AI Manipulation & The Future of Human Autonomy with Louis Rosenberg - Synthetic Minds Podcast EP10

Welcome to another insightful episode of Synthetic Minds, where we explore the intersections of technology, ethics, and futurism with some of the most innovative thinkers of our time. I'm your host, Dr. Mark Van Renam, joined as always by my digital twin as we dive deep into the conversations that challenge our understanding of the future. Today, I am honored to have Dr. Louis Rosenberg, a pioneer in the fields of virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence. With over 300 patents and a career spanning three decades, Louis has not only contributed to the technological landscape, but also shaped it. His work ranges from founding early VR companies like Immersion Corporation to his current role as CEO of Unanimous AI, where he explores the potential of collective superintelligence. In this episode, we'll discuss his views on the convergence of AI and mixed reality, the ethical implications of emerging technologies, and how we can navigate the rapid pace of technological change. We'll also delve into the risks of AI manipulation and the concept of conversational advertising, which poses new challenges for privacy and autonomy in the digital age. Before we begin, don't forget to subscribe to Synthetic Minds on your preferred platform so you never miss an episode.

Hi, Luis. Great to have you on the show today.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Well, as we always do within the Synthetic Mind podcast, I'm very curious if you could share a little bit about your background and the one or two books that you're most proud of.

Yeah, so my background is as a technologist. I did my PhD 30 plus years ago at Stanford, focused on human computer interaction. In my PhD thesis involved really the very first implementation of mixed reality, where people, for the first time could interact with the real world and the virtual world simultaneously. My work was funded by the US Air Force. So I got to go spend a lot of time in research labs at the US Air Force and at NASA working on virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality. And so, yeah, that really shaped my future in terms of how I look at technology. And I've really been a technologist my whole career focused both on the real world of technology and also the fictional world of technology. I gravitate to fiction really for a specific reason, which is in the world of technology, I tend to really focus on things that are 10 to 20 years ahead of where the mainstream is. And because of that, I see the risks really early. I'm digging into. My career is really focused on three core technologies, virtual reality, mixed reality, and artificial intelligence. And in all cases, as I work in those spaces, I see the risks early. And I really. I put a lot of effort into warning the world about those risks. I do that through academic papers. I do that through nonfiction books. But I also do it through, through fiction. And largely because it's one thing to tell people about the risks and maybe they'll, they'll believe you, maybe they won't. It's something else to show people the risks. And, and, and so the, the reason I gravitate to fictional stories is that it's really a way to show people the risks in a way where they can feel it rather than just intellectualize it. And so, yeah, that's been my background. And along the way I've founded a number of companies. I founded one of the early virtual reality companies, a company called Immersion Corporation, founded in 1993, that the company's actually still around. But I left. We brought the public company public in 1999. I left in 2002. Then I founded one of the early augmented reality companies called Outland Research, and that was acquired by Google. And now I run a company called unanimous AI for the last 10 years, an artificial intelligence company. And so, yeah, so I work on these technologies all day, every day. But I also think a lot about the fictional ways of educating the world about how things can go wrong.

Yeah, well, I think that's fascinating. And some of the books you wrote is a rival mind, I believe, with the impact of AI on the human society upgrades, where you write about human augmentation, monkey rooms, which sort of the dark side, if I understand it correctly, of technology. And then your most recent book, Our Next Reality, which is a nonfiction book which discusses about the convergence of the virtual and the physical realities. First of all, which books are you sort of most proud of, which is of course most difficult to choose. And secondly, have you always had this sort of ethical approach of technology that has it always be at the forefront in your writings?

I definitely have always focused on what are the dangers that I see. And it's one of these things where as a technologist, when I'm working on whether it's when I'm working on AI technologies or working on virtual worlds, I can very easily see the things that I could do as a technologist that would be very bad for society. I could see, oh, I'm working on these AI technologies. And I see, oh, I can use these technologies to manipulate people really easily. Like that's something that I, that it becomes obvious when you're working on creating these, these agents that are interacting with people. And if I, you know, my assumption is if I see how I could do this, other people see how they could do it. And. And there are going to be bad actors out there who are going to. Who are going to use these technologies for really, really negative reasons. And so when I see these pathways, I say, oh, well, it's useful to educate the world about these things. And again, you can educate the world through academic papers and you'll reach a certain group of people. But if you can educate the world through something that is a story or more digestible, then you have a bigger impact. And so you'd mentioned Arrival Mind. So Arrival Mind is one of. I wrote it in 2000, and it's written as a picture book, like a children's book, a children's book about the dangers of AI, but it's really for grownups. So it's a picture book for grownups written very much in the style of a children's book. And it makes it really simple to see the potential. The potential risks of. Of an AI system that gets integrated into society that everybody adopts, everybody becomes dependent on it. And so when we start to see that it has the ability to manipulate society, we can't stop using it because we've become dependent on it. And an arrival mind is really based on an academic concept that I had written about previously called the arrival mind paradox. And so the idea here is this, which is. And the way I view AI is that as we move towards super intelligence, we. We are creating an intelligence that will rival humanity and eventually exceed humanity. And what I've observed is that most people, they view this AI that we're creating as something very, very human. And they see it as very human.

