#we're going to have a productive conversation or none at all we're adults here

[scarrletmoon]

okay i know the Discourse™️ has been going on for way too long at this point, but

i think some people outside of the OFMD fandom don’t actually get why we’re particularly annoying about this show

OFMD is not the first queer show to ever exist. if anything, it's a late entry in decades of queer media. over a year and a half since the first few episodes aired, everyone knows that OFMD is queer. that doesn't make it particularly special

but back in March? this is the trailer that dropped in February of 2022, 2 weeks before the premier. if you're used to seeing queer chemistry in shows that aren't intended to be queer, you might see the hints between Ed and Stede here. but to most people? it's just a silly little pirate comedy. just guys being dudes. the trailer doesn't even hint at the other 2 canonical queer relationships in the show -- the closest it gets suggesting romance is the music and the pink in the poster

so when people watched this show in March 2022, they went into it expecting subtext and nothing else. to them, it was like watching Sherlock or Supernatural or Merlin in the 2010s. if you were in any of those fandoms -- especially Sherlock and Supernatural -- you know what it was like; constant jokes at our expense, being mocked for creating explicit fanwork, made fun of by the creators and within the show itself. if we saw queer subtext, that was our problem. this was a time when you pretended NOT to be in fandom, for fear of ridicule. we kept our fanwork to ourselves, we DID NOT share it with the cast, and we accepted that our favourite ships would probably never be canon. maybe one day, if we were lucky, we'd have a show where the subtext wasn't mockery as much as deliberate foreshadowing -- but that had to be YEARS away

right?

OFMD was never billed as a queer show, not in the beginning. there was no LGBTQ+ tag on (HBO) Max, it wasn't on anyone's list of upcoming queer shows in 2022, it flew under the radar through most of its first season. this was a show about pirates, and sure, some of them were queer. but not the LEADS. if you think they're romantically involved, that's must be fandom brain poisoning

except the 9th episode aired, and they kissed. and the show said "you're not crazy for thinking they have chemistry because they really do. it's been a romance this whole time". and in the 10th episode, Stede realizes that he's in love

(not mandating you watch this clip if you don't care for the show, but there's something that feels particularly earth shattering about no one saying the word gay but knowing that Stede's realizing he is, that it's completely unambiguous and explicit in a way that only straight romances are usually allowed to be)

this is why people freaked out about this show. no one knew. even the creator, David Jenkins, was surprised when WE were surprised that it was gay for real -- he set out to write a love story, using all the tried and true beats of a rom com. he'd never even heard of the term queerbaiting. he looked at historical Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet and thought "oh, there's something here" and just...wrote that, with very little fanfare, like it was inevitable. like it was obvious. of course Jim and Pam end up together. of course Buttercup and Westley end up together. what kind of disappointing ending would it be if You've Got Mail ended with the main characters just going their separate ways?

so of course Ed and Stede are in love

look, i get it. we're annoying and won't shut the fuck up about this show that seems mediocre at best. i watched the whole thing back in march, thought "huh, that was cool" and was sure that i'd forget about it in a few days

an hour after looking at fanart on twitter, i was lost in the fucking sauce

there's just so much to unpack from a mere 10 episodes. it covers racism, toxic masculinity, gender expression, sexuality, trauma and abuse. and i don't think we should overlook the fact that the non-white characters in this show get to be fully human in a way i haven't seen in my favourite shows in recent memory

additionally, most OFMD are 25 or older. we're not people who've been spoiled by queer rep, who don't get how hard it used to be, how you'd have to grovel for scraps, how shipping and fanfiction was a way to find queer rep where we thought there never would be. we've been here. we're annoying about this show because for a lot of us, it's the first time we've been treated like our queerness isn't an anomaly that needs to be relegated to its own section, that needs to be praised for the bare minimum of acknowledging that we exist. it's not pulling punches to avoid scaring away a straight audience. it just is.

OFMD for me is like when i watched Black Panther for the first time and realized that this is what white people felt all the time. have there been other black superhero movies? of course! does Disney fucking suck? BOY does it. but that was the first time i got to sit in a movie theater and watch a mainstream film that looked at Africa and said "look at how beautiful you are, exactly as you are"

and idk. i think that's really cool

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

what are your expectations for the twilight reboot?

i don't know if i can envision a version of twilight that isn't cringe so i have zero expectations.

I have none either. I can make a few guesses but they could end up entirely wrong.

I believe the studio in charge of the reboot is Lionsgate Television, which among other things has co-produced shows like Mad Men, Dear White People, and several others. Notably, the parent company Lionsgate films produced the Hunger Games films.

What I'm getting at here is that this is a large subsidiary studio of a large well-established studio who has gotten their hands on a well-known IP that is primarily targeted to teenage/young women.

Specifically, they're not going to rock the boat. I expect the show to be marketed towards the audience of the books (young women/teenage girls) and not to a broader adult audience (see Mad Men).

More, given the books were so popular, they'll generally follow the plotline and try to tie into book moments they think audience members will like, but they will tone it down a lot. Much like the movies did.

Twilight will probably be kept entirely intact. We'll have the meadow, we'll have Bella nearly be crushed by a van, the blood testing in Biology, the Italian restaurant scene, the James subplot, etc.

However, details like Edward methodically planning the massacre of his biology classroom, will more than likely be dropped or else glossed over.

We're probably going to get an Edward who's palatable. He still has an aura of mysterious darkness, of course, but the audience can rest assured he's their sweet nerd and cinnamon roll and that the vampirism is just an unfortunate, if sexy, affliction.

We'll also likely get a Bella who's more talkative and takes more initiative. Not only does this address common complaints about the character, but it's very difficult to write a show where one of your main character rarely expresses herself out loud. (If you read the books, what Bella narrates versus what she says are two very different things.)

The movies addressed this in part by keeping the voice over narration for Bella with... uh... effect (I personally thought it was very poorly done and mostly hokey).

They might go the same route in the show, maybe Bella will intro each episode and outtro with a diary she writes in, "Dear Diary, today Edward stared at me, he was hot", or we'll get her voice over in pivotal scenes, or she's going to have to start talking to somebody about what she's feeling and thinking.

However, we'll probably get all the major plot points.

After Twilight, is where we might get changes.

It will probably take the film route and blame Edward's religious nature on his dad. They can't remove it, as Edward needs some reason to deny Bella becoming a vampire even when he and his family eat animals, and it can't be the spicy 'you'll probably eat humans anyway'. In the books what he said was Bella would lose her soul, Carlisle disagreed with this in a conversation with Bella. In the movies, they had Carlisle go all in as it ah--makes Edward look like the misguided product of his parents than it being him being religious himself.

Even though New Moon is hilarious in that the romantic lead disappears for an entire novel and Bella spends that novel hallucinating Edward, they're not going to drop it because of the importance of the Quileute characters as well as Jacob being the secondary love interest.

What they might try to do is spice it up and tone it down at the same time. Rather than be a complete depressed blob the entire novel, we might see Bella make significant recoveries to feed the Jacob/Bella side of the love triangle. We'll also probably spend a lot more time on the tribe both to flesh out the characters and to distract from the giant amount of nothing that happens in New Moon.

Bella may or may not hallucinate Edward. It was a large part of the novel, but it was weird, and never to be mentioned again when Eclipse happened. It's also not too fondly remembered by fans, even fans of the Edward/Bella ship. People remember the meadow and the wedding, not the time Bella rode a motorcycle with Edward saying "Don't dooooo iiiiiiiiit". It's entirely possible the producers would find it too spicy.

On the other hand, it's all we see of Edward of what could be half if not an entire season. Given he's the romantic lead that Bella ultimately ends up with, you can't have him on vacation for a fourth of the show.

So, 50/50 on Hallucination Edward.

Eclipse will probably remain mostly intact as well, as we get an exciting love triangle there, but they'll probably tone down Edward again. No longer will Edward kidnap Bella to his house, too spicy, instead he'll look sad and cuckolded as his girlfriend flirts with Jacob. The tent scene will probably be toned down quite a bit as well to remove some of Edward's more alarming statements.

Actually...

I expect all of Edward to always be toned down in every moment. I'm not sure what the hell they'll have him say, but it won't typically be what he says in the books in his more "WHOA" moments.

Now, Breaking Dawn is... interesting. On the one hand, they can squeeze a season out of it and if they're three seasons in and haven't been canceled yet then why not? On the other hand, it doesn't fit in with a typical teenage story that they want to draw people in for.

Bella's suddenly married??? And pregnant??? With a demon??? Their protagonists are out of high school, Bella's pregnant with a demon and dying, there's a war on and all these weird non-teenage people are showing up.

They could choose to end the show with the wedding. Bella and Edward get married, he promises to turn her, they ride off into the sunset.

On the other hand, there are fans who would murder them and cry tears of blood if they don't get the honeymoon/the rest of breaking dawn (even though fans simultaneously hate breaking dawn).

We could get a Breaking Dawn sans Renesmee. The Volturi instead accuse the Cullens of some crime they very clearly have not committed. Irina narks on them for a crime they didn't commit because she was secretly in love with Edward (her character having been merged with Tanya's) or else becuase she seeks revenge for Laurent and didn't act until now. Bella gets her wedding and honeymoon but has to be summoned back because shenanigans are happening again!

However, in that case, they have to figure out how to turn Bella since one of Edward's primary character traits (and one they can't really change as it would alter the entire plot) is that Edward doesn't want to turn her.) And they're going to want Edward to have to do it versus any other character, as it validates that Edward truly does wish to be with Bella forever.

There could be a subplot where Edward tries to hide Bella in the mountains when the Volturi are coming but Bella tells him, "No, Edward, this time we cannot run" despite, you know, the tent debacle weeks earlier where she said "Edward, we absolutely can run"

But again, I really don't know. I'm in the same boat as the rest of you.

[vannybarber]

The Prenup: Final Chapter

Summary: After four years of being together and finally being engaged, Chris wants you to sign a prenup.

Chris Evans x Reader

Warnings: angst, swearing, chris getting his ass handed to him, a lot of pain.

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

You lied.

You didn't come back the day after. Or the next day. In fact, you stayed at the hotel for almost a week. You didn't stay in the same clothes of course. You went out to buy everything you needed. Clothes, hygiene products, prenatal vitamins. You were the saddest and most ridiculous thing to walk this earth.

Lisa and Scott eventually came over with your permission of course. You couldn't say no to them. You weren't upset with them.

"How've you been, sweetie?" They both look for your answer, trying to read your face.

"To tell you the truth, I actually feel like an asshole. I honestly realize how immature I was. Chris definitely was, but I was stooping to that level myself. But I won't admit to him just yet. I want him to recognize how immature he was too."

It was crazy to even hear it from your own mouth. But you had time to think it over. You recognized how stupid you looked living in a hotel because you couldn't put your immaturity aside.

"Well this might be a shock to you, but I had a talk with him also and it might've did something." You make eye contact with her and your eyebrows jump. Indeed, you were surprised. She continues.

"I know you guys will be able to resolve this. But you need to try. You've have been together too long to let this get in between you two. I think he finally understands." She sets her hand on yours, which was placed in your lap.

He finally understood? You had to see this for yourself. You hoped to everything that she was right. You actually wanted to fix this and he needed to be on board and feel the same way.

