Neal Stephenson on History, Spycraft, and American-Soviet Parallels

Neal Stephenson's ability to illuminate complex, future-focused ideas in ways that both provoke thought and spark wonder has established him as one of the most innovative thinkers in literature today. Yet his new novel, Polostan, revisits the Soviet era with a twist, shifting his focus from the speculative technologies of tomorrow to the historical currents of the 1930s. In Neal's second appearance, Tyler asks him why he sometimes shifts from envisioning the future to illustrating the past, the rise of history autodidacts, the implications of leaked secrets from the atomic age to today's AI, the logistics of faking one's death, why he still drafts novels in longhand, Soviet idealism among Western intellectuals, which Soviet achievements he admires, the lag in AR development, how LLMs might boost AR, whether social media is increasingly giving way to private group chats, his continuing influence on technologists, why AI-generated art might struggle to connect with readers, the primer from The Diamond Age in light of today's LLMs, the prospect of AGI becoming an unnoticed background tool, what Neal believes the world really needs more of, what lies ahead in Polostan and the broader "Bomb Light" series, and more Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/neal-stephenson-2/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/LSw0skSwrys. Recorded October 9th, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Follow Neal https://x.com/nealstephenson on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts.

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

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:26Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. This is my second conversation with Neil Stephenson, who needs no introduction, but do let me tell you about Neil's new book, Polostan, which I read an advance copy of. It's a very different kind of book. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I very much liked it. And the real test of this is, when the book ends, are you sad that it wasn't longer? And I was sad that it wasn't longer, and I will be pre-ordering Parts II, III, and whatever else comes. Neil, welcome.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Good to be back.

• 0:59Tyler Cowen?

  How is it that you think about why you sometimes switch from showing us the future to illustrating the past?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  You know, for me, it's a continuum. All of my science-fiction-y books have had callbacks to historical themes, some more than others. So to me, I've always enjoyed history. I've had the opportunity to write historical fiction. I've greatly enjoyed it. It's been a while since I went there. It was like going home, almost, you know, being able to go back and work in a historical setting again.

• 1:35Tyler Cowen?

  Sometimes I think that when the present and future are changing most rapidly, that's when we need to write about the past, that it's easier to speculate about the future when nothing's happening.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting. I mean, we're in a weird situation now where I think that the formal education, people's formal education in history, is probably at an all-time low, and yet there are all of these new ways of learning about history that didn't exist 50 years ago. There's podcasts and YouTube videos and so on that you can sink your teeth into.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  If you decide that you're interested in some particular era of of history. So I think that more and more what we have now is kind of autodidacts out there. You know, who sort of in their in their on their own time, not at school, but during their leisure time have have decided to become history geeks.

• 2:30Tyler Cowen?

  Why is this book called Polostan?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  You know, the name is explained toward the very end of the the book. There's a funny thing about book titles today, which is that they need to be searchable. They need to be uniquely searchable. So I've had the experience a few times in the last decade or two of proposing a title for a book. And the publisher coming back saying, that's an awesome title. You know, we'd love to use it, but it's not going to work when people begin typing it into a search engine. So now the the trend is towards finding things that that'll autocomplete pretty, pretty quickly. So Polostan is a word that emerges. It's it's sort of a joke that one of the characters makes toward the end of the book.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  But it's a reference to the the fact that that the sport of polo enters into the storyline in a few different contexts.

• 3:28Tyler Cowen?

  How many spies do you think psychologically are just totally screwed up? Are all of them screwed up? Or can you be a normal spy, the way you might be a normal grocer?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  I suspect that it begins to screw you up over time. You might go in normal, but it takes a big psychological toll to be trying to maintain multiple identities and always worrying about divulging information. It's just not a natural way for for people to live. From what I can tell, looking at kind of espionage in the era of, say, the Second World War, the best spies were completely unexceptional people. And that's probably still true today, but you don't want James Bond. You know, you don't want a femme fatale kind of character who's going to stand out. You want somebody who just disappears into the the background.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  And so that's the kind of people that they they like to recruit.

• 4:24Tyler Cowen?

  And you want psychological compartmentalization? People who suppress emotion?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that it's easiest when you don't have to lie. You know, when you're the, the role that you're playing is reasonably close to who you really are. I guess unless you're a total sociopath.

• 4:43Tyler Cowen?

