How to Know What's Real: How to be Immortal Online - How to Touch Grass

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[00:02]
St. John's College
Saint John's College is the nation's great books. College students explore 3,000 years of human thought in just four years or two. For graduate students, encounter history's most influential works where students engage in group discussions about the fundamental questions underlying human society. Learn more about St. John's undergraduate and graduate programs in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Annapolis, Maryland, including online options at sjc.edu.
[00:31]
Hannah Reichel
We'Re so done with new Year, new you. This year it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Geminis because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want and you know what? We love that for you, someone else will too be more you this year and find them on Bumblebee.
[01:02]
Andrea Valdez
So the Ouija board was a very controversial toy in my house growing up. I think my mother was just very much against having one because of its associations with magic and the occult. But I was able to finally convince her to buy me one because I pointed out to her that it was manufactured by Parker Brothers. And I figured if they could create a board game like Monopoly, that the Ouija board must not be that dangerous.
[01:31]
Megan Garber
I mean, that is a winning argument if I ever heard one.
[01:34]
Andrea Valdez
Yeah.
[01:35]
Megan Garber
Yes.
[01:39]
Andrea Valdez
I'm Andrea Valdez. I'm an editor at the Atlantic.
[01:42]
Megan Garber
And I'm Megan Garber, a writer at the Atlantic.
[01:45]
Andrea Valdez
And this is how to know what's real.
[01:51]
Megan Garber
Andra. When I played with Ouija boards, which was exclusively at slumber parties and exclusively to ask this mysterious portal to another world about people we had crushes on, I remember feeling really entranced by it, but also a little creeped out by it. And I think I still might feel that way just a little bit, even though I know now the science behind it. You know, Ouija boards work through something called the ideometer effect, where thoughts in the players minds, in a way that's pretty unconscious to the players themselves, end up guiding their movements across the board. Which is actually a nice metaphor, I think, for the web and really for so much of what we've been talking about this season of the show. You know, this thing that initially felt mysterious, it turns out was human the whole time.
[02:44]
Andrea Valdez
Oh, that's so interesting. And I think that the really human thing about all of these fortune telling devices is that they provide answers. And as humans, we really, really crave answers. And I think that that's also maybe why the web, I mean, really, the Internet at large, it felt so magical for so long because it's this gigantic answer providing machine. So it starts to make sense to me that we've collectively imparted a certain sort of deified state to the Internet because it's this seemingly omniscient oracle.
[03:19]
Megan Garber
Ah, yes. But then also because the web is made by humans, it's also limited in its vision. Right, which is a pretty big flaw, oracle wise. And the fact that the web can seem omniscient, just like you said, I think can make it even more jarring when, you know, the glitches show up, as they inevitably will. And when we think about the reality of the Internet, when we consider it in light of how to know what's real, that hope for omniscience, I think, is also really instructive because many of us do invest tech with a certain spirituality. But I'm really interested in why we do that and especially what the consequences might be. So I spoke with Hannah Reichel, who is an associate professor of Reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Professor Reichl has a particular interest in what they call theologies of the digital, which means basically that they take one of the core interests of theological thought, you know, questions about how humans interact with a higher power and apply that to digital technologies like social media and AI. Professor Reichl thinks really expansively, but also with remarkable nuance about tech as a form of faith. And their insights are clarifying, I think, for anyone who is grappling with technologies that are made by humans, but that can feel at times just beyond our grasp.
[04:57]
Hannah Reichel
If the 20th century was the century of power, we might say the 21st century is the century of knowledge. People often talk about data as the new oil, the new gold. This whole question of technology and the kind of superhuman power it affords and how that intersects with human freedom and agency seems super interesting to me and actually is something that theologians have been thinking about for a long time, right? Centuries, probably going back to Boethius in the 6th century, to think about, like, if there is someone who knows everything about you, what does that do to human freedom? How can we still think about the openness of the future? Is everything predetermined or not? And theologians have, of course, thought about these questions in relation to God. And here we have a long tradition of thinking through these questions that might also serve as a resource to think through some of the versions in which these questions appear in a technological age.
[05:53]
Megan Garber
And what are some of those versions? In particular, what are some of the connections you're seeing right now between religion.
[06:00]
Hannah Reichel
And tech just in public Discourses about technology. How often metaphors of God get invoked, right, like the all seeing eye in the sky, the divine puppet master, the idea of eternity and infinity and transcendence, all these ideas that are traditionally associated with God. God as the original creator. Everywhere that we see technology as a creation, people suddenly reflect on what it is like to be a creator. So we're kind of putting ourself in the position of God as technological makers. And on the other hand, we're experiencing ourselves as, to some extent, also under the power of technology. And to me, one of the very interesting also early AI applications that I saw was one that was literally called God in a Box. It was a GPT 3.5 powered thing that you could subscribe to on WhatsApp. And it was, you know, for a mere $9 a month. And people used it as an oracle. You could ask it anything. And that was so fascinating to me as like, you know, both it's the God in a box. So I kind of have this power and now I can consult it at any time. It can give me advice. There's something, you know, very interesting about that. But also I control it, right? It is in a box and I can put it in my pocket. But also this tendency that people would ask questions to these AI bots that they might not feel comfortable asking a friend or a pastor or a counselor, which is really interesting. So there's an almost therapeutic and spiritual function of like, me and my secret, really secret questions that might be too embarrassing. And this, by the way, goes much further back earlier, like the earliest versions of AI, you know, when people started coming up with Turing tests to see if is this other thing a person or not, if you put two bots in conversation with one another, they would start insulting one another and they would start asking religious questions like, interestingly, these were the two things they did to mimic human behavior. But so kind of, I think, right, the idea of God here both often functions as signaling either a utopian promise or this dystopian horror which turns out to be partially hinges on the question who we perceive to be in control. Are we in control of the technological? Are the technologies in control of us? Or who, you know, steers them mysteriously in the background, which corporations, which political interests and so forth.
[08:37]
Megan Garber
You're reminding me actually of that great line from Arthur C. Clarke. Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, which captures so much, I think, not only about Czech itself, but also about the human power dynamics you're talking about, because magic is Something that almost by definition we can't control, right? It's just there. And so we don't question it. And I think that's part of why magic is invoked so often, almost as a sales pitch, really, with AI, you know, with branding that treats the tech not just as a new consumer experience, but also as a new existential fact. You know, it's the idea that this is just the reality now, you know, So I guess to question the magic, how should we be talking about AI? Is it a force, an agent? How do you think about AI in linguistic terms?
[09:32]
Hannah Reichel
