Families so they can be rea for anything. Comcast along with these Television Companies support cspan2 as a public service. Author and professor douglas, you describe yourself in your latest survival of the richest, the impact of Digital Technology and not a futurist. Whats the difference between the two . Beatrice is usually someone you come to to tell you whats going to happen in the future. I have been right a lot so they call me a futurist but really i am a present test, more interested in looking in describing accurately what is happening right now and thats usually an easier way to know whats going to happen in the future but i dont usually talk about it, futurist seen or propagandist fighting for the future they want to see or positions the company is in the best place for as a consultant the most needed place and get interested in the future by scaring them about this is going to happen or that but if you are present which is really more what i am, a cultural anthropologist or sociologist looking at what is, you end up freed to talk about ways that other people dont. For me when i realized this was fun aol was buying time warner, i dont remember if you remember this everyone was excited aol, the first big Digital Company now time warner, the old Media Company and it meant the new synergy, and how great it was and the New York Times called me to write the piece on what was happening so i wrote this saying as i look at it and understand, it looks like aol is cashing in, the founder of aol group is as much as he could and probably peaking at using inflation to buy a real company, amusement parks and libraries and all that and we are probably not at the peakak of the. Com level and they say we cant publish this, everybody says is the greatest thing it means this is coming in amount of futurist, im just looking at what is and what is, it looks to me like the end of the videogame cash out and i think hes cashing out. Of course they didnt publish it but i turned out to be right but not because i am a futurist, thats the difference, it is predictive but more by looking at what is rather than trying guess whats out there. When it comes to the impact of emerging Digital Technology, would you describe yourselfta as optimist or pessimist . Neither. Its interesting, was optimistic about how this will work out or pessimistic about how its going i would say i am frustrated, hopeful but frustrated. Im always hopeful when beings will find a way out of the mess they are in but frustrated we usess technology on people. We use it on people instead of having technology with their ability to use them, we are surrendering this digital renaissance for the need of the market when i look at the people running the Biggest Media Companies today as if they think of themselves as demigods should be in charge of everything from covid and farming to society and education and politics and its like wait a minute, to what end . What are your values . For classes did you take incl college if any before you drop out in freshman year . I saw emerging internet, before the internet, emerging Computer Networks as part of a larger cultural phenomenon. We had just been through cb radio which is the first Media Movement in my lifetime, video happened the beginning of interactivity, only passive using joysticks to move things around, playing pong machines send each other messages and people Walking Around with phones rather than getting a call, mobile phones, they often of how the world works and electronic music and kids going waves with debris on the stage, Just Entertainment in the middle of a field, a psychedelic survival where people were looking up reengineering their own cognitive apparatus and it seemed these things on the internet were part of a new culture, west coast psychedelic cyber diy old earth culture that might think shake things up. How predictable the place where, a beginning and middle and end. This internet thing was surprising. Im sure like you, i was raised in a world where people who liked computers were like geek people with pocket protectors and thehe kids who turned in the hallways, at little right angles, it was a certain type and by the late 80s i was finding out my weirdest most psychedelic friends from college are going out to Silicon Valley work for apple and sun and intel and it was confusing, why the weird people working with computers so i started covering it is a journalist and i saw different computer story, a Different Technology story which these folks were working at intel during the day and going home scraping the bugs off tripping at night and creating images being shown that shows the next weekend so it was like something happening in the first book i learned about, life in the trenches of cyberspace looking at these different threads as part of the same culturale assertion we could red design realityer and all of thee things whether it was fantasy roleplaying games where they were scared but it wasnt. Choose where that takes you, opened the drawer and look inside and go in your own pathway, it was very new and too many of us, it seemed to be an omen or cursor to the idea that going to move into a more deliberate society. The psychedelic culture, the moment describe two, survival of the richest fantasies of billionaires. The last couple of pages of my book, interestingly, i know these are people, my book was canceled in 1992 because they thought the internet was going to be over 1 by 1993 when the bk was supposed to come out. I had a letter from the editor and we were too late on it. [laughter] is a letter from somewhere . America credit in a drawer with all the other rejections of the book so its funny. By the time i was putting it together so three or four years in the making the last tractor who published it wired magazine Just Launched and wired magazine came along and told a different story but what was happening on the internet. A whole big thing but what it is is good for business, the internet is going to create more surface area on the market. Thanks to the internet, the