Technology and the Soul with Terry Brock

Terry Brock, MBA, CPAE, is a public speaker working with corporations in the area of technology. He is a recipient of the Cavett Award from the National Speakers Association, the highest honor bestowed by that organization. His website is https://terrybrock.com/speaker/ Also see https://www.starkravingentrepreneurs.com/

In this wide-ranging discussion Terry Brock examines both the promise and the dangers associated with technology. He also shares some exciting developments in the area of AI. The discussion also focuses on the question of consciousness.

00:00 Introduction
02:42 Open-minded skepticism
06:17 Disenchantment of the world
12:07 Potential dangers
16:17 New uses of AI
27:07 Will AI become self-aware
34:45 The purpose of a human being
38:30 Mind and brain
40:02 Dealing with the dangers
44:43 Conclusion

Edited subtitles for this video are available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.

(Recorded on March 11, 2024)

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New Thinking Allowed is a non-profit endeavor. Your contributions to the New Thinking Allowed Foundation make a meaningful difference in our ability to produce new videos. Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Hello and welcome. I’m Jeffrey Mishlove.

Today is a very special program. I’m with an old friend, Terry Brock, and we’re going to be talking about technology and the soul. Terry is a public speaker. He’s been one for many decades, working with groups of people, corporations, executives on how to make the best use of technology.

That’s his field of expertise, and he’s so good that he recently won what is known as the Cavett Award from the National Speakers Association. It is the highest award that a public speaker can receive from that organization. So, I’m very honored and pleased to be with an old friend

Today to talk about technology and the soul. Welcome, Terry. It’s wonderful to be here with you. Thank you, sir. It’s a great pleasure to be with you and to discuss a topic that is of enormous concern to people these days. Of course, I was born, you and I were both

Born into a technological society, but since then, over the last 70-some years or so of my life, it’s accelerated exponentially. Yes, very much so. We’re seeing an acceleration, which has a lot of good. I love to see the acceleration in the medical field, for instance,

Making great advances there to save lives and make lives better for people. But with any technological advancement, we’ve seen the challenges there also. Same as my buddy Og, who came up with this invention long ago back in the cave called

Fire. It was really amazing. Hey, it’ll heat your cave at night. That’s wonderful. Cook your food. This is good. Wait a minute. It’s destructive, too. It can kill you. Well, we’ve got to learn how to deal with that technology. Same thing, more recently, with airplanes. Airplanes,

Unfortunately, people have died because of airplane accidents. But that doesn’t mean we stop using airplanes. It means we use our brains. We learn what went right, what went wrong. What can we do to make this technology better to serve people? Let’s talk a little bit, if I can shift gears, about your

Background. I heard a very interesting story from you, and I hope you don’t mind talking about your religious upbringing was not exactly based on what one might think of as a highly rational world. Well, yes. I love my parents. They were great people. They’re no longer with us now.

But they felt it was important for children to be involved in the church. And they were Christians, and so they decided to get involved in that. I learned a lot of good principles, a lot of character traits that are important that you and I embrace.

Treating people right, living honestly, being kind, don’t hurt others, don’t take their stuff. All of that was somehow communicated there. But there were some other elements that got involved in it that I later on in life realized that’s just not as healthy.

If you don’t do it this way, according to a prescribed rule, terrible things will happen to you, not just in this life, but for eternity. And so I’m not going to get into the merits of that right now or the demerits of it. I’ll just say that I started looking at life

Realizing, you know, what really matters, that we need to love one another, which is spoken of in the Christian New Testament. I see that that’s important to treat people properly and right. And that’s where I want to focus my efforts, as I’ve had the opportunity, as you

Have, to travel different places around the world and see different religions. I think the most important thing is that we let people have their opinion and let people do whatever they want. And I mean that literally, whatever, as long as they don’t harm others and they don’t take their stuff.

Live and let live, I think, is really the best way to live. As you probably know, this program, New Thinking Allowed, has a very heavy emphasis on the paranormal side of life. And you’ve explained to me that when it comes to the paranormal, you’re more or less in the skeptic camp.

Yes, I tend to be a skeptic defined as the idea of not just anything that’s there, I’m going to deny it. No, but rather to say, I come in, my background, undergrad degree is journalism. You know, radio, TV, newspaper, I have written for papers.

I worked in radio extensively and I found I like to step back. And in journalism, they teach us to fold your arms like this and go, yeah, right. Sure. So I kind of got that about anything. But that also doesn’t mean that you say, I’m going to deny everything.

If it doesn’t fit my set of beliefs and systems, then I’m denying it. Well, you’re hurting yourselves and you’re hurting yourself and others. I think what we need to do is to say, well, OK, tell me more about that. I don’t know about it yet, but show me the evidence.

