📚🧐🦾 226 - Stephen Reid on Technological Metamodernism

that kind of applications that I would like to see with AI is using AI-assisted drones for reforestation. If we can have drone kill nets floating over city, or people are speculating, and there's some insane level of drone production happening in Ukraine right now, what would it take to drive the same level of interest and capital investment in drones to actually restore ecosystems and actually make a difference to the climate question? My sense is there's a lot that could be done there if somehow we conjure the social and political will for it. And then you can go further and actually more fun, questions around AI for talking to animals and plants.

Some work on this has already been done, but these are the kinds of technologies that I would love to see accelerated based on this desire to really feel ourselves as part of that broader web of life that humanity to remember its place as a stewards of natural work. Greetings future fossils. I'm Michael Garfield, welcome to the new to the podcast that explores our place in time. By this week, I'm talking with Stephen Reed, who describes himself as a transdisciplinary technologist, facilitator and Dharma student trained in the fields of AI and machine learning, complexity science, physics, transformative coaching, and insight meditation.

Quite a cluster altogether there. We're having this conversation as a kind of pre-game for the course he is teaching very soon on futurecraft on technological metamodernism in which I will be guest lecturing along with Hansi Freenacht, Ellie Hain, Rufus Pollock, and Alexander Biner, exploring the transformative impact of technology on self-culture and society. However, you care to define those four categories. Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I consider all of them mutually overlapping and recontextualizing.

And that's one of the things that I hope sticks with you after listening to this conversation. Because another way of thinking about where we are in time is that a good many people in the early 21st century are confronted by the implications of the non-human turn and the linguistic turn and philosophy, the idea that all knowledge is contextualized, the humility that we have to assume by accepting that our knowledge systems are imperfect and that all the models we make of reality are in some way flawed or biased. I think that this is really important now as we craft a new metaphysics together. Actually, probably several different metaphysics living in some kind of ecological balance.

What is going to come out of the collapse of technocratic globalism is not going to be a single dominant philosophy or a worlding, but an ecology of minds. Whether or not you consider artificial intelligence a mind, it's safe to say that what we're dealing with here now is the population and proliferation of new domains and new information structures and how we proceed in this matters enormously and depends on our ability to run experiments in massive parallel. If you go back and listen to episode 109 when I interviewed Bruce Damer about the origins of life, life didn't start as a single good idea but as a web of richly interconnected fluid identities and the more that lateral information transfer and the domain of culture assumes priority alongside the horizontal time bound information transfer of nature, then it's safe to say that we are also moving into a domain where when I, for instance, talk to Anna Riedel about bounded rationalism and effective altruism from a critical perspective back in episode 166 or just recently in 223 with Tim Morton where we explored how evil arises from ideology and theology and that the promise of the future lies in radical contingents. All of these conversations are alluding to the fact that we have to approach our visions of the future with unknowing that what happens is the designoid outcome of evolutionary processes that draw from an extraordinary planet-scale biospheric aggregation of minds as contested models, provisional hypotheses about what's really going on and therefore as I explore in this conversation with Stephen taking an axiological approach, deciding on values before we try to encode those values in our technologies has to face the reality that everyone has a plan as Muhammad Ali said until you get punched in the face.

Ultimately it all comes back to the question of who are we anyway, why is it that we care about the things that we care about and then not settling on the answers but truly living those questions. I'm excited to live these questions with you in more depth over the next hour and again in the ongoing series of essays and forthcoming interviews for humans on the loop which by the way I am very glad to announce now has token backing from the cosmos institute as well as Ashanna Sea Ventures as well as imaginal seeds bringing me up to about 28% of the funding goal that I have to give a year of full-time work and devotion to this project while somehow raising decent children and caring for my marriage. So yeah if you care about this work now is a really good time to show that you care by helping me identify sponsors for humans on the loop or if you've been on the fence for a while and you have the means this project is listener supported I want to thank Kali Azim, Damian Newman and Max Compton for all recently joining the paid subscriber base. I'm doing all of this work out of faith that the enrichment of a knowledge commons is going to matter more in the long run but dad's got E.

Enjoy this conversation, like, subscribe, review the show and be sure to visit the show notes where I have links to the most recent writing and to the upcoming course where you can register and join us in what will assuredly be a much more extensive and provocative discussion. Thanks. Stephen, welcome on board. How are you?

Thanks so much, really good to be here. Yeah I'm doing really well. I'm coming back for a run. Feeling good and buddy of mine.

Excellent. This conversation really could have happened much sooner but we had a reason suddenly and that reason is that you're teaching a course on metamodernism and technology. I am figured in that Alexander Biner who I was just chatting with yesterday has figured in that. Several other interesting people that you've looped into this.

Assuming no prior knowledge on the part of our audience I would love for you to bring us down from orbit and into context about who you are, where you come from, what animates you in your work and why these two things together. Why metamodernism and technology in conjunction? I've always been able to code. I mean that in a sense that my father worked in IT and I grew up just around computers.

So in a technologist since a very young age I studied physics and complexity science at university and they got very involved in the climate activist movement actually having studied some climate science and being like, it sounds pretty bad. Why is no one doing anything about this? Yes, some years in the kind of activist world. Then got then to, I was like, they look for the first time and got very interested in the notion of interchange or interled change started at the UK, psychedelics society.

That's part of a not-profit work at cooperative. I still work with called symbiotome but since 2020 I've gone back to my technology roots in a way both creating the dandelion platform for events and co-created gatherings and running courses on mostly on technology topics through that platform. So the latest course that I'm offering is indeed technological metamodernism. Somewhere along the way I discovered interval theory and then the work of Hans E.

