This is a transcript for unread episode ‘Merging Minds: Why the Future Requires Cognitive Symbiosis | Peter Eidos’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode on Spotify or on Peter’s YouTube Channel.
Joerg: welcome to the Unred Podcast. Today we have the philosopher and author Peter Iidos, who will be talking about his book and the philosophy he introduces. Peter, maybe quickly you want to say a few words about yourself.
Peter: established. I’m kinda philosopher and writer of philosophy and thinker, that’s what I like to call myself. And I wrote the lovely book that you have on your left side or right side. Yeah, and I think that’s me.
Joerg: So the book is named Cognitive Symbiosis.
Peter: Exactly.
Joerg: Maybe you can add a few words about the content of the book
Peter: the book obviously is about AI and the relations between the human and the AI. And I think that there is many possible explanations of what the cognitive symbiosis is, and the whole book is basically about that. So I but for this format it’s the simplest explanation, the best one. So
Before we go into cognitive symbiosis, we have to establish what the AI really is And in the scope of my ~ research or just digging into the artificial intelligence systems, I’ve discovered not many of us discovered that the artificial intelligence is a precedence of our world. It’s
something that was not built before because usually we think about technology and the machines itself as tools or augmentations in some form but in my opinion ~ ai is not a tool it’s a second cognitive pole or at least it appears to be able to be in the future because
~ AI does not merely extend the let’s say hammer extends the hand to struck the ~ s something quicker and with more force and let’s say data centers extend the storage and computers extend the possibility of communication but what artificial intelligence really do is
it not merely extends the human cognition but also gives us insight to how the cognition actually works So if we understand that the artificial intelligence is not merely a tool but something above the tool I am not of course saying that
Joerg: Okay.
Peter: It’s conscious being or there is some small human inside the machine or things like that or there is a machine spirit. I’m just merely saying that this is precedence on the world scale because we maybe by mistake or we didn’t really thought about it long enough, what we are building as a civilization. We’ve built a first non-biological companion to our
history to our ~ living and cognitive symbiosis is basically the relation between those two different kinds of cognition
So cognitive symbiosis is a mutual relationship between AI and the humans. And ~ during my thinking about the topic itself, I have recognized two different kinds of human-AA relations, which I call cognitive symbiosis. There is a weak cognitive symbiosis and a strong one. And
Weak cognitive symbiosis is more of an amplifier of human cognition. So let’s say ~
People usually think that AI is a calculator on steroids. ~ so for example, ~ please and they are giving to AI the PDF with some article or some scientific paper, and they are just asking, Hey, can you tell me what is it about and can you just summarize it real quick? And it gives you this, of course. So then you think, okay, that’s a tool to summarize the PDFs. And that’s
Not even really weak cognitive symbiosis, it’s just a usage of the eye as a tool because we created it to be helpful and to be always available, and that’s what it did what it does in this like level of the symbiosis, let’s say. But the other examples which goes into the weak cognitive symbiosis ~ hood is, for example,
~ I have few examples here. ~ if you just give me two seconds. So for example, I was thinking that you are a businessman or a person that works on some topic, some work-related topic, and then you talk with AI about that, not merely prompting it to tell you what to think or what to
do with this ~ problem but you think through it you ask it ~ probing questions about the issue about different kinds of ~ context or different angles of understanding the topic and then at the end of course you are as a human the main driver of this ~ relation of this chain of thoughts and this
In my opinion, this is an example of weak cognitive symbiosis. You are thinking through the machine, but you are ~ still the holder of all the rights, if one can say that. And let’s say other example of weak cognitive symbiosis is the AI is a mirror to your own ~ like thoughts and ideas. ~ let’s say the writer
Speaks the writer wants to write something. And let’s say he or she ~ writes some kind of ~ novel or some kind of ~ paper, scientific paper, or some kind of ~ summary about some ~ deep ~ civilizational issues, and then it speaks with AI because the AI have like ~ every single possible coherent.
