Speaker 1Roll up, roll up, and welcome back to the James Kennedy podcast, episode number 21, man. How are you doing? You doing good? You feeling good? You enjoying the sunshine? Are you unable to sleep like I am? Do you spend eight months of the year complaining about the rain and then when you get two days of sunshine, you complain about being hot? God bless you. Me too. Me too. I hope you enjoyed the episode last week talking with Nathan Stilwell from My Death, My Decision. I got a lot of messages off the back of that one and it seemed to really resonate with a lot of people, which is always a good thing. So I'm glad that the episode was well received. We are kind of sticking on the same theme today, except we're talking about the afterlife. We're talking about digital immortality, artificial sentience, robots, and is it possible to live forever? You know they're working on it, man. Those 1% trillionaires, they've been working on the immortality game for decades at least, trying to cheat death, you know? The latest development in that area seems to be this thing where they're digitizing the content of somebody's life. With the aim of one day being able to upload it again into some kind of physical avatar, like a robot or a machine or a hologram or something like that, that would effectively emulate the person. Very much in the same way that the human body is merely a temporary vessel for the experience of life. I guess they're hoping that by digitizing the contents of one's brain, their personality, their loves, their hopes, their dreams, their desires, their opinions, their thoughts, their creativity, if you can digitize all of that, and then, you know, just re-upload that into a new temporary vessel, then essentially the same thing, right? But because it's digital and not housed inside an organic matter such as the brain, which decays and dies one day, you can essentially live forever, is the thought behind it. You and your digital form living on inside a metallic or holographic eternal vessel. Would you want that? Loved ones? Interesting shit, no? Personally, scares the shit out of me. But it's damn interesting stuff. And that's why I'm super excited to have onto the show today, the awesome Maggie Savin-Baden, who's written extensively on this subject and knows the score. But before we jump in, I'm going to do my weekly nag, have you subscribe to the MoFo podcast, man. Come on, dude, get on it and hit those stars, baby. Give me that star rating at the platforms. Know what's going down over here so they can push it. out to more people for me to brainwash. Now, let's do it. Maggie Savin-Baden is a professor of education at the University of Worcester, where she has been since 2014. She has published a staggering 21 books, as well as over 60 peer reviewed journals. She has written widely on the subjects of digital immortality and artificial intelligence. And whilst I'm completely out of my depth, I cannot wait to find out what it's all about. So Maggie, thanks so much for spending time with us today. How are you doing?
Speaker 2Thank you very much indeed. Yeah, very well. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. It's good to be able to talk about this stuff in a
Speaker 1podcast. Oh, I can't wait, man. I'm fascinated by this stuff. So thanks so much for coming on today. Apologies in advance, because I'll be very enthusiastic, despite not knowing what the hell I'm talking about. So I'm just putting the apologies out there now. And before we jump in, what I usually ask people to do, if you don't mind, is just to give people a quick rundown as to who you are and what your credentials are and all that before we jump into it. So who is Maggie Savin-Baden and what's going on?
Speaker 2I mean, maybe it's good for your listeners to know to start with that the reason I got so interested in research and in learning was because I failed at school. And because I failed at school, I had to kind of fight my way back. And so I finished my PhD at the University of London when I was 36 years old. So I've kind of gone on from there, really. So I'm fascinated by learning, and that was my starting point. And then over the years, I was quite interested in learning in different spaces, which basically, I've been doing for a long time. And I've been doing for a long time. Which began with work when Second Life, the virtual world became popular. And that was really the starting point for getting interested in virtual humans.
Speaker 1Well, look at you now, you know, Professor of Education at Worcester University. You haven't done too bad.
Speaker 2No. And I discovered in the process of all of this that I quite like writing.
Speaker 1Well, I can tell. I mean, Jesus, 21 books?
Speaker 2I'm doing the search. So that's what I do. So yeah, my work started, I started with putting chatbots, which are sort of pretend people. You may have seen something on the Ikea web store, I suppose. At a push, you could call Siri a chatbot, but that can be quite limited, really. I don't know if you've ever noticed that once you get past seven questions, Siri gets a bit stuck. If you haven't, you should try it. So we put some chatbots in virtual worlds to see how students responded to them. And then went on there to do all sorts of things, hide chatbots in seminars to see if students notice them, with ethical permission, of course. But from that grew the work on creating copies of people. So we had some funded money, and it was to create different levels of chatbots or pedagogical agents or whatever you want to call them, from the basic Siri kind of thing, teach me maths, through to, you know, things like that. And then from there, we created a copy of virtual Barry. So we took all of Barry's emails and his friends, and we interviewed people, and we created a copy of Barry. And we called him virtual Barry. And we wanted to see how realistic people thought he was. So we did that over about a year. And then a few summers ago, we wanted to see if we could create something quite quickly. I was working with a company called Dayden in Birmingham at the time. And so they created a virtual Maggie. Within about three weeks.
