TED Radio Hour - Cuts Both Ways

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

There are two sides to every coin — and sometimes our strengths become weaknesses. This hour, TED speakers explore the mixed blessings and volatile flip sides of mental health, parenting and AI. Guests include developmental psychologist Yuko Munakata, entrepreneur Andy Dunn and AI researcher Yejin Choi. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. I want to start the show with an apology to those of you who are nervous flyers, which includes me. Yuko Munakata knows how we feel. Yes, it is still hard to talk about even all this time away from it.

This was a flight when we were living, in Boston. About 20 years ago, after getting their psychology PhDs, Ugo and her husband were working at MIT. And we were traveling to Stockholm for a research collaboration. They were taking an overnight flight. And we had dinner and the flight attendants were clearing the trays and we hit some turbulence and the plane just dropped. The plane just dropped suddenly, and, you know, my heart started pounding.

At first, a bunch of teenagers at the back led out a whoop like they were on a roller coaster. So I felt like, okay, it's just some turbulence, it's going to be okay. But then it happened again, and it was incredibly strong. Just this huge drop that led the food carts to hit the ceiling. and the force of these drops led the panels in the ceiling to fly upward, and that revealed the sort of wiring going along the length of the plane and the ceiling was crumbling dust. I mean, it just felt like the plane was falling apart.

You know, those whoops just completely gave way to people screaming and sobbing. I just curled up into this ball and started rocking. And then it happened a third time. We weren't just falling, but we're actually being actively thrust downward. Oh, gosh. And finally, the pilot said, we don't know what that was. We don't know what's coming. Stay in your seats.

And the screaming just started again. I mean, it just was the least reassuring thing you could possibly hear. The plane finally leveled out, and the rest of the flight actually went pretty smoothly. And eventually they landed safely in Stockholm. A few weeks later, Yucco and her husband got a letter from the airline explaining what had happened. It was clear air turbulence. And we learned that the planes are built to withstand forces up to, I think, 8G or something, many times greater than what we were. experience, which is really mind-boggling.

So despite terrifying the bejesus out of the passengers, their plane was never in any danger of crashing. But Yucco and her husband reacted completely differently to this news. So he came away from it feeling like planes are incredibly safe. Gosh. We could have gone through things way worse than that and still have been completely fine. planes are great. This is just this amazingly safe way to travel. Whereas I came away from it feeling like I just, I've never been able to fly like I used to fly before this incident.

Even just talking about it now, you know, my palms are sweaty, feel myself trembling a little bit. And even if I know all these things in the abstract, I still can't help it. If there's turbulence, my mind just immediately goes back to that experience. We've all heard the saying there are two sides to the same coin, like an awful experience that traumatizes someone but reassures another, or a person's charisma and drive that helps them become wildly successful, but also causes their downfall. Or new technology that has the potential to make our lives infinitely easier, but could also ultimately, ultimately, destroy us. Today on the show cuts both ways. We investigate the mixed blessings and volatile

flip sides of things that appear intensely wonderful. And for psychologist Yuko Muna Kata telling the story about that long ago flight, where she finds it helps explain her research into parenting and child development. It had a really strong influence on me. I still carry that with me more than 20 years later. But it had a completely different. influence on my husband, who was there right next to me, experiencing the exact same thing. So just as she and her husband walked away from the same incident with different perspectives, Yucco says there's no predicting the impact that parents will have on their kids. There are some really surprising findings from this work that attempts to tease apart

all the many influences that are often swirling around and intermixed in shaping who kids become. Here's Yuko Munakata on the TED stage. Parents want what's best for their children, and parenting books promise to show how to achieve the best outcomes, to address the difficult decisions that parents face every day, and in the process to reveal why each of us turned out the way we did. The problem is that parenting books send conflicting messages, tiger parenting or free-range parenting? Parent like the Dutch, to raise the happiest kids in the world, or like the Germans to raise self-reliant children.

The one consistent message is that if your child isn't succeeding, you're doing something wrong. There's good news, though. The science supports a totally different message that is ultimately empowering. Trying to predict how a child will turn to, based on choices made by the parents is like trying to predict a hurricane from the flap of a butterfly's wings. If you are a parent, you are the butterfly flapping your wings.

