What Will The Future Look Like? - Theo Priestley & Bronwyn Williams | Modern Wisdom Podcast 330

Theo Priestley 0:00 Nobody really questions a lot of what is being said. So we all tend to be distracted by the shiny objects and the, the lovely futures that are painted for us, augmented reality. We're gonna live in virtu- with virtual avatars, and spend virtual money and things like that. But no one really sort of questions whether this is actually the best way to resolve or solve some of humanity's biggest challenges.

Chris Williamson 0:24 What's

Chris Williamson 0:25 an anti-futurist?

Theo Priestley 0:27 (laughs) I get asked this all the time. It's a little bit of marketing spin. I think it, it goes to, uh, uh, perhaps Bronwen and I's, um, our, our particular, uh, viewpoint of the future, which is, if you look at the pop culture futurists like Dia- Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, they paint a very specific, uh, uh, version of utopia, which is everyone will merge in, w- merge with machines and become one with the singularity. Um, and my particular take is more akin to I cast a, a large dollop of cynicism, um, on top of all of it, and just, and, and kind of sort of take a step back and say, "Well, is this really, you know, the preferred version that we want to actually prescribe to? And, and why, why should we believe that these two men or these particular futurists who sh- have the loudest voice are the right ones that we should be following?" So my take on futurism or anti-futurism is really a more pragmatic and realistic approach, uh, borne out of the fact I used to be a chief evangelist of a technology company. So I used to put on a lot of the spin and the happy version, you know, happy clappy version and stuff like that, and hug trees. And now I hug trees because, you know, the trees are disappearing, and I realize that, you know, technology is, uh, isn't as, uh, rosy as what other people paint it to be. So I kind of take, um, a very sort of, um, negative stance, in a sense, towards, uh, these particular futures other people want us to, to, to prescribe and, and, and walk towards, uh, with blinkers on, in a sense.

Chris Williamson 2:02 What are your main criticisms of the status quo, the, the dominant guard-

Theo Priestley 2:07 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 2:08 ... ideology for futurism?

Theo Priestley 2:11 Um, s- uh, I, I don't think there are enough younger voices in the room, for one. So my criticism for futurism in general is there aren't enough younger voices in the room. Um, so it tends to be sort of old fuddy-duddy guard, um, that kind of sort of has a very sort of, um, you know, uh, I, I would guess blinkered and old way of manifesting what they believe is a future, uh, f- fit for humanity. The second thing is, uh, which, uh, uh, goes towards Bronwen and I's, um, you know, uh, very sort of strong stance is that nobody really questions, um, I think, a lot of what is being said. So we all tend to be distracted by the shiny objects and the, the lovely futures that are painted for us, augmented reality. We're gonna live in virtu- with virtual avatars and spend virtual money and things like that. But no one really sort of questions whether this is actually the best way to resolve or solve some of humanity's biggest challenges, like poverty, uh, homelessness, you know, inequality, you know, our, our sense of self or what we are worth as people. So, um, I would, you know, my other criticism apart from, let's speak to the younger people behind us who want to take, have a stake in that, um, that future is let's actually stop and question each particular step along the way and just ask, is this the right step that we take? And it goes towards the, you know, the future cone scenario where I think a lot of them are, rather than looking at the preferable future, they're, they're away wandering off, um, along the, um, you know, the, the, the one that they, th- that they kind of prefer themselves. So that is, again, it goes back to that biased view again. This is the one I want, but it's not, might not be the future that everybody wants. And it'd be nice for people to just stop and question that. Go for it. (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 4:02 Yeah, I suppose I have quite a similar view to Theo, but also a little bit more divergence in that my problem with conversations around the future is that they do tend to be imposed from above by the most powerful, wealthiest, best-connected voices in the room, and they tend to be quite binary. They're either selling you on a probable dystopia or on a probable utopia. And that's very, very binary way of thinking. But they both selling you, and that's the key.

Chris Williamson 4:27 Mm-hmm.

Bronwyn Williams 4:27 So people either selling you on inevitable doom and gloom in order to get you to essentially fall under their will to do what they want to do. That's, this is what politicians like to do. They like to talk about the negative only, to sell the fear side of the future so that you kind of listen to what they say and you give up a whole lot of your rights and your agency over where we are headed, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, you've kind of got people more in the private sector selling you on complete, like Theo was saying, this technological utopia, this fully automated luxury communism that awaits us all if, once again, we just fall in line and do what they say and buy what they are selling. And that, for me, is quite a huge problem because both those roads sort of end up in a future where most of us are ending up giving up a whole lot of our agency, a whole lot of our ability to direct and broaden that future cone. And instead of broadening our realm of possibility, because there are, like, almost eight billion of us on the planet. We should have lots of different ideas. Instead we're kind of being funneled into a much narrower idea of where we are headed with a sense of inevitability. And I think that's what we really want to sort of shake people out of. None of this is set. The future starts, as the cover says, now, and it always starts now. We get to choose the next step in every direction that we're headed.

Chris Williamson 5:41 So interesting that when you think about futurism as an area of research, that the more that people become dogmatic, the less interesting futurism is, that you're constraining your own futures by f- putting your colors to one particular flagpole or another. And, um, there's not many things where the person that has the most clout or the most power or the most convincing advertising campaign doesn't end up winning, right? So I suppose that it is important for people to just...And you are trying to encourage them to do it, in this book as well, to think about what sort of a future they want, as opposed to just listening to people who ostensibly don't... I don't, can you have a qualification in the future? I don't really think so. I think that people, it's, it's ours to create, right? That's why we're sovereign individuals. So you go through a, a ton of different examples, different areas in the book, and, uh, I wanna go through some of those today. So the first one, (laughs) uh, making it nice and positive, was warfare, the future of warfare. (laughs) .

Bronwyn Williams 6:39 (laughs) . Yeah, that sounds about right.

Chris Williamson 6:41 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 6:43 (laughs) .

Theo Priestley 6:43 Well, it's interesting. I mean, Kristina, um, Kristina Levy from, uh, Hypergiant wrote that one, um, and she's got a particular viewpoint. And, and I, I, and I think it prescribes to a lot of what other people sort of think as well, which is, is become- warfare is becoming fully automated, which means our input and our agency, uh, and our, and our, our, uh, I guess, the humanity side of, uh, if there is a human, the human side of-

Chris Williamson 7:07 The humane side of killing each other, yeah, exactly.

Theo Priestley 7:08 ... the humane side of warfare. Where, where was I gonna go with that one, I wonder? Um, you know, that side has actually been completely taken away, and, and, we, you know, we have examples of robot- you know, robotic warfare, we have drone warfare, and things like that, and we're giving up all of that decision-making to, um, algorithms. So there's that side. Um, and then there's also the cyber warfare, which is the eternal war against, um, people hacking, uh, various mach- you know, um, our computers, our infrastructure, our utilities, uh, to hold us to ransom. Um, and so warfare kind of, sort of takes many forms, and in the future, obviously, you've got that technological layer upon it, which kind of, sort of makes it even more dystopian than, than it is, I guess. Um, but it also allows people to... Uh, I guess the attack vector suddenly becomes a lot more, uh, wider and broader because everybody can, can take a little stab at it. You have script kiddies writing little algorithms that are polymorphic and, and suddenly become virus that take over. You know, I've seen... And, and cryptocurrency is, uh, is quite an interesting one right now because obviously it's supposed to be this, you know, um, decentralized, uh, pot o' wealth of money, um, that, uh, you ha- you have your wallet, nobody can hack into it and things like that. And what we're finding is that, uh, you know, all this money is disappearing in left, right, and center because there are holes even in, in something as, uh, you know, as, as, um, a- as complex, uh, as decentralized finance. So it's, um, i- it's interesting. I think our, like I said, our attack vector is becoming broader even though we think it should be actually shrinking through technology, so...

Bronwyn Williams 8:48 Yeah, and decentralized finance sounds quite, quite nice, but decentralized warfare suddenly should give us all pause for thought-

Chris Williamson 8:53 Yeah. (laughs) .

Bronwyn Williams 8:53 ... and this is what technology is doing. It's democratizing all sorts of things, not necessarily just things we want to have democratized. It's asking us to ask very different questions. I think Kristina's chapter is quite important in that it also shows how warfare is almost becoming de-civilized. So what we source throughout sort of like the history of warfare is it started off being an individual versus an individual, then we sort of outsourced the fighting to soldiers, and they would fight each other. But now what's happening is we've got soldiers and machines that are going after civilians again. So you kind of de-civilized that process, and if you actually look at what's going on in the Middle East, if you look at s- what's happening with- out- out in the, the eastern side of Europe and what's happening as like- (laughs) . ... what's bumping into each other in the, on the far sides of Asia too, is that it seems to be like centralized control, whether that's power or money, because of course some of these are private armies (laughs) that are involving these, these various different automated machines, are now using them as a form of terror against civilians. So civilians now become part of warfare once again. So it is a conversation that we all have to be aware of because these things are out the bottle, and it's not just drones as, oh, and cyber technology, it's also of course all the bio-warfare which we have to be very, very aware of. It only takes one guy, and it's a lot easier to make a hugely destructive civilization-ending bioweapon in your garage than it is to make a nuclear bomb. (laughs) . So we have to be very, very aware of these things and we have to start thinking again around these ideas of centralization, decentralization, and how, again, the path is probably somewhere in between the two of them, that there are some benefits to sometimes having central control over very, very dangerous things and ideas.

