Monstrous Technologies?

Josh Landy
Will new technologies like artificial intelligence and bioengineering be the salvation of humankind?

Ken Taylor
Or will they destroy our bodies, our democratic institutions and even our planet?

Josh Landy
Who’s going to control the technologies of the future?

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Cemex Auditorium on the Stanford campus.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner where Ken teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ken Taylor
Welcome, everyone to Philosophy Talk.

Today, we’re thinking about monstrous technologies, as part of Stanford University’s Frankenstein at 200. Project,

Josh Landy
Monstrous technologies. That’s a strong word, Ken.

Ken Taylor
Well, Josh, come on. Look, I love my iPhone. But you got to admit smartphones are causing an epidemic of distraction and insomnia, and depression. That seems pretty monstrous to me.

Josh Landy
And that’s just techno panic can take no, whew, look, people are always freaking out about the latest technological invention. You know, like the printing press, the mechanized loom, newspapers, electricity, always turns out, there was never anything to worry about Shosh Come on,

Ken Taylor
tell that to the inhabitants of Chernobyl or Fukushima, or the victims of asbestos poisoning, or although solidified babies. You’re a big literary guys, just like Mary Shelley says in her novel Frankenstein, that we’re thinking about. Technology can be deadly.

Josh Landy
Look, you’ve watched too many Frankenstein movies can but the novel, The novel is a lot more subtle and sophisticated than you are Hollywood are making it out to be that novel. It’s not just some Luddites read against the horrors of technology. But it’s a philosophical investigation into personal identity. It’s a it’s a brilliant experiment with literary form. It’s an exploration of deeply buried anti social impulses. I mean that no, you’re forgetting

Ken Taylor
the main thing, Josh. It’s about also about a technological marvel that runs around killing people. You left that out,

Josh Landy
right. All right, fair point. But remember that great scene in the novel where the creature learns about language, he calls language, a godlike science, and writing, writing, he says, opens up a field for Wonder and delight,

Ken Taylor
Josh, you’re waxing so poetic, a big deal?

Josh Landy
Well notice a big deal. Writing is a technology. It’s among the greatest technologies ever invented. The novel celebrates that kind of technology, and we should do Oh,

Ken Taylor
look, just look, look, look, I love writing to. I mean, that’s why I spent hours and hours writing myself it’s not just because I have writer’s block, because I love writing. I even love other people’s writing I love reading your writing job. But you know, even a technology as glorious and as powerful as writing has its downside Look, no writing. No mine comp no mine comp no World War Two QED technology by

Josh Landy
Godwin’s Law can look, look, look, it’s not the technology of writing that was responsible for my company. That’s the guy who wrote it. And it’s the people who read and believed it. I mean, you you can’t blame technology for what people do with the technology. You have to blame the people.

Ken Taylor
But you’re missing my point, Josh. Technology is often designed explicitly designed to exploit human weaknesses. Why do you use your iPhone so much? Because it’s a drunk Josh. And so his social media and social media is driving people to suicide, and it’s ruining our democracy.

Josh Landy
Sounds like you don’t trust people very much to handle their own technology.

Ken Taylor
What Why should I well, okay,

Josh Landy
but what do you want? You want the government to intervene? I mean, that’s paternalism. Like, look, if I want to waste my time watching cat videos on Facebook, that’s my business. No,

Ken Taylor
no, it’s not just your business. My life is impacted by your choices. Their lives are impacted by your choices, Facebook, and it’s addicted adult users. They’re just dropping our democracy, my democracy,

Josh Landy
okay, I’m not gonna defend Facebook. That’s good. But but the question still remains right. How can we prevent all the negative have outcomes, the monstrous outcomes without losing all the benefits? And how can we have the good outcomes without resorting to paternalism and stifling individual freedom?

Ken Taylor
That’s a good question, Josh. Good question. But I think the answer is kind of obvious. Technology producers and designers have to take on some of the responsibility, they have to do a better job of predicting, compensating for the effects of their inventions. And and they have to care. They have to care about more than just creating cool, fun gadgets and you know, making a bunch of money. Yeah, and pigs have to fly. Well, what? If producers refuse to regulate themselves? Well, then the rest of us will just have to make them an offer they can’t refuse. Why don’t take me well, I’m talking about changing the incentive structure. Okay. So taxes, regulation, or social shaming, maybe?

Josh Landy
Well, look, I agree, we’ve got to do something if we don’t do anything. nightmare scenarios may well be around the corner. I agree with you. We’re going to start seeing things like on black America, right.

Ken Taylor
That’s a great TV show. But but you know how much of that show is pure fiction, and how much of it is future reality? Well,

Josh Landy
as it happens, can we ask our roving philosophical reporter, Liza veal to find out she files this report?

