Latest / Mahon McCann / Brandon Griggs - Mapping UNIVERSAL ETHICS for the DIGITAL AGE

Transcript

Brandon Griggs - Mapping UNIVERSAL ETHICS for the DIGITAL AGE · Mahon McCann

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SPEAKER_00: Imagine if you grew up on the moon,
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SPEAKER_00: like you would normalize around an entirely different gravity,
0:05
SPEAKER_00: right?
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SPEAKER_00: And this different gravity would affect every physical prediction that you would make, right?
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Around movement and weight and speed and inertia.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: And then let's say you had to move back to earth, right?
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SPEAKER_00: All those predictions would be totally wrong.
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SPEAKER_00: Like you would get prediction error like crazy and the gravity on earth would feel
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SPEAKER_00: way more oppressive,
0:21
SPEAKER_00: right?
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SPEAKER_00: Because all these things would be harder.
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SPEAKER_00: They would demand more energy.
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SPEAKER_00: There would be more frictions.
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SPEAKER_00: Everywhere.
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SPEAKER_00: And I think there's potentially an equivalent with digital here,
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SPEAKER_00: where if you're a digital native,
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SPEAKER_00: you're growing up in digital environments.
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SPEAKER_00: You're normalizing around something completely different.
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SPEAKER_02: Brandon Griggs, thank you very much for joining me, sir.
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SPEAKER_02: You are the author of the Tech for Life Substack.
0:50
SPEAKER_02: I've been really enjoying the articles.
0:52
SPEAKER_02: And as I was saying beforehand,
0:54
SPEAKER_02: it's great to find somebody that's as interested in this and that's,
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SPEAKER_02: I suppose,
1:00
SPEAKER_02: willing to go into these different domains theoretically and trying to pull it
1:03
SPEAKER_02: together to understand technology,
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SPEAKER_02: but also what the technology is doing to us.
1:09
SPEAKER_02: And so...
1:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
1:10
SPEAKER_02: I wanted you maybe just to start off just to say a little bit about what you're
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SPEAKER_02: doing and why you're working on this project and what it means to you.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
1:18
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:19
SPEAKER_00: likewise,
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SPEAKER_00: I feel like I found a kindred spirit in the podcast here in terms of its
1:22
SPEAKER_00: willingness to embrace both of these kind of sides of the question.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: And that's also kind of my answer, right?
1:28
SPEAKER_00: And that there's really not enough people that are engaging with technology and
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SPEAKER_00: willing to kind of push it into the bigger questions,
1:35
SPEAKER_00: right?
1:35
SPEAKER_00: Like there's certainly ethics of technology.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: But a lot of the discourse around both ethics and technology in general,
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SPEAKER_00: it just feels very low dimensional to me.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: You know,
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SPEAKER_00: either these false binaries of techno-optimism and techno-pessimism or AI ethics,
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SPEAKER_00: it's just limited to,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: bias and representation or losing our jobs or it's going the other direction,
1:56
SPEAKER_00: right?
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SPEAKER_00: Which is like, oh, the end of the world and this kind of thing.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: And kind of really grappling it with a way that is taking these issues seriously.
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SPEAKER_00: It just felt to me that we need more philosophers and we need more technologies.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: We need more voices kind of engaging with these big issues.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: And I think what I'm trying to bring to the table is just honestly a complete amateur's perspective.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: I'm really leaning into that.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: So I have no degree.
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SPEAKER_00: I have no publications.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: I have no credentials of any kind.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, I have no constraints of like tenure or publication or career.
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SPEAKER_00: So I feel like I have complete freedom to ask all of the stupid questions and
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SPEAKER_00: speculate wildly,
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SPEAKER_00: be incredibly naive.
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SPEAKER_00: And I feel like that's somewhat rare.
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SPEAKER_00: So I feel like I have an obligation to make the most of that.
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SPEAKER_00: And part of my writing was try to get some of these things out there and find the kindred spirit.
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SPEAKER_00: So here we are.
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SPEAKER_02: Yeah, 100%, man.
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SPEAKER_02: And you can see,
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SPEAKER_02: like,
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SPEAKER_02: because there's a great deal of creativity as well of bringing together different,
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SPEAKER_02: like,
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SPEAKER_02: not being afraid to go into,
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SPEAKER_02: like,
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SPEAKER_02: different areas that are kind of,
3:01
SPEAKER_02: you know,
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SPEAKER_02: wouldn't necessarily be in somebody's wheelhouse.
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SPEAKER_02: Like, I find that in academia, like, with publications and stuff like that.
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SPEAKER_02: It's very,
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SPEAKER_02: like,
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SPEAKER_02: you're expected to kind of fill a niche,
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SPEAKER_02: whereas this problem isn't a niche-specific problem.
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SPEAKER_02: Like, technology is a huge topic.
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SPEAKER_02: And I wanted to start out, I wanted to kind of explore an idea with you, which is that...
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SPEAKER_02: I've been thinking about it that now we're in a fundamentally different age.
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SPEAKER_02: If you think about it, you have classical antiquity, you have the Middle Ages, you have the modern age.
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SPEAKER_02: And then with this invention of the internet and the digital world and the coming AI,
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SPEAKER_02: that we're in a kind of qualitatively different thing now.
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SPEAKER_02: like that our environment is entirely man-made in some sense in the digital world,
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SPEAKER_02: which has just never been the case before.
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SPEAKER_02: And that's become more significant.
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SPEAKER_02: I wonder, do you agree with that?
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SPEAKER_02: Do you think it's too much or is that something you've been thinking about yourself?
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SPEAKER_00: I absolutely agree with it.
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SPEAKER_00: I think the kind of common criticism that most people would throw back at you
4:00
SPEAKER_00: immediately would be,
4:01
SPEAKER_00: well,
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SPEAKER_00: every generation thinks this way,
4:03
SPEAKER_00: right?
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SPEAKER_00: So like you have to make the case.
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SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the ways where this becomes obvious to me is,
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SPEAKER_00: So some people that engage with ethics of technology, they want to go backwards.
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SPEAKER_00: They want to go back to antiquity.
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SPEAKER_00: They want to go back to the Greeks.
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SPEAKER_00: They want to go back to classical philosophy and see if there's some wisdom there
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SPEAKER_00: that can be gleaned that we have lost and that that will be what can guide us.
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SPEAKER_00: That will be what can define this right relation between humanity and nature and
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SPEAKER_00: technology that can give us the affordances to judge and guide technology.
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SPEAKER_00: Like that's the missing piece.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: And I just think that's
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SPEAKER_00: that's wildly insufficient for the reasons that you just described.
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SPEAKER_00: When Aristotle was laying out and considering his virtue ethics,
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SPEAKER_00: the scope and scale of human agency was contrived often to just interactions
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SPEAKER_00: between subjects,
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SPEAKER_00: between individuals,
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SPEAKER_00: and confined within the city-state.
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SPEAKER_00: These were essentially the scale and scope of responsibility that those ethics were dealing with.
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SPEAKER_00: And now, given the agency that technology has afforded this, which
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SPEAKER_00: If you throw it into this notion of the Anthropocene,
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SPEAKER_00: this notion of obviously climate change and these types of things,
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SPEAKER_00: we have the agency,
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SPEAKER_00: the potency of a geophysical force.
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SPEAKER_00: It's this notion of the global has now become planetary.
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SPEAKER_00: This is the agency we have, whether we want it or not, whether we plan for it or not.
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SPEAKER_00: This is what technology has created.
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SPEAKER_00: And so the scope of the ethical concern is now dramatically higher.
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SPEAKER_00: And it's not just kind of like affecting ethics in terms of how we're interacting
5:38
SPEAKER_00: on an individual to individual basis,
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SPEAKER_00: but how we're acting as a collective in ways that we've never had to confront before.
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SPEAKER_00: So I think it's adding dimensionality to ethics at every scale.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: And of course,
5:51
SPEAKER_00: like to your point around the digital,
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SPEAKER_00: this is just an entirely new mode of being that we have never confronted before.
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SPEAKER_00: It's a technology that's essentially merging the medium with our attention.
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SPEAKER_00: And it's something that in a lot of ways,
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SPEAKER_00: historically,
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SPEAKER_00: is the completion of these projects that go back to at least the enlightenment of
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SPEAKER_00: this desire for pure control and pure autonomy,
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SPEAKER_00: right?
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SPEAKER_00: So I want to be a self-authoring being.
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SPEAKER_00: I want to be fully liberated from anything that is going to get in the way of me
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SPEAKER_00: implementing my desires in their purest form.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: And digital, in many ways, is precisely, precisely that.
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SPEAKER_02: So, yes, I agree.
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SPEAKER_02: It removes the constraints of space and time.
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SPEAKER_02: And I've been really enjoying that digital formation book, actually.
6:39
SPEAKER_02: Anton Barberkay?
6:42
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: A web of our own making.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: It's great.
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SPEAKER_02: Just genius, man.
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SPEAKER_02: Really brilliant.
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SPEAKER_02: Kind of like a modern McLuhan book.
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SPEAKER_02: And yeah, just we've created this digital world almost accidentally.
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SPEAKER_02: And it's become such a,
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SPEAKER_02: I would say since the pandemic,
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SPEAKER_02: really,
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SPEAKER_02: that it's leaped over the physical,
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SPEAKER_02: like that the social,
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SPEAKER_02: the economic,
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SPEAKER_02: the political is being filtered through the algorithms,
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SPEAKER_02: through like,
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SPEAKER_02: not just on social media platforms,
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SPEAKER_02: but I suppose even the structure of just how we've built the architecture of this
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SPEAKER_02: kind of
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SPEAKER_02: barbake describes it as like half video game half uh television kind of thing mixed
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SPEAKER_02: with the car it's kind of like a meta invention um
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SPEAKER_02: but just how that's been done accidentally in some sense.
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SPEAKER_02: And that now there needs to be this second generation of like adding constraints to it.
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SPEAKER_02: Cause you've made the point of like, it was designed to remove all constraints.
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SPEAKER_02: But I think that's where a lot of the problems come in is that you take away the
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SPEAKER_02: constraints and it turns out people,
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SPEAKER_02: things like,
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SPEAKER_02: you know,
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SPEAKER_02: us functioning well,
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SPEAKER_02: or even just our,
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SPEAKER_02: our basic sanity requires some kind of constraints.
7:44
SPEAKER_02: Um,
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SPEAKER_02: but what those constraints are and how they're going to look is kind of,
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SPEAKER_02: I think what the ethics is really grappling with.
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SPEAKER_02: Like, is it going to be a classical version?
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SPEAKER_02: Is it going to be something, you know, does it need to be something new?
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SPEAKER_02: I know Hans Jonas deals with that,
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SPEAKER_02: but I wonder,
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SPEAKER_02: does,
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SPEAKER_02: do you,
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SPEAKER_02: does that sit well with you in terms of like,
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SPEAKER_02: that it's been built in one way accidentally.
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SPEAKER_02: And now there's this kind of discussion about what the constraints should be.
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SPEAKER_02: Um, after the fact or like a re remodeling.
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SPEAKER_00: Right.
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SPEAKER_00: Um, I think that is what, uh,
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SPEAKER_00: makes technology extremely difficult both to analyze and to kind of apply normative values to.
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SPEAKER_00: The sense of it's accidental, right?
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SPEAKER_00: Because the way that technology is adopted into society, A, it's never what was originally planned.
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SPEAKER_00: And you can talk to almost any inventor,
8:34
SPEAKER_00: anyone that kind of initially came up with some technology,
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SPEAKER_00: and then compare that to what it actually ended up with in terms of its full
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SPEAKER_00: adoption into our socioeconomic dimensions.
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SPEAKER_00: And that's never the same.
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SPEAKER_00: And it's always evolving.
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SPEAKER_00: It's always changing.
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SPEAKER_00: Like every new technology that's injected into an environment is going to change
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SPEAKER_00: all the other technologies that are a part of that environment.
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SPEAKER_00: And so it always feels kind of accidental.
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SPEAKER_00: And it's always one of those where it's also,
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SPEAKER_00: every technology was invented for some reason of a very positive aspiration,
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SPEAKER_00: right?
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SPEAKER_00: And it's often sold that way.
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SPEAKER_00: And that's how it's sold to the public to get it.
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SPEAKER_00: But then of course, like,
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SPEAKER_00: Capitalism and greed and fear and all these things kind of play in and those kind of take their toll.
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SPEAKER_00: And again,
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SPEAKER_00: the end result is always something much less than whatever those initial positive
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SPEAKER_00: aspirations were for the technology.
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SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of one part of it.
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SPEAKER_00: And I think the digital side of it as well kind of makes that even more opaque
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SPEAKER_00: because every time we're engaging with digital,
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SPEAKER_00: it never feels momentous.
