American Thought Leaders - How Tech Overlords Profit Off AI Predictions | Carissa Véliz

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Is the end of privacy inevitable? Is programmable money inevitable? Is it inevitable that artificial intelligence will eliminate most of the world’s white-collar jobs?Oxford professor Carissa Véliz argues that such claims are a red flag.She’s the author of the new book “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future.”Someone who says a future is inevitable is trying to get you to do something and benefit from your belief, she argues.She is convinced that such self‑fulfilling prophecies only work if we believe them and she urges people to defy these narratives by asking: Who is predicting this future? Who benefits? What data supports it—and what missing data might contradict it?Véliz is a philosopher and author who specializes in privacy and the ethics of artificial intelligence. She is an associate professor of philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford.Prediction, Véliz explains, is a business model: diagnose a problem, promise that more data will solve it, then sell tools to analyze the huge datasets institutions don’t know how to use.Throughout history, rulers have attached themselves to prophets. Today, that role is played by immensely rich and powerful tech executives who advise governments and control key infrastructure and access to citizens via social media.In our interview, we discuss how surveillance and behavioral prediction undermine and erode an open society where people should have the freedom to speak, protest, and be anonymous.Other questions we discuss: Do “digital natives” like Gen Z and Gen Alpha—who have never experienced a true non-digital world—even understand the role of privacy? And what are the best antidotes to the harms of digital life?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

If I tell you, Jan, tomorrow, an AI is going to replace you and you quit your job because it's no longer worth it, then you're obeying. And if I'm a tech executive who's selling this product, well, then you're doing me a favor. We've been told that one in five jobs will be replaced by AI. But when we treat this prediction as fact, are we actually seeing the future or are we manifesting it? The future doesn't get predicted. gets produced many times through prediction. But when you're able to predict what somebody's going to do, that's bad news. That's not scientific advancement.

That is a symptom of authoritarianism. Today I sit down with Carissa Valise, an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics and AI at Oxford University and a leading digital ethics expert. Her latest book, Prophecy, questions how prediction culture, from ancient oracles to modern AI forecasts, is actually determining our future.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Yek Kellock. Karissa Veliz, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much for having me, Jan. I've been doing a lot of thinking about utilitarianism and this way of thinking, how it's on the rise in our society, and also how AI is kind of fueling in a way that kind of thinking. This is a centerpiece in some ways of what you write about in prophecy, in your new book. Explain this to me.

In a way, prophecy is about how we think about things, how we perceive things. And part of what I'm concerned about is how this very probabilistic, very instrumental way of thinking has been exported to all kinds of spheres of life and has colonized our way of thinking. So Utitarianism is roughly the moral theory that we should maximize utility. And utility usually gets cashed out as either well-being or pleasure. And the idea is that the best thing to do is whatever maximizes the good for the majority. So the greatest good is often the greatest part. That's true.

The greatest good for the greatest number. This way of thinking has not only been dominant in policymaking context, but it has also influenced culture in a way that, even the way we speak reveals this mentality. So whenever you propose that we do something, oftentimes you will get a kind of reaction of people like, well, but is it worth it? And the question supposes that there is a calculation to be made of what are the chances of success,

what's the effort involved, and you sort of weigh it. And I'd like to push back against that culture, because I think that there are many things that are wrong with it. One thing that is wrong with it is, is that it's kind of complacent because it encourages you only to go for the more likely than not successes. Whereas in life, it's often very important to defy the odds. But the second thing that is wrong with it, and that is the narrative and the kind of the thread that weaves all of the book

together is that it heavily depends on prediction. So if you are very confident that you can predict the consequences of an action, then maybe utilitarianism seems more attractive. But the moment you start seeing the faults of prediction and realizing just how limited our predictive abilities are, then utilitarianism doesn't look half as attractive because you realize we can't actually predict the consequences of our actions. Because predictions are in a way portrayed as facts very often and are used as a tool that way. And that's really, again, it's kind of obvious the moment that you say it as I was reading that, but it's not obvious, actually, when we're just kind of dealing with it in everyday life. Tell me about that. I didn't start off realizing that. I discovered it as I wrote.

