Speaker 1: Exponential tech is is really powerful. It's like the power
Speaker 1: of gods, at least little gods. But we don't have
Speaker 1: the kind of wisdom, love and prudence to use that
Speaker 1: power well. And you don't get to keep doing exponential
Speaker 1: warfare and exponential externalities on a finite planet not blow
Speaker 1: yourself up. Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. In
Speaker 1: this episode, I talked to social philosopher Daniel Schmockenberger about
Speaker 1: exponential technology and its effects on our current world. According
Speaker 1: to Daniel, organizations that harness the power of modern tech
Speaker 1: rarely use it for good, like how social media companies
Speaker 1: boost polarizing content to maximize user engagement, leading to a
Speaker 1: distrust of science and destabilized democracies. To overcome humanity's current
Speaker 1: existential threat, Daniel argues, we all need to work towards
Speaker 1: a radical cultural envitenment. We also touch on the topics
Speaker 1: of collective intelligence, human development, power, responsibility, and civilization. It's
Speaker 1: always great chatting with Daniel. He's a good friend and
Speaker 1: very thoughtful human being. So without further ado, I'll bring
Speaker 1: you Daniel Schmuckeberger. Hey, Daniel, I can't wait to talk
Speaker 1: to you today on the Psychody Podcast. I'm so happy
Speaker 1: to be talking to you again, Scott. It's been a while.
Speaker 1: It has been a while. I love the beard. I
Speaker 1: love the beard. Thank you. You've got a couple months
Speaker 1: to catch up. I do a couple of months. But
Speaker 1: you look very wise, and that will catch up with
Speaker 1: the fact you are wise. You know you are very
Speaker 1: wise human. As long as I've known you, I've been
Speaker 1: really impressed by your insights and your almost quaeravoyance about
Speaker 1: the future of civilization, which is pretty cool. Did you
Speaker 1: always have that kind of being able to think not
Speaker 1: short term, but very very long term about the arc
Speaker 1: of humanity? I think it's worth noting that I'm profoundly
Speaker 1: less good at that than I wish I was, and
Speaker 1: also profoundly less good at it than I thought I
Speaker 1: was when I was younger. Oh, that's fair enough. It's
Speaker 1: an important thing to comment on. But yeah, I was fortunate.
Speaker 1: I was homeschooled growing up and got to have a
Speaker 1: pretty unique curriculum, largely self guided curriculum. But the things
Speaker 1: my parents were into, so I was exposed. One of
Speaker 1: them was Bucky Fuller and so comprehensive anticipatory design science
Speaker 1: thinking through long arc of history, long arc of future,
Speaker 1: and how we designed with that in mind was kind
Speaker 1: of early background, and then a lot of Fritcheoff, Kapri
Speaker 1: and system science that was also doing kind of long
Speaker 1: term forecasting and deep history. So I would say long
Speaker 1: time scale has been with me most of my life. Well,
Speaker 1: it's really allowed you to see and point out a
Speaker 1: lot of things going on in our world today that
Speaker 1: could be greatly, greatly improved. And there's a lot there's
Speaker 1: a lot that could be improved. So let's take some
Speaker 1: slice of some of the things that have been on
Speaker 1: your mind lately. I know one big thing is technology
Speaker 1: and the impact of technology on our psychology and the
Speaker 1: risk of technology. But I am wondering to what extent
Speaker 1: you see the problem as do you see it as
Speaker 1: an extreme, extremely as bad as you know people are panicking.
Speaker 1: You know there's a whole tech panic. Where are you
Speaker 1: in the spectrum from that too? It is completely fundamentally
Speaker 1: turning kids into robots and causing them be addicted and
Speaker 1: suicide rates, et cetera. First, the other continuum. There's a
Speaker 1: new book that just came out by Robbie Suave. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've heard about it called I think
Speaker 1: it's actually called tech panic, where he says, everybody calmed down,
Speaker 1: there's really nothing to worry here. All the liberals are
Speaker 1: panicking for nothing. Where do you kind of fall in
Speaker 1: this large broad spectrum. Yeah, there are naive techno optimists
Speaker 1: and naive techno pessimist views. The naive techno pessimist view
Speaker 1: sees the problems that are associated with tech and takes
Speaker 1: a luddite direction, and that approach will always just lose
Speaker 1: because it will have less power than whatever group is
Speaker 1: embracing the tech which has the power. So really, there
Speaker 1: are no futures that have any chance that aren't high tech,
Speaker 1: because even if they were better, they would just lose.
Speaker 1: And so from a real politic assessment, specifically, now, exponential
Speaker 1: tech is so much more powerful than every other form
Speaker 1: of legacy power that only the groups that are developing
Speaker 1: and deploying exponential tech will have any say in the future. Wait,
Speaker 1: can you actually define what exponential tech is? Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a number of different ways we could define it. Tech
Speaker 1: that has exponentially more influence or power with or exponentially
Speaker 1: less people need to be involved, exponentially less resource timescale,
Speaker 1: so formally, exponential tech would mean technology that recursively makes
Speaker 1: itself better. So if you think about computation, I can
Speaker 1: use a computer to simulate how to make a better
Speaker 1: computer chip, get better transistor dency, and then that better
Speaker 1: computer chip can do better simulations to make a better
Speaker 1: computer chip. I can use AI to make better AI.
Speaker 1: But not just formally that. There are kinds of tech
Speaker 1: that help advance a world system where that world system
Speaker 1: as a whole makes better tech. Right, Nukes don't necessarily
Speaker 1: make better nukes, but they definitely concentrate power to where
Speaker 1: the groups that have them can do more tech investment,
Speaker 1: including in nukes. So I wouldn't call it an exponential
Speaker 1: tech formally in terms of self recursion. But so's there's
Speaker 1: a range of definitions. If we mostly we're talking about
Speaker 1: when we say exponential type, we're talking about computation and
Speaker 1: its derivatives that do recursively affect themselves. But you also
Speaker 1: have things like you have a product for sale, a
Speaker 1: good or service that doesn't have atoms involved, so there's
Speaker 1: no unit cost. So I make the thing once and
Speaker 1: then sell it an indefinite number of times with no
Speaker 1: you know, so it's all margin so I get an
Speaker 1: exponential return on capital as a result. This is why
Speaker 1: pretty much all the unicorns are software companies, and all
Speaker 1: of the capital flows into software, which is from hardware
Speaker 1: or so much of it has, which is why Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley has been largely software. But exponential tech also means
Speaker 1: if you look at the timescale that it took for
Speaker 1: Facebook to reach a billion people compared to say anything
Speaker 1: else historically the first oil company or whatever, so the
Speaker 1: speed to scale or that Facebook has three billion users
Speaker 1: on a monthly basis, So the total scale or the
Speaker 1: amount of scale those social media companies have AI models
Speaker 1: to be the predict your behavior better than intelligence companies
Speaker 1: have on their own populations. Also, it takes way less
Speaker 1: people to run one of those companies or that technology.
Speaker 1: And so by exponential tech we mean all of the
Speaker 1: roughly all of those things where there is some kinds
Speaker 1: of either the return on capital, the tech making the
Speaker 1: tech better, basically increased scale of impact from smaller groups
Speaker 1: in shorter periods of time. Okay, cool, So yeah, so
Speaker 1: where do you see that? Yeah? So the center of
Speaker 1: that is computation. The very center of that is AI,
Speaker 1: and then computation and AI working on computational substrate, like
Speaker 1: how to make quantum computers and photo computers and better
Speaker 1: GPUs and all like that is the next step. Then
Speaker 1: all the sensors that go into it, the whole Internet
Speaker 1: of Things world and the ARVR kind of extensions. Then
Speaker 1: computation in AI applied to nanotech, biotech, protein folding, the
Speaker 1: rest of the world. Right, So that's kind of the
Speaker 1: way of thinking about it. I would say that exponental
Speaker 1: tech provides so much more power than everything else that
Speaker 1: it just wins via economic warfare, political information warfare, whatever
Speaker 1: you want to call it, competitive dynamics. And so you're
Speaker 1: if there's a group that has got a vision for
Speaker 1: how to make a better future, but it doesn't have
Speaker 1: the power to enact it, it's not going to matter.
Speaker 1: And the power to enact it is going to come
Speaker 1: through the size of the lever that is affecting the choices,
Speaker 1: which is going to be the tech. And so right now,
Speaker 1: I would say there are only a few types of
Speaker 1: groups that are really developing and deploying exponential tech, which
Speaker 1: means they are the types of groups that have the
Speaker 1: most influence on shaping the future currently, and none of
Speaker 1: them are thinking about the types of things that matter
Speaker 1: for the types of future we want adequately. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: pause there. You're saying so much that is rich. No.
Speaker 1: I assume Facebook is one of those that you're referring to.
Speaker 1: And do you think they have been rightly criticized along
Speaker 1: those lines for not fully realizing their potential that they
Speaker 1: could have or the kind of power they could have. Totally? Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: I didn't answer your initial question. I started to go
Speaker 1: off another direction around the techno optimists or technopesmistic direction.
Speaker 1: Nobody wants to go back to a pre technology time
Speaker 1: where novacane didn't exist, and you stelling dental work right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's lots of things about tech that we like, but
Speaker 1: all the tech also corresponds with externalities of harms across
Speaker 1: environmental supply chains or social dynamics or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: So is the world getting better from tech like pinker
Speaker 1: and rustling and people would say, or is it getting worse?
