Gerd Leonhard & Peter Vander Auwera: Chapter 1: a prologue to the Future

Hello, this is Gerd Leonhard, futurist and author of Technology vs. Humanity. Today I have a conversation with Peter Van. Peter is the latest addition to the Futures Agency team. He is the content curator and also is helping me with the Digital Ethics newsletter, which by the way is at digitalethics.co. You can sign up, it's free of course. And we are doing a series of new shows talking about my book. Technology vs Humanity, chapter by chapter. So Peter has had the job of reading the book in great detail, and he will ask me some pointed questions about what I'm trying to say in the book. And today we're doing chapter 1. Again, if you're interested in the book, it's techvshuman.com, Technology vs Humanity. Hello, Peter.

Hello, Gerd.

So what chapter 1, can you tell us a bit more about the general layout of chapter 1 just to give people a bit of context?

Yeah, in your book in chapter 1, the title of the chapter is "A Prologue to the Future," and there are a couple of elements in there where you basically say where we are and where we are going in terms of future and technology future. And then you make a sort of call for action that it's time to do something about what's going on, especially for the survival and the flourishing of human species.

Great, that's a good summary. I think we should leave it at that and just go right into the questions about that you find pertinent to chapter 1. And to the listeners here, I'm also, future project is I'm gonna record chapter by chapter as a free MP3 So you can look for that also on the website, it's coming out. But first of all, you know, you've got to buy 1,000 copies of the book just right away. Just kidding. So Peter, let's get going. Yeah.

So your, your main meme opening in chapter 1 is, and you use it in many of your conversations as well, is humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in the previous 300 years. Can you expand a bit on that?

Yeah. I mean, we're, we're, um, I get this question all the time. It sounds kind of like hyperbole or, you know, stuff, so California stuff. But basically what's happening is that all the changes of technology 300 years ago, Industrial Revolution, the atomic bomb and the internet and telephone and so on, they were all outside of us. They didn't change us as a human. They changed our behavior like television, but not like we have today. You know, our behavior is totally impacted by social media, by smartphones. Very soon we have augmented virtual reality. So we're going to think different, we're going to see different, we're going to hear different, like language translation, right? And very soon we can go inside of our body and change that too. So we can change our genetic makeup, we can change our biome, which we're already experimenting with. We can have prosthesis, we can become cyborgs, right? So this is why I'm saying the next 20 years, it will change us as a human. That's completely different than changes outside of us, like, you know, having a fancy telephone or so. So this is why I'm thinking like, you know, the changes are all coming together, they're exponential, they're combinatorial. So basically all of the advances of science, whether it's nanotechnology or AI or deep learning, they're all coming together now, right? They're creating new products, new possibilities, and of course entirely new challenges as well.

Yeah, I like the dimension of behavior, change of behavior. It's like we are entering a second phase of what, Douglas Rushkoff at the time wrote "Program or Be Programmed." It looks like being sucked into this whole online world where you get recommendations and so, those big organizations are on purpose, intentionally trying to reprogram our behavior.

Yeah, I mean, they are, let's put it this way, intentional or not, I mean, really what they're working on is influencing us and changing changing us so that we can fit their setup better. So now if you have anything interesting to share, you won't tell anyone, you'll put it on Instagram. And it seems like every conversation that we're having with people must be mediated by somebody. It's like if it's not mediated, it's not worthy. Douglas talks in his new book, Team Human, I think he talks a lot about these things. And we're on the same agenda there, which by the way, I recommend very much to you. Look at Douglas's book, Team Human, in that context. But I think this is really important that inadvertently or by design, we're moving to a world that is essentially sort of remote controlled by a lot of these large platforms and what they allow us to do. And then we forget what we can do without them because we're lazy, convenience, and so on.

Your book was published, I think, in 2016. And I noticed that a couple of the memes in the book are now being taken up by people like Tim O'Reilly in a recent article that was labeled "Gradually, Then Suddenly." I found this theme, gradually, then suddenly, in your first chapter of your book of 2016 already. So what do you mean with the gradually, then suddenly?

