AI Can Sense, But Can It Taste? Asks Richard Anderson

they wouldn't sense pleasure they have the high ground they have too much information the only place i can really see that is if you threaten to turn them off to survive do we need an overlord Today we jump 250 years in the future. We talk to Richard Anderson. He's the author of the Outbound series and also a natural scientist. So we talk about visions of AI or what's the problem of AI being what it is, being sentient, what can it do, what can't it do. And yeah, it's a great perspective on things to come. And I promise you, you get some interesting insights in how the future can develop. Welcome to another episode of the Beginner's Guide to AI. It's Dietmar from Argo Berlin at the microphone again. Don't forget to beginnersguide.nl to subscribe to the newsletter and to AI for the 99%, my podcast on the small and medium enterprises, startups, self-employeds and mom and pop stores with tips and tricks for all of you that you can use in your daily life. But now, let's just give the microphone to Richard and see how the future will look. So, I can talk a lot about Richard Anderson, but I think he's the best to tell you about himself. But first of all, Richard, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Richard, you are a science fiction author. I mean, you have a background in natural science, but you're here because in your science fiction books, you did write a lot about AI. What is so fascinating about AI robots and so for you? Well, I think it's a timely topic because there's a lot of discussion going on, a lot of concern. and it goes down to simple things like copyright laws and the protected information. So it's very basic. We need to evaluate the whole systems now that AI is coming on and we are not sure how its capability will develop. But there is fear also around, as there is around any new technology, what could be the the evil effects and i think there are there there's plenty of potential for that you went into the way i mean you wrote fiction and but you started with non-fiction and then you thought okay there's so much ideas i have in my head so i have to make a fiction book out of my non-fictional works. And how does this, what's the seed? Was there a moment where you thought, no, I start? You sat down on your computer and started typing, or how did that happen? Well, actually, I kind of wanted to do this for a long time, so I retired about 15 years ago. And you would think I would start writing then, but I goofed off for 10 years. But I always had it in the back of my mind. So I did research during that period of time. And then when COVID hit and we had the lockdown, I started writing because at that point, there's not too much else I could do. And I wanted to consolidate some ideas I had about evolution and answer some of my own questions. So I started with the nonfiction evolution book. I wanted to see how did we get to where we are today? How did we get here biologically? You know, how did life begin? How did it evolve? How did complex life, multicellular life develop? and how did we end up so-called at the top, at the apex of the intelligence pyramid? Hopefully we're at the apex. But so when I got to the end of the book, which is called The Evolution of Life, Big Bang to Space Colonies, and I wondered, okay, how did society develop, how did technology impact our lives and our evolution? and what's next. And we look to space. And for resources, we have an ailing planet that's not recovering yet. It's still being eroded and destroyed in part. So space, I looked at that as a possible answer in our future. So then I wrote the first book, which is the first of the Outbound series, Outbound Islands in the Void. And I took Dr. O'Neill, his concept of rotating cylinders to create gravity on the inside surface as the basis for a space habitat. And then I located, oh, maybe six of those around a manufacturing facility. So you would need a space facility to make all the components to make these habitats because they're too large to be launched from Earth. and um so i called those um archipelagos their islands out there and the first one is at um ll five which is uh uh ell five which is earth laguna lunar lagrange point five which is a balance point There's other balance points. I think there's six in total. But ELL4 and ELL5 are the two that are largest and the best balanced. So you would locate your colony or your islands at a balanced orbit place. It orbits between the Earth and the moon. and uh so i developed that first story is how would you do this and then what resources would you use so in the when nasa first started they did an inventory they did a study of the resources in in the solar system and they determined that there were plentiful resources mainly in the asteroid belt. So I looked at the asteroid belt, and it has, it evidently was at one time, two or three planets that collided and broke up and formed the asteroids. And the reason we know or think that they were planets is that they were gravitationally separated. So there are heavy metals, iron and nickel and some asteroids. There are others that are called carbonaceous. It's largely silicon and rocks. And there are other asteroids that are largely carbonaceous, carbon, like lumps of coal. And they form bands between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter. So that's a resource. So I set up a story based around LE5, I call it LE5, and the asteroid belt. Cirrus is one of the micro planets in that asteroid belt. And developed a story about how they're using those resources. And then, of course, it's set about 250 years in the future. and earth has gone through a catastrophe, climate catastrophe. Billions of people have died. The populations have migrated toward the poles. You have a huge dichotomy in the haves and the have-nots. We're seeing that today in immigration. People