What Will The Future Look Like? - Theo Priestley & Bronwyn Williams | Modern Wisdom Podcast 330

Theo Priestley and Bronwyn Jones are futurists, trend analysts and authors. The future is supposed to be ours to choose, but who is educated enough to tell us if we're going in the wrong direction? Theo & Bronwyn brought together the world's leading futurists to articulate, clarify and predict the current trajectories in all the areas of life that you care about, like the future of warfare, education, transport, politics, economics, space travel, relationships and more. Sponsors: Get 10% discount on everything from Slater Menswear at https://www.slaters.co.uk/modernwisdom (use code MW10) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy The Future Starts Now - https://amzn.to/34FfgKr Follow Theo on Twitter - https://twitter.com/tprstly Follow Bronwyn on Twitter - https://twitter.com/bronwynwilliams Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #futurism #technology #warfare - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Nobody really questions a lot of what is being said. So we all tend to be distracted by the shiny objects and the lovely futures that are painted for us, augmented reality. We're going to live in virtual with virtual avatars and spend virtual money and things like that. No one really sort of questions whether this is actually the best way to resolve or solve some of humanity's biggest challenges.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  What's an anti-futurist?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  I get asked this all the time. It's a little bit of a marketing spin. I think it goes to perhaps Bronwyn and I's our particular viewpoint of the future, which is if you look at the pop culture futurists like Peter Diamantis and Ray Kurzweil, they paint a very specific version of utopia, which is everyone will merge with machines and become one with the singularity. And my particular take is more akin to I cast a large dollop of cynicism on top of all of it and just and kind of take a step back and say, well, is this really, you know, the preferred version that we want to actually prescribe to?

• 1:09Speaker 00

  And why should we believe that these two men or these particular futurists who have the loudest voice are the right ones that we should be following? So my take on futurism or anti-futurism is really a more pragmatic and realistic approach born out of the fact I used to be a chief evangelist of a technology company. So I used to put on a lot of the spin and the happy version, you know, happy clappy version and stuff like that and hug trees. And now I hug trees because, you know, the trees are disappearing and I realize that, you know, technology isn't as rosy as what other people paint it to be. So I kind of take a very sort of negative stance in a sense

• 1:52Speaker 00

  towards these particular futures that other people want us to prescribe and walk towards with blinkers on in a sense.

• 2:02Chris Williamson?

  What are your main criticisms of the status quo, the dominant guard ideology for futurism?

• 2:10Speaker 00

  I don't think there are enough younger voices in the room, for one. So my criticism for futurism in general is there aren't enough younger voices in the room. So it tends to be sort of old fuddy duddy guard that kind of sort of has a very sort of, you know, I would guess blinkered and old way of manifesting what they believe is a future that fit for humanity. The second thing is, which goes towards Bronwyn and I's, you know, very sort of strong stance, is that nobody really questions, I think, a lot of what is being said. So we all tend to be distracted by the shiny objects and the lovely futures that are painted

• 2:55Speaker 00

  for us, augmented reality. We're going to live in virtual, with virtual avatars and spend virtual money and things like that. But no one really sort of questions whether this is actually the best way to resolve or solve some of humanity's biggest challenges like poverty, homelessness, you know, inequality, you know, our sense of self and what we are worth as people. So I would, you know, my other criticism apart from, let's speak to the younger people behind us who want to take, have a stake in that, that future is, let's actually stop and question each particular step along the way and just ask, is this the right step that we take? And it goes towards the, you know, the future cone scenario where I think a lot of them

• 3:38Speaker 00

  are, rather than looking at the preferable future, they're a way wandering off along the, you know, the one that they, they kind of prefer themselves. So it's, again, it goes back to that biased view again. This is the one I want, but it's not, might not be the future that everybody wants. And it'd be nice for people to just stop and question that. Go for it.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I suppose I have quite a similar view to Theo, but also a little bit more divergence in that my problem with conversations around the future is that they do tend to be imposed from above by the most powerful, wealthiest, best-connected voices in the room, and they tend to be quite binary. They're either selling you on a probable dystopia or on a probable utopia, and that's a very, very binary way of thinking. But they're both selling you, and that's the key. People are either selling you on inevitable doom and gloom in order to get you to essentially fall under their will to do what they want to do. This is what politicians like to do. They like to talk about the negative only, to sell the fear side of the future, so that you kind of listen to what they're saying, you give up a whole lot of your rights and your agency over where we are headed, and that becomes

• 4:46Speaker 02

  a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, you've kind of got people more in the private sector selling you on complete, like Theo was saying, this technological utopia, this fully automated luxury communism that awaits us all, if once again we just fall in line and do what they say and buy what they are selling. And that for me is quite a huge problem, because both those roads sort of end up in a future where most of us are ending up giving up a whole lot of our agency, a whole lot of our ability to direct and broaden that future cone, and instead of broadening our realm of possibility, because there are like almost eight billion of us on the planet, we should have lots of different ideas. Instead, we're kind of being funneled into a much narrower idea of where we are headed, with a sense of inevitability. And I think that's what we really want to sort

• 5:31Speaker 02

  of shake people out of. None of this is set. The future starts, as the cover says, now, and it always starts now. We get to choose the next step in every direction that we're headed.

• 5:40Chris Williamson?

  So interesting that when you think about futurism as an area of research, that the more that people become dogmatic, the less interesting futurism is, that you're constraining your own futures by putting your colours to one particular flagpole or another. And, um...

• 5:57Chris Williamson?

  There's not many things where the person that has the most clout or the most power or the most convincing advertising campaign doesn't end up winning, right? So I suppose that it is important for people to just, and you are trying to encourage them to do it in this book as well, to think about what sort of a future they want as opposed to just listening to people who ostensibly don't, I don't, can you have a qualification in the future? I don't really think so. I think that people, it's ours to create, right? That's why we're sovereign individuals. So you go through a ton of different examples, different areas in the book, and I want to go through some of those today. So the first one, making it nice and positive, was warfare, the future of warfare.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that sounds about right.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting. I mean, Christina, Christina Libby from Hypergiant wrote that one.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  And she's got a particular viewpoint and I think it prescribes to a lot of what other people sort of think as well, which is it's become warfare is becoming fully automated, which means our input and our agency and our, I guess, the humanity side of, if there is a human.

• 7:06Chris Williamson?

  The humane side of killing each other.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  The humane side of warfare. Where was I going to go with that one, I wonder? You know, that side has actually been completely taken away and, you know, we have examples of robot, you know, robotic warfare. We have drone warfare and things like that, and we're giving up all of that decision making to algorithms. So there's that side. And then there's also the cyber warfare, which is the eternal war against people hacking various, you know, our computers, our infrastructure, our utilities to hold us to ransom. And so warfare kind of sort of takes many forms. And in the future, obviously, you've got that technological layer upon it, which kind of sort of makes it even more dystopian than it is, I guess.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  But it also allows people to. I guess the attack vector suddenly becomes a lot more wider and broader because everybody can can take a little stab at it. You have script kiddies writing little algorithms that are polymorphic and suddenly become virus that take over. You know, I've seen a cryptocurrency is quite an interesting one right now because obviously it's supposed to be this, you know, decentralized pot of wealth of money that you have your wallet, nobody can hack into it and things like that. And what we're finding is that, you know, all this money is disappearing in left, right and centre because

