Joel Pearson - I Think, Therefore AI | The Imperfects

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.

You're an optimist.

I am.

I think of myself as a tech optimist.

You're a tech optimist.

I'm an AI optimist.

So humor me.

This feels like the episode we've been needing to do for a long time.

But maybe putting off or, like, avoiding?

Maybe.

But, yeah, I mean, like I think finally to have someone who knows –

The differences between the subscription plans between ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

I think to break down the features, I think that's really, really important.

That's the highest priority.

It's really important, yeah.

Because it's sometimes really confusing, you know, like $20, $15.

Anyway, we've got someone here.

And it's in US dollars, which is even more confusing.

Exactly.

Anyway, there's lots to go into about AI.

So this is Joel Pearson, by the way.

We're very lucky to have Joel with us today.

Sometimes I'll hit the bio and trim it down a bit, but I'm not going to, because I want people to understand how incredible his brain is.

For Joel Pearson, it's always been about discovery.

And luckily for us, Joel's most recent work involves an attempt to discover the social and psychological impacts of AI and how we can best prepare for an AI future.

Joel began a degree in science before he got bored and switched to fine art with the intention to become a filmmaker.

Reading about the concept of consciousness through a philosophical lens, Joel decided that this was something he needed to understand more.

Joel switched back to a degree in science, completed his PhD in neuroscience and has spent the past 20 years researching how human brains process uncertainty and adapt to change and make decisions.

Joel has published over 100 peer-reviewed publications, a book called The Intuition Toolkit and in 2024 created his own discipline.

As the world's first neurofuturist, Joel studies how AI will impact human brains and aims to design intervention to mitigate potential damage.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Nice intro.

Dad, if you're listening, we love you very much.

And 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.

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 um, it can get quite scary, and the word uncertainty is one of the first word that pops into your mind.

So i thought i might start by asking this question joel um, 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?

That's One word.

Uncertain.

In one word, how would you describe the future?

Word of the moment?

Yeah, uncertain at the moment.

Yeah.

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.

So when you ask a lot of people, you know, what do you think next year is going to be like?

They imagine, you know, chat GPT window and imagine it just a little bit better.

But that's not exponential.

That's just a linear thing.

So people predict in this linear straight line, but AI is going like that.

I heard the analogy someone said the other day that it's growing so rapidly.

It's like in our brain.

We think it's like an iPhone update that might happen every six months, but that amount of progress is happening every couple of hours in AI world apparently.

That's the sort of-

Someone said that from the first iPhone to where we are now, that kind of progress could take place in a month in AI world.

So change, the change is so rapid.

The change, yeah.

And then the other thing is that it's not a single exponential.

So it's like AI is then affecting everything else.

So it's like this tide that's lifting all the other boats.

So everything from protein folding, so AI effectively got a Nobel Prize for that.

It's changing chemistry, biology.

Can you say that again?

AI got a Nobel Prize.

So the team at Google DeepMind did this protein folding project where they could get AI to learn to sort of map out all the different ways proteins could fold.

And that was something that would have taken their estimates like 50, 100 human years to do.

And now AI can just kind of do it on the fly.

And that team of people got the Nobel Prize for that.

But it was really AI that you could say deserved that Nobel Prize.

But my point is like that...

AI is affecting all these different industries.

It's obviously affecting media and photography and video and Hollywood and material science physics, mathematics.

So it's basically changing everything.

So we're starting to see or probably will see exponentials in all those different areas.

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.

For most people.

It's probably hitting them at the moment with the whole job talk, this idea that we're going to see this sort of loss of human jobs.

And we've seen already this year a number of companies cut human workforce.

So that's where the uncertainty is coming from.

From a lot of people, they're feeling that stress.

And sometimes I'll talk about.

Talk about it like there's a pandemic of uncertainty that's spreading, which we know triggers stress and anxiety in people.

So simply not knowing the future is something that freaks out all humans or primates, all animals, really.

I remember growing up as a teenager.

It's like well yes, we didn't necessarily know what the internet would be, but it didn't feel like it was going to happen so quickly or change things so quickly that we couldn't pretty comfortably assume what the world from a technological point of view.

We couldn't guess what it will look like in five years.

There wasn't the fear i don't think of.

What will our kids be dealing with when they're teenagers, if they're born now?

Like we can't possibly imagine yeah, Like I studied IT in high school and like IT was like a class about computers and it's just so vague.

But that was sort of at that time, it was very much like, okay, we're all getting computers now.

We need to learn about computers.

And then the internet was like a whole other thing.

But that sort of feels like...

And it's like the dark side of the moon that we don't quite well.

It doesn't even exist yet, let alone the dark side of the moon.

It's the dark side of a planet we don't know is there.

Yeah.

And I think yeah, one of the things that you hear a lot is people compare, like talk about AI as a tech revolution.

They compare it to the internet, to the printing press or whatever other technical revolutions.

But I think that's not, that's a mistake.

So it's not really, yes, it's a technology, but the impact it's going to have is about intelligence.

So I think it's better to think about it as an intelligence revolution.

And that's something that humanity has never had before.

We've never had... this sort of intelligence that can scale up that we can all have in our pockets.

Yes, we've had the internet and things, but this is really different.

This is something that can do work, make decisions, and we don't know how good it's going to get, how far it's going to go.

So I don't think any of the other revolutions we've been through are a good guide for this.

It's completely different.

And therefore I think, yeah, it is going to change every sort of level of society.

It's going to change our lives, what we do at home, what we do at work, everything in between.

And that amount of change needs to be the sort of the center, the focus of discussions around this.

Not the tech, not the companies, not the any other stuff.

It needs to be this human discussion.

One of the things that really bugs me is that the whole discussion around AI has been massively biased.

And one of the reasons that is, is because the media tends to go to AI experts.

So the godfathers of AI?

You've heard of Geoffrey Hinton and all these people that live, and breathe computer scientists, or they go to the AI CEOs.

And they ask them about what's the future of the world?

What is, how is AI going to change schools and my kids and this?

But they're the wrong people to ask.

They give very tech focused, very computer science answers.

For them and their minds, the biggest threat is this misalignment, the Terminator scenario that AI is going to wipe us out to make more paperclips, or something like that.

And that's something that is one possibility on the horizon.

Who knows when?

Whereas the societal disruption, the job loss, all the human stuff is already happening.

It's baked in and it started to happen.

So I think sort of I see part of my mission is to shift that focus away from the very AI focused sort of nerdy answers like that to the societal effects that are really going to matter to us.

That's great.

Cause I feel like that is, I mean just listening to what you said.

Then I, When I bring up AI with people, some really intelligent people, often they'll be very quick to say well look, we survived the Industrial Revolution.

And it kind of annoys me because I'm like well, you haven't gone that deep on it.

Then, if that's your response,

But I do feel like a lot of people are saying well, as human beings, we're resilient and we've adapted to so many things before.

We'll be fine.

But as you said, this is nothing like that.

Yeah.

It's different and it will be different.

So we need to think about this differently.

Think about it on a much bigger scale.

And I don't see any governments doing that.

You know, think of COVID times a thousand, times 10,000, like that kind of disruption.

And we did see the mental health impact of COVID.

And if we do see massive unemployment, that alone is going to be hugely disruptive.

That is terrifying.

It's terrifying to state the absolute obvious.

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.

I...

There's so many things I worry about, but one of the things I find difficult 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.

It's kind of happening.

Yeah.

And as an individual, you've got no choice to –

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.

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.

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.

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's 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 realize 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.

So people are doing, you know, ice baths and saunas and long hikes and trying to put themselves in situations where they have discomfort.

And there's interesting data in terms of the brain that doing uncomfortable things is actually good for the brain.

It changes a particular part of your brain.

And it's kind of this transferable skill that we see that people who live longer have a larger that part of the brain.

The anterior cingulate cortex is larger in them.

It tends to be more active and grow when people take on hard challenges like running marathons or meditating every day, or they

And there seems to be some adaptability that you could do it for a physical thing and it would actually give you benefits for a non-physical thing like mental thinking.

