Chapter 1: How is AI changing our perception of the future?
In one word, how would you describe the future?
Word of the moment? Yeah, uncertain at the moment. AI is changing so quickly. People predict in this linear straight line, but AI is going like that.
As the world's first neurofuturist, Joel studies how AI will impact human brains and how we can best prepare for an AI future.
We don't know how good it's going to get, how far it's going to go. And that just kind of gets to this state where we can't predict the future at all. And that's where this uncertainty is coming from. Think of COVID times 1,000, times 10,000, like that kind of disruption. everything we do more and more to AI, what is going to happen to our brains?
What's going to happen to our ability to think and make decisions by ourselves? Some people are predicting that we're going to see the first generation where the IQ is lower than the generation before. AI companions. The idea is this is like a companion you'll confide in, you'll talk to, and you'll build a relationship with.
In adults, we've seen people having multi-year, deep, loving relationships, marriage ceremonies. Now we have this sort of range of character AI and all these other
companion apps which are pretty much designed for young people some people are now talking about this you know we've been through however many a decade of this attention hacking it's a tension economy of social media these companion apps that's attachment hacking attachment jesus so we've touched on how the human race is completely fucked um you're an optimist i am i think of myself as a tech optimist you're a tech optimist i'm an
This feels like the episode we've been needing to do for a long time.
But maybe putting off or, like, avoiding?
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Chapter 2: What are the potential impacts of AI on human intelligence?
Nice intro.
Dad, if you're listening, we love you very much. And this is, we're not poking fun at you at all. I believe that when I hear it. It was a year and a half ago, to be fair, when AI wasn't talked about much. Our dad, at Christmas, my son got a present, which was a piece of string. It was a green piece of string and you pressed a button that was attached to it and it would sort of like do this loop.
It was like air would push it around the loop.
Chapter 3: How are young people forming attachments with AI companions?
And my son showed our dad and he said, Oh, is that AI? Dad and many people's understanding of what AI is has progressed in the last year and a half. But I do feel like one of the reasons a lot of us don't know as much as we probably should is because when you start to look at it, it can get quite scary. And the word uncertainty is one of the first words that pops into your mind.
So I thought I might start by asking this question, Joel, in one word. In one word? Yeah. And then you can use more words if you want.
But in one word. How would you describe my sex appeal?
One word? Uncertain. In one word, how would you describe the future? Word of the moment?
Yeah, uncertain at the moment.
Yeah. Why?
Why?
Well, obviously AI at the moment. There's a lot of other things happening in the world, wars and geopolitical strangeness and dynamics. But AI is changing so quickly. It is changing exponentially. It's doubling in capacity, power, if you like, every five or six months, depending on how you measure that. Which means, you know, every six months it's doubling.
And then that whole thing, that amount doubles again, doubles again. And humans are really bad at understanding that. Our intuition fails, right? We have sort of, our brains have evolved in a very linear world. So we're used to every step we take is another, just a meter. You know, if we take exponential steps, about 26 steps, we've walked around the globe. And we don't get that.
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Chapter 4: How can we foster human connections in an AI-driven world?
And people in their day-to-day have so many things that they're worrying about. It could be very microscopic things that only affect them or it could be global political things. There's so many things now. There's too many problems. And so the thought of having to somehow find time
Or even like brain capacity to think about something that we've never faced before seems like a very monumental task.
Yeah, it's terrifying for a lot of people. There's so many directions we could go in here. It's like we've just opened the door. There's so many things I worry about, but one of the things I find...
with a lot of the things you mentioned, and AI being one of them, is that, as you just implied there, Ryan, that so many of these problems are... They're kind of... As an individual, you kind of feel helpless in the face of. Like, there's no real choice here with AI.
Chapter 5: What should parents consider when introducing AI to their children?
It's kind of happening.
Yeah.
And as an individual, you've got no choice to... So you can't, I mean, I don't think I would want to. Maybe this works for some people, but I think for the majority of people, the option of going and living in the hills as a hermit and avoiding it is not really realistic. Some people are doing that. Some people are doing that.
But most people don't have the means and they can't, you know, people buying properties and going fully off grid and don't want anything to do with AI. And that's becoming a thing. But for most people, they can't do that. Need to work. Yeah, I can't do that. Most people I know can't do that. And AI has become a utility like the internet electricity.
So people need to lean into it and use it for their work. Yeah. So we're kind of faced with this, you know, the world is changing. No one voted for this. No one asked for this. No one, some people wanted it, I guess. A lot of people don't want it, but it's already happening. It's already here.
We talk a lot about mental health on the podcast. So I think it might be nice to talk about the brain and the impact that you see AI, that it's already on the brain, that it's going to have on the brain and the flow on to, I mean, you mentioned mental health before, what you see happening. Yeah. I mean, first of all, to our brains. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, all conversations have to start with the uncertainty thing at the moment. And like I said, we know that uncertainty is like, it puts people in this stress state, this fight or flight state. And it's like a pandemic that's spreading through the workforce at the moment. Everywhere I go, I've been giving a lot of talks on this. Could you interchange the word comfort with certainty?