We’ll embrace that scientific method thingy. It seems like a pretty good thing. You know, embrace that as much as we can. And when someone says, hey, look, this and this and this can happen, I go, I don’t know about that. Well, here’s the evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence.

OK, then you showed me the evidence. I will change my opinion when I see new evidence. So I would call you an open-minded skeptic. I like that term, open-minded skeptic. And I like to think of myself the same way. I think it’s a healthy way to live life.

Actually, even though I’m sure we’ll disagree about different things. Also, boy, Jeffery, you should have talked to me when I was 18. I knew it all then. Or at least I thought I did. And right now, I don’t know about you, but I wish,

Hurry up and get that time machine thing you’re working on. Get that, I want to get it, I’m going to go back to my 18-year-old self and probably slap myself across the face. Say, sit down. Listen, you’re going to do this and this. And that guy there, don’t deal with him.

And that woman, stay away from her. But that other one, you needed to get to know her more. So you get that time machine thing fixed. You know. Well, when it comes to the topic of technology and the soul, there’s a lot of literature, I imagine you’re aware of,

That suggests that technology as a whole has had an influence of de-souling people. That we live in a world that’s lost all of its enchantment. Carl Jung, for example, wrote the book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Yeah, his archetypes, wonderful things.

The technology seems to, some people begin to think of themselves as a cog in a great machine. I once interviewed Marvin Minsky, a well-known person now deceased in the field of computers and AI, who said, you should be proud to think of yourself

As the most important or the most complex machine ever developed. He said, don’t think of yourself as being a machine as something lesser. But people sometimes do think of themselves as machines. And as a result of that, I think many of the problems of our civilization

Can be traced to the dehumanizing impact of technology. Yeah, I would agree. I think when we dehumanize it through technology or even just human relations, when someone puts another person down through their language and we would say, well, that’s not technology. Maybe it is.

I’ll leave it up to the linguist to tell us that language itself is a technology. But I think technology is by itself amoral. When you think about it, a car is a technology. Should we say, hey, we should get rid of cars

Because it is better if people walk or better if we use animals? Well, I think cars can be very good. Have people died in cars? Yeah, sure they have. And that’s very sad. But what we do is we look at technology as a way to improve the human condition. We use electricity.

We’re using a lot of electricity right now. The cameras to record us, the microphones. I think we’re better off because we have those. And I think we have to use our brains. I know a lot of people don’t want to do that. And they let those people vote. That’s a whole other thing.

But the thing is what we need to do is we need to say the technology is amoral. What we need to do is find out how can we use that to better serve people, to help people to have a better quality life

So that the life of the average person can be far improved. When you think about it, even with all the yuck, I’ll use that word, the yuck that’s going on right now in our world, we step back and we think, yeah, but we’re far better off

Than people were years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, I think 1,000 years ago. They didn’t complain about their car wouldn’t start. They didn’t have to worry about that. But they didn’t live, maybe to the ripe old age of 30. But our technology has helped us.

So I think we just have to embrace it in the right way. And we need to use our minds and think in terms of how do we benefit and help others by using this technology. And that’s really the focus of your whole career. Yes, exactly. We can use technology to make life easier.

We can get things done that took this much time in this much time. Okay, that’s good because that gives us more time to do other, more profitable, more things that help others better. We can get, instead of this much output from land, by using the right agriculture and scientific methods,

We can get this much more food so that now more people can eat. People don’t have to die of starvation, which was quite common centuries ago. Now that’s a rarity. It still exists and we need to stay on top of it. But we’re far better off because of that technology.

One of the concerns that has been voiced on this channel many times is that if in an authoritarian government technology can be used for social control, and that can be very destructive to people. One gets the feeling in China with facial recognition everywhere and this social scorecard that they have.

They’re keeping track of over a billion citizens using supercomputers. Yeah, and I can see a case could be made. You and I probably would agree having control in certain areas in this area here could be good. Could be good that we know, okay, someone was in an accident.

We know how to find them now. Okay, I could see there’s a good for that. But there’s also an enormous amount of bad that can be, because in the wrong political hands, which would be any human being, then they could use that for nefarious and deadly means.

And we have seen that happen throughout the centuries. I think Goebbels, under Hitler’s regime, would have loved to have that kind of control. I’m glad he didn’t have that, and the Nazis were just a horrendous blight on history. But I think we’ve got to be careful. This is the way human nature works.

And so we understand first human nature, then we design our rules and technologies around that. But we’re living in a time in history where authoritarianism seems to be on the rise globally. Yeah, unfortunately. We see it in country after country. Unfortunately, what happens throughout history, as you know, swings back and forth.

