Ada Palmer | On How Speculative Worlds Can Help Us Demand A Better Future

[00:00:00] Beatrice: It's so nice to have you here, ADA. We're so happy to have you on this podcast. Let's just dive straight into this interview. I would love to hear if you could just share with the people who are listening, who are you, what are you working on? and what got you started? How did you become a sci-fi author, and also a historian?

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[00:00:20] Beatrice: it's quite a mix. 

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[00:00:22] Ada: Yes, a lot of people think of studying history and writing science fiction as being opposites, because one is about the past and the other is about the future. But actually, there's nothing more similar to the future than the past. It's a long period of time in which things change.

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[00:00:35] Ada: We watch how societies are transformed by events, by people, by new ideas and technologies. So I always, from my earliest childhood, wanted to write science fiction and fantasy. I became a historian because I realized how well that synergized with wanting to write Science fiction and fantasy. And so my love of the imaginary and future worlds in which the stories that I always read and then wanted to tell took place is the same as my love of these past eras in history, when people really did live in a different world, or at least believed that lived in a different world from the world we believe we live in.

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[00:01:12] Ada: Because it's not just a difference of how people's houses were built and what people ate and how people's work was organized, but also the cosmos they believed they lived in. And when you comb through history, you're actually looking at multiple different ways the universe could be. And we believe the universe is the way we believe it was, but different people at different points believed it was different other ways.

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[00:01:35] Ada: The two vocations are one in a lot of ways, at least for me. So I wanted to write and was always practicing writing and then studying history to make the writing richer and deeper. 

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[00:01:48] Beatrice: Wow. And you remember, was there, did you just always love sci fi then? Or was there like a specific event that triggered it?

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[00:01:56] Beatrice: I 

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[00:01:57] Ada: I mean, I grew up on science fiction and fantasy. My father was a big science fiction and fantasy reader. The books that were around on the shelves that I could grab when I was small enough to have to be on tiptoes to do so were often science fiction and fantasy books. 

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[00:02:12] Beatrice: Did you have any favorites there?

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[00:02:14] Beatrice: a particular book that has followed you or that you would want to recommend people pick up today? 

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[00:02:21] Ada: my father was very chaotic in the books he left around, in the books he gave me access to. There are a lot of things that I read when I was much too young to understand them at all. so I was very young when I first tried reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which is one of the hardest and most complicated works of science fiction ever written.

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[00:02:39] Ada: And I don't know if you actually understand much less about it when you're nine than you do when you're thirty nine, because it's such a complicated and dense and opaque thing that you don't even understand what's happening until the second pass. But I think that by being a small kid and picking up and reading books that are what we would call above your.

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[00:03:01] Ada: reading level. You're experiencing an important kind of learning, this very authentic childhood, because childhood is the experience of not understanding how the world works, and hearing people have conversations about names and places and things that you've never heard of, and trying to piece them together from that conversation.

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[00:03:18] Ada: And a lot of the way world building is seeded in the most fun and interesting science fiction and fantasy is the characters have conversations about places and peoples and things and issues that the reader of course being from a different world doesn't know, but. You piece them together from the conversations in the same way that a child pieces things together without context.

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[00:03:42] Ada: And I think there's an important continuity between the way children experience a world that we don't understand yet, but we know that we're picking up puzzle pieces and clues, and that if we put them together, they'll fit. And the way a reader has to piece together world building. Most people who seriously read science fiction and fantasy start doing so young and keep doing so.

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[00:04:05] Ada: And a lot of people who try to take it up as a thing to read in adulthood struggle with that exact skill set, struggle with gathering the puzzle pieces, keeping track of them, even though they don't yet fit together, and then waiting for the fun moments when they fit together. And I think that's a skill that grows out of it.

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[00:04:24] Ada: Yeah. childhood and out of reading things moving forward from being a kid. so I read Asimov and I read Heimlein and I read Gene Wolfe and I read Delaney and I read all sorts of random things that Dad had in the house. And I also read Tolkien and I read Anne McCaffrey and I read, just,older and newer fantasy books as well that were all in a jumble.

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[00:04:47] Ada: And I was never aware which of them were recent, which of them were old, which of them were intended for kids, which of them were intended for adults. They were just all books. 

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[00:04:57] Beatrice: Yeah. I'm often, when I think about what I read when I was a kid, I'm often, quite shocked, maybe isn't the right word, but just like amazed that I was picking up and reading these types of old books.

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[00:05:08] Beatrice: Because I think but you're right that it's maybe like this skill that you build up on, piecing, piecing everything together. I feel like there's so much to dive into there, but One thing,this is the existential hope podcast and, we, often sci fi and like speculative fiction comes up as something that, we, that's, it's basically like the best tool for us to get people to engage with, what could a future look like?

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[00:05:34] Beatrice: And especially for us, we're interested in what a really great future looks like. and, but what do you think,what role do you think that science fiction could play? Does it play in society, and what do you think? Maybe if you got to dream, what role do you think it should play?

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[00:05:48] Ada: here, putting on my historian hat, as well as my sci fi and fantasy hat, I think that because we live in a world where we're saturated with innumerable alternate worlds, other ways that the world could be in the present, could have been in the past, could become in the future, or completely different worlds that have been invented and that are based in some ways on ours but completely different.

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[00:06:13] Ada: That's something that is one of the major things that differentiates how modern people think from how pre modern people think. I spent a lot of time studying the Italian Renaissance and the Italian Renaissance includes an interesting movement in which a number of intellectuals inspired by Petrarch want to sit down and say, okay, our world sucks.

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[00:06:34] Ada: we want to transform it for the better. How can it be better? But the only images they have in their mind are images of Earth's real past. And so they say, when we're trying to change the world for the better, what do we want it to resemble? We want it to resemble the best part of the past we know about.