It occurred to you after some time that his points were actually valid. It was just the way he came across is all. You were in your own feelings and took it really personal, which was understandable, but you got stubborn. Even though he got a prenup for his own reasons, you felt as if he didn't love you as much as you love him.

This could all be fixed, but he needed to set some boundaries with Megan. He had no choice. Wait till she finds out about the baby. Evidently none of the other Evans' knew about the baby because it was never brought up. You secretly thank Chris for keeping that between you guys, even though he was most likely still upset that you weren't gonna tell him about the baby right away.

You both are grown ass adults and you're having a child together. This bullshit needed to end.

"Oh my gosh this is great !! All my shit talking did some good." Lisa clears her throat at him. "Along with Ma's great advice of course." You just laugh. You loved your family.

"I think I'm ready to see him. Scratch that. I am ready to see him. I want my fianceé back." You smile and grasp your hands together. You don't think you've ever seen them smile so hard.

"Oh yeah we know you're pregnant." You stop smiling and stare at Scott like you've been caught in the cookie jar. "You know Chris can't keep his big mouth shut." Well that's a Gemini for you.

"Now its really important that you solve this. You're bringing another life into the world!" Lisa exclaims. "Plus I'm gonna have another grandbaby!!"

You giggle and shake your head. "Well we need to head over there right now then!"

Little did you know Chris was on the exact same page as you. Down to every line and every word.

He has always been indecisive and this situation really forced him to take some responsibility and rethink his behavior. You had all the reason to feel the way you did, his intentions clearly being missed by you. Whatever they even were.

He also decided that he was going to set Megan straight about his personal life and respecting you. You were his future wife. And now that you're bringing a baby into the world, she definitely needed to be put in check. He can't even believe how he allowed her to disrespect you like this.

Now he only hoped that you'd want to sort this out and forgive him. He needed you no matter what he said. He did make up excuses because your relationship was too good to be true. He's never had a connection like this before. He never allowed it, but clearly it was for a reason because it give you a chance to come in his life and completely change it for the better.

When he had gotten home from visiting you, his feelings were all over the place. Upset that you didn't come back with him and guilty for making you feel the way you did. He just felt like he was doing the right thing because Megan told him to. Deep down inside, he really didn't even want to get the stupid prenup anyway.

"So where's Y/N? Is she okay?" Shanna asked for everyone. They all expected you to come back too. They didn't know you were this stubborn.

"She's alright. She said she wasn't ready to come back just yet. Which I completely understand. But I feel like a failed once again." He slumps on the couch and lies back. "I don't deserve her at all."

"Now Chris, you know what you have. And what you have is good. Better than anything you had before. You two were made for each other. You're a hard head and I know you're not giving up this easily" Lisa says to him, taking a seat to his right.

"You know she's pregnant." He really shouldn't have said that and he knows it, but he can't keep a secret to save his own life. Everyone in the room gasps. "I found the tests in the bathroom. If I didn't go in there and discover them myself, she wasn't planning on telling me yet."

"Well she probably wanted to fix this before adding more on top of it." Scott adds. And he was absolutely correct.

"Well I'm happy for you! But I you still have this going on." Lisa's voice goes from excited to monotone. She's super happy, but she wished this could have been evented at a much better time.

"Well this could've made things better...or worse." Chris throws his NASA cap on the couch angrily.

Carly speaks up.

"You and Scott should go visit her. I doubt she'll turn it down."

"Yeah Ma. We should see where her heads at. Maybe her mind will change with our advice" Scott agrees. He loves you as a sister. Anything threatening that would have to be put to death immediately.

"Guys, I don't know about that. She seemed pretty definite on how she felt." Chris didn't want to make it worse than what it was, but he always found a way to do that anyway.

"Chris come on" Scott drags out. "We have to try."

"Y/N is a smart girl. She knows what she needs to do and it will come to her. I know it'll work out. And when it does, you'll realize your love is inevitable." Lisa smiles knowing she is absolutely right.

Now she just waits for it all to fall in place.

You were currently outside in the driveway of your house. You drove back there in your car with Lisa and Scott behind you. When you arrived, you hopped in her car to discuss how this was going to go.

Looking at the property, you admit missed your place, but you allowed your infantilism to get in the way.

"Okay he's in there, but he doesn't know you're coming back." Scott speaks lowly from the back seat.

"Wait you didn't tell him?" You snap around mystified. Why did they not tell him?

"Because we wanted it to be a surprise. Well I wanted it to be a surprise." He corrects himself when Lisa throws him a look through the rear view mirror.

"Well um okay. Then this just has to play out itself. Hopefully he's happy to see me..?" You were unsure yourself. The little intimate moment you had before he left couldn't dictate how he'd feel now.

"I'm positive he is, but you won't know unless you get up in there. Go ahead! We'll get your stuff," Lisa encourages. You think she's more excited than anyone. You thank her with a kiss on the cheek and high five Scott then head out of the car. You walk up the driveway to the front door. You didn't get the key out your bag so you rang the doorbell.

A few moments, the door is jerked open. You automatically know he didn't even look through the peephole before he opened the door. He needs to stop doing that.

You appear in his vision and he pauses.

"Y/N? Baby?" Incredulity is all in his voice.

"Yes, that is my name." You giggle. "Can I come in?"

"Uh of course! You live here, ya know." He steps back so you can walk inside. Walking through the threshold, you look around the house as if it was foreign to you. For whatever reason, you expected some dramatic changes. One thing that didn't change is his shoes in the middle of the floor. His bad habit.

"Chris what did I say about your shoes in the walkway?" You scold him and move them to the corner with his others. You can't count how many times you've almost fell face first because of his shoes in the way and truthfully, you not watching where you're going.

"Sorry I forget a lot" he says sheepishly with a tiny smile on his face stopping behind you. This makes your corners turn up as well.

You stand facing him and him facing you. Neither of you say anything. You can't tell if it is because you don't know what to say or that you just really missed each other's faces. Before you do speak, Lisa and Scott are inside with your things.

"Oh guys just put that stuff on the couch. Thank you again!" You point to the sofa, absentmindedly moving closer to Chris.

"We need to talk." Turning back to him, you nod. You remember why you're here in the first place. You needed to put an end to this.

"Right. Patio?" You always go out there to have conversations or just to chill with each other. He nods his head and turns to his family.

"We're gonna go outside and talk for a bit. Okay?"

"Oh yes take all the time you need," Lisa exclaims, shooing you both off. Scott is grinning himself. You just smile and walk to the back door onto the patio. Chris follows quickly behind.

Once you both get outside, you sit down. You wouldn't say it was awkward, but there was definitely some tension. You decide to break it.

"I'm really sorry, Chris."

"Baby I'm so sorry."

Guess he wanted to as well. You were about to talk, but he spoke up first.

"I want to apologize first. I was completely wrong here. I was being an asshole and I deserved everything you said to me. And everything Scott said to me as well." He rolls his eyes at that part. You could only imagine the dragging Scott was giving him. "I allowed Megan to disrespect you and that was a dick move. No one should allow their partner to be treated like that. You're were going to my wife and I stooped that low. I'm truly sorry." He searches in your eyes for something to let him know that you forgave him, knew that he was really sorry at least.

You look away about to let the flood come like Noah and the Arc. You've been waiting to hear that for a while and you knew he meant every word. But now it was your turn. Clearing your throat and wiping your eyes, you speak up.

"This isn't completely your fault, baby." You take his hands in yours. "I am also guilty as well. I acted so immature and didn't even truly try to resolve this because I wanted to victimize myself the whole time. Although you were acting like a huge dick, I still played a part. I am so sorry for not planning on telling you about the baby. That was unfair of me. I know that you love me and that I am important to you, so if you still want me to sign the prenup, I'll do it."

Hearing the words come from your mouth surprised you both. He didn't think you'd ever give in and you sure as hell were making sure you wouldn't. But here you are agreeing to it because you love him that much and wanted to make him happy. Your relationship would work so it would never come to be used. You had strong faith in that.

"That's another thing." He shakes his head and you're now confused. "I don't want you to sign a prenup. We're not doing that. I already plan on talking to Megan about it. And I'm going to address her on knowing her place working for me. Since you know that I love you, so fucking much, I don't need to worry about money. Nor a divorce. Like Ma said, we were made for each other and I'll be damned if I let you get away from me."

"So no prenup?" You needed to hear it again.

"No prenup, love." He grins at you, squeezing your hands. You pull from his grip and jump up busting out random dance moves. His mouth is ajar.

"No prenup! Ain't signing no prenup! Lalalalalaaaaa! No prenup!" After your little dance number, you sit back down with no shame. You needed that.

"I'm glad that you finally came to your senses, Christopher. Your mother taught you well" you say in a pompous manner. He just can't help but laugh. You truly were something else.

"We have a little one coming soon and we have to be out best selves for them. Pinky promise each other that we never ever argue and not fix it in a matter of 25 minutes ever again?" He holds out his pinky finger waiting for yours.

"I promise." You wrap yours around his and grin. "So we're good?"

"Well there is one more thing." He stands up and reaches in his pocket. He pulls out your engagement ring and gets on one knee. Just when you had no tears left to cry.

"Y/N, baby, will you be my fianceé again?" You laugh breathlessly and nod your head.

"Yes, you meatball!" He slips the ring back on your finger and you jump in his arms. Almost knocking him over, he grabs your face and kisses you. You wasted zero time kissing him back because you needed it. It had been so long.

Finally pulling away and balancing your breaths like you just ran a 5k, you both make eye contact and burst out into laughter.

"Come on. Let's go tell them." He grabs your hands and you rush inside the house. Heading into the living room you see them both watching with anticipation.

"So?" Scott speaks and they both stand up.

"Guess who's getting married ?!"

HELP-😌 im so proud of myself. i decided to end this with a nice fluff. it was well deserved. i read you guy's comments and it influenced how i wrote it. some of you mentioned immaturity in y/n and that was really valid. and the point about the prenup making sense.

thank you so much for reading. i am honestly so grateful that you guys liked it. i didn't expect it to blow up like it did. im crying now so bye ✌🏽🤧❤

tags:

@mayafatimakhan @attitude-times @shawn-youth @traceyaudette @kyraroseficreblogs33 @radi0active-thoughts @youthought-iwasa-nicegirl @ohbarracuda @katelyneannxo @jennamarieee623 @craycraycraic @ilikeurdad @captainson-of-coul @joanne-stan @ilovetheeagles @cristinagronk16 @kelbabyblue @onyourgoddamnleft @jessycatth @misz-adrii @geminievans1 @saltyflowermakertaco @a-moment-captured @harrysthiccthighss @dauntless2022 @allboutdatmarvel @ineedpineapple @illyrianprincess @ladycumberbatchofcamelot @thesecretlifeofdaydreamss @marianas-studyblr @obliviatevamps @thevelvetseries @coffeebooksandfandom @shamelessfangirl-3 @quietmyfearswith @kissme-hs @lvgllre @arabescapr @careless-intuition @lady-x-red @donutloverxo @princess-evans-addict

[themjinterviews-blog]

48. Put your hands in the air and say hell yeah. Captain Jack! Johnny Depp!

What motivates you to do what you do? Sheer necessity, usually.

What was the weather like the last time you went out? Hot. It’s Arizona so it’s probably near 100 + sunny.