Frein Act and the whole version of metamodernism is a more recent take on integral theory and been involved in that scene since about 2018. I actually met my partner at the Emerge Conference in Berlin in 2021 who's Swedish and lived in Sweden and that's why I'm currently speaking from Stockholm. I'm beginning this year I moved to Sweden to be with her hit and as I was mentioning to you just before the recording started this morning I was meeting Thomas Bjorkman who's another mover and shaker in this kind of metamodern world who has big plans for a metamodern monastery in the South of Stockholm. That's a little bit about my background at least.

So it seems like it was a natural thing for you to work at the intersection of your philosophical interests and your technological interests. But why this? Why now? You and I have connected on the fact that the technical has leapt out far ahead of the more human dimensions that we've become preoccupied with enhancing our capacity to do things and arguably like Alan Case said this on the homepage for Viewpoints Research Institute says we've got nuclear technologies and Stone Age brains.

Another way of putting it is that Ian McGill-Christ-Frame is something like once you realize that you can do things more and more efficiently the reward for that tends to outcompete the reward to think more deeply. And I was just on a call with an angel investor who said convincing people that they ought to think more carefully about technology is often a losing battle. That the grain of society is into a shorter attention span and a narrower horizon. So is this the pain that you're trying to address here?

Well, I would say convincing tech entrepreneur to think more carefully about technology is often a leading battle. But fortunately society is not made up of a state-to-leo of tech entrepreneurs. Yeah, the rest of us are entitled to an opinion on these matters and can actually exercise somehow. They're not least through legal regulation and state intervention.

And there are other possible avenues of intervention, which maybe will come into that. I think at least is interesting and hopeful. But so some of the key inspirations for this course, the work of Andrew Schrechtenberger, who tells us they're very similar to the one you were just laying out there. And yeah, he's his work of actually logical design and instead a tractor, maybe we'll come on to that.

Vitalik Buterian's D-AC or defensive decentralized accelerationism, which he put out there as a response to E-AC, this effective accelerationism, which as far as I see it, is quite naive, like Gunho, techno-optimism. It was also, Hazy-Brine Act has been a constant influence since I came across the listening societies back in 2018. Time, just putting out this very provocative, cheeky, meta-modern perspective, which I've grown quite familiar with that, haven't explicitly applied to technology. And then as we go further into the course, one of the main influences would be Josh Shri, who I know you've done some work with and this incredible podcast, as you can see, he wants to be a sorcerer in the Asian mythic powers, and I just believe so many people away.

And I think there's a lot there that some of which we'll touch on in the course. But the core of this course really is linking these three thinkers, Hansey, Daniel, and Vitalik in a way that I don't believe, husband number four, I'm not even sure they really know about each other. But I believe axiological design framework is an example of meta-modern technology or technological metamontism. And then as a framework, and then I believe Vitalik's D-AC is the simple and entry-level attempt to apply a more like values-driven approach to technology that will be resulting in some quite interesting and provocative suggestions.

Now, I think there are there's plenty more work to be done on how exactly we can apply a metamontology framework, axiological design framework, and to work out what kinds of technologies actually fall out of that. But I think some of the work is already starting to happen. And I would actually love to get to the point where we might jam on that even us too today to contemplate what other values we'd like to see embedded in our technologies and what kind of technologies would result from those values. Yeah, you know that I have this whole other applied project, humans on the loop, that is concerned with this.

But one of the things that's come up again and again, and just to make sure that we're not playing inside our baseball here, one of the things that comes up again and again is I see there being two different ways to think about who the audience is for something like this. And with that work, I've taken the assumption that we live in such a large, complex, techno-social infrastructure, nested embeddings. But there's this sense I want to interrogate that we are the makers. Steve Jobs has that fantastic letter that he wrote not long before his death about all of the different ways in which he is dependent on other people.

He didn't invent object-oriented programming. He doesn't grow his own food. And so something about this inclines me to disabuse people of where I see an emphasis that you just made on embedding our values in technology, in the process of innovation, in the coding of society, and paying more attention to the ways in which we are already constrained in the ways that even somebody who invents something really amazing and world-shifting, that thing still drops into a really diverse ecosystem of millions and millions of other things that over which they have no control. And so part of what I I'm curious about with you is to look at the figure eight here between when BioCoMFA, I want to look at this idea of design and suggest that the agency of our technologies play a much larger role in the work that we think we are doing to make choices.

And so there's a sense in which, yeah, we have some say in things, but often that say is in the ways that we are using the tools that have already been made for us. Like that whole thing again, like Apple computers, they give you an iPad and they're like, you can do anything with this. It's not really, as Corey Dr. points out, Apple is really fond of digital rights management and locking various potential functions of this device to make it user-friendly.

All of that creative activity is happening within a very narrow channel of what is actually possible. I feel like, yeah, just to hear you riff on the relationship between these two things. One is figuring out how to embed our values in technology is important, but also learning to exercise our values within what is in fact a very limited range of freedom given all of the interactions of all of the other things over which we have no control. Yeah, there's certainly a reciprocal relationship between technology and humanity or technology and values.

