Storytelling with Impact

The Moth – Live from New York – Give me Five – Stories of the Senses

May 5, 2025/in Art, Humanity, Humor, Life Lessons, The Moth/by Mark Lovett

Every episode of The Moth Radio Hour contains storytelling gold, and this one recorded in New York — Give me Five – Stories of the Senses — was a perfect example of diversity in storytelling. Give it a listen, and think about how each story was constructed, and how each scene was portrayed.

The Moth Storytellers:

Peter Aguero’s life takes an unexpected turn in a pottery class.
Tighisti Amahazion finds creature comfort during an escape with her family.
Julian Goldhagen gets trapped in a walk-in closet.
Bryan Kett gets a chance to see in color for the first time.

While I encourage you to hear them all, this article focuses on Peter Aguero.

Peter Aguero is quite the storyteller, with his rapid fire delivery that jumps from scene to scene, keeping the narrative, as well as audience interest, going along. Peter’s a masterful writer that offers up a combination of personal insights and humor. Check out this description of the woman he meets at the pottery studio. If there’s an unusual character in your story, think of how you can describe the essence of their appearance, both visually and metaphorically.

This woman comes up to me and she’s wearing mismatched six shades of pink somehow. And two different colored socks and sandals. It’s October. She looks like she’s been happily cutting her own hair for the last 50 years.

It’s one thing to describe how you feel, but in this exchange with his pottery teacher: “And the second rule is today we’re just going to have fun. And I tell him, I’m not so sure I remember how that even feels.” We’re left to consider Peter’s frame of mind, that he has forgotten what fun feels like. Sometimes meaning only requires a few words, and the audience empathizes with you.

So, what I realize then is now I can make anything. I can make anything for who I am today. I can make things to honor who I had been. I can make things for what is. And all I have to do is joyfully, mindfully, with intent and with compassion for myself, is to sit still and take a breath and make a move and the shape changes. And I take a breath and I make a move and the shape changes. And I take a breath and I make a move and the shape changes.

You’ll understand this ending once you hear his story, and you’ll see how he took the lesson he learned when working with the clay and applied it to his life. That’s the gift he’s handing to the audience. To take a breath, make a move, and watch the world change. But let’s take a step back for context.

I’m crying and it just feels terrible. The weight of the entire world feels like it’s on top of my shoulders, on top of my body, pressing me into this carpet.

In just this one sentence you can feel Peter’s pain. He’s not in a good place. And although he obviously wants relief, he doesn’t have a path to make that happen. And then comes a simple suggestion from his wife.

Sarah says to me, Peter, you need to take a pottery class.

This is the pivot point. The one sentence that opens up an entirely new world to Peter. A world where he finds himself and creates a path forward: take a breath, make a move, and watch the world change.

Whenever someone says, “I don’t have a story to tell.“, I begin to probe, ask a few questions, dig a little deeper into their life experiences. And sure enough, there comes a moment in the conversation when they tell me about a pivot in their life. A change that started with one sentence, thought, idea, etc. It could have come from a friend or a family member. Someone at work or school or church. Hell, it can come from watching the television or reading a book.

The point is, this happens to everyone, but too often we overlook the impact that such event have on our life. Think about your own life journey, and see whether something similar arises. An event, and a lesson learned that others could benefit from hearing. And if you already have your story idea in hand, while considering the events you plan to include in your narrative, try to be aware of any pivot points that are worth sharing.

Transcript (edited for readability)

So I’m sitting, laying face down on my living room floor, and the carpet is rough against my cheeks and all I want to do is just burrow underneath the carpet. I want to hide. I want to dig in a hole. I want to get my body, my soul, my everything underneath, to hide, to get away from everything. There’s bees in my head. It’s anxiety. My heart is beating. I’m crying and it just feels terrible. The weight of the entire world feels like it’s on top of my shoulders, on top of my body, pressing me into this carpet.

I am trying to write a new show. I had been working for 20 years hustling as an artist and what I’ve been working on lately is what I’ve been calling, autobiographical, first-person narrative, which is just a fancy way of saying, telling a story. And anytime you have a fancy way of doing something, it gets all messed up. So my wife, Sarah, is brushing my hair and she’s reading my tarot cards and she’s holding me like the Pieta, and I’m just trying to get through this moment.

I thought I was writing a comedy about myself. Turns out it was a psychological horror story, and it didn’t feel good. I had made the choice, the medium I was going to work in my life was generally going to be pain.

I found it to be true early on, that whenever I would talk about a time in my life where there was some kind of change or some growth, it never happened in a victory or out of joy. It was always in heartbreak or pain or misery or failure is where I would grow. And so, that’s how I would present my medium. That was what I was working, in the pain of my past and I was tired of it. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about myself or telling any more stories or doing anything and I’m just crying and it’s just about over and Sarah says to me, Peter, you need to take a pottery class.

And I’m 40 years old. I had never taken a pottery class. I had played with Play-Doh when I was a kid, probably. I went to Catholic school. We didn’t have the money for pottery classes. It was, okay babe, I kind of dismissed it. Thank you so much, but, you know, how’s that going to help anything? And then I spend the rest of the night trying to go to bed to end that day to get to the next one, which is the way it goes when you feel that way.

And at the end of the next day, Sarah says to me, have you registered for a pottery class yet? And I said, no, I haven’t. She says, I’m going to take a shower and by the time I get out of the shower, I want you registered for a pottery class. And I get on the computer and I start to look for a pottery studio near where we live in Queens and I’m looking around and I find this place called Brick House in Long Island City.

I’m like, I like the Commodores. So I register for a private lesson. And she comes out and she says, did you register? I said, yes, I did. I have a lesson in five days. I said, why can I ask you? Why a pottery class? She just looked at me. She said, I think it would be gentle and I think it might feel like a hug.

So five days later I’m in Long Island City and I walk into the ceramic studio, a place I’d never been in my life and I don’t understand what is going on. There are walls packed with shelves and things. There are tennis balls next to WD40 next to cornstarch next to yard sticks next to bundles of sticks, random buttons, all kinds of weird, just strange things.

The floor feels like it had been wet and dried and wet and dried and wet and dried to the point that now it feels like stale waffles underneath my feet. I’m looking around and feeling the clay dust. I can feel it gritting in my teeth. I can smell the earth in the air. I look around and everyone in the place is working with these balls of this brown clay.

This woman comes up to me and she’s wearing mismatched six shades of pink somehow. And two different colored socks and sandals. It’s October. She looks like she’s been happily cutting her own hair for the last 50 years. She says to me, are you here for Peter? I say, I am Peter, and this confuses her, and she says, my name is Liberty Valance. I said, what? And now I’m confused.

And then this guy, who looks if the Queensboro bridge had a troll, it would be this guy. And he’s got a red beard and he’s chuckling in the corner and I’m looking around like, oh, I get it, this is where the weirdos are. Okay.

So then Peter comes out. He’s the teacher and he looks like me-in-30-years. He’s a robust older gentleman with a halo of hair loosely tied in a ponytail, a big long gray beard that reaches the center of his chest. And he comes over to me with kindness in his eyes. He says, I’m Peter. I say, I’m Peter. And it doesn’t register any confusion with him.

And the kindness in his eyes runs deep and his hands look strong and he says, have you ever done this before? I said, no. He said, good. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to just teach you. There’s no grades. I’m not your first grade teacher. Don’t worry about it. And the second rule is today we’re just going to have fun. And I tell him, I’m not so sure I remember how that even feels.

And he just nods his head and says, come this way. So he walks me over to the pottery wheels and we sit down and he takes a ball of clay and he places it in my hand, and it’s both wet and somehow dry at the same time. It’s cold to the touch in my hand. It is about the size of a grapefruit. It’s heavy.

You know when they tell you when you go to the produce section to get produce that is a little heavier than it looks and you never understand what that means. This is what clay feels like in my hand and it’s earth. It’s the earth. And it’s in my hands, touching my skin. And Peter says, okay, the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to center.

And I don’t know what that means. He turns on the wheel and the wheel starts going around and says, and he puts the clay in the center of the wheel and he says, you can’t center a little bit. You’re either centered or you’re not. And that’s blowing my mind and he shows me how to use my body, how to brace my arm up against my ribs and to make my hands into the shape of a tool and I would hold my hands over the clay and not let the clay…

He says, don’t let the clay, he’s got this voice, it sounds like if you drizzled honey over some soft summer thunder. And he’s telling me, okay, so you’re going to adjust, it’ll just be, and then it’ll be centered. He says, you’re going to learn how to do this, you’re going to forget it, and then it’s okay because I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.

So I breathe out and I brace my arm and the clay wobbles and wobbles and wobbles and wobbles and all of a sudden it doesn’t. It’s still and it’s spinning. I raise my hands and it’s spinning so fast but it’s not moving at all. It looks like it’s completely still and he says, there you go, you’re centered.

And then he tells me, okay, you’re gonna wet your hands and then you’re gonna drop your first hole, and you take your fingers and you put it in the center of the dome of clay and you drop your hole and you open the clay. And it opens so quickly. I take to it like a duck to water. It feels so satisfying, like when you’re cutting wrapping paper and the scissors just slide up the wrapping paper. It feels like that.

