Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

What happens when we start birthing babies on Mars? Might a Martian human become unable to survive on Earth because of differences in microbes and gravity? How much of your body is shaped by the details of this planet? Will radiation accelerate human evolution on Mars? Could living on Mars eventually create a new species of human? Could Mars change the way humans dream? Would a Martian child find Earth's oceans as strange and awe-inspiring as we find another planet? Could two branches of humanity become too different to recognize each other? Today we’re joined by Scott Solomon, evolutionary biologist and author of the book “Becoming Martian: How Living in Space Will Change Our Bodies and Minds”.

Is AI thinking things it never says aloud? How would we know if a large language model were having a subjective experience? Is there a way to read the 'thoughts' of an LLM? Human brains seem to have a 'global workspace' -- what would it mean if we discovered that AI has something similar? Can you reach inside an LLM to change one of its 'thoughts'? Join Eagleman with Anthropic interpretability researcher Jack Lindsey to talk about what might be going on inside the mind of Claude.

Could there be a better form of government than the one we have now? As we enter an AI-powered world, when might we choose an AI leader? Will your grandchildren ever vote for a human president, who comes with a political party & the weaknesses of a human, or will they vote for a system that has a jaw-dropping capacity to extract patterns from vast rivers of data, simulate millions of possible futures, & govern with a deeper wisdom than a human could naturally possess? Will we all have personal AI agents that know our strongest political opinions, such that we finally achieve (for the first time at scale) a direct democracy rather than a representative one? Join Eagleman as he explores the future of an AI leader (pros & cons) and where he thinks we’re inevitably heading.

What happens when old brain circuitry collides with modern tech? Are we heading into an age of abundance, and can abundance create its own psychological problems? Do we need friction in our lives to become better humans? Could curiosity become the most important survival skill of the twenty-first century? What happens to your biological neural networks when artificial neural networks do your thinking for you? Eagleman sits down with author and researcher Steven Kotler to discuss his new book, We Are As Gods.

A brain computer interface (BCI) is any technology that allows you to connect your 3 pounds of wetware to a computer. But instead of implanting electrodes via neurosurgery, might the next revolution in BCIs come from something very small, like nanoparticles? Would this allow us to spy on millions (or billions) of neurons talking at once -- and could we do so without opening the skull? Will this allow BCI tech to become as common as smartphones? Join Eagleman as he talks with the company Subsense about why the next brain-computer interface might come from thinking small.