Jeremy Lent | Should we choose politicians by lottery?

[00:00] Jeremy: What we think of as democracy, where we vote for leaders every four or five years and then they make decisions and we choose this or that group, is actually probably best characterized as almost like an electoral oligarchy, or even, you could go further and call it, an oligarchy by consent. It's really about returning to the things that make humans actually thrive, which is being in communities, self-organizing together, making decisions collaboratively. All these ideas that seem radical, they seem far out there. In almost all cases, they are working. Things like citizens' assemblies are shown to work on the ground right now.

[00:45] Beatrice: I'm very excited today to be joined by Jeremy Lent, who is the author of a new book called Ecocivilization. And yeah, very excited to be digging into this today with you, Jeremy. Thank you for joining us.

[00:57] Jeremy: Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to this conversation, Beatrice.

[01:00] Beatrice: So basically, you were a CEO of an internet company, as I understand it, in the nineties, and you did the IPO, and now you've made this shift to working on this idea of writing about ecological civilization. How did you get from one to the other?

[01:18] Jeremy: Yeah, well, it was quite a real process of transformation and a bit of a real meltdown. As you say, I started an internet company. It was actually the first company ever that allowed people to apply for credit cards online, get approved in real time, and design their own card on the web. So very innovative and exciting times. It was the first dot com boom. And then really things kind of crashed around me personally. My wife at the time, who passed away some years back, got very sick. I left the company to look after her. It went from being dot com boom to dot com bust, basically. I kind of left probably earlier than it was ready for that to happen. And I had been CEO and founder. And then, as I went through this bust period and looked after my wife, she began to develop borderline dementia. So I kind of lost the relationship I'd had with her, even while I was looking after her. Went through real existential query into what is meaning in life? I really was dedicated to make sure that whatever I did with the rest of my life had meaning. So it took a lot. I didn't want to just take somebody else's words for this or ideas for this. So I did a lot of my own research and spent years really going through different levels of interdisciplinary research, everything from philosophy to history to anthropology, all the way back to underlying kind of taking over the layers, like peeling an onion, if you will, then all the way to evolutionary biology. And what that led to was some changes in my own understandings and some books that I wrote, one called The Patterning Instinct, which is a cultural history of humanity's search for meaning, actually looking at the way the different cultures have made meaning out of the universe, all the way from hunter-gatherer times to the present and how that shaped history. And then really I led to my own sense of meaning making, which I wrote in this book, The Web of Meaning, which really looks at integrating some of the great traditions of history, like Buddhism, Taoism, Indigenous knowledge, with findings of modern sciences like systems science and evolutionary biology, cognitive science, et cetera. But that led me to recognize that the way that I saw the world moving was actually on a very potentially very destructive path. And I began to recognize that there are ways in which we can have a really positive, flourishing future for humanity.

[03:45] Jeremy: But in the understanding that I have, that I share with a lot of the people I was following, it needs to be really transformed in a more fundamental and systemic way. And that's what this book, Ecocivilization, the result of basically five years of research and writing, tries to show: that in my view, there is a very positive pathway available for humanity and the living Earth. But it does take changes in really what I think of as the operating system of our world today.

[04:14] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah, because in the book you argue that, you know, people are saying that civilization is malfunctioning, but you're saying that's not really the case. It's really working as it is designed to work. So you don't think that's the ideal way that it could be designed.

[04:31] Jeremy: Exactly. And so that's a key message, at least in the first half, or the first third or so, of the book, which is more like a diagnosis of where we're at today and where that came from historically. And of course, you know, many people are looking to fix problems with the system. Anyone who has a heart and a mind looks at what's going on and sees there are things that are wrong. And of course people want to fix this or fix that. And this was a realization that I came to over some years of this research, that actually the system is a system that is designed for extraction of resources from the living Earth. It's actually designed to exploit most people in the world for the sake of those who have the capital to be able to exploit it. So it's kind of a system built for extraction and exploitation. And it's very much built around what has been called a wealth pump. Essentially, a whole process that kind of sucks wealth from most people and the natural resources of the living Earth to a very tiny elite. So once you see that's what the system is designed to do, then if you're trying to make that system work a bit better, it doesn't actually stop these underlying processes. But those processes can be stopped and they can be changed, in my view. And that's what most of the book looks at: how those changes could happen and how we could actually build basically a system that is designed to set, I mean, in essential terms, a system designed to set the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerating Earth, which I imagine most people in the world would feel, well, that makes total sense. Of course we should have a system that looks like that. But that system would look, in my view, very different than the one we have now.

[06:20] Beatrice: Yeah, the sort of subtitle of the book is Making a World That Works for All. So just to make sure we're on the same page with everyone, your sort of diagnosis of what is wrong is that the current system is built to be too extractive and to only benefit a few people.

