Magic for Nonhumans Webinar
Our first webinar took place on 25 April, and we’re pleased to share to be able to share a recording of the event. Thanks very much to all the speakers for their contributions, to the Cambridge Science Festival for hosting the event, and to all our viewers for tuning in to watch!
(This marks our first attempt at this webinar format, and those who watched live will know that we may have flown a bit close to the sun with our technical aspirations… But everyone involved rallied admirably, and we were able to get a good recording after the first few minutes.)
For info on future events click HERE
Keep scrolling for speaker bios, some suggested readings, and a complete transcript
Featured Speakers:
Prof. Nicola Clayton & Prof. Clive Wilikins (The Captured Thought): Nicola Clayton is Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society. Throughout her distinguished career, Prof. Clayton has worked to combine science with art, and this interdisciplinary journey has brought her to examine the nature of magic with Prof. Clive Wilkins. Prof. Wilikins is the Artist in Residence at Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, and he is an author, painter, and professional magician. Together they are collaborating on the ‘Captured Thought’ project, and they’ve recently conducted empirical research into how bird behavior relates to magic and deception. Captured Thought Website: https://thecapturedthought.com/
+ A Special Guest Appearance by Elias Garcia-Pelegrin a doctoral student in Nicky and Clive’s lab who joined us to discuss his work performing magic for jays.
Prof. Wally Smith: Joining us from Australia, Wally Smith is an Associate Professor at Melbourne University, where he works in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing. Prof. Smith is also a magician who has managed to combine his passion for magic and AI to develop an influential computational theory of magic. He is currently directing a large international research project that aims to implement magicians' deceptive principles into AI systems. University Profile: https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/wsmith/
Jose Ahonen: Joining us from Finland, mentalist and author Jose Ahonen gained worldwide fame for his YouTube video, “Magic for Dogs.” His subsequent viral hits have acquired more than 50 million views. Although Jose is best known as a magician and a mentalist, he also taps into his vast experience as a performer and utilizes his mentalist’s tools in professional training (in various psychological techniques and interaction skills provided to corporations and institutions). He has authored two books on magic and behavior, Think Like a Mentalist and The Anatomy of a Hoax, where he synthesized information on deception collected from psychiatrists, evolutionary biologists, police officers, and more. Personal website: https://mielentaikuutta.com/
Dr. Gustav Kuhn (Moderator): Joining us from London, Dr. Kuhn is a Reader in Psychology at Goldsmiths University of London and director of the MAGIC (Mind, Attention & General Illusory Cognition) Lab. He has authored more 70 scientific papers and a highly acclaimed book on the science of magic (Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic). He is one of the leading researchers in the science of magic field, and he is also acting president of the Science of Magic Association. MAGIC Lab website: https://www.magicresearchlab.com/
Further Reading:
The Science publication mentioned in the discussion about magic and animals:
An example of Prof. Smith’s research integrating magic and AI
Further Watching:
Check-out Jose Ahonen’s YouTube channel to watch puppies, sheep, alpacas, etc. react to magic tricks
On the topic of robots ‘performing’ magic, check-out the work of Mario “The Maker Magician” Marchese
Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
magic, magic trick, animals, dogs, tricks, magician, human, people, ai, effect, fooled, question, counters, deceptive, surprised, deception, simple, spectator, experience, game
SPEAKERS
Wally Smith, Gustav Kuhn, Elias Garcia-Pelegrin, Nicola Clayton, Anthony Barnhart, Clive Wilkins, Jose Ahonen
Clive Wilkins 00:09
Yeah, so what we're saying here is that magical frameworks offer alternative and innovative avenues for hypothesis testing, and experimental design even. And it's hoped that future researchers, people, like ourselves, indeed, will incorporate these ideas into our investigations of the animal mind, as well as the human mind.
Nicola Clayton 00:38
Because magic offers a powerful tool, because so often, it relies on wordless thoughts. And therefore, it's especially translatable for non linguistic animals. Thank you.
Clive Wilkins 00:52
We did a good job there, Nikki. Thank you very much.