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SPEAKER_00: It never feels like we're kind of impacting our future.
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SPEAKER_00: It always feels like we're just doing something like in the moment.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: Right.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: It's just like these kind of like this episodic sequence of just like minor moments.
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SPEAKER_00: And we can always choose.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: We can always choose to end if we want.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: Like we're always making that active decision.
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SPEAKER_00: It's always utterly responsive to our desire.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: So it never feels like we're making these decisions.
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SPEAKER_00: So it kind of that's how it feels accidental.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: Right.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: So I think like that that's absolutely true.
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SPEAKER_00: And that kind of makes it difficult to be like, whoa, whoa.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: All right.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: We need to recognize that this isn't just accidental, that all of these kind of like little sequential
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SPEAKER_00: events and momentum is building up to something that now is consequential.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: And so A, we have to understand that.
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SPEAKER_00: And then B, once with that understanding, we have to understand, yes, what are these constraints?
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SPEAKER_00: What do we actually want from this?
10:26
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm very big in following Heidegger a little bit here where like when he
10:32
SPEAKER_00: wrote his book on technology,
10:33
SPEAKER_00: he said,
10:34
SPEAKER_00: okay,
10:35
SPEAKER_00: why are we trying to understand technology so we can have a free relationship to it,
10:40
SPEAKER_00: right?
10:41
SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of people,
10:42
SPEAKER_00: particularly in digital ethics,
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SPEAKER_00: they kind of jump to making normative claims,
10:46
SPEAKER_00: right?
10:46
SPEAKER_00: That this is less real, that it's worse than, that there's some pathology here.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: Let's characterize it as addiction.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: And I think there could be truth to a lot of those things.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: But I think before we jump to making a lot of those normative claims,
10:58
SPEAKER_00: we have to be really careful that first we're understanding it.
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SPEAKER_00: And why do we want to understand it?
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SPEAKER_00: So we can have a free relationship to it.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: And freedom has this kind of interesting dichotomy between constraints.
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SPEAKER_00: If you have no constraint,
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SPEAKER_00: if you have pure choice,
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SPEAKER_00: then freedom,
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SPEAKER_00: this notion of absolute freedom,
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SPEAKER_00: which is kind of a common philosophical subject,
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SPEAKER_00: it's going to be paralyzing.
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SPEAKER_00: It's actually not possible without constraint.
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SPEAKER_00: So I think to both of your points, yes, it does feel accidental.
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SPEAKER_00: That adds to the challenge of both understanding it and add normative conversations around it.
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SPEAKER_00: And yes, we do need to start understanding
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SPEAKER_00: What are the constraints that are going to enable us to have a free relationship to digital?
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SPEAKER_00: First, an understanding so that we can then start to make normative claims.
11:44
SPEAKER_02: Okay, nice.
11:45
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
11:45
SPEAKER_02: And that our understanding, because I guess maybe it might be worth separate.
11:50
SPEAKER_02: Obviously, my focus is very much on digital technology.
11:52
SPEAKER_02: I know you think you're focused on technology as a broader thing than that.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: So would you make a separation between...
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SPEAKER_02: digital technology and other because I guess on some level I mean the invention of
12:04
SPEAKER_02: the car obviously reshapes you know roads it reshapes where people live and I think
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SPEAKER_02: there is a continuum with that in the internet in terms of how it's going to
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SPEAKER_02: reshape you know in terms of constraints it's like when you invent a car you have
12:16
SPEAKER_02: to invent seatbelts you have to invent stop signs you have to invent roundabouts
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SPEAKER_02: you have to invent like you know
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SPEAKER_02: all of these other things that come as a consequence of that.
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SPEAKER_02: And for me,
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SPEAKER_02: I see the internet as being like the invention of the car,
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SPEAKER_02: but we haven't got all the other stuff yet.
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SPEAKER_02: Like we haven't figured out how to do that.
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SPEAKER_02: And one of the obstacles obviously is that it's on a planetary scale.
12:37
SPEAKER_02: So...
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SPEAKER_02: you made the point that we have to understand,
12:40
SPEAKER_02: first of all,
12:40
SPEAKER_02: you know,
12:41
SPEAKER_02: what our relationship is with technology and understand ourselves,
12:44
SPEAKER_02: I suppose,
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SPEAKER_02: how it's shaping us and what we are and how we function,
12:48
SPEAKER_02: which in a planetary level,
12:50
SPEAKER_02: like beyond cultures and in our very relativistic cultures is quite a difficult
12:55
SPEAKER_02: thing to do as well.
12:56
SPEAKER_02: So,
12:58
SPEAKER_02: Sorry,
12:58
SPEAKER_02: that's a laugh,
12:58
SPEAKER_02: but do you think that's a fair thing that we're at that point in the digital like
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SPEAKER_02: the car and that it's going to require some kind of universal ethics pretty much to
13:11
SPEAKER_02: address it because of the type of invention it is?
13:14
SPEAKER_00: Well,
13:14
SPEAKER_00: I think,
13:15
SPEAKER_00: A,
13:15
SPEAKER_00: we're seeing the digital kind of like so much of what the digital is trying to do
13:20
SPEAKER_00: is it's compelling us to reinterpret everything in our non-digital world on digital terms.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to continue to see more and more of the digital encroaching into the non-digital,
13:32
SPEAKER_00: which of course we're seeing with,
13:33
SPEAKER_00: with self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Right.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Um,
13:37
SPEAKER_00: so in a sense,
13:38
SPEAKER_00: it's,
13:39
SPEAKER_00: it's almost like to compare it to cars is,
13:41
SPEAKER_00: is,
13:42
SPEAKER_00: um,
13:43
SPEAKER_00: a less useful analogy because it's becoming cars.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: Right.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I also think it's a little more important, right.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: And it's a little difficult because like cars is such a, the, the, the demands on what constitutes, um,
13:58
SPEAKER_00: the good in a car is quite simple.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: It's pretty easy to kind of like translate,
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SPEAKER_00: like this is what a good interaction with a car is in ways that are going to be
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SPEAKER_00: legible to constraints and legible to norms that are just not in the digital,
14:15
SPEAKER_00: right?
14:16
SPEAKER_00: And this is the other way that the digital,
14:18
SPEAKER_00: it becomes so important to understand it because right now without kind of
14:24
SPEAKER_00: constraints and not even constraints,
14:25
SPEAKER_00: but just norms and understanding,
14:27
SPEAKER_00: the only way that you can have a right relationship with technology now is this
14:31
SPEAKER_00: kind of like this individual virtue,
14:34
SPEAKER_00: right?
14:34
SPEAKER_00: Like it's up to you to understand this so that you can understand the attention
14:38
SPEAKER_00: dynamics so that you can put in whatever,
14:40
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:41
SPEAKER_00: in your life is necessary.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: And ultimately it's like,
14:44
SPEAKER_00: it's asking everyone to be a philosopher,
14:46
SPEAKER_00: a neuroscientist,
14:48
SPEAKER_00: a evolutionary game dynamic,
14:50
SPEAKER_00: theoretic game dynamic expert,
14:51
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:52
SPEAKER_00: all these types of things because it's so open-ended and because there is such
14:56
SPEAKER_00: little friction.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: between what we're using the medium for and our attention and our desire.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: And the compulsion of digital is to remove friction.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: It's remove all these things, right?
15:08
SPEAKER_00: So it's totally open-ended.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: There's no kind of just looking at digital, here's a right way.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: Now, sometimes things become so obvious that we start to see equilibriums form.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: And I think we're seeing that a little bit,
15:19
SPEAKER_00: at least here in the US,
15:20
SPEAKER_00: I think in the UK as well,
15:21
SPEAKER_00: with starting to take seriously the idea of like banning phones in school,
15:26
SPEAKER_00: right?
15:26
SPEAKER_00: that we've seen enough evidence here that asking children to mediate the entirety
15:32
SPEAKER_00: of their social formation through an app,
15:36
SPEAKER_00: through likes,
15:37
SPEAKER_00: and these types of things like,
15:39
SPEAKER_00: this is not healthy,
15:40
SPEAKER_00: not productive,
15:41
SPEAKER_00: all the science that we're seeing,
15:42
SPEAKER_00: this is leading to atomization and loneliness and anxiety and increased suicide.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: And perhaps those are overblown.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you can
15:51
SPEAKER_00: argue with some of that data but i think it also just intuitively makes sense that
15:54
SPEAKER_00: just children kind of figuring out society through a phone just this isn't going to
15:58
SPEAKER_02: work you'd be surprised man i was actually at a conference today uh weapons of mass
16:04
SPEAKER_02: distraction that was part of european research council um i don't know the exact
16:09
SPEAKER_02: name of the project it was in denmark um but they had yeah one of the debates was
16:15
SPEAKER_02: uh
16:16
SPEAKER_02: is social media harming youth mental health?
16:18
SPEAKER_02: And they had the for and against.
16:19
SPEAKER_02: And just like the statistical analysis,
16:22
SPEAKER_02: one group of statistics says it is,
16:24
SPEAKER_02: the other group says entirely no correlation versus causation.
16:29
SPEAKER_02: Such an incredible split.
16:30
SPEAKER_02: And then they had another set of talks about digital technology harming people
16:36
SPEAKER_02: attention spans or attention capacities and on that it was much more conclusive in
16:41
SPEAKER_02: terms of like oh there's these problems and it just seems like it split the
16:46
SPEAKER_02: audience because I think it's hitting the problem with it is it's those
16:50
SPEAKER_02: enlightenment ideas and like the meta crisis and it's hitting a lot of these gaps
16:54
SPEAKER_02: between like mind and body and how we think about the mind and
16:57
SPEAKER_02: and how we think about because mental health is a very fuzzy category in some sense
17:01
SPEAKER_02: like your point about the car was like yeah okay we we understand how a car works
17:05
SPEAKER_02: it's meant to take us from a to b but you know what is the point of a digital
17:09
SPEAKER_02: platform is it meant to take us like a to b in terms of our like personal
17:12
SPEAKER_02: transformation like is it you know what's the point of these kind of more abstract
17:17
SPEAKER_02: things and really within the scientific community there's a big split in terms of
17:21
SPEAKER_02: how like whatever premises you start from really um
17:25
SPEAKER_02: you're going to end up in a very different thinking about what's good digital tech and what isn't.
17:31
SPEAKER_02: I think you're right that it is moving in that direction,
17:33
SPEAKER_02: but I think part of the slowness is this confusion about the mind and about the norms,
17:40
SPEAKER_02: really,
17:40
SPEAKER_02: of human mental functioning.
17:45
SPEAKER_02: Do you agree with that?
17:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in all sorts of ways.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: It gets to the point of this notion of
17:53
SPEAKER_00: wisdom, what would it be to use digital wisely?
17:56
SPEAKER_00: And again,
17:56
SPEAKER_00: if we go back to Aristotle,
17:58
SPEAKER_00: he kind of saw that in two ways,
18:00
SPEAKER_00: either moral habituation,
18:02
SPEAKER_00: where you're just constantly by habit,
18:04
SPEAKER_00: kind of doing the right thing,
18:05
SPEAKER_00: doing the right thing,
18:05
SPEAKER_00: even if you don't realize it's the right thing.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: If you do enough of that, it starts to become second nature to you in essence.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: And the second component would be this notion of moral exemplars, right?
18:15
SPEAKER_00: These kind of like
18:16
SPEAKER_00: Elder figures or other people that have this reputation of always acting wisely and
18:21
SPEAKER_00: being able to look up to them and essentially ask,
18:24
SPEAKER_00: well,
18:24
SPEAKER_00: what would this person do in this situation?
18:26
SPEAKER_00: There's someone that acts wisely.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: And who are the moral exemplars of living a good digital life, right?
18:33
SPEAKER_00: And this is where there's this gap between this generation,
18:36
SPEAKER_00: this digital native generation and the ones that came before.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: because there's just nothing that the previous generation can really offer in terms of,
18:46
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
18:46
SPEAKER_00: this is how you navigate puberty on an app,
18:51
SPEAKER_00: right?
18:51
SPEAKER_00: This is how you navigate your first crush,
18:54
SPEAKER_00: these first feelings,
18:56
SPEAKER_00: all these social dynamics,
18:57
SPEAKER_00: like we just threw them to the wolves,
18:59
SPEAKER_00: right?
18:59
SPEAKER_00: So like, of course, this is going to be a disaster.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't necessarily think that means like digital itself is a disaster.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: right?
19:06
SPEAKER_00: And I think this is where I want to stake the claim is like, no, we have to understand this first, right?
