we're kind of already cyborgs with our phones like I don't remember anybody's phone number it's all just on there they're a secondary part of our brain at this point where we store things that we want to remember but we don't necessarily need like short-term access to right so it frees up our brain to think about other things but yeah the second order effects of that stuff are hard to speculate on I know people that have spent time in virtual reality playing zero gravity games where you're on th
e space station and you can like push off of virtual walls and float in different directions and then an hour later after playing the game they take the headset off and they go to push off their desk and nothing happens it's like their brain has adapted to this new reality in this new set of physics and they have to re-adapt back to reality as they take it off and I think there's going to be a lot of um strange things like that laughs hey I'm David eleku and this is the knowledge a podcast for a
nyone looking to think deeper and work smarter in every episode I speak with makers thinkers and innovators to help you get more out of life this week I'm speaking with Sterling Crispin Sterling and I had a really incredible conversation this is probably one of my favorite recent conversations which was essentially at the intersection of Art and technology which is where Sterling has spent the bulk of his career so we talked about his background getting postgraduate degrees both on the engineeri
ng side and on the artistic side and his journey both as an artist and as an engineer so I think an accurate framing of the conversation we had which is essentially about the technology that we use to create art and to build things in the world and how the act of using that technology can change us as humans and so we started the conversation talking about art and how the medium of creating art has changed over time we talked about the evolution of Photography the evolution of Art and painting a
nd how things like generative art are changing the art scene and how nfts have changed the way that artists interact with their audience and interact with the financial aspect of being a successful Creator and then we started talking more about the technology side of things Sterling has worked in AR and VR for a number of years he contributed to building the AR specs at snap and also has just spent three and a half years working with apple and contributing to a lot of the Neuroscience that went
into the Apple Vision Pro which has been of particular interest to me and a lot of people in the technology space and so we talked about how the proliferation of wearable forms of technology like airpods the Apple watch the Apple Vision Pro how using these things could change the way that we think for the better and potentially also for the worse and what the future looks like as we rapidly adapt and as we move towards a world that is far more enabled by artificial intelligence and augmented rea
lity and virtual reality and so we went back and forth on a few different vision the future but we touched on so many things that you're definitely going to come away with a strong idea of the many possibilities that lie ahead and a lot of the things that we'll need to think about as we continue to innovate and collaborate on new and inspiring Technologies you can get the full show notes the transcripts and read my newsletter at the knowledge.io every week I share some of the best tools ideas an
d Frameworks that I come across from business psychology philosophy and productivity so if you want the best that I have to share you can get that in the newsletter at the knowledge.io and you can find Starling on Twitter at Sterling Crispin and check out his upcoming project flourish which we'll link to in the podcast show notes or the description if you're watching this on YouTube One Last Thing Before we kick off if you love this episode please do share it with a friend and don't forget to le
ave a review wherever you listen to podcasts but specifically on the Apple podcast app because it helps us tremendously to reach other people just like you the place that I thought made sense to start is so I noticed that you have both the Masters in Fine Arts so you have MFA but then you also have the Masters in multimedia engineering so I guess it's kind of two very different sides I know like I've heard you talking a little bit about your background you grew up in Hawaii and I think you spent
some time in different places in the US as well I would love to know what were the data points that you saw that led you on this journey because what I'm specifically interested in is I think you mentioned okay you started learning to code quite early as a teenager and so there's some of these building blocks that might have taken you directly down like let's say the engineering route but then you still ended up doing the the MFA so how did that come about yeah I mean that's a good question I'v
e always you know been really creative and yeah spent a lot of time on the computer as a young kid and yeah got into programming and stuff but at the time you know when they were teaching computer science to high school students in the early 2000s it was like very not creative and not fully expansive as to like everything that's possible with code these days so it just seemed like a strange career route and I was like I want to do something that's really creative and so yeah I went to art school
and you know really enjoyed that experience and just thinking like conceptually and you know like making art with ideas and being super experimental was painting a drawing degree but I did like very out there kind of stuff like you know working with every medium turning in like sculptures welded out of metal sculptures made of little cakes from gas stations I did artwork once we had this teacher that was giving us crazy assignments you have to come in tomorrow morning you have to wake up and cr
eate an artwork on the way to class you can't start making the artwork now you have to only you have to come up with something as you're coming to class and I was like oh this is awesome they're all these dandelions in the field that are putting their seeds out I'm going to collect about all these dandelions and blow them and have them go across the wind and it's going to be great but it started raining and so there was nothing I could do I ended up like microwaving an ice cream sandwich and pou
ring it into a shoe and passing that around the class it was like really really bizarre artwork that I was making at the time but it really helped me like think non-linearly and like sort of allowing my creativity to go in a lot of different places and yeah I ended up reading all of ray kurzweil's books around the same time thinking about the singularity and you know like the computer and all of our pockets in the shape of a phone is like 100 million times more capable than the computers that to
ok astronauts to the Moon right and that exponential growth of technology is setting us on a path where a thousand dollar computer in 2045 is going to be equivalent to every human brain on the planet combined and it's like what happens to Society at that point you know it's like a really mind-blowing thing and he lays out a really strong argument for it so at the time I was like this is what I want to be doing with my life I need to go back to school and like really get serious about programming
and computer science and stuff and that I think Ray kurzwa really set me on that Journey okay that makes a lot of sense just to step back a bit very quickly the assignment that you mentioned was this in high school or was this when you were doing the MFA that was my BFA that was my BFA it was it was a very like experimental small kind of private art school but yeah yeah that's exactly what I was going to ask about because I can't imagine that that type of assignment in a lot of other places wha
t I would also love to know is I don't know the extent to which you're happy talking about I guess your like family background but I'd love to know if your creativity was something that was encouraged because even the project that you you decided to go with is very out of the box I don't think it's you know something that anyone might typically think of immediately as their first either as their first thought to submit but I think also more specifically in terms of like how you were conceptualiz
ing art at that time and I think this is another thing where very often people go to school and what you get taught is uh is very not rudimentary but very traditional right you see people drawing with graphite you see people painting on canvases it's you know this is Art these are the great masters of the past and here is what you're supposed to be doing and there's not always a lot of room to experiment and think non-linearly about what forms art could possibly take so I'd love to know maybe wh
at maybe took you in that direction as well yeah that's a good question actually my grandfather was a really prolific photographer his name was Jim milmo and he was the one that suggested that I applied to that school and you know he was taking photographs as artworks at a time when photography was like not considered an artwork it's like you take photographs of artwork and their documentation and like photography isn't artwork you know so he was doing really creative things with it and you know
slowly over his lifetime it became recognized as a full-on art form but I think my mom being raised by a prolific photographer you know showed her a lot about art she was taking us to art museums and you know I remember being a teenager and seeing the Carnegie International show in Pittsburgh which is like a big biennial kind of show showing like the most radical artworks all over the world and it was like you know not exactly traditional work like really experimental out there stuff and I mean
it took me a while you know as a person growing up like I remember even thinking about my grandpa's photography like oh photography is so easy you just point the camera and click and like this beautiful images come out and like no big deal and then I took this black and white photography course where we had to you know wind all of our film and develop it all in the dark room and I was like this is actually really really really hard so I think going through that process by hand helps you develop
that appreciation of different medium and then also you know just being exposed to art history in general like I feel like most people they kind of have a rough understanding of art history but kind of like it fades out right around impressionism and then they might know like oh yeah there's Warhol and Banksy and there's a couple of other people in the last 120 years but yeah I think people's like aversion to really experimental stuff just comes from like a a lack of context on what else has be
en going on in art history Yeah you mentioned so many interesting things there's so many different ways I can take things from here but I'd love to know maybe how you might Define art specifically because I think just the last part of what you were mentioning first of all that is very similar to a part of my my art history knowledge by I know it's the same for a lot of people but I think more specifically one of the paradoxes that I find very funny that comes up a lot is that people always assum