  Well, spies might be total sociopaths, right? There's some reasonable percentage of sociopaths out there. And if you're going to do something as a sociopath, maybe spy is it.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe it's a, I don't know if there's a Myers-Briggs category for that, but maybe that's what they look for. I heard a story once that there was a phase, I don't know, it was in the seventies or eighties where there had been some leaks from compromised people in the American intelligence world. And so they went, they started trying to hire really real straight arrow types, you know, who just had no blemishes or perceived blemishes anywhere on their record that could be used to kind of compromise them or blackmail them. And they ended up with such sort of pure innocent kind of characters that the Brits started so withholding information.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Cause they, they just couldn't, you know, they, they couldn't stand having to deal with these kind of small town naive people who were being sent their way by the Americans. Don't know if it's true, but good story.

• 5:47Tyler Cowen?

  I'm not saying Mormons are naive, but I'm told the CIA has a disproportionate share of Mormons, which makes sense, right?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, that's where you would go to look to, to find such people.

• 5:59Tyler Cowen?

  If we run through different counterfactuals, you know, the secrets of the atom bomb, which do of course leak out to the Soviet Union. But how contingent was that? Can you easily imagine a lot of very different futures where we just can hoard that secret for 10 years or more? Or do you think it inevitably was just going to happen?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  You know, there's some debate as to how important that leakage really was. I mean, at the time, it seems like a horrendous failure to have let that information go. How long would it have taken the Soviets to duplicate that effort? You know, based on, on sort of available information, I don't think it would have taken a lot longer. Their incentive to build a bomb was, was too great. And particularly if, if you're.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Willing to settle for the gun style of a bomb as opposed to the implosion device, you know, that's a pretty simple object.

• 6:58Tyler Cowen?

  It could just be they had multiple decent spies. So if we had stopped the ones who carried the secrets, if there were 20 others waiting in the wings, then it's not that contingent at all.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:09Tyler Cowen?

  And how do you think about AI secrets? Do you think those are, are, are bound to flow out or it's contingent?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  You mean like trade secrets or proprietary software that's, that's in AI systems?

• 7:23Tyler Cowen?

  Or if some people would say it's the weights, the data is different opinions as to what the secrets are. But there's something in there that not everyone has.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, the way you get those weights is by running these big training sessions, right, that are incredibly expensive. So I haven't actually thought about it before, but yeah, I would imagine that if you've spent billions of dollars to get a, a set of weights that you're, you're going to try to hang on to that.

• 7:53Tyler Cowen?

  How effectively could you stage your own death? You, you really, so you really want to do it and they're willing to do it.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  To fake it? Or they actually?

• 8:02Tyler Cowen?

  Fake it, but every, everyone thinks it's real.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 8:05Tyler Cowen?

  I read about it in the papers, Neil is gone, I nod my head, I weep. And then I forget about it. I don't mean I forget about you, but you understand what I'm saying.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Boy, there's not that many circumstances under which all, you know, physical traces of, of someone can be obliterated. I mean, that's a fairly hard thing to do because, you know, it would have been easier a hundred years ago. But, you know, we've got cameras everywhere and we've got DNA testing and other ways to prove that, or to, to disprove that somebody's actually dead. So, you know.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I guess it would have to be something like a, a plane crash into the ocean.

• 8:48Tyler Cowen?

  But then how do you survive it?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 8:52Tyler Cowen?

  I mean, to kill yourself is one thing, but to, to pretend you've killed yourself and stayed alive seems harder.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you could parachute out, you know, if it was like a small plane, like not a jet airliner full of people, but you know, a single, single seater. I guess that might work.

• 9:11Tyler Cowen?

  So hire a private plane, have it crash, parachute out into somewhere where you can.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you're, you're witness getting into the plane and taking off.

• 9:21Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  But then, uh, there's no way to recover the evidence for some reason. It's pretty, it's pretty hard to do. I mean, if someone really wanted to, if they were just determined to go and find, you see the efforts that people have gone to, to, to go down to the Titanic. You know, well, I mean, if you can go find that thing and check it out with a submarine, then it's, it's pretty hard to really find a place that can't be accessed in that way.

• 9:53Tyler Cowen?

  Do you still write your novels in longhand on legal pads?

