Ep167 "What Happens With Stone Age Brains + Godlike Tools?" with Steven Kotler

0:00Speaker 1:What happens when stone age brains collide with godlike technology? What happens to your neural networks if artificial neural networks do your thinking for you? Do we need some friction in our lives to become better humans? Could curiosity become the most important survival skill of the twenty first century? Are we heading into an age of abundance? And what happens when abundance creates its own psychological problems? Today we sit down with Stephen Kotler to discuss his new book with Peter Diamandez called We Are As Gods. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our brains look the way they do. It's amazing being a human being in the twenty first century because our brains were built to deal with a world that was small enough to understand.

1:18Speaker 1:For most of human history, almost everything that mattered was somewhere nearby. Your food was close, your family was right there, the people who could help you were all within earshot, and the dangers that you needed to worry about were just around you, and the rate of change was slow enough that the world your parents grew up in was essentially identical to yours. That's the kind of environment in which human brains learned to operate. That's where they learned to notice opportunities and threats and to make predictions from the past. That's where they learned everything about staying alive.

1:58Speaker 1:But then we we ended up just in the last second of evolutionary time. We ended up building a world that looks very different, such that now some event happens on the other side of the planet and it arrives in your pocket in one second or in just a few years. Some technology goes from a lab curiosity to something that billions of people use. Or just think about the fact that you use a little magic rectangle in your pocket to write essays, or translate human languages, or create paintings that never existed, or tutor you in any topic.

2:39Speaker 1:And the list just keeps going, and the pace just keeps accelerating. A friend of mine just returned from a big AI conference in Las Vegas, and he said that half the vendors there were walking dead, by which he meant that in the five months that transpired between the companies signing up for the conference and actually going to the conference. The AI world had evolved so much that their companies no longer made sense, for example, because OpenAI or Anthropic was now doing the thing that the company was doing. So what happens when an environment changes faster then the brain can change. Brains change on the scale of thousands or millions of years, and the pace of our technology change, especially now, is on the scale of months.

3:28Speaker 1:So this is what we're going to talk about today. So let's start with how we think about technology. We generally talk about tech as a collection of tools like smartphones and AI and biotech and robotics and so on. But there's another way to think about it. Every one of these technologies we invent changes the environment in which our three pound brains operate. The smartphone changes what information reaches us. The Internet changes the scale of our social world from a village to a planet. AI changes the amount of cognitive work that we can get done in today.

4:08Speaker 1:Social media changes the number of things that we can pay attention to, and abundant energy changes what we are able to build. So every one of these technologies creates new possibilities for the mind, and it also creates new demands on the mind. So now we have a peculiar situation. A biological system designed for one kind of world is suddenly living inside another. And there are all kinds of questions that pop up, like what happens to memory when we can retrieve anything almost instantly, what happens to creativity when machines can generate an endless stream of ideas, what happens when we are constantly exposed to threats, what happens when useful friction disappears from our lives? And what parts of being human become more important as technology becomes more capable.

5:09Speaker 1:So now, especially with AI changing everything about knowledge and creativity, this all gives us an extraordinary opportunity, and it also creates a psychological challenge because, as I talk about all the time on this podcast, our brains are prediction machines. We build models of the future from our experience of the past, and that works pretty well when the future resembles the past. But exponential change, like what we're living through now, exponential change creates a situation where our predictions are terrible. We can't accurately see around the corner to next year, because from now on the future is probably always going to violate our predictions. The familiar landmarks that help us orient ourselves through time, These are all shifting fast, and when prediction becomes difficult, the brain tends to become more vigilant. It narrows its attention and starts looking for threats, and it clings more tightly to the things that are familiar.