Not completely, but the comfort question is, I think it's a really interesting thing to think about. So you can kind of map out a journey that our society has been on trying to bring more and more comfort to our lives.
And then the last few years, you've seen a backlash against that where people are now, you know, we realise it's not always good for your health to have this comfort and temperature controlled, whatever food you want at the press of a button. And, you know, it's not good for humans to have that 24-7.
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Chapter 6: What frameworks can help us navigate change with AI?
Yeah. So we'll put a link to it in the show notes. He, about 15 years ago, moved into app development thinking this is the future and this is where
um the work will be and about probably three or four years ago i started using ai to help him and on the 5th of february this year i think it was chat gbt had a new update and in that update um that next day he went to work he realized what was taking him six months to do with ai to build an app i could now do it in 40 minutes and much better than he could ever do it and he said overnight an entire an entire industry lost their job
And he just foreshadowed that this is coming for a lot of us. And he said that with each update, another industry will be essentially wiped out. That was kind of the premise of his blog post. We have seen, take for example, how much in Australia right now, or in the world, people are struggling with oil, like the price of fuel.
And you can see the impact it's having on anxiety levels and the way we treat each other, the way we talk to each other. and the impact on that mental health. I just wonder if it's worth just talking about what you see happening with the mental health when a small, no, it's not small. It's a big thing like oil prices going up.
But then this is what we're talking about here is so many people without jobs. I mean, you said it's COVID times 10,000 before.
covid was for in melbourne 245 days people couldn't leave their homes but we got back to work eventually and everyone's working again pretty much we're talking about something totally different here um and that makes me i just have this picture in my head well it's hard to imagine it but what people are going to be like when so many people can't work like the the flow and effects of mental health will be enormous
So we've done some modeling. Typically, people model sort of depression, anxiety, and how that might relate to unemployment just one thing at a time. So there's data showing that, yes, unemployment is linked to anxiety, depression, substance abuse, suicide. But all those things actually interact with themselves as well.
So as anxiety goes up, you think about it, if you model it, there's a sort of a negative impact. forces the others to go up as well. And that also then makes unemployment go up more. So it's like you get this sort of dark spiraling effect and the faster unemployment would go up, the faster this would spiral. And you can sort of, if you model it out,
The point is not to come up with, you know, accurate numbers, but to see this, sort of get a feeling for the dynamics here. So we imagine that sort of unemployment starts going up 10, 20, 30%, and you start to see, yes, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, suicide, loss of purpose, which is linked to all those things as well, goes up.
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Chapter 7: What mental health challenges are linked to AI's societal disruption?
But what I say to most parents is to think about the addictive potential and the sycophancy of models. And so, you know, who has kids and who doesn't? I don't have kids. Nine, six and three. So you probably notice things like, you know, if you tell them a story versus reading them a book versus an audio book versus, you know, a video version of that.
Each one of those is kind of on a spectrum of more stimulating and a little bit more addictive. And then you get to social media and all this other stuff. So you can think about these digital things on a spectrum of how addictive. So AI companions, things are designed to be companions and young kids, hard no. I would say just don't let your kids, you know,
Do you know if your kids are using AI Companions?
Definitely not. Definitely not. I mean, well, they're too young. They don't have access to it. So minor three and six, so there's no access.
Our child who is entering that world is ASD and they follow the rules. And the rules are, yeah, so there's no way that's okay.
But I'm sure it's common for many people.
But the data we're seeing is like 50% of young people, particularly tweens, teens, are using some kind of AI companion. So if you're listening and you haven't had the conversation with your kids, I think it's good to have that conversation because a lot of parents we find don't even realize their kids have an AI companion. They think it's social media or they're texting with their friends.
Can you elaborate what that is?
Because it's newish to me.
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Chapter 8: What does a hopeful future with AI look like?
Exactly.
Yeah. Exactly.
Yep. Yeah. And it, We don't know a lot about how this is going to affect young people. But like you're saying, there's no awkwardness. And you could say, yeah, well, there's a loneliness pandemic at the moment, so it's helping with that. But is it really?
You can also argue that loneliness is, the pain of loneliness is a powerful signal that's useful because people do better when they're socializing. So you don't want to kill that signal. You want it to be there to get people to interact.
Yeah.
But like you said, the companions are not pushing back. You're not forcing young people to compromise. So it doesn't have all the sort of usual human-to-human interactions that we need to learn.
I had an interesting experience actually on Gemini. I started a channel and I love Alfred Adler, who's like a sort of... relatively well-known, I don't know what you call him, like a psychologist, sort of like back in the Freud days, he was sort of in Freud and Jung's ether.
And he's the guy behind all the philosophies in The Courage to be Disliked, which is a very popular book, book that changed my life. And I started a channel and I said like, in this thread, can you give me life advice, but only pull from the published books
work of Alfred Adler so please you know I would like advice but act as Alfred Adler but don't go rogue just stay on his theories and his teachings and I said and also be blunt because Alfred Adler was very blunt so be blunt with me you know don't pussyfoot around, you know? And, and so it was, it was very blunt and I was, and it was so blunt that I was like, actually, can you be less blunt?
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