The Eric Metaxas Show - Dr. William Hurlbut : What does it mean to be human in the age of AI and gene editing? (Continued)

Episode Date: July 26, 2025

Eric continues his conversation with Stanford bioethicist Dr. William Hurlbut in a Socrates in the City conversation on science, morality, and human dignity.

Welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show. They say it's a thin line between love and hate, but we're working every day to thicken that line, or at least to make it a double or triple line. But now here's your line jumping host, Eric Mattaxas. Hey there, folks. This is Hour 2 Friday, and so we'll be playing the second half of my fascinating conversation with William Hurlbutt, whom I'm I earlier said looks and sounds dramatically like Harrison Ford. Don't be fooled. It's not Harrison Ford.

Dr. William Hurlbut is a brilliant bioethicist. He was my guest at Socrates City years ago. And I had him again recently. So we're playing part two of that for you in just a moment. I also want to say, if you're unfamiliar with Socrates in the city, go to our YouTube page. We have like millions and millions of views. It's just if you're just looking for really substantive content, I have interviewed just some of the most fascinating,

brilliant, interesting, thoughtful, incisive, wise people. And if you go to Socrates and the city.com, you can find all kinds of stuff there. Socrates in the city.com. You can sign up for Socrates Plus. It's $5 a month and you get all kinds of other stuff, but I want to encourage you to do that. You can buy most of my books autographed via the Socrates website in case you're looking for a gift, an autographed gift. Just go to Socrates in the city.com. There's all kinds of stuff there, all kinds of swag.

But you've got to go to Socrates and City.com. Some really cool stuff. So we're going to play part two of my conversation in just a session. in just a second, but right now I want to play my conversation with Paul Jacobs of Food for the Poor. We're asking for your help. Families have been devastated. You know the story. We're asking for your help. So Paul Jacobs will be my guest right now. And then after that, we get the part two of Socrates in the City. Stay tuned. You know we've been doing a campaign with Food for the Poor. This is an emergency, so much so that I thought maybe we can get our friend Paul.

Jacob's on to help explain what is going on. Paul, welcome back. No, it's great to be back. You know, it's nearly three weeks since the devastating floods in central Texas, and the need has never been greater. What is food for the poor doing? I mean, I've talked about this, but it's, you know, it's hard for people to get their heads around this because it's such a nightmare. You hear about these floods. You hear about children dying. But then I think most of us think, well, that's that. I don't know, you know, what is there to say? It's a horror. It's a tragedy. But the reason you guys are there is because the tragedy is ongoing. They're people suffering right now and they need our help right now.

Yeah, that's right. You know, but hundreds have lost their lives and probably almost the same amount that are still missing. I think this attention, this tragedy has caught our attention because of the children and the families and this community. The Guadalupe River was literally the center of these three communities where more than 30,000 people lived. And it was the churches, the businesses, the ministries and schools. and of course these camps. And food for the poor, while there's thousands of people there in the response and the recovery effort, food for the poor is working with the local church.

Church partners on the ground that have been responding to help families with emergency relief kits, everything from tarps to cover their belongings to women's care kits for women and girls to be provided for. And even something as simple as baby diapers for small children who have become very vulnerable in this disaster. Well, so what is the area that's affected? I'm not clear. I haven't seen much video or anything of this. In other words, are there towns that have been wiped out? I mean, I know that there are individual businesses and homes.

And where are the people who have been displaced? Where are they staying, many of them? The Guadalupe River is in the center of Kerr County, Kerrville, Ingram, and Hunt, number of cities in the surrounding area. areas. You could say it's probably just out, just about 45 minutes to an hour just outside of San Antonio area, if you're familiar with the San Antonio area. But the thing about this is, while you may not have ever focused on this community on the map, it is for Texans, a very thriving community. One of our ministry partners, excuse me, one of our staff members here at Food for the

poor lives in the San Antonio area. Used to work in Kerrville and this Kerr County area. Matter of fact, He was personally affected because the camp mystic, which was the camp where a lot of those children who were there in summer camp lost their lives. One of the camp directors, a friend of his, also lost his life. So this is very personal for us. This is very personal for my colleague, Kevin Mayne, in San Antonio. But this area in the Guadalupe River has quite a few people that have been displaced. Hundreds of homes, completely destroyed businesses. They're going to take their, it's going to take a long time for them to get back on track.