19:11
SPEAKER_00: We have to understand like there are benefits of engaging in a digital society.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: Like the fact that you can greatly expand who you can share interest with and who
19:20
SPEAKER_00: you can be exposed to and your ability to develop empathy,
19:24
SPEAKER_00: right?
19:24
SPEAKER_00: Just by virtue of the ways of being that you are exposed to beyond just your local, local searchers.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: Like we could go on and on, right?
19:31
SPEAKER_00: Of different ways, but the education has to be like
19:35
SPEAKER_00: OK, children, right?
19:36
SPEAKER_00: Like this is what digital can afford, but this is where it can go wrong.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: And it's going to be up to each of you to kind of figure out what this right balance is.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: And ideally, it's here.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: Here are people that are doing this well.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: And here's why they're doing this.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: And here's why we think it's well.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: Right.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: And then here's some of the science to behind why this can like this actually changes your brain.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: like this will change your brain.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: Like this,
19:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:59
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you're like,
20:00
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to hear you speak on that more than me,
20:02
SPEAKER_00: but like this gets into the understanding part of it,
20:06
SPEAKER_00: right?
20:06
SPEAKER_00: In terms of like how we need to start embracing this.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: It can't just be like, oh, this is bad.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: No digital, you know, no phones.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: This is just, we're going to make blanket normative claims.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: Like we have to understand it first.
20:19
SPEAKER_02: I 100% agree.
20:19
SPEAKER_02: That's so well put.
20:21
SPEAKER_02: And the issue of like this just being kind of dropped into a generation,
20:24
SPEAKER_02: I was obviously born a little bit before it.
20:27
SPEAKER_02: So I remember pre-internet time,
20:28
SPEAKER_02: but like,
20:30
SPEAKER_02: I think it's in that Barbecue book,
20:31
SPEAKER_02: he describes that there's never been a bigger generational gap before than
20:35
SPEAKER_02: the digital natives and their parents or their grandparents in terms of living in
20:39
SPEAKER_02: like different worlds like different value systems different norms different
20:43
SPEAKER_02: challenges and no kind of no response really to prepare people for that like no way
20:48
SPEAKER_02: of setting up these kind of even I don't know communities of moral exemplars like I
20:53
SPEAKER_02: don't even know anybody who I mean I study digital technology and my digital
20:57
SPEAKER_02: relationship to digital technology probably isn't great like I definitely use
21:00
SPEAKER_02: like apps more than i would like to be doing like on so you know there's a real uh
21:06
SPEAKER_02: there's a disconnect there i think between uh understanding that things are going
21:11
SPEAKER_02: wrong and then applying it into norms that can be kind of socially distributed i
21:15
SPEAKER_02: know jonathan height obviously is putting a lot of work into that in terms of like
21:18
SPEAKER_02: the phone free childhood um and that kind of stuff but interestingly in that
21:23
SPEAKER_02: conference the weapons of mass distraction one
21:26
SPEAKER_02: One of the biggest arguments that was made really is the moral panic argument,
21:30
SPEAKER_02: which is that the digital world,
21:32
SPEAKER_02: the digital problems is just a moral panic.
21:35
SPEAKER_02: It's the same as when video games came out and people say,
21:37
SPEAKER_02: oh,
21:37
SPEAKER_02: they cause violence or television comes out and you say,
21:40
SPEAKER_02: oh,
21:40
SPEAKER_02: people are going to be stuck to the screen 10 hours a day and they're going to get
21:43
SPEAKER_02: stupid or something like that.
21:45
SPEAKER_02: So they kind of assume that this is on a conversation.
21:49
SPEAKER_02: continuous i suppose uh the same track as other technologies like from the
21:53
SPEAKER_02: newspaper to the radio to the television to this thing but i i think the digital
21:59
SPEAKER_02: technology is a different type of transformation than that i do think your point is
22:04
SPEAKER_02: that we need to adapt you know communities we need to adapt moral exemplars in ways
22:10
SPEAKER_02: that you probably didn't need to for newspapers or television i don't know if you'd
22:14
SPEAKER_00: agree with that but yeah i mean first i would
22:18
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I personally would dismiss the moral panic argument as being almost utterly speared.
22:22
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: Right.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: Like, because like, it's one thing to say that the moral panic is happening.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: It's another thing to say that the moral panic is correlated with some kind of,
22:33
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:33
SPEAKER_00: inverse it's inversely proportionate to the actual,
22:36
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:36
SPEAKER_00: cause I'm like,
22:37
SPEAKER_00: Oh,
22:38
SPEAKER_00: every technology has moral panic.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: Great.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that it's not justified.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: Right.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: And, and some of those, some of that panic might be more or less justified.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: so it really doesn't matter.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: We still have to understand why it may or may not be justified.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: That's the important part, right?
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Like,
22:52
SPEAKER_00: To kind of use panic as a proxy to just then make that judgment to me seems just
22:56
SPEAKER_00: kind of like a waste of time.
22:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
22:58
SPEAKER_02: I was really shocked how many times it came up,
22:59
SPEAKER_02: to be honest,
23:00
SPEAKER_02: because I thought it was a very weak argument really to be making,
23:05
SPEAKER_02: especially considering the mounting evidence and obviously the longitudinal studies
23:10
SPEAKER_02: on mental health crises among teens.
23:13
SPEAKER_02: I always wonder,
23:14
SPEAKER_02: because I suppose this is,
23:16
SPEAKER_02: again,
23:16
SPEAKER_02: what we're talking about with constraints,
23:17
SPEAKER_02: is how can we understand the
23:20
SPEAKER_02: The positive aspects of the platform,
23:21
SPEAKER_02: the negative aspects of the platforms,
23:23
SPEAKER_02: like we need to kind of have this understanding.
23:27
SPEAKER_02: I know you,
23:28
SPEAKER_02: because we've been talking about active inference,
23:30
SPEAKER_02: obviously in terms of dimensionality,
23:33
SPEAKER_02: our models,
23:33
SPEAKER_02: ability to reduce uncertainty.
23:35
SPEAKER_02: It seems like we need some sort of framework like that just to begin parsing out,
23:41
SPEAKER_02: you know,
23:41
SPEAKER_02: the good bits from the bad bits,
23:43
SPEAKER_02: and then you can kind of articulate that.
23:45
SPEAKER_02: uh to people how to act with the platforms but i'm not even sure we're there yet
23:50
SPEAKER_00: really right and again there i would caution against kind of preemptively labeling
23:55
SPEAKER_00: it the good bits or the bad bits right like we just need to understand the bits
23:58
SPEAKER_00: right like before we can even label one good or bad we have to we have to label
24:02
SPEAKER_00: them or we have to we have to understand precisely what's going on and i think like
24:06
SPEAKER_00: for me um that's that's kind of what led me to kind of trying to draw explore this
24:12
SPEAKER_00: at this idea of active inference
24:15
SPEAKER_00: with digital.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: And it's hard to explain without getting into exactly everything that active inference is.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: But I think the best metaphor I can think of is gravity.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: So imagine if you grew up on the moon, you would normalize around an entirely different gravity.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: And this different gravity would affect every physical prediction that you would
24:40
SPEAKER_00: make around movement and weight and speed and inertia.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: And then let's say you had to move back to Earth.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: All those predictions would be totally wrong.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: You would get prediction error like crazy.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: And the gravity on Earth would feel way more oppressive because all these things would be harder.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: They would demand more energy.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: There would be more friction everywhere.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: Your 200-mile golf drive on the moon would be like 200 yards on Earth.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: Like, ah, crap.
25:06
SPEAKER_00: And I think there's potentially an equivalent with digital here,
25:10
SPEAKER_00: where if you're a digital native,
25:12
SPEAKER_00: you're growing up in digital environments,
25:15
SPEAKER_00: you're normalizing around something completely different.
25:19
SPEAKER_00: But instead of being a different physical gravity that changes your predictions of
25:24
SPEAKER_00: how Newtonian physics affects forces and weights and such,
25:27
SPEAKER_00: it's more like a different mental gravity that changes your predictions for how
25:32
SPEAKER_00: society works,
25:32
SPEAKER_00: for how rules of active inference affect uncertainty.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: And in the active inference terms, like this would be like aerodynamics, right?
25:41
SPEAKER_00: Like the quality of uncertainty we would expect to find in certain situations and
25:46
SPEAKER_00: the quantity of that uncertainty that we would consider manageable,
25:52
SPEAKER_00: right?
25:52
SPEAKER_00: And so I think like this manifests in terms of when we're in digital and we're on
25:57
SPEAKER_00: like the moon,
25:58
SPEAKER_00: so to speak,
25:58
SPEAKER_00: like we're kind of used to be able to completely control our environment.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: We're kind of used to completely control our presentation.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: Like right now we're showing video, but I didn't have to show you video.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: Like right now, like you don't know how tall I am.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: You don't know what my reputation is.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: You don't know where I'm from.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm completely controlling what I'm exposing to you.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: I have control over my presentation.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: This environment is very self-authored.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: Now, the fact that it's a dynamic conversation is adding some uncertainty.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: I might say something incredibly stupid.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: I probably already have.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: But we could have just done an email where I could have controlled it even more, right?
26:32
SPEAKER_00: So I can always control my uncertainty in a way that these things are always on my control.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: Now consider some of the behavior with digital natives that kind of gets parodied a
26:46
SPEAKER_00: little bit,
26:46
SPEAKER_00: but like this notion of everyone's afraid to answer the phone,
26:49
SPEAKER_00: right?
26:50
SPEAKER_00: People are even afraid to have food delivered by opening the door.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: They'd rather just leave it at the door, right?
26:58
SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of the sense of like,
27:00
SPEAKER_00: whoa,
27:00
SPEAKER_00: like,
27:00
SPEAKER_00: well,
27:01
SPEAKER_00: if I'm engaging with this person leaving food,
27:03
SPEAKER_00: like,
27:03
SPEAKER_00: now they're seeing me.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't have control of this presentation, of my own self-presentation.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: Like, there could be a lot of surprise here.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not, I haven't developed the muscles.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: Like, this gravity is a lot stronger now.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: Like, there's friction being introduced here.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: And like, this is kind of an interesting dynamic in terms of like,
27:23
SPEAKER_00: almost developing this muscle to embrace degrees of uncertainty that the
27:29
SPEAKER_00: non-digials have normalized in the non-digital world.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: But if you're kind of developing this normalization through this moon-like gravity,
27:36
SPEAKER_00: Like once you hit that earthquake, it's like, whoa.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: And then of course,
27:39
SPEAKER_00: like if you have no compelling reason to live in that non-digital world with all of
27:43
SPEAKER_00: that friction,
27:44
SPEAKER_00: with that strong gravity,
27:45
SPEAKER_00: why would you?
27:46
SPEAKER_00: Because everything over here, well, I can control it myself.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: I have much more certainty.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: I don't keep running into these prediction errors.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: So what possible reason would I have?
27:54
SPEAKER_00: And now I'm going to start reconstructing,
27:57
SPEAKER_00: recasting,
27:58
SPEAKER_00: reauthoring my reality along those digital terms,
28:01
SPEAKER_00: right?
28:01
SPEAKER_00: That's where I feel most real.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: That's where I've got all of my social interactions,
28:05
SPEAKER_00: all my validation,
28:06
SPEAKER_00: all of my networks,
28:07
SPEAKER_00: all of my self-work.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: So I think I kind of got into active inference and trying to explore what are some
28:13
SPEAKER_00: of these kind of foundations that could help us start to understand how this isn't
28:17
SPEAKER_00: just panic and these types of things,
28:21
SPEAKER_00: that there could be something legitimate here and that this at least starts to
28:25
SPEAKER_00: point at some possible explanations.
28:27
SPEAKER_00: that could even be possibly empirically verified in a way that can help us understand it.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: Right.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: And even in all of that,
28:34
SPEAKER_00: what I just described,
28:35
SPEAKER_00: like I wasn't making a normative claim,
28:37
SPEAKER_00: like I'm just trying to understand why some of this behavior might be occurring and
28:42
SPEAKER_00: what would be the explanation.
28:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:43
SPEAKER_02: And it's a brilliant metaphor, to be honest, the like adapting to a different kind of gravity.