Speaker 1: Like so many environmentalists and Center for Humane Technology and
Speaker 1: other places would say, it's getting better and worse at
Speaker 1: the same time on different metrics. That's the most nuanced
Speaker 1: answer I've ever heard in the history of answers. I
Speaker 1: love that it's getting better associated with the metrics that
Speaker 1: we're measuring and optimizing for, and particularly that have capital
Speaker 1: associated it's getting worse on all the other metrics. It's
Speaker 1: getting worse on heaps of psychological metrics. Related to this
Speaker 1: podcast where we were just talking earlier that there are
Speaker 1: so many psychiatric disorders that where people don't have a
Speaker 1: full blown diagnosable version of it, they have a subclinical
Speaker 1: version of generalized anxiety disorder, or of borderline type dynamics,
Speaker 1: or of addictive tendencies, or of existential angst and nihilism,
Speaker 1: or but like ubiquitous psychopathology is one of the externalities
Speaker 1: of all of our tech and success. Do you mean
Speaker 1: do you mean it? Is it a consequence or is
Speaker 1: it There's obviously a bidirectional loop there, right, there is
Speaker 1: a bidirectional loop. The drug dealer says, hey, I'm just
Speaker 1: supplying a thing that the people want. But when they
Speaker 1: offer the first hit for free to get the people
Speaker 1: to want it, starting when their kids are in bad
Speaker 1: environments where they don't really understand the full consequence, and
Speaker 1: then offer it to people who are already addicted, there's
Speaker 1: a supply side responsibility missing especially given the asymmetric capacity
Speaker 1: of the supply side relative to the demand side. That
Speaker 1: then gets to have this plausible deniability called I'm just
Speaker 1: supplying the existing demand, but it's manufacturing demand that is
Speaker 1: not actually healthy, and that is manufacturable because of the
Speaker 1: asymmetry of supply. So once companies start getting big enough
Speaker 1: to make people want shit that they never had before,
Speaker 1: in fact make them feel unhappy if they don't have
Speaker 1: the shit that they never had before, make designed and
Speaker 1: obsolescence and style changes that make them continue to need
Speaker 1: the new shit, and then say, look, we're just giving
Speaker 1: the people what they want. There's something basically rather than
Speaker 1: authentic demand for real things driving supply of real value.
Speaker 1: You start to have supply wanting to continue to concentrate
Speaker 1: its power, driving demand to then be able to have
Speaker 1: the plausible deniability of saying it's all voluntary, but it's
Speaker 1: appealing to the lower angels of our nature rather than
Speaker 1: the higher angels of our nature. And when you start
Speaker 1: to get such radical asymmetries as multi billion dollar or
Speaker 1: trillion dollar companies that are coordinated and the demand side
Speaker 1: is not coordinated, there isn't There aren't like labor unions
Speaker 1: of all of demand that go up against Google that
Speaker 1: are also using the same kind of AIS. It's the
Speaker 1: individual Google user against Google, and Google's using the most
Speaker 1: advanced aiyes in the world with like a trillion dollar
Speaker 1: market cap against an individual person who doesn't even know
Speaker 1: that their data is being harvested to optimize their behavior
Speaker 1: to sell to somebody. Then the whole idea of market
Speaker 1: and the rationality of the market is very broken. And
Speaker 1: so then if you want to maximize the lifetime revenue
Speaker 1: of a customer, addiction is a great way to maximize
Speaker 1: lifetime revenue customer. And then if you're something like face, s,
Speaker 1: Book or Google, where you're an advertiser, where maximizing addiction
Speaker 1: across every different avenue possible, Right, I get like I'm
Speaker 1: making money by maximizing their attention, and so then I
Speaker 1: can sell their behavior to all of the different industries.
Speaker 1: That's kind of a meta play on addiction. This is
Speaker 1: so rich. So let's pick a pause here a second.
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Speaker 1: be a part of the Transcender community. Okay, now back
Speaker 1: to the show. Let's elucidate or delineate exactly what we
Speaker 1: mean by the lower angels and what we mean by
Speaker 1: the higher angels. I think that would be useful in
Speaker 1: this conversation now. When my head immediately starts to go
Speaker 1: to when you say lower angels, I think ego, I
Speaker 1: think self esteem, drive, you know, I think of it
Speaker 1: from a Maswell perspective, right, I think about what needs
Speaker 1: are being met When I think lower I think basic
Speaker 1: needs versus higher needs, which are more growth oriented needs.
Speaker 1: And I just wanted to see if you're on the
Speaker 1: same paige. Are we thinking among some of our lines
Speaker 1: here I'll say it different way. Okay, So if I'm
Speaker 1: looking at what is like, what is fast food as
Speaker 1: a phenomena? What is hostess in McDonald's as a phenomena?
Speaker 1: Because it's providing base level needs survival needs in the
Speaker 1: same way that food from your garden would provide them.
Speaker 1: So it's not that we're talking about base needs versus
Speaker 1: higher needs. We're talking about even here base needs versus
Speaker 1: base needs, but that are different in kind. Okay, good, God, good,
Speaker 1: this is great. So it'd be the distinction that I
Speaker 1: make between like healthy self esteem versus onhealthy self esteem,
Speaker 1: on healthy self esteem being narcissism, and healthy self esteem
Speaker 1: being a sense of self worth and competence. So yes,
Speaker 1: I also self esteem is actually anti narcissistic, right, it
Speaker 1: has correct in order to truly be healthy. It's acutely
Speaker 1: aware of all the things that it's not good at,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't have its sense of self worth or lovability.
Speaker 1: Coupled to that, so it doesn't have to be in
Speaker 1: competition with everyone all the time. It wants to see
Speaker 1: a healthy world, so that wants to see other people succeeding. Right,
Speaker 1: its own success doesn't get made less by other people's success.
Speaker 1: So healthy self esteem and narcissism aren't like slightly similar versions.
Speaker 1: They're almost almost antithetical and really deep ways to each other.
Speaker 1: Right they are. But yes, and by healthy not, I
Speaker 1: mean in terms of they're both attempts to regulate that
Speaker 1: need for self esteem. One does it in a very unhealthy,
Speaker 1: detrimental way that's not leading to growth, and one way
Speaker 1: is actually caring about growth even at the expense of
Speaker 1: an ego being hurt or something along those lines. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so how we define the healthy versus unhealthy is super important.
Speaker 1: I want to drop back down below esteem to survival
Speaker 1: again and go back to the fast food example because
Speaker 1: it's a particularly clear one, and then we can go
Speaker 1: all the way up. So, in an evolutionary environment for humans,
Speaker 1: there wasn't a lot of abundant sugar floating around. You
Speaker 1: could get a few fruits and a few times a year,
Speaker 1: not that many fruit trees weren't like they are now.
Speaker 1: That they've been hybridized, and there was so much kind
Speaker 1: of chloric surplus in the fruit in the place where
Speaker 1: famine was a real thing and most people died from
Speaker 1: pemin that there was a dope me energic response associated
Speaker 1: with sugar and the sweet taste because those who got
Speaker 1: more of it survived better. Right, And the same is
Speaker 1: true with fat, and the same is true of salt.
Speaker 1: Those were all hard things in evolutionary environments. Again, so
Speaker 1: given that they were scarce and they were evolutionarily adaptive,
Speaker 1: we have a strong feels good, do it again response, right,
Speaker 1: a reward circuit associated with salt, fat, and sugar. Industrialization
Speaker 1: came along, we were able to extract salt and fat
Speaker 1: and sugar from the micronutrients that they were a part of,
Speaker 1: make abundant amounts of them, and then recombine salt fat
Speaker 1: sugar in lots of different ways as a frappuccino, as
Speaker 1: a milkshake, as French fries. It's all just salt, fat
Speaker 1: sugar with different types of flavor and palatability to maximize
Speaker 1: the dope energic response. So then we have in the
Speaker 1: rather than starvation being the leading cause of death, obesity
Speaker 1: being one of the leading causes of death and obc
Speaker 1: related issues in the West, in the developed world. And
Speaker 1: so what we can see that we did is we
Speaker 1: extract the reward part from what it was supposed to
Speaker 1: be coupled to. It was supposed to be coupled to
Speaker 1: vitamins and protein and minerals and the micronutrients and the
Speaker 1: and scarcity of resource. So having some abundance where it
Speaker 1: was actually needed. Now we have excessive amounts, but the
Speaker 1: reward circuit hasn't evolutionarily changed, right, So it's a fucked
Speaker 1: up reward circuit. And what I would say fast food
Speaker 1: is to real nutrition, where you decoupled the reward from
Speaker 1: what it should be rewarding, decoupled it from an actual
Speaker 1: evolutionary benefit. That's what porn is to sexuality. It's what
Speaker 1: social media is to real social relationships. It's what online
Speaker 1: shopping is relative to evolutionary impulse to explore and find
Speaker 1: relevant new things, novelty searching. I would push back on
Speaker 1: one of the things you said for the sake of conversation, please,
Speaker 1: I think that social media can form real social relationship.
