Kim Stanley Robinson on narrative and civilization

What is the connection between the future of humanity and the future of technology? Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (The Mars trilogy, Ministry for the Future) joins the podcast to speculate about how we might evolve as a civilization. Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson joins the podcast to speculate about how we might evolve as a civilization. His books, such as The Mars trilogy or Ministry for the Future to name a few—address issues like economic inequality, governance, and the ethical dilemmas posed by technological advancements. Reid, Aria, and Stan discuss Stan’s books and characters, how he builds his science fiction worlds, and the shifting pace of human acceleration. Plus, Stan explains the way that humans have organized themselves in the past and how AI may change how humans organize themselves in the future. Read the transcript of this episode here. Promotional image credit: Gage Skidmore. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all of the episodes, visit www.possible.fm/podcast. Topics: 3:40 - Hellos and intros 6:00 - Stan’s story development process 9:00 - Where we are on the narrative arc of humanity 14:07 - The pace of human progress 19:35 - Science fiction and the political realm 23:54 - How humans organize themselves 29:23 - The strength of AI programmers 34:44 - How Ministry of the Future applies to the real world 43:53 - Rapidfire questions The award-winning Possible podcast is back with a new season that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. This season, hosts Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, are speaking with a new set of ambitious builders and deep thinkers about everything from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Whether it's Inflection’s Pi, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or other AI tools, each episode will use AI to enhance and advance our discussion. Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network and hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer and Editor. Special thanks to Katie Sanders, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, and Little Monster Media Company.

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

• 0:03Speaker 00

  And this is a science fiction thought that we are experiencing in the future as impinging on the present in ways that perhaps didn't happen in the past, where you had stable technologies for quite a long time and then changes. And it's pretty clear that whatever's going on in these large language models, they are certainly doing a lot of work, trillions upon trillions of operations to get to what Marx would have called the general intellect. And maybe under acknowledged here is everybody's going, oh my God, these AIs are amazing. What I think is, oh my God, these programmers are amazing. Not that the AI is doing interesting things, it is, but it's doing them because the programmers

• 0:46Speaker 00

  have thought up inputs and instructions that are actionable at the level of computation.

• 1:00Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 1:02Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 1:03Reid Hoffman?

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

• 1:09Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with visionaries in many fields, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education.

• 1:17Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations showcase another kind of guest, whether it's Inflection's Pi or OpenAI's ChatGPT, each episode, we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.

• 1:29Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:37Reid Hoffman?

  This is Possible.

• 1:44Reid Hoffman?

  This season on Possible, some of my longtime favorite builders and thinkers are joining us, and our guest today is certainly one of them. In my opinion, our guest is among the most qualified in the world to help us think big and speculate about the best possible future.

• 1:59Aria Finger?

  Today, we are talking to none other than Kim Stanley Robinson. For decades, he's been a respected and prolific author of science fiction novels, short stories, and essays. The Ministry of the Future is currently making its way through my household, but many of you know him for the Mars trilogy, which has won numerous awards. The books span the 200-year journey of colonizing Mars and eventually the rest of the solar system.

• 2:26Reid Hoffman?

  Stan's work is thought provoking, prescient and fearless, especially as he delves in a social and political commentary. His books address issues like economic inequality, governance and the ethical dilemmas posed by technological advancements. So I'm sure you get why we're so excited to speak with him. He nimbly operates where science fiction becomes science fact, an area that we all inhabit as technology and society continue to interweave.

• 2:59Aria Finger?

  Stan once remarked, "By writing about the future, you're really writing about now in a way that has poetic and symbolic meaning." So we sat down for a wide ranging conversation about technology, civilization and the future. What technological advancements can we expect? And how might society and humanity change?

• 3:20Reid Hoffman?

  And top of mind for many of us, how might AI change us? Perhaps an incisive and seasoned futurist like Stan can light the path ahead.

• 3:31Aria Finger?

  Here's our conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.

• 3:40Reid Hoffman?

  Much has been said about the technology of futures you're imagining coming true, but as a serious fan of your writing, I'd like to ask you about the characters in your stories. If you could bring one character from your writing into real life, who would it be? And Kawhi, would you go on a mountaineering hike? Would you have a dinner conversation?

