Pod Insights Modern Wisdom What Happens If Robots Automate The World? - John Danaher | Modern Wisdom Podcast 291 About this episode John Danaher is an author and a lecturer at the National University of Ireland.
Having a job is valorised in modern society. But if our jobs are taken over by robots, will we find a sense of purpose in other things outside of work, or are we just going to lead meaningless lives?
Expect to learn why technological unemployment might be desirable, what a cyborg utopia might look like, why John thinks losing work might not result in loss of purpose, the risks of sacrificing human values in pursuit of utopia and much more...
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Transcript 13,026 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Do we try to fight back against the machines and reclaim our dominance of the cognitive niche? Or do we try and retreat from the cognitive niche and let the machines watch over us and look after our economic wellbeing, our needs, our needs for abundance and affluence and so forth and do something else?
0:21 Chris Williamson? Before we get started, there is a very famous Brazilian jiu-jitsu teacher who shares your name. Did you know this?
0:28 Speaker 00 I am all too aware of this fact.
0:30 Chris Williamson? Yeah, so I posted a big list of upcoming guests on my Instagram. They're like, mate, I didn't know that you were interested in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And I'm thinking, does a guy who talks about automation and robots also do Brazilian jiu-jitsu training? But it turns out that it's just, it's just two different interesting people.
0:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, your fans probably got very excited when they thought it was the other John Danaher. He's got a much higher profile than me.
0:59 Chris Williamson? Little do they know that they actually wanted to learn about robots. So what are we going to be talking about today? What's the topic of our discussion?
1:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, so we're going to talk about this book that I read a couple of years ago on automation and utopia, which is kind of a very abstract philosophical look at the meaning of life in a post-work world. If robots take all our jobs away, what are we going to do with our time? And will we be able to find meaning and flourish?
1:28 Chris Williamson? These sorts of questions are very common at the moment, I think. You know, it seems like every other week, someone's referring to like when the robots take our jobs in a news article.
1:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, it's been a fairly persistent theme in popular media and academic discussions as well for the past decade or so. I'd say it really kind of took off after the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent recession. Ironically, it was probably starting to ebb away a little bit more recently due to the uptick in the economy in the past couple of years, but I think COVID-19 has really kick-started the discussion once more.
2:03 Chris Williamson? An interesting thing I heard today on Ben Shapiro's show was concerns about Joe Biden raising the US minimum wage to $15, encouraging many employers to replace workers with automation precisely for that reason. If it costs X thousand, 10,000, hundreds of thousands of pounds to install the robot system, the more that you raise the minimum wage, the more and more that becomes competitive.
2:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, so I think like Economics 101 would tell you if you raise the price of anything, if it raises the price of labor, you're going to make it less attractive for employers. There, I mean, I don't know exactly whether the rise in the minimum wage in the US to $15 would kick-start a wave of automation or whether we're in fact in the midst of a wave anyway, that this is just a kind of a minor nudge along the path. There was an interesting World Economic Forum report a couple of months ago about the impact of COVID-19 on automation, which had a survey of business leaders around the world and the percentage of them that were looking to automate their workforces. I think it was about 41% of employers are looking to increase the amount of automation at the moment.
3:15 Speaker 00 And then I believe it's again somewhere in the 40 percentage range of people who want to increase the amount of outsourcing of labor that they do. And there's only a handful of employers that were actually to expand the workforce in the wake of COVID-19.
3:31 Chris Williamson? Is human obsolescence imminent?
3:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I mean, that's the sentence that I use to open the book and it's a little bit of hyperbole, that's what I've said to everybody that's interviewing me on this. It's a little bit of rhetorical hyperbole. I think that obsolescence is becoming less useful in certain endeavors or growing out of fashion or something like that. You know, the same way like your phone obsolesces over time, it becomes taken over by better technology. So the idea that I start the book with is this sense that maybe humans are obsolescing in more and more domains of activity. And we've seen this historically happen in Agriculture and manufacturing industry has been the classic examples of obsolescence
4:19 Speaker 00 due to technology and now I think we're starting to see it in a range of other professions from finance to the law profession, even into branches of government where there's increased use of automated technologies like algorithmic prediction tools or robotics to replace human workers or human decision makers.
4:43 Chris Williamson? How about rolling that forward? There's a lot of talk about, well, yeah, robots might have been able to replace weavers and plowers and stuff like that, but they're not going to be able to replace more complex things.
4:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, there's a famous paradox, it was invented by a guy called Hans Moravec back in the late 80s, called Moravec's Paradox, which is about the fact that a lot of what we historically have called kind of abstract thought, kind of high level of thinking is actually relatively easy to automate because it's very simple, involves routines and rule-following behavior. So it's relatively easy, although it was pretty hard, to create a chess-playing computer that could beat the best human players. It's much more difficult, it turns out, to create things that are capable of doing very kind of fine-grained, dexterous, physical movements in a changing environment.
5:42 Speaker 00 So Moravec said this was a paradox, that what we think of as very complex work is actually relatively easy to automate, but things that we think are straightforward and easy, like walking from across a bumpy field, it turns out to be pretty difficult to automate.
5:57 Chris Williamson? Yeah, but not dancing or doing backflips based on what Boston Dynamics are doing.
6:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, Boston Dynamics are showing that even Moravec's Paradox is now becoming less salient. You know, there's a lot of dispute about those videos that they released, as to how carefully curated they are and to what extent these robots are really...
6:20 Speaker 00 Engaging in those behaviours autonomously without a lot of training in advance, a lot of control of the environments that they're in. But I'm certainly impressed by what they've been able to achieve in the past few years. It looks like they are really pushing the boat out on that level of automation. But yeah, I mean, to go back to your point, I lost the track a little bit there. I think we are seeing the automation of a lot of knowledge work nowadays, particularly where that knowledge work is somehow relatively routine, searching through information, spotting patterns in information. You're seeing that to some extent in the medical profession with the use of automation in diagnostic techniques. You're
7:02 Speaker 00 seeing it in the legal profession. I teach law, I teach at a law school, so this is the background that I come from. So you're seeing increased automation of certain tasks that lawyers do now, such as searching through documents or even basic forms of legal research and developing legal argumentation are now being automated.
7:22 Chris Williamson? Is there anything that you think won't become automated? Is there a last bastion or some final stans?
7:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I'm really not sure. I think in principle, I would say that there's nothing that can't be automated. And that kind of comes from a deep philosophical assumption that I have is that, in a sense, humans are just complex machines, complex biological machines. I don't think there's anything special or magical about humans. There's no supernatural essence or soul to them. That's the perspective that I come at this from. So in principle, we could create similarly complex machines. It's been done once. Nature did it through evolution. So it seems possible that we could do it ourselves through our own intelligence or with assistance from machines themselves and designing more complex
8:09 Speaker 00 machines. But at the moment, it seems that there's lots of things that aren't going under an immediate threat of being automated. At least, we're not going to have human equivalents for certain kinds of tasks. But you don't always have to have human equivalents for something to be replaced. You can have a cheaper, more efficient robot that isn't necessarily better at a task, might still be more attractive to an employer or a business owner. So you've got to think about it in those terms.
8:44 Chris Williamson? Why would technological unemployment be desirable for us?
