https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=h76iIz8t1gE
So hello everybody, I am with Dr. Paula Boddington. Dr. Paula is a moral philosopher. You have seen her on my channel before. We talked about AI and we had such a great conversation. We thought it would definitely be worth to continue thinking about AI, but she’s also an expert on the ethical quandaries relating to medicine and in terms of biological issues, let’s say. And so right now, with all these things going on, I posted about this monkey man and then there’s also the whole thing about AI, which is swirling and COVID, of course. So we thought that we would talk about this in relation to storytelling and the kind of stories we tell about the things we do in the world as humans. This is Jonathan Pageot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So Dr. Paula, thank you for coming again. I’m really happy. I know a lot of people really enjoy our first conversation. And so you had something you wanted to start with. So let’s go with that and then we’ll see where it leads us. Yeah, hi. It’s really good to talk to you again. So yesterday, also I should maybe start off by saying Happy St. George’s Day. Okay, great. Yes. Wonderful. So yesterday on Twitter, I saw that somebody had put up that meme from Conference of the Vatican using the kind of creation of Adam meme. I wish it was a meme. It was an advertisement. Like if it had only been a meme, it would have been better. An advert for two hands touching like, and even one had even one side had even got the kind of like, you know, how Adam’s really limp-wristed. And in surgical gloves touching. And you reacted quite strongly to that. Well, it just shows you just how clueless people are about what things refer to. You know, the fact that they would put out an image like that is so problematic on so many levels. And it’s such a misunderstanding of what things like I said, what things refer to. And so I just couldn’t believe that they use this as an advertisement for a conference about medicine and COVID and all of this. It’s quite mad. Yeah. So I’d be really interested to talk to you about what you said, it’s so wrong on so many levels, what those levels are, but also because it’s such a common meme in AI, it’s used so often to illustrate, you know, illustrate AI in various ways. And if you put AI creation meme into a search engine, you’ll get dozens and dozens and dozens of images on different themes. So sometimes it’s like a robot hand. Sometimes it’s like a kind of digital hand. Sometimes there’s sometimes there’s colors and quite often actually there’s a little spark like an electric spark between the fingers. That’s as if instead of being God breathed life into Adam, it’s a spark of electricity. Yeah, there’s so many images like that. And I just think it’s really interesting how well, if there’s so much possibility, there’s so much possibility in terms of how the hands are transposed, the way it makes it really easy to swap one to the other. Yeah. I mean, it’s really in terms of maybe I just want to because I said that on Twitter, maybe I could I should help people understand why it’s such a problem. First of all, then we can see why the AI meme would appear as well. There are many reasons why it’s a problem. And there was there was so many. First of all, that image is problematic in the first sense, because theologically already there’s a difficulty in that image because it because of the whole bearded God figure and then Adam and the touching of the fingers, which is just a very strange way of creation in scripture is manifested through breath. And so the image, it’s through meaning and breath. And so it’s word speaking the word creation into the world and then also breathing. But it’s also light as well. So the AI meme actually gets it better, probably with that little spark that you said in the middle, because there’s also this sense that creation happens through light because light reveals form to us, reveals the unity of things to us. But in that in that meme, they in that advertising, they put gloves on the two, which even if you understand that this like the touching is what created Adam, it’s I always I was thinking like, what if God used contraceptives is basically what they’re trying to suggest to us. It’s like, OK, what a strange idea. And then then all these these these these funny things that are going through my mind, it’s like, oh, so they they basically want to reintroduce veils in the in the tradition. Like, what are they doing? Are they putting a separation, like an absolute separation between God and man? So just this misunderstanding. And there’s also the strange thing, which is that, you know, they wanted to be multiethnic, but they didn’t realize that they had like a white man with with the hand of God and then would look like a black woman with like the the hand of Adam being limp. And then the other one, you know, they don’t it’s like they so don’t understand the things they’re referencing to that it’s exploding all these directions that they obviously didn’t intend. But it’s also because they don’t understand that they don’t understand the problem of the moment, which is why they’re even daring to go in this direction. They don’t understand what how it is that the the covid and the separation of people and this idea of separating yourselves from others, what it means and especially what it means in church, all of these things are things we’re struggling with. And so you can try to just like you can try to gloss over it and pretend it’s not there. But then it ends up coming back even in your own advertisements. You know, even if even as you’re trying to advertise the covid measures, you end up suggesting this separation and this impossibility of life which exists in the covid world. You know, it’s like if you if you if God and Adam have gloves on, then there’s no creation happening. And so that was the problem with that with the let’s say that meme. But in terms of the AI meme, it’s fascinating because it has to do with some of the things that I’ve been talking about in terms of the system of the beast, where in the totalizing system in the desire to be at the top and not have anything above us, right in the desire to kind of have this revolt against against the divine or a revolt against the spiritual world. There is it’s there’s a there’s a story which makes it inevitable that at some point we’re going to want to create life because we have to claim for ourselves all the things that were above us. We have to take the crown for ourselves, put it on our head. And so there’s like an inevitable story which will happen. And it is this, you know, the metropolis, this this whole idea of the creation of an artificial being. It’s just something that was there in the was there in the fiction from the very beginning of the modern age. And it’s just kind of carried through until today. So yeah. Well, isn’t it isn’t it also there in Genesis when he gives birth to Cain and says, I have created a man. I think, no, she says God has given me God has given me a man, I think is what she is what she says. It’s more it’s more it’s more like it’s more the story of these artificial beings in the sense of making these idols that in the scripture, that’s what will become this image of creating an artificial being, which then becomes the center of a community. So it’s like a statue of a god or a person. And we breathe, we breathe in its nostrils, and then it becomes, it becomes like the vehicle for the God that say the shell in which the God inhabits. Yes, yes. Yeah. Actually, actually, I was just listening to a podcast that suggested that actually, that wasn’t what Hebrew means. But that’s a that’s a that’s another discussion. What do you mean? Sorry. Actually, the Hebrew should really be translated so that he was making that claim. Oh, really interesting. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, that that that then I mean, it would be interesting to think about the differences for sure. Because like a good example would be Lilith. So the the mythology around Lilith has to do with this. So Lilith actually spawns children from herself without the seed of Adam. And so she ends up spawning these different monsters. And so there is this desire to, let’s say, contain not being not have this normal complementary union between heaven and earth, but try to kind of contain wherever you are as a totality, and then try to spawn children out of that totality. And so the legend of Lilith certainly has that imagery. And that’s why which ends up creating our monsters. And so the image of like, of Lilith producing monsters is the same story as Frankenstein. It’s the it’s the problem of the the pride of Frankenstein, who wants to to take the crown of God on himself, and then ends up making a monster. And so you see that there’s there are a lot of tropes. There are a lot of those tropes like that, the matrix, all of these stories end up falling into this kind of pattern almost inevitably. Yes, yeah, yes. So so would that be something like the difference between whether or not service a debate in AI around about whether or not we’re creating something which is a tool that will that will be using with us, or whether we’re going to be creating something that’s going to be completely autonomous to us, and maybe been equal to us? Yeah. Or actually, this is one of this is one of the things where in the AI meme, it’s quite often swapped from one side to the other. So but it’s easy to replace one one to the other. So in the AI, in the AI world, there’s, of course, lots of debate and speculation about whether or not AI is going to be superior to us in lots of ways. Yeah, that’ll definitely happen. And then that this is what we talked about before this idea of creating the body for a God. And it seems like that’s that seems to be mostly what’s what’s happening. And it’s also one of the things is that it’s it all makes sense in terms of understanding the scientific approach to reality, because in the day in the kind of materialist approach to reality, we value quantification, right? We value quantity, we value quantity of information, we think that quantity of information, and let’s say, quantifiable phenomena is actually superior or the origin of spiritual truth or of patterns. And so because of that, then it ends up, it’s almost like if because we notice that AI will have more power in terms of capacity to calculate capacity to gather information, then because our value system is already upside down, then we will necessarily see that AI as as a king, because we already think that that’s where reality is. And so if we have a being that can calculate faster than us, and that can gather more information than us, then we will ultimately think that that’s what superiority is. Yeah, yeah. Because I think one of the things that one of the things we have to be really careful with technology over and over and over again, and especially actually when you examine it a lot, that you we end up being kind of in trance by the technology by what it can do. But then we start thinking about what its goals are, and also what its strengths are. And then when we look back at humans, we measure humans by the same goals and strengths. So what you said in terms of like quantity and quantification. Exactly. And that I mean, the modern world has basically is it really is this upside down thing where we wanted if you look at the development of industrial civilization, there really was the desire to transform humans into machines. You know, we wanted the factory workers, the ultimate example of that where we just want human machines, right? We want humans that can just do things repetitively and like machines do. And then when we can get rid of the humans, we will, right? As soon as we can get rid of the human, we will get rid of them because that’s what we value. We value this capacity to be efficient, this capacity to produce things. You know, and it’s a misunderstanding of what first of all, the human is, and it’s a misunderstanding of the normal hierarchy of values. But this is another thing we talked about last time, which is important to understand is that there are a few people, there are some people that understand, that know that, or at least it seems like they know that. And so there’s a trick being played. There’s like a cars behind their back where the AI will be infused with values, will be infused with an ideology. And but it will be presented just as this powerful computer, but it will have, and you can see it right now, right? We see it with Google, how they’re framing reality, how they’re, you know, giving precedent to certain search terms and they’re controlling the search. You can see that it’s actually a value-laden phenomena, but that they try to hide it almost as if they know that we think the quantification is the real, is the most important thing. So let’s hide the value so that people can’t see what we’re doing. It’s like, it is like a card trick. Yes, yes, it is. And I know those notions of efficiency and speed. I mean, so the way in which, I mean, I have another whole topic, but the discussion goes a little bit, so maybe just not go down this, there’s more we can say about the memes, but the way in which intelligence is thought of in relation to AI is such a narrow way of thinking about it, but also part and parcel of intelligence is speed. So like when you do an IQ test, part and parcel of it is how quickly you do it and how efficiently you are and whether or not you’re exactly the same, exactly the same arts, that’s the way in which it comes into factory working. So if you go going back to the use of the Vatican using these kinds of memes in relation to a health conference, and of course, in a sense of like if you’re in a hospital, you want things to be efficient to a certain degree, but so many problems get caused by the goals of efficiency, efficiency and health, and trying to do things really, really, you know, really, really quickly and speedily is not necessarily the way in which to sort of to heal people. I mean, going back to the Vatican meme about wearing those gloves, you would ordinarily, the first thing you would think of, the first thing you’d think of in terms of health, in terms of two hands touching, would be the healing power of touch, and if you’re wearing rubber gloves, you can’t, you’re not touching the person, are you? But touch, like, you know, like, you know, premature babies will thrive if they need skin-to-skin contact, but, you know, it happens throughout whole life, you need the healing power of touch. Yeah, well, it’s contraceptive culture. We think, we don’t realize, because we, let’s say, we’ve reduced reality to a very, very specific thing, and we don’t realize that even the notion of contraceptive as a, let’s say, a factor in society, right, as a part of the story, what it does in terms of understanding what productive human relationships are, you know, that it’s not, it never, it won’t end up being just about sex, it’ll end up flowing out into, because sexuality is such a, it’s such a deep part of our narrative, like, it’s such a deep part of understanding who we are and how bonds are created in society, that when you fiddle with that, you’re gonna end up, yeah, you’re gonna end up with an image of God in man wearing rubber gloves and not, and not seeing what’s going on, like, not understanding why it’s actually, it’s actually preventing contact, it’s actually preventing real productive relationships, so. Yeah, yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s interesting in relation to responses to a pandemic, this notion of hygiene and the idea that we’ve got to have completely separate ourselves off and have all these boundaries around ourselves. So, I think that maybe this is a really complex topic, but I think it might be related to where there’s been such