00:06:53.040But I felt that a purely political analysis was not enough.
00:07:02.020Because yes, there's problems with the politics behind these projects of the tech elite, but also their ideas about the future just don't work, not just politically and sociologically, but also technologically and scientifically.
00:07:17.380And when I thought about that, I realized, okay, you know, that, that means that there's a place that I could make a contribution here. And that contribution would have to come from a science journalist.
00:07:32.780and so I pitched the book and started working on it in 2020 when of course nothing else was going
00:07:39.640on that was distracting or you know made it difficult to get the writing done uh and went
00:07:46.340down a couple of blind alleys and eventually had to sort of restructure the book and rethink the
00:07:52.520book, but by late 2022, um, I was like really solidly into it and had a good idea of exactly
00:08:01.580what the book was and where it was going. And of course, by that point, all sorts of other things
00:08:05.860that were relevant to the book had happened. ChatGPT had just come out. Uh, Sam Bankman
00:08:10.200freed had risen and fallen. Um, and that all happened while I was working on the book. So
00:08:15.940that made things interesting. But I definitely felt at various points, like, I was not the right
00:08:27.740person to write the book. I definitely felt like, oh, you know, what am I doing? I'm not a tech
00:08:34.540journalist. What's going, you know, how did I get myself into this mess? And then as I got deeper
00:08:41.040into the work, I realized, no, it really does need to be a science journalist, not only because
00:08:45.420it needs to be somebody who, you know, whose bread and butter is explaining these concepts
00:08:51.060in a way that, that is accessible, these like, you know, abstrue scientific concepts.
00:08:58.020But also so many tech journalists have either by, you know, preference or by necessity become
00:09:08.240a kind of, you know, are engaged in a kind of access journalism and the access journalism
00:09:15.400is when you essentially trade away your ability to criticize the powerful in exchange for access
00:09:21.900to them so you can interview them. And there is definitely a place. I don't like access
00:09:29.260journalism. I think access journalism is really dangerous thing. There is a place for merely
00:09:35.260interviewing the powerful in order to allow other people who don't have access to criticize them or
00:09:42.840critique them or respond to what they have to say, but it can't be the entire field.
00:09:48.900And unfortunately, access journalism has eaten, uh, or the, that style has eaten tech journalism.
00:09:57.560And, and so nearly all tech journalists, uh, hashtag not all tech journalists, uh, are
00:10:04.120engaged in access journalism primarily or entirely.
00:10:07.360And, you know, you, again, you can understand why, right?
00:10:11.160Uh, it's, if you don't have access to the powerful and the wealthy in the industry and
00:10:18.600you are, I don't know, a tech beat journalist for a major newspaper or magazine, then that
00:10:24.180can make it really hard to do your job.
00:10:26.500Uh, but I don't have that restriction.
00:10:29.880I can say what I like because if I don't have access to Sam Altman, well, I never had access
00:10:36.440to sam altman and i don't have uh you know salary job at a newspaper to worry about keeping and if i
00:10:44.580did it would be on a science beat not a tech beat and so that made it easier for me to say what i
00:10:51.860wanted to say uh without being worried that i would get fired by my boss because i'm my boss
00:10:57.600uh which you know that's one of its perks it's uh its downside is you know i don't have a salary
00:11:04.580i have to hustle but um but uh once i sort of got my head around that that made it easier to
00:11:13.860actually engage in the writing um and i had to read an awful lot of really awful things written
00:11:22.700by awful people uh in order to do the research for the book uh but i i i made it through mostly
00:11:31.040by spending a lot of time outdoors in, in the writing of it, uh, and trying to connect with
00:11:36.940nature, uh, in a way that the people I was writing about, um, don't, uh, so yeah, I,
00:11:46.720I could go on and on and get more and more self-indulgent about a behind the scenes look
00:11:51.020at the writing of the book, but instead I think I'm going to hand it back to Jack, uh,
00:12:29.560But it doesn't just do what I think some science writers do, which is to say, okay, I just need to stick to the science, right?
