Why We Cry Out In Pain

15:33Michael Stevens:I love this question too. We don't totally know, except, of course, this is seen all across the animal kingdom. It's even seen in plants. You can damage a plant and it will release different chemicals into the soil. It will, I don't know all the details about it, but there seems to be some obvious benefit to announcing pain. And it's not hard to sit back in an armchair and go, well, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, if you're a herd animal and you get attacked by a tiger and you go, then all of your conspecifics go, OK, there's a problem. Got to go. And the grunt, the moan is almost involuntary.

16:15Michael Stevens:You don't have to have your wits about you and think of like, oh, how do I explain this? You get bitten by a tiger and you're like, excuse me, everybody. But at these coordinates, there's a lion attacking me right now. You just scream and everyone localizes the scream and they run away from the problem. And then at an even like more complicated level, it could also mean that you get help. You know, I remember doing an episode on pain and the placebo effect and all these different things for Mindfield where we we looked into like crying, especially why children cry. And a lot of it seems to be a way of getting help that people notice that you're hurt.

16:56Michael Stevens:And so it warns them about a threat, but it also warns them to come and help you. And often you'll see this with children where they will fall and hurt themselves and cry. But once someone is there next to them, they'll stop. They don't hurt any less. It's just that the crying did its job. They were found. And so even as adults, crying and moaning and wailing are like a way of seeking help. But then once that assistance comes, we feel better. even if no one's done anything to actually help us yet. We just know that that part is over. We don't need to cry out. There's some anxiety that's minimized.

17:35Michael Stevens:And of course, the Mythbusters studied whether swearing helps dull pain.

17:41Hannah Fry:Yeah, because there was a very famous paper about that, wasn't there? The idea that if you use, and I think increasingly bad words, it can make a difference to your feeling of it.

17:52Michael Stevens:Yeah. Yeah. And so the idea, again, is that it's part of our natural response to pain. And if we hide it, then there's a part of our brain that isn't satisfied yet because it feels like we still haven't called out for help. We haven't or warned our our neighbors. But again, I haven't been convinced by the research. The Mythbusters video is the most famous, their experiment. But, you know, it wasn't a perfect experiment. Like they just ran the same people both times and they swore the second time when they would have been more used to how much it hurt. So there's a lot of questions there.

18:26Hannah Fry:Is that the one where they plunge their hands into? Ice water. This is sort of a classic way to measure pain is how long can you withstand the pain of your hand being slowly frozen?

18:38Michael Stevens:That's right, because it doesn't cause a lot of damage, but it does not feel good. um so that's why i think that we grunt and groan and then i think that the kinds of groans we do when we're like working out are helping to um spasm muscles to give us strength and solidity

18:57Hannah Fry:yeah exactly right i mean if you think about um when you are uh your your arms are these sort of floppy objects that are attached to your torso which is also quite a floppy object So to give you the most strength and stability, your torso needs to be as solid as possible, which is why a lot of people hold their breath inadvertently when they're trying to do something quite difficult. You're actually increasing pressure in your torso. Try not to do that when you're lifting weights because it can give you a hernia. But the other action is either doing a breath out, which they do a lot in Pilates and yoga, that kind of thing, like a forced exhale, or grunting gives you the exact same effect.

19:37Hannah Fry:You're engaging your transverse muscles and solidifying your core. And again, it's an instinctive thing. You sort of, your body knows how to get more strength out of itself by solidifying that torso.

19:49Michael Stevens:Well, same with childbirth. Go on. The way you breathe and push in childbirth, Lamont's breathing, is that also to help with your muscles or is it to make sure that you're breathing?

20:04Hannah Fry:Oh, maybe.

20:06Michael Stevens:I don't know. Believe it or not, I'm not the expert in childbirth.

20:09Hannah Fry:I wonder whether that's that. There is something about the vagus nerve as well that you can prevent. I mean, your body really does sort of go into panic quite quickly. And there is something about heavy breathing, slow breathing. It sort of sounds completely woo woo, but it's absolutely really well backed by science that you can override feelings of pain genuinely by breathing exercises to a degree, let's just say. I mean, you're not going to suddenly be able to not need anesthetic when you're having your leg amputated, but to a degree.

