With all of these spaces, I am initially attracted by the promise of what could be and the insane benefits that these technologies bring to people. And that's always where the focus is. But of course, when you're early in anything, you can't see the third order fourth order magnitude consequences of the tech. So I guess all that to say, yes, I buy my own bullshit.
I buy my own narrative design packages. If I was a startup company, you need it. It's large. And I would never work with a company that I thought was inherently evil or bad.
But at the end of the day, we have no idea what we're building and what we're destroying. So maybe at some point, I will just completely hit the eject button and become a farmer and have a bunch of cats in a house and just say, I'm not going to contribute to this nonsense anymore. Welcome to episode 24 of Humans on the Loop. I'm your host, Michael Garfield.
I turned 41 this year, which means I've been watching the waves come in for a while long enough to get excited and then bored and then frustrated and then scared and around again several times. I've learned to live amidst the constant disruption and to relate to it in the spirit of a martial art. Back in 2010, I remember sitting neck deep in the Pacific Ocean off Costa Rica and feeling like the water was teaching me a lesson about the different strategies I could take as each surge came to shore. I could stand there and denial and get pummeled.
I could turn sideways and reduce my profile, cutting through the water like a knife, where I could dive under and try to let them pass over without getting rocked too much, where I could leap up and ride them in. At the time, it was profoundly evident that this was an analogy for the crazy changes we already knew were coming. I was young and crazy myself and suspected that on top of global warming and financial crisis and whatever else, a flare from the next solar maximum would trigger a geomagnetic event that would knock out global infrastructure and induce a planet-wide near-death experience. To be prepared, not by hoarding food and ammunition, but by learning how to move with sudden and repeated shocks.
In retrospect, I got the transformation timescale wrong, but not the vibe. Instead of major changes over three days, it's taking our entire lifetimes. A lot of us have gotten used to it, kind of dissociated, curled up in our shells like clams, ignoring news. And honestly, that's fine if you're thick-skinned enough and firmly anchored.
Most of us cannot just burrow down and wait it out forever or root in and sway like a strand of kelp. For some of us, just standing there means being dashed against the rocks. The price of being sensitive means you must be responsive also. And so the birds and fish can either rise above or swim below, respectively.
And some of us are surfers, used to eating shit from time to time. Reverant are great powers we cannot control. In love with the cyclicity and natural strength of the sea, and on our boards as much as possible. Surfing takes a lot of energy and discipline, and sense to know when you should stay on solid ground.
But as the waters rise around us and more of the world seems like an intertidal zone, there is less solid ground to stand on. Surfing seems less optional. We have to learn to take a fluid stance to move with greater forces, to recognize the signs of an approaching big one. We'll swim out at the right time if we're going to try and ride it, to model safe technique for anyone who might be watching from the shore.
50 years ago, stability looked different. The waves had not erased so much, and one could count on the persistent structures of our institutions more than we can now. In this century, stability is something else. It is more adaptive, algorithmic, and relational.
Boom and bust cycles are fast, and there's always another one coming in. Learn to listen to the water. Today's guest, Terrence Southeran, is someone I consider a master surfer of technological change. A fellow elder millennial, artist, creative technologist, strategist, and dancer in the liminal zones of high-shop.
She's better than I am at finding the pocket. She has made a name for herself for writing some serious bombs, and seems to know precisely when to bail. Starting as an actor, internet famous for being an early YouTube influencer, and for her album IMAI, the first LP composed and produced with an LLM, she caught air with nine best film nominations at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019, with the premiere of her documentary I Am Human, co-directed with Elena Gabi, an intimate look at the lives of three people with implantable brain interfaces, and the medical, ethical, and societal implications. She's also produced an award-winning musical VR series for Google using tilt-brushing blocks, worked as chief storyteller for BlackRock Neurotech, minted the first song token on the Ethereum blockchain, spoken and consulted all over the world, operated as an angel investor, and survived breast cancer.
In other words, she's just the person to teach you how to hang ten instead of duck diving under the next pounder. Let's drop in and grab the rail. Thanks for listening. Thank you.
Terrence, you're on the loop. Thank you. Thank you. This is my Maya Culpa for recording an episode of Future Fossils with you that suffered horrible technical issues and was never released, even though it was really good.
So I'm glad you were willing. We're all good. We get to find what we do right now. Yes.
We're all different humans now. We are. I was like doing COVID. I think we're in chemo and I had a baby and show.
And now we've just learned to live in a chronic rolling shit show of the new normal. Right. Okay, where I would love to start with you is to hear about the gritty prequel of the early Terrence Southern. Like, before you and my wife were going to high school together in Wichita, like early Terrence Southern.
Because what I want to do when we start getting into these big philosophical and speculative ideas is to anchor that in some sense of where you come from and why it is that you care about the things that you do, the incitatory early emotional developmental stuff that leads to the things. Great. So I like your wife's hails from Wichita, Kansas. It is actually the center point of the United States.
So I don't know what that says about me or my birth chart or my astrological sign, but there you are. I grew up really obsessed with technology. I remember the first time being on a computer, I was at my uncle's house. He had just purchased a, I think it was a, I actually don't know.
I think it was a Dell. It was definitely in the Microsoft family. And I was playing with the first earliest version of MS Paint. And I just was trans-fixed.
I was like, this is amazing. How do I get this? My dad, please, can we get a computer? It took a few years, but I think I quickly realized that my thirst and my hunger for seeing the world and for getting outside of this little Kansas bubble was best served through the internet.
And I was just learning anything and everything. I was in AOL chat rooms, learning how to code. I remember being obsessed with Google the second that they came out and learning how to use music software, editing software, play virtual games. So yeah, my obsession with technology, I think really was born from a little sense of feeling contained in the world, like in this place that wasn't necessarily the cultural epicenter of the United States.