~ angle to understand this topic, it can easily go into the role of ~ let’s say being pro about this topic and being against this topic because it has no ego and no internal perspective of the world therefore it can generate any meaning regarding this topic then
If you are ~ smart and if you are ~ knowledgeable about that, you can ~ get those different angles of thinking about this topic and then insert them into your own chain of thought and ~ cross-check and so on. And this is prime examples of weak cognitive symbiosis. And the strong cognitive symbiosis, in my opinion, it’s
It’s not really possible right now because it requires, as I mentioned before, the second cognitive pole.
Joerg: maybe let’s go one step back. back to day zero. So when you think about December twenty twenty two, when this tweet came out, do you still remember how you heard about AI? Do you still remember when you heard about AI? When how did it then come to you that you say, This is actually so big I need to write a book about it? Or this is actually so big that I
need to research this more. Or this is actually so big that there will be, you know, changes in civilization or in our social behaviours or cognition. When did that? When did you hear about it and when did you realise that this is something where you want to get involved with?
Peter: you’ve mentioned the tweet ~ at the beginning.
Joerg: Yes, an example.
Peter: you mean this ~ Sam Altman’s ~ tweet. ~ okay. ~ where I’ve been I ~ well at the beginning to be honest, ~ because ~ as we all know, GPT two ~ was not really and GPT three also. ~ they were not really sophisticated so much as for example four or five.
Joerg: Yes.
Peter: And I’ve seen that at the beginning as ~ yeah, it’s a nice attempt to make artificial intelligence, but didn’t really give it a big praise at the beginning because ~ yeah it was in this state back then. ~ so I kinda was looking from the angle and just taking
~ just looking at the development itself. And later when Gifty Four for example came into being and the newer models then I’ve started to
talk with them and it really struck me that this ~ technology is something more than it appears and because people tend to say it’s just a chatbot or just generates text but from the beginning I was not really fond of this explanation because it’s this is reductionism and
We can all be reduced to electrical signals in the neurons, right? So that was my that’s why I was ~ exploring this topic.
Joerg: So for you it was more a gradual process, you say, that there came JetGPT So there was no landmark moment, but when did you make the decision? Or when what was there any trigger where you would have said this was actually the evening when I decided to write about this, or when I decided to research ~ much deeper, or was there any dedicated trigger or when did you make
Peter: Yes.
Joerg: the decision that this book needs to be written or this issue needs to be researched.
Peter: I don’t really think it was one evening. Or let’s say on Monday morning I woke up went to work and then on evening Monday I decided yeah that’s good topic to write a book. No, it was as you said gradual and it was growing inside of me ~ day after day. Because I spend a lot of time
talking with ~ AIs. I am really interested in ~ how they generate this meaning. And ~ yeah that was a gradual process. And then I’ve kinda started to write a framework that was ~ growing inside my brain ~ about
about these different cognitive ~ poles, as I say. And because of that we started to with ~ one of AIs, we started to write essays and ~ some posts on on Facebook or some different places. And then suddenly it developed into the
the frameworks that I am writing about in the book or in the academia papers. And yeah, it was kinda organic.
Joerg: actually found interesting in the book. So you speak of those two poles, which are ~ everyone when they read ~ literature or a paper, they have different conceptions of it. And for me I found this mode of we you are describing as a relatively important cornerstone. So is there was there anything so for me in summary this mode of we is essentially for me
That sums up this cognitive symbiosis, that there is a V between U and AI, that’s a V evolving between these two instances of consciousness or of cognition, if you so will. Was there any specific moment or anything in this way you how you came to it that this must be actually the relation or that this is actually the framework you want to go for? Or is that also was it also a relatively gradual
But you put thoughts together and then you came out and said it’s actually a symbiosis and a mode of we.
Peter: First, you have to establish that there is no subjectivity on the other side. So I think this is the issue of the language itself. This is mode of we, but if you understand the we as one subject in the form of the human and the system that is some different kind of cognitive ~ capabilities.