Do you go for walks often? I’m pretty lazy and try to avoid it. You sorta gotta trick me into walking, like take me to a big shopping mall or something so I inadvertently walk around it whilst shopping.

What color shirt are you wearing? Gray.

What is your favorite type of youtube video to watch? I don’t really watch any. I just use it to occasionally look up songs or to record snippets of stuff to remix songs.

Do you need any new clothes right now? I got plenty.

What’s the next project you are excited to start? I’m working on a nonsensical Adult Coloring Book featuring animals committing crimes.

Do you collect anything? If so, what? Used to collect rocks and Pokémon cards. I suppose in a sense I collect all sorts of art/office supplies.

^and if not, what would you like to collect? Nothing really.

What was the last disappointing thing that happened to you? I don’t know. Suppose work being closed for renovation for 2 weeks kinda sucks because I sort of need cash.

What is something God has healed you of? I don’t really do the whole God/Religion rigamarole... Chances are if we are healed of something, there is a psychological, sociological biological or generally rational explanation.

Have you ever experienced a miracle? Like, a phenomenal coincidence? I think as much as I hate to be a downer, there's probably a lot to do with our perceptions of events

What was the last thing you ate? Lucky Charms.

Do you ever eat food that’s intended for kids? Well, Lucky Charms. I also love pizza rolls and chicken nuggets. But I’m not eating Gerber Peas&Carrot baby foods or anything crazy like that.

What was the last stupid thing you did? Define “stupid”? Most things I do are probably stupid to others but perfectly acceptable to me.

Do you get embarrassed easily? Sometimes.

Are you wearing pants or shorts right now? I never wear shorts.

What are your top three names you like for a daughter? Elliot (this is also my pick for a boy name), Tara, Hazel.

Would you ever film a vlog of yourself giving birth? Ew. Fuck no. Honestly, adopting/fostering sounds way more my style anyway. To be totally frank, pregnancy sounds gross and being unable to take my adderall sounds awful. I’d gain like, a million pounds.

Do you like getting caught in the rain? It’s usually a refreshing break from the heat out here.

Do you think your hair looks best straight, wavy, or curly? Messy, or in a side-pony.

What was the last craft project you completed?: Coloring books for my friends’ kid.

Name 3 youtubers you would like to meet in person: I don’t know any.

Has anyone ever spread an untrue rumor about you? Sociopath ex. Not sure he actually said them aloud to people other than myself, but I was constantly being accused of weird stuff I absolutely did not do.

What’s one rumor you’ve heard about yourself, and is it true? N/A. No idea. Not aware of any relevant or applicable rumors. I literally just keep to myself and do crafts.

What color are your nails painted currently? Not painted.

Do you use a pill box? Jesus, I’m not 80.

List 3 people you know who were loving and then turned cold: it’s kind of generic to assume either of those things as permanent traits. But probably most flings or whatever. It always feels cold when one party loses interest.

Have you filmed a youtube video today? Never filmed one in my life.

Do you leave the house when you’re on your period? Um yes. Life doesn’t stop just because I have cramps.

^If not, why not? -

Have you ever felt threatened for your life? Yeah. Sociopath ex would get overtly paranoid and mistake harmless or unrelated things I did or said to be conspiracies against him. And occasionally my imaginary betrayals would lead to violent words or actions. Like, a bundle of index cards with Carrabba’s menu items and their ingredients, word for word, from the Carrabba’s menu, was somehow coded plots to who the fuck knows to have him killed. Irrational stuff like that.

What are you behind on? Student loans. And when I say behind, I really mean that I actively chose not to pay them.

Do you get enough sleep each night? No because night is my time to be productive, uninterrupted and without bothering anyone. I hate having to stop my thoughts just because other people are making noise or trying to converse with me.

Which did you like better: high school or college? Absolutely college.

Which year of your life stands out to you as the most significant so far? Probably last year or two.

…and why? Big personal transitions and revelations in my life philosophy.

What was the last store you shopped at? Walmart, most likely.

Do you have a favorite pharmacist? I used to back in NY. Her name was Evie. She wished a customer Happy Thanksgiving on Valentine’s Day accidentally once and it cracked me up and we had a running joke about it.

Do you have a favorite cashier at the grocery store? I don’t shop frequently enough and I switch up stores when I do.

What was the last thing you ordered at Starbucks? Probably a toffee nut Frappuccino.

What’s something you discovered recently?

What makes you more creative? Emotional turbulence, certain drugs.

What’s the last magical thing you experienced? Um…Magical? The herd of unicorns crossing the I-10.

What is the theme of your bedroom? None. We are staying in a spare room at a friend’s. But we're actually moving this week because being micromanaged and constantly scrutinized was getting old.

Have you ever lived in a dorm? Yes, for a few years

Who is someone whom you admire, and why? I guess the lady at work, Amanda. She’s like 64 and works open-close every day, and still has a great attitude.

When was the last time you stepped outside of your comfort zone? I don’t know. I test the waters every once in awhile.

Where would you like to travel to next? Nowhere crazy. Just back to New York for the Renaissance Faire.

If you could win three dream vacations to anywhere, where would you go? Portugal—New Zealand—Ireland.

Would you rather ride a camel or an elephant? Camel. They’re fuzzy.

Are you a free spirit? I don’t know what that even constitutes. I think outside the box and I question social conformity and other preset patterns of thought. But I don’t know that has much to do with my spirit.

Do you want to lose weight? I think I’m okay for now.

Which insects scare you, if any? They don’t scare me, they just creep me out …spiders, centipedes, millipedes, roaches…ugh.

Do you think it’s silly to be afraid of a tiny insect? It’s not like I think they’re going to murk me with a sawed off shot gun. I know they’re harmless and therefor not technically scary…but they’re still creepy and unsettling somehow.

Have you ever experienced paranoia? To some degree.

Have you ever hallucinated? Indeed.

Were you raised religious? We were raised Roman Catholic. Didn’t stick.

Have you ever been abused? Psychologically, emotionally, physically and sexually. #sociopathic ex.

Do you think the cops should do more about bullying? I think cops have enough shit to worry about as is and don’t know how effective extensive police interference would even be. I think the anti-bullying message is stronger when conveyed by people closer to kids like teachers, parents, siblings or a celebrity figure they idolize.

Is there a coffee shop you like better than Starbucks? I like them all about the same.

If you could afford to get your hair professionally done, what would you get? Probably dye and highlights. Definite trim of my bangs.

If you had a lot of money, do you think you would use it wisely? Absolutely not. I have little to no money now and I don’t even use *that* wisely.

Do you know any rich people who are very irresponsible? I don’t know many people to begin with.

List five careers that you’d like to have: Lawyer (like A.D.A. Barba!)...Graphic Designer...Psychologist...Self-Help writer...and oddly wouldn't mind being a waitress still.

List five far-out things that you’d like to do before you die: I genuinely do not have a bucket list. If I stumble upon something that seems cool, I do it. Making unrealistic lists won't help my quality of life very much.

Do you dream big? Quite the opposite. I sort of just fly by the seat of my pants. Weird expression. Can’t recall ever having very fixated dreams or visions for myself.

What was your first imaginary friend’s name? N/A

What was the name of the first pet that you loved? Comet. <3

What was the first work uniform that you had to wear? Waitress uniform of sorts. I wanna say it was white button down and black pants.

Do you like to go barefoot? Usually. On some surfaces it’s intolerable and I hate the texture, though.

Do you like the same colors now that you did as a kid? Pretty much.

Do you have a blog? You’re on it, buddy. This is a survey blog.

Do you have a youtube channel? What would I even post videos about?? I assure you, I do nothing that the general public would find entertaining.

[clarenceomoore]

Voices in AI – Episode 8: A Conversation with Esther Dyson

Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

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In this episode, Byron and Esther talk about intelligence, jobs, her experience in being a backup cosmonaut and more.

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Voices in AI

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Byron Reese: Today, our guest is Esther Dyson. Esther Dyson is a living legend. She has been an angel investor, and sits on the boards of a number of companies. She is also a best-selling author, a world citizen, and a backup cosmonaut for the Russian Space Program. Now, she serves as the Executive Founder for a non-profit called Way to Wellville. Welcome to the show, Esther.

Esther Dyson: Delighted to be here.

Let’s start with that; that sounds like an intriguing non-profit. Can you talk about what its mission is, and what your role therein is?

Yeah. My role is, I founded it. The reason I founded it, was a question, which was… As I was an angel investor, and doing tech, and getting more and more interested in healthcare, and biotech, and medicine, I also had to ask the basic question; which is: “Why are we spending so much money and countenancing so much tragedy by fixing people when they’re broken, instead of keeping them healthy and resilient, so that they don’t get sick or chronically diseased in the first place?”

The purpose of Way to Wellville is to show what it looks like when you help people stay healthy. I could go on for way too long, but it’s five small communities around the US, so you can get critical mass in a small way, rather than trying to reshape New York City or something.

The basic idea is that this happens in the community. You don’t actually need to experiment and inspect people one-by-one, but change the environment they live in and then look at sort of the overall impact of that. It started a few years ago as a five-year project and a contest. Now, it’s a ten-year project and it’s more like a collaboration among the five communities.

One way AI is really important is that in order to show the impact you’ve had, you need to be able to predict pretty accurately what would’ve happened otherwise. So, in a sense, these are five communities, the United States is the control group.

But, at the same time, you can look at a class of third graders and do your math, and say that one-third of these are going to be obese by the time they’re sixteen, 30% will have dropped out, 10% will be juvenile delinquents, and that’s simply unacceptable. We need to fix that. So, that’s what we’re doing.

We’ll get to the AI stuff here in a moment but I’m just curious, how do you go about doing that? That seems so monumental, as being one of those problems like, where do you start?

Yeah, and that’s why we’re doing it in small communities. Part of the drill was, ask the communities what they want, but at the same time I went in thinking diabetes and heart disease, and exercise, and nutrition. The more we learned, the more we actually, as you say—you’ve got to start at the beginning, which is prenatal care and childhood. If you come from a broken home or with abusive parents, chances are it’s going to be hard for you to eat properly, it’s going to be hard for you to resist drugs.

There’s a concept called adverse childhood experiences. The mind is a very delicate thing. In some ways, we’re incredibly robust and resilient… But then, when you look at a third of the US population is obese—a smaller number is diabetic, according to age. You look at the opioid addiction problem, you look at the number of people who have problems with drinking or other kinds of behavior and you realize, oh, they’re all self-medicating. Again, let’s catch them when they’re kids and help them be addicted to love and children and exciting work, and feeling productive—rather than substances that cause other problems.

What gives you hope that you’ll be successful? Have you had any promising early findings in the first five-year part?

Not the kind you’d want. The first thing is in each community, part of the premise was there’s a group of local leaders who are trying to help the community be healthy. Mostly, they’re volunteers; they don’t have resources; they’re not accountable; so it’s difficult. We’re trying to help bring in some—but not all—of that Silicon Valley startup culture… It’s okay to fail, as long as you learn.

Plan B is not a disaster. Plan B is the result of learning how to fix Plan A, and so forth. If you look at studies, it’s pretty clear that having caring adults in a child’s life is really important. If you look at studies, it’s pretty clear that there’s no way you can eat healthily, if you can’t get healthy food, either because they’re too poor, or it’s inaccessible, or you don’t know what’s healthy.

