2015-10-19 RSA Debate Optimism, Knowledge and the Future of Enlightenment
Duration: 01:15:25
Transcript
Cliff Chanin
I’d like to welcome all of you present here in the great room and everyone viewing on the internet to an exercise in re-enlightenment, an effort to imagine what forms enlightenment might take today. Tonight’s effort actually started the moment we entered this room and looked up. Over 200 years ago, James Barry painted a decidedly optimistic view of the relationship between progress and knowledge. How do we understand that relationship today? Our springboard is optimism, a word that first appeared in English in Barry’s lifetime in the 18th century at the intersection of two questions. Is this the best of all possible worlds? Is this world knowable? The answer enlightenment provided back then, the answer that gave us modern science and modernity itself, was that the world was something that could and should be known because knowledge could make it better. When we invoke optimism tonight then, we do not mean an inclination to see the glass half full but an attitude toward knowledge. Our shorthand for this enlightenment formulation is epistemological optimism. Karen O’Brien will introduce the people who will pace our discussion next. But this event is about institutions as well. A unique collaboration has made this night possible. A collaboration based on a shared attitude toward knowledge. Working in conjunction with the group I represent, the Re-Enlightenment Project, and International Network Concerned with the Future of Enlightenment, three of London’s most prominent institutions have shared resources, intellectual, physical, financial, to enable this inquiry. I want to thank those three enlightenment institutions, our host tonight, the RSA, King’s College London and its Centre for Enlightenment Studies, and the British Museum, not only for sponsoring this event but also in their very willingness to work together for making what Matthew Taylor calls 21st century enlightenment happen. It’s a great pleasure to welcome everybody to this enlightenment conversation today.
Karen O’Brien
I’m going to introduce our two main speakers but the spirit of this event is very much that we should have some initial speeches but then we should open the floor and have a genuine discussion about the meaning of enlightenment, optimism and its relationship to knowledge. I’m going to introduce first Professor David Deutsch, a distinguished physicist, fellow of the Royal Society and visiting professor of physics at the University of Oxford and a man who has a very legitimate claim to be the father of the quantum computer. He is also the author of a number of books on the nature and history of purposeful knowledge creation including The Beginning of Infinity published in 2011. David is going to start our conversation and he’s going to be followed by Martin Rees, an astrophysicist and cosmologist and author in 2003 of Our Final Century. He’s a former president of the Royal Society and the astronomer royal and a self-described worried member of the human race. So take it away David.
David Deutsch
2011 actually, beginning of infinity, so Martin was first. So I think we’ve been deprived of a lot more than flying cars and Mars colonies. I think civilization is currently burdened by a debilitating pessimism, not just prophecies of doom because they’ve always existed. There’s something deeper. The term technological fix has become as pejorative as Luddite used to be. The aspiration for technological solutions is now widely regarded as naive, a fantasy that ignores the inevitability of missteps and side effects and that naivety is labeled optimism because optimism has come to mean something like the assumption that the best will happen or probably will and pessimism that the worst will. They’re both false as general principles. No one adopts them. They’re irrationalities that people accuse each other of having. Everyone classifies themselves as somewhere in the middle, perhaps admitting to a slight bias in one direction or the other and therefore admitting to slight irrationality. But in fact, both ends of the spectrum and the middle are predictions of success or failure, maybe probabilistic, derived only from an attitude or a principle, not from explanations of why reality should match them. And prediction without explanation is prophecy, which is reliance on the supernatural, which isn’t a rational attitude to planning for the future. So what is? Well, here’s the bad news. Conventional pessimism is right that civilization has no guaranteed future, nor does our species. The overwhelming majority of civilizations and species that have ever existed are now extinct, including significantly every one of our cousin species, every species that has ever tried to survive by creating knowledge that was not in their genome, new explanatory knowledge, how to make clothes and fire and farming and to live the new ways of life that that enabled. That is our biological niche to survive through the exercise of creativity, and we are the last species left in that niche. For such species, stasis is not available. We conquer problems by creating knowledge, or they conquer us. So there’s nothing new in our situation of all sorts of existential danger. It’s undeniable that the worst can happen, because the very worst has already happened many times. So now for the good news. All those civilizations who believed that their famines and droughts and disasters were divine punishment for their wickedness or whatever, in reality it was just that they didn’t know enough about irrigation, medicine, and so on. If the ancient Athenians had known about antibiotics or just about hygiene, they could have prevented the plague that contributed to the fall of their nascent optimistic society. And if they had, then as Carl Sagan speculated, we might now be at the stars, and technology would be regulating trivialities like the planetary climate, as automatically as it’s now regulating the temperature in this room.
David Deutsch
We know that’s possible because of a momentous dichotomy that follows directly from the rejection of the supernatural, namely, every transformation of physical systems that is not forbidden by laws of physics is achievable given the right knowledge. And hence, the rational attitude to the future is what I call optimism, the principle of optimism, namely that all evils are caused by lack of knowledge. That isn’t a prophecy of success. It’s an explanation for failure. If we fail at anything that’s physically possible, it’s because of some knowledge that we fail to create. Admittedly, some of the dangers that we currently foresee are themselves side effects of knowledge creation. But trying to slow that down won’t help because what do you slow down? In 1900, no one could possibly have foreseen that research in pure physics into the esoteric properties of the element uranium would, within 50 years, become the centerpiece of everyone’s existential fear, or that another half century later, the centerpiece would be carbon dioxide. In our future, too, the greatest dangers will inevitably be unforeseen. And the only type of knowledge that’s capable of dealing with those is fundamental knowledge of universal regularities in nature. Any area of fundamental research could suddenly become essential to our survival. Biology, engineering, and the world of science, all of these things are fundamental. Biology, engineering, in World War II, pure mathematics was. We also need knowledge of how to structure human institutions to retain the miraculous property of keeping civilization stable under rapid change. Traditions of criticism and error correction, and we need wealth, meaning the ability to deploy technology in practice. And there’s a final consideration. The world doesn’t just contain optimists and pessimists and wise and unwise technology users. It contains enemies of civilization as well. And knowledge is impartial. It can be used for good or evil. But the enemies of civilization all necessarily have one thing in common. They are wrong. And so they fear error correction and truth. And that’s why they resist changes in their ideas, which makes them less creative and slower to innovate. So our defense against the existential danger from malevolent uses of technology, the only defense is speed. The good guys must use their only advantage to stay ahead. And that’s my statement. Thank you.