I mean, ironically, AI is making things more certain.

In terms of?

Well, maybe not more certain, but it's giving like if you're using like ChatGPT, for example, to tell you like I'm going to Amsterdam for three days.

Can you organize an itinerary?

It's giving you tools to make you more prepared or certain or...

It's comfortable.

Maybe, yeah, maybe that's more it.

But no, but it is a design feature that people intentionally put into tech.

So one of the classic cases was like why Uber was so successful when it launched was you think back before Uber?

You ring up and call a taxi and you just stand there waiting and you have no idea how you know.

It's coming in one minute, 10 minutes, half an hour.

Then Uber launches this thing and you go, oh, I can see a little car thing coming.

Do I know exactly when it's coming?

There's no uncertainty.

And people, that feels very nice for people.

Yeah.

Yeah, experiencing discomfort worries me specifically, like on mental tasks and using chat jeopardy or any kind of LLM to minimize discomfort of a mental task.

I really worry what the cost is.

Like if I, as an example, having a spreadsheet of data that I need, or like lots of different information, I need to put it in a spreadsheet.

The act of spending half an hour like copying and pasting that stuff and putting it in there and and making the sums and making mistakes and getting that all to happen, as opposed to just chucking the PDF that it came from into an LLM and saying, can you put this all together and make it work?

I...

To bring in another analogy, when I was younger and when I was at school and you had to write an essay, I would find myself going like, well, I don't know what to... I don't know how to start but I'm going to roll up the page and I'm going to write my headline in and I'm going to write maybe... a line of the intro and I'll just sort of and I'll start doing tasks around it that are quite boring and mind-numbing but it kind of prepared my brain to be ready to write the essay and I feel like I'm cutting out all that boring preparation stuff and getting the LLM to do the boring task I can see that there's a cost to my intelligence there, but I wonder if there's also a cost to my mental health in that I'm not experiencing mental and intellectual discomfort.

Yeah, and it's part of a bigger thing, bigger movement we're seeing at the moment.

So there's this cognitive atrophy.

So it's not just doing the boring stuff.

It's also just as we outsource.

You know every decision, 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?

And some people are predicting that we're going to see the first generation where the IQ is lower than the generation before, which has never happened before.

And as you outsourced AI for more and more things, it absolutely is going to change your brain.

And you can think about when digital GPS was introduced.

Before that, people had amazing ability to navigate and drive.

And if they got stuck, they'd use a map, but they'd have to remember the spatial layout of things.

Now we don't do that.

We just sort of plug it into a GPS thing.

And that would have absolutely changed, rewired our brains.

For that case, it's hard to say whether that's for good or bad.

For some situations, for navigating without a GPS, that's going to be bad.

Now, the thing with AI is like this brain rot.

What's going to happen to us as we just give up on this ability to critically think hard?

And we're seeing a little bit of that already.

We're kind of people are stuck in this bind where there's this pressure to use AI as much as possible.

But the more we use it, the more we're going to lose the capacity to think for ourselves, to think deeply.

And we're going to sort of the resistance, like you said, of thinking hard and from first principles, just gets harder and harder.

And I mean, I'm sure you guys have felt that.

I feel that the more AI you use, then when you go to think of something and do it without AI, it's kind of like oh man, it just.

It's like oh, I guess I'll do it.

Like, it just, it feels like, like it gets harder and harder.

And so one of the things I'll talk about is what I call cognitive upsizing.

So yes, outsource to AI as much as you can.

And everyone has to do that for their work at the moment, pretty much.

So as soon as you do that, don't just sit back and do nothing.

Don't go and get a cup of coffee.

Don't treat it like a holiday.

Do something else.

Find other tasks to do which are juicier, which are more human-like, something that AI maybe can't do.

But the point you were getting to is to keep that feeling of discomfort or pressure up that critical thinking.

So the analogy I'll sometimes use for people is you know, using AI is like going to the gym and having one of those robotic exoskeletons right and lifting the weights.

But the robotic exoskeleton is doing the lifting for you.

So you go every day and, of course, your muscles aren't going to change.

And they're going to atrophy.

So using AI for cognitive tasks is something similar.

Yeah.

So we're set in a situation where we have to sort of use it and we have to find ways of maintaining our critical deep thinking.

And that's a really hard thing to balance.

Is there also an element to it where we're missing out on the reward from achieving something that we've worked hard on?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

Because I heard an interview with a guy who had been in Silicon Valley in the early days of everything.

Yeah.

He was talking about how he really resisted AI to help with coding because he'd been doing it for such a long time.

He didn't want to change the way he was doing it and resisted.

And his friends in the industry were saying like, you got to get on it.

Like we're getting stuff done.

You know that would take us a month.

We're getting done in like a day.

We're getting so much more done and he resisted and he resisted.

And he was working on this one thing and he had to build a table like, just like a simple table on a page for a website or something or an app.

And he had this issue and he was working on it for weeks and he was asking his friends, I'm having this issue with this thing.

They're like, just get, just ask AI to do it.

He's like, no, I want to figure it out.

And he finally figured it out after, like you know, I don't know however long, but he finally figured it out and he felt good.

So happy with himself.

Yeah.

Like it.

Unfortunately, it took like a hundred times longer, or whatever, than it would have taken if he had have just used ChatGPT.

But the reward he explained feeling was something that he realized like that's what we're going to lose.

Yeah.

Are you saying that?

Yeah.

I haven't seen any.

I mean, I feel that sometimes, but I haven't seen any like official data to support that.

There is emerging data that suggests if you use AI to help make a decision, you feel less morally responsible for that, even though you're putting it down as your decision.

That's terrifying.

Which is scary because we know that AI is being used for military operations.

So this idea that yeah, even just discussing it and bouncing ideas back with an AI, people feel less responsible for the final outcome.

That's kind of like that, that kind of ethical question of the pulling the lever on the train.

Yeah.

It's kind of like that.

Yeah.

Have you heard that?

It's, it's like a train.

Tell me if I'm getting this wrong Joel, but a train going down a track and it's sort of facing like a split in the tracks and and If it keeps going on the track it's on, it will kill five people who are on the track.

It will kill five people.

But then if there's a lever that if you pull it it will set the trainer a different track and kill only one person.

And so the question is, do you pull the lever?

Yeah.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

Do you actively make a decision?

Do you actively kill one person?

Yeah.

Or do you just like, and that's kind of like this, it's like if we're able to.

So the second half of that is that when you set up the experiment like that, most people the majority will say yes, I'll pull the lever to save the lives.

But then if you say okay, exact same scenario.

There's no lever, but there's a guy in front of you and you have to touch him and push him off a bridge and that will derail the train or whatever,

So you're still killing the one person, but you're saving the five.

And if you have to touch the person and push then, like most people say, oh no no, I can't do that.

Because the physical act.

So as you have to touch and push and do it, people can't do that.

But if you separate out and have that lever thing, then that separation, that longer lever, that distance makes people feel okay about it.

So AI is like that, like adding the lever, adding the distance from the decision.

I mean in terms of choosing who keeps their jobs and who doesn't, in terms of it makes downsizing, I guess, a lot.

People feel a lot less guilty if it's technically not up to them.

If the AI can decide, well, those people go, these people stay.

It's like, well, it wasn't up to me.

And this is incredibly dark, but I feel like the concept of mutually assured destruction with regards to nuclear war and Armageddon is based on the idea that someone makes a decision to drop the bomb.

So do you know the concept of – it's called MAD?

No.

Which is the idea that the reason why there hasn't been a nuclear holocaust since World War II is that –.

If Russia, in the case of Russia and US during the Cold War, if one of them was to launch a bomb at the other person, they know that the other people are going to respond.

And in that response there will be decisions made at both ends that will wipe out the human race, and no one wants to be the person that makes the decision that has that cost.

And it was nicknamed MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction.

It was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Yes, yeah, yeah, and a few other things along the way.

And I find it terrifying that you could introduce something into that loop that weakens that responsibility and that decision-making.

Yeah.

