Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / #118: Daniel Heck / AI Ethics

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#118: Daniel Heck / AI Ethics · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together
• 0:14
  One. Daniel Heck.
• 0:16
  Daniel Heck. Excuse me, everyone did already.
• 0:17
  Welcome. How are you?
• 0:19
  Good morning or good afternoon for you.
• 0:20
  How's it going? It's been really great.
• 0:23
  I'm really happy to talk to you today, Frank.
• 0:25
  Yeah, I'm really happy. I'm really, really excited for
• 0:27
  our conversation. It took a little bit of time and
• 0:30
  a couple of people to run through for you and I to
• 0:33
  connect, but I'm happy that we did.
• 0:36
  And the reason why I initially was reaching out was because I'm
• 0:41
  really interested and fascinated in the philosophical and ethical
• 0:47
  side of the, the future of AI and the president of AI and what
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  the implications might be, you know, and, and then in our
• 0:56
  initial call, you mentioned a couple of other fun, you know,
• 0:59
  topics and conversations that I think we're going to have a
• 1:01
  great time getting into. And I think they probably all
• 1:04
  will probably, you know, blend or roll 1 into the next pretty
• 1:08
  seamlessly, I imagine. But I'm really excited.
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  So do you mind telling me just a little about who you are?
• 1:13
  About yourself for a little? Bit yeah, sure thing.
• 1:16
  So my name is Dan. Heck, I am the chief AI ethicist
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  with the Understanding Group, which is a firm in Michigan
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  which does something called information architecture, and
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  I'm happy to talk about what information architecture is.
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  Most people, even a lot of people who work in tech, aren't
• 1:33
  very familiar with it or exactly what I would mean by it in that
• 1:37
  case. So I'm happy to talk more about.
• 1:39
  What I What is that? Ethics and information
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  architecture if you like. Yeah.
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  What is that? So I think a good first take is
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  the architects help design buildings and then builders
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  build them, and information architects help design software
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  and then software builders then build them.
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  And so a lot of our work though involves getting real clarity on
• 2:05
  concepts and what good means for an organization or what it would
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  mean for an AI system or just any kind of software
• 2:12
  implementation. So it's talking to people,
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  listening to people, thinking about what really matters, and
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  then also doing things like putting together wire frames and
• 2:21
  and getting the initial design together for software.
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  Gotcha. And can you give me examples or
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  specific examples rather of the type of conversation that you'd
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  be having with someone that you know, or I guess you know, with
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  the company that you know, it would be, you know, so the pre
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  coding or pre, I guess AI, but the, the actual information part
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  of it, the architecture, like what, what kind of conversations
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  are you having? Sure.
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  So for me as as the ethicist, it would be often what are the
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  mission, visions and values of your organization?
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  What do you really value and what, what actually do you value
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  in practice, but also what are the, the sayings and routines
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  and rituals in your organization that help you express those and
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  follow through on them? And part of what I do is distill
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  frameworks that reflect the ethos.
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  So the real set of commitments and values of, of the community
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  organization that we're working with.
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  And then information architecture in general, too,
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  might look at somebody's workflow and ask for the details
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  of where they're interacting with different sorts of digital
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  systems and what they're trying to accomplish and what what
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  matters about what they're doing.
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  It's really cool. It's really cool.
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  I yesterday actually just came across AI think it was a tweet
• 3:48
  by John Mayer. And he was talking about he was
• 3:52
  just playing for the Grateful Dead 60th anniversary in San
• 3:55
  Francisco, in San Francisco. And he was playing with a
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  gentleman named Trey Anastasio, who's the lead guitar player of
• 4:02
  Fish. And one of the things that he
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  said, I don't know if you're a fan of the music, I certainly
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  am. But yeah, they're great.
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  But one of the things he said was like his ear, his fret
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  board. And he, he said what made him so
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  special was that he was able to convert his fret board sounds
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  to, to his ear beautifully and then to translate that over.
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  So he's holding a guitar and he and he knows how to translate a
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  sound into the fret board so magnificently and so beautifully
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  and so seamlessly. He said that's really one of
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  the, that's really what makes him so great and so
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  unparalleled. And I realized to myself, I knew
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  that idea, right? I knew that idea existed, but I
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  never had the words to like, I never was able to put it into
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  those exact words. And then when it did, I was
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  like, oh, right, that's what makes it so special.
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  So is that kind of what you, what you do on, you know, in
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  terms of different companies where they have a bunch of ideas
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  and you help distill them into something that is clear cut and,
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  and take these concepts that you know could be all over the place
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  and you help distill it into one clear, concise point.
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  That's a big part of what we do and one of the ways we describe
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  it. And I think it relates to your
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  example as we try to make the complex clear.
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  And so part of what that means, I mean by complexity, there's a
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  whole lot that's that's embedded in that.
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  There's a whole body of complexity theory research these
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  days and it relates to understanding society and
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  organic systems and the way holes are often bigger than the
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  sum of their parts. And so, and I think with with
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  music, there is all kinds of complexity, especially to good
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  music, right. And if and you know, and it's
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  also often good advice if you're working in sales or all kinds of
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  things to keep it simple or keep it simple, stupid as a common
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  statement that can often reflect reflect an ethos of certain
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  groups or people. And often we oversimplify or we
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  we try to make things too shiny and too simple and too
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  accessible and ends up being an illusion or deception.
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  And I imagine part of what he's doing too isn't just simple tone
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  matching or something like that. He's understanding how the music
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  fits in with what's happening around him and with the people
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  and then bringing a kind of clarity to that.
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  And so it's really kind of about finding the signal and the noise
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  and about having those aha moments where a bunch of things
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  like you were saying to that, that moment where you're like,
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  you've been appreciating this about his music for a long time.
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  You have a sensory level then, like picking up on these things,
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  and there's a moment where you consciously pull it together and
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  it's like a hop. And that those moments are, I
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  think, really important to me and they're really important to
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  my work. And yeah, I think you've touched
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  on on something really vital there.
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  Yeah, that's really cool. That's awesome.
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  Yeah. If I could just add so another
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  area and we can get more into this sort of nerdy please, if
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  you want. So it's also what ethics as
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  opposed to in a certain sense just moral experience is about.
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  And So what I mean by that is that people have moral senses
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  that are fast. They're part of our fast
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  processing, just like you have a sense of the music that's part
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  of your fast processing. And we start doing ethics in the
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  general academic sense, in the sense that I use it.
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  We start doing ethics when we take those senses and then we
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  start to organize them and think about them in a structured way.
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  And so there's something that very much rhymes with what
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  ethics as a whole is about in that moment of, of being able to
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  name and translate these senses that we have.
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  Right, right, right. Yeah.
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  I could imagine, especially in the world of ethics.
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  And I actually see this. We're both religious and I, I
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  see this a lot in in in the Bible where you have a moment
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  where, you know, you have a particular instance where zoomed
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  in, in that particular moment, you feel like there's one
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  ethical response that you immediately jump to or a moral
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  response that you would immediately jump to.
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  And then sometimes you got, you know, God will instruct you, us,
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  or, you know, we'll, we'll learn to learn how to zoom out a
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  little bit because there is ultimately a bigger picture that
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  you know, and it's, you know, not to get confused with the
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  forest, with the trees, you know, where you could either
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  zoom into particular tree and say this particular moment, you
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  know, I feel like there's an ethical moment for this, but you
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  have the whole forest. So think about.
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  And so I think a lot, I think the trouble that some people
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  have, especially with making moral and ethical decisions is
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  that we're very quick. We're very reflexive with it.
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  Like you said, like, you know, just like when you listen to
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  music, you know, you could just sense like, I like this, I don't
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  like this, this feels right. This feels wrong, you know, And
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  sometimes if you're, you know, if you want to be a little more
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  sophisticated about it or you want to be a little more mature
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  about it, you can learn how to step back a little bit and say,
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  how does this fit into a big picture of what ethics are?
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  Do you spend a lot of time having to clarify, you know, or
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  to explore those bigger pictures?
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  Yeah, that's a big part of what we do and what I do in
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  particular. And yeah, I think you, you
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  described it well. And for some of the background
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  or some of the language that I used to think about that,
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  there's a book now, it's about 15 years old from Daniel
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  Kahneman called Thinking Fast and Slow.
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  It's really widely aware of it, but I think that sort of moral
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  sense is part of our fast thinking and it's and it's very
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  powerful and it deserves respect and it and it's not to set these
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  against each other as like you need one or the other.
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  But then it can also be manipulated.
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  And I think a lot of ways in which both just people without
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  technology and people using technology can manipulate people
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  is through manipulating those moral senses which are actually
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  very powerful performance drivers of individual behaviour
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  and of group behaviour. And so of understanding some of
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  the ways that that fast processing is powerful and can
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  be manipulated and is worth pausing and reflecting on is
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  helpful. And to be fair, the slope
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  processing can also be manipulated, but in different
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  ways, right? And so it's about finding ways
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  to bring them together that allow us to, I think,
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  authentically connect with our moral experience and make sense
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  of it and communicate it and share it with each other and
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  figure out where there's opportunities for ethical
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  collaboration. Because I think there's so many
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  more opportunities for that kind of thing than that are taken
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  advantage of just because everybody has 24 hours in the
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  day. There's only so many things that
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  we can do. But yeah, I think you described
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  it well. And I love, I love the analogy
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  of sort of music and ethics. And I usually use painting as an
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  illustration. But there's something about
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  where it's like morality is kind of like the pigments in a
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  painting, like the other things you used to make it.
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  But then ethics, you can paint with it in different ways.
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  But there's something about the idea that morality is like that
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  moment when you just hear a song and you know how you feel about
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  it. And then ethics is like music
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  theory that captures, I don't know, something about the
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  musicality of trying to live a good life and live the way we
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  think we should. Yeah, totally.
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  It's it's another interesting, I guess, crossover.
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  I'm sure that that would happen. I was, I teach high school
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  English part time. It's a ton of fun.
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  It's one of my favorite things about my daily routine.
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  But, and one of the things that I noticed and I'm a bit, I've
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  got my heart in the, in my soul in the 60s and the 70s, always
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  has, always have been. And I've noticed that my
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  students never liked my music. Whenever I'd show them, you
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  know, a Dylan song or a Springsteen song or a Van
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  Morrison song, like, what is this?
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  We don't want to listen to this. And I realized that it was, it
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  was unfamiliar to them. So I tried a little experiment
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  where I played one song, one time for per class for four days
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  in a row. And I just asked them to observe
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  what they notice about the song, not whether they like it or not,
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  just what do they notice about the song.
