April 10, 2023 • 34 mins
What is intelligence? Why don’t gophers write novels? Why didn't crows invent the internet? And what does any of this have to do with brain algorithms, finding aliens on earth, and why World War 5 could involve species besides Homo sapiens?
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
What exactly is intelligence? And why don't crows invent an Internet?
And why don't gophers right novels? And what does any
of this have to do with George Orwell's analysis of
Adolf Hitler? Or why World War five could involve many
other species besides Homo sapiens. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me,
(00:30):
David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University,
and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between
how the brain works and how we experience life. On
today's episode, we're going to explore the future not just
(00:52):
for humans, but for other species as well. The other day,
my kids were in the car while I was pumping gas,
and I was thinking about the future for them, and
specifically what my kids would look back on in twenty
years or thirty years or fifty years and think, wow,
I can't believe we did that. So California has new
(01:15):
legislation that all new cars will have to be electric
by twenty thirty five, and so I was realizing that
when my kids are the age I am now, they'll
look back in moments like this and think, wow, I
remember when dad used to pump fossil fuel into his car,
and they'll see this as a surprising feature of their
(01:35):
childhoods and not something that exists for them anymore. It's
analogous to the way that I look back on black
and white televisions, or pay phones, or cassette tapes or
walkman's or any of the other things from my childhood
that we just don't have anymore. So when I got
back in the car, I asked them to brainstorm about
(01:56):
things that would be different for them when they're adults,
and they brought up more things than I expected. We
were on a road trip and we were passing a
ranch where we saw thousands of cows grazing, and what
we ended up talking about was whether they might look
back strangely in thirty years on raising animals to kill
(02:17):
them for meat, because we looked at those cows and
we understood that they would all be dead soon and
on plates around tables. Now that might change, and not
necessarily because society drifts towards vegetarianism, and not even necessarily
because companies develop better and better plant based alternatives to burgers.
(02:39):
Our bodies, after all, have been clearly carved by evolution
to eat meat, So I think the more likely scenario
will be the move toward lab grown meat will pop
a single cell off a cow and reproducing the lab
dish to grow the burger or the steak directly from
that cell, rather than raise the entire animal and feed
(03:03):
it for years and then slice its throat and process
it and ship the meat, so we could eat meat
free of cruelty and with a lot less ranching effort.
And as time goes on, we'll get better and better
at growing the proper ratios of fat for marbling and
blood vessels to carry in the right kinds of nutrition,
and you'll be able to grow a filet mignon without
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actually having to have thousands of acres and raise and
slaughter a living being that seems to care about it's
young and tries to avoid pain and presumably has a
whole range of emotions. So there are several companies working
on this already, and with time we'll be able to
do this at a price that competes with traditional meat,
(03:48):
and eventually that's far cheaper because you won't have to
raise the cows and feed them and tend to them
and shelter them for years. You won't drive your gas
powered vehicle along the highway and look at these thousands
of cows waiting for their own murder. And once we
can grow burgers from single cells, we can enjoy barbecues
with lion burgers or tiger burgers or elephant burgers or whatever,
(04:14):
because we're just reproducing cells. Anyhow, as we talked, we
got into the future of genetic editing, and there are
tools like crisper Cast nine. This is a molecular tool
that allows scientists to splice out a well defined section
of a genome, in other words, a particular sequence of
(04:35):
a's and seas and teas and geese, and replace that
sequence with a different sequence that they want, so maybe
it's one that doesn't have a particular genetic mutation or
that causes a disease or a disorder. Now, this is
a technology, crisper Cast nine, that started to come into
dim focus in the mid nineteen nineties, but using it
(04:58):
to edit genomes in alien cells that wasn't demonstrated until
twenty twelve, and suddenly the technology blew up and it's
an every lab around the planet. Now. Now, the idea
of using that kind of technology on the human germline
has been an area of really heated ethical debate, and
(05:19):
it appears to have been used on humans illegally by
a doctor in China in twenty eighteen, and it's an
open question where this all goes from here. All countries
have said this is illegal for human use, but it's
just a matter of time probably before more examples hit
the news. And by the way, nowadays, instead of cutting
(05:40):
and replacing whole chunks of DNA like Crisper does, there
are methods to change just a single base pair. Molecular
biologists from MIT and Harvard made a gene editing technique
that rewrites individual as and seas and teas and g's
in the genetic code. This is called base editing. But
what difference would it make if we could edit genomes? Well,
(06:06):
the thing that interests me today is whether we could
leverage these advances in genetic engineering to someday allow us
to boost human intelligence. Now, there are several things to
unpack about that prospect. The first is that every few
years in the neuroscience community there's buzz about the possibility
(06:26):
that someone discovered a noatropic drug, and that just means
one that's going to boost memory or recall or some
other cognitive function. But despite the occasional buzz, there's really
nothing that has changed our cognitive function beyond just drinking
a cup of coffee. But instead of a drug, could
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we improve intelligence by tweaking the genome? Now, one possibility
is that nature has already optimized our intelligence and there's
not too much room to improve it. So let me
explain that by an analogy. Take life span. There's been
a lot of research on how to increase human lifespan,
but the length of a human's lifespan actually has not
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really changed. When we look back to a time before
modern medicine, we see that people in history we're capable
of living long lives. Take Benjamin Franklin, who is born
in seventeen oh six and he died in seventeen ninety
at age eighty four. That's a very ripe old age,
especially for a man. So it's not that people couldn't
(07:35):
live that long. What has changed is the average lifespan,
which is known as life expectancy. So when researchers talk
about the massive improvements in human life expectancy, they're talking
about the average human lifespan. So as we've developed medicine
and antibiotics and methods for reducing child mortality and even
(07:59):
reducing from simple things like getting gang green when you
get a cut. That means that on average, people don't
die in their childhood or young adult lives anymore. It
turns out that some of the most important steps in
reducing mortality where the basic medications introduced last century to
control diarrhea and vomiting. These were massively important in reducing
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death tolls. So people make it down the road of
possibility to live until they're old age. So what's been
improved upon is the average age of death. The point
I want to draw here is that it's not as
though any of our researchers said, oh, I got it,
here's how to make somebody live until they're two hundred
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years old. And this is because the human body, at
least at this point doesn't appear to be set up
to live more than about a century. So by analogy,
it could be the case that human intelligence has been
carefully shaped by evolutionary pressures and is essentially maxed out.
