Dr. Michael Kilgard

Obviously, I wouldn't have mentioned it.

This thing six years ago when I'm sitting in my kitchen with my kids and a pot of water and some flour trying to figure out what I'm going to do with myself.

I didn't want the whole world shut down.

But I got that gift from it that I have that better appreciation now of bagels.

And I just think that's a worldview that we really could have gone down a path where studying the brain made us unimportant.

It made computers good and humans bad.

I've not seen that at all.

I'm super proud of all my friends.

I wouldn't rather hang out with a chat bot than with my friends.

And I think that's going to continue to happen.

I don't expect there's going to be a major revolution in that.

And that's a surprise.

It's a surprise that discovery keeps leading to good things, not bad things.

There are a lot of dangerous things I mentioned, machine guns and nuclear weapons, but we mostly haven't used those things.

We've met all this good stuff.

So you can see I'm an optimist, and it partly comes from studying the brain.

I get to study the brain while it's alive and listen to neurons while they're actually firing.

Other people looked at it while it was in dead tissue under a microscope, but they were both able to see this thing is alive, and that was reflective of how I feel as a live person, not as a machine, not as a pawn, not as a –

one vote in a democracy, but as a real person.

And neuroscience is supporting that.