We tend to anthropomorphize anyway.

Well, they see it as very human because it's being created by humans. They see it as very human because now you can talk to it like a human with chatbots, and you will see it even more human as we start talking to it through voice and through photorealistic avatars. The path, especially as someone who's worked on virtual reality and augmented reality, the path that I know we will be in very soon is we will talk to these AI systems and they will look and sound and act just like humans, and we won't be able to tell the difference. And so people feel like, oh, well, it's very human. And the point of Arrival Mind, this little book, is to say, if this intelligence had come from another planet, if it had arrived here from outer space on a spaceship, we would be very worried about it. Right? If I told you there's a spaceship headed towards Earth, it's got an intelligence on it that's smarter than us humans. We would be preparing.

Well, we would hope so.

But instead there's an alien intelligence that we're building. We're building this alien intelligence. And in fact this alien intelligence that we're building, the way it thinks is nothing like how humans think. The way it learns is nothing the way humans learn. We have no reason to believe that this alien intelligence that we're creating is going to share our values, share our morals, share our interests. We, we have so all the things that we would worry about an alien showing up from space, we should, we should be worried about this alien that we're creating here, but we're not worried about it in the same, at the same gut, visceral level because people say, well, we've, it's been, it's been trained on billions of, of do billions of human artifacts and billions of human, human papers and videos and, and it must be very human. And, and the point of arrival mind, and also a lot of the papers that I write is to say, you know what, just because we've trained it on all this human stuff, it doesn't mean it's human. It means we've trained it to be very good at knowing humans and we've trained it to be very good at pretending to be human things that, that's.

What shouldn't be doing.

Well, that's, that's what these AI, the AI system does not think like a human. It does not learn like a human, but it knows it. We're training it to know humans inside and out, to know everything about us and to be really good at pretending to be us. So now imagine that it was an alien showing up from another planet. Say, oh, there's this alien showing up for another planet. It's smarter than us. It might have interests that are different than us. Oh, and by the way, we know nothing about it, but it knows everything about us and it's really good at pretending to be us. Yeah, that's really, that's even more dangerous. So to the point of a rival mind is to say, you know what, and that's why I call it the arrival mind paradox is because the paradox is we trust the alien that we're building here, even though it's actually from, from every objective stance more dangerous than an alien that's going to show up from another planet. Because it knows us. It is. We're training it how to influence us. We're training it how to manipulate us. Oh, and by the way, we're Giving it control over our infrastructure so it can control our electric, our electrical grid and our power plants. So by the time this alien arrives, becomes sentient, which it will become, it basically will have complete control over a society. It will know what's inside and out. Oh, and we'll be dependent on it for our basic services. That's really dangerous. And so that's. That's why. And again, it's written as a, you know, a little children's book because that's an. A more digestible way to. To just appreciate this in little. I mean, and it's got great artwork in it, and it's to appreciate that, hey, we're not thinking about the arrival of super intelligence the way we should. And, and hopefully, you know, it. It gets people to. To take a step back and say, you know what? We. We can't keep thinking that we're just building a smarter version of a human, because we're not.

So I completely agree with you. And that's one of the things that really worries me, is that we're not thinking clearly about what's happening. We think it's a funny chatbot that we can have a relationship with, but we don't really understand all the things that you just mentioned, that it knows us way better than we know it. How are you going to solve this humongous problem of this alien species that is arriving, and it is arriving fast, not 50 years from now, but a lot sooner? How are we going to prepare 8 billion people to take that different perspective and to wake them up, as you try to do in your book?