My favorite example, which I had from Daniel Schmach the Beggron this is because it would be to go all the way back to the plow. And his suggestion is that like prior to the plow, most human societies had an animistic beliefs and had a relatively respectful view towards nature as a kind of sacred being, even if they were going hunting and killing an animal, there was maybe some moment of recognition and connection of the life you're about to take. And the plow came along to the first day of cultural technologies. And if you're having to whip an ox all day in the hot sun to get it to pull up soil so that you can put your seeds in, it's very difficult, he suggests, to maintain a worldview of like the sacredness non-human life and this sense of respect towards animals in the context of clearly causing that animal suffering.

So that was the technology that then dissolved this animist worldview and actually shifted in a profound way, the relationship between humans and animals and working animals at least. So no doubt there is a reciprocal relationship. And then that of course then that and there's an evolutionary perspective on that as well because changing values then affects the next technology that we might contemplate on the next set of values we might consider in our future technologies. And the other thing that came to mind is this idea that technologies actually, we're asking that word to do a lot of work.

So the conciliants project that Daniel's played talk about actually a civilizational text that we talk about like tools, human-scale artifacts, technologies, you can think of things like sets of tools that are complicated enough to require engineering. So Walter Wills, Steve Menge, and Leibold, refrigerator, ecologies of technologies, infrastructures, which was actually multiple different ecologies of technologies and then whole technological epochs. Yeah, there's both that kind of like reciprocal take and also the sense of like technologies existing in a whole ecology, which we have to be mindful of and respectful of in the context of contemplating how we might wish to embed some A value or some other values in a particular technology. So when you say for those who are not steeped in Schmachtenberger's work, when you're talking about the axiological component of that, give people a little more framing here.

Yeah, sure. To talk about axiological design is worth first going through three, maybe more familiar forms of design and we can relate those two different developmental stages and the kind of metamodal framework for folks who might be familiar with that. And then you talked about naively optimistic design. So this is that your technology to take that that positive values are inherently encoded in technology and just simply by making more technology, the world gets better because technology is inherently good.

So this was came about around the enlightenment, like Renaissance period, I would suggest and carried on through the industrial revolution. It's a kind of modern, it rose in the modern worldview and they like a language, a modern theory. I would actually say it's now experiencing a kind of a reversion to it anyway with the E and similar philosophies, because people could, which I was just people could feel something isn't quite right. Something isn't quite right in with our relationship with technology.

And it's unsurprising that some people's reaction, let's just go back to the last good thing, the last thing that worked, which is just like just believing that technology is just good and it's just doing more of it. And as fast as possible. However, there was another, there was a reaction either at that time to the kind of naively optimistic perspective, which was Ludditism, a movement of people that's, hey, technology is taking jobs and all terms of like degrading quality of our life and making us work like long and unhappy hours, actually in way what the suggestion was that in the negative values of some kind, we're embedded into technology, technology is inherently bad and that we are lives get better redesigning technology out of our lives as much as possible. Now that would be, I could call that maybe a kind of like early postmodern like reaction to technology and then a kind of late postmodern reaction, which is, I would suggest where most people at this point is, is nihilistic design in Daniel's language.

And nihilistic design says it comes up with this very common line like that technology is not good or but technologies are neutral. It's all about how we use them or the term is whether positive and negative things come from it or perhaps it's it technologies are only as good or bad as the people who use them. And that it's that values technology doesn't include values of any kind, like the fields of technology and value are like strictly separate. So it's meaningless to talk about value and technology.

And this is backed up sometimes at least by the kind of postmodern flavor take of just saying what and what even is value on all values just socially constructed anyway. So basically we can one way or another, we can just forget this question and just leave it to the people that are using this technologies to work out what to do with it. Yeah, then you're suggesting that all of those are deficient in various ways. And as a response, it provides a theological design to actually, is the study of value.

And the suggestion is that no, absolutely technology can have values embedded in it can certainly to change our values in a not necessarily obvious but like relatively foreseeable way. If we take the time to sit and think about it, if you've been taking the time to sit and think about how might a plow change our attitudes towards animals, you probably could have been, you probably could have figured that out. And similarly, if we'd spent more time thinking about how might a social media change our relationship to offline connection and body image and you name it, we probably could have figured that out too. But we didn't even take the time to do it because really doing away, he's just calling for just take the time and see all of you says let's seriously sit down and think about what kind of values might be a bit of this technology, how the technology might go about changing our values.

And yet these fields are not separate. They are conjoined to imagine that they are separate image or approach or even the kind of form of it can be a kind of get out clause for folks that might actually realize have a good sense of how their technology might change society. And it's very convenient to say, oh, it's all about who uses them. Yeah, the essence of actually a logical design is really taking time to dig into this question or touching on technology.

So with all debt paid to that kind of a project, something that Daniel himself says is that if in a game theoretical condition, he's fond of operating in, if you show restraint, if you stop to think, if you try to code with reflection into your operation as an organization, then all other things being equal, you lose ground, you are out competed to the sociopaths, like you lose to the organizations or the individuals that do not show this restraint. Again, while that may be true in one layer with no top down regulation, really what he's saying is this is why market dynamics don't rule everything or why markets eventually evolve states or cultural norms that like this tripartite structure in which you have the market, the state and the civil society is is a sort of existential complication of that kind of problem. It's what allows us to think past it. Well, but nonetheless, he says to the degree that things are being ruled by markets, we can't take the time to think in this way.