e that Picasso is super old and because most of the art that you're taught is from people that lived a very long time ago and so actually even when people are hearing about artists that are relatively contemporary they almost put them directly in the box of here are the old monsters and and it just must have been at some vague time in the past so if it's painted it's automatically old and if it is something strange then maybe it's contemporary or maybe it's brand new and there is like you say th
is Gap in between where people don't really know what people are doing or how art transformed so love to know maybe your thoughts on I guess how to conceptualize art and specifically also because this is the other part that you touched on where there's this idea that using photography when you take a photo it might seem easy now relative to okay you take the photography on this on a film camera you're having to develop the film in the dark room you're having to do all of this work and I was actu
ally writing something today that I posted actually which is just this idea about the connection between effort and output and how some of that is changing now that we have like generative Ai and or generative Arts that people are just going on mid-journey and they type in a prompt and create some artwork and it's what is the extent to which you could call this art that you have made in the same sense when there was none of the effort that is connected to it and yeah so I know I've just thrown a
lot of different thoughts at you but I'd love to know how you would respond to that yeah working from the last Point backward I think the connection between the photography and generative AI is super interesting actually if you think about a photographer walking around New York City looking for photographs to take right like they didn't create the city they didn't create all the people they didn't create the culture they didn't create the fact that that person was busy today and they're running
late and they dropped some paperwork and you saw you were standing at that corner at the right time and like you decided right there like oh this is Art you know I'm taking this picture and like someone could walk to that exact same intersection point the camera in the same place decide that that framing is also their photograph and take the same photograph right and at the end of the day photography is like largely an act of starting with the world and like doing a curatorial process of saying
like Okay this moment is Artistic Choice I'm making right I think generative AI is really similar in a way that like you have this sort of open conceptual landscape of things you could depict and the act of you like exploring that space and picking something that you are deciding is this artwork and is this final image is that creative act so to me it's just obviously an art form even though I totally understand like if you went to school specifically for let's say illustration and like your ca
reer has been like essentially being prompted by clients and then using your imagination and the craft that you've honed to you know like illustrate images and give them back to people like this is a very threatening new tool but like the history of civilization is the history of automating human labor and making things easier and like changing the nature of work and like shifting what it is that people do so I totally empathize with those people but at the same time that's kind of how it goes a
nd like you know I write a lot of code and send things happening to coding so it's it's interesting going earlier about your point about what art is and how I Define it you know Marcel Duchamp did a really interesting piece where you know as essentially to get your work seen by the public there was this institution that was like we're the deciders of what art is and isn't and you submit your work to the salon and you're either in the show or you're not in the show and if you're rejected like you
're not an artist and like even Impressions at the time the impressionist painters they were like totally rejected they're like you're making horrible paintings like these these look terrible this is like a violence on nature we hate your work you know there was a pushback against that and you know artists started organizing their own shows that were supposed to be more inclusive and it's like hey if you've got art and you want to show it submit it to us this isn't the salon and you shop or argu
ably there's some like argument in our history that was actually a woman and not Duchamp I like can't remember the entire history behind it but someone submitted this toilet a urinal that was like signed as an artwork right and it was a big controversy at the time they had like a curtain around it oh my God fold the curtain back and see the controversial art that's in the show and that was in like 1905 or something and since then it's kind of like blown up the container of what could be art and
really it's if someone decides that something is an artwork and puts it into an a context of art than it is Art and I know that that like frustrates some people and they're like oh that's not a definition anymore if anything can be art that nothing's art and it's like this is how it is not everything is Art but if you sit down and consciously choose like okay this is an artwork then we can sit down and talk about we can talk about it you know and I think that the question like is this art is sor
t of a dead end question like you just end up with like a yes or no answer and then you move on right but if you like who made this why did they make it like what did they intend behind us what are the cultural forces that must have been around them that led them to make this is this political like is this you know there's so many other questions you get asked to like really dig into what it is that you're looking at try to understand it I feel like just letting go of the pressure of is this art
or not it's like it kind of doesn't matter you know it's like it's funny so the bot you just touched on is very similar to the point I was making but I wonder if I expanded my point if you would then disagree with me because I'm not sure if you would so the view that I was taking and I think in line with what we were just discussing right I think there's two paradigms by which people have been conceptualizing a lot there's the effort Paradigm like how much effort did this take how much work did
you have to do to get to the end product and then the other Paradigm is Judgment like what was your intention how much thought actually went into the creation of this and so sometimes when something looks like low judgment low effort people will say oh it's not you just put a toilet there you just threw some brush Strokes at the wall you didn't think about it deeply and it didn't take you that that much effort to do so this is not art but I think what is really interesting about the moment that
we are getting into is now that you can create art without the same amount of effort in the same way that before photography used to primarily be about effort you had to go somewhere physically you have to set up a huge piece of Machinery at first you know you've got your pinhole camera so it's a whole setup you have the light you have all sorts of stuff but then even going after that when you're developing film that takes a lot of work it takes a lot of patience it takes a lot of skill so you'
re still very high on the effort Paradigm and then when you move from there to mirrorless cameras okay so it's not the same amount of effort you maybe do spend some effort doing like post-processing and learning Photoshop Etc but you can at least take the photo and so now it's a lot more about judgment I would say at least in how people judge photography as art and so it's like okay you're using the world as your canvas but what were you trying to create what was the Judgment here what were you
trying to say with this photo that you took and there's so many choices that go into that there is what lens did you choose is it wide angle is it narrow and all of these tiny little creative decisions are what give you the end product of something that you would call Art and so and I know I'm rambling a lot here but I think this all goes towards the point I think the point is that at least for now the end product is still a product of judgment and so when you judge the art you're judging the th
ought process of the artist and so I guess the way that that Paradigm changes now that you can go on mid-journey and type a prompt and just create something from scratch is that we are still relatively still in the low effort side where the effort is still there in terms of okay you have to learn to prompt and you have to learn to be creative within those constraints but the barrier is very low so anyone can just learn to type a few things from a Twitter thread and create something that looks wo
w amazing so you get the output without necessarily A lot of the same effort but then on the other side I'm wondering what you think of the Judgment side of the Paradigm where I do think there's an extent to which you know creators will always think creatively within constraints and so artists will always push the boundaries of what it is possible to create and so what someone could do with a simple prompt might not be the same as someone that spent a lot of time with prompt engineering and tryi
ng to figure out okay I can use all these different phrases all these different words and get something really dialed in in a different way but I think maybe the part that I find interesting is there's still an extent to which you don't get to choose everything you get to choose when you're done with generating like you could keep generating but you don't necessarily get to choose everything that goes into the output and so there is an extent to which people could judge or say that you know you'
re not creating art so much as like shaping it it's almost like a lot of the Old Masters might have had like an apprentice you are more like The Apprentice watching the master do work and giving feedback and commentary on the extent to which it's done as opposed to the one holding the brush yeah I think those are interesting points I mean I still think it's almost like Photography in a way it's like I just I chose that this moment moment as my artwork you know and especially in an iPhone now it'
s like I just pull my this thing out of my pocket hit go I don't have to worry about exposure or anything I can crop it after the fact you know yeah I didn't create the world or New York City but I could just pop my phone out of my pocket and make an artwork you know but yeah like effort and judgment and stuff those are all totally good points and I guess I have like some empathy for just the fact that other people have different value systems you know like I have two art degrees and I spend a l
