 So, hi, everyone. Welcome to ML Talks. I'm Joe Paradiso. I run the Responsive Environments Group here at the Media Lab. And I'm a long-time science fiction enthusiast ever since I've been, yay, hi, of course. There are some of us who can say that here in the audience. And, yeah, we're really delighted to be able to host this today. Just a few housekeeping notes before we begin. This talk is being webcast. Anyone watching online can ask questions via Twitter using the hashtag MLTalks. And we'll take questions from our live audience and online towards the end. So, again, I'm Joe. This is Ariel over here, Ariel Ekpla, who runs this space initiative here at the Media Lab, this student-led grassroots organization that has totally revolutionized how we view space here at the lab. And she's going to be my co-host. And, of course, we have the guest of honor in between. And Neil needs very little introduction for any of you out here or online. But I've got a few background comments for those of you who may be new to Neil. Neil is a historical and science fiction author. I would say he's a hard science fiction author in the best sense of that word. And I guess a hard historical fiction author if you wanted to define that somehow. And at MIT, we take that very seriously, right? There's a line of authors that get the science right. They really go to great lengths to make the science work. And Neil is one of the top people doing that. And he's been a pioneer in really breaking ground in different genres of science and speculative fiction. He began with really bioscience fiction. We're breaking that open in many ways. There wasn't much around. And he wrote the novel, Zodiac, set here in Boston, about a microbe getting loose and causing lots of problems, threatening to redefine the oceans. And it's a wonderful novel, but exposed a lot of this emerging biotechnology in ways that hadn't been done before. But then he went into cyberpunk and became quickly one of the luminaries of the cyberpunk movement. So Diamond Age and Snow Crash are required reading from many of our media lab students. And those are Neil's formative books in those days. And he put his stamp very much on that genre and really defined much of what happened in it. But then he has got his restless spirit. He went on to redefine himself again to do historical fiction with a science and technology bent, reinventing history as if something had been discovered a little bit beforehand or some twist to something had been found. Starting with Kryptoniacon and a string of other books, really one of the main drivers in what people would call steampunk or cyberpunk now. Lots of names for historical fiction is probably the better one. And then he brings it all together with things like Seven Eves, his new novel, many of us have read it. Wonderful book. Really talking about people into space and what happens but not just like we want to go to space to explore. We got to get off the planet in a hurry. So I mean he really gives motivation to go into space and again brings everything to a real peak in the book because of that. Neil also embeds himself into people doing work in the front lines of this. He's not just writing about stuff sitting back and thinking. He's also getting in there with people. Companies. Companies. Yeah, embedding himself in with companies. Blue Origin recently. Also Magic Leap. And there have been others in the past. So he really gets in there to see what's going on. So without further ado, it's our honor to introduce Neil Stevenson. Thanks. Thanks. I'm hoping this can mostly be a pretty interactive session between me and these people and me and you. But in the spirit of trying to get things going, I thought I would talk a little bit about there's a bunch of things I could talk about. But given that we're here for a thing about space, I thought maybe an interesting place to go would be Seven Eves, which is a novel I published a couple of years ago and maybe told the story of how that book came into existence because it's kind of an unusual origin story for a novel and maybe kind of an interesting thing to this audience. So I was working at Blue Operations LLC, which is sort of the precursor entity to Blue Origin. And one of the things I was looking at at the time was the problem of that we might have an exponential increase in the amount of space junk. And by the way, this is not me doing original research. It's me reading other people's stuff. But the idea is that when you've got pieces of junk in orbit, sometimes two pieces will bang into each other at very high velocity and shatter and make more pieces. And as long as the density remains pretty low, that can stay in and beyond a certain point you can see an exponential rise in that. And people were worried about the possibility that if it got beyond a certain point that we might end up suddenly or just overnight with so much junk in space that it would effectively prevent us from going into space until we cleaned it up. And so I got to thinking about that and that's a serious topic of technical research, but it kind of started twigging my science fiction brain. And because when I was a kid, I read a couple of science fiction books that are in the category of space arc fiction. So your earth is going to be destroyed and people build a space arc and they're going to go into space to save some remnant of civilization. And space arc books require really fine calibration of the disastrous event because if it's a really quick disaster, then you don't have time to build the arc. But if it's a really slow disaster, it's probably cheaper to go and do something to prevent the disaster. So it's got to be a disaster that can be predicted a couple of years in advance. So I thought, well, maybe this is one of those. So I made it much bigger and had it triggered by a explosion of the moon, which is a completely non-scientific idea that is not really ever justified in the book. But I made use of the fact that in this kind of writing people will believe anything that's on the first page. And then once you've gotten more than about 10 or 15 pages into the book and laid out the logic and the ground rules of the story, then people become very stern judges of consistency. So beyond that, if you start breaking the rules that you said at the beginning of the book, you will hear about it. And so in the first sentence of Seven Eves, the moon blows up and I never explained why. So we've got that out of the way. And they figure out that this exponential thing is going to happen in a couple of years and then that gives me the premise for my space arc book. So that idea came about. And I kind of sat on it for a number of years and I didn't really develop it. Well, I did develop it. I kept sort of coming up with different treatments, trying to see if people in the TV or movies or games would be interested in doing something with this idea. And then a few years ago, I just decided what the hell... I always do this in the end. In the end, I always do the same thing, which is I just sit down and write a novel after I've exhausted all of the other possible ways of proceeding. And so I thought of it as a way to address certain facts about the sort of science-fictional, the pop science-fictional landscape that had been on my mind for a while. So I'll just list a couple of those and then maybe we can transition from there into more of a conversation. One is that I wanted to... Aside from blowing up the moon, I wanted to stay within the limits of known physics. And so that means no teleportation, no faster-than-light drive, no warp drive. And what that basically means is that we're never leaving the solar system and it's still my conviction that barring some big change, we, in our current form at least, are never getting out of this solar system. And so it's fine to create a science-fiction universe with ships and aliens and all of the fun stuff that we associate with Star Trek, Star Wars, all of those. But if you're going to keep it honest, it's all got to be within the solar system and probably the inner solar system. So