00:02:54.640Yeah. I never judge anyone for not having read my work because I have a stack of books,
00:02:59.860including by friends, that I have yet to get to. So there's a lot out there.
00:03:04.060Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I feel like there are people out in the world who do judge their colleagues and friends for not reading their books. And I don't like those people and I don't want to be one of those people.
00:03:19.460So yeah, the AI mirror grew out of some lectures I started doing all the way back in 2019, where I was trying to explain to lay audiences. This was back in Silicon Valley, where I was working for almost 20 years before I came to Scotland.
00:03:33.060And I was speaking to a lot of audiences that were kind of steeped in Silicon Valley culture and the assumptions about artificial intelligence that we've been carrying with us since the start of the field, you know, 75 years ago.
00:03:50.020And a lot of those assumptions and a lot of that culture reinforces metaphors for AI that are really unhelpful.
00:03:57.920The most influential, of course, and seemingly obvious one is the metaphor of a mind.
00:04:03.940But what I'm arguing in the book is that that's actually a pretty terrible metaphor for understanding what artificial intelligence as a real commercial product in the world, not as an idea or a trope in science fiction.
00:04:18.040But the idea that these are machine minds is actually deeply misleading.
00:04:21.020And so I started looking for other metaphors to describe how to understand these technologies.
00:04:28.960And back in 2019, I was working with several metaphors at once.
00:04:33.020So one of my metaphors was the idea of AI as a prosthetic, something that can kind of extend human capabilities, but not replace the person.
00:04:41.900Another was the idea of AI as an accelerant.
00:04:45.800So my slides had an image of a gasoline can.
00:04:48.560The idea is that whatever you add AI to, you're likely to accelerate the dynamics that are already there, which means, for example, if you add this kind of AI to a world that has already a lot of racial or gender bias, you're going to accelerate that.
00:05:04.200If you add this kind of AI to a world with a lot of economic and political inequality, you're probably going to accelerate that.
00:05:10.880And the third metaphor that I had was the idea of AI as a mirror, that it doesn't actually have the properties of a mind. It's rather a reflection of data extracted from our minds. And it's really important then to understand the distinction between the reflection and the thing it reflects.
00:05:32.260So what I decided in 2024 was to focus the book on that metaphor alone, because that turned out to be the one that resonated with audiences most and helped them really understand these technologies in a way that countered a lot of the misleading narratives from AI companies in particular.
00:05:51.760And so the idea is also that mirrors aren't always faithful. They can be distorted. They can magnify certain things and occlude other things. So I drew on a lot of different optical properties of mirrors to try to tell stories about AI, including, for example, the idea that mirrors collect light that has already, in a sense, been emitted. And so they reflect the past, literally.
00:06:18.160That's why our mirrors on giant telescopes in space collect light from the early beginnings of the universe, right?
00:06:25.880Because the light has to travel so far to get to the mirror surface.
00:06:28.940Well, there's an interesting fact about AI mirrors as well, which is that they only reflect the data that we've already generated.
00:06:35.900And they reflect the patterns in that data that are most common historically.
00:06:39.320So they tend actually to bring the past forward and present it as the future, which is really problematic when you actually need to grow and change and do things differently.
00:07:22.000And, of course, mirrors have, like, weird optical properties and can distort things, not just fun house mirrors, but, you know, magnifying and, you know, convex and concave mirrors.
00:07:34.220But also just from the perspective of someone who still lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and at some point I'm going to want to know when and how you left, but I see this everywhere here.
00:07:53.840It is the future, and I am just seeing it reflect back at people what they already believe.
00:08:01.220And I'm not just talking about the AI psychosis stuff.
00:08:04.680Here's something that, yeah, you'll know what I'm talking about, but people who don't live here in the Bay might not are going to have to explain it a little bit.
00:08:21.320So those billboards have always been – well, not always, but, like, you know, for the past, oh, 15 years at least, those billboards have been primarily aimed at, like, startup tech VC culture, right, venture capital stuff.
00:08:39.680They have not been billboards – primarily not been billboards for consumer products of any kind.
00:08:45.860It's mostly been, you know, what they call, what's that term, B2B, business-to-business stuff.
00:08:53.760And it's really not even been about trying to get anyone to buy what's on the billboard.
00:08:59.960It's mostly been prestige stuff, right?
