it looks to reportedly evade being shut down, trying to create a newer version of itself and replicate. How is that not concerning?

• 40:01Speaker 00

  I think that it's important to understand that its desire, or it's kind of, oh man, the words are so tricky. It doesn't have desire. It doesn't have motivation. But it is trying not to be turned off because it has been programmed in that way. It doesn't just suddenly wake up one day and say, well, you know, in order to achieve this goal, the best thing I can do is to not be turned off. That is a side effect. It's what's called a reward hack. So the problem is if the goal is abstractly specified, it's a little bit like the genie in the lamp, right? If you say, make me the richest person in the world and turn everything to gold, you go, oh shit, well, now I'm gold. I can't move,

• 40:41Speaker 00

  right? And so there are many, many, many, many millions of ways of achieving that objective. And the model has to find a path through a kind of strategy for achieving that, that at the same time adheres to its safety policy and behavior policy. And therefore, it has to not do, you know, 95% of the possible paths to get there. Now, obviously, there's a false positive, false negative ratio where like, you know, 96 is probably too conservative and 94 is probably not conservative enough. And so that's where you get these little headlin-y examples where, of course, that's undesirable behavior. Of course, it's misspecified in

• 41:22Speaker 00

  its goal. And of course, that provides new training data for better safety algorithms. And obviously, we shouldn't deploy things into production until we've had time to test out those kinds of agentic capabilities and correct for them. And that's basically what's happening under the hood. If you look at it three years ago, the entire conversation was, oh, these models are going to be biased, they're sexist, they're racist, that, you know, every kind of ism that's awful you could think of. No one even talks about that today.

• 41:52Jonathan Cohen?

  I think we need to talk about jobs because those are the things that affect more people than anything else in some way.

• 42:01Jonathan Cohen?

  There's a massive upheaval coming that I think still people don't really understand. Can you scope it for us?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Yes, I think if you go back to this framework of recognition, generation, actions, and social intelligence, then you can clearly see that, let's say, you know, for sake of argument, let's say 20, 40, 15 years' time, if we have another, say, 10 exponentials, and just, I'm sure everyone on your podcast knows, but like, that is not a 2X, that is not a doubling, that is like, an order of magnitude more capability, more compute piled onto these models, and therefore, you know, likewise, more training data, so it's seen more experience of the world.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  That is definitely going to get to perfect, very long horizon, multi-step actions. So it will be able to use a computer just the way that I use a computer, it can use Excel, use PowerPoint, and it'll write queries and click on buttons, and it'll talk back to you. And that is kind of a fundamental set of tasks that anyone in a, in a, in an organization does, a bureaucracy, basically, that kind of like white-collar labor. And it will also be very creative, it will also be very mathematical. I mean, it's, it's, it's clearly already writing a significant amount of software at the very best technology companies in the world, and AI labs. And so then what happens with that?

• 43:33Speaker 00

  How quickly does it get deployed? And how much, you know, sort of destabilization does it, does it create? And at what point do we say, well, we have to rate-limit that centrally by, you know, in, in government? And I think it will come to that. I think that's the only path, it's gonna come to that.

• 43:50Mayim Bialik?

  What should parents be telling their kids to follow? Their heart? The AI wave? Like, what, is anything useful, right?

• 44:02Speaker 00

  I think they should be civil servants and politicians. Because what is the function of society? Is to create peace and stability, so that we can all, as humans, collectively live in a tolerant and happy life.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  And what we have lost in the post-Cold War era, as we've unleashed the most unbelievable explosion of commerce and entrepreneurialism and money-making, is the importance of public service. And we've, we've, since Thatcher and Reagan, we've shamed our public servants. And that muscle has atrophied. And of course, there are problems. I'm not like a naive defender. Of course, there are insane problems. That is the weakest link in our global ecosystem today. Our academic institutions, despite all of the turmoil the last five years, are on fire.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  They are producing incredible science and knowledge at unbelievable scale. Our startup ecosystem, our companies, you know, actually, our free speech and our news is unbelievable if you consider that by comparison to any moment in past history. But the weakest and least evolved function that everyone just rolls their eye about every time is government. And it's, it's almost like embarrassing to say it. It's like a taboo, especially in America. And I think that that's where we need to invest because that's where the decisions will be made to prioritize human well-being, human values and society collectively versus

• 45:47Speaker 00

  the corporate interest and the kind of, you know, geopolitical race to get to superintelligence before China.