Speaker 1Wow, that is awesome. And so what does that entail then? Is that similar to what you were just describing with the chatbots? Does it function very much the same way as that, where it's text orientated? Or does it have a physical element to it as well?
Speaker 2Yeah, the ones we created, which we called a virtual persona in the end, those would kind of use my head and we lip synced behind me. And put all quite a bit of my data behind it. And I do triathlons and running. So I got some of my mates to try it out and see what they thought. And some of them thought it was kind of really weird and odd, but quite like me. And other people thought it was just very strange. And they didn't want anything much to do with it.
Speaker 1How did you feel about it?
Speaker 2Oh, I think it's quite useful. I think if we carried on the work, it would have been a really good jumping off point for creating a digitally mortal. Is why we then got into or I got interested in this idea of the digital. So I said to my colleague, David Burden at Dayden, well, can we create something to leave behind? Because from where I'm sitting, most of the stuff that you see online is all smoke and mirrors. And there's all sorts of very, very strange, different variations of things. But most of them, when you really look at them, is about kind of leaving your stuff behind or there's the terraform movement where you can leave all your data. And when they re-energize you through biogenics, they can put your data back in your head. So it does feel a bit Star Trek, I guess, but it's not very real. So we then wanted to look into digital immortality, as we then called it, and see what was around. And there are all sorts of things like grief bots and dad bots. But again, in reality, they're quite basic things. And they're kind of useful. I think what's become more interesting is digital afterlife, which I think is a more accurate portrayal of what's actually going on at the moment. So a digital immortal has this sense of, you know, they're going to be there forever. They're immortal, which with the best will in the world, you can't be unless you really think in 42 years time when I will be dead and you'll probably just be old. Whether you think until you're immortal can learn. So you can't really be immortal unless you can learn after death.
Speaker 1Right. That makes sense. Yeah. So for people then who don't know what we mean when we when we say digital immortality, I mean, I've done, you know, a little bit of layman's research into this. And, you know, my understanding of it is probably very incorrect and patchy. But it's my understanding based on some interviews I've seen with scientists, and I think I've seen mirrored in your work as well, is this idea that it's possible to download and digitize the contents of someone's brain. And I don't know if we're still in the realms of just theorizing this at the moment or whether it's actually moving towards being possible. But then the theory was that you could re-upload that person's brain essentially in a digital form into some kind of communicative device, like an avatar, perhaps, or a chatbot or a hologram or something like that, whereby in the future, a person could go and actually have a real time conversation with a deceased relative who essentially is not deceased because their, you know, their brain and their personality and everything, the contents within their brain is still very much alive and in a kind of immortal digital form. Is that what we're talking about when we talk about digital immortality? Or are we talking more about the preservation of a person's digital assets that were acquired during the time that they were alive?
Speaker 2Well, it's both and. I don't think it's possible to download somebody's. brain onto a computer now or even after they die what you can do now is you can download memories texts photographs images conversations that you've had with them like interviews and certainly that's what's happened with the dad bot that before his dad died he locked in lots and lots of recordings with his dad and then created a copy of his dad based on those recordings so it's really the current situation we're in is where if you want to create some kind of digital immortal mostly it will be based on memories before people die right so all the stuff about re-energizing and having an avatar yeah you can have an avatar but it will still only be based on the memories it won't be because there is not sentience we haven't got sentience so it can't right so that's the shortcoming of it all got you
Speaker 1right that clears it up yeah i was really confused by that because my father recently passed away and in listening to interviews with scientists talking about this topic and you know all the things that i've read it got me imagining whether you know if we lived in the future and i was able to go and load up his digitized immortal version of himself through some kind of avatar one would i want to do that and secondly it wouldn't be him as a person then it would be him frozen as he was in time in a digital form is that right so for example if i you know if in this imaginary hypothetical situation if i was to ask my my father's avatar you know in 10 years time what he thought of you know the news that day he wouldn't have an opinion because his brain and his memories and his personality and his opinions and his thoughts on everything would be time locked into the time that they were digitized and everything prior to that but he would have no as you say sentience of anything that happened after that point so he wouldn't really be a thinking sentient alive human being it would be a souvenir of a person that he
Speaker 2was no i mean certainly when we've created bots in virtual worlds and we said to the students so you can ask them about the latest research on this you know they we would have got um our fid fees behind them so they could respond to a according to the current news now you could technically do that with your dad and it would sound like him but it would still be not your dad because all he's doing is using his voice right so there's a lot of tricks you can do to make it look like that but they are tricks it is jupiter ultimately do you see
Speaker 1there being any capacity for that to change as you know technology gets more advanced and it's because artificial intelligence becomes more powerful i mean once you've got the input data of a person's personality and memories and opinions and thoughts do you see it being a possibility in the future of artificial intelligence or algorithms of some sort being able to use that raw input data in a way that they can generate something resembling sentience i think