Wally Smith 00:55
Yeah, so my field is human computer interaction. So I'm interested in the ways that people interact with technologies. And recently that's really focused on whether artificial intelligence technologies can be deceptive. And this really grows out of my lifelong interest in magic and doing magic, as a lot of the people here and I share that interest. And it's crossover with psychology. So I have a background in psychology originally. That was my PhD at the University of London, which is right next door to where the Magic Circle used to be. So it was a very convenient arrangement. So, but I think, psychologists, and I know there will be many psychologists here, when they look at a magic trick, they often think of it as a kind of experiment into a particular failing in human cognition. And I think that's a really great view. But another view, the one that I've developed more, is to think of magic tricks as little machines, which produce a powerful effect. And that's a more holistic view, where we think about all the elements of the trick and how they work together. So, coming to AI, I can say straight up, that I don't think artificial intelligence yet is reached a stage where we could think of it as experiencing magic, or indeed, is it being of AI being deceptive. In a sense, it's not really intentional. So it doesn't have intention, or it isn't a sentient being. I think most people would agree with that at the moment. However, if you think about magic tricks, they have a kind of structural pattern, and they embed recurring deceptive techniques. And those patterns can be built into artificial intelligence. So artificial intelligence agents can enact deceptive patterns and deceptive behaviors, and indeed, ones from magic. And that's my interest. They may not know what they're doing, but they might be being deceptive on humans that they are interacting with. And that's a very sort of interesting, exciting and worrying prospect for the world, I think. So I can show you a couple of lines of work that I'm involved in. I'll try and share a video with you. So that first line of work here is where we have looked at how people if people have shown an AI doing a magic trick, doing something impossible, how they respond to that emotionally and cognitively how they try to explain it. And so for this, we developed an app that does card tricks. So the app is a voice assistant. It tells the person what to do with the card. So the spectator has to do all the operations themselves. We wanted to design it so it would be mind blowingly impossible, not just divertingly surprising or funny, it was supposed to completely blow them away. So in this, I'll show you an excerpt from one of the tricks in a moment. But the important thing to realize is, is that the spectators did everything themselves. The researchers didn't touch the cards, they had a free choice of a card early on, a genuinely free choice, they were able to shuffle the cards. And then they dealt through the cards and were asked by the app to deny every card was theirs and it will try and read their mind or detect when they were lying. I'll show you a brief video from that now. It's only an excerpt so you'll have to get the idea. And the other thing about this video is, it's in Mandarin. [video played here] Okay, so I don't know how that would have come over to you. So just a couple of comments on that. So magicians if you're watching, you don't have to be worried that apps are going to take over from you. Because people are incredibly surprised. But it also leaves them quite cold. Because of course, an AI can't inject any sort of love and humor and irony into the performance. So people's responses were not like they were to a normal magic trick. However, they were really surprised. And so one of our findings coming out of this study is that where the people who are more surprised, and more amazed, attributed greater humanity to the app. So there was some kind of association and other people have noted this. Other researchers have noted this. There's an association between being surprised and confused by the technology and thinking it's human-like. We also studied how people generate kind of absurd explanations for how it's done. So people are not comfortable to just let it go as a trick. They want to have an explanation. And they generate sort of nonsense explanations, invoking all sorts of futuristic technologies that measure their lip pressure, or things and so on. So another line of work we've been doing is to come from the other way, and say, "Okay, can we actually build an app, which is capable of doing a trick." The app that you just saw was effectively given all the wisdom of magic from us. We simply just scripted it in. But we're more interested in whether an AI can reason using magical principles and use them deceptively. Now, the next piece of work I'm going to show you is not like a magic trick. So what we've done is develop a game where the agent plays against a human player. And what we wanted to do is create a game where the agent had to deceive the person in order to win the game and use techniques that are magic-like. Now, when you see this game, I'll show it to you, you'll think this isn't anything like a magic trick. So just bear with me. And I will try and talk you through why it's using principles or how we think it's using principles like a magician. So I'm going to fire that one up now. And the second video...I'll explain the game as I go along, although it's a little bit complicated. So what you're seeing here is the agent has a go. At the moment the human's having a go in putting these little black