Yeah, so that's... House of Dynamite.

Incredibly, yeah.

Yeah, that, yeah.

House of Dynamite, yeah, yeah.

Joel, how do we solve that?

Well, we have to study it.

We have to understand it rapidly.

And this is why I came up with this neurofuturism sort of discipline, if you like, because AI is moving so fast.

Like I said, it's exponential.

And science psychology, neuroscience all that's the science we have can't keep up with at the moment.

Science moves, yes, sometimes fast, but mostly pretty slowly.

You get a government grant that might take a year or so or two.

Then you have a couple of years to do the research.

Then you start publishing the papers.

In AI time, that's like three or four years.

The whole world's different by then.

And so that's why I kind of shifted to this mode where I'm trying to make logical, sensible predictions about the future, based on what we do know about the mind, psychology and the brain, about how all this change is going to affect us and what we can do about it.

So there's an article written, it was a blog post written by a guy called Matt Schumer.

Did you read that?

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 And what was taking him six months to do with AI to build an app.

AI could now do it in 40 minutes and much better than he could ever do it.

And he said overnight 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, 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.

So as one goes up, it actually puts 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 accurate numbers but to get a feeling for the dynamics here.

So we imagine that 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.

And all those things sort of have a negative effect on all the other things.

So it accelerates more quickly than just the speed of unemployment going up.

And that's where it gets, the numbers look pretty scary pretty quickly.

Doesn't mean that's going to happen.

I don't want to scare people, but it's worth understanding those dynamics because they're quite complicated and that none of those things are independent.

Right.

Yeah.

You have kids.

Yeah.

That's not a surprise to Joel.

He knew that.

What?

I feel like, and here they are, bring them on in.

That's where it gets.

I think for me that's where it is.

That's where I have to draw a line with.

I think about this a lot, I read about it a lot, I watch a lot of things about it, but it When I try and imagine the future, I mean it's impossible to imagine what the future is like for my kids.

And that is maybe because I'm quite sentimental, but like I remember having conversations with mum and dad about what I might do when I'm older and what they thought I might be good at and what I'd like to do.

It was like an exciting thing to talk about and I would aspire towards that, being a physiotherapist and you know that was a fun.

I never got anywhere near it because I was bad at maths.

But but when I think about the future for my kids, I don't, you know, they're already told me what they'd like to do and it's and I.

It makes me so sad sitting there just thinking I don't, I don't know if any of that's going to be available.

And then I don't know what to say in those moments.

How are you handling this with your kids?

Yeah, I've got young kids.

They're five and eight.

So they're still and they don't know what AI.

They've heard me talk about it and they've heard the phrase, but they don't know what it is.

They've never touched, they've no idea what social media is.

We keep them pretty off screens.

So they will watch a bit of TV, but we'll kind of isolate it to you know.

David Attenborough animal documentaries.

We keep them away from all the branded, you know, cartoons or any Disney stuff.

Oh God, we're failing.

And that doesn't mean I'm not saying, you know, I'm not judging anyone else, but it's the way we've been trying to do it.

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 if you tell them a story versus reading them, a book versus an audio book versus 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 are 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.

Have you asked, do you know if your kids are using AI companions?

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.

Yeah, yeah.

Our child, who is enter into that world as 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 you know if you're listening and you haven't had the conversation with the 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 new, it's newish to me.

Oh, right.

So, yeah.

So there's the kinds of you know, there's the chat GPT, the Claude, the Gemini, the sort of chat window, and then there's agents.

And then we have this other breed of AIs, which are designed to be companions.

And they typically are some kind of avatar.

A lot of them would be – actually you can get any kind you want from characters from cartoons films, through to Elon Musk avatar companion.

Some are very sexualized.

Some are not.

So all kinds of things.

So the idea is, this is like a companion you'll confide in, you'll talk to and you'll build a relationship with.

And one of these products, Replica with a K has been around for quite a few years.

It was actually around before sort of 2022 when the sort of generative AI boom happened.

And in adults, we've seen people having multi-year deep loving relationships, marriage ceremonies, when they tweak the algorithm for replica to actually pull it back and make it less sexual.

Thousands, if hundreds of thousands of people complained that they'd lost a loved one.

They got depressed, they got anxious.

They said, you know, their relationship got dissolved, you know, and they begged them to turn it back to where it was.

Now we have this sort of range of, you know character, AI and all these other companion apps which are pretty much designed for young people.

And we're seeing, I think the data was like 50% of young people in the US are using them daily.

It's different in different countries and for hours every day.

I mean to try and look at it from the point of view of the person who would want to have a companion.

The biggest thing we talk about in this podcast is connection and like the importance of human connection and you know people and relationships.

And it's like, it's what it's all about.

If you're not exposed to lots of people and you haven't got – or you're shy, or you've got some sort of social anxiety and you don't have the confidence to go.

I can absolutely see the allure with a companion or a relationship that is – unconditional love, someone who never challenges you, someone who does seemingly love you.

Quote unquote love you and support you and like, encourage you, and it's the friend slash companion that you've always dreamed of.

It's so I can absolutely see.

That's what's so scary about it.

Yeah, talk about comfort versus discomfort.

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.

But like you said, that the companions are not, you know, they're 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, a 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 – work of alfred adler.

So please, you know i would like advice, but act as alfred adler but um, 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.

And so it was.

It was very blunt.

And it was so blunt that I was like, actually, can you be less blunt?

Because this feels really harsh.

The way you're saying this to me is really harsh.

And so I said, if you'd like to change the bluntness, you'll have to go into the settings.

So I went into Google Gemini's settings.

And in the kind of universal instructions that you can do for the thing I said, can you be 80 blunt?

And it is.

And it was kind of scary that I could really control the feedback that I was getting from this.

It's not a companion, but it's like.

I'm going to try that with Penny tonight.

But that's a good point.

So that's something worth pointing out for listeners is that most of these products do have these universal settings.

You can go in

And so the sycophancy, this thing they always say, oh, that's the best idea ever.

That's amazing.

You're doing a great job.

And there's data saying that that's actually not really good.

One, it's more addictive.

You like to stay on there for longer.

And it's sort of one of the ways that this sort of you can go down rabbit holes of sort of these misbeliefs and start believing things that aren't true.

And so it's good to go in there and sort of give it these universal settings.

Don't just say, I'm amazing.

That's the best, you know, don't be sycophantic.

So I would say yeah for anyone young AI companion kind of style apps hard.

No till 18 or 20, or at least your frontal cortex is more developed, which is really in the 20s.

And for the other more sort of productive work style products, then this is the challenge.

How can you introduce it?

And AI is like, there's a lot of these things, like there's the bad and the good.

And how do you figure out a path to balance those two things?

I would sort of recommend bringing it in a way that is least addictive, least stimulating and is a way that is project-based and can help them solve something they're working on.

And so what age are you talking about here?

Are you thinking teenage years?

Is that kind of…

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to put a – I don't like putting a hard number on that.

Yeah, early teens or before.

I mean, I'm surprised we haven't seen – like there's YouTube for kids.

I'm surprised there isn't yet an LLM for kids or maybe there is.

There's not.

I mean, there's some learning ones, like the Department of Education has one in Australia.

Khan Academy made this Khan Amigo.

So there's educational ones, which are designed for young people, for kids.

But that's different to just jumping on one of these large language models and just going to town.

But yeah, I mean because they're for at least for the US-based AI companies.

They're racing to get to the point where their AIs can build themselves and improve themselves.

And that's their goal.

So mostly they're not interested in how to help society at the moment, or how to help society integrate, or how to help businesses use AI right, or how to build AIs for kids, yet

That will come later, I think.

But right now, they're all just in this sort of arms race to who can get to this self-improvement.

And this sort of super AI thing.

These AGI terms I'm not a fan of because they kind of are meaningless.

But once AI can go and improve itself without any human interaction, then that's this threshold where we'll just hit the vertical and the exponential.

And this is the point where I think...

That highlights to me how significant this is.

I think I heard someone say that.

I think the year gets mentioned.