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Not on legal pads, but, but I do write them on longhand. Yeah, yeah. I buy this fancy paper from Italy. I mean, I kind of had this idea that if I bought fancy paper, you know, I, I'd use less of it. I'd be more kind of conservative. I don't think that worked because even fancy paper doesn't cost very much. I like opening the package too much. It's, it comes in a nice package with like wax, the wax seal on it. So.

• 10:27Tyler Cowen?

  How does longhand improve your thinking or writing process compared to say typing?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Well, I can type really fast, so it's easy to just, to just, you know.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Keyboard goes burr kind of, you know, thing where stuff gets put down on the screen almost as fast as ideas are coming into my head. And that's not necessarily a good thing. It's valuable for a sentence to be lodged in the buffer for a little while, because you can, it's really easy to improve it, or even just to to get rid of it while it's between your ears. But as soon as you put it down on the screen, even though it is editable and all that, it takes on a kind of permanence. It requires more effort to go back and fix it. So I think that the first draft quality is better. It's also

• 11:23Speaker 01

  just faster to edit on on paper. You know, I can just like draw a box around a paragraph and put a big X through it, or cross out a word, or write something in. And it just takes longer to do all of those things if you're screwing around with a mouse or whatever.

• 11:41Tyler Cowen?

  Now, you must have spent a lot of time thinking about communism over the last few years. Why is it, in your view, having come to grips with the topic, that so many American intellectuals became infatuated with Stalinism? And not just agnostic, but positively enthusiastic. This often survived their visits to the Soviet Union. How did that happen? Are we just as humans, deranged beings?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the main character in Polosstan is the daughter of Russian dad and an American woman, who are both so very involved in leftist politics in the late teens, early twenties. So there were a lot of, not just Americans, but Westerners in general, who went to the Soviet Union in those years, because they thought that this was an opportunity to build something great. And this was obviously before Stalinism and all that.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  But even then, there was all kinds of bad stuff going on. The Cheka, the precursor of the KGB, was coming into power and doing bad things. And if you had the eyes to see it, you could see that this was going in a bad direction. But a lot of those people did not want to see the bad side of things and kind of closed their eyes to it. So there's a great book by Malcolm Muggeridge, I think it's called Moscow in Winter, which he wrote in the, I think, 1933. But it's fictionalized, but it's clearly a thinly veiled account of these kinds of people in Moscow in the early 30s.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  And Muggeridge has been there and he knows, he knows bad things are happening. He knows about the famine, the man-made famine in Ukraine. Probably knows about a lot of other things. And he's depicting these, these, these Western expats who just, they, they refuse to, to acknowledge any downside to the, the revolution. There's plenty of stories like that from that era. And I don't know if it means that we're deranged. I think we want to see nice things happen in the world. And if we've decided that there's a particular political movement or ideology that's going to make nice things happen,

• 14:10Speaker 01

  then it's a little too easy for us to deceive ourselves about the downside of such movements.

• 14:17Tyler Cowen?

  And what is it about the Soviet Union that you have ended up most admiring?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Most admiring?

• 14:24Tyler Cowen?

  Most admiring, right, because you've spent a lot of time studying it, reading about it, thinking about it.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, they make- Really good rockets. So if you're in the rocket business, you know, their ability to make high performing rocket engines and so on is pretty astounding. The amazing thing that they did in the 30s, which is the period I'm focusing on, was to yank this backward country forward from the 19th century into the 20th century by building this huge industrial base at breakneck speed. And in the course of doing that, they did a lot of terrible things. So when I say that it's admirable, you know, I'm just referring

• 15:14Speaker 01

  to kind of, oh, look, they build a big steel mill. And I'm not taking into account the body count.

• 15:21Tyler Cowen?

  It strikes me that it was a reasonably favorable environment for enabling strong women. And I'm not sure exactly why, but I do see that in the data.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they were pretty serious about equal rights for women. And so for, I think that was maybe a big part of why a lot of Western leftists thought it was a great place, because there really were a lot of women getting better education, becoming doctors, getting roles in the military. It was easier to get things like abortions or to get a divorce. So they did kind of put their money where their mouth was as far as women's rights was concerned.

• 16:04Tyler Cowen?