Your child is the hurricane, a breathtaking force of nature. You will shape the person your child becomes like the butterfly shapes the hurricane. In complex, seemingly unpredictable, but powerful ways, the hurricane wouldn't exist without the butterfly. Wait, you might ask, what about all the successful parents with successful children? Or the struggling parents with struggling children? They might seem to show the simple power of parenting. But children can be shaped by many forces that are often intertwined, like successful parents, successful genes, and a culture of success that they grow up in. This can make it hard to know which forces influence who children become. I mean, it's the old age-old question, right? Like nature versus nurture. And are we getting any closer

to actually answering that question? Yeah, so parents can be one part of that, but there could be any of these other things. Studies that have tried to pull apart all these interacting factors have led to a surprising conclusion, which is that who we turn out to be is shaped by the genes we receive from our parents and by something in the environment too, but not parents, not something in the environment that leads kids growing up in the same home to be more like each other. So, for example, if you see a parent who's really impulsive and then you see their child is acting impulsively, you might think, oh, well, the parent, because they're behaving this way, the kid sees that and they mimic it. But if they're related genetically, it could be something

about their genetic variance that are leading both of them to behave in that way, rather than the parent shaping the kids. millions of children have been studied to disentangle all those shaping forces that are usually intertwined. These studies follow identical twins and fraternal twins and plain old siblings, growing up together or adopted and raised apart. And it turns out that growing up in the same home does not make children noticeably more alike in how successful they are or how happy or self-reliant and so on. Imagine if you had been taken from birth and raised next door by the family to the left, and your brother or sister had been raised next door by the family to the right. By and large,

that would have made you no more similar or different than growing up together under the same roof. On the one hand, these findings seem unbelievable. Think about all the ways that parents differ from home to home, and how often they argue, in whether they helicopter, and how much they shower their children with love. You would think that would matter, enough to make children growing up in the same home more alike than if they had been raised apart. But it doesn't. In 2015, a meta-analysis, a study of studies, found this pattern across thousands of studies, following over 14 million twin pairs across 39 countries. They measured over 17,000 outcomes, and the researchers concluded that every single one of those outcomes is heritable, so genes influence who children become. But genes didn't

explain everything. The environment mattered too, just something in the environment that didn't shape children growing up in the same home to be more alike. You cite a meta-analysis that came out in 2015 about so many studies that were done about twins and their outcomes, right? If you have two people who are genetically as close as possible, this is the standard way of studying this? So this is one of the standard ways. There's multiple ways that all lead to roughly similar conclusions. So they looked at how similar identical twins are, and they compared it to how similar fraternal twins are, with the idea being because identical twins overlap 100% genetically or close to that,

and fraternal twins on average overlap 50% genetically, you can estimate how much of their variation in outcomes can be attributed to genetic variance. So this meta-analysis, they found that what you reliably see, study after study after study, that first genes matter for every single outcome. They also found effects of the environment that were leading identical twins growing up in the same home to be different from one another. Yes, the environment shapes us, but it doesn't seem to be the parents because if it were, then that should lead identical twins growing up in the same home to be more alike each other. I'm thinking of a friend. Like, his parents are really,

and their eldest child completely rejected religion, the second child became very religious, and the third child feels conflicted. Wow, yes. That's a great example. Same parents, and they might have wanted a specific outcome for all of their kids, and they may have raised them as similarly as they could, but the kids are different. Coming up, what does that mean for all the parenting advice that's out there? What you go learned after becoming a parent herself? on the show today cuts both ways.

I'm Anoush Zamoroti and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Friends, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know about TED Radio Hour Plus. When you become a plus listener, you get bonus episodes made just for you with more ideas from TED speakers and you'll go behind the scenes with our producers. What you won't get, though, are those sponsor messages interrupting the show. And that's because you are directly supporting our work at NPR. So if you'd like to show your support, learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org

slash TED or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. And on the show today cuts both ways, ideas about the wonderful and awful sides of things, like parenting. We were just talking to developmental psychologist Yuko Munakata about the research that shows that parents don't shape who their children become as much as they might think they do.

Yeah, there's not a simple, easy answer about here's what you should do and here's how your kid will turn out. Which, if you're a parent, can make you feel pretty helpless. On the other hand, I think it's beautiful and empowering in a way for parents to be able to embrace that complexity, you know, that kids have this agency. They are their own people. There's not a formula one way that fits all kids that's going to lead to certain outcomes. And I think that can empower us to not be so stressed and worried that we're not doing the exact right thing.

