YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Chatfield

lines on the record: 39
first: 2024-03-27
most recent: 2024-03-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But we have purposes, we have passions, we have loves, these can be perverted, these can be strange. But it's the most fundamental fact there is. It's undoubtedly the evolved fact that somehow allowed us to raise these incredibly vulnerable children and teach them and pass on our culture and iterate it and build and reach the stars. It's love. That's what it's all about”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he says simply imagine that the minute after you die, however you live a long, long life and that the minute after you die, the world is annihilated by an asteroid and everything is gone. How does that change how you feel? If you know with certainty that this will happen. And most people say, well, I'd find that pretty depressing. It hollows out the value of most of the things I believe in. It makes my life feel futile. But why, you can't experience it by definition leaving aside any questions of an afterlife by definition this will have no effect upon you or your pleasures whatsoever. But of course, the value of almost everything we love and believe in and enjoy is bound up with some belief or sense in its continuity in its existing after us and being a vaster identification that's part of something larger than ourselves. And as you say, machines don't have these things. It's not like a black mark against machines. They just don't. We give them their purposes and they pursue them mindlessly and relentlessly.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remarkably though, remarkably, the anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Bleffer Heardy makes this point, we get on with other humans instinctually and innately better than any other species. It's so much more fundamental than the whole stick other people with spears and beat them. Technology is collaboration far more than competition. This is just such an obvious point that's lost. You know, it is a compendium of achievements and sharing. Yes, it can look like an arms race, but underneath that arms race is this vast fundamental structure of shared and inherited and taught and relearned and challenged knowledge. Scientific knowledge is one great, vast party of collaboration and cooperation and sharing and hope. It's love, it's faith in the future. And when you get down to it, actually, egotism is a terrible explanation for human beings and why we do anything. It's a dumb explanation. The philosopher Samuel Scheffler has a great thought experiment.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the answer is partly love the love of learning, the love that is inspired by beauty, the love of the mysteries of the universe, even the love of power. You need to go back to these drives. The future of our species is in the most boringly literal sense guaranteed or not by our ability to raise generation after generation. And this demands love. It is love. It demands this compassionate, mutually caring drive. Unfortunately, of course, many of the atrocities we commit are also born from, if you like, the perversion of these passions.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It gives people purpose. It's also for many people, not all people, the biggest thing in their lives. But love is broader than that. The Greeks knew this. They had many types of love, Eros, Agape, different definitions. To love, why do we pursue computer science? Why do we pursue knowledge? Why do we want to explore the universe? Why do anything? Why not just sit still and inject yourself with heroin?”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two sides of the same coin whether it begins and ends with love. And that's not a kind of little bumper sticker. That's a rigorous anthropological observation. There is no future without children. But raising children is a task of incredible self-sacrifice. It requires enormous dedication on the part of parents. Again and again in social science surveys, you see that having kids, broadly speaking, for most people makes them less happy in a day-to-day hedonic sense. Knackered and tired and overextended, you're not going out anymore, you know, or in certain circumstances, you're desperately trying to feed these little things, you desperately, desperately love and care about more than your own life.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We die in dependence upon others, everything we have, everything we read, eat, do, live in, is the product of this vast web, this global web of ingenuity and manufacture and maintenance. The idea of the kind of solitary life is just, again, utterly incoherent in the context of our species. It's very, very expensive indeed to live a solitary and independent life. You're using vast amounts of money to pay vast amounts of other people to support you, these silly bunkers that billionaires have under the ground on earth they think they're doing. And so this dependency is where I locate hope in our absolute embrace of our biological, emotional, social and technological codependency and our doubling down upon seeking to understand the drives and needs that make for a worthwhile life and then legislate and build the skills and conditions that make sure that we are asking of technology questions worth answering.