Beyond Human

Beyond Human

Transcript for Beyond Human (full episode)

It's 90.1 KZSU, Stanford.

Ian Morris is a professor of history at Stanford.

I started my career as an archaeologist, working mostly in ancient Greece.

He says that a lot of human history can be explained by a pretty simple piece of technology, the plow.

The plow gets invented multiple times around the world.

What happens is that up to the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago, everybody in the world is a hunter-gatherer.

But then, end of the ice age, world warms up, and one consequence of that, population starts to rise.

People start working much harder to try to find the food they need.

So people start moving toward farming, and they all start eventually running into rather similar problems.

Boy, this farming is really hard work.

And so people start thinking about, what can I do to increase the yield from the bit of land that I've got?

My children are hungry, my family is hungry, what can I do?

And so they start tinkering around.

You're still basically hunters and gatherers, but you know that there's this one particular hillside where wheat seems to grow really well.

And so you say, well, maybe let's try taking a few seeds from that hillside, plant them somewhere else, and make a point of, we'll keep going back there.

We'll take a bucket of water with us every so often, and pour a little water on this.

We'll pick up a little bit of animal scat, or we're wandering around the landscape.

We'll try just sort of kneading that into the soil, see if it makes it grow better.

Do you need just a little bit more, and a little bit more, you're just tinkering around all the time, do you need just a little bit more, and a little bit more, and I'm gonna start digging holes with my stick so that the seeds grow better.

Do you need just a little bit more, and a little bit more, little bit more, little bit more, do you need just a little bit more, and a little bit more, and maybe quickly, maybe it's gonna take generations, but you'll start to figure out what works and what doesn't.

But if you go out with a stick, I mean, try it yourself, go out with a stick and start trying to turn the soil and plant seeds, this is really hard work.

And so people are experimenting, trying to find better ways to do this.

And one of the ways they eventually come up with, pretty much everywhere, where it's possible, is some kind of blade pulled by animal.

Cattle, water buffalo, these tend to be the best animals.

Much later on, horses become even better.

This greatly increases the yields.

For the amount of energy you put in ploughing, the payoff in the yields of your crops is just fantastic.

If you're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Mischa Shoni.

Today's show is called Beyond Human.

For Professor Ian Morris, the plow is a perfect example of what happens when we humans try to push past the limits nature's put on us.

With the plow, humans invented a new technology that changed the world, but we were changed in the process and not necessarily for the better.

The plow was this great mover and one of the biggest changes in the whole of world history.

What people find as they move more and more toward plow agriculture is the most effective way to be a plow farmer involves a whole different way of running your entire life really.

And they start to find, boy the jobs we're doing out in the fields now are getting heavier and heavier labor, more and more dependence on upper body strengths.

And it sort of kind of makes sense for men to do a lot of this work.

So people start moving towards saying, well, the outdoor work, the fields, that is man's work.

That's what men should be doing.

In addition, population is growing.

Early farming women, they think probably would have six or seven babies on average.

And they increasingly are in charge of the domestic tasks, of processing food, of weaving clothes, of minding small children.

And the whole new way of running life comes into the world because of this.

And this is what on the whole we nowadays call patriarchy.

And when you look at the history of peasant societies or the anthropology of peasant societies, overwhelmingly you find that these sort of patriarchal values dominate completely massive gender inequalities.

Well, this is a really big historical question.

Why is the peasant world like that?

Is it that all peasant farmers for 5,000 plus years of history were just monsters?

And of course, that's just a stupid explanation.

They moved in this direction because that was what was most effective and worked best in a world of plough agriculture.

Once the Industrial Revolution began, around 1800, and societies beginning in Northwest Europe, then spreading across the world, learned how to tap into the power of fossil fuels and use these to power their machines, then these old economic social dynamics of farming society, they just go out of the window.

By 2000, very large parts of the world have rejected patriarchy, at least in theory, even if a lot of the old-fashioned patriarchal attitudes still keep going.

In a way, the history of tool use, ever since it began, it's been all about extending the capabilities of being a human.

So in a sense, it's always been about becoming more than human.

But of course, it has also often had this unintended, unanticipated side effect of feeding back into and changing what our humanity is all about.

This is something that's become way more clear in the last few decades, as information technology has begun to ramp up so much.

The tools we create, the machines we create, have stopped just being extensions of us.

They're feeding back into us.

They're feeding back into us.

They're changing what we are.