And something that comes up again and again for me in talking with people about the prospect of a wisdom economy, of a devising economic systems that aggregate and average their rewards calculus over multiple different timescales that allow us to leave room for play and scholarly activity and so on is you have to be able to show that it does actually confer benefit in the long run. So that's one thing that I'd like to hear you reflect on. The other thing is, and maybe a cynical about this coming out of complex systems discipline, the notion that we can place responsibility on an inventor to spend polynomial time, any amount of time on thinking through the consequences of their invention is absurd because there's a like what we you go to be up there in Sweden with Nora Bateson, Nora Dave Snowden, these people are very fond of reminding us that human complexity is something that cannot ever be totally modeled. It can't be perfectly predicted and that by creating systems that do better and better jobs of predicting that kind of human behavior, those are new agents in a complex economy that then throw that calculus out like that you end up in Bryan Arthur's evolutionary algorithm simulations where everything is just getting smarter and smarter, trying to model and predict everybody else's activity but then those smarter the other contributors to a system, the greater burden that places on your own smarts and that there's like a ratchet here that doesn't stop until maybe it runs up against the natural limits of that system and something has to give and there's like a collapse of some kind that right sizes that get that arms race to a level where it can actually subsist on the available resources.

So like those are like yeah like the two kind of challenges there reflected in one another is as noble as it is to encourage people to take an axiological approach to technology. We have on the one side the fact that your competitors won't unless they're being forced to by a legally enforced charter or a military or whatever and then on the other hand you have the fact that even given the freedom to spend an effectively unlimited amount of time thinking about this stuff really maybe the best we can do is effect better tools for community oversight and release these things into the wild and then police ourselves and learn as we go that this is not something that even somebody with a galaxy brain like Daniel can sit there and be like ah yes the plow last thing I'll say about it is that my buddy JF Martell on weird studies he made this point about the car right but it was easy to see that the internal combustion engine was getting us from place to place faster it was not at all obvious at first that in a kind of Stafford beer a system is what it does functional sense over a longer time scale that you could argue that what an internal combustion engine is is an engine for injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and so there are horizons that are enforced on us by on our ability to compute these things in multiple different ways and that's my challenge to axiological design I'd love to hear speak to yeah sure I don't think anyone who's endorsing axiological design is would be denying the fact that and this is still really complicated and that in this is as many emergent phenomena that are happening here wicked as well as thinking carefully as doing our best think carefully about how this might change society absolutely we should also have community oversight with this more Snowden s approach to just sensing into the changes like actually talking to people on the ground about this is how we thought it was going to change things is it's actually changing things in the way that we thought and saw it but I think the claim is like to say that oh it's really complicated so let's not even try is an absurd denial of responsibility and like the human capacity for intelligence and imagination and it's it's a far too easy get out of jail card or many individuals corporations perhaps that we'd very much like to just not have to think about this but it's a both and approach I'd say for that but my sense is that quite often that you can actually argue we haven't even really tried seriously over the past few decades to do this so in a way we don't really know how well it's going to work but the externalities from our current technology or technological epoch are such that I would suggest it's clear we need to try something different and this has the right smell to me in a way now the other piece we mentioned and doesn't this require someone with a legal charter or a military or yes it is but yeah so it's a part of what I see in that axiological design or falls out of axiological design is a cool tool to as a kind of like a re-empowerment of the state's role in regulating technologies and again that's not easy and then that's and like the state is going to get things wrong and it's going to be difficult to stay to keep up but none of those are reasons why like we shouldn't shouldn't do it or shouldn't be asking the state to play some role in in checking the power of for example powerful AI companies that are driven by this malochian dynamic but I also think that this is where it actually gets most interesting to me that the other ways of binding these power games so for example guilds and societies and so one could one imagine something like the the Elisynian mysteries which was as far as I understand outside of the Greek like proto state has existed but still seemed to have such an important role in society that was clearly shepherding some kind of powerful technology in that case it was sometimes like right to technology rather than a silicon one but through a seemingly quite complex set of rituals and behaviors there were that technology was like kept in a to a certain community wasn't didn't spill outside of that community to do potential further harm I'm very curious about the role of the of guilds or or things like them and I actually wanted to ask you about because this is I imagine this is something that you might have covered in a way in the the AI and anybody ethics course given that you've been jamming with Josh a little bit on that so do you have any support from that piece? Okay so I've been thinking a lot about the actual nature of the digital and the way that it affords scalability I just wrote this piece for Eon about carcinization and thinking about that everything becomes a crab meme as it's like a joke on the one hand but on the other hand it's speaking to something that is very deeply true about evolution which is that evolution is a metabolic process and that it seeks efficiency it seeks lower energy expenditure wherever possible it seeks risk mitigation in some sense that you can say that the crab is kind of an emblem or symbol of our relationship to technology in that it has a shell and it has periscope eyes that it uses to sense through that shell and that has the claws which is like the extension of its leverage but one of the reasons that I feel like the carcinization meme succeeded during covid was that cancer the crab etymologically has the same route as cancel which is to cross out that the crab claw and to cancel by scratching something into a surface is also connected etymologically to the chart to Descartes and Cartesian logic the grid like Descartes being someone who inherited a quartered plot of land and then went on to the entire surface of the planet with his system which according to the angelic vision he supposedly received was an effort to unify which is to homogenizer to make fungible the reason that works to grant leverage over the natural world and to unify mathematical systems and so on is precisely because it removes things from their context Descartes was a big fan of vivisection and again to that McGillichrist kind of way of seeing the left hemisphere as that which regards every other agent in the world as a non-player character as a soulless automaton and there's I guess you can talk about again this sort of predatory or exploitative mode in which those kinds of rights of passage are jettisoned because there's again this like daniel's concern is that they're standing in the way of if you look at the last hundred years of the evolution of lifestyle consumerism and the ongoing erosion of eldership in society and this tendency in the modern west to fixate on youth and productivity and I think the reason that we see these kinds of systems emerge in certain societies has something to do with those societies having been around for long enough to realize that to take things out of context only gets you so far and so I want to turn this back to you because this is where the metamodering piece comes back in right this is where not just taking a postmodern turn and understanding the linguistic basis for fact or understanding the situatedness of knowledge matters but also understanding the shared context upon which we can start to reconstruct systems that allow us to grant people more agency based on accumulated life experience or that recognize through like web three style systems like quadratic voting that this is like a fundamentally scientific enterprise in that we can start to decompose like the democratic like the tyranny of the majority in democracy is because it regards one vote as equal to another vote and rather than saying maybe some people deserve more votes which is what we get with capitalism and the uneven distribution of capital gain we can say maybe a more heterogeneous population of votes that evinces that this position is anchored in a more objective basis because like science the so-called third-person position transcends an intersubjective agreement between two people by pulling in someone else with different cultural biases so like this question of what rights of passage might look like in the age of ai I think attached all of this stuff but I'm actually curious to know how you're actually making sense of all of this and why specifically you personally have turned to metamodernism as an instrument through which to deepen our sense of how to make and use technologies I hope that's not like a dodge. I think there's a few things there firstly on the rights of passage and kind of initiatory cultures piece I think it's to say that oh wouldn't it be great if we like we could bind the behavior of say pathway i companies through having some kind of guilds that send members through some kind of important ritual or right passage such that people are so motivated and there's nourishing and important and meaningful to the people that part of them that they're not going to do the bad stuff because they're so motivated to stay in the guild so I'm not saying that so we're good either.

