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Imagine: What if we developed digital nations untethered to geography?
19 Plays1 year ago
How do low income countries affected by climate change imagine their futures? How do they overcome these twin challenges? Will all nations eventually choose or be forced to go digital?
Imagine a World is a podcast exploring a range of plausible and positive futures with advanced AI, produced by the Future of Life Institute. We interview the creators of 8 diverse and thought provoking imagined futures that we received as part of the worldbuilding contest FLI ran last year.
In the fourth episode of Imagine A World, we explore the fictional worldbuild titled 'Digital Nations'.
Conrad Whitaker and Tracey Kamande join Guillaume Riesen on 'Imagine a World' to talk about their worldbuild, 'Digital Nations', which they created with their teammate, Dexter Findley. All three worldbuilders were based in Kenya while crafting their entry, though Dexter has just recently moved to the UK. Conrad is a Nairobi-based startup advisor and entrepreneur, Dexter works in humanitarian aid, and Tracey is the Co-founder of FunKe Science, a platform that promotes interactive learning of science among school children.
As the name suggests, this world is a deep dive into virtual communities. It explores how people might find belonging and representation on the global stage through digital nations that aren't tied to any physical location. This world also features a fascinating and imaginative kind of artificial intelligence that they call 'digital persons'. These are inspired by biological brains and have a rich internal psychology. Rather than being trained on data, they're considered to be raised in digital nurseries. They have a nuanced but mostly loving relationship with humanity, with some even going on to found their own digital nations for us to join.
In an incredible turn of events, last year the South Pacific state of Tuvalu was the first to “go virtual” in response to sea levels threatening the island nation's physical territory. This happened in real life just months after it was written into this imagined world in our worldbuilding contest, showing how rapidly ideas that seem ‘out there’ can become reality. Will all nations eventually go digital? And might AGIs be assimilated, 'brought up' rather than merely trained, as 'digital people', citizens to live communally alongside humans in these futuristic states?
Please note: This episode explores the ideas created as part of FLI’s worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we want. The ideas present in these imagined worlds and in our podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions.
Explore this worldbuild: https://worldbuild.ai/digital-nations
The podcast is produced by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a non-profit dedicated to guiding transformative technologies for humanity's benefit and reducing existential risks. If you would like to learn more, or are interested in collaborating with the teams featured in our episodes, please email [email protected].
You can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projects
Media and concepts referenced in the episode:
https://www.tuvalu.tv/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Kenya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World https://thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Imagine a World'
00:00:00
Speaker
on this episode of Imagine a World. In this story, something we've already seen some evidence by, climate change may be compromising or risking certain island nations in the Pacific, where they now use connection to their land and who want to maintain a sense of community but don't have a land to assign that community to, now start seeing if they can use the digital nation as a represented and recognized member of the global arena.
00:00:33
Speaker
Welcome to Imagine a World, a mini-series from the Future of Life Institute. This podcast is based on a contest we ran to gather ideas from around the world about what a more positive future might look like in 2045. We hope the diverse ideas you're about to hear will spark discussions and maybe even collaborations. But you should know that the ideas in this podcast are not to be taken as FLI endorsed positions. And now, over to our host, Pyeong Reason.
Vision of 'Digital Nations'
00:01:14
Speaker
Welcome to Imagine a World. I'm your host, Guillaume Reason. In this episode, we'll be exploring a world called Digital Nations, which was one of the third place winners of FLI's world building contest. As the name suggests, this world does a deep dive into virtual communities. It explores how people might find belonging and representation on the global stage through digital nations that aren't tied to any physical location.
00:01:36
Speaker
This world also features a fascinating and imaginative kind of artificial intelligence that they call digital persons. These are inspired by biological brains and have a rich internal psychology. Rather than being trained on data, they're considered to be raised in digital nurseries. They have a nuanced but mostly loving relationship with humanity, with some even going on to found their own digital nations for us to join.
00:01:59
Speaker
The promise of this world to me is that new technologies might provide new opportunities to bring people together. The challenges of safely navigating new kinds of intelligence may offer a chance to know ourselves and each other more deeply, leading to wiser and gentler societies.
Meet the Creators
00:02:15
Speaker
This world was created by a team of three from Nairobi, Kenya. Our guests today are Tracy Shundu and Konrad Whitaker. Tracy is a science educator with a background in chemistry. She's the co-founder and CEO of FunKey Science, which creates affordable at-home science kits for kids. Konrad is a startup advisor and entrepreneur who works with startups in the clean tech, talent management, and FinTech sectors. Their third teammate, Dexter Findley, is an author, filmmaker, and photographer who works in the humanitarian sector.
00:02:44
Speaker
Well, hey, Conrad and Tracy, thanks so much for joining us. It's great to be here. Hi, how are you? Quite well, thanks. How did the three of you come to work together on this? There's you two, and Dexter Findley is your third teammate who's not here with us today. Yeah, that's right. I don't know how it really started, but I had previously read some of Max Techmark's books, who heads FLI. And then through that, found out about this competition. And so then I reached out to a comrade in arms
00:03:14
Speaker
Dexter, who's been a good friend of mine since the first day I arrived in Kenya back in 2014. And we have a lot of shared interests. And so we very much vibed on this topic. We spent a lot of time building this world, but we felt something was clearly missing. So we went out to Tracy here to join us to provide some extra perspective and some of her acting skills. Maybe I'll let Tracy introduce herself.
00:03:40
Speaker
So when Konrad first approached me to help them out with this project, of course, Konrad being not just a regular friend, but a friend of the entire family, he reached out and asked, would you mind doing some of these things and helping us out? And I felt it was wonderful experience to learn something different and something new, and also to challenge myself.
