Transcript edited for length and clarity.
Clay Wallace, WUKY
Good morning. You're listening to WUKY's Third Cup. I'm Clay Wallace. With me in the studio today is Dr. Lauren Cagle. Glad to have you in again, Cagle.
Dr. Lauren Cagle, Director of the Tracy Farmer Institute for Sustainability and the Environment
Hi, I'm so glad to be here. Thank you, Clay.
Clay
Cagle is a professor in the University of Kentucky's Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies. Her research interests include climate change communication and environmental rhetoric. She's director of both the Kentucky Climate Consortium and the Tracy Farmer Institute for Sustainability and the Environment, the latter of which is hosting a talk with science journalist and podcast host Adam Becker later this month. It's titled "More Everything Forever: Silicon Valley's Boundless Delusions and the Power of Touching Grass." Cagle, tell us a little more about Adam Becker and what we can expect to hear in his talk.
Cagle
I'm very excited to share this with you. Adam Becker is an astrophysicist. He has a PhD in astrophysics, and after graduating he became a science journalist, science writer, and communicator more broadly. His first book is called What Is Real?, and it's a history of debates about quantum physics. It sounds very nerdy, but I promise it's a delight. It tracks the drama over 100 years. That first book was quite successful.
Then he published this second book, More Everything Forever, which has a very lengthy subtitle: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. It came out last year in April and immediately made waves. It hit a lot of bestseller lists. And it's exactly what's advertised on the cover. Adam spent a lot of time interviewing, reading about, and researching all of the folks in Silicon Valley - the "AI overlords" of the title - and the ideologies that drive them.
I asked him to come give a talk at UK in my capacity as director of the Tracy Farmer Institute for Sustainability and the Environment, because part of the book addresses the way our current investments in AI development and data center development affect the choices being made, at a really broad scale, around environment, climate, pollution, air quality, and human health. And as we've seen in the public sphere, a lot of times people don't really feel like they have a voice in this. Adam's work helps us think about where these initiatives are coming from, why we're being pushed to accept certain narratives around technological development, and what we can do about it.
Clay
Some of the words he uses - "crusade," "delusions" - he's not shy about taking particular points of view in his work. His podcast, Dreaming Against the Machine, features talks with experts about how to imagine better futures, and he breaks apart some of the myths that animate Silicon Valley's tech aspirations. He calls them "boundless delusions" in the title of this talk. So, as a professor of rhetoric, how does the way we talk about climate and technology influence what we do about it?
Cagle
The way we talk about technologies, the way we talk about the environment, the way we talk about anything shapes the landscape of what we think is possible. I often think about how our discourse about policy, decision-making, and community futures is bounded, and that's good and bad. We have certain boundaries in place because there are certain futures and outcomes we don't want, so we shouldn't use language that points us in those directions. But when we talk about technology as a necessary good, that limits us. It prevents us from thinking about the ways technology can keep us from achieving the goals we want, like sustainable futures. That's not to say we all have to be Luddites. I'm just always interested in more nuanced language.
The examples you provided - "crusade," "boundless delusions" - don't sound nuanced. But when I say nuanced, I don't mean at the level of the individual speaker. I mean that our discourse as a whole collectively encompasses a lot of different viewpoints that we can sift through and think through, and that gives us lots of different perspectives. That's what Adam Becker's work does. It provides a counter-narrative to what we're getting from a lot of our other media spaces right now, where the conversation about AI is often limited to: Is it going to enable cheating? That's the conversation in higher education, which is my primary space. Is it going to destroy labor markets? Very legitimate concern. Is it polluting water? All of those things are very important, but they leave out a piece of the puzzle that Adam is trying to point our attention to: all of these choices being made around AI are coming out of certain ideologies, and it would behoove us to understand that. It's not as simple as people wanting to make money. There are ideological commitments behind certain technologies being pushed in various spheres.
So it is absolutely important, as your question suggests, that we think about the way we talk about things. In general, I'm in favor of more ways of talking about things, so we can keep pushing at the boundaries of our imaginary space - "imaginations", not "imaginary" like made up - and really think about what's possible now and in the future.
Clay
When I listen to ads about AI technology, or think about the narrative around AI chatbots and these other things, there's an assumption that these big things are going to happen because, one, they're capable of doing them, and two, there will be universal adoption. When we're working off those assumptions, how can we take a step back and ask ourselves: Is this my own framing, or is this a framing that has been packaged for me to better sell this to me?