I tend to be one who wants to embrace freedom, liberty. Let you do whatever you want to do. And I mean that, use your imagination as long as, number one, you take responsibility for what you’re doing. Number two, you do not harm others. You don’t initiate that force or coercion against them.

Number three, you don’t take their stuff. Real simple, if you live peacefully, you can do it. I love the way that Leonard Reed said it. He’s the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education back in 1949, I think it was. He’s three words to tell you how to live life. Anything that’s peaceful.

If it’s peaceful, sounds good to me. I like it. But if somebody starts initiating force or coercion, I don’t like that at all. I’m in total agreement with you about that. But we live in a world where humans have been using force and coercion almost from the beginning.

And it seems to be, I can’t tell whether it’s increasing or decreasing. I guess it depends on your starting point. Yeah, I think you’re right. I agree. We’ve seen it and that’s the reality. We can’t live in a world of, okay, we’re all just going to hug and make it nice

And smile and sing kumbaya. There are people out there that are evil. And there have been throughout history. I mean, if you were living in the steps of Russia, what is now Russia, with Genghis Khan coming through, they were pretty good warriors. I mean, they really were.

They mastered some technology for their day that really wrecked destruction. If you’re in one of those Chinese villages that he and his warriors are coming through, that was pretty horrendous. They were using a technology. I mean, they were able to master riding on the side of their horses

And use their sabers to hit people like they couldn’t do. Well, that was their technology. And the bow and arrow. Yeah, the bow and arrow, exactly. And so it’s been used throughout history. So that means we need to be always vigilant and realize the bad guys are out there.

There are Hitlers in the world. I mean, I forget who said it, but every discussion ultimately comes down to a Hitler somewhere. I guess, OK, we locked it in there. That’s the bad guy. But we also see, OK, what do we do to live free? And we can study life throughout the centuries.

Where did the average person have the greatest sense of well-being, the greatest standard of living, the greatest longevity? And we see that consistently happens when they are able to control their own lives. They don’t have these authoritarian thugs that are out there, as you referenced what they’re doing.

I think what we’ve got now is we want to be able to say, we can use this technology for good. Let’s not swing over to the bad. I understand Rome was doing pretty well for a while, and then somewhere around 435-ish in that era, bad things happened, it collapsed.

And they had about a thousand years before the 1400s came around and we had what is called the Enlightenment. We started waking up and saying, hey, we don’t have to do it this way in the bad way. I don’t want to wait a thousand years to go through some real yuck

In order to make things better. Well, let’s talk about how technology could be most useful, and I mean the new technology, AI, can be most useful to our viewers who are highly educated, lay people from a wide spectrum of occupations and backgrounds. Yeah, I think there’s no one specific thing to do,

But I think in general we have to realize and acknowledge AI, artificial intelligence, is here. And to say, well, it’s not good, we ought to stop it, that’s not going to work. I don’t think if we passed laws here in the United States that the Chinese would go,

Golly gee, guys, we can’t do this anymore. The Russians wouldn’t say that. I don’t think the North Koreans would say, oh, wow, we can’t do it because the Americans passed a law. We need to say, we’re going to use it, and we’re going to use it for good.

Let’s start building that in from the start to make sure we say, look, AI, you can do no harm. Kind of something like the oath that doctors will take. We want to put that in the Hippocratic oath that they take. And I think what we want to do is build that into AI

And have a kill switch. Didn’t Isaac Asimov come up with his robot laws? Yeah, I think those laws, I don’t remember them right now, but what he said, I think it was in his trilogy that he talked about that, and I think that would be good to build it in there.

First of all, do no harm. Okay, those are some good ways to start on that. And I think we need to build that in. I don’t think we need to stop using AI. I think we need to realize, okay, this is reality. We need to study it.

And so I would say to those that are watching this right now and listening to this, it would be important to blend that in as a regular part of your diet, your intellectual diet. Study it. Go to the University of YouTube. Go there. By the way, I love YouTube.

We can get so much good information there. But use your brain. There’s stuff on YouTube that’s not quite so good. Okay, use your judgment. Don’t just walk in and go, I will obey and listen to whatever they say. No, no, no, that’s not the way to do it.