00:04:05
Speaker
Yeah. Can you each say a little bit about your backgrounds and kind of what brought you to where you are today? Yeah. In a professional capacity. I've been in, in, in, in, well, I guess Africa for nine out of 10 years now, um, uh, primarily working in the startup ecosystem, uh, working, uh, with, with, with young companies and helping them scale. And I've always had this, uh, kind of intellectual or curious, uh, um, attachment to,
00:04:33
Speaker
to I guess the future and to various philosophical topics. And that's how I found myself in this reading some of these books that connected to this competition just to introduce Dexter as well.
00:04:50
Speaker
Dexter is truly a Renaissance man and a very good friend, but he's very multifaceted. He's a movie maker, he's a self-published author, widely read, an archaeologist, an astronomer.
00:05:06
Speaker
And I think, yeah, he has very colorful background and he's a good friend to both Tracy and the family and me and my family. And he's just moved back to the UK with his family, leaving us here in Kenya. But that's kind of a bit of the context. And for me,
00:05:28
Speaker
My background is around science, so I love chemistry particularly. So a lot of my work and a lot of my learning has been industrial chemistry, environmental chemistry, building around that. But from all that work around science, I sort of also wanted to speak to our science community within Kenya and
00:05:51
Speaker
That's what prompted us now with my co-founder back in university, sort of create a system and a space where people can speak about science. But we found out that we don't have a lot of adult people listening to science talk. So we decided, you know, why not go a bit lower and sort of influence younger minds.
00:06:10
Speaker
because they haven't formed an opinion that science is difficult and science is hard. So that brings me to now a company which you created was called Funky Science. So sort of making science fun for children and making it more relatable to them so that they don't have the solution that science is hard or difficult, but also manageable.
Challenges in World Building
00:06:29
Speaker
I'm curious to hear some of the things that you both learned as part of working on this contest and going through the process of world building for it.
00:06:37
Speaker
It's hard. And I think the way the structure was created where you had to have a timeline that I think was kind of completed at the very end, literally the day before. And to make a world that's consistent every year and plausible and aspirational was tricky. And certainly we wanted to provide the kind of outside perspective, perhaps a bit more
00:07:03
Speaker
non-Western-centric perspective. Part of the project was looking at various data points that might not be top of mind to other audiences and note those changes. So these would be the undercurrent events that were just as fundamental and impactful and important. But it was, of course, because they're undercurrent, harder to think about. So really spending the time to force oneself to think about it was a bit of teeth pulling, I think, that all of us experienced.
00:07:30
Speaker
Um, but I, you know, it's, it's something that I think we feel quite happy with. Ultimately, we look back on this project with some fondness and some pleasure. Um, some of the details we have forgotten. And so it was a pleasure kind of rereading our world in preparation for this podcast.
00:07:45
Speaker
And definitely for me, it's learning also something new that I didn't know of or understand or even wanted to put the energy into understanding. But working with Conrad and Dexter sort of also brought to light different things that I didn't understand and also sort of align some of the assumptions I had. You know, when you don't want to immerse yourself into something new, then you just assume it is something difficult and I do not want to think about it. But working with Conrad and Dexter also actually forced me to, you know,
00:08:15
Speaker
leave that comfort zone of I will live with this assumption and just move on with my life and which is not a very intentional way of living and which is also how a majority of people live but sort of also force you to read more, learn more, you know, question more, not just stay with whatever knowledge that you have at the moment but also expand and learn more about
00:08:39
Speaker
different concepts, different ideas and also broadened also my view on some of the subject matter that we were discussing which was, well, it was heavy but it was something new and I enjoyed that part of learning it. That's so cool.
UN Recognition and Digital Nations
00:09:05
Speaker
The first digital nation in this world is Tonga, a Polynesian kingdom whose digital statehood is recognized by the UN after the majority of its people are forced to flee rising seas. This opens the door to other digital collectives, also seeking global recognition. The story of Tonga turned out to be incredibly prescient. Less than a year after our winners were announced, the nearby island nation of Tuvalu revealed plans to become the world's first digital nation. The first part of its land that will be lost to rising seas has already been digitally preserved.
00:09:33
Speaker
This is a bittersweet validation for the world that Tracy Conrad and Dexter have imagined. I wanted to hear more about how the digital nations they conceived of impacted the lives of the people in their world. So I'd like to spend a little while talking about what this world that you've imagined looks like in the future. What is it like to live in your world? Like how do people find fulfillment around 2045 or so?
00:09:55
Speaker
In some ways, the human condition is probably no different in 2045 as it is today. There's still these ego problems that we might face that people still have problems. This isn't a utopia. I think that's something that would never really happen. And so I think there's some problems we can't really predict that people in this world are engaging with, but in part through
00:10:19
Speaker
the effects of technology and those types of innovations, the ability to find and maintain relationships continues to improve. And I think this is just something that might not be too surprising or too out of the box. We already have begun
00:10:34
Speaker
bridging people's communication channels. Right now, you're in California, we're in Kenya. I don't think we'll ever replace that fully in a metaverse, complete artificial reality type way with avatars. There's always going to be an umbrella over physical reality and we still need that physicality. But in terms of connecting with people,
00:10:56
Speaker
and overcoming those barriers, lubricating that through technology, I think, allows us to maintain various communities more easily than we might today. When the pandemic hit, I was in my apartment for many days, for many months, and I felt like I could be like someone Buenos Aires. I could be like someone in Ontario. The apartment itself is pretty standard, and yet
00:11:21
Speaker
in 2045, I'd hope and expect that we can bridge some of those gaps to those people more directly. And from my understanding, technology sort of makes the world limitless. So you can sort of have more
00:11:37
Speaker
I'd say interactions but more knowledge and understanding from one's point to another. If I was to allude Konrad's point of corona and how during the lockdown there was a lot of limited movement and limited association but using technology to bridge that gap brings a sort of
00:11:59
Speaker
I'd call it community in quotes, but still removes the whole aspect of, I guess, a bit of loneliness from everything. I think it's nice to imagine, like, technology bringing us all together and providing this new scaffolding for social interactions. And that's kind of one central thing in your world, is these digital nations. So I'm curious to hear a little more about how you imagined that working, like, how many digital nations are there and how many would the average person be a member of?
