Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Forward Thinking. Hey, then, welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that looks the future. It says tomorrow Tomorrow, I love you Tomorrow. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm Joe McCormick. And this is gonna be part two of a two part episode that we had to split up because we ended up talking for a long time. But last time, what were we talking about? It? It was about our favorite predictions of the future. Yeah, we talked about a lot of very quaint French postcards from the turn of the nineteenth century, been with bad wings, and we talked about some driverless car technology, and then we talked about how communications doesn't make you less of a jerk? Is that what we talked about? Yeah, Well, we talked about like telecommunications predictions that the idea of the the rhetoric of the electrical sublime, the people who thought that, you know, the telegraph and eventually the internet would just bring us all together and make us connect and just be friendly. We would friendly happy people. Only we can talk to each other instantaneously. We'll bring about world peace and then we'll all just click on that little button to buy the world a coke. Yeah, and well, you guys aren't alive in the seventies, so you have no idea what I'm talking about. But we all know what by the World of Coke is. Did you ever see those commercials? Were they still around when you guys were kids? Also, I don't know what you're talking you'd like to I'd like to sing. I'd like to teach the world to sing a perfect harmony. I'd like to buy the world of coke and keep it company. I know the polar Bears, the polar Bears, you know, cute little ones. Joe, just talk about robots. Okay, So last time we talked about one of the we reached picking picking a couple of favorite predictions in the future, or at least the most illuminating. I don't know if I could say I have favorites, the ones that are spurring of good conversation, and so we did. Why list telecommunications and all that? Now I want to talk about robots. Uh So I was trying to think what my other favorite prediction would be. And I think that we we've talked about this on the show before, but I have to come back to it because I think it's so fruitful. Uh. And it's the science fiction world embodied in Isaac Asimov's Robots stories and essentially in Asimov's fictional future. Robots are very intelligent, powerful, well integrated into society, performing all kinds of labor the positronic brain, and to keep their behavior in check, they all necessarily are bound by three fundamental laws of robotics. Right, that's kind of like the I mean, we've seen tons of different science fiction stories that build upon the same idea, like even things like RoboCop where he has all the different directives that stems from this concept of the laws of robotics. Yeah, and so the three law us basically are a robot. First law, a robot may not injure or harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Obviously, robotup did not have that one. Nope. The second one, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law. So lo as you couldn't tell robot, hey, I want you to go and punch gim in the face, right, robot has to do what you say unless you tell it to hurt somebody. And then the third law, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws. And then there was the zero with law that got added afterwards, which is a robot may not harm humanity or through an action, allow humanity to come to him, right, the sort of the worldwide extension. And they also would sometimes extend it's not just to humans, but to property as well, so in other words like like you know, extended, saying that a robot couldn't cause damage to property unless again it violated a more important law like further up on the list. Yeah, and so if you haven't read any of these stories, I do recommend going back and reading some of Asimov's robots stories because I think they're very entertaining, their interesting, and they're usually pretty short and self contained. Um but anyway, the dramatic conflict in many of these stories comes from engineers and robopsychologists trying to solve problems with robots, and the problems are created by the fact that the robots are following the laws, but following them in a way that leads to unforeseen problems. Uh So, robots with these types of programming, can be caught in sort of ethical loops or traps that prevent them from doing something crucial or that allow them to do horrible things by way of misunderstanding or misapplication of the laws. So it's kind of similar, and I think I've made this comparison in a previous episode of forward thinking. But for for those of you out there who have ever played Dungeons and Dragons, if you've ever encountered a scenario where your character is granted a wish, you know that any any experienced player will spend ages agonizing over the exact wording of the wish, because dungeon masters the world over have great joy in taking a wish and then purposefully miss interpreting the wish so that a terrible thing happens. So the classic one is make me a sandwich and then boom, the character turns into a sandwich. Like that would be That would be a very simple version of that. But you typically will get someone who has to try and word out an incredibly convoluted wish in order to avoid any potential misinterpretation or or abuse of their request. The same sort of thing is is kind of underlying some of these stories where it's not that a robot is intentionally trying to find its way around its programming. It's simply that in order for it to carry out whatever task it's been given and follow these rules, something doesn't go as people would expect it to. It's really a cautionary tale about human error and hubris. Yes, definitely, and also just the idea of you know, any sort of artificial intelligence that's sufficiently capable of being able to to be autonomous or even semi autonomous, it's hard. Well, yeah, that's exactly why I cited this. I cite this because of the increasing interest in the future challenges presented by AI and sophisticated mobile robotics. Um, but you're exactly right. You know, the more a machine is in line with what we think of as intelligence in the same way we've use intelligence to refer to human intelligence, the more their behavior and reasoning will become proportionally obscure to us. Like things that act in intelligent ways are sometimes hard to understand because intelligens is inherently complex. I've got a very relevant example that happened very recently, which was that you had some people working with a supercomputer over the course of forty eight hours to create a mathematical proof that had been proposed back in the eighties, or at least someone has said, like, I need a proof to prove this whether or not this particular mathematical problem as possible or not possible. And the computer did it in two days, and it took two hundred terabytes of storage to store the proof. And I won't get into the proof that would take forever for me to explain, but the idea being that, uh, it was such a long laborious process, even for a supercomputer working for forty eight hours, essentially that for people it was pretty much a lost cause, right, like like you almost have to uh use a different supercomputer to verify the results because you couldn't employ humans to go through all the steps. It would just take way too long and it and it'd be too easy to lose your place and make a human error and then realize that, oh, well, we've got to have yet another team check that the results here. And you started getting to this idea what this was just to do one mathematical proof and there's not a major downside to humankind if it does something wrong, right, if if it says that the proof shows that this particular mathematical question is impossible, and it turns out it is possible. Big whoop. But you might have similarly complex internal machinations in a robot that is designed to open a door for people. But the robot that's designed to open a door for people could slam the door on people and kill them. So you know, even well, maybe a robot that opens doors for people wouldn't have to be all that intelligence. I'll give the full general AI to the door opener. You say it, But actually when I went to south By Southwest, one of the panels I too. They talked about how there was, uh this team that was trying to develop a robot that could open different types of doors, but it would take hours for the robot to figure out what kind of door it was, and how three types of doors. There's your problem, right right, I mean, it's only got the one door. If you only got one door, then you're fine. But but as we saw also in the darker robotics challenge like opening doors and walking through them, certainly the walking through them part, right, So you know, you've got to find a way to prevent robots from causing harm, and this causes we've got to think about the AI control problem, and it's not as easy as it sounds. And I think this is very well predicted by Asimov's stories, which makes this one of my favorite future predictions, because he starts with these three