Wow!

So it's coming off a low base in terms of percentage, but it...

You, you take a hit on that.

And the more change you have, say, in a month period, the more sort of cumulative impact it has.

And interesting, it's not always about change being good or bad.

Even really good change, like winning millions in the lottery, can be hugely disruptive.

And that's really...

Mm

In the future.

We all feel, like, stable.

"This is who I am." Yeah.

So we get that sort of level of change wrong.

Uh, and the way I sort of view change is from the sort of, it sounds very corporate, but change management point of view.

So from decades and decades of research with companies, you know, when they go, go through a simple change, maybe the, you know, think of Netflix.

They've been through lots of big changes.

John, healthy relationships with the technology.

Hmm,

what do you think?

All right, what are we thinking? Let's do video two, AI, hands up.

I see those hands.

Okay, video one, AI, hands up.

Ooh, maybe video one has an interesting crowd.

Well, they're both done by AI.

But anyway.

Joel, do we have an idea in the workplace what areas are most likely to be affected in the short term?

Well, yeah, anything that gets done on a computer, I would say it that way.

Anything that's digitized and is doing things, that's obviously where things are being affected initially.

And it's not that, you know, AI is just going to do a job of a person.

It's more that another person is enabled to do so much more in any one day, but then take on extra skills and just do extra things.

And so they don't need the team that they used to have.

So the idea of a team shrinking.

And then if you've got millions of artists and poets around the world, as we found out on the internet, where there's a lot of crowding in terms of creativity, how many podcasts can you actually create or listen to? What is the fulfilling part of life, the real purpose in that context? Assuming, of course, that we don't have an artificial super intelligence that decides to snub us out in the first place, but that's another issue.

So,

So what happened? I've always had a passion.

I had Future Minds Lab, which was originally something called the Science of Innovation Lab.

And it was an endeavor with me and the University of New South Wales here to understand and apply cognitive neuroscience, neuroscience and psychology to outside the university walls, to startups, to large corporations, both testing products and services they're doing, but also making education content and things for them.

And so I've always had this passion.

I felt strongly that psychology and neuroscience more or less has been a bit of a failure when it comes to really applied things outside of clinical work and treating disease.

and pure research.

What are the fundamentals to that?

And could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what a neurofuturologist is?

Yeah, thank you.

Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, so I have a mixed background.

I went to art school.

I was going to be a filmmaker at one stage.

And then the mysteries, if you like, of consciousness pulled me away from that sort of career in filmmaking.

Yeah, in the humans.

Mm-hmm.

So as anxiety goes up, so does...

It, it sort of...

There's, there's...

You think about it, if you model it, there's a sort of a negative impact.

So as one goes up, it actually put- forces the others to go up as well.

And that also then makes unemployment go up more.

Mm.

What is the biggest stressor in your life currently and how are you managing it?

Probably right now and on and off over the years, it is stress or anxiety.

It gets me and it will periodically come up and down.

And because I have this weird thing where I both, I love stimulation, I love nicotine and caffeine, I love things that stimulate.

like this source of energy.

So I'll tend to lean into those things too often sometimes, and then I'll go too far and it'll sort of push me over the edge into this sort of stressed anxiety state.

And so that's, I don't like that, but at the same time, I kind of like it just sort of a nudge or two before that critical level.

Precisely why we asked this question.

And me too, I hate writing

on a chalkboard or something in front of an audience because I may misspell something, right? But now, because I dictate or I type, I don't have to even think about spelling because it's all taken care of.

So is it something like that, which feels like it's not really gonna affect us long-term? People have said that, no, the ability to write is critical for the way we think.

And there's some evidence, I think, to support that.

So if we all, over time, sort of just outsource our writing, we're still going to have to talk to each other until we have neural implants that will do it directly or whatever.

It may well have some kind of noticeable en masse change in our thinking style.

Now, I don't want to say it seems like that would be a negative, but you never know.

Mm-hmm.

Can you talk about that?

Yeah.

We've actually developed three different methods over the years, and the first one that sort of, you know, that was pivotal in my personal journey getting to study mental imagery was using a visual illusion called binocular rivalry, which, as it sounds, is rivalry between the images going into each eye.

So if I put up a hand in front of one eye, my brain, my one eye, my right eye will see my hand, my other eye will see you on the computer screen, and that puts my visual system into this state of conflict, hence rivalry.

And when you sort of balance those images out, you get these beautiful vacillations and oscillations of consciousness between whatever's going to one eye versus the other.

And so we s- use that visual illusion, binocular rivalry, to study consciousness in its own right.

But I discovered many years ago that you could actually use the illusion as a way to measure mental imagery.

expensive.But speaking of brains and fMRIs, what do we know about what's happening in the brains of people who have aphantasia? Do we have information from these, uh, brain studies?

But visualizing is still related to how you see.

When you look around the room now and you're seeing, you know, or you're driving a car or whatever you're doing, you're seeing things, a lot of information's hitting your eyes, your retina.

It's shooting back to your visual cortex, and so that's going upwards, if you like, from your eyes up into your brain.

Like there's one where you can observe people's eyes and tell them to imagine looking at something really bright, like the sun.

So the pupil, right, in your eye, when you look at a bright light, it contracts.

It shrinks down here very tiny so it's letting less light through.

Turns out when you imagine bright things, something very similar happens.

Your pupil changes.