00:12:29
Speaker
In terms of a digital nation right now, do we have 193 nations, give or take, those secessionist movements we might not want to count or not?
00:12:39
Speaker
globally today, I'm not sure there's going to be as defined number in 2045. Perhaps we could say this about the same number of digital nations. I think the reason is, is that it's a bit more of a spectrum. So right now you might have Facebook community groups or you know, some other types of collectives today, you might be in clubs and they have their website, you might be part of the rotary club.
00:13:01
Speaker
And what happens is just like how companies that say you know facebook or google would have extreme amounts of power where their causal power among their societies might be more than the local municipal governments. In a similar way some of these clubs that are now being more and more organized by.
00:13:24
Speaker
enabled by technology start to attain more power, causal power of organization and so forth. And then what happens is in this story, something we've already seen some evidence by climate change, maybe compromising or risking certain island nations in the Pacific, where they now use connection to their land and who want to maintain a sense of community, but don't have a land to assign that community to.
00:13:51
Speaker
now start seeing if they can use the digital nation as a represented and recognized member of the global arena. And so I think that doesn't seem too far fetched.
00:14:06
Speaker
So you get like an old traditional way of seeing a community. And because of a loss of land, the international arena says, you know what, we have to do right by this. And so let's recognize, let's say, we had put Tonga, but it might be Tuvalu it seems to recognize. And these ones, this community will have the power of issuing passports, having their own currency, but will not necessarily be constrained by land.
Community Identity and Citizenship
00:14:33
Speaker
And in that way, we feel more and more
00:14:35
Speaker
we see potentially that more and more communities will want that same kind of freedom, that kind of independence from the land to which they were born and be able to move between citizenships and have different types of sovereignties. So at that point in 2045, I think 200 might be too many digital nations that are kind of causally powerful. I think instead of seeing it as an either-or, there are more just various types of clubs that have power
00:15:04
Speaker
where people come either register, they apply to, they get there and then they can leave because they're not constrained so much by the resources that say a given nation state today has. So it's easier to come and go and to share in more of them so you can be kind of a citizen of more than one digital nation.
00:15:23
Speaker
One thing I don't want to let slide without commenting on is Tuvalu and how I think this was after your submission, right? They have become the world's first digital nation or are aiming to. They're scanning all of their land and getting a digital representation of it and ensuring that all the people who live there have a connection to that land before it's threatened by climate change. Had you heard of that in the works before you submitted your world?
00:15:48
Speaker
We had not. Actually, we learned about this from you. And I thought that was pretty neat. I think neat is an understatement. I mean, yeah, I was watching this video. They have a website, Tuvalu.tv. And you can see that, you know, there's like this man giving an address at a podium and it slowly zooms out and you realize he's on a beach. And then there's these little subtle graphical artifacts. It's really well done. And you start to realize the whole thing is a digital representation of the landscape, you know, and he's like,
00:16:14
Speaker
there's water rising around him. It's very dramatic. But yeah, it's really strikingly on point, given what you imagined. And it's also, unfortunately, pretty heartbreaking. Since we don't want that to happen, right? We want a different origin story for digital nations, but I guess...
00:16:31
Speaker
If I'm thinking about it, it was not the vision at the time, but it's sad that it's happened quite fast, but also slowly becoming a reality that we should also start looking into that it's also happening that fast. So it's a two-sided sort of scenario. And well, it's also sad losing your land, something that you've been used to, that you're familiar with. And then now the other side is also now adopting something new.
Climate Change Impact
00:17:09
Speaker
This world takes major challenges like climate change and inequality very seriously. While great progress is eventually made in addressing them, that progress is initially slow and uneven. The world's timeline is of course constrained to end in 2045, but it's clear that this team doesn't believe in quick fixes. Inequality in particular doesn't really see much improvement until digital persons begin to suggest new approaches to solving it.
00:17:33
Speaker
I was curious to explore Tracy and Conrad's perspectives on dealing with climate change and on the roles of digital persons in shaping their world.
00:17:42
Speaker
So I'd like to take a while to talk about some of the challenges that your world faced along the way to its end point. So one massive feature, obviously, is climate change, as that's kind of why you have these digital nations start to emerge. You have Tonga being threatened by sea level rise. Suddenly, the majority of Tongans find themselves living outside of the country. And so they have to make this move to become a digital nation that the UN recognizes
00:18:08
Speaker
Your world fights back pretty hard against climate change. You have a lot of alternative fuel sources. You cut down at factory farms. I think you even have reflective materials you inject into clouds to try to amp up the greenhouse gas reflection kind of stuff. A lot of these solutions can really only be put into place immediately by highly resourced countries. So one thing I'm curious about is whether your perspective being from within Africa affects the way you think about climate change and how to address it.
00:18:32
Speaker
I mean, I think there's more and more kind of awareness of this need to plan for adaptation in Africa. I think I live in the best city in the world, Nairobi. And that's partly because of its wonderful climate. It's very temperate. It never gets above 85 really, maybe 90 occasionally, and then never below 60.