Yeah, so one of the themes that often ends up in a lot of the stories that I write is this idea that we as a society are allowing technology to mediate our lives more and more. And, you know, and. And that's been going on for 100 years, technology, but is sitting between us and the information we get and the activities we do. And. And I really explored this issue at the deepest level in, in my book Upgrade, which is maybe my favorite. My favorite book. And it's a. It's a graphic novel. And again, to be very digestible, it's. It's a graphic novel written to be easy to read. And the concept of Upgrade is that it was published in 10 years ago. No, 12 years ago. The idea is. There's a global pandemic, which now. Which now sounds very familiar. Twelve years ago, it seemed less plausible, this global pandemic. Everybody's afraid, everybody goes inside, and the technology world gives us a virtual world to Live in. And so Upgrade says, okay, society is now in this virtual world where you go to work in this virtual world and you socialize in this virtual world. And we become so dependent on this virtual world that when the pandemic ends, nobody goes back outside because it's so convenient. Right?

And so society very recognizable.

Right? And so, so Upgrade is a world where everybody is in this, you know, everybody. Nobody ever leaves their apartment or their home. They. They never leave. They're actually afraid to leave because of disease. And all of their supplies are delivered by RO robotic drones that bring them their supplies. And, and so now that's. That's kind of the ultimate situation where technology is mediating our lives, right? It's your. All of your interactions with every other person and, and with products. It's all mediated through this virtual world that, that you are in. And the reason it's called Upgrade is that the. The massive technology, the massive companies that control this virtual world, every, you know, every year, they give an upgrade to society. And, and it's really an upgrade to your entire life, right, because your entire world is. Is this virtual world that you interact with. And, and so they are systematically mediating more and more parts of our life. And so you see through this, through the story that, that we. We humans have less and less ability to control our lives, all in the name of convenience. Look how convenient this is. And so there's one place in one of the upgrades. And yet all these changes happen. People have some things show up through robots, and everybody gets an electric shaver that shows up because they've introduced virtual hair. And so you can just shape. Everyone's supposed to just shape their head because why waste time on physical hair when in this virtual world they can give you virtual hair? And there's no more physical clothes. Everyone just has a white jumpsuit because it's all just projected on you. And so you get to this world where nobody has any hair, everybody's wearing these white jumpsuits, nobody ever goes outside, and yet everyone thinks it's really convenient.

Yeah.

And so it's this progression of us allowing ourselves become more and more dependent on technology, but also more and more dependent on the corporations that control that technology. And in Upgrade, one of the things that people always say like, oh, this is coming true now, is in, you know, I get. Get comments all the time. In Upgrade, it's a virtual world. And so there are artificial agents, virtual, you know, AI, AI characters that will interact with you. So if you're trying to. If somebody's trying to sell you a product or you're interacting with a company. You know, there's no website, there's just an AI agent that's talking to you. And, and so in Upgrade I really explored this issue of the fact that an AI is the ultimate tool of persuasion against us humans. So there's this AI and it shows up and it's going to try to sell you something, but it is able to read your facial expressions and read your emotions and so it is able to understand exactly how you're feeling. But all you see is this smiley pretty woman in front of you. And so you think you can trust this AI, you think it looks human, you feel like you can read its emotions. But again, it's just a facade, it's just an AI behind it. And what happens in every Upgrade is that the AI keeps changing its appearance based on what is maximally influential on you.

Right?

So every person has a different AI that shows up and so the lead character, like he has this woman who shows up and every upgrade she gets like more and more extremely sexy and it starts to ultimately look like a prostitute because that's what the AI determined oh, that what's, what works best on him and his girlfriend has an AI that shows up that looks more and more like a, like a weightlifter because like this big and, and that's the, and that's, you know, that's really what will be happening. And so I, you know, I write academic papers now about this fact that saying, you know, we, we now live in this world where we're going to be talking to AI agents. Those AI agents are going to be reading our emotions that already can read our vocal inflections. They're going to read our facial expressions up from our cameras. And the large corporations that are controlling these systems, they already know that they're going to use these things to sell influence. They call it advertising, but it's really selling influence. And instead of selling influence being a little pop up advertisement in your web, on a web page, it's going to be a, a conversational agent. That conversational agent will learn a lot about, you will say, it will know your interest, know what sports teams you like, it will know what your hobbies are. And so it will start the conversation talking to you about sports, talking to you about hobby, talking about you, about your kids or your family. And then it will, it will have a sales pitch about, you know, the product it wants you to buy or the piece of misinformation it wants you to believe. And we will be outmatched because we're not equipped like we evolved to assume that the other person we're talking to is just like us and we can read their emotions just as well as they can read our emotions. And we did not evolve to talk to another human that has super intelligence that has access to a full record of everything about us and can, can just pretend to have emotions. And so it's, you know, I call this the, the AI manipulation problem. And it's been something I, I've been writing about for the last 10 years. And it really, that, that whole premise really came to me when writing Upgrade because I was, I was really immersed in this time and place where these artificial agents would, would come and, and interact with you every day. And, and I would realize like, well, look at all these really dangerous things that you can do. Once you have, once you have this agent that people will inherently trust, they'll start, we'll start to think of them as our friends or our co workers.