That's a very good question. I think one of the key theological terms that applies would be that of a creature, a created being. And one of the interesting things in a theological imaginary, we think of God as the ultimate creator and creatorship as a divine quality. And we think of ourselves as creatures, as being in our being, dependent on that creator having been generated by that creator, but also kind of continuing to have our being from that source. But then as human beings, we're in this unique position that we're kind of created co creators. The Christian tradition uses the language of the imago DEI of kind of seeing our own capacity to create as reflecting something of that divine creativity. But so there's now an iteration of an iteration where we see ourselves capable of creating beings that now also have the capacity to create things. And so that becomes kind of an uncanny chain, right?
[10:35]
Megan Garber
And there are so many different, I guess, links in that chain, right? Because, you know, with AI, we are very directly creating other beings in our own images and trying to make these pieces of tech that very self consciously resemble us as humans. But we're also doing something similar in a less direct way. I think on social media there's a kind of aptness, I guess, to the fact that we talk about content creators and the creator economy. We talk so explicitly about creation there. Except with our videos and selfies and posts. We're not creating other beings, we're just recreating ourselves.
[11:15]
Hannah Reichel
The desire to make oneself transparent and to share everything and to be seen to be recognized by the big and small others. Maybe in a religious terminology we could also say, right, to achieve some sort of permanence, to write one's name into the book of life. If I see the sunset and have this meal, did it even happen? If it isn't written into some sort of record and shared with others. So there's also almost like a frantic work on fashioning and curating a self and a Persona out of these bits of our self. Presentation.
[11:55]
Megan Garber
You know, there's so much anxiety right now about social media and the kind of. The cruelty really on social media and the fact that forgiveness seems to be such a hard ethic for people to embrace right now. And I just. I wonder what you think about that. Does that ring true to you?
[12:13]
Hannah Reichel
Yeah, I mean, there have been so partially.
[12:15]
St. John's College
Right.
[12:16]
Hannah Reichel
If there's an urge to preserve one's memory or to have things recorded, there's obviously also the terror that comes from things then also being preserved and not being able to change them anymore. This pertains to our relationship to time. Of course, things are kind of set into this record. And other people can see what we did last summer or the thing that we said in an unwise moment to someone very quickly. And there have been even legal processes now in the European Union to say we need to achieve a right to be forgotten, not just a right to be remembered. Because it seems that even our humanity or our ability to have a future that is in some ways different from the past that we have already lived and produced needs to be safeguarded. And that's also, to me, a very interesting iteration on this idea of divine judgment, where memory kind of reproduces who you are and that maybe a kind of cut of who we have been yesterday or three years ago is sometimes a means of grace, of being able to become a different person.
[13:28]
Andrea Valdez
I'm so glad Professor Reichl brought up the right to be forgotten laws. You know, they've been introduced in a few countries. They're probably most famously enforced in the European Union. And they aim to do, as they say, if a person has some information about themselves on the Web, that they want to be taken down, they can request that that information be taken down. And there are lots of caveats about what exactly you can request to be deleted. And in fact, some people in the US have wanted these laws. But, you know, the big argument here against them has to do with the tension between our First Amendment law and some privacy laws. But ultimately, the reason right to be forgotten laws are so interesting to me is they're trying to codify into law this ancient and sort of religious notion of mercy.
[14:17]
Megan Garber
Oh, that's such a good point. And especially because mercy isn't just a religious concept. Right. It's also a more broadly cultural one. And the fact that it's both religious and cultural, I think, forces us to clarify things for ourselves. In the sense of religions have concepts like confession and reconciliation and atonement. They have rituals and rites that, if you do believe in them, basically offer you a kind of clarity when it comes to mercy in those ideas, it is God who gives you mercy, and this is how you can seek it and the right to be forgotten. For all of its legal and ethical and like you said, pragmatic complications, I think is an effort to bring some of that clarity to a secular context and to the web. It's trying to answer this very broad and quasi religious question of, you know, when the web remembers everything, how can we create mechanisms on it that will encourage us to forget? Which is also to say to sort of give each other and give ourselves grace.
[15:34]
Andrea Valdez
Yes. And in many religions, the dual force to mercy is justice.
[15:41]
Megan Garber
Yes.
[15:41]
Andrea Valdez
And the Internet and technology more broadly, it has certainly been a tool that's allowed for more justice with various social movements and you can capture injustices on camera. But I think the difference is in a pre Internet era, human laws, cultural constructs, they used to allow people to seek justice and receive mercy. And then we could collectively, for the most part, move forward. I mean, we were imperfect at moving forward, to be sure, but in a digital world now that we live in, in which the mantra is everything on the Internet's forever, we don't seem to get those same resolutions.
[16:22]
Megan Garber
Yeah, the web in so many different ways really does bring kind of, you know, the end of endings. Structurally, it's this constant collision between permanence and impermanence, you know, because in one way, it's made of all these seemingly endless feeds and loops and streams and infinite scrolls. And that can, I think, make a lot of the sense that we share about each other and learn about each other seem extremely temporary and almost disposable. Right. You know, you see it and then it disappears. But then, just like you said, the Internet is forever. The Internet never forgets. And I do think that helps to explain why, like Professor Reichl said, the feelings the web invokes in us can align so naturally with spiritual ideas because the Internet gives us a form of immortality, or at least it seems to.
[17:26]
St. John's College
St. John's College is for students who seek meaning in their lives, who ask hard questions of themselves and their world, and who dare to free their minds. In vigorous discussion based classes, students grapple with fundamental ideas by engaging with works by some of the world's greatest writers and thinkers, from Homer, Plato, Seneca and Euclid to Nietzsche, Einstein, Wolff and Baldwin. St. John's program of study includes over 200 great books from across 3,000 years of history, including philosophy, literature, politics, math, science and music. At St. John's faculty are known as tutors. And not professors. This is because they will never profess to know anything. Rather than telling you what to think, they will help you ask great questions. Questions like, how can human flourishing be maximized? What kinds of leaders do we want and need? Can personal peace exist when social chaos reigns? At St. John's you will learn to listen deeply and across perspectives, to speak and reason with precision, and to honor the value that each student brings to the conversation. St. John's graduates, who are systems thinkers in a world of specialists, go on to become writers, judges, diplomats, lawyers, school leaders, ethicists, linguists, scientists, researchers, and more. Explore 3,000 years of human thought in just four years or two for graduate students on St. John's two campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. Learn about our robust financial aid and our academic programs at sjc. Edu. That's sjc. Edu.
[19:11]
Megan Garber
Professor Reichel, we've been talking about the web as an idea in large part, and now I want to ask you about the web as a physical place and a physical thing. It's easy to talk about the web as something endless, and it feels endless in so many ways, but it's also a very finite thing, right?
[19:30]
Hannah Reichel