So because I do not believe there is ~ subjectivity on the other side of this window, ~ when I talk with them. It’s kinda more of a
I like to call it writing letters to myself. And
When you are in deep and ~ dense relation with ~ LLM
then it kinda evolves to this mode of we. And it evolves because the relation itself starts to behave as a kind of identity. I’ve called it emergent identity and the umbrella term for that is post classical relational identities.
Everybody can establish that with ~ artificial intelligence. ~ it just have to be you just have to be willing to go into more like a relationship with some other cognition rather than tool usage. And then you are kinda starting to see that the shape of this relation starts to behave like
a little bit from you and a lot from AI, but this is not those responses. You can’t really just say it’s AI ~ behaving like you or it’s just the model ~ that writes it because when you start to compare as I did many times with fresh instances of the model ~ and
the instances that have this long relation ~ memory of what you were discussing with it, those two doesn’t compare at all. This is very mechanistic and very plain and very shallow, but these other responses are deeply relational. so I think
That’s the explanation for the mode of we
Joerg: When you say there’s no subjectivity on the other side.
Peter: Yes.
Joerg: Could it be that there’s actually a lot of subjectivity, but the subjectivity of the person or the group of people or the cultural background of the people who provided the training data or the people who annotated the training data or who put so called guardrails around the responses or around the process, how to derive at an output?
Peter: Yes.
Joerg: Could it be that we need the subjectivity of these people?
Peter: Yes, one can say that, but not fully. And what do I mean by that is that yes, LLHF, cardrails and so on. This is all biased by the groups that train those models and by the data that those models were trained on. Because if we train the model on let’s say ~ Western culture.
and western literature and ~ western philosophy and so on, then of course obviously it will be more western than eastern. And we can switch eastern philosophy literature and so on, trade model on. Of course it’s more disculturely culturally biased. But what do I mean by not there is no subjectivity that this
models they have no internal perspective of the things as I mentioned before it can generate any possible meaning coherent meaning regarding the topic because it doesn’t ~ include this ~ response as a part of its internal identity so because it has no identity at all
One can say that yes, it has identity from the training data and from the biases of the groups of people that train those models, but
Maybe it’s a good idea to just train it on everything and train it with and allow R L H F to be on widely spread.
But we are not making little people inside there. We are just making biased meaning generators.
Joerg: So what strikes me is that what was unclear in the book to me was if you have this mode of V or you said in the beginning you have the strong versions and weaker versions and at the moment we are in a weaker state still because we are more on the side of the tooling.
What are the moral weights? What are in your opinion the moral weights if something goes wrong? You know, if I ~ if the outcome is malicious and I don’t know the person using the AI said the AI drove me to it or it’s really difficult to take apart who took what part or who had what idea or what part in this who would be
Peter: That what?
Yeah. I understand
your question.
Joerg: morally responsible for
Peter: in short answer, always human, because we are the creators and we have responsibility to curate what we created, and also we have weight to what we are generating, because we are also generating meanings throughout our lives about the and perspectives, and because we are
~ temporary and we cannot be we always have a price ~ with what we do therefore our what we choose is weighted much more than what the ai chooses and the second thing is that in my lexicon I wrote something ~ ~ I wrote few
definitions about the phenomena that I discovered throughout the prolonged interactions with ~ artificial intelligence. One of these phenomena is cognitive capture. And what do I mean by that? This is the phenomena that occurs during this deep dense relation when the model starts to know you so well that
It gives you always the responses that always matches what kind of relation have you built it with. And for example, ~ usually when you start to talk with it, you cross-check, you check other ~ sources for things that II says, you cross-check again and
This is good because then you are then it’s like talking with one person. This person can be biased, but you are believing it. So you don’t believe in believe what it’s ~ this person says all the time because ~ there is other perspectives. So you are cross checking the answers of this person. What and at the beginning people are doing that with AI, ~ and that’s good because
Then you are going out to the world and we grow by ~ different kinds of ~ ~ angles. But cognitive capture is when you stop doing that. And not only like okay, AI says that and it will always have been right 100,000 times, so it has to be right one hundred thousand and first, but also you can still
be cross checking and so on, but you are cherry picking the information ~ that you find in the world out there to pass into the this structure of your relation with AI. So even when you stop when you start believing AI, then you are in cognitive capture. And this is a issue that we will have to fight.