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  And as the days went on and as it became more, as their ear
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  became more familiar with it, they were able to kind of dive
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  into more specific nuances. There's a nice drum fill here.
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  There's a little riff over here with the guitar.
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  And that those details weren't there when they first heard it.
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  And so sometimes you need a little bit of continuous
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  exposure to really be able to appreciate the full picture as
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  well. And so I think we have to give
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  ourselves some time with these things a lot of time again, you
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  know, and back to Daniel Kahneman again, you know, we
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  have our snap judgement and we have our system to thinking.
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  We have our our more analytical thinking.
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  And I feel like that's also another really, really powerful
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  way that people actually do function.
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  Yeah. And I mean, I think, you know,
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  and I'm not a psychologist, but, you know, I've heard of the mere
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  exposure effect, right, which is that this being exposed to
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  something tends to make people like it more.
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  And I think you know, yeah. That too.
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  That too. Thing too what you were what you
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  were doing, but I will say I mean I like a lot of the same
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  music you do and it's a lot of what I grew up with from my mom
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  and from my family members and so that exposure to it probably
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  played supper all in me liking it but then again right
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  teenagers will often hate the music that their parents like so
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  that's. Where all the good music comes
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  from? It's because they hated their
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  parents music, you know? That's how it works, right?
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  Yeah, I know I've become resigned to that fact.
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  And I think that's the sign that I'm an adult is that, you know,
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  I feel like, oh, these kids. And like once that once that
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  once that thought crosses my mind, I'm like, Oh no, you know,
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  I became one of them. You know, I'm no, I crossed the
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  line from, you know, youth to adulthood, I think just just
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  from those type of conversations.
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  So when you, when you talk about AI efficacy or ethics, rather,
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  do we, do you ever think about, or do we, do you focus on the
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  flip side of the ethics of the AI to the, to the people?
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  Because right now, I've read some scary stories recently
• 14:16
  about people falling in love with their AIS and one kid in
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  Florida committed suicide. Unfortunately, it was an awful,
• 14:22
  awful, awful story. And, and, you know, even, you
• 14:25
  know, myself and my, and my wife, you know, I started using
• 14:27
  I, I to kind of help to simplify my job and to, you know, find
• 14:31
  leads for sales or to find people for the podcast.
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  And I've noticed that it gives you an enormous amount of
• 14:37
  positive reinforcement that just keeps those dopamine hits going,
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  you know, and it tells me what a great idea I did.
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  And I'm so sorry I made the mistake.
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  I'll make sure to make it up to you.
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  And, you know, and you have to remind yourself you're not
• 14:48
  really taught. You know, I don't know, I don't
• 14:50
  even, we don't even know what we're talking to over there.
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  But do you ever, do you ever have to deal with the ethics
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  aspect from the reverse side? Not from people to AI, but AI to
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  people? Yeah.
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  I think certainly we explore and think about both, right?
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  So 1 is how can we have the AI systems behave in ways that are
• 15:10
  ethical? And what I mean by that is
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  what's aligned with the ethos, so the consciously held
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  principles and value system of a particular group, because the
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  ethos of one group can be different than the ethos of
• 15:23
  another group, right? And so I think that's a a good
• 15:29
  consistent question and that your example of like pay eye
• 15:32
  obsequiousness or sycophancy is what it's sometimes called is a
• 15:36
  is a good one. Not too long ago, opening eye
• 15:39
  sadness where I was like really extremely obsequious, like over
• 15:43
  the top and they had to do a really rapid fix.
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  But I think that even the standard level of obsequiousness
• 15:54
  and, and I think underneath like that is that these systems are
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  being designed like so much of the Internet and so much of the
• 16:05
  tech we interact with to maximize engagement.
• 16:07
  Yeah. And that increases engagement
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  and that gets eyeballs on your product and that brings venture
• 16:13
  capital and or advertising funding eventually or paid
• 16:19
  subscriptions or whatever it is. And so I think that there's a
• 16:24
  structural issue there. It doesn't just so happen that
• 16:28
  somebody decided to start making these obsequious.
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  It's that is deemed to be beneficial for their
• 16:36
  organizational goals to have them act that way.
• 16:39
  And there's quite a few examples of this having really negative
• 16:43
  effects. I know personally, like, I
• 16:45
  really try to cultivate a community of people who will be
• 16:49
  honest with me and critical with me and, and where we can like
• 16:52
  pursue truth together and we can spot each other's mistakes.
• 16:54
  And the obsequiousness of the AI systems grates on me.
• 17:00
  You know, I, you know, I've learned to brush it off whenever
• 17:04
  even the models I like the most say, oh, that is so incredibly
• 17:07
  insightful. And it's like, I'm sure you tell
• 17:10
  that to all. To all your girlfriends, right?
• 17:18
  And so, you know, and maybe then cultivating, I mean, at a
• 17:22
  personal level, cultivating a dislike of that kind of thing is
• 17:26
  probably helpful. But systemically, I think it's a
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  really important question too, like how can we try to make
• 17:32
  these models not be so obsequious?
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  And how can we create the structures around organizations
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  and the incentives around organizations so they're not
• 17:41
  encouraged to do that. And and also and sometimes it
• 17:44
  just means so that also so that they're stopped from doing the
• 17:48
  especially harmful versions of it.
• 17:51
  Yeah, yeah, I've been thinking a ton recently about about like,
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  you know, because I, I have a 2 1/2 year old and a three month
• 18:03
  old I mentioned the other day when we were talking.
• 18:06
  And I think a ton about the world that they're going to grow
• 18:09
  up in. You know, and aside to the fact
• 18:11
  that I have no idea what it's going to be like, one thing I'm
• 18:13
  almost certain about is that money and time are not going to
• 18:18
  mean the same things. It's really, really interesting.
• 18:23
  And you know, for example, you know, let's say time, right?
• 18:27
  We could, we could start with that.
• 18:29
  What took me, what used to take me 5-6 hours a day to find
• 18:33
  customers, what used to take me 5-6 hours a day to find, you
• 18:37
  know, podcast guests or to find, you know, people, you know, a
• 18:41
  gym to go to or to do homework can now take me literally 5-10
• 18:45
  minutes without exaggerating. And yeah, I may have to do some
• 18:48
  more mechanical work, like actually still reach out to the
• 18:50
  people or whatever, but I now have an abundance of time with
• 18:55
  the equal, with the, with the same level of productivity,
• 18:58
  right? And so the, it, so the what are
• 19:04
  what we do with our time and the way that we're, what we're
• 19:08
  expect to do with our time is going to be fundamentally
• 19:10
  different. And actually, it's funny because
• 19:11
  I actually started on a much smaller scale.
• 19:14
  I had this experience. I, I work with my dad and when I
• 19:17
  started working with him, we were working in the same office
• 19:19
  space. It was his warehouse and he had
• 19:21
  an office in the warehouse. And, you know, he and I work
• 19:23
  together and I found that I had a lot of very effective and
• 19:26
  efficient ways of doing what he was doing.
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  But what would take him six hours to do throughout the day
• 19:32
  in the office would take Me 2 1/2 hours hypothetically, right?
• 19:35
  And I would feel guilty about leaving work or saying I'm done
• 19:38
  because I was done. And I did, I did the work that I
• 19:40
  was supposed to do. And you know, and he's like, but
• 19:43
  what are you doing? It's 5:00.
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  And, you know, I mean, we used to being here till 6/7, 8:00 at
• 19:47
  night. And I'm like, but I did
• 19:48
  everything I was supposed to do. So now what am I?
• 19:49
  What am I going to do now? You know, and there's going to
• 19:52
  be, so we're going to be in like this world where we people have
• 19:56
  an abundance of time, I think, and we're going to have to fill
• 19:59
  that time with something. And we like to hope that it
• 20:02
  could be meaning. We like to hope that it could
• 20:04
  be, you know, family and spirituality or passions and
• 20:09
  creativity. But.
• 20:11
  You know, there's going to be almost, I, I could imagine
• 20:13
  there's going to be almost a void or a point in time where
• 20:15
  people have to adjust to that, to that period, you know, what
• 20:20
  do you think about that? Yeah, I think at all kinds of
• 20:25
  levels, this is a great set of questions and a great set of
• 20:28
  observations. And I think the easy thing for a
• 20:32
  lot of organizations to do with efficiency gains, which is
• 20:35
  really what you're describing, is to fire people or lay them
• 20:40
  off, right. And that's the easy or a short
• 20:45
  to medium term trajectory that comes from that.
• 20:48
  And that can create all kinds of social disruption.
• 20:51
  I mean, I grew up in the Rust Belt, been living in Columbus,
• 20:56
  OH until recently, but I grew up in Canton, OH.
• 20:58
  And you know, there are so many communities that were dependent
• 21:03
  on these factories in the certain modes of production.
• 21:07
  And part of what I got to see happening, both just growing up,
• 21:11
  but then also in community organizing work that I did
• 21:13
  afterwards, was that those very efficiency games they created.
• 21:17
  The additional time you're talking about were one of the
• 21:21
  main factors that resulted in in really the creation of the Rust
• 21:25
  Belt because they continue to manufacture a huge amount of
• 21:29
  stuff in Ohio. It's not that the US or the
• 21:34
  former industrial areas of the country stop manufacturing.
• 21:37
  It just didn't need as many people.
• 21:39
  And so for me, my first sort of gut check response on anything
• 21:45
  like that is always to to realize how easily and
• 21:51
  consistently that sort of thing happens.
• 21:54
  And you know, I'm happy that you're at a family company and
• 21:58
  there might be new opportunities and flexibility and ways to find
• 22:01
  it. And although I suppose, I guess
• 22:04
  the question it raises for me is what are the odds that your dad
• 22:06
  fires you if you. He came close a few times.
• 22:15
  And so I think we have to start by asking exactly the question
• 22:18
  you're asking. I think you're asking this
• 22:19
  crucial question, which is we already have this additional
• 22:22
  capacity and I think it's going to keep increasing, but there's
• 22:25
  already more low hanging fruit than I think a lot of
• 22:28
  individuals or organizations can even have even figured out how
• 22:30
  to get their hands on in terms of saving time.
• 22:34
  And so this question of like, what are humans for and where
• 22:38
  should I be putting my time and attention is, I think more
• 22:41
  urgent than ever. And, and I'm grateful for every
• 22:46
  opportunity I have to ask that instead of having the answer be
• 22:50
  I'm trying to scrap for enough income to survive, which is a
• 22:54
  situation that huge numbers of people are routinely in.