At first, Yucco came to this conclusion based on the research. But then her son was born, and it made her question everything. Yeah. When he was born, he seemed perfectly healthy, and we were so, so happy. I just feel like the first two days of his life were just complete bliss. And we sent all these messages to the loved ones and sort of announcing, you know, the wonderful news. and we would just add this PS at the end of the messages that said, we're just waiting for poop,

and then we're going to go home because they won't send you home from the hospital until your baby has pooped, just to make sure everything's okay. But they didn't send us home because he didn't poop. They sent us to another hospital where we handed him over to a surgeon who took him back for an operation

to open up, his intestine and clear out a blockage and then put his intestine back together. And at that point, they determined that he did not have functioning neurons in his intestine. These neurons would normally do the peristulses, this kind of squeezing motion of the intestine that pushes the food through it and allows us to absorb nutrients in water. So he did not have these neurostalysis, this kind of squeezing motion of the intestine, that pushes the food through it and it, and it allows us to absorb nutrients and water. So he did not have these neurons. And when they first said this to us, I just felt like the walls were closing in on me. This is quite rare. At that time, some kids were still being sent home just to die. Parents were told that there was nothing that could be done. We didn't know. We didn't know if he could

live, if he did live, what kind of life he would have? At first, their baby was fed intravenously. So having intravenous nutrition is, you know, a miracle, an amazing, amazing thing that can allow kids to live and to thrive. I think, you know, we'd just switch from this kind of uncertain, overwhelmed state to empowered, and we're going to do as much as we possibly can. And we started to see that. He was growing. showing a lot of the healthy things we would want to look for, getting bigger. He started to smile, which was the most beautiful thing, you know.

But eventually they realized that the very treatment that was saving his life was beginning to cause liver failure. And he was turning yellow and then orange with jaundice, with these high levels of Billy Rubin, and just started to scratch and claw and was really, really miserable. And that's when we really, I think, came the most face-to-face with this idea that he may not be able to live. Yucco and her husband were desperate to find a treatment that could possibly work. And then they did.

But it was very experimental. Boston Children's Hospital had developed a way to give intravenous nutrition that was restoring. health to these kids who were dying from the prior version of the intravenous nutrition. We learned that all of the other babies, all of the other 34 babies, except for one, had been saved by this miracle fish oil that was given intravenously. And they looked at our baby and looked at all his information and said, we can save your baby. gradually, gradually, gradually, first his toes started to turn pink

and that's what we heard. That's the first place where you see the jaundiced, yellow or orange skin start to turn back to pink and we saw it there and then it just spread through the rest of his body. How old is he now? He's now 16.

Whoa! Yeah. Parenting, I've come to understand, is about loving my child today, now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that's all there is. I had thought that my expertise in child development would help prepare me for becoming a parent. Instead, becoming a parent helped me to see the science

in a whole new light. Appreciate how powerful the moments can be because of what they mean for you and your child right now, not because of what they mean for your child long term, which you do not know. If we can embrace the complexity of our children's development, that can transform how we approach those parenting decisions we face each day and empower us to realize how much more there is to having a child than trying to shape a specific outcome.

You very poetically draw a conclusion that, you know, as much as you know about the psychology of child development and parenting, you too had to struggle a bit to accept the lack of control. You had, tell me about how your son's illness changed you as a parent, as a researcher in terms of the work you do. Yeah, so knowing about all the science still so natural to fall back on thinking that what we're doing could have this long-term impact, at least in this time and place, given the kinds of messages that are out there for parents. But I think there's so much about parenting that is really about being with our kids in the moment and all that stuff in the future is unknown. And it's unknown because we just,

I mean, every parent, we just do not know. how much time we have with our kids. But that doesn't mean I have no influence. All experiences ultimately go into the mix of forces that shape children. But it's also a little bit unsettling. It's going to take them in different directions. But unsettling in this way that I think really recognizes kids for who they are. They are not carbon copies.

They are unique individuals who are going to respond differently. to what you say and do as a parent. That's developmental psychologist Yuko Munakata. She's a researcher at UC Davis, and you can see her full talk at TED.com. Oh, and her son, by the way, is now 17 years old. On the show today, cuts both ways. And for our next speaker,

the very thing that felt like his superpower was also what brought him down. I always got a charge about this idea of doing something that no one has ever done before. This is Andy Dunn. He's a very successful entrepreneur, and like many startup founders, he's got a story to tell. And his starts with pants. I had a housemate who felt like men's pants didn't fit, of all things, which I thought was a silly idea at the time. Silly until his housemate, Brian, started actually making and sell. his own pants.

