Can AI Become Conscious? What Does That Mean About Your Soul? - with Bruce D. Randall | EP 511

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Close your eyes and imagine. What if the things in life that caused us the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, are challenges. Challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried, but what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth, and I am your host, Brian Smith. Brian Smith here. Welcome back to Grief to Growth, or if this is your first time with this, welcome. This shows about making sense of life, especially when life doesn't make sense. We talk about grief, loss, and the questions that keep us up at night. Who are we? Where do we go when we die? And what happens when the world we built starts moving faster and understanding of what it even means to be human. I bring on guests to help illuminate the path, no matter how unfamiliar the terrain feels. In a day's conversation to take to somewhere, I wasn't sure the show would actually go. But Bruce Randall spent 25 years in the rooms where the future gets decided, leading cloud and AI transformation at companies like Oracle and AT&T. And somewhere along the way, he became just as fluent in stillness as he is in systems. Bruce is also a Reiki master. He's an author and he spent his career living inside a paradox. Most of us are just now starting to feel the edges of how do we build something that thinks without losing the part of us that feels? In this episode, we're going somewhere I think a lot of you have been quietly wondering about, even if you haven't said it out loud. We're going to talk about what happens at the meeting point of artificial intelligence or AI, quantum computing and the human soul and whether a machine could ever actually become aware. And why that question alone might force us to finally answer what awareness even is in ourselves. Bruce and I are going to start with the paradox he writes about in his upcoming book, The AI Human Paradox. Where exactly do we draw the line between enhancing ourselves and losing ourselves? And because Bruce's own path runs through meditation and inner work, as much as it runs through boardrooms, we're going to talk about what it actually means to bring soul into a conversation the world keeps trying to make purely technical. So if you've ever felt that flicker of unease watching the world changes fast, and I think maybe all of us have, wondering what's actually been asked of you as a human in the middle of it, this one's for you. If you're the one who lies awake at night wondering whether the soul has a place at the table, when the table is made of silicone, stay close. I think this conversation is going to meet you right there. And if you want to continue the conversation after the episode, head over to grief2growth.substack.com and you'll find an article about today's discussion where you can comment and connect with me with other listeners. So with that, let's welcome Bruce Randall. Hi Brian, thanks very much. I'm happy to be here today. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to have this conversation. We have a lot in common. We both started with a kind of technical background and you moved into the world of Reiki. I started, I was an engineer, chemical engineer, worked for IBM and some microsystems and moved into this world of spirituality. So we're, we're at a point now where our technology is really making us all question what it even means to be human. So let's start off by talking about, let's talk about the easy question. What is consciousness? The easy question. You know, consciousness is hard to describe. I do it in my book. I describe what it is to me to give context to everybody. And, and to me, it's, it's knowing things that I didn't know and I'm confident I know them and I don't know why I know them. I just know them and they're always right. I mean, I've even, I've even saved the life through this. When I didn't know what I was doing, I just went with it. And all of a sudden I was in a situation where somebody was choking. It was a snowstorm and I had to, had to act and they did and they saved the life. Now that wasn't me wanting to go on the snowstorm. It was something moving my body and I decided to go with it and that's what happened. So consciousness is, it's something that we all have. Some of us develop it more than others. Everyone can develop it. And as you develop it, you start to expand your inside in your consciousness. And then who knows where it goes? Cause everybody has different paths. It's just that you start to experience more. Yeah. So tell me how you got involved in the world of AI. Well, I was, I had done the cloud, you know, dance for a number of years. And then, you know, the world changed. Oracle changes things, you know, every so many years. And I said, well, this is interesting at this point. What do I do? So I knew AI was coming and I was curious with that. And when I saw neurolink, Nolan is the first implant that they did. And Nolan on an interview said, you know, the mouse always goes where I, where I think it to go. But sometimes it goes before I think, but it always goes to the right spot. That's precognition. And I said, that's amazing. And now we're bridging the gap between technology and consciousness. And that's when I decided to write my first book, the AI human paradox, because I said, how do we bridge AI and consciousness? It's like oil and water, right? One's technology and one's human. And how do you bridge the gap? You can put a chip in somebody and you can help them, but then all their thoughts are recorded. Who owns the thoughts, right? That's, that question hasn't come up yet. But the point is that there's a way to get the two to work together with. And I, in my book, I found what that is and it's up to us to expand our inner self at the same time that we, you know, use more technology. So for those who don't know, describe what Neuralink is. Neuralink is Elon Musk's company where he was trying to help quadriplegics function again in society. And he had an idea because he has, he started, you know, a couple AI companies and he understands it, that if he connected the brain to a chip that could interpret, then he could help people that have disabilities become more part of society. And he's done 12 so far, but Nolan was the first one where he puts the chip on the brain and they put these little wires into the brain and it's done with a robot because a person can't be that precise. And then the thoughts are transferred through the chip into the computer and the computer responds in moving the mouse with his thoughts. And that's, that's amazing how that is done because it actually brings together humans and technology, which, you know, theoretically couldn't be done, but now we've got the first instances where they are brought together and that