that was one thing that I wanted to stick with. And then another thing that is true of notably Star Trek but a lot of other... I'll let you guys fill in the blanks on all of the other science-fiction universes that do this, but it's the trope where there are aliens of many different species, but they're all bipeds that are about as tall as we are and basically look like us, maybe with some extra makeup, you know, or funny years and they speak English and with exotic accents. And in some cases, like Star Trek, we can even interbreed with them, which is a remarkable thing when you think about it. So, and don't get me wrong, I think that's all really fun and I love it in Star Trek and so on, but you know, it's a real eyebrow razor on a biology level. And so in Seven Eves, what happens is that the aliens are us. And so basically the human race genetically fragments into a number of subspecies that then sort of they develop after that for thousands of years. They're side-by-side. Some of them stick to themselves and they don't like hanging out with the others. Some of them are more prone to intermingle, but at the end of that 5,000 years, we've got that cool situation with a bunch of alien species that all speak English and can interbreed with each other and look like us. So that was kind of a second box that I wanted to check. And then the last one was what in the Space Biz we talk about as usage in C2 materials. So the idea that we, there's, even if you don't blow up the moon, there's basically an infinite amount of stuff out there that we can just go get to make things out of. Like we would never run out of asteroid materials if we decided to go out and start using that stuff. And so the traditional idea of a lot of science fiction stories, again, notably Star Trek, but also Star Wars, is that you've got people on a ship or a space colony who are going out into space, which is the kind of the final frontier to quote directly from Star Trek. So Earth is the center of civilization, at least in Star Trek. It's the capital of the universe, and the frontier is the planets. And so in this case, I was trying to flip that around and say the more plausible way that this would develop would be that we would use in C2 materials, so asteroids, pieces of the moon, to build environments to our specifications. And those environments would be very subtle, organized places. They would be like living in Singapore. And the Earth below in this version becomes kind of the wild, crazy frontier that has to be explored and settled. So that was kind of the general set of goals I was trying to pursue with the 70s project. And I have no real conclusion to come to, but I thought I might make for a good conversation starter in this context. So we're going to ask a few questions up here. Ariel and I will ping pong a little bit, and we'll open it up because I'm sure there are questions you guys have waiting. We talked a bit, actually we chatted this morning about, you know, some people are hired to look out 100 years and some of the programs you've been involved in. That's a very hard thing for anybody to do now in many ways. And in 70s, you look up 10,000 or more years, of course, but you basically shortcut a bunch of things that are kind of on every science fiction author's plate right now. So this whole AI singularity thing, you know, we all have our opinions about that, but that happens on a time scale of maybe 20, 30, 40 years before a century is up. So you basically sidestep that because they can't make computer ICs of the kind we can now in orbit for some reason in your novel. So they can't get there, and we didn't get there beforehand. Didn't want to go there. Because that would definitely tweak it in crazy ways. Although biology, you got to the point where we were able to play with our genome. Without that, of course, they wouldn't have made it. You got far enough along for that. And of course, that leads to the whole future of what race would be, right? DNA is just a CD's worth of editable data. And you can make it more or less what you want in this kind of a world that's coming. You kind of brought it back in that there are the eves and everything comes into the eves and they have their own identity. So you kind of reinvented it, but I wonder if that is just something that is an anachronism, not something that's part of the future. Well, I think part of what the book is trying to do is to sort of interrogate the idea of race a little bit and what we mean by that. So I'm trying to do that in what I hope is an accessible way. So there's that. And then, yeah, I just didn't want to go into the whole AI singularity thing for that book. Because I already felt like there was enough going on. And so I made that into a cultural decision on the part of the people, these people have to rebuild a civilization out of rocks. And they have records of the civilization that came before, which to them is sort of like their Homeric epic and their Bible and their Federalist papers. And they're always looking at those and certain people and certain habits have become kind of proverbial to them as the result of that. And one thing they've decided they don't like very much is anything that's too cyber or too sort of social media-ish. There's some villains in the piece in the early days who have been led astray by that. And so they make a cultural decision kind of not to go there. And that's probably me just being cowardly and not wanting to mix that in with a bunch of other stuff. I think in some way though we can appreciate that because I understand maybe not wanting to take on the AI as a singularity topic. We have enough dystopian fiction about where that's going. And I think Media Lab's now trying to put a different narrative on that, something more positive around ethics. But you did really treat social media in some ways presaged what can happen with tribalism and the splitting up of communities on social media. And this was in 2014, 2015, well before 2016, 2017 and now, which is interesting that those social conversations are now still very trenchant. Yeah, come to think about it. I myself is having totally missed that and have been totally surprised by the elections and all that because I was totally surprised. But yeah, it's talked about some in 70s. So many words. I guess Twitter is an amazing barrage sometimes. You can ignore that. A question for you about technology and what we should be working on here at the lab. So the space exploration initiative has a goal of trying to actively prototype our sci-fi future. So in many ways we are inspired, and as I mentioned to you before, my PhD research is in some ways inspired by the robots in 70s. Of the technical concepts that you've dreamed up, what would you want us to build that has yet to be built? And maybe start with 70s since we're on the space topic, but if there's something from Diamond Age that you still really want, what would you ask the space initiative or the media lab to build? You know, I have to say that the one... This probably isn't the answer you're looking for, but the one thing that totally dominates my attention right now is the whole problem of how do you have a civil society if you can't agree on what factual reality is. So, you know, and that's not a... Unfortunately not a hardware solvable problem that I'm aware of. It's a... You know, this thing happened that came out of, I think, an idealistic view of what the internet was going to be. And it was... The internet sort of was that for a brief time and now that seems sort of quaint and naive. So, now I'm mostly interested in trying to figure out ways that we could restructure the social media universe in such a way as to encourage a more civic-minded kind of approach to life because that stuff is now completely owned and penetrated to the core by bad actors. And I don't know how to fix that. I mean, going even further, right, with the work you're doing at Magic League together with, you know, your oppressions and Snow Crash, there'll be a point where we can physically perceive a different reality from somebody