That our classmates started buying myself included. So in 2007, Andy and Brian started a company. And Andy's vision was to upend the entire retail industry by selling stylish khaki trousers directly to customers. The idea became, the dream became, build an internet site, deliver a great customer service experience that would give people confidence to buy pants

online. Now this was years before Warby Parker or Allbirds or Bomba's socks, online only right to the shopper was not a thing. And that got me charged up. And that was the beginning of a journey of, hey, let's go, let's go be the first brand ever built on the internet from the ground out. Bonobos was born. And like with every tech startup, CEO Andy pitched any investor who let him through the door. Most people that I pitched said no, and so maybe I had to speak to 500 people over the course of three years. Boardroom after boardroom. Same pitch. We make fitted khaki pants, sell them online, and guess what? I mean, it's amazing what we're doing. They're going fast. $90,000 in our first month. I think we'll do $120,000 this month. I don't think we can keep growing

50% month on month, but like something's happening here. Eventually, investors started lining up. $8 million raised over three years, then another 18.5 in 2010. Bonobos expanded to suits, shirts, outerwear. And all the while, Andy maintained a relentless burn the candle from both ends pace. Like I got on the roller coaster, and the roller coaster looked something like this. I would work all day, and I'd work a long 10 or 12-hour day. And then every night, I would go out and do something social. In some nights, that might be, for professional reasons, a potential investor or a potential team member.

Other nights, that would be going out on the town with friends or going out on a date. And while that might be a normal way to approach life, a day or a two week, I did it seven days a week. I would kind of make a joke that I was a little bit like Voldemort from Harry Potter. I'm not sure that I even existed, if not in reference to, like, sucking other people's energy. It was a pathological level of extroversion. Bonobos continued to spiral upwards, but Andy started to spiral too in a different direction. It was, in fact, a hypomanic energy that was almost a requirement

for raising money for this particular idea at that particular time. And this begins to get into the symbiotic and parasitic relationship that there can be between bipolar and a entrepreneurial career. Andy has bipolar disorder type one. His girlfriend, Manuela, knew about it, so did his parents, but almost no one else. He had avoided dealing with it for a long time, but this episode was different.

I cycled through a couple of mood states. Here's Andy Dunn on the TED stage, and a warning, this next section includes a description of violent behavior. Dizzyingly productive periods of hypomania, a misunderstood moon state that is a diluted form of mania without the telltale psychosis that leads to a diagnosis of bipolar one, but all of the increased energy and creativity and ideation in joad de vivre and burning the candle up both ends, alternating with devastating periods of depression. for me, both mild and severe, often 50 or 100 days at a time, catatonic, can't get out of bed,

disappearing on the team, unable to go to work, sometimes undesirous of living. And all of it was amplified by what was happening at work, a gutting co-founder divorce, a rotating door of executive turnover, maddening and expensive flights into shiny new objects and distracting ideas, and a whopping cash-fetched, burn raid that at times reached $5 million a month. And all of it boiled over in 2016. In a manic episode at my New York apartment, I rose from my bed, literally howling at the moon,

convinced I was the president and Batman, which is actually a high potential combination if you think about it. And then the darkness really set in. I hit my hat on a doorway. I was bleeding from the head. Manuela came to try and help me. I struck her. She called her mom who lives in Manhattan. Her mom came to try to help me. I pushed her mom. Kicked her mom. They called 911. Eight cops flooded the broom. I was pinned to the ground. I was taken to Bellevue. Psychiatric ward there. I spent a week on the ward. And I may well lose everything that I care about. This woman who I love may leave me. Am I going to have to leave my job? And I walked out ready to deal with it and was met upon discharge from Belle U by four NYPD officers. And I was arrested. For what? I was arrested for felony and misdemeanor assault of my now wife and my now mother-in-law who were just trying to protect me from running naked into the streets in New York.

And while they were prepared to share their perspective, which was that this was a mental health episode, Andy wasn't himself. the city of New York, to its credit, doesn't just believe potential victim narratives about what happened. They want to figure it out because not everyone who's in an abusive situation is free to be transparent. And so it was a harrowing six months where I was in and out of the courts, were these charges going to be dismissed? And a number of amazing things happened. You know, first, Manuel said, as long as you take your medication and see your doctor, this is no different than any other. their physical illness. I'm here for it, which was amazing. Her mom said the same thing. My board and my executive team stuck by me while they knew I was working to get better. They said,

we believe in you. We believe you can make a comeback here. As my arresting officer joked when I asked him if there would be PR about this, he goes, dude, you're not the founder at Google. You sell pants. So I was low profile enough. Put you in your place there, huh? He did. It was funny. It was funny at the time. Andy, this was not actually the first time you'd had a bipolar episode. It was your second. When I was 20, I was the Messiah for about a week. You talked about that on stage.