But you go, wait a minute, be a little bit of a skeptic, a healthy skeptic. I think, how do you describe it? An open-minded skeptic? Yes. Yeah, I like that term. And I think that’s what we need to do. And then read the literature, go to conferences where they talk about it,

And find ways that we can embrace it to learn how we can solve problems. You and I yesterday had some fun with that. We sure did. I was here at your wonderful home, loving it, and I saw the statues you had down there. I said, that looks like otters

Or something you said you didn’t know what it was. So I got my cell phone out, just grabbed, here it is, you can’t be far away from your cell phone, you gotta have this. I grabbed this, pulled up ChatGPT, and then I zoomed in on the caricatures of what I thought were otters,

And I took a picture of it. And then I fed that into ChatGPT and asked with the simple, what is this, question mark. Waited a few seconds, ChatGPT came back and said, oh, it looks like it’s a model that looks like otters. For this and this. And it gave me a nice explanation.

I showed it to you. Sure enough, it is. Well, that can help us. That’s a good thing. Now, can it be used for evil? Well, yeah, it could be used for evil. Let’s use it for the good. We had another similar experience at a more philosophical level. I was suggesting to you,

It was kind of a conundrum for me. I remember having a conversation with my friend Jacques Vallée, who was a computer scientist, was involved in SRI International, big military industrial think tank in the 1970s, where they were doing pioneering work in remote viewing. And many of our viewers will know Jacques,

Who has been on this channel, is one of the world’s foremost UFO researchers. So Jacques was explaining that in the 1970s, when he’s at SRI and also helping to create DARPA, the first real internet, he saw the enormous potential for parapsychology and remote viewing as well as the internet.

And I suppose we could add UFOs, which he was well aware of it even back then, all have the potential to change our culture. But we can look back today, 50 years later, and say one of them succeeded. The internet has changed our culture dramatically and permanently. UFOs and parapsychology, not so much.

And so I was puzzling with you, as I wonder why that is. And you said, well, let’s ask ChatGPT. Yeah, why not? Which we did. And we got, I would say, a very cogent answer, not a complete answer, but it was several paragraphs. Oh, yeah. I’d say it’s a good start.

And that’s a good model because today, now we can go much farther to get the answers we need because it is a conversation. It’s not just like we’ve done before with Google, which I love. I think Google has been great. What is the capital of Russia? And we could type that into Google.

We’ll come back and say Moscow and maybe give us some facts on that. That’s nice. But now we can go even more in depth because it gave us that answer. And I think you were asking, what about that? I said, well, let’s just go deeper. So tell me more,

Which, by the way, is a great prompt. Tell me more. And tell me more about number three here of the five things you gave. We got even more information. And then the really good thing about it, I said, well, Jeffrey, would you like to have this?

And I think you said, yeah, that would be nice. I said, no problem. I just tapped on the little dealie up there. That’s the technical term. The little dealie up there at the top. Tap that and then copy the link, send it over to you in email,

And now you’ve got all that information that we can share together if we want to go even more in depth. As I recall, that was a third example that we worked on which had to do with I had been riding my bicycle. Yes. That day I’d take a 12-mile bicycle ride

Whenever I can. And as I was riding, I was thinking to myself, it’s so easy to stay upright on the bicycle when it’s moving, but it’s impossible to remain upright on the bicycle if it’s standing still, unless you have training wheels. Unless you have training wheels.

Yeah, unless you put the training wheels on. I guess you could have some stakes in the ground. And I thought, you know, there must be a physical principle involved, but I don’t know what it is. And so we queried again, ChatGPT, and it explained it had to do with angular momentum primarily

And also a gyroscopic effect, which I suspected. Yeah, you did. You suspected that. And it confirmed that you were suspected. But I didn’t think about angular momentum, which was the main reason. So we got that on your cell phone, as I remember, and then you were able to

Press a couple buttons and forward the answer to me. Yeah, and think about that, Jeffrey. That technology, that methodology, is a great way to arrive at answers, to come up with what we need to do for so many things that are plaguing us right now. We don’t know what to do.

And I would suggest also something we didn’t do last night because we were ecstatically happy with what we did, but I would use ChatGPT, but not only ChatGPT. I would also want to use some other tools like Perplexity, which does similar things but can give us some different answers.

And then also some others that are like Claude. It is a very good tool that lets us take a look at it. I learned that in journalism. In journalism, we have a principle of when someone says something is true, you don’t just go, oh, wow, Bob said this. It must be true.

Rather say, okay, thank you, Bob. That’s good. If you said this and I make clear on that, good. Let me go to a non-corroborating second source and find out what they’re saying and then go to a third non-corroborating source to see are they all saying the same thing.