Liza Veale
If you’ve seen the show Black Mirror, you’ve wondered, how crazy is this stuff? Total fantasy 50 years away. 10 years away. Dylan Hendricks works at the Institute for the Future. He takes the technology and Black Mirror very seriously.

Dylan Hendricks
It is something that internally within our culture, like everybody watches Black Mirror and has opinions about it. So how

Liza Veale
did the futurist weigh in one quick example, The show features these hyper capable robot guard dogs. Those exist already Hendricks bet that soon they’ll be available commercially, and we’ll have to decide how to regulate them. This next example is a little more complicated.

Ken Taylor
Well, it’s been tested though, right? Like a guinea pig. Yes, it’s all fully tested perfectly safe.

Liza Veale
In the episode Archangel, a brain implant allows a mother to monitor her child’s her location, her vital signs, even her vision,

Unknown Speaker
tap this icon here to relay her optic feed. This is what she’s seeing them. That’s right. Oh, that’s amazing. And their parental controls you can apply to that. Controls? Content limitations. If she witnesses something that causes her cortisol levels to rise like stress, it can kind of paint out whatever is triggering it.

Liza Veale
Hendricks says this chip has a lot of realistic elements. Smartphones can act as GPS trackers if we want them to even the more far fetched elements like the idea of viewing the world through the child’s eyes. Because not so crazy. We have some of the technology to capture images directly from the optical nerve translate and broadcast them. But the core of this episode is relatable. On a basic level,

Dylan Hendricks
the temptation of parents to know everything a child’s going through at every moment, is more or less kind of a realistic, even sort of present day kind of choice for parents.

Liza Veale
As a society, we have the technology to surveil and control our children more than we ever did. So we face a question,

Dylan Hendricks
are children allowed to make mistakes? Isn’t that a part of growing up and if you stop them from making mistakes, or they make bigger mistakes later,

Liza Veale
Hendricks last example is about virtual reality game. He says the highly convincing VR we see in black mirror, it’s not that unrealistic.

Dylan Hendricks
We’ve already reached a turning point where they’re very compelling that people will want to spend more time in simulated environments.

Liza Veale
But Hendricks is an optimist. He sees possibilities in VR. For example, He says, if we can’t stop humans from doing bad things to each other in real life, then maybe we can channel that anti social behavior into virtual reality. Here’s an example that might be a little hard to swallow.

Dylan Hendricks
If you could prove that sexual assault in the real world went down because of these kinds of simulations existing. Is that simulation not then kind of a public good, right? Like if we if it turns out we can’t fully deterred behavior, but we could channel it into something where it’s less destructive to real people’s lives.

Liza Veale
Hendricks says this question will only become more pressing. And it doesn’t just apply to VR. Does this technology have more potential to encourage impulses towards anti social behavior, or mitigate the consequences of it? Dylan Hendricks is asking these questions. So our parents, so are some technologists. But who has the final say? For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Beale.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that tour of the dystopian possibilities for the future. I’m Ken Taylor, along with my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy, we’re coming to you from SeaMAX Auditorium on the Stanford campus as part of the university’s Frankenstein at 200 project. Our

Josh Landy
guest today is a physicist and former dean of the School of Engineering here at Stanford recently became the 13th University provost. Please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage, Persis Drell.

Ken Taylor
So Persis, Josh and I were talking earlier about potentially dangerous, even monstrous technologies. I know that’s been a topic that you’ve been interested in for a while. When did you first get interested in these kinds of questions?

Persis Drell
Well, I think the right answer, guys, I grew up with it. Um, my father was a theoretical physicist who spent part of his life pursuing the dream of understanding the natural world and then spent a lot of his life pursuing the attempting to preserve the world from the horrors of nuclear war as an arms controller, and so it was in the house from when I grew up.

Josh Landy
So where did that leave you? I mean, Ken and I were arguing earlier about whether we should be optimists or pessimists. I mean, do you think that there is now or there is, you know, coming up some some Victor Frankenstein type? who’s about to unleash something really deadly on the world? Or do you think basically, we’re gonna be okay?

Persis Drell
I think there are all these engineering students out there who are working on things that couldn’t unleash something terrible on the world, but it could also be something that’s wonderful for the world. That’s the way technology and discovery works. I’m just optimistic that the good will win. So well.

Ken Taylor
I mean, I want to take the world at large, because we were focused, we can be focused on the American context. You know, if Hitler had won that war, if Stalin had, well, he did prevail for a long time, Dad visited horror upon horror, technology in the wrong hands, some some terrorist gets a dirty bomb. I mean, in total, looking at the world, in total, what controls technology in the world taken in total

Persis Drell
people? In the end, it has to be people taking responsibility for the technology that they create. The technology is going to be invented no matter what, you can’t stop it.