ot of time in that world and like the Contemporary Art world has like a very specific set of like things that they value and things that they think are like the real values and how you're supposed to understand art and then everyone else's understanding of art is like some sub some sub form of artwork that normal people like or something and I I just try to have like empathy that like it's all human creativity and nothing's really I mean it's good to judge things and try to understand them but I
just try not to like come at it from a point that like things are in like inherently bad because they don't come from some like Contemporary Art World value system or something which I think some people get caught up on or vice versa like the public has their own value system and they see contemporary artwork they see Maurizio Catalan duct taping a banana to a wall and lose their mind like this is just vile non-artwork right so it kind of goes both ways but I had an intense experience with Will
iam de kooning's work when I first saw it I was just like this is grotesque like these paintings of these women that this guy is making like this is horrible and my mentor at the time was like you should go get like a book of all of De kooning's work and just look through all of it and like spend a couple days with it he's still not my favorite artist but like from an initial judgment and initial knee-jerk reaction like I understand the things that he was trying to say with his paintings and lik
e I understand the aesthetic and like the color choices he was making even though he's still not my favorite artist like I kind of get that and I feel like the pushback against generative art like if you hate something it's probably a good time to look deeper at it and try to understand why and see if you're missing something and see if there's like opportunities there for you to like expand your horizons you know but it's a tough thing to do and I totally understand why people are just like oh
no too easy not our next you know I'd love if you could explain so you you would describe yourself I think as a conceptual artist if you could explain like what conceptual art is and maybe also a definition for generative art because I think even for me I might be using it in the wrong context sometimes I think there's some context where people say generative art to describe you know that there's the type of art where you can put in some code and it's using like some mathematical computation to
create ART versus you know you click a button and something happens and you don't know what happened totally so for me conceptual art is like art that primarily like the focus of the art might be the idea behind it whether that's like super ephemeral like some of Yoko onas work like she's this piece called painting for the wind and I think it's a few sentences that go like hold a bag of seeds and cut it open and watch them fall through the wind and that's a painting for the wind she has this who
le whole book of kind of like poems that are conceptual artwork so you just read and like think about and that's the artwork right so there's kind of that historical context of conceptual art but for me in the way that I approach it like I just let my curiosity guide me to like whatever makes the most sense and that kind of like form and content relationship where you have an idea and you're like okay what form most could reflect that content and that concept and like where does that take mean a
nd I work across like a lot of different mediums and I don't necessarily have like one aesthetic in my body of work that I'm always presenting it's like a kind of a spiral of interests and Aesthetics that kind of like come and go and revisit themselves yeah as far as generative art goes it is like a very large container of different types of artwork right it could be that you're using you know Cinema 4D or blender or some you know 3D rendering engine and using someone else's algorithm that some
computer scientists wrote and clicking a few buttons and watching things happen or you could be starting with a total blank slate and writing all of your own code and kind of you know really carefully crafting every part of an equation to make something come out of it and a lot of that type of generative art has been interesting to see over time people often write a program to make art some images come out of it they might save them they might change the program some different images come out an
d in three weeks you might not even be able to get back to how it used to be and after the course of a month you might just say oh this one sequence of six images that came out of this program these six images are the artwork and the program was just a tool for me to get there and this whole genre called long-form generative art that's kind of come out of the blockchain space where you write a program and transactions are used as a random seed for your algorithm to produce artwork and so everyth
ing that the code produces is like a new instantiation of that artwork so each piece is an artwork but then as a collection you're kind of seeing everything the algorithm does as an artwork and there's no curation after the facts so once you create as things are getting generated you can't go oh these two look terrible I'm taking them out of the collection just like you have to get the program to a point where everything it produces is interesting and that really is like its own sub-genre of wor
k that's very specific and the way that you approach creating that work is like really really different and that's been a super interesting Journey for me to just like engage with this new context that like really changes what the work is and how it's made yeah I think that's a really interesting aspect that you mentioned as well and I can't really think of an analog to Prior times where art can still have this social element and also an element where you're working with something that is not ou
t of your control but it is I guess in addition to you or Beyond you in a sense like that there are some contacts where you can code and create some kind of output but I can't really think of apart from maybe like two painters working on a single painting but even like with photography which we use as an analogy just still very much in control over the output there's not much that could maybe surprise you in how something comes out unless there was a mistake whereas with generative art and worki
ng with computers now almost like Partners it is very interesting to see how that is pushing the boundary of what we can create and what we can expect and the ways that we can interact one with each other and then also with computers as an intermediary as well yeah totally I think there's so many ways to think about it like oh this program is kind of like my studio assistant or it's almost like the chaos that abstract painting might invite where you kind of you sort of know what you're doing and
then something else happens and you kind of have to like roll with it so yeah it's a super interesting super interesting medium for sure yeah just I know that we've been talking about art for a lot and there's a lot of other things I'd love to discuss but one more question that I had on this which I thought would be quite interesting just because you mentioned nfts I'm interesting what you think about the relationship between artists and money and financing and I think you know throughout histo
ry we've seen that evolve as well where you have some of the people that we now say are oh my gosh this is one of the greatest artists to ever live but during their lifetime they could hardly sell a single painting I think even Van Gogh could barely sold any of his paintings while he was alive he did over 900 paintings first of all he doesn't have 900 famous paintings he has a handful and out of that hand before they all sold after he wasn't here and now in retrospect we say wow what a great art
ist and so it's a really that by itself is a very interesting Paradigm I guess but then also now that you have nfts there is this financialization aspects Which is far more immediate I think unless let's say you're doing commissioned work for something where a commission is immediate and is done prior I think it's very interesting that now you're seeing a shift to a process where there's almost not necessarily an expectation the art will be sold but the financialization aspect is a lot much clos
er connected to the creation of the art so I'd love to know what your thoughts on that and how that might change if at all people's creative process in a sense yeah yeah definitely all interesting things to think about I mean for me it's been really interesting because you know coming from kind of the Contemporary Art world and the Art Fair scene and the Art Exhibit scene like I've been making digital art for a long time and there just hasn't been a market for digital art right it's like I've ha
d to take the digital art that I'm making in like programs that I'm writing and try to turn them into like discreet Fine Art objects I call them just these like singular things that you could like you know point to and say like okay this is a unit of art that I can buy and you know put in my collection or bring home or whatnot so there were people buying art on USB sticks but like pretty much nobody right so the introduction of nfts I think has been really awesome to be able to create a market f
or that and they operate a lot like a certificate of authenticity what like a Warhol can be perfectly replicated so the fact that you have a thing from the Warhol Foundation saying it's the real Warhol is what's Val valuable and similarly you know nfts operate in the same way and they do create this 24 7 Global unmediated Market right which I think is super exciting there's definitely huge new ways that that market has evolved you know people sort of like playing to the audience and creating thi
ngs that they think are going to sell well to collectors there's tons of people just gambling and other people making things for them to gamble on so that's like another part of that market happening but the financialization of art has been like a huge part of art for a really long time right like a lot of huge collectors buying artwork at art fairs and stuff and buying you know Van Gogh's and whatnot they might have hundreds of millions of dollars and they might say like okay 10 of my portfolio
is going to be in wine and 10 of my portfolio is going to be an art and I'm just going to do these like more speculative high-risk strange things like portfolio because I already have money in real estate and stocks and like I'm treating art like a financial asset anyway there's tons of that and like I don't know like five billion dollars worth of money exchanges hands at Art Basel Miami and you know a three-day time period so the financialization and playing to the audience and figuring out th
ings that people could gamble on in the art world are definitely a thing and like yeah it's interesting to see like what's successful on the market and what doesn't work and at the end of the day like I'm super interested in my Medics and like how everything is a meme Like Richard Dawkins who coined memes is talking about memes like the cultural version of genes right so photography is a meme the fact that you can even do that is being it's an idea that gets passed between people on paths betwee
