Luke Robert Mason: You’re lis­ten­ing to the Futures Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.

On this episode, I speak to aca­d­e­m­ic and law lec­tur­er, John Dahaner.

When I said that humans are obso­lesc­ing, that does­n’t mean that they’re going to become extinct or irrel­e­vant to the future. It just means that their activ­i­ties will be less significant.
John Danaher, excerpt from interview.

John shared his insights into the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a post work econ­o­my, the impacts of increas­ing automa­tion, and how our future might be deter­mined by either becom­ing a cyborg, or retreat­ing into the virtual.

This episode was record­ed on loca­tion in London, England, before John’s book launch event at London Futurists.

Mason: You open the book with this phrase—this state­ment, real­ly, ​“Human obso­les­cence is immi­nent.” What did you mean by that?

John Danaher: Yeah, I’ve been tak­ing a bit of flack for using that phrase to open the book because it sounds so pes­simistic and omi­nous. I have to con­fess it was a lit­tle bit of rhetor­i­cal hyper­bole. I mean that humans are becom­ing less use­ful in mak­ing changes in the world, or to par­tic­u­lar domains of activ­i­ty. I try to trace out this trend towards human obso­les­cence across dif­fer­ent domains over human his­to­ry. Agriculture is an obvi­ous exam­ple where once upon a time, the major­i­ty of peo­ple used to work in agri­cul­ture. We now see a sig­nif­i­cant decline or reduc­tion in the num­ber of peo­ple work­ing in agri­cul­tur­al relat­ed indus­tries. Less than 5% in most European coun­tries, from over 50% as lit­tle as 100 years ago.

I also look at the decline of human activ­i­ty in man­u­fac­tur­ing, in med­i­cine and the pro­fes­sions and law, and in sci­en­tif­ic inquiry. I look at some new stud­ies that have been done on robot­ic sci­en­tists who can cre­ate their own exper­i­ments and test their own hypothe­ses. In pol­i­tics, in bureau­crat­ic man­age­ment and in polic­ing. So, I look at the trend towards automa­tion across all these domains of activ­i­ty, that I think sup­ports the claim that there is this grow­ing obso­les­cence of humans.

There is one qual­i­fi­ca­tion to that though, which is that when I say that humans are obso­lesc­ing, that does­n’t mean that they’re going to be going extinct or irrel­e­vant to the future. It just means that their activ­i­ties will be less sig­nif­i­cant.

Mason: I mean, you actu­al­ly go one step fur­ther, and you say that this could be an oppor­tu­ni­ty for optimism.

Danaher: So this is it. This is the kind of rhetor­i­cal strat­e­gy in a sense. You’re set­ting it up with this seem­ing­ly omi­nous claim that we’re obso­lesc­ing, and this is some­thing that a lot of peo­ple will be wor­ried about. They’ll view it in a pes­simistic light, but I try to argue that it is actu­al­ly an oppor­tu­ni­ty for opti­mism. Partly because it allows us to tran­scend our exist­ing way of life—in par­tic­u­lar, to escape from the drudgery of paid employ­ment and to pur­sue a post-work utopia.

Mason: I think that is real­ly impor­tant, because you’re not talk­ing about the obso­les­cence of human­i­ty from Planet Earth. You’re talk­ing about the obso­les­cence of human­i­ty with­in the work­place, in the workforce.

Danaher: Yes, exact­ly. Yeah.

Mason: So can we talk a lit­tle bit about this, this idea of a post-work future? In the book, you set up this notion of the fact that a post-work future will be a good thing. Do you think it real­ly will be a utopi­an out­come to have a post work future? Or do you think it could lead to bore­dom and chaos?

Danaher: If it’s the case that humans are no longer going to be use­ful in the work­place or are going to become less and less use­ful over time, such that more and more peo­ple will not pur­sue paid employ­ment in their lives—this leads to two depri­va­tions. One is a depri­va­tion of income, which of course is essen­tial nowa­days because peo­ple need an income in order to sur­vive, to pay for the goods and ser­vices that enable them to flour­ish. But also it could lead to a depri­va­tion of mean­ing, because we live in soci­eties where work is val­orised, in the sense that it’s val­ued. Work eth­ic is seen as a pos­i­tive thing. It’s how peo­ple make a con­tri­bu­tion to their soci­eties. It’s how peo­ple often define them­selves. If we take that away from peo­ple, they’re going to have this cri­sis of mean­ing. So, how can we fill that gap in order to address that cri­sis of mean­ing? The real goal of the book was to exam­ine that poten­tial cri­sis of mean­ing, and whether there is actu­al­ly an oppor­tu­ni­ty for opti­mism embed­ded in it.

Mason: I mean, there are some peo­ple who love their jobs. But in the book, you say you should real­ly hate your job.

Danaher: What I argue in the book is not so much that every­body will nec­es­sar­i­ly hate their jobs, because hatred is a feel­ing you have towards work that you do. It’s quite pos­si­ble that many peo­ple have pos­i­tive feel­ings towards the work that they do. What I argue instead, is that work is struc­tural­ly bad and that we’ve fall­en into a pat­tern of employ­ment that is bad for many work­ers, get­ting worse—partly as a result of tech­nol­o­gy. And so we should be con­cerned about the future of work, and we should look to pos­si­ble ways to trans­form and pos­si­bly even tran­scend the need for work.

Mason: So what we’re talk­ing about is real­ly work that’s done for mon­ey. Exchange time for mon­ey, that’s your def­i­n­i­tion of work.

Danaher: Yeah, you know, you have to be care­ful when you talk about the post-work future and the con­cept of work. The first thing you learn when you talk about the notion of a post-work future is that peo­ple have dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions in mind of what work is. Some peo­ple have very expan­sive def­i­n­i­tions of work. They think work is any phys­i­cal or men­tal activ­i­ty per­formed by humans. So if you talk about a post work future—if that’s your def­i­n­i­tion in mind—then it prob­a­bly real­ly just makes no sense because humans are always going to per­form some kinds of phys­i­cal or men­tal activ­i­ties. We’re always going to work in that broad and expan­sive sense. I try to adopt a nar­row­er inter­pre­ta­tion of what work is as paid employ­ment. So that means that work, for me, is not any par­tic­u­lar kind of activ­i­ty. It is, rather, a con­di­tion under which activ­i­ties are per­formed, name­ly a con­di­tion of eco­nom­ic reward of some sort. The eco­nom­ic reward does not nec­es­sar­i­ly have to be imme­di­ate­ly realised. Sometimes there are unpaid forms of work that are done in the hope of receiv­ing future rewards. So there are lots of young stu­dents who take unpaid intern­ships, for exam­ple, in the hope that they will secure paid employment.

Mason: The rea­son we’re able to talk about a post work future is this pos­si­bil­i­ty of automa­tion. I mean, that’s at the core of the book—the fear that we’re going to become obso­lete because of automa­tion. Automation is going to be the thing that’s going to take our jobs. I just won­der why automa­tion of work is both pos­si­ble and desirable.

Danaher: Lots of things have been writ­ten in the past decade or so about tech­no­log­i­cal unem­ploy­ment and the future of work, and there have been many inter­est­ing argu­ments and claims about the per­cent­age of jobs that are com­put­eriseable or automat­able. I try to engage with those kinds of stud­ies and look at whether it’s real­ly pos­si­ble to auto­mate work. I think there’s a cou­ple of points to bear in mind when you’re try­ing to eval­u­ate that claim. One is that I think a lot of peo­ple approach this with the wrong set of con­cepts. So they think about the dis­place­ment of work­ers or jobs, when they real­ly should be think­ing about the dis­place­ment of work relat­ed tasks.

The kinds of automat­ing tech­nolo­gies that we’re devel­op­ing at the moment are—to use a some­what tech­ni­cal term—they’re kind of nar­row forms of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. They can be good at per­form­ing cer­tain kinds of func­tions or tasks in the work­place. They’re not gen­er­al forms of intel­li­gence, they can’t choose to per­form all the dif­fer­ent tasks in the work­place. So what hap­pens when you auto­mate or intro­duce automat­ing tech­nol­o­gy into the work­place is that you replace humans in the per­for­mance of cer­tain tasks. That does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that you elim­i­nate jobs or elim­i­nate work­ers, because often­times, work­ers can move into com­ple­men­tary tasks.