28:47
SPEAKER_02: And you see that I was talking about,
28:50
SPEAKER_02: there was one study in college students were struggling to recognize people's
28:53
SPEAKER_02: emotions more and
28:55
SPEAKER_02: that some of them were having to be taught essentially to recognize emotions
28:58
SPEAKER_02: because if you spend so much time like there was in previous generations you would
29:03
SPEAKER_02: have had so much time looking at people growing up because there wasn't an
29:07
SPEAKER_02: alternative like if you have a screen basically that can you know fill like how
29:12
SPEAKER_02: many you know hundreds thousands of social interactions you miss because of
29:17
SPEAKER_02: over screen time then you know what's the opportunity cost there is it you know
29:22
SPEAKER_02: recognizing people's emotions is it you know being able to face social anxiety
29:26
SPEAKER_02: being able to you know face the resistance of day-to-day life and then yeah that
29:31
SPEAKER_02: you become uh unfit i suppose in some sense or over adapted to be very successful
29:36
SPEAKER_02: online maybe but that that doesn't translate um to offline environments necessarily
29:42
SPEAKER_02: And that creates almost like a two worlds kind of thing going on where it's like,
29:47
SPEAKER_02: the more you overfit to the digital,
29:48
SPEAKER_02: the less fit you'll be offline.
29:51
SPEAKER_02: But I think we've made,
29:52
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you'd agree with this,
29:53
SPEAKER_02: but because of the social success and economic rewards that are available online,
29:58
SPEAKER_02: like if you spend all of your time streaming or like,
30:00
SPEAKER_02: you know,
30:01
SPEAKER_02: putting out tweets and stuff,
30:02
SPEAKER_02: you can get real opportunities from that.
30:05
SPEAKER_02: It's almost incentivized more than, you know, I don't know,
30:10
SPEAKER_02: offline methods to social success or status.
30:13
SPEAKER_02: So it's almost like young people are being funneled into that overfitting because
30:18
SPEAKER_02: of how,
30:19
SPEAKER_02: I suppose,
30:20
SPEAKER_02: essential it's become to our society.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, overfitting is a good word.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: And I think where there's real risk here is the opportunities that no longer might
30:29
SPEAKER_00: be in your possibility space because you've overfitted in one world and the
30:34
SPEAKER_00: possibility spaces in the other world are now no longer available to you.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: and i think like if if your kind of spectrum of emotional uh legibility or literacy
30:49
SPEAKER_00: i guess would be a good way to say it right like that's going to prevent you from
30:52
SPEAKER_00: kind of really establishing intimate and vulnerable relationships uh you know in
30:57
SPEAKER_00: the real world um and and that likewise is going to prevent you from
31:02
SPEAKER_00: really getting those transcendent relationships that draw you out,
31:05
SPEAKER_00: that make you more than what you were because you confronted something other that
31:08
SPEAKER_00: pushed back,
31:09
SPEAKER_00: that pushed you beyond,
31:10
SPEAKER_00: that questioned you,
31:11
SPEAKER_00: right?
31:12
SPEAKER_00: And again, it's not like, it's not to say that one is necessarily worse than the other, right?
31:18
SPEAKER_00: It's a broader spectrum of possibility.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: And of course,
31:21
SPEAKER_00: like when you're making yourself vulnerable,
31:22
SPEAKER_00: you're also making yourself open to more pain,
31:24
SPEAKER_00: to more finitude,
31:25
SPEAKER_00: right?
31:26
SPEAKER_00: And so like,
31:29
SPEAKER_00: It's natural that someone wants to avoid the pain that comes with embracing these things.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: But if they're going to do that,
31:35
SPEAKER_00: they need to do it with the full understanding that they're also precluding,
31:39
SPEAKER_00: they're also closing off some of those opportunities of the more transcendent
31:42
SPEAKER_00: aspect of these spectrums.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: That not being able to engage these muscles, you need that harder gravity.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: This type of stuff is only available on the earth gravity.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: You're just not going to be able to do these types of things without it.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: So like,
31:56
SPEAKER_00: yes,
31:56
SPEAKER_00: if you're going to be spending all of a sudden digital,
31:57
SPEAKER_00: like go for it,
31:58
SPEAKER_00: but do it with full recognition of exactly what,
32:02
SPEAKER_00: what's happening here.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: Right.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: And I think to your point of like this two worlds,
32:06
SPEAKER_00: I also like,
32:07
SPEAKER_00: this is where I'm a little hesitant of like,
32:10
SPEAKER_00: you know,
32:10
SPEAKER_00: some of these,
32:11
SPEAKER_00: these trad beams or cozy cottage,
32:15
SPEAKER_00: Walden ponding,
32:16
SPEAKER_00: these kind of like different kind of like notions of,
32:20
SPEAKER_00: yeah.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm just like,
32:22
SPEAKER_00: Of saying like, no, we don't want that other world.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: We're going back to this world because this world is better than that world.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: And I think like,
32:29
SPEAKER_00: especially from an educational perspective,
32:30
SPEAKER_00: like we're not going back to one world,
32:32
SPEAKER_00: right?
32:33
SPEAKER_00: Like it's just like,
32:34
SPEAKER_00: in terms of developing,
32:38
SPEAKER_00: even,
32:38
SPEAKER_00: you know,
32:38
SPEAKER_00: getting back to what we were talking about with ethics,
32:40
SPEAKER_00: like we need to,
32:42
SPEAKER_00: can we develop an ethical plasticity by which we can actually navigate between
32:48
SPEAKER_00: different worlds that have different ethical dynamics,
32:52
SPEAKER_00: right?
32:52
SPEAKER_00: Can we navigate between these social environments that have different social dynamics, right?
32:59
SPEAKER_00: If you think about the communities and relationships that you have in digital
33:03
SPEAKER_00: versus the communities and relationships that you have in non-digital,
33:06
SPEAKER_00: these are qualitatively different communities and relationships that are bound to
33:12
SPEAKER_00: the fact that they are either
33:14
SPEAKER_00: constructed and created in the non-digital world or the digital world, right?
33:18
SPEAKER_00: And do we want to say that, oh, I'm pro-digital world communities and not in an anti-non-digital world?
33:24
SPEAKER_00: Like, no, like we need to be able to develop this capacity to navigate between them.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: And so like,
33:30
SPEAKER_00: we've just taken something that we never really mastered in the non-digital world
33:34
SPEAKER_00: in terms of like,
33:35
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:36
SPEAKER_00: like we have to play that game on hard mode by like now adding this meta skill
33:42
SPEAKER_00: of being able to kind of like understand where you are,
33:45
SPEAKER_00: the environment and the rules that those demand and how that's impacting you and
33:49
SPEAKER_00: your kind of active inference muscles,
33:51
SPEAKER_00: right?
33:53
SPEAKER_00: And be able to understand that and act accordingly.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: And I think like the danger,
33:57
SPEAKER_00: again,
33:58
SPEAKER_00: if we want a free relationship to it,
33:59
SPEAKER_00: like great,
34:00
SPEAKER_00: be the streamer,
34:01
SPEAKER_00: but do that from a perspective of freedom and full understanding of both what you
34:08
SPEAKER_00: think that you're gaining and what you risk losing,
34:10
SPEAKER_00: right?
34:11
SPEAKER_00: And so for me, that's kind of how I'm trying to think about this.
34:15
SPEAKER_02: And yeah,
34:16
SPEAKER_02: I love that what you're saying about that kind of duality that there's because it
34:19
SPEAKER_02: was something when I spoke to John Ravakey about this previously,
34:22
SPEAKER_02: and he made the point that the context of this attention economy that's come about
34:27
SPEAKER_02: in the digital world is in the meaning crisis,
34:30
SPEAKER_02: pretty much.
34:31
SPEAKER_02: He was like a lot of the cultural institutions that organized our attention and our experience have been
34:37
SPEAKER_02: you know,
34:38
SPEAKER_02: come under fire in the West or people are largely,
34:40
SPEAKER_02: you know,
34:41
SPEAKER_02: aren't occupying them as much as they used to be.
34:44
SPEAKER_02: So we have a kind of, you know, a time between worlds of like, what are the norms for people's lives?
34:49
SPEAKER_02: Like, what are the expectations for how people should behave that are very uncertain anyway?
34:54
SPEAKER_02: And then you add the problem of then having to figure out the norms for an entirely
34:59
SPEAKER_02: new world when you already have this kind of existing confusion in the offline world.
35:07
SPEAKER_02: And so you can see that,
35:08
SPEAKER_02: like,
35:08
SPEAKER_02: why,
35:08
SPEAKER_02: if all norms are as good as any other norms,
35:10
SPEAKER_02: if we have this kind of relativist perspective,
35:12
SPEAKER_02: like,
35:13
SPEAKER_02: you know,
35:13
SPEAKER_02: why shouldn't,
35:14
SPEAKER_02: you know,
35:14
SPEAKER_02: digital groups be organized any way that they want to be?
35:18
SPEAKER_02: And then,
35:18
SPEAKER_02: of course,
35:18
SPEAKER_02: you get things like pedophilia on Reddit,
35:21
SPEAKER_02: where you get groups of norms of,
35:23
SPEAKER_02: like,
35:24
SPEAKER_02: there was one guy,
35:24
SPEAKER_02: I think he went on TV to try and defend it because they were sharing photos of
35:27
SPEAKER_02: underage girls and they were giving feedback on them based on the mechanics of Reddit.
35:31
SPEAKER_02: And we're like, you know,
35:33
SPEAKER_02: in that weird subgroup of that became normalized and then you go well you know if
35:38
SPEAKER_02: you people are learning these things in those groups and then coming back to the
35:42
SPEAKER_02: offline world you're getting you're having you know i suppose increasing complexity
35:48
SPEAKER_02: from the two of them i don't know like do we need the norms for both or just you
35:52
SPEAKER_02: know are you going to make the digital norms based on the offline norms does that
35:56
SPEAKER_02: work i don't know
35:58
SPEAKER_02: That's a lot to throw at you.
36:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
36:02
SPEAKER_00: the Reddit example is so good because they're coming to the offline world and like,
36:05
SPEAKER_00: well,
36:05
SPEAKER_00: what's the problem?
36:06
SPEAKER_00: Look at all these likes that I was getting.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: Look at all this kind of social credit that I was getting.
36:09
SPEAKER_02: There was great feedback online about why can't I just do this in normal life?
36:15
SPEAKER_00: Right, like what's the problem?
36:16
SPEAKER_00: What's the problem here?
36:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's even more than that.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: It's yes, these old kind of traditions have
36:26
SPEAKER_00: both lost their validity in terms of kind of like establishing givens that we can
36:32
SPEAKER_00: just take for granted that this is how you do things.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: And we're all operating into the same given.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: So we don't have to operate at this level.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: So part of it is this,
36:39
SPEAKER_00: this continuation of just like living in a pluralistic world where everyone is cosmopolitan.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: It's just harder and harder to be centered into kind of these traditional
36:48
SPEAKER_00: communities that says we don't care about the larger world.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: Like these are the givens that we're describing to.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: and we're going to operate accordingly.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: And if you're going to be inside our membrane,
36:56
SPEAKER_00: we're going to be expecting you to also operate to those and not question them,
37:00
SPEAKER_00: just to accept them as givens,
37:03
SPEAKER_00: right?
37:04
SPEAKER_00: And so it seems very unlikely that we're going back to that world, but also even seems worse than that.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: It seems like the possibility of that world is no longer even possible, right?
37:14
SPEAKER_00: Like the possibility of a world to be kind of temporally and theoretically defined as something
37:23
SPEAKER_00: stable and coherent enough to create a set of norms and cultures that then can
37:29
SPEAKER_00: persist within a larger pluralist community.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: It'll be interesting to see even how possible that is and whether our ethics needs
37:39
SPEAKER_00: to be something that is capable of transcending this notion of a stable world to
37:50
SPEAKER_00: begin with.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: It almost needs to embrace that
37:53
SPEAKER_00: things aren't going to slow down.
37:54
SPEAKER_00: Things are only going to accelerate.
37:56
SPEAKER_00: This gap between the grandparents and the children, that's only going to get worse.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: The idea of moral habituation,
38:04
SPEAKER_00: moral exemplars is no longer a viable model of taking wisdom and trying to
38:12
SPEAKER_00: translate that across generations.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: That's no longer viable as a means of ethical norms, ethical education.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: And so like people that argue that's like the end of,
38:23
SPEAKER_02: you know,
38:23
SPEAKER_02: that that one I'm thinking of,
38:25
SPEAKER_02: Zach Stein's work on education at a time between worlds.
38:27
SPEAKER_02: He's big on the intergenerational knowledge transmission and that when the
38:32
SPEAKER_02: intergenerational knowledge transmission breaks down,
38:34
SPEAKER_02: that that's like,
38:35
SPEAKER_02: you know,
38:35
SPEAKER_02: the source of civilizational collapse pretty much.
38:38
SPEAKER_02: Right.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that it breaks down,
38:41
SPEAKER_00: but I'm saying it can't be based on do this because this is how we did it.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: And here's other people that did it like this that you can look up to.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: It's a novel problem.
38:50
SPEAKER_00: Right.