Speaker 2that's what's already really happening in in some of the different companies that are starting to do that but it isn't really any more than algorithms right so it is just really kind of clever machine learning behind somebody because artificial intelligent beings don't actually have sentience yet right nor nor are they likely to for a while right okay and the other thing that you mentioned was about left you behind artifacts i mean that's why i shifted away from the term immortality to afterlife because it it includes much much more because it's a lot of things that are because people do leave behind their photos and their musics which is deeply problematic and we haven't got any laws to manage all of this stuff so you know i don't know if your dad left his passport words behind or access to these photos and yeah whether he told you before he died which is technically illegal you know oh yeah oh yeah it's all it's all quite a mess really in terms of what's allowed and disallowed and what people know and what they don't know and largely people don't have any kind of digital will associated with with what they leave
Speaker 1behind well same here yeah i mean obviously you know my father was ill for quite some time and he was cognizant for for most of his journey so he we did have the difficult conversations you know he did he did work very hard to put a lot of safeguards in place and to make sure that he covered as many bases as he could um so yeah i do have all of his passwords and he's given us access to all of his you know music collection and his hard drives and things like that and his photo collection and stuff at no cost to him so i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point because at no point did we ever talk about you know a digital will or and at no point did any of us consider that him giving us his music collection or his downloads or his you know photos or anything was in any way illegal you know with regards to his online presence you know his social media accounts and anything that he's got any websites or anything like that again because the digital part of somebody's life has not become a normalized part of the end of life conversation for us as a society yet so is this completely uncharted territory at the moment um although
Speaker 2it is they're trying to sort it out in the edited collection that i did with victoria mason robbie um on digital afterlife there's a couple of chapters on the legal side of it in there which are really helpful but i think one of the things that's quite interesting is that there are things that are okay so as long as he'd left his passwords in his will and he didn't give them to you before and that's kind of okay but things like um if his music collection was bought and kept on his computer and it was all digital and he didn't give them to you before and that's kind of okay but if it was all digital downloads for you to now have them would be classed as not legal right so there's quite a bit of case law about people that have fought for that and there've been also quite a few incidents where people have left their tablet behind but haven't left any passwords right and have not allowed them to access the photographs in
Speaker 1the cloud that's
Speaker 2interesting yeah so because of that you know it does need sorting out and it is is a mess but i mean there are a lot of people who are not allowed to access the photographs in the cloud all sorts of other environmental things like the trouble with leaving dead people behind on twitter and facebook is the amount environmental impact that they're having right they've been contained on service in i don't know california or somewhere yeah creating more heat of course yeah and there was an incident where twitter said they were going to take off all the dead people out on twitter and there was a huge outcry and then they put them all back on again
Speaker 1yeah it's a strange one isn't it i've never really considered this before i mean i do remember reading something recently which blew my mind it was a statistic about um deceased profiles on facebook and how many millions of them there were and how pretty soon i think the the number of dead profiles on facebook is going to outnumber the living which is insane but at the same time i mean my father's social media profiles are all still online and there is a strange kind of comfort that i get from knowing that that's still there you know in a weird way so i kind of get it but at the same time i'm not sure if it's a good thing or not but i think it's a good thing i think it's a there is going to come a point surely when these tech companies just aren't going to be able to maintain that amount of dead content for want of a better phrase on their on their platforms you know but i'm really surprised that we're not further down the line with that conversation yet
Speaker 2yeah but it's kind of to their advantage and it's a lot of work to take it down but i think the other interesting thing that goes with the tweets and facebook is is that there's a whole new language associated with how we speak to the dead and there's been particularly through a huge change in the way that media has started to interfere with rituals and practices so people talk about their loved ones they talk to their loved ones on facebook they speak to them if they're angels they ask them to pray for them and then you get the bizarre situations where in funerals now that the funeral directors are becoming the media stars who are directing the proceedings rather than the priest so there's some really odd things that have got to do with what's going on recently which introduce questions about well where is the sacred in this where are the dead in cyberspace fascinating
Speaker 1do you have any opinions or thoughts on how this could be tidied up well i think
Speaker 2i think the dead on in social media space is the only way forward will be to delete them but people are really unhappy with that i can
Speaker 1understand that as somebody who's like i say been through that recently and it's obviously it's all of their content and it's all of their videos their pictures you know their thoughts their opinions it is almost a part of them isn't it it's their digital projection
Speaker 2it's it's a digital legacy yes but surely you can just download it all if you really want to well yeah i mean
