Technology and Us: The New Science of Life, Intelligence, and Stress

No scientific idea has had a greater impact on our understanding of life and our place in the natural world than Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. This provided the foundation for a narrative of living things as a kind of bio-molecular machine built by and for their genes, with no raison d'etre, no reason to be, besides self-preservation. Recently, it has become clear that all life is considerably smarter than we realised. All living things have some ability to store and recall information or behaviours, learn from experience, and problem-solve quickly. This suggests a new view of life, where natural intelligence leads evolutionary change and natural selection follows. This inverts the conventional scientific narrative and has big implications for our personal and sociopolitical values and models of ‘progress’.

With the advent and widespread adoption of new text-based AI systems, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT forebode an unpredictable future. It is more important and difficult than ever to understand what is really happening “under the hood” of these systems. Many explanations either overly anthropomorphise a set of equations, or blind one with more maths than even the most seasoned computer scientist can understand. This talk will simply explain the core principles of how these models actually work, how they are trained, and how they seem to know everything. It simply touches on questions like “Does ChatGPT actually understand what it is saying?”.

Stress is normal. In fact, it’s an essential part of everything we ever want to get better at. Every time we exercise, our heart rate goes up, and when we are nervous, we also breathe harder - these are stress signals. When a deadline is coming up, focus narrows, and that stress is also a very physical signal about our current state. And that state is fundamentally about three things: 1) how our body is managing energy, 2) how it supports adaptation to a particular context (whether that’s a physical, mental, or emotional space) and 3) how it keeps us from blowing up.
Once we have a handle on how this signal works, and what it’s trying to tell us in these different contexts, we have some immediate and also very physical actions we can take to mitigate stress going from acute (short totally necessary bursts of goodness) to chronic (longer lasting sleep wrecking and relationship disrupting) bouts of harmfulness to our health. You will leave this Pint of Science talk with tools you can use immediately to use stress for positive adaptation, resilience and longevity. Promise!