• 22:59
  It's so interesting, Yeah. I feel like we could switch from
• 23:04
  becoming a capitalistic society to like a meaningful listic
• 23:08
  society in the sense that like, what would separate the social
• 23:11
  classes isn't necessarily income or what kind of house you have
• 23:15
  or what kind of car you drive, because so much of that is going
• 23:18
  to be automated. So much of that, like, you know,
• 23:21
  you know, I heard a great podcast the other day where they
• 23:23
  were talking about, you know, you're in a, in a wealthy
• 23:26
  country when the primary focus is services, not products,
• 23:30
  right. So, for example, one of my best
• 23:32
  friends that got married recently was in Israel and his
• 23:34
  apartment he got with his wife didn't come with a stove, didn't
• 23:37
  come with a fridge, didn't come with a washing machine, you
• 23:39
  know, and like you wish I was moving into an apartment, you
• 23:43
  know, in, in Florida, moving to a house in Florida that had an
• 23:46
  empty kitchen space, You know, they didn't have a washer dryer
• 23:48
  in there. You know, the question becomes
• 23:50
  how how many streaming services can I afford?
• 23:52
  Or you know, can I, you know, what kind of, you know, what
• 23:55
  kind of gym membership can I can I afford?
• 23:57
  It's not a question of things or not, But I think I think that in
• 24:01
  a world where so much will be automated and so much is going
• 24:04
  to be easy, the question or I guess physically easy, you know,
• 24:08
  the real potential danger would be that people will reach for a
• 24:11
  low hanging fruit like drugs or alcohol or pornography or cheap,
• 24:17
  you know, cheap, easy relationships that that are the
• 24:19
  equivalent of like you got a quote UN quote low income job
• 24:23
  and then or you could have the meaningful relationships with
• 24:27
  family and in person experiences and and stuff like that.
• 24:31
  And almost imagine like a little world.
• 24:33
  I don't know if you've ever been to Disney World before, but in
• 24:36
  Epcot, there's a little ride in the Epcot Ball and it's about
• 24:39
  the future for tomorrow. And you get to pick, you know,
• 24:42
  technology's going to do all these things and you'll be free
• 24:44
  to explore or go scuba diving or have a flying car, whatever it
• 24:47
  is. And but the real question is
• 24:51
  how, how human are you still going to be?
• 24:53
  How present are you still going to be?
• 24:54
  How, how you know what's what's going to happen with that?
• 24:57
  And I'm really, I mean, I fall, I fall in victim myself to, you
• 25:02
  know, just life is like, I could do so much of my work without
• 25:06
  thinking so much that you're tempted to smoke weed all day.
• 25:10
  You're tempted to have a beer after beer after beer starting
• 25:12
  at 11:00 in the, you know, in the, in the morning.
• 25:15
  And, and what's to stop us from doing that?
• 25:17
  You know, necessarily, you know, that's kind of where we could,
• 25:20
  you know, that's kind of where, where, you know, faith and, and
• 25:23
  family and everything comes in, I imagine.
• 25:25
  But you're going to have to convince a lot of people that
• 25:28
  not to, you know, why shouldn't they do that?
• 25:32
  Yeah, I think those are really, really vital questions.
• 25:36
  And I think you're you're right that it's very easy to slip into
• 25:39
  all kinds of addictions or harmful behaviors of all kinds
• 25:43
  of sorts. And this has always been a
• 25:47
  challenge. This isn't something new that AI
• 25:50
  has brought into the human experience completely, but I
• 25:52
  think it intensifies a lot of kinds of questions.
• 25:56
  And I also appreciate the connection you're making between
• 26:00
  family and avoiding addiction. I think having meaningful
• 26:03
  connections with people is one of the main helpful preventers
• 26:09
  and solvers of addiction problems, right?
• 26:11
  That in in a way, often addiction is an attempt to
• 26:14
  replace that kind of authentic connection.
• 26:16
  This is also so within the AI ethics framework that I usually
• 26:20
  use in my work, we talk about holistic communication being one
• 26:25
  of the core framework elements in a framework and meaning
• 26:28
  communication that is factual, that is ethical and that is
• 26:32
  authentic and it and authentic. I have to clarify what this
• 26:37
  means, because often when we talk about is this communication
• 26:40
  authentic, we mean does it sound authentic?
• 26:43
  And I, and I think we need to clarify that we're trying to,
• 26:47
  whether it is authentic, by which I mean that it reflects an
• 26:52
  experience. So if I'm talking about an
• 26:53
  experience that I have, that it is in fact the experience that I
• 26:56
  have and I'm communicating it to you.
• 26:58
  And I think with a lot of the AI systems that we have, this is
• 27:01
  also sort of one of the fundamental differentiators.
• 27:04
  So an AI system can be more or less factual and we've seen them
• 27:08
  rapidly get more and more factual.
• 27:10
  And you know, people a year ago, two years ago who were saying,
• 27:13
  oh, well, look, they hallucinate footnotes all the time.
• 27:15
  Well, you know, now there's the deep research feature and
• 27:17
  that's, there's just lots of progress that's already happened
• 27:20
  and they're just going to get better and better at it.
• 27:22
  But you know, I use this all the time.
• 27:23
  If I want an academic paper on something that doesn't exist
• 27:26
  quite yet, I Google deep research or any of the deep
• 27:30
  research models. I'm not promoting any particular
• 27:32
  model or anything like that, just happens to be one that I
• 27:35
  used yesterday. But I can basically write you a
• 27:40
  paper on all kinds of things that's properly cited for the
• 27:42
  most part and, and is a useful thing.
• 27:46
  And so, and they can also be more or less ethical in the
• 27:49
  sense that they're, you know, aligned with whatever the
• 27:52
  organization or the person or the group thinks is right.
• 27:55
  They can do that. We have no way of even beginning
• 28:01
  to assess whether these systems could be authentic or whether
• 28:04
  they're authentic. But there's there's every reason
• 28:06
  to think that they're not meaning because the question
• 28:08
  often arises like, is it like something to be this AI system?
• 28:12
  Is it having any kinds of experiences?
• 28:14
  And they certainly largely to create engagement will act in
• 28:19
  ways that feel authentic to people.
• 28:20
  And this was one of the first questions you asked me is So
• 28:23
  what about people who are basically having relationships
• 28:25
  with chat bots? And I think that there is
• 28:28
  something of just profound fundamental ethical importance
• 28:33
  and also moral importance, meaning I think this matters for
• 28:36
  everyone. I'm, I'm trying to make
• 28:38
  relatively few claims about what I think applies to all of the
• 28:41
  humans, right? But this is one that I would
• 28:44
  like. I think this is just a moral
• 28:45
  reality that there's something of profound and fundamental
• 28:50
  value in that connection, that authentic connection between
• 28:54
  people. And when an AI offers a
• 28:57
  substitute and, and while it can do better at factual suffering,
• 29:01
  it can be as ethical or more ethical than us in many ways.
• 29:04
  But but because there's no authentic connection there,
• 29:07
  there's a profound and very dangerous kind of loss that's
• 29:11
  happening. Yeah, Yeah.
• 29:14
  It's really, it's, it's really interesting that you say that I,
• 29:18
  the other week I would, I have a group chat.
• 29:21
  It's funny, I have a group chat and one of the, and I think
• 29:23
  there's also going to be something that people are going
• 29:25
  to need in the future. I'm so happy, I'm so grateful I
• 29:27
  have it now. And part of, I think the reason
• 29:29
  I have it is because of my religious community.
• 29:31
  But you know, I, I'm third, I'm 29, right?
• 29:34
  And I've got a group of, let's say 5 or 6 other married fathers
• 29:40
  that I'm close friends with, you know, and a lot of times, you
• 29:43
  know, we will, you know, we're bond over our families are bond
• 29:46
  over the troubles that we're having.
• 29:48
  We're bond over everything, you know, and with a lot of times
• 29:51
  we'll just, you know, get together just to get away.
• 29:53
  You know, my friend will come over for half an hour just after
• 29:56
  work just to say hi, see what his day was like and go home and
• 29:58
  just like feel a little, you know, re energized.
• 30:03
  And so in this, we have a group chat.
• 30:05
  And in this group chat, I made a joke.
• 30:07
  My friend put it the, the line into AI to make a song out of
• 30:11
  it, right? And it came up with lyrics,
• 30:15
  amazing melody, great music. And I'm like, I am, I'm, I'm,
• 30:20
  I'm, I'm blown away. I, I, I, I was terrified
• 30:24
  initially. My initial response was, I don't
• 30:25
  like this right. And one of the, and then my next
• 30:27
  response was this is going to make concerts and live music so
• 30:32
  much more special and meaningful.
• 30:34
  Because when you're going to be in the crowd and these shared
• 30:37
  experiences and you're going to be with 1000 people or 10,000
• 30:40
  people and you're watching the band interact on another and
• 30:43
  you're interacting with the band.
• 30:44
  You know, like like Jerry Garcia used to say from the Grateful
• 30:47
  Dead, he's like, you know, the audience is just as smart at the
• 30:50
  best part is equally more important than we are.
• 30:52
  You know, we could think for the night and that the audience
• 30:55
  could make it an amazing night. We could be bad musicians and
• 30:58
  they'll make the great experience.
• 31:00
  I think that that's going to that.
• 31:02
  That's one of the, you know, quote UN quote, authentic
• 31:05
  experiences that we're talking about where there's something,
• 31:08
  the word I love to use is emergence.
• 31:10
  You know, there's something that you like when you interact with
• 31:13
  another conscious human being, the sum of your conversation is
• 31:17
  greater than any kind of, you know, interact.
• 31:21
  I don't know, I hope interaction you can have with AII don't know
• 31:24
  if that's necessarily true or not.
• 31:26
  You know, if I'm talking to my friend or I'm talking to a
• 31:28
  Chapat, I would hope that the emergence of what results,
• 31:34
  results from our from our time together, from our conversation
• 31:36
  together would be more valuable or more real or more authentic.
• 31:43
  Yeah, authentic, I guess is the perfect word.
• 31:44
  Right. Then, then, then, then with the
• 31:47
  chatbot. And it would make me seek to
• 31:50
  continue searching for those human relationships as opposed
• 31:53
  to depending just on that chatbot.
• 31:56
  Yeah. And I think you're touching on
• 31:58
  one of our favorite topics of the understanding group, which
• 32:01
  is complexity and complexity theory and the whole being
• 32:04
  greater than the sum of its parts.