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[00:06:51] Ada: And for them, that is idealized histories of the Roman Empire and the movement of neoclassical culture and art that they push, a lot of which is about political hope that can we create a more stable world like the stability of the Pax Romana? The only things they have to look at are their own known history or their neighbors.

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[00:07:17] Ada: And so they can look at how the Florentine Republic works, how the Venetian Republic works, how their notes on the Athenian Republic works. That's basically their list of republics, how the Swiss Republic works, how the Genoese Republic totally doesn't work at all. And they can look at the monarchies that they have around and they can look at past eras, but it means they have maybe two dozen.

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[00:07:39] Ada: Different other ways the world could be set up that they believe themselves to be comparing to. And when they try to make their world better, they have two dozen examples of very similar systems to then choose among and they choose the one they think is the best and then try to. But when we look around and say, what are other ways the world could be?

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[00:07:59] Ada: We have hundreds of ways. Different things to look at. Some of them are from histories, because we have more histories now than they did then, and we study larger parts of the world, but also innumerable better ones, worse ones, terrible ones, utopian ones. Lots and lots of alternate ways the world could be set up.

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[00:08:19] Ada: This is a process that begins over the course of the early modern period, and one of the things that's fun is to look, for example, in the 17th century, when in the wake of Thomas More's Utopia and Bacon's New Atlantis and Discoveries and the idea of setting up new towns and new places, you have a burst of 17th century utopian fiction where lots and lots of people are writing their ideal of how a city or a small country could be set up, most of them based on a specific wacky version of Protestantism.

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[00:08:49] Ada: because this is part of the aftermath of the Reformation. But it's neat to watch, moving from the 1400s, which I'm used to, where they have effectively two dozen examples of how the world could work, and then starting to imagine a few more, and then getting as far as the 17th century, where they're actually dozens, and then bursting into the 20th century.

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[00:09:11] Ada: Science fiction and fantasy where we have hundreds upon hundreds and when someone says, what if things turned into a terrible capitalist oligarch dictatorship, we have hundreds of versions of even that to look at the fine grain and compare themselves to. And when we say, what if voting works differently, we have hundreds of examples of how voting could work differently instead of a dozen examples of how voting could work differently.

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[00:09:37] Ada: Malka Older is a wonderful SF writer and some others who talk about this often use the phrase speculative resistance.that when you are speculating about and describing a different way things could be, it makes you more willing to demand change and broadens the palette of things that you want to ask for and the things that you want to demand.

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[00:09:58] Ada: and I think that having hundreds and hundreds of examples to use for speculative resistance, both of the failed conditions of what could go wrong if X occurs and of the better conditions of, what if society were better. set up this way, makes people in our era demand change in a completely different way from the way people demanded change in the past, and makes us willing and eager to demand things that have never existed, but that we can imagine, discuss, combine.

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[00:10:33] Ada: And Envision, which is just so different from the world of my idealistic and desperate Italian Renaissance people who really want to change, but the only things that they can reach for are a few things that exist in their past and present. 

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[00:10:49] Beatrice: That's really fascinating to get the historical perspective also.

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[00:10:52] Beatrice: I really appreciate that. I hadn't heard of all of this, so that's really exciting.but, and so then do you think that we should use it as obviously we are using it to explore possibilities, but should we use it more as a prescription almost, should we use it as a blueprint for the future?

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[00:11:09] Beatrice: Is it more just like we should use it as a way to expand our imagination about what's possible? 

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[00:11:14] Ada: I think we use it in many different ways. We certainly use the warnings every time a new technology is on its way, we get a nice burst of science fiction horror stories about how this creates the blob that eats the world.

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[00:11:28] Ada: And those are helpful because it means that implementation is a little bit cautious, right? And I remember a few years ago when a gardening company had made a robot whose job was to go around your garden, find slugs, and then squirt salt on them and kill the slugs. And instantly upon the release of this, there were discussions of, wait a minute, this is the first time we've created a robot whose job it is to hunt and kill living things.

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[00:11:54] Ada: do we want to be extra cautious with that? And, that conversation being so quick and us being so ready to ask that question was important. I think that occasionally the warnings can get, so far ahead of the science that you get,rejections of technologies more so than they deserve.

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[00:12:14] Ada: I've been thinking about this a lot lately with genetically modified foods. Because there are a lot of people, or not just genetically modified anything, because we were absolutely correct to warn, we need to be careful about messing with life. What if we make a thing that turns into a bad thing?

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[00:12:31] Ada: We've seen this happen with invasive species. And movies about making the giant kudzu blob that eats New York are useful warnings. and it means that, the government is demanding a lot of care and looking at GM stuff, but it's also gotten so far that like right now we're trying to reintroduce.

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[00:12:51] Ada: Chestnut trees in the US, which were almost completely wiped out by a plague, and we've genetically modified one by ones to be resistant to that plague by subbing in a gene that gives them specific resistance to that specific plague so that they can live and exist. And we know very well what that gene does.

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[00:13:09] Ada: We've mastered science. It's taken from another. And yet. When you post online about what these great chestnut trees people are like, we don't know what those genes will do. Those chestnut trees will turn into mutants and they will destroy everything so well. If we had not listened to the wording that we need to know what the genes do then yes, but we listened to that morning we did.

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[00:13:28] Ada: Like we were, science fiction writers were correct that we need to know what the DNA does. So we made sure we know what the DNA does. And now we're putting it into a tree, which has two options. It's dead and does not exist. Or have this genetic modification where we really thoroughly looked at what it did.

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[00:13:44] Ada: And that's an interesting case where the warning is When interpreted by people who don't understand the science creates too much anxiety about a thing, which, which gets at the, we use these stories to make sure we're having planning in advance, science fiction that lets us have our moral battles about technologies before we implement the technologies.