One of the exam­ples I have of this in the book is to do with legal work­places, let’s say. Within a giv­en law firm there are lots of tasks that a lawyer or a team of lawyers will per­form in order to pro­vide a valu­able ser­vice to their clients. They’ll engage in doc­u­ment review, review­ing con­tracts or oth­er com­plex legal doc­u­ments. They will engage in legal research look­ing at cas­es and statutes to see how the law can be used to the ben­e­fit of their client. They will enter­tain and schmooze with their clients to make them feel good about the ser­vice that they’re offer­ing. They will present and argue in court on behalf of their clients. So there are all these dif­fer­ent tasks that are per­formed with­in that work­place. Automating tech­nolo­gies at the moment can do some of those tasks. We’ve got pret­ty good tech­nolo­gies now for doc­u­ment review, and emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies that enable some kinds of basic legal research and pre­dic­tion of the out­come of cas­es for law firms. At the moment, we don’t have robots that are very good at schmooz­ing with clients and enter­tain­ing them. So if you intro­duce automat­ing tech­nolo­gies into a legal work­place, you might find that human work­ers are dis­placed from the tasks of doc­u­ment review and cer­tain kinds of legal research. They move into the more cus­tomer rela­tions side of it, and maybe also then argue cas­es in court, in order to per­suade a judge or a jury.

Automation changes the dynam­ic of the work­place. That might mean that some work­ers are elim­i­nat­ed because their jobs are pure­ly defined in terms of the tasks that machines are good at. But oth­er work­ers aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly elim­i­nat­ed because they have these oth­er things that they can per­form that com­ple­ment what machines do.

Mason: I think that’s the piece that we so eas­i­ly for­get. In actu­al fact, this automa­tion of the work­place could lead to a com­ple­men­tary rela­tion­ship between AI and the human. In fact, IBM Watson in the US, when they look at the work that they’re doing to review med­ical papers, they talk about it as a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the doc­tor and IBM Watson. IBM Watson nev­er diag­noses a patient. It makes sug­ges­tions to a doctor—a human doctor—to then go and diag­nose a patient based on the infor­ma­tion that IBM Watson has ingest­ed and has tried to under­stand. I think if we start see­ing the future of work being a col­lab­o­ra­tion, then maybe there’s some­thing more excit­ing about how we engage with this automa­tion. Rather than see it as a threat, maybe we could see it as a poten­tial collaborator.

Danaher: In most of these debates about tech­no­log­i­cal unem­ploy­ment, we focus on the dis­place­ment poten­tial of automa­tion, how it dis­places work­ers. There’s also this relat­ed phe­nom­e­non of how automa­tion can com­ple­ment what human work­ers do, and we can col­lab­o­rate with machines. That’s kind of the hope, I think, amongst the main­stream eco­nom­ic views—that real­ly, tech­nol­o­gy won’t result in this mas­sive decline in jobs. It’ll just involve this struc­tur­al reori­en­ta­tion of the work­place so that we just col­lab­o­rate with machines. We do what we’re good at and the machines do what they’re good at. This is the main objec­tion to the claim that we’ll have wide­spread tech­no­log­i­cal unemployment.

When I say that there’s a pos­si­bil­i­ty of a post-work future. I don’t think that means that no one will work in the future. I just mean that a grow­ing per­cent­age of the adult human pop­u­la­tion will not work for a liv­ing. One of the ways in which I illus­trate this is in terms of some­thing called the labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion rate in coun­tries. So the labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion rate is the num­ber of adults of work­ing age who both want work and are at work. In most Western European coun­tries, that fig­ure is some­where between 60 and 70%. So that means it’s already the case that about 30 to 40% of the human pop­u­la­tion don’t work for a liv­ing or don’t even want to work for a liv­ing. So when I talk about a post-work future, I’m talk­ing about a future in which that num­ber of non work­ing adults con­tin­ues to grow. What does it mean to reach a true post work future? I don’t know if there’s an exact bound­ary line. But cer­tain­ly if it’s more than 50% of the pop­u­la­tion that is not work­ing, I think you’ve rad­i­cal­ly changed the kind of world that we live in.

In terms of this com­ple­men­tar­i­ty effect of automa­tion, I’m a lit­tle bit scep­ti­cal about the poten­tial for this to be a recipe for lots of jobs in the future. When we think about the com­ple­men­tar­i­ty effect, the assump­tion here is that machines will replace humans in some kinds of tasks, but this will open up a space of com­ple­men­tary tasks for human work­ers. But there’s a chal­lenge here, which is, can you actu­al­ly get the peo­ple who are dis­placed into these com­ple­men­tary tasks? It may turn out to be dif­fi­cult to do that. They may need to be edu­cat­ed and retrained. There are cer­tain work­ers who may be at a stage of their lives where it’s just not real­ly fea­si­ble or pos­si­ble to edu­cate and retrain them. It may also be the case that there’s just not a huge amount of polit­i­cal will to do this, or polit­i­cal sup­port for it, or edu­ca­tion­al sup­port for it. So can we actu­al­ly adapt to this new real­i­ty where we have to train dif­fer­ent kinds of skills? That’s a seri­ous challenge.

There’s also anoth­er chal­lenge here, which is that the assump­tion is that we’ll be able to train humans into these new tasks at a rate that is faster than the rate at which tech­nol­o­gy is improv­ing in those tasks. This is some­thing that I think peo­ple get wrong when they think about automa­tion and nar­row AI. They assume that AI is only good at par­tic­u­lar tasks. But of course, we’re devel­op­ing mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent streams of AI that are good at dif­fer­ent tasks. So it could be the case that we can train machines to per­form these com­ple­men­tary tasks faster than we can train humans. To give a prac­ti­cal illus­tra­tion of this, it takes about 20 to 30 years to train a human into the workplace.

Mason: And to that point, you say in the book that it can actu­al­ly lead to this thing called the cycle of immis­er­a­tion—this cycle where­by it can nev­er catch up.

Danaher: Yeah. So it’s this idea that that automa­tion can be par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­leng­ing for young peo­ple, because they need to train them­selves to have the skills that are val­ued in the econ­o­my. That means they have to get an edu­ca­tion that will give them those skills. But how can they get the edu­ca­tion, because edu­ca­tion is increas­ing­ly cost­ly and expen­sive for peo­ple? So often­times, the way in which stu­dents can pay for their edu­ca­tion is that they work part time, but an awful lot of those jobs that they work part time in are the jobs that are most at threat of automa­tion. How are they going to be able to pay for the edu­ca­tion that gets them to escape from this threat of automa­tion? This is this poten­tial cycle of immis­er­a­tion that they can nev­er get out of—the rush that they’re in.

Mason: There’s a lot of scep­ti­cism around this idea of tech­no­log­i­cal unem­ploy­ment. In the book, you use the Luddite fal­la­cy to explain some of that scep­ti­cism. I mean, what is the Luddite fal­la­cy?

Danaher: So the Luddites were famous­ly these pro­test­ers in the ear­ly part of the Industrial Revolution. They were fol­low­ers of Ned Ludd, who some peo­ple claim is a fic­tion­al char­ac­ter. There’s an inter­est­ing his­to­ry there, to that. They smashed these machines because they saw them as a threat to their employ­ment, but look­ing back on their activ­i­ties from the van­tage point of 150 years lat­er, it seems that they were wrong to do so, in the sense that the kinds of automa­tion that exists in the ear­ly phas­es of the Industrial Revolution did­n’t lead to wide­spread tech­no­log­i­cal unem­ploy­ment. In fact, there’s prob­a­bly more peo­ple out of work in the world today than there ever has been before.

It seems like a fal­la­cy to assume that automa­tion will dis­place jobs. That real­ly then kind of leads into this argu­ment about the com­ple­men­tar­i­ty effect. There isn’t a fixed num­ber of jobs out there to go around. We’re always cre­at­ing new jobs in light of the new kind of socio-technical real­i­ty that we’ve created.

