00:01:19.620I love that we both have birdsong in our background.
00:01:22.340although yours sounds like songbirds and mine is a raven who's probably wanting to get into my
00:01:28.740compost. But yeah, I'm looking forward to jumping into AI and algorithms. And as we begin, I want
00:01:39.300to think through some of the insidious and invisible ways algorithms and AI shape our lives.
00:01:47.200so to start the conversation i'm wondering how the goals and programs of these algorithms are
00:01:54.200tailored to a specific view of the world and who and what are these algorithms serving
00:02:01.000well i mean that's a pretty broad place to start but not a bad one uh in the sense that i mean
00:02:07.380you know these are these are quite vague terms ai algorithms things like this but then they're
00:02:13.540always kind of intentionally vague I think when you when you hear them being deployed there's
00:02:18.900always something that's kind of missing in the conversation like some kind of level of
00:02:23.360understanding or some level of specificity that really matters but you know the the place that
00:02:28.220we hear them deployed the most is in mostly these days in relationships like the big tech companies
00:02:33.700so you know I mean pretty much anything you do that involves touching a computer you know and
00:02:39.760not just the obvious ones i mean like the atms or even the computer in your car because most cars
00:02:44.420are computers those those are algorithms an algorithm just means a computer program um it's
00:02:49.480any bit of computing machinery which is kind of throughout all these parts of our lives these days
00:02:55.160but mostly what we where we hear we talk about that is you know the kind of the stuff that's
00:03:00.260made by companies because that's who makes most of the tech in the world around us and so of course
00:03:04.920then you know they're making those programs as part of a part of kind of profit systems
00:03:10.900systems that at some level are trying to make a profit make money and that money largely out of
00:03:17.300us you know every time we use a computer system there's an expectation that somewhere somewhere
00:03:21.600is is benefiting from our use of that so some profit is being extracted and that means that
00:03:26.900so many of the systems of you know in the world around us are built with this you know need to
00:03:32.280extract or exploit at some level built into their very basic philosophy they don't come from a place
00:03:37.720of cooperation or collaboration they come you know pretty much explicitly from places of exploitation
00:03:44.880um and i think you know most of us are kind of aware of that these days we know that that our
00:03:50.740use of of things for free on the internet search engines and so on come with a kind of cost to our
00:03:56.820privacy um you know but that logic is embedded in every aspect of our lives it's not a sort of
00:04:02.320technology question but a question of capitalism you know get money off at the grocery store if
00:04:07.740you use your loyalty card right which is just the same exchange of personal data for some kind of
00:04:13.740discount um and and that logic has been so kind of imbued into our everyday lives that
00:04:18.960that always notice when it extends into into kind of bigger things as well and you know one of those
00:04:24.680places is now contemporary artificial intelligence and we can talk about what that means i put very
00:04:30.120very large scare quotes around ai at this point but the ai that we all hear about at the moment
00:04:36.860is that made by these very large tech companies you know whose um whose position is the same
00:04:42.340they're looking to make money out of this thing and they're breeding a kind of intelligence that
00:04:47.540is based on this kind of profit motive and you know my my feeling i'm sure we'll go into this
00:04:52.720is that that kind of intelligence or whether the idea of intelligence is just this incredibly
00:04:57.520narrow one we expect it from our interactions with capital in various forms that these kind
00:05:03.980of expectation of exploitation is built in but i think it becomes a very different thing when
00:05:08.900when we're kind of interacting with things that claim to be intelligent but also have this kind
00:05:13.700of intensely predatory basis built into them but that's the world that certain sectors of the world
00:05:20.460are trying to construct at the moment, and that I think is very poorly understood.
00:05:24.260I want to go into a quote from your book, Ways of Being, and you write,
00:05:28.500that's what happens. It would seem when the development of AI is led primarily by venture
00:05:33.360funded technology companies, the definition of intelligence, which is framed, endorsed,
00:05:38.460and ultimately constructed in machines as a profit-seeking, extractive one. This framing
00:05:44.220is then repeated in our books and films and the news media and the public imagination.
00:05:48.900and science fiction tales of robot overlords and all-powerful, irresistible algorithms
00:05:54.820until it comes to dominate our thinking and understanding.
00:05:58.620We seem incapable of imagining intelligence any other way.