00:12:37.180So I imagine there's all sorts of choices that you're making in your critique about how much this is a critique, you know, in terms of it'll never work versus it's a bad idea versus this is a political project disguised as a scientific one.
00:12:52.820And you're trying to balance those sorts of things.
00:20:31.020Yeah, about what tech calls thinking about how, you know, Silicon Valley's intentional ignorance of its own history is behind a lot of this.
00:20:39.200And, you know, is a way for Silicon Valley to say that previous hype doesn't apply, previous disappointments don't apply because this time it's different.
00:20:50.300I mean, is it just as much, is it just a matter of sort of forcing history onto these people?
00:20:56.420Is there a way to do it or can history be a powerful mode of critique itself?
00:21:01.260I mean, the standard joke that I tell about this is that, you know, these tech elites are ignorant of history and the good news for them is that there's no famous sayings about what happens to people who are ignorant of history.
00:21:26.780And so then the problem is that we need to, you know, keep them from carrying the rest of us along with them in their exercise to repeat history.
00:21:35.440And I know that the second time it's supposed to be farce, but it doesn't feel like a farce when you're in it.
00:21:41.100Um, I just, I think that there is probably not a way to get someone to take something
00:21:54.700seriously that they don't already take seriously once they have billions of dollars.
00:21:59.500I think that billions of dollars make it in like almost impossible for you to listen in
00:22:05.240any meaningful way. And so I don't actually have much hope of getting the tech billionaires to,
00:22:13.240you know, think critically about history or whatnot. I don't think that's the way out of
00:22:16.300this. I think that the solution is to point out the history to everyone else to try to sap some
00:22:24.940of the public power away from these billionaires, right? Because yes, they have many sources of
00:22:31.400power. Some of it's the money. Some of it's the political power. But some of it is the fact that0.88
00:22:36.660they are taken seriously in the public sphere. I think that Elon Musk should be seen as a rich
00:22:42.880buffoon because he is. Instead, he's treated as some kind of, you know, even by his political0.84
00:22:50.560opponents, he's treated as some kind of philosopher king whose utterances are to be taken seriously.
00:22:55.360uh he he is not a serious person and uh you know like when when someone interviews jeff bezos
00:23:04.880and bezos says oh you know you're not going to solve any problems by uh by by taxing billionaires
00:23:11.720that's not going to put more you know food on people's plates i mean we have history to show
00:23:17.140that that's just not true he's just wrong and yet people cite that and they're like well bezos said
00:23:21.820this and like, yeah, Bezos did say it. So, you know, like, uh, you know, like this dude on the
00:23:29.780street says something different to, you know, why should we listen to Bezos versus this other guy?
00:23:35.480Like, I don't, I mean, history also shows us what happens when we pay too much attention to0.99
00:23:43.740utterances from very wealthy, very foolish people. Um, so yeah, I mean, I, I think that0.94
00:23:51.360history, I think that history is actually very powerful as an antidote to the public
00:23:59.480adulation of billionaires. Um, and, and I also think it's a powerful antidote to the terror
00:24:06.580of living through the democratic erosion that we have going on right now. I think that one of the,
00:24:13.480uh one of the intended effects of these sort of flooding the zone with with propaganda and0.98
00:24:23.300bullshit that we are seeing from people like trump and his autocratic ilk around the world0.61
00:24:29.180um is this feeling of of rootlessness in history like the the there's no historical comparison to1.00
00:24:38.700what we're going through right now and the future is completely unknown we're just stuck in an
00:24:42.280eternal present of responding to what's going on. First of all, you can't just be stuck in
00:24:47.420responding to what's going on because then you lose all initiative. You need to take it back.