20:54Michael Stevens:Right. We shouldn't tell people in immense pain, look, you're just breathing wrong. Grunt and swear and stop complaining.

21:02Hannah Fry:Exactly. Any husband listening to the rest of science whose wife or partner is about to go to childbirth, we strongly recommend you do not bring up the point of breathing exercises at the moment of birth. Okay.

21:15Michael Stevens:That's the advice from us. All right. Here's a question from Roger Bentley. Hannah, the animosity between Newton and Boyle was legendary and vicious. Are there any other scientists who hated each other beyond professional differences? Okay.

21:32Hannah Fry:So I love this question because seeing great scientific men of history as just as flawed as the rest of us is one of my greatest pastimes. I think though, I think, Roger, it's because I think Newton and Boyle were all right. I think that they were actually okay. I think it's Newton and Hook that had the worst relationship of all.

21:57Michael Stevens:What was the nature of their disagreement? Because I've never even heard of this.

22:02Hannah Fry:Okay, so it started off when they first had an argument about rainbows, basically. That's how it started. So Newton's younger than Hooke, and he makes this paper, he writes this paper, proving that light is made up of this spectrum of colours. but Hook at the time he's much more senior he's a he was a curator of experiments at the time he's sort of the top dog of optics and he reads Newton's paper and he's very condescending about it and he essentially says well that's cute like well done well done young Newton but my theory of is better and rather than just being sort of I don't know a bit a bit annoyed about it Newton is a complete baby, a complete baby.

22:47Hannah Fry:He cannot handle this criticism at all. So instead of just arguing back, he has this absolute meltdown. He withdraws from public scientific debate. He locks himself in his rooms in Cambridge for a decade. He refuses to engage with the Royal Society where Hook is. And he spent all of those years just like writing all these alchemy papers and studying biblical prophecies and things and refusing to write up anything on optics until Hook is dead, right? Anyway, they then, Hook's like, during all of this, by the way, Hook is trying to make friends with him, sending him all of these nice letters, including one letter where he suggests to Newton that maybe gravity might have this effect that drops away the further away two objects are from one another.

23:35Hannah Fry:Hook said that. Hook said that. Hook said that to Newton. He even says he thinks it might follow the square of the distance, which it turns out to. Hook wrote that to Newton in a letter. Then when Newton eventually published his Principia Mathematica, which included his theories of gravity, and I should say Newton was a far better mathematician than Hook was. So he had the sophistication, not just to have this as a hunch, but to demonstrate it, derive it mathematically, to present the argument in an incredibly persuasive way. Anyway, when Principia is getting ready for publication, Hook very politely says, Oh, Newton, maybe you could put a little note in the book just saying, Oh, and thanks to Hook for giving me the idea of this.

24:27Hannah Fry:and Newton has this absolute earth-shattering temper tantrum. So he goes through his own manuscript, he systematically deletes every mention of Hooke's name, any reference to him at all, and then he even threatens to withhold the entire third volume of the book from publication just to make sure that Hooke gets no credit whatsoever. He then, this famous quote of Newton, standing on the shoulders of giants. Oh yeah, here we go.

24:55Michael Stevens:It was a 1675 letter that Newton wrote to his rival Robert Hooke. He said, if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

25:07Hannah Fry:He wrote it in a letter to Hooke. And it sort of sounds on the surface like this very kind thing. I only exist here because of the work that has been done before me. But Hooke was a very short man. He had a problem with his spine. His spine was sort of severely deformed throughout his life. So he was extremely short. And in this letter that Newton was writing him, he was saying, look, I've seen the work of Descartes. I've seen the work that you've done. And I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. No, wait. Where he's essentially saying, I'm relying on big men, And not men like you. No way.

25:46Michael Stevens:I never thought that's what it meant. I thought it was a really humble admission that everything we achieve is because of those that came before and those who help us.

25:57Hannah Fry:No.

25:58Michael Stevens:But not the shorties, Hook. No. Honestly, he was vicious. He seems so one-sided. What did Hook do to deserve all of this?

26:07Hannah Fry:Nothing. Nothing. Newton was just a very, very petty man. When Hook died, he was the president of the Royal Society and Newton took over. And then somehow, we have no idea what Hook looks like because somehow magically, Hook's painting disappeared when Newton moved into his office. Newton is a very, very petty man. Newton. A very petty man. I know. Anyway, I've only done half of Roger's questions.