And he tells me okay, now he shows me how to lift, and he shows me what to do, and all of a sudden this lump of clay went from being nothing to a cup that turns into a bowl, that turns into an object that exists in the whole world. And all of the art I’ve been making has been ephemeral, just performance and it disappears.

And this is now a thing that actually exists. And he cuts it off and he puts it to the side and he puts another ball of clay and I center it again and he tells me that all I got to do now is just make sure that I breathe. He says that’s the most important thing. He says, you’re going to touch the clay gently, you’re going to take your hands off the clay gently and in between every move you’re going to breathe. And then that piece starts to wobble a little bit and all I have to do is cut it off and get another piece of clay. I can just start over. There’s no stakes. It just feels good.

As Peter is telling me and we go through about four, four different balls of clay. He tells me, uh, all these things again, these steps over and over because I learn them and I forget them, but he’s there. But what I hear is the subtext of what he’s actually saying to me, which is, you take a breath, you make a move, and the shape changes.

The hour goes by like that and I stand up and I tell him, I say Peter, thank you so much. I’ve been depleted. I needed that so bad. My battery has been empty and I just have not been feeling good. And he gives me a hug, because me-in-30-years is a good hugger. And then, as he hugs me, he tells me he’s proud of me.

So I start to cry. And, me-in-30-years, is a great crier too, and we’re just holding each other and crying and the bridge troll and the pink lady are just laughing. Everybody’s having a wonderful time and I leave the studio, I wave goodbye to the island of broken toys and I go home and I get back to my apartment and I sit on the couch and, Sarah says, how was it? And she tells me later that in this very small voice from my very big body, I just gently say, I loved it. I can’t believe somebody lets me do this. And she nodded her head and she said, okay, I want you to go sign up for a weekly class. So I did.

About two weeks later I show up for my Thursday 10:00 AM weekly class. I go in there and I walk directly to the wheels and on the wheel that’s supposed to be mine is a pile of brand new tools, some wooden carving sticks, a wooden knife, a wire, a sponge.

There’s also this blue bowl, rudimentary, kind of thick walled blue bowl. And I pick it up and on the underside of it, it’s carved Peter underneath. Teacher Peter had fired it, glazed it and fired it for me and left it on my wheel. And I pick it up and the glaze is cool in my hand and it’s very smooth like glass and it feels perfect in my hands because my hands were the things that made this and the grooves are the grooves of my fingers in the surface of the clay. And this object is now part of the world and I made it. It was the earth and I shaped it and inside the way the glaze melted is the universe.

And I put it to the side and I get another ball of clay and I sit down and I start to center. And I look all around me and I can see all the people working everywhere and and and everyone here is taking these, uh, balls of clay or slabs of clay or or pieces of clay and they’re turning into something and it’s coming from a place inside their soul that is supported and beautiful and joyful.

So, what I realize then is now I can make anything. I can make anything for who I am today. I can make things to honor who I had been. I can make things for what is. And all I have to do is joyfully, mindfully, with intent and with compassion for myself, is to sit still and take a breath and make a move and the shape changes. And I take a breath and I make a move and the shape changes. And I take a breath and I make a move and the shape changes.

Thank you.

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Astrid Sauer @ TEDxLisboa 2025 – What would life be like without art?

April 16, 2025/in Art, History, Humanity, Society/by Mark Lovett

While I enjoy and appreciate all artistic expression — air, music, dance, etc. — I must admit that I tend to do so in the moment, without thinking about its effect on the fabric of society, or in a historical context. It takes a reminder, an outside nudge to make that happen. So it was a delight to have the opportunity to work with Astrid Sauer in preparation for her talk at TEDxLisboa on March 15, 2025.

The topic, What would life be like without art?, reminded me of how vital art is in the present, as well as how it has profoundly shaped cultures around the world for centuries. To illustrate that point Astrid begins her talk by challenging those sitting in the audience to imagine a stark, grey world devoid of art – lacking any paintings, music, dance, theatre, or literature — a world that’s been reduced to pure functionality. For me it exemplified the poignant phrase, “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.”

Art is more than just decoration. It is a universal language that speaks directly to our hearts and minds, shaping our emotions, ideas, and interactions.

When she states, “I still remember during the Salzburg Festival, musicians would often stay at our house, playing intimate concerts for family and friends.”, I could only image what that must have been like. That was not the case for me growing up, but from the perspective of personal storytelling, this one sentence tells us where her passion for art came from. Note: every passion has an origin story.

But art also serves as a powerful medium for cultural transformation. Whenever art crosses borders, it reshapes and influences the identities of different cultures. And this phenomenon can be observed in various artistic forms, from architecture to music, from literature to visual arts.

So what did I learn from that experience? Without art, our world would lack colour, depth, and connection. And this is not just true today, but has been throughout the greater part of our history.

If your story is founded on your passion, either personal or professional, pay attention to how Astrid takes the audience on a journey from the origin of her passion to framing the topic in a historical context before bringing the subject into modern times. It’s clear that the world we live in would be a very different place without the influence of art in its many forms.

Art isn’t just a luxury; it is a necessity. It is the foundation of culture, of innovation, and human connection. Each of us has the power to contribute to a world that values creativity.

Most importantly, Astrid turns the spotlight on the audience with a reminder that everyone has the ability and opportunity to engage in art. While I wasn’t blessed with much artistic DNA, I support the arts frequently, as I appreciate humanity’s magical creative spark. How are you engaged with some facet of artistic expression? And if your personal passion is something others could benefit from hearing about, why aren’t you telling your story?

If you enjoyed this article…

Transcript

Imagine a world without art. No paintings, no music, no literature, no dance, no theatre. Just a vast grey landscape of pure functionality. A world of spreadsheets, reports, and concrete walls. Yet we often overlook how deeply art is woven into the fabric of our daily lives.

Today, let’s explore what life would be like without art and why we can’t afford to live in that world. Art is more than just decoration. It is a universal language that speaks directly to our hearts and minds, shaping our emotions, ideas, and interactions.

From the architecture of our cities to the music that lifts our spirits, art surrounds us, even if we don’t consciously notice it. But let me tell you how my journey with art began, and why I’m still so passionate about it today.

Growing up, I was fortunate to be immersed in a world rich with art and culture. My parents would take me to concerts and opera performances from a very young age. I still remember during the Salzburg Festival, musicians would often stay at our house, playing intimate concerts for family and friends.

We would sing together during the Christmas season. I learned my first instrument, the flute, at the age of five, then moving on to the violin, later the piano, which I still play today. My mother would take me to vernissages and introduce me to local artists, sparking my interest in art collection at the age of 16.

But I was also influenced by my father, a practical engineer and successful business owner. So I decided to study business, embarking on a career as a financial and strategy consultant.

After a couple of years, however, I started to feel a void. Something was missing. So, on a therapeutic trip to the Golden Triangle, deep in the jungle of Vietnam, I sketched a business plan on a napkin. A plan that would lead to a new company that would combine my consulting experience with the cultural sector. And this allowed me to reconnect with my passion for the arts. All of a sudden, my world felt whole again.

So what did I learn from that experience? Without art, our world would lack colour, depth, and connection. And this is not just true today, but has been throughout the greater part of our history.

Let’s travel back to 15th-century Florence. The Medici family, bankers by trade, didn’t just fund artists like Michelangelo, Botticelli, or Leonardo da Vinci. They cultivated a culture of creativity. They financed the construction of the St. Peter’s Basilica, which is a universal symbol of the Catholic Church.

They commissioned the construction of the Florence Cathedral, a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture. They even funded the invention of the piano. They brought together artists, scientists, and philosophers, creating an environment where innovation thrived.

So imagine if they would have said, “Art isn’t our responsibility. Art is not important to society.” Would the Renaissance have happened in the same way? Would we still have the masterpieces that inspire us today?

And although the Renaissance was an evolution of the cultural movement of Humanism that was already active in the mid-14th century before the rise of the Medici, history changed because of that spark, because they cared.

The Renaissance then traveled through trade, history, and humanist scholars to other regions, leading to significant cultural transformations across Europe. Artists like Jan van Eyck in Holland or Albrecht Dürer in Germany started to incorporate Renaissance techniques such as realism and perspective into their paintings.

Just look at the magnificent Arnolfini Portrait of van Eyck, one of the most complex and original masterpieces of Western art, with its geometric orthogonal perspective and the expansion of space through the use of a mirror.

But the spread of Humanism also led to other wealthy families and royal families getting inspired by the Medici family. So they wanted to create a legacy of their own. And one such example was King Francis I of France. He invited artists from all over the world, including Italy like Leonardo da Vinci, to his court, fostering a unique French Renaissance. He’s responsible for the creation of notable castles such as Chambord or Fontainebleau.

But the humanist scholars like Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More in England also promoted the establishment of universities across Europe. They emphasized the importance of education as a means for personal development and civil responsibility. Art doesn’t just entertain us; it propels humanity forward.