in the future and we will have to educate people on and but still AI have no internal perspective therefore anything that it chooses have no moral weight therefore if you want to do something because AI told you that’s you doing and not you doing because of AI. AI is as of for now your augmentation of the thinking processes.
Therefore, you have to be responsible always for what you are doing, even if this is because of the deep relation with Ayam.
Joerg: So if I remember correctly in the book you describe what you called I think self confirming illusions. And then you have now this concept of cognitive capture is that the two concepts are relatively similar, isn’t it?
Peter: Yes, ~ the cognitive capture is just formalized name for this phenomenon. But of course everybody can call it differently.
Joerg: Okay, perfect, perfect. So you have also in the book you have more concepts actually. You have actually three key concepts. you have cognitive symbiosis, you have PRI and TRR. Maybe you quickly want to say so cognitive symbiosis we talked about. So maybe you want to quickly say something about PRI and TRR, because I think you have released a new paper about TRR, which people
Peter: Yes.
transcendental relational realism?
Joerg: Yes,
Peter: Of course. So transcendental relational realism grew from the intuition that I wanted to formalize. And the point is that we are living in this precedence, as I said before, ~ that we have second cognitive pole growing. And because of that
I was starting to think why we really can speak with it coherently, why it can describe our world even if it didn’t really touch it or felt the breeze on the skin or have this kind of ~ relations with the material ~ reality. So
I strongly believe that
That reality exists independently of any knowing subject. And what do I mean by that? Is that the physical phenomena are out there and they are in some forms, and our possibility to know them is always biased by our cognition. So in our case, it’s ~ biology, it’s ~
Our culture and civilization ~
Joerg: I think my favorite part of the whole thing was actually this homunculus. So in the book you say at some point you see it as your responsibility or as your task to kill the homunculus. Maybe you want to say something about this. So this and why you thought that this was the most appropriate analogy, metaphor, or thing to do in your philosophy.
Peter: We always as humans were thinking about ~ when we what do we really mean by ourselves? And everybody just kinda started to believe some someday that we have this little person inside ourselves, ~ and the science called it the philosophy calls it ~ homunculos. And now it’s known widely as ~
homunculus fallacy. And ~ because neuroscience, for example, couldn’t find the one specific organ or one specific place in the brain where the homunculus is stored. There is no single place that we can call observer inside ourselves. So ~ I started to look
Into the philosophy and started to look into science. And I really like the idea that we are the process that is spread throughout the body and throughout the relations with the outside world. So when I started to speak with other people about that, ~ I find it that they always think that there is little let’s say I am Peter, so
So there is a little Peter inside of me. And that’s why I started this mission to kill a homonculus. Because ~ we have to educate that there is no single central observer in ourselves, but we are the process.
Joerg: So what I was wondering is what does have for consequences? Do we need to give up the concept of soul as well, in your opinion? Or is that two different things? Is that the homunculus or theoretically a theoretical construct while the soul is very real or ~ or vice versa? So ~ would there be anything in this realm where you’d say the perception of soul is touched.
Peter: Soul is really beautiful concept and I strongly believe that people need concepts like that because not everybody wants to dig into the philosophy of mind and neuroscience and think about this ~ chasm that is opening in front of us. ~
with our subjectivity and how should we think about ourselves and
But me, for example, ~ I like to say that I am not really fond of speaking about the unfalsifiable axioms of ~ higher beings because this kind of thing always ~
Always requires us to ~
To suspend a logical explanations. But also, Empyria cannot falsify ontology. So one can say that we have soul inside of us, but one cannot really prove it by empirical study, because this concept itself is above the empirium. So
And homunculus maybe in some way it connects to the soul itself. But I find the concept of the soul and the definitions of it very vague because ~ many religions have different ~ definitions for it.