Martin Rees
Well, I’m typecast as a pessimist because of the book I wrote, which I called Our Final Century with a question mark. The publishers removed the question mark. And then the American publishers retitled the book as Our Final Hour. They like instant gratification in reverse. But my theme in that book was that although our earth is 45 million centuries old, this is the first century when one species, ours, can determine a planet’s future. We’ve entered an era that’s called the Anthropocene. And the difference between this and previous eras is that we are in an interconnected world. The whole world can be affected by local activities. We depend on electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, globally dispersed manufacturing, and so forth. And all these are at risk. Unless they’re highly resilient, their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic breakdowns cascading through the system, real world analogues of the 2008 financial crisis. Air travel can spread a pandemic within days, and social media can spread panic and rumor literally at the speed of light. And I think that as was admitted, knowledge doesn’t always lead to benign applications. And I do worry that as technology gets more powerful, there is a serious and new downside. Advances, for instance, in diagnostics, vaccines, and antibiotics are good for dealing with pandemics. But the same biotech has downsides. For instance, just two years ago, researchers showed it was surprisingly easy to make a virus more virulent and more transmissible. And last October, the U.S. government decided to stop funding these so-called gain-of-function experiments. And concerns about the new CRISPR technique for gene editing have been in the news because of the Chinese work on human embryos. Well, this research is just one more niche in the still under-regulated field of synthetic biology, which is burgeoning, with biohacking even as a hobby. And this is, I think, worrying because whereas it’s hard to make a clandestine H-bomb, biotech involves small-scale dual-use technology, and millions will one day have the capability to misuse it just as they can misuse cybertech today. And we talk about regulations, but whatever regulations are imposed on prudential or ethical grounds, they can’t be enforced any more than the drug laws can. Anything that can be done will be done somewhere by someone. So one of the most intractable challenges to all governments will stem from the rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups, or even individuals, by bio and cyber technology. There’s a risk from error as well as terror. The global village will have its village idiots, and they’ll have global reach. And I think this is a huge challenge to governance, which is going to lead to tension between the global world, and the world of technology.
Martin Rees
What about another fast-advancing technology? Robotics and machine intelligence. These are disrupting the labor market, but robots are still clumsy. They can’t tie your shoelaces or cut your toenails, but they’re advancing fast. And DeepMind, a company that was bought up by Google recently, has created a machine that can figure out the rules of all the old Atari games without being told, and then play them better than humans. And this is a step towards generalized machine learning. And of course, we’ve heard about Google’s driverless car, about military applications, just like biotech does. And of course, in looking decades ahead, we must keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to prospects that may now seem science fiction. How can we ensure that ever more sophisticated computers don’t go rogue? If they could infiltrate the internet and the internet of things, they could manipulate the rest of the world. Well, these are the kind of threats which make me, although an optimist about what technology can do, a pessimist about what will actually happen given political and psychological realities of people involved. And these are threats caused by the empowerment of individuals. But I now want to turn to another kind of concerns we have, which are those threats caused collectively by a rising and more demanding population of humans, affecting the global ecology, etc. Here, we have to worry about ecological shocks. How do we react to these? What’s the ethics? Future generations are clearly harmed if fish stocks dwindle. And there are plants in the rainforest whose genes can be useful to us. But for some, threats to biodiversity are worrying for another reason, because the environment has a value over and above its benefit to us humans. We are, as it were, destroying the book of life before we’ve read it. And to quote the great ecologist E.O. Wilson, if our despoliation of nature causes mass extinctions, he says, it’s a sin that future generations will least forgive us for. And this is a real threat, a sixth extinction. And these threats are aggravated by climate change. And I want to finish up with a few words about climate change, because it’s an issue where we need to think long term. Climate projections are still uncertain, but even amongst those who accept the IPCC consensus, there’s a big range of policy responses. And I think it’s important that the debate about climate change is only partly a debate about the science. It’s far more a debate stemming from differences in economics and ethics, especially in how far ahead we look and on the extent to which we limit our gratification for the benefit of future generations. To be more specific, some economists, for instance, Bjorn Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus, they downplay the priority of tackling climate change. But that’s because they apply a standard discount rate, as you would in deciding where to put up an office building. And in effect, they therefore write off what happens beyond, say, 2050. And of course, in downplaying climate change on those assumptions, they’re consistent, because no one thinks there’ll be a real climatic global disaster as soon as that. But if you care about those who live into the 22nd century and beyond, you should apply a lower discount rate in the long term. And then, as Stern, Weitzman, and other economists argue, you would deem it worth paying an insurance premium now to protect future generations against the risk of crossing tipping points and triggering runaway long term changes, like the melting of Greenland’s ice. So even those who agree there’s a significant probability of catastrophe a century hence will differ in the urgency with which they advocate action today. And the assessment will depend on discount rate, expectations of future growth, and optimism about technological fixes. But above all, the assessment depends on an ethical choice in optimizing people’s life chances should we discriminate on grounds of date of birth.