00:06:03.500I'd love to hear, how has this control and development of AI by venture capitalists
00:06:08.940hijacked our capacity to imagine intelligence beyond exponential growth?
00:06:16.020No, because they started with things long before intelligence.
00:06:18.900We seem very incapable of imagining society beyond a paradigm of exponential growth.
00:06:25.780But I think it's quite understandable how a vision of intelligence has kind of been hijacked in that way.
00:06:34.300Where you see it coming out most strongly at the moment is looking at the areas in which this thing that gets called AI by a certain sector, industry, really gets applied.
00:06:46.180and it gets applied to things that they find interesting but also often things that they
00:06:51.920they think are sort of you know easy or kind of low value in certain ways so what we had was a
00:06:58.460you know a long period of where ai was largely about um games of various kinds you know playing
00:07:04.240chess playing go playing these kind of things and you get ai being applied to to service industries
00:07:10.000logistics that again are seen as kind of low status or low skilled driving actually being one
00:07:15.440of them though it turns out to be much much more complicated than they ever imagined as most of
00:07:20.040these things do um and now the latest wave is hitting at the level of kind of secretarial work
00:07:26.080data work uh and a lot of language things like chat gpt uh but also critically i think at this
00:07:32.320level of image generation because again you have this idea from the perspective of technology
00:07:37.540companies that that's something that must be easy right that's something that's for people who trade
00:07:42.660in algorithms and mathematics exclusively that that kind of visual creativity is also something
00:07:47.260easy something low status that can be conquered in this way like none of these things are easy
00:07:52.720in fact like there's there's lots of really interesting things that happens when this
00:07:56.220gets applied to games things get more complicated things get more interesting
00:07:59.740um turns out it's very very difficult to apply to real world things like driving that's actually
00:08:04.780been you know not a huge success and you know it's it's um a totally different thing when it
00:08:10.280gets applied to writing or to image making to creation what we think of as these very human
00:08:15.240forms of creation as well but they have such sort of power and glamour in society that also gets
00:08:20.320taken very seriously and so you get a kind of degradation of those forms um you get an even
00:08:26.900kind of lower status assigned to the kinds of work that these companies direct ai at whether
00:08:33.400that's you know driving the increased kind of automation of delivery logistic services whether
00:08:41.380that's kind of delivery things whether it's taxi driving all these kind of things also now getting
00:08:46.080applied to the things that were regarded as kind of creative professions as well even though the
00:08:51.440product is still terrible there's just you know the power and the glamour of these things they're
00:08:56.160there the fact they get wrapped up into these strange technological terms make them capable
00:09:02.360are still twisting our idea of, I guess, what's important and what matters about these things
00:09:08.720on a very deep level. Yeah, it's complicated. And there's another piece that you wrote,
00:09:15.940The Great Distractor. You say, quote, to actually interfere with the money-making algorithm at the
00:09:22.000level required to actually protect children, democracy, and our sanity would mean reducing
00:09:27.780the scale of their business. For a company whose business is scale, which cannot operate except at
00:09:33.500scale, that presents an existential threat. Treating the problem would mean they would cease
00:09:39.040to exist, end quote. So yeah, I just want to riff on the issue with seeing profit as godlike or a
00:09:47.360guiding principle here. Because if that's the basis of the project, what are people not willing
00:09:54.220to do yeah i mean it's worth putting that um quote into a bit of context i think so that was
00:10:01.480part of a kind of ongoing work um about contemporary media um and about the way online
00:10:09.440video content creativity works and very specifically a lot of studies i've done of
00:10:16.060children's media online things like youtube for kids uh the way small children use media
00:10:22.560and the way that that's the media ecosystem particularly things like youtube has been like
