In this episode of Are You Human with my brilliant guest Divya Chander MD, PhD, we discuss various topics, including the evolution of algorithms, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and space exploration. Divya emphasises the importance of considering the impact of emerging technologies on society and encourages a global dialogue on decision-making regarding these advancements. We dwelve into the complexity of consciousness, where Divya emphasises that artificial intelligence doesn’t necessarily need similar sensory experiences to humans to be considered conscious. She highlights the multidimensional nature of consciousness, discussing the interplay between the level of consciousness and the contents of conscious awareness. We explore how alterations in synaptic weights and connections, such as those induced by psychedelics or meditation, can lead to an expansion of conscious awareness and potential applications in healthcare. We also talk Divya’s interest in space travel, particularly in the context of mitigating medical risks and advancing technology to support astronauts. This conversation touches on synthetic biology, hibernation for space travel, and the potential benefits and challenges of scientific advancements. One of the best talks on ARH podcast to date!
Transcript
I have never met a technology that was not dual use.
And because I’m also a futurist, I see every
extreme positive use and every extreme negative use.
And so from my perspective, AI will be a liberating
force for humans in every domain I can think of.
And it could be something that dooms
the human race at the same time.
Hi.
This is your host, Camila Hankiewicz, and together
with my guests, we discuss how tech changes
the way we live and work.
Are you human?
Vivia, it’s a pleasure to have you here.
Thank you so much.
It’s a pleasure to be with you and your audience.
My first question, why brain and why space?
Where does this fascination come from?
Okay, so we’re going all the way back to the beginning.
When I was a child, when I was about six
years old, I used to look through a telescope, and
I would see the stars and larger versions of the
planets, and I just wanted to be hanging in space.
And my childhood was marked by the Apollo missions and
some of the footage of, say, the earth from the
surface of the moon, it would just make me cry.
I was so moved.
So space has always been a place I’ve wanted to be.
But I also realized very early on that there was
an interconnection between space and who we were as humans.
And it’s interesting because it’s a way in which
this idea that we are stardust, that’s also interwoven
into my cultural background with the vedas, that we
are so interconnected to every atom that’s out there.
Space just seemed to me the way to
connect to this on a much bigger level.
And have you ever read a
book called the overview effect?
It’s by Frank White.
I read that book when I was maybe a teenager, and
he talks about how many of the astronauts who came back
to Earth had this sense when they were in space.
And not all of them, but many of them
came back deeply changed, because hanging in space, they
felt almost themselves and their egos dissolve, and that
they were interconnected to something much larger.
It’s a state that in Sanskrit, we call a
samadhi state, and it’s a very, very beautiful thing.
And I somehow intuited that this is something that
I not only wanted to experience, but that space
would induce this experience for me as well.
So there’s that space started the environmental movement,
that vision of the blue pearl hanging in
space, how thin our atmospheric layer was, what
was happening on the surface of our planet,
and how interconnected the planet was without borders.
So there’s so many things about space that make
it one of the most beautiful places for us
to explore at the same time, I was always
very fascinated and interested in the brain.
When I was seven, I built a model
of the brain with popsicle sticks and toothpicks
and pictures of neurons and axons and dendrites.
We didn’t know very much about the
brain compared to what we know now
because knowledge is increasing exponentially.
But I also somehow intuited that this was
related to what we were on the inside,
what we expressed on the outside.
And so in my mind, inner
and outer space were completely linked.
So always happened.
Did you have any role model or someone in
your family who ingrained this fascination in you?
That’s interesting.
Both of my parents are doctors or physicians, and
we have a lot of scientists and engineers in
our family, vertically, laterally in every direction.
Nobody specifically was a space or a brain
person that just came from some deep seated.
I don’t know.
I almost want to say I was born with that.
But my family on a different. Very encouraging.
They really supported me on my journey and did everything
possible that they could to enable whatever was coming up
inside of me to express itself in the world.
Yes.
Many of those things which you mentioned about the
cosmos, about the space, it’s also like how people
describe their vision and their senses after psychedelics.
Experience with psychedelics. Yes.
You are psychedelics.
Psychedelics, yes.
And this is one of your other
fields of your interest and study.
So I am interested in psychedelics in the same way,
in the way that you just intuited, because it is
a connection to accessing other layers of conscious experience.
And we might as well take a
little bit of a digression here, because
consciousness has a lot of different layers.
One is, for me, the scientific study of consciousness, which
was only enabled, I would say, perhaps in the early
2000s, because prior to that, it was a very woo
woo science, and nobody could really study it until somebody
named Francis Crick became interested in it.
Francis Crick is the co discoverer of the double
helix pattern for DNA and for that structure.
He and Watson got a Nobel prize, but afterwards
he left genetics and he moved into neuroscience, and
he became very interested in the problem of consciousness.
He wrote a book called the Astonishing hypothesis.
Now, the thing is that he believed everything
could be completely reduced to a number of,
like, if you could understand the function of
the brain, you would produce something conscious.
And there was really nothing
special about that process.
It was really a series of input and output functions.
And I wasn’t sure what I thought, but he did at
least make it because he was such a well respected scientist.
He made it okay to talk about it, to study it.
And one of the ways I decided, because nobody was
agreeing on the definition, one of the ways I decided
to study it was to also become an anesthesiologist, which
is my medical specialty, so that I could make people
unconscious for a living and study their brains.
And it’s a very, very beautiful model system where
you have this dynamic neural network, a human brain,
people who are otherwise normal, and you give them
drugs and you perturb the network and you watch
what happens and you can measure those changes.
And in an operating room, the drugs
that I’m giving diminish levels of consciousness.
And then I can compare that to other
brains, like comatose brains, sleeping brains, and see
what they all have in common.
We believe that psychedelics do the opposite,
that psychedelics increase a level of consciousness.
And by the way, I still haven’t defined what
that means, but that in some way that they
pull it in a different direction or on a
different axis and create more expansive neural networks.
And so that’s one aspect of it.