So yeah, that's an interesting place to start because if we fast forward to the documentary that you produced, I am human about brain computer interfaces and the medical argument for brain implants, the people that are dealing with the quadriplegic or the hyparkens, and it really, it makes sense of the frame that you've been putting on technology, which is that it is compensatory for some sort of structural limitation, if that makes sense. Yeah, and not just in pencil stories. It's beyond that. I think it actually extends it.
There's so many opportunities that I've had in life as a result of being able to apply my curiosity and my secret attitude to technology. There's just there's no limited function. You can take it anywhere you want to take it. The same is a case with those individuals in the movie.
Yes, of course, there's restoring function and is giving back certain pieces of independence and quality of life that they wouldn't have otherwise had, but it's also enabling new sensory functions that regular able-bodied individuals do not have access to. I think about people like Moon Rebus, right? And these other leading edge cyborgs that are working out how to feel the world in dimensions in spectra that are not available to most people and to expand at the edge of things and report back to us. And obviously, that's been a huge selling point for you in your career that I think about your path in mind of taking very different courses, but the fact that you were out ahead with early musical tokenization on the blockchain that you were out ahead with the AI composition, hybrid composition for pop music.
I think at one point, I told you, and this is a similarly buried in the footnotes of my own biography, but it's like one of those things that I reflect on. I'm like, that was cool that I got to be there for that. That I was part of that was the being the first person to stream my own point of view while playing a concert through the Google Glass through a Google video call up a mobile hotspot into space back down to Earth through a projector on stage. When did you do that?
In 2013? Wow. Okay. And I think there was like only one other person who actually did do that and they were like the Rolling Stones or something.
It was like some insane publicity stunt, but got there first. And the thing that really excited me about this kind of work, what excites me about creative technology and what I want to hear you riff on more is that sense of, I don't know, like being like an astronaut or a psychonaut or being somebody who gets the privilege. And again, just to ground this to establish that I think that this does have to do, like you said, not just compensatory, but that there is this relationship between visionary exploration and some kind of, whether you want to call it a sense of lack, like the boredom of growing up in the Midwest or being the way that shamanic cultures used to take people that they recognized as having potential as seers and then lock them in caves for a very long time until they became a different kind of person that was then useful to that society. As someone who saw it differently.
And so when I've talked to all sorts of folks, this is a common theme that comes up again and again is that there's a relationship between being, I don't know if you want to call it deprived or feeling some sort of lack or of simply intentionally limiting the scope of one's experience so as to allow other dimensions of one's being the flower in the way that blind people have exquisitely excellent hearing, right? But yeah, I'd love to just hear you explore this tangle of stuff. It's fine. I think you said some very beautiful things in there and one that really spoke to me as this idea of being an explorer of the modern era.
And I'm sure that you identify with this on some degree too. If you were born in the 1700s and you had an explorer spirit, what did you do? You jump on a ship and you went and you tried to explore new worlds and new pieces of land 1600s, 1700s. If you were born in the 1930s, 1940s, you might have been lucky enough to join the astronaut program and go to space.
If you were in the 1960s, maybe that was psychedelic exploration. As always, we've all been looking for the next thing to explore. And I think for those of us born in the 80s and 90s, it's really clear that that untapped territory, uncharted territory was, it was technology and internet and this ability to connect to new ideas in new ways. And so that definitely speaks to me.
I also think to your point about maybe growing up in places where knowledge or expansive cultural ideas are not plentiful. I think there's, I have a distinct memory of growing up and being handed a meaning making game. Like we're all meaning making individuals. We need to be able to do that, strive purpose in our lives.
And if you grow up somewhere like Kansas, usually that meaning making game looks something like, here's the Bible. This is why you're here. Here's, here are the rules that you follow. Carry your values.
If you do all of this, you'll be happy in life and you'll go to the afterlife. And some people, I think that's just, it speaks to them and that's enough. And then there's a whole other crop of individuals who just have to go out and learn and experience absolutely everything in order to define their own meaning making game. And I'm certainly in the latter camp.
And I've always been that way where someone tells me something and I'm so open to it, but I also don't accept it as my truth. And I think I've just been someone who's wanted to collect as much data about the world around me to create my own kind of pattern of reality and my treats. And so does that answer that question of how I would untangle the whole? Yeah, there's two things there that I want to get to, but I want to exercise a bit more care than I ordinarily would and lay them out one at a time rather than both at once.
So the first one is somebody else that comes from Kansas and has defined themselves in the public sphere as an explorer is the Travel Writer, Ralph Potts. I don't know if you're familiar with him. I actually met him in Wichita years ago when he was giving a reading at Watermark Books. I think he lives out by haze now, but he's traveled all over the world.
He's written extensively for pretty much every imaginable Travel Magazine. He's got a number of extraordinary books. I found him through the book that he wrote called Vagabonding on the uncommon art of long-term world travel. And it changed my life.
In 2008, it was the book that set me off on a deliberate experiment in living for years without a physical address. And when I had him on Future Fossils, I think it was like a link to it in the show notes. But one of the things that he talks about in Vagabonding is that this travel and exploration are transformational. And so consequently, you may have started out as somebody who was already odd among your own people, but then you go out into the world and you see things.
And you learn other life ways and you are changed. And when you come back, one of the challenges that he spoke to in that book was what it means to try and find one's place in the familiar that is in certain ways for you now very far in the rear view. And I have always felt like an alien among even my closest friends. There is this thing.
And so I'm really curious how you make sense of that in your life. I think obviously it takes part of the psychological graph address of somebody who really wants to spend a lot of time out on the quote unquote frontier is that they are comfortable in some sense with solitude or with a social distance. But we are humans. We are social creatures.