Speaker 1: I think there's a certain that doesn't tend to and
Speaker 1: we see a lot of unhealthy aspects of it. But
Speaker 1: I think you know, a lot of people who have
Speaker 1: difficulty communicating with each other outside of online have found
Speaker 1: really strong communities, like people in the autism community, for instance,
Speaker 1: and things that have formed real deep relationships. So I
Speaker 1: would make the case that that analogy is not one
Speaker 1: hundred percent correct because you you know, social media can
Speaker 1: afford real social relationships, but it just doesn't tend to
Speaker 1: be the case. Well, okay, so it's a great example
Speaker 1: autism community being an actual community online because even without
Speaker 1: leaving their house and going into social environments that are awkward,
Speaker 1: they can find people and talk to them. So there's
Speaker 1: this issue of way too many men in China because
Speaker 1: of the one child policy for a long time, and
Speaker 1: it's selected for men, and so you have a bunch
Speaker 1: of unmarriable men, something like maybe one hundred million of them.
Speaker 1: And that's a pretty big deal because whenever a society
Speaker 1: gets too many men, if the men can't get laid,
Speaker 1: they decide to blow the society up, and so you
Speaker 1: have to usually start a land war to get rid
Speaker 1: of some of the men and usually advance the aims
Speaker 1: of the society, Like, that's kind of a well known phenomena,
Speaker 1: and but in modern time, what do we do with it?
Speaker 1: So one of the things that has been happening is
Speaker 1: a lot of these men falling in love with an
Speaker 1: AI chatbot. And you can imagine a world where VR
Speaker 1: porn with AI chatbot type features deals with issues like that,
Speaker 1: and you're like, hey, and porn did a good thing.
Speaker 1: It's not that it can't ever do a good thing.
Speaker 1: It's that overall it is oriented in a way that
Speaker 1: has reward circuits that are decoupled from the thing they
Speaker 1: evolved to enhance. Right over Arkingly, that's the phenomena we're
Speaker 1: looking at, is that someone is getting a reward process
Speaker 1: for something that is not net healthy, revolutionary for them
Speaker 1: or their role in society. And so I would say
Speaker 1: at every level of Maslow's hierarchy, there are going to
Speaker 1: be places where I can get a reward circuit that
Speaker 1: makes me keep doing the thing. The thing that I'm
Speaker 1: doing is not net developmental and a meaningful definition of
Speaker 1: development versus making sure that my reward circuit is actually
Speaker 1: coupled to real development. So an interesting thing about the
Speaker 1: Maslow hierarchy in my revised hierarchy is that I don't
Speaker 1: actually treat as levels but as different I guess forms
Speaker 1: of integration. So that's why I changed it from like
Speaker 1: a hierarchical triangle to pyramid to a sailboat and integrate
Speaker 1: a whole unit. And I know we've had some really
Speaker 1: I remember having a conversation with I don't know, do
Speaker 1: you remember we had a conversation in your car your
Speaker 1: car once after a long walk and we talked about
Speaker 1: integration in Anthony remember with this, So there are two
Speaker 1: things that we both of us have been super interested
Speaker 1: in since we've known each other, integration and emergence. And
Speaker 1: I'm wondering how they come into play here, right, because
Speaker 1: to me it seems like healthy, healthy use of social
Speaker 1: media is a possibility, but it actually takes takes a
Speaker 1: lot more integration than then a lot of people have
Speaker 1: the patients to you know, it's a lot quicker to
Speaker 1: have this kind of disintegration on social media, and you
Speaker 1: see it disintegrates quickly. So any I just want to
Speaker 1: riff on that. I guess your thoughts on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's actually very interesting because to you say, it disintegrates quickly,
Speaker 1: and one of the classic examples that we see is
Speaker 1: the amount of polarization that occurs in social media, whether
Speaker 1: we're talking about social justice or vaccines, or climate change,
Speaker 1: or gay marriage or whatever. And so this is an
Speaker 1: example of where the technology is being developed in a
Speaker 1: landscape where the economics shaped it so heavily right. They
Speaker 1: didn't want to charge the users, so the users aren't
Speaker 1: the customers. The advertisers are so selling the user behavior
Speaker 1: is the product, and so gathering behavior on the user,
Speaker 1: gathering behavioral data on them to be able to sell it,
Speaker 1: and that that should actually be a breach of fiduciary law,
Speaker 1: except it doesn't apply because when it was developed as
Speaker 1: a type of thing didn't exist. Because it's Facebook is
Speaker 1: gathering an amount of information on you from a predictive
Speaker 1: behavioral analytic point of view that should be considered privileged information.
Speaker 1: They can predict your behavior in consequential ways more than
Speaker 1: your psychotherapist or your lawyer or whoever else could. That
Speaker 1: has a fiduciary responsibility to only use that information in
Speaker 1: your interest. But here they're selling it to other people,
Speaker 1: political actors and corporate actors that don't. They want you
Speaker 1: to do a behavior that's aligned with their interests. There's
Speaker 1: a real problem with that, but you can see that,
Speaker 1: Like if Facebook simply charged you for a service and
Speaker 1: let you calibrate what it was optimizing for and had
Speaker 1: a fiduciare responsibility to you in order to have access
Speaker 1: to that much of your behavioral data, it would be
Speaker 1: totally different. But because they're selling ads, they want to
Speaker 1: maximize your time on site and your engagement. And it
Speaker 1: happens to be that the things that are more addictive
Speaker 1: maximize time on site and the thing that are more
Speaker 1: polarizing maximize engagement. So when you train the AI on,
Speaker 1: maximize time on site, maximize engagement. And it's just running
Speaker 1: personal analytics at a scale nobody could possibly make sense of.
Speaker 1: The most polarizing shit and the most limbically hijacking shit
Speaker 1: is what emerges and the lower angels of our nature
Speaker 1: again meaning it's easier to get the dopamine hit from
Speaker 1: the fast food than it is to get the better
Speaker 1: feelings from the eating salad and veggies and exercising, which
Speaker 1: is going to take me months to feel better that like,
Speaker 1: oh wow, I actually have less inflammation in my body
Speaker 1: and I can move and I feel better about things
Speaker 1: there's a two marshmallow delayed gratification thing. And so it's
Speaker 1: the broken reward circuits are just faster. You can appeal
Speaker 1: to them easier. So capitalism appeals to the lower angels
Speaker 1: of our nature better than the higher angels of our nature, right,
Speaker 1: because the higher angels of our nature don't need to
Speaker 1: buy an extrinsic thing to get happiness, and they don't
Speaker 1: and they don't make immediate actions as quickly based on
Speaker 1: some kind of impulsevity. So the marketing is going to
Speaker 1: appeal to impulse control disorders and pushing pain points to
Speaker 1: then offer market based solutions. Yeah, and then being able
Speaker 1: to AI optimize this ad over this ad from this
Speaker 1: company over this company, just creates an arms race of
Speaker 1: maximizing addictiveness writ large everywhere. Well, you nailed it. That
Speaker 1: is what's happening. You know, the psychological concept time preference
Speaker 1: seems relevant here. And it's just very interesting because all
Speaker 1: the things we know about you know, in the in
Speaker 1: the self control or to the self development literature, all
Speaker 1: the things we know that if we have long term
Speaker 1: goals and the strategies we use to curb those long
Speaker 1: term goals, I mean social media they're not designing things
Speaker 1: to bring out the best long term in people. It's
Speaker 1: but they could. The point that I think the point is,
Speaker 1: and this is where we're getting this, is we would
Speaker 1: need a different business model. Yeah yeah, And so I
Speaker 1: really want to have that conversation with you too. What
Speaker 1: could this new business model look what does positive product design?
Speaker 1: Is my colleague Coordiny bigoy I was doing great work
Speaker 1: on designs and as you are and your colleagues, what
Speaker 1: would the new algorithm look like? I believe the colleague
Speaker 1: that introduced us was zach Stein, and that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: Some of the early work he did was a work
Speaker 1: on development, like following the PHA kind of work of
Speaker 1: stages of childhood development past eighteen as an assumption that
Speaker 1: that's when humans stop meaningfully developing, and continuing to ask
Speaker 1: what does a developed human being in a mean in
Speaker 1: a meaningful sense ongoingly? How do we assess that? How
Speaker 1: do we create education for it? How do we personalize
Speaker 1: education for it? And so the group Lectica built the
Speaker 1: thing called electical score. One of the things that they
Speaker 1: were looking at. They're like, this is a good characteristic
Speaker 1: of development writ large, is someone's orientation to seek multiple
Speaker 1: perspectives right in a complex scenario, recognize that each perspective
Speaker 1: will have some signal, not be pure noise, but every
Speaker 1: perspective will probably have some noise in it. So let
Speaker 1: me seek as many perspectives as possible. The first part's
Speaker 1: perspective seek and perspective taking. Next part would be the
Speaker 1: ability to parse those perspectives to try to find the
Speaker 1: signal and get rid of the noise and then do synthesis.
