Cosmic Queries: Minds and Machines

Explore the inner workings of the human mind, the mysteries of memory, The Matrix, deep learning, the ethics of driverless cars, ELIZA, and much more with Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and neuroscientist Dr. Gary Marcus. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/cosmic-queries-minds-and-machines/ Image Credit: metamorworks/iStock.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today is a cosmic queries edition of StarTalk. We've solicited your questions on an interesting subject, queries of minds and machines. Oh yeah, something I can't do myself, had to bring in help for that. We'll get to that in just a moment. Chuck Nice, you helping me out here?

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  That's right. How are you, buddy?

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, good, good. Have you been practicing how to pronounce names?

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  No, I have not, which is why they will be just as awful as they always are. And quite frankly, I believe the people send in crazy names just to hear me butcher them. But I'm totally comfortable with that.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep telling yourself that, that you're doing this on purpose. So, so we've got mind and machines. I mean, this is a, this is a very intriguing topic that touches everything, like morality and politics and culture, business.

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of this.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we've got a guy who's like in the middle of that, and he's sitting here in the middle of us.

• 1:26Chuck Nice?

  Morality and business in one sentence.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary Marcus, Gary, this is not your first rodeo here on StarTalk.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  It's my third time here, thank you.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your third time, welcome. You're a professor at NYU of psychology and neuroscience. So you are a, an expert on the intersection of mind and machine, psychology and technology.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  That's right. My training is in natural intelligence and my work in recent years is mostly in artificial intelligence. And so that is kind of minds and machines and going back and forth between the two.

• 2:01Chuck Nice?

  Wow. We ever see a day where a machine will have a mind?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Depends what you mean by a mind. We can dig into that if you'd like.

• 2:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well then in that case, what is a mind?

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11Chuck Nice?

  Clearly I do not have a mind.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apparently. You got that question wrong.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's start a little further back. So what is it about a human mind that most distinguishes it from the mind of other mammals? Just so I can get a sense of what it is to be human. Just start there.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  I think our language is vastly more sophisticated. I think we can talk about and think about not just what's here and now, but what might be, what could have been, what happened before, what will happen eventually. So abstraction and not just the abstraction of like democracy, but also the abstraction of like what would happen if the United States were no longer a democracy. So things that we hope are so-called counterfactual, but we don't know for sure, given contemporary politics.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so some time ago, I interviewed Ray Kurzweil, and you were our guest in-studio academic guest in response to that show. And he had commented that the next evolution of the human brain, if it's not biological, then it would be mechanical, would be extending what the frontal lobe had done for us. Because as I understand it, the frontal lobe is responsible for this abstract thinking that animals that don't have developed frontal lobes are incapable of attaining. If that's the case, what thoughts are we not having by not having some other lobe in front of the frontal lobe?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  It's a fine question. It's sort of like the Rumsfeld known knowns and unknown unknowns. Sort of a question about unknown unknowns. I mean, the first thing I would say is that we're really restricted by our memories and the capacity limits on them. Computers have something called location addressable memory. That means everything goes in some sort of master map. And that means like-

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's kind of true with the human brain.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Humans use something called context addressable memory, where we don't know exactly where things are. I mean, even like the best brain scientist in the world is not going to be able to tell me exactly where your memory of the Pink Panther movie is.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe because they're not there yet.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Sometimes the memories might not be there, but for the memories you have, they're not very well organized. No, he means maybe the scientists are not there yet.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just because they can't figure it out doesn't mean it's not true. Which is not real. Before Isaac Newton, the planets would look pretty mysterious going forward and backwards up in the sky.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Granted.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Writes down an equation and takes away the mystery.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Granted that there are lots of mysteries and unknown unknowns and all that. But if you look mechanically at how people's memories work, we are, for example, um, subject to a phenomenon you might call blurring together of memories. So if you park every day in the same lot.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You give that an official term, blurring of memory. You don't have a more scientific term than that.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  What?

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We could call it that.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  One of the scientific terms is.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have blurry memory today?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  All of my memories are blurry. Get some glasses for your memory. One of the technical terms is interference, is proactive interference.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That feels a little better, okay.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  It's okay. You want the technical terms. So we are very subject to interference in a way that you wouldn't be if you had location addressable memory. So computers don't get confused between 12 similar memories. They can, for example, use buffers. So if you store, uh, sorry, if you park your car in the same lot every day and then you go out on the 10th day, you will be like, did I park here or there? Cause you blurred together, my technical term again, those memories, there's interference between them. Whereas a computer could have a last entry buffer and it will just forget the first nine. There's a process called garbage collection, get rid of all of those. You just have the piece of information that you're looking for. Our memories are not very reliable. This is why we can't, for example, give eyewitness testimony that's trustworthy and we can't have time, date stamps, the way that you can have on a video.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  So there are lots of ways in which our memory is really not as precise as computer memory.

• 5:53Chuck Nice?

  Can, can an experience bias a memory during the making of the memory itself?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  It's a really hard question to answer.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't, I didn't understand the question.

• 6:03Chuck Nice?

  What's that?

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That went above my head.

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  Real?

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Try that again.

• 6:06Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God, let me ask that again. Wow.

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It sounded deep and I just don't, you know, let me hear it, let me hear it.

• 6:13Chuck Nice?

  All right, so what I'm asking is if, for instance, we're, I don't know, hanging out in the kitchen and, you know, we're having a conversation. And for me, that conversation is like, wow, I was talking to Gary and Neil and I learned all this stuff and, and it's a great conversation, right? And I'm. Able because of my experience to recall things and to it's a better experience for me. Could that same experience that we're all sharing? And you two are like Chuck's a dumbass and I hated this conversation. Could that then mar your actual memory, the information, the surroundings, how you recall it?