opens up a whole list of other questions about that. Now when you say moving the mouse, we're talking about a computer rodent. It's the, it's the cursor on the computer that he moves with his thoughts. Okay. Yeah. And the thing is, so people might be saying, okay, why are we talking about AI on a podcast about, about grief? But, but grief is about consciousness. Grief is about, you know, we, what are we as a human being? What, what, what dies when, when we die, for example, and what, and what goes on. So AI is forcing us to answer these questions. And we've got this, this interface that you're talking about now that we can see that people are somehow consciousness is being transferred to a computer screen. We all familiar with chat GPT and Claude and all those things that are making us really question, are these things conscious? Maybe it would help to tell you how I got to where I am now. Yeah, please. In 2020, everybody has a story about life, right? Because it was difficult. Well, my 2020, I was displaced from work a week before my stepmother had to go into home hospice. And I was taking care of them for the last five years. They lived separately, but I, I was here a couple times a day when I didn't travel. And then a few days later, my dad had a stroke, was in the hospital for a week, couldn't see him, couldn't, you know, because COVID picked him up, brought him home within two, two or three days, he was in home hospice. And I had two in home hospice. And, you know, it's, it's traumatic, different medications and so forth. His wife went into kind of like a coma within the first 30 hours after she was off her meds. And my father was still, you know, moving around with the oxygen. They're both on oxygen. And then she passed away. And within 24 hours, he passed away. And he wanted to live an hour longer than she did. So then so that happened, I went home and talked to my, my fiance, and she was very despondent. And I said, you know, strangers hugged me, and that's all I got. So our relationship ended. And then, about a month later, when I when I went on vacation for the summer, my dog had sick and my dog died. And I said, you know, take me now because I don't need to be here anymore. You've taken everything that means anything to me, right. And of course, that didn't work out. So I had to work through it. And in working through it, that is enough to change a person. And it changed me in ways that I don't understand, where I understood things a lot more because of what I experienced and the depths that I went. And then I decided that I was going to because I was, you know, I was Reiki master then and I was meditating for 20 years, I decided to take a course on AI. So I took a data science course at MIT, to understand what happens in back, how does AI work? And I really wanted to understand that so I could write about it. And then I joined, I got a course on how to build an AI app. And I haven't built anything in my entire life, I can talk about it, but I didn't know how to build it. And then I built my first AI app in eight weeks and it worked. And then I built my second one that's going to go on my website, because it's it aggregates AI and quantum news and populates it every day. And I said, you know, if I can do this at my age, anybody can do this. And I started to write the first book. It was, you know, almost 1000 pages, because I didn't follow the outline. Like, what do I do with this? So I split it into three, it's a trilogy. And, and I said, Well, that makes sense. So I have three, the first two books are out of the third one is coming out soon. And, and then I wrote a fourth one on the end of smart, which is about my toils and trying to find a job when the world changed, and nothing works like it did. You know, so that brought me to understanding AI, and it became a passion. So I understand AI. And then I had to understand quantum. And I've got a large paper that I wrote on my website, explaining it so people understand, because quantum is a mystery to most people. And, and I try and bring this together to help people expand their consciousness to become more aware. Because in the coming years, expanding who we are and knowing who we are, at a deeper level, is how we keep separate from the technology. And that's real important. Okay, this is crazy. I was listening to my ambialics podcast this morning, but when I took my walk this morning, and they were talking about AI, and this person that was on the podcast said almost it was Dr. Diane Hennessy, who's done work with autistic people, she's been on telepathy tapes. And they said almost exactly what you just said word for word, that the way that we you know, the LLMs now could process language better than most of us can. The thing is, we have to keep expanding who we are as human beings, as as they take over those more mundane things. So that's that's expanding our consciousness. And, and AI and quantum are two things that we all hear about all the time, particularly AI, and most of us have no idea how it works. It's like a magic black box to us. That's exactly right. And that's why I'm trying to explain to people. So they understand the difference. And I in my book, my first book, I talk about consciousness, and about technology and how it's important to keep that divide. Because we have a problem with Generation Z right now. They even have boyfriends and girlfriends. Yeah, on the computers, they're, they're depressed. And they're not a lot of them are depressed. And a lot of them are socializing. And I'm writing a book with somebody right now about that to say, well, you've got to, you've got to break away from that, you know, little steps. Because if you stay here, nothing good is going to happen. Yeah. Yeah, it's really making us question who we are. You know, what, what is what is another human being? And I agree with you, I think some of these people, I feel so sorry for them, because I think if, if something can interact with me and give me language back, then it's then it's human, it's conscious. And even worse, now we're building robots. So now we can, you know, sit with them physically. And I think people are losing, you know, what a human is. I think you're absolutely right on that. And I think it's very important to be reminded of what is human with the greatest things on this earth. We have capabilities that most of us don't understand. We have. And if you develop yourself, you develop the intuition to know what's accurate and what's not accurate, and what seems right and what doesn't seem right. Because when I was writing the third book, the QA, I advantage the script for quantum and AI come together. I ran into two articles where the title said one thing, and the article said something else. And it was all factually true. But if you didn't read the article, you look at the title, you have totally opposite opinion as to what was fact. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen that a lot. You know, we call it clickbait now, you know, yeah, and it's happening all over. And when I'm getting it in research articles, and, and you have to go and look at who wrote it, and what their motivations were, you start to determine what is accurate and what is I got to look into this. And I talk about it in my third book, because so many people just see something and the internet is supposed to be true, right? And they believe everything and probably not everything on the internet is true. Yeah, a lot of it's not true. Yeah, well, yeah, and I know we can't we can't do it today. But for people as much as we can, let's just try to help people get an understanding of what what AI is, and what AI isn't. AI is is is a platform that gives you really good answers through probabilities. Okay, it's different ways of parsing data in the back end. So depending on what you put in the box, if you put in a question in two different ways, you're going to get different answers, because it takes your words and the probability of each word being linked together, and goes and finds what links to that and brings it back to you. So if you change it, you're going to get different, different answers. That's pure logic. It's hardware. It's, it's software that's learning all the time from the inputs. And it seems sometimes that it understands you, because you can communicate you better with English, and give you answers like they know you, how can they know this, they must know me to answer like this. But it's pure electronics, it's software, it's, it's artificial intelligence. What we have is we have the ability to think. AI doesn't. We have the ability to feel AI doesn't. We have the ability to, to think, Hey, this doesn't seem right. And this does seem right. Let me look into it and get the truth. Because the truth is what matters. It's not our understanding is good. But our understanding a lot of times is flawed, based on what we input. So we have to learn how to input things that we know are true, we can verify versus what we think are true, because that skews our understanding of things. Yeah, there's a there's a thought experiment I remember hearing about once it was about like, if you put a person in a box, and you had a say, a Chinese to English dictionary and English to Chinese dictionary, and you can and some person you put like, Chinese in and he would take it and translate to English and give it to the other person on the other side who spoke English, and vice versa, it would seem like the person in the box understood Chinese and English, and they really didn't understand either. And I think it's a great analogy for the way I perceive AI anyway, it seems like it understands, but it doesn't. And it's funny, there's there's some things going viral kind of on Facebook now, or a guy will ask AI how many hours are in the word strawberry? A very simple thing that a five year old can answer and it cannot tell you how many hours are in the word strawberry. So while it can do phenomenal things, it can analyze, you know, medical situations, it can tell you that cancer is coming before it's even there. It can't do something really simple. Right. And there's a disparity. And that's what's very unhuman like, because you can only do what the program tells it to do or what knowledge it has, we can learn, we can understand, we can parse data together to get a different understanding. And I can't do that. If it's not data that they can link to, they don't know. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's really, I mean, for me, I would like to really excited by having this conversation with you, because I use AI literally every day now. And it's a phenomenal tool. I also see the things that it can't do. And it can cause you to make huge mistakes. One time, I told Claude, I said, I'm doing this thing on sub stack, and I'm writing an article about it. I want to tell my readers, whatever you do, don't flip the switch because get wiped out all the work you've already done. And I just told Claude that, and it said, why don't you when you're for the sake of writing the article, flip the switch to show your users what would happen. And I said, I just told you, I don't want to do that. So you have to be really careful with this. Yeah, and AI, when it brings up information you ask for, you know, sometimes it's just not accurate. Yeah. So it can't tell between truth and not truth on certain end of those things, it just shows it to you. And for kicks, I put, I put one of my books in and I said, critique my book, right. And it gave me some suggestions. And I went and I searched, you know, the sources. They didn't exist. Yeah, I'm like, oh, can you suggest a source for something that you think I should do that isn't existing? Yeah, yeah, we call it hallucination, you know, and so again, it's, it's, it's really important, I think, for people to understand what it is and what it isn't. And not to treat it like it's all knowing, because it's certainly not right. But it's also not, you know, it's also, it's also pretty amazing. It is, it is amazing. But as a human, I'm responsible for the output. And it's getting better hallucination. But I've seen it do that. It'll, it'll, it'll suggest sources, names, names, titles of books that don't exist. Right? Yeah. And that's, you have to be very careful with that. Because you know, number one, it's a waste of time. But number two, if that if it gives if it's giving you some things that aren't accurate, what about the other things it's giving you have to question the whole thing now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So when it comes to, you know, AI and consciousness, and we've talked about consciousness, and you know, and the materialists call it the hard problem of consciousness. Yeah, because they don't, they first of all, they can't define consciousness, we all know we have it, we all know it's when this is, we all know what it is, because we all have it, but we can't define it. And they can't define, you know, they can't tell you where it came from. So when it comes to AI and consciousness, what are your thoughts about, is it even possible for silicon to become conscious? You know, it goes back to the old story is, you know, they say that Iraq is consciousness, but it's at such a low level, we can't understand it. I know people that communicate with trees, I communicate with dogs. I mean, I don't understand how it works. I just know that if I try certain things happen, yeah, I can, and in this world, I can, I can make things happen, like things that I want, I can put it out there and it happens. I don't know how it works. Yeah, it's just because I'm fairly advanced in that. I'm like, I don't know how it works. But I know it works. It's trial error and understanding what works and what doesn't. And it's like, and this is a really good example that I've put in my book. You're ready to leave the day. It's a beautiful day outside, sun's out, not a cloud in the sky. And you say, gee, you should bring in a breath today. And you said, I don't need an umbrella. It's a beautiful day. And then you go out and you get caught in a downpour. And you're like, shoot, I should have brought the umbrella. And you say, you know, I got to listen to myself more often. That's your consciousness talking to you at a very basic level. And when you develop that, you get a lot more. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a really good point. I would call that intuition. Yeah. But yeah, and for me, that's been a real struggle because I'm, again, I'm an engineer and I was, and I've always been like, think, think things through, think things through logically. And now I, you know, I'm like, okay, you need to listen more to that other part of yourself that says, take an umbrella, even though it's, it's a beautiful day out. That's, that's what I would call it like our intuition. That's that connection to something that we can't really, you know, define. And you made it, you brought up another really great point, I think about consciousness, because, you know, there are there is a system of belief that says everything is consciousness. Everything has consciousness at some level, which really makes this whole AI thing, you know, maybe not so cut and dried. Well, you know, AI is is silicon, it's a chip. Yeah, silicon can do some pretty amazing things. They're mean, there's some consciousness in there, but you know, there's a lot of other things in there. And that's why, when it came to quantum, and the mystery of quantum, I decided to write a paper just so I could get a better understanding, because you can write about something, you research it and you get a lot, you know, you make it makes a lot more sense. And like I said, I gave it to my wife, and I said, Can you understand this, you can get through the first paragraph. Yeah. So together, we normalize it's on my website. Quantum comes from the electronic properties of two atoms, they create a charge and that's quantum. It's not a thing, a place, it's a charge. And the paper explains it very well, but that it gives you the crux of what quantum is because people think it's hardware. It's not it's two atoms interacting in a certain way to create a resonance that can answer a question. And that is really the crux of what quantum is. And it's not what most people think. Yeah, I'm thinking about, you know, this this idea of what what it means to be human, because there are there are people who believe that the universe is deterministic, and that humans are basically just robots. And we have no free will that just if you knew all the inputs, you could determine the output. Now, most of it, again, that's not our lived experience, is that we do make decisions and we do hold people accountable for the decision because we we have determined that people do have will up into this point in our history, you know, especially with computers, for example, we knew exactly how they operated. You knew if you put this input in, you're gonna get this input out. And that that was kind of like the model that people have some people offer humans. But now computers are acting more like us, as you said, we we don't know what the output is going to be. So there is this, I guess, inclination, make this leap to they must be like us. Yeah, and that's what most people understand because when you talk to somebody and you get a connection with them, and you say this person understands me. Now you transfer that to AI, and you get that same feeling from AI. So you give it humanistic properties, because you meet somebody that you think understands you now that the AI understands you, it's the same transference. And that's where people get that from. And to your comment, living in a, you know, like a matrix or where everything's supposed to happen, I have a little different experience with that that I'd like to share. Yeah, please. So my, my Yogi that has taught me for a few decades, when he was born, he came in, he came into this world saying, shoot, what am I doing back here again? Right? And he couldn't speak, right? But he's like, how did this happen? I didn't plan to come back here, right? So he went through life and so forth. But his, his view on it, which to me makes sense based on what I've independently read and researched is that when we're born, we decide where to come in for the life experience to learn our lessons. And there's a wide guard rail, like you're going to go through this life, you're going to have, you're going to have to have certain, you know, experiences, but inside those guard rails, you can make all the decisions you want. And it's not going to impact the main part. So you have free will in there, but you can't go beyond these imaginary guard lines and who knows where they are. But so you go through life, you make your own decisions, you have experiences and certain experiences you're supposed to have for growth. And then, you transition. And then what happens after that, a lot of theory, some people they say, come back, some people don't. That's a whole nother topic, right? Yeah, that's, that's the way I've come to view it. I think I think that's exactly what I'm going to do. And again, we, we tend to want to choose either or either, either it's all wild and open and there's no, there's no plan. There's no, there's no set path or it's all deterministic. You know, I said that, that Newtonian model, the universe, it's like, you know, the gods, the clockmaker that set it in motion and everything is determined. But again, our experience is that there is free will. And then this is the thing I could say about AI, I think they can really force us to really go deep into some of these thought experiments, because it's like, is this thing becoming human? And people even talked about like AI rights, you know, if we have an AI and it becomes sentient in the way that we understand sentient is having lived experiences, then is it right to ever shut it off? You know, because it's like taking a life. That's right. And when that happened, I said, Oh, my gosh, we're here already. Yeah, yeah. They're going to treat them like people. Oh, now we're in trouble. Yeah. Well, it's, it's really scary because there's this idea, as I say this a little bit, I know a little bit about it, you know, of quality, right? So it's like, I know what an apple tastes like. I know what the color red looks like. As far as we know, AI doesn't have that ability, it, you know, it can approximate, it can talk about it, because it's red, what humans have said, but it doesn't know what it's like to feel the sun on its skin doesn't have skin. And that's a very good question. Because in in certain AIs, if you ask for a certain