Speaker 1: And so the complexity to be able to take many perspectives,
Speaker 1: to parse them, to bring them together, and to yet
Speaker 1: still hold enough uncertainty to continue to evolve. That that
Speaker 1: would be a thing we would like to develop in people. Right, So,
Speaker 1: let's say we could automate electical assessment of people based
Speaker 1: on their online behavior. And let's say that we train
Speaker 1: Facebook's algorithm to increase people's electical score, so it was
Speaker 1: going to put in front of them, And let's make
Speaker 1: it simpler. We want to increase people's attention span rather
Speaker 1: than decreasing, and we want to increase their non dope
Speaker 1: energic attention. So we don't just increase their attention span
Speaker 1: by giving them like only more animated videos that they
Speaker 1: can make it through longer, but like increase their attention
Speaker 1: span with text right, with some orring shit, which means
Speaker 1: and it's actually really important why right, It's important that there,
Speaker 1: if there is to be any volition or self determination
Speaker 1: of the being, that they're able to engage their attention
Speaker 1: in a self directed way for enough time to be
Speaker 1: able to actually get enough information to process the complexity
Speaker 1: of a thing. So let's say that Facebook said, all right,
Speaker 1: we only we want to increase everyone's attention span. We
Speaker 1: want to increase their intentionality rather than their distraction. So
Speaker 1: we're going to do continual check ins on the nature
Speaker 1: of their intentionality. I have some friends that just sent
Speaker 1: me a thing on that they're working on developing some
Speaker 1: technology to do attention and intention up regulation. I love
Speaker 1: that you can see a lot of things that we
Speaker 1: could assess that we would add to the objective function
Speaker 1: that we wanted to optimize for that would be net positive.
Speaker 1: And I don't have to say, hey, we're because everyone
Speaker 1: would have a concern, well, is the right going to
Speaker 1: have a control on this? Is the left going to
Speaker 1: have a control on this? If your perspective seeking, then
Speaker 1: that doesn't fucking matter. We're not trying to make people
Speaker 1: have one view more. We're trying to make people better
Speaker 1: at seeking the range of views, being able to understand them,
Speaker 1: being able to articulate them in more nuanced ways. But Daniel,
Speaker 1: this is the This is the tricky thing because the
Speaker 1: lower angel, the most immediate, short term response, is the
Speaker 1: one that's partisan, is the one that's tied to your
Speaker 1: own identity. So I'm just pointing this out to our audience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a kind of McDonald's. It's a kind of heroine.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of porn. Right, tribal identity in politics
Speaker 1: is too real political thinking. What porn is to real
Speaker 1: intimate relationships. Well, I'll speak for yourself, and so what
Speaker 1: I mean is it's a way to get the dopemin
Speaker 1: ergic hit of certainty and sanctimony and righteousness and group
Speaker 1: identity without possibly advancing a functional thing. Okay, think about this.
Speaker 1: If are so many people in the US, whether our
Speaker 1: issues social justice or our issues vaccines, our greatest enemy
Speaker 1: is our fellow countrymen. Right, the right centipathy of the left,
Speaker 1: the left centipathy of the right is so intense that
Speaker 1: our fellow countrymen are our greatest enemies, we put most
Speaker 1: of our our energy into infighting there, well, what happens
Speaker 1: to that nation? That nation breaks down pretty fucking fast,
Speaker 1: while China's Belt and Road initiative becomes the new twenty
Speaker 1: first century global power structure because they don't create a
Speaker 1: system of internal antipathy. And if we put all this
Speaker 1: energy into political infighting every four years to get someone elected,
Speaker 1: who will not be able to focus on anything that
Speaker 1: will take four years or longer. And all infrastructure and
Speaker 1: everything takes four years or longer, so they'll only be
Speaker 1: able to focus on super short term shit and whatever
Speaker 1: they do will get undone in the next four years.
Speaker 1: And whatever new technology of being able to engage the
Speaker 1: people and get them out to vote or change their
Speaker 1: minds that we figure out how to use, the other side,
Speaker 1: if we're effective, will reverse engineer and make a better version.
Speaker 1: So we just drive arms race is on that. That's
Speaker 1: just a path to self termination. You cannot possibly run
Speaker 1: a democracy effectively where your fellow countrymen or your enemy,
Speaker 1: and where your all of the energy turns into waste
Speaker 1: heat because of inviting. So all that does is select
Speaker 1: out democracy and have technologically empowered authoritarianism. Guaranteed to rule
Speaker 1: the world. And so if you are busy doing left
Speaker 1: right in fighting, you're also just busy killing open societies
Speaker 1: completely and voting for digital author or technologically empowered detocracy
Speaker 1: running the world. Your little issue that you're focused on
Speaker 1: is a much littler fucking issue than do we have
Speaker 1: a process to address issues at all that is aligned
Speaker 1: with the kind of society we would like to have.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what we're talking about right now. So how
Speaker 1: can the default response be perspective taking that's my question? Well,
Speaker 1: this is how we come to the one marshmallow versus
Speaker 1: two marshmallow fair politics. Is there's a dopeminergic hit uncertaintyus
Speaker 1: think about it in an evolutionary environment, right in a
Speaker 1: tribal type environment, having enough, having clarity certainty to know
Speaker 1: how to act had value. Do I are there dangerous
Speaker 1: predators over there? Is there a tribe that we're going
Speaker 1: to have to deal with? Is their food to go pursue? Like,
Speaker 1: there's value in the certainty, And it was fairly straightforward
Speaker 1: to get it for those types of things because you
Speaker 1: just go look and you could poke it with a
Speaker 1: stick and have direct five cents experience of the thing,
Speaker 1: and someone else could come have five cents experience of
Speaker 1: the same thing. Right, But now almost all the things
Speaker 1: we're certain of, nobody can poke with a stick, nobody's seen,
Speaker 1: nobody really has a sense what the CCP is doing,
Speaker 1: or what happened in Wuhan Broology Institute, or if the
Speaker 1: mRNA really such and such, or if no fucking idea
Speaker 1: of but totally certain. Right, everyone thinks they're certain they
Speaker 1: know though, Yeah, and so there's an like it feels
Speaker 1: good to be certain. There's a certain good feeling of
Speaker 1: righteousness and kind of moral sanctimony, and there's a certain
Speaker 1: good feel and feeling like I'm with the other ones
Speaker 1: who are right. But all of that is the good
Speaker 1: feeling of eating McDonald's right. It's a dopaminergic hit that
Speaker 1: is artificially giving a neurotransmitter to your brain that is
Speaker 1: decoupled from the actual thing that neurotransmitter would have evolutionarily
Speaker 1: signaled for. And so it feels good but is actually
Speaker 1: making you dumber and batter while you're thinking that you
Speaker 1: are smarter and gooder, right, thinking that you are more
Speaker 1: doing the true and good thing. Yeah, if we were
Speaker 1: to get really nerdy hair. There are multiple dopamine pathways,
Speaker 1: and I've written articles about more evolved dopamine pathways that
Speaker 1: send projections to the dorsalato preform to cortex, which is
Speaker 1: what we want to engage more. When we're talking about
Speaker 1: your kind of way of perspective, taking and holding consciousness
Speaker 1: and being able to inhibit the prepotent response. That's all
Speaker 1: executive functions which do have dopamine projections, but they're more
Speaker 1: later evolved, so they're not as default default. I don't
Speaker 1: know why I said like that as default, but I've
Speaker 1: written about that. I've called it the nerdy dopamine pathway
Speaker 1: is what I've called it. So we need we need
Speaker 1: to activate more of the nerdy dopamine pathway. I think
Speaker 1: you would agree. Yeah, okay, so this is very interesting.
Speaker 1: You come back to polarization, and we come back to
Speaker 1: the topic of democracy for a moment. So democracies, modern
Speaker 1: democracies emerged following the printing press because the printing pressman
Speaker 1: textbooks and newspaper for everyone. So you don't need a
Speaker 1: privileged nobility class that has access to education and information.
Speaker 1: Everybody can get educated and everybody can know what's going on.
Speaker 1: So that they can all participate in government. The social
Speaker 1: media is really an anti force estate and the exact
Speaker 1: opposite of a printing press, because rather than everyone being
Speaker 1: able to get a newspaper to have the same information
Speaker 1: about based reality to then make decisions on here, we're
Speaker 1: going to customize a news feed to my preferences. So
Speaker 1: two people will have certainty because there's an ubiquity of
Speaker 1: information that was customized to my likelihood to believe it
Speaker 1: and interact with it. But they're seeing completely different worlds
Speaker 1: and so what it's And yet that makes me engage
Speaker 1: age more seeing the things that hit my preference biases.
Speaker 1: And so you have AI more powerful than the AI
Speaker 1: that beat cast provate chess, optimizing everyone towards doubling down
Speaker 1: on their own biases, group identities, limbic hijacks, and bias
Speaker 1: for certainty. So democracy breaks with that that you get
Speaker 1: an increasingly polarized population, which creates an increasingly polarized representative class,
Speaker 1: which has more and more gridlock, which can't get shit done,
Speaker 1: which just loses to authoritarianism, and especially technologically empowered authoritarianism
Speaker 1: that without the gridlock inside, can implement exponential tech towards
Speaker 1: long term visions. So when we come back to the
Speaker 1: printing press thing, it's not just that democracy emerged when
Speaker 1: we had broadcasts and the ability to get the same
Speaker 1: message out to everyone. It's that reading was actually an
Speaker 1: important part of it. This was something that Marshall McLuhan discussed,
Speaker 1: and the guys that the Digital Life Foundation go into
Speaker 1: quite a lot is at the time of say, the
Speaker 1: development of this country, out of the political thinking associated.
Speaker 1: There's very little hypernormal stimuli in reading plain text on paper,
Speaker 1: and you have to actually stay focused for a fairly
Speaker 1: long period of time without distractions to get the content in.