38:50
SPEAKER_00: It needs to be more abstract than that.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: It almost needs to be this kind of like meta ethics.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: Like this is ultimately what your values are.
38:57
SPEAKER_00: And you need to be able to kind of locate these values in novel environments.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: And you need to find other people that share these values in novel environments.
39:04
SPEAKER_00: And then you need to figure out how you can live in with integrity to those values
39:09
SPEAKER_00: in these novel environments,
39:10
SPEAKER_00: even environments that you've never seen before.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: Right.
39:13
SPEAKER_00: So it's like that would be an example.
39:15
SPEAKER_00: Right.
39:15
SPEAKER_00: And so it's not learning a set of ethics.
39:18
SPEAKER_00: It's learning a skill by which you can learn ethics, right?
39:21
SPEAKER_00: And that's how we get better at this intergenerational.
39:24
SPEAKER_00: It's more a set of practices by which we can live ethically that doesn't need to be
39:29
SPEAKER_00: anchored to moral habituation.
39:32
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't need to depend on having moral exemplars in order to live ethically, right?
39:37
SPEAKER_00: So I agree with Zach's point that if we lost that capacity, then yes, that would be the end.
39:43
SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't mean that that capacity,
39:46
SPEAKER_00: if it looks different than how it traditionally has looked,
39:49
SPEAKER_00: is necessarily lost.
39:51
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
39:52
SPEAKER_02: And I suppose that there's opportunities as well for it in a sense that you have in
39:56
SPEAKER_02: the digital the ability to transmit information faster across more people to
40:02
SPEAKER_02: remember more things.
40:03
SPEAKER_02: I mean, almost like if you could get the principles right quickly.
40:07
SPEAKER_02: participation in the digital would be the education in some sense like because i
40:11
SPEAKER_02: mean i think we outsource a lot of our self-control to the environment really
40:15
SPEAKER_02: everything i've looked at with attentional control is that it's mostly to do with
40:19
SPEAKER_02: context even internally like in active inference like higher levels of the
40:24
SPEAKER_02: generative model provide context to the lower levels that help it you know
40:28
SPEAKER_02: deal with whatever is coming up like to feel like you're in a familiar environment
40:32
SPEAKER_02: is is contextual and online that context doesn't doesn't track really and i think
40:38
SPEAKER_02: for some that's an advantage for some platforms like so on social media platforms
40:44
SPEAKER_02: like their you know their coffee shops their pubs their libraries their talking
40:50
SPEAKER_02: things their coliseums they're all of these things in one whereas
40:54
SPEAKER_02: In offline places, we can quite clearly say, OK, I'm in a coffee shop.
40:57
SPEAKER_02: I know how to behave in a coffee shop.
40:59
SPEAKER_02: OK, I'm in a library.
40:59
SPEAKER_02: I know how to behave in a library.
41:01
SPEAKER_02: We don't really have that same thing for digital spaces yet.
41:04
SPEAKER_02: It's quite like, you know, I mean, we learn certain things about like norms of email.
41:09
SPEAKER_02: Maybe it's like, OK, somebody emailed me.
41:10
SPEAKER_02: I have to reply in a certain amount of time and stuff.
41:12
SPEAKER_02: But I think there needs to be this kind of contextual shaping to understand how to
41:17
SPEAKER_02: control yourself in the environments.
41:20
SPEAKER_02: Does that land with you?
41:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it does.
41:22
SPEAKER_00: Have you seen anyone that, like... Have you seen good examples of this?
41:25
SPEAKER_00: Have you seen...
41:26
SPEAKER_00: And I guess my question would be,
41:29
SPEAKER_00: like,
41:30
SPEAKER_00: whew,
41:30
SPEAKER_00: short of...
41:31
SPEAKER_00: Like,
41:32
SPEAKER_00: what are the motivations that are going to incentivize these kind of movements into
41:37
SPEAKER_00: the digital?
41:37
SPEAKER_02: Not business incentives,
41:38
SPEAKER_02: anyway,
41:39
SPEAKER_02: because that doesn't seem to be aligning at all,
41:42
SPEAKER_02: pretty much,
41:43
SPEAKER_02: in terms of self-regulation.
41:45
SPEAKER_02: I think it would have to be... Well, external regulation, I think you...
41:51
SPEAKER_02: because I don't know if governments can just do a top down, essentially.
41:54
SPEAKER_02: I think if people were given more opportunities,
41:57
SPEAKER_02: like an example of content ranking algorithms,
41:59
SPEAKER_02: like if people could decide what principle their content ranking algorithm was
42:04
SPEAKER_02: going to be curated by.
42:05
SPEAKER_02: It's like, okay, I want mine to be curated by entertainment today, by learning tomorrow.
42:09
SPEAKER_02: I want it to be, I want to see funny stuff.
42:11
SPEAKER_02: I want to see things of people, positive things.
42:13
SPEAKER_02: I want to see negative things.
42:15
SPEAKER_02: If people could do that,
42:17
SPEAKER_02: had a level of control over it,
42:18
SPEAKER_02: there'd be a kind of competition of ideas for what's the best way to organize this algorithm.
42:24
SPEAKER_02: And you might have something emerge from that to be like,
42:26
SPEAKER_02: oh yeah,
42:26
SPEAKER_02: this is the best type of algorithm that we have in terms of people feel good and
42:32
SPEAKER_02: it's improving their predictive grip or something like that.
42:35
SPEAKER_02: So I think you could have, but again, that's not in the interest of the companies.
42:40
SPEAKER_02: They have a very strict model in terms of a content ranking algorithm.
42:44
SPEAKER_02: which is for engagement, which is the capturing of moment to moment action selection.
42:48
SPEAKER_02: So I think there needs to be some intervention to open that up,
42:51
SPEAKER_02: but then to have a kind of marketplace,
42:54
SPEAKER_02: because a lot of the platforms have been built and they haven't really been changed
42:56
SPEAKER_02: by the people that are on them.
42:58
SPEAKER_02: You know,
42:58
SPEAKER_02: they're,
42:59
SPEAKER_02: they're mostly changed by the companies optimizing to make them more addictive or
43:04
SPEAKER_02: to capture more attention,
43:05
SPEAKER_02: really.
43:06
SPEAKER_02: So I think if people had more influence over that,
43:08
SPEAKER_02: we could have some competition for norms that would win out or for even platform structure.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, two things I'll respond to there that you were discussing.
43:18
SPEAKER_00: I think one is this, I wrote an essay called The Constraint Theory of Technology.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: And in it,
43:23
SPEAKER_00: I was kind of like positing,
43:24
SPEAKER_00: well,
43:24
SPEAKER_00: like how would this,
43:24
SPEAKER_00: if we actually took this seriously,
43:25
SPEAKER_00: what would be one of the things that we would see?
43:28
SPEAKER_00: And one of my points was empowering an individual right of constraint.
43:32
SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of like what you were talking about in terms of controlling the algorithm.
43:36
SPEAKER_00: And it could be a principle.
43:38
SPEAKER_00: It could be, wow, that Hmong guy, he seems like he's wise.
43:43
SPEAKER_00: So I want his algorithm.
43:45
SPEAKER_00: I don't have the capacity to do this or the time, but I definitely understand the importance of it.
43:51
SPEAKER_00: So I'm just going to co-opt his and trust.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to put my trust in
43:57
SPEAKER_00: Um,
43:57
SPEAKER_00: or likewise,
43:58
SPEAKER_00: like these are,
43:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
43:59
SPEAKER_00: these are the statistics that these different algorithms and this one leads to this,
44:03
SPEAKER_00: like actually start testing this,
44:05
SPEAKER_00: right?
44:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, like this leads to these outcomes.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then, oh, cool.
44:08
SPEAKER_00: I want, I want that one.
44:09
SPEAKER_00: So I think that is massively under explored,
44:12
SPEAKER_00: but I will push back a little bit on,
44:14
SPEAKER_00: you know,
44:14
SPEAKER_00: not business incentives,
44:16
SPEAKER_00: right?
44:16
SPEAKER_00: Because like,
44:16
SPEAKER_00: do you think businesses want students or do you think businesses want phones to be
44:22
SPEAKER_00: banned from schools?
44:24
SPEAKER_02: No, I don't think so.
44:25
SPEAKER_02: And I think there's a good point there as well in terms of like,
44:29
SPEAKER_02: if the companies were competing on different metrics,
44:32
SPEAKER_02: that's one thing in the literature that comes up.
44:33
SPEAKER_02: Like if you had health and safety metrics or things like that,
44:37
SPEAKER_02: like a wisdom metric or an autonomy metric that companies are like,
44:41
SPEAKER_02: okay,
44:41
SPEAKER_02: well,
44:42
SPEAKER_02: if you participate in our thing,
44:43
SPEAKER_02: you'll get these other gains.
44:46
SPEAKER_02: At the moment, the way it's set up, it's just competition for attention.
44:49
SPEAKER_02: So like TikTok,
44:51
SPEAKER_02: go short form video.
44:52
SPEAKER_02: So Instagram Reels start doing it.
44:53
SPEAKER_02: And then YouTube Shorts have to do it.
44:55
SPEAKER_02: So they're competing on that short term attention capture.
44:58
SPEAKER_02: But if you had metrics for other things, they could compete on those metrics.
45:02
SPEAKER_02: And then you might get the business interests kind of working the other way.
45:07
SPEAKER_02: So that would be one suggestion.
45:09
SPEAKER_00: Right.
45:10
SPEAKER_00: But I don't think the metrics necessarily buy you anything unless the metrics are
45:14
SPEAKER_00: influencing adoption actually, unless they're legible to profit, right?
45:19
SPEAKER_00: Like the only metric that matters is profit.
45:21
SPEAKER_00: And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
45:22
SPEAKER_00: Like profit is quite useful in compressing a whole bunch of social good into a
45:26
SPEAKER_00: single metric by which like historically,
45:29
SPEAKER_00: when the stakes are of a certain threshold,
45:34
SPEAKER_00: it's been able to kind of like translate that into social good.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: Like businesses aren't going to create products that kill people.
45:40
SPEAKER_00: Like they're not going to kill their customers.
45:42
SPEAKER_00: That's self-defeating.
45:43
SPEAKER_00: And you can kind of elaborate,
45:45
SPEAKER_00: extrapolate from there to all sorts of kind of social positives that the profit
45:49
SPEAKER_00: motive can lead to.
45:51
SPEAKER_00: And so my larger point around businesses wanting to be in phones,
45:56
SPEAKER_00: they're essentially killing their customers.
45:58
SPEAKER_00: If you make it so addictive that it becomes obvious that it's addictive,
46:01
SPEAKER_00: and it becomes obvious that those addictions are leading to social maladaptive
46:05
SPEAKER_00: practices in a way that is not just correlative,
46:08
SPEAKER_00: but causative to the platforms themselves,
46:11
SPEAKER_00: Like that is hitting the profit motive, right?
46:14
SPEAKER_00: So it's not necessarily about different metrics.
46:17
SPEAKER_00: It's more about compressing what we want into the price metric so that it is then
46:21
SPEAKER_00: legible to the companies.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: And like,
46:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
46:24
SPEAKER_00: doing a phone ban because it's become obvious that these things are actually,
46:28
SPEAKER_00: you know,
46:29
SPEAKER_00: provably harmful to children.
46:31
SPEAKER_00: Like there's some potential that that's going to hit them.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: And if some other company came out and said like,
46:37
SPEAKER_00: yes,
46:37
SPEAKER_00: our profit movement is incorporating this and we're doing it in this kind of
46:41
SPEAKER_00: provable way.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: Now that opens up disruption, right?
46:44
SPEAKER_00: And it's, you know, it's not necessarily metric driven.
46:47
SPEAKER_00: Like I definitely grant your point that these things,
46:49
SPEAKER_00: like part of the work of those metrics is to make it legible to the profit motive.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: So that like these other kind of like things that are good about capitalism can
46:57
SPEAKER_00: actually be put in service of these other things that are now being made legible to
47:03
SPEAKER_00: that profit motive.
47:05
SPEAKER_02: Yes, I totally agree.
47:06
SPEAKER_02: I think the incentives, if you could get the incentives working properly, it could be improved that way.
47:13
SPEAKER_02: I think part of the problem is that there's zero price markets for these technologies at the moment.
47:18
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
47:19
SPEAKER_02: Jaron Lanier talks about that,
47:20
SPEAKER_02: where he had this kind of mixture of extreme capitalism and extreme socialism in
47:25
SPEAKER_02: Silicon Valley.
47:26
SPEAKER_02: And they want to give everything away for free, but they need to make loads of money.
47:28
SPEAKER_02: So they gave away the platforms for free, but they make money from the advertisers on the back end.