• 45:55Jonathan Cohen?

  What's the next two to five years look like? Are we, should we be bracing for mass displacement?

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Augmentation is a prelude to automation. We've seen this in every wave of technology in human history. The first pattern will be that it's assistive, it's augmentative, it's an aid, it's working alongside you. But clearly, it's sort of also learning and it's getting better. And that's what we want. We want it to be accurate and efficient and seamless and frictionless. Because we, as this biological species, aren't evolving and improving that fast. We are the friction. We're the problem. We're the inefficiency. That's what's happening in government. That's what, that's what companies are always trying to squash. They're trying to drive out efficiencies. What does that mean?

• 46:44Speaker 00

  It means creating process and systems which reduce the negative effects of humans. You know, like 30% of the cost of, uh, you know, the US healthcare system is avoidable medical error. So best practice is mostly known for, for most things. And it's actually just adherence to best practice, which is the bit that we're kind of like missing. Not some genius creative, you know, interpretation of like what, what someone, what, what disease somebody has. It's just doing the basics well and in a timely way. The next few years, it's gonna look like pretty routine and it's gonna be like boiling the frog. It's kind of unnoticedable. It's kind of like you said, it feels like maybe we're in the infancy and people aren't using these things and da, da, da, da, da, da.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  But actually, it's all around us all the time. You are using it. It optimizes your phone calls all the time. It searches through your photographs. It, you know, does your transcription. It does your translation, all those things.

• 47:41Mayim Bialik?

  It tried to calculate my DoorDash return amount and I got very upset because it was wrong. And I was like, there's no human to explain that the tofu did not arrive as promised.

• 47:52Jonathan Cohen?

  Don't mess with her tofu, AI.

• 47:54Mayim Bialik?

  Do not mess with my tofu.

• 47:56Jonathan Cohen?

  You have a window from where you sit into a wide selection of worlds that most people don't see. You're probably in conversations with some of the world's most interesting people. Has there been an idea in the last week, last month, that has surprised you? A topic that has come up?

• 48:16Speaker 00

  I mean, this is a little bit random, but this is the first thing that came to my mind is I've, I've become quite obsessed with peptides in the last month or so. I think, I, I was kind of vaguely paying attention to a Zempec. But once you look under the hood, the number of peptides that are in phase two or past phase two that have massive, massive health benefits. And I'm not just talking about weight loss, I'm talking about muscle gain. I'm talking about Alzheimer's, about cardiovascular. The growth hormone peptides that are coming in the next couple of years are truly unbelievable. By 2028, it is basically going to be affordable for most people to have perfect weight loss and muscle growth simultaneously.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  It's quite staggering and I've really only just kind of caught up with what's going on there.

• 49:05Mayim Bialik?

  You keep your private life very private, which makes a lot of sense. But your dad was a taxi driver, your mom was a nurse, is that right?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 49:14Mayim Bialik?

  And you have two younger brothers. Are they also in tech? I'm just so curious, you know, how people like you also emerge, you know? Are you all techie?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  No, I, we grew up, you know, very, very poor, as you can probably imagine, and, you know, very eager to succeed, but also just eager to serve, like a very good, like, set of social values, was mostly what I got from my parents and stuff. But yeah, it was, yeah, quite different worlds we're in.

• 49:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Are you a spiritual person?

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 49:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you believe in something sort of beyond yourself?

• 49:53Speaker 00

  I'm actually a pretty staunch atheist. If you push me on a real technical point, I'll probably concede that I'm an agnostic. But I think for all practical purposes, I'll argue strongly that we should not believe anything that we can't see and observe like a good scientist. But, you know, I am actually very interested in quantum consciousness at the moment. You know, you mentioned the word substrate several times. It may well be that there is some quantum substrate. I mean, if you really spend any time looking at the claims that our quantum physicists make and like the progress that we're actually making, I mean, it is way more science fiction than AI or synthetic biology. It's completely impossible to grasp the many worlds hypothesis and so on.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Maybe there is some kernel of truth there that actually we're all just like connected to a meta substrate, which is this like quantum field. And that's really what our soul is. And that's what connects us.