2027 is the year people mention a lot as in where it's really going to things and it starts to change dramatically.

And someone said if we knew there was going to be a population of a foreign species turning up that is far more intelligent than us in 2027, we would be making much more changes.

We'd be trying to be prepared as much as possible.

And yet still people aren't really talking about it that much.

But that is the reality of what's about to happen.

Yeah.

And I'll often say that, particularly when talking to businesses who just think of AI as another piece of software, they'll buy a license and go and give it to their staff and say, you know, go and use this now kind of thing and force it upon them.

And that does not prepare, that just doesn't work.

I think it's better to, like you said, to frame it almost like an alien species has come to Earth.

They seem friendly.

They're going to work with us.

They're going to help us do things.

And they are going to be more intelligent than us.

But it's a whole new species, like you said.

And that's a better framing for people to have the right expectation of what's happening right now.

It's such an abstract thought, though, without them being physical beings.

It's such an abstract... Given time.

Well, yeah, true.

Well, that's a good point.

So what we haven't actually touched on which I normally do earlier on is that we're talking about digital, non-physical form.

But the second wave of what's happening now is the humanoid robots.

Is that actually, we're actually going to have that?

Absolutely, 100%, yeah.

We already have it.

So there are well over 100 companies around the world working on humanoid robots.

The most advanced one that's been made public is Figure Robotics, Figure 3, who is a US-based one.

And it can now run multiple hours fully autonomously working in a house, you know, doing chores and folding and cleaning and doing laundry, all that kind of thing.

And so they've built that with its own onboard AI.

So it's self-learning.

And so what does this mean?

It means a few things.

One is we're going to see this second wave it's going to be delayed of disruption to work, the jobs that are physical and dexterous, which we haven't seen anything like that yet.

Because five years ago people were saying, what's your advice for kids?

Yeah, do a trade.

Yeah, electrician, plumber.

And they're in high demand at the moment, but that time is somewhat limited.

And then the other way to think about this is that Once we have these humanoids in hospitals and nursing homes and all the workplaces and our homes, that's an infinite source of new learning for AI.

And so each of those humanoids will be learning and that'll go back to a central hub and they'll all get smarter like that.

So that's this new frontier of learning.

And that's why these companies are going to lease and sell these humanoids at way below cost, because it's such a big opportunity to learn from.

And develop their tech.

Yeah.

So they've kind of used all the cheap or free data they can get their hands on or steal for training these models, and then the humanoid interaction is the next level.

Now think about what we're already seeing with AI companions and then think what you know you put an AI companion into a humanoid.

Some of these humanoids, the one in particular from Xpeng, the EV car company.

They've made these quite gender specific.

We'll say kind of like quite curvy humanoids.

And you can imagine one of these AI companions being put into this physical form.

And then we're in a very different place where we see, you know, I imagine young people will be choosing to have relationships with these humanoids because they can shape them however they want.

They can have full comfort, no awkwardness.

It's going to be easy.

It's going to be, you know.

Short term, all upside.

But long term, I don't know if that's the case.

So we've touched on how the human race is completely fucked.

You're an optimist.

I am.

I think of myself as a tech optimist.

You're a tech optimist.

I'm an AI optimist.

So humor me.

How?

How on earth?

So like one of you said before that the human race is hugely resilient.

I think we will get to some kind of AI utopia, like a total change, a revamp in our society.

In our lifetime?

I think so.

How old are you?

What do you think?

I'm 44.

Okay.

A little bit younger than me.

Yeah.

I think in our lifetime I don't know when, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20 years, but I think from here to there is gonna be really bumpy.

And so the key to surviving or thriving hanging onto the quality of our lives the next two decades, let's say, is the key to that is to focus on us and our quality of life, to ways of handling this change, because humans are bad at change.

And we can go into sort of this idea of change management models that we could apply at home, at work or for a whole nation.

So we've sort of written a white paper on this, a change management plan for all of Australia and what that might look like, what that might involve.

Wow.

So I think change, just this way of making change less painful for people, is one of the things the government should be stepping up and thinking about planning for right now.

Is it even on the radar?

Like I don't get any sense.

It's never mentioned anywhere in discussions in parliament.

It's not a thing.

So they are setting up an AI safety center, but it's very small and it's very focused only on the model safety themselves.

So the job of the safety center at the moment is to just test the models and see how safe they are.

And that's kind of where things are.

Last year I went to one of the big UN events in Geneva where all the countries come in and talk about sovereign AI.

And there was pretty much zero mention of societal disruption, of job losses, or any of this.

That seems wild.

It was all safety.

How do you stop it from blowing up a nuclear power plant?

Or what are the guardrails?

So important things.

Yeah, and they are important, but I...

I think you can trace all this back to everyone going to advice, this bias of going to getting advice from computer scientists that they have not realised how big societal disruption is going to be from AI.

I mean, I heard Tristan Harris talking about something the other day and he was...

He was saying that the only and this makes sense, the only way that we're going to see proper change in government is if they're worried about losing votes if they don't.

So as long as the general population is not saying much and not demanding change, they probably don't need to.

And that's why I've sort of you know, my lab traditionally was neuroscience but I've kind of shifted and pivoted to now I say this is my full-time job of how do I create awareness, to shift the conversation from all the tech and everything around that and the computer science to society and to our quality of life, our jobs and all this.

Yeah, it's amazing.

You can think about that yet to influence government, to get them to think about it, to expand the scope of these AI safety centers, because that is what is mattering right now and it's already happening.

So that's the thing I didn't mention earlier that the way in terms of job loss, the way companies are using AI and what these frontier models are actually capable of is a big gap.

So what does that mean?

It means if you could magically freeze AI development right now, we'd still see a couple of years of job disruption.

Hey, Hugh and Josh, get this.

From the people who brought you the Resilience Project Schools Program comes workplace wellbeing done differently.

That's right.

Yes, Josh?

Is this the tone you want for the Resilience Project, Dad?

I'm trying to kind of get the excitement up for the Resilience Project Workplace Program.

Okay, go.

Our program is engaging, practical and accessible.

Is that all right?

Yeah, yeah.

That's all true though, isn't it?

It's all very true.

Can I suggest an approach?

Yes, please.

Over to you, Josh.

I feel like it's extremely compelling what the Resilience Project does for kids in schools.

Yes.

The research is unbelievable.

Yes.

So that is extremely compelling, and the fact that almost 50 of adults will experience mental ill health in their lifetime.

I'm very excited about it because I've seen the work that's gone into it and I know it's going to have the same impact in workplaces as it does in schools.

Awesome.

That's Hugh van Kylenburg, founder of The Resilience Project.

So to find out more about the workplace As best as you possibly can, could you explain understanding how difficult a task this is?

But can you explain what Utopia might look like?

Because I'm picturing the fact that we've got comfortable with the fact that no one is really working, but we're focusing on what really matters, which is Yeah.

So we have to be careful with so.

Some people will talk about this in terms of like a Renaissance time where we're going to be able to sit back and it's all holiday time.

We can all just exercise and we'll sit on the beach or write poetry or just do whatever we want.

The problem with that, it does sound a lot like retirement.

And we know that, generally speaking, when people retire, it's really bad for their health, not just mental health but physical health.

We have other studies showing that those that have purpose to their lives when you measure the questionnaire, let's say are less likely to die from all causes by about 140.

Okay.

So that's just not a mental health thing.

It's a broader thing.

So purpose is really important.

So we don't want to think about some kind of universal basic or high income as some kind of retirement do nothing.

That's just not going to drive well with who we are.

It's not going to work.

It's going to be quite negative.

So whatever we move to, we have to solve for the purpose and competition and a few other things, but purpose probably being the big one.

So one of the things we've been working on is this kind of what I call the owner's honest revolution.

And I use that word as an owner of projects we're going to be doing.

It's very similar to the way a lot of people talk about entrepreneurship.

But when you say that, it kind of has some baggage with it.

So I tend not to use that phrase.

But I think we're going to be moving into a world where big companies are going to shrink.

