If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in crypto, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Though Stephenson insists he’s more often wrong than right, his technical sharpness has even led to a half-joking suggestion that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of bitcoin. His latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, involves a more literal sort of brain-picking, exploring what might happen when digitized brains can find a second existence in a virtual afterlife.
So what’s the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, whether we’re in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.
TYLER COWEN: I am here today with Neal Stephenson, who is arguably the world’s greatest author of speculative fiction and science fiction. Welcome, Neal.
NEAL STEPHENSON: It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me on your program.
COWEN: Let me start with some general questions about tech. We will get to your new book.
How will physical surveillance evolve? There’s facial surveillance, gait surveillance in China that’s coming to many airports. What’s your vision for this?
STEPHENSON: When you say physical surveillance, you just mean —
COWEN: They record your face, they know who you are, they track your movements.
STEPHENSON: Actually recording you while you’re wandering around somewhere, as opposed to tapping your phone, that kind of thing.
COWEN: And if you jaywalk, they’ll fine your bank account, and you’ll get a text message two minutes later.
STEPHENSON: Right. Well, I think it’s just going to be based on what people are willing to tolerate and put up with. There’s already something of a backlash going on over the use of facial recognition in some cities in this country. I think people just have to be diligent and be aware of what’s happening in that area and push back against it.
COWEN: Is there a positive scenario for its spread?
STEPHENSON: For it spreading?
COWEN: Right. Is it possible it will make China a more cooperative place, a more orderly place, and in the longer run, they’ll be freer? Or is that just not in the cards?
STEPHENSON: I’m not sure if cooperative, orderly, and freer are compatible concepts, right? Cooperative and orderly, definitely. People who are in internment camps are famously cooperative and orderly, but . . .
Freedom is a funny word. It’s a hard thing to talk about because to a degree, if this kind of thing cuts down, let’s say, on random crime, then it’s going to make people effectively freer. Especially if you’re a woman or someone who is vulnerable to being the victim of random crime, and some kind of surveillance system renders that less likely to happen, then, effectively, you’ve been granted a freedom that you didn’t have before.
But it’s not the kind of statutory freedom that we tend to talk about when we’re talking about politics and that kind of thing.
COWEN: Other than satellites, which are already quite proven, what do you think is the most plausible economic value to space?
STEPHENSON: It’s tough making a really solid economic argument for space. There’s a new book out by Daniel Suarez called Delta-V, in which he’s advancing a particular argument, which is a pretty abstract idea based on how debt works and what you have to do in order to keep an economy afloat. But I think it’s a thing that people need to do because they want to do it, as opposed to because there’s a sound business argument for it.
COWEN: Do you think, socially, we’re less willing or able to do it psychologically than, say, in the 1960s?
STEPHENSON: Well, the ’60s was funny because it was a Cold War propaganda effort on both sides. The whole story of how that came about is a really wild story that begins with World War II, when Hitler wants to bomb London. But it’s too far away, so he has to build big rockets to do it with. So rockets advance way beyond where they would have advanced had he not done that.
Then we grab the technology, and suddenly we need it to drop H bombs on the other side of the world. So again, trillions of dollars of money go into it, and then it becomes so dangerous that we can’t actually use it for that. Instead, we use that rocket technology to compete in the propaganda sphere. I once knew a grizzled old veteran of that ’60s space program who said that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph.
So that’s how that all happened, and it happened way earlier than any kind of rational economic argument could be made for it. I still think it’s the case that, if we’re going to do things in space, it’s more for psychological reasons than it is for money reasons.
COWEN: If we had a Mars colony, how politically free do you think it would be? Or would it just be like perpetual martial law? Like living on a nuclear submarine?
STEPHENSON: I think it would be a lot like living on a nuclear submarine because you can’t — being in space is almost like being in an intensive care unit in a hospital, in the sense that you’re completely dependent on a whole bunch of machines working in order to keep you alive. A lot of what we associate with freedom, with personal freedom, becomes too dangerous to contemplate in that kind of environment.
COWEN: Is there any Heinlein-esque-like scenario — Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where there’s a rebellion? People break free from the constraints of planet Earth. They chart their own institutions. It becomes like the settlements in the New World were.
STEPHENSON: Well, the settlements in the New World, I don’t think are a very good analogy because there it was possible — if you’re a white person in the New World and you have some basic skills, you can go anywhere you want.