Ken Taylor
Can we keep germ weapons, nuclear arms, chemical, chemical weapons are all over the world. There’s a cheap dictators, weapons of mass destruction, can we keep problematic technology out of the hands of all problematic people?

Persis Drell
We can never do it perfectly. But we’ve had nuclear weapons since 1945. And haven’t been used since 1945. It’s a great example. We have biological weapons that we so far have controlled, does that mean we can stop working at it? Absolutely. No. But if you can be you have reason to be optimal. You

Ken Taylor
look out at the world, you look at global warming, all this study stuff, you look out at the world and you like are confident, optimistic, and you don’t look at it like those folks on Black Mirror,

Persis Drell
but if I wasn’t optimistic, where does that leave me?

Josh Landy
Well, maybe vigilant. I mean, right. So being vigilant. So okay, so So what about you know, things that are on the rise and things like, for example, your video fabrication technology? I mean, it seems like, if I understand correctly, we may be on the verge of people being able to make you be saying on video, anything they want you to? I mean, so who’s gonna control that kind of thing?

Persis Drell
Well, that’s a really good question.

Ken Taylor
Okay, so we’ll try to answer that really good question and more really good questions from our audience. After this short break, this is Philosophy Talk, coming to you from Cimex Auditorium on the Stanford campus. Our guest is the provost of Stanford university presses drill.

Josh Landy
In our next segment, we’re going to talk about how we can balance exciting innovation against social responsibility. How do we get the upside without the downside,

Ken Taylor
invention, attention and prevention, along with questions from our technologically savvy audience when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
Let’s hear rock musical guests the Tiffany Austin trio. This is Philosophy Talk. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor, I guess the Stanford physicist and Provost versus drill and we’re thinking about monstrous technology.

Josh Landy
So we’re soon going to be taking questions from you folks. So if you have a question, please take a spot in front of one of these microphones at the front of the stage.

Ken Taylor
So versus okay. We live in a capitalist society. I think capitalism makes it really hard to balance innovation against social responsibility. Can we do it?

Persis Drell
Well, I would say we have existence proofs where we’ve done it in the past, I would say we’ve done it with nuclear technologies. And we’ve done it with some of the biological technologies like recombinant DNA, where the community has really stepped up and taken some responsibility, and not just pushed technology as far as it couldn’t do commercial applications, because they recognize there were potential dangers and threats out. Yeah,

Ken Taylor
yeah. I mean, you really are an optimistic person. I’m glad. I wouldn’t want to downriver. Right? I just wouldn’t, but I gotta say I’m much more of a downer. I just, I’m not sure I believe in the capacity of capitalist production of technology to always regulate technology for the human good. And here’s why. Because the decisions are made kind of locally, that is, I’m going to automate and make my company more efficient. I’m going to lay off workers, I don’t think about the aggregate effects of that I think about my competitive advantage, this person competing with me, and it’s not just within this economy, it’s around the world if I don’t do this, so the pressures are all generated bottom up locally, but then they aggregate into something a mess, right? I

Josh Landy
think we saw this in spades with with with Facebook, right. And Twitter, I mean, the way in which these social media, you know, they’re their profit, is driven by clicks, and likes and shares. And those are driven mostly by controversial news stories. And so, so conspiracy theories and fake news. Well, they’re good for the bottom line.

Persis Drell
So I think what you’re bringing up is a really good point, which is that with the two examples I gave, the threat was evident early, you knew there was a really serious threat out there. I think the threats, and they are very real. And we’ve seen them acting out it from from social media, machine learning. Those we didn’t realize they were dangerous. And so now we’re in a somewhat different situation. I would also say another stark difference, in my view, is that in the cases, again, let me use nuclear weapons or recombinant DNA. There were leaders of the field who stepped up and lead. Where are the leaders? Well, right.

Ken Taylor
But that’s that’s, I mean, I think the threat from nuclear weapons is, you’re right, it’s dark. Because, you know, people used to think about limited nuclear war and all that sort of stuff. And then all these studies came out about nuclear winter. And it’s like, Oh, my God, we can just trust this to the Soviet Union. And the Americans fighting it out. It’s like, the whole world is like, hasn’t taken it. Right. And I think global warming is the same way. But there’s a like, who goes first problem kind of thing. And, you know, the Paris Accords were cool. But you look what our current president did. Right? I mean, but still, there’s a who goes first problem, right? I could, I could freeride off the world during this. So I just think we don’t really have mechanisms that kind of force the balancing of innovation and responsibility. I just think we have precious few mechanisms.