a push towards vaccines, rather than, rather than thinking about, rather than thinking about treatments, the vaccine seems to be pushed far, far more, as if the idea is that the vaccine is shielding us and the germs will never enter, never enter us, as if we’ve got to keep up absolute purity. Yeah, well, also because they figured out a way, because they used to, they made, before you would have a vaccine and then that was it, and that’s no good, like, that’s no good for the business. So, now they found a way to have vaccines that you have to take again. So, it’s like, okay, well, now vaccines are great, because you have to update your vaccine every, like, six months or whatever. So, it’s perfect, right? So, it’s a good solution now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you don’t have to, now everybody has to take it. So, everybody has to take the vaccine and everybody has to update it every several months, and so, it ends up being this interesting, it also ends up being this strange communal thing, the whole aesthetics around the vaccine are so fascinating, you know, because they end up almost being like, all because it’s painful. I think that’s part of why there’s something religious about the vaccine, which is coming up and the way people talk about it, as almost this initiation ritual, I guess, I don’t know how else to say it, where they show pictures of themselves with, like, a bandaid, and there’s this whole kind of celebration of getting the jab, and the pain, it’s almost like a little sacrifice that you have to make for all of society, where you get the jab, and then you’re actually doing it, not just for yourself, but for everybody else. And so, there’s definitely like a religious undertone to this whole, the whole aesthetic of the vaccine, which is not so surprising, but slightly disturbing, I would say. Yeah, it is, because so many people are posting on social media that they have it, and so on. But there’s also, I mean, I’ve also noticed something else in relation to how people talk about the vaccine here, and I don’t know if it’s the same in Canada. It’s talked in terms of when they’ve had the vaccine, how efficient it was, and how clean it was. They went into the centre, and they were out again five minutes later. So, in terms of it, like, this drive for efficiency is literally like a production machine of people just walking in, and getting jabbed, and walking out again. So, it kind of also suggests that they didn’t read the patient information leaflet, or maybe weren’t even given one. I’m sure they didn’t. I’m sure no one has, you know, because this has been the big thing from the beginning. I’ve been also trying to help people understand that ultimately it’s about trust. All of this is about trust. It’s not about a vaccine. It’s not about whether or not we trust the authorities, whether or not we trust what’s going on, whether or not we trust the reason why things are happening. And so, it’s not about science. It’s very little about science. Let’s say people who are doubtful, suspicious, and then the way that those who are kind of on board then treat those that are doubtful and suspicious, it’s mostly about trust and about a vision of what it means to be together. And so, this vaccine has become the means by which we show that we’re part of society, whether or not it ends up leading to an explicit kind of tracing mechanism. But even in the narrative that you see, it’s about showing that you’re part of society by getting this thing. Yeah. I’ve just had a thought. I wonder, because we’ve been so isolated for the last year, more than a year now, isn’t it? Maybe we’re so craving some kind of connection and some kind of way of showing that we’re connected to people, but maybe that’s one of the factors behind. Oh, for sure. That’s for certain. And well, it’s also that it’s a longer story than that. It’s the story of running out of reasons why we are together. And that’s part of why the world is kind of breaking down. Look, we need reasons to know that we’re a society. But you used to have celebrations. We used to have religious unity or religious ways of understanding that we’re together under God or different ways of stating that. But now we’re running out of those. And so, and in a world where they’re trying to create post-national identities, then we also have a problem, which is that how do we… So they tried things like the environment. We’re going to fight. We’re all going to join together and fight against environmental problems. But it’s not working because it’s so abstract and it does involve sacrifice. It makes you sacrifice things and you have your bins so you can kind of have this liturgical practice of separating the trash. But it’s not enough. I don’t think the vaccine is enough either. But it’s like they’re looking for ways to unite people, like racism. And now this is a… The medical one, what’s great about it is that it’s trying to portray itself as non-ideological. So you’re not supposed to be able to argue against it because it really is this kind of objective thing where we all unite and show that we’re together by participating in this story. So… Yeah. Because you’ve talked… And again, this is going in a different direction as well because you’ve talked before about problems with culture and the lack of participation, like losing things. So lots of things have been happening, have lost in my lifetime. So there used to be… When I was at school, we used to do country dance festivals and that’s all gone. And there used to be May carnivals. I don’t know where that’s gone. There used to be carnivals all the time. They kind of vanished. But I also think one of the reasons… So you’ve talked about… This is going off at a tangent. Does it matter? I’ve heard you talk before about, say, like going along to a music concert and just sitting there as an audience and that kind of being a problem because it’s not very… I see this kind of related to the question you just had. You’re totally right because one of the things that they’ve tried to do, especially in the United States, I don’t know in Europe, but in the United States for sure, in the like 70s, 80s, all of this, they tried to unite people under entertainment. And so there was this idea in the water cooler conversation. I don’t know if you remember when people were talking about that, where this idea that you watch a show in the evening and then the next day you go to work, then everybody gets together during break and talks about what happened on the show. Like Seinfeld was one of those things where people had this sense that it was somehow uniting society together because it was creating this common story that we could all attend to and then talk about the next day. But it’s not enough. It’s not enough because it’s not participative. So we need participative story. And that’s why what’s coming up now is more the whole question of racism is like, because that’s a story you can be a character in and you can play a role in. And then also then again now, and now this whole medical question and getting the jab and doing these measures, washing your… Putting on the Purell when you go into the store, all of these kind of liturgical means, measures are there to have a more participative narrative. And I’m not saying that everybody’s… It’s like, you don’t necessarily even have to think of it in terms of conspiratorial behavior where there’s someone controlling this and forcing it to happen this way. It’s just people need this. And so when it appears in front of them, like when it manifests itself, they’re naturally going to gravitate towards it because we need this type of participation. