Chris Anderson: Hello, welcome to the TED Interview. I'm Chris Anderson. And this is the podcast series where I get to sit down with a TED speaker and dive much deeper into their ideas than was possible during their TED Talk. Now, today's episode was recorded live at the TED conference. Our guest is Harvard professor Steven Pinker. You could make the case that Steve Pinker is one of the world's most influential minds. He's a cognitive scientist, a psychologist, a linguist, and in recent years, has become something of a historian and statistician also. His two most recent blockbuster books try to answer an incredibly important question: Is the world getting better or worse?
Steven Pinker (From TED 2018): Many people face the news each morning with trepidation and dread. 2016 was called the "worst year ever" --
(Laughter)
until 2017 claimed that record --
(Laughter)
and left many people longing for earlier decades, when the world seemed safer, cleaner and more equal.
CA: Steve Pinker thinks those fond memories are actually misguided, and the world actually is getting better. But many people struggle to accept that, and it's certainly hard to imagine a more consequential question. So whether you leave this discussion feeling hopeful or depressed may hang on whether he's successful in persuading you. I was certainly super excited to sit down with Steve Pinker and dig in.
(Applause)
Welcome, Steve.
SP: Thank you, Chris.
CA: Progress: I think that the question about how we think about progress -- whether it's actually happening, whether it's an illusion -- I don't see a more important conversation or more important thing to figure out, because what we believe about progress will impact what we pay attention to. If we believe that certain things are heading in the wrong direction, that's what we pay attention to. If that was actually an illusion, then that's a terrible fact, we're paying attention to the wrong things. And then, more than that, what we feel about progress is a kind of soundtrack to our lives, it affects how we feel, whether we're joyful or miserable, whether we make our kids joyful or miserable. So to me, there's just not a more important conversation. And Steve, if I can paraphrase your talk, you basically said that the impression we all have is that the world is getting worse, but actually, that's an illusion, when you actually look at the data. And so let's start with the first part of that: the impression of the world is that it's getting worse. Are you saying that, basically, what we read in the media, that those things are basically false?
SP: Certainly not false. The wars that take place really do take place, and the terrorist attacks and the pollution and the poverty. But there's a basic fallacy that we're vulnerable to when we read the news. Because the news tells us about all of the worst things happening in the world at any given time, we're apt to take that as a snapshot of the world as a whole. And, since it's a quirk of human memory that we tend to forget how bad things were in the past, but we're reminded of how bad they are in the present, we have an illusion of decline, whether or not there is one. It's even the basic mathematical point that you can't interpret a trend from one data point. So if there's a war going on now, it doesn't mean that things have gotten worse. I mean, maybe they've gotten worse, but until you count the number of wars in the past, you don't know one way or another.
CA: So it's such a bizarre thing that journalists are maybe doing their job perfectly, but if the question they're asking is, "What is the most dramatic thing that happened in the last day?" that actually could lead to a terrible unintended consequence. You've basically said that bad things happen more quickly than good things.
SP: Yeah, it's easy to destroy something very quickly, but good things aren't built in a day. And so the timescale of news -- formerly once a day, now, I guess, once a minute -- matches the timescale of destroying things, but not the timescale of improving things, such as the gradual conquest of extreme poverty. Occasionally, there will be a dramatic event when it comes to an advance in public health, such as the eradication of smallpox. But more often, it's a few percentage points a year which get compounded, and so there's never a Thursday in October in which it's actually news.
CA: There's no tradition in journalism of, every time you run a fact about something, of giving some kind of context, that says, by the way, here's the long-term trend here. And so what happens is, people just see fact, fact, fact, fact. They're all dramatic and interesting and amazing, but collectively, somehow, give us the wrong impression.
SP: That's right. I think that's inherent to the nature of journalism. But it is exacerbated by some habits that have become part of journalistic culture, that I think can be separated from the necessary fact that the news comes in every day. There is, in many universities -- and especially in humanities departments, and journalists tend to be graduates of humanities departments -- there is a narrative of decline. It's been going on since the 19th century, with gloomy philosophers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Heidegger and Sartre, and then the postmodernists and critical theorists. That's kind of the culture that you get steeped in nowadays in a university, and that's what journalists come from. Combine that with a narrative that journalists tell themselves that in the past, journalism was too complicit with power -- you know, Franklin Roosevelt was never shown in a wheelchair, John F. Kennedy's affairs were ignored. It was only with Watergate that journalists were able to speak truth to power and affect social change and brought down Nixon -- yes! And it's the movies like "The Post" and "All the President's Men" that the glory in journalism is often thought to be exposing the corruption and evil of power.
And that's obviously a very good thing. But it changes the mission of journalism from reporting on both the improvements and the crises to putting a lot of moral weight on exposing what can go wrong, which leads to, I think, some kinds of even journalistic malpractice. I'll give you just one example. No trend is perfectly monotonic, that is, always going down for bad things or up for good things. There's always little jaggies and sometimes spikes. Let's take just a very boring example of automobile fatalities. So it goes down, down, a couple of years it goes up. Then if you report only the upticks because it's news, for the first time in 15 years, the car accident rate got worse, and you do it 10 years later when it got worse again, you have nothing but stories about something getting worse, whereas, in fact, the overwhelming trend is it gets better. But since it's not news if the same thing happens year after year, the impression that a news reader can get can be completely out of whack with reality.