In other words, if you tweaked the brain circuitry, you
(09:05):
might not be able to squeeze much more juice out
of the lemon. Nonetheless, even if this is the case,
we could in theory improve the intelligence expectancy of the
population by pushing everyone up towards the ceiling. So everyone
is essentially operating at the level of the best brains
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like Albert Einstein or Tony Morrison, or all the people
who are super talented and domains like math or music
or language. Those people are massive outliers from the average.
So that tells us the possibility that on average, most
people could get a bit smarter. However we define intelligence now.
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I'll come back to genetic editing in just a moment,
but first I need to lay another brick in the
foundation by addressing the issue of what is intelligence? The
main challenge we have with understanding it. We don't have
a precise definition for it. The interest in this concept
of intelligence goes back to at least the time of Plato,
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but just over a century ago people started working on
how to quantify this, and by nineteen oh four, the
English psychologist Charles Spearman found that people who scored well
on one sort of task like verbal skills, also tended
to perform well on other sorts of tasks like spatial skills,
(10:28):
so that led Spearman to conclude that intelligence could be
generalized across tasks, and other researchers then found that this
seemed to be true. In other words, tasks of different
abilities tended to have high positive correlations. So what that
means is a person with a high general intelligence score
(10:50):
tends to do better at language and memory and tackling
new sorts of problems and real life activities and so on.
And in nine twenty three a researcher wrote a famous
paper in which he concluded tests tested by which he
meant that whatever the heck intelligence is, there are ways
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to put a number to it. Now, I'll just mention
this has been an area of debate where people point
out that there can be cross cultural issues with testing intelligence.
But that's not the point I'm making here. I'm talking
about if you have a hundred people from the same
culture in the same place and they all sit down
for the test, you'll get a spectrum of scores, and
(11:32):
these scores generally correlate with success in many domains, including
how they do later in life. So with these early
researchers noted is that something is getting captured. But what
exactly is intelligence. Well, it's proven difficult to nail down
with a single definition because it's not one thing, and
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it's certainly not defined by any single area in the brain.
So what do we know about it? Well, first we
know it's not defined by brain's size. At the end
of the eighteen nineties, the Spanish neuroscientist Ramoni ca Hall
was blown away by the fact that an elephant's brain,
let's say, is so much larger than a mouse's brain,
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and yet they're both equally capable of strategies and clever
moves and finding mates and so on. So a bigger
brain is not necessarily any smarter. Or take somebody like
Andre the Giant. He probably wasn't eight times smarter than you,
even though his brain may have had eight times the
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volume of yours. So Ramoni ca Hall said, think about
it like the giant clock tower of Big Ben compared
to a wristwatch. They both keep time with the same accuracy.
And so it goes with brains big and small. It's
not the amount of stuff, but the al rhythms that
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are running on it. It may be that what we
call intelligence is about how many things you could hold
in your short term memory at one time, or maybe
it's the idea that you can store stronger associations between facts,
or maybe it's the ability to resolve cognitive conflict, or
maybe it's about being able to better squelch distractors. So
(13:25):
all these things have been suggested as the basis of intelligence,
but it's going to involve all of these in some
degree or another, and probably a bunch of other things,
like whether you can better structure the information that you've stored,
or do more parallel processing, or i'll talk about this
in the future episode, whether you're better at simulating possible futures. Okay,
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So all this is to say that intelligence doesn't represent
a simple single thing that we can point to in
the brain. Instead, in eligence is one of those words
that carries a lot of semantic weight, meaning there are
all kinds of things that are being lumped together in
that one word. But whatever intelligence is, it sits at
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the heart of what is special about Homo sapiens. Other
species seem to come out more hardwired to solve particular problems,
but we are more live wired, which means our brains adapt.