laws that if you read them, they sound very simple and they sound very air tight. It sounds like they cover all the bases. But you you only have to think a little bit further as Asimov did, and start trying to apply them to unexpected malfunctions and use case scenarios. Well, and it could you it also just imagine where it's not even a malfunction. You could just imagine where a robot would take no action, because it turns out the robot is able to project all the potential consequences of its actions and determined that some of them may in fact cause some form of harm to someone, and that it's not even that necessarily identified, right. It may just be like, well, I took into account the task you gave me, I plotted out all the variables, and it turns out there's maybe a twenty seven percent chance that this could hurt somebody's feelings. And because I interpret that as being harm. I can't actually do what you asked me to do, so I'm just gonna stand here motionless, and you're gonna think I'm broken. The chaos effective robotics like you've created a very expensive brick, and that brick is just constantly thinking like well if I opened this door, then yeah, it's it's a robot paralyzed by self doubt. Essentially, because we so we're creating a Douglas Adams character, would you would have to create a threshold for the robot saying you have to be above this percentage sure that this action is going to cause some form of harm before you decide not to do it right now. Now. Of course, the application of this to the real world is all well, actually I was going to say it's all assuming we ever create general AI of any consequence, but actually I think it's not even even if we don't. As a MOOV stories are interesting for thinking about ethics as they apply to humans. Well, it's also too, I would argue, it's interesting to apply that even if you're talking about narrow definitions of AI, there's still something to be said about it may not be sentient, it may not be self aware, it may not have general AI may not it may not be walking around and interacting with us, but it could very well still affect us in a in a pro in profound ways and so thinking in this case, even for something like narrow AI, I think it's important. It is also important when it comes to just our thoughts about how humans behave I agree, but it's it's it's something that a lot of people have been arguing we should be talking about more anyway, with the state of AI as it stands right now, which I think everyone would say it falls easily into the category of week AI. Yeah. Well, and we talked about autonomous cars in the last episode. You start entering when you've gotten multi ton death machines with combustible engines in them running around being controlled by week AI. Uh, you have you have a potential future rife with Charlie problems. Yeah. Yeah, that's a very good point. Yeah, where you get to that situation where, uh, an action must be taken and there is no clear action that will prevent harm from some happening to someone, right, whether it's yeah, which which someone you choose to cause harm? Right? Would it be the person sitting in the past, your seat, would it be a person outside of the vehicle, would be a person in another vehicle? Yeah, that whole thing exactly. Yeah, I mean, and it also comes down to things that are in conflict. In some of those stories were like you have a very very low risk of a major problem in conflict with a compelling need for something petty as opposed you know, So like in a driverless car, this might mean, Okay, should the car come to a stop every time there is a point zero zero zero zero one percent chance that doing so would prevent injury to someone? I don't know. I mean, what if that means it's coming to a stop all the time and being really inconvenient. So in other words, like let's say that it's um let's say that it's a car that has predictive algorithms that can track motion of various entities around the vehicle. Right, so pedestrians for example, knowing that sometimes pedestrians will walk into the street not at a crosswalk, so it's not a place where they're designated to cross. Well, autonos cars will have to be able to deal with that, have to be able to detect that a person has stepped out into the street and stop. At what point do you tell the car this is indica an indicator that a person is going to walk out on the street, as opposed to this is someone who's trying to step around some dog do that's on the sidewalk, and they're not actually gonna walk in the street, but their path has diverted enough so that if they were to continue on it, they would go out on the street. But that's not what they're playing on doing. If the car thinks you're gonna walk out on the street, then it's gonna stop. So in that case, a really really sensitive car might kill fewer people in the total, but it will take you forever to get to You might be stopping all the time. Another psychological science fiction example, there's there's a movie called Robot and Frank that I think I've brought up on the podcast before Frank Angel and it's got somebody. I think you're right, Yeah, human of some kind or another. I'm pretty sure you're right. I've seen it on that. I've seen that it's on Netflix. I have not watched it. It's it's cute, um, it's it's it's it's a fun it's a fun film. It's it's comedic and and and traumatic at the same time. And and the basic storyline is is that this this this elderly man who is a reformed criminal UM is being placed in the care of a of a home care robot and uh, and the robot can't keep this dude happy. It's directive is to keep the dude happy? Should the robot take him on heists hijinkson soon? So you know, like like how like like at what point, at what point does morality kick in? Yeah, how do you prograb a robot to like not take dudes on heists? Assuming that it shouldn't get similar to maybe it should right starts starts also falling into the plot for Chappie as well, You've got terrible. It's not great, but but it falls into that that same sort of plot. The idea of having a robot that is generally meant to be kind of a positive influence and then bad people or at least people with bad intentions get hold of the robot and UM and and twist its sense of morality because it doesn't have something immately programmed into it so that like, hey, we we need to survive, so in order for us to survive. We need to be able to do these things which are technically crimes, and then convince the robot to do those things. Um, Chappie is is kind of a lot of people have compared it to short circuit, the short circuit movies. I think that's fair. It's not. It's not complimentary, but it's fair. All right, Well, that about does it for me, Lauren. Do you have some of you want to talk about? Yeah? I also wanted to continue talking about speculative fiction because that is where I tend to live, and in thinking about this, I was finding it interesting that that a lot of science fiction and speculative fiction, however you want to say, it centers around those cautionary tales about technology that we were talking a little bit about previously. Um, you know the kind of plot line of like mankind has created this amazing thing and it destroys him, possibly from the inside out, don't we I'm sure? Yeah? Well, I mean it's it's fun storytelling. But but take take Ray Bradbury's work, for for example, UM, excellent work. UM. Ray Bradbury kind of hated technology. His work frequently disdained television and telecommunications in general. In his stories, those kind of technologies made people placid and unthinking and isolated and even cruel. And it's not just in stories. He kind of held the same feelings in real life. There's a great quote from him from an interview with The New York Times in two thousand nine where he was talking to them about the possibility of his work being put into e book format and he said, it's it's great all around. He said. Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo. You know what, I told them, to hell with you, to hell with you, and to hell with the Internet's father science fiction, y'all, or like at least at least one of the crachity uncles of this is a guy who he didn't drive, he didn't fly on airplanes, um and okay, like to be fair, he was born in nineteen twenty and not everyone finds it easy or even desirable to adapt to new technology. And that is fine. It is not up to everyone to adapt to everything that goes on in the world. Um. But but this was this was a guy who envisioned like in air communication headsets and also a t M S Yeah yeah, like earbuds and also self driving cars and also like wall sized flat screen TVs and virtual reality. And he did all of this in the nineteen fifties. Yeah, to be fair, though he thought it was going to be terrible. The future is going to have all this stuff. It's gonna be awful. Yeah. In another interview, um, he said, I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it. Well, I mean and end time. Now in some of the books, and some of the books you can see what he's saying, Like like in some of his books, you understand exactly what the point is that he's getting at, like like fair Knefe or fifty one. You know, you look, you read that book and you realize, like, this is a book that's warning us about anti intellectualism. It's warning us about turning to things like television as a source for information and entertainment and issuing the idea of books which apparently magically make you think while television magically makes you not think. I think that's oversimplification, but you see the route he was going. Yeah, Well, and we and we still have the concept kicking around today that digital communication makes you a colder and more more isolated than person to person communication does, although that's a little bit that's that's a little bit prejudiced in that it's not taking into account people who are bad at in person communication, who have, you know, whatever kind of anxiety or or inability to get out of the house or etcetera, etcetera. And so it also ignores the trend of urbanization where you get to a point where, uh, you weren't growing up in a small a lot most people these days, I should say most people are not growing up in a small community where everyone knows everyone else. In communication is pretty easy because you already know everybody, and I mean that's you can't really get around it. Uh. And then you get into an urban environment where you may have potentially millions of people around you. There's no way for you to know everybody, and so the people you know, the people with whom you form relationships may not be people you encounter all that frequently, unless you're just hanging out with the people you work with or whatever. Uh. So technology has allowed them to maintain these relationships in a way that they couldn't necessarily do without it. There was actually a comic strip I wish I could remember who it was that drew this, I just one of those things that you pop that pops up on a Facebook timeline and I saw, but it was commentary on that very idea. It shows for people on like a subway train and they all have their phones out, and then there's like the one the one version of the thing saying people today, you know, they want to be on their phones. They don't take the time to bother, to communicate with each other, it's terrible. And then there's a flip side of it where it shows what each person is supposedly typing on their phone, and it's all things like like I'm gonna be home soon, I miss you. Like it's actual messages of love and support to people that are meaningful to them. Uh, it's not that they don't have any care for the strangers around them, but they are communicating. They're just communicating to people who aren't in that space at that time. And say, it's kind of judgmental to make that broad statement. You could argue that there are trends that perhaps are changing some of our cultural values, but to make a like a flat statement saying, you know, people care less now because they aren't talking to each other in public, I think that's overly simplifying the matter personally. Joe Joe thinks so too. I'm thinking, I mean, I get it. Where like the idea that you are, you can there are people who use technology as a shield from interacting with others. We do it here at work. You put on headphones, and that tells everybody, even if you're not listening to anything, it tells everybody. Hey. The main move I'm thinking of is like you're out somewhere and you see somebody you don't really want to talk to, so you pretend to be doing something in your phone. Yeah. Yeah. Usually for me, that's when I'm walking home and I just see someone walking the opposite way towards me on the sidewalk, and I'm just like, I don't want to have an interaction with this human being. What can I do? Time to pretend to send a text? I hate saying hello, Hello is fine? Hello is fine. Having to have a five minute conversation on why I don't want to buy your John Wayne blue rays uh that I don't want to have to do again just because I was wearing a cowboy hat. That, by the way, true anecdote. Yeah, I got some blue rays of John Wayne and like, Okay, He's like, do you want to buy a Like no, he's they're collector's items. Like still no. Like I first of all, I could go into a very long conversation with you about why physical media no longer holds any sway with me, but that's beside the point I'm trying to get home anyway. Anyway, I wanted to bring all this up to just as an illustrative point of how UM biased our perceptions of the future can be based on what our current culture and current technological state UM and and to kind of springboard off of that. Some of my favorite predictions for the future predictions in big Old scare quotes UM because they're their imaginings, really, since their speculative fiction are UM like like really like grimy, cyberpunk esque visions like like in the comic book series trans Metropolitan UM by Warren Ellis and the artist Derrick Robertson, or The Snow Crash, which is by Neil Stephenson UM. And maybe maybe because I feel like things like that are are are closer time wise and and feel more realistic to me than than futurists kind of sweeping visions about what's going to be going on? Um In In stories like these, commercialism and personal interests are driving technology forward. This this translates to booms and in wearable and implantable technology that that keep us constantly connected. Uh. The the the information industry in these stories rules the world not too far off from where we are right now. Genetics affords the characters upgrades and strength and resilience. UM can even allow for like X Men style voluntary mutations UM. And the lines between humans and their technology are are blurred. Not not quite a race, so not not quite to a point where you would call it the singularity, so certainly not uh and probably not even as far as trans humanism um. But but but bumping up against that that thresholds somewhere in the squishy meat space before transprisa UM and and all of these these changes and developments results in really amazing things. You can you can pop an anti cancer pill and just never get cancer. You can you can spend your free time in vast and beautiful and enriching virtual world. You can learn about anything and everything that that whole Uh, what is it the the rhetoric of the electrical sublime, that that's that sort of thing. Um, but in these stories it also leads to terrible things. Technology viral code can threaten your life and your sanity. Um. Viral code not viruses. Yes, so you can get a virus, but this is a computer virus. It's it's a brain virus. It's a brain computer virus. M most bodily upgrades in these stories that are considered tacky or vain at best, and are mostly portrayed as just being kind of grotesque. Personal privacy is a complete joke. The lines between the upper and lower classes are even more stark than they are today. So you've got like the haves have way more and the have nots have nothing. Sure and and furthermore that the poor in these stories are being told that a virtual life should be enough. Ah. So this is like the Chimney sweet poem, Like you guys are you guys? I realized that your your real world life is crappy, but if you just stick with it, you're gonna have such a wonderful, wonderful existence afterward. That was essentially the message of the Chimney sweep. Uh it's a poem from the nineteenth century. In that case, they were it was essentially the It was specifically criticizing a very particular approach that some Christian ministers were taking when they were talking to the poor, saying, you should just accept your lot in life because if you if you do that and you're a good person, you will be rewarded in heaven. And the poet in this case was our doing. You're saying this in order to preserve the status quoe. You're not actually saying it because you believe these people's souls are destined to heaven. You're saying it because it's convenient to keeping these people where they are in their social class. If you believe they're destined for heaven, is that destiny dependent on them doing a good job? As being a chimney sweep? Right? So, and furthermore, is is that really a happy ending? Like? Is that a nice thing? Well? And and here's the problem is that, I mean, I remember studying this poem in college and uh, it was a freshman or sophomore poetry class, which meant that uh, and it's technically the chimney sweeper. It's a William Blake poem. And so it was one of those things where several of the students weren't aware of the satirical nature of the poem. They were taking it at face value and that was problematic, whereas it sounds like this is probably a more apparent satire. Oh yeah, oh yeah. It's it's not saying that this stuff is rad it's saying that this is a potential problem of the future. It's not quite a caut nary tale of technology. It's more like a cautionary tale of society, of of like, where given these things society could go, especially considering that that with these stark divides between the rich and the poor, conflict and violence are still thriving in opposition to something something along the lines of like Star Trek, where you know, certainly there's conflict with with other other alien races, but within humanity everything's pretty much sorted out. Everyone's got their basic needs met. They they are allowed to pursue