Persis Drell
Well, in the case of, of global warming, I think capitalism will come to our aid when the economy starts to tank because the effects. But I’d still go back to the internet and say the challenge there is I think the there is the recognition of the problem is now real, but I’m not yet quite seeing where the leadership is going to come from. If we if the field itself does not take some leadership, I think that’s when regulation comes in, in a very heavy

Josh Landy
agree with you now can you know when you see what’s what’s actually coming out of Facebook, now, it seems as though either they’re genuinely in denial, or they’re in some kind of, you know, whoa,

Ken Taylor
wait a minute, wait a minute, see again, but there is a logic of capitalism, and we are capitalist production and markets are cool things. I don’t want to deny that markets are cool things. And I think Facebook’s business model depends on something important that they’re a platform, not a publisher, right? And I think they’re they’re being a platform allows him to say, Let all comers come and we like that we like, oh, there’s freedom there accessibility, if we forced them to be a publisher, and then take on all the liabilities and obligation that a publisher has that I actually don’t know if they survive economically.

Persis Drell
How was that decision made?

Ken Taylor
The they were a platform and not a publisher? Cuz they’re good capitalist. Right? Because what’s happening to the publishers, they’re getting hammered by this new technology. Right? And if they take on this certifying and verifying and distributing and being liable and all that stuff, I don’t think they get all those investors To invest in them, I don’t know, there might be some of them in the audience, what would they have gotten all those investors who invest in them? If they said, Oh, our business model is we’re gonna be a publisher,

Josh Landy
maybe. But meanwhile, if we’re relying on people within those industries to do self regulation seems to me, we’re just putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.

Ken Taylor
I’m really gonna get ready, you’re giving them competing incentive. Right, exactly.

Josh Landy
So the incentive structure seems to be wrong. I mean, and I don’t know whether I mean, you know, I love it. You’re an optimist, even about global warming. I mean, I think you’re a little more of an optimist. You know, maybe capitalism will kick in after everything. It’s too late. But anyway. But so what Yeah, what do you think? I mean, is there a way that we could maybe without regulation, maybe we could change the incentive structure, at least at the level of the social and make it uncool to destroy the planet for cash, you know, stuff like that?

Persis Drell
I think on on the issue of the internet, I think the the threat has become visible in recent years. And I actually see evidence that the that the thought leaders are starting to think about how to address this. And I’m seeing a lot, for example, more discussion, not my field of expertise. But let me just put this out there, around, say, the subject of machine learning and the dangers of machine learning, then we heard say, even five years ago, or 10 years ago, around new social media platforms. Now that just might be that the threats of machine learning are more obvious. But I actually think it might be the thought leaders are starting to have much more of a sense of responsibility. The culture of Silicon Valley has been, as I think, was articulated in a New York Times article quite recently. Build it and ask for forgiveness later. I think we’re starting to move away from that. And so I see the again, optimist, that I am the beginnings of that development of social responsibility. We see that among our students here as well.

Ken Taylor
Right. So I’m going to ask you about the students in the next segment. But I want to back off to the I want to ask about the thought leaders and the innovators. I mean, I grew up to believe, let science and innovation gold, right? The you said innovative build it then then worry about the consequences. Because if you start out I mean, do you believe we should ever restrain technology in science in advancing? Don’t go there? Don’t go there don’t go there.

Persis Drell
I don’t think that works. I think certainly at the basic discovery, scientific discovery stage, you don’t know enough. And then even when you’re going into the technology stage, I mean, you may discover a biological weapon, you may discover limited nuclear weapons and decide we’re not going to build limited nuclear weapons. Do you know, I have to know what could be done there. Because somebody else that bad guy on the other side of the field, might not have had the same moral sense of responsibility. I have to be able to defend myself since

Ken Taylor
science is about the disseminate. It’s, if we’re talking science, right. And universities, for example, and we’re not talking private industry. We don’t keep our discoveries secret. we disseminate them, we publish them, right. The world. I mean, I think every I suspect tells me if I’m right about this, probably every college physics student knows how to build a nuclear bomb.

Persis Drell
I know No, no, it’s actually not that easy. But

Ken Taylor
I mean, I’m not saying they have enough capacity. But they know what has to be where they can figure out what

Persis Drell
what they know, they all know the basic physics, right? Um, the technology to make it really have right. And to assure criticality, and its criticality, and so forth. Is a is not, it’s hard. But I am told, if you search hard enough on the internet, you can, you can find it to make smaller. So you control the fissile material.