[06:38] Jeremy: Exactly. And you know, of course, a lot of people I know, people you've had on your podcast, like Steven Pinker is a perfect example, or many others, would argue, and there's a lot of empirical evidence to support that, well, that's not the case. Look at all the increases in material wealth that you can see spread throughout most of the population, and improvements in health and hygiene and longevity and infant mortality, all that kind of stuff. And I don't disagree with that in the slightest. I think that is absolutely empirically valid. And so that's, you know, like a starting point from what I look at, as well as others. But what some of the differences are, and where this book explores, is that, to begin with, a lot of these improvements came about really through scientific understanding, through technological development, absolutely, but not through the actual economic system which we can just really describe as sort of global capitalism, that developed along with that. And that in fact, it's kind of helpful to separate those two processes out rather than put it all together in one sort of lump, one sort of fused approach, if you will. And on that basis, in fact, interestingly, some studies have actually looked at not measures, for example, like GDP, which kind of shows the rate at which activity, human activity and resources are sucked into the monetary economy. But actually if you look at the normal, like the subsistence basket of what ordinary people need to live on, or things like studies of their height at death, or very basic qualities like that, what you find is that actually when our dominant Western system, through colonialism, moved into these other places, those qualities of ordinary life, material quality of life, actually declined significantly. In some cases, they still haven't even gone back to where they were before that arose. So the point is that there's almost like deeper layers of analysis that show that the system actually does not work for all, the way we have it right now. It works mostly for people who are on the more privileged part of that system and who were born into

[09:01] Jeremy: the wealthier countries and who have the capital to be able to employ it for their benefit, not for the bulk of people who are on the other side of that equation.

[09:11] Beatrice: Yeah, and I think, like you mentioned, there's maybe some of our previous guests, you know, from the sort of Foresight community that would have a very different take on this. And I want to get into that, but first I just want to make sure that we understand your ideas. So it would be nice to, because you actually have an idea of what we should design instead.

[09:31] Jeremy: Really, the foundation begins by looking at what this concept of ecological civilization even means. One is it looks at the notion of civilization itself. So it goes beyond things like, we need to change our economics or change our technology or change this or that. But actually every aspect of what we call civilization can and would need to be transformed in order to give us the system that works for all. So the scope is really important. And then the ecological part is really important. It's not just saying we need to be ecological and be in harmony with the rest of life, which is part of it. But we can actually take some of the principles for the kind of change we need from the principles of life itself. And for example, one of those, which is really important, is the idea of mutually beneficial symbiosis. When we look at how life works, it works not really from outcompeting one species with another. Competition is always part of ecosystems. But actually life's rich abundance has evolved over billions of years through different species learning how to work together symbiotically with other species, which ends up creating a whole that is greater than the parts and more complex and richer. And that kind of mutually beneficial symbiosis is something that we as humans actually evolved really to do ourselves. We lived most of our lives as nomadic hunter-gatherers, working very much cooperatively with each other. And it's really like a return to that kind of cooperation that I'm talking about.

[11:08] Beatrice: It's actually really nice, the idea of mutually beneficial symbiosis. Because I feel like we exist in very different ID ecosystems to some extent. But this idea reminded me very much of something that we talk a lot about, which is called Paretotopia, where you can move in a Pareto-preferred direction, basically, so that everyone is better off and no one is worse off. And yeah, it sounds a little bit like this idea, but it's just different language for similar ideas.

[11:37] Jeremy: Yeah, I think that is absolutely right. So then the question is, well, how would that actually work in all kinds of areas, everything from wealth distribution to how we grow our food to how we live with the living Earth, to actually how technology gets developed and used. And so, you know, what the book looks at is for every one of these questions, there's a chapter, and actually I should add governance is a big part of it too, how we make decisions collectively. In every case it looks at how the system works now and shows how that's led to imbalances, and then shows how actually it can be reorganized in fundamentally different ways to reach that sort of Pareto optimality across the board in different places. Exactly.

[12:24] Beatrice: So for someone hearing about the concept of ecocivilization for the first time, what would be your one-sentence version of explaining it?

[12:31] Jeremy: Well, I think it begins with a simple sentence: it would be a civilization that sets the conditions for all beings to thrive on a regenerating Earth. And so importantly, it's about setting conditions. It's recognizing you're not going to control things. This is not about, for example, saying we need to go from capitalism to communism or socialism or some of these old dichotomies from the past. But it's about basically really, in some ways, taking a systems-oriented view of looking at how organizations and societies self-organize and saying if you set the conditions for things to be optimized, then you allow it to happen in its own way. Importantly, it's for all beings to thrive on a regenerating Earth, which includes both human beings and the other non-human organisms with which we share this Earth, and which ties again to that notion of mutually beneficial symbiosis. So it sets the parameters for things like technology or agriculture or the ways in which we relate to the rest of Earth. It asks a different kind of question: how can we utilize these incredible technologies that we have for the benefit of all? And not for the benefit, really, of the zero-sum game for humans at the expense of the rest of Earth, for example.