8:50 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, so that kind of comes from a combination of two things, I suppose. One is that, you know, one of the arguments that I make in the book, in a chapter that's somewhat, I guess, provocatively titled, called Why You Should Hate Your Job, is that I think that a lot of, a lot of work in the modern world is pretty unpleasant, it has a number of negative features to it, and it's being made worse oftentimes by technology. Even even when machines don't replace humans, humans have to work alongside machines in such a way that actually disimproves the quality of their work.
9:30 Speaker 00 And then I think it would be desirable to maybe hasten the automation of work because there are alternatives to working for a living that would be better. But I mean, I will say that that argument hinges on how you define work and kind of deeper discussion about what it means for humans to flourish and live better lives.
9:54 Chris Williamson? Yeah, precisely.
9:55 Speaker 00 Having to go into it.
9:56 Chris Williamson? Yeah, that was that was one thing I thought about, like, I quite like this job. I actually can't believe that I've just referred to it as a job. I enjoy having these conversations. I don't want some shiny robot bastard to come and take this microphone off me.
10:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I mean, so this is the thing, the observation that I started that chapter of the book with is that I quite like my job as well. I mean, one of the reasons that I like my job is that, for the most part, it doesn't feel like a job either. I'm an academic and I get to spend most of my time sitting in my office at home, even pre-COVID times.
10:31 Speaker 00 Read books and write about things that interest me and nobody's telling me what to do. And I find that quite self-actualizing and meaningful. I think I'm probably one of the lucky ones and I think you're. Probably one of the lucky ones too, you know, you've you've managed to kind of craft this space for yourself. I don't know, I should preface all this by saying I don't know exactly everything that you do apart from this podcast, but if I assume that this podcast is your major kind of form of work, then it seems like you know, you've kind of crafted a space for yourself, an audience for yourself that you can get to dictate the terms of your own life in a way
11:12 Speaker 00 that a lot of people would find enviable. I suppose my observation of the book is that most of us or most people in the world don't have that kind of luxury and that I'm relatively privileged in my kind of job and what I get to do. And you are also relatively privileged. There's lots of people who started podcasts who aren't successful and haven't managed to turn it into a way of life. You know, you're one of the superstars out there that's managed to do that.
11:41 Chris Williamson? Don't people find like mastery and community and status and other stuff in work? They might not love it, but it gives them a sense of meaning. I remember seeing a bunch of different studies about people who retire earlier, just how much sooner they die.
11:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I think that work is certainly a source of good things for people. It's a source of, as you say, mastery. You can master a skill set, gain this sense of pride and achievement from the work that you do. It's also for many people, it's their main source of community. It's you have to work every day for a certain number of hours. And so that they have to associate with certain people that they work with and they can build meaningful relationships in that way. It's also a source of social status. We live in societies, for the most part, that really valorize work and that think, you know, having a job is having a stable income, being able to provide for people. That's kind of the
12:39 Speaker 00 be all and end all of life. I suppose like what I would say about that is that I'm certainly willing to accept that work is a source of good things for many people. I guess the question is whether we can find those things in other outlets outside of work and whether there's a sense in which. Work is a source of those things for many people because they have no other option. You know, work, they have to work, you know, it's a matter of economics necessity for them to work. They're not going to be able to survive without us. And so they have to find those things in work. There's no, no other forum for them to do so. And I would also say that even though people make those claims about work being a, you know, a source of community, providing a sense of mastery and so forth.
13:24 Speaker 00 Um, I think it's also true for a lot of people that it's not a source of those things. And that actually what they do outside of work with their hobbies, with their friends, with their families is more of a source of meaning that work for a lot of people is kind of a means to an end and a form of, of drudgery. I do cite this example in, in the book. Um, and I'm certainly not claiming that this is the only evidence for this proposition or idea or the best evidence, but the polling firm Gallup have frequently done these kind of state of the global workforce surveys every few years. And one of, certainly for the past decade and a half, one of their consistent findings in those surveys is that most people are not actively engaged by their work.
14:06 Speaker 00 In fact, I think within Europe, the European Union area, the average is about 10% of people are actively engaged at work. In the U S, it's a little bit higher, so they're like 30%. But in nowhere in the world does it crack through like 40, 50% of people being actively engaged and enthused by their work. Most people seem to find it kind of mundane, a little bit monotonous, um, and not kind of their main source of, of pride or mastery.
14:35 Chris Williamson? And when you think that that's something you're spending 40,000 hours of your life doing ish, even if you don't necessarily have a job for life, if you kind of vacillate from all right job to slightly less shit job to whatever it might be. Yeah, I, I, I think a lot of the stuff upon reading your book, you really need, you need to remove the visceral response that you have to some of the things that come up. So for instance, talking about the fact that, well, don't people find community at work? And you're like, well, yeah, I mean, they find community at work, but would you be friends with those people if it wasn't for the fact that you're at work? Like
15:18 Speaker 00 And if it wasn't for the fact that you have to lick up to them, maybe to
15:21 Chris Williamson? Well, yeah, and it's
15:22 Speaker 00 Succeed at work.
15:23 Chris Williamson? We're all in this together. It's part of this sort of common cause that we've got like. If the only thing that you and somebody else have bonded over is the way that you acquire resources through somebody else who is taking on all of the risk.
15:40 Chris Williamson? You know, I'm sure that you can find soulmates, both sort of romantically and in terms of friendships in jobs, but I don't think that we should kid ourselves that we're bonding over the job. We are in a job with someone else and we have managed to find common ground between us outside of the job. And the same thing goes for everything else. Like, like you said, status, like, what does it mean to be a carpenter, farmer, hairdresser, you know, what, pick whatever it might be like? Yeah, that gives you status, but is that the best status that you could give you? Like, is that the highest form of your actualization that you could have got to? And sadly, we never get to split test our own life, which I've always thought would be a fantastic idea. Like,
16:25 Chris Williamson? if whoever's running the simulation could allow us to do that and just allow me to A B split test a bunch of different decisions, that'd be phenomenal. But we never get to do that. You don't know if the fact that you chose to be a hairdresser instead of a masseuse or a P T instead of an accountant or whatever it might be, you don't ever know that what degree of flourishing you've actually managed to get yourself to.
16:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I guess part of me thinks that maybe that's one of the tragedies of human life is that we don't get to run the experiment again. I guess, you know, it's more true nowadays that people have the opportunity to experiment a little bit with their profession. And as you said earlier, vacillate about from job to job and try different things out. And that's more tolerated. A lot of people don't really, you know, settle down in a kind of meaningful sense until they're into their, their 30s, probably in most kind of developed economies. Whereas I guess, you know, my, my parents' generation. You entered your job when you were eighteen, when you left school and you stayed in that job for the next forty years. I mean, my father, that's literally what happened to me. He entered the bank when he was eighteen years old and he stayed there until he retired.
17:32 Chris Williamson? Left, left when he was sixty five, yeah.
17:35 Speaker 00 So he definitely didn't get to split test his life. He had one path, one path through life and that was the norm a generation ago. So I think we're in a little bit of a better position when it comes to that. But your general argument or idea is right that we, I think there's probably a lot of, you know, post hoc rationalization.
17:56 Chris Williamson? Massively, massively.