n generations and it's something that's like survived over time right so the idea that van Gogh is valuable painter and that these objects are valuable is also a meme and it might have taken like a rich collector who got in early on those paintings to then go pay an art historian to write articles about how important Van Gogh's work was so that their collection could accrue in value and they're like all of these games people play by like storytelling and you know I'm on the board of directors at
this Museum and I happen to own a bunch of work by this artist and I'm gonna advocate for them to be in this show which then increases the prominence of my collection like it's all kind of Game of Thrones and like the landscape of ideas and culture that makes all this stuff happen I'd love to hear maybe a bit more about your work you've mentioned some in bits but you've done a lot of really interesting work I think you had one project which was future tense so you had the future tense project w
hich I saw which was super interesting and then you've also got flourish which I think is coming up with art blocks I'd love to hear more about how you think about the work that you create and you know the Judgment that goes into it and also a lot of the ideas that you talk about because I think I've heard you talking about you know the future and what the future looks like Etc as being one of the influences in in your work yeah so I think I have these two main undercurrents in my work one is li
ke the computational beauty of nature like I grew up in Hawaii and I have this like deep reverence for the beauty of Nature and having written code for like nature simulations you just get in awe of how complex and incredible the natural world is and I've made a lot of work that kind of touches that like flourishes a piece that is indirectly about that it's a project about making generative architectural drawings for ornamentation they're kind of inspired by the late 1800s and early 1900s of the
se Architects that would do these kante crayon drawings of primary geometry recombining and creating these more elaborate forms that would be carved out by masonry artists and I just found those drawings to be sublimely beautiful and wanted to see you know what that would look like through code and through software and kind of like reimagined in this more generative automated way so that's that's a project I've got coming up in August through ART blocks and yeah I've made a bunch of other work k
ind of like that and it's like a nice kind of grounding part of my practice but I'd say like the other underlying current is sort of comes just through like the anxiety of living in the modern world right like somehow there's like geopolitical instability and like the dollar is weakening and we're growing water in California or we're growing food in California with 10 000 year old groundwater and there's so many sort of like collapse narratives that are out in the air right but at the same time
you know AI is developing very rapidly and we've got driverless cars and all this stuff and it's kind of like how is this incredible growth seemingly inevitable and also the collapse of the global environment feeling inevitable like how are these two things happening at the same time and intention with each other so yeah future tense was like a big collection of works it was my first solo show in New York that I kind of was taking these anxieties and like turning them into objects and just think
ing about these like conflicting cultural narratives and trying to make objects that sort of represented them in ways so there's one of the pieces is a surfboard that I called an escape vehicle but it's this like existential Escape vehicle like I love the idea of you know if New York City collapsed like somehow just like surfing into the ocean like at the end of The Point Break movie if you saw Point Break and just kind of like letting letting the apocalypse take you and the surfboards got like
graphs about the CO2 levels in the atmosphere and you know AI kind of prophecies and predictions about the growth of AI and that kind of thing on it that's super interesting I guess you know even on that topic of the future I would love to know I guess it's your take on one part of it is the future and where things are heading but I think the other part is what I find really interesting is how our vision of the future has evolved over time you know if you look back to let's say I don't know even
the 20s or the 50s or so the vision of the future was wow gleaming paradise and how much better everything could be it was very optimistic and I think actually even at some points maybe let's say in the 80s or so there were still some elements of optimism but definitely there was also simultaneously a shift towards a lot of pessimism around the world that we are creating and I don't know if that is just a factor of maybe you know we had my point of view might be that I think we had a lot of thi
s initial optimism during a very industrialist phase where we're rapidly evolving and rapidly growing and there is an extent to which the future could be anything and it wasn't super crystal clear because technology was taking so many different directions and then I think we started to catch up to the future we were envisioning and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we thought it was there were some parts that seemed magical and seemed great but it's very interesting for example when you look
at films Marty McFly had shoelaces that tied themselves right and he had his hovercraft and he had a bunch of these things but what's really interesting is that in some of these futuristic films from the past there's some really basic stuff that they didn't have they didn't have doors that just opened and closed by themselves right which we have you just have it in the supermarket and so it's strange how you know there's some stuff that we thought oh my gosh this is going to be really cool in t
he future that we never got and there's some really basic fundamental things like oh everyone should just have clean water and you know people should have toilets and all these fundamental things that we completely forgot and we don't have at all yeah absolutely I mean what's that saying the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed right like that's kind of I think that's a good way of thinking about it and I think kind of the pessimism about the future is almost like a second ord
er effect of mass media and like what drives eyeballs and what drives advertising right if you say something is scary it like triggers some like deep you know ancient part of her brain like oh something's scary I have to pay attention to this because I might run into it in the future and so you click through and we've all been sort of like as a culture wound up into thinking that bad things are constantly about to happen which I guess part of that show that I made was definitely about but yeah i
t's hard to tell like the second order effects of things I think we could sit right down right now and say like obviously the capabilities of AI are going to rapidly advance and they're going to change society in ways that we just can't predict and like I think that's part of why Ray kurzweil's writing is so interesting to me because he does he does sort of try to what might happen after the singularity but like the singularity is this idea that like at some point technology is going to Advanced
so far that there is no predicting what's beyond that it's just this like line and time where like future predictions are no longer possible in any way right what does it mean if thousand dollars of computing power is equivalent to every human brain the planet combine like what happens to the government what happens to corporations what does money mean you know like things just fundamentally break down but yeah I mean it's interesting like if you imagine the world that you want to exist and sta
rt building toward it it's going to be way more possible and I guess that's that's like one of the lessons of SpaceX like we could have really really incredibly Advanced space programs right now but people stopped working on it you know it wasn't this thing where people kept working on it and it kept getting better so yeah it's kind of up to all of us to like contribute toward whatever World Vision we'd like to see happen okay one of the next things I wanted to ask you about is the work that you
contributed to at Apple because I think there's very much links in and there's some follow-up questions that are related to what you just said but I want to break the ice with the AR VR stuff first so I would love to know I mean to what extent you can you know if you could share some of the work that you were involved in and some of the work that you did because I think it's super interesting and I guess we can go from there yeah totally so I've spent you know my entire sort of professional car
eer as a software developer and product designer in the AR VR space so yeah look completely focused on head mounted displays AR glasses headsets that kind of thing and at one point I was recruited onto this neurotechnology team at Apple and they were focused on you know designing experiments that would use neurological and physiological data to try to augment immersive experiences and I can't really talk about it in much detail that's sort of what my public job description said but some of the p
atents that came out of that involved you know trying to have models that would predict like how relaxed you were or how focused you were doing an immersive experience so you can imagine like you're in a virtual reality type of experience and maybe you're trying to study and the app somehow knows that you're being distracted and it changes the environment in a way to remove distractions so you can focus better right so those are the kinds of like opportunities that you have in an immersive exper
ience like at the end of the day just generally speaking not necessarily about this product but there's a lot of Neuroscience research that happens with virtual reality because you can control what someone hears you can control what they see sometimes with haptics you can control what they feel and so you have this kind of like ultimate laboratory for the brain to like measure what the brain is responding to and what it's seeing and try try to understand our sort of perceptual and cognitive syst
em is one is one whole and I'll say as well I'm not a neuroscientist by training but you know I picked up a lot of a lot of it through osmosis and it's it's all super fascinating especially in the context of immersive media sure what was because I know that I think maybe the last year or so you weren't involved with the projects anymore and so you're I guess seeing the the finished product now I guess from a combination of the experience that you had and from what you're seeing now what has impr
