 Hello, hey humans So now we begin and so we begin So let's see we were talking backstage about Why this era is different and like sort of like How do we call? When you call the technique the technique and also the Technopoly right by Neil postman or If you guys will forgive a little bit of the punniness like Now live in the like a new epic we live in the epoch Yeah, yes, and geologists often call it the Anthropocene the Anthropocene exactly or so we can get technosene Yes, yeah, the tech scene the tech. Yeah, it's a little Yeah, it doesn't rule off the tongue no no, but I think it's actually a really important thing to call out That you know these things that sit in our pockets Now are the sense-making devices by which we understand the world these are sort of the GPS's I mean this and technology more broadly That we navigate that we make meaning we decide what's valuable to us like how we even like come to what is our identity? all comes through Technology well, I would actually go further than that and one of the things that happened recently interestingly is that aza Belongs to a collective of art and technologists and he recently had a dinner that he hosted at his house a bunch of very well-known technologists were attending there and One of the things that I realized actually during the course of that conversation when we were when we were sitting around the dinner table was that All of us were working on the project of humanizing technology that we were all working towards making the human Are there a recognizable part of what we were building? Adapting technology to human needs You know making sure that the tendency of technology to dehumanize is curbed Yeah, and what I realized also is that a lot of us that were in the room were Software designers software developers we'd been working at places such as Facebook and Google and You know all of the various companies that that I have I have worked at and all the startups that we've been building and that we've Been actually addressing an incredibly small part of the problem We are basically and I and I have I've been this is like my fourth time actually up on the up on the slush stage Yeah, and the and You've actually actually been at least that many times up on this last day just this is the slush I'm realizing but the but that the Thing that we've been talking about is actually changing the way that we build software We've been talking about the way that we design our apps You know how much we use our phones But what occurred to me at that meaning was number one all of us are very earnest in our efforts Yeah, but isn't it a little bit like the foxes guarding the henhouse, right? How are the technologists going to actually change the technology when we come from that orientation ourselves? And I was I was realizing that as we were having that conversation that that all of us were coming from a very technological orientation and not from outside of that and one of my particular You know kind of bugs or features is that I come from the humanities You also studied music and we come from places outside of technology and so we have a different perspective on the technology and how to build it and Really what we're talking about actually many layers up above The feature set of the software that we're we're building what we're actually talking about is the reality We're talking about the technique. I call it the technique I've been reading recently a bunch of Italian philosophers Francesco Bifobarati and Federico Campania who talk about the technique and the technique as I understand it comes also partially from the idea of Of how everything in the world everything that we see around them the chairs We sit on the the floor beneath us the ceiling the very trees that are in nature have become as Heidegger says in his essay questions concerning technology standing stock Standing stock everything is standing stock Trees are not trees. The forest is not the forest. It's standing stock. It's waiting there with You know technological use and that he says I think it's very interesting. He says that technology itself is not inherently Technical it's not technological. It's this idea of Being there waiting and being seen as and having a use as only these things Such as standing stock human beings are just their potential labor and the thing that's happened to us Is that we have become? As is dictated by the world around us and look at look at the world around you right now And look at the things that you see and look at the lights in this room and the You know everything the people around you and the conversation that's having a stage and the screens that it's also being projected upon All of this is the technique and we are in it We are completely immersed in it and the thing to remember about it. It isn't constructed reality It is a recently constructed reality and such as a changeable reality It is something that we ourselves invented and we ourselves can reject and you know, for example Ursula Le Guin the science fiction writer We both love you know, you know, she writes that Capitalism in our world seems as if it isn't an inevitability. It is absolutely inescapable. It's everything that we do It's everything that we see around us It is why we do the work that we do it's the the you know, reason we design all that software that we design I'm a venture capitalist myself and She said that it seems as if it is that way, but so was once the divine right of kings Mm-hmm. How do we change this reality? I know you have some ideas about this Just a simple 20-minute conversation One of the things thinking about the way the technology is affecting humanity now, right? Like we're not We're a complicated species like we're not exactly. Oh, did I disappear? Hello Can you hear us? Can you guys hear or did I just disappear? Can you hear us? No No, okay, we've gone offline. Well, this is great now. We can