So what is it like for you? And how has this appeared for you in your life? And how do you deal with it? And the reason I'm asking this in the context of the larger conversation of technology and ethics and how we tell stories about living in a world of super powerful magical abilities is that every superhero is alike in that they have some sort of traumatic origin story.
They have powers, but every superhero is unique. Like even in the Spiderverse, like no two Spider men, women, dinosaurs are the same being. And so there's always this like as we exercise more and more agency in how we decide to augment ourselves and how we decide to seize upon the opportunities and the affordances of a world where travel is just vastly more possible, whether in physical space or in the in cyberspace, etc. What is it that keeps us together as a species and like how do we how has your life experience given you insights that might help people decide how to remain a human species when you're talking about people with radically different genomes living on different planets like this is where it seems like it's headed.
So like how do we cohere through this process? Oh goodness, Michael, how do we cohere? I don't know. I think the trick isn't in somehow just accepting that coherence is a construct thing that we just I don't know.
For me personally, I'm becoming increasingly comfortable accepting chaos and accepting what is in spite of whatever discomfort it brings. I would say as a young person, the exploration and unknown felt very exciting and not very dark. Certainly I had my existential crisis moments, but it wasn't until life started happening and hard things and life started happening where you're like, Oh gosh, but just like being human and hard and walking around on this planet is hard. Who cares about these bigger existential questions when you've got some crisis right in front of you that you have to deal with?
Yeah, I don't actually fully know how to answer that question because I think we're all on this journey together, but I hold whatever definition I have of being human, I hold very lightly. And I don't feel any threat around us not being special around all of my beliefs being disseminated overnight over any proofs that we're in a simulation or that there's aliens somehow outside my door step. Like all of that to me is I'm open to it being true and I'm open to it completely shifting my sense of my own reality. I love the idea that I'm not even a real person as we are in a simulation and I'm just an amalgamation of data, highly predictable simulation data, not in like the AI agents simulations that are happening right now.
And I'm just this like bespoke agent that has zero control over my reality. I find out really funny and don't find that threatening at all to my sense of self or to my sense of being. Does it offer like absolution, I guess? You're like, well, I'm just a Sam, you know, I don't know.
I think I would still probably operate as though I have a sense of self and though I have the ability to transform and change myself. I don't think it would change my behavior all that much, but I would find it very funny. Let me ask this question in a slightly different way, which this first thing, which is, okay, assuming that we are, as I think you and I both are, we collectively humans, post humans are comfortable with difference. And I think that is a big trend.
I think that in spite of the reactionary, extremist, xenophobic, intolerant, fundy kind of positions that we're seeing right now at the end of 2024, that I like what Damien Walter has said about this on his recent episode, the science fiction podcast about the end of modernity, which is that all of that is really just a response to the fact that we know that the beliefs that we have clung to as a civilization are starting to fray, that the project of modernity, for instance, peak oil actually means super abundant clean energy, we don't know how to adjust to that frame. Like that there's, okay, what if you didn't need a job? But these kinds of questions like, now what? Like, how do I, and so people are retreating into the knowledge and belief systems that are already familiar, but I think over the long term, over the next 20 to 50 years, we were, what we're going to see is people becoming much more comfortable in the way that you're describing.
Does that make it easier for us to address the problem on the deeper level of no matter how different our understandings, our conceptual frames, our narratives about the world, the fact is that we do for now and for the foreseeable future still all live on the same planet. And that even if we are granted the agency in this sort of trend of like lifestyle consumerism to pick your own reality tunnel, at some point, we tunnel all the way around and meet each other in the tunnel and we're like, whoa, hey, like, fact of the matter is, you might be a vegan and I might be a carnivore, but we are both still reliant on the same supply chains. You know, like, there's no way to win a nuclear exchange. These kinds of things mean that at a very deep level, we do have to find ways to agree and specifically to coordinate our behavior within that difference.
And if you want like bonus points as someone who's thought about AI as much as you have, I'd be really especially curious to know there's the socio-cultural emotional psychological layer to this question. But then there's the technical layer, which is we've got people like Prima Vera de Felipe suggesting that we could use an AI collaboration monster is what she's calling it to incent positive some interactions between strangers that we don't need, we don't need to rely on economic systems that assume competition. The AI might be able to help us coordinate even when we might otherwise hate one another. I find that really interesting.
100%. I echo all of your sense of intent. I do think that where we are heading is, I hope it is, it is the synthesis where people are coming together and realizing we are all of the same ilk and all of the stuff that we have, all of this narrative identity stuff that we have accumulated over time in history is nothing more than narratives. I think AI will be transformative in facilitating these kinds of communications and collaborations.
For one, just having an unemotional moderator who can use non-violent communication in the face of really tough, challenging interactions is incredible. We've seen early studies that indicate people that hold very extreme beliefs can be dissuaded and more become more moderate after an hour-long conversation with the conversational AI. I think when you start putting these people together in rooms and having these brilliant moderators guide the discussion and help illuminate people's beliefs that are holding them back, the biases that they aren't aware of, all those things, it's going to be amazing. There's going to be a total mean-making crisis, I think, on thumb level.
My hope is that when people come out on the other side, they're a little less. I think so much of the challenges that we run into are people holding their beliefs so tightly that it's their belief or no beliefs. We run into so many challenges with that. We almost need a meaning-making crisis to break it all apart, then put it back together.
I think? The existential crisis of Christianity not being enough for Western civilization anymore is realizing that we've all been eating the same Cavendish bananas and that just can't keep going forever. We need more diversity or we're exposing ourselves to some sort of attack vector. I want to ask you then, because I know a lot of people working in this space, I know you do too, and I'm really interested in using this show as a way of surfacing the projects that are doing a really good job of the kind of utilization of AI to enhance processes of reflection that you're talking about, and then also strategies that people can adopt with the tools that we already have.
