Hi everybody, very good to see everybody here of course. Five minutes, 300 seconds, obviously nowhere near enough time. Easy answer, print some. It's listening to what's going on here, that's not so hard. We've got organ printing already, crank it forward a bit, do some brain printing, mash them all together into parallel system, and you have as much time as you want. So when's that gonna happen? I guess the consensus opinion would be not yet,
but that's a consensus opinion. It's not actually an entirely universal opinion. There's some kind of strange strands of thinking, some quite ancient, some very recent, that suggest that once you've got artificial time production, you really lose your confidence about which time you're in at all. People probably are most familiar with a recent version of this through something called the simulation argument. As I say, 300 seconds, I won't try and rehearse the whole thing, but it's a statistical argument that it's almost inevitable that actually everything that is going on right now is already happening in an artificial time environment. I'm sure I've had my 300 seconds.
I'll just wipe it up to say the question of whether technology happens in time or time happens in technology is something that becomes an ever more urgent problem. I think even if people think it can be delayed right now or even has been delayed right now, It's not something that we're gonna be able to delay forever. And I think it's one of the questions that we have to address in this question about now and the future. So I'll start by that. Thank you so much for your inspiring provocations. I just wanted to start with a really big question, which I think relates to all of our projects in the room, which is the extent to which you can actively design the future. Is that something that you think is possible?
A way to turn that right round is that the more we find out about the way things really happen, there's a way to come at this from a very different tradition, which is the Buddhist tradition, which is also the deep skeptical tradition in the West. They have the same origin, even though that's really got lost. Which is that the more you find out about something, the more you learn about something, the less you believe it. That's very odd, I think, for people most, you know, the modern mind tends to think the more that you learn about something, the more you understand it, the more real it seems, the more credible it seems, the more solid it seems.
But this is, in certain traditions, the exact opposite of the way naturally things are understood. that in fact, this very central Buddhist notion of dependent origination, which is basically exactly the same as scientific causality or nature, that the very insight into dependent origination is something that stops you believing that something's real. It's actually a way of overcoming delusion. It's a way that something becomes delusionary, object of false credibility, suddenly is dissolved and you escape from that delusion. So I think that these sort of questions, they might seem of course extremely arcane,
but ultimately I think they're the questions that are being raised when you say, how much can you actually design or plan things? You know, and to the extent that you feel you can do that, it's because you think the kind of structures of agency, of self, of reality that seem normal to you and are happening right now, are actually what reality is made up of. If you don't think that, if you stop thinking of that, if that is in some sense disrupted or fractured, then you begin to wonder really where things are coming from, when they happened, and what is in fact taking place. Okay, I'm gonna try to throw something else out, which is the question about fear and desire. I think a lot of the science fiction books that have been mentioned and stories
and also a lot of the stuff that is happening around us today, I mean, also in the Maker Carnival, has an element of fear, an element of terror that maybe is sort of just bubbling there under the surface. I mean, of course, there's nothing that seems so terrifying when you walk outside and everyone's being friendly, but it's not that hard to sort of speculate out and say where this is leading, especially for someone who is immersed in the world of science fiction, is a story that is quite terrifying. And at the same time, there seems to be an unconscious, or maybe sometimes conscious, desire for that same future, and a lot of that has to do with the transformation of the species, the loss of human agency, and these sort of things.
So if I can, I know this is not quite a question, but if I can ask you to just speak when you think about your own work and how the future plays, if you can think about this mixture of terror and fear and also seduction and desire. It's a particular dimension of horror that I think people will identify with quite strongly and I think has a lot of content to it. It's quite fascinating. And an easy way to explain it is When people are doing a kind of elementary explanation of entropy to children or people who are not very well-versed in these topics, they often say, you know, you drop an egg on the floor, you have a smashed egg, there's no way
that you can smash that egg, unsmash that egg. You know, there's a basic, the nature of time understood in this sort of thermodynamic sense is that things get smashed and they don't unsmash. And I think actually, I guess people think in a way entropy is a bad thing, but really people are most comfortable in the world that consists of entropy and agency. You know, they like to think that the things around them are basically falling to pieces, except when people put them together and they understand what people are and they understand that sort of process. And those two things together is quite a comfortable world for people. but obviously the old thing about that that egg example is that there are eggs you know, I mean if we were living in a universe
where eggs can get smashed and they can never get built then exactly why are there eggs everyone knows there are eggs and then it's not so hard for people to come up with an explanation of why there are eggs but when they start doing that I think that's when you start actually entering into this world of horror You know, it's like, it's distributed over enough time, it's easy enough to push it into different compartments that people don't quite see it, but the notion of a whole bunch of things coming together without agents, without people controlling it, without any recognisable goals or objectives, and actually coming up with extremely organised, complex systems is something that when people look at it so clearly, I think that is a very strong,
horrific vibration that people get from that. And I think the example, which probably people will recognize from the movies, is that moment in the second Terminator movie when there's an almost indestructible liquid metal robot trying to kill and chase and kill people. They release some liquid hydrogen or some extremely cold thing and freeze it and then smash it into a whole bunch of pieces. So this previously formidable killing machine is just strewn all over the road, as I said, a little fragile glass-like particles. But as they start falling, it starts pooling together
and you can see it all running back into this organized entity. And that is an absolutely just exemplary convergent wave. I mean, that looks horrible, horrific, there's no doubt about it horrific but that's what when you look at the world with any realism that is what you're seeing you're seeing this terminator monster um it may not be a terminator monster but you're seeing something very like that it's just happening over a time scale and in a distributed way that you're not recognizing over that same vivid uh shock and it seems to me this kind of technology and the kind of things that go on here very much have that actually uh going on under the surface and there's a lot of room for some deep horrific affect tied up with that.