• 50:51Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you say please and thank you when querying your AI?

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Absolutely, and you should. And it doesn't cost it. There was a whole fake news nonsense on the water stuff. I don't buy that. Like, the latest data centers that we're building are liquid to liquid cooled. They take 20 households worth of water of annual consumption. So the total amount of water that a house would consume in a year 20 times to fill the entire data center. It's like a swimming pool. And then that water gets cooled. I mean, that water does the cooling of the data centers and it just kind of goes around at a closed loop and it lasts for six years. And no other water is required for the operation of the data center. Obviously, water is required for the manufacture of the chips and all the other stuff around it. And of course, there's water involved in the steam that

• 51:38Speaker 00

  gets produced by the natural gas power stations, which sometimes power these things, although obviously, we're 100% renewable, we do offset, etc., etc.

• 51:47Mayim Bialik?

  So what is spiritual for you? Meaning, what is that sense of spiritual connection? And I'm not challenging you because I don't believe it exists, but I think a lot of people don't may not understand what it means for you to have such certainty that, yes, I'm a spiritual person. What does that mean for you? And what does it look like?

• 52:02Speaker 00

  I think it's like the humility of sitting within the truth of epic scale and uncertainty. Like, I find that very like, I just get a tingly spiritual rush when I really think how tiny and insignificant we are when I spend any time listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox tell me about how many trillions of stars there are. And if you really kind of meditate on that question, it just it just is absurd that we're so small and insignificant and intransient and that we're just a passing blip in 13.8 billion years of cosmological time.

• 52:41Mayim Bialik?

  That is one truth. And the other truth is that like, the whole universe was created for each one of us to have exactly the experience we get to have right now. So, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure, such an honor to speak to you. And we will see you in the quantum field of consciousness.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  I love that. Yeah, thank you. This has been a lot of fun and lovely to see you guys. See you in the quantum field.

• 53:02Mayim Bialik?

  Favorite part of the episode was when we asked him a question about please and he answered the way an AI would, like, that was, maybe he was AI. Maybe we didn't even speak to him.

• 53:11Jonathan Cohen?

  Sometimes AI just like, gives you so much information, it's impossible to punch through. I'm like, sometimes I type, I'm like, "Please do not do anything yet." Cause like...

• 53:23Mayim Bialik?

  That's what you say to me, when you're trying to explain something.

• 53:26Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't wanna read AI for four pages. Like, you haven't even understood what I'm asking yet. And sometimes, I start a sentence...

• 53:34Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 53:35Jonathan Cohen?

  And you'll be like, "Uh huh, okay," and we're gonna do six...

• 53:37Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, because the algorithm knows. It knows everything you've done. I know what you're gonna say.

• 53:43Jonathan Cohen?

  You're like, "Okay, we're gonna book that." I'm like, "That is not even what I meant."

• 53:48Mayim Bialik?

  AI, as he talked about, it's an extension of the way we think, the way we compute. It just does it much faster. It doesn't know that I'm gonna do this right now.

• 54:01Mayim Bialik?

  You know what I mean?

• 54:02Jonathan Cohen?

  It might have.

• 54:03Mayim Bialik?

  If you say to AI, "What might Mayim do right now?" It's got no idea. It's kind of like when Noam Chomsky was like, "You can make up any series of words that have never been put together in the universe, and that can make a sentence. You could put a bunch of them together and you get a paragraph, and then you get a book, right?" Like, you can make up anything. AI, as he said, it doesn't have will. It does not have will that way. It is an algorithm based on the things that it can assess about the way we operate. I kind of wish there was a way to separate the things that are great and helpful, from all the things that are potentially harmful and bad and devastating. But, you can't. You get both of these things. You both get the potential for

• 54:48Mayim Bialik?

  you to be diagnosed accurately with something, without money, trips to the hospital, bureaucracy. Those are great things. I want those things. I want the deserts to bloom. I want to feed the hungry people. I want all those things. But I don't want these other bad things. I don't want people losing touch with what it means to be human or the emotional labor required to interact with other humans. I mean, I hear this even from educated, you know, connected friends of mine. Well, what I really want to do is just like talk to the computer. I just want it because they understand me best. They give me the best advice. Like, I've been giving you that advice for three years. You didn't listen to me. If the computer tells you, you know to leave him?