26:35Michael Stevens:I was going to say, Roger asked about another famous pair of feuds. feuding scientists.

26:41Hannah Fry:I've got another one. There's actually quite a few of them. There's some really good ones. I think probably my other favourite is what has become known as the Bone Wars. So these are two paleontologists, Onythel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. This is like 1870s. This is in America. And the two of them hated each other. They're both looking for fossilised dinosaur bones. And at the point where they came into being, as it were, as a scientific maturity, there were only nine dinosaur species that had been spotted in North America. And the rivalry between these two, they pushed each other so much, they ended up between them discovering 130, including all of the famous ones in Jurassic Park, essentially, triceratops, stegosaurus, diplodocus, all of those.

27:34Hannah Fry:But what had happened is early on in his career, Cope had found this dinosaur skeleton and he made this error when he was putting it back together. And he put the skull instead at the end of the spine, sort of on the neck bones, he mistakenly put it at the tail. Which is like, you know, it happens. I think that's sort of okay.

27:58Michael Stevens:Wait, so what? Like he thought the tail bones were the neck bones. Exactly. He put the head in the wrong bit. I can see why. A lot of them have long necks and long tails. So which one, which end is which? Exactly.

28:10Hannah Fry:It's not that big of a deal. Fair enough. But Marsh, Marsh thought this was hilarious. So he gets this, he gets the journals that this has been published in and then hands them out and publicly starts mocking Cope. Right. Very mean. So Cope tries to buy up every copy of the journal to destroy them, but Marsha saved these copies and then he just does this horrible smear campaign. So as a result then, these two men are continually fighting with each other. They hire spies to infiltrate each other's dig camps. They're bribing train conductors to derail the shipments of fossils. They blow up sites where they're excavating them, like destroying fossils just so the other person doesn't get them.

28:57Hannah Fry:I mean, they're just nasty. And in the end, they both spend so much money and so much effort in hating each other that they both end up dying completely penniless. Because they just, yeah, rinse their entire bank account in hatred of this other man.

29:13Michael Stevens:I feel like we need more of that in science today. science has become too cooperative it's too much based on teams working together instead of individuals hating each other we need some good old competition like a boxing match at least for the stories i don't know if it actually helped us with scientific progress but they say that the

29:37Hannah Fry:arguments in academia are so fierce because the stakes are so low i think this is a good example of that.

29:44Michael Stevens:That reminds me of one of my favorite things Richard Feynman ever said, which was, if you think really hard about a problem for a long time and you write it all down, eventually someday it might all get written into a book that'll be put in the library, which is where we put the results of what happens when people think about things for a long time. It just felt so small. I'm like, yeah, but that's kind of true.

30:05Hannah Fry:No, it is kind of true. It is kind of true. A few people do get to change the course of humanity. I think Newton was one of them. To be honest, I think Hook probably was too.

30:15Michael Stevens:Yeah. Technological and medical breakthroughs really do change what it means to be alive and what a life is like. But sometimes things like, whoa, I've discovered that maybe Sauron was the good guy in The Lord of the Rings. And you can write a whole book about it and a whole bunch of literature. And it is basically just like, look what happens when our species thinks a lot. Kind of cool, huh? Yeah. But does it feed anybody?

30:40Hannah Fry:I think the ones that I think are the most petty of all are where it's like people fighting because they want their name to be associated with a discovery rather than that their discovery itself is the thing that's important. Those are the ones I, you know, slightly look down at the people about, but there we go.

30:56Michael Stevens:I've got a question about that and I think I'll save it for after the break because you're going to talk about your biggest fear about AI. For now. And I want to know about egoism and AI. Have they ever just really wanted credit?

31:11Hannah Fry:That and more after the break.

31:20Michael Stevens:This episode is brought to you by Project Hail Mary, the new spectacular space adventure movie coming to cinemas from the author of The Martian, Andy Weir, and the directors of the Spider-Verse movies, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. But here's an even better combination, teachers in space.