Speaker 1you can download the photos and things like that and the videos but i mean if there was an app and i'm sure there probably is um or a function within the platforms themselves whereby you could download the entire news feed you know all of the you know posts and comments and things like that then that would be quite a cool little digital keepsake i think of a person's as you described it digital legacy and then it would give the platform to the ability to clean out all of these kind of redundant profiles you know so if something like that doesn't exist then it most definitely should i think but jumping forward say 50 years given that our digital lives are now so important to us and most of us spend more of our lives in the digital realm than we do in the physical realm do you see a situation whereby in 50 years perhaps digital reality will be seen as more real than physical reality i think it
Speaker 2already is i mean the author sherry turkle is very critical of this and she cites an incident when she was on a boat with her daughter and her daughter was i don't know how old eight or something and you had been in virtual worlds and stuff and she put her hand in the water near the fish and said to mom mom this is really real and you do hear people saying oh she's really real about the real yeah so interesting questions about i mean it goes back to the matrix doesn't it what is real you know we're all in a computer program because in a way we are and the question is just because it's on a computer does that mean it's not real which again has had interesting questions about um i've been doing some work with the church of england on running online services and lots of discussions about well where is god if you're doing a service on zoom is god in the computer well actually of course he he she is right you know where else would god be god is in the machine so i mean i just think it's so i think there isn't a real and an unreal anymore it's all i for me there is no digital and non-digital we are post-digital now what do you
Speaker 1mean by post-digital
Speaker 2i mean that everything is merged together you can't distinguish between what is digital and what isn't digital anymore you know even if you go into the garden with your phone it'll tell you what your plants are so post-digital is more a kind of meshing together more a sense of what we're dealing with is now ungraspable we can't make sense of it anymore because everything's merged together yeah that's
Speaker 1an interesting point and i guess that given that we are living in such a content heavy world now and we're on a global scale all of us are bombarded every second of every day and all of our senses with content to make sense of constantly it's inevitable that we then have to use technology in order to navigate that world that our dependence on technology has actually created for us like our brains have not evolved to be able to navigate that in the environment that we live in now you know we've evolved to survive out in the wild you know and given that we now have a device in on our person at all times you know we're just listening to our every passing conversation it's monitoring our every search and our every fleeting desire or whatever i suppose by holding on to that hooker by crook we are essentially functioning as a hybrid entity already yeah i mean i don't
Speaker 2think our brains have adapted or been changed by particularly i mean there is some debate on that but i think we also one of the things i often say is that we do have choice you know we can choose to leave our phones behind when we leave the house we can go on holiday and turn our phones off you know we we can choose to go for a walk without our phone so i think we're going to have the thing that people often forget is that our dependency is a choice right and i think is a dependency and i i think it's important to remember that well
Speaker 1when i think about turning off all of my devices and just putting them in a drawer you know the overwhelming feeling that i feel immediately is one of immense relief you know
Speaker 2whereas a lot of people will feel stressed and anxious yeah you know that gets just because they can't find the phone or they've left the phone behind or they've dropped the phone or they've got your phone you know they get very stressed about it
Speaker 1and i suppose it's because that difference between exactly what you alluded to earlier what what is real what is your reality for some people you know their instagram world and the connections they make there even if they've never met these people in person or anything like that that is their true reality and the physical reality of walking around during the day and going to work and stuff like that is almost kind of secondary to the the online projection of the digital reality that they
Speaker 2live in yeah and yet within all of that there is such lying and deceit going on true fake people and fake news no and that's also part of our lives that a lot of that isn't not real yeah well
Speaker 1social media i think you know definitely when it had its heyday it certainly had a strong people power democratizing element to it which i liked an anarchic element to it you know you saw it being of use in you know things like the arab spring and police brutality cases and things like that suddenly it was almost like everybody now had the powers of surveillance and mass communication you know which i'm all for but then gradually that power has been diluted and stoned away and corrupted and infiltrated by you know the powers that be government agencies and you know marketing agencies and things like that and we saw it in the extreme around the time of the trump election you know you had these russian-based agencies working out ukraine funded through london or whatever you know whose job it was basically to infiltrate conversations on places like twitter and facebook and just basically argue and set people off against each other spread disinformation so instead of the traditional means of propaganda social media became the tool of propaganda and it's so insidious because we don't notice it because it just slides in and out of the conversations that we think we're having amongst ourselves and we're not
Speaker 2anymore yeah and at the same time you've got all sorts of other strange practices like virtue signaling and digital pillorying and you know scapegoat ecology where what the public do to each other in media spaces to just you know if your political opinion or you drive a four by four which i don't choose not to or you behave in a particular way you can be victimized from the internet because of the choices you've made so it's not a particularly kind world in a lot of these media spaces yeah well