Mason: Even if some of those jobs as David Graeber says are ​“bull­shit jobs.”

Danaher: Right, yeah. Even though they’re mean­ing­less or point­less admin­is­tra­tive jobs, they’re still jobs that are paid.

Mason: As you’ve just out­lined, the automa­tion work is—to a degree—both pos­si­ble and desir­able. But you’re clear to state in the book that the automa­tion life, how­ev­er, is not as desir­able. Could you explain the dif­fer­ence between the two and why that’s so important?

Danaher: If we look into how auto­mat­ed tech­nolo­gies affect life more gen­er­al­ly, not just work­ing life—I think there are rea­sons for pes­simism. One of the ways in which I illus­trate this in the book is to use the exam­ple of the Pixar movie, WALL‑E. Very rough­ly, WALL‑E depicts this kind of dystopi­an future for human­i­ty where the Earth has become envi­ron­men­tal­ly despoiled. Humans have had to nav­i­gate off the plan­et to these space­ships that are bring­ing them to some oth­er place that they can live, and there are lots of robots in this future. Lots of automat­ing tech­nolo­gies. The humans on these Interstellar space­ships are real­ly fat, obese, slug like beings. They float around in these elec­tron­ic chairs. They’re fed a diet of fast food and light enter­tain­ment, and there are all these robots around them scur­ry­ing about, doing all the work that needs to be done to fly these ships. This has been referred to by some tech­nol­o­gy crit­ics as the sofalar­i­ty. We all just end up on our sofas being fed enter­tain­ment, and food and every­thing we need by automat­ing tech­nol­o­gy. So we don’t real­ly do any­thing, we just sit back and enjoy the ride. Even though this is an extreme and satir­i­cal depic­tion of the auto­mat­ed future, it does—I think—contain a ker­nel of truth and some­thing that we should be con­cerned about.

An awful lot of how we derive mean­ing and val­ue from our lives depends on our agency. The fact that we, through our activ­i­ties, make some kind of dif­fer­ence to the world. We do things that are objec­tive­ly valu­able to the soci­eties in which we live in and maybe in some oth­er grander, cos­mic sense of objec­tive val­ue, and that we are sub­jec­tive­ly engaged and sat­is­fied by the actions that we per­form. The prob­lem with auto­mat­ed tech­nolo­gies is that they kind of cut or sev­er the link between human action and what hap­pens in the world. Because what you’re doing when you rely upon an auto­mat­ed tech­nol­o­gy is that you’re out­sourc­ing either phys­i­cal or cog­ni­tive activ­i­ty to a machine, so that you’re no longer the agent that’s mak­ing the dif­fer­ence to the world. I think this is a seri­ous threat to human mean­ing and flour­ish­ing and some­thing that we should be con­cerned about.

Mason: In the book, you set up these two pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios, these two pos­si­ble utopias: The cyborg utopia, and the vir­tu­al utopia. First, I want to talk about this idea of this cyborg utopia. I mean, how would we build a cyborg utopia?

Danaher: People might be famil­iar with the sto­ry of the ori­gin of the term. You know, neol­o­gism, a cyber­net­ic organ­ism. This idea that has kind of tak­en hold in bio­log­i­cal sci­ences and social sci­ences is a notion of some­thing that humans can aspire to, that they can become more machine-like. What does that mean in prac­tice? There are two dif­fer­ent under­stand­ings of what a cyborg is, par­tic­u­lar­ly in phi­los­o­phy. The one under­stand­ing is that a cyborg is a lit­er­al fusion between human biol­o­gy and a machine. That you’re inte­grat­ing machine-like mech­a­nisms into bio­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms so that they form one hybrid sys­tem. An exam­ple of this would be some­thing like a brain-computer inter­face, where you’re incor­po­rat­ing elec­tri­cal cir­cuits or chips into neur­al cir­cuits in order to per­form some func­tion from the com­bi­na­tion of the two things.

For peo­ple who lis­ten to this pod­cast, you inter­viewed one of the lead­ing pio­neers in cyborg tech­nol­o­gy ear­ly on—Kevin Warwick, right? He’s done all these inter­est­ing pio­neer­ing stud­ies on brain com­put­er inter­faces and how you can implant chips in one per­son­’s brain and send a sig­nal to a robot­ic arm. That’s a kind of illus­tra­tion of this form of lit­er­al fusion between human biol­o­gy and technology.

There’s anoth­er under­stand­ing of what a cyborg is though, that’s quite pop­u­lar in cer­tain sec­tors with the philo­soph­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty. Mainly asso­ci­at­ed with a fig­ure called Andy Clark, who says that we’re all nat­ur­al born cyborgs. That we are, by our very natures, a tech­no­log­i­cal species. One of the defin­ing traits of human­i­ty is that we’ve always lived in a tech­no­log­i­cal ecol­o­gy. We don’t live in the nat­ur­al world—we live in a world that’s con­struct­ed by our tech­nolo­gies. We have these rela­tion­ships of depen­den­cy with tech­nol­o­gy and also inter­de­pen­den­cy. We use ham­mers and axes and so forth to do things in the world, and we’ve been increas­ing the amount of tech­nol­o­gi­sa­tion of our every­day lives over the past sev­er­al thou­sand years. So we’re more inte­grat­ed with, and more depen­dent on tech­nol­o­gy. We’re becom­ing more cyborg-like over time.

For Clark, the rela­tion­ship that you have with your smartphone—let’s say if you’re using Google Maps to walk around a city—you have a very inter­de­pen­dent rela­tion­ship with the tech­nol­o­gy. You have a lit­tle avatar that you fol­low on screen, and your move­ments affect the image that you see on the screen. That kind of depen­den­cy rela­tion­ship is an illus­tra­tion of this oth­er path to cyborg sta­tus. It does­n’t mean that you lit­er­al­ly fuse your bio­log­i­cal cir­cuits with the machine cir­cuits, but you have this kind of sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship with the tech­nol­o­gy. That means you are a cyborg. You know the dif­fer­ence between these two kinds of cyborg are dif­fer­ences of degree as opposed to dif­fer­ences of fun­da­men­tal type, I think. The more inter­de­pen­den­cy you have with an arte­fact, the more cyborg like you become.

Mason: It’s sur­pris­ing to me that you start with a cyborg artist, Neil Harbisson, who’s a colour­blind artist who has for want of a bet­ter descrip­tion an anten­na sur­gi­cal­ly implant­ed into the back of his skull that allows him to hear colour, although it’s not quite hear­ing, it’s slight­ly more nuanced than that. It’s a form of elec­tri­cal bone con­duc­tion, which is vibrat­ing his skull, which gives him a sense of sound. What’s inter­est­ing about Neil Harbison is that he’s a col­or­blind artist who’s now able to hear this colour and he now dreams with these sono-chromatic dreams. He no longer sees this anten­na as a device, but he sees it as an organ; as part of his body. My own inter­ac­tions with Neil…if you go up to him and you watch peo­ple try to touch the anten­na, it’s as if I came up to you, John, and tried to touch your nose. He has the same sort of revul­sion to it. It feels to him very much like this organ has become—as Andy Clark would say—profoundly embod­ied. I just won­der why you start­ed with that exam­ple of an artist explor­ing the cyborg-isation of his body because what he’s doing seems the fur­thest thing away from me as some­thing which is prac­ti­cal for use in the workforce.

Danaher: I think he’s a good exam­ple. Partly because he’s some­body who self iden­ti­fies as a cyborg. I use a quote from an inter­view with him where he says, ​“I don’t use tech­nol­o­gy, I am technology.”—that’s the phrase that he uses. I think he’s his­tor­i­cal­ly set up some­thing like the Cyborg Society that cam­paigns for the rights of cyborgs and, more recent­ly, some­thing like the Transpecies Society where he’s argu­ing for a post human iden­ti­ty as a concept.