• 6:57Chuck Nice?

  So that we recall the same experience differently because we're biased by the way we felt about the experience while it was happening.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  There's kind of two processes there.

• 7:06Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  One we would call encoding. And the other we would call retrieval.

• 7:11Chuck Nice?

  So one is called re-encoding.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  And then retrieval. So we know there's lots of distortions made at retrieval time. So you can show people a video of somebody going past a yield sign and then ask them a question. How fast was the car going when it passed through the stoplight? And they'll just be like, oh, I guess it was a stoplight. And and so they'll distort the memory by having some new information on top of the old information. And coding is like how you put that memory down in the first place. And it's less clear. We may have bias even in how we record that information at the time, but it's a little bit harder to do the experiments. We know that at retrieval time, there's lots of distortion. In fact, we reconstruct a lot of our memories. So computers, like a videotape, you're you're just pulling out something that is stored. There's no question about it. A lot of what we do is we try to figure out, well, what could it have been like?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  So if I asked you, we did that episode with Kurt Swell and what did I say about Kurt Swell? You might sit there and try to remember, well, at the end I said nice things about Kurt Swell, but I was nicer than Gary. And so what did Gary say? And go back and try to reconstruct it or your viewers can go watch the podcast of it. They'll have a different experience watching the podcast of it as opposed to you figuring out from your memory. Your memory is not a video recording and some of your biases.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm trained to not trust what I cannot, don't have explicit memory of. I mean, I have some training to edit that away from any statement, right? So so so in other words, and I agree with you, there are people who particularly under pressure to have to remember something. They'll they'll stitch together bits and pieces from things that didn't happen or happen that resembled it. And come up with some other other reality and that becomes the reality, right? So if I kind of don't remember something, I don't try to, I don't try to. Uh, buff it up to try to make it fit in.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  You think you don't and you might be better than the average person.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not saying I don't. I'm saying I'm trained.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Train yourself to avoid it.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just that.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  There's a process called reconsolidation that humans seem to use, um, or biological creatures in general seem to use by which when you access a memory, that memory actually becomes loose and flexible and then you put it back down. You don't put it back exactly the way you found it. And this is just a fact about how biological creatures use their memory. Again, it's very different from what a computer does. And to go back to the earlier question, if you said, how would I soup up? Um, a human brain, I would start with a memory system and make it more reliable.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so my evidence for how I, whether I fail or succeed at this, and I think we can all test in, in this way.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How well do you remember a scene of a film you saw ten, once 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago? And.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  It doesn't have the words Kaiser Soze. I don't remember.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So I'm just saying that's an example of something you experienced. No, you were not in the scene, but you observed the scene. It's, it's, so think of it as part of your life experience and, and there are plenty of people say, I don't remember who was acting. Although I forgot the scene, but some people are candid about what they remember, what they don't. I have really acute memory of movie scenes, which tells me that I should also have corresponding acute memory of, of events of my life. And by the way, it's not that I remember everything. I'm not one of those. But if I think I remember it, chances are I remembered it accurately. There's plenty of stuff I say I have no clue. I was not paying attention. I was not, I was ignoring it. Plenty of times I will tell you that. But if I know something, it's, it's pretty much there.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  So a few years ago, I wrote a piece for Wired, which was called Total Recall. Um, and it was about a woman named Jill Price who seemed to have a perfect memory. Um, but it turned out it was mostly for autobiographical facts. So it was things about her own life. Compartmentalized. A lot of it, I think, was essentially, I don't know how to say this politely, was narcissism. Um, she kind of practiced her own memories, the way I practiced baseball statistics when I was a kid. So when I was a kid, I was known as the walking encyclopedia of baseball. And it's not because I had some phenomenal memories. It's because I kept reading the Baltimore Orioles information guide. And so I just. I knew all of the stats that were in there because I read it so many times and she spent a lot of time rehearsing her own life. But when I asked her, when the Magna Carta was signed, she said, what, do I look like I'm 500 years old?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Which was way off because it wasn't autobiographical and so she didn't know about it. So people can choose, like if you care about movies, I heard you offstage talking about how you like to use movies as a scaffold to teach people about science. So the movies become important to you. You spend a lot of time getting it right.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only if it's a communal knowledge about.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Right. And my mentor, Steve Pinker, does that a lot with Woody Allen things in his books. He'll use, you know, funny Woody Allen's kids.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pick a professor at Harvard.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Professor at Harvard. He was at MIT when he was my PhD advisor. And in his books, he uses a lot of pop culture also. I'm not as funny and can't pull it off, but Pinker pulls it off very well.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those books are on the bestseller list.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  That's why his book, one of mine made it once for a few weeks, but anyway. But his reliable.

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which one of these books, yeah, I have you here, The Future of the Brain? Did that make it? Or you edited that?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  I added that Guitar Zero was my book that was.

