Reid riffs on the future of human connectivity

This week, Reid veers toward science fiction, tackling big questions including: Is a single mentally-linked network in our future? Can and should humans create other sentient beings? Select mentions: David Brin

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Reid Hoffman?

  I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:02Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finkler.

• 0:03Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way.

• 0:08Aria Finger?

  Typically, we ask our guests for their outlook on the best possible future. But now, every other week, I get to ask Reid for his take.

• 0:18Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 0:22Aria Finger?

  So Reid, obviously, last week, we spoke with Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic, and we covered a lot. We talked about AI, native generations, and privacy, and data, and friendship, family, empathy, so much. But there was still a lot that we didn't get to. And so, one question that I wanted to ask, but didn't get a chance to, is about the future of how humans are connected with one another. So companies are working on technology that can sense and monitor brain activity. So Nick Thompson, who we interviewed, obviously, in our last episode, he had previously said that in the future, perhaps instead of people having individual thoughts, we could become a mentally linked network as a species. Like, what do you think of this prospect?

• 1:07Aria Finger?

  Is that crazy? Are we approaching this as we start to build out these LLMs, you know, based on the corpus of human knowledge?

• 1:14Reid Hoffman?

  Well, this is a very science fiction thought. But of course, you know, science fiction, you know, eventually, we get to the moon, you know, other kinds of things. So, science fiction thoughts are not reasons to disregard them. And I do think, you know, to some degree, we're already at a place where we have interconnected minds. I mean, this is cell phones. This is podcasts. This is a bunch of other things. Look, we're already in some part of this. And obviously, you say, well, what if happens if we now have, you know, embedded links, or things that even if they weren't surgically, but they had a, you know, kind of a computer human interface that was through, you know, neurological touch, you know, in various neurons? And what would that mean for individual thoughts, and group thoughts, and communications? And, you know, because one of our mistakes

• 1:58Reid Hoffman?

  is we usually think ourselves as various forms of Crusoe, where we're like, whoa, whoa, we're these independent thinkers. And we don't realize that even in language, we swim in a medium that isn't just like us spitting it out, but we're like, we're in it, too. It shapes, you know, the format of our languages, and how our values shape our thoughts, and how we react, and a bunch of other things. So, so that extension through technology is obviously something that, in various points, is becoming more and more possible. Obviously, this is fraught because, you know, we really care about, you know, individual autonomy and agency and ability to make those choices and to not be, you know, kind of like over like, you know, if you said, I've got a new future for humanity,

• 2:43Reid Hoffman?

  we're all gonna become like ants and be a hive. Probably, most people would go, you're out of your mind. You know, maybe I would be going, you're out of your mind. How do we have, you know, this kind of like, human enablement, which preserves the essential things that we think about, you know, kind of everything from human autonomy and human agency and human dignity, together with the benefits that we would get from it, even though it might be changing and it might be a little alienating in the way that, for example, if you probably went back 100 years and told people what we were doing with smartphones, they would think we were cyborgs. We're already doing some version of this with

• 3:22Reid Hoffman?

  our smartphones. So, you know, don't panic, you know, build slowly, be careful, you know, some good things will come up.

• 3:31Aria Finger?

  I'm gonna stay on the science fiction thread, because just a few weeks ago, we were in a meeting and we were supposed to be doing deep work, but we got sidetracked on science fiction. And we were talking about David Brin's books and just the like, deep philosophical questions that they bring up. And one of the sort of macro questions that we decided that we have to answer as we think about the future is, to what extent is it our responsibility as humans to create more other sentient beings?

• 4:00Reid Hoffman?

  Well, the reason I, you know, somewhat shocked you by bringing up this as a question is because I think it's a question that people haven't thought about. A lot of people think that, that there is a importance of bringing the next generation of humanity of sentient beings into the world. And so, you know, there's a variety of people who are very passionate about that and, you know, could agree with a version of this question, just on that principle. But the deeper question is, is if we say, well, part of the trajectory you're on as human beings is we is, you know, when you look back in the thousands of years of recorded history in various ways, we've gone on a kind of a consciousness expansion thing.

• 4:39Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it's like, okay, you know, other races than our own are also conscious, you know, sentient, deserving of rights and respect and so on, other genders other than men. Right. And especially, of course, you know, in the preceding decades, we're not that many decades away from this, women, you know, you know, should have, you know, kind of the full spectrum of human rights. You say that and you say, well, you know, we're funding this earth species project. We're beginning to maybe we have an ability to have a conversation with whales or dolphins. And all of a sudden, maybe we realize they have poetry and they have, you know, maybe thousands of years of cultural tradition and world tradition that they're passing along.

• 5:23Reid Hoffman?

  And you go, okay, well, you know, understanding their sentience and talking to them may be something that is part of our meaning of life in the universe is expanding consciousness. And then, once you get there, then you say, well, what if we could, and this is part of David Brin's very early 1980s, you know, question and insight and uplift is, well, what if the, you know, kind of the purpose of consciousness is to bring more forms of consciousness, you know, more species, more, more cognitive diversity, just as the same cognitive diversity path that we've been on in terms of the respect of it, maybe that's, that's a reasonable thesis in the, in what our mission should be as human beings.

• 6:08Reid Hoffman?

  Now, this can get very wild, not just wild, because you're like, well, do we have to uplift dolphins and make dolphins like if dolphins are like pretty sentient, but could be much more? And what's their participation? What's our responsibility? You know, what's the relationship with this? What's the ethics of this? And you get mind boggling questions. But of course, you know, part of, you know, one of the things that we have, we have more or less as a society, not really paid attention to. Is, you know, they go, oh, genetic engineering bad? Well, we're already doing some forms of genetic engineering with, you know, IVF and, and, you know, kind of eggs and so forth. And, you know, and obviously we'll quickly get into and say, oh, we can get rid of the genetics that cause Huntington's disease or, you know, name your thing.

• 6:53Reid Hoffman?

  And, you know, this is a path that we're on. What happens? We start getting genetic diversity within, you know, uh, you know, the, the homo sapiens part. The important thing on this question is, I think it's an important question amongst the set that we just literally, no one's asking, that we will need to ask. Um, and, and the, the answer is probably not going to be simple. It's going to be complicated and evolving and has to do a lot with, you know, our human values and what the value of what humanity is becoming. The big failure of, of, of imagination in science fiction is, you know, like Star Trek, you know, what are we in the hundreds of years future is where people in leotards flying around in spaceships?

• 7:37Reid Hoffman?

  And the, the short answer is humanity is not static. We're not static in the technology that embodies us, like, you know, iPhones now currently or internet or, you know, eventually Neuralink and other sorts of things. But we're also going to be not static genetically either. And what is that path that we're going to be heading down? It's really important to start having the conversations about, well, what is the, the path of humanity? Uh, because the stasis of humanity, you know, that, that's the failure of most of the envisionment of our, of our science fiction futures.

• 8:19Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Aller, Sarah Shleid, Adrian Bain, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 8:38Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saieda Sapieva, Ian Ellis, Greg Beato, Ben Relis, Parth Patel, and Little Monster Media Company.