But right now, we're focused not necessarily on the long term, but really the immediate need of getting families, the recovery efforts, and the recovery efforts, helping them with the emergency kits they need to just get through another day. Okay, so folks, if you want to help, you can go to my radio website, metaxis talk.com. Metaxistocococon.com at the top of the page that you see the banner. And we're asking you every $50 purchases one of these emergency relief kits. So some of you can do multiples of that. But whatever you can do, we need your help, desperately need your help. And what is the partner that Food for the Poor is working with on the ground there? Do you know the name of that, Paul Jacobs, the name of the partner?

Well, that's the great news. We work with the local church, church partners, ministries that are set up in San Antonio as a distribution site. We've already sent the first few pallets of emergency relief kits like the ones you just mentioned that these families for $50 could provide a family with emergency kits. And it's going through pastors, local ministries on the ground. Matter of fact, I was supposed to right now be in an interview with them just to kind of get an assessment of what's going on at this very moment. unfortunately, as you can well imagine, they are very caught up with meetings and a lot of things that are going on in the ground. They could not change. So we've had to postpone that.

But you can just imagine that's how busy things are and how frenetic and why you're needed right now to help our ministry partners and churches on the ground. I have a phone number here, which I want to give in case anybody prefers to call. But folks, anything you can do, this is tax deductible and it is an emergency. So the phone number to call so you can give is 844-863-4673, 844-863-8-6-7-3. I mentioned the radio website is metaxis talk.com. You'll see the banner at the top of the page. Or if you want to text my name to this number, you'll get the link. Metaxus is M-E-T-A-X-A-S.

You can text it to 5-1-55-5-5-5. Again, text Metaxis, M-E-T-A-X-A-S, text Metaxis to 5-1-55-5-5-5. Text Metaxus to 5-1-55-5-5-5. The phone number, again, is 8-4-6-3-46-7-3, 8-4-6-7-3. Paul, any final thoughts? Yeah, very much. It's community effort. It is going to be a community effort in the response to help each and every one of these families.

We have seen on the news, we've heard it through our ministry partners on the ground, and we have seen thousands of dollars poured out through the Metaxus talk listeners. You know, those of you that are listened to this program, and maybe if you have not heard of this, Maybe this is the very first time of hearing about food for the poor or you're hearing about the efforts that through this radio program is going to help those families. We need you to join this community of those who are desperately in need, vulnerable children, families, just like you who need your help right now. Well, I'm glad to hear that it's through the local churches. I know a lot of people who are wanting to help or would be comfortable with that because they know that local churches know what's going on in the local. local area and they are, they have compassion and wisdom. And so I'm grateful that food for the

poor is partnering with the local churches in the area. So folks, I'll just say it again. This is an emergency. Food for the poor has come to us asking us to please ask you to help. So again, mettaxistocot.com is the website mettaxistocot.com at the top of the page. You see the banner, help Texas. We're asking you to do what you can. If you can't do much, just do what you can. And it is direly needed right now. So God bless you as you give. Thank you.

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Call them at 800, 2468, 751. Use discount code Eric. Order online at balance of nature.com. Use discount code Eric to get 40% off this week only. Folks, just to remind you, the flooding in central Texas has taken over 100 lives. Many people still missing. We on this program are asking you to join us in Food for the Poor as we rush. Emergency relief to devastated families.

please call 844-863-4673 or text Metaxus to 51555 to give right now, or you can click on the banner, metaxistalk.com. Thank you. Well, but even if you do have, you know, what I would call a biblical view of the human person, you would say that there are many things that we can do, which we could do and let's do them, right? In other words, I'm wearing glasses. We don't say, hey, hey, You know, if God wanted you to see well, he would have given you 2020 vision. You know, we acknowledge that, you know, getting a stent, there are all kinds of things we wouldn't really have a problem with. So the question is, where do we bump into that's going too far or that's potentially going too far?

What are some of the possibilities that people are looking at right now that would give you pause? I mean, if somebody says, I can extend your lifespan. And by 50 years, I wouldn't have any ethical problem with that, I don't think. Well, maybe you should think about it a little more. Why? Why? Well, let me get back to that in a second. So first, back to your glasses. So I was on a program, I think it was called Ethics in America,

with Judge Scalia and a bioethicist who was arguing with Scalia about using technology to improve humanity. and he said to Scalia, you sent your kids to the SAT coaching thing and so forth, and you wear glasses. That's a technology. And I waited until I had a good opportunity. I turned to the guy and I said, well, wait a minute. Glasses are a tool, but gene editing goes right into your body.