What I find inter­est­ing about what Neil is doing is that he is using tech­nol­o­gy in a way to tran­scend the lim­i­ta­tions of human bio­log­i­cal form. To me, what he’s doing is he’s cre­at­ing a new kind of sen­so­ry engage­ment with the world, which I find inter­est­ing. He’s exper­i­ment­ing with the lim­its of human form. To me, this is a utopi­an project, because one of the things I argue in the book is that we should­n’t have a con­cep­tion of what a utopia is. That is, it’s a blue­print for the ide­al society—something like Plato’s Republic, or Thomas More’s utopia, where it’s a very rigid for­mu­la for what the ide­al soci­ety should look like. I think we should have a more hori­zon­al under­stand­ing of what a utopia is. A utopi­an soci­ety is one that’s kind of dynam­ic in the right ways. It’s not some­thing that’s dri­ven by inter­per­son­al con­flict and vio­lence. That’s the wrong kind of dynamism that you want in a soci­ety. So it’s sta­ble in that respect, it’s peace­ful. But there’s an open future for peo­ple, that we’re expand­ing into new hori­zons. What I think Neil is doing is he’s expand­ing into a new hori­zon of pos­si­ble human exis­tence, and that’s what I find stim­u­lat­ing and excit­ing about what he’s doing.

Mason: It seems to me they’re try­ing to explore a spec­trum of human pos­si­bil­i­ties, and the cyborg is no longer as Kevin Warwick or even Tim Cannon from Grindhouse Wetware would say. It’s no longer about upgrad­ing or mak­ing the human bet­ter or stronger or faster or smarter. For Neil, or Moon, it’s real­ly about explor­ing a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed sen­so­ry modal­i­ties, allow­ing them­selves to be more sim­i­lar to ani­mals than to machines.

Danaher: It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly that they’re try­ing to com­pete with machines in terms of cog­ni­tive abil­i­ty. What they are doing is that they are explor­ing dif­fer­ent kinds of mor­phol­o­gy, dif­fer­ent kinds of phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, and dif­fer­ent ways of expe­ri­enc­ing and engag­ing with the world. There’s two dif­fer­ent visions of what tran­shu­man­ism is, let’s say. There is the kind of human­i­ty on steroids view, which is that we’re upgrad­ing our exist­ing abil­i­ties. You just want more intel­li­gence, more strength, more happiness—that kind of thing. Maybe the David Pierce under­stand­ing of tran­shu­man­ism, that it’s the three supers: super intel­li­gence, super hap­pi­ness and super longevi­ty; super long lives. What Neil and Moon are doing is some­thing dif­fer­ent, which is try­ing to explore the adja­cent pos­si­bil­i­ty, I guess. The oth­er forms of human exis­tence that might be pos­si­ble out there.

Mason: So the ques­tion then becomes, are we cre­at­ing that form of cyborg utopia—to have some­thing to do in a post-work soci­ety? Because there’s not real­ly going to help us com­pete with machines. Versus what Tim Cannon is argu­ing for, which is to enhance human­i­ty to a lev­el at which it can be com­pet­i­tive to machine-like process­es. If we’re going to be com­pet­ing in the work­place against automa­tion robots and AI, then if we’re able to upgrade our brain and retain all of the fuzzi­ness that makes humans special—but also do all the things that machines can do—then that makes us a much more use­ful worker.

Danaher: There are these dif­fer­ent ways of pur­su­ing the cyborg project, either the one of tran­scend­ing what is pos­si­ble for humans, and explor­ing new forms of sen­so­ry and embod­ied engage­ment with the world. I out­line that as one of the main argu­ments in favour of the cyborg utopia. But the coun­ter­point to that, and one of the detrac­tions from it, I think, is pur­su­ing the oth­er ver­sion of it, which is like upgrad­ed humans, because I think what’s gonna hap­pen if we do that is it’s just going to dou­ble down on the worst fea­tures of the econ­o­my that we have at the moment. So you know, instead of just com­pet­ing on edu­ca­tion for employ­a­bil­i­ty, you’re also going to be com­pet­ing on hav­ing the right kinds of cyborg implants. Some peo­ple might think this holds a degree of hope for the future of work because what it might do is it might increase the pow­er of labour rel­a­tive to cap­i­tal, because cyborg work­ers have more bar­gain­ing pow­er than ordi­nary human work­ers. But I’m scep­ti­cal of that because it depends on how cyborg implants get dis­trib­uted amongst the work­force, you know. Is this some­thing that’s only going to be avail­able to an elite few?

Also, if you think about the kinds of things that a cyborg work­er could do bet­ter than a machine, based on what we see at the moment, it’s prob­a­bly going to be some­thing like a ware­house work­er or phys­i­cal work­er with an exoskele­ton that just enables them to per­form dex­ter­ous phys­i­cal tasks with greater speed, effi­cien­cy, that kind of thing. At the moment, it’s the case that those kinds of work are often the least val­ued and least pleas­ant forms of work in human soci­ety. So if that’s the way that the cyborg implants are going to go, it does­n’t seem to be a recipe for flour­ish­ing or utopia.

Mason: It does seem that the thing that’s on the near hori­zon is the sort of cyborg upgrades that are sim­i­lar to non neur­al pros­thet­ics; the exoskele­tons that allow humans to lift heavier

objects. But it also feels like there is going to be a race around the human brain, around brain com­put­er inter­faces. It feels like Brian Johnson and his Kernel Co. in com­pe­ti­tion with Elon Musk’s neur­al link might be the bat­tle we see over the future of work. I just want­ed your opin­ion on those sorts of cyber­net­ic enhance­ments, the ones that look like they’re going to be on the mar­ket poten­tial­ly very soon—if the ways in which they’re advo­cat­ing for these sorts of tech­nolo­gies hold true.

Danaher: If these implants are cre­at­ed part­ly with the aim of upgrad­ing humans in such a way that they’re com­pet­i­tive with machines, I think we’re going to dou­ble down on the worst fea­tures of the employ­ment mar­ket. So this isn’t a recipe for a post-work utopia, in my sense. The oth­er thing then, I sup­pose, is just a degree of scep­ti­cism about the claims that are made on behalf of these kinds of tech­nolo­gies, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the short term. There are a lot of crit­i­cisms of the kinds of things that Elon Musk is com­ing up with. Whether they real­ly will be this kind of tran­scen­dent implant. What I see at the moment is inter­est­ing exper­i­ments and proofs of con­cept. But I don’t real­ly see any­thing that is gen­uine­ly trans­for­ma­tive. I’m def­i­nite­ly open to being sur­prised in this field.

Part of my scep­ti­cism here stems from old­er research inter­ests that I’ve had in the human enhance­ment debate around phar­ma­co­log­i­cal enhance­ments. The philoso­phers spent a lot of time debat­ing those things, and lots of inter­est­ing work was done in it. But let’s be hon­est, in real­i­ty, we haven’t real­ly had any gen­uine phar­ma­co­log­i­cal enhance­ments, just pret­ty minor improve­ments. We might be going down the same route when it comes to these kinds of cyborg enhance­ments. That’s anoth­er rea­son as well—why I think the alter­na­tive path­way to the cyborg future, which is not one of upgrad­ing human­i­ty, but one of mov­ing into this adja­cent possible—isn’t a more inter­est­ing pathway.

Mason: There is some­thing inter­est­ing that the poten­tial of the cyborg utopia leads to. Whether its longevi­ty and col­lec­tive after­life, or even cyborgs in space, which, odd­ly enough, fea­tures both as an advan­tage of a cyborg utopia and a dis­ad­van­tage of a cyborg utopia. It was one of the most inter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties in that chap­ter, and I just won­der if you could explain a lit­tle bit more about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cyborgs in space.