Chris Williamson 10:32 That's the problem, right? As you democratize technology, and more people have access to increasingly greater powers of destruction, what you end up with is previously the, the worst damage that anybody could cause was with a knife or a sword, but that same person can now 3D print themselves a gun if they have the resources for it, and then you just continue to roll the clock forward. And you go, right, okay, so in 500 years time, what is the most basic thing that anyone can do? I can make my own rocket ship. Well, fantastic. Now, how are we going to police that? How are we going to be able to control that? Nick Bostrom has this example where he talks about how it could have been the way that physics was constructed in this universe, that if you put sand in a microwave, it made an atomic bomb. Now by the quirk of chemistry and physics that we have, that isn't the case, but it's not that it couldn't have been the case, and as you continue to pull these urn- the balls out of the urn, right, each one of them could be something that's really, really bad, but it could be something that's just sufficiently accessible enough...

Theo Priestley 11:28 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 11:28 ... to cause some damage. And that's, yeah, as you've got a society that's ever growing, you have people feeling disaffected, you know, the difference between, I think it's the, um, school killings that you get in Japan or China perhaps, are people going around with a knife, whereas how much destruction can you do there versus how much destruction can you see in America? And again, you just continue to roll that forward, some unfortunate disaffected person trying to damage the world around them, and, um, yeah, it makes for a, it makes for a scary future. So what do we do? How do we protect ourselves?

Bronwyn Williams 12:02 ... probably starting to see is we're seeing a resurgence of essentially a kind of a digitized version of sort of serfdom that we're kind of seeing emerging in front of our eyes, like Theo was talking about the world of crypto too. And what that is doing is empowering vast amounts of wealth into very small individual hands. Again, sort of decentralization has come full circle back to sort of centralization of massive amounts of power in the world.

Chris Williamson 12:22 The Winkl- the Winklevoss twins currently-

Theo Priestley 12:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:25 ... ruling half of the, the universe of crypto. Yeah, exactly.

Bronwyn Williams 12:28 Yeah, exactly. Or Elon Musk and abilities to, like, move markets and devastate small children across the world.

Chris Williamson 12:33 Just wipe a trillion, a trillion dollars off the cryptocurrency market, yeah, precisely.

Theo Priestley 12:37 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 12:37 So it's like we've created quite an unstable system there, but what it's pointing to when you tie that together with the ability of people to literally develop private armies is you end up with a world where more and more of us are going to be looking for, essentially, protection from private players rather than from our states. Because at the same time that private hands are developing a whole lot of power due to decentralization, states are, at the same time, losing that power, losing that monopoly over violence, over currency, which is heading to quite a destabilizing point in society, almost like a new sort of Hobbesian state of nature that we're going to have to find a new equilibrium in. But the way we find that balance against those rogue agents is to essentially attach ourselves to the protection of people who have the means, the money, and the, the guns and weapons, essentially, to protect us. And that's, that's the sort of the, that's the unspoken, but kind of a spoken base case future that we're sort of stumbling into-

Chris Williamson 13:34 Wow.

Bronwyn Williams 13:34 ... whether you're looking at the sort of prophecies of the World Economic Forum or whether you're listening to what the powerful, mainly men in crypto are saying, they're essentially pointing us in that direction once you start to connect the dots. And this is why we want people involved with the conversation because then this isn't inevitable yet. If that doesn't fill you with joy, now is the time to say that, you know, there's a place for, for both regulation and education in trying to solve our very, very messy, very, very wicked human problems. I myself do lean towards more liberty and less rules, but at the same time, I've met people, and I think that as much as I don't like rules to apply to me, I- I'm quite kind of in favor of them applying to, to other people.

Chris Williamson 14:14 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 14:14 So I recognize that hypocrisy. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:18 Yeah, I, um...

Chris Williamson 14:20 It seems almost like a world in which similar to how the American healthcare system is set up, where you have healthcare insurance, it might be a fact that you need to pay for some sort of digital private security, some physical private security, and then you've actually got a market for these sort of mercenary protection for hire companies almost, you know, to-

Bronwyn Williams 14:43 Yeah, funny you say that. (laughs)

Theo Priestley 14:44 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:44 Uh, yes, what did we see this week?

Bronwyn Williams 14:46 I, I, I say... I live in South Africa. We've had private security and private healthcare and private education for even the middle classes and the lower middle classes. Our private school education costs less than a state education, although we have essentially or theoretically free state education. It doesn't actually play out in the real world and we pay for our own security. I live in a, in a state complex so we have armed guards at the gate. We have a compound. This is like how I've grown up, so it's quite normal to me. I'm like, South Africa is a preview of this very neo-feudal future we're sort of stumbling into. And then just this week, we've seen a couple of companies out in Los Angeles where the whole Defund the Police movement has gained quite a lot of popular support. At the same time, you've got rich people who are now investing in a sort of tech startup for on-demand, this sort of, you know, e-hailing version of private security, which as-

Chris Williamson 15:33 No way.

Bronwyn Williams 15:33 ... a South African, I know very well.

Theo Priestley 15:36 Yeah.

Bronwyn Williams 15:36 But this is shocking Americans, people-

Chris Williamson 15:37 Is this like Uber, Uber for goons with guns? Is that what it is?

Theo Priestley 15:40 Yeah. Yeah. Vigilantes for hire.

Bronwyn Williams 15:42 People are given now the right, the right to arrest people. So yeah, I've seen the future. (laughs) It's not all it's cracked up to be-

Chris Williamson 15:50 Everyone's-

Bronwyn Williams 15:50 ... if you think very, very consciously about these things.

Chris Williamson 15:52 Everyone's going to be South Africa.

Chris Williamson 15:54 That's terrifying. And the fact that we're all laughing about it as well is purely because it's so ridiculous and terrifying, there's no other outlet for the emotion. You just say, "Well, I've, I've, I've got to laugh at it because the alternative would be to break down in despair in the corner and just weep."

Theo Priestley 16:08 Well, that's actually quite an interesting point because the natural reaction is to go, "Oh, how stupid. This will never happen. Blah, blah, blah."

Chris Williamson 16:16 Yeah.

Theo Priestley 16:16 And of course, our apathy towards the shock and the awe and, um... It- it is, is, is becoming normalized to the, to the point where it just happens under our feet. And then the next day you wake up, you know, um, you've got armed guards and people posting leaflets going, "Would you like protection going to work?" kind of sort of thing. And it's like, when did this happen? Well, of course, we, we stood laughing about it last week-

Chris Williamson 16:38 Yeah.

Theo Priestley 16:38 ... but you, you missed the bullet in where you, where you had the opportunity to say, "No, I don't want this." And again, it goes back to the book. You know, you have a stake in the future. Instead of, you know, being apathetic about it, actually stand up and, and say, "Yes, this is fine for me. No, I don't want this for me."

Chris Williamson 16:56 What about transportation? What did you learn about that?

Theo Priestley 16:59 Um, flying cars. I think Doug writes about flying cars. (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 17:03 You're not gonna have one. (laughs)

Theo Priestley 17:05 Yeah, and you're not going to have one anytime soon.

Bronwyn Williams 17:06 Well, you're not going to own one. You might get to ride in one. (laughs)

Theo Priestley 17:11 (laughs) Um, I think it's... Transportation's an intre- um... You know, I'm going to bob and weave on this one as well because I saw, uh, an interesting, uh, video where, um, in China, they were trialing, um, what they called, uh, an autonomous, uh, vehicle which drove along the road. Um, essentially, China invented the bus. But the way that they painted it was that there was this autonomous vehicle that had many carriages that drove along the road and followed the path of the road. And I just thought, well, hang on a minute. I've, I've, you know, I've, I've kind of had these in Edinburgh for, you know, 50, 100 years now, you know, and so have many other countries. But because it's autonomous, um, all of a sudden it's something new. And, and what... So generally what we do, what we find is a lot of ideas have been recycled for one-... um, on the transportation side, we're not gonna see flying cars. What you will see is autonomous taxi drones, for example, where there will be either single passenger or s- multi-passenger, maybe two, three, four family size. Nothing like a flying bus, let's put it that way. But, uh, again, f- you know, not for the general public, I would say, um, for one. So for the uber-rich and for the rich who, who can afford to sort of call a taxi to their, to their acreage in the backyard and take them up to the skyscraper penthouse suite, that's fine. For the rest of us, it's hoofing it down to the bottom of the streets again.