CA: So isn't there something else? Creativity seems to emerge much better from a dark place than a joyful place. Like, all the best plays and novels and so forth often seem to have been born out of a form of suffering. Those that describe all being well in the garden come over as trite.
SP: It can, although I guess Shakespeare wrote tragedies and comedies, "All's Well That Ends Well." So it is possible to have positive narratives. However, an interesting example of that asymmetry is in stories set in the future, which are almost always dystopian. And it's very hard to conceive of a future-situated narrative where things are actually better. I mean, there's "The Jetsons," but that was kind of camp and ironic. But otherwise, we have "1984" and "Brave New World" and "Blade Runner."
CA: Actually, Neil Gaiman is with us, and I asked him a couple years back to try and curate some new sci-fi stories of the future that would include a sort of hopeful future. And he made a heroic attempt at doing so, and I'm not sure he really came up with anything that quite did that. I mean, it's just much more compelling when it's creepy. "Black Mirror" is an amazing TV series, and it's creepy.
SP: Yeah. And there is a kind of asymmetry in our moral perceptions, as financial writer Morgan Housel pointed out, pessimists sound like they're trying to help you, optimists sound like they're trying to sell you something. It's a tough sell.
CA: So, Steve, I ask you this: Are you trying to sell us something?
(Laughter)
SP: A lot of people, when they hear a talk of the kind that I gave the other day or read the book or read essays, say, "Oh, it's so nice to see someone who's optimistic." But that isn't really what I'm trying to do, because it's not seeing the glass half full or being optimistic to say that global poverty has declined from 90 percent to 10 percent. That's a fact. And it's a fact that people aren't aware of. If you ask people, "Has global poverty gone up or down?" they give the wrong answer, they say it's gone up.
CA: OK, so what I'd love to do is to dig into a few more of your examples of where you believe progress has been made. You've presented compelling stats about life span, health, education, safety and several other things, all of which show shocking, stunning progress over the last few hundred years. What other aspects of progress are notable to you?
SP: The spread of tolerance, liberal values, respect for marginalized groups. So racism, sexism, homophobia are all in decline. Certainly if you ask people overtly, questions like, "Would you be upset if your child married an African American?" "Would you move out if an African American moved next door?" "Do you think that blacks and whites should go to separate schools?" "Do you think that African Americans are inherently lazier than whites?" All of them have plummeted, and a lot of them are kind of in the range of crank opinion. Likewise, "Do you think that gay people should be fired from their positions as teachers?" "Do you think they should be imprisoned?" "Do you think women should return to their traditional roles?" Just about any question like that that you ask, the percentage of respondents giving the traditional racist, sexist or homophobic attitudes have declined, although there are many differences among countries.
Now, you might worry -- and I worry -- that maybe the only thing that's declined is the social acceptability of racist and sexist opinions, and people are savvy enough to know that they'd be committing a faux pas if they gave a racist answer. But there are a number of more unobtrusive measures that confirm that. I did one of them just going to Google Trends and seeing the percentage of people who search for racist jokes or sexist jokes or homophobic jokes. People do that in the privacy of their own keyboard. No one knows that they're doing it. Google counts how often they do it, but no one knows who has done it. And all three of them have shown a decline just since the early 2000s. And if anything, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who pioneered this kind of social science by Google search, told me that, in fact, the decline is probably even more dramatic than that, because in the early days of Google, it was more tech-savvy, educated people who used Google. Google has become hugely democratized, and so the sample now includes the kind of demographics who, if anything, would be more likely to be racist and sexist. Also, the World Values Survey, which surveys countries from all over the world and has been doing so since the early 80s, has found that a composite of what we might think of as liberal values, that composite still shows huge differences among the world's regions. Like, Western Europe is certainly more liberal than the Middle East. But all of them have increased over the last 50 years.
CA: But one problem of saying this to some people will be that this may be true, but there is still deeply offensive sexism, racism, etc, and you can sound complacent in saying it. You're saying that we don't have to worry about this anymore, Steve? Really?
SP: No. What I always have to remind people is that there's a difference between progress and perfection, that the fact that things are better now than they were in the past, doesn't mean they're acceptable now. And in fact, quite the contrary to complacency, if it were true that 55 years after the civil rights movement there had been no progress in racial equality, the natural conclusion would be, well, you know, why bother with activism, it hasn't accomplished anything. And similarly for women's rights. The fact that the activism of the past and other changes have made progress, if anything, I think, emboldens us to seek more.
