Talking To Robots With David Ewing Duncan

Technology is a double edged sword. You know, it can be great, it can be for good, or it can be for evil. And technology itself is neutral. But it's a huge amplifier, especially with the technology we have now. So you can amplify it for really good and noble parts of humanity, you know, human nature, or you can amplify the really ugly parts. I think we're at a pivotal moment where and most of the people building these things don't even entirely realize this because they're focusing on but the code we're writing right now in AI, I mean, this is the base code that will propel the future.

Welcome to the Capability amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts. All right, I am here right now with David Ewing Duncan, who is the author of Talking to Tales from our Human Robot Futures. Thank you for being here.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

All right, so why don't we begin with what are you working on right now that gets you tap dancing to work every day or maybe into your home office or wherever you're doing your work?

Well, I'm a writer and I love writing. And anybody that follows the media industry, a journalist as well, knows that it's been having some difficult times in the last 10 years. And I woke up one morning, actually my mother called me in 2009 and said, is this your magazine that just went out under, which was Connie Nast Portfolio is their big magazine, business magazine.

It was a pretty magazine.

Yeah, it was a beautiful magazine. And the last 10 years have been interesting. I mean, I've done, I still got in the. Got to do a lot of writing. But the last year or two I'm back. There's more than I'm being asked to do than I can ever do. And I'm writing. Long form journalism is back. You know, Wired, Vanity Fair, you know, lots of other magazines I write for. This crazy book I wrote is an experimental book. It's half. We can talk more about it, but it's half nonfiction and half fiction. And I got Dutton, you know, part of Penguin Random House, to actually publish it. So I'm just happy to be back, you know, back in the saddle again doing what I love to do.

I am so glad Longform is back. I've been tired of the nugget. You know, it's just nice to have some deep thinking and to reward real writers again in the marketplace as well. So very interesting. So I'll, I'll begin because you showed me the table of contents to the book. And this is a. So the first one is Teddy bear bot, the blank, blanking, brinking robot that swiped my job. Sex intimacy bot, Facebook bot, Doc bot. Hello. Robot driver, Warrior bot, Beer bot. It's not about the robots bot. Oh, there's more. Politician bot, Wearable bot, Amazon bot, Journalism bot, Mars demon bot, or daemon bot. Risk free bot, Brain of optimization bot, Thriller bot, Coffee delivery bot, Memory bot, Matrix bot, Homo digitalis, Homo syntheticis, syntheticis. Syntheticus Syntheticus.

Synthetic humans.

There we go. Tourist evolution bot. God bot, Immortal me bot. And then epilogue. Okay, after the robots arrived, really cool ideas. I like how you broke this down. And you've got amazing contributors and people you interviewed for this, too. I'm just looking through the list. So tell me a story. Give us one of the chapters. What was your favorite chapter to write and why?

So there are 24 robots in there, and there could be 200, there could be 500. In fact, I love asking people, as I did Kevin Kelly and Tim O'Reilly and Brian Greene, the physicist, these great thinkers of our time, what kind of robot would you want to meet or you'd be afraid to meet in the future? And so that's where these all came from. But I actually haven't been asked the what's my favorite question yet? So thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. I want to make difficult question like which is which children is my favorite child is my favorite.

The ugly one. Pick the ugly one.

Yeah, right. It's the run of the litter. But I don't know. I mean, I think it kind of depends on what we're talking about.

Let me frame this another way. So you worked with a bunch of contributors. You interviewed a lot of people, obviously, and they shared some stories. Is there a repeating theme that popped up over and over again that either you felt was super controversial or a constant irritant? And you're like, ah, I've got an idea. And that turned into a chapter.