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's interesting, Reed. Thank you for that. My characters mean a lot to me. I'm a novelist and despite the content that is visionary or futuristic, the way science fiction portrays different societies, still as a lover of novels, I feel like they're always based on characters in a plot. And so my characters matter to me. And it occurs to me that my characters are.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Based on people that I know. And so I don't really need to have a character brought to life to have them around me. I don't have superheroes or omni competent characters. For the most part, they're pretty ordinary. And so that leads me to this. I once wrote a novel with a very great lead character because it was Galileo. And so I wrote Galileo's Dream to give it a sense of what I called in that novel, the first scientist. In the novel, Galileo is dragged off by time travelers to the, to the year 3020. And so that he can be on the moons of Jupiter.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  And the people there want Galileo's judgment on what they're doing as scientists. And it's a comedy, really. It's a time traveling comedy. But it occurred to me, thinking about this question, that I could make a Galileo into a time traveling detective. They could take him hither and yon in order to have his mind cast onto various topics. And it struck me funny. And for me, what I would like to do is just follow him around in his life as the character Cartophilus, a time traveler and narrator of that novel, follows him around, lives with him, watches him at work. So if I could bring back one of my characters alive, since he's not really mine, he's the world's, I would like to see Galileo in action.

• 6:00Aria Finger?

  That is awesome. So Stan, I'm going to zoom out from characters. You know, through your writing, you've been envisioning our future for more than 40 years, and that takes deep imagination. But it also requires, you know, a deep understanding and conviction about like, what are humans capable of, like both good and bad? And so we'd love to hear from you, like, how do you develop these prophecies about humans and our universe? Like, what is, what is your process like?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for that, especially asking about what humans are capable of in the future. That, I'm interested in that. That's what a science fiction writer is certainly pursuing as a question. So that makes you into a historian. I'm very interested in how we got to what we are now, because then you can run trajectory lines off into the future and say, well, then maybe we could become that. But so, sociobiology has been of great interest to me. How did we become human? What were we as prehumans? What caused the brain to expand by a factor of three in just a couple million years in evolutionary terms?

• 7:14Speaker 00

  And of course, language is implicated there, but other things as well. And then, when I have stories that are set in the future, I'm working off of that basis of understanding us as social primates with a certain, particular history. And then, the one thing I want to say here is that I have avoided doing what certain science fiction writers have done, quite famous ones, in establishing a quote "future history" that all of my works conform to and fit into a timeline. So some greats have done that, Highline famously, Asimov to a certain extent. There's some retroactive making it all fit when it didn't fit in the first place type work. I've always abjured that. That's not the right way.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Each novel should have its own history and past, leading back to now, each science fiction novel. So that's what I've done. Many times, the assignment has been weird. I've said to myself, like in 2312, "Let's see what humans are like 300 years from now." Well, for me, that's an enormous stretch. For some science fiction writers, that's like a snap of the fingers. For me, that is just as long out as I can possibly imagine. And then you have to do the historian thing again. Well, if things are so different in 300 years, what happened in the first half of the 21st century, then the second half, then the 22nd century? Oh, my God, can you even think that?

• 8:40Speaker 00

  And so for each novel, I do something that we all do all the time. Cast your mind forward and it's sort of an if then. If we do this, then we'll get to that. It's extremely basic to human cognition. We're all science fiction writers. We all do this all the time.

• 9:01Reid Hoffman?

  So, you know, part of the thing that is an interesting parallel between what you do and what I do with my tech investor hat is you're making predictions about, you know, kind of based off what humanity currently is and the patterns of humanity, where it's going, and then also technology, right? But what would you say, if you think about this as kind of the timeline of humanity is where is humanity? One way of asking this question might be, what's your theory of human nature? Where are we on the narrative arc of humanity?

