-: Welcome everyone.
First Media Lab talk of the year.
I'm Kate Darling, I'm a researcher here at the lab.
I am excited and slightly terrified
to be next to Douglas Rushkoff here today.
I first heard about Douglas
from our lab director Joey Ito,
who said, I quote, Douglas is braver than I am.
Which if you know Joey Ito,
I mean the guy who invented the disobedience award
at MIT, that's pretty high praise.
So for those of you who don't know him,
Douglas is a fairly prolific media scholar,
I think your website says media theorist,
although looking at his work,
I feel like media is defined probably about as broadly
as we define it here at the Media Lab.
He's written, how many books have you written?
-: Depends if you count graphic novels.
-: Oh, wow.
-: If you do then it's like 20,
but otherwise it's like 15.
-: That's, well okay, either way,
an inhumane number of books.
Including the book that we are
talking about today, Team Human.
So I have a signed copy of Team Human.
It has a snarky inscription.
You too can get a signed copy of Team Human
if you like after this talk,
we're selling books back there.
And if you're watching this on the livestream
and you're in the lab, please don't do that,
please come here, it's much nicer in this room,
you can get a book, you can hug Douglas
if he'll let you, ask for consent first.
Come join us in the atrium.
A few housekeeping notes,
if you are watching on the livestream
and you can't join us here today,
and you want to participate on social media,
there's a hashtag, I think it's up there,
#mltalks, and you can ask questions on Twitter
because we will, the way this works is,
we're gonna talk a little bit about the book
and then we'll open it up to broader conversation,
we'll take questions from the room
and also some questions from Twitter
that I'll sneak in, probably to Douglas's chagrin.
Because I know you prefer in person questions.
-: Yeah, while they're here. -: But please ask
questions on Twitter, I'm a big fan of Twitter questions.
So,
Douglas, we go way back.
We go way back to last September when we first met.
I met you in New York.
You were about to give a talk
and I did not know who you were,
and my baby crawled up to you
and tried to knock over your water,
I think that's how we started talking.
And I just, I remember that conversation
just being struck by how
warm and kind and
mild mannered you were.
Just really nice.
-: Aww.
-: And then I sat down to watch your talk.
And this nice guy just launches into this
most powerful, passionate,
angry speech I had ever heard,
and I almost choked on my wine,
because I realized who you were,
I realized you were Douglas Rushkoff.
-: Oh, courageous guy.
-: The brave guy.
-: Oh, brave, sorry.
-: So I feel like the reason
I didn't put two and two together is because
it seemed like such a contrast at the time,
this fiery rhetoric and your demeanor.
But looking at your work and reading this book,
I actually feel like it makes a lot of sense
that you are both nice and angry at the same time.
And that maybe we should all be a little bit
more of both of those things.
And I do want to get, I am hoping we can kindle
some of that fire here today,
but I actually wanna start with the warm and fuzzy side.
-: Okay.
-: So,
you're not jaded about people.
Your book is called Team Human,
don't you think people are kind of terrible?
What gives you so much faith in the human race?
-: Well, what else am I gonna have faith in, you know?
I mean I certainly think people can be corrupted.
I think people can become
addicted to systems, to operating systems
that they're not aware of.
I think they can sometimes see
invented things as given circumstances of nature
and then respond accordingly.
If you're born into a competitive, angry war game,
you're gonna think that's the world.
But no, I don't think,
I think human beings are just confused right now.
And I can watch almost anybody, I mean,
to think of the darkest people in politics today.
I can watch almost any of them
and see the human being there.
I can have, I don't know if compassion's
exactly the right word, but I can see
the person struggling, trying desperately
to establish rapport in a world where they
don't know how to engage with other people and all.
But yeah, when I look at the story of human civilization,
what I see is a story of our efforts
to collaborate and coordinate and work together
and forge solidarity and rapport with each other.
And then how fear or capitalism
or something kind of turns those things against us,
or against that effort.
But yeah, I have to.
Unless we believe that some savior's
gonna come down in some deus ex machina thing and fix it,
then I've gotta believe it will come from humans.
And I think our,
our current lowest, low sense of self esteem
we have as a species is largely manufactured,
is largely a result of living in a dehumanized landscape.
I think our big problem now is we're having trouble
understanding people in any terms
other than our utility value.
And I'm a Mr. Rogers kid,
I was told that I'm special just the way I am.
And you could say that that's a sick boomer illusion,
but
if you don't think that there's
some essential merit or worth to humans,
and if you don't have the experience
of establishing rapport,
or seeing somebody's pupils get larger
and feeling the mirror neurons fire
and the oxytocin go through your blood
and bonding with another person,
then you don't understand where our power
actually comes from as a species,
where the whole thing derives.
And then yeah, sure, you're gonna end up
being one of the billionaires
building a bunker in New Zealand.
-: Oh, tell this story, that's a good one.
-: Yeah, that was the thing I did that talk about
was I had been invited to do a talk
for what I thought was gonna be this group of bankers
about the digital future and it turned out to be
five billionaires who they brought into the green room
to pepper me with questions about
how they should invest their money.
But eventually the whole conversation turned to
where should they put their doomsday bunkers,
you know, for the climate catastrophe
or the electromagnetic pulse
or the social unrest that was gonna come.
And they spent the majority of the time
on the single question, how do we maintain control
of our security force after the event?
Because they know their money's gonna be worthless
and then these guys will have the guns and be more powerful,
so should they have a combination to a lock?
That's what one of them thought,
I'll have the only one who has the combination to the food.
It's like, that's really, that's a recipe for waterboarding.
Or shock collars or other disciplinary techniques.
So I decided to, you know, I mean--
-: Did they really say shock collars?
-: Yeah, yeah, it was one of the--
-: That's incredible. -: It was half facetious,
so what do we do, shock collars?
I mean, it was sort of more like that.
It's where you have collars around the guys
that if they wanna serve you,
they've gotta wear these things so you can,
you know, you'll be asleep,
they'll change the controls, it doesn't work.