Well, the book is basically laid out. I tell about these different robots, you know, warrior bot, sex bot, whatever, in the present. And I've interviewed people that either know something about that or that was the robot that they want to meet in the future or they're afraid of meeting. And I report on that as I always have as a journalist. So I'm a nonfiction writer. But it's actually told from the future. So there's this narrator. We don't know who it is. It could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be a Robot who lives in the future and actually knows how these things turned out. So we'll just call him Godbot. Yeah, right. Well, that's. Eventually we get way in the future, but I did that. You asked for overarching themes. An overarching theme of my career has been writing about technology. I mostly write about biotechnologies, genetics, things like that, synthetic biology. But I'm interested in the technology and the people doing it, but I'm more interested in how it affects society. So this book is really structured to give us some possible future scenarios. And I'm a historian by training, and so essentially I'm drawing from history on how we've reacted to different technologies. You know, if you want to go even back to the discovery of fire, there are probably people that loved it and feared it, right? And we're still there. And I think we are in a pivotal moment in human history, you know, planetary history, galactic history, where we are about to have the power to build these robots that we've always kind of thought about, or artificial beings, you know, trying to understand ourselves, you know, war or love. And so it's really about that. It's about these emotions and how it might play out, because some of these scenarios turn out well, some not so well. And we're seeing this in, you know, fiction. And, I mean, even I am, like, on a dystopic future overload right now with all of the television and movies. So it's a little bit playful, it's a little whimsical at times. I'm sometimes making fun of our culture for, you know, thinking in terms of utopia and dystopia about the future.

All right, I'm burning for a story here. I want you to tell me a story.

Well, let's see. We could jump into.

Oh, hell, yeah.

You pick one.

I'm gonna do it right now. The obvious one is I could do Sexbot, because why the hell not? And that, to me, I've got a friend who's absolutely convinced that is going to be one of the biggest markets for obvious reasons. And it's easy to project and think of all the ethical issues that pop up that go along with that. I mean, this. This could be the biggest addiction ever in a short period of time and certainly could damage probably multiple generations of boys and men who are not prepared to deal with the challenges. So let's. Let's just take that one on. What the hell?

Well, I think. I mean, I think it's already happening through porn, you know, I mean, there's a Wonderful. TED Talk. Make love, not porn. If you're under a certain age, you grew up with porn and, you know, at least a lot of women complain about that, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, not that women don't watch porn, but you can extrapolate that. That into creating actual sex bots. And the industry is much farther along than we might realize. I mean, they're actually AI equipped sex bots. They're about to go on sale, that costs between 30,000 and 60,000 dollars, and they learn about you. It's machine learning. And. But the interesting thing about this is these are not marketed as sex bots. They're not like blow up doll kind of, you know, creepy, weird things. I mean, they're creepy and weird, but in different ways. Yeah, they're really about intimacy and companionship. And in fact, the reason I call it sex and then Perrin's intimacy bottom is Esther Perel, who, you know, the famous sex and relationship therapist. When I asked her, you know, about talking to me about a sex bot, she kind of got upset with me and said, it's not about sex. Who cares? It's boring. That's boring. That's a boring robot. It's about intimacy. And that's really what we're struggling for. So in that particular story, I spent a lot of time about where we are right now and these different robots and just some really disturbing trends, like, you know, millennials are not, at least according to surveys, are not having as much sex.

Right.

Which is crazy because, you know, generations before them fought for sexual, you know, the sexual revolution and sexual freedom.

We scared them into not having sex.

Exactly. And that's a complicated, you know, issue why or why not? But part of it is got to have to do with technology. And, you know, you spend a lot more time in front of your cell phone than, you know, your smartphone than previous generations. And there's not, maybe not enough time in the day. And you have countries like Japan where young men are just not interested in sex or even being with humans, human women in a relationship. And so they're not getting married and they're not having kids. And that country is facing a population collapse.

Yeah. They're talking about importing.