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Well, I'll pursue it kind of one strand at a time because these are several interesting strands. One of the things that has gone stronger for me as the last 40 years have passed is a conviction that humanity co-evolved with Earth. It will never prosper off of Earth. Our trips off of Earth are trips into the death zone, which is what climbers call the elevations above about 26,000 feet where the body starts to break down when you're a mountain climber. And no matter what you do, and you have to get back down out of the death zone. I think all space above 26,000 feet is the death zone.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  And while we're up there, we are in the process of breaking down. And this has been caused by many factors, but I would point out one main one, which is the gut microbiome, not something we talked about when I was a young science fiction writer. And so the thing about that one is this information that now is common, 50% of the DNA inside your body is not human DNA. Well, this is news and it changes everything because you can't take Earth with you when you go off even to the moon or Mars, much less off into interstellar space where I have actually written an entire novel suggesting we're not going to the stars because we

• 11:02Speaker 00

  co-evolved with Earth and we're only healthy here. And in my solar system novels, where you can see some from the mid 80s and some from the last 10 years, you'll see a shift in that in the ones in the last 10 years, people always have to go back to Earth for their sabbatical. They have to go back and eat some dirt. They have to get connected with the biosphere of Earth, which is their extended body in order to be healthy again. And then when they go back out into the moons of Jupiter or the various solar system spaces that I've invented over the years, they are in fact getting unhealthy.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  So that's one consideration that has grown in my mind, this geocentricity of humanity, that we are co-evolved with this planet and biosphere and that the Earth is our extended body and we begin to die as we leave it. Maybe slowly, you know, maybe it just will cut years off your life like smoking cigarettes or something, but in any case, it's bad for you not to be on this planet. And then you mentioned human nature. I'm very interested, as I said, in social biology. We do, we evolved by certain activities with each other. We're social species. So, human nature is intensely social and therefore there's both competition and altruism.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  And I love this phrase by Raymond Williams, an English literary critic, "Structures of Feeling," that in any historical moment, we have basic biological feelings for sure as animals, fear, love, hope, etc. But culture and language together shapes a much more articulated array of emotions that strike us as...

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Basic and natural, but in fact, they're cultural and learned. And so the big, basic biological emotions, strong as they are, are split up into, I mean, in English, you can quickly come up with three or 400 words for emotions. And so this huge articulated system of emotions is, changes over time in what Williams called a structure of feeling, where what feels normal at any one given time, at an earlier time, it might not have felt normal at all. And the emotion that we can, in English, tag as love, I mean, famously, the ancient Greeks would split that up into eros and agape and a couple more.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  But it's so clear that in different cultures, that means different things to people, depending on what they've learned in their cultural system. And so, when you're writing science fiction, you have to think to yourself, is this future society going to have a different structure of feeling? And can I possibly think my way into that or suggest it in a way that alienates the reader, the reader is going, oh, my gosh, these people, they're different than they are now, they're different than me. And that's an accomplishment, both for historical fiction and for science fiction.

• 14:08Aria Finger?

  So it's interesting, Reid and I, last week, were with Ariel Ekblak, who was a previous possible guest from season one, if anyone hasn't listened to her episode. And she's an expert on going into space. And she dreams of going to the moon and going to Mars, et cetera. But what she was positing last week, interestingly enough, was perhaps Earth is for us, Earth is for humans. And actually, what is going to happen in space is offshoring, off-planeting. We do chemical processes up in space, and then we come down and live on our sort of beautiful green earth, where we don't besmirch it with some of the bad stuff we're doing right now. So lots of science factors, agree with that science fiction take.

• 14:51Aria Finger?

  Also, really interesting to see you talk about the difference between, you know, some of your books take place in plus 15 years. And some of your books takes place in plus 300 years. And there's like such a different experience in creating that. And I think sometimes people underestimate what's how different the world's going to be in 25 or 300 years. So would love to ask you about progress, progress of humanity, progress of the human race, like, are there like epicenters of progress? How are we doing right now?

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Oh, I do think there are moments of intense acceleration that are mostly accidental. Sometimes they're pushed as in wartime development. World War II very famously began what the social scientists called the Great Acceleration. Everything that we measure since World War II has been accelerating pretty consistently with jumps along the way of intense acceleration. I'm going to say one of them was very definitely 2020 in the pandemic. An acceleration in our awareness of our dependence on the biosphere and the ramifications of that are still unfolding for us.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  And sometimes you can think to yourself, this is something for everyone to ponder, that after a period of acceleration, things slow down. But all these things are relative to each other. And it could be that in a after a pace of of intense change like these last three years, that what we now think of as being slower, if we do, is actually just adjustment to that more rapid rate of change and that we're on a perpetual speed of change. And this is a science fiction thought that we are experiencing in the future as impinging on the present in ways that perhaps didn't happen in the past, where you had stable