Martin Rees
Well, for politicians who have to cope with these trends, of course, the immediate trumps the long term, the national trumps the global, and that’s why it’s hard to maintain concerns about climate change high on the agenda. Activists and experts by themselves can’t generate or sustain political will. Only if their voice is amplified by a wide public and by the media will these long term global causes rise high enough on the political agenda. And I’d like to finish with a plug for religion, because I think in this context the Pope’s encyclical was hugely welcome, the one that came out in June. The Catholic Church transcends normal political constraints. There’s no gainsaying its global reach, nor its durability and long term vision, nor its focus on the world’s poor. And the Pope’s words will have major impact in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia, perhaps even in the American Republican Party. And he reminds us of our responsibilities to our children, to the poorest, and to our stewardship of the diverse life on earth, a longer term vision than we get from our politicians. Well, I’m a technical optimist, but I’m a political pessimist, and as I’ve indicated, I think the unintended consequences of advanced technology could trigger serious, even catastrophic setbacks to our civilization. We’ll have a bumpy ride through this century. And we shouldn’t be complacent about the risks being small. It’s an important maxim that the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable. But I don’t want to leave you in a despairing note, so I’ll conclude with the words from the great biologist Peter Medawar. I quote, the bells that toll for mankind are like the bells of alpine cattle. They’re attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they don’t make a tuneful and melodious sound. Thank you very much.
Karen O’Brien
Thank you both very much indeed. I’m going to bring in as our first discussant, Matthew Taylor, who is the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, and who’s very familiar with this frieze, the progress of human knowledge and culture around us, and ask him to say something in response.
Matthew Taylor
Well, thank you. I’ve had lots of challenging events here over my nine years at the RSA, but I think trying to follow David and Martin is probably the toughest gig I’ve ever had. I’m reminded in your last comments, Martin, by of course what Gramsci urged, which is pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. That is to say that there are plenty of reasons for us intellectually to share some of your pessimism, but we can do nothing but try our best in these circumstances. And let me refer back to Cliff said that we use the phrase 21st century enlightenment as a strap line, and if I explain for a moment what that’s about, I think it is relevant to this debate. So what we mean by 21st century enlightenment is that we think that the core values of the enlightenment, the value of autonomy, of universalism, and of humanism, that those values are as important today as they were then, but we think two things. Firstly, that those values have been in many ways hollowed out. The things that they have come to mean today are much poorer than the philosophers of the enlightenment, what they indicated by those ideas. And secondly, that even were those ideas as rich as they were in the 18th century, we’d still need to renew them for 21st century challenges. So for example, autonomy has been hollowed out and turned into a kind of narrow, shallow idea of freedom as the goal of human progress. Universalism is seen too much as being about rights and entitlements and not enough in our view about relationships and empathy and respect. And humanism often turns into a kind of materialistic utilitarianism, a shallow materialistic utilitarianism. And that I think is the relevance to this debate, which is that the enlightenment set in train some very powerful engines of progress. Science and technology is one, markets is another, government and bureaucracy is a third. But each of those domains has difficulty often in talking about what the right thing to do is, getting back to the substantive question of what is the nature of human progress. So I think as we renew those enlightenment, we return those enlightenment principles and we renew them, a critical one is opening up a wider discourse to discuss the nature of human progress. And I think that one of the things, one of the variables, not the only variable, one of the variables that will determine whether or not we, it is optimism or pessimism that is the most appropriate way to think about the future, is whether or not we are able to have that space. And that one of the reasons that there is a kind of public fear of a variety of things, whether it’s artificial intelligence or robotics or genetic manipulation or whatever, is the sense that these things are continuing without that kind of rich public discourse about what this is for and in what progress comprises.
Matthew Taylor
Thank you. I might ask Martin and David just if they’d like to respond briefly to that.
Martin Rees
Well, I’d simply like to say that by expressing pessimism, I didn’t want to discourage efforts to minimise all these downsides. In fact, I’m involved in a new group at Cambridge University which is trying to do just this, to convene experts to try and minimise these downsides from new technology and to engage with people with the technology. Because as you say, the decisions about how these techniques should be applied are decisions that require extensive prior discussion. They’re not just for the experts. And as you know far better than me, any political decision involves science, but it involves ethics, economics and politics as well.
David Deutsch
Yes, I’m surprised by how much I agree with both people who have spoken. But I think the crucial difference is not what we fear and what might happen, but as you said, what’s best to do about it. And the optimistic view in the way I define it is that the thing to do is defence. Because the bad things will happen, not only the ones we know about. You spoke of, you know, you said our descendants won’t forgive us for a mass extinction. Well, there are plenty of things much worse than that, for example, the non-existence of our descendants, which would be worse than that. And things which threaten that could come up, new things that we haven’t thought of. And I can’t see any alternative to the argument that the defence against that is rapid progress. So we need to think about these extreme high-consequence, low-probability risks and not enough thought has been given to them compared to the huge amount of attention being given to minor risks, in the carcinogens in the food, in the radiation doses and things like that. There’s too much focus on those, but we’re in denial about the possible but potentially catastrophic risks from these new technologies.
Karen O’Brien
Thank you. So in Matthew’s spirit of a richer public debate about all of these issues, I’m going to open up the floor and ask for contributions. We’ve got some roving mics. It would be very helpful, not least because we’re live streaming this event. If you could just briefly say your name and perhaps if you have an affiliation or something you’d just like to say about yourself, that would be fantastic. And then we’ll try and move the discussion, as it were, horizontally as well as back and forth between yourselves and the podium. So I have a volunteer there.
David Wood
So, Lord Rees, a few months ago you wrote a very powerful piece, I think it was in the Financial Times, saying that some centuries in the future it’s inevitable, not possible or likely inevitable, that the next raft of advances will have to be taken by machines and artificial intelligence. Surely in a way that might be, I’m asking both of the lecturers, could that be a cause for optimism? Can we not hope and try to develop them to act as better saviors of mankind than we’ve been so far?
Karen O’Brien
Go ahead.