That raises a whole lot more complicated questions. Okay? And there's a real difference. And so now back to extending your lifespan. Okay. I know it's a very, most of us would like to live longer, and I would too. Most of the advances in the 20th century came from better, not from medicine actually. Well, vaccines and antibiotics were very helpful, but most of it came from better, sanitation, better diet, better understanding of the role of exercise, and so forth. And so the question is, well, can we extend our lifespan? And when I was serving on the President's Council, we took this on. With a very interesting volume, by the way, for your readers, I think it's the best thing we

produced as a council. It was a volume called Beyond Therapy, Biotechnology, and the Pursuit of Happiness. And what we did was we didn't go into the transhumanist sort of extensive kind of modifications. We just took on things that most people would like, like longer lives, happier babies, peaceful souls and happy souls, more effective action in the world. And one of the things we took on was the question of technological life extension. And it was a very challenging subject because if life is good, more life might be. seemed better, and I kind of agree with that, and I don't have major objections.

On the other hand, there's many questions you have to ask yourself for that. I did a calculation while we were doing that project, that if technology, medical technology, advanced to the point where most everybody born lived to be 150 and didn't die along the way, and that's slowly making its way, at least to 80, 90, or 100, and I tell my students, every one of you in this room could live to be 100 now if you take good care of yourself

and your good luck. And no speeding. And no speeding, yeah, and no drugs. Yeah. But if you, if everybody lives to 150, then every newborn child would have 64 great, great, great, great, great grandparents, 32 great, great, great grandparents and so forth.

So, you know, a couple hundred relatives who they wouldn't be that related to genetically because they, you know. I don't see this as a whopping ethical problem. It's funny, though, to talk about. I guess I'm more concerned with, like, clear ethical issues, like the idea of, I mean, what some of the transhumanists are talking about. I mean, some of the more dramatic stuff, like, you know, brain implants or whatever. They seem to, I mean, really where it's going is where I'm troubled, at least what I've seen.

And it reminds me of the book, I guess, H.G. Wells wrote this short novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau. And it presupposes this idea that there are no boundaries, to use your term. There are no boundaries. And we can make anything. We can be anything. It's kind of a Darwinian model that just says, you know, the idea that, oh, you're created in God's image, you're a human being. They say, no, there's no such thing. There's a continuum in any direction, you know, in this direction to the apes,

and in this direction to some godlike future, where we become some other thing. So it strikes me that at the heart of this project in transhumanism is that we would be as gods, which has uncomfortable echoes. But there seems to be something about it in that direction that worries me. It's sort of we're the masters of our destiny. But anyway, that's what worries me. I just don't know the specifics of what's possible or what they're claiming is possible. Well, much of what they're claiming is possible, I think, will not be possible.

And that's the good news. Because, yeah, well, you see, the very word human comes from the same Latin root as humus, earth, soil, where the creatures of the earth are made from the red dust of the earth. And that's theology, but it's also a metaphor for we are intimately engaged with the world in which we were born and formed. And we're like a hand made to fit an existing glove. We exist in a particular relationship with the world and with one another. And people don't appreciate, I think, how subtle that is and how the human being is so mysteriously unique among creatures. and I think it's much more likely

we would disrupt things. I'm a physician. I want to deal with disorders and disease. There may be some things we could do to make our lives easier and more effective. But I basically think we should live our natural lives, except where there's identifiable issues of illness. And I don't personally want brain implants

or I don't want to take drugs. You know, the basic... How do you feel about dentures? Dentures? That's okay. I'm not trying to be negative here. I'm trying to be attentive to the delicate balance that is human life.

And to recognize that we can easily knock ourselves off kilter. I mean, look what's happened in our civilization, the number of people who are using drugs. either recreationally or sort of semi-therapeutically or just to feel more comfortable about themselves. It's really unbalancing human life. And drugs have become a substitute for spiritual solutions to things. And I think it's not the right direction.

The great hypocrite tradition says, above all, do no harm. And the first century physician Galen said, the physician is only nature's assistant. And those are two watchwords that guide my thinking. Practically, everything you do, including just taking Tylenol, has major impacts on your body. That's not to say that it isn't okay in certain circumstances, but the idea of intervening in your body disrupts balances and harmonies.