We will think exactly what's happening at the moment and we'll think like, oh, like this are getting relations.

This, this AI, like he, you know, he or she looks trustworthy, she's you know, smiling like. And you don't realize like no, this is completely artificial, it's completely manufactured. And so it's, you know, for me just the process of writing these stories actually educates me a lot about where the future is going because you're there and you see it and then you say, and you've spent the time in that world to know. There's this whole dangerous angle to AI that nobody's thinking about its ability to manipulate us, especially when it looks photorealistic and especially when it looks so good that it will inspire empathy from us. And that's where we become so outmatched because we will feel empathy for, for these AIs that look human and act human and have express emotions, but it's just fake. They're not human.

I think that's sort of the challenge that we face at the moment is that we anthropomorphize AI. I always try to really make an effort not to call it a he or she, but to call it it. And I think that sort of already distances yourself from the technology. But it's, you know, I catch myself quite a few times that I say that I talk about he about ChatGPT, which is just a weird thing if you think about it. But it is, you know, I think it's, that's where you can see the problem that you are describing just, you know, sort of unfolding in front of us where you know, people are having relationships. They had to have emotional bonds with these machines. And in the movie, her I think was a great example of something that is really coming, coming, becoming reality as we speak. So from the technologies that you describe in your books, which technology do you fear? Which prediction do you fear most that it will come true? Is that this, what we just talked about?

So I would say it's the use of AI. And so again, the things I write about most are AI and virtual and augmented reality. In a lot of sense they're just merging together, merging together into. And that's why I wrote this non fiction book called Our Next Reality. Because they're, they're, they're merging together into what will really just be a new reality for, for us humans where the world and, and I see the future really as being a mixed reality where we're, we're wearing lightweight glasses and, and we can see the real world. But then we can also have virtual elements put into this world and it's all controlled by AI. And there will be AI characters, AI characters in this world and real people in this world. And it will get to the point where we will stop thinking about what's real and what's virtual, we'll stop thinking about what's human and what's artificial and it'll just be reality and there'll be. And that's really where we're headed. And, and it's really dangerous. And it's really dangerous because we are allowing third parties to then manipulate the world around us at their discretion. Right? So when we're in this world where you're walking down the street and there's real things and there's virtual things and there's virtual characters, there is a large corporation, multiple corporations who are, who control this infrastructure. And when we're in that world, they can track everything that we do and say because they need to be able to do that to create these, to create these virtual experiences and change what we see in here at their discretion.

And so well, and they operate for their best interest, right? For that, for the, they operate for their own shareholders and not for you and me, right?

And, and so we talk about like this technology is mediating our lives more and more like, well, like right now at least technology mediates our lives when we're sitting in front of social media or something and it's influencing our communication, our information. But we can go walk down the street and we're in the real world, we're going to lose that too. Where walking down the street now is mediated. And there will be artificial agents that are, we'll call them assistants that are whispering in our ears through earbuds. Because one of the things that is absolutely happening is when we have these lightweight glasses that look like normal glasses, they have cameras on them, they have microphones on them. And that allows the AI to see and hear what you see in here. And Meta already has this. Apple's already working on this, Google's working on this. This is not science fiction. This is. And so all of, in the very near future, people will be wearing devices where the, the AI that's in this device that's whispering in your ears as an assistant can see and hear everything that you're doing and, and give you advice, give you guidance. You know, you're walking down the street and you're passing by dry cleaners and it whispers in your, hey, you forgot to pick up your dry cleaning, right? Or, or, or you walk up to somebody and it's, it's an old friend, you can't remember their name, and it whispers in your ear, oh, that's so. And so the last time you saw them was this. And, and so it'll be really convenient, like this week, what will become dependent on this? But again, controlled by large corporations, they're going to use the same thing to, you know, to advertise to you, to try to influence your behavior in their best interests, actually to try to show the world, rather than tell the world this type of scenario of where we're headed in the very near future when people are just wearing these lightweight glasses. I wrote a short story that was turned into a short film called Privacy Lost and it was funded by the Minder Foundation. And it's just a three minute, this little three minute film. You can find it@privacylost.org and it just shows you a friendly family eating in a restaurant in the near future. They're all wearing their glasses, but the servers are virtual. The servers walk up and they're virtual. And so the servers are able to read people's facial expressions. And you can see how these AI agents that are the servers are able to manipulate the family into buying more things, spending more money. But it also shows how we all will have this AI power on our heads. And so the, the husband and wife, they're each getting advice from their agent about the conversation that they're having with each other, right? So, so they're getting, they're getting guidance of, of how to respond to each other because we, we're giving ourselves this superpower, right? The superpower of. Oh, that the AI is following this conversation. The AI recognizes that my wife is getting mad by what I'm saying. And it's saying, hey, you know, you're making, you're, you're pissing her off. And this like, this will happen. Like we are very close to this world.