And it's not a crazy science fiction prediction to suggest that 100 years from now, these machines may in many ways have displaced old fashioned human beings altogether.

The obvious analogy here is us ourselves.

Fully modern humans probably show up between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago.

By 20,000 years ago, every other kind of human on the planet has gone extinct.

We outcompete them.

They can't find food with us around.

They all go extinct.

It's a very nasty story.

That's how we got to be us.

And that, I suspect, is how we will stop being us as well.

We are creating these machines that are extensions of us, just like we initially were extensions of the precursor kinds of humanity.

These machines, I think, very probably will go on to replace us.

It's the same process as we've seen extinctions going back 3.8 billion years to the origin of life.

Same old, same old.

It's just that now it works so much faster.

That story was produced by Charlie Mintz and featured music by Pottington Bear, Wilted Woman and Broke for Free.

This is State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Mischa Shoni.

Today's show is Beyond Human.

Going beyond human can be risky.

Professor Ian Morris foresees a world where the machines we created to make life easier, they might one day replace us entirely, replace us the same way that we homo sapiens replaced the almost humans who came before us.

That's one vision of going beyond human.

Today on our show, we will bring you four other visions, four stories of people looking beyond our human boundaries, exploring ways to be more than we are right now.

As you might expect, pushing the envelope like this brings us to a question that seems simple, but is really actually very hard.

What makes us us?

In our first story, we meet a human who's so totally limited in one sense, but who's found a way to make his presence felt all over the world.

Our second story is about two scientists who think that trying to be more than human is maybe the most human thing about us.

In our third story, a Stanford professor helps discover ways that computers can be human and why embracing this fact can make us more human too.

In our fourth story, we've got a radio play for you.

It's about the strawberry sized gap between humans and machines.

Stay with us.

You're listening to State of the Human.

Today's episode is Beyond Human.

In our first story, we're going to meet a man who has gone far beyond what most humans are capable of.

He's unable to walk, but he can fly.

This is a story about Henry Evans.

In a lot of ways, Henry's life is just like mine and yours.

He lives with his wife, Jane, high up in the hills of Los Altos, California.

He has four kids, Steve, Nick, Michaela, and Mike.

He likes to crack jokes and play soccer.

But Henry does these things differently for most of us.

To explain why, his wife Jane tells a story.

It will soon be clear why she's the one telling it.

So what was life like before the episode?

Busy.

Yeah, life was wonderful.

15 years ago, Henry was the CFO of a successful startup in Silicon Valley.

He and Jane had just bought their first home and Henry was fixing it up himself.

He was handy, he built furniture, he gardened, skied, played every kind of sport.

But one day, everything changed.

It was the night before, it was back to school night for the kids and he was complaining about a headache.

He went to dinner and he kept complaining about the headache, so I'm gonna take it, just take something for it.

Well, he got up at three in the morning, went out here to the hot tub and, you know, I never heard him get up and the next day, he kept complaining about that headache and I was like, can't we let you just stay home and sleep?

Okay, he said, no, I got a big day at work, so he insists on taking the kids to school.

And so, on the way down, his speech started becoming slurred.

And you have to imagine, this is, we're 2,000 feet up in Pageville Road.

And so, and it's a windy road, and the kid thought he was gonna drive off the ledge.

And Stephen was saying, Dad, you know, what is going on?

And he kept saying, I'm sick, I'm sick.

And so, he gets him off at school, and then turns around, and comes back up Pageville Road, and comes through the door, and I kind of see him grabbing the walls, walking back there, and I'm going, Henry?

And he's saying, I just need to sleep.

And I'm like, no, you don't need to sleep.

You need to get in the car right now, and go to the hospital.

And he's very stubborn.

And I'm 5'3, he's 6'4.

It's not like I can really move this man, okay?

So I finally said to him, okay, Henry, remember when I told you I was so sure about marrying you that day?

Okay, this is even more than that, okay?

You need to get in the car.

And at that point, he was so dizzy that he could still walk and still use his arms, but he was disoriented.

And so I told him, Henry, this is how I did it.

When I had migraines, had to change diapers, just focus about a foot in front of your fingers and just crawl.

So I got him to crawl to the car and then got him to use his arm to lift himself, pull himself up into the car.

And drove him down to the doctor's office.

When they took one look at him, they said, get him to the ER right now.

Henry had suffered a brainstem attack, which is similar to a stroke.