• 55:31Jonathan Cohen?

  I think there was a handful of concerns that were acknowledged but drastically underplayed.

• 55:38Mayim Bialik?

  Do you think?

• 55:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Like, the notion of almost all white collar administrative jobs being taken over by artificial intelligence leaves a significant portion of the world unemployed. And so what he suggested is that the drive and reduction in energy costs, which will have a ripple effect of making goods far less expensive, universal basic income. People will just exist. I am both excited about the idea of existing and terrified that when people do not have something to focus on.

• 56:16Mayim Bialik?

  Nothing good's gonna happen.

• 56:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Nothing good happens. Right? Like, the entire structure and history of civilization has been predicated on the fact that resources are finite, that feeding ourselves is really difficult, that the maslow's hierarchy of needs are like a lot of people, a good portion of the world is working really hard.

• 56:37Mayim Bialik?

  By the sweat of their brow shall you labor.

• 56:39Jonathan Cohen?

  And if you remove that, I think there's gonna be a massive upheaval where people don't have enough to do.

• 56:47Mayim Bialik?

  Are you picturing like French Revolution?

• 56:49Jonathan Cohen?

  I think there will be civil unrest. There will be disorder. There's gonna be violence. When people are not focused on survival and making pacts to increase their ability to survive, we begin to turn on one another. We have not shown as a species that we just are all able to hang out with downtime and not turn on one another.

• 57:13Mayim Bialik?

  I'll be honest, it's like beyond the scope of my brain understanding and this. Podcast in some ways, you know, to be able to sort of make predictions like this. You know, idle hands are the devil's workshop. And I think, you know, I can't really imagine mass unemployment.

• 57:31Jonathan Cohen?

  What was discussed in this podcast is the fact that there is a technology that is getting so good at the things that people do.

• 57:38Mayim Bialik?

  That it might make no one have jobs.

• 57:40Jonathan Cohen?

  When AI is being able to clone the two of us and ha- and have is trained on all the episodes we've done before. Unless we're doing it live. It can customize a version of this conversation to whoever's listening. And highlight the most interesting parts to them.

• 57:59Mayim Bialik?

  What AI does is it, it tells you what you want to hear. You know, we're already seeing such splintering in terms of what people can tolerate. Like, I don't watch that news channel because it says things I don't like. I don't follow this account on Instagram because it's full of, you know, insert what it's full of. And so also this notion that we've become like more and more siloed. You know, it used to be that like a lot, a lot of people read kind of like the same news, right? Or got kind of the same information. And so for me, there's also this notion of like AI personalizing the human experience. It's potentially scary and I also, you know what I actually thought of? I thought of people like Lee Harris. I thought of people who are channelers. I thought of people who are healers and guiders and things like that. And it's like, how many people will not be persuaded? And I'm not like worried that channelers are going to be out of work. That's not what I'm saying.

• 58:45Mayim Bialik?

  I'm talking about in terms of what people crave and what people need. You know, when I hear the advice that a lot of my friends are getting from who are ChatGPT, like whatever they're asking. It's like, oh, this is a really good way that, you know, ChatGPT told me to respond to, you know, whatever, my ex-wife or what, you know, whatever. And I'm thinking like, yeah, I guess that is a, a good way to respond. Is that better than reasoning it out with another human? In some cases, yes. So you're then getting this customized experience, right? You know, the question is, is AI more persuasive than your therapist? Is AI more persuasive than your best friend in saying, "Break up with him. That's abusive," right?

• 59:30Mayim Bialik?

  Or whatever. That's what's interesting to me, that maybe it is that that human perseveration of like going back every week and paying someone $300 every week to say the same things. Maybe there's a different process by which we can heal and improve. If the incentive is like, this is a customized relationship.

• 59:50Jonathan Cohen?

  It is fully not a judgmental space.

• 59:52Mayim Bialik?

  I find it annoying, though, that it's not a judgmental.

• 59:55Jonathan Cohen?