• 16:49Speaker 00

  technologies for quite a long time and then changes. I just went to the bicycle shop yesterday because I was irritated because things I knew about the bicycle that I learned 50 years ago were no longer true and I couldn't get the tire off to my chagrin. And that's because there was a new Technology, well, it was 50 years since I last looked at how a bicycle works. And of course, there's going to be some changes. Bicycles are very stable compared to other technologies. But so this speed of acceleration is of huge interest to me. And indeed, in all my, one of the things I've retained in my science fiction, and let me quickly put it in aside, there's near future science fiction

• 17:33Speaker 00

  that is really day after tomorrow or now. There's far future science fiction, space opera, Star Wars, Star Trek, a kind of fantasy space because people are zipping around the galaxy. And then in between those, I call it future history because there's not a good name for it, a couple hundred years out. So in my, in my future histories, the Mars trilogy, my earlier work set in the solar system, 2312, I keep kind of coming back to that zone that's a couple hundred years out as being extremely interesting, hard to write about, and somewhat depopulate in the science fiction landscape. In other words, people usually do near future or far future.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  They don't usually go to this zone that I'm interested in a couple hundred years out. So right from the Mars trilogy and even before I had what I called the accelerando, a period that it changed in different novels, but call it, say, the 22nd century, where we solved certain problems about our relationship between us and the Earth and got a solid platform underneath ourselves in terms of our bio infrastructural life support system. And then all of the other advances we were making kind of wound together into what I call the accelerando. Amongst science fiction writers, I'm kind of a slowpoke in terms of belief in what kind of progress we're going to make.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  And I've been more interested in socioeconomic features than in the high-tech features. So for me, rather modest changes seem like a big acceleration. And acceleration of justice, these, these issues have consumed me my whole career. Utopian fiction is about making a better social system, a more just, more equitable, more successful for all, rather than just a few. And so that has put me into a slightly different zone of what, what kind of acceleration I'm talking about.

• 19:35Reid Hoffman?

  This actually goes to a pattern that I've Been curious to talk to you about for a number of years, which is it's this interplay between the future of humanity and future of technology. Because you know, part of the question about, you know, what opens up new possibilities of human organization, civilization, societies is in part technology. Because you have media technologies, which are the constitution of the state. You've got, you know, questions around, you know, financial technologies. One thing's about technology is a central thing about the reorganization. And you tend to focus very intensely on the kind of the, the social and politics of it.

• 20:17Reid Hoffman?

  And, um, you know, my reflex tends to be that the best way to change the sort of politics is change the landscape of, of technology, of possibilities, of, you know, kind of incentives and so forth. You know, like, so a classic one, you know, for climate is either geoengineering or, you know, nuclear power, clean energy for doing stuff. And say a little bit about why you focus where you do, why you're, you know, to some degree more optimistic than most about the fact that we can make social progress without these other things. Shine a light there for, for how you're thinking about it.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  It is an interest of mine. And I think that all art has a political aspect to it, but science fiction is inherently political because as you postulate your various future histories, you're, um, revealing a theory of history that has a political element to it. What's driving change, et cetera. And so technology, there were entire books called, Does Technology Drive History? But what I always want to suggest is software matters as much as hardware.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  And so coming from the field as you do, from the angle you've come from, you must agree with this, the software is crucial. It isn't just the metal, the plastic, the, the bits. It's the software. Okay. Software is a tech. Technology, therefore, law is a technology and justice is a technology. They are software systems. And so at that point, I'm talking about technology as much as anyone else. But I'm talking about the software of how we run our affairs with each other. There's feudalism, then there's capitalism, then there's whatever comes next because it isn't going to end. And again, Raymond Williams, there's residual and emergent.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  At any moment in culture, there's parts that come from the past, the system right before you, or even the deep past, there's emergent features of the next system that are already here. And they're harder to see and they're harder to tell whether they'll be come to dominate or not, but they're there. And so residual and emergent, what Williams would say is that feudalism is a strange combination of the ancient empires and emerging capitalism. Then capitalism is a strange combination of residual feudalism, where there are kings, there are serfs, there is a managerial class that runs the thing for the kings.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  And then there's something emerging that's different. What might come next? And since we come from a system that, which is to say, America, that values, and at least states as a value, equality and justice, then you can imagine increases in those factors that would mean that the intense power relation and inequality of capitalism is going to give way to something more just. What would it be? How would it work? Well, these are interesting questions for stories to tell. So that's my technology. I mean, that's my focus in the way some people might focus on AI or on geoengineering or on engineering in general, on rocketry. These are technologies that have driven a lot of science fiction stories in interesting ways.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  But for me, it's been this software system that we call, I don't know, government.