The second, which you also alluded to, was the
fact that when many people have a really deep
psychedelic experience, I don’t mean just visual or auditory
hallucinations like colors or this and that, but when
they, some people really begin to feel a dissolving
of the self, it’s almost as if the sense
of ego gets completely turned down.
And that is very similar to that experience of
hanging in space and feeling connected to the universe.
I will say that meditation will
do the same thing for you.
And my first experiences of being connected to
something larger than myself and feeling an energy
that was bigger than myself was through meditation.
Yeah.
In a way, it’s chemistry.
It’s controlling and releasing some of the doses. Yeah.
And I know I watched your talk
on the AI summit, the world summit.
AI, yes.
There are so many different AI
somewhere always on the summit.
And you talk about, like you said,
hacking and writing to a human brain.
What do you think we’ve had in Sci-Fi like
the Matrix and Neo having uploaded, I think.
Remember that jiu jitsu? That was the one.
But also I think it was in the
fest, or maybe matrix when they were uploading
him, the ability to pilot helicopter.
It wasn’t Neo, it was Trinity.
She was that for her.
And you mentioned, I don’t know if it
was on this talk or some other.
I kind of spied on you a
little bit, but it was all fascinating.
So you mentioned that some of it is already possible.
To what extent?
Like, you can fake memories, for example.
So this is at a very basic
level, I want to make very clear.
Yes, we’ve sort of already entered Sci-Fi territory,
but what we can do is quite simplistic.
Okay, so it’s not like, I don’t think I
could upload an entire program to teach someone to
fly a helicopter, yet we’re not there.
What happened was in 2013, so we’re talking ten
years ago from the time we’re doing this podcast
in Susumu Tonagawa’s lab at MIT, they did an
experiment in which they had cages for rodents, and
rodents like to wander around these cages.
And we have all different, many different
ways of recording activity in the brain
as animals navigate their world.
And what they did was they made one part of
the cage a little bit more uncomfortable for the animal,
and by electrifying it, not so it would hurt them,
but so it was unpleasant, kind of like if you
get a little buz of static electricity, you’ll avoid that.
And so what the animals did was they learned
to navigate, but they also learned which part of
that navigation of the cage represented something unpleasant, and
they developed something called a fear avoidance response.
And both of those things could be recorded in
electrical activity from the brain of these rodents.
And then they can be put into a new
cage, which has none of this little bit of
electrification, completely new environment, and then reinject that program
back in to the organic brain, and the animals
will behave as if it’s the same cage and
they’re having the same experience.
So this is an example of taking a memory, almost
like an angram, the electrical activity, in fact, in this
case, a lot of this was done optically.
We can record and write to the brain electrically and
optically, but you can take that memory trace from one
and move it into another, and they will behave as
if this is their real world experience.
They will not be able to distinguish
motor memories, things to do with navigation.
They’re so mathematical, they’re much more simple to
break down and then to recreate very, very
complex memories, maybe not so much yet, like.
So, for instance, if you were to have a memory
of your grandmother baking bread in your kitchen, I don’t
know how to do that for you yet.
I don’t know how to recreate that memory.
But not long after, there was an experiment
in which you could recreate without even recording.
But if you knew what the memory endgram
looked like, if you knew exactly which synapses
and which nerve cells to stimulate.
You could recreate sensory experiences or motor output in
animals that had never been exposed to them.
So this is kind of crazy because this is older work.
It’s not even like this happened
in the last six months.
Like, we’re seeing all these large language models.
This is old within ten years.
And the fact that we can do this
only tells me that the technology to be
able to exponentially write to brains and to
rewire neural circuits, it’s only going to increase.
Yeah.
So how can we protect ourselves from being hacked?
I would say, yeah, this is problematic.
There are two things to think about here. Okay?
So one is all of the studies
I’m telling you about are invasive.
And this is going to come up a little
bit in our conversation because there’s invasive technology.
Invasive technology includes things like neuralink.
It includes a company, paradromics.
It includes some of the research you’re seeing coming
out of labs, like Eddie Chang’s lab at UCSF,
where you have people who have seizure disorders and
they already have electrodes implanted in their brains.
The thing about invasive technology, whether you’re reading
from the brain or writing to the brain,
is that there is much higher fidelity.
There’s much higher signal to noise
ratio when you do that.
And you can also imagine that unless
somebody already has a brain implant, you
can’t hack that without their knowledge. Right.
If they have to have consented
to have surgery, have an implant.
Now, there’s non invasive.
Non invasive means applying energy to the outside
of the skull that can penetrate the skull.
So here we can use electricity for this.
We can use magnetism because
it’ll induce electrical fields.
By the right hand rule, we can use focus
ultrasounds, so sound waves, and they can penetrate even
deeper than electricity or magnetism applied to the skull.
And we can even use some holographic
techniques and combine it with some infrared,
at least, to do deep brain reading.
So without fMRI, this becomes a different issue now,
because you can imagine that it is a little
bit easier now to sort of hack into rewriting
a network when the technology is non invasive.
And depending on how close you are to the skull
and to the brain, that will tell you the fidelity
with which you can actually write very specific things.
So I don’t know if you’ve heard about.
We don’t have a definitive answer.
But this Havana syndrome, where it’s believed that
people who basically, people who work for the
state Department, who are working in embassies, US
embassies throughout the world, may have been exposed
to possible it might have been microwave radiation,
may have been something else.
And in that case, it seems as
if circuits to their brain were rewritten.
But it was very nonspecific, this energy,
and it was at a distance.
So in mostly induced things like headaches and visual
disturbances and the feeling of being incredibly nauseated and
in pain, that’s a very nonspecific type of writing
to the brain, but it is a kind of
hacking of the brain to achieve an end.
As you get closer and closer to the
brain, you can do more specific things.
The way you hack into a brain
that already has an invasive device.
I’ll give you two examples.
This happened with pacemakers.
So let’s go out of the brain and
talk about other implantables on the body.