Cagle
Yes, that is the crucial question. And it might be sold in a literal sense - you're being advertised to - or in a sociocultural, ideological sense, where you're being invited to accept a certain version of reality.
I would start right at the bottom, with the phrase "artificial intelligence." Let's break that down. It's a noun-adjective combo. Sorry, I'm a rhetoric professor. The noun, "intelligence," is a word we see all the time. You grow up hearing about intelligence. We talk about human intelligence, about people being intelligent, about measuring intelligence. And "artificial," of course, means not natural - created or built in some way.
The problem with that phrase is that it already asks us to accept a bunch of assumptions. The very first is that intelligence is a singular thing, and that's simply not true. There's this concept of general intelligence, which the field of psychology has spent a long time trying to track down with very little success. So the idea that there's a general intelligence we can measure, quantify, and compare across people or populations is frankly not a tenable position. Now, we can talk about emotional intelligence, or intelligence related to certain skills like logic or spatial reasoning. But that's not what we're being asked to accept with the term "artificial intelligence." We're being asked to accept that there's a thing called intelligence that humans have, and that we can copy it into an artificial context. There is zero evidence that that's actually happening, or even that it necessarily will.
We can build machines that do things we do faster. I hesitate to say "better," because that already implies certain criteria. What is better? Calculators will calculate much faster than the average human. However, my dishwasher is going to wash dishes a lot slower than I am. So speed is not the only criterion by which we evaluate our technologies.
We can build, as we have now, these large language model chatbots that produce synthetic text, and that text looks like human-produced text. But we have no evidence that what they're doing is reasoning. What they're doing is essentially predictive, a combination, these days, of search and predictive text generation. These LLMs are very good at stringing pieces of language together in ways that are recognizably grammatical and perhaps even meaningful, in the sense that they convey meaning. But there's no evidence that those machines are reasoning the way we reason to get to language. The output looks like what we might consider a marker of intelligence. But the process, assuming we accept that intelligence is a thing, is not just an artificial version of what we're doing. It's a completely different thing.
That's where I would always encourage people to start. When we're talking about "AI" - or these days, maybe "SI," superintelligence - we're accepting a certain framing of what these technologies are, what they're capable of, and how they relate to us as humans.
Clay
As both a professor of rhetoric and a reader of Becker's work, is there a particular point or argument you think he makes exceptionally well?
Cagle
Ooh, that is an interesting question. I love thinking about arguments, and breaking apart arguments. It's what got me into rhetoric as a field in the first place, the study of argumentation and persuasion.
I think what he does very well in More Everything Forever, which is what we're going to hear some pieces from at his lecture at UK, is provide an extraordinary amount of evidence for the historical bases of the ideas and ideologies we're seeing now. He writes, for example, about the singularity, the concept that technology will hit a point where it becomes self-improving and self-replicating. If we can build a computer that is intelligent enough, then it can start building computers that are more intelligent than itself, and we're out of the loop entirely. He traces the lineage of those ideas, which include the singularity, transhumanism, and effective altruism, not just back to the early days of Silicon Valley but decades before that, to early sci-fi. A lot of this stuff comes out of science fiction. That's not to suggest it's purely fictional. Many early science fiction writers were also scientists, technologists, and futurists, and they were often using science fiction as a way to explore what they considered real or possible.
In the process, his argument becomes extraordinarily sound, because of the volume of evidence he presents about how deep these ideas go. It would be very easy if it were simply, "This one tech CEO gave a speech one time where he said that in the future, computers will be able to replicate or improve themselves." As a professional assessor of arguments, I would say, "Okay, great. But how do we know that's actually influencing anything about Silicon Valley? That's just a one-off." But he assembles a mass of evidence showing that people have been talking about these ideas for decades and decades, and that the current crop of Silicon Valley leadership is influenced by them. For example, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was involved in cryptocurrency fraud and is now in prison for it, was deeply involved in getting professional and nonprofit organizations associated with some of these ideas off the ground. It was his avowed reason for becoming a cryptocurrency leader.
