Antithesis of My Design Education (Part 2)

The Antithesis of My Design Education Part II

Edited by: Lucien Ng

Morals & Ethics.

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Wait. What? We Can Rewire Our Sense of Morality?

by Michelle Quint

Scientists have long believed that the ability of the human brain to create new neurons ended in early development. Yet new research suggests that new cells are generated in the human brain throughout our lives. In fact, the new evidence suggests that thousands of new neurons are added each day, with only a modest decline in old age. Those blue spots in the image above highlight newborn neurons in an adult human brain.

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What roles do these new neurons play? And what controls the rate of neurogenesis, as their birth is called? These questions stand at the heart of new exploration in neuroscience, where the brain is seen as more malleable and dynamic than previously thought.

In the new TED Book Rewiring Our Morality, London-based neuroscientist Daniel Reisel asks how neurogenesis might shape our morality over the course of our lives—and how our new understanding of brain growth might reshape our criminal justice system. For instance, could restorative encounters, where perpetrators and victims of crime are brought together in facilitated meetings, trigger the growth of new neurons in parts of the human brain that are involved in empathy? Might we be able to rewire our sense of morality?

“Experience cannot alter the genetic code, but it can alter the way it is expressed. That is because there are numerous molecular switches that control when genes are turned on and off at various stages of life. Growing evidence suggests that what we experience—in the womb, as children, and throughout life— leaves an imprint on the so-called epigenome. Everything we experience can help determine which genes are active and which stay silent. The old question of nature vs. Nurture… has cast its shadow over many debates in the human sciences. However, the problem is not whether one is right and the other is wrong. The problem is the framing of the question: the perception that one of these aspects of the human story could completely determine a person’s choices. Because in their very interaction lies freedom and possibility.”

It’s been shown, for instance, that stress can stunt the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus, a brain area thought to be involved in forming new memories. In Reisel’s bold reading, he asks, could we also encourage the growth of new neurons in areas that might make us better and more moral people? It’s a lot of responsibility for the little blue spot you see above.

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As Reisel writes:

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JOSHUA GREENE Q&A MORALS & ETHICS

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The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality Evolution didn’t equip us for modern judgments.

Our instincts don’t always serve us well. Moral psychologist Joshua Greene explains why, in the modern world, we need to figure out when to put our sense of right and wrong in manual mode. His new book is Moral Tribe: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Tiffany O’Callaghan: You say morality is more than it evolved to be. What do you mean?

Joshua Greene: Morality is essentially a suite of psychological mechanisms that enable us to cooperate. But, biologically at least, we only evolved to cooperate in a tribal way. Individuals who were more moral—more cooperative with those around them—could outcompete others who were not. However, we have the capacity to take a step back from this and ask what a more global morality would look like. Why are the lives of people on the other side of the world worth any less than those in my immediate community? Going through that reasoning process can allow our moral thinking to do something it never evolved to.

TO: So we need to be able to switch from intuitive morality to more considered responses? When should we use which system?

JG: When it’s a matter of me versus us, my interests versus those of others, our instincts do pretty well. They don’t do as well when it’s us versus them,

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my group’s interests and values versus another group’s. Our moral intuitions didn’t evolve to solve that problem in an even-handed way. When groups disagree about the right thing to do, we need to slow down and shift into manual mode.

TO: Do we need a manual mode because our morals are dependent on culture and upbringing?

JG: When you share your moral common sense with people in your locality, that helps you to form a community. But those gut reactions differ between groups, making it harder to get along with other groups.

TO: And these differences result in what you call the “tragedy of common-sense morality”?

JG: Exactly. It is the modern moral problem, us versus them. When there is a conflict, which group’s sense of right and wrong should prevail? If a morality is a system that allows individuals to form a group and to get along with each other, then the challenge is to devise a system that allows different groups to get along—what I call a meta-morality.

TO: You propose utilitarianism, which aims to maximize everyone’s happiness impartially. The idea has been around since the 1700s. What’s different now?

JG: We now have a better biological and psychological understanding of our moral thinking. We can do experiments that reveal its quirks and inconsistencies. The idea that we should do what maximizes happiness sounds very reasonable, but it often conflicts with our gut reactions. Philosophers have spent the last century or so finding examples where our intuition runs counter to this idea and have taken these as signals that something is wrong with this philosophy. But when you look at the psychology behind those examples, they become less compelling. An alternative is that our gut reactions are not always reliable.

That said, there are some things you can do. In a 2010 study, Amitai Shenhav and I had people make moral judgments involving trade-offs, where you can

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TO: Some of your studies use brain imaging. What can this reveal about decision-making and how do we avoid reading too much into the results?

JG: Since functional brain imaging first emerged, we have learned that there aren’t very many brain regions uniquely responsible for specific tasks; most complex tasks engage many if not all of the brain’s major networks. So it is fairly hard to make general psychological inferences just from brain data.

Obviously easier said than done but where do we begin or how do we establish this metamorality?

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save one person for sure, or possibly save some number of people with varying probability. We found that the brain regions responsible for assigning values in these moral judgments are ones that perform the same function more generally, for example, when making decisions about food or money. This indicates that we are using general-purpose valuation mechanisms, and that may matter.

TO: Why does the particular mechanism we use to judge moral values matter?

JG: In the study I just mentioned, we saw that as the number of lives you can save goes up, people care less and less about each one. Why is that? The neural circuitry we inherited from our mammalian ancestors might offer an explanation. If you’re a monkey making a decision about which food to forage for, the more food there is available, the more each bit of it diminishes in value. There’s only so much you can eat. The thing is, we are using that same kind of process to think about things like saving lives. So an experiment that implicates our basic mammalian valuation mechanisms in making judgments about saving people’s lives can give you an explanation for why we show this pattern, and give us reason to question our intuitive judgment.

TO: In what other ways should we question our intuition?

JG: Consider the dilemma philosopher Peter Singer posed four decades ago.

You see a child drowning. You could save that child’s life but, if you do, you will ruin your fancy $1,000 suit. Singer asked if it was OK to let the child drown. Most people say, of course not, that would be monstrous.

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In another case, children on the other side of the world are desperately in need of food. By donating money, you could save their lives. Do you have an obligation to do that? Most people say that it’s nice if you do, but it’s not terrible if you instead choose to spend your money on luxuries for yourself.

Most philosophers have taken those intuitions at face value and said, that’s right, there is a moral obligation when the child is right in front of you, but not on the other side of the world. But Singer asked, is there really a moral difference?

TO: So, is there a moral difference between helping people nearby and those far away?

JG: Psychology can help us answer that question. Jay Musen and I recently did a more controlled version of Singer’s experiment and got very similar results—distance made a difference. What does that mean? When you are thinking about whether you have an obligation to try to save people’s lives, you don’t usually think, well, how close by are they? Understanding what we

If, biologically, morality evolved to help us get along with individuals in our community, it makes sense that we have heartstrings that can be tugged— and that they are not going to be tugged very hard from far away. But does that make sense? From a more reflective moral perspective, that may just be a cognitive glitch.

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are reacting to can change the way we think about the problem.

TO: If we value everyone’s happiness equally, won’t we be overwhelmed by the suffering of others?

JG: Utilitarianism is inherently pragmatic—in fact, I prefer to call it “deep pragmatism.” Humans have real limitations, obligations, and frailties, so the best policy is to set reasonable goals, given your limitations. Just try to be a little less tribalistic.

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The Moral Roots Of Liberals And Conservatives Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we’re left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.

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Suppose that two American friends are traveling together in Italy. They go to see Michelangelo’s “David,” and when they finally come face to face with the statue, they both freeze dead in their tracks. The first guy—we’ll call him Adam—is transfixed by the beauty of the perfect human form. The second guy—we’ll call him Bill—is transfixed by embarrassment, at staring at the thing there in the center. So here’s my question for you: which one of these two guys was more likely to have voted for George Bush, which for Al Gore?

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I don’t need a show of hands because we all have the same political stereotypes.

We all know that it’s Bill. And in this case, the stereotype corresponds to reality. It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience. People who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel.

People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.

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If you know about this trait, you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior. You can understand why artists are so different from accountants.

You can actually predict what kinds of books they like to read, what kinds of places they like to travel to, and what kinds of food they like to eat. Once you understand this trait, you can understand why anybody would eat at Applebee’s, but not anybody that you know. (Laughter) This trait also tells us

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This trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join. So here’s the description of a group I found on the Web. What kinds of people would join a global community welcoming people from every discipline and culture, who seek a deeper understanding of the world, and who hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all? This is from some guy named Ted. (Laughter) Well, let’s see now, if openness predicts who becomes liberal, and openness predicts who becomes a TEDster, then might we predict that most TEDsters are liberal? Let’s find out. I’m going to ask you to raise your hand, whether you are liberal, left of center—on social issues, we’re talking about, primarily—or conservative, and I’ll give a third option, because I know there are a number of libertarians in the audience. So, right now, please raise your hand -- down in the simulcast rooms, too, let’s let everybody see who’s here—please raise your hand if you would say that you are liberal or left of center. Please raise your hand high right now. OK. Please raise your hand if you’d say you’re libertarian. OK, about a—two dozen. And please raise your hand if you’d say you are right of center or conservative. One, two, three, four, five—about eight or 10.

OK. This is a bit of a problem. Because if our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team, and once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open-minded thinking. When the liberal team loses, as it did in 2004, and as it almost did in 2000, we comfort ourselves. (Laughter) We try to explain why half of America voted for the other team. We think they must be blinded by religion, or by simple stupidity. (Laughter) (Applause) So, if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way, then my message to you is that you’re trapped in a moral matrix, in a particular moral matrix. And by the matrix, I mean literally the matrix, like the movie “The Matrix.”

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But I’m here today to give you a choice. You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions, or you can take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix. Now, because I know— (Applause)—OK, I assume that answers my question. I was going to ask you which one you picked, but no need. You’re all high in openness to experience, and besides, it looks like it might even taste good, and you’re all epicures. So

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a lot about politics. The main researcher of this trait, Robert McCrae says that, “Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views”—they like a society which is open and changing—“whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right-wing views.”

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anyway, let’s go with the red pill. Let’s study some moral psychology and see where it takes us.

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Let’s start at the beginning. What is morality and where does it come from?

The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds, and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others. The best definition of innateness I’ve ever seen— this just clarifies so many things for me—is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. He says, “The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Built-in doesn’t mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.” OK, so what’s on the first draft of the moral mind?

To find out, my colleague, Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches. What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines? That you find across cultures and even across species? We found five—five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality.

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The first one is harm/care. We’re all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

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The second foundation is fairness/reciprocity. There’s actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. This Norman Rockwell painting is called “The Golden Rule,” and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong, of course, as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

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The third foundation is in-group/loyalty. You do find groups in the animal kingdom—you do find cooperative groups—but these groups are always either very small or they’re all siblings. It’s only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology.

And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don’t

The fourth foundation is authority/respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species. But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It’s based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.

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The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity. This painting is called “The Allegory Of Chastity,” but purity’s not just about suppressing female sexuality. It’s about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you’re willing to touch, or put into your body.

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I believe these are the five best candidates for what’s written on the first draft of the moral mind. I think this is what we come with, at least a preparedness to learn all of these things. But as my son, Max, grows up in a liberal college town, how is this first draft going to get revised? And how will it end up being different from a kid born 60 miles south of us in Lynchburg, Virginia? To think about culture variation, let’s try a different metaphor. If there really are five systems at work in the mind—five sources of intuitions and emotions —then we can think of the moral mind as being like one of those audio equalizers that has five channels, where you can set it to a different setting on every channel. And my colleagues, Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham, and I, made a questionnaire, which we put up on the Web at www.YourMorals. org. And so far, 30,000 people have taken this questionnaire, and you can too. Here are the results. Here are the results from about 23,000 American citizens. On the left, I’ve plotted the scores for liberals; on the right, those for conservatives; in the middle, the moderates. The blue line shows you people’s responses on the average of all the harm questions.

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So, as you see, people care about harm and care issues. They give high endorsement of these sorts of statements all across the board, but as you also see, liberals care about it a little more than conservatives -- the line slopes down. Same story for fairness. But look at the other three lines. For liberals, the scores are very low. Liberals are basically saying, “No, this is not morality. In-group, authority, purity—this stuff has nothing to do with morality. I reject it.” But as people get more conservative, the values rise.

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have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it’s fun. (Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

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We can say that liberals have a kind of a two-channel, or two-foundation morality. Conservatives have more of a five-foundation, or five-channel morality.

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We find this in every country we look at. Here’s the data for 1,100 Canadians.

I’ll just flip through a few other slides. The U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia. Notice also that on all of these graphs, the slope is steeper on in-group, authority, purity. Which shows that within any country, the disagreement isn’t over harm and fairness. Everybody—I mean, we debate over what’s fair—but everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter. Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group, authority, purity.

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This effect is so robust that we find it no matter how we ask the question. In one recent study, we asked people to suppose you’re about to get a dog. You picked a particular breed, you learned some new information about the breed.

Suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded, and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal? Well, if you are a liberal, you say, “Hey, that’s great!” Because liberals like to say, “Fetch, please.” (Laughter) But if you’re conservative, that’s not so attractive. If you’re conservative, and you learn that a dog’s extremely loyal to its home and family, and doesn’t warm up quickly to strangers, for conservatives, well, loyalty is good—dogs ought to be loyal. But to a liberal, it sounds like this dog is running for the Republican nomination. (Laughter)

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So, you might say, OK, there are these differences between liberals and conservatives, but what makes those three other foundations moral?

Aren’t those just the foundations of xenophobia and authoritarianism and Puritanism? What makes them moral? The answer, I think, is contained in this incredible triptych from Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” In the first panel, we see the moment of creation. All is ordered, all is beautiful, all the people and animals are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, where they’re supposed to be. But then, given the way of the world, things change. We get every person doing whatever he wants, with every aperture of every other person and every other animal. Some of you might recognize this as the ‘60s. (Laughter) But the ‘60s inevitably gives way to the ‘70s, where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more. Of course, Bosch called this hell.

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So this triptych, these three panels portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay. The truth of social entropy. But lest you think this is just some part

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But then—and here’s the trick—Fehr and Gachter said, on the seventh round, they told people, “You know what? New rule. If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren’t contributing, you can do that.” And as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on, cooperation shoots up. It shoots up and it keeps going up. There’s a lot of research showing that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps. It’s not enough to just appeal to people’s good motives. It really helps to have some sort of punishment. Even if it’s just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they’re in large groups, to cooperate. There’s even some recent research suggesting that religion— priming God, making people think about God—often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior.

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Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere, in part for the purpose of trusting each other, and then being more effective at competing with other groups. I think that’s probably right, although this is a controversial issue.

But I’m particularly interested in religion, and the origin of religion, and in what it does to us and for us. Because I think that the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is really simple. It’s just a lot of rock, and then a lot of water and wind, and a lot of time, and you get the Grand Canyon. It’s not that complicated. This is what’s really complicated, that there were people living in places like the Grand Canyon, cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa, or on the frozen shores of Alaska, and then some of these villages grew into the mighty cities

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of the Christian imagination where Christians have this weird problem with pleasure, here’s the same story, the same progression, told in a paper that was published in Nature a few years ago, in which Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter had people play a commons dilemma. A game in which you give people money, and then, on each round of the game, they can put money into a common pot, and then the experimenter doubles what’s in there, and then it’s all divided among the players. So it’s a really nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues, where we’re asking people to make a sacrifice and they themselves don’t really benefit from their own sacrifice. But you really want everybody else to sacrifice, but everybody has a temptation to a free ride. And what happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative—and this is all played anonymously. On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can. But they quickly see, “You know what, other people aren’t doing so much though. I don’t want to be a sucker. I’m not going to cooperate.” And so cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good, down to close to zero.

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of Babylon, and Rome, and Tenochtitlan. How did this happen? This is an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon.

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The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox. It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups. Yes, you do need to be concerned about harm, you do need a psychology of justice. But it really helps to organize a group if you can have sub-groups, and if those sub-groups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality, to pursue higher, nobler ends. And now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. Because liberals reject three of these foundations. They say “No, let’s celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership.” They say, “Let’s question authority.” And they say, “Keep your laws off my body.”

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Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. Traditional authority, traditional morality can be quite repressive, and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people that don’t fit in. So liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. This guy’s shirt says, “Stop bitching, start a revolution.” If you’re high in openness to experience, revolution is good, it’s change, it’s fun. Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at some cost to those at the bottom. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious, and it’s really easy to lose. So as Edmund Burke said, “The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.” This was after the chaos of the French Revolution. So once you see this—once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability—then I think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix.

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This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained. Think about yin and yang. Yin and yang aren’t enemies. Yin and yang don’t hate each other. Yin and yang are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world. You find the same thing in Hinduism. There are many high gods in Hinduism. Two of them are Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. This image actually is both of those gods sharing the same body. You have the markings of Vishnu on the left, so we could think of Vishnu as the conservative god. You have the markings of Shiva on the right, Shiva’s the liberal god. And they work together. You find the same thing in Buddhism. These two stanzas contain, I think, the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology. From the Zen master Seng-ts’an: “If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or

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So, what’s the point? What should you do? Well, if you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions, and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, I think you come to these conclusions: that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth. So what should you do? Am I telling you to not strive? Am I telling you to embrace Seng-ts’an and stop, stop with this struggle of for and against? No, absolutely not. I’m not saying that. This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much, using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their money, to make the world a better place, to fight—to fight wrongs, to solve problems.

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But as we learned from Samantha Power, in her story about Sergio Vieira de Mello, you can’t just go charging in, saying, “You’re wrong, and I’m right.” Because, as we just heard, everybody thinks they are right. A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are—understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we’re right—and then step out, even if it’s just for a moment, step out—check in with Seng-ts’an. Step out of the moral matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out, in which everybody does think they’re right, and everybody, at least, has some reasons—even if you disagree with them— everybody has some reasons for what they’re doing. Step out. And if you do that, that’s the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition. Think about the Dalai Lama. Think about the enormous moral authority of the Dalai Lama—and it comes from his moral humility.

So I think the point—the point of my talk, and I think the point of TED—is that this is a group that is passionately engaged in the pursuit of changing the world for the better. People here are passionately engaged in trying to make the world a better place. But there is also a passionate commitment to the truth. And so I think that the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try to turn it into a better future for us all. Thank you. (Applause)

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against. The struggle between for and against is the mind’s worst disease.”

Now unfortunately, it’s a disease that has been caught by many of the world’s leaders. But before you feel superior to George Bush, before you throw a stone, ask yourself, do you accept this? Do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil? Can you be not for or against anything?

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Jonathan Haidt on the Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt of New York University and author of The Righteous Mind talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his book, the nature of human nature, and how our brain affects our morality and politics. Haidt argues that reason often serves our emotions rather than the mind being in charge.

We can be less interested in the truth and more interested in finding facts and stories that fit preconceived narratives and ideology. We are genetically predisposed to work with each other rather than being purely self-interested and our genes influence our morality and ideology as well. Haidt tries to understand why people come to different visions of morality and politics and how we might understand each other despite those differences.

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Intro. [Recording date: January 7, 2014.] Russ: I have to say at the beginning that The Righteous Mind is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last 10 years. I do worry that my assessment is biased. It deals with a host of issues that come up regularly here on EconTalk, in particular the limits of reason, as well as issues that I’m grappling with as I work on a book on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. So my rave review may not apply very well for those of you listening out there. But it might. So let’s get into it. Jonathan, earlier in your book you ask how children come to know right from wrong. Where does morality come from? What’s your answer?

Guest: My answer is that we are products of evolution, like everything else, and we have certain stuff built into us that helps us navigate the social world.

That’s the first part of the story. But nothing is hard-wired. Evolution in people is quite flexible. And the second part of the story is culture shapes us to develop certain capacities more than others. So, when I was first in grad school, the general answer was: ‘oh, kids figure it out for themselves’—is what

I wonder if it is innate; do we inherit it from our parents then???

Russ: Now, you say we are born to be righteous, and you also claim that children, not only are they prone to hit back but they are prone to be favorable toward kind people and kind even physical objects—in puppet shows and other representations—and not sympathetic, not empathetic with cruel, suggesting that harm as a moral principle, an opposition to harming others is deeply embedded in us. Talk a little bit about how that could possibly be known. And I’m a little bit skeptical about it. I’m sympathetic to the idea, but I’m skeptical about the findings. Guest: Okay. My general approach is called ‘moral foundations theory’, the idea that there are multiple foundations. Just as we have multiple taste buds on our tongue. We don’t just have one taste

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How does it go about structuring itself in advance? What does it model after?

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Lawrence Kohlberg said, or anthropologists said. Or, ‘Kids internalize it from the grown-ups in their culture.’ But I really went a third way, which is kind of a modified nativist view, starts with what’s innate and then you look at how it develops within a cultural context. Russ: So, explain what you mean by nativist and what you mean by innate. Guest: So, in the social sciences one of the big controversial areas, really for a couple hundred years, is: Is human nature innate? Is there human nature, even? Steve Pinker wrote a book called The Blank Slate, arguing against the prevailing notion. It’s most common on the political Left that there is no human nature; that people are flexible, malleable. We can raise kids to turn out however we want. That’s the extreme view of what is sometimes called the ‘empiricist’ position, which is everything is a product of experience. At the other extreme is the extreme nativist view, which is to say that our behavior, our personality, all that is as innate as our eye color and our hair color. After all, everything is heritable.

That’s the big debate in the social sciences. And I’ve come down fairly firmly on the nativist side, as long as you grant that culture and flexibility is part of our evolutionary endowment. Russ: And you say often—you have a number of different metaphors, but I like a point you say: ‘We are predisposed but not predestined’, in various ways. But you have other ways of talking about it. Guest: That’s right. The best definition of ‘innate’ that I’ve ever found that I think just cuts through all the confusion is from my colleague here at NYU [New York University], Gary Marcus, who says that ‘innate’ just means structured in advance of experience but then experience can revise it.

If you look at the way kids come out all over the world they tend to kind of know that if someone hits you, you hit him back. You don’t have to teach that.

Now, you can try to teach them to love their neighbor and to turn the other cheek, and maybe you’ll have a little bit of success. But we are structured in advance of experience to think in terms of reciprocity. If someone is nice to me, I’ll be nice to him. If someone does something mean to me, I’ll do something mean to her. So that’s what I mean by structured in advance of experience but still flexible afterwards.

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receptor that guides us to delicious food. We have taste receptors that guide us to fruit and other receptors that guide us to meat—sweet and sour on the one hand, and umami or glutamate and salt on the other. And in the same way, in our social lives, we have to figure out: Who should I cooperate with?

Who should I trust? Who should I marry? Who should I partner with? And so we’ve got all these moral taste buds, you might say. And one of the most basic is: Who is nice, and first is, who is cruel? People vary a lot on this. So I was working on this theory over the last 8 or 10 years, and while I was doing that, there was this amazing work coming out of Yale, coming out of Paul Bloom and Karen Wynn, their lab, their developmental lab at Yale where they study children. And what they found is that when you take kids as young as 3 or 4 months and you show them a puppet show with these wooden puppets they made in which one of the puppets is struggling to get up a hill and the other puppet either seems to come out behind it and help push it up to the top, or, you take the same puppet that starts from the top and he comes down and he smashes into him from above and blocks him and pushes him down. So even 3-month-olds seem to detect this is a story about helping or about hindering. And then after they see that story, you put the two puppets on a tray and you look at which one they look at, or, when they are a little older, which one they reach for. And what you find is that as young as 3 months, and very clear by 6 months, the kids like the puppet that was helping, and they don’t like the puppet that was hindering. There are a lot of results like this that show that kids are picking up what’s sweet. They like what’s sweet; they don’t like what’s sour or bitter. They are picking up what’s nice, sort of morally sweet, you might say. Russ: Do you remember what—again, I’m a little skeptical of that kind of finding. Part of the reason I’m skeptical is it’s so cool. A 3-month-old is hard-wired to be kind. So one question I’d ask, and maybe you don’t know this stuff off the top of your head; I apologize if you don’t: but, how statistically different, not significant, but what’s the magnitude of the difference? Is it 80% of the time the kids pick up the nice puppet? Or is it 53% of the time? Versus the mean puppet.

Guest: Yeah. I don’t have those numbers handy but I’m pretty sure it’s in between. So, these studies tend to not use large sample sizes. Your question is very germane when you have large sample sizes. Sometimes you can have, you know, 52% of Republicans but only 48% of Democrats do something, in a sample of 10,000 people; and that’s statistically significant but it’s so small that we don’t really care about it. These studies are a little harder to do—they tend to just use like 15 or 20 subjects per cell. And my recollection is that they are pretty robust. So, it’s not like 80%, I mean, when you are dealing with little kids there is a lot of noise in the data. But it’s also not just a tiny effect. Lots of labs get these effects. They are now getting them for something even about group loyalty, in-group/out-group. But I’m puzzled

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Russ: You mention—a key idea of your book in passing—I want you to talk about it some detail, which is that we have moral receptors that are varied in the same way we have taste receptors. And that’s just a metaphor. So, to make that real and vigorous you have to talk about it in more detail. But to get us into that, I want you to talk about ‘WEIRD.’ Now, WEIRD is an acronym used for Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic folk, folk who live in, say, America. And I don’t know who made the acronym, but the acronym points out that we are actually somewhat distinctive. WEIRD folk, like you and me—what’s weird about us in terms of the scope of our morality?

What is the range of moral sensitivities that you’ve discovered, in your research and that of others? Guest: Sure. So, I began my research looking

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by your skepticism. Why would you be skeptical? Why would you think that kids are born blank slates, unable to distinguish between someone in their environment who is nice and warm and gentle between someone who is cruel and tyrannical and violent? Russ: Well, for starters—I have no problem with the idea that we may be hard-wired to be that way. Part of me, as I suspect many listeners would say, would like to believe that. When I think about that actual experiment I worry about: what did ‘reach for’ mean? I worry about—does a 3-month old really know what it means for a puppet to go up a hill? Does it really understand? There’s a lot of things I’m just not so sure about. Guest: I was going to say: These findings build on some of the coolest findings in developmental psychology done in the 1980s by Renee Baillargeon, who showed that kids have an intuitive understanding of physics. So, she’s the one who developed this method where you show people, like, a car which seems to move through a solid block, or in other cases the car is moving on a track behind the solid block. And she found that kids as young as three months, they stare longer at what looks like magic. It’s like, oh my God, if the blank slate is true, this doesn’t make sense, because how could they have learned that? But if knowledge of physics is innate then it makes perfect sense. Now think how crazy it is to be surprised that knowledge of physics is innate. In horses, horses are born; they stand up on the first day, and they move. They don’t run into trees. A horse’s brain is able to see, well, there’s a tree; I can’t go through it. Why can’t a baby’s brain be born to understand that objects are solid, and objects can’t pass through other solid objects? The brain is very, very structured in advance of experience. Russ: I’m open to that idea; and as I said, I’m more than open; I like the idea of it to some extent. But I just think we should be a little bit skeptical of experimental results in general. Guest: That is true. Russ: And we’ll come back to that.

Guest: There are reasons to be skeptical of experimental results. We have to be more skeptical of them than we have been. I agree with that. Russ: So, we’ll come back to that.

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into what I called harmless taboo violations. When I was a grad student, I was trying to understand morality across cultures. And I read the Old Testament, I read the Koran, I read a lot of religious texts. I read a lot of anthropology; I read a lot of accounts of non-Western societies. And what struck me is that most of them care a great deal about purity and pollution.

They have all kinds of elaborate rules for how to treat women who are menstruating and what to do with corpses, and so much stuff about the body—which we think is just hygiene. This isn’t morality—this is hygiene.

But we, it turns out, are the exceptions. Most cultures moralize the body; they think food has all kinds of moral properties and moral essences. Of course, sex is often heavily moralized; we do that, too. But my point is that it’s like morality is very thick in most parts of the world; and then for us, it’s really thin. For us, we went through this historical process in the Enlightenment and both before and after of rising individualism, rising individual liberty.

You can’t tell me to not do something unless you can show that I’m hurting you. Or in some [?] of standing to say that I’m causing some harm to someone.

But in most of the world morality is thicker: It regulates all kinds of stuff. So anyway, so I’m doing that work in the 1990s and early 2000s, and at the same time this team at the U. of British Columbia led by Joe Henrich, they were summarizing all the results they could find, including my research, on how it is that people from WEIRD cultures—Westerners like us—are different.

And even in visual perception. That’s what’s so cool. It’s even in visual perception, the general perception is, we WEIRDos see a world full of individual objects, and most people see a world of things that are more connected. One nice example is if you show people a picture of fish swimming, we WEIRDos focus on the lead fish; we think he’s leading. People from East Asia, they actually see and remember more about all the fish. And they actually notice the background. Americans can’t remember the background, because they didn’t notice; they were just looking at the lead fish. So, our minds work differently. We’re more individualistic. And that leads to us thinking in very different ways and behaving in different ways. Russ: So talk about the 6 types or morality that you feel cover the spectrum, given that you feel it’s a wider spectrum outside the United States and the West. Guest: Yeah. So, starting with the 3 that we all have, that everybody has and that we Americans have—so we’ve already talked about issues of care vs. harm. You find that everywhere. Then there are issues of fairness vs. cheating. Now you will never find a human society that doesn’t care a lot about reciprocity, trading favors, vendettas, feuds, gratitude, exchange. So this also is a basic foundation of human sociality and of human morality everywhere. Now what we found is that Liberals focus more on equality—by ‘liberal’ I just mean Left. And Conservatives, the Right, focus more on proportionality. But they all think that they care about fairness. Third foundation is liberty vs.

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oppression. We are primates. We evolved in hierarchical primate groups. We can do hierarchy. But we really resent a bullying alpha male. And you see this, boy, do you see this in the Tea Party, where the bullying alpha male is the government. And it harkens back to the American Revolution and liberty, liberty, liberty. You see on the Left, too, where the bully is the corporations and the rich, and we need the government to protect us. So, there it’s the same psychology, only a different villain. So those are the 3 that are easy, that are at the heart of the American cultural war now. Now we can move on to the 3 that are less common the political Left. Now, you still find them on the Right, and you find them in almost all traditional societies. But those three are: authority vs. subversion—so the idea that people in power or it’s especially clear within the family: there are positions where someone is deserving of respect. Just the word ‘backtalk,’ where in my sort of liberal Jewish family there was no such thing as backtalk. Of course you talked back to anybody who tells you to do something and you disagree. Russ: You wouldn’t have a special term for it, in other words. Guest: Yeah. That’s right. But when I began teaching at the U. of Virginia, or actually when I lived in an African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, and the kids would use words like ‘backtalk,’ and the rural kids in Virginia would say that: ‘You know, you don’t talk back to grown-ups.’ So that’s the fourth foundation, authority. The fifth is loyalty vs. betrayal. And here you find this, especially in working class families, the idea that blood is thicker than water, that you owe things to people because you are members of the group. And then the last one is sanctity vs. degradation. And this is, for example, the idea that the body is a temple. On the Left there is more—actually, I have bumper stickers in my book: ‘Your body may be a temple, but mine’s a playground.’ The idea that things are sacred, that we shouldn’t take advantage of them even if we would enjoy it and there’s no harm. And you see this especially in the Evangelical Christianity; it’s all over the Koran, the Old Testament. The idea of sacredness and sanctity and holiness and purity. And these issues, you always find, if you look at the older cultural war, battles like over drug use, abortion, euthanasia—any of these life-and-death issues. They are not really just about harm versus choice. They are almost always about some lingering notion of sanctity, zones where we should not transgress. Russ: Now you said—I don’t want listeners to get confused. You said the first three of those are Western, and the last three are more associated with traditional cultures.

Guest: Well, the first three are universal. Russ: But the last three do exist in lots of places in America. And in general you associate them with Conservative politics. Yes. That’s correct. But since the people doing the scholarship are almost always secular Liberals, they tend not to see that as part of the moral domain. If you look at the moral philosophy literature, it’s almost as though there’s a prize for whoever can identify a single foundation

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of morality. So, the philosophy literature, which grows overwhelmingly out of sort of Liberal or Leftist thinking—leaving aside the Catholic tradition, that is—it’s either, you’ve got the Utilitarians who say morality is all about harm; that’s all it is; everything is reducible to harm. Or, you’ve got the Kanteans and Deontologists, who say, No, no, it’s all about rights and fairness and justice. So, yes, you do find all of the moral foundations in the United States, but they are rather thin on the secular Left, those last three. Russ: And I should mention that you are a member—you would probably classify yourself as a member of the secular Left, correct? Guest: Um, well, not exactly. I’m certainly secular. And I was Liberal all my life. And I’ve really hated George W. Bush—I thought he really was just destroying the country, the policies. And as long as he was President I had to consider myself a Liberal. But in writing the book I really tried to understand everybody from the inside, and I really tried to read a lot— Russ: It’s a very risky strategy.

Guest: Well, I guess in terms of where it led me, yeah. I realized I couldn’t call myself a Liberal any more. I’m not a Conservative. My views are as a social psychologist who studies morality. I’ve come to believe the research, which is that everybody is an expert on certain aspects of the moral domain, and that causes them to go blind to what the other side is saying. And I realized—you know, I think Liberals are right about a lot of important issues and rising inequality and some sort of things we ought to do to get a capitalist system to function humanely. They are right on a lot of important issues. But in doing the research, I came to see that, wow, Conservatives, if your criterion is how to run a healthy society that actually leads to flourishing and wellbeing, actually Conservatives and libertarians are right on a lot of things, too. So now I consider myself a centrist who finds a lot of wisdom on all sides but not much in the current Republican Party.

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Russ: We’re going to come back to that maybe toward the end. I raised the issue about your personal views, which usually are irrelevant in our conversations, but in this one I think they are— Guest: They are relevant.

Russ: They are somewhat important. But it raised an interesting issue just as a sidenote, which is, I find as I’ve tried to become more tolerant, as I get older—I don’t know if I’ve been successful—but we talk a lot on this program about how we have to be aware of our own tendencies to self-deceive; we have to be humble. It’s a very Hayekian viewpoint, that we don’t understand everything; there are limits to reason. One of the possible outcomes of that is that you lose faith in your principles, because you start to realize, you know, the other guy, he’s well-intentioned as well as I am. And I don’t have a monopoly on truth. Guest: Yes, that is true. Russ: So, reflect on that.

Guest: That is true, you lose faith in your principles. That’s absolutely true.

I spent the 1980s being really angry at Reagan; I spent the 1990s exalting

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in Clinton and being angry at his enemies. I just think, be a sort of average level of anger. Maybe [?] Russ: Partisan. Guest: As you get older—as a partisan, yeah, that’s right. But as you get older, as your testosterone levels drop, generally in the life course one gets less angry with age. So I can’t tell what it is. But I have found myself not getting angry that much. I despair at the gridlock and the ridiculousness of our political system. But it is true that I am less confident of my principles and therefore I have less-principled anger. Russ: Less self-righteousness. Guest: That’s right. Now, I think if I was an activist, if I were a legislator, well, there are a lot of reasons why you might want that passion. But I’m a scientist. My job is to figure out what’s right, and so I’m willing to make that tradeoff of having fewer passionate principles driving me; and actually I feel like I can see more than I was able to 5 years ago. Russ: Does that make you a relativist? I’m sure you get that charge sometimes. Guest: Yeah. I do, especially from the Right. It’s a little bit complicated— Russ: By the way, that’s usually used as a pejorative term.

It could be viewed as a compliment but it does have a pejorative sense to it.

Guest: That’s right. So, I certainly am not a moral realist in that I don’t think that there is some objective truth outside humanity. ‘Earth is the third planet from the sun’—that’s what’s called a non-anthropocentric truth. If aliens come here from another galaxy they will discover that earth is the third planet from the sun. But ‘men and women should have equal political rights’—well, is that an objective truth? I think that’s a truth today but I’m not willing to say that our ancestors 5 and 10 and 50,000 years ago were wrong when there was always a gender division in which men handled the politics and women would handle the home life. So I don’t think that there are eternal moral truths that are true regardless of how we live. If that makes me a relativist, then I’m a relativist. Actually, here you go: I think of myself as an emergentist. I think that moral truths are actually like truths of the market? Is gold more valuable than silver? Well, you know, if aliens come from another planet, they might not think so. But given the way we live and the way we trade, the value of gold emerges, just as gender equality has emerged. And it is really true. There is a moral truth now that women should have equal political rights. So there you go. I’m an emergentist, just like you. Russ: I’ll accept— Guest: Isn’t it Hayekian? Russ: It is, but I’m more absolutist than you are in the following way. Guest: Okay, how so? Russ: I think people misunderstand spontaneous order in in the following way. I’m not suggesting you do, but maybe. We’ll find out. I think we tend to romanticize; I do think there’s something romantic and wondrous and marvelous about spontaneous order. But I also realize there are many emergent orders that are horrific and a-moral or immoral. Slavery, say, in the late 18th, early 19th century in America, even though that was an emergent phenomenon—no one designed it. In fact the opposite; a lot of people tried to stop it from being part of the

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American fabric when we became a literal nation. So it was emergent but it was awful. And I have no problem saying that the morality that saw African Americans as inferior was evil. So, in that sense, I’m not a relativist. Guest: Okay. So let’s build on that. The way I like to think about it is this. A cultural relativist would say, Hey, if that’s the way they do it then it’s okay. That’s the first step. And I definitely would not say that, and for the reasons that you said.

The next step would be: Let’s look at the people who appear to be victims in this society and if they themselves think they are victims, that’s enough of a reason for us to condemn it. So, African slaves did everything they could to flee; they hated it; there is no reason to think that this was a legitimate moral order that they approved. Same thing for Jews in Nazi Germany. But if we look at, say, Muslim societies in which the women veil, well, sometimes—I don’t know enough about it—but it seems as though that is not necessarily enforced against their will. So there could be multiple emergent moral orders in which even the people that we think are victims endorse it, don’t feel they are victimized, and can articulate justifications that don’t seem crazy. Now of course there are issues of false consciousness and deception. But at any rate, I’m one who believes that— Russ: You’re right; I think that’s a great starting place. Looking at how the alleged victims actually feels seems to be a crucial way to distinguish.

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Russ: Now, you say at one point—you say it a lot actually, and I think it’s a beautiful phrase. This is a good point to explain it. You say ‘morality binds and blinds.’ Explain that. Guest: Yes. So the thing that really has motivated me in writing the book is trying to think about this miracle of human civilization. No other species on the planet can cooperate unless they are siblings. So that bees, ants, wasps, termites, and naked mole rats can all live in giant structures that they’ve built together because they are all sisters, or sisters and brothers. But humans develop this ability to work together in all kinds of ways, not just people who are not kin but even with strangers. You and I have never met but we are able to cooperate and put on this podcast.

We’re just so good at this. How did that happen? And so, you know, we could look at language; we could look at all sorts of things that allowed us to interact. But what allowed us to actually trust each other and not take advantage of each other and to reap the benefits of cooperation? And the story I tell in the book is that morality serves a variety of functions but they are social functions, one of which is to bind groups together in ways so that they can cooperate to compete against other groups. And so what we gain in cohesion we often lose in open-mindedness. And you see this on Capitol Hill all the time—one side, the mere fact that one side proposes something means the other side will suddenly do everything it can show why that’s wrong.

Even if that side had actually proposed the same idea 10 or 20 years earlier.

Well said.

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Now, some of that is strategic and is just Kabuki theater. But in general, but when you get a moralistic group, a group bound together by a certainty that it’s right, they become blind, closed off to contradictory evidence. And I’ve kind of made a little cottage industry of showing how that happens on the Left. The academic world, where almost everybody is Liberal; I think in general we do a good job in the sciences, social sciences, but on the key issues, where there are sacred moral values at stake, it’s hard for us to think straight.

Russ: Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the role of reason. You say that ‘intuitions come first; strategic reasoning second.’ And you use the image of the rider and the elephant. Explain that image and how you apply it.

Guest: So, from my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, I was examining ten ancient truths, and the most basic psychological insight from around the world is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Usually one of these parts is said to be reason or conscious reasoning or something like that. And the other is emotion or intuition, something like that. Now, Plato gave us the metaphor that these two parts are—reason is the charioteer and the passions are the horses. And the charioteer, if he can control the horses, then you get a rational reasonable person. And so a man should study philosophy and learn to control the passions. But that’s a very optimistic view of reason. But I think the evidence just doesn’t support it. The evidence shows that people are automatically and effortlessly do motivated reasoning. We start with the conclusion and we think: How can I find evidence to support that conclusion? Research has found that if you compare people who are really smart versus those that are less smart, the really smart people aren’t more open-minded. They are not better at looking at both sides. What they are better at is finding ever more and better post hoc justifications. So, basically, I concluded pretty early on that David Hume was right when he said that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. Most of my career has basically been an experimental vindication of David Hume’s arguments against those who are worshiping reasoning in the Platonic tradition. Russ: So, talk about the rider and the elephant. Guest: So, what I came to see in writing the first book is that the mind is divided like a rider and an elephant.

If you make New Year’s resolutions—this came about when I was, say, in dating relationships, and I would resolve, Oh, I should break up with her; but I found myself powerless to do so. And I just marveled at my—what’s the word—my inability to make myself do what I thought I should do. There’s a line from Ovid: I see the right way and approved it; alas, I follow the wrong.

So, individual reasoning I think is not very powerful. Danny Kahneman talks about this as System 2, with reasoning, versus System 1, the intuition.

But all is not lost for reason. While individual reasoning is so flawed, while an individual rider is pretty poor at making the elephants do what the rider

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wants; but if you put us together in groups in the right way so that we can correct each others’ motivated reasoning, human beings and human groups can actually end up producing pretty rational behavior. So this is my main debate with the rationalists. A lot of people accuse me of being an antirationalist who thinks that reason doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. And I say, no, it’s just that individual reasoning is really, really unreliable, or rather it reliably plays the role of a lawyer or press secretary. But why science works so well is because, while we can’t disprove our own ideas—we are bad at that— boy, are we good at disproving each others’ ideas. So, science ends up being pretty rational, even though it is made of individually flawed scientists. Russ: Yeah. Vernon Smith says something similar on this program a few years back. He won the Nobel Prize the same year that Danny Kahneman did and they both were experimentalists. Kahneman emphasized the irrationality of the human mind, and what Vernon Smith’s interested in is how markets push irrational people into rational decisions. Guest: Yeah. Perfect. I love it. Let’s give that guy the Nobel Prize. Russ: I do too. But of course I would like it, given my ideology, so I have to be careful. But there is no doubt that individuals don’t make great decisions and markets make pretty good ones.

So there’s something going on there. Guest: Yeah, you aggregate—that’s right, the weaknesses cancel out. Russ: Well, I don’t know if they cancel out, but something’s going on. It’s actually, I think, a subject for a different kind of research agenda than the experimental kind, that the experimentalists do in labs, to think about how that process works. I don’t know if anyone’s written successfully on that. I think it would be a good idea.

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Russ: Let’s talk about your metaphor of our individualism versus our social side. You just mentioned that how we work well in groups and of course sometimes we work well in groups to hurt other groups; sometimes we work well in groups to create beautiful, extraordinary things, like a symphony performance. You say humans are 90% chimp and 10% bee. First, say what you mean by that. And my question, which I don’t think you talk about much in the book, is: Where do you get those numbers from? Guest: Okay, sure.

The easy part is the numbers I just made up as being approximate. Russ: Yeah, I understand. It’s not 90.3, 90.7. Guest: Yeah. So what does it mean?

There’s so much written on the evolution of morality. And this especially started in the 1960s. So, Charles Darwin was really concerned about the evolution of morality, because here he was talking about the importance of competition, and why is it that animals sometimes cooperate? And what about humans? Morality seemed to be something of a challenge for his theory. So he had a lot of really good ideas about it, one of which was that sometimes a virtue might put one at a disadvantage relative to your peers, but if it helps the whole group and your group is competing with other groups, then this

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virtue can spread in that way, because your group is more successful. So this is known as group selection. And Darwin thought that perhaps as one of several processes human morality was a result of group selection as tribes vied with other tribes. And lots of people loved this idea that we are born to be cooperative. But it was applied in very wooly-headed ways. In the 1960s George Wilson basically demolished the idea and showed that if you just do very simple mathematical models that any sort of genetic basis for being altruistic might help your group but if there is a selfish person in the next tent over from you, that person will on average have more children than you and the genes for it will disappear. So that became dogma. Richard Dawkins really the developed the idea further in The Selfish Gene. That idea really became dogma: No group selection; there is no group selection. And so for 30 years all anyone talked about was reciprocal altruism, which is, you can easily show—Darwin suggested this—how we can’t evolve to be uniformly nice, but boy, if we can recognize who is likely to return the favor, it is adaptive to be nice to that person. So, reciprocal altruism and kin selection.

For 30 years that’s all anyone ever wrote about. It got so boring, I couldn’t stand to read these analyses in books, in the 1980s and 1990s. And in the 1990s then this guy, David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University had been arguing all along that, No, no, the models actually work for humans because as long as we have a way of stamping out free riding and punishing cheaters, actually you can get group selection models working well. And I read his book, Darwin’s Cathedral, and I found it very, very persuasive. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if you are just thinking about morality as altruism, you don’t need group selection. But if you expand the moral domain as I did and you are interested in group loyalty and respect for authority and the idea of making things sacred, boy, these things don’t make a lot of sense from reciprocal altruism. But they make perfect sense if you think about tribes competing with other tribes. And if you think as Darwin did that group cohesion matters when you have intergroup competition.

So, what I’m saying here is that almost all human nature can be explained without group selection. We are 90% chimps. Chimps are not really groupselected. So, as Frans de Waal says, all the building blocks of human morality can be found in chimps. And I think almost all can. So that’s the 90% chimp.

But I think that, beginning with Homo heidelbergensis, which is about 800,000 years ago, beginning with that species, which is thought first to tame fire, have campsites, hunt large game cooperatively, bring it back to the campsite, butcher it—well, this group probably also, they had spears. They probably also were engaged in intergroup conflict. And it’s this species that also begins to have cumulative cultural evolutions—the first signs of culture building on previous innovations. So, that I think was our Rubicon—Homo heidelbergensis, 800-500,000 years ago. So that opens up the possibility of

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true group selection aided by gene culture co-evolution. Now, bees are group selected. The bee doesn’t live or die based on its ability to outcompete other bees. Bees live and die based on the hive’s ability to prevail over other hives.

So that’s what I mean by we are 10% bee. We have a short period, maybe just a couple hundred thousand years, in which I believe there was group selection, adding a kind of group-selected overlay to our older human nature.

And this is crucial for not just understanding war and genocide and all the ugly stuff, but patriotism, nation-building, local pride, sports. Our ability to form companies. Corporations—a corporation is, in law and in practice, a body composed of other bodies. So I think the evidence is all around us that we are groupish. And that’s what I’m trying to capture in that metaphor— we are 10% bee. We have a little bit in common with bees because we went through a group selection process.

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Russ: I’m deeply in agreement with that. It’s one of the things I think libertarians sometimes miss, which is our desire to be part of something larger than our self. I think the Left romanticizes, say, our democracy or political process and takes away some of the realities of it to make it look more appealing than it actually is. But I think libertarians have no ability, almost no ability, to even appreciate the idea of the body politic or collective decision-making. And I understand the harm of it, the dangers of it. But it seems to be an important part of our humanity in lots of ways. And for some people, their political persuasion is their religion; for other people, their sports is their religion; and for some folks, their literal religion is their religion. Let’s talk about that. I like your UVA, University of Virginia, Saturday afternoon religious experience. Talk about that and talk about how sports, religion, and all these things have many things in common. Guest: Yeah. That’s what I found so—so, to make the structure of the book clear, the first part of the book is about the idea that intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second.

And you and I already talked about that. The middle part of the book is based on the idea that there is more to morality than harm and fairness. And that’s all the moral taste buds, the moral foundations. The third part of the book is based on the idea that morality binds and blinds. And it’s because I saw so much the same behavior—if you read about initiation rites in nonWestern societies and what it takes to turn a boy into a man and make him feel part of the group and a warrior who will defend the tribe’s honor, and you look at what gangs do in the inner cities—same stuff. You look at the rituals, the way cults work to incorporate people—same stuff. You look at what a lot of religions do, a lot of sports teams do. Now even though they are doing more, more complicated. But there are all these different ways of achieving the same end, which is changing the individual to a group member. I’m very ungroups. I’m rational atheist; I identified more with Spock than with Kirk

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Guest: Here, I think we should bring in the idea of stories and narrative.

And I know you’ve written two books that try to get at this. So, I must first ask you: Why did you write your books? Was it because you recognized this problem? Russ: Yeah, that’s part of it. I’ve written actually three novels.

They are all designed to touch the heart, because I think that’s the overwhelming way that people accept or adopt ideas. And if we only as people of freedom, people who care about liberty, only couch our ideas in blackboard graphs and charts, we lose. Guest: Yeah. That’s right. And here I would also bring in Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute [AEI]— Russ: He’s trying to do the same thing. Guest: He’s trying to do the same thing for Conservatives. Exactly. That’s right. That the arguments for the free market system can’t be about productivity and graphs.

Russ: Getting rich. Guest: They have to be that markets end up solving poverty; markets end up helping people, markets end up doing things that people on the Left would approve of. Russ: You, as we’ve talked about, are sympathetic, at least in concept, to Conservatives, and in certain issues. But what I’ve noticed—and this goes back—I’m going to lump Conservatives and libertarians together. Obviously in many ways they don’t belong together.

But in many areas they do overlap. They overlap certainly in economic

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growing up watching Star Trek. But at least as a scholar and a social scientist I see all this stuff. And I felt it at times. So I began studying it that way. And I think your point about libertarians—that’s what I’ve found in my research on the different psychological types—libertarians are the most individualistic, the least emotional, the least sociable. They are the most rational. They are the smartest. Sounds like if you lean libertarian and if you recognize that portrait of libertarian, it sounds like you at least can rationally recognize that most people are really groupish, even if you are not. And so that’s what I’m trying to do in this part of the book, is appeal to everybody to just explain that sort of bizarreness of our species. You look at sports, look at people going to football games in sub-zero weather painting their faces and taking their shirts off. By any rational calculation intuitive, it’s crazy, unless you realize that we are 10% bee. Russ: Yeah, and I think libertarians have handicapped themselves tremendously by failing to realize that most people aren’t like us.

Guest: That’s right. I agree. Russ: Most people are groupish, most people are emotional. They don’t want an analytical argument. Most people don’t.

They want an argument that appeals to the heart; and they want to feel part of something. So the libertarian—obviously there are many different strands of libertarianism, but I think the worst strand is the one that is totally individualistic and totally analytical; and that appeals powerfully to an analytical individualist. And then they can’t understand why no one wants to go with them. And the answer is because you’ve made it unattractive.

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policy. Excuse me—they tend to. I think there is a problem with the probusiness wing of the Conservative movement, which libertarians totally reject. But let’s put that to the side. In 2001, James Buchanan, Nobel Laureate, wrote a rather extraordinary op ed in the Wall Street Journal, where he said that classical liberalism—and by that he meant a whole bunch of things, but one of the things it includes is free market policies—has lost the moral high ground. And you suggest in the book, implicitly, that because of these different moral centers that we have in our brain, that in many ways Conservatives, and you could argue libertarians who are free-market oriented, have an advantage, because they’ve got all these additional arguments. But I agree with Buchanan. I think the free-market viewpoint has lost a lot of its moral fiber; has trouble making a moral case to skeptics and independents. And we see this today when Republicans are trying to stop, say, unemployment benefits from being extended for—I think they’ve been in place for 5 years instead of the normal 39 weeks. But Republicans cannot make a moral case. And therefore they are going to vote to extend it, which they’ve done so far. What’s going on there? Guest: Well, I don’t know that free market ideology has lost the moral high ground, in that the evidence of history, which was ambiguous during the 20th century and which looked pretty bad in the 1930s for free market policies, obviously scored a big win with the fall of Communism. But what I’m seeing—here, I am in the business school—is the incredible rise of India and China and so many other countries, which has led to the rapid fall of poverty. I mean, this is one of the biggest events in human history: poverty rates are plummeting around the world.

Because whenever a nation turns toward free markets, bang!, their poverty level drops. Maybe there are exceptions here and there, but in general. So, I think that free market have in a sense, won, on the global scale. Now, I think what’s happening is that there are so many different forms of capitalism, which vary in their corruption, efficient markets are wonderful things but business leaders, government officials—there is so much to be gained by warping markets and taking kickbacks, bribes, rents. So, to the extent that free market societies in practice are corrupted, then it triggers outrage. It triggers the fairness foundation, that these guys are cheating; it triggers the liberty/oppression foundation and that these guys are bullying us. So, I spent a little time at Occupy Wall Street. I arrived at NYU—I moved here in 2011, just as Occupy Wall Street was starting. And there’s a lot to hate about a system that overall is the only system that actually generates wealth and leads to good society. That’s the conundrum. And I think that if the free market folks were less ideological—as I said, morality binds and blinds—if they would say, Markets are wonderful things but when left to their own devices you can bet that there’s going to be monopoly; there are going to be distortions of information, there are going to be all kinds of terrible externalities foisted

While we are complaining and condemning it, we are the consumers that drive these markets.

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We are cherry pickers, we cherry pick our data to rationalize our arguments/beliefs.

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on the environment and the poor and animals. So, if the free market types would be less worshipping of Milton Friedman and a little more focused on how do we get markets to actually be efficient, I think they would regain the high ground pretty quickly. Russ: I totally disagree with that. But that’s a long— Guest: Okay. But tell me where I’m wrong. Because I’m just trying these ideas out. I’m new in the business school. I’m especially interested in— I’ve sort of swallowed the Kool-Aid on the power of markets, but I want to be convinced that they can actually deliver in ways that are not exploitative.

Russ: Well, I think the big question is when you try to fix them using the not-so-healthy, not-so-perfect political system, what you end up with would seem to matter. Guest: Right. Russ: I want to push this in that direction.

Which is, it seems to me, and I want your psychologist hat now: It seems to me that people care a lot about appearances rather than reality in policy areas. So, let’s take the minimum wage. The minimum wage, I believe, is overwhelmingly bad for poor people. I could be wrong. I’m totally willing to accept the possibility that the empirical evidence is otherwise. I happen to know something about that empirical evidence and how hard it is to actually tease out the independent effect. But a lot of economists have come to the view, which is very different from how it used to be, that the minimum wage is a good idea and we ought to increase it. I think they are wrong, but a lot of people feel that way. And they’ve got “evidence” to support it, but it’s not very good evidence. And it’s not very good evidence on my side, either, by the way.

I don’t want to suggest that I’ve got the good evidence and they’ve got the bad evidence. I don’t think that’s true. But my point is that—let me take a better example: Education. We ask people in a survey: Should we spend more on education? A lot of people say yes. The answer is independent of how much we already spend. It’s independent of what the impact has been. And a lot of it is—let’s just talk about social circles. I don’t want to be one of those people who doesn’t like children. And my answer is always: I like children; that’s why I don’t want to spend more on education. It’s not working. It’s hurting children. We’ve lost a generation of children, two generations now, kids in the inner city, through this top down education system. But they say we just need to spend more. And so the moral high ground—my side, which one is decentralize education, which is something of a crapshoot, because it looks scary and uncertain. The other side just says: What, you don’t like the children? So it seems to me a lot of our debate on the Left/Right axis or the free market, top down vs. bottom up axis—we lose, those of us who want less government, more bottom up, because we can’t in general make a very convincing moral case. Do you think that’s true? Guest: Absolutely. This is so—we reason not to find the truth. We reason to find arguments that we like. We reason to defend our reputation. So in general we are like a public relations firm. We are much more concerned with appearance than with

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reality. And this is the big problem with voting. People always wonder: Why do people vote against their self-interest? Answer: no matter which way you vote, it doesn’t affect your self-interest unless the election is won by a single vote. Voting is expressive. It’s an expressive act. And if you vote for—more welfare or more school spending—you are saying you are a compassionate person. Russ: I’m a good guy. Guest: Yeah. So, voting, policy. And this is even with the minimum wage. I can’t see any argument—whatever you think of the minimum wage—I can’t see any argument against indexing it for inflation. But apparently legislators never do because they want the credit— when they raise the minimum wage, they want the credit for it. So this is the problem. And you are right to say that the political system is so inept, and it’s in part because even more than normal life, politicians live and die by appearances, not by reality. There is no feedback mechanism by which a bad policy will lead to a person or a party being kicked out. The delays are so long; the complexities are such. So the political system doesn’t evolve. Policy doesn’t evolve. In the biological world, innovations that are maladaptive fade out. In the business world, innovations that don’t bring in more customers fade out. In the policy and politics world, there is no corrective mechanism; there is no evolution. It’s a disaster, of course. Russ: There’s some. Guest: You’re right, there is some. But it’s pretty poor. And this is where at least in a Parliamentary system, at least one party, you’ve got responsible party government. So, a party is in control; if things aren’t working out, you punish the party. But we with divided government, nobody knows whose fault it is.

Russ: Yeah.

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Russ: Well, let’s turn to economists. Economists use some moral reasoning, just like everybody else. Talk about your work in that area. Guest: Again, now that I’m in a business school and I’m beginning to shift my research away from politics and more toward business and business ethics, so just for example, I read—there was an interesting essay by Paul Krugman last year in which he argued that the austerians—actually, I have a quote from him right here. The austerians, the people who favor austerity, they tend to be Conservative. He said, “Some [powerful people] have a visceral sense that suffering is good, that we must pay a price for past sins” [brackets from Michael Kinsley—Econlib Ed.]. And I thought that made sense and I looked at our data set from YourMorals.org, and what I found—in fact, there’s a great question in there. Here. We had a question measuring the Protestant work ethic, we had an item: ‘Life would have very little meaning if we never had to suffer’. Well, it turns out Liberals generally say No, I disagree with that; and Conservatives say Yes. Another one is: ‘The world would be a better place’—let me find the exact wording of it—’if we let unsuccessful people fail and suffer the consequences.’ Really steep slope on that one. Liberals say

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definitely No, and Conservatives say definitely Yes. So, if you think about economists who are thinking about austerity, what’s the proper response to a fiscal meltdown; and if you have this sort of Protestant work ethic, you know, a binge should be followed by a purge, you are going to look for the data that supports austerity. Austerity policies are going to be pleasing: it’s the punishment after the sin. And you’ll find it, because as long as there is ambiguity, you’ll find the evidence you want. Whereas Liberals are focused on the poor; they are focused on the greedy bastards at the top who made off with all the gains—they left the poor holding the bag. They are going to look for the evidence that austerity doesn’t work. Now, I happen to think that Krugman is right on this. I happen to think that austerity is a foolish policy in the wake of a—but I’m not an economist; what do I know? All I’m saying is that everybody—Left, Right, libertarian—when they approach an ambiguous field of controversial findings, they start with their own moral intuitions. Those guide them to prefer certain conclusions. They look for the evidence that those conclusions are right. They always find that evidence.

And this is why—what’s the famous saying—if you laid economists end to end you wouldn’t reach a conclusion? This is why you can’t get closure on some pretty basic empirical claims in economics, if they are ideologically laden. Would you agree with that claim? Russ: Well, I think it’s worse than that, actually. I think it’s, because we deal in a multi-causal world and because the economy is complex, because there’s an infinite number of things that change at the same time, as you say, you can always cherry-pick the data in a way, you can always tell an ex post, ad hoc story. And economists on the Left and on the Right are really good at that. But you are saying something stronger than that, which is which side you pick to align with is based on your moral principles, not your scientific understanding. It’s not just that there are two different sides. It’s that people line up with sides that they are already pre-conditioned to line up with. Guest: Yeah. That’s the whole point of the heritability part of my story. So, let’s take the case of compassion. Some kids are, like if they see animal cruelty, it’s so painful for them. They are really affected by cruelty. Other kids, you know, they’ll swing cats into trees. Now, if compassion is incredibly powerful in you, you will then resonate more toward Leftist arguments about the poor than you will towards libertarian arguments about the importance of competition or individualism or whatever.

Similarly, some people are very low on disgust sensitivity. Others people are very high on it. If you tend to see or feel that certain things are contaminated, others are sacred, you’ll respond more to arguments about sacredness and to some religious practices, say in Judaism or Catholicism, that treat certain things as sacred or off limits. So, what I’m saying, as we know, every aspect of personality is heritable. Identical twins reared apart tend to be similar. So as identical twins grow up in different families and are exposed to political

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argument, when they reach college, let’s say, they will gravitate to the ones that resonate with their innate personality. That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Economics as a field, once it became so mathematical, it began to attract more high systemizers, probably more people with Asperger’s, so economics is going to attract, you know, more people who are very rational, very high systemizers, relatively low on empathy. Russ: To be fair to Paul Krugman, he argues relentlessly that he’s just a scientist and it’s the other folks who have these biases. But I actually suspect that both sides have these biases. Being an austerian myself, and admitting to my bias, I can certainly make the case that the stimulus didn’t work very well. But Paul seems to make the case easily on the other side. Strangely enough. Guest: Yeah. I think Paul is quite a passionate partisan. So, while I think he’s a good economist, nobody is just a good—well, I shouldn’t say ‘nobody’— Russ: You can. Guest: Certainly someone as passionate as he can’t be just an open-minded scientist. Russ: It’s hard. It’s difficult. And having said that, however, I do believe that there are historic episodes that add to knowledge in economics. I don’t think it’s all, whatever you want it to say and the numbers don’t tell us anything. I think there are some episodes in economic history where people do learn things, that a consensus does build around, even on Left and Right. Just to pick one we’ve mentioned before, what causes inflation. A lot of people say it’s an increase in the money supply. Though, having said that, we do have a time now where there is an increase in the money supply without inflation.

People debate about why that is. But what is true— Guest: Because the world is multi-factorial, multi-causal. Russ: Yeah, it is. But what is true is, I don’t think there are very many if any episodes of inflation without a money supply increase. It’s not the same thing. But that point I think is correct. And I do want to encourage, I’ll put a link up to it, over at EconLog, the sisterblog of EconTalk at the Library of Economics and Liberty, Scott Sumner has been chronicling some of the recent statements by some economists claiming to predict the effects of monetarism or stimulus. And there’s some pretty strong evidence. It’s never conclusive, though. And that’s why there’s always a chance to tell a story later.

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Russ: We’re almost out of time. How has the academic community taken your work? I have two more questions. This is the first one. You’ve had a very successful non-academic book. That usually makes academic folks annoyed, and they tend to disparage it because obviously it’s tawdry to be successful.

How has your book been received by the academic community? Guest: So, I think what you say about how academics would look down on popular trade books—I think that was very true up until the 1990s. But I think especially in the Social Sciences, there have been so many good trade books, starting with Steve Pinker and [?] Wilson and the literary agent John Brockman brings

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a lot of these out. I found that actually my academic colleagues have liked both of my books, and I don’t think I’ve lost any credibility for speaking to a broad audience or writing trade books. In part, my recent book was sort of riding the giant wave of findings, from neuroscience, primatology, about the importance of intuition and emotion and evolution. So, in part The Righteous Mind is really just chronicling major trends. So, in that sense I’m still very much, I’m part of the movement and I don’t think I’m seen as a rebel or a crazy person. Russ: But your former colleague, Brian Nosek, was a guest on EconTalk, and he, along with others, has been working on the credibility and replicability of psychological experiments. You say you are riding a wave of findings. Do you think they’ll stand up? Guest: Yeah.

So we have a huge problem in psychology, which turns out to be common to most of the sciences—the social sciences—and medicine, which is that the publication process makes it very easy for people to get results that are not replicable, that are false, that are spurious, but that you can still get just if you just vary things enough— Russ: Do enough studies— Guest: Torture the data [?] as we say— Russ: Fool yourself. Guest: So Brian is doing fantastic work, holding our feet to the fire and saying we’ve got to up our game. Look at it this way: something as simple as posting your data online is going to stop people from doing the shenanigans. It’s common practice in my field and in many others to try lots of different statistical tests until you get one that works. And you could just decide that. But of course you could just tie in with anything when there’s ambiguity. So Brian is saying, and what others are saying, is: Let’s post our data online. And that way you’ll be held accountable and responsible. So that would be a big improvement. That’s one problem.

I’ve been calling attention to another problem, which is because there are essentially no Conservatives in Social Psychology—I have only been able to find one. So this means that our science, our tendency, our need for those to take the other side of the bet, for those to challenge confirmation bias— it breaks down on ideological matters. Especially race and gender. So we have a problem there, too. We have a few problems. Well, they are common to the sciences, especially the Social Sciences, and especially Psychology.

We have several problems. But I think it is ultimately self-corrective. After scandals. We’ve had a number of scandals of people who actually just made up data. And so this is part of what has given people like Brian both the push to do something about it and the respect that it’s painful. What Brian is asking us to do is going to be difficult; it’s going to be harder. But I think we are learning. We are going to improve our standards and produce better science as we go forth. Russ: Last question: do you worry your book will be used by political players to shape messages that move us further apart politically? I know you make a strong plea for bipartisanship at the end of the book, and how—just humanity, it’s good to try to understand our fellows and

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people who don’t agree with us are human beings; they actually have good motivations sometimes. But political players, it’s a blood sport. Your insights into the human brain—do you think there’s a temptation to use them for purposes that are not so— Guest: Oh, my God, yeah. One of my former students worked on the Obama campaign. He said he saw copies of the book around political headquarters. Liberal commentators on the web will say, Oh, you should read this book; it will tell you how to speak to Conservatives.

So I know it’s being used that way on the Left. And that was really part of my original impetus for writing the book was back when I was a partisan Liberal, I wanted the Left to win. So, I know the book is being used on the Left. I believe it’s being used on the Right as well. But I’m encouraged at least that readers who are not active in politics, readers from what they write on Amazon and elsewhere, really are having the kind of experience that I myself had from looking at both sides. And that my students in my classes have. Which is: Hey, wow, it doesn’t change my politics, but, man, I see they are not as stupid and crazy as I had thought. And so I’m very encouraged by the general reaction that most readers are having.

Joshua Greene on Moral Tribes, Moral Dilemmas, and Utilitarianism

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Joshua Greene, of Harvard University and author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about morality and the challenges we face when our morality conflicts with that of others. Topics discussed include the difference between what Greene calls automatic thinking and manual thinking, the moral dilemma known as “the trolley problem,” and the difficulties of identifying and solving problems in a society that has a plurality of values. Greene defends utilitarianism as a way of adjudicating moral differences.

Intro. [Recording date: December 23, 2014.] Russ: I want to mention that as we have done in the past, we’d like to know your top episodes of the year.

To participate, go to econtalk.org, where you will find a link in the upper lefthand corner to a survey that will give you a chance to tell us a little bit about yourself, give us some general feedback if you’d like, as well as voting for your 5 favorite episodes of 2014. That survey will stay up through early February of 2015; and I will announce the results some time in mid- to late February.

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Russ: Now, on to today’s guest, Joshua Greene, Professor of Psychology at Harvard U. and the Director of the Moral Cognition Lab there. He is the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, which is our topic for today’s episode. So, this is a fascinating, thoughtprovoking, and very ambitious book. It’s got an enormous amount of stuff packed into it—ideas, claims for making the world a better place, some fantastic thought experiments. We’ll try to do justice to the book. I want to start with what you call our tribal nature. You argue that we have evolved to be fairly effective cooperators within our tribes, but not so good cooperators with other tribes. Explain what you mean by that—what you mean by ‘tribes’ and the tragedy of common sense morality. Guest: Right. So it begins with a question of will: what is morality, to begin with? And what I think, and a lot of other recent commentators and some people in some sense going all the

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way back to Charles Darwin thinks morality is fundamentally about is our social nature. And more specifically about cooperation: that is, what we call morality is really a suite of psychological tendencies and capacities that allow us to live successfully in groups, that allow us to reap the advantages of cooperation. But these tendencies that make up morality come primarily in the form of emotional responses that drive social behavior and that respond to other people’s social behavior. I think a natural starting point begins with a familiar story to an economist: this is the tragedy of the commons, which I can talk about a little bit, if you want. Russ: Yeah, go ahead. Guest: So, the tragedy of the commons is a parable told by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. He tells the story of a bunch of herders who share a common pasture, and these are rational, self-interested herders who ask themselves, ‘Should I add more animals to my herd?’ And they think, ‘Well, if I add more animals, that’s more animals that I have at market and that’s good. That’s the upside. What’s the downside? Not so much downside: we’re all sharing this common pasture.’

And so they say the benefits outweigh the costs, and they add more and more animals to their herd. So then when they all do this, there’s not enough grass to support any of the animals and they all die and everybody is worse off.

And that’s the same as the tragedy of the commons. It’s basically a parable about the problem of cooperation, which is really the problem of how do you get people to put collective interest over self-interest. Russ: With the key point that by doing so, they’ll be better off. Guest: Correct. Russ: Their self-interests will actually be served. So it’s not a literal sacrifice. It’s a sacrifice in the short run, for a longer-run benefit. Guest: That’s right. If it’s a repeated game then it’s in everybody’s long term self-interest. I think that that’s right.

In the short term it’s a conflict between self-interest and collective interest, but in the long term, a cooperative system is one that makes everybody better off. Although at any given moment it may be possible for someone, at least in a short-[?] way to benefit themselves at the expense of the group. Russ: Absolutely. Guest: And so the idea is that our minds are designed to help us solve this problem. And you can think of us as having psychological carrots and sticks that we apply to ourselves and that we apply to other people. So, a psychological carrot that we apply to ourselves to be cooperative would be feelings of love and friendship and goodwill that motivate us to say, ‘Hey, it’s not just my sheep that matters. Everybody else’s sheep, or at least some other people’s sheep’ motivates you to be cooperative. Or you could have negative feelings that act as a stick for yourself, like shame and guilt. I would feel ashamed of myself if everybody else limited the size of their herds for the greater good and then I cheated. And we have positive feelings that reward other people—so you have my gratitude if you keep your sheep in line. And we have negative feelings that punish other people—you’ll have my contempt and my anger and my disgust if you grow your herd as much as you feel like

The world we live in today.

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Insightful. Explains why we do certain things, and why we are so irrational.

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without regard for the rest of us who share the pasture. So the idea is these feelings, these psychological carrots and sticks that we apply to ourselves and other people, that’s the core of morality and that’s what makes basic cooperation within a group possible. Russ: And just to mention Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments he says, “Man desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” And so there’s some self-regulating impulse to do the right thing, because you want people to respect you. And those carrots and sticks are flying around with all of our social interactions. So, it worked pretty well; and we had Pete Boettke on EconTalk talking about the work of Elinor Ostrom—she got the Nobel Prize. She explains that within small groups, they often devise norms and other voluntary, non-coercive ways to limit the tragedy. But the problem you are fascinated by—which I am, too— is when two tribes come along and they don’t share the same morality. So, talk about the tragedy of common sense morality, as you describe it. Guest: Right. So, this is my sequel to Hardin’s parable. And one version goes like this. So, imagine that there’s this large forest. And all around this large forest are many different tribes. And these different tribes are all cooperative, but they are cooperative on different terms. So, on the one side you might have your communist herders who say, Not only are we going to have a common pasture; we’re just going to have a common herd, and that’s how everything gets aligned. Everything is about us. And on the other side of the forest you might have the individualist herders who say, Not only are we not going to have common herds; we are not going to have a common pasture. We are going to privatize the pasture, divide it up; and everybody’s responsible for their own piece of land. And our cooperation will consist in everybody’s respecting each other’s property rights. As opposed to sharing a common pasture. And you can imagine any number of arrangements in between. And there are other dimensions along which tribes can vary. So, they vary in what I call their proper nouns, so that is: Which leaders or religious texts or traditions have authority to govern daily life in the tribe? And tribes may respond differently to threats and outsiders. Some may be relatively laissez faire about people who break the rules. Other people may be incredibly harsh. Some tribes will be very hostile to outsiders; others may be more welcoming. All different ways the tribes can achieve cooperation on different terms. They are all dotted around this large forest. And then the parable continues: One hot, dry summer, lightning strikes and there’s a forest fire and the forest burns to the ground. And then the rains come and suddenly there is this lovely green pasture in the middle. And all the tribes look at that pasture and say, ‘Hmmm, nice pasture.’ And they all move in. So now we have in this common space all of these different tribes that are cooperative in different ways, cooperative on different terms, with different leaders, with different ideals, with different histories, all trying to exist in the same space.

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And this is the modern tragedy. This is the modern moral problem. That is, it’s not a problem of turning a bunch of ‘me-s’ into an ‘us.’ That’s the basic problem of the tragedy of the commons. It’s about having a bunch of different us-es all existing in the same place, all moral in their own way, but with different conceptions of what it means to be moral. And so, if our basic psychology does a pretty good job of solving the me-versus-us problem of having basic cooperation within a group, the modern problem, both I think philosophically and psychologically is: What kind of a system and what kind of thinking do we need to regulate life on those new pastures of the modern world, where we have many different tribes with many different terms of cooperation, many different moral systems?

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Russ: Before we go further, I want to just ask you an aside question that I thought about as I was reading the book, which is: You argue that we evolved morality to help us solve these kind of problems. Why do we have different wants? And in particular—we’ll probably come back to this later on—I’m more of a bottom up guy than you are; you are a top down guy, more than I am. You concede in places that bottom up is good; and I of course concede in certain places that top down is good. But overall, we have a philosophical difference. And you identify that difference to some extent with the northern and southern tribes—the northern tribes being more individualistic— Guest: Right: metaphorically northern and southern. Yeah. Russ: And southern tribes being more collectivist. As you point out, there’s obviously lots of gray areas in between. Why do you think there are such different ideologies to start with? Why am I a bottom up guy, and why are you a top down guy? And you talk a lot about the fact that, of course, we both think that we are right. And we both think we have evidence for why we are right.

But, given that the world’s a complicated place, how do we get that difference to start with? Why don’t we both have the same morality toward how we solve problems? Guest: Well, so I’m not sure exactly what you mean by bottom up and top down, but I actually have, I think, the leading scientific explanations are at least what I would call pretty bottom uppish. So, a couple of places here. Joe Henrich and colleagues, for example, have collected evidence from small-scale societies all around the world and found quite a bit of variation in terms of how people cooperate. In the “lab”—that is, having them play standardized economic games, and then also in their everyday life.

So, take the Lamalera of Indonesia. These are people who make their living by hunting whales in collective hunting parties. So, their livelihood depends very much on cooperation. And sure enough, when you have them do public goods games, prisoner’s dilemma—so the kinds of economic games that model the tragedy of the commons, they are exceptionally cooperative. You have other societies where people hunt individually—I hope I’m getting this

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Russ: Let’s talk about the two Trolley Problems and what you learn about morality from those, because obviously there’s of variations on the Trolley Problems that you talk about in the book. But talk about the two basic ones and talk about what you mean by automatic mode and manual mode, which I found very interesting. Guest: Okay. So, before I get to trolleys specifically, let me say a little bit about how I think this connects to the first set of questions you asked about the tragedy of the commons, the tragedy of common-sense morality. Because one of the main ideas of the book is we have two kinds of problems; we also have two kinds of thinking. And that the our gut reactions, our intuitions, what I call our automatic settings, which I’ll explain in a moment, do a good job of solving the original tragedy of the commons, but they create the problem of the problem of common-sense morality. That our

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right, but the Machiguenga of I believe Peru but certainly in South America, they hunt as individuals and individual families; and they they play these economic games, they are much less cooperative. Which is not to say that they are not cooperative people, but they tend to cooperate within family as opposed to across families, at least economically. Now, if you live in a place where there are whales to be hunted, then there are advantages to having a cooperative way of life. If you live in the Amazon where there aren’t whales to be hunted and the way you get food is by just going off in your own directly and finding what you can, then that lends itself to a more individualistic society. There is a paper that came out a couple of years ago, or actually maybe it was just this year, by Kensayama and colleagues arguing that there are big differences between cultures--and this is going back to some ideas

by Richard Nisbett and colleagues—cultures that cultivate wheat versus cultivating rice, the more collectivist cultures of Asia, are ultimately driven by the original rice-based economies that lived there: rice cultivation can be incredibly productive but requires a lot of intense cooperation and Nisbett has also for example cited evidence about more individualistic tendencies for people who live in herding cultures where it’s a mountainous region and you are not going to be growing crops on the ground but instead are going to be herding sheep, let’s say. That ends up leading toward more individual societies.

So, I’m not sure if we actually disagree on this. Russ: I don’t think we do. At all. I’m trying to get a more nuanced view, which I think is in the book, which is: The tribe we’re in is not just a result of evolution. It’s also cultural and depends on our situation. Guest: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. No, I think that what we’re born with is a set of options. It’s a lot like language, right?

All humans, all healthy humans are born with the capacity for language. But whether you end up speaking English or Chinese or something else is going to depend on the environment, the linguistic environment into which you are born.

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gut reactions about how we ought to live make it harder for us to live in many ways in a pluralistic world. So, let me give you my metaphor, which is familiar to people who have read—well, at least the idea is familiar to people who have read Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, and a lot of the research on dual-process decision-making. My preferred metaphor for this is the visual SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera—so, a camera like the one I got many years ago now; has the automatic settings on it. So just for everyday use, if you are taking a picture of a mountain from a mile away in broad daylight, you put it in landscape mode and click, point and shoot, you’ve got your shot. Or if you are taking a picture of somebody up close in indoor light then you put it in portrait mode and click, you’ve got your shot. And it also has a manual mode where you can by hand adjust the f-stop and everything else. And I say, why does the camera have these two different ways of taking photos, your automatic settings and your manual mode? And the idea is that this allows you to navigate the tradeoff between flexibility and efficiencies.

So, the automatic settings are very efficient, point and shoot; and they are good for the kinds of situations that the manufacturer has already anticipated.

Like taking a landscape picture or taking a standard portrait picture. But the manufacturer also knows that there are going to be situations that the manufacturer isn’t going to specifically anticipate; and so the manufacturer also gives you a manual mode where you can adjust everything yourself. The manual mode is very flexible, but it’s not very efficient. So you can do anything with it, but you have to know what you are doing; it takes time; you might make a mistake. And this design of having both, overall makes a lot of sense, because sometimes, most of the time, you can get by just pointing and shooting, and that’s what you really want. But occasionally you want to have the flexibility to put the camera in manual mode and get exactly what you want, depending on conditions— Russ: And if you don’t you are going to get a really bad picture sometimes. I think that’s the— Guest: Right. Exactly.

So the idea is that the human brain has the same design: that we have automatic settings, and we have our manual modes. Our automatic settings are our gut reactions, our largely-emotional responses to situations, especially social situations, that tell us: That’s good, that’s bad, this is what you ought to do, this is what you ought not to do. We also have a manual mode; we also have the ability to step back and think in an explicit, deliberate, what you might call, in a somewhat loaded sense, rational way about whatever it is that’s facing us. And we might override some gut reaction we might have because we’d say, well, in this case, even though it feels like we should do this, it actually makes more sense to do that. So, with this idea in mind of the tension between our automatic settings and our manual mode, our gut reaction and our slow, deliberate thinking, all introduce, as you said, the Trolley Dilemma. This is the philosophical problem that got me interested,

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well, really got me started in my research as a scientist. So, one version of the Trolley case goes like this. You’ve got a trolley headed towards 5 people, and you can save them but they are going to die if you don’t do anything. If you hit a switch you can turn the trolley away from the five and onto another track, but unfortunately there’s still 1 person there. And if you ask most people, ‘Is it okay to turn the trolley away from the 5 and have it run over the 1 person?’ depending on who you ask and how you ask it, about 90% of people will say, ‘Yes.’ Russ: Better that one person dies than five. Guest: That’s right. The tradeoff is between 5 lives and 1, and the particular mechanism is hitting the switch that will turn the trolley away from the five and onto the one. Parallel case, which we’ll call the Footbridge Case: This time the trolley is again headed towards 5 people, but now you are on a footbridge over the track, in between the oncoming trolley and the 5 people.

We stipulate the only way that you can save them now is to end up killing somebody. So, there’s this large guy, wearing a large backpack, who is right next to you. And you can push him off of the footbridge and he’ll land on the tracks and he’ll die—he’ll get killed by the trolley—but it will stop the trolley from running over the 5 people. Now, to cut down on the number of angry emails that you get from people, I have to make some stipulations clear. We are stipulating that, a). You cannot jump, yourself. The only way to save the 5 is— Russ: You’re not big enough. Guest: That’s right. Not big enough.

You cannot jump, yourself. And yes, this will definitely work. And I know you’ve all been to the movies and sometimes you are able to suspend disbelief, and I ask you to do the same thing here. And we ask our participants, when we do these experiments, to do the same thing; and in general they don’t have any problem doing this. Here, one of the questions is: Is it okay to push the guy off the footbridge, use him as a trolley stopper to save the 5 people?

Most people say no. There are some populations where people are more likely to say yes. But in general, take an American sample, somewhere between about 10% and 35% of people will say that it’s okay to push the guy off the footbridge; most people will say that it’s not okay. So, interesting question: What’s going on? Why do we say that it’s okay to trade 1 life for 5 when you can hit a switch that will divert the trolley away from 5 and onto 1, but it’s not okay to push the guy off the footbridge—even if we assume that this is going to work and if we assume that there’s no other way to achieve this worthy goal. Most people still say that it’s wrong. We’re coming up on a decade and a half of research on or stemming from this moral dilemma. And we’ve learned a lot. It seems that it’s primarily an emotional response to that physical action of pushing the guy off the footbridge. And you can see, for example, in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which you might think of as a mammal’s early-warning alarm system that something may be bad, needs attention, maybe not a good idea—you see that alarm bell going off in

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this basic part of the mammalian emotional brain. And the strength of that signal is correlated with the extent to which people say that it’s wrong to push the guy off the footbridge or whatever it is. You also see increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that’s most closely associated with explicit reasoning, or anything that really requires a kind of mental effort, like remembering a phone number or resisting an impulse of some kind or explicitly applying a behavioral rule. That’s sort of the seat of manual mode. And these two signals from different parts of the brain, one a kind of automatic response to the action and the other reflecting the balance of costs and benefits, do get out in the brain; and in some people they go one way and in some people they go the other way. And if you give people a distracting secondary task, then it slows down their utilitarian judgments—that is, the judgments when they say that it’s okay to kill 1 to save 5. If you give people more time, they are more likely to give a utilitarian judgment. People who give more reflective answers to tricky math questions are more likely to say that it’s okay to push the guy off the footbridge. If you give people a drug that in the short term heightens certain kinds of emotional responses—so the drug used in the experiments is Citalopram, which is an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor), kind of like Prozac, people are more likely to say that it’s wrong to push the guy off the footbridge. If you give people an anti-anxiety drug, Lorazepam is the one used in the study I have in mind, they are more likely to say that it’s okay to push the guy off the footbridge. And so there’s a lot of evidence, from a lot of different kinds of experiments. Brain imaging, behavioral manipulations, pharmacological manipulations, looking at patients with different kinds of brain damage— they all support this kind of dual process story. That is, that there’s a gut reaction that’s saying, ‘No, don’t push the guy off the footbridge’; and then a more conscious, explicit, calculating response that says, ‘Well, but you can save 5 lives; don’t you think that makes sense?’ And—well, I could go on.

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Russ: Talk about how you might want to exploit or use those differences— and I just have to say as a footnote: There’s a lot of experiments in economics that make all kinds of different claims about behavior, and one of the aspects of these experiments of course—it’s really a big one in the footbridge example—is that this is a very alien experience for most people. And I think the challenge in interpreting, part of it, is the fact that, if it happened every day--if people were constantly shoving people over footbridges—maybe people would have different responses. Guest: Absolutely. Russ: There’s a grappling uncertainty issue. And even though you say don’t be uncertain, I think that’s the automatic part maybe that’s kicking in, not necessarily the morality. But let’s put that to the side. It’s definitely true that we have some gut reactions about some things and then some more pensive and thoughtful

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reactions. But others—what’s the implication of that for these tragedies of the common-sense morality, these philosophical, ideological moral differences between tribes and groups? Guest: So, there are a few dots I think that need to be connected. So, if you sort of follow the arc of the book, the first part is about the two tragedies and their different structure. And then the next part is about morality fast and slow in general. Initially it’s just illustrating the idea that our moral thinking involves a tension between gut reactions to certain types of actions that are generally bad but maybe not always bad. And then a kind of cost/benefit thinking that can either be selfish, or it can be impartial in the case of the third-party observer saying, ‘Well, isn’t it better just to save more lives?’ What I propose as a solution to the tragedy of common sense morality is a much maligned and poorly named philosophy which many of your listeners will be familiar with, known as utilitarianism. Russ: Oooooh.

Guest: Boo. Russ: That was ‘oooh.’ Just suspense. It wasn’t necessarily—I have an anti-utilitarian streak, but I a pro-one, also. So, I’m ambivalent. That was just ‘oooh.’ Go ahead. Guest: Okay. So, I think utilitarianism is very much misunderstood. And this is part of the reason why we shouldn’t even call it utilitarianism at all. We should call it what I call ‘deep pragmatism’, which I think better captures what I think utilitarianism is really like, if you really apply it in real life, in light of an understanding of human nature. But, we can come back to that. The idea, going back to the tragedy of commonsense morality is you’ve got all these different tribes with all of these different values based on their different ways of life. What can they do to get along?

And I think that the best answer that we have is—well, let’s back up. In order to resolve any kind of tradeoff, you have to have some kind of common metric. You have to have some kind of common currency. And I think that what utilitarianism, whether it’s the moral truth or not, is provide a kind of common currency. So, what is utilitarianism? It’s basically the idea that— it’s really two ideas put together. One is the idea of impartiality. That is, at least as social decision makers, we should regard everybody’s interests as of equal worth. Everybody counts the same. And then you might say, ‘Well, but okay, what does it mean to count everybody the same? What is it that really matters for you and for me and for everybody else?’ And there the utilitarian’s answer is what is sometimes called, somewhat accurately and somewhat misleadingly, happiness. But it’s not really happiness in the sense of cherries on sundaes, things that make you smile. It’s really the quality of conscious experience. So, the idea is that if you start with anything that you value, and say, ‘Why do you care about that?’ and keep asking, ‘Why do you care about that?’ or ‘Why do you care about that?’ you ultimately come down to the quality of someone’s conscious experience. So if I were to say, ‘Why did you go to work today?’ you’d say, ‘Well, I need to make money; and I also enjoy my work.’ ‘Well, what do you need your money

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Refering to Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher, founder of modern ultilitarianism.

for?’ ‘Well, I need to have a place to live; it costs money.’ ‘Well, why can’t you just live outside?’ ‘Well, I need a place to sleep; it’s cold at night.’ ‘Well, what’s wrong with being cold?’ ‘Well, it’s uncomfortable.’ ‘What’s wrong with being uncomfortable?’ ‘It’s just bad.’ Right? At some point if you keep asking why, why, why, it’s going to come down to the conscious experience— in Bentham’s terms, again somewhat misleading, the pleasure and pain of either you or somebody else that you care about. So the utilitarian idea is to say, Okay, we all have our pleasures and pains, and as a moral philosophy we should all count equally. And so a good standard for resolving public disagreements is to say we should go with whatever option is going to produce the best overall experience for the people who are affected. Which you can think of as shorthand as maximizing happiness—although I think that that’s somewhat misleading. And the solution has a lot of merit to it. But it also has endured a couple of centuries of legitimate criticism. And one of the biggest criticisms—and now we’re getting back to the Trolley cases, is that utilitarianism doesn’t adequately account for people’s rights. So, take the footbridge case. It seems that it’s wrong to push that guy off the footbridge.