I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. But I did spend a fair amount of time preaching my gospel at the Burger King in Evanston. How you were hospitalized. You talked to a psychiatrist. I was just a 20-year-old Midwestern kid having a manic episode. And you say that at the time you ignored the diagnosis. You tried to do everything you could to shake it off and just move on. And it was very much not awesome for my family and my friends. Why?

Yeah, look, I grew up in a family that was very different culturally. My mom's family were Punjabi Indian immigrants. Lots of doctors in my mom's family, a strong medical bent. But mental health was not something. that was discussed. Ironically, my dad's father had been a psychiatrist, my dad's mother, had mental illness. He actually had her committed twice,

and they had a Scandinavian Midwestern ethos. In that family as well, on my dad's side, there was a culture of not talking about what happened. And so these legacies, these cultures were brought into my life such that when I was discharged, I don't remember any conversations amongst any family or friends, at least with me, about what had happened.

Even the diagnosis itself to me felt traumatic. It was like a sledgehammer hit my chest. You have bipolar disorder. And of course, what people say is you are bipolar. And so I amputed, oh my gosh, I was just Andy Dunn a week ago. And now I'm Andy Dunn, who is bipolar. And of course, you know, we would never say someone is cancer. or we would say they have it.

One of the tragedies of mental illness is that we conflate the illness with the identity, which makes it so much harder to take it on because you have to accept not that you have to deal with this awful thing, which you do, but that you literally are that awful thing. When we come back,

Andy Dunn tries to get better while confronting a startup culture that rewards unhealthy, damaging behavior. On the show today, cuts both ways. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. And on the show today, cuts both ways. We were just talking to the co-founder of the clothing company Bonobos, Andy Dunn. While Andy was under pressure to rapidly grow his company, he ignored his diagnosis of bipolar type 1. which led to a psychotic break in 2016.

And so what exactly is a manic episode? Typical symptoms include a lack of sleep, grandiosity, relentless optimism, high-risk behaviors, racing speech, and ideas that are seen as delusional. Does that remind you of anyone? Because it sounds to me like an entrepreneur having a good day. And in fact, it is estimated

that 3% of all of us have bipolar, a staggering number in its own right. For entrepreneurs, that number is 11%. And at the intersection, Hi, Mom, that's me, the best of both worlds. And it's not just bipolar. According to a study from the University of California at San Francisco,

entrepreneurs also overindex in ADHD, in depression, and in substance use. and maybe this correlation between neurodiversity and innovation shouldn't surprise us. After all, to be an entrepreneur is to conjure things that aren't real yet. I mean, you see a big connection between mental health problems and entrepreneurialism. And I wonder what you think this says about our startup culture, that it fuels unhealthy habits. Yeah, you know, the different. kinds of neurodiversity that we're talking about that can be these superpowers, there is an

insidious feedback loop between these kinds of behaviors and conditions and business success. We could go through it, right? We could go through business tighten by business titan, right? And we could probably have a conversation around what their underlying mental health conditions might be. And I make a joke when I'm in front of a crowd sometimes. I don't know if it's a good joke or not. But there's one mental illness that every single entrepreneur has, which is narcissistic personality disorder. And, you know, the reason it's funny is it's true, right? To start something requires an unhealthy level of self-belief. Otherwise, why you? And I think capitalism rewards people without size narcissism, with workaholism, with conditions that might lead them to be inclined

to think differently. And I think we can credit Milton Friedman with this idea. If the only purpose of a corporation is to generate profits, then the people there are not a first concern, right? The productivity of the employees are important, but for their morale, for their mental health, I don't know. It's more kind of a pure labor mindset. How do we extract the most from this group, whether or not it's good for them, right?