An unheralded part of what happened there is that, when those people got into trouble, a lot of times, they were helped out by the indigenous peoples who were already there and who knew how to do stuff. None of those things are true in a space colony kind of environment. You don’t have indigenous people who know how to get food and how to get shelter. You don’t have that ability to just freely pick up stakes and move about.
On social media
COWEN: You saw some of the downsides of social media earlier than most people did in Seveneves. It’s also in your new book, Fall. What’s the worst-case scenario for how social media evolved? And what’s the institutional failure? Why do many people think they’re screwing things up?
STEPHENSON: I think we’re actually living through the worst-case scenario right now, so look about you, and that’s what we’ve got. Our civil institutions were founded upon an assumption that people would be able to agree on what reality is, agree on facts, and that they would then make rational, good-faith decisions based on that. They might disagree as to how to interpret those facts or what their political philosophy was, but it was all founded on a shared understanding of reality.
And that’s now been dissolved out from under us, and we don’t have a mechanism to address that problem.
COWEN: But what’s the fundamental problem there? Is it that decentralized communications media intrinsically fail because there are too many voices? Is there something about the particular structure of social media now?
STEPHENSON: The problem seems to be the fact that it’s algorithmically driven, and that there are not humans in the loop making decisions, making editorial, sort of curatorial decisions about what is going to be disseminated on those networks.
As such, it’s very easy for people who are acting in bad faith to game that system and produce whatever kind of depiction of reality best suits them. Sometimes that may be something that drives people in a particular direction politically, but there’s also just a completely nihilistic, let-it-all-burn kind of approach that some of these actors are taking, which is just to destroy people’s faith in any kind of information and create a kind of gridlock in which nobody can agree on anything.
COWEN: If we go back to the world of 2006, where there’s Google Reader, there’s plenty of blogs, RSS is significant, algorithms are much, much less important — does that work well in your view? Or is the problem more deeply rooted than that?
STEPHENSON: Well, I think, at the end of the day, people are not going to agree on facts unless there’s a reason for them to do so. I’ve been talking about a really interesting book called A Culture of Fact by Barbara Shapiro, which is a sort of academic-style book that discusses how the idea of facts entered our minds in the first place because we didn’t always have it. Procedures were developed that would enable people to agree on what was factual, and that had a huge impact on culture and on the economy and everything else.
And now that’s, as I said, going away, and the only way to bring it back is, first, to have a situation where people need and want to agree on facts.
On what the future will look like
COWEN: Your idea of this smart book, which is in Diamond Age — do you think that will ever happen? There will be a primer that people use, and it’s online, and it will educate them and teach them how to be more disciplined?
STEPHENSON: A lot of different people have taken inspiration from The Diamond Age and worked on various aspects of the problem. It’s always interesting to talk to them because it’s sort of a classic “six blind men and the elephant” thing, where I’ll hear from someone who says, “Oh, I’m working on something inspired by The Diamond Age.” And I ask them what that means to them, and it’s always a little different.
Sometimes it’s how do we physically build something that could do what that book does? Sometimes it’s how do we organize knowledge, how do we set up curricula that are adaptable to the needs of a particular reader? It’s really not just one technology. It’s a whole basket of different hardware and software technologies, and people are definitely coming at that from various angles right now.
COWEN: What do you think stops it from happening? We don’t have the tech? Or just users aren’t interested, or what? What’s the constraint?
STEPHENSON: It’s just kind of distributed among a large number of different projects. There’s not any one big, centralized, this-is-it version of the thing, which isn’t necessarily bad. That’s a great way for people to spawn a lot of ideas and do a lot of decentralized work on a project, but nothing is pulling it together into the primer.
COWEN: In your early novels, like Snow Crash, Diamond Age, there’s a sense that states often have become quite weak. Do you think in reality, the state has ended up staying more powerful, for reasons which are surprising? Or you foresaw that?
STEPHENSON: I certainly didn’t foresee anything. In Snow Crash, in Diamond Age, I’m kind of riffing on a way of thinking that I saw quite a bit among basically libertarian-minded techies during the ’80s and the ’90s that was all about getting rid of the nation-state and reducing the power of nation-states.
If that was happening, I think it got flipped in the other direction, basically, by 9/11. When something like that happens, it immediately creates a desire in a lot of people’s minds to return to a more centralized, authoritarian nation-state arrangement, and that’s the trajectory that we’ve been on ever since.