Even if you stipulate that you can save more people’s lives. And so anyone who is going to defend utilitarianism as a meta-morality—that is, a solution to the tragedy of common sense morality, as a moral system to adjudicate among competing tribal moral systems—if you are going to defend it in that way, as I do, you have to face up to these philosophical challenges: is it okay to kill on person to save five people in this kind of situation? So I spend a lot of the book trying to understand the psychology of cases like the footbridge case. And you mention these being kind of unrealistic and weird cases. That’s actually part of my defense. Russ: Yeah, there’s some plus to it, I agree. Guest: Right. And the idea is that your amygdala is responding to an act of violence. And most acts of violence are bad. And so it is good for us to have a gut reaction, which is really a reaction in your amygdala that’s then sending a signal to your ventromedial prefrontal cortex and so on and so forth, and we can talk about that. It’s good to have that reaction that says, ‘Don’t push people off of footbridges.’ But if you construct a case in which you stipulate that committing this act of violence is going to lead to the greater good, and it still feels wrong, I think it’s a mistake to interpret that gut reaction as a challenge to the theory that says we should do whatever in general is going to promote the greater good. That is, our gut reactions are somewhat limited. They are good for everyday life. It’s good that you have a gut reaction that says, ‘Don’t go shoving people off of high places.’ But that shouldn’t be a veto against a general idea that otherwise makes a lot of sense.

Which is that in the modern world, we have a lot of different competing value systems, and that the way to resolve disagreements among those different competing value systems is to say, ‘What’s going to actually produce the best

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Russ: Yeah. So, there’s some things about the utilitarian idea that are deeply appealing, and you do a beautiful job making the case for it. And you spend a lot of time conceding there are problems with it and then giving what you think is the best answer; and I found those very interesting. Not totally persuasive, but provocative. I want to raise a couple of issues and let you respond. So, the first is that: I think part of the reason that people have problems with pushing that guy off the bridge is: there’s an arrogance involved. Which makes me nervous, as a northern herder in your example.

Guest: Right. Russ: So, I like the idea of going around saving lives. And people make lots of claims for—the death penalty saves lives; it doesn’t take lives, it saves lives. And there are a lot of different claims that people make.

Ultimately most of those claims come down to empirical claims, somewhat supported by evidence but not totally, completely, ironclad, about how x leads to y. And one of the main themes of EconTalk is that, I’m humble about that connection between x and y. And I’m thinking, you go out there pushing people off of footbridges, you’re actually a dangerous person. You are not a moral person. You’re going to run amok. Guest: I agree. I think what you are essentially doing is making a good, deep-pragmatist, long-term utilitarian argument against being too quick to implement what might narrowly seem to be a utilitarian solution. Russ: And that’s really by the way—that’s a nice way to put it. That’s really what economists do, by the way—often what economists say: ‘Not so fast.’ Right? Guest: Right. So, I think it depends on the case, right? When it comes to—take something like physician-assisted suicide. Right? You might have a kind of footbridge sort of reaction: I think the American Medical Association are a lot of people, too, which says, it’s just wrong for you to intentionally and actively end the life of a patient even if they want to. Right? It pushes—I’m willing to bet it pushes that amygdala button. Russ: Yeah, big time. Guest: Right? But, you might say, ‘But the greater good is served by not forcing people who are suffering and who have no quality of life and no hope of a better life to go on and suffer and wait for the disease to kill them instead of them dying their own way.’ Now, on the one hand, there’s something—I think about that caution that says, ‘Well wait a second. This could go terribly wrong.’ If we have doctors who are too quick to say, ‘Oh, you want to die? Oh, here you go.’ Russ: It’s a slippery slope argument. Guest: Yeah. So, on the one hand you want to be careful and you want to listen to that amygdala signal that says you are playing with fire here. But at the same time, you don’t want to give it an absolute veto. And so

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consequences?’ And best consequences measured in terms of the quality of people’s experience. So, that’s kind of completing or partially completing the circle between the tragedy of the commons, that discussion, and how do we get to the Trolleys.

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I think that the kind of skepticism about overly ambitious social policy is a good skepticism. At the same time, I think it is often possible to do things that feel wrong but that actually end up making things better. Russ: For sure.

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Russ: So, let’s talk about the basic idea. You actually—in the book you sum it up in three words: maximize happiness impartially. And of course by happiness, you don’t mean necessarily, although it could include dancing at a party while drunk or gorging on ice cream. It’s a richer concept. Sometimes we call it flourishing here on the program. Or I think the fancy name is eudaimonia. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly. I think that’s Aristotelian. And it’s about—there’s a whole very rich menu of stuff that give us a feeling of pleasure, of utility, of satisfaction, deep tranquility, serenity, etc. And we’re going to be open about—we’re not going to try to narrow down that definition. So I’m with you there. So, for me, as an individual, me, just me, I face tradeoffs all the time about satisfaction and pleasure and happiness. How long should I stay at work? Should I watch the football game instead of helping my kids with their homework? These are all questions that we face every single day as individuals and we do our best, and sometimes we make mistakes that we regret; and we understand that: life isn’t perfect. And morality to some extent, and self-help books, are trying to help us navigate those tradeoffs. The problem I have with your tradeoff is—and I understand the desire for a common currency across these tradeoffs—but they are across different people. And I can’t measure happiness. Even if I could I’m not sure that I can imagine an entity that would come up with the right desire to make those tradeoffs. So, we think about this in a political context, which is naturally what you do in the book. So, here we are in the United States.

We’re in this pasture. We’re all here together. We have very different philosophies. Unfortunately, we don’t really have—not only do we disagree, even if we agreed, you and I, on what the right, say, way to adjudicate our dispute, we don’t really have a mechanism for implementing it. We think we do. We call it democracy. But it’s a very imperfect mechanism that often exploits our differences for the benefit and gain of individuals. So it’s not obvious to me that it’s even a good idea to say, Let’s pretend we could decide what is the greatest happiness across these 330 million people, let alone the 7 billion, and then hope that somehow it’ll get implemented. Is that really a practical solution to our political problems? Guest: No, I don’t think that there is any alternative. I think that we are living someone’s attempts to adjudicate these tradeoffs of values, and we can either just accept what the powers that be put in front of us, or we can vote our conscience and try to change them or vote our conscience and say, yes I endorse this. I think that what you’re objecting to is the difficulty of the problem, not an inherent problem with the solution, if you want to call it that, that I’m proposing. So I

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think it’s easier to think about these things with a concrete example. So, take the case of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Now, let’s suppose that I know that this is controversial. But let’s suppose that government spending can provide good stimulus to the economy and can increase employment and make things better off for the people who are employed as a result. Okay, so you have to do a tradeoff. You would have to say, How much do the wealthiest people lose by having their incomes reduced by some amount from someone who is making half a million dollars a year, and they might pay, instead of paying 30% in taxes they’d pay 40% or something like that, versus the benefits that go to people who now have jobs as a result of expansion of the public sector, or children who have a better shot at living the good life because of increased commitment to early childhood education, etc. There are a lot of empirical assumptions here or questions here. But if we can at least agree on the empirics, then there’s the question of, Okay, is this tradeoff worth it? I don’t think there’s any way to avoid asking that question, and I think that in a lot of these cases, it’s actually pretty clear—that, for example, taking people who are already very wealthy and reducing their income somewhat doesn’t really do much to their happiness. Whereas if you provide opportunities to people at the bottom of the scale, that actually can make an enormous difference in their lives. So, you know, I think that the alternative is to just say, let it just evolve the way it evolves without consciously thinking about this as a social problem. But I don’t think that that’s a better alternative. Russ: Well, that’s because you’re a southerner. I’m a northerner, and as a northerner, I say, if we get the government out of this, the private sector, charity and other ways, will be done to help poor people. They’ll take money from rich people. They do give it voluntarily—maybe not so much as we’d like; certainly not as much as they’d give if they were forced to give. But the real issue I have, and this is my meta-meta morality, I guess, and I think it’s an interesting thought experiment—the real problem I have is the empirical assumptions that you need to make for some reason don’t appeal to me. And they do tend to appeal to people who are the collectivists. Right? So, you made a lot of— you just gave a couple; we could think of 10 more: better schools, better preschools, more training programs, greener this, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, stimulate the economy, reduce unemployment. And most of those things everybody agrees on would be good if they happened. But strangely enough—and this is, to me, a different kind of tragedy—the people who are from the north, us individualists, we seem to think that the empirical evidence is very unconvincing. Whereas the people who are in the south seem to find it extremely compelling. Guest: Right. Russ: So, what it comes down to is a pretense, what I would fear—it’s a pretense we are doing something scientific by just looking at the outcomes rather than arguing about our principles. ‘We’re just going to see what works the best.’ But that’s kind of a

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false—that’s kind of an illusion, I worry. What do you think? Guest: But why—I see this problem on both sides. I think that both sides— Russ: I do, too. Guest: interpret the evidence. The evidence in social science is almost always ambiguous. And both sides interpret the evidence so as to support the kind of social policy that they intuitively favor. I think that’s a problem on both sides. Russ: I agree. Guest: But, you know—I think it’s not an impossible task to sort out the fact from the bias. And the signal-to-noise ratio may be lower than we’d like, but I still think that there is a signal there. I think one thing that we can do, and this is one of the major practical points in the book, is to not think of these social problems when we are really trying to have an honest discussion about it in terms of rights. Russ: Yeah, I really like that, by the way. Even though I’ve probably made those rights arguments.

I thought this was fantastic. Go ahead. Guest: And I use the language of rights as well. I think it has its place, I also argued in the book. But if something becomes a matter of rights—take capital punishment; it’s the public’s right to see justice done, which means having the person killed; or capital punishment is a violation of human rights, as Amnesty International says—if you make something about rights then it essentially leaves the realm of the empirical, because we can essentially use the language of rights as a front for whatever our automatic settings say, for whatever our amygdala says. Right? Russ: Yep. Guest: And so, one way to try to make progress from both sides is to say, Okay, we’re not going to discuss these problems in terms of absolute rights. Because we have no way of figuring out what rights people really have in some ultimate metaphysical sense. And instead we can ask, which kinds of policies actually work. A lot of these things are difficult because we can’t do controlled experiments—we’re not rats living in a lab.

We’re people living in a society where it’s almost impossible to do controlled experiments with things like the death penalty. Russ: Or a stimulus. Guest: But we can look at other countries that don’t have the death penalty and say, well, do they have rampant murder problems? Or, is there something fundamentally different about those societies that’s making them relatively murder-free compared to the United States? I think that the empirical battle is winnable, but it’s 10 steps forward and 9 steps back.

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Russ: So, let me phrase the challenge in a different way. You concede at one point in the book—you reject it, but you concede at one point in the book that people think we’re already doing this. We favor the policies that work out the best, or that create the most happiness, or that are good for most people, or the “best policies.” And isn’t part of the problem really that we’re really pretending what we’re arguing about? It’s all rhetoric? We all have our stories to tell: as Ed Leamer says, we’re pattern-seeking, story-telling animals. So we cherry pick our data. And it’s just, all this utilitarian stuff, all it’s really doing

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Russ: Let me ask you a couple of different challenges. This is a little bit like ask the doctor; these are hard ones. Uber, the car-sharing, taxi-ish service you can use on your iPhone, recently got in trouble in Sydney, Australia during a crisis situation, and it’s happened with other natural disasters: there’s an increase in demand somewhere, and the Uber algorithm raises the price.

Which draws more drivers into the area. And as an economist, whether I’m a southerner or not—or northerner or not, I mean--that kind of—I love that.

I see more people getting out of town. A lot of people can’t see it. They don’t care, even. They see that it’s just wrong to take advantage of people and they think Uber is immoral. And to me it’s amoral; and in fact, it’s good. So, why do you think people have that reaction to so-called price gouging? Guest: So, I actually haven’t followed the details of the Uber situation, and I would say, whether or not I think it’s a good or bad thing will probably turn on facts that are not much discussed in the case. So, I think the kind of standard response to price gouging is, you know, there’s a flood and the people who are selling buckets are suddenly selling them for a thousand dollars each.

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is just giving me a different rhetorical frame. I’m not really going to make progress. So tell me something cheerful. Guest: Uh, so, let’s take the case of prison policies and things like solitary confinement and other exceptionally harsh treatments that exist in American prisons. You’re seeing, now you’re seeing a lot of this in the news. For a long time people on the Left have been saying these practices of exceptionally harsh punishment in prisons is not doing anything to help anyone; it doesn’t deter crime very much because most would-be criminals are not paying attention to these levels of details.

Russ: Worse. Could be worse. Guest: It makes things miserable for the prisoners. Russ: Could be worse. Guest: Sorry? Russ: Yeah, it could be worse for society. It reduces their ability to come out and do something productive. Guest: Exactly. Right. And what you’re seeing now is people on the Right who are coming around to say, Look, it’s not productive; this is not helping. This is a place where we’re actually I think just beginning to see a consensus on Left and Right, at least on certain flash-point issues like solitary confinement and things like that. And it’s really driven by evidence. Russ: That’s a good example. And I’d use the drug war as another example. It’s hard for—there are a lot of people who see it as a rights-based issue: people should not have the right to harm themselves. And when they see the effect of the drug war, they start—some, not all—but some people do change their minds based on the fact that they actually don’t think it’s making the world a better place. It’s not reducing necessarily even the amount of drugs being taken; it’s corrupting the police; etc. So, I don’t mean to argue that empirical evidence or reality doesn’t come into it. I’m just a little worried about the bigger, overarching claim.

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And the idea is, you are exploiting those people; you are making it harder for people to deal with their emergency and they could be losing an awful lot.

Because you’re saying, this is a chance where I could make an extra buck.

And so from a utilitarian perspective, you are saying, okay, so you get a little extra money selling your stuff and the other person’s house gets flooded—or I should have said fire. In a fire there’s a person selling buckets. And the other person’s house is burning down, and you’re concerned about making a few extra dollars taking advantage of someone in need. There I think the utilitarian analysis clearly says, Price gouging is terrible. You are taking a little gain for yourself relatively speaking, because someone is desperate and they are trying to save their house, which is worth much, much more to them. If that’s what’s going on, then I think price gouging is bad, and it might be good to have regulations. Russ: And that’s a world where there’s a fixed number of buckets. Guest: Exactly. Russ: And a fixed number of buckets— Guest: Now, what’s going on with Uber, is all of these people saying, ‘You know, I’m willing to work overtime’, essentially: ‘I’m willing to add extra travel capacity; but I’m not willing to do it for my usual price. I’m willing to do it for a little bit more; but fortunately there are people who are willing to pay for it.’ I actually think that that is, overall, a better thing. So if it’s actually increasing the availability in a time when people need it, that’s better. Now, it would be better still if people said, ‘You know what? I’m willing to do this as a kind of partial public service where I will get paid for it but I’m not going to increase my rate even though I could.’ That would be even better.

But we naturally compare it to Uber at the usual price instead of someone staying home and not driving at all. So, when I said that I think it depends critically on facts that aren’t normally discussed, I would say it really depends on whether or not the alternative is not providing the service, as opposed to providing the service at the usual price. Russ: So, I’m going to concede my utilitarian side here, agree with you in the following way. Which is, I think one of the things that’s often missing from these conversations, and it’s missing from some of the moral dilemmas in the psychology literature that you cite, is an awareness of what Hayek called the knowledge problem—the fact that knowledge is dispersed and it’s very hard to get it in the real world into people’s heads quickly. So in the case of Sydney, a lot of people didn’t know that there was a crisis going on. A lot of people didn’t realize there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people that wanted to get to the airport.

And maybe if they knew they would have volunteered to help them. They would have done a bunch of things. But that app alerted dozens or hundreds of drivers that there are a bunch of people who needed help. Guest: Right.

Russ: And that price played an incredibly important role. Guest: Yes. Russ: So, my utilitarian side, where it agrees with you, is that I actually am naive enough to think that if more and more people understood that

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Russ: So, I want to take an example you use that I found really interesting; I think all of us have to think about it, whether we are utilitarian or not. It’s an example you take from Peter Singer. You say, you are out strolling in the park and you come across a shallow pond, and there’s a small child stumbled into it and is going to drown. You can wade in and save the child, but you are going to ruin your $500 suit. And most people say, you are morally obligated to wade in. You have to give up the $500 suit to save the child. The problem is that it’s much more difficult to then say: Instead of buying the $500 suit, you should have sent it to a charity in Africa to save a child’s life, and maybe two children. So, talk about that issue from the utilitarian perspective and how you respond to it. Guest: Right. So, I think that Peter Singer had one of the most important insights of the 21st century. Which is the nonobvious moral equivalence of those two cases that you describe. Which is of course controversial, but I think he’s basically right. And I think that this is reflected in our intuitive morality, both as a result of our biology and our cultural experience. So, you know, we evolve both biologically and culturally to live in relatively small groups in which we cooperate: we solve the tragedy of the commons with the people who are immediately around us. And so when you imagine seeing that child right in front of you, that pushes those emotional buttons that say, You have to do something; this is a person that counts, this is a person who is or is likely to be a member of your community. But, we didn’t evolve to cooperate with or even care about people on the other side of the world. And so, from a biological perspective, the mystery is not why are we indifferent to far-away suffering but even why do we care about the people in front of us? But, I argue, as many people argue, that this is what morality is about: it makes you willing to pay that cost, at least in the short term, to benefit somebody else. But overall we all end up better off if we all have these moral impulses. So, I think that this is essentially a limitation of our intuitive morality, that through some combination of biological and cultural shaping, it pushes our emotional moral buttons when we have the child right in front of us, but children or even worse, adults, on the other side of the world don’t push our buttons in that way. I think that if we’re looking to construct a meta-morality, that is, to have a kind of moral standard that can work for the whole world, as opposed to just the tribe, then it’s going to require valuing the lives, valuing the wellbeing of distant people as much as we value the wellbeing of people who are nearby. Maybe not in our hearts, but at least in terms of the kinds of policies that we feel that we can publicly justify. Russ: Yeah. And my first thought when I read your example is that this knowledge

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phenomenon, they would be more understanding of higher prices in crises.

That’s my idealistic, utilitarian side. Guest: Yeah, nope, I agree. I think it’s well said.

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problem, which is—when I give the $250, the $500 to the charity, I’m not sure it’s really going to make a difference. And of course that could just be my rationalization for why I can be selfish and hold my head high. So, I think your book makes us think about those issues in a very thoughtful way, and I think one of the biggest lessons of the book is: Slow down. You are so sure that you know what the right thing is: step back and be open. And this is a theme of Jonathan Haidt’s also, who you cite and who has been a guest on the program. It’s hard, but try to put yourself in the shoes of somebody else’s morality. It’s a very productive thing to do. Guest: Yep. Think slow when it comes to morality is I think one of the major points of my book. Russ: Unless you are on the footbridge. Then you have to think fast or it’s too late. Let me raise a different set of issues. As an economist I think sometimes about the minimum wage and how controversial it is, and the arguments on both sides.

And deep down I do like to think that it’s a utilitarian issue, is that: What is really best for poor people and low-skilled people and does this really help them or does it hurt them? And both sides have evidence, of course. Guest: Right. Russ: And just as an aside you make a great point that a lot of people are northerners because—they are individualists because they are selfish.

And it gives them cover. But their selfishness, what I think you failed to point out, is that southerners sometimes like to run people’s lives, and like power.

Each side has its own sort of evil twin, evil cousin, that if we’re not careful— Guest: I have to say, though—I think things are not quite as symmetrical on that point. I really do think that selfishness is pretty basic and pervasive for humans and for other animals. I think that the idea of the liberal who inherently wants to run other people’s lives—I actually think that that’s a myth. I think that that’s a boogie man. I think that—there are certainly plenty of misguided liberals and liberal policies, people who think something is going to help but it actually ends up making things worse. But I don’t think that a desire to sort of run other people’s lives is actually a major force behind either well-guided or misguided liberalism. That’s my take on it. Russ: Well, I like your asymmetry point. The problem is, is that centralizing power can lead to totalitarianism, and it often is justified because it’s benign. And of course it’s rarely—in my opinion, it’s rarely benign. Guest: That I agree with. I would say the rank-and-file liberal voters, let’s say, I don’t think are particularly interested in running other people’s lives. But I agree that there is a strong tendency towards mission creep and that once individuals have a certain power to do something, then they have an incentive to maintain and expand that power. I think that that’s absolutely right.

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Russ: So, what I was going to say, though, before I digressed: minimum wage is an important thing, I think. A more important problem is: What do we do about people who are struggling to acquire skills or who have

Russ: Let’s close with a philosophical issue which is really beautiful in the book, where you imagine—you have an incredible thought experiment. And you use it to argue for utilitarianism. I wasn’t persuaded by it, but I loved it.

We all desire to be good people, we want to be righteous, so the problem is that we lack awareness, we are all trapped in a bubble.

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trouble finding a job, and it’s of course a very complex problem. We have some empirical evidence, hard to argue about. Let’s take a bigger problem, what I would call a bigger problem, which is the problem of what you might call the ‘bottom billion.’ People are not just struggling to express themselves, or making less than they otherwise would, but are near death. Really tragic, horrible situations around the world. I don’t see that very much as a common-sense morality problem; it’s more of a power, 0-sum game where people are taking money from other folks and keeping a system going that is good for them and not so good for the rest of the people. Guest: These are in autocratic regimes, like perhaps the best example would be North Korea, right? Russ: Correct. Guest: Where you have a powerful elite who are basically holding a lot of human potential hostage. Russ: Right. Do you agree with that? Guest: Hmm? Yeah. I think that a lot of the world’s worst situations are the result of corrupt politics. You know. As opposed to real, sort of moral disagreement among communities. Russ: Yeah. I think, other than global warming, which potentially threatens the planet—although I’m a skeptic, to some extent—of course. You’re not. As we would expect. Most of these problems are—many of our worst problems are not meta-morality problems, it seems to me that we just don’t know what’s going on. Either we don’t know what’s going on fully, or there’s something more basic going on.

So, again, I like your attempt to avoid conflict; I’m not sure it’s the central problem. Guest: But even then though, we as third parties face a moral question, right? Which is: Do we intervene? And if we do intervene, how do we intervene? Do we use force to overthrow an oppressive regime? Or, do we impose economic sanctions as a result of what we see as human rights abuses? And there are disagreements within our own community about how if at all we should respond to people who are being oppressed by bad political arrangements. So I think that in a sense the powerful economies of the world, those nations could get together, pretty much do what they want to most of the world’s nasty autocratic regimes, and it’s a question of, why don’t we, and is it wise restraint or a lack of moral will or something in between that prevents us from doing that? Russ: I agree with you there that it’s not so much to me the utilitarian argument but the consequentialist argument, relative to, say, a rights-based argument. People will argue we need to intervene in this situation because it’s just the right thing to do. Those people over there, their rights are being violated; we have to help them and we have the power to do so. And I look at it and say, Well, we’ve tried this 9 times; it worked 1 of them.

That’s not good. Maybe we should be more cautious.

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I thought it was great. So, imagine we could create a world of three different kinds of species. Species 1 is Homo selfishus. Species 2 is Homo justlikeus.

And Species 3 is Homo utilitus. Tell us what are those three species and what you come down with—what’s your argument? Guest: Right. Yeah.

So, let’s provide a little bit of a background for this. I think that one of the big problems philosophically with utilitarianism is the Peter Singer problem, and seeing where it goes. That is, what utilitarianism essentially says is that, at least if you are an ideal utilitarian, you’ll turn yourself into a happiness pump. That is, you will just use whatever resources you have to make the world as happy as possible. And what that means in practice is using all of your resources to alleviate the misery of people who are in the worst possible shape. Right? And so there’s nothing left for you personally, nothing left for your friends and your family—it’s all just going to the bottom 1%. And so, how do you make sense of that, because that seems to be above and beyond?

And it seems to be a point against utilitarianism, if it’s overly demanding. So it’s essentially a question of how does a utilitarian or deep pragmatist deal with this over-demandingness objection? And my answer is to say, Look, instead of putting the blame on utilitarianism, why don’t we put the blame on ourselves, but accept that there are limits to how much we are going to do about it. So, when I have a birthday party for my son and my daughter instead of just giving the money to charity, question, can I really justify that in utilitarian terms? And in a sense, I can’t. But at the same time, you have to operate within the limitations of your own mind and your own species.

We didn’t evolve for universal benevolence. And so it’s not, I think, really in the cards for us to try to go there, at least not directly. Nevertheless, I think that we can step back and recognize that there is something better about universal benevolence; and that’s what this thought experiment is about. So, what we say is: suppose that you are a god, or God, or just in charge of the universe, and you can create a new species; and Homo selfishus is a species of people where they only care about themselves, themselves and a few other people, and they do everything they can to amass as many resources for themselves as individual and don’t care about anybody else. And this ends up being a Hobbesian nightmare, and obviously this is not a very good world to live in. So we’ll say, okay, we are not going to create that species. The real contenders are what I call Homo justlikeus and Homo utilitus. Home justlikeus is, we care a lot about ourselves and the people with whom we have close relationships, our close friends and our family and to some extent about people with whom we have a certain shared identity. And most of the world, we care about in a distant kind of way but not enough to make much of a sacrifice. So, we can know that there are people who, children who are dying of preventable diseases, and we say, ‘Well, I’d like to help but instead I’m going to renovate my kitchen because I’d like it to look nicer.’ And in

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Russ: So, we’re overtime, but it’s so interesting. I’ll close with one last question and let you finish it up. You talk about the fact that these tribal differences— it’s a little bit depressing. You propose a way to try to improve on them. A lot of people are very discouraged about the state of political life in America, the kind of differences we’ve been talking about philosophical differences which seem to be difficult to resolve, and you propose one way to get there, to improve things. One view would say, it’s getting worse. A lot of people think it’s getting worse: we’re more partisan, we’re more combative, we get less done. And of course as a northern I always think, ‘Well, maybe that’s a good thing,’ or maybe I don’t want us to work together so much because I don’t always like the outcome. But put that to the side. The general feeling is things are getting worse. And yet at the same time you have people like Steven Pinker, who you cite in the book, who is saying, things are getting a lot

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that world, a lot of people are very happy but there’s an enormous amount of preventable misery that doesn’t get prevented because people aren’t willing to make any kind of sacrifice for people with whom they don’t have a kind of personal connection. And then Homo utilitus is this species where everybody loves everybody, or at least everybody is willing to make sacrifices for the well-being of other people. And in that world, you might imagine, mindless drones who have no personality or no personal relationships. But I think that’s the wrong way to think about it. But I think the right way to think about it is in terms of just some of the people who are a bit more heroic than most of us—someone who’s willing to donate a kidney to a stranger, or someone, like Wesley Autrey who is willing to dive in front of a subway car to save a guy who is having an epileptic seizure from being crushed by a train.

If you had a worldful of people like that who have friends and family and take care of themselves but who are willing to make sacrifices for other people when there are other people in great need, I think the world would be a lot happier. And even if we don’t have it in us to make those sort of sacrifices, we sort of fallible humans, we can see that that would be a kind of better species, the kind of species you would choose to make if you were in charge of the universe. And so the idea is if you actually step back from the limitations of our human values, we can see that even as we are unwilling to abandon the selfishness and the parochialism of our commitments, we can see that there would be something admirable, or that it would be more ideal if we could expand our concern, even if we don’t see ourselves doing that any time soon.

Russ: Yeah. I just want to comment: it’s interesting in Jewish law, you are obligated to give 10% of your income to charity. You can give up to 20%, but after 20% you are discouraged because you risk becoming poor yourself.

And that’s again a kind of— Guest: I didn’t know about that. Russ: A limit.

So that’s kind of a utilitarian, consequentialist motive in there.

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better; we’re actually making progress as human beings in how we treat each other. Where do you fall on that—half full, half empty? What do you think?

Guest: I think that Pinker and the evidence he cites is absolutely right. That is, in almost every way that matters, the world is getting better. Now that’s not to say that there couldn’t be some grand reversal, as a result of climate change or recently, you’ve talked about unfriendly artificial intelligence with Nick Bostrom, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about myself.

And things like that. So, I don’t want to say that our continued— Russ: We’re out of the woods— Guest: peace and prosperity have to, as a matter of social scientific law continue forever. But I think that despite the sense we get from reading the newspaper, the world is absolutely getting better. And if the question is why, I think it’s because we are cobbling together a metamorality; that we are building systems that allow us to put us ahead of me, but allow us to reconcile the competing moral visions of the world’s different us-es and forge some kind of global system that can allow as many people as possible to flourish

I can only hope so.

Russ Roberts and Mike Munger on How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life

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EconTalk host Russ Roberts is interviewed by long-time EconTalk guest Michael Munger about Russ’s new book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness. Topics discussed include how economists view human motivation and consumer behavior, the role of conscience and self-interest in acts of kindness, and the costs and benefits of judging others. The conversation closes with a discussion of how Smith can help us understand villains in movies.

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Intro. [Recording date: October 7, 2014.] Russ: This week’s episode is going to be a little different. I have a new book out, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness. And the ideas of that book are the subject of this week’s conversation. To do the interviewing I’m going to allow—it may be a huge mistake—I’m going to let Mike Munger of Duke University, long-time EconTalk guest, be the Guest Host for this episode; and in theory, let me to do more of the talking than usual. Mike, how do you think that’s going to work out? Munger: Oh, there’s a new sheriff in town, baby. Russ: So this week it’s a Mike at the mike, and we’re all holding our breath, especially on this end. But seriously, Mike, thanks for doing this and welcome back to EconTalk. Munger: I’m looking forward to doing it. Russ: Okay. Your turn. Munger: All right. As Russ said, he has a new book that’s just coming out. I was lucky enough to get a preprint. And the first question that I want to ask on seeing it, and I want to inflect this two ways. Not inflict, but inflect it two ways. Why did you write

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this book, Russ? And then, why did you write this book. Russ: Uh, I don’t understand the inflection. Help me out. Why did I write it, and why this book? Munger: Yeah. Why does this book need to be written at this point; and why is it that you would write it? Because this is not a book—as we’ll talk about in a few minutes—economists don’t read this. And so, is it going to be a self-help book, or is this a book where you hope to get economists to say, ‘You know, I should read that, too.’ Russ: Well, I had a couple of goals, and long-time listeners will remember the 6-part series on the Theory of Moral Sentiments that I did with Dan Klein a few years back. We’ll of course put up links to that; it’s in our archive. But that set of interviews with Dan got me interested in the book. And I confess I had not read it at that point. I had read a few famous quotes from it but nothing more. And I had a few goals in writing this book. There is a self-help aspect to it. It does purport to give you life advance, from Adam Smith, based on Smith’s ideas and applying them to modern life: how to earn respect from your peers, how to deal with tragedy and triumph, and how to interact with the tragedy and triumphs of your friends and your family; how to think about how to act with people close to you versus strangers; what makes us tick, how knowing that helps people interact and be successful in life—really find the good life, broadly defined. So, on the surface that doesn’t have anything to do with economics, you might argue. I would argue differently. I would argue that economics is how to get the most out of life. It’s about choices. It’s about understanding opportunity cost and using your time wisely. Our time is our scarcest resource. You can’t—it’s the ultimate nonrenewable resource. For me, the book is in that sense an economics book. Now there is of course actual economics here and there both in Smith’s book and mine, what we would normally call economics. So one of my goals was to simply take what I found fascinating ideas about life and living and work and family that are in that Smith book and bring them to the present. The second goal I had really was to redeem poor Mr. Smith, who for a variety of reasons has a reputation as a champion of greed. And I think that would have horrified him. He turns in his grave, I think, every time someone invokes Smith’s name in defense of greed. Smith was very interested in the virtues, and the virtues that he emphasizes in this book are prudence, beneficence, justice. Nothing about greed in there. So I really love the idea of trying to clear his name in that sense. Finally, I think, as everybody listening to this program knows, I’m not so happy with the mathematicization of economics. And I think Smith’s approach to social science generally, whether it’s morality or philosophy, or what this book in many ways is a psychology book intermingled with economics—The Theory of Moral Sentiments is in many ways a mixture of philosophy, psychology, and economics. And I like interdisciplinary work—I think that’s a lovely thought—but what I care more about is the methodology

Time is a social construct.

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Munger: It is interesting that that theme comes up a fair amount among people that may be seen as heterodox by “true” economists. So, Friedrich Hayek often talks about scientism, the pretence of knowledge, how in the way that we model things we’re making assumptions about information and structure that we don’t have. But Smith’s critique, and the way that you channel Smith’s critique, is actually deeper, because it has to do with the nature of people and their motivations in choosing. So, I think it’s hard actually to read even just The Wealth of Nations and say that Smith thought that people were fundamentally and exclusively greedy. But the Wealth of Nations, as you point out, is more often quoted and read. It may be that the Theory of Moral Sentiments is not even usually read any more, at least not by economists. I was wondering about that, so I went and checked the citations in Google Scholar. And the Theory of Moral Sentiments has the same number of citations since 2000 as The Calculus of Consent. So, the Calculus of Consent, one of the main books of public choice, written by Buchanan and Tullock. The Theory of Moral Sentiments has the same number of citations as that. So it’s not true that it’s not cited. But almost none of those cites are in economics journals. Almost none of those cites, the citations, are from things where they are addressing what we might think of as being Smith’s theory of choice. Now that you’ve read that and you are in a position to offer some critiques of economics, is it just the scientism? Or is it that we’re able to— the selfishness theory is somehow simpler, and in order to understand Smith you eventually have to work? One of things that I thought was charming about your book was that you said the first time you took up The Theory of Moral Sentiments you put it down again because it starts in the middle; it’s hard to read. And you were a sympathetic reader. Russ: Yeah. I had to read it for that interview; and as I say at the opening of the book, I had some second thoughts and maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. I think, to get to your question: I think it’s first important to distinguish between selfishness and self-interest. Smith was very, very aware of how self-interested we are.

Or you might even think of it as self-centered, in the literal meaning of that word: we are each the center of our own universe. We inevitably think of ourselves most of the time. We don’t think a lot about other people. But we do, occasionally; and occasionally we rise to greatness and do glorious things for other people without expectation of return. And I think that phenomenon is what motivated Smith to write that book. He and everyone in his day and I think any thoughtful person today admits that self-interest and selfcenteredness are very relevant. That doesn’t get you to greedy. And it doesn’t

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of narrative and humility. And I think modern economics has gone a little too far away from those lessons. And part of me wants to get us back closer to Adam Smith’s social scientist and what we currently do as social science.

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rule out compassionate acts on behalf of other people, even when there’s no expectation of a return of kindness. So that’s big part of what motivates Smith in the book: What makes us moral? What makes us do things that we would call “the right thing”? So that’s one piece that has economics built into it in some sense, because it’s about behavior; it’s about choice. The other part I think that we might talk about, and you can take it any direction you want because you’re in charge today—but the other part is, in economics, our theory of what motivates people is called utility theory. We are agnostic, generally, about what makes people happy. We say it’s whatever floats your boat. We don’t say it’s sports; we don’t say it’s music; we don’t say it’s money.

We say it’s whatever you choose. And we say that people try to maximize how much satisfaction they get from life, given that they have a fixed amount of money and unlimited wants. That’s really the essence of homo economicus.

That’s how people look at—that’s how economists are trained to think about human beings. Now, I don’t want to debate whether that’s realistic or not.

I think most economists will concede it’s not perfectly true. It’s not close to perfectly true. But it’s a useful framework. I’m not sure it’s a useful framework any more. I’ve become skeptical of that from my teaching of economics. But the point I want to make is, when you ask—you don’t ask Smith, but if you read The Theory of Moral Sentiments— Munger: Well, you kind of are.

You are sort of interrogating—one of the things I think is really great about this book is I sometimes felt I was privy to a conversation between you and Smith. Russ: Oh, thank you. Well, that was part of the goal. Some of that was to try to grapple with the ideas in a more conversational way, because, as everybody knows, I’m kind of a conversationalist; that’s what makes this show. But the point I was trying to make is that Smith’s not a maximizer.

Smith’s framework of human nature is not easily put into a mathematical framework. And what Smith says—and I think about this all the time, ever since I read the book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and ever since I wrote mine, man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely.

And he says, I think in three places, I think explicitly: That’s the road to happiness. To be loved and lovely. That’s the road to serenity, tranquility, satisfaction—whatever you want to call it. Not necessarily partying joy, the level of exuberant exhilaration we might call ‘happy’. But what Smith meant by it was satisfaction, tranquility, and serenity. And he says, to get there you don’t buy lots of stuff. You don’t get rich. The way you get there is to be loved and to be lovely. And that’s a very different model of human nature than most economists have when they talk about what makes people tick.

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Munger: That part reminded me, and you start pretty early on—as early as p.5 you say, ‘Smith helped me understand why Whitney Houston and Marilyn Monroe were so unhappy. And then why their deaths made so many

WE need to be taught this at school.

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people so sad.’ And then, a little further on, ‘He’s the father of capitalism.

He wrote the most famous examples, maybe the best book ever on why some nations are rich and poor. But he wrote as eloquently in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about the futility of pursuing money with the hope of finding happiness.’ One of the things we do as economists is to assume autonomy. That is, people get to make their own choices. And subjectivity, where the definition of happiness is up to the individual. If we were to take this prescription seriously—and I thought we might take this up again at the end, but to foreshadow—What should economists do? What sort of models or approach to understanding human motivations could we have then, other than doing interviews or using survey? Russ: That’s obviously a tough question. I want to give a two-part answer to that. I think when we’re trying to deal—and this is my advice for teachers, so I’m going to go way out on a methodological limb here for people who teach microeconomics or who teach principles of economics. So, I did that for about 30 years. And when I first started teaching, I taught the theory of the consumer. Because that’s a bunch of chapters in every textbook, utility theory. Which is about formalizing the idea that there are tradeoffs between different goods and the prices that those goods cost, or how I should decide how much to buy of each good. And that’s—going back to an interview with Vernon Smith here at EconTalk, when I think he asked his professor—I want to say it’s Leontief at Harvard, what utility was good for, Leontief said something like ‘exam questions.’ And I may be confusing my version of the same joke, which I used to tell. So, we’ll go back to that transcript and look it up. But the point is that I think utility theory is remarkably sterile and not a particularly helpful way to think about consumer choice. And what it mainly leads to in an intermediate micro class or even a principles class is: the demand curve. And somewhere along the way I realized that the enormously complex apparatus of indifference curves and budget lines—there are a few lessons. I don’t want to say there’s zero. But overwhelmingly what you get out of that is you generate a demand curve. And I don’t know why we wouldn’t just say: Let’s assume that people buy less when the price gets higher, holding everything else constant—which is what I think a demand curve is. I don’t know why we spend all that class time generating that curve when it’s just okay to start with that as a working assumption. So, that’s the first point. That’s a methodological point. The deeper point, when you said, What should economists do? The challenge here is that I push the idea that economics is an art and a craft, rather than a science. And it’s easy to criticize economics the way I do and say: Oh, it’s not scientific. People don’t really maximize utility. The predictions are too strong. They are not borne out by the data. When we try to use the data in ways that are consistent with the theory we put too much pressure on the data that it can’t withstand and its conclusions are not reliable, they

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are not precise. We can’t estimate the elasticity of demand, for example. We can’t assume a particular mathematical form of the utility function. I mean, that’s bizarrely, to my mind, that’s just strange. But people do that. I don’t think that’s very fruitful. But then the question is: Okay, so let’s be more realistic. Let’s, you could say, let’s give economics a richer palette. Let’s talk about the fact that people care about their reputation—they don’t just care about how much stuff they have. Let’s talk about the fact that they care about love. Let’s talk about the fact that their family is often the unit at which they make decisions and not just themselves, purely individualistic. And of course Gary Becker, more than anyone, took the formal apparatus of economics and applied it, tried to apply it, to these types of non-financial purchases of goods.

Decisions. And obviously he made a tremendous contribution to that. So there is some value to that formalization. But I would argue most of the time the value is coming from our intuition and common sense. And Smithiantype ideas about how people behave and what makes them tick. If you go too far in that direction you are left with psychology. You don’t have a theory.

You just have: every case is unique. And I think what makes the approach I’m advocating for tenable, as some sort of discipline rather than just a thoughtful person opining about human behavior, is markets. So, when you embed the choices that people make into market decisions, you get a very different set of insights that you wouldn’t get if you just treat everybody individually as a mix of rational/irrational, altruistic/self-centered, etc. And again—Vernon Smith says this very well. I think he said it when I interviewed him and he said in lots of other places: ‘Sure, people make mistakes all the time; sure, people aren’t perfectly rational; so the “economic model” is silly and wrong. But in markets, markets discipline those decisions.’ They teach people what works and doesn’t work. They also punish bad decisions. They take away your money if you consistently make bad decisions. Markets provide you information to help you be wiser than you are on your own. So I think that’s where I’d try to—that’s the synthesis I’d like to think about. Munger: May I ask you how far on that you’re willing to go? I think—you were in an economics department, business school; you won a number of teaching awards as an economist. I basically never got a job as an economist. I’ve been a political scientist for a long time. So, often, early in class— Russ: Though you have a Ph.D. in economics. Munger: I do. All my original training, and a lot of the way that I think is the way that economists should think. But of course that’s self-serving.

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Munger: So, I want to see your skepticism and raise you a little bit and see how far you’ll go with this. When I teach class, I say homo economicus is a sociopath. No society composed of homo economicus could possibly survive. Russ: Yep. Munger: And the reason is, we would cheat on deals

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if we thought we could get away with them. So, what I want to advocate is actually—and this is a terrible thing to admit—is that Rousseau, JeanJacques Rousseau, was actually right about something: that the real way to understand the successful society is not to treat morals and the constraints that society puts on us as constraints, but as part of the objective function.

So, what that means in more English is it’s something that we want to accomplish, not something that constrains what we want to accomplish. We actually care about what other people think about us. So, on p.186 you have a great paragraph: “We never stop to think about how it came to pass that we live in a world that’s fairly decent. A civilized world. Yes, we have a legal system that legislates against the worst crimes, such as theft and murder. But our conscience keeps us on the straight and narrow.” And the conscience— the way I see that is, it’s not a constraint: I want to do all these bad things but I’m prevented because I would feel guilty. It actually matters that I want to be perceived, and to be lovely—in your terms. So is that going too far? Or should we put moral convictions and our sense of desire to be admired by others and be admirable into the set of objectives that people try to achieve?

Russ: Well, certainly—by the way, of course, that phrase, ‘lovely’ is not mine; it’s Smith’s. But thanks for the implicit compliment. Munger: Russ, I think you’re lovely. Russ: It’s a lifetime struggle, to be lovely. Seriously, it’s a fascinating thing to think about. One of the themes of the book is mindfulness, and the idea that you should be aware of how you are perceived by others.

And Smith is very honest about the fact that we don’t really want to do that.

But when you force yourself to do that, it’s a very powerful experience for thinking about how to be a better person, how to be more successful. Etc. Munger: Yeah. That’s the self-help part. That if you can get through the barriers that you’ve constructed to thinking about that, not only will you understand more, but you’ll be happier. Russ: Right. But it’s challenging.

So, I can’t get the quote exactly right, but he says something like, ‘Bold is the surgeon whose hand does not tremble when he operates upon himself.’ And we don’t like to operate on ourselves. We like to criticize others. Ourselves, not quite as much. And especially in today’s world where self-esteem is so venerated and praised, the whole idea of being critical of one’s own conduct, to being aware of one’s flaws, is not easily accessed in today’s culture. But, to go back to your Rousseau question: I’m not sure I understand it. So let me see if I can— Munger: What Rousseau said was that in order to understand people, in order for society to work, we must inscribe the law on their hearts.

So, the law is not something external: we inscribe it on their hearts. And then they’ll follow it without any police. Because it’s written on their heart.

Russ: That’s exactly what Smith’s talking about. And I just want to add that what makes Smith’s contribution about the power of conscience so novel is not just the point that conscience restrains bad conduct. I think that’s well

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understood at least since Rousseau and probably before. But I think what’s Smith’s contribution is, is thinking about where our conscience comes from.

And in Smith’s conception it doesn’t come from our religious upbringing. It doesn’t come from our parents, you know, teaching us and modeling for us. It comes from our fears and hopes for what other people think of us. And that’s his whole concept of the impartial spectator, the idea that when we choose an action we are confronting a dilemma; when we are deciding how to act we are imagining someone who is disinterested—meaning, certainly not selfinterested, someone who does not have a stake in the outcome—observing us and judging us accordingly. And that’s a really powerful metaphor, which is Smith’s real contribution to this whole idea of conscience. But to come back to the more general point about society, I think Smith’s great point, which I doubt Rousseau shared, is that the inscription of virtue on our hearts comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up. And Smith writes incredibly eloquently about how norms of civility and behavior and trust emerge from our interactions with each other. Because he argues that deep down, we have a fundamental—this is the only really—I don’t know what the right way to phrase this is—idealistic side of Smith. He argues that deep down, because he says, we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely—naturally desire, meaning it’s hard-wired into us that we care about what other people think of us and we want to earn their respect. And so as a result, knowing that—and even not knowing it, subconsciously, I am going to let other people influence me and I will in turn influence other people with my judgments about their behavior and their judgments about my behavior. I will praise them when they do good deeds and I will look askance when they do things that are less moral. And what Smith argues is that that’s what produces civilization. That’s what produces a world where trust can be imaginable.

Forget the fact that it’s not perfect. It’s not perfect. But the fact that it works at all is shocking when you think, step back and think about how self-interested we actually are. And Smith says, the inevitable interactions we have with the people around us are going to constrain us, because we care about what they think of us.

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Munger: What I think is so great about that insight is not just that it works as well as it does, but I don’t think you could have a society unless people thought of themselves and each other that way. So, what’s interesting about Smith’s insight is that he actually foresaw something that later biologists have made an argument for as part of something that humans are adapted for in evolutionary terms. For a kind of cooperation that’s considerably more than you would get by modeling people as homo economicus. And so, Vernon Smith and others, over and over again, have found that we are kind of natural cooperators. There’s plenty of situations where you can get us to not

Munger: I wonder if we could talk for a second about evolution. As you may know, there’s a field now called Experimental Philosophy—which I just think is a wonderful phrase. Because if there’s anything that’s not experimental, it should be philosophy. But what people are interested in is a

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to cooperate. But what’s interesting is that we often will—and we can make up stories about that. But Smith actually has a really great story about it. It’s a metaphor—it’s the impartial spectator. But it actually gets you a lot of the results that we’ve since come to, by completely different means. And so, when you talk about the stories that people tell—on your p.64 and 65 you have a football coach who quits because he wants to spend more time with his family. Politicians always do that: there’s a sort of unspoken deal where if I want to fire you, but you agree to announce you are going to spend more time with your family, I’ll say that—and he’s a good family man; he quit. Russ: And my claim in the book, of course, is that somebody who works, let’s say, over 100 hours a week, 110 hours a week, watching football film—kind of hard to argue they are family oriented. Because that’s what it takes to be a successful football coach. Munger: They take a new job [?] Russ: Yes they can. Exactly. Munger: Well, but you also say, I go to—I have a problem with my plumbing and it depends who I ask what the solution is going to be. So, one guy wants to put in new pipes. One guy wants to use the snake. And in each case, it’s the stuff that they actually sell. But it doesn’t mean that they are bad or malicious. They actually think that those things work. And if nothing else, they’ve persuaded themselves that that’s the right thing for you to do.

So, human beings are pretty good at detecting dissembling. Fibbing. And so the best salesman is going to be someone who actually believes. Russ: Yeah.

Munger: So, you can explain at the same time these two things: People are making an argument that appears to be self-interested, but actually believe and have persuaded themselves and are trying to persuade you, that it’s the right thing for you to do. And so, the problem that we may have is recognizing that, and most importantly, recognizing it in ourselves. That these things that we know to be true—so your description of your reading of econometric essays, you know which ones are correct and well-conducted by the fact, by the conclusions. So it’s confirmation bias. Russ: Yeah, exactly.

That’s a, um, Smith makes you think about that, and of course that’s an issue I’ve been thinking about for a long time now—from the work of Taleb and Jonathan Haidt, and others. It’s very hard not to fool oneself. What I find absolutely fascinating is given how much time I think about self-deception, I still fool myself all the time. Well, not all the time. But it’s not zero. And you’d think—I’m pretty sensitive to it. And yet, I can find myself loving a study, still, that I know is flawed when I step back and think about it. Just because it comes to conclusions I love.

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kind of philosophy of mind: why it is that people think the way that they do.

So, there’s an interesting question: Why do we have emotions? In biological terms, what is adaptive about having emotions? Human beings are more emotional than most animals. Russ: A lot more. I think. Munger: Well— [?] we laugh. And so Mark Twain said that human beings are the only ones who laugh—or should. Because watching each other, the foibles of each other, maybe laughing helps us deal with that rather than think of it as being hypocrisy. But one of the things that emotions do is provide the public good of norm enforcement. And if I see you behaving badly, I should just think, ‘Ach, he’s behaving badly.’ But if I try to correct him, he’ll yell at me, I’ll get hurt; he probably has some reason where he can explain it in his own mind.

And yet, more often than you might expect we’ll confront even strangers who we think are behaving badly. So, is there something that—might it be that I perceive you acting badly and I think that your impartial spectator is defective? And so I try to stand in for it. Russ: Yeah, yeah. So, a couple of things. First of all, Smith, writing before Darwin—although he influenced Darwin greatly because of his understandings of competition—but Smith writing before Darwin didn’t think about evolution. He talked about the ‘author of nature.’ Which was God. I had an interesting discussion with Dan Klein about how much of a religious person Adam Smith is. But certainly the emotions you are talking about are hard-wired. They are not, mostly—there are obviously things we learn culturally about how to respond to all kinds of things, but the underlying emotions are hard-wired into us. And now, I’m the guest, and I’ve lost my train of thought. So, what was your—see, when I’m the host and I lose my train of thought, I edit it out. It’s fabulous. And I could still edit this out but I won’t. I’m going to let you rephrase the last part of that question again and remind me what you were asking. Munger: Well, I go up to someone, and when I yell at them, in effect what I’m saying is their impartial spectator is defective. Russ: Yeah. So, one time, more than once actually, and maybe you can relate to this, other listeners--I’ve been in a public place with my children. And I’ve been reprimanded by a stranger for their behavior. I will say this happened—the two times that are most vivid to me, they both happened on the Coasts. And maybe this is a Coastal phenomenon. So, I was on Cape Cod when my kids were little on a summer vacation and my kids were running up and down the sand dunes.

Which, of course, every child--and many adults—want to do. And somebody stood up and said—screamed, yelled, on the beach, ‘Whose children are these?’ I looked up from my book, and said, ‘I guess they’re mine.’ ‘How dare you allow these children to desecrate this natural environment?’ So, I apologized; and I mentioned to the kids that dunes are somewhat fragile; it’s probably best to not run on them. And I got them off. Another time we were over in Big Sur, at Julia Pfeiffer State Park, which is one of the most beautiful

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spots on the face of the earth. And there’s a lookover where you can see, an overlook, where you can see this gorgeous waterfall falling onto a beach; and look in the other direction, there’s great stuff to see. It’s a very famous spot.

You can find images of it on the web. I think I’ve got the name of the state park right. So, my kids—one of my kids is carving some word—not a bad word, just some word, maybe just a shape--into the bark of a tree. Munger: With a knife. Russ: Well he didn’t have a knife. I think he was just using a stick maybe. I don’t know what he was doing. Munger: A stick or a stone.

But he effectively did tear up the bark. Russ: He was defacing the tree. And a person came up to me; and when I went over to talk to my kids; I think the word that she said was ‘horrific.’ I think she said, ‘This is horrific.’ Or ‘horrifying.’ And I wanted to say two things. I just apologized and said to my child, stop. My son. But I wanted to say, ‘No. Genocide is horrific. Bark on a tree, not horrific.’ And the second thing I wanted to say was: There are about 80 or 1000, I don’t know, a big number of people who have already marked the bark of the tree. I don’t argue that that makes it okay to then add to it.

But it’s possible that the tree is sustainable in its life without this little extra piece of bark still, because I’m not sure it’s decision. And maybe a different tone would be appropriate. Etc. So, having said that: Most of the time, in my life—or not most of the time, but many times in my life, it’s very hard to judge other people publicly, or even sometimes privately. So, one of the things I concede in the book is, I think in Smith’s day, which is the mid-18th century—in Smith’s day, being judgmental of others was easier. For better or for worse. We live in a much more tolerant age. And when people do things that are immoral in our day, most of the time, a lot of the time, people just shrug. And they say, that’s not my business. And, I shouldn’t judge another person. I think people are very uncomfortable playing the role of the partial spectator, the actual spectator, with their friends and colleagues at work, etc.

Smith’s mechanism for culture and civilization, which is the critical remark that raised eyebrow, the ‘I’m not going to go to his parties any more because he’s not a nice person’—I think that’s less common today. Or at least I feel that it is. I feel it’s much harder for us. You know, somebody will brag to me about something they did to get a good deal, say, at the grocery or on the web. And I look at that behavior sometimes and I think, gee, I think that’s immoral. I understand it’s legal, but I think it’s immoral. I find it difficult— sometimes I say it—but often times I say, well, I’m just going to ignore that.

I’m not going to jump in with praise for it, like the person is asking me to— wow, that was clever. But I just—you know. And the other example is a joke that’s in bad taste. It’s very hard to say, that isn’t funny to me. I’ve said it, when people tell jokes that I think are cruel or inappropriate—cruel, mainly.

But it’s hard. And our culture doesn’t encourage it in the way I think it did in Smith’s time.

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Munger: Nonetheless, we are more likely to do it than we would if we were just purely reason motivated, because if you confront someone they’re going to think less of you, probably not going to be persuaded. Now, in your case you did defer in the two cases about the children, but you were thinking, oh, please, come on. So, what I think is interesting is there’s kind of a black box.

And the contents of it are socially constructed. So it’s different in different societies. Russ: Absolutely. Munger: What all human beings—all human beings have an emotional reaction if whatever the contents of their black box are, are violated by someone else. We can make excuses for ourselves. So, in some societies, if people cut in line, the norm of the line is not very strong. But I had a time, and I think we’ve talked about this before on EconTalk—I was standing in line; a young woman cut in front of me. When I tried to confront her, she said, If you say one more word I’m going to call the police. Russ: Slightly different, yeah. Munger: I was so upset--the point is, she was costing me 20 seconds. All I had to do was say nothing. I was so upset I almost couldn’t sleep that night. It took me hours to fall asleep. I was thinking, ‘I should have said, this, I should have said this.’ Why? That’s crazy. Just let it go. But I couldn’t. I was unable to. So, we have an emotional response--we are suffused with a cocktail of chemicals that actually put a sort of bright mark in our brains of that memory. And it’s much stronger than it should be if we were just reasoning creatures. And so the power of that emotional--it’s kind of a subsidy or inducement to provide the public good of norm enforcement means that people are more likely to try to take into account other people’s reactions, because they are more likely to react than they would be if they were just homo economicus. So, if I may, one more example: When I was in Germany, I’m crossing the street against the light, and this little tiny grandmother tries to beat me with an umbrella. She wasn’t hitting me hard, but she was beating me, saying ‘Kinder murderer, kinder murderer’. So she meant I was a murderer of children, because children might see this and then they might cross when there was a car. And so you must not disobey the rules.

These rules must be obeyed. And if not, little grandmothers will come out of the woodwork to try to beat you with umbrellas. So, that emotional response is, I think, some of what Smith intuited without any of the evolutionary apparatus that we now look back with. Russ: Yeah, or the neuroscience and brain research that we’re doing. I want to footnote what I said earlier, as you made me realize I’d overstated. When I said it’s hard to be critical, you make the correct point: it’s a black box and what’s in the box varies by society and by time. And the more I think about it, the environmental issues are clearly examples where people are very comfortable criticizing other people. Forget the sand dunes and the redwoods—I don’t think they were redwoods but they might have been in Big Sur, which, I love redwoods, too--but the point I want to make— Munger: That’s horrific. Russ: Yeah. It is horrific. It was

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so horrific. You can’t believe it. But the point I want to make, take away a little bit of the emotion now: I want to look at littering. Littering is something that— Munger: It’s a perfect example. Russ: that when I was a little boy, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, everybody littered. That’s what you did. You were driving down the road—we’ve probably talked about this but it bears repeating—you tossed your popsicle wrapper out the window when you were driving down the street. Munger: Yeah, it was sticky. It was not going to keep in the car. Russ: Yeah. And you threw stuff down on the road or the street all the time. And that ended through peer pressure. That ended—yes, there were some public campaigns; there were ads; there were billboards; there were fines. But those are really—of course the real test is that I would never litter on a deserted highway driving by myself. It’s not just that my wife’s going to frown at me; it’s not that my kids are going to tease me. Munger: All those things are true, but even if they weren’t. Russ: They are. But even by myself, I’m not going to do it. And I’ve absorbed that norm—through some actual spectators and then through the norm of the impartial imaginary spectator, I basically said I’m not going to do this; this is not who I am. I’m not a litterer.

Even though it does of course create jobs for people in a very Keynesian way of picking up the litter. But that’s an example where people are incredibly judgmental. Another example would be smoking. It’s not okay to smoke in most of the circles that I’m in. This is just fascinating. When I was a little boy—and again, we’re in the 1960s now—my father smoked. You go over to somebody’s house, there are ashtrays around. You lit up a cigarette when you wanted to, just like you’d open a soda when you want to or take money out of your wallet. It was just the normal human thing people did all the time. Now, the idea—could you imagine being at a dinner party at someone’s house and just taking out a cigarette and lighting it? It’s a faux pas of enormous proportions. Munger: We would be horrified. Everybody else would be horrified. Russ: You can’t even ask. It went from light up whenever you want to ‘Do you mind if I smoke, is that okay?’ ‘Oh, sure, go ahead.’ To, ‘Excuse me, I have to go outside.’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Oh, I have to smoke and of course I can’t do it in here.’ That evolution—again, there was some top down pressure on it, but most of it, a lot of the enforcement and evolution, that norm about smoking, came from actual spectators; and then on top of that, afterwards, an imaginary spectator. The example I give in the book of a similar phenomenon is corporal punishment—striking your children when they misbehave. My parents cuffed me—I never got a whipping. But I was cuffed from time to time. Right? Munger: Oh, yeah. Russ: Not often.

But I was. And I always assumed being a good parent—because I liked my parents, I respected them; of course I would strike my own children to keep them disciplined. I’ve never hit my children. I’ve wanted to. I confess that in the book; my editor said: Don’t put that in; that doesn’t sound good. But it’s

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true, and I don’t mind putting it in. Munger: An illustration—you wanted to and didn’t. Russ: Yeah. Munger: And you probably wouldn’t. Even if you’d been by yourself and just the kids and they might not have really blamed you—you didn’t do it because eh, that’s not right. Russ: I just decided it was wrong. And that, again there are plenty of people who still strike their kids. But in my circles, that just isn’t done. And that’s interesting that that evolved without any top down—it just emerged. Obviously I think Smith helps us understand that. I think markets help us understand it. But what’s interesting for Smith’s insight is that it doesn’t take place through the normal prices that we think of in markets. It takes place through emotional prices. It takes place through people glaring at you in the supermarket if you smoked or littered or hit your kid. So you can hit your kid still in America—not too much. But you can still give your kid a little bit of a whack. And if you do that in public, in certain supermarkets you’re going to get glared at; and in others, I think, people would applaud. It’s dependent on geography, time, place, etc. But those norms are, as you say, they are emotionally driven. And what gets put in the black box of what I am emotionally, viscerally “a-rationally, irrationally” react to, comes from the people around me. Munger: Yeah.

The experience—in my own thoughts about what’s right and wrong—but it’s a recursive process. And it can change. It changes slowly, but it can change.

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Munger: So, what I wanted to ask about is altruism. I want to make sure that the listeners understand that Smith’s not talking about what we might call altruism. You have sympathy. You do have sympathy for others—I feel bad when the people in China die in the earthquake. But it’s much less than me worrying about my own little finger in the Wealth of Nations. Russ: No, it’s in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, actually. Munger: That’s in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. So, I’m more worried about the prospect of losing my little finger tomorrow morning—which would be pretty bad: I know I have to go and they are going to chop off my little finger—that would be pretty awful. And I can’t do anything about the millions of people, doesn’t have to be Chinese—people somewhere far away. One difference is now I can see it on television, so maybe it is more real. I do feel a little bit—it’s not so abstract; I can see pictures of children. I wanted to ask about altruism, and what you would think is the kind of level of importance that Smith would have. Because this story about the impartial spectator could be self-interest properly understood: I live in a group; the esteem of that group is important for my flourishing, for my children to have a family name where other people trust us. And so it’s a broader kind of conception of self-interest. Is there any actual room for altruism in Smith? Russ: Yeah, there is. It’s just it’s not very big. He says—here’s the quote. He says—he’s talking about—I’m glad you brought up the earthquake because it’s so important. People quote that

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passage and they say Smith’s hard-hearted; he thinks we’re awful people because we care more about our little finger than we do about millions of people dying in an earthquake. And of course he’s correct that I would sleep much less well the night before a minor surgery than I would after an earthquake that killed thousands or millions of people very far away. And maybe even somewhat close. But his example was a little bit of a reductio ad absurdum. So, millions of people dying far away, I might express some sadness; I might give some charity to the Red Cross to help the people. But I can sleep like a baby that night. But knowing I have surgery tomorrow, I can’t sleep even though it’s my little finger. The punchline of the story is coming up. The punchline is: Even though you feel that way, if you had a chance to save your little finger by killing millions of people, you wouldn’t think about it for a second. Because it’s too horrific—to use the correct word there. And the question is: Why? And Smith’s point is that it’s not because you are a wonderful person, the altruist we’re talking about. It’s because— and it’s not because people would think less of you. He’s really saying that you’ve internalized the lessons of people thinking less of you. You realize through living, through going through life, through dealing with other people, that you are small relative to the rest of the world, and that your life is not as important—is no more important—even though it feels like it is, it’s no more important than someone’s life in China. And Smith’s very much a universalist; and it’s a wonderful, correct way to think about the world. And for you to take the lives of strangers to save a piece of your life is just—it’s just wrong. And you wouldn’t countenance it. You wouldn’t think about it. You wouldn’t imagine actually executing that plan, because you would think so little of yourself afterward. Munger: You wouldn’t even imagine yourself as being able to imagine it. Even at one removed. I wouldn’t consider that.

Russ: So he says—this is a great quote. I love when he says: “It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love.” What he’s saying there is, we have some altruism, but it’s a feeble spark. It isn’t the main driving force of why we do the right thing. What makes us do the right thing is we want to think well of ourselves. We want to be loved—by ‘loved’ he meant respected, admired, honored, thought well of—and we want to be lovely. And by that he meant decent, respectable, honorable, good. And he’s saying, deep down that’s what we want. Now, we have to fight against the fact that we mainly like ourselves.

Because we don’t have much—it’s a feeble spark that works in the other direction. And so what makes that feeble spark active, the reason that we do generous things and the reason that we don’t do horrific things, is because we imagine thinking about what other people think of us. And of course then, in fact we get the result of what other people think of us when we actually choose

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to do bad things or virtuous things. Now, I just want to make one side note.

We talked earlier about Gary Becker and the utility function: My first published paper in economics was putting altruism in the utility function. I built a model which was based on Gary Becker’s work of saying we don’t just care about our own happiness; we care about what other people consume.

So, poor people make me sad. And so that motivates me to give to charity.

And that’s the way an economist looks at charity. An economist looks at charity and says, there’s a price to charity, which is that I have to give up my own consumption; and in return I get the satisfaction from helping other people. And I’ll just presume that that’s there. Smith had a richer conception of what motivates charity and our behavior. And it’s not just the form of selfinterest once removed that you are talking about—oh, if I give to charity people will think highly of me, and then I’ll be happy. It’s also just—it’s the right thing to do. And I am motivated at times, not to do a lot but to do some things to help others simply because I want to see myself as someone who does the right thing. Munger: And what’s so great about this explanation is that it recognizes the, I think, perfectly correct observation that yes, we actually have a spark of beneficence and we would do it to help people; but it’s not very big. What makes things work is having this additional impulse.

And it’s not just to have others think well of us, but to be able to think well of ourselves. Russ: Yeah. Munger: And that’s the whole extra thing. There’s a famous story—Richard Alexander, University of Michigan, evolutionary biologist, who was just a fierce opponent of any kind of group selection or altruism, had this ongoing argument with one of his colleagues: There’s no altruism anywhere in the animal kingdom; it can’t exist; the gene is selfish, just like Richard Dawkins says. So, one day—it was a spring day; the colleague is walking along the sidewalk and he sees an earthworm. So, he says, Aha. He picks up the earthworm and he puts it in the grass because it would have died; it would have gotten mashed on the sidewalk. And he runs to Richard Alexander’s office and tells Alexander about this: I got my finger so sticky; this you have to admit was an altruistic act. And Alexander says: ‘Yes, it was, until you told me.’ If you’d just done it and not told me, I might concede that, but you didn’t. So, we really do care that other people see us as being good people. Russ: Absolutely. And that’s a beautiful story. Except of course what it misses is that, if he had knocked on his door and he hadn’t been in, he still would have been happy to have not stepped on the earthworm.

Right? Munger: Yes. Yes. So, I think Alexander is wrong, but he’s right about the essential point. Russ: He’s on to something. Munger: It’s not pure altruism. It’s that it might be enough that the colleague would be able to think of himself, ‘Aha! I’m an altruist; I see myself as an altruist.’ Not so much that he is. But what he bought for himself by getting his hand sticky was the right, the licensing to see himself as being a good person. Russ:

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Munger: I think what’s so important about what you just said is—Richard Alexander, or a biologist would say, ‘But you put it in the black box.’ By writing it down and saying it’s the highest principle, you still know. If you had donated but it was truly anonymous and you didn’t know you had donated, why would you do it? It actually matters that you know. Russ: Yeah, that’s true. Munger: So, Maimonides wrote it down, put it in the black box: This is the set of things that you get to feel really good about yourself, if you do; and in fact it’s one of the highest. And so you think, I’m a good person, because I did this. Russ: But of course Maimonides—this is going off track a little bit but I think it’s such an important point—Maimonides wasn’t just interested in the alleviation of poverty. He was; he thought that was a great thing. But he’s also interested in character refinement. And I think one of the flaws of policy in the modern world, ironically, is that we look at material outcomes as the only thing that counts. That’s certainly an economist’s score card. So, it doesn’t matter how the poor get their money, whether they earn it, I give it them, the government gives it to them. And I think in reality those three are very different. And similarly, if I help my parents and I overcome the free riding problem with my siblings, and I overcome the issues of parent-child relationships and I help sustain them in their old age, that’s somehow the same as you helping my parents through Social Security. And I don’t think those are the same. I think that part of being a human being, being a good human being, is overcoming your self-interest at times. And doing it through private, voluntary action is very different than coercive taxation. And I just

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Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and thinker, talks about the different levels of charity, of helping other people. And the highest level is helping someone get off of charity by teaching him a trade or craft or finding a way for them to work. The lowest level is for me to give you money and I know who you are and you know who I am. The highest level below finding a person a job is anonymity. I give you money—I think it’s I don’t know who you are, but certainly you don’t know who I am—I don’t get to bask in your gratitude or unease that I’m helping you. You maintain, I think, a different level of dignity. So people do give anonymously; not just that the donor, recipient, doesn’t know, but no one knows. Or almost no one knows.

Sometimes literally no one. And of course I think—is that a higher level? I don’t know. But there is something somehow more admirable about not taking some of the glory and letting that not be part of the equation. It’s interesting. I’ve never thought about that before. It actually reminds me a little bit about some of the conversations you and I have had about profitseeking: somebody who does a good deed and makes money at it, certainly the making money doesn’t seem to reduce the value of the deed. It’s still a good deed.

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think we’ve lost that, totally. And that’s, I think, sad. Part of the reason we’ve lost it is the economic methodology that we were talking about earlier.

Munger: Sure. Yes. Because once you start thinking in terms of utility—so in the Christian tradition, particularly in the Protestant Christian tradition, the important thing about faith to be salvatory is that he be authentic. And that means it has to be voluntary. So, it can’t be coerced. And so, Roger Williams, when he found— Russ: By definition. I can’t force you to believe something. Belief can’t be coerced. Munger: I can’t force you to act as if you believe it. And so, having rules about attending church on Sunday, not drinking—those rules actually protect you from having to think this through and do it voluntarily. And so you are actually condemning people to hell, because they are not able to develop their character and do it voluntarily on their own. The establishment of Rhode Island, the reason that they argued for toleration—you have to allow people to sin for them to have any hope of being saved. Because their faith has to be authentic. Which means that there has to be the possibility that they do something else.

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Munger: That raises the possibility of evil. We don’t have much time left, but I did want to ask what Smith’s view of evil is. And the reason I wanted to ask was that I’m a big fan of movies. And one of the things that I think makes for a good movie villain is—there’s two bases of attraction. There’s two sweet spots. One is, a movie villain who is incomprehensibly evil and where there’s no sympathy, but does it in a way where they otherwise feel fairly human.

Or, someone that you are actually pretty sympathetic to and you understand their motives, and then you are horrified at the fact that you are sympathizing with this villain. So, if Adam Smith were a consultant, if we could bring him now and Quentin Tarantino’s going to have a movie where he has a truly horrifying villain, how might we think about this absence of sympathy as something that when we confront it—this is someone who is not governed by an impartial spectator, this villain. But they have to be aware of the fact.

They can’t just be autistic or mentally incapable of understanding. They fully understand the social norms they are transgressing by killing or torturing.

And yet do it anyway. Is that why? My real question is: Is that why we find movie villains so horrifying, is that they are violating what Smith tells us is actually the nature of people? So, when I look at Javier Bardem’s character in No Country for Old Men—so, the guy who was the Russian killer, he was just chaos. He was able to kill completely without compunction. And yet he had certain rules that he followed. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie; some of the listeners have probably seen the movie. He used dice or random chance to decide who would live or die, which is completely different. So— this was a long intro for what’s really a pretty short question: Can we use what you’ve discovered about Smith to help us understand why it is that we

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find effective movie villains so horrible—is it that absence of an effective impartial spectator? Russ: That’s fascinating. There’s a third type of villain you didn’t mention, which is the redemption villain. Right? The movie where the movie opens—very common theme—where the villain starts out as a villain and then through some set of lessons is transformed into a good person.

Those movies sell like hotcakes when they are done well, because there is something deep inside us that wants to see that transformation. Which is fascinating when you think about it. Munger: Yeah, it’s an affirmation of these Smithian values. Russ: Yes. And on the pure evil thing—I think you’re right. I don’t have much to add to your analysis, which is why that long intro was totally worth it; I’m not going to cut a second of it, Mike. I should just mention, by the way—people have asked me, guests always ask me, Are these edited? There’s basically no edits to EconTalk. It’s just our conversation. The only things I edit out are obscenities, which occasionally get muttered by a guest. If I can find a way to save the train of thought. A sneeze or a cough. Or losing the train of thought which I do—happens to me about once every two episodes. And so, these are not edited. I didn’t edit out any part of that intro. And it was utterly fascinating. What I want to add to it is that Smith actually in a number of places in the book—and I don’t write much about this; I didn’t find a good place to write about it—but he writes a lot about what grabs our attention as viewers of drama. And I think he says, a drama about a man who loses his leg is a lot less interesting than a drama about a man who loses his mistress. And that’s interesting in and of itself.

But that’s not your question. But I think you are right. I think that someone who does not respond to the normal norms--my version of this would be the Joker in the Batman movies— Munger: Absolutely. Russ: I actually can’t enjoy those movies. Friends of mine love them. I just—after the first one, Batman Begins, which I thought was marvelous, the second one, which is I think The Dark Knight, the second one, I found it—I couldn’t watch it. I actually walked out of it about three quarters of the way through. Munger: Really? Russ: Yeah. Well, I have to confess: I was with my daughter, and I could see she wasn’t enjoying it, either. Whether I would have walked out on my own, I don’t know. But I found that manipulation of the audience through the threat of—this guy will do anything; there’s no degradation he’s not—he’s capable of any degradation. I find that deeply—maybe that’s my black box, that I find it so disturbing. That I don’t want to look at it. I do think there is a—it’s a version of what you’ve pointed out, I think, a version of a horror story. Munger: Oh, yeah. All the other things are— Russ: We like to be scared. Munger: [?] ephemeral[?]. It’s really that person’s lack of soul that’s the horrifying thing. The stuff that he does, sure, that’s bad; but that’s just histrionics. The reason I thought it was such a great movie was that the figure of the Joker to me is an iconic figure of human evil. Russ:

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Yep. Munger: And I didn’t see it as manipulative. I saw it as insightful. And the reason—that was actually the closing part that I had for this question: Heath Ledger committed suicide. Russ: Yeah, it’s horrible. Munger: And in May of 2013, his father released parts of his diary. And in the diary, Ledger talks about having to confront the sort of raw edge beyond which you are not really human any more. Even though you are human in form. And so that, in some ways—obviously he had maybe other difficulties—but confronting what you just said you walked about: He couldn’t walk out. Russ: Yeah.

Munger: He killed himself. Confronting that day after day was just too much for him. Russ: Yeah. I don’t think it helped. I don’t know if it was the cause but it certainly didn’t help. Munger: Yeah. He had other difficulties.

But in his diary, he did talk about it over and over again, which I thought was interesting; so that your walking out—you didn’t have to stay. It’s not effective for you in the sense that: oh, this is a movie villain; I’ll have more popcorn. Russ: Yeah. Exactly. Munger: So, Smith is on to something there that’s so deep. Well, really all I wanted to say was I thought that this affirmed, on the negative side, the things that we had been talking about—the positive side—about Smith’s insights into human nature. Russ: Yeah. That’s a great point. Munger: That is more than all I had hoped to get through. It was a great pleasure to be able to talk to you about this book, Russ. Russ: Mike, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Munger: Thank you.

WhitePaper: Ethics in Design…

SomeOne Senior Designer Tom Myers asks what lines are able to be crossed while holding an ethical stance…

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Ethics in Design Creatives are a famously liberal lot: Taught in the liberal arts, often unmotivated by money and keen to change the world with design; we’re optimists who often believe that human endeavour can triumph greed and tyranny. We can use our talents for good, we say.

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The First Things First manifestos are often cited as the earliest basis of higher moral thinking in our industry. Their message remains influential: Think before you work for Big Bad Corporation Y, use your skills for good instead.

First Things First set the bar for ethical thinking in design and continues to be the benchmark — the 2000 update rekindled the viewpoint in the modern generation of designers and continues to be the key influence for many.

A new coat of paint never covers up these deep-set prejudices either. The most common way of using the power of branding to escape past practices is running away, forcing people to forget you and starting again. Remember

WHITE PAPER: ETHICS IN DESIGN

It can sometimes feel at odds with the shareholder-focused world of business. While ethics may not be the goal for many companies, modern brand perception actually gives them little choice — as Jeff Bezos says, ‘Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room’. Damaged brands are difficult to salvage in this world (think of Starbucks, BP or even Sodastream) and branding alone can’t remove the public’s perception of these companies — actions speak louder than words. Where unethical practices remain, the impulse to boycott these organisations remains too.

WHITE PAPER: ETHICS IN DESIGN

the human-rights violations committed by Blackwater Security? A year after the controversy, they became XE Services. Two years after that, they became Academi. They now ambiguously offer ‘Best in class operational excellence’ and aspire to ‘be boring’. Any search for the company is still saturated with articles about Blackwater and their pursuit of anonymity. It’s impossible in this age to run away from your ethics.

My old creative director’s working motto was always ‘no booze no fags no gambling’. It was a simple mantra that kept the work out of the studio that he didn’t feel comfortable working on, and it reassured us that he was a good and moral CD to work under. We felt protected by this. It felt very First Things First. I took his learnings to heart, seeing in him a successful creative at the top of his game in a world-class design studio; in him I saw that it was possible to run a business built with morals in mind. It was clean. It was clear.

It felt black and white. It felt like a code that I too could live under.

Some years after that period, I found myself at a much larger agency working not on booze or fags or gambling, but on an oil company. It was a big one — and very recently at that time — a very bad one.

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This brief was different though: we were tasked with shaping a new internal rewards scheme. No longer based on large financial rewards for ‘drilling more oil’, it would be about financially rewarding good deeds happening within. It was their own internal First Things First and it felt Good. We worked hard to create something that could genuinely infect a corporate structure of excessat-any-cost with the virus of wider thinking and good deeds.

However, sure enough, after six weeks of board-level hand-wringing and shareholder dissent, the rewards program was fast becoming about drilling for more oil again. We had failed. As a studio, however, we were still pressing on with the now-revised brief. The task had changed, the significance was missing, but the money was still there on the table.

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This felt like selling out. It was affecting me in a way I wasn’t comfortable with, and I handed my notice in. It felt black and white.

Ever the naïve optimist, I believed that our role had an in-built moral obligation to guide the hand of the clients we worked for; away from pure profits and toward something more creative. I felt let down that we took their oil-stained dollars instead. I had resigned and had done what I thought to be the moral thing, burning bridges along the way. I did it in a most petulant way, but this way I could at least sleep at night.

I once asked a design director why he likes branding over other forms of design. He answered, ‘the opportunity to walk into a board room of a multinational corporation and use design to influence their thinking’.

MORALS & ETHICS

Design is a powerful tool, and we work in branding because we start the process. We go from nothing and create change. No other part of the graphic design process has as much influence over the final result. It’s compelling, and we do have influence.

It wasn’t hubris, it was genuine. It was his way of using these creative skills to effect real change.

So what of my current situation? My job is great; the perks are fantastic. I like going to work, and that’s a rare thing in any walk of life. But the moral code that I had made such sacrifices for is not nearly as black and white as before — we do booze, for example. We do gambling. We don’t do fags though. Where’s the line then? SomeOne’s ethical line is less clearly ethical, but is definitely there — “we don’t work on anything that we wouldn’t use ourselves”.

Gambling? We might have a flutter. Booze? Yes. Would we shoot someone?

No. Would we kill someone? No. It rules out jobs based on our own personal set of ethics. If I don’t personally want to work on a betting shop, that’s fine, there’s another person who is quite happy to. And if there’s no-one happy to work on it, the account gets resigned.

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So where does the line become tested under this model?

A pharmaceutical company can, on one hand, create a drug that saves the world from a terrible disease (and we can create world-changing design

WHITE PAPER: ETHICS IN DESIGN

Charity is a good example — It’s non-profit, with a mission to selflessly improve the world. These are good things, surely black and white. But use for example a successful charity, extremely good at what they do. They’ve created a lot of good in the world and the world is a better place for them; people are falling over themselves to work with them. A charity so well run that they begin to work with other charities to make a bigger difference. They now make such a big difference that smaller charities in unrelated sectors are finding it hard to have their voice heard, next to the 800lb gorilla. The big charity is squeezing the life from smaller, but no less worthy causes without the financial clout to compete. Can charity be bad? The truth is as it is with many things in life: ‘it can be’.

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to promote and market it). They can also, on the other hand, exploit their power and restrict the flow of their products to generate profits. What if BAE Systems called, with some fantastic new world-changing technology they need a name for? It’s not booze or fags or gambling; but are we naive to think their other produce doesn’t also kill people? How about a Government? Or the endless money in a quick Arab TV channel identity?

The ‘corrupting’ booze brands that we work on at SomeOne are craft beers and high-end luxury spirits, not White Lightning or cheap vodka. Where’s the harm there?

Particularly relevant is the recently-debated Kalashnikov. Would you work on it? Is it a gun that gives the every-man the ability to overthrow tyranny?

Or is it just a gun that kills people? It’s a debate that has divided for as long as the AK-47 has changed the landscape of the world.

So what’s the conclusion then? Where’s the line? What should you work on?

What should you decide is dirty and not to be touched? It’s not easy, and it’s certainly not clear. Life often isn’t. Very rarely in this world do things finally fall into clear categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’.

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Even in the extremes of broader ethical debate, there’s no clear answer — even curing diseases is far from a clear case of right and wrong; removing leading natural causes of death also removes natural causes of population control.

Global population growth over human history shows a direct correlation with scientific endeavour; we cure the diseases we fear, and in the process we end up killing the planet we live on. Even curing cancer comes with an ethical dilemma. Nothing is free from debate. There are no definitive statements.

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So if nothing is clear, where do you draw your line? That’s actually closer to the point. There is no line beyond what you are comfortable with. We are instilled with our own moral compasses — we should use these instincts to draw our own lines. But always make sure these instincts are fed with facts — educate yourself.

Scrutinise. Criticise. Follow your head as much as your heart. Most of all, don’t be dictated by dogma — yours or anyone else’s. First Things First set out to free creatives from a life of their talents being used to forward unquestioned corporate goals. Don’t let your talents be bound to hollow ethical promises either.

Find your own line.

Ethics in Design: 10 Questions

by Clive Dilnot Every word of this essay is important, so read it and I will try not to highlight it.

1. Why Might We Need An Ethics Of Design?

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Here is one reason. It comes from designer and educator Victor Papanek, from Design for the Real World, first published in 1974 but still unparalleled in its attack on the economic and social irresponsibility of design.

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There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhine­ stone covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. Before... if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal-mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis.

By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed... As long as design concerns itself with confecting trivial ‘toys for adults’, killing machines with gleaming tailfins, and ‘sexed up’ shrouds for toasters, telephones, and computers, it... is about time that design as we have come to know it, should cease to exist. (Papanek 1974: 9,10)

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Here is another. It comes from the Dutch communications and graphic designer Jan van Toorn.

Capitalist culture organizes people as buyers of commodities and services [and]... transform[s] information and knowledge into commodities.... The corporate conglomerates of the” culture industry have created a global public sphere which does not offer any scope for discussion of the social and cultural consequences of the ‘free flow of information organized by them. The fusion of trade, politics and communication has brought about the sophisticated one-dimensional character of our symbolic environment, which is at least as menacing as the pollution of the natural environment.

This is partly due to the lack of a critical attitude to the social-cultural conditions of professional mediation. Cooperation with institutions and adaptation to their structures has resulted in ideological accommodation, expressed in a lack of insight into the social role of the profession.... Under the pressure of neoliberalism and the power relationships of the free market... not only is the designer’s individual freedom, ‘ostensibly still existing within a space of its own... infiltrated by the client’s way of thinking,’ but design ends up discovering that at best it serves today as little more than a ‘theatrical substitute for [missing] essential forms of social communication’—whilst at worst, ‘drawing on its roles in the organization of production and in helping to stimulate consumption’, it is both hand-in-glove the ‘extensive disciplining of the general public’ in the terms of the market—a disciplining ‘whose most far-reaching consequence is undoubtedly a political neutralization that is at odds with the functioning of an open and democratic society’ (van Toorn 1994: 151; 1997: 154).

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Here is yet a third, this time by the architectural historian and critic Kenneth Frampton, reflecting on the contemporary urban condition.

A recent publication by the artists Laurent Malone and Dennis Adams recorded in photographic form the random topographic panorama that unfurled as they took a walk in a straight line from a storefront in Manhattan to the initial threshold of Kennedy airport. A more unaesthetic and strangely repetitive urban fabric would be hard to imagine. It is a dystopia from which we are usually shielded by the kaleidoscopic blur of the taxi window. Looked at through [a] pedestrian optic this is an in-your-face urban fabric. It is oddly paranoid, rather ruthless, instrumental, and resentful landscape compounded of endless chain-link fences, graffiti, razor wire, rusted ironwork, fast food [outlets], signs of all kinds, housing projects that are barely distinguishable from penal institutions, the occasional fading ad or former cinema... and as

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one gets further out... closely packed parsimonious suburban homes with their white plastic siding. And everywhere, of course… the signs of hardscrabble economic survival about to get harder.... One cannot help asking oneself if these are truly the shades of the American dream for which we are ostensibly liberating the Middle East. Is there some fatal, inescapable paralysis that prevails, separating the increasingly smart, technological extravagance of our armaments from the widespread dumbness and meanness of our environment? (Frampton 2003: 3) 2. What Do These Three Quotations Have In Common? What Do They Suggest In Relation To The Ethics Of Design?

Each of these three quotations—which touch respectively on the design of products, on the roles of image culture and the graphic designer, and on the forces that shape contemporary urban environments have some things in common. Each • attacks, in different ways, the venality, triviality, and paralysis of the imagination that market brings to design • bemoans the loss of a public sphere outside of the market • condemns the way that market forces tend to eclipse or obliterate the human

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•

•

•

In relation to design, each • •

•

refuses the “false truth” of design as a practice that is only of occasion for the market opposes the denial of the other and of persons and their interests implicit in so much contemporary making, whether that of the world as a whole or within the specialist practices of design sees current modes of designing or making the world as a betrayal of

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by turning the human being into nothing other than a consumer and the designer as the irresponsible servant of those who wish to promote ever more unbridled consumption (Papanek) by inducing into a world that is daily being made more unsustainable an additional “dumbness and meanness” into the built and made environments within which we try to exist (this is Frampton’s point when he looks at the degraded humanscapes of Brooklyn and Queens in New York) by reducing the conditions of our political and public life (at extreme, as van Toorn insists, helping to destroy the conditions that make democratic society possible)

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•

design’s potential feels that design has become blind to its own possibility and therefore has lost the sense of its critical and affirmative capabilities

Overall, all three, implicitly or explicitly •

•

•

consider design’s role as serving the wider (longer-term) interests of subjects rather than the narrow (and necessarily short-term) interest of private profit want to create an ethics and a politics of design sufficiently powerful to contest both the overall reduction of the human by the market and design’s self-eclipsing as a critical agency understand design as an agency capable of helping us shape, in humane and sustainable directions, our relations with the artificial and natural worlds

3. Is What Is Needed Therefore An Ethics?

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The first answer is “Yes.” We need to recover what the veteran designer Gui Bonsiepe has called the “virtues” of design (Bonsiepe, 1997). But, the answer must be conditioned with caution, for this cannot be ethics as we used to think of it, as a “weak practice,” something external to design; a moral overlay that is “applied” to professional, practice but which does not enter the act of designing. Neither is the ethics we need simply something that is called up to salve a conscience.

The ethics that Papanek, van Torn and Framp­ton are all implicitly calling for is • •

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not a “bandage” not an ethical statement of intent that has no force for practice (as the International Council of Societies for Industrial Design and other design organizations are fond of creating) not an excuse for inaction not a covert plea for maintaining the status quo, particularly the status quo of unequal, venal, and destructive economic forces. (On the problem of weak ethics see Badiou 2001 passim)

On the contrary, the ethics we need • •

is against the capitulation of human interests to those of the market is emphatically opposed to the destructiveness of what is and to the catastrophe-inducing economic rapacity that global capitalism is now

•

inducing sees itself as interruption of the processes of economic “errancy’’ (Badiou, 2005, l45) and “de-futuring” (Fry 1999) and therefore as a way of helping contend with the consequences of negative globalization refuses resignation in the face of the given and refuses to acquiesce to the current domination of modes of reactive, negative, and destructive actions (Badiou’ 2001: 30)

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•

Affirmatively, whether couched as responsibility (Papanek), as the ability of the designer to address the public as citizens and not consumers (van Toorn), or as the infusing of “humane intelligence” into the made environment (Frampton) this ethics would •

• •

Counter the nihilism of our cultural and social inability to designate the dimension of a human good beyond that of the market—and instead insist that• the many and varied dimensions of the ‘good can be articulated substantively and made evident have the confidence to reassert—over against the market—the absolute primacy of the interests of human beings in a humane future posit the possibility of truly human-humane, sustainable—ways of making and remaking the world 555

4. But What, Specifically, Can Design—Considered As Ethics— Address?

If we bracket the narrow professional concerns of design and rather begin to look structurally at design in this expanded field of relations—which is what positing the possibility of sustainable ways of making and remaking the world involves—we can understand that essentially design relates to four moments: those of persons, relations, situations, and contexts. The ethics of design concerns how we address these.