Speaker 1: So you're actually training attention span like a muscle. And obviously,
Speaker 1: to engage in democracy, I've got to be able to
Speaker 1: hold my view and someone else's view in someone else's
Speaker 1: view at the same time. Right, the complexity of the
Speaker 1: situation means I need more working memory to hold the
Speaker 1: whole thing. If my work memory and attention span comes
Speaker 1: too small, I can only be a fundamentalist who has
Speaker 1: reactionary views that can fit into sound bites correct, because
Speaker 1: the truth is too nuanced to fit into a sound bite.
Speaker 1: So you have to have much longer attention spans. Which
Speaker 1: means you have to train attention span, which means rather
Speaker 1: than fast cycles of low dopaminergic stuff, I need stuff
Speaker 1: like reading it's boring as fuck. And then also writing
Speaker 1: right when the medium was reading and writing. Writing also
Speaker 1: meant I had to be able to understand what I
Speaker 1: thought well enough to articulate it in structured. And so
Speaker 1: I'm not saying we go to a pre digital age.
Speaker 1: We're not going to, but we have to look at
Speaker 1: the things that cognitive capacities that those media were developing
Speaker 1: in us and say, in this new media age, how
Speaker 1: do we develop those same cognitive capacities, and if not,
Speaker 1: what does that portend for our social structures? Yes, and
Speaker 1: you'll play improv here with you. Yes. And the dopamine
Speaker 1: pathway that goes to the dorsalot of prefrontal cortex is
Speaker 1: correlated with the personality trait openness to experience. So there
Speaker 1: are individual differences in this, and there are some people
Speaker 1: who do find greater reward value of information, of learning
Speaker 1: new information. So, you know, knowing that, how can we
Speaker 1: kind of for those that are very low on that
Speaker 1: personality trait spectrum where they're not getting reward value from
Speaker 1: information they're getting more reward value from more of the
Speaker 1: primal dopamine pathways, sex drugs, rock and roll. You know,
Speaker 1: how do we kind of increase that motivation in everyone?
Speaker 1: Is that this obviously a million dollar question. First thing
Speaker 1: is that you can be aware of what increases the
Speaker 1: opposite of it in people and start looking at how
Speaker 1: do we deal with that. We can't have multi billion
Speaker 1: person networks with multi trillion dollar market caps using AI
Speaker 1: and personalization to make people oriented to certainty even more aggressively, angrily,
Speaker 1: righteously certain right. Like, if you're doing that thing, you're
Speaker 1: not just saying how do we It's not just can
Speaker 1: we develop everyone more? It's look, we're actually fucking the
Speaker 1: thing up pretty badly. So that's one thing to look at.
Speaker 1: The other thing is like, Okay, are those differences genetic?
Speaker 1: Are they early childhood? Are they even in utero? What
Speaker 1: was going on in the neurochemistry of the mom that
Speaker 1: was affecting the receptor's informations? Who the fuck knows. I
Speaker 1: think it's very complex, and every piece of science looks
Speaker 1: at the thing it's looking at and then over indexes
Speaker 1: how important that thing was. But I think it's a
Speaker 1: complex function of a lot of those things. But you
Speaker 1: look at a cross cultures where you're gonna have a
Speaker 1: distribution of different genetic predispositions and typologies, yet where you
Speaker 1: still get the Bell curve moved one way or the
Speaker 1: other for the culture as a whole, which is indicating
Speaker 1: the way in culturation works. And so you look at
Speaker 1: Buddhists and their orientation regarding violence across age groups and whatever,
Speaker 1: and you're like, are the Buddhists less violent historically across
Speaker 1: the last three thousand years ten million people, varying plus
Speaker 1: or minus wartime, peace, time, famine, whatever. Yes, they're just
Speaker 1: less violent. Can you attribute that to genes? No, it's
Speaker 1: lots of different gene groups, and some people with the
Speaker 1: same genes who are not Buddhists but are Hindus or
Speaker 1: Muslims or whatever else are more violent in other situations,
Speaker 1: like in culturing people to compassion for all sentient beings
Speaker 1: as the core thing from early childhood with all of
Speaker 1: the practices, like it actually works. If you look at
Speaker 1: Jews and you're like, do Jews develop a higher degree
Speaker 1: of education across the Bell curve for their people regardless
Speaker 1: of the embedding environment there in they do. They do
Speaker 1: a pretty good job of that historically across a couple
Speaker 1: thousand years at least. And so there's something in the
Speaker 1: culture of what the value systems are and how they
Speaker 1: embed the value systems that have to do with the nature.
Speaker 1: You know, does the sabbath have something to do with
Speaker 1: making sure that tech isn't running your life too much
Speaker 1: because you have a break from its effect on your
Speaker 1: life where you're also communing with the sacred and the
Speaker 1: sense of what how should my life be directed? You know,
Speaker 1: like that itself would be a social technology. It's very
Speaker 1: interesting to be able to bind a culture and increase
Speaker 1: its power to steward physical technology. Well, so can we
Speaker 1: develop everyone? Can we prevent people from being developed in
Speaker 1: the worst ways? Yes? Can we develop people in progressively
Speaker 1: better ways as whole cultures independent of individual disposition? Yes?
Speaker 1: Should everyone be equally good at all things? No, because
Speaker 1: the person who might have less reward circuit on complex
Speaker 1: cognitive aps thought might be a fucking brilliant musician. And
Speaker 1: so great society wants lots of different kinds of things,
Speaker 1: right in so far as it starts to have to
Speaker 1: do with governance. Now we have this big question this
Speaker 1: is why do we want a direct democracy where everyone
Speaker 1: votes on everything or where they just vote on representatives.
Speaker 1: A lot of the arguments against direct democracy were like, fuck,
Speaker 1: do you really want these people voting on everything? Or
Speaker 1: do you at least want them to vote on a
Speaker 1: representative classt as some training in law and politics and
Speaker 1: stuff to not do super dumb stuff. We can do
Speaker 1: better than that. Now we can do things like a
Speaker 1: liquid democracy where rather than pick one representative to represent
Speaker 1: me across all things, who now, like, okay, so this
Speaker 1: person is supposed to have a say on defense issues
Speaker 1: and technology issues and monetary issues and international policy and
Speaker 1: domestic like, what the fuck? Who has that expertise? So
Speaker 1: what if we have a liquid democracy situation where we have, say,
Speaker 1: a digital democratic platform I give to engage in the topics,
Speaker 1: and on the topics where I don't understand them well,
Speaker 1: I can seed my vote to someone who does that
Speaker 1: I think understands it well in that topic. But the
Speaker 1: guy who I really trust in what we should do
Speaker 1: with the energy grid might be totally different than who
Speaker 1: I trust in what I think we should do with
Speaker 1: monetary policy. Now, what if we can go a step
Speaker 1: further into something like qualified platforms where you bind rights
Speaker 1: and responsibilities. This starts to sound really tricky, but when
Speaker 1: you think about what all the alternatives are, what's scary
Speaker 1: about this is not more scary. It's less scary than
Speaker 1: what's scarier about all the other options. So binding rights
Speaker 1: and responsibilities do you mean integrate them? What do you
Speaker 1: by binding? If I have a right without an attendant responsibility,
Speaker 1: we end up getting entitlement dynamics. If I have a
Speaker 1: responsibility without a right, we get enslavement dynamics. And so
Speaker 1: the binding of if I want more rights in the system,
Speaker 1: they are more responsibilities because if I have the right
Speaker 1: to influence the system in a certain way, but somebody's
Speaker 1: going to be responsible to implement that shit. But I
Speaker 1: don't have any responsibility, and I'll always vote myself benefits
Speaker 1: that I don't want to take responsibility for paying the
Speaker 1: cost of right. So there's something around the more responsibility
Speaker 1: we can take, the more right we have to influence
Speaker 1: the thing. It's a meritocratic kind of idea. There's of
Speaker 1: course problems with it. We could get into this in
Speaker 1: a more nuanced a time where we have more nuanced
Speaker 1: for it. But let's just imagine for a moment that
Speaker 1: we had a digital engagement kind of democratic platform like
Speaker 1: where I could help craft individual propositions so I didn't
Speaker 1: just have to vote yes or no in a bundled proposition,
Speaker 1: were both suck yes socks and no socks based on
Speaker 1: what's bundled into it and where the structure of that
Speaker 1: forces the polarization of the population just based on even
Speaker 1: those who are voting yes are causing harm to the
Speaker 1: people who are connected to whatever it harms, and lahlah.
Speaker 1: So we can actually do proposition creation in this process.