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[00:14:09] Ada: And the first artificially intelligent robot to be given citizenship was given citizenship in 2003. Long before there were or are, because there still aren't any. Artificial intelligence robots. This was the ceremonial citizenship given to Astro Boy in Japan because Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy, as far back as 1950 started conversations about will artificial life have rights and think tanks and people, and especially people in Japan have been thinking hard about that for a long time and comes down on the side of, yes, when we have artificial intelligence robots, they will not be unfree, ownable properties.

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[00:14:47] Ada: They will be citizens and they will have. so they will be able to vote and the government wants to declare this is so so they issue a birth certificate for Astro Boy on the date that the fictitious robot comes into existence as a pledge of confirming we have fought this moral battle in advance and we are extending these civil rights, even though we don't actually have the thing we need to extend the civil rights to yet, but we are ethically prepared.

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[00:15:12] Ada: So this is one of the things that science fiction and fantasy worlds help us do. But another thing they do is just broaden the range of what we ask for when we ask for change, when we think about problems like low voter turnout, which is something that happens a lot in the U. S. has a Voter turnout problem, deliberate voter turnout problem, engineered low voter turnout.

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[00:15:35] Ada: we can compare it to other countries that have higher voter turnout, like Australia, but we can also compare it to fictitious worlds. And, in my entire IGNOTA system, one of the nine major polities that I explore in detail has a very rapid, 48 hour turnover of a vote. Things where everybody has an app on their phone who's a citizen of that government and they can all vote incredibly fast and people bring that up as an example of, why doesn't voting work like this?

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[00:16:06] Ada: And there are various answers to why voting doesn't work like that, but by imagining and describing it, it goes into the palette of what people talk about. So they don't only talk about how voting works in the U. S. versus Japan versus England versus Australia. They also talk about how voting works. Works in, the humanists of Terra Ignota and can ask for things that haven't been implemented, debating.

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[00:16:30] Beatrice: , I definitely agree with that, both in terms of the warnings, of the technologies. I think that's what, that's something that we've certainly talked a lot about, that's what comes up first, almost. I especially feel like you mentioned GMOs, like people seem to be only aware almost of the, potential downsides or challenges or something and they're aware at all of the alternative costs or the benefits.

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[00:16:54] Ada: the demands of science copywriters have been, don't do the thing without thoroughly understanding the science. But we're at the, we thoroughly understand the science stage of it. 

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[00:17:04] Beatrice: Yeah, it's not Frankenstein anymore. Yeah. Yeah.so I guess then, what, because you said that, it can help us think about,what we want to ask for, I guess for us, the existential hope things,what are we trying to bring about?

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[00:17:17] Beatrice: What do we want to bring about? you mentioned the phone voting that you have in your series. is there anything else that you think, Maybe it's either in your book series or if you've seen it in any other ones that you think are like cool governance systems or, technologies or anything like that, that you think, this, we should really look closer at.

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[00:17:38] Ada: Yeah, I think, both Malka Older's Infomocracy and my, Terra Ignota in imagining a bunch of different plural future systems of government, all of them different from what we have, that also coexist geographically.and both of these are works that are interested in thinking about.

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[00:18:01] Ada: Either non geographic or flexibly geographic systems, because right now we very much have these entrenched blots of color on a map, and you can get a globe, but you can see this is this region, and this region's government has to all be the same system. And there is regional variance within nations because there will be policies that affect urban spaces and policies that affect rural spaces, but fundamentally we have one system of government per one geographic unit, and when things change within a geographic unit such that does or doesn't make sense anymore, the process of changing how the geographic unit to government ratio goes.

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[00:18:47] Ada: War, revolution, etc. are our main systems to this, and it's extremely uncommon for there to be peaceful transitions from, okay, this has been one country, it's going to be two, or this has been two countries, it's going to be one. Both Malka and I Imagine systems in which voting itself will mean, okay, these people have decided they want to be part of this other government right now, they will be part of this other government for an amount of time, and then they'll vote again and they might be part of the same government as before, which is something that makes more sense in Our world of fast transit and diasporic community formation via digital communications.

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[00:19:27] Ada: And I think that everybody is aware that, if you made a list of the 50 people you communicate with most in life, only a few of them are geographically near you. And others of them are in another city, or even in another country, but we're connected to them digitally, and they're friends who live far away, they're family who live far away, they're co-workers who live far away.

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[00:19:48] Ada: If we look at why policy equaled geography, it evolved in the world when geography dictated who we're connected to, and it made sense that all of the people who share X characteristics, therefore will share one government that they might. share because they have the same interests, they use the same languages, etc.

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[00:20:10] Ada: More and more of our communities are becoming diasporic. And that's a really important thing to be thinking about when we look at apparatuses of what shared interests people have, what shared needs people have, how do people help each other, how do people not help each other. COVID was a really vivid instance of this, in which suddenly both the, oh, this is the actual neighborhood I'm in, the people who can deliver me medicine and I can deliver them medicine, or where a pop up, community help thing, is geographic, and how different that is from the online communities of people with whom one is communicating by voice and video and text, throughout most of one's day.

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[00:20:54] Ada: Our governments don't have very much of a way to look at those two types of communities. What is my geographic community? What is my online diasporic community? And have them integrate into government and governance in any significant way. But it's possible to imagine worlds like mine or Malga's that do And one of the things that imagining a world where everybody chooses the government they're part of based on preference rather than geography is that it makes you think, should our geographic government influence some more things that are specifically based around microgeography or specifically based around diasporic communities and their needs, etc.

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[00:21:38] Ada: Why are the systems still, by legacy, Assuming that the people you interact with are going to be the people right next to where you are. 

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[00:21:46] Beatrice: Yeah.yeah, actually, like the whole pluralism thing, I think, is the one that most people seem to be able to agree on, that would potentially be a good idea, or in terms of scenarios of the future that I've read and been excited about, and that tends to be the one rather than, the more, The one world 

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[00:22:03] Ada: government homogeneity.