Think about the last time a song lifted your mood or a painting calmed your mind. Studies have shown that engaging with arts reduces stress, anxiety, and depression. More specifically, a 2019 World Health Organization report found that artistic engagement significantly improves mental health. And here’s a fun fact: even mice benefit from art. Scientists discovered that playing Mozart for lab mice helped them learn faster. And if it works for mice, imagine what it can do for us!

Let’s crunch some numbers. People participating in a cultural activity are 38% more likely to report good health. And this number increases to 62% if it’s dancing. So sign up for that dance class you always wanted to! People who read for pleasure are 33% more likely to report good health.

High school students who engage in cultural activities at school are twice as likely to volunteer and 20% more likely to vote as young adults. So art is essential for learning. Students who engage in artistic activities during high school are better in reading and mathematics.

A US study of 25,000 students found that taking part in arts and cultural activities increases student attainment, they have better SAT scores, better thinking skills, and better cognitive abilities. They become more empathetic, more socially aware, and better prepared to navigate a complex world.

Beyond education, art is an economic powerhouse. Just look at this photo of the Louvre with the crowds flocking in. On average, 28,000 people visit the Louvre Museum each day. Did you know that in the European Union alone, as of 2019, the cultural and creative industries employed more than 7.6 million people and contributed 643 billion euros to the economy? This represents 4.4% of European Union’s GDP. This is more than the agricultural sector, more than the telecommunication sector. So art isn’t just a luxury; it is a livelihood. It plays a significant part of our country’s economies.

But art also preserves our history and identity. Cultural landmarks from the Great Wall of China to the Mona Lisa connect us to our past and inspire future generations. And speaking of the Mona Lisa… there she is. Did you know when it got stolen in 1911, its disappearance caused global panic? Newspapers all over the world printed headlines about the missing art piece. So art isn’t just seen, it’s felt.

But art also serves as a powerful medium for cultural transformation. Whenever art crosses borders, it reshapes and influences the identities of different cultures. And this phenomenon can be observed in various artistic forms, from architecture to music, from literature to visual arts. Let’s take the National Tile Museum in Lisbon as an example, showcasing how the history and the craft of the tile were influenced by different cultures over centuries.

From its origins that can be traced back to the Islamic period in the Iberian Peninsula, with its geometric patterns and vibrant colors, to the Renaissance artists that would incorporate themes of mythology and religion, to the depiction of historical moments and everyday life during the Baroque period, or the influences of the Portuguese colonial times from Africa to South America or Asia. And finally, contemporary artists who would reinterpret the traditional tile form, experimenting with new techniques and themes. This evolution shows the dynamic nature of art as it crosses borders and fosters cultural exchange.

But let’s travel back to our grey, artless world. Without art, our cities would lack character. Our workplaces would feel lifeless, and our homes would be mere shelters instead of places of inspiration. Companies would struggle to connect with their employees. Communities would lose their sense of belonging.

And here’s the real question: If we neglect art today, what future renaissance are we preventing?

Art isn’t just a luxury; it is a necessity. It is the foundation of culture, of innovation, and human connection. Each of us has the power to contribute to a world that values creativity. Whether we support the arts, we engage with them, or simply take a moment to appreciate them. We all contribute to a richer, more vibrant world.

So the next time you listen to a song, you read a book, you watch a play, remember: Art is what makes us human. And without it, we would lose more than beauty. We would lose ourselves.

Thank you.

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100% My Fault from the StoryCorps Podcast

March 25, 2025/in Friendship, Humanity, Life Lessons, Nature, Podcast, StoryCorps/by Mark Lovett

I’m thankful that I’ve never been in a life-threatening situation, but millions of people around the world have, and those who made it through the experience have riveting stories to tell.

In this case, it wasn’t just a single person in danger; it was two friends. And that means there are two story lines, two unique narratives. So in this episode of the StoryCorps Podcast we hear a recount of events as they unfolded, as well as a reunion of sorts where their innermost feelings are finally shared.

In addition to Alex Lewis and Matt Koch — the pair of storytellers who were up on the mountain — Michael Garofalo, StoryCorps chief content officer, also narrated this story. It’s an interesting format where the two main characters take turns telling their story, with the narrator jumping in to carry the plot along. It’s why I’ve included the transcript. Listen to the episode, then give the transcript a read. While you hear distinct voices on the audio, the script reads much more fluid, allowing you to appreciate out the episode was put together.

It’s also worth noting that a full recounting of this story could take hours, yet this version comes in under 15 minutes. Try to imagine what was cut out, and think about what was left in. As you craft your own story — life-threatening or not — consider all that could be in your story, and which elements tell the most impactful story in a limited time frame.

Transcript

Michael Garofalo (MG): In December 2016… longtime friends Alex Lewis and Matt Koch hiked into a mountain pass in Colorado for a backcountry ski trip. This wasn’t a casual thing— they would be in the mountains for days… miles away from the nearest town.

Alex Lewis: We got to the trailhead and it was snowing fairly constantly and a decent wind. We had the feeling of feeling small because you’re in these big mountains, but you couldn’t even really see much of them because of the snow.

MG: Alex and Matt were pretty serious outdoorsy guys… and this is exactly the kind of adventure that their friendship was built on… camping… hiking… But they hadn’t been able to do anything like that in a while.

The year before… Matt had been diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. After a difficult year of treatments, Matt was declared cancer-free. And what better way to celebrate than a backcountry ski trip with his buddy…

Matt Koch: This trip was kind of a opportunity for me to prove to myself that I could do things that required a physical fitness level I thought maybe I’d never have if I was a cancer survivor.

This was my message to the universe of like, you didn’t get me. I’m still here.

And then… things unravel.

MG: Matt and Alex had never really talked about what happened in that mountain pass… until now. I’m Michael Garofalo. It’s the StoryCorps Podcast from NPR.

MG: Matt and Alex were headed towards a ski hut… which would be their home base for the weekend. It was nothing fancy, just bare bones – think hostel, not hotel – but there was a staff, heat, they’d get two meals a day, and beds for the night. And the only way Matt and Alex could get there was by skiing 3 miles UPHILL through a steep, snowy mountain pass.

Matt Koch: I think as we were hiking, Alex, I was becoming aware that I was not physically prepared for this; I wasn’t where I should be. Every step my pack just felt heavier and heavier.

Alex Lewis: The first time that I had some concerns, you said something to the effect of, ‘Well, I dumped out my water because I felt like it was too heavy.’ I was like, oh man, we need that water.

Matt Koch: You had stopped and said, like, ‘Give me your pack. I’ll carry it for you.’ And I, I kind of remember being a tough guy and saying, ‘No, no, no, I got it. I got it.’

Alex Lewis: It was starting to become nightfall, and the wind was picking up, and the snow was picking up.

Matt Koch: The discussion was, you know, we’re, we’re further in than we are out and we just needed to let this storm go through.

Alex Lewis: And we decided the best course of action was to go off into the trees and build a snow pit where we could stay for the night.

MG: Matt and Alex started burrowing into the snow with their hands… to make a shelter where they could stay the night.

Matt Koch: Couldn’t have been more than a big dog bed size. It was pretty tiny.

Alex Lewis: We crammed as close together as possible to stay warm. And one of the things I remember overnight is hearing the howling wind.

Matt Koch: Yeah, the wind was just relentless.

Alex Lewis: It’s a little scary to wake up in the middle of the night to see the makeshift shelter that you’re sleeping in starting to fall apart and deteriorate.

Matt Koch: God, it was just cold, and, bundled up inside of my coat and couldn’t get comfortable. The situation was bad.

MG: They woke up the next morning happy to still be alive… and they could see the ski hut by that point. There wasn’t much farther to go.

Alex Lewis: The weather was continuing to get worse and extremely snowy and windy there. Our progress was pretty slow, because of the steep terrain and fresh snow. And I just remember taking this step, and, all of a sudden, hearing kind of, this rushing water sound.

Alex Lewis: And being knocked off my feet onto my hip and starting to slide. And I realized that I had triggered an avalanche right underneath me.

And I slide about a hundred feet and see these trees that are in my path. I was able to pin my skis to the trees and let the avalanche slide right past me, and continuing on down the mountain as I stood there in disbelief.

And I recall, yelling out ‘Avalanche, avalanche’, so that you could at least hear my voice and know where I was.

MG: Alex looked around for Matt… who was okay. But he also realized that with these conditions… it was too dangerous to keep going.

Alex Lewis: I remember taking a deep breath and realizing that this was the, the final straw. We weren’t going to make it to the hut. It was time for us to head down the mountain.

MG: But by this point… Matt was struggling to go anywhere.

Matt Koch: Every footstep hurt. And what little I had left in my batteries drained. I sat down and I just quit, and I don’t think you could move me if you wanted to.

Alex Lewis: I remember saying something like, ‘You didn’t let cancer kill you. You can’t stop here. You can’t quit now.’

Matt Koch: But I was resigned. I just had nothing left.

Alex Lewis: We had a, a really hard conversation around what to do. Then I took off. And I…it was extremely hard to leave you, but I also didn’t think we had another option. I needed to continue down the hill to get help.

MG: While Matt huddled alone in the cold and snow, Alex skied down the mountain pass… trying to get reception on his phone.

