YouSaid · the spoken record

Jenny Kleeman

lines on the record: 42
first: 2020-07-17
most recent: 2020-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Anyway, I mean, that's another thing that's come to me through lockdown is there are so many things that we think we need that we don't need and our capacity to change our behavior radically if a year ago you could have said everybody is going to en masse stay at home and change the way they live, you wouldn't have believed it possible. But human beings are really adaptable and you can just go for a run if you need exercise. You can just meditate. You don't need fancy gadgets. You can have them if you choose them, but don't choose them uncritically. Go into it with open eyes, I would say.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is the point, it's the same thing as a hotel providing you with earplugs when it's pumping music really loudly outside your room. It's all a little bit ridiculous. So the question is, do we really need this technology? Do we already have all the answers that this technology is promising to provide within our hands, as in just put your phone down, just turn the music off, just eat less meat? Do we actually need all of this? And actually, for me, I found it quite empowering to realize that all the things that these entrepreneurs are promising us, we do already have in our hands if we choose to enact them, it's just going to be harder work than just buying for something, but it's going to be harder work than just paying for something, paying for an off-the-shelf solution that isn't really a solution. So I'd say you need to look at tech skeptically and ask yourself whether or not you really need the next shiny new thing, or could you just do it?”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These products are going to exist. It is up to us whether or not we choose to buy them. You have to ask yourself all the time, do I actually need this thing that I'm being sold? Do I need a meditation app? I could just meditate, for example. You know, I was really interested by the rise of, in America you can buy the hormone melatonin in capsules over the counter to help you sleep because we're all going through the sleep crisis at the moment because we're all obsessed with tech and we can't put our iPhones down and that's interfering with our sleep You could just put your iPhone away and go to sleep instead of taking pills in order to do it”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without sacrifice, and that is how to part people from their money, is to say you can carry on as normal, you might have these ethical niggles, you might have these worries, you might find certain aspects of existence difficult. We're going to make it easy for you. Just buy this. And actually, that's never going to be the answer. We need to do kind of proper work in order to progress. We need to reform ourselves and progress doesn't come from bits of kit and bits of technology. It comes from social change.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, all of these technologies, all of these innovations are supposed to be solutions to big human problems. But in fact, they're not solutions. They are circumventions. They are a way of getting around the problem without solving it. And we already have within our power the means to solve it. It just requires more effort. It requires some real intellectual thought. I mean, if you look at the future of death, if we could find a way to frame legislation so that people can have the right to die without weak and vulnerable people being exploited, then you wouldn't need fancy death machines that provide you with the perfect death. Or, you know, lab-grown meat is so obvious. It's like if we would just eat less meat, you wouldn't need all this overshoot engineering. And actually, though, what these innovations represent is the commercial opportunity of the easy fix of somebody saying to you, we can give you what you want.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm going to save the world. I'm going to connect people. I'm going to bring people together. Yes, it's really funny.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my discussions with all of these people, these people want to go down in history as people who've radically disrupted the world with their technology, even though I think it might be the disruptions might be far different from what they intend.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, absolutely. There was very much a sense of that and a kind of blind faith as well, which again goes back to what we've been talking about, this inability to question things would be the inability to question things and the idea that it would be heretical to ask, you know, is this really what we want to do? Is this achieving what we want to achieve? Is this really silly over engineering when we could just be eating less meat, for example? Or does the world need this? Is this going to have potentially massive consequences that we didn't intend? And yes, there was very much a kind of a cult of the inventor. You don't want to question the visionary genius behind all of it. And all of those visionary geniuses behind all of these pieces of technology were people with massive egos who were really motivated by a quest for validation and fame. And Steve Jobs and Elon Musk came up quite a lot.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, absolutely. And part of that comes from the way that we report on tech, which is that we think of progress as technology as progress, that it must be good. And we don't immediately ask those critical questions. But when we think about social issues, we're always looking for the problems there, if you see what I mean. So it's almost like when we're looking at human things, we're looking to problematize them, but when we're looking at inventions and pieces of equipment, we're dazzled by the potential there. And maybe we need a bit of balance in those two things and be more willing to criticise technology and more open to look at the possibilities of solving human problems by changing our behaviour rather than constantly looking at what's wrong with kind of moral change or legislation or the rest of it.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually, if we give that power up, it's more likely to be beneficial to men than for women because men, they'll be, even in the most misogynistic societies, women are valued for their ability to produce children. So it was a giant can of worms for me. And really interesting way of kind of putting into perspective how the double-edged sword of reproductive power, what it is for women, it's a source of weakness and a source of power.