Some of these things are the result of childhood experiences. Some are the result of poverty, and transportation issues… Yes, you’re right, all these things interact. You can’t go in and fix everything; but if you focus on the kids and their parents, that’s a good place to start.

I learned a lot of concepts. One of them is child storage, as opposed to child enrichment. If your child is going to a preschool that helps them learn how to play, that has caring adults, that can help the kid overcome a horrible home environment… It’s not going to solve all the community’s problems, but it’s definitely going to help some percentage of the children do better. That kind of stuff spreads, just the way the opposite spreads.

In the end, is your hope that you come out of it with, I guess, a set of best practices that you can then disseminate?

People know the best practices. What we really want to do is two things. One, show that it’s possible and inspire people that are [in] regular communities. This is not some multi-million dollar gated community designed for rich people to live healthy and fulfilling lives and go to the spa.

There are five of them, real places in various parts of America: Muskegon, Michigan; Spartanburg, South Carolina; North Hartford, Connecticut; Clatsop County, Oregon; and Lake County, California; that normal people in these places can fundamentally change the community to make it a place where kids are born lucky, instead of unlucky.

Yes, they can look at what we did and there will be certain things we did. One includes… The community needs to come together in different sectors; like the schools, and business people, and the hospital system need to cooperate. And, most likely, somebody needs to pay.

You need coaches to do everything from nurse visits, pre- and post-birth, early childhood education that’s effectively delivered, caring teachers in the schools, healthy school lunches. Really sad to see the government just backtracked on sodium and other stuff in the school lunches… But in a sense, we’re trying to simulate what it would look like, if we had really wonderful policies around fostering healthy childhoods and show the impact that has.

Let’s zoom the lens way out from there, because that might be an example of the kinds of things you hear a lot about today. It seems like it’s a world full of insurmountable problems, and then it’s also a world full of real, legitimate hope that there’s a way to get through them.

If I were to ask you in a broad way, how do you see the future? [Through] what lens do you look at the future, either of this country, or the world, or anything, in ten years, twenty years, thirty years? What do you think is going to happen, and what will be the big driving forces?

Well, I get my dopamine from doing something, rather than sitting around worrying. Intellectually, I feel these problems; and practically, I’m doing something about them the best way I know that will have leverage, which is doing something small and concentrated, rather than diffuse with no impact.

I want a real impact in a small number of dense places. Then, make that visible to a lot of other people and scale by having them do it, not by trying to do it myself. If you didn’t have hope, you wouldn’t do anything. Nothing happens without people doing something. So, I’m hopeful. Yeah, this is very circular.

So, I was journalist and I didn’t persuade people, I told them the truth. Ultimately, I think the truth is extremely powerful. You need to educate people to understand the truth and pay attention to it, but the truth is always much more persuasive than a lot of people just trying to cajole you, or persuade you, or deceive you, or manipulate you.

I want to create a truth that is encouraging and moves people to action, by making them feel that they could do this too; because they can, if they believe they can. This is not believing you will be blessed… It’s more like: Hey, you’ve got to do a lot of the hard work, and you need to change your community, and you need to think about food, and you need to be helping parents become better parents. There are active things you can do.

Is there any precedent for that? That sounds like it calls for changing lots of behaviors.

Well, the precedent is all the lucky people we know whose parents did love them, and who felt secure, and did amazing things. Many of them don’t realize how lucky they are. There’s also, of course, the people who had horrible circumstances and survived somehow anyway.

One of the best examples currently is J.D. Vance in the book Hillbilly Elegy. Many of them were just lucky to have an uncle, or a neighbor lady, or a grandmother, or somebody who gave them that support that they needed to overcome all the obstacles, and then there’s so many others who didn’t [have that].

Yes, certainly, there’s these people who’ve done things like this, but not ones that are visible enough that it really moves people to action. Part of this, we’re hoping to have a documentary that explains what we’re doing. Now, it’s early, because we haven’t done that much.

We’ve done a lot of preparation, and the communities are changing, but believe me: We’re not finished. I will say, when we started we put out a call for applications, and got applications for us to come in and help from forty-two communities.

Then, in the Summer of 2014, Rick Brush, our CEO, and I picked ten of them to go visit. One of them we turned down, because they were too good. That’s the town of Columbus, Indiana, which is, basically, the company town of Cummins Engine, which is just a wonderful place.

They were doing such a good job making their community healthier that we said, “Bless you guys, keep doing it. We don’t want to come in and claim the credit. There’s five other places that need us more.”

There are some pretty wonderful places in America, but there’s also a lot of places that have lost their middle class, people are dispirited, high unemployment. They need employers, they need good parents, they need better schools, they need all this stuff.

It’s not a nice white lady who came from New York to tell you how to live or to give you stuff. It’s this team of five that’s here to help you fix things for yourself, so that when we leave in ten years, you own your community. You will have helped repair it.

That sounds wonderful, in the sense that, if you ever can affect change, it should be kind of a positive reinforcement. Hopefully, it stays and builds on itself.

Yeah. It’s like, if you need us to be there, yes, we believe we’re helping in making a difference. But at some point, it’s their community, they have to own it. Otherwise, it’s not real, because it depends on us and when we leave it, it’s gone.

They’re building it for themselves, we’re just kind of poking them, counseling them, and introducing them to programs. And, “Hey, did you know this is what they’re doing at adverse childhood experiences in this or that study. This is how you can design a program like that for yourselves or hire the right training company, and build capacity in your own community.”

A lot of this is training people in the community to deliver various kinds of coaching and care, and stuff like that.

Your background is squarely in technology. Let’s switch gears and chat about that for a moment. Let’s start with the topic of show, which is artificial intelligence. What are your thoughts about it? Where do you think we’re at? Where do you think we’re going? What do you think it’s all about?

Yeah. Well, so, I first wrote about artificial intelligence inside a newsletter back in the days of Marvin Minsky and expert systems. Expert systems were basically logic. If this, and that, and the other thing, then… If someone shows up, and their blood pressure’s higher than x, and so forth. They didn’t sell very well.

Then they started calling them assistants instead of experts. In other words, we’re not going to replace you with an expert, we’re just going to assist you in doing your job. Pretty soon, they didn’t seem to be AI anymore because they really weren’t. They were simply logic.

The definition of artificial intelligence, to me, is somewhat similar to magic. The moment you really, really understand how it works, it no longer seems artificially-intelligent. It just seems like a tool that you design and it does stuff. Now, of course, we’re moving towards neural nets, and the so-called black boxes and things that actually, in theory, they can explain what they do; but now, they start to program themselves, based on large datasets.

They’re beyond the comprehension of a lot people, what exactly they do, and that’s some of the sort of social/ethical discussions that are happening. Or, you ask a bot to mimic a human being, and you discover most human beings make pretty poor decisions a lot of the time, or reflect biases of their culture.

AI was really hard to do at scale, back when we had very underpowered computers, compared with what we have today. Now, it’s both omnipresent and still pretty pathetic, in terms of… AI is generally still pretty brittle.

There’s not even a consensus definition on what intelligence is, let alone, what an AI is, but whatever it means… Would you say we have it, to at least some degree, today?

Oh, yeah. Again, the definition is becoming… Yes, the threshold of what we call AI is rising from what we called AI twenty years ago.

Where do you think it will go? Do you think that we’re building something that as it gradually gets better, in this kind of incrementalism, it’s eventually going to emerge as a general intelligence? Or do you think the quest to build something as smart and versatile as a human will require dramatically different technology than we have now?

Well, there’s a couple of different things around that. First of all, if something is not general, is it intelligent or is it simply good at doing its specific task? Like, I can do amazing machine translation now—with large enough corpuses—that simply has a whole lot of pattern recognition and translates from one language into another, but it doesn’t really understand anything.

At some point, if something is a super-intelligence, then I think it’s no longer artificial. It may not be wet. It may be totally electronic. If it’s really intelligent, it’s not artificial anymore, it’s intelligent. It may not be human, or conceived, or wet… But that’s my definition, someone else might just simply define it differently.

No, that’s quite legitimate actually. It’s unclear what the word artificial is doing in the phrase. One view is that it’s artificial in the sense that artificial turf is artificial. It may look like turf, but it’s not really turf. That sounds kind of like how you—not to put words in your mouth—but that sounds kind of like how you view it.

It can look like intelligence for a long time to come, but it isn’t really. It isn’t intelligent until it understands something. If that’s the case, we don’t know how to build a machine that understands anything. Would you agree?

Yes. They’re all these jokes, like… The moment it becomes truly intelligent, it’s going to start asking you for a salary. There are all these different jokes about AI. But yeah, until it ‘has a mind of its own’, what is intelligence? Is it because of the soul? Is it purpose? Can you be truly intelligent without having a purpose? Because, if you’re truly intelligent, but you have no purpose, you will do nothing, because you need a purpose to do something.

Right. In the past, we’ve always built our machines with implicit purposes, but they’ve never, kind of, gotten a purpose on their own.

Precisely. It’s sort of like dopamine for machines. What is it that makes a machine do something? Then, they have the runaway machines who do something because they want more electricity to grow, but they’ve been programmed to grow. But then, that’s not their own purpose.

Right. Are you familiar with Searle’s Chinese Room Analogy?

You mean the guy sitting in the backroom who does all the work

Exactly. The point of his illustration is, does this man who’s essentially just looking stuff up in books… He doesn’t speak Chinese, but he does a great job answering Chinese questions, because he can just look stuff up in these special books.

But he has no idea what he’s doing.

Right. He doesn’t know if it’s about cholera or coffee beans, or cough drops, or anything. The punchline is, does the man understand Chinese? The interesting thing is, you’re one of few people I’ve spoken to who unequivocally says, “No, if there’s nobody at home, it’s not intelligent.” Because, obviously, Turing would say, “That thing’s thinking; it understands.”

Well, no, I don’t think Turing would’ve said that. The Turing Test is a very good test for its time, but, I mean… George [Dyson, the futurist and technology historian who happens to be her brother] would know this much better. But the ability to pass the test… Again, what AI was at that point is very different from what it is now.

Right. Turing asked the question, can a machine think? The real question he was asking, in his own words, was something to the effect of: Could it do something radically different than us, that doesn’t look like thinking… But don’t we kind of have to grant that it is thinking? 

That’s when he said… This idea that you could have a conversation with something and therefore, it’s doing it completely differently. It’s kind of cheating. It’s not really, obviously, but it’s kind of shortcutting it’s way to knowing Chinese, but it doesn’t really [know Chinese]. By that analogy and by that logic, you probably think it’s unlikely we’ll develop conscious machines. Is that right?

Well, no. I think we might, but then it’s going to be something quite… I mean, this is the really interesting question. In the end, we evolved from just bits of carbon-based stuff, and maybe there’s another form of intelligence that could evolve from electronic stuff. Yeah, I mean, we’re a miracle and maybe there’s another kind of miracle waiting to happen. But, what we’ve got in our machines now is definitely not that.

It is fascinating. Matt Ridley, wrote Rational Optimist, said in his book that the most important thing to know about life is [that] all life is one, is that life happened on this planet and survived one time… And every living thing shares a huge amount of the same DNA.

Yeah. I think it might’ve evolved multiple times, or little bits went through the same process, but I don’t think we all came from the same cell. I think it’s much more likely there was a lot of soup and there were a whole bunch of random bits that kind of coalesced. There might’ve been bunches of them that coalesced separately, but similarly.