The question is like what can we start to look at so yes we should start to look at state regulation more carefully and how we can like up skill states and be able to regulate technology and also could we look at things like guilds with rights of passage as an alternative we don't really know which one is going to work out best maybe it'll be different in different countries with different technologies however I do think you can make a very strong argument that like how the hell are we expecting rights of passage to make any kind of difference in tech world if even our teenagers right to passage right to passage have just been like lost to such a great extent throughout the western world at least possibly probably the first step is actually just ensuring that our kids get good rights of passage as they make their way into adulthood and just the general population are they going to buy major migrants of transition like Bill Blockin's work on Solgroff and the journey of soul initiation is really fantastic on this that's yeah that isn't like a simple one there's that there's actually a whole very beautiful conversation about rights of passage and society more generally I'd suggest that I think there is something that ultimately now the kind of meta-modern flavor to this is to say if something already has like a meta-modern flavor to it is to say okay it's naive techno-optimism on one hand we've got like the kind of Luddite or the Neelistic post-modern perspectives on other what is the position that transcends and includes both of those things this is actually for me axiological design has this metamodal flavor to it which is like technology isn't always good but it isn't always bad either yes it could have positive benefits of society if we really think about it hard but then the kind of more interesting metamodal twist I would say is so what is the application of about the axiological design most of what so if we're so what kinds of technology or first of what kinds of values are worth embedding into technology and then all kinds of technologies would result from those kind of values because it isn't axiological design and kind of metamodal technology is not is technological position is not saying and there's not build anything let's simply let's strictly constrain the development with the power of the state and he's able to wear it's saying absolutely yes there's build stuff but there's been stuff in really cool way this is what I mentioned the talent material is a co-founder of Ethereum and his DAC philosophy and this I would suggest is a kind of application of axiological design I'm not sure he would see it in that way the D stands for defensive or decentralized or differential accelerationism and in the post he's certainly more technodismist than me the lot more than Daniel there's no doubt about that like he really makes a strong technology having proved people's lives and all kinds of ways but then says oh climate change like that seems to be a pretty huge failure of the market and the kind of technodismist perspective that doesn't seem like it's getting sold anytime seen through the current paradigm and also he's clearly concerned about AI risk so just the great thing actually says to me the moral of the story is often this often it really is the case that version N about civilizations technology causes a problem and version n plus one fixes it however this does not happen automatically and requires intentional human effort it is intentional action coordinated through public discourse and culture shaping the perspective of government scientists and philanthropists and not an inexorable techno capital machine that solves these problems so that you can see there actually that the way in which he's saying like he's saying intentional action coordinated through public discourse has this kind of axiological flavor to it yes let's make take but let's really talk about it and be careful with it but and actually then what he comes up with or is a set of technologies that are really but rooted in that the value of sovereignty I would say is probably the best way to describe it and he divides these into the world of bits in the world of atoms in the world of atoms he talks about a micro defense and macro defense and a lot of bits he talks about the defense and info defense I can get more into any of those if you're interested but then this is the point at which yeah we're saying like yeah let's there are actually technologies that are worth building that are in service to values that we really do cherish on reflection and we can be relatively confident that these technologies are not going to introduce more damaging externalities if anything we'd like to have a hunch that they are synergistic satisfies in Daniel's language that they are more likely than not for positive externalities positive not convex that even if we can't be sure until we see them in the world so let's look at a case study then did you brought up cybersecurity okay so I'll brief you guys through all four of the ones I mentioned actually because I think it's in the world of atoms when he's talking about micro defense the main technologies abacake board is decentralized vaccine production and ways of cleaning the air he says that the vaccine debate was so toxic essentially because of the amount of power the state had in it the state was the only act capable of coordinating the production of the vaccines and then could further mandate that people took them but what they imagine the world were instead like anyone everyone can actually just have print a vaccine in their own home including two like novel biological threats really changed the conversation there and yeah is clearly offers this defensive aspect against a threat which many people very concerned with including in the age of eight up in the potential eyes to you know be able to produce novel pathogens in the hands of people that might seek to do harm the macro defense mainly pointing to resilient physical infrastructure these are anti-centralized physical infrastructure such as decentralized energy generation decentralized ways of growing food again the kind of part of the context of this is is COVID and why was COVID so bad because this is a blood chain and like everything we rely on is depends on supply chains however if everyone could still get on internet and produce or an engine and get like in heaven and could beat themselves just in their own communities there wouldn't have nearly been such a problem there in the world of bits so cyber defense I guess that this is when you ask for so the main kind of main issue in terms of cyber defense is the concentration of technological power in the hands of very few companies that then even if they say they're not going to what they say they don't want to or elitiv govern us into like all the handover your messages or handover your emails and so on the first request seems like so what kind of technologies can actually just mean that is impossible even in principle is things like blockchains be secured decentralized data storage systems that's even in principle is not possible for the state for example it could be a kind of some kind of other malicious actor to to obtain private data from individuals the final category is and the world of bits this info defense here the main issue