essed you the most about what they've been able to do and I know that maybe you haven't actually seen the finished products you know it's not something that people have got their hands on but I think considering the amount of work that has gone into it and considering the depth to which like apple has thought about the neuroscience and all of the things that go into it like which aspects of that from a technical perspective do you think is the most impressive yeah that's an interesting question
I mean I'll say that like having seen behind the curtain like the kind of engineering happening at Apple most people wouldn't believe like I think I saw a public figure that their r d budget for 2022 was like 26 billion dollars or something like that that's the money they're spending just doing research on things not not even necessarily like oh we had to spend that money to make the iPhones it's just like paying scientists and Engineers to come up with stuff so for every little like Oh and it c
an do this it's like a thousand people might have spent ten thousand hours like making that kind of thing happen and I guess to answer your question just seeing all of that labor come together as as one whole is amazing like I think about like the Sistine Chapel as this like standout piece of like human creativity and labor in our time like maybe the International Space Station is this sort of Sistine Apple of like oh my God like Humanity was able to do this collectively through all of our work
like I think the International Space Station is like a profoundly beautiful object like it's a spiritual object almost because it's like such a embodiment of what we're capable of when we cooperate and work hard and understand the universe around us and like I don't think the Apple Vision Pro is on that level but there are like aspects of it where it's just oh my God people really worked hard and like invented new technologies and new materials like so much Discovery and progress behind the scen
es real scientific progress went into making this thing real and changed had like changed reality even though no one's tried it just the fact yeah I mean people have tried it but it's not like millions of people's hands yet but just the fact that it exists is kind of awe-inspiring to me and it's not the only product that does that there's um positive that many other things kind of like a approach that level but having seen behind the curtain and knowing everything that went into it I guess exist
entially it's very it's an impressive object to me I guess is what I would say yeah and I think a lot of the magic for me particularly and it's happened a few times with different Apple products in the past comes from there's a gap between what you think you're experiencing and what it takes to create that experience because I remember listening to Steve Jobs talking about with the iPhone for example it had the touch screen but I think what made the touchscreen work so well is that they made the
hitbox on the screen of what you're touching bigger than your finger because very often I think when you tap something with your finger the part where you think is touching the screen is not actually what's touching the screen it's like slightly below or is slightly different and so they are trying to anticipate at least with the very first iPhone the whole point was trying to anticipate what you think you're touching because it's actually probably not what you are touching so what part of the
screen do you think you're touching and trying to to make sure that that matched the output and the experience in the end and so it felt like this magical experience where wow I can move my hands I can do the multi-touch I can touch all of these things but actually there is so much additional work in the gap between the magic you think is happening and the magic that's actually happening that enables that experience and I think from what I've heard about the Apple Vision Pro as well what I don't
know if you mentioned it I think you mentioned it in your thread but I've also heard people talk about it from having tried it as well just how magical the experience of the click is and the fact that you know it tracks your eyes you can look around on a screen that you might have in front of you and then you click with your fingers you put your fingers together when it clicks but it's the combination of okay it's doing this eye tracking it obviously has an array of cameras that can see when yo
u put your fingers together but actually it's also guessing in advance or from your brain and from your cognition what you are trying to click and when you are trying to click before you actually make the motion with your hand specifically so it's not just waiting until you've actually done the action but it's kind of predicting or trying to preempt what actions you're trying to take and also using the example you gave before you know let's say you're trying to learn something and you can see th
at you might be distracted it's being able to preempt that as well I think is where the real magic comes in yeah totally I mean I don't wanna I don't want to speak to like any of the algorithms or potential or technical details of how any of that might work I definitely was doing research that got patented about predicting intentions to interact before they happen but the eye tracking system is a very large beast and I don't want to speak to any internal development but I can say that this compa
ny SMI that developed a really incredible eye tracking technology I got to try that when they were public I think in 2015 and it might have been 2016 but it was at a conference for augmented reality I remember trying their eye tracking glasses on and you know looking at Targets and interacting with things with my eyes and then being able to read things and you you get to the bottom of the paragraph and the text starts moving up automatically as you're reading this was at a time where people were
trying to use interfaces where you'd rotate your whole head instead of your eyes because nobody really had eye tracking there were all these clunky ways of doing interaction and I told the guy who's given me the demo like whoever acquires your company is going to win the AR VR space this is the most impressive technical demo I've ever had and I think like six months later Apple acquired them and it's been whatever it's been like eight years or something since that acquisition so a bunch of peop
le have been working really hard to make it even better and I think when I tried it eight years ago it was already mind-blowing so it's really it's it's like they say 90 of the effort is getting the last five percent of the results or something like that and it's really true like that gap between oh it works most of the time and this is magical is really an incredible amount of effort yeah one thing I wanted to ask you about because I've seen a lot of people being upset well having a variety of
responses to it and I would love to know I guess from your view either your best guess or if there is some official answer the reasoning for having your eyes show on the external screen actually no it's a two-ball question one having the external screen in the first place considering the impact that that would have on the battery because people are already complaining that okay it only lasts for two hours and actually if you didn't have this external screen it could have lasted for longer or you
know there's other Cuts you could have made to have a longer battery life and so obviously the fact that you know Apple has made this investment in having the screen shows that it's something significant I'd love to know if you have the best guesses like why that is important I have some ideas but I think they're probably a bit crazy so I'd love to hear what you think yeah so I'll qualify my answer that this isn't based on internal Apple development or product development decisions but like you
said I think it's clear the fact that they included it and they made such a point about it in the keynote that staying connected to other people and not being isolated was like a core value of the product right and that's been a big criticism of virtual reality and like I work in the AR VR space and like I don't spend that much time in VR because like I'm done working at the end of the day the last thing I want to do is you know my wife is here and I'm like putting on this VR headset and gettin
g like completely disconnect from the people that care about the most like that's not a good value proposition but human connection is is super important right it's like a profound part of what we value as human beings and I think people will realize when you see it in person like Mike Rockwell's described the fact that it's a curved lenticular display so as you walk around it you get a unique view of where the person's eyes are and it actually sort of looks like their eyes aren't on the front o
f the device but their eyes are where they should be on their face so I think it'll be really awesome I think people had like a big pushback against the scene where the parent is recording their children through this headset instead of being present I think that maybe in my personal opinion was kind of like a PR blunder where it could have it should have been the kid being like hey like I'm gonna do a cartwheel and then he puts the thing on to record it and takes it off and it's like that was aw
esome you know there should have been like a a softer narrative Arc around that but at the same time I mean people go to funerals and look at their iPhone the whole time or their Android or whatever like we're already super sucked into our devices so it's not like this is coming out of nowhere right like it's already being connected to our phones is already a huge part of modern life and I think that it's actually a huge opportunity to be like oh now you know my posture is better I have this thi
ng on I'm looking forward I'm looking out into the world instead of down into my phone I'm actually able to be more connected just spatially with the world around me and if someone comes up to me it's easy for them to get my attention because they they walk into the scene and the spreadsheet I was looking at disappears and they can see my eyes and I think that it's you're going to be more connected than you would have been if you were looking at your phone if that makes sense which is maybe like
counterintuitive to think about but that's my expectation yeah I completely agree and it sounds like heresy to say that wearing this huge set of goggles on your head you're going to be more connected to people but genuinely exactly like you said I think people underwrite just how much time you spend looking at your phone especially when you're supposed to be social especially when you're out and you're meant to be interacting with other humans so I think there's that old part of it and then als
o another good point that you touched on is I just can't imagine how much people are going to save on medical bills because their screen is automatically at the correct height that it should be and they are not looking up or looking down and they're not you know getting carpal tunnel from having to move their Mouse around and clicking all the time and doing all of this stuff that we've accepted as natural behavior and the fact that you have to sit down at your chair and and all of that stuff to
