David Eagleman

And biology can do extremely

extraordinary things that computers cannot.

And as I mentioned earlier, computers are obsolescent from the day they come off the factory.

So I'll give an example, which is the Mars rover.

I can't remember if it was Spirit or Curiosity, one of them.

Anyway, it got up to Mars.

It did an extraordinary job, rolled around the red planet and saw lots of stuff.

But then it got its right front wheel stuck in the Martian soil and it couldn't move out of there and it died.

Okay, contrast that with what happens when a wolf gets its leg caught in a trap.

The wolf chews its leg off and then figures out how to walk on three legs.

It's not that it was pre-programmed to walk on three legs.

It just figures it out.

It figures out how to make that happen because it is driven by motivations.

It wants to get to food, to water, back to its pack, and so on.

So it just figures out how to run its body differently.

And wouldn't it be great if we could build a billion dollar Mars rover, if we're spending all that money and effort on it, if it could just, you know, saw off its wheel and then figure out how to operate in a different way.

So this is the idea of live wiring.

And it's still the case that almost everything we program and the robots we build and the Mars rovers we build are all totally pre-programmed.

This is what your body looks like.

This is how you're going to operate it as opposed to letting it operate like a human infant where it has to figure out its body.