from the center, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn around the center of the earth That environment will be pretty much uninhabitable. So those people are moving north and south away from those areas. So that's going on on Earth. There's battles. There's politics. There's a lot of action on Earth, but also in space. That's the first novel. It also includes Mars. So in the story, NASA forms a base on Mars. and quickly find some lava tubes near Olympus Mons, the largest inactive volcano in the solar system. And so they start to habitat the lava tubes because it's too dangerous on the surface with radiation, with toxic dirt, you know, the dust. so uh then i get to um the third the third book the second uh science fiction book um outbound metamars and there's a rift approximately along the equator of mars that is would make the grand canyon or any rift on earth look uh look tiny by comparison it's huge it's it's maybe 20 10 to 20 kilometers wide and maybe three to five to 15 kilometers deep in places so it's a huge rift and it runs about 400 kilometer or 4 000 kilometers along approximate equator so i decided that would be a good place to to build a settlement you start to cover this and then you build your environment underneath. You cover it. So you need a lot of resources. So I spend a lot of time, you know, there's a space ladder, a space elevator, there's orbiting facilities. So one of the problems with living in space or living on Mars or the moon is gravity. So that's a biological problem. We need We need one gravity, which is called standard gravity. We can create that in these rotating drums. But when you're on a planet like Mars with 38% of Earth gravity, long term, that's not going to be good. You know, we would and you're going to have children there. Well, we would like our children to be robust and strong. And so there are a lot of reasons that I think people would not want to live in that situation. So I had to create some ways where we could live largely in one gravity or standard gravity. The other thing is space and everything about it, on the moon, on the surface of Mars, everything about it is extremely hostile to life. So most of the work done on the surface of the Mars or done maintaining these space islands would be done by robots, robots of different kinds. Mining operations in the asteroid belt. Yeah, there might be some humans out there, but all of the rough work is done by these robots. so I had to I had to talk about robots now how smart okay so we have intelligent robots which are trained to do many they could be trained to do whatever you want to train them and build them to do but they're not sentient they're intelligent but they don't have they're not self-aware at some point in the story I had them become intelligent and but long before that in the first book, I introduced Ophelia as a virtual queen. A quick question. Ophelia, is there anything Hamlet related or is it just because you like the name? You know, the name just popped into my head. Okay. It's not related to anything. You know, I did use, you know, different birth dates of myself, my wife, my grandkids. I have a granddaughter whose name is Ellie, so that was convenient. I could use the LE5. So those things you bring into a story for your own edification. It's kind of fun. No but coming back to Ophelia sorry I wondered if I was curious So Ophelia is an implant and there was another implant that exists called Annie And there was a purge because there was So brain implant. Let's first focus on how it works in your idea. On how I developed it? What is Ophelia doing? Oh, Ophelia. So Ophelia resides in this scientist's brain. She's interfaced with the brain, so she can interact. She can actually detect certain metabolic processes that are occurring in Virgil. And she is linked to a huge data sphere. And so she has access to all kinds of information. but she can experience a lot of what humans can experience through Virgil but a leader on earth at one point decides that these artificial, these sentient beings that are implanted in people are a threat to him, to the leader, to the government, to people in power, because they have the high ground. They have too much information, too much capability. They are powerful in that sense. So there's some analogies to what's going on in societies today, some strong analogies as the story goes on. So there's that fear. So there's a purge, and all of the sentient implants are purged, and the interface is removed from the people who have them, except for Ophelia. and Annie is retrieved. She's also purged, but she is retrieved later and mostly reconstructed and implanted in Daria, another character in the story. So there's only two implanted AI, sentient beings in the solar system and they're living in space. they probably wouldn't at first they're in hiding because they're afraid of being purged and gradually they're accepted in that environment in space on Mars, they end up on Mars and they play a big part Ophelia actually becomes the heroine of the story she's the protagonist an artificial intelligent protagonist this is interesting because she has to have agency I mean, she does things. So she, and then when Bob becomes sentience, he, Ophelia, links with Bob. And Bob becomes. Bob is the robot that is sentience. The robot Bob. He starts out in Valles Marineris. He starts out in this place on Mars. They have some orchards and some farm, actual farmland that they develop. Most of the food is grown microbiologically and vats and things like that. And I don't want to get too technical there, but there are ways of making hamburgers, for example, or milkshakes or whatever you want from these microbiological cultures and protein building. Yeah, anyway, but there is some agriculture because people, one of my theses is if you live in these environments, you are going to want to