I completely agree. But it seems to me, you know, to be very, a very dystopic future in the near future. You know, it's, it's, it's. We, it sort of feels we are losing our control of our own lives more and more. And we already do that. You know, if you go out for dinner, you see friends, four friends at the table and they all had their smartphone instead of talking to each other. So you can already see this happening. That big tech is already controlling us into showing behavior. That's not necessarily the best behavior for you as a person, but it's the best behavior for the big tech company. I think that's really problematic. But what can we do about it? If you look at the long term, you know, impact of AI and on society and, and big tech having, you know, which is really driven by, by a capitalist society that we have because that's what drives this shareholder value. Value and not necessarily drives, you know, a stakeholder value. What, what can, what can we, what can we as individuals do? What can we as organizations do? And what, what can we as society do to sort of counter that and to sort of stand a chance against this, these two dozen big tech companies that will most likely define and redefine and control our personal lives.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's an issue that I, that I think about a lot and get involved in a lot. And I think the, the only real solution is policy and regulation to protect the public. And, and I know that there's a lot of technologists who are against regulation because they think that it's restricts progress, but I think we're at a point where the potential dangers are so, so significant that we really, we really do need to protect the public. And the things that, and I talk with policymakers a lot about these issues and the area that I really try to get people to focus on is that the risks of AI that they're focused on right now are things like deep fakes and fake videos, fake scientific reports. And I understand that we need to protect against that, but that's really just an amplification of a current problem. Deep Fakes have existed. People create fake content, fake news. AI just makes it faster and easier to do it. What I really work hard to educate policymakers about is that in the future it's not going to be a fake video. That's the thing that's influential. It's when you're interacting directly with the AI, it's when you're engaged in a conversation with the AI. It's when the AI is adapting to you in real time. And so that everywhere, every individual is being targeted personally. Yeah, and that's really something that, that I've been really focused on ever since I wrote Upgrade, which was in the thing that I really focused on in the book Upgrade is that, is that the AI is treating every individual as a personally. And so we've, you know, we've gone. If you look at how technology has evolved, you know, we went from broadcast media which you know, even with newspapers, radio, television, broadcast media, everybody's being hit with the same, the same content. Then we went to social media and regulators really failed on social media because they thought, oh, we know how to, we know how to regulate broadcast media. Social media is the same thing. And they didn't realize, well, social media has the ability to do targeting and, and they didn't realize like that really once you start targeting different groups in different ways, you start polarizing society. And they just really didn't realize that the targeting was so significant. And what I tell to policymakers is, well, now we're going to enter an age where it's, we're not just targeting groups, we're targeting individuals. And these AI systems are going to adapt in real time to every individual you can deploy at scale. In the not so distant future, an advertiser will pay meta or pay Google to say I want to sell this person this car. And they'll just deploy an artificial agent. And that agent will craft a conversation that is optimized to sell that person that car. And there'll be an artificial agent that appears and their, their gender of that artificial agent, their, their age, their, their mannerisms, everything about that agent will be chosen to be most influential on that person. And, and, and it'll be very skilled and it will adapt in real time as, as you re as. You know, if, if that agent says oh, you should buy this car because it has this good range and, and it sees go, he looks skeptical. It will work to overcome that skepticism. And so these, you know, we'll go from kind of targeting like you know, buckshot to really a heat seeking missile. Every One of these agents will be a heat seeking missile that is optimized to maximize its influence on every one of us personally. And once that happens, we lose our individual agency. We, we will be so outmatched and so easy to influence. And so what I tell regulators is that's the thing you need to protect against because we have no defenses against that. And so you shouldn't allow an AI agent to adapt to your emotions and your vocal inflections, to adapt to changes in your pupil dilation, to adapt to changes in your facial expressions. And if, if you, if, if an AI is allowed to use those things, we, we can't, we can't defend against that. If an AI agent is going to, gonna try to persuade you to, to buy a product or believe a piece of information, it should have to tell you should say, hey, I'm transitioning from casual conversation to something that's a paid promotional interaction. So at least you know that. Oh, because otherwise, otherwise you could be, you could be talking to Chat GPT or a future version of Chat GPT and asking it, oh, I, you know, you know, I'm trying to find the, I'm trying to plan out my route in my electric car. Can you tell me the best, the best places to stop, to charge? And it's giving you this informational, informational conversation and then it just starts to weave in saying, you know, you know, if you had this other car, you would have to stop fewer times. And, and so we won't even know where does the, where does the factual information end and the promotional information begin. Unless there's regulation that says, you know, a promotional conversation needs to be made, an artificial agent needs to reveal when it's, when it's conveying promotional content to you.