6:13Speaker 1:This is one reason the psychology of technological change matters so much. The challenges of the modern world are taking place in the nervous system of each one of us. But as we'll hear about today, there may be an intriguing possibility here, and that involves understanding some of the brain's oldest mechanisms more deeply, like attention and curiosity and challenge and meaning. And one thing we'll talk about today is the state of flow. If you don't know what that is, stick around for a few minutes, because today we're going to talk with one of the world's experts on flow, someone who spent much of his career thinking about the past and future of human performance. Stephen Kotler is an author and journalist, a researcher, and the founder of the Flow Research Collective. He studies flow and creativity and performance and what happens when human beings operate at the edge of their capabilities. Stephen has written seventeen books, and his latest one is called We Are As Gods, which he co authored with Peter diamandis. We're going to hear more about that title in a moment. I sat down to interview Stephen at the Human plus Tech Week,

7:24Speaker 1:which is a wonderful conference hosted by our friend Nicole Bradford, and Stephen and I discussed everything from AI to how to preserve our human capacity for thought and creativity. Here's my conversation with Steven Kottler. All right, well, Steven is great to see you again, old friend. We're gonna talk about your book here. We're here in San Francisco, which is where Stuart Brand lives, who is one of the godfathers of Silicon Valley, and he made a statement in nineteen sixty eight about our relationship with technology. What was the statement, What does it mean?

8:01Speaker 2:In sixty eight Stuart Brand said, we are as gods and we might as well get good at it. He was talking about technology and in nineteen sixty eight, godlike technology was a little ways away. Today it's a remarkably different story, which is where the title comes from.

8:20Speaker 1:And so when we think about gods, we think about omniscients and omnipresence and creation, inscruction, and resurrection. What are humans given by the current technology that makes us godlike?

8:32Speaker 2:So let's just use the terms. We don't call it omnisciens. We call it Google or chetch ebt. We don't call it omnipresence. We call it zoom. But the technologies and the capabilities are the same. In fact, at the start of the book, we took the Bible, the Old Testament. There are eighty three miracles in the Bible. They break down into ten categories. If you run modern technology through those ten categories, we ended up with twelve pages of single space technology. There's six pages in the book because I cut it in half. It was just too much.

9:06Speaker 2:But the best example, I think is the Science Corporation, which is going after macular degeneration blindness.

9:15Speaker 3:Curing blindness is a biblical miracle.

9:18Speaker 2:Macular degeneration is a disease that affects one hundred and seventy million people, and we've now got a technological cure for maculator.

9:25Speaker 3:That's a miracle of biblical re work.

9:28Speaker 1:So we've got this godlike technology. But really one of the central problems is that the development of these tools has outstripped the pace of our psychology. So we're stuck with stone age brains and godlike tools. So is that the central problem?

9:43Speaker 2:Yeah, the central problem is our brains evolved in a local and linear world. Local meaning everything that was roughly a day's walk away. Linear, The rate of change was really slow. So your great grandfather's life was the same as his great granddather's life today. The world global and exponential. Global if it happens on the other side of the world, we hear about it milliseconds later, and exponential meaning the ry to change is so fast. Day to day is often very different, and the brain was just not built for this speed or this scale.

10:13Speaker 1:So you and your co author Peter Demandus have written in the past about abundance, and abundance is a big part of this book as well. What do you see as the strongest evidence that we're moving from a world of scarcity to abundance.

10:26Speaker 2:So in twenty twelve, when Peter and I first wrote Abundance, the promise was, Hey, there are these ten technologies that are now advancing and exponential growth curves, and they should soon give us the ability to me and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. And everybody said we were wrong. Everybody said we were wrong. Right, And it's twelve years later, and just here are a handful of numbers of what's happened in the past ten years.

10:51Speaker 2:Two hundred million people have escaped extreme poverty. It's the largest reduction in poverty in history of the world. A billion people gained access to fresh drinking water, two billion people getting access to ilestricity. And depending on how you work the numbers on the spread of smartphones, five or six billion people got access to compute and communications technology.

11:13Speaker 1:Beautiful. And so when we think about abundance, we don't mean people have any more stuff. We mean more optionality, more agency, things like that.

11:20Speaker 2:Right, I think abundance when Peter and I were first thinking about it is, you know, is a world where we obviously we meet everybody's basic needs, but it's a world where everybody can go after their dreams at least has the basic capabilities to give it a shot. That's what I think Peter and I were both thinking a lot about.

11:39Speaker 1:And when you think about abundance, where's that most visible to you? Is that in compute, energy, education, medicine. Where do you see it the most?