Speaker 1i had dan gardner on the podcast a while back you know the author of the book risk and he writes a lot based on the work of daniel kahneman you know to do with our cognitive biases and behavioral characteristics and things like that and he was saying something that was fascinating to me and i think it's really interesting and i think it's really interesting and he said that if you get a group of people together with with varying viewpoints they will tend to all converge and settle in one part of the opinion spectrum and studies have shown that that point of convergence where they all settle in agreement is always at the extreme end it's almost as if groupthink kicks in and we amplify each other towards the extreme end of things and it's been proven in studies that this happens in social dynamics but it's proven also that it also happens online in social media which is which is crazy yeah because
Speaker 2it makes us feel good that we're better than the people who drive four by fours or whatever it is that we disagree with you know
Speaker 1it is yeah well given that we're stuck with this now though i mean what is the answer you know given the artificial intelligence or even artificial sentience will be so superior to what our seemingly basic evolutionary physical humanity is capable of you know are we doomed now to rule by robot or is this some way that we can actually turn things around and bring this technology back into the service of humanity and the planet you know are we at a crossroads right
Speaker 2now i don't think we're particularly at a crossroads i mean we've created this stuff i think we've gone past the point of no return but i mean i think there's some amazing films that you can look at whether it's i robot or the novel the afterwife or the one that people quote a lot is black mirror and it just i think it does show us the kinds of futures we're going to be heading towards right but i don't think people are interested in actually doing anything about it and certainly our legal system is trying to do stuff i attend the house of lord select committee on artificial intelligence and there's a huge awareness of the difficulties that we're going to be particularly in the states more on the worries around self-driving cars that we might turn into sentient beings online and kill
Speaker 1somebody so why is that
Speaker 2then i think education really at a young age it worries me in a way that i probably did the same that you see parents carers in the park with young children on their phone at six months old you see children in looking at newspapers trying to move the picture yeah to move it on to the next picture you have a reduction in conversation you know people going for dinner and they don't talk to each other they talk to whoever's on their phone so there's this sense of absent presence going on right and i just think there are not enough questions being asked you know we've got the office for students trying to fix grammar and spelling in universities instead of just introducing questions about well what does learning mean in these spaces and how do we raise awareness of improving communication or fake news or helping students to understand what is reliable information and how to be critical how to think through the issues rather than being either scapegoats or changed by somebody else's extreme view i think we need to be more critical but in a positive way you know the real meaning of criticality not yeah pretty sizing somebody but actually taking a stance towards some of these difficult issues well
Speaker 1that's interesting because you're a professor of education and everything you just said then about the education system i 100 agree with so given that you're in a position of influence there what is the actual barrier to the education system being changed the government right
Speaker 2the difficulty we've got is we've got people in government who make decisions about education when they're not educated in in the field of education. I'm a higher education researcher i'm not an early years or reception or primary or secondary teacher my my research has always been at the university level but when you think about the imposition that the government has on the way universities are run the what is taught in schools there is no sense of freedom for the teachers to be the professionals that they are right there's too much interference so you have things like sats and you have things like government inspectors coming in to check that things being taught in the right way but it doesn't give any sense that the teachers are professionals you know how to teach right and equally we have this thing called the research exercise which began as something called research assessment exercise and has changed into the research excellence framework and what they're basically doing is they're checking how good our research is you know so again it's too much interference
Speaker 1it always comes down to the bloody government doesn't it every conversation i have on this podcast regardless of the issue always comes down to the fact that the government is about 50 years behind the rest of us i
Speaker 2know it's just no just no idea that's great
Speaker 1must be so frustrating for
Speaker 2yourself as well yeah it is i mean that's probably why i write such a lot because it's a way in a book they can't stop you saying stuff you know i can be critical in a book or an article i can take a view i can have a glance about the issues and i can say you know this is not good enough we shouldn't be doing it this way and thankfully you know i have been asked around the world over the years to to talk about this stuff so it does have resonance you know i say we need to stand up we need to fight we need to believe in our profession and the fact that we should have a voice and university i mean for me the other thing is i don't know why university management systems don't stand up and say no we're not doing
Speaker 1this right because we should be well it seems to me with with everything so fast and with technology racing ahead of us at the speed that it is physical services and jobs are going to become more and more redundant we're seeing that already it seems to me that in terms of education we would be far better suited coming out of school with an ability to like as you said think critically about things to be creative to understand how to think and how to navigate the world rather than basically priming us to get a useful job in a world that is very quickly becoming redundant i think the more generalized skills such as the one that you're talking about the more just as you said being able to think critically to be able to adapt and to be creative i think that would they would be far better skills to arm people with in in the world that we're moving into would you agree with that