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fear with having enough food to eat, with having a basic kind of de minimum of equality and security without these things flourishing is almost impossible. And so you come to the very basic point that in order to enable all this wonderful great, marvelous technological stuff, you start with the non-technological, with the human body, with the human animal. The link I forge here, leaning on work like that of the philosopher Alistair McIntyre in his later works like dependent rational animals, is that we are animals, not to denigrate us, but we are brains and bodies. And the most fundamental things that give us purpose are to do with our relations with others, the love we receive and give, the care we receive and give. We're born into utter dependency upon other humans. We're born as these tiny, amazing, vulnerable little things who take years and years and years to gradually be inculcated into the vast riches of human culture and society”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Elevate your thinking? And what does it mean as a society to avoid the denigration of human agency and thought? This, of course, is the governments, the companies. What does it mean to legislate for humans thriving? Humans want purposeful work. Humans need a certain degree of bodily security. Humans, in my view, need a degree of privacy, of freedom from certain kinds of measuring and tracking and surveillance. Now globally I can't make my hands and wave this kind of thing go away, but you can try and very clearly advocate for it and come up with practical legislation focused upon harms and freedoms. Ultimately, of course I don't have all the answers. I think you're quite right to say when one looks at development, economics and so on, you want to enable people to be thinkers, to be to participate in society, to have rich lives. All of the first things you do have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with peace, with security from bodily.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your ability to use it well and thoughtfully, your ability to see through attempts at manipulation and deception, your ability to think about the systems you're immeshed in and their connectedness. So this connects to ideas of systems thinking, of environmental and ecological thinking. Because these often hidden systems that are determining how you're being judged, how you're being surveilled, the services you're getting, what the information you see or don't see, your ability to have a negotiation with these in some kind of state of comprehension or power is a crucial part of modern citizenship. Your almost intuitions for these I encourage kids to play with AIs, to experiment with them, and not to anthropomorphize them, not to consider them as rivals, to consider them potentially as partners as extensions of their own minds and the question is then what does it mean to use them well, to use them to deepen your thinking.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I spend a lot of time. I write textbooks for use in schools and universities about critical thinking and thinking skills and study skills. I've written a children's book for you, some primary schools about neurodiodiversity. I spend quite a lot of time doing talks and workshops with children. I am absolutely fascinated by these questions. One way I sometimes put it is that in the world today, we have marvelous technologies that are endlessly capable of giving us answers. They can plausibly and endlessly answer any question. But only we can come up with questions and decide which questions are worth asking in the first place, the purposes and values begin and end with us. When it comes to future skills, that very loose bundle of skills I sometimes call critical thinking, I think are incredibly important because it's partly about ownership of your own thoughts and knowing what to do with these tools at your disposal, given that you have a tool with endless potential.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So did dwelling, so did fire, you know, the story of our species is the story uniquely of a technological culture surrounding a species that changes profoundly what it is to be a member of that species at any particular point in time. The idea that there are just tools and you use them well or badly, again, I think is kind of nonsensically oversimplified and doesn't really stand up to serious scrutiny. If I want to kill you, a gun is much better than a pen. If I want to launch a rocket to Mars using gravitational slingshots, a pen is only going to get me so far if I want to have a conversation with the simulation of the ghost of Plato. Again, a pen is only going to get me so far. Technologies change us and are part of us.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's redefining what it means to be human. Calculator. But you should because append defined what it means to be human are going to be more profoundly than AI has, right? Karl Popper said of Einstein, my pen and I are smarter than I am. To be human is to be a creature of language and technology. It is to be in the constant process of self reinvention. So to be human is to be changed profoundly. We're born into a technological order. When we're young, when we're children, you have a child. A child is born into the world. They're not quite a blank slate, but a child today is profoundly different to a child from 3,000 years ago, not because of biology genetics, but because like a sponge, the mind of that child as it learns language and culture and technology becomes part of this kind of great connected entity that is the human technologized species. AI technology, the internet vastly change who we are. So did writing. So did literacy. So did religion. So did money. So did chairs.