17:57 Speaker 00 Well, I'm in, I'm in this job, I'm working with these people, I have to get along with them and, you know, actually they have some good features and, yeah, I'll go for a couple of drinks with them and suddenly they're my, my friends for, for life and then my work is my, my source of, of meaning and status because it's the thing that can occupy my attention all day long. And so we don't, we don't get to consider those alternative options and see whether there are other ways in which we could flourish. There's a lot of sunk costs involved for a lot of people as well. And this isn't actually something that I already got into in the book, but it's something I talk about a lot because I, it's the thing I teach on, on finance and the world of banking. And one of the courses I teach is just the,
18:38 Speaker 00 the level of indebtedness in the modern world and how, you know, people have kind of less disposable income and kind of less options as a result of this. And I think this kind of leads to the sunk cost fallacy in life that, well, I'm, I'm kind of stuck in this rush and I can't afford to run the alternative experiment. And it's only probably when people really hit rock bottom or they're forced out of the position that they've been in that they do get to run that split test on their life, so to speak.
19:09 Chris Williamson? Yeah. What in your opinion is the good life? How do people find meaning in flourishing while we're alive?
19:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, look, I mean, this is a topic that could fill a thousand podcasts. And in a sense, many of your podcasts have dealt with this theme in the past, based on what I've seen. And I don't have any, like, you know, radical new answers to that question, apart from repeating what, you know, philosophers and psychologists have been saying for centuries. I mean, at a very abstract level, the way in which people think about the good life is probably a combination of your subjective satisfaction with your life, you know, the amount of pleasure you have, the desires that you fulfill, the goals that you achieve in life, those are markers of having a good life.
20:01 Speaker 00 And then, combined with that, the objective value of the things that you're doing in life, what you produce for the world, what you achieve in the world, whether those are good things. So, I guess the philosophical view is that you could spend your entire life counting the blades of grass in your back garden, and maybe you're really happy doing that and satisfied, or maybe some AI has planted a little chip in your brain to say that this is, you know, a real source of pleasure, it's like the equivalent of crack cocaine for you or something. But that doesn't look like a good life, in a philosophical sense, because you're not doing anything that has, you know, objective value or meaning.
20:43 Speaker 00 So, one of the accounts that I look at in the book is an account of the good life from a philosopher called Susan Wolf, where she talks about the so-called fitting fulfillment theory of the good life, of the meaningful life, that it's one where you're doing something that is objectively worthwhile, that is fitting, and you are fulfilled by doing that thing. And I think you probably need the combination of those two things. And in terms of like, what kinds of things have objective value, well, again, there can standard answers to that, there's, you know, doing good things for the world, for other people. You know, making their lives morally better, alleviating their suffering. Um, there's achieving kind of break breakthroughs in in knowledge, producing
21:25 Speaker 00 knowledge or information or goods that are valuable to others in the world. And I guess it's also like art and aesthetic um production and appreciation as part of good life. The philosophical slogan that sums this up is that things that are worthwhile in life are the good, the true and the beautiful. Let's see, triumvirate of meaning in life.
21:47 Chris Williamson? I'm just about to finish The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. And he finishes the book um by contesting the happiness comes from within Buddhist claim. And he talks about something similar, which is happiness comes from within and without. Um, and he's talking about this this two way street. Um, and I think I wonder how much of that is part of a i- i- is jaded by a society that's a meritocracy. That's one where you are what you can do, very much about creation and and um tacitly things being there, you know, we make things happen. We do stuff as a society right now. Um, and I wonder whether
22:33 Chris Williamson? we do that because we know that we can, we push people to try and create things and try and add objective value to the world because we know that that's an option for them. Whereas if you're a serf in Romania in like the fourteen hundreds, I don't even know if they had serfs in Romania in the four, you know, I mean, someone hoeing the fields and stuff like that, like would would it be as forefront of the way that philosophy looks at looks at this stuff if people didn't have the option to do it?
23:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, this is a good question. I mean, I I think that in the modern era, we probably are too wedded to this maybe objectivist and productivist view of what provides meaning in life, that it's it's all about producing good things, that actually oftentimes doing that for many people isn't a source of of fulfillment. I guess the, you know, classical stoic view is that.
23:25 Speaker 00 You know, the only thing that you get to control is your own kind of perception of reality and how you interpret events and how you understand them. And that you can't rely too much on external phenomena or even do it producing good things in the world because it's subject to so many contingencies and luck. It's a mistake to attach your happiness to things that aren't completely within your control. And of course, you know, that idea is a feature of a lot of modern psychotherapy too. Cognitive behavioral therapy is essentially premised on that ancient Stoic ideal, right, of controlling your perception of events, that you shouldn't be too attached to the
24:06 Speaker 00 approval of others or attached to achievement as a source of kind of meaning and happiness in life. So I mean, there's certainly part of me that is attracted to the classic Stoic view that you've got to focus on your perception of events and the things that are within your control. I do think that the productivist ideal of what the good life is, is dangerous insofar as a lot of those objective goods, like, you know, doing good things for the world, making the world a morally better place, or achieving some kind of great insight and some truth, or producing something of value for the world. Those tend to be relatively elitist goods.
24:47 Speaker 00 Like, there's probably only a handful of people that really get to achieve those objectively good things for the world. And I'm not saying that I don't, it's impossible for me to do good things for my friends and family, but the actual, the scope of my influence is relatively minimal. So I do think it would be wise to kind of rein in this attachment to producing good things as a source of meaning. And like, in one sense, you could read the book that I've written as a, as a way of arguing that, arguing for that hypothesis, sort of that idea, even though it's probably not something I brought explicitly to the forefront of the book, but now that we're talking about it, it's something that occurs to me.
25:28 Chris Williamson? I think it aligns as well. Okay, so let's say that it is a good, or that someone's proposing automation should occur. What are the strongest criticisms against letting it happen?
25:42 Speaker 00 I mean, the automation and letting it run rampant in in human life. Well, I mean, the the most obvious criticism of it is, and this unfortunately is not something I engage with in the book, is what does it actually do to people's lives from an economic perspective? Because at the at the moment, work is an economic necessity for people. It's how they gain access to an income, and they need an income in order to survive and thrive. And you can lament that fact or regret that fact, but that's just a a reality in the modern world. And, you know, it's more true in some countries than others. In some countries, we have fairly robust safety nets and welfare that could protect people from the harsh realities
26:27 Speaker 00 of losing their job. I guess one of the interesting features of the COVID-19 pandemic is how a lot of governments have stepped in to provide even more support for people who've lost their jobs, and some reasonably generous supports in comparison to what was previously there, although that's always been on the assumption that it's a temporary stopgap measure. That keeps on getting extended.
26:53 Speaker 00 Keeps getting extended, and you kind of wonder, like, how much longer can it be extended for? But yeah, I mean, so losing your income is going to be the main kind of objection to automation. So unless there's something done to correct for this loss of income. Bring that bring that floor up. It's going to be a pretty. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be a pretty bad thing for a lot of people. And you can kind of see that happening to some extent already. And I mean, more generally, I think there are objections to the impact that automation is having on human well-being, kind of not just in a purely economic sense. I discuss kind of five problems in the book that I think
27:32 Speaker 00 are already apparent, but are likely to get worse the more automation there is. One problem is kind of linked back to the conversation we're just having about, you know, what it takes to live a good life, the sense that you need both subjective satisfaction and some kind of connection to the world around you to be doing things that are good for the world around you. Look, a very obvious point is that the whole purpose of automation is to. Sever that link between human effort and production in the world so that, you know, humans aren't needed for producing that good. And that's happening like not just in jobs, it's also happening in other spheres of life.