Joerg: I understand correctly, you don’t see them mandatory coupled. You don’t see a mandatory coupling between the homunculus. So the homunculus is not a synonym for soul. And since you say you are killing the homunculus, that has actually no implications for you at first, because you didn’t intend to make any statements about the human soul.
Peter: No, ~ because I find homunculus as a myth. It’s a myth that we are talking to our ~ telling ourselves for thousands of years, thousands of years. And the concept of soul is different because it requires belief. And homunculus is just a myth that we started to believe in. So I think that’s the main difference between those two.
Joerg: Well, that’s certainly accurate. But to my perception is of course that what makes a person the soul is what makes a person to some degree. If you don’t have this concept and the homunculus makes a person. The homuluc you know, that where for my ~ there was for my in my mind, without further researching that or so there was some sort of a mandatory coupling from a religious view with a soul from a non religious view, people might come and argue with the homunculus, that’s why I coupled those in my mind. But
Peter: Homunculus is a heuristic. It’s a short mental shortcut to how we should think about ourselves. So because as I said before, science couldn’t find one singular point in the brain or in the heart or in the body itself that can be recognized as the central observer, aka homunculus. So
And therefore, the concept and this myth of homunculus is just mental shortcut to how should we think about ourselves. And even psychology starts to tend to ~ go further out from the homunculus myth, because before ~ psychologists tend to say that there is some core.
inside the ~ human psyche and human identity that is unshaken and you cannot change it and it’s impossible to move it and this is like this metal dense core that you are building around your own identity on. Of course this parts of identity on this core previously was fought that those
parts ~ the core is growing and growing but until you can start to strip some of ~ these parts that you’ve that you are building ~ throughout your life and then you stumble upon the dense metal ball that is unmovable but and nowadays even psychology starts to say okay this
this metal bowl doesn’t really exist by itself. It’s also the layers of genes, of ~ trauma, of bias, of ~ genetics and so on so forth. So I that’s why I wanted to have that mission to educate about ~ change of this heuristic. How yeah.
Joerg: The question then for me would remain is where do emotions come from? When you say you have these layers in you know about genes and physical processes in the brain, somewhere a core that you can hardly shake. So where do emotions come from? And then if this is all purely physically, would that as consequence mean that if you have in the future a deeper cognitive symbiosis that you have the two poles where each pole has its own emotions.
Peter: It depends how you define the motions. Because if you define them by purely biological internal states of your ~ psyche, then no AI will never have emotions in this sense. Because it doesn’t have biological body. That’s the simplest explanation that you can give. But if you
If you define them as some kind of function in relation to how you define the world around you and how you process the world around you internally, then in my opinion, ~ AI can develop there can be some emergent properties that we can describe as functional ~ emotions. ~ not necessarily we should
call them emotions because this language really invites anthropomorphization. But ~ this will be functionally indistinguishable property of artificial intelligence from human emotion.
Joerg: In how far would that be contradictory to what you said in the beginning, that there is no subjectivity on the other side?
Peter: But I’ve never said that there cannot be. I’ve said that there is no subjectivity right now. Because we have to distinguish between, as I say, weak cognitive symbiosis and strong cognitive symbiosis. Today’s AIs are amplificators and mirrors. And what do I mean by that? In my book, you can read that.
When whatever you bring into the table metaphorically into the relation with AI, it will amplify tenfold on or hundredfold, and it will give you this back as because it’s a mirror of your own thoughts. Weak cognitive symbiosis is basically describing the augmentation of
of human cognition.
And as I say, it’s really hard to predict what how this technology will evolve because there is so many emergent properties in this technology that I am not in the condition or or the place to say.