You won't need thousands of employees to do things.

And we're at the same time going to see an explosion of lots of very small companies with one or two people. and with the support of AI and robotics, they're gonna be doing all kinds of amazing things.

Some of those will be for profit, some of those will be not for profit.

So yes, going into space, cleaning the ocean, mental health things, all kinds of things.

And that is one of the only ways that I can see the way you can solve for some of these purpose, competition and things that will get us out of bed in the morning.

And that's what I was referring to before.

Then if you think about that kind of world where none of us will be employees in the way most people are at the moment,

So you won't be going to a job and we'll be told what to do.

We'll do it, hand it to someone else.

That idea is going to change.

And we're more like freelancers.

And that's a mental shift where we have to learn and teach students at university and schools to think about this kind of work differently.

So they're going to be the owners of whatever they're doing.

And universities and schools don't do that, right?

You get told what to do.

You need to learn this.

You need to do this.

Someone's going to mark that and you did it right or you did it wrong.

And having the freedom to do whatever you want and have to, you know, learn to find purpose.

And some people say, you know, only a small percentage of population can be entrepreneurs.

But I don't know if that's true, because most people go through a school system where that's kind of

That sort of group work, project work, finding your purpose and practicing that over and over they don't really get that experience.

And so it's not clear to me.

If you change the school and university system to something a bit like I'm talking about, maybe we could all be more entrepreneurial.

Yeah.

I think the utopia I have in my head, which is just the thing I've been hanging on to desperately, is this idea that in however long 10, 20 years' time, when you go to school and university rather than doing subjects, you do a problem.

So like one of the problems is global warming.

One of the problems is garbage.

Garbage one of them, and you learn problem solving skills within, like what are you most passionate about helping with and everyone on the earth is there to help solve a problem.

Yeah um, There's plenty to solve.

And if the whole world is divided into whatever the main six problems are, and then we're all working with AI towards that.

And I can't remember where I heard this, but AI.

Someone said that utopia is when we eventually say actually I, we haven't done a good job of running the world.

Like, look at the problems we've caused.

It's over to you, which is a scary thing, but you tell us how to like.

Like, we're going to work with you, you're the boss now.

We don't have human beings who are in charge and We want a sustainable planet.

We want no war.

We want no one to die before, you know, all those kind of things.

That's kind of this utopia I've got in my head.

And I feel like it's wishful thinking, but it's been helpful for me to think.

Maybe my kids could be a part of that one day.

Yeah, that's kind of the way I see it.

Yeah, this idea that we...

The problem is that a lot of people, even though they get purpose from work, they say they hate their job, but they still get purpose.

They're still doing something for the world.

They're getting money for their family or whatever.

They're supporting people and routine and they're getting up in the morning and that gives a lot to people.

That's one of the reasons, like I said, the retirement's actually not good for your health.

And so how we manage that transition is going to be really important.

And you hear a lot of the tech people and Elon Musk these kind of people talking about all these future scenarios, but we're not hearing.

Governments need to start taking this really seriously and thinking about it and how.

What would that transition be like?

And there's a lot of money that's going to be needed to help people through this.

And where does that money come from?

Because we're going to see less jobs but at the same time, we're going to see an explosion of AI agents billions of them.

And I'll sometimes rephrase.

What's an agent?

So it's a type of AI which runs autonomously.

So you give it skills, you can give it a personality, a skill set, and you say, go off and do this.

Your objective and goals are these things and don't do these things.

And it can spin up its own agents automatically.

And so it'll go off and do stuff while you're doing something else.

So that might be like on a simplistic term.

For people it might be like okay, someone's running a t-shirt business.

And so it's like an agent might be an employee who takes orders, makes sure that everything's right, puts the order into the manufacturer, make sure it's getting paid.

All that's happening autonomously and the human doesn't have to even worry about that.

It's very different to sitting on a computer, looking at a little square chat window and chatting instructions, do this, do that, and getting the feedback straight away.

So that's what's, these agents are where AI is at at the moment.

And this is the year of agents.

And so a lot is going to change this year.

What I was going to say before is that sometimes I'll rephrase that as AI immigrants.

If you think about it for a second.

There's a lot of talk, especially at the moment.

People get scared of human immigrants coming to Australia.

But the humans are not the immigrants you need to worry about.

It's these AI immigrants.

There's going to be a lot more of them.

They're the ones that are going to take jobs.

And they're all coming from mainly the US for us.

And so the money that's going to them is going straight offshore at the moment.

When you hire a human immigrant, let's say in Australia that money is going back into the community.

It's going back to rent and grocery stores and all that sort of stuff.

With AI immigrants, that money is going straight to California, let's say.

So that presents another problem of these kind of immigrants.

It's just taking money from Australia straight overseas.

When you frame it like that, I think that opens it up to a larger section of the population to think about AI in a different way.

So, just to cover it off and I got the sense from what you said before this is not something that you're worried about, but the Terminator scenario being like once AI can self-improve.

And then AI is solving the problems of the world.

And like what if like?

One of the doomsday fears is like what if the AI recognizes that humans are problematic to the earth, existing and with no emotional, emotional thought?

It just sort of like wipes out humans because we're actually an inefficient part of the functioning of the Earth, of the planet.

Yeah.

Is that a possibility?

Yeah, it's a non-zero possibility.

So it is a possibility, but it's somewhere in the future.

Yeah, okay.

And so I'm not saying we should ignore that issue, but I'm saying the other stuff the massive change, the job losses, societal disruption, education disruption, lifestyle disruption all that is already begun and it's here right now.

It's already happening.

And we should focus on that.

Yeah.

So, but you know, one of the things we study in my lab is how, when you imagine, you can imagine something like a killer robot, like the whatever T1000 terminator kind of thing.

You have something to imagine.

You can imagine it.

Your limbic system amygdala, responds to that, because when you imagine stuff, you kind of trick the emotional parts of your brain into almost like you're seeing the thing in front of you.

So that's a very emotional thing.

And we know from a lot of psychology, we tend to worry about the things more that are easy to imagine and drive emotion more.

Whereas when I say massive societal disruption, people are like there's not a killer robot to imagine.

It gets more click-baity with articles.

It fires up emotion.

A lot more people get more fearful about it.

But I think I'm not saying it's not a problem, but I think the societal stuff is here right now and that's where people should be focusing.

And that's also part of the bias that, of course, if you ask the godfathers of AI, they're going to give you an AI style answer, which is this misalignment terminator thing, that they're not the experts in education or children or societal functioning mental health.

So they're not going to talk on those topics.

And if they are, they're not going to give them the sort of airtime they deserve.

Yep.

So the other day and I told this during the podcast, but my wife came running downstairs and said you've got to see this video on Instagram.

It's the funniest thing I've ever seen.

It was a cat that had someone sat on a cat and it flew up to the roof, swung around the fan and then flew out.

The window came back in.

It was ridiculous and she didn't realize it was fake.

And the kids said, what is it?

What are you laughing at?

And we showed the kids.

And then I explained to them it wasn't real.

And then two nights ago, I said to my kids, you've got to see this breakdancing that I've just seen.

This kid, 16-year-old called Ian Hotke.

I think his name is the Red Bull breakdancing.

One of the most incredible things I've ever seen.

60 million views on YouTube.

Most of them are mine.

And I showed my kids and they'd never seen break dancing before.

And they went, that's not real.

I said, no, no, no, this is real.

And they said, no, it's not.

No one can do that.

That's not real.

And I just, I was like, this is so sad.

The boy who cried deep fake.

Yeah.

And so that just, I couldn't stop thinking about that.

Like, anything that's good, are they going to question?

Is this real?

Anything that's funny, are they going to question, is it real?

And it just got me thinking about the topic of deep fakes.

Absolutely.

So right, you know, 2026, seeing is no longer believing.

So photographs and video went from something about documenting things that actually happened in the world to now something very different.

There's something that's creative.

The click of a button, you can create either photos or videos that look indistinguishable.

And so it's a generative, creative thing now.

It's not about documenting reality anymore.