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I suppose the racism one has got a bit of a problem in terms of participation because people are assigned roles against their… Often against their will. So but a lot of people are getting really annoyed about being told because of something extraneous about you, you therefore think this or… Yeah, it’s a dangerous game to play. It’s definitely a dangerous game to play because it’s actually separating us into clans again. And so that’s a scary thing. It seems like it’s possible that it’s separating us into clans in order for something else to come in, the whole divide and conquer strategy where something else will come and then unite. And the medical one is, like I said, it’s perfect because it’s supposed to be non-ideological. Yes, yes, yes. And so one of the many problems with the racism one is that the people who are most liable to be attacked, the very people who are… So for example, I won’t give any details, but I mean a friend of a friend was telling me something that happened to a friend of hers recently. And the sort of people who are getting into trouble are precisely the kind of people who are, say, maybe working with diverse groups, trying to promote equity, trying to do social work amongst certain people and so on, and then maybe just accused of not using the right word. So the people who are getting into trouble are the people who actually have spent all their lives trying to improve equality, those kinds of things. So I just think that they know for a fact that they’re not there, that they’re trying to do something to help. And everyone’s, of course, who have been getting into trouble because they have to… So recently, I’m having about two or three weeks ago, in Britain, we were told that the acronym that had been used was BAME, Black and Asian Minority Ethnic, I think. We’re told they’re not allowed to use it anymore. It’s unclear as to what we are supposed to say. So those kinds of things are happening with such rapidity, but it’s really quickly breaking down and just making lots of people get… Yeah, it’s funny because it’s one of those things where if we only had a normal acknowledgement of reality, which is that… A good example is, let’s say, we can use one where it’s like if you have a physical handicap, right? If you have a physical handicap, then you are necessarily going to be a marginal part of society. And that has negative aspects and positive aspects. And so if you try to… If you realize that a word you’re using and that it’s referring to the negative aspects, and then you change the word to something else, you’re going to have a problem because the negative aspects are going to come back because the negative aspects are there. And it’s the same with being a minority in general. When you’re a minority in a group, it doesn’t matter what… It has nothing to do with race or whatever. If you’re a minority in a group, then you are necessarily going to struggle to find your place in that group, whether it’s any type of group. And so instead of just realizing that this is a normal thing and we need to try to palliate for it and try to make it as good as we can and try to help people integrate as much as possible, if we keep just playing this weird semantic game, then it’s… Whatever word you use to talk about a minority is going to have negative undertones because it’s hard to be a minority. And so you can’t avoid it. It’s going to keep coming back. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It’s just this ignoring of how reality works, I think, and a desire to impose this weird system, which actually doesn’t pan out in the world. Yes. So one of the things I think that we really need to stress in thinking about what technology is doing is it’s never just the technology. It’s never just the technology. It’s always the culture behind it. And they’re often working in synergy or the technology then is helping to shape the culture. And there’s like a really complex interaction between the two. And that happens in relation to how we think about health, for example, about the ways in which technology might open up possibilities with health and that changes how we think of it. So actually, so for example, I mean, in relation to the pandemic, the expectation for how long we should live has changed so rapidly. So I looked up some charts just last week. Life expectancy in the developed world, or life expectancy in general has shifted, but life expectancy in the UK, which I presume is similar to Canada, has increased by three years in the last decade. It’s just astonishing. And so our expectations of what we expect out of health, it’s. No, it’s changed everything. And like you said, and so even this might be very controversial, but I get a sense that, for example, when you look at COVID deaths in different countries and everything, I always wonder if it’s more a comment on the state, let’s say, of the society itself, pre-pandemic, rather than about the disease. And so if there was a country where the population was extremely old and that the systems to say to deal or to live with these elderly people was not healthy, then I think that’s what happened here in Quebec. We have one of the highest rates of death in Canada and almost in the world in terms of percentage. And people are like, oh, we’re hit hard, we’re hit hard. But I’m like, I’m not sure it’s because we’re hit hard. I think there’s something else going on. It’s more a story about how the elderly exist and how, like you said, the expectations we’ve had, which is that the idea of dying at 70 when I was young was like, hey, it’s not bad. But now dying at 70 is almost like a scandal. You can’t die at 70. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It’s really interesting. It’s actually changed the story. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that because I know you were thinking about the idea of how one of the things it does, like technology offers up these possibilities and then that possibility will affect the way the story lays itself out. Yes, yes, it really does. So I listened to your monkey man video last week, the monkey man. Yeah. I was just so interested in that. I looked at the actual paper. I didn’t read all of it because it’s like pages and pages of really technical stuff. But it’s got something in it that you see over and over and over again. So in the summary, it talks about interspecies chimera formation, I’ve got it here, with human pluripotent stem cells. This represents a necessary alternative. It’s presented as being necessary. So it’s research is being presented as necessary, necessary to what? So it’s an instrumental rationality. It’s necessary to certain aims that you have. So, you know, what do they say? Do they tell us what the aims are? Do they mention them? You know, so, so, so there are various regenerative medicine applications. So, for example, including like the generation of organs and tissues for transplantation, and also just understanding early human development and early embryo development in humans, and also evolution, evolution of humans and primates. So, so one sort of fairly abstract knowledge, I mean, the abstract knowledge, to be perfectly fair, a lot of knowledge, which is called like blue skies research ends up being really useful, but also just fascinating. I mean, like, stories about human evolution, finding out about human evolution is just really, is just really interesting. But it’s always presented as being necessary, but as a way of finding something out, the only way you can do it is in this kind of way. But I mean, so, but if you’d murdered somebody, for example, it would be necessary to find a way to dispose of a body to make certain you’re being on it, wouldn’t it? But you probably shouldn’t have murdered them. So it depends what it depends what the goal are, goals is, but that word necessary is just, it’s just so often slipped in as something that we just have to do. And it also describes it as fundamental research. So talking about it as fundamental research, again, emphasizes the notion that it’s just really, really important to do. But I was fascinated in terms of how so there’s ways in which this idea of necessity is opened up in terms of the possibilities