Martin Rees
Yes. Well, indeed, what I did say was that although the rate at which AI will develop is uncertain, the direction of travel is clear and in a century or two there will be post-human intelligences which will be of an inorganic kind and I think they’ll find their main arena probably away from the Earth. They don’t want to be on a planet, they’ll be out there. And if we think of a huge timeline which has taken four and a half billion years to get to us since the Earth formed and a billion years ahead, then the next few billion years will be inorganic evolution of these advanced machines and the organic civilizations that we’re part of in that concertina perspective will be just a few millennia. And as to how one reacts to that, it’s interesting the response I got to that article. Some people said, you know, it’s wonderful to think that these machines may have even deeper cogitations than humans, etc., etc. Whereas others, I think, implicitly assumed that consciousness was specific to the sort of wet hardware in organic brains and wouldn’t exist in these much more powerful networks. And this, of course, is a philosophical question. And if you think there’d be no consciousness, then you might think it’s a valueless future universe. Whereas on the other hand, if you think consciousness is just an emergent property, then these creatures with far more elaborate brains than organic brains would have deeper thoughts, etc. And we should indeed then welcome it.
Karen O’Brien
But that’s a very long term horizon.
David Wood
I’m David Wood, Chair of London Futurist. I wanted to ask Professor Deutsch about the principle of optimism, which I think was defined that wickedness is all caused by insufficient knowledge. So is it then the case that when we are confronted by people who are strong supporters of Islamic terrorism or people who are fundamentalists, deniers of climate or whatever, that the way to deal with it is giving more knowledge to them? Is that your suggestion?
David Deutsch
Yes, but knowledge isn’t a fluid. It’s not something you can pour from one person into another mechanically. It’s an active process on the part of the recipient. So giving them knowledge is rather the wrong metaphor for what needs to be done. They need knowledge. We can’t give it to them. So indirect methods have to be used.
Audience member
Thank you. I’m simply a visitor to the RSA. We all agree that the future of humanity will throw upon us unknown problems, problems that we can’t even imagine today. So to solve those problems, we need the creativity. And if we are to judge who is more important, the pessimists or the optimists, optimists or pessimists, I think we have to find out who contributes more to our urge for creativity. I think, okay, I’ll leave it at that. Who gives us greater urge for creativity? The pessimists or the optimists? Thank you.
David Deutsch
Well, I think it’s well known that it’s hard to make progress if you think that it’s impossible.
Karen O’Brien
Two comments.
Peter Sear
Hi, Peter Sear, a fellow of the RSA. Some of the greatest buildings that have been left by past civilizations, even up until the last couple of hundred years, have been created for religious purposes. We built for God, not for people. I wondered how much the erosion of religion has stopped us thinking long term. Was it only for God and the future and the afterlife, et cetera, that was the reason that we were thinking long term?
Martin Rees
Can I respond? Well, I certainly think that’s true. I mean, if you think back to those who built the cathedrals, they thought the world was only a few thousand years old and would last only another thousand, but they built cathedrals which they wouldn’t live to see finished, which still inspire us centuries later. And that’s why I did mention that I think that the religions are on our side in many of these attempts to promote long term thinking. But going back to, if I can just inject something slightly irrelevant about buildings, I think when we look at the London skyline, what depresses me is not the architecture, but the fact that until 50 years ago, the prominent buildings were all for the public. They were religious buildings, they were railway stations, museums, parliament, et cetera. Now they’re either apartments for the transient super rich or their banks and things like that. And I think this shows a decline of our culture and civilization. And that’s why I’m irritated whenever I see the London skyline.
Karen O’Brien
Adam.
Adam Sutcliffe
Adam Sutcliffe from the History Department at King’s College London. I’d like to ask both speakers to what extent you think that the advance of technology brings with it an inherent tendency to increase the level of inequality in our societies, both political inequality and economic inequality, as small numbers of innovators have huge impacts and become very rich and very powerful, while that technology puts many others out of work and makes them feel at the very least disempowered in society. So to what extent is that true? And if it’s true, how big a problem is it and what should we do about it?
David Deutsch
Well, as I said, I’m not a Luddite. So I think the Luddites were mistaken, as history shows. The jobs that they thought were being lost were soon replaced. And I think that will be true forever. I think we’re going to merge with the machines rather than be taken over by them. And that merging with machines began about 6,000 years ago when writing was invented. This is a continuous process. We are completely different people knowing writing than we were before that. And this will always be true. Apart from that, technology and knowledge are impartial. That’s my stand.
Martin Rees
Can I respond? I think in the long term, David may have it right, but in the medium term, clearly there is a concern about certain jobs being eroded and inequalities. And of course the jobs being eroded by machines are not just blue collar, but things like medical diagnosis and routine legal work and things like that. This is happening. And there is clearly a risk of greater inequality if the money earned by the robots, as it were, goes to an elite. And I personally think that under government’s present complexion, this might happen. But I think this is an extra incentive for massive redistribution. So the money earned by the robots is used to provide dignified and secure work for the kind of jobs that anyone can do, which machines can’t do as well, like caring, teaching assistants, gardening in public parks and things like that. So I think there will be a stronger need for massive redistribution in order to provide a fairer society. And remember, if we don’t have a fairer society, if we have more embittered people than all the threats I mentioned earlier of individuals using bio-error or cyber-terror to cause disruption, we’ll have more motivation. So we have an interest to ensure there are fewer embittered people. And that’s another reason for reducing these inequalities.
Karen O’Brien
Thank you. At this point I’d like to bring in Nezahat Gultekin, who is advisor to Tech City’s Future 50 program and has agreed to join us today as a discussant. I just thought this might be a moment to focus a little bit more on technology as part of the discussion.
