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Big Think
By bigthinkEducation
Big Think episodes
- The unexpected impact of AI on animals | Peter Singer
Can AI and animals coexist? Philosopher Peter Singer gives us a nuanced take on the issue.
Philosopher Peter Singer explores the impact of AI on animals, using historical parallels in how humans have previously used technology to exploit nature. He discusses AI's current applications in factory farming and wildlife management, which are already raising ethical concerns.Singer believes AI should not only serve human interests, and that we should consider how it impacts all sentient beings as we continue to develop it.He also delves into the philosophical question of AI surpassing human intelligence, its potential consciousness, and moral status, emphasizing the need for government standards akin to animal welfare regulations.0:00 How will AI and animals coexist?0:30 Technology has hurt animals in the past0:55 AI’s current application to animals1:35 AI’s possible benefits for animals2:30 Is AI conscious?3:25 Will we be able to control AI?--------------------
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8 min - Why modern America creates fragile children | Jonathan Haidt
Kids are more anxious and depressed than ever. Is identity politics to blame?
Generation Z, born from 1995 onwards, has been raised with “moral dependency,” argues social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. As the first generation to get social media at age 13, Gen Z has been denied the independence that previous generations enjoyed — the “free play,” the time spent off devices.In general, Haidt argues that this generation is more fragile and sensitive to conflict, insults, and exclusion, making them less adept at solving problems on their own. And Haidt believes that overprotection has made them weaker and easily discouraged.That’s why teaching critical thinking and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) may be the key to helping young people question their initial interpretations and improve their mental health. Haidt also discusses identity politics, differentiating between “common humanity” and “common enemy” approaches. Fostering a sense of commonality rather than division, Haidt argues, is essential for creating inclusive and diverse environments in educational institutions and society at large.Chapters:
0:00 Kids born after 19951:25 Locking kids up2:00 The end of independence3:05 What are triggers?3:30 Psychological habits to break4:04 Habit #1: Motivated reasoning5:14 Cognitive behavioral therapy6:28 Habit #2: Tribalism7:29 Good and bad identity politics----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Jonathan Haidt:Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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15 min - Are conscious machines possible? | Oxford professor Michael Wooldridge
University of Oxford professor explains how conscious machines are possible.
In his book "A Brief History of AI," Michael Wooldridge, a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and an AI researcher, explains that AI is not about creating life, but rather about creating machines that can perform tasks requiring intelligence.Wooldridge discusses the two approaches to AI: symbolic AI and machine learning. Symbolic AI involves coding human knowledge into machines, while machine learning allows machines to learn from examples to perform specific tasks. Progress in AI stalled in the 1970s due to a lack of data and computational power, but recent advancements in technology have led to significant progress. AI can perform narrow tasks better than humans, but the grand dream of AI is achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), which means creating machines with the same intellectual capabilities as humans. One challenge for AI is giving machines social skills, such as cooperation, coordination, and negotiation.The path to conscious machines is slow and complex, and the mystery of human consciousness and self-awareness remains unsolved. The limits of computing are only bounded by imagination.chapters:
0:00 The Hollywood dream of AI: consciousness1:16 The birth of AI & machine learning3:28 The AI winter4:04 The next era of intelligence: AGI5:03 Why do humans have big brains?5:52 Creating conscious machines----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Michael Wooldridge:Michael Wooldridge is a professor of Computer Science and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. Since earning his Ph.D. In AI, he has published more than 350 scientific articles on the subject. Mike has been at the heart of the AI community for a quarter of a century and knows most of the key figures in the international AI community. He has been president of the International Association for AI since 2015 and is a fellow of the American Association for AI. He has a long track record of public speaking and science communication on AI matters and related topics.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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13 min - How to win a negotiation, with former FBI hostage chief Chris Voss
Negotiation isn’t about logic & reason. It’s about emotional intelligence, explains former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss.