The technological resources, we should not forget that they're also limited, right? A lot of these metaphors that we have of the cloud, they seem like these are disembodied, almost spiritual, transcendent structures, but they rely on very concrete material resources. Rare earths, server plants, metals, energy. There are hard stops to the expansion of that economy. It's probably already got to be pretty unsustainable in our lifetime, just in terms of the energy and the resources that it needs, let alone questions like climate effects and social and political inequalities and instability that it produces. So maybe this promise of, like, eradication of uncertainty and overcoming of finitude turns out to be more of an illusion at the end of the day, even.
[20:17]
Megan Garber
Though the cloud in reality is a series of hulking server farms scattered across the landscape, we experience the data it holds as almost metaphysical. And humans every day live out a version of that disconnect. You know, we want to be more than our bodies, whatever the more might mean for us. But we have to do that wanting, while knowing that our physical lives are also, in their own way, limited resources.
[20:45]
Hannah Reichel
Religion is fundamentally about grappling with contingency, right? With the fact that we have limited control and that we have limited lives, and that religion is kind of what provides mechanisms and practices and frameworks to not overcome that, but to come to terms with that. So we could think more generally about religion as having to do with this attunement to our affinitude that is temporal and in so many other ways also expressed. What, of course, is interesting is how technology itself, not just its creators, but the technologies itself, become an instrument of faith, or even an object of faith. Right. Tech will make us better. We'll achieve perfection. We'll overcome all these things. That kind of like tech, will save us from all the things as a religion in and of itself, that I think many of these founding figures actually believe in, which I think goes back.
[21:43]
Megan Garber
To the problem of definitions in a way. Right. Because when we're told that tech will offer us a form of salvation, it's not always clear what precisely we're being saved from, or really, for that matter, what the tech in question actually is. And that's partly because, sure, the tech itself is evolving so quickly and so chaotically, but I wonder whether it's also because we haven't fully articulated what we want the tech to be doing for us and where its limits should be.
[22:13]
Hannah Reichel
You know, regardless of the questions of actual interiority and consciousness and so forth, which I do think might probably not be so close as we think, but we actually build meaningful relationships with artificial beings.
[22:26]
Megan Garber
Right?
[22:26]
Hannah Reichel
Right, right. You know, I don't know whether we will ever be able to upload our minds into the cloud and live forever. Probably not, but we can, you know, train a machine to talk to us like the deceased loved one if we just have enough of their letters and recordings, and they will look and sound and talk like them, and we will feel like we relate to that being. And there's all these debates about what AI can do better than humans and what it can not. In many ways, it's maybe alien intelligence more than artificial intelligence. So we need to artificially make the appearance that this is artificial when it's actually, you know, programmed and fed and trained by human beings who have to make distinctions in data sets and so forth. So sometimes, and we know this also, right, There's a lot of reproduction of the same kinds of things that we see in human knowledge that comes out of AI, and it's sometimes even amplified. So all the biases and the original data set in our assumptions and expectations get reflected back to us.
[23:31]
Megan Garber
And then there's the question of what happens when those reflections keep going and when the biases keep scaling and really, at what point we meaningfully lose control over them. So many religious traditions have considered that question of overstep, basically, in the context of Humans relationship with the divine. And I wonder whether they might have insight when it comes to the relationships humans are building with our machines. How can we check this power that we've unleashed?
[24:01]
Hannah Reichel
I mean, I think you see this actually as a trope in many religions. So you have the story of Daedalus and Icarus, who harness the power of technology and fly too close to the sun and get burned. You have the idea of Prometheus who invents fire, right? You have the story of Pandora's box. Very ancient ideas that there's an unleashing of a power that is a created power that spirals out of control. And I think so many of our contemporary debates around technology ask this question, right? Like, should we try and have that power? It's a question that we asked around atomic power. It's a question that we ask. And I think it has something to do with this law of we always overestimate the short term effects and underestimate the long term effects. We are actually not capable of really estimating. Well, the actual consequences that some changes in technology will have. We just see that there are these landslide moments. And when that happens, it's difficult to put the genie back in the box. In the Jewish tradition, you have the legend of Rabi Loew who creates the Golem, right? And you have Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster. You have Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's legend of the magician's apprentice who bewitches the brooms and they start cleaning for him. And then there's just, you know, he can't control them anymore. They're good creative powers, but they can kind of spiral into ungodly forms, which has less to do with like, violating concrete moral codes or religious codes, and more with this understanding of like, leaving this position of what it means to be a creature that then does not result in punishment from God, but the thing itself creates its own punishment, right? Like the genie that runs out of control. The atomic power, the bomb, like the thing that we created enslaves us.
[26:10]
Andrea Valdez
What Professor Reichl just said, that's the big fear, right? That we create something to solve a problem or just to create something cool. And its consequence is more sweeping than we imagined. For me, one of the technologies I'm convinced will have wider ramifications than we're aware of is this idea of resurrection. Like, Megan, do you remember that hologram of Tupac performing at Coachella?
[26:35]
Megan Garber
Yes. Oh, wow. Yes, I do.
[26:37]
Andrea Valdez
Yeah. Yeah. So. So this happened in 2012, and since then we've had a few other Performing holograms of performers who have died, for example, Selena. And I just have to say, these things really creep me out.
[26:52]
Megan Garber
Yeah, yeah.
[26:54]
Andrea Valdez
As you were talking about with Professor Reichl, these tools where you can recreate a person who died using images, videos, recordings of them, they just feel very ethically dubious.
[27:06]
Megan Garber
I mean, even though you said that. Recreate a person. Oh, my goodness. And in one way, those are really rarefied ideas. Right? I mean, very few people will be converted into holograms, But I think they're also questions that we'll all need to grapple with in one way or another. And especially so with the rise of AI and the chatbots that Professor Reichel mentioned, which claim to allow their customers to, quote, unquote, chat with their departed loved ones. But then chatbots, like humans, can be error prone, you know, especially in their earlier iterations. And there have been stories recently about those types of bots that seem to have a problem with glitchiness. And one woman who was chatting, again, quote, unquote, with her deceased former boyfriend was told by him that he was in hell.
[28:00]
Andrea Valdez
Oh, my gosh.
[28:01]
Megan Garber
How awful.
[28:02]
Andrea Valdez
Well, you know, I'm just very intrigued by this idea of who gets to define or own a legacy or the memory of a person. Yeah, when you're thinking about someone's memory, it feels pretty harmless to theorize about what a person might say or think or do, you know, like if they were alive today, you know, that sort of thing. In the case of these, say, holograms, you know, they're attempting to push your fantasy onto a literal, projected reality.
[28:32]
Megan Garber
Yeah.
[28:33]
Andrea Valdez
So, I mean, it's one thing to daydream, and it's quite another to make those daydreams a manifested reality.
[28:40]
Megan Garber