And you're right. In hindsight, it looks obvious, but it's not obvious in the way we engage with predictions, in the way we hear them, and in the way we pronounce them. So a prediction just grammatically sounds so similar to a fact. If I say, it is going to rain, it sounds so similar as it is raining or it has rained. And yet it's a completely different thing because a prediction in the best case scenario is an educated guess. And sometimes educated guesses can be very important. But when you look at predictions in the public sphere, you realize more often than not, predictions are not even that. They are marketing, they are wishful thinking, or they are power plays in disguise. If we hear them as if they were facts and if we just assume that

that future that is being predicted is the future. And we act in accordance with that. What we are actually doing is obeying in advance because very often predictions have a veiled command. So if I tell you it's going to rain tomorrow, I might also be saying, take your umbrella or postpone that meeting or something to that effect. And if you take my prediction at face value and just act as if that was true, then you're obeying. And that gets trickier when there are social predictions. If I tell you, Jan, tomorrow, an AI is going to replace you and you quit your job because it's no longer worth it, then you're obeying. And if I'm a tech executive who's selling this product, well, then you're doing me a favor. Talk about this relationship between tech executives and government,

which has developed and how this idea of prediction, this is kind of Oracle of Delphi nature of AI and and by extension the tech moguls, so to speak, or the technocratic class, if you will. Tell me about how that is impacting our society. The first thing to note is that these kinds of relationships are not new. When you look at the history of prediction, which, by the way, is a fascinating story. But your first few chapters, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I won't give it away, but please continue. Yeah, they're very historical because as I as I fell into this,

rabbit hole. I discovered all kinds of interesting facts and patterns. And one of the patterns you see is that when there are leaders, they usually attach themselves to some kind of profit. In the past, it might have been an or a seer of different kinds. Then they became astrologers, and then that figure morphed. But there's always somebody who's talking about the future next to the leaders. Now it's computer scientists and tech executives who, who are mostly talking about the future, and advising governments, and governments are asking for their advice.

And so this is a common pattern. What is new and quite concerning is that it's not only that governments are taking advice from these people who have very high financial interest, but it's also that they are depending on them for things as important as getting access to the citizenry. If people don't read the news anymore,

if they don't watch TV, but they're on social media, then suddenly politicians need these tech executives, to reach their audience. But even more concerning than that, governments are more and more depending on tech companies for infrastructure, for data servers, and for even internet cables, many of which are now private.

And so there is this relationship of cooperation, but also dependence that is quite tricky for democracy. But also, you know, needing to compute vast amounts of data with the idea that you will be able to predict, that you'll be able to assess, come up with credible assertions, right? This is a fascinating intersection for me because I've been thinking about the totalitarian mind a lot over the last years, right? And so there's this idea, when I look at AI, for the people that have that, let's say, predisposition to thinking I can control things into success, right? like a society or whatever. They're like, well, we just didn't have enough information before.

We weren't able to harness all that information. But now with AI, with the amount of compute, when we develop these huge data centers and all that, and finally we'll have the ability to figure everything out and control it just right and create that perfect society, finally. What do you think? There's so much to say. I think we could spend the whole hour

just talking about this one question. One thing to bear in mind is that prediction is a business. It's always been a business. When I thought about the Oracle of Delphi, I imagined this very spiritual sanctuary. It wasn't. It was actually a really profitable kind of setting in which the Oracle was put there to put Delphi on the map

and to attract people who had to stay there and suddenly the taverns and the restaurants and the inns were thriving. And there were not Olympic Games, games that were second in importance to the Olympic ones. So there were Delphic games and so on and so forth. And so this is a business. And part of how you create more business for yourself is you diagnose a problem and then you offer the solution. So ancient magicians would tell you what the future holds and then sell you the services to influence that future. And just like if you go into a pub in the

corner today, you will be sold trips because that will make you thirsty and you'll buy more beer. And so So one of the phenomenons we're seeing is that we are collecting all this data in the promise that the more data the better, which we'll come back to that, but it's not always the case. And then you have so much data that you don't know what to do with it as an institution. But don't worry, because there's a tech company that sells you products to analyze all that data that you don't know what to do it. And so they create their own business that way.

Now let's go back to this point about is more data always better? And the answer is absolutely not. Because often when we are searching for something in the data, it's like searching for a needle in the haystack. And making the haystack bigger is not helpful. Data is only helpful if it's helpful data, if it's relevant data. Garbage in, garbage out, yes.

Yes. But not only that, even when the data is accurate, if it's not relevant to you, it's not exactly garbage, but it's not going to help you. It's just going to make things harder, actually. But the most important thing is the situations in which you cannot collect the data that you would need to collect to get at the right conclusion,

because it doesn't exist. Why doesn't it exist? Well, because we never collect the data of counterfactuals. So if I give a loan to someone, I can track how that person does. But if I don't give a loan to someone else, I will never be able to figure out how well would that a person had I given the loan. I didn't give the loan. You're missing a whole big piece of the data set that would be essential.

Always, no matter what, because in reality, you can only choose one thing. And we see this phenomenon in all kinds of ways, but in people who die. You never get the data of people who die because they're dead. And so data has this tendency to skew things even when it's precise. What do you think about the fact that now with these bigger data sets and more sensors and more cameras throughout society watching what people are doing and more sensors on our fingers and our watches and so forth, that we actually aren't we getting a more complete picture of the way our circadian rhythms work, the way our,

how much pat we have in our bodies, how we're, the interactions we have with others. We do seem to have more better data, right? We have more data. It's not always better. So not long ago, I was reading about a person who used different watches, smart watches, to track their sleep and other metrics, and how much it diverged from one another. So something important is that in most of these cases, these sensors are produced, design, fabricated. implemented by companies. And companies want profit.