counters on the table, on the board. When the agent has a go we'll drive these little shuttles you'll see across the board, and it picks up colored counters from the edge of the board and places them onto the board. And the aim of the agent is to create a continuous chain of red counters to connect two of the anchor symbols on the board. So the agent will win the game, if it makes a complete connection of red counters. There are also yellow and blue counters and they are irrelevant to the game, although they will act as distractors. I hope that gave you a brief idea of the kind of game you need to work with. With AI it has to be quite simple. The way in which that's deceptive like a magician, is that the AI has to has to understand that it needs to pretend that it's building a chain of counters in one part of the board. And it has to lead the spectators to firmly believe that the chain's being built in one part. All the counters are facedown, so the spectator doesn't have perfect knowledge of where the chain has been built; it has to make an inference. Now, the AI works to keep feeding confirmatory evidence to the spectator so that it develops the wrong hypothesis about where that red chain is. The AI can also use convincers, so it uses a range of techniques for magic now: one of them is convincers. So it can flash the color of selected counters on the board to provide confirmatory evidence about this false hypothesis that it is sewing in the mind of its human in the game. We don't have a lot of human performance data to show you at this stage. I'm afraid we're more concerned with the theory of what it takes for an agent to play that game. But I think the lesson I want to draw from it and maybe I'll put it up is that in order for deception to happen, it's as much a property of the environment, whether deception happens, as it is a property of the deceptive actor. So one of the challenges we're looking at in this research is, what are the properties of an environment that affords deception? And that's quite an ecological approach and an evolutionary approach. So it's actually quite a big task for us as researchers to construct a game, an environment, where magic can happen. And that's really where we're at at the moment is theorizing the structure of these environments. And when we've done that, when we've settled, and solved that problem, then we will be able to collect some human performance data.
Jose Ahonen 12:11
My name is Jose Ahonen, and I'm a professional magician and mentalist in Finland. And I do mostly corporate shows, and I mostly performed to humans. But in 2014, I did this video where I did some magic tricks for dogs. And it got viral and it has a lot of views and from that video, I went around the world and shot different videos for Purina, the dog food company, and stuff like that. I've been doing tricks for humans and non humans. And I think, the question for today, "can non humans experience magic," I think the important thing is that you have to separate magic from esoteric and mystical things that we as humans experience, because when we experience magic, I think we experience a lot of that like esoteric type of thing. But in pure essence, I think magic is just about fooling the senses. And if you have senses, you can be fooled. And any animal with senses can be fooled, and in evolution, a lot of animals cheat to get something, so it's an ordinary thing in different animals. So I think the question is really weird. "Can non humans experience magic," because obviously. Obviously. And when I do magic for dogs, I can see from their eyes that they are experiencing the exact same thing as, like, an engineer from Finland is experiencing. If I vanish a coin, for example, the sensation is the same thing. Yeah, and I think it's pretty simple, but after that, comes all the philosophy and the things that you experience as a human when you experience magic. There's all this showbusiness. You can feel comedy, and you can feel thoughts. More like animals can. But, I think in essence it's the same thing. You can be fooled. If you have senses, you can be fooled. I've wrote up a couple of books about deception, and also human interaction and stuff like that. And we did videos where we pay with paper. So we pay something and we give paper instead of cash, and fool the people. Because that's an interesting thing. Also, I think that if you show to the cashier that you have, for example, five euros, and you start to ask her about a really complicated thing, for example, "have a headache?" "Do you know where is the nearest drugstore? Is it like east or west or something like that?" And when the brain is thinking of that, you switch the bill to paper, and they just take the paper. So we have been doing a lot of those things, and it's quite interesting. Actually, it was really interesting about the birds and the passes, and how you can fool the birds because it's so simple. It was like 2014, when I did that first trick to our dog at that time. I just take a dog treat, and I vanished the dog treat in front of the dog's nose, and the dog was like, "where did it went?" And it's just that simple and pure. And I think that's the essence of magic, the purest form. And I think it's super interesting that people are questioning that. Can non humans be fooled like that? Of course, of course, because it's so simple. It's just our like, basic instincts, and if they can be fooled, of course. And I think the interesting thing is that is there in magic, is there something more? Is there? Is there something like more in like, philosophical sense, or esoteric sense, than just fooling the senses?