Danaher: Yeah, it does have that kind of cheesy 1980s sci­ence fic­tion title, or some­thing even more dat­ed. So with­in that chap­ter on the cyborg utopia, one of the argu­ments in favour of Cyborgism is space explo­ration and trav­el. This is kind of the orig­i­nal ratio­nale for the cyborg, the orig­i­nal coin­ing of the term was that it would help us to explore space. But why would explor­ing space be a utopi­an project? Well, part of it goes back to this notion of expand­ing the hori­zons of human pos­si­bil­i­ty. So peo­ple like Neil Harbisson—they’re expand­ing the hori­zons of pos­si­ble human embod­ied exis­tence. That’s one hori­zon that we can explore. But there’s also gen­uine geo­graph­i­cal hori­zons that we can explore. The sad real­i­ty is that we’ve explored most of the hori­zons here on earth and the hori­zons that are left to us are in space. So, space pro­vides this almost infi­nite land­scape that we can expand out into, and explore new pos­si­ble forms of human exis­tence in that infi­nite land­scape. That’s inter­est­ing, I think. To me, it’s part of this need for dynamism and open­ness in the future.

There’s also an argu­ment that I’m quite influ­enced by by a guy called Ian Crawford, who is one of the lead­ing pro­po­nents of human space explo­ration, where he out­lines this intel­lec­tu­al argu­ment for space trav­el. It’s to the extent that we think that new knowl­edge and new intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenges are a part of what gives mean­ing to our lives. It seems like explor­ing space is going to be a recipe for that kind of intel­lec­tu­al excite­ment and engage­ment, both in terms of sci­en­tif­ic explo­ration of space, sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­men­ta­tion, sci­en­tif­ic exam­i­na­tion of inter­stel­lar envi­ron­ments and oth­er plan­ets, but also new forms of aes­thet­ic expression.

One of the points that Crawford makes is that—to some extent anyway—our aes­thet­ic expres­sion depends on the kinds of expe­ri­ences that we have. As we expand out to explore new envi­ron­ments, we’re going to have new kinds of aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ences and new forms of aes­thet­ic expres­sion. It’s a recipe for enhanced cos­mic art­work, for exam­ple. Also that we’ll have to explore new forms of polit­i­cal and social arrange­ment. How we deal with mul­ti gen­er­a­tional star­ships. How will we man­age colonies on mul­ti­ple plan­ets? What kind of polit­i­cal organ­i­sa­tion, what kind of eth­i­cal rules do we need for that? So there’s some­thing inter­est­ing here. There are jobs for polit­i­cal and eth­i­cal philoso­phers in this world. It’s an intel­lec­tu­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing project.

There’s also anoth­er point here, which is that it may in some sense be exis­ten­tial­ly nec­es­sary for us to explore space. It cer­tain­ly seems to be true in the long run, that we’ll need to get off the plan­et if we want to sur­vive. But maybe even in the short run, it’s some­thing that we need to do to actu­al­ly con­tin­ue human existence…and con­tin­ued human exis­tence is a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for con­tin­ued human flourishing.

The coun­ter­point to that is that there could be a lot of risks embed­ded in it. The philoso­pher Phil Torres—he’s writ­ten this inter­est­ing paper about the exis­ten­tial risks of space coloni­sa­tion. One of the points he makes is that as we expand out onto dif­fer­ent plan­ets, it’s pos­si­ble that humans will spe­ci­ate because they’ll be fac­ing dif­fer­ent kinds of selec­tive pres­sures in dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments. So they’ll form dif­fer­ent groups with dif­fer­ent needs and dif­fer­ent ide­olo­gies. There’s going to be a recipe for poten­tial con­flicts between the dif­fer­ent groups and dif­fer­ent plan­ets. How do we man­age con­flict here on earth? Well, going back to the work of British polit­i­cal philoso­pher Thomas Hobbes, we need some kind of Leviathan, some kind of polit­i­cal insti­tu­tion­al struc­ture that keeps the peace between peo­ple. Torres’ point is that it’s gonna be very, very dif­fi­cult to have a cos­mic solar sys­tem wide or inter­galac­tic Leviathan. So what’s gonna hap­pen then, is that there’s a dan­ger that these dif­fer­ent colonies with dif­fer­ent inter­ests and needs per­ceive each oth­er as a threat to their con­tin­ued sur­vival and flour­ish­ing. So they engage in these pre­emp­tive strikes to wipe out the threat. There’s no cos­mic Leviathan to keep the peace, and so we’re gonna have this mas­sive inter­galac­tic war. This leads Torres to con­clude that we should delay space coloni­sa­tion and explo­ration as much as possible.

Some of what Torres says I think is fan­ci­ful and spec­u­la­tive. I think there are rea­sons to believe that actu­al­ly, sur­viv­ing dif­fer­ent plans might reduce the kinds of con­flicts between dif­fer­ent groups. I use this kind of glib phrase in the book from Robert Frost that, ​“Good fences make for good neigh­bours, and what could be a bet­ter fence than a cou­ple of light years of cold dark space.” But there’s also going to be prob­lems on indi­vid­ual colonies with­in space that because they face such extreme con­di­tions of exis­tence that aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly hos­pitable to crea­tures like us, they could cre­ate the con­di­tions for very author­i­tar­i­an forms of gov­ern­ment. The astro­bi­ol­o­gist Charles Cockle has writ­ten some very inter­est­ing papers on this phe­nom­e­non, about tyran­ny in space colonies being a seri­ous prob­lem. Those are some rea­sons to be cau­tious about the project of space coloni­sa­tion, being some­thing that’s tru­ly utopian.

Mason: I won­der almost if the work that Neil Harbisson is doing with trans-species and the new polit­i­cal ways in which we’ll have to organ­ise soci­ety here on Earth as we cre­ate a dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed form of human­i­ty based on all of our dif­fer­ent cyber­net­ic addi­tions and enhance­ments that will pre­pare us for deal­ing with the pol­i­tics of sub speciation.

Danaher: Yeah, no, I think that’s a weak­ness in the Torres argu­ment. So the assump­tion that he’s mak­ing is that stay­ing on plan­ets is bet­ter than going off plan­et but actu­al­ly stay­ing on, there are lots of exis­ten­tial risks that we face when we’re on plan­et and we could face very sim­i­lar kinds of polit­i­cal strife. So we’re gonna have to con­front those kinds of prob­lems any­way, prob­a­bly, even if we stay put on Earth.

Mason: What you were just say­ing is the rea­son that cybor­gism isn’t real­ly the utopia we’re look­ing for is because it feels like these devel­op­ments are so far away, but the utopia that could just be around the cor­ner is the Virtual utopia. Just help me to under­stand what you mean when you talk about this vir­tu­al utopia.

Danaher: This is the trick­i­est part of the book, by far. It’s also the bit that I think has con­fused most peo­ple. One thing I’ll just say at the out­set is that I think the con­cept of a vir­tu­al form of exis­tence is inher­ent­ly prob­lem­at­ic and neb­u­lous. I don’t think there’s ever such a thing as a com­plete­ly vir­tu­al way of life. But there is a way of life, I think, that has ele­ments to it that qual­i­fy as vir­tu­al. Now how I under­stand the con­cept of a vir­tu­al way of life…I’m bet­ter at defin­ing what it’s not, then nec­es­sar­i­ly defin­ing what it is. The forms of vir­tu­al utopia that I don’t agree with are what I call the stereo­typ­i­cal view of what a vir­tu­al utopia is, which is the computerised—the com­put­er sim­u­la­tion view. So what a vir­tu­al form of exis­tence is, is that you immerse your­self in a com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed envi­ron­ment. Something like…let’s say the Holodeck from Star Trek, or Neal Stephenson’s meta­verse from his pop­u­lar nov­el in the ear­ly 90s, the Snow Crash—which was actu­al­ly quite influ­en­tial for peo­ple cre­at­ing vir­tu­al real­i­ty tech­nolo­gies. That form of exis­tence? That’s cer­tain­ly vir­tu­al in some sens­es because some of the things that hap­pen with­in a com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed envi­ron­ment or some of the objects and peo­ple you encounter aren’t quite real.