• 8:30Speaker 00

  there are holes even in something as, you know, as complex as decentralized finance. So it's it's interesting. I think our, like I said, our attack vector is becoming broader, even though we think it should be actually shrinking through technology. So.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, decentralized finance sounds quite, quite nice, but decentralized warfare suddenly should give us all a pause for thought. And this is what technology is doing. It's democratizing all sorts of things, not necessarily just things we want to have democratized. It's asking us to ask very different questions. I think Christina's chapter is quite important in that it also shows how warfare is almost becoming decivilized. So what we saw throughout sort of like the history of warfare is starting off being an individual versus an individual. Then we sort of outsourced the fighting to soldiers and they would fight each other. But now what's happening is we've got soldiers and machines that are going after civilians again. So you've kind of decivilized that process. And if you actually look at what's going on in the Middle East, if you look at what's

• 9:28Speaker 02

  happening with out in the eastern side of Europe and what's happening is like what's bumping into each other on the far sides of Asia too, is that it seems to be like centralized control where that's power or money. Because of course, some of these are private armies that are involving these these various different automated machines are now using them as a form of terror against civilians. So civilians now become part of warfare once again. So it is a conversation that we all have to be aware of because these things are out the bottle and it's not just drones and cyber technology, it's also of course all the bio warfare, which we have to be very, very aware of. It only takes one guy and it's a lot easier to make a hugely destructive civilization ending bio weapon in your garage

• 10:12Speaker 02

  than it is to make a nuclear bomb. So we have to be very, very aware of these things and we have to start thinking again around these ideas of centralisation, decentralisation, and how again the path is probably somewhere in between the two of them, but there are some benefits to sometimes having central control over very, very dangerous things and ideas.

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  That's the problem, right? Is you democratised technology and more people have access to increasingly greater powers of destruction. What you end up with is previously the worst damage that anybody could cause was with a knife or a sword, but that same person can now 3D print themselves a gun if they have the resources for it and then you just continue to roll the clock forward. And you go, right, okay, so in 500 years' time, what is the most basic thing that anyone can do? I can make my own rocket ship. Well, fantastic. How are we going to police that? How are we going to be able to control that? Nick Bostrom has this example where he talks about how it could have been the way that physics was constructed in this universe, that if you put sand in a microwave, it made an atomic bomb. Now, by the quirk of chemistry and physics that we have, that

• 11:15Chris Williamson?

  isn't the case, but it's not that it couldn't have been the case. And as you continue to pull these urn, the balls out of the urn, right, each one of them could be something that's really, really bad, but it could be something that's just sufficiently accessible enough to cause some damage. And that's, yeah, as you've got a society that's ever growing, you have people feeling disaffected, you know, the difference between, I think it's the school killings that you get in Japan or China perhaps, are people going around with a knife, whereas how much destruction can you do there versus how much destruction can you see in America? And again, you just continue to roll that forward, some unfortunate disaffected person trying to damage the world around them. And yeah, it makes for a scary future. So what do we do? How do we protect ourselves?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Well, we're starting to see, we're seeing a resurgence of essentially a kind of a digitized version of sort of serfdom that we're kind of seeing emerging in front of our eyes, like Theo was talking about the world of crypto too. And what that is doing is empowering vast amounts of wealth into very small individual hands. Again, sort of decentralization has come full circle back to sort of centralization of massive amounts of

• 12:22Chris Williamson?

  The Winklevoss twins currently ruling half of the universe of crypto. Yeah, exactly.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Or Elon Musk in a belt seat is to like move markets and devastate small children across the world.

• 12:33Chris Williamson?

  Just wipe a trillion, a trillion dollars off the cryptocurrency market. Yeah, precisely.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  We've created quite an unstable system there. But what it's pointing to, when you tie that together with the ability of people to literally develop private armies, is you end up with a world where more and more of us are going to be looking for essentially protection from private players rather than from our states. Because at the same time, the private hands are developing a whole lot of power due to decentralization. States are at the same time losing that power, losing that monopoly over violence, over currency, which is heading to quite a destabilizing point in society, almost like a new sort of Hobbesian state of nature that we're going to have to find a new equilibrium in. But the way we find that balance against those rogue agents is to essentially attach ourselves to the protection of people who have the means, the money, and the guns and weapons

• 13:22Speaker 02

  essentially to protect us. And that's, that's the sort of the, that's the unspoken, but kind of the spoken, base case future that we're sort of stumbling into. Whether you're looking at the sort of prophecies of the World Economic Forum, or whether you're listening to what the powerful mainly men in crypto are saying, they're essentially pointing us in that direction. Once you start to connect the dots. And this is why we want people involved in the conversation, because then this is inevitable yet. If that doesn't fill you with joy, now is the time to say that, you know, there's a place for for both regulation and education in trying to solve our very, very messy, very, very wicked human problems. I myself do lean towards more liberty and less rules, but at the same

• 14:06Speaker 02

  time, I've met people and I think that as much as I don't like rules to apply to me, I'm quite kind of in favor of them applying to, to other people. I recognize that hypocrisy.

• 14:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I um, it seems almost like a world in which, similar to how the American healthcare system is set up, where you have healthcare insurance, it might be the fact that you need to pay for some sort of digital private security, some physical private security, and then you've actually got a market for these sort of mercenary protection for higher companies, almost.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Funny you say that.

• 14:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes, what did we see this week?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  I say, I live in South Africa, we've had private security and private healthcare and private education for even the middle classes and the lower middle classes. Our private school education costs less than a state education, although we have essentially or theoretically free state education doesn't actually play out in the real world. And we pay for our own security. I live in a state complex, so we have armed guards at the gate, we have a compound. This is like how I've grown up, so it's quite normal to me. I'm like, South Africa is a preview of this very neo feudal future we're sort of stumbling into. And then just this week, we've seen a couple of companies out in Los Angeles, where the whole defund the police movement has gained quite a lot of popular support. At the same time, you've got rich people who are now investing in a sort of tech startup

• 15:27Speaker 02

  for on demand, this sort of, you know, e-hailing version of private security, which I'm so African, I know very well, but this is shocking Americans.

• 15:36Chris Williamson?

  It's just like Uber, Uber for goons with guns. Is that what it is? Yeah. Vigilantes for hire.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  The right to arrest people. So, yeah, I've seen the future. It's not all it's cracked up to be. We don't think very, very consciously about these things.

• 15:52Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's going to be South Africa. That's terrifying. And the fact that we're all laughing about it as well, is purely because it's so ridiculous and terrifying, there's no other outlet for the emotion. You just say, well, I've got to laugh at it, because the alternative would be to break down in despair in the corner, just weep.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Well, that's actually quite an interesting point because the natural reaction is to go, oh, how stupid. This will never happen, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And of course, our apathy towards the shock and the awe and it is is is becoming normalized to the to the point where it just happens under our feet. And then the next day you wake up, you know, you've got armed guards and people posting leaflets going, would you like protection going to work? Kind of sort of thing. And it's like, when did this happen? Well, of course, we stood laughing about it last week. Yeah. But you missed the bullet in where you where you had the opportunity to say, no, I didn't want this. And again, goes back to the book, you know, you have a stake in the future. Instead of, you know, being apathetic about it, actually stand up and and saying, yes, this is fine for me.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  No, I don't want this for me. What about transportation? What did you learn about that?