any type of activity they want, whether it's something that would be described as a job or just you know, you just want to I just want to sit and think. Fine, fine, go ahead, do not think also fine? And and there are still, in those sweepingly optimistic stories like Star Trek, a little little side tales, side quests. If you will about about particular groups of people who, for whatever reason are being oppressed or or miss read it in some way because I don't know why, but because maybe maybe because we can't currently imagine a future without people being jerks. Well, and dramatic necessity, Well, I mean, but that's what I'm saying, like, like, does dramatic necessity mean that we like, like that is the fact that a story is boring to us if bad things aren't happening to people, Like, what does that say about us? That you can't just tell a story where everything is pleasant, there's never any conflict, and then everything just ends fine. That seems like it's not a story. Well, that's what that's That's kind of what Lauren's point is is that without that conflict, we don't consider it a story. Well, does that mean that at the very basic core of being a human we need bad people and bad things to happen in order to define, you know, to understand it. I was I was thinking about this when you were talking about Marconi's point about things like wireless technology making things like war ridiculous, and and I found myself wondering whether any technological thing could ever solve war or or conflict or poverty, because it it does seem like at this point in society at least, distrust and greed for better or for worse are are are part of the human experience. They're part of the fabric of our makeup. And and maybe it's just one of those things that I cannot imagine being different from our current perspective. Um, And I don't I don't mean this to be a downer note. It's actually an optimistic downer note because maybe some unpredictable technology will come along that will solve energy or solve empathy and um and lead to a kind of utopia. Yeah. I don't know if I can ever see a full utopia. I just see things. Uh. My optimistic vision for the future is one of progressive solving of small problems. In my optimistic view of the future is that we get to a point air we've already we've already reached the point where we can talk to almost anybody that's continuing. Obviously, not everyone has access to the internet, but that is that that the number of people who don't have access to the Internet decreases every year. My optimistic vision of the future is that we arrive at a day where we're listening to everyone. We're no longer just talking to everyone, but we can actually listen and at least be able to have that conversation, which you could argue it gets right back to that simplistic notion of all sit down and talk it out and everything will be fine, right. I mean, I'm not trying to criticize you for this, but if you just take that literally, just listen to everyone, well, a lot of the people you're going to be listening to are going to have some really stupid and hateful things to say. But then if you ultimately get at the core of why they say those things, you could perhaps address the root issues that are that are producing this in the first place. Unless you just come to the conclusion that some people are inherently bad, which I have I have a I have a problem with that idea, but I mean, there's some people who certainly behave as if they are inherently bad and give very little indication that they are otherwise. But assuming that you don't buy into that that philosophy, then you could say, let's look at the series of events or the various uh components of the scenario that are in place that have led to this behavior and find out are there things that need to be addressed so that people don't develop these ideas or thoughts or prejudices, because I think more often than not it comes from a place of putting blame on others for a situation that you are in, whether it was justified or or not. So in other words, you might say I'm not as successful as I should be because those people over there begin are given preferential treatment, or I am I should be guaranteed the place where I'm at. Don't give that other group the same sort of opportunities that I've had, because then you're somehow taking away where I'm at, Like you have to get to the bottom of where does that? I mean you're talking about particularly you're talking about like group prejudice or something. But there's also I mean, there are lots of ways to have nothing good to contribute. I mean, you can also just be like a sociopath who hates people. Well, sure, but that's that's always going to be the case, right There always going to be sociopath unless we come up with h is it yeah, maybe not. I mean I mean, if we come up with a way of identifying it immediately. And then but then you have a question of how do you deal with that? Do you do something where you're making a fundamental change to someone's uh neural, uh, you know, performance, so that they are not going to be a sociopath? At what point does that go way too freaking far? Right? These are we did. We did a whole other very long episodes like The Moral Moral Bio Enhancements. Yeah, so, I mean they're always going to be outliers. I don't think you're ever going to get a thing where it's going to be universal. But I I at least not that I necessarily think we're going to get to a point where we're all listening to one another. But I think we should always be striving to that right, that should be our goal. Even if we have all concluded that that goal will we will never be there. To me, it's still something that we have to strive for if we want to continue to improve as just humans. Yeah, I guess the way I would interpret that, maybe what you're saying is making a good faith attempt to understand everyone else's point of view. Yeah, that's that's that's fair, fair assessment. Yes, yeah, yeah, if we could have a technology that would allow people to do that, and I think so easily that it would come as second nature. I think it's one of those I think it's one of those things where perhaps, uh, we just get to a point where we're able to switch the focus is from the technological capability to more of all, right, let's really address the social and cultural issues that are in place that are allowing such things to foster and really just have conversations about that and really talk about what are the what are the various causes of this um and what can we do about it? Like, are there things that we can are there problems that we can actually work on solving? Are there some things that are really it's so you know, nebulous that there's not really a way to solve it, and if so, what else could we do? But then, to me, that's not talking about the technology anymore. That's that's talking about people being people um And And you know, maybe the technology allows for greater conversations to happen, but the technology itself doesn't doesn't actually make the change again unless we get that good evil switch in everybody's head and you just make sure everyone switched to good. Yeah, no, I I don't know. I think that that's the That's the point about all of these discussions of prediction for the future is that whatever future technology we can imagine, people, as far as I can personally discern, are are still going to be people. Um And and it technology can slowly change the way that we act, in the way that we interact, But I don't think it changes us like intrinsically, I don't think it does either. What I think it would allow us to do is just, uh, again, be more aware of what is going on beyond our our own selves. Um. Whether that means that we care, that's kind of up to the individual. Right. That's technology is not going to magically make someone care if a person around on the other side of the world is suffering or not, even if they see really compelling evidence that that person is indeed suffering. Um. But it it certainly, it certainly makes more people aware of it. And that's at least the first step toward getting something done, because if people are unaware, then of course there's no they're not going to move to action. Yeah, they can't act because they didn't know, right, So, whether the ignorance was self imposed or not, Um, anyway, these are This is exactly why we wanted to do these episodes, right, to have these kind of conversations, to talk about these big predictions and big ideas. And uh, there's so many more we could have touched on, Like we limited ourselves to just a couple each because we knew We didn't know it was going to go over to two episodes, but we knew it was going to be a heck of a conversation. But we've got so much more to say. You'll have to tune in next week to hear our our thoughts. Uh, we've got a very special episode coming up for you guys, so you should tune into that. And um, guys, it's been great. If you want to check us out on Facebook or Twitter, we are FW thinking. All were on Twitter. Search fw thinking on Facebook. Our profile page will pop up and we will talk to you again really soon on this topic. In the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places

Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Forward Thinking. Hey, then, welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that looks the future. It says tomorrow Tomorrow, I love you Tomorrow. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm Joe McCormick. And this is gonna be part two of a two part episode that we had to split up because we ended up talking for a long time. But last time, what were we talking about? It? It was about our favorite predictions of the future. Yeah, we talked about a lot of very quaint French postcards from the turn of the nineteenth century, been with bad wings, and we talked about some driverless car technology, and then we talked about how communications doesn't make you less of a jerk? Is that what we talked about? Yeah, Well, we talked about like telecommunications predictions that the idea of the the rhetoric of the electrical sublime, the people who thought that, you know, the telegraph and eventually the internet would just bring us all together and make us connect and just be friendly. We would friendly happy people. Only we can talk to each other instantaneously. We'll bring about world peace and then we'll all just click on that little button to buy the world a coke. Yeah, and well, you guys aren't alive in the seventies, so you have no idea what I'm talking about. But we all know what by the World of Coke is. Did you ever see those commercials? Were they still around when you guys were kids? Also, I don't know what you're talking you'd like to I'd like to sing. I'd like to teach the world to sing a perfect harmony. I'd like to buy the world of coke and keep it company. I know the polar Bears, the polar Bears, you know, cute little ones. Joe, just talk about robots. Okay, So last time we talked about one of the we reached picking picking a couple of favorite predictions in the future, or at least the most illuminating. I don't know if I could say I have favorites, the ones that are spurring of good conversation, and so we did. Why list telecommunications and all that? Now I want to talk about robots. Uh So I was trying to think what my other favorite prediction would be. And I think that we we've talked about this on the show before, but I have to come back to it because I think it's so fruitful. Uh. And it's the science fiction world embodied in Isaac Asimov's Robots stories and essentially in Asimov's fictional future. Robots are very intelligent, powerful, well integrated into society, performing all kinds of labor the positronic brain, and to keep their behavior in check, they all necessarily are bound by three fundamental laws of robotics. Right, that's kind of like the I mean, we've seen tons of different science fiction stories that build upon the same idea, like even things like RoboCop where he has all the different directives that stems from this concept of the laws of robotics. Yeah, and so the three law us basically are a robot. First law, a robot may not injure or harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Obviously, robotup did not have that one. Nope. The second one, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law. So lo as you couldn't tell robot, hey, I want you to go and punch gim in the face, right, robot has to do what you say unless you tell it to hurt somebody. And then the third law, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws. And then there was the zero with law that got added afterwards, which is a robot may not harm humanity or through an action, allow humanity to come to him, right, the sort of the worldwide extension. And they also would sometimes extend it's not just to humans, but to property as well, so in other words like like you know, extended, saying that a robot couldn't cause damage to property unless again it violated a more important law like further up on the list. Yeah, and so if you haven't read any of these stories, I do recommend going back and reading some of Asimov's robots stories because I think they're very entertaining, their interesting, and they're usually pretty short and self contained. Um but anyway, the dramatic conflict in many of these stories comes from engineers and robopsychologists trying to solve problems with robots, and the problems are created by the fact that the robots are following the laws, but following them in a way that leads to unforeseen problems. Uh So, robots with these types of programming, can be caught in sort of ethical loops or traps that prevent them from doing something crucial or that allow them to do horrible things by way of misunderstanding or misapplication of the laws. So it's kind of similar, and I think I've made this comparison in a previous episode of forward thinking. But for for those of you out there who have ever played Dungeons and Dragons, if you've ever encountered a scenario where your character is granted a wish, you know that any any experienced player will spend ages agonizing over the exact wording of the wish, because dungeon masters the world over have great joy in taking a wish and then purposefully miss interpreting the wish so that a terrible thing happens. So the classic one is make me a sandwich and then boom, the character turns into a sandwich. Like that would be That would be a very simple version of that. But you typically will get someone who has to try and word out an incredibly convoluted wish in order to avoid any potential misinterpretation or or abuse of their request. The same sort of thing is is kind of underlying some of these stories where it's not that a robot is intentionally trying to find its way around its programming. It's simply that in order for it to carry out whatever task it's been given and follow these rules, something doesn't go as people would expect it to. It's really a cautionary tale about human error and hubris. Yes, definitely, and also just the idea of you know, any sort of artificial intelligence that's sufficiently capable of being able to to be autonomous or even semi autonomous, it's hard. Well, yeah, that's exactly why I cited this. I cite this because of the increasing interest in the future challenges presented by AI and sophisticated mobile robotics. Um, but you're exactly right. You know, the more a machine is in line with what we think of as intelligence in the same way we've use intelligence to refer to human intelligence, the more their behavior and reasoning will become proportionally obscure to us. Like things that act in intelligent ways are sometimes hard to understand because intelligens is inherently complex. I've got a very relevant example that happened very recently, which was that you had some people working with a supercomputer over the course of forty eight hours to create a mathematical proof that had been proposed back in the eighties, or at least someone has said, like, I need a proof to prove this whether or not this particular mathematical problem as possible or not possible. And the computer did it in two days, and it took two hundred terabytes of storage to store the proof. And I won't get into the proof that would take forever for me to explain, but the idea being that, uh, it was such a long laborious process, even for a supercomputer working for forty eight hours, essentially that for people it was pretty much a lost cause, right, like like you almost have to uh use a different supercomputer to verify the results because you couldn't employ humans to go through all the steps. It would just take way too long and it and it'd be too easy to lose your place and make a human error and then realize that, oh, well, we've got to have yet another team check that the results here. And you started getting to this idea what this was just to do one mathematical proof and there's not a major downside to humankind if it does something wrong, right, if if it says that the proof shows that this particular mathematical question is impossible, and it turns out it is possible. Big whoop. But you might have similarly complex internal machinations in a robot that is designed to open a door for people. But the robot that's designed to open a door for people could slam the door on people and kill them. So you know, even well, maybe a robot that opens doors for people wouldn't have to be all that intelligence. I'll give the full general AI to the door opener. You say it, But actually when I went to south By Southwest, one of the panels I too. They talked about how there was, uh this team that was trying to develop a robot that could open different types of doors, but it would take hours for the robot to figure out what kind of door it was, and how three types of doors. There's your problem, right right, I mean, it's only got the one door. If you only got one door, then you're fine. But but as we saw also in the darker robotics challenge like opening doors and walking through them, certainly the walking through them part, right, So you know, you've got to find a way to prevent robots from causing harm, and this causes we've got to think about the AI control problem, and it's not as easy as it sounds. And I think this is very well predicted by Asimov's stories, which makes this one of my favorite future predictions, because he starts with these three