• 23:54Reid Hoffman?

  I think we would be remiss getting into this kind of like, how is the future the being affected by the software and in humanity and not to think about, you know, kind of AI and civilization. So how do you think AI is going to affect how we organize ourselves?

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Well, it's a good question, Reid. And first, I want to confess this. I am confused and even stunned. In my thinking about AI, I come to it as a English major and an outsider, but also as a science fiction writer. So I have been thinking about it for many a year, but the recent rapid developments have left me in a state of confusion as to what's might come next. That's how I want to start. And then I want to say that the Turing test was always a very low bar. We maybe didn't know that, but it was. And also, artificial

• 25:00Speaker 00

  intelligence is a hype name. It is not an accurate descriptor for clarifying our thinking. So if you were to call it extremely rapid computation, you would have a completely different vibe coming off of it than when you say artificial intelligence, because what's intelligence? And, okay, it's artificial. Yes, indeed, we've concocted it. But what is intelligence? And if it's only just extremely rapid computation, and if humans are doing something different in their brains and bodies, in their embodied minds, if they're doing something different than simply extremely rapid computation, which is a big if, then

• 25:41Speaker 00

  we're talking about different things and different capabilities. So, okay, with that said, and I want to still say that I'm still blown away by the most recent developments. The course that we're on now with the systems that we're using now, as amazing as they are, they're not going to lead to

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Minds thinking like ours are, they simply aren't. So sometimes they call it AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, which might involve, what would it be? There you begin to drop into philosophy at this point. Questions of agency, will, judgment, desire. As I say, you almost immediately plunge off into the deep ends of philosophy and human thinking, which is already murky enough to the point where to think that you might put, here we come to software again, the algorithms that we ourselves have written,

• 26:44Speaker 00

  we can ask these algorithms to recursively improve themselves, but they don't know what that means because we don't know what that means. We can't expect what we're doing now in AI to result in Artificial General Intelligence because we don't know what that is and we don't have algorithms that will make it happen. So let's go back to just extremely rapid computation. What can it do for us? Well, it can do a lot, for one thing. And now it can imitate ordinary human discourse and even human visual imagery. And so it can be in the hands of the good actors or bad actors. It can be a really powerful tool. And that makes it interesting. Powerful tools are always interesting. And since we are talking about software systems

• 27:28Speaker 00

  of how we run society, there are people who are saying, look, our current levels of AI, we could have a direct democracy. The entire world could be one eight billion person Congress running the world and AI would facilitate that. Probably true and interesting as hell. So many different social and philosophical questions are being mushed into one topic as if it were one topic when it isn't. And the last thing I want to add to this about this notions of AI and rapid progress in towards Artificial General Intelligence is this.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  We don't know how brains work and we can never know how our brains work. And Whether we can develop better, more exact tools to figure out how, see how we're thinking, while we're thinking, well, this is one of those science fiction questions, I think there are going to be limits into how well we can understand how we think. And since we don't understand how we think, and maybe can't ever, maybe one of those barriers that we can't get past. The idea that we could then concoct something that thinks like we do is, seems to me more remote than ever. But I have my reasons for thinking about this in terms of AI, and I have written entire

• 28:52Speaker 00

  novels in which the AI is the narrator, so I've had a lot of laughs, I must say, pondering what artificial intelligence might be like when it's tasked with, say, for instance, write me a novel. Because famously, right now, AI cannot summarize very well. It can't find out points of importance and then summarize them. If you give it the task and it just tries to recombine in the ways that it's been told, well, you get results and they're not uninteresting.