CA: I mean, there's this wonderful phrase, "Be on the right side of history," which progressives use, actually, really powerfully, I think most recently in gay marriage legalization, that actually celebrates that progress and almost says, "Look, there is an irreversibility to this. Get on board the train." And maybe we should find a way of using that more in the way that we report progress, so it doesn't seem complacent. It's a challenge to me, because people are still fighting really hard, passionate battles and don't want to be told that your issue doesn't matter quite as much as it did 20 years ago.
SP: Yeah. The question of whether you can identify progress as a thing, as a force, as an arch of history, is one that I grappled with in the book, because I'm skeptical of that kind of explanation. As someone with a scientific mindset or temperament, I don't like to pull forces out of the blue and say there's somehow some force that makes us more tolerant, more cosmopolitan, more liberal. So I looked for what would be the drivers of a development like that. And it really is a development, it's not completely irreversible, but it does seem to be a rising tide. So what's going on?
CA: What is going on?
SP: I think some of it is the cosmopolitanism, the mixing of people and ideas, education. And this is a deeply Enlightenment idea, that when you're called upon to justify your beliefs, there are certain things that just crumble, as long as you're not relying on habit, dogma, tradition, authority, religious commandments ... But you have to explain the reason. Then it's kind of hard to come up with a really good reason why gay people shouldn't be teachers. And I think some of the fairly sudden changes, gay marriage perhaps being the most dramatic, might come about just simply because the arguments -- given that we all value certain things, like fairness, like flourishing -- certain things logically follow, and if you're forced to defend them, then that side will prevail in the argument.
CA: But then how worried should we be just in the last few years that the internet has facilitated some sort of, you know, fracturing of communities into different bubbles of opinion? Is there a risk that that trend could get undone by this?
SP: Well, it is something that I think we're all naturally concerned with, both the rise of authoritarian populism and possibly the contribution of social media in fostering it, although I think some of these trends really may have more to do with talk radio and cable news than with social media. But even the terms of the debate, what's even being discussed, even in the most regressive government that we've had in years, there isn't discussion of return to segregation, which there was in 1968, when George Wallace won five states and 13 percent of the vote in the United States. Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, who then ran for president and said, "Segregation now, segregation forever." Not even the alt-right is saying "Segregation now, segregation forever," it would be just too silly. Certain issues get left behind, and even the regressive part of the spectrum has -- Except for the -- of course, in the deep cesspools of the internet, you can find any opinion expressed. But in terms of what we think of as the mainstream, what's considered left, right and center has moved liberal-ward over the years.
CA: What other types of progress have you noticed?
SP: Well, one that's in one sense, obvious, and in other sense, never discussed, is just the quality and richness of our experience, the fact that, thanks to the much-maligned internet and web, we can experience any movie that we want. When you and I were students, if you wanted to see a classic Truffaut film or a Kubrick film or a Bergman film, you had to wait years for it to be played at the local repertory theater or maybe on late-night TV, if you could see it at all. Now you can see any classic film on demand within a few seconds.
CA: Is that always a good? Like, my personal experience of television -- I'm going to ignore Netflix and binge modern television viewing, but cable TV, flicking through 200 channels, I personally find more stressful and frustrating, I think, than 30 years ago in England, when there were four channels and you had your four, but I was still -- you know, the simplicity of that choice almost made it easier to make one choice, sit down, watch it, get enjoyment. Like, is it possible that modernity is driving us to too much choice and that that is actually bringing with it stress?
SP: I think to some extent it has, and any good thing will involve trade-offs and, in particular, freedom. With freedom comes anxiety of regret of the option you didn't take; maybe you will choose the wrong option. But I think there is an inherent value in freedom and richness of choice. And evidence for that is, if any of us were given the choice now -- and in fact, we have the choice now -- I mean, you could choose only to sample those four channels, they're still there, and just don't explore the rest of the dial. But you don't, because however much anxiety there is, you'd rather be able to see the old films.
CA: Yeah, but I could choose to be a vegan right now, and I don't. And I think that would be better for me. I mean, we're kind of flawed. That's part of the trouble, we constantly fail to make conscious choices that actually might be better for us, right?
SP: That's true, and I think that's part of the package of freedom. That's almost what freedom is; that is, you don't have an authority choosing what's good for you. And in a free society, I think a certain amount of decision anxiety and regret are part of the package. But we wouldn't opt for the alternative, we wouldn't go back. Just to sort of close the loop on the question: in so many realms of life, our experiences are so much richer than they were 30 or 40 years ago. The range of foods that are available -- in a small American town, you can go out for Thai food or Japanese food, which you couldn't have 30 or 40 years ago. The number of items in a supermarket, the number of forms of music that are available to you. And when you ask what makes life worth living beyond material comfort, richness of cultural experiences certainly would be up there. Ability to travel, which has been tremendously democratized with the plunging of the cost of air travel. So there's a very real sense in which we live richer lives than we did several decades ago. And that tends to get submerged in all of the anxieties that come with it.
CA: And yet, we're cursed with the psychology of hedonic adjustment, where you get all these things and you're absolutely thrilled for it for four and a half months. And then suddenly, you take it all for granted, and you actually don't feel the benefit of that.