Chris Williamson 18:43 Surely, that would be democratized down, though, as the technology becomes more widespread. You're gonna inevitably end up, if there's a market, therefore, you're going to continue to drop the price and drop the price and drop the price until you can match supply and demand.

Theo Priestley 18:55 Yeah, but at the same time, I mean, you find all these techn- you know, all these sort of technological shifts and innovations are always trialed and built for specific cities in mind. Um, and so you have them, th- th- they're, you know, for, for, uh, Tesla and things like, and autonomous transportation, it's always, it's always trialed and built for American roads where it's very long, very straight, huge, cavernous roads, um, and it's all grid-like patterns. Now, if you, if you come to s- a city like Edinburgh-

Chris Williamson 19:24 Edinburgh, yeah, precisely. (laughs)

Theo Priestley 19:26 Yeah. Yeah, or Newcastle or something like that, it's just not gonna work, and we're not... And we certainly don't have the buildings or the infrastructure or even, you know, the technical infrastructure as well to, one, uh, support electric- electrification, two, our roads are so bad that, you know, you would never want an autonomous vehicle to even attempt to drive it. And then three-

Chris Williamson 19:45 Landing on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, yeah, exactly.

Theo Priestley 19:47 Oh, that's it. That's about it. It just goes up and down in a straight line, and that's great. The rest of it, just forget it. Oh, no, another pothole. (laughs) You know, and, and then, and then flying vehicles or, or ta- or flying drone taxis kinda sorta thing, again, you've got that kind of, uh, we don't have even the... You know, are we gonna have, like, mini, um, air traffic control systems all over the place? Because every city is built different, um, all the infrastructure. You know, the fact that we don't have double-decker trains in the UK is because we built, you know, like in Amsterdam, uh, or in the Netherlands is because our rail structure, we have low bridges 'cause they never even considered it. So all we could do is just make trains extra long rather than doubling them up and having, doubling the capacity a different way, and it's the same with, like, uh, taxi infrastructure or flying infrastructure or electrifications as well. Some cities have been built a specific way that they just even didn't even think about that at all in the future. And so it's gonna be very difficult to overlay some advanced technological innovation onto a really crumbling old sort of Victorian infrastructure.

Chris Williamson 20:57 Yeah, that- that's the problem of having a country as old as ours in the UK, right? It's all well and good looking at Dubai and seeing that, oh, well, you don't really have the, the history that we do, or America and you say, "Well, you've existed for 250 years. The oldest building that you've got doesn't really matter, and we've got all of this beautiful history." But we also have roads that were designed by three-year-olds-

Theo Priestley 21:17 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 21:17 ... that had too many E numbers, you know-

Theo Priestley 21:19 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 21:19 ... that had too much glucose and got let loose with a Sharpie pen, and it's squiggles and all over the place. I mean,

Chris Williamson 21:26 to, to sing the song for the techno-optimists in this, it seems to me like it's just, it's a coding problem. You just need to come up with a sufficiently scalable advanced algorithm that would be able to work out and negotiate with the other vehicles that are around and can be s- sufficiently, um, understanding of the different types of landscapes.

Bronwyn Williams 21:48 In theory, yes. When it comes to the, the issues of autonomous vehicles in general and flying autonomous vehicles in particular, what's really holding us back is not actually the technology so much as it is the people, because we tend to forget about this. So just because it can be done doesn't mean it will be allowed to be done. The thing with autonomous vehicles is the regulatory and legal absolute nightmare, and we have become a very timid species. We no longer like risk. So the great analogy is if we invented the motorcar for the first time this year in the year of fear and loathing across the planet, would we have allowed anyone to get in a vehicle that goes at 120 kilometers an hour? You know, (laughs) I don't think so. You see, we've just got to a point where we are very, very afraid of each other. We sue each other for all sorts of things, and we have allowed probably too much red tape and too much safety-ism to have crept into our society. So I don't know if there's a will to get, you know, general mass transport autonomous vehicles off the ground. That's the first thing. The second thing is, of course, that flying cars, in particular, do require quite a lot of space. So once again, if you're in a very big city, it's not accessible for everyone to use these things. You know, there's only so much rooftop space that you can land on, so you can imagine the sort of queues out the elevators instead of sort of queues on the pavement for, for taxis. There's simply less space for these things to actually pick people up. So what you get to is a point where essentially the same sort of people who are able to use helicopters right now get to use these things instead. But the other regulatory issue that's going to slow this down, even if we are able to overcome all the technological challenges, is the eco movement and the fact that even if these things are running on renewable energy, they still have a higher carbon footprint than your bicycle. And I live in South Africa, but I have noticed with big eyes and a slight amount of laughter how Europe is pushing back on any sorts of progress and is regressing to basically the fastest speed that they, that one is encouraged to go at is the speed of basically a two-speed bicycle. So we have to understand that this is the society that these things are being launched into, which is why there's a very different future ahead for your sort of aging, perhaps sort of paler, colder nations up north than there are for perhaps some of the more vibrant, younger economies that have not yet lost their nerve, so to speak, which is quite an interesting thing for me to say. But living in South Africa, we're kind of at the, the melting point of all these different worldviews from East, West, North, and South, and there's a very different...... tint on the future coming out of those societies.

Chris Williamson 24:19 That's super interesting, the fact that culturally we have muted our desire for rapid growth. Uh, there's a lot of... I had Alex Epstein on the show recently, who is a pro-fossil fuels philosopher and researcher, and he was talking about human racism, as he calls it, which is the hatred of our own race, and this is, you talk about destroying the planet and using fossil fuels incorrectly and so on and so forth. You guys should love him. You should really check out his stuff. Um, I wonder whether... You know the valley of despair that people have as part of-

Bronwyn Williams 24:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 24:49 ... a learning curve? I wonder if there's an equivalent with the valley of comfort that we've managed to get to now. So previously, all of our problems were problems of scarcity, not problems of abundance. We've now flipped that on its head. It's problems of abundance, not scarcity. There could be more comfort, more abundance down the road, but I wonder whether we think, "Well, it's all right now. This feels okay to me. I don't need more convenient travel. I don't need more whatever it might be, X, Y, and Z. So we'll just stick here, that we've reached a point pre-" You know, I don't think, I think it would have been difficult to have justified 1,000 years ago not continuing to develop all of the things that we've had to, but now we get to a stage where you think, "Okay, so I feel all right as a normal person. I don't really have too many problems, so why bother?"

Bronwyn Williams 25:40 Yeah, comfort definitely slows us down from progress, but I think that's also quite a, sort of first world sort of perspective. Like, I think there's a lot of people who require quite a lot of growth in my corner of the world, and I still am on the more privileged corner of the African continent. So I think that what I've definitely noticed, particularly with people that work professionally in this sort of futures space and the policy space is that we're getting messages of not just, "We have enough," coming from Europe and from "the greater West", if you want to sort of use that sort of summary, but actually pushes towards things like de-growth, actually saying we should have less. But at the same time, uh, us sitting in Africa are saying, "Uh, we can't actually do with less. We actually need quite a lot more." So there is quite a big, a big conflict emerging there, and I thought it was quite interesting, I actually got yelled at on Twitter today for, for commenting on how there's messages coming out of, again, Europe saying that the children are bad for the planet, so you shouldn't have any. I mean, like, that's a really privileged point of view to actually start telling people that people are bad, we should save the planet for these people that aren't going to be born, right? Who are we saving it for (laughs) ?

Chris Williamson 26:43 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 26:43 I find, I find it quite, quite a lot of irony in any sort of de-growth messaging. It just riles me completely the wrong way. We need to be finding ways to sort of leave this place better than we found it, but also to progress to something new, because stagnation is just death. I mean, when we stop changing, that's literally the definition of death in some (laughs) , in some terms. So we have to be optimistic about these things. Otherwise, we do sort of coil, coil into a little ball and start preaching de-growth, and, you know, there are anti-natalist movements, which is about as, about as pessimistic as you can get in terms of humanity. But we're there already, and these movements are growing right now. Deaths of despair are increasing-

Chris Williamson 27:21 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 27:21 ... and deaths from suicide are now more common than deaths from homicide at a global level. These things should all give us pause for thought about how pessimistic we've become as a species. Even if we pretend otherwise, we're not acting like we're optimistic, and I find that quite shocking, because all the trends are generally pointing up. We should be quite excited. It's quite a good time to be around. In fact, you look at the general lottery of life, if you didn't know where you were gonna be born or to which parents, and you were told you could pick a date, this would be a pretty good bet. I mean, I pro- I don't know if I want to pick a date further back in history. The chances of having a decent life today anywhere in the world are greater than they were at any point previously in history. But we've completely misplaced our optimism. I'm not quite sure why that is. Maybe it's because we're too comfortable. Maybe it's because we are just a little bit... We're just naturally dissatisfied, envious species. I don't know. Maybe you've got some thoughts, Theo (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 28:15 .