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in a way these are all products of a kind of particularly male way of controlling birth, food, sex and death, or a male idea of how we should be approaching these questions, which again brings up very interesting, you know, it's interesting when you look at artificial wombs, they have the potential to liberate women and make women equal to men in that men and women could both just supply the gametes and then the gestation could happen externally. It means women, their careers won't have to suffer from being pregnant, they won't face the same kind of discrimination. It's an incredible source of equality in many ways. But actually for me, I mean, the big thing from writing that section was realizing that the source of so many of our weaknesses, women, the fact that we are the ones that bear the children and the basis of the inequality between the sexes is also the source of an amazing power that women have that men unequivocally don't have.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of them did, I mean none of them saw their tech as solving fundamental human problems and making life better for people, making life better for everybody, and they kind of quite often when I brought up the problems with them, they were quite irritated because they were saying, you know, can't you see we're going to be providing companionship for the lonely? We're going to be saving the planet. We're going to be saving really premature babies. We're going to be freeing old people from the fear of death. All these other considerations kind of got in the way very much. And that was worrying. All of the people who are behind all of these inventions, apart from one member of one of the teams working on artificial wombs, they were all men, all of them.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“trust them to be pregnant. And when a technology like this can exist and they'll be able to, they're hoping that they'll be able to start trials with human babies sometime this year, you don't need a full replacement for pregnancy for that. You could just have this bio bag and you could deem certain women as being not responsible enough to carry on with their pregnancy. And that really, really terrifies me.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It exposed for me the gulf between the perfect world in which this technology is being developed and the real world and the fact that we need to sort things out pretty quickly before this technology arrives because it could be put to use for some very nefarious ends. For example, if you think that this technology is being developed to save the most vulnerable babies on Earth, supermature babies, few people could argue with that. Few people would say, no, I don't want these babies to die. But, you know, in certain states, in certain parts of America, in certain parts of the UK and in Europe, there are people who will make arguments saying if we're going to rescue vulnerable babies who are born prematurely, we should rescue vulnerable babies who are being gestated inside the wombs of women who are taking drugs or behaving inappropriately. Maybe they're smoking. Maybe they're not very bright. Maybe there are all sorts of reasons why we can't.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of all of the sections of my book, this was the most difficult to write. And this was one that was hardest to find interviewees. It was easier to find someone prepared to say on the record that they wanted to have sex with a robot than people who would say they would like to gestate a baby in a bag. So it was really challenging, but also terrifying the kind of implications of what this means for women, the rights of women are based so much on our autonomy over our bodies, you're right to choose whether or not to be pregnant is the right to choose what happens to your body. What if it doesn't happen to your body? What if you can say, okay, I don't want to have this baby? And the state could say, all right, well, transfer it into a biobag and we'll grow it there. Why should women have the right to say that their baby is going to die just because they don't want to gestate it? I mean, that was just one of many, many different implications of this technology. And so, yes, artificial wounds for me were the most terrifying.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around and their definitely gestating, but they are not inside any animal. But it turns out that human beings have been trying to do this for a long time, to improve outcomes for premature babies. And it must be said that at this stage, it's not possible to replace pregnancy because whilst you can keep, well, not fetuses, you can keep embryo embryos after conception for up to two weeks there is a kind of ethical limit that you're supposed to destroy embryos after two weeks. But at some point it will be scientifically possible to grow embryos for longer and the points between saving a very premature baby and growing an embryo will one day meet one day in the very distant future. Well, not very within a few generations. So these artificial wounds, the idea of completely replacing pregnancy is a lot further off than the inventions, the other inventions in my book. But even partially replacing pregnancy comes with enormous ramifications.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super premature babies and all they're trying to do is improve outcomes for premature babies because at the moment if you have a baby too soon the baby's put in an incubator the incubator treats the baby as if it's a newborn, not a fetus. So it supports the baby with breathing but it doesn't allow the process of gestation to continue. Whereas their invention, the biobag allows the baby to carry on gestating and the biobag is a kind of ziploc bag, a big plastic bag filled with man-made amniotic fluid. And there's a portal into it through which some tubes go that are put into the lamb's umbilical cord and that oxygenates the blood, removes carbon dioxide and acts as a sort of artificial placenta. So this was enormous news when it came out in 2017 because it came with some incredible pictures of these lambs that look very much like fetuses and then a few weeks later there they are and they've grown wool all over themselves and they're moving.