Speaker 1: But let's say there's a thing where if I want
Speaker 1: to engage in this topic, there's a very basic test
Speaker 1: that I take that shows that I understand this kind
Speaker 1: of general pros and cons of the proposition or basic
Speaker 1: facts of the issue. It doesn't mean I have to
Speaker 1: agree with him. It just means that I understand some
Speaker 1: basic things, and then I get engage. If I don't,
Speaker 1: I still have a vote that I can proxy to
Speaker 1: someone who has through a liquid democracy, But rather than
Speaker 1: vote for a representative across the board, it can be
Speaker 1: someone who I think is good on that topic. But
Speaker 1: I can also choose to get more educated about that topic,
Speaker 1: and the platform will educate me in audio or video
Speaker 1: or text, so if I'm blind or whatever, and in
Speaker 1: any language I want, and it's free, right, So I
Speaker 1: have the capacity to get more educated. But should everyone
Speaker 1: who has no idea at all really have a say
Speaker 1: in what our energy grid stability policy against EMPs and
Speaker 1: Carrington events be? Like? I don't want that. I want
Speaker 1: people who understand, who at least have some sense of
Speaker 1: understanding the basic things so they weren't controlled by a
Speaker 1: manipulative populism, to engage in it. And if someone else
Speaker 1: that they know does have that basic understanding and they
Speaker 1: want to liquid put it across, great. So now you
Speaker 1: have this issue where someone is like, fuck, I want
Speaker 1: to make great music. I trust these people in these areas.
Speaker 1: I don't care to know that much. But I'm also now,
Speaker 1: you don't have the populist incentive to have a demagogue
Speaker 1: leader try to get all of those people to believe
Speaker 1: nonsense so that they can go vote in a particular
Speaker 1: nonsense direction. I mean, look, I agree with this theory,
Speaker 1: but I want to keep going back to well, how
Speaker 1: can these big tech companies use this information to help
Speaker 1: redesign civilization? Well, we're talking about right now would be
Speaker 1: more something like how could the governments of the world
Speaker 1: build the next phase of government where we actually had
Speaker 1: to build a lot of infrastructure for this government town
Speaker 1: halls where the people could meet and talk through the thing,
Speaker 1: and courts where the judiciary process could happen, and a
Speaker 1: mail system so the information could be shipped around. It's
Speaker 1: just that's a super old system. It is not technologically relevant.
Speaker 1: And so now we have like e services, so you
Speaker 1: can log on a DMB and do some basic shit,
Speaker 1: but the structure of government, how it processes information has
Speaker 1: not evolved to process the kind of information issues that
Speaker 1: we have in a way that it could. Taiwan is
Speaker 1: the best example so far of a open society or
Speaker 1: a democratic country actually building a democratic platform where people
Speaker 1: can engage in fundamentally different ways than the previous system
Speaker 1: because you couldn't fit everyone in a town hall, there
Speaker 1: was no way, But you could fit everyone into an
Speaker 1: Internet platform that could contribute to in constructive ways to
Speaker 1: the creation of the right propositions, and they're doing a
Speaker 1: brilliant job with that. We wrote a paper overviewing the
Speaker 1: way Taiwan transition to Digital democracy on the Consilience Project
Speaker 1: if people want to check it out. Audrey Tang helped
Speaker 1: lead that work. It's so and it's kind of important
Speaker 1: to realize that the nuclear bomb, as a massive advancement
Speaker 1: in tech, the first existential tech ever was not created
Speaker 1: by the market state and the recognition that there was
Speaker 1: an existential risk if it didn't create it. It It created
Speaker 1: an indefinite budget, right black budget to bring all the
Speaker 1: top scientists together to build the tech that the world
Speaker 1: that the country needed. We could do a Manhattan project
Speaker 1: to take the AI and blockchain and all of the
Speaker 1: types of digital technology to build the next phase of
Speaker 1: open society. Recognizing that open societies are being eroded and
Speaker 1: are almost totally gone, and they're being eroded by the
Speaker 1: same tech because the tech is making corporations exponentially more
Speaker 1: powerful that are actually eroding democracy in the way that
Speaker 1: we have mentioned and are unable to be regulated by
Speaker 1: the democracy because they're getting more powerful than it, and
Speaker 1: authoritarian nation states can implement the technology to make more
Speaker 1: powerful authoritarian nation states if open societies don't innovate in
Speaker 1: how to use that tech. Because the thing we said
Speaker 1: at the beginning is only the groups are developing and
Speaker 1: deploying the exponential tech, we'll have a say in the
Speaker 1: future because that's where the power is. And yet none
Speaker 1: of the groups that are doing that are democratic or
Speaker 1: even have a democratic ideal, whether it's a tech company
Speaker 1: or in an authoritarian nations say their top down systems,
Speaker 1: so there is no bottom up jurisprudence. And so I
Speaker 1: want to see open societies take on the role of
Speaker 1: innovating not one type of tech, but the whole suite
Speaker 1: of digital tech to make better open societies, because they
Speaker 1: don't see that open societies survive otherwise. Okay, so let's
Speaker 1: talk about the Consilience project a little bit. So how
Speaker 1: are you doing that now? You also are partnering with
Speaker 1: Tristan Harris on some stuff right from the Social Dilemma
Speaker 1: movie he was featured in there. Can you talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about that? Yeah, the Social Dilemma probably many
Speaker 1: people have seen it. If they haven't, it's worth checking out.
Speaker 1: And it just overviews a lot of the issues and
Speaker 1: harms that the attention economy technologies create. Tristan's a lead
Speaker 1: in that runs a group called the Center for Humane Technology,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, we're good friends and colleagues and worked
Speaker 1: with talking with a lot of people in US government
Speaker 1: and other governments on how to address some of these issues,
Speaker 1: and somewhat tech companies and some with just general public education.
Speaker 1: The Consience Project is trying to put out content that
Speaker 1: will help people understand the deeper issues addressing the state
Speaker 1: of the world, so that they can more competently make
Speaker 1: sense of what is going on beyond what they would
Speaker 1: get through their news feed or other sources, so that
Speaker 1: also they can the kind of collective intelligence of the
Speaker 1: world can be better applied to innovate the things that matter.
Speaker 1: We are about to do a series of ten new
Speaker 1: papers that just centrally describe what we would consider the
Speaker 1: meta crisis climate change, and the issues associated with AI
Speaker 1: risk and tech and all the planetary boundary issues like that.
Speaker 1: They're actually all instantiations of a kind of broken civilization system.
Speaker 1: How do you understand what's wrong with the civilization system
Speaker 1: and what is needed to be stu words of the
Speaker 1: power of exponential tech kind of Mythopoetically, you can say,
Speaker 1: exponential tech is really powerful. It's like the power of gods,
Speaker 1: at least little gods. But we don't have the kind
Speaker 1: of wisdom, love, and prudence to use that power well,
Speaker 1: and you don't get to keep doing exponential warfare and
Speaker 1: exponential externalities on a finite planet, not blow yourself up.
Speaker 1: So what do we need in terms of a culture
Speaker 1: that is producing the love and wisdom and then new
Speaker 1: social systems made by that culture that have the ability
Speaker 1: to utilize the tech but also bind, guide and direct
Speaker 1: it to fully healthy for the people and the planet directions,
Speaker 1: not the extract of harm causing ones. So we're writing
Speaker 1: that series and then other things to try and work
Speaker 1: on having more people understand the bigger picture of what's
Speaker 1: going on so that there are more people capable of
Speaker 1: problem solving in meaningful ways. Well, I hope this podcast
Speaker 1: chat goes along those lines. You're not against exponential technologies,
Speaker 1: You're against increasingly decentralized exponential technologies. Not about decentralized Honestly,
Speaker 1: what you see with Facebook is a radical centralization of power. Right.
Speaker 1: You have one social media company that is radically more
Speaker 1: powerful than all the other ones and has a monopoly
Speaker 1: of attention. Facebook. I mean Google is that to search engines,
Speaker 1: Amazon is that to online stores. There's a way that
Speaker 1: network dynamics started creating natural monopolies that weren't governed by
Speaker 1: previous antitrust type dynamics. And that's actually an example of
Speaker 1: how exponential tech leads to centralization in very harmful ways.
Speaker 1: But in other ways, decentralized exponential technologies are just bad.
Speaker 1: So exponential tech both radically centralizes and decentralizes power, both
Speaker 1: in problematic ways. The decentralized power is the ability for
Speaker 1: a small group of people to do cyber attacks on
Speaker 1: infrastructure that can actually shut whole infrastructure down. The ability to,
Speaker 1: over the next little while, be able to build drone
Speaker 1: weapons and AI weapons and bioweapons by tiny, little non
Speaker 1: state actors that have catastrophic ability. The decentralization of radical
Speaker 1: power equals the decentralization of catastrophic power too, So how
Speaker 1: do you deal with a world where like, we only
Speaker 1: had one catastrophe weapon when we had the bomb, but
Speaker 1: it was really hard to make, so it was pretty
Speaker 1: easy to control and monitor. But now we're talking about
Speaker 1: things that are not hard to make. They're super super
Speaker 1: easy to make, but super catastrophic. So the decentralization of
Speaker 1: exponential tech gives a world of increasing catastrophes. The centralization
Speaker 1: of it gives dystopias, right now those are the only
Speaker 1: two attractors. I got catastrophes or dystopias. I don't like
Speaker 1: any of those options, right, so we need a third
Speaker 1: attractor that has the power to bind the tech in
Speaker 1: non to not be catastrophic, but is not a top
Speaker 1: down hedgemon in the way that it binds it, which
Speaker 1: would be dystopic. Which means, how do you act actually
Speaker 1: facilitate a collective intelligence? Right, something that is truly democratic,
Speaker 1: but that is has the speed and effectiveness, which means
Speaker 1: it can't have polarization, it can't have travels, We can't
Speaker 1: have any of those dynamics, which is why it will
Speaker 1: probably fail, and which is why there's cultural work that
Speaker 1: has to happen first, and like pretty fucking significant culture
Speaker 1: work otherwise the dystopias, but that at least have top
Speaker 1: down control when and so this is why I really
Speaker 1: am caring about this. How do we upgrade people's cultural
Speaker 1: orientation to be like, okay, fuck, let me really seek
Speaker 1: to understand the other perspectives that I'm that I have
Speaker 1: currently just made the enemy, and let me avoid the
Speaker 1: dopamine hits of certainty and righteousness that my perspective is
Speaker 1: already right because Without that, there is really no chance
Speaker 1: at all. Like, if you don't start to have a
Speaker 1: cultural movement, it can instantiate new types of institutions that
Speaker 1: are of foreign by a people that would instantiate those
Speaker 1: better institutions. Then you either don't get the power to
Speaker 1: bind the tech, in which case the decentralized versions of
Speaker 1: the tech that emerge anywhere will just cause catastrophes, or
Speaker 1: you end up getting someone who has the power to
Speaker 1: do it but is not of formed by the people
Speaker 1: because the people can't agree with each other, in which
Speaker 1: case you get technology AI empowered authoritarianism. And so like,
Speaker 1: it's either AI empowered authoritarianism, decentrazed catastrophes, or a radical
Speaker 1: fucking cultural enlightenment to be able to have a government
Speaker 1: of formed by the people that has the capacities because
Speaker 1: we've also developed the people and able in order to
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah, you've called that the new Enlightenment, right,
Speaker 1: something like that, Yeah, something like that. The term changes sometimes, So, well,
Speaker 1: how can we create a world that is more anti
Speaker 1: fragile considering these factors when you think about what creates fragility?