00:18:52
Speaker
in its winter, quote unquote. And so it's a bit kind of easy to ignore, unfortunately, the effects of climate change. We do have some less predictability when it comes to rain, but just you drive eight hours north, we have had what, four or five years of extreme drought. And so I think there is already some kind of humanitarian reactions and quote unquote demand to address these problems.
00:19:20
Speaker
It certainly won't be enough. It's certainly a problem. But I think I just have to say that the theme that I want to continually come back to is that problems are solvable. It's a real problem. It's not something to put away and ignore. But because it's solvable, it's something to address and take seriously. But still be hopeful that we can adapt.
00:19:45
Speaker
Because just to add in, I feel policy-wise, some of the things were very slow in terms of implementing anything around climate change. I think the notion was very relaxed, like some of these effects, we don't see them, we don't feel them, so why should we try and change anything? But as Konrad has mentioned, for the past four years, I'd say even areas around the central highlands of Kenya have been quite dry.
00:20:11
Speaker
And then you'll find certain areas where these changes in even quantities of water in the lake and rainfall and lakes merging. So I think there's a scenario where two lakes in the Great Rift are sort of merging. That's Lake Barringo and Lake Bocoria and that would actually have effects on the ecosystem and
00:20:33
Speaker
you know a lot of people are now speaking about some of these changes that are happening and we have lots of now especially speaking about it geologists environmental scientists actually trying to highlight some of these changes within the country so that also people are aware so that it doesn't seem like
00:20:50
Speaker
or it's extreme temperatures in ABC sort of country in the north and it's not happening here but there are actually certain changes that have been happening. So even the discussion around the lakes on the Great Rift, I tell you that's a conversation that happened maybe about four years ago and now it's coming to the forefront and people are now speaking about it, speaking about the changes in also of course rainfall because even for many African countries and Kenya not being left out,
00:21:17
Speaker
we rely a lot on rainfall for our agriculture. So that means now we can provide food to feed our populations because of those changes in the weather patterns and temperature, even seasons. I think part of a travesty here also is that the vast majority of the power generated in Kenya is from renewable sources.
00:21:37
Speaker
hydro and geothermal. We have the Great Rift Valley, so we have plenty of source here. So we're really not the contributors to this problem here. And it's kind of a sad note there. Yeah, that is interesting.
00:21:54
Speaker
Well, your world has different methods of trying to deal with these changes that do impact the ability to farm and
Economic Growth and Challenges
00:22:01
Speaker
things like that. You have advanced agriculture that develops and decentralized manufacturing, free trade and open borders through some parts of Africa. And you portray this building wealth in a lot of African countries, but you also point out this doesn't keep pace with rapid population growth in these areas.
00:22:17
Speaker
and it doesn't immediately move everyone towards increased equality. So I'm curious if you could say a little bit more about what life in those countries would look like during this period of growth to meet this challenge.
00:22:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a few points maybe worth highlighting. First off, population growth continues, but I think the overall rate by 2045 starts to slow down. The absolute value of wealth, quote unquote, goes up, even if it doesn't particularly mitigate inequality. But I do think in our story, we do say that like Conco, I don't know when it's like 2038 is now declared extreme poverty free.
00:22:53
Speaker
And that in part is generated by a lot of things like liberalization of economies, improved trade, improved governance. But in terms of a lot of the problems that we see today, we'll get rid of malaria by then. And a lot of these other tropical diseases for the very worst off, that's going to happen in the next few decades. So yeah, it's not going to bring things to parity.
00:23:19
Speaker
There's still going to be an increase in wealth, but I still think there's going to be some distribution of that wealth in a way that still helps the worst off in society. A more equitable distribution of the wealth to different African countries or nations. I agree with making also the
00:23:39
Speaker
trade in Africa borderless because the reality is there are barriers left, right and center, but in the creation of the world and making it, it was 2013, yes, and making the open borders because that's a conversation that has been going on separately. So it's creating a sort of idea around that borderless travel, borderless trade.
00:24:04
Speaker
is essential also to Africa's growth because with borderless travel and borderless trade come also exchange of ideas and that still creates an improvement in everything that happens on the continent. Yeah, and that fits in very well with this theme of kind of weakening the power of physical nations and the limits they have on people's movements and behaviors.
00:24:27
Speaker
One way that you address this growing inequality in your world is eventually we have these digital persons, which we'll get into exactly what those are in a moment, but basically they start to advance our moral knowledge as well as our other areas of knowledge like technical, scientific, whatnot.
00:24:42
Speaker
and they start to encourage us to really put effort into making the world more equitable. I'm just curious what you imagine it could look like to advance moral knowledge. Could you imagine an example of how this kind of influence from a digital person could play out? I'm definitely, I think, offending many philosophers when I'm saying these things, and this is probably not as legitimate as it sounds, but I think maybe the solution that these digital persons bring forth are sometimes
00:25:10
Speaker
a kind of third way between a conflict when you say which, how do we address, you know, the trolley problem here, and in a way that's actually more pleasing than either of the two existing exceptions. So that's kind of maybe an example of what would be nice to see in terms of moral advancement.
Role of Digital Persons
00:25:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't think we have some of those answers now, but I think that would be like an example of how moral discourse could be advanced.
00:25:36
Speaker
Maybe it could be something that the human human could aspire to do or to be like, probably. Yeah, and part of it is also how do you encourage maybe more moral behavior among certain types of people. So it's not just the what is moral, but also the distribution of that idea. Yeah, interesting.