00:09:02.700It's been like, we are a startup successful enough that we can afford a billboard on 101.
00:09:12.540And it's always been crazy and it's always been stuff that's like nigh incomprehensible if you don't learn more about the tech industry than you ever really wanted to know.
00:09:23.340And then the AI bubble arrived and all of that just got supercharged.
00:09:31.040And so now every single one of those billboards essentially is about some kind of AI product, but it just reflects the past.
00:09:38.400It's just the past, you know, magnified and distorted.
00:09:41.760And sold back to us as the future, which, you know, I mean, the past is really useful. And this is, you know, this is something that I think is easy to lose sight of for me in particular, as I get more and more frustrated about kind of the abuses of AI is that in my core, still believe in a world where AI is a good part of it.
00:10:07.440And there's so much that we can learn from our data.
00:10:12.840There's so much we can learn from not just our data, because actually, you know, the
00:10:17.360book is really about models that are trained on us.
00:10:20.920But what's really happening is we're now seeing so much investment in large language
00:10:25.560models and their kin that we're under-investing in the narrow applications of machine learning
00:17:08.500And in particular, it's this libertarian fantasia of the past, right?
00:17:12.360This idea that, first of all, that the New Deal did nothing good, and that government regulation was invented either by FDR or by TR, right?
00:17:27.020And that, you know, before we had income tax, everything was awesome.0.90
00:17:32.380Yeah. And yeah, I just I mean, you you know this already because you read my book, but like one of the sort of running themes of my book that I never explicitly stated is like libertarianism just doesn't work and doesn't really make any sense.
00:17:51.300and, you know, runs on an interlocking set of denials
00:18:19.400what this so-called Californian ideology. And then it gets reflected back to us by these AIs0.99
00:18:25.880that are supposed to be oracles that, uh, that, you know, tell us what, well, not oracles that
00:18:32.720tell us the future, but representatives of the future, like, uh, you know, instantiations of
00:18:39.040the future that are here now. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny too, because, uh,
00:18:44.400the kind of libertarian um voices that are out there almost none of them are actually consistent
00:18:51.500anyway so i mean libertarianism if you were consistent about it would fail but also uh i
00:18:58.040don't know how many times you know libertarians have suddenly gone weirdly quiet when it's time
00:19:03.400for bailouts uh by the government right of uh a big uh of big industry or or banks or when it's
00:19:11.540time to silence those who challenge these kinds of values in universities. I mean, it's just
00:19:20.400amazing to see, for example, how, and not all of these were self-professed libertarians, but
00:19:26.000the whole sort of campus free speech from the right movement in the United States.
00:19:31.860Oh, we have to have viewpoint diversity. We have to ensure that no one in academia is punished
00:19:40.320for what they write or or what they say and then suddenly the trump administration comes in
00:19:47.400and rips the guts out of free speech uh by silencing anyone they can who is directly or
00:19:57.260indirectly receiving federal funds and suddenly all the free speech advocates on the right and
00:20:03.180all the libertarians just go so quiet yeah or they say you know the left did it to themselves
00:20:09.120It's because you people were too loud about, you know, thinking that trans people are are human beings that that this happened to you.
00:20:18.100So, yeah, I have no patience for that.
00:20:20.800But again, you know, I care about history and try to remember what things happened and then learn about things that happened before I was born.
00:20:30.480And the people in this industry don't.
00:20:34.560um and libertarians i mean this is i agree with everything that you just said and it's also making
00:20:41.660me think about one of the real surprises that i ran into when writing the book i probably should
00:20:51.100have known this but somehow didn't uh i was confused that i kept running into libertarians
00:21:00.280talking about pseudoscientific like debunked quote-unquote race science and at first I was
00:21:08.920like okay this person is a libertarian and they're a racist and then this person's a libertarian and
00:21:13.360also a racist and it kept coming up I didn't understand what the connection was but I could
00:21:18.640tell that there was one and so I went and had a conversation with a friend who was a former
00:21:22.820libertarian and and asked her you know hey what what's going on here there has to be a story
00:21:30.140and she connected dots that i i really in retrospect were very obvious but you know of
00:21:36.500course it takes someone steeped in that community who knew it well to like hit me over the head with
00:21:41.340this but um and also she's very smart to be clear but like she said libertarians need to believe
00:22:18.460And, you know, every man is an island. And so if you believe all of that, then you end up having to believe that certain races of people are just inferior to others. Because otherwise, why is it that white people make more money than black people in the U.S. and so on and so forth?