And questions about how we treat the dead, I think, are often really questions about how we should be treating the living. And I think that's part of the fantasy idea that you're talking about. It's really easy to imagine a world where people's legacies become subject to so many of the things that we've been talking about throughout this season of the show, you know, to misinformation, to confusion, to this kind of uncertainty about where the person ends and the tech begins. Because I think, as with those other questions, a lot will come down to our ability to clarify the risks we're facing, and maybe even more importantly, to clarify the kind of world we want to live in before those risks become our reality. Professor Reichl, this season of how to has taken on a question that might seem philosophical at first, but I think is also becoming, in very practical ways, ever more urgent. How can we know what's real? How can we build a reliable sense of the world? And so far, we've looked at ways that new technologies are blurring the lines between fact and fiction in our relationships, in our informational systems, in our entertainment, really, in our daily lives. And I want to end by asking you how that question of what's real relates to spirituality, whatever form it might take for us. And if we're looking for meaning in the chaos, how can we know what's real?
[30:17]
Hannah Reichel
Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, and what is reality? Is also one of the oldest questions of humanity, right? What is real and what is illusion? And how do we even know that we don't exist in a matrix or in a cave? And it's just ideas, right?
[30:31]
Megan Garber
I just assume we're in a matrix all the time.
[30:33]
Hannah Reichel
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, one important question would be, like, what difference does it make? I mean, you know. But there's a tendency sometimes, right, to talk about the virtual as. Or there's different meanings of the term virtual. Sometimes we say virtual as in not quite real, right. Like, I was so close. I was virtually there. Or as make belief, right? It's not quite that, or it's just pretend. Sometimes we talk about virtual as like indistinction from material. And I think that's how sometimes this distinction now gets used when you ask, like, is this real? Because it seems disembodied. But so maybe in that sense, we need new techniques to better connect the materialities and the virtualities. Right? The hardware and the software and to kind of make visible how and where they connect. Because things are actually not disembodied. They're just often more spatially extended in their embodiment.
[31:34]
Megan Garber
Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah.
[31:37]
Hannah Reichel
Yeah. And in many ways, right, the virtual experiences, even what we think of as, like, their disembodied forms, are very real, right? They're actual experiences. They're actual relationships that I have formed on social media with people who. Actual professional collaborations and real friendships have emerged with people that I have never met and never touched. I would say real is what has an impact, what makes a difference in our lives. And reality, in that sense, can have different dimensions, Right. It can be more physical, material, spiritual, intellectual. And typically, all these things at some point will connect again in the way that they make a difference.
[32:23]
Megan Garber
Mm, I love that. And it occurs to me, too, that, you know, even though we've been talking primarily about religion as a way to connect to a higher power. Religion is also about people connecting to each other, right? It's community. It's faith in whatever form turned into something collective. And I wonder if that's part of the lesson here too. You know, community itself and the relationships that we build with each other, our reality, in this very direct and tangible and reliable way, they're the things we can trust even when so much else can feel unsteady. You know, images can be faked, information can be wrong, but other people, in this very basic way, they're there. They're real. I'm thinking back to our first episode when we Talked about Marshall McLuhan's ideas about media as extensions of man. And one thing I've been thinking about this season is whether extensions of man, as radical as that idea was in its time, actually might not go far enough. You know, because in philosophical ways, but also in really bluntly practical ones, I think it is becoming harder to know where we end and the web begins. And that isn't necessarily a problem. It's simply the reality. For millennia now, people have tried to make distinctions between the phys and the spiritual and between the sacred and the profane and the body and the soul. And now we're trying to understand the connection between our bodies and our data.
[34:03]
Andrea Valdez
I really like that. And Professor Reichl said, and it's worth repeating, that what is real is one of the biggest questions of all. And where we fit into things, that's what spawned 100 religions, a thousand works of art, I mean, in at least one podcast.
[34:24]
Megan Garber
But it's so true. That drive, I think, is such a powerful part of just who we are as humans, as a species. And because of that, it can be tempting to treat the world as its own kind of Magic 8 ball, basically, you know, to keep asking the same questions, and, you know, even if all we get is a, you know, reply hazy or an ask again later, we keep going. And, you know, I think in a way that that insistent curiosity and that drive to keep asking and wondering and trying to figure out our place in the world, it is so core to us. And it's one way that we try to make peace with what's probably one of the hardest parts of being human, really, which is, you know, we're finite beings who want so deeply to know what infinity feels like. And I think that desire helps to explain why it can feel natural to approach the web, this machine, in spiritual terms. It answers our questions, it responds to our desires, and it gives us a Chance to be, in a way, immortal.
[35:31]
Andrea Valdez
Mm. Well, you know, since this is our last episode, Megan, it has me thinking about endings. And, you know, to what you were just saying. One of the biggest trends in Silicon Valley right now has been this obsession with living forever. You know, the very famous technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, he famously talked about uploading our consciousness to the cloud. So even if that doesn't happen, it's this limitlessness, this idea of forever. That's what's so appealing. Yeah, and I mean, I get it, but there are so many sayings that suggest it's completely unattainable. You know, nothing lasts forever. All good things must come to an end. Even the idea of the Internet is forever. I mean, that's not quite right.
[36:18]
Megan Garber
Hmm.
[36:18]
Andrea Valdez
There's a move to legislate forgetting we'll run out of literal server space. The world and its resources, they're simply not infinite. Maybe something is real not because it's tangible or material necessarily, but because it will end.
[36:40]
Megan Garber
That's all for this episode of how to Know what's Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudia Nabaid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact checked by Enna Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smirciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of Audio is Claudina Baid, and the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.
[37:08]
Andrea Valdez
Thanks for listening to this season of how to. If you like what you heard, share this season with a friend, post a link on social media or leave a review.
[37:18]
Megan Garber
How to we'll be back with you before too long.
[37:34]
St. John's College
St. John's College is for students who seek meaning in their lives, who ask hard questions of themselves and their world, and who dare to free their minds. In vigorous discussion based classes, students grapple with fundamental ideas by engaging with works by some of the world's greatest writers and thinkers, from Homer, Plato, Seneca and Euclid to Nietzsche, Einstein, Wolff and Baldwin. St. John's program of study includes over 200 great books from across 3,000 years of history, including philosophy, literature, politics, math, science and music. At St. John's faculty are known as tutors and not professors. This is because they will never profess to know anything. Rather than telling you what to think, they will help you ask great questions. Questions like, how can human flourishing be maximized? What kinds of leaders do we want and need? Can personal peace exist when social chaos reigns? At St. John's you will learn to listen deeply and across perspectives, to speak and reason with precision, and to honor the value that each student brings to the conversation. St. John's graduates, who are systems thinkers in a world of specialists, go on to become writers, judges, diplomats, lawyers, school leaders, ethicists, linguists, scientists, researchers, and more. Explore 3,000 years of human thought in just four years or two for graduate students on St. John's two campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. Learn about our robust financial aid and our academic programs at sjc. Edu. That's sjc, Eduardo.