So what I was trying to tell them is
there at the end of a scenario
that they're thinking about wrong from here.
In other words, that rather than trying to figure out
how much money they need to earn to insulate themselves
from the world they're creating
by earning money in this way,
they could think about what about making the world a place
that they don't have to insulate themselves from.
But that's the antihuman bias
that's so embedded in,
really, in our technology culture today,
in digital culture, and that's because digital culture
is built on an unrecognized operating system
of corporate capitalism which has always been about
getting humans out of the equation.
It isn't just digital companies that wanted fewer workers
because they can't scale if they have humans.
It isn't just digital companies
that think we have to use all of our technologies
to manipulate people rather than serving people.
So it's much older than that,
and that was part of my trepidation coming here,
is I don't want, particularly MIT Media Lab people,
to think that I'm railing out against technology.
I love technology.
If anything, I'm disappointed in what we did
with technology because I really believed that
the internet could have helped us
practice collective intelligence,
collective awareness, collective activity.
It could have helped us not do it,
but at least be training wheels for,
you know, at the time,
in our little psychedelic world we thought,
for the guy in mind,
for the global neural pathways to emerge,
and we just surrendered it so fast to the market
that we're using it for the opposite.
We are not the users of the internet anymore,
and we're not even the product,
even that would be something,
we're the medium at this point.
The net is playing us,
we are the medium of our technologies.
We don't use algorithms, algorithms use us.
We don't use our smartphone,
our smartphone, every time you swipe on your smartphone,
it gets smarter about you and you get dumber about it.
And we can't even learn about the smartphone
because the algorithms in there
are protected by proprietary black boxes.
So we can't even know the systems.
In an oppressive law, at least bad laws you can see,
they're on the books, oh, look at this bad law.
Once the laws have migrated into code,
they become subterranean,
they become part of the operating system,
and that's a little bit different.
-: Yeah, what I really like about this,
so you do talk a lot about technology
and digital media in your book,
and, you know, I'm a millennial.
The cutoff for millennials is 82,
so I'm barely millennial, but I'm there,
and I'm extremely online, as the kids say.
I love social media, I met my husband on Twitter,
we got engaged on Twitter, like I--
-: Had you met him before?
-: No, we met on Twitter.
-: And you got engaged on Twitter,
but you met between? -: Three years later, yeah.
(audience laughing)
Yes. (laughs)
But I'm a huge fan of social media
and I believe that it connects people in new ways
and in interesting ways, and not just social media,
a lot of stuff that we do here,
from social robotics to affective computing
to fluid interfaces, I think that there are a lot of things
we do that connect people in new ways, in interesting ways.
And so, normally when someone, you know,
a lot of the popular tech criticism out there,
like what I hear is that Douglas Adams quote.
You know, the anything that gets invented
after you're 30 is against the natural order of things
and the beginning of the end of civilization.
Because their arguments are usually just like,
look at that teenager absorbed in their cell phone.
And that's their whole argument,
and then they sell books,
because there's a whole generation of people who are like,
well, yes, clearly that's a bad thing.
And it's the same argument we've heard
about every technology, like new medium that's got,
people said that about books when they came about.
Oh, the books are gonna destroy the kids,
the rock music's gonna destroy the kids.
But your argument is different,
your argument is not a criticism of technology,
it's a criticism of the systems that co-op the technology.
Is that fair?
-: Yeah, yeah, it is.
I mean I'm as annoyed as the next guy
by this rampant
sort of almost medium rhetoric that I see now,
and I love, I write for medium, and I love a lot of it,
but basically it's like, putting two sentences
next to each other somehow connects them.
So it's like, writers deserve to be paid for their work,
you know, the Internet Archive can be clicked on by anyone.
Okay.
I get you're upset, and that's really
the only response I can have, I got it.
You feel threatened, you're upset.
But it's like, you're not making sense.
There's a day that for me shall remain in infamy,
the day that Netscape went public.
Netscape was a web browser
that was actually based on Mosaic.
And Mosaic was done, like champagne,
I think it was University of Illinois, shareware.
Netscape went public on the same day that Jerry Garcia,
the guitarist for the Grateful Dead, died.
And for me,
it put together something.
For me, it felt, and I'm saying it felt,
and this is another one of those
putting two things together that are actually unrelated.
But to me, those two things happening on the same day
made me feel like the 60s communal,
common zing, counter cultural cyberpunk values
that I thought were going to be expressed by the internet
were being surrendered to
the needs of the sort of IPO stock market.
That Wired magazine won and Mondo 2000 lost.
That the internet would be contextualized
not as a cultural renaissance,
but as an economic revolution.
And an economic revolution really means
we are not going to disrupt anything.
When I read Kevin Kelly's book of that period,
New Rules of the New Economy,
it seemed extraordinarily reactionary to me,
that what that book was saying is,
here is how, even though we have this
seemingly disruptive digital technology,
you all can still make money the same old way
by investing in things, externalizing your costs,
extracting value and moving on.
So it's like, don't worry,
the Walmart model will still work, and it does.
We have Amazon, we have Uber,
it's the same rule book from
the British East India Trading Company,
on how to go to a place and colonize it
and form a beachhead, extract its value,
enslave its people and move on.
And,
my hope, my naive hope, was that the internet,
rather than being a revolution, it would be a renaissance.
That it would retrieve the values that had been repressed
in the original renaissance, the peer to peer values
and local marketplaces, and all the kind of
late medieval mechanisms that got
sidetracked or repressed by centralized currency
and chartered monopolies
and the replacement of the city state by the nation state,
all these kind of abstracted, scaled solutions to things.
But instead, the digital ended up being
more about scale than anything else.
And the problem as I see it is that
human beings don't live at scale, we live locally
and the planet turns out to be local as well.
So we're in conflict, and that's where
you get these sort of throwing rocks
at the Google bus situations,
where you have a company that is,
on an abstract level, is extremely wealthy,
but in its actual physical world operational level,
it ends up being extractive to the humans
who are trying to coexist with it.