00:22:42.820and that was a very unpleasant thing to understand yeah yeah no and and that's exactly i mean that
00:22:52.380diagnosis is spot on um yeah i remember when i started teaching um in the late 90s early o's
00:23:01.080even then every once in a while you know you'd get you'd get a bright student who'd come into
00:23:05.000your office and they were all excited because someone had um given them a book by ann rand
00:23:10.260And they wanted to talk about it. Yeah. And you just have to kind of not not judge, not roll your eyes, but talk them through what they think this means.
00:23:21.460And it was always really interesting to realize the kind of articles of faith that you have to cling to in order for this to be, you know, a remotely plausible or attractive worldview.
00:23:34.520too. And, you know, a lot of a lot of the young people that were initially attracted to these
00:23:41.640ideas, you know, I think for some of them, initially, it really was this idea that I want
00:23:47.460to believe in a world that has a level playing field, because I don't know how to cope with a
00:23:52.560world that has always been unjust. I don't know how to cope with a world that has systemic
00:23:58.160problems when I feel like I'm an individual that can only do a little bit to change the world.
00:24:09.960So sometimes it was this idea that there was something comforting about this illusion.
00:24:14.320But other times you could see that there were people for whom they really needed to believe
00:24:20.080that their own advantages were deserved.
00:24:22.940You know, particularly when I was teaching in institutions where a disproportionate number of the students came from very privileged economic backgrounds, they didn't want to question those advantages and they wanted to believe that they stood on a level playing field and had never been given a leg up, which was always sad to me because they got into college.
00:24:51.240There's so much opportunity. You know, you can just let that go and focus on what you're actually doing now. No one's asking you to feel guilty about having gotten into an expensive university, right?
00:25:05.500But they really had this kind of fear of not having earned their status and needing a worldview that would tell them that every bit of success or advantage they had was something that they could claim.
00:25:23.240Yes, I have seen this and I completely agree, but I also can't resist quoting one of my favorite sort of internet quotes from a guy named John Rogers.
00:25:36.220There are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year-old's life, The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
00:25:58.280That's a great one. I really do love that one. Yeah, I have another one that I have a saved image of. It's a cartoon panel and it's like a 50s styled housewife mom feeding her kid at the table who's some like toe-headed, you know, 10-year-old boy or something.
00:26:19.680And he says something like, Mom, I want to be a libertarian when I grow up.
00:26:26.680And the next panel is her saying, Well, honey, you can't do both.
00:26:36.160But yeah, no, this is this is clearly what this podcast does now, Dreaming Against the Machine, where we just rag on libertarians all episode long.
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00:29:34.260The other thing that I was thinking when you were talking about these experiences with these students whose lives were changed by Atlas Shrugged and not Lord of the Rings, or, you know, maybe both, like Peter Thiel.
00:29:46.460But, and we do really need to do an episode at some point about how bad Peter Thiel is at reading Lord of the Rings.
00:29:56.460Yeah, I know. It's everywhere. But, um, but, um, and the Bible. Oh yeah. And everything like just bad at reading. Um, and also not just Teal, but right. And then suddenly we're, yeah, you know, back at all the stuff I was talking about in my book. But, but I was thinking about conspiracy theories, right? There's a way in which this is reminding me of the reasons that people get really into conspiracy theories, right?
00:30:26.180They want to have a picture of the world that, A, is, like, less scary and more ordered than the, like, large, chaotic, uncontrolled world that we live in.
00:30:41.920And, B, they want this theory to also, like, reinforce things that they already wanted to believe.
00:30:49.540And in that sense, this kind of libertarianism looks kind of like a conspiracy theory.
00:30:56.180Yeah, I mean, I think it exists on a spectrum. No one is immune, right, from the desire to have the world conform to your expectations, to your values, to your hopes, and for it to make sense.
00:31:13.260And yeah, the world in a lot of ways doesn't make sense and has never made sense.
00:31:17.500And the whole field of philosophy exists because it doesn't make sense to people.
00:31:22.500And so they spend their whole lives trying to, you know, trying to wrestle with that.
00:31:28.280So I am, as a philosopher, deeply sympathetic to this compulsion to make meaning, to tell a rational story, to create this kind of ordered wrapper around the world.