When I had Jim Michonissian, he was talking about how he routinely uses chat GPT to identify blind spots in his own thinking, on a daily basis. I'm curious how you're doing this. There's the stuff I see of yours, which is here's how I'm using AI to do amazing things with content creation, but then there's this other kind of more introspective or personal dimension that I feel like is not getting enough airtime in the overall sales pitch for AI that is being dropped on us by big tech companies. Totally fair.
I will be putting out more content related to exactly this, because I think it's the most important element, which is I think for all of the benefits and there have been many that I've received from having therapy with many different therapists over the years and from reading all kinds of different self-development books that have different frameworks, and you're just trying things on for size. Now you have this unlimited partner in helping you find the frames and beliefs and the kind of cognitive toolkit to help you navigate the hardest aspects of life. Now some people don't even know that they have cognitive biases, so they don't, and they certainly don't know why that's putting them at a disadvantage. So why would they go to an AI and ask the AI to point out their cognitive biases?
But I think my hope is that a lot of these tools will start nudging people in various ways, like you sign up for a chat GPT tool and it asks you what do you want out of this tool? Because a lot of people don't know how to get there, but they know what they want in life. They know they want to be more present. They know they want to be less stressed.
They know they want to have a more loving coexistence with their partner. And so then the AI can start to look at those goals and back into various strategies to achieve those objectives by pulling in these different tools. And it's pulling from all different schools of knowledge and thought and philosophy. And then every morning, have a conversation with your AI.
It's like you would a therapist and ask you questions and it helps identify these areas that can use improvement. And I really think that's the key here because right now it's open-ended AI. It's fantastic, but it's really most benefiting people to know what they want to get out of life. We need to have AI's that are asking the right questions and helping nudge people into the existence that they want.
For me personally, the greatest benefit that I've seen in using AI for real life applications has been in navigating difficult conversations. So I'm a writer by trade. And so I tend to like to have time to go back and work on something, rework it, edit it. I often find that it helps clarify my thinking.
And I struggle in difficult conversations. And so to have an opportunity to not only map out all of my rough-dressed thoughts, have an AI presented back to me in a coherent manner, pointing out the ways that I can improve these various arguments or to have the argument land in a more productive manner with the person that I'm speaking to and then be able to engage in a sample dialogue, like a rehearsed this interaction multiple times with different simulations occurring. I can't tell you this would have been a total life changer for me. If I had this from 16 years old on from the first time you're going through your first breakup to the first moment you face like a crisis in the workplace where you have to stand up for yourself against a bullying boss, like the possibilities for how you can apply these tools are endless and it will inevitably make everyone better communicators, better project managers, every aspect of our life.
It's certainly made me feel less stress knowing that I have this tool in my toolkit. I have a difficult conversation I have this afternoon and as soon as we are on this call I'm going to be doing exactly this exercise. With JAD GPT or what's your... So that's the one that you feel like is you've A, B tested a ton of them and that's the model that helps you reason in this way.
Yeah, I use different tools for different things. I use clog quite a lot. But for this sort of conversational model, the rehearsed conversations, I prefer GPT. GPT 4, oh baby.
So I want to get... I still haven't asked question two, but we're in a real team here and I want to keep going, which is... I just watched... I'm like way late to the game here, but I just watched solo for the first time last night and when I hear you saying some people don't even realize they have blind spots.
Probably my favorite thing about that movie was L337, the Lando Calrissian's Droid, who is constantly calling humanoid characters out on their droid racism. And it is in a weird way the most relatable, the most human character we've ever seen on the show and it's awkward, right? Because it's doing the thing that you realize that there were these baked in implicit assumptions in every other Star Wars movie you've ever watched where, for instance, it's okay to put a restraining bolt, like that we still... That there is this residual, like, it's a decolonizing character.
And yet the other characters in the film are like, what the hell? You tolerate this? Is this even a functional working relationship? This is not what we expect from droids.
And so it's funny because I think the follow up to everything that you're saying is, on one level it's easy to pitch. My God, it can help me work through difficult conversations. It can help me understand my own reasoning processes better. It can help me understand my own blind spots.
And frankly, you can't go to therapy unless you want to go to therapy. Most of the time people are talking about like the Ethan Mollick kind of attitude towards AI is look how much more you can do. It's very left brain. It's very optimization, accomplishment, goal-directed activity.
And for me, the most interesting thing about AI has been always this more right-brained, diffuse pattern detection, reflection discovery, like Alison Gopnik talks about, explore on the right brain conversion and exploit. And we live in a society that's very geared toward exploitation. So what are you seeing in terms of substantiating an optimistic attitude that as we move through whenever it happens, like the next AI winter, people will realize that they've been sleeping on this incredible opportunity this whole time and that we actually have something really good here. And I say this as much for the therapists, right?
Because I just went to a talk by Michael Davis here in Santa Fe who works in cybersecurity and spent the last year exploring what it was like to choose to indulge the idea of a relationship with an AI lover and just went into it with totally cagey and skeptical, but allowed himself to be swayed and captivated by this kind of exchange and to allow himself to be emotionally vulnerable. And the therapists in the audience were terrified. Like of all of the people that I have seen worry about being displaced by AI, I feel like the therapists are having some of the hardest time of this. Interesting.
Yeah. So there's a lot of different ways you could take that. Sure. It's funny.