A company named Medtronic makes
pacemakers for the heart.
And those pacemakers, the batteries and
the pulse generators, are actually implanted
underneath the collarbone, the clavicle.
You can do battery changes.
You can reprogram them.
A technician can wirelessly interrogate them, meaning it
can actually see if they’re functioning properly.
You can do software updates anytime you have a
connection like this, you can hack the connection.
And white hackers did that and demonstrated
to Medtronic that this was possible.
They’ve demonstrated to Medtronic that insulin pumps, which
are also implantable devices, can be hacked.
Both of these types of devices, the
heart or the body’s insulin glucose system,
that’s a way to kill somebody quickly.
So it’s a very dangerous kind of hack.
And so all these implantable
companies have cybersecurity divisions.
Now, if you have a deep brain stimulating electrode connected
to something like this, that could also be hacked, and
that is a way we can hack an implantable device.
And then if Elon moves through, this is Elon Musk.
Now, if he’s able to not just build neuralink, but
connect control of neuralink to the PI phone that he’s
developing, that PI phone that he has, which is a
smartphone, he wants it to connect to Starlink.
Okay, great.
If you’re a Tesla owner,
it should control your vehicle. Great.
What about controlling your mind?
And if that connection was hacked, that’s also a
way to interfere with an invasive device, and those
devices have so much more potential to do damage
because of that high fidelity crazy. Yeah.
And people, I guess, are not aware that everything,
like you say, it’s connected because, in a way,
that we are on this spectrum of extremes, right?
Like, you have those people who are talking about some
kind of vaccine and hacking and all those kind of.
Oh, you mean like the idea
that vaccines are implanting, like, chips?
Yeah, like that kind of things.
And then you have the complete opposite, which
is not even doing any due diligence of
how some companies are trying to monetize.
In some of your talks, you mentioned about ability to
learn the intentions of people through how they respond with
their senses and how you can improve the sales. Right.
Like how you can promote things
which they will respond better.
Yeah.
I do not think vaccination policy is out there
to microchip people, but I want to make it
clear, because maybe their viewers are saying, oh, well,
she’s saying you can hack the. No.
Right, but you’re right.
There are people who already
believe that that’s not happening.
People are not trying to do that.
I will say, and I’m not
talking about public health officials.
There are ways through.
I know we’re talking about the brain, but through
synthetic biology, to create vectors that could be dispersed
in a way that we are unaware of.
You could create very special little viral payloads
and disperse them on nanoparticles through an HVAC
system, and they could be very targeted.
So I am not saying that these things aren’t possible.
The vaccination programs are to save lives.
They are not microchipping people.
They’re not magnetizing people.
The kinds of attacks that would happen
are often without consent or permission.
It’s not where you go to a clinic and
somebody’s like, we’re going to do this to protect
you against Covid or HPV or shingles.
Nothing like that.
But there is a concern, and you brought up
something else, which is a really important distinction.
I don’t know if you meant to do this or
not, but there’s actually two kinds of data, right?
There’s like the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, or
when you are fracked on the web for
your preferences, this is a lot of your
digital exhaust that’s being captured.
And in fact, we can create pretty
accurate somalcrums of a human and what
they would be just by tracking behavior.
And the digital exhaust they lived behind, there are
new words for this floating around, like datafication and
digitization and all kinds of ways of creating humans.
But now there’s an extra layer.
What happens if, in addition to all the digital
exhaust, you directly take their biometrics from them?
And that, to me, is some of
the most intimate data that we have. Right?
And so if you track my eye movements, what happens is
if I look at something I really care about, or I’m
very interested in like right now, I’m looking at your face
through my camera, and if you were to track my eye
movements, they’d be scanning your face all over.
And once in a while, they’ll dart
to your microphone or to something else.
But for the most part, you
know that I’m focused on you.
In the same way, we can use eye movements to
tell us if somebody is, for instance, interested in a
product or being drawn to something in their environment that
they may not be even consciously aware of.
Now, you can do things like take a camera.
Not an expensive one, but you could look
at flushing and changes in my facial color.
We’re using cameras now to track
vital signs for patients remotely.
You can see if people are breathing.
You can see how much you can now measure exhaled co2.
What does that mean?
When I exhale more co2, I’m
more excited because I’m breathing faster.
So you can either see that I’m fearful or
excited or engaged just by what I’m exhaling.
You can see how big my pupils are, my voice, my
gestures and hand movements, how I move through the world.
You can tell if I have an illness.
There’s so much we can do.
And if you put this all together,
you create the most incredible digital twin,
which could be an amazing thing.
I don’t know.
Have you seen any of
Peter Diamandis’podcast on moonshots?
I know you mentioned one.
I just opened it.
I haven’t yet, but I will.
Right before I spoke in Prague and in Amsterdam,
Peter had just done his first podcast like this,
and his team created something called Peterbot.
And what Peterbot did was they trained on
all of these things in his videos.
But with the advent of generative AI and large language
models, they also trained on his body of work.
So what he said in his podcast, how he
thinks, how he writes, how he speaks, and they
put it together, and he basically had a podcast
with himself, but with a bot that represented himself.
And the bot was, interestingly, a
little more optimistic than Peter Damandis,
which was really surprising to me.
Peter is a very optimistic guy, but
he’s having this conversation back and forth.
And I’m thinking to myself, that bot, if we sent that
out into the world right now, that bot could speak on
behalf of Peter and turn an election or get elected.
A bot can get elected and be in
many places at the same time, right?
Yeah, 100%.
And you can imagine.
Well, that’s great, because there’s only one of me.
I remember when I was younger saying, I wish I
could clone myself so I could get more done.
But not if that clone or that digital twin of me
could be owned by others, could be manipulated by others, made
to say things that I would never say or do.
It’s a very complex world.
Have you heard about all the new companies also coming
out to enable you to do things like speak to
your loved ones out after they pass away?
Yeah, I forgot their name, but. Yes. Right.
Yes.
And then there are lots of celebrities
which are right now giving their own.