00:24:51.780And second, of course, there are historical parallels to what's going on. We have been
00:24:55.080here before and we will probably be here again. This is an ongoing fight and we have to find our
00:25:01.520way out of it. And history provides a guide to that. Yeah. I mean, that's getting at something
00:25:05.700else that sort of came out so clearly in your stories about, you know, what we might call
00:25:12.880the singularitarians, you know, the exponentialists, these folks who, you know, their version of
00:25:18.440the future, which is a sort of the accelerationist version of the future, that is also sort of
00:25:24.460hyper-determined, right, and presented as sort of inevitable, and also quite, you know, as in
00:25:34.120the existential risk sort of story it's quite depressing profoundly depressing um and very
00:25:40.100very hard for people to extract sort of hope from but the thing that that sort of really struck me
00:25:46.740and i wonder what you think of this contradiction is that the people that are telling this story
00:25:50.820about inevitability right would also want us to appreciate their particular type of genius
00:49:56.960I mean, this is why the hype about AI data centers in space is happening is because they're having trouble building data centers here on Earth and they'll say, oh, yeah, energy is cheaper and blah, blah, blah, blah. There's no economic case for building data centers in space. Of course, there isn't. There's there's you know, it's there's not even really a physics case for being, you know, something that we could reasonably do.
00:50:17.180So, you know, every case that you could do it has to assume that SpaceX's Starship V3 is going to not only work, but work better than it's supposed to.
00:50:32.000And they've yet to be able to get that one off the launch pad successfully.
00:50:36.980uh anyway um so so i think that a lot of it is really about not being able to build the data
00:50:44.520centers they want to build here on earth because of political resistance um and it's fascinating
00:50:49.140isn't it that space becomes the solution to politics has been for decades it's like oh yeah
00:50:54.820i mean the anything they see it as a place yeah exactly anything's possible in space they see it
00:50:59.400as a space um they see space as a place that's free of politics and again you know forgetting
00:51:06.140that politics is something that happens once you've got more than one person involved so let
00:51:09.920me let me come to a question that a couple of questions actually which are about effective
00:51:15.140altruism so you do a really interesting discussion of effective altruism and i think
00:51:20.020like a lot of educators at especially science universities we have encountered students with
00:51:27.660interests in effective altruism i think it's particularly notable for us because a lot of us
00:51:32.780here we teach ethics um we understand the sort of you know the history of ethics and the tenets of
00:51:40.420ethics and so and i think one of the other questions gets to this is like was there a gap
00:51:46.580or were we missing something effective altruism has taken over a lot of young students
00:51:53.640minds in a really interesting interesting way and i think um i think we didn't quite
00:52:00.940get the scale of it um what what is it to i mean in the words of the way the question is is put
00:52:09.020here it's it's brilliantly concise what is it about effective altruism that is so attractive
00:52:13.200to young people yeah oh it's such a good question um i i mean there's a few things right i think
00:52:20.880that the big one is that it provides a sense of purpose right if you are looking for a way
00:52:55.280to making the world a better place with math.
00:52:59.180And that's a pretty appealing pitch if you are that kind of young person.
00:53:06.120And then another thing that makes it appealing, I think, especially to a lot of its adherence, again, here in the U.S., I don't think this is as much of a thing in the U.K., but a lot of the people who are really into effective altruism here in the U.S.
00:53:20.500come from highly religious backgrounds that they have left, like various strains of
00:53:29.060fundamentalist or orthodox Christianity or other religions. And when you do that,
00:53:36.140you are essentially raised with this sense of purpose. And then you leave that community for
00:53:42.960many of these young people because they get into science and technology and realize that,
00:54:52.220Um, and, and I think that that struggle exists even in secular societies like the UK, uh,
00:55:00.320because it's, it's sort of a, a, a societal struggle, um, in, in the world.