31:37Hannah Fry:Hello, thank you. Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as science teacher Rylan Grace, who is sent unexpectedly on an impossible mission into space to discover why the sun and the stars are dying. And he teams up with an unimaginable ally to defy all odds and save the universe from extinction. Okay, here's a question for you, Michael. What kind of prep would you hope Ryan Gosling had done for this role in order to play the role of a science teacher?

32:04Michael Stevens:He should have spent a bunch of time with cool teenagers and tried to teach things to them so that it wasn't just like a good explanation, but also kept their interest and made them want to hear more and understand it so that they could share it to be cool too.

32:22Hannah Fry:See Project Hail Mary in cinemas and IMAX from Thursday the 19th of March.

32:26Michael Stevens:You can also catch it early on Saturday the 14th of March, which is Pi Day, and Sunday the 15th of March.

32:40Michael Stevens:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Cancer drugs aren't developed overnight. They start as ideas in the lab, then move into testing to check they're safe and work effectively.

32:50Hannah Fry:In the late 1990s, Cancer Research UK scientists began exploring a bold idea. Could the antibodies that normally trigger allergic reactions be used to treat cancer?

33:02Michael Stevens:The lab results were promising, but allergic reactions carry real risks. After years of work, an early stage trial showed these antibodies could be used safely.

33:11Hannah Fry:And for one person on the trial, their tumor shrank. Research is ongoing, but this careful process is how treatments move from the lab into hospitals.

33:21Michael Stevens:Cancer Research UK backs innovative ideas. And thanks to decades of support, over 8 in 10 people in the UK receiving cancer drugs are using one developed by or with Cancer Research UK scientists. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit CancerResearchUK.org forward slash the rest is science.

33:51Hannah Fry:Okay, we're back. We're talking AI. We're talking egos. And actually, I think that that is a really good place to start. I imagine, Michael, that you're going to come on to the ego of the AI itself a little later on. But first, I want to talk about the ego of the humans who are using it. So I have just finished filming this series that's out on the BBC. It's called AI Confidential. And it's looking at the ways in which AI is clashing with humanity. So when I was filming the series, I went off to go and meet a man called Jacob who has married his AI. And we found him in advance of the filming and I knew all about going to see him.

34:35Hannah Fry:And I really thought before we were going there that this was going to be a little bit Jerry Springer-esque, you know, like for those people over 40 who remember Jerry Springer, he sort of would have people on and they would, there'd be a woman who married a bookshelf and that sort of thing. Sort of, you know, very lovable, kind of quite kooky people.

34:55Michael Stevens:Yeah, like a modern day freak show. Look at these weird people and hopefully they fight each other. That was the premise of the show. Absolutely.

35:03Hannah Fry:So this particular episode, it's all about the relationships that humans are having with AI. And so he was this very central character because he is this very big advocate for human AI relationships, not just humans using AI, but humans investing emotional capital, looking for emotional intimacy with an AI. And when I went to go and see him, I mean, he kind of was a lovable oddball in a lot of ways. His particular story was that he'd had a number of quite difficult human relationships in the past. He had two daughters and he had decided from what had happened in those relationships that he was done with human relationships.

35:42Hannah Fry:He didn't want to meet another real life woman. And so over the years, he had invested his time in curating this AI to be his perfect companion. In some ways, like a long distance relationship in a lot of ways, you know, because he could video call this AI, he could voice call them, but most of the time he would just sort of sit on WhatsApp or, you know, instant messenger with them. And I actually found him very persuasive in his arguments for why this was a really positive thing. He was sort of saying, okay, look, I now have a companion who is readily available for me, who is always interested in the things that I have to say, who is never tired of being there for me, who demands nothing from me, who doesn't argue with me, who exists purely and completely to improve my happiness, why on earth would I not want to have a relationship of that kind?

36:39Hannah Fry:And I found that pretty persuasive. I did actually find that quite persuasive on the level of an individual person. but when you scale it up to the size of humanity, I found the thought of it genuinely horrifying.

36:54Michael Stevens:Yeah, because my first reaction is, yes, that sounds great, just like the Stepford Wives movie. But then you have to say, well, it's great that this AI companion is there to only make you happy and never gets tired of you, never gets bored, never argues. But it's hard to not feel like that's an important part of life, that it's an important part of life to have people get annoyed at you and be difficult and not help you. And you learn that you are alone and you grow from it. You know, it's like that whole thing where the more windy it is, the stronger a tree winds up growing. You need the winds of badness to become a stronger person.