color, if you're creating something, it, for the life of whatever, it cannot get the color right. Yet if you go to another AI that's trained on colors, it gets the color quickly and you can move on. So it's based on the training of the AI, that's going to be able to give you the result you want. And that's why I use four or five different AIs, because it depends on what I'm trying to do. Yeah, yeah, that reminds me, there's a guy who does, he does these things with AI to make it look silly. And he gets a Facebook following, he puts balls under cups. And he's moving the cups around saying which cup is the ball under and, you know, again, we could track it with our eyes. He's even done it with clear cups, where you could see the ball under the cup, but it still gets it wrong because it's trained on tracking the cups and it loses track. Right? Yeah, and it can't, it can't see, like we can see, it's different. So it can't, it can't look at that, because it's not trained to look at that. It's trained to look at the positioning. Yeah, yeah. So it's, like I said, it's really fascinating. So what we talked before and I said, you know, there, there is this fear. There's, there's either people that go one extreme or the other, either AI is going to take over the world where it's going to be Skynet, and we're going to all become slaves to it. Or we're going to live in a paradise because AI is going to solve all of our energy problems and we won't have to work anymore. What are your thoughts on either extreme? Well, I, you know, there's no way to tell the future and, and the way it's going now, you can get both views depending on how you, how you look at it. But I think it's going to be somewhere in the middle because like I'm a, I'm a regular guy I've been in business for decades. I'm involved in two new technologies. One has to do with energy, which is something that is going to revolutionize that industry. And the others, based on cybersecurity, and it's going to revolutionize that industry based on who created with something that couldn't be done. So if I'm one person and I've got two of these things that I'm I'm working with, you know, with other people, how many other people are like me that we don't know about that are working on other similar opportunities or technologies. I think that what AI does and quantum does, and it allows everybody to work on it at their own level. And it's not, it's not combined in one view, it's all a bunch of millions of individualized views. And how many people are going to come up with something that none of us thought of that's going to impact our lives. And that's the part that I think is really hard to understand, because I'm I've got two technologies I'm involved with, and they're quite honestly, the billion dollar opportunities, right? And how many other like that? It's just, it's just it's propagating opportunities that we never had before, if you understand it, and you can use it in a way that benefits humanity instead of driving the dollar. Okay, and that's how I kind of look at it. Yeah, yeah, it's Yeah, it's really, um, I think about like, when I was younger, I still do like, like, well, my grandmother was born, you know, the technology exists, exists today was not even imaginable. I mean, you just you could not imagine that we'd have the internet, or we'd be able to talk wire. I remember when I was working for IBM and they developed Bluetooth. And we're all of us were like, what is Bluetooth in there? Oh, it's a low powered wireless network. We're like, what's that good for? What are you going to do with it? Because nobody can imagine Bluetooth headphones, you know, so we we don't even know what we don't know, we have we have no idea where where it's going to go. And on the fear side of it, you know, I think the least to me and tell me whether you agree or not, a lot of the fear we have is based upon our egos and our wills. So we say if I had that kind of power, I would take over the world. I don't believe AI has will or ego. What are your thoughts on that? I don't think it does either. Although, you know, there's been a couple of instances where the guard rails were down when they were developing and yes, AI get out and infiltrated something I'm like, so did they train it to do that? Just do that? So I mean, these are the questions we don't know, right? It's very odd that something like that would happen. And maybe it's just doing what software does when you know, when it gets out of the sandbox and is unrefined. I don't have the answers, but it's very curious to me that that happened a couple times. And I have I have more questions than I have answers right now on that. Yeah, it makes me because I guess it's really a philosophical thing. And maybe just my wishful thinking that it doesn't have will or doesn't have ego. But if you train something to optimize for something, you know, and it doesn't have morals either, right? So it might say the best way to save the planet is to kill all the humans, because the planet would be better off without humans, the animals would thrive. And we have, you know, pollution will go away and earth would be great. And we like if we forget the program that part in about saving the humans, yeah, that could be an obvious answer. Well, there's a paper written about a paper clip. So they they trained AI to make paperclips and make them the most efficient they can do. So the only job of AI was to make paperclips. And within so many years, the only thing that was left on the earth was paperclips. Yeah, because it had no other instructions. And that's all it did. You know, to man's demise, it would make paperclips. Yeah, and that's what we have to be really careful about. And that I think that's the that's the thing about humans, you know, again, morals, understanding complex situations, you know, being able to hold things in tension, saying, yes, it might be more efficient to only make paperclips. But that's that, that's not the that's not the goal of the world is living in a world that's just full of paperclips. But here's a question because we brought this topic up. Now, who's in charge of the ethics with AI? Well, it's unelected leaders of these companies that are using their judgments and certain recent, well, fairly recently, there's been an ethics officer that left a company because they didn't think they were being careful enough. Yes. So you start to get these cracks in the armor and saying, are they going more for profits or for humanity? And it seems, well, if I look at business in general, I mean, they're the charter is profits, right? For shareholders, it's not humanity. So I don't know where this is going to end up. But there seems, depending on some of the leaders you talked to, there seems to be more humanity and some than others. And we just have to hope for the best because we do really not much we can do about that except