SP: It's true that we find new things to get upset about when one need is satisfied. As John Mueller pointed out, there's a sense in which things never get better, in the sense that we can get jaded. On the other hand, there's a pretty big effect of sheer prosperity on happiness, that richer countries are happier, richer people in a given country are happier. That would not be true if we simply adapted to the mean. Now, it's a logarithmic relationship, so you get a much bigger boost in happiness when incomes rise in poor countries compared to rich countries. But there's never a point at which it completely levels out. I mentioned during the talk that 85 percent of countries for which we have data have gotten happier. The United States is not one of them. And the first data came from the United States, so it seemed that since American happiness has stagnated since the 1950s. There's the premature conclusion that prosperity doesn't make people happier, hasn't made Americans happier. But it's not true that it doesn't make people happier across the board.
CA: What's your explanation of the fact that America missed out on that?
SP: Yeah, it really is a puzzle. I think one possibility is that American expectations were so high in the golden years of the 50s and 60s, when it just seemed that America was a shining city upon a hill, and our technological ingenuity would go on forever, and we were spreading democracy through the world. And then, we started to become aware of poverty, of foreign policy, of fiascoes and blunders and pollution. And it all kind of came crashing down, perhaps more in the United States than elsewhere. It may also be that the United States, because it has a weaker social safety net, that even with a rise in prosperity, people are more on edge that they could lose everything. And that anxiety perhaps reduces overall well-being. And also, any country is a mixture of different ages, sexes, ethnic groups, and the curves kind of go in different directions for different subpopulations.
CA: There was one critique of your book from Jennifer Szalai, if I've pronounced that right, in the New York Times, which is relevant to this. "He," meaning you, "He has little patience for individual tragedy. It's the aggregate that excites him. Even if manufacturing jobs have gone to China, 'and the world's poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower class,' he still sees this as cause for celebration. But life isn't lived in the aggregate, and it's crude utilitarian sentiments like this -- a jarring blend of chipper triumphalism and unfeeling sangfroid -- that makes 'Enlightenment Now' such a profoundly maddening book." Professor Pinker.
SP: I think that's terrible reasoning and terrible moral reasoning, that kind of critique, because the aggregate consists of flesh-and-blood human beings, lots of them. So imagine a person who rises out of poverty, whose child makes it to the age of five without dying of diarrhea or malaria, who goes to school, who has a comfortable existence. Now imagine another person like that and another person, and do it a billion times. Now that is a triumph. And the fact that it, to some extent, comes at the expense of a displaced American steelworker -- it's not that you celebrate the fact that things have gotten worse for the American steelworker. But life is a set of trade-offs, and the fact that you have an enormous increase in well-being for an enormous number of people, and not every last person on earth experiences that, means it is something to favor. If the choice was, "Well, let's keep China and Bangladesh and India and Africa in poverty, but the steelworker keeps the same job that he had in 1965," no, I think that's not a defensible trade-off.
CA: But just going back to this Enlightenment idea of freedom. There is a critique of that idea, which is that it's not really based on a realistic view of human nature, that yes, you can see, in principle, give everyone as much freedom as possible, so long as it doesn't infringe on anyone. It sounds like a lovely philosophical ranting idea, but in practice -- I was brought up a Christian, I was taught that what was much more important than external freedom was internal freedom, to have power over your demons, and that that was actually where the core battle of life was worked out. And that because humans don't fully have power over their demons, whether literal or psychological, Enlightenment-style freedom is actually dangerous for us. We go there and it makes us miserable.
SP: I think that traditional Christianity did have a major insight about how we ought to comport our lives, and that is that being a decent person often is a struggle between some of our urges, which are not so social, not so defensible, and some measure of self-control, reinforced by moral and social norms. But to go back to a time in which that choice was wrested from us, and it was authorities that decided for us -- well, we kind of know what it was like. There's a whole literature from the 19th and early 20th century about how people chafed under repressive social and moral norms, especially minorities, to say nothing of gay people and poor people. And we kind of won that battle, that people did have their freedom. We now have the responsibility of how not to become addicted and obese and profligate, which I think is part of the human condition, which Christianity recognized. It's maybe more acute now that we have a less repressive society. But I don't see us going back to authorities making our life decisions for us, our parents choosing our marriage partners, for example. That is not going to happen, and it shouldn't happen.
CA: But perhaps you could make the case that there is some kind of blend of traditional and Enlightenment views on liberty with some sort of Eastern and maybe even religious values that say, "Be careful," at the very least. I mean, you're an evolutionary psychologist -- we need to know the quirks that are in there, that if we scratch those too hard, they're going to push us in weird directions.
SP: No, I think that's right, although I think of that as part of the general Enlightenment project. The exact analysis that you just suggested -- namely, should we step back and look at the shortcomings in human nature, figure out what about the human condition traditional religions got right and preserve those, while discarding all the things they got wrong -- that itself is an application of reason, as opposed to just doing what your priest tells you.