I see. Back in their own day, merged into something that we are all related to?

Yeah. Again, all carbon-based. There are some interesting things at the bottom of the ocean that are quite different.

Right. In fact, that suggests you’re more likely to find life in the clouds on Venus—as inhospitable as it is, at least stuff’s happening there—than you might find on a barren, more hospitable planet.

Yeah.

When you talk to people who believe in an AGI, who believe we’re going to develop an AGI, and then you ask them, “When?” you get this interesting range between five and five hundred years, depending on who you ask. And these are all people who have some amount of training and familiarity with the issues. What does that suggest to you, that you get that kind of a disparity from people? What would you glean from that?

That we really don’t know.

I think that’s really interesting, because so many people are on that spectrum. Nobody says oh, somewhere between five and five hundred years. No person says that. The five-year people—

—They’re all so different. Yeah.

But all very confident, all very confident. You know, “We’ll have something by 2050.” A lot of it I think boils down to whether you think we’re a couple of hops, skips, and a jump away from something that can take off on its own… Or, it’s going to be a long, long, long time.

Yeah. It’s also, how you define it. Again, to me, in a sense, I’ve been thinking about this and reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus and various other people… But to me, in the end, there’s something about purpose, which means, again, it really is… It’s the anti-entropy thing.

What is it that makes you grow, makes you reproduce? We know how that works physically, but, then when you talk about a soul or a consciousness, there’s some animating thing or some animating force, and it’s this purpose in life. It’s reproduction to create more life. That’s sort of an accident, of something that had to have purpose to reproduce, and the other stuff didn’t.

Again, there’s more biological descriptions of that. Where that fits in something that’s not wet, how that gets implemented—purpose; we haven’t yet found. It’s like, we found substances that correlate with purpose, but there’s some anti-entropy that moves us. Without which, we wouldn’t do anything.

If you’re right, that without purpose, without understanding—as fantastic as it is with our very stone-knives-and-bearskins kind of AI we have today—I would guess… And not to put words in your mouth, but, I would guess you are less worried about the AI’s taking all the jobs than somebody else might be. What is your view on that?

Yeah. Well, in [terms of] the AIs taking all the jobs… That is something that we can control, not easily. It’s just like saying we can control the government or we can control health. Human beings collectively can—and I believe should—start making decisions about what we do about people and jobs.

I don’t think we want a universal basic income, as much as we want almost universal basic vouchers to… Again, I think people need purpose in their lives. They need to feel useful. Some people can create art and feel useful, and sell it, or just feel good when other people look at their art. But I think a more simple, more practical way to do this is, we need to raise the salaries of people who do childcare, coaching, you know.

We need to give people jobs, for which they are paid, that are useful jobs. And I think some of the most useful things people can do, generally—some people can become coders and design things and program artificial intelligence tools, and so forth, and build things. But a lot of people, I think, can be very effectively employed. This goes back to the Way to Wellville in caring for children, in coaching mothers through pregnancy, in running baseball teams in high schools.

We can sit here and talk about artificial intelligence, but this is a world in which people are afraid to let their kids out to play and everywhere you go, bridges are falling down. I live in New York City, and we’re going to have to close some of our train tunnels, because we haven’t done enough repair work. There actually is an awful lot of work out there.

We need to design our society more rationally. Not by giving everybody a basic income, but by figuring out how to construct a world in which almost everybody is employed doing something useful, and they’re being paid to do that, and it’s not like a giant relief act.

This is a society with a lot of surplus. We can somehow construct it so that people get paid enough that they can live comfortable lives. Not easy lives, but comfortable lives, where you do some amount of work and you get paid.

At the margins, yes, take care of people who’ve fallen off; but let’s do a better job raising our children and creating more people who do, in fact… You know, their childhoods don’t destroy their sense of worth and dignity, and they want to do something useful. And feel that they matter, and they get paid to do that useful thing.

Then, we can use all the AI that makes society, as a whole, very rich. Consumption doesn’t give people purpose. Production does, whether it’s production of services or production of things.

I think you’re entirely right, you could just… on the back of an envelope say, “Yeah, we could use another half-million kindergarten teachers and another quarter-million…”—you can come up with a list of things, from a societal standpoint, [that] would be good and that maybe market forces aren’t creating. It isn’t just make-work, it’s all actually really important stuff. Do you have any thoughts on how that would work practically?

Yeah.

You implied it’s not the WPA again, or is it…?

No. Go to the people who talk about the universal basic income and say, look, why don’t you make this slightly different. Let’s talk about, you get double dollars for buying vegetables with your food stamps. How do we do something that gives everybody an account, that they can apply to pay for service work?

So, every time I use the services of a hairdresser, or a babysitter, or a basketball coach, or a gym teacher, there’s this category of services. This is not simple, there’s a certain amount of complexity here, because you don’t want to be able to—to be gross, you know—hire the teenage girl next door to provide sexual services. I think it needs to be companies, rather than government.

Whether it’s Uber vetting drivers—and that’s a whole other story—but you want an intermediary that does quality control. Both in terms of how the customers behave, and how the providers behave, and manage the training of the providers, and so forth.

Then, there’s a collective subsidy to the wages that are paid to the people who provide the services that foster… Long ago, women didn’t have many occupations open to them, so second-grade teachers tended to be a lot of very smart women, who were dedicated, and didn’t get paid much.

But that was okay, and now that’s changing. Now, we need to pay them more, which is great. There’s a collective benefit to having people teaching second grade that benefits society and should be paid for collectively.

In a way, you could throw away the entire tax code we have and say for every item, whether it’s a wage or buying something, we’re going to either calculate the cost to society or the benefit to society. Those will either be subsidies or taxes on top of that, so that the bag of potato chips—

—The economic term is—

—Internalizing the externalities?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. It’s actually the only thing I can think of that doesn’t actually cause perverse incentives, because in theory, all the externalities have been internalized and reflected in the price.

Yes. So, you’re not interfering with the market, you’re just letting the market reflect both the individual and collective costs and stuff like that. It doesn’t need to be perfect. We’re imperfect, life is imperfect, we all die, but let’s sort of improve things in the brief period that we’re alive.

I can’t quite gauge whether you’re ‘in theory’ optimistic, or practically optimistic. Like, do you think we’re going to accomplish these things? Do you think we’re going to do some flavor of them? Or, do you just realize they’re possibilities and we may or may not?

I’m trying to make this happen. The way I would do that is not, “Gee, I’m going to do this myself.” But I’m going to contribute to a bunch of people, both doing it and feeling… A lot more people would be doing this, if they thought it was possible, so let’s get together and become visible to one another.

Just as in what I saw happen in Eastern Europe, where individually people felt powerless, but then, they—and this really was where the Internet did help. People began to say, “Oh, you know, I’m not the only one who is beginning to question our abusive government.” People got together, and felt empowered, and started to change the story, both by telling their own stories and by creating alternative narratives to the one that the government fed them.

In our case, we’re being fed, I don’t know, we’re being fed short-term. Everything in our society is short-term. I’m on the board of The Long Now, just for what it’s worth. Wall Street is short-term. Government politicians are mostly concerned with being reelected. People are consuming information in little chunks and not understanding the long-term narratives or the structure of how things work.

It’s great if you hear someone talk about externalities. If you walk down the street and ask people what an externality is, they’ll say, “Is that, like, a science fiction thing or what?” No, it’s a real concept and one that should be paid attention to. There are people who know this, and they need to bring it together, and change how people think about themselves.

The very question you asked: “Do you think you can do this practically?” No, I can’t alone, but together, yeah, we can change how people think about things, and get them to think more about long-term investments. Not this day-by-day, what’s my ROI tomorrow, or what’s next quarters? But if we do this now, what will be different twenty years from now?

It’s never been easier, so I hear, to make a billion dollars. Google and Facebook each minted something like six billionaires apiece. The number of billionaires continues to grow. The number who made their own money, the percent that made their own money, continues to grow, as opposed to inheriting it.

Right.

But, am I right that all of that money that’s being created at the top, that isn’t… I mean, mathematically, it contributes to income inequality because it’s moving some to the end… But do you think that that’s part of the problem? Do all of those billions get made at the expense of someone else, or do those billions get made just independent of their effect on other people?

There’s no simple answer to that one. It varies. I was very pleased to see the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation. And the people that bother me more, honestly, are… There’s a point at which you stop adding value, and I would say a lot of Wall Street is no longer adding value. Google, it depends what they do with their billions.

I’m less concerned about the money Google makes. It depends what the people who own the shares in Google do with the money they’ve made. Part of the problem is, more the trolls on the Internet are encouraging some of this short-sided thinking, instant gratification. I’d rather look at cat photos than talk to my two-year old, or what have you.

For me, the issue’s not to demonize people but to encourage the ones who have assets and capacity to use them more wisely. Sometimes, they’ll do that when they’re young. Sometimes, they will earn all the money and then start to change later, and so forth.

The problem isn’t that Google has a lot of money and the people in Muskegon don’t. The problem is that the people in Muskegon, or so many other places… They have crappy jobs, the people who are parents now might have had parents who weren’t very good. Things are going downhill rather than uphill. Their kids are no longer more educated than they are. They no longer have better jobs. The food is getting worse, etc.

It’s not simply an issue of more money. It’s how the money is spent, and what the money is spent on. Is it spent accountably for the right things? It’s not just giving people money. It’s having an education system that educates people. It’s having a food system that nourishes them. It’s stuff like that.

We now know how to do those things. We also are much better, because of AI, at predicting what will happen if we don’t. I think the market, and incentives, and individual action are tremendously important; but you can influence them. Which is what I’m trying to do, by showing how much better things could work.

Well, no matter what, the world that you would envision as being a better world, certainly requires lots and lots and lots of people power, right? Like, you need more teachers, you need more nutritionists, you need all of these other things. It’s sounds like you don’t—

Right. And, you need people voting to fix the bridges instead of keep voting on which politician makes promises that are unbelievable or whatever. In a sense, we need to be much more thoughtful about what it is we’re doing and to think more about the long-term consequences.

Do you think there ever was a time that, like, do you have any society that you look at or even, any time in any society when you say… “Well, they weren’t perfect, but here was a society that thought ahead, and planned ahead, and organized things in a pretty smart way”? Do you have any examples?

Yes and no. There was never like a perfect place. A lot of things were worse a hundred years ago, including how the women were treated, how minorities were treated, a lot of people were poor. But there was a lot less entitlement, there was a lot less consumption around instant gratification. People invested.

In many ways, things were much worse, but people took it for granted that they needed to work hard and save. Again, many of them had a sense of purpose. You go back to the 1840s, and the amount of liquor consumed was crazy. There’s no perfect society. The norms were better.

Perhaps there was more hypocrisy. Hey, there was a lot of crime a hundred years ago and, sort of, the notion of polite society was perhaps not all of society. People didn’t aspire to be celebrities. They aspired to be respected, and loved, and productive, and so forth. It just goes back to that word: purpose.

Being a celebrity does not mean having an impact. It means being well-known. There’s something lacking in being a celebrity, versus being of value to society. I think there’s less aspiration towards value and more towards something flashier and emptier. That’s what I’d love to change, without being puritan and boring about it.