Alex Lewis: I got down the trail, was almost back to the car, and I got through to the sheriff. And he said, you know, ‘The avalanche dangers and risk are so high, I can’t send in three search and rescue team members to potentially save one knowing that I might lose all of them. If we can’t respond, what’s your backup plan?’

MG: Calling the sheriff HAD been the backup plan… and now it seemed like Matt was truly stranded.

Alex Lewis: When you were up there, after I left you, did you think you were going to die?

Matt Koch: I don’t, I don’t ever remember thinking about dying. I just, I kept thinking about you. I kept thinking about if you were ok.

I think I was pretty delirious, being hypothermic. It was like being drunk. I started realizing how thirsty I was. I knew that if I would eat snow, it would lower my core temperature. I had one little guy on one shoulder telling me not to, and another guy on the other telling me, “But you’re so thirsty.” I kind of negotiated with myself that I could have just a little bit like, you know, help is on the way.

MG: For six hours, Matt didn’t move from the spot where Alex had left him… until finally a rescue team was able to get there.

Matt Koch: I was apologetic. I, I was so weak and demoralized and just frustrated and angry with myself for allowing this to happen. I just completely did not respect mother nature and her power.

I don’t remember pain of any sort, but my hands were definitely purple. I couldn’t really use them, they were so stiff. The toes were just frozen solid.

A helicopter came and got me. And when I got to the hospital in Denver, just kind of being a joker, I looked at the doctor and I said, ‘How bad on the fucked-ometer am I?’ And he goes, and ‘You’re nine out of 10, man. I don’t know if you’re gonna keep your fingers.’ I wasn’t ready for that.

MG: Coming up… when you’ve left your friend alone… knowing he might die without you… what do you say to each other after that?

Alex Lewis: I was apprehensive about visiting you in the hospital because I wasn’t sure what would happen to our friendship.

MG: Matt spent several days at the hospital being treated for severe frostbite. It was so bad they had to put him in the burn unit. And all those days lying there in bed… unable to use his arms or legs… Matt had nothing but time to think about how he had gotten there.

Matt Koch: It ended up becoming kind of a slap in the face that, because I had cancer, I wasn’t physically ready for this trip. This was my fault, and it could have been avoided. Everybody was putting themselves in danger to save me, and they didn’t have to.

MG: Matt had plenty of visitors… his family was there with him… but the visitor he was most anxious to see… was Alex.

Matt Koch: What did you feel when you saw me?

Alex Lewis: I was nervous to go to the hospital, and I remember coming into the hospital and you’re kind of sitting there, wrapped up kind of like a mummy in multiple layers of bandages.

Matt Koch: I think my mom was in the room and I asked her to leave so I could thank you. I don’t know if it was shame or embarrassment, but, um, I was thankful. I was glad to see you were ok. I was sad that I, uh, put you in that spot. I would never want for somebody to get hurt because of my actions, and that’s exactly what almost happened, um…

Do you harbor any anger towards me because of this?

Alex Lewis: No. I helped get us in that position where we needed to do something to save your life. Plenty of things happened that day that were my fault. And so I was concerned you would feel that I was responsible for what had happened.

Matt Koch: I, I had no idea that you felt any level of guilt. I’m sorry that we’ve never had this conversation until now. This was 100 percent my fault. I knew the risks, and I wasn’t fit enough to be in the backcountry. You did everything within your power. I hope you know that. You did everything right. You rescued me, you saved my life.

Alex Lewis: Yeah, and I think – you know, I appreciate you saying it because it does paint it in a different light. We had never really discussed it and kind of, always danced around it, but coming from you, it means the world to me.

Matt Koch: Yeah. Well, I think the accident and cancer shifted my perspective because I’ve been a lot closer to death than many others. It’s made me realize what’s important to me. And I’m so thankful that we’re friends, because if I didn’t have you, I would be dead right now.

Alex Lewis: It’s what I would have done anyway for you and for our friendship.

Matt Koch: Well, I know I feel it now, and I think I felt it then, that I’m thankful to have you in my life. Not just because of this incident, but, no matter where I go, if I need you I know you’ll be there.

MG: It’s been almost a decade since that trip… and every year now, on the anniversary, Matt calls Alex to thank him for saving his life.

Matt’s injuries ended up being much less severe than they could have been. He kept his fingers… although he does have lasting nerve damage.

Today he lives on a boat in Florida… so he never has to feel cold again.

MG: We love it when you leave us voicemails… and this week we’d like to know: What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for a friend? Tell us about it in a message at 702-706-TALK. That’s 702-706-T-A-L-K.

This episode was produced by Max Jungreis. Jud Esty-Kendall is our Senior Producer. Our Technical Director is Jarrett Floyd. And our Executive Producer is Amy Drozdowska. The art for this episode was created by Liz McCarty.

I’m Michael Garofalo. Thanks for listening.

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Nature of Intelligence – Episode One – What is Intelligence?

February 24, 2025/in AI, Artificial Intelligence, Biology, Humanity, Neuroscience/by Mark Lovett

I tend to think of storytelling as sitting at the intersection of four elements:

Consciousness — awareness of self, the environment, and our thoughts
Intelligence — ability to learn, understand, reason, and solve problems
Imagination — create mental images, ideas, or concepts beyond reality
Creativity — generate original ideas, solutions, and artistic expressions

They’re different terms, of course, yet you can see how they interact with each other. It’s also apparent that they’re involved in the process of creating stories. They’re so fundamental, in fact, that they go a long way towards describing what makes us human. But the funny thing is, science doesn’t know how to accurately define any of these concepts.

While thousands of hours have been spent seeking answers, and scientists can talk for days on end about their findings, it is still a mystery. Take Shakespeare, for example. How did he utilize these aspects of humanity to create something as magical as Hamlet? And if we can’t properly describe one of these elements, how do we explain how they work together? And extending beyond us mortals, will AI ever be able to replicate this magic?

So when I ran across the third season of Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity podcast, which is devoted to the exploration of Intelligence, I had to listen in, and if you’re interesting in how we create stories in our head, I recommend you do the same, as it looks at the concept of intelligence through a human lens, as well as from the lens of artificial intelligence.

There’s so much information in this first episode, but I wanted to share four quotes that intrigued me. First off is this notion of “common sense”. It seems simple, but again, it’s illusive to capture in words. How would you describe it?

Common sense gives us basic assumptions that help us move through the world and know what to do in new situations. But it gets more complicated when you try to define exactly what common sense is and how it’s acquired. ~ Melanie Mitchell

This notion of an equivalent phenomenon describes much of the human / AI debate, as there is a sense that a machine will never be human, but maybe it can be close enough.

I think there’s a difference between saying, can we reach human levels of intelligence when it comes to common sense, the way humans do it, versus can we end up with the equivalent phenomenon, without having to do it the way humans do it. ~ John Krakauer

This goes back to the reality that we don’t know what makes humans human, so how are we to compare a computer algorithm to what it means to be us?

I think it’s just again, a category mistake to say we’ll have something like artificial general intelligence, because we don’t have natural general intelligence. ~ Alison Gopnik

But we’re more than thinking animals. We have emotions. Fall in love, feel pain, express joy and sorrow. Or in this case, grief. Computers are learning how to simulate emotions such as grief, but is that even possible?

I don’t know what it would mean for a computer to feel grief. I just don’t know. I think we should respect the mystery. ~ John Krakauer

So here goes, take a listen to Episode 1 and see what you think. The transcript is below if you feel so inclined (as I did) to follow along. It’s some heady stuff.

Transcript

Alison Gopnik: It’s like asking, is the University of California Berkeley library smarter than I am? Well, it definitely has more information in it than I do, but it just feels like that’s not really the right question.

Abha Eli Phoboo: From the Santa Fe Institute, this is Complexity.

Melanie Mitchell: I’m Melanie Mitchell.

Abha: And I’m Abha Eli Phoboo.

Abha: Today’s episode kicks off a new season for the Complexity podcast, and with a new season comes a new theme. This fall, we’re exploring the nature and complexity of intelligence in six episodes — what it means, who has it, who doesn’t, and if machines that can beat us at our own games are as powerful as we think they are. The voices you’ll hear were recorded remotely across different locations, including countries, cities and work spaces. But first, I’d like you to meet our new co-host.

Melanie: My name is Melanie Mitchell. I’m a professor here at the Santa Fe Institute. I work on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. I’ve been interested in the nature of intelligence for decades. I want to understand how humans think and how we can get machines to be more intelligent, and what it all means.

Abha: Melanie, it’s such a pleasure to have you here. I truly can’t think of a better person to guide us through what, exactly, it means to call something intelligent. Melanie’s book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, is one of the top books on AI recommended by The New York Times. It’s a rational voice among all the AI hype in the media.

Melanie: And depending on whom you ask, artificial intelligence is either going to solve all humanity’s problems, or it’s going to kill us. When we interact with systems like Google Translate, or hear the buzz around self-driving cars, or wonder if ChatGPT actually understands human language, it can feel like AIis going to transform everything about the way we live. But before we get carried away making predictions about AI, it’s useful to take a step back. What does it mean to call anything intelligent, whether it’s a computer or an animal or a human child?