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Um, flying cars, I think Doug writes about flying cars.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  You're not going to have one.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're not going to have one anytime soon.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Well, you're not going to own one. You might get to ride in one.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  I think it's transportation's an interesting, um, you know, I'm going to bob and weave on this one as well because I saw an interesting video where in China they were trialing, what they called an autonomous vehicle which drove along the road.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Essentially, China invented the bus, but the way that they painted it was that there was this autonomous vehicle that had many carriages that drove along the road and followed the path of the road. And I just thought, well, hang on a minute. I've, I've, you know, I've, I've kind of had these in Edinburgh for, you know, fifty, hundred years now, you know, and so have many other countries, but because it's autonomous, all of a sudden it's something new. And and what so generally what we do, what we find is a lot of ideas have been recycled, for one. On the transportation side, we're not going to see flying cars. What you will see is autonomous taxi drones, for example, where there will be either single passenger or multi-passenger, maybe two, three, four, family size, nothing like a flying bus. Let's put it that way.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  But again, you know. Not for the general public, I would say, for one. So for the uber rich and for the rich who can afford to sort of call a taxi to their acreage in the backyard and take them up to their skyscraper penthouse suite. That's fine. For the rest of us, it's hoofing it down at the bottom of the streets again.

• 18:42Chris Williamson?

  Surely that would be democratized down though, as the technology becomes more widespread. You're going to inevitably end up, if there's a market there for it, you're going to continue to drop the price and drop the price and drop the price until you can match supply and demand.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, but at the same time, I mean, you find all these, you know, all these sort of technological shifts and innovations are always trialed and built for specific cities in mind. And so you have them, you know, for Tesla and things like autonomous transportation, it's always, it's always trialed and built for American roads where it's very long, very straight, huge cavernous roads, and it's all grid-like patterns. Now, if you, if you come to a city like Edinburgh.

• 19:24Chris Williamson?

  Edinburgh, yeah, precisely.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, or Newcastle or something like that. It's just not going to work. And we're not, and we certainly don't have the buildings or the infrastructure or even, you know, the technical infrastructure as well to, one, support electrification. Two, our roads are so bad that, you know, you would never want an autonomous vehicle to even attempt to drive it.

• 19:44Chris Williamson?

  Landing on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. Yeah, exactly.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  That's it. That's about it. It just goes up and down in a straight line and that's great. The rest of it, just forget it. Oh no, another pothole.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  You know, and then, and then flying vehicles or, or flying drone taxis kind of sort of thing. Again, you've got that kind of, we don't have even the, you know, are we going to have like mini air traffic control systems all over the place? Because every city is built different. All the infrastructure, you know, the fact that we don't have double decker trains in the UK is because we built, you know, like in Amsterdam or in the Netherlands is because our rail structure, we have low bridges because they never even considered it. So all we could do is just make trains extra long, rather than doubling them up and doubling the capacity a different way. And it's the same with like taxi infrastructure

• 20:37Speaker 00

  or flying infrastructure or electrifications as well. Some cities have been built a specific way that they just even didn't even think about that at all in the future. And so it's going to be very difficult to overlay some advanced technological innovation onto a really crumbling, old sort of Victorian infrastructure.

• 20:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's the problem of having a country as old as ours in the UK, right? It's all well and good looking at Dubai and seeing that, oh, well, you don't really have the history that we do, or America, and you say, well, you've existed for 250 years. The oldest building that you've got doesn't really matter. And we've got all of this beautiful history. But we also have roads that were designed by a three-year-olds that had too many E-numbers, you know, that had too much glucose and got let loose with a Sharpie pen. And it's squiggles and all over the place. I mean, to sing the song for the techno-optimists in this, it seems to me like it's just, it's a coding problem. You just need to come up with a sufficiently scalable, advanced algorithm that would be

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  able to work out and negotiate with the other vehicles that are around and can be sufficiently understanding of the different types of landscapes.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  In theory, yes. When it comes to the issues of autonomous vehicles in general, and flying autonomous vehicles in particular, what's really holding us back is not actually the technology so much as it is the people, because we tend to forget about this. So just because it can be done, doesn't mean it will be allowed to be done. The thing with autonomous vehicles is a regulatory and legal absolute nightmare. And we have become a very timid species. We no longer like risk. So the great analogy is if we invented the motorcar for the first time this year, in the year of fear and loathing across the planet, would we have allowed anyone to get in a vehicle that goes at 120 kilometres an hour? You know, I don't think so. You see, we've just got to a point where

• 22:32Speaker 02

  we are very, very afraid of each other. We sue each other for all sorts of things. And we have allowed probably too much red tape and too much safetyism to have crept into our society. So I don't know if there's a will to get... You know, general mass transport autonomous vehicles off the ground. That's the first thing. The second thing is, of course, that flying cars in particular do require quite a lot of space. So once again, if you're in a very big city, it's not accessible for everyone to use these things. You know, there's only so much rooftop space that you can land on. So you can imagine the sort of queues up elevators instead of sort of queues on the pavement for taxis. There's simply less space for these things to actually pick people up. So what you get to is a point where essentially the same sort of people who are able to use helicopters right now get to use

• 23:15Speaker 02

  these things instead. But the other regulatory issue that's going to slow this down, even if we are able to overcome all the technological challenges, is the eco movement and the fact that even if these things are running on renewable energy, they still have a higher carbon footprint than your bicycle. And I live in South Africa, but I have noticed with big eyes and a slight amount of laughter, how Europe is pushing back on any sorts of progress and is regressing to basically the fastest speed that they've that one is encouraged to go at is the speed of basically a two-speed bicycle. So we have to understand that this is the society that these things are being launched into, which is why there's a very different future ahead for your sort of

• 23:55Speaker 02

  aging, perhaps sort of paler cul-de-nations up north than they are for perhaps some of the more vibrant younger economies that have not yet lost their nerves, so to speak, which is quite an interesting thing for me to say. But living in South Africa, we're kind of at the the melting point of all these different worldviews from east, west, north and south. And there's a very different tint on the future coming out of those societies.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  That's super interesting, the fact that culturally we have muted our desire for rapid growth. There's a lot of, I had Alex Epstein on the show recently, who is a pro fossil fuels philosopher and researcher. And he was talking about human racism, as he calls it, which is the hatred of our own race. And this is, you talk about destroying the planet and using fossil fuels incorrectly and so on and so forth. You guys would love him. You should really check out his stuff. I wonder whether, you know, the valley of despair that people have as part of a learning curve. I wonder if there's an equivalent with the valley of comfort that we've managed to get to now. So previously, all of our problems were problems of scarcity, not problems of abundance.

• 25:01Chris Williamson?

  We've now flipped that on its head. It's problems of abundance, not scarcity. There could be more comfort, more abundance down the road. But I wonder whether we think, well, it's all right now. This feels okay to me. I don't need more convenient travel. I don't need more, whatever it might be, X, Y and Z. So we'll just stick here that we've reached a point previous, you know, I don't think, I think it would have been difficult to have justified a thousand years ago, not continuing to develop all of the things that we've had to. But now we get to a stage where we think, okay, so I feel all right as a normal person. I don't really have too many problems. So why bother?