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[00:22:05] Beatrice: Exactly. Yeah. I don't, yeah, it doesn't tend to excite a lot of people, I guess.it 

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[00:22:11] Ada: depends, because if you have one world government, then it, if it has lots of pluralness within it, the way a federated government can, then there can be both of these things. But classic depictions of one world government have generally been depictions of, when we're looking at the 1970s and 1980s, have generally been depictions of one homogenous culture swallowing up all of the Cultures and getting rid of variation within it.

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[00:22:37] Ada: And I think a lot more people are being wary of that as having a legacy in some of the grimmer parts of the last few centuries. 

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[00:22:46] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah. And I think even oftentimes I think when people think of sci fi, they think about people in white clothing or just very visually homogenous as well.

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[00:22:56] Beatrice: And everything is just one. Yeah. 

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[00:22:58] Ada: one thing that's complex as we think about science fiction, and I think this is something that's been unwinding mostly around and since the year 2000. science fiction of the Science fiction golden age through the 1980s, really more through 1985, made a lot of promises about things we would definitely have in the near future.

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[00:23:21] Ada: And we have a whole generation or several generations who saw the images of the Jetsons and science fiction book covers and it was very clear that by the year 2000 we would have robot butlers and moving sidewalks and flying cars and things like that. Kids in school were taking field trips to the moon and Mars and this was just on the edge and coming indefinite.

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[00:23:46] Ada: To the degree that when you look at science fiction written before 1980, there are almost no examples in which it's substantially into Earth's future and Earth is still mostly on Earth. Unless there's been some sort of horrible disaster, it's either we have a new dark age and therefore we're still on the Earth because we nuked ourselves into oblivion, or we're way out into the stars having a Star Trek like multiple solar system giant cool space empire.

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[00:24:17] Ada: There's almost nothing that imagines that by the year 2020, we will still be mostly on Earth and mostly dealing with Earth's solar system. And when the year 2000 approached and came, there was a kind of a trauma of this broken promise of the city of tomorrow that had been showcased at World's Fairs and at Disneyland.

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[00:24:44] Ada: There's a couple of problems. books about this. There's, Brian Feist's Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, and there's Naoki Urasawa's brilliant manga 20th Century Boys, both of which are about the trauma of growing up expecting the city of tomorrow and then hitting the year 2000 and having it look the way it did, in which lots of new technologies were there, but they didn't look like a science fiction book cover.

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[00:25:07] Ada: And right now, as we look about, pay attention about what the shape of the future is going to be. We're seeing a lot of tension that is specifically about the aesthetics and promises of City of Tomorrow. So when people gripe about why billionaires are investing money in goofy looking cars and bizarre Mars projects.

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[00:25:30] Ada: And, building weird bunkers in strange places. All of those things are achieving the promises of what science fiction said would be true by the year 2000.and there is a kind of trauma of that and a wish for the future. output of technology to resemble that. Whereas the real output of technology doesn't look like that aesthetically, but is really impressive and has done amazing things that society has wished for ages, right?

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[00:25:59] Ada: We're making these enormous strides with malaria right now, which is something that we should be celebrating up to the skies all over the place, but we're too busy dealing with crises to worry about them. But the malaria vaccine rollout is the Biggest life saving thing all of humanity has ever done in the entirety of human history.

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[00:26:22] Ada: A few months ago, we celebrated the eradication of malaria in Egypt. They started trying to eradicate malaria in Egypt in 5000 BC, right? And so here is the current leadership getting to make the speech of, we've been at it for 7000 years and we've succeeded. We've eradicated malaria in Egypt. That is incredible.

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[00:26:42] Ada: And when I look again at my, putting on my historian hat, my Renaissance people, they are imagining a world of stability and political lack of tumult. They're often imagining an empire. They're imagining something in which there will not be wars between neighbors, in which there will be a strong central authority that will bring peace.

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[00:27:05] Ada: Because they're desperate for greater peace, right? This is an area with very low life expectancy, huge amounts of strife and tumult. And the thing they think can be improved is the government, because that's the thing that they see people having control of. In many ways, we've made less progress in stabilizing government, but we've made tons of progress at, the city fire brigade so that the city doesn't burn down with giant fires every single time there's a lightning storm because we now have lightning rods and giant fire trucks and all these things so that our cities don't burn down all the time.

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[00:27:44] Ada: We've made enormous progress with disease, which is something that Renaissance people didn't even have the apparatus to hope would occur. And I mentioned before Petrarch, who was the most famous of the intellectuals who called for, hey, let's revive the ancient Roman Empire. Let's try to regain this golden age of the Pax Romana.

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[00:28:05] Ada: He was a major vocal spokesman for that. He talks a lot about, if we change government this way to be more like Rome, if we change education this way to be more like Rome, if we raise our Leaders and movers and shakers and, merchant elites on the books that shaped Cicero in antiquity so that they behave more patriotically and more virtuously and put the goods of the people before the good of their family or their pride, we can achieve better situations in terms of war.

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[00:28:35] Ada: When he talks about disease, he has no hope.and there's a very moving passage in one of his books, on how to endure the slings of fortune. Um,Remedies Against Fortune, Fair and Foul, where he talks about the plague. Which he lived through the main Black Death epidemic as well as returns of it.

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[00:28:55] Ada: And, after having this long book full of consolation, are you afraid of war? Here's how to have hope in the face of war. Are you afraid of being conquered? Here's how to have hope in the face of Congress. Are you afraid of poverty? Here's how to have hope in the face of poverty. Are you afraid of dying of the disease of an epidemic?

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[00:29:17] Ada: And he says, if you're afraid of that. Good, you should be.and if the grief and pain you fear are pity for the human condition, then yes, you should pity yourself and your neighbors. and if you feel more terror of dying in an epidemic than other death, just remind yourself that you should not fear more to die with lots of company than you would fear to die alone.