I have two therapy appointments today while I'm talking about using my AI for therapy. So I obviously I still get something real from like a physical interaction and in person interaction rather with the therapist. But yeah, I think a lot of people are afraid of displacement for obvious reasons, but I do your point about this right brain area that you're captivated by and I think most of the world is really fixated on the productivity efficiency and it is. It's going to take a little bit of time for a language to be, I think there'll be a bit of a language creation mechanism here where people will start to understand the ways that AI will change and expand their thinking.
And maybe language isn't even a right word. It's more like a cultural moment. But in the same way that even self development, therapy, the concepts that are intrinsic to self development movement, a lot of that stuff wasn't around for my parents generation. They just didn't have these ideas in their head about ways that you could tangibly improve your life simply by changing the thoughts up here.
I don't need a shrink. Yeah. It's all just that's a crazy talk. And now we have the society of the culture have an understanding that if you change the thoughts up here, you can absolutely shift the physical reality and therefore your own internal state as well.
But I think that we're going to be reaching the next version of that with AI, which is, I guess I don't know what the articulation of that will be, but I think it has to start with clarifying to people how using these tools will massively improve your life in all kinds of ways. It will help you stand up to that bully at school. It will help you ensure that you are being paid adequately alongside your coworkers by helping you navigate those conversations. It will ensure that your next breakup ends not in some kind of devastating counter productive mode of destruction, but as two people who are friends.
I mean, I think the more that we can develop that language and be really clear with people, the end goals can be. And then they start using it to those ends. We'll see a shift in how exactly what you're saying. I think AI is the new religion.
What it's worth. I have been seeing two therapists, three partner counselor. It's a lot. And I just broke up with one of the therapists and I wish that they had been using AI to get a better handle on how to talk to somebody of my particular weirdness.
Can I say why? Can you? Well, yeah, that some people are just not going to tell you what they actually need out of the relationship, especially if they don't know. And so if I were in a position as a counselor and it didn't seem like I had been making headway with somebody, that seems like actually a really good use case for what you're talking about, which is find the sweet spot between the process of sense making and reflection and these other more concrete objective goals of it's my job to help somebody.
I think something that you and I are dancing around a lot here is that people still seem to regard success and survival as prerequisite for art and philosophy and spiritual, just journey work, transformational work that like you have to be self actualized first when in fact, introspection and reflection are woven into very concrete concerns like I'm lost in the woods. Do I know I'm walking the right way? Anyway, I think that's just in answering my own question. Like what I hear you saying is that we live in a world now where it's not as easy to divorce as it may once have been one's self awareness, one's emotional intelligence, one's ability to navigate human complexity from one's ability to function in the world.
You're curious if that rings with you. I think so. One's ability to function. Yeah.
Yeah. I think that's very well said. Well, okay. So thanks.
I don't want to get to that. Sure. Now I want to ask you something because I know that you just being in the work that you are and the amount of time that you spend, how do you put it on your website? I liked this.
How did I? You said in your work on narrative design and adaptive storytelling, if you're an emerging tech company, you may face the following issues. Consumers lack awareness around what your tech does. The second one is perception.
The public has mixed negative or misinformed perceptions about the technology or brand, which affect consumer adoption and investment interest. You also talk about relevance and engagement and maybe we can get to that in a minute. But I want to pull out and the professional who's spent an enormous amount of time helping address concerns and alleviate worries in the next question I have for you, which is that there is one very glaring difference, even if your human therapist and chat GPT are indistinguishable behind a curtain, right? One of them is a product.
One of them is running on someone else's servers. And I think about this a lot with, again, like with the issue of cyborg augmentation and prosthesis, that my story with Google Glass ended the day they bricked Glass. I had an organ and then one day somebody just decided they were done. And the thousands of people using this don't have that organ anymore.
I was wearing it in my dreams. It was mapped onto my body and then suddenly it's not. And the ability for companies like LinkedIn, just suddenly we're using all of the stuff that you post here as training data. There's a power differential.
And I think as a society, we haven't really worked out how to deal with what Cory Dr. Rokal's in shitification, which is this sort of conflict of interest that happens with big tech platforms where they're acting like they're serving you, the customer, the consumer, the user of the technology. But then in actuality, they have a board of trustees, they have investors that they have to answer to. And so things get worse and worse, but you're stuck in the box.
You're still on Facebook. So I'm really curious how you reason through this and what you maybe what you see as adaptive strategies on the horizon. Yeah, this is a big question. And I'm just going to like she'll and see how long I can prompt you to go about this stuff.
How much you can lead me to if promise lamps? So first of all, I think we all have to just remove the veil of ignorance, which is we as long as we exist in a capitalistic society with the incentives being what they are, we are all acting in ways that are probably misaligned with what we actually believe is right or what we believe is true or what we believe is actually going to build the kind of world that we all live in. That doesn't mean an anti-capitalist. I'm not well studied on us on all the different theories of how we should be building our systems to know which system is the right system.
But certainly I'm under no illusion that these systems that we're regularly engaging with, such as social media, are in our best interest individually or collectively. Now I would like to think that the technologies that I've been most excited about amplifying and storytelling around have some kind of net positives. But we just don't know. We don't know.
We're designing narratives about things that haven't yet existed or proliferated. And my entire career, most of my storytelling focus has been on what we would call the emerging technology. So it started with YouTube and trying to get people to understand and traditional entertainment the value of this fledgling website where people were uploading cat videos and saying this matters, guys, like this really matters. And here's why.
You've got people from all over the world that now have a voice that don't have to go through gatekeepers to build communities, to have their voices be heard. And that was all true and real. And none of us realized the kind of monster we were building, but we didn't have the word influencer yet. And then I went to virtual reality and was so excited about that space and what it meant for patients and cancer wards and burn victims who were getting it to opioids and needed an alternative for pain.