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, comfort definitely slows us down from progress, but I think that's also quite a sort of first world sort of perspective. Like, I think there's a lot of people who are quite, quite a lot of growth in my corner of the world. And I still am on the more privileged corner of the African continent. So I think that what I definitely noticed, in particular with people that work professionally in the sort of future space and the policy space, is that we're getting messages of not just, we have enough coming from Europe and from the greater West, if you want to sort of use that sort of summary, but actually pushes towards things like degrowth, actually saying we should have less. But at the same time, us sitting in Africa are saying, oh, we can't actually do with less. We actually need quite a lot more. So there is quite a big, a big conflict emerging there.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  And I thought it was quite interesting. I actually got yelled at on Twitter today for, for comments saying on how these messages coming out of again, Europe saying that the children are bad for the planet. See, you shouldn't have any. I mean, like, that's a really privileged point of view to actually start telling people that people are bad. We should save the planet for these people that aren't going to be born, right? Who are we saving it for? I find quite, quite a lot of irony in any sort of degrowth messaging. It just riles me completely the wrong way. We need to be finding ways to sort of leave this place better than we found it, but also to progress to something new, because stagnation is just death. I mean, when we stop changing, that's literally the definition of death in some, in some terms. So we have to be optimistic about these things. Otherwise, we do sort of coil, cool into a little ball and start preaching degrowth.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  And, you know, the anti-natalist movements, which is about as, about as pessimistic as you can get. In terms of humanity, but we're there already and these movements are growing right now. Deaths of despair are increasing and deaths from suicide are now more common than deaths from homicide at a global level. These things should all give us pause for thought about how pessimistic we've become as a species, even if we pretend otherwise. We're not acting like we're optimistic and I find that quite shocking because all the trends are generally pointing up. We should be quite excited. It's quite a good time to be around. In fact, you look at the general lottery of life. If you didn't know where you were going to be born or to which parents and you were told you could pick a date, this would be a pretty good bet. I mean, I don't know if I want to pick a date further back in history.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  The chances of having a decent life today anywhere in the world are greater than they were at any point previously in history. But we've completely misplaced our optimism. I'm not quite sure why that is. Maybe it's because we're too comfortable. Maybe it's because we are just a little bit. We're just naturally dissatisfied, envious species. I don't know. Maybe you've got some thoughts, Theo.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Um, I, I, I'll go back to my, um, my, my thoughts around apathy. Um, we have become an apathetic species, but I think, and, and maybe falling into that comfort zone. But I think it's, it's also a question of distraction as well. So we, a lot of the technology that we have today around us today is built to distract. So we, you know, generally, um, uh, we, I agree with Bronwyn that we are actually living in a, in a period of time where things are abundant and we are actually in a better state than we have, ever have been in, in the past. But people are apathetic to actually want to find out that information and those facts for themselves.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  And instead of fed that information, the, the negative side of that information, which is, oh, woe is me, everything is doom and gloom. This is the worst we've ever been. This is the worst state that humanity's ever been in. And they're fed that point of view and because they are, are, they are in a comfort zone and they are also apathetic. They don't want to find out any other information around that. Is that the right point of view? Do I just accept, well, I can't be bothered, you know, oh, someone's posted something on Facebook. Oh, there's a new TikTok. Here we go. This this will this will distract me from the truth and what's actually happening in the world today. And I think this is quite an interesting but also dangerous place that we're in right now, which is there is a lot

• 29:36Speaker 00

  of people sleepwalking into the future at the moment and and completely unaware of all the good things that are happening in the world today, but completely besotted with all the bad things, because these are the things that the algorithms love to serve up, because it keeps us in that kind of benign state.

• 29:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, from the valley of despair to the comfort zone of apathy. We've managed to switch those around. What about work? What's the future of work looking like? Are we all going on universal basic income? Are robots taking our jobs? What's happening?

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Neither.

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  Those were the two. Those are the only two doors that I had to go behind.

• 30:17Chris Williamson?

  What's happening there?

• 30:19Speaker 00

  So I think, well, I'll let Brobman speak on on some of this as well. But my my thoughts are, you know, robots aren't going to take our job. I think what they're going to do is augment certain functions that we perform and hopefully allow us to do other things and allow us to explore other sides of humanity. This is what I would like to see. Certainly, you know, I spoke about it in a TED Talk. I did a couple of years back as well on that kind of front. You know, will will we ever follow a robot leader? Or will we actually do learn to be humans again? And I would like to see this kind of golden age or a Renaissance where people rediscover rediscover the arts and humanities and and go and paint something just because not because there's no money in it, but because I actually want

• 31:01Speaker 00

  to explore that side for myself and be creative. I would like to see, you know, the autonomy and the augmentation allow us to switch to something like a three or a four day week rather than speeding up the productivity but filling in that five days again. So we don't escape it. I would like to see us escape that a little bit.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  On the the other door, which I've completely forgotten which one, oh, universal basic income. I always find it really interesting that the biggest supporters and the biggest and the loudest voices of universal basic income are the ones that are are are um are setting us up for these kind of sort of traps of automation and and and and putting us in that particular state to want universal basic income. So the Bill Gates and the and the Elon Musks and all that kind of sort of thing. If you look at their history, their history has all been about software and automation and and, you know, Jeff Bezos and things like that and and making us work harder and faster to the point where but giving us nothing in return to the point that we actually need

• 32:07Speaker 00

  more to survive. And they're the biggest supporters of it. And you have to question whether it's a completely flawed system in the first place as a result of that.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in terms of sort of universal basic income, I think it's it follows on quite nicely from our conversation and degrowth. It's always amusing to me that rich young men in Silicon Valley are the ones that want to preach to us about why we should accept a please, so can I have some more universal basic income future? At the same time, it's also quite ironic that it's rich old men in political power in Europe that are trying to sell us some ideas of degrowth, which incidentally leads to the same point, because a lot of the degrowth idea is about making do with less, about job sharing, about like you were talking about the four day work weeks, which is still, I think, the wrong way to look at this, because they're still talking about sort of master slave

• 32:59Speaker 02

  owner employee type relationships. Where we actually heading is into a post job world, but not a post work world. There's quite a big distinction there. Jobs are an artifact of the Industrial Revolution for that people were either literally serfs or they were hand to mouth sort of subsistence farmers. You worked for yourself, by yourself, or you were kind of a slave and you didn't really have a choice. We don't really want to go back to that, but that's kind of what I'm seeing is going to happen, because I don't see much difference from being a soef that has to till a physical land in order to get your allowance from the owner of the means of production, compared to being a digital soef that has to, you know, either fall into

• 33:41Speaker 02

  the jobs works programme of your sort of MMT toting heterodox economists in the west, or to ask very nicely for your tech overlords to hand you an allowance, or to increase your allowance at the end of every month. Essentially, as long as your ability to survive is dependent on someone else, he sort of feeds you, owns you. So I don't see any sort of universal basic in time type proposal as being anything other than a Band-Aid over a very failed society. What we are actually working towards, and I'm a bit more optimistic about this, and perhaps Theo would be, we are working towards a post-job world. Jobs are less and less attractive, particularly to young people. Even in my country, which has some of the

• 34:24Speaker 02

  highest employment and inequality rates in the world, young people don't want bullshit jobs. They want good jobs, or they prefer not to have a job at all. And this makes a lot of sense, but of course you can't have a society where more people are dependent on the state or handout than are independent of it. So the only way to sort of resolve that tension is for more people to become independent, or to become gainfully unemployed, as is actually someone like myself. And I think, Theo, you've been gainfully unemployed for a large part of your career too, which comes with a lot less security than a universal basic income or salary would give you, but it also actually comes with a lot more freedom, and it comes with the ability for you to manage your own time and to sort of not work

• 35:06Speaker 02

  to live, you know, but to enjoy the work that you're doing. And work then becomes a value equation, whereby we have to find ways, the challenge to individuals, to add value to society. And if we don't, we are going to end up in a neo-soefdom type relationship, where we are dependent on someone else for a handout that can be changed, removed, or have added Ts and Cs added to, which is what should scare us the most. Because universal basic incomes are going to be attached to things like your healthcare and to a whole lot of rules that come with it. I mean, we've got smart toilets now. So if you're going to have your universal basic income and your universal basic healthcare, you have to follow the rules. You're going to lose your privileges, right? So your toilet's going to know when you've been eating badly or when you haven't been going to the gym and it's going to tell on you.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  And that's a very sort of crass example, but that's the world we're kind of working towards. We have to understand, as long as we're getting stuff for free, we are the product, even if we're getting it for free from our state, whatever that case might be. So the alternative is to find a way to actually add value to your society. And ironically, many, many people in salary jobs are not adding value to society. That's quite harsh words, but I'm sure many of us have met the permafrost layers, the management layers in organisations, who are sort of collecting their cheque, passing go, collect cheque at the end of every month without adding value to the organisation. And those people are going to find themselves out of a job. They're going to find themselves out of a job and out of work because unless you've found a way to add value to society, you are going to be someone else's essentially property.