00:55:07.920it's, it's bigger than just, you know, uh, one person's life or one country's level of
00:55:14.380religiosity. This is, this is a thing that I think, um, that like European culture has been
00:55:19.860struggling with for quite some time. Um, and so I think a sense of purpose, especially when you've
00:55:27.020got a world filled with manifest problems, like climate change, inequality, you name it. Um,
00:55:34.120um and uh and then that brings me to another thing which is unfortunately the leaders of
00:55:41.240the community are pretty slick about selling it um and they're interested in selling it in a way
00:55:45.680that say like i'm not aware of anybody who is out there acting as like uh you know uh a marketing
00:55:56.880department for say Kantian ethics or virtue ethics. Um, uh, whereas, whereas it turns out
00:56:06.880this particular kind of utilitarianism has people in it who are saying things like, oh, well, you
00:56:14.320know, um, the gateway is caring about climate change or caring about nuclear war. And then we
00:56:20.660use that to get people to worry about the AI apocalypse. And you've got multiple leaders in
00:56:26.820the effective altruism community saying things like that. People like Yon Talin, a tech billionaire,
00:56:32.740and Will McCaskill, philosopher at Oxford, have both said things like that.
00:56:37.680Yeah. To the point that you were making about nihilism and I guess the risk that a lot of us
00:56:47.440would detect which is saying critical things about science and technology right when these
00:56:55.580futures are so are presented as so deterministic um and this goes to the to the next question on
00:57:02.960the on the list here right how do we criticize critically analyze those those ideas um without
00:57:12.540appearing you know pessimistic nihilistic um despairing you know when it when it seems like
00:57:21.380you know silicon valley has owned owned the future i mean do you have a either sort of
00:57:27.640is there a conceptual point there or is it a sort of tactical one about saying
00:57:31.420no they're all you know here are some really interesting areas of science technology that
00:57:35.600are being neglected for example yeah oh god i love this question this is something i've been
00:57:40.560thinking about a lot lately. Um, and it's something I was thinking about a lot while
00:57:44.140I was writing the book. I mean, this is, you know, one of the, one of the many strange
00:57:50.480things that happen when you're, when you're writing a book is, is you, you sort of realize
00:57:55.560where you want to go before you figure out how you want to get there. I knew that the
00:57:59.700last sentence of the book had to be the future is open. Um, but I wasn't sure how to get
00:58:07.500there. And so for a while I was thinking, okay, the last section of the last chapter is going to
00:58:13.360have to be me doing more than just criticizing. I'm going to have to actually, you know, put
00:58:19.860forward a positive vision of what I want the world to be like. That's sort of comprehensive
00:58:25.540in the same way that these, you know, tech utopians are, are putting forward. And I kept
00:58:34.160trying to do that and kept completely failing. And then I came across, uh, an essay by one of
00:58:41.100my favorite writers, George Orwell, where he said, you know, um, and this is the quote that
00:58:47.520I put into the end of the book at my editor's suggestion. He said something to the effect of
00:58:51.840like, you know, we shouldn't be trying to envision a full blown utopia. We should just be thinking
00:58:57.900about, you know, these are the directions that we want to move in, but the destination is not
00:59:02.000known um because because utopia is not the kind of thing that we can realistically envision
00:59:08.260and i maybe he's he's not right for everybody but he's certainly right for me i'm no good at
00:59:14.100realistically envisioning a full-blown utopia um nor is mark zuckerberg it seems yeah yes exactly
00:59:21.640um and and i also think it's suggestive that you know the word utopia doesn't mean a perfect place
00:59:27.280it means no place, right? Um, place that doesn't exist. Uh, but, um, I think, you know, another
00:59:37.160reason I love this question is that, you know, people, people ask me, well, you seem like such