47:33
SPEAKER_02: And
47:34
SPEAKER_02: You know,
47:34
SPEAKER_02: there's some movement towards subscription models,
47:36
SPEAKER_02: but as long as that's the model in some sense,
47:39
SPEAKER_02: their hands are kind of tied because they have to capture more attention to make
47:43
SPEAKER_02: money from the advertisers.
47:44
SPEAKER_02: And then that incentivizes the bad behavior.
47:46
SPEAKER_02: So if you had a different kind of business model, um,
47:50
SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
47:50
SPEAKER_02: I think I think that that could work at the moment,
47:52
SPEAKER_02: the way they're set up and because of network effects,
47:54
SPEAKER_02: the biggest companies have the most people.
47:57
SPEAKER_02: And so people can't transfer between them very easily.
48:00
SPEAKER_02: So there's a kind of stasis where it's like because the platforms themselves aren't that complicated.
48:05
SPEAKER_02: I mean, they don't make money on their software.
48:06
SPEAKER_02: They make money on their popularity, like on everybody being there and being reachable.
48:11
SPEAKER_02: So we're at a weird kind of stasis in terms of that.
48:14
SPEAKER_02: um,
48:14
SPEAKER_02: where they're quite,
48:15
SPEAKER_02: you know,
48:16
SPEAKER_02: very competitive with each other and rigid,
48:18
SPEAKER_02: uh,
48:18
SPEAKER_02: because of the business model.
48:20
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think you could have something better.
48:23
SPEAKER_02: Like I know you could innovate and make a better platform and then market it,
48:27
SPEAKER_02: be like,
48:28
SPEAKER_02: this is better than those ones.
48:29
SPEAKER_02: And you can get more people and kind of establish a new model.
48:32
SPEAKER_02: I would a hundred percent agree with that.
48:35
SPEAKER_02: Um,
48:35
SPEAKER_02: It's just not really happening at the moment.
48:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm similar.
48:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm a little bit reactive against people that kind of make blanket statements that
48:45
SPEAKER_00: capitalism is the root of all evil here.
48:47
SPEAKER_02: I'm a big fan of capitalism.
48:50
SPEAKER_02: I actually think this is not capitalistic because what they're doing is hacking human.
48:55
SPEAKER_02: It's not very free market.
48:57
SPEAKER_02: It's manipulative in a sense.
48:59
SPEAKER_02: Addictive goods don't behave like normal goods, so they're an exception really to the...
49:04
SPEAKER_02: the functioning of the market.
49:06
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
49:06
SPEAKER_00: And I think I'm also a big proponent of common goods in the commons.
49:11
SPEAKER_00: And I think a digital commons and kind of establishing that would be phenomenal.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: You let capitalism kind of compete on metrics by which these attentional dynamics
49:24
SPEAKER_00: are kind of like sequestered,
49:25
SPEAKER_00: quarantined,
49:26
SPEAKER_00: right?
49:26
SPEAKER_00: And so you render into Moloch that,
49:27
SPEAKER_00: which is Moloch,
49:28
SPEAKER_00: but you just don't let Moloch even play with some of these things that we've kind
49:31
SPEAKER_00: of sequestered to the commons and said,
49:32
SPEAKER_00: no,
49:33
SPEAKER_00: you can't touch these.
49:35
SPEAKER_00: So I think there's like a lot of interest.
49:36
SPEAKER_00: Like, I think the place to kind of like redeem capitalism is underexplored.
49:44
SPEAKER_00: And like,
49:44
SPEAKER_00: before we just throw the baby out with the bathwater,
49:47
SPEAKER_00: I think like we could play with that bathwater quite a bit.
49:51
SPEAKER_00: yeah um but there's a lot there's a lot we could play there's a lot we could play
49:54
SPEAKER_02: keep keep the bath water and the baby i don't know yeah because they and you're
49:59
SPEAKER_02: totally right because i think the the full state solution like what china does like
50:02
SPEAKER_02: in terms of controlling like just having uh the informational space completely
50:07
SPEAKER_02: controlled by the government is a terrible idea like it's really not going to be i
50:11
SPEAKER_02: don't think any government with that level of power is going to use it you know
50:15
SPEAKER_02: responsibly really it's too much so yeah this kind of semi needing to keep the
50:20
SPEAKER_02: private but then the companies haven't been you know great but it's almost like if
50:24
SPEAKER_02: you could just get like the proper principles and automate it i know that was the
50:28
SPEAKER_02: idea like a lot of the web 3 stuff and the blockchain of setting it up so it was
50:32
SPEAKER_02: like nobody was in control but it's decentralized but obviously that requires like
50:37
SPEAKER_02: a lot of skill for people to use it um that the vast majority of people just don't
50:41
SPEAKER_02: have to be onboarded to um
50:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think we have to realize we are, what, 16 years into the digital age proper?
50:54
SPEAKER_00: That is nothing.
50:55
SPEAKER_00: The amount of time that that represents for trial and error to work its magic, that is nothing.
51:01
SPEAKER_00: And I think now we're seeing the need for much more trial and error.
51:05
SPEAKER_00: But when you look at historically, when transformative technologies have entered the scene,
51:12
SPEAKER_00: you notice two things.
51:13
SPEAKER_00: One,
51:13
SPEAKER_00: the periods of the most chaos and human violence has always accompanied these
51:19
SPEAKER_00: moments of technological transition,
51:21
SPEAKER_00: whether it's agriculture,
51:23
SPEAKER_00: whether it's the printing press,
51:25
SPEAKER_00: industrialized bureaucracies.
51:28
SPEAKER_00: It's easy to draw these convergences.
51:32
SPEAKER_00: But the other thing is like, it takes time.
51:34
SPEAKER_00: It takes time to figure this out.
51:35
SPEAKER_00: Like humans are exceptionally good at finding the equilibrium,
51:38
SPEAKER_00: but we need to be,
51:40
SPEAKER_00: we need to have the capacity to run these trials and errors,
51:43
SPEAKER_00: right?
51:43
SPEAKER_00: Like this is what we do.
51:45
SPEAKER_00: This is kind of like the magic of even of active inference, right?
51:48
SPEAKER_00: It's like you learn from experience to update your generative models.
51:51
SPEAKER_00: Like, and we need the breathing room to do that.
51:54
SPEAKER_00: And we need to do it in a way is that like,
51:55
SPEAKER_00: we just don't sacrifice an entire generation to like,
51:57
SPEAKER_00: hey,
51:58
SPEAKER_00: you guys figure this out.
51:58
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna let you guys run the experiment.
52:00
SPEAKER_00: Oh crap, that didn't quite work out, but sorry.
52:03
SPEAKER_00: Like now we'll try to find equilibrium.
52:05
SPEAKER_00: Now we'll try to like, you know, course correct.
52:07
SPEAKER_00: So like the more infrastructure that we can build in,
52:10
SPEAKER_00: you know,
52:11
SPEAKER_00: if we think of public infrastructure,
52:12
SPEAKER_00: like public infrastructure for the digital,
52:14
SPEAKER_00: in my opinion,
52:15
SPEAKER_00: should be the things that allow us to run these types of experiments.
52:19
SPEAKER_00: at scale at agencies that previously just weren't really required.
52:23
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they were.
52:24
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we just dumped a bunch of lead into the environment and it lowered the IQ
52:29
SPEAKER_00: of generations or we just dumped a bunch of ozone into the atmosphere.
52:33
SPEAKER_00: But for the most part,
52:34
SPEAKER_00: the scale of these new technologies are going to demand,
52:36
SPEAKER_00: we're not going to plan this.
52:37
SPEAKER_00: We're not going to perfectly plan the social adoption of any of this.
52:41
SPEAKER_00: The only thing that we've ever proven to actually make progress and what we're
52:45
SPEAKER_00: exceptionally good at is trial and error.
52:48
SPEAKER_00: So what is the version of trial and error for digital?
52:51
SPEAKER_00: What is the version for technologies to that scale?
52:53
SPEAKER_00: I think is a massively under explored question.
52:56
SPEAKER_00: And that's where like,
52:57
SPEAKER_00: if you think about public infrastructure,
52:58
SPEAKER_00: like public infrastructure that can enable like these types of trial and errors,
53:02
SPEAKER_00: I think is kind of a whole opportunity space that like would warrant college
53:07
SPEAKER_00: departments everywhere.
53:07
SPEAKER_00: Cause like, that's how important this is gonna be.
53:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, 100%.
53:11
SPEAKER_02: And based on like even learning from what they've done so far in terms of having
53:15
SPEAKER_02: access to like,
53:17
SPEAKER_02: you know,
53:17
SPEAKER_02: Facebook's data,
53:18
SPEAKER_02: Instagram data for researchers,
53:20
SPEAKER_02: because they've,
53:20
SPEAKER_02: I mean,
53:21
SPEAKER_02: their psychographic measurement metastructures,
53:24
SPEAKER_02: as Zach Stein was fond of saying,
53:26
SPEAKER_02: like that they've pretty much mapped out the entire of,
53:29
SPEAKER_02: you know,
53:30
SPEAKER_02: billions of people's personalities like there's so you know they've they've really
53:34
SPEAKER_02: cooked up something there that uh you know could be very useful to understand
53:38
SPEAKER_02: ourselves if it wasn't just being used for you know kind of you know selling ads um
53:43
SPEAKER_02: and so i think i mean i don't know if you ever watched that it reminds me exactly
53:47
SPEAKER_02: he's talking about a planetary scale computation this idea that we've we've made
53:52
SPEAKER_02: this kind of digital world that's planetary that connects all of these things it's
53:56
SPEAKER_02: not rooted in something specific and that it's um
54:00
SPEAKER_02: In that sense,
54:00
SPEAKER_02: it's once you put AI on it and you start giving it almost like an agency to
54:06
SPEAKER_02: interact with us,
54:07
SPEAKER_02: you end up with this kind of unified...
54:10
SPEAKER_02: like super being super kind of,
54:13
SPEAKER_02: um,
54:14
SPEAKER_02: essential,
54:15
SPEAKER_02: I don't know,
54:16
SPEAKER_02: centralized,
54:16
SPEAKER_02: like planet wide centralization of intelligence or some kind of higher thing.
54:21
SPEAKER_02: And he thinks that this is where this is going really,
54:23
SPEAKER_02: that the,
54:24
SPEAKER_02: a lot of this early digital stuff that was accidentally made is a kind of front
54:28
SPEAKER_02: loader for this,
54:29
SPEAKER_02: uh,
54:30
SPEAKER_02: longer term.
54:31
SPEAKER_02: Like this isn't going to be the finished product.
54:32
SPEAKER_02: This is just draft one, but, uh,
54:35
SPEAKER_02: really it's setting the stage for a much more comprehensive kind of AI global,
54:41
SPEAKER_02: you know,
54:41
SPEAKER_02: um,
54:42
SPEAKER_02: good or bad.
54:43
SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying it's good or bad, but in some sense that that's where it's moving towards.
54:47
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
54:47
SPEAKER_02: Do you agree with that?
54:48
SPEAKER_02: Does that, um,
54:52
SPEAKER_00: So the thing that I'm familiar with that kind of has explored this is a guy named Benjamin Bratton.
54:57
SPEAKER_00: Is that who you're referring to?
54:58
SPEAKER_02: It's based on Benjamin Bratton's work.
55:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm a huge fan of his.
55:03
SPEAKER_00: He's,
55:03
SPEAKER_00: in my opinion,
55:04
SPEAKER_00: one of the few kind of like philosophers of technology that are actually doing
55:07
SPEAKER_00: philosophy of technology and kind of thinking in new ways that it's demanding.
55:12
SPEAKER_00: That's not to say that I agree with everything that he's coming out with, but
55:17
SPEAKER_00: I don't know that he is suggesting that there's this kind of unavoidable projection
55:23
SPEAKER_00: in terms of this planetary scale at the level of governance or control.
55:28
SPEAKER_00: I think the way I kind of corresponded to this notion of dimensionality in terms of
55:36
SPEAKER_00: so much of our reality now contains such higher dimensionality than all of the
55:41
SPEAKER_00: frameworks that we currently have to process it,
55:45
SPEAKER_00: to effectively model it.
55:47
SPEAKER_00: to properly integrate it, right?
55:49
SPEAKER_00: And what the digital is doing,
55:50
SPEAKER_00: what all these technologies are doing is it's exposing,
55:53
SPEAKER_00: it's dramatically expanding the dimensionality that we can play with,
55:56
SPEAKER_00: right?
55:57
SPEAKER_00: But we're all surrounded by frameworks,
55:59
SPEAKER_00: by institutions,
56:00
SPEAKER_00: by norms,
56:01
SPEAKER_00: by societies that are leaking dimensionality all over the place.