that he's thinking of is essentially truth-funding and misinformation and so an example that he excites approving his community notes which might possibly you know a little bit about how it works and really interesting algorithm actually that I understand you two were about to roll out something similar as well that essentially if you're seeing a community note on a tweet you're seeing a not something that's been like voted up by the most people you're seeing something that's been that has the most consensus amongst people from or between people from different political perspectives and so yeah that's some of the details about the kind of kind of defensive technologies it's all in that in different ways in defending its different kinds of contemporary threats that that metallic would love to see more work on I'd like to speak to irony and post-irony whether I would like you to speak to iron it was like like you have email on this the sort of less public facing half of Hansi free knocked in this conversation I've had conversation with Daniel Garret one of the things that keeps coming up in his work and came up in our conversation is this humility and I guess you mentioned this earlier when we were talking about the we can't expect to do this perfectly but we must still try when I was on parallax with Daniel and Tomamart we talked about how this shows up in the kind of ethos of Star Trek right that it's not that participation in Starfleet is a commitment to a set of values even though you are aware that those values are chosen and even though you are aware that those values are enacted imperfectly but the prime directive is one of the things that characterizes the prime directive is that it's constantly violated because the Kirk or Picard or whomever have to make decisions on the ground that they don't have the luxury of time to check against with Starfleet control in San Francisco and I'm very curious how you personally make sense of ways that irony and its cousin compromise fit into the way that metamodern approach to technology operates at the level of the individual and feel free to give concrete stories if you want about about surprising yourself or about finding yourself in a position of unintended consequences or this I feel like we can't do this work without a sense of humor or a bit of self deprecation and that's something that's missing in so much of the effective altruist or effective accelerationist dialogue is that these are areas it's also true among the centralists these are areas where ideology rules and that doesn't seem like it's going to get us where we're hoping to go say a couple of things to come to mind firstly at the grandest level I think there is a huge irony in realizing that actually externalities like of modern technology for the generations assumed to be so minor as to be significant we are now in realizing many ways we're actually like the main play all along and actually the main thing we were producing through our technologies was actually like intense ecological and psycho-social externalities and we didn't quite see that because there's a dandelé but like at some point the clock was always ticking at some point that I think the alarm's going to go off and we are going to have to reckon with the fact that all of the convenience that we've enjoyed through modern technology is going to be seem like an absolute joke relative to the inconvenience that we might be facing down the line unless we start thinking about technology in a very new way so I think there's a certain there as a personal anecdote like I guess I had I actually talked about the act I guess I was on like PSYAC like psychedelic accelerationism for a time like from founding the UK's psychedelic society in 2014 and for those first years at least like really really believing like this is it's like delix that are going to like solve all of our problems you just give people this magic tab magic pill they have this overwhelming sense of unity and interconnectedness these mystical type experiences they awaken to the unity of all things and that is going to fundamentally alter their worldview in service of freedom and compassion and it's turned out to be a lot more complicated than that and to be honest like I would have known I should have known if I had more elders around me at that time but I thought how I was accessing psychedelics in at that time was using cryptocurrency through the dark net like without any kind of elder or complex or like indigenous stewardship to guide my use and thinking around them and I've got my ask kicks plenty of times in that context and then was nowadays like extremely grateful to have found elders and indigenous communities that I've worked with that that ironically have helped me to see that let me see the opinion that the best thing that the best attitude towards brooding a word about psychedelics is to say almost nothing at all and just allow them to just do their work and find the right people the right times in the right ways and are more or less any like shouting about the kind of transformation and certainly about how much profit they might be able to like make this new wave of psychedelic corporations years like ends in tears so that's a spin of the big tenor out from being very kind of public advocate and I was the advocate for psychedelics 10 years ago and then to add a touch of humor into things so how about e-act the act I want to advocate or coin a new meme on that I thought I thought of just earlier today actually which is tree which is the kind of acceleration or the cut let's start with a level of values all right and values an interesting thing because you're entitled to yours and I'm entitled to mine like that would we can disagree about these things and so I think the question about it is a deeply personal one there's a fantastic organizational the meaning alignment Institute led by Joe Odenman and Ellie Hain and others that doing really interesting work on using on using AI to help people uncover what they truly about because I would suggest but a lot of people haven't really thought about it probably you know you're a deep thinker I thought about it a bit as well but like the conversations about you are like nearly as widespread in society and politics as I would like but a value I hold is the kind of sanctity of biological life if you like you can find e-act people that like actually clearly ambivalent biological life whatever if the next thing you know iteration is just silicon and hardware so be it or give the shit just a means to an end yeah I'm just saying for me I choose to find some sacredness and meaning in in biological life and so to that end I would like to see triac like acceleration of two the ends of actually most broadly like restoring the ecosphere and there are the kind of applications that I would like to see talking about with AI is using AI and AI powered drones AICD drones for reforestation that is if we can have like drone kill nets like floating over city to people speculating and we can like and there's like in some insane level of drone production like happening in Ukraine right now what would it take to drive the same level of interest and capital investment in drones to actually restore ecosystems and actually make a difference to the climate question my sense is there's a lot that