28:16 Speaker 00 I mean, one example that I look at in the book is in scientific inquiry. Now, like, these are very kind of preliminary tech, preliminary forms of technology, but there's a group of researchers in Aberystwyth in Wales, actually, who've produced these robot scientists who are able to review the scientific literature, generate their own hypothesis and test it. And the two, I think the two robots that they've created that I remember reading about were Adam and Eve, they're both called, have different names. And, you know, they were doing a fairly, you could say, basic research on testing different kinds of, creating new kinds of yeast and different kind of drug treatments. But it's an interesting proof of concept that you could actually have
29:00 Speaker 00 scientists, like, not just assisting in the process of scientific inquiry, but actually autonomously generating their own hypotheses and testing them. And, you know, there's sometimes this notion that if we don't work, we'll just kind of swan around and have more time for scientific inquiry and intellectual endeavor.
29:21 Chris Williamson? All of those, all of those things that people are just moonlighting on in evening time as they're, they're taking up the violin and they're doing some Picasso in the garage and some DNA CRISPR editing in the, on the way to work and all this.
29:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, it's the reality is that, well, number one and all, people don't do that and don't have the capacity to do it or the means to do it, but also it could be the case that automating technologies obviate the need for them to do that in the first place. Like, one of the things I talk about in the book, I mean, I, I'm happy to admit that it's a It might seem to many people like a satirical example, but you know, the movie Wall-E, which is one of my, one of my favorite Pixar movies, has this depiction of an automated future where you have lots of robots doing, you know, basic tasks around the world. And what do the humans do in that world? You know, the humans are all incredibly
30:15 Speaker 00 obese. They're sitting on floating couches in this interstellar cruise ship, trying to transport them to a better world because they've completely environmentally destroyed the, destroyed the earth. And they're watching, you know, light entertainment and being fed a diet of fast food. So they're the kind of almost these passive slug-like beings because technology has made their life too convenient and too easy and they don't really have the motivation to do anything. And I'm, you know, I'm sure that's satire, obviously in one sense. And people have ridiculed it, referring to it as this kind of vision of the future as the so-filarity as opposed to the singularity where we all just end
30:59 Speaker 00 up on our sofas. But I mean, part of me thinks there's something true to it, right? That humans have, although, you know, engaging in difficult tasks and difficult forms of, you know, physical labor or cognition can be very rewarding and fulfilling, they're also very difficult to do and need to be very kind of motivated to do them. And if, if technology means that we don't have to do these things anymore, I think there's a danger for a lot of people that they'll just kind of fall back into a very passive form of existence. I know that all the problems that I discuss in the book, the five problems that I discuss are all kind of linked to that basic idea, this theme of passivity as a result of automation.
31:41 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I mean, think about the rise in stoicism, like why that's happening or why people are enjoying doing Iron Man triathlons or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or cold showers. Cold showers, perfect example. And why do people want to do it? Like, it sucks. You don't, nobody enjoys the cold shower.
32:01 Speaker 00 They want to feel alive.
32:02 Chris Williamson? They enjoy the satisfaction. They enjoy the state change. Yes, precisely. They, there's not many things that we do now unless you skid on the ice outside in your car. There's not many things that we do that make us feel alive, you know, that give us that sort of, there's a dominatrix who Paul Bloom interviewed for one of his upcoming books. And she said, nothing captures attention like a whip. And she means that when you slap someone in the face as hard as you can, they're not thinking about anything for five seconds after you've hit them. They're just thinking, did I just get fucking slapped? Did he just slap me? That's, that's what they're thinking. And I think that, again, Naval Ravikant talks about, we don't want peace of mind, we want peace from mind.
32:45 Chris Williamson? And this desperate desire to kind of just get ourselves into a lower stimulus state in a significantly higher stimulus world is just a constant battle. But again, if we were to be able to have some beautifully omnipotent omniscient being AGI, it could solve all of those problems in any case. So anything that we can think of, any of these issues that we can postulate, it can come up with the correct combination of drug cocktail, the correct virtual environment for us to be in, the perfect robot soulmate sex friend that we need to make us feel fulfilled. That solution should be found if you had a,
33:28 Chris Williamson? an AGI that was sufficiently advanced with enough resources to be able to do it. So, okay, so let's say that we managed to replace work with automation in an effort to get to a utopia. Like, what, what does it even mean to get it right? Like, what is a utopia by your definition?
33:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, this is another kind of whole, whole other discussion in many ways, but yeah, I guess one of the things I do in the book is I contrast two ideas of what a utopia is. There's kind of the, the traditional popular conception of what a utopia is, or what you find in so-called utopian literature, which is what I call the blueprint, our blueprint model of utopia. You find this in Plato's Republic, you know, what is the ideal city? And he has this very rigid hierarchical society. Everyone knows their place. There are very set rules about what people are supposed to be doing. You get it in, you know, Thomas More's classic work on utopia, first coinage of the term actually
34:32 Speaker 00 in, in modern English, where he had depicts this hypothetical society, which is kind of a neo-feudalist society where everyone is divided into these cases and they have certain roles in society. And arguably, this is, this is less true in the sense that communist theory was probably
34:53 Speaker 00 Struck by the fact that the communist utopia was never very precisely specified, but those kinds of societies that did arise that espoused a communist philosophy often had this kind of rigid authoritarian structure. So implementing this blueprint, there is that we have this model of what the ideal world is, and we just need to kind of match the actual reality to that blueprint. And if that means that some people have to be, you know, sacrificed along the way for the good of the revolution, for the good of achieving this blueprint, then so be it. And I think that's why utopianism in many people's minds is very kind of negative set of connotations, that it's associated with a lot of failed
35:36 Speaker 00 movements like communism, critiques as being a utopianist movement, and then it's also associated with a lot of violence and cruelty on the pathway to achieving a utopia.
35:47 Chris Williamson? Ruthless, isn't it? Oddly, a utopia is seen as a very ruthless sort of thing, where people are just going to be left behind. It sort of makes me think a lot about epigenetic, not epigenetic, what was the thing that?
36:00 Speaker 00 Eugenics.
36:01 Chris Williamson? Eugenics, that's it. Like eugenics and stuff like selective breeding, like that's what a utopia. But I mean, I'm massively jaded, obviously, by precisely the sort of old literature and the new sci fi that I insist on reading to make me fall asleep on a night time.
36:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, and the famous kind of philosopher of science, Karl Popper, as you might have heard of, he wrote these influential critiques of utopianism, saying that they can necessarily lead to violence, because anyone who's part of the utopian movement will just think it's the ends justify the means. So if you have to break some eggs to make the omelette, and if that means, you know, cracking heads and putting people in prison camps, so be it. That's definitely not the model of utopianism that I favor in the book. I contrast that with what I call a horizontal, or you could almost call it like a frontier model of utopia that. The ideal society is one that is open and dynamic, right?
37:00 Speaker 00 That actually doesn't have a fixed destination or fixed kind of map for what the ideal society is, but that is focused on not becoming static, not becoming limited, that explores different horizons of possibility for humanity, both in terms of kind of activities, in terms of how we embody ourselves, how we relate to other people, how we explore our environment. It's this sense that there's always more possibilities, that the future can always be better. And maintaining that open horizon in the future is the key to having a utopian society. So it's maybe a slightly paradoxical idea in the sense that a utopian society for me
37:43 Speaker 00 is not one that has a particular fixed model or blueprint, but it's something that is open-ended and dynamic.