Nezahat Gultekin
Thank you very much. It’s a great pleasure to be here. So I consider myself as an optimist, but I was told recently that pessimists are educated optimists. So maybe I haven’t been educated enough, but I’ve been fortunate to be around the technology sector for the last 16 years because I found myself in Silicon Valley in late 90s when Google was started on campus when I was at Stanford. So I’m a huge believer in technology and innovation because I believe it does democratize access to information and acquisition of knowledge. So I will be compelled to disagree with the statement that was made earlier, whether technology creates perhaps few individuals who tend to be perhaps super wealthy and whatnot. I think today as we look at the world, there are three billion active Internet users. And to put things in perspective also, there are as many mobile phones as number of people living on Earth today. So it’s roughly seven billion. And there are over two billion active social media accounts. Now, we can argue whether it’s being used properly or abused or whatnot, but it’s there and it facilitates access to information and sharing of experiences and knowledge between people. And technology and innovation has advanced and reinvented a number of traditional industries. If you look at retail, how we purchase some of the items that we choose to purchase today. And financial services industry, the way that we interact with our banks, for example, online banking or mobile banking. And we tend to hear a lot about whether tech is a very disruptive force, i.e. eliminating some of the traditional industry positions and so forth. But I think equally we have to look at it the way the technology has advanced some of these industries, the way that data is being processed, the way that data is being provided to individuals and put it to work. And maybe to put things in perspective again, it took 75 years for telephone to reach 100 million users globally. It took World Wide Web seven years to reach 100 million users. And it took Facebook about 2.3 years. And Candy Crush Saga, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this game. I don’t play it, but it took it 1.3 years. So it is exponential, the pace, the access to that information and availability, the digital tools that things can change quite quickly. And of course, we talk about artificial intelligence. What it does essentially, some of the things that we’ve seen over the years, people might argue to be revolution, but in many ways I think they have been revolution also. And what the computing power does today is not only to synthesize data, but to be in a position to interpret it as well. So that’s why we talk about predictive analytics, for example. I do agree with the point that when there is a new way of doing things, it equally provides on the flip side, perhaps a situation where it opens to abuse, like cyber attacks, for example, that has been mentioned.
Nezahat Gultekin
Now, on the flip side, of course, then it’s a huge industry today that employs millions of people as well, the companies that provide security software solutions to us as consumers and to corporations and to governments as well. So obviously these are the bad people attacking our information privacy and so forth, but that’s an industry on its own right. And there are companies that are being started and providing solutions there. And perhaps just to finish off, I was watching this video clip from former President Bill Clinton’s interview of Elizabeth Holmes. I don’t know if you have heard about her. She is one of the most famous entrepreneurs in the U.S. in the medical technology field. She dropped out of college at the age of 19 and started this company called Theranos, which provides cost-effective blood tests to wider masses, and they have about 200 tests today. And the idea is providing access to information at the most important time that it’s needed. So that’s the medical information so that people can act on that to prevent some of the illnesses that they might be exposed to. And the second person on that interview was Jack Ma, the founder and the CEO of Alibaba, whom I guess most of you would know. And the main point that they made, which I firmly agree, was the power of information technology to help economic progress and fight against inequality. Because now we are empowering individuals to become entrepreneurs on their own right. So there are platforms like Alibaba.com or eBay or others, which we call online marketplaces, enabling individuals to start their own businesses. So there might be one person in rural China selling apples to the people in Beijing, for example. So I think that economic impact is really important. And right now, roughly 10% of the U.K.’s GDP is digital economy. That’s a big number. Financial services industry, which I came from originally, used to represent 20% roughly before the Lehman bankruptcy. I used to work there as well, so I went through that process. So digital economy and technology as a sector is becoming one of the biggest contributors to the GDP. And that’s in developed economies as well as in developing economies. And the average at the moment with G20 is 5.3. So U.K. is already almost twice as high in terms of digital economy’s contribution to the whole economy. So again, I’m an optimist as far as technology and innovation is concerned. Hopefully, people will be using it more effectively and efficiently as opposed to abusing the system. Thank you.
Karen O’Brien
Thanks very much. Back to the floor.
Audience member
I actually would like to make the point from digital economy to human values. So Professor Deutsch said, knowledge is impartial. It can be used for the good and for the bad. And you, Lord Rees, said it all depends on ethical choices. So my question would be, is all we are talking about tonight about ethics and maybe power and not technological fixes and markets and economies? What are they driven about? Isn’t the driver an underlying ethical issue?
Karen O’Brien
Yes. Yes. Can I? Yeah.
Martin Rees
Well, of course, any new technology poses new challenges. For instance, biology is posing a whole lot of new challenges which we didn’t have until a few years ago, but modifying the germ line and all that. So we have to confront new challenges which are stimulated by technology. And going back to the issue of the digital economy, et cetera, I agree with what was said earlier. I think if we look at the welfare of the average blue collar worker in this country, they got worse off in real terms in the last 20 years. The only reason they’re probably better off is because of the consumer surplus, as it were, from IT, the fact that they’ve got multichannels and Internet and all that. That’s the one thing they benefited. And also it’s been a huge benefit to have mobile phones in Africa. But let’s not be too complacent because there are all these mobile phones, but there are far fewer people who have clean water or have proper toilets. So one needs to sort of emphasize that it’s only a tiny part of what people in Africa need for their development, although it’s a big plus.
Matthew Taylor
Sorry to come in again, but there’s something that I thought was important when we talk about the digital economy, which is I don’t think we really understand it fully. And we don’t know how to respond to it because its effects are paradoxical in the sense that you’re absolutely right. It creates opportunities for millions, hundreds of millions of small entrepreneurs. But it also concentrates power incredibly in the hands of a very small number of people, all of whom live in the same part of the world. And those platforms, the big boys, it seems to me they now have the capital and they have the capacity to attract talent and they have the capacity to continuously algorithmically improve what they do in a way which it feels like it’s almost inconceivable that they’ll ever be challenged in that power. So arguably we have never in human history had corporate leaders as powerful as the corporate leaders who now live in Silicon Valley. And I don’t think we really understand the implications of that or really know what to do about it. You know, we have the European Union and others kind of bumbling around thinking that they can regulate this. I suspect that’s not going to work. But there’s a big issue there about a position we have drifted into and not chosen.
Karen O’Brien
Thank you. John Hughes, a fellow here.
John Hughes
I’ve got a question about accident and mistake as a vehicle for knowledge discovery and kind of getting over the human ego. When we think about how many things that have transformed society have happened by mistake, unintended positive consequence. Unintended consequences I think are often assumed to be negative, but we’ve been the beneficiaries of lots of unintended positive consequences.