[13:52] Beatrice: And there are a lot of different sort of concrete pieces in the book. I know you mentioned, for example, donut economics, you talk about worker co-ops, rights of nature, technology. Could you maybe say which one or two you think would be useful for the listener to have a bit of an overview?

[14:11] Jeremy: Sure. Well, let's maybe take a look at a couple. Maybe the economics one, donut economics, is a great reframing. And also maybe look at governance, which is a very interesting concept. We can also look at reframing. And so that'll give a little bit of a feeling for where this goes. So first off, economics is a key one. Now, when we look at standard conventional economics, that is based to a very large extent on the notion of increased GDP. That's the measure of success that politicians or economists use. If a politician can show that during their time in power GDP rose by three percent or more, then great, we're doing well. If it goes down, that's a problem. So that's how we base things. But one of the major findings, and again, these are not my findings, but ones that I share in the book, is that a simple look at the measure of GDP does not actually measure welfare. It measures, as I was mentioning before, the rate at which things are sucked into the monetary economy. But Kate Raworth, who calls herself a renegade economist in the UK, wrote this book a number of years back called Doughnut Economics, which offers a reframing of basically what economics could and should be about. And the reason she uses the word donut is because it has an outer ring and an inner ring. And the outer ring represents the notion of planetary boundaries, which has been developed by a lot of Earth scientists. And I would imagine probably you've explored this on your program at different times. But the Stockholm Resilience Institute is a foundational organization, with people like Johan Rockström. It looks at really, there are nine planetary boundaries, things like climate, ozone layer, pollution, which the scientists have determined we need to stay within for a sustainable human future on this Earth. But the terrifying discovery is we've broken through about seven of those. So the donut economics outer ring is essentially those planetary boundaries, and saying we need to move our economics so we actually live within that outer ring. We live within sustainable boundaries. And then the inner ring represents the core material foundations needed to have those conditions for everyone to be able to flourish.

[16:35] Jeremy: So basic access to clean water, you know, clean and safe accommodation, food, nutrition, education, et cetera. And so then it reframes the goal of economics: it's not to grow GDP, but how do we organize the economy so that we can actually stay within those boundaries? So that's kind of an example of a reframe. There are implications that come from that. But I'll give a second example and then we can explore those if we want, which has to do with this notion of governance. And yeah, probably most people who listen to this podcast would agree that the idea of democracy is a good idea, that we should actually have a system where people, ordinary people, get an equal say in what happens to their future, which is great. But what, again through my research over these years, I began to discover is that what we think of as the best kind of democracy now, we call electoral democracy, where we vote for leaders every four or five years and then they make decisions and we choose this or that group, is actually probably best characterized as almost like an electoral oligarchy, or even you could go further and call it an oligarchy by consent, which is that this is not actually what people in fact want. What you get to choose between is two different groups, which mostly are dominated by people who are wealthy elites who have been educated and have the wealth to be able to be in those positions, and also people with characteristics of more charisma and oftentimes egotism and manipulation to get to these places where they become the sort of high, well-known politicians. And those are the people we get to choose, rather than actually ordinary people deciding our futures. Now it turns out, if you look all the way back to ancient Greece and Aristotle, in ancient Athens, looking at ways to organize ourselves, he right from the beginning looked at two different ways we can organize. One was this kind of electoral approach, which he called oligarchy. The other approach, which he called democracy, was how Athens actually did work, except it only worked for male citizens, not for females or slaves or other people there.

[18:54] Jeremy: But it worked through sortition, essentially choosing by lottery ordinary people to get together and think and talk and assemble to make decisions about what should be done for the society as a whole. Well, it turns out that in the last few decades, around the world, and Europe is actually leading the way on this, even though it's in other countries in other parts of the world too, there is the notion of citizens' assemblies, where ordinary people are again chosen by sortition, and there may be a hundred or so people who then get together in assemblies, which are facilitated, and it brings out conversations in people who then get to choose experts to come and tell them detailed answers to questions they have. And the amazing thing is that when people get together in these ways and they know that their decisions can impact society, they tend to leave the polarization that we see in normal society right now more at the door. And people will actually begin to think together, build off each other's ideas, and come to collective recommendations and decisions that turn out to be far more reasonable, that really show common sense and work, than those that electoral politicians tend to stand for. So that's an example of how we can reframe how we think of governance in a fundamentally different way that's very consistent with what we kind of implicitly want to begin with.