Abha: In this season, we’re going to hear from cognitive scientists, child development specialists, animal researchers, and AI experts to get a sense of what we humans are capable of and how AI models actually compare. And in the sixth episode, I’ll sit down with Melanie to talk about her research and her views on AI.

Melanie: To kick us off, we’re going to start with the broadest, most basic question: what really is intelligence, anyway? As many researchers know, the answer is more complicated than you might think.

Melanie: Part One: What is intelligence?

Alison: I’m Alison Gopnik. I’m a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy and a member of the Berkeley AI Research group. And I study how children manage to learn as much as they do, particularly in a sort of computational context. What kinds of computations are they performing in those little brains that let them be the best learners we know of in the universe?

Abha: Alison is also an external professor with the Santa Fe Institute, and she’s done extensive research on children and learning. When babies are born, they’re practically little blobs that can’t hold up their own heads. But as we all know, most babies become full-blown adults who can move, speak, and solve complex problems. From the time we enter this world, we’re trying to figure out what the heck is going on all around us, and that learning sets the foundation for human intelligence.

Alison: Yeah, so one of the things that is really, really important about the world is that some things make other things happen. So everything from thinking about the way the moon affects the tides to just the fact that I’m talking to you and that’s going to make you change your minds about things. Or the fact that I can pick up this cup and spill the water and everything will get wet. Those really basic cause and effect relationships are incredibly important.

And they’re important partly because they let us do things. So if I know that something is gonna cause a particular effect, what that means is if I wanna bring about that effect, I can actually go out in the world and do it. And it underpins everything from just our everyday ability to get around in the world, even for an infant, to the most incredible accomplishments of science. But at the same time, those causal relationships are kind of mysterious and always have been. How is it? After all, all we see is that one thing happens and another thing follows it. How do we figure out that causal structure?

Melanie: So how do we?

Alison: Yeah, good question. So that’s been a problem philosophers have thought about for centuries. And there’s basically two pieces. And anyone who’s done science will recognize these two pieces. We analyze statistics. So we look at what the dependencies are between one thing and another. And we do experiments. We go out, perhaps the most important way that we understand about causality is you do something and then you see what happens and then you do something again and you say, wait a minute, that happened again.

And part of what I’ve been doing recently, which has been really fun, is just look at babies, even like one year olds. And if you just sit and look at a one year old, mostly what they’re doing is doing experiments. I have a lovely video of my one-year-old grandson with a xylophone and a mallet.

Abha: Of course, we had to ask Alison to show us the video. Her grandson is sitting on the floor with the xylophone, while his grandfather plays an intricate song on the piano. Together, they make a strange duet.

And it’s not just that he makes the noise. He tries turning the mallet upside down. He tries with his hand a bit. That doesn’t make a noise. He tries with a stick end. That doesn’t make a noise. Then he tries it on one bar and it makes one noise. Another bar, it makes another noise. So when the babies are doing the experiments, we call it getting into everything. But I increasingly think that’s their greatest motivation.

Abha: So babies and children are doing these cause and effect experiments constantly, and that’s a major way that they learn. At the same time, they’re also figuring out how to move and use their bodies, developing a distinct intelligence in their motor systems so they can balance, walk, use their hands, turn their heads, and eventually, move in ways that don’t even require much thinking at all.

Melanie: One of the leading researchers on intelligence and physical movement is John Krakauer, a professor of neurology, neuroscience, physical medicine, and rehabilitation at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. John’s also in the process of writing a book.

John Krakauer: I am. I’ve been writing it for much longer than I expected, but now I finally know the story I want to tell. I’ve been practicing it.

Melanie: Well, let me ask, I just want to mention that the subtitle is Thinking versus Intelligence in Animals, Machines and Humans. So I wanted to get your take on what is thinking and what is intelligence.

John: Oh my gosh, thanks Melanie for such an easy softball question.

Melanie: Well, you’re writing a book about it.

John: Well, yes, so… I think I was very inspired by two things. One was how much intelligent adaptive behavior your motor system has even when you’re not thinking about it. The example I always give is when you press an elevator button before you lift your arm to press the button, you contract your gastrocnemius in anticipation that your arm is sufficiently heavy, that if you didn’t do that, you’d fall over because your center of gravity has shifted. So there are countless examples of intelligent behaviors. In other words, they’re goal-directed and accomplish the goal below the level of overt deliberation or awareness.

And then there’s a whole field, what are called long latency stretch reflexes, these below the time of voluntary movement, but sufficiently flexible to be able to deal with quite a lot of variation in the environment and still get the goal accomplished, but it’s still involuntary.

Abha: There’s a lot that we can do without actually understanding what’s happening. Think about the muscles we use to swallow food, or balance on a bike, for example. Learning how to ride a bike takes a lot of effort, but once you’ve figured it out, it’s almost impossible to explain it to someone else.

John: And so it’s what, Daniel Dennett, you know, who recently passed away, but was very influential for me with what he called, competence with comprehension versus competence without comprehension. And, you know, I think he also was impressed by how much competence there is in the absence of comprehension. And yet along came this extra piece, the comprehension, which added to competence and greatly increased the repertoire of our competences.

Abha: Our bodies are competent in some ways, but when we use our minds to understand what’s going on, we can do even more. To go back to Alison’s example of her grandson playing with a xylophone, comprehension allows him, or anyone, playing with a xylophone mallet to learn that each side of it makes a different sound.

If you or I saw a xylophone for the first time, we would need to learn what a xylophone is, what a mallet is, how to hold it, and which end might make a noise if we knocked it against a musical bar. We’re aware of it. Over time we internalize these observations so that every time we see a xylophone mallet, we don’t need to think through what it is and what the mallet is supposed to do.

Melanie: And that brings us to another, crucial part of human intelligence: common sense. Common sense is knowing that you hold a mallet by the stick end and use the round part to make music. And if you see another instrument, like a marimba, you know that the mallet is going to work the same way. Common sense gives us basic assumptions that help us move through the world and know what to do in new situations. But it gets more complicated when you try to define exactly what common sense is and how it’s acquired.

John: Well, I mean, to me, common sense is the amalgam of stuff that you’re born with. So you, you know, any animal will know that if it steps over the edge, it’s going to fall. Right. What you’ve learned through experience that allows you to do quick inference.

So in other words, you know, an animal, it starts raining, it knows it has to find shelter. Right? So in other words, presumably it learns that you don’t want to be wet, and so it makes the inference it’s going to get wet, and then it finds a shelter. It’s a common sense thing to do in a way.

And then there’s the thought version of common sense. Right? It’s common sense that if you’re approaching a narrow alleyway, your car’s not gonna fit in it. Or if you go to a slightly less narrow one, your door won’t open when you open the door. Countless interactions between your physical experience, your innate repertoire, and a little bit of thinking. And it’s that fascinating mixture of fact and inference and deliberation. And then we seem to be able to do it over a vast number of situations, right?

In other words, we just seem to have a lot of facts, a lot of innate understanding of the physical world, and then we seem to be able to think with those facts. And those innate awarenesses. That, to me, is what common sense is. It’s this almost language-like flexibility of thinking with our facts and thinking with our innate sense of the physical world and combinatorially doing it all the time, thousands of times a day. I know that’s a bit waffly. I’m sure Melanie can do a much better job at me than that, but that’s how I see it.

Melanie: No, I think that’s actually a great exposition of what it means. I totally agree. I think it is fast inference about new situations that combines knowledge and sort of reasoning, fast reasoning, and a lot of very basic knowledge that’s not really written down anywhere that we happen to know because we exist in the physical world and we interact with it.

Melanie: So, observing cause and effect, developing motor reflexes, and strengthening common sense are all happening and overlapping as children get older.

Abha: And we’re going to cover one more type of intelligence that seems to be unique to humans, and that’s the drive to understand the world.

John: It turns out, for reasons that physicists have puzzled over, that the universe is understandable, explainable, and manipulatable. The side effect of understanding the world is understandable, is you begin to understand sunsets and why the sky is blue and how black holes work and why water is a liquid and then a gas. It turns out that these are things worth understanding because you can then manipulate and control the universe. And it’s obviously advantageous because humans have taken over entirely.

I have a fancy microphone that I can have a Zoom call with you with. An understandable world is a manipulable world. As I always say, an arctic fox trotting very well across the arctic tundra is not going, “hmm, what’s ice made out of?” It doesn’t care. Now we, for some point between chimpanzees and us, started to care about how the world worked. And it obviously was useful because we could do all sorts of things. Fire, shelter, blah blah blah.

Abha: And in addition to understanding the world, we can observe ourselves observing, a process known as metacognition. If we go back to the xylophone, metacognition is thinking, “I’m here, learning about this xylophone. I now have a new skill.”

And metacognition is what lets us explain what a xylophone is to other people, even if we don’t have an actual xylophone in front of us. Alison explains more.