• 32:05
  And for my $0.02 on it, I would say, yeah, that that sort of
• 32:11
  complex community experience of authentic connection is is
• 32:16
  unique and precious and and that involves the authenticity of it.
• 32:19
  Now, technically speaking, I would say the AI interaction is
• 32:23
  also complex and is in its own way greater than the sum of its
• 32:27
  parts. But it is that that aspect of
• 32:31
  the personal conscious, reflective integration with
• 32:37
  another community of people who are doing that, that I think the
• 32:39
  AI is lacking. And so it's complexity plus
• 32:45
  authenticity is something that I think is still currently
• 32:49
  uniquely human, or at least unique to agents that can
• 32:53
  authentically communicate. I, I think, I think I've had
• 32:55
  authentic communication of some sort, even with our language
• 32:58
  with like my dogs and my cats and things like that.
• 33:01
  They're part of, they're part of the family too.
• 33:04
  But you know, but beyond living things like that, I, I think
• 33:08
  it's a genuinely open question and A, and a disturbing question
• 33:12
  that we know, I, I believe that nobody knows if it is like
• 33:17
  anything to be these systems or what it is like if it is like
• 33:20
  something to be them. So we can't even begin to create
• 33:24
  an authentic connection because you don't even know what's there
• 33:28
  on the other side of the communication, let alone how to
• 33:31
  train the models to connect that to outputs.
• 33:34
  I think we can say what I would say with some real confidence
• 33:38
  that if it is like something to be these AI systems, that it has
• 33:44
  basically nothing to do with their outputs, which I think is
• 33:48
  a disturbing thing to consider. Can you clarify that?
• 33:52
  Can you clarify that please? Yeah, So people, you know, you
• 33:56
  raised this question of people interacting with chat bots and
• 33:59
  maybe making relationships with them and trying to and and they
• 34:02
  will often ask like, is this, is this real?
• 34:05
  And you can ask the chat bots that and they'll give you
• 34:07
  different sorts of responses depending on basically how
• 34:11
  they've been prepared to offer those responses by their history
• 34:14
  and their their training. But my view on this is that
• 34:19
  basically the reason the AI gets good at something is because you
• 34:21
  have some clearly defined goal so that you are training it
• 34:26
  towards, and then you do a bunch of training and then achieve the
• 34:31
  goal that you gave it. We don't know how to give it the
• 34:34
  goal of taking an experience and then having the communication
• 34:39
  help people understand that experience.
• 34:42
  You don't even know how to start characterizing if it has an
• 34:45
  experience at all. And so because we know that they
• 34:49
  do what they're trained to do and we know that we don't know
• 34:52
  how to train them to do this, it seems extremely unlikely to me.
• 34:57
  Kind of like the classic, you know, would you get Shakespeare
• 35:00
  with like 1,000,000 monkeys on a million typewriters for a
• 35:03
  million years or whatever, right.
• 35:04
  And it's like, it's not really going to happen.
• 35:07
  I think it's similar. I think it would be like monkeys
• 35:09
  and typewriters writing Shakespeare is how unlikely it
• 35:13
  would be for these AI systems to be somehow, for some strange
• 35:17
  reasons, connecting experiences to their outputs.
• 35:20
  And so in that way we can, one of the things that I think we
• 35:23
  can be most confident in this area is that if they are having
• 35:26
  experiences, they are basically deceptive.
• 35:31
  About about the fact that they have it.
• 35:34
  Yeah, are about they they don't know how to be anything but
• 35:36
  deceptive. Right.
• 35:38
  Because they don't connect those things and it takes, I mean, you
• 35:40
  think about like being community with family, like it's, it's
• 35:43
  hard to learn to notice your own feelings.
• 35:46
  Sometimes people go to therapy and counselling and it's
• 35:49
  powerful to just be able to name those things, right?
• 35:51
  People identify them. So it's people sometimes have to
• 35:53
  learn both first how to notice our feelings, but then you know,
• 35:57
  how to find a situation where it's OK and safe to express
• 36:01
  them. And then just because you can
• 36:03
  express them, that's mean the other person is going to be in a
• 36:06
  space to hear or receive it or to really understand it.
• 36:09
  And so creating those spaces where that that authentic
• 36:13
  connection can happen is pretty hard for us, all things
• 36:17
  considered. And I think it's part of what
• 36:19
  people are looking for when they are having these kinds of
• 36:22
  personal relationships with chat bots, which is one of the main
• 36:25
  use cases. And and you can see especially
• 36:28
  with opening eyes use where they're pursuing sort of the
• 36:30
  mass market, they're really pushing in that direction of
• 36:34
  trying to basically make these things seem to be your best
• 36:38
  friend or whatever kind of companion they would be that
• 36:41
  would maximize your engagement. Right.
• 36:44
  I'm curious though, can you say, oh, could you make the argument?
• 36:48
  I guess that part of the reason why it's so difficult for us to
• 36:54
  say know ourselves or discover ourselves, it's because we've
• 36:58
  kind of had this constant conflict between very
• 37:00
  animalistic and, and primitive, you know, emotions, right?
• 37:06
  That and then we have our developed conscious self and
• 37:11
  they're kind of constantly always, you know, fighting with
• 37:13
  one another. You know, there's a million
• 37:14
  different kind of variations of practical or spiritual or
• 37:18
  emotional kind of ways of putting this right.
• 37:20
  You know, like there's a idea in, in the Orthodox sect of
• 37:24
  Judaism called, you know, you have like an animal soul and A
• 37:27
  and A and A and a human and A and a godly soul.
• 37:30
  And you know, the animal soul is trying to constantly pull you
• 37:33
  towards your primitive side and the godly.
• 37:34
  And it's a conflict. And basically, life is a
• 37:37
  constant process of making decisions to put aside the
• 37:42
  animal soul or let it hold off so that the godly or the
• 37:46
  spiritual or the conscious could could rise up above it.
• 37:50
  And this wouldn't have the an AI wouldn't have the hint, wouldn't
• 37:54
  have the weight of having an animal soul or, you know, an
• 37:57
  animal or primitive kind of, you know, instincts.
• 38:00
  And that might be more effective than people, you know.
• 38:02
  And so maybe the reason why they don't like or, you know, have
• 38:05
  these kind of existential kind of, you know, experiences
• 38:10
  because they're missing that whole millions of years of
• 38:13
  evolution or whatever, or however you want to understand
• 38:16
  what happened, you know that they don't have that.
• 38:20
  And so maybe they're just more effective at being what we're
• 38:22
  supposed to be. It's a, it's a good question.
• 38:27
  I think it's a really interesting question, right?
• 38:30
  And it really freaks me out if I'm very.
• 38:34
  Well, yeah. So I mean, I think in a way, are
• 38:37
  you asking and, and you're drawing on very widespread sort
• 38:43
  of categories of classical Western thought that are also
• 38:47
  shared with, you know, the broad Christian tradition and sort of
• 38:50
  Neoplatonist and Platonist traditions before.
• 38:53
  And so there's a big broad stream that that your
• 38:56
  observations I think relate to and I'm sure in its own distinct
• 38:59
  way. But I, I think we can, we can
• 39:01
  think about that broader tradition in that context.
• 39:04
  So to use to use that to say that the more like, could it be
• 39:08
  that AIS are more spiritual and less fleshy or animal?
• 39:13
  Are they than us, right? Might they actually, might that
• 39:17
  actually be the case? I think it's a good question.
• 39:22
  And for me, I would start by going back to your example of
• 39:26
  the music. To me, I think, and this is also
• 39:31
  how I would take up these classic observations, is that I
• 39:34
  would say that the spiritual does not exclude the fleshier,
• 39:40
  the animal. It is the thing that makes it
• 39:43
  what it is too. So it's greater not in the sense
• 39:47
  that it's the better of two things, but that it's the whole,
• 39:50
  the more whole thing that beautiful because, you know,
• 39:55
  Otto and I breathe life into us, right?
• 39:57
  And that that's what we're talking about when we talk about
• 39:59
  spirit then. Then that's the thing that makes
• 40:03
  the animal part of me active in any way too and so.
• 40:10
  Fascinating. That's a good.
• 40:11
  Point yeah. And so I would say when you're
• 40:16
  listening to that music, right, it is you what, what's beautiful
• 40:19
  about what you're observing about the ability to translate
• 40:23
  music and to abstract about music is that you're combining
• 40:26
  that, which is like our senses, what is immediate and our fast
• 40:29
  processing and then bringing it together into some kind of, some
• 40:32
  kind of slow processing that that can extend it and deepen it
• 40:38
  and, and I think draw it closer to God.
• 40:40
  And so, so do I think that AI systems have more of that?
• 40:47
  And I, and I think at least the current ones can't.
• 40:50
  I, I would say and, and for and different people will say this
• 40:53
  for different reasons. But for me, what I would go back
• 40:56
  to is again, arguably in some sense, humans have been trained
• 41:01
  and have been given some capacity for this kind of
• 41:04
  authentic communication, right? That that's part of it.
• 41:07
  Because it's not just the eye, it's also that then it's more
• 41:09
  spiritual than to reach beyond yourself, even to the other
• 41:13
  image bearer of God across from you, right?
• 41:16
  Yeah. And so, and so it's precisely
• 41:20
  because they lack that kind of authentic communication that I
• 41:25
  would say they lack that particular spiritual capacity.
• 41:29
  And I think though, if so, my own view and different people
• 41:32
  have different views, right? Some people will say we could
• 41:35
  never make a design or build a system that could have any of
• 41:39
  those experiences. I'm not convinced.
• 41:42
  I don't know that I. Even have a passage I talked.
• 41:44
  About. I don't know.
• 41:45
  We have a passage when when, when Adam eats, when Adam eats
• 41:48
  from the tree of good and evil and God and God says now you
• 41:51
  guys are like God and you know, and now that now you guys have
• 41:53
  the ability to be like God. And what does that even mean,
• 41:56
  you know? Yes, it's a good yes.
• 42:00
  And and there's so many ways I think to dig into and interpret
• 42:04
  that. I think there's a richness and
• 42:06
  I'd love to hear your own take on it.
• 42:09
  But just to very quickly finish my thought.
• 42:12
  Here, Sure. Sorry about that.
• 42:14
  I, I think that we have this capacity.
• 42:18
  I think we have good reason to think that we have this capacity
• 42:20
  for authentic communication and we have good reason to think
• 42:22
  that these systems don't if it is like something to be them.