So when we drop into the world, we can in
our first several years learn all the most important things
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that our species has figured out before us, and then
we can springboard from there. And that means we can
solve open ended problems, and that can be surviving in
the Arctic Circle or surviving at the equator, whether that's
figuring out quantum physics or how to distill nitrogen from
the air for fertilizer or whatever. Other species do smart things,
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but none can even come close to our capacity to
tackle abstract, open ended problems. And all of this leads
me to the main point of today's podcast, which is
one of the most interesting possibilities for how the world
could be different for our children. They've grown up with
(15:20):
Homo sapiens being the only intelligent species that is doing
anything remarkable on this planet. And that's not to say
other animals aren't intelligent in their own ways, but they
are not as far as we know, building an internet,
or vaccines or quantum computation, or certainly not building satellites
and rocketships and getting off the planet. For example, did
(15:42):
you know that at any given moment in time, there
are approximately one million Homo sapiens up in the atmosphere
above the clouds, sitting in comfortable leather chairs. So we
might argue about animal intelligence, but what's clear is that
other animals are not building airplanes, or for that matter,
(16:02):
fleets of electric vehicles, or neutron bombs or smartphones. And
it's an interesting question, right, why don't we find wolves
constructing great libraries, or kangaroo's building hospital systems, or just
universities where say, Koalas from all over the world come
loping over and they spend four years to learn everything
(16:24):
about Kowala history and the future and new technologies, and
they study all night to take Koala qualifications to make
them experts in law or medicine, or study their own
Koala brains. So what I want to consider is whether
we will be able to leverage our growing knowledge of
(16:45):
genetics to uplift other animal species. That means, to help them,
presumably genetically, to have much higher levels of intelligence. The
idea is that as we better understand genetics, will be
able to tweak the circuitry to optimize things. After all,
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the important part is that every single organism on the
Earth is made of exactly the same letters ACTG, and
there's something just slightly different about the way that our
letters structure the human brain, so that we not only
have bipedal walking in hairless faces and acne and really
useful thumbs, but also we have this massive intelligence. Could
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we crack the code on that part and give intelligence
to our animal cousins. Now that might sound like pure fantasy,
but in fact, there have been a growing number of
experiments that make this easier to envision. For example, there's
a gene called fox P two, which is thought to
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have something to do with the sudden explosion of speech
and language in humans. Now, the interpretation about fox P
two is a bit controversial, but the thing I want
to point out is that colleagues in mt took a
version of this gene that was like the human gene,
and they put it into mice and they were able
to show that the mice could learn mazes faster than
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normal mice. Now, there's still a long way to go,
and it won't just be this gene, but hundreds of
other genes that will be required to make cells in
the brain hook up in the right ways, and it
probably won't happen in our lifetime. But the point is,
animal uplift is a possibility in the distant future, and
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It's something that's important to start thinking about now. As
Charles Joy said in a recent Scientific American blog, if
we cannot find aliens in the stars, we might create
alien intelligences on Earth. Imagine our children looking back on
this time and saying, Wow, that was the time before
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dogs could get elected as senators, or crows ran certain
university courses, or zebras were winning the Nobel Prize. What
a world we might be heading into now, as you
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might imagine these sorts of studies and the imagination that
gets opened about animal uplift. This sparks massive debate among
bioethicists and philosophers. The idea is, possibly we will get
to the point where we can uplift in animal species,
but should we The author David Brynn, who writes great
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science fiction, wrote a series of novels called the Uplift Series,
and he explores this idea. And in these books we
come to live with all kinds of intelligent animals who
live among us, and they're working parts of society. And
in a interview, Brynn pointed out that he felt the
benefits of animal uplift could be amazing and really change
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the planet. And in fact, others argue that it is
a moral imperative, meaning we're obligated to do this. We're
like the first ones to get up the ladder onto
the roof, and we need to extend our hands down
and lift up all our cousin species who happen to
be behind us. I think if it, like if my
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dog hurts her leg, I will use human discoveries to
help her, like antibiotics in a cast, and if she
gets cancer, I'm going to use imaging technology like MRI
and oncogenic drugs. My colleague George Davorski, who's a futurist
and an ethicist, he said in an interview with The
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Boston Globe, quote, there are other creatures on this planet
that may be in need or deserving of also getting
these sorts of interventions. We should always be considering the
larger family of sentient organisms on this planet, not just
human beings. And in fact, Dvorski argues that if you
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deny this future technology of making a brain better, if
you deny this to an animal species, it's just as
unethical as if you deny the education as some group
of people based on their nationality or race or whatever.
In other words, we're morally obligated to help. Now. On
the other side of the argument, philosophers argue that the
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problem is that our long line of experiments to make
this happen in animals won't be instant because it never is,
and this will lead to lots of suffering among the
animal species while we try to uplift them but don't
quite get it right, and especially if we make them
smarter but we don't get the rest of the thing
perfect right away, such that they have meant illness and
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are smart enough to know it, or they have a
ticking clock of a short lifespan and they're smart enough
to know it, and this could get really terrible if
we have to keep experimenting on them once they are
cognitively enhanced like us. The difficulty is that uplift seems
like an easy task. Perhaps we just make an animal's
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brain bigger, but it's going to be way harder than that.
One quick example, in Sweden, some researchers tried to breed
bigger brains in guppies, these little fish. So they took
the ones with the biggest brains and kept breeding them
together for several generations, and they did the same with
the smallest brains too. Now, this sort of artificial selection
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is what agriculturalists and dog breeders and horse breeders have
been doing forever. So eventually they had two lines with
a nine percent size difference in their brains, and they
were able to show that the bigger brained guppies could
perform a little better on some simple cognitive tasks. So
that seemed great, But it turned out the fish with
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the big brains were incapable of producing as many offspring,
and they had smaller guts. So brains are massively energy
hungry engines. And the conclusion the scienceists came to is
that if you want bigger brains, the body needs to
scale back somewhere else. In other words, big brains come
with a cost. Now, the study doesn't really tell us
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much about intelligence anyway, because we already saw that brain
size is almost entirely uncorrelated with intelligence. So there are
far better studies that need to be done on this.
But I just want to make a single point here.
Changes in biology never come by themselves. They're always tied
to the rest of the functioning of the machinery. So
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if you make a heart bigger or legs longer, or
a head bigger than other. Things change as well, So
when the con text of uplifting animals, it might mean
that we need to figure out genetic changes not only
to the brain, but to all kinds of aspects of
their body, which could make the whole endeavor more challenging
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than we thought it was when we were just looking
at the brain. And again, we know it won't just
be about making brains bigger. For example, horses have brains
as big as humans, but they're not discovering mathematics. Presumably
the issue is that they're not running the same algorithms
in their forests of neurons, or if you look at
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the great apes are nearest neighbors, they seem to have
everything that you would need, but they're not building the
Internet and writing novels and doing molecular biology. Why not, Well,
it's true their brains are a little smaller, but presumably
the issue is a more microscopic detail than that. It's
almost certainly something in the algorithms that are getting run
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by the billions of neurons, So it's more than size.
It's what programs are running, and there are decades of
work ahead of us to even scratch the surface of
that scientific problem. And there's another challenge here. Typically, when
we think about animal uplift, we picture an animal speaking
English and having a conversation with us. But it's possible
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that it's going to be very difficult to do animal
uplift because the intelligence of our species is so tied
to other things like our opposable thumbs or our larynx,
which allows us to do things like make podcasts and
sing songs. And so the argument is, if you give
a squirrel a better brain or the right algorithms to run,
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it still won't be able to play a flute. And
even if it can think of some new solution to
quantum electrodynamics, it can't simply tell it to you because
it doesn't have a larynx to produce language. So there
are a whole series of things that may need to
be put into place so that we can translate languages.