[20:24] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah, I think that the democracy angle is also a really good example of how technology could help us do better here, or like how we actually have better tools at hand these days.

[20:37] Jeremy: Exactly. In Taiwan, there are some fantastic examples that have been developed by somebody called Audrey Tang, who is actually the elected minister for this kind of technology in Taiwan. And they use these ideas of citizen thought, collective thought, but use technology, and one particular technology in general is called Pol.is, which actually goes away from the way in which our social media and most of our sort of shared technology is currently working, which enhances polarization or enhances basically falsities rather than truth, significantly so, which creates this kind of epistemic chaos. But instead it looks differently. It looks at how different ideas put out by people can actually reach more consensus by looking at the shared agreements that ideas have between people. And it actually brings out the areas where people who might be technically viewed as more polarized or against each other, areas where they agree, and it brings those up to the surface. So that's a great way in which technology can actually be used to bring us to consensus decisions rather than fighting against each other.

[21:53] Beatrice: Yeah, I was actually very happy to interview her last week or something, but we haven't published it yet. But we will definitely try to link that episode maybe from this one so people can find it. But yeah, she goes into these great tools that they've developed. Mm-hmm. Yeah, what could be interesting is also some of the reflections that came up on my end when I read it, on what an alternative perspective could be, which is one of the things was

[22:01] Jeremy: Glad to hear that, yeah.

[22:24] Beatrice: the focus on planetary boundaries. I think Foresight is a very, very techno-optimist community. And for example, we have a space part of our program. So the focus there is very much on, like, what about also expansion outwards. Obviously we need to think and care about the boundaries as well, but we could do that and aim for expansion, maybe. Because in the long term it seems like we don't really have any other option, also because the Earth will only exist for so long.

[22:51] Jeremy: Yeah, so when you say expansion outwards, you mean literally out from the Earth's planetary boundary, to basically expansion into other parts of the galaxy, or

[23:03] Beatrice: That's literally, but also the case for, and this is probably where you would have a very different perspective, but it has always seemed when we look at the history of technology that we're able to do more with less, and that when it seems that we're at the end of something, a resource, we're able to invent something else, and so there's another type of mindset where it's like well, it's like a problem-solving kind of like

[23:33] Jeremy: Yes. And so, yeah, those are two different and each important concepts. Maybe we can look at each. And so yeah, this is one of the findings I came across in my research, I write about in the book, that also may be a little challenging for some people's presumptions in the conversations you have, which is this notion of green growth. And there's this wonderful idea that's shared by many people, including like the UN or the EU and many major institutions, that green growth is really doable and is what we need to get to. The simple concept. Exactly. Do more with less. We can keep growing GDP and keep developing, but we can actually break apart from the consumption and the rate at which we're consuming the Earth or whatever. And what I discovered is there are actually studies by people such as Jason Hickel and others that have looked in kind of detail at green growth, and have shown that actually this decoupling, as it's called, true decoupling, not just relative decoupling, so it's not just GDP grows a little faster than resource use, but actually moving in different directions, has never happened. And in fact, if you look at total global resource use over the last, say, 50 years, and you graph it against the increase in GDP, you see these two lines going almost touching each other all the way along without any actual sign of this green growth happening. And you say, well, why would that be? And really the reason for that, I think the best reason was discovered by an economist in England in the nineteenth century called Jevons. And what it's known as is Jevons paradox. And Jevons, he studied basically the invention of the steam engine in England in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And the paradox was that the steam engine was designed to actually make it more efficient to pump water out of the coal mines so it'd be easier to mine the coal. And the engine was designed so it could be more efficient. So you didn't have to use so much coal to get more coal, basically. So the logic under the design was that there should have been less coal mined because you didn't need as much anymore as you did before.

[26:03] Jeremy: But instead of mining less coal, the efficiency of the steam engine led to way more coal being mined. And then economists since then have looked at virtually every example of increased efficiency and material usage, and they found that to be the case. And so you get things like, if you increase the fuel efficiency of cars, it turns out that on average people then drive further because then it's cheaper for them to make longer journeys or whatever. In the American South, say in the nineteenth century, these are classic discoveries. They made cotton picking and the extraction of cotton way, way more efficient through the invention of the cotton gin, which should have logically led to the reduction of the need for the amount of slaves that got enslaved and had to work to do that. Instead, it led to more slaves getting used because people could make even more money from the cotton production. So this paradox is kind of fundamental to our economic system of global capitalism, which we've talked about from the beginning, that whenever you make, with the best intention, a way to increase the efficiency of something, to kind of get that decoupling, the system goes, well, we can make more money from this. This could be better for shareholders. Let's invest more in this and do more of it. So for example, we see this great progress in the cost of renewable energy. Now it's basically cheaper than fossil fuel usage. That has not led, though, to a reduction of fossil fuel usage. It's led to the usage of more energy, including renewables as well as fossil fuels. And of course, with something like AI, the opportunity is even greater. Let's even use more energy. So this is a crucial and it's a very difficult understanding because it sort of undermines a lot of the reasons why we can say, okay, there's this wonderful kind of utopia available for us. But it doesn't mean we should give up on what we're really looking for, on material benefits for everybody. It just means that we have to develop a system where we can actually look for what is a material sufficiency.