• 29:23Reid Hoffman?

  Just to go into the, some of the AI stuff a little bit deeper, I do think it actually is doing a pretty good job on summaries. Like, part of what you're getting is, is you're getting a kind of, almost like a kind of a, a social collaborative intelligence by the training on, on large corpuses of language, which allows it to do linguistic tricks easily. It allows it to do translation, allows it to do, you know, code generation, a bunch of stuff. And some of it is like, if you said, like, one of the things I think will be a, will be a common part of our toolset in the next year or two, is, you know, you get a document and it says, for you, here is the summary, or for you, here's the three pieces that are

• 30:06Reid Hoffman?

  most important to look at, and it will be in a fitness function loop by which it will be getting much better than that. And I do think that one of the things that's interesting about this is that is, if you go kind of steam engine of the mind... We're gonna be kind of changing our thinking, communication and analysis patterns because it'll change the kind of where our cognition kind of most leverages the tool. So for example, you know, like, you know, when we had writing, memory wasn't as important, right? When we have Google, memory is not as important. And so it changes the shape of which things we need to do. And AI is going to do the same thing, I think,

• 30:47Reid Hoffman?

  in this kind of symbiotic, you know, relationship with us. And so I think that's some what we'll see. But I think it plays very well into your kind of the social technology, post capitalism, science fiction for, you know, some of the thinking you're doing. And that's the reason I'm kind of, I'm nudging you a little bit more in that direction because I would love to see what you will make of it in your future writings.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for that. And you did send me indeed a personalized narrative where Kim Stanley Robinson was the prompt for the AI to personalize. And then it was pretty amazing. And it's pretty clear that whatever's going on in these large language models, they are certainly doing a lot of work, trillions upon trillions of operations to get to what Marx would have called the general intellect. And this is what everybody has said about this before. And you're right, it's, well, I don't know if it's summarized so much as it's collated. If you see the distinction I'm making, enough sentences

• 31:58Speaker 00

  have been searched that match, that when you put it together, it makes a grammatical and sometimes a logical whole that is new. And that I find stunning, because really there, the programming, the algorithms and the inputs from humans have to have been

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Powerful, suggestive and generative in some ways that are not trivial. I would not, there are some people you can see just scoffing at large language models as being nothing but re combinations of previous sentences that have been sorted by probability. I don't think that's true. I can see that there's something a little more generative going on. And so that implies to me that the programmers are doing interesting things. Not that the AI is doing interesting things, it is, but it's doing them because the programmers have thought up inputs and or and instructions that are actionable at the level of computation.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  This is pretty great programming. And then maybe, you know, under acknowledged here is everybody's going, oh, my God, these AIs are amazing. What I think is, oh, my God, these programmers are amazing. And that's where the ingenuity and the creativity, let's try this. And the reiterative aspect of working on these problems from the point of view of the programmers, not just the AIs, is it's a hidden intellectual effort. And some of it's because it's proprietarial and people are hoping to make money off of it. And some of it's because it's so much human work that you couldn't describe it to an outsider, even if you tried. So this is where it gets interesting.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  And at the level of commentary and journalism, you don't have a proper acknowledgement of the the human work behind these new large language models and the ingenuity, the creativity. What it'll lead to is where I have to just confess, I'm just too flabbergasted at the current progress to be able to think very well about what could come next.

• 34:15Aria Finger?

  I also love that, that like, everyone's like, the amazing ingenuity of AI. And it's like, well, who, who do you think created it? We did. We're the ones who are creating these tools. And, you know, I think it is so important, you talk about nomenclature. It's like, the journalistic headlines, you know, extremely rapid computation is going to take over the world and kill you, like, might not be as, you know, uh, people might not get as scared. And so, when you use different words, like, that really matters. Which brings me to the words that you use to try to influence policymakers, public discourse. I mean, my husband and I both read Ministry for the Future this past summer. It was just incredible what we were learning while we were, you know, postulating about

• 34:59Aria Finger?

