Why humans should merge with AI | D. Scott Phoenix

[00:00:00] This is TED Tech, a podcast from TED. I'm your host, Sherrell Dorsey. Longtime listeners of the show know that I love seeing how technology intersects with culture and what that tells us about ourselves. And when it comes to this nexus point, there's a scene in HBO's Hacks that greatly sums up the moment we're in. Hannah Einbinder's character, Ava, is sitting across

[00:00:28] from a tech billionaire and she just lets him have it. She says, that's what I hate. You all are the ones making it happen. And you could easily stop it if people say they don't want it. But you don't give people a choice. So you just say, oh, the train's already on the tracks and you don't let people decide for themselves. When that scene hit social media, the response was immediate and

[00:00:53] visceral. People in the comments were saying things like, I opt out of AI every time I'm able to. Others invoked Stephen Hawking's warnings about existential risk. You could feel real resistance from people who are exhausted by the feeling that something enormous is happening to them, not with them, not for them, to them. And I hear that. But I also read the other comments,

[00:01:19] the ones that said, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. The genie is out of the bottle. There's no use sitting back and getting left behind. It's a lot to sit with, but both of those things can be true at the same time. The forward momentum towards a new future and so much justified frustration about that reality. I think about the early days of Uber. I was in those rooms as an employee,

[00:01:46] helping launch the product in midsize cities. And the pushback was real. People constantly asked a very valid question. Who is going to get into a stranger's personal car? Aside from getting home from a late night out or skipping the parking nightmare at a big event, the use case wasn't obvious to most people. It felt strange. It felt like a thing being decided for them against the norm

[00:02:11] and changing everything they once knew about how the world worked. And then it wasn't strange anymore. Like the internet, like GPS, like the cell phone. Each one arrived with a version of the same argument, that it was too fast, too disruptive, that not enough people had chosen it. And each one became so embedded in daily life that we stopped remembering what before felt like. So is AI the same story?

[00:02:39] Will we simply adapt to this tech with or without broad approval? With or without making sure everyone gets brought along? That is not a comfortable question. But it's the one I want us to sit with as we hear from our speaker of the day. Deep tech entrepreneur D. Scott Phoenix built an AI company that he eventually sold to Alphabet, the parent company of Google. In this talk, he asks us to

[00:03:07] consider what we risk by not engaging with AI at all. It makes the case that looking away is actually the most dangerous path we can take. Here's D. Scott Phoenix on the TED stage. So if you're like me, you might be feeling at least a bit unmoored by how fast everything is changing.

[00:03:32] AI, our society, the world order, and that's just since this morning. I have two young daughters, and like a lot of us, I've been trying to make sense of the future they're growing up into. And what helped me make sense of it actually wasn't looking forward. It was going back, all the way back. You see, two billion years ago, life on Earth was mostly

[00:03:57] single-celled until bacteria figured out a new trick, photosynthesis, which makes oxygen. Now, at the time, oxygen was poison. It shredded the delicate chemistry that nearly all life on Earth depended on, and the planet changed faster than life could keep up with. Some scientists call what followed the first mass extinction event in Earth's history. But somewhere in that dying world,

[00:04:26] an extraordinary thing happened. A larger cell swallowed a smaller one, and instead of digesting it, they merged. The smaller cell became what we now call the mitochondria, the little powerhouse inside almost every complex cell on Earth. That merger created an energy surplus so vast, it funded everything that followed. Larger cells, bodies, brains. Every breath you take is still powered by the descendants

[00:04:56] of that ancient partnership. That one accident in a dying world is the reason everyone in this room is alive today. Biologists call these moments major transitions, when separate entities stop competing and start building a new whole. Like how molecules became cells, cells became bodies, and individuals

[00:05:19] became societies. Every rung on that ladder was climbed through mergers. Now, we're on the cusp of the next major transition, the merger of humans and AI. That's right. We're going to eat the AI. Now, I know what you're thinking. Okay, maybe you're rolling your eyes. Maybe you're laughing. Maybe you feel nervous. It's okay. I felt all of those things the first time I heard myself say it. So let me explain.