11:47Speaker 2:I think it's most compute is really obvious smartphones are There are more smartphones on the planet than there are people right now, right so it's like one and a half smartphones for every personal planet at this point. That's a massive amount of computing power. If you measure sort of the value density in a smartphone. Back when we wrote Abundance, if you look at the smartphone, I hit about a million dollars worth of technology GPS and encyclopedias and whatever. Today it's about seven point three million dollars worth of technology. So if you think about it, six billion people just got access to seven million dollars worth of technology in their pockets.

12:30Speaker 3:That's incredible.

12:31Speaker 1:And actually, this is one of the things that makes me so optimistic because cell phones were touted just like all new technologies, Oh maybe only the rich people will have it, but that proved not to be true. It's spend around the world very rapidly.

12:43Speaker 2:One of the interesting things about a lot of these technologies that were really supposed to stay walled off. The classic example, and my co author Peter likes to say this, if you came to somebody three years ago and said, hey, I'm going to have this technology that's going to be able to it's going to write pretty well, it's going to be able to answer most questions. And if you were just describe AI to them and say, okay, how much are you going to pay for this?

13:05Speaker 3:How much do you think this is going to be worth?

13:07Speaker 2:Right, it's thousands of dollars a month that you're willing to and it's free. We've made not only is intelligence maybe one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of the world, but it's available to everybody.

13:17Speaker 1:Awesome. Okay, so I want to return to some of the themes of your book. Let's return to this idea about stone age brains in a high tech world. We evolved. For example, detecting threat is very important. But now what does it mean that we're detecting threat all the time with our news feeds or job displacement or graphs of climate change or so on. How does our brain deal with this?

13:37Speaker 3:Yes, this is interesting.

13:38Speaker 2:This I called this exponential leadership syndrome because I started first seeing it in leaders and now it seems to be everybody else. And it's so the human brain. We evolved in an era of scarcity and information was scarce. Right, the first record we have of anybody who tried to count up the amount of information in the world, it was Buckminster Fuller. And in three thousand, which is the very first year, we have writing, so things are being written down. We create about of gigabytes worth of data. Right, that's not what the brain evolved the process. It probably evolve for a little bit less, but that's what we have.

14:12Speaker 2:This is the first year. Last year we created one hundred and eighty one zeta bytes.

14:17Speaker 3:Worth of information.

14:19Speaker 2:We went from one thousand books or four thousand books. That's about a gigabyte if they're three hundred page books too. I think it's equadrillon trillion books in a single year. The bandwidth of attention is still one hundred and eighty bits wide, and working memory can hold four concepts. So we're suffering from a massive amount of information overload. It automatically leads to cognitive overload. It fills out the brain and you have trouble thinking. That goes immediately into what I think a lot of us are feeling, choice paralysis.

14:46Speaker 2:We no longer know how to pick because there's too much stuff coming at us. Choice paralysis leads into a really interesting set of circumstances. You start to get meaning drift, so things no longer mean what they used to mean, and I think a lot of us are feeling that are lo lives. Meaning drift starts to lead to skills erosion. Creativity goes away, resilience goes away. This leads directly to burnout, which is why burnout is now at an epidemic proportion.

15:11Speaker 2:I think we're all feeling this and this is just information overload. We can go into what you were talking about, which is threat detection everything.

15:17Speaker 3:Else, but we'll just stop there.

15:19Speaker 1:Good. And this is related to something which is I know this is a problem that you've thought about a lot, which is when we look at an exponential future, we're very bad at modeling that looks more like chaos to us. And in part that's because our brains are all about prediction, but we're limited. We have very limited eternal models. When the world's going like that, we're constantly bouncing off with incorrect predictions. Is that why? Yeah?

15:40Speaker 2:I mean, you know, we have the brain as a prediction engine and it can only use priors. It uses past experience to predict the future. And almost everything we deal with is linear. It's very and humans are terrible at trackie exponentials. We have no eye, we have very little idea on how to do it. In fact, like when you when I work with entrepreneurs and we're working on your performance, one of the things that we help them do is track exponentials. This is how you think in exponentials because it's difficult for youmans to do.

16:09Speaker 1:And there's another reason we're bad at seeing that, and that has to do with cognitive biases, the way our brains are built. Tell us about that.

16:16Speaker 2:So I think this is particularly dangerous in the modern world. First of all, as you said, most of us at this point are hyper vigilant, right, We're taking in way too much information and the brain's getting afraid and it's collapsing in on itself. Threat detection kills curiosity. It makes us logical and linear.