Design begins and ends with its relation to persons: the ethical core of design lies in the relation of reciprocity established in any act of human making.

A perception about the frailty, resilience, and dependence upon things of persons is projected into an artifact that can reciprocally answer these needs (as the pain of standing is relieved by constructing a chair). Design—in no matter what form-is nothing more (or less) than the self-conscious elaboration and exploration of this fundamental relationship. The problem with this exploration is that turned into a quasi-autonomous activity (or worse, into a

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The First Is Persons

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profession), design forgets its ontological roots. The work of design ethics is to bring back design to these origins—and to think about the consequences of so doing. (On the relation of persons and making see Scarry, 1985, chapter 5; Dilnot 2005, especially 87-104).

The Second Is Relations Relations means here the infinitely multiple, complex, and variegated relations of human beings to the things they make—including, of course, themselves and, today, the world as a whole (for today that too is a made thing).

Design is, of course, in its essence, about relations. What design designs are the relations between things and persons and things and nature. Nonethical design reduces these to commodity relations (reduces all that a thing can be for us to the imaginary of the act of its purchase) or to a utilitarian operative relations (the kind that Adorno criticized when he lamented that Technology is making gestures precise and brutal and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility.... Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus... which... is not consumed in the moment of action.

(Adorno 1974: 40).

By contrast, ethically informed design (in the sense meant here) contests both reductions. It reverses the “loveless disregard for things that eventually turns against persons” (Adorno 1974: 39) and insists that if indeed evil is the reduction of things-including the reduction in the complexity and density of relations that a thing or a person is permitted to enjoy—then the good is the enhancement of relations. Ethics, we might say, works to proliferate relations.

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The Third Is Situations In the best and simplest definition of design we have (that by Herbert Simon in The Sciences of the Artificial), design is the process of planning and devising how we transform “existing into preferred” situations (Simon 1996: 111). Specifically, design addresses the infinite potential in situations. Infinite means here two things. It means, first, that the potential network of relations that a situation actually or potentially sustains always exceeds the state in which we encounter any situation (were this not the case no transformation could ever happen). Situations then are inherently open, inherently full of possibility. Second, infinite means the ability of all situations to be

To put this another way, the difference between ethical design and design that eschews ethics is that the former insists that what matters in situations is not their market value, not the capacity to e exploited and reduced for profit, but the human implications of the situation: its capacity to hold promise for how we can better—which today means more sustainably—live our lives.

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transformed, for the better, in our interests. Design is the process, then, of seizing and realizing the potential of situations (a) to be transformed; (b) to be so on behalf of or in the interests of or for the project of, persons. (On the ethics of situations see for example Badiou 2005 and Bauman and Keith 2001:13).

The fourth address is to the context(s) we inhabit. We will consider this in the next section.

5. Is The Artificial The Real Subject Matter Of Design?

In truth, the contexts that design potentially, addresses are multiple. Persons, relations, and situations are all contexts. It is easy to add to this the physical contexts of the environments within which we exist. But is the deepest context of design the artificial?

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The Artificial

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Design is bound to artifice. It exists only because we make things and because in making things we sunder them from us—and therefore require design to ameliorate this sundering. On the other hand, and particularly today, the artificial is the context for our lives. Industrialization induced the major break from modes of existence in which it was still possible to posit nature (and gods) as the horizons of our existence. Today, at least as far as our finite lives are concerned, these horizons have vanished. The years 1945 (Hiroshima) and then again 2005 (global warming) mark the points at which human society entered a watershed in which the artificial became the horizon and medium of our existence. Since then we have experienced a break not only with the past but with the continuity of the future. The destructive potentials first of unleashed technology (the A-bomb and then the H-bomb) and then of unlimited and rapacious economic growth (global warming) has instituted a break with the future such that today the future is no longer assured to us. This changes the work our culture has to do. Our work today is to create the conditions for a (humane) future to come about and to prefigure the possibility of a humane and mature attitude toward the artificial (and hence toward nature). But to do this we must know what

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the artificial can be, and this we do not know. Design is a way—in many arenas—the only, way—of exploring the artificial in terms of exploring what are its possibilities for us. (See Dilnot 2005: 15-35; 41-53.)

The Ethics of Discovery As is made clear below, this is not without ethical or social importance.

Milan Kundera makes the point that the ethics of the novel lives on the discovery of hitherto unforeseen possibilities for human existence (Kundera 1988). The same point applies to design: design is the discovery of what the artificial can be for us. Since the artificial is also today the frame of our possibilities as human beings, to discover what the artificial can be for us is to discover what our possibility can be, and hence (here its third dimension), it is also a discovery of what possibility can be. This too is ethically significant since for us, possibility has been reduced very largely, either to the economic extrapolation of what is (more) or to what, technologically, can be made into a product. It is germane to the crises we face that we no longer think about possibility in general, nor do we by any means fully understand what artifice and the artificial can mean for us (meaning here: mean for us—for our lives-other than as the production of things for consumption and profit}.

By contrast, design is a deliberation about the possible to conducted not only in thought (though its speculative, conceptual dimension should not be ignored), but through emblematic constructions in the form of propositions— prototypes that have the typographical form “this!?”—meaning that they are at once assertions and questions, both real and prefigurative (real and fictive) in the same moment.

What designed products emblematically explore are the possibilities of how we can live (well, badly) with the artificial, which is our product. Design is a teaching (which means also a learning) concerning how we can contend with what we have made.

6. What Is The Relation Between The Ethics Of Design And Acting Ethically In The World In General?

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We can answer this question three ways: 1. Traditionally, ethics concerns the assessment of well-being (in Greek, the search for the “good” way of being). Today, we understand that the search for well-being takes us through making. But this means that ethics today has to be not (only) a series of prescriptions for how we might behave but also—or even primarily—a mode of transitively and

•

•

•

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learning: for learning, “mediates the social and the political: it works precisely by making mistakes, by taking the risk of action, and then by reflecting on its unintended consequences, and then taking the risk, yet again, for further action”. (Rose 1996: 38) risk, or action without guarantee: “for politics does not happen when you act on behalf of your own damaged good but when you act without guarantee, for the good of all-this is to take the risk of the universal interest.” (Rose 1996; 62) creative action as negotiation: for acknowledgment of the “creative involvement of action in the configurations of power and law” and of “the risk of action, arising out of negotiation with the law” (Rose 1996:12, 36, 77) is a precondition to being able to act in relation to these configurations, as against merely evading the ambiguities and anxieties that they give rise to positing: which refers, in Rose’s language, to the “temporarily constitutive positings” (Rose 1996: 12-13) of actors, which “form and reform both

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substantively acting in the world. Ethics in general is therefore a process of, exploring the ways that we can live well with making. This is not, different from the work of design.

2. One problem we now face in the world is that as the horizon and medium of the world becomes, increasingly, artificial—as, in effect, we displace nature and re-create our world over as artificial-so we have to think and understand what it means to live, well, in an artificial world. This, as we know, we are failing (dramatically) to do. Not only do we need a mode of acting in relation to the artificial that, can allow us to develop more sensitive and attuned relations between persons and things and between the artificial and the natural as a whole, but we need to learn: what it might be to act well in a world defined by the artificial Design can be conceived of as par excellence an activity of learning how we can be (well) with the artificial.

3. Although conventionally we separate designing from acting in the world in general, this is a product of a historical division of labor induced by the Industrial Revolution, whose relevance may now be passing. That this might be so—and that therefore the difference between design action and acting in the world might be so much less than we have thought is suggested by work of the late English philosopher Gillain Rose. In her last book, Mourning Becomes the Law (Rose 1996), is it possible to discern the plan for a mode of acting that is simultaneously ethical in the work it can achieve and wholly congruent with design. In Rose’s formulation, what she called “activity-beyond-activity” has as its characteristics that it privileges.

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selves”; this “constant risk of positing and failing and positing again I shall call “activity beyond activity”’ (Dilnot 2005: 78) Note that these characteristics of action are not only highly congruent with design; they are a way of describing design.

7. How Do The Singular Ethics Of Design Connect To Crucial Questions In Contemporary Ethics As A Whole?

Learning; risk, or action without guarantee; creative action as negotiation with power and law, and an understanding of action as iterative positing are all, and particularly in their combination, potentially modes of acting in the world in a design-congruent way that have resonance beyond the usual limits of what we think of as (non­transitive) ethical action; For example, against the failure of the (traditional) ethical imagination in relation’ to the “fast expanding realm of our ethical responsibilities (Bauman 2006:’99)·and in the Absence of (other) modes of acting in the world that can put “what-is” and its de-futuring consequences at a distance (that can measure it and, in gauging it and its consequences for lives, reassert the primacy of the latter over the “errancy” of the former); then transitive and substantive imagination of design conjoined with Rose’s “activity-beyond-activity” has something powerful to offer in terms of ethics as a whole.

In particular, an ethics that could conjoin (as an ethics informed by design could) imagination, transitive action, the perception of the possibility inhering in situations, and the capacitive to be prefigurative (to give only a random list of what would be within the ethics of design as sketched earlier) would have at least a chance of addressing; for example, •

•

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•

the fear and trepidation, not to say stasis, that we feel vis-a-vis the future—since to break the grip of the latter we need prefigurative possibility as a core attribute the unsustainability of what is-since it is only as a praxis that combines ethical arid behavioral injunctions with material inscriptions and enactments that sustainment can even begin to be realized as a project the radical incompatibility between the destructive potential of unleashed technological and economic forces and the weakness of ethical injunctions or social abilities to productively direct or orient technological and economic potential—since it is only when the latter is internalized in praxis is there the possibility of dealing with this threat

If this is the case, then it becomes possible to see design as one element in a

8. How Is The Ethical Axiom Manifest In Design?

We will neglect here the interesting question of the ethics latent in the processes of design and the capabilities that it patterns and subtends.

Answering these questions would confirm further a conclusion that should be already apparent-that ethics is internal to design, properly understood.

But if ethics is internal to design, there is also an ethics of drawing out and making manifest this potential. The modes of so doing are infinite, for no prescription can be given in advance as to what might constitute an ethical drawing out of these possibilities. Nonetheless, three strategies in particular stand out-the exercise of radical compassion, the address to dignity, and the reconception of the “achievement of the ordinary.”

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militant material practice, executed on behalf of subjects and on behalf of the project of the sustainable and the humane.

Radical Compassion At the core of design is an ontological and anthropological act—making as the making of self—which is also a meditation on and a realization of being.

The obliteration of this origin is what marks most nonethical design and is the cause of the attacks that Papanek, van Toorn, and Frampton were each impelled to make. Conversely, all ethics begins with compassion. It is inconceivable to imagine an ethics, (as against a morality) that does not begin from a solidarity toward living beings, which is founded upon something other than their formal rights as subjects, and which is grounded in substantive apperception of the suffering and possibility of others.

The element of compassion translates, in the first instance in design, in the language of one of the best accounts we have so far concerning this— the final chapter of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (Scarry 1985)—to a perception concerning the pain of others and the ability of the designer to

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This is by no means only (only!) a moral injunction. We should equally see it as a historical project—for it is, after all, the loss of global compassion, or more precisely, the inability to make compassion matter and therefore keep it in play as more than a weak, transitory, and essentially personal matter (we could say: the inability to make compassion political)—that marks the last century and that already threatens this one. In this context, compassion and solidarity are political as well as ethical moments, and this should not be forgotten, particularly by those for whom compassion seems a somewhat less than sufficiently engaging political concept.

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relieve that pain, not merely through expressions of sympathy but though the translation of that understanding into a self-standing artifact that is operative in relation to that pain. The ethical moment of this designing—action is captured most economically in the formulation Scarry offers when she notes that although the resulting artifact cannot itself “be sentiently aware of pain, it is... [in] itself the objectification of that awareness; itself incapable of the act of perceiving, its design, its structure, is the structure of a perception’’ (Scarry 1985: 289). What Scarry’s observation immediately conveys is the sense that what the designer offers, ethically, is two-fold: that is; a quantum of (empathic and imaginative) perception concerning a situation, together with (and this is where professional expertise comes in} the capacity to translate that perception into an objective or standing form that is capable, simultaneously; of understanding, recognizing, meeting, and extending needs. All three are significant. None of the three are merely technical; none can be dispensed with, and in none can the question of ethics as we are posing it here be bracketed.

The Reconception of the “Achievement of the Ordinary”

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If “radical compassion” equates, roughly, to the address to the subject, the reconception of the “achievement of the ordinary” equates to the manner in which we bring back under thought—under the aegis of a human project— the relations, situations, and contexts that constitute everyday life. This can easily be seen from a traditional point of view (conservative or radical it scarcely matters) as a descent into banality. Nietzsche might make us think differently about this, as might also a poet life Wallace Stevens. For Stevens, the task of the poet is the saying of the plainest things, to get “straight to the transfixing object” (Stevens 1955: 471). In turn, for Nietzsche, it is the plainest things that deliver us from the forgetting of being—or in Vattimo’s paraphrase: “when the origin has revealed its significance… then we become open to the meaning and riches of proximity... [In those moments,] the nearest reality, that which is around us and inside of us, little by little starts to display color and beauty and enigma and wealth of meaning—things which ealier men never dreamed of” (Vattimo 1988: 177, 169).

Perhaps this suggests that what Stevens elsewhere calls the “vulgate” of experience, or what Nietzsche calls the realm of the “nearest things” are the spaces in which design operates at once at its most subversive, and at its most ethical. The trope of modesty folded with those of the “plainest things” and the “nearest things” gives a double ethic: to deal at once, as tenderly as possible, with the proximity of things and life (my example would be the adult

The first of these moments fulfills the requirement of responsivity identified by both Bahktin and Levinas (if differently) as the core of our ethical “answerability” to the world and to the other. To be practically disposed toward responsivity may in fact be the most fundamental mark of the ethical.

But what is interesting about design is that the responsivity called for here is double: The subject is also a situated possibility. The situation is the everyday.

Design lives in the impurity and even banality of the everyday: Its ethical work in this respect is the enhancement of the density of discriminated affirmative relations that a situation or an object is capable of delivering on behalf of the subject, seen, of course, not as a consumer, but as a project (the project of “becoming (finally) human”)

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Shaker rocking cradle found in the infirmary in Hancock Shaker Village, used to ease with gentleness the last hours of aged Shakes) and, on the other side, to understand design as the activity in which one pursues a practice that can help deliver us, in Simon Critchley’s words, from the “actual... to the eventual everyday” (Critchley 1997: 118)

The Address to Dignity

If for design, the defense of dignity begins with the degree of recognition accorded the subject to whom work is addressed, design has a particular role, as is widely recognized, in terms of the public sphere. Gui Bonsiepe, in the paper referred to earlier makes the case most elegantly: As the third design virtue in the future, I would like to see maintained the concern for the public domain, and this all the more so when registering the almost delirious onslaught on everything public that seems to be a

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Finally, no adequate ethics is possible that does not address and today defend—to the point of extremity—the dignity of the subject. We are realizing today that only the defense of dignity saves the subject as a political subject and therefore preserves the possibility of our having some defense against the possibility that we may be dismissed even from the fragile position of the consumer and thus find ourselves literally in the wasteland of the superfluous—those declared outside the realm of the social. (On the day that I write this in May 2008, there are reports of attacks on refugees in South Africa; meanwhile, in Italy, the new government begins to expel the Romany population—whom, shades of 1933, it is treating as the scapegoats for the state of the Italian economy). In this respect there can be no compromise: the axiom or the criteria of dignity toward the subject or subjects to whom work is addressed is the beginning of the act.

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generalized credo of the predominant economic paradigm. One does well to recall that the socially devastating effects of unrestricted private interests have to be counter-balanced by public interest in any society that claims to be called democratic and that deserves that label. (Bonsiepe 1997: 107) This is a wonderful statement, which economically nails the case-the ethical, but also, in the broad sense, the political case—for the public domain.

It seems to me essential, politically speaking, but also on behalf of ourselves as subjects, that the public domain be revalued, and in more than honorific ways. This is not just a matter though in my view this is not insignificant, of helping to create the “public sphere” (much maligned though that concept has been in the last decades). It is also an issue of creating the kinds of spaces and domains, mental as much as physical (though the latter seem to me in large part the necessary initiators of the former) in which subjects can again find themselves as “citizens”—and this term seems necessary to revive in the sense that the term “subject” has today almost entirely lost all connotations of citizenship.

So denuded, in fact, is this latter concept that it becomes almost possible to forget that there is a complex realm of subjective life that is not delimited by work, the immediate demands of family, or consumption. This forgetting is not merely in the mind. In the last half-century it has begun to be reflected in the “habitus” we inhabit, literally as well as ideologically. When Bonsiepe talks about “the almost delirious onslaught on everything public that seems to be a generalized credo of the predominant economic paradigm,” one aspect he is surely referring to is the erosion of the urban to a condition in which, particularly in the United States, but also in Europe (as well as globally across nearly all pockets of the “developed” economy), the urban is reduced to nothing but a finely calibrated machine or system for consumption. Today, generalized distributed and privatized settlement is linked not to the city as the locus of the public realm beyond the life of the family, but only to sites of consumption. In effect, the latter has consumed the former. The significant results of this process are not only such developments as the effective loss of the small town (with its, however small, sense of urban complexity and density introduced into rural areas; the necessary counterpoint to what was historically relative rural isolation), but, much more seriously, the wider flattering and closure of spaces and realms of experience, such that nothing else is now able to obtain except a spiraling interaction between family/home, consumption, and entertainment. In these spaces and environments, what is lost is everything that does not pertain to consumption in the moment.

Space does not permit elucidating examples. But in any case, they could be legion. For even in its most repressed moments, the negation of the ethical is rarely wholly complete-which is why, with much complacency, the design professions assure themselves that they are indeed, at heart, ethical. Given that we do not have the space to discuss individual cases, it might be better to list the virtues (in the old-fashioned sense) on which a radical ethics (one that takes the measure of a life and a practice) can be grounded. One of these is renunciation, in the sense of the ability to renounce what is false, for example, the architect Luis Barragan, in Mexico, in 1940, renouncing speculative modern architecture on the grouns that the activity corroded the conditions necessary for dwelling. The ability to take that critique and, rather than capitulate to what is, or retreat to cynicism or into the profession, to turn that critique into critical affirmation, is what makes ethical courage. Similarly, I think of the courage to originate: to place a paradigm at a distance and to draw on previously unthought configurative possibilities-and, in the case of Henry Beck and the London Underground Diagram, to create one of the exemplary gifts of twentieth-century design (the gift itself being one of the figures of the ethical). One wishes therefore to foreground courage, but also the ability that Richard Ellman, James Joyce’s great biographer, discerned in Ulysses, namely the capacity-wihtout illusion-to be able to disengage what is affirmable in life and to affirm that (Ellman 1972: 185).

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9. What Examples Of Ethical Approaches To Design Might Be Offered?

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10. What, In The End Is Responsibility?

This sense is captured, if incompletely, by Peter Sloterdijk in the conclusion to his essay on Nietzsche. He says this: One’s misery consists not so much of one’s sufferings as in the inability to be responsible for them-one’s inability to want to be responsible for them. The will to accept one’s own responsibility-which is as it were, the psychonautical variant of amor fati—indications neither narcissistic hubris nor fatalistic

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Since the essay opened with Papanek’s attack on the irresponsibility of designers, it is right and proper to finish on the question of responsibility. To do so I will conclude with the paragraph with which I ended my extended Archeworks lecture on ethics (Dilnot 2005: 147-48): The demand for the ethical is, at best, a demand for a way of being responsible.

But even more emphatically, the demand for the ethical is a search for lessons in how to be responsible.

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masochism, but rather the courage and the composure to accept one’s life in all its reality and potentiality. He who wants to be responsible for himself stops searching for guilty parties: he ceases to live theoretically and to constitute himself on mission origins supposed causes. Through the drama, he himself becomes the hero of knowledge.

For all its peculiarity, there is something in Sloterdijk’s formulation that catches precisely what is required here. His formulations speaks to the precariousness of the enterprise of thinking and acting responsibly—the same precariousness-with-courage that was evidently between-the-lines of Gillian Rose’s “activity beyond activity” and that is present, to some degree, in each act of designing that takes the ethical axiom seriously and thinks and acts out it consequences. The ethical in this sense is a risk-taking activity, and the best conclusion to this essay is therefore to repeat the formulation that we gave earlier on this, namely, that the ethical “does not happy when you act on behalf of your own damaged good, but when,” as Gillian Rose put it “you act, without guarantess, for the good of all—this is to take the risk of the universal interest” (Rose 1996: 62)

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Notes

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Culture & Society. Culture & Soiety. Culture & Society. Culture & Society. Culture & Society. Culure & Society. Culture & Society.

Culture & Society. Culture & Soiety. Culture & Society. Culture & Society. Culture & Society. Culure & Society. Culture & Society.

Culture & Society. Culture & Soiety. Culture & Society. Culture & Society. Culture & Society. Culure & Society. Culture & Society.

Culture & Society. Culture & Soiety. Culture & Society. Culture

Culture & Society. Culture & So ciety. Culture & Society. Cultur & Society. Culture & Society. Cul ture & Society. Culture & Society Culture & Society. Culture & So ciety. Culture & Society. Cultur & Society. Culture & Society. Cul ture & Society. Culture & Society Culture & Society. Culture & So ciety. Culture & Society. Cultur & Society. Culture & Society. Cul ture & Society. Culture & Society Culture & Society. Culture & So ciety. Culture & Society. Cultur

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Faking Cultural Literacy Written by Karl Taro Greenfeld, a journalist and the author of the forthcoming novel “SubPrime.”

LOS ANGELES—I CAN’T help it. Every few weeks, my wife mentions the latest book her book club is reading, and no matter what it is, whether I’ve read it or not, I offer an opinion of the work, based entirely on ... what, exactly? Often, these are books I’ve not even read a review or essay about, yet I freely hold forth on the grandiosity of Cheryl Strayed or the restrained sentimentality of Edwidge Danticat. These data motes are gleaned, apparently, from the ether—or, more realistically, from various social media feeds.

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What was Solange Knowles’s elevator attack on Jay-Z about? I didn’t watch the security-camera video on TMZ—it would have taken too long—but I scrolled through enough chatter to know that Solange had scrubbed her Instagram feed of photos of her sister, Beyoncé. How about this season of “Game of Thrones” and that nonconsensual intercourse in the crypt?

I don’t watch the show, but I’ve scanned the recaps on Vulture.com, and I am prepared to argue that this was deeply offensive. Is Pope Francis a postmodern pontiff ? I’ve never listened to one of his homilies nor watched his recent “60 Minutes” appearance, but I’ve seen plenty of his @Pontifex tweets retweeted, so I’m ready to say his position on inequality and social justice is remarkably progressive.

Hence shallow conversations.But this is slightly better than people who scroll through facebook to only see cute animal pictures and “articles” on buzzfeed.

It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them. Instead of watching “Mad Men” or the Super Bowl or the Oscars or a presidential debate, you can simply scroll through someone else’s live-tweeting of it, or read the recaps the next day.

In his 1987 book “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” E. D. Hirsch Jr. listed 5,000 essential concepts and names—1066, Babbitt, Pickwickian—that educated people should be familiar with. (Or at least that’s what I believe he wrote, not having actually read the book.) Mr. Hirsch’s book, along with its contemporary “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom, made the point that cultural literacy—Mr. Bloom’s canon—was the bedrock of our agreed-upon values.

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Our cultural canon is becoming determined by whatever gets the most clicks.

What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette, a cocktail party, so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened. What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists—and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.

NPR’s April Fools’ Day web story “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?” went viral on Facebook, where pranksters in on the joke linked to the piece and others then argued that they do too read and indignantly shared the link with exhortations to “read the story!” without actually clicking on it themselves to see that the only content was the revelation that the whole thing was a prank: “We sometimes get the sense that some people are commenting on NPR stories that they haven’t actually read. If you are reading this, please like this post and do not comment on it. Then let’s see what people have to say about this ‘story.’ ”

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According to a recent survey by the American Press Institute, nearly six in 10 Americans acknowledge that they do nothing more than read news headlines—and I know this only because I skimmed a Washington Post headline about the survey. After we’ve skimmed, we share. Commenters frequently start their posts with TL;DR—short for Too Long; Didn’t Read— and then proceed to offer an opinion on the subject at hand anyway. As Tony Haile, the chief executive of the web traffic analytics company Chartbeat, recently put it, “We’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading.” (He tweeted that.)

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It’s not lying, exactly, when we nod knowingly at a cocktail party or over drinks when a colleague mentions a movie or book that we have not actually

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seen or read, nor even read a review of. There is a very good chance that our conversational partner may herself be simply repeating the mordant observations of someone in her timeline or feed. The entire in-person exchange is built from a few factoids netted in the course of a day’s scanning of iPhone apps. Who wants to be the Luddite who slows everything down by admitting he has never actually read a Malcolm Gladwell book and maybe doesn’t exactly understand what is meant by the term “Gladwellian”— though he occasionally uses it himself?

Whenever anyone, anywhere, mentions anything, we must pretend to know about it. Data has become our currency. (And in the case of Bitcoin, a classic example of something that we all talk about but nobody actually seems to understand, I mean that literally.)

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Those of us in the business of gathering, dispensing and otherwise trafficking in information may be among the worst offenders. Recently I was on the phone with an editor who mentioned a piece by a prominent author. I claimed I had read the story. It was only later in the conversation that it became clear to me that the article had not yet been published and I could not possibly have read it. By then we had moved on to discussing a possible article on a California politician caught in a rather complicated scandal. Neither of us could come up with his first name. Did that prevent us from talking pseudoknowledgably about the pros and cons of the potential story? Absolutely not.

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It’s understandable that one party or even both parties in a conversation may have only the faintest idea of what is being talked about. We’re all very busy—busier, if I believe the harried responses (when there are any at all) to most emails I send, than any previous generation. And because we spend so much time staring at our phones and screens, texting and tweeting about how busy we are, we no longer have the time to consume any primary material.

We rely instead on the casual observations of our “friends” or the people we “follow” or, well, who, actually?

Who decides what we know, what opinions we see, what ideas we are repurposing as our own observations? Algorithms, apparently, as Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social media postindustrial complex rely on these complicated mathematical tools to determine what we are actually reading and seeing and buying.

We have outsourced our opinions to this loop of data that will allow us to hold steady at a dinner party, though while you and I are ostensibly talking about “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” what we are actually doing, since neither of

This keeps us trapped in a bubble of what we only like and we will hardly venture outside of what we presumably like.

THERE was a time when we knew where we were getting our ideas. In my eighth grade English class, we were assigned “A Tale of Two Cities,” and lest we enjoy the novel, we were instructed to read Charles Dickens’s classic with an eye toward tracking the symbolism in the text. One afternoon while I was in the library, struggling to find symbols, I ran into a few of my classmates, who removed from their pockets folded yellow and black pamphlets that read “Cliffs Notes” and beneath that the title of Dickens’s novel in block letters.

That “study guide” was a revelation.

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us has seen it, is comparing social media feeds. Does anyone anywhere ever admit that he or she is completely lost in the conversation? No. We nod and say, “I’ve heard the name,” or “It sounds very familiar,” which usually means we are totally unfamiliar with the subject at hand.

Here were the plot, the characters, even the symbols, all laid out in paragraphs and bullet points. I read the Cliffs Notes in one night, and wrote my B paper without finishing the novel. The lesson was not to immerse and get lost in the actual cultural document itself but to mine it for any valuable ore and minerals—data, factoids, what you need to know—and then trade them on the open market.

With the advent of each new technology—movable type, radio, television, the Internet—there have been laments that the end is nigh for illuminated manuscripts, for books, magazines and newspapers. What is different now is the ubiquity of the technology that is replacing every old medium.

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The information is everywhere, a constant feed in our hands, in our pockets, on our desktops, our cars, even in the cloud. The data stream can’t be shut off. It pours into our lives a rising tide of words, facts, jokes, GIFs, gossip and commentary that threatens to drown us. Perhaps it is this fear of submersion that is behind this insistence that we’ve seen, we’ve read, we know. It’s a nonetoo-convincing assertion that we are still afloat. So here we are, desperately paddling, making observations about pop culture memes, because to admit that we’ve fallen behind, that we don’t know what anyone is talking about, that we have nothing to say about each passing blip on the screen, is to be dead.

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EYE MAGAZINE

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There Is Such A Thing As Society It is time to think again about design’s social function and the way it is determined by our culture.

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*‘There is no such thing as society’ – Margaret Thatcher, 31 October 1987 In 1964 British designer Ken Garland and a group of 21 colleagues issued a manifesto entitled ‘First Things First.’ Aimed at fellow graphic designers, it was a succinct and gutsy appeal to reject the ‘high pitched scream of consumer selling’ and omnipotent lure of the advertising industry in favour of what was defined as socially useful graphic design work. The manifesto was reproduced in the publication Modern Publicity, together with an interview in which Garland attempted to defend it to Douglas Haines (described as a creative executive with British agency and marketing specialists Mather and Crowther), who was hostile to the idea that there is anything wrong with the market place or that the advertising industry does anything other than a good and necessary job.

What makes the manifesto interesting today is the realisation that its premises

On the other hand, a trend has emerged more recently that claims to seek a new clarity—of intention as well as aesthetic. Rick Poynor (Eye, no. 9 vol. 3) suggests that there is a growing reaction by ‘design students, teachers and young professionals’ against what are seen as the ‘excesses’ of formal experimentation and in favour of a less ambiguous, more messagerelated program. In the Netherlands, designers Dingeman Kuilman and Neils Meulman are calling for an approach that is not sophisticated, not technological, and not intellectual, just ‘basic’ (Emigre no. 25).

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appear as radical now as they did 30 years ago. And more significantly, the issue it addresses is as unresolved now as it was then. But the manifesto also touches on a dimension that seems to be missing from current debate: a concern with the social function and purpose of graphic design. Discussion in the profession in the mid-1990s appears to have crystallized into a debate between two schools of thought. On the one hand there is the ‘new wave’ of Macintosh-devoted design, some of which has been produced under the theoretical auspices of poststructuralist analysis and is guided by an exploration of the formal problems of representation and meaning, as in the work of the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Some of its exponents claim that their output represents a new aesthetic; their critics dismiss it as a form of visual pyrotechnics, a lavish aesthetic feast but low on nutritional content.

Such critics believe that despite its stated intentions (where there have been intentions to state), this work is aimless and impenetrable.

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‘The advertising industry corrupted society,’ said Benetton creative director Oliviero Toscani. His response has been a series of notorious campaigns about race, birth control, Bosnia and so on that are supposed to shock consumers out of complacency—and into what exactly? This invasion of our consciousness is in no sense a dialogue: the messages flow in one direction only, from manufacturer to consumer, and the purpose is still to make you buy jumpers.

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For some designers, and I would include myself and many of those I class as colleagues here, a search for formal solutions has only ever been a part of, not an alternative to, a longer-term socially and politically influenced project. For us (only an ‘us’ in as much as we have histories and influences in common), to interpret much of what is characterized as ‘new wave’ as playfully self-indulgent is not a refusal to ‘join in the party,’ nor does it signify lack of interest in new technologies and experimentation. Rather, it springs from a continuing interest that goes beyond a search for parts of the design jigsaw, of which formal visual vocabulary is a piece, to an understanding of how the jigsaw fits together.

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It is perhaps understandable that recent debate has centred on conflicting ideas about what contemporary design should look like and what methods it should employ in order to create understanding: how it should function formally. The impact of computer technology has transformed the nature of the design activity, allowing designers to assume control (competently or not) of many stages in the production process that were traditionally shared among a number of people with different skills and expertise. It has also had a profound effect on aesthetics. The computer makes it possible to construct multifaceted compositions with relative ease and at vastly increased speeds.

Its capacity for sampling, duplication and the integrated assembly of all manner of visual elements has given designers the opportunity to view countless variations and to realise more visually complex ideas. Visual, formal possibilities have taken centre stage.

Discussion of content, apart from as formal exploration, has tended to concentrate on the internal subject matter of individual works. But there is another sort of content in graphic design: its social content as a form of social production. The significance of this lies in the ways in which function influences form and purpose informs content. It suggests that the character of our work is determined by more than our intentions alone, since production processes and the social context within which the work is received have a profound impact in directing, respectively, its aesthetic and the kinds of understanding it is capable of generating. These issues touch on the very definition of graphic design.

To see graphic design as a form of social production rather than as individual acts of creativity means recognising that it is subject to the same economic and ideological forces that shape other forms of human social activity. It means that in order to understand the nature of our activity and to think about its possibilities, we must be able to locate it within a historical context that relates it to economic and political forces. This is (strangely) problematic, as Anne Burdick rightly states (Eye no. 9 vol. 3), because ‘it is considered outside our role to analyse the content of our work in relation to politics, theory, economics, morals and so on.’ But if the present debate is about creating a body of work that is meaningful to people in general, that plays a part in the development of a stimulating visual culture, then it must involve understanding how our culture functions, how it is shaped, and how it shapes our perceptions of ourselves. It means addressing people’s need for a culture in which they can participate actively, for which they can help shape the agenda. It will inevitably involve an analysis of what prevents us from building such a culture.

Whether one sees advanced capitalism and the consumer society as good or bad, one cannot ignore the ways they have encroached on previously private areas of consciousness. The building of markets is not a purely economic exercise: it is we, the ‘citizens’, who are the intended markets, and their creation is very much an ideological task. This involves a process, explains Kelly, in which our needs are broken down into smaller and smaller units, ‘so that they match (and can be met by) the outputs of a profitable production process’. ‘Thus, for example,’ says Kelly, ‘the desire to avoid giving off offensive odours is redefined as a positive, and normal, desire to achieve ‘personal hygiene,’ and is pictured as a continuous, and inevitable, struggle in which only the deliberately anti-social would refuse to participate.’

Convinced of the need to obtain this ‘personal hygiene,’ we are offered our bodies divided into separate marketing zones—underarm, mouth, vagina, feet—within each of which, writes Kelly, ‘the consumer can be educated to make choices (roll-on or stick, fragrant or natural), and within each of which separate innovations are possible.’

In addition, the political avenues through which we might expect to control the decisions that govern our lives are severely restricted. Stuart Hall has talked about ‘a growing gap between where people are politically and the

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This fragmentation of our needs and desires does not operate only in relation to areas of industrialised production. It is paralleled in the operations of the state, from health and medicine to education and leisure, where we are taught to consume professionalised services. In this sense there are no areas of our personal lives that are not subject to the social pressures of the marketplace, wherein decisions that might have been made by consenting citizens are reduced to purchasing choices made by passive consumers. Since the 1950s and 1960s, writers have referred to these encroachments as inducing a state of crisis in personal and cultural life.

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The economic organisation of our society depends on the promise of everexpanding production and the building of markets to absorb that production.

We have the means to make goods in sufficient quantity and range to satisfy all our basic needs. But, ‘Goods are no longer sold on the basis that they satisfy a known and voiced human need, but instead demands are developed through ‘research’ and through marketing in order that commodities may be produced to meet them,’ explains Owen Kelly (Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels, 1984). Goods are only a means to an end: the production of surplus value. Consequently, ‘there can be no such thing as sufficient production of any commodity, since there is no such thing as sufficient surplus value’.

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institutions and organisations which express that in a formal political way.’

Recent trends reveal a growth in intense pseudo-religious movements, in nationalist and neo-fascist ideas, in young people embracing directly oppositional lifestyles. Few would deny that at the centre of this is a search for something meaningful to believe in, a vision of ourselves as empowered human beings able to act upon our needs and desires as we define them.

It is crucial that we recognise that there is a direct correspondence between the condition of our culture and the ways we organise the production of materials. The form of economic organisation we refer to as capitalism ceased long ago to be simply that, and has become a means of organising the consciousness necessary for that economic system to flourish. As designers whose work is concerned with the expression and exchange of ideas and information and the construction of the visual vocabulary of day-to-day culture, we must establish a perspective on where we fit into this scheme. We must ask in what ways our function helps to organise consciousness. We must also discover to what extent and in what ways the solutions, vocabularies, and dialogues that we are able to conceive and construct are determined for us. The ‘First Things First’ manifesto was an attempt at least to address these issues.

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Its conclusions, however, fall short of what seems necessary. Written at a time when the high-intensity market was establishing itself at the heart of the design profession in Britain, it was perhaps a last-ditch attempt to hold back the flood of ‘gimmick merchants, status salesmen, and hidden persuaders’. It starts off in a forcible and radical manner. But at the beginning of the fourth paragraph it extinguishes its own flames when it says, ‘We don’t advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this is not feasible’ – without making clear whether or not this is perceived as desirable. After its declaration of a rebellion against the techniques and apparatus of highpressure consumer advertising, there is a trace of retreat here, despite the fact that it would probably be defended as ‘realism’.

Garland echoes this concession in the interview, and the power of his argument is all the less compelling for it. Early on he concurs with Haines that ‘We are not against advertising as a whole. The techniques of publicity and selling are vital to Western society.’ But isn’t that the problem? This allows Haines’s contention that high-pressure advertising and the ideology of the market place are healthy and natural to go unchallenged, and leaves an impression that what Garland is arguing for is the same cake, sliced differently. But the logic of the manifesto implies that social and cultural needs are constantly circumvented, if not distorted, by the power of an

Theories of Causation.

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industry whose primary purpose is to create demand for consumption, regardless of usefulness. Furthermore, that the effect—on young designers in particular—of the absence of an alternative sense of what meaningful work might be is leading to a gradual erosion of enthusiasm and creativity.

What is needed is a different cake altogether, but to argue for such a thing is to take a leap into the unknown. The modern advertising industry is the creation of the high-intensity market, and graphic design has always been at the centre of its strategy. Its history forms a large part of the history of design.

To question that industry and the ideology of consumerism it promotes is to question our whole economic organization. It is easier to argue for more of the cake.

The manifesto’s concern with purpose and social function should not be confused with a moralising preoccupation with ‘politically correct’ subject matter. It should not be interpreted as a determinist concern with ‘the message,’ though it does not exclude a commitment to direct (or indirect) political expression. Devotees of the new wave may well demonstrate little interest in the ‘message as content’ approach, perhaps justifiably, when one considers the unbelievably inane work of ‘cultural ground-breakers’ such as Oliviero Toscani and his sponsors, Benetton.

‘I want to make people think,’ says Toscani in an interview in the Independent (16 December 1992). ‘I want them to remember a name.’ Thus social criticism is appropriated in the struggle for brand identification. ‘It [the advertising industry] persuades people that they are respected for what they consume, that they are only worth what they possess,’ says Toscani, angrily upbraiding the industry for corrupting society. Most advertising, he tells us, is based on the emotions and has nothing to do with the product. One can only wonder what graveyard crosses during the Gulf War, a ship overflowing with refugees, an electric chair, children in Third World slums, and a nun and priest kissing have to do with expensive, multicoloured knitwear? But even these are surpassed by Toscani’s idea for a ‘fun’ campaign about wifebeating for Guinness. What makes Toscani’s ever-so-radical ideas ever so depressing is that his accurate critique of the advertising industry’s effect on our aspirations and self-image appears to be of no help to him in establishing the link between the industry and the economic ideology that spawned it.

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Whatever his intentions, Toscani’s posters are merely a state-of-the-art marketing device masquerading as social conscience. It is extreme arrogance to throw images at people in the belief that they need to be told what issues are of social importance. Radical work is never a question of presenting correct political opinions, but is concerned instead with the nature of the

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dialogue that is made possible between the author and the audience.

It is not at all clear, on the other hand, in what sense the approach advocated

by Dutch designers Kuilman and Meulman is basic, or what is the meaning and significance of what they have to say. Is this perhaps a private argument between them and the technological, intellectual sophisticates about the most effective formal approach to sell spicy sausage or decorative floor tiles?

Or is the liberation from confusion they wish to achieve to be reserved for greater purposes? Appending political messages to work as if forms were empty vessels is simple-minded, and advocacy of ‘basicness’ is meaningless if it is concerned only with the internal logic of design. But does this mean that formal exploration, as content, is the way forward?

Writers such as Roland Barthes are said to have been of seminal influence in the development of the work and ideas of at least one agency of the new wave—the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Jeffery Keedy, a former Cranbrook student, says, ‘It was the poetic aspect of Roland Barthes which attracted me, not the Marxist analysis. After all, we’re designers working in a consumer society, and while social criticism is an interesting idea, I wouldn’t want to put it into practice’ (Eye no. 3 vol. 1). Barthes’s work is indeed poetic, which gives it a resonance lacking in much Marxist theory, but to disconnect the critique from the form seems a perverse example of literary raiding. The work of other French writers of the same period, such as the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, is also poetic and also concerned with the decay of personal and cultural life under modern capitalism. His book The Revolution of Everyday Life deals with the subjugation of our potential to be active, independentminded and creative. It is a complex description of our condition, which focuses on the corruption of our desires, dreams, values, and aspirations, and a ferocious social critique. If it is not on the Cranbrook reading list, perhaps it should be.

The major artistic movements of this century—the Futurists, Constructivists, Dadaists, Surrealists—all had a theory of society which guided their explorations. The exploration of the formal structure of language—its signs, symbols and how these construct and carry meaning—should be the staple diet of designers. Language is a means through which we express our consciousness of ourselves and our relationship to the world; it is our attempts to describe our situation and to think about the future that lead us to search for appropriate vocabularies. Language changes when it is no longer able to express what its users require of it, so unless it is to be of academic interest only, an exploration of language must also take into account the changing consciousness of human beings. It is difficult to comprehend the point of

Whether our activity and its products are open and empowering, whether they contribute to the building of a democratic culture, is not dependent only on the content of our work, but also on the productive social relations that affect the nature of the dialogues we are able to construct. A large advertising poster for multicoloured knitwear, for instance, is not a dialogue on equal terms, if it is a dialogue at all. It is designed to make an intervention into our consciousness in ways we cannot ignore; it shouts at us so that we may remember a name that will influence our acts of purchasing. It is a form developed for a social context that the audience cannot control. This is what makes it oppressive. No amount of fiddling with the visual forms it employs or the message it carries will transform it into an open-ended product.

But the ideology of consumerism is not limited to the world of commerce. Our consciousness is fragmented so that we are better able to consume everything: films, music, fashion, diets, healthcare, education, information, even our own history. This problem cannot be avoided simply by choosing between ‘good’ or ‘bad’ products, or between commercial and non-commercial work, since the nature of the problem is not just consumption but the ordering of our consciousness to become consumers in the first place.

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exploring form if it is not related to contemporary problems of vocabulary and the search for meaning. The study of visual form and language is limited if it does not consider the forces of cultural production, which involve a set of social relations between producer and audience.

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Graphic design has a part to play in creating a visual culture that empowers and enlightens, that makes ideas and information accessible and memorable.

Many designers may argue that their job is not politics, and they would be right. But this does not prevent us from developing ideas about cultural democracy. We cannot separate our work from the social context in which it is received and from the purpose it serves. If we care about the integrity of our design decisions, we should be concerned that the relations implicit in our communications extend active participation in our culture. If what we are looking for is meaning and significance, then the first step is to ask, who controls the work and whose ends does it serve?

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The computer revolution that brought us new aesthetic possibilities has given us other opportunities too. The technological condensing of the production process has the potential to alter our notion of authorship, and with it our aspirations. The technical self-sufficiency the computer has allowed may give us the conceptual space to develop a more complete consideration of our work in relation to the way it is received and the purpose it serves. It

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may encourage us to initiate more often, and in the process to establish partnerships and collaborations in which design is not simply a means to sell and persuade, but a means of organising ideas and finding forms of expression that suit the interests of a more specific audience.

The work that flows from such a practice cannot be prescribed. It may or may not be sophisticated, technological and so on. It will in no way preclude an exploration of the formal representation of language. Its content may be concerned with what it is we are able to think about (subjects), or the ways in which we are able to think (forms). It will recognise that how something is produced and distributed socially carries with it specific relations that affect the dialogue that is possible between author and audience and limit the sort of meanings that can be constructed. Above all, it will acknowledge the link between our choices as designers and the sort of culture we wish to contribute to.

How Cultures Around The World Make Decisions Is the American obsession with individual freedom really such a great idea? What other cultures know about how to make good choices.

Sit down at a restaurant in France, and there’s a menu. Salmon with rice.

French beans. Wine. If you ask for potatoes instead of rice, the restaurant will say no. Because it is their menu. Not yours. To an American, this is nearly unfathomable.

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One American model: Give me personal autonomy or give me death.

“In terms of fetishizing the idea of choice, the U.S. is the absolute pinnacle,” says Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory and social change at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice. “We want to be able to choose everything that matters, as well as the things that don’t.”

We Want To Be Able To Choose Everything That Matters, As Well As The Things That Don’t.

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Rice and potatoes aside, the American desire for choice has manifested in numerous ways: politically, in a demand for a voice in governance; commercially, in the demand for a variety of consumer goods and services; and spiritually, in the demand to choose and create exactly the kind of individual life, and self, you believe in. In the U.S., the overriding perception is that anything you do out of allegiance to tradition and social expectation is

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inauthentic and not you. Because the real you is the choices you make.

After Protestant colonists brought the concept of personal autonomy to the U.S., the idea was further cemented into the national psychology with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Personal and religious freedom became irrevocably tied to economic freedom from the monarchy and early capitalism. “Americans were truly the only people that brought those ideas together,” says Sheena Iyengar, professor at Columbia Business School and author of The Art of Choosing (TED Talk: The art of choosing.) “It made the idea of personal autonomy such a dogma that it almost became a religion itself.”

The American Cultural Responsibility To Revere Choice Has Been Present Since Before America was America. In Other Words, It Was Never A Choice.

My fellow Americans and I believe that choice allows us to individuate ourselves, to prove that we are free. Our preferences, therefore, become who we are. We feel acutely the need to construct a personal narrative out of our choices and, thus, construct our own identity.

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There’s a certain degree to which this is sheer lunacy, and also fallacy.

Because our cultural responsibility to revere choice has been instilled in us since before America was America. In other words, we never chose choice.

The Amish model: Belonging, not choice, is crucial.

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Even within the U.S., not all cultures regard the idea of personal autonomy as sacrosanct. In the Anabaptist religious tradition, for example, there is one major choice to be made: whether or not to be baptized into the church.

The Amish are baptized between the ages of 18 and 24 years old, after a “rumspringa,” or period in their teenage years in which they experience modern life, including dating, driving and using technology.

The Amish Wonder Why We’re So Anxious About Out Work That We’ll Tear Apart Our Families And Move Across The Country For A Job, To End Up Living Among Strangers.

Once they’ve made the choice to be part of the church—which the majority of young adults do—and are baptized, all other choices are made within the Amish canopy, says Donald Kraybill, senior fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, and author of

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numerous books on the Amish. For example, because formal education terminates at the end of eighth grade, there are limits to the choice of profession. You can’t be a lawyer or surgeon. But within limits, you have every freedom to choose whether to become a small business owner, or carpenter, or baker, or horse trainer, or any number of other occupations. The Amish sense of identity isn’t shaped by choices they make but is conferred to them by the community. Instead of choice, they have belonging.

“I have a very intelligent Amish friend who thinks the rest of us are crazy in how we view the professional choices we make,” says Kraybill. “We’re so anxious about our occupations that we’ll tear apart our families and move across the country for a job and end up living among strangers with no family or social support if we get ill or have an emergency. And put that way—how insane does that sound?”

Why should it be any less authentic to be a product of the family that raised you and the culture you grew up in and the religious institutions you participate in? Rather than knowing who you are by knowing your preferences, you know who you are by knowing what you belong to.

One Asian model: Focus on interdependence and harmony, not independence and self-expression.

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In some Asian cultures, to fulfill your independent self is not the primary goal of an individual: The goal is to be interdependent and maintain relationships and make them harmonious. In Japan, for example, being a “going your own way” person is to be immature and not culturally sophisticated. Though people obviously have preferences, they often don’t choose what they like, because that’s not the ideal manner. “Your cultural task is harmony, not self-expression,” says Hazel Markus, social psychologist and professor of behavioral sciences at Stanford University.

The Idea Is That The Person Is Not A Whole, But A Part, And Only Becomes Whole In Connection With Others.

In Confucianism, especially, the belief is that without knowing your place

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Why? Partly because being part of the social organization is a core tenet of traditional Eastern religions. “All of them foster an idea that a person is not a whole, but a part, and only becomes whole in connection with others,” says Markus. “The fundamental, ontological understanding of what a person is is as a node in a network.”

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in the hierarchy, and behaving accordingly, chaos will ensue. Certainly, you can choose not to adhere to the norm; Confucius says not to do certain acts if you don’t believe them, says Peter Carroll, associate professor of Chinese history at Northwestern University and author of Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou.

You have the choice to opt in or opt out; the difference is that there’s a clear expectation of what the correct choice is. By not doing the correct thing, you are demonstrating that you are less than a full person.

Meanwhile, in America, a similar rhetoric rules. By not exercising your full range of choices, you are demonstrating yourself to be less than a full person—even though most people don’t exercise the choices they believe so strongly in, such as the right to vote. This is the fiction of choice in the West, says Carroll. “Individual choice is a powerful received idea, but frankly, it’s a bit of a white lie that our culture tells itself,” he says.

According to the United States Census Bureau, only 57.1 percent of Americans over the age of 18 voted in the 2008 presidential election.

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“We’re not the most non-conformist, and we’re not the most individualized,” says Iyengar. “But what Americans do have is a very strong dogma. We believe ourselves to be the most autonomous; we value autonomy more than any other culture; we value the concept of non-conformity more than any other culture; and we value the concept of individual freedom and individual choice more than any other culture, at least rhetorically. But we’re certainly not the most radical in offering freedoms, such as with gay rights or getting women the right to vote. We are not the first ones to actually empower people with autonomy.”

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As Western Consumer Culture Proliferates Around The World.

Will Cultural Views On Choice Change?

Our fixation on individual choice is actually dangerous to our society, because it pacifies our activism, argues Renata Salecl, philosopher and sociologist (TED Talk: Our unhealthy obsession with choice). Making choices based on social and political good actually engineers the most change. In the Scandinavian countries, she notes, it was a political choice to open government to women and make rules regarding energy use and environmental sustainability. If left to the individual, that likely wouldn’t have happened.

In India, studies found that even while young college students become megaconsumers, that picking clothes or music without consideration for what their parents might think is not considered particularly moral, says Markus. In Japan, advertisements explicitly encourage individuals to “follow the trend” and “fit in.” Similarly, in Korea, ads for food products advertise that “You might be able to make a dish almost as good as your motherin-law’s”—because the ability to uphold tradition is most valued in driving personal choices, not innovation or individuality.

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As Western consumer culture, with its seemingly endless choices, proliferates around the world, will the cultural view on choice change?

Still, as countries become more urban, more people will be exposed to diversity and, generally, open themselves up to reflection. Likewise, as more people around the world are educated—and educated in a Western style— the more they will come into contact with different ways of living and the more they will see and deliberate on choices in their own life. The digital revolution vastly accelerates the process.

The American Obsession With Choice Insists That Choice Be Installed Globablly, Whether Through Geopolitics Or Consumer Goods.

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“You have a lot of people around the world consuming an American-style education, and what that does is teach a common language regarding how you discuss and frame your ideas,” says Iyengar. “A result of that is that the intellectual class around the world is starting to debate more. That’s leading to more conflict for sure, but they are also using this way of arguing when it comes to choices they need to make, even when it comes to defending an absence of choice, like in a political system.”

Yet complete radical freedom and individualism creates a life that can’t be lived. Tyranny is unacceptable too, of course. But somewhere between

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The American obsession with choice insists that choice be installed globally, whether through geopolitics or consumer goods. It’s anathema to let people limit their own choices. “It’s tied to being free,” says Markus. “And how do you know you’re free? Because you get to freely choose and do what you want to do and follow your heart and your dream. The way things are now are not the way they have to be tomorrow. It’s bedrock for us, for our American selves. Freedom equals choice, and in every human heart is the desire to be free, so that must mean choice for all.”

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tyranny and radical freedom resides a mixture of constraints, social norms, legal constraints and individual freedom of choice that enables people to lead satisfying, meaningful and authentic lives.

Munger on Cultural Norms Michael Munger of Duke University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about cultural norms--the subtle signals we send to each other in our daily interactions. Mike, having returned from a four-month stint as a visiting professor in Germany, talks about the challenges of being an American in a different culture with very different expectations on how people will interact.

Our speech patterns, how we wait in line, how we treat each other at the grocery, the interaction between a teacher and a student, how we drive, how we tip for services rendered, even how we listen to music all emerge from our culture and are often different in different countries. The listener will learn what Ted Williams and Joe Dimaggio have to do with the Book of Judges along with the relative merits of Williams and Dimaggio performances in 1941.

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Intro. [Recording date: August 21, 2009.] Culture: the way people interact on a daily basis with each other. Came up with topic after Munger taught graduate classes in Europe at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany.

Munger doesn’t speak German. When business people travel, they seek and are advised in advance how business customs differ: how people shake hands, bow, etc. in different cultures. Hand gestures can differ; tipping customs differ. Subtler cues and behavior. George Bernard Shaw: “Manners is the art of offending no one unintentionally.” If you want to offend someone, it has to be on purpose. Bad manners, you don’t know it. Ancient tradition in Europe and in Germany called the “academic quarter.” Presumption was that academics were so confused that they were not likely to be able to find their classrooms till at least 15 minutes after the supposed start time. Munger had a class to start at 6 p.m.; as is his wont, he got there at 5 minutes to 6; and waited. A few people after there at 10 after 6; started class; remarked to latecomers that he expected timeliness. Germans, after all-expect timeliness! May be a stereotype; flagrantly wrong. Second class, same thing. “Maybe you have a class beforehand or a train to catch. Let’s start at 6:10.” Kid raises hand, “So you mean start at 6:25?” No! Finally explained that you add 15 minutes to the written-down start time. No problem so long as people’s expectations are consistent. Finally began starting class at 6:15 and it was all fine. Opposite of “Vince Lombardi time”—if the meeting

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was called for 6, you showed up at 5:45. If you showed up at 5:50 you were late—disrespectful. Taught class in English, there as an avatar, exemplar, of teaching in America. Any differences in behavior of students? The students were outraged that Munger assigned readings. Expected them to have read before class, but can’t expect the students to read materials, or to talk. It’s a lecture. Not just quantitatively less, it’s qualitatively less. It’s nothing. Doug North, Nobel Prize, Robert Fogel before him answering the question said “I could talk about this for hours,” and North jumped in and said “And if nobody stops him, he will!” Happy to talk for hours.

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Legendary story, Pigou and Marshall. Pigou signs up for a class with Marshall, one student in the class, goes to front of room, one student, takes notes. Classroom demeanor is different. Bicycle Munger rode around different. What about shopping, other things? Expectations of what is rude, Japan. Come to stoplight as a pedestrian, look both ways, then cross, even if there are no cars coming, people will yell at you. Sister living in Kyoto crossed against the light once, little grandmother came out with an umbrella and tried to hit her for violating the social order. Didn’t matter that there were no cars coming. The light was red. In U.S., occasional—got a ticket in D.C. once for jaywalking, but very rare. Taxis in NYC enforce this— they’ll hit you. Erlangen, 20 kilometers north of Nurnberg, rough population 60,000, medieval town, Siemens research facility, egg-headish. Believe it has highest concentration of bicycles per automobile in all of Germany, top three; almost all the traffic is bicycle. From the South of the U.S., always try to let a bicycle in, slow down a little bit to let in a pedestrian in a place where there is no other reason to slow down; but causes accidents in Germany.

What do you do if a pedestrian is crossing and it’s pretty crowded and you are riding a bicycle? Answer in Germany is: Aim at them, under the assumption that they’ll continue to walk. If they are an American, they might stop, and you’ll hit them. If it’s an American riding his bicycle, he might stop. But if they are all German, the German bicyclist knows to ride directly at the pedestrian, who will take two more steps in the intervening time, and you’ll go just behind them. Found that out by watching; caused significant accident, sitting on bench with sore legs, asked people. Took people time to answer the question because it was so obvious to them. To be fair, it makes perfect sense; Munger was doing what he thought was polite, but he was the one being rude. Two more examples: In California in the Bay area, particularly on the campus of Stanford, you stop for a pedestrian in the middle of the block. As a pedestrian, you come to be pretty aggressive. Car drivers act extremely passively, including at stop signs. In New York, “I was there a millisecond before you, I’m on the right, I’m going.” In Stanford, for a visitor there as a driver it’s different. In D.C., first moved there, thunderstorm, power out in

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Move away from traffic, example where decisions being made spontaneously, real time; issue of stability and rudeness. What happened at the grocery? Not an expert on civility, prefer not to offend people intentionally. See woman coming up with shopping cart, might offer to take it for her the rest of the trip.

In Europe, laughing: to get a shopping cart, have to pay a deposit of a euro—a coin, something like $1.40; put it into a slot, get a shopping cart and when you return the cart to the slot later, the euro pops back out. Just a deposit; makes sure the cart returns. That’s the custom there. Didn’t know this. Apparent familiarity of the situation—“I know how to act in the grocery store!”— old lady faked left, right; started screaming. Didn’t know what was wrong.

Policeman running. What in the world is going on? Yelling in German. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak German.” Policeman: “What are you doing?!” Corners of mouth start to turn up; asked for ID; mentioned his nephew had gone to Duke University; almost smiling, says “She’s still looking, isn’t she?” She wants justice to be done; he pokes finger into his chest; “She doesn’t speak English; if you just nod our business here will be finished.” Excellent police work. Nods; he walks back to his car, she walks back to her car. Try to steal a euro from an old lady. For the next week or so, tried to carry stuff in arms, too psychologically damaged. Once you learn what has happened, no big deal. Gray area: areas where there is some nuance. Interesting in real life the subtlety of signals. People basically don’t tip in Germany. If you pay for something, you go up to the next euro, consider it annoying to have to make change. Give the bill, say, Euro17.50; give them a 20 Euro bill and wait for change and then give a 2 Euro tip--that’s what would do in the United States.

That would be a big tip—at most 10%—”service wasteland”—so giving an American size tip; but it was just demeaning to have to make change. Why would that be? Answer is: No one does it. Why would you make someone do

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Montgomery County and stoplights out. In general, if stoplights out, some, maybe not most, people’s expectation is pretend it’s green on a less busy street, and on a busy street pretend it’s red or that there is a stop sign. As a driver on a busy street, slow down coming into an intersection slowing down can cause an accident. Like any coordination game, problem comes from the mix of expectations. Intersections in Asia where people go at full speed without a stoplight or stop sign; then other side gets the edge. Sort of works out. Video at Arc de Triomphe. Heavily congested circle with no lanes, but they figure it out. People on the outside want to get out; people on the inside want to get off the circle; the other ends up stopping. Suppose a bunch of people who want to go straight; no way for these circle continuers to break in. But then there is a break and the circle continuers start to go and the ones who want to get off have to wait. They manage to figure it out without any lanes or signals.

Manage to figure it out. Would hate to drive it.

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that? Like throwing something on the floor and wanting someone to pick it up.

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Another gray area: Gouging podcast discussion, maybe: if you are in line, waiting to board plane at the airport and they call Group 2, there is a certain dance that emerges at the gate. Don’t always line up. Southwest, cattlecar you. Semi-circular group around the gate. If others have gotten up and you haven’t, it’s not okay to put yourself ahead of those ahead. Racing to get on, but same airline. Carry on space does disappear. Checking your bag might mean losing your bag. Computer bag heavy. If they call Group 2 and a Group 3-er cheats, the gate person sometimes waves them through; other times says they have to wait. Grocery store—against the rules to cut in line, elbow your way to the front. Also would be considered unbelievably gauche to act like an economist and say, “Folks, I’m kind of in a hurry; I wonder if I could give each of you $2 if I could cut in front.” Standard answer for why that doesn’t happen is transaction costs—someone would do it for $4, bargaining process. But it’s more about custom. Risk that people will lie.

Julian Simon created a way to let people cut in line when not enough seats on a plane; little mini-auction on the spot, with transactions costs, but it works out well. Who’s willing for a free round-trip ticket to go on a later flight. Overbook on purpose; solve it beautifully. Sometimes it’s okay to use money when it’s institutionalized; but when you try to do it on your own, raised eyebrows, pretend you aren’t talking; people embarrassed for you.

Culture seems like it’s hard wired. Example: In United States, physiological response to seeing someone else breaking the rules; more likely to provide the public good of norm enforcement. A lot of times violation of norms doesn’t harm us. Little old lady in Japan. Emotional and physiological response, biological and evolved way of solving the collective action problem; anger inappropriate. Not rational to teach someone a lesson if they cut you off when driving. Benefits shared; individually you bear all the costs. Waiting in D.C. for a movie, about ten minutes more; someone cut in front of him while he was turned around; large woman cut in front of him; he’s also large; she threatened to call the police if he complained; but it cost him at most 20 seconds. We respond irrationally to seeing violations of cultural norms by providing more norm enforcement. If it had been a guy, might have had a fight. If instead helped her and come back, no problem—still would have taken a few minutes of time.

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Right experiment: doing a good deed. Adaptive, group response. Two components: black box, inherited culturally determined norms. We didn’t decide on them. If raised in China, not the norm of lines, people just crush in. All humans have physiological response to seeing the laws of that black

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Shame vs. guilt: guilt is I have a sense that I will feel bad if I do something perceived as wrong. Shame is that other people will think I’ve done something wrong and it will look bad for my family. We care about our families. Butting in line would make me feel terrible. Trust—can’t specify all the contingencies of contracts. In a repeat setting reputation internalizes what would be external costs. Gray area of what’s allowed and what isn’t allowed. Rental contract: rent a place on vacation, put down a deposit; showed up, gave the other half. The wife reminded Russ that it wasn’t just supposed to be the rental, but an additional deposit against damages. Standard procedure; looked at Russ and said not to worry about it; face to face might have felt embarrassed to ask for the money. Also forgot to ask for the cleaning fee, which Russ

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box broken. Example: Shibboleth, story from Bible, Judges, Chapter 12.

Shibbolet, no “th” in Hebrew, and different accent—it is either an ear of corn or wheat, or a freshet, a stream. Two Hebrew tribes had a war—the Ephraimites and the Gileadites—1200 B.C., more than 3000 years ago.

Gileadites had lost, set themselves up on the Jordan, trying to find out if any of the Ephraimites were disguised as refugees. The Gileadites would ask “Are you an Ephraimite? Say ye ‘Shibboleth’” and slew anyone who couldn’t pronounce it their way, with an “sh” sound at the start. Trust but verify.

Culture is inherited from the people who raise you. Pair of Ephraimite twins, one raised with Ephraimites and the other with the Gileadites. Pre-exhilic Hebrew had a number of dialects. Some languages have the “sh” sound and some don’t; all children can say it if they learn it before a certain age. Person who cut in line, sociopath—usually slightly more heinous kind of behavior.

Line cutter is example of homo-economicus—economic man or economic woman—who took advantage of own self-interest, felt no shame or guilt.

You don’t tip a bank teller—they’d think you are a fool; but in a restaurant if you don’t tip you are considered gauche. Every good economist understands that acting in your own self-interest is not always what people do. Rational economic man gives blood, doesn’t cut in line. If you did not get raised with those norms—Jennifer Robach Morse’s book Love and Family—you can become homo-economicus and be an unpleasant person to be around.

Thesis: Homo-economicus is a sociopath if what you mean is I get away with everything I can get away with. More than caring. In general people who behave that way get a short run benefit but a huge long run cost, trouble finding business partners, people to contract with; hard to get married. P. T. Barnum gets a bad rap for his quotation “there’s a sucker born every minute”—but he created the circus by creating the honest circus. Before he came along, people would stand in crowds and watch the acts, and the owner would circulate pickpockets. Barnum said he wouldn’t do that; wrote a book; honest dealing is the road to profit—if you can capture the reputation.

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volunteered the next day. Would feel bad if later he didn’t pay for it. Idea of damages is so vague—tracked in dirt, could have torn something, scratched the wall. Kids could have done something and hidden it; landlord could have thought something was damage even if Russ didn’t. Landlords get references on tenants; usually tenants don’t get references on landlords. They could; if it was the tendency of landlords to always keep the deposit they would. Has to be some expected level of damage. When you sell a house, what condition do you leave it in? Boilerplate in the contract, but unpleasant to sue; the way that gets settled is through a norm of what you can leave around. You’ll never see the person again. The norms emerge and get passed on. Nonspecific reciprocity—seems like a contradiction. Means I expect other people to treat me that way.

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Should always talk about baseball. Cultural shibboleth—the word has come to mean a password, not a word you can’t pronounce, like “swordfish”— Marx brothers reference, Horse Feathers. WWII, Battle of the Bulge, SS division that was going up north and had made considerable progress. Sent ahead some scouts who had been raised in the United States and who spoke perfect English. Idiomatic, unaccented American English. Sent to blow up things, change signs. Operating 50-75 miles behind the lines trying to make things more difficult. How do you discover someone, if their English is that perfect? Answer: hold at gunpoint and ask who led the American league in home runs in 1941? Worked almost perfectly. Some Type II error. Didn’t shoot them. Caught almost all the Germans who had been back in Germany the last few years. Baseball is the American shibboleth. Even if the person had been taught the answer, say Ted Williams, could go on and ask what he hit. Can press the cultural questions further.

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Talked about how cultural norms are inherited from your parents. Book on music: read that major and minor keys—Happy Birthday vs. a mournful dirge—in America major keys mean happy and minor keys mean mournful.

But in other cultures it’s the opposite—they get happy over things we would hear as sad. That has to be taught. Would have thought that would be hardwired. Could be false, but it was said to be true. Hard to believe. Sad music can make you cry—how can that not be hard wired? Closing thoughts: It was Ted Williams, slugging average of 735 in 1941; on-base percentage of 551; that was the year he batted 406. Highest on-base percentage before Barry Bonds. He did not win the MVP that year. Dimaggio that year. 56game hitting streak will be broken some day. Baseball as a shibboleth and a religious experience—a beautiful game.

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The Scourge of “Relatability”

by Rebecca Mead

If Twitter is a place in which a user may be rewarded for exposing his most stupid self, Ira Glass put the medium to good use this week, when, after watching John Lithgow appear as King Lear at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, he tweeted his response: “Shakespeare sucks.” Glass admired Lithgow’s performance but thought the play flawed. “No stakes, not relatable,” he wrote. Later, he tweeted that the productions of “Richard III” and “Twelfth Night” in which he had seen Mark Rylance perform last winter had affected him similarly: “fantastic acting, surprisingly funny, but Shakespeare is not relatable, unemotional.”

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The suckiness or otherwise of Shakespeare is a topic that cannot be broached without generating considerable online outrage, and Glass later backtracked, telling Entertainment Weekly that his provocative comment was “kind of an off-the-cuff thing to say that in the cold light of day, I’m not sure I can defend at all.” What Glass didn’t rescind, though, was the yardstick by which he was judging the merit of Shakespeare’s work: whether the plays are “relatable.”

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Perhaps that’s no surprise, because relatability—a logism so neo that it’s not even recognized by the 2008 iteration of Microsoft Word with which these words are being written—has become widely and unthinkingly accepted as a criterion of value, even by people who might be expected to have more sophisticated critical tools at their disposal. What was remarkable about Glass’s tweet wasn’t so much his judgment of Shakespeare’s merit but the fact that the Bard of Public Radio expressed himself like a resentful millennial filling out a teacher evaluation.

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Whence comes relatability? A hundred years ago, if someone said something was “relatable,” she meant that it could be told—the Shakespearean sense of “relate”—or that it could be connected to some other thing. As recently as a decade ago, even as “relatable” began to accrue its current meaning, the word remained uncommon. The contemporary meaning of “relatable”—to describe a character or a situation in which an ordinary person might see himself reflected—first was popularized by the television industry. When Rosie O’Donnell launched her TV talk show in 1996, she said that she hoped to preserve time with her family. “It’s the stories about living your life that makes you relatable to your audience,” she said. In 2004, the critic Virginia Heffernan called “relatable” “a weird daytime [TV] word” and characterized it thus: “I thought the stock way daytime people become ‘relatable’ is by being older than starlets, with wider hips. They talk about dieting.”

That weird daytime word has jumped decisively to other realms of the arts and entertainment, like an interspecies contagion. Five years ago, Times writers resorted to “relatable” on only sixteen occasions in a twelve-month period. By last year, the newspaper’s reliance on “relatable” had surged: the word appeared in a hundred and sixteen articles in 2013. In the Times Book Review, the reviewer of Leila Sales’s Y.A. novel “This Song Will Save Your Life” observed that its heroine “is a mostly relatable misfit.” In a review of the movie “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” it was noted that a character’s “journey towards self-actualization is deeply relatable.” The term has appeared in the fashion pages (Han Kjøbenhavn’s clothes are “accessibly luxurious, relatable shapes done in rich fabrics in unexpected and beautiful colors”) and the sports columns (Andy Murray, the tennis player, is a “relatable underdog”).

Elsewhere, too, praise for relatability proliferates. Writing on the Web site The Millions, David Masciotra said that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s account of his teen-age pursuits—drinking beer, kissing girls, playing electric guitar— in the “My Struggle” novels is “universally relatable.” Goodreads, the peerbook-recommendation site, lists books designated by its users as “relatable”: they include the works of the Y.A. authors Rainbow Rowell and John Green, as well as several authors who were embraced by young adults well before that marketing category was coined (Sylvia Plath, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger).

A Web site called Thought Catalog offers “29 Incredibly Relatable Quotes from ‘Girls’ That Will Make Any 20-Something Feel Less Alone,” among them the following, from Hannah Horvath: “I’m an individual and I feel how I feel when I feel it.” Richard Linklater’s film “Boyhood” reduced Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post to tears because it allowed “viewers into the lives on screen not as specimens to be watched from a safe distance but

What are the qualities that make a work “relatable,” and why have these qualities come to be so highly valued? To seek to see oneself in a work of art is nothing new, nor is it new to enjoy the sensation. Since Freud theorized the process of identification—as a means whereby an individual develops his or her personality through idealizing and imitating a parent or other figure—the concept has fruitfully been applied to the appreciation of the arts. Identification with a character is one of the pleasures of reading, or of watching movies, or of seeing plays, though if it is where one’s engagement with the work begins, it should not be where critical thought ends. The concept of identification implies that the reader or viewer is, to some degree at least, actively engaged with the work in question: she is thinking herself into the experience of the characters on the page or screen or stage.

But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.

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To appreciate “King Lear”—or even “The Catcher in the Rye” or “The Fault in Our Stars”—only to the extent that the work functions as one’s mirror would make for a hopelessly reductive experience. But to reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure.

It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of “relatable.”

In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities. That’s what sucks, not Shakespeare.

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as resonant, relatable touchstones of our own.” (That “Boyhood” has been almost universally hailed as a masterpiece, despite the banality of its plot and the cliché nature of much of its characterization, is due, in part, to the irresistible emotional power that lies in the harnessing of the passage of time, a passage that takes its toll upon all of us. The movie is the apotheosis of relatability.)

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Technology & Ourselves.

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‘Who Owns the Future?’

by Jaron Lanier

by Evgeny Morozov

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Should Google compensate us for our searches? Should Amazon pay us for the books we buy? They should, because they are using us to expand their databases and hone their algorithms—and, eventually, steal our jobs.

This is the startling argument advanced by Jaron Lanier in “Who Owns the Future?,” his eccentric but unconvincing meditation on how the middle classes could survive the menace of digitization.

In Lanier’s utopia, the data we divulge to what he dubs the “Siren Servers”— the likes of Google and Amazon—would earn us “royalties based on creative contributions from a whole lifetime.” We must seize the initiative to make this happen or prepare for “an eventual socialist backlash.”

Lanier’s proposed scheme—“the only way that democracy and capitalism can be in alignment”—is anything but modest. The title of one of his sections, “It’s All About I,” perfectly captures the book’s hyper-narcissistic tone: “My

How would Lanier’s grandiose plan work? Whenever Amazon uses our customer history to make a sale or whenever OkCupid matches a couple based on our dating history, we should get a cut—a “nanopayment.” As Google Translate gets smarter while we translate rap lyrics from Maltese to Latin, shouldn’t we get something? Perhaps—let’s just wait for Google Translate to earn Google some money first.

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tale of a talking seagull strikes me as being kitschy and contrived,” a typical sentence begins.

Karl Marx has nothing on Jaron Lanier. In Lanier’s ideal future, we would all be liking in the morning, texting in the afternoon and tweeting in the evening. Robots and 3-D printers would do all the hard work, allowing us to get rich simply by being ourselves. “In a humanistic digital economy,” he writes, “designers will still make a living, even when a dress is sewn in a home by a robot.” And the good news keeps coming: “Someone who wears the dress well might also make a little money inadvertently by popularizing it.” Go ahead: Get yourself another dress and get even richer!

To account for this lucrative wardrobe, Lanier proposes a system of ubiquitous surveillance, with cameras, databases and all. Since we can’t get any privacy, we might at least get paid. “Commercial rights,” he notes, “are better suited for the multitude of quirky little situations that will come up in real life than new kinds of civil rights along the lines of digital privacy.”

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Following Lanier’s logic, any correction in the market system—say, price adjustments based on changing demand—would require that extra profits be transferred to consumers. But should you expect a supermarket to send you a check simply because you chose to buy one brand of milk over another?

Probably not. Why treat Amazon differently?

To some, the very idea that our every decision is a piece of data to be monetized might seem appalling—and rightly so. What exactly is “humanistic” about Lanier’s vision? Its chief hero seems to be, to borrow a phrase from philosopher Michel Foucault, an “entrepreneur of the self,” always eager to cash in on some personal trivia.

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Lanier’s proposal raises two questions that he never fully confronts. First, will this scheme actually help the middle class make a decent living once IBM’s Watson starts seeing patients and grading essays? Second, how many of the online services would survive his proposed reforms?

WASHINGTON POST

If the fate of musicians is any guide, the middle class is finished. Spotify already pays musicians based on the number of times their tracks are played; so does YouTube. This works well for big-name celebrities but earns peanuts for unknown artists.

Besides, the kinds of automation that worry Lanier—say, the replacement of cabdrivers by self-driving cars—don’t require human experts to contribute any personal data. Teachers, doctors and cabdrivers actually have it much worse than musicians. Unless cabdrivers have directly contributed to the making of maps used by self-driving cars, it’s hard to see how a royalty-like system can be justified.

The second question—how many services would survive Lanier’s proposed reforms?—further undermines his argument. Take Wikipedia. Why not compensate its authors for every comma they contribute? Well, one reason is that the introduction of monetary incentives would probably affect authors’ motivation. Wikipedia the nonprofit attracts far more of them than would Wikipedia the start-up.

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While digital evangelists often go overboard in celebrating the anticommercial spirit of “the sharing economy” and “remix culture,” they do have a point, as scholars working on the sociology of incentives recognized a long ago. Lanier’s proposal would infuse all of our digital experiences with the crude commercialism of Groupon.

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Nor does Lanier discuss how his proposed scheme is to coexist with the doctrine of “fair use”—the idea that creators can freely excerpt limited portions of material created by others. Lanier writes that “if a snippet of your video were reused in someone else’s video, you would automatically get a micropayment,” never mentioning that “fair use” is a political choice, not a random outcome of inferior tracking technologies.

Many companies already do what Lanier is only fantasizing about. A new breed of businesses—data lockers—allows users to charge third parties for accessing their personal data (including genetic information). But there’s not a word about them in the book.

Stingy with specifics—he rarely quotes his ideological opponents, opting for constructions like “I am often told” and “I continue to hear fairly often,” and introducing them as the “Pirate Party/Linux/openness crowd”—Lanier eagerly opines on dense economic matters. “Keynes was an unapologetic financial elitist and had no interest in a quest for income equality or a planned

Lost in his own brand of digital sophistry, Lanier never gets around to asking how a fully automated society ought to function. Is the idea of education embedded in massive online open courses worth embracing? Is automated journalism—with algorithms churning out trivial news stories—compatible with a democratic society? A clever micropayment system won’t answer these questions.

There are many simpler ways to protect the middle classes. Pushing technology companies to provide better working conditions—it was only last year that Amazon agreed to install air conditioning in its warehouses—and closing numerous tax loopholes would be a good start. Lanier’s solution, alas, is an odd and unfortunate distraction.

The problem with DIY is that we are lowering the value of the professional who does it.

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economy,” he informs us, without providing a source.

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Social Anxiety: Why You Didn’t Have A Life In 2014 Just like on Black Mirror, when you live your life online, you’re always on the clock

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A few weeks ago, I walked into a friend’s living room and discovered a strange scene. Eight people were sandwiched together on a wrap-around couch, polishing off a luxurious dinner of steak and pasta laid out on a big wooden table. The scene felt cozy, like Thanksgiving—only everyone was facing the room’s gigantic TV, watching their own mirror image captured via a small spherical camera placed atop the TV screen. Someone had decided to broadcast the dinner party on Playstation Network Live, an internet-based service that enables users to stream their video game activity in real time and invite others to watch and offer commentary in a chatroom. The dinner party doubled as a premise for a conceptual PSN channel, its name a tongue-andcheek acknowledgement of the the online trolls who’d inevitably be dropping in: “Just A Dinner in America: A Place for Open and Polite Discourse.”

The chatroom conversation, comprised of around 150 PSN users, was largely tamer than I expected. Aside from the odd offensive comment—some regarding the physical attributes of the different females in the room, others about how we looked like hipsters, or Jews—a lot of users were just posting their phone numbers, trying to get us to call them. Eventually, it became hard to focus on anything in the room other than the TV screen; we were essentially sitting in front of a large, moving group selfie, and although we were all exchanging casual banter with the commenters in the room, I found

myself transfixed by my own onscreen likeness. It’s endlessly absorbing to see how you appear in others’ eyes—the same way it’s easy to get caught staring at your own face on Skype—and although I was just sitting in a chair, I couldn’t avoid the feeling that I was somehow “performing” the act of sitting in a chair, more like an actor at a theatrical rendition of a dinner party than someone actually attending one. Everything that happened in the room only “mattered” in the sense that it produced a corresponding event on screen, and when the number of people viewing the channel started its inevitable decline, the unspoken consensus in the room was that the broadcast was no longer necessary, and our host switched off the camera.

The dinner party experiment was really just an exaggerated version of something we do all the time: we’re always projecting ourselves onto the internet. I’m especially guilty of this—mostly because of my activity on this very website, but also because of the numerous apps and social media platforms I routinely check throughout my day. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check my text messages, then my Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; at day’s end, my “winding down” routine looks pretty much the same (with the addition of Netflix, naturally). I sleep with my laptop in bed with me and sit all day in front of a screen, in a room full of other people who are also interfacing with screens.

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Of course, there were plenty of events, news stories, and cultural artifacts that “made my year” (FADER’s 2014 Listmania extravaganza plots many of these), but the number one “happening” in my life this year was, undoubtedly, the internet. Aside from a few days when I purposely decided to unplug, I was constantly using it to absorb and create media, order cabs, send people money, get directions, and meet up (or cancel plans) with other people.

The myth of smartphones is that they’re supposed to make life easier, but they’ve also turned every possible facet of life into an engagement with the information marketplace, which is by extension an economic marketplace, one increasingly reliant on our eyes, clicks, and consumer data. In a world where there is an app for everything, it becomes harder to isolate a single moment of waking life that is not, either knowingly or not, “productive” in the economic sense.

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Recently, a coworker recommended 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, a book written by Jonathan Crary, a professor of modern art and theory at Columbia University. The book discusses life’s progressive integration into

THE FADER.COM

In a world where there is an app for everything, it becomes harder to isolate a single moment of waking life that is not, either knowingly or not, ‘productive’ in the economic sense.

THE FADER.COM

the ceaseless operations of 24/7 capitalism, with the premise that sleep—and the period of necessary, restorative inactivity that it entails—has become humanity’s last defense against total market subjugation. It opens with a chilling anecdote about how our government subsidizes studies on the brain function of a sparrow, which is able to go without sleep for days at a time, and charts the West’s historical evolution from a world governed by seasonal and diurnal rhythms to a world that “never sleeps.”

Television was a technological development that extended the sphere of market participation beyond traditional business hours, but the internet, it would seem, has effectively rendered “off time” a thing of the past. “One of the goals Google, Facebook, and other enterprises (five years from now the names may be different) is to normalize and make indispensable […] the idea of a continuous interface—not literally seamless, but a relatively unbroken engagement with illuminated screens of diverse kinds that unremittingly demand interest or response,” Crary writes. “As the opportunity for electronic transactions of all kinds becomes omnipresent, there is no vestige of what used to be everyday life beyond the reach of corporate intrusion. An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7.”

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I grew up listening to songs from the Broadway musical Rent, which preaches, somewhat cheesily, that the best way to measure a year is to measure in love.

I’m not sure what sort of love Jonathan Larson meant by that—romantic love? family love? friend love?—but I’ve always taken the sentiment of the song to mean that it’s the personal side of life that matters the most: the quality of your relationships with others and with yourself, the experiences of mutuality and fellow feeling that temporarily outshine and disrupt our more self-interested tendencies. What was sad about the dinner party experiment is that is that it took a potentially meaningful experience—a period of sharing between friends who were happy to conclude another long, hard working week—and turned it into just another piece of “content,” another opportunity to “draw eyeballs,” another means of participating in the market. It functioned as an example of how maintaining a “private” or “personal” life is increasingly difficult, but what truly made the experience scary is that we were the ones who wanted it to happen, the ones who set up the dinner table and switched the camera on.

It’s tempting to place the blame of this social phenomenon on our employers or some abstract notion of “the man,” but it’s worth considering how much of “offline” life’s impoverishment is fueled by our increasing inability to

It will not be long before our sleep/dreams is invaded by the market.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we chuck our iPhones and pretend as though technology does not exist. As a journalist (which has always been a 24/7 career), I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to survive without one.

Furthermore, I’ll always maintain some faith in the internet’s power to make the world a fairer, more equitable, and easily navigable place. Still, as we enter into the holidays, what many of us are fortunate enough to experience as a period of introspection and rest—an uber-consumerist time of year, yes, but also a dark period, one that represents the periodic disruption of the “regular” functioning of the market—I thought I’d use this column as a reminder to cherish these fleeting opportunities for “non-productive” personal time. If we hand every inch of our lives over to the information marketplace, we won’t have much of anything left for ourselves—or the sense that we ourselves have any innate value outside of it.

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We have to insist, through actions and words, on the continued existence of the “personal,” lest we want life to turn out similar to the dystopian universe portrayed in the second episode of the the recently added-to-Netflix British television show Black Mirror, “Fifteen Million Merits.” The episode submerges viewers in a humanity divided into classes of content consumers, content creators, and the unfortunates who clean up after them. The consumers—seemingly the largest class of people in this fictional society— sit on exercise bikes all day long, earning “merits” (the reigning form of currency) for the amount of miles they pedal while simultaneously disbursing “merits” for the constant stream of audio-visual content they consume on screen, including whatever compulsory programming they want to skip over.

Every quiver of every eyeball has been monetized, and so has every possible corner of human activity, right down to brushing your teeth. Everybody

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conceive the value of our own lives outside an economy of likes, follows, and retweets. “Because one’s bank account and one’s friendships can now be managed through identical mechanic operations and gestures, there is a growing homogenization of what used to be entirely unrelated areas of experience,” Crary writes. “At the same time, whatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematic participation, tend to deteriorate in esteem and desirability. Real-life activities that do no have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or to cease to be relevant. […] Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny diverting, impressive than anything in one’s immediate actual circumstances.” To go one disturbing step further, my friends seemed to find the online image of our dinner party infinitely more fascinating than the real-life get-together we were experiencing.

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sleeps alone in cells surrounded by video screens, and the only hope anybody has of escaping is auditioning for an American Idol-type show called Hot Shots, where successful contestants are offered a chance to “switch over to the other side” and become professional entertainers.

The world of “Fifteen Million Merits” is a world devoid of private life; when everyone is on the clock at all times, it becomes impossible to try to measure one’s life in love. Still, the protagonist of the episode does end up falling for someone: a young woman who sits on a nearby exercise bike. In what is perhaps the only remaining gesture of self-sacrifice available to a person in this dystopia, he hands over to her almost the whole of his life savings (specifically, “fifteen million merits”) so that she can audition on Hot Shots.

Sadly, his attempt to help her goes awry; he snaps, and somehow ends up the host of his own anti-establishment video channel, offering up a continuously broadcast stream of “real talk” about how messed up society has become: “15,000 new dopple wardrobe options, launched last week alone,” he says in one transmission. “Which effectively translates to 15,000 new ways to kill time in your cell, before you explore an afterlife, which doesn’t exist anyway.

But with any luck it’ll take your mind off those saddle sores, eh?” The vision of 24/7 capitalism we experience in this Black Mirror episode is certainly a nightmarish one, but it seems to suggest that the personal is still something worth fighting for—even if the fight comes in the form of yet another piece of content.

How the Web Became Our ‘External Brain,’ and What It Means for Our Kids

by Michael Harris

RECENTLY, MY TWO-YEAR-OLD nephew Benjamin came across a copy of Vanity Fair abandoned on the floor. His eyes scanned the glossy cover, which shone less fiercely than the iPad he is used to but had a faint luster of its own. I watched his pudgy thumb and index finger pinch together and spread apart on Bradley Cooper’s smiling mug. At last, Benjamin looked over at me, flummoxed and frustrated, as though to say, “This thing’s broken.”

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Search YouTube for “baby” and “iPad” and you’ll find clips featuring oneyear-olds attempting to manipulate magazine pages and television screens as though they were touch-sensitive displays. These children are one step away from assuming that such technology is a natural, spontaneous part of the material world. They’ll grow up thinking about the internet with the same nonchalance that I hold toward my toaster and teakettle. I can resist all I like, but for Benjamin’s generation resistance is moot. The revolution is already complete.

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Technology Is Evolving Just Like Our DNA Does With its theory of evolution, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species may have outlined, back in 1859, an idea that explains our children’s relationship with iPhones and Facebook. We are now witness to a new kind of evolution, one played out by our technologies.

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The “meme,” a term coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, is an extension of Darwin’s Big Idea past the boundaries of genetics.

A meme, put simply, is a cultural product that is copied. We humans are enamored of imitation and so become the ultimate “meme machines.”

Memes—pieces of culture—copy themselves through history and enjoy a kind of evolution of their own, and they do so riding on the backs of successful genes: ours.

According to the memeticist Susan Blackmore, just as Darwinism submits that genes good at replicating will naturally become the most prevalent, technologies with a knack for replication rise to dominance. These “temes,” as she’s called these new replicators, could be copied, varied, and selected as digital information—thus establishing a new evolutionary process (and one far speedier than our genetic model). Blackmore’s work offers a fascinating explanation for why each generation seems less capable of managing solitude, and less likely to opt for technological disengagement.

She suggests that temes are a different kind of replicator from the basic memes of everyday material culture. “Most memes... we forget how often we get them wrong,” Blackmore says. (Oral traditions of storytelling, for example, were characterized by constant twists in the tale.) “But with digital machines the fidelity is almost 100 percent. As it is, indeed, with our genes.”