Summary6 min read

Podcast Title: How to Age Up
Host/Author: The Atlantic
Episode: How to Know What's Real: How to be Immortal Online
Release Date: June 17, 2024

Introduction

In the thought-provoking episode titled "How to Know What's Real: How to be Immortal Online," hosts Andrea Valdez and Megan Garber delve into the intricate relationship between modern technology and our evolving cultural narratives surrounding reality and immortality. The discussion is further enriched by insights from Hannah Reichel, an associate professor of Reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, who specializes in theologies of the digital. This episode navigates through metaphors like Ouija boards to complex concepts such as the "right to be forgotten," exploring how our digital age mirrors and diverges from traditional spiritual and religious frameworks.

Technology as a Modern Oracle: Ouija Boards and the Internet

Andrea Valdez initiates the conversation by drawing an intriguing parallel between the Ouija board and the internet:

"[01:01] Andrea Valdez: So the Ouija board was a very controversial toy in my house growing up... I figured if they could create a board game like Monopoly, that the Ouija board must not be that dangerous."

This analogy serves as a foundation for understanding the web's perceived omniscience. Megan Garber adds depth by explaining the psychological underpinnings:

"[02:43] Megan Garber: [...] Ouija boards work through something called the ideometer effect... Which is actually a nice metaphor, I think, for the web and really for so much of what we've been talking about this season of the show."

They explore how both the Ouija board and the internet function as tools that provide answers, satisfying the human craving for knowledge and certainty. This comparison illustrates the human tendency to attribute almost mystical qualities to technologies that are, in reality, deeply rooted in human design and limitation.

Theologies of the Digital: Faith and Technology

Introducing Hannah Reichel, the discussion shifts to the intersection of theology and technology. Megan Garber outlines Reichel's expertise:

"[03:18] Megan Garber: [...] Professor Reichl has a particular interest in what they call theologies of the digital... questions about how humans interact with a higher power and apply that to digital technologies like social media and AI."