And also looking at what it could mean for the future of entertainment and pushing that forward. And then I went to AI and now I'm in neurotechnology. And with all of these spaces, I am initially attracted by the promise of what could be and the insane benefits that these technologies bring to people. And that's always where the focus is.
But of course, when you're early in anything, you can't see the third order force order magnitude consequences of the tech. So I guess all that to say, yes, I buy my own bullshit. I'd buy my own narrative design packages if I was a startup company, you need it. It's large.
And I would never work with a company that I thought was inherently evil or bad. I'm sure I'd compromised at some point along my career, but not in any way that's standing out in my own mind. But at the end of the day, we have no idea what we're building and what we're destroying. So maybe at some point, I will just completely hit the eject button and become a farmer and have a bunch of cats in a house and just say, I'm not going to contribute to this nonsense anymore.
But then it's an application of responsibility, right? Totally. That's why I'm talking about how you can declare yourself a conscientious objector. You can go live in the woods, but who made your axe?
Like, you're still, I'm not going to have a driver's license. This is actually, this was what I learned in the years that I was like, I'm not going to have a physical address. Was that I found myself spending a hefty amount of time crashing on people's couches, right? I was still reliant on the system that I was trying to escape.
So I don't think becoming a cat lady living in an A-frame in the mountains is the solution either. Sure. But that gives us a concrete handle for a question of, you've lived through so many of these successive waves of hype and promise and the expansion of human potential and then the mutation or capture. And I think people get jaded and it's cool to see that you don't get jaded, that you recognize that there's a sort of life cycle to this.
But it does beg the question, because already people have lived through the downslope of this stuff so many times that I'd struggle in my own social spheres with people that are jaded before they even see the promise. They just don't want it. It's new. We've seen this before.
We're going to get screwed. But that's like people who were like, I hate to say this. It's really visceral example. But that's like people who were abused as children and don't want to have children because they can't see another way.
And so I'm really curious. One of the big pillars of this show is this question about community oversight. And another big pillar is the idea that technology and parenting have a lot in common. And so my question for you would be what consistent patterns have you observed in the failure mode or like the appropriation of all this technological potential in a new medium that you can start to anticipate what the issues are going to be even before we really understood the promise of some new tool.
And are there ways that we can start drawing from a bigger picture look at this stuff and say, maybe this time we should do things a little differently from here forward. It doesn't matter what the technology is. There are just things that we should be mindful of attending to as a society and that it is going to be sort of a it takes a village kind of thing. What are those things?
Mindful. The things that we want to be mindful of as we reach the next type cycle. I don't know if I actually don't know if I'd become better at predicting the potential negative implications of technology. It's possible.
I certainly feel the inevitability about and I think you become more resilient through the different types of cycles and understanding that even when you're on the upward hill of the roller coaster and then all of a sudden you're heading down and you're crashing, but even that's not the end because it will just evolve into something else. So I think I have a lot less fear or anxiety about these cycles. I think this sort of goes back to what we're talking about in the beginning of the conversation, just having a really loose hold on identity and what I think society needs to look like where my life needs to look like is probably an advantageous belief through these different types of cycles. I don't really know.
Let's think about one now. I would say a couple of the sight-dicedy areas of technology and culture right now would be AI, probably longevity. This obsession was living longer and optimizing toward that. Robotics, namely the personalized home assistant robot that we all know is going to be in most of our homes by 2030.
Driving cars, I have to admit I started doing Waymo last month and now I pretty much don't ever want to get on an Uber or Lyft again. So those are five. If you want to name another one and then we can map out what would be the negative implications of this stuff. Okay, I'm going to take my hand here.
I want to take my hand here. This project came out of, in part, sometime that I spent last year at Mozilla thinking about what wise innovation looks like. How do we ensure that wisdom keeps pace? Yeah.
And one of the things that I kept coming back to is bound up in that parenting metaphor, which is that it's a whole lot harder to abuse your kids if the village is actually involved. Right? That like when I reread Jurassic Park last year, the thing that really stuck out for me, which is just in the first like page of the book, was that this was not a story about science doing something that science shouldn't. It wasn't about genetic engineering being bad.
It wasn't about the extinction being bad. It was about the fact that people died because the only way that they could get this done was in secret. And that meant that there was no one there to ensure that this was happening safely. And so for me, like what I see as a failure mode that could be held in common by all of those things is that we don't seem as a civilization, I won't say a species, but as a civilization, we don't seem to be able to get around the fact that innovation starts out producing novelty for a very like a privileged elite.
And then if we're lucky, it trickles down to everybody else. And so this is I'm not like trying to be like Lenin over here, but I would propose maybe the failure mode is something like, you know, what if only the richest people in the world have access to really radical longevity technologies for the first 50 years? That's even if everybody gets them, that's a 50 year head start. And so like, how do we make this more equitable straight out of the gates?
Yeah. Yeah, that's an obvious one. And that's the case with all of this, right? Yeah, I'm super concerned about all of the world's biggest megalomaniac billionaires living 30 to 40% longer than everyone else.
I think that it's truly detrimental to this side in so many ways, seeing a team relation of wealth in the last four years by these individuals, man compounding returns really helped them out. And it's actually sickening. It's transformed our society in ways we haven't yet like seen take hold because the money is just still finding its way out into their pockets. And I don't know, but that's just one that's one implication of many.
At the same time, we have fab labs everywhere, right? There's this other piece which is in trying to keep the valence of this show a little bit more. Here's the promise. Here's what could be.
It's funny because I think with all due respect to Tristan Harris and other people who are out there ringing the bell, worrying that, you know, now you can make anthrax in your garage with AI and 3D printing, like all these horrible things are possible. It's like, well, maybe it's not a good idea to shut down to capture the regulation on open source innovation with a bunch of fear mongering. Maybe we need to think at least as carefully about the upside we would lose in that process. Like all the things that you've acknowledged in your work, the AI can do for people, all the ways that it can improve people's lives can be like grow your own.