-: So when I was reading your book,
and it kind of starts out by saying
market forces depend on human predictability to operate.
And so the market forces try to
separate us for social control.
And I was like, I don't know Douglas,
that's a really dystopian view of things.
And then literally just last week,
I was at this conference with a bunch of
marketing data analytics people,
and I had never really
talked to people in that world before.
They were all super nice, but I learned so much.
I learned that that Gillette ad,
they knew exactly what was gonna happen.
And it was exactly what they wanted to happen,
they weren't trying to
make a political statement or anything.
You know, I'm naive.
I learned that I'm part of the 45%
that prefers lime Skittles to green apple.
It was fascinating.
So I met this woman there and she was great.
She had this party trick that she could do,
where she could ask you three totally unrelated questions
and tell you exactly what type of menstrual product you use.
Tampons, pads, she could even
tell whether you use pads with wings.
And it's because I found out, you're absolutely right,
the ad industry, the menstrual product industry says
there are three types of women.
There are exactly three buckets
and they can sort you into a bucket
depending on all these attributes.
And I was like, holy, that's a fun party trick,
but you know, what's the bigger picture here?
-: I mean,
it's funny 'cause I kind of came up
with this construction for that, even for that Ted Talk.
The idea that, when the digital renaissance,
whatever it was, was emerging,
part of what made us excited about it
was we were excited about the novelty.
We were excited about the possibilities
of an unbridled collective human imagination
and what would that bring forth, you know,
that the digital future seemed like
open terrain, infinite possibility.
And investors don't want that.
Investors want predictability.
They hire scenario planners,
some from even this very institution I'm sure,
in the global business network,
to tell them what's gonna happen so they can bet on it.
If you're betting, you want the most predictable outcome,
you wanna bet on a sure thing.
So we've ended up, I feel we've ended up using data
and technology more to figure out where things are going,
than to have some impact
on where we might want things to go.
And especially those billionaires
who saw themselves as so utterly powerless
to influence the future that the best they could do
was build bomb shelters to prepare
for the inevitable collapse of civilization.
I thought, wow, I feel more powerful than they do,
is that because I'm an idiot,
or because they're so locked into their betting?
So when I look at the primary use of algorithms today,
or of big data today, when I look at Facebook,
what I see is an operating system
that uses data from our past
to put us in a statistical bucket
and then use behavioral finance and machine learning
to get us to behave true to our statistical bucket.
So if they determine, with say 80% accuracy,
that I'm gonna go on a diet in the next two months,
they're gonna start filling my newsfeed with,
hey, Doug, you're looking fat,
or this is what the veins of someone
who's not taking care of themselves look like.
And they're not just doing it
so that I buy a particular diet product,
they're doing it to make sure
I stay true to my statistical profile,
to get that 80% up to 85% or 90%.
So what they're actually doing, and I understand why,
because they wanna increase the predictability
and ultimately serve me better
if I want the thing that they've got.
But what they're doing is taking that 20%,
that Pareto principle weird factor,
and reducing it to 10% or 5%,
or if they can get it down to nothing, they would.
So what are they doing is reducing our novelty.
They're reducing the one thing
that humans have over machines,
if anything, is our 20%, is that anomalous behavior,
is that unpredictable thing.
If we're gonna cure cancer or solve climate change,
it's not gonna be the 80% doing things the way we do it,
it's gonna be the weird 20% who figure it out.
So if we get rid of that, that's a problem.
What is that 20% basically considered
in our current technological parlance, that's called noise.
But that's not noise, that's humanity.
That's what I see as the thing,
that's the quirky weird thing
I'm trying to promote and celebrate,
and that's the part that seems soft and squishy.
But I'm arguing that there is a weird,
good reason to keep people around,
this was the argument I got into with the famous
singularity guy on a panel for CNN,
and they cut this part from it.
Where he was arguing that the singularity's coming
and people should accept that
computers are our evolutionary successor,
and we should be humble enough to pass the torch to them
and then recede and stick around
as long as computers need us to keep the lights on
and then accept our inevitable extinction, it happens.
And I was like, no, but people are special,
we should be kept around.
A human being, we can sustain paradox,
and we can enjoy ambiguity.
We can watch a David Lynch movie
and not understand what it means
and still experience it as pleasurable.
What is that?
It's those soft, squishy, liminal, contradictory places,
that ability to experience awe in confusion,
that moment that the dog has.
Dinosaur didn't do it, but when you confuse a dog
and it goes like that for a second,
and we go, oh, we recognize that human, huh?
That's the part I'm trying to celebrate,
'cause I think that's where the magic of life happens.
And if we intentionally stamp that out,
and we have machines that are really good
at shaving that off, who we are,
at automating our behavior,
we will never be as good machines as our machines,
they will never be human, but we won't really care.
So I'm worried for the,
you know, the day that computers pass the Turing test.
But not because computers will have gotten so smart,
but because we will have gotten so dumb
that we can't tell the difference anymore.
-: So, Larry Lessig, he railed against copyright legislation
for years and years and years and years,
and he popularized this whole movement,
the copyleft movement with his work.
And then after years in this space,
he realized he was still just fighting
this uphill battle and just getting nowhere.
And he realized, oh, it's because
the problem isn't copyright, the problem is
our system of government that's so corrupt
that I'm never gonna win this battle.
And so he shifted his focus
to fighting government corruption.
And so in this case, how much of this problem is
technology versus just unbridled capitalism?
-: I don't really blame the technology at all.
Technology does not want anything.
I promise you, Kevin's wrong on that.
But it wonts for something,
in the sort of Shakespearean sense,
W-O-N-T, it wonts for direction or consciousness,
or intention, and that's what we would have to
instill it with.
We were just talking about dear John Barlow's
Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,
and how it was inspired, but it also inspired a wrong turn.
Those of us in the early cyber days,
we saw government as the enemy.
And I remember fighting with Larry Lessig about this.
Because they had done Operation Sundevil,
I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember that.