  And to get into the headspace or the feel of writing about Soviet Union of that time, are there specific things you do? You put on Prokofiev, or you, you know, open Dr. Zhivago, or what? How does that work for you? Or you just do it?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I like to find first person accounts. I like to look at pictures to the iconography of the Soviet Union. You know, there are various people who went there in the 20s and 30s and wrote memoirs, Americans, you know, who wrote memoirs describing their experiences there. Because they were written at the time, kind of before people knew about Stalinism and, you know, the excesses of Stalinism. It's written without kind of a full premonition of how bad things were going to get. In particular, there's an account of a I don't, I'm not going to be able to remember the name right now, but there was

• 17:02Speaker 01

  an American engineer who went and worked at this huge steel mill at Magnitogorsk in the 30s and helped them build that. And so he's got a memoir telling about just his day-to-day experiences of working with these people, kind of the good and the bad mixed together.

• 17:23Tyler Cowen?

  Is there much in Soviet fiction that you admire?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Man, I don't know if I've ever read a single word of Soviet fiction.

• 17:33Tyler Cowen?

  Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate. I'm doing a whole podcast on it. That's a great, great novel.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 17:39Tyler Cowen?

  There's some Soviet science fiction, like Strugotsky, which ended up turning into the movie Stalker. From Poland, Stanislav Lem, probably you know Solaris. He's very good.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure I know that one.

• 17:54Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, yeah. Overall, yeah.

• 17:58Tyler Cowen?

  Do you think there are other American fiction writers who've succeeded in capturing something of the Soviet experience? So I think of Norman Mallor's Oswald book, which I think is quite good. It's maybe my favorite Norman Mallor. But not many examples. But I liked what you did with it.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks. Thanks. Yeah, I was just listening to the Rest is History podcast about the Kennedy assassination, and they do a segment on Oswald's stint in the Soviet Union. And Delillo writes about it, too. But no, I don't, I'm sure it exists, but I'm, I'm too poorly read to know about it.

• 18:37Tyler Cowen?

  You know, since when I was 19, I visited Gary, Indiana, which of course is now a while ago. It was more up and running than it is now. And ever since then, I had this dream to visit Magnitogorsk. I mean, do you, like me, also want to go there? Or it's just somewhere you want to stay away from? Assuming you could go safely. Forget about the current war and the like.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I could go safely, it would be interesting to see for sure. But, you know, obviously, I'm not setting foot in Russia anytime soon. Yeah, the, the story, for those who don't know it, is that Stalin said, I want the world's biggest steel mill. And at the time, it was Gary, Indiana. So they just got the, the numbers on Gary, Indiana, and so increased them by, I don't know, 10% and started working on this huge. Steel mill in this place called Magnitogorsk, which means magnetic mountain, which is in the Urals, out in the middle of nowhere. It's called magnetic mountain because it's an incredibly rich load of iron ore.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  And so in a pretty short time, they built this giant steel mill complex, which still exists. And the city has grown up around it. I imagine that a lot of what made it interesting in 1933 is probably gone now. I did go to Volga Grad once, which, you know, got a few things in common with Magnitogorsk, I guess. The former, the former Stalingrad.

• 20:05Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know Russia well, but some part of me feels that the Soviet Union and America had more in common in the 1930s than they ever had before or have had since. Does that make sense to you at all? And what is that something?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I think it does. I've actually got one of my characters in the book. He kind of talks about this a little bit because there's this, in both cases, there's a, there's one part of the country in, in the United States, it's basically everything from Chicago to the Atlantic, which is densely populated and urbanized and lots of industry. And then in the Soviet Union, obviously, that's the, the western part of the country. And then there's this huge hinterland, which is mostly empty. It's got indigenous people, it's got a history of those people being poorly treated by the cosmopolitan, industrialized, you know, dominant culture.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's kind of vast, open resource extraction zone to feed the industrial beast. So it's got that in common. And, you know, I do think that there are some, some ways in which those two countries sort of understood each other at the time. And I think, I think there was some of that thinking when Americans would, would come and visit and try to get involved in building the, the Soviet Union.

• 21:33Tyler Cowen?

  There's some common obsession to industrialize, to urbanize.

• 21:37Tyler Cowen?

  The working class is quite focal in very different ways, but in both places.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  But at the same time, idealizing the wide open spaces, the wilderness, you know, the idea of the frontier. So it's kind of both of those things going at once.

• 21:54Tyler Cowen?

  I have some questions about other issues in tech.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 21:58Tyler Cowen?

