Boyan Slat and Joe Rogan on Incentivizing High-Tech Altruism

Well, journalists are fucked right now, and it's not their fault. It's just print journalism is almost on the way out in terms of buying things, buying newspapers and buying magazines. Their numbers are radically down. So they resort to online things. In the online world, you have so much competition. You have competition from a million different things that people can choose to look at or read and to get them to read a fucking article, you've got to have something good in there. So you have to distort. You have to inflame. You have to get people polarized. You've got to get them upset. You've got to paint a picture that makes you want to click on it. Like, what is he doing? That fucking idiot's wasting his time trying to pull truck. Doesn't he know what Greta Thorneberg has been saying? How dare you? That's what's going on, man. But it's just a fun, weird time for humans. There's a lot of negative things, but there's also a lot of positive things. It's a fun, weird time. There's a lot going on, and it's happening very, very, very quickly. And the prognosticators, the people that are trying to have some sort of an idea of where this is all going, no one really knows. And change is happening at such a rapid pace that it scares everybody. So they're looking to define things, and they're looking for control, and they're looking to be the person who's got it figured out, because nobody's got it figured out. It's madness. The earth is heating. The fucking ice caps are melting. The fish are disappearing. People are eating dolphins. It's madness. It's madness out there. The fucking garbage patch is growing and growing and growing. And if it wasn't for someone like you who's actually acting and doing something about it, it would just get worse. You have a workable solution. You should be applauded. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck that guy. You heard me. Right, Jamie? I didn't think it was the sift of the day. Fuck him hard. Fuck him hard, right? Yeah. Jamie agrees. Consensus. Yes. Consensus is fuck that guy. Consensus is fuck that guy. Consensus doesn't create clicks, so maybe we need some comfortable... That guy is trying to make a living, or she, or they. They're trying to make a living. I mean, I don't understand. In this day and age, things you have to write about. So they write about things, and it might not necessarily be honest. So how do you incentivize the truth? That's a question. Again, I think we're in this transitionary phase. And I also think technology is going to make a lot of what we're concentrating on obsolete. I think we are really, really close to some crazy breakthroughs in terms of distribution of information that's going to make it obsolete. And people aren't going to care as much about click-baity things, because you're going to be able to feel things from digitally created media. I mean, we're very, very close to augmented reality becoming an essential part of people's lives, the same way your phone has become an essential part of your life. Twenty years ago, no one carried a phone around. It was very rare. In 1999, a small percentage of people had phones on them. Now it's 100%, right? All this stuff is happening at this exponentially increasing rate when they implement augmented reality. And who's telling us that Apple's somewhere around 2021? Man, I've been looking that up. I mentioned it once or twice. You definitely did. Might have been you. But some other folks have brought it up too that Apple's really close, and they're in the process right now of developing some sort of augmented reality goggles. And they'll be like glasses. You put on a pair of, just like this, but you'll be seeing all these things in front of you. You'll be able to move them around. You'll be able to see navigation. You'll turn it on and off. It'll probably work on Siri. You'll be able to talk to it. And you're going to be able to get video and information written, podcasts, all these things, music. It's going to come through this. And probably this is one step in this ever increasing trend of us getting further and further immersed in technology. And augmented reality will lead to some sort of impossible to determine virtual reality, where it's indistinguishable from regular reality. We're like 50 years away from literally being in the matrix. Yeah. So I think it's under appreciated how much our behavior is also guided by technology. I mean, of course, we have our genes, our genotype, which kind of lies at the most fundamental level of how our behaviors are formed. That's why there is such a thing as human nature. But then there is this whole sort of cultural layer that we humans created around us, which I call the technosphere. Maybe other people have different names for it. But it's indeed everything in red. We interact with some of like 30,000 inventions or 30,000 technologies through our entire lives. That's a huge amount. And I think that environment that shapes your behavior, it decides what kind of genes are expressed. The interesting thing is that it's not just a natural environment, but it's an environment we create. So probably, when you think about people being born thousands of years ago, their genes were very, very similar to the people today. Yet how they behave is completely different. Look again at violence. And why is that the case? It's thanks to these inventions, not just physical inventions, but also cultural inventions and institutions that we created