that created. So that it’s, it’s, it’s trying to think up or trying to produce like, maybe organs into transplant. So we already actually pick pig valves are often used in transplant for heart valve operations. So humans often have pig valves planted into them. So there’s a possibility that you might be maybe able to grow organs in other species or, or somehow use cross species organs. So in research, they’ve tried to do so basically in a research research, they took human stem cells. So a stem, just to remind everybody a stem cell, it will come from a stem cell line grown in a lab, a stem cell is a stem that’s got the capacity to become any different type of cell cell. So it could be placed in the body, and they’ve managed to get got these monkey embryos. So in terms of getting the monkey embryos, that means that they’ve had to get the egg and the sperm from the monkeys, which means that the female monkey has had to super ovulate and have the eggs harvested, which is, I mean, it’s quite a burden on the monkey, actually, because for women who’ve gone through that IVF, it’s quite a burdensome procedure, actually. So then they’ve fertilized the monkey embryos and then in and then inject them in a stem cell. Yeah, they got a human stem cell and put it into the monkey embryo to see how many days it can survive. And then they haven’t transplanted it into an animal. But if they were to do so, it would remain an open question as to what would happen to the human stem cells? What would it do? Would it develop into a particular organ? So it’s a worst nightmare would be but like it’s a monkey body and human brain. So there’s that kind of problem. But the idea that it’s necessary because we need it for organs for transplant, it’s really interesting how that kind of necessity starts to develop. So the first organ transplant patient was somebody who happened to have an identical twin. So who kidneys had packed in and he needed a kidney transplant. Well, needed a kidney transplant. That was the only possibility. And he had an identical twin. So you can transplant from identical twin because there’s not going to be any organ rejection. Yeah, exactly the same. So from then organs then spread out to close relatives, as long as they’re a match, and then to finding searches with strangers. And then it’s also spread out more to sort of black markets in organs actually, and people being accounts of people being kidnapped and then the search. So what happens is the class of patients who could benefit from an organ transplant is vastly greater than the supply of organs. That’s already set up a kind of short form. So you’ve created a possibility in medicine, we think we can do this. And then lots of people could benefit from this very vaguely described possibility. And then because it’s a medical need, so it’s also really important to understand. You could think of it in terms of a mad scientist in a lab, like some crazy scientist doing this stuff. You can easily imagine the scientist doing this must be kind of really crazy mad type driven by lust for power. Yeah. In medicine, it’s also really important. But one of the major factors behind this is compassion. Yeah. Who’s sick. Yeah. And the one thing you always have to remember in the story is that you’re going to die. Like I’m going to die, you’re going to die, we’re all going to die. Okay. So that’s going to happen. Like you said, so now the problem is that is rather when am I going to die? And what is the limit that I’m willing to accept that that death is reasonable. Right. And so with medicine, what’s happened is that without necessarily understanding the ramifications of that, we’ve pushed the limit of what is reasonable reason to die further and further to a point where, like you said, they’re doing these things and they’re saying it’s necessary because you’ve already accepted a limit. Yes. What it means for a death to be reasonable. And that limit is so far that we’re willing to do other things which can be questionable in order to satisfy that limit. And it has a great application to COVID, which is that we know we can, let’s say, they think that medically we can contain this thing somehow. Yes. Because it’s possible, we think it’s possible and because technology makes it possible, then it’s there no even question whether we should do it or not. Whether we should, how far we should go. There’s no limit to how far we should go because once you’ve created that possibility and because like you said, it’s motivated by compassion, then it’s like this strange parasitic story comes in and people just stop thinking and stop asking that, stop noticing that there’s actually a competing set of values that have to be thought of. They just see the possibility and they just embody it and jump into it. Yeah. And this happens all the time with technology, but certain values come to the fore. And it tends to be values that you can count. So in terms of health, of course, you can count the number of years and how long you are alive and things that you can more easily account. It happens within the healthcare system in terms of like efficiency of goals of target. Because of course, one of the other terrible things that’s happening is that people are living longer and longer and longer. But the quality of care for elderly people is absolutely atrocious. It’s just absolutely, absolutely abysmal. So it’s really interesting how I think one of the things we’re faced with, I’ve got lots and lots of examples of this, but one of the things that we’re faced with is how the technology is making different values come of kind of like clash with each other or produce paradoxes. So here’s one whole set of paradoxes in, I don’t know if paradox is the right word, but certainly, so one of the ways in which medicine has gone down the route, actually, I want to get back to talking about the monkey embryos in a minute, but one of the ways in which it produces a kind of clash, sort of a clash, but you tell me whether it’s the right word, would be through genetic technology, which is developed techniques for screening before, either within testing embryos in the womb and maybe having selective termination of pregnancy for various damaged ones or pre-implantation diagnosis. So they do this for lots and lots of different diseases, really commonly, as for many pregnant women will be screened for Down syndrome. At the same time, there are other people putting in lots and lots of work to treat the very same diseases. So cystic fibrosis, for example, which is quite quite a common genetic disease among certain populations, it’s a quite a pretty serious disease, but the treatment for that is improving really, really, really, really quite well. And Down syndrome, I think, is a really important example, because at the same time as screening the Down syndrome is being pushed. So I believe that Iceland is hoping to have like zero Down syndrome births. At the same time, people with Down syndrome are living longer and longer and longer. They’re going to school, they’re going to university, they’re holding down jobs, they’re getting married. The possibilities of the life of somebody with Down syndrome is increasing really quite significantly. People with Down syndrome are being used in adverts. So it’s different strands. There’s a major clash. There’s basically an inclusion versus eugenics clash, which is quite insane when you realize just how extreme those two things are. Yeah, yeah, yes. And also, so much of this, again, is also driven by compassion, by feeling that parents would feel they wouldn’t be able to cope with certain things. So again, I want to stress, it’s really, really easy when you’re talking about these things to make it sound as if you’re being really judgmental of people. So that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not kind of, everyone’s sort of, it’s partly because we have such a legalistic way of thinking about ethics that you think if