Right, right, right. And the men there have devices like something called Gatebox. So Gatebox is a plexiglass box, and I guess you put it on your table or something, and there's an 18 inch high holographic woman that looks like an anime, you know, style woman. And she's sort of like an Alexa, except, you know, she's actually there and she communicates with her man all day long, like, how are you doing? Can't wait for you to get home. Basically, you know, the woman that sometimes the movie, right. That just is like, you're so cool. You're so great. I mean, you know, we're, you know, men wanting to be built and, you know, women saying, okay, I'm not going to say how great you are every five minutes. Right. I mean, because you're not that great sometimes. But, you know, your anime gate box woman always tells you you're great. And, you know, these guys are working hard. We know that that's a culture that, you know, overworks people. And, you know, we're not that far behind. And so the. The story works through. I talked to Esther, but a couple of other sex therapists, and we devise what would be some of the, you know, a preferable robot to just these sex bots, which is, which is intimacy bot. And in the future, none of us would. Would have sex or, you know, discuss a relationship without our intimacy bot that's there to sort of advise us. And that's one. It goes kind of bad. I mean, people hack into it, you know, the Russians hack into it, you know, in the future. And, you know, we all, we all get very disillusioned with our intimacy bots, but. But eventually we fix that. And that's one of those where it turns out, okay, all right, that's fun.

So you do really go down the story path with it and you create a new feature.

We're actually doing a television series and its rights have been bought anyway. We're talking about doing 15 to 30 minute segments on each of these robots.

It's brilliant. I think it's Netflix or Amazon prime has something like Sexbots and something and war.

Oh, sex, sex, death and robots, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

Have you watched any of those?

Yeah, I never seen it. And that's exactly the format.

Okay. Oh, it's great.

I.

That's why. All right, we're on the same page. I love that.

Let's pick another one.

I'll go for it. Let's do it. Let's do politician bot.

Oh, good.

Okay, awesome.

So Dan loves politics. He loves American politics and history, by the way. Yeah, he's a huge historian.

Yeah. So this is one that in the present, well, we're already seeing government turning more and more like, like all aspects of life in the, you know, computerizing things to even have, you know, AI to kind of manage, you know, United States government is the most Massive enterprise, I think probably in history on the planet Earth. And, you know, we need these, we need help to manage this. So there's a lot of fake government.

Run by fake politicians.

Right, right.

Fake laws.

But we're also, you know, in an age when humans are showing their fallibility big time in politics. I mean, we really, you know, how many lies a minute? You know, it's our president tell or something like that. So there are people that are building AI systems that could be, say, president. And the idea is they don't lie. You know, they do what they say they're going to do. They're trustworthy, all those things that we're missing. Okay, so that sounds great. Right? Except in this story, the rope. Well, all robots can be programmed to be good or bad. And that's a major point in the book. It's kind of who does the programming.

Yeah, yeah, so, so we have naughty bot.

Well, you have naughty politician bot. And in fact, in that chapter, you know, this is from the future, we discover in the future that there actually was a president in the past who was a robot. And guess who he was.

No kidding?

Yeah.

Oh, that's hilarious.

And in that story, the real Donald Trump actually was knocked off by the mafia when he went bankrupt in the 90s. And some reality show producers from the future sent back in time a robot that looks just like him. So he's the one that does the Apprentice, and he goes through and he becomes president. But his programming is hacked by, first by Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of kind of right of center talk show hosts and then by Vladimir Putin, by, you know, but the problem is nobody has full control over him. So he just keeps reverting, going back and forth, changing his mind, you know, doubling down and then reversing all these things that we're seeing actually happening. It's because he, nobody has complete control over his programming. And that one has, I don't know, an interesting ending because he actually ends up exploding, you know, in one of the primaries during the 2020 election.

Right. All right.

That might be revealing some of my political inclinations. Yes.

Oh, it's fun, though. You know what, we're just making sense stories here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's, it's, you know, you're in the entertainment business. Never forget that. Right, right. Okay. Okay. I, I have to tell you, I've got an idea. So I've, I know three presidential candidates right now, and one of them I had a conversation with, and I said, I know how to beat Donald Trump. And the Basic idea is you hire a bunch of comedians who create the narrative and then put a bug in the ear. Because one thing I've noticed about Donald is he doesn't have a sense of humor and. And he can't laugh at himself. Right?

Yeah.

And so if you want to see him self destruct, he's just make fun of him, you know, humiliation. And I don't see comedy bot in here, but that seems to be a.