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guitar Zero.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  On the bestseller.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New Musician and the Science of Learning. Very nice. And a failed video game.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  A failed video. It's actually a story about, I am awesome at Guitar Zero. What? Okay. The game is Guitar Hero and the title was a joke.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was the, oh, the, oh.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  It was a joke on the game because I started learning about music after failing and then succeeding at the game. So your joke actually cuts to my, you know, personal history, but that's another story for another day.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I'd love what you're talking about, how you store memory and it leads me to wonder, maybe you have some insight into this. If we did have perfect memory, storage and recall, would that make us less creative?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  People have asked that question.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anchored to reality and creativity comes out of a non-reality, no matter what. The science, art, music, it's something that did not exist before, maybe in threads. And you put it together into something that no one thought of before and you are not recalling this. So we can complain about how we store and retrieve memory, but maybe that's the basic essence of what it is to be human.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  I've heard that argument before. I don't buy it, but it's, I think it's open. So. Um, I think a lot of what passes for creativity is simply taking two elements from different places and combining them. You can do that if you have perfect memory, you can do that if you have lousy memory. On, on the other hand,

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Point.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Um, it is the case that we do things like free association where we just kind of jump from topic to topic. And sometimes it hits pretty well and that can count as creativity too. So I don't know. There was a, there was a

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Second creativity was more what I was describing.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you take two perfectly remembered things and put them together, yes, you can come up with something new. But you're still anchored to the reality of the perfect memory. And if you have imperfect memory, so in there are like unicorns and that you think you saw and whatever. And out comes a whole thing that is not derived from anything real that happened to you.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Could be. I mean, there's a, a study in science a few years ago where they took

• 14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Journal of

• 14:01Speaker 02

  The Journal of Science, probably 10 and 15 years ago now.

• 14:04Chuck Nice?

  Love that you two knew that, you know, I said, studying science the other year. Uh, yes.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  The capital S.

• 14:09Chuck Nice?

  Right. The Journal of

• 14:10Speaker 02

  He read my mind and saw them.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just trying to

• 14:12Chuck Nice?

  Not just general science.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  In the journal.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of science. No, there's a journal.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  He proceeds his journal entitled.

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The American counterpart to the Journal Nature in the UK.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Um, in which they compared Madison Avenue trainees or something like that with a computer program for advertising. And people just made up things like, I don't know, like a, a drink that was fast. They would, you put tennis shoes and, and soda together, whatever. And the computer could do it just as well as people. And there people had, you know, the weird memory that we do, machines didn't, the machines did just fine. So it partly depends on what the task is.

• 14:46Chuck Nice?

  Hmm. That would totally explain Japanese commercials, cause they are crazy.

• 14:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That comes from someplace else.

• 14:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. It's just like

• 14:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See Japanese everything on television.

• 14:56Chuck Nice?

  It's so true. Yeah. It's like the Simpsons actually make fun of them. They're like Homer looks like a character and is like called Mr. Sparkle. And they actually see the commercial and it just makes no sense at all because they're looking at it from through American eyes. So, cool.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the future of this? Where's this gonna go?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  I mean, we will invent

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First, are you cyborg? Let me just.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  I am part Apple Watch and part human being.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Um, and I mean, mostly I rely on my external memory from my phone, right? My, my phone is really a game changer. I used to have to remember phone numbers. I used to have to remember all kinds of.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your iPhone.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  My iPhone. Um, you can tell from the watch. You can infer that I'm, I'm a fanboy, I guess. Um, the, the phone extends my cognitive reach greatly. Eventually it might be on board. I worry about like Bluetooth hackery and stuff like that. I mean, you put a phone outside of my body and hack it, I can probably still hack it in the other sense of the word hack. Um, if you have, you know, something inside my head, you know, cybercrime is gonna happen.

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I walk by you and, and makes you think, no, no, no, it'll first happen with advertising.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll make you, yeah, you want a Shake Shack burger right now.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Exactly, right.

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this moment.

• 16:03Chuck Nice?

  And I'm a vegan. Where's that come from? How's that even happen?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Now, the other side of that.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  The other side of this, we're suggestible anyway. You just said Shake Shack and I want one. I don't, you don't need a brain implant to do it.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ain't that some shit? Right. So, so why, what is the urge to merge? You like that rhyme?

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Urge to merge.

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is the urge to merge?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Got a need for speed and a urge to merge.

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's your?

• 16:32Speaker 02

  I am insane for an implant in my brain.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's like a little too many syllables in there.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Oh, come on. Tough crowd here.

• 16:39Chuck Nice?

  It's like, cut me a break.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The third one in never gets it right. I, I, um, cause the second one creates the trend and then you gotta stay with the trend and now the pressure's on you.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Twice, three times.

• 16:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what is the urge to merge it into your physiology, biology? When it, it's perfectly fine sitting in your palm.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  There's two things.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's within my arms reach. Why do I have to, why, why have to, why do I need a USB port into my neck?

• 17:09Speaker 02

  I think some of it's.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like in Avatar, they had USB.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  I think some of it's efficiency and some of it's a false quest for immortality. So, um, Efficiency is if I don't have to type it, I don't have to say it, it's faster. And if I'm paraplegic and I can't type it, I can't say it.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clearly, in those cases.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  So there are some cases where, you know, the efficiency wins hands down. And if I don't have to sit here typing and I can search for those facts that I wanted to give you faster, that's

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just by thinking.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Just by thinking, that would be great. And I think it will happen eventually.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I have the choice between a neurosurgeon cutting into my brain and sticking electrodes, sticking chips

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in it, or

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Using the phone.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hitting my iPhone with my thumb. I'm thumbing. I got the thumb thing.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  I understand you got the thumbing, but the analogy I would make is to all kinds of things that people do in sports where they want an edge. And people are going to want their kids to get in, I mean, already do want to get their kids into Harvard. And if they think I can get my kid into Harvard with this implant, if they think it's safe enough, they might do it, just like they'll give their kids steroids so that they can, you know, get an athletics scholarship.

• 18:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a way, it's a Wow. It's a

• 18:16Speaker 02

  It's an edge.

• 18:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Human augmentation. There you go.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  That's what it is. We're talking about human augmentation.