When he woke up, he was completely paralyzed and unable to speak.

Even today, his voice is limited to what you can hear in the background.

But despite this physical condition, Henry's mind is intact.

To communicate with the outside world, he and his family have developed a special tool they call the board.

N-O, okay.

C-H.

The board is a 12 inch by 12 inch piece of clear plexiglass with all 26 letters and 10 digits stenciled on it.

The letters are arranged in groups, A, B, C, D, E, F, just like you would see on the tight pad of an old T9 phone.

In order to speak, Henry needs a translator to hold up the board in front of him.

He then stares at a specific group of letters until the translator can tell where he's looking.

Once this is done, the translator reads off each letter one at a time.

When Henry hears the right letter, he nods, and the whole process begins again.

Using this method, he eventually spells out words and phrases.

S, R, T, T.

W, Y, U, okay, U, S, T, no, U, R, your, P, A, your part is over.

At first, the board was the only way that Henry could communicate.

Later, Henry got another way to communicate.

It's what you're hearing now.

He can pre-program speech into a computer, using a special kind of mouse controlled by a very slight head movement.

One by one, he types each letter.

This lets him communicate on his own.

But it has drawbacks too.

Typing this way.

It's very slow, so Henry uses both methods.

The computer when he's alone, or with someone who doesn't know him very well.

The board when he's with his family.

What can you find a quadrupedic?

W-H-W-E, well.

T-S-T-S-U, no, I'm sorry, Henry.

Well, R-I, right, well, you left them.

You them.

Except for Henry, that's not exactly the case.

Because even though his body is limited, he can be present all over the globe.

At a lab in Brown University, at the Hermitage in St.

Petersburg, he does this using robots.

Robots that roll, robots that fly.

He controls them from his bed using head motions, and through them, he can explore the world.

No, it's T, H, E.

It's the C, L, closest thing to walking.

It's the closest thing to walking for me.

After his incident, Henry got a television interview about some of the exciting new work being done with robots.

He contacted the researchers, and together, they created a project known as Robots for Humanity.

Now, they are working together to create technology to expand the world of disabled individuals across the globe.

Thanks to their work, Henry is able to shave himself or scratch an itch using robots.

He's part guinea pig, part spokesperson, and part innovator.

As part of his work, Henry has flown drones with his head tracker, spoken to Congress, and presented a TED Talk.

But as he likes to say, all work and no fun makes for a dull quadriplegic, he plays soccer too.

So that's at Brown University.

So see, this is how it works.

See, he's driving this.

Oh my gosh.

So he'll see where he's going.

That's the foot of the robot, that way he won't bump into a person.

He's controlling a robot across the country at a lab in Providence, Rhode Island.

Thank you.

The robot has a small head-mounted camera, so we can see where he is going.

Henry controls the robot with the same head tracker he uses to type.

Moving around the lab, he bumps the ball with the foot of the robot.

He shoots.

He scores a goal.

Cool.

This is the world we're living in, a world where someone like Henry is still bound, on the one hand, to old technologies like the board, and to newer but still frustrating technologies, like the computer he uses for speech.

But it's also a world where unheard of freedoms are on the horizon.

It's a world where flying, rolling, talking robots will give humans, in effect, new bodies.

Henry says he feels lucky to be leading us there.

I have no idea how long I will be able to do this.

That story was produced by Eileen Williams and Miles Siever.

Eileen is a freshman at Stanford University.

Miles is a senior and a producer for State of the Human.

That story featured music by AudioNautix and broke for free.

To learn more about Henry Evans and his work with Robots for Humanity, you can go to r4h.org.

That's the letter R, the number 4, and the letter H.

Welcome back to State of the Human.

I'm Mischa Shoni.

The theme of our show today is Beyond Human.

We're looking at what happens when we go beyond what nature gave us.

Pretty much forever, we humans have had this funny habit of looking at ourselves and thinking, meh, we could do better.

Our skin was soft, so we made armor.

Our eyes were weak, so we made telescopes.

Then we started changing the body itself.

Lasik eye surgery, pacemakers, cochlear implants and grafted skin.

Now we're at a new frontier.

Scientists can change our DNA.

Jack Dewey tells us the story of two scientists at this frontier.

If you ask Xander Honkala to introduce himself, he'll say this.

My name is Alexander Honkala.

I am a dork from a long line of dorks.

We're very proud.

But if things go right for Xander, in the future, he'll introduce himself like this.