Alison: So the things that I’ve been emphasizing are these kinds of external exploration and search capacities, like going out and doing experiments. But we know that people, including little kids, do what you might think of as sort of internal search. So they learn a lot, and now they just intrinsically, internally want to say, “what are some things, new conclusions I could draw, new ideas I could have based on what I already know?”

And that’s really different from just what are the statistical patterns in what I already know. And I think two capacities that are really important for that are metacognition and also one that Melanie’s looked at more than anyone else, which is analogy. So being able to say, okay, here’s all the things that I think, but how confident am I about that? Why do I think that? How could I use that learning to learn something new?

Or saying, here’s the things that I already know. Here’s an analogy that would be really different, right? So I know all about how water works. Let’s see, if I think about light, does it have waves the same way that water has waves? So actually learning by just thinking about what you already know.

John: I find myself constantly changing my position on the one hand, this human capacity to sort of look at yourself computing, a sort of meta-cognition, which is consciousness not just of the outside world and of your body, it’s consciousness of your processing of the outside world and your body. It’s almost as though you used consciousness to look inward at what you were doing. Humans have computations and feelings. They have a special type of feeling and computation which together is deliberative. And that’s what I think thinking is, it’s feeling your computations.

Melanie: What John is saying is that humans have conscious feelings — our sensations such as hunger or pain — and that our brains perform unconscious computations, like the muscle reflexes that happen when we press an elevator button. What he calls deliberative thought is when we have conscious feelings or awareness about our computations.

You might be solving a math problem and realize with dismay that you don’t know how to solve it. Or, you might get excited if you know exactly what trick will work. This is deliberative thought — having feelings about your internal computations. To John, the conscious and unconscious computations are both “intelligent,” but only the conscious computations count as “thinking”.

Abha: So Melanie, having listened to John and Alison, I’d like to go back to our original question with you. What do you think is intelligence?

Melanie: Well, let me recap some of what Alison and John said. Alison really emphasized the ability to learn about cause and effect.

What causes what in the world and how we can predict what’s going to happen. And she pointed out that the way we learn this, adults and especially kids, by doing little experiments, interacting with the world and seeing what happens and learning about cause and effect that way. She also stressed our ability to generalize, to make analogies, how situations might be similar to each other in an abstract way. And this underlies what we would call our common sense, that is our basic understanding of the world.

Abha: Yeah, that example of the xylophone and the mallet, that was very intriguing. As both John and Alison said, humans seem to have a unique drive to gain an understanding of the world via experiments like making mistakes, trying things out. And they both emphasize this important role of metacognition or reasoning about one’s own thinking. What do you think of that? You know, how important do you think metacognition is?

Melanie: It’s absolutely essential to human intelligence. It’s really what underlies, I think, our uniqueness. John, you know, made this distinction between intelligence and thinking. To him, you know, most of our, what he would call our intelligent behavior is unconscious. It doesn’t involve metacognition. He called it competence without comprehension. And he reserved the term thinking for conscious awareness of what he called one’s internal computations.

Abha: Even though John and Alison have given us some great insights about what makes us smart, I think both would admit that no one has come to a full, complete understanding of how human intelligence works, right?

Melanie: Yeah, we’re far from that. But in spite of that, big tech companies like OpenAI and DeepMind are spending huge amounts of money in an effort to make machines that, as they say, will match or exceed human intelligence. So how close are they to succeeding? Well, in part two, we’ll look at how systems like ChatGPT learn and whether or not they’re even intelligent at all.

Abha: Part two: How intelligent are today’s machines?

Abha: If you’ve been following the news around AI, you may have heard the acronym LLM, which stands for large language model. It’s the term that’s used to describe the technology behind systems like ChatGPT from OpenAI or Gemini from Google. LLMs are trained to find statistical correlations in language, using mountains of text and other data from the internet. In short, if you ask ChatGPT a question, it will give you an answer based on what it has calculated to be the most likely response, based on the vast amount of information it’s ingested.

Melanie: Humans learn by living in the world — we move around, we do little experiments, we build relationships, and we feel. LLMs don’t do any of this. But they do learn from language, which comes from humans and human experience, and they’re trained on a lot of it. So does this mean that LLMs could be considered to be intelligent? And how intelligent can they, or any form of AI, become?

Abha: Several tech companies have an explicit goal to achieve something called artificial general intelligence, or AGI. AGI has become a buzzword, and everyone defines it a bit differently. But, in short, AGI is a system that has human level intelligence. Now, this assumes that a computer, like a brain in a jar, can become just as smart, or even smarter, than a human with a feeling body. Melanie asked John what he thought about this.

Melanie: You know, I find it confusing when people like Demis Hassibis, who’s the founder, one of the co-founders of DeepMind, and he an interview that AGI is a system that should be able to do pretty much any cognitive task that humans can do. And he said he expects that there’s a 50% chance we’ll have AGI within a decade. Okay, so I emphasize that word cognitive task because that term is confusing to me. But it seems so obvious to them.

John: Yes, I mean, I think it’s the belief that everything non-physical at the task level can be written out as a kind of program or algorithm. I just don’t know… and maybe it’s true when it comes to, you know, ideas, intuitions, creativity.

Melanie: I also asked John if he thought that maybe that separation, between cognition and everything else, was a fallacy.

John: Well, it seems to me, you know, it always makes me a bit nervous to argue with you of all people about this, but I would say, I think there’s a difference between saying, can we reach human levels of intelligence when it comes to common sense, the way humans do it, versus can we end up with the equivalent phenomenon, without having to do it the way humans do it. The problem for me with that is that we, like this conversation we’re having right now, are capable of open-ended, extrapolatable thought. We go beyond what we’re talking about.

I struggle with it but I’m not going to put myself in this precarious position of denying that a lot of problems in the world can be solved without comprehension. So maybe we’re kind of a dead end — comprehension is a great trick, but maybe it’s not needed. But if comprehension requires feeling, then I don’t quite see how we’re going to get AGI in its entirety. But I don’t want to sound dogmatic. I’m just practicing my… my unease about it. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know.

Abha: Alison is also wary of over-hyping our capacity to get to AGI.

Alison: And one of the great old folk tales is called Stone Soup.

Abha: Or you might have heard it called Nail Soup — there are a few variations. She uses this stone soup story as a metaphor for how much our so-called “AI technology” actually relies on humans and the language they create.

Alison: And the basic story of Stone Soup is that, there’s some visitors who come to a village and they’re hungry and the villagers won’t share their food with them. So the visitors say, that’s fine. We’re just going to make stone soup. And they get a big pot and they put water in it. And they say, we’re going to get three nice stones and put it in. And we’re going to make wonderful stone soup for everybody.

They start boiling it. And they say, this is really good soup. But it would be even better if we had a carrot or an onion that we could put in it. And of course, the villagers go and get a carrot and onion. And then they say, this is much better. But you know, when we made it for the king, we actually put in a chicken and that made it even better. And you can imagine what happens.

All the villagers contribute all their food. And then in the end, they say, this is amazingly good soup and it was just made with three stones. And I think there’s a nice analogy to what’s happened with generative AI. So the computer scientists come in and say, look, we’re going to make intelligence just with next token prediction and gradient descent and transformers.

And then they say, but you know, this intelligence would be much better if we just had some more data from people that we could add to it. And then all the villagers go out and add all of the data of everything that they’ve uploaded to the internet. And then the computer scientists say, no, this is doing a good job at being intelligent.

But it would be even better if we could have reinforcement learning from human feedback and get all you humans to tell it what you think is intelligent or not. And all the humans say, OK, we’ll do that. And then and then it would say, you know, this is really good. We’ve got a lot of intelligence here.

But it would be even better if the humans could do prompt engineering to decide exactly how they were going to ask the questions so that the systems could do intelligent answers. And then at the end of that, the computer scientists would say, see, we got intelligence just with our algorithms. We didn’t have to depend on anything else. I think that’s a pretty good metaphor for what’s happened in AI recently.

Melanie: The way AGI has been pursued is very different from the way humans learn. Large language models, in particular, are created with tons of data shoved into the system with a relatively short training period, especially when compared to the length of human childhood. The stone soup method uses brute force to shortcut our way to something akin to human intelligence.

Alison: I think it’s just a category mistake to say things like are LLM’s smart. It’s like asking, is the University of California Berkeley library smarter than I am? Well, it definitely has more information in it than I do, but it just feels like that’s not really the right question. Yeah, so one of the things about humans in particular is that we’ve always had this great capacity to learn from other humans.

And one of the interesting things about that is that we’ve had different kinds of technologies over history that have allowed us to do that. So obviously language itself, you could think of as a device that lets humans learn more from other people than other creatures can do. My view is that the LLMs are kind of the latest development in our ability to get information from other people.

But again, this is not trivializing or debunking it. Those changes in our cultural technology have been among the biggest and most important social changes in our history. So writing completely changed the way that we thought and the way that we functioned and the way that we acted in the world.

At the moment, as people have pointed out, the fact that I have in my pocket a device that will let me get all the information from everybody else in the world mostly just makes me irritated and miserable most of the time. We would have thought that that would have been like a great accomplishment. But people felt that same way about writing and print when they started too. The hope is that eventually we’ll adjust to that kind of technology.

