Carl Zimmer

And I like that kind of thing.

You know who I used to really like and should check out some more of their books is Carl Zimmer.

Have you ever read Carl Zimmer?

No. No.

He's just a columnist.

There were lots of studies offering a new way of understanding consciousness.

And by the way, as an aside, there's a really good article in the New Yorker recently by Carl Zimmer, the science writer, about consciousness in babies.

And he goes through how we used to think that babies actually didn't have consciousness until they were, I don't remember what it was, six months, whatever, it was old.

And when they cry, it was just like some kind of stress.

They are part of an entire cavalcade of mind-controlling parasites, of fungi and viruses, and worms and insects and more that all specialize in subverting and overriding the wills of their hosts.

Now, I first learned about this way of life through David Attenborough's Trials of Life about 20 years ago, and then later through a wonderful book called Parasite Rex by my friend Carl Zimmer.

And I've been writing about these creatures ever since.

Few topics in biology enthrall me more.

So they were just extremely good.

I remember being at the studios in Santa Monica with them and they talked about mail ordering slime molds just to kind of get an idea of how they grow in situ and so they were great and then they engaged us in the popularization of it because they didn't realize how big it was going to be and they thought that we got a lot of pushback so with Carl Zimmer we did something also for World War Z to popularize things so last of us was one approach also the girl with all the gifts we were engaged with and Joao on our team did a lot of stuff there Matt Reeves let me in he consulted with me a lot and a lot of these ideas of How realistic is it to see parasites do what parasites do in ants, but to humans? Of course, it's not realistic.

They just make our life miserable, but they don't manipulate our behavior.

So they wanted some context there.

As my guest will tell us, many scientists who worry about the way such research could spiral catastrophically out of control say the world needs to adopt a ban on the use of artificial intelligence for the production of biological weapons.

Carl Zimmer writes the Origins column and covers news about science as a freelance contributor to The New York Times, where you can read his article, AI Queries from Abroad Raise Fears of a Biological Weapons Race.

Carl, welcome to Think.

Thanks for having me.

There are people who are going into caves to harvest bat guano and those bats are little incubators of coronaviruses.

And that's happening every day.

Carl Zimmer writes the Origins column and covers news about science as a freelance contributor to the New York Times.

His recent article there is headlined AI Queries from a Broad Rays Fears of a Biological Weapons Race.

Research- researchers said they had tailored a virus to attack one patient's illness." For the first...

By Carl Zimmer.

For the first time, scientists say they have used viruses design- designed by artificial intelligence to treat a human patient.

Researchers announced on Tuesday that they admin- administered the virus, known as a phage, to a patient suffering from a deadly bacterial infection.