One of the illus­tra­tions I have of this in the book is, imag­ine you’re in a com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed envi­ron­ment, where there’s an apple on a table, let’s say. Clearly, the apple isn’t a real apple. It’s a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of an apple. It does­n’t have the phys­i­cal prop­er­ties that a real apple has to have. It does­n’t have the right mix of pro­teins, and sug­ars and all that. It exists as a sim­u­la­tion of a real world apple, and that’s what that’s what makes it vir­tu­al in that world. But it’s also true to say that lots of things that hap­pen in a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion will be real, and can have real con­ver­sa­tions with oth­er peo­ple through avatars in a vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment. We do this all the time already. We live an increas­ing amount of our lives in dig­i­tal spaces, but I don’t think any­one would say that the kinds of inter­ac­tions that we have in those spaces are not real. In fact, they’re very real and very con­se­quen­tial. The emo­tion­al expe­ri­ences that you can have in a com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed world can be real. You can be real­ly afraid and be real­ly hap­py. You can be real­ly trau­ma­tised by things that hap­pen to you. People can ​“assault” you in a vir­tu­al environment—not in the sense that they phys­i­cal­ly harm you, but they can psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly harm you. In law, we recog­nise psy­cho­log­i­cal harm as a form of assault.

I think the stereo­typ­i­cal view of vir­tu­al real­i­ty is flawed, because it does­n’t make these dis­tinc­tions between the things that are real with­in a vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment or a com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed envi­ron­ment, and things that are not real with­in a com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed environment.

Mason: You make it very clear that you’re not talk­ing about vir­tu­al real­i­ty as we know it currently—the head­sets and the Oculus Rift. You’re talk­ing about this notion of the vir­tu­al where­by we’re com­fort­able with cer­tain things which are not phys­i­cal­ly real, and yet still actu­al. So for exam­ple, fic­tion­al char­ac­ters. You use the exam­ple of Sherlock Holmes in the book.

Danaher: Yeah. So the Sherlock Holmes exam­ple is that—how does he exist? Well, he clear­ly does­n’t exist as a real phys­i­cal per­son, but he does exist as a real fic­tion­al char­ac­ter. You can make claims about Sherlock Holmes that are true and false. Sherlock Holmes lived at 22A Baker Street. That’s a real claim about the fic­tion­al char­ac­ter Sherlock Holmes. You know, you can describe actions that took place in the nov­el. So, he has a real form of exis­tence —he just does­n’t exist as a real phys­i­cal per­son. Different kinds of things in the world have dif­fer­ent exis­tence con­di­tions attached to them. So things like apples and chairs—they have to have a real phys­i­cal exis­tence in order to count as an instance of an apple or a chair. But there are oth­er things that don’t actu­al­ly have to have a phys­i­cal exis­tence to count as a real thing, right? So that’s actu­al­ly one of the points I make about Sherlock Holmes. You could have detec­tives that exist in pure­ly com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed form, because what a detec­tive is, is real­ly just a func­tion­al thing. It solves crimes.

There are already peo­ple try­ing to cre­ate AI that can help in solv­ing crimes. Are those AIs not real? Are they vir­tu­al, sim­ply because they exist inside a com­put­er? No, because they are func­tion­al objects. What they need to real­ly exist is to per­form the right func­tion. Again, this gets back to the point that things that exist in com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed envi­ron­ments. Some of them are not real, some of them are pure­ly virtual—but some of them are actu­al­ly real, because they per­form the func­tions that those things are sup­posed to perform.

Mason: They’re real inso­far as they can have an effect on us, and our emo­tions and our experience.

Danaher:  Yeah, so that’s anoth­er kind of real­i­ty. Yeah. So they do make a dif­fer­ence to the world in some way.

Mason: You use the author of Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari’s idea of how cer­tain things that we per­ceive in real life, every­day real­i­ty as hav­ing some ele­ment of sim­u­la­tion to them. These fic­tions, these meta-fictions that we cre­ate, to us, become real—whether it’s reli­gion or cap­i­tal­ism. These aren’t nat­ur­al things. They’re arti­fi­cial things that we’ve giv­en a degree of agency. Therefore those fic­tions, again, become a real part of every­day lived reality.

Danaher: The Harari view is kind of the coun­ter­point to the stereo­typ­i­cal view. The stereo­typ­i­cal view of vir­tu­al real­i­ty is that we have this com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed thing. The Harari view—I refer to it in the book as the coun­ter­in­tu­itive view—which is that actu­al­ly pret­ty much  large chunks of our lives are real­ly all vir­tu­al. That’s his main claim, right. You know, there are two ways of mak­ing that claim. Harari makes it one way, but I’m going to make an adja­cent claim that I think sup­ports the same point, which is that actu­al­ly a huge amount of our lives are lived in arti­fi­cial­ly con­struct­ed envi­ron­ments as is. Right now as we’re speak­ing, we’re hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion in a room that shields us from the exter­nal envi­ron­ment, has arti­cle light­ing, arti­fi­cial heat­ing, and so forth. Humans have long been cre­at­ing these arti­fi­cial envi­ron­ments in which we can live out our lives, in which we are shield­ed from a lot of the con­se­quences, a lot of the neg­a­tive fea­tures of the real world.

You could argue that the long term trend for civ­i­liza­tion is to have an increas­ing­ly vir­tu­al form of life, liv­ing inside increas­ing­ly arti­fi­cial envi­ron­ments. So this is kind of a par­al­lel to Andy Clark’s point about us being nat­ur­al born cyborgs. What I’m sug­gest­ing here is that we’re kind of nat­ur­al born vir­tu­al beings as well. Harari’s point is slight­ly dif­fer­ent, which is that actu­al­ly, in addi­tion to the arti­fi­cial­i­ty of the envi­ron­ments that we live in, a lot of the mean­ing and val­ue that we attach to the activ­i­ties we per­form in these envi­ron­ments is a pro­jec­tion of our imag­i­na­tion. He uses this exam­ple of reli­gion. He uses this illus­tra­tion of if you look around Jerusalem, lots of peo­ple attach reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance and mean­ing to arte­facts in that phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment, but that’s not actu­al­ly intrin­sic or inher­ent in the objects. If you invest into them sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, you would­n’t find their holi­ness, so to speak. It’s some­thing that we project onto the envi­ron­ment through our minds. This is a more gen­er­al point that has been made by oth­ers in more or less rad­i­cal forums.

I use a quote from Terence McKenna in the book—which is one of the most extreme illustrations—which is that real­i­ty is a col­lec­tive hal­lu­ci­na­tion. But you know, philoso­phers as respectable as Emmanuel Kant have essen­tial­ly argued that a large part of what we expe­ri­ence in the world is some­thing that we project onto that world. We’re run­ning a kind of vir­tu­al real­i­ty sim­u­la­tor in our minds that we use to inter­pret our expe­ri­ences. Harari goes a step fur­ther. When peo­ple are wor­ried about what the future holds, does that mean the world is going to live inside vir­tu­al real­i­ty machines and play com­put­er games all the time? He makes the claim that actu­al­ly we’re already doing that, and he goes so far as to sug­gest that reli­gion is itself a vir­tu­al real­i­ty game. He also uses con­sumerist cap­i­tal­ism as an illus­tra­tion of this. Religion is a vir­tu­al real­i­ty game where you score points by per­form­ing the right behav­iours, and you lev­el up at the end by going to par­adise. This is lit­er­al­ly the claim he makes, right?

Yeah, as provoca­tive as Harari is, I think he’s right to say that a large part of what we cur­rent­ly do and the way we cur­rent­ly live is vir­tu­al­ly sim­u­lat­ed in our minds. I think he goes a step too far, because I think if you asked reli­gious believ­ers whether what they’re doing is a vir­tu­al real­i­ty, they would say to us, ​“Absolutely not, I real­ly believe that these things are holy, and what I’m doing real­ly mat­ters. I don’t think that what I’m doing is incon­se­quen­tial or triv­ial. It’s not a game to me.” So what I argue for instead, is that we kind of embrace this Harari-like coun­ter­in­tu­itive view of what vir­tu­al real­i­ty is, but we step back a lit­tle bit from his extreme inter­pre­ta­tion, which is that every­thing is kind of a vir­tu­al real­i­ty game. We argue that there’s only cer­tain kinds of things that are vir­tu­al real­i­ty games, and they are things that we know our­selves to be games. So we know that there is a kind of arbi­trary set of rules that we’ve applied to the way in which we engage and per­form activities.