And profit and truth or precision or science don't always align well. And so this is not a scientific environment in which we are trying to maximize accuracy. If it creates a profit, that's good enough. So, for example, I was listening to an incredible athlete not long ago. And one of the things that she said that struck me as interesting is that she thinks that part of her competitive advantage is that, sure, she collects all this data like many athletes do today. But when her body feels different than the data, when those diverged, she trusts her body. And it makes sense. Like your body has evolved through thousands of years of polishing.

A product like a smartwatch, a few years. And it's incredible how biased we are towards tech and data that we would follow the watch instead of your body that is much more precise. 100%. You know, I'm thinking of these examples where the Navi Chan, I'm using the Japanese word in my mind. No, that basically the Ways or Google Maps

or one of these types of apps, and it ends up starting to take you somewhere where you don't want to be going, but you're like, hey, this is where I'm supposed to go, apparently. right? And this has happened and people have been robbed and, you know, all sorts of bad things have happened as these things have kind of cut through, you know, places where we weren't really supposed to be going. Exactly. But then going back to your question, aren't we getting more data? Yes, we're getting more data. Is that a good thing? Well, it depends. It depends on the effects of that data and how we use the data and who holds the data. And at the moment, I think that no, it hasn't been a positive development. So a lot of the times we get sold the idea that if we have more data and more surveillance, we'll be safer. But I'm Spanish. Spain is one of the safest countries in the world. with one of the lowest markers of homicide, for instance. And it's been that for quite a while.

Is it thanks to surveillance? No. The UK has much more surveillance. Is it a safer country? No, it's not. And so there are all these assumptions that are questionable at best, questionable putting it very generously, if not outright, wrong. And then let's suppose that, okay, we do have more data

and we can better track people and better, importantly, predict people's behavior. Is that a good thing? Well, if you want an authoritarian regime, that's a great thing. If you want a liberal democracy that is healthy in which people feel, for example, freedom to protest anonymously and peacefully, then no, that's not a good thing at all. And part of what history teaches us about prediction is that the future doesn't get predicted. It gets produced many times through prediction. But when you're able to predict what somebody is going to do, that's bad news.

That's not scientific advancement. That is a symptom of authoritarianism because chances are you're determining it. And just to go to the extreme as an illustration, you want to know where somebody is going to be tomorrow? Jail them. You'll know. And is that what we want? I hope not. Now I'm thinking of something that people that younger than me would call meta, okay?

Because we have this idea that, I mean, I'm certainly being programmed with this all the time, that the future absolutely involves more sensors, more surveillance, more tracking, the end of privacy. It's inevitable. It's absolutely inevitable that, you know, for example, programmable currency, inevitable, right? Is that, is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? I almost believe it, but I really don't want to. So help me here, okay? One of the best news about self-fulfilling prophecies is that they only work if we believe them.

So in the paradigmatic myth of Oedipus, when he gets told that he's going to murder his father and marry his mother, he panics. And in his horror at that prospect, he tries to flee from his destiny. And it is in that trying to flee from it that he makes the prophecy come true. So there are many ways to interpret a myth. And the way that I got the lesson or I got taught this myth was, well, there's destiny and you can't escape it. And if you try to escape it, you'll only make it come true. But for me, the actual lesson is, no, if Oedipas had laughed at the prophet and chilled, he would have never made the prophecy come true.

It's only because he believed it that he made it come true. Except that if I chill right now, then those people that are in-shad, these people that I was mentioning before that believe that with maximal data, with full sensor sweep of our bodies, of our minds, of everything, they're going to be able to create that perfect world and make life better for you and me. They're determined. You're absolutely right.

And by chill, I don't mean not do anything. I mean not panic. I mean not panic and not act in a way that plays into the sun. fulfilling prophecy. So if Edipus instead had said like, okay, I'm going to become a pacifist, I'm not going to murder anyone, then that's a pretty good method not to murder your father. So in a way, what we have to do is get busy building the future, because the future is not written, and it depends on us. And one very important red flag is when anyone says that any kind of future is inevitable because that's just patently false. And it's a red flag because it means

that that person is trying to get you to do something, is selling something. They have an interest that you think and you believe this. And so whenever somebody says, this future is inevitable, red flag and start asking questions. Who is this person? Why are they making this prediction? Who stands to benefit? Does it come from data? What kind of data? And what are the data that we don't have that I falsify that. And how is he benefiting? You said that, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And who stands to benefit? And do I want this future? And if not, what am I going to do to make sure that that is not my future? I was just texting with a friend of mine this morning. You know, something happens that goes against, you know, basically that doesn't go the way that we would like to see the world developing. And you get this what people call blackpilling something. It's just, okay, you know what? Forget it. There's no hope. We're just stuck with it. The bad guys are going to do their thing. We can do nothing about it. And that's, you know, that's kind of the opposite of what the sort of mindset that you're describing. It is very easy to fall into that, I think, right? When you see all these sort of machinations happening around you, moving in a direction that you don't see hope in or you don't see a future in.