Yeah, I think a lot of the memes are kind of universal thinking that are cruising around the internet. In various incarnations. So I'm quite happy about that. I wrote a book, I don't know, 7 or 8 years ago called From Ego to Eco. And then as I was writing, there was another guy, Arthur Sharma, who published a book with the title From Ego to Eco. So there's lots of overlap here and I'm happy about that. I think Gradually Then Suddenly is taken from Hemingway, of course, from a character named Mark in one of his books who answers the question, how does a man get broke? Gradually than suddenly. And so what is happening with technology is, and this is very hard for us to understand because humans are linear, we are working day by day, hour by hour, you know, we don't exponentially grow, we don't exponentially change, you know, it's a process while technology leaps. That is because when you think binary, you give it more firepower and more juice, you know, then you can leap exponentially. But more firepower wouldn't do anything for us because we can't just increase our brain capacity and then it would be faster exponential for us. Well, some people are saying that we can, but I don't think we can. So basically the problem with gradually, that certainly is that we don't see the change because it's so gradual. So we don't see the change, for example, that's occurring in the medical field with CRISPR-Cas9 and genome editing and all the things that are happening. Until the moment that the Chinese doctor works on two babies and allegedly has changed their genes not to get HIV, right? And then we're saying, oh shit, gradually then suddenly, it's suddenly here. And this is really hard for us to comprehend, but we must understand that we're going exponentially into the future.

In the same spirit, in the same thinking, in your book you also have a sort of confrontation, if I can call it that way, of humans versus transhumans. And I know you're, pun intended, a big fan of Zoltán István, where he basically says, hey guys, we are the future, like it or not. And your idea of a humanist approach to that is that this sort of transhumanism poses a danger of being human and free and authentic. And there was a German word in there that you may want to expand on. Das Ein, I think?

Dasein, yes.

Dasein? Dasein? Why did you add it to this part of the conversation?

Yeah, I think first, I think the idea of transcending our human limitations is interesting when you think about if that is not going to be, if transcending doesn't mean we're gonna leave something behind. I mean, if you take a cholesterol pill to lower your cholesterol, you're transcending humanity, right? But in return, you're gonna get some side effects. Everybody knows that. And Marshall McLuhan has already said, the more we extend humanity and our human skills, the more we amputate something else. So the telephone is amputating conversations, which, you know, we can live with that. The TV is amputating making music at home, maybe things like that. Some of that we can live with. But if we were to extend humanity by taking away all the things that make us human, that are kind of a pain in the butt, you know, lies, mistakes, serendipity, accidents, imagination, intuition, you know, the things that are difficult for machines that are not binary. If we take that all away because we want it to be more efficient, we want to be superhuman, so we never make a mistake, I think that's a ridiculous concept because to me that is definitely a downgrade, not an upgrade. So this idea of Dasein, which is a German word for existence, means that we are not just defined by mathematical rules, you know, as I think Harari says, or I think he says that organisms are algorithms. And I don't think we are. I think if we were just algorithms, and there is a possibility for that, we will at least need another 100 years to figure out what that algorithm is.

You have another word for human algorithms, right?

Yeah, I call it androrhythms, you know, the human rhythms. And they are what makes us human. And actually there's a website, androrhythms.com. But so we're talking about passion, intuition, emotions, empathy, compassion. Now try to imagine a computer to actually be compassionate. There's a very big difference between knowing what compassion is as zeros and ones information or text or images and being compassionate. That's like, you could understand what compassionate is by looking at images and saying, oh, Gerd looks like he's compassionate, right? And that's a volume of maybe 0.5% of 100, but being compassion is 100, right? And so we shouldn't confuse these two things. So that's very dangerous, you know, that we're saying, oh, the computer knows what compassionate is. You know, the computer knows the meaning, the mathematical meaning of that definition. It does not know what it feels like. It does not know what a face is just because it can do face recognition. It doesn't know what it feels like to have a face. And will machines learn that? Yeah, maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years. Eventually, I think they probably can. And that would be the point that Ray Kurzweil called singularity, right? That is going to be quite dangerous for us to manage.

It looks like the machines are focusing on two outer aspects of being human in the sense of the scientific part and the mathematical part, but they completely ignore two deeper dimensions which I would label as what is imaginable and what is possible. So we are there in the space of almost philosophy and of human flourishing.

Well, I think the things that make us human are the things that I think Minsky, Marvin Minsky, once said, we know the things the best that we don't know that we know. So basically we are doing these things just because we can. We don't even think about it. I mean, if I see a stranger on the street or the airport, 0.4 seconds to estimate what that person is. And, and because we're receiving transmissions on 1,000 channels, you know, we don't just get zeros and ones, you know, where, and I always like to say machines are binary and we are multinary. When machines switch to quantum computing, they may be able to have multinary information, for example, which includes things like what's called the intractable problem. So a computer will not find an objective solution to 2 or 3 data points that are constantly changing because as it's found the solution, the other point has changed and it has to start again. And the human can easily say, you know what, ignore this, here's my decision. And machines can't do that. Machines can't do accidents and mistakes and misunderstandings and wishes and mystery, right? I mean, if it was up to machines, there would be no mystery. And what's life without mystery?