37:52 Chris Williamson? Got you. What's a cyborg utopia? You kind of break it into into two different types. What's a cyborg one?
37:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, the last part of the book, I look at two different models of utopia, the cyborg utopia and what I call the virtual utopia. I want to kind of take a step back before I talk about it, just to explain why I had those two possible futures, because some people might think it's, well, why did you pick those two? And why is it so binary? So where I arrive at the end of the first half of the book is this notion that humanity is at a crossroads. What's happening, and I use this idea from evolutionary anthropology, that humans evolved to fill what I call the cognitive niche, right? What sets us apart from other animals is that we use our brains, both individually and collectively, to solve problems.
38:42 Speaker 00 And we kind of generate our own ecological niche. We're not as dependent on the physical world or not so susceptible to the whims of the natural world as other animals, because we've managed to carve out this niche for ourselves using our brain power. What's happening now is that we're creating technologies that are gradually replacing us, that they're kind of shunting us out of the cognitive niche, pushing us out gradually. And so we face a dilemma. The question is, you know, do we, do we try to fight back against the machines and reclaim our dominance of the cognitive niche? Or do we try and retreat from the cognitive niche and, you know, let the kind of machines
39:22 Speaker 00 watch over us and look after our economic wellbeing, our, our needs, our, the kind of the needs for abundance and affluence and so forth, and do something else? And so I associate those kind of two options with two different models of utopia, the cyborg utopia, which is where we basically try to become like the machines that are gradually replacing us, and the virtual utopia, which is where we essentially retreat from the cognitive niche and do something else.
39:51 Chris Williamson? What I think's really interesting about that is it, it makes me think about the status conversation that we were having before, about your job sort of gives you your sense of who you are and it's the label you give yourself.
40:05 Chris Williamson? And that cognitive niche is kind of like a species-wide status that we've given ourselves, right? Like, we are the cognitive kings of the jungle. You know, there isn't anything else that we know in the universe that's smarter than us, that has the powers of abstraction and planning and mindfulness and all of the creativity, everything that we value for the big meatloaf inside of our heads. Pretty soon, unless the, um, unless AGI continues to remain narrow and go deeper as opposed to actually being able to broaden out, and it does seem like there is a bit of debate about whether or not that's going to happen, but if it is able to get to proper Nick Bostrom
40:49 Chris Williamson? shit-your-pants stuff, then we're no longer going to be top of the tree. We are, we are literally going to be...
40:57 Chris Williamson? In a best case scenario, friends with a god that we have managed to constrict into, constrict or convince to align its goals and ours together. But we are no longer going to be top of the tree. And I wonder what that does to a civilization when that happens. Like, what does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to be supposedly the rulers of a planet when you're no longer the smartest individual on it?
41:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting way of kind of framing it or putting it. That, you know, our, our brain power is the status that we've given ourselves as a species. I guess, you know, evolutionists hate this notion that we are part of some chain of beings. We're, it's a hierarchy and we sit at the top of it. And they would argue that, you know, the whole point of evolutionary thinking of the Darwinian revolution is to rid us of that notion that we're somehow at the center of the evolutionary universe, that it's just this kind of big, kind of massive sprawling branch, branching tree of different organisms. But yeah, I think the reality is that many human civilizations, many humans probably
42:23 Speaker 00 do think of themselves as in some sense, superior to the rest of the world. And this notion that we're going to lose that status is problematic. And I think it does going to pose a major existential threat to us, not in the Bostromian sense of like, the machines are going to turn us into paperclips, but in the sense that what are we here for? What's the purpose of it all?
42:45 Chris Williamson? Oh yeah, so not only could we be paperclips, but mentally we could think of ourselves as paperclips. So there's two different ways that we could be, we could be displaced, both spiritually and physically, we could get displaced by the machines. Okay, so cyborg, cyborg utopia, give us the, what's, what's that look like?
43:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's a number of different ideas or pathways to cyborg utopia out there. For people who aren't aware of, and most people are aware of this nowadays, that cyborg is a cybernetic organism. Actually, the concept or idea comes from a paper written by a couple of scientists who have very suspiciously similar surnames, but they're spelled differently. So I don't actually remember their first names ever, but it's Kleins and Klein. The names of the people that wrote this paper.
43:34 Speaker 00 On the cyborg, and they were actually writing as part of the space race. Like, they were talking about, you know, how can we get humans into space? And they were commenting on the fact that, well, you know, humans aren't very well adapted to space. If you put us outside a spaceship for a couple of seconds, we're gonna, you know, not be thriving and flourishing, to put it mildly. So how can we improve things? Well, we could turn humans into machines, or kind of integrate human biological systems with machines so that we're better adapted to the environment of space. And that's where the term cyborg came from, from their paper that they wrote about this idea. And obviously, it's been taken on a whole other life since in popular culture. But, I mean, that's basically what I'm talking about when I look at the cyborg utopia,
44:19 Speaker 00 is that we kind of fight back against the machines by trying to become machines ourselves, by integrating ourselves more and more with machines, so that who we are is part and parcel of what our automating technology is as well. So our fates are bound together, not just in a loose sense, but in the sense that we are the same thing, and our identity is the same as them. Now, you know, there's two very different pathways to achieving cyborg status. You could achieve it by actually physically integrating yourself with technology. One of the examples I discuss in the book is this artist, Neil Harbison.
45:03 Speaker 00 I don't know if you've interviewed him, you should probably try and interview him. He's an interesting guy. He's a founder of the Cyborg Society, and more recently, the Trans-Species Society, who's advocating for the rights of people who don't ascribe to a human identity. So I think that might be something that is intriguing to you, post-human identity. So he has this antenna at the back of his head. And he was born colorblind. And what this antenna does is it converts light rays into sound. So it allows him to to hear in color. All right, so it's a bit of technology that I guess you could call it a technology, a technologically induced form of synesthesia. He's combining two senses.
45:47 Speaker 00 And he he talks about this a lot and how it changes his sensory perception and engagement with the world. So what he's doing there literally is he's using a piece of technology to change how he experiences reality. He's integrating himself with the technology. And in interviews that he's conducted, he he refers to himself as a bit of technology. He says, you know, I'm not, it's not that I use technology to engage with the world. I am kind of an extended piece of technology. My identity with this antenna that I've drilled into my skull is it's part of me. And like he's won the right to kind of wear it in identity photographs and all that kind of things. So he's an interesting character.
46:31 Speaker 00 Like, it's a very primitive form of cyborg technology. He's just kind of adding a new sensory modality. But it's, I think, a proof of concept of how we can integrate ourselves with machines. And there are lots of other people doing similar experiments or developing similar cyborg technologies, you know, brain-computer interfaces that allow people to have like robotic arms that are directly attached into their nervous system, usually for people who've suffered from some kind of amputation or loss of limb function. Or you have these exoskeletons that people are creating that allow you to kind of lift heavier objects or move faster. And these are all examples of kind of technical integration between our biological systems
47:14 Speaker 00 and either a computer or robotic system in some way. So that's one form of cyborgization. There's another form as well, this kind of looser form, that some people say that we are kind of cyborgs already. There's a Scottish philosopher called Andy Clark who says that
47:30 Speaker 00 We're natural born cyborgs that again, kind of go back to this idea of the cognitive niche, you know, how did we succeed? How do we thrive within the cognitive niche? It's because we built technologies that we have tied our fate to that humans have always been a technological species, have used technology to survive. And we're just doing more and more of that nowadays. And we've become kind of highly interdependent with our technologies. It's a trite example, but the notion that like, how close you are to your phone and how often you look at your phone and how reliant you are on your phone for your memory, for navigation, for financial management, whatever it might
48:11 Speaker 00 be. That's an example of kind of cyborgization. But that's a, I think, a looser metaphorical sense of what it means to become a cyborg. And I'm kind of more interested in the technical form of cyborgization.