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the way that our power as a species is outstripping our self-control and self-knowledge, they speak to our desire not to die, which is a pretty old one. They speak to our desire to have perfect control, to escape death, to our fear of being judged and destroyed. And so, my goodness, we need all the tools in the box to talk about this stuff, myth, psychoanalyst, technology, philosophy, ethics, art. We need to come together and talk about this. The idea that there's one way of talking about this and that it can be resolved to a consequentialist calculus of do these things or the bad AI is going to eat you and your children, even if there's some truth in that, it's still an absurdly trite way of talking about it.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“by millions upon millions of humans living and dead, I am tapping into a vast form of collective intelligence when I string words together, and lo and behold when we string together a few billion words and do advanced pattern recognition, they speak back to us with the kind of echoing voices of the countless dead. So it's a mysterious and wonderful time to be alive, and if you're not amazed by this, you're not paying attention. But the key thing is that in different forms we grapple with what it means to be human, with what the idea of rapture and transcendence and life and death are, I think the least interesting thing we can do with stories like the singularities take them literally. They're myths. They are rapture stories. They are theological ideas about the future. Maybe there's some truth in them, but even if there is some truth in them, which I think is unknowable, you know, what they're telling us is that we are deeply anxious in a profound way.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it comes to the products of these things, again, there's an enormous novelty here, even in the, as it were, the business of AI, the power of what you might call transformer architectures, deep learning architectures, to generate from vast amounts of data, incredibly kind of coherent, plausible, persuasive outputs. This is something truly remarkable and provokes truly remarkable debates. What is understanding? If they possess understanding conceptually, it doesn't look like ours. To some degree, I love Alison Gopnick, the psychologist and philosopher, her description of AI as a social technology, like a library, in the sense that it shows us the amount of knowledge and understanding that is latent in language and culture. As a writer, I'm acutely aware of the fact that when I write languages speaking through me as much as I am using it, I'm using a structure that was literally”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How is this different, or is it different? Well, there's lots that's new here because there's lots that's new, my goodness. I mean, you know, machines beating humans at chess and go and creating artworks indistinguishable from the works of humans and writing poetry. That's new. That's unbelievably new. And it brings news, right? It brings news about intelligence. I'd said it alongside some remarkable work into animal intelligence and toolmaking that's going on. What you might call mind space, the idea that there are many different kinds of minds in the biological world, many different kinds of intelligence. My goodness, we're learning. We're learning that we are perhaps not what we thought we were, that we are informational organisms, that we, you know, I mean, computers are, AIs are brilliantly smart. I believe they're mindless, but they're mindlessly intelligent. So there's this huge, wonderful, vast challenge to our self-conception as a species. And then absolutely.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“hegemony assumption, but yes, it is collective, and this is the thing that I try to say in the book. It's a difficult message, I think, that the freedoms we have and the choices we have are non-absolute. They're qualified, they're incremental, they're collective, they're imperfect, but this is the only kind of freedom that actually ever exists, and thus it's the only kind of freedom that's ever really worth wanting. You're not really free till you understand the constraints surrounding you. You're not free in the context of technology until you realize the enormous numbers of ways in which it's constraining you and perhaps manipulating you. This is not a pessimistic message, I think. It's a message about the fact that once you have seen these things, then you have at least the possibility of entering with others into a negotiation with them, and until you see them you are not free.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The video AI, and whether it included YouTube and open data or not, artists and writers around the world have protested the use of their work without permission. And that has both moral and legal force. I should declare that I chair a couple of organizations devoted to the rights of creators and to helping them exercise those rights. The author's licensing collecting society and the copyright licensing agency. We see in these areas there being a very kind of clear case being made for questioning or unrolling or disputing or challenging some of the things that are being done. These actions are collective, of course. And legal cases are yet to be determined. I think collectively under certain circumstances, very powerful challenges can be brought against various kinds of kind of”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a