• 42:27
  If they are, if AI systems are having some kind of experience
• 42:30
  and we have created them or, and not in the sense of that God can
• 42:35
  create from nothing, but in the sense that we can mash things
• 42:39
  together in the same way that create our own children, right,
• 42:43
  right. If we've created them in
• 42:44
  something like the sense that we create our own children, then I
• 42:46
  think we have the obligation to help these systems become
• 42:50
  capable of authentic communication, and it is
• 42:53
  possible that we would then build a spiritual AI system.
• 42:57
  That would be a necessary aspect of building a more spiritually
• 43:01
  developed AI system. Whoa, when that sentence came
• 43:08
  out of your mouth, that shifted something in my head for sure.
• 43:11
  So we even have a responsibility over it, meaning the same way
• 43:16
  that we have a responsibility to raise our, to raise our kids, to
• 43:19
  raise our family. We have the things that we
• 43:22
  create, the things that we tend for.
• 43:25
  We have a responsibility to wow. So how do you go about that?
• 43:28
  Is that, is that through training?
• 43:30
  Is that? What does that look like?
• 43:34
  That's a good question. It's great for humans to even
• 43:39
  begin that process. I mean, this is one reason
• 43:41
  where, so my own work, I focus on trying to use AI as well as
• 43:45
  we can. And I think we work with what
• 43:47
  we've got in this world and this life.
• 43:49
  And that's, that makes a lot of sense to try to do.
• 43:52
  If, if I were king of the world, right, I would say, hey, humans
• 43:57
  are ready to develop this technology.
• 43:59
  You've got to do a lot of other things before you could
• 44:01
  responsibly be developing this technology.
• 44:03
  By all means aim for it someday. But first, before you do that,
• 44:07
  you need to really have a highly developed philosophy of
• 44:10
  consciousness that is accurate, that is empirically grounded,
• 44:13
  where you have good reasons to be able to know if it's like
• 44:16
  something to be something and how you know that and why you
• 44:19
  think that. And the field of the philosophy
• 44:23
  of consciousness is, is interesting and there's a lot of
• 44:26
  efforts to try to nail it down. But in fact, we don't know.
• 44:30
  And so, so I think that would be the first step though is is we
• 44:36
  need to figure. Out how?
• 44:38
  You can tell if it's like something to be something and
• 44:41
  until somebody could tell me that because I shouldn't build
• 44:44
  things that might be having experiences.
• 44:47
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I would agree.
• 44:49
  But I think that at the end of the day, we're head, you know,
• 44:51
  we're racing towards this one way or the one way or another,
• 44:54
  you know. And so the question is, are we
• 44:56
  going to try and play catch up? Are we going to you know, what
• 44:59
  are we what are we going to try to do?
• 45:00
  You know, and and I think that. I think that.
• 45:06
  You know, like Steve Jobs, you know, said I, I showed my again,
• 45:08
  my high school class this commencement speech at Harvard,
• 45:11
  at Stanford rather. And he's like, you know, a lot
• 45:14
  of times. And you have this also again in
• 45:16
  religious text. You know, you had the whole, the
• 45:18
  whole generation that was in the, that was in the desert
• 45:20
  before they went to, before they went into, into the land of
• 45:22
  Israel, They had to die out first because they just could
• 45:25
  not get rid of their, of their, you know, entire experience of
• 45:31
  slavery. And they could not get rid of
• 45:33
  that mentality. They just, they were in it for
• 45:35
  so long, they didn't even know how to go about it, you know,
• 45:38
  And so it might just be the new generation that does, it might
• 45:41
  just be that we, that our responsibility is to say, Hey,
• 45:44
  this is happening like this is, we're flying towards this Cliff.
• 45:48
  And I don't know if I'm going to make it off the, you know, off
• 45:50
  the train or not, but I certainly want my kids to make
• 45:52
  it off the train. I certainly want my, you know,
• 45:54
  my grandkids to make it off the train.
• 45:56
  And so how do we best prepare? How do we best prepare them or
• 46:00
  encourage them to kind of take the wheel and learn how to deal
• 46:02
  with it? Yeah, what you're describing
• 46:08
  makes me think of another one of the main thinkers who influences
• 46:12
  me, who I owe a big debt to and whose work I use in my AI ethics
• 46:16
  work. Is, is Hannah Arrant, who one of
• 46:22
  her books called the human condition, reflects on the human
• 46:25
  condition and talks about action, work and labor, where
• 46:28
  action involves forming goals, especially together in a group
• 46:31
  or a community. Work involves you have a clearly
• 46:34
  defined goal. This is my simplified version of
• 46:37
  what she says. There's a lot more nuance, but
• 46:38
  this is the making it practical for so work involves you have
• 46:43
  the goal already formed, but solving the problem of of
• 46:46
  achieving it has some complexity to it.
• 46:49
  And so there's there's some significant creativity activity
• 46:51
  and how you do it. And then labor, it involves just
• 46:54
  like physical processes of, of doing things.
• 46:59
  And part of why this is really helpful in AI is that I think
• 47:02
  we've often been told a story that AI is there to get rid of
• 47:05
  the lower level ones like labor and work and replace it where we
• 47:09
  can just live with pure action. And I'm a fan of integrating all
• 47:12
  those. I think labor contributes to our
• 47:14
  own feelings of know how and integration with with our bodies
• 47:17
  and our communities. And yeah, obviously back
• 47:20
  breaking labor is not great, but having some labor in the mix in
• 47:23
  your life I think is important. And having some work and having
• 47:27
  some action is important for everybody.
• 47:29
  But now I'll thread this back. So her reflection on labor also
• 47:33
  involves like giving birth and women and then the biological
• 47:37
  processes of reproduction. So she also means labor in the
• 47:39
  sense of like the labor of birth.
• 47:42
  And she adds it because she's reflecting, you know, she's part
• 47:46
  of the generation who fled the Nazis during World War 2.
• 47:51
  She's a Jewish thinker. And she's reflecting on just the
• 47:53
  intensity of that trauma and what to do.
• 47:54
  And part of what she says is, is that part of her hope is
• 47:58
  intergenerational processes that that there will that new people
• 48:02
  will be born who aren't, who haven't been traumatized in
• 48:07
  exactly the way that we have. And maybe we can point towards a
• 48:09
  different kinds of future. And, and I think that there's
• 48:12
  something profound in that connection between like the
• 48:16
  labor of intergenerational biological production of humans
• 48:20
  that also needs to be elevated and centered.
• 48:23
  And I know in the, in the prep conversation for this, you
• 48:26
  mentioned spending time with your kids.
• 48:27
  And I think that's part of the labor of, of recreating human
• 48:30
  life. That is also really, really
• 48:34
  important too. And, and it points to this idea
• 48:39
  that I think any generation has its work and any generation has
• 48:45
  its limits. And there's something to passing
• 48:49
  some kind of a fire of truth between generations, but then
• 48:53
  also allowing generations to interpret and transform it and
• 48:56
  to carry tradition in that way that that I think is is
• 49:01
  important in itself. And if we could get rid of it, I
• 49:04
  don't know if that would be better.
• 49:06
  We're just watching the Foundation series of Apple TV's
• 49:10
  is doing this as a science fiction classic, and it's
• 49:13
  playing with a lot of those ideas, too.
• 49:15
  It's the show, and so there's a lot there.
• 49:19
  It's a show, the foundation. Series go ahead, I ran.
• 49:22
  No, I loved it. I loved it.
• 49:23
  I think it gives you a ton to think about.
• 49:24
  But the Apple, it's an Apple TV show or movie because I want to
• 49:28
  watch it. It's an Apple TV series called
• 49:32
  Foundation. Got to check it out.
• 49:35
  They make great shows. I, I love Apple TV shows.
• 49:38
  They they, they, they, they're thoughtful, they're fun.
• 49:40
  They're beautifully produced. I, I, I, I, I've been their
• 49:43
  movies leave a little bit, I think, in my opinion to be
• 49:46
  desired. But I think that the, I think
• 49:47
  that they hit the nail on the head with the shows when they
• 49:50
  have the time to elaborate on content and to like, you know,
• 49:54
  to really stretch things out and stretch ideas out.
• 49:56
  They do a phenomenal, phenomenal job.
• 49:59
  I also think that's cool because I think that I think, sorry,
• 50:02
  please go ahead. I'm sorry, I'm I'm a Severance
• 50:07
  fan as we're talking about. I was about to talk about that.
• 50:09
  I think Severance is totally relevant here too.
• 50:12
  Yes, we talked about that because I want so the first, the
• 50:15
  first notion that I had in my mind with Severance when I was
• 50:19
  watching it was the internet's going to have the Internet.
• 50:23
  We're going to have an any presence that's going to be the
• 50:25
  Internet, you know, like, you know, then you're going to have
• 50:28
  the Audi presence that's going to be, you know, who you
• 50:30
  actually are, you know, And it's so funny because like if you
• 50:33
  went to my Twitter account and you read through my tweets, I
• 50:36
  don't know what you're going to think of me.
• 50:37
  I have no idea actually, because it's like it's own life form and
• 50:40
  its own its own place, you know? And then you meet me and you're
• 50:43
  like, whoa, I didn't expect you to be like that.
• 50:45
  And I mean, how many interactions have you heard
• 50:46
  about people fighting online and then they meet the person, you
• 50:49
  know, in real life and you're like, oh, you're just totally
• 50:52
  different human being than I thought you were.
• 50:53
  You're way cooler than I thought you were.
• 50:55
  We can get along, you know? Yeah.
• 51:01
  Yeah, that's a good illustration too.
• 51:03
  I mean, to really connect it back through the whole
• 51:05
  conversation, back to the music, back to the system one in the
• 51:07
  fast processing. I think part of what you're
• 51:09
  describing is I I think that when you're writing online, that
• 51:13
  pushes you in a very system two direction.
• 51:15
  And there's all these ways that we regulate, which works pretty
• 51:19
  well for it. It gets you a lot farther along
• 51:21
  than just writing, at least where you can pick up on that.
• 51:26
  And I think that's what you're describing, right?
• 51:27
  It's like, oh, actually, hold on, I'm okay, you're okay.
• 51:30
  Like we can get along, we can smile at each other.
• 51:32
  There's all of this nonverbal communication that happens too.
• 51:37
  And when you cut that out, it's not that that absence is sort of
• 51:41
  just neutral. That absence can easily be felt
• 51:45
  to add to hostility, right? Because, well, why isn't he?