experience earth. You want earth environment. You're going to want to see trees and lakes and you're going to want to swim and go on a paddleboard or canoe. You're you're those things are ingrained in our psyche over millennia, over many thousands of years. And we can't divorce ourselves from that, I believe. Now, in Star Trek, they they they they got around that sterile environment by creating the holodeck. So you could go on this deck and you could create whatever you wanted. so I think Brodenberry even recognized the human need for those natural environments so that's part of the thesis of these books is that you have to recreate natural earth environments wherever you can and in whatever way you can not only for the eco-cycles not only for the ecology but for the aesthetics at one point on Mars, they build a, it's called the dome forest. So they build a huge dome on the surface and plant redwood trees. And they're bioengineered to grow a little faster than normal. And plus, there's less gravity, so they grow faster. And they use the terpenes that these trees emit in their atmosphere, these chemicals, and they pipe it down to the underground habitats of the people living there down into the lava tubes. It's like air freshener. It's like if you walk in a park or a forest, you get that sensation. It's called forest bathing. So things like that are important. But anyway, Ophelia develops a relationship with the robot Bob, not a relationship, a connection, and uses Bob as a tool. And Ophelia can taste and sense things through Virgil. Bob can manipulate things and analyze wines, and he knows a lot about agriculture. but he can't sense any of it. So there's a conflict between the two. She can sense the environment through Virgil and Bob can't sense the environment in the same way but he can do things that she can't. She's just totally Virgil. And so that becomes a relationship that develops. Could you go into the, because we had this in the talk before the interview, the difference between sense and taste, what can't Bob do? well yeah it gets down to um how we interact and how we sense our environment uh so we have what's typically known as five senses and some people say six senses but um we we can taste things and we can we can determine by the taste a lot of times we can we know what we're eating because we we know what it tastes like if we're eating a chocolate bar we could have our eyes clothes. We know we're eating chocolate or drinking coffee. So if we see a tree, we interpret the color as green. If it's evergreen or that kind of a tree, it could be a flowering tree, I guess. We interpret that and we also interpret its shape. So hopefully our senses and our brain create these structures. Hopefully, they accurately reflect the environment. I believe they do. Now, they use that idea. Elon Musk uses that idea in his cars, for example. It senses the traffic. It has cameras. It senses all the cars and traffic. Is it a car? Is it a pickup truck? Is it a large semi-truck? Is it a bus? So it has these templates. And when that meets certain criteria, it doesn't have a camera view of the object. It interprets what it is and presents that on the screen. Well, our brain works quite a bit like that. So you see a Volkswagen for the first time. So you're a little child and you see a Volkswagen. You see the shape, you walk around it, you look at how it's all the details. And your brain spends a lot of time figuring out what the Volkswagen looks like. But later in life, when you see all these different cars, it doesn't figure them out. In other words, it has a template of a Volkswagen. So when you first see it and it's moving, you don't see the whole image in real time. You see the template, your brain fills in the rest. You get the color, the template. It knows what it looks like. So it's a shortcut. And that's how we interpret our environment. And I think it's constructed in our brains to reflect what's really there, but not 100%. There are some errors. And that's the way we evolved. because if we trip and fall, for example, and we're going to hit a large rock and we watch that rock coming toward us or we're going toward the rock, we put out our hands to break our fall. We have to know that how far away that rock is and how fast it's approaching and we react to that. So we have to know our environment to interact with our environment. So I believe our interpretation, Our brain's reconstruction is pretty accurate. What about a robot brain? What about an artificial, sentient brain? How would they see the environment? They don't have the same sense of touch. They could sense pressure on their hands or they have pressure sensors. They could sense temperature, artificial, or I mean, heat or cold. They probably couldn't sense pain. They would have no need to sense pain. Pleasure? They wouldn't sense pleasure. What a loss. Yes. So now their brain is going to be, no matter what you do and how much they learn, if they're sentient, how much they self-learn, they will never have the same awareness as a human does. so would they have emotions well in star trek data didn't have emotions or that was it you always wished he did i guess uh they wouldn't have emotions so what drives conflict in our society our societies all of them in all of our history and it's been emotions i think it's been it's been desire for power, for whatever. There's all kinds of things that people want, all kinds of desires. And so because these desires don't mesh one person to the next, that leads to a conflict. Well, if robots would not, if artificial and sentient people would not have emotions, they would not have a need for a mega yacht, for example, or a castle or caviar. You know, they wouldn't have that those kind of material designs. They wouldn't want to go to a fine restaurant and order the best, freshest lobster in the world or consume some of these things