Audrey, thank you so much for setting us up with a sub-optimal but functional situation, here.
I really only found out about the work that you are doing today, in our earlier conversation. I find it incredibly inspiring.
I think that, for me, what it really left is the sense that we need to have both shared architectures that are about the use of the Internet to empower people in political process. That means that there’s something that is centralized, and there’s something that’s decentralized, both.
You need infrastructures that are centralized in the sense, for example, that anybody can type a URL on their computer and get to the same place. That requires a degree of centralization.
The idea that the Internet is a kind of amorphous gas has not been true for a very long time. It isn’t, in fact, a way that the Internet can work scalably. At the same time, you have to have the agency to be able to participate as an individual.
If we really start to think about what I think the promise and the concern is about the day after tomorrow, a lot of it, in my mind, has to do with striking the balance between on the one hand, being able to work effectively collectively.
Even when we have profound differences of values, even when we don’t all agree on the principles and things like the kind of mediative process that you’re suggesting, I think are very powerful tools for doing that.
Yet, at the same time that we have this mediative and collective super-organism, if you like, I think it’s also vitally important that we preserve our own individuality and our own agency and our own power to be ourselves and to be alone. Without being able to be both together and alone, I think we sacrifice one of the two halves of what it means to be human.
I know that this was set up, in theory, as some kind of debate, but I think we’re in much more violent agreement than not, on all of these points.
I don’t know honestly how much value there is in going through the slides. I think probably the best thing that I can do is to really move to the parts of this that...Of course, the most visual parts will also be the most compromised by doing it this way, but I think it’s also the most interesting thing that’s in the slides.
This past summer has been really the season of machine intelligence doing art. I don’t know how many of you are aware of these developments. Those of you who spend a lot of time on tech sites on the Internet have probably seen these things. Those who don’t may not have seen.
But it’s been a very, very interesting moment, because we think about creativity and about imagination and so on as being really core human properties that are very much not connected with computers. Computers can be tools, perhaps, but the idea of a computer, for example, being creative or having imagination seems crazy.
But as a computational neuroscientist, which is my original field, somebody who is not only interested in building things but in studying brains and understanding how brains work, we’re in Paris. You’re the people who wrote "L’Homme Machine" and books like this that really kicked off the enlightenment in many ways and that posit the idea that we are actually mechanisms.
We’re not some kind of abstract spirit. Our brains work according to physical processes. In some sense, of course everything that we do with our brains can be done with other physical substrates. To not believe that is to be a dualist. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t something remarkable and magical about being human and about having a mind.
But it does mean that I don’t think that we are going to have a monopoly on any of those qualities for the indefinite future. As we understand more and as we build more, we will find that all of those parts of what it means to be human are ultimately things that we can construct and create, as well as be.