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  But not everyone is built to be a creator of some kind, adding, we need to have, the reason that you have stratified levels within organisations is that there are people with varying degrees of conscientiousness and intelligence and abilities and so on and so forth. So what are you going to do for the people at the bottom of that or at the bottom half of that?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  I'm not too worried about the people at the bottom. Most of the people at the bottom of our societies and our economic ladders are actually essential workers. They were the people that were still working last year when we were all in lockdown. They weren't earning much money, but they're essential to society, which means they are actually adding value. The sort of people that aren't adding value tend to be your overprivileged, overpaid, white collar workers in good jobs, after all, the definition of a good job is being paid more than you are worth. So let that settle in to everyone that's listening and it feels like you ended up last year richer than you started out, even though you didn't work too hard and you knew it.

• 37:31Chris Williamson?

  That wasn't me. My fellow payment was shit. But if you think about presumably the people at the bottom of that ladder are also the ones whose jobs are going to be close to the easiest to automate. So

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Not necessarily.

• 37:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay, tell me about it.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Because any job that involves your hands, that involves your hands or your eyes or a physical part of your body is much harder to automate. These are jobs and roles like caring. And caring is of course going to be one of the biggest industries coming forward as our populations age and we're running out of young people as we're talking about sort of population degrowth across vast swaths of our globe. Those jobs are going to increase. Things like being a pastor or a personal trainer are going to do just fine. So in other words, if you're touching people either spiritually or emotionally or physically, you're going to be okay. And they're much harder to automate. It's much more difficult and much more expensive to create a machine to pour a cup of coffee than it is to create a piece of code that can copy your insurance adjuster, your financial advisor's advice.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  So even within those roles, that's why financial advisors are having to shift from selling products to actually giving you coaching and mentorship around your financial status. So you've got to find where you're actually adding value and where you're just being a cost to the people who are paying your bills. And there are portions and places to add value in every different industry or job function, but you have to find them. Because too many of us in too many of our industries are bolt on essentially being sort of toll keepers and collecting rents.

• 38:58Chris Williamson?

  Is there enough room for everybody to step into this?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you, if you want to know if there's enough room for everybody to either be a creator or to add value, just go look at, look at the people who are making a living selling their mediocre NFTs right now. There's a buyer for everything.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  As long as you can persuade someone else it's valuable to them, that's going to be good. But don't think you're going to get a salary from it. That is going to shift. I do think salaries are going to be something that you don't want. Salary jobs are going to be the sort of jobs you don't want to have and only the desperate will be taking going forward.

• 39:34Chris Williamson?

  What about?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Good people.

• 39:36Chris Williamson?

  What about space travel? Space travel is like the frontier of futurism, right? What's, what's, what's the future of space travel got in store for us?

• 39:45Speaker 02

  It's going to happen.

• 39:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Whether we set up a settlement on Mars or the moon in the next 50 years is something completely different. It's interesting, I saw the, what's it called, is it Artemis or Gateway? It's called Gateway, Gateway which is like the lunar, basically the lunar version of the ISS and it's going to serve as some sort of hub for, to shuttle, you know, rich folk to the moon and back and, or to the Mars and back and act as a staging post and it'll be permanently manned and things like that. And it always makes me laugh because you see these programs like the Expanse and Star Trek and Star Wars and they paint, you know, the Expanse is probably the closest vision of the future and it's

• 40:30Speaker 00

  certainly a very dystopian one anyway. But at the same time, it still doesn't paint a very realistic picture in, in the sense that space is very hard. So failure is always going to be on a big scale. So at some point, you know, when Elon Musk boards his space rocket, there's going to be a tiny part of him that's going to be shitting his pants because that payload might go up in his face. So for one, it, there's a big risk there. Two, living in space is actually really, really hard on the human body. If you've ever seen an astronaut coming back down from ISS after a 200 day stay, they are literally crippled. They have muscle atrophied, they can barely stand on their own. Now, if you

• 41:15Speaker 00

  can imagine us, you know, saying, I'm going to live on Mars, which has, you know, a different set of atmospheres, a different set of gravity and the same on the moon as well. And then thinking about the journey to get there, having a little two week holiday and then the journey to get back to earth, for example, you know, that's going to wreck the human body. And I just don't think that the species at this point in time and technologically were advanced enough to be settling. So it's essentially a one-way trip.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  The other thing as well is if you notice the complaints from the astronomy point of view of Starlink as well. So at the moment, we are literally littering the skies with satellites, with little bits of space junk as well. And it's becoming harder and harder for us to actually track, I believe. And then I think in the future, we'll see this sort of scenario where Wally got it right, where the Earth is literally cocooned by all these dead satellites, or just this horrible cocoon of metal. And it's going to become ever more increasing risk to actually travel to the stars until we sort that out as well. So there are known risks, which are, you know, space is hard, the financial

• 42:30Speaker 00

  side is incredible, failure is spectacular, and it's really hard on the human body. And then you've got all the actual physical risks in terms of, you know, risk to the body, you've got the risks of space and space junk up there, you've got radiation as well from the sun and from the space in general. It's not going to be an easy thing. And I wish people would read up a little bit more rather than looking at the fanciful renders and the movies out there that paint a very utopian version of what life is going to be like. Because it's going to be indentured servitude and one-way trips for the people who actually

• 43:15Speaker 00

  want to pay to get there.

• 43:17Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, though, if the people that are going are the ones that have the money, if the companies that are giving the service to them are refining their payloads and their rockets and the technology that they use and everything else, if you want to repurpose people that have too much money's money to companies that want to take their money to research it to make... Essentially democratize or at least bring the cost down for future space travel. Surely that's a good thing.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean, this, this is no different to Chris Columbus and all these other people who've built a boat, financed the boat and then thought, you know, sod it, let's take a chance, stick, you know, fill this boat up with some intrepid people and let's go and explore the brave new world. You know, it's exactly the same thing, but just on a completely different scale. Um, so those, you know, to the, to the victor go the spoils in a sense, you know, the people who set foot on Mars, who, or the moon, who build the first colony, survive, propagate, you know, the world, you know, they, they'll be known as the pioneers, the true pioneers, you know, at the moment, we're at this kind of sort of weird stage where

• 44:31Speaker 00

  everyone, everyone believes that this crazy guy who claims he has autism is the, is the future of mankind. Um, and I think we just need a bit more realism injected into that vision first. But, but certainly, you know, the, the, it's, um, it's, it's a grand prize. I'll, you know, no bones about it. This one's a grand prize, but it's certainly a, it's certainly going to take real pioneers to get there.

• 44:56Chris Williamson?

  You're not a fan of Elon Musk?