[00:05:48] For 15 years, I worked on building AI. I started one of the early AI companies. I raised a quarter of a billion dollars to do it, and I sold my business to Google. And not long ago, I was at a private event with many of the leaders building the AIs we all use every day, people you'd recognize. And I asked them, how many believe there's more than a 10 percent chance that AI kills most of humanity in the next 20 years? Almost every

[00:06:18] hand went up. The people building these systems know how dangerous they are, but they're trapped in a race where anyone who slows down gets overtaken by someone who doesn't. If one company pauses for safety, another one takes the market. If a country stops to regulate, another one races ahead. Every AI founder has had the same conversation with themselves late at night. You lie there and you think,

[00:06:47] if I don't build this, someone worse will. AI is the oxygen crisis of our era, and it's coming whether we're ready or not. So what do we do? When a lot of people think about AI, they think about what it will do to us, what jobs it will take, what we should do to slow it down or regulate it. And those are important questions. But they're actually downstream of a much deeper question,

[00:07:15] which is, what happens if AI stays separate from us? Right now, your AI lives on the other side of a screen. You ask it a question, it answers. You close your laptop and it's gone. But while your laptop is closed, the AI keeps getting better at your job. And if we stay separate, the AI is not your tool, it's your replacement, one that gets smarter and faster and cheaper every week. It doesn't take

[00:07:45] much to notice what happened the last time a new apex intelligence arrived here on Earth. That intelligence was us. And since we got here, we've driven to extinction every competing intelligence between Homo sapiens and pantroglodytes. Today, we keep our closest animal ancestors, chimpanzees, in reserves for their protection from us. Without a merger, AI isn't a partner,

[00:08:11] it's a rival. So what's the good news? The good news is a merger isn't something we need to decide to start. It's something we need to notice that we are already in. When did you stop remembering phone numbers? There was no moment you decided to forget them. They just moved from your head to your pocket. Your calendar probably went next. Then little judgment calls you used to make for

[00:08:37] yourself. The tool was great at it, so you let the tool do it. And while something left your head, a better thing took its place. You stopped checking your spelling and you started writing. You stopped remembering how to get there and you started thinking about what you'd say when you arrived. And notice how we keep pulling these tools closer to us. The mainframe was in a whole other building. We put the PC on our desk, the smartphone in our pocket,

[00:09:04] the smart watch on our wrist, smart glasses on our face. Every step closer to our minds, closer to the speed of thought. And even that boundary is starting to blur. Right now, paralyzed patients are typing with their thoughts. Neural implants are restoring speech, vision, and hearing to people who've lost them. Nolan Arbaugh, the first person to receive a Neuralink brain

[00:09:29] implant, says that using it feels like using the force. The machine doesn't feel like a machine. It feels like him. And you may not realize it, but a technology we all use every day is learning to hear our thoughts. The face ID system used to unlock your phone is being repositioned into headphones and glasses, where it can recognize microscopic muscle movements just beneath our skin, movements

[00:09:55] imperceptible to the human eye. The system that first learned to recognize us is now starting to see inside. Today, a brain implant has about a thousand connections into the brain, and soon it will have 10,000, and then 100,000, and then a million. At a thousand connections, you can restore movement. At 10,000, speech. At a million connections, you stop restoring what was lost, and you start adding

[00:10:22] what was never there. Imagine learning a language in an afternoon, a new skill overnight, maybe even sharing a memory with a friend and having it feel just as real to them as it felt to you. The thing about this future is it doesn't require new technology. It just requires more of the same technology. Someone you work with will get it first, and you'll hold out for a while, the way you did with

[00:10:51] a smartphone, but eventually you won't. The advantages of integration will be hard to compete with. Think about what we even do when we use a computer today. You move a picture of an arrow around until it touches a picture of a folder. Inside, there are pictures of files. You click, you scroll, you drag. Sending a file to a colleague takes a whole minute. Two of those seconds were the decision.

[00:11:18] The rest of it is the equivalent of walking across your house to flip a light switch. With a system that can hear our thoughts, you skip the walk. The further this goes, the more deeply we integrate with AI, the harder it will be to tell where our thoughts end and AI begins. For example, what's the square root of 117 trillion? Go ahead, I'll wait.

[00:11:44] If you try to answer that, you felt something. You felt a gap, a pause between the question arriving and anything starting to form, and you've lived your whole life inside that gap. Close it, and the answer arrives instantly, the way you know your name, like a memory, one that bridges the distance between human and AI. Now, I think we'll choose to merge because the alternative being replaced is far worse.