Now that doesn’t mean that all three of them are right. All three of them could be wrong. But it starts giving us a better basis on what to do. So I would say using that in AI, yes, we’re going to use ChatGPT. It’s the dominant force. Perplexity has some real good

Information and it gives us the references where it came from. And then using Claude, that gives us yet another way to build that three-legged stool to get answers. On this program, we use other systems and I think some of them I may have learned from you. One is called Whisper. We use

Whisper to create an accurate transcript of every one of our interviews. It’s better than the built-in transcripts from YouTube. Yes. Really good idea. And getting the transcript is good because it helps us to understand it better. I find that when I listen to something and I read it,

It helps me just to learn a little bit more. Plus it gives the authenticity that that was what the person said. We hear it and we see it written down. It increases the level of understanding that we have. We also use AI. I don’t know if it’s Whisper.

I think it’s a different program. I have volunteers who help out. But once we get a really good English transcript, we translate it into seven other languages. Excellent. Excellent. That’s something I’m doing now in my programs that I do. And I use a program called Castmagic. And it gives me the

Ability to tap into the power of ChatGPT. That’s where they’re getting their information. But at the end of my interviews, I’ll give a Spanish language summary. And I’m hearing my readers, those who are viewing it, saying, thank you for doing that. And of course I can put it into many other languages

As well. I’m hoping, Jeffrey, that that can increase the connection of people around the globe. That instead of trying to shoot and hurt each other, we can say, hey, let’s get to know each other better. Let’s see where we have areas of disagreement, but areas where we can

Agree and work toward a more peaceful world. You know, I hear from viewers occasionally and they say I’m a really big fan of your program. I’ve been watching it for a long time. I would just love to have the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with you.

I would love to be your friend. And the truth is I’m awful busy. We’re putting up four to five videos every week, Terry. You had the opportunity to sit down with me and look at the Jeffrey Mishlove bot and I’m tempted to tell some of these people, well, I don’t have time,

Honestly. I wish I did, but I don’t. But there is this bot you can interact with and it’s almost like being with me if you limit it to certain questions that are related to the interviews we’ve done. In fact, you had an opportunity to interact with the Jeffrey Mishlove

Bot. Yes, I think that’s a wonderful thing. It’s a great way to say what would Jeffrey say about this? Well, here’s what he said in this paper, in that one, and even a little bit over in this paper as well. We put that together, we can find

Out from you because you’re a human being. You give so much and I’ve seen you do that through the years. You’re marvelous, you’re brilliant, and you’re very giving to help other people. And we thank you for that. On behalf of everyone watching this, we thank you for doing that. And now

Using the technology, which by the way, to your credit, you’ve embraced it. You’ve embraced it with a healthy, open mind skepticism first, but you see that it works, you go, let’s get it, it’ll help more people. And I think that’s something that we can

All do now. When you have a body of work that you’ve put together over time, answering certain questions, now you can distill that into an AI tool so that people can live their lives better and know more what you say. And also, if you have something, you say, hmm, for the

Last several years I’ve believed X and I find out now with new evidence, that’s not exactly true. There’s a Y component into it as well. Let me put that in there and now you can update that very quickly. I think that’s a beautiful thing that we can do in going forward

With our knowledge. And incidentally, I will put in the description of this video instructions for any viewers who want to access that bot. Thank you. I think that will be really good. Let us know in plain, simple, step-by-step. Gentlemen, this is a football kind of language and be able to use it. It’s

Available for free, as a matter of fact. Free is pretty good. Free is in the budget for most of us. Because it’s being subsidized by another wonderful organization that reached out to me called ServiceSpace that decided that they created what they called the Compassion Bot and they felt that other organizations

That were aligned with their values of fostering compassion should have access to AI technology. We appreciate what they’re doing and give big thanks to them. Yeah. So, there’s no question that AI has a role in, you might even say, people’s spiritual life. I think so because it helps us to understand

Why we believe what we believe and how we can help others in a very tangible way. AI is just a tool kind of like the internet. Does the internet have potential for good? Yeah, absolutely. Does it have potential for bad? That’s true, too. We have to use our brains and think

What can we do to best utilize this tool. Let me ask you this. Would you agree with me that AI is not conscious? I think right now, yes, I would agree with you. There is the possibility that people way, way smarter than me are saying that it could somehow become more sentient, become

More conscious and aware of itself. I’m not going to rule that out. I would say we’re not there right now as we’re recording this, but we’re moving very fast. And who knows what could happen or what the ramifications of that could be. I think it’s something we need to

Let really smart people look at it and all of us need to look at it and study it. Be aware of the potential for good and the potential for bad. Most viewers, I’m sure, are aware of Data. The android and the Star Trek, the next generation. I’m a hardcore Trekkie.

And that would be, at least in a fictional context, an example of conscious robotics, conscious AI Yes. As a matter of fact, they even had an episode on that. The Measure of a Man I think was the name of that episode where data was on trial and they had to treat it

Like that and it was a breakthrough. It was real good. If you haven’t seen that episode, you need to. But really I think it raises the questions of how do we determine life? How do we define sentient life and why do we define

It that way? So I think we’ve got a lot more questions now and that’s a good place to start. Did you know that Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of computer technology, developed what is well known as the Turing Test, a test to determine, is the computer conscious or not?