master Stock Exchange would grow exponentially, uninterrupted forever. I understand what they were saying, they look at Digital Technology as the ultimate derivative of the way finance works is going meta, one level above i what happening between people and you can buy stock so you are one level removed. You dont just have to buy stock, you can buy a derivative, one level removed from that and so on and so on or you could look at colonialism, among swimmers on the internet but look at infinite real estate and websites so markets can expand onto new surface and territory so interesting whats happening but happening is a financial phenomenon, business phenomena and one for came in a suit there is a window of opportunity sees this cultural phenomenon is what it is, a new experiment in the collective human imagination, the ideas unfolding of human culture but some folks want to enclose this has a business phenomena turn it into something else. What it can do to the culture and it turns out culture if you can look at the early internet about exploring Infinite Possibilities of connected culture, what does the connected human imagination do what can we do when we are connected when we cant do when we are totally alone . What happens when we share processing cycles in the collective project . That. Want to bet on the internet as a stock, youre not looking for how you increase possibility, youre looking for how you increase probability. The highest probability that will come true. You get on aol in the web whatever you get on in the highest probability of working so instead of using technology to increase possibility, we using technology on people to increase probability and you can see 1993, 94 n95 what we started to use were words like stickiness, the object of the game was to create a website that was sticky meaning they couldnt leave and they had an ad for one of the companies that makes you website sticky that shows users stuck on piece of white paper as if its a happy user because they are stuck on what you are doing. Metric called eyeball hours and that was a number of honors human eyeball would spend looking at your monitor announcing living in the attentionn economy and people wo werent paying attention were the enemies. After they came up with this is when we started to see all diagnoses of attention Deficit Disorder getting people to pay gbetter attention. I started to write about i wonder if a shortened Attention Span might be defense against the world where they create sticky websites and use every tool at their disposal. Behavior slot machine algorithms and how you capture human attention and modify Human Behavior online so for me that was the turn when people, especially people in the Technology Industry began to think of their users more of the heroin users think of it. So what is the mindset . The mindset is idea but its a few things, the easiest way i could describe the mindset is idea that earn enough money insulate yourself the damage to create by earning money and that way or can develop enough technology to correct all the problems you created with the technology you just made so the mindset is Silicon Valley believe with more tech and money, they can solve for anything. Its a techno solution is understanding of the world where human beings are the problem and technology is the solution so they tend to be libertarian, they understand human relationship as purely a market phenomenon. They tend to be afraid, women, nature and black people and indigenous people. They tend to want to own everything, the object is to see ones own contribution as unique, your own ip, without precedent. It is an urge to neutralize the unknown by dominating it and the emanating it. When you hear them talk about self sovereignty and progress and increasing toys must somehow starting over, its funny, there is a place in california where a bunch the tech pros want to build a new perfect city they are going to live in, its renewable and it uses energy and computerized stacks for education and religion and traffic, the perfect thing but its like going to mars or the dark side of the moon or moving to new zealand or alaska. They need to do it as if from scratch they need to begin this art to get to a new territory. This there and then start ovr completely. When you talk to these guys, whether it is zuckerberg or musk or bezos, they all share these same understandings of human beings as the masses and them as one level above. Mark zuckerberg wants to go to the metaverse, elon musk wants to go to mars. Peter teal talks about one order of magnitude above everybody else. That is the mindset. It really peaks in this almost eugenic idea called effective altruism, where they believe it is ok to be awful person now as long as you earn a lot of money and give some of the money back. It is a weird utilitarianism on digital psychedelic steroids, or they believe this is how far the mindset goes it is this tech worship, hatred of the human, the body, of everything earthly that they think in the future there will be hundreds of they think in the future there will be hundreds of trillions of post human Artificial Intelligences spread throughout the gallery. Because there are so many of them, their total happiness matters more than the happiness of the 8 billion human maggots that happen to be alive on the mother nest right now. The future of trillions of robot consciousness. That is pie why i am not a futurist spirit if you can use this and a certain kind to say that is true. They doue matter more. Rosave ourselves, let the people die get the rockets to the next climate. It is ignoring the president. I have much more faith in the reality of the present. They actually matter. Then we would make very different decisions if we stopped the people alive today rather than the robots in the fantasy future. For much more on the mindset escape fantasies of technology billionaires, the latest book, 20 books, we are talking about all of them in depth this month and asking you to join the conversation. For those living in the