else. If our, you know, senses are mediated by ubiquitous AR, then it's not something at arm's length which has caused tremendous damage. Now, it's physically what a real time we see in here. Could this be better somehow instead of worse? Well, I mean, I would say the point of working with any kind of media, be it AR or VR or conventional media, is to give the user something that in some way is more rewarding or more interesting than the practical reality that's out there. And so I think, I mean, this is a very old distinction that, you know, goes back to Aristotle, so history versus poetry. And media gives us a way to create, not just history, but to create poetry, to create things that partake of the imaginary, of art. So, I'm sure we'll also have very practical-minded applications, but, you know, I think the ones that people are going to get excited about are the ones that have a more, they're sort of poetic in the sense Aristotle meant. You know, not strictly realistic based on some element of fancy or imagination. Do you think Nell's primer from Diamond Age was something along those lines, and is there a concept, like a parallel concept now for us, what a primer would be? So the interesting thing about that is how many different people have decided that they want to implement some version or some aspect of it. And I long ago kind of lost track. You mentioned that there's been a dozen theses that have a primer in them. Yeah, so, and so I think the important thing is to not to privilege any one of those over any other, you know, oh yeah, that person's getting it right. Because what's interesting is the different takes different people have on it. Some people come at it from a hardware point of view. You know, how could we build something that worked like that? Some people come at it from a performance art point of view, you know, or a software point of view. So I haven't thought about it in the context of the other issue I mentioned of, you know, can we agree on what's factual? But maybe we need one of those. I think there's certainly truth is also education. They're both related, right? Now we think education is the path to truth. But I think the question coming up now is what do we learn in our brain and what does the cloud learn and how do they come together? Because our brains are rapidly being outsourced. I search now. I'll remember just a few words and I'll, you know, take out my phone, Google it and oh, that's what it is. So I don't have to remember things the way I used to, and I can also remember more, maybe. And when we have the wearable, that's going to be omnipresent and alert. It'll be part of our brain. And where we stop where the cloud begins is just an intriguing thing. And that makes me think of, you know, Strauss's novel, Luxelorando, where the guy has the glasses. He takes them off and he's stupid, right? He is mentally deficient. He cannot function. And are we trending toward a society like that? Is there a way to do it to make it work for the better? Do we still live without them? Yeah, the theory that every enhancement is an amputation. I can't remember who came up with that phrase, but it stuck with me. No, I mean, you know, we use technology in all kinds of ways to get better at things, you know. I have clothes so I can go out into the cold Cambridge, Massachusetts winter and not be cold, you know. So, you know, that doesn't mean that, you know, I don't look down on myself for being a weak person who would get cold outside if I went out there without clothes on. So it's just a, you know, we look for ways to use tech to make things better. And at a certain point we stop referring to them as technology. You know, I think people have expressed this in various ways, but the one that stuck with me is technology is anything that was invented after you were born, right? So, again, I don't know who said that. We should Google it. So, you know, buttons, tires, scissors, those are all technologies and, you know, we're going to keep on making technologies. Have you seen the hyper-reality video by Keiichi Matsuda? It's been circulating around the lab. It's a dystopian five-minute view on everywhere AR. Oh, yeah. It's in media. But the most amazing part of that movie, that short for me, is when she gets hacked and you see the real world and it's dull. Even though you've been totally shocked by all this overload, when it goes away, it's just like you have the soul sucked out of you for a few minutes, you want it back. Will we be addicted to this? Is addiction even the right word? I think, you know, anything if it's used in an abusive way can be abusive. So, it's not a, I mean, the purpose of that video is to very carefully and consciously depict the most annoying possible bad use of immersive technology. And that person does an excellent job of it. And what anyone comes away with who sees the video is that it's, well, we don't want that. So, if we, you know, it's a, what I see in like today's internet is that there's this constant push-pull between people, advertisers, mostly who are trying to exploit the existing channels to put as many ads in your face and as many interruptions as they can pack in. And things like ad blockers and so on and filters that are keeping that stuff at bay. It's interesting to consider as well, there's this kind of black mirror side of AR and responsive environment tech and being completely immersed in these things. And yet we do see some models where maybe they are more purely altruistic or beneficial things for humans. And something that comes to mind is pilots. The more they come to rely on autopilot, there's always concern that the better the autopilot gets, that's great. But then the pilots will lose some of their proficiency and not be able to actually jump in and save it. And yet, there's a way to balance that. There's a way to keep the pilots engaged. In a space context, NASA's already looking at ways for astronauts to use VR to be connected to Houston, right? So they can have a VR headset, be trying to fix something mission-critical on the International Space Station, and be getting a live person from Houston, not just giving them a checklist where you have a whole list of human factors issues that might confuse what you do, but an actual guided tour with this assistive VR technology. Things like that, rather than thinking of it solely as a, you know, an appendage that's been cut off, is there enough assistive tech like that that you're excited about? I mean, I think a lot of what we see right now in the way the Internet works today is, grows out of the fact that everyone opted for a free model. And so, the only way for people to make money is with advertising and other gimmicks like that. I think if we get away from that, and it's related to what I was talking about earlier in the way that social media, you know, have been penetrated by bad actors, you know, if you can get a free account, and you can make a bot that'll sign up for a bazillion free accounts anytime you want, then it leads to a particular kind of usage or abuse of the system that makes it a lot less satisfying for a lot of the users. I've often wondered about the solution to that. If we wanted to dig on that in particular, I personally would be more than happy to pay for the services that I'm getting for free. If instead of having to pay in my privacy and my data, I was able to just pay Gmail as a service, I certainly would. But then does that set up a bit of a have-and-have-nots scenario where the relatively privileged among us can pay for the services and not be exploited by our data and then the remainder are still being exploited in some way with this free data? Or is there a better economic answer that we really could go to a not-from-you model where it's so easily exploited across the board? Yeah, I don't know. Geron Lanier has had some really interesting thoughts on that topic in his last couple of books, so you should get him up here. I know Patty's had him many times from... Oh, friend. I bet he does, yeah. So... Yeah, here you tend to see a lot more support for free and open