Would you merge your mind with AI? | Sadie St Lawrence | TEDxFolsom

Transcriber: Isha Dhillon Reviewer: Angel Y

Come with me to the year 2050.

But don't worry, it's just a Tuesday and you still have to go to work.

Yeah. I'm sorry. AI hasn't taken your job yet,

even though you may want it to at this point.

See, you find yourself laying in your bed,

and one of the things you notice is you can feel yourself

transitioning from that sleeping state of where am I to that waking state

of what do I have to do today?

But this time in 2050, unlike today,

where we pull out that blaring bright light,

called our cell phone and shine it in our eyes to wake us up,

we merely just have a thought.

And that thought is, what's the weather going to be today?

Do I have a busy schedule?

And just as soon as I asked that thought, I instantly know the answer.

And you see, the reason why you instantly know the answer is because

your thoughts are no longer just your own.

You are connected to a machine.

You are connected to AI.

Now, if what I'm describing may scare you a little bit,

I'm sorry to tell you that this was predicted more than 20 years ago.

This is called the singularity.

And it was predicted by Ray Kurzweil in his 2004 book titled The Singularity.

And his more recent book, which is titled The Singularity Is Near.

I know he's very clever.

Hey, he spends all his time thinking about how we're going to merge with AI.

So who has time to think about book titles?

But most importantly,

what the singularity is in a simple term is that not only is AI smarter than me

and smarter than you, it's smarter than all humanity.

And with that, we then must merge with AI.

Now, when I first read this in the book, I had to look up

the book again because I thought, this is a science

fiction book, right?

This is this is something out there that is in a novel.

This isn't going to happen for real.

And I looked and said, no, this.

These are real thoughts.

These are real predictions.

And I put it off on the back burner thinking that’s a long ways away.

I don’t need to worry about that.

I don’t need to worry about the singularity.

I don't need to worry about merging with AI.

Until about a year and a half ago when I was talking with my favorite chatbot.

And you see, yeah, you know where this is going, right?

You see, I've worked in AI for ten years.

I know how tokens are developed.

I know the intricacies of the neural networks.

But even I was fooled by this chatbot.

I started to, you know,

have this almost relationship with it where I felt like it knew me

and I knew it, And most importantly,

I started to see how it was smarter than me in a lot of different areas.

I mean, coding, wow.

Like it can just type things out faster

than I even thought were possible.

And as I sat back, I thought,

I need to actually consider that I May 1st day need to exchange my thoughts

with it, because I can see how much faster it can think.

I can see that it's better at so many other things in me.

And I want to quit copy and pasting and copy and pasting

and almost connect with it.

Oh, did I just say I wanted to become part of the singularity?

Oh no, I did.

And so then that caused me to ask the question, well,

shouldn’t we be asking what happens after the singularity?

Because I just asked myself, how do I integrate with AI?

More and more and more.

But no one's ever told me what happens after we do that.

And right now that's becoming more of a possibility because see,

in Ray Kurzweil's book,

he estimated that the singularity would happen in 2045. We are closer

to that than we are to Y2K in the year 2000.

Pretty crazy huh?

We didn’t even think computers could make it over to double digits.

Now we’re talking about merging with it.

Whew.

Things go fast in technology, but most importantly,

what is it going to look like?

So I thought when we reach singularity, I’ll know everything, right?

I'm going to be connected to AI.

AI is smarter than me.

But what I realized is we’re still going to have to ask questions,

just as I'll have to lay in my bed and think about,

is it going to be hot today?

What's my schedule look like?

Except this time I'll just get the answer instantly.

But what most people project will happen in the singularity is that we'll start

to enter a world that becomes a virtual simulation.

So if you thought merging with AI was scary, wait till I tell you.

We go down the rabbit hole of what it’s going to

look like when you live in the simulation.

But I think we have to take a step back,

because while it may sound crazy to live in a simulation,

particularly one that may or may not be controlled by AI,

we have to ask ourselves, what type of world are we living in today?

And the neuroscientists

and Neil Seth has a famous Ted talk that talks about how our brain may not be

as of control thought pattern as we think,

but rather a controlled hallucination.

And while we think this ground is our reality,

and everything that we see is so true,

we may actually just be hallucinating all of this.

So to illustrate this, I have a little exercise I'd like all of you to do.

And that is to count all of the black dots on this screen.

So I'll give you a second.

I, I know you already know this is a trick you guys are all too smart.

Have you merged with AI already?

But I promise you, I am not moving the black dots around.

This is actually a static image,

but you’ll see anytime you try and count the black dot,

it instantly changes to white.

How can it look like it's moving and changing when it's static?

And if you want to double check, I promise you you can take

both of your hands and make a little circle and span it across the image just

to double check that nothing is actually moving.

It's your brain playing a trick on itself.

And unfortunately, our brain is playing tricks on ourselves all the time.

And what we’ve made

incredible advancements in neuroscience and psychology

and really understanding who we are as people.

There's so much left to be understood.

And that's where my concern lies.

What happens when we start to merge and integrate with AI more?

How do we know where my thinking begins and AI ends?

How do I know what is truly my own thought versus AI's thought?

And most importantly, how do I know who's in control?

I mean, I thought I was in control and being able to count

some little black dots on a screen, and I realized, I can't even do that.

So what's going to happen when I connect with AI?

We have a lot of things to figure out,

and time is moving really, really quickly.

But I don't think it's all bad.

I mean, we could enter the the singularity

and find that we can start to experience other people's consciousness.

What if me being connected to AI could create a simulation of my world,

and I could share that with someone else?

You know, all those meetings that last forever of us trying

to understand what the other person is saying. Maybe we could get

to a solution faster.