Yeah. For people who are very powerful and who want to set the agenda, that's great news, right? That's exactly how they want us to make, that's exactly how they want us to feel, because that means that we'll just do on our phones on the couch and do nothing about it. And it's also a product, all this kind of mentality of like, oh, these people are very powerful, I'm no one, I can't really do anything, I'm just going to disengage. And that seems on the surface like the easiest way. to go and the easiest option. And when I suggest that we should do something else, one question that I

get is like, but is it fair to put that burden on individual's shoulders? And the answer is, no, it's not fair. We shouldn't have to fight for our rights to be respected. But the fact of the matter is our rights are not being respected. And if we don't fight for them now, it's just going to get harder. So one way to look at it is, look, life is full of problems. If you're out of problems, that's terrible news because it means you're out of life. And it's about solving better problems. A good life is having better problems than the alternative. And I think that making an effort to protect democracy is a much better problem to have than fighting authoritarianism once it's here. And the other thing is that even though on the surface, it seems like the easiest option to doomscroll

on your couch. It's not going to make you feel better. It's not going to make you happier, and it's not going to make you feel satisfied or proud or hopeful or anything that makes life meaningful. And I wish we could invoke this sense of, look, part of the magic of being a human being is that we can defy the odds, that we've seen it happen time and again. And when you encounter a situation that is very hard and in which you have to defy the odds, that the attitude is not like, okay, then I'm going to back down. It's like, no, I like a good challenge. Let's take it on. Bring it on. I was just reminded yesterday of the Lord of the Rings, one of my favorite stories, but this is really the story, right? You kind of like really bad odds, right? Really bad

odds for a very long time. But sometimes it works out and it's worth it, just giving it a shot, right? That's kind of the message. I mean, I'm very, very glib and oversimplified here, but I think that's a compelling argument. Absolutely. And it's not only fiction, although I love fiction and fiction is very important. It's all the people that we tend to admire. The people we tend to admire are not the people who just stayed at home and just accepted their odds. They're the people who impressed us. I don't know, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, whoever you can think of as a hero, probably had quite a few difficulties along the way. And they were bucking the odds.

It's very interesting that you say that because you're this idea of, you know, kind of probabilities and self-fulfilling prophecies is, again, the centerpiece of what you're writing about. But really, it's the people who say, you know what? I don't. Sure, but I'm still going to do this. Yes. And the paradox is that the more we believe that we can do it, the better our chances. If you don't think you can do it and you stay home, like the chances of succeeding are zero. Or zero. And sometimes in life, some battles are so important that I genuinely think, that is. it's better to fight them and be on the right side of history, even if you're convinced that you're going to lose. So for example, if you have a child and that child has a difficulty,

any kind of difficulty, social, physical, whatever. If it's your child and you love them, you'll do whatever you can to make their life better, even if you think you're going to fail, because that's not the point in a way. And so for the very important battles in life, when it's very important to be on the right side of history, it's kind of inappropriate to make a calculation

about whether you're going to win or lose. It doesn't matter. It's that important. Let me tell you about something else I've been thinking about, which I think fits into a very profound thing, I think you said, which is that we're analog beings, not digital beings, right? And so something I've been thinking about in terms of this, you know, utilitarianism that's sort of on the rise in our societies, I juxtapose these two concepts in the medical context, right? So the traditional medicine is in the Hippocratic view, right? The Hippocratic view is that as a medical practitioner, I would look at the totality of who you are, and I have to figure out how to help you best. And the other far end of that spectrum is this utilitarian bioethics,

which is that greatest good for the greatest number, sometimes called the greatest happiness for the greatest number. And this is the point where the challenge is that someone kind of gets to decide what that greatest good is, and someone gets sacrificed, that is actually utilitarianism personified. Like, this is why you get atrocity in these communist societies, because someone says, well, the greatest good is my survival or survival of the Communist Party, right? It feels like the digital mentality lends itself

to a kind of utilitarian bioethical view of the human being. What do you think? Yes, I agree. Part of what I tried to do in the book is give a little bit of a sense, sense of who each character was as a person in the history of statistics, but also further on when we come to utilitarianism. Because the kind of people they wear tells you something about where they coming from and why they might have thought what they did.