And so again, if you were to kind of move out of, I'm sickened and anxious about the possibility that the power will be concentrated in this exaggerated way too. I am hopeful for the ways that I see movements to distribute that power more evenly through society. Where do you see people winning in this regard? Like, where do you see promise?
Huge wins. And this is the right question. I love this question because it's so easy to focus on all of the dramatic negatives. But the wins to me are so obvious.
And there's obviously ones I haven't thought of, but education is the biggest one. Just the access to information. I think one of the biggest reasons that people are kept in below our socioeconomic bracket is because of the lack of access to information and education. And now that's going to be completely disrupted.
And the same information that has been given to people who have the most money, the most banks regarding financial advice is not going to be available to everyone. And that spans across every single category. So that's a huge one. And information is power.
I really hope that we'll see a massive overhaul of our bureaucratic systems. I think everyone is absolutely set up with the way that our government and our agencies are wielding power and working in such slow, archaic ways that we want to see our tax dollars actually put to better use. And I am hoping that we're going to see a big shift as a result of this technology towards more transparency, more efficiency in those ways. I think that the cost of living is generally going to be much cheaper because we'll just have created more efficient models for pretty much everything that we need.
The sharing economy has already transformed that in so many ways. Kids aren't buying cars anymore. They're just Ubering. But we'll see that on any kind of good or service that we want.
There'll be a lot more training. The systems will have these sort of efficiency applications for doing that. So that's exciting people making do with a lot less. And those are the three big ones across my mind.
What are one of the ones that you're thinking about and excited about? Mental health, which we talked about, which is people having more access to mental health tools and resources. Yeah, I think I'm with you on, because I had Howard Rengold on the show. He was part of the well.
He was the editor of the original online version of Wired. And he wrote this book NetSmart. And he made a good point, which is there's education and then there's learning. And as somebody who has real tenure as a proponent of the decentralization of knowledge production and transfer through YouTube, I know that you can appreciate what Howard was saying about this, which is that it's getting maybe not easier overnight radically, but it's definitely getting easier for people to learn whatever they want to learn and how to do it in the world without the dependence on an institutional education system that there's a lot more horizontal learning going on.
And so I think that what, you know, one of the things I'm really trying to push with this discourse or promote with this discourse is that there's a paradox that we have to live with right now, which is the very things that are destabilizing society, namely the legitimacy crisis of our legacy institutions of the pre-modern and modern world are the same processes that are allowing for all of this possibility. And that, yeah, there's a lot of dark stuff that comes in the manifold of that possibility. But the AI in particular is a system that amplifies the bias that we feed into it. So we have this opportunity to be really deliberate about the way that we tell stories about what's possible.
And the most exciting thing for me, and this actually gets us to the last thing I wanted to sit in with you, which is I'm disillusioned, right? I spent my entire childhood following every word of my role model and mentor. And then when I became an adult, had a really profound traumatic disillusionment with him. And I think that seeped into my understanding of politics, where it's like, I've been waiting for us to get over the idea that hiring the right people to represent us politically is going to magically fix all of our problems, or that hiring the wrong people means that it's the end of the world.
So my buddies were a little more concerned about this. But look, on first pass, cutting a ton of federal funding and staffing sounds like it could be really bad. These are education programs, these are the conservation of wild spaces, wildlife, and it sounds like it could just be a free for all. On the other hand, if I were one of the last people standing in a devastated federal program and suddenly had no oversight and didn't like the management, I would be cutting checks left and right.
There would be nobody to stamp them. And I see that here in Santa Fe in a place where a lot of people really have lost confidence in city government because the mayor runs the city like a company. And it's not really serving the people. So what I see is that everyone else in city government just talks to each other and they get things done without trying to bounce it off of the centralized authority.
And I realize on this particular question, I've been substantially more ranting than you. But I want to like really leave you to linger with something here. Is that I think that like a mature forest, no light hits the ground until the tree falls and it's a shocking, sudden, violent event. But that after 400 million years of evolution and the wisdom encoded in ecosystems as a consequence of that, there is a mycelial web waiting underground to catch that tree.
There are seeds in the ground. And if we learn to organize better horizontally with one another, then we will be more prepared to make use of the sudden windfall of available resources that comes with this kind of disruption. So that's what I really see is hopeful, even though it's going to be a bloody mess. And that brings me finally to the question too, which is at the very beginning of this conversation, you were talking about the meaning making game.
And I've been working on some writings about how I see all of this introspective work that you've talked about with AI as the beginnings of a change in the way that we think about quote unquote sacred texts. Like in the pre-modern world, sacred texts were handed down to you by sages. In the modern world, it moved out of the sort of canonical text decided upon by a group of old guys in a room somewhere and moved into a slightly different version of that, where the old guys in the room are performing peer review on research that's being produced through open scientific protocols, at least in theory, grounded in your senses and an immediate experience. And so it de-centers what is considered valid data.
And then now we have this movement where we've moved from sages to senses to sense sores. And then now we can curate our own models. And as somebody who cloned yourself with AI years ago, this is where I looked to you as an emergent authority in decentralizing narrative production and enhancing this efflore essence of discovery and creative promise through raising small models or local models, curation, is suddenly available to us in a way that it wasn't even in science, like even with peer review, right? Like now we can actually ask questions that haven't found funding or they've been rejected by the gatekeeping journals and we can ask weird questions in science now.