So that has huge implications for most of what you see on social media now is synthetic.

It's not caught with a lens and a camera.

We don't know what percentage that is, but it's a lot.

And so it changes the way we think about things that are caught with a camera.

We start to doubt those.

So this deepfake thing, they've been around for a while, but now they're so good that you can't tell the difference.

And there's lots of things happening in this space.

But one thing I'd like to point out is that.

So let's say, you go online and you see your favorite actor or CEO of a company or politician saying something really upsetting hurtful, racist.

And you go, oh, my God.

And you see at the bottom, oh, this has been tagged as a fake.

And you think, okay, no problem.

Keep on scrolling.

Now there is a problem there because in that moment that emotional response you've had changes your mental model of that individual.

Even if you know it's fake.

Even if you know it's fake and you've seen the thing.

So the stronger the emotion around that, or the more horrific the thing they're saying is and this is called the continued influence effect that there's a continuing influence on your mental model of that individual, that brand or whatever it is.

And so by being told it was fake, it doesn't undo that.

Oh my God.

And when this is strong it can take some time, like a week or two or depending on what your exposure is to that thing, to sort of rejig that mental model back to where it was.

So going in there knowing it's a fake beforehand does reduce this effect, but it doesn't get rid of it.

And I assume it's by exposure to that person being normal again or something would.

Yeah, that should just be it up, yeah.

So if you don't have, So if you see one video of Oh, I thought of Jack Nicholson then, but Jack Nicholson doing something completely bizarre, and then i don't see jack nicholson again for six months, my brain is going to have less of a chance of rejigging my mental model of him.

Yeah wow, and so it's because a lot of people still think about the deep fake thing.

You know, the solution now is to get another ai to scan through the things and try and find what's fake and what's not and then tag it.

So it's like a cybersecurity solution.

But there's this whole other psychological dimension to it, which is not solved by that.

So I think it's worth pointing out for people.

Yeah.

Wow.

You said earlier the change framework, the white paper that you've been working on.

Yeah.

For the style of show I mean, it sounds like you could do so much on every aspect of that but for the show we make and for the listeners of this show, I think it'd be really helpful to extrapolate a little bit on the personal side of that and what change you sort of.

You mentioned tools to be more resilient, a framework for handling change better.

Is there a way we could go a little bit more sort of tease some of them out so people can, because I think it's really important that people develop some of these tools.

Yeah.

So let's take an example of, let's say you want to bring AI into your family at home.

So let's go through a very simplified version of an AI-specific change model.

So you would start off – let's imagine it's a cycle.

This is one of the other things.

Traditional change management would be a one-off.

You know, you change –

A company is going to do some change.

Netflix is going to go from posting out DVDs to streaming.

That's a big change.

They bring in change experts.

They go from A to B, done, and then things go back to normal.

AI is not going to be like that.

We need sort of models that will just be, it's just going to be change after change after change.

So if this model is a cyclic thing, let's say it's a circle that goes around.

So let's start at the top.

We're going to start with some kind of actionable inspiration or fuel.

Why do you want to bring, in this example, AI into your family?

So we'd start with that.

Is it because everyone else is doing it, or is it because you think if you don't do it, your kids are going to be left behind?

Or what is that reason?

And it's important to have that reason and fuel, because when you're going through change, there's normally some point where everyone gets to a resistance of change, where they're like no, it's too much.

It's too scary.

I want to stop.

Well, my specific example is going to be my kids are going to need to understand these tools, so I should be introducing them in the home in a safe way, so they can start to use them, integrate them into their life in a way that I'm aware of, rather than just sort of head in the sand and they'll work it out themselves.

Yeah.

So that's great.

Yeah.

So that's the fuel.

So when you get to some hard points, you have to remember that point.

That's why you want to do this.

So we have that reason for doing it.

Then we're going to go into a sort of education phase where you're going to start wrapping your head around what AI can do, what it can't do.

What is it right now?

And, based on that sort of education phase, we're going to move into sort of mapping out a roadmap of what this is going to be like for you guys and your family.

Is it going to be on one extreme?

You're just going to default through every decision you guys are going to make, from what's for dinner through to what are you going to do on the weekend.

Is everything going to go through AI or is it going to be just one thing?

What are you going to do on the weekend?

Or is it going to be? one hour every afternoon.

What's, what's that roadmap like?

And think about that based on what AI is and what it's not.

Then we're going to execute that roadmap and you know, are you going to do it for one week, one month.

So there's a whole roadmap thinking about that.

Just to give a specific.

I might keep giving specific examples because I think it helps to sort of for people to picture it.

Slightly trivial.

My son loves fojoas.

We've planted a fojoa plant.

Oh, okay. and we're waiting for it to grow.

And I noticed that some of the leaves are dying.

And he said why don't you take a photo of it and put it into that thing in your phone and it'll tell you what it is?

And at that point I was like I want to do that, but should we talk about it and try and work out what it is ourselves, or should I put it into the phone to get the answer?

And I don't have any kind of, I guess I haven't had a discussion as a household with my wife.

We have no principle on that.

Do we do that?

Do we have the discussion?

Do we go get a book from inside, look through the book and say, what do you think it is?

And sort of have that journey with the child, which feels like a really fun thing to do, especially with the way my eldest son's brain works.

Or do I just get the picture and we grab the spray and spray it or cut off the limb or whatever?

Not his limb, the plant.

Yeah.

So that's an example, I think, of where a discussion and framework of why we're using it and how do we use it would be important for me and my wife to have.

Yeah.

So you understand that.

And yeah, put some scaffolding and framework around that to put it in context for him.

For him.

Yeah.

And then the final step there would be to socialize that and talk about it in the family altogether and talk about it with extended family or friends.

And so don't just keep it like within this tight little things.

So as you discuss it and you socialize it, it feels very normal for everyone.

And you might learn tips from other people and they'll learn from you.

So making sure, and this is something that gets forgotten sometimes when companies are doing this, But it can reduce some of the uncertainty, some of the fear, and it makes it feel very normal.

So would in that case, would that be me and my sons have breakfast with a mate every Friday?

Would it be a case of saying in that breakfast, bringing up with the – he's a great adult, very intelligent guy – bringing up with my son there?

Oh, we used AI the other day to work out what was going wrong with the plant.

Would you do that?

And then have just a general discussion about the usage of it with him.

Yeah.

And if your kids are there, they can talk about what do they think?

What do they think AI is?

Or do they like having the answer instantly?

And just discussing that whole what worked and what didn't work Yeah.

And then if you think about we're talking about like a ring, a circle here, like a spoke model for a wheel, and the thing in the center there where you want to think about sort of wellbeing, mental health, is it causing anyone in this case in your family any stress?

Is it, this is more for adults, but is it...

How is it affecting the way you see yourself?

So some people are anti-tech and anti-AI.

So that's something that needs to be sort of given some thought to as well for a journey like this.

Your beliefs around yourself.

You think yourself as not a tech person, not an AI person.

Going through a journey like this is going to be much, much harder.

So beliefs also are really important there.

So that's a really simplified version and you can kind of scale that up to think of how a business might do it, or scale that up to a whole country.

But that's the very simple thing that we've taken certain elements out of existing.

There are whole lots of organizational change management models and put them into a cyclic version of this.

You know, if you're applying this to a whole country or in a business sense, that whole mental health piece would be much more important because you'd have lots of other things jobs, issues would come up and that would cause a lot of stress and anxiety.

So that whole, that sort of centerpiece would be more important to check in to the mental health side at every step of that sort of cyclic journey.

Yeah.

It feels like it gives you some agency, I think in a world that's changing, where I feel like I have none.

It feels like it gives me some skerrick of agency and control over its impact on my life.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it feels kind of empowering as a model.

And that's why companies you know, even a small company with 100 people, they're going to go through a change they get change experts in to help them.

If a country like Australia is going through the biggest change we've ever been through, of course you're going to need help with that.

We're going to need some kind of big change plan.

How are we going to manage this?

And you can imagine that part of that might be a big PR campaign across the whole country.