use your computer you know how does that change if you could actually move around and walk in space and walk around your house you could be standing up you can actually move and it changes completely the relationship that we have with Computing and with work perhaps obviously we'll have to see what it looks like in practice but I think all of that has huge potential impact of being like very good for humans and very good for society there is still the part where you know there is something on yo
ur face but one of the things I was thinking about and I was surprised that I guess you know maybe it's not something that everyone thinks about but considering they have mentioned that they thought a lot about the Neuroscience of all of this and to me it makes complete sense that well complete sense in the sense that it is unintuitive because they're the first ones that didn't because if it was complete sense everyone would have done it beforehand but it makes a lot of sense considering what th
ey've invested into it having the eyes on the front because so much of our physiology or so much of our like our brains have evolved to be able to interact with other human beings we look at people's eyes there's entire parts of the brain like the fusiform gyrus that is supposed to be letting you recognize faces that's why people see faces in clouds like you're looking for faces everywhere because a part of your brain is devoted to doing that one thing and there's other parts of your brain like
the temporal sarcos yeah which is like helping you to perceive what other people are perceiving so what that used to be for maybe is like you are talking to someone and they look at something over your shoulder which could be dangerous and you are able to track what they are looking at so you also turn and you see if there's something dangerous but like our brains have evolved all these pieces to be able to observe other human beings and make inferences and understand the world through seeing ea
ch other and I think that is also super important so as much as we want to have this future where we could wear these headsets and have portable face computers and all of that it's also important that you know we accommodate for human biology at the same time yeah yeah absolutely absolutely like you said it's super important and you know I also expect this is my own personal speculation that like probably if you were in immersive experience and I walked in the room and I was like oh hey what's u
p here's your coffee that you asked me to bring you you'd be like oh cool thanks you take the cough when you go back to what you're doing but if I came in and I started asking you like meaningfully deep complicated questions you might turn to me listen to me for a little while say something and if the conversation kept going you'd probably just take the headset off and just talk to me you know what I mean I don't think that the vast majority of people would just be like okay I'm sucked in this t
hing all the time and I'm gonna go cook dinner wearing this thing and I'm gonna go downstairs and do my laundry and I'm just never taking this off like people will probably do that but I think for the most part like you know just as it happens now like someone's trying to get your attention away from your phone at some point you just put the phone down and change the context that you're in and like re-engage with people differently that makes sense yeah but I still think maybe I'm a better but I
'm in a very tough place on this and maybe this is this will be a follow-up question for you about how you think this might you know the development of AR and VR might start to change the way we interact with each other as humans blah blah blah okay I'll give you a really good example I'm wearing airpods right now I wear airpods most of the time there's a few reasons for that one I'm very sensitive to like lots of different annoying type sounds like I don't know high-pitched sounds or different
sounds and so it's it's good for me and I use the noise cancellation mode a lot of the time pretty much all day however one thing that I noticed is the transparency mode is slightly better than my actual ears I don't know if I don't know if my ears have deteriorated I don't think it's a result of having these but because it's using the mics to project the sound it is actually like I can hear slightly better just by turning on transparency mode instead of taking them out and so I don't always lik
e before I would and sometimes I still do I'll take out one ear if someone's talking to me but sometimes I will actually just especially if there's other noise going on I'll just put it on transparency mode because I can actually hear you slightly louder than if I took both earphones out and that is one of those weird quirks where if you can use technology to augment your natural sensors there's a sense in which they can kind of become part of the way that you interact with others and the way th
at you interact with the world I don't know if that is for the best in the long term but it at least seems to be working for now in some circumstances so I'd love to know maybe what you think about that part of what I've just said but also I guess moving beyond that lots of people have shared different thoughts at different points in time not just now but even as we've been using our phones about how you know how does social media change the way that kids interact with each other how does the wa
y that we use our phones interact with the accent to which people are going outside and interacting with each other is it possible that when you have AR and VR everyone will sit at home in their chairs and you know instead of going out to see your friends you will just go meet them in the metaverse and something like that so you know there's lots of different visions of what the far future could look like I'd love to know based on the fact that you've spent so much of your time working in this s
pace how you see that evolving yeah I mean that's a really good question like you said we're kind of already cyborgs with our phones like I don't remember anybody's phone number it's all just on there they're a secondary part of our brain at this point where we store things that we want to remember but we don't necessarily need like short-term access to right so it frees up our brain to think about other things but yeah the second order effects of that stuff are hard to speculate on like I know
people that have you know spent time in virtual reality playing like zero gravity games where you're on the space station and you can like push off of virtual walls and float in different directions and then at an hour later after playing the game they take the headset off and they go to push off their desk and nothing happens it's like their brain has adapted to this new reality in this new set of physics and they have to re-adapt back to reality as they take it off and I think there's going to
be a lot of strange things like that like people get like Phantom text messages in their pocket when their phone's not in their pocket just because they're used to you know their phone going off in their pocket or whatever I mean we'll definitely see stuff like that like I think you could imagine at some point having an app that like let you know people's names floating above their head or if you'd seen them before the last conversation you had or like you know I'm just speculating on an app th
at might exist and then you take the glasses off and suddenly like you just don't remember who anybody is because like you've let go of the task of remembering that kind of stuff to your device I mean yeah whether it's good or bad it's strange and it's happening and I did say earlier that you know I think everyone has the responsibility to like imagine the future we want to live in and work toward that and don't build sort of don't build dangerous Technologies but at the same time I think we're
also like sort of along for the ride technology is this thing that we're co-evolving with and it is kind of like second layer of intelligence and evolution that's happening on Earth and it's waking up and this thing is happening and like we have some responsibility to craft that but it's happening one way or the other yeah understanding the second order effects of all this stuff is like it's super hard to tell right like when Mark Zuckerberg was lonely in college and wanted to hook up with chick
s and figure out a way to network with people at his college you probably didn't think that genocides were going to be carried out on this dating platform that he made you know but that happened and like people collected up tons of data and used it to like basically do psychological warfare and manipulate elections so that's also this like just crazy second order effect from this weird dating networking website that happened and like how do you how do you like accurately project some of those ki
nds of things out into the future in a way that's meaningful I mean I try to have hope to you know now it's like you look at what Apple's done with the Apple watch and it's it's like a productivity tool but it's also like this health and wellness tool and now they've got this app that you can log your mental health in and like there are ways that it can like change our relationship to ourselves in really positive ways as well so I think that if we imagine those possibilities and work toward them
like that'd be great I always joke I wish that there was a show called like silver mirror or something where it was like a show where every episode is about like profound Futures where like a small invention like transformed Society for the better and we could all like collectively imagine positive things instead of like Killer Robots you know yeah I think it's a really interesting point that you mentioned though just around this idea that there's an extent to which technology is self-perpetuat
ing so I remember I wrote a while ago about this idea of competitive cognitive artifacts and complementary cognitive artifacts and the distinction being that complementary cognitive artifacts might be something like writing because learning to write in the act of writing actually helps improve your brain even when you stop doing it and so that's the distinction like competitive cognitive artifacts are things that you do it and once you learn to do it you become worse when you're not doing it so
using your phone like you mentioned the example of okay you put all your friends phone numbers in your phone that is an example of perhaps a competitive cognitive artifact because the more you offload the needing to remember names onto this external device you no longer have to need to remember names and so your memory could get worse the more you stop relying on your long-term memory you're mostly just using your whether it's your episodic memory or your procedural memory of like oh I'm doing t