internet. And people, of course, equate innovation at that level, right? There's nobody charging more for certain packets, and it's all free, so you can try whatever you want. On the other hand, you have the dark side, so it's always a balance. Yeah. In Seven Eves, you created a very rich world and a lot of it you only see at the end, right? These other cultures that... I kind of suspect that we're always there as reading the book. Yeah, they are there. In the oceans. That's who they are. Okay, then the book ends. So you're not one for sequels usually, but would we be seeing maybe a sequel to this or a development on this? And if so, my question would be, do we find out more about the agent? Well, the overall idea was to build a science-fictional universe and see what happened. And what may happen when I'm optimistic will happen is that we may be able to start realizing that universe in media. So we've got some conversations going on with Skydance and with Imagine about bringing Seven Eves to the screen, and nothing's definite until it's definite, but we've got an exciting group of people behind that project now, and I'm hoping it will move forward and that we'll be able to answer a lot of those questions. Maybe not in a novelistic sequel, but in media. So should we open it up? This might be a good time. I'm sure you're all waiting for questions. Laura has the tossable microphone. I don't know if that was a media-live invention. I first saw it here with Ted Selker years ago. So, any questions from the floor? I'm sure. Okay, over here. Can you catch? Oops. How can we... I'm not sure exactly how you phrased it, but how can we coordinate our actions and do things effectively if we don't agree on facts? Hold the cube closer to your ear. It keeps going up and down. I think you answered that question in ANFM, where you had the people from the outside and the people from the inside collaborating together because they had a shared goal or a shared mutual emotional connection. So even if they didn't necessarily have the same background and agree on the facts in the past, they had a motivation to solve the problems using current facts and things. So I think you answered your question with that book. I love that book, by the way. Great book. Yeah, thank you. So, asked and answered. But it's a reference to ANFM, which is a book where... a universe where you've got sort of... all of the blue state book-reading people have been herded into monastic compounds and they hang out together and be nerds. And they're surrounded by a bigger civilization that mostly doesn't care about them. And yeah, the book gets into how do those two... how can those two groups work together? So over here, if you can toss it. So I guess my question would kind of flip the Media Lab perspective on its head a little, because as a novelist, the technology is... at least as I read your stuff, is a probe for what novelists do, which is try and understand human beings, the characters you create and sort of some problems in human nature. So I guess what I'm curious is you've said several problems that we need to address in the technical area, what we might do about fact, what we might do about the various technologies that make a lot of your work so exciting. But I guess what I'd love to know is what human problem you're trying to investigate. If there's a program through your work or if there's specific novels where you try to get at certain aspects of human nature and human emotion and that kind of thing. There's... I'm having a little bit of trouble with the monitor. So I'm not catching 100% of the questions that are being asked on this thing. Is that any better? That's it. There you go. Got to hold it like this. So yeah, I'm just saying that sort of flip the... I'm wondering about your own process, I guess. The technology and the questioning about where we're going with different machines and our affordances makes a lot of your work incredibly exciting, but at the same time, the novelist's job is often to probe the human emotion, the human concerns, qualities of human nature. Yeah. And I'm wondering what aspects of... If you have a program through many of your books or if you're thinking about something now, what is it about the way human beings are interacting that's really making you curious? Well, I think the novel is a pop culture medium and I'm an entertainer. So I think it's... I fear the moment when I lose sight of those two facts and try to be something else. So the novel's always been straight up pop culture. Its purpose is to entertain people by telling yarns and my job is to do that. So I think the first goal is always to hit that objective and to tell a story that people want to keep reading. And that can mean a lot of different things, but one of the things that you do need to do is to engage people on topics and themes that are emotionally important to them. I mean, it's partly style and storytelling and pacing and plot, but the subject matter needs to be something that is of interest and that feels relevant to people. So a thing that I've been around a lot is technology and so that tends to be my hook, right? So to the extent that people are interested in space, for example, well, okay, I can write a yarn about space that you'll have explosions and fights and drama and all the stuff that makes for a good story, but it's set in a kind of technological world and I can talk about Delta V and hypergolic propellants and all of that stuff as part of the fabric of the story. So I think, you know, in the best case, out of all of that comes something that has these sort of more sophisticated payloads, but my approach is not to come at it on that level. There's always got to be an underlying yarn and characters and if I really work hard and do my job right, I may get to some of the more elevated goals at the end. To jump in there with one thought, I'd say at least from my perspective, I think you have achieved a really interesting human story or character development, especially for young women. As someone reading Nell's story and the Nell in the primary was fantastic to see her character development and Seven Eves. It's about the women who found the future of humanity and figured out amongst themselves and it's not to say that that's not present elsewhere in science fiction, but it is rare. Women tend to have a very different, sometimes frankly, sex spot role in a lot of other science fiction from the 50s forward and your stories are so different and I really appreciate that from a human character development story. Well, thanks. Thank you very much for the vote of confidence. It means a lot. Charles. I love the vision of the internet, the metaverse vision where it's more experiential and less about facts, true or not. What's holding us back from having that in real life? From having the metaverse version of things. I mean, it went in a totally different direction, right? So I actually wrote Snow Crash before we had the internet per se. I mean, the internet existed, obviously, but it wasn't, most people who were online were not on the internet. They were on like CompuServe or proprietary services. CERN. What? CERN. Yeah. So in some ways it's a dated picture. It's more based on television. Like, okay, we've got these for-profit online services. What if they were in 3D? And what if the people who ran those services were trying to provide a kind of bread-and-circus model that would attract a lot of viewers, a lot of users? And so, you know, the metaverse is founded on a certain kind of scarcity model that you've got the street, which is the high-value real estate, and everybody wants to be on the street. There's only so much real estate there, and that's not what happened, right? So what happened was that we got the web, which is, I mean, there's high-value domains on the web, but it's mostly a kind of free, like one Earl is the same as any other Earl. So you don't have that scarcity model in the same way. So I sort of feel like I was wrong with the metaverse. And if you really want to dig down, it comes to the fact that what made 3D graphics