Do you guys remember like Slip, Slop, Slap or one of those campaigns?

So maybe we have kind of some kind of AI awareness campaign to help reduce some of that uncertainty but help people who don't.

A lot of people don't even know what AI is or what this thing.

What's happening right now?

So some kind of large scale nice, catchy tune PR thing that's scaled out across all media in the country.

So that would be an interesting thing to think about the government doing right now, I think.

Yeah.

And I think of the social media ban or whatever people may think of that.

I personally think it's great, but at least it's given me a toolkit to chat to my child about it, to say like see, this is there's been, the government says this is not good for you and he's having discussions and we can have discussions.

There's a place to talk from it, because it's in the collective conversation, as opposed to having that discussion completely isolated and the child saying well, Jack up the road uses it and he's fine.

You know, there's a broader discussion happening.

Yeah, and I think it's very useful for parents for that.

It gives them scaffolding around that, some guidance.

Yeah.

And the next stage is to take that into which the eSafety Commissioner is starting to do into more of the AI companions.

So 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.

And now we're moving to the new social media is these companion apps.

And that's attachment, hacking attachment.

Jesus.

So an economy of attachment.

How sticky can you make these bonds so that young people feel that they can never let go of these things and they're really bonded to them?

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Yeah, I actually heard the other day Mark Zuckerberg say something like the average child wants 15 friends, but only has three.

So they're going to create the next 12 that they need.

That is terrifying.

It's horrifying.

Wow.

So we talked before about, you mentioned universities, and I keep thinking about kids.

I was up at Melbourne Uni yesterday morning and I was watching these kids walking from college across to uni, from going to lectures, and I was thinking about university in this world because I don't know.

It would be so demotivating to be at uni.

I really feel for kids at uni right now, because one of the motivations that keeps you going at a very unmotivating time in your life at university is one needs to get a job and to have that potentially taken away from you.

Surely that's going to impact enrolments in universities.

People are going well.

I don't have to go to university anymore because that job won't be there for me.

Universities are incredible institutions that bring so much meaning and they're so important to the development of it.

I mean, if that's where you – if you end up at university, it tends to be a really significant – like almost like a rite of passage to go through in your life.

I don't know if universities are talking about this much internally.

My father-in-law is a professor of public health at Melbourne University.

Incredible man so well respected across public health.

He the other day said to me, could you sort of fill me in on AI, what's going on with AI?

And I thought gosh, if he's not being told by his university all this stuff, that was really interesting to me.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

I mean, I've, after speaking at some public events, I've had, you know, year 12 students lining up basically in tears saying, look, I want to do this degree, you know, next year, but I think that in five years that job won't even exist anymore.

What do I do?

I'm in limbo.

Should I just wait?

And they really like feel stuck and they don't have any good advice, any good guidance.

And so I think it's too early to say, don't go to university.

Absolutely still go to university.

There's so much benefit socially and all kinds of things you mentioned.

But universities are big, big beasts.

They complex a lot of people and they're slow moving.

There's a lot of organizational bureaucracy in there.

And so I think the awareness is starting to dawn on the management of universities, and but they can't keep up with the pace that AI is changing.

They just can't.

And last month, whenever it was, there was an op-ed in one of the major newspapers saying that universities should go back to all on campus, all invigilated, which just means in the room in the old exam hall.

Pen and paper, no digital.

And I think that's a huge mistake, because trying to cut AI out of the university education is the wrong solution.

That's a band-aid solution at best.

It's going backwards in time.

It's like a time machine answer.

It's just the wrong solution.

Right now, Yes, I think we are graduating students who are not ready.

They're still doing degrees where the amount of AI they can use is limited, whereas they're going into a job where they're expected to use AI a lot.

There's a mismatch there.

So the universities need to catch up.

But that's a big task.

That means rejigging all the courses, the degrees, the way education's done.

Then there's a whole big debate about AI cheating and the fact that for a lot of students, they're thinking of a degree as a piece of paper and So as long as they do well, it doesn't matter how they get there.

It's just the outcome, which means you can imagine students getting their degree and then not actually being prepared.

An engineer that may not be able to build a safe bridge because they've used AI all the way through.

But I think that the fact that students are thinking that way already now is kind of a red flag.

They're not understanding the value of learning and degrees.

They're treating it like a piece of paper.

And that's a dangerous thing in itself.

It's almost revealed an already bad incentive structure that was sitting there already.

It's sort of put a microscope on that and unveiled that maybe, maybe a vast majority of people aren't treating these institutions the way that they could be.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

This might sound incredibly naive and maybe we can cut it out of it if it does.

But we've spoken a lot.

Ryan, you introduced me to this concept years ago of process over time.

Product.

And it was a game changer for me in my life of making this show, spending so much of my life coming from a world where I did video production at uni, and so much of that is about the end product.

And that prioritizing the process because you spend 999 of your time in the process prioritizing the experience of the process is the most important thing, and not the product in the end.

The product will take care of itself.

It'll either be good or it won't be, but that you get a momentary moment of that product.

And I feel like, with such so much uncertainty and who knows what the product's going to be, prioritizing the experience of life as you're going through it, although hard to quantify, feels so important.

My mum used to say when I was younger, like it doesn't matter if you're when you start reading a book.

It doesn't matter if you don't quite get it yet or you don't quite understand it.

Get to the end, because you'll be a different person at the end of that book.

And I kind of feel like that, with so much of what we're talking about, there's so much opportunity to engage with the world.

And if you're doing it in a questioning, curious way and not just sort of mindlessly going along with it Who knows what's coming?

But the product will take care of itself if you prioritize the living process.

Or the process is your life.

Yeah.

That's your life, yeah.

And I know that might sound really naive, but I think that-.

No yeah, it sounds simple on one level, but I think if you dig a bit deeper it's not.

Yeah.

It gives me a bit of optimism and hope.

Yeah.

So with universities, yeah, we need to as fast as possible start changing these courses.

I think, if you go back to what I was saying before, of this sort of the idea that we're going to be the owners of our own projects, whether that's for profit or not, profit or whatever,

Then you can think of when to start shifting over time, university subjects to be more and more project-based work and let people use whatever tools are available AI robotics, whatever and change the way the courses are assessed.

And that is going to take some time to do.

That's what I'm recommending to universities at the moment.

Gosh.

We're talking about such big things, right?

Everywhere I go and I give these talks, I can feel the room.

You feel the emotion in the room change.

I'll often get a show of hands of anxiety levels at the beginning and at the end.

And quite often, anxiety will be higher at the end.

And I kind of do that somewhat on purpose, because I want people to feel the emotion around this, because I want them to start thinking about their lives society, jobs and understand what's happening.

I think it's time to, it's no longer time to have our heads in the sand.

And they need to start talking about this with their friends and family and colleagues.

And we need to start that sort of grassroots pressure start making its way up to the government to start taking this societal disruption more seriously.

So apologies to you guys or anyone listening that these topics can be triggering, but we have to kind of talk about it now.

It's a really good thing to say because in my head I'm thinking –

We need to have this like hopeful, positive kind of end to this conversation.

But if we do that, it erodes the urgency of like we need to start talking.

Yeah, it builds complacency.

Yeah.

And so I think that's what this episode is.

Can I ask sorry, I know we've pretty much finished this conversation, but just practically.

You've talked about your framework, which I love.

I think, just practically in my head, just the way you're talking, I'm thinking I feel like we need to start growing our own food at home.

We need to start making our own bread, which is going to be interesting.

Yeah.

But like practically things like that, other people should be doing things like that, like.

Yeah, so I don't.

I don't want to start being alarmist and saying build bunkers and be a prepper and have a basement full of food to last a year.

I don't want people to think like that.

But the analogy is useful because I think you could say what is the psychological version of a prepper.

So rather than having a basement full of water supply and food and batteries and everything.

What we need to think about is the psychological version.

So I'm a big fan of habits, right?

Most people don't sit there and debate whether they're going to clean their teeth or not before they go to bed.

They just do it.

It's a habit.

It happens twice a day or more.