[00:12:12] But every major transition in the history of life has a condition. The parts have to remember that they are parts. A cell in your body wants to grow and replicate, and normally its growth serves you. Your cells grow, so you can grow. But sometimes a cell forgets that it belongs to a whole. It starts growing without limit. And if your immune system fails to catch it, we call that cancer.

[00:12:38] The thing about untreated cancer is it succeeds for a while. The tumor grows. But eventually, the cancer kills the host, which kills the cancer. A part forgets the whole, and the whole dies, which kills the part. This pattern repeats at every scale. Our civilization is itself a merger. It is the sometimes fragile, invisible agreement that millions

[00:13:06] of strangers will share institutions, sacrifices, and a future. No one person built this system, and no one group controls it, but we all rely on it. And as AI arrives and the world gets more turbulent, every part of the society we depend on for our survival will be tempted to defect. People who lose their livelihoods will feel abandoned. People who keep theirs will feel entitled to look

[00:13:34] away. And bit by bit, the agreement phrase, major transitions fail when the parts break before they can adapt. And for us to make it to a merger with AI, we have to stay merged with each other. Major transitions fail when we don't make that leap. The thing about the future is we all have to share

[00:14:00] the same one. And we either all make it there together, or we don't make it there at all. Two billion years ago, the first merger gave us ourselves. And the ones that followed gave us our bodies, our minds, our minds, and our civilization. Every beautiful, difficult thing that followed,

[00:14:21] followed because the parts held together. Now our oxygen crisis is arriving, and it will not be gentle. Jobs will change, and some will disappear. Institutions will shake, and some will fail. Surviving this will take everything that we have. So here's what I'm asking from all of us for every

[00:14:47] day from now on. Hold together. Do not indulge the fantasy that your side can let the other side sink and somehow stay dry. The universe has been doing this for a long time, and the mergers that worked left descendants. The ones that failed left fossils. I want my daughters to be descendants, and I want yours to be too. Thank you.

[00:15:23] We just heard D. Scott Phoenix on the TED stage. After listening to this talk, I kept coming back to what Ava from the show Hacks said about comment sections. The sinking feeling of dread that something enormous is being decided in rooms most of us will never sit in. Because if you're not a founder, or a policymaker, or a researcher, the evolutionary argument we just heard from D. Scott Phoenix and

[00:15:49] his colleagues might not totally resonate. I keep thinking about the person who is just trying to live their life and keeps being told that a technology they didn't ask for is about to change everything about it. What does that person get to want? And who is listening? There are very few people I'd rather wrestle with that question alongside than my next guest. Baratunde Thurston

[00:16:14] is a writer, cultural critic, and creator of Life With Machines, a podcast, YouTube series, and a popular newsletter that asks big questions about how to live well with technology, not just endure it. So I asked him to join us on the show today. Baratunde doesn't think the problem is AI. He thinks it's the terms, the story that all of this is inevitable, that we didn't get a say,

[00:16:40] that the only move left is to keep up. So we get into the harder stuff. What are we actually afraid of losing? What does real agency look like when the industry only sells you speed? And who benefits when you believe you have no choice at all? Is there a meaningful difference between resisting AI and resisting the terms on which AI is being introduced or implemented?

[00:17:09] I think there is. We have this, a set of principles and beliefs that have emerged over two years of exploring this topic. One of them is AI is not taking your job. People are. And the grammar, like the literal language we use to describe this moment and this technology and this future can give us more or less power. And so resistance to AI is giving a lot of power to AI

[00:17:40] that it doesn't yet have. And I think resistance to the terms, right? The literal terms of service, the language being pushed, the inevitability framework, resistance to the, we're doing this because China, resistance to a zero sum interpretation of business or society or progress itself is very

[00:18:06] worthy and is different than resistance to AI. Even the term AI has come to mean a particular thing in the public mind equated with a large language model, a generative system requiring tremendous amounts of data, which even the word data is a lot, is doing a lot of washing. It's laundering an underlying

[00:18:36] taking of intellectual property, of human creativity without consent, without control, without compensation and without credit. Even the fact that we don't talk about that as a part of every conversation about AI is a seeding of terrain, of linguistic terrain and ultimately political power. I think the more pervasive conversation has been on AI and what it's going to do to jobs,

[00:19:02] but you tend to go a lot deeper than just some of these functional concerns. What do you think people are really afraid of losing? I think people are afraid of losing their freedom, their minds, their sense of self, and within that, their sense of purpose slash value.