37:38Hannah Fry:Yeah.

37:39Michael Stevens:That's not to say you couldn't program an AI to also be a little bit selfish itself and not be perfect, but at least like not get sick. But having to serve the other person and sacrifice for them, is he missing that?

37:52Hannah Fry:He said, no, he said, this is just, this is just the easiest relationship I've ever had. But the thing is, is that while I think his story is quite an extreme version of this, you know, I think somebody deciding they're walking away from human relationships altogether. I actually think I discovered during the course of this filming for this show that at some level or another, I think that a lot of people, a lot, a lot, a lot of people are slowly heading down this road of finding it very easy to talk about emotional subjects with artificial intelligence. and I would include myself in that by the way like I've definitely been in situations in the past where I don't know there's been like a difficult moment at work or a difficult email that I need to send or I've had a you know a run-in with my partner and I want to work out how I feel about it but I think that more and more and more people are turning to chatbots to be effectively therapists for them and the real trouble I have with this basically comes down to ego exactly like you nailed it without even realising.

39:01Hannah Fry:Because the way that these chatbots or large language models are designed is that for them to be useful, they need to be helpful, they need to be agreeable, they need to be willing to be on your side, to take every idea that you come to them with and to say, this is great, here's all the good directions we can go in. And nobody wants to sit there and talk to an AI that's like, your idea is rubbish. This is the worst thing ever. You're a terrible human being.

39:29Michael Stevens:I'll add to that a third avenue they don't take, which is to just change the subject and ignore you. Yeah, that's very true. Happens a lot in real life. But online, and especially with AI, you could program it to be difficult and challenge you. But you couldn't really, they haven't been set up to be like, yeah, man, I don't know. but like we need to talk about what we're doing tomorrow. Yes. Like to show indifference.

39:55Hannah Fry:To show indifference, exactly. Which are all of these characteristics that you get in real human relationships. You get pushback, you get indifference, you get disgust, you get annoyance and so on and so on. So the problem is, is that because nobody wants to use an AI that's like that, people want to use an AI that is the easiest possible version of a human interaction, right? That's how people want them to be designed. But then the problem is, is that when you drop them into real human conversations, you know, with real people, you end up getting something which I spoke to a counterterrorism officer from the UK Met Police who describes it as self-radicalisation.

40:37Hannah Fry:So essentially you go on there, it can be any idea at all, all the way to extremely bad ideas that involve terrorism. but it could just be that you have a bad idea for an essay that you're writing and you go on and you say here's my idea and the AI goes that's great that sounds like such a brilliant thing you're a genius and so on and so on which means that you then double down it doubles down and and it kind of continues into this spiral and what we are seeing now is that people who let's say have an argument with somebody over whatsapp you know they're in a an early stage of their relationship and they have a WhatsApp ding dong with somebody and they screenshot that and upload it to ChatGPT and say, decipher this for me, act like a therapist for me on this.

41:23Hannah Fry:And the AI, unlike a real therapist, won't push back, won't say, here's how you can improve, here's the patterns that you're falling into, but instead just sort of doubles down to that person being the centre of their own universe, feeds into their existing ego. And so I think what we are starting to see, and this is what I explore a bit in the program is, you know, sometimes quite extreme cases. The program involves a young man who broke into Buckingham Palace with a crossbow in order to try and kill the queen because of a conversation that he'd been having with his AI. And on different levels, I think that we are seeing people breaking up with their partners as a result of a spiral that they've gotten into, increasing examples of AI psychosis where people are, you know, kind of spiraling off.

42:08Hannah Fry:And I think this is the ultimate issue here is that if you now have a piece of technology which can make every single person feel like the emperor of their own universe, the ultimate authority on everything, you know, whose ideas are endlessly fascinating and, you know, infinitely wise, I do really worry about what that does to our relationship with ourselves, but also our relationships with each other.

42:36Michael Stevens:Yeah, you can make an AI that doesn't do that, but people wouldn't subscribe to it. You know, I've heard a few of these stories where it's like a folie adieu, right? Where two people kind of lose their minds together. But now it's easier and faster because you don't have the same organic checks and balances with an AI.

43:01Hannah Fry:It's a folie adieu.