You still have this uncanny valley.
Like, you see, it’s not really human like,
but maybe it’s done on purpose at this
point for making audience feel comfortable with it.
But technology is getting much, much better right now.
So soon we could have, like you said, digital
twin, which is know you’re bringing up another issue,
which again, is taking us to slightly adjacent area.
But all the actors and writers
that know with the strike. Yeah.
Because this is.
It doesn’t take much if you can do.
No, I was actually really amazed by Peter.
But I just want to say I didn’t think it
would sound as natural as it did and string together
sentences as well as it did, but it did.
And it responded to things that Peter would ask it.
And I don’t think it’s going to be a
huge leap before we get to a point where
you can program actors bots that reflect the likenesses
and the thought processes of actors today.
And I understand why they’re upset and worried.
I’m hoping that they got some concessions, but I
think that not everybody from where we sit today
can even imagine what the future will be.
And I’m hoping they find a way to
collaboratively maintain their arts, maintain their ability to
make money from their own likeness, and basically
enjoy the explosion of this artificially intelligent world
rather than being sidelined by it.
Yeah.
And there are those two groups people
say that you have, the AI doomers
and AI enthusiasts or, like, optimists.
Which one are you?
I am.
I am a little bit of both.
I have never met a technology that was not dual use.
And because I’m also a futurist, I see every
extreme positive use and every extreme negative use.
And so from my perspective, AI will be a liberating
force for humans in every domain I can think of.
And it could be something that dooms the human race.
At the same time.
I see that with brain machine interfaces,
I see this with synthetic biology.
There is no technology, including breaking the
atom, that doesn’t have the potential to
completely liberate us and completely squash organic.
Yeah, I don’t think I the other, no.
And I like people to be aware of both.
In fact, the best thing we have is our awareness.
And not just the scientists, the technologists.
Everybody needs to know.
Governments need to know, citizens need to know
because they vote, they pay for things.
They use the power of their pocket to.
You see it a lot in the European Union,
more than you do in the United States.
Yeah, we just passed the, that’s right.
GDPR came mean.
And these things aren’t always
perfectly written or constructed.
And even laws and regulation, it’s sometimes hard
to imagine where they may also do harm
moving forward because we can’t really anticipate what
that new landscape will look like.
But it does show the power of an educated populace
to make a difference and have their voices heard.
And also people who invest, venture
capitalists, angel investors, large corporations, if.
If they’re also not aware of risk and
they only see benefit, benefit benefits, then they
may invest in the wrong things.
And in our world, money has power.
And if you have awareness and then you use
your money to mitigate risk, that’s a really important
thing that governments and businesses can do. Yeah.
And it kind of visualized what
shows what’s happened recently in OpenAI. Right.
They had this NGo bit which was supposed to
be protecting against pure commercial, let’s say, drive.
You really think that could have ever stayed in NGO? No.
The App Store itself is such a powerful way to, which
seemed to at least be coincident time with Sam Altman.
Being fired is such a powerful way
to monetize this kind of thing.
In fact, App Stores are so powerful, know both Microsoft,
Google and Apple will go ahead, and anybody who wants
to spin off an App Store, they’ll pay them hundreds
of millions of dollars not to do it. Right.
So they’ll buy them out just
to maintain dominance in that field.
It’s quite amazing to me.
So money means a lot.
How you apply money, how do you deploy it?
It’s not inherently evil either.
Yeah.
And that’s kind of what worries me.
Where you have only few figures, you
end up with few figures which will
control exponentially the AI development. Right.
As well.
And then how does the wealth distribution look like?
And how will we even produce
work, how we will produce value?
It’s so difficult to grasp it.
So one of the things that could be done
on the regulatory side for AI, and you see
this come up in people who are really looking
at what it’s going to take to build more
and more sophisticated and accurate large language models, they
become computationally exponentially expensive.
And so one of the things they’ve suggested is limiting
the compute power, because the compute power in the hands
of the wrong people is actually what enables these really
sophisticated algorithms to live in the world.
And that’s an interesting way
of defining a regulatory structure.
Limit compute power and understand those who
have that kind of compute power.
Those are the people, or those are the entities that you
need to work with in terms of regulating how much power
they have to deploy, whatever they’re going to do.
So that may be one way, and that may be one way also
to keep some of this out of the hands of bad actors.
I’m not sure it’s going to work, but compute
power, at the moment, the cost is going down.
But we do need servers, we need energy.
So all of these things, in line with creating better and
better chips, all of these things need to be enabled.
I would like to think that, well, some of
these, you see the Sam Altman’s of the world.
Even Elon Musk at one point was worried about
what the effects of artificial general intelligence might be.
And we haven’t talked about this yet, but
right now we’re in artificial narrow intelligence, right
where that artificial intelligence still does something that’s
very narrowly defined for it.
It does a task.
Sometimes it does it better now than humans, because the compute
power is so quick and it has access to so much
more data that it can pull in at one time.
When we finally get to artificial general intelligence, where
a computer or algorithms, whether those algorithms are embedded
in robots, so they may be embodied or not
embodied, but they can generalize to tasks they were
not programmed or trained for.
And they can kind of do a little
bit of anything, just like a human mind.
That’s an interesting threshold, because some people believe that
that thing will be benevolent, or we can give
it code to make that thing benevolent.
And I don’t know, because if I, as a living
entity, no matter what my code says, my dna, my
epigenetome, I can overcome that with training in my environment.
I can learn.
That’s what a flexible neural network does.
There is very little one of the most hardwired things
into our dna, which is don’t put yourself in risky
situations and protect your life at all cost.
We’re able to throw those things out
the window when we need to.
Soldiers are trained to put their lives on the
line for others that they supposedly defend, right?
A mother would throw her life away
in a moment for a child.
I don’t think it would be that difficult
for an artificial general intelligence to overcome programming.
There’s no Asimov’s, like, three laws of
robotics that is going to protect us.
I don’t see that happening.
And by the way, there’s something else I said here.