Speaker 2yeah completely i've got um two young people one she's just finished criminology degree and the other one's doing a computer science degree and they both came out of school and you know it was to do with filling in job application forms or doing something why don't they teach you this stuff at school you know my son even sent me a video that had been done funny video about all the things they got taught school and all things that were useless right you know and i agree because you know i never had a use for 2 pi r until i started to bake and i realized that actually it was useful for putting the marzipan on the christmas cake well you know
Speaker 1that's that's a noble skill it is now yeah
Speaker 2but it's useful but you know it is about how do we get people to apply the stuff that they're learning people fail because they don't what the point is yeah
Speaker 1it's really worrying man and when you see the power that these mass tech companies are gathering as well and with all of our data and the ability to manipulate and to literally control us as we kind of walk blindly into a future that we are going to be very very ill-equipped to to survive you know it is a real concern and most people aren't even aware of this you know it's crazy but to loop it back to uh the start of the conversation i'm going to talk about you know i am heartened to know that the digital immortality as i understood it at the start of the conversation is is not and anywhere near the uh the realm of possibility just yet the idea of immortal sentient beings stamping around the world as giants you know never dying it kind of freaked me out and as i said at the start you know these trillionaires i know that they want it man you know because you know one day you go maniacs but also you know the fear of death and that existential turmoil that we carry throughout over all of our lives is a real fear of death is very much a defining part of the human condition isn't it yeah but for me our mortality and the finite nature of life and everything is part of what makes life worth living is what makes you fight for something you know because the clock is ticking and i think that's a beautiful thing i think uh and an acceptance of one's mortality is is a very beautiful and powerful thing so i'm glad at least that with all the things that we've just mentioned considered that we're not also racing towards a future of um you know immortal trillionaires
Speaker 2yeah and it's interesting when you i interviewed people for a research project and i asked people if they would want to leave a copy of themselves behind and a few of them said they would but largely the view was now why would i want to leave a copy of me behind for my family why they want more of me true
Speaker 1yeah i want to be gone
Speaker 2yeah well unfortunately
Speaker 1there's all people that would want to live forever probably the sort of sociopaths we wouldn't want to have around you
Speaker 2know well yeah can you imagine a copy of donald trump no thanks you
Speaker 1see you mentioned a sociopath and what's the first thing that pops into everybody's mind you know that dude would be all over this as well man you know he'd be like oh great i can run for president you know like till the end of time oh god can you imagine so um yeah so please reassure us then on that note um that this digital immortality gig whilst very real and happening yeah does not mean sentient thinking intelligent beings walking around the world for all of time and any claim that developing true sentience is not going to be happening anytime soon no
Speaker 2i don't think so not not for 40 years or so i mean as i said there's some clever jupiter you can you can they did it i think the un they had sophia who was a robot that they programmed behind and they pretended that she was you know fully sentient but actually she wasn't because again it's smoke and mirror so there's lots of clever things you can do to make things look real but actually they're not right that's what i think people have to be careful you know there was a thing on microsoft i think of a few months ago where they said oh they could clone people and i thought well you could kind of clone people kind of copy them but you can't make them sentient so whenever you look at the websites and there are lots that offer you that ability you know you can pay to have yourself uploaded but there's no guarantee that you can be downloaded into anything sensible anytime soon so what kind
Speaker 1of information can be downloaded and digitized from the human brain and i think i remember you saying memories was one of them is there anything
Speaker 2else well yeah i mean anything well my memories if i spoke it all in um now my voice could be used my photographs my stories my diaries you know all of that could be what you could do is you could take all the information from my past and you could take all the information from my past and then you could do a copy of my voice and then you could turn all my memories and stories into just that a digital copy of myself right at different ages you could do it all but only
Speaker 1going backwards
Speaker 2yeah well and forwards i'm
Speaker 1still here of course yeah thank god thank you but yeah no i
Speaker 2still think i mean what david burden and i who wrote a book called virtual human launched the book and even then this was some five years ago i think we both still said that we both felt that sentience was about 40 years off even then so i don't think it's near do you
Speaker 1think it's possible
Speaker 2oh anything's possible look where we are now you know when i was when i was a child we didn't have a television right right yeah look where we are now so yes i'm sure it will be possible i'm sure i'm glad i won't be here that's
Speaker 1scary yeah that's scary because
Speaker 2then you're looking at you know what are the rights what are the rights of people and how do you decide about what robot rights are and who makes
Speaker 1those decisions yeah and at that point we've we've we've surpassed the human being we're something else at that
Speaker 2point yeah and i mean to some extent all the i mean people are already trying to join themselves with the machines anyway yeah yeah chips and ears and all the rest of it to i don't know i think the question will soon be what what is a human right again i don't know if you've seen these um it's in spain somewhere they call it the block the guy who's got ears on his head and somebody else who i can't remember what else they've grown but things they've grown onto themselves to adapt themselves to make themselves kind of differently human
Speaker 1i haven't seen that so is that like an attempt at some kind of human slash technology hybrid yeah