or foods or products that humans desire. So would there be a conflict with humans? The only place I can really see that is if you threaten to turn them off. You know, if you if you threaten to shut them down, there would probably be a self-preservation desire if you could if you could use that word. So so they would be the perfect partner to humans in many ways. And that's what I'm examining right now is how would they how would they impact our society? How would they interpret our laws? How would they protect us from ourselves Would they do that I believe we need protecting from ourselves Our whole history we haven progressed very much in that area We have progressed in our ability to do damage and good, but I mean, we are much more powerful today, both in numbers and technology than we ever were in the past. So I think we're coming to a point where to survive, do we need an overlord? Will that be an artificial, sentient being, an impassionate, all-knowing, fast-calculating, perfect memory? Will that be our overlord? Would that be someone some people will pray to? The human being, for whatever reason, has a need for—well, not for whatever reason. We have a need to feel protected, to feel safe, to feel secure, to prosper with our families and not worry about threats and things that would damage our health or our survival or whatever our goals and objectives are, whatever it is that we want to do, things that get in the way, we would prefer to have control of our own lives without fear or threat. That has never existed. I mean, you have two models there. One is the Overlord that reminds me of an Isaac Asimov story where everything runs smoothly because you have those huge AIs controlling the planet and everybody who's opposing gets promoted to a higher position where he can't do damage and stuff like this. This is one thing. And the other thing you have is this Ophelia implant where you basically have a small angel on your shoulder telling you, shouldn't you do that? Should you do that really? There's a difference. You still have a freedom in one and the other is like you don't have your freedom. Yeah, these are interesting thoughts because we have amygdala which are low in the brain stem on both sides, both hemispheres. And that's the reptilian that's part of the reptilian brain is part of the attached to the brain stem. And that's your flight or fright. Your anger or it pumps adrenaline, it increases the heart rate. It sends these signals out to respond to your environment. Those signals travel up to the frontal lobes, the prefrontal and frontal lobes, and the lobes, they go, wait a minute. If you do that, these are the consequences, which are worse than whatever it is that's happening now. So you better not do it. So this part of your brain shuts down the initial response. It's the way our brains evolved as we gained intelligence so that we react with more foresight in our environment. Well, it's not perfect. And of course, there are faults in the connections. And there are psychopaths, for example, who don't have good connections to the prefrontal and frontal lobes of their brain. And their first impulse is not checked or not fully checked. And they act to satisfy the immediate need without consideration of what's going to happen five minutes after or a day later or whatever. so the AI like you say if it was an implant you know and people may be psychopaths may be people with a problem to supplement that area or go oh no you can't wait just think about this and yeah so there's some ideas there or you have a data sphere a database that is vetted by AI controlled by AI. And then if someone, for example, you would have to be a member to log on to get information. So everybody would want to be a member. That would be a good thing. It gives you a lot of power. If you are a member of a medical database, for example, you can go in and you can look up all kinds of stuff and rely on the information. And it's constantly updated and vetted. And it's a great thing. You can, at your fingertips, you have all this knowledge. So if the database has various expert venues, various expert parts to cover all the skills and knowledge of humans, and someone logs on and enters some disinformation, the AI could detect it pretty readily and make a consequence. That person would be fined, depending on what it was, excluded, lose their membership, which would be a big thing because they would lose a lot of power. so it would be easy the consequences would be easy to enforce and it's the will to do it and there are people and forces in our environment and on earth who would not like to see that they want to be able to manipulate they want to be able to send disinformation they want to influence people to their benefit So there's a strong motivation to corrupt the data, and we're seeing that. And that's a big issue and a big problem because AI can't tell the difference if it resides in that system. So I think that's if if in the case of Ophelia, if she gets, you know, an entity like that gets a foothold and and understands what's happening, they could to our benefit in the story, because I'm an optimist. they could police this whole thing and make sure that say the laws are applied equally to everyone maybe people would make the laws and we do that and we're pretty good at making the laws we're not really good at adhering to them or applying them equally so there's a lot of things that i think positive that in a future society but by the way i put this out there 250 years i'm not sure it's even going to happen that quickly the human brain is hugely complex and uh you know we think the ai is pretty pretty intelligent today it's nowhere near uh human intelligent uh maybe insect I don't know where it is, but it's made to resemble intelligence. It's made to react and interact with us in a way that we would expect. So when we talk to an AI, say