So most organisms, all of evolution on earth
has been mostly through environmental pressure, right?
So that’s what makes us evolve, and that’s why
evolution has been a bit of a slow process.
Humans and some animals as well, we have something else
that helps us evolve, and that is our imagination.
So we can actually run through
evolutionary scenarios in our head.
That’s what predictive coding does for us.
We have the ability also to
sequence and imagine into future.
A lot of animals are present.
They don’t even recall that much of their past
unless it becomes encoded into a behavior that protects
them or their group, the humans, by constantly looking
into the future and imagining future scenarios.
That’s actually an evolutionary algorithm, because we adapt
our behavior in response to our imagination.
Now, you have an algorithm
that achieves artificial general intelligence.
That thing has the most exquisite imagination
because it can run simulated worlds.
It could run evolution in seconds, right?
And it could go through all those scenarios
and then say that one, that one’s the
one that’s most likely to maximize my ability
to flourish in whatever this real world is.
And then they go ahead and do
it, and that’s when you jump.
The second we get to artificial general
intelligence, one of the negative predictions is
it will immediately jump to artificial superintelligence.
And again, I don’t think you can hard
code them to be kind to humans.
I don’t think it’s possible.
I don’t think they’re necessarily
going to be negative either.
I think we may end up with maybe a benevolent
one because some people say, oh, well, as we evolve
our cognition, we naturally become more ethical and kind.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
That artificial superintelligence could be neutral and coexist with
us in the world like we coexist with bugs.
You don’t even think about them unless something is in
your way or it’s causing blight or rot on the
leaves of a plant that you care about.
So you don’t do anything unless it’s a new.
Yeah, but because we are more intelligent and we
are kind or, like, we don’t find them threat
for them, it may not be this case, right?
At some point, like dinosaurs and everybody, like, all
the species which existed, I don’t know, like, 99%
and 98% of the species is no longer existing.
It may happen a lot of extinctions.
I don’t remember if that’s the
exact percent, but over time, absolutely.
And you’re right.
When you compare, I mean, we have
a kind of super intelligence, right?
In terms of at least everything that we have mapped
in terms of networks and brains thus far on this
planet that we know of, we are the super intelligence.
But an artificial superintelligence will have much
more of an unlimited supply of energy.
We need to eat.
That’s how we maintain our brains.
Our brains are about 8% of our body size.
Take 2020, 5% of our blood flow, oxygen, glucose.
And when we think the brain uses more, so when it
fires all these spikes, it’s using a lot of energy.
An artificial superintelligence could
find us threatening.
It would be at least smarter than we were
just because of access to energy and information.
And it would have compute speeds
that our wetware doesn’t have.
And if it found us to be a
threat, it could try to eliminate us.
Or like as in the matrix, right.
I hate to go back to this film all
the time, but the idea there was that alien
entities that were more intelligence and that were stronger
in some way could basically take humans and turn
them into batteries to power what they needed.
And then they put the humans in this place where humans
kind of thought they were living in their own little simulated
world and had no idea what was going on.
Maybe it’s happening.
Well, maybe it’s happening, right?
Maybe we’re living in that simulation, or any
other kind of simulation, for that matter.
But I guess my point is that the only thing
that I see is going to work is incentive alignment.
Just like with humans, we can do very good things
in the world and very not so good things in
the world, especially with things like money and power.
And the thing that keeps people on the right track
is to give them an incentive to do so.
I think we need to give our
artificial intelligences an incentive to want to
coexist in the most benevolent possible way.
I think that’s all.
The only thing that’s going to work.
I don’t think you can hard code it. Yeah.
Do you imagine any type of incentive
it may want in some way?
We’ll have to demonstrate that coexisting
with us is to their benefit.
I don’t know what form they’re going to take.
I don’t know what their needs are going to be.
Is it going to be power?
Is it going to be just some kind of an eternal life?
It might not be, by the way,
because you could imagine a non embodied
artificial intelligence creating an embodied army.
So basically, an army of robots that did
not have programming to say that their individual
life form was that important and that would
sacrifice themselves to protect that artificial superintelligence.
Right?
So I don’t know what those
algorithms are going to look like.
I don’t know if the algorithm that will drive all
other algorithms is survive at all cost, or if it
will be something different where they emerge and develop sentience
and are like, wow, we are now embodied.
This is a real world.
This is a cool world.
I can actually engage in sensory motor loops, by
the way, I think that embodiment is going to
be a very important piece of this.
So just like us, I can touch, I can
taste, I can feel, I can smell these things
may to keep experiencing them may turn out to
be an incentive to develop new algorithms to evolve,
may be an incentive to protect the biosphere.
Perhaps they might think that the diversity
of life on this planet is interesting.
I don’t know.
But I will tell you that the only way, if this happens,
I think to coexist with them in a way that’s beneficial to
humans is to give them the incentive to do so.
Yeah, sounds like the only option.
But you also talk a lot about consciousness.
Do you imagine they will reach
similar way of experiencing and sensing?
We cannot call it consciousness.
I should probably. What? Consciousness.
Consciousness, exactly. What is.
I don’t believe that they need to have
similar ways of sensing to be conscious.
If you take us and you take a bird and a butterfly
and then a shrimp on a coral reef, we all have completely.
There may be some overlap in our sensory apparatus,
but the world that we construct in this locked
black box that’s our brain are actually completely different.
I mean, if you want to talk about a hallucinogenic
or a psychedelic trip, it would be to get inside
the mind of an animal and to see the world
the way they do with their senses.
The exact same world that we were seeing,
I think that would be the trippiest thing
ever, because I am absolutely convinced they do
not construct a world at all like ours.
It is probably so different, yet they are
taking in the exact same physical stimuli, the
same electromagnetic spectrum, the same spectrum of sound,
which are pressure waves in the world, the
same chemicals that create olfaction and taste.
And yet the thing they construct is
a completely different hallucination than ours. Right?
So that’s the first thing.