laws that if you read them, they sound very simple and they sound very air tight. It sounds like they cover all the bases. But you you only have to think a little bit further as Asimov did, and start trying to apply them to unexpected malfunctions and use case scenarios. Well, and it could you it also just imagine where it's not even a malfunction. You could just imagine where a robot would take no action, because it turns out the robot is able to project all the potential consequences of its actions and determined that some of them may in fact cause some form of harm to someone, and that it's not even that necessarily identified, right. It may just be like, well, I took into account the task you gave me, I plotted out all the variables, and it turns out there's maybe a twenty seven percent chance that this could hurt somebody's feelings. And because I interpret that as being harm. I can't actually do what you asked me to do, so I'm just gonna stand here motionless, and you're gonna think I'm broken. The chaos effective robotics like you've created a very expensive brick, and that brick is just constantly thinking like well if I opened this door, then yeah, it's it's a robot paralyzed by self doubt. Essentially, because we so we're creating a Douglas Adams character, would you would have to create a threshold for the robot saying you have to be above this percentage sure that this action is going to cause some form of harm before you decide not to do it right now. Now. Of course, the application of this to the real world is all well, actually I was going to say it's all assuming we ever create general AI of any consequence, but actually I think it's not even even if we don't. As a MOOV stories are interesting for thinking about ethics as they apply to humans. Well, it's also too, I would argue, it's interesting to apply that even if you're talking about narrow definitions of AI, there's still something to be said about it may not be sentient, it may not be self aware, it may not have general AI may not it may not be walking around and interacting with us, but it could very well still affect us in a in a pro in profound ways and so thinking in this case, even for something like narrow AI, I think it's important. It is also important when it comes to just our thoughts about how humans behave I agree, but it's it's it's something that a lot of people have been arguing we should be talking about more anyway, with the state of AI as it stands right now, which I think everyone would say it falls easily into the category of week AI. Yeah. Well, and we talked about autonomous cars in the last episode. You start entering when you've gotten multi ton death machines with combustible engines in them running around being controlled by week AI. Uh, you have you have a potential future rife with Charlie problems. Yeah. Yeah, that's a very good point. Yeah, where you get to that situation where, uh, an action must be taken and there is no clear action that will prevent harm from some happening to someone, right, whether it's yeah, which which someone you choose to cause harm? Right? Would it be the person sitting in the past, your seat, would it be a person outside of the vehicle, would be a person in another vehicle? Yeah, that whole thing exactly. Yeah, I mean, and it also comes down to things that are in conflict. In some of those stories were like you have a very very low risk of a major problem in conflict with a compelling need for something petty as opposed you know, So like in a driverless car, this might mean, Okay, should the car come to a stop every time there is a point zero zero zero zero one percent chance that doing so would prevent injury to someone? I don't know. I mean, what if that means it's coming to a stop all the time and being really inconvenient. So in other words, like let's say that it's um let's say that it's a car that has predictive algorithms that can track motion of various entities around the vehicle. Right, so pedestrians for example, knowing that sometimes pedestrians will walk into the street not at a crosswalk, so it's not a place where they're designated to cross. Well, autonos cars will have to be able to deal with that, have to be able to detect that a person has stepped out into the street and stop. At what point do you tell the car this is indica an indicator that a person is going to walk out on the street, as opposed to this is someone who's trying to step around some dog do that's on the sidewalk, and they're not actually gonna walk in the street, but their path has diverted enough so that if they were to continue on it, they would go out on the street. But that's not what they're playing on doing. If the car thinks you're gonna walk out on the street, then it's gonna stop. So in that case, a really really sensitive car might kill fewer people in the total, but it will take you forever to get to You might be stopping all the time. Another psychological science fiction example, there's there's a movie called Robot and Frank that I think I've brought up on the podcast before Frank Angel and it's got somebody. I think you're right, Yeah, human of some kind or another. I'm pretty sure you're right. I've seen it on that. I've seen that it's on Netflix. I have not watched it. It's it's cute, um, it's it's it's it's a fun it's a fun film. It's it's comedic and and and traumatic at the same time. And and the basic storyline is is that this this this elderly man who is a reformed criminal UM is being placed in the care of a of a home care robot and uh, and the robot can't keep this dude happy. It's directive is to keep the dude happy? Should the robot take him on heists hijinkson soon? So you know, like like how like like at what point, at what point does morality kick in? Yeah, how do you prograb a robot to like not take dudes on heists? Assuming that it shouldn't get similar to maybe it should right starts starts also falling into the plot for Chappie as well, You've got terrible. It's not great, but but it falls into that that same sort of plot. The idea of having a robot that is generally meant to be kind of a positive influence and then bad people or at least people with bad intentions get hold of the robot and UM and and twist its sense of morality because it doesn't have something immately programmed into it so that like, hey, we we need to survive, so in order for us to survive. We need to be able to do these things which are technically crimes, and then convince the robot to do those things. Um, Chappie is is kind of a lot of people have compared it to short circuit, the short circuit movies. I think that's fair. It's not. It's not complimentary, but it's fair. All right, Well, that about does it for me, Lauren. Do you have some of you want to talk about? Yeah? I also wanted to continue talking about speculative fiction because that is where I tend to live, and in thinking about this, I was finding it interesting that that a lot of science fiction and speculative fiction, however you want to say, it centers around those cautionary tales about technology that we were talking a little bit about previously. Um, you know the kind of plot line of like mankind has created this amazing thing and it destroys him, possibly from the inside out, don't we I'm sure? Yeah? Well, I mean it's it's fun storytelling. But but take take Ray Bradbury's work, for for example, UM, excellent work. UM. Ray Bradbury kind of hated technology. His work frequently disdained television and telecommunications in general. In his stories, those kind of technologies made people placid and unthinking and isolated and even cruel. And it's not just in stories. He kind of held the same feelings in real life. There's a great quote from him from an interview with The New York Times in two thousand nine where he was talking to them about the possibility of his work being put into e book format and he said, it's it's great all around. He said. Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo. You know what, I told them, to hell with you, to hell with you, and to hell with the Internet's father science fiction, y'all, or like at least at least one of the crachity uncles of this is a guy who he didn't drive, he didn't fly on airplanes, um and okay, like to be fair, he was born in nineteen twenty and not everyone finds it easy or even desirable to adapt to new technology. And that is fine. It is not up to everyone to adapt to everything that goes on in the world. Um. But but this was this was a guy who envisioned like in air communication headsets and also a t M S Yeah yeah, like earbuds and also self driving cars and also like wall sized flat screen TVs and virtual reality. And he did all of this in the nineteen fifties. Yeah, to be fair, though he thought it was going to be terrible. The future is going to have all this stuff. It's gonna be awful. Yeah. In another interview, um, he said, I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it. Well, I mean and end time. Now in some of the books, and some of the books you can see what he's saying, Like like in some of his books, you understand exactly what the point is that he's getting at, like like fair Knefe or fifty one. You know, you look, you read that book and you realize, like, this is a book that's warning us about anti intellectualism. It's warning us about turning to things like television as a source for information and entertainment and issuing the idea of books which apparently magically make you think while television magically makes you not think. I think that's oversimplification, but you see the route he was going. Yeah, Well, and we and we still have the concept kicking around today that digital communication makes you a colder and more more isolated than person to person communication does, although that's a little bit that's that's a little bit prejudiced in that it's not taking into account people who are bad at in person communication, who have, you know, whatever kind of anxiety or or inability to get out of the house or etcetera, etcetera. And so it also ignores the trend of urbanization where you get to a point where, uh, you weren't growing up in a small a lot most people these days, I should say most people are not growing up in a small community where everyone knows everyone else. In communication is pretty easy because you already know everybody, and I mean that's you can't really get around it. Uh. And then you get into an urban environment where you may have potentially millions of people around you. There's no way for you to know everybody, and so the people you know, the people with whom you form relationships may not be people you encounter all that frequently, unless you're just hanging out with the people you work with or whatever. Uh. So technology has allowed them to maintain these relationships in a way that they couldn't necessarily do without it. There was actually a comic strip I wish I could remember who it was that drew this, I just one of those things that you pop that pops up on a Facebook timeline and I saw, but it was commentary on that very idea. It shows for people on like a subway train and they all have their phones out, and then there's like the one the one version of the thing saying people today, you know, they want to be on their phones. They don't take the time to bother, to communicate with each other, it's terrible. And then there's a flip side of it where it shows what each person is supposedly typing on their phone, and it's all things like like I'm gonna be home soon, I miss you. Like it's actual messages of love and support to people that are meaningful to them. Uh, it's not that they don't have any care for the strangers around them, but they are communicating. They're just communicating to people who aren't in that space at that time. And say, it's kind of judgmental to make that broad statement. You could argue that there are trends that perhaps are changing some of our cultural values, but to make a like a flat statement saying, you know, people care less now because they aren't talking to each other in public, I think that's overly simplifying the matter personally. Joe Joe thinks so too. I'm thinking, I mean, I get it. Where like the idea that you are, you can there are people who use technology as a shield from interacting with others. We do it here at work. You put on headphones, and that tells everybody, even if you're not listening to anything, it tells everybody. Hey. The main move I'm thinking of is like you're out somewhere and you see somebody you don't really want to talk to, so you pretend to be doing something in your phone. Yeah. Yeah. Usually for me, that's when I'm walking home and I just see someone walking the opposite way towards me on the sidewalk, and I'm just like, I don't want to have an interaction with this human being. What can I do? Time to pretend to send a text? I hate saying hello, Hello is fine? Hello is fine. Having to have a five minute conversation on why I don't want to buy your John Wayne blue rays uh that I don't want to have to do again just because I was wearing a cowboy hat. That, by the way, true anecdote. Yeah, I got some blue rays of John Wayne and like, Okay, He's like, do you want to buy a Like no, he's they're collector's items. Like still no. Like I first of all, I could go into a very long conversation with you about why physical media no longer holds any sway with me, but that's beside the point I'm trying to get home anyway. Anyway, I wanted to bring all this up to just as an illustrative point of how UM biased our perceptions of the future can be based on what our current culture and current technological state UM and and to kind of springboard off of that. Some of my favorite predictions for the future predictions in big Old scare quotes UM because they're their imaginings, really, since their speculative fiction are UM like like really like grimy, cyberpunk esque visions like like in the comic book series trans Metropolitan UM by Warren Ellis and the artist Derrick Robertson, or The Snow Crash, which is by Neil Stephenson UM. And maybe maybe because I feel like things like that are are are closer time wise and and feel more realistic to me than than futurists kind of sweeping visions about what's going to be going on? Um In In stories like these, commercialism and personal interests are driving technology forward. This this translates to booms and in wearable and implantable technology that that keep us constantly connected. Uh. The the the information industry in these stories rules the world not too far off from where we are right now. Genetics affords the characters upgrades and strength and resilience. UM can even allow for like X Men style voluntary mutations UM. And the lines between humans and their technology are are blurred. Not not quite a race, so not not quite to a point where you would call it the singularity, so certainly not uh and probably not even as far as trans humanism um. But but but bumping up against that that thresholds somewhere in the squishy meat space before transprisa UM and and all of these these changes and developments results in really amazing things. You can you can pop an anti cancer pill and just never get cancer. You can you can spend your free time in vast and beautiful and enriching virtual world. You can learn about anything and everything that that whole Uh, what is it the the rhetoric of the electrical sublime, that that's that sort of thing. Um, but in these stories it also leads to terrible things. Technology viral code can threaten your life and your sanity. Um. Viral code not viruses. Yes, so you can get a virus, but this is a computer virus. It's it's a brain virus. It's a brain computer virus. M most bodily upgrades in these stories that are considered tacky or vain at best, and are mostly portrayed as just being kind of grotesque. Personal privacy is a complete joke. The lines between the upper and lower classes are even more stark than they are today. So you've got like the haves have way more and the have nots have nothing. Sure and and furthermore that the poor in these stories are being told that a virtual life should be enough. Ah. So this is like the Chimney sweet poem, Like you guys are you guys? I realized that your your real world life is crappy, but if you just stick with it, you're gonna have such a wonderful, wonderful existence afterward. That was essentially the message of the Chimney sweep. Uh it's a poem from the nineteenth century. In that case, they were it was essentially the It was specifically criticizing a very particular approach that some Christian ministers were taking when they were talking to the poor, saying, you should just accept your lot in life because if you if you do that and you're a good person, you will be rewarded in heaven. And the poet in this case was our doing. You're saying this in order to preserve the status quoe. You're not actually saying it because you believe these people's souls are destined to heaven. You're saying it because it's convenient to keeping these people where they are in their social class. If you believe they're destined for heaven, is that destiny dependent on them doing a good job? As being a chimney sweep? Right? So, and furthermore, is is that really a happy ending? Like? Is that a nice thing? Well? And and here's the problem is that, I mean, I remember studying this poem in college and uh, it was a freshman or sophomore poetry class, which meant that uh, and it's technically the chimney sweeper. It's a William Blake poem. And so it was one of those things where several of the students weren't aware of the satirical nature of the poem. They were taking it at face value and that was problematic, whereas it sounds like this is probably a more apparent satire. Oh yeah, oh yeah. It's it's not saying that this stuff is rad it's saying that this is a potential problem of the future. It's not quite a caut nary tale of technology. It's more like a cautionary tale of society, of of like, where given these things society could go, especially considering that that with these stark divides between the rich and the poor, conflict and violence are still thriving in opposition to something something along the lines of like Star Trek, where you know, certainly there's conflict with with other other alien races, but within humanity everything's pretty much sorted out. Everyone's got their basic needs met. They they are allowed to pursue