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[00:29:43] Ada: That's all he has. That's all he has in terms of Hope or lack thereof for disease, just that it will always be as bad as it is. And our only consolation is maybe we and our friends will die together. And to tell him we've eradicated malaria in not only all of Italy, but also, Egypt and we've, They got treatments for the plague that you're scared of, so that it's only a very minor, rather than a major global disease now, and we've cured all these other things, and life expectancy has gone up from, you know what life expectancy was in Petrarch's day?

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[00:30:19] Ada: 18. 18 years old, this is the average life expectancy when Petrarch is alive. 18. We've gotten that up into the 70s or 80s. He would just cry. But it's not within his imagination of what could be, because his imagination of what could be is his past. And he imagines that humans have power over our politics and almost nothing else.

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[00:30:46] Ada: we understand that we have power over a lot of things, and we have power over health, and we have power over disease, but a world without malaria doesn't look any more like a science fiction book cover than a world with malaria. It looks the same. It's so much better, and millions of lives are saved, and it's amazing, and we should all be running around in circles waving our arms about how excited we are that's happening.

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[00:31:11] Ada: But it doesn't look like a science fiction book cover, and so it doesn't help treat the trauma of, did the year 2000 come and break its promises? And the answer is, it broke some of them, but boy, do we have a lot of other things. And when we talk about the necessity of having hope, right now, bad news gets shared and re-shared a hundred times more than good news.

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[00:31:34] Ada: I've been working a little bit in collaboration with a company called Fix the News. I love to fix the news. Everybody should go to Fix News's website and sign up for their free newsletter, where once a week you'll get in your inbox a roundup of all of that week's good news that got under reported, and it's global news from all over the world, and it covers science and disease and politics and civil rights and environment and technology and climate.

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[00:31:59] Ada: victories and there is so much good news. The solar rollout has exceeded what anybody ever imagined over the past couple of years by 8 times over our highest possible expectation. It looks like we are past peak carbon and global carbon is probably going to be going down, not up. From now on, we've had huge strides in enshrining civil rights and protections in countries all over the world.

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[00:32:27] Ada: There have been major democratic victories. We don't see this because we see the bad.and sometimes, the science fictional thing is just to remember that a realistic world is a mix of good things and bad things. And sometimes people have this attitude of, things are bad, and to talk about the things that are good is somehow negative, or destructive, or disingenuous, or trying to hide from the grim reality by talking about these fake, small, good victories when the real things are bad.

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[00:32:58] Ada: There's nothing fake or small about eradicating malaria.and there's nothing fake or small about exceeding eight times our highest hopes for how quickly the green power transition would go. What's unrealistic is to say all news must be bad. because that is what lets you despair, and despair is really easy.

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[00:33:17] Ada: Despair is really emotionally satisfying because in the state of despair, you don't have to do anything. We're already doomed. Nothing that we can do matters, so you can sit back and do what you want to and you don't have any responsibility. The emotionally difficult thing is accepting the 50 50 mix of here is terrible news and here is really good news.

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[00:33:39] Ada: And here are these victories that we actually had because we worked hard and it worked. Because if you admit that, then you have an obligation to work hard. There was a really great study that Fix the News reported a few months ago. It was a mega study of, 350, I think it was, some number in the 300s, conservation efforts, over the past 30 years that have been conservation efforts focused on one species, save the Earth.

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[00:34:07] Ada: Tiger. And any conservation effort like that usually actually saves a bunch of species because they're interrelated and their ecosystem is being protected for the name of the charismatic species in the middle. But this was just looking at, okay, these are 300 and something efforts to save species. How well did they do?

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[00:34:24] Ada: And the answer is two thirds of them succeeded. And two thirds of those species are now way healthier, way more numerous, fine, in good shape, on track to be saved, and are okay. And one third of them didn't, and those species are still struggling, or in a few cases, they became extinct. That is good news, but it's really hard to accept, because it means, yes, we have an obligation to work this hard.

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[00:34:49] Ada: Yes, we have an obligation to work on these things. Yes, we can we pour our lives and labors into these projects. They do bear fruit. Two thirds of the time, one third of the time, they'll fail. And all of the efforts that we poured in will happen to have rolled badly and be the ones that don't succeed.

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[00:35:08] Ada: And that is a very emotionally difficult thing to face, because it means accepting that your job is to work really hard and try, and you might fail. But we have to do it, because if nobody does it, then none of the species are saved. If we do it, then two thirds of the species are saved. And this is exactly how we need to be thinking about human Efforts as well, right?

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[00:35:31] Ada: And we push for political change and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail and therefore we have an obligation to keep pushing and succeeding. And we especially have an obligation to remind each other of the successes that happen and the good legislation that passes and the other stuff because if we don't, we create the artificial image of a world of only bad news, in which we therefore have the ethical option to give up and not try.

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[00:36:00] Ada: People love going straight from climate denial to climate despair, because in both of them you don't have to do anything.it's admitting that actually we're doing a pretty good job and the hard work we're doing does matter. That is the difficult thing to accept.

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[00:36:16] Beatrice: I'll just, yeah, there's so much to pick up on, I feel but we don't have time. But yeah, I think there's so much of, yeah, what we're trying to do now with Existential Hope and just like the Petrarch thing. I know, Allison, you found a great quote by Petrarch that we've been using in our presentations as well, that's also just about what could be possible.

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[00:36:36] Ada: also then to remember what he doesn't think is possible. 

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[00:36:39] Beatrice: Yeah, exactly. The limits of his home, the longevity and that goes so much into all the work on longevity that, I know Allison is doing a lot with that at Foresight Institute and everything, but I'll just hand over to you, Allison to take over. 

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[00:36:52] Allison: Yeah, this was fantastic so far. I was also quite struck by the fact that I think when writing about progress you once mentioned that back in the days, one thing that we find really hard to imagine now is just the sheer fact that there was so much ignorance and the ignorance was almost painful to that extent because there really was so much that there really wasn't.