• 44:57Speaker 02

  We're not gonna stop trying.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  Um, he, um, do you know, I, he's an interesting character. I'm not a great fan of him. I, I think there are flashes of brilliance in what he does sometimes, you know, in, you know, what he's done with Tesla off, off the back of workers, I might add, it's not just him. Um, you know, tents full of people sweating their arses off to get cars out the door of the shoddy panels, um, and things like that. But, you know, uh, you know, um, and then what he's done with SpaceX, I think is fantastic in terms of lowering the cost and democratizing that and taking that away from, you know, agency control where it's just, we have to just trust NASA to do it all kind of sort of thing. He's now commercialized space. Um, but I think the, um,

• 45:46Speaker 00

  I think he kind of brings himself down with all the weird stuff that he gets on with. And the old crypto thing and the odd tweets and getting into, you know, instead of picking up the phone, he should maybe just like pick up the next sketchbook and do something, you know, and do something wonderful again, you know, like his namesake, you know, on, on, on his, you know, on his company logo Tesla, you know, dream up some big wonderful ideas again, you know, the boring company, another classic example, I'm gonna tunnel under the earth and, and take away all the congestion and it's going to be automated highways under the ground. And in the end, it was just a tunnel that you drive through with flashing lights that would probably give you a headache, you know, and trigger off an epileptic fit and cause a crash.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  So, you know, sometimes he does something fantastic and, and then, you know, three out of four times, you know, he just, he just could, is a complete dick.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting thinking about people like that. I often think about the price that we need to pay to be the people that we admire. And, you know, if the byproduct of having democratized space travel and commercialized it so that people can go up and the future generations, you know, at these inflection points earlier in the development of technology, you are setting the tone so much more importantly than you would be down the line because you're essentially opening up different branches of potential futures, right, when you do this thing. And if the price that we need to pay is to have like the Donald Trump of tech

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  tweeting away, which is totally, and I, I think Elon's a, he's an interesting guy. I, I like the, the sort of Tony Stark, real world's crazy Tony Stark thing that we've got going on. It would be more optimal if he, he just had his company look after his Twitter account. But again, that's perhaps the price that we need to pay. The price that you need to pay to have the guy that thinks those things is also the fact that he's going to try stuff like putting a tunnel underneath LA that perhaps doesn't necessarily work. What about health? What's happening? What's the future of our health gonna look like?

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Which future of health? I mean, there's, there are two very divergent views in terms of health, which is, I think, coming back to the Elon conversation, there's people that want to progress and there's people that want to regress. And Elon's an interesting guy because he's one of the few people that is actually building, doing, taking risks, making new things. We're also quite associated with a whole lot of the really rich people who don't have a god or a meaning in their lives, that are wanting to live forever. So you've got people that are pushing for immortality, which would be, not, it's not real immortality, let's put it that way, but just trying to find ways, they want to get their consciousness or their essence to be passed down to the rest of humanity because they believe they are the super, sort of, uber mensia of the world, of our

• 48:29Speaker 02

  generation. But on the other hand, you've got people that are desperately wanting to shorten their lifespans. You see things like euthanasia on the app everywhere.

• 48:38Chris Williamson?

  Is this true? I haven't, I haven't been exposed to people wanting to shorten their lives.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  The euthanasia thing is huge.

• 48:45Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that people that are already dying though, right? They're not actually, they're not healthy people that are wanting to die.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Some of them are just old people.

• 48:52Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Like, we're tired now, we're done. So, and that's...

• 48:57Chris Williamson?

  Sick of this place. Elon, if Elon must tweets one more time, I swear to God.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  But I think that's quite natural. I think lots of people get tired after a while, especially if you are thinking that the future's not going to be any more exciting, or you could get sick, or that you're going to start declining. But there are definitely people out here that don't value any life at all, much less their own. I think that's the growing subtext of the apathy and of the sort of anti-growth, anti-progress narrative. It does spill over into that quite dramatically. And if you look at the sort of categories of where, where people are pushing for things like euthanasia to be, or like compassion is killing, whatever, there's different sort of legal categories, to be legalized. You can see those categories get broader and broader, not just for people that are, you know... Have terminal illnesses. I mean technically we all do, right? We're all mortal unless you try,

• 49:46Speaker 02

  try push for the digital immortality route on the other side, which seems to be the most likely way to do it. Of course, digital immortality comes with a hundred percent fatality rate upfront, but then your consciousness can be cloned and off you can go. That seems like the most likely way we're able to do this. Infinite life extension doesn't look like it's going to be achievable within our lifespans. That's not to say that it won't. But much like the, the issue with civilization ending events, like we were talking about earlier. Like one guy blowing up the species with a misplaced, you know, printing of some sort of smallpox virus in his home printer. You know, it, the odds on eventually compound against your favor, even if you're able to renew your physical body in terms of preventing illness, sooner or later, accidents or injury catch up with you.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  And, and that's the sort of threat that comes with trying to pursue immortality as, as health. But that is definitely the direction we're going to, where it's from a, from a sort of individual perspective, doing things that put you in the position of injury or illness gets more and more frowned upon. At the same time, healthcare costs increase because of course, everybody wants access to every sort of life extending treatment that exists for us, which puts huge pressure onto social security safety nets. On the other hand, you've got the sort of really, really wealthy people who are able to purchase all of these things and to postpone their lives as long as possible. Pouring huge and huge, huge amounts of R and D into these fields too. Actually doing quite interesting things with dogs, if you are a pet lover.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  They have making quite good progress on extending the life of your

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  How old can you get your dog to be?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  At the moment. Well, they're, they're busy messing around with it right now. So this is like a, there's quite a prominent company. I'm not going to mention names. It's attracting quite a lot of funding at the moment and they say they should be able to sort of extend your pet's lifespan for sort of twenty percent, even up to doubling it eventually. They're hoping to use the same technology on humans. So we look forward to a longer, much more expensive life with many, many, many more rules. And say what we are and are, are not allowed to do if we do want access to those, those life extending treatments. So it becomes a case of quality or quantity of life. How long would you like to live if you were never allowed another glass of wine? Another cigarette or you weren't ever allowed to drive in a car or go up to space? Because those are all things that could result in expensive insurance payouts for your, for your public or private sector insurer.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  So that's the sort of the sort of overview of healthcare, where we're trying to look now at life extension rather than just curing disease, but actually preventing. The prevention also comes with increased biosurveillance, increased biohacking if you're doing it yourself, but it means basically living your living your life, what you have of it around maintaining your health, which can become a bit obsessive for anyone that's understands things like eating disorders and exercise disorders. It's almost, it can take over your life. So I suppose that's a that's a sort of broad picture in terms of how we can, we can, we can kill ourselves by trying to keep ourselves alive or how far are we prepared to go in that pursuit.

• 52:43Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think about the fact that when your life is potentially infinite or is negligibly finite in terms of how long it goes away from you, you do do a cost benefit analysis on every action that you take and you're just going to end up potentially with an entire society of people that have got agoraphobia and they're unprepared to leave the house. Because at the moment, the likelihood of me being hit by a car versus the remaining 50 years of my life, I think, well, you know, it's all right, 50 years. But if you're thinking, okay, it's 50,000 years that you've potentially got, or 500 years, or, you know, even 150 years, well, I'm weighing this up against the, the scales are tilting now in a very interesting way.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  I'll catch up with you. Because it's everything, every potential life-ending injury, accident, illness, eventually becomes more probable, given a long enough timeline. So you have to become more and more obsessive about trying to prevent these things from happening to us. And that can be hugely mentally distressing, especially if you imagine you had been able to keep yourself alive for a couple of hundred years and then you sort of literally get like killed by a crow dropping out of the sky in a freak accident, right? You'd be quite, you'd be quite annoyed at that. It also makes you hugely, hugely paranoid. So, you know, the longer we extend our lifespans, the more afraid we get of death, on the one hand. On the other hand, you've got other people just want to opt out, that want the, want to take the early exit, which I do think is quite interesting in terms of our psyche.