No. I thought about that. I mean, part of it was, you know, people I could get access to in the time I needed. Yeah, but that easily could be one. I mean, there's thriller writer bot, which is David Baldacci, and that's a crazy one because David go down the path. He sat down with me and he helped me create the future story. So there is a story, and that actually involves, you know, a presidential robot that is probably under control of this evil cartel. I mean, this is like a David Baldacci novel. And David Baldacci, a future version of him, becomes the hero who exposes all of this. But then he's being chased. I don't know. It's. It's. I'm partly, like I said, making fun of some of the genres, and he was totally game to do that. And it was very fun. And of course, it has a crazy, you know, cliffhanger ending, which is. Then I really won't tell. I won't tell.

No, no, I don't want the ending here. So here's the path I do want to go down, though. So you've written. I know. I saw the number. How many books total?

This is number 10.

Okay. A lot of books and countless articles. When you look at everything you've done, I mean, it's very impressive. So how many years have you been in journalism?

Well, really, it started in college, so. A long time.

Forever. Yeah, forever, for all practical purposes. And I'm curious about your brain. So this is a lot of fiction, really, but you've got access to incredible people. You build a hell of a reputation and career for yourself, and you've actually gotten paid doing your art.

Usually.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, actually, yeah. No, I can't. I can't complain.

So tell us a little bit about your brain. What do you think about what keeps you interested all the time and keeps you moving?

Well, I'm basically trying to understand the world. I mean, again, as a student of history, why did things turn out the way they did? And there's always this theory, it's the great man should be a great woman. As well, but theory that individual humans drive history and there's other theories that right place, right time, it's almost accidental with the way things happen. But I really do believe that humans, and amazing, creative, powerful humans, you know, they could be good or not so good, shape it. And so I have spent most of my career trying to understand that through the lens of technology. Because that, you know, that is, you know, I guess in ancient Rome it was, you know, conquer, conquest and you know, you can look at different areas of history, what kind of the currency was. Our currency is technology and it's moving incredibly rapidly. And I want to understand that by talking to the people that are doing it. But I also, I'm a little bit of a curmudgeon. You know, you can even tell from the stories I was telling. I mean, and that's because we are living in a very techno optimistic, at least era, at least where I am at, you know, until recently in Silicon Valley. And that kind of drives me crazy because technology is a double edged sword. You know, it can be great, it can be for good and, or it can be for evil. And technology itself is neutral and it's, but it's a huge amplifier, especially with technology we have now. So you can amplify it for really good and noble parts of humanity, human nature, or you can amplify the really ugly parts. And as I said earlier, I think we're at a pivotal moment where. And most of the people building these things don't even entirely realize this because they're focusing on. But the code we're writing right now in AI I mean, this is the base code that will, you know, propel the future. And are they going to be pissed at us because we kind of screwed it up or are they going to be, you know, happy with us? Are they going to have to just rip it apart and start over again? Right. So, I mean, yeah, if you look.

At what Facebook's done and become, I mean originally it was just like, hey, I'll share some pictures, it's a college thingy. And it was a Facebook. And then it developed into this unbelievable media machine that serves up whatever you want, short of porn, basically.

Well, and it's being manipulated. And that's, that's such a great example of what I'm talking about. Right? Because the people that built it, including Mark Zuckerberg, I still think they don't fundamentally understand that there is real evil in the world and there are people that want to do harm to large numbers of human beings for their own gain or Greed or whatever it is. And this is real. And it's like they don't quite understand that. And so they built this engine that billions of people use based on their own sort of philosophy of techno optimism. And we can't really. And there is actually Facebook bot in the book and there are three or four really short chapters. That one is, it starts with, hi, Mark, it's me, Facebook.

I'm talking to you from the future. Don't try to figure out how I'm doing this, but I have to warn you that I have become the ultimate evil in the future and you have to stop me back in the present. So it's just a little letter, a little note, and apparently the publisher, by the way, Google has a new AI audio reading system for books which I haven't used yet, but we're on that chapter because it's the only one where this narrator isn't speaking. They're going to use a robot sounding voice that's actually AI generated to read that chapter for the audio version. Oh, that's great.

That's hilarious. I love it, I love it. I gotta check out, is that operational? Is it in beta right now? The Google.