So what’s the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, whether we’re in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.TYLER COWEN: I am here today with Neal Stephenson, who is arguably the world’s greatest author of speculative fiction and science fiction. Welcome, Neal.
NEAL STEPHENSON: It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me on your program.
COWEN: Let me start with some general questions about tech. We will get to your new book.
How will physical surveillance evolve? There’s facial surveillance, gait surveillance in China that’s coming to many airports. What’s your vision for this?
STEPHENSON: When you say physical surveillance, you just mean —
COWEN: They record your face, they know who you are, they track your movements.
STEPHENSON: Actually recording you while you’re wandering around somewhere, as opposed to tapping your phone, that kind of thing.
COWEN: And if you jaywalk, they’ll fine your bank account, and you’ll get a text message two minutes later.
STEPHENSON: Right. Well, I think it’s just going to be based on what people are willing to tolerate and put up with. There’s already something of a backlash going on over the use of facial recognition in some cities in this country. I think people just have to be diligent and be aware of what’s happening in that area and push back against it.
COWEN: Is there a positive scenario for its spread?
STEPHENSON: For it spreading?
COWEN: Right. Is it possible it will make China a more cooperative place, a more orderly place, and in the longer run, they’ll be freer? Or is that just not in the cards?
STEPHENSON: I’m not sure if cooperative, orderly, and freer are compatible concepts, right? Cooperative and orderly, definitely. People who are in internment camps are famously cooperative and orderly, but . . .
Freedom is a funny word. It’s a hard thing to talk about because to a degree, if this kind of thing cuts down, let’s say, on random crime, then it’s going to make people effectively freer. Especially if you’re a woman or someone who is vulnerable to being the victim of random crime, and some kind of surveillance system renders that less likely to happen, then, effectively, you’ve been granted a freedom that you didn’t have before.
But it’s not the kind of statutory freedom that we tend to talk about when we’re talking about politics and that kind of thing.
COWEN: Other than satellites, which are already quite proven, what do you think is the most plausible economic value to space?
STEPHENSON: It’s tough making a really solid economic argument for space. There’s a new book out by Daniel Suarez called Delta-V, in which he’s advancing a particular argument, which is a pretty abstract idea based on how debt works and what you have to do in order to keep an economy afloat. But I think it’s a thing that people need to do because they want to do it, as opposed to because there’s a sound business argument for it.
COWEN: Do you think, socially, we’re less willing or able to do it psychologically than, say, in the 1960s?
STEPHENSON: Well, the ’60s was funny because it was a Cold War propaganda effort on both sides. The whole story of how that came about is a really wild story that begins with World War II, when Hitler wants to bomb London. But it’s too far away, so he has to build big rockets to do it with. So rockets advance way beyond where they would have advanced had he not done that.
Then we grab the technology, and suddenly we need it to drop H bombs on the other side of the world. So again, trillions of dollars of money go into it, and then it becomes so dangerous that we can’t actually use it for that. Instead, we use that rocket technology to compete in the propaganda sphere. I once knew a grizzled old veteran of that ’60s space program who said that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph.
So that’s how that all happened, and it happened way earlier than any kind of rational economic argument could be made for it. I still think it’s the case that, if we’re going to do things in space, it’s more for psychological reasons than it is for money reasons.
COWEN: If we had a Mars colony, how politically free do you think it would be? Or would it just be like perpetual martial law? Like living on a nuclear submarine?
STEPHENSON: I think it would be a lot like living on a nuclear submarine because you can’t — being in space is almost like being in an intensive care unit in a hospital, in the sense that you’re completely dependent on a whole bunch of machines working in order to keep you alive. A lot of what we associate with freedom, with personal freedom, becomes too dangerous to contemplate in that kind of environment.
COWEN: Is there any Heinlein-esque-like scenario — Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where there’s a rebellion? People break free from the constraints of planet Earth. They chart their own institutions. It becomes like the settlements in the New World were.
STEPHENSON: Well, the settlements in the New World, I don’t think are a very good analogy because there it was possible — if you’re a white person in the New World and you have some basic skills, you can go anywhere you want.
An unheralded part of what happened there is that, when those people got into trouble, a lot of times, they were helped out by the indigenous peoples who were already there and who knew how to do stuff. None of those things are true in a space colony kind of environment. You don’t have indigenous people who know how to get food and how to get shelter. You don’t have that ability to just freely pick up stakes and move about.