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is, I have to say. It is Cole. Although the motivation for this is slightly different, the motivation for this, and the birth section is about artificial wombs, what if you could have a baby without anyone being pregnant, gestating a baby outside the human body, which is kind of referred to as ectogenesis, it's a word coined by JBS Haldane, which sounds very science fiction, but we are creeping closer to it every year, and that's because of attempts to save ever more premature babies. And in 2017, some researchers at the Children's Hospital Philadelphia showed that they had managed to gestate lamb fetuses in bags for several weeks, and when they opened the bags, the land inside were no different from lambs that had gestated inside the uteruses of pregnant ewes. And these researchers, they work with”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Section is a really good example of that because I spoke to Mark Post, who's the man who created the first lab grown hamburger, which I'm sure if anyone listening now, if they think of lab-grown meat, they will imagine this burger in a petri dish that became this big made in the news a few years ago and it was his burger. He's very clearly not driven by anything other than total excitement about what he's doing and the idea that it might change the world. And I think his heart is in the right place. So, you know, I could ask him anything. But it's the people who the shutters come down and where they don't want you piercing the hype where it becomes really interesting and you think, hmm, why don't you like this? I really love that part of the job, I have to say.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did, but I'm quite good at it because I'm not afraid of looking stupid. It's a great, I've discovered now that you can have a lot of power and strength as a journalist if you're prepared to ask very basic questions and also I do all of my own transcription, which I have to say is a living hell and takes ages and is really dull. But what it means is I'm intimately familiar with every word my interviewees have said. And when you look at the language people use, you can really cut through and see what they're confident talking about and what they're not. So I was constantly confronted with hype and I really enjoy kind of piercing it and asking those basic questions. And you very quickly get a feel for who is genuine and authentic, who is really enjoying pulling the wool over your eyes and gets very cross when you ask very simple questions. And who is genuinely engaged in the mission that they say that they are into? I mean, and in the meats.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at the way that sex robots are reported on, for example, journalists really uncritically report on it, all lab grown meat. If you look at any other coverage of it, people are dazzled by the idea of it and they don't want to puncture the idea by injecting a bit of reality into it and saying, hmm, maybe this isn't ready for human consumption. Maybe this robot isn't quite as good as the inventor said it was. Because there are stories that we like to tell ourselves and the people behind these technologies play on that quite a lot by giving us that narrative and assuming that nobody's going to probe too deeply into it and make it kind of disintegrate.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that's true. And they are kind of driving things forward very quietly and very relentlessly and their influenced by ethics, of course, but generally also by market forces, which are kind of more powerful than any government at the moment, certainly. And when you talk about, you know, we're influenced by what we can see, there is also this aspect that I discovered from doing the reporting of the book of the performances that the people who create this technology are prepared to put on to show the public what they're doing. And they are performances. And even when you ask questions that aren't really very welcome or aren't the questions that they want, they all kind of shut down and get very cross because they want you to see a particular kind of display of what they're doing and not think about, you know, the unintended consequences of all of this or what could go wrong in all of this. I guess that's kind of obvious any business would want to control their image in that way. But the performances that they put on are very distracting.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, it actually has led me to do some further reporting, some things that I've been looking at since writing the book, particularly when you're looking at funding and the philanthropists who fund the nonprofits that have been promoting, like Bruce Friedrich's organization, that it made me look at how the world is being sort of quietly shaped by people who are spending their money, giving their money away according to their own ethical positions that makes them far more powerful than any government and that they're sort of quietly driving certain areas of technology and certain kind of lobby groups and wielding an enormous amount of power that is largely unseen and it requires quite a bit of effort to kind of join the dots, I would say, on all of that.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep it very quiet. So I met some remarkable people. I met this guy, Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute, who's dedicated his life to stopping animal agriculture, who was so eloquent and so inspiring and interesting. But he used to be head of vegan campaigns at Peter, and he doesn't really mention that until I bring it up. And then when I probe into who all the funders are, who are backing these companies, they're all vegans too, but that's all kept quite quiet. So that was part of the story as well. Why is everyone keeping quiet about this veganism? And is the future of meat really going to be vegan?”