And I'm not talking about English to Chinese like I
(26:00):
have on my Google Translate app, but human to dolphin
or gopher to human, which takes into account the evolutionary
history of the species and things that would have meaning
to that animal. For example, a dolphin lives in a
three dimensional world of movements and patterns, and so it's
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picking up on different things, and it presumably cares about
different things. And that's what Google Translate may look like
a century from now, figuring out how to communicate the
needs and desires and insights of one species to another.
Now there's one other thing to consider, and this one
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we can't ignore. So I'm going to take a tangent
here for just a few moments. Many years ago, when
the European Union was first getting put together, I wrote
an article about the possible problems that such a union
might confront in the future, and I quoted George Orwell,
who wrote a deeply insightful essay about Adolf Hitler in
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nineteen forty and Orwell pointed out the following, and I quote,
Hitler knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety,
short working hours, hygiene, birth control, and in general common sense,
they also, at least intermittently want struggle and self sacrifice,
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not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades. I used
Orwell's quotation to illustrate something that could end up being
the Achilles heel of the European Union, which is that
eventually neighbors will fight one another, just as in America
the North and South did in the Civil War. People
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don't just want peace. Sometimes they want to bang their
drums and wave their flags. If you look at the
history of our species, this is the standard. It's very
hard to get groups to form a union forever or
even for very long, and that's because of identity politics
and our desire to show that we are different from
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and usually better than our neighbors. So just look at
the entire history of the twentieth century to see how
easily groups will foamen genocide against other people they're living with.
Whether that's the Communists in the USSR or the Hutu
in Rwanda, or Hitler telling the Germans that they deserve
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the entirety of Europe around them. It is shockingly easy
to get groups to orient against other groups that they
used to be fine with, they used to be neighbors with.
Now I'm going to do another episode about empathy and
how people view one another and why we as a
species so easily slip into war. But in today's context,
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you can guess my reason for mentioning all this will
and uplifted animal species at some point want to beat
its own drums and fly its own flags and have
its own loyalty parades. In other words, what happens when
we get our dogs to communicate with us and work
with us? Are they always going to put up with us?
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Or do they at some point say, I don't want
you to put me outside. I don't want you to
hit me on the nose when I pee in the house.
I think that all of our problems stem from our
historical relationship with you, and it's time for us to
shed our callers and bear our fangs and bite you
right in the juggular in the name of freedom and dignity. Now,
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this is similar to the situation that was portrayed in
the New Planet of the Apes movies. Humans genetically engineer
the apes to uplift them, and then things devolve into
a war between the species. So this is one worry
about the future of animal uplift. If human intelligence is
any guide, and it's really the only guide we have,
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then the introduction of intelligence will probably open the door
to the horrors not of a civil war, but of
a species war. And what's interesting is you could extrapolate
from what happened in previous world wars where unlikely countries
banded together, like in World War Two, where the United
States banded with their unlikely bedfellow Stalin and the USSR,
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or for that matter, Germany linked arms with Japan. Everyone
collaborates where they see the most benefit in the political sphere.
So just imagine what could happen when we enter not
just a world war, but a multi species world war
where humans have to fight against dolphins and camels and
hippos who have all linked up with one another. Or
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maybe in the more distant future, as the world gets
used to having multiple species, things will get complex in
the way they always do, where some dolphins collaborate with
some humans and they ride the waves as a unit,
and other dolphins and other humans are finding on the
other side, So you have species that are split down
the middle, like families in a civil war. Or maybe,
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just maybe this all happens in a different way and
they are smart enough or just different from us enough
to bring us peace or at least lock us into
non aggression. And we learn the meaning of humanity from
non humans. So let's wrap up. When my children are
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my age and they're thinking about how they used to
eat animals and pump gas. The way that we look
back now on physicians promoting cigarettes or babies being in
the car without seat belts. My children might also look
backward and think about the time when they were this
single species on Earth, building durable knowledge and making discoveries
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about our cosmos. And maybe this will be our grandkids
or our great grandkids. But when I try to imagine
what their experiences are like, I wonder if it'll be
like the way we travel around and are always surprised
and impressed with other cultures, Like when the Spaniards first
stepped foot on the shores of what we now call
(32:23):
North America and discovered entire empires built by the Aztec
and the Inca and the Maya, complete with buildings and
communities and zigarots and other forms of writing such as
tying knots and strings, and completely different religions with their
own deities and stories of creation. I wonder whether it'll
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be like this when we stumble on animal communities that
we've uplifted, let's say, gophers, and discovering entire mythologies that
the gophers have written, and whole types of architecture and
technologies we simply wouldn't have thought of because of differences
in our needs or imaginations. Just like different cultures invent
(33:08):
different technologies based on their local needs, so will different species.
In any case, someday after I'm long gone and my
podcast exist on some medium that we can't even imagine,
I hope that you, dear listener of the future, will
really picture me pulling up to a gas station and
(33:31):
having to buy gas to get from place to place.
And maybe, listener, you are a member of an animal
species that in my day had very little cognitive power.
So I dedicate this podcast to you, especially if you've
joined our ranks as being fascinated by not only where
(33:55):
we are, but you also simulate possible paths to where
we could go, and then you leverage the scientific method
to build pathways to get there. To find out more
and to share your thoughts, head over to eagleman dot
com slash podcasts. I have links there for further reading
(34:16):
about Animal Uplift, and I also have that incredible George
Orwell essay about Hitler, and I recommend reading it as
one of the most insightful political essays I know. Even
after seven decades, it is as relevant as ever until
next time, I'm David Eagleman and thank you for joining
me in the inner cosmos.
What exactly is intelligence? And why don't crows invent an Internet?