00:31:40.820But where my patience ends is when it starts hurting people.
00:34:13.920But the workshop was full of not just philosophers and computer scientists, but neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists,
00:34:24.400People who work on comparative studies of intelligence with humans and other animals, right? And once you get that full complement of scientific expertise in the room, it is so obvious that the brain is a computer only in this very loose metaphorical constructed sense and that the brain is its own very messy, weird kind of thing.
00:34:49.920It is a kludgy hodgepodge of different systems that evolved on top of each other and interacted with a complex changing environment to produce these kind of weird composites of modular systems talking to each other, integrating.
00:35:06.280And no one would build a computer that looks like that, right?
00:35:13.640And in some ways, it's simpler and more elegant and more efficient than any designed computer.
00:35:21.220And in other ways, it's more chaotic and kind of senseless in its design than you could imagine.
00:35:27.780And so just understanding the brain as this marvelous, weird, freaky thing that evolution on this planet produced really helps you kind of just break that illusion that, oh, it's a computer.
00:35:40.700um now there's of course what a lot of people do is they then try to salvage the uh the idea
00:35:52.200by defining computation so loosely that it can describe literally anything in the universe
00:35:59.240and so that's the other strategy that philosophers and and computationists will sometimes do is
00:36:04.180they'll say well the brain isn't a digital computer but it's a computer in the sense you
00:36:09.600know, that it processes information. And you're just like, come on, right? And then they have,
00:36:15.200of course, a definition of information that is so comprehensive that it describes every object
00:36:20.740in the universe as doing computation. So it is really, I think, caused more confusion
00:36:29.120about what the brain is, what intelligence is, what minds are, than any other idea in the last
00:36:36.400100 years. And I'll put in a plug for my colleague at the University of Edinburgh, Masvita Chiramuta,
00:36:42.380who wrote a book called The Brain Abstracted, which really looks at this from the standpoint
00:36:46.900of the philosophy of neuroscience and understanding the ways in which the computational model is just
00:36:53.560a very limited abstraction that helps us model certain features of what the brain is doing in
00:37:00.520a way that's practically useful for science, but becomes completely obscuring of reality
00:37:07.600when we take it as a literal theory of what the brain is.
00:37:11.640No, this is, you're reminding me of a book that I'm going to plug, Matthew Cobb's book,
00:37:39.160But really, it's not like either of those things because computers and clocks were designed.
00:37:44.060And the brain is something that evolved.
00:37:46.140And I think the idea also that the brain is a computer is attractive to people who want to deny both the contribution of the environment to intelligence and the contribution of the parts of the body that aren't the brain.
00:38:03.180So the brain, of course, is part of an entire physical system situated in a physical environment that makes a tremendous amount of difference, both to its development and its actual functioning.
00:38:14.880And that was, again, the nice thing about the Santa Fe Institute workshop is we spent so much time talking about all the ways that, you know, what the brain is doing depends on so many things that are not the brain and is coupled with things that are not the brain.
00:38:26.040And there was debate about this. There were people who, you know, wanted to argue for a much more kind of brain-centric understanding of intelligence than others in the room.
00:38:41.420But no one was arguing that somehow you can take everything that represents the intelligent functioning of an animal and, you know, just describe what's inside the skull and that that's going to capture it.
00:38:54.520But the idea that the brain alone carries all of our capabilities is really attractive if things like digital uploading, right, are fantasies that you cling to.
00:39:08.180If you've got plans to throw your brain into cryostorage and let it turn into goo there, you've got to believe that the brain is enough and that the brain can be modeled computationally because you're not going to actually put that physical brain anywhere.
00:39:30.140You're going to somehow try to extract some computational model of it and then have that be the thing that can do everything your brain does, which again, you know, makes this kind of map is not the territory kind of mistake.
00:39:44.880It's also, it's attractive, you know, believing that everything that you are and all of your intelligence is just your brain is very attractive if you want to ignore particular parts of the environment like everybody else.
00:40:01.280And you really want to just believe that it's all just you like a libertarian.
00:40:06.300Or, sorry, it's also very attractive if you want to believe that everything is computation and that computer science is the most important thing that there is, which is very attractive if you're a software engineer.
00:40:21.180For much of history, philosophers were convinced that our discipline was the kind of thing that the smartest people did and the thing that got to the deepest truths about the world.