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa. All right, let's bring this first segment to a close. And when we come back, it will be cosmic queries.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Promised. As promised, we will get to cosmic queries. You watching, possibly listening to StarTalk.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. That's Professor Marcus here from NYU, New York University. Who says a lot of cool stuff lately, NYU. From the, from the actors, they've got a whole math department. Uh, what's it called? The whole

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Koran.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Koran Institute, yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if your math is not a department, it's an institute.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they say it's good philosophers there. You got a lot of good stuff going on at NYU. So it's, it's great to have you in our backyard. So thanks for making time for us. You're, you're one of the world's experts on thinking about, uh, it's funny you get to say that about a professor. They don't have to do anything to be famous. They just have to think about it. The world's expert for thinking about this intersection of, of technology and mind. And we solicited questions on this very subject from our fan base and all the usual, uh, cast of, of sources, uh, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, what else?

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Uh, pretty much anywhere that there is an internet.

• 19:43Chuck Nice?

  People can send us a question.

• 19:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Send us a question. So Chuck, what do you have for us?

• 19:46Chuck Nice?

  All right, our first question is actually from a name that I can pronounce perfectly. Chuck Nice, uh, sitting here on the couch, who would like to know.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you taking first question?

• 19:57Chuck Nice?

  I am taking first question.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Patreon member?

• 19:59Chuck Nice?

  I, I am a data Patreon member.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well, there you go.

• 20:01Chuck Nice?

  Yes. So, uh, I would like to know, since we know how we download information to computers, how exactly are we downloading memories to our brain?

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From our brain to a machine?

• 20:16Chuck Nice?

  Well, no, period. Us as, as biological organisms that have this brain function in the hippocampus. How does that process actually take place? How are we downloading memories?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  I guess it depends what you mean by downloading.

• 20:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So here's your brain.

• 20:32Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People talk about putting your brain in a machine.

• 20:35Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm not talking about that. So here's the thing.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Talking about everyday ordinary.

• 20:37Chuck Nice?

  Everyday experiences, which we see and we record.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 20:42Chuck Nice?

  And then they're downloaded to a place in our brain or uploaded, or uploaded if you want.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay.

• 20:47Chuck Nice?

  Okay, if you want to get technical or uploaded to the place in our brain, our hippocampus. How does, what is that process?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Cause there's really two versions of the question. I think we're both thinking that. One is like the ordinary course of events. Forget about modern technology. How do I make a memory at all?

• 21:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  And then the other is like, am I ever going to be able to have a way where I can type something in my phone? And kind of like airdrop it, if you know the Apple technology, um, directly into my brain. So like,

• 21:11Chuck Nice?

  Somebody else.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  There's, you know, the famous scene.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or somebody else, somebody else.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Somebody else. There's a famous scene in The Matrix where she like downloads the skill for flying a helicopter.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that scene.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Isn't that an awesome scene? So, so that's like the second version of the question. The first is like in ordinary experience, if I want to learn to ride a helicopter, I have to practice a lot. And every trial is changing something, you know, in my hippocampus, in my free frontal cortex. The honest answer is we as neuroscientists don't yet understand that process. We, we have looked at some simpler organisms. So the plesia is the most famous one. And you can pluck at its gill and eventually it learns, hey, someone's being annoying. I won't pull my gill in every time. Um, and we know something about how the synapses in, in the nervous system of the plesia change. Change over many, many trials. And so that's a kind of gradual learning. But most of the learning that's interesting to us isn't about I tried something 50 million trials. I mean, there's some things like, you know, shooting a basketball is many, many trials.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Practice makes perfect. My guitar book was about learning to play guitar and, and learning those things. But there's also like, I saw my friend Gary and he taught me the new word of chimera. And like, you don't need a million trials to do that. You're like, that's a cool thing. And it kind of rattles you around your brain. We don't know exactly how the brain does that. We don't even know exactly where it does it. So this very quick memory, which is most of what you're talking about. Yes. There are a few things we would like to know. We'd like to know where it is. We'd like to know what the biological processes. We'd like to know what the representational scheme is, which is like, is it sort of like a bitmap for a picture? Is it, you know, like a set of words in a sentence? Do we use the ASCII code? What is the encoding scheme by which that information is stored?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, we mostly don't know. There are some places we know a little bit. So we know something, for example, about motor memories. And so we can read to some extent. If somebody is paralyzed and we stick in implants in their brain, we can guess where they want to move their hands. And we're partly reading their memories a little bit. The implants are for you to read what's happening in their brain. Read what's happening in their brain. But we don't actually have a general understanding of memory. It's one of the most basic things, but also like the memory of an eplegia is pretty different from the memory of a Chuck Nice, right? So.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  And, and we don't want to do the same kind of experiments. Most people don't get too squeamish if you chop open the eplegia. But probably you don't want to be chopped open and you have a say in it and, you know, your wife might get mad at me if I did it and it might be litigation. She's the only one that's a fan of it. There might not be a lot of lawsuits, but there'd be some. It's a lot of paperwork. And so we, we, I'm being facetious, of course. But we, we as scientists don't do the same kinds of experiments on people. So we do things like MRI brain scans, but they're very coarse. MRI, the pixels in an image, or they're called voxels because they're three dimensional, has like 70,000 neurons in it. And a memory might be a matter of like 100 neurons in those 70,000 neurons being configured the right way. I wrote an article in the

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need a higher resolution, a higher voxel resolution machine.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  You definitely need a higher voxel machine. And there have been some work. So in people that have epilepsy, sometimes you have to cut open their brain in order to do surgery. And there are experiments in which scientists have stuck electrodes in the brains of those people and found some pretty interesting things. Like they have found neurons that only respond when you see Oprah Winfrey or hear her name. So they're kind of multimodal.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oprah neurons?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Oprah neurons.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a thing?

• 24:31Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, there are about 50 million women in this country who have that experience.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Oprah neuron.

• 24:37Chuck Nice?