All games to me are a form of vir­tu­al real­i­ty. Take the exam­ple of chess—there’s noth­ing in the laws of physics that dic­tates that you have to move pieces around the chess­board in a par­tic­u­lar way. You don’t. We have con­struct­ed a set of rules that we apply to how we engage with the chess­board, and they con­strain how we behave in the envi­ron­ment. We know that they are arbi­trary rules. Nevertheless, peo­ple play these games, and there are good ways of play­ing them. There are ways of play­ing it skill­ful­ly and well, and peo­ple derive great mean­ing and sat­is­fac­tion from play­ing these games. Some peo­ple ded­i­cate their entire lives to doing so, right? But they know that they are games. Just to fin­ish the point, that with the vir­tu­al utopia chap­ter is that we can use that as a mod­el for a vir­tu­al utopia, where every­thing we do is, in a sense, a game.

Mason: When you set up the propo­si­tions at the begin­ning of the book, you’re talk­ing about this vir­tu­al utopia. I won­dered, ​“Is John sug­gest­ing that we will escape into vir­tu­al real­i­ty?”, but no—what you’re sug­gest­ing is some­thing much more nuanced. You set up the qual­i­ties that a vir­tu­al utopia should have, which are very sim­i­lar to rules of the game. I just won­der if you could share some of those qual­i­ties and why you think those are so impor­tant for cre­at­ing this vir­tu­al utopia.

Danaher: My under­stand­ing of vir­tu­al utopia is tech­no­log­i­cal­ly agnos­tic, in that I think you can realise a vir­tu­al form of exis­tence in many dif­fer­ent kinds of envi­ron­ments. You can do it in a com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed envi­ron­ment, and I don’t deny that. I’m open to that pos­si­bil­i­ty, and I use exam­ples of that in the book. You can also realise that in the real world—games are a way of doing this. So you know, I rely in the book on a the­o­ry from a philoso­pher called Bernard Suits about what a game is. Suits wrote this very odd book back in the 70s. It’s a dia­logue about what a game is and what a utopia is. What he argues is that a game is some­thing that has three prop­er­ties. It has a pret­ty luso­ry goal. It has a luso­ry atti­tude and a set of con­sti­tu­tive rules. A pre­lu­so­ry goal is some­thing that you do that can be iden­ti­fied before you know what the game is, that con­sti­tutes suc­cess in the game. In a sense, he argues that it’s kind of the scor­ing of points in a game.

To use the illus­tra­tion I have in the book—the game of golf. The pre­lu­so­ry goal in golf is to get your ball into a hole, and that’s the end state that you want to reach. The con­sti­tu­tive rules are the way in which you have to go about achiev­ing the pre­lu­so­ry goal. The con­sti­tu­tive rules—what they do is they set up arbi­trary obsta­cles to achiev­ing the goal in the most effi­cient, pos­si­ble way. So the most effi­cient way to get a ball into a hole is just to pick it up, walk down the fair­way and drop it in the hole. But that, of course, is not how you’re sup­posed to play golf. There’s lim­i­ta­tions on what you can do, you have to use a club to hit the ball to get it in the hole. There are all sorts of oth­er rules about when you’re not allowed to ground your club, when you’re in a haz­ard and you have to drop it out of a cer­tain area. So there’s all these addi­tion­al con­sti­tu­tive rules that place con­straints on how we can get the ball into the hole. Those are the con­sti­tu­tive rules and the luso­ry atti­tude is just a pos­i­tive ori­en­ta­tion towards the game; that you accept the con­stituent rules as the con­straints on how you achieve the goal.

The short way of express­ing Suits’ view of what a game is, is that it is the vol­un­tary tri­umph over arbi­trary obsta­cles. That’s the essence of what a game is. That’s what I’m argu­ing for in the book—is that we can actu­al­ly use this as a mod­el for a utopi­an form of exis­tence, where what we should try to do is to play games, cre­ate more games, and explore a land­scape of dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble games. This holds with­in it the poten­tial for utopia. But the key thing, then, about that under­stand­ing is that it does­n’t have to be com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed. We can be play­ing games in the real phys­i­cal world, and that would count as a form of vir­tu­al exis­tence, because—again to go back to the point I made about Harari—for me, what’s wrong with Harari is that he does­n’t acknowl­edge that some peo­ple don’t see the rules and con­straints on their behav­iour as pure­ly arbi­trary. Whereas when you’re play­ing a game, you are aware of the fact that they are arbitrary.

Mason: The way in which you dis­cuss vir­tu­al utopia: one instance is like a game as you just described, but you also describe it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty for world build­ing. I won­der if you could explain that sec­ond form of under­stand­ing of vir­tu­al utopia, and then bring those togeth­er to help us under­stand what a vir­tu­al utopia might actu­al­ly look like in practice.

Danaher: So you’re right, there are two argu­ments that I have for a vir­tu­al utopia. One is based on this game-like mod­el. The oth­er one is a slight­ly more polit­i­cal under­stand­ing of what a vir­tu­al utopia is. I look at the work of the philoso­pher Robert Nozick, who wrote a famous book back in the 70s called Anarchy, State, and Utopia. That book is famous for the Anarchy and State parts, but most peo­ple ignore the last part of the book, which is the Utopian part—which to me is actu­al­ly the most inter­est­ing part of the book because it’s the most nov­el part of it. He has this very inter­est­ing analy­sis of what a utopia is. What he says is that a utopi­an world is a world that is sta­ble. And a world that is sta­ble is a world in which every mem­ber of that world likes it more than any oth­er pos­si­ble world. Then he argues that you can’t pos­si­bly realise that utopia in the real world because every­one has dif­fer­ent under­stand­ings of what an ide­al form of exis­tence would look like. They have dif­fer­ent pref­er­ences, dif­fer­ent ways in which they will order what is valu­able and impor­tant to them.

Some peo­ple might pri­ori­tise playing—to use the game analogy—one kind of game over anoth­er kind of game. We can’t have a utopia in which every­one is forced to play chess. Or, to use a lit­er­ary illus­tra­tion, Hermann has this nov­el, The Glass Bead Game, where there’s this one sin­gle game that every­one is ori­ent­ed towards play­ing in soci­ety. This is the source of mean­ing and val­ue in that soci­ety. That does­n’t look utopi­an because some peo­ple have dif­fer­ent pref­er­ences. So Nozick says, ​“Well, you can’t realise a sta­ble world or utopi­an world. So what can you do?” He says, ​“What you can do is you can try to cre­ate a meta utopia.” What that means is you cre­ate a world build­ing mech­a­nism; a way in which peo­ple can cre­ate the kind of world that they pre­fer that match­es their pref­er­ences, and then some­how they’re kept iso­lat­ed from peo­ple with com­pet­ing pref­er­ences. He argues that a lib­er­tar­i­an, min­i­mal state is the meta-utopia, A min­i­mal state allows peo­ple to cre­ate these dif­fer­ent asso­ci­a­tions that have what­ev­er val­ue struc­ture they pre­fer, and they can live with­in those asso­ci­a­tions, and they can migrate between dif­fer­ent asso­ci­a­tions if they like. All the state does is it just tries to keep the peace between the dif­fer­ent asso­ci­a­tions. That’s what a meta-utopia is. It’s just it’s a world build­ing mech­a­nism for peo­ple to cre­ate the asso­ci­a­tions that they prefer.

What I argue in the book is that I think that’s an inter­est­ing pro­pos­al and mod­el of what utopi­an exis­tence would look like, but it faces some prac­ti­cal lim­i­ta­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly if we’re going to try and realise it in the real world, in the phys­i­cal world. Because there are geo­graph­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions of space—how are we going to cre­ate all these dif­fer­ent worlds? These dif­fer­ent asso­ci­a­tions? How are you actu­al­ly going to please the bound­aries between the dif­fer­ent asso­ci­a­tions? And what if one asso­ci­a­tion prefers to con­vert every­body else to their calls, their mis­sion­ar­ies or impe­ri­al­ists? That’s the lan­guage that Nozick uses in analy­sis. It seems it’s gonna be very prac­ti­cal­ly dif­fi­cult to do this. What I do suggest—and this is where I do rely heav­i­ly on the notion of a com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed mod­el of utopia, vir­tu­al utopianism—is that what we could do is that we could cre­ate dif­fer­ent worlds in a com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed envi­ron­ment, and then we don’t face the same kinds of phys­i­cal con­straints and con­cerns or prac­ti­cal dif­fi­cul­ties that we would face in Nozick’s vision of utopia. So I don’t see those two dif­fer­ent utopias—utopia games and the utopia of the vir­tu­al meta-utopia—as two dif­fer­ent things. I think they’re com­ple­men­tary visions of what vir­tu­al utopia is. You can play the games, you can also cre­ate these dif­fer­ent vir­tu­al com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed asso­ci­a­tions in which you can con­sort with like mind­ed people.