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[00:37:10] Allison: We just had no idea about how the world around us worked and the forces that we were subject to. And now even just the sheer fact that, with things like COVID, we can figure out why it occurred more or less. We might not all agree on it, but there are real good theories about it. The theories are good enough to actually help us come up with a vaccine, et cetera, et cetera.

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[00:37:28] Allison: And all of these things, just like the sheer. Knowledge that we now have to mold society into like interacting with society. Even just that understanding that we must have of ourselves living in a world that is now a little bit more understandable to us,is truly amazing and hard to comprehend for us.

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[00:37:45] Ada: Yeah. And I think one of the things that understanding also gives us is the hope that steps can be taken to avoid this happening again. And when a plane crashes and people who have lost loved ones in a plane crash are overcome with grief. We analyze what happened. We analyze the black box. We say, okay, we're going to implement policy changes to try to make there be fewer plane crashes.

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[00:38:05] Ada: And you get a kind of a consolation from that of, okay, I'm in terrible grief, but hopefully in the future, future generations will not have as much of this grief. Whereas when you're in Pedroic's world and a ship sinks, that ship sunk. And there's nothing you can do about it. And the next ship that sinks, we're not going to know any more about how the first ship sank.

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[00:38:26] Ada: Those ships just sank. 

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[00:38:27] Allison: But we're probably in Petra's role with regards to a few things right now in our lives. Do you have any idea what that might be? Like what are the kind of the blind spots where we might not have a good handle on some of the forces that are ruling our lives?

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[00:38:40] Allison: I think we're getting fewer and fewer because genetics is helping us understand things like why cancers happen.I think that, there are fewer and fewer, we understand why hurricanes happen. We understand why skin conditions happen. We understand why practically all diseases happen.

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[00:38:58] Ada: If we don't have a treatment, we at least have an explanation. Here is what it is. And when you have an explanation, you therefore have hope that we'll figure it out later. When you have no explanation, that's when you just say, okay, and I guess humanity is powerless. in the face of this thing. But there are very few things in the face of which humanity feels completely powerless right now.

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[00:39:19] Ada: I would say the thing in the face of which we feel most powerless is ourselves and our own decisions when we make political choices that we hate. and how often political systems end up in a situation where we're choosing between one thing we don't like and a different thing that we don't like more than that thing.

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[00:39:36] Ada: and we do feel somewhat powerless in the midst of why are our political systems like this? Why can't we have politicians that we actually like when nobody likes these particular politicians? not in, not choice A and not choice B. but we do understand. almost all of the biology, almost all of the geology, almost all of the natural disasters.

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[00:39:59] Ada: What we need to do is enhance our understanding of the human social world. This is one of the things that as somebody who's, in a social sciences department at the university, we're constantly arguing with funding people about because there's so much idea that we want to fund STEM more and fund the humanities and social sciences less.

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[00:40:20] Ada: And then we're like, okay, when COVID hit. There was a three stage problem. There was a treatment for the disease, and a vaccine for the disease. That was the STEM problem. We did it. We did it amazingly fast. Go us. We've solved the STEM thing. STEM is great. The next problem was the social infrastructure of getting the vaccine into arms.

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[00:40:42] Ada: and the persuasive structure of getting people to agree that they wanted to get the vaccine into their arms. That was the social sciences and the humanities problems, and that's what we botched. So the message should not be to strip funding away from the two things we were bad at to give it to the thing that we were good at.

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[00:40:58] Ada: We're good at that thing. It's good that it has funding, but we need to fund the things we botched. The things we botched were social science.problems and the humanities-problem. We need to flood more support into those because those are the arenas in which we still feel powerless. 

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[00:41:14] Allison: Yeah, you have this,I think quote in a previous podcast that you often mentioned, which is, we've saved the world so many times and I think you really go through a few of these cycles and, and it is quite a hopeful story and now we just have to do it again.

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[00:41:25] Allison: And yes, it's going to be hard, but, but we're also like. Somewhat up to the challenge. and it's hard to hold those two worlds in your head, I think, but if you could put your finger on a few social changes, I know that, your books, for example, they put their finger on many social changes or innovations that one could have, it's arguably like a real work of a social, technological toolkit that you produce there.

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[00:41:46] Allison: are there a few challenges that you think we're currently facing, specific investments, from a monetary lens or just. like sheer effort,could make a real difference if invested in good sociopolitical technology. 

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[00:41:59] Ada: I think right now one of the things that some, but not all countries struggle with, but certainly the US struggles with, is that the administration and structuring of the educational system doesn't do a good job of making use of the vast knowledge resources that actually surround us.

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[00:42:17] Ada: And, a lot of education is oriented around, trying to use standardized tests to test metrics, and then judging the education based on that. But this fails the test of as soon as you make a metric into a goal, it stops being a metric. and as soon as the test score becomes a goal, now the school is just oriented around teaching people to pass that test, not oriented around actually giving people a deep and broad education.

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[00:42:50] Ada: That's a good 

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[00:42:50] Allison: hassle. 

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[00:42:52] Ada: when you look at early America, one of the things that a lot of people said was this system will never work. This radical experiment of having the actual entire populace govern.that too many people are ignorant and do not know how government works and do not know how to govern.

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[00:43:12] Ada: it had been a consensus of all polities to which Europe had access that it works best for there to be an educated political class and for power to be in the hands of that class and that government. Class is more capable of rule than the vast populace, and therefore giving power to the populace will be negative.

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[00:43:31] Ada: You need to keep power in the hands of the political oligarchy. And America looked at this problem and people were like, if you're going to let everybody vote, it's going to fall apart. And there are different ways to try to address that. The old way and the consensus in 1600. And what we can call the conservative way, and I'll define why I'm calling it that in a moment, is to say, okay, we're going to make some kind of criteria and you have to pass an exam to vote.

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[00:44:03] Ada: We're going to make a meritocracy system. We're going to do something so that the unworthy or low information populace is not part of shaping this. And this is introducing meritocracy. into democracy, but when you introduce meritocracy into democracy, what you get is oligarchy.that democracy mixed with meritocracy creates oligarchy.