And one of the, when he wrote his original article, I think it was 1955 or so, he said one of his concerns was ESP. He said that as far as he felt, the research back in the 1950s of extrasensory perception, J.B. Rhine card guessing experiments, Duke University convinced him that ESP

Was real. And the Turing Test he felt would be invalidated if people were to use or even, he was really thinking about the people working with AI. The idea is for viewers who may not know, according to Turing and the Turing Test, a computer could be conscious if

You’re interacting with it on an old teletype system, which is what they had in those days. You’re querying the computer and you have another person, a real person, you’re querying them on the teletype or engaging in conversation. And if you can’t tell who’s the real person and who is the

Computer, then for all intents and purposes, the computer is conscious. But then he said, however, if you’re using ESP, then you could cheat somehow and know in advance which was real and which was the computer and that would invalidate the Turing Test. Very good. I think that’s something we need to study more.

Again, being a healthy-minded, open-minded skeptic, I think when we talk about ESP, perhaps we’ve been denying it too much and we need to understand more of the possibilities of what does exist and that could we really do that rather than shrug our shoulders or cross our arms and go, no, that

Doesn’t exist. I think we need to say, wait a minute, let’s look at the evidence. Let’s do some more Turing Tests of our own to explore this much more in depth. I think we could be better off because we did that. I’m in agreement with you that presently AI is not conscious.

Computers aren’t conscious, but they are very intelligent at the same time. They are exercising what, for all intents and purposes, is mental abilities they can calculate. Yeah, and they can do it a lot faster than we can. And they’re going to be doing it even faster in the future. But we have

To realize it’s artificial intelligence. And we need to bring in the human element on that so that it becomes authentic. And it’s really the human spirit that’s saying, I’m going to use this to the advantage, much like you and I would use a car. If we wanted to get from

Here to, let’s say, Santa Fe from here, you and I could walk from here to Santa Fe. We could. That’s a possibility. It would take longer, we’d have to wear the right clothing, we’d have to have a plan, etc. A much better way. If we really needed to get from here,

Where we are in Albuquerque, to Santa Fe, would be a car. Or we hire a limo, or maybe even a helicopter. There’s a train. You can take a train. Take a train. There’s all kinds of ways to do it. We’re using technology in those cases. And that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

It doesn’t mean we’re doing away. And there is a place where we’re running and bicycling like you do when you’re 12 miles, getting out there and doing that. And I think we just have to use our judgment and not jump into a either-or situation. Well, what it says to me is that there’s

A distinction between mind and consciousness. I do think that AI is an expression of mental activity, but not conscious. Yeah, at least not yet. I would agree with you. I think that’s why we’ve got facts, we’ve got information in there. And we can say, you know, who was the

16th President of the United States? Well, the computer can get that very quickly for us. If we need to know that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President. But what we can’t do is let the computer start looking with the issues that are ethical, that are more moral and spiritual.

We do need to program that in there so that we can prevent future dystopian that we’ve seen in Hollywood before. Well, I guess the point I’m driving at is, Descartes, the great philosopher, said, I think, therefore I am. And now it seems to me that thinking doesn’t mean that you are. Maybe it’s

The other way. I am, therefore I think. But computers can think and I don’t think a computer can honestly say, I am, and that is I am aware of myself. Computers can simulate that very well. I’m sure computers can simulate it to the point of fooling humans, but it doesn’t

Mean that they are conscious. And even the episode with Data, I think, would leave people wondering, is he really conscious or is it just clever programming? Yeah, exactly. And this was of course shot back in the 90s. But I think they raised some very good things. By the way, as a side note,

That was one of the beauties of Star Trek. Because Star Trek was set in this world of the future and a time when things could be done that we only dream about now. But it led us to think about the possibilities of where we could go and answer

Some questions that need to be addressed in the realm of fiction. We see the fiction so it helps us to think more clearly. Here’s something I want to share with you. One of my professors, Berkeley, the philosopher, Michael Scriven, developed what he thought of as an improvement on the Turing test.

Which is, if you want to determine whether a computer is conscious, if it can successfully perform an ESP test, then it would be. I think that’s a reasonable premise to start from and to examine. The idea being that there’s something about consciousness that reaches out beyond the body itself,

Beyond the nervous system, beyond the brain to gather information from a distant location. That that’s something consciousness can do that mind or calculation cannot. Yeah, exactly. It’s who we are is really being a human being. I love what medical community has done, but largely they are looking at

The physical structure. How do I mend a broken arm? Or how do I overcome this illness? And they do a wonderful, beautiful job of that. But we need to go beyond that. We need to have that and go beyond it to say what is the real meaning of life?