And if you've met any utilitarians, you might notice that these are not particularly good people at, you know, the embodied part of life. For example, in their latest iteration, in effective altruists, a lot of these people are making assumptions about what the future will look like. And part of the assumption is that we will upload ourselves into some kind of cloud. Of course, that has so many assumptions that I think are wrong, precisely because we are not

digital beings, and we will never be digital beings. Part of what it means to be a human being is to enjoy each other's presence. We make trips and all kinds of things, precisely because we're not digital. And it's not the same to look something on a screen as to be there. And when it comes to thinking about ethics, one way to make the point that you were making about how utitarianism tends to think about the community as one organism.

And John Rawls, a philosopher in the 20th century, famously argued against this idea that it is a kind of this analogy. because if you think of yourself as one organism, and imagine that you're in the situation in which you have gangrene on your toe, and if you don't cut off your toe, you're going to die. You might well be willing to cut off your toe. But the analogy that we should do the same with society and the society's one organism is incorrect, because your toe doesn't have objectives for itself.

It doesn't have values for itself. And so the way John Rawls puts it is that utilitarianism denies the same, separateness of persons in the sense that every person is a project onto themselves with their own values and their own projects and their own life. And you can't sacrifice it as you would at because a toe is that it doesn't have that kind of separateness. I mean, fascinating and and its own problems for that matter, right? I want to jump back to this obedience idea, obedience to prediction because I you captured my imagination with this okay I'm going to read something that actually I think it was from Timothy so you quote Timothy Snyder right yes that's exactly right

anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy he says by believing and acting in accordance with their predictions we don't even notice we're obeying if we take a second to recognize them as predictions if we understand the predictions are prescriptive and not descriptive we stand a better chance of controlling your fate. Now that I think about it, you've kind of been telling me this, right? But this really makes me want to remove all sorts of predictive decision-making. Because we all have it in our lives, right? And even in our very simple lives, like deciding about the weather.

But is there a way of going too far, I guess? Yes. I think there are all kinds of situations in which following predictions is, very good idea. I live in the UK and I check my weather up multiple times a day and I will continue to do so. But what I'm arguing for is a more enlightened use of prediction. To be clearer about the things that we can predict, the things that we can't predict, and if we have the illusion that we can predict, it's going to lead us astray. And to be clearer about the things that we shouldn't predict, even if we could, because we are partly determining it. What shouldn't we predict?

I think we shouldn't predict the fate of individuals. I think that is a disrespectful way of treating people because it treats them as things and not as agents who have a say in that future who can defy the odds. And there's a lot of arrogance in thinking that you know what the fate of an individual will be. Isn't this the whole insurance industry based on this? I mean...

Yes and no. And of course there are situations in which it's tricky. It cannot be a blanket rule. More tricky, I think, is medicine, because sometimes you need a sense of the diagnosis, and a diagnosis carries some prognosis to treat someone. So it is more nuanced than that. But in the case of insurance, that is a great question, because insurance is fascinating. It's the most important industry, I think, when it comes to prediction, and certainly one of the oldest ones.

And it's a very important industry for the whole of society, because it provides a kind of safety net. And in so doing, it contributes to stability. But if I may, right, as you mentioned before, there's a lot of profit motive in there as well. Absolutely. Yeah. And originally, insurance wasn't a kind of business. It was a kind of pooling of risk in solidarity of workers who knew that, you know, if the breadwinner died, their family would be in trouble and to kind of join forces to keep people safe. And that is quite a noble history of insurance.

I completely agree, actually. And I'm actually, I use that kind of a system, which they don't even call insurance. They call it a health share. Exactly. So when it comes to insurance, insurance is a good idea. Society benefits from insurance in a way that it doesn't from other kinds of industries. But what is very important is for insurance to make predictions at a population level. Because then it has much less of that force of self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's kind of diffused. And so if you predict that, you know, however many people in a million will get diabetes, that's something very different from thinking, oh, this person's going to get diabetes, and then charging them higher for their premiums. And we're seeing that trend towards more individualized kind of insurance. And individualized insurance isn't insurance at all. The whole point of insurance is pulling risk. If individuals are paying for their own way, then we might as well pay for our own way

and not pay the middleman who is making a profit. There's a whole lot of insurance that smoking is one of these things, very clear. You know, you're much more likely. You could smoke two packs a day and live to be 100. People have done that. But the likelihood of that goes down. It's in the probabilities, right? And so you're going to pay higher premiums if you're a two pack a day smoker,

if your insurance company knows that, right? But you're kind of saying that you don't want any of that. You have it pull the risk equally. I'm saying we need to have a public debate and we need to make this decision in a conscious way. And I don't think we're doing that. By the way, I'm very attracted to your idea here in a lot of ways, right? I can see pros and cons to it, but it's definitely heading in that direction. But explain again why we shouldn't do that, even with something as obvious as smoking potentially.