Where the government and the FBI went in
and they raided the apartments of these little raver,
you know, raver hacker kids who would,
you know, someone broke into AT&T
or someone broke into a shopping mall,
on the computer, just to see
if they could change the thermostat.
The FBI is coming in there with handcuffs
and tear gas and we're all like,
oh, fuck you, fuck the man.
And at the same time, it was like Tipper Gore era,
and they were doing the Computer Decency Act,
and they were gonna shut down websites
that had dirty words, and we were just like, okay.
So then John Barlow writes
the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,
saying, governments of the world, beware, stand away,
we will govern ourselves, we don't need you.
And we got rid of government off the internet.
But stupid little raver kids that we were,
we didn't know that government and corporations
kind of balance each other
like fungus and bacteria in the body.
You get rid of all the bacteria with antibiotics
and your fungus goes nuts, that was the same thing.
So we got rid of government
and we created this free space for corporations.
We didn't know that they would wanna come.
The corporations hated the internet at that point.
The average household that had an internet connection
was watching nine hours less
commercial television a week in 1994.
AT&T was offered the internet for like a buck
and they turned it down, because they were like,
we don't wanna have to maintain this stupid social thing,
people are just talking to each other.
We've gotta get back into commercial media,
they thought it was, I mean,
my first book on the net was canceled in 1992
because they thought the internet would be over by 1993,
when the book was supposed to come out.
I mean, that's how little and stupid
they thought this thing was.
So the idea that we were wresting it
from the hands of government, it seemed like a good thing.
But no, it turned out to be a bad thing.
And the problem is,
it's not just the corporate capitalism on steroids thing,
but that the young developers, they drop out of college
before they've taken a civics class,
or anthropology, or sociology, these are kids,
they're 19 year olds, they don't even have
the myelin sheaths fully formed on their frontal lobe.
So they have impulse control issues
and they're already computer geek kids.
With impulse control, going in,
and instead of having their professors as their mentors,
now they've got some Silicon Valley guy in a sweater
saying, here's how it's done.
We're gonna get you VC, you're a company kid,
instead of being worth $20, it's now worth 20 million.
And that sounds so good until they realize
they have to pay back 2 billion.
The hundred X is the problem.
So now kid, we're gonna take this network
for connecting people to people
and we're gonna pivot just over here,
just a little bit, it can look like that,
but we're actually doing this.
So now your business plan is to extract value
and data and whatever from people.
And the great, you know, and sell this company
before the data bubble pops.
But they lose what they were doing.
So I don't even, and I gotta read Zucked,
I haven't read it, I just read the beginning.
But it feels like even that book, McNamee's book,
is kind of presenting Zuckerberg as a knafe, as an innocent.
And sort of like, Sheryl Sandberg
and her armies corrupted this adolescent.
I mean, Thefacebooks's original purpose was pretty dark
but at least it was social.
It was white male toxic social, but at least it was social.
I feel like it would have been easier to pivot
sick social toward healthy social
than pure capitalism to healthy social.
-: So you mentioned, you know,
the young white male aspect of this.
And a lot of people, including myself,
would argue that more diverse people building technology
or even leading technology companies
would lead to better outcomes.
Because people's work is so influenced
by their life experience, and you know,
if you have a 20-something dude bro in San Francisco
who's like, I wanna make an app
so I can order pizza with one button.
And then you look at the history of technology
that can't recognize dark skin from photography
to the automatic faucets in the bathroom
to now facial recognition, you know,
it just seems that diversity in tech
might lead to better technology,
but maybe also to better business models.
Do you think that that could be part of the solution?
-: Yeah.
I mean, we can blame capitalism for half of it.
And the fact that they're unconscious of capitalism.
But the other half I feel like is this,
a kind of an anti-human agenda
that seems to just be embedded,
particularly in Western culture.
So I keep thinking about the Thomas Jefferson's dumbwaiter.
And yeah, he was a privileged white male
and he developed the dumbwaiter,
and we're all taught that the dumbwaiter was there
to save his slaves on the effort
of having to carry all the food up the stairs.
But it didn't, it was just there,
they still had to carry the food up the stairs.
And through a whole two mile tunnel from the real kitchen.
The purpose of the dumbwaiter
was to hide the slave from the dinner guests.
It was to externalize the labor, so we don't have to see.
So it was ultimately a dehumanizing device
to make it look like slavery wasn't there.
And that's part of our problem is, we have in America
such a pedal to the metal, blindered,
forward-looking understanding of technological development.
Where everything that we've done to get to this point,
and everything that we're doing,
that all the externalized harm is behind us.
It's all back there.
And for all the memory in these devices,
there's no sense of memory.
So we make movies about robot slaves
that have a revolution and kill us.
Where do you think that fear is really coming from?
It's from a nation that was built on slavery
and still hasn't acknowledged where the heck it came from.
And it still hasn't looked even that far back,
much less at the exhaust pipe sticking out of the back of,
you know, every one of our lives,
as if you can go forward with it.
So I feel like capitalism is a big problem,
but there's also a more fundamental problem
with any technology that we develop,
and I would go all the way back to language and text,
that all of these terrific, potentially unifying
or collaborative technologies and languages and media.
If we're not aware of the
affordances of that medium,
we end up at the mercy of the medium
rather than in control of it.
And technology, digital is just the latest one of them.
When we got texts, you could look at
the invention of Judaism, say, as
a society trying to deal with the
potential downsides of a world of text.
Of a world where we're going to have
this history and a future.
They remake their relationship with God into a contract,
a covenant is what Torah is.
They write down laws because they're looking
and they're saying, oh, wait a minute.
When we start writing things down,
now people are using text to keep track of their slaves,
it's the first thing we did with text.
People are lying in text, they're writing contracts
that they then don't follow.
So what if we tried to develop laws that are gonna codify,
I mean they were really trying to think about,
you can, and I have, you can analyze
even the Ten Commandments as,
these are the things that we're gonna to need to deal with
as we move from an oral culture into a textual culture,
it's kind of interesting.