00:10:27.280shaped around them and so what you have happening there is that you have um what gets called the
00:10:32.720attention economy or surveillance capitalism which is a system for making money off getting people's
00:10:38.180attention quite simply um the more eyeballs in the terminology that are on a thing the more money
00:10:44.160will be made and then when that system is largely automated really really weird and often quite
00:10:49.720terrible stuff starts happening i you know first encountered it really strongly and wrote quite a
00:10:54.700lot about what happens when that happens to like kids content so you get children's cartoons that
00:10:59.320are increasingly designed partly by humans but also partly by the kind of feedback loops of
00:11:06.000these profit machines to get longer to get stranger to get more addictive for small children in very
00:11:12.460unhealthy ways and that sometimes also are then susceptible to really nasty content violent content
00:11:19.720sexual content being kind of threaded into them but the system at that point becomes so complex
00:11:24.180and large that no one really understands what's going on it's very hard to intervene
00:11:27.100and to intervene would mean shutting the system down now i think the system should mostly be
00:11:33.300shut down in that case um we're in this very weird position now where technology and the
00:11:39.740technological companies behind them have got such kind of momentum that it's almost impossible to
00:11:44.540imagine that you would just shut them down so this isn't just isn't just a problem for like
00:11:49.400children's media although it is a huge problem with children's media it's a problem for all of
00:11:52.640us it's well documented now that there's a kind of radicalization process that happens when people
00:11:57.720view content online that is ordered for them algorithmically whether that's kind of youtube
00:12:02.380videos or the facebook news feed because that system wants you to watch more it ends up showing
00:12:08.340you more and more extreme content so people get pushed into like positions of very extreme
00:12:13.060radicality whether that's the far right uh religious extremism um or just kind of absolutely
00:12:18.880insane conspiracy theories the algorithm wants you to pay more attention it will feed you more
00:12:23.120extreme content and your position will be moved to this more and more extreme place and you know
00:12:29.100my counter example of that is always like you know imagine there was a stop a shop on your local high
00:12:34.460street your main street whatever it is you know and one in ten people who went in there um came
00:12:41.780out believing in the supremacy of the white race like we would shut it down like it's just
00:12:47.240fundamentally um something that we would say like there's all kinds of complex issues here
00:12:52.640but we should stop this particular thing being present within our society and we seem really
00:12:57.060incapable of doing that within technological cultures exists at the moment um because of
00:13:01.420this kind of weird glamour that technology has uh this claim that people don't really understand it
00:13:06.260fully that people are scared to like speak about it fully um that it's somehow disconnected from
00:13:11.200our culture and you see this happening now again you know as i said i've been writing about this
00:13:15.440extensively about television media children's cartoons but also adult social media whatever
00:13:20.840it is you see it happening now with ai that you have what are not intelligent at all but are like
00:13:27.940very powerful computer systems fed on the last couple of decades of all of our personal information
00:13:34.000being kind of unleashed into the world with what will be huge consequences and what we actually
00:13:39.120have is is the people building it going around the world telling us that like the robot overlords
00:13:43.620are coming and we should worry about that and not about the kind of incredibly predatory forms of
00:13:50.620profit extraction that they're actually doing it's the most extraordinary piece of kind of
00:13:55.120misdirection that they've attempted in some time and is very blatant and it seems to be working
00:14:01.140very well but it's um yeah it's just it's such a strange thing that capitalism in its current form
00:14:08.020is just so good at moving onto these new territories, as it always does,
00:14:14.780while we are seeming capable of sort of talking meaningfully or directly about it.
00:14:21.580It really concerns me. Let me start over because a lot of this concerns me.