I should also add, though, that when I argue for this utopi­an vision—one in which we can build dif­fer­ent worlds, and we can play dif­fer­ent games—I don’t mean by that, that those are the only things that we do. It’s not that we only ever play games. There’s still lots of oth­er things that are open to you, in life. You can have friend­ships, you can have fam­i­lies, you can have dif­fer­ent kinds of social organ­i­sa­tions, you can per­form good moral deeds towards your neigh­bours. These things are all still acces­si­ble to us in this mod­el. It’s just that instead of work being the main focus or tra­di­tion­al polit­i­cal struc­tures being the main focus of our atten­tion, we focus on games instead.

Mason: If these are pos­si­ble utopias, then why don’t we start them right now, here, on ter­ra fir­ma? Here on ter­res­tri­al Earth? There are so many prob­lems that we could solve through gam­i­fy­ing cer­tain things, such as cli­mate change, that would enable us to con­tin­ue to live on this plan­et, rather than go off and live our Cyborg future out in space. I won­der, could what you’re prof­fer­ing in the book be applied to the real world as we live in it now with the chal­lenges that we’re fac­ing on the hori­zon? The biggest one being climate.

Danaher: To some extent, I think that what I’m propos­ing in the book is already hap­pen­ing. I use some exam­ples that sug­gest that the amount of time that peo­ple spend on leisure—playing com­put­er games is one illus­tra­tion of this—has increased, par­tic­u­lar­ly in young peo­ple over time, because they find it more dif­fi­cult to find employ­ment. So it’s already the case that there’s this kind of gam­i­fi­ca­tion of life tak­ing place. Whether it can be used to solve exis­ten­tial risks, like cli­mate change? You know, there are peo­ple who are exper­i­ment­ing with ways of har­ness­ing col­lec­tive intel­li­gence and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to solve some of these prob­lems. I think Thomas Malone from MIT wrote this inter­est­ing pop­u­lar book last year called Superminds, where he talks a lot about some of the ways in which his lab is try­ing to cre­ate these games that enable peo­ple to come up with pol­i­cy pro­pos­als to solve real world prob­lems, which have a gam­i­fied struc­ture to them. I think those pro­pos­als are interesting.

 One of the assump­tions that I do have in the book is that I think we’re going to increas­ing­ly rely on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and machines and automat­ing tech­nolo­gies to address some of these prob­lems over time. I spoke to a guy called Miles Brundage about this, actually—on my own pod­cast. He has this inter­est­ing paper, he wrote The Case for Conditional Optimism about AI. It’s very con­di­tion­al, but the one of the main points he makes is that AI can actu­al­ly help to solve glob­al coor­di­na­tion prob­lems that we have, includ­ing prob­lems around arms con­trol and cli­mate change. We can use gam­i­fied struc­tures to address some of these prob­lems, but I think it’s going to be part­ly a col­lab­o­ra­tion between humans and machines, and also increas­ing­ly some­thing that we out­source to machines.

Mason: In that case, Cyborg utopia or vir­tu­al utopia? If you had to pick, which one would you choose, John?

Danaher: I come down in favour of the vir­tu­al utopia, because I think it’s more prac­ti­cal­ly achiev­able in the short run. I think it also does con­tain some­thing that is some­thing gen­uine­ly post-work, and also allows for a seri­ous kind of human flour­ish­ing. That’s not some­thing that we’ve addressed in this con­ver­sa­tion. So let me just briefly say that when I ini­tial­ly present this notion of a utopia of games to peo­ple, they recoil from it because they think it’s some­thing triv­ial about that exis­tence. But I try to point out that actu­al­ly, there’s lots of good things that you can achieve with­in a game. You can per­form moral acts with­in a game-like struc­ture. You can achieve mas­tery over cer­tain skill sets. There are intrin­sic goods asso­ci­at­ed with the activ­i­ties that you per­form in a game. It also pro­vides this infi­nite land­scape of pos­si­bil­i­ty for us to explore, so it fits with this hori­zon­al mod­el of utopi­anism that I was out­lin­ing ear­li­er on.

I’m not, how­ev­er, com­plete­ly opposed to the cyborg utopia, as it has come out in this con­ver­sa­tion. There are cer­tain ways of becom­ing Cyborg-like that, I think, feed into this kind of vir­tu­al mod­el of utopia. It’s about new kinds of enter­tain­ment, as we were say­ing, and new forms of exis­tence, and not about dou­bling down on the worst fea­tures of human exis­tence. On bal­ance, though, I think that the cyborg utopia is less like­ly in the medi­um term, and so that’s why I favour the vir­tu­al utopia.

Mason: I mean these are the two things that link these forms of utopia. Is it real­ly the fact that a post-work soci­ety is going to give us so much more oppor­tu­ni­ty to explore a spec­trum of dif­fer­ence in the ways in which we live in the future?

Danaher: Yeah, I think I think that’s right. I like the way that you framed it—which I wish I now used in the book—which is that we have two pos­si­bil­i­ties: just exper­i­ment­ing with our bod­ies and minds and exper­i­ment­ing with the envi­ron­ments in which we live. One cor­re­sponds to the cyborg utopia, and one cor­re­sponds to the vir­tu­al utopia. Even though I am scep­ti­cal about the medi­um term prospects of the cyborg utopia, that does­n’t mean that we should­n’t pur­sue it. It’s part­ly an issue of pri­ori­ti­sa­tion of resources over time, and where we put things…so it can be put on the back burn­er to some extent.

Mason: How con­fi­dent do you feel that either of these utopias will ever be achieved?

Danaher: Yeah, look, that’s a great ques­tion. So, I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly feel con­fi­dent that either of them will be achieved. One thing I say in the book—and I’ve said a lot in inter­views that I’ve given—is that I’m not a tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ist, or fade­less. I don’t think these things are just nat­u­ral­ly going to hap­pen. These are things that will require polit­i­cal effort and col­lec­tive efforts. It’s not some­thing that’s going to hap­pen as a mat­ter of course. We’ll have to agi­tate for it, reform our soci­eties in favour of it. I had a very spe­cif­ic aim in this book, which was to eval­u­ate the dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble post-work utopias, because I felt that this was some­thing that was not being done in the lit­er­a­ture on automa­tion in the human future. There’s kind of an assump­tion that these things will be great and there are implied prin­ci­ples of eth­i­cal prin­ci­ples and val­ue prin­ci­ples that guide that claim, but they’re not made explic­it and they’re not sub­ject­ed to a kind of rig­or­ous analy­sis. That was what I was aim­ing to do in the book. The hope is that by artic­u­lat­ing a vision of what would be a good post-world utopia, this will pro­vide the moti­va­tion to think about how we can real­ly, prac­ti­cal­ly imple­ment it.

Mason: So real­ly, this is a book that is there to inspire a mul­ti­tude of pos­si­bil­i­ties for a post-work future, to encour­age peo­ple not to be so pes­simistic of the idea of human obso­les­cence in the workplace?

Danaher: Yeah, that’s exact­ly right. So it’s a book that’s try­ing to moti­vate and inspire peo­ple towards a pos­i­tive vision of the future.

Mason: John Danaher, thank you for your time.

Danaher: Thank you.

Mason: Thank you to John for shar­ing his insights into the devel­op­ments that might mas­sive­ly trans­form the world of work. You can find out more by pur­chas­ing his book Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work, avail­able now.

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