And, you know, we're finally now, I think, starting to have an honest conversation that one might really be good at something, but that thing might not be good for them. And so then what do we do? And I felt that way many times at Bonobo's like, can I just get out of this? How do I quit? How do I escape? Did you feel trapped? I mean, oh my gosh. I think every entrepreneur feels trapped at some point. But I definitely, definitely felt trapped because once I'd raise money and that money escalated at some point to over a hundred. $120 million in over five or 600 employees. The way to the world, I felt like was on my shoulders. I owed these investors, not just $120 million back, but with a return. And all these individuals who I'd recruited and said, hey, this is going to be a valuable company. Come work here. Part of your package will be equity. I felt like I owed all those folks. And then, frankly, myself, you know, work for a period of time, a decade on something. And you're like, was this not, was this going to worth it ever. Do you mind explaining to me what a day is like for you now as compared to before times?

Oh my God, it's so boring. Let's do it. So I've got, and I'm proud to say, an Olympic regimen of mental hygiene and mental fitness. I see a psychiatrist two to three times a week for a 45-minute therapy session. Now, you would think therapy once a week is enough. But for me, I want my doctor to lay eyes on me every 72 hours so he can assess my mood. I've got five different medications that I take, one every day, and the other four, we titrate up and down depending on where I am. And then I've got a relentless focus on sleep, because sleep is, for me certainly with bipolar, a leading or a lagging indicator of mood.

And by the way, that might be all of us. And so every morning, the first thing I do is that I'm just, send a Fitbit sleep report to a WhatsApp group that includes my doctor, my wife, and the three people who have endured this with me the longest. My mom, Usha, my dad, Charlie, and my sister Monica. Andy, I want to make sure that I say aloud, I'm guessing that there are some listeners thinking, wow, what he's describing this new life that he lives, how could anyone do that if they weren't rich to be able to see a psychiatrist twice a week, to have such a regimented life. Maybe when that awful incident, when you hit your fiancé, maybe the police would have shot you

if you'd been a black man. There's so much here about your survival that speaks to what's possible in our society for some and not for others. A hundred percent. It's so true. the number of vectors of privilege that I had, yeah, let's include the attorney I was able to hire to represent me in court, the treatment at Bellevue, the quality of the doctor that I found, ability to pay for out-of-pocket expenses, which are astronomical, crisis PR firm from the vantage point of my job, the understanding of our board kept me going, executive team. There may be eight or ten things where I was in the top desial of the... look and still, I feel like in many ways still barely made it. How can we expect other people who

don't have all those vectors of privilege to endure this? We need to make mental health care fundamentally acceptable. Actually, hang on, this whole thing is going to land great. Actually affordable and universally accessible. Look, I want us to be delusional sometimes. I want want to be delusional sometimes. I want people whose brains work differently, like mine does and like yours might, to be able to dream crazy dreams, to share crazy thoughts, and God willing, or universe willing, bring those dreams to life. But we have to keep ourselves in check, don't we? After all, only messiahs are all knowing, and entrepreneurs are not gods, even when we think we are.

We will be better humans, building a better future together when we take stock not just of how we change the world, but how we treated each other and ourselves along the way. Thank you. Andy Dunn is an entrepreneur

and the former CEO of Bonobos. His book is called Burn Rate, launching a startup and losing my mom. You can see his full talk at ted.com. And if you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the suicide and crisis lifeline. It's 988. On the show today, cuts both ways. And so far we have talked about humans.

Now let's talk about machines and the strengths and weaknesses of artificial intelligence. Because there are so many things that make bots like chimes. Chat GPT, amazing. It's able to pass the bar exam or college exams as long as plenty of those exam examples were in the training data. It can also write poetry, compose music, summarize vast amounts of data in a fluid, human-like way. Some people are genuinely wowed by that, like, oh my goodness, chat GPT is so creative. And making powerful AI so easy to use has resurfaced a long-running debate.

Whether AI will save us or steal all our jobs and kill us. I'd say either is a possibility. This is Ye Jin Choi. And we don't know what's going to happen for sure. She's an AI expert, a MacArthur Genius Award winner and a professor at the University of Washington. And that means a lot is up to us to shape the future. So, Yejin, you gave a test. head talk recently about AI and a big conundrum, as you see it.