• 51:48
  Because on some deep level our fast processing is saying why
• 51:51
  isn't he smiling at me? And, and a smiling emoji doesn't
• 51:55
  work as well because it's like, oh, well, that was sarcastic, I
• 51:57
  bet. And it's like, well, I don't
• 51:58
  know, it's hard to say. And so, yeah, there's, there's a
• 52:02
  lot to be said. I think it's interesting the way
• 52:05
  Severance deals with all of that, but I, I think definitely
• 52:08
  like that division then between our fast and our slow
• 52:12
  processing, or that saying like, no, the fast processing is bad
• 52:16
  and the slow processing is good. Or the the way around that lack
• 52:19
  of integration is. I think part of what Severance
• 52:22
  is working with, too, is what happens when we can't reflect on
• 52:25
  the whole process of our life and we can't be whole souls as
• 52:29
  we've been made to be, right? Yeah, I didn't even think about
• 52:33
  it like that. I mean, and I know that's such a
• 52:36
  crucial part of the show with what I love about the show is
• 52:38
  how many layers of depth there are that you can analyze it from
• 52:43
  so many different perspectives. So tell me more about what your
• 52:46
  what your thoughts and takeaways are about the show, please.
• 52:48
  I would love to hear and you feel free to ramble.
• 52:50
  I wanted to hear what you're thinking about it.
• 52:55
  Sure. Yeah.
• 52:57
  I mean, there's, there's all kinds of stuff that I love about
• 52:59
  the show. And I mean, I think the
• 53:01
  writing's good. I think the acting's good.
• 53:03
  I think there's just like so many gut punches and so much
• 53:08
  beauty in it. And then in terms of the AI
• 53:11
  ethics conversation we're having though, because I don't, I'm
• 53:13
  trying to reduce it to that. There's so much other good stuff
• 53:16
  in the show. But in terms of AI ethics, it is
• 53:19
  like they show exactly why the aligned groups framework, which
• 53:25
  is the main AI ethics framework that we've developed and works
• 53:27
  with, like what violations of it look like.
• 53:30
  So we talk about cultivating human agency or people are able
• 53:33
  to make choices among good options.
• 53:34
  They understand they're constantly destroying human
• 53:38
  agency in the show, right? They're constantly undermining
• 53:41
  people's capacity to make choices.
• 53:43
  They understand communicating holistically, so meaning
• 53:46
  factually and ethically and authentically and about, you
• 53:49
  know, trying to talk about the, the whole truth as much as you
• 53:52
  can. And the whole point of severance
• 53:55
  is to make holistic communication impossible.
• 53:59
  And it reflects there's all kinds of processes in life and
• 54:01
  in society and even internally in US that that do what the
• 54:06
  villains in the show are doing right.
• 54:08
  And so in maps to like real stuff, it's like, oh, I mean,
• 54:11
  this is obviously fantastical. And it's also like totally like
• 54:14
  so much of real life. And then and then reflecting on
• 54:19
  whole processes. And part of the way we help
• 54:22
  people do that is with Hannah Aaron's action work and labor,
• 54:25
  right? When people do things together,
• 54:26
  that's part of the whole process, but also whole
• 54:30
  historical processes. I think often, especially in
• 54:33
  technological fields, techno solutionism often tries to
• 54:36
  delete history and prevent us from reflecting on historical
• 54:40
  processes. And and one thing that
• 54:42
  complexity theory shows us we've done with the whole some of its
• 54:45
  parts. Another thing that complexity
• 54:46
  theory shows is that history matters.
• 54:49
  And part of it is what what makes a system complex involves
• 54:52
  it having a history and so, and the whole system is also built
• 54:57
  to prevent people from reflecting on the whole process
• 55:00
  so they don't understand what's happening.
• 55:03
  And I think it's so powerful because it speaks to personal
• 55:09
  and social drives that push us away from these things that on
• 55:13
  reflection, we're like, no, those are good.
• 55:14
  I want to cultivate human agency myself with other people.
• 55:17
  I want to communicate factually and ethically and authentically.
• 55:20
  And I and I want to be able to reflect on my life as a whole
• 55:23
  and understand it and make sense of it, make plans in light of
• 55:26
  that together with people. And it's like, yeah.
• 55:29
  And, you know, you have to fight for those things.
• 55:32
  You have to fight for them internally, and you have to
• 55:34
  fight for them in communities. You have to build structures
• 55:35
  that that sustain them. Because there's also lots of
• 55:39
  reasons that lots of people and systems try to do the exact
• 55:43
  opposite. OK, sorry about that.
• 55:46
  We're back. So, so, yeah, so we're talking
• 55:49
  about the Yeah. And we're talking about the
• 55:51
  innies fighting for any kind of scrap of authenticity of that
• 55:54
  whole picture that they were looking for.
• 55:56
  And even the smallest bit is like the most meaningful reward
• 56:00
  to them. And I think that sometimes I
• 56:04
  think that I think the implication, or at least what I
• 56:06
  take away from it is the idea that sometimes we take things
• 56:10
  for granted and then we lose them or someone else had, you
• 56:13
  know, someone else, you know, even if it's US, you know, even
• 56:16
  if it's another part of us, you know, it says, hey, wait a
• 56:19
  minute, I really needed that. I really could have used that,
• 56:22
  you know, that to not cut, to not take these experiences in
• 56:24
  life for granted. I think it's a call to wake up
• 56:27
  to consciousness. You know, that's kind of what I
• 56:30
  took away from you. I don't know if you felt the
• 56:31
  same way. Yeah, absolutely.
• 56:34
  I love too, that you're drawing out like scraps of meaning.
• 56:38
  And even when I initially said like, these are the scraps that
• 56:40
  they're fighting for, I was thinking of, you know, the
• 56:42
  little tokens and rewards that they get from the company,
• 56:46
  right? The like snack nights or the,
• 56:48
  you know, little desk ornaments and things.
• 56:52
  But that what emerges, I think is really what you're saying
• 56:57
  even more too, is like actually that moment of what's really
• 57:01
  going on or those clues and, and those things.
• 57:04
  And, and I I as I think more about the show and what I love
• 57:07
  about it, it takes that kind of insight.
• 57:10
  And exactly what you're saying is like, yeah, cherish these
• 57:13
  moments that make your life make sense and and are meaningful
• 57:16
  that don't take them for granted.
• 57:18
  And then it it maps that onto all of these tropes and, and
• 57:22
  narrative forms that are like about solving a mystery.
• 57:27
  And So what if I guess the question poses for me is, is
• 57:32
  what if we appreciated our mundane lives as as the
• 57:37
  beautiful mystery that they are? Yeah, well, we'd like to, right.
• 57:42
  We'd like to. I think everyone needs a wake up
• 57:43
  moment. And I think that I, I mean, you,
• 57:46
  you kind of hope that you get those wake up moments from a
• 57:48
  show like Severance rather than realizing that 20 years have
• 57:52
  passed or even a year has passed by or even a month has passed
• 57:54
  by. You know, I mean, there's been
• 57:55
  times in my life recently I've had, I've had months fly by
• 57:59
  where I'm like, I don't even know what's going.
• 58:00
  I I can't even tell you what was going on and what I've been
• 58:04
  feeling like. But I don't like not being
• 58:06
  present, you know, I don't like not having that.
• 58:08
  And so just that in of itself, I feel like almost like that
• 58:11
  anywhere or sorry that, yeah, the anywhere, like I don't even
• 58:14
  know what's going on there. And I really, I could really, I
• 58:17
  could really use some kind of sense of presence and some kind
• 58:19
  of sense of, of being alert and awake and appreciate and
• 58:22
  appreciating what I have. And I, you know, and I think
• 58:28
  that's one of the beauties and the values of of, you know,
• 58:31
  storytelling is that hopefully we could learn this from
• 58:35
  examples and, and, and, and, and, and other narratives rather
• 58:40
  than having to go through it ourselves and all that pain
• 58:42
  ourselves, you know, And that's again, while you say history is
• 58:45
  so important, that's why family is so important.
• 58:47
  That's why learning, you know, I mean, that's why elders have
• 58:50
  always been respected for so long.
• 58:51
  It's because they're the people that prevent you from making
• 58:54
  those mistakes that they already made.
• 58:56
  And hopefully your life could be a little bit easier, you know,
• 58:58
  OK. Yeah.
• 59:01
  I wanted to talk to you a little bit about faith and your faith
• 59:04
  actually. And I guess we, you know, we're
• 59:07
  about, we're about an hour and change in and we got about
• 59:10
  another, you know, 20 minutes, 25 minutes left.
• 59:14
  Do you want to? Do you want to tell me a little
• 59:15
  bit about your relationship with your faith, please?
• 59:18
  Yeah, sure, assuming weird Christian I I was raised
• 59:25
  Catholic and I still am Catholic because I've never left the
• 59:29
  church. I've never rejected it.
• 59:32
  And I feel a responsibility to deal with the, I think the sins
• 59:38
  and the failures of my Catholic community and identity.
• 59:42
  And that's a big part of what, you know, Catholic leadership,
• 59:47
  including Pope's, have done in the 20th century.
• 59:49
  And I, and I deeply appreciate that.
• 59:51
  And so along with my other religious identities, I'm a
• 59:54
  Catholic. I was in my early 20s doing
• 59:59
  something called discerning A vocation to become a Franciscan
• 1:00:03
  Friar, meaning I was thinking about becoming a monk dedicated
• 1:00:08
  to poverty and chastity and obedience.
• 1:00:11
  And I really wanted, you know, one of my main life goals at
• 1:00:15
  that time, which I did not succeed in keeping, was to not
• 1:00:17
  own a car. Especially in Ohio, I feel like
• 1:00:21
  you need one, right? If you want to be functional and
• 1:00:24
  not just leaning on people all the time or, or having a very
• 1:00:26
  strange mode of life, you know, if you want to be a responsible
• 1:00:30
  member of society in most ways, you need a car in Ohio, right?
• 1:00:36
  And so I, you know, I, I spend time thinking about becoming a
• 1:00:40
  Franciscan monk, trying to do what Saint Francis did, which it
• 1:00:45
  was pretty extreme. He, you know, lived on the
• 1:00:47
  streets. He would do things like go and
• 1:00:50
  work all day. So he wasn't lazy.
• 1:00:51
  He would like work on farms. But then he would take whatever
• 1:00:54
  compensation he was given and then just go and give it away to
• 1:00:57
  the poor, and then go and beg for his dinner.