talk about all the real thing. Oh, here we go um Thinking about the way that technology affects humanity What is it that you're saying? Yeah Humanity is not we're a complicated species like we are not purely good. We're not purely evil and The environments that we live in dictate so much about our behavior. Mm-hmm. I think we we have this I we're now we're now ten minutes in seven minutes, and we're gonna get to the free will conversation Which is like one of the things I think we know as designers is that human beings don't have as much free will as They think they do yes, and we're way more easily hackable. Mm-hmm so The Stanford Prison experiment. Mm-hmm my takeaway from that, right? This is where you like you take a set of Undergraduate and graduate Stanford students you randomly split them one group becomes a Prisoners the other group becomes prisoner guards And they had to stop the study a couple days in Because even though these students all knew that the other people were students the act of being in an environment Which feels oppressive the prisoner guards started to abuse strip search do all these terrible things to Dehumanize the prisoners and my takeaway from this is not that humanity is a terrible race My takeaway is that people by and large Operate in the environment that they're given and they just sort of like take the path of least resistance We act the way that we're sort of expected to and the so then I think about like the technique. Yeah, this is like It's sort of like building a garden You can't control any individual human being or any visual plants like Progress how it blooms but you can certainly affect the how nice a garden is to be in you can affect the overall structure And when I think about how do we build? technology that Understands that we as human beings are very persuadable and manipulatable Right all it took so 55% of plastic surgeons in the US Now say report having seen patients that come in and ask to look like their selfie filters All it took to get this was a couple of like buttons and a counter And showing those images to other people to get soulful validation to climb so far down people's brain stems That they're willing to go under the knife and change how they physically look To look more to more like the thing that our technology tells them that they wanted you and I think that's sort of What you sort of mean about that like the technique is that we live in this invisible sphere of identity and influence that we Both feel that it's inevitable. It's just how things are and yet can change so quickly if we if we if we here's the thing That I'm actually questioning. Okay, is the inevitability of this I hear this over and over again, and I hear everybody say well It's a done deal. Yeah, it's already happened. There's no escape We're in it, right? How do we how do we you know ever escape it? We don't right? Do you believe that I mean because I actually don't believe that I mean I'm actually very skeptical about that and everybody always says that yeah, well that ship is already sailed Yeah, that's already done and and to me I'm a born disrupter Right, I just I just I just just just like the status quo Whatever the status quo is and this was you know when I started my career or whatever that was 20 years ago or more I I Enjoyed I have you know as we kind of have previously discussed Have a have a great love for kind of Identifying kind of what's wrong with the current reality and then trying to trying to disrupt it Right, I think that that is the common tendency among a lot of the people that are in the audience here today And the people that work in technology is that there's a certain attraction to the idea of disruption Yep, right and that we have the ability to actually change things, but you know it does seem as if this has been a fairly Not very well thought-up disruption, right? It's been kind of very Let's say move fast and break things kind of kind of disruption and you know as we've as we've we've seen amply Demonstrated Things have been broken. Yep. Well, I think back to other times when those way completely great things are not inevitable And I think the one of the saving grace is here It's like the future we're moving towards is one that I don't think very many people want to have happened No, and you know there have been other times when there's this kind of like game theory, right? Because we're in this weird game theory around like capturing human attention actually you asked me When a while ago like why is it that we systematically abuse animals? in factory farms and Yeah, and I think the answer there Originally, oh, maybe it's in the Enlightenment thinking and it's like a transcendence and like a sentence of man over animal We like no actually this much simple It's just the game theory of the cultures that out competed other cultures are the one that Learned to use animals as resources to exploit and it's the same kind of game theory going on here now Which is what companies are now out competing all the other companies the ones that have greater than 50% Of the like stock market value in the US Oh, these are companies that are learning to use human beings and our attentions at resources to exploit getting back to the Heidegger point. Yes. So when is this kind of game theory happened before well actually? slavery Had the same kind of game theory where the British Empire couldn't step off of slavery Because if they're like if we do that well France's economy is just going to surge ahead Huge competitive advantage. So it's impossible. How could we possibly do this thing? And when? When Great Britain did step off the slavery Trainership they had to sacrifice 2% of their GDP for 60 years But the way they did it is they ended up being a human rights issues a thing that everyone said this is now Morally repugnant. This is not the way you treat human beings And so we can all agree to slowly