I don't know if we should do it with smoking because on the one hand, I think it's a good incentive for people not to smoke. But it's a slippery slope because if we accept smoking, then we start tracking people for whether they are exercising. And you might think, well, that's fair. You know, if you exercise, you have a lower chance of getting sick and that's fair for everyone. Except it's not as simple as that because it's not only that it's statistics. So you're right that somebody can smoke and then, you know, live to be a hundred. But when it comes to exercise, their bodies are very different. And there's situations in life and there are bodies that don't actually benefit from exercise in the same way as others.

And then the way we track exercise is very rudimentary. So it's easy to track whether somebody runs. But then people also game the system. So you attach your garment to your dog and let them run. But also there are all the other kinds of exercise that are not that easy to track. If you do gardening, it's a kind of exercise. And so you start getting into situations that create. unfairness. And in general, first, there are conditions that are much more important for health

that we have no control over, like our genes, and we shouldn't be punished for those. And it's better not to know who's lucky and unlucky, and just to pull risk altogether. And secondly, you have an effect on people. So if we start tracking people, and if you start, you know, being too petty about of things. That creates a kind of stress and a kind of competition and a kind of invasive imposure that will have effects on health. And so sometimes we undermine the things that we're trying to incentivize. Right. Well, I mean, 100% and the extreme of that is the sort of the penopticon that communist China is developing with the social credit system in every camera

in your gesture. And whatever it is, I say something, oh, your score just went down. It wasn't pro-communist party, right? On and on and on. It's turning a human being into, I don't know, digitizing. Let's use your concept here, digitizing the human being maybe. I don't know what it is. But this is, again, this is this idea with just enough, we have enough information. We can sort of shape and mold people just to live great productive lives, right?

And everyone will be, it'll be wonderful. Yeah. And it assumes that there is a right on wrong thing to do, are better and worse for everyone and it's the same, right? So one of the examples of the Chinese social credit system is that if you play video games, that's bad, and if you buy diapers, that's good. And you can see the reasoning behind it, and you can see how roughly that might have some sense. But first of all, it's very judgmental to think, like, oh, if you have kids, that's a good thing. Well, it depends on the circumstances, and we should have freedom to have kids or not have kids.

And then with video games, you know, there are situations in which actually playing a video game might be a very good idea. For example, there are studies that suggest that certain kinds of video games are actually quite good to process PTSD. So it creates a lack of nuance and a kind of totalitarianism. And part of what we mean when we use this word, totalitarian is a system that imposes upon itself on people's lives in all areas of life. So it's not only your job and it's not only the government, it's your neighbors and your personal life and everything in between. Whereas liberal democracies are supposed to have different spheres so that maybe you're a terrible neighbor and it's fair for your neighbor to hate you. But that shouldn't impact how much taxes you pay or how the government treats you. You raise all sorts of incredibly, incredibly important questions.

that the reason I mentioned earlier, like, I almost believe, right? And I'm very skeptical, and I don't want to believe this, but I almost believe that this, you know, sort of data penopticon is almost inevitable because things are moving so hard, so fast in that direction. It's just where progress is going. Now, I don't want to believe it. You understand, right? but I kind of do when I think about it because it's so it almost seems obvious that things have to go there.

And I know we've talked about how you don't, you need to change your thinking, right? And that's the only way that'll ever change. And that's exactly right. How do we get out of that mind frame? How do you get out of the mind frames that, you know, you're seeing being programmed onto you. So I have quite a long-standing habit of being quite stubborn, which I wouldn't recommend for everything, but it has its silver linings or virtues. And I think everyone has experienced this, but some people more than others.

And women and foreigners tend to experience this more than others, of finding yourself in a situation in which you know, people around you are predicting your failure. And instead of letting that bring you down saying, going to prove them wrong. And there's a pleasure in that and that kind of, you know, constructive, friendly defiance of like, no, that's not our world. And it partly depends on how we behave, right? So are you going to buy surveillance cameras? Then, yeah, suddenly the surveillance state becomes a little bit more likely and a little bit harder to fight. So it really depends on how we act. I think people underestimate the power that they have, the power that they have not only as citizens,

but as friends and as parents and as neighbors and as nodes in this social system. Another way to have a little bit of fun and defy the system is to study the predictions of the past. We are remarkably bad at predicting the future. And futures that seemed inevitable not that long ago just didn't exist. One example is Paul earlier with his idea of the future. population bomb. There was a very, very strong belief that it was inevitable that there would be so much overpopulation that there would be famine and it would be a disaster. And that never happened. And then a few decades later, it was inevitable that we were going to shrink to nothingness