Gustav Kuhn 18:37
We've heard like three different perspectives, so this brings us to the discussion bit, and I guess, kind of like, my first question is, I mean so far, I feel we've very much spoken about deception and fooling, but this session is about magic, isn't it? And so I guess this really raises the important question, "is it enough to fool someone to experience the magic?" And can I mean, are these birds are the dogs and maybe even an AI system, I mean, is there a possibility for these different non human entities to experience magic? Well, yeah, I'd be interested to hear from you about it. So maybe kind of like maybe we could start off with Wally? Yeah, see, like his views and then kind of like, move over to the influence to animals?
Wally Smith 19:34
Yeah, well, I don't really think that AI can experience magic. I'd say it just because we haven't reached full AI and we may never reach full AI and it may be a mistake to think of AI as quite quasi-humans. I'm fascinated by watching the videos of animals. Jose, your videos of dogs see magic tricks. And I'm just really surprised from an evolutionary point of view that they seem to show this surprise response that we can empathize with and relate to. And it just feels like you're showing a trick to a person. So I'm actually I'm surprised by that. I don't know if this is out of my domain of knowledge, animal behavior. So I'm just really surprised that animals can experience and seem show this or what if they're almost saying, you can see a kind of wonderment? I don't know if it's just us imposing that emotion response over the animal. It probably is to an extent, but even in their behavior, it seems to be there. So I'm gonna I'm throwing the question back to the animal.
Gustav Kuhn 20:49
Elias, I mean, you've performed lots of French Drops with maggots, which is pretty disgusting, I think. But also really very remarkable, as well. I mean, I've watched many of those videos. I mean, I mean, I don't know if Jays can experience wonder, but I mean, what do you think? We're kind of out from having all of this experience from performing for these jays, I mean, do these days experience anything that is similar to magic? Or is it just about deception? I'm very interested to hear from Nicky and Clive on that one as well?
Elias Garcia-Pelegrin 21:21
Gosh, this is a very complex question, I guess. I would say parsimoniously speaking, I would, I wouldn't dare to say that they experience anything like, what we experience while we watch an effect in terms of like this, this, this sense of, of wonderment and amazement that that we do experience right? That the fact that they are maybe confused, confusion is is a is a better adjective to describe what well, at least what the what the birds are experiencing. And I quite, quite confidently, I could say that the dogs probably are experiencing confusion. Similarly, what the what the birds are experiencing. I guess there's, I mean, bear in mind that like in animal behavior, magic tricks have been used in a sense for a long time, right? Similarly, in developmental psychology, these things have been used for a long, long time. So we know more or less, what fools them and how, and it's all based on how they experience the world. I guess that's [inaudible]
Gustav Kuhn 22:42
Nikki.
Nicola Clayton 22:43
I suppose it reveals something about the biological basis, though, of behavior and cognition. And we know from associative learning theory, that we and other animals learn about surprising. And that's where a lot of so I guess we need to make a distinction between what's unexpected, and the surprising. And what's an entertainment value that creates wonderness, and not deception? And suppose that, to me seems to be the critical, the fact that we know from unexpected violationcy theories that animals do look at something that is unexpected is surprising. And that young children do that from, you know, three months of age. So with young children with literally talking infants, babies, we know there's a biological basis to question when something happens that is not expected. And you could say that's surprise. Whereas the level at which it becomes wonderment, that's an entertainment value at which you go. "Oh, my God, I don't know how that works. I just want to see it again. This is just exquisite."
Gustav Kuhn 24:12
Yeah,
Nicola Clayton 24:13
That's quite different, right?