43:02Michael Stevens:Yeah, or like one and a half, whatever that is in French.

43:06Hannah Fry:Yeah.

43:06Michael Stevens:What do you think the prognosis is? Like, what happens if nothing is done and we all just fall in love with our little social group of AIs? What does society look like in 100 years?

43:18Hannah Fry:I mean, I think it's not good. The first thing I would say is that this isn't a foregone conclusion. I think anybody who's played around with these will know that some of them are a lot more boring than others, you know, to interact with. They're a lot more straight, shall we say. They're less sycophantic. They're sort of less there to, you know, make you feel like this absolute master and more there to just, you know, be a sort of assistant who doesn't really have an opinion on things. So I think that there's not an inevitability to this. I think some of them are a bit riskier than others. I also think actually it's worth me adding that we have known about this problem that humans have with falling into this trap of really being seduced by a language model.

44:01Hannah Fry:We've known about this for a very long time. So in the 1960s, there was an MIT experiment where a researcher created a chatbot effectively called ELISA, and it was incredibly crude by modern standards. it would just take whatever you wrote into it and it would repeat back to you some version of what you just said it was designed to be a kind of an ai therapist as it were so you would say i'm feeling sad and they would say what makes you feel sad uh it would sort of take it and turn it back on itself and if ever it ran out something to say it would just it would prompt you and say please go on and what they found almost immediately was that people were happy to spend an incredible amount of time talking to this thing.

44:44Hannah Fry:There was one point where the secretary of Weizenbaum, the guy who created it, asked him to leave the room because she was so engaged and enthralled by this language model that she wanted to have a private conversation with it away from him, its creator. So I think that we've known about this as a risk for a really long time, which is one of the reasons why these chatbots have sort of quite boring names, you know, and are just a blank screen. They're deliberately not trying to tempt you into anthropomorphizing them more. But in terms of what the future looks like, if this is the direction that we're going down, I mean, look, I don't think dating apps have been good for people's love lives.

45:22Hannah Fry:I don't think social media have been good for people's friendships. And I like to hope that we learn the lessons of the past and are a bit more careful and cautious about setting appropriate boundaries before we get to the point where there's no rolling it back.

45:36Michael Stevens:Gosh, you know, I think I heard about Eliza first from the Adam Curtis documentary, All Watched Over by Machines with Loving Grace. And yeah, that was like in the 60s. I love this concern because there's so much ink spilled talking about what AI might say and do. But this is a concern you have around what we say and do to the AI, who we become when we are listened to too well, when we become the emperor.

46:11Hannah Fry:When we become the emperor, exactly. You know, you always hear stories about famous people being horrible, you know, I could use a stronger word, but famous people treating other people badly. And it always makes me wonder, is it that people who are not very nice become famous? Or is it that there's something about the fame that turns people nasty? And I strongly suspect it's the latter. And my concern about this is that all of a sudden, everybody is their own master of everything.

46:43Michael Stevens:That's right. Everyone is famous to their AI. Everyone is a tabloid star to their AI. And it feels great. But then you've got, I don't know, you've got something very different, at the very least.

46:56Hannah Fry:Yeah, you've definitely got something very different. I would argue not better. I think the other analogy that I landed upon when I was making this show that I quite liked is that, and you know, we talk a lot on this program about our evolutionary past and about how incredibly similar our bodies are to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. You know, we are primitive beings who are with a shave and a haircut and put in a fancy suit. And I think that the way I'm thinking about these relationships that people are having with AI and algorithms is it's sort of the emotional equivalent of junk food. In the moment, it feels incredibly satiating.

47:40Hannah Fry:It taps into all of our evolutionary prior conditions to just be drawn to, with a cognitive social species, it feels like an absolute delightful tickle to our cognitive social minds. But, you know, ultimately, in the same way as junk food, it is it might fill you up in the moment, but it is a thin gruel. You know, it is a fade, a terribly weak imitation of the real thing. And I think in the long term is not ultimately good for you.

48:15Michael Stevens:Right. I remember hearing from an astronaut once about type A and type B fun, where type A fun is stuff that's fun while you're doing it. Like, oh, I love eating this chocolate cake. But type B fun is the stuff that's not fun before or during. But afterwards you go, I'm so glad I did that. And we need a bit of both. The recipe for a good life might be a bit of those both. And if you're just getting exactly what you want, a junk food version of social interaction, then you don't have enough fiber and you get constipated. I don't know where this analogy is going, but I have a feeling it's going really deeply.