And why don't gophers right novels? And what does any
of this have to do with George Orwell's analysis of
Adolf Hitler? Or why World War five could involve many
other species besides Homo sapiens. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me,
(00:30):
David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University,
and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between
how the brain works and how we experience life. On
today's episode, we're going to explore the future not just
(00:52):
for humans, but for other species as well. The other day,
my kids were in the car while I was pumping gas,
and I was thinking about the future for them, and
specifically what my kids would look back on in twenty
years or thirty years or fifty years and think, wow,
I can't believe we did that. So California has new
(01:15):
legislation that all new cars will have to be electric
by twenty thirty five, and so I was realizing that
when my kids are the age I am now, they'll
look back in moments like this and think, wow, I
remember when dad used to pump fossil fuel into his car,
and they'll see this as a surprising feature of their
(01:35):
childhoods and not something that exists for them anymore. It's
analogous to the way that I look back on black
and white televisions, or pay phones, or cassette tapes or
walkman's or any of the other things from my childhood
that we just don't have anymore. So when I got
back in the car, I asked them to brainstorm about
(01:56):
things that would be different for them when they're adults,
and they brought up more things than I expected. We
were on a road trip and we were passing a
ranch where we saw thousands of cows grazing, and what
we ended up talking about was whether they might look
back strangely in thirty years on raising animals to kill
(02:17):
them for meat, because we looked at those cows and
we understood that they would all be dead soon and
on plates around tables. Now that might change, and not
necessarily because society drifts towards vegetarianism, and not even necessarily
because companies develop better and better plant based alternatives to burgers.
(02:39):
Our bodies, after all, have been clearly carved by evolution
to eat meat, So I think the more likely scenario
will be the move toward lab grown meat will pop
a single cell off a cow and reproducing the lab
dish to grow the burger or the steak directly from
that cell, rather than raise the entire animal and feed
(03:03):
it for years and then slice its throat and process
it and ship the meat, so we could eat meat
free of cruelty and with a lot less ranching effort.
And as time goes on, we'll get better and better
at growing the proper ratios of fat for marbling and
blood vessels to carry in the right kinds of nutrition,
and you'll be able to grow a filet mignon without
(03:27):
actually having to have thousands of acres and raise and
slaughter a living being that seems to care about it's
young and tries to avoid pain and presumably has a
whole range of emotions. So there are several companies working
on this already, and with time we'll be able to
do this at a price that competes with traditional meat,
(03:48):
and eventually that's far cheaper because you won't have to
raise the cows and feed them and tend to them
and shelter them for years. You won't drive your gas
powered vehicle along the highway and look at these thousands
of cows waiting for their own murder. And once we
can grow burgers from single cells, we can enjoy barbecues
with lion burgers or tiger burgers or elephant burgers or whatever,
(04:14):
because we're just reproducing cells. Anyhow, as we talked, we
got into the future of genetic editing, and there are
tools like crisper Cast nine. This is a molecular tool
that allows scientists to splice out a well defined section
of a genome, in other words, a particular sequence of
(04:35):
a's and seas and teas and geese, and replace that
sequence with a different sequence that they want, so maybe
it's one that doesn't have a particular genetic mutation or
that causes a disease or a disorder. Now, this is
a technology, crisper Cast nine, that started to come into
dim focus in the mid nineteen nineties, but using it
(04:58):
to edit genomes in alien cells that wasn't demonstrated until
twenty twelve, and suddenly the technology blew up and it's
an every lab around the planet. Now. Now, the idea
of using that kind of technology on the human germline
has been an area of really heated ethical debate, and
(05:19):
it appears to have been used on humans illegally by
a doctor in China in twenty eighteen, and it's an
open question where this all goes from here. All countries
have said this is illegal for human use, but it's
just a matter of time probably before more examples hit
the news. And by the way, nowadays, instead of cutting
(05:40):
and replacing whole chunks of DNA like Crisper does, there
are methods to change just a single base pair. Molecular
biologists from MIT and Harvard made a gene editing technique
that rewrites individual as and seas and teas and g's
in the genetic code. This is called base editing. But
what difference would it make if we could edit genomes? Well,
(06:06):
the thing that interests me today is whether we could
leverage these advances in genetic engineering to someday allow us
to boost human intelligence. Now, there are several things to
unpack about that prospect. The first is that every few
years in the neuroscience community there's buzz about the possibility
(06:26):
that someone discovered a noatropic drug, and that just means
one that's going to boost memory or recall or some
other cognitive function. But despite the occasional buzz, there's really
nothing that has changed our cognitive function beyond just drinking
a cup of coffee. But instead of a drug, could
(06:48):
we improve intelligence by tweaking the genome? Now, one possibility
is that nature has already optimized our intelligence and there's
not too much room to improve it. So let me
explain that by an analogy. Take life span. There's been
a lot of research on how to increase human lifespan,
but the length of a human's lifespan actually has not
(07:12):
really changed. When we look back to a time before
modern medicine, we see that people in history we're capable
of living long lives. Take Benjamin Franklin, who is born
in seventeen oh six and he died in seventeen ninety
at age eighty four. That's a very ripe old age,
especially for a man. So it's not that people couldn't
(07:35):
live that long. What has changed is the average lifespan,
which is known as life expectancy. So when researchers talk
about the massive improvements in human life expectancy, they're talking
about the average human lifespan. So as we've developed medicine
and antibiotics and methods for reducing child mortality and even
(07:59):
reducing from simple things like getting gang green when you
get a cut. That means that on average, people don't
die in their childhood or young adult lives anymore. It
turns out that some of the most important steps in
reducing mortality where the basic medications introduced last century to
control diarrhea and vomiting. These were massively important in reducing
(08:21):
death tolls. So people make it down the road of
possibility to live until they're old age. So what's been
improved upon is the average age of death. The point
I want to draw here is that it's not as
though any of our researchers said, oh, I got it,
here's how to make somebody live until they're two hundred
(08:42):
years old. And this is because the human body, at
least at this point doesn't appear to be set up
to live more than about a century. So by analogy,
it could be the case that human intelligence has been
carefully shaped by evolutionary pressures and is essentially maxed out.