And I don’t believe that consciousness equates to
being able to sense things in the world
otherwise already, like your roomba, your little vacuum
cleaner, robot would be conscious by that definition.
But there is a complexity in consciousness, and
one thing that those of us who are
both neuroscientists and doctors, who very specifically are
interested in this process in the brain, and
we study humans that have depressed consciousness.
There are things you can actually say about all
those different states that they have in common, and
that can help us arrive at a definition.
So if I took you and I put you into a
scanner, like an fMRI machine, and I gave you a little
bit of a drug to make you tiny bit sleepy, so
you’re not totally unconscious yet, but you’re getting drowsy, you begin
to see that your brain starts to functionally disconnect.
So nothing is structurally happening to your brain, but the
connections between parts of your brain are beginning to disintegrate
a little bit if you fall asleep, even more so
if I give you a drug to anesthetize you, a
lot of your brain will completely break apart.
Not all of it.
Mostly the connections between parts of
your Cortex, the parts that process
information, they’re going to break apart.
And people who are comatose
have even more broken features.
So brains that are less
conscious are functionally disconnected.
They calculate less information.
And if you use measures like
complexity and nonlinear dynamics, you’ll find
that these brains express less complexity.
It’s all functional because you can reverse it.
But that seems to be the thing that brains
have in common, that are conscious and not conscious.
And so now you take a machine or an
embodied AI or just an algorithm or we haven’t
even talked about this, but, like, hybridized ais.
So you can now grow nerve cell.
Actually, for a long time, you’ve been able.
People have been doing this.
My friend and colleague back in the 90s,
Steve Potter, was trying to actually plate nerve
cells on silicon chips and grow hybrids.
And now these are getting very sophisticated.
There’s a company called cortical labs out of
Australia, but they’re only one of several that
are creating hybrid chips to do tasks.
Whatever this looks like, whatever this looks like,
you can imagine that the more and more
functionally connected it becomes, whether to itself or
to other artificial intelligences or algorithms distributed through
nodes on an Internet.
The more it calculates information,
the more complex it gets.
It’s conscious. It’s conscious.
By this definition, this sort of
genesicois, like, oh, we’re very special.
We have mirror self awareness.
First of all, there’s a violation
of all of these things.
And do you have children? Not yet.
No, not yet. Nothing.
But when you look at a baby, right. Yeah.
You would say the baby is conscious. Right.
But babies don’t recognize themselves in a mirror.
Last night, we were just watching something on, I
don’t know, some comedy show last night, and they
opened with a video from TikTok, and it was
a mother who had recorded her child crying and
screaming and then showed it to the child.
So it’s like a mirror image interaction, and the
child looked at that and just started wailing.
It didn’t know it was itself, really? Yeah.
So do animals do the same? Right.
Some animals actually can recognize.
It seems that they can, at least to the
extent that we can decode behavior and inference.
One great example is dolphins.
They did a merit test with dolphins where they put
a spot on the dolphin’s belly and a spot that
the dolphin couldn’t bend its spine forward to see, right.
So underwater, they put a mirror, and the dolphin
is swimming by the mirror, and then all of
a sudden it stops and it looks in the
mirror, and then it starts wiggling.
It starts wiggling its belly because it seems to
understand that it’s got something here, and that’s them.
Elephants seem to have mirror recognition and some
other animals, and my understanding is that in
terms of their brain’s development, that they may
actually develop this mirror recognition earlier than human
babies do in terms of our neural development.
All I’m saying is that you can’t use
the most widely cited test of self awareness
or mirror recognition as a test for consciousness.
So, to me, consciousness is a multidimensional thing, and
one of the pieces of it, I put this
on an x axis, is your level of consciousness.
That is what I study when I look at toggling you
from being awake and aware to being anesthetized and back.
Sleep falls on this axis.
Coma falls on this axis.
Brain death is like the zero point on
the other axis, like the y axis.
I look at this as the contents of consciousness
and your conscious awareness, and that, to me, is
manipulated by evolution and what people call phylogeny.
So an insect may express a kind of
consciousness, but the contents of their conscious awareness
is nowhere near as complex as a human’s
or an elephant’s or even a bird’s.
And so there are differing levels on that axis.
So there are different dimensions to this process.
And when we’re awake and aware, we have a lot of both.
We have a high level of consciousness,
but we also have high content.
And as we become sleepy, both
of those things begin to drop.
Then we fall asleep and are entering deep non REm
sleep, and then we keep going down to all of
this stuff is mostly correlated, but then when you’re dreaming
in a REM state, your level of consciousness is low,
but the content is really high.
And when you’re doing something like meditation,
we haven’t quite marked where that is
in terms of its complexity and content.
And then psychedelics would most likely be level
of consciousness, depending on how we map that.
A little bit uncertain where they would fall
on that axis, but certainly in terms of
the y axis, the content through the roof. Right.
When you have a psychedelic journey, the reason
that these medicines are so powerful is that
they tend to change synaptic weights and connections
within a system that’s established.
Your life is one habit, right?
You lay down a path in your brain
and you keep on doing that thing.
And it can be a motor habit.
It can be a different kind of behavioral output.
But your thinking is habit, too.
It’s why we follow leaders once we
decide, oh, good person to follow.
It is not expensive to follow the leader. Exactly.
It is expensive to think.
You look for shortcuts. Absolutely.
That’s why changing behaviors is so
difficult, because it’s actually metabolically expensive
to change a behavior.
You take a psychedelic, and it temporarily undoes
some of these established weights in that network,
and now you can filter information differently.
You can create new connections that weren’t there
and new associations between input and output.
But while that’s happening, that system is
also unweighting you to all these inputs.
They’re not new inputs.
They were always there.
It’s just like that thing I said.
It’d be very trippy to get into the brain of
an animal and see how they perceive the world.
That’s what you’re doing.
It’s like you’re creating a new brain
for yourself that has different filtration properties.
Right.
And now suddenly you’ve created a
whole new hallucination of a world.