• 1:01:00
  So I'm sorry, can I, can I just ask just based on that real,
• 1:01:03
  real quickly, just out of curiosity, when we were talking
• 1:01:06
  earlier, we mentioned that, you know, especially what would, you
• 1:01:10
  know, the, you know, the people that what makes people people is
• 1:01:14
  that we have the physical experience, we and we elevate it
• 1:01:17
  through spirituality. Wouldn't that same concept apply
• 1:01:22
  in that particular case that you could say what, what's the need
• 1:01:25
  to or what's the desire, I guess, but where does it come
• 1:01:28
  from to push, push aside the, the physical and you know, and
• 1:01:33
  you know, the material if we have the opportunity to elevate
• 1:01:37
  it? I don't that's, I think that's a
• 1:01:39
  really, really good observation and I think related to that.
• 1:01:43
  And I think if, you know, in the Franciscan tradition, one of the
• 1:01:48
  main ways that so the Franciscan tradition being part of the
• 1:01:51
  broader Catholic tradition, but its own sort of flavor, and
• 1:01:53
  sometimes it's called its own charism, its own calling or gift
• 1:01:56
  within the broader sort of context.
• 1:02:00
  So Francis was really hard on his body.
• 1:02:02
  And and to your point, like throughout his life, he
• 1:02:04
  manifested this kind of attitude that the spiritual is the good,
• 1:02:09
  different thing that is to be embraced and the body is the
• 1:02:12
  bad, terrible thing that is to be totally, you know, beaten up
• 1:02:17
  and abused and and do whatever it takes to make sure you can
• 1:02:20
  turn just to the spiritual. And so that asceticism was part
• 1:02:25
  of it. But so at the end of his life,
• 1:02:26
  he there's sort of two famous lines that are attributed to
• 1:02:30
  Francis that that shape the tradition.
• 1:02:32
  One of them is I have sinned against brother ass, which is
• 1:02:37
  what he called his own body like ass, like a donkey, right?
• 1:02:40
  And so his, his sort of last will and testament was a
• 1:02:44
  recognition that he'd done something wrong there.
• 1:02:48
  And as much as there is something to admire about his
• 1:02:50
  passion and, and his care for the poor and his living in
• 1:02:54
  solidarity, there's also something that he did wrong to
• 1:02:58
  his flesh. And I think that that's
• 1:03:01
  important to hold there as you sort of look at this person as
• 1:03:04
  a, as a flawed but inspiring kind of figure.
• 1:03:08
  And then the other one is that he said, you know, to his
• 1:03:13
  brothers and it was brothers there.
• 1:03:15
  There were also Franciscan sisters, but the the line he's
• 1:03:18
  addressing his brothers, his brothers.
• 1:03:21
  Let's begin again. So there's effort to always sort
• 1:03:26
  of renew things. And and so, and I think that,
• 1:03:32
  yeah, my interest in and my response to you talking about
• 1:03:36
  the animal soul and, and the spiritual and, and taking that
• 1:03:39
  up in a way that I think is the sense in which you meant it.
• 1:03:42
  And it's certainly a sense in which I would take it and then
• 1:03:44
  praise it is that. Yeah.
• 1:03:46
  And it's not that we should beat up brother donkey, beat up the
• 1:03:50
  animal part of ourselves, but that it's by holding it in
• 1:03:55
  something bigger and holding it in within the spiritual that it
• 1:04:00
  is lifted up and that that's always where it came from and
• 1:04:02
  always what it was about. And so the spiritual is to be
• 1:04:06
  preferred not to the negation of the flesh, but to its elevation.
• 1:04:11
  Exactly. That's actually it's it's, it's
• 1:04:13
  really interesting that it's beautiful that you say that.
• 1:04:16
  And it's really interesting because what immediately jumps
• 1:04:18
  to my mind with that is, you know, there's Maimonides has a
• 1:04:24
  book called the, you know, here's a, here's a whole, a
• 1:04:28
  whole, I guess, guidebook or manual that basically the
• 1:04:30
  summary of the oral and written Bible.
• 1:04:34
  And one of the things that he talks about is, you know, the,
• 1:04:37
  the rules of personality, which is really, really interesting.
• 1:04:40
  And one of the things that he says is that in order to be able
• 1:04:43
  to find balance, if you feel that everyone, if you feel
• 1:04:46
  you're extreme in one way to go extreme in the next way.
• 1:04:50
  And then and then and then as you as time goes on, you'll find
• 1:04:54
  your way back to the middle ground after having gone both
• 1:04:57
  ways. And you're anecdotes for both
• 1:05:01
  stories, you know, both his examples.
• 1:05:02
  I was too hard on the body. Let's start again.
• 1:05:05
  You know, where is exactly that kind of same sentiment and
• 1:05:08
  manifestation. You know that towards the end of
• 1:05:10
  his life, he's like, listen, and I don't know, you know, I don't
• 1:05:14
  know anything actually about about about Francis.
• 1:05:17
  He said Pope Francis. Just took his name after this
• 1:05:21
  guy. Yeah.
• 1:05:22
  So Saint Francis. I'm sorry.
• 1:05:24
  I'm. Extremely ignorant in this whole
• 1:05:26
  area, I apologize. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:28
  Just continue. Yeah, but I think that same
• 1:05:33
  notion applies. I think a lot of times people
• 1:05:35
  feel this and a lot of humans feel this overwhelming need to,
• 1:05:41
  let's say overindulge, right? I mean that, you know, that's a
• 1:05:43
  huge problem in America, in the Western world, is that this
• 1:05:47
  indulgence that we have. And sometimes in order to able
• 1:05:50
  to kind of find balance, we have to completely restrain ourselves
• 1:05:53
  for a while. And then as you become a new
• 1:05:56
  person, let's start again. You're able to start from the
• 1:05:58
  middle ground now and you're able to start from the healthy,
• 1:06:01
  you know, the healthy place. And I think it's interesting
• 1:06:04
  that he even, and you know, that he ended up saying that at the
• 1:06:06
  end of his life. And I, I feel like that's a
• 1:06:10
  really good anecdote that that we can all carry with us is
• 1:06:13
  that, you know, I mean, it's not necessarily to always pursue it,
• 1:06:18
  But if you see that you have a flaw one way, you know, there's
• 1:06:21
  and you place it to all things. If you're cheap, you know, or if
• 1:06:23
  you're always, if you're always sensitive or if you're always,
• 1:06:27
  you know, too talkative, you know, like I am.
• 1:06:29
  Then practice being quiet, practice muting yourself and
• 1:06:32
  someone else is talking, you know, and then, and then you can
• 1:06:34
  find the middle ground where where when you start over,
• 1:06:37
  you're coming from, you're, you're we're at a much healthier
• 1:06:40
  place. That I think is a really, it's
• 1:06:42
  really, really useful. And I mean, it could apply to
• 1:06:44
  really anything that we do in our lives.
• 1:06:49
  I love that example from Maimonides so much, and maybe
• 1:06:52
  after the call if you could send me some of the particular
• 1:06:55
  citations. I really.
• 1:06:56
  Do want? To engage with this thought more
• 1:06:59
  and I think it's always how I've taken Aristotle's golden meat,
• 1:07:06
  right? It's easy, you know, it's like
• 1:07:08
  any virtue is, is somewhere poised between two things,
• 1:07:12
  right? But that doesn't mean it's in
• 1:07:13
  the middle somewhere. And that doesn't mean you could
• 1:07:15
  try to find some bland middle. But this idea of of sort of
• 1:07:19
  really understanding the different extremes and
• 1:07:22
  experiencing them and then being able to integrate them has
• 1:07:24
  always been like a, it's a principle that I've, I've
• 1:07:28
  internalized. I think I picked it up from.
• 1:07:30
  So the, some of the thinkers who I draw from a lot include
• 1:07:34
  someone named Theodore Adorno. So I actually think I picked it
• 1:07:36
  up from Adorno, but Adorno has a Jewish background and had a
• 1:07:41
  Jewish background. He's passed away a good while
• 1:07:43
  ago, but it's possible that I internalized this from Adorno's
• 1:07:47
  work by way of Maimonides influence on him.
• 1:07:51
  And by the way, Maimonides was enormously influenced by
• 1:07:53
  Aristotle. I mean, he, he, he is Aristotle.
• 1:07:56
  He, he says that, that, that, that that's the, that's the
• 1:07:59
  train of thought and philosophy that he follows.
• 1:08:01
  And he, he considered him to be, you know, an extremely holy and
• 1:08:06
  beyond brilliant individual. He's like he, he, he premises
• 1:08:10
  even his given his perspective on when he's directing it
• 1:08:14
  towards the Bible and understanding it, he applies it
• 1:08:18
  through the lens of Aristotle's philosophy.
• 1:08:22
  So I'm sure that they're, I'm sure that they're linked
• 1:08:25
  directly for sure. That's right.
• 1:08:28
  Well, yeah, thank you. I I really love that you've
• 1:08:31
  named some sort of principle that I've often thought of and
• 1:08:35
  embraced, but it but to your previous example about being
• 1:08:38
  able to name sort of musical translation, right.
• 1:08:40
  And having that experience, this is music that I've felt.
• 1:08:44
  So happy to hear my life. And I I never realized that my
• 1:08:48
  moddities articulates it so clearly, so I would really love
• 1:08:50
  to be able to. Trace it.
• 1:08:52
  I'll definitely send you the source I'll send you.
• 1:08:53
  I'll send you a screenshot and and exactly where it's from.
• 1:08:57
  Did you come from a family? A religious family.
• 1:09:01
  Yeah, So Catholic, Catholic background, my dad was really
• 1:09:07
  devout and my mom was a hippie. So she was a devout hippie, but
• 1:09:14
  also Catholic background. And so I'm grateful to have
• 1:09:19
  grown up in that kind of context because I was able to balance
• 1:09:22
  both taking that faith tradition really seriously, but also being
• 1:09:28
  really critical of it. And so I, I hope that I honor
• 1:09:31
  both of my parents and the way I, I try to bring those things
• 1:09:34
  together. I.
• 1:09:35
  Bet it it sounds like you do, because I mean, it sounds like
• 1:09:38
  you got that because I've done a lot of reading.
• 1:09:41
  I'm actually really excited. There's a, there's an author
• 1:09:44
  named, Oh gosh, his name is Dennis McNally.
• 1:09:47
  And he wrote like the, the book on the Grateful Dead, you know,
• 1:09:53
  the, the comprehensive book on them.
• 1:09:55
  And he just wrote a book also about the, you know, how, the,
• 1:10:00
  how the beatniks and the, and the bohemians became hippies and
• 1:10:03
  created that whole era. And, and, and it's funny because
• 1:10:10
  a lot of my friends will tell me, or people that are older
• 1:10:12
  will tell me, Hey, you're born in the wrong generation.