  The Oprah neuron.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Is it Jennifer Aniston neuron that was identified? But these are kind of like outputs of a process. So we don't know the circuitry that causes this neuron to actually activate. We just know at the end of some long chain of events, it fires there. There are a bunch of memories that are involved in that that help you know what she looks like, what the name looks like. But we don't, we haven't decoded that stuff yet.

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess you're not in a position to say, to tell me where in the brain is your concept of self?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I can tell you things like your prefrontal cortex is involved. If I blow away your prefrontal cortex, you're not going to have much of a concept of self. But there's the old joke you might know about the frog and the foreleg. The scientists are trying to figure out where hearing is in the frog and they operationalize it by clapping and the frog jumps. And they cut away their front leg, front left leg, they clap, the frog still jumps. So they say hearing isn't in the front left leg and they cut away the front right leg and the frog still jumps. They cut away the back left leg, it still jumps. And then when they cut away the back right leg, the frog doesn't jump anymore. And so they conclude, ah, hearing must be in the back right leg of the frog. This is, you know, a pretty shoddy inference. And unfortunately, a lot of the inferences that we might make about memory and self and so forth are kind of similar. We lesion some part of the brain

• 25:49Speaker 02

  or we study someone that has lesion. We don't

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Veritably.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  We don't actually cause lesions too often in humans, except to cure epilepsy or something like that. And then something doesn't work anymore, but that doesn't mean it's the only piece involved. It's like

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's say you're stopping the epilepsy, you're not curing it. I would use a different word.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Well, fine. Point well taken.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will cut your brain open, cut through some lesion to cure you.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  You know, there's, there's a long sordid history of that sort of thing. Going back to trephining, when they cut holes in people's skulls and.

• 26:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the one where they, they ice pick your thing?

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a trephining.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay. Uh, so, uh, one, one quick, uh, quick follow up on this.

• 26:29Chuck Nice?

  Ahead.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A, a quick, it might be a naive question. In the scene in The Matrix where Trinity gets uploaded the instructions for flying the helicopter.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wouldn't she have also needed muscle memory for that rather than just knowledge?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Well.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How to fly the helicopter?

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Muscle memory is in your brain. It's not in your muscles. It's a misnomer. And.

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Some of it's in your spinal cord, if you want to get technical about it.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fine. So if I can read a book on Kung Fu and I can know every move, but if I have not performed it, are you implying that you can put performance memory in my brain?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's a really astute and clever question you're asking. So why is it that when you read a book, you don't get the muscle memory for free? So why, when I read about guitar and music theory and all the things that, you know, you needed to do to play and strumming and read all these books about strumming, could I still not do it very well? And I still had to go practicing and I got at least a little bit better. Um, I think that's a kind of question about which processes are linked in which ways into the brain. It's not a question of whether that stuff is ultimately in the brain and we can do brain scans and show that different parts of the brain change as you learn to strum. So it's an access question.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Not all parts of the brain are, are sorry, are equally accessible to one another. And so even though you can read about it, you don't have a circuit that is responsible. You think about the environment of adaptation. Exactly.

• 27:50Chuck Nice?

  So you can upload the knowledge of the information, but then separately upload the experiential.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, okay, maybe that's.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  In principle, you ought to be able to do that.

• 27:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  And someday, you know, I won't be here to collect or not collect on the bet, but someday, um, you know, maybe it's a hundred years from now, we will, I think, be able to do that. Like, in principle, there's no reason why the experiential part of it can't be encoded, can't be fired in there using, you know, nanobots that, that change the circuitry of your brain. My book, The Future of the Brain, talks about some of this stuff. Um, there's no reason in principle why you can't do that, but right now. We don't know how to read the code. It's like if a computer dropped from above, it would take a while. You know, there's no other computers and you had volt meters and stuff like that. You could sit there and try to figure it out, but it would take a long time before you could say, so that's how Microsoft Word works. There's a lot of complication there.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question.

• 28:41Chuck Nice?

  All right. Next question is from Cat Pirates on from Twitter and at Cat Pirates. Since we're on this subject, will it one day be possible at some point to use computers to store and access our memory? So this is just the exact opposite of what we were talking about and my question.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Offload it, offload.

• 29:00Chuck Nice?

  Offload.

• 29:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Chuck Nice?

  So can we take what's up here and offload it on to some storage device?

• 29:07Speaker 02

  I think the answer eventually will be yes. We're stuck in the same place if we don't really know the code yet. There's also a separate question I didn't talk about, which is invasiveness. So right now we can use an FMRI, you know, basically a set of magnets to read stuff, but not with enough resolution to get the resolution. We have no way of doing it now, short of putting stuff in the brain. And then even now that doesn't really work and.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that? I saw people, they were reconstructing a photograph of somebody out of their brain thoughts.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there are studies like that that are actually non.

• 29:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Know about that?

• 29:38Speaker 02

  I did not know.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm asking because I saw it weeks ago, weeks ago.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  One of the guys.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like it was fuzzy, of course, but it's like, whoa, that's a, that's a person. That's incredible.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  It's fuzzy. There's some tricks involved. So you need to have right now, it'll be solved eventually. As a kind of crutch to make these systems work better, these decoding systems, you have to kind of give them a hint. It's almost like animal mineral or vegetable. So you tell them it's an animal and then given this information, you kind of guess, I'm making a little bit cruder, but you, you guess what kind of animal it is. It doesn't, the systems we have now can't sort of take an arbitrary picture and reconstruct it. But if you narrow things down, then the system.

• 30:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Help it out.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  You help it out with what's called a prior and the systems can get somewhere. Eventually you'll need less and less support because the resolution will get better and better. And we'll be able to do things less and less dangerously. There'll be less worry about infections of brains and stuff like that. You will be able to do it. I want to pause, by the way, and say, I love. Of the Star Trek episode of Black Mirror, I probably a lot of people saw it.