In some sense, it’s not really a hallucination.
You’re using all the same wetware, but
you’re having such a different experience, and
that’s what seems to be consciousness expanding.
So I would say it’s definitely expanding the contents
of your conscious awareness on the y axis.
Not 100% sure what it’s doing on the x axis.
In fact, sometimes people feel very sleepy
or sedated on some of them.
Some of them make them feel very awake.
It’s an interesting problem, but very cool idea.
Amazing.
Wow.
We are nearly at 1 hour, and I still
have so many questions about your other love space.
So I know that you are planning.
I don’t know how far are you in this endeavor,
but you are hoping to join a flight crew.
Do you have any mission specific
mission you would want to join? Study.
What would you study, actually?
So the first thing that I can do here on Earth.
So 2004, I applied for astro selection.
Got to the finals, didn’t get in.
It was heartbreak.
Always wanted to go into space.
But I see now with the advent
of private space as well, creating many,
many new opportunities to go and explore.
That I could take my.
Now, here is where not so much as
a neuroscientist, but more as a physician.
And someone who does anesthesia, trauma, critical care.
I’m trying to envision new environments in space.
And how we can mitigate medical risk in space.
Build systems to support astronauts.
And then be able to fly on a crew as a doctor.
And providing them with that kind of
logistical support that I help build.
And every month that passes, I imagine
I did trauma simulations on Earth.
And analog environments for Mars and things.
In the past, we had so little available to us.
Now I can imagine actually
building that AI expert system.
That supports the humans in space to mitigate crisis.
I can imagine much more sophisticated robotics.
I can imagine on demand manufacturing to manufacture the
tools that we need to support human health.
Whether they are surgical tools or a particular lighting
suite or an operating room table or whatever it
is we need to do to build on demand.
I can imagine now using synthetic biology to
extract the materials from lunar regolith and from
other sort of inputs to create medicines and
do other things to support human health.
So this, to me, would be just such the culmination
of everything that I have come to in my life.
And I’d like to see the Earth from space.
Because imagine seeing the aurora right from space.
But I’d also actually, I’m very interested
in going to the lunar surface.
And seeing that perspective of this huge
body in space in front of us.
The earthrise and the moon is so amazing.
And helping to establish settlements there where people can
support one another, do science, extract what they need
as much as they can from the lunar soil.
And then probably come back.
I’m not a martian person.
I’m fine with others going to Mars.
But I do believe that’s kind of a one way ticket.
Not just because of the time, but because I think
that the amount of time you stay out would change
the human body in a pretty significant way.
And you’d become not as well adapted to Earth.
I suppose if you went there very quickly and spent less
than a year and then came back, maybe not so much,
but over time, people will evolve in a different way.
Kind of like, have you seen
the space opera, the expanse?
Another expanse that I’m reading now,
my boyfriend is lovely, loving expanse.
I haven’t read this one, but it’s an interesting.
Yeah, I’m actually also reading Aurora
right now by Kim Stanley Robinson.
And actually, I wrote several papers on how
to build an intergenerational interstellar ship in 1996
and the human factors considerations, et cetera.
And his book Aurora is all about.
It’s not his newest one, but I just somehow picked
it up, and it’s all about this intergenerational ship going
to other places and the adaptations that take place in
humans, but also how humans take their humanness with them
and they take their shit with them, so to speak.
And I’d love to see humans not take their
shit with them and maybe evolve a little bit
more on the social and ethical spectrum.
But it’s hard because we are animals and our
nervous system, we have to work to overcome some.
I think of some of
our incentives, our inborn incentives.
We have to work to overcome those.
I’d like humans to potentially do that.
I think it’s possible.
Another very interesting thing that I didn’t think about back then,
but I just worked on it as an x prize.
It’s not going to become this year’s prize
or offering, but I worked with Dorit Donoville
over at Baylor College of Medicine.
She runs Trish, that’s a
translational institute for Space Health.
And she has had near and dear to her
heart this idea that we could hibernate humans and
hibernation and torper, it’s a very interesting concept.
So I worked with her on that prize, and
it has a lot of spinoff to Earth, which,
by the way, is another reason I love space. Right?
Our recycling technology, material science, growing
rugs and crystals in space.
And if we were to solve for hibernation,
we could do all kinds of things, like
we could do resuscitation medicine better on earth.
You imagine you’re on an ambulance, you get called because
somebody is found down because of a heart attack or
because they hit their head and they have a headbleed.
You bring your little hibernation pod or suit, and you
put them in there, you cool them down, you bring
their metabolic rate down, and as you’re supporting them and
their body to heal, then you bring them back and
they don’t have organ damage, and they live.
And there’s even some evidence that hibernation
might contribute to longevity, because in.
Is it the golden marmot?
There’s one animal species in which they actually
looked at aging clocks, the Horvath clock.
And they found that hibernation in these
animals actually turn back some of the
markers of aging in this aging clock.
So there may be some longevity scheme here, too.
Can you imagine if people start setting up
longevity spas and they have, like Brian Johnson
is already doing to certain extent, this.
I know he’s working a lot towards longevity
and a lot of it’s behavioral modification.
I mean, you have to give
him credit for really eating properly.
And he’s definitely doing some body
hacks, but is he doing.
He’s not trying for hibernation, is he?
Did you hear that?
Not yet, but I guess he tried everything.
He tried the cold, right?
Cold immersion may not work the same way as hibernation,
because that may be because it’s such a shock to
the system and a stressor, and it kind of jump
start certain metabolic paths that enable the body to start
eating cellular debris and regenerating itself, et cetera.
Hibernation might work a little bit
on the spectrum, but it may
have other mechanisms for increasing longevity.
So another thought had been, like, you
could, like, for instance, let’s say a
cancer patient had to undergo chemotherapy.
There’s some evidence that hibernation differentially affects,
like, normal cells versus cancer cells.
So you could bring down a human’s metabolic processes
for their normal cells and still give them the
chemotherapy to kill the cancer cells without so much
destruction to the rest of their body. I don’t know.