could be done there if somehow we conjure the social and political will for it and then you can go further and actually more fun questions around AI for talking to animals and plants some work on this has already been done but these are the kinds of technologies that I would love to see accelerated based on this desire to really feel ourselves as part of that broader web of life for humanity to remember its place as a stewards of natural work and maybe this is a question for Ellie and I'm glad that you've woven her into this program that she's on the faculty it's funny because it's a problem we've been dancing around this a lot on this column when we're another there's the common complaint that we've created these incredibly powerful tools and what are people doing with them they're sharing cat memes or watching porn or binge watching that flexor whatever we assume that helping people think about their values we assume that helping people ask themselves what they want and bring that into focus is going to give us the reward of a society of people that care about the things we hope they care about but your question about the role of rights of passage and about the social container within which all of this stuff is happening it's a question of what if 95% of people interact with this kind of a mirror and come away being like it turns out that my most deeply held values are that I win it's not necessarily going to be trees it's going to be so like part of what I've been putting my head against in all of this is not just AI as a tool for self discovery and certainly not in the way that Doug Rushkoff critiques social engineering through design saying you've already lost the moral battle because you're trying to influence people in opaque how can these tools rather than nudge people in a social engineering way into a desired values system how can we use them to make the complexity of the environment in which they actually operate more transparent given the fact that environmental complexity like we were talking about earlier with these arms functions as a developmental driver right like the whole notion of the self-authoring modern valued driven person rather than the pre-modern person who's just trying to do well within the value system that they've inherited people like Harvard psychologist Robert Keegan point to the emergence of transcontinental and trans-oceanic trade that the exposure to other cultures as part of what led people to ask about what they actually care about in the first place but we have this problem which is that the way that algorithms are being deployed now has been famously critiqued as reifying the filter bubble it's like undoing that work in a way it's giving you what you already want rather than creating the conditions where you are prompted to reflect on that which you do not already know about yourself or I guess you see what I'm getting at here right like we're back at that same question where we started about axiological design and how it is that we can reward a system that actually requires more work on the part of people to reflect and not just decide what I like is Amazon Prime Day yeah I think it's an important point that there's many technologies that like you might hope they're going to do one thing but if you fail to consider adequately the context of psychosocial environment which they've been launched they can turn out in a completely different way I think Joe and Elliot meaning and I'm interested in other things really interesting it makes me think of it's Center for human technologies piece around we really fucked it up with social media this is our second chance it's not f**king up again meaning 11 are actually they've got a very large grant from OpenAI and a connected bits of I really have taught people open AI so let's hope that they managed to steer something in the right direction there and that tool does become a useful way of uncovering people's deeper values however absolutely I would suggest that in any case that's going to be probably a relatively minor part of this process of the discovery of deeper values and that makes me think of Josh Rice and I'm actually planning to do his mythic body course this year long course in in ritual and nature connection he that's a question I'm interested in is like how do we just get people outside more how do you get access to nature more in time and the ability to just connect with sampling much simpler and more ancient and it's through those kinds of experiences maybe in an ideal world so you can add some psychedelics here or there I'm reminded of out of Southsley's island if you remember this where like it's when the teenagers come of age they actually take themselves off into the wilderness we put sound stuff in plastic mushrooms and they co-create like a mushroom ceremony as a group of teenagers and they come back as initiated adults into the slate psychedelic culture but even without the mock-room medicine like even just the nature of the machine will be a good start at least so what can we do to encourage that because in my experience speaking personally it is those experiences of nature connection that then have shifted my values and what I care about and led me to the point which I'm willing to say yes a core value for me is the sex to your biological life if we're just going to ask people what they care about in the absence of also having some plan of giving people new and different ways of experiencing themselves vis-a-vis the natural world then probably oh we are just going to get the set of what you and I might think is quite shallow value so it has to be as part of a larger picture here so that's actually funny because one of the things asking for a friend given the fact that it comes home to roost in the fact that you are selling this course something that I talk about a lot with people working in these spaces is that we face a challenge akin to the the challenge that you're not going to come to a therapist unless you realize you have a problem and I'm curious if you are experiencing any kind of juicy generative friction in explaining the utility of a course like this and who are those people and what do you think is going to change their minds or do you think that trying to convince people of the relevance of this thing is pointless because I'll just say that over the years I've spent a lot of time being in Ken Wilbur's scene or in Evolver.net or at SFI where there's a tension inherent in the narrative that these organizations or these social movements have about themselves which is on the one hand they say this is happening this is the direction in which the evolution of consciousness is moving or the direction in which science is moving and then on the other hand there is this sense that we are at the growing tip of this that we have a responsibility to push this river in some way and those they don't seem terribly compatible to me but suggesting that this is going to happen whether or not we exist and yet we must do this we have a moral imperative and when I think about trying to convince people that meditating on issues of meaning making or of the derivation of personal significance precisely because our technologies have remixed space and time and the life cycle of a person and like meditation technologies that used to be reserved for people in