00:40:35.000And we were always fighting with mathematicians and physicists about this, right? Because, of course, the mathematicians had a very different view of this. And it's now just evolved right into it being the computer scientists who believe not only that they are, you know, really good at programming and understanding computation, but that that means that they are good at understanding literally everything else in the universe.
00:41:05.000So it's partly just this kind of weird hierarchical obsession that has always plagued academia.
00:41:11.800But now, again, it's spilling over and kind of causing damage outside of academic departments.
00:41:19.840And that's something that, unfortunately, we can't afford.
00:41:23.920As a physicist, some of the impetus behind my book was me looking at the software engineers and computer scientists saying such things.
00:41:34.760and thinking, oh, okay, first of all, you've got physics envy. You keep talking about how much
00:41:41.220better it would be if we could have a world made of bits rather than atoms. And that feels like a
00:41:46.480kind of academic professional thing and also feels like you wanting to have a world that is
00:41:53.420tractable and made by people as opposed to trying to understand a world that people never made.
00:41:58.320uh but also speaking as a physicist who left academia and who you know has spent a lot of time
00:42:07.140sort of studying the culture of physics uh you don't want to be like physicists you know physics
00:42:14.920is great and all but like the arrogance of some physicists i'm not going to say that that all
00:42:22.340physicists are like this hashtag, not all physicists, but, um, but the arrogance of
00:42:27.560some physicists in like parachuting into other fields and saying, oh, this is just physics.
00:42:31.280Physics is everything. Physics is, is all that we do. And like, okay, do, do you know about
00:42:37.480any other field? I mean, you know, I did, uh, I did an undergrad degree in philosophy and a lot
00:42:46.480of physicists were like, why are you bothering with philosophy? Like, why aren't you? What about
00:42:51.820the other fields like physics is not at the bottom of absolutely everything uh but speaking of my
00:42:59.400book uh or my more recent book in a way i was just alluding to my first book uh what is real
00:43:04.340available wherever fine books are sold but um but no but speaking of more everything forever um i
00:43:09.820you know we're we're getting close to the end here and i want to bring it back to why i brought you
00:43:14.060onto this podcast in the first place which is you went on blue sky and said a bunch of really nice
00:43:19.600things about my book, which was not enough to, to, you know, have me bring someone on the podcast
00:43:24.720by itself, though. I love it when people say nice things about my books. Um, but you, you also said
00:43:30.340that you disagreed with me and that's when I was like, okay, I already know about Shannon, but you
00:43:38.100know, she likes my book, but she disagrees with me about something. Oh, I got to have her on the
00:43:41.480podcast. Yeah. So, uh, I think the disagreement is a very soft disagreement. Um, and maybe,0.93
00:43:47.240And maybe I'm also, I mean, this is an interesting opportunity to kind of hear your response, because it may be that I am misreading something that wasn't really part of the message of the book.
00:44:02.000But towards the end of the book, you know, you have this really affecting, actually, a reflection on your own early fascination with technology, with things like space travel and colonization, and this belief that these are the things that actually carry us into the future that we want.
00:44:22.540And that resonated really deeply with me because I had a very similar trajectory myself.
00:44:29.820I was a giant sci-fi nerd and I, you know, programmed computers as a little kid in my bedroom and just, you know, was I didn't study the philosophy of technology so that I could dismiss the value of technology.
00:44:46.100I love technology. I always have. And it's always been both a fascination and an affection of mine.
00:44:52.500But as you sort of see the abuses and distortions of the tech industry and the failings, really, to deliver on the idea that technology is something that brings us comfort, that technology is something that makes the world more livable, that technology is something that makes the future more secure and accessible for more of us, right?
00:45:18.560that dream that that's what technology does is feels like it's slipping away and i wrote a piece
00:45:24.060for mit technology review i think in maybe 2015 maybe it was that old i'm not sure it might have
00:45:30.040been more recent uh that was like we used to get excited about technology what happened and it was
00:45:35.700really about you know kind of that loss of of love for for tech that can come but here's what i saw
00:45:40.780in your book that um it felt like maybe you had gone a little further down that road than i have
00:45:45.920Or that maybe you didn't have quite as much hope anymore that technologies, including technologies associated with space exploration and things like that, but technologies like AI itself, it felt like maybe you were no longer convinced that these have a big role to play in helping humans progress,
00:46:11.240helping humans live better together, helping humans have a more sort of sustainable and
00:46:17.860desirable future on this planet. And I'm still clinging to that in a lot of ways.