This is a startling thought: By delivering to the world technologies capable of replicating information with the same accuracy as DNA, we are playing a grand game indeed.

Old Ways of Thinking Are on the Verge of Extinction The brains our children are born with are not substantively different from the brains our ancestors had 40,000 years ago. For all the wild variety of our cultures, personalities, and thought patterns, we’re all still operating with roughly the same three-pound lump of gray matter. But almost from day one, the allotment of neurons in those brains (and therefore the way they function) is different today from the way it was even one generation ago. Every second of your lived experience represents new connections among the roughly 86 billion neurons packed inside your brain. Children, then, can become literally incapable of thinking and feeling the way their grandparents did. A slower, less harried way of thinking may be on the verge of extinction.

In your brain, your billions of neurons are tied to each other by trillions of synapses, a portion of which are firing right now, forging (by still mysterious means) your memory of this sentence, your critique of this very notion, and your emotions as you reflect on this information. Our brains are so plastic that they will reengineer themselves to function optimally in whatever

UCLA’s Gary Small is a pioneer of neuroplasticity research, and in 2008 he produced the first solid evidence showing that our brains are reorganized by our use of the internet. He placed a set of “internet naïve” people in MRI machines and made recordings of their brain activity while they took a stab at going online. Small then had each of them practice browsing the internet for an hour a day for a week. On returning to the MRI machine, those subjects now toted brains that lit up significantly in the frontal lobe, where there had been minimal neural activity beforehand. Neural pathways quickly develop when we give our brains new tasks, and Small had shown that this held true—over the course of just a few hours, in fact— following internet use.

“We know that technology is changing our lives. It’s also changing our brains,” he announced. On the one hand, neuroplasticity gives him great hope for the elderly. “It’s not just some linear trajectory with older brains getting weaker,” he told me. The flip side of all this, though, is that young brains may be more equipped to deal with digital reality than with the decidedly less flashy reality that makes up our dirty, sometimes boring, material world.

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environment we give them. Repetition of stimuli produces a strengthening of responding neural circuits. Neglect of other stimuli will cause corresponding neural circuits to weaken. (Grannies who maintain their crossword puzzle regime knew that already.)

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In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how the internet fundamentally works on our plastic minds to make them more capable of shallow thinking and less capable of deep thinking. After enough time in front of our screens, we learn to absorb more information less effectively, skip the bottom half of paragraphs, shift focus constantly; “the brighter the software, the dimmer the user,” he suggests at one point.

The possibilities of such injections of “unearned” learning are as marvelous

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Kids These Days Can Think Quickly—But Not Deeply The most startling example of our brain’s malleability, though, comes from new research by neural engineers at Boston University who now suggest that our children will be able to “incept” a person “to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized.” The team was able to use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to modify in highly specific ways the brain activity in the visual cortex of their human subjects.

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as they are quagmires for bioethical debate. Your grandchild’s brain could be trained in a certain direction while watching ads through digital contact lenses without his or her awareness (or, for that matter, acquiescence). For now, it’s easier to tell that something has changed in our minds, but we still feel helpless against it, and we even feel addicted to the technologies that are that change’s agents. But will our children feel the static?

In 2012, Elon University worked with the Pew Internet and American Life Project to release a report that compiled the opinions of 1,021 critics, experts, and stakeholders, asking for their thoughts on digital natives. Their boileddown message was that young people now count on the internet as “their external brain” and have become skillful decision makers—even while they also “thirst for instant gratification and often make quick, shallow choices.”

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Some of those experts were optimistic about the future brains of the young.

Susan Price, CEO and chief Web strategist at San Antonio’s Firecat Studio, suggested that “those who bemoan the perceived decline in deep thinking... fail to appreciate the need to evolve our processes and behaviors to suit the new realities and opportunities.” Price promises that the young are developing new skills and standards better suited to their own reality than to the outmoded reality of, say, 1992. Meanwhile, the report’s coauthor, Janna Anderson, noted that while many respondents were enthusiastic about the future of such minds, there was a clear dissenting voice: “Some said they are already witnessing deficiencies in young people’s abilities to focus their attention, be patient and think deeply. Some experts expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people become shallow consumers of information, endangering society.”

TECHNOLOGY & OURSELVES

We may be on our way to becoming servants to the evolution of our own technologies. The power shifts very quickly from the spark of human intention to the absorption of human will by a technology that seems to have intentions of its own.

But we’ll likely find there was no robotic villain behind the curtain. Our own capitalist drive pushes these technologies to evolve. We push the technology down an evolutionary path that results in the most addictive possible outcome.

Yet even as we do this, it doesn’t feel as though we have any control. It feels, instead, like a destined outcome—a fate.

Technoslaves!

Who Should Own the Internet?

Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society

Turning Point: The top E.U. court orders Google to grant the “right to be forgotten.’’

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It is now a journalistic cliché to remark that George Orwell’s “1984” was “prophetic.” The novel was so prophetic that its prophecies have become modern-day prosaisms. Reading it now is a tedious experience. Against the omniscient marvels of today’s surveillance state, Big Brother’s fixtures—the watchful televisions and hidden microphones—seem quaint, even reassuring.

Everything about the world Orwell envisioned has become so obvious that one keeps running up against the novel’s narrative shortcomings.

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I am more impressed with another of his oracles: the 1945 essay “You and the Atomic Bomb,” in which Orwell more or less anticipates the geopolitical shape of the world for the next half-century. “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make,” he explains, “will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon—so long as there is no answer to it—gives claws to the weak.”

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Describing the atomic bomb (which had only two months before been used to flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as an “inherently tyrannical weapon,” he predicts that it will concentrate power in the hands of the “two or three monstrous super-states” that have the advanced industrial and research bases necessary to produce it. Suppose, he asks, “that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another?

Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate?”

The real reason lies in the calculus of power: the destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else, leaving “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes,” as Orwell wrote, “still more hopeless.”

The likely result, he concludes, will be “an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.” Inventing the term, he predicts “a permanent state of ‘cold war,”’ a “peace that is no peace,” in which “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.”

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There are parallels between Orwell’s time and ours. For one, there has been a lot of talk about the importance of “protecting privacy” in recent months, but little about why it is important. It is not, as we are asked to believe, that privacy is inherently valuable. It is not.

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The second parallel is even more serious, and even less well understood. At present even those leading the charge against the surveillance state continue to treat the issue as if it were a political scandal that can be blamed on the corrupt policies of a few bad men who must be held accountable. It is widely hoped that all our societies need to do to fix our problems is to pass a few laws.

The cancer is much deeper than this. We live not only in a surveillance state, but in a surveillance society. Totalitarian surveillance is not only embodied in our governments; it is embedded in our economy, in our mundane uses of technology and in our everyday interactions.

The very concept of the Internet—a single, global, homogenous network that enmeshes the world—is the essence of a surveillance state. The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored.

Unlike intelligence agencies, which eavesdrop on international telecommunications lines, the commercial surveillance complex lures billions of human beings with the promise of “free services.” Their business model is the industrial destruction of privacy. And yet even the more strident critics of NSA surveillance do not appear to be calling for an end to Google and Facebook.

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At their core, companies like Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency. They collect a vast amount of information about people, store it, integrate it and use it to predict individual and group behavior, which they then sell to advertisers and others.

This similarity made them natural partners for the NSA, and that’s why they were approached to be part of PRISM, the secret Internet surveillance program.

Technical and technological advances brought about the dawn of human civilization.

Recalling Orwell’s remarks, there is an undeniable “tyrannical” side to the Internet. But the Internet is too complex to be unequivocally categorized as a “tyrannical” or a “democratic” phenomenon.

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When people first gathered in cities, they were able to coordinate in large groups for the first time, and to exchange ideas quickly, at scale. The consequent technical and technological advances brought about the dawn of human civilization.

Something similar has been happening in our epoch. It is possible for more people to communicate and trade with others in more places in a single instant than it ever has been in history. The same developments that make our civilization easier to surveil make it harder to predict. They have made it easier for the larger part of humanity to educate itself, to race to consensus, and to compete with entrenched power groups.

If there is a modern analogue to Orwell’s “simple” and “democratic weapon,” which “gives claws to the weak” it is cryptography, the basis for the mathematics behind Bitcoin and the best secure communications programs.

It is cheap to produce: cryptographic software can be written on a home computer. It is even cheaper to spread: software can be copied in a way that physical objects cannot. But it is also insuperable—the mathematics at the

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This is encouraging, but unless it is nurtured, it may be short-lived.

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heart of modern cryptography are sound, and can withstand the might of a superpower. The same technologies that allowed the Allies to encrypt their radio communications against Axis intercepts can now be downloaded over a dial-up Internet connection and deployed with a cheap laptop.

Humanity cannot now reject the Internet, but clearly we cannot surrender it either.

Whereas in 1945, much of the world faced a half-century of tyranny as a result of the atomic bomb, in 2015, we face the inexorable spread of invasive mass surveillance and the attendant transfer of power to those connected to its superstructures. It is too early to say whether the “democratizing” or the “tyrannical” side of the Internet will eventually win out. But acknowledging them — and perceiving them as the field of struggle—is the first step toward acting effectively.

Humanity cannot now reject the Internet, but clearly we cannot surrender it either. Instead, we have to fight for it. Just as the dawn of atomic weapons inaugurated the Cold War, the manifold logic of the Internet is the key to understanding the approaching war for the intellectual center of our civilization.

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Technologies Smart Enough to Exploit Human Nature Persuasive technologies surround us, and they’re growing smarter. How do these technologies work? And why?

GSN Games, which designs mobile games like poker and bingo, collects billions of signals every day from the phones and tablets its players are using— revealing everything from the time of day they play to the types of game they prefer to how they deal with failure. If two people were to download a game onto the same type of phone simultaneously, in as little as five minutes their games would begin to diverge—each one automatically tailored to its user’s style of play.

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Yet GSN does not simply track customers’ preferences and customize its services accordingly, as many digital businesses do. In an effort to induce players to play longer and try more games, it uses the data it pulls from phones to watch for signs that they are tiring. Largely by measuring how frequently, how fervently, and how quickly you press on the screen, the company can predict with a high degree of accuracy just when you are likely to lose interest—giving it the chance to suggest other games long before that happens.

The idea that computers, mobile phones, websites, and other technologies could be designed to influence people’s behavior and even attitudes dates

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The games are free, but GSN shows ads and sells virtual items that are useful to players, so the longer the company can persuade someone to play, the more money it can make. Its quickly growing revenue and earnings are a testament to how well this strategy works, says P ­ ortman Wills, GSN’s chief information officer. Along with factors such as smart engineering and creative design, using data to shape persuasive tactics is a key to the company’s success.

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back to the early 1990s, when Stanford professor B. J. Fogg coined the term “persuasive computing” (later broadened to “persuasive technology”). But today many companies have taken that one step further: using technologies that measure customer behavior to design products that are not just persuasive but specifically aimed at forging new habits.

If habit formation as a business model was once largely limited to casinos and cigarette manufacturers, today technology has opened up the option to a broad range of companies. Insights from psychology and behavioral economics about how and why people make certain choices, combined with digital technologies, social media, and smartphones, have enabled designers of websites, apps, and a wide variety of other products to create sophisticated persuasive technologies.

How these technologies work and why are the big questions this Business Report will answer.

With new digital tools, companies that might once have been simply hardware makers (such as Jawbone) or service providers (Expedia) are now taking on the role of influencer, attempting to shape the habits of their users by exploiting the psychological underpinnings of how people make choices.

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While Expedia is trying to design its website so as to trigger someone to visit daily, Jawbone has built features into its fitness bands and other products that executive Kelvin Kwong grandly describes as “using our best understanding of how the brain works to get you to act.” And Kwong says it’s working.

Sending carefully designed messages to people wearing Jawbone fitness trackers has helped them get an additional 23 minutes of sleep per night on average, and move 27 percent more, the company says.

Habit Design, which bills itself as “the leading habit training program,” employs game designers and people with PhDs in behavioral science. It says it has created a platform that keeps 80 percent of participants in corporate wellness programs involved over three months. Traditional programs like seminars or counseling, by contrast, generally lose 80 percent of participants in the first 10 days, according to Michael Kim, a former Microsoft executive who is now Habit Design’s CEO. New data-centered models of persuasion are having an impact not only on new startups but on traditional influencers, from political consultants to advertising agencies. In politics, data consulting firms that emulate the kind of voter modeling, mobilization, and persuasion the Obama campaigns

One model for today’s new type of ad firm is Rocket Fuel, based in Redwood City, California. Staffed by people with PhDs in game theory and predictive modeling, the firm uses artificial intelligence to predict the best ad to show a given customer looking at a particular Web page, taking into account data gathered from websites; the browsing, advertising, and purchase history associated with a given shopper’s IP address; and insights into what style of ad works best on a certain website (blue hues are best on Answers.com, for example). Founded in 2008, the company claims its targeted ads generate revenue for clients amounting to two to eight times what is spent on the ads.

Last year Rocket Fuel had revenue of more than $400 million.

Marketers argue that there’s potential for all this to benefit consumers, who want better service and more suitable offers. “They expect companies have data on them. They just want it to do something useful for them,” says Philip Wickline, CEO of Zaius, a Boston-based startup building a platform that will allow a company to track customers’ behavior, with their permission, as they interact with it in stores, online, and in any other context. Armed with this information, companies could better understand the value of each customer and more effectively measure the return on ads or discounts directed at that person.

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pioneered are multiplying.

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Given the depth of information about us that tracking technologies generate, and companies’ increasingly sophisticated attempts to affect our behavior, what are the appropriate limits of a kind of persuasion that can be so well designed as to be nearly invisible? There are already legal limits on how companies can advertise products. But the government’s own use of behavioral persuasion has led to calls for updated regulations.

Rather than trying to regulate hard-to-spot attempts to get people to form new habits, a more practical solution might be for product designers to agree to adhere to principles like transparency and disclosure. Requiring a user to sign up to be persuaded—as you very well might in search of better sleep or fitness—could be best.

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Gary Marcus on the Future of Artificial Intelligence and the Brain Gary Marcus of New York University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). While Marcus is concerned about how advances in AI might hurt human flourishing, he argues that truly transformative smart machines are still a long way away and that to date, the exponential improvements in technology have been in hardware, not software. Marcus proposes ways to raise standards in programming to reduce mistakes that would have catastrophic effects if advanced AI does come to fruition. The two also discuss “big data’s” emphasis on correlations, and how that leaves much to be desired.

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Intro. [Recording date: December 8, 2014.] Russ: We’re going to talk about human intelligence, artificial intelligence, building on a recent talk and article on the subject that he has done; whether we should be worried about artificial intelligence running amok. Gary, welcome to EconTalk. Guest: Thanks very much. I should mention, by the way that I have a more recent book that’s very relevant, which is called The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists. Maybe we’ll touch on that. Russ: Excellent. We’ll put a link up to it. Now, there’ve been a lot of really smart folks raising the alarm about artificial intelligence, or as it’s usually called, AI. They are worried about it taking over the world, forcing humans into second-class status at best or maybe destroying the human race. Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have both shown concern. And here at EconTalk I recently spoke with Nick Bostrom about the potential for superintelligence, which is what he calls it, to be an anti-human force that we would lose control of. So, let’s start with where we stand now. What are the successes of artificial intelligence, what are its capabilities today in 2014? Guest: I think we’re a long way from superintelligence. People have been working on AI for 50 or 60 years, depending on how you count. And we have some real success stories. Like, Google Translate—pretty impressive. You can put in a news story in any language you like, get the translation back in English. And you will at least figure out what the story was about. You probably won’t get all the

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details right. Google Translate doesn’t actually understand what it translates.

It’s parasitic on human translators. It tries to find sentences that are similar in some big database, and it sort of cuts and pastes things together. It’s really cool that we have it. It’s free. It’s an amazing thing. It’s a produce of artificial intelligence. But it’s not truly intelligent. It can’t answer a question about what it reads; it can’t take a complicated sentence and translate it, that, into good English. Apparently I can’t, either. It has problems. Even though it does what it does well. It’s also typical of the kind of state of AI, which is kind of like it’s an idiot savant. The savant that’s mastered this critic of translation without understanding anything deeper. So, Google Translate couldn’t play chess. It couldn’t ride a bicycle. It just does this one thing well. And that’s characteristic of AI. You can think, for example, of chess computers. That’s all they do. Watson is really good at playing Jeopardy, but IBM (International Business Machines), hasn’t yet really mastered the art of applying it to other problems—working in medicine for example. But nobody would use Watson as their doctor just yet. So we have a lot of specialist computers that do particular problems. Superintelligence I think would at a minimum require things like the ability to confront a new problem and say, ‘How do I solve that?’ So, read up on Wikipedia and see. Superintelligence ought to be able to figure out how to put a car together, for example. We don’t have an AI system that’s anywhere near being able to do that. So, it’s in progress; but we also have to understand that the progress is limited. On some of the deeper questions, we still don’t know how to build genuinely intelligent machines.

Russ: Now, to be fair to AI and those who work on it, I think, I don’t know who, someone made the observation but it’s a thoughtful observation that any time we make progress–well, let me back up. People say, ‘Well, computers can do this now, but they’ll never be able to do xyz.’ Then, when they learn to do xyz, they say, ‘Well, of course. That’s just an easy problem. But they’ll never be able to do what you’ve just said’–say–’understand the question.’ So, we’ve made a lot of progress, right, in a certain dimension. Google Translate is one example. Siri is another example. Wayz, is a really remarkable, directiongenerating GPS (Global Positioning System) thing for helping you drive.

They seem sort of smart. But as you point out, they are very narrowly smart.

And they are not really smart. They are idiot savants. But one view says the glass is half full; we’ve made a lot of progress. And we should be optimistic about where we’ll head in the future. Is it just a matter of time? Guest: Um, I think it probably is a matter of time. It’s a question of whether are we talking decades or centuries. Kurzweil has talked about having AI in about 15 years from now. A true artificial intelligence. And that’s not going to happen. It might happen in the century. It might happen somewhere in between. I don’t think that it’s in principle an impossible problem. I don’t think that anybody in the AI community would argue that we are never going to get there. I

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think there have been some philosophers who have made that argument, but I don’t think that the philosophers have made that argument in a compelling way. I do think eventually we will have machines that have the flexibility of human intelligence. Going back to something else that you said, I don’t think it’s actually the case that goalposts are shifting as much as you might think. So, it is true that there is this old thing that whatever used to be called AI is now just called engineering, once we can do it. Russ: Right. Guest: There’s some truth in that. But there’s also some truth in the fact that the early days of AI promised things that we still haven’t achieved. Like there was a famous summer project to understand vision. Well, computers still don’t do vision. And that was 50-some years ago. And computers can only do vision in limited ways, like met-camera does face recognition, and that’s helpful for its autofocus. Russ: Amazing. Guest: And you know, that’s pretty cool. But there’s no digital camera you can point out in the world and say, ‘Watch what’s going on and explain it to me.’ There is actually a program that Google just released that does a little bit of that. But if you read the fine print, they don’t give you any accuracy data. And then some really weird results there, that like, if a 2-year-old made errors like that you would bring them to a doctor and say, ‘Is there some kind of brain damage here?

Why is my 2-year-old doing this?’

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Russ: So, we talked here in a recent episode, and you read, talked about it, the cat-recognition program that Google has. Not so good. Guest: So, the cat recognizer was the biggest neural network every constructed to date. It was on the front page of the New York Times about 2 years ago. Turns out that nobody is actually using it any more. The Times got very excited about something that was sort of a demo, but not really that rich. So, what it really would do is it would recognize cat faces of a particular sort. It wouldn’t even recognize a line drawing of a cat face. It would just cluster together a bunch of similar stimuli. Well, I have a 2-year old; that’s not what he does with cats.

He doesn’t just recognize this particular view of a cat. He can recognize many different views of cats. And he can recognize drawings of cats; he can recognize cartoons of cats. We don’t know how to build any access to that.

Russ: So, what would Ray Kurzweil say in response—you know, he’s an optimist, he thinks—in many dimensions; we’ll talk about some of other ones as well. But he says it’s “fifteen years away.” Besides the fact that it makes it more fun to listen to him when he says that, what do you think his—what does he have in mind? Does he have something in mind? Guest: He’s always talking about this exponential law. He’s talking about Moore’s Law. So, he’s saying, ‘Look at this; look at how much cheaper transistors have gotten, how many more we can pack in, how much faster computers have gotten.’ And this is an acceleration here. He calls it the Law of Accelerating

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Russ: So, let me raise an unattractive thought here. And I’ll lump in myself in a different way, or at least my profession, to try to soften the ugliness of it. Isn’t it impossible that people that people who are involved in AI, who of course are the experts, are a little more optimistic about both the potential for progress and the impact of it on our lives? And maybe they ought to be, because they are self-interested. I think about economists— Guest: Whoa. I should say that I am involved. I actually started a very quiet startup company.

I would like to see AI as enhanced, from a personal process, perspective. I write in the AI journals; I just had accepted yesterday, in Communications of the ACM, which is one of the big journals; I have another one coming out in AM Magazine. So, I mean, I am part of the field, now. I am kind of converted over from cognitive science to artificial intelligence in some ways.

Russ: Well, that’s okay. You’re allowed to be self-reflective about your [?].

Guest: And I look around in the field, and a lot of people are really excited.

And there a lot people that aren’t. So, I’m running a workshop in Austin[?], co-running I should say, workshop in Austin about sequels to the Turing test[desk?]. This is coming up in January. And my co-organizers and I are

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Returns, or something like that. And that’s true for some things. But it’s not for others. So, for a strong artificial intelligence, which is what we are really talking about, where you have a system that really is as flexible and clever as a person, you look over the last 50 years and you don’t really see exponential growth. So, like, we have this chat bot called Siri. Back in the 1960s before I was born so it’s a funny use of the word ‘we’, but the field had ELIZA that pretended to be a psychiatrist. And some people were fooled. Russ: And some people presumably got comfort from it. Guest: And some people presumably got comfort from it. But it didn’t really understand what it was talking about. And it was really kind of a parlor trick. And if you talked to it for long enough you would realize. Now we have Eugene Goostman, that does a little bit better—”one that’s earned the Turing test this year”. But did that by pretending to be a 13-year-old Russian boy who didn’t know our culture and our language, but was basically a big evasion, as ELIZA was.

It’s not really any smarter. Siri is a little bit smarter than ELIZA, because it can tell you about the movies and maybe the weather and so forth. But I wouldn’t say that Siri is an exponential increase on what it was before. I would say it’s a lot incremental engineering for 50 years. But not anything like exponential important. I think Kurzweil conflates the exponential improvement in hardware—which is undeniable—with software, where we can exponentially improve certain things—has gotten exponentially better.

But on the hard problem of intelligence, of really understanding the world, being able to flexibly interpret it and act on it, we haven’t made exponential progress. I mean, linear progress; and not even a lot of that.

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just doing an interview, and we talked about why we did this. We are trying to build a sequel to the Turing test. And we all have this. And the field has gotten really good at building trees, but the forest isn’t there yet. And I don’t think you’ll actually find that many people in the field that will disagree.

Russ: No, I know; but in terms of the—and by the way, explain what the Turing Test is, for those who don’t know. And we’ll come back to it. Guest: The Turing Test is this famous test of Alan Turing, devised to say whether a computer was intelligent. And he did it in the days of B. F. Skinner and behaviorism, and so forth. And we wouldn’t do it the way he did it. But he said, let’s operationally define intelligence as, let’s see if you can fool me into thinking you are actually a person, if you are actually a machine. And I don’t think it’s actually that meaningful a test. So, if we don’t have that long a conversation, I can make a computer that kind of pretends to not be very smart; that’s what this program Eugene Goostman did—not very smart or not very sophisticated, can be very paranoid, and so forth, and so evades the questions. All that’s really showing is how easy it is to fool a person, but it’s not actually a true measure of intelligence. It was a nice try but it was 60 years ago, before people really had computers, and somehow it’s become this divine test. But it doesn’t [?] with the times, which is the point of this session, that Manuela Veloso, Francesca Rossi, and I are running at the Triple[?] AI Society, the big artificial intelligence society.

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Russ: Let me come back to this question of bias. What I was going to say is I think if you ask most economists how well we understand the business cycle, say, booms and busts, recessions, recoveries, depression, they’d say, well, we have a pretty good understanding but it’s just a matter of time before we really master it. And I have a different perspective. I don’t think it’s just a matter of time. So I accept your point that there are certain people in AI who think we haven’t gotten very far. But it seems to me that there are a lot of people in AI who think it’s only a matter of time, and that the consequences are going to be enormous. They’re not going to just be like a marginal improvement or marginal challenge. They “threaten the human race.”

Guest: Before we get to those consequences, which I actually do think are important, I’ll just say that there’s this very interesting [?] by a place called MIRI in Berkeley, MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute). And what they found is that they traced people’s prediction of how far away AI is.

And the first thing to know is what they found is, the central prediction, I believe it was the modal prediction, close to the median prediction, was 20 years away. But what’s really interesting is that they then went back and divided the data by year, and it turns out that people have always been saying it’s 20 years away. And they were saying it was 20 years away in 1955 and they’re saying it now. And so people always think it’s just around the corner.

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The joke in the field is that if you say it’s 20 years away, you can get a grant to do it. If you said it was 5 years away, you’d have to deliver it; and if 100 years, nobody’s going to talk to you. Russ: Yeah. Twenty is perfect. Let’s go back to your point about the progress not being as exponential as, say, the hardware, as people might have hoped. You said it’s been linear at best, maybe not so much. It seems to me that we’ve made very little progress on the qualitative aspect and a lot of progress on the quantitative aspect—which is what you’d expect. Right? You’d expect there to be a chess-playing program that can move more quickly, look at more moves, etc. A driverless car is a little bit more sophisticated, it seems to me: it requires maybe a different kind of processing in real time. Guest: Actually, driverless cars are really interesting because you could do it in different ways. Same with chess. You could imagine playing chess like people do. The Grand Masters only look at a few positions. It’s really interesting that they’re able to do that. Nobody knows how to program a machine to do that. Instead chess was solved in a different way, through brute force, through looking at lots of positions really fast, with some clever tricks about deciding which [?]; but looking at billions of positions rather than dozens. It turns out in driving you can also imagine a couple of ways to do it. One would be, you teach a machine to have, say, values about what a car is worth and what a person is worth, and you give it a 3-dimensional understanding of the geometry of the world, and all of these kinds of things. In a way, what Google’s actually doing is coming closer to brute force: an enormous amount of data, a lot of canned coded cases, although I’m not exactly sure how they’re doing it. And they rely on incredibly detailed road maps—much more detailed than the regular maps that you rely on. They rely on things down to a much finer degree—I don’t know if it’s by the inch or something like that, I don’t have the exact data, which they don’t share very freely. But from what I understand, the car can drive around in the Bay area because they have very detailed maps there. They wouldn’t be able to drive in New York, because they don’t have the same maps. And so they are relying on this specialist data rather than a general understanding of what it is to drive and interact with other objects and so forth. Russ: Yeah; I think it was David Autor who was talking about it here on EconTalk. He said it’s more like a train on tracks than it is like the way a person drives.

Guest: Yeah; it’s a very good analogy. Russ: And—so let’s talk about that non-brute force strategy for a little bit. I think a lot of people believe that it’s just a matter of time before we understand the chemistry and biology and physics of the brain, and we’ll be able to replicate that in a box, and make a really good one—or a really big one—so that it would look at a dozen moves in a chess game and just go, ‘Oh, yeah.’ It would have what we call intuition.

What are your thoughts on that? Guest: Well, my new book, The Future of the Brain, which is an edited book with a lot of contributors, not just me, is

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partly on that question. And there are several things I would say, kind of bringing together what everybody there has written. The first is: nobody thinks that we are that close to that. So, people are trying to figure out how to look, for example, at one cubic millimeter of cortex and figure out what’s going on there. And people will be thrilled if we can do that in the next decade. Not that many people think we’ll really get that far. So there’s a lot of question about how long it will take in order to have, say, a complete wiring diagram. And where we are now is we have some idea about how to make a wiring diagram where we don’t actually know what the units are. So, imagine you have a diagram for a radio but I’ve obscured what’s a resistor, what’s a transistor, and so forth. You just know something goes here. Well, that’s not going to tell you very much. People are aware of the problem. So, part of the Brain Initiative is sponsoring programs to figure out what kinds of neurons do we have. How many different kinds of neurons are there in the brain? We don’t even know that yet. A lot of people think it’s like 800 or 1000. We don’t know what they’re all there for, or why there are so many different ones. We know there’s an enormous amount of diversity in the brain, but we don’t have at all a handle on what the diversity is about. So, that’s one issue: when will we actually have enough data? And a sub-question there is: Can we ever get it from the living human brain? So, we can cut up mammals’ brains and most people won’t get too upset about it. But nobody’s going to cut up their living relatives in order to figure out how the brain works. Russ: They might want to. It’s gauche. Guest: They might want to. Most people are going to draw the line there. So, there’s actually interesting things you can do. Like, you can take some brain tissue from people with epilepsy where they have to remove part of the brain. And you don’t want to sort of cut too little out because then you leave things in and sort of like removing a tumor: it’s a kind of delicate balance. So you get some extra brain tissue from living human brains that you can look at. It’s not that we have 0 data. But it’s pretty difficult to get the data that we need. And then, if you have it in a dish it’s not the same thing as having it in the live brain. So, it’s not clear when we are going to get the data that we would need to do a complete simulation of the human brain.

I’m willing to go on record as betting that that won’t happen in the next decade, and maybe not the next 2 decades. Then you have the question of how do they put it all together in a simulation. And there are people working on the question; it’s a very interesting question but it’s a pretty hard one. And even if people figure out what they need to do, which requires figuring out what level of analysis to have, which is something your economic audience would understand—like, do you want to model things at the level of the individual or the corporation; what’s my sampling unit? Well, that comes up in the brain. So, do I want to model things at the level of the individual neuron, the individual synapse, or the molecules within? It makes a difference

Russ: Given all of that, why are people so obsessed right now—this week, almost, it feels like—with the threat of super AI, or real AI, or whatever you want to call it, the Musk, Hawking, Bostrom worries? We haven’t made any progress—much. We’re not anywhere close to understanding how the brain actually works. We are not close to creating a machine that can think, that can learn, that can improve itself—which is what everybody’s worried about

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with the simulation, how [?] simulation is. In the worst case, we might need to go down to the level of the molecule. The chance that the brain simulation will run in real time is basically zero. Russ: Why is that? Guest: So, the computational complexity gets so vast. You can think about, like, the weather right now. People know how to build simulations of the weather where you take a lot of detailed information and you predict where we’re going to be in the next hour. That works pretty. Right? Predicting weather in the next hour is great. Predicting it in the next day is okay, Predicting it two weeks from now—forget about it. Russ: But we’re pretty good at—November through January is going to be colder than—right? Guest: Yeah, you get some broad trends; I can give you some broad trends without doing a detailed simulation of the brain. Like I can tell you if I offer somebody a choice between $1000 and $5, they are going to take the thousand dollars. I don’t need to do the brain simulation to get that right. But if I really want to predict your detailed behavioral patterns, then to do that at any length of time beyond a few seconds is probably going to be really difficult. It’s going to be very computationally expensive. And if there are minor errors, as there may well be, then you may wind up in totally the wrong place. We also think about the famous butterfly flapping its wings in Cincinnati changes the weather somewhere else. Really, there are effects like that in the brain. It’s just not clear that any time soon there is really going to be a way of building it in AI. And then the third objection I have to that whole approach is, we’re not trying to build replications of human beings. I love Peter Norvig’s line on that. Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google. He says, ‘Look, I already built two of those’—meaning his kids. Russ: Yeah. He’s good at that. We know how to do that pretty well. Guest: The real question is how do we build a machine that’s actually smarter and doesn’t inherit our limitations. Another book I wrote is called Kluge which is about the limitations of the human mind. So, for example, our memories are pretty lousy. Nobody wants to build a machine that has lousy memory. Why would you do that? If all you could do is emulate every detail of the brain without understanding it, that’s what you’d wind up with—a computer that’s just as bad at remembering where it put its car keys as my brain is. That’s not what we want. We really have to understand the brain to simulate it. And that’s a pretty hard problem.

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or excited about, depending on their perspective, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. But, why do you think there’s this sudden uptick, spike in focusing on the potential and threat of it right now? Guest: Well, I don’t have a full explanation for why people are worried now. I actually think we should be worried. I don’t understand exactly why there was such a shift in the public view. So, I wanted to write about this for The New Yorker a couple of years ago, and my editor thought, ‘Don’t write this. You have this reputation as this sober scientist who understands where things are. This is going to sound like Science Fiction. It will not be good for your reputation.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think it’s really important and I’d like to write about it anyway.’ We had some back and forth, and I was able to write some about it—not as much as I wanted. And now, yeah, everybody is talking about it. I don’t know if it’s because Bostrom’s book is coming out or because people, there’s been a bunch of hyping, AI stories make AI seem closer than it is, so it’s more salient to people. I’m not actually sure what the explanation is. All that said, here’s why I think we should still be worried about it. If you talk to people in the field I think they’ll actually agree with me that nothing too exciting is going to happen in the next decade. There will be progress and so forth and we’re all looking forward to the progress. But nobody thinks that 10 years from now we’re going to have a machine like HAL in 2001. However, nobody really knows downstream how to control the machines. So, the more autonomy that machines have, the more dangerous they are. So, if I have an Angry Birds App on my phone, I’m not hooked up to the Internet, the worst that’s going to happen if there’s some coding error maybe the phone crashes.

Not a big deal. But if I hook up a program to the stock market, it might lose me a couple hundred million dollars very quickly—if I had enough invested in the market, which I don’t. But some company did in fact lose a hundred million dollars in a few minutes a couple of years ago, because a program with a bug that is hooked up and empowered can do a lot of harm. I mean, in that case it’s only economic harm; and [?] maybe the company went out of business—I forget. But nobody died. But then you raise things another level: If machines can control the trains—which they can—and so forth, then machines that either deliberately or unintentionally or maybe we don’t even want to talk about intentions: if they cause damage, can cause real damage.

And I think it’s a reasonable expectation that machines will be assigned more and more control over things. And they will be able to do more and more sophisticated things over time. And right now, we don’t even have a theory about how to regulate that. Now, anybody can build any kind of computer program they want. There’s very little regulation. There’s some, but very little regulation. It’s kind of, in little ways, like the Wild West. And nobody has a theory about what would be better. So, what worries me is that there is at least potential risk. I’m not sure it’s as bad as like, Hawking, said. Hawking

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seemed to think like it’s like night follows day: They are going to get smarter than us; they’re not going to have any room for us; bye-bye humanity. And I don’t think it’s as simple as that. The world being machines eventually that are smarter than us, I take that for granted. But they not care about us, that they might not wish to do us harm—you know, computers have gotten smarter and smarter but they haven’t shown any interest in our property, for example, our health, or whatever. So far, computers have been indifferent to us. Russ: Well, I think they have no intention other than what we put in them. And I think the parallel worry with the idea that some day we are going to cross this boundary from these idiot savants into a thinking machine is, ‘Well, then, if they are thinking they must have intention. They must have consciousness.’ I think that’s the worry. I just don’t know if that’s a real—I don’t know if that’s a legitimate worry. I’m skeptical. I’m not against it; I don’t think it’s wrong. It’s just not obvious. Guest: It’s not obvious that consciousness comes with being smarter. First thing that I would say. And the second thing that I would say is, it’s not obvious that even if they make a transition to being a lot smarter—whatever that means—that they will care about our concerns then, either. But, at the same time, it’s not obvious that they won’t. I haven’t seen somebody prove that they won’t, or shown me a regulation that will guarantee our safety. Russ: Yeah, that’s a whole separate issue, when you think about—okay, let’s take it seriously: what are we possibly going to do? I can’t imagine what we might do to protect “ourselves”— humans, from these machines. Other than unplugging them, which, you know, Bostrom I think over-exaggerates but he suggests it might not be possible to unplug them. They’ll just take charge of our brains and fool us and manipulate us and—the next thing you know, we’re gone. I don’t find that plausible. It’s interesting. Maybe we should worry about it. But given that we can’t imagine what the skillset of things are going to be, it’s hard to know what we might do to prevent it from happening. Guest: I mean, at some level I agree with you. I think there’s a difference between you and I can’t imagine sitting here on this phone call, and maybe having society invest a little bit of money in academic programs to think about these things, and so forth. And maybe with enough intense interest we might come up with something. I’ll give you an example. There is a field in AI, let’s say in computer science, called program verification, in which you try to make sure a program actually does what it’s supposed to do. Which most people most of the time don’t do. Most of the time, they release something; there are bugs; they fix the bugs. And in some domains that’s okay. In a car, it’s not really okay. And in, you know, the stronger, more powerful a machine gets, the less okay it is to just say, ‘Oh, we’ll try that; we’ll see if there are bugs and we’ll fix them.’

You would like actually a science of how you assure yourself that the machine is going to do what you want it to do. And there is such a field. It’s not, I think,

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up to the job so far. But you could think about, how do you grow a field like that so that it might help us? So, there are academic avenues you can consider.

And there are legal avenues, too. Do we need to think how people think more about what the penalties are? How serious a crime is it? Most people think that software violations, unless they are like embezzlement, they are not that serious. But maybe there should be some class of software violations that should be treated with much more severe penalties. Russ: Well, an air traffic control system that went awry, or ran amok, would be horrifying. Obviously, the driverless car that swerves off the road into a crowd. These are obviously bad things. Right now we have something of a legal system to deal with it; but you are right: it would have to probably be fashioned somewhat differently.

But when you talk about that kind of regulation, it reminds me a little bit of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). Right? The FDA is designed to try to make sure that the human-created intelligence in pharmaceuticals is “safe.” I don’t think it’s been a very good—I think it’s been a very bad way to do that. I’m not sure we want to go down that road for computer programs.

Obviously we need a computer program that would measure whether they are safe or not. And of course, that’s impossible. In my opinion. Because there’s no such thing as ‘safe’—it inevitably involves judgment. Guest: Yeah.

I mean, I think there are steps one could take; but I don’t think they add up to something that makes me feel totally confident. So, that’s why I still worry, even though I don’t think the problem is an immediate one. I guess the other thing that Bostrom and others talked about is, the problem could come more quickly than we think. I mean, I wouldn’t want the whole species to bet on my particular pessimism about the field. I mean, I could be wrong. Russ: That’s a good point. Guest: There could be a lot of arguments for why I think, you know, next decade not that much is going to happen. But maybe someone will come up with some clever idea that nobody really considered before, and it will come quickly. Russ: And all of our appliances will conspire while we are asleep to take over the house. Right? That’s the worry, right?

And we won’t even know about it. They’ll have extracted our organs and sold them on markets before we can even wake up. Guest: Well, you make it sound ridiculous. But— Russ: I’m trying. Guest: But 20 years from now, the Internet of Things will be pervasive. People will be habituated to it, just like they are habituated to the complete lack of privacy that they have on Facebook. And they’ll be used to the fact that all of their devices are on the web. And, I think, like create—what do they call them—I’ll call it ‘black malware’ on the web—ransomware is the word. Where they create something that says ‘I’m going to erase your hard drive unless you send me some Paypal money. Now multiply that by the Internet of Things. Russ: Yeah. I’d say that’s more worrisome than—I’d say, as some listeners have pointed out in response to the Bostrom episode, that’s a little more frightening than HAL

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Russ: Let’s go back to some of the technical side of things. And you speculated about this in a recent talk you gave; and we’ll post that on the episode’s web page. Why haven’t we made more progress? As you say, we’ve made a lot of progress in certain areas. Why have some of the optimists been disappointed? Where do you think AI has gone wrong? Guest: Well, I think in the early days people simply didn’t realize how hard the problem was. I mean, people really thought that you could solve vision[?] in the summer.

There was a grant for it; there was a proposal; they said, this is what we are going to do. And people just didn’t understand the complexity, I think. First and foremost, the way in which top-down knowledge about how the world works interfaces with bottom-up knowledge about, like, what the pixels look like—I’ve used pixels in a row; is there a line there in this diagram? And we’re pretty good now, 50 years later, at the bottom-up stuff: do these patterns of dots look like a number ‘6’ or a number ‘7’? We’ve trained a lot of examples; we can get a machine to do that automatically. But the top down stuff we really need to understand the world, nobody’s got a solution yet. I think it’s partly because you need to do a lot of hard work to get that right. It’s possible to build relatively simple algorithms that do the bottom up stuff. And right now the commercial field of AI is dominated by approaches like that, where you use Big Data and you get things like that kind of part right. So, nobody cares if your recommendation is kind of 70% correct. So, if I told you you’d like a book by Gary Marcus, and you don’t, well, it’s not the end of the world.

But there are domains where you need to get things right. Driving is one of them; maybe you can do that by brute force and maybe you can’t. Google hasn’t quite proven yet that you can. If you wanted a robot in your home then the standard needs to be very high. It’s not enough to be sort of 70% correct using a statistical technique. So, the 70% correct statistical technique gives you the translation that gives you the gist. Nobody would use Google Translate on a legal contract, though, because gist wouldn’t be good enough.

And similarly, you wouldn’t want a robot that is right most of the time. Right?

Because if it’s wrong a little bit, it puts your cat in your dishwasher, and it’s bad. And so— Russ: Steers you down a one-way street in the wrong way.

Guest: [?] there is a higher standard for what is required, but nobody knows how to do that yet. So, people are kind of focusing on where the street lights are. The street lights are how to make money off Big Data. And that’s kind of where the field is focused right now. And understandably so. There’s money to be made. But that’s not getting us to the deeper level there. Russ: And in your talk, I think you mentioned a very perceptive point about what Big Data is really about is, this thing is related to this other thing. And that’s not what we really want. Guest: I mean, it’s mostly right, doing statistical analysis,

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run amok. Guest: I think in the short to medium term, it is.

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correlational analysis. And correlation can only get you so far. And usually correlations are out there in the world because they are causal principles that make them true. But if you only pick up on the correlation rather than the causal principle, then you are wrong in the cases where maybe there is another principle that applies or something like that. And so, statistical correlations are good guides, but they are not great guides. And yet that’s kind of where more of the work is right now. Russ: Well, that’s where we’re at in economics. That’s where we’re at in epidemiology. That’s where we’re at to some extent with analyzing climate. These are all complex systems where we don’t fully understand how things fully connect, and we hope that the things we’ve measured are enough. And I think they often aren’t. So, I’m more of a pessimist about the potential of Big Data. Guest: I had that piece in The New York Times called “Eight (No, Nine!) Problems With Big Data,” and expressed exactly that view. The graphic that you’re talking about actually came from something that the Times’s freelance artist did for that Op-Ed. And we went through all the kinds of problems that you get with Big Data— maybe you can put that one in the show notes. Ultimately they are variations on the theme of correlation and causation. And there are some sort of more sophisticated cases. But if that’s all you are relying on is the Big Data and you don’t have a deeper conceptual understanding of the problem, things can go wrong at any minute. Like a famous example now is Google Flu Trends, which worked very well for a while. Russ: Google what? Guest: Flu Trends.

Like, do you have the flu? Russ: Okay. Guest: And what it did was it looked at the search trends people were doing. And for a while, they were pretty well correlated. More searches for these words meant more people had the flu. And then it stopped working. And nobody really quite knew why. And because there was just some correlational data, it was a guide but it was a very soluble guide. There were all these papers written when it first came out about how they were much better than the CDC (Centers for Disease Control); it was much faster than the data that the CDC was collecting, and so forth. And it is faster. It’s immediate. But that doesn’t make it right. Russ: Yeah. It’s interesting.

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Russ: What’s the up side? Let’s not be so worried for the moment about, say, my coffee maker, which I can program, taking up my internal organs while I’m sleeping. Let’s talk about something a little cheerier. I’ve been surprised—maybe I don’t read enough, obviously--but when they talk about the potential for AI, they use words like ‘energy’, ‘medicine’, and ‘science’.

And I’m curious—which are all things we all care about; they are really important. I’d like to go the doctor; people are using AI to interpret x-rays; that’s a good thing. Sometimes, and maybe a lot of the time—I was talking to Daphne Koller about maybe they are better than humans. Great. That’s

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an improvement. What we really want, though, is a cure for cancer. I think, ideally. Are those things—we want “free energy,” we want a battery that lasts more than a day—these are the things that are going to change the texture and quality of life. Are they in reach if we made enough progress? Guest: I think so. I mean, we were talking a minute ago I guess about epidemiology and things like that. I think that a lot of biological problems—we’ll start with biology—are very, very complex in a way that an individual human brain probably can’t fathom. So, think about the number of molecules.

There are hundreds of thousands of different molecules in the body. And the interactions of them matter. You can think of it like a play with a hundred thousand different actors. Right? Your brain just can’t handle that. People write plays—who was the guy?—Robert Altman would make movies with like 30 characters, and your brain would hurt trying to follow them. Well, biology is hundreds of thousands of characters. And really, it’s like hundreds of thousands of tribes. Because each of those molecules is many, many copies, slightly different from one another. It might be that no human brain can ever really grok that, can never really interpret all those. And a really smart machine might be able to. Right now, machines aren’t that smart. They can keep track of all those characters but they don’t really understand the relations between them. But imagine a machine that really understood, say, how a container works. How a blood vessel works. How molecules are transported through. Really had the conceptual apparatus that a good scientist has; but the computational apparatus that the machine has. Well, that could be pretty exciting. That could really fundamentally change medicine. So, and that’s part of why I keep doing this, despite the worries: I do think on balance that probably it’s going to be good for us rather than bad. I think it’s like a lot of other technologies: there’s some risks and there’s some rewards. I think the rewards are in these big scientific problems and big engineering problems that individual brains can’t quite handle. Russ: That’s a little bit mesmerizing and fascinating. I should tell our followers—I wrote a followup to the Bostrom episode that is up at econtalk.org; you are welcome to go check it out. There were some interesting moments in that conversation. But one of the things I raise in that followup is related to your point about lots of molecules being analogous to lots of characters in a play. Which is—one analogy I think about is history. So, we don’t have a theory of history. We don’t pretend to understand the “real” cause of WWI or the American Civil War. We understand it’s a messy, unscientific enterprise. People have different stories to tell; they have evidence for their stories. But we don’t pretend that we’re going to ever discover the real source of the Second World War, the First World War, the Civil War. Or why one side won rather than the other.

We have speculation. But the real problem is what you just said—there’s a hundred thousand players. Sometimes it’s just 10—Kaiser Wilhelm and Lloyd

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George and Clemenceau and the Czar, and Woodrow Wilson—and that’s already too hard for us. We can’t—we don’t have enough data; we don’t have enough evidence; there’s too much going on. And again, I think of economics being like that. There are many people who disagree. But I think these are in many ways, possibly, fundamentally insoluble. Is that possible? Guest: Well, I think there’s a difference between like predicting everything that’s going to happen in this particular organism from this moment going forward and understanding the role of this molecule such that I can build something that interacts with it. And realizing that if I do, that things might change. So, I don’t know that the entire problem is graspable, but I don’t think that that rules out that if you better understand the nature of some of those interactions that you won’t be able to intervene. Russ: No, I agree. And obviously we’ve made—medicine’s a beautiful example of how little we know and yet we’ve made extraordinary progress, maybe not as extraordinary as we’d like, in helping people deal with things that we call pathologies—things that are disease, etc. And I think we have a lot of potential there, for customized pharmaceuticals, to your own particular metabolism and body, etc. I think that’s coming; I think we’ll make progress there. Guest: Well, I think AI will be really important in making that progress, actually. If you think about how much data is in your genome, it’s too much for you to actually sort out by yourself. But you might, for example, be able to run silico simulations in order to get a sense of whether this drug is likely to work with your particular genome. And probably that’s just too hard a computation for one doctor to do. So we thank God, machines help with it. Russ: Absolutely. Yeah. And they’ll figure out the dose, whether it will work or not; they’ll tailor the dose, which is remarkably blunt at current levels of medical understanding. Guest: They’ll find a cocktail for you. Russ: Sure. Because interactions are too hard for us. In theory, I guess simulation could take us a long way there. Guest: I would add that on the point about simulation that intelligence simulation, let’s call it, is a lot better than blind simulation. Like, if you really have to go down to the level of the individual molecule, you get back into that problem I was talking about before, computational complexity. You really want the simulations to have some understanding of the principles that are there in order to do it efficiently.

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Russ: Let’s talk about how humans—let’s move away from this machine that understands everything including what I need next, not just, not only knows what drug to give me; it knows that I shouldn’t go skiing tomorrow because I’m not going to really like it so much. That’s sort of, to me, this unrealistic but maybe possible future that machines, our interactions with machines. What about the possibility of humans just being augmented by technology? We think about the wearables, and I assume, people are already

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Russ: Let’s talk about the economic effects and talk about employment. Of course, it’s a big issue right now. This is a little more plausible to me: it’s not so much that AI is going to know how to interview really interesting, smart people so I won’t be able to do EconTalk any more. There are plenty of technological advancements that we’ve seen in the last 25 years that have made people unemployable or certain skills unusable in the workforce. What do you think is coming there in the shorter run, before we get to this superintelligence? What are some of the things that are going to make it challenging for certain skills to be employable? Guest: The first major skillset that’s going to diminish in value, pretty rapidly, is driving. In the next 2 decades, most taxi drivers will lose their job, delivery truck drivers, bus drivers. Most of that will go away. And it’ll certainly go away in 3 decades,

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doing it, of course, implantables. What’s the potential for machines to be tied to my brain in ways they aren’t now? Now I’m just listening or looking at them. But maybe more directly. Is that going to happen? Guest: Well, something else you can add to your show notes is a piece I wrote on brain implants for The Wall Street Journal with Christof Koch. And we talked about these kinds of things and we went through some of the limitations. So, for example, right now a problem with brain implants is the risk of infection.

So, we put something in, but we’ve got to clean the dressing every week or you might have an infection that will kill you. It’s a pretty serious restriction.

I would love to have Google onboard, directly interfaced with my brain, giving me all the information I need as I need it. But I don’t really want to pay the risk of infection and death. And so there are some technical problems like that that need to be solved. And probably will. There’s some energy and power problems that need to be solved. There’s some interface problems. So, we know enough about how the motor cortex works to make it so that roughly you can move a robot arm with your thoughts. You can’t move it that well; it’s sort of inefficient. It’s like one of those things you see in a little carnival where you’ve got a little gear driving this thing—it’s not a very direct connection.

But we know something about it. We don’t know anything about how to interface ideas to machines. So, the software and the pulling things out of your memory is not that hard: Google solves that, and Spotlight and Apple solve that, and so forth. We have technology for things like that. But the problem of interpreting your brain state so that we know what search query to run, that’s pretty hard. It’s so hard that we’ve made no progress on it so far.

We will eventually. There’s no reason to think that there’s no coding there to be understood. It’s a matter of cracking codes. The code might be different for different individuals; you might have to do a lot of calibration. But there are probably some general laws that could help us get started. And some day we’ll figure out those laws. But we haven’t yet.

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and probably in 2. Some of the problems are still on the software side, but I think they’re mostly solvable. There are some liability issues, and people getting used to the idea. But eventually machines will drive better than people. And they’ll do it cheaper and they’ll be able to do it 24 hours a day, and so the trucking companies will want to do it, taxi companies will want to do it— Russ: You’ll be safer, in theory. It’s a glorious thing, in theory: use less energy, it’ll be more efficient. Guest: Eventually all that will come to pass. And there the ‘eventually’ really is like a 20, 30 year horizon. It’s not 100 years. There’s no reason that it will take that long. And so that’s a pretty radical shift to society. There are lots of people that make their living driving.

And it’s not clear what those people will do. The common story I hear is, well, we’ll all get micropayments; Google will pay for our information, there’s a [?] story; or we’ll all make tons of money on Youtube and Etsy and so forth.

And I don’t buy that. I think that there’s a little bit of money—well, actually, there’s a lot of money to be made for a small number of people. You look at Youtube videos; the top 100 people make a real career out of it. But most people don’t. And that’s going to be true in each of these domains, so you might get a few hundred thousand people, if you are really lucky across a whole lot of different creative enterprises making some money; and then you are going to have several hundred thousand people that really don’t have an alternative career. The end—the problem’s going to get worse, because the problem is going to happen in the service industry. So, you already, some places, can order your pizza by touching a touchpad; you don’t need a waiter there any more. There’s someone who has a burger assembly plant that’s completely automated; and I’m sure McDonald’s is investing in that kind of thing. There’s going to be fewer people working in fast food. There’s going to be a whole lot of industries, one by one, that disappear. What I think the endgame is here, and I don’t know how in America we are going to get there, is in fact a guaranteed minimum income from the state. The state is going to have to tax more heavily the people that own all of these technologies—I think that that’s clear. And there’s going to have to be a separation in people’s lives between how they find meaning and how they work. So, you and I grew up in an era in which meaning, especially for men but also for many women comes from work. I mean, not solely from that—it comes from parenting and so forth. But that’s going to change. It’s going to have to change, because for most people that’s not going to be an option any more. People are going to have to make meaning in a different way. Russ: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think a lot of the deepest questions around these technological changes are political and cultural. So you said those driverless cars are coming in 20 or 30 years, driverless vehicles. Guest: Could be 10. Russ: No, I think it could be 10, too. I think we’ll have the technology. The question is whether we’ll have the political will to fight it and to make it happen. So, right now, just to take a

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trivial example, Uber, which is, to me the forerunner of the driverless car— because I think that’s the way you’ll be picked up; you’ll be picked up by a drone, whether it’s in the air or on the ground, that’s going to drive you where you ask it to go. And it’ll figure out through a network system how not to run into other things. But Uber’s having a lot—everyone who uses it, almost everyone, thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. And yet there are many cities where you are not allowed to use it, because it hurts the cab drivers who have paid a lot for their medallions; or people are alarmed by it.

They find it somehow unattractive that they can charge certain prices at certain times, that they don’t do x, y, or z. So, one question is the political will. The cultural will is another area where you’re point is a fantastic point, about meaning. Because to me, I think that’s what matters. I think people— the pie is going to be really big, and dividing it up is going to be not as hard as it might be, as you might think. But the challenge is: how much fun is it going to be to watch Youtube all day? I mean, people do seem to be drawn to it. I, myself, have trouble sometimes pulling myself away from entertaining videos. But that’s a strange life, compared to, as you say, the way we grew up.

Guest: I personally never watch Youtube. But I will admit I spend a lot of time on my iPad, merely doing other things. I think that to some extent the pain will be eased for some people because a lot of available— Russ: Say that again—a lot of what? Guest: The pain will be eased. So, the Oculus Rift and its competitors—a lot of people are going to enjoy immersing themselves in virtual worlds. So, it might be that this a sort of eat cake, a kind of software driven cake that nobody imagined before. And it might be that some people don’t find that meaningful. Some people might do physical things, go back to the land. I think different people respond differently. I do have to say that the Web and eye-devices and all those kinds of things really do suck up a lot of people’s time; and I think that’s part of what will happen.

That will be the more true. Russ: Yeah, I see it as a possible—obviously there will be cultural change as to what’s acceptable and what’s considered honorable and what’s considered praiseworthy. My parents, and to some extent me, we frown on people who sit on the Internet all day, to some extent.

But part of that is happening with us, too. So, we’re not—but our children, they think it’s normal. They don’t think anything is remarkable about it at all, to inhabit a virtual world for long periods of time. And I presume it will become even more normal. So, some of these worries I think won’t be worries.

But as you point out—we have a lot of hardwired things in us that are not easily changed by culture, perhaps. I think about just how physically fit so many people are, physically active, in a world where being physically active is really not as valuable as it used to be, and maybe isn’t even so healthy.

People tout its healthiness; it makes you live longer. But a lot of it I think is just a desire for real stuff. Nassim Taleb points out how weird it is that when you

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check into the hotel you see the person’s bags being carried by an employee of the hotel, and then half an hour later that same person is in the gym lifting heavy things. And lifting his own bags. We’re a complicated species. Guest: We are a complicated species. I think what’s interesting about the iPad, for example, is how well it taps into our innate psychology. So I think we do have an evolved psychology; it’s a malleable one, malleable through culture. But people have figured out how to build toys that didn’t exist before that really drive—first it was television, now it’s the iPhone—toys that—the iPod in between. These toys really do tap into needs that have existed for hundreds of thousands of years.

55:30

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Russ: So, why don’t we close with—I want to ask you what’s coming in 20 years, because—that’s not the best way to think about it, but what’s coming soon besides driverless cars that excites you or that worries you? Guest: I’m actually pretty excited about the virtual reality stuff. I’m ambivalent about it. I think that it’s going to be incredibly exciting and some people aren’t going to want to leave it. I think it’s going to be fun—like you step into a virtual reality system and suddenly you are climbing Mt. Everest.

And I think that’s different from playing a conventional video game where you might be walking around—I think that there’ll be some real, visceral excitement to that. And that might be 10 years; certainly won’t be more than 20. Part of the technology is already in place. I think that’s going to feel very powerful. It may wear off. I remember being really excited by high definition television and watching videos of underwater creatures and thinking this is the most amazing thing ever. Russ: Mesmerizing. Yeah. Guest: I was totally mesmerized for months. And now, you know, I watch my HD TV once a month, maybe, and it’s fine; but it doesn’t really do much for me any more. Russ: I’ve felt that way about my iPad, too. When I first got it I just couldn’t believe what it could do. I just enjoyed just touching it, watching it, putting it through its paces. Now, it’s like, eh. Guest: I need it for work, my iPad. Russ: Yeah, it’s a different thing. Guest: I think some of the excitement goes away and then it’s a matter of, do these actually help me?

And maybe that’ll be true with the virtual reality. But I think also you’ll have some people at least for a little while who will check out. And that’s not necessarily what you want for your society. So, it’s complicated. I think that’s the next big movement that I see coming—virtual reality is in some way going to fundamentally change the texture of society. And I don’t really want to guess which way, whether it’s going to be positive or negative, or just fun, or doesn’t last very long, or whatever if it’s a long-term thing. But at least for a little while, that’s going to be a big thing.

Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday

by Ashlee Vance

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ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.

While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.

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The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies.

Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity—a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.

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Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company—Google—works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.

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Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.)

The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.

Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing.

On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans—or at least something derived from them—can have it all.

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“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human—to extend who we are.”

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But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

In the years since the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, violently inveighed against the predations of technology, plenty of other more sober and sophisticated warnings have arrived. There are camps of environmentalists who decry efforts to manipulate nature, challenges from religious groups that see the Singularity as a version of “Frankenstein” in which people play at being gods, and technologists who fear a runaway artificial intelligence that subjugates humans.

A popular network television show, “Fringe,” playfully explores some of these concerns by featuring a mad scientist and a team of federal agents investigating crimes related to the Pattern—an influx of threatening events caused by out-of-control technology like computer programs that melt brains

Some of the Singularity’s adherents portray a future where humans break off into two species: the Haves, who have superior intelligence and can live for hundreds of years, and the Have-Nots, who are hampered by their antiquated, corporeal forms and beliefs.

Of course, some people will opt for inadequacy, while others will have inadequacy thrust upon them. Critics find such scenarios unnerving because the keys to the next phase of evolution may be beyond the grasp of most people.

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and genetically engineered chimeras that go on killing sprees.

“The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have,” says Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who has written extensively on techno-utopianism. “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”

Peter A. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a major investor in Facebook, is a Singularity devotee who offers a “Singularity or bust” scenario.

“It may not happen, but there are a lot of technologies that need to be developed for a whole series of problems to be solved,” he says. “I think there is no good future in which it doesn’t happen.”

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‘Transcendent Man’ In late August, Mr. Kurzweil will begin a cross-country multimedia road show to promote “Transcendent Man,” a documentary about his life and beliefs. Another of his projects, “The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,” has also started to make its way around the film festival circuit.

Throughout “Transcendent Man,” Mr. Kurzweil is presented almost as a mystic, sitting in a chair with a shimmering, circular light floating around his head as he explains his philosophy’s basic tenets. During one scene at a beach, he is asked what he’s thinking as he stares out at a beautiful sunset with waves rolling in and wind tussling his hair.

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“Well, I was thinking about how much computation is represented by the ocean,” he replies. “I mean, it’s all these water molecules interacting with each other. That’s computation.”

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Mr. Kurzweil is the writer, producer and co-director of “The Singularity Is Near,” the tale of Ramona, a virtual being he builds that gradually becomes more human, battles hordes of microscopic robots and taps the lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz for legal advice and the motivational guru Tony Robbins for guidance on personal interactions.

With his glasses, receding hairline and lecturer’s ease, Mr. Kurzweil, 62, seems more professor than thespian. His films are just another facet of the Kurzweil franchise, which includes best-selling books, lucrative speaking engagements, blockbuster inventions and a line of health supplements called Ray & Terry’s (developed with the physician Terry Grossman).

Mr. Kurzweil credits a low-fat, vegetable-rich diet and regular exercise for his trim frame, and says he conquered diabetes decades ago by changing what he ate and later reprogramming his body with supplements. He currently takes about 150 pills a day and has regular intravenous procedures. He is also co-writer of a pair of health books, “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever” and “Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.”

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Mr. Kurzweil routinely taps into early memories that explain his lifelong passion for inventing. “My parents gave me all these construction toys, and sometimes I would put things together, and they would do something cool,” he says. “I got the idea that you could change the world for the better with invention — that you could put things together in just the right way, and they would have transcendent effects.

“That was kind of the religion of my family: the power of human ideas.”

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A child prodigy, he stunned television audiences in 1965, when he was 17, with a computer he had built that composed music. A couple of years later, in college, he developed a computer program that would seek the best college fit for high school students. A New York publishing house bought the company for $100,000, plus royalties.

“Most of us were going to school to get knowledge and a degree,” says Aaron Kleiner, who studied with Mr. Kurzweil at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later became his business partner. “He saw school as a tool that let him do what he needed to do.”

Some of Mr. Kurzweil’s better-known inventions include the first printscanning systems that converted text to speech and allowed the blind to read standard texts, as well as sophisticated electronic keyboards and voice-

He began his march toward the Singularity around 1980, when he started plotting things like the speed of chips and memory capacity inside computers and realized that some elements of information technology improved at predictable—and exponential—rates.

“With 30 linear steps, you get to 30,” he often says in speeches. “With 30 steps exponentially, you get to one billion. The price-performance of computers has improved one billion times since I was a student. In 25 years, a computer as powerful as today’s smartphones will be the size of a blood cell.”

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recognition software. He has made millions selling his inventions, and his companies continue developing other products, like software for securities traders and e-readers for digital publications.

His fascination with exponential trends eventually led him to construct an elaborate philosophy, illustrated in charts, that provided an analytical backbone for the Singularity and other ideas that had been floating around science-fiction circles for decades.

As far back as the 1950s, John von Neumann, the mathematician, is said to have talked about a “singularity”—an event in which the always-accelerating pace of technology would alter the course of human affairs. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer, computer scientist and math professor, wrote a research paper called “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.”

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“Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” Mr. Vinge wrote. “Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

In “The Singularity Is Near,” Mr. Kurzweil posits that technological progress in this century will be 1,000 times greater than that of the last century. He writes about humans trumping biology by filling their bodies with nanoscale creatures that can repair cells and by allowing their minds to tap into superintelligent computers.

Mr. Kurzweil writes: “Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all along), at least doubling in power each year.

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“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence,” he continues. “This is the destiny of the universe.”

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The underlying premise of the Singularity responds to people’s insecurity about the speed of social and technological change in the computer era. Mr. Kurzweil posits that the computer and the Internet have changed society much faster than electricity, phones or television, and that the next great leap will occur when industries like medicine and energy start moving at the same exponential pace as I.T. He believes that this latter stage will occur when we learn to manipulate DNA more effectively and arrange atoms and have readily available computers that surpass the human brain.

In 1970, well before the era of nanobot doctors, Mr. Kurzweil’s father, Fredric, died of a heart attack at his home in Queens. Fredric was 58, and Ray was 22. Since then, Mr. Kurzweil has filled a storage space with his father’s effects—photographs, letters, bills and newspaper clippings. In a world where computers and humans merge, Mr. Kurzweil expects that these documents can be combined with memories harvested from his own brain, and then possibly with Fredric’s DNA, to effect a partial resurrection of his father.

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By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, as the Singularity starts to come into full flower.

Despite such optimism, some Singularitarians aren’t all that fond of Mr. Kurzweil.

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“I think he’s a genius and has certainly brought a lot of these ideas into the public discourse,” says James J. Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit that studies the implications of advancing technology. “But there are plenty of people that say he has hijacked the Singularity term.”

Mr. Kurzweil says that he is simply trying to put analytical clothing on the concept so that people can think more clearly about the future. And regardless of any debate about his intentions, if you’re encountering the Singularity in the business world and elsewhere today, it’s most likely his take.

Bursts of Innovation Peter H. Diamandis, 49, is a small man with a wide, bright smile and a thick mound of dark hair. He routinely holds meetings by cellphone and can

He is also a firm believer in the Singularity and is a technocelebrity in his own right, primarily through his role in commercializing space travel. At a recent Singularity University lunch, he hopped up to make a speech peppered with passion and conviction.

“My target is to live 700 years,” he declared.

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usually be found typing away on his laptop. He went to medical school to make his mother happy but has always dreamed of heading to outer space.

The students chuckled.

“I say that seriously,” he retorted.

The NASA site, the Ames Research Center, houses an odd collection of unusual buildings, including a giant wind tunnel, a huge supercomputing center and a flight simulator facility with equipment capable throwing people 60 feet into the air.

Today, the government operates NASA Ames as a bustling, publicsector-meets-private-sector technology bazaar. Start-ups, universities and corporations have set up shop here, and Google plans to build a new campus here over the next few years that will include housing for workers.

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A nondescript structure, Building 20, is the Singularity University headquarters, and most students stay in nearby apartments on the NASA land. Mr. Kurzweil set up the school with Mr. Diamandis, who, as chief executive of the X Prize Foundation, doled out $10 million in 2004 to a team that sent a private spacecraft 100 kilometers above the earth. Google has offered $30 million in rewards for an X Prize project intended to inspire a private team to send a robot to the moon. And a $10 million prize will go to the first team that can sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days at a cost of $10,000 or less each—which, in theory, would turn an expensive, complex lab exercise into an ordinary affair.

Mr. Diamandis champions the idea that large prizes inspire rapid bursts of innovation and may pave a path to that 700-year lifetime.

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“I don’t think it’s a matter of if,” he says. “I think it’s a matter of how. You and I have a decent shot, and for kids being born today, I think it will be a matter of choice.”

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For the most part, Mr. Kurzweil serves as a figurehead of Singularity University, while Mr. Diamandis steers the institution. He pitches the graduate student program as a way to train young, inspired people to think exponentially and solve the world’s biggest problems — to develop projects that will “change the lives of one billion people,” as the in-house mantra goes.

Mr. Diamandis hopes that the university can create an unrivaled network of graduates and bold thinkers—a Harvard Business School for the future— who can put its ideas into action. Along with that goal, he’s considering creating a venture capital fund to help turn the university’s big ideas into big businesses. As some of their favored student creations, school leaders point to a rapid disaster alert-and-response system and a venture that lets individuals rent their cars to other people via cellphone.

Devin Fidler, a former student, is in the midst of securing funding for a company that will build a portable machine that squirts out a cementlike goop that allows builders to erect an entire house, layer by layer. Such technology could almost eliminate labor costs and bring better housing to low-income areas.

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Mr. Diamandis has certainly built a selective institution. More than 1,600 people applied for just 40 spots in the inaugural graduate program held last year. A second, 10-week graduate program will kick off this month with 80 students, culled from 1,200 applicants.

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One incoming student, David Dalrymple, is an 18-year-old working on his doctorate from M.I.T.. He says he plans to start a research institute someday to explore artificial intelligence, medicine, space systems and energy. (He met Mr. Kurzweil at a White House dinner, and at the age of 8 accepted the offer to have Mr. Kurzweil serve as his mentor.)

During the spring executive program, about 30 people—almost all of them men — showed up for the course, which is something of a mental endurance test. Days begin at dawn with group exercise sessions. Coursework runs until about 9 p.m.; then philosophizing over wine and popcorn goes until midnight or later. A former Google chef prepares special meals—all of which are billed as “life extending”—for the executives.

The meat of the executive program is lectures, company tours and group thought exercises.

Day 4 includes test drives of Tesla Motors electric sports cars and a group

However much the Singularity informs the environment here, a majority of the executives attending the spring course expressed less interest in living forever and more in figuring out their next business venture or where they wanted to invest.

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genetic test, thanks to a company called deCODEme. By Day 6, people are annoyed by the BrinBot, which is interrupting lectures with its whirs and sputters. Someone tapes a pair of paper ears on it to try to humanize it. One executive sullenly declines to participate in another robot design exercise because no one in his group will consider making a sexbot.

Robin Tedder, a Scottish baron who lives in Australia and divides his time among managing a personal fortune, racing a yacht and running a vineyard, says he read about Singularity University in an investor newsletter and checked out the Web site.

“What really convinced me to pay the 15 grand was that I didn’t think it was some kind of hoax,” Mr. Tedder said in an interview after he completed the executive program. “I looked at the people involved and thought it was the real deal. In retrospect, I think it’s a very good value.”

Like a number of other participants, Mr. Tedder is contemplating business ventures with his classmates and points to high-octane networking as the school’s major benefit.

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Attendees at the spring session came from all over the globe and included John Mauldin, a best-selling author who writes an investment newsletter; Stephen Long, a research director at the Defense Department; Fernando A. de la Viesca, C.E.O. of the Argentinean investment firm TPCG Financial; Eitan Eliram, the new-media director for the prime minister’s office in Israel; and Guy Fraker, the director of trends and foresight at State Farm Insurance.

“We end up cleaning up the mess of unintended consequences,” says Mr. Fraker of his company’s work. He says it makes sense for him to gauge technological trends in case humans can one day gain new tools for averting catastrophes. For example, he’s confident that in the future people will have the ability to steer hurricanes away from populated areas.

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Executives in the spring program also heard that some young people had started leaving college to set up their own synthetic biology labs on the cheap.

Such people resemble computer tinkerers from a generation earlier, attendees note, except now they’re fiddling with the genetic code of organisms rather

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than software.

“Biology is moving outside of the traditional education sphere,” says Andrew Hessel, a former research operations manager at Amgen, during a lecture here. “The students are teaching their professors. This is happening faster than the computer evolved. These students don’t have newsletters. They have Web sites.”

Daniel T. Barry, a Singularity University professor, gives a lecture about the falling cost of robotics technology and how these types of systems are close to entering the home. Dr. Barry, a former astronaut and “Survivor” contestant with an M.D. and a Ph. D., has put his ideas into action. He has a robot at home that can take a pizza from the delivery person, pay for it and carry it into the kitchen.

“You have the robot say, ‘Take the 20 and leave the pizza on top of me,’ ” Dr. Barry says. “I get the pizza about a third of the time.”

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Other lecturers talk about a coming onslaught of biomedical advances as thousands of people have their genomes decoded. Jason Bobe, who works on the Personal Genome Project, an effort backed by the Harvard Medical School to establish a huge database of genetic information, points to forecasts that a million people will have their genomes decoded by 2014.

“The machines for doing this will be in your kitchen next to the toaster,” Mr. Bobe says.

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Mr. Hessel describes an even more dramatic future in which people create hybrid pets based on the body parts of different animals and tweak the genetic makeup of plants so they resemble things like chairs and tables, allowing us to grow fields of everyday objects for home and work. Mr. Hessel, like Mr. Kurzweil, thinks that people will use genetic engineering techniques to grow meat in factories rather than harvesting it from dead animals.

“I know in 10 years it will be a junior-high project to build a bacteria,” says Mr. Hessel. “This is what happens when we get control over the code of life.

We are just on the cusp of that.”

Christopher deCharms, another Singularity University speaker, runs Omneuron, a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., that pushes the limits of brain imaging technology. He’s trying to pull information out of the brain via sensing systems, so that there can be some quantification of people’s levels of

“We are at the forefront today of being able to read out real information from the human brain of single individuals,” he tells the executives.

Preparing to Evolve Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, has followed Mr. Kurzweil’s work and written a science-fiction thriller, “Breakpoint,” in which a group of terrorists try to halt the advance of technology. He sees major conflicts coming as the government and citizens try to wrap their heads around technology that’s just beginning to appear.

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depression and pain.

“There are enormous social and political issues that will arise,” Mr. Clarke says. “There are vast groups of people in society who believe the earth is 5,000 years old. If they want to slow down progress and prevent the world from changing around them and they engaged in political action or violence, then there will have to be some sort of decision point.”

Mr. Clarke says the government has a contingency plan for just about everything—including an attack by Canada—but has yet to think through the implications of techno-philosophies like the Singularity. (If it’s any consolation, Mr. Long of the Defense Department asked a flood of questions while attending Singularity University.)

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Mr. Kurzweil himself acknowledges the possibility of grim outcomes from rapidly advancing technology but prefers to think positively. “Technological evolution is a continuation of biological evolution,” he says. “That is very much a natural process.”

To prepare for any rocky transitions from our benighted present to the technoutopia of 2030 or so, a number of people tied to the Singularity movement have begun to build what they call “an education and protection framework.”

Among them is Keith Kleiner, who joined Google in its early days and walked away as a wealthy man in 2005. During a period of personal reflection after his departure, he read “The Singularity Is Near.” He admires Mr. Kurzweil’s vision.

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“What he taught me was ‘Wake up, man,’ ” Mr. Kleiner says. “Yeah, computers will get faster so you can do more things and store more data, but it’s bigger than that. It starts to permeate every industry.”

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Mr. Kleiner, 32, founded a Web site, SingularityHub.com, with a writing staff that reports on radical advances in technology. He has also given $100,000 to Singularity University.

Sonia Arrison, a founder of Singularity University and the wife of one of Google’s first employees, spends her days writing a book about longevity, tentatively titled “100 Plus.” It outlines changes that people can expect as life expectancies increase, like 20-year marriages with sunset clauses.

She says the book and the university are her attempts to ready people for the inevitable.

“One day we will wake up and say, ‘Wow, we can regenerate a new liver,’ ” Ms. Arrison says. “It will happen so fast, and the role of Singularity University is to prepare people in advance.”

Despite all of the zeal behind the movement, there are those who look askance at its promises and prospects.

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Jonathan Huebner, for example, is often held up as Mr. Kurzweil’s foil. A physicist who works at the Naval Air Warfare Center as a weapons designer, he, like Mr. Kurzweil, has compiled his own cathedral of graphs and lists of important inventions. He is unimpressed with the state of progress and, in 2005, published in a scientific journal a paper called “A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation.”

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Measuring the number of innovations divided by the size of the worldwide population, Dr. Huebner contends that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873.

Or, based on the number of patents in the United States weighed against the population, he found a peak around 1916. (Both Dr. Huebner and Mr. Kurzweil are occasionally teased about their faith in graphs.)

“The amount of advance in this century will not compare well at all to the last century,” Dr. Huebner says, before criticizing tenets of the Singularity.

“I don’t believe that something like artificial intelligence as they describe it will ever appear.”

William S. Bainbridge, who has spent the last two decades evaluating grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, also sides with the skeptics.

“We are not seeing exponential results from the exponential gains in computing power,” he says. “I think we are at a time where progress will be increasingly difficult in many fields.

‘Deus ex Machina’ Last month, a biotech concern, Synthetic Genomics, announced that it had created a bacterial genome from scratch, kicking off a firestorm of discussion about the development of artificial life. J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in the human genome trade and head of Synthetic Genomics, hailed his company’s work as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

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“We should not base ideas of the world on simplistic extrapolations of what has happened in the past,” he adds.

Steve Jurvetson, a director of Synthetic Genomics, is part of a group of very rich, very bright Singularity observers who end up somewhere in the middle on the philosophy’s merits—optimistic about the growing powers of technology but pessimistic about humankind’s ability to reach a point where those forces can actually be harnessed.

Mr. Jurvetson, a venture capitalist and managing director of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, says the advances of companies like Synthetic Genomics give him confidence that we will witness great progress in areas like biofuels and vaccines. Still, he fears that such technology could also be used maliciously—and he has a pantry filled with products like Spam and honey in case his family has to hunker down during a viral outbreak or attack.

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“Thank God we have a swimming pool,” he says, noting that it gives him a large store of potentially potable water.

Mr. Orlowski, the journalist, sees the Singularity as a grand, tech-nerd dream in which engineers, inventors and innovators of every stripe create the greatest of all reset buttons. He says the techies “seem to want a deus ex machina to make everything right again.”

They certainly don’t want any outside interference, and are utterly confident that they will realize the Singularity on their own terms and with their own wits — all of which fits with Silicon Valley’s strong libertarian traditions.

Google and Microsoft employees trailed only members of the military as the largest individual contributors to Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign.

“Dealing with politics means having to compromise and convince people of

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The Valley’s wizards also prefer to avoid any confrontation with Washington.

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things and form alliances with people who don’t always agree with you,” Mr. Orlowski says. “They’re not wired for that.”

Increasing Acceptance Mr. Kurzweil is currently consulting for the Army on technology initiatives, and says he routinely talks with government and business leaders. Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, appears in Mr. Kurzweil’s books and often on the back flaps with celebratory quotations.

Mr. Kurzweil and Mr. Page of Google created a renewable-energy plan for the National Academy of Engineering, advising that solar power will one day soon meet all of the world’s energy needs.

Mr. Kurzweil’s 31-year-old son, Ethan, says his father has always been ahead of the curve. The family had the first flat-screen television and car phone on the block, as well as a phone that could fax photos.

“We also had this thing where you put on a hat that had sensors and it would create music to match your brain waves and help you meditate,” Ethan says.

“People would come over and play with it.”

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Ethan previously worked for Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life. These days he’s a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners. A section of the bookshelves in his office has been reserved for multiple copies of his father’s works.

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“A lot of what he has predicted has happened, and it’s interesting to see what he’s been saying become more mainstream,” says Ethan, who looks very much like a younger version of his father. “He has a certain world view that he feels strongly about that he thinks is absolutely coming to pass. The data so far suggests it is. He’s incredibly thorough with his research, and I have confidence his critics haven’t thought things through on the same level.”

Indeed, Ethan says, his father is almost, well, accepted.

“He is seen as less weird now,” he says. “Much less weird.”

Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—And Must— Take Our Jobs Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do?

It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

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It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time. This upheaval is being led by a second wave of automation, one that is centered on artificial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning, and distributed smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual labor to knowledge work.

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First, machines will consolidate their gains in already-automated industries.

After robots finish replacing assembly line workers, they will replace the workers in warehouses. Speedy bots able to lift 150 pounds all day long will retrieve boxes, sort them, and load them onto trucks. Fruit and vegetable picking will continue to be robotized until no humans pick outside of specialty farms. Pharmacies will feature a single pill-dispensing robot in the back while the pharmacists focus on patient consulting. Next, the more dexterous chores of cleaning in offices and schools will be taken over by late-night robots, starting with easy-to-do floors and windows and eventually getting to toilets. The highway legs of long-haul trucking routes will be driven by robots embedded in truck cabs.

All the while, robots will continue their migration into white-collar work. We already have artificial intelligence in many of our machines; we just don’t call it that. Witness one piece of software by Narrative Science (profiled in issue 20.05) that can write newspaper stories about sports games directly from the games’ stats or generate a synopsis of a company’s stock performance each day from bits of text around the web. Any job dealing with reams of paperwork will be taken over by bots, including much of medicine. Even those areas of medicine not defined by paperwork, such as surgery, are becoming increasingly robotic. The rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic.

And it has already begun.

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Here’s why we’re at the inflection point: Machines are acquiring smarts.

We have preconceptions about how an intelligent robot should look and act, and these can blind us to what is already happening around us. To demand that artificial intelligence be humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be birdlike, with flapping wings. Robots will think different. To see how far artificial intelligence has penetrated our lives, we need to shed the idea that they will be humanlike.

Consider Baxter, a revolutionary new workbot from Rethink Robotics.

Designed by Rodney Brooks, the former MIT professor who invented the best-selling Roomba vacuum cleaner and its descendants, Baxter is an early example of a new class of industrial robots created to work alongside humans.

Baxter does not look impressive. It’s got big strong arms and a flatscreen display like many industrial bots. And Baxter’s hands perform repetitive

First, it can look around and indicate where it is looking by shifting the cartoon eyes on its head. It can perceive humans working near it and avoid injuring them. And workers can see whether it sees them. Previous industrial robots couldn’t do this, which means that working robots have to be physically segregated from humans. The typical factory robot is imprisoned within a chain-link fence or caged in a glass case. They are simply too dangerous to be around, because they are oblivious to others. This isolation prevents such robots from working in a small shop, where isolation is not practical.

Optimally, workers should be able to get materials to and from the robot or to tweak its controls by hand throughout the workday; isolation makes that difficult. Baxter, however, is aware. Using force-feedback technology to feel if it is colliding with a person or another bot, it is courteous. You can plug it into a wall socket in your garage and easily work right next to it.

Second, anyone can train Baxter. It is not as fast, strong, or precise as other industrial robots, but it is smarter. To train the bot you simply grab its arms and guide them in the correct motions and sequence. It’s a kind of “watch me do this” routine. Baxter learns the procedure and then repeats it. Any worker is capable of this show-and-tell; you don’t even have to be literate. Previous workbots required highly educated engineers and crack programmers to write thousands of lines of code (and then debug them) in order to instruct the robot in the simplest change of task. The code has to be loaded in batch mode, i.e., in large, infrequent batches, because the robot cannot be reprogrammed while it is being used. Turns out the real cost of the typical industrial robot is not its hardware but its operation. Industrial robots cost $100,000-plus to purchase but can require four times that amount over a lifespan to program, train, and maintain. The costs pile up until the average lifetime bill for an industrial robot is half a million dollars or more.

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The third difference, then, is that Baxter is cheap. Priced at $22,000, it’s in a different league compared with the $500,000 total bill of its predecessors.

It is as if those established robots, with their batch-mode programming, are the mainframe computers of the robot world, and Baxter is the first PC robot. It is likely to be dismissed as a hobbyist toy, missing key features like sub-millimeter precision, and not serious enough. But as with the PC, and unlike the mainframe, the user can interact with it directly, immediately, without waiting for experts to mediate—and use it for nonserious, even frivolous things. It’s cheap enough that small-time manufacturers can afford one to package up their wares or custom paint their product or run their 3-D

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manual tasks, just as factory robots do. But it’s different in three significant ways.

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printing machine. Or you could staff up a factory that makes iPhones.

Baxter was invented in a century-old brick building near the Charles River in Boston. In 1895 the building was a manufacturing marvel in the very center of the new manufacturing world. It even generated its own electricity.

For a hundred years the factories inside its walls changed the world around us. Now the capabilities of Baxter and the approaching cascade of superior robot workers spur Brooks to speculate on how these robots will shift manufacturing in a disruption greater than the last revolution. Looking out his office window at the former industrial neighborhood, he says, “Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within 5 miles of where they are needed.”

That may be true of making stuff, but a lot of jobs left in the world for humans are service jobs. I ask Brooks to walk with me through a local McDonald’s and point out the jobs that his kind of robots can replace. He demurs and suggests it might be 30 years before robots will cook for us. “In a fast food place you’re not doing the same task very long. You’re always changing things on the fly, so you need special solutions. We are not trying to sell a specific solution. We are building a general-purpose machine that other workers can set up themselves and work alongside.” And once we can cowork with robots right next to us, it’s inevitable that our tasks will bleed together, and soon our old work will become theirs—and our new work will become something we can hardly imagine.

The rows indicate whether robots will take over existing jobs or make new ones, and the columns indicate whether these jobs seem (at first) like jobs for humans or for machines.

Let’s begin with quadrant A: jobs humans can do but robots can do even better. Humans can weave cotton cloth with great effort, but automated looms make perfect cloth, by the mile, for a few cents. The only reason to buy handmade cloth today is because you want the imperfections humans introduce. We no longer value irregularities while traveling 70 miles per hour, though—so the fewer humans who touch our car as it is being made, the better.

And yet for more complicated chores, we still tend to believe computers and robots can’t be trusted. That’s why we’ve been slow to acknowledge how they’ve mastered some conceptual routines, in some cases even surpassing their mastery of physical routines. A computerized brain known as the autopilot can fly a 787 jet unaided, but irrationally we place human pilots in the cockpit to babysit the autopilot “just in case.” In the 1990s, computerized mortgage appraisals replaced human appraisers wholesale. Much tax preparation has gone to computers, as well as routine x-ray analysis and pretrial evidence-gathering—all once done by highly paid smart people.

We’ve accepted utter reliability in robot manufacturing; soon we’ll accept it in robotic intelligence and service.

While the displacement of formerly human jobs gets all the headlines, the greatest benefits bestowed by robots and automation come from their occupation of jobs we are unable to do. We don’t have the attention span to

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Next is quadrant B: jobs that humans can’t do but robots can. A trivial example: Humans have trouble making a single brass screw unassisted, but automation can produce a thousand exact ones per hour. Without automation, we could not make a single computer chip—a job that requires degrees of precision, control, and unwavering attention that our animal bodies don’t possess. Likewise no human, indeed no group of humans, no matter their education, can quickly search through all the web pages in the world to uncover the one page revealing the price of eggs in Katmandu yesterday.

Every time you click on the search button you are employing a robot to do something we as a species are unable to do alone.:

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To understand how robot replacement will happen, it’s useful to break down our relationship with robots into four categories, as summed up in this chart

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inspect every square millimeter of every CAT scan looking for cancer cells.

We don’t have the millisecond reflexes needed to inflate molten glass into the shape of a bottle. We don’t have an infallible memory to keep track of every pitch in Major League Baseball and calculate the probability of the next pitch in real time.

We aren’t giving “good jobs” to robots. Most of the time we are giving them jobs we could never do. Without them, these jobs would remain undone.

Now let’s consider quadrant C, the new jobs created by automation— including the jobs that we did not know we wanted done. This is the greatest genius of the robot takeover: With the assistance of robots and computerized intelligence, we already can do things we never imagined doing 150 years ago. We can remove a tumor in our gut through our navel, make a talkingpicture video of our wedding, drive a cart on Mars, print a pattern on fabric that a friend mailed to us through the air. We are doing, and are sometimes paid for doing, a million new activities that would have dazzled and shocked the farmers of 1850. These new accomplishments are not merely chores that were difficult before. Rather they are dreams that are created chiefly by the capabilities of the machines that can do them. They are jobs the machines make up.

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Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flatscreen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. Crafty AIs embedded in first-personshooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers—a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.

To reiterate, the bulk of new tasks created by automation are tasks only other automation can handle. Now that we have search engines like Google, we set the servant upon a thousand new errands. Google, can you tell me where my phone is? Google, can you match the people suffering depression with the doctors selling pills? Google, can you predict when the next viral epidemic will erupt? Technology is indiscriminate this way, piling up possibilities and options for both humans and machines.

Finally, that leaves us with quadrant D, the jobs that only humans can do—at first. The one thing humans can do that robots can’t (at least for a long while) is to decide what it is that humans want to do. This is not a trivial trick; our desires are inspired by our previous inventions, making this a circular question.

When robots and automation do our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?” Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles; but of course, over time, the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?” It will be many generations before a robot can answer that.