and that the population was going to be dwindling. And that didn't happen. And a few months before or the Wright brothers managed to make an airplane fly, the New York Times published this scathing article saying that it would take from 1 million to 10 million years to make people fly in airplanes. They're completely wrong. So next time you listen to one of these predictions, just look to the past and read these predictions of the past,

and it gives you a lot of perspective to say, no. And in fact, when you listen to our own, prediction given the terrible track record of our predicting if anything rather than make you sad or panic it should kind of give you a reason to be optimistic because we've been so bad at making predictions that if you listen to our prediction that's probably going to be wrong as well one of the areas that you've thought a lot about in fact you wrote your previous book about it is privacy and your huge advocate for privacy and thank you for that by the way so i i am also a deep believer in that. But when I look at this newest generation, Gen Z, right, that's

come of age, they have a very different view of privacy. It's a very different way of viewing their digital natives. They've grown up in the culture where, you know, these, the big companies have just been siphoning everything, selling it off. There's this whole information economy, right? And they don't even, in a sense, in many of them that I've talked to don't actually even grasp why you would even need it. The culture has shifted so much in that generation, right? They're just happy to give away all of it. I mean, as far as I can tell where, and I'm, you know, I'm, my God, like, what are we, what are we giving away? An example was, right? It was, it's a criminal offense, right, to open someone else's mail. But, you know, it's like we

forgot about all that and just in today's digital economy everything is basically up for grabs whatever it is even like you know when i'm looking in the phone they can you can be picking up all the different things that are in the field of the camera and you know trying to sell to me based on that and so forth so i'm concerned you can our culture has shifted certainly with this newest generation around this issue of privacy and i'm worried that we're going to have a future where people don't even understand what that was like. And how can they make decisions if they don't even understand how that was like? How can they see the value of it?

I'm torn about that. Sometimes when I look at trends on social media and if you focus on particular kinds of social media like Instagram or TikTok, I definitely get the same sense as you do. And I worry. I worry about, especially about us. educating a generation of people who have never had privacy. I think that stunts people, that we are educating people to be subjects and not citizens. Because part of what it means to grow up is to make mistakes and break your arm and learn from that process.

And if you're so afraid that anything you do will end up in social media, you are much more afraid to make mistakes and then you don't make them and you don't learn from them. And you don't grow up in a sense. However, I think in history we have tended to underestimate the creativity and the wits and the ability to surprise us of young generations. More and more I encounter my youngest students that they don't want social media. And granted, my students at Oxford are not particularly representative of the general population. However, there is something going on there that wasn't happening before. And often they have their first social media when they come to Oxford

because they feel they need to belong to the Oxford societies, which is a shame. And I hope that we can work on that. But and I asked them, you know, so what do you do with your time? Because at the same time, I worry that their attention spans have become so short that they're not reading, which is a huge problem. that maybe we can go back to later on in conversation. But they are often playing role games and they are doing crafts things.

And they are... Like physical things, not digital things. And they're going to the gym and they are meeting their friends. And so I wonder if we're starting to see a bit of a reaction of people tired of being online all the time, of being on front stage all the time. And there's an excellent documentary that I highly recommend

called Molly versus Machines. And it's about the case of Molly Russell, who was a teenager in the UK, who ended her own life after being exposed to around 2,000 posts of self-harm content on social media. And this was a very big case in the UK because her father, Ian Russell,

took this case to court. And it was the first time that a judge ruled that social media companies were partly responsible for the death of that teenager. And part of what the documentary shows is the lives of her friends and how her friends process this experience. And of course, this is a very particular case because this is a teenager who ended her life. But these young women were incredibly reflected about social media. And even though they had social media, they were much more.

savvy about privacy and about limits than I think maybe the average teenager or what we imagine the average teenager to be. So privacy is something that we value many times when we learn the lesson of what happens when we don't have it. And I think many teenagers have suffered horrendously from exposure of different kinds and they're much more wary than teenagers five years ago where. Right. I mean, we're kind of, we've got through some of that shift.

Like, it's that point where people are starting to wonder, wait a sec, is this really as important as good? I just interviewed a young woman. She's a bit older than a teenager, but she went through this earlier, who just decided one day I have to turn off my Instagram, right? because I just, it's just too much. It's too, and that was the moment, and she realized after she turned it off,

he was like, I don't need this, but she was living in it, basically, and as many young women are, apparently, as I've been learning, right? But so, and that was, like, what caused that self-refraction? She said, wait a second, this has been like a focus of my life

and I actually don't need this. Maybe that's the thing we, you know, you recommend, try it out. Get off the thing for a moment, see what happens, right? Yes. Something that I would like to instill in young people is how much reading paper books is the antidote to many of the ills that the digital era has brought. How instead of shortening your attention span, it will broaden it and it will not misinform you.