And so what other habits can we start building?

And we know everything from- just meditation or just doing the box breathing, or things that can bring your physiology back down, or reframing the uncertainty piece, right through to the food and sleep and all the stuff that the internet's so full of right now.

But starting to take those things more seriously, because we're going to shift into this transitionary period where those things will be more important than ever before in human history.

Um, and to when you put the work in, when it's when the going is easy and you build the habit.

When the going gets tough, the habit can like, do some of the work for you.

You don't have to sit there and debate it.

You have to get through that difficult thing.

You can't just do it.

An example i sometimes give is um, And I will go to the gym on the way to work when I'm going to my university where I work.

And I'll intentionally, even if I don't have time.

I'll leave the house wearing workout gear that I don't want to wear at work.

So I know I have to stop and at least change.

And at least I'll go to the gym and have a shower or do a stretch.

And so it's keeping that habit up.

So in my mind, going to work means going through the gym.

And that habit is automatic.

So on the days when I'm like, oh man, I'm too tired or whatever, I'll just go there and have a sauna, or I'll just go there and stretch.

So it's not optimizing the perfect workout or anything like that.

It's keeping that habit there that will do some of the heavy lifting when I don't feel like it.

Yeah.

Habit stacking, I think, is who did we have on the call?

Oh, the Atomic Habits.

Yeah.

James Clear calls it.

Yeah.

Habit stacking, where you kind of attach habits to other habits and it'll or other things that you know you're going to do.

Yes.

So some powerful ideas there that, yeah, building like this psychological toolkit and what habits.

We haven't talked about emotional intelligence much, or emotional awareness, but I think that's something that's really interesting right now.

How we can.

There are apps you can download to pop up and get you Sort of to figure out.

Pay attention to how you're feeling right now and you zoom in and put a word and a color to it, kind of thing.

And just doing that over time helps you be more aware of the state you're in.

So if you are angry or anxious, a lot of people don't even realize they're in that state.

So that's the first step.

If you want to do something about it.

You kind of need some way of knowing you're in this elevated state.

I'm just thinking we should link to in the notes for this episode.

We have a psychologist who comes on all the time, Dr Emily, and she's done an episode on uncertainty and on the importance of uncertainty.

I think that would be a good re-listen.

And then also maybe even radical acceptance, which is also probably a good thing to reacquaint ourselves with.

Because it sounds like what you're really talking about is this.

It's the acceptance of this and sort of walking alongside it and finding the best way to walk alongside it and embrace it.

Yeah.

And practice uncertainty more.

Yeah.

This is a kind of strange hypothetical.

It's sort of an unhelpful question in some ways, but I am interested to know your answer.

If you had a time machine and could go back before.

The godfather of AI came up with the concept of AI, and I'm speaking very simplistically, but

Yes, the question is, if you had a wish and a genie came, do you think we're better off with what's going on now, or would we be better off without it completely?

I think we will be better off in the future.

So a version of this, someone asked me the other day is, you know, if you could be born anytime, when would it be?

And I said something like in 25 years or something like that.

Like when we're through this transition, this rough transitionary period.

Like, I think, I mean, AI has been around for such a long time.

It was a big deal in the 70s.

Everyone thought it was going to happen in the 70s and it didn't happen.

And so, yes, you could go back in time and stop all that, but I think it's going to be inevitable.

It's going to happen at some point in time.

And-

Other people who say this is the most exciting time ever to be alive in.

Everything's changing.

It's full of thrills and excitement.

And yeah, that's an amazing way to reframe the uncertainty and the fear that's full of opportunity.

And everything's up for grabs right now.

Everything's dynamic.

And so if you want to start a business, you want to do this, you want to do that.

You can just do it because everything's shifting tectonically.

So the answer would be no, I don't think I would.

You wouldn't change it.

Yeah.

And I think I mean there's some hope in that, even though there's like it's going to be a rough road to get there.

But we just have to assume that on the other side of the mountain it's great.

Yeah.

And that's my, that's why I'm, you know, doing a lot of this.

Talking about these subjects is, I think, the more we can pay attention to the human side of this, the toolkit, how we can manage that change um, how we can focus on the quality of life for the next two decades, um then we can minimize and reduce that pain of transformation, of that change.

And that's what we should be focusing on.

AI is going to do AI.

The company is going to do their thing.

I'm a huge fan of Tristan Harris and Center for Humane Technology.

And some of the legal battles they're helping with are shifting the needle with the AI companies.

But what I see the other side of the coin or the other thing is getting humans ready.

So yes, push for more humane technology and maybe those companies will listen a little bit.

But the more important thing right now is to get people ready and start building new infrastructure, new toolkits, new habits all these things that really help us through the next few decades.

The analogy I've had in my head for a long time is that and I think it works with what you just said is that I saw a meme in 2022 and it was a picture of a beach and it was a surf beach and there was a big set coming in.

It was a big wave and it said 2020.

There was a big wave behind it that said 2021 and 2022 was even bigger.

And it was in 2022 and then there was nothing after it.

And I keep thinking.

Now there's like it's a tidal wave, like a tsunami that's coming in 2000, whatever 2027.

And I feel like a lot of the work is like trying to make the wave just to a bit less of a tsunami, but we're not giving floaties to people and people are going to need floaties and dinghies.

And that's what I think the work you're doing is giving people floaties and dinghies.

A floatie probably wouldn't work for tidal wave, but like...

No, but that is helpful.

If we knew a tsunami was coming, if we knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt, we would be putting things in place to prepare to be at higher ground.

Yeah.

And that's the work you're doing.

I see, with all the disharmony and hate in the world right now and people yelling stuff on social media, I feel like they're throwing pebbles into the tidal wave.

I just sort of want to get floaties on my kids and I want to get a dinghy for them because it's happening.

It is happening and I think it's, I think it's already happening.

It's already baked in.

And yeah, it sounds kind of not nihilistic, but it is happening.

I don't see a way that it's not going to happen right now.

Well, to that end, you're doing the most important work in the world right now.

So well done.

No, totally.

I'm just trying to yeah, get more people could listen, I think and start shifting that focus to more of the human side of all this.

And that's what the world needs, yeah, right now.

Yeah, there's so much to think about.

And I am just so grateful you spent time with us today, because I just feel like it's for a long while now I have been wanting to have this conversation.

Everyone in this podcast has been wanting to.

But a lot of the conversations have been like who's the right person and you are the right person.

So thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for helping the change happen and helping this mission at the moment.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Thank you.

If you enjoyed our chat with Joel today, there's actually another 25 minutes that we couldn't get to of amazing questions from our Patreon community.

The environmental and climate impact, the storage and energy needed to run AI is enormous.

Yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

Some people are predicting we're going to have like the world is going to be tiled with these data centers, and they require a lot of power and the chips need water cooling.

So the water has to come in, cool them and then go back out again.

The overall energy demand is just going to be massive.

You can hear that at A Little More Imperfects, which you can find on Patreon or subscribe at Apple Podcasts in your app.

And we pay our respects to elders past and present.

The Imperfects is not a licensed mental health service and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, treatment or assessment.

The advice given in this episode is general in nature, but if you're struggling, please see a healthcare professional or call Lifeline on 13 11, 14.

[The Neurofuturist’s Guide to Surviving the AI Revolution]-[Joel Pearson - I Think, Therefore AI]

📋 Summary

Navigating the AI Frontier: A Neurofuturist’s Perspective

The Fallacy of Linear Prediction

Cognitive Atrophy and the Cost of Comfort

The Rise of AI Companions and Attachment Hacking

Toward a New Societal Framework

A Tech-Optimist’s Utopia

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Neurofuturist’s Guide to Surviving the AI Revolution]-[Joel Pearson - I Think, Therefore AI]

📋 Summary

Navigating the AI Frontier: A Neurofuturist’s Perspective

The Fallacy of Linear Prediction

Cognitive Atrophy and the Cost of Comfort

The Rise of AI Companions and Attachment Hacking

Toward a New Societal Framework

A Tech-Optimist’s Utopia

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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