What exactly is intelligence?

And why don't crows invent an internet and why don't gopher's write novels?

And what does any of this have to do with George Orwell's analysis of Adolf Hitler?

Or why World War 5 could involve many other species

besides Homo sapiens.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University, and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection

between how the brain works and how we experience life.

On today's episode, we're going to explore the future,

not just for humans, but for other species as well the other day my kids were

in the car while I was pumping gas and I was thinking about the future for them and specifically

what my kids would look back on in 20 years or 30 years or 50 years and think, wow, I can't believe we did that.

So California has new legislation that all new cars will have to be electric by 2035.

And so I was realizing that when my kids are the age I am now, they'll look back in moments like this and think, wow, I remember when dad used to pump

fossil fuel into his car. And they'll see this as a surprising feature of their childhoods and not

something that exists for them anymore. It's analogous to the way that I look back on black and

white televisions or payphones or cassette tapes or

Walkmans or any of the other things from my childhood that we just don't have anymore. So when I got

back in the car, I asked them to brainstorm about things that would be different for them when they're

adults. And they brought up more things that I expected.

We were on a road trip and we were passing a ranch where we saw thousands of cows grazing.

And what we ended up talking about was whether they might look back strangely in 30 years on

...