48:22 Chris Williamson? It's an interesting thought experiment that I've just been going through in my head there, thinking about, I don't think that I'm a cyborg, even if the phone, the phone's outside of me, it's not me. Right. Okay. So let's say that everybody within the next 300 years gets a robotic set of hips because hips are a nightmare and we don't want, okay, like, no, no, no, because that's just, that's just the robot. And then you just slippery slope your way all the way down. And you go, okay, so now I've got robotic legs. Okay. So now, now 80% of me, all the way up to the nips or all the way up to the neck, like that's, that's all robotic. We've just dispensed with our bodies, but our heads are still there. Or reverse it and say, okay, maybe we've realized that actually we can replace certain
49:06 Chris Williamson? areas of the brain, like we can get rid of fear, fear and anxiety response by getting rid of like the way the amygdala works. And we can put a chip in in place of that. And it's kind of the same size and the same shape and slippery slope your way all your way down through that as well. And you go, right. Okay. Now the hippocampus is gone. Now like the prefrontal cortex is gone. Now this is gone. You actually get to a point where you can remove all parts of you and replace them with a machine and yet somehow still consider that you're not a machine. Just I think because we hold on to our sense of I am me. And it's very difficult to abstract ourselves into what would it be like for my consciousness to be placed in something else? You know, we understand what happens when we see someone in a wheelchair. They are not the wheelchair. But at what point does replacing the parts of you that you consider to be you?
49:51 Chris Williamson? And this is a broader question that Sam Harris asks a lot, which is, he says, like, where are you? You consider that you're somewhere in your head, behind your eyes. But really, like, what are we talking about here? And I suppose this is a, this is a much deeper sort of philosophical question. But certainly, when you talk about cyborgs, it does, it certainly seems that from some sort of objective metric, it would be quite feasible to think of a situation in which we were cybernetic organisms.
50:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, and look, as I say, there are, there are many people who argue that there are already humans that are cyborgs, you know, kind of neuroprosthetics, use of retinal implants, cochlear implants, you know, they're not replacing parts of your cortex yet, but they are replacing parts of your kind of sensory peripheries. And it seems like a very good, clear proof of concept that you could do more kind of functional integration with technical systems. And the more of that we do, the more technology-like we become, the more we become cyborgs. You know, there is an interesting philosophical question, is that like, if you replace every
51:03 Speaker 00 single neuron in your head gradually over time, do you actually maintain the same identity? Or is there a certain point in time at which the lights switch off? And, you know, there's some philosophers who think that maybe that will happen, like, maybe as you're gradually replacing each neuron, you seem like you're still inside your skull or inside your body, but then at some point, suddenly it all disappears.
51:23 Chris Williamson? Like a, like a cybernetic zombie.
51:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, there have been people who have argued that, that that might be possible and that we'll never know.
51:32 Chris Williamson? And that's the problem, because you never get to see. Well, I had a bunch of conversations recently about consciousness. Philip Goff was on talking about consciousness and.
51:44 Chris Williamson? The, the, my favorite quote from that reminded me of something I'd read ages ago, which is, if it wasn't for the fact that we experience it, the universe would give us no indication that consciousness existed.
51:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. So that's, that's the problem. Somebody could be walking around with a...
52:02 Chris Williamson? Making the noises, doing the movements, having the responses. Wouldn't know. Okay, so, cyborg utopia, sounds all right. Little bit of work to be done on it. What's virtual utopia?
52:14 Speaker 00 Right. So this is a much, a much more kind of slippery concept, I think, and something that's, that's difficult to wrap your, your head around. Partly that's because the, the concept of what virtual reality is, is kind of inherently paradoxical and maybe not well understood. Like one, so what, within the book, I contrast kind of two ideas of what a virtual reality is. One is, I guess, the, the technical sense of it where you, you know, you're literally putting on like a headset or something and going inside a computer simulated environment and living out a life like that. Idea depicted in, in lots of movies.
52:57 Speaker 00 I guess The Matrix is a famous variation on this idea of living in a virtual world through technology. And there, there are other examples that don't spring to mind all of a sudden. I suppose my favorite example is the Neal Stephenson book, Snow Crash, if anyone's ever read that, about the metaverse.
53:14 Chris Williamson? I've tried, so here's, here's, here's the main question of this. I've started to try and get into that twice, and I've just kind of got stuck a few pages deep. It just hasn't gripped, gripped me. Is it worth reading?
53:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, it is worth reading. It's, it's quite dated and I guess like you, you'll be familiar with a lot of the concepts in it. But I think that's largely because he's been quite influential in...
53:36 Speaker 00 You know, tech culture and Silicon Valley culture and.
53:39 Chris Williamson? You reckon I should give it a go?
53:41 Speaker 00 I reckon you should give it a go. I do have that problem with a lot of Neil Stephenson books, though, in that several of them are gathering dust on my shelves and, you know, they're, they're all like a thousand pages long or.
53:51 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
53:52 Speaker 00 Two thousand page, multi-volume books.
53:54 Chris Williamson? Did you, um, did you try Seven Eves?
53:57 Speaker 00 I, so that, that's probably, I might have some of a point with Seven Eves.
54:00 Chris Williamson? Oh dude, keep at it. Please keep at it. That, I can, I promise you, that one is worth it. Neil, if you're listening, I'm sorry, mate, but the second, the final third of that book, after, you'll know the point at which it's the final third. The final third of that book just didn't need to be there. Like, the first two thirds of it, once you get into it, I couldn't put it down. I went on a stag do to New York and someone recommended that I start reading it. Let's remember that I've been, I'd been sort of going at it fairly hard for four days in New York and it was a 10-hour plane journey home or whatever.
54:36 Chris Williamson? I didn't sleep. So I opened Seven Eves and 230 pages later, or whatever the hell I'd done, I hadn't bothered sleeping. I got to Amsterdam, absolutely wrecked, uh, but like, I knew what had happened, uh, 500 days after the moon had exploded or whatever it was. And yeah, that was a bizarre experience. Anyway, we've, we've got sidetracked. So, uh, virtual utopia.
55:04 Speaker 00 Yeah. Um, so, so this, this idea of like, living in a computer simulated environment, that's what living in a virtual world is. And, you know, some people can argue that's utopia and, and part of me thinks that there's, there is potential to it in so far as you can create an endless space of possible worlds to live out your life in. And it's kind of this perfect fantasy playground for whatever it is that you happen to desire. In, in principle, it depends on whether the, the technology gets there. There is another sense of what a, a virtual life is that I, I'm more attracted to, which is the notion, again, that, that humans have always, in a sense, been constructing a virtual world for themselves. Kind of again, to go back to my point about the cognitive niche and just kind of flip it around.