In other words, if you tweaked the brain circuitry, you
(09:05):
might not be able to squeeze much more juice out
of the lemon. Nonetheless, even if this is the case,
we could in theory improve the intelligence expectancy of the
population by pushing everyone up towards the ceiling. So everyone
is essentially operating at the level of the best brains
(09:25):
like Albert Einstein or Tony Morrison, or all the people
who are super talented and domains like math or music
or language. Those people are massive outliers from the average.
So that tells us the possibility that on average, most
people could get a bit smarter. However we define intelligence now.
(09:45):
I'll come back to genetic editing in just a moment,
but first I need to lay another brick in the
foundation by addressing the issue of what is intelligence? The
main challenge we have with understanding it. We don't have
a precise definition for it. The interest in this concept
of intelligence goes back to at least the time of Plato,
(10:08):
but just over a century ago people started working on
how to quantify this, and by nineteen oh four, the
English psychologist Charles Spearman found that people who scored well
on one sort of task like verbal skills, also tended
to perform well on other sorts of tasks like spatial skills,
(10:28):
so that led Spearman to conclude that intelligence could be
generalized across tasks, and other researchers then found that this
seemed to be true. In other words, tasks of different
abilities tended to have high positive correlations. So what that
means is a person with a high general intelligence score
(10:50):
tends to do better at language and memory and tackling
new sorts of problems and real life activities and so on.
And in nine twenty three a researcher wrote a famous
paper in which he concluded tests tested by which he
meant that whatever the heck intelligence is, there are ways
(11:11):
to put a number to it. Now, I'll just mention
this has been an area of debate where people point
out that there can be cross cultural issues with testing intelligence.
But that's not the point I'm making here. I'm talking
about if you have a hundred people from the same
culture in the same place and they all sit down
for the test, you'll get a spectrum of scores, and
(11:32):
these scores generally correlate with success in many domains, including
how they do later in life. So with these early
researchers noted is that something is getting captured. But what
exactly is intelligence. Well, it's proven difficult to nail down
with a single definition because it's not one thing, and
(11:56):
it's certainly not defined by any single area in the brain.
So what do we know about it? Well, first we
know it's not defined by brain's size. At the end
of the eighteen nineties, the Spanish neuroscientist Ramoni ca Hall
was blown away by the fact that an elephant's brain,
let's say, is so much larger than a mouse's brain,
(12:19):
and yet they're both equally capable of strategies and clever
moves and finding mates and so on. So a bigger
brain is not necessarily any smarter. Or take somebody like
Andre the Giant. He probably wasn't eight times smarter than you,
even though his brain may have had eight times the
(12:40):
volume of yours. So Ramoni ca Hall said, think about
it like the giant clock tower of Big Ben compared
to a wristwatch. They both keep time with the same accuracy.
And so it goes with brains big and small. It's
not the amount of stuff, but the al rhythms that
(13:00):
are running on it. It may be that what we
call intelligence is about how many things you could hold
in your short term memory at one time, or maybe
it's the idea that you can store stronger associations between facts,
or maybe it's the ability to resolve cognitive conflict, or
maybe it's about being able to better squelch distractors. So
(13:25):
all these things have been suggested as the basis of intelligence,
but it's going to involve all of these in some
degree or another, and probably a bunch of other things,
like whether you can better structure the information that you've stored,
or do more parallel processing, or i'll talk about this
in the future episode, whether you're better at simulating possible futures. Okay,
(13:51):
So all this is to say that intelligence doesn't represent
a simple single thing that we can point to in
the brain. Instead, in eligence is one of those words
that carries a lot of semantic weight, meaning there are
all kinds of things that are being lumped together in
that one word. But whatever intelligence is, it sits at
(14:14):
the heart of what is special about Homo sapiens. Other
species seem to come out more hardwired to solve particular problems,
but we are more live wired, which means our brains adapt.
So when we drop into the world, we can in
our first several years learn all the most important things
(14:36):
that our species has figured out before us, and then
we can springboard from there. And that means we can
solve open ended problems, and that can be surviving in
the Arctic Circle or surviving at the equator, whether that's
figuring out quantum physics or how to distill nitrogen from
the air for fertilizer or whatever. Other species do smart things,
(14:59):
but none can even come close to our capacity to
tackle abstract, open ended problems. And all of this leads
me to the main point of today's podcast, which is
one of the most interesting possibilities for how the world
could be different for our children. They've grown up with
(15:20):
Homo sapiens being the only intelligent species that is doing
anything remarkable on this planet. And that's not to say
other animals aren't intelligent in their own ways, but they
are not as far as we know, building an internet,
or vaccines or quantum computation, or certainly not building satellites
and rocketships and getting off the planet. For example, did
(15:42):
you know that at any given moment in time, there
are approximately one million Homo sapiens up in the atmosphere
above the clouds, sitting in comfortable leather chairs. So we
might argue about animal intelligence, but what's clear is that
other animals are not building airplanes, or for that matter,
(16:02):
fleets of electric vehicles, or neutron bombs or smartphones. And
it's an interesting question, right, why don't we find wolves
constructing great libraries, or kangaroo's building hospital systems, or just
universities where say, Koalas from all over the world come
loping over and they spend four years to learn everything
(16:24):
about Kowala history and the future and new technologies, and
they study all night to take Koala qualifications to make
them experts in law or medicine, or study their own
Koala brains. So what I want to consider is whether
we will be able to leverage our growing knowledge of
(16:45):
genetics to uplift other animal species. That means, to help them,
presumably genetically, to have much higher levels of intelligence. The
idea is that as we better understand genetics, will be
able to tweak the circuitry to optimize things. After all,
(17:08):
the important part is that every single organism on the
Earth is made of exactly the same letters ACTG, and
there's something just slightly different about the way that our
letters structure the human brain, so that we not only
have bipedal walking in hairless faces and acne and really
useful thumbs, but also we have this massive intelligence. Could
(17:34):
we crack the code on that part and give intelligence