56:05
SPEAKER_00: They just can't model this effectively, right?
56:07
SPEAKER_00: So if we're thinking about like what you were just describing with Facebook was like,
56:12
SPEAKER_00: we have all of this psychometric data,
56:13
SPEAKER_00: like this vast dimensionality that if we could compress that dimensionality,
56:17
SPEAKER_00: if we could take that and we can make it legible to our models to properly kind of
56:21
SPEAKER_00: like an officially integrate,
56:22
SPEAKER_00: like think of the things that we could do.
56:24
SPEAKER_00: Think if we had institutions that could take all that dimensionality and
56:27
SPEAKER_00: effectively model it,
56:29
SPEAKER_00: that would be phenomenal,
56:30
SPEAKER_00: right?
56:30
SPEAKER_00: And I think like planetary sapience and planetary scale computation is similar to that, right?
56:36
SPEAKER_00: Like when we're talking about like having this planetary agency,
56:41
SPEAKER_00: this capacity to have outsized effects at the effect of the planet to kind of
56:47
SPEAKER_00: properly wield this agency is going to demand being able to make all of this
56:53
SPEAKER_00: dimensionality legible,
56:55
SPEAKER_00: right?
56:55
SPEAKER_00: And we can only do that if we have kind of the surveillance, the sensors, these types of things.
57:00
SPEAKER_00: Like he goes on quite a bit about how this kind of like backlash against
57:03
SPEAKER_00: surveillance is almost gonna put us back because we've kind of like now anchored it
57:09
SPEAKER_00: to this surveillance capitalism, this like surveillance can only be done for bad.
57:13
SPEAKER_00: But like surveillance also is how we get access to dimensionality.
57:17
SPEAKER_00: And it affords us more optionality to then properly compress and integrate that
57:21
SPEAKER_00: dimensionality into ways that we can then properly model our reality.
57:25
SPEAKER_00: What are we doing to the planet?
57:26
SPEAKER_00: What do we need to do to get to the planet back to homeostasis?
57:29
SPEAKER_00: Like, well, we got to model that, right?
57:31
SPEAKER_00: And how did we even figure out that climate change happened, right?
57:34
SPEAKER_00: Because of technology, right?
57:35
SPEAKER_00: Technology both created and surfaced climate change.
57:39
SPEAKER_00: So like, I think that's what he's going with there.
57:41
SPEAKER_00: And I think like you can, and I think Braddock makes the point as well.
57:45
SPEAKER_00: Like, I mean, there's models, like you can separate that from governance, right?
57:50
SPEAKER_00: Like you could say like,
57:51
SPEAKER_00: and I'm sure many people do,
57:53
SPEAKER_00: like you can tell the story that,
57:55
SPEAKER_00: well,
57:55
SPEAKER_00: this is leading to,
57:56
SPEAKER_00: you know,
57:56
SPEAKER_00: one world government and this type of thing.
57:59
SPEAKER_00: But I think that's, again, like you're not doing, like you're not thinking that hard enough.
58:06
SPEAKER_00: Because like, sure, in its worst case scenario, like that could certainly happen.
58:11
SPEAKER_00: But it's not determined.
58:14
SPEAKER_00: There's a million different ways that that can happen.
58:15
SPEAKER_00: There's a million technological models that we can start to play with and explore
58:18
SPEAKER_00: and consider by which that wouldn't happen.
58:22
SPEAKER_00: And like,
58:22
SPEAKER_00: I would argue that we have to do that,
58:24
SPEAKER_00: that those are required and that the work of that has to be done now.
58:28
SPEAKER_00: So as to prevent something like this kind of global planetary,
58:32
SPEAKER_00: you know,
58:32
SPEAKER_00: one world,
58:33
SPEAKER_00: one government system,
58:34
SPEAKER_00: like there's a difference between
58:36
SPEAKER_00: planetary government and planetary governance, right?
58:41
SPEAKER_00: One planetary government,
58:42
SPEAKER_00: you think of this kind of like very top down and authoritarian and,
58:46
SPEAKER_00: you know,
58:46
SPEAKER_00: one world government to rule everyone.
58:48
SPEAKER_00: But planetary governance happens in today's world with all sorts of different mechanisms.
58:52
SPEAKER_00: There's a huge dimensional space of possibilities for planetary governance.
58:57
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of those are opened up by technology, right?
59:00
SPEAKER_00: So this all has to happen together.
59:02
SPEAKER_00: Like we're not at the point right now where we can just like throw technologies and
59:05
SPEAKER_00: then we'll figure out later.
59:06
SPEAKER_00: Like we need to proactively think about what are the infrastructures,
59:09
SPEAKER_00: what are the governance models by which we can start to engage with this planetary governance?
59:13
SPEAKER_00: Because otherwise,
59:14
SPEAKER_00: like the scale of it is such that the air becomes so pronounced and so profound
59:19
SPEAKER_00: that there's not going to be room left for many more trials.
59:22
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
59:23
SPEAKER_02: And yeah,
59:24
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if I said one world government in a sense of,
59:26
SPEAKER_02: because it wouldn't necessarily have to be a government,
59:29
SPEAKER_02: I suppose.
59:29
SPEAKER_02: It's just you've created this kind of distributed system that isn't working on national lines anymore.
59:36
SPEAKER_02: that would be coordinated potentially by some kind of independent uh artificial
59:43
SPEAKER_02: agency or something that's been programmed and you know i mean zach's kind of
59:47
SPEAKER_02: ambivalent about that in terms of like ai tutor kind of thing i mean you could have
59:51
SPEAKER_02: because we talk about the psychographic data and all of that like if you could be
59:55
SPEAKER_02: it's literally personalized education in some sense of being like here's a model of
59:59
SPEAKER_02: your
1:00:00
SPEAKER_02: dimensionality or your modeling here's you know where the end of your model is you
1:00:04
SPEAKER_02: need to go and do these things in order to advance you know to learn really so it
1:00:09
SPEAKER_02: could be a very positive I mean profoundly
1:00:12
SPEAKER_02: He talks about it as turning the whole world into a temple,
1:00:15
SPEAKER_02: like that this was almost like a sacred thing,
1:00:18
SPEAKER_02: really,
1:00:18
SPEAKER_02: if we could treat it properly.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_02: But obviously,
1:00:22
SPEAKER_02: the immense risk of that is that we blow ourselves up or drive ourselves insane in
1:00:27
SPEAKER_02: the process.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_02: So it does seem to be that significant, like on the cost of, you know, heaven and heaven.
1:00:35
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to,
1:00:35
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to understand that world is a temporal metaphor more because like this
1:00:39
SPEAKER_00: very much gets to something of interest to me in terms of,
1:00:44
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:00:44
SPEAKER_00: what,
1:00:44
SPEAKER_00: what is the thing by which technology is in service of.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_00: And,
1:00:51
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:00:51
SPEAKER_00: traditionally that has been some kind of religion,
1:00:53
SPEAKER_00: some kind of philosophy,
1:00:55
SPEAKER_00: like what,
1:00:55
SPEAKER_00: what is the thing that is bigger than technology that operates independently and
1:00:59
SPEAKER_00: autonomously outside of technology?
1:01:01
SPEAKER_00: by which that thing can then say, this technology is good or bad.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_00: And this is how we should make this technology better, right?
1:01:08
SPEAKER_00: And it sounds like when you're kind of like casting this global planetary scale
1:01:14
SPEAKER_00: technology as something that could be perceived or conceptualized as a temple,
1:01:18
SPEAKER_00: like you're starting to put that into a mythical form that is kind of like
1:01:23
SPEAKER_00: suggesting this broader perspective that is something bigger than technology itself.
1:01:30
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's super interesting.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_00: And I'm concerned that to do work at this scale, something like that would be required.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_00: And Jonas gets into this a little bit.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_00: We criticize China because if they have this amount of top-down control, nothing good can come from it.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_00: But the flip side of that argument where I would push back would be only China has
1:01:56
SPEAKER_00: the capacity to say that
1:01:59
SPEAKER_00: We are going to make the claim that our children playing 10 hours of video games a
1:02:05
SPEAKER_00: day is not a good,
1:02:07
SPEAKER_00: right?
1:02:07
SPEAKER_00: This is not the definition of the good.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_00: And we are going to make practical implementations to prevent that from happening, right?
1:02:15
SPEAKER_00: Like that's something that's just inconceivable in a Western democracy.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_00: That's just out, that's beyond the possibility space of what a Western democracy.
1:02:24
SPEAKER_00: So if technology is getting at the global scale where something like that is necessary,
1:02:29
SPEAKER_00: Where at some point, a good has to be declared.
1:02:32
SPEAKER_00: And at some point, practices need to be implemented in service of that good.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting to kind of look at that model,
1:02:39
SPEAKER_00: not again to say China's good or bad,
1:02:40
SPEAKER_00: but just to understand exactly what's happening here and what might be required to
1:02:44
SPEAKER_00: be able to do some of this planetary governance at the scale of the technologies
1:02:49
SPEAKER_00: that we are looking at.
1:02:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:02:51
SPEAKER_02: And that it's kind of two sacred cows really in the West in some sense of like the
1:02:55
SPEAKER_02: individual freedom,
1:02:56
SPEAKER_02: but then also the innovation,
1:02:58
SPEAKER_02: like the innovations creating this environment that we're all going to inhabit.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_02: That's really,
1:03:03
SPEAKER_02: because like the digital world,
1:03:04
SPEAKER_02: it's based on like this,
1:03:05
SPEAKER_02: you know,
1:03:05
SPEAKER_02: liberalism,
1:03:06
SPEAKER_02: freedom,
1:03:06
SPEAKER_02: information for everybody,
1:03:07
SPEAKER_02: but it really constrains our lives as well.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_02: Like it does, you know, you have to be subscribing to certain things to participate in it.
1:03:14
SPEAKER_02: And so as we expand the technology, it's going to,
1:03:18
SPEAKER_02: It hits the philosophical questions anyway, I think.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_02: As the technology becomes our environment, the environment shapes who we are.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_02: We have to specify what the environment is, so we have to specify who we should be.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_02: The ethical questions are unavoidable.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_02: And if we don't address them,
1:03:34
SPEAKER_02: what is already happening is going to continue happening,
1:03:36
SPEAKER_02: which is that the companies just decide by default whatever suits them is going to
1:03:41
SPEAKER_02: be the end goal,
1:03:43
SPEAKER_02: the good.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_02: and i think the chinese model as you know authoritarian as it is they can do that
1:03:50
SPEAKER_02: and and we can't and that's why we've struggled to deal with the problem more than
1:03:54
SPEAKER_00: they have right i mean the question is what is going to have the authority to make
1:03:58
SPEAKER_00: those kind of declarations that you were just describing right because like the
1:04:01
SPEAKER_00: classic criticism of liberalism is that it's kind of agnostic on what the good is
1:04:08
SPEAKER_00: and where it wants to enable is the pursuit of good right like
1:04:12
SPEAKER_00: It's less interested in defining what the good is.
1:04:14
SPEAKER_00: It's more interested in enabling the pursuit of that good for all, right?
1:04:18
SPEAKER_00: And that's obviously led to many, many positives, right?
1:04:23
SPEAKER_00: So no one's going to criticize it on those terms.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_00: But at some point,
1:04:28
SPEAKER_00: when a good has to be declared,
1:04:30
SPEAKER_00: because you can no longer make agnostic decisions on,
1:04:33
SPEAKER_00: say,
1:04:33
SPEAKER_00: whether bioengineering is something that is a good or not,
1:04:39
SPEAKER_00: right?
1:04:39
SPEAKER_00: Geoengineering, AI, all these things, right?
1:04:42
SPEAKER_00: these are going to demand definitions of the good and then,
1:04:45
SPEAKER_00: and then practical implementations to enforce those definitions of the good.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_00: And yeah,
1:04:50
SPEAKER_00: that's,
1:04:50
SPEAKER_00: that's an open question for me is,
1:04:53
SPEAKER_00: is that,
1:04:53
SPEAKER_00: is that a process by which the West can engage with?
1:04:56
SPEAKER_00: And if not, then what?
1:04:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_02: And I mean,
1:05:00
SPEAKER_02: like what a difficult question,
1:05:03
SPEAKER_02: especially the like gene editing and question of like,
1:05:06
SPEAKER_02: you know,
1:05:07
SPEAKER_02: that level of control.
1:05:08
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I, I,
1:05:10
SPEAKER_02: Arguably,
1:05:10
SPEAKER_02: I don't think we should have it,
1:05:11
SPEAKER_02: but if that's the way it's going,
1:05:15
SPEAKER_02: what is the good that you're selecting for in some sense?