Google Reader? It must be. I just, I just heard about this the other day. I haven't even looked into it. Yeah.

Oh, I love that. That's really smart. And oh my God, you're gonna have to, you know.

But that's, that's the story. And basically Facebook bot in the future tells Mark he needs to sort of step aside and let people, you know, into Facebook who actually know how, you know, know what's what in the world and this darker side of humanity that's really just manipulating the hel. Social media right now.

So what was your intent writing this book in the first place? What was it that motivated you? And if you had a dream and outcome or a happily ever after prayer for it, what's your goal?

Well, I actually want to make people laugh a little bit. I want to be more whimsical. Despite what I just said about the dark side, I do think that we are also overstating that. And I meant it when I said I love dystopic sci fi. I mean the good stuff, the best, but it's just like we're washing it. And that's one of the things that's attractive, I guess, to the television people that this is more. I mean, believe me, there's dark things in the book, but things turn out well too. But the main motivation is the serious one, that we really need to get our act together and we need to do it fast. And we're actually probably going in the opposite direction because like I said, take Warrior bot. That is a scary chapter and it's a scary subject. I had, I even had no idea, you know, how close we are to autonomous weapons systems. You know, for the simple reason that human, the human brain can't keep up with the speed now that we, you know, that these systems are working under.

And the fact that they're integrating so quickly as well.

Yeah. And you know, we're already with, with cyber warfare, a lot of that is already automated. I mean, we can't react fast enough. Now the military, the doctrine of the United States and most actually pretty much every other major country is there needs to be a human in the loop, you know, for making lethal decisions. Like if that cruise missile is heading towards a target, a human actually has to say yes, you know, blow the person up. Right, right. But it's really. Could happen at any moment. Yeah.

And that's a. For now.

Yeah. Right, right. But it could happen at any moment where if somebody switches to an automated system, everybody has to. Because you won't be able to, you know, react fast enough.

Totally.

And that's not even a future scenario. That's, that's, that could happen at any moment. Yeah. And so we'll, we'll just have to see. And I interviewed a guy named General Bob Latif, General Robert Lateef, who was a two star general in the Air Force who actually ran NORAD at one time. And he's written this really scary, fascinating book called the Future of War.

Oh yeah, I've seen that.

Yeah. And he boy goes through all these weapon systems and talks about the soldiers too. You know, how they're building basically these super soldiers and they're trying to create, for instance, drugs that would help them forget. Right. You know, if they see something horrible and so that would prevent ptsd. And I mean the layers of this are fascinating.

It's awesome. It's awesome. Awesomely scary, but it's, it's awesome. Again, the integration that's going on is absolutely fascinating. So here's what I'd like to do. First of all, where can folks, where should they follow you with the most impact? Where are you producing the most content aside from the platforms you're on?

Well, I have my website which is davidhueingduncan.com and you know, we'll make sure.

There'S a link in the show notes for sure.

And obviously like, you know, Twitter, Facebook even. Despite what we said.

Right.

I keep my. Yeah, I largely keep my Facebook account because I, you know, want to tell people about my books and things.

Of course.

I mean, I personally am not on.

You're not a fool.

Yeah, right.

I know, exactly.

These are really my friends. I mean, I don't really have like 5,000 friends.

Here we go.

Right. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, yeah. That's not real ones anyway. And then the book, what's the published date?

It's July 16th, which, by the way, happens to be the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

Oh, fantastic.

We're playing off that a little bit.

Well done, well done. I can't wait. Well, here's what I'll make sure I do. First of all, promote the hell out on all my platforms. And then I think I'm going to have to reach out to you for a follow up because I want to go deeper in the psychology of what you do and why you're doing it, too.

No, I'd love to do that. And we didn't even talk about most of what I've done, which is on the bio stuff, like synthetic biology. And that's partly in the book, too, but that's. That's also very cool. And I have another book I'm writing, too, which we can talk about later.

All right, let's do it. So I'll follow up for another interview and we'll go deep on a couple more topics. Cool. Awesome.

Thank you, David.

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