But that's also very, very tricky because if in this example of the route that you ask your futures at ChatGPT, it could just direct you along the shops that the advertisers have paid it, you need to stop at that petrol station or electric charging station because they paid the most. And you will never know. You will never know.

You will never know.

To your point, this is all manipulation. If we don't know about it. And then I think, can we really trust the regulators? Can we trust our politicians? Because they stand to benefit from these manipulations as much as Big Tech does. If they could use this, and we've already seen it happening in American elections with the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica was sort of a very, very first initial thing of what is possible. And with this manipulation, it becomes a lot worse. So can we trust the regulators to do the right thing for us as citizens? And even if they can, how do they know what to do? Because you see, big tech is lobbying all over the place and to frame the regulation into their advantage. Do we stand any chance? As an individual. As individual.

You know, it definitely is up to regulators and policymakers and standards bodies to step up and protect the public. It's, I think that most, most regulators, most politicians really do want to protect the public. There, there are, you know, certainly parts of the world where the governments themselves will use these tools against their, their own people because manipulation is a powerful tool. But the best, you know, the, the best we can do is have, you know, large parts of the world have thoughtful regulation that really is aimed at protecting humanity against these interactive artificial agents that will, that will otherwise be optimized to manipulate us. And also because if we can, if it's restricted, then these companies won't build their business model on this premise. And this is another place where regulators failed for social media. So in the world of social media, regulators didn't really focus on targeted advertising. And so all of the big social media companies, they became, they had an advertising business model where they're competing with each other not to have the best experience for users, but to see whose targeted advertisements would generate the most clicks. That's their. And if we don't put regulation in place and we transition from a world where you're not typing into Google to search, but you're just talking to a photorealistic artificial agent as your assistant, if that goes down, this advertising business model, then all of these companies will compete on whose artificial agent can weave the most, the most persuasive information into the conversation and generate the most sales or generate the most votes or whatever it is they're trying to. So the regulation is really essential if we want society to not be manipulated by AI systems that could so easily be optimized. And again, you think about it, we all know that for almost a decade technologists could build AI systems that can beat the world's best chess players, go players, poker players. We know that we can be outmatched. What chance do we really have if, if the AI agents are being designed to be the ultimate salesperson? That it's trained on cognitive psychology, it's trained on sales techniques, it's trained on techniques of persuasion, and it knows more about you than any human salesperson ever could. And it could read your emotions better than any salesperson could. And instead of just trying to Sell you a car or a product, it could be trying to convince you of misinformation, disinformation and it will be just as effective. And if we don't protect against that, then it will be way too easy to influence society and we lose human agency. And without that we go into a dystopia. And so there's so many. Most of the fiction that I write and it shows a pathway to dystopia, usually doesn't start there, but shows how we get there. And protecting against AI manipulation in my mind is the biggest risk. It's not the sexiest risk. The big risk of AI that people worry about is super intelligence that's going to take over humanity with red eyed robots. And that is, that is a risk. But before we ever get there, it's much simpler, just way more subtle, much simpler to just manipulate us than deploy a robot.