limited desktop computer and I can in some skill, I can train up a model from scratch. It'll take me a while and I probably want to get some cloud processing, but it's perfectly possible for me to now train a model if I want to and fine-tune it and so on. Small models may be a large part of the future. We don't know what this future is going to be. There's an enormous concentration of power in certain places. But as we've seen with things like facial surveillance, with profiling, with algorithms used in systems of justice, with algorithms that are potentially discriminatory when it comes to judgment, actually a great deal of pressure can be exerted through ethical and legal force, through courts in certain parts of the world, through asking questions and refusing simply to accept that the answer is it can't be done and thinking of the face of, I think, the CTO of OpenAI when she was recently asked in an interview about the training data used for”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inevitably it was going to lead to the toppling of regimes in the Middle East, the liberalization of countries throughout the world and so on. And lo and behold, exactly as you say, dictatorial, oppressive regimes, or just those who had other ideas said, no thank you, this isn't inevitable, we're going to use this technology in this way. Thank you very much. So again, that gives the lie to these silly narratives of the technology has this property. One of the fascinating things about AI, of course, is that it's only as good as the data it's trained upon. And even the big models have very severe problems with hallucination, with transparency, with predictability, with risk, with environmental impacts and so on and so on. But also that in the open source world, if you look at the list of models maintained, documented by organizations like Hugging Face, you find that it's becoming cheaper and easier to run a model yourself, to train one up.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think one way of taking back control, so to speak, is not simply accepting what you're told by vested interests at face value. It doesn't mean that everyone's lying to you, but it means they have a perspective, the story that AI can only be done by big companies in an opaque manner on dubiously ethical or non-transparent data sets. That's a story. It's a very convenient story. The story that tech can't be regulated is a story. The story that tech companies should regulate themselves is a story. The story that AI is this placeless everywhere thing. Now, the EU has just passed a massive piece of legislation which seeks to regulate AI at a root level in line with certain values. And I'm sure the regulation is problematic in many ways, but equally it is very much an effort to do what people said couldn't be done or shouldn't be done. In a very different sense, many years ago now, we remember the internet being preached as a kind of inevitable force of freedom.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why. You know, if we're lucky enough to have freedom, leisure, and some agency, we want to pay to try to understand better the situations of others, to try to understand where we fit into these vast networks of networks that girdle the world”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That nevertheless it's incredibly patronizing and dismissive and defeat position has no agency, has zero agency. It does an incredible disservice to the bravery of activists, of authors, of thinkers, of parents. There are many tiny acts. And to some degree, I think we need to do two things. We need to pay very close attention to what technology is actually doing to actual people in different places and different times, how it affects different lives, how it affects those who have less power and less privilege. And then we also need to look at the dynamics of the systems of regulation, of governance, of development, of oversight, of scrutiny, that if you are an engineer, what you're building, if you are a citizen in a country where you're lucky to be free to vote and express your mind, of where you're allocating your attention, and what you're doing as a parent, as a citizen, so those opportunities for action we do variously have, I think we need to try and see where they fit into a bigger picture. But it's hard. I would not for a moment wish to sort of preach the panacea that some great amorphous we must rise up and do exor.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no No, no, absolutely. That's why I said it's unevenly distributed. No, no. I mean, incredibly. You know, some people are hugely, hugely disempowered, maybe even the majority of people, utterly naive to sort of offer kind of lifestyle type advice saying, oh, you know, you should all put down your devices or you should protest against this. I mean, if you're saying that to somewhere in Xinjiang province in China, then very quickly, very unpleasant things are going to happen to them and their family. And if you're saying to a worker in a precarious position, oh, you know, you're being tyrannized by technology, you should stop doing what the various apps that you work precarious gig jobs through should do. You're just going to be cast aside. So power is incredibly unequally distributed, opportunity and controller, incredibly unequally distributed. So I am necessarily when I say we addressing it to a we where a few people have a lot of agency. But it's a really big but, I think.