55:45 Speaker 00 What I said is that, you know, we're using our brain power to make ourselves less susceptible to the vicissitudes of the natural world. Like, we're, we're less subject to its, its whims and its caprice. Uh, we, we live inside nice, safe, controlled environments. I'm coming to you from a, a centrally heated, artificially lit room, right? So I'm not outside in the Siberian winds that are certainly sweeping across the British Isles this evening, right? So I'm gonna, we've always been constructing these artificial environments and we're going to continue to do it, it's just that the kind of stakes associated with it, the kinds of lives that we live in these artificially constructed environments are going to be
56:29 Speaker 00 less, they're going to have less stakes associated with them insofar as what we're doing inside them is not going to determine our fate in life, our economic destiny in life. So the Israeli historian and futurist now as well, Yuval Noah Harari, has made this point, right, that he actually made it in a very short op-ed in The Guardian a few years ago, but it's a major theme of both of his first two books, Sapiens and Omadéas, that what is distinctive about human civilization is that we use our imaginations to kind of project a layer onto our experience of the world that isn't really there.
57:14 Speaker 00 You know, we perceive these status hierarchies, these kind of mythical symbols and meanings that actually aren't really in the physical environment. And so his argument is that humanity is, in a sense, built on a series of virtual reality games that we're playing in our head. And so people who worry about the end of work and the automation of work, that we're going to lose something important, are misguided because we're all, we've always been constructing these new virtual reality games and we're just going to continue doing it in the future. It's just not going to be an economic game anymore, it's going to be some other kind of virtual reality game that we're playing. And that's the model of the virtual utopia that I defend in the book, this, what I call
57:55 Speaker 00 the utopia of games, where we engage in lots of different game-like activities, and you know, they're very meaningful to us and we have achievements within those games, we build friendships within those games, but we're not playing those games because of some economic necessity or because we're forced to. And my claim is that it's possible for us to construct an infinite number of these games to play, and that can be a kind of utopia.
58:26 Chris Williamson? A lot of the objections that I sort of observe coming up inside myself as I'm hearing you talk and as I read the book can be answered again by a sufficiently powerful or sufficiently high fidelity simulation. So one of the things that I was thinking was, well, isn't struggle a part of what gives life meaning? Wouldn't a virtual hedonic adaptation kick in at just progressively higher and higher levels? But the virtual reality, if it was programmed by something sufficiently intelligent, would know that you need to have struggle in order to get meaning, therefore the struggle would be programmed in. And we get to a question about if, it's like the reverse philosophical zombie,
59:10 Chris Williamson? it's like the environment zombie. Like if you experience everything in the environment, which gives you all of the stimuli that you would have needed to lead a fulfilled and meaningful and flourished life, but it's not in the real environment, is there anything different going on?
59:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, so like, I mean, my view is that there isn't ultimately, or I mean, there might be something different, but it's not, it's not a difference that renders our lives less flourishing or less meaningful. That said, like, there is a, you know, a large school of opposition to this idea. There's a philosopher called Robert Nozick, who, you know, I quite like as a philosopher, he's better known as a political philosopher. He kind of defended a version of libertarianism and minimal state libertarianism back in the seventies, that is very influential in the US. But I kind of like him more as a more general philosophy. I think he has lots of interesting ideas. And he has this famous thought experiment of the experience machine, which is basically what you're imagining.
1:00:12 Speaker 00 So, you know, imagine you could plug yourself into an artificial simulation that was, you know, high fidelity, very realistic. You didn't, you wouldn't remember your old world, your life in the real world. You could kind of play out whatever simulation you want. Would you choose to plug into the experience machine? And he argued that he wouldn't because he wants to live in the real world. The Experience Machine would be missing something that he desires. And he claimed to have surveyed his students on this and that they all agreed with him. And a lot of people, I think, when first presented with this thought experiment, agree with it. It turns out more recently, there's a bunch of experiments that have been done on this, where people have asked kind of variations on the original Experience Machine thought experiment,
1:00:54 Speaker 00 where they say, well, okay, what if instead of plugging into a machine, you were asked to plug out of a machine? So you were told, well, everything that you value in your life right now is a simulation. And you can plug out of that simulation, go into the real world. Basically, the thought experiment that's depicted in the movie The Matrix would choose to do it. And some of the experimental studies in this suggest that actually people wouldn't choose to do it, or they're less likely to choose to do it, significantly less likely to choose to do it if they are plugging out of the machine. So some people have argued that Nozick's thought experiment was playing upon a kind of status quo bias.
1:01:29 Chris Williamson? Yes, precisely.
1:01:30 Speaker 00 People are attached to their current way of life, and they're afraid to kind of move out of it. And it's not really saying anything about whether living inside this virtual reality machine is actually valuable or meaningful or not.
1:01:43 Chris Williamson? This is like a virtual reality trolley problem, like an inverted virtual reality trolley problem. Is there a case here? I'm going to guess that there will be. People will be pretty swayed by a naturalistic fallacy as well.
1:01:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I, I, yeah, I think you can see that in kind of some aspects of the modern environmentalist movement. Not, not, I'm not going to denigrate all forms of environmentalism by any stretch of the imagination. And I think we are facing into some major environmental catastrophes in the future. Though I'm not sure that we can actually do anything about them, or whether we have the collective will or the institutions that can do anything about it. But I think there are serious problems. But that said, you know, within the environmental movement, you can find kind of pockets that are very much attached to some kind of golden age that was in the past, or kind of a primitivist life, or more in touch with nature. I think a lot of that is kind of mythical and an overstatement,
1:02:43 Speaker 00 and an over-idealization of the past, which has always been. Feature of human in life. I mean, there is an argument as to why that happened. You know, the kind of Garden of Eden myth that you find. One of the standard historical explanations of that is that this was people who had undergone the agricultural revolution, wishing that they were hunter gatherers again. Because it turns out, if you, you know, if you study hunter gatherer tribes. Nowadays, and if you look at some historical records of them, it seems that they had much kind of more leisure filled lives than we do and seem to have been maybe happier than we were. This guy called Marshall Salins wrote this famous paper back in the
1:03:24 Speaker 00 sixties called the original, the original affluent society or the original leisure society, which he said hunter gatherers were the original leisure society, because if you look at them, what they do is they spend maybe two hours a day working instead of looking for food. And then the rest of the time is spent kind of playing, hanging around with their families and not doing much else. Um, so like, it could be that people are appealing to that kind of mythical ideal. But I think there's lots of unpleasant features of that form of life too, in terms of
1:03:52 Chris Williamson? The dysentery, the disease, the teeth falling out.
1:03:55 Speaker 00 Intertribal warfare.
1:03:57 Chris Williamson? Yeah, the rampant rape. Yeah, I um, I had David Pearce on the show, transhumanist guy.
1:04:03 Speaker 00 Sure, yeah, yeah.
1:04:04 Chris Williamson? Yes, I had David on the show. Must be years ago now, it must be a couple of years ago. And um, prior to prior to speaking to him, I think I had a very different sort of view around us moving forward. But in the way that ideas oddly do tend to infect you, because I spoke to him so long ago. And because I've reflected on the stuff that he does for quite a while. That status quo bias, like my Overton window of what I consider to be a mental projection of where we could end up as a civilization has just, it's just sort of expanded and expanded and expanded. And now I'm like,
1:04:43 Chris Williamson? well, I mean, you know, if there was a way of virtually essentially making me feel like I'm on MDMA all the time and never come down from it and just e- exist at degrees of human enjoyment that have heretofore never been discovered. I'm like, hmm, is there? It becomes a question, it becomes an ethical question. It it's it simply comes down to that as far as I can see.