CA: Yes, yes, yes. So, a related critique to this is this idea that fundamentally, the progress story, the Enlightenment-driven progress story is a story about elitist Western ideas: the march of progress in Europe and America, ignoring the pain of what happened in much of the rest of the world, ignoring that it was often used to drive colonialism, say. How do you respond to that type of critique?
SP: I distinguish Enlightenment values from Western values. And both supporters and critics often conflate them. Even though many Enlightenment ideas originated from the West, all ideas have to originate somewhere, but it doesn't mean they're parochial to the West, just as discoveries of science and mathematics that may have originated in a particular country aren't specific to that country. They're universal truths that, you know, someone had to discover them, and they had to be somewhere. The Enlightenment values, you could see versions of them that were voiced in other cultures, in classical Islamic civilization in Mughal India. So not only are ideas like knowledge and life and health and safety and peace I think, universal, but they haven't been univocally embraced in the West.
No sooner did the Enlightenment unfold that there was a counter-Enlightenment, there was a rise of nationalism and racialism and the valorization of blood and soil as opposed to universal human values that appeared with the Romantic movement in Europe in the 19th century romantic militarism that then turned into fascism. We're seeing something of a recrudescence of it right now in the United States and in Eastern Europe. So Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment values within the West have always pushed against each other. And indeed, many of Enlightenment values were accepted globally despite some pushback from the United States and Britain. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an example, where it was signed by -- without opposition -- by seven Muslim countries in the late 1940s, by Ethiopia, by Thailand, by Burma. And the United States had to have its arm twisted by Eleanor Roosevelt and others to sign it, because it had this problem of racial segregation still going on. Britain dragged its feet because of colonialism, whereas Turkey and Egypt and Lebanon and Ethiopia and Burma were gung ho for it. Likewise, the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, which are humanistic value statements. And every last country signed on to them, it wasn't particularly Western.
CA: Yes. What about inequality? You've presented a really strong graph showing how the world is getting more prosperous. But it is not fairly distributed, it's getting -- you know, all the rewards going to the one percent of the one percent. And isn't that deadly dangerous as well as being deeply unfair?
SP: I take a somewhat unorthodox position there, I'm not the only one, but I tend to think that focus on inequality per se is misplaced, that what we should focus on is certainly unfairness and the ability of the wealthy to game the system, the danger of plutocracy. That is a real problem. Certainly the well-being of poor people is absolutely a problem, globally and within wealthy countries. But I think focusing on the gap between the rich and the poor is just not the morally relevant criterion. Here, I'm echoing an argument made by philosophers like Derek Parfit and Harry Frankfurt, that what we should care about is how well people live their lives, not how evenly distributed things are.
CA: But I mean, a sense of fairness does seem to be pretty core to humans. So there was this idea that you actually take on in your book, that inequality triggers all manner of other evils in society, from stress and health and many other things. Do you think that that book "The Spirit Level" has been discredited to some extent?
SP: The newest and most comprehensive study with the largest sample does seem to discredit that hypothesis, the hypothesis that inequality causes a number of social ills, such as crime and obesity, and that absolute level of wealth doesn't matter as much. This most recent analysis suggests that it's wealth that's more important in societal well-being, that you can have countries -- a dramatic example is Venezuela, which has become much more equal in the last 10 years but much more miserable in every dimension, whereas there are countries like Hong Kong, which is highly unequal, but the people are doing pretty well by measures of human well-being.
CA: But a lot of people here in the technology business, will look out at the world and feel quite worried about this, because it seems like, as the world connects, it's very hard to see how inequality reverses, that because businesses that drive the world and create wealth can reach billions of customers, owned by just a few people, it seems that technology itself is inherently going to make the world more unequal. And at some point, don't the pitchforks come out?
SP: Yeah. It is true that the great escape from universal poverty in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, where some countries escaped the pack before others started to catch up, may be replicated with new sources of wealth being discovered, particularly thanks to globalization. So the question is, what can be done about that, because we're not going to go back to a world without an internet and without this kind of asymmetry. And certainly government policies can make a difference, such as various kinds of negative income tax or an income tax credit that can top up the salaries of people at the lower end. And that probably will reduce inequality. But I think, my argument is that what's good about those policies is not that they reduce inequality, but that they bring up the bottom. And that's what we should care about. You raise another point, that the perceptions of fairness probably are more relevant than the actual distribution, which is why there is often a decoupling between inequality measures and social trust and social pathology. As long as people feel that the system isn't rigged against them, they can tolerate inequality. It's when they think that those on top are enjoying ill-gotten gains that the pitchforks come out.
CA: So it makes a big difference what the very wealthy do with that wealth.
SP: Yes, and how people experience the rules of the game, whether they think they're stacked against them or not. This is a result of a literature review by Christine Starmans and Paul Bloom, that looked back at a number of studies from psychology that seem to suggest that people are averse to inequity, that they want an equal distribution. And they looked back, and they said that's actually not what the literature shows. As long as the inequality is either distributed as a result of fair and random lottery or as a reward for risk or effort, people are OK with it. When they think that there's unfairness, that's when they get angry.
