David Eagleman
speaker
1,631 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 20 Mar
David Eagleman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Yeah, they're God, essentially. They're God. Exactly right. It's scary because, in fact, it's just some 21-year-old guy with a goatee. Who's like playing Warcraft at the same time on another screen. Exactly. So that's a really weird thing. There's presumably going to be whole bodies of legislation around this and what the rules are around this.
But yes, one of the things I mentioned is that let's imagine we realized, oh God, the universe is collapsing and the universe is only going to last five more minutes. The programmer couldn't speed it up so that you live a thousand years in those last five minutes and you didn't know it.
It might work. You certainly could freeze a body that long. We have not perfected cryogenics yet, but in theory, it's not so hard. And we know that it works in the sense that sometimes people will fall through the ice on a lake and they will try to get out and they can't get out and they drown and they die.
And then their body is rescued and they're brought to the hospital and there's this whole thing where you extract the blood and warm the blood in a machine and you're passing it back in. And people end up freezing.
fine like they actually come back to life really from being frozen i've never heard of that happening that's incredible here's one to link in the show notes i'll send you a lancet article is a medical journal about a woman who was a young doctor who this happened to on a skiing trip and yeah she's probably fine she's practicing medicine now and so on but she was dead she was actually dead and frozen and she was brought back this happens not infrequently in theory she's a few minutes younger than her actual age it's not bad
Not bad. So everything about cryogenics should work in theory. The problem is simply that how do you freeze things fast enough so that you don't get ice crystals and you get ice crystals that tears the cell membranes and blah, blah. So there's some stuff to be worked out there. But yeah, I think freezing people and sending them on space travel is certainly a possibility.
What's interesting about that theory is that Descartes was at least one of the first people to talk about this thing. How do I know I'm not brain in a vat being stimulated by scientists so that I think I'm sitting in this sunny living room talking with Jordan and so on? And people have worked on better and better versions of this.
And obviously, in the modern computer era, this became, how do I know I'm not a computer simulation? Well, what's been so weird to watch just over the last decade, really, is... how extraordinary things are becoming. For example, with generative AI, people are using this in VR now to create whole VR worlds instantly. Like, hey, I want a 15th century whatever with a castle.
And this just gets created the same way you would create an image, but a whole 3D VR world. And we're just in 2025. I mean, just imagine what things are going to be in 2045 or something. So the point is, it becomes more and more plausible to say, God, we know we can make extraordinary simulations. Why not? And all it requires is imagining that maybe...
Just imagine our civilization a thousand years from now, they might be running these sims. And of course, this could be recursive all the way down.
So do you remember the website called Second Life? Yeah, of course. Philip Rosedale, a friend, he's the guy who started that. Wow. And for those who don't remember Second Life, it's just you get to be an avatar in this little computer world. You walk around, you talk to other avatars, and you can talk to them. First, I met a couple that had met in Second Life, and they were married to one another.
That's how they met each other. But it turns out that's not uncommon. Here's the thing. Technology has moved way on beyond Second Life. But there's still about a million people that use Second Life every day.
And these people often, not always, but quite often are people who, for example, are in wheelchairs or have other physical ailments, and they can be in Second Life and be avatars and live this other kind of life, which is precisely what you're describing. It's exactly the kind of thing.
So you and I will be hanging out in the metaverse where we don't have any dots on our skin or gray hairs, and we'll be really great high-resolution 3D avatars instead of low-resolution Second Life avatars. But I think that's exactly where we're all going.
Oh, that's really interesting to me. That's right. You know what I was thinking about is imagine you were in that situation and People find themselves in these situations. Let's not even take something as awful, but just like a divorce. You know, they're alone again. Building up a new relationship and getting a new spouse, that's a giant undertaking.
So I've been very interested in what is the near-term future of AI relationships. As you may know, there are tons of websites where people get, let's say, an AI girlfriend. It's typically males getting an AI girlfriend. There are some women who get AI boyfriends.
But in Japan, apparently, this is an enormous thing going on where the statistic I heard, I haven't verified this, but I heard that 30% of young males have an AI girlfriend. Now, I'm fascinated by this because presumably that's not going away. So there's two things that could happen.
The general prediction that I see in the media is that this is going to lead to the collapse of the population and people are going to get married and stuff like that. Why? Because an AI girlfriend is always going to be better than a real girlfriend in the sense that... They don't have needs. Yeah, exactly. They don't get hangry. They don't get grumpy. They don't say mean things to you sometimes.
But I have a more optimistic view on it. I think that this kind of thing might... in the best circumstances, actually improve relationships because it's sort of a way to get practice and do all the dumb stuff and say something. And the AI girlfriend says, hey, that really hurt my feelings when you said that. And maybe your AI girlfriend leaves you or whatever.
But the point is... Damn it, I can't even keep an AI girlfriend. And they're still billing me. But the point is you get practice like all of us as young men do stupid stuff and we learn and you get wiser in relationships.
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