  Augmented reality, it's gotten a lot of attention lately. So there's Meta's Orion product, which is forthcoming at some pace. Apple Vision Pro with the second version on the way. What do you think of these? Are we getting somewhere or is it still stuck?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think we got somewhere with magically, you know, a few years ago. I think these products are all kind of doing similar, similar things and sort of the only thing I'm interested in hearing about is how much, how many billions of dollars these companies are putting into the development of content to run on these devices? Because nobody's going to use them or want them unless there, there's a reason to put them on, a reason to use them. And making content for an augmented reality device is very difficult, you know? I mean, it's, you take ordinary game development, that's no picnic, you know, in and of itself.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  That's a, requires a lot of smart people with specialized skillsets. VR is a whole step above that in terms of its level of difficulty. And AR is, is way beyond VR because there's so many other factors that you have to, to take into account in order to make content that, that actually takes advantage of what AR can, can do. So I feel that, you know, my general sense is that. The kinds of people who invest in building this hardware, they're very comfortable building hardware. They're not comfortable investing in content plays and they have this mentality

• 23:41Speaker 01

  of, you know, if we build it, they will come. If we provide the hardware, then creators are just going to somehow jump out of the woodwork and build cool applications that run on this hardware. I think that magically did a really good job of supporting a bunch of different creative teams making content for that device, but it's still, they still could have used more. You know, so far, both of those companies have got programs to try to encourage people to, to build content, but I think they're still relying on other investors too much to somehow come in and start writing checks and supporting developers. It takes years

• 24:26Speaker 01

  and millions and millions of dollars to make anything at all that, that's worth seeing on one of these. And so where do you find, where do you find the investors willing to, to write those checks?

• 24:39Tyler Cowen?

  What do you think of the daily uses of AR? So let's say I don't want to watch a movie on Apple Vision Pro, but I want to walk around to a party and it will tell me the name of all these people I've met before, the names, but I don't remember their names and it tells me who they are. Now, this might violate privacy for some people, but will that be popular? Will there be, oh, I take it into the Whole Foods and it just points me to what's on sale or what's good that day. Is that going to work?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  I mean, the, the thing is Tyler, that the, those two applications that you just described are things that we were talking about 10 years ago at magically and they were old ideas then. So I'm not, I'm not cracking on you for having old ideas, but I'm just saying that, you know, what is it about this space that, you know, with the, like probably hundreds of billions by this point that have been poured into, to building these systems and the zillions of, of person years that, you know, we're still talking about the, the party name finder application, right?

• 25:45Tyler Cowen?

  But don't L L Ms make all the difference? I mean, that would be the change. So L L Ms at a quality level are quite recent and I can talk to it, it can talk back to me. That's now virtually seamless. Isn't that going to mean it's all going to work? It's like, becomes the operating system for your AR?

• 26:03Speaker 01

  It can work and it does work and it's very promising. You know, I'm, I'm working on a project with that right now, but there's no obvious sort of organic connection between that and AR particularly. If I want to build an application that uses L L Ms or any other kind of cool technology that's come along, again, I've got to think about the numbers. I've got to think about, okay, I'm going to have to employ X number of programmers for X years, you know, here's how much it's going to cost. The investors supporting this project are going to want to get paid back. Now, how many people own AR headsets?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Okay, like a few thousand, I don't know. Is that tiny group of people going to actually generate enough revenue that the investors who bankrolled this whole project are going to get paid back? Well, regardless of what your answer is to that question, it's definitely the case that there's billions of people, literally billions with a B, who have access to phones, pads, laptops, you know, flat screen technology. And so that market is so much more enormous that so the economic considerations force

• 27:26Speaker 01

  you as a developer to, to make whatever you're making, you got to make it run on phones and iPads and, and all of that stuff. So if you do that, then you may, you might also have the same thing ported to an AR device, but the market and the revenue that you get out of your application is going to be completely dominated by, by the version of it that runs on ordinary flat screen devices.

• 27:55Tyler Cowen?

  Are social media being replaced by group chats? And if so, is that good or bad?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Group chats like Discord, Slack, that kind of thing?

• 28:04Tyler Cowen?