to our animal cousins. Now that might sound like pure fantasy,
but in fact, there have been a growing number of
experiments that make this easier to envision. For example, there's
a gene called fox P two, which is thought to
(17:54):
have something to do with the sudden explosion of speech
and language in humans. Now, the interpretation about fox P
two is a bit controversial, but the thing I want
to point out is that colleagues in mt took a
version of this gene that was like the human gene,
and they put it into mice and they were able
to show that the mice could learn mazes faster than
(18:16):
normal mice. Now, there's still a long way to go,
and it won't just be this gene, but hundreds of
other genes that will be required to make cells in
the brain hook up in the right ways, and it
probably won't happen in our lifetime. But the point is,
animal uplift is a possibility in the distant future, and
(18:37):
It's something that's important to start thinking about now. As
Charles Joy said in a recent Scientific American blog, if
we cannot find aliens in the stars, we might create
alien intelligences on Earth. Imagine our children looking back on
this time and saying, Wow, that was the time before
(18:58):
dogs could get elected as senators, or crows ran certain
university courses, or zebras were winning the Nobel Prize. What
a world we might be heading into now, as you
(19:26):
might imagine these sorts of studies and the imagination that
gets opened about animal uplift. This sparks massive debate among
bioethicists and philosophers. The idea is, possibly we will get
to the point where we can uplift in animal species,
but should we The author David Brynn, who writes great
(19:49):
science fiction, wrote a series of novels called the Uplift Series,
and he explores this idea. And in these books we
come to live with all kinds of intelligent animals who
live among us, and they're working parts of society. And
in a interview, Brynn pointed out that he felt the
benefits of animal uplift could be amazing and really change
(20:12):
the planet. And in fact, others argue that it is
a moral imperative, meaning we're obligated to do this. We're
like the first ones to get up the ladder onto
the roof, and we need to extend our hands down
and lift up all our cousin species who happen to
be behind us. I think if it, like if my
(20:33):
dog hurts her leg, I will use human discoveries to
help her, like antibiotics in a cast, and if she
gets cancer, I'm going to use imaging technology like MRI
and oncogenic drugs. My colleague George Davorski, who's a futurist
and an ethicist, he said in an interview with The
(20:53):
Boston Globe, quote, there are other creatures on this planet
that may be in need or deserving of also getting
these sorts of interventions. We should always be considering the
larger family of sentient organisms on this planet, not just
human beings. And in fact, Dvorski argues that if you
(21:13):
deny this future technology of making a brain better, if
you deny this to an animal species, it's just as
unethical as if you deny the education as some group
of people based on their nationality or race or whatever.
In other words, we're morally obligated to help. Now. On
the other side of the argument, philosophers argue that the
(21:37):
problem is that our long line of experiments to make
this happen in animals won't be instant because it never is,
and this will lead to lots of suffering among the
animal species while we try to uplift them but don't
quite get it right, and especially if we make them
smarter but we don't get the rest of the thing
perfect right away, such that they have meant illness and
(22:00):
are smart enough to know it, or they have a
ticking clock of a short lifespan and they're smart enough
to know it, and this could get really terrible if
we have to keep experimenting on them once they are
cognitively enhanced like us. The difficulty is that uplift seems
like an easy task. Perhaps we just make an animal's
(22:22):
brain bigger, but it's going to be way harder than that.
One quick example, in Sweden, some researchers tried to breed
bigger brains in guppies, these little fish. So they took
the ones with the biggest brains and kept breeding them
together for several generations, and they did the same with
the smallest brains too. Now, this sort of artificial selection
(22:44):
is what agriculturalists and dog breeders and horse breeders have
been doing forever. So eventually they had two lines with
a nine percent size difference in their brains, and they
were able to show that the bigger brained guppies could
perform a little better on some simple cognitive tasks. So
that seemed great, But it turned out the fish with
(23:07):
the big brains were incapable of producing as many offspring,
and they had smaller guts. So brains are massively energy
hungry engines. And the conclusion the scienceists came to is
that if you want bigger brains, the body needs to
scale back somewhere else. In other words, big brains come
with a cost. Now, the study doesn't really tell us
(23:30):
much about intelligence anyway, because we already saw that brain
size is almost entirely uncorrelated with intelligence. So there are
far better studies that need to be done on this.
But I just want to make a single point here.
Changes in biology never come by themselves. They're always tied
to the rest of the functioning of the machinery. So
(23:51):
if you make a heart bigger or legs longer, or
a head bigger than other. Things change as well, So
when the con text of uplifting animals, it might mean
that we need to figure out genetic changes not only
to the brain, but to all kinds of aspects of
their body, which could make the whole endeavor more challenging
(24:12):
than we thought it was when we were just looking
at the brain. And again, we know it won't just
be about making brains bigger. For example, horses have brains
as big as humans, but they're not discovering mathematics. Presumably
the issue is that they're not running the same algorithms
in their forests of neurons, or if you look at
(24:32):
the great apes are nearest neighbors, they seem to have
everything that you would need, but they're not building the
Internet and writing novels and doing molecular biology. Why not, Well,
it's true their brains are a little smaller, but presumably
the issue is a more microscopic detail than that. It's
almost certainly something in the algorithms that are getting run
(24:53):
by the billions of neurons, So it's more than size.
It's what programs are running, and there are decades of
work ahead of us to even scratch the surface of
that scientific problem. And there's another challenge here. Typically, when
we think about animal uplift, we picture an animal speaking
English and having a conversation with us. But it's possible
(25:16):
that it's going to be very difficult to do animal
uplift because the intelligence of our species is so tied
to other things like our opposable thumbs or our larynx,
which allows us to do things like make podcasts and
sing songs. And so the argument is, if you give
a squirrel a better brain or the right algorithms to run,
(25:38):
it still won't be able to play a flute. And
even if it can think of some new solution to
quantum electrodynamics, it can't simply tell it to you because
it doesn't have a larynx to produce language. So there
are a whole series of things that may need to
be put into place so that we can translate languages.