00:46:23.240A lot of the criticism of AI that I see, for example, on Blue Sky, even when it's well-founded,
00:46:30.540at times, tonally, it seems to me to be giving away the game, basically, and saying,0.98
00:46:36.540AI is garbage. Tech is not going to save us. And of course it's not going to save us. And I'm0.94
00:46:43.160absolutely not one of these kind of techno-solutionist people who thinks that every
00:46:47.960social problem is a problem for an engineer to solve or a software developer to solve.
00:46:54.920And it's almost never the case that it's their problem to solve. But I don't want to
00:47:01.680give away, if you will, the idea that technology is for people and that technology is a power that
00:47:09.320we have and have always had, that we've had it since we climbed down from the trees,
00:47:13.740a way of remaking the world to meet one another's needs and our own. And I don't want to surrender
00:47:20.040that to the Zuckerbergs and the Teals and the Altmans, right? I don't want them to be able to
00:47:26.540claim that. I want us to keep that for a more kind of egalitarian social and political vision.
00:47:34.540So I'm curious whether you think you're more cynical than I am about that. And if you are,
00:47:40.580maybe how we might address that dispute. Oh, man. There's always like a little
00:47:46.700part of me in the back of my head that wants to give flip answers to absolutely every single
00:47:51.420question. And, uh, and so the flip answer that's coming to mind is now you're just seeing the fact
00:47:56.820that like you left the Bay and I'm still stuck here. Um, that's, that's all you were seeing in
00:48:01.980the book. Yeah. Um, and I am, I am curious about, uh, about like your journey here and then away
00:48:10.180from here, but we can, we can talk about that later, but it's a good question. It's also striking
00:48:14.760to me that I've had several people, you know, friendly people, uh, uh, friends, uh, in the
00:48:21.340sort of AI ethics, you know, tech critical space say things to me like, yeah, I really
00:48:28.340liked your book, but I was surprised by how easy you went on the tech bros in it at the
00:49:51.080And in some ways, it's one of our oldest technologies and also the one that we've worked on, the artist, because it's a really difficult one to get right.
00:49:59.600I mean, this is one of the—I mean, now I'm going to be preaching to the choir here, but, like, one of the things that gets me when people criticize philosophy, which I heard a lot when I was actually in college and studying philosophy, was, well, but philosophy hasn't produced anything useful.
00:50:20.520The philosophers have just been studying the same questions over and over for thousands of years.
00:50:25.020Like, okay, what if that just means the questions are really hard?
00:50:39.040And he basically argues that the reason that it appears that philosophy doesn't make any progress is every time philosophers solve a problem or find a path to the solution for the problem, it breaks off from philosophy and just becomes a science, right?
00:50:54.600Physicists used to be called natural philosophers, right?
00:51:24.980Really, there's just this one broad human endeavor that we are all engaged in. And so in that sense, you also can't cut off technology because that's part of it, too. And it's, you know, part of the human experience. Humans, you know, evolve the way that we did in part because we learned how to deal with fire and work together. And these are technologies.
00:51:47.040And yet, you know, libertarians still think that you can do everything by yourself. Anyway, I will never get tired of getting a dig in at them. But I think it's the techno solutionism. You know, one of the things I'm sort of embarrassed to admit is that I actually hadn't encountered the term techno solutionism until after I was done with the book.
00:52:11.240There are all sorts of scholars in this field whose work I was, you know, kind of ignorant of, not because I didn't do research. I think I did a lot of research, but there's just there's so much.
00:52:25.120And in my heart, I think I think everyone who's like self-aware and doing doing like work in the world suffers from some imposter syndrome because otherwise, you know, you're you're like, I don't know, some kind of sociopath.
00:52:40.920But yeah, insufferable is probably a nicer way to put it.
00:52:44.780But yes, somewhere on the spectrum from insufferable to sociopath.
00:52:50.620Yeah. I, you know, at the end of the day, feel like I always feel like I'm a physicist cosplaying as a historian, anthropologist, sociologist, journalist, what have you.
00:53:05.020I mean, in a way, the flip answer I wanted to give is not really a joke. The culture here in the Bay is so steeped in techno solutionism that that they can't see it.