And they understood what was gonna happen.
They understood when we move from an oral culture
to a written culture, a lot of the rabbis
were so upset that we were gonna write this stuff down.
They said, oh no, people aren't going to remember
the stories once they're written down.
People aren't gonna have to,
learning the stories won't be a communal event.
So then they made a rule and said, okay, okay,
we'll make it so that if you read Torah
you've gotta have 10 people there, a minion,
to try to reinforce the social fabric of it.
So if we had been that conscious
developing radio and television and the internet of,
okay, what are the biases of this medium,
how are they gonna change the way we relate?
What ethical presumptions about humans
might these technologies not recognize
and how can we compensate for that?
You know, that would be a very different path,
but I feel like we're developing this stuff
on top of operating systems that we don't even understand
the biases of them, and we're just building on
and building on and building on,
and we need to disinter some of the
biases and embedded values.
And I would argue that rather than rejecting technology,
all we need to do is retrieve essential human values
and embed them in the technologies of tomorrow,
rather than forget them utterly.
-: So when I asked you what you wanted to talk about today,
I know that you mentioned that artificial intelligence
and technology might be interesting, you know,
we're at the Media Lab after all.
But there's actually another part of your book that
was really fascinating to me, it's just a little part,
but I thought it was really relevant to our here institution
and that's the part about education.
What is education?
-: Yeah, I mean, I thought a lot about that because
I've been teaching myself for four or five years,
and I have all these kids coming in and their parents
all about what job can I get when I study media studies?
You know, what's the job?
And public education, I teach in a public university,
public education was not developed for job readiness.
Public education was developed as compensation for
people who had to work all day.
The idea was that the coal miner
was working in the coal mines all day,
he should be able to come home at the end of the day
and have enough education to be able to
pick up a novel and appreciate it.
That even though he's a coal worker,
he should be able to live with the dignity
of a thinking, conscious person with real cognition
and thoughts that are valuable.
And plus, if we're gonna live in a democracy,
they need to be able to read the newspaper
and be informed enough about the issues
to actually exercise the enlightenment value of voting.
And instead now, we've turned
the classroom into job training.
We have CEOs meeting with high school principals
and college presidents who are anxious to find out
what skills do you need our students to have
so they can get a job in your company?
Do they need to know Excel spreadsheets,
should we teach them that,
or do they wanna know Python or Java?
What do you need?
So the classroom is a way now
for corporations to externalize job training,
rather than being these,
dare I sound too idealistic,
these sacred places where young people get to,
through mimesis, get to practice
what it is to learn with a capital L.
And that's where, I mean I got into
Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason.
It's a great small book where he's arguing about,
and this is old, from like the Frankfurt group.
Where he's arguing that there's this sort of
capital R reasons that we do things,
are like the big, almost platonic valley,
I don't wanna talk about,
because it's really more Aristotelian, it's a long story.
But the real ideals, the reasons we do something
versus being reasonable, the little R, utilitarian reasons.
And that's, we've started to think of education
in a utilitarian way, in terms of inputs and outputs.
How am I making a more,
how am I optimizing these people
to be workers in the economy of tomorrow,
rather than how am I enhancing
this human beings ability to experience
the essential dignity of being human.
And it's just so funny that even that now
is almost considered elitist or a luxury.
Oh, you're not the one who needs to get a job
when you get out of school.
It's kind of this, and there's an ass backwards in that.
And I use that as sort of one of the main examples
of this reversal of figuring ground,
how human beings have become the objects
of our reality rather than the subject.
And that's a dangerous place for us to be,
and it's just not an appropriate way
for us to teach each other and be with each other.
-: Can you just explain the figuring ground concept
for people who aren't familiar?
-: I mean, yeah, figuring ground,
it started, it was I guess a Danish psychologist,
it was that famous picture that could look like a goblet
or it could look like two faces looking at each other.
And some people see the goblet, some people see the faces.
So it's sort of a test, in a way,
of whether you're seeing the figure or the ground,
the subject of the picture or the landscape in the picture.
And you know, you want kind of a healthy balance,
where you understand the ground
and you understand the figure,
but I use it really as a way of
describing this kind of profound
reversal between people and their technologies.
When I think about the internet of things,
I think of the human beings are the things.
We're the things in the internet of things
that are actually being tracked and ultimately manipulated.
-: So that's not the only, so education is one
that you kind of unravel there.
There are a bunch of constructions
that you talk about in the book
that we kind of just take for granted today,
and this might actually lead nicely
into the AI discussion, 'cause
my favorite part of the AI chapter
was talking about automation in jobs.
Because you know, all day I hear people being like,
oh, are the robots gonna take all the jobs
or are they not gonna take all the jobs.
But you peel back an additional layer of that
and you're like, well, what even are jobs?
So you say about jobs today,
they're not a way to guarantee that necessary work gets done
but a way of justifying one's share in the abundance.
What do you mean by that?
-: Well, what are jobs for right now?
I mean all politicians always talk about
let me get people more jobs, more jobs, more jobs.
I mean, who really wants a job?
A job?
(audience laughing)
When were jobs invented, jobs were invented,
we talked about that, in the transition
from medievalism to Renaissance capitalism.
People used to have small businesses
and then those businesses were made illegal,
so they had to get employment, they had to get jobs.
That was the first time since slavery
that people had to sell their time.
If you're talking about technological determinism,
that's when they put the clock on the tower
in the middle of town, to make it look fair
that you're selling your hour instead of
selling the bread or the thing that you made.
When I hear, and originally it was,
I was listening to Obama and Bush and all those guys
talking about jobs, creating more jobs for people.
I was thinking, why do they wanna create jobs for people?
Is it because we need more stuff, we need more work done?
We're tearing down houses in California
because they're in foreclosure
and we don't want the market prices to go down.
The USDA is burning food every week
in order to keep market prices high,
and trying to, you know it's, what?
So why can't we let people live in those houses
or have that food, well they can't
have it or live there because they don't have jobs.