Emotional intelligence and tactical empathy are key to successful negotiating, says former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss. He highlights the value of understanding and addressing the other party's emotional standpoint in both business and personal negotiations. By doing so, people can make better deals and foster long-term relationships.Voss emphasizes the importance of addressing people's fears and practicing tactical empathy through labeling. This approach involves identifying and acknowledging the emotions involved in the negotiation. By listening carefully and discerning the underlying motivations and concerns, negotiators can guide discussions more effectively and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Being nice to others can often lead to surprising results, proving the power of empathy and understanding in negotiations.0:00 What drives people?1:18 Negotiation is NOT about logic2:14 1. Emotionally intelligent decisions3:00 2. Mitigate loss aversion4:48 3. Try “listener’s judo”5:54 Practice your negotiating skills----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Chris Voss:Chris Voss is the Founder and CEO of the Black Swan Group Ltd. He has used his many years of experience in international crisis and high stakes negotiations to develop a unique program and team that applies these globally proven techniques to the business world. Prior to 2008, Chris was the was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the FBI's hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council's Hostage Working Group. During his government career he also represented the U.S. Government at two (2) international conferences sponsored by the G-8 as an expert in kidnapping. Prior to becoming the FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator, Christopher served as the lead Crisis Negotiator for the New York City Division of the FBI. Christopher was a member of the New York City Joint Terrorist Task Force for 14 years. He was the case agent on such cases as TERRSTOP (the Blind Sheikh Case – Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman), the TWA Flight 800 catastrophe and negotiated the surrender of the first hostage taker to give up in the Chase Manhattan bank robbery hostage taking.During Chris's 24 year tenure in the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by not only the FBI, but Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. He is also a recipient of the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award for Distinguished and Exemplary Service. Chris currently teaches business negotiation in the MBA program as an adjunct professor at University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. He has taught business negotiation at Harvard University, guest lectured at The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, The IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland and The Goethe School of Business in Frankfurt, Germany. Since 2009 Christopher has also worked with Insite Security as their Managing Director of the Kidnapping Resolution Practice.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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12 min - How fiction reveals truths journalism cannot | Lawrence Wright
“As a reporter, you can look into the eyes of the people you're talking to and try to evaluate what they're thinking when they say what they say. But you are not really gonna get into their brain. There's only one artistic form that allows you to do that. “
What can fiction reveal that history and journalism leave hidden? Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lawrence Wright turns to the novel to explore the lives caught in conflict in Israel and Palestine.His book The Human Scale uses narrative to confront the unequal ways lives are valued in this region, asking whether storytelling can expose truths that politics can obscure.0:00 The Human Scale1:37 Deriving truth and meaning from fiction2:26 The uneven weight of human life4:28 Why narrative can get into the mind of another6:28 Confronting uncomfortable truths10:27 The setting of The Human Scale----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Lawrence Wright:Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, and screenwriter whose work focuses on politics, religion, and culture. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Wright is best known for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.Beyond his landmark works on extremism, Wright has explored the complexities of Scientology in Going Clear, the global response to pandemics in The End of October, and the role of Texas as both a cultural crucible and a political bellwether in God Save Texas.----------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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24 min - Why sex, food, and shelter aren’t enough for Homo Sapiens | Agustín Fuentes
What is the capacity for belief in humans, and how does it shape our lives and interactions with the world? According to Agustín Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University and author of Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being, the human capacity for belief is the most significant trait that sets us apart from other animals.