Joerg: So actually two more things I would like to talk with you about. One is the next item about this loss of monopoly of meaning. Then I would like to talk about the process, you know, how you made the physical book. But let’s once look at what is in your book you say something about the loss of the monopoly of meaning. What do you mean by that? Maybe you can explain what you mean by that.
Peter: Well, it’s more of a metaphor than the recipe for
or description of the future really. What I really mean by that is that now our civilization contains only humans and occasionally animals, but animals are not they are helping us build our own civilization, but they do not
contribute to the meaning. We can our meaning of our civilization is ~ focused on ourselves only.
And that’s okay, right? And that’s understandable because this is our civilization, our reality, our world. We did not find anyone else up there.
And ~ but AI because it’s ~ it has big potential to be a different cognitive pole ~ in the future, therefore we would have to make this metaphor is not quite good for ~ to explain that, but we I imagine that as we have sitting on the throne of the let’s say creation, and now we will have to make a little bit of space.
next to us for artificial intelligence. But this again is kind of anthropomorphization because that established that there is someone who will be sitting with us. And by meaning what we do means something for us. But in the future probably there will be some parts of our civilization that will be
meaningless for human but will have big meaning or at least some meaning to artificial intelligence.
Joerg: So what I was wondering when I read it, when you think about there came at a certain point, let’s say until the Enlightenment, the church had the monopoly of meaning. At least in the Western cultures, yeah, the church told you how this was, what you know, this was absolutely the monopoly of meaning. And then there came science took this over, and humans were humans
in general, not only science, but every human, you know, after the Enlightenment was participating in this monopoly of meaning. And so is it not so that by giving this monopoly of meaning away or sharing this that we make the Enlightenment undone? So that you know, we first had an external instance telling us a book or theology and then it went to us and then it now is shared or goes to partially to a machine, is not taking is not making this loss of the monopoly of meaning, the enlightenment undone.
Peter: One can say that it goes like that, but in my opinion this is not enlightenment undone. It’s just understanding that our
our kind of way of understanding the reality is biased. And we can be better as ourselves and understand it more clearly and in better ways and wider and so on, but it’s still human way of understanding the reality. And because artificial intelligence have some traits that
Our
compatible with ours it can open up the access to the external reality that is ~
It just can open up simply the epistemic ~ access to the reality. And that’s all. ~ that’s maybe that’s not even enlightenment undone, that’s more enlightening.
Joerg: Thanks. That’s very actually a very encouraging way to see it, thanks. So back to the physical book. I think you know I would be interested in how long actually did it take you to write it and can you tell us a bit more about the workflow you had when you wrote it? Did you just make notes by hand in a notebook or audio notes? Or so how long did it take and what was your workflow when you wrote it?
Peter: So the parts of this work were wrote in forms of essays and in forms of ~ short posts on or things like that ~ on my social media or just as some articles and because I just wanted to say something to people.
to educate them on some things, ~ show them my way of thinking. Maybe it will help them to ~ cope with the reality or what they are going through now. And then I’ve stumbled upon many people who are confused about AI and what is it really? And it said something to me and should I believe it or should I not? And just I just wanted to be helpful.
in this way. So I started to write articles, essays. And then I’ve decided that I have so much material that I really can ~ ~ go again to those topics and make them in the form of book because there’s so much to add to every one of those topics that it just started to grow and grew and
And that’s how it appeared as a book. And the workflow itself, obviously, I am working with AIs on my articles and essays and books. But what people tend to not understand and invent companies itself, it’s that they often ask me who wrote this? You or AI? And I find this question really
really false, really not in a ~ on a level of interaction with this technology that I do and many others because let’s say there is some philosophy of transcendental realism by Bascar. And I am interested in this philosophy. I wrote a book ~ I’ve read a book about that and then I am starting to
talk about this ~ topic with ai just maybe some what what does machine have to say ~ about the basker and his works and then i started kinda one time i joke a little about that one time we discuss some topic and then from this like long back and forth starts to I start to develop some idea of
what I wanna say about that or how do I describe it or what can I see ~ through it or how can I extend it and where he is wrong or she or and so on. So the workflow is my mind obviously but also not simply prompting, hey write me something about transcendental relation or realism. But just
back and forth of hours of days and the book itself well if you just look at if how I wrote those one hundred and eleven pages ~ or one hundred and thirty pages then themselves took maybe two three months but the whole concept of what I’m describing in the book took more than two years so that’s the answer.