David Deutsch
I think that unintended positive consequences always come as a result of creativity from the person who noticed them. You know, penicillin was discovered because of some accidental experiment which wasn’t intended. But plenty of people observed mold many times in human history. It took a scientist guessing what that was about and guessing that it might have applications and then applying that and developing it and so on. So yes, accidents can be good. But the key that makes knowledge is creativity, not accident.
Karen O’Brien
On this particular topic, I’d like to bring in Timandra Harkness, who’s very kindly joined us. Timandra is a columnist for The Independent. She described herself as a comedian and also a radio broadcaster. You have a program coming up entitled Future Proofing. So would you like to say something from your perspective, Timandra?
Timandra Harkness
I’m columnist for The Independent. I once won a competition, which meant I won a laptop. I think I’m here mainly because of Future Proofing, which is a Radio 4 series back next spring, where we look at ideas that will shape the future like the singularity or synthetic biology. And I constantly find myself going, wow, the potential from this is amazing. It throws up more questions than it answers, and that’s a good thing. So that probably situates where I come from. I was really struck by the thing you said right at the beginning, David, about technological fix and how that’s now almost a swear word. But I think this throws up one of the great ironies of this discussion, because I agree with you, things that should be quite straightforward technological solutions to recognized problems. I mean, I would suggest nuclear power as one of those is rejected as technological fixes, with the suggestion that that’s not the solution, there should be a solution involving people changing what they do. But I think at the root of that actually is not a suspicion of the technology. It’s a suspicion of the people who would be using the technology, or even people in the broader context. So the idea that if you gave people nuclear power, they would just use more energy when they should be using less energy. And I think ironically, that suspicion of people, which is at the root of that complaint, is not something that is subject to a technological fix. And I think in fact, Lord Rees put his finger on that when he said, I’m a technological optimist, but a political pessimist. And I think for that, we do need to get back to what Matthew was suggesting was the much wider route and discussion of the Enlightenment. The idea that actually it’s not just about harnessing knowledge to create technology, to do more things better. There is, you know, there’s half of the autonomy idea at the root of the Enlightenment, which is about material freedom, if you like, the freedom that we all have now to travel the world, or to be literate, or to communicate with each other, and not to die in childhood, and things like that which really do liberate us from the shackles of nature in some major ways. But there is also the other side of freedom, which is the freedom to debate, the freedom to experiment, the freedom to take risks, freedom of thought. And those freedoms are much more tricky, and they’re much more about having arguments and negotiating, and accepting that maybe we don’t all agree on what progress is and what we want the future to look like. And those are not things that you can just have straightforward knowledge about. You know, we don’t know what is the best form of progress, because us in this room, we might disagree on that. I’m certain some of you have a vision of the future, which is a clean city full of people cycling and being vegetarians. And I have to say, that’s my idea of hell. And knowledge isn’t going to solve that.
Timandra Harkness
We just have to sit down and have an argument with it, preferably over a glass of wine. Thank you.
Karen O’Brien
Thank you very much. Let’s entertain that thought of the cycling-only city. Chiara, you wanted to come in.
Chiara Marletto
Yes. So I’m Chiara Marletto. I work at the University of Oxford, and I’m a physicist. And I’m actually working with David Deutsch on constructor theory. So I think there was a point that was touched on by both of you, which would be nice to perhaps develop a bit. How much do your positions, the optimistic one and the pessimistic one, depend on the assumption that there are or there are not fundamental limits to knowledge creation? And for the person who, I mean, for the position that actually argues that there are such limits, what can we do about that? I mean, what would enlightenment mean in a world where there were like fundamental limitations, and by fundamental I mean physical limitations to how much knowledge we can create and how many problems we can solve. And so that’s my question.
David Deutsch
My position depends entirely on there not being such limits. Well, over 99% on there not being such limits. I think if there was a fundamental limit to the human capacity to improve things, then we’re sunk as soon as we hit that limit. It seems to me that we’ve got enough knowledge now to provide a good world for the seven billion people on it now. There’s a gap between what we could do and what is actually happening with the present knowledge. So extra knowledge is not a prerequisite for providing a decent life for everyone. It’s like a political will and other problems. Of course, greater knowledge will be a bonus particularly for health and better IT and all that, but I don’t think we need it.
Martin Rees
There’s another question which I think perhaps you have in the back of mind, which is about the limits to knowledge. And here I think David and I disagree. I think there are going to be lots of aspects of physical reality which our brains just aren’t up to comprehending at all. So I think we are going to hit the buffers in terms of what we can understand. Maybe a computer could compute, but in terms of what we can actually grasp, I think there are going to be limits, many, many problems. But I think we can’t use that, even if it’s true, as an excuse for not improving the world. Because, as I say, the knowledge we have now is more than enough to produce a far better world.
Karen O’Brien
So this is about an asymmetry between what a computer can compute and the cognitive capabilities that we have. You’re seeing a widening gap opening up and you’re not seeing much of a gap at all.
David Deutsch
Cognitive abilities are just another computation. And when we merge with computers, this merge of computers, I don’t mean sort of cyborg science fiction thing. I mean the same sort of thing that happened when we invented writing. We understand things via, let’s say, writing down an equation on a piece of paper, which we couldn’t possibly understand without paper. And so paper is just another one of those transhuman technologies which will expand, and computers are as well. There’s no difference.
Karen O’Brien
So transhuman rather than post-human.
David Deutsch
Whatever, I’m not sure of the difference.
Karen O’Brien
Many hands up, so just back there.
Tita Chico
Hi, thank you. I’m Tita Chico. I’m a visiting fellow at IAS and also a professor at the University of Maryland. So I’m fascinated by the panel’s comments and the questions. Of course, this all began with what is enlightenment? And one of the questions I wanted to invite you to reflect upon is what is knowledge? It seems to me that a number of the assumptions here have been knowledge is scientific or technical. And I wonder if you could reflect a little bit on the potential of that, the limits of that, where humanistic, to go back to an earlier point, where humanistic knowledge figures into your version of and vision of the enlightenment today and in the future.