  Or WhatsApp, often small groups, occasionally large. People talk about issues of the world. It's private in a way Twitter never has been. It seems to me those are much more influential. Does that make you feel better about social media or the same?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to feel worse about social media. So I do think that anything that gets you out of the glare of the big social media platforms and it kind of de-risks it. You have the feeling that you're talking amongst friends, among people that you know. You don't have to be as guarded. You don't have to spend as much time kind of fending off bots and dealing with just complete asinine bullshit that comes at you so thick and fast on Twitter or other kind of open platforms.

• 28:55Tyler Cowen?

  Does it matter much that it seems today in the United States, there's so much more surveillance than, say, 10 years ago?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  If people don't seem to feel that it matters, right? I mean, I may have my own opinions, but people are just amazingly willing to put devices in their homes that keep them 24/7 surveillance. You know, listen to every sound that they make and track them with cameras. And, you know, they're on the internet all the time. I guess we haven't yet seen a huge disaster resulting from that. You know, we haven't yet seen a, well, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm giving a Western perspective here, but it does seem that for a couple of decades,

• 29:47Speaker 01

  we got like a couple of decades head start before the authoritarian, totalitarian countries of the world figured out how to make use of the internet. Right? So the internet was kind of open everywhere. And now it's not. Now China and Russia and North Korea have ways of walling off their internet and, you know, controlling what goes in and out of the country information wise. And in like manner, they're making use of kind of the surveillance capabilities of technology that we've naively, you know, provided them with. So I think. There have been bad consequences, obviously, in those countries for dissidents,

• 30:31Speaker 01

  you know, or anybody who kind of runs afoul of the authorities. If that stuff is happening here, I guess I haven't heard about it yet. It doesn't seem to matter yet.

• 30:44Tyler Cowen?

  Your writing seems to influence actual technologists. Does that make you nervous at all? Do you feel some kind of moral nervousness every time you sit down to handwrite something out? Like, oh, my goodness, you know, what's this going to cause in the world? Or you just go ahead and you write blithely and try to write something that's interesting?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  I kind of write something that reasonably balanced in terms of pros and cons. And that is rooted in in some kind of basic understanding of the the technology. And then let the chips fall where they may. You know, the most recent book of that type that I've written was Termination Shock, which is about solar radiation management, solar geoengineering. And, you know, I feel like I went to some effort to present a balanced approach there and to present arguments on both sides and to to show why some people would think it was great and other people would would hate it.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  My feeling is that if I do that, then, you know, no one can say I'm presenting a sort of propagandistic, one-sided view of the the issue. And people are then free to kind of make up their own minds as to what position they want to take.

• 32:00Tyler Cowen?

  In what year do you think we will first see a novel co-authored by a human and an AI, where the AI does more than just some basic research, but actually writes a fair amount of the novel? And that the novel is at least as good as what a talented human could accomplish?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, something close to that's probably happened already. I mean, I'm sure it's happened. And so so your question boils down to a critical judgment as to quality. My

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Position on this, which I put out in a sub stack a couple of weeks ago, is that the real purpose of art and the reason we like art is because it exposes us to a very dense package of micro decisions that have been made by, by the artist. And as such, we're engaged in a kind of communion with that artist. And what makes it interesting is, is that, that connection. It may be to a living writer, or maybe to a sculptor who died, you know, 2,500 years ago. But in either case, we're making a human to human connection. If we know that we're reading something or experiencing a work of art that was just

• 33:12Speaker 01

  generated by an algorithm, then that element of human connection is, isn't there anymore. And furthermore, we know that for every one such book or image or whatever, a million more could be generated just by, you know, clicking a, watching a Python script, basically. And so familiarity, or, I mean, the law of supply and demand takes over at that point. So if there's an infinite supply of this stuff, then it's, it's value drops to zero. So even if such a book kind of reads pretty well as a novel, I, I don't think people are going to be interested in it.

• 33:54Tyler Cowen?

  Well, but they may not know it was partly written by an AI or fully written by an AI, right?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, that's, that's an interesting thought experiment is try to craft a, try lie and claim that there was a human who wrote it and, you know, create a fake fan club or, or whatever. I guess that's possible. I don't know. Personally, I, I'm just not interested in it. I, I have too many books on my shelf that I haven't read yet that were written by humans.

• 34:27Tyler Cowen?