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[00:44:26] Ada: There are different governments you can mix with each other, right? You can mix, for example, democracy with monarchy. You can have some systems be democratic and some systems be monarchical. Those two systems hybridize fine. You cannot hybridize meritocracy and democracy without ending up with oligarchy.

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[00:44:43] Ada: It just is what happens when you mix those two chemicals. red and yellow still make orange. Democracy plus meritocracy makes oligarchy. And so that's not what early America did. What early America did is say, okay, then we're going to have to take incredibly seriously the challenge of educating people.

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[00:45:03] Ada: We're going to have to throw our efforts behind not only mandating and organizing education during childhood, but also sustaining political education throughout the rest of life afterward. This is why America created Media Mail, a subsidized circulation of newspapers, magazines, books, and information.

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[00:45:24] Ada: And many people who've used the post office in different places will notice that there's sometimes a cheaper rate for mailing books than there is for mailing other things. That was for democracy. That was the government subsidizing the movement of information with the idea of If we're going to have people capable of voting, what we need is lots of circulation and information, lots of circulation of newspapers.

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[00:45:47] Ada: No, we won't judge them, though we won't say they get it, those don't. If it's a printed medium with information on it, let it circulate. It doesn't matter whether it's a newspaper or a children's book or a comic book, and it doesn't matter whether it's politically leaning one way or another. All of it being subsidized will mean all of it reaches people easily.

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[00:46:05] Ada: People reach information easily. You have an educated populace. Instead of saying, okay, we will remove the unworthy people from political participation, they said, okay, we'll make all the people ready to be political participants by creating this educational system. From the beginning, it was assumed democracy would need that.

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[00:46:24] Ada: And there have been a lot of transformations and degenerations and people forgetting that's what the educational system was for. It was because democracy can't work without this thing working. And if we have a dysfunctional educational system in which its goal is to teach to the test, or its goal is be a giant babysitting apparatus, but not actually trying to get information across, then democracy of course is going to mess up and have problems.

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[00:46:51] Ada: This was predicted from the very beginning of trying this. and you cannot separate them. 

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[00:46:56] Allison: If you think about the flip side of just like a eucatastrophic moment to call it in Tolkien's,terms of what would a system look like in the US or possibly globally where education is just like at a pretty good level.

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[00:47:07] Allison: it 

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[00:47:07] Ada: would look like Finland is what it would look like. And if you go to Finland, it's like you're walking around in a science fictional utopia, especially because every time you approach any device, someone walks up to you and it's Would you like to hear about how well our public transit system works?

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[00:47:21] Ada: Exactly like people walk up to you in a utopian book and are like, let us explain our system of government. Let us explain our educational system. This is a problem that we have demonstrations of. If you make education a prestige and celebrated thing, Finland's core is you have to pass very rigorous exams to be a teacher.

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[00:47:41] Ada: And then teachers are an elite profession that has the acclaim and income of. Then you have a really great educational system in which people who really know and really care really get things across and you have an incredibly participatory citizen. And it also means that it's much easier for people to say, rather than being in this brainless, uninteresting mechanical job that has been put in front of me, I will.

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[00:48:10] Ada: Use my knowledge of engineering to help automate this job and then do something higher on the arts and sciences and writing level that is more creative. And one of the problems that we're having right now is automation. It can be great and relieve them, we don't want people sitting there flipping burgers and for a burger flipping machine is much better if we can have one.

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[00:48:31] Ada: So long as we've also then created opportunities for those people to move into the creative spheres and live as creators of the interesting and intellectually stimulating things we want. But we are simultaneously. Undermining the pay for writers, undermining the pay for artists, undermining the pay for actors, so that people who do move into creative spheres are desperately struggling.

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[00:48:55] Ada: we need to fund the careers into which people want to move when they're smart and educated and want to move out of the other ones, instead of creating a choke point in which oligarchy says, no, we're just going to have this sort of business elite be rich and everyone else needs to not. This is a roundabout way of saying there sure are a lot of things that are fixed by UBI.

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[00:49:18] Ada: And, among them is when people no longer have to do menial work nobody wants to do, what can they move across to doing, and how do we facilitate that? It's always been the case that when a new technology comes along and it's, okay, we don't need to have nearly as many farmhands now because we're raising wheat instead of spelt, and raising wheat instead of spelt uses a lot less manual labor.

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[00:49:45] Ada: Hey, guess what, everyone? Good job, we don't have to work with spelt anymore. Everyone is oh, thank god, I hate growing spelt. Spelt sucks. for those unfamiliar, a grain of spelt has to be cracked like a nut in order to get the grain out of it. So it takes enormous amounts of manually painful, obnoxious labor, whereas with wheat, you just hit it with a thing, and the chaff comes off, and it's way better.

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[00:50:09] Ada: Medieval people loathed spelt. Growing spelt. You can track misery when people have to grow spelt. But if the answer is okay and now we don't need you to crack the spelt grade so you're going to be left to starve to death, that's no good. But if it's instead, so you can You know, move on to somewhere else and get a job in the Italian Renaissance, learning how to build beautiful chairs and guilds, things for palaces and be an artisan.

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[00:50:35] Ada: That's better. We have always known or have known for centuries that we need our transformations in, what we could call industrial technologies, including agricultural technologies to go along with facilitating people transitioning to these new arenas of employment. And we don't need them, just letting people drop off the edge of society.

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[00:50:57] Allison: Yeah, I think education will definitely be one of the biggest challenges that we'll have to get a headset on and have to get a headset on fast if we want to, if we want to keep pace with the AI revolution. And it's no coincidence 

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[00:51:10] Ada: In places where you see oligarchic elites trying to entrench against change, you also see them deliberately dismantling education.