step away at the same time I think the exact same thing is true now whether you think about it from like up here at the capitalist Sort of like stack or down here at the attention economy kind of stack week We can make that kind of like well, I do think that you know, we you know I come from the the the ancient days of the web 2.0 and and during that era of building Software for people we were building what we thought of and what we considered to be building was online communities Yeah, and and you know, you know as they came to be called social media as they came to be Attentioning gathering devices as they came to actually be very exploitive. Yeah You know in their in their outlook a lot of that was lost and I I do think that that core of what I what I saw as a culture of generosity in the very early days of the internet and a very collaborative community oriented participatory non-passive Participation and the building of cultures. Yeah is something that you know I think was really built in in the early days of the internet We saw that I saw that and you know the the well right the kind of the Howard Reingold Stewart Brand era of the internet and kind of subsequent to that and I think that it was only in I would say the past I actually I actually kind of Myself peg There are a lot of there are a lot of wrong turns along the way and I think that that you know as we kind of saw You know especially social media and and you know Twitter and Facebook especially become dominant that the point at which it turned Was the activity feed? Actually, this is this is actually what I what I think it happened was when it was sorted by attention That to me was the crucial point at which things went wrong and that you could buy your way Into someone's attention that could be Advertisers or it could be foreign governments and so I I I Really see some of these Being dependent on business models. Yep. I see a lot of them You know in the early days of Flickr when we were building that it was entirely paid for By subscription and one of the things that's happened right now is that Flickr has been a Sold to it was it belonged to yahoo and then subsequently to Verizon and then became part of smug mug is now going back to a Subscription model and very clearly is stating We are not gonna harvest and sell your data. You are not a product to be sold You know, it's it's an interesting it's returning to that and I was very happy to see that It makes me wonder as we move with Selling I really like your point selling brand is almost identical to selling ideology Mm-hmm. It was pretty much inevitable as you started to step down that path of selling attention that we would have state actors and foreign actors Vying to Essentially, I think of it as a drift attack. They find what actually in the last US election I think this is fascinating the 2018 one the 2016 Russia did a lot of content creation In 2018 they stopped doing that. They're like actually it's even more effective to find people's positions whether it's black lives matters or the women's March and just Extremize those views to take them and push them even further further. Yes. They work in the tension economy to create a greater divide Exactly. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, you know what I'd like to like to talk a little bit about is Ways out like the paths or the islands in the technique that that serve humanity in a way that Is not immediately obvious I think to a lot of people especially those of us who work in the industry and are surrounded every day with you know all of our multiple screens and Devices and all of that kind of thing and I'm actually gonna I secretly Hid a little piece of paper in my pocket and I have a quote that I'm gonna read so this is This is what I call Darwin's regret and I think that it's a regret that a lot of People who work in the sciences and technology share. Yeah, and this was written by Charles Darwin in a letter to a friend Towards the end of his life My mind has changed during the last 20 or 30 years Now for many years. I cannot endure to read a line of poetry I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding out general laws from large collections of facts Hmm if I had my life to live again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week the loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness and Many and may possibly be injurious to the intellect and more probably to the moral character By enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. Hmm. I'm Wow, I'm reminded of the there's a Peruvian phrase Which is? sickness is the inability To appreciate the beauty of a flower Yes, and these things actually feel very sympathetic. That's very very very similar and I do think that You know we come from the valley and of course see as I read a psychologist describe it so much success and so little happiness. Yeah, and My my orientation and my back. I'm actually a kind of an accidental technologist I was I was originally studying Renaissance literature when I accidentally Fell into the tech industry being in San Francisco in the mid 90s which is a kind of a Irresistible attraction and and and fascinating and it was it was very clearly the creation of new worlds But I think now You know so many years later we can see the danger of what of what we have become and you know I originally I originally came out to California to get a PhD and in basically I studied Shakespeare's sonnets Was my my main area of study and we we Somehow have have lost the ability to see that you were I remember we were having a conversation previously I'm producing an upcoming podcast and One of the things that you said really Terrified you is that people started talking about post nature. Yeah Yeah, post nature, you know, we live in a post nature world You know, it's really fascinating. We're saying we're sitting here on the evergreen stage, which is