00:14:27.080There's, of course, the media piece and the piece around impacting and influencing children,
00:14:33.460which to me, that is a real cultural issue. Just everything that feeds into how us as a humanity
00:14:41.240understand things, believe in our value systems, and the fact that AI is going that deep is really
00:14:48.480frightening. And then the other thing that maybe frightens me as much is how AI and algorithms are
00:14:55.280also now playing a role in extraction. And there's another quote in your book, Ways of Being, that
00:15:01.960speaks to Repsol, which has this relationship with Google, and it's putting advanced machine
00:15:09.380learning algorithms to work across networks of oil refineries, helping boost efficiency and output
00:15:16.360and things of that nature. So I just wanted to dive in a bit about how AI is being used to
00:15:22.640further extraction. You think about industrialization and how quickly that ramped up
00:15:29.160the rate of destruction of the planet and i can only imagine now what ai could do in terms of that
00:15:36.440speed of extraction yeah i mean so what's happening within that kind of fossil fuel economy at the
00:15:42.840moment is that you have the weird paradox that as we approach um the limits of that fossil fuel
00:15:51.140economy i.e we start to you know we we've basically extracted everything that's relatively easy to
00:15:55.940extract and what's left is kind of gets harder and harder but as a result it also gets more valuable
00:16:00.220because we're completely failing to transition away from it um so the world is still just in
00:16:05.560much need of what's there um and so what is there just kind of keeps increasing in value even if it's
00:16:11.700hard to get so it becomes more rewarding to get out even though it's harder but i have to push
00:16:15.980back a bit on the idea this is really about ai and algorithms yes of course having you know more
00:16:21.980powerful computer systems does allow you to drill more efficiently to do more fine-grained surveys
00:16:29.220to identify deposits that would not have been so obvious before etc etc it does allow for that and
00:16:35.800of course it allows it at a higher level and so on so forth compared to the techniques that were
00:16:39.460going on before but really this is just in line with a much broader trajectory of capitalism which
00:16:43.660is always going to go and extract these things anyway it just now has ai as a tool to do it
00:16:48.180but there'd be guys out there with chisels if they didn't have ai like in that sense it really
00:16:53.040is just a tool that's being put to use and i think it's really important when we talk about
00:16:58.460algorithms and ai that we don't do it in this kind of abstract way where we kind of pointed
00:17:03.300a computer and go oh it's the computer doing the scary thing it's very clear in cases like this
00:17:08.200that it is the industry that is doing this thing it is you know it is the fossil fuel companies and
00:17:13.320their allies in the technology company who um are continuing to do work which is going to result in
00:17:20.880vast destruction of life across this planet and that's just not a technological question that's
00:17:26.180a social and political question it's a question about our culture and what we're prepared to do
00:17:29.880and how much we're prepared to change and and really you know for me it's like ai is so not
00:17:35.940interesting right particularly this kind of ai which is just really powerful computers like it's
00:17:42.200interesting how powerful those computers are but then when you see what they're being put to use
00:17:45.940for you realize that they are just the building block of something much more powerful which is0.99
00:17:50.140the kind of the profit motive and the selfishness and stupidity that's associated with that0.98
00:17:55.280what that realization should do is kind of shift our attention away from this kind of glamour of0.91
00:18:03.280ai and algorithms to understand that technology really is just a tool and it's a tool that we can
00:18:08.520make choices about that we can have opinions about that we can think about quite clearly
00:18:13.180rather than getting lost in a kind of technological determinism by technological
00:18:18.240determinism i mean this sort of feeling that most of us have that technology just does what it does
00:18:25.660irrespective of our desires um you know we may not like what it's doing but oh well that's just you
00:18:31.960know what happens when you apply technology well it's not as a result of the culture rather in
00:18:36.420which those technologies are produced we have a culture of fossil fuel dependency and we have a
00:18:42.980culture of seeing the earth as a resource for extraction and really as i said it doesn't matter
00:18:48.840in that culture whether you use a teaspoon or an ai to extract the oil people are going to go
00:18:55.620after that oil and it's the kind of culture and thinking around this stuff that needs to change
00:19:00.340No, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I'm sure that those of us who want to continue extracting will create more and more tools to support that extraction, whether it's AI or some other technological tool moving into the future.