Right. It seems you keep coming back to the purpose idea, even when you’re not using that word. You talked about [how] Wall Street used to add value, and [now] they don’t. That’s another way of saying they’ve lost their purpose. We talked about the billionaires… It sounds like you’re fine with it, it depends on what their purpose of it all is with it. How do you think people find their purpose?

It goes back to their parents. There’s this satisfaction that really can’t be beaten. When I spent time in Russia, the women were much better off than the men, because the men felt—many of them—purposeless. They did useless jobs and got paid money that was not worth much, and then their wives took the rubles and stood in line to get food and raise the children.

Having children gives you purpose, ideally. Then, you get to the point where your children become just one more trophy, and that’s unutterably sad. They’re people who love the children and also focus too much on, “Is this child popular?” or “Will he get into the right college and reflect well on me?” But, in the end, children are what give purpose to most people.

Let’s talk about space for a minute. It’s seems that a lot of Silicon Valley folks, noteworthy ones, have a complete fascination with it. You’ve got Jeff Bezos hauling Apollo 11 boosters out of the ocean. Elon is planning to, according to him, “die on Mars, just not on impact.” You, obviously, have a—

—I want to retire on Mars. That’s my line. And, not too soon.

There’s a large part of this country, for instance, that doesn’t really care about space at all. It seemed like a whole lot of wasted money, and emptiness, and all of that. Why do you think it’s so intriguing? What about it is interesting for you? For goodness sakes, I can’t put you as “trained to be backup cosmonaut” in your introduction, and then not—that’s like the worst thing a host can do, and then never mention it again. So please talk about that, if you don’t mind.

It’s our destiny, we should spread. It’s our backup plan if we really screw up the earth and obliterate ourselves, whether it’s with a polluted atmosphere, or an explosion, or some kind of biological disaster. We need another place to go.

Mars… Number one, it’s good backup. Number two, maybe we can learn something. There’s this wonderful new thing call the circular economy. The reality is, yes, we’re in a circular economy, but it’s so large we don’t recognize it. On Mars, because you start out so small, it’s much clearer that there’s a circular economy.

I’m hoping that the National Geographic series is actually going to change some people’s opinions. Yeah, in some sense, our purpose is to explore, to learn, to discover what else might lie beyond our own little planet. Again, it’s always good to have Option B.

Final question: We already talked about what you’re working on, but… What gives you… Because our chat had lots of ups and downs, possibilities, and then worries. What is—if there is anything—what gives you hope? What give you hope that there’s a good chance that we’ll muddle through this?

I’m an optimist. I have hope, because I’m a human being and it’s been bred into me over all those generations. The ones who weren’t hopeful didn’t bother to try, and they mostly disappeared. But now you can survive, even if you’re not hopeful; so maybe that’s why all this pessimism, and lassitude and stuff is spreading. Maybe, we should all go to Mars, where it’s much tougher, and you do need to be hopeful to survive.

Yeah, and have purpose. In closing, anybody who wants to keep up with what you’re doing with your non-profit…

WaytoWellville.net.

And if people want to keep up with you, personally, how do they do that?

Probably on Twitter, @edyson.

Excellent. Well, I want to thank you so much for finding the time.

Thank you. It was really fun.

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his upcoming book The Fourth Age, to be published in April by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Pre-order a copy here. 

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Voices in AI – Episode 8: A Conversation with Esther Dyson

Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

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In this episode, Byron and Esther talk about intelligence, jobs, her experience in being a backup cosmonaut and more.

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Byron Reese: Today, our guest is Esther Dyson. Esther Dyson is a living legend. She has been an angel investor, and sits on the boards of a number of companies. She is also a best-selling author, a world citizen, and a backup cosmonaut for the Russian Space Program. Now, she serves as the Executive Founder for a non-profit called Way to Wellville. Welcome to the show, Esther.

Esther Dyson: Delighted to be here.

Let’s start with that; that sounds like an intriguing non-profit. Can you talk about what its mission is, and what your role therein is?

Yeah. My role is, I founded it. The reason I founded it, was a question, which was… As I was an angel investor, and doing tech, and getting more and more interested in healthcare, and biotech, and medicine, I also had to ask the basic question; which is: “Why are we spending so much money and countenancing so much tragedy by fixing people when they’re broken, instead of keeping them healthy and resilient, so that they don’t get sick or chronically diseased in the first place?”

The purpose of Way to Wellville is to show what it looks like when you help people stay healthy. I could go on for way too long, but it’s five small communities around the US, so you can get critical mass in a small way, rather than trying to reshape New York City or something.

The basic idea is that this happens in the community. You don’t actually need to experiment and inspect people one-by-one, but change the environment they live in and then look at sort of the overall impact of that. It started a few years ago as a five-year project and a contest. Now, it’s a ten-year project and it’s more like a collaboration among the five communities.

One way AI is really important is that in order to show the impact you’ve had, you need to be able to predict pretty accurately what would’ve happened otherwise. So, in a sense, these are five communities, the United States is the control group.

But, at the same time, you can look at a class of third graders and do your math, and say that one-third of these are going to be obese by the time they’re sixteen, 30% will have dropped out, 10% will be juvenile delinquents, and that’s simply unacceptable. We need to fix that. So, that’s what we’re doing.

We’ll get to the AI stuff here in a moment but I’m just curious, how do you go about doing that? That seems so monumental, as being one of those problems like, where do you start?

Yeah, and that’s why we’re doing it in small communities. Part of the drill was, ask the communities what they want, but at the same time I went in thinking diabetes and heart disease, and exercise, and nutrition. The more we learned, the more we actually, as you say—you’ve got to start at the beginning, which is prenatal care and childhood. If you come from a broken home or with abusive parents, chances are it’s going to be hard for you to eat properly, it’s going to be hard for you to resist drugs.

There’s a concept called adverse childhood experiences. The mind is a very delicate thing. In some ways, we’re incredibly robust and resilient… But then, when you look at a third of the US population is obese—a smaller number is diabetic, according to age. You look at the opioid addiction problem, you look at the number of people who have problems with drinking or other kinds of behavior and you realize, oh, they’re all self-medicating. Again, let’s catch them when they’re kids and help them be addicted to love and children and exciting work, and feeling productive—rather than substances that cause other problems.

What gives you hope that you’ll be successful? Have you had any promising early findings in the first five-year part?

Not the kind you’d want. The first thing is in each community, part of the premise was there’s a group of local leaders who are trying to help the community be healthy. Mostly, they’re volunteers; they don’t have resources; they’re not accountable; so it’s difficult. We’re trying to help bring in some—but not all—of that Silicon Valley startup culture… It’s okay to fail, as long as you learn.

Plan B is not a disaster. Plan B is the result of learning how to fix Plan A, and so forth. If you look at studies, it’s pretty clear that having caring adults in a child’s life is really important. If you look at studies, it’s pretty clear that there’s no way you can eat healthily, if you can’t get healthy food, either because they’re too poor, or it’s inaccessible, or you don’t know what’s healthy.

Some of these things are the result of childhood experiences. Some are the result of poverty, and transportation issues… Yes, you’re right, all these things interact. You can’t go in and fix everything; but if you focus on the kids and their parents, that’s a good place to start.

I learned a lot of concepts. One of them is child storage, as opposed to child enrichment. If your child is going to a preschool that helps them learn how to play, that has caring adults, that can help the kid overcome a horrible home environment… It’s not going to solve all the community’s problems, but it’s definitely going to help some percentage of the children do better. That kind of stuff spreads, just the way the opposite spreads.

In the end, is your hope that you come out of it with, I guess, a set of best practices that you can then disseminate?

People know the best practices. What we really want to do is two things. One, show that it’s possible and inspire people that are [in] regular communities. This is not some multi-million dollar gated community designed for rich people to live healthy and fulfilling lives and go to the spa.

There are five of them, real places in various parts of America: Muskegon, Michigan; Spartanburg, South Carolina; North Hartford, Connecticut; Clatsop County, Oregon; and Lake County, California; that normal people in these places can fundamentally change the community to make it a place where kids are born lucky, instead of unlucky.

Yes, they can look at what we did and there will be certain things we did. One includes… The community needs to come together in different sectors; like the schools, and business people, and the hospital system need to cooperate. And, most likely, somebody needs to pay.

You need coaches to do everything from nurse visits, pre- and post-birth, early childhood education that’s effectively delivered, caring teachers in the schools, healthy school lunches. Really sad to see the government just backtracked on sodium and other stuff in the school lunches… But in a sense, we’re trying to simulate what it would look like, if we had really wonderful policies around fostering healthy childhoods and show the impact that has.

Let’s zoom the lens way out from there, because that might be an example of the kinds of things you hear a lot about today. It seems like it’s a world full of insurmountable problems, and then it’s also a world full of real, legitimate hope that there’s a way to get through them.

If I were to ask you in a broad way, how do you see the future? [Through] what lens do you look at the future, either of this country, or the world, or anything, in ten years, twenty years, thirty years? What do you think is going to happen, and what will be the big driving forces?

Well, I get my dopamine from doing something, rather than sitting around worrying. Intellectually, I feel these problems; and practically, I’m doing something about them the best way I know that will have leverage, which is doing something small and concentrated, rather than diffuse with no impact.

I want a real impact in a small number of dense places. Then, make that visible to a lot of other people and scale by having them do it, not by trying to do it myself. If you didn’t have hope, you wouldn’t do anything. Nothing happens without people doing something. So, I’m hopeful. Yeah, this is very circular.

So, I was journalist and I didn’t persuade people, I told them the truth. Ultimately, I think the truth is extremely powerful. You need to educate people to understand the truth and pay attention to it, but the truth is always much more persuasive than a lot of people just trying to cajole you, or persuade you, or deceive you, or manipulate you.

I want to create a truth that is encouraging and moves people to action, by making them feel that they could do this too; because they can, if they believe they can. This is not believing you will be blessed… It’s more like: Hey, you’ve got to do a lot of the hard work, and you need to change your community, and you need to think about food, and you need to be helping parents become better parents. There are active things you can do.

Is there any precedent for that? That sounds like it calls for changing lots of behaviors.

Well, the precedent is all the lucky people we know whose parents did love them, and who felt secure, and did amazing things. Many of them don’t realize how lucky they are. There’s also, of course, the people who had horrible circumstances and survived somehow anyway.

One of the best examples currently is J.D. Vance in the book Hillbilly Elegy. Many of them were just lucky to have an uncle, or a neighbor lady, or a grandmother, or somebody who gave them that support that they needed to overcome all the obstacles, and then there’s so many others who didn’t [have that].

Yes, certainly, there’s these people who’ve done things like this, but not ones that are visible enough that it really moves people to action. Part of this, we’re hoping to have a documentary that explains what we’re doing. Now, it’s early, because we haven’t done that much.

We’ve done a lot of preparation, and the communities are changing, but believe me: We’re not finished. I will say, when we started we put out a call for applications, and got applications for us to come in and help from forty-two communities.

Then, in the Summer of 2014, Rick Brush, our CEO, and I picked ten of them to go visit. One of them we turned down, because they were too good. That’s the town of Columbus, Indiana, which is, basically, the company town of Cummins Engine, which is just a wonderful place.

They were doing such a good job making their community healthier that we said, “Bless you guys, keep doing it. We don’t want to come in and claim the credit. There’s five other places that need us more.”