any type of activity they want, whether it's something that would be described as a job or just you know, you just want to I just want to sit and think. Fine, fine, go ahead, do not think also fine? And and there are still, in those sweepingly optimistic stories like Star Trek, a little little side tales, side quests. If you will about about particular groups of people who, for whatever reason are being oppressed or or miss read it in some way because I don't know why, but because maybe maybe because we can't currently imagine a future without people being jerks. Well, and dramatic necessity, Well, I mean, but that's what I'm saying, like, like, does dramatic necessity mean that we like, like that is the fact that a story is boring to us if bad things aren't happening to people, Like, what does that say about us? That you can't just tell a story where everything is pleasant, there's never any conflict, and then everything just ends fine. That seems like it's not a story. Well, that's what that's That's kind of what Lauren's point is is that without that conflict, we don't consider it a story. Well, does that mean that at the very basic core of being a human we need bad people and bad things to happen in order to define, you know, to understand it. I was I was thinking about this when you were talking about Marconi's point about things like wireless technology making things like war ridiculous, and and I found myself wondering whether any technological thing could ever solve war or or conflict or poverty, because it it does seem like at this point in society at least, distrust and greed for better or for worse are are are part of the human experience. They're part of the fabric of our makeup. And and maybe it's just one of those things that I cannot imagine being different from our current perspective. Um, And I don't I don't mean this to be a downer note. It's actually an optimistic downer note because maybe some unpredictable technology will come along that will solve energy or solve empathy and um and lead to a kind of utopia. Yeah. I don't know if I can ever see a full utopia. I just see things. Uh. My optimistic vision for the future is one of progressive solving of small problems. In my optimistic view of the future is that we get to a point air we've already we've already reached the point where we can talk to almost anybody that's continuing. Obviously, not everyone has access to the internet, but that is that that the number of people who don't have access to the Internet decreases every year. My optimistic vision of the future is that we arrive at a day where we're listening to everyone. We're no longer just talking to everyone, but we can actually listen and at least be able to have that conversation, which you could argue it gets right back to that simplistic notion of all sit down and talk it out and everything will be fine, right. I mean, I'm not trying to criticize you for this, but if you just take that literally, just listen to everyone, well, a lot of the people you're going to be listening to are going to have some really stupid and hateful things to say. But then if you ultimately get at the core of why they say those things, you could perhaps address the root issues that are that are producing this in the first place. Unless you just come to the conclusion that some people are inherently bad, which I have I have a I have a problem with that idea, but I mean, there's some people who certainly behave as if they are inherently bad and give very little indication that they are otherwise. But assuming that you don't buy into that that philosophy, then you could say, let's look at the series of events or the various uh components of the scenario that are in place that have led to this behavior and find out are there things that need to be addressed so that people don't develop these ideas or thoughts or prejudices, because I think more often than not it comes from a place of putting blame on others for a situation that you are in, whether it was justified or or not. So in other words, you might say I'm not as successful as I should be because those people over there begin are given preferential treatment, or I am I should be guaranteed the place where I'm at. Don't give that other group the same sort of opportunities that I've had, because then you're somehow taking away where I'm at, Like you have to get to the bottom of where does that? I mean you're talking about particularly you're talking about like group prejudice or something. But there's also I mean, there are lots of ways to have nothing good to contribute. I mean, you can also just be like a sociopath who hates people. Well, sure, but that's that's always going to be the case, right There always going to be sociopath unless we come up with h is it yeah, maybe not. I mean I mean, if we come up with a way of identifying it immediately. And then but then you have a question of how do you deal with that? Do you do something where you're making a fundamental change to someone's uh neural, uh, you know, performance, so that they are not going to be a sociopath? At what point does that go way too freaking far? Right? These are we did. We did a whole other very long episodes like The Moral Moral Bio Enhancements. Yeah, so, I mean they're always going to be outliers. I don't think you're ever going to get a thing where it's going to be universal. But I I at least not that I necessarily think we're going to get to a point where we're all listening to one another. But I think we should always be striving to that right, that should be our goal. Even if we have all concluded that that goal will we will never be there. To me, it's still something that we have to strive for if we want to continue to improve as just humans. Yeah, I guess the way I would interpret that, maybe what you're saying is making a good faith attempt to understand everyone else's point of view. Yeah, that's that's that's fair, fair assessment. Yes, yeah, yeah, if we could have a technology that would allow people to do that, and I think so easily that it would come as second nature. I think it's one of those I think it's one of those things where perhaps, uh, we just get to a point where we're able to switch the focus is from the technological capability to more of all, right, let's really address the social and cultural issues that are in place that are allowing such things to foster and really just have conversations about that and really talk about what are the what are the various causes of this um and what can we do about it? Like, are there things that we can are there problems that we can actually work on solving? Are there some things that are really it's so you know, nebulous that there's not really a way to solve it, and if so, what else could we do? But then, to me, that's not talking about the technology anymore. That's that's talking about people being people um And And you know, maybe the technology allows for greater conversations to happen, but the technology itself doesn't doesn't actually make the change again unless we get that good evil switch in everybody's head and you just make sure everyone switched to good. Yeah, no, I I don't know. I think that that's the That's the point about all of these discussions of prediction for the future is that whatever future technology we can imagine, people, as far as I can personally discern, are are still going to be people. Um And and it technology can slowly change the way that we act, in the way that we interact, But I don't think it changes us like intrinsically, I don't think it does either. What I think it would allow us to do is just, uh, again, be more aware of what is going on beyond our our own selves. Um. Whether that means that we care, that's kind of up to the individual. Right. That's technology is not going to magically make someone care if a person around on the other side of the world is suffering or not, even if they see really compelling evidence that that person is indeed suffering. Um. But it it certainly, it certainly makes more people aware of it. And that's at least the first step toward getting something done, because if people are unaware, then of course there's no they're not going to move to action. Yeah, they can't act because they didn't know, right, So, whether the ignorance was self imposed or not, Um, anyway, these are This is exactly why we wanted to do these episodes, right, to have these kind of conversations, to talk about these big predictions and big ideas. And uh, there's so many more we could have touched on, Like we limited ourselves to just a couple each because we knew We didn't know it was going to go over to two episodes, but we knew it was going to be a heck of a conversation. But we've got so much more to say. You'll have to tune in next week to hear our our thoughts. Uh, we've got a very special episode coming up for you guys, so you should tune into that. And um, guys, it's been great. If you want to check us out on Facebook or Twitter, we are FW thinking. All were on Twitter. Search fw thinking on Facebook. Our profile page will pop up and we will talk to you again really soon on this topic. In the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places