Clay
That's so interesting. When you talk about how we can look back at the stories we've been telling ourselves and how that affects the present, I think about our current relationship with our phones, tablets, iPads - we see their foundations in Star Trek, and wrist communicators in spy movies and so on. So, to what you were saying earlier, the bounds of what we have now are based off the bounds of what we could imagine before.
Cagle
Yes, absolutely. When you spend time with people who work professionally in software development and consumer-facing hardware development, one of the things you'll hear is that our advances have become incremental.
I think back to 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. It was literally a cultural shift. We had lots of precursors: Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys, pagers. We had experiences of being more and more tethered to work through the BlackBerry, of being reached on-the-go via the brick car phones of the '80s, of receiving alerts via a pager. But the iPhone was a real sea change because it was a platform: a piece of hardware that could infinitely expand its internal capabilities because it was a tiny computer. Part of what made it function as a tiny computer for people, as opposed to, say, a BlackBerry, was Steve Jobs. I don't want to get into hagiography - he was, by all accounts, a very abusive manager. But he had a relentless focus on usability and how users interacted with technology. The idea of a touchscreen, that you could interact with this device without a keyboard, really changed the everyday experience of using it. That combination of the user experience and the technology as a platform we can keep adding functionality to, that really shifted things.
We don't very often get a new technology that blows our minds and completely shifts the way our everyday lives function. What we get is another app, a minor tweak to the user interface, whatever. And that locks us into thinking about how technology should be and how we should engage with it in certain ways. Sci-fi can help us envision cool new technologies. But I really wish we spent more time working backwards, not from "what would be a cool tech innovation?" but from "what is the world that we want to live in?" And then, "what technologies do we need to build to get there?" That's what I want to see happen.
Clay
As I speak with you, it's only been a few days since the U.S. midterm elections. Voters cited data centers and AI as major influences on their votes in both local and federal races. Becker makes explicit the cause-and-effect relationship between the demands of the tech industry and environmental damage, and his upcoming talk is hosted by the Tracy Farmer Institute for Sustainability and the Environment, which you direct. How can climate communicators meet this moment, when that connection is at the forefront of people's minds, and build off it?
Cagle
I think it's through a relentless focus on community, not just in the sense of geographically-bounded neighbors, but community in the sense of the place we live. And the place we live includes the water we drink, the soil we grow our home gardens in, the air we breathe. All of that is part of our community.
Data centers have become such an interesting nonpartisan flashpoint among the electorate - certainly it's falling out more partisan in terms of how the different parties in the U.S. are talking about them in official statements - but people are putting the pieces together.
When people with an economic interest in my community's resources, who are not from this community, come in and promise a couple of jobs, maybe a little bit of economic development, in exchange for an ungodly amount of energy, water, and land, people recognize not just that this is not a good deal. This is not just economic give and take. They recognize the underlying sentiment, which is: you don't care about my community.
You mentioned that a lot of voters cited these issues. The clearest signal we have is that there were 35 ballot initiatives nationwide to limit development of data centers, in specific communities and specific states, that in some way said no - whether that's no with conditions or no completely. All 35 passed, and 28 of the 35 passed with over 70% of the vote. One of the signals we're getting in politics right now is that people are saying, "We don't want this here." And it's a real shift from past times, when you got this economic-versus-environment argument. People are busting out of that frame and reframing the whole thing as: Do you care about my community or not?
Work like this and lectures like this are really foundational to putting our money where our mouth is at UK, in terms of a commitment to transdisciplinary research on environment and sustainability. Transdisciplinary research means we're bringing together not just different disciplines from the university, but also community - making the work we do at the university visible, accessible, and relevant to community, and allowing communities to help drive what we're doing. So we're responding to this level of interest by saying, let's bring in a speaker, and we will pay for this speaker so that it can be free to the public. And bringing in somebody like Adam Becker, who has training as a scientist and is a very successful science writer, really shows how we can put the humanities, social science, and sociocultural approaches to technology at the center of these conversations. It does not have to be reduced to just a question of what's technologically feasible or not.
"More Everything Forever: Silicon Valley's Boundless Delusions and the Power of Touching Grass," with science journalist Adam Becker, is Wednesday, November 18th, at 6 p.m. in Singletary Recital Hall on UK's campus. Tickets are free, but seats must be reserved in advance. WUKY will be airing Becker's talk the following Monday, November 23, during Third Cup.