Theo Priestley 28:15 Um, I'll, I'll, I'll go back to my, uh, my, my thoughts around apathy. Um, we have become an apathetic species, but I think... And, and maybe falling into that comfort zone. But I think it's, it's also a question of distraction as well. So we... A, a lot of the technology that we have today, around us today is built to distract. So we, uh, you know, generally, um, uh, we... I agree with Bronwyn that we are actually living in a, in a period of time where things are abundant, and we are actually in a better state than we have, ever have been in, in the past. But people are apathetic to actually f- want to find out that information and those facts for themselves, and instead are fed that information, th- the negative side of that information, which is, "Oh, woe is me. Everything is doom and gloom. This is the worst we've ever been. This is the worst state that humanity's ever been in," and they're fed that point of view. And because there are, are, they are in a comfort zone, and they are also apathetic, um, they don't want to find out any other information around that. Is that the right point of view? Do I just accept? "Well, I can't be bothered." You know, "Oh, someone's posted something on Facebook. Oh, there's a new TikTok. Here we go. This, this'll, uh, this'll distract me from the truth and what's actually happening in the world today." And, and I think this is quite an i- an interesting but also dangerous place that we're in right now, which is that there's a lot of people sleepwalking into the future, um, at the moment, and, uh, and, and completely unaware of all the good things that are happening in the world today, uh, but completely besotted with all the bad things, because these are the things that the algorithms love to s- s- uh, serve up, because it keeps us in that kind of benign state.

Chris Williamson 29:57 Yeah. From the valley of despair to the comfort zone of apathy, we've managed to-

Theo Priestley 30:01 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 30:01 ... switch those around (laughs) . What about work? What's the future of work looking like? Are we all going on universal basic income? Are robots taking our jobs? What's happening?

Theo Priestley 30:10 Neither (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 30:13 Those were the two... Those were the only two doors that I had to go behind, Theo.

Theo Priestley 30:17 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 30:18 What's happening there?

Theo Priestley 30:19 (laughs) Um, I, so I, I, I think, well, I'll let Bronwen speak on, uh, on some of this as well. But my p- my thoughts are, you know, uh, robots aren't gonna take our job. I think what they're gonna do is augment certain functions that we perform and hopefully allow us to do other things, um, and allow us to explore other sides of humanity. This is what I would like to see. Um, certainly, you know, I spoke about it in a TED Talk I, I did a couple of years back as well on that kind of front. You know, will, will we ever follow a robot leader or will we actually do, learn to be humans again? Um, and I would like to see this kind of golden age or a renaissance where people discov- rediscover the arts and humanities and, and, and go and paint something just because, not because there's no money in it, but because I actually want to explore that side for myself and be creative. Um, I would like to see, you know, the autonomy and the augmentation allow us to switch to something like a three or a four-day week rather than speeding up the productivity, but filling in that five days again so we don't escape it. I would like to see us escape that a little bit. Um, on the, the other door, which I've completely forgotten which one (laughs) , oh, universal basic income. Um, I always find it really interesting that the biggest supporters and the biggest and the loudest voices of universal basic income are the ones that are, are, are, um, are setting us up for these kind of sort of traps of automation and, and, um, and, and, and putting us in that particular state to want universal basic income. So the Bill Gates and the, uh, and the Elon Musks and all that kind of sort of thing, if you look at their history, their history has all been about software and automation and, and, you know, Jeff Bezos and things like that, and, and making us work harder and faster to the point where, um, uh, but giving us nothing in return to the point that we actually need more to survive. And they're the biggest supporters of it, and you g- you have to question whether it is a completely flawed system in the first place as a result of that.

Bronwyn Williams 32:18 Yeah, so in terms of sort of universal basic income, I think it's, it follows on quite nicely from our conversation on degrowth. It's always amusing to me that rich young men in Silicon Valley are the ones that want to preach to us about why we should accept a, "Please, sir, can I have some more universal basic income" future. At the same time, it's also quite ironic that it's rich old men in political power in Europe that are trying to sell us on ideas of degrowth, which incidentally leads to the same point, because a lot of the degrowth idea is about making do with less, about job sharing, about, like you were talking about, Theo, four-day work weeks, which is still, I think, the wrong way to look at this, because they're still talking about sort of master/slave, owner/employee type relationships. Where we're actually heading is into a post-job world, but not a post-work world. And there's quite a big distinction there. Jobs are an artifact of the Industrial Revolution. Before that, people were either literally serfs or they were hand-to-mouth sort of subsistence farmers. You worked for yourself by yourself, or you were kind of a slave and you didn't really have a choice. We don't really wanna go back to that, but that's kind of what I'm seeing is going to happen, because I don't see much difference from being a serf that has to till the physical land in order to get your allowance from the owner of the means of production compared to being a digital serf that has to, you know, either fall into the jobs works program of your sort of MMT-toting heterodox economists in the West, or to ask very nicely for your tech overlords to hand you an allowance or to increase your alliance- allowance at the end of every month. Essentially, as long as your ability to survive is dependent on someone else, he who sort of feeds you owns you. So I don't see any sort of universal basic income time, type proposal as being anything other tha- than a Band-Aid over a very failed society. What we are actually working towards, and I'm, I'm a bit more optimistic about this than perhaps Theo would be, we are working towards a post-job world. Jobs are less and less attractive, particularly to young people. Even in my country, which has some of the highest employment an- and inequality rates in the world, young people don't want bullshit jobs. They want good jobs, or they prefer not to have a job at all. And this makes a lot of sense, but of course, you can't have a society where more people are dependent on the state or a handout than are independent of it. So the only way to sort of resolve that tension is for more people to become independent or to become gainfully unemployed as, as is actually someone like myself, and I think, Theo, you've been gainfully unemployed for, (laughs) for a large part of your career too.

Theo Priestley 34:55 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 34:56 Which comes with a lot less security than a universal basic income or a salary would give you, but it also actually comes with a lot more freedom, and it comes with the ability for you to manage your own time and to sort of not work to live, you know, but, but to enjoy the work that you're doing. And work then becomes a value equation whereby we have to find ways, as the challenge to individuals, to add value to society. And if we don't, we are going to end up in a neo-serfdom type relationship where we are dependent on someone else for handouts that can be changed, removed, or have added Ts and Cs added to it, which is what should scare us the most.

Theo Priestley 35:31 Mm-hmm.

Bronwyn Williams 35:31 'Cause universal basic incomes are going to be attached to things like your health care and to a whole lot of rules that come with it. I mean, we've got smart toilets now, so if you're going to have your universal basic income and your universal basic healthcare, you have to follow the rules. You're going to lose your privileges, right? So your toilet's going to know when you've been eating badly or when you haven't been going to the gym, and it's going to tell on you. And that's a very sort of crass example, but that's the world we're kind of working towards. We have to understand, as long as we're getting stuff for free, we are the product, even if we're getting it for free from our state, whatever that case might be. So the alternative is to find a way to actually add value to s- to your society. And ironically, many, many people in salaried jobs are not adding value to society. That's quite harsh words, but I'm sure many of us have met the permafrost layers, the management layers in organizations, who are sort of collecting their check, passing go, collect check end of every month without adding value to the organization. And those people are going to find themselves out of a job. They're going to find themselves out of a job and out of work, because unless you found a way to add value to society, you are going to be someone else's, essentially, property.

Chris Williamson 36:37 But not everyone is built to be a creator of some kind, adding ... We, we need to have... The reason that you have stratified levels within organizations is that there are people with varying degrees of conscientiousness and intelligence and abilities and so on and so forth. So what are you gonna do for the people at the bottom of that, or at the bottom half of that?

Bronwyn Williams 36:59 I'm not too worried about the people at the bottom. Most of the people at the bottom of our societies and our economic ladders are actually essential workers. They were the people that were still working last year when we were all in lockdown. They weren't earning much money, but they were essential to society, which means they are actually adding value. The sort of people that aren't adding value tend to be your over-privileged, over-paid, white-collar workers in good jobs. After all, the definition of a good job is being paid more than you are worth. So let that settle in to everyone that's listening and it feels like you, you ended up last year richer than you started out, even though you didn't work too hard and you knew it.

Chris Williamson 37:31 That wasn't me. My furlough payment was shit. (laughs) Um, but if you think about presumably the people at the bottom of that ladder are also the ones whose jobs are going to be close to the easiest to automate. So...

Theo Priestley 37:42 Not necessarily.

Bronwyn Williams 37:43 Not, not so. Not so at all.

Chris Williamson 37:44 Okay. Tell me about it.