1:05:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, like, I think David's work is kind of groundbreaking and definitely you can perspective shifting work is book, the hedonistic imperative, which I believe you can access the entire text of it online. It was written back in the 90s, I believe. So it's it it might seem a little bit dated in some aspects, but it's still, I think, a very provocative and current work and will really can reshape your thinking about. I guess the big idea within it is the notion that some people can have a lower hedonistic baseline than everyone else. And that means they're kind of disadvantaged and they live a more impoverished life and that we can we should do something to kind of up the hedonistic ante for them to kind of live more flourishing, blissful lives.
1:05:55 Speaker 00 And so he's a, I would say, an alternative model of the utopia to me, but it's not entirely dissimilar. And, you know, David is a transhumanist. And I guess what I talk about, when I talk about the cyborg utopia, is a kind of transhumanist future. You know, David reduces transhumanism to the so-called three supers, that the goal is super longevity, you know, ending death and or not ending death rather, but having extra long lives, a super intelligence, you know, creating more and more intelligence and improving human intelligence, and then super happiness, which is this idea of the hedonistic imperative, making people more blissful and happy.
1:06:37 Speaker 00 And I think I think that kind of chimes with what I view as the cyborg utopia. I'm a little bit more dismissive of that idea in the book, but I'm favor the virtual utopia, but I'm not completely down on the cyborg utopia. I think it has merits as well. What I'm skeptical about is its technological feasibility in the medium term.
1:06:58 Chris Williamson? What is going to happen next, do you think, in the space of not the science side, but in terms of philosophy? What do you think people are going to spend the next five to 10 years thinking about with regards to this space? Do you have any inclination of that?
1:07:14 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, I guess like a lot of my day job is focusing on the ethical implications, legal implications of artificial intelligence and robotics. I hate to call myself an AI ethicist or anything like that, because I think that term is loaded. And a lot of the work that these people, these people that AI ethicists do is not very similar to what I do. But I think the main debates there are, unfortunately, I think, very traditional debates about political power, like who controls technology and who controls access to technology, you're seeing these things
1:07:55 Speaker 00 play out, the effect of artificial intelligence on political polarization and debate, the effect that it has on economic polarization, inequality, issues of bias in technology, biased decision making. I know I've been talking about the previous book that I did, but I actually, I'm a co-author on a new book, which looks at a lot of these themes. It's called, I actually have it here. This wasn't intentional, but I just have it next to me. It's called The Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence.
1:08:29 Chris Williamson? When's it out? Is it out now?
1:08:31 Speaker 00 It's out at the end of February. So I'm not the lead author on it, but it might be a good idea to get the lead author, a guy called John Zerilli, to talk about it.
1:08:40 Chris Williamson? I'll link, I'll link to that in the show notes below. I've got Brian Christian on next week.
1:08:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. The Alignment Problem book. Yeah, I just, I just purchased that. I haven't read it yet.
1:08:53 Chris Williamson? It'll be gathering dust next to Seven Eves. Yeah, man. I mean, I know that the audience do enjoy this, but it's, they'd better continue enjoying it because I find discussions about the ethics to do with artificial intelligence and automation and robots and all that sort of stuff. I find them endlessly fascinating. I find them fascinating in a way.
1:09:18 Chris Williamson? That I don't think classical philosophy has, it's not a replacement, but it's a fantastic side dish. And it satisfies me.
1:09:28 Speaker 00 You're probably getting a lot of the debates in classical philosophy within kind of AI and robotics related philosophy. It's just, it might seem more kind of current and interesting.
1:09:37 Chris Williamson? So that, that, that new book is where you think the, a lot of the direction will be going?
1:09:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, like what I'd say is I think there are like medium term issues and long term issues. So the Bostrom, superintelligence, existential risk angle, that's sort of the long term debate and concerns. And then the short, medium term debate is about like the effect on work, the economy, the effect on, on politics, political debate, polarization, and the, the legal uses of AI, like the use of predictive tools to determine whether somebody is going to commit a crime again, or in child welfare protection, these kinds of things. These are, those are all examples that we discussed in that book. So that's why I'm, I'm raising them. That's where a lot of the conversation is. Now, it's interesting
1:10:24 Speaker 00 the question as to why those two conversations are actually quite separate in the philosophical and legal communities. And they probably shouldn't be, they should actually be more joined up. And I'd be one of the people who'd be arguing for them to be more joined up. But I think there are some people who are very dismissive of the long term concerns. They think they're too speculative, too fanciful in that we should limit ourselves to the more medium term concerns. But I, I think you have to focus on both. And I think the long term, yeah, I think you have to have a long term perspective. Otherwise, I think you're missing out on a lot of what is interesting about the human project.
1:11:03 Chris Williamson? There's also a, a risk here, the black ball out of the urn, or the, the black swan, or the unknown unknowns, whatever you want to call it. Like, if you decide to take, if you decide to take your eye off a ball, which is a civilization killer, which even has an infinitesimal chance of doing it, like, it's, it's not a very good idea. I mean, dude, I got, I thought I knew existential risk and I read Toby Oates, The Precipice, last year. And that, that book made me fully shit myself. It's like, I couldn't, I just can't believe how far.
1:11:44 Chris Williamson? Public attention and public consciousness is directed in completely the wrong area when it comes to this. You mentioned sort of the environmental movement earlier on, and I angered a lot of people across multiple different social media domains about a month ago, where I said, I posted the table of Toby Ord's chance of us being destroyed within the next century by, and he lists all the different existential risks. And the caption was, "Climate change is not an existential risk. Priority change my mind." And a lot, an awful lot of people got very angry because the wording was purposely provocative, but is, as far as I can see, by anyone that understands what's going on, true. And if we were to have a sufficiently powerful
1:12:29 Chris Williamson? superintelligence, that would probably be able to fix and undo any of the damage that we've done to the environment in any case. But if it's turned us all into fucking paperclips or stuck electrodes in our face, then it kind of doesn't matter.
1:12:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, again, I don't want to reopen the kind of worms that you opened for yourself on Twitter, but I suppose, you know, Toby Ord has a very kind of narrow definition of what an existential risk is. It has to be basically something that's civilization ending, that ends humanity. And climate change could make this very unpleasant for a lot of people, but humans, as a general population, will survive it, no doubt, as they have survived significant climatic events in the past.
1:13:10 Chris Williamson? Before we tumble down further down that rabbit hole, I have your other book here, Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work, will be linked in the show notes below. Anywhere else that people should go and check out? Also, your new book will be linked as well. Any other stuff people should go and see?
1:13:26 Speaker 00 I guess just my website. It has a complicated title. It's Philosophical Disquisitions, maybe something to link in the show notes as well. It's a blog. Like, I write regular articles on it. And I also have a podcast of my own that deals with AI and philosophy and ethics issues. So people might be interested in that if they're interested in this conversation.
1:13:51 Chris Williamson? Amazing. John, thank you, man.
1:13:53 Speaker 00 All right. Thank you.
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