[28:12] Jeremy: And in many cases, we can look at actually the sort of luxuries that people might want to enjoy can be actually made more available rather than owned by small elites that then keep other people out, made more available so basically lots of ordinary people can enjoy these luxuries rather than just a few. So it kind of reframes, it almost goes back to that donut economics way of thinking. So rather than being a defeatist sort of notion, it kind of reorients what we can think of as truly developing for basically better living for all. So I guess really where that all goes is there is a sort of fundamental shift in what is technology for, or what really are we humans on Earth for? And there is definitely a part of our dominant worldview that is this belief, like, it's all about, you know, we've got to explore more and expand more. And this is what basically is the excitement of being human or being alive. And again, I love this idea of exploring and expanding more. But there are ways in which we can do that basically to expand the qualities of our lives rather than the material consumption of our lives. And that's what a lot of this book is about, is looking at how we can truly expand quality through things like community, collective intelligence, and rediscovering how humans really evolved to flourish on this Earth, which is really being in community with others rather than being separated and feeling fragmented. And we can do that by sharing the material wealth that is all around in different ways. So that kind of reframes what is possible for us to grow into.

[30:03] Beatrice: Yeah, I think that's a, I see a lot of overlap there because to me, when I think of existential hope, it very much means that we should be strategic, or we should be intentional, about how we build a future. So for example, like you're saying, the fact that we can use more renewable energy is much better than using more fossil fuels. I think if you believe in science, you agree on that. And so as humans we're very good at problem solving, but there's a hard problem that keeps coming up, which is that it's hard to be strategic on a civilizational scale, and that often you end up with these sort of lock-in effects where just because there was a system that was there first, it makes it really hard to change that system. But the keyboard is the, the

[30:49] Jeremy: Exactly. And that does, actually, I think that's a great point you raise. And that's a huge challenge, which in a sense what this book is about is having us look at that challenge. It's a little bit like saying, okay, the QWERTY keyboard was not designed to be optimal. We've got to redesign the QWERTY keyboard. And then you can say, well, you can't do that because for all the reasons you say, like it's embedded within our systems. And so we've got to work within the system. And so the book does something different. It may be worth just spending a moment on this, because it's a methodological approach which I think is important to understand. It uses this concept that's used sometimes in planning circles called backcasting, which essentially means let's look at the kind of future we actually want for humanity and for ourselves and for life. And now let's look at where we are now and then look at what needs to happen for us to get from here, how can we map a path to get to that future we want? And it's very different from the sort of QWERTY optimization, if you will. I mean, that's such a great metaphor for what we're talking about. And just for people who aren't quite familiar with that, basically what this relates to is the fact that the keyboard that we're all used to using was actually designed not to make it more efficient for people to type, but to make it more difficult for people to type. Because in those days, each key of an old-fashioned typewriter would, if you typed it too fast, the two keys would hit each other and it would cause a problem. So they designed a keyboard to make it hard for people to type one letter after the other really quickly, based on the ways the letters are used in the alphabet, to make those old-fashioned machines more efficient. But of course that led now to a keyboard that is not nearly as fast as if we were to design it in a different way. But everyone's used to it. And so we're stuck in that conditioning. So it's a key concept. And then you could say, well, it's more realistic to begin with a QWERTY keyboard and then say, how can we just make ourselves faster to work with that? But the concept is that if the things that we are doing are not working and actually are leading to the problems becoming greater and greater, then it's actually unrealistic. And in fact it's kind of almost like we're putting blinders on to keep doing what we're doing.