There are some pretty wonderful places in America, but there’s also a lot of places that have lost their middle class, people are dispirited, high unemployment. They need employers, they need good parents, they need better schools, they need all this stuff.

It’s not a nice white lady who came from New York to tell you how to live or to give you stuff. It’s this team of five that’s here to help you fix things for yourself, so that when we leave in ten years, you own your community. You will have helped repair it.

That sounds wonderful, in the sense that, if you ever can affect change, it should be kind of a positive reinforcement. Hopefully, it stays and builds on itself.

Yeah. It’s like, if you need us to be there, yes, we believe we’re helping in making a difference. But at some point, it’s their community, they have to own it. Otherwise, it’s not real, because it depends on us and when we leave it, it’s gone.

They’re building it for themselves, we’re just kind of poking them, counseling them, and introducing them to programs. And, “Hey, did you know this is what they’re doing at adverse childhood experiences in this or that study. This is how you can design a program like that for yourselves or hire the right training company, and build capacity in your own community.”

A lot of this is training people in the community to deliver various kinds of coaching and care, and stuff like that.

Your background is squarely in technology. Let’s switch gears and chat about that for a moment. Let’s start with the topic of show, which is artificial intelligence. What are your thoughts about it? Where do you think we’re at? Where do you think we’re going? What do you think it’s all about?

Yeah. Well, so, I first wrote about artificial intelligence inside a newsletter back in the days of Marvin Minsky and expert systems. Expert systems were basically logic. If this, and that, and the other thing, then… If someone shows up, and their blood pressure’s higher than x, and so forth. They didn’t sell very well.

Then they started calling them assistants instead of experts. In other words, we’re not going to replace you with an expert, we’re just going to assist you in doing your job. Pretty soon, they didn’t seem to be AI anymore because they really weren’t. They were simply logic.

The definition of artificial intelligence, to me, is somewhat similar to magic. The moment you really, really understand how it works, it no longer seems artificially-intelligent. It just seems like a tool that you design and it does stuff. Now, of course, we’re moving towards neural nets, and the so-called black boxes and things that actually, in theory, they can explain what they do; but now, they start to program themselves, based on large datasets.

They’re beyond the comprehension of a lot people, what exactly they do, and that’s some of the sort of social/ethical discussions that are happening. Or, you ask a bot to mimic a human being, and you discover most human beings make pretty poor decisions a lot of the time, or reflect biases of their culture.

AI was really hard to do at scale, back when we had very underpowered computers, compared with what we have today. Now, it’s both omnipresent and still pretty pathetic, in terms of… AI is generally still pretty brittle.

There’s not even a consensus definition on what intelligence is, let alone, what an AI is, but whatever it means… Would you say we have it, to at least some degree, today?

Oh, yeah. Again, the definition is becoming… Yes, the threshold of what we call AI is rising from what we called AI twenty years ago.

Where do you think it will go? Do you think that we’re building something that as it gradually gets better, in this kind of incrementalism, it’s eventually going to emerge as a general intelligence? Or do you think the quest to build something as smart and versatile as a human will require dramatically different technology than we have now?

Well, there’s a couple of different things around that. First of all, if something is not general, is it intelligent or is it simply good at doing its specific task? Like, I can do amazing machine translation now—with large enough corpuses—that simply has a whole lot of pattern recognition and translates from one language into another, but it doesn’t really understand anything.

At some point, if something is a super-intelligence, then I think it’s no longer artificial. It may not be wet. It may be totally electronic. If it’s really intelligent, it’s not artificial anymore, it’s intelligent. It may not be human, or conceived, or wet… But that’s my definition, someone else might just simply define it differently.

No, that’s quite legitimate actually. It’s unclear what the word artificial is doing in the phrase. One view is that it’s artificial in the sense that artificial turf is artificial. It may look like turf, but it’s not really turf. That sounds kind of like how you—not to put words in your mouth—but that sounds kind of like how you view it.

It can look like intelligence for a long time to come, but it isn’t really. It isn’t intelligent until it understands something. If that’s the case, we don’t know how to build a machine that understands anything. Would you agree?

Yes. They’re all these jokes, like… The moment it becomes truly intelligent, it’s going to start asking you for a salary. There are all these different jokes about AI. But yeah, until it ‘has a mind of its own’, what is intelligence? Is it because of the soul? Is it purpose? Can you be truly intelligent without having a purpose? Because, if you’re truly intelligent, but you have no purpose, you will do nothing, because you need a purpose to do something.

Right. In the past, we’ve always built our machines with implicit purposes, but they’ve never, kind of, gotten a purpose on their own.

Precisely. It’s sort of like dopamine for machines. What is it that makes a machine do something? Then, they have the runaway machines who do something because they want more electricity to grow, but they’ve been programmed to grow. But then, that’s not their own purpose.

Right. Are you familiar with Searle’s Chinese Room Analogy?

You mean the guy sitting in the backroom who does all the work

Exactly. The point of his illustration is, does this man who’s essentially just looking stuff up in books… He doesn’t speak Chinese, but he does a great job answering Chinese questions, because he can just look stuff up in these special books.

But he has no idea what he’s doing.

Right. He doesn’t know if it’s about cholera or coffee beans, or cough drops, or anything. The punchline is, does the man understand Chinese? The interesting thing is, you’re one of few people I’ve spoken to who unequivocally says, “No, if there’s nobody at home, it’s not intelligent.” Because, obviously, Turing would say, “That thing’s thinking; it understands.”

Well, no, I don’t think Turing would’ve said that. The Turing Test is a very good test for its time, but, I mean… George [Dyson, the futurist and technology historian who happens to be her brother] would know this much better. But the ability to pass the test… Again, what AI was at that point is very different from what it is now.

Right. Turing asked the question, can a machine think? The real question he was asking, in his own words, was something to the effect of: Could it do something radically different than us, that doesn’t look like thinking… But don’t we kind of have to grant that it is thinking? 

That’s when he said… This idea that you could have a conversation with something and therefore, it’s doing it completely differently. It’s kind of cheating. It’s not really, obviously, but it’s kind of shortcutting it’s way to knowing Chinese, but it doesn’t really [know Chinese]. By that analogy and by that logic, you probably think it’s unlikely we’ll develop conscious machines. Is that right?

Well, no. I think we might, but then it’s going to be something quite… I mean, this is the really interesting question. In the end, we evolved from just bits of carbon-based stuff, and maybe there’s another form of intelligence that could evolve from electronic stuff. Yeah, I mean, we’re a miracle and maybe there’s another kind of miracle waiting to happen. But, what we’ve got in our machines now is definitely not that.

It is fascinating. Matt Ridley, wrote Rational Optimist, said in his book that the most important thing to know about life is [that] all life is one, is that life happened on this planet and survived one time… And every living thing shares a huge amount of the same DNA.

Yeah. I think it might’ve evolved multiple times, or little bits went through the same process, but I don’t think we all came from the same cell. I think it’s much more likely there was a lot of soup and there were a whole bunch of random bits that kind of coalesced. There might’ve been bunches of them that coalesced separately, but similarly.

I see. Back in their own day, merged into something that we are all related to?

Yeah. Again, all carbon-based. There are some interesting things at the bottom of the ocean that are quite different.

Right. In fact, that suggests you’re more likely to find life in the clouds on Venus—as inhospitable as it is, at least stuff’s happening there—than you might find on a barren, more hospitable planet.

Yeah.

When you talk to people who believe in an AGI, who believe we’re going to develop an AGI, and then you ask them, “When?” you get this interesting range between five and five hundred years, depending on who you ask. And these are all people who have some amount of training and familiarity with the issues. What does that suggest to you, that you get that kind of a disparity from people? What would you glean from that?

That we really don’t know.

I think that’s really interesting, because so many people are on that spectrum. Nobody says oh, somewhere between five and five hundred years. No person says that. The five-year people—

—They’re all so different. Yeah.

But all very confident, all very confident. You know, “We’ll have something by 2050.” A lot of it I think boils down to whether you think we’re a couple of hops, skips, and a jump away from something that can take off on its own… Or, it’s going to be a long, long, long time.

Yeah. It’s also, how you define it. Again, to me, in a sense, I’ve been thinking about this and reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus and various other people… But to me, in the end, there’s something about purpose, which means, again, it really is… It’s the anti-entropy thing.

What is it that makes you grow, makes you reproduce? We know how that works physically, but, then when you talk about a soul or a consciousness, there’s some animating thing or some animating force, and it’s this purpose in life. It’s reproduction to create more life. That’s sort of an accident, of something that had to have purpose to reproduce, and the other stuff didn’t.

Again, there’s more biological descriptions of that. Where that fits in something that’s not wet, how that gets implemented—purpose; we haven’t yet found. It’s like, we found substances that correlate with purpose, but there’s some anti-entropy that moves us. Without which, we wouldn’t do anything.

If you’re right, that without purpose, without understanding—as fantastic as it is with our very stone-knives-and-bearskins kind of AI we have today—I would guess… And not to put words in your mouth, but, I would guess you are less worried about the AI’s taking all the jobs than somebody else might be. What is your view on that?

Yeah. Well, in [terms of] the AIs taking all the jobs… That is something that we can control, not easily. It’s just like saying we can control the government or we can control health. Human beings collectively can—and I believe should—start making decisions about what we do about people and jobs.

I don’t think we want a universal basic income, as much as we want almost universal basic vouchers to… Again, I think people need purpose in their lives. They need to feel useful. Some people can create art and feel useful, and sell it, or just feel good when other people look at their art. But I think a more simple, more practical way to do this is, we need to raise the salaries of people who do childcare, coaching, you know.

We need to give people jobs, for which they are paid, that are useful jobs. And I think some of the most useful things people can do, generally—some people can become coders and design things and program artificial intelligence tools, and so forth, and build things. But a lot of people, I think, can be very effectively employed. This goes back to the Way to Wellville in caring for children, in coaching mothers through pregnancy, in running baseball teams in high schools.

We can sit here and talk about artificial intelligence, but this is a world in which people are afraid to let their kids out to play and everywhere you go, bridges are falling down. I live in New York City, and we’re going to have to close some of our train tunnels, because we haven’t done enough repair work. There actually is an awful lot of work out there.

We need to design our society more rationally. Not by giving everybody a basic income, but by figuring out how to construct a world in which almost everybody is employed doing something useful, and they’re being paid to do that, and it’s not like a giant relief act.

This is a society with a lot of surplus. We can somehow construct it so that people get paid enough that they can live comfortable lives. Not easy lives, but comfortable lives, where you do some amount of work and you get paid.

At the margins, yes, take care of people who’ve fallen off; but let’s do a better job raising our children and creating more people who do, in fact… You know, their childhoods don’t destroy their sense of worth and dignity, and they want to do something useful. And feel that they matter, and they get paid to do that useful thing.

Then, we can use all the AI that makes society, as a whole, very rich. Consumption doesn’t give people purpose. Production does, whether it’s production of services or production of things.

I think you’re entirely right, you could just… on the back of an envelope say, “Yeah, we could use another half-million kindergarten teachers and another quarter-million…”—you can come up with a list of things, from a societal standpoint, [that] would be good and that maybe market forces aren’t creating. It isn’t just make-work, it’s all actually really important stuff. Do you have any thoughts on how that would work practically?