Reichel articulates a profound connection between technological advancements and theological concepts:

"[04:56] Hannah Reichel: If the 20th century was the century of power, we might say the 21st century is the century of knowledge... This intersects with human freedom and agency."

She points out that just as religious thought has historically grappled with concepts of omniscience and free will, modern theology now extends these inquiries to encompass digital technologies. This perspective frames technology not merely as tools but as entities that evoke spiritual and ethical considerations traditionally reserved for discussions about the divine.

The Dual Forces of Mercy and Justice in Technology

The conversation progresses to explore the balance between mercy and justice within the digital realm. Reichel introduces the concept of "right to be forgotten" laws as a secular embodiment of mercy:

"[14:16] Megan Garber: [...] effort to bring some of that clarity to a secular context and to the web. It's trying to answer this very broad and quasi religious question of, you know, when the web remembers everything, how can we create mechanisms on it that will encourage us to forget."

Andrea Valdez builds on this by linking it to religious notions:

"[15:33] Andrea Valdez: [...] trying to codify into law this ancient and sort of religious notion of mercy."

The hosts and Reichel discuss how these laws attempt to reconcile the internet's permanence with the human need for forgiveness and the ability to move forward from past mistakes. This dialogue underscores the tension between enduring digital records and the impermanent nature of human life and relationships.

The Finite Reality of the Infinite Web

Addressing the misconception of the internet's boundless nature, Reichel emphasizes the physical constraints that underpin digital infrastructures:

"[19:30] Hannah Reichel: The technological resources, we should not forget that they're also limited, right? [...] rare earths, server plants, metals, energy."

Megan Garber reflects on this by contrasting the metaphorical perception of the web with its tangible limitations:

"[20:16] Megan Garber: Though the cloud in reality is a series of hulking server farms scattered across the landscape, we experience the data it holds as almost metaphysical."

This segment illuminates the paradox of the internet as both an expansive, seemingly magical entity and a system anchored in finite, resource-dependent infrastructure. It challenges listeners to reconsider the sustainability and ethical implications of our digital dependencies.

Resurrection and Legacy in the Digital Age

The ethical dimensions of digital legacy and resurrection are scrutinized as Andrea Valdez introduces examples of holographic recreations:

"[26:09] Andrea Valdez: [...] technologies I'm convinced will have wider ramifications than we're aware of is this idea of resurrection. Like, Megan, do you remember that hologram of Tupac performing at Coachella?"

The hosts discuss the unsettling aspects of digitally resurrecting deceased individuals, questioning the morality and long-term effects of such technologies:

"[27:06] Megan Garber: [...] a chatbot [...] can be error prone [...] one woman [...] was told by him that he was in hell."

This discussion highlights the ethical dilemmas surrounding digital immortality, including issues of consent, accuracy, and the potential emotional harm to individuals interacting with artificially resurrected personas.

Defining Reality and Spirituality in the Web Era

Exploring the philosophical aspects, Reichel challenges listeners to reconsider the essence of reality in a digitally mediated world:

"[31:34] Hannah Reichel: [...] real experiences. They're actual relationships that I have formed on social media [...] real is what has an impact, what makes a difference in our lives."

Megan Garber connects this to community and faith, suggesting that genuine human connections transcend digital facades:

"[32:22] Megan Garber: [...] community itself and the relationships that we build with each other, our reality, in this very direct and tangible and reliable way, they're the things we can trust even when so much else can feel unsteady."

The episode underscores the importance of tangible human interactions amid the pervasive influence of digital technologies, advocating for a balanced understanding of what constitutes reality and meaningful connections.

Conclusion: Navigating Reality and Immortality Online

In the concluding sections, the hosts and Reichel reflect on the quest for meaning and permanence in an ever-evolving digital landscape:

"[35:30] Andrea Valdez: [...] marching towards the idea of forever. That's what's so appealing. [...] the Internet is forever. I mean, that's not quite right."

They ponder the limitations of technological immortality and emphasize the inevitability of endings, both in human life and digital existence:

"[36:18] Andrea Valdez: [...] something is real not because it's tangible or material necessarily, but because it will end."

The episode closes by contemplating the balance between embracing technological advancements and acknowledging their inherent limitations, encouraging listeners to seek authenticity and connection in a world where the lines between the physical and digital continue to blur.

Notable Quotes

Andrea Valdez [01:01]: "If they could create a board game like Monopoly, that the Ouija board must not be that dangerous."
Megan Garber [02:43]: "Ouija boards work through something called the ideometer effect... Which is actually a nice metaphor for the web."
Hannah Reichel [04:56]: "If the 20th century was the century of power, we might say the 21st century is the century of knowledge."
Hannah Reichel [14:16]: "They're trying to codify into law this ancient and sort of religious notion of mercy."
Hannah Reichel [19:30]: "The technological resources... are also limited, right? Rare earths, server plants, metals, energy."
Hannah Reichel [31:34]: "Real is what has an impact, what makes a difference in our lives."
Andrea Valdez [36:18]: "Maybe something is real not because it's tangible or material necessarily, but because it will end."

Closing Thoughts

"How to Know What's Real: How to be Immortal Online" offers a comprehensive exploration of how digital technologies reshape our understanding of reality, legacy, and spirituality. By intertwining theological perspectives with technological discourse, the episode invites listeners to critically evaluate the role of the internet and AI in their lives, urging a mindful approach to the pursuit of knowledge and immortality in the digital age.