16:35Speaker 3:Right.

16:35Speaker 2:The more fear in our system, the more the brain wants to be tried, true, safe and secure. Give me something that worked one thousand percent of the time. We also have loss of version. Loss of version is the idea that whatever is coming, it's going to be worse than what I already have, right, so don't take away what I've got because we have a negativity bias. The number is weird, and I don't think this is a real science fact, but the metaphor is, we take a nine bit of negative information for every positive bit that gets through under normal conditions, and when threat detention gets cranked up, that ratio changes. And you've got to remember we're only conscious as one hundred and twenty bits wide.

17:12Speaker 2:So if you're getting nine bits of negative for every one bit of positive that's getting through, and then you have a negativity bias making that worse, you're not getting a whole lot of new information.

17:22Speaker 1:And negativity bias, of course, is so important because that's the stuff that's important to pay attention to. Yeah, okay, so it's very hard to see the future. So something that you've been studying for many years is this concept of flow. So tell us what flow is and tell us why it can serve as an antidote to future shock.

17:38Speaker 2:So flow, as most of you guys know, is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, everything else just starts to disappear. Time will pass strangely. Usually it speeds up. Just gets so sucked into what you're doing. An hour goes by, and what feels like five seconds, and throughout all aspects of performance mental, physical, and emotional tend to skyrocket.

18:04Speaker 3:So there's a bunch of really big deals here.

18:07Speaker 2:One of the easiest ones is when we move into flow, the brain pushes basically all the stress hormones out of our system, so it resets the nervous system, so that hypervigilance, that threat detection that we're feeling.

18:20Speaker 3:Flow calms that down. First of all.

18:23Speaker 2:It also, and this is not our research for McKinsey did a ten year study of top executives and flow.

18:28Speaker 3:The world is speeding up, it's hard to keep up.

18:31Speaker 2:They found the top executives and flow on average, and this was a ten year study. They went around the globe, talked to tens of thousands, of people, but it was self reported, so you always got to take that with a grain of salt. But on average, people reported being five hundred percent more productive in flow. The Department of Fence and DARPA looked at soldiers in flow. They learned two hundred and thirty percent faster than normal. So you've got heightened productivity, accelerated learning, and massively amplified creativity. These are are all core skills for keeping up in the twenty first century. Flow amplifies all of them. I think the biggest one is meaning. Drift is a real problem today.

19:11Speaker 2:Meaning is being eroded very quickly, and flow underpins happiness, well being, overall, life satisfaction, meaning and purpose. And this is some new work. But flow overwrites burnout. We'll overwrite PTSD and it's neuroprotective. Does an overwrite If it's neuroprotective against anxiety and depression by holy disorder, I could go on the giant mental health plague that's going on right now. Flows the only thing that can there's no pill, there's no protocol that does what flow can do. And the really cool thing is there's nothing to sell. This is built in, like everybody can get into flow. It's a built in feature of being human. So the antidote that we need to the modern world comes built in, which is remarkably good use.

20:12Speaker 1:So this can help calm our nervous system in a rapidly changing world. Something I think about a lot is in an age of abundance, there's so much information coming in, so much stimulation. How do we make sure that world doesn't overwhelm us and that we can find our way into something calming.

20:30Speaker 3:It's an interesting question.

20:31Speaker 2:So one thing I want to say, and the book definitely talks a lot about this. We are moving towards in a world of abundance, but we're also seeing the dark side of abundance. Right.

20:39Speaker 3:We have an abundance amount of cheap food. It's led to an abundance of obesity.

20:45Speaker 2:We have an abundance of computing technology and communication technologies. Social media has led to the largest mental health crisis in history. We have an abundance of energy. We also have an abundance of carbon in the atmosphere. So there's a dark side to abundance, right, and that's starting to show up as well. And I think we're seeing both sides of the coin, and we're having to deal with both at once.

21:08Speaker 1:Yeah. So now, one of the things you argue in the book is that a lot of people feel that the future is something that is happening to them, and you campaign for a shift into agencies. So what does that look like in the ear?

21:20Speaker 3:Yeah, so this is I see this a lot with AI.