Why can we do this? Why can we not do that? And what do we need to do to become more conscious of ourselves? More of a sentient being and understand the why. To get beyond this nonsense that we’re going through right now about obliterating life on the planet

Because we could throw bombs at each other. That is just not a way to live. Let’s focus it on how can we make life more enriched for the average person and be all better off. What a wonderful question to ask. It reminds me of I had a mentor, a man

Named Arthur M. Young. He was an inventor. He actually invented the helicopter. Oh, really? Yes, he did. And he used to say, you know, there are people who say the world is a great big machine or people are machines. And then he said, you know, there was never a machine made that didn’t

Have a purpose. But humans, many humans wonder, do I have a purpose? And I think that it’s a good question for everybody to ask. It gets down to the question of soul. Are you born with a purpose? Why are you here at all in the first place? Exactly. Exactly. Think of what

Simon Sinek has given us as a real gift to the world. He said, start with why. We start with why are we here? Why are we doing this? Then we have a strong enough reason to do it. And I believe that we can move forward then. We see that

This is the way to do it. I think it was our buddy, Friedrich Nietzsche, who told us, you know, if you have a strong enough why, you can figure out any how. And I think that’s really where we need to go. We start with it. Here’s why we’re doing this. And that’s where

I come back to technology. It can make life better for the average person. It can bring people together. One of my heroes is Andrew Carnegie, who was the railroad and then steel magnet that created so many wonderful opportunities for people. He died of a broken heart because he saw

The potential of being able to create things. Think of the mass production capabilities that came out, the wonderful lifestyle from, say, 1865 to 1914. A very productive period. Yeah, it was incredible, more so than any time in history up to that point.

But he died because he wanted to be able to have people together, having the technology so that we would not want to fight. And yet he saw World War I emerge, which just tore him apart. And it was one of the most worthless, senseless wars that we

Ever were in. And so much of the problems of the 20th century came because of that. That’s a whole other discussion. But I think what we need to do is use this technology to bond together more. So that we can talk. One of the things I think is great,

When we can talk into a machine, I speak in my native language of American English, but someone who might be speaking Mandarin could understand it immediately in Mandarin. And then they respond back to me in Mandarin, but I hear it in English. I remember talking to Kuo Zhang about that, who at

The time was the general manager of Alibaba.com, who was his first ever English language interview. And he asked me to do it. Wanted me to do that and talk about it. He was telling me that he and Jack Ma were working on that technology to develop commerce. And I thought,

What a wonderful thing. If we’re dealing with each other peacefully in commerce, helping each other, having scientists, medical professionals in countries, sharing information, coming up with cures for diseases, what a more wonderful and better way to live life than figuring out more weapons that are deadlier and faster and uglier

And meaner. I think we need to focus on the benefit of technology to do that. What would you say in your life is the most important technology that you use? Our brain. I think the brain is a technology that we use, and that’s the key to your phrase

That we use, and sometimes we’re not using it. I’ll witness the voters, and I’ll let everyone else figure out that. But I think the idea is we need to use our brain. That’s real good technology. Now there are many others that are very helpful as well. Right now, AI is

Emerging as a tool that helps us to answer those questions, just like you and I had in a fun but real situation yesterday several times. We said, well, what about those little statues? They look like otters, are they? We let tech, ChatGPT … I could zoom in on it with my camera.

The zoom is a nice thing. It showed us what it was, and then we wanted to find out about, how come we don’t fall off that bicycle? You and I were riding about that, and I can’t afford the bicycle. I’m hoping someday I can afford two wheels. You ride a unicycle!

That’s right. That’s amazing. For me, it’s fun. I just ride around there in our area of Orlando, Florida, and it’s nice, but it really is a metaphor for life. You need balance, because you could fall this way, you go that way. If you go either way, you’re out of line, or too

Far forward, and you have to keep moving. If I try to stop on that unicycle and just stand still, guess what happens? I can tell you from experience, you fall down. Which is not always pleasant. We need to keep moving forward. And so I think what we need to do is

Look at that as a metaphor for life. Continue to learn. Learn about AI. Learn about other technologies that can help us a lot with many areas. We haven’t even talked about all the wonders that are possible with voice, and with video, but also the dangers that are there.