It will keep you more informed. And it will give you... Especially the great books, right? Yes, great books. And it will give you this resilience that social media tends to take away from you. It's just you and that author in the world of ideas. For all the dazzling qualities of digital tech, the book, it's still the best technology we have by far

of both conveying experience and other person's experience, what it is to be someone else. You only get to live once, but if you read, you get to live many lives in one. And complex thinking. If you don't have the attention span only of 14 seconds, are arguments that you can't possibly comprehend because their arguments are just more complex than 140 characters or whatever it is these days.

And it takes you out of the digital world. You know, it just needs to be, I think it really needs to just be a part of our life because there's always this encroachment, more digital, more digital, more digital. It's a kind of bubble. Nobody's surveilling you, you don't get any notifications. The book doesn't ask anything of you. It's a really special kind of activity, in fact, so special, that when reading became more individualized. So at the beginning reading was communal because it was so effortful to produce a book

that you couldn't have books for everyone. You just had one book, and so somebody had to read it out loud. But when we could produce more books, people were so afraid of the autonomy it conveyed that they didn't want to allow women to read alone. Because it's a dangerous thing. You strengthen your mind. You strengthen not only your mind, but also your spirit in the sense of it gives you so many more tools to think about the world, but also to face the world.

It gives you this calmness. And so it's not only that for young people that you should read because it's like eating vegetables and they're good for you, is that if you don't, you are truly missing out on one of life's greatest planeters. And in my view, a lot of people who don't like to read, it's not that they don't like to read, but that they haven't trained their attention to make it pleasurable. Because books are so broad that surely there's something that you would enjoy reading, whether it's mystery novels or romance novels or, you know, or non-fiction or whatever.

There is something for you. If only you can tap into it by training your attention. It's so interesting that you talk about this time where we went from, you know, the written word not being as available. then the Gutenberg Press comes into being is built, right? And that first democratizes faith. People start thinking about, you know, what does the Bible really mean? Right?

And it causes wars and it causes the reformation. It causes the Enlightenment. It probably, you know, probably causes liberal democracy, you could argue. Anyway, this is a whole discussion. But a big, big change, a big shift as this media form of media's created Now you can get books and a thousand people can, 10,000 people, whatever, you can be reading together. I'm wondering, and there's a number of books to this effect right now, The Information State by Jacob Siegel, for example, that I recently read and interviewed about,

that we're in a situation like that now where we're shifting into a new kind of media with social media, this AI juiced up, social media, the silos it creates, the democratization of information that creates, the ability to control it creates, and we don't even really know what it's going to look like on the other end. if you've thought about this or whether you think we're in one of these times. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's tricky to make the comparison to books.

I just mean like a shift in the way that the way media is created and the way the, in a way, it's the emotion that's conveyed through media because we can see each other, right? And we can sort of, it's like the transmission of body language now en masse, right? I mean, that would be a piece of it. There's definitely a shift, I think that is undeniable, but I wouldn't assume that the shift is always positive or that it's always going to remain the way it is. So going back to predictions that were wrong, when the electronic book came out, the belief, the majoritarian belief was that the paper book would disappear within a matter of years. And here we are decades later, and the paper book is still stronger, I think partly because it's tactile. So anyway, in this shift, again, we have seen predictions about the end of books

and that we'll only have this other kind of information in the shape of websites and podcasts and social media. And I'm very suspicious of this term of democratizing information. Because it seems to me like in some ways, yes, the Internet has made access to certain kinds of information much more easy and easily available. So Wikipedia, perhaps, is the best example, in contrast to encyclopedias that were paper-based and quite expensive and not everyone could access, and even less precise than Wikipedia,

or at least Wikipedia at a certain point in time. I'm not sure if that still holds. However, I had this unsettling experience that I wrote Privacy as Power six years ago, and researching that book was so much easy. than researching prophecy in ways that were easy to compare in the sense that I was looking for a very particular claim by a very particular person and I knew exactly what I was looking for. In 2019 and 2020 I could find it in 20 seconds. Today it takes me six hours to find that claim that

I was looking for partly because yeah there's so much slope out there there's so much more and And not all of it is information that is worthy or credible or precise. And some of it is just there to mix things up intentionally. Yeah. So my experience is that it's getting harder to get at the good quality information than it was a few years ago. And that is very concerning. I could talk to you for hours. But I think we're going to have to finish fairly soon.

Do you have a final thought as we finish? Perhaps, going back to your question of how do we deal with this doom and gloom and when you hear a prediction and you believe it, you don't want to believe it, and part of how we deal with it is humor. I think we're taking some people too seriously and that humor is a very important tool in life to cope with the hardest parts of life, but also in democracy because there is irreverence in humor

and there is critical thinking in humor. And so turning to comedy is not as superficial as it might seem. Well, Carissa Valise, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you all for joining Carissa Valise and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kelek.