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that was one of the most interesting things about it. And that's the reason why clean meat in the title is vegan meat, is clean meat, which is what they were calling lab-grown meat at the time of my reporting that I think they're now calling it cultivated meat. The industry is entirely run by and funded by vegans. And they keep it very quiet because it's based on a premise It's based on the premise that the animal rights argument that the ethical veganism argument has failed, that people haven't stopped eating meat even though they know that it's produced in a horrible way. So instead we need to be telling people it's healthier and better for the environment to not eat meat grown in an animal and you shouldn't mention veganism because it puts people off. People feel like there's an attitude of moral rectitude tied to the idea of being a vegan. The future all these people are fighting for is a future where the entire meat industry is run by and controlled by vegans, but the vegans themselves”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has to give. And so there are kind of two directions that we can go in. One is that we eat less meat and the other is that we eat the same amount of meat, but we produce it in a different way, which is what these Silicon Valley giants say they are able to do, which is growing meat in laboratories, taking biopsies of animals culturing them and growing them into meat that we can eat. And this is not, you might think of be thinking about beyond burgers and impossible burgers here. That's not what I'm talking about. Those are plant-based meats. Those are meats where there's a kind of plants that have been tinkered with in a very clever way to turn them into very convincing meat substitutes. This is actual meat, but instead of being grown on the body of an animal, it's been grown in a lab. And I got to go to a Silicon Valley startup and eat a chicken nugget from a chicken named Ian who is still alive and flapping his wings. I believe even now. Also they told me.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, absolutely. I look at intensive animal agriculture and all the different reasons why it's completely indefensible without looking at the animal rights argument. And there are many, many reasons. It's a massive contributor to climate change. It's a massive contributor to antibiotic resistance. It causes water pollution. It uses land in an absurdly inefficient way, eating meat makes us ill, causes cancer, causes heart disease. We know that eating meat relies on the death of animals and that most animals live really horrible lives in order to become our meat but that isn't enough for carnivores like me. I'm somebody who eats meat to stop eating meat. We shut our eyes when we open our mouth but the world is becoming much more overpopulated and if we continue eating meat at the rate that we're doing the cause of the stinction basically something.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think there is definitely, technology is massively useful. Here we are in lockdown. Ten years ago, lockdown wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't had Zoom and Netflix and all the different ways of remote working that we have now in many ways. We're all alive because of technology at the moment. But you need to ask all the time, what are we being sold? Is it snake oil? Is it something that's strictly necessary? And if it's not strictly necessary, what are going to be the unintended consequences of using this technology and is it worth it?”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we need to be sceptical about all technology, and I think that's one of the great virtues of looking at all of this from my background was that I'm not a tech journalist. So I'm asking very basic questions and I'm skeptical in a way that maybe a tech journalist wouldn't be. And I'm kind of not dazzled by things in the same way. And I don't have ongoing relationships with the people making this tech. I'm definitely not a Luddite. I really see the point of technology. I think we need to be able to ask questions all the time from the beginning about it. But the first question we should ask is, do we really need this? And in the case of sex robots, lab grown meat, artificial wombs, artificial wombs, maybe there's more of a question mark over it, and euthanasia machines. I would say the argument is that we don't need any of these things. They are being provided to us as a way of stopping us from confronting things that we could do if we were prepared to do this sort of intellectual work of solving problems.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“have to make sure that we don't lose what makes us human when we interact with them, when we get used to it really interacting profoundly with very realistic looking robots.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rape fantasies on something that is very hyper realistic looks like a woman sounds like a woman. And that may be true, but for me, the greatest problem was an even bigger problem, a broader problem, which is these robots will enable human beings to have relationships where only what they want matters, a partnership where one side of the partnership is the only side that matters. And when we get used to having a partnership where all that matters is what you want and when you want to have sex and your partner always laughs at your jokes and never has periods and is always in the mood and doesn't have any annoying friends, relationships with other human beings will start to be a little bit more like hard work. And when empathy no longer becomes a requirement of a relationship, then we will lose our humanity a little bit. So, you know, even though sex robots sound like the stuff of science fiction, they are definitely coming. And when they do come, we...”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's like, don't worry, you know, we can have the loud music, but you can also have your piece because here's a little piece of technology that will solve the problem. Of course, they could just switch the music off, but they're not going to do that because we want to have our cake and eat it. We want to be able to have everything at once. And we're relying on technology to help us do that. But what technology does is it just creates extra orders of magnitudes of problems. And the thing about sex robots for me was there are kind of, I mean, I don't want to say obvious arguments because they're very legitimate arguments about the danger of having such objectified forms of femininity and they are basically only female dolls. I mean, obviously there are some male sex robots who are being built, but those are really only for PR purposes, I would say. And the vast majority of the people who buy the sex dolls are men, even the male sex dolls are born by men. There's a kind of classic argument that it will further objectify women. It will allow men to act out.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, I mean, the people who make sex robots, and it's not just abys creations, there are many people all over the world racing each other to be the first to put a really realistic sex robot on the market. They all claim that they are providing companionship for the lonely, for the bereaved, for people who would otherwise have no chance of having a relationship. But what those people need is human contact. They don't need circuitry and silicone. And, you know, I had this very striking experience which stayed with me throughout the entire book when I was in Las Vegas interviewing this robot inventor and I went back to my hotel room and the hotel was playing really really loud music to try and get people to come into the casino and gamble and I was exhausted. I was worried about how I was going to sleep but when I got up to my hotel room I saw that the management had left this profusion of different kinds of earplugs in a little tray next to the bed.