00:19:16.920but I also wanted to speak about different forms of intelligence. And I'm just considering that as
00:19:24.880we reckon with the reality that intelligence may be far more than our human-centric minds once
00:19:32.380believed, I'm interested in the multiple paths of intelligence that's possible. What might it
00:19:40.240look like to recognize artificial intelligence alongside more than human intelligence more
00:19:45.120broadly yeah i mean this is this is in part why i get frustrated with this kind of very narrow
00:19:51.840vision of intelligence that's promoted by those who talk about ai a lot um because it's just it's
00:19:58.840such a like a pathetically narrow way of seeing the world um like even leaving aside all the
00:20:06.160hideous like actual damage that it does it's also just this extraordinary failure of the imagination
00:20:11.560i've been working with ai again this thing that gets called ai in various forms for like a couple
00:20:17.940of decades and you know it's always this constant ah question to work out like what is interesting
00:20:25.200about this thing how does it allow us to think things that we haven't thought before like one
00:20:31.880more interesting definition of intelligence is not like how does this allow us to do the same0.80
00:20:37.980stupid things we've been doing forever just faster and harder but rather how does it allow us to think
00:20:43.660new thoughts about the world and one of the things one of the new thoughts about the world0.99
00:20:49.020that for me ai allowed me to think was this this slow and dawning realization that machine
00:20:57.080intelligence whatever it is is something different to human intelligence and that comes really you
00:21:03.380know without all the other interesting things i'll talk about in a moment that comes from just
00:21:06.700a direct engagement with the the technology as a totally like rational uh quite narrow humanist
00:21:13.580perspective you know for for the last decades upon decades like since the 1940s if not you know some
00:21:20.300theorizing before computer scientists have been trying to build this thing called ai expecting
00:21:26.700it to be like human intelligence basically expecting to make something that acted in the
00:21:31.820world like a human being or thought in the world like a human being and every time we try out in
00:21:36.980all these different problems it does stuff that we don't really expect um it it behaves in very
00:21:42.800different ways you see it in and everything from the way that it plays chess to the way that it
00:21:47.340sorts information to the way that it understands categorizes and acts upon the world which is what
00:21:53.780most forms of intelligence do some forms of intelligence do it just does it in a radically
00:21:57.960different way to humans and that's really fascinating it means you can collaborate with
00:22:02.240it in like interesting ways if you treat it as a collaborator rather than just as a kind of
00:22:06.320a device or a slave but at a higher level it also says well hey like there are different ways of
00:22:14.100doing intelligence more generally like that human intelligence even in the thing that we created
00:22:19.700that we thought was going to be like a human intelligence turns out to be something quite
00:22:23.400different that intelligence is in fact just for starters some kind of spectrum that there are
00:22:28.580different kind of ways of doing it and so for me i i come to believe quite fundamentally that you
00:22:34.460know the the cultural purpose of of artificial intelligence is really to be something that
00:22:39.220forces us to recognize that within the kind of western kind of rationalist enlightenment
00:22:44.800position you know which is not by any necessity the majority position of this planet um we're bad
00:22:52.560at recognizing we're not good at acknowledging the intelligence of non-humans in any meaningful way
00:22:57.180in fact we've tended to restrict this term intelligence really pretty much to humans
00:23:01.880the standard definition of it and and suddenly we find even in this thing that we've built
00:23:06.340ourselves something unhuman going on in terms of its intelligence and you know the straight up first
00:23:13.220result from that kind of experimental result is that oh okay there's more than one way of doing
00:23:19.280intelligence and if more than one then multiple then potentially infinite you know and my view
00:23:25.700on technologies in general however much they're used or misused they are always downstream of
00:23:31.920culture they are products of the cultures that we have and and they tell us something quite often
00:23:36.780about our culture you know i spend most of my most of my life in fact as a teenager thinking
00:23:42.900too much about the internet and thinking that to the extent to which is this kind of incredible
00:23:47.380flowering of culture that no one really set out to build or think about and yet is kind of the
00:23:52.580greatest cultural inventions it's probably language itself and likewise i i think our
00:23:57.640obsession with intelligence and ai is is a is a kind of often unconscious mostly unconscious
00:24:04.940but not dissimilar desire to manifest some aspect of this non-human intelligence in the world so
00:24:16.140that we can feel closer to it so that we can understand it better so it can essentially open
00:24:19.800our eyes to all of the other intelligences that exist in the world it turns out that intelligence
00:24:25.600is is way way more interesting than anything we could build in a box but for some reason and this
00:24:33.140is something i have not figured out yet but i'm endlessly fascinated with we always seem to need
00:24:36.680to build the box first we always seem to need to like make these kind of toy versions of things
00:24:41.560before suddenly then we start to recognize that they're already all around us in the world
00:32:35.000You know, that's the kind of holistic kind of ecological view of it.
00:32:38.780You can also look at, like, you know, these incredibly, like, specific examples of intelligence or, you know, kind of thinking.
00:32:46.060So I think of something like the slime molds, which I read about a fair bit, you know, which in one particular aspect of something that they do are very akin to machine intelligence in that it is possible to work with slime molds in such a way that you can get them to essentially perform a type of mathematical operation.