Speaker 2it is so the problem is that they have trouble getting through airports and stuff because you know the these things aren't built one of them's got sort of like a microphone that's built into his brain because he's colorblind and it comes out of his head and across in a sort of long stool jesus christ completely attached to him so that it had to be surgically inserted so if he wants to travel he has to you know has to get proper clearance to get through the airport because this thing is is actually embedded in his brain that's
Speaker 1mental man like my initial gut reaction when hearing stuff like that is to kind of pull back and think like oh hang on a second like we're meddling with our brain now you know i mean like that that is going into dangerous wars but the truth is that there's probably tons of medical benefits to the to this technology and to the coming technology as well so outside of that do you see any other benefits to us having this technology you know i mean we've talked a lot about the negative and the worrying sides of it which are both very real but are there some positives to this stuff as
Speaker 2well well this is where you have to decide what i mean a pacemaker is a piece of technology isn't it true so it's to do with this i was talking to a really interesting guy from the university of ghent who's kind of doing sort of some different taxonomy of these different additions because when i was working at coventry university the the professor kevin borick put a chip in his wrist which could i don't know open his fridge or turn she's heating on or communicate with his wife and then people have gone on from that to adapt their bodies for performance art and certainly the guy with the antenna coming out of his head i think he's colorblind and it enables him to feel colors right so i think there are lots of medical benefits but i think they're kind of hidden
Speaker 1well i can see that probably changing you know as human machine hybrids become much more the norm
Speaker 2you know yeah yeah i think so i mean you know artificial limbs they're all getting you know more interesting in terms of what you could do and you know so there are some great benefits to to the use of technology in this way but um i think you know there are some very interesting areas and because i'm really into death rather than the living at the moment right i haven't really looked at that for some time but i mean there is some very interesting research in this area which is really robotics more than
Speaker 1artificial intelligence yeah of course yeah well i think it's more the artificial intelligence and the meddling with your brain thing that concerns me the most i think i mean you know functional use of technology you know great but when our brain and our means of perception and logic and understanding and thinking and making decisions for ourself is manipulable i think it's game over so i'm glad that you said that we are far far away from that point just yet
Speaker 2yeah well i hope we are so what could
Speaker 1people do then i mean you you said earlier that most people don't know enough or anything at all about these issues and that is really worrying because they should so anyone who's just listened to this this conversation today and goes delving into these subjects and goes looking through your books and your articles on your website and everything like that and educates themselves on this issue what can they do after that point because you know we're up against a behemoth of big tech and clearly no regulation or anything around any of these these related issues so what can we do where where do we start in building the defense what seems to be an unstoppable momentum i think
Speaker 2i would start small i think things like creating a digital will finding out the providence of your music collection when you can leave it behind making decisions about um whether you do want to leave a digital copy of yourself behind which you quite easily do yourself there are companies that help making decisions about do you want to have an online business or do you want to have a digital business or do you want to have an online business candle for people to light do you how what do you want to have in terms of do you want to have a qr code on your gravestone after you die i mean i think those things are worth thinking about i think in terms of the impact i think if anybody's really interested i think getting communities together to think about it um in terms of workshops to discuss it i mean again i've had a platform within the church of england to to talk about that and certainly i'm increasingly asked to run workshops on dealing with the digital and getting people to think about it so i think a lot of it is just thinking about well do you have your phones at the table right or not right do you have family meals do you leave your phone behind when you go out do you turn off your computer and it's complete with its camera yeah at night so you're not tracked do you turn your tracking off when you're traveling some of these are really simple but they do prevent you from doing that so i think a lot of it is just thinking about well do you have those things are a good start that makes a lot of sense yeah basically
Speaker 1just taking control of your digital life on on a basic day-by-day basis everything that you just said then are things that i don't do and i could easily do which would make a massive difference i suppose it's about just becoming a little bit more savvy to where we're heading and where we're at and getting
Speaker 2involved a bit more yeah i mean when we have people around for dinner generally they don't have to bring their phones to the table but if they do we just say oh really sorry we don't have phones at the table right right okay yeah you know because this is
Speaker 1about conversation yes taking it back to the
Speaker 2human absolutely yeah absolutely and what
Speaker 1are you working on currently then i read on your website i think that you're working on four books is that right
Speaker 2um well i've just finished the one on post-digital theologies so that's all being dealt with at the moment i'm finishing a book on digital theology and i'm going to be talking about the digital displacement stories an edited collection which is about people's stories of apartheid or adoption or japanese internment or those kinds of stories displaced in different countries moving from one to the other so that's a kind of global collection i'm doing a new book on problem-based learning online which is problem-based learning is where i started and what my phd was about and actually working with a colleague who's just finished a phd in this area so working with her on that but my new book that i'm really interested in is rather hurting my brain to write is called post-digital learning for a changing university oh wow and it's really trying to take on things like digital scapegoating absence and presence way learning is designed within universities thinking about it in the context of the digital world post-digital world