David Deutsch
It’s essential, as I said, because the science alone can’t possibly progress unless society is such as to be stable under what science produces. So we’re going to have to create knowledge about human institutions as well, forever.
Karen O’Brien
Question here.
Paul Barnard
Paul Barnard, fellow of the RSA. The question is, there’s agreement or disagreement about optimism or pessimism, but is there agreement about what the purpose of trying to seek enlightenment actually is? To improve the world?
Karen O’Brien
Just continue that conversation. We do want to answer that, Martin.
Martin Rees
Yes. Well, I think we all have our vision of how the world could be and of what we want to aspire to do as individuals. And that is different. People of religion have slightly different views. But I think we all have views on how we would like things to be. And we’re all aware that there’s a gap between the way we’d like things to be and the way things are. And the question is, to what extent can collective action and politics narrow that gap?
Cayman
Hello. My name is Cayman. I graduated a few months ago, so sorry if I sound a bit naive. But it seems like knowledge is sort of like a currency to buy some enlightenment, so we should accept all knowledge. But there’s a small elephant in the room with Julian Assange this week and WikiLeaks. So what is the cost of knowledge? Small question for you, David.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Knowledge is… I don’t think that question takes into account that knowledge is impartial. So it’s not information. There’s an infinite amount of information around. Most of it isn’t knowledge. And even the knowledge is mostly false. So we just have to keep improving. But I repeat myself.
Martin Rees
Well, I think what David’s saying is that there’s a distinction between knowledge of general principles and science, et cetera, and information which may be appropriate for some people to have, but not for others, if it’s personal or private information. And that’s why this whole issue about information and privacy is so important. I mean, I think it’s going to be in more tension as we worry about security, because clearly we need more information to be given to the authorities if we want more security, but we don’t like that.
Karen O’Brien
Question here.
Roger Dore
Roger Dore, Fellow of the Society. I’d like to take up an answer to a previous question about how we tackle ISIS and other fundamentalist groups in this enlightened world. And the answer you gave was knowledge, but you couldn’t do it directly. It had to be done indirectly. I’m rather intrigued as to what are the indirect methods for tackling these very big issues at the present time using knowledge.
David Deutsch
Well, I don’t know. I’m a physicist. This is, I know that in the past, civilization has managed to civilize uncivilized societies. At the end of the Second World War, it was done. But most attempts to do this, and it was done spectacularly well, but most attempts to do the same thing have spectacularly failed. And I don’t know why, but this is a type of knowledge that we need to have.
Karen O’Brien
Over here.
Sajjad
Right, my name’s Sajjad, just a visiting member of the public. My question, the very short point I wanted to make is that sometimes I feel that in society there’s too much emphasis placed on being clever as opposed to being wise. I do appreciate it’s harder to teach someone how to be wise. I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on that? Thank you.
Martin Rees
Well, I mean, I think that is a very important distinction. Certainly those of us who spend our lives among academics and who are supposed to be clever in some sense, fully realize that these people should not be let loose on politics. They don’t have more than average wisdom in more general areas. And so clearly there is this distinction and judgment is separate quality from deep knowledge or specialized knowledge. And that is why I’m slightly ambivalent about the clamor to have more scientists in politics. We need to have a public which is more widely informed about the basic ideas of science so as to be responsible citizens to address the issues we have a scientific dimension. But it’s not clear to me that we benefit much from having more professional scientists in politics.
Karen O’Brien
Yes. It’s a surprising thing to hear you say. So we have so few in this country.
Martin Rees
Well, I mean, to take an example, I mean, I’d rather a politician had a degree in history than a degree in dentistry. We won’t go into it.
Karen O’Brien
Cliff, did you want to come in?
Cliff Chanin
I’m just sensing that there’s an issue of scale between these two positions because in David’s initial formulation, he was asking us to kind of zoom out and say, you know, which species has survived and what hasn’t. And it may have been your American publisher that zoomed you into an hour. But I’m sensing that in a lot of your answers, you also kind of zoom in on the notion that there’s enough knowledge in the world to make this world as it is a better place. As I’m thinking about it seems like a stranger and stranger answer as if there’s a kind of fund of knowledge here and it’s just how we manipulate or distribute it. And that seems fundamentally different from the gesture that David’s making. So I don’t know whether these are just two opposing stances based on the difference of scale or whether there’s some way in which these are in conversation.
Martin Rees
Well, on that, I mean, surely everyone would agree that we could hugely improve what’s happening in the developing world by proper application of existing technology and medicine, et cetera, if you know what I meant.
David Deutsch
Sorry, but we don’t know how.
Martin Rees
Well, the difficulty is not a scientific difficulty. It’s a political difficulty.
Cliff Chanin
Political, philosophical, of governance.
Martin Rees
Yes.
David Deutsch
Well, maybe it’s a knowledge of how to optimize the economy and incentives in those countries so that these things happen. I mean, governance is the most important issue in Africa, probably impeding development.
Martin Rees
So we could do that. But I think another point which actually is response to an earlier point made over there is that although there are many issues where different cities could take different attitudes about being vegetarians, et cetera. The point is that there’s a growing number of issues which are global, and climate is obviously one of them. And here we do need to have a debate which does embrace as much of the world as possible. We can’t have a choice as to how warm we want the world to be. You’ve got to agree on that. And there are a few other things like exhaustible resources, et cetera, where the same issue applies. So I think there are more issues which have a scientific dimension and also more issues which need to be decided on a scale larger than a nation.
Cliff Chanin
As well as scale, it’s also a question of range. So thinking about the Enlightenment and the capacity of the Enlightenment to transform knowledge into a kind of optimism through a future orientation, that was generally, as we see around here, quite incremental through human history and on a kind of horizon that wasn’t anywhere near as long as the horizon you were describing, Martin. So I think is it something about our ability to think in Enlightenment terms perhaps more than three, four generations ahead to mitigate against catastrophes that we can barely anticipate, asteroids colliding with our planet? And that’s the kind of failure of 21st century Enlightenment, perhaps.