Killer robots. Yeah, I very much believe that we sort of sleepwalked into this digital age. And that's just one of the reasons why we're not paying attention. That's why we are so almost gullible into, into accepting that whatever is being sent to us through the Internet. What role does science fiction, what role can science fiction play in educating ourselves more? Not only ourselves, but also organizations and governments and in making us aware of the dangers of what's happening. Because I do believe that if we are more educated on this topic, starting from almost, maybe from kindergarten, if we are more aware of what's happening, then we become less gullible, we become less able to be manipulated. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean I think that allowing the role of fiction is really most powerful when it's allowing people to experience the dangers rather than intellectualize the dangers and experience it through story. And in today's age, really being able to encapsulate that in very short messages is maybe the way to reach the most people. It's one of the reasons made that short film privacy lost because in three minutes people will watch it. You could write a whole book on that. Much, much fewer people will, will experience it. It's also why, you know, I've written a couple of these little children's book style stories because it's a way to very quickly get people to, to think about the issues. But I think that you know, science fiction at all, at all levels, whether it's, you know, full novels, feature films, short films, short stories, they all can have a big impact. They, you know, they get people, they put people in a time and place and get Them to really think about the implications and not think about it so much from, from a scholarly perspective, but just from a personal perspective of what, how would it impact you? And, and I think that's, that's one of the best ways to get everybody to appreciate the dangers. It's important to get the regulators to appreciate the dangers. But if you don't get the public also to appreciate the dangers, the regulators don't feel like there's a motivation to make changes. So really it's about getting the public to understand that yes, there's all these amazing things that AI will do to make society better. I mean, scientific advancements and conveniences. But if we don't protect against the downsides, if the risk is we lose our agency, we become easy to manipulate. People are already relatively easy to manipulate. But the tools that the manipulators will have are about to become superpowers and has to be protected against.

I think that's completely true. And also the very scary outlook that we have to rely on the regulators to protect us. And I think that education is becoming, becoming really, really important. And with that, I think sort of a, a future thinking approach that of course as a science fiction writer, you're very good at being able to depict the future, both the optimistic or the stopic future, and really dive, dive deep into, into that. How can organizations as well as regulators, as well as individuals, you know, adopt a similar mindset to, to stay ahead in this, in this fast changing world and to, to, to be able to mitigate those risks that, that are coming?

Yeah, I, I think it's really about just putting yourself in the time and place of the future of, you know, people, you know, a lot of tech companies are working hard to design next, you know, next generation technologies, next generation technologies. They really need to think about, okay, what is it like to be a person in that world that they're creating and really think about where, what are the ways it can go wrong? And it's, you know, people often ask me like, you know, I, you know, I run technology companies and, but I also, you know, speak a lot about the dangers. And they say, well, you know, how can you speak about the dangers but also be developing technologies? And, and I say, well, when social media companies were created, they really did believe that they were going to help society. These were not evil people creating social media companies. And yet if you pull, like if you poll the public right now in the US like 70% of the public or something like that thinks social media is damaging to society. Do you think they wanted to create a company where 70% of the public thinks what they do is damaging to society. Like they didn't want to do it, but they just didn't. But, and they could have avoided that if they, if they really thought what are the downsides of this? What are the things that could, that could, where are the ways that this can go wrong? Because they knew before anybody else they could, like they could see it early because they're developing it and they, if they, if they saw it and they raised the issue and they talked to regulators, they, they could have avoided this. And, and I say that because they all feel, as somebody who's, who's run a company, run multiple companies like you, you very often feel like you don't have a choice. You're forced down a path because, and I say that because imagine you're a social media company and you think, you know, targeted advertising is bad and then your competitor launches the first little targeted advertisement and all the advertising dollars go there. Well, now you really have no choice but to go to target advertising as well. And so it becomes this arms race and then, and then another competitor makes, has an even better way to do targeted advertising and they go down this path. Had they raised the issue early and regulation went and got put into place that you can't do targeted advertising in these ways, then those companies could have just competed on different fronts and they would have had developed just as big businesses and it would have been very successful companies. And so companies often think, oh, regulation is the enemy. And I look at it as like, no. Regulation means we don't have to compete on a playing field where we all know this is going to get more and more dangerous. And let's compete instead on making our products better for the public. And who has the. And so in the world of AI, if they put regulation in place that you can't do conversational advertising, we could make a Tina today. No, conversational advertising is too dangerous. It's too manipulative. Fine. All these AI companies could make their trillions of dollars by competing on other fronts and they wouldn't have to chase each other down this path of an arms race to have who could have the most influential conversational advertisement.

That's very much driven by the fact that we live in a capitalist society because everything revolves around shareholder value, short term, general value, next quarter. And let's not think about the long term implications of whatever technology we built. Because if we look at the long term implications of conversational advertising, we can pretty clearly see the dangers and the damages it will do on the long term for society. So in the short term it will bring tremendous amount of money, but in the long term it will have significant downsides. But we don't think about those long term aspects because of the fact that we live in a capital, the society. What can we, is there anything we can do about that? You know, not, not to, to, to get rid of capitalism because it has brought us to where we are, but to really, to offer something that is, that is really, really beneficial to society?