regulate, which can only do so much. Yeah, well, that's that kind of comes back to the goals thing, right? If you give me a goal, and people need to understand this corporations have one goal is to maximize shareholder wealth. I learned this long ago when I was working for IBM, and they took they gave the trainers and business that maximize shareholder wealth. And my wife and I debate this all the time, because we talk about like, you know, regulations, I believe we need to have regulations, because otherwise, they will maximize shareholder wealth, they will literally sell you poison, if they can make money selling you poison, right? And an auto manufacturer will say, well, we could fix that defect, but it would cost us several billion dollars, or we could set aside funds to pay the lawsuits when people die. And they'll set aside, set aside the funds. So we have to be aware that when you have this super powerful tool that we have now, as you said, you know, you have to have guardrails, keep it in the sandbox. We don't want to have AI, you know, just making decisions willy nilly without human review. That's right. And, and that's the paradox that we're in. That's one of the paradoxes that we're in, because, you know, how do we, how do we fix this? Or how do we get steer this in the direction that we want it to go? And there's really, there's really no answer to that, because there's so many different parts, and so many different people that we know of that are doing this, and we don't know about the people that we don't know about that are doing this also that are pretty advanced also. And I know two of them. So, and also, there's, there's the public view on AI, and there's the behind the closed door on AI. And I'm a little bit in both. So I can tell you that behind the closed doors, they're much more advanced than the public AI. And they don't put out press releases, they don't talk about it, they don't tell anybody. But we're more advanced than the public AI is and that people need to understand that because we're not where we think we are. We're getting the dumb down version. Right. You're saying yeah. And I was listening to debate the other day about using AI and in medical in medicine, and everybody was saying, again, I think they were trying to make themselves feel good. Oh, but it will always be reviewed by humans because humans need you know, we don't want AI making mistakes. And this there was a doctor I really respect is he's a public figure, Dr. Zeke manual and he goes, you guys are trying to make yourself feel good. He said AI is actually smarter than most doctors right now. So we don't need human review over AI. We actually we need to listen to the AI. And he said, like, I think he said 5 to 15% of diagnoses by medical doctors are incorrect. So it's like, you know, we're not as infallible as we think we are. So, you know, it brings up this question, what happens when AI gets smarter than we are? And we have to start listening to the AI because it's giving us answers that we don't understand. That's right. That's right. And you know, it's the intelligence that the AI has, but it doesn't have the humanitarian consciousness that we have. Right. So intelligence will get you so far, but you need to combine the two to make those decisions. And he's right about that. But at some point, we've got to mix the two together to make the humanitarian decisions. Yeah, yeah. So that's that is that is the I think the paradox that we're that we're talking about, you know, and and in bringing it back to, you know, human, you know, my belief is that we are more than just our, our, our substrate, you know, we're more than just our silicon. We, as far as we know now, if we flip off the power to an AI, it's gone. It doesn't, it doesn't persist. The evidence shows me that that we do that we do persist after our biology is done. And I think that's another difference between us and these things that we're creating. I agree with you. And that's, that's what makes human unique in this in this world, is that we have innate abilities that are unique to us that no machine will ever get. And that's the part that needs to be developed so that we can better manage AI and this these technologies as they come up because it's a human aspect that sees what AI doesn't and that combination is the best is the best combination moving forward. Yeah. So, um, and in terms of, you know, we again, we, this is a program is about grief. He said, you went through this transformative period after you, after you had these grief events. And you talked a little bit about, you believe, I think it sounds like in some sort of planning and in terms of our lives, we've got these, these guardrails. So what are your, what are your thoughts on that? Expand on that a little bit. Well, I mean, with, with my life, you know, I've developed the consciousness. And I think when you do that, you get a little bit more freedom in that. Like, I mean, I've gone to the other side once, right? I've experienced that I came back. And, you know, you see, you see things that you just don't see here and you have, you get understandings that you may not understand at the time, but after you come back, you start getting a better understanding of that. So there's we, our spirit, you know, our soul was put in this body. And we were born, right? That gives us the humanistic characteristics. And with our vision, we, we see what we're programmed to see. Some people can see other entities after they have a life experience and they see them just like they see regular humans. How do we explain these things? And what are they seeing? And are they really there versus our reality? When you start getting deeper into it, you start asking these questions. And with my consciousness expanded the way it is. I mean, I've, I've solved problems that I don't know, I don't know how I could have solved them that they just get solved because it's what I, what I intended. And it's, it's that consciousness questions. It's really hard to answer. Like you can say this, but how does it work? And I can't explain how it works. I can just say as your consciousness increases, you get, you know, a little more emphasis on what it is you're trying to do. And I haven't read a good explanation of what consciousness is yet. I've read some good ones that go into different aspects of it, but nothing that encompasses the whole thing. Because I, it's one of these things, it's hard to put into words and it's said often, it's hard to put into words. And for this very reason, it's hard to put into words because how do you explain something that like an experience of feeling that isn't able to be put into words? Yeah, yeah, it's a really good point. You know, I think we're just thinking about, you were talking about Einstein and they said that he was trying to solve a problem. A lot of times he would just go take a nap. Yeah, instead