Ep147 "Can we engineer human thought?" with Tom Griffiths
Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman
iHeartPodcasts
4.7 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
Can the mind be captured with math? Modern AI seems to have burst out of the gate recently, but is it actually the latest chapter in a 300-year project to turn thought into something we can model? Why does current AI need petabytes of data, but a child can learn from just a few examples? Why does AI have 'jagged' intelligence – meaning it looks brilliant in one moment and then does something that seems nonsensical? In physics we have various laws (gravity, motion, etc), and today we’re joined by cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths to ask whether we're moving towards laws of thought.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | AI seems like it burst out of the gate a few years ago, but is it actually the latest |
| 0:10.3 | chapter in a 300-year trajectory to turn thought into math? Can the mind be captured with equations? |
| 0:19.8 | Why do current AI models need petabytes of data, |
| 0:23.3 | but a child can learn from just a few examples? |
| 0:26.4 | Why does AI have jagged intelligence, |
| 0:29.8 | meaning it looks brilliant in one moment, |
| 0:32.1 | and then it does something totally nonsensical? |
| 0:35.1 | In physics, we have various laws, like the law of gravity or the laws of motion. |
| 0:41.0 | And today, we're joined by cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths from Princeton to talk about whether |
| 0:46.8 | we are moving towards nailing down laws of thought. |
| 0:54.6 | Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. |
| 0:57.5 | I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford. |
| 1:00.1 | And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. |
| 1:18.3 | Yeah. look the way they do. This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 1:21.1 | Guaranteed human. |
| 1:23.1 | No gloss, no filter. |
| 1:26.2 | Just stories. |
| 1:27.9 | Spoken without fear. |
| 1:29.6 | Person who is not generous can not be an artist. |
| 1:32.5 | The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. |
| 1:37.2 | Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pujabhaw on the IHeart Radio app, |
| 1:41.6 | Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. |
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