21:22Speaker 2:I hear it a lot when people talk about AI. They talk about AI coming for their jobs. They talk about AI as if it's something that's happening to them rather than something that humans are creating. And I think you hear this a lot with exponential technology, robots or what's are coming for a job, all these things. What they do is they give up agency you're creating. And what's known in psychology as an external locus to control. Right, an internal locus and control is I control my life.

21:49Speaker 2:I control where I'm going and what I can do. Once you have an external locus control, you have a victim mindset. And the difficulty with a victim mindset is your brain is an efficient engine. It always wants to save energy. So if you decide that I've got no power here, there's nothing I can do to affect the situation, your brain won't even bother to give you the energy to try. Right, forget about getting it to flow. You're just not even going to get into the fight because your brain doesn't want to. It's not going to waste energy on motivation if you can't win. And so if you are constantly thinking AI is happening to you rather than it's something that we're actually creating, if you give up that energy energy, you're giving up all your power in this equation.

22:34Speaker 1:One of the things I think about a lot is this issue about the capabilities that we're going to lose, not only because of things like memory outsourcing and hard problem that's sourcing, but more generally just friction. We get rid of a lot of friction, then the question is do we need friction to better ourselves as humans?

22:51Speaker 3:Yeah, this is one of the things that we talk a lot about in We Are as Gods.

22:55Speaker 2:You can't erase challenge from the equation for a bunch of reasons. One, you need to challenge for learning, right, you need challenge for flow. One of the classic flow triggers is known as a challenge skills balance. Flow always follows focus, and we pay the most attention to the task it hand. When the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. Right, that's one of flow's made triggers. Flow underbins happiness and well being, meaning and purpose. So if you start to erase challenge, you start to erase learning and flow and meaning and happiness and well being.

23:28Speaker 2:And I think it's really in all these situations you want to put challenge back into the equation.

23:32Speaker 1:So what would you tell to some kid about how to make it so that AI enhances them rather than atrophies.

23:39Speaker 2:Then, so there's a I have a couple rules for working with AI that are really important. The first, the one I'll I always like to start with is if you're working with AI and you want to maintain humanity, the first thing to do is always write and think first. Never start, Never let the machines start. We have associated, right, so our brains are built to link.

24:02Speaker 3:At ideas to ideas to ideas.

24:04Speaker 2:If the AI comes up with the first idea, you've literally locked your brain out of the equation. You can no longer collaborate to your full extent. You've locked your creativity out, you've locked out your associative quarters. You basically locked out the whole generative creative process, and the AI is literally doing the thinking for you.

24:21Speaker 3:So you always want to.

24:22Speaker 2:Write first, use the AI for feedback, use it to stress test things.

24:28Speaker 3:But you don't want to start. You have to start the thinking.

24:31Speaker 1:Oh, excellent, and how do you think about flow and the world that you see as being a community issue.

24:38Speaker 2:All of my books with Peter started because each of us were trying to solve a problem. Peter was looking at sort of the evidence for abundance and stuff. I laid out the two hundred million people, the reductions of poverty, and he was looking at the negativity in the world, and the evidence for abundance is saying, this doesn't match at all, Like the world is getting People think it's getting worse and worse, and the evidence shows that actually the world is getting better and better. Peter was trying to solve I was looking at all the dark side of abundance is the challenge of abundance, and I was looking at the question of cooperation at scale. All of the biggest problems that we have in the world today, whether it's rogue AI or manufactured pandemics or environmental disaster, there are things that can only be solved by cooperation at scale, right, we have to be able to cooperate like that ever before. And interestingly, that was a nonsensical idea pre COVID, and then COVID happened, and for the very first time, we cooperated globally without a war or a sporting event. Normally, the only time we cooperate all

25:40Speaker 2:together is if there's a war a sporting event. Right, But suddenly we cooperated like em before and you can, however, you want to come out on the side of the vaccines, fine, we got global cooperation and we got the fastest vaccine development in history. We've got seventeen different vaccines and that was amazing. So that was the first thing I looked at, like, oh my god, there's proof of concept and it was technologically enabled. The second thing I looked at is and we've been in my lab, we've been working on a lot of this. There are now technologies for cooperation. So we know, for example, brain and trainment synchrony. We're talking together, you know that our brain waves are syncing up. That's brain and trainment. It's a precursor to group flow. Group flow is the technology Nature invented for cooperation at scale.