Clive Wilkins 24:14
Yeah, I think there's something here that, in a sense, we're probably missing or have been missing up till now. Something that Wally has said, which I think is so so very important, which doesn't feature in a lot of the literature so far, is that the environment in which the magic takes place is crucial to the effect being successful. Now I know by being a practicing magician, that when I do an effect, I make an assessment as I'm doing it, whether it's going to be 100% successful, 70% successful, or only 50% successful. Now 50% is good, actually. 50% is better than most scientists get in their own experiments. And I know that if I do a trick, and it works very well, it will be 100% awe-inspiring. But I'll settle for 70%. Or I'll settle for 50%. Or if when I introduce an effect, I know it's not going to work, I stop and I change the subject. Now, assessing the environment in which these things occur is so important. Now, how do we do that? How do we as a bird, a jay hiding something, or even as a human being perpetrating a magic trick, know whether it's worth succeeding, whether it's worth going forward with the effect? And there are environments that do work and there are environments that don't work. Magicians know, for example, that when you're doing a close up effect, sometimes you need a table; sometimes you don't need a table. Sometimes you need a pocket; sometimes you don't need a pocket. You can't just do every effect everywhere. You have to choose your moment. And this ability to choose the right time in which something occurs is something we don't often consider. How does the bird know when to hide its cache? How does the magician know when it can succeed with a double lift? Or a French drop? These are interesting questions that we don't normally take account of. We just imagine that in all circumstances, these effects will work. They won't.
Gustav Kuhn 26:30
Right. And so Jose, so in your introduction you were saying that you think that the dogs, really sort of like experience the magic. I mean, to what extent I mean, is it I mean, I like Nikki's idea of magic is really kind of like this bit of wonderment. You want to see it again. I mean, like with the dogs, I mean, are they just really annoyed that they don't know where it's gone?
Anthony Barnhart 26:59
Dai Vernon famously said that confusion is not magic. So how could we ever, in nonlinguistic beings, differentiate between confusion and wonderment, if that's the term we want to apply to it?
Jose Ahonen 27:16
Yeah, so I think it was interesting, because obviously, when I did the trick, the treat didn't actually disappear. It's a spoiler, but it didn't disappear. It was up on my sleep, or somewhere. Yeah. And you would think that the dogs had a like a good nose and tail would like smell where the treat is. But they didn't. It was actually I did like, I think there was all in all, like 40 dogs that I do the magic trick for. And I think one or two of them actually started using the senses to smell where the treat is. So I think that is quite fascinating and interesting thing that they forget to smell were the treat is and they're just bewildered about the thing that it's the treat disappears. And I think for the dog, the visual sensory is more important than their smelling. And we tend to think that dogs smell everything, like really good and they just know where everything is with, like nose, but actually, that wasn't the case. Because Yeah, the treat was up in my sleeve or somewhere. And from like for the dogs, like one of two dogs just actually went for the treat and smelled where there is. So I think that was quite interesting and tells me something about how dogs Actually, I I cannot say that they experienced magic but they experienced, like cheating or something like that. Yeah.
Anthony Barnhart 29:18
So Amory Danek is in the chat room. Is that where you were going as well? Amory Danek is in the chat room and she's a prolific researcher in problem solving and magic. And you'll see her at the September webinar if you come to that one. But she's contributed something here that I think is really insightful. She says maybe the question of simple surprise versus wonder could be disentangled by looking at the reaction toward the magician. So do dogs prefer the magician to a neutral person after witnessing the trick? Those who were in this room when we were waiting to start saw Jose's video performing magic for alpaca and you saw very different responses from different alpaca. Many of them just ran away from him after he made the treat disappear, but some stuck around and explored. So maybe that's an important distinction.
Nicola Clayton 29:55
Jose, another question. I guess kind of question both really to Elias and Jose, like in terms of type of magic trick. Again, there's a question here from Yuki. How do you fool dogs? And I guess I'd like to sort of like ask this question more generally, as well. I mean, maybe we can bring AI into this as well. I mean, I've watched several of your videos. And I mean, I think the vanishes seem to work really, really well for the dogs. The limitations I wasn't quite sure that the dog seems just fairly confused as to just see and kind of like the sausage spinning, spinning around. I didn't see that much of wonderment in the dog's eyes. Though I'm really not a dog expert. So I wouldn't really be able to judge. But I guess the more general question is, if you go to design a magic trick for a dog or a jay or maybe even kind of like an AI system? I mean, what are the kind of tricks that will work best?