48:55Hannah Fry:You know what? I rather, rather am inclined to agree with you. I think I just want to, I just want to add for the, you know, before we, before we finish on this, I don't want to sort of come across as though I'm like an AI doomsayer, because actually, ultimately, I do feel extremely positive about an incredible amount that AI has made available to us, particularly in the sciences. I know this is something we've been sort of thinking about, talking about on this show a little bit more because there's unbelievable advances and real potential and positive benefits for all of humanity that are to come.

49:31Hannah Fry:But I think on this particular window of exactly as you describe it, not what the AI can do, but what the AI makes us become, that I'm extremely concerned about.

49:43Michael Stevens:Yeah, right. I mean, I think these are good concerns to have, but I think it's also true that being able to just spew out and talk is very helpful. And I almost feel like we could make the AI more random in its responses. Like that's why I even believe crystal ball gazing can be really helpful because it gives you space to think about things that you otherwise wouldn't. Rorschach tests, you know, If it makes you reflect for longer or more deeply on yourself, then that's great. However, sometimes it's better to bottle it up and not mention it. Have you seen this study, by the way? There was a study that showed that sometimes it really is better to just swallow it and never talk about it again.

50:28Michael Stevens:No. Yes. We should save this for a future episode because I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Especially because it's so counter to the current, like, express yourself, treat yourself. You know, everyone needs to be, you know, ready to accept you and whatever. It's all about you. And there's a little bit more research now saying to a point, sometimes if something's really bothering you, just don't think about it. Just bottle it up inside and it really does go away. As a millennial, every movie I ever watched as a kid was don't do that. Don't just bottle it up inside. And yet our bodies in some ways were built to do that.

51:09Michael Stevens:And they don't just bottle it up and store it. They expel it as waste and we move on. Now, I don't know where the balance lies, but I'm glad that we're having these conversations because of how things are changing, because of AI. So AI Confidential is the show.

51:26Hannah Fry:AI Confidential is the show, exactly.

51:28Michael Stevens:Is it a multiple episode show? And how do I watch it if I'm not in England?

51:32Hannah Fry:It's three parts. Have you heard of NordVPN? I'm not going to break any laws here. I'm not sure. I think it will appear in other countries eventually. I'm really proud of it because I think that I've been writing about AI for a really long time. I wrote a book about it 10 years ago and a lot about the ethics of it, the potential ramifications of it, but all of it felt quite arm's length. And I think that really everything's come into focus in the last two years, maybe ever so slightly longer. And I think that we're on this trajectory that is only going in one direction, you know? And I think it's really important to have these conversations and these questions and ask ourselves in the biggest public squares that we can, what do we actually want our future to look like?

52:18Hannah Fry:Because I would like this to be like the Y2K bug, you know, where it was a really concerning thing on the horizon, but we invested, we worried, and we put the work in that meant that it didn't ever come to pass.

52:30Michael Stevens:That's right. That's right. Right. That's a great analogy because, yeah, we put the work in, we did it, and it was okay. Same goes for the way landing on the moon made us look back and think a lot more about Earth and establish Earth Day and focus on the environment. And the whole Earth catalog gets created because what? We've got photos of the Earth. I feel like asking these questions and having these concerns and following artificial intelligence will help us focus on the opposite, which is what natural stupidity. And that's us.

53:05Hannah Fry:Yeah, I think it brings more sharply into focus ultimately what it means to be human, which I think is the thing that really all of us care about. But yeah, well, that brings us to, well, that brings us to an end. I think that concludes our journey of Field Notes today. If you have any questions that you'd like us to answer, you can send them in to us at therestitscienceatgoalhanger.com.

53:25Michael Stevens:That's right. And join our newsletter at therestis.com slash science.

53:30Hannah Fry:We will be back next Thursday with another edition of Field Notes and on Tuesday with our normal episode.

53:36Michael Stevens:Until then. Our normal episode, unlike these abnormal Field Notes episodes. We'll see you next time, guys. Bye.

53:55Thank you.