26:25Speaker 2:We have a term for it, communitos is group flow at scale. Right when you go to rock concert, everybody's clapping in the music and merged and won.

26:32Speaker 3:That's communitos. We understand what the precursors are.

26:36Speaker 2:So we now have the technology to boost cooperation at scale. We have the technology to cooperate at scale, and we have evidence that we can do this.

26:47Speaker 3:So that was the thing I was looking at.

26:49Speaker 2:And flow because flow amplifies cooperation and collaboration. It fills you with all the pro social bonding chemicals. Right, if you have ever taken an organization when you go to a do a row course that you're trying to get everybody into flows to heighten social bonding, right, it does that very quickly.

27:06Speaker 3:We have technologies for that now.

27:08Speaker 2:So that was the stuff I was looking at, and that gives me the most hope for the future.

27:14Speaker 1:Is Wow.

27:15Speaker 2:The thing we need to solve this problem is we need to be able to cooperate at scale, and we've got the technology is to surround that problem for the first time in history.

27:22Speaker 1:Excellent. And so one of the things you write about is that abundance without meaning, which we touched on. That's dangerous. So what human capacities. Would you want to really work on everybody enhancing in themselves so we don't end up with that. Yeah.

27:39Speaker 2:I think a couple of mentioned this today, But I think skills that were soft skills in the twentieth century, whether it's focused and attention, meaning, creativity, all these things that were soft skills, they're mandatory in the twenty first And one of the main reasons is they're how we make meaning right, and they're how we make meaning is the byproduct of combining hard work, meaningful work towards a purpose with flow.

28:08Speaker 3:Right.

28:08Speaker 2:The best we get to feel on the planet is a purpose driven life. And what that is a high flow lifestyle where the thing that's driving you into flow is aligned with a cause greater than yourself. This is where meaning comes from. This is how we manufacture, and I think in the twenty first century we have to lean into it. We have to really constantly be making meaning for ourselves because the world's eroding it.

28:29Speaker 1:And when you think about abundance, what's your nightmare scenario and what's your best case scenario?

28:35Speaker 2:You know, I don't know if I have an easy answer for this. Peter, my co author, has a good one, and I'm going to give you his He thinks about it in terms of the star trek versus the matrix. He thinks we either like double down on curiosity, we boldly go purpose and curiosity versus the matrix where we just sort of plug in and tune out and live inside the simulation.

28:58Speaker 1:Okay, last one, and then we'll wrap, which is yeah. So, if you were advising a twelve year old kid who's just growing up into this world about what is the important thing to cultivate, what would that be?

29:10Speaker 2:I stress I emphasize curiosity, but I emphasized curiosity for a really psychologically stabilizing reason. Curiosity is how we take information over letteringly, how we take novelty in and we dial down the threat response with curiosity. That's exactly how you neutralize the threat response in the face of so much novelty which is coming at us. So to me, that's the fundamental life skill in the twenty first century. If you can't lead with curiosity, you're going to get hid in the live by the technology.

29:40Speaker 1:All Right, congratulations on the new book, Stephen. That was my conversation with Stephen Kotler so in nineteen sixty eight, when Stuart Brand said we are as gods and we might as well get good at it. At the time he said it, it was a provocation and about technology in the future. But I think it's fair to say that now it feels more like a description of our daily lives. We have acquired capabilities that previous generations described, as Steven said in mythological terms, we have instant planetary communication.

30:17Speaker 1:We create images from sentences, We can see inside the human body that we can edit biological systems, we can summon information on anything instantly. And now our machines are doing cognitive work that is so sophisticated and sometimes not even understandable by us. And given that we've only taken the first few steps on this road so far, we're really just starting to figure out what these capabilities are going to mean. In other words, what happens to this animal species us when our technological abilities come to so vastly outstrip our biological abilities. Stephen and I mentioned that when the environment changes exponentially, our predictive internal models struggle to keep up. The world is accelerating at a tremendous rate while our nervous systems still process reality. One moment at a time. That may be one of the central psychological problems of the coming decades. We are building environments that operate at machine speed while inhabiting bodies that operate at biological speed, and this gives us a fascinating challenge.