Ken Taylor
The Iranian to Trump is so worried about a new world is worried about I mean, they’re smart enough, oh, sure, technologically advanced enough, that if they set their mind to it, now, the question is, will we put a stop to it, but they’re technologically advanced enough to do this? Right? You can’t take this knowledge and put it in some bottle. So

Persis Drell
Right. So that was why so many people work for so hard on the Non Proliferation Treaty, and we didn’t get it. And, and that’s where the focus now is, isn’t proliferation it’s not so much in mutual assured destruction, destruction, and we’re worried about the Soviet Union, which doesn’t exist anymore.

Josh Landy
So it sounds like they’re actually, in a way three stages here. There’s the stage of invention. And I think you’re making very I agree with you. I think we can’t stop that. Right. But then there’s the stage of, of recognizing this potentially dangerous, and maybe we should be encouraging people to do that. And then potentially down the line there interventions that we can use regulations or social norms.

Persis Drell
Right. And I think it is, I think that’s a wonderful separation. Gosh, and, and it’s at that middle stage, where it’s absolutely critical for the technologists that themselves to have a sense of moral and social responsibility towards what they see themselves developing, that is the critical moment. Because if it’s later and it’s regulation, it’s not so good.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about monstrous technologies in front of a live audience at the Stanford campus with our guest versus drill. And we’ve got questions from that live audience. I’ll go from one side to the other room. I’ll start with you. Welcome to philosophy.

Speaker 1
Good evening. My name is Rajesh, I did my masters here at Stanford. My question is, you made a very good point about not being able to stifle a stop or slow down the invention phase of technology. But what about the aspect of influencing it because there’s a lot of discussion around how, for example, all these things like Twitter, Facebook, Google, were built by a select few of the world, and how that’s affected those, the way those technologies have shaped our world. For example, Twitter is a great place where people are harassed and bullied all over all the time. And people have discussed about how they have it has implications on people’s lives, both positive and negative? What are your thoughts on how we can sort of change that? How can we add more diversity in both in terms of the people who are inventing those technologies, as well as the ideas that we use when we do that?

Persis Drell
Got an answer? So, um, so Twitter is, again, it’s a tool that has marvelous benefits, and it is used in really negative ways, I ponder a lot is there a way of ensuring at least some accountability in Twitter. And my understanding is that many companies in these, they actually have rules that they don’t even force themselves, about fake accounts, and so forth. So that is a place where the, I believe Twitter, let’s pick on them should actually force a little more accountability in the use of its platform. And along with that, it would be great for society to realize that just because speech is protected, doesn’t mean it’s actually appropriate all the time.

Ken Taylor
So what do you think about this, we all have to be into this making and remaking of the world together. And and you can’t we I don’t want to train our students to say, hey, look, I’m an engineer. I’m a physicist,

Persis Drell
I totally agree with you. Right?

Ken Taylor
So how do we how do we do that? How do we get this conversation to be a broad conversation involving all these people? Because it seems to me that’s what we need. We need the physicist sitting with the philosopher sitting with a politician sitting with a journalist. Right.

Persis Drell
And the economist, let’s not forget the Economist. They actually know what they’re doing in this case, um,

Ken Taylor
maybe, maybe.

Josh Landy
But there are some models. I mean, you know, hospitals have ethics boards, and they’re responsible for certain kinds of,

Ken Taylor
well, I don’t we responsible for there being review boards, right. human suffering, because of the some experiments that took place here. It’s

Josh Landy
the Prison Experiment. Yes.

Persis Drell
Yes. The IRB Yeah. Right.

Josh Landy
So so it’s not as I mean, it’s either everything’s the Wild West, right? So and so we just have to throw up our hands, it seems to me that, in fact, we, you know, we could shift we could decide as a society, we want to shift some of these areas of technological innovation more in the direction of things that have a little bit of inbuilt policing and responsibility.

Persis Drell
Yes, we could. And and it wouldn’t be that hard to do. The first thing, though, is to acknowledge the threat. And I think that’s really what’s just happening. So I agree with where you’re going. But I would point that it probably is a little unrealistic to think it would all be in place now. Because I just don’t think until, until a few years ago, we recognize the magnitude of the threat. Welcome to philosophy.

Ken Taylor
What’s your comment? Your question? Who are you? What’s your comment?

Speaker 2
My name is Victoria. And I’m currently an undergraduate students on campus. So I guess my question is philosophical, perhaps in nature, since struck, structurally, the rise of artificial intelligence or by extension, the aspiring to develop it, and research, it implies the displacement of conventional workforces, right, so the abilities of computers to start taking on complicated tasks that is beyond even monotony. So we’ve seen, you know, in cases where they’re starting to take on diagnosing diseases or produce legal documents, or you know, even creative, creating appointment cetera. So in that case, of course, these abilities got magnified. And, you know, those workers that are in most vulnerable societies are harmed most. So in that case, do you think there’s a moral responsibility of companies or people who participate in AI development to compensate that in forms of taxation or others? And how do we go about kind of thinking about that conceptually?