• 54:07Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting, or it's interesting because you've got.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  You know, if you have the means, the financial means to say, I want to add another 100 years to my life, you know, you're going to get that treatment potentially upfront. So it's a war of cash and then you're going to feel, well, this investment has cost me a lot of money, so I'm going to have to protect that investment.

• 54:28Chris Williamson?

  Protect the investment, yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  And I'm going to stay inside. Or you get this situation where it's like immortality as a service, where you're paying a subscription fee to get your monthly jab. And if you can't afford the jab any longer, then essentially, you know, oh no, I'm going to lose the benefit of this healthy extended lifestyle and I'm going to die next week. So it's... And then what have you got to live for, for a start? I mean, let's put it this way, unless you are rich and have means, are you going to really fall back on the state pension if there is one at that point in time? Is the state going to be happy that you're going to live another 50 years and not actually contribute to society because you're claiming a pension of them? Or are they going to force you to work in your retirement age now, is now 130 and not 65 or 75?

• 55:13Speaker 00

  And if that's the kind of life that you're going to live forward to, then again, I'm booking a flight to Dignitas.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  What are your thoughts? What's been booked for you?

• 55:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. You've got to go off here.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  You missed your payment this month. Off you go.

• 55:27Chris Williamson?

  See you later on. Go through this tunnel. What are your thoughts on whether or not we're going to have a super intelligent, artificial general intelligence within the next 100 years, or by 2100?

• 55:41Speaker 02

  I would put them at the lower odds on that one. And I know I'm probably in the minority of people that do think in the future space. I'm not convinced that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that we can recreate. I know, once again, that doesn't put me necessarily with the majority of philosophers out there. But then again, I don't necessarily respect the majority of contemporary philosophers around these days, for better or for worse. And you get in trouble for saying such things. I think it's quite a huge assumption to believe that we are able to recreate that jump when we're not able to understand it. And we haven't seemed to come any closer to solving, not even all the soft problems of consciousness, let alone the hard ones.

• 56:22Chris Williamson?

  Do you need consciousness to have general intelligence?

• 56:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much. Eventually you would, because the thing with with general intelligence is would have to act like us. It would have to have a will. It wouldn't just be a program. So you could have a very, very complicated intelligence that's smarter than us in many, many domain functions. But in order for it to become a general intelligence, it requires a will, which means there would need to either have a will to to do good, to do bad, or to change the direction that it had been programmed in. In order for it to become general, it has to act independently from how it was programmed. So that goes way beyond complexity or to chaos theory into having something else. That is what real general intelligence is. To have domain-specific general intelligence, I think we're already there. If you pick any particular human function, we can program something to do it better, faster, smarter.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  You know, that's that's the that's the way it works. But at the same time, until that that intelligence is able to coalesce and to actually direct itself to choose to do things, which we don't even really understand how we do. We sort of have vague ideas, but not proper ideas. Then we're not going to make that leap. So whether we make that leap or not is about as as sort of plausible as to getting into the really big questions as to whether there's there's a god or gods or not, right? I mean, it's a very, very big assumption. These are the basic assumptions and questions of philosophy that the ancient Greeks have been debating, that we haven't really got much further than running around in circles over the the last few thousand years. I don't know if you agree, Theo. So I'd say there's a possibility, but I would put it in the pretty low odds.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, same. I'm in the same mind camps and camp regarding intelligence and the fact that, you know, AGI requires requires will, choice and spontaneity and creativity as well. So like real creativity, not programmed one.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  Beyond programming, right?

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And we're just not there yet. I think. We will never, we won't see just one all encompassing Skynet either. I mean, there are so many initiatives out there to race to create the first one. Anyway, what we're going to actually see is probably a few. If there are ever an emergent AGI or certainly domain specific AGIs or ones that coalesce like Bronwyn says, that creates, you know, that creates one but has specific elements of other domains, there's going to be several. I mean, you look at Facebook with that had M before, Google's AI assistant, you've got OpenAI doing stuff with GPT-3 and

• 58:56Speaker 00

  things like that, Alexa, Siri, they're all shades of something that's very weak at the moment. The same with Tesla's car, that's a domain specific intelligence that will get you from A to B as safely as possible, but it's not going to do your maths homework or complete a thesis or anything else like that, or draw a picture. But we will see, I think, shades of AGI and there will be more than one. There's not going to be a Skynet that rules everything. There will be more than one. And if there ever were a real AGI to emerge by 2100 and if there ever were one or more AGI, that's when I think things might get interesting.

• 59:41Chris Williamson?

  That's when Nick Bostrom needs to be raised from wherever he is buried in Oxford in 2100. And like, look, Nick, we really, we really need you, really need your back, mate. So neither of you two believe that consciousness comes along for the ride with information processing then? That it's not just a case of scaling up the amount of information processing? There is something else in there, some sort of special something that layers on top?

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean-

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  It's something we don't understand. If we don't understand it, we can't program it. So, you know, to think that that magically appears, that it emerges without being programmed into something that has been programmed and built from us from scratch, that requires a leap of faith or belief or basically sort of belief in something that you cannot prove. So, which is basically the same thing as trying to say that you believe in a god, right? That's believing something that cannot be proved because we don't know what it is. We can only program what we know how to program. We can get things to do things faster than us, smarter than us. We can combine functions, but- In order to try and imagine that technology will do something that hasn't actually been built to do, I think puts quite probably too much faith in our own ability, right?

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  That is a big logical step, right? To take it from what we're doing at the moment, which is superhuman to super intelligent.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's not to say that machines won't be smarter than us to be able to make better decisions than us, but to actually think of having a general intelligence is quite a specific claim that I'm not convinced that we're there. I don't think we know enough to program that. I don't think that it's like alchemy, right? You can think that you can combine all the elements, but it doesn't spontaneously turn into gold. You're kind of missing that, that last step. We've got everything together. It's sort of almost like the cargo cult, right? You know, sort of build it and it will come.

• 1:01:26Chris Williamson?

  What do you think?

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Of course, I know computer scientists are going to disparage us hugely from this.

• 1:01:35Chris Williamson?

  You're just destroying their entire industry. Yeah, exactly. What are your thoughts on whether or not the human race reaches its full civilizational potential? I'm big into existential risk and if superintelligent AGI, a misaligned one, Stuart Russell's human compatible, he doesn't need to worry and Toby Ord, he doesn't need to worry, at least for a little bit of his work, and Nick Bostrom wrote superintelligence, basically just as a fiction book for us all to have a look at. If that's potentially out the window, and that's off the table at least with regards to a risk, what are your confidences that we end up, let's say, colonizing the galaxy before we wipe our race out? You think it's going to happen?