that shapes our behavior. And probably human behavior is very hard to change unless it actually benefits what we do. So, smartphones, how fast that happened versus how long it takes for smoking to go away. One is kind of incentivizing the continued use of it through addictive products, while with smartphones. Again, it's something that you want to use. I just wonder whether that interaction between humans and the technology that we create incentivizes inventors to become morally better and better because they... Did she lose me already? No, no, no, no. No. So, the question is... Well, people are incentivized primarily by profit, right? Right. The behavior that people express is kind of shaped by the world they live in. And who knows, maybe a person today is more incentivized to do good things because of the environment that has been created rather than a thousand years ago. No, I think that's absolutely the case. And I hope that people's ability to express themselves through social media, all those often negative and bitchy, sometimes also can give you a sense of the moral landscape of the culture. Not just the people on the far fringes that are the most angry and vehement about things, but people that have objective, real rational thoughts. The fact that you were able to read that article and objectively assess whether or not someone has any good points or not. And we could all do that about everything. Most people have that sort of perspective instead of being so reactionary, instead of being so angry about things, just look at criticisms, look at possibilities, look at all these different things and then shape technology to fit within our ethical and moral boundaries. So there's... And also, it's very profitable, right? Because if things don't feel... If you don't have a guilty feeling about buying something, like every time I get a plastic straw, now I feel guilty, right? If there's something that people, where they innovate to the point where you don't feel guilty supporting products and you feel like this company has the same sort of ethics and ideas that you have, that's all good. And I think we're moving more towards that. But again, we're dealing with a very short window of time where human beings have had to adapt to this incredible amount of change that takes place during a small period of time. One way to look at problems is that it's kind of this chasm between human nature, human behavior and how we want the world to be. And indeed, social media, that's the case, but similarly for environmental problems. We humans are driven by certain things, indeed, self-interest is definitely a big part of it. And yet, that's not creating the world right now that we want to live in because the technosphere, the technology that is the interface between the world, so sort of nature and human nature, that interface is not compatible with both. So you either have something that's compatible with human nature, so it's like a big car with a V8 engine, but that's not compatible with nature. Or you have something that's compatible with nature, which is pretty walking, but it's not really compatible with human nature because we're lazy and greedy. It's cold outside and you got to get somewhere in a snowstorm. Exactly. So ideally, what we do is rather than trying to change humans, which I don't think is a very futile activity because there is such a thing as human nature, we have genes, we have this evolutionary history. Rather than trying to change that, I think it's much more effective to change the technology around us that enables our inner desires and behaviors to be positive rather than negative. I agree with you. I think it's going to be difficult though to get that same sort of positive result when it comes to our addiction to technology, our addiction to smartphones in particular. For a long time, it was like televisions, right? People talked about how much kids watch TV. Kids watch TV eight hours a day. It's so much. It's so bad. You don't really hear that anymore. You hear about phones. This is sort of an undiscussed, rapid shift in what we waste our time doing. Most of it is what you hear people talking about. Most of the use of these phones, I'd be willing to bet a giant chunk of that social media. Yes. Right? Yeah. I suppose that's, again, this sort of infantile stage of that technology. Now we're infantiles. Adolescent before. Now you're dropping it down. Yeah, it's going down. I think you're right. Yeah. Again, probably we can engineer social media and our information technology to incentivize people to do good things. But indeed, now it's probably incentivizing the use of scrolling through timelines because you watch more ads. Also, I think it's our bodies and our minds and the way we view the world. We're not designed to live in this digital realm. This is a completely new thing for the species. I think we don't really know how to handle the dopamine rush that we get from clicking on Instagram and scrolling through your feeds and checking your DMs and reading your emails and constantly interacting with people and checking, did he text me back? Oh, what did he say? Oh, well, that's interesting. What about this and that and this and that? You're just all day, all day interacting with some digital device. We're not made for this. We're supposed to go outside. Then you have very bright engineers somewhere in a big shiny building, A, B testing all day to see whether a red dot on a certain icon in the social media app makes people click more or less.