My name is Xander.

I used to be white, and now I am chrome.

To understand how Xander will go from being white to chrome and why he'd want to, you have to go back to the beginning.

A couple years ago, a very close family member was in the hospital liver failure.

And at the time I had graduated in molecular biology and immunology, I thought I understood biology very well.

But going to visit this person in the hospital, someone I don't see very often, that I've been very close to, being bright yellow from liver failure and being so weak and powerless and having diabetes from trying to clear off the liver problems.

And despite everything I knew about biology, molecular biology and why this happened, I was powerless to fix it.

The doctors, they couldn't do much either beyond treating the symptoms.

They could do metabolic screens.

They could see what was wrong with the liver, but they couldn't reach in and actually do anything to fix it.

And this is crude.

Many of us have felt disillusioned with science when a loved one is sick with something that doctors can't cure.

But Xander is better equipped than most of us to do something about it.

He had studied immunology and biology.

He also had a taste for robotics.

He got a chance to combine these pursuits when he met Andre.

I am Andre Watson.

Well, I studied biomedical engineering at RPI, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

It's the place where email came from, and, well, the at sign.

Andre had some of the same ideas about medicine percolating in his mind.

I had done a lot of literature research in pharmacology and neuroscience.

And he was on Xander's wavelength.

It was like finally finding someone you could talk at your full nerd level at.

So we kind of combined powers and formed this neuro-immuno-pharmaco-nanotech thing.

So within about 45 seconds, we found Ligandal.

Ligandal is a nanotechnology startup.

Xander and Andre's goal is to fix two problems with modern medicine.

The first problem, we don't have a way to deliver medicine so that it just affects one part of your body.

Xander and Andre are trying to build delivery mechanisms for drugs.

Xander calls them multi-stage rockets.

Thanks for watching.

So, the first part of Ligandl's plan is a new delivery mechanism for drugs.

Both Xander and Andre are making different drugs, too.

Right now, most drugs are mass-produced.

As the price of gene sequencing rapidly falls, it's becoming cheaper to understand each person's illness down to their genome, and to make genome-editing machines that are specific to each person's needs.

We only deliver drugs when we deliver genomic cures, so that if it's a genomic problem, it's permanently cured in one application.

In other words, medicine customized to your genes, tailored like a good suit.

And it will be something that you step into a clinic, and if you have prostate cancer or small cell lung cancer, in the next five years, you'll be okay, more than likely.

Andre and Xander are being very optimistic, but there's real science here that backs some of this up.

A company in Boston has built something like Xander and Andre's nano-missiles.

It delivers chemotherapy drugs, and other labs are figuring out how to edit human genomes.

Xander and Andre are hoping to combine these two developments, and the results they're seeing in preliminary tests are looking really good, which means that the cures Xander and Andre hope for are on their way.

But for Xander and Andre, cures are just the beginning.

I'm not satisfied with just fixing to the point of making someone merely normal human, which is kind of fragile.

Xander and Andre are talking about improvements, augmentations.

If we use our technology to cure your asthma, and you come out with the tidal lung volume of an athlete, have you cured you or have you augmented you?

Here's where things get tricky.

Because we like cures.

Cures take us back to what's basically human.

Hearing, seeing, walking.

Cures are democratic.

But augmenting people, at the level of genome, that's taking us beyond human.

When we bring up the subjects of human augmentation, a lot of people wince and immediately start imagining their limbs being chopped off and replaced with machines.

And this will probably happen, to be frank.

In a future like Xander and Andre imagine, people can do more than heal like superheroes.

They can see in the dark.

They can breathe underwater.

They can change their bodies so much, they don't even look like people anymore.

We asked Xander and Andre the big question.

At what point do augmented humans stop being humans?

If someone wants to have 18 arms and compound eyes, I don't see that as them not wanting to be human.

I see them as wanting to be human differently than you are.

Xander thinks that it's not your body that defines your humanity.

It's your mind, your personality.

Therefore, if you have more ability to express yourself, in some ways you're becoming more human.

Allowing people to augment themselves in accord with their own autonomy is not robbing them of their humanity, it's enabling their expression thereof.

He halfway believes in the soul, but he's not quite a dualist.

He sees the soul as being part of your biology.

I do know that you could put an electrode on a certain part of your brain and you would lose pretty much any semblance of a soul or capacity to express yourself, but that doesn't mean that you don't have a soul.