cheap wasn't television, it was video games. And so to have a metaverse, to have any kind of 3D-shared reality, the first thing you've got to have is cheap 3D graphics, and the way we ended up getting cheap 3D graphics was people wanting to play video games and that driving the cost of graphics cards down to almost nothing. So what we've got is more of a game-based economy than a TV-based. I'm not sure I totally understand so, but could we get there? To the metaverse, to that style of... I mean, anyone could set it up, right, but you've got to attract people to it. And so, I don't know, stay tuned, I guess. Can we get Neha over here? Good throw. That's a good throw. I loved Cryptonomicon and the way that you talked about cryptography and code-breaking and how you explained it to people. And I wanted to ask you about cryptocurrencies. So I work on cryptocurrencies, and you write a lot about money and sort of the way people pay for things in your future, and I'm curious to hear about what you think is going on now. And even in Ream, you wrote about sort of the mining that was happening in games. And so what are your thoughts on virtual currencies and the future of money? Well, you know, I'm just kind of, like a lot of people vaguely aware that there's a whole lot of ferment going on in that area with ICOs of various kinds, you know, and that there's a range of those from, you know, very sketchy or like maybe not even serious at all, but more like parodies of ICOs. Two ones that seem to have more legitimacy. You know, I don't, like, I look on in amazement. If I don't feel myself to be that in touch, you know, with that stuff anymore, there was this moment, like Cryptonomicon came out of this moment in the 90s when a lot of the Bay Area cypherpunks broke towards money. You know, they were working on all kinds of applications of crypto at the time and figured out that you could do financial transactions and they got really interested in money. And so that's kind of where that came from. The current happenings, I don't feel like I have as much of a connection to the story of those people. I kind of knew the story of the Bay Area cypherpunks and I think that gave me a novelistic kind of soil for something to grow out of. And I'm not in touch in the same way with people who are doing the ICO stuff right now. And that leaves me kind of a little bit with my nose pressed up against the glass. Do you want to know more about it? Talk to Neha. Well, no, I mean, like, I know who to call. You know, and now you're on that list too, but I just haven't decided to dive back into it, I guess. One thing, I just wanted to distinguish between the cryptocurrencies and the ICOs. I think a lot of the ICOs are scams. People kind of trying to take advantage of others and sell things that don't really have a lot of basis to them, but I do think there's something behind the idea of cryptocurrencies. I think they're really interesting. Yeah, thanks for clarifying the distinction. And I agree with you. You know, I heard one thing and substituted another. So my bad. Shin. I actually could not ask for a better leading question after this one. You may want to hold that up closer so we can hear you. Okay. So a great question to follow up on, actually. So I found like this technology discussion not really fascinating, but so far all the kind of conversations I've heard are still quite much operating under a simplistic institution. So whatever the technology we're developing where still an assumption is going to be economically benefiting the rage or kind of separate, like draw more separations in the society. So for me, I kind of curious, is there any technology so far you can see happening or you're imagining that would actually change the political and social structure? There's a very stupid, simple example I'm showing out there it might be not accurate at all, is if brain interfaces could achieve to a certain level that people reach collective intelligence, would it change the way human relationship and then the way we connect with each other and the buying and selling you and me if that concept is challenged, I think it's interesting to look at whether the simplistic structure is still going to be stable as now. So could some of the work that's going on here in the way... Or anywhere before or in your imagination. Yeah, some of the kind of work that's going on here could create alterations in the way economic systems work that take us away from a capitalistic model and toward a socialistic. Not necessarily socialistic, but something else. Something else. Yeah, big question and probably a novel worthy undertaking to answer that one. It has been notable to me that the legs have been kicked out from under the left, the economic left. So it's kind of happened slowly over a period of decades, but right now people who are not fans of straight-up capitalism don't have a lot of arrows in their quiver, don't have a lot of levers to affect the kinds of changes they want to see, which is very different from the way it was 100 years ago or even 50 years ago, where there was more of a balance between labor and capital, I would say, and it wasn't pretty, but there was a functioning kind of labor movement that was able to wield some real power. So it's really swung the other way, and I understand why, but it's definitely interesting to speculate on what, if anything, could replace that. We have a question from Greg Tucker, who's a former MIT labber. He is watching and he wants to know what your goal was for System of the World and its two companion books. You have to speak up. Oh, sorry. The question is, what was Neil's goal and System of the World and its two companion books? System of the World and what? The two companion books. The two companion books? Companion books. Oh, got it, got it. So yeah, the Baroque cycle grew out, thank you, grew out of, it was an unexpected offshoot of kryptonomicon. As I was finishing kryptonomicon within about, space of about a week, I received two unrelated pieces of information. One was from George Dyson, who was going to be here tomorrow if he's not here already. He will be. Which was a book that he wrote about Leibniz and about the first sort of efforts toward computing. Darwin Among the Machines. And it was basically that Leibniz worked on computers. And then unrelated to that, another friend of mine mentioned that he had been studying Newton and the fact that Newton ran the Mint. So here I was almost finished writing a book about computers and money. And I found out that 300 years ago, the two smartest people that we know about in the world at that time, one was working on computers, the other was working on money, and they hated each other. And then I started looking into that era, which is a little bit of a blank page and when we learn American history, we don't learn a lot about that span of years and pilgrims sailing which trials, that's about it. And it turned out to be a really interesting period of history with lots of pirates and sword fights and other things that make for good novel writing. So I thought, well, how can I not do this? So I dove into that. You know, it wasn't a... As I was saying to Tom earlier, this isn't me being motivated by some grand plan to achieve a specific thing. It really grows out of telling a funny yarn about interesting characters and writing some plot. I thought this was a good place to do that. And so I don't really know if I had a clearly articulated goal. Other than that, it's not how I operate in general. But I guess I wanted to show that these themes, they're important to us today, money and computers are old themes and that it was possible to tell a fun story about them. Thanks. So I have a question related to your work at Magic Leap. I'm wondering how you see your role as an entertainer in the medium of AR. How do you see entertainment happening in augmented reality? So the... I'm the chief futurist, which is a fairly ambiguous title. And what I said at the very beginning was that I didn't want to just be a navel-gazing kind of chief futurist, but I wanted to