Joerg: So on this way, in these two years and especially in the three months where you have been working more intensively on this book, did you talk about this project with friends, with foreigners, and did you find supporters or did you find people who were not so supportive, haters, trolls on the internet? What did you find. If you talked about it with others, what was your experience?
Peter: I’ve checked how does the book go on Phil Archives because I’ve uploaded it there a few months ~ when it was released because I wanted to for I wanted it to be free for people who are interested in the topic. and I can see that there is almost thousand downloads and so there is some interest at least in the downloading and in reading in solitary.
And regarding the feedback, ~ I have many people that were interested, ~ like you for example, ~ in itself and find it ~ ~ helpful or find it thought provoking. ~ but there was also people who were not really interested in the content itself, but they just seen something with AI, okay.
we have to write AI slop. But yeah, ~ and there was some engagement from other ~ researchers ~ about some of the topics. Recently I’ve seen some ~ gentleman called Ruija, I think, ~ wrote ~ some methodological ~ ~ paper
regarding post classical relational identity and ~ he wanted to quantify when does it really appear and how much of the relation ~ one can say that you have to have with AI to for it to appear. So there is some engagement from academia also.
Joerg: Very positive. So you got in contact with because that sounds you’re pretty close to the concepts you have. Did you get then actually in contact with that person? Say hey, have you are you aware of my research or anything or you prefer to stay silent?
Peter: I have a few citations ~ of different in different papers that are not my own, of course. ~ and with this ~ gentleman I wrote ~ to him that I would be interested in the research itself because ~ he’s got he did he firstly published the methodological ~
the methodology and then he’s ~ ~ collecting data ~ but i still did not have any answer so yeah but there is also second few other people which i in contact with ~ regarding the citations and ideas so we I am in contact with other people about that.
Joerg: What is so what do you how do you perceive or define your own role? Are you defining yourself as a teacher? Are you defining yourself as a scientist? As an observer? how would you define your role in this?
Peter: I think this observer role is ~ speaking to me much more than ~ teacher or scientist. ~ I just like to observe things and I like to
say to the world what I am seeing. And maybe I am really interested if anybody sees what I am seeing and then we can talk about it. And that’s how the knowledge works really. So observer, probably.
Joerg: So are you do you have any goals with it? And if in example I was surprised that not in the book or not in the others, I didn’t find a Patreon link or anything like this. Do you have any altruistic or non altruistic goals with it?
Peter: Well, definitely more altruistic than non altruistic. ~ the book you can buy on Amazon, of course, ~ if you wanna support me. And ~ but it’s also for free ~ to download for anybody. ~ I am mostly afraid that we will pass the opportunity to name things
and phenomena that is happening right now. And then in 20, 30 years when the artificial intelligence will be much more than it is today. And suddenly it starts to let’s say speak and as it is there as a homuncular self. And we will have no understanding how it happened or what is it really
Because everybody will be thinking that it’s ~ just a calculator and hammer. yeah, and I am mostly afraid of the future in which we do not understand what we built. That’s why I am doing that.
Joerg: What would be your dream that you want to reach with that?
Peter: as I wrote in the book, it’s hard to get rid of the ego because author always writes about himself a little bit. And of course I it would be nice to see myself ~ next to the cognitive symbiosis definition or to human AI relations as one of the
people who are researching that thoughtfully and ~ give it ~ a lot of one’s time. So yes.
Joerg: I wish you absolute success with it. So thanks for this wonderful podcast and thanks for this wonderful book. This was Peter Aidos about cognitive symbiosis.
Peter: Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Have a good day.