So if you were to say, slowly replace the biological brain with nanomachinery that emulates your brain perfectly, it's not clear to him what happens to the soul, or at what point, if at any point, the person stops being a person.

And I personally have not come to an answer on this that I feel strongly as the right answer.

Ultimately, Xander and Andrei aren't sure whether augmented humans will really be beyond human.

I don't think we understand it well enough to say they'll be fundamentally different.

We'd have to meet such a creature before we can decide whether or not they're still human.

But if things work out for Ligandal, we'll be able to meet one of those creatures one day.

He'll say, My name is Andrei.

At the age of something, I got a glioblastoma, which used to be the most deadly brain tumor.

We designed a customized nanotechnology that targeted the glioblastoma.

It turned those cells into stem cells, and then we changed them into another cell type.

That was quite fine.

I now have a lot more neurons.

Aside from that, I also got to glow in the dark tattoo.

I can turn it on when I think of the words that make me angry.

There's a phrase.

I don't want to say it.

He'll reach out and shake your hand with one of his many hands.

And my skin heals really fast.

I'm kind of like Wolverine.

I jump, and I don't have the claws yet.

I really want to.

I haven't figured out how to get them to retract and not hurt a lot.

But anyway, I mean, we're working on it, but it's good times.

That story was produced by Rachel Hamburg and Jack Dewey.

It included music by Christopher Bjorklund, Pottington Bear and Roll Music.

Welcome back to State of the Human.

Today's show is called Beyond Human.

We're looking at what changes when we change what nature's given us.

We've heard how technology can push us further and further out into the boundary of what is human.

We've asked if we can change ourselves so much that we are no longer human.

Our next story takes a different approach.

It suggests that one of our most advanced technologies, the computer, can offer new ways to understand what's essentially human.

And the man who helped us realize that was one of the most human humans you could ever meet.

When I was looking at doctoral programs back in the early 90s, decided to apply here to Stanford and wow, I got in.

This is BJ Fogg.

He's a technology consultant and he directs the persuasive tech lab at Stanford University.

And after they admitted me and I was still deciding, I got a phone call from this guy named Cliff Nass, but I remember Cliff talking to me and then also talking to, and this is super high voice, to this baby saying, yay, Matthew, cooing over this baby, Matthew, which was really odd.

And I got off the phone and I was like, wow, that was really different.

But it also sort of put me at ease a little bit about, okay, this will be a kind of a human kind of place to be.

Professor Clifford Nass was a luminary of Stanford campus.

He was a beloved mentor to his students and a trusted advisor to his colleagues.

Companies like Microsoft, Toyota and BMW asked him to help make their products better.

His 2009 research about the dangers of multitasking earned him headlines in the New York Times.

And as famous as he was for his work, he was almost as famous for his goofy, giddy, infectious personality.

My name is Ed Maibach.

I'm the director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.

Cliff was one of my professors in the doctoral program at Stanford.

My hypothesis about the world we live in today is that Cliff was the first case of nerd chic.

He was the guy who showed the rest of the world that being a nerd is really super cool.

As you may know, last year, after a long hike in the mountains, Clifford Nass suffered a heart attack and collapsed.

At the age of 55, he passed away.

He was always laughing.

He was always delighted by something somebody said.

This is Laurie Mason.

She was a doctoral student in Stanford's communication department.

He was always waving his arms and talking so fast he would spit.

He could just see something happen on a street corner and think about why had it caught his eye and choose from all the things to distill down to a research study and then so generously invite in the grad students and give them real jobs and real credit.

Yeah, they're all very, you know, there aren't that many people that I've met that I would be able to say these things about.

He was very unusual, and I was very sorry to hear he had gone.

Professor Clifford Nass has passed on, but his legacy endures.

He helped transform our understanding of what happens when we use technologies like computers or cell phones.

And his research is changing our world in some surprising, amazing, and slightly unsettling ways.

Senior producer Charlie Mintz tells the story.

Luis is a few inches tall, and she lives on an iPad.

She's a talking, animated virtual nurse.

Luis is technically termed an embodied conversational agent.

And you wouldn't expect her to be a good nurse, but she is.

Her job is to communicate with a patient in the hospital and explain various aspects of their care when they leave and they go home.

That's Chris Corio.

He's the CEO of Engineered Care, the company that sells Luis.

She's in about 10 hospitals right now.

Stanford's VA Hospital recently purchased the software.

And Chris comes by every now and then to see how his virtual nurse is doing.