It's interesting. It's not the sort of narrative that one usually hears from speakers coming from Silicon Valley. In your book, you also highlight that Europe has a big opportunity here. What's the opportunity?

Well, I think Europe is an amazing, I would say, state, United States of Europe, that has the tradition of the thinking and the collective human thinking. I mean, most people in Europe are humanists and they're not technologists. They're not Silicon Valley utopians in that sense. And this is of course also a problem, makes us slower. We think about the past and the present and a little bit about the future. And Americans think only about the future, the past gets burned. We're in a good position because we understand what it means to be human. Like if you go to Portugal and you say, you know what, transcending humanity, uploading my brain to the internet, most people will shake their head in disbelief. Longevity, living forever, the end of dying. Yeah, that sounds all very positive, but most people in Europe would say that's ridiculous, right? So we have an interesting proposition there I think Europe could be the place where technology and humanity can converge and where we can build a system that takes care of both. Embrace technology but don't become it, as I say in the book. While America is hopelessly stuck in the capitalist loop, will do whatever it takes to make money, and China is basically a neo-capitalist state that does the same thing except for the state does it, not the VCs. Well, now the VCs do it as well. Not saying anything bad about China. I admire many things about China. But anyway, so I think this is why Europe has such a good position, but we have to come together and create a framework, what I call the Digital Ethics Council, to say, okay, what is right and what is wrong on the top-level issues? Not of the minor issues, that would be too granular, but the top-level issues. How do we define our future. What do we want to be?

That's a tough question. What do we want to be? I'll ask you a last question just to get you going and maybe going overboard. Who is Ray Kurzweil?

Yeah, Ray, of course, is the chief scientist for Google, the inventor of the Kurzweil piano and maybe 50 other things that he has invented. Yeah. Um, I think his first book was How to Make a Human, or his last book. Uh, anyway, he's kind of— he started with the whole singularity discussion. And Ray is essentially proposing that we upload our brain, that we become one with the machine, right? So, uh, the singularity, transhumanism. And, you know, Ray's extremely bright guy. I love his work. I read all his books. I look at his video. But it's a freezing kind of thought that we would sell out to be superhuman. We would sell out everything else that makes us human just so that we can live to be 150. I think it's a chilling conversation to have to say that we're not enough and we have to keep up with the machines. So therefore I'm going to need arms and legs that are 100 times better than what I have. So I cut them off and I get new ones. I mean, all these things are a little bit like principal ideas, probably not totally incorrect that we can improve ourselves, you know, but in the extreme it's dehumanizing.

I very much like the word unfreezing, unfrozen. I think you probably can do something with that. I don't know who said it, that music is like frozen architecture or something along those lines. It seems to me, and especially in this chapter 1, that you are offering an unfreezing opportunity, an unfreezing way of thinking about this future, unfreezing the thinking of people like Istvan and Ray Kurzweil.

Yeah, I think it's good that these people exist. We need all kinds of people in the future. We need people who want to be cyborgs and live on the internet and stuff. Yeah, we need those people, but we still need a general societal consensus. Uh, and we also need laws and regulations and we need a social context that says, yeah, you know, alcohol is not illegal. Uh, but drinking a bottle of brandy at 9 o'clock in the morning is probably not socially acceptable. And so yes, we can cure cancer using, uh, genomic editing in the future, but it should not be legal to use genomic editing so that I could say, well, my kids really should you know, have the following attributes and then I'm just going to program them and they will be superior in every way. I don't think that should be legal in that sort of return, you know, if you flip the argument. So that gets into, you know, we need a council of wise people like ancient Greece. Yes.

So you're calling for politicians and policymakers or experts or regulators to step up and to join the debate and the conversation, but do you think they're up to speed to do this? I mean, it's like they need some sort of driver's license before we can engage in that conversation. If you look at the interrogation of Zuckerberg in the US, the questions that were asked by the senators were just terrible, so ignorant about what's going on.