his task as opposed to oh I need to actually remember this and I think there was a study where they looked at this with phones as well phones in terms of when people take pictures so if you go to an event and you know that oh I can just take pictures of everything and I can video everything and it's going to be fine you are less likely to have strong memories of the stuff that you took pictures of because you kind of offloaded the need to remember that stuff onto your device so when you go back
and look at your device you're like oh yeah I remember all this stuff whereas if you were not using your phone to take the pictures and you just looked with your eyes you might remember it a lot more vividly and I think it's interesting the extent to which because there's loads of other examples of that like okay walking as opposed to walking and looking around and using physical maps as opposed to using digital Maps physical maps are complementary artifacts because using them helps with like ge
ospatial awareness and all of that like actually learning how to navigate helps your brain so even when you stop looking at the map you have improved your brain in a sense whereas just using the GPS it just tells you to the left you don't even need to know what is happening what is left what's happening after the next turn you just do what you're told and it is interesting the extent to which because now you could wrap back in some of the stuff we talked about earlier this idea that okay now you
layer AI onto that and I think it's also an interesting space where now people are starting to use AI in school and so instead of learning the mechanics of writing an essay for yourself you might just generate some pieces of that essay and there's parts of that might be useful and you know not detracting in that hey you know at least you got this thing done faster and at least research is a lot faster but there is the negative aspect to which like what happens in a world where you no longer nee
d to find any information anymore like you don't actually have to spend any time looking for any bit of knowledge it is just as soon as you want it to be there it's presented to you and what do humans become when humans no longer need to have like long memories because all of your memories are stored in this device that is on your head or attached to your head or whatever it is so if you don't need to have the memories and you don't need to like there's so many things that you will no longer nee
d to know how to do I wonder how brittle all that might make us as beings on this Earth obviously you know global warming might mean that maybe we don't have to live for that long anyway but it's really interesting to think about how that might change us as humans the more we rely on AI and the more we rely on tools yeah I mean absolutely I heard someone say something like we've trained exactly one human generation that understands how computers work and then that's it you know and if you're usi
ng chat GPT to write essays you're kind of like a CEO in a way where you're just doing this like executive level thinking and having something else produce it but yeah I mean I think it will erode people's ability to think critically right like as you're writing an essay you're like doing a lot of critical thinking and like trying to figure out how you want to communicate and how your ideas can form stronger arguments and how you can like communicate things that are either true or untrue and yea
h eroding our ability to critically think is sort of like a macro Trend in society right now and another macro trend is like people's inability to distinguish truth from fiction right there are all these like bubbles of narratives forming where people don't think that the Earth is round other people think that reptilian pedophiles running the government and there are people in Congress that like have these like really deeply out there thoughts where it's like they almost don't exist in the same
reality like their world model is so radically different the number of things that they share between other people it's like that Venn diagram the overlap of that Venn diagram of their world model is just shrinking and shrinking and if you think about like generative media and generative Ai and the fact that we're already you know our feeds are already getting so customized you could imagine in the short-term future I open up Netflix or social media or whatever it is and like everything that I'm
seeing or 90 of what I'm seeing is just like being generated in real time just for me I might ask you like oh did you see such and such a show and like I'm the only one that that show exists for you couldn't have seen it right and then like maybe our only shared realities oh like there is a McDonald's on the next intersection you know they're like these very few like physically located sort of objective things that we can agree on and then like otherwise we just live in our own narratives and y
ou can imagine those things also colliding with a macro trend of like you know spatial perceptual Computing where it's not in a feed it's like literally being manifested into my room and so like in a very literal way my perception of reality is like completely isolated to myself you get into this weird feedback loop where you're just super deep out there and like almost we might not be able to really even relate to one another on a small scale because our world models become so so different but
then maybe we aren't relating to One Another We're relating to these like deep networks of AI systems that like know us better than any human could know us because they've seen everything we've seen and it could be a very strange reality but it's you know it's all speculation yeah I think so much of what you just said is so interesting to me I think just that last part about I was having a conversation with a friend just this idea that AI is already at a point where okay the way I would start is
let's say like from an IQ perspective there's obviously a large differentiation and some people have super high IQs some people have you know not super high IQs and the average person just by definition of what average means half of the people who have like below average and half the people will have above average just based on what average means but what that also means is that like the average conversation is not super high brow the average conversation does not contain so much data and infor
mation the number of words that you use in a day-to-day contact X outside of work and outside of politics and some of these different contexts where you have a lot more complex words it's very simple and so actually the complexity that you need for AI to be relatively convincing and a standard conversation is not super high you don't need lots of like a very high fidelity of wow it needs to understand all my deepest feelings because the average person is not using that many words anyway and actu
ally so much of human interaction is intuited it is what we infer from how the other person responds as opposed to what someone has actually said or what actually happens a lot of the conversations we have happen in our own heads and it's our own interpretation of what the other person has said and so all of that to say you could be very quickly and I think we already have a lot of the tooling available that how do you know that when you go on Twitter we already have the Twitter block problem bu
t I think that's kind of different where those Bots are you know maybe trying to sell you something or make you click on something but there is no evidence to say that every input by a particular Twitter profile it is not being generated by an AI and so how do you know that maybe the friends that you make online or someone that you interact with without meeting in person and physically seeing them how do you know that that is already not just artificially generated you would never really be able
to tell I think we're already at that point and you could go further beyond that but I think when you think about oh the other part that makes humans human is actually the mistakes that we make and it's the fact that we are predictably irrational as Dan arieli might say like we make lots of irrational decisions and we don't do the most optimal thing like what happens in a world where you have ai that will always do the optimal thing specifically for you because this is AI That's tuned to how yo
u think of what you want and so suddenly you could have a bunch of AI friends like during the pandemic I had a friend that I just saw for her birthday a few months ago and we'd been speaking every week or so on Zoom like we would write together and stuff I hadn't seen her physically for probably over two years it's like just because of the pandemic and we don't live in the exact same place and so it's just startling to think about how you could develop friendships with people that may not even e
xist and because they're AI you might get along with them better than you get along with your friends and you could have your AI girlfriend that you know is more receptive to anything that you might have to say they're never going to get upset with you they're never going to argue with you you don't have all the same issues that you have with ordinary humans and when you put that in the context of all this other stuff that we were talking about it is so I have no idea what happens in that kind o
f world to people like what is the extent to which we still need to rely on each other and just like the other point that you were making as well that I touch on is this idea and I did write about this as well though we're already kind of living in many metaverses like people are so worried when Mark Zuckerberg started talking about oh come and join your friends in the metaverse and I was like I mean you're already in a metaverse it's just you don't have to wear a headset every platform that you
go to Every social platform every news app is already changing what it shows based on your past behavior and so actually everything is just a reflection of the person that you used to be or the person you were at one point in time and so there's a sense in which you don't even get to evolve necessarily as a person because your prior beliefs are being consistently reinforced and so you get a lot of people where maybe they are stuck in some part of a society that might not even exist just because
that is the stuff that they keep being shown and so there's a growing distinction in what people believe about the world because the world that they believe in might not even exist like the world that they believe in is the world that they're being shown through a bunch of digital prisms and we're getting to a point where it has no bearing on reality I think the simplest analogy for it is like the prettiest girl on Instagram this was the example that I gave where it's like okay back in the day
you used to have oh this is the prettiest girl in my neighborhood and that is your bar your inference for what prettyness looks like and there was a point in time where you had all this beauty pageants you had oh Miss Idaho and Miss Nevada and Miss wherever and then you have Miss Universe and now it's like whoa who's the prettiest girl in in the world and then now you have okay who's the prettiest girl on Instagram and what changes there is that now that it's digitized you're adding filters and