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. I mean, in the world of Android robotics, there is something called the uncanny valley, which is a sort of theory that is when human beings are confronted with something that is almost but not quite human, you feel disgust, you feel kind of horror. And with harmony, you know, she was very impressive, but I was encouraged to talk to her and to interview her. And my mind went completely blank. I didn't know how to relate to her or how to talk to her. And her eyes were kind of darting between me and Matt McMullen, who runs Abyss Creations. And she looked real, but also she wasn't real. Her movement wasn't quite right and her speech wasn't quite right, the cadence of her speech. So my mind went completely blank. And I also thought, you know, how do you have a conversation with something where there's nothing to empathize with? So it was a very strange experience because I was being watched by her creator who was so proud. And there I was trying to think of things to say to this very, very...”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and that's a thing that goes through the book one person's bright future is another person's dystopia. And in many ways, you know, when I went down onto the shop floor and saw all these headless torsos hanging on a rack, hanging from a track in the ceiling, they did look like carcasses in an abattoir. They did look like pieces.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is, he has been investing serious money into putting animatronics and artificial intelligence into these sex dolls. So they become sex robots. And the idea is not only will you be able to customize your perfect partner so it looks exactly how you want it to look, but you can also customize its personality. And the AI will remember key facts about you, who your friends are, what food you like to eat, what music you like. And you can program its mood system, you can program it what kind of personality this dole has so that it becomes an artificial companion rather than just a sex doll.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Abyss creations is a multi million dollar business that makes hyperrealistic silicone sextolls and they cost a lot of money. The cheapest models and the cheapest models are headless torso without legs. They cost about $5,000, but they will make a hyper-realistic to the touch and to the eye sex doll for about eight thousand dollars and these dolls are highly customized. You specify there are 42 different types of nipple to choose between. There are 14 different styles of labia. You can specify where you want each individual freckle to go on the body. And depending on how demanding your specifications are, they can customize something for you. It can cost up to $50,000 or beyond. And this business has been going since the late 90s. It's made the man behind it very wealthy. But his dream has always been to bring his dolls to life. So over the past few years,”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What other problems are created in this attempt to have the perfect birth, the perfect food, the perfect sex and the perfect death?”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, well, I chose to divide the book up into four sections, birth, food, sex and death as the fundamental pillars of human existence. These are the things that we all experience. We're all born out of our mother's bodies or a woman's body. We all seek out relationships, sexual relationships with other human beings. We all eat food and generally it's been the flesh of another animal and then we all die. And these have all been things that, you know, whilst we might have tinkered with food, I guess all the other things are largely beyond our control, but we are now at an age where technology is allowing us to control those pillars of human experiences. Technology is allowing us to control those pillars of human experience more than ever. And I wanted to look at who's trying to control them and why and what are the unintended consequences of doing that.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You always learn more things when you're face to face. And quite often when I want to interview people who are on the other side of the world, they don't understand why we can't just do a phone interview or a Skype interview. But you learn so much more from being in the room with someone from seeing what their room is like. You learn so much more from seeing all the stuff that they haven't chosen to necessarily direct towards your attention. And the SHUL-LEAS stuff is something that I've learned from kind of being freelancer, not being part of a system where I'm getting kind of press releases. I've always had to kind of go out and talk to people and I've learned that you get so much more by actually going to see people, even if they're baffled or don't really understand why you want to be in their physical presence.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interviews that you're not just sort of sitting opposite someone with a table in between you and asking them questions, you're asking them to show you stuff so that you can draw your own conclusions from what you see as much as what you hear.”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny that you say that. I mean, the book was always intended to be kind of reportage because my background is actually in documentary filmmaking. I learnt my craft on television and I was a foreign correspondent for many years on this channel four program called Unreported World. So whenever I think of stories, I always think of them as journeys and I think of it as scenes. And all the television programs I've made were always made by current affairs departments who were kind of a little bit sheepish about making, drawing big conclusions. It was almost as if you had to smuggle intellectual points behind some exciting scenes and some exciting journeys. I've kind of grown up on the idea that that's the way you do journalism. But I think it works quite well in this book and as an exercise it forces you to think of things as encounters rather than”
2020-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, with Jenny Kleeman and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source