Anyway, you'll remember that there's a giant AI computer named HAL 9000. And HAL is the cause of all the troubles in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Anyway, you'll remember there's this crazy scene in which HAL has tried to kill the main characters. And then the main character, Dave Bowman, has to shut him down. And so he's slowly shutting him down by sort of removing parts of his digital brain. And I remember sort of feeling sorry for Hal. He was basically, Hal was a total prick. He's like spying on the characters, he's sabotaging, he kills the crew members. But I still sort of felt bad for him because there's this scene where he's drunkenly sort of crooning this song, Bicycle Built for Two, while his digital mind is being sort of deconstructed by Dave Bowman. And it just has this kind of sad quality. And I just felt bad for him, even though he's just a robot. He's just a digital intelligence. But the fact that he sort of doesn't want to be shut off is a property of animals. It's sort of a, I want to live and continue living is this property that rocks don't have, but every kind of animal has. In fact, a philosopher named Spinoza called this conatus, which is a Latin word, which means striving. So living things are always striving to continue living. I'm such a sucker for this kind of, you know, desire of consciousness to continue that even in that Tom Hanks movie, Castaway, you know, he has this, he's alone and sort of stranded on an island by himself. And he's so alone that he has a volleyball that's some of the junk that's stranded with him. And he names the volleyball Wilson. And he becomes completely attached to it. And even when he loses Wilson, I was like, oh, no, not Wilson. And we as an audience are sort of drawn in to identify this volleyball as having a personality and having Konatus or wanting to live, even though, of course, it's just an inanimate object. So I think like a lot of people, I'm kind of a sucker for this stuff. If the character talks and has a face, even if it's like a drawn on face, in this case of Wilson, then I'm ready to sort of give it rights and, you know, maybe the vote. So AI movies get me hooked every time. Like I get really drawn in and identify with the sort of digital consciousness. And it reminds me that like humans are really great at sort of attributing or projecting minds onto machines. And not just machines, but really all kinds of things. Like we think that constellations in the sky have kind of motivations and intentions and direct us through astrology. We think that, you know, vehicles have character. We refer to like your, you know, guy talks about his truck as a she. And, you know, if you just watch a Walt Disney film, you think of tree stumps and spoons as having personality. So there's a sense in which we're all what is technically called animists. And animism is this idea that there's other kind of persons in the world besides human beings. So trees could be persons and rivers could be persons. And this is a way that like Native Americans think about nature. And if you, you know, live in parts of Africa or Southeast Asia, still people think of nature as having spirit persons. Japan, for example, has the animism that oftentimes influences, you know, great filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki. And many people have seen Totoro and Spirited Away and that kind of thing. But what's cool is that there might be a kind of evolutionary reason why we kind of over project or attribute mind or personalities to nature. So like in a kind of hostile environment where our species evolved, like during the Pleistocene era, it definitely would have been better to err on the side of caution and think that some rustling in the bushes might be, you know, a lion, or it might be a tiger, a creature of some kind. It would be better to be wrong and embarrassed than to be like, oh, dismissing it, like, it's just the wind, and then it turns out to be a tiger because then you're basically dead. So there's a kind of maybe a natural selection for us to kind of be constantly projecting personalities into nature, even when they're not there. And I think this way of looking at nature and about, and eventually like, I'm going to argue like computers and machines is kind of natural. It's, it's a kind of dramatic way or animistic way of thinking about the world. And I think it's probably the original system of human cognition. Like this is how we all see the world. Like kids see the world this way they think of inanimate objects as having personalities and they kind of have to be trained out of this so you probably maybe you had a kind of connection to your doll and you thought of it as maybe having a little bit of personality when you were a young kid and then you go to school and they tell you over and over again you know that's stupid don't think way. And we have to kind of abandon this way of thinking about the world. And we get a better scientific literacy. So it's good. But we lose something in the process, too. And so I want to just sort of talk about some movies that look at this idea of conscious personality in machines and in computers and see what you guys make of these films. Some of them, I think, get it right and others are way off base. So if it's like a Hollywood blockbuster or other kind of film, it can be sort of playing with these sort of anthropomorphic tendencies where we're projecting personality. One thing I should remind us of, and maybe you're already familiar with this, but there was a kind of Turing test, which is the name that was given to how we would know whether a machine like a computer had become conscious. You may remember this great mathematician and sort of code breaker, Alan Turing, devised this test. It's like a kind of a thought experiment. He's saying, how would we know if a computer ever did evolve consciousness? And the Turing test goes like this. Let's say you've got a room in which a person is typing on a computer and having a conversation to somebody in another room. Now, in that other room, you've got sort of an AI, which is purely artificial consciousness, artificial intelligence, and you've got real people. And so you're in room A doing your sort of emailing conversation or texting with somebody that's in room B, but you don't know if it's a computer or a real person. You're just having a conversation. So you're like, Hey, what, how's, how's the weather? How's your day going? What's new with you? And there's a response coming from room B showing up on your computer as a text. And the person in room A does this for like an hour, and afterwards they are asked, okay, was it a computer like an AI talking to you, like a set of algorithms that was sort of responding to you in this formulaic way, or was it a real human being? And you basically pick one or the other. And then they check on this, and they do this with a lot of people in a lot of rooms all around the world, and they find, okay, if you're basically identifying this thing as a person, and it turns out that it's just an AI, you didn't realize this, but the computer algorithm is so sophisticated, then you are basically assigning that AI a conscious kind of status. If it can talk to you and you can't actually discriminate that it's a machine and not a person, then Turing said it has effectively entered the consciousness club. And you can't keep it out because really this is how you determine whether other people are conscious. You talk to them and if they sound intelligent, then you basically put them in the consciousness club. So if you're doing that with other people and you basically are now doing it with this computer, then the computer has evolved consciousness. Now that's the Turing test. And it's a pretty high bar until recently when all this chat GPT stuff seems to be able to pass the Turing test with a very, you know, quick and ready facility.