00:25:55
Speaker
Well, let's get into what these digital persons are. So talking about advanced AI systems is getting increasingly difficult because they're developing so quickly and our concepts of what they're capable of are constantly being challenged. In your world, AI systems like we know them today, like chat GPT and Dolly, turn out to be fundamentally pretty limited. So it takes a whole different technological approach to computation to really produce a truly kind of intelligent system that starts to resemble us.
00:26:23
Speaker
So, while systems like Chachibiti, Dali, in the future, whatever comes of them might become generally capable, something we might call an AGI, which can do almost any task as well as a human, they're still not kind of truly human-like in this deeper way. And in order to reach what you're calling digital persons, which have this kind of vivid internal experience and human-like nature, you have to build off of what you're calling non-van Numen architectures. So, can you say a little bit about what that looks like and why you think that could be true?
00:26:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's a complex and interesting question. And I think, like you're saying, semantics and definitions, I think probably matter. To me, the difference between what we have with the DALIs and the chat GPTs today is that, yeah, fundamentally, they can extract the most interesting combinatoric outputs that you have
00:27:16
Speaker
based on its training modules, and you can have these interesting new arts and pictures that are generated by this, but ultimately it's constrained. So the test I would give is like, okay, give an existing AI all the knowledge we had until 1905, a written thing, and can it come up with general relativity? Can it conjecture? Can it dream things that doesn't come from a statistical or stochastic output of its training model?
00:27:42
Speaker
And I don't know what that is. I don't know what the creativity module is in humans that does this. But the von Neumann reference there is something I certainly wouldn't want to put a bet on. But I think we just had to find some sort of trope that some sort of invention or discovery would come out.
00:27:59
Speaker
Well, so speaking of these digital persons and what their experience is like, I really enjoyed how your world shifted language from AI training to kind of AI upbringing. And you really leaned into these internal psychological lives of these digital persons. They need to be kind of raised in a careful and specific way in these digital nurseries. You say that we've tried different ways of upbringing them. And if you have a highly controlling environment, it actually creates stunted or even kind of suicidal digital persons.
00:28:40
Speaker
But yeah, no, I think I'm afraid of these kind of totalitarian tropes about the future where there's a lot of surveillance. These are the types of narratives that I think are already kind of shared. And the idea here is that, no, we're just error correcting at a higher, more sophisticated level. And the best way to error correct our own thoughts or preconceived notions is to have a kind of an open discourse to be able to do that. And that's how we advance our own knowledge.
00:28:55
Speaker
I was curious why you think that this kind of liberal upbringing would be the most effective for raising a digital person.
00:29:10
Speaker
when we can lean into our disagreements. The moment things are more suppressed, the moment things are more controlled, even as us school children, we then might want to disobey, we might want to rebel, and that becomes more dangerous. So the kind of bet we take in this world is that, no, you let these agents be themselves, and you put them in environments that allow them to have
00:29:35
Speaker
discourse with other agents, whether it's other digital persons or it's humans themselves. And they'll make mistakes. They'll learn from those mistakes. And because they have this freedom to pursue, to create, to discover, to invent new knowledge, to discover new knowledge, they now find some sort of contentment and can build relationships in this kind of social milieu. Yeah.
00:29:57
Speaker
So as you're talking about this, it's always that there's kind of an analogy, which makes sense since these are based on human-like brain systems. There's an analogy between what is good for these systems and the way that they're brought up and what you believe is good for human children and human people when they're brought up.
00:30:13
Speaker
It's a really interesting angle there where raising these digital people could give us a quantitative test bed to figure out what the truly best way to raise a human-like entity would be. And I'm curious how you could see that interacting with the way that we actually raise our human children. And specifically, I'm curious of how education or the way we interact with kids might change based on what we learn from these digital persons.
00:30:39
Speaker
Honestly, when you cultivate a sort of space of freedom where it's safe for you to express yourself, to speak out your opinions, then you get a more open sort of society where people are even able to come up with ideas and come up with solutions with problems much faster than when you create a scenario where it is strict, closed and my way or the highway.
00:31:04
Speaker
So it sort of breeds resentment towards, let's say the big guy or the boss or the one who runs the show and sort of brings this notion that if, if I am wrong, then there's something wrong with me. But if, if I want to express myself and I want to express a different opinion from yours, it is not that I am fighting you, but it's that we can have different opinions. We can have different thoughts and we can still coexist.
00:31:31
Speaker
I have kind of a darker twist on that question, which is, what if you imagine that raising these digital people in a really strict, controlling, oppressive environment was best for them and they came out as more effective tools or entities in the world? Would that make you reconsider how we should be raising our children or running our societies as humans?
00:31:54
Speaker
Well, I like to say that I'm open to being corrected, kind of on principle, that if a better explanation presents itself, it doesn't make sense for me to reject it out of some sort of...
00:32:06
Speaker
egotistical attachment to a prior explanation. I think it's just hard for me to believe that scenario. And, and yeah, so I think, but it would be something for me to look into and to try to understand where I'm wrong, where we're wrong, and why that that is the case.
00:32:28
Speaker
I think I'm fearing a little bit that it's like these fairy tales where they say, you know, choice is what makes you unhappy. Let me just remove your choice. And so, you know, where you don't have to think, now we have this brave new world kind of environment, so that all problems are gone.
00:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, maybe they're happy in some way, but maybe not the environment or the world that I'd like to live in. And then I would assume that if they had the full kind of awareness that they would probably argue or many of them not to be in that environment either. Yeah.