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This vision of technology is this kind of conveyor belt that bears us forwards towards the inevitable future is silly, is historically illiterate, is defeatist, is philosophically barren, is really a series of excuses to not think and not do the very difficult thing, which is to embrace the fact that we do have agency in control, but this is very unevenly distributed. It's very indirect, it's very difficult, but it's there and it's real.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Example AI is not one thing. AI is many technologies instantiated in many different countries, under many different sets of values and regimes. What AI means in China is a very different thing to what it means in Europe, to America, to in Tehran or Moscow, or indeed. Cape Town or Cairo, and so There are already many different possible futures out there, many different possible local visions of what technology should do and can do and might do.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“brings incredibly novel things as computation does, but I think by looking at this very ancient series of debates, and we looked at the Middle Ages, we looked to the church, which had this incredibly ambivalent relationship with printing post-Gutenberg on the one hand printing could get the word of God and the word of the church out to the many. You could spread the truth. On the other hand, lots of other people with a different version of truth could get going a printing press and spread theirs. And suddenly it became very hard to control the truth. So these debates animate us. And by realizing their old debates, and by realizing that there is this incredible kind of richness and the sheer difference of what it meant to be human in different times and different places, I think we can realize that the simple stories we tell about AI does this are simply not true. One last...”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years ago to love and to hope and to fear, and elsewhere in his writing he writes again with great suspicion about the art of rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech. He compares a trial in front of a jury as a competition between a doctor and a cook to an audience of children where the cook gets to present the children with tasty sweets and seduces them into doing whatever he wants and the doctor tries to give them bitter medicine, the bitter medicine of truth and is ignored. This sounds a lot like social media to me. The idea of rhetoric, the trouble that comes with the power of persuasion and when that which is emotionally appealing can be divorced from its truth, its significance, its value. I'm not saying that Plato had all the answers and I'm not saying there's no new thing under the sun because of course the point Plato was making was that right”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Puts these words into the mouth of a character called Socrates around the lifelessness of writing. It will encourage forgetfulness in its hearers. They will have a semblance of understanding but not know anything. They'll be like bad actors stumbling their way through a script. And yet he used the written word. He embraced the power and the risk of this lifeless language, this language that could travel apart from its speaker through time and space that could preserve and create incredible informational complexities but that perpetually risked being understood and couldn't speak for itself. These concerns seem startlingly modern to me. He was a philosopher of information, and he realized that this cascading series of consequences calm when you record and pool information, when you record such simple things as laws and property and loans, but also such complex things as what it meant to be alive two and a half thousand.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's fair enough, of course, for us to worry about existential risks. I don't want to say we shouldn't worry about worst case scenarios for our species. I just mean we should think about them alongside a whole bunch of other stuff, that shouldn't be the only thing we think about. It can't be a full stop. I mean, in the book, I talk quite a bit about the philosopher Plato. And here's fairly well known today, I think, writings around the invention of writing. He lived in a Mediterranean culture that was gradually drifting from an oral spoken culture to a written culture, a culture of written and recorded records. His great teacher Socrates never wrote anything down like Jesus of Nazareth, another great teacher from five hundred years later. Written words were not the way these teachers communicated. But Plato did write things down, and he was worried about this. And he, in his Phedrus, writes about his fears.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About this world we live in. I've tried to say, look, a lot of the ways that technology is commonly talked about as a series of gadgets, as something distinct from us that we pick up and put down, as something that might wipe out our species or save us, a lot of these ways are, in my opinion, insufficiently rich, insufficiently alive to life as we live it. So let me try and show you some new and different ways of thinking about these things. And I guess I say at the end of the book, I just want to make suggestions to share my passionate enthusiasms with people to say, look, isn't this interesting? Have you thought about this? In a funny way, it's almost a childish impulse. It's just like, hey, here's some things that I really think are just a little beautiful or interesting or strange.