look for some way to actually do something. And for various reasons, it seems like making experiences is a good way to do that. So I'm thinking about ways to make experiences that one can have using this kind of hardware. And it turns out to be quite an interesting problem on a bunch of levels because you need to use... Basically, technology, the toolchain that is used by the game industry is the toolchain that you need. Game engines and Maya and Photoshop and all of that stuff is what you need to use, but you need to use it in a radically different way. And so none of the standard operating procedures of the game industry are directly transferrable because the interface is different and you don't control the world. You can add things to the real world, but you don't get to decide where the chair is. The chair is where it is and you have to deal with that. And that's hard. It's a really interesting challenge. So I guess my big picture answer to your question is that when new platforms come along, usually after a certain period of time, people figure out how to make money by generating content for those platforms. So in the case of movies, it turns out the way to make money is to make sequels to existing superhero franchises. And so all of the money goes to that. And it becomes difficult to make things that are not bad because that's how you make money. And the same is true of games or for that matter even books or other kinds of media. But when a new platform comes along, there's this window of time during which nobody knows yet how to make money from it. And during that window of time, you may have an opportunity to try a bunch of weird new stuff. So that's where we're at right now. Perhaps when we have robot socialism and nobody has to make money, you can be truly creative. Music would be completely the panacea for it because great music comes with money in my opinion. So if that broadens, we'll see this new art form blossom. It's tough because the tool chain is hard to use. Even in a normal game production environment, it requires a lot of sophistication to use it. And as I said, we're now having to use it in different ways. When you embed with a company, what level do you engage with the company? Do you work with the engineers? Do you develop code with them? Do you work in the application level? Are you just with the board meeting on vision or is it all across the board? I'm more the hangout with engineers kind of person, but the caveat is that... So I'll take Blue Origin as an example. It's not enough in engineering just to know how to use the tools of engineering. So you can be super good, for example, at writing code or using a CAD program, and that's great, but actually participating in a large engineering effort is a huge social and organizational and cultural component. You've got to check in your code in a civilized way. You've got to get along with the other people working on the project and a million other things, which are not my strong suit. I didn't ever have to learn that stuff. So in the case of Blue Origin, for example, when it turned its efforts towards a more serious and focused engineering process, that was the point where I was kind of like, well, you know, I can't be a responsible engineer if I'm going to disappear for three weeks at random intervals and go on book tours. So the area where I can actually be of any use has got a lot of the nitty-gritty engineering stuff to it, but it's before we've gotten into the realm of a serious, planned, budgeted, scoped engineering process. So the visionary part, it's still dealing with the real technology and the real technical issues, but before it actually gets down to line items and a workflow. Yeah, I mean, I think the visionary part is kind of the easy part in some ways, and the important part is having enough of a foothold on the engineering realities to know what is an achievable vision in a reasonable period of time. You had to pick another domain outside of Blue Origin or Magic Leap where you'd enjoy that early-stage exploratory culture and really want to be shaping the nitty-gritty with some of the engineers. Is it something like a CRISPR bio lab, a genetic engineering lab? Is it something like MIT, DCI, where you have computers and money? Or maybe JPL, looking for the origin or looking for life elsewhere? I feel like I'm so weak in the life sciences that I wish I'd learned more about that stuff, but I'm more of a code and physics kind of brain. So it would be quite a challenge to try to turn myself into somebody that different. So I guess, I like building things. I enjoy writing code, but again, once the project grows beyond a certain level of seriousness and responsibility, I have to sort of back away. We're very playful here. I think we could adopt you as the Space Initiative space architect. Does it have a question? If the microphone can get to him, who has the holy microphone? There's the Chris New. Big fan. Talk loud. I'm right up. Snow Crash was required reading in my MIT courses in the 90s, by the way, for three years. My area here is law and technology, and I've been looking at Accelerando now much more closely, the parts where you talk about those basically smart contracts and virtual legal entities that can be spun up quickly, like servers and a Docker or some kind of DevOps environment. I'd like the way you talk about law and technology and creatively extrapolate how it could be used as part of complex workflows. What are you thinking now in terms of what could be the role of law, lawyers, justice as we build out these environments, and especially as we look at things like the question you posed, the big challenge about distinguishing what's true, what's not true, and the role of human judgment? Actually, just two days ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine. He was one of the aforementioned cypherpunks who now is a lawyer in New York practicing crypto law. So, yeah, the... I don't know. I've been reading a book whose name I'm going to forget because I can never remember these things, but it's a culture of fact. Barber Shapiro. Sorry, I just have a little latency in the name buffer. You need the wearable. Yeah. And it's about... I'm reading it because it's about fact. The idea of facts and where that idea came from because we didn't always just have that idea. And so she tells the story about how she traces it back to the judicial system in England where you had these traveling judges who would go to communities to address crimes that had taken place maybe weeks or months earlier. And so you can't just walk into the crime scene and finger somebody, and it's not that kind of scene at all. There's no evidence. You've got to have an algorithm. You've got to have a panel of jury. You've got to then find witnesses and you've got to impose certain rules like this is where we get no hearsay evidence and all of the machinery that we have now sort of emerges from that tradition. And it's a very carefully thought out algorithm that they use to establish facts that were remote from their own perception. In other words, this happened three months ago. I'm a judge. My job is to find out what happened. I can't just throw up my hands and say, I don't know. I have to produce an answer. Here's my algorithm. And so she goes on to talk about how the elements of this thinking and this process then got picked up by other professions. So starting with history, people who wrote history. Prior to this tended to be quite poetic and like Herodotus will jump from pretty straight up history to ridiculous myth like in the middle of a sentence. And that was considered normal then because that's probably what historians did. And that starts to go away as the historians begin to say, no, this is not what we do. We have to be like judges. We have to look at the evidence. We're using judicial terminology and judicial style procedures in order to write better history. And then she goes on to talk about how similar things happen with the early Royals Society and their procedure for examining evidence and deciding what is scientific