1:05:18
SPEAKER_02: And I think with digital technologies,
1:05:20
SPEAKER_02: when we immerse ourselves in them,
1:05:22
SPEAKER_02: we're modifying our perceptions,
1:05:23
SPEAKER_02: we're modifying our priors in active inference language.
1:05:27
SPEAKER_02: There's no way of avoiding that in some sense.
1:05:29
SPEAKER_02: So we can either try and get it right or we can just leave it on autopilot, which doesn't really work.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_02: But again, as you pointed out, it's pretty early doors in terms of
1:05:39
SPEAKER_02: this just starting so the cool thing is it's bringing up these philosophical
1:05:43
SPEAKER_02: questions and making them relevant in like a real pressing way whereas before we
1:05:48
SPEAKER_02: could avoid them and be like no it doesn't you know the good can be whatever it
1:05:51
SPEAKER_02: doesn't you know it's fine but uh now it's like oh yeah this is like an existential
1:05:56
SPEAKER_02: threat really um that we have to do it um and so i'm working at the moment i mean
1:06:01
SPEAKER_02: it might be something interesting i know we're a little bit over time here but
1:06:05
SPEAKER_02: And that's something I've been working on because I think we need a universal ethics.
1:06:10
SPEAKER_02: So I've been looking at the active inference framework account of well-being.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_02: as a eudaimonic ethic, essentially.
1:06:17
SPEAKER_02: So what Plato does in the Republic is he,
1:06:20
SPEAKER_02: Plato was dealing with the problem of moral relativism in ancient Greece from the
1:06:24
SPEAKER_02: Ionian Revolution,
1:06:26
SPEAKER_02: or the Ionian Enlightenment,
1:06:28
SPEAKER_02: and then also the kind of Homeric mythology of the warrior king that he was trying
1:06:33
SPEAKER_02: to get past.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_02: And so he tries to ground,
1:06:37
SPEAKER_02: he grounds his virtue ethics in a structure of the psyche,
1:06:40
SPEAKER_02: the tripartite self.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_02: And I think the generative model in active inference is very similar to that,
1:06:47
SPEAKER_02: in a sense,
1:06:48
SPEAKER_02: that you have this leveled control structure where the higher levels are supposed
1:06:53
SPEAKER_02: to control the lower levels.
1:06:55
SPEAKER_02: And so I'm arguing,
1:06:56
SPEAKER_02: essentially,
1:06:57
SPEAKER_02: we can have a kind of universal virtue ethic based in that that can be...
1:07:04
SPEAKER_02: It gets over the charge of cultural relativism because you're saying it's rooted in
1:07:07
SPEAKER_02: a universal account of human nature,
1:07:09
SPEAKER_02: which the act of inference isn't.
1:07:11
SPEAKER_02: There's culturally relative aspects to it, but it's a universal account pretty much.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_02: So you'd have the kind of minimum viable character, basically, to preserve.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_02: that would then have to be programmed an active inference is computational so that
1:07:25
SPEAKER_02: i think that's a disadvantage in terms of describing the full nature of a person i
1:07:29
SPEAKER_02: don't think we're fully computational um but it's an advantage in terms of it means
1:07:34
SPEAKER_02: it can be programmed because it's you know anything that's going to be programmed
1:07:38
SPEAKER_02: digitally has to be well defined it has to be mathematical it can't be you know
1:07:42
SPEAKER_02: which means we're never going to fully fit into it as well i think there is you
1:07:46
SPEAKER_02: know we're non-computational beings essentially um
1:07:50
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I wonder maybe to get your thoughts on that a little bit.
1:07:54
SPEAKER_02: Do you think it's insanity or is there anything worth pursuing there?
1:07:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think there's absolutely something worth pursuing.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_00: But like with all of these,
1:08:07
SPEAKER_00: all these kind of like trying to look to nature,
1:08:10
SPEAKER_00: look to life,
1:08:10
SPEAKER_00: look to active inferences,
1:08:11
SPEAKER_00: types of things.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_00: It's just obviously something that has to be done so carefully because I think
1:08:16
SPEAKER_00: there's traditionally been...
1:08:21
SPEAKER_00: And Zach gets into this with his other book about, you know, cosmic or out of riches, right?
1:08:24
SPEAKER_00: Where he's saying like this notion of value,
1:08:27
SPEAKER_00: right,
1:08:28
SPEAKER_00: is something that is kind of inherent in the universe itself in the cosmos.
1:08:33
SPEAKER_00: And kind of where we've gotten away from it is assuming that it's eternal, right?
1:08:37
SPEAKER_00: That like whatever it was decreed by the Greeks or by Christ or by any of these
1:08:42
SPEAKER_00: other kind of axiomatic figures,
1:08:43
SPEAKER_00: like that should be frozen in time.
1:08:45
SPEAKER_00: And those values are eternal.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_00: And what he's trying to argue is that, no, the difference here is that they're also evolving.
1:08:51
SPEAKER_00: They're changing just like everything else.
1:08:53
SPEAKER_00: And that as we evolve, value evolves.
1:08:56
SPEAKER_00: And so like, I think there's interesting kind of lenses to kind of like,
1:09:00
SPEAKER_00: uh get beyond this kind of like naive naturalism this kind of like naive natural
1:09:05
SPEAKER_00: law kind of like that have have kind of taken on traditional criticisms but then
1:09:10
SPEAKER_00: haven't really been reconsidered in light of all the new science all the new
1:09:15
SPEAKER_00: reality all the new dimensionality that we currently have to consider those things
1:09:19
SPEAKER_00: um so i think kind of exploring these like even just in my own in exploring them if
1:09:23
SPEAKER_00: nothing else they've been tremendously generative and just kind of like
1:09:28
SPEAKER_00: opening them up the possibility space for me to consider the ethical domain of technology, right?
1:09:33
SPEAKER_00: And whether active inference proves to be something resilient to all the ethical
1:09:38
SPEAKER_00: challenges of humanity,
1:09:39
SPEAKER_00: I think that would be the open question that I would absolutely encourage you to explore.
1:09:44
SPEAKER_00: And I would love to see your work in progress on that.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_00: I think the interesting thing there is this notion of
1:09:52
SPEAKER_00: You know,
1:09:52
SPEAKER_00: prediction and surprise,
1:09:53
SPEAKER_00: because I think like a lot of what where I value the human is,
1:09:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:10:00
SPEAKER_00: our notion,
1:10:01
SPEAKER_00: our capacity to be suboptimal,
1:10:04
SPEAKER_00: our capacity to be like,
1:10:05
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:10:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be irrational because I have the capacity to be irrational.
1:10:08
SPEAKER_00: And if I want to be irrational, I'm going to be irrational.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_00: And like, I'm going to do something completely novel.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to do something that my generative model cannot account for, right?
1:10:18
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm going to defy, yeah, I'm going to defy optimization, right?
1:10:24
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to defy computation.
1:10:26
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to defy the algorithm.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_00: And this is the essence of human freedom, right?
1:10:32
SPEAKER_00: So I actually haven't thought about it.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_00: This is me kind of thinking out loud, but like, it'd be interesting to kind of phrase that dynamic
1:10:39
SPEAKER_00: you know, within active inference in terms of like, I'm now in novel settings, right?
1:10:45
SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean for me in terms of now, like the script no longer applies, right?
1:10:50
SPEAKER_00: So what does that mean kind of from an ethical perspective in terms of how active
1:10:56
SPEAKER_00: inference is kind of like enabling you to navigate those types of spaces?
1:11:02
SPEAKER_02: yeah well that for me i mean i i'm totally in agreement with that i think we live
1:11:06
SPEAKER_02: in complex environments that aren't complicated so we can't just algorithm our way
1:11:10
SPEAKER_02: out of it like there's not just going to be a set of top-down rules and processes
1:11:15
SPEAKER_02: that you can just have that are universally applicable in a kind of natural law
1:11:19
SPEAKER_02: sense like a physics um but then again i also don't think values are entirely
1:11:23
SPEAKER_02: relative i think value is an objective structure that we you know it's like an
1:11:27
SPEAKER_02: affordance it's a
1:11:28
SPEAKER_02: relationship between the subject object that's, you know, transjective properly.
1:11:34
SPEAKER_02: And so the reason for selecting virtue ethics is because it's context dependent and
1:11:39
SPEAKER_02: it's to do with development.
1:11:41
SPEAKER_02: So it's almost like you're putting in a developmental.
1:11:45
SPEAKER_02: So it's like Verveke says that his relevance realization is the same as precision
1:11:50
SPEAKER_02: weighting of prediction error in active inference.
1:11:53
SPEAKER_02: So he has a paper integrating the two of them.
1:11:56
SPEAKER_02: And for him, relevance realization isn't solvable top down.
1:12:00
SPEAKER_02: You can't have a decree of something that's perennially relevant,
1:12:03
SPEAKER_02: but you can get better at realizing relevance.
1:12:06
SPEAKER_02: So you can get good at discerning between things that are relevant and irrelevant in quicker times.
1:12:12
SPEAKER_02: And so I think that will be the kind of norm that you'd have in a sense of this
1:12:16
SPEAKER_02: technology should foster our ability to separate signal from noise rather than
1:12:21
SPEAKER_02: bullshitting us.
1:12:23
SPEAKER_02: Like,
1:12:23
SPEAKER_02: you know,
1:12:24
SPEAKER_02: there's a capacity there that can be grown at a capacity that can be normative
1:12:29
SPEAKER_02: rather than saying that,
1:12:31
SPEAKER_02: you know,
1:12:31
SPEAKER_02: here are all of the laws that have to be followed in all time.
1:12:36
SPEAKER_02: Because I just think that that's not the reality we're in.
1:12:39
SPEAKER_02: So that's why I'm thinking about the act of inference and kind of virtue ethics, because it's...
1:12:45
SPEAKER_02: yeah it's to do with the realization of relevance rather than just a relevance menu
1:12:49
SPEAKER_00: that you just enforce um right uh yeah no i love that and like i think like you
1:12:54
SPEAKER_00: know this also plays into technology because like so much of the difficulty of
1:12:59
SPEAKER_00: relevance realization in a complex environment is combinatorial explosion right and
1:13:03
SPEAKER_00: so like all of the heuristics and kind of gut instincts and all these types of
1:13:07
SPEAKER_00: things that the human brain has developed has been to kind of to optimize
1:13:12
SPEAKER_00: to compress dimensionality into legible forms by which we can make quick decisions
1:13:16
SPEAKER_00: that are energy efficient.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_00: And so the more that technology can do that,
1:13:20
SPEAKER_00: the more that technology can kind of both expose the dimensionality in our complex environments,
1:13:25
SPEAKER_00: but then also compress so that we can integrate it into our models without
1:13:29
SPEAKER_00: pretending like we need some kind of AI to do all this hard work for us.
1:13:33
SPEAKER_00: Then we are going to improve in our capacity
1:13:37
SPEAKER_00: to realize relevance so like i'm i'm totally down with this approach and i think it
1:13:41
SPEAKER_00: ties into a lot of what we've been talking about here awesome well that's you know
1:13:47
SPEAKER_02: i i really appreciate you um i all this brand to be honest it's really uh amazing
1:13:52
SPEAKER_02: to get to share it with somebody because you know this is all pulling together a
1:13:56
SPEAKER_02: lot of stuff here um and yeah it's uh
1:14:00
SPEAKER_02: It's very exciting.
1:14:00
SPEAKER_02: So I hope you have another chat soon.
1:14:03
SPEAKER_02: I think we should keep that discussion.
1:14:04
SPEAKER_00: I'd be happy to,
1:14:05
SPEAKER_00: especially if you,
1:14:06
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to,
1:14:06
SPEAKER_00: like if you have any work on your kind of,
1:14:09
SPEAKER_00: your project here,
1:14:10
SPEAKER_00: like send it my way.
1:14:11
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to read it.
1:14:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_02: It's ongoing at the moment anyway.
1:14:15
SPEAKER_02: I'm still in the early days.
1:14:17
SPEAKER_00: PhD.
1:14:17
SPEAKER_00: So I'll touch base in like seven years.
1:14:20
SPEAKER_00: Is that the difficult timeframe?
1:14:22
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it'll be 2026, probably.
1:14:25
SPEAKER_00: Hopefully we'll have a world government by then.
1:14:29
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the universal AI super god.
1:14:33
SPEAKER_02: And I'll include the link to Tech for Life as well.
1:14:35
SPEAKER_02: I encourage people to check that out.
1:14:37
100%.
1:14:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that'd be great.
1:14:38
SPEAKER_02: Awesome work.
1:14:40
SPEAKER_00: Awesome work.
1:14:40
SPEAKER_00: Had a great time.
1:14:41
SPEAKER_00: Love to do it again.