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, my background, I guess, is kind of literary and philosophical as well. When you write a book, you do a strange thing because you talk about we, your very grand, you know, you try to sort of talk about big things passionately or I do. But at the same time, you're writing a book in English at a particular moment in time. A number of people are going to read you, not a vast number of people. And you're making a very modest contribution to the world. I mean, the honest answer is this book is for anyone who's interested. I've tried to tell a story. I've tried to write with a little kind of beauty and passion. And I've tried not to pretend I've got all the answers to offer people questions I think are interesting. Anyone who cares about our relationships with and through technology, a product manager, yes, Elon Musk, yes, if he's got the time, or someone who's just a parent or a writer or a thinker or a citizen who's curious.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of this totality, this ecosystem almost is just much more interesting. And I think paradoxically much more realistic and practical because it takes us towards a kind of real lived dilemmas and experiences. How do you help your kids use technology well when you're really worried about deep fakes and democracy? Where do you look? It takes us, I think, towards a really usefully specific engagement with these things rather than hand waving about superintelligent AI and apocalypses and flying to Mars, which is all really just a load of distracting noise.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This accumulative process that has led such a thing to become possible. So the founding idea of the book for me in some ways is that we need to look at how our species has co-evolved with technology from stones and flames through written words to computation in order to have a richer discussion about what these technologies mean. When we only focus on gadgets and new stuff, we have a debate that is very shallow about is this new thing bad or good? Is it going to change the world? Is it going to save us? Is it going to condemn us? Is it just inevitable? We don't have a rich discussion about, well, what is the, you know, what is the story of our relationship through mediated culture, through writing, through symbols, through computation? What's the story of our relationship with the built environment with the homes we live in and so on and so on? This evolutionary process for me, an understanding technology is this.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I take a very broad view of technology, which is it's the entirety of the human made artifacts that extend and amplify our grasp of the world. This is a wildly large vision of technology that encompasses the tools that people use to make fires and flames and chairs and desks and houses and indeed written words, as well as iPhones and compasses and clocks. And the reason for doing this is exactly to have that long perspective and to understand that every technology, whether it is something new we're astonished by, or something old that's slipped beneath the notice of our attention, every technology is linked to every other technology in a kind of evolutionary web because you can only create a new technology out of pre existing components and ideas. Imagine the making of a computer, and the millennia of ingenuity and distribution.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“with features, and I think we need a much richer and more humane way of talking about technology. I think we need to talk about the emotional ethical aspects of human beings using technologies. As a parent, I write a lot about my kids who are now eight and ten, but were much younger when I started the book. We have these intense emotional relations with technology. They mediate our relationships with each other, with society and the world. And so I want to try and bring the whole kind of gamut of philosophy and literature and anthropology and ethics as well as technological and engineering thinking to bear upon what it means to use and to think about technology well.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, I've written, I think this is my 12th book by some measures, so I can't stop writing them. But I started out with studying literature and philosophy, but being a geek who did maths and La Video games. My first book was about video games. And I've just been obsessed really with the fact that through technology in all its forms, through the internet, through digital technologists, through the rise of artificial intelligence, all of the kind of ancient remarkable stuff and achievements of our species, you know, our culture, our language, our beliefs, our loves and our longings and hopes, our governance, all of that is being mediated through radically new technologies. And I have a deep frustration, which is that I think a lot of the way that technology is debated publicly is very thin, is very much about individual users using gadgets.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Summer heats up in FX's the shards. Said in 80s Los Angeles. The shards follows a group of beautiful, privileged prep school students who are preyed on by the trawler, a serial killer targeting teenagers across the city. This fever dream of youth, beauties, sex, and mystery is a must-see. FX's the shards, streaming August 5th on Hulu on Disney+. Sign up now at Disneyplus.com.”
2024-03-27 · Intelligence Squared · How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, with Tom Chatfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT