Transcript
athenastevens: it's Athena Stevens, with Dr Tracey Tokuhama Espinosa, and we've got a new season of NeuroBlast coming up in a few weeks' time.
athenastevens: Tracy, are you excited? I am.
Tracey: I can't wait. I'm loving it. And all of the different topics that we've been throwing around. They are just cutting edge. I just love it. So thank you.
athenastevens: Oh, man. So we are talking about this season. cognitive stewardship and how to use your brain in an increasingly AI and automated world. We just wanted to have a quick cold open of the season review and talk about
athenastevens: What AI is and what can it do here at the end of 2026, 2027? Because we're all using it. And we've all been using it, actually, for quite a long time without realizing it.
athenastevens: Tracey I know you're not an AI expert, but what is it?
Tracey: Well, what I think AI is or what it's done is it sort of normalized this idea of leveraging the way computers can very quickly and very efficiently.
Tracey: kind of speed up. typical thought processes. Like a great example is the spell check on our computers, which is almost automated. in many different programs. It anticipates errors, which is really funny because I've always been a bad speller to begin with, but I've always liked to sort of suffer through figuring out, oh, that's how you spell challenge. It's not the E, it's an A, or right now I can't even remember. But as I suffered through it.
Tracey: I'm creating a better memory for it and eventually I'm going to learn it. But if I'm not, I'm just sort of passing over that. So AI to me are things that speed up what a normal human could do. find their navigate their way to the supermarket but then we're offloading that to other to a machine to do and And it's bigger than that though. I think it's... That's something that I use on a daily basis, but I would just. I think there's thousands of things and we don't even know that we're using them, right?
athenastevens: It is. I'm working at Beth Israel Hospital and I was in a... lab meeting the other day. where they were talking about using AI to...
athenastevens: develop vaccines. And what this of course means is they don't have some iRobot in the back mixing the vaccine, but they're using AI to look for patterns in the genome.
athenastevens: what kind of statistical inferences can be made about people with certain genes who might respond with a high immunity after the vaccine who might respond
athenastevens: badly to the vaccine. That is one way that AI is being used to progress medicine and we're not even aware of that and the most gracious understanding is that is a good thing because it's bigger than any human brain can do and speed things along.
athenastevens: We don't want to stop that, and yet... There's other sides that AI can go horribly wrong, and we just wanted to take a few minutes and give you some idea of what this technology is.
athenastevens: is and can do so. What can it do?
Tracey: Well, just what you said, okay, coming up with vaccines is amazing, but what happens if it comes up with a biological weapon?
athenastevens: with someone who is actually trying to design it. Yeah. Yeah. There's that, you know, it has the ability to...
athenastevens: I have... because of my disability. I hate... APA 7 hanging indents.
athenastevens: I hate the hanging indent. It is a bane of my life. There is no intelligence.
Tracey: It's a psychological torture or no, it's actually a test. They're just following us to see how we react. I do this.
athenastevens: When we the.. bibliography, the first line of the entry is... All the way to the and then the next line has to be what is called a hanging indent. I hate it. Uh, anyway, it can do my hanging indents.
Tracey: something I saw yesterday I did not even know. It's called anystyle.io. And it takes any style of writing and puts it into any other style.
Tracey: Like even your gibberish, you put anything the way you've added in your. reference and then say it's got to be ai and it converts everything converts
athenastevens: I mean, I... I was working on a bibliography once a few years ago and with AI and I was checking it through. I was doing a paper on ADHD.
athenastevens: You know, there were only like five sources, and I went... What's that article about schizophrenia doing in there?
Tracey: Uh -huh.
athenastevens: My Bibliography with ADHD, and it just decided to... add an article that I did not give it.
athenastevens: It was not. Related to the topic. All because I wanted to avoid a hanging indent. Oh!
athenastevens: Like...
Tracey: But this is true, right? You think, okay, it's kind of beneficial.
athenastevens: Yes.
Tracey: It'll help me as I'm doing research. It'll help me vary my keywords or come up with synonyms or things like that. That's kind of beneficial. But then it says, oh, would you like me to also do the search for you?
Tracey: Oh, and would you like me to also do the synthesis for you? And then all of a sudden there's a paper there that you did not write. And when you go back to it, what's absolutely fascinating, you do see all these hallucinations.
Tracey: It makes up stuff. Like I'll say. I know. this author. She never wrote that, right? And then you'll think, okay, well, out of its grand helpfulness, its desire to please, it's going to pop in anything.
Tracey: And that is super dangerous. I think it's very, very dangerous because it not only pulls out the cognitive scaffolding of thinking, but it's also... It's incredibly misleading. And I don't know, there's certain journals now that...
Tracey: Most of the journals I know. They make you sign this thing. Even if you're just the reviewer, you're saying, I did not use AI to do this. And it's trying to say we value.
athenastevens: Yeah.
Tracey: perspectives, which is really fascinating.
athenastevens: I was in a conversation with the Royal Literary Society. And they are debating right now their AI policy.
athenastevens: for creative writing. Difficulty is if you use... Speech to text As I do, that is all AI .
athenastevens: That is nothing but AI and that is an access issue that many people like myself cannot type.