31:28Speaker 1:We tend to think of the future as a technological problem, like what should we build next? But there's another category of question that's just as important. What kind of nervous system do we want to bring into that future? What happens to our attention and our curiosity and our memory and our creativity when machines generate endless possibilities, And what happens to motivation when we remove most of the obstacles that force us to develop skills. The central issue is that a lot of human behavior is shaped by the constraints that we evolved in, like limited calories and limited information and limited time, and limited relationships and limited physical abilities and opportunities. So here's an example of this. We developed reward systems that make food desirable because food was scarce.

32:22Speaker 1:We developed attention systems that prioritize unusual events because information was limited. We developed motivation systems that push us towards goals because accomplishing things required effort. We developed social systems that help us cooperate because we're physically vulnerable when we're alone, and we developed extraordinarily sophisticated learning systems because the environment demanded that. We needed that kind of mental flexibility to absorb what was going on. Now, a lot of those constraints are changing. Information is abundant, communication is abundant, choice is abundant. Energy and material resources are becoming abundant. Now, abundance sounds like an unqualified good, but Stephen made the important point during our conversation that abundance can generate its own problems. An abundance of food can produce health problems, an abundance of information can produce cognitive overload, an abundance of stimulation can make sustained attention difficult, an abundance of computational power can create new forms of dependence, and an abundance of choice can make choosing harder. So this is

33:45Speaker 1:so wild through an evolutionary lens, because for essentially all of human history, this central problem was getting enough, and increasingly the central problem is knowing what to do with enough. That is a very different psychological challenge. And it brings us back to the idea of agency. One of the most important things that Steven emphasized is the difference between experiencing technology is something that is happening to you and experiencing technology is something you can actively shape. We require a sense that our actions matter. We need goals and challenges and opportunities to learn. We need to direct our attention towards things that are meaningful, And to my mind, the most important thing for us to remember in an age when technology can make almost everything easier is that there's always a temptation to remove obstacles. We try to make everything instant, like information bang and communication and transportation and creation. We try to make work faster and generally remove all the friction. Now, there can be a lot of value in that, but there's also something worth protecting

34:59Speaker 1:in the experience of having to struggle with a problem long enough for your brain to change. Learning requires effort, skill requires repetition. Creativity often requires staying with a problem through periods of uncertainty. Meaning often emerges from sustain commitment. So the way I've been thinking about this lately is that there are two types of friction. We should be making a distinction between there's vicious friction and virtuous friction.

35:34Speaker 1:Vicious friction is all the time wasting stuff we do, and if computers and robots can take care of that, awesome, But virtuous friction is the stuff that forces the brain to develop. It's the hard problems that we tackle that lead to useful changes in the configuration of our neural networks. This is where the brain develops, and so I think this increasingly is one of the great design problems of the future. We are building machines that remove obstacles, but we have to decide which obstacles we actually want removed.

36:09Speaker 1:We're going to be able to outsource huge portions of memory and calculation and navigation and writing and planning and decision making, and that could free us up for extraordinary things. But it could also change the skills we practice. And the reason this matters is because whatever the brain practice is, it becomes better at This is the heart of brain plasticity. The brain constantly adapts to the demands placed upon it. So as we fall headlong into this future, what are we going to ask our brains to practice? If we spend our days consuming machine generated information, our brains will adapt to that environment. But if we spend our days generating our own ideas and asking questions and exploring and creating and collaborating with machines, our brains will it adapt to that environment. And this is why I loved Stephen's suggestion about AI, which is do your own thinking first, start with your own ideas, and then bring the machine into the process. So this brings us back to the title of Stephen and Peter's book, We Are As Gods.

37:18Speaker 1:I've always found Stuart Brand's quotation very sobering because obviously, having godlike tools does not automatically give us godlike wisdom, just like having access to a huge sea of information does not automatically give us understanding, and just like having extraordinary power does not automatically give us good judgment. So our new tools are not going away, and the challenge for us is to try to be smart about how we plan our relationship with tech. The machines will just keep getting better. Our job is to figure out what we want our minds to become. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.

38:06Speaker 1:Join the weekly discussions on my substack and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.