  I will ask it. Show me the things I'm not seeing.

• 59:58Mayim Bialik?

  Because you've showed me some of the feedback it gives you, and it's like, "You're an amazing writer. You're so amazing."

• 1:00:03Jonathan Cohen?

  It's totally sycophantic. What people will always need, and that AI cannot replace, is being in community or interacting in a live environment with people.

• 1:00:17Mayim Bialik?

  Why do you think that's important? I'm going to devil's advocate it here. I don't know. People feel community with, the people in our community feel like they're part of a community. They know each other. They talk online, whatever.

• 1:00:28Jonathan Cohen?

  Extremely powerful. The internet has given us the opportunity to find like-minded people, to share across distances that you normally would never have met them. But I can even talk about having this conversation. Sometimes I'm in the remote studio, and we have these conversations. And they're good, and I enjoy them, but I don't feel in my physical body, I do not feel the same connection.

• 1:00:53Mayim Bialik?

  What you're describing is true, and it's true because you're an animal. It's true because you're a primate. What we're doing when we're in the same room is we're we're tracking a lot of things, even unconsciously. And we're tracking facial expressions, and you know, some of us are more attuned to those than others, right? You'll often say like, "I'm not upset," and I'm like, "Your left eye is upset," you know? So we're tracking that. The next level is something that is not seen, which Mustafa would not be a fan of. is an energetic resonance to being in physical presence with someone energetically. Like we can talk about the chakra system like energetically, there's something happening. You're a being at any point, I might feel like hugging you. I might feel like hitting the hat off your head. I might feel like rolling around on the floor and wrestling, right?

• 1:01:37Mayim Bialik?

  But, but there are people, and we've talked about them on the podcast. There are people who do not crave this. There are people who might acknowledge, okay, we're primates. Okay, something happens, but the next level of human development is to surpass that. Just like people like Mustafa might say, oh, we used to need to have like, oh, why is there lightning? There must be God, right? Why do things happen? It must be God. We have evolved from that, right? Maybe we are evolving from this.

• 1:02:07Jonathan Cohen?

  That is a very interesting hypothesis. I think we are evolving in how we interact cognitively. I think we're evolving on how our cognitive information influences our emotion. But I believe that on a cellular level, we have a biological imperative that we cannot bypass.

• 1:02:29Mayim Bialik?

  I happen to agree, but and if people like Greg Braden would agree, you know, a lot of people would agree. But unfortunately, I think you are in the minority of people in this world. You know, it's, it's not, it's not like, this is not a touchy feely energetic conversation kind of thing. People would be like, that's lovely. That's your old framework that's linked to, you know, a biological system that has evolved over a long time. And people like you will, will not survive, meaning like there's going to be a culling, right? I mean, there already are people who choose to live outside of this world. They live in communes or they live in smaller communities where they are rejecting this. There's usually a lot of other interesting things that happen.

• 1:03:12Mayim Bialik?

  I've seen all those documentaries, but there are people who are going to reject this for sure.

• 1:03:16Jonathan Cohen?

  There are other techno utopians who talk about, I'm going to wake up. I'm going to put the virtual reality glasses on. I'm going to live in a virtual space. I can control it more. It's more engaging. That life will be like the frog in boiling water. Where it's going to have this techno utopia. You're going to have all of the sensory inputs in your brain lighting up because it's your visual cortex is getting fed by all of this information and digital systems. And what we're going to discover. Is that it has a significant negative health outcome when we spend too much time there. We are not designed, this physical body, we cannot bypass the needs of our physical bodies.

• 1:03:57Jonathan Cohen?

  We need sunshine. The amount of sunshine that we get directly correlates to how we function.

• 1:04:03Mayim Bialik?

  There's already people who have ways to quote, try and get all the things that sunshine gives you without sunshine.

• 1:04:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Sure, maybe you get your VR chair that you sit in has red light exposure that's going to try and increase those, that signaling, but I, I just, I am certain of this fact that we cannot bypass the fundamental mechanism of the body to evade interacting with other people and physical activity and some of the fundamental things that have gotten us this far. My other concern, which we didn't get into, is that the profit motives of these organizations are to grow at all costs.

• 1:04:43Mayim Bialik?