Yeah.

You implied it’s not the WPA again, or is it…?

No. Go to the people who talk about the universal basic income and say, look, why don’t you make this slightly different. Let’s talk about, you get double dollars for buying vegetables with your food stamps. How do we do something that gives everybody an account, that they can apply to pay for service work?

So, every time I use the services of a hairdresser, or a babysitter, or a basketball coach, or a gym teacher, there’s this category of services. This is not simple, there’s a certain amount of complexity here, because you don’t want to be able to—to be gross, you know—hire the teenage girl next door to provide sexual services. I think it needs to be companies, rather than government.

Whether it’s Uber vetting drivers—and that’s a whole other story—but you want an intermediary that does quality control. Both in terms of how the customers behave, and how the providers behave, and manage the training of the providers, and so forth.

Then, there’s a collective subsidy to the wages that are paid to the people who provide the services that foster… Long ago, women didn’t have many occupations open to them, so second-grade teachers tended to be a lot of very smart women, who were dedicated, and didn’t get paid much.

But that was okay, and now that’s changing. Now, we need to pay them more, which is great. There’s a collective benefit to having people teaching second grade that benefits society and should be paid for collectively.

In a way, you could throw away the entire tax code we have and say for every item, whether it’s a wage or buying something, we’re going to either calculate the cost to society or the benefit to society. Those will either be subsidies or taxes on top of that, so that the bag of potato chips—

—The economic term is—

—Internalizing the externalities?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. It’s actually the only thing I can think of that doesn’t actually cause perverse incentives, because in theory, all the externalities have been internalized and reflected in the price.

Yes. So, you’re not interfering with the market, you’re just letting the market reflect both the individual and collective costs and stuff like that. It doesn’t need to be perfect. We’re imperfect, life is imperfect, we all die, but let’s sort of improve things in the brief period that we’re alive.

I can’t quite gauge whether you’re ‘in theory’ optimistic, or practically optimistic. Like, do you think we’re going to accomplish these things? Do you think we’re going to do some flavor of them? Or, do you just realize they’re possibilities and we may or may not?

I’m trying to make this happen. The way I would do that is not, “Gee, I’m going to do this myself.” But I’m going to contribute to a bunch of people, both doing it and feeling… A lot more people would be doing this, if they thought it was possible, so let’s get together and become visible to one another.

Just as in what I saw happen in Eastern Europe, where individually people felt powerless, but then, they—and this really was where the Internet did help. People began to say, “Oh, you know, I’m not the only one who is beginning to question our abusive government.” People got together, and felt empowered, and started to change the story, both by telling their own stories and by creating alternative narratives to the one that the government fed them.

In our case, we’re being fed, I don’t know, we’re being fed short-term. Everything in our society is short-term. I’m on the board of The Long Now, just for what it’s worth. Wall Street is short-term. Government politicians are mostly concerned with being reelected. People are consuming information in little chunks and not understanding the long-term narratives or the structure of how things work.

It’s great if you hear someone talk about externalities. If you walk down the street and ask people what an externality is, they’ll say, “Is that, like, a science fiction thing or what?” No, it’s a real concept and one that should be paid attention to. There are people who know this, and they need to bring it together, and change how people think about themselves.

The very question you asked: “Do you think you can do this practically?” No, I can’t alone, but together, yeah, we can change how people think about things, and get them to think more about long-term investments. Not this day-by-day, what’s my ROI tomorrow, or what’s next quarters? But if we do this now, what will be different twenty years from now?

It’s never been easier, so I hear, to make a billion dollars. Google and Facebook each minted something like six billionaires apiece. The number of billionaires continues to grow. The number who made their own money, the percent that made their own money, continues to grow, as opposed to inheriting it.

Right.

But, am I right that all of that money that’s being created at the top, that isn’t… I mean, mathematically, it contributes to income inequality because it’s moving some to the end… But do you think that that’s part of the problem? Do all of those billions get made at the expense of someone else, or do those billions get made just independent of their effect on other people?

There’s no simple answer to that one. It varies. I was very pleased to see the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation. And the people that bother me more, honestly, are… There’s a point at which you stop adding value, and I would say a lot of Wall Street is no longer adding value. Google, it depends what they do with their billions.

I’m less concerned about the money Google makes. It depends what the people who own the shares in Google do with the money they’ve made. Part of the problem is, more the trolls on the Internet are encouraging some of this short-sided thinking, instant gratification. I’d rather look at cat photos than talk to my two-year old, or what have you.

For me, the issue’s not to demonize people but to encourage the ones who have assets and capacity to use them more wisely. Sometimes, they’ll do that when they’re young. Sometimes, they will earn all the money and then start to change later, and so forth.

The problem isn’t that Google has a lot of money and the people in Muskegon don’t. The problem is that the people in Muskegon, or so many other places… They have crappy jobs, the people who are parents now might have had parents who weren’t very good. Things are going downhill rather than uphill. Their kids are no longer more educated than they are. They no longer have better jobs. The food is getting worse, etc.

It’s not simply an issue of more money. It’s how the money is spent, and what the money is spent on. Is it spent accountably for the right things? It’s not just giving people money. It’s having an education system that educates people. It’s having a food system that nourishes them. It’s stuff like that.

We now know how to do those things. We also are much better, because of AI, at predicting what will happen if we don’t. I think the market, and incentives, and individual action are tremendously important; but you can influence them. Which is what I’m trying to do, by showing how much better things could work.

Well, no matter what, the world that you would envision as being a better world, certainly requires lots and lots and lots of people power, right? Like, you need more teachers, you need more nutritionists, you need all of these other things. It’s sounds like you don’t—

Right. And, you need people voting to fix the bridges instead of keep voting on which politician makes promises that are unbelievable or whatever. In a sense, we need to be much more thoughtful about what it is we’re doing and to think more about the long-term consequences.

Do you think there ever was a time that, like, do you have any society that you look at or even, any time in any society when you say… “Well, they weren’t perfect, but here was a society that thought ahead, and planned ahead, and organized things in a pretty smart way”? Do you have any examples?

Yes and no. There was never like a perfect place. A lot of things were worse a hundred years ago, including how the women were treated, how minorities were treated, a lot of people were poor. But there was a lot less entitlement, there was a lot less consumption around instant gratification. People invested.

In many ways, things were much worse, but people took it for granted that they needed to work hard and save. Again, many of them had a sense of purpose. You go back to the 1840s, and the amount of liquor consumed was crazy. There’s no perfect society. The norms were better.

Perhaps there was more hypocrisy. Hey, there was a lot of crime a hundred years ago and, sort of, the notion of polite society was perhaps not all of society. People didn’t aspire to be celebrities. They aspired to be respected, and loved, and productive, and so forth. It just goes back to that word: purpose.

Being a celebrity does not mean having an impact. It means being well-known. There’s something lacking in being a celebrity, versus being of value to society. I think there’s less aspiration towards value and more towards something flashier and emptier. That’s what I’d love to change, without being puritan and boring about it.

Right. It seems you keep coming back to the purpose idea, even when you’re not using that word. You talked about [how] Wall Street used to add value, and [now] they don’t. That’s another way of saying they’ve lost their purpose. We talked about the billionaires… It sounds like you’re fine with it, it depends on what their purpose of it all is with it. How do you think people find their purpose?

It goes back to their parents. There’s this satisfaction that really can’t be beaten. When I spent time in Russia, the women were much better off than the men, because the men felt—many of them—purposeless. They did useless jobs and got paid money that was not worth much, and then their wives took the rubles and stood in line to get food and raise the children.

Having children gives you purpose, ideally. Then, you get to the point where your children become just one more trophy, and that’s unutterably sad. They’re people who love the children and also focus too much on, “Is this child popular?” or “Will he get into the right college and reflect well on me?” But, in the end, children are what give purpose to most people.

Let’s talk about space for a minute. It’s seems that a lot of Silicon Valley folks, noteworthy ones, have a complete fascination with it. You’ve got Jeff Bezos hauling Apollo 11 boosters out of the ocean. Elon is planning to, according to him, “die on Mars, just not on impact.” You, obviously, have a—

—I want to retire on Mars. That’s my line. And, not too soon.

There’s a large part of this country, for instance, that doesn’t really care about space at all. It seemed like a whole lot of wasted money, and emptiness, and all of that. Why do you think it’s so intriguing? What about it is interesting for you? For goodness sakes, I can’t put you as “trained to be backup cosmonaut” in your introduction, and then not—that’s like the worst thing a host can do, and then never mention it again. So please talk about that, if you don’t mind.

It’s our destiny, we should spread. It’s our backup plan if we really screw up the earth and obliterate ourselves, whether it’s with a polluted atmosphere, or an explosion, or some kind of biological disaster. We need another place to go.

Mars… Number one, it’s good backup. Number two, maybe we can learn something. There’s this wonderful new thing call the circular economy. The reality is, yes, we’re in a circular economy, but it’s so large we don’t recognize it. On Mars, because you start out so small, it’s much clearer that there’s a circular economy.

I’m hoping that the National Geographic series is actually going to change some people’s opinions. Yeah, in some sense, our purpose is to explore, to learn, to discover what else might lie beyond our own little planet. Again, it’s always good to have Option B.

Final question: We already talked about what you’re working on, but… What gives you… Because our chat had lots of ups and downs, possibilities, and then worries. What is—if there is anything—what gives you hope? What give you hope that there’s a good chance that we’ll muddle through this?

I’m an optimist. I have hope, because I’m a human being and it’s been bred into me over all those generations. The ones who weren’t hopeful didn’t bother to try, and they mostly disappeared. But now you can survive, even if you’re not hopeful; so maybe that’s why all this pessimism, and lassitude and stuff is spreading. Maybe, we should all go to Mars, where it’s much tougher, and you do need to be hopeful to survive.

Yeah, and have purpose. In closing, anybody who wants to keep up with what you’re doing with your non-profit…

WaytoWellville.net.

And if people want to keep up with you, personally, how do they do that?

Probably on Twitter, @edyson.

Excellent. Well, I want to thank you so much for finding the time.

Thank you. It was really fun.

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his upcoming book The Fourth Age, to be published in April by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Pre-order a copy here. 

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.voice-in-ai-link-back-embed { font-size: 1.4rem; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/cropped-voices-background.jpg) black; background-position: center; background-size: cover; color: white; padding: 1rem 1.5rem; font-weight: 200; text-transform: uppercase; margin-bottom: 1.5rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed:last-of-type { margin-bottom: 0; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { margin-top: .25rem; display: block; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/voices-in-ai-logo-light-768x264.png) center left no-repeat; background-size: contain; width: 100%; padding-bottom: 30%; text-indent: -9999rem; margin-bottom: 1.5rem } @media (min-width: 960px) { .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { width: 262px; height: 90px; float: left; margin-right: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0; padding-bottom: 0; } } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:visited { color: #FF6B00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back a:hover { color: #ff4f00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links { margin-left: 0 !important; margin-right: 0 !important; margin-bottom: 0.25rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:visited { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.77); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:hover { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.63); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links .stitcher .stitcher-logo { display: inline; width: auto; fill: currentColor; height: 1em; margin-bottom: -.15em; } from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2017/10/16/voices-in-ai-episode-8-a-conversation-with-esther-dyson/