So, sure, let's look at his latest version of Luis.

Chris whips out an iPad, touches a button, and there she is.

She's wearing a white lab coat, she has dark hair, coffee-colored skin.

Luis explains that I have pneumonia...

.

in your lungs.

And she's going to tell me how to get better.

Well, one thing I would like to talk with you about is how you can help your lungs recover with exercise.

On the right-hand side of the screen are buttons I can tap to give different responses.

I can say, okay, or I don't understand.

I tap one that says, I'm too sick.

I'm sorry you're not feeling well.

But actually there are several things that I think you will be able to do to exercise your lungs and help get better.

Luis turns down her eyebrows in a show of concern.

And here, this moment, this is why I say Luis shouldn't work.

Because most of what she does is pretty simple.

She gives pre-programmed answers to a variety of statements and questions, fine.

But this, this saying sorry, this making a face, this is really strange.

This has nothing to do with giving information.

This is giving empathy.

This is weirdly human.

I think it's sort of interesting, especially if you look back 15 years, you would have had just the very basics of human characters being able to be on screen.

And now you can have almost an entirely photorealistic experience.

I mean, if you look at a Pixar movie or things like that, they're amazingly close to real.

And human beings at this point sort of just accept the fact that they're very close, but they're not.

The more we interact with software and the more it provides value to us, you sort of look beyond the fact that they're not human.

I shouldn't feel creeped out by the fact that she's real.

You're going to see more and more, so.

Chris told me that researchers studying how patients react to Luis, they found something surprising.

Patients preferred her to real nurses.

And maybe this all feels inevitable, this transition we're making as computers get more and more personal.

In a world where we can talk, not just with our phones, but to them, maybe a sympathetic virtual nurse doesn't seem like such a leap.

But even if Luis feels normal, just beneath the surface, some very strange things are happening.

And to understand what deep, weird, and weirdly human forces are in motion, you need to hear a story about Professor Clifford Nass.

Yes, all right, my name is S.

Shyam Sundar.

I'm a distinguished professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at the College of Communications at Penn State University.

Shyam Sundar was a graduate student who worked with Professor Cliff Nass in the early 90s.

Back then, only about one in 10 households even owned a computer.

And the main way of thinking about them was as tools.

Primarily the concern was how to get computers to do your work, and those days, the idea of computers having effects on user psychology was rather new.

Even the idea of personal computers was still taking off.

So this is how things were around the time Professor Nass came to Stanford in 1986.

He'd studied sociology, but came to Stanford wanting to study how people responded to media objects like computers.

Fortunately, he landed in an office right next to a professor who'd been thinking along the same lines.

His name was Byron Reeves.

I'm a professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University.

So you and Cliff became pretty close.

How did that begin?

You said you had offices next door to each other.

It was certainly an influence of architecture.

I mean, we were on the same floor.

I mean, we weren't really similar people.

In personality, no.

Professor Reeves was a bit older, more reserved than the exuberant Nass, but they shared an interest in how people responded to things on screens.

I remember there was one ad for sausage.

For Byron, that meant television screens.

And there was a sausage roll on a table, and then the roll of sausage starts rolling down the table and getting larger.

As a professor at the University of Wisconsin, he'd studied how people's brains treat advertisements like their real life.

And I'm looking at brain activation, getting substantially higher as the sausage comes closer and closer to the face of the viewer.

And I thought, this is incredible.

That, you know, of course the sausage isn't going to come out of the screen and, you know, hit you in the face.

But that's what your old brain thought was going to happen.

When it comes to media, we humans have a tendency to confuse images for the real thing, at least deep in our unconscious.

The image of a giant sausage rolling toward us, getting closer and closer, at a certain level, our brain treats that as an actual giant sausage coming closer and closer.

And that's understandably terrifying.

This fact helps explain why scary movies, like Jaws or Alien, are so scary.

Old visual systems, auditory systems, approach avoidance systems, all the things that really kept the genes going from generation to generation, all of these responses that people were having were old brain responses.

Professors Nass and Reeves talked a lot about these quirky ways human brains got all confused by new technologies.

And Professor Nass got to wondering about another kind of technology, computers.

Did humans make the same kind of mistakes when they used computers?

Was there a computer equivalent to thinking about the giant sausage rolling towards us?

Or was there an even deeper way that computers fooled us?

Edward Maibach was a graduate student at the time, and he remembers how Professor Nass put his new idea.