their 50s are now being practiced by people in their 20s in order to give them a competitive edge in the workplace we have this jumble where you can make the case that understanding matters of significance matters more to survival and success and you can argue that maybe the more crazy, unstable, turbulent, vuca things become the more people are just going to realize the value of this like that the fact that we have an epidemic of trauma in this world and also we have this proliferation of people that are actively seeking out counseling and coaching and these kinds of services nonetheless it still seems like a minority position and I guess I just wonder to what extent are you making an effort to reach people who don't get it and to what extent has crashing the prow of this ship up against the rocks of like you said that sort of techno venture capitalist mindset or the goldfish consumer mindset well what have you learned from all that yeah a much greater number of people that are just familiar with say Daniel's work or Hansi's work or Vitalik's work than people that are familiar with all three so I'd say in the primary audience of the course of people that might be familiar with one of those thinkers and noticed in Hansi's case that it hasn't been much and about technology specifically and here's a chance to encounter some some other thing with Josh as well and then of course all the people that are actually joining us on the course are the people that can be suspected that people might not be previously exposed to I'm quite well connected in the whole web3 blockchain space for example and on that topic I entered 10-lodged mechanism to a open civics collaborative research match funding round and that project finished top so it should actually be getting like a healthy amount of match funding which in exchange for that match funding I'm going to open source all of the notes and all of the videos from the course so that is another thing that will mean that has the potential to reach large numbers of people it's not just going to be locked away behind some people there and the earlier part of what you said was it's just who do we think we are is why who do I think we are we can make any difference to this inexorable tenor capitalist machine of Fraser Vitalik I think like the me the kind of metamorphosis position there is to is to really move towards just the fascination and the war and the wonder and the curiosity that maybe at folk like maybe a little bit too you know keen on or they can only they're afraid to experience anything other than just the place they're willing to stay but yeah let's experience that let's get into that just be like wow things are you know big things are about to get weird as you said in one of your recent pieces let's enjoy that as best we can and at the same time see that you know our current culture we can say in many ways like and including artistry to technology is in many ways deeply immature and then it makes a very good case of that and that it's that it's if we decide that we care about amongst other things the future of biological life on this earth which I hope we do but we can all have a say in that then we've got some we've got some serious work to do because like things are not heading in the right direction as much as we might wish that they are this like this or mixed with like responsibility maturity something that I tried to sit with and exercise in in healthy ways so actually yeah that brings me to like the last place because obviously you and I enjoy this kind of discussion we otherwise we wouldn't be here but what you just got to is where I feel like I've landed with respect to what the work really is I realize I figured this out much sooner in my life like I'm on record talking about this stuff back in my 20s and I had forgotten it which is simply that what seems to really matter most rather than teaching people any particular thing or nudging people in any particular direction as far as values are concerned is helping people remember how to play and how to exercise their curiosity in an environment where anxiety and fear and outrage and exploitation are steeply incented and that one can make an argument from so many different perspectives that like right now when the narratives have failed us and the institutions are in doubt and are we're off the rails as far as what we have is in a cohesive social fabric what seems to matter most is high temperature search so last thing quickly here would just be what do you find most effective in helping people recover that awe and that curiosity and that playfulness that you're talking about here yeah I maybe add to that a sense of what really matters in life what other things are truly most important I think it might experience all of those things going together and I think it has a lot to do with the body actually it is embodied experience of one kind or another and that actually helps us or has helped me to discover that lightness and that playfulness and this motivation to continue working in context some quite gnarly stuff to be honest that we think about like a safety debate and climate change and so on I'm so deeply grateful that I have had time to go on extended meditation retreats that are out to do a vision quest and some of that spending time in the wild to have experienced plant medicine ceremonies there are many not turning a few paths you're probably many of your listeners will some of them might be and that is what these kinds of practices that allow me to continue feeding lightness and ease and that blow in life including by going all the way down to those most basic questions or like what is going on here and what is the nature of consciousness I love the conversation you had Andrea's Gomez and Nielsen actually and I feel like you two are such a pair of big brains like I was like he's terrified of coming onto this podcast I'm just listening to but that to engage in practices that takes like all the way down to that level what the thought and where we really asked just what the fuck is going on here always brings a smile to my face as well so whichever practice that is there and the people listening out there don't forget about that when was your last mushroom trip when was your last extended meditation retreat when was the last time you spent a few nights in nature without any electronic devices maybe it's time when was the last time you asked what the fuck and he put the brush dude Stephen I'm really grateful that we get to play on this course together and thanks for picking the time today thanks for the invitation thanks again for listening if you enjoyed that links to the upcoming course and my latest writings and be found in the show notes as well as a link to hire me as a consultant or advisor consultancy work is part of what helps fund all of the free public goods I produce with future fossils so book some time with me and then lastly I'm excited to announce that how to live in the future my first book of collected essays is finally in the last yards of pre-publication with Revolor Press and I will have a pre-sales page up for you soon keep your ear to the ground on that by subscribing to sub stack or patreon that's it thanks a lot take care and stay tuned for upcoming conversations with Bill Saril, Sarah Fin Huntley, Jenny Curcio and Matt Segal