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Transcript67 lines

[00:02]
St. John's College
Saint John's College is the nation's great books. College students explore 3,000 years of human thought in just four years or two. For graduate students, encounter history's most influential works where students engage in group discussions about the fundamental questions underlying human society. Learn more about St. John's undergraduate and graduate programs in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Annapolis, Maryland, including online options at sjc.edu.
[00:31]
Hannah Reichel
We'Re so done with new Year, new you. This year it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Geminis because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want and you know what? We love that for you, someone else will too be more you this year and find them on Bumblebee.
[01:02]
Andrea Valdez
So the Ouija board was a very controversial toy in my house growing up. I think my mother was just very much against having one because of its associations with magic and the occult. But I was able to finally convince her to buy me one because I pointed out to her that it was manufactured by Parker Brothers. And I figured if they could create a board game like Monopoly, that the Ouija board must not be that dangerous.
[01:31]
Megan Garber
I mean, that is a winning argument if I ever heard one.
[01:34]
Andrea Valdez
Yeah.
[01:35]
Megan Garber
Yes.
[01:39]
Andrea Valdez
I'm Andrea Valdez. I'm an editor at the Atlantic.
[01:42]
Megan Garber
And I'm Megan Garber, a writer at the Atlantic.
[01:45]
Andrea Valdez
And this is how to know what's real.
[01:51]
Megan Garber
Andra. When I played with Ouija boards, which was exclusively at slumber parties and exclusively to ask this mysterious portal to another world about people we had crushes on, I remember feeling really entranced by it, but also a little creeped out by it. And I think I still might feel that way just a little bit, even though I know now the science behind it. You know, Ouija boards work through something called the ideometer effect, where thoughts in the players minds, in a way that's pretty unconscious to the players themselves, end up guiding their movements across the board. Which is actually a nice metaphor, I think, for the web and really for so much of what we've been talking about this season of the show. You know, this thing that initially felt mysterious, it turns out was human the whole time.
[02:44]
Andrea Valdez
Oh, that's so interesting. And I think that the really human thing about all of these fortune telling devices is that they provide answers. And as humans, we really, really crave answers. And I think that that's also maybe why the web, I mean, really, the Internet at large, it felt so magical for so long because it's this gigantic answer providing machine. So it starts to make sense to me that we've collectively imparted a certain sort of deified state to the Internet because it's this seemingly omniscient oracle.
[03:19]
Megan Garber
Ah, yes. But then also because the web is made by humans, it's also limited in its vision. Right, which is a pretty big flaw, oracle wise. And the fact that the web can seem omniscient, just like you said, I think can make it even more jarring when, you know, the glitches show up, as they inevitably will. And when we think about the reality of the Internet, when we consider it in light of how to know what's real, that hope for omniscience, I think, is also really instructive because many of us do invest tech with a certain spirituality. But I'm really interested in why we do that and especially what the consequences might be. So I spoke with Hannah Reichel, who is an associate professor of Reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Professor Reichl has a particular interest in what they call theologies of the digital, which means basically that they take one of the core interests of theological thought, you know, questions about how humans interact with a higher power and apply that to digital technologies like social media and AI. Professor Reichl thinks really expansively, but also with remarkable nuance about tech as a form of faith. And their insights are clarifying, I think, for anyone who is grappling with technologies that are made by humans, but that can feel at times just beyond our grasp.
[04:57]
Hannah Reichel
If the 20th century was the century of power, we might say the 21st century is the century of knowledge. People often talk about data as the new oil, the new gold. This whole question of technology and the kind of superhuman power it affords and how that intersects with human freedom and agency seems super interesting to me and actually is something that theologians have been thinking about for a long time, right? Centuries, probably going back to Boethius in the 6th century, to think about, like, if there is someone who knows everything about you, what does that do to human freedom? How can we still think about the openness of the future? Is everything predetermined or not? And theologians have, of course, thought about these questions in relation to God. And here we have a long tradition of thinking through these questions that might also serve as a resource to think through some of the versions in which these questions appear in a technological age.
[05:53]
Megan Garber
And what are some of those versions? In particular, what are some of the connections you're seeing right now between religion.
[06:00]
Hannah Reichel
And tech just in public Discourses about technology. How often metaphors of God get invoked, right, like the all seeing eye in the sky, the divine puppet master, the idea of eternity and infinity and transcendence, all these ideas that are traditionally associated with God. God as the original creator. Everywhere that we see technology as a creation, people suddenly reflect on what it is like to be a creator. So we're kind of putting ourself in the position of God as technological makers. And on the other hand, we're experiencing ourselves as, to some extent, also under the power of technology. And to me, one of the very interesting also early AI applications that I saw was one that was literally called God in a Box. It was a GPT 3.5 powered thing that you could subscribe to on WhatsApp. And it was, you know, for a mere $9 a month. And people used it as an oracle. You could ask it anything. And that was so fascinating to me as like, you know, both it's the God in a box. So I kind of have this power and now I can consult it at any time. It can give me advice. There's something, you know, very interesting about that. But also I control it, right? It is in a box and I can put it in my pocket. But also this tendency that people would ask questions to these AI bots that they might not feel comfortable asking a friend or a pastor or a counselor, which is really interesting. So there's an almost therapeutic and spiritual function of like, me and my secret, really secret questions that might be too embarrassing. And this, by the way, goes much further back earlier, like the earliest versions of AI, you know, when people started coming up with Turing tests to see if is this other thing a person or not, if you put two bots in conversation with one another, they would start insulting one another and they would start asking religious questions like, interestingly, these were the two things they did to mimic human behavior. But so kind of, I think, right, the idea of God here both often functions as signaling either a utopian promise or this dystopian horror which turns out to be partially hinges on the question who we perceive to be in control. Are we in control of the technological? Are the technologies in control of us? Or who, you know, steers them mysteriously in the background, which corporations, which political interests and so forth.