And you don't, as far as possible, you want to live, letting your body heal itself, your body guide. itself and your spiritual life guiding your body. I would agree, but obviously you being a scientist and a doctor would say that there are nonetheless great possibilities. You can imagine, I mean, I think anybody can imagine that there are great scientific and medical breakthroughs that lie ahead, and we can be excited about that. The only question is where do we, again, draw that line.

The former head of the NIH Francis Collins, it came out recently that he was involved or had approved of research done with fetal tissue. It's very gruesome at the University of Pittsburgh. And, you know, you can see both sides. You can see somebody thinking, well, this could lead to great breakthroughs. And then you can see other people like me saying, perhaps, but nonetheless, you've crossed a line.

You ought not to have done that kind of research. It's gruesome. The temptation, and I think the profit motive, is driving a lot of stuff. You could even talk about the gain of function stuff that, you know, if the U.S. government says to Anthony Fauci, that's illegal here, he'll find a way to do it in a lab in China. How do you put this genie back in the bottle when the incentive is so strong? And when there are going to always be scientists that think, I know better, like your friend J.K.

He thought, well, I want to be the first. I want to do this. I may be hailed as a trailblazer a hundred years from now. Folks, just try to imagine losing everything overnight, your home, your car, your loved ones. That's what's been happening in flood ravage, Texas. as you know, we on this program are partnering with Food for the Portisend emergency kits to those who need them desperately. Go to metaxis talk.com, click on the banner, metaxistalkis talk.com, or call 844-863-463-4673, or text Metaxus to 5155-5-5. Thank you.

Well, you started it just the right way by saying, just because something, possible doesn't mean we should do it, or perhaps it does, it means we shouldn't do it yet because we need to think about it. And the way you deal with this, in my opinion, is you think carefully about it. So you think comprehensively about it, so that it fits in with the entire wisdom of how you see the world, not just because you've got one identifiable good goal. You see. The point being, and by the way, interventions beyond therapy, it's not as simple as just therapy is good and interventions are bad. So, for example, if you're a surgeon and taking a drug could calm your fingers so that you could operate effectively on a child's eyes, even if that drug did something bad to you, you might say, I'm willing to have a little loss to my existence in order to help solve this child's eyes.

problem. You see, so that, but that's a very different attitude because you're intervening not to gain a competitive advantage or to serve your appetites or ambitions. You're taking on

an intervention in your body for service to other people for positive purposes. You see, and in a way you're taking on a risk, you're sacrificing for the good of other. And that is the more comprehensive view. This is the key, I think, is to see the technologies in a full worldview perspective.

It's interesting to me how this, there's nothing new under the sun in the sense that the desire for certain human beings to gain power over other human beings and then to think of those other human beings as not quite human beings or as, human beings upon whom I can act, that really will never go away because it's human nature. So then the question is, what do we do about it? How do we stand against it? I'm, as I said, encouraged that the Chinese government cared about world, the international horror at what your friend J.K. did.

but I wonder, you know, whether other countries or whether China in the future would be so sensitive because we're really talking about the potential of, as we say, great profit in doing things that other people won't do. I mean, it's like the slave trade. You know, if you end the slave trade in your country, you can't stop it in every other country. And that's always the challenge. You know, there was a professor at Columbia, Erwin Targolf, who was a very significant scientist made great contributions to late 20th century genetics,

and he warned us that what he saw lying in the future was not an Auschwitz, which is going to extract gold teeth. It was a coming era where we would use human, embryos and fetuses to extract tissues, organs, hormones. I mean, he was prescient. He saw the dangers coming. And yes, there are huge commercial motives for this. There are also some very positive motives.

I'll give you an example of something that's both horrifying at once and strangely propitious in the sense of offering hope. This happened 30 years ago. I was friends with a guy who was a pretty good, effective scientist postdoc at Stanford. He helped isolate the stem cell that leads to the blood formation. And they started a company, he and this professor who's working under, called Systemics. And Systemics was a company that was studying early developmental biology. They later got bought out by a huge pharmaceutical.

pharmaceutical company for something like $700 million. And I was interested in what they were doing because I knew they were using fetal tissues and they were trying to figure out developmental biology and solutions for AIDS in those days. So I said, could I see what you guys, could you walk me through the lab? So I went to the, they wouldn't do this work at Stanford. They formed a private company. And so he took me down to this private company in South Palo Alto. And we were walking through the lab and he picked up a,

a test tube and he said look in there and I looked down in this test tube and there was a little tiny human hand about three-eighths of an inch across just a hand sitting in the bottom of the test tube and I said where did you get that and he said well we took a tiny limb bud the part that goes the embryo starts sort of like a cylinder and then it buds off to form the arms and the legs he said we snipped off the early little bud off the arm, off the four or five-week-old fetus. Off a human embryo. Where did they get this human being? From an abortion, okay?