fact and people who wrote travelogues. And so it's a highly recommended read about how law and legal procedures and legal thinking became really pervasive and really important outside of just law and in science and history writing. And that all then flows through. If we have histories that people agree on as being legitimate historical accounts of what happened, then we can base intelligent decisions upon those histories. So it's not an answer yet, but it's sort of at least a slightly less depressing kind of... It suggests that we were once in a state where we didn't have a way of deciding on facts and we managed to climb our way out of that. And so, A Culture of Fact by Barbara Shapiro. Great book. This is so critical in the judicial context and interestingly it makes me think of a New York Times article that I think is number one most popular on New York Times online right now by Fahad, one of their contributing editors around the beauty of returning for a few months just to print newspapers and facts that are determined slowly, deliberately, well researched in a similar context in which a judge might do it and the beauty of getting off of the instant notification news cycle. Yeah, yeah, so... Yeah, so it's been like a couple of years now since Project Hieroglyph. Can't see the cube. Yeah, okay. Is this good? Yeah. All right. A couple of years since Project Hieroglyph and the role of optimism in science fiction in helping society tackle big problems. Yeah. I was wondering, given a five-year retrospective, how, like, what kind of an impact you felt that project had? Well, I don't know. You know, I think it... So he's referring to a project that we ran with Arizona State to produce an anthology of optimistic science fiction. And so the... And so a number of science fiction writers contributed stories to this collection. And... Oh, particularly of interest here is Cory Doctorow's story, which is about 3D printers on the moon. So... So that is totally worth checking out if you space geeks haven't seen that one yet. So... But, you know, I think it was... I think there were some good stories in it. I think it was an opportunity to kind of go around and raise that issue and talk about it a little bit. It's hard to trace results from it. You never know. You never know what the results of these things are. But I feel like there was a little uptick in people being more conscious of, you know, why are they always dystopias? Can we please get away from the dystopia thing for a minute? I mean, the effects on young people, too. I see my daughters in middle school. They're reading science fiction. All dystopia. Yeah. I mean, it's easy to write a story. There's obviously something there that's a conflict. There's a drive. But you wonder about the effects. We were talking about E. Doc Smith earlier, right? It was kind of a crazy space. You're talking about being a space opera. And that was when it started. It wasn't dystopia. Or the wells may have been dystopian anyways. Of course, the time machine were the world. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. So I work in human factors, human machine interaction, and situations where the machine works beautifully, the human is sane, and when you put them together, things go terribly wrong. You do that narrative and talk about that very compellingly, more compellingly than most people I've ever read. It's one of my favorite things about your writing. So a lot of us actually work in that area, and we live in a world where that type of drama is more and more important and more and more common. Can you give us some advice on how to talk about that narrative and how to help the world understand how important it is? As a scientist. Which narrative? The narrative of you have a human and a machine, and the interaction between them is something important and that should be looked at closely. This can be called human factors, human machine interaction. I work in human machine trust. But these themes run deeply through your writing, and you're very good at making them compelling and interesting. As a scientist, I work to make both my grant committees and the people who I disseminate my findings to to understand that. And I know many of us do. Many of us work in that space. Well, I got it easy compared to you. I can just write that they have this user interface that does this, that, and the other thing, and it's awesome. As you know, and as anyone knows who works in UI design, actually making a UI that works consistently for a lot of different human beings on different hardware and different conditions is amazingly hard. And even if you think you've got something dialed in and working really well, if the processor gets busy or the memory is full, and it slows down the responsiveness of a widget by a fraction of a second, it just blows everything to hell. So I guess from what little I've seen of actually trying to do this as opposed to just making stuff up in a hand-wavy fashion in books, it's really, the devil is really in the details of figuring out how these tiny little micro-interactions work and how you, well, it is trust, your word trust really is the key to it because if one time you try to pull the menu down and it doesn't come down, it destroys your trust and your expectation that the menu is what it reports to be. You get confused and, you know, I see this all the time with people who are not as computer-y and when the UI is glitchy or slow or doesn't do what they expect, it all goes to hell. I've worked with autonomous vehicles, cyber defense, and in your books, a lot of the drama you build is out of these types of interactions, actually. Sorry, I said in your books, the type of drama that you build is often out of things like autonomous vehicles, robots, you know, human machine interaction. Well, I think that a way to sell the realism of a fictional world is to get into some of that nitty-gritty stuff a little bit because it's something we deal with all the time, living in a technological society. And so, you know, the limitations that we face on technology, the surprisingly bad surprises that happen when something goes wrong or there's some human error involved or something just breaks. You know, we've all been there. We've all had those experiences. And so, in a fictional setting, I think one, you know, like, just, I mean, trick, for lack of a better word, that I can use as an author to include moments where the system doesn't work perfectly or it's slow or somebody makes a mistake or something breaks because, as I said, we've all been there and it immediately feels like, yeah, yeah, that's... that rings true. That's what would happen. Talking about UI, I mean, as far as we can look in UI, we can do a lot of it here, are implantables. And in Snow Crash, you didn't like them very much, it seems, right? They were the agents of the evil Sumerians to mind control people. But of course, you know, it's been many years since and that's looming ever closer. And you talked about, you know, the network being based around video games. What would the network based around implantables look like, perhaps? Or, you know, is there an upside to it? I think it will not happen. Implantables really, to me, gets us into a space that a lot of people are uncomfortable with. So, I don't know, I know a few people who've done it on a small level, like implanting chips in their fingers or whatever, you know, for various purposes. The... I don't know. I mean, I see why that's a super important thing to think about here at the MIT Media Lab. I think the... I don't know, I have to paga that one a little harder because anything that modifies your body immediately gets you into a cultural space that is sort of weird or, you know... Uncanny Valley or something. Yeah, and... So, that's not necessarily a fair judgment, but you're definitely making a cultural statement. When you get even a small tattoo or a piercing, unless it's a nice normal ear piercing and you're a girl, then it's fine. But any other piercings, you know, you've... stepped over into a kind of a different space and you're