Martin Rees
Well, I think this is true. We need to think about events which are remote in different parts of the world. But also we do in the context of climate change in particular need to think about what might happen a century hence. And this is not within the range of normal economic decisions. So we do need to have a different kind of economics and think longer term, have a low discount rate. And incidentally, the other thing we need to do is to include in our estimates of capital, natural capital, and include despoiling of natural resources as a negative contribution to GNP. And so I think these are ways in which a different attitude to economics could stimulate long term thinking. But we certainly have to make these changes if we are to address such long term issues. Incidentally, I talk about discount rate. There’s just one context where policy implies a zero discount rate. And that’s in disposing of radioactive waste, when people talk with a straight face about whether the repository is safe for 10,000 years. That’s applying a zero discount rate. And it’s ironic that in that context we think 10,000 years ahead, whereas in keeping the lights on we don’t think 30 years ahead.
Matthew Taylor
One tiny point, because I think it’s been missed in the debate. And that is in certain key areas we know less than we used to know. So political leaders know less about how to lead now than political leaders knew 40 or 50 years ago. Because the world has become more complex, because populations have become more diverse, because we are less deferential, our political leaders are much more at sea, much less confident of their knowledge about how it is you drive change in societies. So we must factor into this debate that in some ways technological and scientific progress and its consequences make some forms of knowledge go backwards, not forwards.
David Deutsch
And they were complaining that internet billionaires have muscled in. You can’t complain about that at the same time as saying that now politicians don’t know enough.
Matthew Taylor
Well it’s because the things that they have got are a lot cleverer than democracy, for example. So that’s one of the kind of challenges we’re talking about.
David Deutsch
Well you could think of that as a democratization of power going out of the hands of government to the people. Because those billionaires get their money from people signing up to Facebook and so on. They would easily sign up to something else.
Peter de Bolla
Hi, I’m Peter de Bolla, I’m part of the Re-Enlightenment Project. I think the conversation’s got to a really interesting point. We asked our two panelists, our two main speakers, to talk a little bit about this topic and we gave you the rubric of epistemological optimism. I think what we had in the back of our minds and what’s now come out in the conversation is the thought that we have to pay attention, perhaps urgently now at this particular moment in human history in relation to a number of things that have already been said about the particular position that we have vis-à-vis the speed of change in relation to technology and science and so on. What we had in mind was that we need to take a set of stances to what we call knowledge, what we think of as knowledge. So when you were talking, Martin, about the idea that you might have an attitude, so one of the attitudes that you might take towards knowledge is, we could call it for the moment, optimism. But there are a whole number of other attitudes or stances we could take in respect to knowledge. Just kind of imagine what David said. And it also picks up on what Matthew was saying. So we might take, for example, an attitude in which we wish to curate knowledge. In other words, we wish to preserve the best that we’ve thought about something. This picks up on David’s idea about we progress towards knowledge by getting the right answers and when we find that they’re wrong, we correct. So there’s a curative, a curation aspect to that. But that’s not the only important stance that we need to take. We also need to take stances which have something of the ethical in them, which you’ve spoken about. So I’m not going to go on too long because I know we’re going to wrap up. But one of the real problems, as you know, and everyone in the room knows about the climate debate, is that in the current world in which we’re in which communication is ubiquitous around the globe and continuous, it is difficult to establish the positions from which so-called scientists or those whom we trust to have knowledge about this have the main say. So it can be challenged in some places. People think this is good. In some cases, some people think it’s bad. But one of the stances that we can take to knowledge is to trust those who advance, as it were, the best explanation. And that’s an attitude. In other words, you can say, Martin, you can say, looking into your crystal ball, you fear that things may go wrong. The problem with crystal ball gazing is that, of course, the future hasn’t yet happened. And, you know, hopefully it will happen, but, you know, you say it might not. But it hasn’t happened. So you have to develop something of a relationship of trust to the person who says that. So that’s another aspect, if you like, of the political or the social, which needs to be put out there on the table in relation to this question about knowledge and our future.
Karen O’Brien
Thank you, Pete. I think on that question of good explanations and trusting the explainer, we might ask our two speakers to say a few words in summary, perhaps starting with you, Martin.
Martin Rees
Yes. Well, I agree with what Pete de Bolla says. As Matthew pointed out, that the job of a politician is getting harder and the power they have is getting more limited also because of multinationals and all that. And they certainly need all the advice they can get. And I think one consequence of what Pete de Bolla was saying is that there does need to be some system whereby there can be advice to politicians from experts. But I think my impression from being a bit in this world is that advice from experts to politicians directly is often not heeded. It’s far better if the experts get through to the public and the press. And then there is pressure from MPs’ postbags and from the press, and the politicians do respond to that. So that’s another reason why I think scientific experts should engage with the wide public and with the press, because that’s the way they’ll have more influence. So I think we need to involve the public more widely. And one reason I am pessimistic is that the job of politicians is getting very, very difficult. And the control they have is getting less simply because of the dispersal of power, which is in many ways so beneficial.
Karen O’Brien
David?
David Deutsch
Yeah, well, I agree. And I agree that I also distrust the idea of scientist kings. I think Plato was very wrong about that. I’m not sure it’s fair that I get the first word and the last word. So can I just say that trusting those who provide the best explanations isn’t quite it. The democratization of knowledge via the best explanations would mean, you see, once a process has decided that something is the best explanation, there’s no need to trust anyone. And that’s really the whole point. For knowledge to have effects, it shouldn’t be filtered through any single source. So I agree with that.
Karen O’Brien
Well, we’re not giving anyone the last word because the last words will take place over a drink in the Benjamin Franklin room, and what more appropriate room title than Benjamin Franklin for optimism, knowledge and enlightenment. So, I mean, many thanks to the RSA for hosting this event and generously providing us with a drinks reception afterwards. But please join me in thanking our two wonderful speakers. Thank you very much.
Markdown