• 30:37Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  But there's something totally wrong with it, which is there, you get the complete set of memories from somebody's DNA. And DNA doesn't actually carry memories. It carries the kind of evolutionary memory, if you will, but does not carry. Well, actually, there's an interesting question there, which is DNA might actually be a substrate for memory, but it would be different. Like, we might use or strands of RNA.

• 30:57Chuck Nice?

  Could store memory in it.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  You could. That's right. It's a digital thing. Maybe even biology does in ways that we don't know, but you don't store it in what we call the germ line DNA that they sequence in that show in order to reconstruct the memory. So just taking somebody's hair is not going to allow you to break into their brain and decide, were they looking at the porn or not? Like, that, that is not going to be recorded in their DNA.

• 31:19Chuck Nice?

  Well, thank God for that.

• 31:22Chuck Nice?

  Chuck, I got this hair.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  You know the answer for you. We don't need that.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  I remember you, polyamorous roboticist.

• 31:29Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Polyamorous roboticist. I love it. All right. What's next? Uh, here we go. Alex Lander wants to know this. How close are we to toys that can be remotely controlled by thoughts transmitted as instructions via radio? So I did see where there are some things that we can control with our eyes, but that's really just tracking movements. That's become the joystick. Right, right. Is there any transmission otherwise that we might be able to do?

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Funny you mentioned joystick, because I was going to say, if all you want is a joystick, you could probably do that now. There may even be some, like Kickstarter, to do this, where you put an EEG skull cap on people and you can train up low resolution. So you get a few bits of information. So.

• 32:13Chuck Nice?

  I was at Comic Con. They were selling these hats that.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 32:17Chuck Nice?

  Claim to read your, some EEG of your brain and there were things that would spin or something. And if you're in love, it would spin one way. And if you hate. So it looked kind of gimmicky and it wasn't that expensive. So it could be just a fun party.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, trinket, but.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  It's sort of party technology now and you know, probably not even that reliable. So there's an open question about how much you can get from a skull cap that you wear outside your head. So you can get some bits of information. So forward and backwards or things like that. You're not going to get subtlety like I want the toy to go under the chair, around that other chair, up the guitar, next to the wall and back. Like that's too complicated a thought for the skull caps, maybe ever, but not too complicated in principle ever. We might need.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you get into the brain in other ways.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  If you get into the brain in other ways, eventually then yes.

• 33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you would be, this is basically electromagnetic signals at this point because you're, the sensors will be reading out of your brain. And now that gets converted to, we know how to communicate across space. We just, but you need some conversion.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From electromagnetic signals of your brain to some transmitter.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At that point.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  It all again, comes down to resolution. So right now we can do that in a kind of low res kind of way. So you get a limited bit of information. The resolution will get better and there's a decoding problem. You know, what is the code by which we read this? We don't know how much actually kind of makes it outside the skull. That's an open question, but some of it does and we'll get better at it.

• 33:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take a break and when we come back, we'll finish this up, which I hate to do because I want this to go on forever.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, man.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, Chuck, I want to ask a first question in that segment.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  All right.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause my turn.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got Chuck Nice, I got Gary Marcus, Neil Tyson. We'll be right back.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on a really cool episode of StarTalk. We're talking about the intersection of mind and machine, psychology and technology. Chuck Nice helping me out here as usual. Professor Gary Marcus, thanks for coming back to StarTalk. We last had you on, I had last had you with Ray Kurzweil.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great program. Thanks for your contributions there. A question for you. I, reading up on your, your profile, you're, you're a critic of deep learning and, and deep learning is a major sort of research angle in Google and in, and in, in IBM. And so what's your problem with deep learning? This is where machine is sort of teaches itself based on just a few parameters on, and gets better and better at it on a level where it's better than anything we could have trained it to do.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Well, it is for some things, but not all. There's an old logical fallacy, the fallacy of composition. You see something is true for X and you think it's true for everything.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We do that in astrophysics all the time.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  It's always a problem. Deep learning is really good at recognizing objects, but not perfect at that. I'll tell you about that in a second. It's very good at speech recognition. So it allows your Siri or whatever to transcribe your sentences. But it's not very good at what some people call artificial general intelligence. So artificial general intelligence means machines, AGI, machines that could answer kind of any question and not just a particular narrow set of questions. So we have seen great advance in, for example, playing Go. But Go is something where you can get as much data as you want.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a Chinese strategy board game.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  That's right. And DeepMind, a division of Google, has done fantastically well on that. But it's not clear how that translates to real-world problems, ranging from driverless cars, which seem like they're okay now, but they don't seem like they're maybe getting to where they're safe enough to actually use, to general natural language understanding.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just have to be safer than humans?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Well, even safer than humans is pretty hard. So the problem with deep learning and the problem with driverless cars is what we call outlier cases. So deep learning is kind of like a glorified version of memorization. If you've seen some version close to this before, then you can interpolate, this is like that. But if you see something that's unusual, the systems don't work that well. So there've been a couple of accidents with Tesla. One of them-

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In self-drive mode?

• 36:28Speaker 02

  In self-driving mode. One of them, it was in self-driving mode, a Tesla ran into a semi-truck that was white on a sunny day that was crossing a highway. Well, it's an outlier case. It's unusual. If your paradigm is basically to memorize what you've seen before, you get into something unusual, something bad happens. Another case, we suspect driverless mode was engaged was just a month or two ago. A Tesla at 65 miles an hour on a highway ran into a stopped fire truck. A human probably would not make that mistake.

• 36:59Chuck Nice?

  Now, this is, this is the red fire truck.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Red.