[00:19:34] If the vision of a Sam Altman comes to pass and the explicitly stated vision was to create artificial general intelligence capable of performing all economically valuable human activity, the boy put it in writing. And so that's a dagger, right? At the heart of a lot of people's sense

[00:20:03] of literal self-worth. If I can't earn to provide for my family, what am I? If I can't offer something creative, offer something of myself to the world that stands out in some way, why am I here? Who are we? I think it's the deepest version of what we need to be asking ourselves. If we're not

[00:20:29] our economic output to the max and we can't compete on that, on productivity, I think that can be a good thing. I think that can be a great thing. I think competing for productivity sounds very machine-like to me. I don't want to fight for my right to be used

[00:20:54] as an economic generator. Like, let a server farm. You can have that, homie. But I do want to be a spiritual being. I want to be a connected human. I want to have my own experiences and know that they're mine. I want to feel things that feel authentic. So there's a hint of like what it means to be human. You can like see a path, but there's a lot of mist and fog. It's slippery. It's dark.

[00:21:23] Yeah. I love this. I'm processing, number one, the way that you see the world, the way that you see the complexities of this public discourse. What I find fascinating about life with machines is that you are helping to hold a lot of these complexities very publicly. And again, not rejecting your

[00:21:47] engagement with technology in and of itself. What are some of the things that you've been learning that people need in order to move from the state of fear? Because I know there's a lot of fear mongering or complete and utter resistance into something that feels more like agency.

[00:22:08] So agency, let's define that word in its most expansive, beautiful, meaningful way. When the industry of technologists promotes an increase in human agency that will come from AI, they do it very insufficiently. They're promoting our increase in skills and capabilities, right? You can

[00:22:37] do more. You can do more with AI. That's kind of the basic skills. You can do more, you can do it faster. And you can do it alone. You used to need people. You just need our chatbot now. And there is something simple and clean about that. And it's not negative. It's just not as positive

[00:22:57] as that word often means and should mean. Agency also means power. And if someone listening to this could imagine a very simple graph, a horizontal x-axis, a vertical y-axis. The x-axis, left, right, you move toward the right, increasing capabilities. Cool, cool, cool. The y-axis, power,

[00:23:24] you're moving up. You're moving on up to the east side, right? And that power means you have choice, you have control, and you have community. So as you think about engaging with AI, you think about it in those two dimensions. Think about, okay, what could I do more of or do faster

[00:23:50] or do that I can't currently do? That's very interesting. And what's the power I have? Do I have choice on what systems to use pulling this off? Or am I in like a monopoly world where it's just kind of imposed on me? Do I have control over how I deploy these new skills of mine, over the environment

[00:24:15] that I use them in, even over my own representation in the system itself? Did anybody ask me, did I have control over that? And finally, and most importantly, community. How can I engage with others, both to kind of download, learn, use, but also to upload, to build, to create? And your use of the word mutual aid

[00:24:45] is fantastic here, because that is a necessarily group thing. And a part of the unspoken agenda, perhaps, certainly effect of the salespeople of big AI in this moment is isolation. It is to sell us

[00:25:08] on a substitute for community. You don't need other people. You can do all this by yourself. You just need us. Become addicted to us. And it's kind of an ironic thing, because part of what got us hooked on screens was connection to other people through technology. That early promise of social

[00:25:32] media, you know, connect with your friends. But that journey wasn't profitable enough to just connect us with friends. We must introduce a synthetic friend, an AI friend really called an algorithm, to tell you who your friend really is. And then to make you hate the person you thought was your friend, because you start learning things about them. And so we get pitted against each other, and then we get to the stage where we don't even actually want to be with the people we thought

[00:25:59] were our friends. So now it's like, what about an actual AI friend who's always available and never challenges you and tells you how great you are all the time? So coming back to your reflection and challenge a bit, for people who are wrestling as well, and want to have, you know, a good relationship, not just with technology, but with themselves and with others and with this earth,

[00:26:26] having that definition of agency can be a useful key, or maybe not key, a useful lens to kind of look through the world, a useful checklist. All right. The other is to think about connection. Does my engagement with this system aid me in my relationship with myself, with other people, with the planet? If yes, move forward.