Ken Taylor
Do you have a view or you want to punt this one?

Persis Drell
Well, I do but I actually would love to hear from the philosopher first. Well,

Ken Taylor
well, I think this is a really hard question. I think it’s a really huge question. Because there are people to speaking of the economist I mean, there’s a difference greement about this. People used to believe that in the old days technology destroy jobs, but it produced compensating jobs. That’s actually not as true as you might think that’s a complicated thing. But there’s some people believe that day is coming when technology is just a net destroyer of the demand for human labor, and that, and that we could see that in the next 10 or 15 years, we can see the demand for human labor decrease 40%. In the next by the next century, we can see the demand for human labor almost go away. Right? How do we live in such a world? Of course, there’s a moral responsibility, but who does it fall on? It’s a really hard I mean, that is, among the hardest questions with

Josh Landy
it. I’m not saying it’s easy question. But I think we can apply similar principles here to the ones we apply elsewhere, and just say, Look, if there is something that a reasonable personal set of people could predict, then you should be setting about trying to predict it. And if you’re not even trying, then I think you can be held liable for that you’re

Ken Taylor
listening to philosophy dog. We’re coming to you from Cimex auditorium as part of on the Stanford campus as part of this university’s Frankenstein at 200 project.

Josh Landy
We’re thinking about monstrous technologies with Persis Drell, Stanford’s new provost

Ken Taylor
In our final segment will ask versus how she thinks we should train the engineers of the future,

Josh Landy
educating for responsibility plus more questions from our audience when Philosophy Talk continues. Hello

thanks again to our musical guests, the Tiffany Austin trio. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ken Taylor
except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. We’re thinking about monstrous technologies, with purses drove from Stanford University. So we’ve got a whole bunch of questions. So why don’t we start with Welcome to philosophy. Hi,

Speaker 3
I’m Sarah. I’m an undergraduate here at Stanford. And we live in a world in which there are huge socio economic disparities. And as newer technologies become available, they’re often only available to those of higher socioeconomic status. So I was wondering what your opinions were on how inventors and companies can ensure that those disparities don’t become so big that they’re unable to be overcome.

Ken Taylor
presupposition after question is that it is the responsibility of the technologist themselves. Do you think do you share that presupposition?

Persis Drell
Ah, I would well, I would like to say I think broader society should take responsibility. I like it when technology does take responsibility, too. But I would also like to point out in some ways, certain technology has been incredibly democratizing. So it has cut both ways. But ultimately, for me, and this probably reveals a certain amount about my political persuasions, I do believe society should be taking responsibility to ensure that it is available broadly.

Ken Taylor
You said technologies that are democratizing sometimes technologies that look democratizing. So the internet is supposed to be a great democratizing technology, right? Sometimes technology that are democratizing, just break down the public square because they, they substitute noise for knowledge, right? Instead of these authorized these top, one of the things that these top top authorities did they certified stuff as legitimate as memorable was worth paying attention to when everybody has access.

Persis Drell
But let me give a very specific example theoretical physics used to be if you want to do theoretical physics, you had to be in one of those pillars like Princeton or Stanford or Harvard or Oxford. And and if you wanted to learn about the hottest latest thing in theoretical physics, you had to write away with a little postcard for free. Gone. And then now theoretical physics, innovation comes from all across the world. It’s been phenomenal.

Ken Taylor
That’s true. That’s the upside. Right?

Persis Drell
I’m the optimist. Yeah.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to philosophy. What’s your comment your question?

Speaker 4
I’m Wade from Portland, Oregon, and as an aspiring engineer in a very large organization, how do you how do you feel one should navigate these considerations when you’re just a tiny cog and maybe a much greater machine there

Ken Taylor
you go versus

Persis Drell
Wow. That’s for you ever lose your moral compass, no matter what level you are in the organization and hold yourself accountable to it, and it will guide you. Well, okay,

Josh Landy
so those are inspiring words. So this brings me to asking you, is this these words enough to integrate The next generation of, of budding engineers, we’ve got a room, including some current students here. So what do we what do we do to try to make sure that the next generation are going to be helping the world rather than sort of new Victor Frankenstein’s creating without the proper vigilance.