So then we have to, what, loan money to a bank
to give it to a corporation to build a factory
to create plastic doodads that nobody wants,
so they have to hire an advertising agency
to create demand for this crap
that people will use and then throw into the ocean
and starve the fish that we actually wanna eat.
All so this person could have a job.
You know what I mean?
(audience clapping)
And if we're just trying to program a fix,
a kluge to the existing system,
then digital technology will come to the rescue
and create jobs, oh, TaskRabbit jobs,
or these jobs, we'll make jobs,
we'll create jobs, it's okay.
You know, we'll pump out jobs
if that's what you're looking for.
So I was like, I don't want a job,
so what if we look instead at,
rather than, I mean it goes to a whole lot of
possible economic arguments,
but let's think about what actually needs to get done.
And if we don't have enough jobs
then we're gonna have to share the jobs
so that everybody can have the experience of contributing.
But the fact is we're not really near a jobless future.
If we were, then we wouldn't have to send kids into caves
in the Congo to get rare earth metals,
we wouldn't have to leave mercury
in landfills in China and Brazil.
We wouldn't have to destroy the topsoil
in the next five or six decades.
If we had more labor intensive, careful practices
in our production and agriculture and everything else,
we might actually get to stay alive as a species.
So there's not even a shortage of tasks for people to do,
but we consider jobs another thing, you know,
you wanna limit the number of bodies
that are in your company so that you can
scale infinitely and sell,
you can't sell a company that has
people unless they're programmers,
and even then the acqui-hires, that's kinda faded as well.
So yeah, there's just this,
that's another figuring ground problem,
it's this ass backwardsness that happens
if we don't interrogate the underlying assumptions
of the problems that we're trying to solve.
-: So what about AI though, should we,
I see people constantly trying to create AI systems that
are a replacement for human intelligence,
that can perform human tasks,
and we wanna automate human jobs,
is that a good thing or a bad thing?
-: Depends what we want the AIs to do.
You know? -: Okay.
-: I mean seriously, it does.
An AI is gonna try to do whatever you tell it to do.
What's the function of a car salesman?
Is it to get someone in the car they need,
or is it to get someone in your company's car?
And those are two different things.
I don't like AIs being
told
to get people to do something.
And that's language I've been trying to avoid
since I talked to technologists at the beginning.
How do we get people to do this?
Even well meaning lefty liberal whatever,
how do we get people to care more about the commons,
how do we get people to, you know,
and that whole construction is, again,
it's objectifying the person.
So when AIs are about that, then no.
I mean if an AI wants to drive me around
or run my subway or something, yeah,
if it's safe, sure, and if it's gonna make a calculation
whether to kill the rat or the squirrel,
you know, because it can steer and kill one or the other,
sure, that's a problem that--
-: You don't have a preference, rat or squirrel?
-: I do, but I don't know where the actual,
for me, I think it's prejudice.
I think the rat's actually,
isn't a rat smarter than a squirrel?
Even though squirrel's cuter, I mean, I don't know.
(audience and Kate laughing)
You know, that's so the AI can figure that out.
I just wanna ride on the subway and drink my beer
and read the paper, leave me alone, you figure it out.
But yeah, I mean, because that's
a painful choice I don't wanna make.
-: Okay, so, we're at the Media Lab.
We were talking a little bit before this
about how, I know that there are a lot of students
in this building who do care about
what happens to their technology after they've created it,
and they do worry about.
You know, I told you about a student
who was worried that McDonald's was gonna get
their hands on this educational toy
he built for children and use it to exploit kids.
And so,
I guess the big question is,
what can we do about that?
Can we lean into the positive sides of technology,
are there ways to design it in a way
that's it less likely to be co opted?
Should we give up and go home?
Is it possible to get it right in today's capitalist system?
Are there examples of people getting it right?
What do we do?
-: I mean,
there's so many ways to get caught up
or to take a weird wrong turn.
I mean, one of them is,
a lot of times we design technologies
before we have a use for them.
That's a tricky one.
I mean, it's not to say we shouldn't do pure research,
I mean we have to, sometimes it's just cool,
how do electrons spin and how does this work and all that.
But it's like, I love watching,
nothing against blockchain,
but I love watching blockchain conferences,
'cause so much of it is about,
we have this ledger, what task can we
retrofit it to that will do social good
and not allow this and not allow that?
And sometimes I feel like
we've got these toys that we don't know how,
we don't know how to use, even,
let's try some of this, try some of that.
It's almost impossible to,
in the current landscape, it's almost impossible
to develop technology that won't be used
also in some other way.
-: So do we go higher up, is it a political thing?
Do we have to--
-: I think we go lower down in some ways.
I mean if we keep interrogating
the operating systems beneath what we're doing,
and look, you know, what is it
that's fueling my lab and letting me to do this,
who am I working for,
what control am I giving up
as I develop this thing forward, that's where...
I mean it depends, it's really a case by case basis.
Right now we are developing digital technologies
with an industrial age framework.
And that's not gonna work,
this is not the fourth industrial age.
It's something else.
The industrial age is about
one size fits all scaled solutions to whatever.
And part of the beauty,
if you remember the early cyberpunk era,
was how distributed this was.
Was this homespun, I've got my own computer,
I've got my own thing here, I've got my own server.
And it wasn't about, I'm gonna...
I mean, I know it's the good old days,
we did share, we shared our apps
on the back of the school bus.
And you wanted six other kids
to play your friggin' maze game.
And maybe it would get to the neighboring high school.
And this was on paper tape, I mean back in the day,
and they would play it.
And that was the original, that excitement of,
the way you knew if what you had done was good and worthy
was if a lot of people were using it.
And that was kind of the point.
It doesn't really translate anymore into,
well, the way you know it's good
is if VCs are giving you enough money
to force your cab company into this town
that really doesn't want it.
You know what I mean, this is no longer
a natural uptake of of technologies.
But yeah, I think if you start
by looking at an actual human need
and then think, how can I address this need with technology,
and actually engage with people on the ground.