• 37:03Chuck Nice?

  A big, bright red fire truck.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Because they pretty much only come in two colors, which is bright red and bright yellow. Was a red one, but we'll have to have your research.

• 37:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The red is not even dull red.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Terrify that.

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's candy apple red.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  And you're like, how could that happen?

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, how could that happen?

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Well, the way I think about it is deep learning is kind of like the part of your brain that recognizes textures and patterns, but not the part of your brain that reasons about things. So you don't have an experience probably of a fire truck parked on the side of a highway. So you can't look that up in your memorized experience. But you do have part of your brain that can be like, that's a very large object. It's not moving. That's probably not a good thing. I think I will move out of the way or slow down. And it's hard to build something like a driverless car system that can deal with the full variety of human experience. We're near my home in Greenwich Village. I ride a unicycle around here. I really don't want driverless cars. I do, and I do not want driverless cars in Manhattan because they're not going to have a big data set on unicycles.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  That's the problem with deep learning is they don't have a big data set about a particular thing. They don't know what to do with it. So the term deep learning is actually like a great rhetorical move, like calling something the death tax. Deep learning refers to a particular thing about how many layers in a neural network and something else.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  But not how abstract it is.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so there's an interesting ethical question. If deep learning for self-driving cars removes the possibility of death, for most cases that any human would end up killing themselves or someone else, like not seeing someone cross the road because they're putting on makeup or reading or texting. And.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Or unicycling and juggling.

• 38:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If, no way. So if it.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  I never do that while I'm driving.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Prevents 100% of those cases.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  But causes its own problems.

• 38:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, but the cases that we would have avoided.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A few of those slipped through, but nonetheless, we go from 30,000 deaths a year to 1,000 deaths a year. But every one of those 1,000 deaths could have been avoided by a human.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  If that guy wasn't juggling on a unicycle. For me, that's not a hard ethical question. I mean, I think then we should go with the machines. The statistical reality is we're not even close to that yet. And the political reality is that questions of deep importance. So there is no question in my mind, even though I'm a skeptic about deep learning and so forth, that it is possible to build a driverless car that's safer than a human. Being but politically speaking, there are going to be people that die in kind of objectionable ways. Nobody was too worried about the guy who died in the Tesla because he was a rich guy. He was watching Harry Potter and people thought he's spoiled and they kind of let it go. But at some point, there will be a driverless car that, you know, kills a bunch of children. And then there'll be a congressional investigation and so forth. And at that point, your question is really important because it might be that in fact statistically,

• 39:46Speaker 02

  it's just much better off, but they can't sell it to their constituents or think they can't sell it to their constituents. And they could cut the whole thing off. And so I worry about that a lot.

• 39:54Chuck Nice?

  But if what Neil is saying is the case, um, uh, your, your outliers notwithstanding, then the answer would be if I'm the company, I'm going to create a pool of other companies where we just take a crap load of money and dump it into this pool that becomes the insurance, uh, pro policy for when the one in one thousandth person dies.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, there, there's an economic question about whose liability it is. And, you know, there are places like, well, maybe I can't say on the record, but there, there are big car companies who are thinking about maybe they can self insure themselves. So there's that side, but there's also the political and legal side of it. So even if there's enough money to pay the, you know, families of the victims, nobody wants to be, you know, in, in that category of family of victim and the people whose, whose families are killed in these very peculiar ways that you're talking about are going to be very upset. And they're going to say, we should ban the driverless cars, even if the overall statistics say, you know, actually we would save 20,000 lives.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The drunk teenagers on prom night who didn't die is not a news story.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  That's right. Right.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That the self-driving car protected.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go, go quick to AI on there because we got, we don't have much time.

• 41:08Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's do it. Should, uh, this is Nicodemus, uh, Archelone, who says this, or Archelone says, should sentient artificial intelligence be subject to the same laws and hold the same rights as humans? Oh, my.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I can certainly see that argument. The problem I would say there is we have no idea how to tell whether something is sentient. So it's one thing to be able to say, can Machine behave in all these kinds of circumstances in ways that are reasonable or whatever. We don't have a measure. I mean, it's like for consciousness. We don't have a consciousness meter. So there's this whole scientific field of trying to figure out consciousness. We got an argument about philosophy.

• 41:44Chuck Nice?

  Make it real simple for you, Gary. Machine, okay, you've programmed it, blah, blah, blah. And then you say, I'm going to unplug you. And the machine says, please, man, don't kill me, man. Please don't unplug me. Please, Gary.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  It's not persuasive because.

• 41:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, damn.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Because.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Because. You can.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's hear him out. Let's hear him out. Let's hear him out. Go.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  It's not persuasive for the same reason the Turing test is not persuasive.

• 42:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  You can can responses. So it's not that hard for someone to build a robot and have a sensor to see if somebody's unplugging it. And say that, just like, you know, Siri has this line about Blade Runner being a story about two intelligent assistants or whatever. And some comedian sits there and writes it. You have an assistant who's, you know, been contracted to write jokes of this sort.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All I, you reminded me of this comic I saw. I think I've told you about this once. Uh, probably a New Yorker comic. There are two dolphins swimming together and one says to the other of the humans on the side. Uh, they face each other and make noises, but there's no evidence that they're actually communicating.

• 42:53Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Say.

• 42:55Chuck Nice?

  That's very funny.

• 42:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says the bigger brained mammal.

• 42:57Chuck Nice?

  Bigger brained mammal.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's give me another one.