This capacity for belief, which importantly is not limited to religious belief, allows us to take our experiences and turn them into perceptions, ideologies, and lifestyles to which we can fully commit — thereby shaping our reality and the reality of future generations.At its core, Fuentes explains, human belief is rooted in, and contingent on, our evolutionary history. Unlike other mammals, human infants are born with brains that are just 40% of their adult size. This extended childhood allows for constant social and environmental influence, which become the fabric of our being. Beliefs even influence our biological make-up, from our gut microbiome to our hormones.0:00 Why are humans so complicated?1:16 Human baby vs. Giraffe baby (aka the human brain is an anomaly)2:18 How belief becomes reality3:52 The religion question5:25 When realities collideRead the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/the-well/evoluti...----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Agustín Fuentes:Agustín Fuentes, a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. Earning his BA/BS in Anthropology and Zoology and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, he has conducted research across four continents, multiple species, and two-million years of human history. His current projects include exploring cooperation, creativity, and belief in human evolution, multispecies anthropologies, evolutionary theory and processes, and engaging race and racism. Fuentes’ books include Race, Monogamy, and other lies they told you: busting myths about human nature (U of California), The Creative Spark: how imagination made humans exceptional (Dutton), and Why We Believe: evolution and the human way of being (Yale).-----------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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11 min - I study demonic possession dreams. Here’s what we’ve found. | Patrick McNamara
This interview is an episode from @The-Well, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation.
What are nightmares, and why do we have them? Patrick McNamara, an experimental neuroscientist who studies the neurobiology of sleep, dreams, and religion, believes nightmares have both important spiritual and emotional functions for our minds.While nightmares can be deeply unpleasant, they have been experienced and recorded by humans for thousands of years, and historically those who were able to withstand and control their nightmares were held in high societal regard — appointed as spiritual guides, or shamans.Beyond the spiritual, McNamara explains that nightmares can provide insights into the neurobiology of our REM sleep, where we can confront and process trauma. Nightmares can create a kind of exposure therapy, assisting emotional regulation and helping to maintain healthy emotional responses to the environment. That’s why REM sleep is crucial for processing emotional trauma: it allows us to integrate traumatic experiences into our long-term memory stores.0:00 When REM sleep goes off the rails0:30 Your brain on nightmares1:33 Investigating religious nightmares & demonic possession3:52 Those who conquer demons4:45 REM neurobiology: Trauma processing----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Patrick McNamara:Patrick McNamara is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northcentral University. He also holds appointments in the departments of Neurology at the University of Minnesota and Boston University School of Medicine. He is a founding editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior, the flagship journal for the emerging field of neuroscience of religion. McNamara's current research centers on the evolution of the frontal lobes, the evolution of the two mammalian sleep states (REM and NREM), and the evolution of religion in human cultures.McNamara is the editor of Where God and Science Meet and Science and World Religions, and the author of The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press), Religion, Neuroscience and the Self: A New Personalism (Routledge), and numerous publications on the neurology and psychology of religion. McNamara is a John Templeton Foundation award recipient for his research project The Neurology of Religious Cognition.---------------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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10 min - Why does it feel like the world is falling apart? | Brian Klaas
**The Hidden Fragility of Modern Life: Why the Future Is More Unpredictable Than Ever**
We live in a world unlike any before—**safe, stable, predictable... Or so it seems.** But beneath the surface, we’ve built a system so **delicately balanced** that a single grain of sand can send everything crashing down.
Hunter-gatherers faced **local chaos but global stability**—their daily lives were unpredictable, but the world itself changed slowly. Today, we’ve flipped that equation: **our lives feel stable, but the world is more volatile than ever.** Democracies are crumbling. Rivers are drying up. A random event—one war, one market crash, one algorithm shift—can send shockwaves across the planet.
The problem? We still think in **linear terms**: small causes lead to small effects. But the real world is **nonlinear**—a butterfly’s wing can unleash a hurricane. Complex systems don’t just break; they **adapt, shift, and collapse in ways we never see coming.**
From the **Arab Spring** to the **2020 pandemic**, history proves that **our predictions fail when the world itself changes beneath our feet.** And yet, we trust AI, markets, and governments to guide us using outdated models, blind to the hidden tipping points that could rewrite everything overnight.
Are we living on the edge of **a global sandpile**, where the next black swan event is not just possible but inevitable? And if so—**what happens when it finally topples?**
🔮 **This episode is a wake-up call.** The future is coming faster than we think—and it won’t wait for us to catch up.