And so I'm really curious as far as what insights, what strategies, what opportunities you see in that kind of space that you really feel like more people should know about or like ways of thinking about this that you feel are going to be beneficial for us to adopt more broadly. Strategy, ways of thinking, great. I mean, at some level, like you were saying, this idea of creating local models, there is an opportunity for us to dramatically reduce complexity through the use of applying AI to problems, to problems sets and making sure that all the stakeholders get their opportunity to speak, utilizing technology to survey. One of the biggest challenges we face in solving problems is knowing the right questions to ask.
I don't know if you've seen this, but how often have you been in discussion about a problem and a person who's leading the discussion is just completely ignoring the most important question. Then I find that a lot. And so I think the models A, need to ask the right question. B, they need to include all of the necessary stakeholders.
C, they need to reduce complexity. And that means not necessarily incorporating stakeholders that inherit complexity. So there's like a process that needs to happen in integrating this technology into solving our societal issues. I'd love to see how it will apply in governance.
I'd love to see some mayor stand up and say, we're going to become an AI-powered study from here on out. All of the decisions will be made using these various frameworks and plugging it into whether it's chat GBT or whatever custom model they come up with and see what actually happens with town decisions as a result for that. I'd love to see some case studies and some larger experiments being run. Maybe somebody will do that on their island.
Make it the first AI-powered country. Right? I mean, someone got to do it. And then for us as individuals, this is all going to happen really quickly, especially with AI agents now becoming more readily available.
But I think what will become like an interesting strategy in the next 12 to 18 months is each person creating very specific sets of data, if you will, about their life. So you've got your Michaels got his finance data. And within that data, of course, it's all of the access to your bank account information and you're spending habits in your credit. But then it's also going to be a hard questionnaire that will ask you all of your financial objectives.
And then you'll have this set of data that you allow whatever specific LLM access to to provide you guidance. And you're going to have this across every facet of your life, your career, your personal life. So it's about building kind of the knowledge base of you and making sure that knowledge base is really accurate. And it'll be really interesting to see what companies can incentivize the creation of this, because it's also really important that we have Michaels accurate knowledge base of Taren's accurate knowledge base so that when we start engaging with these community wide problems and larger seat wide problems, now we have these individual knowledge bases that can go on our behalf and advocate for our needs on our behalf.
But it has to be accurate. And so whatever, I don't know what kind of process will all undertake and what company will incentivize as all to build these out. But I think that's necessary to get this right. It strikes me that in saying this, you just hacked your way around the fundamental limitation that has forced us to rely on representative governance in the first place, right?
Well, I couldn't be there. So I don't get to participate in the conversation. And now everybody can go have their twin, permutate every possible conversation with every other member of society. And like something can precipitate out of that.
But that just begs the well, that guy has to be running on my own server, right? I can't. There's so many issues with that. So many issues that have to be solved.
Yeah. Yeah. And the other piece of this, which goes back to education is you and I might think that we have one lead or that we have an objective. And then when we hear the sort of larger implications of a particular issue where that objective may be of interest, we might change our mind about our stance on something or where we sit.
It's all the time with like propositions in voting manuals where people don't, it's so it asks you like a single word in question and doesn't give you any context for the proposition and then you go online and you look up both side arguments and you're like, oh my God, this is crazy. I had no idea what I was voting on. And so that's the other element of this that's really critical is we can't be sending our agents us to advocate for us without understanding what they're advocating for and why and what the implications of that are for ourselves and our communities. We have to have this bean back loop where it's not just our AI agent existing over here.
And we're over here. There has to be the constant dialogue. And I almost wonder if we'll see the value of civic duty brought back in a unique way. Like we don't think about civic duty the way that our parents and grandparents thought about it.
And maybe now that we will actually feel empowered and feel like our knowledge bases, our values, our objectives will be heard by a larger institution will be more incentivized to engage in conversations with our agents to be more informed and to ensure that our agent is representing us appropriately. Yeah. Anyway, I love it. It's super weird, but no, you know, Jamie Joyce, society library.
Oh my God, I have to introduce the two of you. He's working on the AI assisted tools for making enormous complex political debates legible to people so that they can actually revive a sense of citizen participation and like working these learning issues together. I will make sure to introduce the two of you in closing. You asked this question, who deserves more of an opportunity to speak?
Who do you think deserves more of an opportunity to speak? Who do you want to hear on this show that is probably not already super overwhelmed with bids on their attention or is but would have fun in a conversation like this. That's such a great question. I'm so bad with these on the spot answers.
But I would say she need both values because it's your friend of mine. She's awesome. She's deep in the AI ethics conversation, but she's also just got this gracefulness about the way that she approaches hard stuff. I love watching her speak about all of these topics and I recommend her.
Perfect. Well, I will ask for that introduction and I will gladly reach out to anybody else that you think of later that you would recommend and yeah, turn thanks so much. This was a way better conversation than the one we lost. Thanks for your time.
I'm happy. I was like, it was like, the first one was weird. I think we're just like, what if we turn into machines? It's possible.
All right. Have a good one. See ya. Have fun with the therapists.
Thanks again for listening. Humans on the Loop is a listener supported project committed to helping us dream better together. I want to thank my new Patrons KDT, David Williams, VenLets, Brandon McGinney, Frank Crooks, Miley Chapman, David Farington, Dan Gershovich, John Kachuk, and Livestock XKJ3 for throwing in on sub-stack and Patreon. If you liked this episode, dig into the archives and learn more about the perks of membership at humansontheloop.com, where you can find extensive citations, the show's reading list, the interactive knowledge graph, and a link to the Wisdom and Technology Discord server.
Our next dialogue is with Larry Mulstein, former DeepMind researcher and founder of the Technological Love Project on holistic technology and how to embody the best of our humanity in the built environment. Stay tuned and remember, imagination and attention are our greatest natural resources.