00:33:03.640now there's a thing called the traveling salesman problem which is this like really
00:33:08.620gnarly mathematical problem that simply asks like given six cities on a map how do you visit each
00:33:15.000one you know in the shortest uh possible time kind of only once very valuable problem for like
00:33:20.700logistics companies but a problem that humans and and also computers are really terrible at
00:33:25.360the problem we face in various forms all the time um but the mathematics of figuring out the best
00:33:30.980answer are really hard and critically it's uh what's called an exponentially hard problem so
00:33:36.960every time you add a city it gets way way way harder um but it turns out slime molds uh one
00:33:42.580of the things that slime molds do you know is that they spread around these little kind of damp
00:33:46.840wiggly patches on the on the forest floor finding bits of food and finding the shortest route
00:33:51.540between them turns out they solve this problem this particular kind of what to us is a mathematical
00:33:56.580problem is to them is just looking for food but they're capable of solving this problem better
00:34:00.980than than us or any of our greatest supercomputers they're doing they're thinking this problem in a
00:34:06.180way that we have thus far no access to at all so it's this like very specific form of intelligence
00:34:11.500and then you know thinking intelligence kind of relationally as just like an awareness of the
00:34:17.840world and an acting upon it i think one of the most beautiful examples i've i've come across
00:34:22.420recently is in the book i write quite a lot about the intelligence of um honeybees for example who
00:34:29.320are you know reasonably well known these days for being brilliant like communicators but also
00:34:33.940political decision makers um honeybees collect information about the world around their nests
00:34:40.620particularly the location of nectar sources that they return to their hives and they do this
00:34:45.520amazing dance the waggle dance to communicate um the location of nectar sources they do this little
00:34:52.160kind of running around in circles wiggling their bums dance and that tells the other bees how far
00:34:57.140to fly and what angle to the sun in order to find the nectar and they do this with nesting sites as
00:35:02.040well so when the hive wants to move honeybees will go out to scouts find new nesting sites
00:35:06.880and then they'll bring that information back and they'll do the dance but then multiple bees will
00:35:11.600dance different locations uh in a kind of form of debate uh while different locations are checked
00:35:16.680out until gradually through a kind of process of essentially direct democracy a consensus is
00:35:22.060reached and the whole hive you know goes off to one of these new locations the incredible job of
00:35:27.160collective information synthesis and consensus building uh on the hive of hundreds sometimes
00:35:33.960thousands of bees uh that some have kind of likened as well to like the way in which our neurons
00:35:39.140or our whole bodies kind of synthesize information it's kind of mass information since this is a very
00:35:44.380hard problem but which evolution has solved in all of these different ways just as it appears to have
00:35:49.540solve the problem of intelligence well not the problem of intelligence the opportunity of
00:35:53.440intelligence perhaps in all these radically different ways in different kind of embodied
00:35:57.220life forms but i was just reading the other day something that isn't in the book as well that
00:36:01.000that i just can't stop thinking about which is that it's not just the bees that are out there
00:36:06.460um like looking around being smart gathering information aware of the world around them
00:36:11.280um the flowers are too uh recent research has shown that um flowering plants perhaps in general
00:36:18.180certainly many species of flowers individually, perceive the vibrations of the wings of their
00:36:25.820pollinators, usually honeybees, but also moths as well for some species. They perceive the specific
00:36:32.560frequency of those pollinators and they change their behavior as a result. So within a few
00:36:37.820seconds or a few minutes of hearing, being vibrated by this frequency, hearing, hearing the bee,
00:36:43.360The flower increases the sweetness of its nectar in response in order to attract first one pollinator, maybe repeat visits from others.
00:36:53.500The flower hears the bee. There's this incredible total communication and awareness going on all around us all the time at every single level of life,
00:37:05.000most of which we are radically unaware of and may remain unaware of forever, but nevertheless exists.
00:42:21.560You know, start to kind of float free of a lot of the kind of assumptions that we make about our bodies, about ourselves as a species, about our superiority and our relationship to the rest of the world.
00:42:32.820And I think it's a really, it's a really critical realization to come to this kind of series of realizations about the dependency of each of us on other members of our species and other members of this planet.