00:59:41.440a curmudgeon. You're so down on so much technology. Um, but I also, I, I like to think that I actually
00:59:47.720have a pretty sunny personality. And so maybe part of the answer is you do it with a smile on your
00:59:51.760face, but that's not the whole thing, right? Because there are technologies that I'm excited
00:59:55.680about. Um, and some of them are technologies that are under attack, right? Like I'm so excited. So,
01:00:02.520so, so excited about MRNA vaccines. Um, and it is terrifying to see them under attack by the
01:00:11.320current administration here in the U S. Um, there are also social technologies that I'm really
01:00:16.580excited about, which are also under attack. Like I think foreign aid is great. I'm a big fan of
01:00:22.860foreign aid uh and uh and of course that's under attack as well um i think that um
01:00:32.620you know i i think that there's all sorts of very interesting technology some of which we
01:00:40.920already know about and some of which we we won't know until it shows up that that are that's
01:00:45.140probably coming down the pike. Um, and I don't think I am a bit of a Luddite. Um, but I, I think0.97
01:00:52.680that technology of course has a role to play. I mean, the technology that I'm maybe most excited
01:00:57.560about is the, you know, massive, um, crash in prices of, uh, green energy, right? Solar cells
01:01:08.360are so much more effective and less expensive than they used to be. This is fantastic. This
01:01:12.580is the best news ever um which is one of the reasons why it's so rich when people say oh you
01:01:18.720know we're going to use ai to solve climate change man we don't need ai to solve climate change we
01:01:23.280know what we need to do to solve climate change um we just aren't doing it and that's a political
01:01:28.080problem not a scientific or technological one um i mean yes there's more technologies that we could
01:01:33.920create that would make it easier to deal with the climate crisis but it's not the primary barrier
01:01:38.520to the problem anymore yeah um i do think that one of the problems that i've i've run into and
01:01:47.080that we as a society have is that um these ideas about the future many of them didn't come from
01:01:54.980the tech billionaires the tech billionaires are pretty unimaginative they mostly just stole ideas
01:01:58.800that were already out there like space colonization like the singularity like agi right um and and
01:02:05.560And part of the reason these ideas have such traction is not just that the tech billionaires are pouring so much money into it, but also that they are latching on to ideas that already had a lot of cultural purchase.
01:02:22.040And a lot of that is due to, you know, beloved genre, science fiction that I just am a complete sci-fi junkie, as I say in the book.
01:02:32.600um and so i think part of our part of what we need to do is we need science fiction to
01:02:39.080be doing more to help us think about what different futures could be like even though
01:02:46.300science fiction is not really about what the future could be like um and there's a lot of
01:02:52.220great science fiction that does that it's just not the sci-fi that these billionaires are paying
01:02:55.840attention to uh and i also think that you know a lot of this a lot of this sort of emotional reaction
01:03:07.000is what happens when you try to push people to kind of speed run the um the journey that i
01:03:18.420describe myself going through over the course of you know years at the end of the book of like i
01:03:22.940used to really believe that space was the future. And then it took me many years to get to a place
01:03:28.340where I realized it wasn't. And then I go to an auditorium and get up in front of a group of
01:03:32.920people and tell them space is not the place. And there are people there who haven't gone through
01:03:38.040that journey yet and who get very upset that I'm pushing them to do that quickly. But I think that
01:03:46.260That just means that we have to not just be looking at the facts, but looking at the emotions
01:03:53.580that come along with this and say, look, you know, I understand that this is something
01:03:57.340that you care about, something that you want.
01:04:00.800Um, and I'm here to tell you that that is a false promise that you've been lied to that,
01:04:10.200um, that, you know, we need to build realistic futures and that's not one of them.