you’re trying to look at the subtlety or nuances behind things, that means you think you’re going to try and, what you’re intending to do is to stop people from doing things. Yeah, but we need to be attentive to this because let’s take the monkey man story. Yeah. And so this drive to create hybrids, right, this drive to, and it really is a weird drive. It’s like a narrative drive. This drive to create hybrids for medical reasons, but at the same time, there is a narrative in society. There’s a story. And one of those stories is the revolutionary story. And so if you have a revolutionary pattern in your culture and you create AI, that revolutionary pattern is going to find its place in AI. So we’re going to have a sense that the robots need to free themselves from us. So if you do the same with the hybrid, you have the same problem. The recent line of Planet of the Apes movies has the apes as the good guys and the humans as the bad guys. Please remember that people, because as you’re creating these hybrids and you have a revolutionary pattern in your culture, you’re setting up something that you’re not going to, you’re setting up a situation where you’re going to have compassion for these hybrids and an upside down compassion even, where you’re going to want to make them into your king, which is just a scary stuff. Yeah. Yes. So one of the things that I’ve noticed going back to the AI creation meme with the spark of electricity, as you said, I mean, you pointed out that if it was light, then that would fit it more with the Genesis story. But if we’re thinking about it in terms of electricity, and we’re thinking that, and of course we are made of electricity, our brains run on electricity. But that’s one of the ways in which humans can be seen to be inferior to AI. Because one of the ways in which we’re often talked of dismissively is it because our brains are running in bio, where trapped, if you like, it’s not a good way of putting it, but we are biological beings. And lots of people saying, well, the way in which we think, if our brains are like computers, we’re trapped by what’s called wetware. Have you ever come across them? Like, where, where, where, where, where, where? So then the AI isn’t, it can run much faster. It’s in silicone, you can have quantum computing, you can do stuff far faster. So again, that’s an example of how we think what we create is going to be better than us. We’re just trapped, trapped in wetware, or the way in which our thought processes are hampered, if you like, by our emotions, our desires, or by the ways in which actually we’ve stemmed from evolution. So another way in which we’re seen as being potentially inferior to AI is because I haven’t actually heard it until recently, but we’re just kind of like trapped in monkey suits, because of the ways in which we’re, the ways in which we have, you know, factors about how we behave driven by our evolutionary past, for example. Yeah. This is actually a really good example about how we’re kind of seen to be, we’ve progressed beyond the monkey, but we’re kind of like trapped, trapped by like taints of our monkey-ness. If only we could get away from the monkey-ness, we could then go on to the next step. Yeah. That’s where we, that’s where you see this, this like hint of narcissism in the modern thinking. You know, the idea that evolution is progress, right? First of all, it’s very, it’s supposedly deeply unscientific, but it seems to be a trope that people cannot get rid of. They just keep, even the most, even the most like evolutionist, if you listen to an evolutionary biologist for long enough, you’re going to, you’re going to find them falling right in that trope. Even if, even if he’ll say, no, no, no, evolution is in progress, they just end up getting into that trope no matter how they, how they do it. And so the image of moving from the monkey to the computer is definitely something which has a deep story, a deep story version. Like you see it in all kinds of very, even popular culture and type of thinking where you have this idea of the the robot as being a superior form. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so yes. So in the, in the monkey, in doing these monkey, these monkey experiments, we have, this is one of the ways in which there’s a form of hybridity in terms of the ways in which we flip from one way of thinking about ourselves to another way of thinking about ourselves. So in order to do the experiments, in order for it to work, we had to pick a monkey because they’re closer to us in evolutionary terms. We’ve only diverged from them, I don’t know, 17 million years old. So we’re quite close to, quite close to them. So that’s why it works. So we have to see ourselves as like biological beings who are fairly closely related to monkeys. But then in order to justify doing the research on these monkeys, who are after all, they’re quite complex, really complex beings, in order to justify like taking, it’s worse for the female monkey. I mean, it is actually worse for the female monkey because of collecting eggs is so much more onerous. In order to justify doing it, we’ve got to think of ourselves as being superior to the monkeys. Because we’re not, we’re not trying to create organs in order to save monkey lives. We’re using monkeys to try to save human lives. We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t sacrifice a human to try to save a monkey. He just wouldn’t do it because we think of ourselves. But it’s, I asked him, so it’s really interesting. So only like about 20 years ago, when we managed a sequence of human genome, everybody was really excited and saying, at last we found the essence of man, as if our genomic code was going to be like the book of life. People talked about that for various reasons. We don’t talk about that anymore. One of the reasons being, but when we sequenced all the genes, it turned out that really embarrassingly, humans didn’t have many genes compared to other animals. We got that same genes as really simple worms, and other animals have got far more than us. So that like was, it’s really strange how that’s kind of like a bit embarrassing. And then it turns out that genes are much more complex than we thought. But a lot of stuff is actually really environment. And, and that lots of disease we thought we were going to be able to cure is actually much more complex. So that’s all faded. But this, but one of the things that technology does is, is like, it exposes and puts pressure on the contradictory ways in which we think about ourselves and evolution. I mean, evolution is evolution, the point that you’re making about evolution is completely right. It’s really hard to find anybody talking about evolution and not see it in terms of progress. And it’s like, so I think evolution has done this really cunning bait and switch on us. So it came along in the 19th century. And despite what anybody says, it was used to say that we’re really, we’re just like, we’re nothing but monkeys. Yeah. All those cartoons of Charles Darwin being like a monkey, we’re nothing like monkeys. So therefore religion is a lot of rubbish. We just evolved in this random. It’s interesting in terms of how it’s now seen in terms of progress. It’s just as completely random, completely meaningless. These random mutations happened and some of them worked and some of them didn’t. And by this accidental progress, accidental, I said progress by mistake. Yeah, yeah. The process we’ve done with humans as being like the latest thing. But then having got rid of religion, more or less, amongst people thinking really scientifically, it’s like they have to get some kind of meaning and progress from somewhere. So the meaning and the progress comes from evolution. And so now, so the interesting, really interesting thing is instead of having a picture before whereby there were animals lower down and then man in the middle and then angels and then God, you know, like, I’ve been