This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
REID:
I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens, if in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.
ARIA:
Typically, we ask our guests for their outlook on the best possible future. But now, every other week, I get to ask Reid for his take.
REID:
This is Possible.
ARIA:
So, Reid, obviously last week we spoke with Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic, and we covered a lot. We talked about AI, native generations and privacy and data and friendship, family, empathy, so much. But there was still a lot that we didn’t get to. And so one question that I wanted to ask but didn’t get a chance to, is about the future of how humans are connected with one another. So companies are working on technology that can sense and monitor brain activity. So Nick Thompson, who we interviewed obviously in our last episode — he had previously said that in the future, perhaps instead of people having individual thoughts, we could become a mentally linked network as a species. Like, what do you think of this prospect? Is that crazy? Are we approaching this as we start to build out these LLMs, you know, based on the corpus of human knowledge?
REID:
Well, this is a very science fiction thought. But of course, you know, science fiction — you know, eventually we get to the moon, you know, other kinds of things. So science fiction thoughts are not reasons to disregard them. And I do think, you know, to some degree, we’re already at a place where we have interconnected minds. I mean, this is cell phones, this is podcasts, this is a bunch of other things. Like, we’re already in some part of this. And obviously you say, “Well, what happens if we now have, you know, embedded links or things that even if they weren’t surgically—but they had a computer-human interface that was through neurological touch in various neurons. And, what would that mean for individual thoughts? And group thoughts? And communications?” And because one of our mistakes is, we usually think of ourselves as various forms of Crusoe where we’re like, “Oh, we’re these independent thinkers.”
REID:
And we don’t realize that even in language, we swim in a medium that isn’t just like us spitting it out, but we’re like, we’re in it too. It shapes the format of our languages and how we’re—our values shape our thoughts and how we react and a bunch of other things. So that extension through technology is obviously something that in various points is becoming more and more possible. Obviously, this is fraught because, you know, we really care about individual autonomy and agency and ability to make those choices and to not be, you know, kind of like over — like, you know, if you said, “I’ve got a new future for humanity: We’re all going to become like ants and be a hive.” Probably most people would go, “You’re out of your mind.” You know, maybe I would be going, “You’re out of your mind.”
REID:
How do we have this kind of human enablement, which preserves the essential things that we think about — everything from human autonomy and human agency and human dignity together with the benefits that we would get from it, even though it might be changing. And it might be a little alienating in the way that, for example, if you probably went back a hundred years and told people what we were doing with smartphones, they would think we were cyborgs. We’re already doing some version of this with our smartphones. So, you know, don’t panic. You know, build slowly, be careful, you know, some good things will come out.
ARIA:
I’m going to stay on the science fiction thread because just a few weeks ago we were in a meeting and we were supposed to be doing deep work, but we got sidetracked on science fiction and we were talking about David Brin’s books and just the deep philosophical questions that they bring up. And one of the sort of macro questions that we decided that we have to answer as we think about the future is to what extent is it our responsibility as humans to create more other sentient beings?
REID:
Well, the reason I somewhat shocked you by bringing up this as a question is because I think it’s a question that people haven’t thought about. A lot of people think that there is an importance of bringing the next generation of humanity, of sentient beings into the world. And so there’s a variety of people who are very passionate about that and could agree with a version of this question just on that principle. But the deeper question is, if we say, “Well, part of the trajectory you’re on as human beings is we — when you look back in the thousands of years of recorded history, in various ways we’ve been on a kind of a consciousness expansion thing.” Well, it’s like, “Okay, you know, other races than our own are also conscious — you know, sentient, deserving of rights, and respect and so forth. Other genders other than men [laughs], right?”
REID:
And especially of course, in the preceding decades — we’re not that many decades away from this — women should have kind of the full spectrum of human rights. And you say that and you say, “Well, you know, we’re funding this Earth Species Project. We’re beginning to—maybe we have an ability to have a conversation with whales or dolphins.” And all of a sudden, maybe we realize they have poetry and they have maybe thousands of years of cultural tradition and world tradition that they’re passing along. And you go, “Okay, well, you know, understanding they’re sentient and talking to them may be something that is part of our meaning of life in the universe — is expanding consciousness.” And then once you get there, then you say, “Well, what if we could — and this is part of David Brin’s very early 1980s, you know, question and insight and uplift is — well, what if the, you know, kind of the purpose of consciousness is to bring more forms of consciousness, more species, more cognitive diversity, just as the same cognitive diversity path that we’ve been on in terms of the respect of it.”
REID:
Maybe that’s a reasonable thesis in the, in what our mission should be as human beings. Now, this can get very wild. Not just wild because, you know, like, well, we have to uplift dolphins and make dolphins—like if dolphins are pretty sentient, but could be much more, and what’s their participation? What’s our responsibility? You know, what’s the relationship with this? What’s the ethics of this? And you get mind boggling questions. But of course, you know, part of—one of the things that we’ve more or less as a society not really paid attention to is, you know, they go, “Well, genetic engineering bad.” Well, but we’re already doing some forms of genetic engineering with IVF and eggs. And so then, you know, and obviously we’ll quickly get into it and say, “Oh, we can get rid of the genetics that cause Huntington’s disease,” or, you know, name your thing and this is a path that we’re on.
REID:
What happens? We start getting genetic diversity within the Homo sapiens part. The important thing on this question is, I think it’s an important question amongst the set that we — just literally no one’s asking — that we will need to ask. And the answer is probably not going to be simple. It’s going to be complicated and evolving and has to do a lot with our human values and what the value of what humanity’s becoming. The big failure of imagination and science fiction is like Star Trek — you know, what are we in the hundreds of years future, is where people in leotards flying around in spaceships. And the short answer is, humanity is not static. We’re not static in the technology that embodies us—like, you know, iPhones now, currently, or internet or—and eventually Neuralink and other sorts of things. But we’re also going to be not static genetically either. And what is that path that we’re going to be heading down? It’s really important to start having the conversations about, “Well, what is the path of humanity?” Because the stasis of humanity, you know, that’s the failure of most of the envisionment of our science-fiction features.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, Adrien Behn, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Karrie Huang, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, and Parth Patil, and Little Monster Media Company.