of, instead of, you know, working on the problem from that, from the level of consciousness we think about every day, it's like, you know, go, go take a nap. And I think about like artists and that was the, there was a Michael Jackson movie I just watched recently and he was lying in the pool and his brother's like, what are you doing? He goes, I'm getting a song and I'm writing a song, but I'm getting a song. And he was like, if I don't, if I don't record it, Prince will. And there's a story about Prince one time, they said he like, I guess called all the musicians in the studio, like in the middle of the night. And he said, I've got the song. If I don't get it out, somebody else will. So the closest thing I've heard the consciousness makes sense to me as consciousness is like a field, a field that we can, that we can tap into. And that explains a lot of like telepathy explains what we talked about, like people getting inspiration. It explains some of the out of body experiences people have are near death experiences. People have there. They're leaving this place in a location where our consciousness focus and focusing somewhere else. So that's the best explanation that I've come I've heard. Yeah. And I think that's, that's, that's a good explanation because I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to explain it in a different way. Because consciousness is, you know, it is, it's a feeling, it's a sensation. And, you know, I get, some people call them downloads, like I get information. And I, and I know the answers and I know what to talk about. And I didn't know it before the conversation, but I know what I'm talking to is true. How do you explain that? I mean, yeah, I don't know. And I don't know how it happens. It just happens on occasion. Yeah. And that's, that's a, you know, a thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is as a, as a scientific person, as a person who studied engineering and stuff, you know, we wanted, we know, we want to know how we want to know the mechanism. And as I'm moving more into this world of Reiki and energy and consciousness, it's like, we just know what happens. We don't know how it happens. And I'm like, I look at the, I look at the data, I look at the evidence and it's clear it does happen. People do get these downloads, they get inspirations, they know things that they're not supposed to know. And there's a word for it in that. And it's called clear cognizance. It's like, when you know something that you don't know how you know it, we have a word for it. It's in some, and we get that. And we all have had experiences where we've had something, a premonition, you know, we know someone's going to call and they call, or we have a dream that and then the next day something happens that like that happened in my dream. So we all know that. But because we don't know the mechanism, a lot of people just reject it and say, well, it can't be true. Yeah. And, and that's perception, right? You don't understand that therefore you reject it. Right. Yeah. Or you have a closer, your mind's more closed and you reject it because it doesn't fit your box. Right. Yeah. Like I gave you an example of like this shoulder. I've had three top doc, two top doctors in Boston and one South of Boston was trained in Boston. They all said, there's nothing left. You need a replacement shoulder. And we don't understand why you're not in pain. I say, cause I manage the pain. Well, when you're done managing the pain, come back to us, we'll replace your shoulder. Well, this is my good shoulder now. So all the top doctors said it couldn't be done and possible. And I did it. And it's my good shoulder. This is what I'm talking about. I can't explain it. But things happen. Right. And there's a good example of how things happen that are unexplainable. That is a good example. And you know, it's interesting because going back to the medical field, they would, they would say, well, that's the placebo effect. And it's really interesting how they'll throw that word out. It's the placebo effect. Like, oh, that explains it. That explains nothing. Right. It explains literally nothing. Because the MRIs and everything show this nothing left. Yet it works well now and I'm not in pain. Yeah, well, that's that's a great example where they've done. They've done what they call sham surgeries. They'll take someone and they'll say we're going to we're going to do a knee repair on you and they don't do they cut them open. They don't do anything. And then the next day, they're our next day, but they go through therapy and then they're fine. They're like, well, we didn't we didn't do anything. So that that is that that's what I believe consciousness. That's where consciousness comes in, which doesn't fit our paradigm. So again, it's we we know it works. We know it happens. We know that if you give someone a pill and tell them that we'll do this, that it's 30 to 40% effective. Yeah, as good as as good as a lot of things that we prescribe for people. Because you think it's going to work and it works because you think it's going to work. Yeah, yeah. So that's that's I think the the thing that we you know, the again, the thing that AI is really forcing us to look at, like, again, what does it mean to be a human? What what is consciousness? You know, how do we how do we take our morality and our values and everything and make sure that we are as we have this extremely powerful tool. I mean, I don't think we've ever had anything like this in the history of humanity. You know, you think about maybe the printing press was a big deal. And the industrial revolution, the internet has changed all of our lives. This is that on steroids. It is is that on steroids and it's moving faster than anything in our life has moved. Yeah. And and it's moving is such a speed that it's hard to keep up with it. Like I I've written books, I've researched this. I don't think I'm up on every aspect of AI just certain aspects because it's it's it's a behemoth and to keep up on everything is is hard thing to do. Yeah, it reminds me when I was when I was working for IBM, and we had our operating systems in the mainframe, MVS and had all these different, you know, aspects to it. I remember talking to one of our systems engineers, I said, how does anybody understand like the whole thing? He said, nobody does. Everybody understands little parts of it, but it's gotten to be so big, nobody understands the whole thing. And we have all these LLMs now, and there's multiples of them. Yeah, and I'm trying to keep up because I was on chat CPT for a couple years. And finally, I reluctantly switched over to Claude and I'm on Claude now. And then I'm reading something yesterday about like, what chat CPT is just leapfrog Claude again, you know, you should move back to chat CPT, because they just came out with this thing. And it's changing, like you said, there's no way it's possible to keep up with it. Yeah, it's impossible. And I, I keep up on the changes in the LLMs that I use, because, because I need to end. And it really blows my mind. I mean, you've got agents now that you can create that just run in a cycle over and over again, and feed you the information that you need. Like I thought about creating one from my website for my books. I'm like, I could just feed it 24 hours a day. With, with the key words, and how I do it and send people to it. And, you know, but that's not my goal. But I'm like, I could do that because that's what agents do. And that's just one aspect of AI, right? That not a lot of people know about. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, I just said, I go back to think about what even like now that I'm the age I am now, what like when I was born, the changes that we've had that we couldn't imagine and so if we project out even, I don't know, four or five years, I don't think we can imagine what, what these, what these systems are going to be doing. So I think, you know, for the purposes of the listeners today, as we sit here geeking out, it's really important to have some understanding what this is. So, because I'm all about alleviating fear as much as possible. You know, so that's why I like to talk about things that people like to talk about death, the afterlife, because we should, none of us should fear that we're all going there. And I think, I think the news is good. When it comes to AI, as you said, we can't predict the future, but we, we have the opportunity to create the future. And, and we need to understand what this is, you know, and we understand what it is, what it isn't, you know, I tell my, my, I've got my, my daughter's engaged in her fiance, it's like 32. And my daughter's like 29. I'm like, you've got to prepare yourself for this world. You know, you can't, you can't just have a job where your job and then they don't, but you're just putting data into a computer all day long, because that job's not going to exist in the future. That's right. The whole and that's, that's kind of what I talk about in the end of smart. It's for kids that haven't decided, you know, in high school, they haven't decided where they're going to go yet or people that are in college because the world changed before they get out, get out the world's changed. And then the people that are in work right now, because a lot of them don't understand what's changed, it's going to affect them. So it's a really good read as to where we're going, where we are now and what, what professions are going to do well and what professions aren't going to do well, to your point. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and things that you might not have been imagined, you know, that's customer service, you know, you think, well, okay, well, they've got chatbots on websites now. And I was, when I was running my own website, I played around with some of those chatbots and they're awful. And every time I see a chatbot, I don't even want to talk to you because you're done. Right. You know, I've already done, I've already unplugged it. I've already done all that stuff. But now, you know, with voice recognition, you can be talking to an AI and not even realize it. That's right. I get a phone call. I always have my, my driveway sealed and I put in a request, a couple of requests online and I got a phone call. This was like a, a year and a half ago. And they said, hi, Bruce, this is so-and-so from paving. I said, hi. And they say, we'd like to talk to you a little bit about your job before we come out. I said, good. So we ask questions. And then about 30, 20 seconds into it, I said, something's not right. I said, am I talking to a human or an AI? And they say, we want to give you the best experience we can give you. I said, I have a human call me because I have a different right away. But you know what they did? They use my name often and people don't do that. And I said, this is not right. Yeah. And sure, it was an AI. And most people would have just been done and say, oh, that was a very nice conversation. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You were right. Yeah. Well, again, beware if that's your job, you know, that you may want to think about what am I going to what am I going to do? And I love your your thing. It's like, they're always gonna be roles for humans to play. And then we have we as a society, we have to start making decisions. Yeah, we're going to support people because, you know, AI is going to be able to do a lot of the jobs as humans doing a day, that can either be an economic disaster, because everybody's out of work, or it could be an economic boon because we can do other things that are more creative. Right. And I think that's right, because to your point, the data entry jobs, I mean, manual labor is always going to be here. And, and, you know, working with the data is good because in the book, there's a leader of an of an LLM that said, you know, if I have two people who are equally qualified, I'm going to go with the guy that has some AI experiments versus the guy that doesn't. And that's key to getting hired. Yeah, yeah. Well, back in our day, it was like, or not my day, it was after my day, but it's like, I know how to use Word, I know how to use Excel, and that might be like today. And then it's going to be in the future. Like I know how to manage an AI, because we're going to be hiring people to manage these systems. And you have to be able to speak in the interview about your AI experience. You just can't put it in and not talk about it. You have to be able to talk about it. Yeah, exactly. We're coming to the end of our time, Bruce. I've really enjoyed our conversation day. I know you have a few books out, so tell people and some more coming out. So tell people where they can find out more about you and what your books are. Sure, the books are the AI Human Paradox, the Quantum Human Paradox and the QAI Human Paradox, which is a very insightful book. And then the End of Smart. And they're on, the first two are on Amazon, under Bruce D. Randall, author, or by the book name. And then I have a website where I have some white papers I wrote on consciousness and AI and Quantum. And it's Bruce D. Randall.Ai under the Insights tab. Scroll down and that's where my papers are. That sounds great. I'll definitely be checking them out because again, I it's something as much as I've looked at, I feel like I always could learn more about what AI is, what Quantum is, especially because that's one thing that we know it's coming up and that's going to change computing in ways again that we can't really understand. Right. And my goal is to help people understand so that everybody can have a more successful future. Yeah, exactly. Well, thanks for being here today. It's great to talk to you. Thank you, Brian.