AI today is unbelievably intelligent and then shocking me stupid. You used an example of drying laundry to demonstrate how literal it can be. So suppose I left five clothes to dry out in the sun and it took them five hours to dry completely. How long would it take to dry 30 clothes? Yeah, it doesn't matter how many people. pieces of clothes, it takes the same five hours. But... GPT4, the newest, greatest AI system says 30 hours. Not good. Chat GPT supposedly learns from its mistakes. But I tried asking it something similar,

with a couple linguistic variations, and things didn't go any better. If it takes seven hours to dry five pieces of clothes in the sun, how long will it take to dry 10 clothes? The drying time in your question seems to be directly proportional to the number of clothes. So, if you have 10 pieces of clothes, it will take 14 hours to dry all of them, assuming the conditions remain the same. Okay, let's ask again. Here's a new one. If it takes one shirt, three hours and one pair of pants, four hours to dry in the sun, how long would it take two shirts to dry? In this scenario, given that it takes three hours to dry one shirt, it would take twice that time.

time to dry two shirts. So it would take six hours to dry two shirts. Oh, poor Chad GPT. You are not going to have a lot of clothes to wear. You and I, once we understood a concept, then no matter how we rephrase the question, no matter how we ask the question differently, to us, it's the same question. So we can answer them correctly. It's a strange why, such an impressive AI that can even pass the bar exam struggles with little variations of the same question that requires just common sense. But it's not surprising if you know how AI is trained. It's trained to predict which word will come next. It's just reading a lot of data and try to learn the patterns behind the data.

So it's not trained to do critical reasoning. And having common sense means applying reasoning to all sorts of scenarios. which computers can't do, at least not like humans. So common sense is what's strikingly easy for humans, but surprisingly hard for machines. It's everyday knowledge that you and I have about different objects and events that we interact with in life. And it's been a longstanding challenge in AI field. Yeah, I like drawing inspirations from humans because when you, children grow up, it's not the case that we just feed them with internet data and then let them

figure out on their own. Actually, the outcome of that would be pretty horrible. Yes. And so what do we do to prevent it is to tell them in a more declarative form what's right and what's wrong. You mean like don't hit somebody? Yeah, for example, we tell them that it's not right to kill people. Where, you know, It's not polite to yell at people, even if they get angry. We teach them a lot of these things from only on in their lives. So if most AI models are learning from the vast amount of information that's available on the web, how can you teach them these sort of more nebulous ideas? So in one research project, we built a collection of these rules of thumbs about social norms.

You know, in general, don't do this, or, Is this good or bad? And we give some answers and then train the model to learn from that. And the end result is that the model is able to learn considerably if the learning procedure is focused directly on it compared to the models that only learned from the Internet data. So I guess it's, you know, no big deal if AI gets it wrong in terms of figuring out how long it takes clothes to dry in the sun. But what are some of the other reasons why it's important for AI to have common sense, to be able to do a better job of understanding the world? So it's actually a bigger deal than you think.

Common sense locks into every corner of our life. If AI didn't have a basic level of common sense understanding, it can lead to a decision that's detrimental to the human sense. human safety. In a famous thought experiment proposed by Nick Bostrom, AI was asked to produce and maximize paperclips, and that AI decided to kill humans to utilize them as additional resources to turn you into paperclips.

Because AI didn't have the basic human understanding about human values. Now, writing a better objective in equations, that explicitly states do not kill humans will not work either because AI might go ahead and kill all the trees, thinking that's a perfectly okay things to do. And in fact, there are endless other things that AI obviously shouldn't do while maximizing paper clips, including don't spread fake news, don't steal, don't lie, which are all part of our common sense understanding about how the world works. It's so hard to even think of all the things. we don't want AI to do, I guess.

It's impossible to list what's okay to do versus what's not okay to do because there are always cases that pops up that the AI may not know whether it's okay or not okay. And so similar to how there are laws that humans try to agree upon and then revise over time, we could potentially have some such mechanisms for AI. teaching as well. So if somebody listening is thinking, okay, well, what does this mean for me on a daily basis in the near future? What would you tell them? They don't need to be an expert, but it really helps for them to understand where the flaws are so that they know how to navigate around this powerful AI that is also surprisingly prone to making silly mistakes. We could focus on

developing AI such that it can benefit a lot of people, or if we are not careful enough, it could also create a lot of problems for us. Yejin Choi is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, where she's working to make sure that AI is a benefit to humanity, not a detriment. You can see her full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our episode Cuts Both Ways. It was produced by Rachel Faulkner White, Fiona Gehrin, James Delahousie, and Harsha Nhatta. It was edited by Sanaas Meskampur and me.

Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Montalione, Matthew Cloutier, Andrea Gutierrez, and Lane Kaplan Levinson. Our audio engineers were Co. Takasugi, Chernivan, and Patrick Murray. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewey, our partners, at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Ballerzzo. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.