The real revolution erupts when everyone has personal workbots, the descendants of Baxter, at their beck and call. Imagine you run a small organic farm. Your fleet of worker bots do all the weeding, pest control, and harvesting of produce, as directed by an overseer bot, embodied by a mesh

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This postindustrial economy will keep expanding, even though most of the work is done by bots, because part of your task tomorrow will be to find, make, and complete new things to do, new things that will later become repetitive jobs for the robots. In the coming years robot-driven cars and trucks will become ubiquitous; this automation will spawn the new human occupation of trip optimizer, a person who tweaks the traffic system for optimal energy and time usage. Routine robo-surgery will necessitate the new skills of keeping machines sterile. When automatic self-tracking of all your activities becomes the normal thing to do, a new breed of professional analysts will arise to help you make sense of the data. And of course we will need a whole army of robot nannies, dedicated to keeping your personal bots up and running. Each of these new vocations will in turn be taken over by robots later.

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It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.

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of probes in the soil. One day your task might be to research which variety of heirloom tomato to plant; the next day it might be to update your custom labels. The bots perform everything else that can be measured.

Right now it seems unthinkable: We can’t imagine a bot that can assemble a stack of ingredients into a gift or manufacture spare parts for our lawn mower or fabricate materials for our new kitchen. We can’t imagine our nephews and nieces running a dozen workbots in their garage, churning out inverters for their friend’s electric-vehicle startup. We can’t imagine our children becoming appliance designers, making custom batches of liquidnitrogen dessert machines to sell to the millionaires in China. But that’s what personal robot automation will enable.

Everyone will have access to a personal robot, but simply owning one will not guarantee success. Rather, success will go to those who innovate in the organization, optimization, and customization of the process of getting work done with bots and machines. Geographical clusters of production will matter, not for any differential in labor costs but because of the differential in human expertise. It’s human-robot symbiosis. Our human assignment will be to keep making jobs for robots—and that is a task that will never be finished. So we will always have at least that one “job.”

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In the coming years our relationships with robots will become ever more complex. But already a recurring pattern is emerging. No matter what your current job or your salary, you will progress through these Seven Stages of Robot Replacement, again and again: 1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do.

2. OK, it can do a lot of them, but it can’t do everything I do.

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3. OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.

4. OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks.

5. OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do.

6. Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more fun and pays more!

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose.

This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots.

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7. I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do now.

We need to let robots take over. They will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.

Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.

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2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal We’re fast approaching the moment when humans and machines merge.

Welcome to the Singularity movement

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I’ve Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists—they included a comedian and a former Miss America—had to guess what it was.

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On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.

Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself—a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil’s age than by anything he’d actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she’d been President Lyndon Johnson’s first-grade teacher.

But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It’s an act of self-expression; you’re

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster—that is, the rate at which they’re getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

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not supposed to be able to do it if you don’t have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness—not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there’s no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly.

It wouldn’t even take breaks to play Farmville.

Probably. It’s impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-thanhuman intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you’d be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we’ll merge with them to become super-

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That was Kurzweil’s real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we’re approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity—our bodies, our minds, our civilization—will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.

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intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we’ll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity.

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you’re talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn’t, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It’s not a fringe idea; it’s a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There’s an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it’s an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

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People are spending a lot of money trying to understand it. The three-yearold Singularity University, which offers inter-disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives, is hosted by NASA. Google was a founding sponsor; its CEO and co-founder Larry Page spoke there last year. People are attracted to the Singularity for the shock value, like an intellectual freak show, but they stay because there’s more to it than they expected. And of course, in the event that it turns out to be real, it will be the most important thing to happen to human beings since the invention of language.

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The Singularity isn’t a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an “intelligence explosion”: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.

Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time—or example, inside a black hole—at which the rules of ordinary

By that time Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity too. He’d been busy since his appearance on I’ve Got a Secret. He’d made several fortunes as an engineer and inventor; he founded and then sold his first software company while he was still at MIT. He went on to build the first print-tospeech reading machine for the blind—Stevie Wonder was customer No. 1—and made innovations in a range of technical fields, including music synthesizers and speech recognition. He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology.

But Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005. A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil, Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January.

(Kurzweil is actually the subject of two current documentaries. The other one, less authorized but more informative, is called The Transcendent Man.) Bill Gates has called him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”

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physics do not apply. In the 1980s the science-fiction novelist Vernor Vinge attached it to Good’s intelligence-explosion scenario. At a NASA symposium in 1993, Vinge announced that “within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

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In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could pass for Woody Allen’s even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., and you can still hear a trace of it in his voice. Now 62, he speaks with the soft, almost hypnotic calm of someone who gives 60 public lectures a year. As the Singularity’s most visible champion, he has heard all the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before. He’s good-natured about it. His manner is almost apologetic: I wish I could bring you less exciting news of the future, but I’ve looked at the numbers, and this is what they say, so what else can I tell you?

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Kurzweil’s interest in humanity’s cyborganic destiny began about 1980 largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of technological progress. Even great inventions can fail if they arrive before their time, and he wanted to make sure that when he released his, the timing was right. “Even at that time, technology was moving quickly enough that the world was going to be different by the time you finished a project,” he

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says. “So it’s like skeet shooting—you can’t shoot at the target.” He knew about Moore’s law, of course, which states that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles about every two years. It’s a surprisingly reliable rule of thumb. Kurzweil tried plotting a slightly different curve: the change over time in the amount of computing power, measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), that you can buy for $1,000.

As it turned out, Kurzweil’s numbers looked a lot like Moore’s. They doubled every couple of years. Drawn as graphs, they both made exponential curves, with their value increasing by multiples of two instead of by regular increments in a straight line. The curves held eerily steady, even when Kurzweil extended his backward through the decades of pretransistor computing technologies like relays and vacuum tubes, all the way back to 1900.

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Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes—the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond—the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. “It’s really amazing how smooth these trajectories are,” he says. “Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions.” Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.

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Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity. According to Kurzweil, we’re not evolved to think in terms of exponential growth. “It’s not intuitive. Our built-in predictors are linear. When we’re trying to avoid an animal, we pick the linear prediction of where it’s going to be in 20 seconds and what to do about it. That is actually hardwired in our brains.”

Here’s what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverseengineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity—never say he’s not conservative—at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.

Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There’s room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won’t happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you’re walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificialintelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen’s distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mindspace you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity.

Expect turbulence.

In addition to the Singularity University, which Kurzweil co-founded, there’s also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco. It counts among its advisers Peter Thiel, a former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. The institute holds an annual conference called the Singularity Summit. (Kurzweil co-founded that too.) Because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of Singularity theory, it attracts a diverse crowd. Artificial intelligence is the main event, but the sessions also cover the galloping progress of, among other fields, genetics and nanotechnology.

After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent

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At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the professional magician and debunker James “the Amazing” Randi. The atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention. Proponents of seasteading—the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing politically autonomous floating communities in international waters— handed out pamphlets. An android chatted with visitors in one corner.

TECHNOLOGY & OURSELVES

The Singularity isn’t just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians.

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and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It’s not just wishful thinking; there’s actual science going on here.

For example, it’s well known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can’t reproduce anymore and dies.

But there’s an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it’s one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular non-cancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a group of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn’t just get better; they got younger.

Aubrey de Grey is one of the world’s best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. “People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable—rather like the heat death of the universe—is simply ridiculous,” he says. “It’s just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It’s really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable.”

Kurzweil takes life extension seriously too. His father, with whom he was very close, died of heart disease at 58. Kurzweil inherited his father’s genetic predisposition; he also developed Type 2 diabetes when he was 35. Working with Terry Grossman, a doctor who specializes in longevity medicine, Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is essentially cured, and although he’s 62 years old from a chronological perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger.

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But his goal differs slightly from de Grey’s. For Kurzweil, it’s not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it’s about staying alive until the Singularity. It’s an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they’ll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we’ll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.

It’s an idea that’s radical and ancient at the same time. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” W.B. Yeats describes mankind’s fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead? But Kurzweil finds that life extension produces even more resistance in his audiences than his exponential growth curves. “There are people who can accept computers being more intelligent than people,” he says. “But the idea of significant changes to human longevity—that seems to be particularly controversial. People invested a lot of personal effort into certain philosophies dealing with the issue of life and death. I mean, that’s the major reason we have religion.”

Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense—a fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent.

Why not? Obviously we’re still waiting on all that exponentially growing computing power to get here. But it’s also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can’t be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too

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The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this question.

But AI doesn’t currently produce the kind of intelligence we associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies—HAL or C3PO or Data.

Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don’t make conversation at parties. They’re intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way.

The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn’t exist yet.

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complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer’s Singularity Summit.

“Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits,” he argued, in a talk titled “What Cells Can Do That Robots Can’t,” “they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events.” That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude.

Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones.

Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being—in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness—a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?

TECHNOLOGY & OURSELVES

Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you’re still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?

Kurzweil admits that there’s a fundamental level of risk associated with the Singularity that’s impossible to refine away, simply because we don’t know what a highly advanced artificial intelligence, finding itself a newly created inhabitant of the planet Earth, would choose to do. It might not feel like competing with us for resources. One of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly. You don’t have to be a super-intelligent cyborg to understand that introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is a basic Darwinian error.

If the Singularity is coming, these questions are going to get answers whether

Kurzweil is an almost inhumanly patient and thorough debater. He relishes it. He’s tireless in hunting down his critics so that he can respond to them, point by point, carefully and in detail.

Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever.

He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. “Generally speaking,” he says, “the core of a disagreement I’ll have with a critic is, they’ll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don’t believe I’m underestimating the challenge. I think they’re underestimating the power of exponential growth.”

By definition, the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable by our linear, chemical, animal brains, but Kurzweil is teeming with theories about it. He positively flogs himself to think bigger and bigger; you can see him kicking against the confines of his aging organic hardware. “When people look at the implications of ongoing exponential growth, it gets harder and harder

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This position doesn’t make Kurzweil an outlier, at least among Singularitarians. Plenty of people make more-extreme predictions. Since 2005 the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been running an ambitious initiative at the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. It’s called the Blue Brain project, and it’s an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM’s Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram’s team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat’s brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons.

Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you’d then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?)

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we like it or not, and Kurzweil thinks that trying to put off the Singularity by banning technologies is not only impossible but also unethical and probably dangerous. “It would require a totalitarian system to implement such a ban,” he says. “It wouldn’t work. It would just drive these technologies underground, where the responsible scientists who we’re counting on to create the defenses would not have easy access to the tools.”

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to accept,” he says. “So you get people who really accept, yes, things are progressing exponentially, but they fall off the horse at some point because the implications are too fantastic. I’ve tried to push myself to really look.”

In Kurzweil’s future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century’s worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life.

We can scan our consciousnesses into computers and enter a virtual existence or swap our bodies for immortal robots and light out for the edges of space as intergalactic godlings. Within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe. This is, Kurzweil believes, our destiny as a species.

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Or it isn’t. When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.

TECHNOLOGY & OURSELVES

But as for the minor questions, they’re already being decided all around us and in plain sight. The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn’t have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn’t see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld networkenabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls?

Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson’s disease have neural implants.

Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops.

This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM supercomputer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century’s answer to the Founding Fathers—except unlike the Founding Fathers, they’ll still be alive to get credit—or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney’s Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future.

But even if they’re dead wrong about the future, they’re right about the present. They’re taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

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It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn’t need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English. Watson isn’t strong AI, but if strong AI happens, it will arrive gradually, bit by bit, and this will have been one of the bits.

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Notes

Genetically Modified Organisms Risk Global Ruin, Says Black Swan Author

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Experts have severely underestimated the risks of genetically modified food, says a group of researchers lead by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is 20 years since the FDA approved the Flavr Savr tomato for human consumption, the first genetically engineered food to gain this status. Since then, genetically modified food has become a significant part of the human diet in many parts of the world, particularly in the US. In 2013 roughly 85 per cent of corn and 90 per cent of soybeans produced in the US were genetically modified.

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Given the ubiquity of this kind of foodstuff, you could be forgiven for thinking that the scientific debate over its safety has been largely settled. It is certainly true that a large number of scientists seem to take that view. In 2012, for example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science declared that genetically modified crops pose no greater risk than the same foods made from crops modified by conventional plant breeding techniques.

Taleb and co begin by making a clear distinction between risks with consequences that are local and those with consequences that have the potential to cause global ruin. When global harm is possible, an action must be avoided unless there is scientific near-certainty that it is safe. This

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Today, Nassim Nicholas Taleb at New York University and a few pals say that this kind of thinking vastly underestimates the threat posed by genetically modified organisms. “Genetically modified organisms represent a public risk of global harm,” they say. Consequently, this risk should be treated differently from those that only have the potential for local harm. “The precautionary principle should be used to prescribe severe of limits on genetically modified organisms,” they conclude.

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approach is known as the precautionary principle.

The question, of course, is when the precautionary principle should be applied. Taleb and co begin by saying that their aim is to place the precautionary principle within a formal statistical structure that is grounded in probability theory and the properties of complex systems. “Our aim is to allow decision-makers to discern which circumstances require the use of the precautionary principle and in which cases evoking the precautionary principle is inappropriate.”

Their argument begins by dividing potential harm into two types. The first is localised and non-spreading. The second is propagating harm that results in irreversible and widespread damage. Taleb and co say that traditional decision-making strategies focus on the first type of risk where the harm is localised and the risk is easy to calculate from past data.

In this case, it is always possible to make a mistake when decision-making about risk. The crucial point is that when the harm is localised, the potential danger from a miscalculation is bounded.

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By contrast, harm that is able to propagate on a global scale is entirely different. “The possibility of irreversible and widespread damage raises different questions about the nature of decision-making and what risks can be reasonably taken,” say Taleb and co. In this case, the potential danger from a miscalculation can be essentially infinite. It is in this category of total ruin problems that the precautionary principle comes into play, they say.

A key difference between these types of risks is the statistical structure of their impact. This structure is either dependent on scale or independent of scale. An example of a scale-dependent distribution is the weight of an adult

However, a single individual can be richer than the poorest 2 billion humans.

So wealth follows a scale independent distribution.

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human which is generally never greater than about 10 times the weight of an average human.

When it comes to risk, the harm from scale dependent risks comes from the collective effect of many events, since no single event alone can dominate the total. “It is practically impossible for a single data account for 99 percent of all heart attacks in a given year,� say Taleb and co by way of an example.

By contrast, the harm from scale independent risks can be dominated by a single event. For example, the Earth is constantly bombarded by small rocks from space that have little effect. Nevertheless, a single large rock could wipe out the entire human race.

Taleb and co focus on two examples. The first is nuclear energy. They point out that many people are justifiably concerned about the risk associated with nuclear energy. Scientists are well aware of the harm that can be caused by radiation release, core meltdown and the disposal of radioactive waste and these risks have been studied extensively.

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While the potential harm from a nuclear accident can be large, it is generally scale dependent and far from global. So when it comes to making decisions about whether to use nuclear energy on a local scale, the risks involved can be managed using appropriate safety measures that have been carefully considered.

Taleb and co contrast this to the case of genetically modified organisms.

They argue that the risk from genetically modified organisms is a potential for widespread impact on the ecosystem and widespread impact on human health. In other words, it is scale independent.

Over many generations, humans have chosen and adapted biological organisms that are relatively safe for consumption, even though there are

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One of the arguments that genetically modified crops are safe is that it is no more unnatural than the selective farming that people have been doing for generations. However, Taleb and co argue that this kind of farming is different from the current practice because any mistake in the form of a harmful variation will almost certainly be localised and die out as a result.

This is the natural process of selection.

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many organisms that are not safe, including parts of and varieties of the crops that we do cultivate.

By contrast, genetic engineering works in a very different way. This process introduces rapid changes on a global scale. But selection cannot operate on this scale, they argue.

“There is no comparison between tinkering with the selective breeding of genetic components of organisms that have previously undergone extensive histories of selection and the top-down engineering of taking a gene from a fish and putting it into a tomato,” they argue. “Saying that such a product is natural misses the process of natural selection by which things become “natural.””

The potential impact of genetically modified organisms on human health is even more worrying. Taleb and co say that the current mechanism for determining whether or not the genetic engineering of particular protein into a plant is safe is woefully inadequate.

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The FDA currently does this by considering the existing knowledge of risks associated with that protein. “The number of ways such an evaluation can be an error is large,” they say.

That’s because proteins in living organisms are part of complex chemical networks. In general, the effect of a new protein on this network is difficult to predict even though the purpose of introducing it is to strongly impact the chemical functions of the plant, for example, by modifying its resistance to other chemicals such as herbicides or pesticides.

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Even more serious is the introduction of monocultures—the use of single crops over large areas. This dramatically increases the likelihood that the entire crop might fail due to the action of some invasive species, disease or change in the environment.

When harm is localised, it can be used as part of the learning process to prevent the same set of circumstances occurring again. Global harm is different. “We should exert the precautionary principle here because we do not want to discover errors after considerable and irreversible environmental and health damage,” conclude Taleb and co.

They go on to discuss a number of fallacious arguments against using the precautionary principle. One of these is the Loch Ness fallacy, which states

Taleb and co say this is a corruption of the absence of evidence problem and unrelated to the question of whether the precautionary principle should apply. That is because the harm associated with the Loch Ness monster is purely local. “If the Loch Ness monster did exist, it would still be no reason to invoke the precautionary principle, as the harm he might cause is limited in scope to Loch Ness itself, and does not present the risk of ruin,� they say.

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that the precautionary principle should prevent us from swimming in the Loch because we have no evidence that the Loch Ness monster does not exist.

They go on to consider numerous other fallacies that confuse the issue over whether to use the precautionary principle or not. The central point in most of these is whether the risk involved is one of global ruin or local ruin.

That is an interesting contribution to the debate over genetically modified organisms, which has become becalmed in recent years. While the argument itself is interesting, the fact that the lead author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb is such a high profile commentator on risk is bound to raise the profile of the debate. The co-authors include a number of other well-known researchers such as Raphael Douady at the Institute of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Paris and Yaneer Bar-Yam at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge.

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It is unlikely, of course, that the other actors in this debate will meekly agree with this new assessment. In particular, companies with a financial interest in the future of genetic engineering, such as Monsanto, will want to put their side of the debate.

More interesting will be how the FDA takes into account the arguments that Taleb and co put forward. Expect fireworks in the coming weeks and months.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787 : The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms) GMO TO RUIN (MEDIUM)

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Can Artificial Meat Save The World?

Traditional chicken, beef, and pork production devours resources and creates waste. Meat-free meat might be the solution.

On an ordinary spring morning in Columbia, Missouri, Ethan Brown stands in the middle of an ordinary kitchen tearing apart a chicken fajita strip. “Look at this,” he says. “It’s amazing!” Around him, a handful of stout Midwestern food-factory workers lean in and nod approvingly. “I’m just so proud of it.”

The meat Brown is pulling apart looks normal enough: beige flesh that separates into long strands. It would not be out of place in a chicken salad or Caesar wrap. Bob Prusha, a colleague of Brown’s, stands over a stove sautéing a batch for us to eat. But the meat Brown is fiddling with and Prusha is frying is far from ordinary. It’s actually not meat at all.

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Brown is the CEO of Beyond Meat, a four-year-old company that manufactures a meat substitute made mainly from soy and pea proteins and amaranth. Mock meat is not a new idea. Grocery stores are full of plant-based substitutes—the Boca and Gardenburgers of the world, not to mention Asian staples like tofu and seitan. What sets Beyond Meat apart is how startlingly meat-like its product is. The “chicken” strips have the distinct fibrous structure of poultry, and they deliver a similar nutritional profile.

Each serving has about the same amount of protein as an equivalent portion of chicken, but with zero cholesterol or saturated and trans fats.

To Brown, there is little difference between his product and the real thing.

Factory-farmed chickens aren’t really treated as animals, he says; they’re machines that transform vegetable inputs into chicken breasts. Beyond Meat simply uses a more efficient production system. Where one pound of cooked

In other words, the planet needs to rethink how it gets its meat. Brown is addressing the issue by supplying a near-perfect meat analogue, but he is not alone in reinventing animal products. Just across town, Modern Meadow uses 3-D printers and tissue engineering to grow meat in a lab. The company already has a refrigerator full of lab-grown beef and pork; in fact, the company’s co-founder, Gabor Forgacs, fried and ate a piece of engineered pork onstage at a 2011 TED talk. Another scientist, Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, is also using tissue engineering to produce meat in a lab. In August, he served an entire lab-grown burger to two diners on a London stage as a curious but skeptical crowd looked on.

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boneless chicken requires 7.5 pounds of dry feed and 30 liters of water, the same amount of Beyond Meat requires only 1.1 pound of ingredients and two liters of water.

The ability to efficiently create meat, or something sufficiently meat-like, will become progressively more important in coming years because humanity may be reaching a point when there’s not enough animal protein to go around. The United Nations expects the global population to grow from the current 7.2 billion to 9.6 billion by 2050. Also, as countries such as China and India continue to develop, their populations are adopting more Western diets. Worldwide the amount of meat eaten per person nearly doubled from 1961 to 2007, and the UN projects it will double again by 2050.

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It took more than two decades to create a vegetable-based meat analogue with a consistency and texture similar to chicken; Whole Foods began selling the packaged Beyond Meat product in spring.

Staring at the bucketful of precooked strips, it’s hard to imagine a future in which meat is, by necessity, not meat. Or in which meat is grown in a manufacturing facility instead of a field or feedlot. But that future is fast approaching, and here in the heart of Big Ag country, both Beyond Meat and Modern Meadow are confronting it head on.

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Revolutions tend to appear revolutionary only from a distance, and as Brown walks me to the production floor, I’m struck by how similar the Beyond Meat factory looks to any other. Nondescript metal machinery churns away.

Ingredients sit in plastic bulk-foods bins. We put on hairnets and white coats and walk over to a small blue conveyor belt, where Brown’s chicken strips emerge from the machinery cooked and in oddly rectilinear form. They are not yet seasoned, he says, but they are ready to eat. At the end of the conveyor belt, the still-steaming strips fall unceremoniously into a steel bucket, where they land with a dull thud.

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Each year, Americans eat more than 200 pounds of meat per person, and midMissouri is as good a place as any to see what it takes to satisfy that appetite.

Columbia sits dead center in the state, so approaching on I-70 from either direction means driving about two hours past huge tracts of farmland—soy, corn, and wheat fields and herds of grazing cattle. Giant truck stops glow on the horizon, and mile-long trains tug boxcars loaded with grain to places as far away as Mexico and California.

It’s a rich country that for nearly 150 years has fed the nation and the world.

Yet most of the crops grown around Columbia will never land on diningroom tables but rather in giant feedlot troughs. That’s not unusual. About 80 percent of the world’s farmland is used to support the meat and poultry industries, and much of that goes to growing animal feed. An efficient use of resources this is not. For example, a single pound of cooked beef, a family meal’s worth of hamburgers, requires 298 square feet of land, 27 pounds of feed, and 211 gallons of water.

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Supplying meat not only devours resources but also creates waste. That same pound of hamburger requires more than 4,000 Btus of fossil-fuel energy to get to the dinner table; something has to power the tractors, feedlots, slaughterhouses, and trucks. That process, along with the methane the cows belch throughout their lives, contributes as much as 51 percent of all greenhouse gas produced in the world.

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To understand how humans developed such a reliance on meat, it’s useful to start at the beginning. Several million years ago, hominids had large guts and smaller brains. That began to reverse around two million years ago: Brains got bigger as guts got smaller. The primary reason for the change, according to a seminal 1995 study by evolutionary anthropologist Leslie Aiello, then of the University College London, is that our ancestors started eating meat, a compact, high-energy source of calories. With meat, hominids did not need to maintain a large, energy-intense digestive system. Instead, they could divert energy elsewhere, namely to power big energy-hungry brains. And with those brains, they changed the world.

As time progressed, meat became culturally important too. Hunting fostered cooperation; cooking and eating the kill brought communities together over shared rituals—as it still does in backyard barbecues. Neal Barnard, a nutrition author and physician at George Washington University, argues that today the cultural appeal of meat trumps any physiological benefits.

“We have known for a long time that people who don’t eat meat are thinner and healthier and live longer than people who do,” he says. Nutritionally,

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meat is a good source of protein, iron, and vitamin B12, but Barnard says those nutrients are easily available from other sources that aren’t also heavy in saturated fats. “For the millennia of our sojourn on Earth, we have been getting more than enough protein from entirely plant-based sources. The cow gets its protein that way and simply rearranges it into muscle. People say, ‘Gee if I don’t eat muscle, where will I get protein?’ You get it from the same place the cow got it.”

To Barnard, the simple conclusion is that everyone should stick to eating plants—and he’s right that it would be a far more efficient use of all that cropland. And yet to most people, meat tastes good. Studies suggest that eating meat activates the brain’s pleasure center in much the same way chocolate does. Even many vegetarians say bacon smells great when it’s cooking. For whatever reason, most people simply love to eat meat—myself included. And that makes re-creating it, whether from vegetables or cells in a lab, exceedingly difficult.

In the mid-1980s, a food scientist named Fu-hung Hsieh moved to Columbia, Missouri, to start a food-engineering program at the University of Missouri.

Hsieh was coming to academia from a successful career in the processedfoods industry, at Quaker Oats, and he convinced the university to buy him a commercial-grade extrusion machine, nearly unheard of in an academic setting.

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An extruder is one of the processed-food industry’s most important and versatile pieces of equipment, the invention responsible for Froot Loops and Cheetos and premade cookie dough. Dry and wet ingredients are poured into a hopper on one end of the machine and a rotating auger pushes them through a long barrel, where they are subjected to varying levels of heat and pressure. At the barrel’s end, the ingredients pass through a die that forms them into whatever shape and texture the machine has been programmed to produce. The mixture emerges at the far end as a continuous ribbon of food, which is sliced into the desired portions.

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On one level, an extruder is a simple piece of technology—something like a giant sausage maker—but producing the desired result can be devilishly complicated. “Some people say extrusion cooking is an art form,” says Harold Huff, a meat-loving Missouri native who works with Hsieh as a senior research specialist. Around 1989, Hsieh and Huff took an interest in using the extruder to make the first realistic meat analogue. “We didn’t worry about flavor or anything else,” Hsieh tells me. “We wanted it to tear apart like chicken—it was all just about initial appearance.” They knew there wasn’t

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a single physical or chemical adjustment that would bring about a solution.

They just had to experiment. “You have to have the right ingredients, the right temperature, the right hardware,” Huff says. “You try things, make observations, and make adjustments” for years, even decades. And so it went, until Ethan Brown came calling in 2009. Brown, a vegan environmentalist, had been working for a fuel-cell company and had become frustrated by his colleagues’ ignorance of meat’s role in climate change. “We would go to conferences and sit there wringing our hands over all these energy issues, and then we’d go to dinner and people would order huge steaks,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is stupid, I want to go work on that problem.’ ” To the ridicule of old friends, who joked that he was moving to the country to start a tofu factory, he started poring over journal articles and casting around for meat analogues to market—which is how he heard about Hsieh’s work.

Brown licensed the veggie chicken and began fine-tuning it with the scientists for mass consumption. “If we used too much soy, it was too firm, and if we reduced it too much, it became soft, like tofu,” Brown remembers. “It took us two years to figure that out, and it’s still not perfect.”

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As Brown and Hsieh refined the product, it began to gain notice. Bill Gates, who has adopted the meat-production crisis as one of his signature issues, published a report about the issue on his blog, The Gates Notes, in which he endorsed Beyond Meat as an important innovation. “I couldn’t tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken,” he wrote. Perhaps more impressive, New York Times food correspondent and best-selling cookbook author Mark Bittman tried Beyond Meat in a blind taste test last year (at the behest of Brown, who served Bittman a burrito) and said that it “fooled me badly.” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone invested in the company last year, not long after the powerful Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers bought a stake.

“We are going to be meat. We’ll just be slaughtering plants instead of animals.”“One of the partners at Kleiner asked me to meet with Ethan and give them feedback, because they knew I was a vegan. I said yes, really as a favor,” Stone says. “I went into it thinking it’s going to be a boutiquey thing, for well-to-do vegans. Instead, I was introduced to this big-science approach.

Ethan was talking about competing in the multibillion-dollar meat business.

We are going to be meat, he said, we are just going to be slaughtering plants instead of animals. And here are all the ways it matters, in terms of global health, resource scarcity, number of people in the world. I was like, ‘Oh, my god. They are thinking completely differently.’”

Brown has set up a taste test: three plates of Beyond Meat in three preseasoned flavors. I pop one of the Southwest-flavored strips into my mouth, and it tastes, well, a bit like soy in the form of chicken, sprinkled with chipotle dust.

That’s also how it chews—very chicken-like but somehow just shy of chicken.

After all the buildup, I’m a little disappointed. But I also have the distinct impression that I’m eating something more like meat than veggies. And I’m eating it unadorned, as opposed to in Bittman’s burrito.

Over the course of the next month, I replace boneless chicken breasts with the lightly seasoned strips in various meals: an omelet with spinach and feta, a plate of fajitas, a wok-ful of fried rice. I’m never once fooled that it’s chicken.

For me, chicken is the whole sensory package—crisp skin, the roasting pan, the juices—and when I want one, I make one. But when I want lean, chewy protein as a flavor medium in some other dish, I find I don’t care whether it comes from an animal or vegetable. But what if it comes from neither?

To reach this stage, about 700 million beef cells spent two weeks growing in a cell-growth medium in a wardrobe-size incubator. The cells were then spun free in a centrifuge, and the resulting slurry, which is the consistency of honey, was transferred to a large syringe that acts as the business end of the printer.

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On the other side of Columbia, at a biotech start-up incubator on the edge of the University of Missouri campus, the scientists at Modern Meadow are working on a very different solution to the meat-production crisis. When I visit, a 3-D printer about the size of an HP desktop unit streams a line of yellowish goo onto a petri dish. Back and forth, the machine creates a series of narrow rows a hair’s breadth apart. After covering a few inches of the dish, the printer switches direction and lays new rows atop the first ones in a crosshatch pattern. There’s no noise but an electric whir, no smell, nothing to suggest that the goo is an embryonic form of meat that will turn into a little sausage. Once the printer finishes its run, the result looks something like a large Band-Aid.

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The day I visit, the factory in Columbia is humming because the company is preparing its first shipment of packaged product to Whole Foods, which agreed to sell it nationwide after a successful trial in some California stores.

On the production floor, the extruder is roaring away, pumping out strips ready for seasoning, flash-freezing, or quick grilling. A digital readout shows the configuration of the die that gives Beyond Meat its chicken-like structure.

It is the company’s secret sauce, the result of all those years of research, and Brown darts over to block my view of the readout as we approach. It’s the one thing that’s not entirely transparent about the operation.

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The printed cells will now go back into an incubator for a few more days, during which time they will start to develop an extracellular matrix, a naturally occurring scaffold of collagens that gives cells structural support.

The result is actual muscle tissue.

The technology in front of me is the work of Gabor Forgacs, a Hungarianborn theoretical physicist who turned to developmental biology mid-career.

In 2005, he led a team that developed a process to print multicellular aggregates rather than individual cells. His printer produces physiologically viable tubes of cells that can adhere to create large complex structures.

In 2007, Gabor and his son, Andras, helped found a company called Organovo that uses Gabor’s technology to print human tissue for medical applications (pharmaceutical testing, for instance) and aims one day to print functioning human organs for transplants. Gabor was the science mind behind the company, and Andras worked in various roles on the business side.

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“Fairly early on, people asked us, ‘Hey, could you make meat?’ ” Andras remembers. “And we were pretty dismissive of the idea”—it was simply too far from Organovo’s mission. But by 2011, Organovo had brought on a new management team and laid plans to go public (which it did in early 2012). Gabor began brainstorming new projects with his two closest scientific collaborators—Françoise Marga and Karoly Jakab. Andras, meanwhile, had moved to Shanghai to work in venture capital. He saw how diets in China were changing and how much of the meat came from places as far away as Latin America and Australia.

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“If we can make living tissues, then we can certainly make food-grade ones.” That confluence of factors made bio-fabricated meat appear more attractive. Even better, Gabor suspected meat would be simpler to produce than functioning human parts. “If we can make living tissues, then certainly we can make food-grade tissues, which don’t have to be as exacting,” he says.

“We do not have to worry about immune compatibility, for instance.”

In late 2011, Andras returned to the U.S., and the team landed a USDA Small Business Innovation Research grant shortly thereafter. It then received a grant from Breakout Labs, an arm of Peter Thiel’s foundation.

(Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal and a tech investor and futurist.) With help from the grant, Andras set up a business office at Singularity University on the campus of NASA’s Silicon Valley research park, and Gabor set up his

As ghoulish as growing lab meat sounds, the concept has a long history, and not just in science fiction. In 1931, Winston Churchill wrote, “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” He was wrong about the date, but the same sentiment drives the meat-alternatives community today. If you consider the conditions under which meat is produced—how the animals are treated and how much waste is involved—factory farming, not tissue culture, seems the ghoulish option.

By comparison, lab meat looks both humane and sensible; a study for the EU predicted that, if produced on a large scale, lab-grown meat would use 99.7 percent less land and 94 percent less water than factory farming, and it would contribute 98.8 percent fewer greenhouse gases.

Over the past few decades, a handful of scientists have pursued lab-grown meat, most notably Mark Post in the Netherlands. Post created the burger for his London taste test using a different tissue-engineering process that involves growing cells around a cylindrical scaffold. According to Isha Datar, the director of New Harvest, a nonprofit research and advocacy group that focuses on meat alternatives, Post’s process may actually be “more amenable to mass production, theoretically” than Modern Meadow’s 3-D printing. On the other hand, Datar points to the head start Modern Meadow has: “It’s an actual business. The other groups are all academic, and you never know if they have the power to get out of the lab.”

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scientific headquarters in Columbia. Modern Meadow was born.

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By August, Modern Meadow was experimenting with other bio-assembly techniques that could quickly lay down large cell arrays. And Mark Post revealed his own high-profile Silicon Valley backer: Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose track record bringing improbable products to market isn’t bad.

To make the meat more appealing, Modern Meadow has enlisted the

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But being first to market doesn’t matter if the meat coming out of the labs isn’t appetizing. Post’s burger got tepid reviews from his two tasters. And Modern Meadow’s current product is hardly even recognizable as meat; it lacks blood and fat, which are responsible for most of actual meat’s color, flavor, and juicy texture. Karoly Jakab shows me a couple of the samples he’s storing in the lab refrigerator: They look like tiny beige-gray sausages—fully grown, rolled-up versions of the Band-Aid I saw coming out the printer— about the size of an infant’s pinkie finger.

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Chicago chef Homaro Cantu, whose restaurant, Moto, has become an icon of molecular gastronomy. For Modern Meadow, he’ll be working on what Andras calls “last-mile issues” like texture, flavor, appearance, and mouthfeel by, for instance, suggesting how much fat to add and what kind.

And sometime in the next couple of years, Andras says, with Cantu’s help, Modern Meadow plans to start conducting invitation-only tasting sessions, where friends of the company will sign waivers and sample dishes.

There will be plenty of technical hurdles just to get to that point, but putting lab-grown meat in the hands of the masses could be even trickier because there is no regulatory precedent. Meat falls under the USDA’s jurisdiction, but Andras expects the FDA to be involved too. “They have the sophistication and understanding of how tissue engineering works in medicine,” he says.

Approval could take at least 10 years.

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In the meantime, Modern Meadow needs to make money, so the team is focusing heavily on growing leather, which turns out to be easier than meat and won’t face as many regulatory hurdles. Gabor hands me a pepperonisize disc of dark-brown leather, indistinguishable from the stuff used in one of my favorite pairs of shoes. It even smells like leather. It is leather. Much as the company is partnering with chef Cantu on perfecting the meat, it’s in talks with fashion brands and automakers to create products with the labgrown leather.

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Ethan Brown folds his lanky frame into one of the metal chairs at the Main Squeeze, an organic juice café in downtown Columbia, and begins talking about how he’ll define success for Beyond Meat in the near term. “I want to be in the meat aisle,” he says. “You go to the grocery store, and they sell meat in one section and vegetable-based proteins in another section. Why are they penalizing the non-meat?” He points to the rise of soy milk and its eventual inclusion in the dairy aisle—which helped to drive a 500 percent increase in sales since 1997—as his model.

“Our earliest adopters are the vegans and locavore types who prefer tofu and beans and quinoa,” he says. “But the sweet spot for us is folks who are simply cutting down on their meat consumption. They still eat at Taco Bell, but they know they shouldn’t do it that much.”

There’s an uncanny valley of food. Until engineered meat is perfect, it will be creepy.

Appealing to those people with a near-perfect imitation of meat makes sense on one level. But there’s also a risk, Andras Forgacs says. In the world of

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animation and robotics, there’s a concept called the “uncanny valley,” which states that if a simulated human too closely resembles the real thing, it will repel people. “There’s also an uncanny valley of food,” Andras says. “Until it becomes perfect, it’s going to be creepy.”

I’ve seen the uncanny valley response up close, when I’ve tried to serve my wife Beyond Meat. She has no problem eating processed meats that bear no resemblance to the animal they come from: hot dogs, say, or on the high end, goose liver pâté. And she’ll eat other soy proteins, such as tofu, that don’t pretend to be meat. But she won’t touch Beyond Meat. To her, it imitates the real thing just a little too closely.

Modern Meadow may simply back away from the uncanny valley, rather than try to cross it. “I have an analogy that goes back to Organovo,” Gabor says. “We will never be able to print a heart exactly as it appears in nature— but we don’t have to. What we need is to create an organ that functions as well as your heart, or better, from your own cells so that it works in your body. That we can do. And the same goes for meat. What we are going to put into your mouth is not what you’d get when you slaughter a cow. But from all other points of view—nutritional value, taste—it will be just like the real thing. You recognize it as meat, but it’s a different kind of meat.” Like a hot dog or goose liver pâté.

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And if fake meat doesn’t have to perfectly mimic real meat, it can be made even better than the real thing. The teams at Beyond Meat and Modern Meadow envision super meats enhanced with things like omega-3 fatty acids and extra vitamins. “You could eat a Beyond Meat Philly cheesesteak that lowers your cholesterol and gives you sexual prowess,” Brown says. He is only half joking.

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However they move forward, neither company envisions its product entirely replacing meat, nor do they see themselves as being in competition with each other. Isha Datar of New Harvest predicts a portfolio of approaches that would address the meat-production crisis: lab-grown meat and plant-based meats, yes, but also sustainably raised livestock and less meat-intensive diets.

A 2012 study at the University of Exeter in the U.K. calculated the degree to which diets must change in order to feed the world in 2050 and stave off catastrophic climate change. The researchers found that average global meat consumption would have to decrease from 16.6 percent of average daily calorie intake to 15 percent. That may not sound like much, but it translates to roughly halving the amount of meat in Western diets—a major change, but conceivable with high-quality meat alternatives.

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One theme cuts through all those visions of the future: Educated consumers who have the benefit of total transparency into the meat-production process.

Brown has considered installing cameras on the Beyond Meat production floor and streaming the video online so people can see for themselves how harmless the process is. The contrast to the secretive policies of industrial slaughterhouses would be stark.

Andras Forgacs imagines something even more dramatic. He pictures Modern Meadow’s production facilities as regional petting zoos. “You’d need to replenish the cell source periodically so all we’d really need is a few animals from which we could take occasional biopsies. They’d be like mascots. Other than getting poked every month or so, they would lead these perfectly charmed lives.” People could come meet the animals as they grazed and then make their way into a facility to watch a giant 3-D printer stream the cells onto trays, where they would grow into pork chops and steaks.

“Would you rather visit a slaughterhouse and see a cow get killed, skinned, and disemboweled right before you go eat a steak dinner, or would you rather visit a petting zoo and a facility that looks a little Willy Wonka–ish and then go eat the meat right afterward?”

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It’s a dream, but Andras insists it’s not outlandish. “Bio-fabrication already exists, and it’s inevitable that in the coming decades there will be applications beyond medicine—consumer applications, like food.” The question is whether the world will be ready for them.

The Next Food Revolution Activist chef Jamie Oliver talks about the future of food—cooking, eating, and farming.

Obesity is on the rise in neighborhoods around the world—and so are the rates of diabetes and heart disease. Can a small bit of nutrition education make a big difference? Activist chef and 2010 TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver thinks so. (Watch his talk, Teach every child about food.) His TED Prize wish was to help kids understand where food comes from, how to cook it, and how it affects their body—and to support better nutrition education for all, Oliver created the Food Revolution. Below, Oliver’s current thoughts on the future of food.

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BY 2040, EVEN FAST FOOD WILL CONTAIN A MUCH BIGGER RAINBOW OF FRUITS AND VEGGIES. What do you think people will be eating more of in 2040?

I hope that an integrated approach to food and farming policy will be prioritised in the next decade or so to support smaller farmers and incentivise all farmers to adopt sustainable operation methods. Smaller farms will

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I reckon it will be the norm to consume everyday food—even fast food—that contains more whole grains, less added sugar and a much bigger rainbow of fruits and veggies. I’m talking about wholesome, nutritious food that’s more traceable, less processed and easily accessible to everyone. With regard to meat, hopefully the narrative of “quality not quantity” will have reached more people, helping them live longer, healthier lives. I also think that by 2040 the science and measurement of the effects of good food and nutrients will be super robust.

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hopefully find ways to survive by working together in a more strategic way through digital technology, allowing them to be more seasonal, fresh, agile and unusual in the range of products they carry and serve. What will be exciting is the coming together of small farms to serve their communities— which has already started happening in pockets around the UK—so that as consumers we are buying from a group of farmers and producers that are local to us. Technology should allow the smaller farmer to go to lower prices, making them more competitive. On the other extreme I’d like to think that bigger famers will focus on the impact they’re having on the environment, with much less misuse of chemicals and pesticides and higher animal welfare standards.

As a result of better farming methods and healthier individual habits, I also hope to see better education and clearer labelling of farming methods, as well as provenance and nutrition, on the food we eat, so that we can all become savvy consumers. It should be statutory to know how something is grown and whether anything is added to that process, such as herbicides or pesticides, as well as the impact they can have on you and your children.

If we could change three things about our diet—to improve our own health and the health of our planet—what should they be?

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Well, we live in a world where there are 1.5 billion people who are overweight or obese, and we have so many unsustainable food production methods, huge amounts of food waste—and all of this needs to be addressed.

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So, in no particular order, the first thing we can all do is to eat less meat and more locally grown vegetables—that will have the biggest impact from a planetary point of view, and it’ll be good for us too.

The next thing would to be embrace food that’s been grown within cities using surplus energy from everyday city systems. This is something we really need to act on—harnessing energy that is already there to create extremely fresh food that has a positive environmental impact and genuine social value, grown as part of an urban community. Like I said, quality not quantity is key. In an ideal world, animal products should all come from animals living according to their natural place in the ecosystem, and in harmony with other natural systems.

WE’LL GET ON TOP OF FOOD WASTE—GROWING, SELLING, BUYING AND EATING EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED

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The third thing, which relates to diet in a roundabout way, is to start addressing food waste. We need to get on top of everything from surplus production to surplus consumption—to start growing, selling, buying and eating exactly what we need. We also need to be cleverer about how we use byproducts of the food industry. This will all have a massive impact.

What do you foresee as being the next big advance in food production in the next 10 years?

I don’t think there’s a simple answer here—there are loads of areas that are changing and evolving. Whether we like it or not, genetically modified crops will be completely and totally taken to new levels. There is a plethora of debate around that, for better or for worse: in whose hands, if any, is this to be trusted? People argue that we could help eradicate famine by using GMOs in the developing world, but who knows what negatives could come alongside that? We focus too much on the ability of technology to intensify production; this is not where we’ll find the solution. There are now more people in the world who are overweight and obese than who are hungry; the solution is not to simply produce more. In order to change, there needs to be a focus on sustainable diets.

WE FOCUS TOO MUCH ON USING TECHNOLOGY TO INTENSIFY PRODUCTION. WE SHOULD BE WORKING WITH NATURE, NOT TRYING TO CONTROL IT.

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From a farming point of view, the management of water and the displacement of that water through selling large amounts of food to other parts of the world will have to happen in a more advanced way. It’s a massive problem that needs attention, and technology must have a role to play there.

Overfishing in most oceans is also a huge problem. But thanks to the development of technology for sustainable fishing, as well as new technology for organic and sustainable aquaculture, I think the tide is already turning.

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Another area where technology must surely play a part is in the better management and understanding of our soil. We should be working with nature, not trying to control it. We’re already seeing a new era for sustainable and regenerative agriculture using big data combined with a better understanding of microbiology, like technology to repair soil degraded by decades of intensive, industrial agriculture. The aim is more nutrient-dense food and less misuse of our planet.

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And finally, I think more consideration and understanding about Environmental Profit & Loss (EP&L) will be key. Typically when we design businesses and sell products we only consider the human impact. But if you suddenly started having to pay for all the other elements—biodiversity, rainfall, bees pollinating crops, even sunlight—it changes the setup of that business. It immediately starts to make you treat what’s free in a completely different way, and in a way that is sympathetic to the planet we will hand over to the next generation. It sounds a bit hippy, but you can’t deny what we’ve taken for granted.

EVERY CHILD WILL BE TAUGHT ABOUT FOOD—WHERE IT COMES FROM, HOW IT AFFECTS THEIR BODY, AND HOW TO COOK IT. Technology really needs to become all about you, and wearable technology is certainly headed that way. It’s about gathering all that background info— genetics, dietary preferences, religion, age, location on the planet—and then loving you, encouraging you, and making suggestions. Suggestions could be ways to find produce, people, restaurants, cooking schools—whatever’s relevant specifically to you and that will satisfy your individuality. It all comes back to the importance of food education.

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If a genie granted you one wish regarding food and technology, what would you wish for?

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Ultimately, my only wish is always the same as my TED Prize statement. I wish for every child—in whichever way is relevant at the time—to be taught about food, where it comes from, how it affects their body, and how to cook it, allowing them to be confident in the kitchen and to enjoy food and all the pleasure it can bring them and their future family. That’s my only wish, and our biggest challenge.

Freedom from Food It takes time to plan a meal, to say nothing of cooking and eating it.

What if we could opt out of food altogether?

There are plenty of superpowers that would make a nice addition to my current lifestyle. I would be delighted to wake up one morning with the ability to fly, to become invisible, or even to turn matter into gold, provided my Midas touch came with a reliable on-off switch. But the superpower that I really want—the one I actually daydream about, wasting time that I don’t have—is the ability to create an extra day or two for myself each week. As the clock strikes midnight between Monday and Tuesday, a private portal would open up: an extra day, just for me. While everyone else sleeps, I write, read, send emails, and maybe even clean the oven, before going to bed and waking up on Tuesday, rested and refreshed just like everyone else, but with everything done.

‘According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, people spend about 90 minutes a day on food,’ Rhinehart explained. That figure is an average that includes grocery shopping, food preparation, consumption, and doing the dishes. By opting out of food, and replacing it with Soylent—named after

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The odds are reasonable that you might share this fantasy, in the abstract if not in the details. Each year, Gallup asks people in the US whether they feel pressed for time, and, each year for the past two decades, half of the population says that they generally do not have enough time to do what they want. The results—stress, sleep deprivation, and even obesity—are equally well-documented. What if all of those people could have an extra 90 minutes every day, to use as we see fit? Rob Rhinehart, a 25-year-old engineer and entrepreneur based in Studio City, California, believes that his new product, Soylent, can offer exactly that.

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the soy lentil burgers in the sci-fi novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966) by Harry Harrison, rather than its much better-known film adaptation Soylent Green (1973) which came up with the cannibalistic plotline—Rhinehart told me that he’s saved ‘easily an hour a day, plus’.

Rhinehart came up with the idea for a nutritionally complete liquid food substitute in December 2012, spurred by dissatisfaction at his expensive, timeconsuming and nutritionally dubious diet of fast food, frozen quesadillas, and pasta. In February 2013, he wrote a blog post entitled ‘How I Stopped Eating Food’, in which he reported feeling like the ‘six-million-dollar man’ after just 30 days of replacing food with a ‘thick, odourless, beige liquid’ made up of ‘every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial’.

The response was overwhelming. Readers of Hacker News, a website popular with programmers and tech entrepreneurs, were the first to latch on to Rhinehart’s Soylent post, encouraging him to share the recipe online. When he did, it quickly spawned an animated Reddit thread in which DIY Soylent adopters reviewed recipes, discussed magnesium sourcing, and compared bowel movements. Within three months, Rhinehart decided that demand was sufficient for him to quit his tech start-up and form his own company in order to supply Soylent to the masses. By the time Soylent 1.0 started shipping in May 2014, the company had already accumulated a backlog of more than 20,000 pre-orders, adding up to more than $2 million dollars in sales and – at a conservative estimate—a collective saving of 2,875 years.

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What, one wonders, are people doing with all this extra time? Will we see a new Renaissance: a Soylent-fuelled flowering of novels, art or, at the very least, apps? It is perhaps too early to tell, but early signs are mixed. Rhinehart has ploughed his 90 minutes a day into launching his company, and says he still has ‘a long reading list, a long online course list, a lot of personal projects I’d like to do’. He is not against using the time for relaxation, of course, and tells me that he’s heard from other early adopters that they spend an extra hour and a half watching TV, hanging out with friends and family, or just catching up on our pervasive national sleep deficit.

‘Just giving people a little more time in general is something the United States really needs,’ he told me. ‘However you use that time is up to you.’

My own experience bodes less well. I lived on Soylent for five days (Rhinehart sent me a week’s supply, but I cracked early) and I was indeed painfully aware of vast open periods that I would have typically spent planning, shopping

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for, making, enjoying and cleaning up after meals. Much to my editor’s disappointment, I spent all that extra time joylessly clicking around on the internet, my brain resisting every effort to corral it into more productive activities as if it knew it was being cheated of an expected break. (My editor kindly pointed out that this might be more of a reflection of my own personal failings than a shortcoming inherent to Soylent.)

Of course, this is not the first time Americans have been promised relief from the time-suck of food preparation. Today’s Soylent craze has its roots in the post-Second World War embrace of convenience foods. And, then as now, the range of possible uses for that saved time ranged from the trivial to the substantial—but with a much more gendered twist.

As Harvey Levenstein writes in Paradox of Plenty (1962), the president of the US Grocery Manufacturers Association proudly claimed that convenience foods had reduced the time the average housewife spent on food preparation from 5.5 to 1.5 hours a day over the course of the preceding decade. A few years later, in 1969, the chairman of the board of the US Corn Products Company explained to the Financial Times that ‘we—that is, the food industry—have given her [the housewife] the gift of time, which she may reinvest in bridge, canasta, garden club, and other perhaps more soulsatisfying pursuits’.

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Canasta and garden club aside, the real use of all the time saved by convenience foods can be found in female workforce participation rates.

Levenstein points out that ‘by 1960, there were twice as many working wives in America as there had been in 1950, and the number of working mothers had increased by 400 per cent’. The food historian Rachel Laudan, in her provocative essay ‘In Praise of Fast Food’ (2010), notes that modern, processed convenience foods are reviled by today’s cultural elite—and yet they represent an incredible liberation for the women upon whom the labour of food preparation would otherwise traditionally fall.

Simply having the choice of whether to spend time on food, or not, is a valuable and empowering thing

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In a particularly striking example, Laudan told me that, as recently as 20 years ago, a Mexican woman without servants would expect to spend four to five hours a day, every day, grinding maize in order to feed a family of five.

The mass production of tortillas at the industrial scale was not perfected until the 1980s – and, during the early 1990s, Mexico experienced a dramatic rise in the number of women working outside the home, from fewer than 30 per

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cent to nearly half. Mexican women ‘know supermarket tortillas don’t taste as good; they don’t care’, Laudan said. ‘Because if they want to have time, if they want to work, if they want to send their kids to school, then taste is less important than having that bit of extra money, and moving into the middle class.’

There is always a trade-off, in other words, involved in replacing homemade with convenience food—and, undoubtedly, in replacing food altogether in favour of a gritty beige liquid. Yet Laudan is clear: simply having the choice of whether to spend time on food, or not, is a valuable and empowering thing.

Rhinehart certainly sees Soylent as the logical next step on humanity’s journey from hunting and gathering to Go-Gurt. ‘That’s the trend that’s been in place since pretty much the dawn of history,’ he said. Soylent fits directly on a trajectory in which people consistently seek ‘more time to focus on higher arts and improve themselves, and to not worry so much about keeping themselves alive’. Indeed, reduced worry is another of Soylent’s benefits: beyond the quantifiable time savings in food shopping and preparation, the knowledge that breakfast, lunch and dinner are solved frees up a substantial chunk of mental energy.

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This, too, simply expands upon the existing attractions of convenience food. Take my favourite example, from a ground-breaking, obsessively detailed ethnography of the material culture of 32 middle-class Los Angeles households based on research conducted at UCLA between 2001 and 2005.

In the resulting book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century (2012), the authors note that when families in the study cooked weekday dinners from fresh, rather than pre-packaged, ingredients, it took only 10 to 12 minutes longer, on average, than preparing a convenience-food meal. Nonetheless, most of the parents in the study cite time scarcity as the reason they rely on frozen pizza, boxed macaroni-and-cheese, microwave dinners and takeout for two-thirds of their family’s weeknight meals.

Why, then, is eating convenience food viewed as a timesaving strategy?

According to the researchers, the answer has to do with a reduction of mental effort. ‘Perhaps the most important and clear-cut effect of packaged foods is that they reduce the complexity of meal planning,’ they write. ‘The family chef can invest less time thinking about the week’s meals.’

In other words, in a world where nearly 100,000 new food and drink products are added to supermarket shelves each year, convenience food offers a valuable freedom from decision-making—a signposted shortcut through

Again, Soylent simply takes this logic one step further: it offers diminished reality as a feature, rather than a bug. The Soylent drinker can blissfully tune out any media noise about whether eating red meat will kill or cure you, whether gluten is poison, and whether the Chipotle Mexican Grill is actually any healthier than McDonald’s, secure in the knowledge that they are consuming exactly what their body needs. As it says on the packet, Soylent guarantees ‘maximum nutrition with minimum effort’.

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the bewildering cornucopia and competing claims of the contemporary food environment.

It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to ask whether the answer to the problems that Soylent and its convenience-food precursors solve could actually be tackled more effectively by addressing the core problem, not the symptom. If women bear an unequal share of food-related labour, perhaps tackling gender inequality might result in similar benefits with fewer trade-offs than the TV dinner. Similarly, if confusing packaging claims, clickbait scare stories, and manipulative grocery store layouts contribute to an overwhelming sense that the act of feeding yourself and your family involves a stressful, complex, and far too fatiguing set of choices, then perhaps we need to rethink the contemporary food environment rather than opt out altogether.

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With that question in mind, let’s examine the trade-offs associated with replacing food with Soylent more closely.

Among its detractors’ most common complaints is the argument that food— and, specifically, the rituals around its preparation and consumption— is essential to culture and community. The family meal, in particular, is currently talked up as a cure to almost everything that ails us. Social scientists and politicians largely agree that sitting down to eat together every evening reduces child delinquency, substance abuse and the risk of obesity, improves health and mental well-being, and even holds the key to academic achievement.

‘The concept of the meal is kind of gone,’ he replied. ‘As soon as I feel a little hunger, I just down some Soylent.’ In fact, he added, with a note of pride,

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Soylent’s Rhinehart, on the other hand, no longer even owns a kitchen table and chairs, and tells me he’s looking forward to creating a customised version of Soylent for kids for when he has offspring of his own. When I asked whether he found himself holding on to any last vestiges of mealtime rituals, he laughed.

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‘people are surprised at how fast I drink it. I can do 20 ounces in just a few seconds at this point. So I’ve even kind of optimised down the seconds I devote to drinking it.’

The end of the meal is not a source of concern for Rhinehart at all—and perhaps rightly so. After all, as he pointed out to me, regular meals ‘were an invention in the first place’. As the historian Abigail Carroll wrote in her book Three Squares (2013), the US family dinner, despite its sacred role in contemporary culture, is only 150 years old. She notes that, like Rhinehart, the majority of 17th-century Virginia households had no table. Bowls and utensils were also in short supply before the 19th century, meaning that family members often ate in sequence rather than together. Meanwhile, Carroll ascribes the rise of the family dinner to the Industrial Revolution.

Once the urban 9-to-5 replaced the agricultural schedule, she explains, ‘evening became the only significant portion of the workday when siblings and parents could reconnect, dinner became special, and it still is’.

With Carroll’s context in mind, it is hard not to side with Rhinehart on this one: the tradition of three meals a day is a relatively recent one, enforced by the changing demands of work rather than essential to our humanity, and seemingly on its way out anyway, according to headlines such as ‘Snacking Could Be the Future of Eating’ (2012) in Food Processing. The social ritual of communal eating is much older, on the other hand, dating back to the earliest feasts following a successful hunting expedition. And even Rhinehart indulges in what historians call ‘feasting’ and he calls ‘recreational eating’.

Dinner parties or meals out with friends form, he estimates, 10 per cent of his caloric intake, with solo Soylent ingestion accounting for the other 90 per cent.

Another regular, though slightly less common, concern is that replacing food with a liquid substitute makes much of our oral apparatus entirely unnecessary—and that must have consequences, mustn’t it? But the scientific evidence that never chewing is harmful to human health is both thin and inconclusive. Chewing does spur insulin production, as the body prepares itself for food, and one Japanese study in 2013 found a slight link between higher blood glucose and insulin levels and more thorough mastication.

Another study (also in Japan, which seems to lead this obscure field of research) in 2007 found that eating hard-to-chew foods results in a smaller waist size, but not a lower body-mass index overall.

‘Soylent-face’ might become a recognisable look. Eventually, teeth themselves might become obsolete

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I did find one shocking, if speculative, hypothesis that, on at least two occasions in the past, changes in how we chew food have changed the entire shape of our faces. The UK food historian Bee Wilson pointed me to the work of the US anthropologist C Loring Brace, who has been obsessed with the ‘various manifestations of human dentition’ since the 1960s.

By examining European skulls, Brace found that the typical way in which human teeth fail to meet, with the upper set overlapping the lower set in an overbite, is a phenomenon that is actually only 250 years old in the West. That shift that correlates almost exactly with the widespread adoption of the table knife and fork. Before cutlery, Europeans would clamp their teeth together on large chunks of meat, in order to hack off pieces with a dagger—a style of eating Brace christened the ‘stuff-and-cut’. Afterward, the cutting was done on the plate, and the overbite became common. By way of proof, Brace offers the Chinese, who had adopted chopsticks 900 years earlier—and whose overbite predates the European version by exactly the same amount of time.

If Brace’s theory holds true, the implication is that the replacement of food with a liquid substitute could result in dramatic changes to the human jaw.

‘Soylent-face’ might become a recognisable look. Eventually, teeth themselves might become obsolete. Only time will tell, in this case.

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Chewing aside, Soylent claims to fulfil all your body’s nutritional needs. ‘It contains all of the elements of a healthy diet,’ confirms the website, ‘with limited contribution from less desirable components such as sugars, saturated fats, or cholesterol.’ Rhinehart’s formula blends vitamins and minerals at the levels recommended by the US Institute of Medicine, tested on himself and a handful of friends, and refined under the supervision of Xavier PiSunyer, professor of medicine the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University.

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Of course, as the historian Warren Belasco points in his enthralling book on the future of food Meals to Come (2006), this is not the first time that humans have been sure they could reverse-engineer food’s properties from its constituent parts. The discovery of vitamins in the early decades of the 20th century prompted a similar ‘belief that nutrition could be reduced to specific chemicals, which could be easily synthesised in the test-tube – the streamlined modernist cauldron’. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, the nutrition exhibits of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) were displayed beneath a sign declaring: ‘Man = Chemicals = Food’. Sadly, Vitamin B12 (essential for liver health) would not be isolated until 1948,

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meaning that the USDA’s chemical-fuelled man would likely have suffered from pernicious anaemia.

Rhinehart is sanguine when asked about the likelihood of his formula being revealed as deficient once our understanding of human physiology progresses in the future. Soylent is deliberately marketed as Soylent 1.0, he told me, to make it clear that ‘it’s certainly something that will have to continue to evolve and improve’.

The only time Rhinehart became uncomfortable during our wide-ranging conversation was when I asked him about his gut microbiome. This ecosystem of microbes, which live in the human gastrointestinal tract and assist in the digestion of food, has recently been shown to have enormous, though as yet poorly understood, impacts on human health. Rhinehart confessed to having recently had his gut microbiome sequenced, after a year in which nine-tenths of his diet consisted of Soylent.

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Sharing the results, he began, feels ‘a little exposing’. When prodded, he admitted: ‘They’re very telling. They’re very fascinating.’ In short, the microbes in Rhinehart’s guts ‘appear to be quite different’ from those found inside his fellow Americans. Though microbiome research is in its infancy, it seems that Soylent (unsurprisingly) might not be as comprehensive a food substitute for the microbes in our guts as it is for us. Of course, the argument could easily be made—and it has, by Rhinehart—that, while Soylent 1.0 might not yet be perfect, it is still a lot healthier than many of us manage on old-school food.

Beyond its impact on human well-being, however, food is equally deeply entwined with ecological health. While Rhinehart daydreams about a future in which Soylent is synthesised by algae in energy-neutral bioreactors, for now, its raw ingredients are purchased from a variety of sources across the US and China. An educated consumer might guess at the possible growing and processing conditions behind the eggs, broccoli and chicken thighs in their shopping basket but, in the case of Soylent’s chemical constituents, the dislocation is complete: the world’s largest manufacturer of the ergocalciferol (Vitamin D2 on Soylent’s ingredient list) is a factory in China’s Sichuan province, which synthesizes the chemical by applying ultraviolet radiation to fungi.

Soylent’s ingredients seem simple and pure: the distilled essence of nutrition.

In reality, however, its supply chains and ecological impact are as complex as – and even more mysterious than – the food it replaces.

Belasco points to this ‘aspiration to make food production disappear, if not from the land at least from consumer consciousness’ as one of the hallmarks of what he calls ‘modernist’ food—the 20th-century impetus to reduce cuisine to chemistry. This is perhaps Soylent’s most significant failing: food is the primary means by which we embody and enact our shifting, species-shaping relationship with natural world. Soylent represents an impossible wish to terminate that relationship entirely, to the impoverishment of both sides.

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Its most pressing problem is how downright unpleasant it tastes: like overly sweet vanilla body wash, but with the texture of silt

Soylent’s trade-offs, at least in terms of human and ecological health, are, it seems, quite significant. However, after five days spent living on 100 per cent Soylent, I can report that its most pressing problem is how downright unpleasant it tastes: like oversweet vanilla body wash, but with the texture of silt. It also has a rather unappetising tendency to separate into a scummy top, oily layer, and dense, mud-like bottom. I lost weight, but only because I found it was more tempting to go to bed hungry than to drink more Soylent.

Indeed, for me the only real upside to replacing food with Soylent was that my first real food after five days—half a proper New York bagel with butter, Cowgirl Creamery Mt Tam cheese, a perfect Jersey tomato, and a pinch of Maldon Sea Salt—tasted so utterly, incredibly good that the hand with which I lifted it to my mouth started shaking uncontrollably. I will remember that meal for the rest of my life—and I have been unable to recreate its groundshattering deliciousness since.

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Perhaps Soylent’s real value, then, is that by offering a functional simulation of food it enables us to appreciate those qualities in the original that are most important to us. In the same way that a study of AstroTurf reveals the attributes we most value in turfgrass, Soylent is a Rorschach test for our individual and societal relationship with food.

I still have three pouches sitting in my kitchen cabinet, if anyone wants some…

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Correction: This article has been edited to reflect Soylent’s use of a plantbased source for Vitamin D, rather than the lanolin-based source originally described.

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Greg Page on Food, Agriculture, and Cargill Greg Page, former CEO of Cargill, the largest privately-held company in America, talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the global food supply and the challenges of running a company with employees and activity all over the world. Page talks about the role of prices in global food markets in signaling information and prompting changes in response to those signals.

Other topics include government’s role in agriculture, the locavore movement and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

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Intro. [Recording date: January 5, 2015.] Russ: Before introducing today’s guest, I want to encourage listeners to go to econtalk.org, and in the upper left-hand corner of the page you’ll find a link to a survey where you can tell me a little bit about yourself and vote for your 5 favorite episodes of 2014.

Now for today’s guest. He is Greg Page, the Executive Chairman and former CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Cargill, the world’s largest privately held company with revenues in 2013 of about $136 billion. They have about 142 thousand employees and they are involved in many, many aspects of the food business. Greg, welcome to EconTalk. Guest: Good to be with you, Russ.

Russ: Let’s start with what Cargill does. I said you’re involved in the food industry. I know that doesn’t begin to cover it. And I know you can’t do that—if we had the whole hour on this, I’m sure you cover it. But just briefly: what does Cargill do? What are they involved in? Guest: So, we describe ourselves as being involved in food, ag (agricultural), and risk management.

And in the food-and-ag space we would differentiate the upstream activities

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of dealing directly with farmers and producers, whether that’s producer education on how to produce products that are safer, cleaner, more fit for purpose; and then following those through the links to where many of our customers are the consumer packaged goods companies that your listeners would recognize—the Nestles, the Krafts, the Unilevers, the General Mills of the world. We also provide risk management; and we started out in 1865— this year is our 150th anniversary—we started out really as a risk management company. So we work both at the producer level and at the consumer level helping people manage their price risk and their supply chain risk. Russ: So, you were CEO for a little over 6 years. Which I suppose to some people might seem like a short time to be in one job; but I’m sure it was a very intense experience. Was there anything remotely like a typical day? What’s it like, day to day, to be the CEO of an enterprise that massive? Guest: I don’t know that there would be a typical day. Certainly there are rhythms in any big company in terms of our interaction with our shareholders, who have been enormously supportive and loyal to the company for 150 years—both the Cargill and the MacMillan families continue to own all of the stock in the company excluding that which they share with employees. And so there is a certain normal day to that rhythm, or a normal month. We have a Board of Directors that fortunately is also populated by 6 external executives; since we are as an employee stock ownership company they serve as fiduciaries for our employees and have been enormously important to the company. So there is a portion of my time as Chairman and CEO that is spent dealing with our Board members as well as our shareholders. I think the second thing, given that we’re in 67 countries and do business probably in 140 different countries, there is a geopolitical element to a typical month, or a typical week. I would normally spend more 100 days outside of the United States in support of our employees and our customers in a variety of places and roles. So I think the only thing that’s common about a week or a given month is the uncertainty that events around the world bring to Cargill. And so I tried, and I believe the advice I’ve given to my successor is, to keep a portion of my calendar open and not to be oversubscribed, given that there will be time that will be required for events that can’t be predicted or projected. Russ: Was there a crisis in those 6 years that stands out that you had to deal with? That you could talk about? Guest: Well, certainly the late summer and the fall of 2008, the financial crisis in particular; and the timing of it—it came during the North American harvest season and one of the manifestations of the crisis was a shrinking of the liquidity. And clearly agriculture requires a lot of liquidity to buy harvests from farmers as they come due on a biological cycle.

And so we went through a period where we worked very closely with the U.S. Treasury and others to ensure that the flow of capital to agriculture was sustained. And I think that sticks out in my mind. There were a lot of other

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offshoots of that event in terms of individual commodity prices plummeting and some individual country-specific events such as those in the former Soviet Union. But more broadly, the liquidity crisis in 2008 was certainly an interesting time for agriculture overall. Russ: You’ve been with Cargill, I think, according to the site that I saw, for 4 decades. Is that right? Guest: Yes. This is my 41st year. Russ: Wow. So you probably knew something about food going into that job. Was there a lesson that you learned about food and food supply that you hadn’t learned beforehand? I’m sure you learned a lot being CEO. But in terms of just food, anything stand out? Guest: I think an underappreciated aspect of food and agriculture certainly the interconnectedness of the various links in the supply chain but powerfully within that is the role of price in changing behavior in a positive way. I think most of the general media will cover price movements generally on the upside as a harbinger of inflation or as something that’s unfair. Russ: Something sinister, yeah. Guest: Something sinister. But in point of fact, that you watch as price signals very quickly go through the global agricultural landscape and cause players and each individual link to behave differently. And I’ve seen it in a very positive way. That after, for instance, the very recent result, severe weather in 2012 in the U.S. Midwest, the way in which farmers in the outback of Brazil and other places in Latin America and Central Europe, the way they responded to that drop in supply related to U.S. weather to ensure that the amount of calories that we actually produced worldwide as you look at 2012 and 2013 together were very close to on trend. And I think people miss that, and it’s under-reported, that that signal went out and its speed of response all across the food supply chain to price signals is something that I would not have appreciated as I came out of college in spite of taking a few courses in microeconomics. But it’s something that we try to talk about more openly and more often as price movements are usually cast in a very ugly light. In point of fact people miss the huge positive value they have in terms of food security. Russ: That’s a great example. Of course we’re in the middle of a very dramatic fall in energy prices right now, and when energy prices rise, there’s always sinister talk. Somehow when they fall, there’s nothing sinister. Except for how slow they fall. They never fall fast enough. But they do fall, which is surprising. And as you point out, they do change behavior, on both ends, the up and the down. How about on the personal level? Any particular lessons you learned from going into that chair of CEO? Guest: A sense of nakedness. Each word and each gesture is overanalyzed by a large group of people, internally and externally. I think you come from a small town and hopefully are sincerely modest and you find yourself and your comments being overly impactful to people. I think you learn very quickly that the risks of thinking out loud are greater than the benefits of it. So my goal had never been to be anything but transparent, but there is a certain

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caution that you grow into rather quickly as you find out that people have a hard time distinguishing between what’s part of your learning process in your verbalizing in order to get people’s reaction versus actually encouraging people to act on those thoughts. Russ: It’s a very tough job. I’ve talked at length to a couple of CEOs in my life, not very many; and it was a while before that happened. And I don’t think we really have, those of us who are out here in the world, much of an idea what that life is like. There must be a certain loneliness, also. I’m sure you got a lot of advice before you went into the job. But I wonder how much you ended up communing with other CEOs about the challenges. Does that happen? Guest: Yes. And what’s interesting is you first think you’re the only CEO that’s seeking those opportunities where you can be unfettered in your thinking and comments. But I think most CEOs appreciate a couple of weekends a year where they can interact with other people whose day to day work experiences are quite parallel to their own, in spite of the fact that you are in very different industries and very different points in the cycles of those various industries. And in some cases very different geographies. The degree of commonality is pretty high. And there is a value to that, that I’ve seen. And I think the fact that many CEOs are willing to give up a couple of weekends a year to have those interactions says that it’s beneficial. And I think it’s beneficial to the person; I think it’s beneficial to the corporation and to the shareholders.

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Russ: Obviously you can’t answer this question precisely, but what proportion of your time as CEO would be taken up by what we might call legal and regulatory issues? Guest: Mmm. Russ: 110%? Guest: Yeah. In one way. They form a backdrop for a whole host of other decisions that you make. Right? Who you choose; the whole issue of ‘the imaginary horribles,’ we call them. How do you prepare yourself for those 5 or 6 standarddeviation events that can really change the trajectory of a company? And so, the degree that you spend time to mitigate risks to have a balance sheet that’s resilient to really, really harsh external financial environments, you could make the case that it preoccupies, or pre-populates, all of your other decisionmaking. Russ: How much time did you spend brainstorming about those black swans, those 5-6 standard-deviation disasters? Guest: Not enough.

But a significant amount of time. And I think it was Eisenhower: The plan means nothing; the planning means a lot. And so I think the whole ongoing discussion as you meet with individual division heads and asking the kind of ‘what keeps you awake at night’ questions is an ongoing process. Part of it is not for the headquarters to be prepared for that but to have a sense of how well prepared individual country leaders or individual industry leaders are for that and how much time they are giving it. I think the one thing you learn in Cargill, 67 countries and 65 different businesses, and many of them

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in places where our participation is mandated by nature, in terms of crops only grown in some places and not others. People often ask me, “Greg, why does Cargill continue to stay in country x?’ Because we have to. Ours is to figure out how to do it within the bounds of our ethics and to have a balance sheet and a set of risk profiles that realize that we are going to be in difficult circumstances many times. And so what’s important to us is the people we choose as leaders and their willingness to prepare themselves through those black swan events.

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Russ: That’s a nice segue to some of the policy issues I’d like to turn to. Talk about food security. What does that phrase mean? And what does Cargill do to worry about it? Guest: The food security was a main, great question. To me, it’s the ability over time and over a broad swath of geography and over broad swaths of the world income demographics to provide affordable safe nutritious food. So that’s at the highest level. And I say ‘over time’ because weather will throw curve balls at us, whether it’s the 2012 event here in the United States or weather events that we’ve experienced in the Black Sea region in the last 4 or 5 years, etc., etc. Second thing is: food security if it’s defined one country at a time, none of us will be food secure. So it is an interdependent definition that we try to get people to appreciate. One of the big threats to food security is the attempt by individual countries to define food security only in the context of their own citizens. That manifests itself in some cases—people try to start trying to grow crops for which they enjoy no comparative advantage. And so they take valuable acres, valuable rainfall, and force farmers, through tax policy or other means, to plant crops which don’t really suit their situation, because they are simply not prepared to have trust-based trade with others who do enjoy advantage in that crop. A good positive example is as China’s population and per capita GDP (Gross Domestic Product) has grown, they’ve come to realize that raising all their own soybeans doesn’t make sense—that they have far more comparative advantage in growing starches: wheat, rice, and corn. And so they have allowed themselves to become significant trust-based traders with the United States to some degree and with Latin America to a great degree on soybeans, and have taken their local water and land to grow starch, where they do enjoy comparative advantage. Everybody wins. If today China had a policy of trying to be self-sufficient in soybeans, every single person on earth would be less food secure. And getting that simple message across is more difficult than you’d think; and to this very day, we continue to see governments suddenly becoming anxious about a given crop where they enjoy no advantages and yet compelling their farmers to grow those crops for this sense of single-nation defined food security. Really dangerous for all 7 billion people. Might make great local politics in a given country. But if that were

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practiced on a broad scale by a large number of countries, a lot of our food security would evaporate. Russ: I was shocked in prepping for this interview to discover, which I did not know beforehand, that Saudi Arabia had been trying to become a wheat exporter. Which is a rather extraordinary story.

Guest: It’s great to go and see. Yeah. You can see the remnants of it. They’ve stopped, obviously, and have significantly wound that activity down. But I was there: the Minister of Commerce shared with me—at one point 90% of the pumped water that they were bringing up out of the ancient aquifer was being used for agriculture. And they realized that that water was most likely fossil water and not replenishing. And it made no sense to continue to do that vis-a-vis buying their barley from the Canadians, for instance. Russ: So, let’s talk about the United States. We are thought to be a free-trade country. And we are more free trade than we were 100 years ago or 50 years ago. But there are of course pockets where we intervene—for political reasons, presumably.

Two that come to mind are sugar, where we don’t let in much sugar from the rest of the world, or sugar-based stuff. And the other is corn. Which, as far as I can tell, we subsidize in all kinds of complicated ways, through ethanol requirements and other policies. A lot of people have blamed that, the ethanol requirement and other corn-based policies, for pushing down the price of corn artificially worldwide, because we export it, making it harder for farmers outside the United States to make a living. What are your thoughts on that?

What do we know about that? Guest: Well, I think, even the question is mixing a couple of different forces. So, compelled import prohibitions—and certainly we have those to some degree in poultry through phytosanitary rules. In the case of sugar it’s been very explicit for quite some time. Those clearly are a manifestation of politics, and they enforce by definition a cost on consumers, albeit in the case of the United States probably relatively modest as a percent of GDP, but it is a de facto form of indirect taxation on consumers in order to pass revenue-certainty to a small group of producers—in this case, cane and sugar beet producers. It’s been there for a long time; it will probably continue for a long time, based on the political makeup in the United States. In the total scheme of our food system, it’s probably relatively small. The second issue that you brought up about corn; and clearly in the case of ethanol, particularly from the period from 2007 until probably in the last 6 or 7 months has been the fact that it has raised the price of grain and therefore been a burden on the world’s poorest people. It clearly creates demand for corn. If you look at it from a policy standpoint, what we see going on in just biofuels more broadly, and particularly in the last 7, 8 months, is commodity prices have collapsed. If you go back 25 or 30 years ago, whenever agricultural prices collapse, government reaction to that was generally to restrain supply, even going back into the 1930s where there were restraints on supply to try to get commodity prices up during the Depression. What’s

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come out in the last 15 years is a realization by governments, by putting in demand requirements you can also raise agricultural prices. And so we’ve gone from a ag policy worldwide, where price management was generally carried out through the Treasury using its money to restrict supply, we’ve now entered an area where treasuries have realized, we don’t need to use any money if we simply put a mandate. It’s a very easy tax, if you will, to put on automobile owners by and large to put in place a biofuel mandate. And so recently for instance we’ve seen India put in place a sugar-based biofuels mandate at a price way above market clearing. And so this is no longer Western Europe or a U.S. set of policy prescriptions. We have seen at least a dozen countries that are worried about the collapsing prices of commodities on their rural farmers and trying to prevent a rural-to-urban migration on an unplanned basis, and don’t have the Treasury to do it through supply restrictions. They are putting in place demand mandates that have—S&D [?supply and demand?] price discovery dynamic have the same effect. And so they are benign to the Treasury; they are a modest tax on each individual person. Most of it falls on vehicle owners who arguably would not be in the bottom quartile of income demographics. And so the great new tool of ag policy in the world is demand management through biofuels. Then back to the U.S. subsidy programs. Clearly they’ve changed with the new farm bill.

And the direct payments have gone away; and so the primary vehicle is insurance subsidies. I would make the argument for that in terms of global food security, having that safety net for the world’s largest and most benevolent exporter is a good tradeoff to make for global food security, and the way I would describe that is, as a result of that insurance safety net, we have continued even in today’s low commodity prices to see American farmers to be relatively aggressive in terms of the quality and quantity of inputs they use to grow their crops. If they were operating with no safety net whatsoever at today’s market dynamic I think you would almost certainly see a more precipitous decline in the amount of fertilizer that’s used, in the amount of intensification that’s in place, because they would be managing both the yield versus input tradeoff that they always have to make, but also the price tradeoff and a working capital tradeoff. And with no safety net whatsoever I think they would take more risks—i.e., reduce the amount of inputs in intensification. If that was combined with bad weather, the world would get to experience what food insecurity feels like when at least part of it is precipitated by a farmer’s hedging of their own risks. So, I’ll stop there to be sure it makes sense, because I think it’s a really important concept. And I don’t mean to be an apologist for the farm bill, but at a cost of less than $1 per global citizen, in effect you take one of the most productive countries in the world and ensure that they continue to practice agronomy on a very aggressive level. And given our willingness to be free traders, to me it raises

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Russ: So, I want to go back to something you said earlier, just to clarify, and then we’ll come back to this issue of safety net. You mentioned the increases in grain prices. So, earlier you spoke about the role that price signals play.

And I assume what has happened is that as the demand for land to grow corn in the United States it’s gotten more expensive to grow non-corn products— soybeans and other products that are used for feed and other purposes.

And that’s what you meant by the increase in grain prices. Correct? Guest: I’m not sure I understand the question. Russ: Well, in theory, an ethanol requirement, which is going to push up the demand for corn, is going to have a rippling effect through a whole bunch of other markets. Guest: Absolutely. Russ: And that’s what you meant when you talked about grain prices going up. Guest: Yup. So, the farmer sits down—the best thing about the U.S. farm bill versus what existed before the last decade—so, what we call freedom to plant—that a farmer can sit down in February and look at his land and look at an array of price signals that he is receiving and determine what crops he should grow. If you go back 15 years ago, in many cases you had to farm to the legislation—that in order to maintain your base acres, and therefore your safety net, you were compelled to grow crops. Today you have in the United States an enormous amount of latitude to make the single best decision for you and your family as to what crop you will grow this year, given your soil moisture levels and a host of other signals. But to sit down at your kitchen table with your advisor or whatever and to make a 10-key calculator determination of what to plant in response to the market signals that you are getting. And so one of the big plusses, and it also has been in the last 15 years, this freedom to use your land according to market signals. Are those market signals shaped by things like biofuels policy? Absolutely. And so, what affects one crop, what affects the price of one crop will clearly affect the level of production for all other crops as well. Russ: Yeah. I don’t—that’s a fascinating change, which most Americans don’t pay any attention to— Guest: A huge change. Russ: We read for decades that we paid people not to grow stuff. Economists and others thought that was nuts. They pushed— most of us favored no agricultural subsidies. We don’t believe that there’s a literal security issue. There might be arguments about risk and uncertainty and how hard it is to be a farmer. But we have changed. You want to speculate about changed politically to make that feasible? Or do you want to leave that alone? Because—the reason I say that is when I talk to people, occasionally I talk to people who are legislative assistants in Congress about the sugar thing, which drives me nuts; and they always say, ‘Yeah, it drives us nuts, too.’

Because it’s just politically so-called ‘impossible’ to get rid of an incredibly

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food security to have that safety net in place. Is that potentially disruptive?

Yes. Are there other tools to offset that? Yes.

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large benefit to a handful of people in the sugar beet and sugar cane world, when the costs of that are spread across 330 million Americans. So that’s a classic Mancur Olson analysis of why some laws persist. And yet, the subsidy program for agriculture has apparently changed. And I wonder what made that possible. Guest: I think on the positive side what made it possible is the increased financial performance of basic agriculture in the United States over the last decade. That if you take the period prior to, say, 2005, I think you could build a case that agriculture broadly defined was decapitalizing itself; that in the absence of direct farmer payments, that farmers in the United States Midwest, the average age of their machinery was increasing; you can go through a host of issues. The price of land declined precipitously from what it was in 1981, 1982. The amount of money being spent by the railroads on trackage in the grain infrastructure area was at reduced levels because the profitability of those activities wasn’t there. You can go through a host of things—the construction of port facilities had basically, nothing had taken place since the late 1970s. And so, what happened is, agriculture went from being in a situation that absent direct capital injections from taxpayers, it felt[?] like it was a negative cash flow business; and it behaved that way broadly. With the advent of China becoming wealthier, more middle class citizens defined as people making more than $10 a day, started to grow, combined with the biofuels mandates in the few[?] geographies at that point in time, suddenly you saw crop prices transition into a net cash flow positive activity. And with that optimism came a sense of confidence. Also what came with it was the realization that trying to overly manipulate acreage allocation was just more than you should ask from a government. And there have always been voices to let market signals determine how farmers planted their crops. Don’t make people grow cotton just to maintain their base acres in the cotton program, when the world is crying out for more soybeans to feed itself.

And so, I think there was a food security, there was a recognition that it was immoral at some point to force farmers to grow crops that the market wasn’t calling for. And so, I think a coalition of a host of voices combined with a sense of more self-confidence in agriculture to take on a less interventionist government farm bill combined to get those things done. So I think there are really positive roots for it. The seed of that and the voices for that had always been there. They just hadn’t been a majority. And I think the rising prosperity of the world really gave Congress the confidence to do that. Russ: The food production business has become dramatically more concentrated than it was 25, 50 years ago, correct? Which has reduced some of that variance in incomes that probably was there before. Is that accurate? Guest: No. It depends on what you define on the food business. Clearly— Russ: Well, I said food production. Guest: Has the market share of the 10 largest grocers increased? Yes. Has the market share of the 10 largest consumer

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package groups grown through consolidation? Yes. Have the number of railroads serving agriculture in the United States contracted? Absolutely. So at the level of food production, if in the United States clearly the average farm size has grown dramatically in that period, partly accommodated by changes in technology, partly required by the changes in the sophistication of the equipment and the capital that’s required to really be the best-cost producer—so there’s a lot of voices. At the same time, the proportion of agriculture that continues to be held by extremely small holders, in some cases subsistence farmers who are really trying to feed their family and really aren’t responsive to price signals, has that continued to be a big part of the total global calorie production system? Absolutely. And so, I think what we have today is a more bifurcated agriculture with a number of places with larger, very sophisticated farmers; and yet a portion of the world which for geo—not geopolitical but rural sociology issues—have continued to fight against that and have sustained subscale small holders to produce food as a way again to avoid rural-urban migration that they don’t want to see. So I think it’s hard to generalize and to say that it’s been a pervasive consolidation in agriculture, because it hasn’t happened. There are 5 or 6 geographies where it has happened, and there are dozens and dozens of countries where it really hasn’t changed that much. Russ: Yeah; I mainly meant the United States.

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Russ: What I find interesting in the case of Cargill is that—I’m sure I’m not a food expert, and I’m not in the trenches, and you are in the trenches.

I’m sure there are a lot of people who find the size of Cargill to be something sinister. What struck me as encouraging on the other side is that your margins remain steady and low, is what it sounds like from my reading. Which suggests it’s a fairly competitive environment even when it’s more concentrated. Or whatever that means. Guest: I think a couple of things have happened. One it’s less concentrated than people think. They often talk about the ABCD— ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus. Yet if you look at our share of global waterborne trade, it really hasn’t changed all that much over the last decade.

There are a lot of emerging new participants out of Brazil, out of China.

Certainly there are a number of trading firms that have emerged in places like Singapore that participate in regional trade flows. The second is the quality and the availability of information has gone up dramatically. So, one of the things that always compresses margins is transparency. And certainly that’s grown. So the extent there’s been a modest amount of consolidation it’s been equally or more than us in information availability. And I think that transparency will continue to have a controlling effect on the ability to raise margins. There’s just too much timely high-quality—not too much, there’s just more and more high-quality timely information that will have the effect

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to offset any impacts of consolidation. Russ: You mentioned global—I think the phrase you used was ‘global waterborne trade.’ You are deeply involved in a lot of stuff being shipped across the world’s oceans. You have a large fleet. Is that correct? Guest: On time charter, yes. We don’t own a lot of vessels. But we have under time charter contracts, a lot of dry cargo. Russ: And what’s moving in those—those are I assume raw agricultural products? Guest: Yes. Russ: Grain and—is it meat also? I’ve read about how global the chicken market is, and I’ve been interested in chickens and eggs for a long time. Which is neither here nor there. But, chicken moves around the world. How does it get there? Guest: Yep. Most of it today moves in containers. And so, very different than the dry bulk. But first for your listeners, to put it in context is: I would guess, I don’t know the exact number for chicken but I know within the animal protein space in general: About 15% of global poultry production travels across borders, if you would view the EU (European Union) as a single food entity—which is really how it operates in many cases. And so it’s still a very localized business. In poultry, the flows, the vast majority of those flows are from countries like Brazil, which enjoy enormous comparative advantage to countries like the Middle East which is just not blessed with the crops or the climate for animal agriculture to the same degree. And so there are some enormous trade flows in poultry that have very good foundation in terms of comparative advantage, and I suspect those will continue to grow.