CA: There's a lot of people here who are worried about, you know, we're creating these machines that get ever smarter and smarter, and the way it's progress, progress, progress for a few years, then suddenly, in the possibly not-very-distant future, depending on who you talk to, 10 years, 20 years, they acquire superintelligence, and we are no longer the main game in town, and anything could happen, we could be pets or meat.
SP: Yeah, I do discuss that in the book. My attitude is that there are things that we should really worry about: climate change, nuclear war, big among them. But artificial intelligence subjugating us or turning us into paper clips or raw materials is not one of them. I think that the fear of runaway artificial intelligence is based on a couple of misconceptions, one of them being the conflation of intelligence with dominance. A lot of the kitschier scenarios from science fiction hinge on that equation, that as a system gets smarter, it's going to want to dominate and take over, and since we dominate the animals, and the West colonized the global south, that it's only a matter of time before AI dominates us.
CA: But the argument is, it's not necessarily about domination, it's just any intelligence with a goal, if that really is its goal, will operate to move things away that get in the way of that goal. And without any desire to dominate humans, it might just want a goal, and these little biological flappy things are sort of in the way of it, and so -- pshh! -- you know?
SP: Yeah. So that's a somewhat more realistic concern, sometimes called the "value alignment problem," that we might give it a goal and forget to give it a second goal of not destroying us. It's like, "Oh my God, we forgot to build that in!"
(Laughter)
I think that's equally unlikely, and the idea that we'd have a system that's so brilliant that it could figure out how to, say, cure cancer, and so stupid that it would turn us into involuntary guinea pigs and give us cancer in order to cure it in fatal experiments, is internally contradictory. That would not be intelligence, that would be stupidity.
CA: And yet, every technology we've built has gone wrong at some point. And the concern is that if the intelligence we build is runaway intelligence, we only have one shot at it, and there might be an awful "oopsie" moment.
SP: And I also think that that's misconceived. The "foom" scenario, that the intelligence will recursively improve its own intelligence, and that on a particular Thursday that cycle will get started, blast off exponentially, and then we'll wake up to superintelligent machines or robots is completely unrealistic.
CA: So it's the cognitive scientist in you who knows a bit about intelligence. You're saying that people don't understand how much is involved there, and how unrealistic a scenario that is?
SP: Exactly. And it's thinking of intelligence as this potent stuff, this substance that a system can have in much greater quantity than us, without looking at what intelligence actually consists of, which is the deployment of knowledge to achieve goals. And there simply is no such thing as a system that by sheer brainpower knows how the world works. The only way that a system can achieve goals in a world is to know empirically the way matter works, and the way that people work, and the way that complex interactions among pieces of matter work. And the only way to acquire that is by experiment, by hypothesis testing, which can't simply be done by sheer computation. Kevin Kelly calls it "thinkism," the idea that if only you could have a powerful enough CPU, then you could solve all problems without having to interact with the world. But there's no system that ever works out of the box, there's always a cycle of testing and refinement. And it's just in the nature of intelligence that that will be true of an artificially intelligent system, too. It needs knowledge, and knowledge can't be deduced from a chip.
CA: Alright, well this is reassuring in itself. But what about the related danger of just unintended consequences? I mean, one of the whole tech narratives of the last couple years -- am I right? -- is that we built these powerful algorithms with the best of intent and then suddenly, "Holy crap, what did we just do?" This whole system is operating wildly out of control in ways we never imagined.
SP: Well, I anticipate that there will be problems with artificial intelligence, just because, as you say, there are problems with everything. But that's not the same as seeing it as an existential threat, as more dangerous than nuclear weapons, or the end of humankind. It's that catastrophic scenario that I think is out of touch with the nature of intelligence. But yes, there will absolutely be problems, because there are always problems.
CA: Alright, so we are minutes away from your questions, I hope you guys are ready. I just want to have one last one for you here, Steve. Are we special? This has been asked in this conference: Are we special? In "How the Mind Works," you said at one point in there that you should think of the mind in parallel with, say, the elephant's trunk. These are both remarkable things. The human mind can reason and think and have all these abilities of vision and so forth. But the elephant's trunk has 10,000 muscles in it and can operate as a shower and a feeder and smell, and communication and so forth -- just as remarkable an endpoint of billions of years of evolution as the human mind. We should not expect our minds to do everything. There is no reason why we should expect that we should one day, for example, understand the hard problem of consciousness. It's an evolutionary organ.
But then, I've noticed in "Enlightenment Now," you're quoting David Deutsch in a couple of places. And in his book, "The Beginning of Infinity," he makes a different argument, that, actually, knowledge and the ability to understand, the ability to reason, these are special in the sense that they can initiate a process, a force, that iterates on itself and can, in principle, expand to the scale of a solar system, a galaxy. His example is, there are two kinds of planets in the universe -- those that can shoot down incoming asteroids and those that can't. One has knowledge, one doesn't. That we are special. Are we special?