one of my, actually my favourite, I love Sarmatian, you know, but man has, you have made us man a little lower than the angels. What is man that bow out mindful of him? A little lower than the angels, dominion over the animals. So there’s a huge amount of fuss of people saying, this religious view is awful. How dare you think you’ve got dominion over the animals? Yeah. Yeah. How dare you think so? And what that’s been replaced by, it’s by, I blame it all on John Lennon, actually, his song Imagine. Yeah. Horrible song. There’s no heaven above us, only sky. So that if above us is only sky, that means that we’re at the top. That’s right. Yeah, we’re at the top and it plays out in so many interesting and, let’s say, like you said, kind of these contradictory ways, but end up showing the same reality, which is that even the idea of environmentalism is so powerful because it’s all the environmentalists say how arrogant, you know, man is so arrogant because he places himself above nature and tries to control nature. It’s like, would you tell an ant that? Like, would you tell an ant that it’s that it’s trying to control nature? No, you, the only reason why you say that is because you do believe that you are above nature and you do believe that you’re going to save the environment, you know, and that by acting like a human does, you’re going to undo the bad things that other humans did. And so you can’t get out of it. It just, even in those that are the most anti-human kind of pro-environment thinking, they end up putting human beings at the top. You just, it just happens on its own. It’s actually quite funny to pay attention to. Yes, yeah, because in terms of environmentalism, if you just see us as organisms part of a planet, if you take a Gaia hypothesis, then if, for example, we lead, we do stuff that leads to human extinction through climate change or whatever we’re doing, but we’ll just die out and the cockroaches will take over and stuff. That’s right. Is there morality to like the meteorite that destroyed the dinosaurs? Like, why would there be more morality in human extinction? Or not just human extinction, all the other races that are being extinct, like if a, like if a certain predator like eats away, eats all its prey, and then it does it to an extent that it can’t survive itself, that’s no moral question. It just happened. And then other beings will take its place and just keep going. And so nobody believes that. Like nobody, everybody believes that we are like little gods, you know, in the world. It’s just that whether or not this little god has ultimate power or whether or not it should be submitted to a higher truth, that ends up being the question. And there’s a kind of unconsciousness about so many of these movements and these, especially environmentalism is the one that is the most, to me, like contradicting. It’s like, I agree that we should take care of the world around us. I don’t think we think what we’re doing is that it’s abusive, but I think that there’s a blindness, which means that you’re going to struggle to get there because you don’t see what’s really happening. Oh, right, right. Yes, yes. And so the monkey man is definitely something that we need to pay attention to in terms of the question of hybridity. And the idea of the human computer hybrid is also something which is definitely at the same time on the, on the floor, let’s say with Elon Musk and his microchips in the brain. So I don’t know if you’ve thought a little bit about that and the stories that are surrounding that kind of thinking. Right. Yes, yes, yes. Well, because because that is that’s linked to a notion of progress. So if we’re so if you take, if you take this, the view that like some ways of thinking about now humans are the pinnacle of evolution. Of course, the problem with that is if you’re, if you’re thinking that evolution is a is a prime move of any region, you just wait and see what evolves next. But actually, people are not really satisfied with that. So this kind of, if you like, well, a number of different strands forward, but you could divide them into two, one is one is a kind of strand of humans need to need to use machinery to try to improve, to try to improve ourselves. So we have the Elon Musk type of wanting to have a neural link implant in the brain. So one of the reasons why he wants to do that is to make us able to keep up with AI, because thinking that AI is going to be basically thinking so fast that we won’t be able to understand it. So we need to be able to be able to link with AI to be able to understand it. So merge having these plates in your brain. I mean, I don’t think I would volunteer for that. But actually, that’s also really interesting, because it’s also really interesting, it actually relates again back to that question of medicine, in terms of developing it, because a proposed use for it would be for people who are maybe completely paralysed, who’ve been paralysed in some terrible accident, who might be actually quite grateful for an implant in their brain so that they can maybe directly move the world, so that you could maybe get your thoughts translated and so on. So that actually you could you could then actually really start to understand why if you’d had this if you were suddenly paralysed, or you’ve been in some catastrophic medical disaster, and you were given the option that it might be pretty dangerous, but would you like an implant in your head so that you can then communicate what locked in syndrome, you can you can actually understand why somebody might think that would be, you know, a really good progress for somebody. But in terms of understanding, in terms of taking upon that risk in order to communicate with AI, one of the things that’s happening is that it’s thinking of progress in terms of something really quite specific. So that people who talk about progress in this way, there are people who, so Max Tegmark, for example, who’s he’s a cosmologist. I think he’s at MIT, and he was one of the people who’s he’s one of the founders of the Future of Life Institute, and he wrote a book about three years ago, I think, called, I think it’s, I think it’s called Human 3.0. Sometimes, yes, Human 3.0. I suggested you read it, I want, but I know you haven’t had time to read it. So he talks about evolution, he’s an example of people talking about evolution, but seeing evolution in terms of making the universe aware of itself, and having knowledge and understanding, and seeing it in terms of facts, that’s a good thing. So he said before that happened, before the universe woke up, there was no value in the world. You have to wake up in order to have consciousness of yourself, and that would create knowledge and value. But then humans are at the pinnacle of that, but we’ve reached the end, more or less the end of it, in terms of biological evolution is going to be too slow. Stephen Hawking talks about that as well. He said, human biological evolution is so slow, so we’re going to get overtaken by machines. So you might worry that machines are overtaking us, or you might be pleased, because you might think what we can do is invent machines, and they’ll be more intelligent, and we’ll create more and more and more intelligence of the universe. And that’s where the future is. The future is not human. So one future is humans, we need to enhance ourselves to survive, or to develop. And the other is, but bye bye little human, you were just like the monkey ancestor, you were just like the Neanderthal to the AI, and the future descendants are going to be AI. But of course, in order to paint that picture, you have to decide what’s happening in evolution is progress. What’s happening in progress constitutes intelligence. So if we go back to the creation of Adam meme, if you think about man is made in the image of God, you then have to think about, well, what aspects of us are in the image of God? It can’t be every little tiny detail. What is