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  Well, I suppose that depends on how deep you mean by colonization. I think we're going to keep on pushing until we do get to Mars and get to the moon. I'm not sure how happy we'll be there because, I mean, as much as we are pessimistic about the Earth's own prospects, I think it's still nicer to live in Siberia than it would be to live on Mars, from the pictures I've seen anyway. You know how happy we will be there and if it takes into being a sort of a thriving community is of course a different question. And a lot of the reasons why people are pushing for sort of intergalactic settlement is because of worries over sort of Earth's sustainability. But if our problems change from having too many people to having too few people before we actually get those sort of colonies started, that becomes a very, very different question.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  I think we sort of have to bear that in mind in that it looks like our population curve is going to start bending over faster than we would have initially thought. And then, of course, you're not sort of meeting your population replacement rates. That becomes quite a different existential challenge for humanity. When you look at the far enough timelines, because you're talking about intergalactic settlements, you're talking after many, many generations. And if over that time, your population has shrunk, those whole sort of challenges change. I think bigger risks to our sort of flourishing and more realistic risks, in fact, that I think that are almost inevitable as opposed to general intelligence, which is, which is hypothetical, it is something we can consider, it's a possibility, it won't rule it out, but it's not sort of inevitable, the way I see it right now.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  I think that is almost inevitable that we are going to embark, in fact, we already have, on intelligent design, which is also written about in the book there in Craig's chapter with the sort of homo or geritus, I think he called it, he made it up himself, that word, so I can pronounce it over. He just, he looked in, looked in a Latin sort of dictionary and picked, picked it out. The whole thing of intelligent design is happening and that is going to accelerate our fulfillment as species or accelerate our demise, depending on how we deal with that sort of post-human transition. And that is, I think, something that I'm much more interested in than AGI as a separate entity, rather than combining of humanity with technology from a biological perspective and from a hardware perspective. All of those technologies are converging at the same time.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  And I'm probably more certain that we'll either sort of, you know, either augment our own intelligence to the point where we become sort of human general intelligence before we actually create an artificial general intelligence. And that's just as dangerous. So I know, once again, a lot of people would, would disagree with that race as to whether humans become too smart for our own good or too smart for what is currently the human species, we actually sort of transcend that, that sort of level up as a species. I think we'll probably do that before sort of artificial intelligence spontaneously generates its own consciousness and will.

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Theo, what do you reckon? Are we gonna do it?

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  I'll probably get wiped out by another pandemic, probably.

• 1:05:12Chris Williamson?

  You think?

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  The way things are headed.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, or another war. I mean...

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  That's mutually exclusive, right? There's enough mutually exclusive concepts.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  I mean, if you're talking about the flourishing of humanity across the solar system and things like that, I mean, like you say, we'll probably get to a stage where we will colonize or certainly set foot and set something up on Mars and the moon as the most, I guess, easiest habitable options. Getting further is gonna take us a hell of a long time, I think, given the resources and the constraints and again, all the risks associated with space travel. And we're just not there yet with other means of space travel or certainly safer means and faster means as well. So, you know, we have a long way to go, certainly maybe 500, a thousand years, to try and imagine, are we actually gonna make it that far?

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Or will we cause something, again, whether it's a war on Earth or whether it's even our first interplanetary war where the Martian colonies think, "We don't want to be part of your disgusting mess anymore." And the Earth people say, or the Terrans say, "No, you must come under our rule once more."

• 1:06:25Chris Williamson?

  You've been watching too much of the Expanse again, haven't you, Theo?

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  The Herodotate independence, they haven't even got there yet. I mean, right, the Martian constitution, they've declared independence from you. And it's very equitable, it's super work, okay?

• 1:06:38Chris Williamson?

  Is that a thing? They've got a constitution for Mars?

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Martian constitution is published. You can go look that up, yeah.

• 1:06:44Chris Williamson?

  Who wrote that?

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  It's like, it puts the South African constitution to shame. It's very happily written.

• 1:06:52Chris Williamson?

  Who created it?

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  You know that we're gonna send that whole Mars colony? So I know about it from Adriana Murray, who was one of the chosen astronauts, yeah.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  They were all, it was all part of that Mars one thing that it came out of. I don't think Mars one exists anymore, but.

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  No, it doesn't. No, the crowdfunding failed spectacularly, didn't it?

• 1:07:13Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I've been learning a little bit about astro-politics, about the politics of space, who owns areas of space, who owns the moon, who owns Mars? That's just.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  No one owns anything, possession in that case. I think it's.

• 1:07:25Chris Williamson?

  First come, first served. First come, first served. Yeah, exactly. You put your hand on it.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  You can't claim like indigenous populations, you know.

• 1:07:33Chris Williamson?

  All these microbes that say that they were here first.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Bring your own microbes.

• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

  Given, given the, how would you say, the

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  overbearing positive nature of most of futurism, as far as I get to see, right? The, the articles that are written and stuff like that. How are, how are the things that you guys talk about? How is your narrative received generally among the futurist community? Because I imagine that it must be this hyper realism, perhaps where you're saying, what about this? And wait, what about that? I imagine it must feel like someone's coming in and pissing on their party a little bit.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Well, I think you've got to understand there's different groups of futurists. Academic futurism is hugely pessimistic. They are too pessimistic. That's what I was saying right at the beginning. Those views are very binary. Academic futurism is obsessed with climate change and degrowth. They're all pushing for sort of like fully automated, very lower middle class communism as a solution to sort of, you know, climate change and sustainability, which is a, a very sort of European view on the future. I probably shouldn't say that, but that's kind of the perspective I get. It's, it matches very neatly with the sort of EU sort of development goals. It's very hard to separate academic futurism from the EU's plans for the future. And it's sustainability orientated and smaller, not larger. And ride a bike, don't take a rocket, right?

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  So that's, that's the, that's the one side of futurism. And I, I do have a degree in futurism. So I kind of understand what I'm talking about there. The other side is of course the sort of more sort of techno-futurism realm, which I know Theo has sort of skirts it around, which is the tech evangelists and the hugely optimistic ones. But again, they're selling stuff. So there's a huge amount of cynicism there. So they might find us a bit annoying, but only in that we're sort of messing up their marketing plans. Not that we're really challenging their ideas.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  So yeah, I suppose I suppose be somewhere in the middle and like anyone that's kind of in the middle, you don't tend to be very popular with your peers. But we have found with this particular book that because we're talking like actual human beings, we're not trying to talk down to people about these ideas. It's been very well received by by people that don't have a formal or at least a paid background in futurism, but aren't don't have a vested monetary interest in pushing a particular view.

• 1:09:56Chris Williamson?

  It's an interesting one. It's an interesting one to think about the potentials for our future and how many biases and agendas different people are pushing when they're talking about it. I mean, if there's one thing.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  The future, it always comes with an agenda and it's and you have to see past that because people, the best thinkers in the world confuse us because the best people are describing the world as it is from a completely positive or deterministic perspective are also generally the best thinkers and the best talkers, which means they are very persuasive when it comes to slipping in, they are more normative ideas. And that's where people get the will pulled over their eyes because we listen to someone, we know they write about describing the world as it is. And when they subtly start leading us by the noses to what should be, talking about instead of what is into what should be, we end up being sort of drawn along into the inevitability of these plans. And that nobody's making it clear where they stop

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  from describing into prescribing what should happen. Everyone is slightly disingenuous about that. Everyone's selling something, a policy, an election, a product. And you have to sort of separate that from that. So just a keynote, right? I mean, of course, it's easy to sell keynotes if you're talking about, yeah, it's technology exponential curves. I mean, you know, this theory, I know this. We have to separate the the description and the the reality from from the sales pitch. And people have to question that, otherwise you do get sucked in.

• 1:11:23Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Theo Priestley and Bronwyn Williams, ladies and gentlemen, The Future Starts Now, expert insights into the future of business, technology and society will be linked in the show notes below. Where else should people go if they want to check out your stuff?

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  Well, I'm on LinkedIn or Twitter mostly. T Priestley, with all the vowels removed because I'm so hip and trendy like every startup these days. Or Theo Priestley on LinkedIn. Not too far behind every meme, I suppose.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm also likewise easiest to find on Twitter or LinkedIn, @BarnmanWilliams on both. Come and fight with me about consciousness and artificial general intelligence over there. I'm sure intelligent listeners of this show would have something to say, but that's the point. We invite you to disagree with us. Please disagree with us. Don't take anything we say as gospel.

• 1:12:16Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Guys, thank you so much for today.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  Thank you.