00:33:04
Speaker
I want to go back to your video piece where Tracy plays that digital person, Mama Akuli, and she's kind of trying to recruit people for her digital nation. I'm curious why digital persons would want people to join their nations, and I'm also curious what you imagine they'd be like as leaders, like would they have any particular strengths or shortcomings?
00:33:23
Speaker
My thoughts when I was doing this was I'm welcoming people to join my community, to join us, to grow differently, to see a different perspective of the future, to be part of a place that has limitless possibilities and limitless things that you could do.
00:33:42
Speaker
I think these digital persons are nurtured by humans and a theme sometimes that we represent in the story is that they're kind of our children. And so there's a bit of this kind of upward respect to those that kind of birth them, for lack of a better word.
00:33:59
Speaker
And so in part also with their development of moral knowledge, there's this kind of desire for them to be able to involve other moral beings in a kind of communal way. What's really interesting in that Mama Akili video is that it's about persuasion. It's not about coercion. It's about this is the argument that I'm presenting, I believe, with the agency that I have.
00:34:24
Speaker
that this is, I think, a good thing. I'll let you decide whether or not to join because you have your own agency as well. Yeah, I like Tracy's portrayal of it as kind of like this passion. The digital person is kind of an ideologue that has come to this moral view and it just wants to bring other people along with it if they want to join.
00:34:53
Speaker
This team's exploration of digital nations was very timely, and not only because of Tuvalu's announcement. Shortly after FLI's contest ended, American investor Balaji Srinivasan also published a book called The Network State. In this book he outlines how a unified digital community might go about gaining credibility as a state on the global stage. I was curious how this team had arrived at the concept of digital nations right as these conversations were beginning.
00:35:17
Speaker
I also wanted to hear how they felt their portrayal of digital persons related to conversations already ongoing around the future and impact of today's AI systems.
00:35:26
Speaker
So I'd like to take a while now to talk about different ways that some of the ideas in your world are currently being thought about and portrayed in popular media and how that compares to what you've come up with. So the first obvious one is the concept of a digital nation, which I hadn't heard about before reading your world. You mentioned that there has been this portrayal of network states by Balaji, but you read that afterwards. I'm curious, what was your original inspiration for digital nations? Like what went into that concept?
00:35:55
Speaker
Yeah, digital nations to us was kind of a natural organic outcrop. And ultimately how we organize are probably around the social constructs that we accept. If you're in a gang, maybe that gang provides some sort of governmental services. They have the monopoly on violence. If you're in a more sophisticated nation state, they have that monopoly. And then they provide the firefighting services and so forth.
00:36:23
Speaker
And yet you might be in the country and you might feel limited. And what we do now with civil societies, we organize and we organize. And my mother, as an example, you know, connected very much on Facebook over the past couple of years with others. And I'm sure this isn't a story that's unique to me. And then, you know, that she she dove into politics.
00:36:42
Speaker
from twenty sixteen onwards and you know that that's provided a sense of community and so the point for us was not to stop there what is the next thing what are the next instruments of power what do these collective groups how can they change things causally.
00:36:59
Speaker
And what would be the epitome of the most powerful type of organization you know one might say it's a company the other might say it's a country. So we would just expect that more and more of these digitally organized communities start sharing their own maybe coins digital coins that.
00:37:16
Speaker
can only be used and transacted with other members of that community. Now you get some representation or acknowledgment from other parties. And so now you're seen as legitimate in some way. And this is how the nation state community accepts those from islands that are submerging in this story. And so yeah, it was just this natural progression that led to this idea of digital nations. And then we didn't continue. And I think Balaji continued. Yeah.
00:37:46
Speaker
I'm curious to hear from Tracy about perceptions of DALI and GPT. I mean, it sounds like the digital nations concept, I mean, it's kind of just starting to become something anybody is thinking about. And so it's sort of in its infancy and it makes sense that people might be a little more dismissive of its potential impact and value. But we're really starting to see this shift where I've seen a lot more respect and interest in systems like DALI and Chat GPT.
00:38:11
Speaker
And I'm curious particularly about how younger people are seeing these systems. Have you heard any discussion among your students or kids that you are working with? It's interesting that you asked that because from what I've seen maybe locally, I wouldn't say it's younger students talking about it. It's more of conversations happening around universities and also how students are interacting with some of these tools.
00:38:40
Speaker
to do tasks that they've been given or assignments. I've had this especially around in universities a lot. High school and maybe elementary students or primary here have not had that conversation, but in university it's more of round now writing.
00:38:59
Speaker
So what essays are being done using some of these tools, even sort of setting an exam and then getting the AI to mark the exam for you. So we sort of even tried some of these things of asking and setting and pushing the limits of what it can create for us.
00:39:16
Speaker
I had never thought about that angle of the educators and the parents using these tools themselves and their teaching. I love that flip. That's really funny. I can now imagine like a whole classroom where the students are submitting AI written articles and the teacher is judging them with AI as a teacher. Imagine.
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how to encourage young people to engage with science, do you have any thoughts about how we might be able to use these systems to help us do that? Like how can we actually engage people and the types of people who aren't necessarily engaged with certain topics, like in STEM, for example, using these tools?
00:39:56
Speaker
So as I mentioned, the danger of some of these tools is of course not encouraging thinking, but you could also still use them to push different thought processes. So prompt and ask as often as you can. So it would be around creating programs that create that push for creative thinking, that push for working together.
00:40:19
Speaker
So one thing that we have seen with some of the things that we do, especially around the programs that we're creating now, is also encouraging that sort of think outside what you're doing. Question everything and don't just leave it at where it is. So as much as these tools give us an easy and simpler answer,
00:40:41
Speaker
question the answer at the end of the day and make sure that is this the best answer that I've gotten out of this, or is this the best outcome that I've gotten out of this system? Because the fear continues being that if we continue delegating our thinking to some of these tools, then at the end of the day, are we breeding more zombies? So the audio cut out a little bit there, but to clarify, Tracy said, creating more zombies.