01:04:16.260uh and and i think that couching it that way makes it a less bitter pill to swallow
01:04:23.480yeah yeah um so final one final question um about you know about being a science writer
01:04:33.560um we've got a couple of questions here one is about you know civility and politeness and
01:04:42.040the sort of language of science certainly in britain maybe globally is is quite a sort of
01:04:48.380polite one so maybe you know calling people out is something that a lot of scientists and science
01:04:54.500writers are um unwilling or unable to to do and then the second one is about how your
01:05:01.500writing has changed after this book or the response to to the book so just say say a bit
01:05:08.980about you know the sort of about tone um about types of engagement politeness that sort of thing
01:05:17.440ah that's hard i'm finding myself thinking about a play that i like a very famous play
01:05:25.300crucible by arthur miller um there's a scene toward the end of the play where um the the
01:05:32.580main character um whose name i'm blanking on because of course i am um uh john proctor there
01:05:40.080we go john proctor is asked to um sign a false confession and he's told you sign this false
01:05:47.040confession everything's going to be fine you'll be fine you you get to walk off with your life
01:05:52.600and he says he'll do it and then at the last minute he rips it up instead and you know we
01:05:58.520can debate whether or not that was the right call but when he's asked why did you do that
01:06:02.200he says because i have to sign my name to this because it is my name because i cannot have
01:06:07.900another in this life um and you know whether or not that was a foolish thing to do whether or not
01:06:16.620uh you know it's okay to sign a false confession in order to save your own life and then maybe you
01:06:20.960fight the regime that's forcing you to do that afterwards so we can put that aside but i i think
01:06:25.960it's actually a very nice encapsulation of the idea of integrity um that you have one name that
01:06:33.480you are given in this life and what you sign it to what you put it on is something that you get
01:06:38.540to make choices about and it's one of the few things that you get to make choices about i think
01:06:42.200a lot of things in our lives we are not things that we determine they're determined by you know
01:06:48.000giant historical and and physical forces that are larger than we are um societal forces um but
01:06:54.320i try to conduct myself that way and i think that one of the nice things about writing books is
01:07:02.800your name is right there on the cover and i don't mean that's nice in an egotistical way although i
01:07:08.440you know there's a bit of an ego boost um i mean like it keeps you honest when you're writing the
01:07:14.160book you know you can think oh you know well maybe that's good enough and they're like wait
01:07:18.020my name's going to be on this hold on a second um and and people pay attention to the name on
01:07:25.640the cover of a book i think much more than they pay attention to a byline in a story i think a
01:07:29.900lot of people don't even really look at bylines unfortunately um and and that brings me back to
01:07:39.280the question right because i i feel like an important part of conducting yourself with that
01:07:45.040kind of integrity is remembering that, you know, praise for something doesn't mean anything unless
01:07:50.800you're also willing to call things out when you see problems with stuff. If you just always offer
01:07:57.800praise, then what does it mean? Like I have been lucky enough to get many lovely reviews of my,
01:08:04.760of my books. Um, but the ones that mean the most to me come from people who I know are also willing
01:08:09.640to pan books because i know that they wouldn't just say that um they're saying it because they
01:08:15.240mean it um and one of the ways that i have been trying to take this sort of thing to heart since
01:08:26.660writing this book is i've been asked to review some books and they've been bad books and i've
01:08:31.540called them out. So that's one answer. I think, how has my writing changed? How has my writing
01:08:44.160changed since I finished writing this book? I'm going to give the same answer that a famous
01:08:51.420historian whose name I don't remember gave when asked about the effects of the French Revolution.
01:08:55.580it's too soon to tell um i don't know ask me that again in 10 years um i just finished writing it a
01:09:04.280couple years ago it's just too soon to tell um you know or at least ask me after i finish the
01:09:09.580next book whatever that is uh or if and when that happens i don't know um but yeah i don't know um
01:09:16.920i guess it's the really only honest answer i can give but i do think that we need to be willing to
01:09:21.020criticize publicly, even, even other journalists, if they do something that is crap, we need to be0.91
01:09:30.000willing to say that. I mean, something, this is not a change from after this book. Cause I was0.77
01:09:34.560doing this before I wrote the book too. I remember on one of the most important lessons that I have
01:09:40.300learned as a science journalist is something that I learned in a fit of peak. Uh, I saw a bunch of
01:09:46.280people writing about something that i felt strongly was bullshit um this this you know new framework
01:09:53.880for a theory of everything that was coming from steven wolfram about five six years ago it was0.93
01:09:59.140six years ago it was 2020 it was during the pandemic um yeah it was early on in lockdown
01:10:04.560actually uh and i saw coverage of it that i really thought was just too mealy-mouthed and
01:10:09.380and engaging in false balance um false balance is one of those terms that i just try to like
01:10:16.280always keep in mind when I'm thinking about how to write about things.
01:10:19.220I don't want to engage in false balance.
01:10:21.400I want to, you know, as the saying goes, as a journalist,
01:10:25.560we need to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.