They, they, there's a whole, you know, there's a whole set of principles that are operating for use of human tissues. Folks, just to remind you, the flooding in central Texas has taken over 100 lives. Many people still missing. We on this program are asking you to join us in Food for the Poor as we rush emergency relief to devastated families. Please call 844-863-4673 or text Metaxus to 51555 to give right now or you can click on the banner, metaxis talk.com. Thank you. Folks, as you know, this is a real crisis.

Over 129 are confirmed dead. Dozens still missing in Texas. Eric Metaxis here urging you to help us get emergency supplies to flood victims, partner with us, and food for the poor. Call 844-863-4673, or text Metaxus to 51555 or click on the banner at Metaxistalkis talk.com.com. Thank you. There are some legitimate uses of field tissues that some can be procured in ways that are not illicit, spontaneous abortions, for example, are not a very good source of tissues, but one wouldn't object to that anymore

than would object to use an organ from somebody killed in a homicide or a car accident. Right. Okay, so they took this limb bud off. They put it into a mouse's abdominal space. It wired in, so to speak, the bloodstream started growing because it was living tissue,

and they opened up the mouse about three or four weeks later and there was a fully formed little hand. All it took to get the hand was the initiated dynamics of the cells. I would have thought it would have required the whole embryo, but it doesn't. Well, that was a major moment for me in terms of my scientific understanding

because suddenly I realized that if you could figure out the elements that form that little tiny bud off the embryo, you could perhaps find a way to, in a laboratory, produce hands, maybe arms, maybe all the organs of the human body, independent of embryos and fetuses, in a way that would be morally legitimate to form replacement parts for therapy. You see? And of course, the downside is that that tiny hand was meant, to be the hand of a little girl and it didn't get to be that hand.

Yes, and that, I immediately felt that too. I looked at that little hand in the test tube and I thought, wow, that's so sad because that was going to be somebody's little hand. And I remembered the hands that with my little babies when my wife would nurse them, the little hand lays across the breast

and it's just like, it's sort of a transatlant, incidentally beautiful moment where the little emerging life is being nourished and that this life was terminated. And in fact, that was my first experience of the issue of embryos and fetuses when I was a first-year medical student. I scrubbed in on what turned out to be an abortion, but in those days, many abortions were done by labeling them as pathologies like tumors. And I thought I was scrubbing in on a tumor operation, okay? And this was not a Stanford physician as a private physician, okay? But he knew I was contending with these questions of what is early developing life. So he invited me in on this operation.

And I watched, it was a suction abortion, and it was like 15, 16 weeks maybe. And the way a suction abortion is done, they open, sort of open up the uterus, they stick in a tube and they suck out the fetus, which is, you know, it's soft tissue, so it'll suck through a tube. But they put it into a vacuum bottle and with a filter, and they collect the fetal parts, and then they have to stop the machine,

and they lay the fetal parts out on towel to make sure they've got the whole fetus, because if you leave anything in it, it starts to get, you know, rotten and necrotic is the medical word. and it'll damage the woman's womb. So when he turned the machine off and started laying the fetal parts out on the towel,

he stood in front of me, wouldn't let me see anything. And then he went over, took something up, he went over to the water faucet, came back, and right there in the surgical room, he lay the little fetus on my hand. And the arms and the legs and the head had been ripped off, but there was a little tiny spine, tiny pelvis, little tiny ribs, and I looked down at that.

And it was like a monumental moment for me. Tears just welled up in my eyes right in front of the surgical nurses, hard-boiled creatures who were used to this, but I wasn't used to it. And I thought, oh my gosh, this was going to be somebody's little child, and this life is over. And it just, from that point on, I could not countenance abortion. I realize unwanted pregnancies

are a huge problem. I'm not denying that, but it's the wrong solution, in my opinion. It's not the loving solution. It's, we should reverence early human life. We should recognize even the early embryo as being the first stage of a human life.