Bronwyn Williams 37:45 Because any job that involves your hands, that involves your hands or your eyes or a physical part of your body is much harder to automate. These are jobs in roles like caring. And caring is of course going to be one of the biggest industries coming forward as our populations age and we're running out of young people, as we're talking about sort of population de-growth across vast swaths of our globe. Those jobs are going to increase. Things like being a pastor or personal trainer are gonna do just fine. So in other words, if you're touching people, either spiritually or emotionally or physically-

Theo Priestley 38:13 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 38:13 ... you're gonna be okay. And they're much harder to automate. It's much more difficult and much more expensive to create a machine to pour a cup of coffee than it is to create a piece of code that can copy your insurance adjuster, your financial advisor's advice. So even within those roles, that's why financial advisors are having to shift from selling products to actually giving you coaching and mentorship around your financial status. So you've gotta find where you're actually adding value and where you're just being a cost to the people who are paying your bills. And there are portions and places to add value in every different industry or job function, but you have to find them 'cause too many of us and too many of our industries are built on essentially being sort of toll keepers and collecting rents.

Chris Williamson 38:58 Is there enough room for everybody to step into this?

Bronwyn Williams 39:02 Yeah. I mean, if you, if you, if you want to know if there's enough room for everybody to either be a creator or to add value, just go look at, look at the people who are making a living selling their mediocre NFTs right now. There's a buyer for everything.

Chris Williamson 39:17 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 39:19 As long as you can persuade someone else it's valuable to them, that's gonna be good, but don't think you're gonna get a salary from it. That is going to shift. I do think salaries are going to be something that you don't want. Salary jobs are going to be the sort of jobs you don't want to have, only the desperate will be taking going forward.

Chris Williamson 39:35 What about s-

Bronwyn Williams 39:35 Good people will charge their own amounts. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 39:37 What about space travel? Space travel's like the frontier of futurism, right? What's, what's, what's the future of space travel got in store for us?

Bronwyn Williams 39:45 It's gonna happen.

Theo Priestley 39:46 Yeah.

Bronwyn Williams 39:46 Finally. (laughs)

Theo Priestley 39:48 W- whether we, uh, whether we set up a, a settlement on Mars or the moon in the next 50 years is something completely different. Um, uh, it's interesting. I saw the, um, is, what's it called? Is it Artemis or Gateway? It's called Gateway. Um, Gateway, which is like the, uh, the lunar basically, the I- the lunar version of the ISS. And it's gonna serve as some sort of hub for, to, to, to shuttle, you know, rich folk to the moon and back and, or to the Mars and back, and act as a staging post. And it'll be permanently manned and things like that. And it always makes me laugh 'cause you see these programs like The Expanse and Star Trek and Star Wars, and they, they paint, you, you know, The Expanse is probably the closest, um, vision of the future, and it's certainly a very dystopian one anyway. Um, but at the same time, it still doesn't paint a very realistic picture in, in the sense that space is very hard. So failure is always gonna be on a big scale. So at some point, you know, when Elon Musk boards his space rocket, there's gonna be a tiny part of him that's gonna be shitting his pants because that payload might go up in his face. So for one, it, there's a big risk there. Two, living in space is actually really, really hard on the human body. If you've ever seen an astronaut coming back down from ISS after a 200-day stay, they are literally crippled. They have muscle atrophied. Um, they can barely stand on their own. Now, if you can imagine us, im- you know, saying, "Oh, I'm gonna live on Mars," which has, you know, a different set of atmospheres, a different set of gravity, and the same on the moon as well, and then thinking about the journey to get there, having a little two-week holiday, and then the journey to get back to Earth, for example, uh, you know, uh, that's gonna wreck the human body. Um, and I just don't think that the species at this point in time and technologically we're advanced enough to be settling. So it's essentially a one-way trip. The other thing as well is if you notice the, the complaints from the astronomy point of view, um, of Starlink as well. So at the moment, we are literally lit- littering the skies with satellites, with little bits of space junk as well. And it's becoming harder and harder for us to actually track, I believe. And then I think in the future, we'll see this sort of scenario where WALL-E got it right, where the, the earth is literally cocooned by all these dead satellites, so just this, this horrible, you know, cocoon of metal. And it's gonna become evermore increasing risk to actually travel to the stars until we sort that out as well. So there are inherent, you know, there are known risks which are, you know, space is hard. Ev- the, the, the financial side is incredible. Failure is spectacular. Um, and it's really hard on the human body. And then you've got all the, all the, uh, actual physical risks in terms of, you know, risk to the body. You've got the risks of, um, space and space junk up there. You've got radiation as well, um, from, you know, from the, from the sun and from space in general. Um, it's, it's not gonna be an easy thing. Um, uh, and I, I wish people would read up a little bit more rather than looking at the fanciful renders and, uh, the, the movies out there that paint a, a very utopian version of, uh, what life is gonna be like, um, because it's gonna be indentured servitude, um, and one-way trips for the people who, who actually want to pay to get there.

Chris Williamson 43:17 Presumably, though, if the people that are going are the ones that have the money, if the companies that are giving the service to them are refining their payloads and their rockets and the technology that they use and everything else, if you want to repurpose people that have too much money as money to companies that want to take their money to research it, to make... essentially democratize or at least bring the cost down for future space travel, surely that's a good thing.

Theo Priestley 43:47 Oh, I mean, uh, this... this is no different to Chris Columbus and all these other people who built a boat, financed the boat, and then thought, you know, "Sod it, let's take a chance. Stick, you know, fill this boat up with some, uh, intrepid people and let's go and explore the brave new world." You know, it's exactly the same thing, but just on a completely different scale. Um, so those pe- you know, to the, to the victor go the spoils, in a sense. You know, the people who set foot on Mars, who, or the moon, who build the first colony, survive, propagate, you know, the world, you know, th- they'll, they'll be known as the pioneers, the true pioneers. You know, u- at the moment, we're at this kind of sort of weird stage where everyone, everyone believes, uh, that this crazy guy who claims he has autism is the, is the future of mankind, um, and I think we just need a bit more, um, realism injected into that vision first. But, but certainly, you know, the, the... it's, um, it's a, it's a grand prize, uh, you know, n- no bones about it. This one's a grand prize, but it's certainly a... it's certainly gonna take real pioneers to get there.

Chris Williamson 44:57 You're not a fan of Elon Musk?

Bronwyn Williams 44:58 But he's not gonna stop trying.

Theo Priestley 45:00 Um, he, um... (sighs) Do you know what? I, I... He's an interesting character. I'm not a great fan of him. I, I think there are flashes of brilliance in what he does sometimes, you know, uh, in, you know, Te- what he's done with Tesla off, off the back of workers, I might add. It's not just him. Um, you know, tents full of people sweating their arses off to get cars out the door with shoddy panels, um, and things like that. But, you know, uh, you know, um, and then what he's done with SpaceX I think is fantastic in terms of lowering the cost and democratizing that, and taking that away from, you know, agency control where it's just we have to just trust NASA to do it all kind of sort of thing. He's now commercialized space. Um, but I think the, um... I, I think he kind of brings himself down with all the weird stuff that he gets on with, an old crypto thing and the odd tweets and getting into... You know, instead of picking up the phone, he should maybe just like pick up the next sketchbook and do something, you know, and do something wonderful again, you know, like his namesake, you know, on, on, on his, uh, you know, on his company logo, Tesla, you know, dream up some big, wonderful ideas again. You know, ra- uh, The Boring Company, another classic example. "I'm gonna tunnel under the earth and, and take away all the congestion, and there's gonna be automated highways under the ground," and in the end, it was just a tunnel that you drive through with flashing lights that would probably give you a headache-

Chris Williamson 46:26 (laughs)

Theo Priestley 46:26 ... you know, and trigger off an epileptic fit and cause a crash.

Chris Williamson 46:29 (laughs)

Theo Priestley 46:29 So, you know, (laughs) sometimes he does something fantastic and, and then, you know, three out of four times, you know, he just, he just c- is a complete

Theo Priestley 46:39 dick.

Chris Williamson 46:39 Yeah, it's interesting thinking about people like that. I often think about the price that we need to pay to be the people that we admire, and, you know, if the byproduct of having democratized space travel and commercialized it so that people can go up and the future generations... You know, at these inflection points earlier in the development of technology, you are setting the tone so much more importantly than you would be down the line, because you're essentially opening up different branches of potential futures, right, when you do this thing. And if the price that we need to pay is to have, like, the Donald Trump of tech-

Theo Priestley 47:10 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 47:12 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 47:13 ... um, tweeting away, which is totally... And I, I, I think Elon's a... he's an interesting guy. I, I like the, the sort of Tony Stark, real-world crazy Tony Stark thing that we've got going on. It would be more optimal if he'd, he'd just had his company look after his Twitter account. But again, that's perhaps the price that we need to pay, the price that you need to pay to have the guy that thinks those things is also the fact that he's gonna try stuff like putting a tunnel underneath LA that perhaps doesn't necessarily work.

Bronwyn Williams 47:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 47:40 What about health? What's happening? What's the future of our health gonna look like?

Theo Priestley 47:46 Oh...