And I'm not talking about English to Chinese like I
(26:00):
have on my Google Translate app, but human to dolphin
or gopher to human, which takes into account the evolutionary
history of the species and things that would have meaning
to that animal. For example, a dolphin lives in a
three dimensional world of movements and patterns, and so it's
(26:20):
picking up on different things, and it presumably cares about
different things. And that's what Google Translate may look like
a century from now, figuring out how to communicate the
needs and desires and insights of one species to another.
Now there's one other thing to consider, and this one
(26:43):
we can't ignore. So I'm going to take a tangent
here for just a few moments. Many years ago, when
the European Union was first getting put together, I wrote
an article about the possible problems that such a union
might confront in the future, and I quoted George Orwell,
who wrote a deeply insightful essay about Adolf Hitler in
(27:05):
nineteen forty and Orwell pointed out the following, and I quote,
Hitler knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety,
short working hours, hygiene, birth control, and in general common sense,
they also, at least intermittently want struggle and self sacrifice,
(27:29):
not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades. I used
Orwell's quotation to illustrate something that could end up being
the Achilles heel of the European Union, which is that
eventually neighbors will fight one another, just as in America
the North and South did in the Civil War. People
(27:51):
don't just want peace. Sometimes they want to bang their
drums and wave their flags. If you look at the
history of our species, this is the standard. It's very
hard to get groups to form a union forever or
even for very long, and that's because of identity politics
and our desire to show that we are different from
(28:13):
and usually better than our neighbors. So just look at
the entire history of the twentieth century to see how
easily groups will foamen genocide against other people they're living with.
Whether that's the Communists in the USSR or the Hutu
in Rwanda, or Hitler telling the Germans that they deserve
(28:33):
the entirety of Europe around them. It is shockingly easy
to get groups to orient against other groups that they
used to be fine with, they used to be neighbors with.
Now I'm going to do another episode about empathy and
how people view one another and why we as a
species so easily slip into war. But in today's context,
(28:56):
you can guess my reason for mentioning all this will
and uplifted animal species at some point want to beat
its own drums and fly its own flags and have
its own loyalty parades. In other words, what happens when
we get our dogs to communicate with us and work
with us? Are they always going to put up with us?
(29:19):
Or do they at some point say, I don't want
you to put me outside. I don't want you to
hit me on the nose when I pee in the house.
I think that all of our problems stem from our
historical relationship with you, and it's time for us to
shed our callers and bear our fangs and bite you
right in the juggular in the name of freedom and dignity. Now,
(29:43):
this is similar to the situation that was portrayed in
the New Planet of the Apes movies. Humans genetically engineer
the apes to uplift them, and then things devolve into
a war between the species. So this is one worry
about the future of animal uplift. If human intelligence is
any guide, and it's really the only guide we have,
(30:06):
then the introduction of intelligence will probably open the door
to the horrors not of a civil war, but of
a species war. And what's interesting is you could extrapolate
from what happened in previous world wars where unlikely countries
banded together, like in World War Two, where the United
States banded with their unlikely bedfellow Stalin and the USSR,
(30:30):
or for that matter, Germany linked arms with Japan. Everyone
collaborates where they see the most benefit in the political sphere.
So just imagine what could happen when we enter not
just a world war, but a multi species world war
where humans have to fight against dolphins and camels and
hippos who have all linked up with one another. Or
(30:52):
maybe in the more distant future, as the world gets
used to having multiple species, things will get complex in
the way they always do, where some dolphins collaborate with
some humans and they ride the waves as a unit,
and other dolphins and other humans are finding on the
other side, So you have species that are split down
the middle, like families in a civil war. Or maybe,
(31:17):
just maybe this all happens in a different way and
they are smart enough or just different from us enough
to bring us peace or at least lock us into
non aggression. And we learn the meaning of humanity from
non humans. So let's wrap up. When my children are
(31:39):
my age and they're thinking about how they used to
eat animals and pump gas. The way that we look
back now on physicians promoting cigarettes or babies being in
the car without seat belts. My children might also look
backward and think about the time when they were this
single species on Earth, building durable knowledge and making discoveries
(32:02):
about our cosmos. And maybe this will be our grandkids
or our great grandkids. But when I try to imagine
what their experiences are like, I wonder if it'll be
like the way we travel around and are always surprised
and impressed with other cultures, Like when the Spaniards first
stepped foot on the shores of what we now call
(32:23):
North America and discovered entire empires built by the Aztec
and the Inca and the Maya, complete with buildings and
communities and zigarots and other forms of writing such as
tying knots and strings, and completely different religions with their
own deities and stories of creation. I wonder whether it'll
(32:44):
be like this when we stumble on animal communities that
we've uplifted, let's say, gophers, and discovering entire mythologies that
the gophers have written, and whole types of architecture and
technologies we simply wouldn't have thought of because of differences
in our needs or imaginations. Just like different cultures invent
(33:08):
different technologies based on their local needs, so will different species.
In any case, someday after I'm long gone and my
podcast exist on some medium that we can't even imagine,
I hope that you, dear listener of the future, will
really picture me pulling up to a gas station and
(33:31):
having to buy gas to get from place to place.
And maybe, listener, you are a member of an animal
species that in my day had very little cognitive power.
So I dedicate this podcast to you, especially if you've
joined our ranks as being fascinated by not only where
(33:55):
we are, but you also simulate possible paths to where
we could go, and then you leverage the scientific method
to build pathways to get there. To find out more
and to share your thoughts, head over to eagleman dot
com slash podcasts. I have links there for further reading
(34:16):
about Animal Uplift, and I also have that incredible George
Orwell essay about Hitler, and I recommend reading it as
one of the most insightful political essays I know. Even
after seven decades, it is as relevant as ever until
next time, I'm David Eagleman and thank you for joining
me in the inner cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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