Jose Ahonen 31:07
Yeah, you got it. Got to keep it really simple. So I delve into this a lot. And I thought about this a lot and you can like vanish things. And you can produce things and you can levitate things. That's about it. But about the levitating thing. It was really interesting that the small dogs didn't care about the levitating sausage at all. They were just like eating it. But the bigger dogs, the bigger the dogs went, the bigger dogs were like actually afraid of the levitating sausage. And we have a like, one. What is it called? Like? Danish? Like a super big dog. super big, big dog.
Clive Wilkins 31:59
Great dane.
Jose Ahonen 32:00
Great dane. Great dane. Thank you. So he was like, super scared about the levitating sausage. And I was like, kind of surprised by it. Because Yeah, the little dogs was were just like, "give me that" and they were like eating it. But the Great Dane was like, really suspicious about the levitating weiner or sausage. So I don't know what's that about, but...
Nicola Clayton 32:00
Great dane.
Clive Wilkins 32:30
It probably had no ketchup on it.
Jose Ahonen 32:34
Probably Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, can you repeat the question, please?
Gustav Kuhn 32:41
I guess it's kind of like, what kind of tricks do you need?
Jose Ahonen 32:44
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes. What kind of tricks? Yeah, yeah. So obviously, because the video went viral. And I thought a lot of things that you could do with dogs, because it would be super cool if you could do like, more videos that people would enjoy, and bring like, entertainment to the world. But yeah, the scale I think is quite limited.
Gustav Kuhn 33:16
So you've pretty much use up your repertoire, now. Do you think that?
Jose Ahonen 33:19
Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. I think the vanishing of the treat is the best way because it's simple. And you can see the dog's reaction on it. And super fun. And, and it's really simple. I think a lot of magicians have done that trick. If they have a like a dog. I'm not the first to do it. But I think I'm about the first to do a video that went viral with that. But yeah, it's quite normal is that you do magic, if you're a magician in your home. And for dogs, it's funny and in the entertaining. And...
Anthony Barnhart 34:05
I think the thing that we're trying to achieve is to violate people's expectation of reality. When you can violate people's expectation of reality, then you've produced an effect, which is significant. Now with other animals, we've have difficulty doing that. As you say, Jose, the tricks are quite simple. For human beings, you can make the the effects more sophisticated, so long as you can present them in such a way that you violate people's expectation of reality.
Wally Smith 34:43
It's interesting that with the tricks with animals often involve food, which is kind of unsurprising, but it means that the effect has a kind of consequence for the animal. And so this is and it draws the interest from the animal. And I guess you might think with human magic, its more sophisticated and gets away from this basic necessities of life. But actually, you know, if you think about the history of magic, it gravitates around things like coins and cards. And it does actually try to relate to the narratives that get weaved through magic tricks are often quite visceral, and they're quite basic. And they do come back to important things in our life. And if you just show people abstract tricks, which is puzzles, or, you know, conceptual or theoretical puzzles, it's pretty dull stuff, actually. You want to see something that has kind of really kind of a consequence. Often magic tricks involve violence, with sawing in half, and so on. So I think in some ways, human magic tricks are not that far away from, you know, having a piece of food dangling in front of you and made to disappear. That there is a kind of continuity between this basic materials of animal magic and human magic.
Clive Wilkins 36:00
For example, if a magician takes a blue piece of paper and changes it into a red piece of paper, people aren't very interested in that. If you take a five euro banknote, and you change it into a 20 euro banknote, or a $5 bill and you change it into a $20 bill, they're suddenly amazed.
Jose Ahonen 36:23
Very, very good point. Very good point.