Speaker 1: You and I are talking on computers and microphones and
Speaker 1: all that where the actual production of these computers took
Speaker 1: supply chains that probably span six continents right in dozens
Speaker 1: of countries. So something can break in a local area
Speaker 1: where the only place that has the mind for that
Speaker 1: thing or the ability to do that kind of lithography
Speaker 1: or whatever it is, and you get cascades of breakdown.
Speaker 1: And we saw that in Wuhan, right one area has
Speaker 1: an issue, and then you have to have travel lockdowns,
Speaker 1: which means you can't move fertilizers across borders, which means
Speaker 1: that you lose crop supply in Northern Africa and parts
Speaker 1: of the Middle East that affect hundreds of millions of people,
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh fuck, that's very fragile. So increasing
Speaker 1: more local closed loop dynamics addresses fragility, increasing stores of
Speaker 1: critical resource in terms of stocks and flows. But there's
Speaker 1: a trade off between resiliency and efficiency, and we've indexed
Speaker 1: for efficiency so much because of money on money dynamics.
Speaker 1: The indexing for efficiency means I don't want any stores,
Speaker 1: but that means much less resilient. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of things that we can do infrastructurally and whatever for
Speaker 1: anti fragility, but there's nothing as significant as having a
Speaker 1: collective intelligence that actually thinks about the world better and
Speaker 1: can one problem solve better and problem solved with the
Speaker 1: other people, which means cooperate and coordinate like sense make
Speaker 1: and choice make collectively better and even more fundamentally, don't
Speaker 1: make the problem worse by getting inducted as warriors in
Speaker 1: somebody's kind of narrative war or information war. So the
Speaker 1: cultural shifts that we're talking about where people actually seek
Speaker 1: multiple seek many perspectives. Yep, that's a good one. They
Speaker 1: seek many perspectives. They seek to kind of empirically validate stuff,
Speaker 1: they seek to synthesize them, They seek to have real,
Speaker 1: meaningful generative dialogue, realizing that the other people that you
Speaker 1: hate are still political actors and they don't leave the
Speaker 1: planet just when you win. They do shit right, and
Speaker 1: so you have to coordinate with them or war with them.
Speaker 1: There is nothing we can do for resilition. It's an
Speaker 1: anti fragility better than increasing the collective intelligence of the people. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is I want to double click on this idea
Speaker 1: of collective intelligence of the people. So can you explain
Speaker 1: a little bit more what you mean by a collective
Speaker 1: intelligence for our listeners. Yeah, we say collective intelligence. We're
Speaker 1: talking about the intelligence of the people, plus the ways
Speaker 1: that groups of people can be more intelligent than just
Speaker 1: the sums of the individual people. So how do we
Speaker 1: make institutions and groups that are intelligent? Which has to
Speaker 1: do with things like their ability to communicate and coordinate well, obviously,
Speaker 1: the reason we will have like a scientific institution is
Speaker 1: because some things are too complicated for a person to
Speaker 1: figure out. So it takes a lot of people dividing
Speaker 1: up the work working together well. But they have to
Speaker 1: be able to trust each other that they're not lying
Speaker 1: or whatever. They have to trust check each other's work.
Speaker 1: They have to make sure they're ego dynamics to take
Speaker 1: the credit, don't get in the way too much that
Speaker 1: it kind of messes the stuff up. And if you
Speaker 1: have a bunch of really smart people and not a
Speaker 1: good system for them working together, the collective intelligence of
Speaker 1: the group will still be low, even though the intelligence
Speaker 1: of all the individual actors might be high. I have
Speaker 1: sadly been in mini groups like that too, And so
Speaker 1: democracy and markets are supposedly collective intelligence systems, right, how
Speaker 1: do we have the intelligence of everyone work together to
Speaker 1: have the best things emerge the best choices made, they've
Speaker 1: broken down in really significant ways and they need really
Speaker 1: significant updates. And like the best thinking at the time
Speaker 1: of Adam Smith or the Founding Fathers is not the
Speaker 1: best thinking anymore, even though the spirit of some of
Speaker 1: those principles, you know, needs to continue. So when I'm
Speaker 1: talking about collective intelligence, I'm talking about the world's ability
Speaker 1: to make sense of itself and make choices that everyone
Speaker 1: can contribute to and agree with that if they're going
Speaker 1: to be affected by it or bound by it. We
Speaker 1: are living in an age where there's this weaponization of
Speaker 1: complexity and intellect, and it has led to anti intellectualism
Speaker 1: and I would say distrust of science as a counter weapon.
Speaker 1: And so I'm just I'm wondering what you think we
Speaker 1: can do about that. Yeah, we have a paper and
Speaker 1: the Concerns Project on the challenges of the twenty first
Speaker 1: century sense making that's worth checking out. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that has discussed is how many of the
Speaker 1: things that this I think this came out of the
Speaker 1: work of Lriic Beck after during the Cold War and
Speaker 1: specifically looking at nuclear risk that uranium isotope in the air.
Speaker 1: After Chernobyl blows up or whatever is invisible, and the
Speaker 1: whether it is a democratic government or an autocratic government,
Speaker 1: trying to figure out, well, how far did the wind
Speaker 1: blow that stuff to and what parts per million should
Speaker 1: we allow to say? Where do we tell all the
Speaker 1: farmers they have to tell their stuff back into the soil,
Speaker 1: versus we can feed it to people. If you don't
Speaker 1: have a Geiger counter, you're gonna have a real hard
Speaker 1: time just kind of rule of thumb in that one,
Speaker 1: you know. And so there are a lot of people
Speaker 1: who were like I, just before the tech advanced very
Speaker 1: rapidly and the world changed much slower. You could just
Speaker 1: kind of have a sense of like, the way we've
Speaker 1: done things for a long time is the right way
Speaker 1: to do things. We can trust the knowledge of our forefathers.
Speaker 1: We've always done it this way. Yeah, but you didn't
Speaker 1: fucking have nuclear isotopes. That's a new thing, and your
Speaker 1: hunch for what happens with them is just gibberish. It's
Speaker 1: based on nothing, right, So we need Geiger counters to
Speaker 1: check it out. We need to do some studies on
Speaker 1: what parts permelion really seem to have big effects. But
Speaker 1: that means that there is some privileged class of people
Speaker 1: that know how to read a Geiger counter and know
Speaker 1: how to do cell cultures that we have to trust
Speaker 1: to some new kind of priesthood to tell us what
Speaker 1: the invisible but significant shit means. And so how do
Speaker 1: we know if we can trust them? Because it is
Speaker 1: kind of it's invisible stuff and this is COVID again, right,
Speaker 1: like it's true, or like, okay, we don't want certain
Speaker 1: kinds of petrol, toxins and pesticides whatever in our food. Well,
Speaker 1: when invisible stuff and this is climate change again, has
Speaker 1: real causal implications. So you can't sense it yourself. You
Speaker 1: have to basically empower some group that has the capacity
Speaker 1: to sense it. And then the question is how do
Speaker 1: you do checks and balances on that? How do you
Speaker 1: create an institution that has institutional capacity that the people
Speaker 1: actually trust. That's right, and it's you know, it's a
Speaker 1: tricky thing. But as we have a continuously technologically complex world,
Speaker 1: we'll have more and more invisible stuff, and more and
Speaker 1: more hyper object and complex stuff, and more places where
Speaker 1: what affects one thing affects lots and lots of other things,
Speaker 1: and all that complexity has to be factored and so
Speaker 1: now think about it like this. Okay, we want a
Speaker 1: democratic population who get to have a say in things,
Speaker 1: but they want to have a say in things like
Speaker 1: the application of tech that they absolutely don't have the
Speaker 1: education to create that tech. Right, it was a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of PhD engineers from MIT and whatever. They created
Speaker 1: the tech, and they know they couldn't create the fucking tech.