Persis Drell
So I am a huge believer that engineers need to be educated not just in engineering, but they need to be educated broadly, because they need to care about the impacts of the technologies that they’re going to be involved in inventing. They don’t get that by taking more physics classes or more math classes or more engineering glasses. They get that by taking a philosophy course or they get that by taking a literature course, and being forced to think through the impacts of what they’re doing, or if they’re really more directly interested, take a social science course. But I think that educating engineers to be engineers, only his criminal,

Ken Taylor
I totally agree with you, I say to students, I put it starkly. And they sometimes gasp, I say, you know, Hitler had his technologist Stalin had his technologists is not enough to be a technologist, if you’re just a technologist, you’re fit to be a tool of some broader social thing. But is that what you want? You want to just be a tool, right? And students sometimes are taken aback when I say this, but I think we have become too focused on imparting into our students or narrow technocratic education. Right. And partly, our students are demit want that of us because of their parents and the, you know, we have this silly reputation as undeserved as get rich you and all that sort of stuff, and they think Chase the brass ring and get the job and all that stuff. And we need to address this. And I don’t think this is a small thing, I think it’s a huge thing.

Persis Drell
Okay, so But there’s another piece of that, which is that so I do think we have students majoring in technical subjects, computer science, whatever, for the wrong reasons. And all and helping them choose the subject they want to major in for the right reasons is, is obviously part of our responsibility. And we could be doing it better. But I also think that and here, I’m going to speak as somebody who was a was only in the School of Engineering for two and a half years, I’m not an engineer, I’ve never taken an engineering course. But what engineering did, which was really Varium is doing, which is very impressive, is they actually think a lot about not just what do they need to impart to the students. But what are the students want to learn? And how do they want to learn it right. And that focus has helped some of the majors and CS is one of them be incredibly attractive. With really good on ramps, I understand that. And I think other subjects, certainly my own subject could learn a few lessons. Yeah.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk. So what’s your comment?

Speaker 5
Okay, good evening. My name is Shelby and I have engineering and business degrees from here at Stanford. And there’s two points I, I want to be an optimist. I am an optimist somehow or other. But logic gets in the way. And when you talk about people, using technology, people being responsible, the problem that I see there is it has to be every person responsible forever. It’s just out there. And you know, that’s the one thing and then the other thing is that we have AI. Now AI is a different monster from all the others because it can have a will of its own, philosophically, potentially. And we don’t know what kind of Will It might develop. So those are now so what’s the question? How can we not be pessimistic even though Yeah, that’s one for you.

Ken Taylor
But I have to say AI. AI is coming like gangbusters. And the day is coming when anything a human can do. Some AI software will be able to do better. That’s just coming.

Josh Landy
I I’ll take that bet. Yeah, I will,

Ken Taylor
too. It’s coming.

Josh Landy
I want to see anything. I want to see someone design this look, what’s the textbook?

Ken Taylor
Look, it’s already and this isn’t even super intelligent AI. It’s just think machine learning techniques. They can already out diagnose your average doctor, right diagnosis, anything that involves pattern recognition, that involves

Persis Drell
we do a lot of things that are beyond pattern, right.

Ken Taylor
I know what I’m talking about today, and what’s coming next. It’s it’s coming. Okay, we’ll take a photo.

Josh Landy
Try Google Translate. You’ll you’ll sleep better.

Ken Taylor
But, you know, Google will never Welcome to have asked me the last question.

Speaker 6
Thanks. I wanted to ask about the discussion you had about encouraging humanities education. I, my husband and I are both alumni here. He was in the philosophy major, and I was an engineering major. And we discussed this a lot about our own children now where he hopes they get a strong humanities education you and I say, Absolutely. Like, it’s good to get some but

Speaker 6
back to I find it’s employable to get the engineering degree. And I do believe you’re a better person for having a humanities education. But then what happens after they get out of college, they need to pay for their rent, they need to, you know, do all these things. So, I mean, how do we close the gap there?

Josh Landy
So when I take it, the person wasn’t necessarily recommending that people major in a humanities subject. Right. So the thought could just be look, if you’re going to be an engineer, also learn some other things. So I think there’s a good compromise.

Persis Drell
Well, but I think if I were to lay my bed on the table of the degree of the future, it is not the pure engineering degree. It’s got to be a social science degree with computational literacy, because you need to know the questions to ask. And there are these huge societal challenges. And I do believe the social sciences helps you understand what questions to ask, but you can’t understand them without computational literacy. So I really think that’s the magic combination that I would would put my, my money on.

Josh Landy
So I’m finally want your kids to get a job. So

Ken Taylor
I want to address this, I want to address this briefly. Look, we are educating the makers of the world, the real Baker’s of the world, humans, human society is constantly making and remaking itself. And the Stanford students that we educate, they’re going to play a role in making and remaking the world. And we need to educate them in multiple things. We need to turn out excellent students it all we need to turn out the great engineers, great scientists, great great artists, great literary thinkers, great philosophers, great social scientist, but we also need them each to understand that making and remaking the world is a deeply collaborative thing that requires multiple disciplinary talent, there is no competition, we have the stupid thing. It’s never the student say, Well, you were techie or fuzzy. If I could be both, right, you better be too fuzzy or too tight, or techie or whatever that is. Because if we don’t produce people who in whom all these things live simultaneously, the making and remaking of the world will be a disaster. So personally, she got one last bit of wisdom for us.