Clive Wilkins 36:25
And it's the same with a jay. So if they're expecting a waxworm, their favorite, the Belgian truffles of the crow world, and you turn it into a peanut or a piece of cheese, they're not exactly pleased with it. The crest goes up, they throw the cup at you. We've got some film footage that Eli and Clive and I did for a BBC program a few months before, just before the month before COVID lockdown, actually. And you saw one of the jays just chuck the plastic cup. And needless to say, if it's a peanut or a piece of cheese, you know, a food that's nice, but not a waxworm, and then it appears as a waxworm, they're happy as Larry. So tha kind of effect works for the birds as well.
Anthony Barnhart 37:17
So when perpetrating a magic effect, you need to work with the bias of the species that you're working with, in order to create a big effect. So this actually says that the reality that you're dealing with is not a real reality in the first place. It's an imagined reality. It's one that's understood by the species that you're working with. And this is one of the essential premises of magic. You don't just deal with reality as it is, you deal with the perception of reality as it's understood.
Nicola Clayton 37:50
Great. Thank you. So we are almost running out of time. But there's one more question I would like to ask. This is really question from Yuki, in the chat. And Yuki is asking, "could you use a robot for tricks?" And I guess I'd like to expand this. I mean, can animals perform magic as well? Could you perform a dog? Jay, I'm not really sure. But I mean, does the performer themselves, do they have to be human, or what happens if the performer becomes a robot or potentially an animal as well? I mean, do you think they will be effective magicians? And should that be a threat to the magic fraternity?
Wally Smith 38:32
I can say about robots, I think one of the surprising findings, which is just an intuitive finding, when we did the magic app experiments, and it does a number of different tricks. And it leaves people quite cold. I was quite surprised by this. They sort of admire it. "Now, that's very clever." But they don't have that kind of, they don't have that warm engagement that people have with human magic. And we haven't done the experimental contrast and Gustav is always pushing for this. But so we don't have good evidence on this. But my feeling is it's quite cold when it comes from a machine.
Gustav Kuhn 39:11
But I mean, Wally, that's maybe, is that just specific to the app? Or if you have a really cute little robot, I mean, would that cute robot with big eyes, would they be able to kind of perform more engaging magic?
Wally Smith 39:25
Quite possibly. And also, I think if it was designed to weave in humor as well, so I suppose Yeah, I suppose it can happen. It is possible. But I think Yeah, so Okay, well, I'll reverse my answer, then. I think it could happen provided that the designer tended to the humor that comes with magic. So magic performance is not just surprise. I think it's as you say, it's wonder. But it also comes with a lot of ... There's a strong relationship between the performer and the audience and a good magician is one who doesn't, as all magicians know, mustn't come over as being clever, and outwitting the performers as the last thing you want to do as a magician. You want to feel that you're kind of sharing this thing with them, and you're showing it to them. And you don't quite understand it yourself. But it's this amazing thing. So you have this sort of modest. Most magicians go for quite a modest take. Not a clever take. And it's quite hard for a machine to do that, I think. We don't expect a machine to have that kind of persona.
Gustav Kuhn 40:34
Great. And what about animals? I mean, okay, jays, I don't know. I mean, could you train those? Maybe chimps? Well...
Elias Garcia-Pelegrin 40:43
I mean, through associative learning, you can train any animal to do anything. Well, not any animal. But you understand what I mean? Yeah, I guess the main point here is what one is saying about wonder and the rapport that the animal would have with their audience. I don't think you could train that. That's a human human, sociological relationship that animals don't have.
Gustav Kuhn 41:18
Jose?
Jose Ahonen 41:22
Yes. What's up?
Gustav Kuhn 41:34
I guess the question is, who's the bigger threat? Is it the trained monkeys or is it the robots? But maybe that will be kind of like a discussion that we will continue in one of our next sort of sessions, where we're going to be looking at the emotions that magic elicits. So I think this pretty much brings us to the end of this first podium webinar. And with that, I'd also like to say thank you to all the panelists. Thank you to the Cambridge Science Festival, and I hope I see you all at one of these other podiums, and hopefully in the in the Wonder Bar, as well. So that's really kind of like all from us here on zoom, and hopefully see you over there.
Jose Ahonen 42:17
Thank you.