“We've engineered a volatile world where Starbucks is completely unchanging from year to year, but democracies are collapsing and rivers are drying up.”
As modern humans we experience a different world and experience than anyone who has ever come before us. This is because we've inverted the dynamics of how our lives unfold. We live on a planet defined by local stability, but global instability. The hunter-gatherers that came before us lived in a world that was defined by local instability, but global stability, says political scientist Dr. Brian Klaas.As hunter-gatherers, their day-to-day lives in their local environment was unpredictable. Now we have flipped that world. We experience local stability, but global instability. We have extreme regularity in our daily lives. We can order products online and expect exactly when they're going to arrive. We can go to Starbucks anywhere in the world and it's going to taste roughly the same. But our world is changing faster than it ever has before. Consequentially, when things do go wrong, the ripple effects are much more profound and much more immediate. This is where that sort of aspect of global instability becomes very dangerous.Timestamps: 0:00: Modern volatility1:20: Complex systems theory6:06: The sandpile model6:47: Basins of attraction7:49: Black swan events
About Brian Klaas:Dr. Brian Klaas is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London, an affiliate researcher at the University of Oxford, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is also the author five books, including Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters and Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. Klaas writes the popular The Garden of Forking Paths Substack and created the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast, which has been downloaded roughly three million times.Klaas is an expert on democracy, authoritarianism, American politics, political violence, elections, and the nature of power. Additionally, his research interests include contingency, chaos theory, evolutionary biology, the philosophy of science and social science, and complex systems. In addition to Fluke and Corruptible, Klaas authored three earlier books: The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy; The Despot's Accomplice: How the West is Aiding & Abetting the Decline of Democracy, and How to Rig an Election
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15 min - You don’t need a 10-year plan. You need to experiment. | Anne-Laure Le Cunff
“By not focusing on the outcome and instead designing a tiny experiment, what you can do is letting go of any definition of success, letting go of that binary results that you're looking for, and instead focusing something that makes you feel curious and that you want to explore.”
What if the secret to a meaningful life isn’t a five-year plan—but a five-day experiment? Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff argues that in a world obsessed with goals, clarity, and productivity, the real path to growth lies in something much smaller: curiosity-driven, low-stakes experiments.Instead of asking, “What’s my purpose?” she suggests asking, “What am I curious about, and what small step can I take today to explore it?”Chapters:-
00:00 Staring at the leaderboard00:40 Finding your purpose01:21 Cognitive overload02:14 Linear vs experimental03:29 Affective labeling04:47 3 subconscious mindsets06:48 Experimental mindset09:04 Information vs knowledge11:29 Cognitive scripts13:35 “Finding your purpose”15:39 Systemic barriers to experimentation17:49 Self-anthropology-----------------------------About Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Anne-Laure Le Cunff is an award-winning neuroscientist and entrepreneur. She is the founder of Ness Labs, where her weekly newsletter is read by more than 100,000 curious minds. Her research at King’s College London focuses on the psychology and neuroscience of lifelong learning, curiosity, and adaptability. Her book, Tiny Experiments, is a transformative guide for living a more experimental life, turning uncertainty into curiosity, and carving a path of self-discovery. Previously, she worked at Google as an executive on digital health projects. Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Forbes, Financial Times, WIRED, and more.--------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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26 min - Sam Harris: Experience emotions without being consumed by them
"You can be aware of sadness from a point of view that is not merely sad, and you can be aware of fear from a point of view that's not merely afraid.”
Can consciousness serve as a refuge from suffering? By examining the raw textures of difficult emotions like anger and sadness, Sam Harris explains how we can experience them without suffering, and how digging into awareness reveals a layer of openness below the mental state.Harris explains how meditation and direct attention can alleviate pain and liberate us from a prison of our emotions.0:00 The condition of awareness0:48 Reframing our mental state2:22 The condition of consciousness4:55 How does consciousness arise?7:09 Meditation and consciousness7:36 Thought vs physiology----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Sam Harris:Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.----------------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster.…
Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
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