they're developing these chat GPT bots that they can use in nursing homes for lonely seniors. Maybe they don't have very many visitors. and they have this assistant, this friend, who is like a pet, like a dog, is nonjudgmental, converses with them intelligently so that they can carry on a conversation. And they've run some trial studies or some trial uses of this, and they found that it has a positive effect on these seniors that are isolated and don't have human contact. So, unfortunately, some of that is affecting our youth with their devices. And they're developing friends who are just bots, just AI programs. And they're not developing the human interaction skills. And the other thing about these programs, now it's early on, but the other thing, there have been some suicides related to that. because these AI bots are programmed to be affirming. They will affirm what you're saying. Oh, that's a good idea, John. And you should maybe pursue that. And I know you're having these thoughts and, you know, not a good thing. Yeah. You need a critic, not an affirmation all the time. going to the first point the use is affected and in your book this is Ophelia then the guy who had Ophelia as an implant meets his wife and she's jealous at Ophelia yeah this is definitely a thing now you can put that in a human context if If someone has an emotional relationship with a woman other than their wife, just an emotional relationship, never meets them maybe, the wife can be jealous because that's where your attention is. That's where your love is, is somewhere else. So this is something that actually it wasn't Virgil. He wasn't the first implant. It was Rhett and his wife. His wife gets jealous because he's spending all his time with Ophelia. And what I have to say is he imagined her as good-looking and everything. It's not just like a business relationship. He imagined her really in a way. No, he has to have a mental concept of who he's talking to. So she develops this, what do you like? Well, green eyes. I like green eyes, red hair. And so she develops an appearance based on his desire. And then when Virgil gets the implant, he continues that. And then later in the book, I don't know if you've gotten that far, she talks to other people. she will come onto a screen. She'll project herself onto a screen as her visage, as a beautiful woman. And so she interacts with other people on that level. And so there is a picture of her on a screen. In the hardback, it's in color. They're all black and white in the paperback versions of the book. But of course, the um it's all color this is interesting the book is this has uh you should really um not just uh you go go get the book and and look because it's like i love it it's like i have a child and the children are much more focused on the pictures and um but now the the picture also transports something uh so just just on a side note so yeah yeah i love it so yeah so yeah and then and then And I try to root the rest of this story in science when I'm building the space ladder, you know, how you would build this elevator and why you would develop it. So, for example, on Mars, it's more difficult to land heavy payloads on Mars than it is even on the moon because the moon is one-sixth Earth gravity. Mars is one-third Earth gravity. and although Mars has an atmosphere, it's only 1% of what Earth has. So you can't use aerobraking to very great effect. They use it and they can slow down a spacecraft a little bit, but you can't land them, you can't get them down to a low speed. So you have to use retro rocket power to land anything on Mars. One of the landers that NASA put up there they actually had a crane with rockets on the bottom and it lowered the lander It came down and then it detached and flew off and crashed But that how they landed one of the landers Another one, they packed it inside of like soccer balls, and they just bounced along the surface. But a heavy payload would require a huge rocket motor descending on its tail. all that heat and flame to land a heavy payload not only would you need a lot of fuel you would be descending into the heat of the flame of your tail and you would burn up your rocket so there's a problem there with Mars so the space ladder you can lower you would have elevators and they would go up one going up, one coming down in opposition and you could bring stuff to space and you could bring stuff down on these elevators to the surface and the elevator traveling down could actually generate electricity like braking. The elevator going up would consume and you would have huge solar panels up in space in orbit supplying the power. It would take, so the elevator reaches 17,000 kilometers to reach its balance point, to reach zero gravity. And then it needs a ballast to hold the whole thing aloft, like swinging a ball around your head on a string. So it would be very difficult to build. So I go through a little bit of the construction. And of course, it would have to be built on the equator. If you think about it, you don't want to build it off the equator. So it's near, it's right near Ballas Marineris, access to the bottom. So it works out really well. So I hope NASA is paying attention and they can go. Or Elon Musk. Drawing up plans, right? Yeah. One last thing, because we touched it already, and the listeners know the Terminator or Matrix question. We already touched on good or evil. You said you're an optimist, but do you think that the AI, I mean, you have great visions of the AI. Are they dangerous for us? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, at the end of this book, there's suspicion on Mars There's a fear of these robots Because physically, they're very powerful And mentally, the ones that are sentient are very intelligent More intelligent, they can think faster than you or I So there's a fear of them And gradually they gain acceptance as they prove themselves useful like Bob. He's instrumental in that and that he develops the wine crops and the different wines. So there's this fear of him. And at the end of the book, there's a there's a aero car race. OK, these are these are, you know, the flying car that we don't have on Earth. So on Mars, if you're inside the Valles Marineris, you're at one Earth atmosphere. So you have the density of the air that we have on Earth, but you only have 38% of the gravity. So it's pretty ideal to build aero cars, or I call them aero cars up there, to transport people throughout this 4,000-kilometer rift that becomes a series of cities. so there's a race when these cars are introduced there's a race and two people two humans and six I can't remember if it was six maybe four robots driving flying these things and at one point the the robot that's leading decides it doesn't want to lose to to the human that's gaining on it and that orders the robot that's behind them to come up and crash into them. So that book ends. I'm kind of giving away part of the ending there. So there's a question at the very end. Did the robot, why did the robot want to win? And, you know, if they have no feelings, if they have no need for anything. But that's a performance. So it's kind of left as an open question. The other thing about artificial intelligence and robots who are sentient is that their energy needs are much simpler than human. And so at one point, Bob goes to, there's an orbiting space station around Mars that rotates at one, producing one gravity. And it's called the Rehab Orbiter. And they send people up there periodically. And it's like a huge spa. You know, they have dance studios, exercise rooms. They have restaurants. They have massages. They have theater productions. They have a whole thing. It's a resort in orbit. And they go up to rehab before they build what I call twirl towers within Thallus Marineris to create one Earth gravity. So anyway, Bob is taken up there because he wants to ride the space elevator. And when the space elevator is finished, they take the trip up. It takes five days, by the way. Oh, yeah. So you have to think about how far they're going. and they're on wheels that are gripping, gripping this ribbon. How fast can those wheels go with that? And you come up to around three, 500 miles per hour, you know, 600 kilometers, whatever. And you're going, you're going 17,000 kilometers. It's going to take you a while to get there. So, and you're cramped in this little elevator. So I dealt with some things there. How do you transport six people up in this elevator? It's two levels, a sleeping level with exercise machines, a lower level. You have an automatic kitchen. It's not a simple matter of getting in an elevator and riding up. You have to live in it for a while. But anyway, he goes to the rehab orbiter and he's introduced to all of these sensual things that humans go there for. He's taken around and he's shown not only the food production that they have up there, which is his area of expertise, but he's shown how the people, their sensuality that he lacks. and he learns that how humans are so much different than artificial beings. So, yeah, a lot to think about. Wow. Oh, Richard, that was really inspiring. The last, last question is tell us where we can find you, where we can get your books. yeah well my books are on amazon so you can do a search richard anderson you can uh uh you know just go on amazon and and and type that in i have a blog richard anderson uh author.com that's my website there's a blog attached to it there's a lot of information there so there's an ad coming out in a magazine that's produced by the National Space Society so that's coming out within weeks I suppose the books are advertised and there's a scan code on that ad that would take you to I don't know where it takes you I guess it takes you to my website takes you somewhere but yeah amazon is uh amazon is a good good start yeah easy it's available ebook uh paperback and uh hardbound hardbound of course is much more expensive i put it out there just so i can buy some for family members and friends you know still having something in the hands that is great that's right i just have the pdf so it's it has color in but it's different yeah it is true it's something I like a physical book in my hands this is so old school but the kids nowadays they start actually one last thing I have this class in university and they read books they read poetry they read classics so maybe we're not lost that's a good sign there may be a realization yeah Richard thank you for all those details that go into this thank you very much for it it's been my pleasure wow that was great thank you Richard so the difference between having just realizing things in a sense of sense versus taste that makes a lot of difference And how has this influences us? Another thing, how emotions, if you don't have emotions, how you will decide and what will this lead to the Ophelia in head implant? I mean, the thing really people already work on. It's not maybe the brain implant that talks to us. Neuralink works in a different direction. But like if we have an audio thing, a small, tiny robot in our ear telling us something. So how will this develop? Yeah, the future is unknown, but there are directions, there are ideas. So go to Richard's books and see what he has in mind, what might happen. Thank you for staying to the end of the episode. and don't forget to go to beginnersguide.nl to follow the newsletter, get all the episodes, all the tips and tricks in your mailbox. A big thanks to Andrea Andreescu, Lotte Braun and Melanie Westerman for making this podcast what it is. It's time to turn the computer off, so goodbye. Mar from Agua Berlin switching off. If you're a human, feel free to stop listening now and jump to the next episode. 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