Kind of it's kind of fascinatingly kind of pseudo nature In the midst of the technique, yeah One of the most The moment when I knew humanity in some ways to just jump the shark if you will Mm-hmm, or San Francisco at the very least was there's a while maybe three years ago four years ago where every bus in San Francisco Had a beautiful picture of nature And then the slogan was go visit your screensaver The pain in that yeah, it's pain where once again this goes back to like the technic or the sorrow Yeah, it's which is our image of what the natural world is Yeah, comes now by the thing that we stir out every day and that shines a blue light in our eyes Yeah, yeah, blue lighting. Yep lighting and and you know, one of the things about You know, I think living in the technic is that We we can we can just so easily step out of it, right? It's just so it's actually it's actually incredibly easy You know, we just step a little bit to the left We just turn off our devices. We just kind of like walk out on the streets to me is like one of the like there's a kind of You can call it cultural gas lighting that I think we as technology companies do but yeah the whole attention of Connie Facebook YouTube and here here is sort of like the fundamental lie or the abuse which is The simplest version of it is to say, you know, they put hundreds of engineers behind every screen We have the smartest supercomputers that we then sick on trying to find the content that'll keep you around But when you're addicted, it's your fault Yeah, and yeah worse like yeah, we just we're told that we get like we are just given what we want when we open up our Facebook news feed or when we see YouTube recommendations It's just feeding us what we want and there's like a fundamental bug in this just the the thought processes of The epistemology of like that word want because it's not what we want No, what we can't help but look at and there's a kind of praying on our neuroplasticity that's going on here Like we can't humans like we have it's an instinct hacking. We can't help Yeah, but look at a car crash when it's basically like a security exploit exactly is basically what it is exactly It's like a biological security explain and you know, here's the thing that I have I have found really interesting is that I when you think about what Robots what what technology with software what computers can do What it actually excludes are the things that humans in particular and especially can do which is have compassion Have emotion fall in love. Yeah Care for one another and all of these things are not accomplishable or achievable or by machines or Measurable by machines. They're they're non-numeric and It was interesting. I read it. I read an article that was Basically saying that you know an AI dominated future is interestingly a feminist future, which I thought was interesting because Qualities that are are most frequently attributed to women. Yeah, all of those things human connection Compassion care. Yeah The teaching professions nursing You know, you know, are things that are not You know, they're like, you know Anybody who's been in the uncanny valley of being served by a robot Which which is probably happening somewhere here on the floor of slash I'm sure that opportunity is available to all of us right now is is You know, it's it's very clear what it is not So what it is not is those things that are special to us so I hear there's like this trope of Empathy is one of those special things that only humans do I'm really worried that that's another case of humans liking to think we're special But actually my hunch is that empathy is going to be one of the biggest backdoors into the human mind So here's some art that I've been thinking about doing. Yeah And it sort of plays on the idea of like How hackable are we? How readable are we? So imagine a one of those new deep Faked generated faces that can just do whatever face it wants and you walk up to a screen imagine like you walk into a dark room There's a light and there's a screen in front of you and on it is one of these like AI generated faces And there's a little camera that watches your face and it just mirrors you anything you do It just does right back and if you've done eye gazing, you know that you like, right? Actually, you should all do this find somebody in the audience and just eye gaze with them for like two minutes It's super uncomfortable. There'll be lots of emotions that come up and your faces will start to like will align and eventually They'll like they'll be doing the same face at the same time And just like if you smile You get happier if you force yourself to like frown you get sadder. Yeah So imagine the AI sort of like you do it your eye gaze for a little bit until you like it catches you And you're doing the same thing and then it just starts drifting you very slowly towards some emotion happiness Sadness kindness It it just well Facebook like the Facebook researchers were already doing this to us It's true But at the text level and at the image level yeah, and here's like we can just hack some of like right we can hack mirror neurons Sure, and the idea being like Well, I think there's a bunch of fun things you can play with this once you have it But yeah empathy isn't I think just a thing that humans can do You know the thing yeah, here's the thing is is there should be some kind of how you're the gas in your house Has an added stink So that when you have a gas leak, you know it because otherwise you can't smell it and you would just perish Unvenos yourself. It seems as if these systems should have some kind of stink That's added to them. Yeah, so that you're aware when you are communicating with an AI and have the potential to be manipulated agreed that's a great idea it's sort of like the The blade runner law. Yes. Yeah. Yes Blinky lights Okay, that's it for us. Yep. Thanks everyone. Thanks everybody