Tracey: But there's a big schism there, isn't there? There's one thing which is a literal translation, a literal.
athenastevens: Yeah.
Tracey: what you're what you're saying and what it's put you know speech to text versus when i'm talking about creative writing you know oh wouldn't it be great if we embellish this you know let's let's switch out this word for this other word it'll really change the feel of things that is At what point is that creative process you?
Tracey: And at what point is that creative process the machine, right?
athenastevens: And at what point is it substituting what an editor would do?
Tracey: Yeah, precisely.
athenastevens: All of that.
Tracey: Precisely.
athenastevens: Another example is this technology if you... take a picture of what's in your refrigerator and ask it, what should I have for dinner? It can come up with a recipe based on what it sees in your refrigerator.
Tracey: But did you see this other thing that came out yesterday? If it was, it was... In a promotional flyer, there was three university students, and they decided for the promotion, it'd be better if we change this one kid from a different ethnicity and gender. Let's just...
Tracey: you know move this person out and let's put in another person. And that's just not. real. Now, Super lots of controversial things in doing that, but that happens every single day. I mean, you take a picture now on your average phone, you can just sort of decide to.
athenastevens: Yeah.
Tracey: It's like, wow. So that really gets into, I think, reality checks.
athenastevens: Hmm.
Tracey: I think those are things that really kind of. They're on a lot of people's minds because they're in their own hands. They can actually do it and they don't even know what that means.
athenastevens: And... We're not even talking about filters on dating apps.
Tracey: Yeah.
athenastevens: What that can do for pornography?
Tracey: Absolutely. I mean, there's so many questions and I think, I guess that's, that's probably if you. It boils down to things. People are saying, oh, is this good or it's bad or the doomsdayers or the people who celebrate it.
Tracey: If there's... It's always this gray space. It's how humans are using it. And I think that's where most of our dilemmas are, is that we haven't taken the time to stand back and ask ourselves how.
Tracey: Should this, could this be used? What is ethical? What's not ethical? All of those questions haven't... we haven't had time to process a lot of those things yet and we don't we're just so unaware of things i had a student i'll give you a great example Turns in this paper, and we write this semester project. pieces. So they always get feedback and feedback and feedback.
Tracey: and I've always emphasized they can use AI as a sparring partner to get some informal feedback or to do other things. They may never use it to write. And so we get to the methodology section and the student says, so.
Tracey: I used, you know, I found these keywords, they weren't enough, but then I used... uh consensus an app that actually looked for all the articles with all of the keywords. and synthesized it for me.
Tracey: But don't worry, I didn't use it to write. And I said, yeah, but you offloaded all the thinking that's behind that to write. And she did not. see a problem.
Tracey: And here was this young woman, 30 something from Germany, completely, you know. correct in most of her life i suppose but here it is she did not see that that could be something.
Tracey: you know, egregious. There's a problem there. There's a challenge to her decision -making in that. So how do you do that, Athena? I mean, what do you do in that context when we don't even know what we're dealing with? I mean, people obviously don't. feel that those things.
Tracey: They haven't had enough practice with them to judge them.
athenastevens: Well then, and how do we get the factors with them if we have a pair? puritanical view of no AI at all.
Tracey: Right.
athenastevens: Which Is a whole other Kettle of fish. I actually asked AI last night.
athenastevens: what it can do well and what it does badly. Guys, the list goes on. It is very... Good. things that you would not believe in yet. equally very bad at things that should be common sense and it changes what said to me, what AI said when I asked it.
athenastevens: is AI. AI conveys confidence without reliability
athenastevens: Wait, do you know? Some days I feel that way about myself as well.
athenastevens: No, no. This season, we are looking at... Cognitive stewardship. How do we use our brains and keep our tools sharp in a world that is... producing shortcuts and making things seemingly easier, sometimes without accountability.
athenastevens: Often without reliability. And how do we live in an increasingly AI -driven world? And we can't wait to share that with you.
athenastevens: See you.
Tracey: I love this. And Athena, don't forget the one huge aspect of... humanity and this humaneness, one of the things that I think is so enjoyable about going back and forth with you is just The dynamic dialogue and your ideas change when my ideas change. When you say something, it changes what I think.
Tracey: And that is really interesting because AI is getting so close to doing that. And it does it so nicely. It's so kind. And I think that one of the things that we've got. to really think about is you know where is that fine edge between what is.
Tracey: humane interaction. And I think that's something that's going to come up over and over again as we talk. It's not just what's going on in your brain. It's how we, what do we think? we are as humans like what is it that separates us from from that machine that's so kind and nice and gives us all the right advice about what to cook with what's in our refrigerator.
athenastevens: Yeah, and of course, as a science fiction writer. I can't leave that alone. So... Like us, subscribe us, keep an up. Subscribe us? Is that right? I don't know. Confidence without reliability. Right here.
athenastevens: You can.
Tracey: Live and in living color and in human flesh. There we are.
athenastevens: So stay tuned, you guys. We'll be in touch and talking to you soon about all of this.
Tracey: Thanks, Athena.
athenastevens: Bye -bye.
Tracey: Bye.