One of the things I talk about now in my program just, as a matter of fact, Sunday, a week ago, I was in Dallas speaking to a group, and I showed them a video that had a man named Jimmy Donaldson on there. Jimmy Donaldson is also known as MrBeast. He became a billionaire

With a B, has over a billion followers on YouTube. Yes, I read about him. And he had him on there, we saw him on there. His voice, that was him, saying, you are one of 10,000 people that have won the opportunity to get an iPhone 15 plus for only $2.

$2, the instructions are below, you send that, we will send you an iPhone 15 plus. I’m Jimmy Donaldson, MrBeast, and thank you for being here. It sounded really good, and I show that to the audiences, and they go, that sounds like a good deal, I mean $2, and that really does sound

Exactly like MrBeast, but it wasn’t him. And the real Jimmy Donaldson came on soon, put out his own video saying, this is not me, it’s a fake. But you think about it, the bad guys, I’ll call them that, the bad guys that did that figured people would say

$2, yeah, that’s nothing, and then when they find out they didn’t get the iPhone, they’re probably not going to put a lot of time, money, and energy into that for $2, but think about it, if you’ve got over a billion followers, do you think there might be even a million

Or two million? This is the world where we live, and that’s one of the dangers of that, and it would be really bad if we had that during an election year. Fortunately, that’s not going to happen. Wait a minute, wait a minute, we’re in an election year. Holy smoke! And it is happening.

I’ve seen it here in the United States on both the Biden side and on the Trump side. Both sides have bad actors. And so we first, the thing we need to do, those watching this video need to say, okay, hold it, we know it exists. Just like we know airplanes could crash,

It doesn’t mean we say I’m never going to get on an airplane because it could crash. No. We exercise smarts. And we put the right systems in place, we get really smart people who know what to do in this to examine it and go ah, that’s not really him. And

We let AI determine is this really AI? Because it will know it better than we do. Well, it does raise a big issue of trust. What can you trust? If you can’t trust AI, but you have to trust AI to know whether or not you can trust AI, it’s sort of a paradox.

Yeah, it’s tough. But I think we get a good example in the free marketplace. One of the best ways for free market enterprise to operate is with competition. And if we have competition, if I say, hey, I got this right here and I’m going to keep raising my price more and more,

The answer is not to say, well, we need somebody to come along and smash you down. Instead we need to say, well, okay, but somebody else can come up here with a better product, cost a little bit less, and has a feature that I don’t have. Uh-oh, competition

Can be really bad. So I think what we need to do is have AI monitoring AI and build in the controls with that so it can tell us that really looks like Jimmy Donaldson, but it’s not him. The voice is 98. 375% accurate, but not the real thing. But I imagine when that

Happens somebody else is going to say I can build an AI system that will simulate the system that’s supposed to monitor AI, but it won’t be, it’ll be programmed by me. Absolutely. Throughout history we’ve seen it where you say, okay, this is going to be safe

And then the bad actors come along and go, whoops, we’re leapfrogging here. And they can exist for a while until someone says, wait a minute, we’re going to leapfrog over that. Which means we don’t rest. We keep going and actually that’s how we do better as human beings.

We keep stretching our minds. And we do it within reason. We do it within limits that are sound medically and not going to harm someone. We do it in a way that says, here’s a challenge. Let’s keep going out there and keep developing and keep getting better all the time. Well earlier you

Indicated that you thought the most important technology that you use is your brain. Yes. And I began thinking about that because many people would say, I am my brain. It’s not something I use, it’s who I am. Well, I can understand they would feel that. I think

It’s a part of us. And it’s integral how we think. We’re thinking about that all the time. The intrapersonal communication that we have. We’re saying, oh, no, what is he doing? What’s he thinking about me right now? And we need that to an extent. Our ancestors back in the steppes needed that

To know, is that saber-toothed tiger coming after me? Or, oh, that’s not a saber-toothed tiger, it’s just the wind. And the brush is, okay, good, safe right now. But by being aware of that, when it really is a saber-toothed tiger, you can go, ah, ah, ah, ah, we’re not going

Over there. Or, give me that spear over here, I might need that right now. So we continue to do it, but I think we also have good communities around us. We need communities of good people. And what you’re doing here, I’m going to maybe embarrass you just a little bit, but you’re

Providing so much good. You’re giving us a continual flow of good ideas. Not that we have to agree with all of them, nor that we should. But we hear different points of view, oh, I hadn’t thought of that side. So thank you for sharing those ideas

And tapping into the brains of so many other really, really smart people to help us to question, to help us to think, and to help us make the world a better place. Well, Terry Brock, thank you for all you do. And for coming here to Albuquerque and being with me in my little

Studio and sharing so much of your wisdom with our viewers, wisdom that many corporate executives pay a lot of money to hear. Well, it’s an honor to be with you, my friend, and I really appreciate what you’re doing. Likewise. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you

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