But overall, if you look at calories and grams of protein, the world’s food system remains pretty localized. We may be in some years up to 17 or 18% that will trade waterborne in grains and oil seeds but generally probably closer to 15% than to 18%. And so, to the people that are buying that 1518% it’s obviously enormously important. And particularly in the case of countries like Saudi Arabia that have elected to rely on trust-based free trade for their food security to a greater degree. And so we need to keep in mind the portion of the world’s food that does trade across international borders is critical to price discovery and it’s critical to the food security of people who are trying to benefit from other countries’ comparative advantage in their water resources. At the same time, we need to realize that food production remains a highly localized activity. Back to the issue of consolidation: even in the United States, we have seen an enormous growth in organic farms for instance, and artisanal agricultural production. And so even in Minnesota, for the first time in the last census we did not suffer a decline in the total number of farms. Even though the average size of the big row-crop farms did grow, the number of specialty farmers surrounding the Twin Cities, for instance, farming 5-15 acres, has grown dramatically as consumers look forward to seasonal produce raised in a local radius. And so, we’re seeing a somewhat bipolar agriculture emerge in the United States, too, with rowcrop farms getting larger and more specialty farmers proliferating. Hugely

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Russ: So, I have no problem with people who want to buy food from someone whose face they see, if they choose to do that. Or food that tastes better. Or— we’ve interviewed an organic farmer on the program, and I’ve talked about my wife’s participation in a local food co-op. Which is extremely expensive; and very pleasant and tasty. I’m all for it. But a lot of people are suggesting that that’s a model that we ought to spread widely. And not just because the food tastes better or it’s pleasant to interact with someone who provides your food, but because it’s better for the environment or the community in some ways—and that’s what’s sometimes called the locavore movement. What are your thoughts on that, particularly on the environmental side? Guest: I think it depends on how you measure it. I think when someone has a Ford F-150 pickup pull up in front of their house in suburban Minneapolis as I see people along my street do and the farmer from 20 miles away drops off 5 pounds of tomatoes, I think if we mapped the carbon footprint of that kind of agriculture, it would not give a story that is sustainable measured across the host of dimensions. I think in some cases there are row-crops that are being farmed organically and therefore requiring enormous amounts of tillage to control weeds. And having owned a farm that was farmed organically for a number of years, that kind of continuous tillage in my opinion has some detrimental aspects to soil quality and erosion resistance. And so, it depends on how you measure it. I think it’s great for employment. I think it’s great for stabilizing real communities. I think people do enjoy touching the hand of the farmer that grew their food. But I think to make a broad generalization that anything that’s produced locally is by definition more environmentally sustainable, I don’t think would stand the test of mathematics. Russ: How about on the cost side? Again, I think there’s a lot of romance about local farming. And of course it reminds one a little bit of electric cars, that are relatively carbon-friendly until you have to expand coal production. So, a small amount of local farming is one thing; being self-sufficient from your local farm region you’d have a bunch of those price signals would unleash a lot of changes that people probably don’t anticipate when they advocate for that. What do you think, more generally, the benefits of our global trading system are, where we don’t worry much about--much; some people do—but mostly we worry about, ‘Where can I buy the highest quality as cheaply as possible?’ Guest: I think you should ask again, Russ. I’m not sure that I followed the train of it. Russ: Sorry. A lot of people push for—they are against what you do. They think we shouldn’t be involved in 67 countries;

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positive thing in my opinion, particularly for employment and population in some of these rural counties that had been suffering shrinkage, to see people coming in and doing high value-added agriculture in their communities is an enormous positive.

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each country, each region, each town, each state, each city—there’s different flavors of this—but people want to advocate for a much more self-sufficient form of agriculture. And, besides the fact that I think the benefits of that are overstated, I think people grossly underestimate the costs—that is, they underestimate the benefits provided by global trading systems. So, I’m curious if you’ve thought how large those gains might be. I know it’s hard to measure them; you can’t measure them with any precision. But if we try to be more self-sufficient, I think we’d be shocked at how expensive it would be; and in turn how beneficial the current system is to the extent it’s free.

Guest: Yeah. Right. I think we have evidence. We started out with farmers’ markets in New York City; when they first started I think they had a 150mile radius to qualify, under the definition of the local food. I saw recently in the New York Times, they now define local food as 400-mile radius. Which means you can raise almost to the western Pennsylvania border. And all it is, is a realization that an overly restrictive definition of ‘local’ is both impractical and impossible as well as being significantly more expensive. If I look at it as a larger scale—I lived for a period of time in Thailand and watched while they tried to be self-sufficient in soybeans. They had to pay their farmers more than 50% above the world price to get them to grow a crop in which they enjoyed no advantage. So, there are examples where you can do it, and the price can be big enough. We grow non-GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) crops here in the United States for a number of our customers—that’s what they want and we’re here to provide choice. I know what we have to pay in terms of premiums to farmers to make them give up that technology to pay for the additional fuel, for more cultivation, to accept lower yields, particularly in years of more stressful weather. And so we get a window through our business on places where you can actually grow a crop that you shouldn’t, and what it costs. Call it 40 or 50% at the farm gate. Then there are other crops, like the growing demand for cocoa, where there just is no choice that it will be grown in climates where it can happen, I guess short of growing greenhouse oranges here in Minnesota, really outlandish things like that. There are portions of our diet, unless we are willing to compress the variety of the things we enjoy, where it’s just not going to respond to any price or any compelled production beyond the real absurdity of trying to grow cocoa beans or orange juice in greenhouses. And so the costs are not insignificant, percentagewise. I’ll stop there.

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Russ: I’m glad you mentioned GMOs, because that was going to be my next question. I’m interviewing Nassim Taleb; we talked about black swans earlier. He’s responsible for that phrase being somewhat common in conversation now. He is very concerned about Genetically Modified Organisms, GMOs, and the role they play in the food supply. He argues that

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the uncertainty about it means we shouldn’t be involved. What’s your take on that? Guest: One, we could feed the world without GMOs; there are other practices that we could follow. So the idea that we are prisoners of this technology I think is something that should be dispelled. On the other hand, I don’t think we should try that. I think if our water is precious, if our topsoil is precious, if we really care about the hydrocarbon footprint that we have in terms of the amount of cultivation that we need to carry out, that we should think very carefully about eliminating or demonizing genetic engineering.

And so, two things. I don’t think we should try to create a future where these products have been stigmatized. On the other side, it does us no good to make consumers feel that we can’t feed 9 billion people unless we use this technology. I don’t believe it’s the case, but it would take more land, it would take more water, it would take more diesel fuel to do it. But we would still provide the calories that 9 billion people are likely to require. As to the issue about human health, I look to third-party institutions, whether it’s the Harvard Medical School, the National Academy of Science, the Center for Disease Control, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), even the European Food Safety Agency, don’t make the case that this technology is leading to the creation of crops that harms individuals. That being said, I think we as an industry, and I hope that it’s something that will be taken up in the U.S. Congress in the coming year, are prepared to place more strictures on these technologies, a more transparent review process, greater involvement earlier on of the regulatory bodies, be they FDA, EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture). And so, we need to more thoughtfully and consistently enlist consumers’ confidence in these technologies if we are going to have a global food system that uses the least amount of land, least amount of water, and least amount of hydrocarbons.

And we can do a better job of that as an industry, and we all need to be prepared to do that because the demonization of this technology, and even more broadly just of science in our food system in our opinion isn’t going to lead to a great outcome. What we have to be careful of as a food industry is we don’t try to frighten people into these technologies by saying, ‘If we don’t do this, we can’t feed ourselves.’ That message isn’t necessary. But a message of enlisting and engaging consumers, citizens, young mothers in an understanding of the role of science both environmentally and nutritionally in our food system is something that we all have to do a better job of. Russ: So, we’ve been selectively breeding stuff forever. I’ve seen pictures—I think they’re probably right—of what a tomato looked like centuries ago. It was a berry. Corn was like a seed. And we have, through judicious and improving knowledge of the genetic process, gotten better at growing stuff. Obviously— my favorite examples, my parents tell me that white meat in a chicken of their era, which would be in the 1940s and 1950s was very different than today,

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because people prefer white meat so the chicken breasts are larger. They’ve bred chickens to do that. Is there some line we shouldn’t be crossing, that might be a different quality of genetic engineering that we ought to be more careful about? Is there something that’s qualitatively different about some of the stuff we’re doing now that we might need to be more careful about?

Guest: I think going forward you have to say the answer to your question is Yes. That we should operate on the premise that there are things that science may discover that we should not deploy. I don’t know what they are, specifically. I don’t think that we are, today, selling any of those products in commerce. But as people push the boundaries of science, will there be moments at which a sound regulatory system and a system of review is going to be important and might someone stumble across a technology, while it creates enormous changes in productivity, it comes with some unintended risks and therefore should not be pursued: I think that’s gone on for a long time, whether it’s in pharmaceuticals—there are a host of areas where something is a wonderful idea except for its side effects. And so, might that be the case going forward in the area of plant science? I would think that we should prepare for that and put policies in place to address those as they arise. Russ: So, I mentioned chickens and eggs earlier, and I’ve written about the fact that on a certain level, the technology of, say, egg production is inside the chicken, and you’d think there would be limits to how much more productive you could make a chicken. But of course we play with every single margin of improvement in terms of both how many people are involved in the egg production process, how much nutrition is involved, the role of medicine in making the chickens healthier. So, in the last 50 years, we’ve totally transformed the productivity of egg production from a subsistence level or slightly above subsistence level, a chicken wandering around in somebody’s backyard where you went and picked up the eggs, to a world where it’s an incredibly computerized, mechanized process. That’s [?] I know a little bit about. But you know a lot more than I do. I’d be curious, in your impression, what pieces of the food business have changed the most dramatically in the last 40, 50 years and where have the biggest productivity increases come from; how were they achieved? Guest: Well, I think you’ve given a great example—amongst the modern gastrics, the chicken has been enormous. I think the one thing you left out and that’s underappreciated, if you go back to the area you described where the chicken was outdoors, and things, if you think about it, it was an era where we had incredibly cheap commodities. And in effect, you were using grain to heat the chicken. Russ: Yep, absolutely. Guest: In the winter. In the same time, when it was that 95-degree wetball[?] temperature in July that the chicken would shut down and [?] and it would really not be very productive, and so what people have missed is that the degree of these improvements have come about as a result

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Russ: So, some of these improvements are what we would call—computer technology for example, the delivery of the—we’ve created a world, and this is true in manufacturing and agriculture, of course, is some sense of [?] manufacturing, a world where very few people are involved. People are expensive. Fortunately, we live in a world where our costs are getting higher because we are more productive in general. And so everybody responds to that by trying to find ways to substitute machines for people and other ways for people. So, that’s one way it’s happened. How about the science side? How much of the changes, in terms of yields and productivity generally, not just animals but grain production, comes from scientific breakthroughs versus

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of dramatic improvements in the quality of the housing. If you look at the way in which a modern pig or modern chicken or laying hen is housed, it’s changed dramatically in terms of their comfort and the amount of energy they spend either heating themselves or the amount of their energy they spend trying to get rid of excessive heat. That’s being afforded to them by a much more controlled environment. Russ: Just like us. Guest: Just like us.

Same thing. Imagine what worker productivity would be if the average office in Washington, D.C. was not air conditioned. And so it’s a host of incremental things that come together. Part of it is genetics, but certainly not all of it. Part of it is nutritional science. Clearly the quality, the intensity and the density of the diets that are fed today—yes, the feed conversion is improved. But the cost of the individual diet has also gone up as the density of them has increased, so in effect more horsepower per pound of feed that we put in front of these animals. So it’s all of those things coming together. One of the interesting things that has happened in the last 4 or 5 years as you saw corn go up to $8 is people realize there’s a whole ‘nother level of housing quality that can have a return on investment. If you forecast a future of $4 corn or a future of $8 corn, you’ll see a dramatic difference in how much people invest in the housing facilities for these livestock. Because the return on investment on the housing quality is obviously much better in an $8 corn environment than in a $4 corn environment. And so from an environmental standpoint, broadly defined, you could build a case that people are going to get more out of each kernel of grain if it costs $8, whether it’s waste control or whether it’s the quality of housing, than out of $4. Now, I don’t want to make the case or to be the prophet of the world will be more environmentally sustainable if we have very high-priced grain versus low-priced grain, but there is an element of that that’s entirely true: that the incentive to optimize each and every pound of feed provided to the animal is greater, the higher the value of the feed. And so, price again, back as a signal to do the right thing will increase the intensification of housing using livestock as the example. And that could manifest itself over a host of other things as well.

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technology or trial and error, all kinds of other ways that we improve things?

Guest: I don’t know that I know the exact percentage. I think that there’s an important interdependence: that, if you are going to buy seed that costs $125 an acre, the return on your investment to buy a planter that puts one of those seeds every 3 inches every time and at the exact distance below the surface of the earth goes up, than if you were using the kinds of open-pollinated seeds from 20 or 25 years ago. And so, I think that you could have wonderful seeds and take them to a place where controlling the depth of the planting or the amount of fertility, the fertility of the soil, the water retention capacity of the soil, you could have the world’s greatest genetics and not achieve an outcome. So it is the interconnected deployment of all of those things. And it’s been remarkable to watch as the price of fertilizer went from sub-$200 a ton to where it was in 2008, $800 or $900 a ton, the amount of technology, computer and otherwise that went into planters and sprayers and spreaders to optimize that $800 or $900 fertilizer versus $200. So you can see it in the machinery that people buy and the planters they buy and the amount of spending that a farmer will put into his soil testing. And so I think to ascribe 30-40% of our yield improvements came from genetics, even if it were true in a laboratory sense, I don’t think it’s as meaningful as the realization that farmers and their suppliers and their vendors doing all of those things in concert with each other, informed by price—whether it’s the price of the inputs or the price of the crops that they produce—that’s where the real magic occurs. And so that’s where we’re now, we’re circled all the way back to what’s the Farm Bill under which all of that takes place. Russ: Well, a lot of what we’ve been talking about has been the role of price in sending signals, and certainly I prefer a world where there is more of that than less of it. And I prefer a world where there’s more free trade than less. A lot of what we’ve been talking about is an application of Friedrich Hayek’s article, “The Use of knowledge in society. You just called it magic. He called it a marvel. And the reason I called you to interview you is I’d seen a piece by Marc Gunther in The Guardian. He had sent it to me. And he happened to quote me in it. But he sent it to me; it got me interested in talking to you. And in that article you invoked in a particular sentence Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Hayek. And I want to close by asking about your interest in economics and where it comes from, and how it affects your work life, to the extent that it does. Guest: Well, it affects it enormously. I see Cargill as a great laboratory of both macroeconomics and microeconomics; that the good news is, given the planting cycle and the harvesting cycle each year provides the opportunity to see many of the things that economic theorists would tell us actually play out on the kitchen tables of individual farmers with 10-key calculators responding to signals. I think in a positive sense watching the NDRC (National Development and Reform Commission) in China make

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a decision to redefine their definition of food security to include importing soybeans rather than compelling land allocation within their own country, against their comparative advantage, again listening to the voice of Ricardo, to say, hold it, this is really not something that we’re good at. And so, we watch it happen, positively and negatively. We see people ignore—to me, to their great disadvantage—the lessons of those three economists in terms of how they price water, in terms of how they charge for infrastructure. And so we get to see both the positive power of the messages that those economists talked about but we also get to see the damaging effect of ignoring them. And in very few cases to we see them as being wrong. That these are rules that at least in food and agriculture apply rather consistently and rather quickly.

Russ: And how did you encounter those ideas? When did you encounter them first? Guest: First as a student. And compelled learning. And suddenly there you were, three years into your life at Cargill and thought, ‘Aha! Something that my father paid for during those four years is immediately applicable.’

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TED TALK (CITIES FROM FOOD)

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Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world.

How do you feed a city? It’s one of the great questions of our time. Yet it’s one that’s rarely asked. We take it for granted that if we go into a shop or restaurant, or indeed into this theater’s foyer in about an hour’s time, there is going to be food there waiting for us, having magically come from somewhere.

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How Food Shapes Our Cities

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But when you think that every day for a city the size of London, enough food has to be produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten, disposed of, and that something similar has to happen every day for every city on earth, it’s remarkable that cities get fed at all.

0:53

We live in places like this as if they’re the most natural things in the world, forgetting that because we’re animals and that we need to eat, we’re actually as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were. And as more of us move into cities, more of that natural world is being transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me—it’s soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil—in order to feed us. These are extraordinary landscapes, but few of us ever get to see them.

1:26

And increasingly these landscapes are not just feeding us either. As more of us move into cities, more of us are eating meat, so that a third of the annual grain crop globally now gets fed to animals rather than to us human animals.

And given that it takes three times as much grain—actually ten times as much grain—to feed a human if it’s passed through an animal first, that’s not a very efficient way of feeding us.

And it’s an escalating problem too. By 2050, it’s estimated that twice the number of us are going to be living in cities. And it’s also estimated that there is going to be twice as much meat and dairy consumed. So meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand. And that’s going to pose an enormous problem. Six billion hungry carnivores to feed, by 2050. That’s a big problem.

And actually if we carry on as we are, it’s a problem we’re very unlikely to be able to solve.

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Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to create new arable land. Although at the same time we’re losing an equivalent amount of existing arables to salinization and erosion. We’re very hungry for fossil fuels too. It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie of food that we consume in the West. And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost, we don’t actually value it. Half the food produced in the USA is currently thrown away. And to end all of this, at the end of this long process, we’re not even managing to feed the planet properly. A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve. None of it makes very much sense.

3:11

And when you think that 80 percent of global trade in food now is controlled by just five multinational corporations, it’s a grim picture. As we’re moving into cities, the world is also embracing a Western diet. And if we look to the future, it’s an unsustainable diet.

So how did we get here? And more importantly, what are we going to do about it? Well, to answer the slightly easier question first, about 10,000 years ago, I would say, is the beginning of this process in the ancient Near East, known as the Fertile Crescent. Because, as you can see, it was crescent shaped. And it was also fertile. And it was here, about 10,000 years ago, that two extraordinary inventions, agriculture and urbanism, happened roughly in the same place and at the same time.

4:01

This is no accident, because agriculture and cities are bound together. They need each other. Because it was discovery of grain by our ancient ancestors for the first time that produced a food source that was large enough and stable enough to support permanent settlements. And if we look at what those settlements were like, we see they were compact. They were surrounded by productive farm land and dominated by large temple complexes like this one at Ur, that were, in fact, effectively, spiritualized, central food distribution centers.

4:35

Because it was the temples that organized the harvest, gathered in the grain, offered it to the gods, and then offered the grain that the gods didn’t eat back

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to the people. So, if you like, the whole spiritual and physical life of these cities was dominated by the grain and the harvest that sustained them. And in fact, that’s true of every ancient city. But of course not all of them were that small. Famously, Rome had about a million citizens by the first century A.D. So how did a city like this feed itself? The answer is what I call “ancient food miles.”

5:11

Basically, Rome had access to the sea, which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away. This is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world, because it was very difficult to transport food over roads, which were rough. And the food obviously went off very quickly. So Rome effectively waged war on places like Carthage and Egypt just to get its paws on their grain reserves. And, in fact, you could say that the expansion of the Empire was really sort of one long, drawn out militarized shopping spree, really. (Laughter) In fact—I love the fact, I just have to mention this: Rome in fact used to import oysters from London, at one stage. I think that’s extraordinary.

5:51

So Rome shaped its hinterland through its appetite. But the interesting thing is that the other thing also happened in the pre-industrial world. If we look at a map of London in the 17th century, we can see that its grain, which is coming in from the Thames, along the bottom of this map. So the grain markets were to the south of the city. And the roads leading up from them to Cheapside, which was the main market, were also grain markets.

6:17

And if you look at the name of one of those streets, Bread Street, you can tell what was going on there 300 years ago. And the same of course was true for fish. Fish was, of course, coming in by river as well. Same thing.

And of course Billingsgate, famously, was London’s fish market, operating on-site here until the mid-1980s. Which is extraordinary, really, when you think about it. Everybody else was wandering around with mobile phones that looked like bricks and sort of smelly fish happening down on the port.

6:46

This is another thing about food in cities: Once its roots into the city are established, they very rarely move. Meat is a very different story because, of course, animals could walk into the city. So much of London’s meat was coming from the northwest, from Scotland and Wales. So it was coming in, and arriving at the city at the northwest, which is why Smithfield, London’s very famous meat market, was located up there. Poultry was coming in from East Anglia and so on, to the northeast. I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this. Anyway, and so the birds were coming in with their feet protected with little canvas shoes. And then when they hit the eastern end of Cheapside,

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And, in fact, if you look at the map of any city built before the industrial age, you can trace food coming in to it. You can actually see how it was physically shaped by food, both by reading the names of the streets, which give you a lot of clues. Friday Street, in a previous life, is where you went to buy your fish on a Friday. But also you have to imagine it full of food. Because the streets and the public spaces were the only places where food was bought and sold.

7:57

And if we look at an image of Smithfield in 1830 you can see that it would have been very difficult to live in a city like this and be unaware of where your food came from. In fact, if you were having Sunday lunch, the chances were it was mooing or bleating outside your window about three days earlier.

So this was obviously an organic city, part of an organic cycle. And then 10 years later everything changed.

8:20

This is an image of the Great Western in 1840. And as you can see, some of the earliest train passengers were pigs and sheep. So all of a sudden, these animals are no longer walking into market. They’re being slaughtered out of sight and mind, somewhere in the countryside. And they’re coming into the city by rail. And this changes everything. To start off with, it makes it possible for the first time to grow cities, really any size and shape, in any place. Cities used to be constrained by geography; they used to have to get their food through very difficult physical means. All of a sudden they are effectively emancipated from geography.

And as you can see from these maps of London, in the 90 years after the trains came, it goes from being a little blob that was quite easy to feed by animals coming in on foot, and so on, to a large splurge, that would be very, very difficult to feed with anybody on foot, either animals or people. And of course that was just the beginning. After the trains came cars, and really this marks the end of this process. It’s the final emancipation of the city from any apparent relationship with nature at all.

9:27

And this is the kind of city that’s devoid of smell, devoid of mess, certainly devoid of people, because nobody would have dreamed of walking in such a landscape. In fact, what they did to get food was they got in their cars, drove to a box somewhere on the outskirts, came back with a week’s worth of shopping, and wondered what on earth to do with it. And this really is the moment when our relationship, both with food and cities, changes completely.

9:51

Here we have food—that used to be the center, the social core of the city—at

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that’s where they were sold, which is why it’s called Poultry.

TED TALK (CITIES FROM FOOD)

the periphery. It used to be a social event, buying and selling food. Now it’s anonymous. We used to cook; now we just add water, or a little bit of an egg if you’re making a cake or something. We don’t smell food to see if it’s okay to eat. We just read the back of a label on a packet. And we don’t value food.

We don’t trust it. So instead of trusting it, we fear it. And instead of valuing it, we throw it away.

10:24

One of the great ironies of modern food systems is that they’ve made the very thing they promised to make easier much harder. By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place, they’ve actually distanced us from our most important relationship, which is that of us and nature. And also they’ve made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver, that, as we’ve seen, are unsustainable.

10:47

So what are we going to do about that? It’s not a new question. 500 years ago it’s what Thomas More was asking himself. This is the frontispiece of his book “Utopia.” And it was a series of semi-independent city-states, if that sounds remotely familiar, a day’s walk from one another where everyone was basically farming-mad, and grew vegetables in their back gardens, and ate communal meals together, and so on. And I think you could argue that food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia, even though More never framed it that way.

11:19

And here is another very famous “Utopian” vision, that of Ebenezer Howard, “The Garden City.” Same idea: series of semi-independent city-states, little blobs of metropolitan stuff with arable land around, joined to one another by railway. And again, food could be said to be the ordering principle of his vision. It even got built, but nothing to do with this vision that Howard had.

And that is the problem with these Utopian ideas, that they are Utopian.

11:47

Utopia was actually a word that Thomas Moore used deliberately. It was a kind of joke, because it’s got a double derivation from the Greek. It can either mean a good place, or no place. Because it’s an ideal. It’s an imaginary thing.

We can’t have it. And I think, as a conceptual tool for thinking about the very deep problem of human dwelling, that makes it not much use. So I’ve come up with an alternative, which is Sitopia, from the ancient Greek, “sitos” for food, and “topos” for place. I believe we already live in Sitopia. We live in a world shaped by food, and if we realize that, we can use food as a really powerful tool—a conceptual tool, design tool, to shape the world differently.

So if we were to do that, what might Sitopia look like? Well I think it looks a bit like this. I have to use this slide. It’s just the look on the face of the dog.

But anyway, this is—(Laughter) it’s food at the center of life, at the center of

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12:48

But you can’t have scenes like this unless you have people like this. By the way, these can be men as well. It’s people who think about food, who think ahead, who plan, who can stare at a pile of raw vegetables and actually recognize them. We need these people. We’re part of a network. Because without these kinds of people we can’t have places like this. Here, I deliberately chose this because it is a man buying a vegetable. But networks, markets where food is being grown locally. It’s common. It’s fresh. It’s part of the social life of the city. Because without that, you can’t have this kind of place, food that is grown locally and also is part of the landscape, and is not just a zero-sum commodity off in some unseen hell-hole. Cows with a view. Steaming piles of humus. This is basically bringing the whole thing together.And this is a community project I visited recently in Toronto. It’s a greenhouse, where kids get told all about food and growing their own food. Here is a plant called Kevin, or maybe it’s a plant belonging to a kid called Kevin. I don’t know. But anyway, these kinds of projects that are trying to reconnect us with nature is extremely important.

13:59

So Sitopia, for me, is really a way of seeing. It’s basically recognizing that Sitopia already exists in little pockets everywhere. The trick is to join them up, to use food as a way of seeing. And if we do that, we’re going to stop seeing cities as big, metropolitan, unproductive blobs, like this. We’re going to see them more like this, as part of the productive, organic framework of which they are inevitably a part, symbiotically connected. But of course, that’s not a great image either, because we need not to be producing food like this anymore. We need to be thinking more about permaculture, which is why I think this image just sums up for me the kind of thinking we need to be doing. It’s a re-conceptualization of the way food shapes our lives.

14:43

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The best image I know of this is from 650 years ago. It’s Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s “Allegory of Good Government.” It’s about the relationship between the city and the countryside. And I think the message of this is very clear. If the city looks after the country, the country will look after the city. And I want us to ask now, what would Ambrogio Lorenzetti paint if he painted this image today? What would an allegory of good government look like today? Because I think it’s an urgent question. It’s one we have to ask, and we have to start answering. We know we are what we eat. We need to realize that the world is also what we eat. But if we take that idea, we can use food as a really powerful tool to shape the world better. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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family life, being celebrated, being enjoyed, people taking time for it. This is where food should be in our society.

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TED TALK (FUNGUS MATERIALS)

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Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new, fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture, plasma screens— and the environment.

0:15

So, I’d like to spend a few minutes with you folks today imagining what our planet might look like in a thousand years. But before I do that, I need to talk to you about synthetic materials like plastics, which require huge amounts of energy to create and, because of their disposal issues, are slowly poisoning our planet. I also want to tell you and share with you how my team and I have been using mushrooms over the last three years. Not like that. (Laughter) We’re using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials, which perform a lot like plastics during their use, but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives.

0:55

But first, I need to talk to you about what I consider one of the most egregious offenders in the disposable plastics category. This is a material you all know is Styrofoam, but I like to think of it as toxic white stuff. In a single cubic foot of this material—about what would come around your computer or large television—you have the same energy content of about a liter and a half of petrol. Yet, after just a few weeks of use, you’ll throw this material in the trash. And this isn’t just found in packaging. 20 billion dollars of this material is produced every year, in everything from building materials to surfboards to coffee cups to table tops. And that’s not the only place it’s found. The EPA estimates, in the United States, by volume, this material occupies 25 percent of our landfills. Even worse is when it finds its way into our natural environment—on the side of the road or next to a river. If it’s not picked up by a human, like me and you, it’ll stay there for thousands and thousands of years. Perhaps even worse is when it finds its way into our oceans, like in the great plastic gyre, where these materials are being mechanically broken into smaller and smaller bits, but they’re not really going away. They’re not

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Are Mushrooms The New Plastic

So, for all these reasons, I think we need better materials, and there are three key principles we can use to guide these materials. The first is feedstocks.

Today, we use a single feedstock, petroleum, to heat our homes, power our cars and make most of the materials you see around you. We recognize this is a finite resource, and it’s simply crazy to do this, to put a liter and a half of petrol in the trash every time you get a package. Second of all, we should really strive to use far less energy in creating these materials. I say far less, because 10 percent isn’t going to cut it. We should be talking about half, a quarter, one-tenth the energy content. And lastly, and I think perhaps most importantly, we should be creating materials that fit into what I call nature’s recycling system. This recycling system has been in place for the last billion years. I fit into it, you fit into it, and a hundred years tops, my body can return to the Earth with no preprocessing. Yet that packaging I got in the mail yesterday is going to last for thousands of years. This is crazy.

3:18

But nature provides us with a really good model here. When a tree’s done using its leaves—its solar collectors, these amazing molecular photon capturing devices—at the end of a season, it doesn’t pack them up, take them to the leaf reprocessing center and have them melted down to form new leaves.

It just drops them, the shortest distance possible, to the forest floor, where they’re actually upcycled into next year’s topsoil. And this gets us back to the mushrooms. Because in nature, mushrooms are the recycling system. And what we’ve discovered is, by using a part of the mushroom you’ve probably never seen -- analogous to its root structure; it’s called mycelium—we can actually grow materials with many of the same properties of conventional synthetics.

4:00

Now, mycelium is an amazing material, because it’s a self-assembling material. It actually takes things we would consider waste—things like seed husks or woody biomass—and can transform them into a chitinous polymer, which you can form into almost any shape. In our process, we basically use it as a glue. And by using mycelium as a glue, you can mold things just like you do in the plastic industry, and you can create materials with many different properties, materials that are insulating, fire-resistant, moistureresistant, vapor-resistant—materials that can absorb impacts, that can absorb acoustical impacts. But these materials are grown from agricultural

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biologically compatible. They’re basically fouling up Earth’s respiratory and circulatory systems. And because these materials are so prolific, because they’re found in so many places, there’s one other place you’ll find this material, styrene, which is made from benzene, a known carcinogen. You’ll find it inside of you.

TED TALK (FUNGUS MATERIALS)

byproducts, not petroleum. And because they’re made of natural materials, they are 100 percent compostable in you own backyard.

4:47

So I’d like to share with you the four basic steps required to make these materials. The first is selecting a feedstock, preferably something that’s regional, that’s in your area, right—local manufacturing. The next is actually taking this feedstock and putting in a tool, physically filling an enclosure, a mold, in whatever shape you want to get. Then you actually grow the mycelium through these particles, and that’s where the magic happens, because the organism is doing the work in this process, not the equipment.

The final step is, of course, the product, whether it’s a packaging material, a table top, or building block. Our vision is local manufacturing, like the local food movement, for production. So we’ve created formulations for all around the world using regional byproducts. If you’re in China, you might use a rice husk or a cottonseed hull. If you’re in Northern Europe or North America, you can use things like buckwheat husks or oat hulls. We then process these husks with some basic equipment.

5:40

And I want to share with you a quick video from our facility that gives you a sense of how this looks at scale. So what you’re seeing here is actually cotton hulls from Texas, in this case. It’s a waste product. And what they’re doing in our equipment is going through a continuous system, which cleans, cooks, cools and pasteurizes these materials, while also continuously inoculating them with our mycelium. This gives us a continuous stream of material that we can put into almost any shape, though today we’re making corner blocks.

And it’s when this lid goes on the part, that the magic really starts. Because the manufacturing process is our organism. It’ll actually begin to digest these wastes and, over the next five days, assemble them into biocomposites. Our entire facility is comprised of thousands and thousands and thousands of these tools sitting indoors in the dark, quietly self-assembling materials—and everything from building materials to, in this case, a packaging corner block.

6:37

So I’ve said a number of times that we grow materials. And it’s kind of hard to picture how that happens. So my team has taken five days-worth of growth, a typical growth cycle for us, and condensed it into a 15-second time lapse.

And I want you to really watch closely these little white dots on the screen, because, over the five-day period, what they do is extend out and through this material, using the energy that’s contained in these seed husks to build this chitinous polymer matrix. This matrix self-assembles, growing through and around the particles, making millions and millions of tiny fibers. And what parts of the seed husk we don’t digest, actually become part of the final, physical composite. So in front of your eyes, this part just self-assembled.

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7:23

The last step, of course, is application. In this case, we’ve grown a corner block. A major Fortune 500 furniture maker uses these corner blocks to protect their tables in shipment. They used to use a plastic packaging buffer, but we were able to give them the exact same physical performance with our grown material. Best of all, when it gets to the customer, it’s not trash. They can actually put this in their natural ecosystem without any processing, and it’s going to improve the local soil.

7:49

So, why mycelium? The first reason is local open feedstocks. You want to be able to do this anywhere in the world and not worry about peak rice hull or peak cottonseed hulls, because you have multiple choices. The next is selfassembly, because the organism is actually doing most of the work in this process. You don’t need a lot of equipment to set up a production facility.

So you can have lots of small facilities spread all across the world. Biological yield is really important. And because 100 percent of what we put in the tool become the final product, even the parts that aren’t digested become part of the structure, we’re getting incredible yield rates.

8:22

Natural polymers, well... I think that’s what’s most important, because these polymers have been tried and tested in our ecosystem for the last billion years, in everything from mushrooms to crustaceans. They’re not going to clog up Earth’s ecosystems. They work great. And while, today, we can practically guarantee that yesterday’s packaging is going to be here in 10,000 years, what I want to guarantee is that in 10,000 years, our descendants, our children’s children, will be living happily and in harmony with a healthy Earth. And I think that can be some really good news.

8:54

Thank you.

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It actually takes a little longer. It takes five days. But it’s much faster than conventional farming.

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TED TALK (BIOMIMICRY)

68

How can architects build a new world of sustainable beauty? By learning from nature. At TEDSalon in London, Michael Pawlyn describes three habits of nature that could transform architecture and society: radical resource efficiency, closed loops, and drawing energy from the sun.

0:11

I’d like to start with a couple of quick examples. These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider. They produce six different types of silk, which is spun together into a fiber, tougher than any fiber humans have ever made.

The nearest we’ve come is with aramid fiber. And to make that, it involves extremes of temperature, extremes of pressure and loads of pollution. And yet the spider manages to do it at ambient temperature and pressure with raw materials of dead flies and water. It does suggest we’ve still got a bit to learn. This beetle can detect a forest fire at 80 kilometers away. That’s roughly 10,000 times the range of man-made fire detectors. And what’s more, this guy doesn’t need a wire connected all the way back to a power station burning fossil fuels.

0:53

So these two examples give a sense of what biomimicry can deliver. If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use. And if we’re to make progress with the sustainability revolution, I believe there are three really big changes we need to bring about. Firstly, radical increases in resource efficiency. Secondly, shifting from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a closed-loop model.

And thirdly, changing from a fossil fuel economy to a solar economy. And for all three of these, I believe, biomimicry has a lot of the solutions that we’re going to need.

1:30

You could look at nature as being like a catalog of products, and all of those have benefited from a 3.8-billion-year research and development period.

And given that level of investment, it makes sense to use it. So I’m going to

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Using Nature’s Genius In Architecture

2:20

The next move was that we wanted to try and maximize the size of those hexagons. And to do that we had to find an alternative to glass, which is really very limited in terms of its unit sizes. And in nature there are lots of examples of very efficient structures based on pressurized membranes. So we started exploring this material called ETFE. It’s a high-strength polymer.

And what you do is you put it together in three layers, you weld it around the edge, and then you inflate it. And the great thing about this stuff is you can make it in units of roughly seven times the size of glass, and it was only one percent of the weight of double-glazing. So that was a factor-100 saving. And what we found is that we got into a positive cycle in which one breakthrough facilitated another. So with such large, lightweight pillows, we had much less steel. With less steel we were getting more sunlight in, which meant we didn’t have to put as much extra heat in winter. And with less overall weight in the superstructure, there were big savings in the foundations. And at the end of the project we worked out that the weight of that superstructure was actually less than the weight of the air inside the building.

So I think the Eden Project is a fairly good example of how ideas from biology can lead to radical increases in resource efficiency—delivering the same function, but with a fraction of the resource input. And actually there are loads of examples in nature that you could turn to for similar solutions.

So for instance, you could develop super-efficient roof structures based on giant Amazon water lilies, whole buildings inspired by abalone shells, superlightweight bridges inspired by plant cells. There’s a world of beauty and efficiency to explore here using nature as a design tool.

3:55

So now I want to go onto talking about the linear-to-closed-loop idea. The way we tend to use resources is we extract them, we turn them into shortlife products and then dispose of them. Nature works very differently. In ecosystems, the waste from one organism becomes the nutrient for something else in that system. And there are some examples of projects that have deliberately tried to mimic ecosystems. And one of my favorites is called the

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talk about some projects that have explored these ideas. And let’s start with radical increases in resource efficiency. When we were working on the Eden Project, we had to create a very large greenhouse in a site that was not only irregular, but it was continually changing because it was still being quarried.

It was a hell of a challenge, and it was actually examples from biology that provided a lot of the clues. So for instance, it was soap bubbles that helped us generate a building form that would work regardless of the final ground levels. Studying pollen grains and radiolaria and carbon molecules helped us devise the most efficient structural solution using hexagons and pentagons.

TED TALK (BIOMIMICRY)

Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles. And in their area they had a lot of shops and restaurants that were producing lots of food, cardboard and plastic waste. It was ending up in landfills. Now the really clever bit is what they did with the cardboard waste. And I’m just going to talk through this animation.

4:34

So they were paid to collect it from the restaurants. They then shredded the cardboard and sold it to equestrian centers as horse bedding. When that was soiled, they were paid again to collect it. They put it into worm recomposting systems, which produced a lot of worms, which they fed to Siberian sturgeon, which produced caviar, which they sold back to the restaurants. So it transformed a linear process into a closed-loop model, and it created more value in the process. Graham Wiles has continued to add more and more elements to this, turning waste streams into schemes that create value. And just as natural systems tend to increase in diversity and resilience over time, there’s a real sense with this project that the number of possibilities just continue increasing. And I know it’s a quirky example, but I think the implications of this are quite radical, because it suggests that we could actually transform a big problem—waste—into a massive opportunity.

5:24

And particularly in cities—we could look at the whole metabolism of cities, and look at those as opportunities. And that’s what we’re doing on the next project I’m going to talk about, the Mobius Project, where we’re trying to bring together a number of activities, all within one building, so that the waste from one can be the nutrient for another. And the kind of elements I’m talking about are, firstly, we have a restaurant inside a productive greenhouse, a bit like this one in Amsterdam called De Kas. Then we would have an anaerobic digester, which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area, turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid. We’d have a water treatment system treating wastewater, turning that into fresh water and generating energy from the solids using just plants and micro-organisms. We’d have a fish farm fed with vegetable waste from the kitchen and worms from the compost and supplying fish back to the restaurant. And we’d also have a coffee shop, and the waste grains from that could be used as a substrate for growing mushrooms.

6:17

So you can see that we’re bringing together cycles of food, energy and water and waste all within one building. And just for fun, we’ve proposed this for a roundabout in central London, which at the moment is a complete eyesore.

Some of you may recognize this. And with just a little bit of planning, we could transform a space dominated by traffic into one that provides open space for people, reconnects people with food and transforms waste into

SUSTENANCE ON EARTH

738

So the final project I want to talk about is the Sahara Forest Project, which we’re working on at the moment. It may come as a surprise to some of you to hear that quite large areas of what are currently desert were actually forested a fairly short time ago. So for instance, when Julius Caesar arrived in North Africa, huge areas of North Africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests.

And during the evolution of life on the Earth, it was the colonization of the land by plants that helped create the benign climate we currently enjoy. The converse is also true. The more vegetation we lose, the more that’s likely to exacerbate climate change and lead to further desertification. And this animation, this shows photosynthetic activity over the course of a number of years, and what you can see is that the boundaries of those deserts shift quite a lot, and that raises the question of whether we can intervene at the boundary conditions to halt, or maybe even reverse, desertification.

7:38

And if you look at some of the organisms that have evolved to live in deserts, there are some amazing examples of adaptations to water scarcity. This is the Namibian fog-basking beetle, and it’s evolved a way of harvesting its own fresh water in a desert. The way it does this is it comes out at night, crawls to the top of a sand dune, and because it’s got a matte black shell, is able to radiate heat out to the night sky and become slightly cooler than its surroundings. So when the moist breeze blows in off the sea, you get these droplets of water forming on the beetle’s shell. Just before sunrise, he tips his shell up, the water runs down into his mouth, has a good drink, goes off and hides for the rest of the day. And the ingenuity, if you could call it that, goes even further. Because if you look closely at the beetle’s shell, there are lots of little bumps on that shell. And those bumps are hydrophilic; they attract water. Between them there’s a waxy finish which repels water. And the effect of this is that as the droplets start to form on the bumps, they stay in tight, spherical beads, which means they’re much more mobile than they would be if it was just a film of water over the whole beetle’s shell. So even when there’s only a small amount of moisture in the air, it’s able to harvest that very effectively and channel it down to its mouth. So amazing example of an adaptation to a very resource-constrained environment—and in that sense, very relevant to the kind of challenges we’re going to be facing over the next few years, next few decades.

8:51

We’re working with the guy who invented the Seawater Greenhouse. This is a greenhouse designed for arid coastal regions, and the way it works is that you have this whole wall of evaporator grills, and you trickle seawater over that so that wind blows through, it picks up a lot of moisture and is cooled

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closed loop opportunities.

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in the process. So inside it’s cool and humid, which means the plants need less water to grow. And then at the back of the greenhouse, it condenses a lot of that humidity as freshwater in a process that is effectively identical to the beetle. And what they found with the first Seawater Greenhouse that was built was it was producing slightly more freshwater than it needed for the plants inside. So they just started spreading this on the land around, and the combination of that and the elevated humidity had quite a dramatic effect on the local area. This photograph was taken on completion day, and just one year later, it looked like that. So it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land—and in that sense, going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design.

9:48

So we were keen to scale this up and apply biomimicry ideas to maximize the benefits. And when you think about nature, often you think about it as being all about competition. But actually in mature ecosystems, you’re just as likely to find examples of symbiotic relationships. So an important biomimicry principle is to find ways of bringing technologies together in symbiotic clusters. And the technology that we settled on as an ideal partner for the Seawater Greenhouse is concentrated solar power, which uses solar-tracking mirrors to focus the sun’s heat to create electricity. And just to give you some sense of the potential of CSP, consider that we receive 10,000 times as much energy from the sun every year as we use in energy from all forms—10,000 times. So our energy problems are not intractable. It’s a challenge to our ingenuity. And the kind of synergies I’m talking about are, firstly, both these technologies work very well in hot, sunny deserts. CSP needs a supply of demineralized freshwater. That’s exactly what the Seawater Greenhouse produces. CSP produces a lot of waste heat. We’ll be able to make use of all that to evaporate more seawater and enhance the restorative benefits. And finally, in the shade under the mirrors, it’s possible to grow all sorts of crops that would not grow in direct sunlight. So this is how this scheme would look.

The idea is we create this long hedge of greenhouses facing the wind. We’d have concentrated solar power plants at intervals along the way.

11:08

Some of you might be wondering what we would do with all the salts. And with biomimicry, if you’ve got an underutilized resource, you don’t think, “How am I going to dispose of this?” You think, “What can I add to the system to create more value?” And it turns out that different things crystallize out at different stages. When you evaporate seawater, the first thing to crystallize out is calcium carbonate. And that builds up on the evaporators -- and that’s what that image on the left is—gradually getting encrusted with the calcium carbonate. So after a while, we could take that out, use it as a lightweight building block. And if you think about the carbon in that, that would have

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The next thing is sodium chloride. You can also compress that into a building block, as they did here. This is a hotel in Bolivia. And then after that, there are all sorts of compounds and elements that we can extract, like phosphates, that we need to get back into the desert soils to fertilize them. And there’s just about every element of the periodic table in seawater. So it should be possible to extract valuable elements like lithium for high-performance batteries.

And in parts of the Arabian Gulf, the seawater, the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants. And it’s pushing the ecosystem close to collapse. Now we would be able to make use of all that waste brine. We could evaporate it to enhance the restorative benefits and capture the salts, transforming an urgent waste problem into a big opportunity. Really the Sahara Forest Project is a model for how we could create zero-carbon food, abundant renewable energy in some of the most water-stressed parts of the planet as well as reversing desertification in certain areas.

12:44

So returning to those big challenges that I mentioned at the beginning: radical increases in resource efficiency, closing loops and a solar economy. They’re not just possible; they’re critical. And I firmly believe that studying the way nature solves problems will provide a lot of the solutions. But perhaps more than anything, what this thinking provides is a really positive way of talking about sustainable design. Far too much of the talk about the environment uses very negative language. But here it’s about synergies and abundance and optimizing. And this is an important point.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said, “If you want to build a flotilla of ships, you don’t sit around talking about carpentry. No, you need to set people’s souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores.” And that’s what we need to do, so let’s be positive, and let’s make progress with what could be the most exciting period of innovation we’ve ever seen.

13:32

Thank you.

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come out of the atmosphere, into the sea and then locked away in a building product.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Precautionary Principle and Genetically Modified Organisms Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile, Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a recent coauthored paper on the risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the use of the Precautionary Principle. Taleb contrasts harm with ruin and explains how the differences imply different rules of behavior when dealing with the risk of each. Taleb argues that when considering the riskiness of GMOs, the right understanding of statistics is more valuable than expertise in biology or genetics. The central issue that pervades the conversation is how to cope with a small non-negligible risk of catastrophe.

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Intro. [Recording date: January 8, 2015.] Russ: I want to remind listeners: please go to econtalk.org; in the upper left-hand corner you’ll find a link to a survey where you can vote for your favorite episodes of 2014. Now for today’s guest, Nassim, Nicholas Taleb. [...] Today we are going to be talking about a recent paper of his, co-authored with Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman, and Yaneer Bar-Yam on “The Precautionary Principle (with Applications to the Genetic Modification of Organisms),” and other general issues related to risk and ruin. Nassim, welcome back to EconTalk.

Guest: Hi. I’m always honored to be on your show, but also I have to admit that also it’s a pleasure, conversation with you. Perhaps we think too much alike, and it may be a problem from a scientific standpoint but it’s always a pleasure. Russ: Well, it looks like two data points; it may only be one.

That’s correct. Let’s start: what is the precautionary principle and why is it important? Guest: Okay. There’s some water on the floor. Do you drink from it? Would you drink from it? No. Why do you not drink from water on

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the floor, if you are thirsty, you are very careful. But you have no evidence that it’s poisonous. Uh-huh. So you are making a decision without evidence.

This is the exercise of the precautionary principle in your daily life. In other words, for things for which you don’t have evidence, you try to stay cautious until you accumulate the evidence; then you can pick the risk. Russ: So, it’s useful in situations where, you call it ‘non-evidentiary problems.’ Guest: So, technically, the definition of the precautionary principle is on decision making, what should be accepted or rejected in situations for which you do not have enough evidence or you do not have evidence yet. In other words, scientific knowledge has not been sufficient in establishing a clear cut answer about things, like what you exercise in daily life. 99% [?] are based on precautionary principles in our daily lives. But there is something much deeper there, is that as people are getting more and more into techniques of risk management, they tend to forget that most of the risks we are taking are of non-evidentiary nature, in the sense that the evidence comes always too late. And this is what we’re trying to avoid. This is a very general concept, that people who know have always understood in history in decision making, and the problem of what we call ‘scientism,’ in the Hayekian sense, Hayekian/ Popperian sense, scientism, this idea of using mechanistic tools from science to make claims and techniques, scientism has blinded people to this sort of reasoning. That is, effectively more rigorous than science because you have an asymmetry: you may die if you are wrong; and if you are right, [?] very [?]. Russ: And you argue very thoughtfully in the paper that experts are important, but you have to pick the right kind. Guest: Very often, people in a given profession develop expertise about what they are doing. In most domains, they don’t quite have a grasp of the risks, simply because their knowledge, professional knowledge that may help you do a lot of things, but particularly if it’s academic, it’s not going to help you understand the risks.

This we’ve seen in many domains. Like, traders understand the risk because they are pretty much risk managers, there to be risk managers. But, say, people that we’ve encountered, [?] for example, they understand return but they don’t understand the risk of something. But what they don’t understand typically is that the risk belongs to a completely different category. In other words the tail risk, the risk of ruin, is very different from knowledge. So, for example, your risk can increase while your knowledge is increasing. And we have shown, in the paper and some derivations elsewhere, how for example sometimes you bring something new, a new technique, for which you understand the benefits are going to be great. And what you do is increase both the benefits and the risk of ruin. So we end up worse off than we started, sometimes from a pure problem with another one. Is this clear enough, or should I— Russ: I think— Guest: Let me continue—yes. Go ahead.

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Russ: I think we talked about this in a previous episode. You have to make a distinction between the process and the consequences of the process. Right? So I think— Guest: Exactly. So, some people—they understand biology, okay?

They understand very well. And science is not about making claims about risk. Science is about making some verifiable and generalizable claims, from a given process; and that someone else can read and continue and improving on a body of things. But it doesn’t make claims about risk. So, we notice that neurobiologists, or biologists in general, but particularly but the same was done on neurobiologists, quite general, through that profession, through the broad field, they understand what they are doing, but the claims of evidence are usually more than 53% of the time in that experiment, in that paper which seem that they get things wrong in that they are making the claim statistically. So, a statistician can direct once that higher than a neurobiologist in a scientific claim. And the error is common, is, for example, the testing whether a is better than b is a test of significance of (a) and the significance of (b), and without testing the significance of the difference between a and b.

May be technical for the common person, but it’s a know-known statistics.

And yet more than half of papers in top journals in neurobiology make that mistake. Russ: Yeah, it’s a great point. Guest: So, a statistician—and the way these people operate is they know biology a lot; but there’s a cop called a statistician on top of them, who studies the paper and puts a stamp on it. And typically runs the data himself or let him run the data on SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) or something. And then give his approval.

So, knowing biology doesn’t mean you understand the evidence. Okay? And this is quite good. Now, once that higher up is that understanding statistical evidence, doesn’t mean you understand statistical risk. And that’s how. Many people we have discussed the problem. I wanted to detail analysis, any kind of statement about some kind of technology that may masses of people. Many of these people think that they have evidence; and then you read their papers and you look at it, and no statistician would ever let you say ‘I have evidence that’—this is again the Black Swan problem. A statistician would only let you say, ‘I failed to reject the null at x% confidence. This is what we brought up, which all of us are doing in our lives. So here you see that statistical evidence or what we call the mechanism doesn’t say anything about a tail. Russ: Well that’s the distinction— Guest: The tail. Statistics is what happened with that band and do we have enough data to make that claim that this works.

If it doesn’t say anything about what happens if that claim is wrong, and they give you, they say, okay, there’s 1% probability or 2% probability or 5% probability of that claim being wrong. But what happens when it’s wrong is usually a different business. And that’s where risk measurement starts. And that’s my profession. Russ: And of course therefore Nassim is the expert of experts. You have to be careful. It is a comforting thought for you. Maybe

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Russ: So, the way I think about it, that I learned from your paper is really a distinction between harm and ruin. In one world, you play poker every night; and some nights you lose a dollar, some nights you make a dollar.

Some nights you might lose $5. But if you are in a neighborhood poker game, you are not going to lose your entire wealth. You are not going to have ruin. But you are dealing with cases—you are making a crucial distinction between harm, which is that ‘some nights I might lose a little money,’ versus being wiped out. In the case of the globe, you are talking about extinction.

Guest: Exactly. So, what happens is that, to frame it with the discussion of the three layers of knowledge from the biologists to the statistician to the risk analyst, the body of the distribution is particularly the job of the statistician. Variations, all these things. It’s not part of our job. Our job is ruin; completely different dynamics. And for many probability distributions, there is a complete decoupling between variation and ruin. You remember, when I published The Black Swan it was in April 2007; if I received a Mexican peso for every time someone mentioned the Great Moderation to

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not for us. Guest: No, no, I’m not an expert on experts. Our job is the left tail, which is a sub-specialty. Russ: Yeah, that’s true. Guest: But, so when it comes to right tail or benefit, stuff like that understanding process, body of distribution, we have no specialty; or we may understand some things but we don’t rank higher. Guest: So, now that I give you hierarchy—I said, neurobiologists and I said on top of neurobiologists you have statisticians saying whether or what their claim was or whether the claim missed the statistical evidence or not; and then higher you have the left tail, and it’s a complete different business that we have discussed there. Now one simple analogy of why people sometimes in the profession are not qualified to talk about risk of the profession is what we call the Carpenter Fallacy. If you want to understand the risk of ruin or sequence of bets. It’s a standard result in probability. But who would you go to for that problem? Would you go to a carpenter who builds roulette? Or would you go to a probability person?

The carpenter may claim, ‘Hey, you know what, you are insulting me. I know very well how this is built,’ and stuff like that. But his knowledge of the carpentry involved in building the roulette table doesn’t allow him to make claims as to the probability distribution of what is going to happen. And then less even about claims concerning large deviations, the long sequences of tail events. You see my point. Russ: I do. Guest: So here we have. This is where we are positioning that precautionary principle—it’s about saying that are in the business of that very left tail, who are completely different, a different science than yours. Science never really talk about left tails. Only journalists think science talks about that—or bad scientists. And then you need a cop for that. That’s it.

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me, that the world is becoming a lot safer because it’s less volatile, I would probably own a big strip of land in northern Mexico. And then of course, sure that the crisis happened; and then it was not a change of regime. It was nothing. Just that they are making claims concerning tail events from observations about the distribution. And for the class of distribution that we used to work with, with fat tails, these claims cannot be made at all. So the risk can increase while at the same time variation can get smaller. And this is where Ben Bernanke went from, because he was not trained enough in statistical, in fat tails, to understand the risk. Another problem. Russ: Why are— Guest: Let me, steal, here—let me steal a method you gave me; actually I’ve used it before and I gave you credit the first couple of times and I stopped giving you credit. So maybe—so I owe it to your listeners, is I learned from you something. It’s that, you remember when you were talking about the difference between a systemic and fat-tailed systemic event, and a capacity, a smalltime capacity—that if a plane crashes, it’s a tragedy because it will kill the people on the plane and it’s a great loss—very bad news. But a plane crash will not kill every single person who ever took a plane before.

Whereas in some domains, such as finance, for example, banks can lose in a single quarter every single penny they ever made before. So in fat-tailed domain you have to be very careful because the tail is absorbing—it’s a lot worse, but that’s only money. It’s a lot worse when we talk about finance.

Vastly worse, because this is not renewable. Go ahead.

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Russ: So, talk about the underlying processes. It’s a little bit puzzling to an amateur as to why fat tails are so important. So, for example, if I have thin tails, well, it just means that ruin is just very unlikely. It’s still possible, though. So why are fat tails important? Guest: Fat tails are important because number 1, you don’t notice the variation, as I said are compressed, so you don’t notice that the risk is present. In a thin-tailed domain, evidence can accumulate as to the riskiness of something. If you go to Las Vegas and are there for 3 days, you pretty much understand everything; you can predict anything that can happen. Because in the thin tails are so tractable and the law of large numbers operates very quickly. For fat tails, you need a lot more data to know what’s going on. And when an event happens it can hit you big time. And the consequences of the event can be monstrous. Which is why we cannot be casual about fat-tailed domains. Now, we can ex ante figure out that something is fat-tailed: we know the ecology is rather fat-tailed, and that the crises in an ecosystem are not systemic because we have isolations. We do not have a large scale, generalized—or we did not have that before GMOs (genetically modified organisms), why I am worried about GMOs. Russ: Well the example you give that I think makes that so clear is a forest fire.

Forest fires are extremely destructive. But there are all these natural built-

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in barriers: there’s oceans, there’s rivers, there’s mountains, there’s natural firebreaks that keep a fire from being a catastrophic event. But what you’re worried about is something that has the potential to cross those barriers.

Guest: Exactly. So the way we say that nature has not blown up at least in the history of the process we have zillions of variations, trillions and trillions of variations on mother Earth, and it did produce some tail events but not pronounced enough to cause extinction. So even if we adjust by what we call survivorship bias or some similar principle, we just can make claims that nature seems to have survived thanks to a mechanism by which capacities stay relatively local. So things don’t spread. So in other words, plane crashing doesn’t kill every single passenger on other planes or every plane before.

Things stay confined and isolated. We had that in economic life of course until globalization; so what happened, a crisis now took place on the planet in 2008 and there is no place to hide. Or almost no place to hide. In the ecology, it’s going to be worse. We used to have an island separation, every island barrier, which produced effectively some diversity, because diversity is much higher in square meter on an island than it is on a continent. And we’re losing it. And we’re losing it through a lot of methods. But we’ll come back to that in a minute. Now I have one other element of fat tails I want to add so we can inform the rest of the conversation, which is as follows. Many people understand that there is a risk of ruin, and it could be very small, and sometimes we’ve got to take it. Many people understand that. But few understand that risk needs to be zero. Not small. Why? Because think of what happens in the sequence of risk-taking. If you take a risk, say with Russian roulette, a risk of ruin, and survive, what would you do next? You may take it again. So many risks that are very, very small, because you’ve survived them, lead to 100% risk of ruin. Russ: Right, because you get—well, it’s a couple of things we’ve talked about before which I find extremely powerful, which is what you call the Turkey Problem, which you get from Bertrand Russell: every day the turkey is being taken care of by the farmer and thinking— every day he gets additional and new evidence that it’s safe. It’s fine. He’s got a good life. Until Thanksgiving comes and he’s killed. And similarly, Value at Risk (VaR) in the financial crisis—it’s working; it’s fine; we’re making profits every quarter; we’re very prudent; we’re very careful because we have this tool that we use. And—I may have mentioned this before: I have a friend who is skeptical of your work. I won’t name him on the show. But he says to me, ‘Oh, everybody knows Value at Risk is dangerous.’ I say, ‘Well, it’s true.’

In theory. But after a while if you keep using it, you’ll probably get lulled into—if you are not careful and if you don’t have other feedback loops that make you wary, you are very likely to start thinking ‘I’ve got this licked.’

So you fire the Russian roulette; the bullet doesn’t kill you because it’s got a thousand chambers. Or maybe 100,000. But if you live for 40 years, you

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are in trouble. Guest: Yeah, exactly. So, this is what people fail to get: that ruin is not a renewable resource. It’s insurance. Russ: Explain. Guest: Let me explain. If I play Russian roulette, if I play things like that, I’m not—the probabilities add up. So mountain climbers have a very small probability of dying in any given episode. What happens? Hey, they survived. So they’re going to attempt to do it again. So eventually their life expectancies are going to be much shorter. Because they do a lot of it. So, on the repetition, you end up with 100% guarantee of ruin. So you lose—it’s a resource that’s not renewable. And people fail to look at risk that way—it’s that, you look at the risk of one episode, not succession of tail risk taken by the planet. So I have no problem of people taking risk so long as everyone stays local, not—doesn’t the whole human race. Russ: And you mentioned insurance because it’s like the cat having 9 lives? You get another— Guest: [?] with insurance you have a cash flow. And they understand the problem very well, since Cramer [probably Harald Cramér—Econlib Ed.], the guy who studied insurance.

They looked at some process that compensate the risk you are taking because you are making some money to accumulate in some reservoir that’s going to be depleted, but not 100%. So the idea is to calibrate the risk taking to what you are getting into the reservoir. In insurance you can do that. In ecology, and many domains, you cannot do that, because the reservoir is not being filled. We are just wasting risk. You see? So what happens in the end, risk accumulates to 100% probability of ruin.

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Russ: So, let me ask one more general question and then we’ll turn to GMOs and environmental issues more generally. In the article you talk about a contrast between bottom up, local events leading to thin tails, whereas global, connected, top down events are going to be fat-tailed. Talk about that.

Guest: The best way before getting to the statistical taxonomy of these things is through a common—probably your next best economist. Who is your next best economist, after Adam Smith? Russ: Uh, that would be F. A. Hayek.

Guest: There you go. So let’s talk about Hayek. You see—by now I can read you. Russ: I got nervous; I got nervous there for a minute. But I got the right answer. I’m relieved. Guest: What was the idea of Hayek? Why did Hayek want distributed knowledge in society, nothing, no monopoly of knowledge by anyone? Because he wants the errors to be distributed. He thinks that the system knows more than any individual part of the system. And also be he thinks we cannot forecast—the mind cannot foresee its own advance. That’s another profundity, not just we can’t forecast: we can’t forecast how we are going to forecast in the future. So really, let’s call it Popper/Hayek because they really worked on that together and the two friends were brilliant in slightly different domains. So, Hayek was against—what? Against a top down social planner who thinks he knows things in advance, can’t foresee

Russ: Well, let’s talk about that. Guest: So, GMOs. If you look at evolution,

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results. And makes—because the person first of all has arrogant claims that may harm us, but also because of mistakes—he’s not going to foresee his own mistakes; and mistakes will be large. So you see where I’m coming from?

Russ: Yep. It’s Adam Smith’s man of system, also—same problem. Guest: Let’s continue with Hayekian thought. And this led Hayek to stand against what he calls ‘scientism’. Scientism is an unscientific use of science, that I’ve encountered with pro-GMO people who keep attacking me—the scientism, because they say, oh, I’m for science; risk management is science fiction. And then there’s no point, there’s nothing wrong. Hayek has solved that problem of scientism and false claims, what, 50, 60 years ago. And he effectively is a man who is vindicated. There’s something even more interesting than that about Hayekianism. You know, the opposite of Hayek—people who did exactly what he was against—were the Soviets. You know? Russ: Yeah. Guest: Now, it so happened that there’s a branch of mathematics largely developed by the Soviets in dynamical system, one just got the Abel Prize, in that tradition, started by the Soviet Union, in the heyday of Soviet science, about nonlinear dynamics. And the last one was the billiard ball fellow, Yakov Sinai, who got the Abel Prize. And he’s probably the most crowned mathematician alive today. Now, what is this Soviet mathematician saying? You know what, in a complex system you can’t predict. That’s sort of what they said. Financed by who? A social planner. Russ: Yeah, it’s ironic. Guest: But nobody saw the contradiction. That if they are right, then they should have no Soviet system.

It’s ironic, but let’s not laugh too early, because it looks like many people are making that mistake. Russ: Well, it’s a common problem. Guest: [?] But making it is different when you switch domains and the fact is the mistake isn’t a mistake thinking that an environment is predictable when it’s not. It’s a mistake of not realizing that an idea developed in one domain can apply to another one, while accepting that these two domains have same operating mechanisms. So you continue Hayek effectively looked at nature as a format by which things—he sort of like thought of nature directly and indirectly and thought of the organic directly or indirectly as operating according to his principle of distributed knowledge. And technologies. And tinkering—away from that central planning mode. Russ: Well, that’s why the latest paper on macroeconomics that claims that such and such an intervention is good for the economy, or bad for the economy, is the same as the epidemiologist who claims that drinking coffee or wine or whatever it is, is good or bad for you.

And they find some data— Guest: I would say—it’s benign to say coffee is good or bad for you. But it is a benign claim. And some such claims can be rigorous. But let’s say now, a Soviet planner, one that comes to nature. Aha— GMOs. You see where I am coming from?

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if you look at how things get from point A to point B, it’s by small tinkering, where mistakes are kept small and local. And you cannot foresee interaction in a given complex system unless you experiment with things. And that’s Hayek, that’s the mathematics that we have behind us, and the entire class of— Russ: Schumpeter. Yeah. Guest: I don’t know about Schumpeter, but I know about the real mathematicians who worked on these problems and dynamical systems. You cannot really forecast interaction in systems that are too complex. And you can explain it to someone, you can explain limits, with all kind of incompleteness theorems that we have; or with simple example of billiard balls. So, the problem that natural systems—this is universality of complex system—has opacity, if you look at them from the standpoint of a social planner. But they are very understandable if we look at them from the perspective of a complex system that has evolutionary attributes. So, what you do is, time counts a lot. You put things together, let them interact, and then there’s some dynamics of interaction; and you see if the system doesn’t blow up, then it’s a good system. If it blows up, then it’s a bad system. And the system would anyway clean itself automatically using these mechanisms.

And small tinkering. Russ: Feedback loops. Guest: Sorry? If it was feedback loops things. In Antifragile I presented it in terms of different layers. You have a fragile layer at the bottom, like your selves. And then you have a hierarchy, above the selves, and you have individuals and then you have society. And then your families and then society and so on. And then humanity. And then—oh, species, and stuff like that. So you have hierarchies. And then you have, of course, evolutionary mechanisms at all levels of the hierarchies. So, this is how things work in nature. And I’m not saying anything that that’s not true for evolutionary biologists. That that’s how the process of tinkering is accepted. Now, and that was bricolage actually—the word ‘tinkering’ I’m using now comes from bricolage, from the famous Monod and Jacob papers, two French people who got the Nobel in the 1960s. Now, when we look at GMOs, what are we doing with GMOs? We are skipping steps. A tomato, okay, there’s a GMO tomato made according to the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) will be the same as a tomato—the same organically through natural mechanisms—or human breeding, even. But these steps are not the same as skipping zillions of steps to get to a tomato. We don’t know in the soil what’s going to do to other plants. We don’t know what it’s going to do to you. We have a lot of unknowns. So, when you have a lot of unknowns like that, you put the precautionary principle until further notice. So that’s where we’re going.

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Russ: I interviewed Greg Page, who is the former CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Cargill. And he accepts the idea that there may be some risk.

But he, as you would argue, doesn’t think much about ruin. So his view,

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and I think the view of many people in the industry, and certainly many scientists, whether they are tainted by self-interest or not, they would say, ‘Well, look. People are eating these new tomatoes that have, say, the gene of a fish in it—or whatever has been done to it. And they are not dying.

And it’s hard to understand why you would be worried about the fact that there’s going to be, say, a mass extinction of human beings from eating a GMO-modified tomato.’ So, what’s the scientific evidence? Guest: No, no, that’s exactly what we want to avoid, having to talk about scientific evidence when the burden of the proof is on the GMO people to show us that they understand anything remotely about the tail risk. Which they don’t. The tail risk is not someone dying from eating the tomato. That’s not a big risk.

No. That’s not a systemic risk. The big risk is what can happen when you have two things going together—which is, what happens, Soviet style, is a combination of monopoly of some plants over others, that it’s too large a system; and of course creation of other species that will themselves also be too powerful and then you may kill the GMOs or one may kill the other and you may have huge imbalances in nature. And these imbalances in nature can produce large deviations. This is our point. And we haven’t seen any paper looking at the risk from that standpoint. And when people look at risk—we looked at them, some are using 1960s error type reasoning, which of course is not, is too primitive to allow us to make any conclusion. And when people say, where is the evidence, tell them, ‘Hey, you know, what was the evidence that smoking could cause cancer? What was the evidence that lobotomy was bad? What was the evidence that Teldane, Triludan, Seldane, Ecotrin, where was the evidence that these were harmful?’ Evidence showed up late. Sometimes—even in one case across a generation. So you have a problem with the reasoning of people invoking evidence when they don’t know what they are talking about as far as evidence. No statistician would put his stamp that we have evidence, that it is safe. They tell you failure to reject the null at this percentage. And, so they sort of agree with us that that tail is not investigated. We haven’t seen an investigation of the tail that’s properly done. Russ: But as you point out in the paper, if you are not careful, you can invoke that for lots of things. Guest: Exactly. So we are not invoking—for the nuclear, we cannot invoke the precautionary principle for the nuclear. Why? Because the nuclear will stay local. It doesn’t mean it’s not risky. You may want to ban nuclear, for risk purpose; but the nuclear, you cannot have, a Fukushima cannot lead to destruction in India. Or may, in India, but not in Lebanon. Or maybe Lebanon but not Cyprus. So you don’t have—if you have now the same crops invading the whole planet, it’s too much. Having GMOs on an island is one thing, and generalizing same to the planet in the name of science is another thing. And I have heard—listen, if I had to inform you that it was Mexican peso, that if I had the Lebanese lira,

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or maybe the Turkish lira--now there is a lot of trading in the Turkish lira —every time I heard people saying that we scientists with a zillion Ph.Ds. think that these securities are very safe, say in people speaking employed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or Morgan Stanley in 2007 before the crisis. And they would say no, there is zero probability of a fail in that. And even if you saw the Stiglitz-Orszag report about Fannie Mae. Russ: Oh, yeah. Guest: So, the point is you have to deal with skepticism in a corner of the probability distribution unless you have some strong feeling or really a very, very robust reasoning showing that this is not going to harm beyond that local.

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Russ: Well, let me ask it a different way. I understand—well, you said it in 2007; if you said, well, if the so-called Ph.D. expert said it’s been safe so far, you could have said, well, these things are all tied together. You could say, oh, you have insurance but every firm has insurance with AIG, and therefore when everybody goes broke, AIG is going to have a problem honoring their promises. So you could say that, then. The question now I have is that: Where is the evidence that this GMO process is a fat-tailed process rather than a thing-tailed process? Guest: The first thing you’ve got to—when you think of are we in fat-tailed or thin-tailed domains is look the other way and say, ‘What is the evidence that we are in a thin-tailed domain?’ Nature has some, produced some thin-tailed things under a process that has to have some kind of balance and obeys central limits. For example, within species, humans—the height follows a Gaussian distribution. But nature doesn’t deliver thin tails between species. Look at an elephant versus a mouse. Hey, this is a very fat-tailed process. Or the difference in size between a mammoth and a bacteria. And they are all life—life can take a lot of forms. So, nature is effectively largely fat-tailed. And the way we define fat-tailed in the paper is rigorously as in the class we call sub-exponential class. So nature is fattailed. But why doesn’t nature blow up? Since it’s fat tailed. Uh-huh. Because effectively you have circuit breakers that transform the fat tails into what we call ‘modified thin tails.’ You see what I mean? Russ: Well, you are talking about an example of, there could be an extinction on an island; there could be an extinction on a continent. Guest: Exactly. Exactly. Russ: Local— there could be ruin, but it’s local ruin. Guest: Exactly. So it stays local. So, nature—so it’s much healthier for people to default to fat tails and [?] the evidence of thin-tailedness the other one. And I wrote a paper, actually a paper, it’s a chapter in Silent Risk, I think Chapter 4 now—you know what happens, we keep adding chapters— Russ: Silent Risk is a manuscript you are working on. Guest: It’s freely available on the web. Russ: Right. Guest: It has all the mathematical theorems and backup of these things, plus a lot of discussions of fat tails, how to calibrate fat tails. Russ: And people who are intimidated by the math can open just to the beginning and see a cartoon

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of Nassim Taleb in a boat going over an enormous waterfall as he’s saying, ‘Stop!’ and the people in the boat saying, ‘Oh, where’s the evidence saying anything is wrong with the boat?’ Etc., etc. So, we’ll put a link up to it. It’s good browsing even for the non-mathematical. Guest: Great. The book is effectively is a mathematicization of “Incerto.” “Incerto” is the four books I’ve written so far, philosophical essays on uncertainty. Russ: The fourth one being The Bed of Procrustes which I did not mention in my introduction.

Guest: Exactly. So nothing in there that’s not said verbally; and what I’m going to discuss now instead of talking about the mathematical version of Chapter 4 of Silent Risk, I can talk about what I called in The Black Swan the Masquerade Problem, in that you can always say the process is not thintailed; you cannot with any confidence say the process is not fat-tailed. Just from observation. Simply because fat-tailed processes can masquerade as thin tails. And that’s a Turkey Problem. Russ: And I feel bad—we should have made it clear, because I forget that not everybody has been listening to EconTalk since 2006, but: Thin tails means that the probability of remote events is very, very, very vanishingly small. And fat tails means it’s small, but not zero. Is that a good summary? Guest: Exactly. It’s a good summary.

In other words, view it as not in probabilities but in consequences. And if I gather a thousand people randomly and through an EconTalk episode to watch and weigh them, and then evidently have the total weights, and then you add to that sample the largest human being on the planet, that person will not represent more than .3% of the total. You see? But if you do the same with wealth, you will have one of the total—you will be maybe because you have a lot of people living on a few dollars a day on the planet, 7 billion people total population, you have 3 or 4 billion very poor people. So, odds are you have maybe a million and a half net worth for your sample. And then you add to that the richest person on the planet, $75 billion, and look what happens. There will be a rounding error. So it means fat tailed is how much the rare event contributes to the total [?]. Russ: Although I’d like to think Warren Buffett is an EconTalk listener. I don’t know that he isn’t. So, you know. But go ahead. [more to come, 44:02]

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How I Fell In Love With A Fish Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie’s honeymoon he’s enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain.

0:12

So, I’ve known a lot of fish in my life. I’ve loved only two. That first one, it was more like a passionate affair. It was a beautiful fish: flavorful, textured, meaty, a bestseller on the menu. What a fish. (Laughter) Even better, it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability. So you could feel good about selling it.

0:48

I was in a relationship with this beauty for several months. One day, the head of the company called and asked if I’d speak at an event about the farm’s sustainability. “Absolutely,” I said. Here was a company trying to solve what’s become this unimaginable problem for us chefs: How do we keep fish on our menus?

1:13

For the past 50 years, we’ve been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests.

It’s hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love—the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish—they’ve collapsed.

There’s almost nothing left. So, for better or for worse, aquaculture, fish farming, is going to be a part of our future. A lot of arguments against it: Fish farms pollute—most of them do anyway—and they’re inefficient. Take tuna, a major drawback. It’s got a feed conversion ratio of 15 to one. That means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna.

Not very sustainable. It doesn’t taste very good either.

So here, finally, was a company trying to do it right. I wanted to support them. The day before the event, I called the head of P.R. for the company.

Let’s call him Don.

2:23 “Don,” I said, “just to get the facts straight, you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea, you don’t pollute.”

2:29 “That’s right,” he said. “We’re so far out, the waste from our fish gets distributed, not concentrated.” And then he added, “We’re basically a world unto ourselves. That feed conversion ratio? 2.5 to one,” he said. “Best in the business.”

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2:07

2.5 to one, great. “2.5 what? What are you feeding?”

2:52 “Sustainable proteins,” he said.

2:55 “Great,” I said. Got off the phone. And that night, I was lying in bed, and I thought: What the hell is a sustainable protein? (Laughter) 3:08

3:14

So the next day, just before the event, I called Don. I said, “Don, what are some examples of sustainable proteins?”

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He said he didn’t know. He would ask around. Well, I got on the phone with a few people in the company; no one could give me a straight answer until finally, I got on the phone with the head biologist. Let’s call him Don too.

(Laughter)

3:33 “Don,” I said, “what are some examples of sustainable proteins?”

Well, he mentioned some algaes and some fish meals, and then he said chicken pellets. I said, “Chicken pellets?”

3:46

He said, “Yeah, feathers, skin, bone meal, scraps, dried and processed into feed.”

3:53

I said, “What percentage of your feed is chicken?” Thinking, you know, two percent.

4:01 “Well, it’s about 30 percent,” he said.

4:04

I said, “Don, what’s sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?” (Laughter)

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There was a long pause on the line, and he said, “There’s just too much chicken in the world.” (Laughter)

4:26

I fell out of love with this fish. (Laughter) No, not because I’m some selfrighteous, goody-two shoes foodie. I actually am. (Laughter) No, I actually fell out of love with this fish because, I swear to God, after that conversation, the fish tasted like chicken. (Laughter)

4:54

This second fish, it’s a different kind of love story. It’s the romantic kind, the kind where the more you get to know your fish, you love the fish. I first ate it at a restaurant in southern Spain. A journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time. She kind of set us up. (Laughter) It came to the table a bright, almost shimmering, white color. The chef had overcooked it. Like twice over. Amazingly, it was still delicious.

5:36

Who can make a fish taste good after it’s been overcooked? I can’t, but this guy can. Let’s call him Miguel—actually his name is Miguel. (Laughter) And no, he didn’t cook the fish, and he’s not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand it. He’s a biologist at Veta La Palma. It’s a fish farm in the southwestern corner of Spain. It’s at the tip of the Guadalquivir river.

6:09

Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. They did it by draining the land.

They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. Well, they couldn’t make it work, not economically.

And ecologically, it was a disaster. It killed like 90 percent of the birds, which, for this place, is a lot of birds. And so in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land.

6:46

What did they do? They reversed the flow of water. They literally flipped the switch. Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. They flooded the canals. They created a 27,000-acre fish farm— bass, mullet, shrimp, eel—and in the process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction. The farm’s incredible. I mean, you’ve never seen anything like this. You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland.

7:31

I was there not long ago with Miguel. He’s an amazing guy, like three parts Charles Darwin and one part Crocodile Dundee. (Laughter) Okay? There we are slogging through the wetlands, and I’m panting and sweating, got

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8:07

It turns out, Miguel spent the better part of his career in the Mikumi National Park in Africa. I asked him how he became such an expert on fish.

8:17

He said, “Fish? I didn’t know anything about fish. I’m an expert in relationships.” And then he’s off, launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants.

8:29

And don’t get me wrong, that was really fascinating, you know, the biotic community unplugged, kind of thing. It’s great, but I was in love. And my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish I had the night before. So I interrupted him. I said, “Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?”

8:48

He pointed at the algae.

8:50 “I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships: It’s amazing.

But what are your fish eating? What’s the feed conversion ratio?”

Well, he goes on to tell me it’s such a rich system that the fish are eating what they’d be eating in the wild. The plant biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, it’s what feeds the fish. The system is so healthy, it’s totally self-renewing. There is no feed. Ever heard of a farm that doesn’t feed its animals?

9:29

Later that day, I was driving around this property with Miguel, and I asked him, I said, “For a place that seems so natural, unlike like any farm I’d ever been at, how do you measure success?”

9:43

At that moment, it was as if a film director called for a set change. And we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight: thousands and thousands of pink flamingos, a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see.

9:59 “That’s success,” he said. “Look at their bellies, pink. They’re feasting.”

Feasting? I was totally confused.

10:08

I said, “Miguel, aren’t they feasting on your fish?” (Laughter)

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mud up to my knees, and Miguel’s calmly conducting a biology lecture. Here, he’s pointing out a rare Black-shouldered Kite. Now, he’s mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton. And here, here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the Tanzanian Giraffe.

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10:12 “Yes,” he said. (Laughter) “We lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds.

Well, last year, this property had 600,000 birds on it, more than 250 different species. It’s become, today, the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of Europe.”

10:42

I said, “Miguel, isn’t a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm?” (Laughter) He shook his head, no.

10:51

He said, “We farm extensively, not intensively. This is an ecological network.

The flamingos eat the shrimp. The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. So the pinker the belly, the better the system.”

11:09

Okay, so let’s review: a farm that doesn’t feed its animals, and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators. A fish farm, but also a bird sanctuary. Oh, and by the way, those flamingos, they shouldn’t even be there in the first place. They brood in a town 150 miles away, where the soil conditions are better for building nests. Every morning, they fly 150 miles into the farm. And every evening, they fly 150 miles back. (Laughter) They do that because they’re able to follow the broken white line of highway A92.

(Laughter) No kidding.

12:01

I was imagining a “March of the Penguins” thing, so I looked at Miguel. I said, “Miguel, do they fly 150 miles to the farm, and then do they fly 150 miles back at night? Do they do that for the children?”

12:17

He looked at me like I had just quoted a Whitney Houston song. (Laughter) He said, “No; they do it because the food’s better.” (Laughter)

12:29

I didn’t mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious—and I don’t like fish skin; I don’t like it seared, I don’t like it crispy. It’s that acrid, tar-like flavor. I almost never cook with it. Yet, when I tasted it at that restaurant in southern Spain, it tasted not at all like fish skin. It tasted sweet and clean, like you were taking a bite of the ocean. I mentioned that to Miguel, and he nodded. He said, “The skin acts like a sponge. It’s the last defense before anything enters the body. It evolved to soak up impurities.” And then he added, “But our water has no impurities.”

13:18

OK. A farm that doesn’t feed its fish, a farm that measures its success by the success of its predators. And then I realized when he says, “A farm that has no impurities,” he made a big understatement, because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River. It’s a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days: chemical

14:43

What we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good. (Laughter) (Applause) But for a lot people, that’s a bit too radical. We’re not realists, us foodies; we’re lovers. We love farmers’ markets, we love small family farms, we talk about local food, we eat organic. And when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food, someone, somewhere stands up and says, “Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how are you going to feed the world?” How are you going to feed the world?

15:35

Can I be honest? I don’t love that question. No, not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world. One billion people will go hungry today. One billion—that’s more than ever before—because of gross inequalities in distribution, not tonnage. Now, I don’t love this question because it’s determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years.

Feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to soil, chicken to fish, and all along agribusiness has simply asked, “If we’re feeding more people more cheaply, how terrible could that be?” That’s been the motivation, it’s been the justification: it’s been the business plan of American agriculture. We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that’s quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible. That’s not a business, and it isn’t agriculture.

16:45

Our breadbasket is threatened today, not because of diminishing supply, but because of diminishing resources. Not by the latest combine and tractor invention, but by fertile land; not by pumps, but by fresh water; not by chainsaws, but by forests; and not by fishing boats and nets, but by fish in the sea.

17:07

Want to feed the world? Let’s start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves? Or better: How can we create conditions that enable every

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The obesity rate all around the world has been rising. In america alone, more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight. Clearly, our appetite is growing bigger and bigger and we have a problem of overconsumption

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16:03

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contaminants, pesticide runoff. And when it works its way through the system and leaves, the water is cleaner than when it entered. The system is so healthy, it purifies the water. So, not just a farm that doesn’t feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators, but a farm that’s literally a water purification plant—and not just for those fish, but for you and me as well. Because when that water leaves, it dumps out into the Atlantic. A drop in the ocean, I know, but I’ll take it, and so should you, because this love story, however romantic, is also instructive. You might say it’s a recipe for the future of good food, whether we’re talking about bass or beef cattle.

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community to feed itself? (Applause) To do that, don’t look at the agribusiness model for the future. It’s really old, and it’s tired. It’s high on capital, chemistry and machines, and it’s never produced anything really good to eat. Instead, let’s look to the ecological model. That’s the one that relies on two billion years of on-the-job experience.

17:54

Look to Miguel, farmers like Miguel. Farms that aren’t worlds unto themselves; farms that restore instead of deplete; farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively; farmers that are not just producers, but experts in relationships. Because they’re the ones that are experts in flavor, too. And if I’m going to be really honest, they’re a better chef than I’ll ever be. You know, I’m okay with that, because if that’s the future of good food, it’s going to be delicious.

18:31

Thank you. (Applause)

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Design for All Life Is it time to re-examine human-centered design?

By Prasad Boradkar, Co-Director of the Biomimicry Center, Arizona State University

It was sixty years ago that pioneering industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss first introduced us to Joe and Josephine in his seminal book Designing For People. Every industrial designer has encountered this couple in the anthropometric charts and diagrams Dreyfuss created; they appear in side view, front view and top view, marked with lines, arcs, arrows and numbers, quietly promoting design for the human body. With the 1955 publication of Designing for People, Dreyfuss clearly paved the way for the discipline of human factors and ergonomics. He reminded us that the objects we design are “ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in some way used by people individually or en masse,� and taking into account their physiological and psychological needs should be central to the design process.... Since then, we as industrial designers have taken our task of designing for people rather seriously, and this has given rise to approaches called user-centered design, human-centered design, participatory design, and empathic design. This is design of the people, by the people, for the people.

But I wonder if this anthropocentrism in design has encouraged a myopic and self-centered conception of our goals as designers. Clearly, the things we design with such diligent research and utmost care for people do not impact only people. The consequences of design activity (human-centered

Perhaps we need a new paradigm that distinctly recognizes and explicitly extends design’s locus of action to move beyond anthropocentrism and towards biocentrism. This, in no way suggests that we reject human-centered design; instead, it recommends that we re-imagine our goals and adopt new methods that acknowledge the other millions of species who are our neighbors. Interestingly, it is not quite clear how many species cohabit this planet with us. While reports of the total number vary widely and wildly, according to a recent issue of Science, “the number of species on Earth today is 5 ± 3 million, of which 1.5 million are named.” Modern day humans are but one subspecies called Homo sapiens sapiens, with Homo sapiens being the only surviving species of the genus Homo. And while we might be the apex predators seemingly ruling land, water and air, biologists are quick to point out how hopeless things would be should insects, microorganisms and other creatures cease to exist. Louis Pasteur famously said, “life would not long remain possible in the absence of microbes.” This notion has since been refuted by biologists who contend that we might still survive, but with a significantly degraded quality of life. As we start learning more about the other species we share this planet with, it is not unusual to encounter startling facts. For instance, according to biologists Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, “all ants in the world taken together weigh about as much as all human beings.” Surely this must give us pause.

In addition to acting in neighborly ways towards other species by including them in our design goals, we can also learn from them. And this is where we can turn to biomimicry, an emerging field of study described by Janine Benyus as “innovation inspired by nature.” In her groundbreaking book

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If we refresh the paradigm of anthropocentric thinking and human-centered design to biocentric thinking and life-centered design, our solutions might start exhibiting a sense of care that extends beyond people. Of course, sustainable design, green design, ecodesign, and other similar practices do address issues of the environment. However, what I am suggesting here is an essential expansion and unambiguous reframing of whom we identify as the target user. Can our target user include all living beings?

This is how it should be.

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or otherwise) reach far beyond humans. We are, after all, one of several million species who live on this planet. Why then, should our design be so anthropocentric? Can we not design products and services keeping in mind not only people, but also other species and entire ecosystems? Can we not envision the potential impacts of all that we design not only on people, but on all inhabitants of our biosphere? Is it time to re-examine our anthropocentrism in design?

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published in 1997, Benyus explains the new paradigm that biomimicry represents. “Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.” Implicit in this explanation of biomimicry is the focus on sustainability. Biomimicry can certainly inspire ingenious solutions to thorny problems, but its true promise lies in helping us devise solutions that are ecologically sound.

Soon after the publication of her book, Benyus teamed up with biologist Dayna Baumeister to further the concept of biomimicry. Their partnership has resulted into two organizations—Biomimicry 3.8 and the Biomimicry Institute—that are constantly developing new resources to practice design and innovation inspired by nature. One of the more powerful tools developed by these organizations is called Life’s Principles, a collection and distillation of deep patterns in nature that help organisms adapt to and survive in their ecosystems. According to Baumeister, “Life’s Principles are intended to represent nature’s strategies for sustainability, that is, how life has sustained on Earth for 3.85 billion years.” And these principles can inspire design strategies which, in turn, can be used to create new products, building, business plans, engineering solutions, resource management strategies, and so on.

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At Arizona State University (ASU), we are exploring the concept of lifecentered design as a means of developing sustainable solutions inspired by natural systems. In 2008, we started working with the Biomimicry Institute to introduce principles of biomimicry to design, business and engineering students. This week Biomimicry 3.8 and ASU launch a new partnership and initiative called the Biomimicry Center. This center represents an interdisciplinary effort by biologists, designers, engineers, business professionals, writers, ecologists, material scientists, chemists and others to address the complex opportunities and challenges we face today.

The rapid urbanization we have witnessed over the last few decades is distancing us from the “realities of the natural world,” warns Sir David Attenborough in an interview in The Guardian. Speaking about the world’s population, he says that “over 50% is to some degree out of touch with the natural world and don’t even see an animal from one day to the next unless it’s a rat or a pigeon.” Have we, through our concrete jungles, created artificial boundaries between the human-made world and the natural world?

Do we think of ourselves as distinct from nature? What is the nature of our relationship with other organisms? Biologist Edward O. Wilson believes that people have a hereditary affinity for other living creatures. His term for this human proclivity is biophilia, and he defines it as “the innate tendency to

About Prasad Boradkarp Prasad Boradkar is Professor in Industrial Design at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. He is the Director of InnovationSpace, a transdisciplinary laboratory at ASU where faculty and students from design, business, sustainability and engineering partner with corporations to develop humancentered product concepts that hold societal benefit and minimize impacts on the environment. He also serves as the Co-Director of the Biomimicry Center at ASU, an organization dedicated to the exploration of biologicallyinspired solutions to problems of sustainability. Prasad is the author of Designing Things: A Critical Introduction to the Culture of Objects (Berg 2010). He is the co-editor of Encountering Things, an anthology of essays on the cultural meaning of objects, and is currently working on a book on Indian design.