00:42:47.080really fundamental realization i think is also you know essentially kind of critical to our survival
00:42:51.840and and makes a kind of rethinking of our place in relations absolutely necessary and once we
00:42:59.160understand that we are the product of all this kind of extraordinary heterogenization over
00:43:04.460billions of years uh it makes almost everything that we're doing right now almost completely
00:43:11.080nonsensical. That's the perfect way to say it. I often feel like the ecocidal decisions we're
00:43:19.760making right now are a type of insanity and truly don't make sense for our survival or even our
00:43:26.500fulfillment. I don't think we're happier for it or more well, of course. So yeah, I appreciate you
00:43:34.200speaking to that. And another topic that I found really interesting that you write about is the
00:43:40.540ecology of technology. And in your book, Ways of Being, you say, quote, an ecology of technology
00:43:47.400then is concerned with the interrelationships between technology and the world, its meaning
00:43:53.040and materiality, its impacts and uses beyond the everyday deterministic fact of its own existence,
00:44:00.480end quote. So I'd love to hear from you, why is it important to contextualize technology in this way,
00:44:06.200especially as new forms of technology become more and more embedded within our daily lives and
00:44:13.040rituals to um start for better accounting for um what it was that like my use of technology
00:44:22.020in particular how that related to the planet something that i've thought about for a long
00:44:26.600time is the way in which when things become these a funny word here i think a better one
00:48:48.180that they produce there's a direct connection between the complexity and the opacity of these
00:48:53.540technologies that we use every day and the general sense of kind of fear uh shading into anger and
00:48:59.880rage is the kind of dominant tenant of our times and i see that very much in the um in our responses
00:49:06.940to planetary crisis as well um that you know the planetary system as we are now aware of it again
00:49:13.240through technology is so extraordinarily complex and so obviously in a really hideously
00:49:20.960terrifying sense of chaos and danger but that most of us have no way of responding to that in
00:49:28.620any meaningful way and so again our result is this kind of fear shading into anger and fear
00:49:33.280primarily helplessness in the face of vast global change everyone knows something terrible is
00:49:40.060occurring and nobody knows what we could possibly do about it we're all frozen in place by this kind
00:49:44.660of climate trauma this climate anxiety and the realization of what's going on and so now mostly
00:49:50.780i'm concerned with you know what are these practices of um of drawing kind of connections
00:49:56.460of making speaking about these um the potential of um so much of the stuff around us whether it's
00:50:03.920technological ecologically kind of considered differently to make us more capable of taking
00:50:10.080action in some way not as a process of kind of revelation of just going look look how bad the
00:50:15.820situation is but like pointing out the actual mechanical basis of it whether that's in our
00:50:21.020technology or whether it's in our relationship to other beings we are capable of operating on and
00:50:26.820with the world around us at the most amazing level whether it's through the use of computers
00:50:31.420so in my computational work i often teach people to code on really simple levels not as a chance
00:50:38.100to get a job but so that they don't feel so disempowered by the technology that they use
00:50:42.940every single day and likewise in ecological work you know that can take the form of uh you know
00:50:49.040one of the things i do is i teach people to wire up solar panels so they don't feel that their
00:50:52.920relation to the climate is so completely radically alienated or talk about going out and actually
00:50:58.920talking to the trees or getting to know the bees or having these kind of direct relationships
00:51:03.620which shift us from a position of total helplessness and total fear into one of
00:51:08.960awareness and relationship and agency that actually allows us to have a meaningful relationship with
00:51:14.640the world once again and therefore perhaps to start to perform the kind of shifts in
00:51:18.600consciousness and action that are so necessary. I'm so happy you spoke to that or all of those
00:51:25.380things because I was definitely thinking about how social media dysregulates us and also how AI
00:51:34.900takes away our ability to act. And that was where I wanted to go in this next question.
00:51:42.160You had brought up how much of this overculture distracts us and guides our attention in really
00:51:50.920specific ways. And there's something you wrote titled, Air Pollution Rots Our Brains. Is That
00:51:58.220Why We Don't Do Anything About It? That's the title. And you write, multiple studies have shown
00:52:02.520that the way in which social media regulates our information intake for profit leaves us more
00:52:07.120divided, less politically aware, and increasingly prejudiced and violent, end quote. And I wonder
00:52:13.560on a bigger level when we are in so many ways being called to stand and fight for our loved
00:52:21.360ones, the health of our loved ones, for ourselves, for the land we live on, for our water.