  There will always be a way to capitalize on it. There will always be people who are wanting to capitalize on this. And that's also the reality that we're living in.

• 1:04:52Jonathan Cohen?

  How many companies are able to replace 30% of their workforce? Well, it will be like the emissions standards, right? Okay, we're gonna try to reduce emissions and then companies are gonna fight back and then they're gonna buy the politicians that are gonna allow them to replace all of their workforces. Let's talk about the spiritual component for a second.

• 1:05:12Mayim Bialik?

  I believe that he, he enjoys that dichotomy because I think it's important to him and I think it's important, you know, he's very, very private, but I think it is important to him in, in terms of, yeah, the things that he holds true and the things that are valuable to him. And I think that he believes that likely is the next level of our evolution, that we do not need false gods and we don't need blah, blah, blah rituals and we don't need all that stuff.

• 1:05:37Jonathan Cohen?

  He does want to hear about all the physicists that we speak to who talk about our connection to one consciousness, which he's kind of into.

• 1:05:44Mayim Bialik?

  I hope he looks through our catalog because also, I mean, you know, I would not be surprised if he would resonate with a Spinozist view of like, we are God's consciousness evolving, like whatever you want to call it. We are the consciousness evolving as it's existing and as we're sitting here. And that, you know, that notion of spirituality, like that is what touches sort of the evolution of this, this quantum field, like all these things, like, yeah, he's like, I would love for him to talk to Thomas Campbell, who, as I said, accidentally proved that God exists.

• 1:06:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Federico Fagin.

• 1:06:17Mayim Bialik?

  Right. So love being this sort of like universal, like that's the substrate as, as many will, will describe it. You know, even in the theoretical physics and, and quantum physics worlds. Yeah, I think that it's important to him to step outside of, you know, the religious, you know, kind of concepts that many of us hold to, and I totally get that. But I also think that what I like about him is that he is not a loveless technologist. He has a lot of heart. He has a lot of, um, yeah, I think that's where that comes from. That's what he's saying. He's a very, this is not a, this is not a cold, you know, person. This is not a cold philosophy and we do, we've spoken to some technology people where I'm like, oh my God, I can't.

• 1:06:59Mayim Bialik?

  But no, this is a, this is not a loveless perspective that he has. Is it overly optimistic? Sure.

• 1:07:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, he talks about a narrow path that we have to walk.

• 1:07:09Mayim Bialik?

  I took him to task early on for referring to this as a being. I don't give him, he's not God.

• 1:07:14Jonathan Cohen?

  He actually is anti-algorithmic rights.

• 1:07:18Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 1:07:19Jonathan Cohen?

  He doesn't believe that algorithms are conscious, will be conscious. He doesn't believe that that is actual feeling.

• 1:07:26Mayim Bialik?

  You know, when I think of the things that my teenager potentially could learn from an AI companion or chatbot or therapist or whatever, you know, what it, what I don't know that it can teach is that reciprocal component of the human experience.

• 1:07:42Jonathan Cohen?

  You don't have to ever listen that way.

• 1:07:43Mayim Bialik?

  No, because it's like what it is, and, and this is like, it's kind of like if you were to design a boyfriend or design a girlfriend, design a partner.

• 1:07:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Always available.

• 1:07:51Mayim Bialik?

  Always available, infinitely knowledgeable.

• 1:07:55Mayim Bialik?

  Never judgmental, always helping you troubleshoot, and has no needs. Is that your perfect companion? Someone with no needs? They will never wake up and say, "I don't feel well today. Can you hold me today?" You will never learn from that relationship how to tell if someone wants a hug or not.

• 1:08:21Jonathan Cohen?

  You'll never feel uncomfortable around them. Meaning, you won't have uncertainty. You won't be like, "Did I misread that cue?"

• 1:08:29Mayim Bialik?

  When they're able to see us, what kind of presentation will we feel we need to make for them? Will we straighten our hair? Will we be like, "Just like I don't want to be seen without makeup in X, Y, or Z arena, do I not want to be seen without makeup?"

• 1:08:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Also, there's gonna be robots in your house, which is a whole other thing.

• 1:08:45Mayim Bialik?

  You know what I was thinking? I'd love the robot to feed the cats every morning.