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focus on life and lifelike processes.” This notion has inspired biophilic design, described as “an innovative approach that emphasizes the necessity of maintaining, enhancing, and restoring the beneficial experience of nature in the built environment.” It also inspired Icelandic singer and songwriter Björk to release a multimedia album titled Biophilia in 2011 as an artistic response to some of the ongoing environmental challenges in her native country.

Biomimicry “attenuates the sense of aliveness we feel when tapping one of our most primal identities—our biophilic, or life-loving, selves.” Have we, as designers, become too technophilic? Can we turn to our biophilia and to biomimicry to imagine new paradigms by which to create more sustainable solutions designed not only for people, but for all life?

FUCK YEAH!

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The Advantages Of Design In The 21st Century

by Chad Mazzola

There’s a talk by Bruno Latour titled A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design that I find myself coming back to again and again. As with most academic presentations, the path it follows is winding and at times obscure, but it plunges into depths that few manage to obtain.

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In the talk, Latour speaks of design as a practice and perspective that will be central to shaping the 21st century. In his view, the world is shifting away from what he calls “matters of fact” and towards “matters of concern.”

Meaning those things we formerly viewed as objective facts which must be grimly accepted are now coming under our ability to control: disease, death, the traits of our children, the earth’s climate, and on and on. The world we inhabit will increasingly be one that is designed by humans.

The central portion of the talk outlines what Latour sees as the “five advantages of the concept of ‘design’”. The argument that runs through each is that design is a necessary antidote to certain perspectives that shaped the 20th century.

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1. Design implies humility As a concept, design implies a humility that seems absent from the word “construction” or “building”.

2. Design pays attention to details “Go forward, break radically with the past and the consequences will take care of themselves!” This was the old way—to build, to construct, to destroy, to radically overhaul: “Après moi le déluge!” But that has never been the way of approaching a design project. A mad attention to the details has always been attached to the very definition of design skills.

We are increasingly surrounded by artificial and that is effecting our relationship with nature.

Wherever you think of something as being designed, you bring all of the tools, skills and crafts of interpretation to the analysis of that thing. It is thus of great import to witness the depths to which our daily surroundings, our most common artefacts are said to be designed.

4. Design is always a redesign Design is a task that follows to make that something more lively, more commercial, more usable, more user friendly, more acceptable, more sustainable, and so on, depending on the various constraints to which the project has to answer.

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3. Design is open to interpretation and questions of meaning

Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing, or breaking with the past. It is an antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings, and radical departures.

5. Design involves an ethical dimension No designer will be able to claim: “I am just stating what exists”, or “I am simply drawing the consequences of the laws of nature”, or “I am simply reading the bottom line”.

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There is of course much more nuance and detail to be found within the talk on each of these points.

The talk ends with a challenge to designers: Now here is the challenge: In its long history, design practice has done a marvellous job of inventing the practical skills for drawing objects, from architectural drawing, mechanic blueprints, scale models, prototyping etc.

But what has always been missing from those marvellous drawings (designs in the literal sense) are an impression of the controversies and the many contradicting stake holders that are born within with these.

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In short, if design is charged with responding to the negative externalities of 20th century technology—climate change, disease, increasing inequality— how can we avoid creating new (and perhaps even more devastating) unintended outcomes?

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A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk)

It came to me at a launching party for a Networks of Design meeting—I was struggling to grasp the extent to which the word “design” has been expanded when we were invited to visit an exhibition called “Re-imagining Cornwall”!

I was aware that corporations had to be reengineered, natural ecosystems reclaimed, that cities had to be remodelled and wastelands redeveloped.

I knew that neighbourhoods had to be beautified and political platforms scripted, and that interiors had to be redecorated and journal layouts restyled.

The Cornwall exhibit confirmed that I was indeed on the right track: if entire provinces can be redesigned then the term no longer has any limit.

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When I was young, the word design (imported to French from English) meant no more than what we now call “relooking” in French (a good English word that, unfortunately, does not exist in English). To “relook” means to give a new and better “look” or shape to something—a chair, a knife, a car, a package, a lamp, an interior—which would otherwise remain too clumsy, too severe or too bared if it were left only to its naked function. “Design” in this old and limited meaning was a way to redress the efficient but somewhat boring emphasis of engineers and commercial staff. Design occurred by adding a veneer of form to their creations, some superficial feature that could make a difference in taste and fashion. Even if design could be greatly admired, it was always taken as one branch of an alternative: look not only at the function, but also at the design. This dichotomy was true even though the best design was one that, in good modernist fashion (as it did in “functionalism”), approximated function as closely as possible. “Design” was always taken in this “not only... but also” balance. It was as if there were really two very different ways of grasping an object: one through its intrinsic materiality, the other through its more aesthetic or “symbolic” aspects.

I know this is a very poor rendering of what you now want to mean by “design”. (I am well aware that the French use of the word is much more restricted than the Scandinavian or the English one). However, I want to

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The reason I am interested in the spread in comprehension and extension of the term design is not because of any intimate knowledge of design practice. (I know even less about its history and I hope the many historians of the notion among you will not contradict me too much). Yet I take its expansion as a fascinating tell tale of a change in the ways we deal with objects and action more generally. If it is true as I have claimed that we have never been modern, and if it is true, as a consequence, that “matters of fact” have now clearly become “matters of concern”, then there is logic to the following observation: the typically modernist divide between materiality on the one hand and design on the other is slowly being dissolved away.

The more objects are turned into things—that is, the more matters of facts are turned into matters of concern—the more they are rendered into objects of design through and through. If it is true that the present historical situation is defined by a complete disconnect between two great alternative narratives—one of emancipation, detachment, modernization, progress and mastery, and the other, completely different, of attachment, precaution, entanglement, dependence and care—then the little word “design” could offer a very important touch stone for detecting where we are heading and how well modernism (and also postmodernism) has been faring. To put it more provocatively, I would argue that design is one of the terms that has replaced the word “revolution”! To say that everything has to be designed and redesigned (including nature), we imply something of the sort: “it will neither be revolutionized, nor will it be modernized”. For me, the word design is a

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utilize this definition from my youth as a base line from which to fathom the extraordinary career of this term. From a surface feature in the hands of a not-so-serious-profession that added features in the purview of much-moreserious-professionals (engineers, scientists, accountants), design has been spreading continuously so that it increasingly matters to the very substance of production. What is more, design has been extended from the details of daily objects to cities, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, and, as I will argue, to nature itself—which is in great need of being re-designed. It is as though the meaning of the word has grown in what logicians refer to as ‘comprehension’ and ‘extension’. First, it has grown in comprehension—it has eaten up more and more elements of what a thing is. Today everyone with an iPhone knows that it would be absurd to distinguish what has been designed from what has been planned, calculated, arrayed, arranged, packed, packaged, defined, projected, tinkered, written down in code, disposed of and so on. From now on, “to design” could mean equally any or all of those verbs. Secondly, it has grown in extension—design is applicable to ever larger assemblages of production. The range of things that can be designed is far wider now than a limited list of ordinary or even luxury goods.

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little tracer whose expansion could prove the depth to which we have stopped believing that we have been modern. In other words, the more we think of ourselves as designers, the less we think of ourselves as modernizers. It is from this philosophical or anthropological position on design that I address this audience tonight.

Five advantages of the concept of “design” I dare to articulate this odd argument based (very flimsily I agree) on the various undertones of the word “design” itself. It is the weaknesses of this vague concept that give me reason to believe that we can take it as a clear symptom of a sea change in our collective definition of action. The first section of this lecture will review five successive connotations of the concept of design. In the second I will provide an introduction to Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of design. And finally, I with end with a brief conclusion on how to draw things together, that is, to design.

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As a concept, design implies a humility that seems absent from the word “construction” or “building”. Because of its historical roots as a mere addition to the “real” practicality, sturdy materiality and functions of daily objects, there is always some modesty in claiming to design something anew.

In design there is nothing foundational. It seems to me that to say you plan to design something, does not carry the same risk of hubris as saying one is going to build something. Introducing Prometheus to some other hero of the past as a “designer” would doubtlessly have angered him. Thus, the expansion of the word “design” is an indication (a weak one to be sure) of what could be called a post Promethean theory of action. This theory of action has arisen just at the moment (this is its really interesting feature) when every single thing, every detail of our daily existence, from the way we produce food, to the way we travel, build cars or houses, clone cows, etc is to be, well, redesigned. It is just at the moment where the dimensions of the tasks at hand have been fantastically amplified by the various ecological crises, that a non or a post Promethean’s sense of what it means to act is taking over public consciousness.

A second and perhaps more important implication of design is an attentiveness to details that is completely lacking in the heroic, Promethean, hubristic dream of action. “Go forward, break radically with the past and the consequences will take care of themselves!” This was the old way—to build, to construct, to destroy, to radically overhaul: “Après moi le déluge!” But that has never been the way of approaching a design project. A mad attention to the details has always been attached to the very definition of design skills.

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The third connotation of the word design that seems to me so significant is that when analyzing the design of some artefact the task is unquestionably about meaning—be it symbolic, commercial, or otherwise. Design lends itself to interpretation; it is made to be interpreted in the language of signs.

In design, there is always as the French say, un dessein, or in Italian, designo.

To be sure, in its weakest form design added only superficial meaning to what was brute matter and efficiency. But as it infiltrated into to more and more levels of the objects, it carried with it a new attention to meaning. Wherever you think of something as being designed, you bring all of the tools, skills and crafts of interpretation to the analysis of that thing. It is thus of great import to witness the depths to which our daily surroundings, our most common artefacts are said to be designed. To think of artefacts in terms of design means conceiving of them less and less as modernist objects, and conceiving of them more and more as “things”. To use my language artefacts are becoming conceivable as complex assemblies of contradictory issues (I remind you that this is the etymological meaning of the word “thing” in English—as well as in other European languages).* When things are taken has having been well or badly designed then they no longer appear as matters of fact. So as their appearance as matters of fact weakens, their place among the many matters of concern that are at issue is strengthened.

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And ‘skill’ is actually a term that is also attached to design, in the same way that design is associated with the words ‘art’ and ‘craft’. In addition to modesty, there is a sense of skilfulness, craftsmanship and an obsessive attention to detail that make up a key connotation of design. The reason why this is a point worth remarking is because it was unthinkable to connect these features of design with the revolutionary and modernizing urges of the recent past. To the contrary, a careful attention to detail, craft and skill, was precisely what seemed reactionary as this would only have slowed the swift march to progress. The expanding concept of design indicates a deep shift in our emotional make up: at the very moment when the scale of what has to be remade has become infinitely larger (no political revolutionary committed to challenging capitalist modes of production has ever considered redesigning the earth’s climate), what means to “make” something is also being deeply modified. The modification is so deep that things are no longer “made” or “fabricated”, but rather carefully “designed”, and if I may use the term, precautionarily designed. It is as though we had to combine the engineering tradition with the precautionary principle; it is as though we had to imagine Prometheus stealing fire from heaven in a cautious way! What is clear is that at this very historical juncture, two absolutely foreign sets of passions (foreign for the modernist ethos that is) are having to be recombined and reconciled.

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The transformation of objects into signs has been greatly accelerated by the spread of computers. It is obvious that digitalization has done a lot to expand semiotics to the core of objectivity: when almost every feature of digitalized artefacts is “written down” in codes and software, it is no wonder that hermeneutics have seeped deeper and deeper into the very definition of materiality. If Galileo’s book of nature was written in mathematical terms, prodigiously expanding the empire of interpretation and exegesis, this expansion is even truer today when more and more elements of our surroundings are literally and not metaphorically written down in mathematical (or at least in computer) terms. Although the old dichotomy between function and form could be vaguely maintained for a hammer, a locomotive or a chair, it is ridiculous when applied to a mobile phone. Where would you draw the line between form and function? The artefact is composed of writings all the way down! But this is not only true of computerized artefacts and gadgets. It is also true of good old-fashioned materiality: what are nano- or bio-technologies if not the expansion of design to another level?

Those who can make individual atoms write the letters “IBM”, those who implant copyright tags into DNA, or who devise nano cars which “race” on four wheels, would certainly consider themselves to be designers. Here again, matter is absorbed into meaning (or rather as contested meaning) in a more and more intimate fashion.

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The fourth advantage I see in the word “design” (in addition to its modesty, its attention to detail and the semiotic skills it always carries with it), is that it is never a process that begins from scratch: to design is always to redesign. There is always something that exists first as a given, as an issue, as a problem. Design is a task that follows to make that something more lively, more commercial, more usable, more user’s friendly, more acceptable, more sustainable, and so on, depending on the various constraints to which the project has to answer. In other words, there is always something remedial in design. This is the advantage of the “not only... but also” feature although I criticized it above. This split is a weakness to be sure (there is always the temptation of seeing design as an afterthought, as a secondary task, as a less serious one than those of engineering, commerce and science) but it is also an immense advantage when compared to the idea of creation. To design is never to create ex nihilo. It is amusing that creationists in America use the word “intelligent design” as a rough substitute for “God the Creator”.

They don’t seem to realize the tremendous abyss that exists between creating and designing. The most intelligent designers never start from a tabula rasa.

God the designer is really a redesigner of something else that was already there—and this is even truer for His Son as well as for the Spirit, who both are sent to redeem what has been botched in the first place… If humanity

A small parenthesis on our two disciplines: when science and technology

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The fifth and decisive advantage of the concept of design is that it necessarily involves an ethical dimension which is tied into the obvious question of good versus bad design. In the modernist style, this goodness and badness were qualities that matters of fact could not possibly possess. They were supposed to sit there, undisputable, and removed from any normative judgment.

This was so much so that their entire purpose was to make the fact/value distinction possible. “We are there whether you like it or not”. But it is easy to understand that when you say that something has been “designed”, you are not only authorized but forced to ask whether it has been well or badly designed. The spread of design to the inner definitions of things carries with it, not only meaning and hermeneutics, but also morality. More exactly, it is as if materiality and morality were finally coalescing. This is of great importance because if you begin to redesign cities, landscapes, natural parks, societies, as well as genes, brains and chips, no designer will be allowed to hide behind the old protection of matters of fact. No designer will be able to claim: “I am just stating what exists”, or “I am simply drawing the consequences of the laws of nature”, or “I am simply reading the bottom line”. By expanding design so that it is relevant everywhere, designers take up the mantle of morality as well. I will come back to this in the conclusion: suffice it to say now that this normative dimension that is intrinsic to design offers a good handle from which to extend the question of design to politics.

A politics of matters of facts and of objects has always seemed far fetched; a politics of designed things and issues is somewhat more obvious. If things, or rather Dinge, are gatherings, as Heidegger used to define them, then it is a short step from there to considering all things as the result of an activity called “collaborative design” in Scandinavia. This activity is in fact the very definition of the politics of matters of concern since all designs are “collaborative” designs—even if in some cases the “collaborators” are not all visible, welcomed or willing.

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“has been made (or should I have said designed?) as the image of God”, then they too should learn that things are never created but rather carefully and modestly redesigned. It is in that sense that I take the spread of the word design as a clear substitute for revolution and modernization. I do so furthermore, because there is always something slightly superficial in design, something clearly and explicitly transitory, something linked to fashion and thus to shifts in fashions, something tied to tastes and therefore somewhat relative. Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing, or breaking with the past. It is an antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings, and radical departures.

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studies (STS) scholars began to revisit the old materialist traditions some forty years ago, they too would deeply transformed objects into projects. They too had brought meaning into what was defined as mere “material constraints”; they too had disputed the form versus function argument; transformed matters of fact into complex and contradictory assemblies of conflicting humans and non humans; they too had demonstrated that “artefacts have politics” and that a parliament of things could be assembled. But because of the word “construction” (used especially in the infamous expression “social construction”), they too were divided by the modernist opposition between what was social, symbolic, subjective, lived and what was material, real, objective and factual. No matter how many efforts were made to escape the trap that the modernist constitution has laid in the path of empirical inquiries, science and technology studies has always lurched into it. (Would things have looked better had we talked of “social design” instead of “social construction”? I doubt it). The trap has been nearly impossible to escape.

Impossible that is, so long as we remained officially modern. But what is so interesting to me in that in the spread of design, this concept has undergone the same amazing transformations as my own field. STS, that was until a few years back but a small subfield of social (alas, alas, so social!) science, has now received the formidable support of a much larger movement. What was a slightly far fetched and a clearly scandalous claim, namely that there are no objects but only things and disputed assemblages, is now fast becoming common sense. Everything that was conceived of earlier as hard objective undisputable material drives (remember the “irresistible path of progress” “the white heat of technology”?), has now melted into air. Yes, everything that has been designed during the four or five former industrial revolutions has had to be redesigned—including Cornwall. It is the same material world, but now it has to be remade with a completely different notion of what it is to make something. What has gone is mastery—this odd idea of mastery that refused to include the mystery of unintended consequences.

Of course, all five of these dimensions of design as well as the development of STS could be taken as a clear sign of postmodernism, as a quiet and lazy abandonment of the tasks of Promethean modernism. Some diehard modernists do think that way, but I don’t believe this is the case. As I pointed out earlier, the spread of the word “design” doesn’t come at a time when there is less to do; it comes at a time when there is more to do. Infinitely more, since it is the whole fabric of life that is now concerned thanks to the ecological crisis. What no revolution has ever contemplated, namely the remaking of our collective life on earth, is to be carried through with exactly the opposite of revolutionary and modernizing attitudes. This is what renders the spirit of the time so interesting. President Mao was right after all: the revolution

“Dasein ist Design” The best way to sum up the first part of this lecture is by quoting a marvellous pun made by Henk Oosterling: “Dasein ist design”. Oosterling is a specialist of the work of Peter Sloterdijk, the great German thinker to whom I will now turn in order to continue this little meditation on the philosophy of design.

By taking seriously what Heidegger had only abstractedly meant by Dasein, Sloterdijk has managed to extirpate the Western philosophical tradition from the bifurcated way in which it has always dealt with materiality (always, that is, since the 17th century). This seriousness about Dasein is what makes his philosophy so exciting for people like you who are bombarded with offers to redesign everything from chairs to climates. You cannot indulge anymore into the idea that there are, on the one hand, objective material constraints and, on the other, symbolic, human subjective ones. (Actually, I feel that the organizers of this conference should have invited Sloterdijk to give this keynote instead of me, but my desire to visit a Cornwall I had only “imagined” until now, made me hide this proposition until tonight!).*

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has to always be revolutionized. What he did not anticipate is that the new “revolutionary” energy would be taken from the set of attitudes that are hard to come by in revolutionary movements: modesty, care, precautions, skills, crafts, meanings, attention to details, careful conservations, redesign, artificiality, and ever shifting transitory fashions. We have to be radically careful, or carefully radical… What an odd time we are living through.

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The reason for why you should have invited him, is that Sloterdijk, very early on and very literally took on the spread in comprehension and extension of the notion of design. So literally, in fact, that he has been made the Rektor, that is the Dean or Master, of a School in Karlsruhe—the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung (Gestalt being the word here for design). This is a tremendously original art, craft, and philosophy institute (that is housed, by the way, in the same revamped factory as ZKM, the place where I have been fortunate enough to curate the two exhibitions of ICONOCLASH and MAKING THINGS PUBLIC).

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When we say that “Dasein is in the world” we usually pass very quickly on the little preposition “in”. Not Sloterdijk. In what? he asks, and in where? Are you in a room? In an air conditioned amphitheatre? And if so what sort of air pumps and energy sources keep it up? Are you outside? There is no outside: outside is another inside with another climate control, another thermostat, another air conditioning system. Are you in public? Public spaces are spaces too, for goodness sake. They are not different in that respect from private

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spaces. They are simply organized differently, with different architectures, different entry points, different surveillance systems, different soundscapes.

To try to philosophize about what it is to be “thrown into the world” without defining more precisely, more literally (Sloterdijk is first of all a literalist in his use of metaphors) the sort of envelopes into which humans are thrown, would be like trying to kick a cosmonaut into outer space without a spacesuit. Naked humans are as rare as naked cosmonauts. To define humans is to define the envelopes, the life support systems, the Umwelt that make it possible for them to breathe. This is exactly what humanism has always missed. (This is why Habermas became so cross at Sloterdijk and launched a very mean attack against him: naked humans on the one hand, fully equipped humans on life support on the other—of course there was no way for those two German thinkers to agree with one another).

I hope you are beginning to see why Sloterdijk is your philosopher: in the same way as a space suit or a space station is entirely artificially and carefully designed, so are all of the envelopes that constitutes the fragile life supports of humans. (Sloterdijk calls these “spheres”, and uses the term, “spherology” to name his endeavour.) Human are to be handled with infinite precaution from the womb (natural or artificial) in which they are grown (Sloterdijk defines philosophy as a kind of obstetrics!) all the way to the place where they survive and die. What is so important in the extended metaphors that Sloterdijk pursues to the bitter end is that they begin to accomplish exactly what I was asking for in the first part of this lecture. How can we reconcile the entirely different sets of emotions, passions and drives triggered by the two alternative Great Narratives of modernity—the one of emancipation (the official story) and the one of attachment (the hidden one)? When you check on your space suit before getting out of the space shuttle, you are radically cautious and cautiously radical... you are painfully aware of how precarious you are, and yet simultaneously, you are completely ready to artificially engineer and to design in obsessive detail what is necessary to survive. Whereas modernist or anti-modernist philosophies of history are always considering only one narrative (that of progress or the failure of progress), Sloterdijk is the rare thinker who shows how the stories of both emancipation and of attachment are a single story. This unification is possible provided that you deeply modify what it is to be “in the world”: the cosmonaut is emancipated from gravity because he or she never lives one fraction of a second outside of his or her life supports. To be emancipated and to be attached are two incarnations of the same event, provided you draw your attention to how artificial atmospheres are well or badly designed.

The concept that is key for reconciling those two sets of passions and for

What I find so important in the notion of explicitation, of folding envelopes

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So you see, what was called the “modernist style” in history of design should now be given a much more profound signification and a much longer life span. The very ways in which things have presented themselves as matters of fact which are now visible as a style –and a style that is changing under our very eyes. The aesthetics of matters of fact have always been precisely that: a historically situated aesthetics, a way to light objects, to frame them, to present them, to situate the gaze of the viewers, to design the interiors in which they are presented—and of course the politics with which they are (they were) so strongly associated.*

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inventing this strange role of a precautionary Prometheus, is that of explicitation. Explicitation is a consequence of the concept of envelopes.

The envelope is a term that will surely draw the attention of architects and designers: we are enveloped, entangled, surrounded; we are never outside without having recreated another more artificial, more fragile, more engineered envelope. We move from envelopes to envelopes, from folds to folds, never from one private sphere to the Great Outside Modernism, in the hands of Sloterdijk is no longer a concept. It is a place, a design, a style. It is a very specific type of architecture to which the whole second volume of SPHÄREN is dedicated: that of Globes. A modernist is someone who lives under a vast dome, and who sees things as though sitting under a huge architecture, the Globe of Science, the globe of Reason, the globe of Politics. For the modernist, the humanist is the one who reads a book under a lamp or who sits clothed in some sort of Roman toga on the stairs of a huge amphitheatre under the painted fresco of some immense dome... except that in the modernist architecture, the life supports necessary for this Dome or this Globe to be sustainable have not been explicitated. A modernist takes for granted that there will always be air, space, water, heat, for the development of his or her “global view”. But there is nothing global in globalization. Global is always a lot of globaloney, a lot of hot air. And of course, blowing hot air also requires a mechanism of some sort, a pump, a hairdryer—a designed hairdryer! What happened in the second half of the last century is that modernism disappeared in the exact measure where the life supports were made more explicit, one after the next. Ecological crisis, in such a view, are the slow and painful realization that there is no outside anymore. It means that none of the elements necessary to support life can be taken for granted.

To live under a huge inflated Globe you need a powerful air conditioning system and powerful pumps to keep it inflated. Yes, modernist Globes have been deflated; modernism’s fate has been somewhat the same as that of those dirigibles, like the Zeppelin or the Hindenburg.

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into envelopes, is that it is a powerful way of retrieving science and technology by completely modifying what is meant by a sustainable artificial life. It is really in that sense, that Sloterdijk is THE philosopher of design. If earlier I have been correct in defining the five reasons why the notion of design was such a powerful substitute to the notion of making, building and constructing, explicitation might allow us to understand that it is possible to rematerialize without importing with the notion of ‘matter’ the whole modernist baggage of ‘matters of fact’. This is exactly what Sloterdijk does. No contemporary philosopher is more interested in materiality, in engineering, in biotechnology, in design proper, in contemporary arts, and in science more generally. Yet when he deals with materialities it is not as if these were so many matters of fact that would inject indisputable natural necessity as the final word in some social or symbolic questions. Instead, when he adds materiality to a site he is rendering another fragile envelope into which we are even more entangled, explicit. This entanglement is as relevant for the envelopes of biotechnology as it is for space stations.

This is exactly the reason why Habermas could not accept Sloterdijk’s argument. For a good old modernist humanist, when someone begins to talk about life support, about the necessary conditions to “cultivate human beings”, about the air-conditioning to have them breathe safely, this is a tantamount to a plea for an Orwellian world, for eugenism. What Habermas has entirely missed, however, is that when humanists accuse people of “treating humans like objects”, they are thoroughly unaware that they are treating objects unfairly. A humanist cannot imagine that objects may be things, that matters of facts might be matters of concern, that the whole language of science and engineering might be portrayed as anything other than the boring carriers of the indisputable necessities that modernism has rendered popular. Humanists are concerned only about humans; the rest, for them, is mere materiality or cold objectivity. But Sloterdijk is not treating humans matter of factually as humanists claim. Rather, he treats both humans and non humans as “matters of grave and careful concerns”. By treating human life supports as matters of concern, we pile concerns over concerns, we fold, we envelop, we embed humans into more and more elements that have been carefully explicitated, protected, conserved and maintained (immunology being, according to Sloterdijk, the great philosophy of biology).

This little shift in the definition of matter modifies everything. It allows practitioners to reuse all of the notions of materiality and of artificiality by freeing them from the restrictions imposed by the older style of modernist matters of fact. In other words, we can have science and technology without implying naturalization. Not only has nature disappeared as the outside

It is somewhat understandable that when Sloterdijk raised the question of how humans could be “designed”, that is, artificially nurtured, this invokes the old phantasm of eugenic manipulations. But the similarities between these two projects prove to be completely superficial when submitted to a close examination. They are similar only in the same way that two trains can both be moving ahead even though they are at an intersection that will lead them toward completely different destinations. Habermas missed the switch, the bifurcation that is so important for us to locate. Yes humans have to be artificially made and remade, but everything depends on what you mean by artificial and even more deeply by what you mean by “making”.

We have returned to Prometheus and to the question of Creation. Are we able to be the God of intelligent design? This is the heart of the matter. This is why it is so important to talk of design and not of construction, creation or of fabrication. To design something as I indicated earlier, allows us to raise not only the semiotic question of meaning but also the normative question of good and bad design. This is true of DNA manipulation, as well as of climate control, gadgets, fashion, cities or natural landscapes, a perfect case of design from beginning to end. Artificiality is our destiny, but it does not mean accepting the modernist definition of an artefact as the invasion of matters of fact over the softer flesh of human frailty forever. To put it even differently by alluding to another line of more fashionable thought: there is nothing necessarily post human in enveloping, folding, veiling humans into their life supports. Humanists as well as post-humanists seem to have no other repertory for speaking of science and technology other than the modernist idiom of matters of fact.

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The great importance of Sloterdijk’s philosophy (and I think the major interest of a designer’s way of looking at things) is that it offers another idiom.

The idiom of matters of concern reclaims matter, matters and materiality and renders them into something that can and must be carefully redesigned.

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of human action (this has become common wisdom by now); not only has “natural” become a synonym of “carefully managed”, “skilfully staged”, “artificially maintained”, “cleverly designed” (this is true especially of so called “natural” parks or “organic foods”); but the very idea that to bring the knowledge of scientists and engineers to bear on a question is to necessarily resort to the unquestionable laws of nature, is also becoming obsolete.

Bringing in scientists and engineers is quickly becoming another way of asking: “How can it be better redesigned?” The bricolage and tinkering elements always associated with design have taken over nature. Actually, they are inherent in nature if we take Darwinian ways as a clever form of bricolage, of “intelligent design”... albeit a blind one.

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This might be far from the humanists’ limited view of what humans are, but it is every bit as removed from the post human dreams of cyborgs.

What is clear is that the collective definition of what artificial life supports are supposed to be becomes the key site of politically minded investigation.

Nothing much is left of the scenography of the modernist theory of action: no male hubris, no mastery, no appeal to the outside, no dream of expatriation in an outside space which would not require any life support of any sort, no nature, no grand gesture of radical departure —and yet still the necessity of redoing everything once again in a strange combination of conservation and innovation that is unprecedented in the short history of modernism. Will Prometheus ever be cautious enough to redesign the planet?

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It might have been raised but that doesn’t mean it has been addressed for the common good.

I hope I have not been too far off the mark by proposing (out of ignorance, surely) these few steps toward a philosophy of design or by introducing Sloterdijk as its main contributor. I wish to conclude by offering a challenge to the specialists of the history of design assembled here. When I said earlier that there is something inherently normative in design because of the necessary follow up question, “Is it well or badly designed?”, I also mentioned that this was a good handle for bringing in the question of politics. If the whole fabric of our earthly existence has to be redesigned in excruciating details; if for each detail the question of good and bad has to be raised; if every aspect has become a disputed matter of concern and can no longer be stabilized as an indisputable matter of fact; then we are obviously entering into a completely new political territory. As every one of you knows too well, it is the perverse character of all ecological questions that they branch out in all sort of counterintuitive ways. It is probably of ecology that St Paul was talking when he said: “I don’t do the good I wish to do and I do the bad that I hate”. Political ecology is bringing political difficulty to the square. For according to this marvellous rather Paulinian quote of de Gaulle: “If of the good only good would ensue, and if of bad only bad ensued, government would be rather simple: a village parson could do it”.

Let me raise the question of design, taken literally in the etymological sense of drawing or rather of “drawing together”. How can we draw together matters of concern so as to offer to political disputes an overview, or at least a view, of the difficulties that will entangle us every time we must modify the practical details of our material existence? We know that whenever we prepare to change our fixtures from incandescent to low energy light bulbs, to pay our carbon expenses, to introduce wind farms, to reintroduce the wolf to the Alps, or to develop corn based fuel, immediately, some controversy will be ignited that turns our best intentions into hell. And we are no longer able to stop the controversies by stating the undisputable facts of the matter

It is definitely necessary that we start rethinking and redoing the damage we have done before it is too late.

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because facts are constantly disputed. Fine, unintended consequences are now on everyone’s mind, Prometheus braces himself for the worse.

Now here is the challenge: In its long history, design practice has done a marvellous job of inventing the practical skills for drawing objects, from architectural drawing, mechanic blueprints, scale models, prototyping etc.

But what has always been missing from those marvellous drawings (designs in the literal sense) are an impression of the controversies and the many contradicting stake holders that are born within with these. In other words, you in design as well as we in science and technology studies may insist that objects are always assemblies, “gatherings” in Heidegger’s meaning of the word, or things and Dinge, and yet, four hundred years after the invention of perspective drawing, three hundred years after projective geometry, fifty years after the development of CAD computer screens, we are still utterly unable to draw together, to simulate, to materialize, to approximate, to fully model to scale, what a thing in all of its complexity, is. We know how to draw, to simulate, to materialize, to zoom in and out on objects; we know how to make them move in 3-D space, to have them sail through the computerized virtual res extensa, to mark them with a great number of data points, etc.

Yet we are perfectly aware that the space in which those objects seem to move so effortlessly is the most utopian (or rather atopic) of spaces. It these are the least realistic spaces of circulation ever imagined. They are spaces that do not even fit with the ways in which architects, engineers, designers draw and modify blueprints, nor with the process through which they direct fabrication on the factory floor or manipulate scale models. To use some more German: we know how to draw Gegenstand but we have no clue what it is to draw Ding. I once asked one of the greatest historians of technology to send me what he considered his best drawing of the marvellously complex history of mechanisms he has been writing about for so long. He sent me some doodle which I would not have dared showing to my first year students as an example of what a thing is. How could this doodle be compared to the comfortable and effortless manner in which objects float through the so called “Euclidian space” of a CAD design or to the ways in which I can visit Falmouth before I arrive there through the apparently smooth travel of Google Earth?

Flip to Page 4.

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I know this is a meeting on the history of design, but what would be the use of studying design history, if not for the purposes of providing a scheme for its future? There is much to suggest that the whole history of technical drawing and of scientific visualizations more broadly conceived has been one of the main driving forces for the development of science and technology in its modernist version. It is more than likely that the same will be true for

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the development of science and technology, once freed from its modernist limitation. However, what history also shows is that we are a long way from being able to provide for things, that is for matters of concern, a visual, publicly inspectable space that is as remotely as rich, at least as easy to handle, and as codified as what has been done over four centuries for objects conceived of as matters of fact. As long as this lacuna remains there will be no way for design to ease modernism out of its historical dead end. To imagine that a political ecology of the magnitude being anticipated by all of the experts can be carried out without new innovative tools is to court disaster. New innovation will be absolutely necessary if we are to adequately represent the conflicting natures of all the things that are to be designed. (I take here the verb “to represent” here in the largest sense, including artistic, scientific and political representation techniques).

So here is the question I wish to raise to designers: where are the visualization tools that allow the contradictory and controversial nature of matters of concern to be represented? A common mistake (a very post-modernist one) is to believe that this goal will have been reached once the “linear”, “objectified”, and “reified” modernist view has been scattered through multiple view points and heterogeneous make shift assemblages. However, breaking down the tyranny of the modernist point of view will lead nowhere since we have never been modern. Critique, deconstruction and iconoclasm, once again, will simply not do the job of finding an alternative design. What is needed instead are tools that capture what have always been the hidden practices of modernist innovations: objects have always been projects; matters of fact have always been matters of concern. The tools we need to grasp these hidden practices will teach us just as much as the old aesthetics of matters of fact—and then again much more. Let me be clear—I am not advocating another CAD design for Prometheus. What I am pressing for is a means for drawing things together—gods, non humans and mortals included. Why should this prove to be an impossible task? Why can the powerful visual vocabulary that has been devised in the past by generations of artists, engineers, designers, philosophers, artisans and activists for matters of fact, not be devised (I hesitate to say restyled) for matters of concern?

The Critical in Design (Part One)

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‘What could be a criticality in design? What could be a form of resistance in design? Is design a catalyst between art and capital and therefore always subjected to its role of functioning? Does design need a kind of external experimental space?’

Abstract The paper concerns the critical in design which is examined under three headings: structurally, as an internal aspect of the processes of designing; economically, in terms of the internal collusion between (weak) design and the strength, persis- tence and lure of market forces and private interests; historically, in terms of the emergence of a situation—the artificial becoming the horizon and medium of our existence—that now marks our times as one where design takes on new critical dimensions, above all in relation to securing and creating the conditions that can support a humane sustainable global futures.

It was perhaps these uncertainties that prompted, in December 2007, a rare silence on the Ph.D. Design list-serve. Kaja Gretinger, a designer, researcher and writer from the Jan Van Eyck Akadamie sought help in understanding

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I: The indispensability of the critical ‘Criticality’ trips uncomfortably off the tongue, feels instinctively awkward in use. No surprise then that its use is unfamiliar, and not only in everyday speech. For design, ever unsure how to treat the critical, the connotations are in any case difficult: it is one thing to deploy criticism (in an opera- tional context—to make it useful to designers as in a studio critique), it is even permissible (just) to be a critic (in a professional sense)—there is, after all, if in embryo, a field of design criticism. But what are we to make of the critical when we deploy it as a noun? What does criticality describe? And what would it be to have the critical not just as an occasional moment, but as that which defines the very state of being of a practice?

Keywords criticality critical processes market forces economics crises history

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the potential of the ‘critical’ of design. (The epigraph reproduces the essence of her request.) But though pregnant with implication, for practice as much as for theory, her questions evoked little response. They were, as Barthes might have put it, the ‘motor of no development’. Nor did they provoke what many might think long overdue, namely a debate (or at least a discussion, a symposia) around the role of the critical in design.1 In the context of design research as we see it is playing out today (at least in its more orthodox moments), none of this is very surprising. For a field that often gives the impression it would like to eschew the critical in its entirety, the question as Kaja Gretinger posed it: ‘What could be criticality in design?’ is bound to be uncomfortable. Similarly, to ask whether design must always be ‘subjected to’ the ‘role of [the] functioning of capital’ is by implication to signal the desire to explore the possibility of other kinds of practice—other, that is, than those permitted by the market. ‘Form[s] of resistance’ and ‘external experimental space’ (Gretinger, 2007) are equally difficult; their associations (respectively political and aesthetic) call up realms that design research more or less eschews. Taken together, it is clear that these terms and phrases suggest a set of values and practices that ask of research and practice a response beyond what they can today comfortably deliver.2 But to note all this only throws into relief both the greater difficulty of placing the critical in relation to design and the urgency of so doing. The (still) dominant stance that design should efface itself as critical knowledge, in favour of translating the tasks assigned to it into operational or instrumental procedures, already eschews, from the beginning, a critical perspective. The critical is no less difficult for research. The ‘self-oblivious’ instrumentality that still governs the research ethic (and which design research has largely taken over without question) tends to balk at such concerns—operational finesse sits uncertainly with critical viewpoints; certainty is not vouchsafed for in the speculations of critical thought or practice (which aim, of course, at a different kind of truth).

From neither perspective, operational nor speculative (or...research nor practice?), then, can the critical easily come into view. True, this is no more than we expect (nothing lower than the critical expectations of most practice —or most research). Yet the implications are still an occasion for concern, and on two grounds. First, because if these terms ask more of practice or research than either can currently deliver, this must make us ask some hard questions about the range and robustness of the conceptual structures of both—why should such terms threaten? Why should the critical be so difficult for both?

Second, if the critical is today outside of the range of apprehension of much

1. It should be noted that Kaja Gretinger has recently answered her own questions in a short but telling paper Thinking Through Blind Spots, 2008.

(Unpublished at time of writing)

2. In this paper I have used the terms ‘design’ and ‘research’ generically and in the context of noting tendencies. Thus I am not referring to specific designers but to orientations within the field as a whole. It goes without saying that in reality these orientations take diverse forms and call forth also critical responses to them.

There is therefore in the end no singular design or even no singular form of research (though the range of variability of the latter is smaller than that of the former). Against the dangers of abstraction the value of speaking generically is that they name preponderancy – sometimes to the point where an orientation or tendency has passed so far into norm that no alternate perspective can be acknowledged.

To some of course this will seem of little import. What matters (it will be said) if the critical is not thought, provided we are able to grasp the instrumental or operational core of design? The thought has its attractions. Yet even minimal reflection tells us that understanding the critical is not an option or a luxury that can be dispensed with in favour of allegedly more rigorous pursuits, but is integral to any adequate comprehension of what design achieves and the processes whereby it does so. Even in its most evident repression, the critical is always and necessarily present—so present indeed that its presence is routinely discounted.

Take for example Herbert Simon’s famous definition of design. Often evoked as a justification for instrumental action, the ‘devising of courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1996: 111) is in fact secondary not primary. The process which ends with the realization of previously unforeseen possibilities cast into a new configuration, begins from an understanding that it is possible to critically discern amongst the potentialities existing within a situation those that can form the basis of a new (preferred) entity. No motivation for setting in train the ‘devising of courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ happens without an initial apperception that what-is is in some manner deficient vis-à-vis what could be. Objects arise, as Elaine Scarry reminds us, first as ‘objectification[s] of [sentient] awareness’; moments of ‘perception’ subsequently materialized ‘into a free- standing design’ (Scarry 1985: 289– 90). Perception, not realization, opens the game; that which is in the gift of the designer is, therefore, in the first instance, a critical apperception.

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Even its repression cannot negate the qualitative force of the critical. Just as it is said that the real value of a scientific or philosophical project lies not in the success of the answer or argument it might offer, but in the acuity, forcefulness and originality of the critical questions it asks, so, also, it is out of, or it is from, the initial critical process that so much (most?) of what is of qualitative, cognitive and ethical significance in design comes forth. Critical perception seizes, shows, exposes, and announces the truths of a situation and its potentiality as it sees it. Design, the process of the realization of these perceptions—these truths—into an actualized form (whether that of an artifact, a situation or a perceptual tool) is the process of translation of these perceptions into a composite synthetic configuration that is the realization of these perceived truths (no matter how intuitive their origin) and the

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design thinking and practice, this means not only that the critical is not thought, but that there is, in effect, an acute blind spot in design, a place where thinking—and to a large degree practice—cannot enter.

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realization of the critical truths of configuration.

By contrast the denial of critical perception (or the reduction of its role to a mere nominal or artificial moment) is the replacement of critical perceptual truths by the falsehoods generated by interests that refuse the opportunity for critical reflection. The denial of critical perception therefore institutes the realm of un-truth at the level of things.

Further proof of the structural necessity of the critical is given by the fact that even those who would wish it away are nonetheless forced to invent substitutions.

The specific rhythms of the fashion seasons, and of annual styling changes; in general the valorization of avant-gardes, the glorification of novelty and the new for its own sake, are all procedures invented to induce a just sufficient discontinuity between what-is and what-could-be to set the configurative process in motion—whilst allowing design to trick itself that it can escape the responsibility of critical thinking. But perception—critical perception in the sense meant here—not only originates a design, but, crucially, gives it orientation (perception having, in this sense, a directive quality) and as Jan van Toorn reminds us, even the most ‘dynamic position for production does not mean...that we can do without an orienting principle in relation to social circumstances (van Toorn 1994: 150).

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We can summarize these initial reflections in the following way: if the critical is necessarily at the core of practice this means that criticality in some ways names the state of design. This naming is open, not closed: it is not premature nor is it a forcing. The critical names design as an open condition. But this also tells us why the critical is a problem for research for it is that which cannot be predicted—since the result of the critical process in relation to a situation cannot be known in advance.

To refuse this understanding (and its implications) is not just to place design in something akin to the position of psychology before Freud (we sense that the unconscious is determinate, although in ways we do not understand or have not yet modelled) it is also, more seriously, to have to make a substitution. It is to offer against the density, complexity and the dimensions of the critical truths (the capacities) that design is capable of touching upon, a merely ‘ersatz’ version of design, one that is ‘fitted’, almost exquisitely, to the demands of the market but which is useless for determining our truth in relation to things and thus useless for comprehending the possibilities of design in other than in its instrumental roles.

For design, these predictions have come home to roost. The evasion, abandonment and outright refusal to encompass the critical together with the retreat from the emancipatory goals that were, at least to a degree, a significant motivation and driving force in European modernism, has meant that in the absence of any countervailing ideologies or axioms, design has placed itself more and more at the direct service of private interests. The ensuing relation has had benefits for both—at least superficially. As van Toorn has noted, the ‘coinciding group interests of clients and the [design] disciplines’ has meant that the ‘practices and notions of [professional] design

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So effective are these ideologies that today design (and the modes of study of it that reflect its formations back to itself) is now characterized by so powerful an adherence to what-is that the very possibility of other modes of design practice (at least at the institutional level) becomes all but impossible to conceive. This transformation is not without cost. More than sixty years ago, Adorno and Horkheimer gave a grim assessment of the trajectory that otherwise critical practices undergo through the metamorphoses engineered by blindly pragmatized thought, noting that such practices ‘suffer what triumphant thought has always suffered. If it willingly emerges from its critical element to become a mere means at the disposal of the existing order, then despite itself it tends to convert the positive it elected to defend into something negative and destructive’ (Adorn and Horkheimer 1979: xii). In other words, too close a naive affiliation with the powers (as Jan van Toorn puts it) of ‘money, bureaucracy and the media’ (van Toorn 1994: 147) cannot but be corrosive in terms of determining our truth in relation to things: ‘The metamorphoses of criticism into affirmation do not leave the theoretical content untouched, for its truth evaporates’ (Adorn and Horkheimer 1979: xii).

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II: The economic paralysis of imagination On one level all of this is self-evident—except that today it is not. That it needs to be re-articulated—against the grain of how matters are now conceived— speaks to the remarkable effectiveness, at least at the level of common sense, of the ideologies (practical, theoretical, pedagogical, methodological) that aver that one need not concern oneself with the critical. The transformation of a once reflective, critical and pre-figurative practice into the a-critical affirmation of what-is can be laid (though not entirely) at the door of the process whereby, since 1945, design has become a branch of the culture industry, and has thus learned to place the un-critical affirmation of what-is at the centre of its world (rather than, for example, offering what modernism initially promised: the anticipation of a realizable future possibility that was not dependent on a particular economic schema).

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have been introduced into society on an ever larger scale. This has...fostered the acceptance of the images and doctrines of design,...[and] strengthened the position of design in relation to economic, social and political intercourse’ (van Toorn 1994: 150).3 But of course no such (Faustian) bargain comes without a quid pro quo. As van Toorn again notes (in a critique that has only gained increased force in the fourteen years since it was first offered), what suffers in this process is the relation to those whom, ostensibly, design serves, for while design still wishes to ‘claim responsibility for the interests of users’ and presents its ‘professional and private concerns as a public interest’, ‘under the pressure of neo-liberalism and the power relationships of the free market’, design has been ‘forced to dilute the public wine with a large dose of private water’.

Thus despite the remnant of the ideology of public service that still accrues to design, in practice we encounter only its almost complete replacement by the concerns and values of the market. Public interest today occurs at the margins—or it occurs through and as a consequence of the private. The latter, and not the former, sets the overall agenda.

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In this process not only is the designer’s individual freedom, purportedly still existing within a space of its own, infiltrated by the client’s way of thinking, but design ends up discovering that, for all its attempted accommodation with these interests, it has become little more than a handmaiden to market concerns. Small wonder then (as van Toorn puts it in his most incisive criticism) that even at best design serves today as little more than a ‘theatrical substitute for [missing] essential forms of social communication’ —whilst at worst, ‘drawing on its roles in the organization of production and in helping to stimulate consumption’, it is at once hand-in-glove with the intensifying creation of a fundamentally unsustainable world (a role it is incapable of acknowledging with any honesty) and part of the ‘extensive disciplining of the general public’ in the terms of the market—a disciplining ‘whose most far-reaching consequence’ (even beyond the inflation of unsustainable consumption) ‘is...a political neutralization that is at odds with the functioning of an open and democratic society’.

What makes all this possible (van Toorn goes on to argue) is a blindness to social and economic realities that ‘cannot any longer be called accidental.’

Despite the enormous dissemination of information, the complex factors of institutional power, which definitively contribute to production have mostly been ignored. Nor has contemporary design been related to theoretical developments in other spheres of cultural production, or to conditions in the

3. I was intrigued to see that the request for help with the concept of criticality came from Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, Holland.

In the 1990s, van Toorn’s directorship made the Jan van Eyck school an acclaimed centre for critical thought in art and design. At least two significant books of papers originating from conferences in the school were published in this period – And Justice for All, edited by Ole Bouman, in 1994 and design beyond Design, edited by Jan van Toorn, in 1997 (both Maastricht, Jan van Eyck Akadamie). Both sets of essays pushed at the limits of design thinking as it was then circumscribed. Van Toorn in particular gave a unique force to these discussions, bringing to them his identification with the perspectives of the Frankfurt School, and his considerable experience of the realities (and possibilities) of communicative practice. In the following pages, as at once a tribute to van Toorn’s trenchant critique and as a means of trying to bring back something of his forcefulness in these matters, I have quoted extensively from his essays in these books (van Toorn (1994) and (1997)). I have also done so as a means of reminding contemporary researchers and practitioners that there is a limited, but nonetheless significant, tradition of critical thinking in design.

‘Forgetfulness’ (which

But if ‘individual designers and the discipline as a whole are seldom more than superficially aware of their role in the staging of the cultural environment’ this is not because of inherent qualities or conditions within design but because ‘designers... fail to reflect critically upon the conditions in which their action comes about’. Since they ‘lack the necessary concepts and arguments...they have found themselves incapable of re-negotiating an attitude which is beneficial to all’ and thus less and less capable of mediating private interests and public needs. What is missing in all this is the sense of a ‘critical attitude...by which the use of language and the methods of the operational critique [can be deployed] to see the world in terms of multidimensionality and transformation.’ Dispossessed of the insights that a critical perspective—and only this—can provide, design loses sight of its own work and of the contexts in which it operates.

Attenuated in this way practice (and thought) are thrown exclusively into the present. Through persuading itself that the future exists beyond the pale of thought except as the extrusion of what-is, design loses the capacity to pre-figure or to address meaningfully future possibility. But in losing the future history is also lost: lost as a past that is still operative in the present, and lost as movement, for as consciousness closes around the present, the comprehension of historical transformation vanishes. Exclusive attention

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To lose sight of context is also to lose sight of the real ‘spaces and places’ (and persons) in regard to which design works. But it is also to lose sight of the real capabilities design deploys or touches upon, for these only become evident when they are understood and seen in relation to context. But as perception of the context of design’s work narrows, so does self-understanding: design becomes blind, both to itself as to its capabilities, and blind in relation to the work it performs (or should perform) for others. But blindness is also weakness. If the loss of critical perspective erodes self-understanding, the disappearance of the idea of design as a mode of transitive action capable of engaging with the actuality of the world debilitates how design can take up— i.e., can actively and critically engage with—the growing commercialization and consolidation of the world. The result is a growing lack of belief, within the design professions, as to the ‘makeability, the changeableness of sociocultural’ and economic conditions. Design, in other words, ceases to see itself as a transitive and transformative practice and as a mode of acting with its own ethical and even political demands. In a word it acquiesces to what the market wishes of it—it becomes (to repeat), the handmaiden of consumption and cheer-leader for inequality. It becomes passive where once it was active.

is never innocent) is a perennial problem, as much in design research as in practice.

Both have a tendency to turn a disdain for history into an obliteration of what has gone before. In van Toorn’s case these quotations have the further advantage (if one be needed) of bringing back into circulation a level of critique (‘reasoned anger’) that today seems in danger of disappearing.

References to van Toorn’s essay texts will not be further paginated. The reader is referred directly to the books and essays themselves.

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economy and media.

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to technological transformation has diverted attention from the deeper transformations occurring in our situation. These transformations have acute consequences for design, though they refer less to immediate transformations in the character of practice (though these too are occurring, and in ways that will accelerate in the coming decades) than to a shift in the historical significance or meaning (the responsibility) of the act of designing. Critical comprehension of design possibility requires an understanding of the depth of the historical changes that are now beginning to become evident. Above all, it requires a comprehension of the radical transmutation of responsibility that is called for by the corpus of immanent and emergent crises and possibilities that are before us. It is to these that we must now turn.

III. The transmutation of responsibility We shall see as we progress that there are a number of developments in the character of what used to be called late capitalism that are determinates both for the context of design and its structural position. From the point of view of criticality or the role of the critical we can best characterize the implications of these developments in terms of the transmutation of responsibility, which they entail. We should begin with the most profound underlying transformation with which we need to be concerned, which is also the deepest and most abstract, and the one that bears most particularly objectively on design, in that it signals the shift in the structural position that design (or at least those capabilities associated with it) will inhabit in the future.

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This transformation can be easily stated: it concerns the objective rise of the artificial to the point where it (and not nature) now constitutes the ‘horizon and medium’4 of existence.

In is not difficult to see immediately some of the consequences of this shift.

The rise of the artificial to the point where it, and not nature, provides the constitutive horizon of our lives and our world, changes the balance between the realms of nature (or natural forces), human conduct and artifice. These objective transformations have subjective implications, not least in terms of what we might call the ‘answerability’ asked of us. The transmutation of responsibility can be seen in terms of the call that this new situation makes on us to become adequate to that which we have made.

The degree of shift involved here (a shift both ideological and practical) can perhaps be seen best if we consider that across most of recorded history it has been assumed (at least intellectually) that mankind could sufficiently comprehend the conditions of human possibility through mentally inhabiting

4. The term “horizon and medium’ is borrowed from HansGeorge Gadamer. In Truth and Method (London, Sheen and Ward, 1960) Gadamer calls language the ‘horizon and medium’ of existence. My reference to Gadamer here is deliberate for of course I am suggesting that if language appeared to be the horizon for human thought in the twentieth century artifice is the horizon of existence in the twenty-first century.

The focus that was on language—that compulsion which made almost all philosophy across the century focus upon it—now needs to be on the artificial (of which language is but a moment).

Today—which means here ‘for the foreseeable future, and increasingly so’— the situation is reversed. We are beginning to perceive that our comprehension of who we are and even more of who and what we might be depends on how we understand the artificial; not only operationally or instrumentally (as the determining condition with which we must contend, and as that which sets the terms for the systems and environments in relation to which we negotiate our existence) but ontologically—as that throughwhich, or by-which, or in relation to which, we interpret and realize (historicize) our condition (which means realize our being as finite creatures who are enabled to be so only through our capacities to deploy artifice). To make this statement reveals the degree of transformation that is now under way.

This changes, powerfully, the character of ethics. It means that the axioms and criteria that might guide an ethics adequate to our time can only have weight, or find resonance, if they are capable of encompassing artifice. One consequence of this is that the distinction, once thought almost absolute, between the realm of (free) ethical conduct and (unfree) praxis—a distinction that persisted in every attempt to make a differentiation between labour, work and action and to offer hierarchies of conduct on that basis—dissolves, utterly.

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What we are discovering (albeit painfully, yet not without moments of joy— for there is a certain exhilaration in what is now opened to us) is that it is only through the artificial that we can discern our possibilities—and that it is the sufficient (or insufficient) character of the artificial (that which is, after all, our product and which now constitutes the environment in relation to which both we and nature subsist) which becomes the seismograph or the true gauge of our existence. To put this another way: we discover today the ‘measure-taking’ of our existence now passes through the artificial—as indeed do all of our relations to nature, and as indeed do all questions of conduct.

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or understanding only the first and second of the three moments listed above.

We have largely assumed—and our universities still largely reflect this assumption—that ‘nature’ (including here theology or the nature of the gods, and understood through the apprehension of natural or religious laws) and conduct (understood across the swathe of human behaviour as revealed to us, for example, through history and literature, and later anthropology) between them encompassed the context and character of the human condition and therefore sufficed to comprehend the essential range of human possibility.

Artifice, the third realm, central to practical life, has been largely thought irrelevant—except in the form of language, annexed as a natural aspect of the realm of human conduct.

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The question of the sufficient or insufficient character of the artificial that is now at the heart of ethics transforms the question of conduct. The break that is involved here is with the premise that conduct relates of necessity only to actions taken in direct relation to other subjects. The shift we are speaking of here insists rather that the question of conduct now takes also (and urgently) the form of the question of doing—with doing here meaning transitive action in and in relation to the world. The implication is clear: questions of moral philosophy are today questions of transitive action. But this also means that there are no acts of transitive action (i.e., also no acts of design) that are today not also moral acts. Responsibility, moral responsibility, now passes through transitive action. The question of the qualitative formation of the artificial is now the key moral question of our time. But this appears to us not as an ought (the ideal to which we should aspire) but as immanent to how we act: as the axiom of action or, better, as its criteria.

The question of the transmutation of responsibility, which of course now takes in artifice in all its aspects, has implications at a number of levels.

1. For example, the axiom of the qualitative formation of the artificial (qualitative with respect to the conditions for human and natural life) reverses the axiom of neutrality vis-à-vis what we used to call material culture. A-critical praxis has always paradoxically justified itself by implying that, in the end, the material practices that design helped shape were not of consequence. That was ever a lie. Technology (and the image) has long entered consciousness. As Adorno puts it as early as 1943, ‘The new human type cannot be properly understood without an awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things around him, even in his most secret innervations’ (Adorno 1974: 40).

Who we are as subjects has thus long been determined (and by no means always for ill) by our relationship to material culture. As that culture today becomes total (in the quite objective sense of this term) and at the same time is the direct agent that engenders global and not merely local unsustainability, the illusion of more or less benign (or even empty) neutrality falls away.

Material culture in the total sense of the term is now that which both sustains and un-sustains us, this grammatical infelicity being justified only to try to encompass the double and different position we now inhabit, in which we are required to understand, far more sharply than we have previously, the way that our frailty (and resilience) as human beings is both supported (sustained) and undermined (de-futured) by artifice.

2. This is partly a consequence of how artifice arrived at this point. If we attempt to give dates to the onset of the artificial as the horizon of the world,

two will suffice. The first, 1945, marks the coincidence (which is of course no such thing) of the globalization of technology and the onset of the capability or potentiality for destruction on a planetary scale. The second, 1995, can stand as the retrospective marker of the onset of global warming—or more pertinently and exactly, the onset of the globally objective standard by which we can measure the un-sustainability of what is. Within these fifty years we can mark the germination of the epoch we are now moving into. Both are by no means only objective developments. As Adorno already hinted, such developments do not remain external to us. On the contrary, as Julia Kristeva has noted with some acuity, the potential for destructiveness that we inherit from the last century is necessarily formative for our consciousness:

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We, as civilizations, we know not only that we are mortal, as Paul Valéry asserted after the war of 1914; we also know that we can inflict death upon ourselves. Auschwitz and Hiroshima have revealed that the malady of death as Marguerite Duras might say, informs our most concealed inner recesses.

If military and economic realms, as well as political and social bonds, are governed by a passion for death, the latter has been revealed to rule even the once noble kingdom of the spirit. A tremendous crisis has emerged... never has the power of destructive forces appeared as unquestionable and unavoidable as now, within and without society and the individual.

(Kristeva 1989: 221)

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The implications of this for our understanding of history—meaning our history, the history we hope will come—are revealed in some lines by Peter Eisenman given in an essay in 1984:

There is always a temptation, on reading these lines, to want to see this final phrase of as merely messiani—and on that basis to dismiss the insight as a whole. It should be resisted. Even empirically, if the particular threat that is referred to here (nuclear holocaust) appears to have receded since 1989, it has not disappeared. (One would, for example, be unlikely to secure high odds for a wager that there will not be a nuclear exchange in the next decades.) Meanwhile, the ramifications of 9/11; the omnipresence of terrorist

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[Today] a new sensibility exists. It was born in the rupture of 1945. This sensibility was neither predicated in the tenets of modernism nor brought about by their failure to achieve the utopias of the present. Rather, it emerged from something unforeseen to modernism, in the fact that not since the advent of modern science, technology and medicine has a generation faced, as it does today, the potential extinction of an entire civilization.

(Eisenman 1984: 65)

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threat (now internalized into political consciousness and on that basis made necessary for all concerned); the visible decline of governments as effective organizing forces (and not only in the third world) and the wider social, economic and ultimately demographic or democidal (and even genocidal) implications of the undeniable slippage towards ecological disaster, can all be seen as the symptoms of an unprecedented underlying crisis. The delay in the possibility of our extinction does not necessarily therefore refute the depth of Eisenman’s insight.

But the deeper issue Eisenman is pushing towards here is the argument that 1945 marks the beginning of an epoch characterized by a wholly new historical condition.

Previously, the present was seen as a moment between the past and the future.

Now the present contains two unrelated poles: a memory of this pre- vious and progressive time and an immanence, the presence of an end—the end of the future—a new kind of time.

(Eisenman 1984: 65) In this view 1945 marks the second of the breaks or discontinuities that separate us (and definitively so) from all preceding societies.

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The first of these was with the continuity of the past, a break that is the very mark of becoming modern, which commences between 1500 and 1700 and is made irreversible with the assured victory of industrialization after 1820 (no retreat to the sylvan woodlands) and which finds one of its most poignant cultural expressions in Barthes’ lamentation: ‘is not to be modern to know clearly what cannot be started over again?’ (Barthes 1977: 13).

By contrast, the second great discontinuity of the modern period, the rupture of 1945, is not with the past but with the future. From this moment, Eisenman is saying, the future is no longer assured, is no longer for us a certainty. We exist in a present that lacks a guarantee that it will have a future. This is a shattering development. If the previous ‘shocks’ to the human psyche have been in terms of breaking with human discontinuity and exceptionalism vis-à-vis existence (Copernicus), nature (Darwin) and unreason (Freud), this break establishes a fundamental shattering of the assumption that, of all things, the future will be there. While this possibility has faced both individuals and communities—is it not one of the greatest poignancies and crimes of the Holocaust that any and all futures were to be denied to the European Jews?—it has not, ever, faced human beings as a whole. We, as an entirety as it were, as a global population persist and indeed numerically

Yet over the last fifty years we have only very narrowly, and still with no absolute certainty, escaped the effective destruction of a very great deal of human life. Emerging ecological crises, and the social, political and economic crises they will spawn, have less definitive outcomes. It is worth remembering, however, that as crises of artifice, not to say technology, these fall under the tendency of social crises since the mid-nineteenth century that, once they have erupted, above all into warfare, have been infinitely more deadly than even the most imaginative thought. No one conceived, or could have conceived, that the US Civil War of the 1860s would eventually consume 620,000 lives, or 2 per cent of the then US population (equivalent to six million deaths today); or that WWI would take the lives of ten to fifteen million, and would be a catastrophe that set in motion revolutions, and political developments that, over the next sixty years, would consume somewhere between 100 and 150 million lives, including around fifty-five million dead in WWII alone.

It would be foolish, then, to underestimate once again the capacity for systemic failure to induce conflict and crises beyond the capacity of our current political systems to manage. The possibility of nuclear destruction is the objective reminder that this remains on the table. Eisenman’s warning of a historical break with the assuredness of the future therefore needs to be taken seriously—if only because by so doing we might gain an adequate perspective on the present.

Charged with a new sense of the fugitive and precarious—but also revelatory— character of immanent existence, history and the future are no longer for us the abstract givens of our existence, that to which we can automatically refer

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3. Eisenman’s proposition changes, completely, the ‘work’ we need to do in culture. In modernity, culture celebrated the sundered continuity with the past. Insisting that all naive attempts at continuity were false, it projected itself into the assurance of a future to come. Such assurance was the wellspring of confidence in ‘heroic’ modernism. (It was also, taken naively, the source of its downfall.) We, who are modern in a different way, know that this particular project cannot be started over again. If the depth of our crisis is such that even the future cannot be assured to us—and hence history in the projective sense, as a given, as an axiom of existence, individually and collectively can no longer be assumed—our negotiation is not therefore with a sundered past and an assured future, rather it takes place in order to bring the future into being.

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flourish—it would appear unstoppably so.

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and therefore have scant need to bring to consciousness as such. Indeed, in a sense, there is no longer history (or the future) or rather, and better, we are in the unprecedented position of seeking to create the conditions in which there can (again) be history in the sense of a continuing progression into a future that is not destructive. This last sentence exaggerates, but not by much. The truth that the otherwise empty slogan ‘the end of history’ catches (against its own ideological thrust) is that in the absence of an assured future the most fundamental assumption, that of continuity beyond the present, falls away, and with it, therefore, go (or seem to go) the axioms that secure history even in its minimally progressive sense.

4. This then gives us our task—that if neither past nor future are any longer continuous with our present, if these connections cannot be assumed, then the relation to both, and especially to the future, has to be (re-)negotiated.

The work of culture becomes that of building the possibilities for history— meaning for a future. This is not the historical ambition of building-thefuture in a modernist sense (whether Fordist, Stakhonovite or Fascist), but the cultural project of seeking to create the conditions for a future. Today, culture (which of course includes design—and which, or us, replaces history) is today an attempt to make the future possible; i.e., the role of culture is create the conditions to make (a humane and sustainable) future possible.

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Two requirements (at the minimum) now come to the fore. The first is that the objective potential of extinction sets in motion the need to articulate and deal with the difficulties (and creative possibilities) opened by the tension between the memory of historical progression and the new condition of finite immanence (of making the future possible) into which we are thrown. The exploration of the impossible dialectic between the memory of (historical) continuity and the exploration of a sense of immanence is the very opposite of merely living within capitalism’s endless afternoon of the now. It is perhaps one of the major ways of snapping the cycle of denial that marks our political and cultural moment. Second, the affirmative shadow of what Eisenman discusses as the potentiality for catastrophe, is the break from history into culture—by which I mean culture as praxis, as proposition and as transformation. What matters, today, is not expressing the objective movement of history—for there is none. What matters instead is proposing a grammar for the forms that (democratic) life can take. Democratic, here, does not mean only in the liberal sense in which we now take it, it stands also for the idea of exploring (under the double axioms of the same or equality and the realization of justice) the possibilities of a humane transition to a (truly) humane modern world-system.

5. Simply naming these tasks already suggests the degree of change that

Does this exhaust the dimensions of the critical? Not at all. The transformed historical position of design in relation to artifice and the crisis of the future, when thought of also in relation to design’s possibility or its potentiality (including, most evidently, that of which we are not yet aware), calls forth something of a new object for design—using this word now in its sense of goal or ambition—except that what is called for here is not an external ought, not a commandment (even less is it a rule), but something more like a series of axioms or criteria; a net shall we say (if metaphorically) within which one might catch the critical and design in new ways. In part two of this paper I would like to take up the ‘principal propositions’ (Barthes 1977: 156) around which we can gather criticality today.

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has taken place in our sense of history and therefore in our conception of both artifice and culture. Design—which as we know owes its identity and possibility to both (and which stands as an agent of negotiation and mediation between them)—changes consequentially. If we are to look back on what this paper has opened so far we would say that it has revealed (and therefore opened) three levels of the critical: the structural (the critical as a condition of design, even when almost violently repressed as such); the economic (where the lack of a critical perspective induces blindness—‘Wealth Makes Blind’ as the title of one of Otto Kunzli’s marvellous pieces of jewellery has it); and the historical (which we now discover is the cultural and the requirement that we seek to establish the conditions for (a humane) future to be possible).

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JOHN C JAY (AIGA)

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Design Journey & 10 Lessons For Young Designers

Creative mastermind John C Jay moves seamlessly across disciplines in an impossibly broad world of art and commerce, excelling at just about everything he touches, from photography to creative direction for music projects and urban revitalization. This penchant for evolution and reinvention is part of what drives him and keeps his ideas so remarkably fresh. One day he’ll be hanging out with Chinese beat-box musicians in Shanghai; the next he’s showing the Japanese architect Masamichi Katayama around Portland in a caravan of pedicabs. Somehow he fits perfectly into these worlds and countless others.

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“Storytelling is what I’ve always done,” says Jay. “I feel like I’ve come full circle.”

That circle encompasses a career that began in 1980 in the menswear and home-furnishing departments of Bloomingdale’s in New York. “I had nothing relevant in my portfolio to impress them,” he recalls of how he got his first big break, which he landed despite having no real experience in retail, fashion, advertising or marketing. He won them over with his passion, but through his talent and drive he moved up the ranks. During his 12 years at Bloomie’s he eventually became executive vice president, director of marketing and creative services. In 1993 he took his brand expertise to Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, where he has led game-changing campaigns for Nike, established satellite offices in Tokyo (1998), Shanghai (2003) and Delhi (2007), and is currently partner and global executive creative director. He has even had the enviable job of consulting with LucasArts on the global marketing of two Star Wars prequels.

Jay thinks and acts locally as well as globally. With his wife, Janet, he runs Studio J, an independent creative consultancy located in Portland’s Old Town/Chinatown, where they develop new lifestyle concepts, products and experiences, from residences to restaurants. One such development project

If it seems as though Jay is constantly working, then you have the right impression. He has an almost limitless passion for creating and delights in sharing his enthusiasm with others. For the last 15 years, he has hosted art salons with the sole purpose of bringing together artists of varied disciplines, from graphic design to painting to journalism. He credits Diane Von Furstenberg, whose now legendary gatherings he attended in the 1980s in her then-expansive Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum in New York, with the perfection of the format. Of his desire to bring creative people together, he says, “It has nothing to do with making money… nothing to do with getting work. It’s about being a conduit for culture and information.”

Jay thinks quite a bit about culture and information, and approaches branding with a prescience that has allowed him to anticipate trends and tell people exactly the stories they want to hear. For W+K Tokyo in 1999, Jay, tasked with creating new basketball mythologies in a post-Michael Jordan world, turned to Japanese hip-hop, a genre that was then finding its voice and beginning to embrace its own cultural relevance. Jay saw a chance to tell the compelling stories of three new athletes Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan and Jason “White Chocolate” Williams through the prism of that musical genre and lifestyle. The campaign included a limited-edition vinyl release called Player’s Delight (a riff on “Rapper’s Delight” by Sugarhill Gang) and gave rise to W+K Tokyo Lab, an audiovisual label. One of the most successful acts to be launched under Jay’s creative direction has been the break-beat trio Hifana, now on its third album.

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Not only does he know which story to tell, but Jay also has an uncanny ability of knowing how and when to tell it. His work for Nike at Wieden+Kennedy contributed to Advertising Age’s naming the company “Marketer of the Year” in 1996. By 1997 Nike sales had swelled to $9.2 billion; at the same time Jay was cultivating an antiestablishment identity for the athletic brand with a campaign centered on street basketball and captured in an awardwinning book, Soul of the Game.

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is a floating home on the Columbia River inspired by the Minka style of Japanese rural architecture. Another is the James Beard Award-nominated restaurant Ping, of which Studio J is part owner. “Studio J is trying to bring a new vision and energy to the area,” says Jay. “My goal is to help shape a new creative corridor of this city based upon contemporary Asian creativity and culture. So, if successful, my next ‘adventure’ is the creative direction of a full city block in Chinatown.”

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One of the traits that make Jay unique in the advertising world is his genuine appreciation of the opportunities his success has created, perhaps because he didn’t always have them. The first child of Chinese immigrants living in Columbus, Ohio, Jay grew up sharing one large backroom at his parents’ business, a laundry. He picked up his first English words by watching car commercials on television. He would stand on a corner downtown watching traffic, “spotting the cars, matching their shapes to the commercials and practicing the ‘sound’ of their logo,” he says.

More than once, he got in trouble with his parents for drawing on their walls.

Those early drawings often depicted the toys he wished he owned—robots, space guns, airplanes—and the Art Deco LeVeque Tower, then Columbus’ tallest building. The prolific young artist even entered a drawing contest in the back of a comic book. “To my surprise, a contest representative came to the laundry to see my parents and praise my ‘gift’ as an artist,” Jay recalls.

“He was simply a salesman, and my parents couldn’t afford the lessons anyway. That was maybe the very first thought I had about being an artist. It was positive reinforcement of the most primal kind.”

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All of it—the drawing, the early obsessions with cars, architecture and toy space guns—might have led him to a career in industrial design had Jay and his family known that such a path existed. It wasn’t until he was a student at Ohio State University that a friend suggested he take a course in visual communications. Soon he was devouring European design magazines in the university library. “It was startlingly new,” says Jay, and he knew he was finally in his element. Although his new calling was initially a tough sell with his (eventually supportive) parents, Jay graduated from OSU in 1971 with a visual communications degree.

Ever since then, he has been helping to reshape the world through design. He remains grateful to the friend at OSU who pointed him in the right direction, and to his mother and father, in whose names he recently established an art and design scholarship for students of Asian descent at his alma mater.

When asked about important lessons from design, he says, “We learn to have more empathy for other cultures and ideas. We learn that collaboration is a powerful way to solve problems.” Jay is continually actualizing those lessons in his work. In October 2009 Studio J organized an exhibition of contemporary Chinese design, “The Jelly Generation,” in the Old Town neighborhood. And in late 2009 he and hotelier Alex Calderwood co-edited and creative-directed an issue of Arkitip magazine celebrating, of all things, great collaborations.

10 Lessons For Young Designers: 1. Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.

2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.

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How does he sustain all of this constant self-reinvention? “It’s still fun. That’s why I work so hard,” says Jay. “When work and play are inseparable, that’s the goal. That’s what we’re all striving for.”

3. Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral.

4. Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.

5. Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.

6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.

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7. Try not to work for stupid people or you’ll soon become one of them.

8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.

9. The Golden Rule actually works. Do good.

10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

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JONATHAN HARRIS (MANIFESTO)

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World Building in a Crazy World World Building in a Crazy World is a series of vignettes about the state of the digital world in 2009.

1. Baz Before getting into anything digital, I’d like to tell two short stories about my fourth grade teacher, Baz.

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Baz and I recently got together for lunch, after 14 years with no contact. He was 84 and I was 29. His big white beard still spilled out under his classic gray fedora, but now he was thin like his handwriting. Instead of towering over me as he once did, we now saw eye to eye.

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I asked him what was the secret to being a great teacher, and he said, “Well, you’ve gotta bring yourself to class every day. Your whole self. Your problems, your opinions, your stories—all of it. When you’re a full person, your students see you as an equal, and they trust you like they trust each other.”

He told me about being a young playwright, living on Long Island with his new wife, Corinna. One day he came in from the garden while Corinna was making lunch, laid down on the table, looked up at the ceiling, and suddenly started to cry. He had been writing ambitious plays about big ideas, but the finished works always disappointed him. Leaning back with eyes wide open, he said, “I was trying to make the audience go ‘Wowww!’, but in fact I needed to make the audience go ‘Wowww...’”—this time he leaned forward and squinted, like he was straining to hear a secret.

“I was trying to impress the audience with smart answers to life’s big questions,” he said. “It was all hype. But then I realized I didn’t have the answers to life’s big questions, and instead of writing plays that pretended to,

2. Me I had been living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in New York City, for five years, and finally the city became too much for me.

As a certain kind of artist, you try to run out ahead of society and look back at it so you can get a better view of it and try to say something about it. But as everything started moving faster, it became harder to run out ahead, and I suddenly had to try to understand things from within.

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I had to write plays that simply asked the right questions. I had to bring the audience up on stage with me, include them in the answering.”

This got to be too hard, so I quit the race, bought a car, packed up my place, and headed west. Since mid-September, I’ve been living in a small log cabin in the mountains of Oregon, at 3,500 feet, next to a 350-foot deep crater lake, which is spring-fed and very cold. I work all day, go for hikes and swims to clear my head, cook my meals and eat alone, and most days don’t see anyone.

Despite the natural setting, I think constantly about the online world.

3. Our Digital Crisis

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The Internet is causing mass homogenization of human identity, making us all look the same.

We use the same tools and social networks, fitting into the same templates, designed by companies to maximize page views and profits (with some notable exceptions like Craigslist).

These experiences are sensitive neither to individual humans nor to the human collective, but only to page views and growth (in a corporate, not personal sense).

It is fitting that these companies call their customers “users”.

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Most online experiences are made, like fast food, to be cheap, easy, and addictive: appealing to our hunger for connection but rarely serving up nourishment. Shrink-wrapped junk food experiences are handed to us for free by social media companies, and we swallow them up eagerly, like kids given buckets of candy with ads on all the wrappers.

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It begins from understanding ourselves first.

As we fill in the same boxes, answer the same questions, and express ourselves in the same generic ways, we might think this convergence of identity is a good thing, leading to some kind of global unity or mass empathy. But true empathy comes not from forcing people all to be the same, but from helping people to appreciate their differences.

Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.

We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril.

For the last 100 years—from letters, to phones, to faxes, to emails, to chats, to texts, to tweets—communication has been getting shorter and faster, but we are approaching a terminal velocity.

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I doubt there is a shorter means of communication than the tweet, unless we start to make monosyllabic grunts at each other or communicate silently, brain to brain. Brief gestures of communication can be beautiful, but can also be shallow. So what will happen next? Will we stop at the tweet, or will we bounce back in the other direction, suddenly craving more depth? I’d bet on the latter.

But even if we start to crave more depth, we cannot run away to a more primitive time.

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The momentum of technological growth is too strong for us to prevent it from defining our future. Like it or not, our future world will largely be digital.

Instead of fleeing to the forest, we must find the humanity in the machine and learn to love it. If we decide the humanity does not yet exist there in the ways we expect, then we must create it.

4. World Builders The digital world, like the physical world, belongs to all of us, and not only to the companies who currently dominate it.

The digital world is not some magic land that evolves alone. The digital

I sure hope so.

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world is composed of the things we build there. Just as architects define the built landscape of a country, digital architects define the built landscape of the web.

Unlike the physical world, the digital world can support a boundless set of worlds within worlds—worlds for every human need. Many human needs are already answered online (though the elegance of the answers can always be improved), but many others are still without good online answers.

Human needs that have to do with authenticity, self-reflection, depth of communication, and real relationship-building are especially poorly answered online (at least currently). Maybe these needs cannot be answered online and require physical contact in all cases, but my sense is that they can, if only we design the right worlds to encourage and support them. Some such worlds probably exist already (indeed, the web is so vast that one can find examples of just about anything), but even if they do exist, they have not become widespread, and the predominate thrust of today’s web is not around satisfying these needs.

Today’s web feels more like one giant cocktail party, full of chatter, gossip, and he said, she said.

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It is often called the social web, but “garrulous web” might be more appropriate. Yes, there is more social communication now than at any other time in the history of the world, but much of that communication is chatter.

There is nothing wrong with chatter (and beauty often hides in chatter), but there needs to be a place for deeper, longer-lasting communication too.

We cherish our capitols, cathedrals, museums, monuments, and parks, but who will build structures of this stature in the digital world?

Ancient and beloved fields like journalism, publishing, and music are drowning in this tsunami of change. Students of journalism are wondering whether they should study computer science to stay afloat. But they should

So often, we take for granted the consequences of our work.

JONATHAN HARRIS (MANIFESTO)

You could argue that people will do what people will do, and that trying to change people’s behavior is arrogant and foolish. There is truth to that, but people’s behavior is largely influenced by the context in which they live.

People who live near a ski slope are more likely to ski, as people who live in a city are more likely to hang out at bars. When we design spaces (real or virtual), we need to take responsibility for the types of behavior those spaces are likely to encourage.

JONATHAN HARRIS (MANIFESTO)

have patience. It is the job of journalists to do great journalism, and not to build platforms to disseminate that journalism. They should be able to trust those who build platforms to build them great platforms. But this has not happened yet—the digital world needs great builders.

Speaking especially to young students of computer science, art, architecture, and design—I would encourage you, as you imagine what you want to become, to consider becoming digital world builders.

Help construct our future digital world. Build honestly, naturally, authentically, beautifully, not motivated by page views or ad revenue but by what the digital world should be, in its purest, noblest sense. Articulate digital spaces that nurture the soul and the spirit.

Companies are not obligated to do this for us. If they were to do it, it will not be altruistic but to exploit you.

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Don’t leave it to today’s companies to solve these problems, as they will only perpetuate the same habits they have already adopted. There needs to be a new vision for the future of the web, one that is sensitive both to the human individual and the human collective, just like real life.

Toward the end of his life, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright often said that with 20 more years he could rebuild America, and give it an architecture that was organic, natural, and truly its own. Others called him arrogant for making these claims, but he would respond that a great nation should expect its great architects to build it great buildings.

The same is true for the digital world. The rest of the human race—the struggling journalists, the embattled authors of books, the makers of music, the normal folks who have been robbed of their individuality by today’s web—should expect its digital world builders to build them beautiful, honest, nourishing worlds.

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5. Simplicity Simplicity is hot right now, made fashionable by RISD president John Maeda and companies like Apple and Google. But there are some things to be said about it.

First, simplicity and minimalism are not equivalent, though they’re often conflated. Minimalism is a child of simplicity, but simplicity has other children too, the most versatile being organic or natural simplicity. Nature is more complex than anything humans could imagine, but nature is precisely as complex as it needs to be and not one bit more, which makes it simple. As

I admire minimalism as an art movement. Donald Judd, its founder, is one of my favorite artists, and Marfa, Texas, the town he shaped in his image, is one of my favorite towns. But minimalism can be a dangerous dogma in the context of world building. Unchallenged, it can lead to the same aesthetic solutions for very different problems and situations, producing a boring, soulless landscape.

In architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright’s natural, site-specific approach battled against the booming voice of International Modernism, which worshiped geometry and universal proportions, spitting out generic glass boxes for every project, regardless of the setting. This strict adherence to minimalism has left us with the drab corporate landscapes of many modern cities. On the Internet, this adherence to minimalism has left us with the drab homogenous landscape of the social web, in which the major sites all look and act more or less the same, encouraging and producing the same types of behavior.

In architecture, the basic trait is matter and the basic need is shelter. Online, the basic trait is interaction and the basic need is connection. The homogeneity of modern architecture has to do with aesthetics. The homogeneity of the web has to do with behavior.

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Einstein said, “Make things as simple as can be—but not simpler.”

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When building tools (like Google or Wikipedia), minimalism makes a lot of sense. But when building worlds to house our digital selves, minimalism quickly crushes our individuality and leads to the kind of blah undifferentiated landscapes of shopping malls, corporate office parks, and many of today’s social networks. When building worlds, minimalism for its own sake should usually be avoided.

6. Language Worlds need languages to function.

A language is basically a system for expressing ideas.

JONATHAN HARRIS (MANIFESTO)

Finally, there is a difference between simplicity based on familiarity and simplicity based on universal truths. The lemming-like aesthetic conformity of today’s digital world has more to do with the former. True simplicity comes not from imitation, but from understanding. Certain situations will suggest a minimalist approach, but others won’t. Our digital worlds should feel like they sustain life—not just geometry.

JONATHAN HARRIS (MANIFESTO)

A good language is succinct, highly expressive, and intuitive to learn.

There are obvious languages like English, Spanish, and Mandarin, and less obvious languages like film, photography, music, dance, HTML, Flash, and Java.

When the world changes, sometimes a new language is needed to handle that change. For instance, telegraphs spawned morse code, airplanes spawned air traffic control signals, and computers spawned machine language, C++, Java, and many others.

When building a world, you need to decide which language you will use.

Foreign novelists and filmmakers have long faced this question, weighing the comfort of writing in their native tongue with the larger potential audience of writing in English. Online it is no different. If you use Java or Flash instead of HTML, you will be able to build more nuanced worlds, but your audience will likely be smaller.

You have to decide if you want to make operas that affect a few people deeply, or folk songs that spread far and wide.

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You may decide that no existing language can satisfy the needs of your world, and so you may choose to become a language maker, which presents its own challenges.

DESIGNING POSSIBLE FUTURES

Or you may decide that an adequate language does exist, but you don’t know it yet, and so you may choose to become a language learner. If you choose this path, remember there is a difference between learning a language and actually using that language to say something, and that saying something is far more important (and difficult).

Don’t get stuck like the schoolboy, endlessly practicing grammar and learning vocabulary, but never writing a poem, a play, or a novel.

7. Special Effects In movies, we’re familiar with the concept of special effects. In today’s online world, special effects are things like sound, animation, motion, and certain kinds of interactivity and layering.

I consider a special effect to be any expendable deviation from essential simplicity.

I see a certain obscenity in unrestrained special effects.

The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky sought to make his special effects seem banal and ordinary. Speaking about his 1972 sci-fi film, Solaris, Tarkovsky says he tried to make boarding a spaceship feel like boarding a trolley. Most directors fetishize gadgets and technology, explaining away every contrivance as if they had to show you the blueprints. The result is that Tarkovsky movies still feel ordinary and timeless, while movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey now feel like products of the 1960s, as movies like Minority Report in ten years will surely feel like products of 2002.

Special effects are not all bad, and a few well-chosen effects, used sparingly and for good reason, can really bring a world to life. Again, it is useful to remember Baz’s advice—beginners strive for the easy Wowww!, while masters seek the more difficult Wowww...

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When using Java and Flash, the tools impose few limitations—the processor can handle almost anything the code can demand. When using HTML and Javascript, the tools create their own constraints—the rectilinear grid of CSS, not too much motion, etc. These two working experiences are very different, each encouraging a certain kind of behavior. When unconstrained by his tools, the creator must choose his own constraints. He can be like a desert hermit subsisting on rice, or like a fat man at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

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8. Opinions When I was living in Brooklyn, I found it hard to have opinions. With so many perspectives and new bits of information constantly to consider, earnest opinions felt foolish. How could I have a firm stance about the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, about climate change, the Big Bang, or abortion, when I could so easily argue both sides?

If you can find a place where you’re all alone, that’s usually a good place to be.

JONATHAN HARRIS (MANIFESTO)

But just because you can’t have opinions about all things doesn’t mean you can’t have opinions about any things. There are some things we know for sure. These might be minor—how to treat your parents, how to grow tomatoes, how to build a house. We each have a few such things. Start there with your feet firmly planted and see how it feels. Then take a few small steps until you reach a place that still feels firm, but where nobody else is standing.

Then try to make something beautiful with what you see.

JONATHAN HARRIS (MANIFESTO)

9. Beliefs These days it’s unfashionable to have beliefs, largely because we worship science and we don’t like to worship more than one god. Some people believe only what they can prove and like to scoff at mystery, because mystery is what they don’t understand and what they don’t understand scares them.

Scientists should cherish mystery, as it represents the potential of science, temporarily filling the gap between knowledge and possibility. Without mystery, there would be no wild hypotheses to test and no strange new worlds to explore. Our future hides in mystery, and we ignore it at our peril.

I believe in mystery and generally keep an open mind even to its wildest suggestions. Mystery can be a valuable tool for making work, especially if your work is less about how the world currently is, and more about how the world someday could be.

10. Ideas

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Millions of dollars are spent each year at conferences that people attend to be inspired, to learn the latest memes and speak the latest jargon. They stand around in hotel lobbies, drinking bottled water and swapping business cards.

They look at what everyone else is doing, and try to figure out how to apply what they see to their own particular endeavor. These conferences lead to what I call “city ideas”.

City ideas have to do with a particular moment in time, a scene, a movement, other people’s work, what critics say, or what’s happening in the zeitgeist.

City ideas tend to be slick, sexy, smart, and savvy, like the people who live in cities. City ideas are often incremental improvements—small steps forward, usually in response to what your neighbor is doing or what you just read in the paper. City ideas, like cities, are fashionable. But fashions change quickly, so city ideas live and die on short cycles.

The opposite of city ideas are “natural ideas”, which account for the big leaps forward and often appear to come from nowhere. These ideas come from nature, solitude, and meditation. They’re less concerned with how the world is, and more with how the world could and should be.

11. Imitation Many people try to imitate the masters they admire, but this is a mistake.

If you need to copy, copy precisely what you need, do something new with it, make it your own, and move on.

Read “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon.

Imitation gets you stuck in someone else’s mud.

12. Reputation

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As the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd said, “If you imitate a person you admire, the best you can possibly hope for is to become a bad imitation of the person you admire. What you need to do instead is to locate the same level of inventiveness as the person you admire, and apply it to a new domain.”

You will become known for doing what you do.

This sounds obvious, but is useful to understand.

Many people think that before they can do what they want to be known for doing, they first need to pay their dues. The problem is that once they start paying their dues, they never get around to doing the thing they always wanted to do.

If you are lucky enough to know what you want to be known for doing (and this is a very hard question), then start doing that thing immediately!

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At first you will probably have to work nights and weekends, and make certain sacrifices. But eventually, if you do that thing prolifically and beautifully, you will become known as a person who does that thing prolifically and beautifully. Then, people might hire or pay you to do that particular thing (or by that point you might not even care, because the work itself will be sustenance enough).

If you decide to act alone—as an artist, as an entrepreneur, as a hermit—in isolation, unilaterally, or otherwise by yourself, then even as you act alone, act on behalf of others.

Make things that make people’s lives better or more beautiful.

It’s good for your karma, and the world needs you.

If you do nice things for the world, the world will find a way to pay you back.

JONATHAN HARRIS (MANIFESTO)

13. Acting Alone

JONATHAN HARRIS (MANIFESTO)

14. Irony I’m not a big fan of irony.

It’s a slippery slope that quickly leads to sarcasm and cynicism.

Paraphrasing the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, irony can occasionally be used by the master to drive home an already sharpened point that much further, but should generally be avoided by the beginner, as it is obvious and simple (in the worst sense).