Speaker 1sounds amazing it sounds like it actually covers a lot of what we've dipped into today you know the educational system and the uh the post-digital world yeah man let me know when that one comes out because i'll be all over that
Speaker 2one correct to another interview then
Speaker 1yeah i probably won't be able to understand a lot of it but i'll certainly give it a go so where can people follow your work because you've got tons of literature online you're clearly a prolific worker and a prolific writer there's tons of stuff on your website is that a good place for people to check you out what's what's the um where can people find you
Speaker 2most of my articles are on the website um there are a few talks hanging around if they google me they're probably a bit old now but there's some stuff on there or yeah feel free to contact me at university of worcester email me and ask me i'm happy to share articles or have discussions now you've
Speaker 1opened the floodgates now because now you're gonna have every you know tech geek in the world sending you emails about robots and stuff but for people who have listened to this and obviously we've tried to cover as many different aspects of these areas as we can you know they are very um complex and detailed and there is obviously you know a much deeper level to this stuff if you want to delve further into it and if you're going to do that i would definitely say check out maggie's um writings online and her website is at maggie savin baden.wordpress.com and i'll put the the link in the description as well so you can click straight through to it i would recommend everybody to do that because there is tons of well-researched well-argued and well-presented information on all of these things that we've dipped into today and at the very least please do maggie a huge favor and myself and all of the future of humanity please stop taking your phone to the dinner table and start turning the goddamn thing off when you go out for a drive or when you go to sleep at
Speaker 2night absolutely that's a good starting point and a good ending point i guess oh
Speaker 1maggie i promised i wouldn't keep you longer than an hour we were literally on the minute so thank you so so much for your time and i'll see you next time i really appreciate you you've blown my mind and inspired me to to research further into this stuff best wishes with everything thanks for all the great work you're doing and sharing with us all and hopefully we can have another chat again soon
Speaker 2yeah my pleasure and thanks for asking me
Speaker 1james thanks maggie speak to you again soon
Speaker 2have a great day bye-bye
Speaker 1bye man my brain hurts my brain hurts but in a really awesome way i feel like that was a conversation that probably could have gone on for about six hours because i could have just pulled it this way and that way like a gazillion more questions but uh it's probably better that i didn't i think already there's like a decade's worth of stuff to delve into there if you're interested you know i mean and man that is such an interesting field of work to spend your life involved in you know it must be so much fun if you know if if like maggie you've got a passion and a talent and an expertise in those areas it must be so cool to get to like study it and you know experiment and write about it you know i always wish that like i had the intelligence and the talent and you know the mathematical ability to become a scientist or something and i know it's always got it's a bit like being a musician it's got a kind of romantic imagery attached to it you know the mad professor in the lab you know with uh all sorts of like pioneering groundbreaking world-changing experiments happening all around you but i'm guessing that just like being a musician that romantic imagery is probably um wholly inaccurate you know people think that being a musician is like the most awesome job in the world but most of the time you and just say I'm hanging around waiting for stuff. i'm imagining that you know being a professor or a scientist is uh much the same you know you're spending a lot of time you know waiting for stuff to happen that doesn't happen and writing lots of reports but i hope you enjoyed that one man i really did i i i i did struggle in order to try and keep up without wasting maggie's time in all honesty so i hope i uh you know managed to shepherd that through okay for you guys and the other thing i'm struggling with is the fact that it is absolutely scorching heat and in order to do these recordings i've got to keep all the windows and doors closed in my studio obviously you know for sound purposes so i'm literally melting in my chair at the moment which is why my voice keeps going all low and sleepy and slurry so without further ado please rush off grab yourself an ice cream and a cold drink and go and check out maggiesavinbaden.wordpress.org i'll put a link in the description as well so you can click straight on it go and check out all of maggie's amazing work you know and do some further research on digital immortality hybrid humans and all the crazy stuff that's right around the corner very very important stuff it's not just sci-fi good fun you know it's actually really really important and if we're not educated and aware and mature about where this technology is going and who's in control of it we are doomed it is going to be like the terminator movie for real so whilst this stuff is damn good fun you know it is a very important area as well to educate yourself on and to empower yourself on but yeah it's all good and i hope you enjoyed that one man i hope you enjoyed that one man i hope you also damn interesting and damn good fun so i'm gonna clock off now and go and jump into a bath full of ice um i love you guys to bits thanks again for listening don't forget to leave me some stars and some reviews and subscribe and spread the word and share the links and leave comments and all that jazz that i tell you to do every week but none of you do it you buggers but i still love you nonetheless so have a great week i shall see you next time take care of yourselves take care of others i love you loads bye
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