Yeah, I mean, the topic of a driver's license for the future has been popping up in my speeches a lot, and we have now an animation on this very soon. I mean, basically I think every politician, every public official, whether it's a mayor or just a guy running a party or in government, whatever, needs to have a certificate that he understands, or she, more she's hopefully, will understand the future. Because the issues that are gradually then suddenly, right? I mean, these issues are not in 50 years, they're in 5 years. You're gonna have to decide what it means to be human in 5 years. And right now they have no clue that that even exists. And so that's one thing. The other thing is on the Digital Ethics Council, I don't necessarily think that this should be politicians. I think politicians have jobs to do that are much more practical and pragmatic, and the democratic process is tedious, you know, so they spend a lot of time on the process. In America, that means mostly raising money. But I think we need the Ethics Council to be like a council of the wise people. And they should definitely be 50/50 men, women, that's for one thing. But we should have people that get paid very nicely, like a CEO, to do nothing else but to ponder those large issues and to issue recommendations.

When is that going to happen, Gerd? When are you going to install this digital ethics council?

Well, I'm working on that, you know. But, you know, I'm writing a white paper about this right now, but I think the I think the Global Digital Ethics Council is unavoidable if we're going to solve issues beyond national administration. Of course, the UN has many initiatives in this direction, but I think the problem with the UN is that if you are a rapporteur or anybody in the UN, you know, you can do this job if you happen to have the money to not work, you know? And I think that's a totally wrong approach. I mean, we spend— how much money do we spend on research for artificial intelligence? I think last year was something like $56 billion. Billion. And how much money do we spend on securing humanity? And that's like, okay, a bunch of researchers, academics, and some writers, you know, and people like us, you know, that just can't be true because, you know, I think we have to spend as much money on humanity as we spend on technology because otherwise technology will be humanity, will replace humanity because it makes money.

And that's why you have said that many, many, many occasions that we are at the crucial junction of what it means, or to define what it means to be human.

Yes, you know, I mean, Tim Cook said this when he was speaking in Brussels, right? Technology can be awesome, can do awesome things, Well, it does not want to do awesome things. It doesn't want anything. And then he said in his next sentence, we will have to decide what we want to be because now technology affords us to be whatever.

Yeah, it was more what society we want to have, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, of course, you know, his we usually refers to Apple, but, but, um, so on the larger story, this is the key question. What does it mean to be human? What are the limitations of that, what is dehumanizing and what is humanizing. And sometimes I jokingly say we need to re-humanize technology. And this will be very, very pertinent to social media. Put the human back inside because it has become dehumanized. And when things become dehumanized too much, I think our social contract collapses.

I think it's a nice segue into Chapter 2. I mean, I see that the subtitle of Chapter 2 is "Let's stop and consider our humanity for a moment." Yes, so, you know, my position on this whole thing is that I'm totally for technology.

I believe technology technology is amazing. We can solve most of our practical problems like water, food, energy using technology. Technology will not solve social, cultural, human, political problems. It will make them worse because it's an efficiency engine. And if we want to live in a world that is not just technology, then we're going to have to create a framework for it. And that does not mean we're going to be less, uh, investing less in science, you know, but science also needs a purpose and the purpose is to make humanity flourish, not to achieve an invention that is doubtful or that cannot be regulated. I mean, this is basically something that we need to agree on. So let's stop there and wrap up, huh?

Sure.

So you could find out more about the book at tech versus human tech vs human.com. Future with Gerd, my website, my YouTube channel, gerdtube.com, GERD, like gastrointestinal reflux disease, same thing. Uh, and Peter van, you can find him on my webpage starting next week. We have a relaunch. Uh, anything else you want to add, Peter?

No, I'm looking forward to the next podcast. When will that be? Is that a weekly or monthly sort of schedule?

Depends how fast you read, you know, but no, basically we can, I think this will be a weekly thing. And of course you can find this on my podcast channel. If you found this on my blog, I have a channel on iTunes, just look for Gerd Leonhard. And of course SoundCloud, where it all got started, and Spotify as of lately, just search there and there's all of the audio versions of my keynotes. Are also to be found there. And, you know, one more thing at the end, you know, we just started, Peter and me, a digital ethics newsletter, digitalethics.co. You can sign up there. We're gonna have a bunch of podcasts coming out and a bunch of new speeches, blog posts on my website. So my focus is this year on this whole digital ethics topic. You can find more on that by using the hashtag #digitalethics on Twitter. You can see all the wisdom sprouting or, you know, basically exploding there. So thanks very much for tuning in, and thanks, Peter.

Thank you, Gert. Thank you.

Cheers.

Bye.