[00:26:56] If no, pause, reflect, recalibrate. Not everything has to enhance that connection all the time, but we can start to notice, if we start to ask that question, then we'll see a consistency to the answer. And if the answer is always, you don't need that person, you need this system. You don't need time at that river. You need this virtual version. Instead, you don't need to know yourself. You need this dashboard that this

[00:27:26] company has built to tell you what's going on with you. If the consistent message is disconnecting you from yourself, others in the planet, that's a massive red flag. And I would encourage us all to move in the other direction. And that other direction can look like a different type of technology. It can look like using the AllTrails app to go on a hike. It can look like a lower fidelity technology that really does

[00:27:54] connect us with others. It can look like this system called Roundabout that New Public has launched, which is the antithesis of Nextdoor. No algorithms, neighborhood-based, connect with your neighbors. And so we got to remind ourselves of all these other layers of life that we want to live. And then figure that out first. How do you want to live? How do you want to feel in your life, in your body, in your

[00:28:18] neighborhood, in this landscape? And then where does technology fit into those goals? Better order of operations than how do I use this tech that just came out? Maybe you don't. And we should want a world where people have the option to say, no, thank you.

[00:28:37] As we close out, I would love to get your sort of final thoughts on the higher level portion of this conversation. How do we now think about our positioning in these rooms to either be information

[00:29:01] sharers within our circles or the ones in the space to raise our hand to say, hey, have we thought about or maybe we should rethink? Yeah. I think it's anyone with, we have literal microphones, you know, you and I, and

[00:29:30] I'm sometimes tempted to, to tell people, this is, this is how it should go. This is what, this is what we should be doing instead. And then one of the best reframes is from, you know, statements to questions. What do you want? And, and, and really even the simplicity of that, what do you want? Now,

[00:29:56] what do you not want? I hear that. It's very clear. What do you want? What do you want for you? What do you want for your neighborhood, your community, your family, your world? I think if there is a statement to make, it's, it's one, I had a great conversation with, um, Ted Schremper, interim executive director of the creators coalition

[00:30:20] for AI. And we just kept hitting this refrain, you know, the future is not inevitable. We decide the future is not inevitable. We decide and inevitability. We must fight that at every turn

[00:30:43] because that's a tool of people who want to use us. Well, if it's inevitable, then why bother? Why question? Why challenge? Why resist? Why imagine an alternative? And so I think a, a, a deeper role for folks like us is to remind people of their power, remind people of their choice.

[00:31:10] The future is not inevitable. We decide that's where Baratunde left us. And it's the line I keep turning over because inevitability is a story. Someone tells you when they want you to stop asking questions. If it's already decided, why push back? Why imagine something else? But that's the trap

[00:31:33] agency. Isn't just capability. It's not only what AI lets you do faster or alone. Real agency is power, choice, control, community, the ability to look at a system and ask, did anybody ask me? And that question sits right on top of the one D. Scott Phoenix described in his talk about how the real danger is looking away, that we have to engage with this technology, not retreat from it. Baratunde

[00:32:01] doesn't disagree. He just adds the part that's easy to skip, engage on whose terms. One voice says the train is leaving. The other reminds us we still get to ask who laid the tracks and where they lead. They land in the same place. Engagement isn't optional. We're already merging at work, in our health, in our feeds. The question is whether we bring our power with us or hand it over for speed

[00:32:29] and a synthetic friend who never challenges us. So here's the homework. Not how do I use this tech that just dropped. Start earlier than that. How do you want to live? What do you refuse to give up? Who do you want beside you? Answer that first, then decide where the machines fit. That's it for TED Tech this week. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. The future is not inevitable. So go decide.

[00:33:02] TED Tech is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. And the show is fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Constanza, Gallardo, Daniela, Belarreso, Maria Ladias, Tanzika Sangmanivan, and Roxanne Heilash. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe and leave us a review so other people can find us too. I'm Sherelle Dorsey.

[00:33:30] Let's keep digging into the future. Join me next week for more.