Bronwyn Williams 47:46 Which future of health? (laughs) I mean, like, there's... they're, they're two very divergent views in terms of health, which is, I think, coming back to the Elon conversation. There's people that want to progress and there's people that want to regress. And Elon's an interesting guy because he's one of the few people that is actually building, doing, taking risks, making new things, which also quite associates it with a whole lot of the, the really rich people who don't have a god or a meaning in their lives and are wanting to live forever. So you've got people that are pushing for immortality, which would be... not even... it's not real immortality, let's put it that way, but just trying to find ways in order to get their consciousness or their essence to be passed down to the rest of humanity because they believe they are the super... sort of übermensch of the world, of our generation. But on the other hand, you've got people that are desperately wanting to shorten their lifespans, 'cause you see things like euthanasia on the up everywhere. Suicides.

Chris Williamson 48:39 Is this true?

Bronwyn Williams 48:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:40 I haven't, I haven't been exposed to people wanting to shorten their lives.

Bronwyn Williams 48:44 The euthanasia thing is huge.

Chris Williamson 48:46 Isn't that people that are already dying though, right?

Bronwyn Williams 48:48 People writing the rights to die.

Chris Williamson 48:48 They're not actually... they're not healthy people that are wanting to die.

Bronwyn Williams 48:51 Some of them are just old people.

Chris Williamson 48:53 Right, okay.

Bronwyn Williams 48:54 They're like, "We've had... we're tired now. We're, we're done." So, and that's the thing, so-

Chris Williamson 48:57 (laughs) I'm sick of this place. Elon... if Elon Musk tweets-

Theo Priestley 48:59 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 48:59 ... one more time, I swear to God. (laughs)

Theo Priestley 49:02 That's it, I'm booking a flight to Dakar.

Bronwyn Williams 49:03 But I think that's quite natural. I think lots of people get tired after a while, especially if you are thinking that, that the future's not going to be any more exciting or that you could get sick or that you're going to start declining. But there are definitely people out here that don't value any life at all, much less their own. I think that's a growing subtext of the, the apathy and of the sort of anti-growth and anti-progress narrative. It does spill over into that quite dramatically.If you look at the sort of categories of where, where people are pushing for things like euthanasia to be, or like, compassionate killing, whatever, there's different sort of legal categories, to be legalized, you can see those categories get broader and broader, and not just for people that are, you know, have terminal illnesses. I mean, technically we all do, right? We're all mortal. Unless (laughs) you try, try push for the digital immortality route on the other side, which seems to be the most likely way to do it. Of course, digital immortality comes with 100% fatality rate upfront, but then your consciousness can be cloned and off you can go. That seems like the most likely way we're able to do this. Infinite life extension doesn't look like it's going to be achievable within our lifespans. That's not to say that it won't, but much like the, the issue with ci- civilization-ending events like we were talking about earlier, like one guy blowing up a species with a, a misplaced, you know, printing of some sort of smallpox virus on his home printer. You know, it, the odds on, eventually compound against your favor. Even if you're able to renew your physical body in terms of preventing illness, sooner or later, accident or injury catch up with you. (laughs) And, and that's the sort of threat that comes with trying to pursue immortality as, as health. But that is definitely a direction we're going too, where it's, from a, from a sort of individual perspective, doing things that put you in the position of injury or illness gets more and more frowned upon. At the same time, healthcare costs increase because, of course, everybody wants access to every sort of life-extending treatment that exists for us, which puts huge pressure onto social security safety nets. On the other hand, you've got the sort of really, really wealthy people who are able to purchase all of these things and to postpone their lives as long as possible, pouring huge and huge, huge amounts of R&D into these fields too. Actually doing quite interesting things with dogs, if, if you are a pet lover. They're making quite good progress on extending the life of your, of your dog or cat-

Chris Williamson 51:17 How old can you get your dog to be?

Bronwyn Williams 51:19 ... at the moment. (laughs) Well, they, they're busy messing around with it right now, so this is like a, there's quite a prominent company, I'm not gonna me- mention names, it's attracting quite a lot of funding at the moment, and they say they should be able to sort of extend your pet's lifespan for sort of 20%, even up to doubling it eventually. They're hoping to use the same technology on humans. So we can look forward to a longer, much more expensive life with many, many, many more rules that say what we are and are, are not allowed to do if we do want access to those, those life-extending treatments. So it becomes a case of quality or quantity of life. How long would you like to live if you were never allowed another glass of wine, another cigarette, or you weren't ever allowed to drive in a car, or go up to space? Because those are all things that could result in expensive insurance payouts- (laughs) Will your, will your-

Chris Williamson 52:00 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 52:00 ... public or private sector insure it? So that's the sort of, the, the sort of overview of healthcare, where we're trying to look now at life extension rather than just curing disease, but actually preventing. The prevention also comes with increased biosurveillance, increased biohacking if you're doing it to yourself, but it means basically living your, living your life, what you have of it, around maintaining your health, which can become a bit obsessive for anyone that's understands things like eating disorders and exercise disorders. It's almost, it can take over your life. So, I suppose that's a, that's a sort of broad picture in terms of how we can, we can, we can kill ourselves by trying to keep ourselves alive, or how far are we prepared to go in that pursuit.

Chris Williamson 52:43 It's interesting to think about the fact that when your life is potentially infinite or is negligibly finite in terms of how long it goes away from you, you do do a cost-benefit analysis on every action that you take, and you're just gonna end up potentially with an entire society of people that have got agoraphobia and-

Bronwyn Williams 53:04 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 53:04 ... they're unprepared to leave the house. Because at the moment, the likelihood of me being hit by a car versus the remaining 50 years of my life, I think, "Well, eh, you know, it's all right, 50 years." But if you're thinking, "Okay, it's 50,000 years that you've potentially got, or 500 years, or, you know, even 150 years," well, I'm weighing this up against ... The, the, the scales are tilting now in a very interesting way.

Bronwyn Williams 53:26 The odds catch up with you. (laughs) Because it's everything. Every potential life-ending injury, accident, illness eventually becomes more probable given a long enough timeline. So we have to become more and more obsessive about trying to prevent these things from happening to us, and that can be hugely mentally distressing, especially if you imagine you had been able to keep yourself alive for a couple of hundred years and then you sort of literally get, like, killed by a crow dropping out of the sky in a freak accident, right? You'd be quite, you'd be quite annoyed at that. It would also make you hugely, hugely paranoid. So, (laughs) you know, the longer we extend our lifespans, the more afraid we get of death, on the one hand. On the other hand, you've got other people who just want to opt out, that want the, want to take the early exit, which I do think is quite interesting. In terms of our psyche-

Theo Priestley 54:08 Well, it's interesting, it's interesting because you've got, you know, i- i- if you're, if you, if you have that, if you have the means, the financial means to say, "I want to add another 100 years to my life," you know, um, you're gonna get that treatment potentially upfront, so it's a wad of cash. And then you're gonna feel, "Well, this investment has cost me a lot of money, so I'm gonna have to protect that investment."

Chris Williamson 54:28 Protect the investment, yeah.

Theo Priestley 54:29 "And I'm gonna stay inside." Or you get this situation where it's like immortality as a service, where you're paying a subscription fee to get your monthly jab, and if you can't, if you can't afford the jab any longer, then essentially, you know, "Oh, no, I'm gonna lose the benefit of this healthy extended lifestyle and I'm gonna die next week." So, it's, y- and then what have you got to live for, for a start? I mean, let's put it this way. It's not, un- unless you are rich and have means, are you gonna really fall back on the state pension, if there is one at that point in time? Is the state gonna be happy that you're gonna live another 50 years and not actually contribute to society because you're, you're claiming a pension off them? Or are they gonna force you to work and your retirement age now is then 130 and not 65 or 75? Uh, you know, and if that's the kind of life that you're gonna look forward to, then again, I'm booking a flight to Dignitas.

Chris Williamson 55:21 What are your thoughts?

Bronwyn Williams 55:22 Always be booked for you. (laughs)

Theo Priestley 55:23 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 55:23 Yeah, exactly. You've gotta, you've gotta go off here.

Theo Priestley 55:25 Well, yeah, exactly.

Chris Williamson 55:25 Um-

Theo Priestley 55:25 You missed your payment this month. Off you go.

Chris Williamson 55:28 See you later on. Go through this tunnel.

Theo Priestley 55:29 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 55:30 What are your thoughts

Chris Williamson 55:33 on whether or not we're going to have a super intelligent, artificial general intelligence within the next hundred years? Uh, by 2100.

Bronwyn Williams 55:44 I would put them-

Theo Priestley 55:45 Do you think so?

Bronwyn Williams 55:45 ... at, um, uh, the lower odds on that one, and I know I'm probably in the minority of people that do think in the future space. I'm not convinced that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that we can recreate. I know, once again, that doesn't put me necessarily with the majority of philosophers out there, but then again, I don't necessarily respect the majority of contemporary philosophers (laughs) around, around these days, for better or for worse, and you get in trouble for saying such things. I think it's quite a huge assumption to believe that we are able to recreate that jump when we're not able to understand it, and we haven't seemed to come any closer to ho- solving, not even all the soft problems of consciousness, let alone the hard ones.