  the future of our planet. So, how do you think about that? Are you, are you writing these books and your more recent, um, stories to save our planet to influence the public policymakers? Is there a call to action with them?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Yes. I would say yes. Especially for the Ministry for the Future, but also the whole line of books back have been ways of thinking about how we decide what we do and what we should decide to do from where we are now. And just briefly, my novel Aurora, suggesting that this notion that humanity's going to go to the stars and that's a, that's a measure of humanity's success is a gigantic category error. And a story we told ourselves before we knew certain things about the size of the universe and the nature of our biological being, that it turns out that story is wrong and we should toss it aside and really focus on Earth.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  So, I've been trying to impress, um, ideas, notions, philosophical positions, political positions through my novels, all along. With Ministry for the Future, I was thinking, let's start in the present, let's do a best case scenario for the next 30 years, which means we dodge a mass extinction event, we began to, uh, decarbonize, and, um, if we do that in the next 30 years, that's a utopian story at this point, because we are in terrible, terrible danger. So I did all that on purpose, and indeed, it was a kind of an everything principle. Even the things I wasn't going to cover, I needed to list in the novel as things that should be covered in some other novel.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  I wanted to be comprehensive, I wanted to throw in the kitchen sink, and I did. And it seems to have worked, partly because of the juggling act and the formal games of the novel, partly because of the characters, Mary and Frank and Badim and all the rest of them. And so it functions as an ordinary novel that you can come back to, like every third chapter. But in between, you're getting all of the cards on the table. The reasons why this future could happen and that kind of thing, that the ideological understructure is kind of, it's like looking at the backside of the carpet, you have to look at the threads, and you have to appreciate threads as threads, which some people don't. They're like, please, just give me the picture.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  But Ministry is a particular kind of a novel, it's not unique, and it's not new. There have always been some novels like it. And I read those, I drew on those, I loved those. Just for one, John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, which is the great description of the 1920s in America, that kind of multi-stranded, many-charactered, comprehensive novel, they exist, and I did one there. And indeed, I was hoping, but I have to say immediately, that my hopes have been exceeded

• 38:01Speaker 00

  so hugely that, again, I'm stunned, and I'm at a loss to explain what's happened in these last three years since Ministry, since it came out. I'm wondering, and more and more I'm convinced, A, people are scared, they want a story that tells them that the ordinary workings of civilization could actually succeed even without a plan.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then B, that the pandemic was a slap in the face such that after the pandemic, during the pandemic, Reading Ministry had an extra spur in the butt or in the brain to make you think, okay, this isn't just a science fiction story. This kind of stuff does happen because I'm living the pandemic right now. And there was an urgency there that has been,

• 38:52Speaker 00

  yeah, it's been amazing and stunning. I'm, I'm still in the midst of it, still trying to cope with it.

• 38:57Reid Hoffman?

  Two related questions. What have you seen as kind of feedback from Ministry of the Future that, you know, gives some lens to the use of science fiction, you know, accelerando, 300 future years of history in order to try to help us navigate and shape? And then similarly, what would you call on scientists, government leaders, business people and so forth to go, hey, look, part of what I'm trying to do in this kind of leadership is to get you to, to expand your thinking, your capabilities, your action in the following kinds of ways. And that's obviously the two questions are related.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  I've seen, I think, that people want to put their own particular efforts and their own disciplines into the context of the totality of the larger historical picture. So if you get a novel, like Ministry in particular, it, it allows you to think for a while the big picture and then see your own work as a brick in a wall. And you can see the wall and you need to see the wall, partly just to keep from losing hope that your brick isn't big enough because nobody's brick is big enough. And so that I've seen, and

• 40:15Speaker 00

  that's one explanation for the rather incredible response that that book has gotten. But then also what I've been learning is everybody was already working on all this stuff and they maybe didn't know about the other efforts. And I myself didn't know about the efforts. So I wrote about the carbon coin based on this one paper by Delton Chen. It's a good idea. It's a good concept.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  Pi, how would you explain this?