On social media
COWEN: You saw some of the downsides of social media earlier than most people did in Seveneves. It’s also in your new book, Fall. What’s the worst-case scenario for how social media evolved? And what’s the institutional failure? Why do many people think they’re screwing things up?
STEPHENSON: I think we’re actually living through the worst-case scenario right now, so look about you, and that’s what we’ve got. Our civil institutions were founded upon an assumption that people would be able to agree on what reality is, agree on facts, and that they would then make rational, good-faith decisions based on that. They might disagree as to how to interpret those facts or what their political philosophy was, but it was all founded on a shared understanding of reality.
And that’s now been dissolved out from under us, and we don’t have a mechanism to address that problem.
COWEN: But what’s the fundamental problem there? Is it that decentralized communications media intrinsically fail because there are too many voices? Is there something about the particular structure of social media now?
STEPHENSON: The problem seems to be the fact that it’s algorithmically driven, and that there are not humans in the loop making decisions, making editorial, sort of curatorial decisions about what is going to be disseminated on those networks.
As such, it’s very easy for people who are acting in bad faith to game that system and produce whatever kind of depiction of reality best suits them. Sometimes that may be something that drives people in a particular direction politically, but there’s also just a completely nihilistic, let-it-all-burn kind of approach that some of these actors are taking, which is just to destroy people’s faith in any kind of information and create a kind of gridlock in which nobody can agree on anything.
COWEN: If we go back to the world of 2006, where there’s Google Reader, there’s plenty of blogs, RSS is significant, algorithms are much, much less important — does that work well in your view? Or is the problem more deeply rooted than that?
STEPHENSON: Well, I think, at the end of the day, people are not going to agree on facts unless there’s a reason for them to do so. I’ve been talking about a really interesting book called A Culture of Fact by Barbara Shapiro, which is a sort of academic-style book that discusses how the idea of facts entered our minds in the first place because we didn’t always have it. Procedures were developed that would enable people to agree on what was factual, and that had a huge impact on culture and on the economy and everything else.
And now that’s, as I said, going away, and the only way to bring it back is, first, to have a situation where people need and want to agree on facts.
On what the future will look like
COWEN: Your idea of this smart book, which is in Diamond Age — do you think that will ever happen? There will be a primer that people use, and it’s online, and it will educate them and teach them how to be more disciplined?
STEPHENSON: A lot of different people have taken inspiration from The Diamond Age and worked on various aspects of the problem. It’s always interesting to talk to them because it’s sort of a classic “six blind men and the elephant” thing, where I’ll hear from someone who says, “Oh, I’m working on something inspired by The Diamond Age.” And I ask them what that means to them, and it’s always a little different.
Sometimes it’s how do we physically build something that could do what that book does? Sometimes it’s how do we organize knowledge, how do we set up curricula that are adaptable to the needs of a particular reader? It’s really not just one technology. It’s a whole basket of different hardware and software technologies, and people are definitely coming at that from various angles right now.
COWEN: What do you think stops it from happening? We don’t have the tech? Or just users aren’t interested, or what? What’s the constraint?
STEPHENSON: It’s just kind of distributed among a large number of different projects. There’s not any one big, centralized, this-is-it version of the thing, which isn’t necessarily bad. That’s a great way for people to spawn a lot of ideas and do a lot of decentralized work on a project, but nothing is pulling it together into the primer.
COWEN: In your early novels, like Snow Crash, Diamond Age, there’s a sense that states often have become quite weak. Do you think in reality, the state has ended up staying more powerful, for reasons which are surprising? Or you foresaw that?
STEPHENSON: I certainly didn’t foresee anything. In Snow Crash, in Diamond Age, I’m kind of riffing on a way of thinking that I saw quite a bit among basically libertarian-minded techies during the ’80s and the ’90s that was all about getting rid of the nation-state and reducing the power of nation-states.
If that was happening, I think it got flipped in the other direction, basically, by 9/11. When something like that happens, it immediately creates a desire in a lot of people’s minds to return to a more centralized, authoritarian nation-state arrangement, and that’s the trajectory that we’ve been on ever since.
by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Utility | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. I've been waiting for this interview since it was first announced.]
[ed. I've been waiting for this interview since it was first announced.]