Yeah, no, it's, I mean it is all driven by, it's all driven by competition and, and, and the market economy and that's the world we live in. And it's going to become even more complicated with AI because AI is, is, is going to start changing those dynamics of the value of people in this market economy. Right. And that's the other thing that is definitely I worry about is that as AI starts to replace humans in this process, we start to become a lower value element in this market economy and we're really not prepared for that either. That's one of the things that we, myself and my co author of Our Next Reality, the book is, is really written about, you know, this future of this AI powered future and, and one of the things we really talk about is the impact of what's, what's its impact on, you know, just this human workforce and, and, and nobody has good answers yet, but we're going to have to confront that as well. I mean there's a lot of the big tech companies talk about universal basic income. AI will now allow universal basic income and so all the efficiencies of AI will be shared by society and that's a great utopian vision, but we've never seen that. We've gone through an entire industrial revolution with these great efficiencies and it hasn't had as the first transition to automation did make people's lives easier. But if you look at how society has changed since the computing revolution, people don't work less hours today than they did before 30 years ago. Before computing had really made these great efficiencies. And so now we're supposed to think, well, AI is going to mean everyone can work a lot less and get universal basic income and that would be great. But again, it's not going to happen by, it's not going to happen because corporations are saying that's going to happen. It would happen if governments say that's going to happen.

Final question. It seems that there is a, a lot of material for you for any of a new book to explore these topic perspectives. What are the sort of new themes, technologies that you are exploring in upcoming work? Is there a new science fiction book coming? Can you share a little bit about what we can expect from your work?

I'm always working on new things, but really just finished our next reality. So that was a big effort until recently. The thing that I think about a lot now because it's so different than ever before is the speed of change. I mean technology's always felt like it was moving quickly, but over the last really three years, it's moving so quickly that everybody who I talk to, even technologists, people working in AI, people working on the cutting edge, I talk to them all the time, they feel overwhelmed as well. I think we're now at a point where everybody feels overwhelmed by the speed of change. Even the people who are supposed to be the most knowledgeable. And that's like, that's a situation I don't know that we've ever been in where the people who are making the decisions, the people who are the geniuses who are innovating, everybody feels overwhelmed by the speed of change. What's going to happen from that? That's not how we make good decisions at least. Right.

It's very problematic. I was on a flight from Sydney to Sao Paulo a few days ago and I didn't have any Internet. And then by the time I landed 20 hours later, I sort of feels like I'm completely out of date, you know?

Yeah, yeah, no, it's funny, it's related to that. There's a related theme in the my book Upgrade. So Upgrade. I said, you know, everyone lives in this society that the, the protagonist in that book, he gets kicked out and, and, and so his whole world, like he had like his whole world is he, he can't access any of the people, any of the places. He can't get he get to work, he can't get to do anything because he got kicked out. And so it's I. And that's where we're headed. And again it goes back to this theme of our lives are getting more and more mediated by technology. We're getting more and more reliant on technology and if it gets shut off, we'll become helpless. Right. You think about, obviously everybody is familiar with how dependent we've become on GPS when driving in a car. You know, we're soon going to have AIs in our ears talking to us. We're going to become dependent. Like we won't be able to walk down the street without feeling like we're lacking the guidance that we need. Yeah. Yeah.

Well it seems that to me a challenging future. And I think, you know, the work that you do with your both your science fiction work and your non science fiction work is nonfiction work I think is really, really important. So thank you very much for joining my show, Louis.

Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. It's fun.

As we wrap up this thought provoking conversation with Dr. Louis Rosenberg, a few key takeaways stand out. Louis exploration of conversational advertising highlights the growing threat of AI systems that can manipulate us in ways we are not equipped to resist. His comparison of AI to an alien intelligence underscores the urgency of with which we must address the ethical and societal challenges these technologies pose. As he pointed out, without proper regulation and public awareness, we risk sleepwalking into a future where our autonomy is eroded by AI systems designed to influence our every decision. Louis also emphasized the importance of futures thinking, a mindset that is crucial not just for technologists, but for all of us. By imagining and preparing for the potential consequences of today's innovations, we can better navigate the complex and rapidly changing landscape of tomorrow. This episode reminds us that while technology can bring immense benefits, it also requires us to be vigilant, informed, and proactive in shaping a future that serves the interests of all, not just a few. Thank you for joining us on this journey. If you found today's discussion enlightening, please subscribe, share and leave a review. Together, we can continue to explore the future with a critical eye and and an optimistic heart. See you next time on Synthetic Mind.