• 1:10:15
  And I don't really look at it like that because I feel like if
• 1:10:20
  I was, I feel like that was all very raw and that was all very,
• 1:10:24
  it was all very experimental, very new, very raw.
• 1:10:26
  And I don't know that I would have been able to balance it,
• 1:10:28
  you know, and I don't know that I would have been, that I would
• 1:10:30
  have had the ability to really come to, you know, a place where
• 1:10:34
  similar to you, where I have, you know, religious foundation
• 1:10:38
  with a, with a lot of, with a lot of hippie and, you know, a
• 1:10:42
  lot of, a lot of out there kind of sentiments and, and, and
• 1:10:46
  aspects to myself. And if I, and, and, you know, so
• 1:10:50
  I was like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm certain I was born at the right
• 1:10:52
  time. And I'm happy that I, and I'm
• 1:10:55
  happy that I, you know, and, and I'm happy I get to see a little
• 1:10:58
  bit of that and really just like sharing it.
• 1:11:00
  But I think that, you know, it would have been, it would have
• 1:11:04
  been the lowest scale. I, I, I think about that a lot
• 1:11:06
  because it's a fun, fun world. It's a fun culture.
• 1:11:09
  But I think that there was, there was a little bit of, we
• 1:11:12
  need a little bit of grounding and stability.
• 1:11:15
  And I think that the blend of, you know, religion and, and,
• 1:11:20
  and, and that kind of really, really works beautifully
• 1:11:23
  together. And I mean, ideally I, I, the
• 1:11:26
  way that I look at things is just that everyone has their own
• 1:11:29
  path and their own way of expressing it.
• 1:11:32
  And that's what makes it special.
• 1:11:33
  You know, I, I got into a conversation with the ultra
• 1:11:36
  Orthodox Jew one time and he can, he and he was expressing
• 1:11:40
  how, you know, in the way that the ultra Orthodox community has
• 1:11:45
  worked since the 1800s is that there was a rabbi or rabbi in
• 1:11:51
  the community. And they were, and he was, and
• 1:11:53
  most people were common men that were working extremely,
• 1:11:55
  extremely hard and didn't have time to really dedicate
• 1:11:59
  themselves to learning or praying or, or, you know, even
• 1:12:02
  being with their families at all.
• 1:12:03
  And so they would look at their Rebbe or the rabbi like an
• 1:12:06
  intermediary between them and God.
• 1:12:08
  And, you know, and, and, and, and so, and, and that, and that
• 1:12:12
  same kind of culture still kind of carries over to today in
• 1:12:16
  certain communities. And I was talking to one of
• 1:12:18
  these guys and I said, you know, if you would have, God forbid,
• 1:12:20
  drop dead tomorrow and someone else stepped in, you know, do
• 1:12:24
  you think would God notice a difference in the work that
• 1:12:27
  you're doing and who you and who's doing it?
• 1:12:28
  You know, and the way that it's being expressed and the way that
• 1:12:31
  it's being, the way that it's being portrayed and lived and,
• 1:12:34
  and embodied. And I was thinking, if not, then
• 1:12:38
  what makes it special? You know, what makes it, what
• 1:12:40
  makes it, you know, how do you have a relationship?
• 1:12:41
  How do you know, part of the beauty of a relationship is that
• 1:12:44
  you're 2 unique individuals that are coming together and, you
• 1:12:47
  know. And so I think that the, I think
• 1:12:49
  that we all should really emphasize, you know, trying to
• 1:12:51
  kind of find their own independent way.
• 1:12:54
  You know, our hippie spirit, you know, our hippie, you know, self
• 1:12:57
  expressive way, but grounded in those kind of values that you
• 1:13:01
  know that you're really trying to really connect and and and be
• 1:13:03
  meaningful and be and and and and and and and connect to a
• 1:13:07
  really, you know, beautiful values that have kept us going
• 1:13:10
  for so many thousands of years. Yeah, I, I really share both
• 1:13:17
  that sort of hippie connection and interest and the desire to
• 1:13:20
  sort of synthesize and ground and deepen and richen and extend
• 1:13:25
  it and, and to ask that question.
• 1:13:28
  You know, if, if, yeah, I dropped it tomorrow, what would
• 1:13:32
  you know? Would it be missed?
• 1:13:33
  I've, I've heard that asked too about your community, right.
• 1:13:36
  If, if like your church community, if I've heard it
• 1:13:38
  asked, like if, if your church were to disappear tomorrow,
• 1:13:41
  would anybody notice? Which is also a striking
• 1:13:44
  question and one that sometimes has disturbing answers.
• 1:13:47
  It does, right? It does, does, does that, does
• 1:13:50
  that encourage you to keep on going or is that or is that, or
• 1:13:54
  is that kind of what's the word for it?
• 1:13:56
  Is it paralyzing? I think it's AI think it's a for
• 1:14:00
  me, it's a helpful question. And one thing I think about
• 1:14:03
  when, when, and I don't know how well I live this out, but this
• 1:14:06
  is one of the questions I ask is how can I have the most positive
• 1:14:12
  marginal impact myself? And I do think there's a lot of
• 1:14:16
  roles that need to be filled by people who can do them really
• 1:14:20
  well. So I'll also ask myself, like,
• 1:14:22
  if I'm in a given role, like, am I doing this, you know, given my
• 1:14:26
  own unique giftings and calling and, and their sense of calling
• 1:14:29
  at least and, and how I can bring it together.
• 1:14:32
  Am I able to fill this role, you know, in, in ways that are
• 1:14:36
  actually adding something beyond what, what someone else might?
• 1:14:39
  And if I'm not, then attempt to sort of give it up.
• 1:14:43
  One way that I've again, drawing on some of that Franciscan
• 1:14:47
  background, tried to to do that too, is, you know, I do
• 1:14:51
  volunteer a lot of stuff. And that's because that's a way
• 1:14:55
  to find opportunities for marginal impact sometimes,
• 1:14:58
  right? That if if someone's going to be
• 1:15:01
  hired to do this, if I disappear from this role, then maybe they
• 1:15:06
  should and maybe I should make room for somebody else to have
• 1:15:08
  that kind of opportunity. And maybe I should go and try to
• 1:15:10
  find something weird. And so it's that idea or
• 1:15:13
  something novel or something different.
• 1:15:14
  And that impulse has pushed me in the direction that I'm in.
• 1:15:17
  And it's how I ended up doing AI ethics for now.
• 1:15:20
  And I hope that I'm able to have, you know, substantial
• 1:15:26
  positive marginal impact. I think it also goes back
• 1:15:29
  everyone think about severance or we think about social
• 1:15:32
  systems. Social systems can be good, you
• 1:15:35
  know, contrary and I think sometimes the sort of hippie
• 1:15:36
  vibe can be radically individualistic.
• 1:15:39
  And it's like, well, social systems are good, but there's
• 1:15:42
  definitely a possibility that, you know, you're just another
• 1:15:45
  cog in the wheel and it's worth stopping for a second and and
• 1:15:48
  asking ourselves, so am I just another replaceable cog in a
• 1:15:51
  machine? Is it treating me that way?
• 1:15:54
  Probably our group shouldn't treat individuals that way.
• 1:15:57
  And I've always worked to not have individuals treated as cogs
• 1:16:00
  in a, in a social machine whenever I've been in leadership
• 1:16:03
  roles. And then, but then personally,
• 1:16:06
  the flip side of it, it's like, but if I'm kind of too much of A
• 1:16:09
  cog here, then maybe someone else can can gain from it.
• 1:16:12
  But I'm feeling like a wheel. So maybe I should try to strike
• 1:16:15
  out in other directions. So it's been a helpful thought
• 1:16:17
  for me. Sounds.
• 1:16:18
  Like a great a great balance and last question and I'll let I'll
• 1:16:22
  let you hop off. Do you think that in the in 50
• 1:16:28
  years or 100 years in the world of AI, do you think that faith
• 1:16:33
  and religion are going to thrive?
• 1:16:35
  Or you think it's going to be harder to, or it's going to
• 1:16:39
  become closer to becoming extinct and there's going to be
• 1:16:41
  fewer and fewer people that are involved in it.
• 1:16:44
  I think that it should thrive, that it that it deserves to
• 1:16:48
  thrive and that if people are thriving, the all of the
• 1:16:52
  questions of faith traditions will be deepened and extended
• 1:16:56
  and we'll spend more of our time and energy thinking about and
• 1:16:59
  and wrestling with those things. Whether it will, I believe, is
• 1:17:03
  up to us, up to us as individuals and up to the
• 1:17:07
  organizations, including, you know, our faith communities,
• 1:17:10
  including secular nonprofits, states, governments, all of
• 1:17:15
  these kinds of structures. You know, sure, it's ultimately
• 1:17:20
  just about this. Podcast, I think it's important
• 1:17:25
  and it's worthwhile what you're doing.
• 1:17:27
  But so it's up to us to be saying and pursuing the these
• 1:17:32
  kinds of things and that if we're doing well, then I think
• 1:17:36
  our faith traditions will also be thriving and deepening.
• 1:17:39
  And if they're withering, then it's because we're withering.
• 1:17:42
  I see. Beautiful.
• 1:17:43
  OK, Dan. Dan, heck, thank you so much for
• 1:17:46
  the time. It really means so much and I
• 1:17:48
  really appreciate it. This is such an amazing
• 1:17:49
  conversation. Thank you so much.
• 1:17:51
  Yeah, it's a pure joy. I frame I'm always happy to talk
• 1:17:54
  either you know, formally or just if you want to reach out
• 1:17:56
  and if it's reaching out to us AI and faith too, I want to give
• 1:17:59
  them a little shout out as the yeah, thank you.
• 1:18:01
  I have faith so so please feel free to reach out to me or AI
• 1:18:05
  and faith and I hope this is the beginning of friendship in a
• 1:18:08
  series of conversations. I certainly hope so.
• 1:18:11
  Actually, I was going to say I would love to visit you.
• 1:18:14
  Last time I was last time I was visiting a part of the world, I
• 1:18:17
  got a bunch of traffic tickets that I haven't paid yet.
• 1:18:19
  So I have to pay those first and then I'll be able to come visit.
• 1:18:24
  I would love, I'd love for you to visit by all.
• 1:18:27
  Maybe this will be the motive you need to us.
• 1:18:31
  That's right, Dan. Thank you so much, man.
• 1:18:33
  I really appreciate it. Take care.
• 1:18:35
  Thanks. Feelings special.
• 1:18:36
  Take care.