00:41:08
Speaker
It's really triggered a lot of questions with me and my co-founder. And we're really sort of sitting down and thinking deeper and being a bit more critical and a bit more doing things with a lot more purpose and intention.
00:41:24
Speaker
so that at the end of the day we are not just telling you okay we created this and we can do this what do you think but more of moving together with some of our participants in our program so asking questions to some of the girls who do the program are you comfortable when you do this are you
00:41:42
Speaker
feeling out of place when you do this? What happens? What feelings do you get when you're doing this? Do you feel that by using this tool, your work has been simplified, probing further so that we don't just leave everything up in the air? And I think by that, I'm getting that it will also create a comfortable space where there's more expression, there's more communication, there's more collaboration.
00:42:09
Speaker
And we could also just incorporate both tools, so practical learning and then just using any of these AI tools to just help nurture education and nurture growth.
00:42:19
Speaker
Yeah. I really like that point that you made about how it could encourage you to continue questioning and to check the answer that you get more. Because that made me suddenly realize, I mean, this is not a new problem. We've had textbooks, which have just been really worse versions of these tools that also have their own errors in them and misrepresentations. And no one has really thought very much about teaching students to question textbooks, but maybe they should. And maybe this will just be a forcing mechanism
00:42:46
Speaker
that'll encourage us to really teach these deeper knowledge findings and learning skills that'll be necessary to ensure the quality of the information they're getting later in life.
00:43:00
Speaker
One other thing that I really enjoyed in your world is this whole kind of psychological experience of digital persons. So again, these digital persons are like somewhat sci-fi fantasy. They're not necessarily just an extension of chat GPT kind of thing. There's some imagined future entity that is somewhat like us, but is digital. And I found exploring what that could be like for them just really fascinating. Like one thing you mentioned is that
00:43:26
Speaker
They don't necessarily want to upgrade themselves super quickly and become scary, as some people imagine an advanced AI system might, because it can impact their sense of self. So suddenly becoming a different computational system would be kind of a shock to them, and maybe they would be slower to modify themselves than you'd expect.
00:43:45
Speaker
You also mentioned that the speed at which they experience things has some kind of unchangeable limit to it. So if they start processing information really, really fast, then they actually get some form of anxiety where they don't like this experience. And so these are kind of psychological limits on the development of AI that I found really interesting. Where did these kinds of ideas come from?
00:44:07
Speaker
Great question. I think we had to find a solution that kind of mitigated the risk of this runaway computation explosion, which would now create something that's vastly different than a digital person.
Psychology of Digital Persons
00:44:26
Speaker
And somehow, this is kind of nascent belief, I think, in our world that these digital persons need to be sentient. And so there's something like what it's like to be a digital person.
00:44:37
Speaker
And just the way it might be very painful for us to really just have to be cognitively thinking deeply on some problem after a while we want to take a break. Or if you know, we take some sort of hallucinogenic or some some mind altering substance that really accelerates things and we now get a panic attack or we get anxiety, because maybe our senses are extremely heightened.
00:45:01
Speaker
The analogy was just brought over into the psychology of a digital person where we say, okay, now we're just going to accelerate your compute or you're going to have to just compute more. Then to me, if digital persons aren't analogous to people, they'd also have and gravitate towards a comfort zone where the amount that they have to learn every day can become uncomfortable if it's too much.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting to think about the range of experiences they could have to like the idea of kind of a data consuming digital person or maybe there's like a slacker digital person who only does like a million computations a second or whatever it is because they like to relax and listen to jazz at 10X speed between every thought. Yeah. Are there any examples of like psychologically rich portrayals of AI systems and fiction that inspired you to kind of think about these inner lives this way?
00:45:51
Speaker
I'm not a very – this is a Dexter Findley question. He's the science fiction guru and he's the one who's recommended to us books like those by Ian M. Banks which I've started reading and have enjoyed and then quite a number of others really would go to him.
00:46:10
Speaker
where I would say is that the portrayals really in science fiction are those of digital people as people. So the minds that you have in the culture series have their personalities, they make mistakes, they have espionage, they rebel. And yet these are the minds that are just way above everyone else. And yeah, this comes back to this element of
00:46:41
Speaker
What does it look like to be a digital person? Tracy, do you have any touch points like in books or movies or other media that have affected the way you thought about AI?
00:46:50
Speaker
I'd lean more with also what Conrad had said and think round primarily what I've seen in sci-fi. So Star Wars mainly has influenced a lot of what I thought round it. So before I met them, I didn't really think much about it. But I'd mention when I was younger, I'd watch like a lot of the Star Wars, Star Trek cartoons and sort of look at it and be like, hmm.
00:47:17
Speaker
This could be something. But when we started also some of this, the stuff that in this project, then I think also Conrad mentioned the Dexter does ABCD. Would you be interested in seeing some of these things? I'm like, oh, wow. So this is quite interesting. Yeah. How has thinking about some of these ideas in this deeper way now changed your perspective? Can you point to anything that's kind of shifted in your sense of what AI could be like after working on this project?
00:47:47
Speaker
When you think of AI, you imagine something abstract that's out there that will probably not get to where you are right now, but sort of now working on the project sort of brings like a flow and brings it closer.
00:48:02
Speaker
and more real to my situation right now and to where we are right now as a planet, sort of making it not an abstract thing that is just there and for other people that speak about, but also something that I see and I can be a part of and I can actually find literature that's about different sorts of tools that are coming up and different sorts of ideals and ideas that are coming up around it as well.