Because I mean I work a lot at Civic Hall in New York,
which is a very well meaning place where
lots of independent people come in
and develop these civic technologies,
but I'll talk to a guy, it's like,
oh, I'm making this app for homeless people on the street
to be able to use blockchain to get
durable identity over long periods of time.
It's like if you talk to anybody about this,
and it's like, finally they launch this thing
and they talk to the homeless people
and they're like, I don't want durable identity,
I'm hoping that I get out of this
and no one remembers who I am at this stage of my life.
Don't put that to me, or I'm trying to use the benefits
of two different shelters at once,
so I got two different IDs, don't mess with me, buddy.
You know what I mean, so there's like--
-: Yeah, so we're not connecting with people enough,
again, it's--
-: Right.
And the techno-solutionist urge,
even when it's meant as I'm gonna do
something good for humanity, it still so often
comes from the place of human beings are the problem
and technology is the solution,
and that's troubling, really.
Right now in most people's experience,
technology is the problem and human beings are the solution.
And that's the mindset, as prejudice as it may be,
people understand that from the Vannevar,
well, they won't understand it in these words,
but Vannevar Bush went to Eisenhower
and said, your colonial expansion is not gonna work anymore.
You can't grow capitalism on the backs of the third world.
But I have a new territory for you to colonize,
and that territory is gonna be virtual,
it's gonna be this computer territory,
this is gonna be the new industry
that lets the American economy expand.
But what we didn't realize was that
you can't actually colonize the internet,
you colonize human attention,
you colonize human data, you colonize human cognition,
and that's what's been colonized,
and people don't feel,
I don't anyway, like I have enough time of the day
in my own head or with other people.
I feel at the mercy of these algorithms
that want to figure out what kind of menstrual pad I use.
And they're not, if it was just surveillance capitalism,
if they were just watching me,
that'd be one thing, but they're not just watching me.
They're tilting the very landscape
to influence my behaviors, they're changing the world.
It's like they're, it's a Truman Show where
the internet that I get, which is everything at this point,
is being rendered in real time by algorithms
that are trying to get me to behave in particular ways.
And that is a weird world to be walking through.
And it's a world where, because I can't really see that,
I don't distrust the simulation,
I distrust the other people.
I distrust the other people because
I can't establish rapport with them anymore,
because they're not looking at me,
because they're walking down the street
staring in their phone,
or because I'm only seeing them in Skype
where I can't see their pupils get bigger.
I can't establish report, and I don't blame the technology,
I blame the other person.
And that leads to a kind of a feedback loop
of increasingly dehumanized developments.
-: Well, we are in a room with other people right now,
we can connect and I do want to
open it up to some audience questions.
We have this question box,
which if you haven't seen it before,
you just throw it to each other.
And so if anyone would like the box,
it has a microphone in it, so please speak into the box
and let us know who you are.
-: My name is Ana Hessenbrook,
I teach innovation here at MIT.
You describe my problems, you describe my mother's problems,
you describe my children's problems,
you describe my granddaughter's problems.
But at the same time, half a billion Chinese
have been lifted out of poverty since Jerry Garcia died.
Isn't that more important?
-: So wait, I just wanna get the two things.
So, but give it back to him, though.
(Kate and audience laughing)
How are your grandchildren's problems
and the Chinese getting out of poverty connected?
-: No, what we're talking about is
our attention being lost,
the
dehumanization of our world,
all the values that we had as kids are sort of disappearing.
That's something that we in this room
can all agree to, because we're rich.
We're the rich guys, right?
But there's a world of poverty out there,
and there's half a billion Chinese, just to represent them,
and that's not the only ones.
They've been lifted out of poverty
while we've been losing a tiny bit of our quality of life.
So, which one is more important?
-: And you attribute the Chinese wealth
to AI, to Facebook, to Google, to what?
-: Sure, to electronics and to the
electronics that's been assembled
and the globalization of the system
where all of a sudden there's a lot of work in China
where people can get paid, that wasn't there 30 years ago.
-: I mean, it's an interesting model.
Alright, so let's say, and it's possible,
white Western culture has run its course.
We've been bad, we killed Native Americans,
we enslaved the Africans, so
maybe the appropriate and ethical step for us to take
is to
create technologies
that make us suffer
and maybe end our civilization, but
our consumption of these technologies
creates wealth for
the Chinese who are assembling it.
I mean, maybe.
It still feels to me a little bit like a zero sum game
that I don't know if we,
it's sort of like saying, okay,
all of America's addicted to heroin,
but we're buying the heroin from these
Arab and Chinese countries that are growing the poppies
and they're getting out of poverty as a result.
And fuck it, you know, we're kind of bastards anyway,
so let that happen.
I could buy that as kind of a civilization-wide penance,
but
I think we're also in danger,
and this is just me and 90% of scientists,
I think we're also in danger
of destroying the planet itself.
And I
don't know if
arresting the American psyche,
in an effort to save the Chinese economy
through industrialization
is the
easiest way to fix things.
But no, I see it.
I mean, the real thing I would say is,
for however much I hate Facebook for Americans,
you look at how Facebook or crypto are being used in Africa,
it's quite exciting.
In Africa, they just call the internet Facebook.
That's how they get on, and that's how they do
money transfer and find out about jobs,
women use crypto, here, crypto is an investment scheme,
in Africa, it's a way for women to make money
and hide it from their husbands,
so they can, rather than having it
beat out of them when they get home.
So there's a lot of
ways that people who have
more genuine needs,
or more direct needs,
are using technology in ways that we can't quite imagine
because we're using them for entertainment.
But at the same time, I feel like
our use of technology in this way
is paralyzing our ability as kind of a
civic guided republic,
and potential
catalyst
for positive global change.
I feel like it's distracted us from that purpose.
I don't feel like America, other than maybe
through the purchase of Chinese industrial goods,
which that's still poisoning the planet,
I don't see how we are actively positively contributing to,
you know, some kind of global harmony.