  What for you is the biggest weakness or flaw in current L L Ms?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  They don't yet seem to have a.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Understanding of spatial relations and just basic logical relationships that exist between between things in the real world. I mean, there's a million examples of this on the on the internet. There are people on Twitter who delight in posting, you know, the results of, you know, some non, you know, ask L L M to do an arithmetic problem and it'll give you the the wrong answer in a very convincing and confident way. So they kind of don't know their own limitations in that sense. The L L M should say, oh, well, that looks like a math problem and I I suck at math, you know, I can't I can't give you the right answer. You should, you know,

• 35:16Speaker 01

  get your calculator out, but they don't do that. They just confidently, you know, give you the wrong answer.

• 35:24Tyler Cowen?

  Do you think we can use robots and robotic data to in essence, teach L L M's about spatial relations? The robot will learn spatial relations going through the world, right? Oh, you bumped into a tree, you need to stop. And this all gets fed into the L L M. And then we have them make videos and we grade the videos and do reinforcement learning on how good the videos are. And can't we in less than five years have A I's that are just awesomely good at that?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  We have a terminology issue to to talk about here, which is, you know, L L M's. I don't think that an L L M per se is the right kind of architecture to use to to solve that problem. I'm sure that you can train a some kind of A I on that kind of data set. And in fact, we know that this is happening with, say, self-driving cars, you know, where you can use, I say, a game engine to create an imaginary city with imaginary roads. And then you can generate the videos, you know, from the car's point of view of what it would look like to drive around that city. And so you can generate that video data set

• 36:35Speaker 01

  way more cheaply and rapidly than, you know, if you had to physically go out. In a car with a camera on it and and drive around in a car. So you can definitely feed huge amount of synthetic data to an AI system and and help it learn that way. It's a different kind of brain from a large language model per se.

• 36:58Tyler Cowen?

  I have a long question from a reader, which I'll paraphrase, but it basically says, "You seem to be better at predicting the future than almost anyone else, and you've done this in a wide variety of areas. What's your self-awareness as to how this has been possible?"

• 37:12Speaker 01

  I think there's a kind of a scattershot phenomenon going on where, you know, a science fiction book might include a large number of hypothetical inventions, and the ones that are in there might be described somewhat vaguely. So a bunch of those might never get realized, but people very generously tend to forget about those. They they give the writer, the novelist a free pass, you know, and they they only take into account the ones that seem to have have come true. And there's also some generosity there in that the description of the invention might be a little wishy-washy, a little vague, but

• 37:57Speaker 01

  then later on, when a somewhat similar real invention gets made, someone's nice enough to to say that, you know, the science fiction writer invented this.

• 38:08Tyler Cowen?

  But say the primer from Diamond Age. Do you feel we have that now or soon with large language models? They will teach you almost anything, right? Not how to make a bomb, but anything scientific, anything legitimate. They'll give you multiple choice questions. They'll grade them for you. They're not perfect, but is that, in fact, what you meant?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Lots of different elements that have to come together to make something that would work like the primer in the Diamond Age, and you just described one of them, which we can now get with with LLMs. The other or another part of it is, how do you create that special relationship between the the learner and the object, the book? So somehow, it's just not as compelling to

• 38:58Speaker 01

  To sort of go on the internet and pull up a large language model and ask it to teach you something. And you can do it for sure, but you don't see a lot of people that I know of kind of using it that way. So what you need is to productize that, I think, to use a really crass word and, you know, sort of package it in a way that a kid or somebody could pick up an object and, you know, open it to the next page and see what they needed to see that day tailored for their learning style. And I don't know if people are working on that or not.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Probably they're working on it.

• 39:38Tyler Cowen?

  Could you imagine that we have a near future where artificial general intelligence comes, AGI, and that basically people don't much notice or care and the world just continues? And some people have these big doses of extra IQ in their pocket at a low price, but the world doesn't change that much?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Nor, I mean, that sounds like, you know, a promising place to begin a science fiction novel. Tyler, you should work on that. I like it. I don't know how important IQ really is. So, I mean, to your earlier question about are we all depraved? You know, like lots of, lots of people with high IQs fell for ridiculous bullshit during the 20th century and are falling for it today. So getting access to even more IQ in a pocket or whatever doesn't necessarily get you anywhere in dealing with practical, real world decision making.

• 40:36Tyler Cowen?

  What do you think then is scarce? Is it kindness? Is it common sense? Is it being more skeptical? Or what's the one thing we really do need more of if the marginal value of extra IQ is iffy?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Kindness sounds great.