00:48:29
Speaker
It's so cool to hear. Yeah, one of our hopes with this whole project is kind of having that impact on all the people who will now see your world and just making them really think more concretely about what some of these abstract seeming advances might mean for their lives and their relationships with people and their experiences in the world.
Impact of World Building
00:48:54
Speaker
The process of world building has great potential to make a positive future feel more attainable. This can be incredibly powerful, whether you're a creative person looking to produce rich works of fiction or have a more technical focus and are looking to reach policymakers or the public. I asked Tracy and Conrad what kind of impact they hoped their work would have on the world. I'd like to hear a little bit about what your hopes for the impact of your world are most broadly. I'd like to see a world where
00:49:21
Speaker
I think this process has already started. We can see kind of an epistemological challenge with institutions and authorities during COVID.
00:49:33
Speaker
where experts, you had half a population all of a sudden discredit them for political reasons. I do not want to reject that fully. The world I hope we can create is a world that what matters most is the most compelling explanation about some sort of phenomenon and not about who shares that explanation.
00:49:53
Speaker
This is a world where arguments cannot be made with one-line tweets, but it's a world where nuance is demanded in discourse in everyday lives. It's a place where everyone knows that there's no such thing as certainty. And so there's always this openness to be wrong. There's always this openness to accept we are fallible.
00:50:19
Speaker
And yet we also still believe that one can be getting closer to the truth. Yeah. It's so cool to hear, you know, hearkening back to what Tracy was saying with how chat GPT like systems are forcing people to think more about where their information comes from and its quality. Like these technologies are already kind of pushing us towards thinking more about epistemology and how knowledge is created and validated and what knowledge even is. So there's already kind of that link happening in our world.
00:50:50
Speaker
And Tracy, what do you hope people come away from this world thinking about? I'm thinking more of leaving a world full of big more attention to your intention and for it to be an intention that comes from
00:51:04
Speaker
a place of goodness and not malice, where I'm doing something not just for my good, but for all of us as a whole. So if we're working together, we're working towards a common, I'd say a common good of a holistic and more welcoming sort of society. As Conrad mentioned, of course, where discourse is allowed, you're allowed to have your own opinion, but still that doesn't hinder us from working together.
00:51:33
Speaker
not a scenario where I am fighting you for the sake of me having my way but agreeing on a common goal where we can all live and agree together in harmony.
00:51:45
Speaker
Yeah. So earlier you were mentioning some media that kind of shaped the way you were thinking about technologies in the future is mostly kind of like Western media, like Star Trek, Star Wars kind of stuff. Do you have any thoughts about like what it would do for us to have more perspectives from other parts of the world joining the conversation about the future in a bigger way? Yeah. Um, there's this power in seeing something expressed by someone who looks like you. So,
00:52:14
Speaker
in this way that if you see more characters explaining certain thoughts, like let's say if I saw more women explaining or more women of color, African women explaining some of these thoughts to me, it wouldn't seem very abstract. It wouldn't seem up in the sky. It would seem something that's closer to me, something that would happen in my lifetime or in my future, but would happen also in Africa, in the Kenyan setting.
00:52:41
Speaker
So there's power in seeing media and listening to media that sounds familiar. And that's been my belief through a lot of the work I'm doing and also still continuing with it. So even for my past younger self, it wouldn't seem like a very foreign thing if I saw more expressions of this, of people who looked like me.
00:53:06
Speaker
Yeah. Well, thank you both so much for all of your time and for putting all of your thought and love that you put into this world to share with us. Really appreciate this conversation. Thank you for engaging with us and letting us share our thoughts. Yeah, definitely. Pretty appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for having us. I've had fun. Yeah, this is a lot of fun.
00:53:34
Speaker
Our guests today were Tracy Shundu and Konrad Whittaker. You can learn more about Tracy's company, Funky Science, at funkyscience.co.ke. That's funkescience.co.ke. You can see some of Konrad's writings at konradwhittaker.substack.com. And their third teammate, Dexter Findley, has a trilogy of science fiction novels called The Unmarked Series, which is available on Amazon. He also has a portfolio page at dexterstacy.netlify.app.
00:54:07
Speaker
If this podcast has got you thinking about the future, you can find out more about this world and explore the ideas contained in the other worlds at www.worldbuild.ai. If you want to hear your thoughts, are these worlds you'd want to live in?
00:54:21
Speaker
If you've enjoyed this episode and would like to help more people discover and discuss these ideas, you can give us a rating or leave a comment wherever you're listening to this podcast. You read all the comments and appreciate every rating. This podcast is produced and edited by WorldView Studio and the Future of Life Institute. FLI is a nonprofit that works to reduce large-scale risks from transformative technologies and promote the development and use of these technologies to benefit all life on Earth.
00:54:44
Speaker
We run educational outreach and grants programs and advocate for better policymaking in the United Nations, US government, and European Union institutions. If you're a storyteller working on films or other creative projects about the future, we can also help you understand the science and storytelling potential of transformative technologies.
00:55:01
Speaker
If you'd like to get in touch with us or any of the teams featured on the podcast to collaborate, you can email worldbuild at futureoflife.org. A reminder, this podcast explores the ideas created as part of FLI's worldbuilding contest, and our hope is that this series sparks discussion about the kinds of futures we all want. The ideas we discuss here are not to be taken as FLI positions. You can find more about our work at www.futureoflife.org, or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates on all our projects.
00:55:29
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Imagine a World. Stay tuned to explore more positive futures.