kind of making a statement. Except if you're deaf and you have a cochlear implant. I mean, once you're prosthetic, it's another story. And as those develop to the point where they can do other things, that's another kind of a slope. Yeah, well, there is that. Yeah, I know it's a fascinating topic. I don't know if I can do justice to it. Two things that come to mind that might interest you on that regard. One is Janan's work, with faculty members at the Media Lab looking at implantables under the skin. There's a new clean room here, basically building a facility to be able to do some development in-house. And then Hugh Hare's work with prosthetic limbs and the Bionic Man and Human 2.0 question being once his limbs, and they're already so close, if not already surpassing this, less energy to use a prosthetic limb to bound than the energy required for a natural human body. When do you choose to self-amputate? Because it'll give you an advantage over just being something that replaces functionality that you once had. So choosing to do these. Yeah, if it gives you an advantage and what you really want. So, okay, so let me back away from what I said a minute ago to that I wasn't thinking of disability type situations. That's a that's a different category of stuff, but voluntarily changing a normal body to enhance it or whatever is gets us into it. In seven eaves, though, that happened, but I think it happened prenatally, right? So they didn't choose themselves. It was chosen for them. It was chosen for them by, yeah, by yeah, each of the eaves gets a free one. It's to choose one genetic alteration that she thinks will make for a better human future. Right. So speaking of extremes, I wanted to ask the one way ticket question for all of you up here. Exploring space is really breathtaking and we feel that just wondering would any of you take a one way ticket and to where and under what conditions and why kind of an open ended exploration question. You stole my final question for Neil, which is going to be would you go to Mars and if yes or no give us the answer as to why? You want to take that first and then Joe and I could answer for ourselves. Sure. The more that I looked at space the more I was confronted by the reality that it would be at least for the foreseeable future a pretty unpleasant place to be. Certainly if you're in zero G it's terrible if you're in zero G and exposed to radiation all the time which is true of almost all people who've ever been in space you know that is that is bad news and it's so and it's going to be that way for a long time it's going to be like you know living in a corridor at Port Authority oh boy that's an image you're not going to be drifting looking at the Crab Nebula it's going to be pretty gritty and you're going to have to be underground a lot because of cosmic rays and you're going to be confined to a space that might not smell so good eventually that'll all get better there will be a great big huge floating space colonies but I don't know if I would take a one way ticket if I'm going to end up in one of those environments until I die to me there's not enough payoff to justify that maybe later when we have pretty places to go that smell nice I would go I would go so I thought about this for a while and I'm already calculating the years to when I think NASA will open up recruiting for 2030s, 2040s astronauts and will I be too old at that point to be able to do a manned Mars mission say one way ticket is a hard choice I really love the verdant green earth people who know me know that I have like 30 house plants in my apartment so that would be hard to give up family and give up a life here but I think that's part of what makes us human and something really special about us is that we want to explore we want to go push the final frontier and I would absolutely go I think you both have great points I tend to agree with Neil but anything we do to the planet on our own pretty much is not going to make it as bad as any of the places we can get to Venus is just terrible terrible planet you don't want to hang out there for those seconds and Mars we can live inside of caves and stuff like that there's radiation, there's no air no air we can breathe it's cold blah blah blah so we're living in the tunnel basically we go to a place like that and I think unless you have to you don't want to spend a whole lot of time in these environments I think the deeper question if you look at eventually people going on Mars into space maybe a time when something leaves what will it be? will it be anything we recognize as human? humans aren't built to live there and if you look at the scales of modifying ourselves it's about the same time scale as going into space and the singularity stuff if you believe any variant of that that's all kind of coming at the same time so what goes into space probably won't be us as we know it and that leads to my last question for Neil where are the aliens? I mean you think that if life is plentiful we can notice even if they're solar system they do something or are they just doing VR and buried in their magic leaps they don't care it seems pretty clear that there aren't any cold? cold? yeah but I mean it just it seems like a really simple explanation of the observable facts is that there aren't any right? at least any doing things that we think they would do right? if we change ourselves they could be doing things we can't even conceive of or they could have self-destructed in which case there aren't any, you're back to that or they just never remain but yeah there's that one thread of hope that maybe they do something that we don't know space is boring it's just stuff I'm like Ariel, I was born to go and I love this stuff I applied as an astronaut, there are all these things we have our hopes with you but yeah that's now if you wait 50-100 years at the time scale when everybody could go realistically into space we won't be the same organisms necessarily if we're still here it is interesting to think about this paradigm that we have that anytime we send an organism currently out into space it has to be surrounded in an earth-like bubble, air, certain temperature we love your plastic bags we love them a lot not mine totally not that I want to hang out in one for a while great solution but how do you flip that, how do you not have to send humans always up into space in an earth-like environmental bubble can you instead make humans, ourselves or organisms more space tolerant and for anybody watching the live stream who's going to tune in to Beyond the Cradle which is a big space being held at the media lab we're going to talk a little bit about some tardigrade research being done here at the lab in crypto-biosis trying to take a genetic property that would make organisms more vacuum desiccation tolerant, more mitigation tolerant and create a new wave of organisms eventually humans very very far in the future I mean there's also true enlightenment so what we've been able to figure out from just being on earth has been amazing if we just augment ourselves a little bit if not progress more we're going to be able to figure everything out probably by staying here and then why do anything I don't know that's a question for Joey I guess bring enlightenment into the I do think that we're confined to the solar system so barring huge huge changes in biology we are never ever going to get out of the solar system in a significant way I mean go a little bit outside the solar system but we're never going to go to other stars and so if that's true of other alien species it would explain quite a bit about why we don't see them but it doesn't explain everything we'll find a lot out I think in the next decade or two it's going to be an exciting time as we start getting these observations from robotic spacecraft back about nature of life and where it is or where it isn't so on that note this has been wonderful Neil great to see you back at the lab you're welcome anytime we hope you're not a stranger here it's good to be here we'll fix that going forward thank you very much yeah thanks