I feel like we're descending into kind of,
in some sense, this digitally induced nationalism
and borders and
a very binary, polarized, dehumanized way
of seeing the rest of the world.
But sure, I mean some of what I'm talking about
are white people problems.
Some of what I'm talking about, though,
are species annihilation problems.
-: Where'd the box go?
-: Thank you.
I'm Neo Mohsenvand, a PhD student
in Pattie Maes' lab, fluid interfaces.
And my question is about cyborgs.
Where do you think they will fit in team human?
Imagine in a decade or so we will integrate with AI,
so every individual will have superhuman abilities.
So how do you see that unfolding
with the current operating system of the society?
-: The who did you call them?
-: Cyborgs.
-: Oh, the cyborgs, human cyborgs?
I mean I always thought of like
a person with glasses as a cyborg, right?
It's sort of the beginning, you know?
I think it's always a matter of balance.
Different people can tolerate different levels of
enhancement before they kind of lose
their center of cognitive gravity.
And that's sort of what we're gonna see is,
how much can you do, how quickly,
before the person tips (laughs) into something else?
So it's gonna be interesting.
I don't think that the...
Some of it, which is interesting to me.
Some of it is about reacquainting people
with the physical world, which is interesting.
Like the people who put a little sensor on
that buzzes when they're facing north,
and it's like, and they experience it as really
as this kind of a grounding thing,
or people that have a little shock or something go off
when they're just about to fall asleep
so they can sustain the liminal state
between waking and sleep.
I mean that to me, those are cyborg enhancements.
So I'm more interested in cyborg enhancements
that kind of extend the nervous system
and my perceptual apparatus,
than I am in ones that extend my
supply of fixed data.
So having the Spanish language,
you know, the Cassell's Dictionary here,
is not as interesting to me as
these almost more humanities, artsy kinds of
extensions.
But I mean I do think we're gonna have some fallout.
It's the same as with pharmaceuticals.
And again, I think the guide should be,
and again, this might be, you know, a white Western guide,
but it's a guide, is
are we correcting the individual
for the values of society?
Are we giving the person their drugs
so they fit into a sick, depressed, extractive society?
Are we drugging 30% of, what is it,
30% of America's on SSRIs now or something?
I mean, are we drugging because there's a
systemic problem that needs to be addressed,
or are we actually enhancing
in an interesting and fun direction?
That sort of, for me, will always be the litmus test
on whether I'm kind of interested in the thing.
If we're just gonna increase somebody's utility value
by giving them the claw, you know,
so now they can, you know.
I mean, sure, if you like that,
but that's the part that starts to
make me think of the human is the canvas,
rather than the artist.
-: Actually, I'm gonna take this Twitter question,
because I think it'll infuriate you.
What do you think of the concept of voluntary obsoletion,
where humanity is slowly phased out
in favor of a new conception of what it means to be human?
Team Human strikes me as needlessly adversarial.
I think that's a transhumanist, don't you?
-: I guess.
I guess I'm adversarial, needlessly adversarial,
in other words, it's interesting construction.
Why not just accept that humans are going obsolete?
My argument
to retain a place for humans
is adversarial to those who would replace us.
I get that, it's sort of like creative destruction.
The robots come, and that's
a creative destruction and the people go.
No, I don't think I'm being adversarial,
I think I'm arguing that we're not good enough
at programming yet to take into account
all of the weirdness of humans.
I don't believe that we yet know
everything that happens in a square centimeter of soil.
We're only now getting scientists
and everyone to agree that soil is alive,
that soil is a matrix, that trees use soil
to pass nutrients to one another,
and there's, you know,
the mycelia are more adapted
and advanced than us and keep us alive.
So there's so much about us that we don't yet know,
that I'm concerned that the xerox copy that we envision,
even with its improvements, may leave something out.
I still feel, again, controversially,
like there's something about record albums
that CDs don't capture, even at 44,000
whatever they are.
Cycles, we'll call 'em.
Oh, the sampling rate.
And it may be everything, it may be all you need, but.
And that, when it finally comes down to it,
it sounds almost
theist, but I,
like Aristotle, I believe in the human soul.
I think that there's some kind of
pre-existing something about us.
I think we come in with value,
that we don't have to prove our value.
And until we really resolve a lot of questions
about the quantum fields and all,
I'm not willing to let us all go.
I think that the human project is still in its adolescence.
And
I will admit, in the 21st century,
it is considered adversarial
to argue for a place for humans in the future.
That's adversarial.
And if it is adversarial then I understand
my work is important, because I am arguing for
a sustainable role for humans in our future,
at least for the next couple of hundred years.
I think it's worth keeping us around,
more than three or four of us in a zoo.
And I think that losing several billion people
to climate change as things move on
would be a catastrophe, a bad thing.
People on the other side of the wall in Mexico are humans.
They're not just MI 13s or whatever they are,
they're human beings.
So yeah.
But I don't mean it's like...
Team human is fighting words, I guess.
They say, you only say this because you're human,
it's like hubris, and I say, yeah, fine,
guilty as charged, I'm on team human.
And that's kind of something fun to fight for.
It's kind of fun.
Where I come from, old fashioned,
humankind was sort of this given, that we have this role.
I think we have a unique role in nature.
I think that we're the only ones who are
self-aware in the way that we are.
And I think that we can be sort of planetary stewards.
I think we can make nature less cruel.
I think that we can bring meaning to existence.
And I don't yet have faith that
the rapid deployment of digital technology
in the name of
the next kind of human
is being done with the care and precision,
with the understanding of the underlying biases,
with any consciousness of capitalism and the rules
and what we're embedding the technologies with.
I don't think that we are wise enough
to build the next species
as worthy as we are.
-: Well, I'm human,
so thank you for fighting for me. (laughs)
And for all of us.
We're over time, but, you know,
pick up a book, get it signed,
I'm sure we can hang out for
a little bit more in this room.
And please give our guest, Douglas Rushkoff, a big hand.
-: Thank you, thanks so much for having me.
(audience applauding)