Most irony falls into the category of “city ideas.”

Remember it is much easier to critique than to create.

15. 1. 2. 3.

I have three main principles that guide my work.

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When I was working at Fabrica in Italy, my boss was a British man named Andy Cameron. One day I was excitedly telling him about my ideas, and as I talked he didn’t say much. When I finished, he said, “Jonathan, when you’re considering a new idea for a project, ask yourself if it’s something the Italian everyman could understand.”

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I asked Andy what he meant by that.

He said, “Ask yourself if you could explain your idea to one of those old men standing around in Piazza Signori on Sunday mornings. If you can make him understand and appreciate your idea, using only your bad Italian and his broken English, then you will have hit on something very powerful. If you can’t, you might have hit on something powerful, but your odds will be diminished.”

Andy’s lesson became my first principle—that each project should be based on a universally understandable idea.

The next two principles followed from there—that each project should be executed as simply as possible, and that each project should possess an element of play, nostalgia, or beauty to humanize it and bring it to life.

So—a universal idea executed simply, with an element of play, nostalgia or

Those have been helpful guidelines, but they’re not dogma.

Find what works for you.

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beauty.

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DUNNE & RABY (CRITICAL DESIGN)

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Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

Preface Speculative Everything began as a list we created a few years ago called A/B, a sort of manifesto. In it, we juxtaposed design as it is usually understood with the kind of design we found ourselves doing. B was not intended to replace A but to simply add another dimension, something to compare it to and facilitate discussion. Ideally, C, D, E, and many others would follow.

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This book unpacks the B bit of the list, making connections between usually disparate ideas, locating them within an expanded notion of contemporary design practice, and establishing some historical links. It is not a straightforward survey, anthology of essays, or monograph but offers a very specific view of design based on several years of experimentation, teaching, and reflection. We use examples from our own practice, student and graduate work from the Royal College of Art, and other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. In researching this book we also surveyed literature from futurology, cinematic and literary fiction, political theory, and the philosophy of technology.

The ideas in this book move from a general setting out of what conceptual design is, through its use as a critical medium for exploring the implications of new developments in science and technology, to the aesthetics of crafting speculative designs. It ends by zooming out to explore the idea of “speculative everything� and design as a catalyst for social dreaming.

Speculative Everything is an intentionally eclectic and idiosyncratic journey through an emerging cultural landscape of ideas, ideals, and approaches.

We hope designers interested in doing more than making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable will find this book enjoyable, stimulating and inspiring.

Speculative Everything has served me as a bible for my thesis.

Dreams are powerful. They are repositories of our desire. They animate the entertainment industry and drive consumption. They can blind people to reality and provide cover for political horror. But they can also inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that imaginary world.

It is hard to say what today’s dreams are; it seems they have been downgraded to hopes—hope that we will not allow ourselves to become extinct, hope that we can feed the starving, hope that there will be room for us all on this tiny planet. There are no more visions. We don’t know how to fix the planet and ensure our survival. We are just hopeful.

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1. Beyond Radical Design?

As Fredric Jameson famously remarked, it is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism. Yet alternatives are exactly what we need. We need to dream new dreams for the twenty-first century as those of the twentieth century rapidly fade. But what role can design play?

Rather than giving up altogether, though, there are other possibilities for design: one is to use design as a means of speculating how things could be— speculative design. This form of design thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.

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When people think of design, most believe it is about problem solving. Even the more expressive forms of design are about solving aesthetic problems.

Faced with huge challenges such as overpopulation, water shortages, and climate change, designers feel an overpowering urge to work together to fix them, as though they can be broken down, quantified, and solved. Design’s inherent optimism leaves no alternative but it is becoming clear that many of the challenges we face today are unfixable and that the only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. Although essential most of the time, design’s inbuilt optimism can greatly complicate things, first, as a form of denial that the problems we face are more serious than they appear, and second, by channeling energy and resources into fiddling with the world out there rather than the ideas and attitudes inside our heads that shape the world out there.

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Probable/Plausible/Possible/Preferable Being involved with science and technology and working with many technology companies, we regularly encounter thinking about futures, especially about “The Future.” Usually it is concerned with predicting or forecasting the future, sometimes it is about new trends and identifying weak signals that can be extrapolated into the near future, but it is always about trying to pin the future down. This is something we are absolutely not interested in; when it comes to technology, future predictions have been proven wrong again and again. In our view, it is a pointless activity. What we are interested in, though, is the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and, of course, ones people do not want. They usually take the form of scenarios, often starting with a what-if question, and are intended to open up spaces of debate and discussion; therefore, they are by necessity provocative, intentionally simplified, and fictional. Their fictional nature requires viewers to suspend their disbelief and allow their imaginations to wander, to momentarily forget how things are now, and wonder about how things could be. We rarely develop scenarios that suggest how things should be because it becomes too didactic and even moralistic. For us futures are not a destination or something to be strived for but a medium to aid imaginative thought—to speculate with. Not just about the future but about today as well, and this is where they become critique, especially when they highlight limitations that can be removed and loosen, even just a bit, reality’s grip on our imagination.

As all design to some extent is future oriented, we are very interested in positioning design speculation in relation to futurology, speculative culture including literature and cinema, fine art, and radical social science concerned with changing reality rather than simply describing it or maintaining it. This space lies somewhere between reality and the impossible and to operate in it effectively, as a designer, requires new design roles, contexts, and methods. It relates to ideas about progress—change for the better but, of course, better means different things to different people.

To find inspiration for speculating through design we need to look beyond design to the methodological playgrounds of cinema, literature, science, ethics, politics, and art; to explore, hybridize, borrow, and embrace the many tools available for crafting not only things but also ideas— fictional worlds, cautionary tales, what-if scenarios, thought experiments, counterfactuals, reductio ad absurdum experiments, prefigurative futures, and so on.

In 2009, the futurologist Stuart Candy visited the Design Interactions

Most people don’t want change. Change means having to readapt, to leave their bubble of comfort.

The first cone was the probable. This is where most designers operate. It describes what is likely to happen unless there is some extreme upheaval such as a financial crash, eco disaster, or war. Most design methods, processes, tools, acknowledged good practice, and even design education are oriented toward this space. How designs are evaluated is also closely linked to a thorough understanding of probable futures, although it is rarely expressed in those terms.

The next cone describes plausible futures. This is the space of scenario planning and foresight, the space of what could happen. In the 1970s companies such as Royal Dutch Shell developed techniques for modeling alternative near-future global situations to ensure that they would survive through a number of large-scale, global, economic, or political shifts. The space of plausible futures is not about prediction but exploring alternative economic and political futures to ensure an organization will be prepared for and thrive in a number of different futures.

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The next cone is the possible. The skill here is making links between today’s world and the suggested one. Michio Kaku’s book Physics of the Impossible sets out three classes of impossibility, and even in the third, the most extreme—things that are not possible according to our current understanding of science—there are only two, perpetual motion and precognition, which, based on our current understanding of science, are impossible. All other changes—political, social, economic, and cultural—are not impossible but it can be difficult to imagine how we would get from here to there. In the scenarios we develop we believe, first, they should be scientifically possible, and second, there should be a path from where we are today to where we are in the scenario. A believable series of events that led to the new situation is necessary, even if entirely fictional. This allows viewers to relate the scenario to their own world and to use it as an aid for critical reflection. This is the space of speculative culture—writing, cinema, science fiction, social fiction, and so on. Although speculative, experts are often consulted when building these scenarios, as David Kirby points out in a fascinating chapter about distinctions between what he calls speculative scenarios and fantastic science in his book Lab Coats in Hollywood; the role of the expert is often, not to prevent the impossible but to make it acceptable.

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program at the Royal College of Art and used a fascinating diagram in his presentation to illustrate different kinds of potential futures. It consisted of a number of cones fanning out from the present into the future. Each cone represented different levels of likelihood. We were very taken by this imperfect but helpful diagram and adapted it for our own purposes.

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Beyond this lies the zone of fantasy, an area we have little interest in. Fantasy exists in its own world, with very few if any links to the world we live in. It is of course valuable, especially as a form of entertainment, but for us, it is too removed from how the world is. This is the space of fairy tales, goblins, superheroes, and space opera.

A final cone intersects the probable and plausible. This is the cone of preferable futures. of course the idea of preferable is not so straightforward; what does preferable mean, for whom, and who decides? Currently, it is determined by government and industry, and although we play a role as consumers and voters, it is a limited one. In Imaginary Futures, Richard Barbrook explores futures as tools designed for organizing and justifying the present in the interests of a powerful minority. But, assuming it is possible to create more socially constructive imaginary futures, could design help people participate more actively as citizen-consumers? And if so, how?

This is the bit we are interested in. Not in trying to predict the future but in using design to open up all sorts of possibilities that can be discussed, debated, and used to collectively define a preferable future for a given group of people: from companies, to cities, to societies. Designers should not define futures for everyone else but working with experts, including ethicists, political scientists, economists, and so on, generate futures that act as catalysts for public debate and discussion about the kinds of futures people really want. Design can give experts permission to let their imaginations flow freely, give material expression to the insights generated, ground these imaginings in everyday situations, and provide platforms for further collaborative speculation.

We believe that by speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable and, although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening. And equally, factors that may lead to undesirable futures can be spotted early on and addressed or at least limited.

Beyond Radical Design?

We have long been inspired by radical architecture and fine art that use speculation for critical and provocative purposes, particularly projects from the 1960s and 1970s by studios such as Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, Ant Farm, Haus-Rucker-Co, and Walter Pichler. But why is this so rare in design? During the Cold War Modern exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008 we were delighted to finally see so many projects from this period for real. The exuberant energy and visionary imagination of the

We believe several key changes have happened since the high point of radical design in the 1970s that make imaginative, social, and political speculation today more difficult and less likely. First, during the 1980s design became hyper-commercialized to such an extent that alternative roles for design were lost. Socially oriented designers such as Victor Papanek who were celebrated in the 1970s were no longer regarded as interesting; they were seen as out of sync with design’s potential to generate wealth and to provide a layer of designer gloss to every aspect of our daily lives. There was some good in this—design was embraced by big business and entered the mainstream but usually only in the most superficial way. Design became fully integrated into the neoliberal model of capitalism that emerged during the 1980s, and all other possibilities for design were soon viewed as economically unviable and therefore irrelevant.

Second, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War the possibility of other ways of being and alternative models for society collapsed as well. Market-led capitalism had won and reality instantly shrank, becoming one dimensional. There were no longer other social or political possibilities beyond capitalism for design to align itself with. Anything that did not fit was dismissed as fantasy, as unreal. At that moment, the “real” expanded and swallowed up whole continents of social imagination marginalizing as fantasy whatever was left. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no alternative.”

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Third, society has become more atomized. As Zygmunt Bauman writes in Liquid Modernity, we have become a society of individuals. People work where work is available, travel to study, move about more, and live away from their families. There has been a gradual shift in the United Kingdom from government that looks after the most vulnerable in society to a small government that places more responsibility on individuals to manage their own lives. on the one hand this undoubtedly creates freedom and liberation for those who wish to create new enterprises and projects but it also minimizes the safety net and encourages everyone to look out for himor herself. At the same time, the advent of the Internet has allowed people to connect with similar-minded people all over the world. As we channel energy into making new friends around the world we no longer need to care about our immediate neighbors. on a more positive note, with this reduction

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projects in the final room of the exhibition were incredibly inspiring for us. We were left wondering how this spirit could be reintroduced to contemporary design and how design’s boundaries could be extended beyond the strictly commercial to embrace the extreme, the imaginative, and the inspiring.

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in top-down governing, there has been a corresponding shift away from the top-down mega-utopias dreamt up by an elite; today, we can strive for one million tiny utopias each dreamt up by a single person.

Fourth, the downgrading of dreams to hopes once it became clear that the dreams of the twentieth century were unsustainable, as the world’s population has more than doubled in the last forty-five years to seven billion.

The great modernist social dreams of the post-war era probably reached a peak in the 1970s when it started to become clear that the planet had limited resources and we were using them up fast. As populations continued to grow at an exponential rate we would have to reconsider the consumer world set in motion during the 1950s. This feeling has become even more acute with the financial crash and the emergence since the new millennium of scientific data suggesting that the climate is warming up due to human activity. Now, a younger generation doesn’t dream, it hopes; it hopes that we will survive, that there will be water for all, that we will be able to feed everyone, that we will not destroy ourselves.

But we are optimistic. Triggered by the financial crash of 2008, there has been a new wave of interest in thinking about alternatives to the current system. And although no new forms of capitalism have emerged yet, there is a growing desire for other ways of managing our economic lives and the relationship among state, market, citizen, and consumer. This dissatisfaction with existing models coupled with new forms of bottom-up democracy enhanced by social media make this a perfect time to revisit our social dreams and ideals and design’s role in facilitating alternative visions rather than defining them. of being a catalyst rather than a source of visions. It is impossible to continue with the methodology employed by the visionary designers of the 1960s and 1970s. We live in a very different world now but we can reconnect with that spirit and develop new methods appropriate for today’s world and once again begin to dream.

But to do this, we need more pluralism in design, not of style but of ideology and values.

2. A Map Of Unreality Once designers step away from industrial production and the marketplace we enter the realm of the unreal, the fictional, or what we prefer to think of as conceptual design—design about ideas. It has a short but rich history and it is a place where many interconnected and not very well understood forms of design happen—speculative design, critical design, design fiction, design

For us, this separation from the marketplace creates a parallel design channel free from market pressures and available to explore ideas and issues. These could be new possibilities for design itself; new aesthetic possibilities for technology; social, cultural, and ethical implications for science and technology research; or large-scale social and political issues such as democracy, sustainability, and alternatives to our current model of capitalism. This potential to use the language of design to pose questions, provoke, and inspire is conceptual design’s defining feature.

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futures, antidesign, radical design, interrogative design, design for debate, adversarial design, discursive design, futurescaping, and some design art.

It is different from social and humanitarian design, and design thinking too, which, although also often rejecting market-driven design, still operate within the limits of reality as it is. This is very important for us. We are not talking about a space for experimenting with how things are now, making them better or different, but about other possibilities altogether.

It is often said that if something is conceptual, it is only an idea, but that is missing the point. It is because it is an idea that it is important. New ideas are exactly what we need today. Conceptual designs are not only ideas but also ideals, and as the moral philosopher Susan Neiman has pointed out, we should measure reality against ideals, not the other way around: “Ideals are not measured by whether they conform to reality; reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals. Reason’s task is to deny that the claims of experience are

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We are more interested in designing for how things could be. Conceptual design provides a space for doing this. It deals, by definition, with unreality.

Conceptual designs are not conceptual because they haven’t yet been realized or are waiting to be realized but out of choice. They celebrate their unreality and take full advantage of being made from ideas. Patrick Stevenson Keating’s The Quantum Parallelograph (2011) is a public engagement prop exploring ideas about quantum physics and multiverses by finding and printing out online information from a user’s “parallel life.” It uses abstraction along with generic technical references to suggest a strange technological device.

It is clearly a prop but it sets to work on the imagination very quickly. The aesthetics are fresh, striking, and immediately signal that the object is conceptual without diminishing it in anyway. A more concrete example is MTKS-3/The Meta-territorial Kitchen System-3 (2003) by Martí guixé. It consists of models of components for an open source kitchen, the final objects are abstract, simplified geometric forms that celebrate their propness and make no effort at realism; they are what they are: ideas.

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final—and to push us to widen the horizon of our experience by providing ideas that experience ought to obey.”

One of the main purposes of conceptual design, therefore, as we see it, is to provide an alternative context to design that is driven entirely by market forces. It is a space for thinking, for trying out ideas, and ideals. As Hans Vaihinger writes in The Philosophy of As If, “The ideal is an ideational construct contradictory in itself and in contradiction with reality, but it has an irresistible power. The ideal is a practical fiction.”

A Map Of Unreality The spectrum of conceptual design is broad. Each area of design has its own form and is used in different ways. At one end it is very close to conceptual art and is about pure ideas, often to do with the medium itself. Much applied art, ceramics, furniture, and device art, for example, sit here. At the other end of the spectrum conceptual design means a parallel space of speculation that uses hypothetical or, more accurately, fictional products to explore possible technological futures. Industrial and product design usually operate at this end. This is the end we are interested in.

Even though Marcel Duchamp is acknowledged as the first true conceptual artist, it was not until the 1960s that artists such as Sol LeWitt and Adrian Piper clearly articulated what it meant to make art out of ideas. In his “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1969) LeWitt lists what have become for many the core features of a conceptual artwork, for example: 10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

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13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist’s mind.

17. All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.

28. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.

31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist’s concept involved the material.

The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.

In design, people often struggle to get beyond the concept to appreciate and engage with the ideas. It is at the level of ideas that the craft of conceptual design happens. Ideas are constructed or found, evaluated, combined, edited, tweaked, and embedded.

Conceptual approaches exist in most areas of design, either in a pure state, usually for exhibitions, or fused with more commercial goals and available to buy. graphic design has a long tradition of experimenting with ideas and an established critical context for discussing and debating them. The work of highly conceptual studios such as Åbäke, Metahaven, and Daniel Eatock is regularly discussed, exhibited, and debated in the design press. In Facestate (2011) Metahaven use the kind of strategic thinking usually applied to commercial corporate identity projects to critique the political implications of blurring boundaries between consumerism and citizenship, especially when social software is embraced by governments in the name of improved transparency and interaction.

Furniture design has a history of using chairs as vehicles for exploring new design philosophies and visions for everyday life, whether aesthetic,

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In fashion it ranges from one-off haute couture pieces for the catwalk to massproduced diffusion lines for sale in high street shops. In the 1960s, inspired by the space age, designers such as André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, and Pacco Rabanne disregarded practicalities to explore ideas about the future using new forms, production processes, and materials. In the 1980s, Katherine Hamnett made protest t-shirts fashionable with her infamous slogan t-shirts such as “NUCLEAR BAN NOW,” “PRESERVE THE RAINFORESTS,” “SAVE THE WORLD,” and “EDUCATION NOT MISSILES.” Today, leading designers use the catwalk to present experimental clothes that more often communicate brand values and the designer’s identity than challenge social norms. Hussein Chayalan is an exception. His shows are beautifully crafted vignettes that make use of ingenious objects and novel technologies; his “airplane dress” is one of our favorites. Companies such as Comme des garçon, A-POC, and Martin Margiella make highly conceptual but wearable clothes that play with ideas of materiality and tailoring, social conventions and expectations, and aesthetics.

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One of the most interesting for us is point 9:

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social, or political. The 1990s saw a renewed interest in conceptualism driven primarily by the Dutch design group Droog. It is hard to say when conceptualism first appeared in furniture design—definitely the Bauhaus’s early bent steel tube chairs and in work by postwar Italian designers such as Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass, Studio De Pas D’Urbino, Lomazzi, Archizoom, Alessandro Mendini, and Memphis before design dissolved into a miasma of extreme commercialism in the 1980s. But, possibly, it was the designer William Morris who was the first to create critical design objects in the way we understand them today, that is, embodying ideals and values intentionally at odds with those of his own time. As Will Bradley and Charles Esche point out in their introduction to Art and Social Change, William Morris’s thinking is still relevant today through his opposition of utopian ideals of artistic production with capitalist industrialist models of production, which also influenced Walter gropius and the Bauhaus.

Today, although furniture is still where most conceptual activity happens, the focus is on aesthetics, manufacturing processes, and materials. Designers such as Jurgen Bey and Martí guixé go well beyond this, using conceptual design to explore social or political issues. Bey’s Slow Car (2007), a motorized office chair and desk enclosure is designed to question our use of time spent in cars in highly congested cities. It is not intended to be mass produced but to circulate through exhibitions and publications.

Martí guixé’s Food Facility (2005) for Mediamatic in Amsterdam was a prototype restaurant in the form of a performance space that used the Internet to outsource cooking. Customers gathered in the “restaurant,” enjoying its social ambience but ordered their food from local take-away restaurants.

The restaurant’s kitchen was replaced by the kitchens of existing local takeaways. Customers were guided by food advisors, who provided information on food quality and estimated delivery time, and food DJs received deliveries and repackaged it for the food advisor to serve to the customer. The project experimented with the mixing of digital and analog cultures, using search engines to help reorganize traditional social events. Another project by Martí guixé, The Solar Kitchen Restaurant for Lapin Kulta (2011), explores new ways of organizing a restaurant business around solar cooking technologies.

Customers need to be flexible, forgiving, and adventurous; if it rains, for instance, lunch might be canceled or a cloudy sky might delay dinner.

There is even a well-established gallery system. galerie Kreo in Paris works with designers including Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Konstantin grcic, and Jasper Morrison as a lab for aesthetic experimentation and developing ideas that would be impossible in an industrial context. grcic’s Champions

Vehicle design, too, has a strong tradition of concept cars designed to be displayed in shows to communicate future design directions and gauge customer reaction. Roland Barthes’s famous essay celebrating the Citroën DS in Mythologies captures the magic of these visions at their high point.

Buckminster Fuller’s 1930s prototype Dymaxion car promoted new ways of thinking about safety and aerodynamics. More recent studies have focused on style and imagery; Marc Newson’s 021C (1999) for Ford aimed to introduce new cultural references to car design, and Chris Bangle’s GINA (2008) concept car for BMW suggested replacing current materials with futuristic shape-shifting materials that adjust the car’s aerodynamics on the move. But, although technically innovative, concept cars rarely deal with the social and cultural implications of transportation systems and consistently focus on the car as an object. one recent exception, maybe not intentionally so, is ora-ïto’s Evo Mobil (2010) for Citroën, an imaginary evolution of early Citroëns such as the Traction Avant into a futuristic “personal mobility system,” essentially a sedan chair—one of two designs intended to promote new thinking in the car industry about possible new directions and values.

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Of all the design disciplines it is probably architecture that has the richest, most diverse tradition for exploring ideas. From paper architecture to visionary design, its long history is full of exciting and inspiring examples.

There is a tension between visionary architecture, which has an outward facing social or critical agenda, and paper architecture, which, though often introspective and concerned only with architectural theory, is rarely intended to ever be built. one of the most interesting examples to cross over from idea to reality is Peter Eisenman’s famous House VI (1975), which prioritized formalist concerns over practicalities to an extreme extent. The client later wrote about the many practical problems it had but still loved living in such a conceptual building. The relationship between reality and unreality is particularly interesting in architecture because many buildings are designed to be built but remain on paper due to economic or political reasons. House VI is unusual because it was intentionally an uncompromising piece of architectural art someone could live in, just about. It was as though

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(2011) tables import craft techniques, aesthetics and graphics from the world of motor racing, and high-performance sports equipment into the world of furniture. Sometimes the ideas produced for these exhibitions can end up being developed elsewhere with industrial partners. The Bouroullec Brothers’ Algue (2004), small plastic, organic-looking elements that can be linked together to form room dividers, began as an installation, only later becoming a highly successful product manufactured by Vitra and going on to sell in vast numbers.

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the owner lived inside an idea rather than a building.

Beyond this lies the world of film design and more recently game design, which deals less with conceptual objects and more with imaginary worlds.

We will return to this subject later in chapter 5.

Commodified Imaginations In the fields of applied arts, graphics, fashion, furniture, vehicle, and architecture, conceptual design is a highly valued, mature, and interesting way of working, and it embraces one-off experiments by individual designers through to products available in shops. Unlike these fields, product design struggles with this kind of work. At least at professional level, it is usually done by students, which although laudable means it can lack the depth and sophistication experienced designers would bring to it.

Although it is possible to buy a “conceptual” skirt from Comme des garçons or A-POC, it is not possible to buy a conceptual phone, at least not since the failed but brave efforts of Enorme in the 1980s or Daniel Weil’s batchproduced highly conceptual radios also from the 1980s. With the exception of farsighted entrepreneur designers such as Naoto Fukasawa and his +/-0 line of products, Maywa Denki’s otamatone, Sam Hecht/Industrial Facility’s everyday objects, and Hulger’s low-energy Plumen Light Bulb, product design remains closely aligned with market expectation and is one of the few areas in which conceptual and commercial approaches really do not mix.

Does the difference in scales of production, technological complexity, and need to address a mass market make work like this impossible in the technology industry? Since the new millennium there has been a significant increase in experimentation at the boundaries of interaction design and media art sometimes referred to as device art but it is usually focused on aesthetic, communicative, and functional possibilities for new media rather than visions for how life could be, and mainly takes the form of digital craft rather than future speculations. Artist-designer Ryota Kuwakubo is one of the most established practitioners working in this way. Similar to many people in the field of interactive devices his work sits between design and art. The devices often look industrially produced but are usually one-offs for galleries. His Prepared Radios (2006), programmed to filter out vowel sounds from the broadcasts of local radio stations, are designed to look like minimalistic domestic radios but are handmade. Some of his projects cross over from one-offs to mass production, for example, his Bitman Video Bulb (2005), which plugs into the back of a TV and plays a looped animation of his Bitman character.

Although not intended to be mass produced it is intended to have an impact on production by introducing new values and attitudes into how companies think about the home and its consumer products. Designers Syd Mead and Luigi Colani were pioneers of this form of speculative industrial design during the 1970s and 1980s. Colani’s work for Canon cameras in the 1980s introduced a form of “biodynamic” design that continues to influence camera design today.

Increasingly, design exhibitions are moving beyond showcasing designers and products to address more complex societal issues. The 2010 Saint Etienne

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Since Syd Mead and Luigi Colani, there haven’t really been many, if any, designers who have concentrated on developing highly speculative scenarios either independently or with companies. There have been occasional surrealistic moments from designers such as Marc Newson, Jaime Hayón, and Marcel Wanders, which although mainly marketing oriented, broke away from furniture to explore their imaginative inner worlds and fantastical design objects. Some of the most striking are Marc Newson’s Kelvin 40 Concept Jet (2003) airplane, Marcel Wanders’s oversized Calvin Lamp (2007), and his mosaic-tiled but fully functional car for the mosaic brand Bisazza. Wanders claimed his oversized objects were a response to the democratization of design leaving designers with no choice but to draw from their own imagination to provide something special. These extravagantly absurd technological fantasy objects hinted at a future direction for design cut short by the global financial crash. Although decadent and often marketing exercises, for a moment, designers broke away from narrow cultural references and the limited imagination of most design shows.

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The technology industry does have its own tradition of conceptual design in the form of Vision of the Future video scenarios setting out future directions or promoting new corporate values but they are often very limited in their scope and vision. They usually feature perfect worlds for perfect people interacting perfectly with perfect technologies. Whirlpool, and especially Philips Design, are two companies that have consistently gone beyond this and successfully used conceptual projects to explore alternative visions for everyday life, which with Philips’s design probes pushed the medium itself forward. Their Microbial Home (2011) is a proposal for integrating domestic activities such as cooking, energy usage, human waste management, food preparation, and storage, as well as lighting into one sustainable ecosystem in which each function’s output is another’s input. At the heart of the project is a view of the home as a biological machine.

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International Design Biennale under the theme teleportation addressed a wide range of issues from alternative transportation to future technologies in nine interconnected exhibitions. New Energy in Design and Art (2011) at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam presented alternative thinking by artists and designers around energy and MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind (2008) explored interactions between design and science from the concrete to the highly speculative.

We recognize it is very difficult to finance this kind of design activity and there are limited opportunities but it is needed. It feeds the profession’s imagination and it opens up new possibilities, not only for technology, materials, and manufacturing but also for narrative, meaning, and the rethinking of everyday life. Rather than waiting for commissions from industry or seeking out market gaps for new products, designers could work with curators and other professionals, independently of industry, in partnership with organizations focused on society in the broadest sense, not just business. Similar to architects, designers could take this on as a profession using some of our time for more civic purposes. This is also a role designers in academies could take on. Universities and art schools could become platforms for experimentation, speculation, and the reimagining of everyday life.

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3. Design As Critique To be human is to refuse to accept the given as given.

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Once we accept that conceptual design is more than a style option, corporate propaganda, or designer self-promotion, what uses can it take on? There are many possibilities—socially engaged design for raising awareness; satire and critique; inspiration, reflection, highbrow entertainment; aesthetic explorations; speculation about possible futures; and as a catalyst for change.

For us, one of the most interesting uses for conceptual design is as a form of critique. Maybe it is because of our background in design but we feel that the privileged space of conceptual design should serve a purpose. It is not enough that it simply exists and can be used to experiment or entertain; we also want it to be useful, to have a sort of social usefulness, specifically, to question, critique, and challenge the way technologies enter our lives and the limitations they place on people through their narrow definition of what it means to be human, or as Andrew Feenberg writes, “The most important question to ask about modern societies is therefore what understanding of human life is embodied in the prevailing technical arrangements.”

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Critical Design We coined the term critical design in the mid-nineties when we were researchers in the Computer Related Design Research Studio at the Royal College of Art. It grew out of our concerns with the uncritical drive behind technological progress, when technology is always assumed to be good and capable of solving any problem. our definition then was that “critical design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life.”

It was more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a methodology. Its opposite is affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo.

For many years the term slipped into the background but recently it has resurfaced as a part of growing discourse in design research, exhibitions, and even articles in the mainstream press. This is good but the danger is it becomes a design label rather than an activity, a style rather than an approach.

There are many people using design as a form of critique who have never heard of the term critical design and who have their own way of describing what they do. Naming it critical design was simply a useful way of making this activity more visible and subject to discussion and debate. And, although it is very exciting to see it taken up by so many people and evolving in new directions, over the years its meaning and potential has changed for us, too, and we feel it is the right moment to offer an updated view of what we think it is.

Especially in the current generation we live in, we have so many tools to create fake things that seem real and authentic.

When people encounter the term critical design for the first time, they often assume it has something to do with critical theory and the Frankfurt School or just plain criticism. But it is neither. We are more interested in critical thinking, that is, not taking things for granted, being skeptical, and always questioning what is given. All good design is critical. Designers start by identifying shortcomings in the thing they are redesigning and offer a better version. Critical design applies this to larger more complex issues. Critical design is critical thought translated into materiality. It is about thinking

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Critique/Critical Thinking/Critical Theory/Criticism Critique is not necessarily negative; it can also be a gentle refusal, a turning away from what exists, a longing, wishful thinking, a desire, and even a dream.

Critical designs are testimonials to what could be, but at the same time, they offer alternatives that highlight weaknesses within existing normality.

Read “Critical Graphic Design: Critical of What?” on page 28.

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through design rather than through words and using the language and structure of design to engage people. It is an expression or manifestation of our skeptical fascination with technology, a way of unpicking the different hopes, fears, promises, delusions, and nightmares of technological development and change, especially how scientific discoveries move from the laboratory into everyday life through the marketplace. The subject can vary. on the most basic level it is about questioning underlying assumptions in design itself, on the next level it is directed at the technology industry and its market-driven limitations, and beyond that, general social theory, politics, and ideology.

Some people take it very literally as negative design, anti-everything, interested only in pointing out shortcomings and limitations, which if already understood and appreciated, we agree is a pointless activity. This is where critical design gets confused with commentary. All good critical design offers an alternative to how things are. It is the gap between reality as we know it and the different idea of reality referred to in the critical design proposal that creates the space for discussion. It depends on dialectical opposition between fiction and reality to have an effect. Critical design uses commentary but it is only one layer of many. Ultimately it is positive and idealistic because we believe that change is possible, that things can be better; it is just that the way of getting there is different; it is an intellectual journey based on challenging and changing values, ideas, and beliefs. In Do You Want to Replace the Existing Normal?, a project we did with designer Michael Anastassiades in 2007–2008, we designed a collection of electronic products that intentionally embodied values at odds with those we would expect from products today.

The statistical clock searches newsfeeds for fatalities and organizes them by form of transport in a database. The owner sets the channel to car, train, plane, for instance, and once the device detects an event, it speaks out the numbers in sequence, one, two, three. . . . We imagined a world where there was a desire for products that met existential needs, reminding us of the frailty of life. Although fully functional and technically simple, we knew there was no market for a product like this because people do not want to be reminded of such things. But, that is its point: to confront us with alternative needs and hint at a parallel world of everyday philosophical products. These objects are designed in anticipation of that time. What would have to change for a need like this to emerge?

Reality For Sale But it is not just about design. In fact, the power of design is often overestimated.

Sometimes we can have more effect as citizens than as designers. Protests and boycotts can still be the most effective ways of making a point. We have recently become interested in the idea of critical shopping. It is by buying

The problem with design education, at least with mine (in 3 different art schools) is that we were not taught about morals, philosophy or economics etc. It was not required or expected that we know these things, and I think that is the root of the problem for design.

Once workers could exert power by withholding their labor, by striking; today, as we see again and again, this is less so. In today’s economy it is as consumers that we have power. The most threatening act of protest for a capitalist system would be for its citizens to refuse to consume. As Erik olin Wright points out, “If somehow it were to come to pass that large numbers of people in a capitalist society were able to resist the preferences shaped by consumerist culture and opt for ‘voluntary simplicity’ with lower consumption and much more leisure time, this would precipitate a severe economic crisis, for if demand in the market were to significantly decline, the profits of many capitalist firms would collapse.”

As we can see from the current economic crisis: “The state’s role in promoting the consumption bias inherent in capitalist economies is particularly sharply revealed in times of economic crisis. In an economic downturn, governments attempt to ‘stimulate’ the economy by, in various ways, encouraging people to consume more by reducing taxes, by reducing interest rates so borrowing is cheaper or, in some cases, by directly giving people more money to spend.”

Dark Design: The Positive Use Of Negativity One of critical design’s roles is to question the limited range of emotional and psychological experiences offered through designed products. Design is assumed only to make things nice; it is as if all designers have taken an

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In a consumer society like ours, it is through buying goods that reality takes shape. The moment money is exchanged, a possible future becomes real.

If it did not sell it would be sent back, becoming a rejected reality. In a consumer society, the moment we part with our money is the moment a little bit of reality is created. Not just physical reality or cultural but psychological, ethical, and behavioral. This is one of the purposes of critical design—to help us become more discerning consumers, to encourage people to demand more from industry and society as critical consumers. The designer is not positioned on a higher moral plane, a common criticism of critical theory, but like everyone else is immersed in the system. Design can help raise awareness of the consequences of our actions as citizen-consumers.

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things that they become real, moving from the virtual space of research and development by way of advertising into our lives. We get the reality we pay for. It is in the shops, waiting to happen, waiting to be consumed. Critical shoppers, by being more discriminating, could prevent certain material realities taking shape and encourage others to flourish. Manufacturers are never sure which reality we will embrace or reject, they simply offer them up and do their best through advertising to influence our choices.

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unspoken Hippocratic oath to never make anything ugly or think a negative thought. This limits and prevents designers from fully engaging with and designing for the complexities of human nature, which of course is not always nice.

Critical design can often be dark or deal with dark themes but not just for the sake of it. Dark, complex emotions are usually ignored in design; nearly every other area of culture accepts that people are complicated, contradictory, and even neurotic, but not design. We view people as obedient and predictable users and consumers. Darkness as an antidote to naive techno-utopianism can jolt people into action. In design, darkness creates a frisson that excites and challenges. It is more about the positive use of negativity, not negativity for its own sake but to draw attention to a scary possibility in the form of a cautionary tale. A good example of this is Bernd Hopfengaertner’s Belief Systems (2009). Hopfengaertner asks what would happen if one of the tech industry’s many dreams comes true, if all the research being done by separate companies into making humans machine readable were to combine and move from laboratory to everyday life: combined algorithms and camera systems that can read emotions from faces, gait, and demeanor; neurotechnologies that cannot exactly read minds but can make a good guess at what people are thinking; profiling software that tracks and traces our every click and purchase; and so on. He developed six scenarios that explored different aspects of this rather grim world. In one, a person wants to buy a teapot. She walks up to a machine, pays, then hundreds of images of teapots flash before her on a screen suddenly stopping on one, the one the machine decides the shopper wants from reading micro expressions on her face. In another, a person is trying to identify muscle groups in her face so she can learn to control them and not give her feelings away, voluntarily becoming inhuman in order to protect her humanity. For some this is the ultimate usercentered dream, but for many Hopfengaertner’s project is a cautionary tale fast-forwarding to a time when currently diverse technologies are combined to ease our every interaction with technology.

Humor is a very important but often misused element in this kind of design.

Satire is the goal but often only parody and pastiche are achieved. These reduce the effectiveness of the design in a number of ways. Borrowing from existing formats, they signal too clearly that it is ironic and so relieve some burden from the viewer. The viewer should experience a dilemma: is it serious or not? Real or not? For a critical design to be successful viewers need to make up their own mind. It would be very easy to preach: a skillful use of satire and irony can engage the audience in a more constructive way by appealing to the imagination as well as engaging the intellect. Deadpan and

Good political comedians do this well. Probably the most celebrated artists working in this way are The Yes Men ( Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos) who use satire, shock tactics, caricature, hoaxes, fakery, spoofing, absurdity, and “identity correction” (impersonating target organizations and individuals) to raise awareness of the mistreatment of ordinary people by large corporations and governments. Posing as representatives of target organizations they use corporate and governmental tactics such as spin to make outlandish claims or present fictional scenarios that are enthusiastically picked up by the popular media. Although impressive and highly entertaining, for us it is too sensational and fits in a context of media activism, performance, and theater. Their fake 4 July 2009 New York Times is different, though; it is subtle, beautifully crafted, and through headlines such as “Iraq War Ends” and “Nation Sets Its Sights on Building Sane Economy” showed what a different, better world might be like. Approximately eighty thousand copies were handed out in several cities around the United States.

Dark design is not pessimistic, cynical, or misanthropic; it is a counterpoint to a form of design that through denial does more harm than good. Dark design

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Unfortunately, in critical design, irony can all too often be interpreted as cynicism especially in a discipline in which people expect solutions, functionality, and realism. As viewers, when we encounter critical designs we need to accept that appearances can be deceptive and similar to other cultural products; they require effort from the viewer. We explored this in the huggable atomic mushrooms part of a collection of products we designed with Michael Anastassiades in 2004–2005 called Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times. Each atomic mushroom was based on a nuclear test and available in small, medium, or large sizes. We were inspired by treatments for phobias in which patients are exposed to the source of their fear in increasing doses. In the case of our mushrooms, someone with a dread of nuclear annihilation would begin with Priscilla (37 Kilotons, Nevada 1957), the smallest huggable atomic mushroom in the series. The objects were created in a dry and straightforward way with the high attention to quality of materials, construction, and detail one would expect in a welldesigned object. It is through its demeanor that one starts to wonder just how serious it is. Due to its softness it slumps, giving it a slightly pathetic look that, when you remember what it represents, begins to create conflicting emotions in the viewer.

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black humor work best but a certain amount of absurdity is useful, too. It helps resist streamlined thinking and instrumental logic that leads to passive acceptance; it is disruptive and appeals to the imagination.

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is driven by idealism and optimism, by a belief that it is possible to think our way out of a mess and that design can play an active role. Negativity, cautionary tales, and satire can jolt the viewer out of a cozy complacency that all is well. It aims to trigger shifts in perspective and understanding that open spaces for as-of-yet, unthought-of possibilities.

Critiquing Critique Without an intellectual framework it is very difficult to advance the practice of critical design; lots of projects happen but many simply repeat what has gone before. We need some criteria that make it possible to advance this form of design through reflection and critique or at least get a sense of how the area can be refined. Conventional design’s success is measured against how well it sells and how elegantly conflicts among aesthetics, production, usability, and costs are resolved. How is critical design’s success measured?

Design as critique can do many things—pose questions, encourage thought, expose assumptions, provoke action, spark debate, raise awareness, offer new perspectives, and inspire. And even to entertain in an intellectual sort of way.

But what is excellence in critical design? Is it subtlety, originality of topic, the handling of a question? or something more functional such as its impact or its power to make people think? Should it even be measured or evaluated?

It’s not a science after all and does not claim to be the best or most effective way of raising issues.

Critical design might borrow heavily from art’s methods and approaches but that is it. We expect art to be shocking and extreme. Critical design needs to be closer to the everyday; that’s where its power to disturb lies. A critical design should be demanding, challenging, and if it is going to raise awareness, do so for issues that are not already well known. Safe ideas will not linger in people’s minds or challenge prevailing views but if it is too weird, it will be dismissed as art, and if too normal, it will be effortlessly assimilated.

If it is labeled as art it is easier to deal with but if it remains design, it is more disturbing; it suggests that the everyday life as we know it could be different, that things could change.

For us, a key feature is how well it simultaneously sits in this world, the here-and-now, while belonging to another yet-to-exist one. It proposes an alternative that through its lack of fit with this world offers a critique by asking, “why not?” If it sits too comfortably in one or the other it fails. That is why for us, critical designs need to be made physical. Their physical presence can locate them in our world whereas their meaning, embodied values, beliefs, ethics, dreams, hopes, and fears belong somewhere else. This

Compasses Not Maps Using design as a form of critique is just one use for design, as is communication or problem solving. We believe that some design should always question prevailing values and their underlying assumptions and that this activity can sit beside mainstream design rather than replace it. The challenge is to keep evolving techniques that are appropriate to the times and identifying topics that need to be highlighted, reflected on, or challenged.

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is where the critique of critical design should focus, on crafting its coexistence in the here-and-now and yet-to-exist, and when done successfully, providing what author Martin Amis has called “complicated pleasure.”

In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik olin Wright describes emancipatory social science “as a theory of a journey from the present to a possible future: the diagnosis and critique of society tells us why we want to leave the world in which we live; the theory of alternatives tells us where we want to go; and the theory of transformation tells us how to get from here to there—how to make viable alternatives achievable.”

For us, the fulfillment of this journey is highly unlikely if is set out like a blueprint. Instead, we believe to achieve change, it is necessary to unlock people’s imaginations and apply it to all areas of life at a microscale. Critical design, by generating alternatives, can help people construct compasses rather than maps for navigating new sets of values.

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Much energy is going into developing ways of extending life but very little consideration is being given to its social and economic implications. In When We Live to 150 (2012) Jaemin Paik asks, “how would family life change if we all lived to one-hundred and fifty or beyond?” With up to six generations living together and the possibility of huge age gaps between siblings, the traditional model of the family would change dramatically, perhaps even becoming financially unsustainable due to the burden of its large membership. Her project explores the lives and structures of future families in an era of extended life spans by tracing the story of seventy-five year-old Moyra and her sprawling contract-based family. Like the flat-share system, it would be possible to have a family-share in which people move from family to family taking on different roles to suit their changing needs as their long lives unfold. Moyra decides to renew her thirty-year marriage contract with Ted, ensuring they receive better social support and tax benefits from the state.

Aged eighty-two, Moyra’s second thirty-year marriage contract with Ted expires. She decides to leave Ted and move to a “two-generation” family

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where she joins a new husband and a fifty-two-year-old “child.� Presented through a mockumentary and photographic vignettes the project does not offer a design solution or map but serves as a tool for thinking through our own beliefs, values, and priorities when it comes to the pros and cons of extreme life extension.

By acting on peoples’ imaginations rather than the material world, critical design aims to challenge how people think about everyday life. In doing this, it strives to keep alive other possibilities by providing a counterpoint to the world around us and encouraging us to see that everyday life could be different.

4. Consuming Monsters: Big,Perfect,Infectious While we are more than ever aware of both the promise and the threat of technological advance, we still lack the intellectual means and the political tools for managing progress.

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One area in which design as critique has obvious practical applications is science research. By moving upstream and exploring ideas before they become products or even technologies, designers can look into the possible consequences of technological applications before they happen. We can use speculative designs to debate potential ethical, cultural, social, and political implications.

Living In Extreme Times A weird and wonderful world is taking shape around us. genetics, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and neuroscience are all challenging our understanding of nature and suggesting new design possibilities at a level and scale never before possible. If we take just one area, biotechnology, and look more closely, we can see that a revolution is well underway. It is no longer about designing the things in the environment around us but designing life itself from microorganisms to humans, yet as designers we devote very little time to reflecting on what this means.

Driven by breakthroughs in genetics, animals are cloned and genetically modified to improve their food potential, human babies are designed to order and bred to provide organs and tissue for their siblings, fish and knockout pigs are made to glow in the dark, and transgenic goats are engineered to produce military grade spider silk for use in bulletproof vests. Chimera with comical names like geep and zorse and cows that produce humanlike milk have been created. Meat is grown in labs from animal cells, an artist has

Lab > Market > Everyday Life Many of these ideas exist as one-off genetic experiments in laboratories but as microbiologists and engineers begin to work together on the industrialization and systematization of genetic engineering, especially in synthetic biology, these ideas will move from the laboratory into everyday life through the marketplace. Procedures that are currently highly regulated and accessed only through health care may become freely available in a market shaped by consumer desire rather than therapeutic need. Are we prepared to treat society as a living laboratory as we do with digital technologies? Yes, Facebook affects our behavior and social relations but we can choose not to use it. once we begin to design or redesign life itself, it gets complicated; the consequences are more profound and the very nature of being human could change.

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developed bulletproof skin, and a scientist has claimed to have created the first synthetic life form. Being able to design life, both human and animal, is at the core of many of these developments. They have huge consequences for what it means to be human, how we relate to each other, our identity, our dreams, hopes, and fears. of course we have always been able to design nature through selective plant and animal breeding but the difference now is the speed at which these changes will manifest themselves and the extreme nature of the changes.

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We need to question these ideas (and ideals) and explore their human consequences once applied on a mass scale to our daily lives. This is where design enters; we can take research happening in laboratories and fastforward to explore possible applications driven by human desire rather than therapeutic need. By facilitating debate on the implications of advanced research in science, design can take on a practical, almost social purpose, and in doing so, play a role in the democratization of technological change by widening participation in debates about future technologies.

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To do this we need to move design upstream, beyond product, beyond technology, to the concept or research stage, and to develop speculative designs, or “useful fictions,� for facilitating debate. As designers, we need to shift from designing applications to designing implications by creating imaginary products and services that situate these new developments within everyday material culture. As the science fiction writer Frederick Pohl once remarked, a good writer does not think up only the automobile but also the traffic jam. Just as ergonomics emerged during the mechanical age to ensure a better physical fit between our bodies and machines, and user-friendliness came about during the computer age to ensure a better fit between our minds

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and computers, ethics needs to be at the forefront of working with biological technologies. We need to zoom out and consider what it means to be human and how to manage our changing relationship to nature and our new powers over life. This shift in focus requires new design methods, roles, and contexts.

Consumer-Citizens In much of the debate so far, the public have participated as citizens arguing in very general terms about the ethical, moral, and social issues. Yet, when we act as consumers we often suspend these general beliefs and act on other impulses. There is a separation between what we believe ought to be and how we actually behave when we want to use a biotech service or product.

Usually when we discuss big issues we do so as citizens, yet it is as consumers that we help reality take shape. It is only when products are bought that they enter everyday life and have an effect. The act of buying determines our technological future. By presenting people with fictional products, services, and systems from alternative futures people can engage critically with them as citizen-consumers. Being faced with a complex mix of contradictory emotions and responses opens up new perspectives on the debate about biotechnology.

An example of this is Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots (2009) by designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau. They are designed to look like contemporary domestic furniture rather than appliances or machines. Auger and Loizeau looked at research being done into microbial fuel cells that would allow robots to exist autonomously in the wild by converting organic matter like insects into energy, and they wondered how this might translate into new types of domestic robot. Each of the five robots dramatizes the process of creating energy from rodents or insects. The “flypaper robotic clock,� for instance, uses a loop of flypaper rotated by a small motor from which flies and other insects are scraped into a microbial fuel cell. The energy generated by the flies is used to power the motor and a small LCD clock. The project was extremely successful in generating debate online, in the press and even on TV about the implications of using microbial fuel cells to power domestic robots.

Subverting Design Language Design can shift the discussion from one of abstract generalities separated from our lives to tangible examples grounded in our experiences as members of a consumer society. Not to trivialize issues but because, for the most part, we live in a consumer society and consumerism drives economic growth in most Western societies. In this way, people can become involved in the debate earlier creating a dialogue between the public and the experts who define the

Speculating through design by presenting abstract issues as fictional products enables us to explore ethical and social issues within the context of everyday life. We can look at how different ways of purchasing biotech services (through a family doctor or on the Internet, for instance) or how different providers of a service affect people’s perceptions of biotechnology. Ideas of right and wrong are not just abstractions but are entangled in everyday consumer choices. The idea is not to show how things will be but to open up a space for discussion so that people can form their own opinion about what kind of biofuture they desire.

There are some concerns with this approach though. Dangerous ideas can be conceived that open up possibilities better left unexplored, and once thought cannot be unthought. And these projects might prepare people for what is to come by unintentionally paving the way for a greater acceptance of biotechnology through desensitization. Despite this, however, we feel the benefits of this approach far outweigh the negatives.

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policies and regulations that will shape the future of biotechnology. In other words, design can explore public perceptions of different biofutures before they happen and potentially make a contribution to the design of regulations that ensure the most humane and desirable futures are the most likely to become reality.

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Design + Science Design is relatively new to this area but art-science crossovers have happened for decades. In the United Kingdom it even has its own category, SciArt. SciArt is sometimes criticized as bad science and bad art, and it can be, but more often it is simply something different, not science and not art.

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Much SciArt takes on the function of celebrating, promoting, and communicating science, usually through aesthetically sophisticated sciencerelated imagery, processes, or products. It sits within a tradition of using art to aid the public understanding of science, which recently has shifted to public engagement with science through workshops, platforms, and open processes.6 Design, too, has made a contribution to this area in the form of exhibits, experiences, and environments found in expos and science museums. Charles and Ray Eames’s Mathematica: A World of Numbers... and Beyond (1961) for IBM’s contribution to the California Museum of Science and Industry was one of the first. More recently, many specialist design companies have emerged to work with science museums around the world to develop highly sophisticated interactive exhibits. Although all this has a place and value, it is not what we are interested in. We believe that

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design can go beyond this communicative role and facilitate debate and reflection about the social, cultural, and ethical implications of science.

For many funding organizations, and even artists and scientists, the ideal model for art and science is the collaborative project in which an artist and scientist work together to develop a new piece of work. This is an almost utopian dream of art-science collaboration, but in our view, one or the other is usually driving the project. Either the artist is helping the scientist communicate his or her research or the scientist is technically assisting or advising the artist.

Related to this is the idea of artist residencies in the research labs of hightech companies where artists are given free rein to respond to and use work happening around them. on the most basic level it helps to promote the work of the lab and bring it to a wider audience but its true purpose is to spark innovation through the fresh perspective a technologically naive artist might bring to ongoing research. Although Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT)’s 1960s experimental program was one of the first to place artists in industry, it is Xerox PARC that is the best known for this model, especially during the 1970s and early 1980s.

One of the more interesting recent examples of this is Le Laboratoire in Paris, which runs a year-long program to support collaboration between an artist who has never worked with a scientist and a scientist who has not worked before with artists. The aim is to develop a poetic and conceptually interesting project through a dialogue that can in some way be commercialized. Rather than let markets, technology, or known desires and needs lead the development of a product, cultural ideas drive it; then, at the right moment, it receives investment for realization as a product. The commercial angle particularly suits more conceptual designers because it allows designs intended to explore ideas that would usually remain as exhibition pieces to cross over into everyday life via the marketplace, free from the usual marketing constraints and narrow view of needs and wants that often prevents this from happening. one of the first products of this process was Andrea (2009) by Mathieu Lehanneur and David Edwards, an air purifier that uses a living plant to filter dirty air sucked into the device.

Of course this model does not always lead to harmonious outcomes or partnerships. Sometimes an artist may perceive negative implications for the research, but if scientists, or especially a company, opens their laboratory up to an artist or designer and share their research, research that may have taken years to develop, it feels wrong, almost treacherous, to pick up on negative possibilities. This can make it very difficult to deal with possible negative implications for the research. For this reason, other artists such as

Eduardo Kac is known for working with living materials, or transgenic art, as he terms it. He aims to transfer biotechnology techniques from practical applications to more poetic and philosophical possibilities. For the series Natural History of the Enigma Kac created what he calls a plantimal named Eudinia (2003–2008)—a genetically engineered hybrid of a Petunia flower and himself, essentially a transgenic flower. The artist’s DNA is expressed in the veins of the petals. The artist’s gene was isolated and sequenced from his blood, then a new gene was made combining Kac’s DNA with a promoter that ensured the red was expressed only in the plant’s veins. Although there are all sorts of nuanced meanings and associations in his work, it is the drama of the object itself that gives the work impact, particularly through popular media and press.

BCL (Shiho Fukuhara and georg Tremmel), two more artists trained as designers usually work with genetically engineered flowers. They situate their work firmly in the messy context of intellectual property, regulations, monopolies, commercial rights, markets, and consumerism. In Common Flowers/ Blue Rose (2009) they took the first commercially available

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Probably one of the most extreme forms of art and science interaction is when the artist becomes a scientist or at least does science but in a nonscientific way. oron Catts and Ionat Zurr have set up a research laboratory in a biological science department at the University of Western Australia to enable researchers to engage in wet biology practices. Their specialization is tissue culture engineering and they both worked as research fellows at the Harvard Medical School to learn their craft. For them, the doing is as important as the subject and product, and they have complete creative and intellectual independence. Consequently, their work is extremely powerful because they have artistic control over every aspect and stage of creating and presenting their work. For the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA (2008) they presented Victimless Leather: A Prototype of a Stitch-less Jacket Grown in a Technoscientific “Body” (the first version was developed in 2004) they grew in a local lab. The exhibit had to be kept alive throughout the exhibition and at one point began to grow out of control. After much discussion with Paola Antonelli the curator, it was decided to euthanize the artwork. The press had a field day announcing that a MoMA curator decided to kill an artwork. But the debate it sparked is highly pertinent—how should we manage works of art and products when they are made from living tissue?

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Eduardo Kac and Natalie Jeremijenko work independently with scientists as advisors rather than creative partners. Here, the artist is free to set his or her own agenda and take on a more critical role.

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genetically modified flower, an unnatural blue carnation manufactured

by Suntory flowers called Moondust, reverse engineered it, cloned it, and released it into the wild with instructions so others could do the same. The project aims to question ownership of nature and what happens if nature itself is used as the mechanism for reproducing patented natural material. Unlike the more poetic and philosophical work of Kac, BCL’s work is subversive and fully engaged with the mechanisms through which research flows from laboratory to marketplace. It can exist in galleries but is about the world beyond its walls.

In an earlier project, Biopresence (2003), BCL proposed a service in which after death, a person’s DNA is inserted into an apple tree as a memorial using a genetic coding technique invented by Joe Davis to store human DNA within a tree or a plant without affecting the genes of the resulting organism. The trees can be thought of as “living memorials” or “transgenic tombstones.” From a scientific point of view the project is not as interesting because DNA is just information. But from a layperson’s perspective this is a highly symbolic and provocative idea, especially in the case of fruit trees— would you eat an apple from your grandmother’s tree?

Their search over several years for funding to be able to offer individually engineered trees highlighted all sorts of issues around the regulation of biotechnological products. In particular the project served as a very powerful vehicle for exploring ethical issues surrounding cross-species gene splicing in a commercial context.

Although impressive that they attempted to realize the project, even though they were unable to implement it, the project demonstrates that it is not always necessary to be “real” to be valuable. A speculative design proposal can also serve as a “probe” for highlighting legal and ethical limits to existing systems. This form of speculative project usually falls outside the context of SciArt. With its emphasis on modeling ideas and projecting into the future, it is probably a more comfortable space for designers than artists and, indeed, most work in this area is by designers.

Functional Fictions For us, this is one of the strengths of design over art in relation to technology: it can pull new technological developments into imaginary but believable everyday situations so that we can explore possible consequences before they happen. And, it can do this with intelligence, wit, and insight. The following examples grew out of a design approach to biotechnology we have been developing with MA students at the Royal College of Art since 2002.

In 2006, inspired by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s Tissue Engineered Steak No.1 (2000), we asked our students to explore the implications of this technology if it were to be mass produced. one of the most successful proposals was also one of the most straightforward: James King’s Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow (2006). His project examined how we might choose to give shape, texture, and flavor to this new sort of food to remind us where it came from in a world in which traditional livestock farming has disappeared. He suggested using a mobile animal magnetic resonance imaging unit to scan the most perfect examples of cows, chickens, and pigs from head to toe creating accurate cross-sectional images of their inner organs. The most interesting and aesthetically pleasing examples of anatomy would be used as templates to create molds for the lab-grown meat. Although still not delicious looking, it moves beyond the “yuck” factor associated with the original prototype and allows for discussion about the pros and cons of the technology.

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The brief does not start with a problem or need but instead asks students to identify a specific area of science research, then to imagine issues that might arise once the research moves from lab to everyday life, and finally to embody these issues in a design proposal aimed at sparking debate or discussion. The project is about using design to ask questions rather than providing answers or solving problems.

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Would vegetarians eat it because animals would no longer need to be slaughtered or to suffer? Could we eat lab-grown human meat, from a famous pop star perhaps, and would it be for love or malice?

This is quite a utopian vision reflecting the good intentions of scientists and designers. The trouble starts when science moves out of the laboratory into the marketplace, when consumer desire enters the equation and things become more irrational and profit driven. This is the starting point for

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Over the last few years this topic has been revisited many times but recently the focus has shifted onto the bigger picture. In Biophilia: Organ Crafting (2011), Veronica Ranner explores where lab-grown meat should be grown and if laboratories are really the most desirable option. She offers an alternative vision based on an artisanal process that combines laboratory and studio into a studiolab. The objects she produced were not product proposals but evocations of what a craft approach to organ building might be like. The purpose was to move the discussion away from brave new world factory visions on the one hand and gothic, Frankenstein scenarios on the other to the possibility of handcrafted artisanal production processes in which biotechnologists become sculptors of organs.

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Manufacturing Monroe (2011) by Emily Hayes. It is a far darker future than Ranner’s. It uses the same technology but now it has been reduced to producing souvenirs. The outcome is a highly stylized video that shows glimpses of a tissue engineering factory of the future for manufacturing bits of celebrities—sheets of John F. Kennedy’s foreskin, miniature Marilyn Monroe breasts, and sausages of Michael Jackson’s brain. Fans can literally own a bit of their idol. Although Hayes’s project is lighthearted, this is a serious issue. How do we ensure that the translation of science from lab to everyday life avoids the worst aspects of commercialization once it moves beyond medical applications?

Hayes and Ranner both explore different aesthetic possibilities for the representation of biotechnology. All too often bioart and tissue culture engineering projects end up looking slightly gothic—all test tubes, fluids, and bits of flesh, frequently leaning toward horror. Speculative design projects can provide new forms of visual representation for biotechnology that open up other possibilities for debate, linking the discussion to mass consumerism for instance.

Many of the goals driving tissue engineering are concerned with replacing existing organs or body parts—flesh, hearts, breasts, kidneys, corneas, and so on. What other ways could this technology be used to enhance life rather than simply fix what is damaged or replace what is missing? In Biophilia: Survival Tissue (2011), Veronica Ranner looked at growing skin as a surface for a product. She was interested in how this technology could lead to new ways of thinking about medical technologies. As a vehicle for this investigation, she chose an incubator for keeping premature babies alive. This is not a concrete design proposal but a hope for tissue engineering expressed through an imaginary product, in this case an incubator that uses human skin. Its purpose is to ask, Will new biotechnologies enable us to move beyond the current highly technical language of medical technology to a more humane one? Another issue the project touches on is once you start to use semi- living materials such as skin, what happens with built-in obsolescence? Like oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s Victimless Leather Jacket, would we just kill products once they have served their purpose?

Along similar lines but less optimistic are Kevin grennan’s proposals for future robots—The Smell of Control: Trust, Focus, Fear (2011). He is very critical of anthropomorphism applied to technology because he believes it pushes our Darwinian buttons and creates false emotional ties with machines. Fine when robots are harmless but quite scary once they become more advanced.

In this project he wanted to ask how far we are prepared to go in engineering

In the first, about trust, a surgical robot sprays the patient with a hormone before an operation. The second, a factory robot, uses a chemical in male sweat known to calm women and help them focus to improve their productivity.

The third, a bomb-disposal robot, produces the smell of fear, known to improve concentration. The project is presented as a series of drawings that immediately communicate its fictional status. There is no attempt here to make us believe they are real but simply to invite us to make-believe.

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a better fit between humans and robots. He produced three visualizations of robots that use tissue-engineered glands for secreting hormones that affect human behavior in different ways. They are intentionally repulsive.

We already use fresh bread smells in supermarkets to encourage us to buy; how far are we prepared to go in our efforts to close the gap between people and technology, to create seamless interactions and symbiotic relationships with our machines? Is this a future we would like? And, if not, how can we prevent it?

But why stop with animals? Ai Hasegawa’s I Wanna Deliver a Shark (2012) started from the viewpoint of a woman in her thirties troubled by her impulse to give birth, yet for various reasons, not wanting to bring a child into the world or to become a mother. In Hasegawa’s scenario the woman decides to use her reproductive capability to help endangered species prolong their existence. After much research and consultation, Hasegawa discovered that although it is not possible to host a dolphin or tuna, her preferred species, it

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Will the ability to design with semi-living tissue change the way we think about other living creatures and animals? In Life Support (2008), Revital Cohen proposes using animals bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement.

The use of transgenic farm animals or retired working dogs as life support “devices” for renal and respiratory patients offers an alternative to inhumane medical technologies. With this project she asks, Could a transgenic animal function as a whole mechanism and not simply supply the parts? Assistance animals, from guide dogs to psychiatric service cats, unlike computerized machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Could a transgenic sheep matched to a patient’s blood be used as a living kidney dialysis machine? During the night the patient’s blood would flow through the sheep, cleansed by its kidneys, and impurities would be urinated out of the system by the sheep in the morning. The project could be described as a form of “speculative ethics”—a tool for exploring notions of future good and future bad.

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would be technically possible for a woman to host one of the smaller sharks and give birth to it. Although on the surface this project may seem absurd, it raises interesting questions about the reproductive power of a woman’s body and, aided by developments in biomedicine, the possibility of using this power for other purposes than simply reproducing our own, rapidly increasing species.

Probably the most philosophical of all these projects is Koby Barhad’s All That I Am: From a Speck of Hair to Elvis Presley’s Mouse Model (2012).

Barhad was interested in where exactly the sense of “self” lies, the “me” bit, when it comes to the design of living things. The project set out to design an Elvis Presley mouse. Although technically possible, the project had to remain speculative for ethical reasons. The first step was to acquire some genetic material containing Elvis’s DNA, achieved when Barhad managed to purchase one of Elvis’s hairs on eBay. The next step would be to have the DNA sequenced to identify behavioral traits such as sociability, athletic performance, and susceptibility to addiction and obesity. Barhad then identified a company that creates mouse models for scientific experiments and would in theory be able to produce a transgenic Elvis mouse using the genetic material he provided. Next, Barhad built a tower of custom designed environments based on ones used in laboratories to test traits in genetically modified mice. Each compartment simulated key biographical moments in Elvis’s life.

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By going through the process of designing an Elvis mouse based on current technologies, Barhad highlighted the absurdity of thinking of clones as anything more than a material reproduction of another living thing. The final object, the tower, is not only beautiful but it also satirizes the notion of isolating and translating behavioral traits into model environments.

There are no solutions in these projects or even answers, just questions, thoughts, ideas, and possibilities, all expressed through the language of design. They probe our beliefs and values, challenge our assumptions and encourage us to imagine how what we call nature could be different.

They help us see that the way things are now is just one possibility and not necessarily the best one. Each of these speculative projects occupies a space between reality and the impossible, a space of dreams, hopes, and fears. It is an important space, a place where the future can be debated and discussed before it happens so that, at least in theory, the most desirable futures can be aimed for and the least desirable avoided. Although it is not possible for designers to build actual products using biotechnology yet, we should not let that stop us from getting involved; we can still create functional fictions that

5. A Methodological playground: Fictional Worlds And Thought Experiments The universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of human minds and hands. Literary fiction is probably the most active experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise.

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help us explore the kind of biotechnological world we wish to live in.

Although design usually references sculpture and painting for material, formal and graphic inspiration, and more recently the social sciences for protocols on working with and studying people—if we are interested in shifting design’s focus from designing for how the world is now to designing for how things could be—we will need to turn to speculative culture and what Lubomír Doležel has called an “experimental laboratory of the worldconstructing enterprise.”

Speculating is based on imagination, the ability to literally imagine other worlds and alternatives. In Such Stuff as Dreams Keith oatley writes that “[i]magination gives us entry to abstraction, including mathematics. We gain the ability to conceive alternatives and hence to evaluate. We gain the ability to think of futures and outcomes, skills of planning. The ability to think ethically also becomes a possibility.”

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There are many kinds of imagination, dark imaginations, original imaginations, social, creative, mathematical. There are also professional imaginations—the scientific imagination, the technological imagination, the artistic imagination, the sociological imagination, and of course the one we are most interested in, the design imagination.

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Fictional Worlds As Lubomír Doležel writes in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, “our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible worlds.” once we move away from the present, from how things are now, we enter this realm of possible worlds. We find the idea of creating fictional worlds and putting them to work fascinating. The ones we are most interested in are not just for entertainment but for reflection, critique, provocation, and inspiration.

Rather than thinking about architecture, products, and the environment, we start with laws, ethics, political systems, social beliefs, values, fears, and hopes, and how these can be translated into material expressions, embodied

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in material culture, becoming little bits of another world that function as synecdoches.

Although rarely discussed in design beyond the construction of brand worlds and corporate future technology videos, there is a rich body of theoretical work in other fields dealing with the idea of fictional worlds. Probably the most abstract discussion is in philosophy where differences between the many shades of real, fictional, possible, actual, unreal, and imaginary are teased out. In social and political science the focus is on modeling reality; in literary theory it is on the semantics of the real and nonreal; in fine art, make-believe theory and fiction; in game design, literal world creation; and even in science there are many rich strands of discourse around fictionalism, useful fictions, model organisms, and multiverses. For us, the key distinction is between actual and fictional. Actual is part of the world we occupy whereas fictional is not.

Of all these areas of research, it is literature and fine art that offer the most promising sources of inspiration. They can push the notion of fiction to the extreme, going well beyond logical worlds and more pragmatic world building. Although technically a fictional world can be impossible and incomplete, whereas a possible world needs to be plausible, the limit for us is scientific possibility (physics, biology, etc.) everything else— ethics, psychology, behavior, economics, and so on—can be stretched to the breaking point. Fictional worlds are not just figments of a person’s imagination; they circulate and exist independently of us and can be called up, accessed, and explored when needed.

The artist Matthew Barney has created extraordinarily complex fictional worlds. His Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) consists of five feature-length films and hundreds if not thousands of individual artifacts, costumes, and props.

But although beautiful and exquisitely detailed they are also idiosyncratic to the extreme, an externalization of his own inner world that can only be aesthetically appreciated by others. It is art at its purest—noninstrumental, personal, subjective, and profoundly beautiful. Designers, too, have experimented with fictional worlds. Jaime Hayón’s The Fantasy Collection (2008) for Lladró, for instance, consists of porcelain souvenirs from a parallel world. In fashion, too, it is common to use advertising to suggest the imaginary world behind the brand, especially for perfumes, which often drift toward a form of contemporary fairy tale. But game design has to be the area where fictional world building is most developed. Whole worlds are designed, visualized, and linked. Some readers probably remember the first time they experienced an open world video game such as Grand Theft Auto (1997) and

Utopias/Dystopias Probably the purest form of fictional world is the utopia (and its opposite, the dystopia). The term was first used by Thomas More in 1516 as the title of his book Utopia. Lyman Tower Sargent suggests utopia has three faces: the literary utopia, utopian practice (such as intentional communities), and utopian social theory;8 for us, the best are a combination of all three and blur boundaries among art, practice, and social theory. In Envisioning Real Utopias Erik olin Wright defines utopias as “fantasies, morally inspired designs for a humane world of peace and harmony unconstrained by realistic considerations of human psychology and social feasibility.” There is a view that utopia is a dangerous concept that we should not even entertain because Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism are the fruits of utopian thinking. But these are examples of trying to make utopias real, trying to realize them, top down. The idea of utopia is far more interesting when used as a stimulus to keep idealism alive, not as something to try to make real but as a reminder of the possibility of alternatives, as somewhere to aim for rather than build.

For us, Zygmunt Bauman captures the value of utopian thinking perfectly: “To measure the life “as it is” by a life as it should be (that is, a life imagined to be different from the life known, and particularly a life that is better and would be preferable to the life known) is a defining, constitutive feature of humanity.”

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And then there are dystopias, cautionary tales warning us of what might lay ahead if we are not careful. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and george orwell’s 1984 (1949) are two of the twentieth century’s most powerful examples. Much has been written about utopias and dystopias in science fiction but there is a particularly interesting strand of sci-fi critique termed critical science fiction in which dystopias are understood in relation to critical theory and the philosophy of science. In this reading of science fiction, political and social possibilities are emphasized above all else, a role explored in depth by sci-fi theorist Darko Suvin who uses the term cognitive estrangement, a development of Bertolt Brecht’s A-effect, to describe how alternate realities can aid critique of our own world through contrast.

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how enjoyable it was to drive around and explore the world created by its designers rather than playing the game. Although extraordinarily detailed, game worlds tend to focus on the setting, geography, and environment more than ideology, and their purpose is primarily escape and entertainment.

There is, however, a growing number of artist- and activist-designed games that aim to challenge assumptions about game design, their social and cultural uses, and encourage social change. How this relates to design is something we will return to later in this chapter.

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Extrapolation: Neoliberal Speculative Fiction Many utopian and dystopian books borrow political systems such as feudalism, aristocracy, totalitarianism, or collectivism from history, but we find the most thought-provoking and entertaining stories extrapolate today’s free market capitalist system to an extreme, weaving the narrative around hypercommodified human relations, interactions, dreams, and aspirations.

Many of these stories originate in the 1950s. It’s as though, already in the post war years, writers were reflecting on where the promises of consumerism and capitalism were taking us; yes, they would create more wealth and a higher standard of living for a larger number of people than ever before but what will the impact be on our social relations, morality, and ethics?

Philip K . Dick is the master of this. In his novels everything i s marketized and monetized. They are set in twisted utopias where all are free to live as they please but they are trapped within the options available through the market. Or The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, which is set in a society where the highest form of existence is to be an advertising man and crimes against consumption are possible. This view of capitalism is not limited to 1950s and 1960s sci-fi, though, and can be found in contemporary writing. George Saunder’s Pastorialia (2000) is set in a fictional prehistoric theme park where workers are obliged to act like cave people during working hours and try to negotiate a friendship around the rules, contractual obligations, and expectations of visitors. It is sad and funny but recognizable. Other writers who embrace this exaggerated version of capitalism include Brett Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991), most of Douglas Coupland’s Writings, Gary Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story, 2010), Julian Barnes (England England, 1998), and Will Ferguson (Happiness, 2003). They expose at a human scale the limitations and failure of a free-market capitalist utopia, how, even if we achieve it, it is humanely reduced. Although not a strong novel by any means, Ben Elton’s Blind Faith (2007) picks up current trends for dumbing culture down, extraopolation into a near future when inclusiveness, political correctness, public shaming, vulgarity, and conformism are the norm, a world where tabloid values and commercial TV formats shape everyday behavior and interactions.

It can be found in film, too: Idiocracy (2006) and WALL-E (2008) are both set in worlds suffering from social decay and cultural dumbing down. The most recent example is Black Mirror (2012), a satirical miniseries for Chanel Four television in the United Kingdom. It fast-forwards to the point at which the dreams behind technology turn into nightmares with extremely unpleasant human consequences.

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But what does this mean for design? on a visual level, in cinema, a style has developed that is riddled with visual clichés—ubiquitous adverts, corporate logos on every surface, floating interfaces, dense information displays, brands, microfinancial transactions, and so on. Corporate parody and pastiche have become the norm, and although Black Mirror has moved well beyond this, it is the exception. Maybe this is one of the limitations of cinema; it can deliver a very powerful story and immersive experience but requires a degree of passivity in the viewer reinforced by easily recognized and understood visual cues, something we will return to in chapter 6. Literature makes us work so much harder because readers need to construct everything about the fictional world in their imagination. As designers, maybe we are somewhere in between; we provide some visual clues but the viewer still has to imagine the world the designs belong to and its politics, social relations, and ideology.

Ideas As Stories In these examples, it is the backdrop that interests us, not the narrative; the values of the society the story takes place in rather than the plot and characters. For us, ideas are everything but can ideas ever be the story?

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In the introduction to Red Plenty (2010) Francis Spufford writes, “This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved. The idea is the hero.

It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindered by others.” Red Plenty explores what would have happened if Soviet communism had succeeded and how a planned economy might have worked. It is a piece of speculative economics exploring an alternative economic model to our own, a planned economy where everything is centrally controlled, and it unapologetically focuses on ideas. This approach is similar to design writing experiments such as The World, Who Wants it? by architect Ben Nicholson and The Post-spectacular Economy by design critic Justin Mcguirk. Both are stories of ideas exploring the consequences for design of major global, political, and economic changes—Nicholson’s in a dramatic and satirical way and Mcguirk through a more measured approach beginning with real events that morph before our eyes into a not so far-fetched near future. But these are still literary and although both contain many imaginative proposals on a systemic level, they do not explore how these shifts would manifest themselves in the detail of everyday life. We are interested in working the other way around—starting with designs that the viewer can use to imagine the kind of society that would have produced

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them, its values, beliefs, and ideologies.

In After Man—A Zoology of the Future (1981) Dougal Dixon explores a world without people focusing exclusively on biology, meteorology, and environmental sciences. It is an excellent if slightly didactic example of a speculative world based on fact and well-understood evolutionary mechanisms and processes expressed through concrete designs, in this case, animals.

Fifty-million years into the future, the world is divided into six regions: tundra and the polar, coniferous forests, temperate woodlands and grasslands, tropical forests, tropical grasslands, and deserts. Dixon goes into impressive detail about the climate, distribution, and extent of different vegetation and fauna as he sketches out a posthuman landscape on which new kinds of speculative life forms evolve. Each aspect of the new animal kingdom is traced back to specific characteristics that encourage and support the development of new animal types in a human-free world. Each animal relates to ones we are familiar with, but because of an absence of humans, evolve in slightly different ways. A flightless bat whose wings have evolved into legs still uses echolocation to find its prey but now, because an increase in size and power, it stuns its victims. The book is a wonderful example of imaginative speculation grounded in systemic thinking using little more than pen-andink illustrations. It could so easily have been a facile fantasy thrilling us with the weirdness of each individual creature, but by tempering his speculations, Dixon guides us toward the system itself and the interconnectedness of climate, plant, and animal.

As well as highly regarded works of literature, Margaret Atwood’s novels are stories of ideas. Oryx and Crake sets out a postapocalyptic world populated by transgenic animals and beings developed by and for a society comfortable with the commercial exploitation of life: pigoons bred to grow spare human organs, for instance. Oryx and Crake is very close to how a speculative design project might be constructed. All her inventions are based on actual research that she then extrapolates into imaginary but not too far-fetched commercial products. The world she creates serves as a cautionary tale based on the fusion of biotechnology and a free-market system driven by human desire and novelty, where only human needs count. Unlike many sci-fi writers, Atwood is far more interested in the social, cultural, and ethical implications of science and technology than the technology itself. She resists the label of sci-fi preferring to describe her work as speculative literature. For us, she is the gold standard for speculative work—based on real science; focused on social, cultural, ethical, and political implications; interested in using

Whereas Oryx and Crake creates plausibility through an extrapolation of current scientific research, one of our favorite books, Will Self’s The Book of Dave uses a far more idiosyncratic mechanism for establishing a link with today’s world. It is the story of a future society built around a book written hundreds of years earlier by an alcoholic, bigoted, and crazed London taxi driver going through a messy divorce. Buried in his ex-wife’s back garden in Hampstead, he hopes his estranged son will discover the book one day.

He doesn’t, and it is dug up hundreds of years later after a great flood has wiped out civilization as we know it. Basing the logic underlying a future community’s social relations on a dysfunctional taxi driver’s prejudices shows how random our customs can be and how brutality and social injustice can be shaped by strange, fictional narratives. That these lead to so much sadness and misery is tragic, and this book captures the ridiculousness of political and religious dogma. Besides the motos, a kind of genetically modified animal that seems to be a cross between a cow and a pig that speaks in a disturbing childlike manner, most of the inventions are customs, protocols, and even language. Children spend part of each week living with each parent on opposite sides of the street, young women are called au pairs, days are divided into tariffs, souls are fares, priests are drivers, and so on. The Book of Dave is a dense, inventive, highly original, complex, and layered portrayal of a fictional world. But is it possible to apply this to design? We think it is.

Unlike Oryx and Crake, it is not Self’s inventions that inspire but his method and how rich and thought-provoking fictional worlds can be developed from idiosyncratic starting points.

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China Miéville’s The City and the City is based on poetic and contemporary ideas about artificial borders. Two cities, Beszel and Ul qoma coexist in one geographical zone, in one city. A crime is committed that links the two cities so the protagonist, inspector Tyador Borlú, must work across borders to solve it, something that’s usually avoided at all costs because citizens of each city no longer see or acknowledge each other even while using the same streets and sometimes the same buildings. To see the other city or one of its inhabitants is a “breach,” the most serious of all crimes imaginable. It is a wonderful setting that makes not only for a fascinating detective story but also prompts all sorts of ideas about nationality, statehood, identity, and ideological conditioning to surface in the reader’s imagination. As geoff Manaugh points out in an interview with the author, it is essentially poli-sci fiction. Everything in

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stories to aid reflection; yet without sacrificing the quality of storytelling or literary aspects of her work. Similar to Dixon’s After Man the book is full of imaginative and strange designs but based on biotechnology. Each design highlights issues as well as entertaining and moving the story along.

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this book is familiar; it is the reconceptualization of a simple and familiar technical idea, the border, that makes it relevant to design, again, more for its method than its content.

As literary fictional worlds are built from words there are some rather special possibilities that can be explored by pushing language’s relationship to logic to the limit, a bit like the literary equivalent of an Escher drawing. A recent example of this is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010)

by Charles Yu. Here, fictional worlds provide opportunities to play with the very idea of fiction itself. Yu’s world is a fusion of game design, digital media, VFX, and augmented reality. Set in Minor Universe 31, a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, the protagonist Yu is a time travel technician living in TM-31, his time machine. His job is to rescue and prevent people from falling victim to various time travel paradoxes. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe feels like conceptual science fiction: the story unfolds through constant interactions, collisions, and fusions among real reality, imagined reality, simulated reality, remembered reality, and fictional reality.

Can design embrace this level of invention or are we limited to more concrete ways of making fictional worlds? one strength for design is that its medium exists in the here and now. The materiality of design proposals, if expressed through physical props, brings the story closer to our own world away from the worlds of fictional characters. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe makes us wonder about speculative design’s complex relationship to reality and the need to celebrate and enjoy its unreality.

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Thought Experiments One way this might be possible is to treat design speculations not as narratives or coherent “worlds” but as thought experiments—constructions, crafted from ideas expressed through design—that help us think about difficult issues.

Thought experiments are probably closer to conceptual art than they are to conventional design. But it is too easy to focus only on the experiment part; it is the thought bit that makes them interesting and inspirational for us.

They allow us to step outside reality for a moment to try something out. This freedom is very important. Thought experiments are usually done in fields where it is possible to precisely define limits and rules, such as mathematics, science (particularly physics), and philosophy (especially ethics) to test ideas, refute theories, challenge limits, or explore possible implications. They make full use of the imagination and are often beautiful designs in themselves.

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Writers often base short stories on thought experiments, fusing narrative and concept to produce functional fictions designed to get people thinking about something specific in an enjoyable way. Edwin Abbott’s Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) is a good example. It explores interactions between worlds with different dimensions, 1D, 2D, 3D. . . . When a sphere passes perpendicularly through 2D land, none of its inhabitants understand how the bit they see, a disc, can expand and contract in the way it does.

Reductio Ad Absurdum one of our favorite forms of thought experiment uses reductio ad absurdum, a type of logical argument in which one assumes a claim for the sake of argument and derives an absurd or ridiculous outcome by taking it to its extreme, concluding that the original claim must have been wrong because it led to such an absurd result. It lends itself well to humor, too. Thomas Thwaites’s The Toaster Project (2009) is a good example.

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In our desire and attempt to simplify and optimize the way we live, we have constructed huge complex systems to just to simplify that moment.

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Thwaites set out to build a toaster from scratch. on taking apart one of the cheapest ones he could find he was surprised to discover that it was made up of 404 different parts, so he decided to focus on five materials: copper, iron, nickel, mica, and plastic. over the next nine months he visited mines, extracted iron from ore, tracked down mica in Scotland, and eventually made an almost working toaster. Thwaites knew from the start it was an impossible task but used the quest, which was recorded on video and later published as a book, to highlight how dependent we have become on technology and how far removed we are from the processes and systems behind most of the technologies and devices our everyday lives depend on.

The project also highlighted what goes into making even a simple product like a toaster, or maybe, the absurdity of what has to be done to lightly burn a piece of bread each morning. At one point he researches what he would need to smelt iron ore and discovered the last point in history when it was possible for one person to do so was in the fifteenth century. After several failed attempts at replicating the set-up using modern devices such as hairdryers and leaf blowers instead of bellows, Thwaites discovered a patent that used microwaves to smelt iron ore and, using his mother’s microwave and some modifications, he managed to extract a small amount of iron. Sometimes people are disappointed to learn he used modern technologies but the project was never about going back to basics; it was always about highlighting just how complex and difficult the processes behind even the most simple of everyday conveniences, like toasting a piece of bread, have become.

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Counterfactuals Another well-established form of thought experiment is the counterfactual.

A historical fact is changed to see what might have happened, if.... It is sometimes used in history to understand the importance of key events and their influence on how the world turned out. A famous example is how the world might have been if Hitler had won World War II, a theme explored in many works of fiction. For writers, it is an interesting way of creating an alternative present because the reader can understand how that alternate world might have come about. For design it can provide a fresh alternative to future-based thinking by presenting parallel worlds as thought experiments rather than predictions. But it can be slightly cumbersome because of the need to set up the story before people can engage with the project. James Chambers’s Attenborough Design Group (2010) is a simple example of how this approach might translate into a design project.

Chambers asks, What if David Attenborough had become an industrial designer rather than a wildlife filmmaker, who, still fond of nature, established the Attenborough Design group to explore how animal behavior could be used to equip technology products with survival instincts: a gesundheit radio, which sneezes periodically to expel potentially damaging dust, and Floppy Legs, a portable floppy disc drive that stands up if it detects liquid nearby?

The project opens new perspectives on sustainability by suggesting that if products were equipped with sensors they could dodge danger and survive longer before ending up in a landfill. They would also have the added benefit of creating strong emotional ties with their owners because of carefully designed animal-like behaviors that encourage people to project emotions onto them. By going back in time, Chambers was able to shift attention from visual aesthetics to designing animal-inspired behaviors for technology products.

A more elaborate example of this approach is Sascha Pohflepp’s The Golden Institute (2009). Pohflepp revisited a moment in history when a very different America could have developed: “The golden Institute for Energy in Colorado was the premier research and development facility for energy technologies in an alternate reality where Jimmy Carter had defeated Ronald Reagan in the US election of 1981. Equipped with virtually unlimited funding to make the United States the most energy-rich nation on the planet, its scientific and technical advancements were rapid and often groundbreaking.” He then developed a number of large-scale project proposals including turning Nevada into a weather experimentation zone causing a gold rush of lightning energy harvesters and making modifications to freeways so they became energy-generating power plants. The project was presented through a variety

What-Ifs Related to counterfactuals but more forward looking are what-if scenarios.

They allow the author to strip narrative and plot right down to basics in order to explore an idea. What-ifs were often used in a very particular form of English science fiction common in 1950s (e.g., John Christopher, Fred Hoyle, and John Wyndham). John Wyndham, for instance, wrote several novels he termed logical fantasy around dramatic what-ifs based on invasions by different kinds of aliens, not just the outer space variety (e.g., The Kraken Wakes, The Midwhich Cuckoos, and The Day of the Triffids). one of the qualities we like about his work is that he explores what might happen in a society in extreme circumstances, a sort of literary rehearsal involving individuals, elites, the government, media, and army. They unpick where, why, and how things could break down or go wrong. They are large-scale thought experiments about how British society might react to extreme disasters and in what ways lives may change as a consequence. They tend to focus on one major event, such as the escape from a laboratory of genetically modified killer plants, then follow through on fairly straightforward implications. Their lack of apocalyptic drama and focus on middle-class British characters has led to the genre being termed cozy catastrophes by British author Brian Aldiss.

But we are designers not writers. We want to build things that create similar levels of reflection and pleasure but use the language of design. How can we do this? What happens when speculations move from behind the screen or from the pages of a book to coexist in the same space as the viewer?

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What-ifs work well in cinema, too, as a simple way of excusing oneself from reality in order to entertain an unnatural idea. Dog Tooth (2009) by Yorgos Lanthimos sets up an intriguing but simple premise from which all sorts of surprising and disturbing interactions between family members and the outside world take place. Two children are brought up to believe a number of myths created by their parents that shape their understanding of social relations, the outside world, and even language: the word for sea is chair, planes flying overhead are toys, cats are the most ferocious animal in the world, and the way to protect yourself against a cat is to drop to all fours and begin barking, and so on. Inhabiting this alternative linguistic world-model created by their parents, the children’s interactions between themselves and with outsiders and the world slowly spiral into chaos.

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of media, including a corporate video presentation explaining The golden Institute’s history, structure and mission, a model of its Hq, and drawings and images of design proposals.

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SlaveCity—Cradle to Cradle (2005–) by Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) is a very nice example of what-if thinking applied to design, even though Van Lieshout is an artist. AVL explores what size city could be supported if we used humans as slaves to produce energy and even as a source of energy themselves or as raw material. The project addresses how such a process would be designed, what equipment would be needed, how much space, the kind of buildings, machinery, and so on. AVL also explores, in detail, how the city would work economically and its optimal scale. The viewer never sees the whole system, just drawings of various scenes, architectural models, and prototype machinery. As outlandish as it is, SlaveCity is still based on logic and is closer to the logical fantasy of John Wyndham and other writers than Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. The challenge for us is how to go beyond this and embrace the full aesthetic potential of working with unreality.

Fictioneers In Denial The problem with speculation, for designers at least, is that it is fictional, which is still seen as a bad thing. The idea that something is not “real,” when real means it is available in shops, is not good. Yet designers participate in the generation and maintenance of all sorts of fictions, from feature-heavy electronic devices meeting the imaginary needs of imaginary users, to the creation of fantasy brand worlds referenced through products, their content, and their use. Designers today are expert fictioneers in denial. Although there have always been design speculations (e.g., car shows, future visions, haute couture fashions shows), design has become so absorbed in industry, so familiar with the dreams of industry, that it is almost impossible to dream its own dreams, let alone social ones. We are interested in liberating this story making (not storytelling) potential, this dream- materializing ability, from purely commercial applications and redirecting it toward more social ends that address the citizen rather than the consumer or perhaps both at the same time.

For us, the purpose of speculation is to “unsettle the present rather than predict the future.” But to fully exploit this potential, design needs to decouple itself from industry, develop its social imagination more fully, embrace speculative culture, and then, maybe, as MoMA curator Paola Antonelli suggests, we might see the beginnings of a theoretical form of design dedicated to thinking, reflecting, inspiring, and providing new perspectives on some of the challenges facing us.

As the author Milan Kundera writes: “A novel examines not reality, but

We think designers should strive for this, too.

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existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility.”

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