Tom Slater
speaker
197 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 May
Tom Slater’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 — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It happens across generations.
But it was reading a book called The Weirdest People in the World that got me thinking about this.
It's a fascinating book.
But he talks about this way that sort of culture hijacks your physiology and changes the way you think.
And in particular, this learning the skill of reading and writing, it caused these changes in the brain.
We repurpose this area of the brain that was used for recognizing faces.
There's a bit of a trade-off there.
You do become less good at that, but in return you get this incredible skill, which is so useful.
It's just a really stark example of the way that you use technology, in that case writing, reshapes your physiology.
And so it is absolutely possible for a cultural technology to reach inside your skull and change the organ that makes you human.
And what is it doing?
I think that's right.
So I think what you can see is that these cultural changes operate in the same way that genetic changes work.
The three factors are variation, transmission and selection.
If you think about, if you go back to the weirdest people in the world, the example there is the Catholic Church and how that controlled variation and ideas, it controlled transmission the way ideas spread and controlled selection.
Now, if you apply that to what's going on in the world today, AI, we can supercharge variation.
because the number of ideas that you can test, that you can generate, it grows exponentially, and ideas that humans just wouldn't have got to.
It completely changes transmission of ideas.
If a million children ask their parents, why is the sky blue?
They'll get close to a million different answers.
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