Chris Williamson 56:23 Mm-hmm. Do you need consciousness-

Bronwyn Williams 56:24 Not sure about-

Chris Williamson 56:24 ... to have general intelligence?

Bronwyn Williams 56:26 Yeah, pretty much. Eventually, you would because the thing with, with general intelligence is it would have to act like us, so it would have to have a will. It wouldn't just be a program. So you could have a very, very complicated intelligence that's smarter than us in many, many domain functions. In order for it to become a general intelligence, it requires a will, which means that it would need to either have a will to, to do good, to do bad, or to change the direction that it had been programmed in. In order for it to become general, it has to act independently from how it was programmed, so that goes way beyond complexity or to chaos theory into having something else. That is what real general intelligence is. To have domain-specific general intelligence, I think we're already there. If you pick any particular human function, we can program something to do it better, faster, smarter. You know, that's, that's the, that's the way it works. But at the same time, until that, that intelligence is able to coalesce and to actually direct itself to choose to do things, which we don't even really understand how we do. We sort of have vague ideas, but not proper ideas, then we're not going to make that leap. So whether we make that leap or not is about as, as sort of plausible as to getting into the really big questions as to whether there is, there is a god or gods or not, right? I mean, it's a very, very big assumption. These are the basic assumptions and questions of philosophy that the ancient Greeks have been debating that we haven't really got much further than running around in circles over the, the last few thousand years. I don't know if you agree, Theo. So I'd say there's a possibility, but I'd put it in the pretty low odds.

Theo Priestley 57:55 Yeah, same. Um, I'm in the same mind, uh, camps, uh, and camp regarding intelligence and the fact that, um, you know, AGI requires, uh, requires will, choice, and spontaneity and creativity as well. So like real creativity, not programmed one, you know, like-

Bronwyn Williams 58:12 Beyond programming, right? Yeah.

Theo Priestley 58:13 Yeah, exactly. Um, and we're just not there yet. Um, I think we will never s- we won't see, um, just one all-encompassing Skynet either. I mean, there are so many, uh, initiatives out there to, to race to create the first one anyway. What we're gonna actually see is probably s- uh, a few. If there are ever an emergent AGI or certainly domain-specific AGIs or ones that coalesce like, um, Bronwen says, um, that creates, uh, you know, that creates one, but has specific elements of other domains, um, there's gonna be several. Um, uh, I mean, you look at Facebook with, uh, that, that had M before. Um, Google's AI assistant, you've got OpenAI doing stuff with GPT-3 and things like that. Um, Alexa, Siri. They're all shades of something that's very weak at the moment. It's the same with, uh, Tesla's car. That's a domain-specific intelligence that will get you from A to B as safely as possible, uh, but it's not gonna do your maths homework or complete a thesis or anything else like that, um, or draw a picture. Um, but we will see, I think, shades of AGI, um, and there will be more than one. Uh, there's not gonna be a Skynet that rules everything. There will be more than one. And if there ever were a real AGI to emerge by 2100, and if there ever were one or more AGI, that's when I think things might get interesting.

Chris Williamson 59:41 That's when Nick Bostrom needs to be raised from wherever he is, buried in Oxford in 2100, and like-

Theo Priestley 59:48 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:48 ... "Look, Nick, we really, we really need you, really need you back, mate." So neither of you two believe that consciousness comes along for the ride with information processing then, that it's not just a case of scaling up the amount of information processing. There is something else in there, some sort of-

Theo Priestley 1:00:03 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:03 ... special something that layers on top?

Theo Priestley 1:00:06 Yeah. I mean-

Bronwyn Williams 1:00:07 It's something we don't understand.

Theo Priestley 1:00:08 ... my cat's conscious.

Bronwyn Williams 1:00:08 If we don't understand it, we can't program it.

Theo Priestley 1:00:10 Yeah.

Bronwyn Williams 1:00:10 So, you know, to, to think that there, that it magically appears, that it emerges without being programmed into something that has been programmed and built from us from scratch, that requires a leap of faith or belief or basically sort of belief in something that you cannot prove. So (laughs) which is basically the same thing as trying to say that you believe in a god, right? That's believing something that cannot be proved. Because we don't know what it is. We can only program what we know how to program. We can get things to do things faster than us, smarter than us. We can combine functions, but in order to try and imagine the technology will do something that it hasn't actually been built to do, I think puts quite a, probably too much faith in our own ability, right?

Chris Williamson 1:00:48 That is a big logical step, right? To take it from-

Bronwyn Williams 1:00:51 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:00:51 ... what we're doing at the moment, which is superhuman, to super intelligent.

Theo Priestley 1:00:57 Yeah.

Bronwyn Williams 1:00:57 Yeah. So that's not to say that machines won't be smarter than us or be able to make better decisions than us, but, but to actually think of having a general intelligence is, is quite a specific claim that I'm not convinced that we're there yet. I don't think we know enough to program that, so I don't think that, that...

Chris Williamson 1:01:12 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:01:12 Oh, it's like alchemy, right? T- You can think that you can combine all the elements, but it doesn't spontaneously turn into gold. You're kind of missing that, that last step. So (laughs) we've got everything together, sort of almost like the, the cargo cult, right? It's, you know, sort of build it so it will come. (laughs) That's basically...

Chris Williamson 1:01:28 (laughs) What do you think-

Bronwyn Williams 1:01:31 Of course, I know...... computer scientists are going to disparage us hugely from this, but I am certainly someone who loves to be-

Chris Williamson 1:01:36 Th- they're, they're going to have, "Well, you're just destroying their entire industry." Yeah, exactly.

Theo Priestley 1:01:39 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:01:40 Um, what are your thoughts on whether or not the human race reaches its full civilizational potential? I'm big into existential risk and if super intelligent AGI, a misaligned one... Stuart Russell's human compatible, he doesn't need to worry, and Toby Ord, he doesn't need to worry, at least for a little bit of his work. And Nick Bostrom wrote Superintelligence basically just as a, a fiction book for us all to have a look at. If that's potentially out the window, and that's, that's off the table at least as, with regards to a risk, what are your confidences that we end up, let's say, colonizing the galaxy before we wipe our race out? You think it's gonna happen?

Bronwyn Williams 1:02:19 Well, I suppose it depends on how deep you mean by colonization. I think we're going to keep on pushing until we do get to the, get to Mars and get to the moon. I'm not sure how happy we'll be there, because I mean, uh, as much as we are, you know, pessimistic about the Earth's own prospects, I think it's still nicer to live in Siberia than it would be to live on Mars, from the pictures I've seen anyway. (laughs) So you know, I'm happy we'll be there and if it tak- takes into being a sort of a thriving community is, of course, a different question. And a lot of the reasons why people are pushing for a sort of intergalactic settlement is because of worries over sort of Earth's sustainability. But if our problems change from having too many people to having too few people before we actually get those sort of colonies started, it becomes a very, very different question. I think we have, sort of have to bear that in mind, in that it looks like our population curve is going to start bending over faster than we would've initially thought. And then, of course, not sort of meeting your population replacement rates, that becomes quite a different existential challenge for humanity when you look at the far enough timelines, because if you're talking about intergalactic settlements, you're talking after many, many generations. That if over that time, your population has shrunk, those whole sort of challenges change. I think bigger risks to our sort of flourishing and more realistic risks, in fact, that I think that are almost inevitable, as opposed to general intelligence, which is, which is hypothetical. It is something we can consider. It's a possibility. I wouldn't rule it out, but it's not sort of inevitable, the way I see it right now. I think that is almost inevitable that we are going to embark, in fact, we already have, on intelligent design, which is also written about in the book there in Craig- Craig's chapter, with the sort of Homo ogeretus, I think he called it. He made it up himself, that word, so I can-

Theo Priestley 1:04:01 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:04:01 ... pronounce it over. (laughs) He just, he looked in, looked in a Latin sort of dictionary and pick- picked it out. The whole thing of intelligent design is happening and that is going to accelerate our fullfilment as a species or accelerate our demise, depending on how we deal with that sort of post-human transition. And that is, I think, something that I'm much more interested in than AGI as a separate entity, rather the combining of humanity with technology from a biological perspective and from a hardware perspective. All of those technologies are converging at the same time and I'm probably more certain that we'll either sort of, you know, either augment our own intelligence to the point that we become sort of human general intelligence before we actually create an artificial general intelligence, and that's just as dangerous. So I know, once again, a lot of people would, would disagree with that race, as to where the humans become too smart for our own good or too smart for what is currently the human species. We actually sort of transcend that, that sort of level up as a species, and think we'll probably do that before sort of artificial intelligence spontaneously generates its own consciousness and will.

Chris Williamson 1:05:09 Thea, what do you reckon? Are we gonna do it? Are we gonna make it?

Theo Priestley 1:05:11 Oh, we're probably getting wiped out by another pandemic probably.