[33:13] Jeremy: There's this quote around that is attributed to Einstein, but I don't think he ever actually said it, but maybe people attribute it to him because it sounds so smart. Basically, it's almost like something like to keep doing something that you know doesn't work, but to keep doing it again and again, is almost like a sign of insanity. That's what you need to break out of. And in the case of green growth, it's a perfect example of that. If we look at the actual facts and say every time we do these technological improvements within the current system, it leads to actually more consumption, the Jevons paradox, then we need to design a system that undoes that Jevons paradox rather than just keep trying to stay within that. And that's what backcasting is about. But it does lead to these big challenges. And it's these big challenges across the board. And things like reframing economics, reframing democracy are things we've talked about, reframing law, even. These concepts are like the rights of nature, so that actually we can think of law itself as being not just human rights and how property should be allocated between people, but actually giving literally legal rights to nature, which is something that is actually being done in some constitutions in some countries around the world. And things like laws about stopping ecocide give a sense of that kind of idea. So this is not easy stuff in that respect. But the overall message of the book is that rethinking is what we need to get to that future flourishing. But the good news is that it's not rethinking that says somehow human consciousness has to evolve to some unknown level of awakening or anything like that. It's really about returning to the things that make humans actually thrive, which is this way of being in communities, self-organizing together, making decisions collaboratively. And one of the things I show in the book is, for all these ideas that seem radical, that seem far out there, in almost all cases, they are working. They're shown to work. Things like citizens' assemblies or others, and there are many other examples, are shown to work on the ground right now. And so it's not like we have to just try to figure out something like some sort of rocket science next level that hasn't been done, but it's more to recognize there are things that do work, but how can we try to reorient the deeper elements of our system around them?

[35:40] Jeremy: Just one example for that, for example, is we think of corporations, big transactional corporations, as really the only way that there can be efficient use of, you know, this whole process of extracting resources and bringing it for consumers to actually use. And they're tremendously, amazingly efficient in many ways. But it turns out you can have cooperative structures that can be every bit as efficient. There's a massive cooperative, for example, in the Basque Country in Spain called Mondragon, which is a worker-owned cooperative where there are 80,000 worker-owners, basically, in different organizations, different companies within this overall umbrella that is doing high-tech development, engineering, different systems involved in healthcare, all kinds of things. But the big difference is that rather than optimizing for shareholder profits, it optimizes for actually the workers' benefit. And the pay ratio, for example, between the CEO of one of these companies and the lowest-paid worker is no higher than basically six times, rather than thousands of times, the way it is in some of the big corporations now. This is an example of transformation that can happen that has already been shown to work.

[37:01] Beatrice: Yeah. I think that on the backcasting from a future we want, we've done those exercises. I think that the hard thing is obviously that we're not all going to agree on what we want. But one of my favorite sort of ideas for a positive future is actually the idea of, you know, a meta-utopia. So people being able to choose what type of society they want to live in, but that also still obviously requires some coordination from the planet and planetary boundaries and these sort of things.

[37:11] Jeremy: Exactly. Yeah.

[37:30] Beatrice: And this is more, this is not really a question, but just a reflection that I think is interesting. Another sort of criticism that I think comes up often is that, yes, this is really interesting, but we're in a very competitive situation. And so, for example, if you talk about what would be the ideal society, that's okay to think of as something in the future, we can try to do that, we can try to optimize these systems and have a post-scarcity society. But right now we're in a very competitive situation. So if we don't do it, someone else is going to do it. I mean, you can think of that in terms of the AI race right now.

[38:07] Jeremy: Absolutely. So that is a perfect example. I mean, the AI race really captures, and it's really one of the most existential opportunities and threats we're facing, depending on how it evolves. And you get these, there are two levels of what you're talking about. One is within, say, our capitalist structure, you have people like Dario Amodei, say, at Anthropic, who's trying to do things in a more careful way with guardrails compared to, say, OpenAI or whatever. But then he himself will say, but I've got to play the same game because if I try to do the real safe stuff, we'll fall behind. We won't get a place at the table to help to make the policy decisions. We won't be able to get the billions upon billions of investment we need to make this happen. So then he ends up trying to say, well, we'll do the same stuff that we even think is bad and dangerous, but we'll try to do it less bad and try to put some guardrails in place. So that's one issue of that kind of competition you're talking about. And then there's the nationalistic kind of competition, with the Americans saying if we don't do it, the Chinese will do it. And then, you know, we'll live in a world dominated by whatever those Chinese values are. And Chinese engineers quite reasonably fear the same thing from the other end. So there are what they call multipolar traps that we're stuck in right now. And these are huge existential dangers and risks to look at, definitely. And my suggestion is that the only way we can break out of those is to realize that this is really an example of what's classically known as the prisoner's dilemma, which I'm sure many people who watch here are familiar with, which is simply that you've got two groups together, and they both, if they can organize that together properly, could both optimize for, again, that notion of mutually beneficial symbiosis. But they're stuck in this way with incomplete information and having to fight against each other because of the risk that the other one will basically cheat on them and get ahead of them and then destroy them or whatever.