SP: That is an interesting tension. And I think the answer is: we're special in some ways and not others. I mean, not others just in the sense that we can't achieve miracles, we're made out of matter, we need energy to not fall apart and defy entropy and so on. But I do think that human intelligence is a unique adaptation. It's not a miracle, but it does -- It makes us a deeply strange primate, very different than any other species in that particular regard. Now, of course, a biologist could say, "Well, every species is special." And in some ways, there are other species that are special -- blue-green algae, which gave us oxygen and reshaped the planet. But I am sympathetic to Deutsch's point that there is something qualitatively different about the ability to acquire knowledge, to have recursive, symbolic representations of the world, to have thoughts about our thoughts, to have an open-ended, infinite combinatorial system that allows us to entertain an unlimited number of thoughts and to express them in an unlimited number of sentences. And that is why humans genuinely are a very strange species among the millions on earth.
CA: Is the ability to intentionally shape the future a uniquely human trait?
SP: Whenever you say that something is uniquely human, every animal researcher immediately sees red. And they have that in their sights, "Oh, but you know, crows, they cache -- " or, "Clark's nutcrackers cache seeds for the future." So in limited and highly circumscribed respects, there are other animals that do plan for the future. But as kind of an open-ended planning, whatever we want to plan for for the future and setting that as a goal -- that, I think, is uniquely human. Now I say that, despite the fact that I'm courting refutation from all of the zoologists.
CA: Wonderful. Alright, it's time for your questions. Let's just start with the mic here. Go ahead.
Woman: So, Steve, I appreciate the long view, and as an American, I'm worried about the short view, too, and wondered what specific, practical things we can do to encourage or maybe demand the renewed use of reason and science in our public discourse and policy setting?
SP: Yeah. Certainly, just identifying reason and evidence as ideals, as values, would be a start. But a less obvious one is to decouple our policy preferences from our politics. The main enemy of reason -- and I discovered this in writing the chapter on reason -- is not so much scientific illiteracy as it is political tribalism. If you look at, for example, climate literacy among people who accept anthropogenic climate change and those who deny it, there's no difference in how scientifically sophisticated they are, contrary to the stereotypes of, I think, probably of most of us who accept human-made climate change. A lot of people who accept climate change have no idea how it works. They identify ozone as the reason that the temperatures are rising, and they say a way to deal with it is to clean up toxic waste dumps. They have just this vague concept of pollution versus greenness, and that's the depth of their climate understanding. Yet, they are on what most of us would consider to be the correct side of that opinion spectrum. That is true of evolution, it's true of other hot-button issues. As soon as they become identity badges for a political coalition, that's when most of our critical faculties get shut down. And I think it's a problem on the left as well as on the right. And we ought to realize how ignorant we are of what works in a complex society, how open we should be to evidence-based recommendations, whether they feel comfortable from a left-wing perspective or not, or a right-wing perspective or not.
CA: Kate.
Kate: Thanks. Steven, thank you, I really enjoyed reading your book, and I really enjoyed your presentation and discussion today. And I want to respectfully disagree with the way you depict the state with the living world, because as you've said here and in the book, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide -- it's getting better, but as we know, these are the local air pollutants, which are well known to be almost among the only pollutants that do improve as countries get richer.
And I would challenge you, with the science and rationality, to look at the whole story, including global carbon emissions, global material footprints, global impacts of deforestation, biodiversity loss, because these get worse as countries get richer. Now, of course, when we look at some countries, some people say there's a peak, right, some countries have reached a peak in their emissions. But the peaks are far too high. We're creating a climb up a mountain that we can't afford to climb. We cannot survive the peak and then decline if all countries follow this process. Because if we rise to that peak, we may push ourselves over irreversible tipping points, such as the melting of glaciers, the loss of the Amazon, and we can't recover those.
So, in terms of the doughnut I presented yesterday, and I was very honored that you were there, I think your book does a fantastic job of showing that we are indeed making amazing progress in eliminating deprivation within what I've called the social foundation, the hole in the middle. But I feel it doesn't do justice to the outside of it, showing that, actually, this has been getting progressively worse alongside of the inside. And I really would love to hear you address that as well, because I think for a scientific and rational view on the situation, we have to take both into account.
SP: Well, actually, I do exactly that in the chapter on the environment, in which I have, after a more global picture of environmental quality, I separate out greenhouse gas emissions for the entire second half of that chapter. And I completely agree that we're not on course to solve that problem with business as usual and that we do need to tighten up both the policy and the technology, the policy being putting a price on carbon, the technology being a combination of zero-carbon energy sources, and then eventually, removing the CO2 that's already in the atmosphere, whether by the technological means that we heard about this morning, or by planting more forests, reversing deforestation. I actually do single out CO2 and other greenhouse gases as a separate problem from what's traditionally been called air pollution.
CA: But I think some of the harshest pushback on the book, almost, has come from environmentalists, who feel -- like on species extinction, for example, they feel like you didn't fully cover the extent to which we should be worried about that.
