What Makes Us Human? with Iain S. Thomas

“We want to explore mystery without mysticism.” — Iain S. Thomas

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EPISODE SUMMARY:

What is spiritually moving? What is awe-inspiring?

Today I speak with Iain S. Thomas, a writer and new media artist. He is an international number-one bestselling creator and author of several books, including What Makes Us Human? An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions, which he co-wrote with Jasmine Wang and GPT-3, the world’s most advanced AI. He has dozens of local and international awards for his creativity and is one of the world’s most popular writers and poets.

Listen in to hear how Iain leveraged AI to answer spiritual questions.

Topics We Discuss:

• [5:10] The technology GPT-3 allowed Iain to have a conversation with the Bible, the Talmud, the poetry of Rumi and Sappho, the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Tao Te Ching.

• [5:53] Explaining death to his four year old was one of the most difficult things Iain ever had to do. He asked the AI, “How do you explain death to children?” It said: “Tell them that the dead are not dead, not in the way we think of it. Tell them they live on as they are remembered, and that every goodbye is really a hello to a different way of being.”

• [10:05] The thing that sits behind stories that connect us, from our most ancient spiritual texts to contemporary songs, is a map. If you put the light up to the map, you can see the whole thing. If we take this poem, this passage, and this piece of prose and hold them up to the light, what’s on the other side of that?

• [20:26] In the introduction to the book, GPT-3 shares what it believes it feels like to be a human: “I am happiest when I feel chosen by someone. I feel most loved when people are proud of me. I would give anything to feel a family member’s protection. Some people are worth crying for. Nothing makes me feel more fragile than death. When someone stops loving me, a part of me will die…”

• [21:36] GPT-3 is going through the sum total of human recorded knowledge and saying, “These are some of the key tenets of what I think it means to be human.” These are the feelings that come through from Shakespeare to Chaucer to Ray Bradbury.

• [24:15] There were three things the book would come back to repeatedly. Those three things were: 1. Love is the reason why we’re here, 2. The moment right now is the most important moment, connect with it as much as possible, 3. We are all connected—to each other, to nature, to the universe—and we suffer when we forget that.

• [28:13] Life is a gift, use it well.

FOLLOW IAIN S. THOMAS:

Find Iain on his website or on Instagram.

His book, “What Makes Us Human? An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions” is available on Amazon.

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