Hey Ed, I got this notion that people might think about computers in much the same way they think about people.

Where would such an idea come from?

But it turned out to be truly prophetic.

It seems like an incredibly abstract question, but Professors Nass and Reeves found a way to test it.

They went to the library and took out books of research in social psychology.

Social psychologists had studied human interaction in tons of dimensions.

They had asked questions like, did people prefer similar personalities or different personalities?

What kinds of unconscious rules did people follow in conversation?

These were the kinds of questions that Professors Nass and Reeves began applying to human-computer interactions.

So we'd go to the psychological literature that was about humans, humans, cross out one of the humans, put in some form of media, and then go to town.

I'll give you an example of how strongly people treat computers like people.

Consider if I asked you, how do you like my suit today?

This is a speech Professor Nass gave a few years ago, explaining one of his earliest experiments.

It's wonderful, because you know it's important to be polite.

You know that if you said you didn't like it, it would hurt my feelings.

It asked whether people would be polite to computers.

Now, would you worry about hurting a computer's feelings?

Let's find out.

Here's how the experiment worked.

Professors Nass and Reeves had test subjects come in and use a computer.

Then, those subjects evaluated the computer they had just used.

But, one group of people did their evaluations with pencil and paper.

Another did their evaluations on a different computer than the one they'd used.

And the third group did their evaluations on the same computer they had just used.

What happened?

Well, it turned out that when people answered on the computer they worked with, they gave significantly more positive responses than they did when they answered on paper and pencil.

In other words, people were polite to a computer.

Then ask them, would you be polite to a computer?

And to a person, they insisted, absolutely not.

Only an idiot would say nicer things to a computer that asked about itself than they would to a different computer across the room.

No one would be that foolish.

Yet that's exactly what people did.

They did.

An experiment after experiment.

And then we'd laugh and think, well, that was pretty funny.

And then 50 studies later, we published a book.

The book, called The Media Equation, detailed numerous ways that people treated computers like people.

They trusted them.

They felt good when they got compliments from them.

It's just funny to think that you know the messages are fake.

BJ Fogg helped run some of their experiments.

In one, subjects received compliments from computers.

They're popping up from the computer, but you still have these positive responses to it.

And you can't help but have those responses because they're social.

It's built into us.

We're vulnerable.

In another experiment, Professor Nass had test subjects wear a green armband and then work on a problem using a green computer.

In surveys afterwards, people said they liked those computers more.

More than the people who had used computers that were a different color from their own armband.

In other words, they felt like the computer was their teammate.

For Professors Nass and Reeves, this was more proof that people treated computers like people.

Cliff was a strong advocate that that's not a flaw.

The fact that we respond socially to these is not a flaw and it's not that you're crazy.

I don't think he said this, but I think he would say it, that we should celebrate that reaction.

That that's awesome, you're a healthy, well human, if that's your response, and if you're not, then you should be a little worried.

In the end, Professor Byron Reeves and Professor Cliff Nass, they learned more about people than they did about technology.

It turns out that it doesn't really take that much for us to think of a computer as a human.

Even back when a computer was about as human as a traffic light, people were still treating them kind of like people.

So sure, Louise...

I'm sorry you're not feeling well.

She's an expression of how human technology can be.

But actually there are several things that I think you will be able to do to help get better.

But she's also an expression of how inescapably human we are.

When we humans make something, we make it human.

Charlie Mintz is a producer for State of the Human.

The story featured music by Broke for Free, Puddington Bear, Second Mouse, and Memetone.

Thanks to everyone who shared memories of Professor Clifford Nass, Byron Reeves, Shyam Sundar, Laurie Mason, BJ Fogg, Glenn Leshner, Edward Maibach, Leila Takayama, Ben Detenberg, Terry Winograd, Tandy Trower, and Michael Slater.

To learn more about Luis, the virtual nurse, you can visit engineeredcare.com.

Welcome back to State of the Human.

Today's show, Beyond Human.

We've been looking at humans who ventured out beyond their built-in limits.

Our next story is a little different.

It's not about a human trying to go beyond human, but a robot trying to go beyond robot.

It's called The Simulation Deck.

It was produced by Stanford freshman Jackson Roach.

It is time to wake up, Mr.

Williams.

How many times I gotta tell you to call me Jeff?

I apologize, Jeff.

My orders were to address my crewmates formally.

I will prepare your breakfast.