00:52:25.620The fact that we make decisions or allow decisions to be made without a struggle or without resisting
00:52:32.740in terms of poisoning our own water, it's really interesting just on such a basic level
00:52:38.740how distracted and almost paused in our own tracks we are for things that are seemingly
00:52:45.780very clear that we should want to stand up for so i guess the this question of like
00:52:51.940how do these algorithms function in making us less capable of action again you know i wouldn't
00:52:58.380just reduce it to the algorithms like systems are built um many of them you know with very much the
00:53:05.840intention to distract us they don't really care what they're distracting us from um like i don't
00:53:10.940think every single person who builds like you know some stupid mobile game is actively trying to uh0.90
00:53:17.500you know hasten the destruction of the planet because it means we pay attention to that and not0.97
00:53:21.640that um but you know in part that is the result just because we're very bad at choosing where we
00:53:27.680direct our attention and that's not really a modern problem or anything else that's essentially
00:53:32.440the central lesson of every major world religion throughout history or any kind of major spiritual
00:53:38.740practice is about paying attention and to the here and now in various kinds of forms um attention is
00:53:46.440this kind of incredible um is a superpower when you choose where to where to direct it um but most
00:53:52.900of us you know don't have that choice um because we lack uh you know it's so hard to maintain a
00:53:58.980kind of awareness of the ways in which we are being distracted. But also, I mean, really,
00:54:04.780really critically, we're also traumatized. We're also living under circumstances that are almost
00:54:11.100totally unbearable, that most of us are in the position of struggling every day for our daily
00:54:19.220survival under capitalism in incredibly precarious situations where we can't barely think how we
00:54:25.240might change our lives uh we're told that the situation of the world is in some way our fault
00:54:30.800um that it's due to our you know individual behaviors that the world is the way that it is
00:54:36.500and yet there's no way in which the kind of actions that we're capable of taking most of
00:54:42.280us in the present moment will have any effect on that whatsoever so we're faced with that
00:54:46.580realization that we are we are kind of genuinely helpless and we're also traumatized like deeply
00:54:51.560and psychologically by the level of which things are happening it is the most damaging kind of
00:54:56.520thing that can happen to anyone psychologically is to be that kind of level of helpless and what
00:55:02.960it does is is is what trauma does which is that it freezes us in place uh it makes us completely
00:55:09.060incapable of of changing a situation you know the the highest level you see this in you know things
00:55:15.840like ptsd which are around very specific deep forms of direct trauma where people will continue
00:55:21.820to kind of relive and reenact that moment of trauma and be unable to kind of break out of
00:55:26.960this cycle we're all in similar cycles to that because of the trauma of everyday life and also
00:55:32.960the very specific trauma of realizing the the existential danger that our biosphere faces in
00:55:39.220the present moment and we're all traumatized by that realization and no matter if we can talk
00:55:44.460about it all the time and we can blame various factors um and we can certainly can blame certain
00:55:49.940factors and we should blame oil companies and you know the biggest contributors to this that do far
00:55:54.940far more than any kind of individual um but none of that really matters you know we all know how
00:56:01.480bad the situation is what matters is is essentially kind of treating our own trauma in that sense by
00:56:08.100reconnecting ourselves to the world around us in really meaningful ways as a prerequisite to any
00:56:12.800kind of change that might occur you know earlier on we were talking about the individualism
00:56:17.960that is a result of both these kind of algorithmic and social political corporate systems and is also
00:56:24.700a result in part of just our embodiment as humans and the power of overcoming that in various ways
00:56:32.000you know one of the people i return to quite a lot is gregory bateson it was very clear that um
00:56:37.600You know, and this is way back in the kind of 1960s and 70s, that the environmental crisis that would be termed at the time, things like the pollution of Lake Erie, were a psychological crisis, were a mental crisis, were a kind of sickness of society that was infecting the world in this way.
00:56:55.420um he spoke you know he wrote extensively about the fact that um we'd driven lake erie mad through
00:57:01.960our own kind of madness and that we were in this kind of what he called an eco-mental relationship
00:57:06.540with the with the environment around us that continues and so part of the work is understanding
00:57:13.160how we heal our own relationships which is how we heal the world it's not through kind of recycling