it? So the answer these people are giving is that it’s intelligence, a particular form of intelligence, which you think a machine can exemplify. Yeah, exactly. And I think that one of the issues that happens is, of course, understanding yourself as the summit of, as the human person that has the summit of this capacity to value is already, it’s already the problem. Like it’s already the problem, because the mechanism of valuing or the capacity to notice the good is something which at least in every other culture in the whole history of the universe has helped people understand that there’s actually a hierarchy that goes up above us, that this valuing actually leads up to goods which are beyond just the individual person, whether it be communal bodies, you know, in terms of beings that come together in systems that point to something above it, and then continuing on into seeing these values embodied in different images of gods or angels all the way up to the infinite. But as soon as you see the human person as this only valuing thing in reality, then it leads to this problem of, the solipsistic problem of this kind of, like because then it comes self-valuing, like this weird self-valuing, and then it creates these strange aberrations which are both extremes in a way, that are kind of two extremes in terms of, like you said, seeing ourselves as these all powerful gods that can do whatever, or seeing ourselves as these future ants which will spawn something above us which will be something that is more reasonable, that is faster, that is more in terms of quantifiable qualities, has more in terms of these kind of quantifiable qualities. But valuing is not quantifiable, like that’s what valuing is. Value is quality, it’s something which jumps above this quantifiable or this speed or all of this type of thing that people think is what intelligence is, and so there’s an internal problem even in the way that they understand what intelligence is, what the purpose of consciousness is, all of this is deeply problematic. Yes, yes, yes, yeah, I think you’re right, but there are more problems still, so I think one of the problems, I think one of the things we as humans always have to do in terms of thinking about value is always be aware that we might be wrong and to ask ourselves a question, and so that’s why it’s dangerous just to do it on your own, that’s why you might, you need feedback from people, that’s why you always have to, you know, ask yourself whether, you know, whether or not you’re biased in some way, you ask yourself whether or not you’re being selfish. Actually I did my, I mean, this is something else I’ve always been really interested in, I did my PhD on self-deception, we always have to be aware of the fact that we might be, you know, but we might be deluding ourselves in some kind of way, so we need to have a certain sort of humility, but you just don’t see that in these grand visions, and something else also that’s happening is that there’s there’s so much focus on the individual self, there’s so much focus on the individual, so of course the individual is really important, but you can focus on it too much, but there’s focus on the individual at the same time, and so absolute certainty that these people are absolutely certain that they know how to solve the problems, so like, so for example, in terms of like the environment and climate change, the hubris of people who think okay we’re going to block out the sun now. That’s insane, that, that, that, I can’t, when I see that I think I’m in a science fiction movie, these people are not, they don’t exist, like this, there’s no way that someone is actually saying that, it’s like a, like in The Simpsons they had that idea, like blocking off the sun, at some point the Mr. Burns wanted to block off the sun, like crazy. I know, I know, it’s not even like a science fiction movie, like a bad Austin Powers movie, like yeah, it’s just insane, so, so the level of humor is it, but the certainty about the, that the individual is right, when they’re focusing so much on this narrow goal, but the individual self is being sort of emphasized so much at a time when actually in so many ways the technology that we’re using is destroying the individual self, it’s creating so much uncertainty, is there’s so many, there are so many ways in which human, human beings are constructed in, we’re complex and we’re in a sense inherently provoked, and we’ve got parts of us which are prone to divide in various ways, so we can have emotions which can be at odds with what we know about things, we’ve got different aspects to ourselves, we’ve got an inner subjective part, we’ve got an outer objective part, our emotions can be, we can have desires which can be in conflict, and I think one of the things that the technology we have is doing at the moment is in so many different instances over and over and over again, it’s emphasizing certain aspects of ourselves and it’s manipulating us in ways that creates division within ourselves, which is manipulating our desires and it’s manipulating our relationships with ourselves and relationships with other people, so it’s, so for example, we talked before last time about online meetings and talking over Zoom, it changes how we see ourselves because we’re looking at, we can see an image of ourselves all the time, so it’s changing our self-perception, it’s changing how we relate to other people, oh actually, actually I should just mention in relation to, since we talked last time about how odd it is relating to somebody over Zoom and because you’re just relating really, really remotely, I’ve got a new strategy for my Zoom meetings, which is that I’m in the same room as I was last time but I’ve turned the table around because now I’ve turned it so I’m facing the person, so my computer is, I’m facing Montreal, so I’ve looked it up on the map. It’s a little gesture to remind yourself that I’m an embodied person somewhere in Europe. Yeah, I’m talking to some friends in Australia tomorrow, so I’ve got the face in that direction, so that’s my little rebellion. It could seem like it’s not much, just even the idea of attending and having something in memory, like this gesture to just turn your table is recognizing something and recognizing the difficulty of the situation, let’s say, and so it’s not a bad idea because the person isn’t in your screen, and that’s something that we tend to default to even if we don’t think of it rationally, but we tend to act that way and think that way. So yeah, listen, Paula, we’ve been going for a while and I think that we could probably just keep talking forever, and so I think this is definitely going to ask for another conversation sooner than later, and a lot of people are interested in understanding what’s going on and understanding the stories that go with the technology and the contradictions and these competing narratives in terms of who we are and what we’re doing in the time of COVID and with all these new technologies on the horizon as well, so I really appreciate you taking the time with us to work through this and be willing to kind of put yourself out on a limb to talk about difficult things that have a lot of implications, so thanks a lot. Well, thank you, thank you, I really enjoyed it, and as you said, yeah, there’s loads more that we could talk about. Definitely, and we will, that’s for sure, so everybody, thank you for your attention. We really appreciate it. Of course, we’ve touched on so many things, so definitely go at it in the comment section and get involved in the discussion. We, just like Paula and I, just like you, we’re overwhelmed by what we’re seeing and we’re overwhelmed by noticing what’s happening, and so we need to be, all of us, kind of working together and seeing how we can find little solutions and bigger solutions to the difficulties that this situation is bringing to us, so thanks for your attention, everybody, and I’ll talk to you very soon.