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[00:51:20] Allison: Yeah, that's right. I think this is, getting education right would be a good, eucatastrophe future. And, and I think that is the challenge these days. I want to be mindful of your time and just really thank you for coming on today. Maybe I'll leave us with a quote of Petrarc that Beatrice referred to a little earlier.

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[00:51:37] Allison: where he said, my fate is to live among varied and confusing storms, but for you, perhaps, if, as I hope and wish, you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. And he said that in 1343 CE. And so we are now, in that world. We have saved the world a few times in your world,in your words.

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[00:51:53] Allison: And now we're going to do it one more time. And if Petra were here, and if 

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[00:51:57] Ada: Petrarc was here, he would be dismayed by the many wars and politics. Tumults that look familiar, but he would also just be constantly weeping with joy every time he learned that, we know how cancer works and could treat it.

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[00:52:14] Ada: we eradicated most of the diseases he was familiar with. The food is so much cleaner and better. The streets are so much cleaner and better. Just so many incredible transformations, but we don't notice them because we're used to them.we notice the changes we've lived through. We don't notice the changes that precede us unless we study history to remind ourselves, Hey guys, the life expectancy used to be 18.

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[00:52:41] Ada: Things are pretty good. and life expectancy did drop over the last few years with COVID and so on, and also life expectancy has dropped more specifically in a couple of places, including the U. S. and the U. K. due to changes in administration of medicine and so on. But globally, it's going up.and one of the things that.

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[00:53:04] Ada: We also have to zoom out and look globally, because sometimes you are in a place where your particular country is going in a bad direction right now. And it can be easy to think the whole world is going in a bad direction right now and therefore despair, but if you then remind yourself that there are 100 countries, and I can look at the 70 of them where things are going in a good direction.

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[00:53:25] Ada: some of which are going in a good direction after having gone in a bad direction for decades, but have finally gotten the apparatus together to overthrow the regime and so on and get in the new, the new system. This is happening all over the place. So long as we look globally, we see the victories.

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[00:53:42] Ada: And we need to always look globally and not only locally, even if what we're doing is acting locally. 

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[00:53:49] Allison: And perhaps back in time, I think you also mentioned that, sometimes a particular moment in time can feel the worst that it is in our current lived experience. But actually looking back at a larger, historical perspective, it was much worse before.

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[00:54:03] Allison: And, and nevertheless, we should keep on pushing because I think the reason why we're progressing, even if we're sometimes dipping, it's not because that's a natural law, but it is because we make it thank you so much. 

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[00:54:13] Ada: Just in brief, there's a useful metaphor for thinking about. I think it is, it's hard to remember this, but it is natural for there to be several points over the course of your life that are the worst thing that has ever happened to you.

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[00:54:27] Ada: Because things happen, and sometimes they are worse than anything else that has happened to you so far.if you think about it, I've been thinking about Vikings a lot lately, because my newest novel is about Norse mythology, right? if you're a young kid who's been born in Iceland, for the first few years of your life, half of the winters are the worst winter you've ever known.

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[00:54:52] Ada: Just because winters vary, and you haven't known very many winters, and so some of them will be existentially horrible because they're the worst winter you've ever known. And later in your life, there will still be a few winters that are the worst winter that you've ever known, because winters vary. And you can think of it as if there's a piece of cloth, and when something terrible happens, it rips a hole in it.

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[00:55:15] Ada: And later, something bigger is going to come along that's a little bit worse, it will rip a larger hole in it. And something worse will come later, it will rip a larger hole in it. And all of us are a piece of cloth that has a hole, and every so often that hole widens. And every time that happens, that is genuinely traumatic.

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[00:55:30] Ada: It is the worst thing that we have ever experienced. But it's also natural and normal. Everybody widens gradually, the worst thing they've ever experienced. And if when you, when it happens, you can remind yourself, yes, and this is a natural part of human life. Everybody over the course of their life will have several times at which something occurs, which is the worst thing that has ever happened to you.

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[00:55:51] Ada: It does not mean the world is going in the wrong direction. It does not mean the world is doomed. It does not mean you should despair. It just means, all right, this is the point at which I'm a young Viking and this is the worst winter I've known. 

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[00:56:07] Allison: And hopefully it will make you more resilient or possibly anti fragile for the next ones ahead.

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[00:56:12] Ada: And there will be another one. And so you brace for it, but the key is to say, okay, this is the worst winter ever. We've still got to prepare to get through the winter. And when we prepare, we do. And the Viking and Norse civilizations do survive these terrible winters. And we can also, so long as we remind ourselves that it is normal to sometimes feel that thing inside ourselves rip.

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[00:56:36] Ada: And that the world is worse than it's ever been. Yes it is. And that hurts. And that is trauma. And that is internal violence. And that is natural to the human condition. And we can cope with it. 

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[00:56:47] Allison: As we're still in winter here in January, but like gearing up for spring, I think that's a pretty good thing to remember as we look into the new year of 2025.

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[00:56:54] Allison: Thank you so much Ada. It was an absolute pleasure. Pleasure to have you on. Yeah, your mind works in really wonderful ways and, and it's a joy to be a part of it, of seeing it work. So thank you so much. and yeah, we hope to, it's not the last time that we see you, in a foresight venue. 

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[00:57:08] Ada: I hope so.

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[00:57:08] Ada: and I, thank you for having such a great and necessary topic, and theme for your podcast, because. Despair is how we lose. And often, even though we forget it, despair is being intentionally cultivated by people who don't want active action and people who don't want change for the better and people who want to entrench their power.

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[00:57:32] Ada: When we feel despair, a lot of the time that despair is the intentional side effect of people who want us to despair. But despair is the only way we actually genuinely completely lose. So long as we hope, we act. So long as we act, we get partial victories. And if we save two thirds of those species, even if we saved only one third of those species, that's victory.

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[00:57:55] Ada: The only way we don't is if we don't try. And despair is what makes us not try. 

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[00:58:00] Allison: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you both. 

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