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Dalton Chen's Carbon Coin is a concept that aims to address the issue of climate change by creating a new currency backed by the removal of carbon from the atmosphere. The idea is that this coin would be used to reward companies and individuals for their efforts in reducing carbon emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere. Chen argues that this could provide a financial incentive for climate action and help to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The concept has gained some traction in the scientific and financial communities, with some seeing it as a potential solution to the challenge of climate change. However, it's important to note that implementing such a currency would require significant political and economic support.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  I didn't know the network for greening the financial system already existed. It was 90 of the biggest central banks. They've been trying to figure out how to green money right at its source. If fiat money, as it's created by the central banks of the world, will be tilted green right from the get-go, that's the Carbon Coin. It was being worked on before my novel was published, but since my novel came out, people have been pointing out to me things like that. That one, I think, is crucial because we need to pay for all this good work. But there's so many other areas where what I was postulating as being futuristic and might happen in the 2040s after horrible disasters, it was already happening in the

• 42:10Speaker 00

  20 teens, and it's efflorescing and coming to the fore in the 2020s because it's such a scary moment and because of all these things that are making the 2020s a crucial decade. And because of the response to my book and people inviting me and also just telling me, "Oh, you need to look again at chapter 67. Oh, you know, I can see that you know about landscape restoration, but come out and see these 3,000 acres in the Central Valley where we are working our butts off just to change one cow field back into a tulip marsh, et cetera." It's an ongoing living process in the world, and of course, I've found that immensely reassuring.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  So Ministry for the Future is not prophetic, or it's not calling for things that didn't exist. It turns out to be a kind of a... Individual scattershot bit of reporting on things that were already happening. And sometimes I didn't even know about them. So I would say that here we are in late in 2023. The education I've gotten in these last three years has led me to believe that although we're gonna, it's gonna be a wicked political fight, financial fight, and possibly physical

• 43:31Speaker 00

  fight with weapons, that the possibility of success is truly there. And that's been a kind of, you know, I was a more worried person in 2019 than I am now. And that's kind of amazing.

• 43:53Reid Hoffman?

  And with that, I think we shift to rapid fire. So to open, other than obviously your own work, is there a movie, a song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 44:05Speaker 00

  There are so many. Galaxy Quest, Blast from the Past, but here's the one, Groundhog Day, because it's one of the greatest movies of all time and it's existential. How do you live? How do you live? And you gotta keep working at it. So let's say Groundhog Day. Yeah.

• 44:27Aria Finger?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, that was, that was the best answer yet. So you have obviously, you know, you've been interviewed hundreds of times. Is there a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Not really, because so many have been asked. Maybe it seems to me that it's kind of fun that I don't get asked this much, you know, okay, now we're done. What are you gonna do with the rest of your day? Because then everybody's got the rest of their day. They either listening to this podcast or, you know, us making it. And so I never get asked that. And I can say, I'm gonna go garden, I'm gonna go weed Nut's Edge, my bete noire in my garden, the unstoppable Nut's Edge, and plant cabbages. And then I'm gonna go run the Frisbee Golf Course with my running friend Neil and, and hang out with the family here at home. So that's the rest of my day, and I hope everybody else has one as. As pleasant.

• 45:21Reid Hoffman?

  Going and climbing a mountain was one of the things I would have expected as a possible answer from you.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like that, but not today. Yeah.

• 45:28Aria Finger?

  So leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything goes the right way in the next 15 years and what's our sort of first step in that direction?

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Well, the the potential is is huge, which I would just say general prosperity than every human living their full life. That's possible. So the first step is we take it every day. It's a grinding minute and millions of different developments have to all happen. And everybody's got that brick that they're working on in the larger wall. So it I think that climate dread is real. I think despair is real that and and and justified by the situation that we're in

• 46:24Speaker 00

  and the the kind of negativity that we face from some humans, that it is going to be a wicked political fight to get to this best case scenario. But the potential at the end of it is truly remarkable. If everybody gets to be fully themselves, we will still have all the natural tragedies of death and lost love and all that. It will not be a world of universal happiness, not at all. But we won't have the unnecessary tragedies or the blighted potentialities. It's quite possible to get to 8 billion people and the human population will slide downwards over time into even in more comfortable levels in terms of the biosphere supporting us.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  But adequacy and prosperity for all, quite possible. And the what can I say, the the reason for the fight.

• 47:21Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wondery Media Network, hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 47:39Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Katie Sanders, Surya Yala Manchili, Sayida Sepieva, Ian Ellis, Greg Beato, Ben Ralas, and Little Monster Media Company.