[40:15] Jeremy: So the only way to get out of that kind of zero-sum game or that prisoner's dilemma is to actually find ways to encourage this kind of shared collaborative realization that we all actually have the same fears and the same values, and create institutions to help to reduce that level of mistrust. Which in this case, in the case of AI, for example, within a national system like, say, the US, you get people like Amodei calling for, we need better regulation, stronger regulation, like literally asking for some federal parameters in place so everyone can be on the same playing field. Similarly, even with the nation-state rivalry, the same kind of thing can happen and has happened, say at the UN. And the nuclear risk is a great example of how, all the way back to the 1950s, people looked at this existential terror of the end of the world through nuclear, yeah, through nuclear meltdown and worked together very haltingly. And it wasn't like a huge success, but it was relatively successful, just in the sense that here we are 70 years later and we're still alive to look back at the history of this, to kind of try to moderate that risk. These are the kinds of things that you do have groups really working hard right now to try to make happen. There's a group that you may be familiar with, say, called the Center for Humane Technology, led by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, who are there in the middle of this technology world here in the Bay Area, where I come from too, and are looking at these existential risks and trying to put out some of this awareness, not to say, let's not develop this incredible technology that could be for the benefit of all, but to do it in a way that it truly can be available for all of us and not end up with one small group taking all the power. So it's only by looking at the system we're stuck in, looking at these multipolar traps that we're stuck in, and reaching out and trying to find places of trust with those that are most seemingly our opponents, whatever, in this, that we can actually end up creating a system that works for what each of us really wants.

[42:43] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah. Side note, Foresight has a book called Gaming the Future, where they sort of also talk about these multipolar traps and ways to get around them. I'd like to go to the question of, because you mentioned AI as an existential opportunity also. Yeah. And I think that this is a really, obviously, interesting question for our program, which is how do you think we can use this technology to really make the world a better place, and, yeah, how do you imagine we use AI to create the best possible future? Do you have ideas of how we do this?

[43:14] Jeremy: Yeah, well, thank you for asking that. And yeah, I do have some ideas to get at this. Maybe if I can step back one level first, to look at technology in general and how it's developed and how it can be developed optimally. And maybe even before we look at AI, we can look historically at the last couple of decades now, at the development of the internet itself. And when that first emerged, this potential, the excitement was so tremendous. Wow, this is like this democratization of knowledge and the democratization of the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas and everything. Such a fantastic opportunity. So many people so inspired. But of course, now we know over the last few decades what happened was, because of sort of the network effects of scaling, of like those who got bigger actually attracted more usage and then could attract more advertising and then more investment, we ended up in a place with the exact opposite of that democratization: the centralization of knowledge and power within a very small number of groups that actually then use that information and that power not to necessarily make a better world for all, but to make more money for their shareholders, which means they have to get more advertising, which means if fake information gets retweeted or sent around the social media, something like six to nine times as frequently as true information, that's what gets enhanced because it builds more advertising and more eyeballs. So what we have to see then is that the context in which these technologies are developed is fundamental. And to go back to this core theme that people will probably get now, the pattern of what I'm saying: when it's developed within the context of global capitalism and the need to create companies that maximize wealth for the shareholders in order to maximize investment and then maximizing advertising and all the rest of it, that will lead to suboptimal outcomes for most people and very optimal outcomes for a very tiny few. So this is exactly what we're seeing in AI development right now.

[45:30] Jeremy: Even though the promise of AI is just absolutely fantastic, whether you're looking at deep issues around health or how to develop fusion energy or all kinds of possibilities that could really give us a place of true abundance and break out of that green growth problem we were talking about earlier, it's almost inevitable that when AI is developed within these for-profit companies, it's not going to work in that way. In fact, what it's doing is really enclosing. It's a process of enclosure greater than any we've seen before. The notion of enclosure is the notion of wealth that was available at one point to ordinary people gets taken over by those with the power, and often violence, to make that happen. So enclosures happened all the way from when there were common pastures back in the Middle Ages, and the nobles and the landlords used their military power to basically steal that from peasants. And that led to other kinds of enclosures. So this is an enclosure of knowledge. We can really think of the vast treasure trove of human knowledge, which has been developed over millennia, was there available for everyone to access in some way or other. What AI is doing is taking all that knowledge, doing a brilliant job of then using it in these amazing ways to give us the information we want in just the kind of customized way, but it's doing it within this whole process of for-profit companies. So then people get drawn to the source of this information because it's so helpful. But the profits then end up just in the pockets of the few owners who own the companies that are doing this. So rather than them getting a relative benefit of the fact that they're helping us, they basically get all the wealth that humans have created collectively, just for that small group. But there are ways that that can be done differently. One is for the ownership of these companies to basically not be allowed to be in just these small private segments, but the ownership itself can be distributed so everyone gets a share in the actual wealth that is created, which can be done in very effective ways. So things like a universal basic income, which we can almost consider like a social dividend that everyone has from the fact of being alive, of being human beings born onto this Earth. And at a deeper level, though, there's something even more important about the way AI is developed. Because of course, what AI, as we know, is an incredibly smart pattern recognition system, like something that's called a stochastic parrot, of being able to take all this information that is there in human knowledge and then reform it in a way that is most helpful for people. But the thing is, the information itself is information that comes from the dominant worldview that is built on this extraction and exploitation I've been talking about. So some people have been developing AI, trying to get to a deeper layer of knowledge and information, to look at how life itself works and actually try to understand some of the core patterns, not just of human knowledge as we know it, but the actual patterns of living systems, how ecosystems actually thrive. And AI can be used to actually bring some of those core principles into knowledge and into these possibilities. So I think there can be a really deep reframing of what's possible. But again, it doesn't involve simple answers. It involves looking at some of the deeper levels of how things work. But the thing is, because of AI changing things so radically and so fast right now, there are these opportunities that come up. Maybe we used to think it would be decades ahead that is needed for these transformative things to happen. Because of the speed at which AI is disrupting everything, it might be only years ahead in which this opportunity exists to actually reframe how we organize ourselves.