eastern and central time zones and if youre in the mountain or pacific time zones, if you want to send us a text 202 7488903. If you do, please include your name and where you are from. Also on social media it is apple tv on all of our social media platforms. Send your questions and. You talkk about the mind set. What is team human. I dont mean the podcast or the book. The concept. The concept actually came up, it was a long time ago. I was on a panel. A grogan brilliant guy. He was telling the story about how evolution is really a matter of information finding more complex homes. Information like the adam and ulthen the molecule and the real organism of human culture but as humans become more complex, capable of handing more the information will migrate to them and they will prove to be our evolutionary successors. Once that happens, human beings have to pass the evolutionary torch to the robots. The owned inevitable replacement. I think human beings have some qualities that Artificial Intelligences raised on these logics. Human beings can live in that in between space between the yes in the know. Sustaining paradox over time without the needs. We can understand and look at a problem as something to sustain rather than something to solve. A human being can watch a david lynch movie, not understand what it means and still experience that us pleasure. What is that . Human beings are special and we deserve a place in the digital future. You are just saying that because you are human. Like it was an act. I said, okay, fine. I am on team human. Guilty as charged. Fighting for the right of other species to have a place on the planet. The more i thought about it the idea of team human, it goes against the mindset to call humans a team. The mindset is about the sovereign individual. The man emperor. Thinking of himself as the gustus caesar. That is his goal. The single lord over everyone. The idea that it they are arguing that being human is a team sport. Not the story of the survival of the fittest individual. If you read the book, what you will see is page after page to ensure mutual survival. As an enter species coordination if human beings are the most evolved species, it is because we have evolved the most complex methods of collaborating and cooperating with each other. A lot of these are very subtle. When you are in real life with another human being, you see whether their pupils are getting larger or smaller when they speak. Is there breathing synchronizing with yours . Are they making the micro nod motions with their head. You cannot see any of this on zoom or skype or on a text message. We are trying to conduct a human so society in a world that is not letting us get the social cues that we need to fire for the oxytocin to go through our blood. If youre all mine and someone says they agree with you but you dont get the biologic feedback you cant help but be suspicious of them. What happens is the reverse effect on your body. They say they agree with me but i did not get it in my body. It creates this. We have to reemploy and retrieve this greatan mechanism for workg and being together. Its almost like putting the social back in socialism. I careia about people knowing their neighbors. Understanding this whole human project is not about who gets to escape to their bunker but how do we do this together. Im wondering how you think this emerging Technology Fits into team human. The mega connect 2023 union this week. Reviewing ain Artificial Intelligence technology. Our industry will be how do we unify these experiences. The physical that we have with this pilot Digital World that is more coherent to better than anything we have today. In the future, not too far from now, you will walk into a room and there will be as many holograms for you to interact with as there are physical objects. Think about all the things that are physically there they dont actually need to be physical things. The media, the games, the art, your workstation, any screen and all of these interactive holograms. Think about going in and hanging out with your friends. Pretty soon we will be at the point where you will be there physically with some of your friends and others will be there digitally as avatars, holograms. And just as present as everyone else. You will be there, people there physically. There are people sitting there with you a bunch of ai to embody this hologram helping you get different stuff done, to. On that technology that he previewed. The interesting thing is the word unified. Unified the real world with the Digital World. So they can continue kind of colonizing the world that we are in. It may be the problem. For me, when he describes hanging out with your friends and some of them are virtual, that makes me feel sad. I am like who cares. Interesting, right. The technology is really great for increasing our utility value which as i understand. Since the Industrial Age people have been measured in terms of their utility v value. How much money do a have to fly this person to this place at this meeting. The idea of not getting to meet in real life, even if it seems easier on the surface, it never actually is. All this stuff, all of these things that dont need to be physical things, in order to get to the place where you dont have the physical thing, you need to have a lot more physical thingsve involved. In order to make vai in the laser projecting holograph, it will create the virtual avatar on thero room. You have to send kids to get the rarest metals to make mistakes. You have to put huge factories around water to get cobalt out air pollution out and pollution and. You need energy and solar panels that get their energy from the sun. How was the solar panel made . What he is actually describing is not less physical matter being used more physical matter being used at the deny that human beings of actual physical presence. You know, the avatar is a great substitute. Grandmas in the netherlands and the babies in cleveland. They could see each other. As a paraplegic and now can have a virtual exp