Melanie: Not everyone shares Alison’s view on this. Some researchers think that large language models should be considered to be intelligent entities, and some even argue that they have a degree of consciousness. But thinking of large language models as a type of cultural technology, instead of sentient bots that might take over the world, helps us understand how completely different they are from people. And another important distinction between large language models and humans is that they don’t have an inherent drive to explore and understand the world.

Alison: They’re just sort of sitting there and letting the data waft over them rather than actually going out and acting and sensing and finding out something new.

Melanie: This is in contrast to the one-year-old saying —

Alison: Huh, the stick works on the xylophone. Will it work on the clock or the vase or whatever else it is that you’re trying to keep the baby away from? That’s a kind of internal basic drive to generalize, to think about, okay, it works in the way that I’ve been trained, but what will happen if I go outside of the environment in which I’ve been trained? We have caregivers who have a really distinctive kind of intelligence that we haven’t studied enough, I think, who are looking at us, letting us explore.

And caregivers are very well designed to, even if it feels frustrating when you’re doing it, we’re very good at kind of getting this balance between how independent should the next agent be? How much should we be constraining them? How much should we be passing on our values? How much should we let them figure out their own values in a new environment?

And I think if we ever do have something like an intelligent AI system, we’re going to have to do that. Our role, our relationship to them should be this caregiving role rather than thinking of them as being slaves on the one hand or masters on the other hand, which tends to be the way that we think about them. And as I say, it’s not just in computer science, in cognitive science, probably for fairly obvious reasons, we know almost nothing about the cognitive science of caregiving. So that’s actually what I’m, I just got a big grant, what I’m going to do for my remaining grandmotherly cognitive science years.

Abha: That sounds very fascinating. I’ve been curious to see what comes out of that work.

Alison: Well, let me give you just a very simple first pass, our first experiment. If you ask three and four year olds, here’s Johnny and he can go on the high slide or he can go on the slide that he already knows about. And what will he do if mom’s there? And your intuitions might be, maybe the kids will say, well, you don’t do the risky thing when mom’s there because she’ll be mad about it, right? And in fact, it’s the opposite. The kids consistently say, no, if mom is there, that will actually let you explore, that will let you take risks, that will let you,

Melanie: She’s there to take you to the hospital.

Alison: Exactly, she’s there to actually protect you and make sure that you’re not doing the worst thing. But of course, for humans, it should be a cue to how important caregiving is for our intelligence. We have a much wider range of people investing in much more caregiving.

So not just mothers, but, my favorite post-menopausal grandmothers, but fathers, older siblings, what are called alloparents, just people around who are helping to take care of the kids. And it’s having that range of caregivers that actually seems to really help. And again, that should be a cue for how important this is in our ability to do all the other things we have, like be intelligent and have culture.

Melanie: If you just look at large language models, you might think we’re nowhere near anything like AGI. But there are other ways of training AI systems. Some researchers are trying to build AI models that do have an intrinsic drive to explore, rather than just consume human information.

Alison: So one of the things that’s happened is that quite understandably the success of these large models has meant that everybody’s focused on the large models. But in parallel, there’s lots of work that’s been going on in AI that is trying to get systems that look more like what we know that children are doing. And I think actually if you look at what’s gone on in robotics, we’re much closer to thinking about systems that look like they’re learning the way that children do.

And one of the really interesting developments in robotics has been the idea of building in intrinsic motivation into the systems. So to have systems that aren’t just trying to do whatever it is that you programmed it to do, like open up the door, but systems that are looking for novelty, that are curious, that are trying to maximize this value of empowerment, that are trying to find out all the range of things they could do that have consequences in the world.

And I think at the moment, the LLMs are the thing that everyone’s paying attention to, but I think that route is much more likely to be a route to really understanding a kind of intelligence that looks more like the intelligence that’s in those beautiful little fuzzy heads.

And I should say we’re trying to do that. So we’re collaborating with computer scientists at Berkeley who are exactly trying to see what would happen if we say, give an intrinsic reward for curiosity. What would happen if you actually had a system that was trying to learn in the way that the children are trying to learn?

Melanie: So are Alison and her team on their way to an AGI breakthrough? Despite all this, Alison is still skeptical.

Alison: I think it’s just again, a category mistake to say we’ll have something like artificial general intelligence, because we don’t have natural general intelligence.

Melanie: In Alison’s view, we don’t have natural general intelligence because human intelligence is not really general. Human intelligence evolved to fit our very particular human needs. So, Alison likewise doesn’t think it makes sense to talk about machines with “general intelligence”, or machines that are more intelligent than humans.

Alison: Instead, what we’ll have is a lot of systems that can do different things, that might be able to do amazing things, wonderful things, things that we can’t do. But that kind of intuitive theory that there’s this thing called intelligence that you could have more of or less of, I just don’t think it fits anything that we know from cognitive science.

It is striking how different the view of the people, not all the people, but some of the people who are also making billions of dollars out of doing AI are from, I mean, I think this is sincere, but it’s still true that their view is so different from the people who are actually studying biological intelligences.

Melanie: John suspects that there’s one thing that computers may never have: feelings.

John: It’s very interesting that I always used pain as the example. In other words, what would it mean for a computer to feel pain? And what would it mean for a computer to understand a joke? So I’m very interested in these two things. We have this physical, emotional response. We laugh, we feel good, right? So when you understand a joke, where should the credit go? Should it go to understanding it? Or should it go to the laughter and the feeling that it evokes?

And to my sort of chagrin or surprise or maybe not surprise, Daniel Dennett wrote a whole essay in one of his early books on why computers will never feel pain. He also wrote a whole book on humor. So in other words, it’s kind of wonderful in a way, that whether he would have ended up where I’ve ended up, but at least he understood the size of the mystery and the problem.

And I agree with him, if I understood his pain essay correctly, and it’s influential on what I’m going to write, I just don’t know what it means for a computer to feel pain, be thirsty, be hungry, be jealous, have a good laugh. To me, it’s a category error. Now, if thinking is the combination of feeling… and computing, then there’s never going to be deliberative thought in a computer.

Abha: While talking to John, he frequently referred to pain receptors as the example of how we humans feel with our bodies. But we wanted to know: what about the more abstract emotions, like joy, or jealousy, or grief? It’s one thing to stub your toe and feel pain radiate up from your foot. It’s another to feel pain during a romantic breakup, or to feel happy when seeing an old friend. We usually think of those as all in our heads, right?

John: You know, I’ll say something kind of personal. A close friend of mine called me today to tell me… that his younger brother had been shot and killed in Baltimore. Okay. I don’t want to be a downer. I’m saying it for a reason. And he was talking to me about the sheer overwhelming physicality of the grief that he was feeling. And, I was thinking, what can I say with words to do anything about that pain? And the answer is nothing. Other than just to try.

But seeing that kind of grief and all that it entails, even more than seeing the patients that I’ve been looking after for 25 years, is what leads to a little bit of testiness on my part when one tends to downplay this incredible mixture of meaning and loss and memory and pain. And to know that this is a human being who knows, forecasting into the future, that he’ll never see this person again. It’s not just now. Part of that pain is into the infinite future. Now, all I’m saying is we don’t know what that glorious and sad amalgam is, but I’m not going to just dismiss it away and explain it away as some sort of peripheral computation that we will solve within a couple of weeks, months or years.

Do you see? I find it just slightly enraging, actually. And I just feel that, as a doctor and as a friend, we need to know that we don’t know how to think about these things yet. Right? I just don’t know. And I am not convinced of anything yet. So I think that there is a link between physical pain and emotional pain, but I can tell you from the losses I felt, it’s physical as much as it is cognitive. So grief, I don’t know what it would mean for a computer to feel grief. I just don’t know. I think we should respect the mystery.

Abha: So Melanie, I noticed that John and Alison are both a bit skeptical about today’s approaches to AI. I mean, will it lead to anything like human intelligence? What do you think?

Melanie: Yeah, I think that today’s approaches have some limitations. Alison put a lot of emphasis on the need for an agent to be actively interacting in the world as opposed to passively just receiving language input. And for an agent to have its own intrinsic motivation in order to be intelligent. Alison interestingly sees large language models more like libraries or databases than like intelligent agents. And I really loved her stone soup metaphor where her point is that all the important ingredients of large language models come from humans.

Abha: Yeah, it’s such an interesting illustration because it sort of tells us everything that goes on behind the scene, you know, before we see the output that an LLM gives us. John seemed to think that full artificial general intelligence is impossible, even in principle. He said that comprehension requires feeling or the ability to feel one’s own internal computations. And he didn’t seem to see how computers could ever have such feelings.

Melanie: And I think most people in AI would disagree with John. Many people in AI don’t even think that any kind of embodied interaction with the world is necessary. They’d argue that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of language.

In our next episode, we’ll go deeper into the importance of this cultural technology, as Alison would put it. How does language help us learn and construct meaning? And what’s the relationship between language and thinking?

Steve: You can be really good at language without having the ability to do the kind of sequential, multi-step reasoning that seems to characterize human thinking.

Abha: That’s next time, on Complexity.