SP: I absolutely agree that we should be worried, but I disagree with the strategy of painting everything in the most catastrophic possible terms as a way ... out of such a fear of complacency, that I think a large number of people are convinced that the planet is ruined, there's nothing that we can do about it, which tends to make them numb and helpless, as opposed to proactive and believing that it is within our power to slow down or stop species extinction short of undoing the Industrial Revolution and going back to the Middle Ages, which is almost the dichotomy that people feel that we're facing. I think it's very dangerous to think that it's either business as usual or sacrificing all of the gains we've made since the Industrial Revolution.
CA: But you're a psychologist, and a lot of activists certainly seem to believe that unless you really show people what's at stake, you make them fearful, we have no chance of getting people to act. You know, people should be out on the streets on some of these issues to make change. But people are complacent and they worry that you're making them more complacent.
SP: It's interesting, because it is a psychological question to which we don't know the answer. I'm actually doing research on it now, in collaboration with a student, Jason Nemirow, on the trade-off between complacency and fatalism. That is, if you convince people the planet is ruined, it's cooked, and there's just nothing that we can do about it, could that have a regressive effect? Or another danger, I think, of the traditional environmental narrative is if you convince people that it's a choice: you can either continue to enjoy economic growth, greater comfort and richness of experience, and moreover, expand that, allow the developing world to enjoy the same benefits that we've enjoyed; or, you can improve the environment. People are naturally going to drift to the comfort, the efficiency, the richness of experience. I suspect that if you say that that is not an either-or, it's not an inelectible trade-off, that through policy and technology, we can give people the comfort, the travel, the escape from extreme poverty but at the same time, prioritizing environmental quality, reducing pollution, saving species, saving land, it will be much more attractive.
CA: You've had your hand up, yeah, go ahead.
Man: How would you say a rational evidence-based argumentation, especially in a political context, how does that not just lose out to the outrageous, the incendiary, the clickbait-y, in the context of the current major town square forums we have? I'm thinking, specifically, Facebook and YouTube, which seem to have this engagement-focused optimization, which I think encourages a kind of disingenuous and political speech, where people are saying things, not necessarily because they believe it, but just for distribution's sake. How does rationality and the ideals of the Enlightenment win out in that context?
SP: I think what we have to do is figure out how to align values of rationality and reason and evidence with the contagion of virality, clickbait-y dynamics, capitalizing on the fact that people don't like being fooled, they don't like being hoodwinked, they don't like being lied to. They may not realize when they're being lied to, but just as with in the campaign to reduce teen smoking, the gory pictures of what lung cancer will do to you were ineffective, but telling kids, "The tobacco companies are trying to manipulate you, they're hiding the truth from you," that actually worked. To the extent that we can capitalize on people's desire not to be hoodwinked so they would resist the worst forms of clickbait because they know that they're just getting fed crap, that would be a way of aligning truth and reason with the darker parts of our psychology.
CA: So, thank you everyone for spectacularly good questions. Steven, I have one last one for you. Just about this, it's really about narrative. Like, what's at stake here, how much does the narrative that we tell ourselves about progress matter? Does it change how we feel, does it change what we do? What is at stake?
SP: I think an enormous amount is at stake, because as we discussed earlier in regards to inequality, it's often people's perception of the rules of the game, the overall process, that matter more than their actual situation at the present. So narratives matter a lot, especially since the narrative has been increasing that everything is getting worse, that certainly our current president was elected on a platform of deterioration and decadence and decline, that we have to make America great again, look back to a golden age, which I think can be highly destructive. We have to be able, while acknowledging the real problems facing us, also acknowledge the progress that we've made, and even to the extent that we can, to try to valorize the fact that human efforts, in service of increasing human well-being, can succeed and have succeeded, and therefore, have the potential of succeeding even more in the future.
CA: Well, Steven Pinker, I'm not sure absolutely everyone is yet persuaded, but I think even those who aren't would agree that this was a remarkable work of scholarship you've put together here, over many years, and that you've brought the case as persuasively as you could to us at TED. Thank you so much for doing that, that was really so fascinating.
(Applause)
SP: Thanks to all of you, but thank you, especially.
(Applause)
(Music)
CA: This week's show was produced by Sharon Mashihi. Our associate producer is Kim Nederveen Pieterse. Special thanks to Helen Walters. Our show is mixed by David Herman, and our theme music is by Allison Leyton-Brown. In next week's episode, I talk to a force of nature called Robin Steinberg, about her remarkable quest to disrupt America's truly unjust system of cash bail.
(Recording) Robin Steinberg: Nobody should be in a jail cell simply because they cannot afford to buy their presumption of innocence and get out. That's intolerable, and unconscionable and immoral and unnecessary.
CA: That's next week on the TED Interview. Now, before I go, I'd just love to say something quickly about why we're actually doing this. Now, not everyone knows it, but TED is actually a nonprofit organization with a simple mission to spread ideas that matter. Normally, we do that through short TED talks, and this podcast series is an experiment in taking the extra time to go much deeper. So we'd love to know whether it's working for you. Do you like it? If so, we'd love you to share it with your friends, and also to rate and review it on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening. I read every single review and love knowing what you think. So thank you for listening, and thanks for helping spread ideas.