And whatever we do, and there are many, many ways to approach these problems that would be morally acceptable. We have to be creative. We can enter effectively into the era of developmental biology if we parse the questions properly

and we recognize with a certain respect and reverence the integrity of the natural human process from initiation at fertilization to natural death. If we reverence that, we can

find ways to advance science I just don't believe that the Lord of Life has not given us the tools for the healing of life. You know, when you mentioned that that tiny baby that you were looking at was meant to be, you know, someone's little girl, we often don't think about this, but you realize that, yeah, and maybe was meant to be someone's mother. and someone's wife, someone's grandmother, that's, you know, when we're asking the larger question, what is a human? A human is something beyond, you know, just each of us,

that we have the potential, not just to, you know, spawn generations of other humans, but, you know, to do so many things. And so when you talk about the end of a life, It's really, it's a chilling thing, which is why it's so disturbing when people are reductive. And I know in some of the things you've written, you're citing, what's his name, Melvin's Sivsky, who describes human beings reductively as meat machines. Who is that? Folks, right now in Texas, families are reeling from this historic flooding.

Food for the poor is delivering life-saving relief, but they need. our help. I'm Eric Mataxis. Call 844-863-4673 or text Metaxus to 51555 to send emergency supplies or visit Metaxistalk.com. Click on the banner. Metaxistalk.com. Thank you. Folks, right now in Texas, families are reeling from this historic flooding. Food for the poor is delivering life-saving relief, but they need our help. I'm Eric Mataxis. Call 844. 863-4673 or visit metaxis talk.com. Click on the banner. Metaxistalk.com. Thank you.

Well, see, with our advancing technologies, both biotechnology and information technology, we're being challenged to understand what's unique about human nature, what's specifically distinctive about human nature. And we're learning a lot about animals. And I think in a positive way, we're learning that animals have emotions and animals that we share some very important dimensions with animals. And we're learning that machines can emulate, simulate, some of what the human mind does, but we are not computers.

Computers don't think, and we don't exactly compute. And all this stuff is about large language models and chat GP2. It's very challenging because, I mean, the chat GPT kind of program, can now supply such convincing simulation of human beings, but they are actually mimic machines. All they're doing is using statistical models for mining out connections between words, and words have thoughts,

but it's all based on what human beings have produced. There's a famous saying by a Stanford professor in the 1970s, the knowledge is in the connections. That's by gaming David Rummelhard. And it was a brilliant insight at the time, because it showed that he understood that there was a mathematics to the connections of information and that you could make computers based on neural nets

that would discern this in a very special way. And yet, it's wrong. The knowledge is in the connections. No, the knowledge is not in the machine. The knowledge is in the human being who sets up the machine. The machine has no knowledge of what it's doing. It's completely neutral. It has no idea.

It doesn't have an it there. There's no self there to know anything. That's, I mean, we have to end pretty soon here. But that is where, you know, when you're talking about AI, it's an illusion. There's no doubt that this is, it's sort of like if I can train a parrot to speak two sentences, the parrot is just faking it. And you think, oh, that's amazing. But the parrot doesn't know the meaning.

of the words. It's just a simulacrum of the real thing. And that's, we're living at a time right now where so many people are very, very gullibly accepting that we're on the verge of machines developing consciousness, which is just inherently preposterous. But there's so many people that seem to think, no, no, no, where there's this magical leap any minute there's going to, And it really doesn't, I mean, it doesn't make any sense, but I'm astonished how little people really understand what consciousness is to the point where they would make that claim. So I agree with you.

It's the embodied human being, the very, very complicated human being. There are somewhere between 50 and 100 trillion cells in a human being. by some estimates, each cell undergoes a more between 10 and 30 billion chemical reactions per second. We have these senses that apprehend the world. We're nothing like the current robots and computers, whether they will ever get to the point where they can take in information and analyze it in such a way that consciousness emerges. Nobody knows what consciousness is.

So some people believe they will. I don't personally think so, but the point is that the touring test, you know, that is where people can't tell the difference between a person and the computer, is a test of gullibility right now. Yeah. It's a test of whether the computer can simulate human intelligence. Well, whether the computer can fool someone, ultimately. That's right.

Because that's all this. Did it fool you or not? But the point is it can never actually be anything other than a computer. maybe an amazing computer, but not a soul, not a mind. I think it's a good place to leave things. Dr. William Hurlbutt, thank you very much. Thank you. Eric, great talking with you.