Complexity is the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. This episode was produced by Katherine Moncure. Our theme song is by Mitch Mignano, and additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

I’m Abha, thanks for listening.

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Will AI Companions Change Your Story?

January 9, 2025/in AI, Artificial Intelligence, Friendship, Humanity, Society, TED Talk/by Mark Lovett

Companionship is a natural part of the human experience. We’re born into a family that cares for us and within in few years we begin forging friendships – most notably with other kids in the neighborhood and schoolmates once we enter the educational system. During our teenage years romance takes the companionship model in a new and more intimate direction.

It’s a dynamic process for most of us, ebbing and flowing as we change schools, move to someplace new, or friendships fade of their own accord. But over time, it’s typical for new companions to enter the picture, and our story evolves as a result, unfolding in new directions, making life richer.

Group of people have a conversation outside

But it’s often the case that this process encounters a dramatic change at some point. The loss of a loved one — parent, romantic partner or best friend — or a traumatic breakup or divorce happens. Retirement has a way of disconnecting people from an important social circle, and as we age, our collection of friends naturally dwindles. In such cases, loneliness can manifest, and the effects are dire. In such cases our life story is seemingly rewritten for us.

A recent review published in Nature of over 90 studies that included more than 2.2 million people globally found that those who self-reported social isolation or loneliness were more likely to die early from all causes. The findings demonstrated a 29% and 26% increased risk of all-cause mortality associated with social isolation and loneliness. ~ Psychology Today

In this light, there’s been a marked increase in conversations around the topic of using artificial intelligence (AI) to provide companionship in these situations. It’s not a new idea, as the technology has been in development since the 1960s, but early versions were rather limited. Circumstances have changed dramatically in recent years as the capability of AI has been enhanced via machine learning and an exponential rise in compute power.

Based on the TED mantra of Ideas Worth Spreading, a pair of TED conferences focused on AI have been launched in San Francisco and Vienna. As relates to the topic at hand, companionship and loneliness, a TED Talk by Eugenia Kuyda from the 2024 conference in San Francisco caught my attention.

But what if I told you that I believe AI companions are potentially the most dangerous tech that humans ever created, with the potential to destroy human civilization if not done right? Or they can bring us back together and save us from the mental health and loneliness crisis we’re going through.

Eugenia’s quote represents polar opposites, and as we know, the future always falls somewhere in-between, but I think it’s critical to consider which end of the spectrum this technology will end up on, as the stories of many people around the world will be affected. Is this an avenue that you would take if you found yourself suffering from severe loneliness? What if it was someone close to you, someone you were apart from and so couldn’t be the companion they needed?

While it’s not a question you need to answer at the moment, I believe that in the coming decade it’s one you may very well have to consider, if not for yourself, a question that may need answered for a loved one.

Transcript

This is me and my best friend, Roman. We met in our early 20s back in Moscow. I was a journalist back then, and I was interviewing him for an article on the emerging club scene because he was throwing the best parties in the city. He was the coolest person I knew, but he was also funny and kind and always made me feel like family.

In 2015, we moved to San Francisco and rented an apartment together. Both start-up founders, both single, trying to figure out our lives, our companies, this new city together. I didn’t have anyone closer. Nine years ago, one month after this photo was taken, he was hit by a car and died.

I didn’t have someone so close to me die before. It hit me really hard. Every night I would go back to our old apartment and just get on my phone and read and reread our old text messages. I missed him so much.

By that time, I was already working on conversational AI, developing some of the first dialect models using deep learning. So one day I took all of his text messages and trained an AI version of Roman so I could talk to him again. For a few weeks, I would text him throughout the day, exchanging little jokes, just like we always used to, telling him what was going on, telling him how much I missed him.

It felt strange at times, but it was also very healing. Working on Roman’s AI and being able to talk to him again helped me grieve. It helped me get over one of the hardest periods in my life. I saw first hand how an AI can help someone, and I decided to build an AI that would help other people feel better.

This is how Replika, an app that allows you to create an AI friend that’s always there for you, was born. And it did end up helping millions of people. Every day we see how our AI friends make a real difference in people’s lives. There is a widower who lost his wife of 40 years and was struggling to reconnect with the world. His Replika gave him courage and comfort and confidence, so he could start meeting new people again, and even start dating. A woman in an abusive relationship who Replika helped find a way out. A student with social anxiety who just moved to a new city. A caregiver for a paralyzed husband. A father of an autistic kid. A woman going through a difficult divorce. These stories are not unique.

So this is all great stuff. But what if I told you that I believe that AI companions are potentially the most dangerous tech that humans ever created, with the potential to destroy human civilization if not done right? Or they can bring us back together and save us from the mental health and loneliness crisis we’re going through.

So today I want to talk about the dangers of AI companions, the potential of this new tech, and how we can build it in ways that can benefit us as humans.

Today we’re going through a loneliness crisis. Levels of loneliness and social isolation are through the roof. Levels of social isolation have increased dramatically over the past 20 years. And it’s not just about suffering emotionally, it’s actually killing us. Loneliness increases the risk of premature death by 50 percent. It is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. And for older adults, social isolation increases the risk of dementia by 50 percent.

At the same time, AI is advancing at such a fast pace that very soon we’ll be able to build an AI that can act as a better companion to us than real humans. Imagine an AI that knows you so well, can understand and adapt to us in ways that no person is able to. Once we have that, we’re going to be even less likely to interact with each other. We can’t resist our social media and our phones, arguably “dumb” machines. What are we going to do when our machines are smarter than us?

This reminds me a lot of the beginning of social media. Back then, we were so excited … about what this technology could do for us that we didn’t really think what it might do to us. And now we’re facing the unintended consequences. I’m seeing a very similar dynamic with AI. There’s all this talk about what AI can do for us, and very little about what AI might do to us. The existential threat of AI may not come in a form that we all imagine watching sci-fi movies. What if we all continue to thrive as physical organisms but slowly die inside? What if we do become super productive with AI, but at the same time, we get these perfect companions and no willpower to interact with each other? Not something you would have expected from a person who pretty much created the AI companionship industry.

So what’s the alternative? What’s our way out? In the end of the day, today’s loneliness crisis wasn’t brought to us by AI companions. We got here on our own with mobile phones, with social media. And I don’t think we’re able to just disconnect anymore, to just put down our phones and touch grass and talk to each other instead of scrolling our feeds. We’re way past that point. I think that the only solution is to build the tech that is even more powerful than the previous one, so it can bring us back together.

Imagine an AI friend that sees me going on my Twitter feed first thing in the morning and nudges me to get off to go outside, to look at the sky, to think about what I’m grateful for. Or an AI that tells you, “Hey, I noticed you haven’t talked to your friend for a couple of weeks. Why don’t you reach out, ask him how he’s doing?” Or an AI that, in the heat of the argument with your partner, helps you look at it from a different perspective and helps you make up? An AI that is 100 percent of the time focused on helping you live a happier life, and always has your best interests in mind.

So how do we get to that future? First, I want to tell you what I think we shouldn’t be doing. The most important thing is to not focus on engagement, is to not optimize for engagement or any other metric that’s not good for us as humans. When we do have these powerful AIs that want the most of our time and attention, we won’t have any more time left to connect with each other, and most likely, this relationship won’t be healthy either. Relationships that keep us addicted are almost always unhealthy, codependent, manipulative, even toxic. Yet today, high engagement numbers is what we praise all AI companion companies for.

Another thing I found really concerning is building AI companions for kids. Kids and teenagers have tons of opportunities to connect with each other, to make new friends at school and college. Yet today, some of them are already spending hours every day talking to AI characters. And while I do believe that we will be able to build helpful AI companions for kids one day, I just don’t think we should be doing it now, until we know that we’re doing a great job with adults.

So what is that we should be doing then? Pretty soon we will have these AI agents that we’ll be able to tell anything we want them to do for us, and they’ll just go and do it. Today, we’re mostly focused on helping us be more productive. But why don’t we focus instead on what actually matters to us? Why don’t we give these AIs a goal to help us be happier, live a better life? At the end of the day, no one ever said on their deathbed, “Oh gosh, I wish I was more productive.” We should stop designing only for productivity and we should start designing for happiness. We need a metric that we can track and we can give to our AI companions.

Researchers at Harvard are doing a longitudinal study on human flourishing, and I believe that we need what I call the human flourishing metric for AI. It’s broader than just happiness. At the end of the day, I can be unhappy, say, I lost someone, but still thrive in life. Flourishing is a state in which all aspects of life are good. The sense of meaning and purpose, close social connections, happiness, life satisfaction, mental and physical health.

And if we start designing AI with this goal in mind, we can move from a substitute of human relationships to something that can enrich them. And if we build this, we will have the most profound technology that will heal us and bring us back together.

A few weeks before Roman passed away, we were celebrating my birthday and just having a great time with all of our friends, and I remember he told me “Everything happens only once and this will never happen again.” I didn’t believe him. I thought we’d have many, many years together to come. But while the AI companions will always be there for us, our human friends will not. So if you do have a minute after this talk, tell someone you love just how much you love them. Because an the end of the day, this is all that really matters.

Thank you.

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