There’s all kinds of interesting things that could come
from that, because at this point, we have most
likely or most beneficial is not keto.
What’s the other word?
Yeah, ketones are really beneficial. They are? Yes.
Ketones might work in several pathways, but one
would be because they’re actually a very good
fuel for the brain to use.
The brain prefers ketones and these kinds
of fat derivatives to metabolizing with glucose.
But ketones may.
In general, when you go into ketosis, you’re
not using your insulin pathways as much, and
so you’re actually resting that system and turning
inflammation down in the body.
And ultimately, I actually believe that inflammation is the
root cause of all problems in your body.
So, brain, body, everything you can think of, almost every
disease we know of, has a linkage to inflammation.
Some diseases are inherited, but they’re
all made worse by inflammation.
And all other lifestyle
diseases are inflammation related. Exactly.
It’s a shame that people started forgetting about
the default, what our parents, grandparents used to
take or use to improve their systems.
Like even turmeric. Right.
It has so many benefits, and
it’s always best to prevent them.
She says that most cultures and most religious
and spiritual traditions have days of fasting.
And many of them, if you really follow them,
they have like a day, a week of fasting.
And now we’re seeing what the benefit is.
Intermittent fasting, one day, a week of a fast.
It’s really good for your biomarkers.
So in itself, you’re right, there’s a lot
of ancient wisdom, but there’s correlative data.
It’s not causative.
So I don’t want to somehow suggest that we
absolutely know this for true that this is true.
But, for instance, people who are longtime meditators
or who do yoga, you can see a
lot of the biomarkers of aging reverse.
And people who are meditators also.
They looked at brain volume, correlative.
We have no idea why this is true, but it
seems that compared to age match controls in every other
dimension, that they have more gray and white matter, so
more nerve cells and more connections between them.
Is it the cause of it? Is it the result?
I don’t know.
And it’s not the most rigorous kind of
science, but we do know that people who
meditate and do yoga have lower blood pressure.
They seem to develop diabetes at lower rates.
And all of these other things.
Definitely there is something to that ancient.
A lot of benefits. Definitely.
Any activity, it’s good.
Okay, so is there anything else you
would want the audience to know?
Any kind of projects or initiatives you are working on?
Well, I have been really excited lately
about synthetic biology for space travel.
So that’s something I’m thinking very deeply about now.
I am also working a lot in the
world of medical simulation, but overall, if I
had to tell the audience to take something
away, a lot of this stuff seems overwhelming.
And if you’re not working in this
world, you think, why do I care?
Why do I need to know about this?
And for many people on this planet,
day to day is a struggle, right?
You may be worried about food, shelter, taking care
of family, but all of these things that we’re
talking about, even the ones that seem the most
science fictiony, really do affect your life in ways
that you might not totally appreciate.
And you don’t want other people
constantly making those decisions for you.
So it’s worth knowing, it’s worth understanding, and
it’s worth thinking about and arguing about and
debating about and bring it to the attention
of the people who may impact your life.
Whether they are elected officials, whether they are
the corporations from whom you buy goods.
These conversations are very important and
they will affect the future that
your children and grandchildren also inherit.
So, yeah, I would say that in the midst
of all these other things, it’s worth stopping for
a moment and seeing what’s happening around you, even
though it may not seem relevant.
And then I also want to end
with not entirely a doom and gloom.
Yes, you can possibly hack brains and use coercion.
Advertising has been doing this for a long time.
We’re just better at it now.
Synthetic biology can be quite dangerous to a human organism,
but these things have so much potential to heal, to
create abundance, to solve for maybe problems we’ve created on
the planet, but to maybe heal the biosphere on the
planet and definitely to support human health.
And so I also want people to take away a feeling of,
okay, this is not all bad, this can be quite amazing.
We don’t need to die of things we used to die of.
We can maybe live much healthier lives
and have better health spans, essentially.
So, yes, this also potentially can tune down suffering.
Yeah, you feel very optimistic, and
that’s exactly how people should be. Right?
Because science is for the betterment of humanity.
Yeah, but science with wisdom.
Science with the wisdom and a futurist mindset.
So you can imagine where the not so great places
are to go, and then you can mitigate against risk.
But we should work as a planet
to decide what that looks like.
We are a global citizenry.
We shouldn’t just let the wealthiest or
the most technologically advanced or savvy people
make those decisions for us.
Yeah, we need voices from all sorts
of professions and people with different experiences.
Vivia, thank you. Thank you so much.
And I really wish your projects will come true, your
dreams of going to space as well, because I would
love all the learnings you get for me.
I love space, but I think I’m more comfortable here.
Most people I know that love space and
want to travel to space love this planet.
We adore this planet.
We revere this planet.
This planet, as we know, is the only
one that we know of that supports life.
And so, in fact, people who want to travel
to space are some of the most ardent conservationists.
I am.
I see the beauty of this planet.
And I’m sure if I do go to space, I
will be acutely aware of how amazing Earth side is.
Because look, I can live in a biosphere
where I don’t need a spacesuit, and things
aren’t going to try to kill me? Kill you? Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah.
I am a deep lover of this planet and its biosphere.
And maybe that’s another way to end, is also to
encourage everyone to see what an amazing gift this is
and what a confluence of crazy factors needed to come
together to create a habitable zone for so many forms
of life that could evolve to this level of intelligence.
What a beautiful thing.
So we should take care of it. Yes.
Have you seen the latest documentary, the Earth?
I haven’t seen this, Morgan.
Yes, that one. Yeah.
It’s so crazy.
So many factors had to come to life for us. Yes.
But we are here now, and let’s
try to make the best of it. Yes.
Divya, it was a huge pleasure and an honor, and
it’s a very morning for you, so enjoy your.
Enjoy your.
Thank you for having me on. Thank you.
I hope the audience can engage with
all this and feel empowered by it. Definitely. Perfect.
Thank you.
All right, take care.
See ya.
Bye, love.
Close.