you're adding like a bunch of changes that don't actually exist in real life and so now what you're having is your perception of maybe what the average beautiful person looks like has now diverged from the reality of what the average beautiful person looks like and so now what beauty looks like in your head is something that actually doesn't exist in reality and so the compounding of all these things like you can very easily end up in a world you're ready many people are already in a world that
doesn't actually exist and yeah I don't know how you take that back or where like you can't walk that back and I think the more that technology like we've said because it's self-reinforcing the more you use it the more you kind of need to use it in a sense I'm very interested in like the direction that we go because as much as like you were saying you build the things that you want to see in the world like what are people seeing in the world and what world are they seeing you know so I don't kno
w what feedback you might have on that yeah I mean for sure it's all it's all a problem the way that we're our world models are diverging and like you said like maybe you're chasing some beauty that is impossible and then Instagram is like oh how about this other impossibility how about this other impossibility and then like your very own impossible Beauty standard is being reinforced and you might not even share that same possible Beauty standard as some other person that is in your friend grou
p or something so that's that's all very strange and you know a lot of these systems they're like drip feeding you dopamine and keeping you sort of unsatisfied so you keep using it and you keep scrolling so that they can like sell you ads and stuff and a lot of these systems are these like emergent machines where they might not actually have like a very strong central planning element to it like obviously Instagram has like a central planning team on its product but they're also beholden to Mark
et forces and their beholden to user Behavior patterns all these things are kind of like shaping what it is you know software and Societies in this kind of feedback loop where these things that Connect into like Primal parts of our brain get get reinforced and they start shaping us that's kind of what I meant by like not always totally being in control right it's like we're along for the ride and we only have so much authority over that and people are driven by capitalism and creates all these p
erverse incentives to make things that like may not necessarily be in like Humanity's best interests you know it's very strange and like how do you detox from that right there's a lot of like digital detox and wellness programs and people getting more and more interested in meditation and figuring out ways to like become more mindful I mean AI could potentially help with some of this stuff and sort of be like your personal coach where it's like hey I've noticed that you've been telling everyone
the Earth is flat which you like to talk about that more and like maybe we can go into whether that's true or not or whatever you know and it's a strange World we've entered into and it's only going to get stranger yeah I think we've oscillated a bit between High optimism and low pessimism but I'd love maybe to end on an optimistic note I'd love to know what your silver mirror might look like you know what do you think an optimistic world view of the future could look like yeah that's that's a g
ood question a good point I mean like I was saying about the Apple watch and their like mental health journaling tool that they're putting out there I think technology that helps us like be more self-aware and reflect on ourselves is I think amazing and like these kinds of healthcare tools where large Healthcare Systems suddenly become small and they become personalized and maybe algorithms and AI are kind of like helping us become the best versions of ourself possible is really exciting to me I
think that as AI gets more advanced it's going to you know revolutionize let's say like the healthcare industry with like drug bugs like right now some drugs we really treat them almost like we're cooking like a giant stew and we're just throwing ingredients into our brain and it's like very non-specific as far as like the mechanism of action in the brain that it's targeting and I think that we could see like very transformative changes in healthcare that AIS use for drug Discovery and that kin
d of thing I mean all of the worries about us offloading our critical thinking is worrisome but is it analogy you can look at driverless cars right like headlines about Tesla's crashing and killing people are very Sensational but I think that they're like fatalities per 10 000 human you know 10 000 driving hours is way lower than humans I'd imagine I mean there's a lawsuit right now where a lawyer is being drilled by a judge because they use chat gbt to like generate some filing in a court and i
t like referenced some fictional prior work you know so people are getting grilled by that but at some point you know super Advanced AI is going to be helping Congress people make decisions and offloading their decision making to these systems and already politicians are kind of these like public figureheads and we just like vote in whoever we think is tallest most popular or whatever and like man I would vote for gpt4 as president already like I think I think gpt4s already gives me way more con
fidence than like 90 percent of politicians that I've seen and maybe that seems dark to somebody but like the idea that we could sort of take our collective intelligence and fine-tune out the worst parts of it and Elevate the best parts of it and have it try to solve some of these like political human coordination problems that seem to be very bad at you know it's potentially exciting and I think that in a very short time frame we're basically going to create god-like super intelligent AI betwee
n now and then I kind of just feel like we have to hold on and try not to get like swept off the face of the Earth by some foolish some foolish thing that comes before that but yeah I mean I'm fairly optimistic about the future but I think we also like we look back at the past sometimes with you know rose-tinted glasses about some things it's complicated I mean the future is going to be complicated just like the present basically yeah I love the point that you were making about how I guess it th
ere's many ways in which human intelligence is not everything is cracked up to be and the self-driving car example you gave is I think the perfect example because we prefer being in control and we like to think oh everything will be better if a human's hands were on the wheel because if my hands were on the wheel everything would be better but you are worse you are worse in so many ways because humans make all kinds of mistakes like you will kill far more people than the machine would we are alr
eady at a point where maybe you could probably say all cars should be driverless because the rates at which people die in driverless car accidents is not even comparable to humans driving cars and it's funny I was just listening to a podcast they were talking about stand your ground laws and I think it's a very similar concept to where okay if you don't have to stand your ground laws in your state the law is that the bad stuff happens you're supposed to run away and that is actually the best thi
ng to do if you break down the statistics and you say okay out of the options that you have what Behavior should I take you should 100 run away anytime there is some kind of danger some kind of trouble run as far as you can I think in the scenario they were talking about they were even saying that statistically and I'm not you know advocating for this but statistically let's say someone had come into your home and you were downstairs and your kids were upstairs and they had gone upstairs statist
ically they were saying that your best option is to run out of the house even though your kids are upstairs run out of the house and get help because if you go up and try and help your kids you are less likely to be of any use to them than any anyone else and it's far more likely that your entire family is no longer there than if you had just left and called the police and gotten some proper help especially if you know the bad person wasn't there for your kids they were there for you or whatever
and So based on the stats what they were looking at is in stand your ground States what is the difference between the homicide rate and it's far higher and it's far higher particularly among I think they were saying particularly among white men and the kind of people that would have been part of the NRA are the kind of people that end up being disproportionately killed in homicide incidents and it's simply because there is this human judgment that says oh if I am the good guy with the gun like
I can stop it I can you know Stand My Ground and intervene in this incident and actually what you should be doing is just running away and you should just let's let out external forces take control and I think maybe it's a very similar thing with AI there are you know like you said we just elect two people for president all the time that's pretty much the de facto thing Trump was tall you know relative to average person by the most tall Obama was to or whoever you want is just a tall guy that ma
ybe they look cool or there's something that you think is cool about them and so yeah you know there is an extent to which maybe our judgment isn't everything that we want it to be and maybe there are a lot of benefits that we would get as a society from augmenting our decision making with artificial intelligence totally totally one of the best ways I've heard it put is that our brains evolve to think locally and linearly and we live in a global and an exponential world and like the way that our
brains are wired just don't work at a global exponential scale and like you said there's a lot I mean even just the local linear problem of like what do you do if crime is happening to you like our intuitions around some of that stuff just don't match the statistics of like reality and like offloading decisions to a giant statistical intelligence that like understands that as a whole you know it's gonna probably make mistakes and horrible things will happen but like as a whole probably will out
perform humans and that's weirdly you know all what is what's that saying like watched over by Machines of Loving Grace or something like that hopefully it stays good but that's the future we're headed toward anyway thanks Steve thanks so much for making the time man this has been such a great conversation I've really enjoyed this yeah thank you for having me on appreciate it and yeah it's been wonderful awesome thank you so much for tuning in please do stay tuned for more don't forget to rate r
eview And subscribe it really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts see you next time [Music]
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