Chris Williamson 1:05:13 You think? (laughs)

Theo Priestley 1:05:15 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:05:15 The way things are headed. (laughs)

Theo Priestley 1:05:16 Yeah, yeah, or another war. I mean, uh-

Bronwyn Williams 1:05:18 But there's enough mutually exclusive, right? There's enough-

Theo Priestley 1:05:21 No.

Bronwyn Williams 1:05:21 ... mutually exclusive concepts.

Theo Priestley 1:05:21 No. No.

Bronwyn Williams 1:05:22 (laughs)

Theo Priestley 1:05:23 I mean, uh, if, if you're talking about the flourishing of humanity, uh, across the solar system and things like that. I mean, like you say, we'll probably get to a stage where we will colonize or certainly set foot and set something up on Mars and the Moon, um, as the most, uh, I guess, easiest habitable options. Getting further is, takes... Uh, is gonna take us a, a hell of a long time, I think, given the resources and the constraints, and again, all the risks associated with space travel and we're just not there yet with other means of space travel or certainly safer means and faster means as well. So, you know, we have a long way to go, certainly, maybe 500,000 years to try and imagine, are we actually gonna make it that far or will we cause something. Again, whether it's a war on Earth or whether it's even our first interplanetary war where the Mar- the, the Martian colonies think, "We don't want to be part of your disgusting mess anymore," and we-

Chris Williamson 1:06:20 (laughs)

Theo Priestley 1:06:20 And Earth people say, or the Terrans say, "No, you must come under our rule once more." You know, the-

Chris Williamson 1:06:26 You've been watching too much of The Expanse again, haven't you, Thea?

Theo Priestley 1:06:28 Yeah, exactly.

Bronwyn Williams 1:06:28 They've already declared independence. They haven't even got there yet. So I mean-

Theo Priestley 1:06:31 No, no.

Bronwyn Williams 1:06:31 ... with the Martian constitution, they've declared independence from Earth and it's very equitable, it's, it's, it's-

Chris Williamson 1:06:36 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:06:36 ... super work, okay? 100%-

Chris Williamson 1:06:39 Is that a thing? They've got a constitution for Mars?

Theo Priestley 1:06:41 If you want to fail.

Bronwyn Williams 1:06:41 Yeah, the Martian constitution is published. You can go look that up, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:45 Who wrote this?

Bronwyn Williams 1:06:46 It's... It's, it's like, it puts the South African constitution to shame. It's very happily written. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:06:52 Who created it?

Bronwyn Williams 1:06:54 You know that we're gonna send that whole Mars colony, so I know that from-

Chris Williamson 1:06:58 Yes, yes.

Bronwyn Williams 1:06:58 ... Adriana Murray who s- was one of the chosen-

Chris Williamson 1:07:00 Oh, yeah.

Bronwyn Williams 1:07:01 ... astronauts. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:02 Oh, right.

Bronwyn Williams 1:07:02 So (laughs) they were all, it was all part of that Mars One thing that it came out of. I don't think Mars One exists anymore, but...

Theo Priestley 1:07:10 No, it doesn't. No. The crowdfunding failed spectacularly, didn't it?

Chris Williamson 1:07:14 Uh, I've been learning a little bit about astro politics, about the politics of space, who owns areas of space, who owns the moon, who owns Mars. That's just-

Bronwyn Williams 1:07:23 No one owns anything. Possession-

Theo Priestley 1:07:24 Yeah.

Bronwyn Williams 1:07:24 ... in that case, I think it's first come-

Chris Williamson 1:07:26 First come, first serve.

Bronwyn Williams 1:07:26 ... one, first one past the pole, right?

Chris Williamson 1:07:28 First come, first serve. Yeah, exactly. You put your hand on it-

Bronwyn Williams 1:07:30 You can't, you can't claim, like, indigenous populations, you know? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:07:33 All these microbes that say that they were here first.

Theo Priestley 1:07:36 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:07:38 Bring your own microbes.

Chris Williamson 1:07:39 Given-

Theo Priestley 1:07:39 Yeah?

Chris Williamson 1:07:40 Given the...... how would you say? The overbearing positive nature of most of futurism, as far as I get to see, right? The, the articles that are written and stuff like that, how are, uh, uh, how are the things that you guys talk about, how is your narrative received generally among the futurist community? Because I imagine that it must be this hyperrealism perhaps where you're saying, "Uh, wait. W- w- what about this? And w- w- wait, what about that?" I imagine it must feel like someone's coming in and pissing on their party a little bit.

Bronwyn Williams 1:08:17 Well, I think you gotta understand, there's different groups of futurists. Academic futurism is hugely pessimistic. They are too pessimistic.

Chris Williamson 1:08:24 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:08:24 That's what I was saying right at the beginning, those views are very binary. Academic futurism is obsessed with climate change and de-growth. They're all pushing for sort of, like, fully automated, very lower middle class communism as a solution to sort of, you know, climate change and sustainability, which is a, a very sort of European view on the future. Uh, I probably shouldn't say that, but that's kind of the perspective I get. It's v- it matches very neatly with the sort of EU's sort of development goals. It's very hard to separate academic futurism from the EU's plans for the future and be sustainability-orientated and smaller, not larger. And (laughs) so ride a bike, don't take a rocket, right? So (laughs) -

Chris Williamson 1:09:02 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:09:02 ... that's, that's the, that's the one side of futurism, and I, I, ha- I do have a degree in futurism, so I kind of understand what I'm talking about there. The other side is of course the sort of more sort of techno-futurism realm, which I know Theo has sort of skirted around, which is the tech evangelists and the hugely optimistic ones. But again, they're selling stuff, so there's a huge amount of cynicism there. So they might find us a bit annoying, but only in that we're sort of messing up their marketing plans, not that we're really challenging their ideas. So (laughs) , so yeah. I suppose it's supposed to be somewhere in the middle, and like anyone that's kind of in the middle, you don't tend to be very popular with your peers. But we have found with this particular book, that because we're talking like actual human beings, we're not trying to talk down to people about these ideas, it's been very well received by, by people that don't have a formal, or at least a, a paid background in futurism, that aren't, don't have an, a vested monetary interest in pushing a particular view.

Chris Williamson 1:09:56 It's an interesting one. It's an interesting one to think about the potentials for our future and how many biases and agendas different people are pushing when they're talking about it. I mean, if there's one thing-

Bronwyn Williams 1:10:09 The future always, (laughs) it always comes with an agenda.

Chris Williamson 1:10:12 Mm-hmm.

Bronwyn Williams 1:10:12 And it's, and you have to see past that too, because people ... The best thinkers in the world confuse us, because the best people at describing the world as it is from this, from a completely positive or deterministic perspective are also generally the best thinkers and the best talkers, which means they are very persuasive when it comes to slipping in their more normative ideas. And that's where people get the wool pulled over their eyes, because we listen to someone and we know they are right about describing the world as it is, and when they subtly start leading us by the nose as to what should be, talking about instead of what is and to what should be, we end up being sort of drawn along into the inevitability of these plans. And that nobody's making it clear where they stop from describing and to prescribing what should happen. Everyone is slightly disingenuous about that. Everyone's selling something, a policy, an election, a product, and you have to sort of separate that from that. Oh, just a keynote, right? I mean, of course it's easier to sell keynotes-

Chris Williamson 1:11:08 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:11:08 ... if you're talking about, "Yay, technology, exponential curves." I mean, you know this, Theo. I know this. (laughs) but we have to separate the, the description and the, the reality from, from the sales pitch, and people have to question that. Otherwise, you do get sucked in.

Chris Williamson 1:11:24 I love it. Theo Priestley and Bronwen Williams, ladies and gentlemen. The Future Starts Now: Expert Insights Into the Future of Business, Technology, and Society will be linked in the show notes below. Where else should people go if they want to check out your stuff?

Theo Priestley 1:11:37 Um, well, I'm on, uh, LinkedIn or Twitter mostly, um, uh, tpriestley, uh, with all the, uh, vowels removed, because I'm so hip and trendy like every startup these days. Um, or Theo Priestley on, uh, (laughs) on LinkedIn. Um-

Bronwyn Williams 1:11:52 (laughs) .

Theo Priestley 1:11:54 ... not, not too far behind every meme, I suppose. (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:11:57 Yeah. I'm also likewise easiest to find on Twitter or LinkedIn @bronwenwilliams on both. Come and fight with me about consciousness and artificial general intelligence-

Chris Williamson 1:12:06 (laughs)

Bronwyn Williams 1:12:06 ... over there as I'm sure, I'm sure intelligent listeners of this show would, would have something to say. But that's the point. We, we invite you to disagree with us. Please disagree with us. Don't take anything we say as gospel.

Chris Williamson 1:12:16 (laughs) I love it. Guys, thank you so much for today.

Theo Priestley 1:12:20 Thank you.

Chris Williamson 1:12:21 Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy. Peace.