Speaker 1: But they want access to the tech, and then they
Speaker 1: want to make make sure that there isn't some governing
Speaker 1: body that is governing it in a way that will
Speaker 1: affect their convenience or their economy or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: It's like, wait, if you if you can't understand how
Speaker 1: to make the tech, you probably can't be involved in
Speaker 1: its governance. Now that doesn't mean can't be involved at all.
Speaker 1: You can say what your values are, you can say
Speaker 1: what you care about it. You can still tweet your
Speaker 1: opinion about it. Well, no, that's actually the problem, right,
Speaker 1: I can tweet it. I can tweet an opinion that
Speaker 1: is based on gibberish. Yeah, I was saying that ironically,
Speaker 1: I know. But in terms of the actual systems, we
Speaker 1: want to develop the ability to regulate a thing well
Speaker 1: and the ability to understand it well are coupled. And
Speaker 1: this is that rights and responsibilities thing. If I want
Speaker 1: to have the right to really influence a thing, there's
Speaker 1: a responsibility to understand it well enough that I actually
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about. Oh, I agree. I mean,
Speaker 1: you see how many people on the internet think they're
Speaker 1: experts on the science of intelligence, and it bob makes
Speaker 1: my head want to explode. Yeah, so just to take
Speaker 1: my own field for example, So are most of these
Speaker 1: issues that we're talking about, you know, exontential threats? Are
Speaker 1: they historically novel? How do you see that in terms
Speaker 1: of the whole arc of humanity? Yeah? Very hard for
Speaker 1: a caveman to blow up the world, Very hard for
Speaker 1: Caesar to blow up the world. Fair enough, Right, It's
Speaker 1: a technologically mediated thing. And as our technology got bigger,
Speaker 1: our civilizations got bigger because we had technology that could
Speaker 1: extract resources and defend itself and whatever more effectively. But
Speaker 1: what that also means is we had technology that could
Speaker 1: destroy ecosystems and win in war against other groups. And
Speaker 1: so if I'm chopping trees down, like the world's pretty big,
Speaker 1: If I'm chopping trees down with axes, it does seem
Speaker 1: like trees are inexhaustible, so we just priced the tree
Speaker 1: at the cost to extract it. I don't look at
Speaker 1: what it took nature to make it. I don't look
Speaker 1: at the effects on the ecosystem of what it's doing
Speaker 1: to stabilize topsoil and watersheds and oxygen and CO two
Speaker 1: and all of that stuff. It's just because there's still
Speaker 1: plenty of treats. But I take this thing and make
Speaker 1: lumber out of it, and so it's really just called
Speaker 1: taking the shit from Nature's being industrious, and there is
Speaker 1: no balance sheet of nature that has to be paid
Speaker 1: or accounted for or whatever. But when the tech gets bigger, right,
Speaker 1: and we're start to get into slash and burn of
Speaker 1: whole massive areas of forest to get the resources under them,
Speaker 1: and we go from a fishing pole to mile long
Speaker 1: drift nets, and we go from half a billion people
Speaker 1: before the industrial revolution to eight billion people empowered by
Speaker 1: those types of radical industrial and the nuclear aids and
Speaker 1: digital age technologies. The power of our tech has gone
Speaker 1: up so radically that the power of our both intentional
Speaker 1: and unintentional destructive capacity has gone up, right, and the
Speaker 1: constructive capacity also, the construct of capacity is not for everyone.
Speaker 1: It's probably still has a destruct development that's associated with it, right,
Speaker 1: oh oh yeah. And so we didn't have the ability
Speaker 1: to start doing things at a scale that could really
Speaker 1: harm the world beyond our local area till the Industrial revolution.
Speaker 1: And the the Industrial Revolution was like, okay, we can start
Speaker 1: to really scale some shit, which is why we went
Speaker 1: from half a billion people to eight billion people in
Speaker 1: almost no period of time, even though three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: years of Homo sapiens and we never broke a half
Speaker 1: a billion people. And then it wasn't till the bomb
Speaker 1: World War two that we had the ability to kill
Speaker 1: everything in a hurty, right. That was a big deal.
Speaker 1: So we had to make this entire world system, the
Speaker 1: Bretton Woods un much assured destruction world system, to make
Speaker 1: sure that we didn't use our new tech. And that
Speaker 1: was one catastrophe weapon. Now we have dozens of catastrophe weapons.
Speaker 1: It's brand new situation. We have dozens of catastrophe weapons.
Speaker 1: And instead of having two actors that have them where
Speaker 1: you can do mutu assured destruction, we have an indefinite
Speaker 1: number of actors and you can't even know who has them,
Speaker 1: so you can't do mut your sued destruction. Part of
Speaker 1: the solution to World War two not turning into World
Speaker 1: War three, and the post World War two answer was
Speaker 1: we don't want the major empires to war, even though
Speaker 1: the history of the world the major empires always war.
Speaker 1: But now the weapons are so big that if they do,
Speaker 1: they fuck everything for everyone, so they have to not war.
Speaker 1: But everybody still wants more stuff, so we have to
Speaker 1: get them to get more stuff without taking each other stuff.
Speaker 1: So we just have to make exponentially more stuff. So
Speaker 1: we're going to make a monetary system based on exponential growth,
Speaker 1: and that's going to drive in exponential growth in goods
Speaker 1: and services. But that also means in exponential growth and
Speaker 1: taking shit from nature faster than it can replannation, turning
Speaker 1: it into waste faster than it can be processed. So
Speaker 1: then you start to hit planetary boundaries on overfishing and
Speaker 1: cutting down all the trees and excessive extraction of all
Speaker 1: the resources and then turning it into climate change and
Speaker 1: pollution of the gazillion types over on this side, microplastics
Speaker 1: and dead zones and oceans. So the solution to how
Speaker 1: do we not war drove all the planetary fragility issues,
Speaker 1: and then the other thing was the other way we
Speaker 1: want wars. We'll do this globalization thing where we get
Speaker 1: so globally interconnected that you don't want to bomb each
Speaker 1: other because then your supply chains are messed up. But
Speaker 1: that is what then creates the fragility dynamics we mentioned,
Speaker 1: where the world gets so complicated and so fragile that
Speaker 1: a little collapse anywhere can create cascading collapses everywhere. So
Speaker 1: basically there was no global catastrophic risk, human induced catastrophic risks.
Speaker 1: So world War two. We got our first one in
Speaker 1: World War two, and it was such a big deal
Speaker 1: we built an entire world system to mediate it. It
Speaker 1: bought us like seventy five years of no world war,
Speaker 1: but of course lots of proxy war and economic war
Speaker 1: and info war and whatever. It created. All these planetary
Speaker 1: boundary issues created the fragility issues and created the proliferation
Speaker 1: of tech across dozens of sectors, where now we have
Speaker 1: lots of catastrophe weapons, right, not just nukes, but AI
Speaker 1: weapons and bioweapons and blah blah blah cyber weapons. So
Speaker 1: now we're in this situation where we have to build
Speaker 1: a new world system again, like we did after World
Speaker 1: War Two for a completely different risk landscape, and so
Speaker 1: it takes completely different characteristics. It won't be based on
Speaker 1: exponential growth of the monetary system. It won't be based
Speaker 1: on a system that drives more fragility. So it has
Speaker 1: to have interconnectedness without fragility. It won't just drive tech
Speaker 1: to drive markets of all kinds. It has to have
Speaker 1: anticipatory regulation because of the speed of the effect of
Speaker 1: tech built right into the process. So this is basically
Speaker 1: what the world. This is the challenge the world needs
Speaker 1: to rise to right now as I see it, beautiful. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm really glad there are people like you who are
Speaker 1: thinking through these issues for civilization. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for being my podcast. Take Where can people you know
Speaker 1: what they want to read your papers? You mentioned a
Speaker 1: couple of papers that are coming out. Where can people
Speaker 1: read this stuff? Yeah, they can go to conciliensproject dot
Speaker 1: org and check it out. And I've noticed you're not
Speaker 1: on Twitter? Is that intentional not? Yeah? Yeah, I've contemplated,
Speaker 1: but it hasn't been something I've needed to do yet.
Speaker 1: There's someone called Daniel Schmockenberger said us on Twitter did
Speaker 1: you know that? And did you know that I don't
Speaker 1: know who that is. Yeah, I guess the closest I
Speaker 1: think can do to tag you and I when I
Speaker 1: tag you on Twitter, so sometimes I talk about some
Speaker 1: of your stuff. Look, Dane, I really always get so
Speaker 1: much from chatting with you today, and I'm sure our
Speaker 1: listeners will as well. Thanks again for thinking about the
Speaker 1: future future of civilization and for chatting with me today
Speaker 1: on the podcast. This was a really fun talk and
Speaker 1: I enjoyed all the things we covered. Thank you, Scott,
Speaker 1: you too, thanks for listening to this episode of The
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way
Speaker 1: to something you heard, I encourage you to join in
Speaker 1: the discussion at thus Psychology podcast dot com or on
Speaker 1: our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast. We also put up
Speaker 1: some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well,
Speaker 1: so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being
Speaker 1: such a great supporter of the show, and tune in
Speaker 1: next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.