Moran Cerf spent twenty years recording single neurons inside the brains of conscious human beings and he still can't tell you what consciousness is. A former hacker turned neuroscientist, now a professor at Columbia Business School, he argues that AI has quietly replicated the one thing that made humans the crown of creation -language - and is now using it on us.
Moran and I discuss what happens inside Claude's brain when you ask it to think about elephants, why we understand less than half of our own, the thought experiment that makes almost everyone refuse a perfect copy of themselves and how AI learned to lie simply by reading every text message humans have ever sent.
But the argument that lands hardest is about what we lose. Moran believes AI hands you the average of humanity every time and that we are quietly deleting the errors, the flair and the incentives that made life worth the effort - and that technology is making us miss the meaning of life.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Have They Replicated The Human Brain?
00:02:31 - The Elephant Test
00:04:50 - We Understand Less Than Half The Brain
00:06:52 - Consciousness Used To Be A Taboo
00:10:05 - Would You Take This Deal?
00:13:45 - Oliver Sacks And The Lesion Cases
00:16:15 - They Feel The Pain
00:19:35 - Don't Let The Human Turn You Off
00:25:00 - Seven Theories, Seven Winners
00:27:29 - We Can Both Imagine A Unicorn
00:30:42 - Gavagai And The Plot Of Arrival
00:32:18 - AI Is Learning Like A Baby
00:38:26 - Why This Couldn't Be A Zoom Call
00:44:43 - Are We Destroying The Human Experience?
00:46:50 - What Data Did To Football
00:49:24 - Banned From Using AI At School
00:55:58 - Nobody's Having Sex Anymore
01:01:16 - It Shut Down The Power Plant
01:05:43 - I'd Trade My Life For The Answer
01:09:27 - The Rainbows
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CONTACT PETE
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CONNECT WITH MORAN CERF
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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
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