• 43:00Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. Ben Sadaj says this. Do you think it would be possible for AI to be able to identify and assist with mental health? Uh, sort of like a virtual therapist? And I'll go a step further. Uh, do you think that it might be able to identify and then help self-correct? Someone who maybe is going off their meds or about to go into a psychotic break?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  The answer is clearly yes. I'm actually, uh, talking to a guy named Roger Gould about working on a project with him about digital therapy. Um, there's a number of other companies that are starting to work with this. Um, actually, early in the history of AI was something called Eliza, which was not very clever. It had a lot of canned responses.

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm older than, I think I'm older. I remember Eliza when it first came out.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Then you are older than me, because it came out a little before I was born.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Um, Eliza actually uses some of the same kinds of programming techniques as Siri. And it can, you know, get a little ways and say, you know, you mentioned your wife and I can say, well, tell me more about your family or your mother or whatever.

• 43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what Eliza do. Ask me a question. I'm Eliza. Ask me a question.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  All right.

• 44:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any question. Doesn't matter.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  How are you feeling today, Neil?

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do you ask that?

• 44:04Speaker 02

  It's called Rogerian therapy.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, ask another one.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Redirect everything.

• 44:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another question.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Why do you feel so positive about Rogerian therapy?

• 44:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Screw you, Eliza.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so you would, you would say something like, uh, my mother, you know, I don't think my mother likes me. And they say, why don't you think your mother likes you? So it would take the sentence, analyze the sentence, the verbs and the nouns, figure out a sentence to send back to you. And it would be like an active, if you weren't really thinking that it's a, that it's a computer, you'd think it was a sensitive psychologist.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Some people actually got fooled by the original Eliza. It won't fool you for an hour, but it can fool you for five or 10 minutes. There's some advantages to digital therapy. Like, for example, with a real therapist, you have to wait. And I mean, usually like you feel this acute sense of pain, you know, something like that, emotional pain, and you want to talk to somebody right away.

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a month.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Two, two weeks or a month or whatever. Um, and digital therapists in principle could be there like right then, right there. Say, you know, what's your problem? And let's try to figure out how to help you.

• 45:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only therapist, but also someone who could be a friend, your friend, a, a consul.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Well, in China, there's something called Xiaowice. Not too many people know about it here. It's made by Microsoft. And millions of people talk to Xiaowice every day. And it's partly kind of quasi therapeutic friendship kind of relationship.

• 45:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but really it's a

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Thing called Tay.

• 45:21Chuck Nice?

  Government information gathering technique. That's, if it's China, let's be honest.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Theoretically it's not, but I'm not going to touch that part. But, um, Tay, which they made over here, Microsoft made over here and it became very offensive. Is actually somewhat similar technology. Um, but it's sort of trained on a different data set. The other problem with deep learning is it's super sensitive to the data set. And it's hard to get it to, um, kind of step away from the immediate data. So if you have a lot of Donald Trump Twitter bots talking to Tay, it's going to, you know, take Tay in a particular direction. And you don't, you don't have a sort of abstract enough understanding of what's going on.

• 45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, this is, we get two more questions in here, but we'd like go in, in speed mode.

• 45:56Chuck Nice?

  All right, speed mode. Here we go. Uh, Brandon Christopher from Facebook wants to know this. Is there a concern that we are reaching, reaching a tipping point where people psychologically cannot handle the advancement in technology?

• 46:07Speaker 02

  People are pretty, people are pretty good at adapting to new technologies. So, no.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that is surely, no one under 20 asked that question.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  They have adapted.

• 46:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have adapted.

• 46:18Chuck Nice?

  Next one. Uh, Lauren, uh, Puyesi, uh, says this, what ethical guidelines should be established before these new technologies are developed in order to prevent abuses? Now, you want to talk about AI? That's a doggone good question. What are we doing to make sure that we don't?

• 46:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who abuses who? AI abuses us or we abuse AI?

• 46:39Chuck Nice?

  Or we abuse them, like, yeah, well.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  I, I think it's a really hard question. I'll put in a plug for an organization I'm on, on the board of called Ada.ai, which is partly trying to kind of-

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ada as in Greek letter Ada?

• 46:49Speaker 02

  As in the first, uh, female computer programmer, um, first computer programmer was female, Ada Lovelace.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Ada, Ada, yeah, yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  And it's Ada dash AI. Um, and they're trying to impart be a kind of consumer organization to help represent consumers' rights in all of this. So, AI is being driven by the big companies.

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the big problems is you have these, these ethics panels where the people don't know as much about what it is they want to, uh, make law, ethical laws about than the people who are making the thing itself. You want to make sure you have people, maybe with not, with not so much self-interest, but have knowledge.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  The other problem is the machines are just so dumb. So, I had a New Yorker column about what would happen if-

• 47:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in the machines?

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Well, I had a New Yorker article about what would happen if a driverless car went out of control, um, hit, hit a school bus full of children. Everybody picked it up. Barack Obama picked it up. Um, it really spread pretty wild and it's a really interesting-

• 47:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an article you wrote in, in the New Yorker?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, uh, in, in November, I think of 2012. Um, and it, it, you know, a lot of people started thinking about this. There are like conferences where people talk about it now. And the reality is, okay, but right now they're hitting fire trucks on the side of the road. That's not an ethical problem. That's a perceptual problem. We have to solve those first before we can get to some of the ethical problems. But they are important.

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think we gotta, we gotta, we gotta wrap this. Gary, thanks for being on, dude.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Always pleasure.

• 48:04Chuck Nice?

  Pleasure being back.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta get you back. This, let's do this all the time. Once a month, we need a brain machine-

• 48:09Chuck Nice?

  Brain machine episode, yeah. I'm down.

• 48:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, always good to have you here.

• 48:14Chuck Nice?

  Always good to be here.

• 48:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, you've been watching, possibly listening to StarTalk, a Cosmic Queries edition on the brain and machines. As always, I bid you to keep looking out.