00:53:19.180it's the water that they swim in, right? It's the old joke of like the fish that doesn't know
00:53:23.900what water is. And so to push back on it effectively, I felt like I had to push as
00:53:30.420hard as I did in the book. I do say at the end of the book, you know, I think technology is part
00:53:36.020of the answer to solving some of our problems. And certainly, you know, to pick an example,
00:53:43.940not at random at all, I think that, say, vaccines are a wonderful technology that I would very much
00:53:51.180not want to get rid of and would like to see a lot more of. So I don't know that we disagree.
00:53:55.760And actually, I'm going to finish this rambling answer by talking about space, because of course
00:54:01.960I am. It's very funny to me that, funny, funny, interesting, that I've been brought on to a bunch
00:54:13.520of radio shows and podcasts and whatnot in the last year
00:54:42.620And that's not just, oh, I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and I'm still a sci-fi junkie. I am. And that's not, you know, I watched a lot of Carl Sagan as a kid. I did. You know, I have a PhD in astrophysics, although I do.
00:54:57.080But to me, space is a place that I want to know more about.
00:55:03.400It's a place to explore intellectually.
00:55:07.520It is a wonderful place to send robots.
00:55:09.560Something that I say in my book that I'm sure you caught, but a lot of people don't seem to have caught that I said that.
00:55:16.380And I would love to see us sending even more probes out into space and more space telescopes.
00:55:23.480And I just don't think that it makes any sense to send large numbers of people to work and live in space.
00:55:35.660And I also think that it's very interesting that that is like the primary modality that people have in mind for like, what is the future of human interaction with space?
00:55:50.600Whereas I feel like, okay, you know, I want to explore with a light touch. There's no call for going there. And it just, it's surprising to me, although I suppose it shouldn't be, how many people have trouble imagining a human future of interaction with space that is something other than just doing a colonialism.
00:56:14.900Yeah. And like the, the amount of references that people give to like Columbus specifically when talking about space colonization, like, okay, you understand that you're giving the game away right there. But all of this is to say, you know, I think that there is something gorgeous about sending these probes into space.
00:56:40.200Because one of the other questions that people will ask is, okay, but what's the point? Why are we spending all of this money? And I always feel like, okay, you know, when it comes to sending the probes out there, that's a false dichotomy. There's so many other things that we spend so much money on that we should be taking money away from to spend on priorities here on Earth.
00:57:00.260And if it really was a choice between sending a probe to Venus and feeding people here on Earth, of course, I'd choose to feed people here on Earth.
00:57:08.340That's just not the choice that we face.
00:57:10.280But in a way, my answer to your question is I don't like it when people try to justify sending probes to space by talking about all of the spinoff technologies that we get that help us here on Earth.
00:57:24.320Yeah. Because that's, I think, dishonest and disingenuous because it's not why we're doing it. And I think it's very important to be explicit about why we're doing it. We're doing it because we're curious and we want to know the answer. Colonization is not a universal human impulse across all cultures. Curiosity is.
00:57:44.780wanting to explore the world around us and find out answers to questions is. And I think that,
00:57:52.060you know, technology is wonderful for that. It's part of that, but it's not the whole story any
00:57:58.340more than it's the whole story of how do we solve these massive problems that we're facing. So
00:58:02.860I don't know that we disagree very much. I think it is a tonal thing. And the more I think about
00:58:13.900it, the more I actually think that little voice in the back of my head that gave the
00:58:55.980And if you step outside of that, suddenly the room goes cold and quiet.
00:59:01.340And it looks like every cult movie or horror movie you've ever seen about a kind of groupthink that becomes aggressive.
00:59:11.140So, yeah, it's absolutely natural to recoil from that so fully that you kind of just want to distance yourself from the whole kind of tech world.
00:59:22.560And so, yeah, I can see that the closer you are physically and socially to it, probably the harder it is to keep that sort of affection and hopefulness around technology, at least in the short term.
00:59:37.800But I think, obviously, we probably do agree that, you know, in the long run, we have to be able to bring technology back into the fold of the human experience.
00:59:48.080We have to bring it back into the fold of moral and political progress.
00:59:53.780And that's the only way, I think, to imagine ourselves happy.
00:59:59.440Well, I can't think of a better place to end it than that.
01:00:02.000So, Shannon, I am going to read your book and we should talk about it.