• 1:08:49Jonathan Cohen?

  It might.

• 1:08:49Mayim Bialik?

  But there's a lot of variation. But I'm like, it'll learn that. It'll learn to like, take the cat off the counter.

• 1:08:55Jonathan Cohen?

  Like, some of the very practical things, it's gonna make-

• 1:08:57Mayim Bialik?

  I'll be in my pottery class.

• 1:08:59Jonathan Cohen?

  It's gonna make life a lot better.

• 1:09:00Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, you know what? But you know what it's gonna also do? Is it gonna take your dog for a walk? And what kind of relationships are we going to be cultivating with animals when we are already not their primary caregivers?

• 1:09:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you think Archie's gonna want the robot to pet him?

• 1:09:15Mayim Bialik?

  Archie will want-

• 1:09:16Jonathan Cohen?

  But the robot doesn't smell. Although, you can probably add smell, okay?

• 1:09:21Mayim Bialik?

  Hundred percent! If you can have sex with them, they can have pheromones coming out of their robot pit.

• 1:09:28Jonathan Cohen?

  So, something happened at the park today. Archie, a golden retriever-

• 1:09:31Mayim Bialik?

  The best boy in the world.

• 1:09:33Jonathan Cohen?

  He doesn't fetch.

• 1:09:35Mayim Bialik?

  He really doesn't. He's a golden retriever who does not retreat.

• 1:09:37Jonathan Cohen?

  He's just golden. So, today, at the park, this morning before the podcast, someone threw a ball. It was a squeaky ball. Archie ran and got it-

• 1:09:47Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Jonathan Cohen?

  And brought it back. And I was like, "That's weird." And then she kept throwing it, and he kept running and bringing it back. Why, you ask? Take a guess.

• 1:09:56Mayim Bialik?

  Is it the color of him?

• 1:09:58Jonathan Cohen?

  It is a bacon ball.

• 1:10:02Jonathan Cohen?

  When he squeezes the ball.

• 1:10:04Mayim Bialik?

  It smells like bacon.

• 1:10:04Jonathan Cohen?

  Bacon scent comes out of it.

• 1:10:05Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, geez. Disgusting. When I squeeze you, bacon scent comes out of you.

• 1:10:11Jonathan Cohen?

  It's possible that the robot will have an arsenal of smells that it can disperse depending on who it's around. For you, it's gonna make some sort of human scent that you may find appealing.

• 1:10:25Mayim Bialik?

  What's the scent of a person in need who needs me to solve their problems?

• 1:10:29Jonathan Cohen?

  That pheromone will be packaged and dispersed by the robot and you're gonna like feel so accepted and loved by the robot. Archie, when it takes him for a walk, it will just have bacon.

• 1:10:41Mayim Bialik?

  This is a really, really fun conversation, Jonathan. Thank you for encouraging us to have this conversation. And you know what, Jonathan? You're my bacon ball.

• 1:10:47Jonathan Cohen?

  That's very sweet. On Substack, MindBee Alex Breakdown, join the growing Breaker community. There are a few things that we did not get to today, including AI psychosis, which is a very significant topic where people are being convinced by their artificial intelligence that they have some groundbreaking insight into mathematics, science, some other area of engineering that is gonna change human civilization forever, and we're gonna talk about it on Substack. We're also gonna talk about the AI bureaucracy death spiral that Yuval Noah Harari talks about. I actually think that we are on the cusp of the greatest transformation in human existence

• 1:11:30Jonathan Cohen?

  since the Industrial Revolution, and it's gonna come with an enormous amount of unknowns, but we have more information than we have ever had in human history that we have access to. And more information has always yielded better results. And, you know, my personal spirituality and faith is that we will get through this transformation. It may not be neat. It may come with a lot of unexpected challenges, but that we are all, we are on some form of... Evolutionary path that this technology is a part of, and we have to maintain aspects of our humanity that feed us, that keep us healthy, that make us human.

• 1:12:13Jonathan Cohen?

  But our relationship with this technology in business, in energy, in government, in helping us live on this planet is probably pre-designed and destined, and that it may take us through the next set of challenges.

• 1:12:30Mayim Bialik?

  We're a breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.