Persis Drell
I think we have to hold on to our optimism despite the challenges ahead.

Ken Taylor
Well, on that optimistic note, I’m going to thank you for joining us. It’s been a it’s been a great conversation,

Persis Drell
thank you.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Persis Drell, former dean of the Stanford School of Engineering, and recently appointed as our university’s 13th Provost. Now this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is Cody tau Ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog, and you can become a partner in that community, just by visiting our website Philosophy Talk. Oh, RG.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, either here or on the radio, we’d love to hear from you. Email. Your question to us at comments, Philosophy Talk, our G and we may feature it on our blog. Now let’s hear from a man of monstrously rapid speech. It’s Ian Scholes, The 62nd philosopher.

Ian Shoales
In shows at the time Mary Shelley created Frankenstein on a barbette kind of Galvani had just made a dead frog leg Twitch with electricity allegedly, and grave robbers were digging up bodies for medical students to use in their anatomy classes, all of which kind of provided the juice as it were for her novel. One of the reasons body snatching was so reviled was the widespread Christian belief that come judgment day would be resurrected whole, cutting up bodies might make such a resurrection a little more problematic. I don’t know what the deal was an amputees are getting victims though. Headless ghosts again, you might recall were a bit of a literary trope for a long while. They’re also about 10 years after the writing of Frankenstein to enterprising grave robbers named Burke and here took anatomy research a step further by murdering people to provide cavern cadavers for anatomy lectures 16 and all is believed their unique method of strangulation became known as burking. Just as Gabonese name wound up, describing frog leg twitching, and name of Frankenstein came to be known as the monster not the creator of the monster. What’s up with that? the whims of legend often trump the facts of history. As we all know, the recent passing of the Reverend Billy Graham is certainly proof of that. I recall his being regarded as a somewhat relatively liberal figure in the evangelical world. Certainly ecumenical dining with Pope’s and talk show hosts and presidents, a preacher who is shooed fire and brimstone, had a nice haircut were catered suits and did not sweat or storm about. But when he died my mind there was a torrent of ill wishes that he was dead because of anti semitism. And he had lunch with Kissinger, same guy, but now he’s a monster. We have seen the reputations of Darwin, Freud and Marx go up and down with Darwin and Mark sometimes achieving monstrousness. Along with misapprehension and Freud achieving more and more irrelevant says drugs replaced therapy and psychotherapist wander the streets carrying their sad little signs will reveal your unconscious processes for food. The monsters of tomorrow are being stitched together today with gene splicing artificial intelligence applications, autonomous cars, global warming fears, and the tyranny of the algorithm. These could be real monsters or just topics for the blockbusters of tomorrow like cloning dinosaurs, for instance, it has proven to be not so much a threat to humanity as a never ending money machine without once achieving reality. As for the Frankenstein monster himself that this section does not hold the appeal at once did though artificial limbs are bound along with hearing aids eyeglasses mood enhancing drugs endurance enhancing drugs strength enhancing drugs that can serve to make any of us not be psychotic monster with better natural abilities. No Frankenstein creator needed right off the shelf eliminate the middleman. Also, with the dance, post Freudian counseling techniques we can embrace our new selves the stray limbs we acquired legally assimilated into a new post human hole. And should we choose to run amok under medical supervision of course, and then escape to the Arctic global warming will assure that we are not fleeing from pursuers leaping from ice flow to ice flow, but relaxing on the newly warm and placid sea on a floatation device catching up the latest fake news and our smartphone and rubbing sunscreen on our brand new legs. A little r&r and then back to DC to lobby for the trans human movement. Hacked lives matter once you please give I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of K LW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Jr. Stanford University copyright 2018.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin. Special thanks to the scamp Sanford School of Engineering the symbolic systems program the department of philosophy and the medicine and the music program.

Ken Taylor
Thanks also to suddenly Emily King Dan Brandon Corolla great man. Conchita Perales and our musical guest Adam Shulman on piano, David Yule and the bass and the one and only Tiffany Austin on vocals.

Josh Landy
A senior producer of Philosophy Talk is demonstrate image. Laura McGuire is our Director of Research and our marketing director is Cindy prints bound

Ken Taylor
support for philosophy taught comes in various groups here at Stanford University, and the partners in our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or miss expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University, or other funders,

Ken Taylor
not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk, or G where YouTube can become a partner in our community of thinkers.

Ken Taylor
I’m Josh Landy and I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.