• 40:53Tyler Cowen?

  But it might be somewhat cheap in supply, right? Like, oh, everyone's kind, but we don't do much about it. And, you know, seven weeks later, there's still babies in Africa with malaria.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of people who, you know, going back to our earlier topic, who were involved in terrible political movements in the 20th century and now probably did so in the belief that they were ultimately being kind, you know, that they were trying to improve the world somehow. You know, there's a level of self deception that can creep in that makes, can make kind people paradoxically very dangerous.

• 41:34Tyler Cowen?

  Do you think readers enjoy reading scenes of torture? Enjoy in a broad sense of the term.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  So I don't know about, I don't know if enjoy is precisely the right word. One of my favorite writers is Joe Abercrombie, who writes sort of fantasy novels that, and one of the main characters in his whole cycle of novels is a professional torturer. And so the, the trick that, that Joe manages to achieve is that he depicts this guy doing horrific things, but he ends up being a really interesting character and you almost end up kind of rooting for him in, in a strange way. There's a whole field of what's called body horror, which some writers kind of like to work with. That's somehow fascinating to

• 42:25Speaker 01

  people. We all have bodies. We all know things can go wrong with our bodies. This shows up from, from time to time in fiction. So I think that if you're going to depict it, the key thing is just not to, to do it in a way that doesn't appeal to, to the worst parts of the reader's human nature.

• 42:44Tyler Cowen?

  Do you like the TV show The Americans?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Haven't seen it.

• 42:48Tyler Cowen?

  By the way, has had a whole bunch of torture scenes in it.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Okay, haven't seen it.

• 42:53Tyler Cowen?

  You should watch it. I think it's very good and some parts of it are not unrelated to themes in your book.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  That that's why Tyler's I I vaguely know what it's about. And so if I'm working on a a project of my own, I so actively avoid trying to see other fictional treatments of the same or similar subject matter.

• 43:17Tyler Cowen?

  Did you go see the movie Oppenheimer?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  I did.

• 43:21Tyler Cowen?

  What did you think?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  I would have liked to see more about making the bomb and less about his bureaucratic troubles, getting his security clearance renewed. I mean, like, I guess I see why that that makes for us a certain kind of drama that plays well on on screen. It's not what I went there for.

• 43:45Tyler Cowen?

  Last question, not asking for any spoilers, but on the cover of Polosstan, which again I liked very much. It says, volume one of Bomb Light, which is going to be some kind of series. Without giving it away, is there anything you can tell us about where this is headed?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's about, you can guess from the name of the series that it it's going to relate to the bomb eventually. And so what I've kind of became aware of, starting about 10 years ago, is that in the 10 years or so leading up to the building of the first atomic bomb, there was all kinds of really interesting stuff going on in the world, in the world of physics. You know, the neutron wasn't even discovered until 1932. So, you know, within living memory, there were all kinds of physics experiments underway during the 1930s where

• 44:41Speaker 01

  people like Fermi and the Curies, Compton, Millikan, Rutherford, Chadwick were solving the the mysteries, you know, pursuing this kind of detective story, you know, how does the universe work? Using very simple, comparatively simple kind of experiments and just deductive reasoning and railing just on the coattails of that, you've got. People in the world of military, the government, and so on, beginning to understand that this is going to be really important. They don't necessarily know that the bomb is going to be possible that early, but they know it's important.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  And so, all kinds of weird stuff begins to happen that is understood only by a few people in the world, but people who are in the know understand that it's really important. And so, to me, there's all kinds of fodder in that situation for storytelling, for novel writing. So, I'm starting, I mean, this one really gets going in about 1932, Polosstan. It ends in early 1934. It features one, one of the main characters of the series, who's a young woman, who I mentioned before, who's half Russian, half American. The next book in the series is gonna focus more on a different character

• 46:07Speaker 01

  who's introduced in this book, but we don't see much of him. Then, there's a third book planned that'll be based around a different character. And eventually, all this comes together in the, in the 1940s. And along the way, we, we see the development of what's going on in the world of physics, but we also see what's happening in parallel with that, with the rise of, of the Nazis and Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War, you know, everything else that, that's happening in the world during that decade.

• 46:41Tyler Cowen?

  Neil Stephenson, thank you very much.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me on your program again.

• 46:49Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowan, and the show is @CowanConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.