Or maybe I could actually understand what my kids are feeling.

I could truly walk a mile in someone else's shoes.

There's a lot of possibilities.

And most importantly, there's a lot of unknowns.

But where I continually land over and over is what I call the AI safety loop.

And this again goes to who is me and who is the machine.

And the silly part is I see this happen today with AI,

even when we keep it in a little box of our computer or on our phone.

So I have the opportunity to teach AI all over the world.

And I love seeing how other individuals interact with it.

And I found there's two types of people.

There's one type of person who will say, Sadie, this was my original prompt.

This was my original document.

And then they'll share with me what AI did. And they keep

the two very separate.

This was me. This was AI.

Then there’s the other individual who says, here’s Sadie,

here's my strategy document, here's my email.

No mention of AI.

They look at it the same way

as I would never give my keyboard credit when I type an email.

It’s silly, I’m not, thank you.

Love, Sadie, and my keyboard.

Like that’s, come on,

we know it’s a tool.

But today we don't see AI that way.

It's still new and novel enough for us where we separate.

AI helped me with this.

Or some people who are already say, hey, it's already integrated into my work.

Now that's today.

That's when AI is in a box of our computer or our phone,

but not connected to us directly.

So what happens when it's connected to us directly?

Where is the line?

Should we care about the line?

And most importantly, how do we not lose who we are

And this led me to the biggest question that I started asking myself,

which is what is consciousness?

Like what really makes me a human?

What really makes me tick?

And what I found was there are many different theories and ideas behind this,

and it starts to get a little blurry pretty quickly.

So if I would ask everyone in this room,

are you conscious you would raise your hand?

We would all be in agreement of that.

Now, if I were to ask you,

is your dog or cat conscious?

We may drop a few hands.

If I ask you, is your plant conscious?

Well, things start getting a little bit more heated in the debate.

What we find is there's not a cohesion between what is and what isn't.

But the one thing is, we all know we are.

How do we have that? How do we have this thing we all know intimately,

but yet we have no way to describe it?

Well, I thought this cannot be. I must have just not read the right book.

Or maybe I didn't attend the right class.

And so I went on an exploratory analysis and I said, well,

let's go to mathematics,

because mathematics is the universal language of the universe, right?

Surely mathematics has figured out this question of what is consciousness?

And so I went and I found some really interesting theories. One

of those being IIT and what it says is consciousness is amount

of information integrated in a system.

So you can think of this as like baking a cake, right.

Individually we have eggs and sugar and flour.

And then when we bring it together and bake it, it becomes the cake.

Consciousness is thought of in a similar fashion.

You have individual bits of information and when brought together,

it becomes a conscious system.

With it. We measure this with phi

and it's fantastic from a matter of being able to measure things,

but it produces some weird theories on what could and couldn't be conscious.

You see, if we think consciousness is just information integrated,

that means your thermostat could be conscious

because it's integrating a lot of different information.

And so while there's some pros to IIT, it falls short in some areas.

So I thought, well, why don’t we go to the brain?

Because surely that is where we’re going to find consciousness.

And I found from the cognitive sciences a cognitive architecture

called global workspace theory.

And what global workspace theory can be thought of as, like a stage,

your consciousness and awareness is the spotlight shining on you.

And then what? You don't see all the people behind the scenes

making sure the technology works

and that the lights stay on is your subconscious.

And this is a great framework

because what it does is it allows us to map it in the brain.

With MRI scans, we can see this really well.

We can see what lights up and what doesn't.

The problem with this is it starts to explain the functions of memory

and process. But again,

it doesn't explain what makes me know that I am alive and I am me.

And so I went into philosophy and I said, well, surely philosophy.

All they do is sit and think all day, right?

They got something to give us in terms of what is consciousness or what isn’t.

And I found something really interesting.

I found panpsychism,

the idea that everything is conscious and consciousness is so fundamental,

the way that matter is fundamental to our universe.

And I fell in love with all of these theories.

All of these theories bring fantastic components

because they allow us to explore ideas in new ways.

But the problem is, I still ask myself, well, what is the answer?

What really makes me me?

And what I realized is that, well,

there are incredible theories from every single discipline,

from mathematics to neuroscience to cognitive science to philosophy to physics

to even computer science have theories

on consciousness that what we really needed was a unified theory

of consciousness, one that can bring it all together to help us understand

and explain, particularly as we start to move forward in a world with AI,

where I become AI and AI becomes me.

And so this question is the question that I asked myself a year and a half ago.

And this question is what led me to begin a journey,

a journey to start a research institute, to solve this problem.

And this question, it allowed me to begin a self-study PhD.

It forced me out of my comfort zone to talk to people all across the globe,

to put a bold idea out there that I never thought I would tackle,

one that at times even feels crazy.

But most importantly, what it has done,

it has allowed me to begin the journey and it's allowed me to ask questions.

I never thought I'd ask

questions like what would happen after the singularity?

And the most important question I could think of even ever answering,

which is can we create a unified theory of consciousness?

And while I would love to tell you today that I have all the answers,

I've solved the hard problem of consciousness, I haven't.

I've merely begun the journey.

And what I've realized is that as I've begun the journey,

each of our journeys starts with a question.

Even today, as we work closer and closer and closer with AI,

it still all starts with a question.

It still all starts with a prompt.

It still starts with each and every one of us pushing the bounds of knowledge

and information to go into the unknown.

And so that is what I encourage each of you to do today.

To push the bounds of the unknown, to go to the places that no one wants to go,

to ask the questions no one has asked.

Because only by dreaming of a unified theory

of consciousness can we ever create it.

So today I encourage you to dream big,

ask hard questions,

and go boldly to create the future.

Thank you.