How would you like your eggs this morning?

The usual.

Is everything all right, Jeff?

Fine, just feels weird every time I move up or down a deck level.

That is very normal.

Experienced weight changes in relation to distance from the hub of the station's centrifugal rotation, and-

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they told me all that.

How long before I get used to it?

Most become acclimated within their first week in orbit.

Your breakfast is ready.

Thanks, George.

Are you just gonna stand there?

Is there a task you wish me to perform, Jeff?

Uh, no, no, just, do you have to stare at me like that?

You may reattach the panel now, Jeff.

Yes.

Simulation Deck Repair Complete.

Alrighty, now what?

You are free to use the Simulation Deck whenever you wish.

What does it do?

The Simulation Deck produces rudimentary simulations of environments and situations that can be found on Earth.

What do you mean?

I will show you.

Whoa.

What is it for?

The simulation deck is designed to maintain the psychological well-being of human crew members.

Jeff.

Hey, George.

Do you need something?

No, I'm all right.

Where'd that come from?

Miss Wallace, Sarah, left this violin here after her residence on the station.

Did she teach you how to play it?

No, I learned by listening and watching.

Is something funny?

No, no, not really.

It's just a bizarre sight.

You, floating there upside down by the window, a robot playing the violin, pretty well too.

Who would have thought?

And the whole earth right there behind you, like an audience.

I am not upside down, you are.

Oh, I guess you're right.

Ceiling looks like the floor where I am.

Weightlessness is a tricky thing for us humans to really comprehend, I guess.

Apparently.

What was Sarah like?

Was she nice?

She left the violin here.

Quite a view.

It'd be easy to sit here forever, watching it all turn down there.

Easy.

How's it look out there, George?

Moving towards Leek Tide.

Adjusting cameras.

There you are, I can see you just fine.

I have arrived at the Leek Tide beginning patch.

Alrighty, I'll be right here if you need anything.

May I ask you a question, Jeff?

Is something wrong?

Do you need assistance from the arm?

No, just a question.

Oh, okay, sure, George, shoot.

Have you ever eaten a strawberry, Jeff?

What?

A strawberry.

Heard you, why are you asking me about strawberries?

I am curious.

You use the simulation tech?

Yes, sometimes.

Of course I've eaten a strawberry before.

What did it taste like?

Oh, you know, just like a strawberry, just like a strawberry should.

What should a strawberry taste like, Jeff?

I don't know.

Sweet, I guess.

What is sweet like, Jeff?

You know, like sugar.

Candy and ice cream and stuff, things like that are sweet.

You misunderstand my question.

I know about the group of foods that are called sweet.

I would like to know what it feels like to taste something sweet.

Oh, well, that's hard to say.

I guess it's nice.

It's a good feeling, sort of cold without being actually cold.

Maybe soft, happy, I guess.

Makes your tongue get all surprised or something.

Like when you run your hand under a hot water, and it almost hurts, but then it feels good and you keep it there.

I don't really know what I'm saying.

I don't know why I'm telling you this, George.

Sometimes I forget.

I don't know.

It's not like you could understand what feelings like that are like anyway.

You're a machine.

Yes, I am.

So you can't feel like I can.

You don't need to.

Why not?

Well, machines are built to work.

You're just silicon and electricity in a metal box.

Are you not just meat and electricity in a carbon box?

Yeah, but well, it's just you don't...

Human beings can be special.

We have the opportunity to be more than what we're made of.

How?

I don't really know, George.

Somehow.

That's what religion and philosophy and art are for.

I can play the violin.

Yes, but the music you're playing doesn't have any meaning.

Meaning?

You can't tell the difference between Vivaldi and me playing the violin.

And me playing the violin.

Re-patched.

Ugh.

George.

George?

Where are you?

Oh, God.

Geez, George, get the **** out of me.

George?

George?

George!

George!

George!

How do I shut off the water?

George!

It is time to wake up.

Short.

This week's show is produced by Charlie Mintz, Rachel Hamburg, Josh Hoyt, Will Rogers, Eileen Williams, Ojan Sierbinowski, Jack Dewey, and Jackson Roach.

With help from Jonah Willengans, Natasha Ruck, Kristi Hartman, Nina Foushey, Josh Hoyt, and Miles Siever.

Thanks to the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and to Bruce Brayden for his generous financial support.

To learn more about the Stanford Storytelling Project, you can go to storytelling.stanford.edu.

Thank you.