[49:45] Beatrice: Yeah, there's some interesting work happening on public AI that I've seen as well. Exactly. We're basically running out of time, but I want to ask you a few quick questions just to wrap up, which is, let's say someone young is listening to this and they want to engage, they want to do something. Do you have any place in particular that you would recommend they start?

[50:11] Jeremy: Well, I think the best place to begin is by feeling, each person's got their own unique way of caring about what's going on in the world. And really this feeling into sort of two elements within each person's own heart. Where is your heartbreak? What is it that really upsets you about what's going on in the world? For some people it might be fixing the ways in which elephants are almost vanishing worldwide. Other people might be incredible inequalities or anything. What is it that you're feeling this heartbreak around? And what is it that makes you come alive and feel like, this is what I want to be putting my time into to help to make the world a better place? And let yourself be driven by what drives you from the inside. But then crucially important is to recognize that whatever you've come across that needs to be done, there are groups out there already doing this kind of stuff. There are so many groups of people organizing to try to be effective. So rather than try to create your own little group to go do this or that, find the groups that are already doing the stuff that you care about, join them, and be part of something bigger. Because it's only when we are working together, collectively and collaboratively, sharing our ideas with others and hearing their ideas, that we can be truly effective in turning around where we're headed.

[51:34] Beatrice: Yeah, community is a really big part of it. If you could recommend an organization or a person that you think is doing really important work on, you know, similar things to what you're doing, do you have anything that you would recommend?

[51:51] Jeremy: Yeah, thank you. Well, I'd say a couple of organizations I'd recommend: one, as I've mentioned, the Center for Humane Technology, for anyone who's really interested in these big questions of AI and technology development in general and looking at how we need to look clearly at the dangers and the possibilities. Another organization I strongly recommend is called the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. And we've talked about how GDP is not necessarily the best measure of what we're really trained to do. And there's this great alliance of people from around the world working with governments to reframe how we think about well-being, which you can actually join and be part of this kind of conversation. And probably if there's one single book I'd recommend to people, it's that book I mentioned called Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth. And for people who really want to explore a deeper way, some of the themes I look at in my Ecocivilization book, a deeper way of how we as humans can organize outside of the sort of whatever capitalist or hierarchical structures we're used to, there's a book about what's called the commons, which is really how humans always did organize for most of our history. It's called Free, Fair and Alive. And it's co-written by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich. And it's brilliant. It also looks at this notion of what's called an ontoshift, like changing how we think about what we're trying to do as human beings, from trying to optimize for ourselves individually to optimizing for ourselves collectively in community. And it's got some great real-world modern examples of what's available in that kind of reorientation.

[53:35] Beatrice: Yeah, I think those are some great recommendations. We'll also link them. The final question for you is, what is the best piece of advice you've ever received?

[53:45] Jeremy: Well, thank you. I love that. Probably the best piece of advice I've ever received is ultimately to be kind. To be kind to myself and to be kind to others. Because ultimately, for all the things we're trying to do, we'll come across within ourselves things we don't like in ourselves or mistakes we make and get caught in these really negative approaches. Or then we relate to others and we're angry with that person. We can't believe how stupid they are, or all this kind of stuff. And these are difficult things to hold, but when we always orient towards kindness, it's almost this way in which we can soften those difficult places. And really when we start to turn to ourselves with kindness, it starts to build this almost like this muscle, which then allows us to relate to others with that same kindness. And it's through kindness, I think, that we can truly get into those places of collaborative working together and work with each other to create the world that we all want.

[54:46] Beatrice: I love it. That's a very sweet, very nice note to end on. Thank you so much, Jeremy. Thank you for taking the time.

[54:53] Jeremy: Thank you. Thank you, Beatrice, for a really rich, it felt like a very rich conversation. I appreciated it.

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