[08:37]
Megan Garber
You're reminding me actually of that great line from Arthur C. Clarke. Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, which captures so much, I think, not only about Czech itself, but also about the human power dynamics you're talking about, because magic is Something that almost by definition we can't control, right? It's just there. And so we don't question it. And I think that's part of why magic is invoked so often, almost as a sales pitch, really, with AI, you know, with branding that treats the tech not just as a new consumer experience, but also as a new existential fact. You know, it's the idea that this is just the reality now, you know, So I guess to question the magic, how should we be talking about AI? Is it a force, an agent? How do you think about AI in linguistic terms?
[09:32]
Hannah Reichel
That's a very good question. I think one of the key theological terms that applies would be that of a creature, a created being. And one of the interesting things in a theological imaginary, we think of God as the ultimate creator and creatorship as a divine quality. And we think of ourselves as creatures, as being in our being, dependent on that creator having been generated by that creator, but also kind of continuing to have our being from that source. But then as human beings, we're in this unique position that we're kind of created co creators. The Christian tradition uses the language of the imago DEI of kind of seeing our own capacity to create as reflecting something of that divine creativity. But so there's now an iteration of an iteration where we see ourselves capable of creating beings that now also have the capacity to create things. And so that becomes kind of an uncanny chain, right?
[10:35]
Megan Garber
And there are so many different, I guess, links in that chain, right? Because, you know, with AI, we are very directly creating other beings in our own images and trying to make these pieces of tech that very self consciously resemble us as humans. But we're also doing something similar in a less direct way. I think on social media there's a kind of aptness, I guess, to the fact that we talk about content creators and the creator economy. We talk so explicitly about creation there. Except with our videos and selfies and posts. We're not creating other beings, we're just recreating ourselves.
[11:15]
Hannah Reichel
The desire to make oneself transparent and to share everything and to be seen to be recognized by the big and small others. Maybe in a religious terminology we could also say, right, to achieve some sort of permanence, to write one's name into the book of life. If I see the sunset and have this meal, did it even happen? If it isn't written into some sort of record and shared with others. So there's also almost like a frantic work on fashioning and curating a self and a Persona out of these bits of our self. Presentation.
[11:55]
Megan Garber
You know, there's so much anxiety right now about social media and the kind of. The cruelty really on social media and the fact that forgiveness seems to be such a hard ethic for people to embrace right now. And I just. I wonder what you think about that. Does that ring true to you?
[12:13]
Hannah Reichel
Yeah, I mean, there have been so partially.
[12:15]
St. John's College
Right.
[12:16]
Hannah Reichel
If there's an urge to preserve one's memory or to have things recorded, there's obviously also the terror that comes from things then also being preserved and not being able to change them anymore. This pertains to our relationship to time. Of course, things are kind of set into this record. And other people can see what we did last summer or the thing that we said in an unwise moment to someone very quickly. And there have been even legal processes now in the European Union to say we need to achieve a right to be forgotten, not just a right to be remembered. Because it seems that even our humanity or our ability to have a future that is in some ways different from the past that we have already lived and produced needs to be safeguarded. And that's also, to me, a very interesting iteration on this idea of divine judgment, where memory kind of reproduces who you are and that maybe a kind of cut of who we have been yesterday or three years ago is sometimes a means of grace, of being able to become a different person.
[13:28]
Andrea Valdez
I'm so glad Professor Reichl brought up the right to be forgotten laws. You know, they've been introduced in a few countries. They're probably most famously enforced in the European Union. And they aim to do, as they say, if a person has some information about themselves on the Web, that they want to be taken down, they can request that that information be taken down. And there are lots of caveats about what exactly you can request to be deleted. And in fact, some people in the US have wanted these laws. But, you know, the big argument here against them has to do with the tension between our First Amendment law and some privacy laws. But ultimately, the reason right to be forgotten laws are so interesting to me is they're trying to codify into law this ancient and sort of religious notion of mercy.
[14:17]
Megan Garber
Oh, that's such a good point. And especially because mercy isn't just a religious concept. Right. It's also a more broadly cultural one. And the fact that it's both religious and cultural, I think, forces us to clarify things for ourselves. In the sense of religions have concepts like confession and reconciliation and atonement. They have rituals and rites that, if you do believe in them, basically offer you a kind of clarity when it comes to mercy in those ideas, it is God who gives you mercy, and this is how you can seek it and the right to be forgotten. For all of its legal and ethical and like you said, pragmatic complications, I think is an effort to bring some of that clarity to a secular context and to the web. It's trying to answer this very broad and quasi religious question of, you know, when the web remembers everything, how can we create mechanisms on it that will encourage us to forget? Which is also to say to sort of give each other and give ourselves grace.
[15:34]
Andrea Valdez
Yes. And in many religions, the dual force to mercy is justice.
[15:41]
Megan Garber
Yes.
[15:41]
Andrea Valdez
And the Internet and technology more broadly, it has certainly been a tool that's allowed for more justice with various social movements and you can capture injustices on camera. But I think the difference is in a pre Internet era, human laws, cultural constructs, they used to allow people to seek justice and receive mercy. And then we could collectively, for the most part, move forward. I mean, we were imperfect at moving forward, to be sure, but in a digital world now that we live in, in which the mantra is everything on the Internet's forever, we don't seem to get those same resolutions.
[16:22]
Megan Garber
Yeah, the web in so many different ways really does bring kind of, you know, the end of endings. Structurally, it's this constant collision between permanence and impermanence, you know, because in one way, it's made of all these seemingly endless feeds and loops and streams and infinite scrolls. And that can, I think, make a lot of the sense that we share about each other and learn about each other seem extremely temporary and almost disposable. Right. You know, you see it and then it disappears. But then, just like you said, the Internet is forever. The Internet never forgets. And I do think that helps to explain why, like Professor Reichl said, the feelings the web invokes in us can align so naturally with spiritual ideas because the Internet gives us a form of immortality, or at least it seems to.
[17:26]
St. John's College
St. John's College is for students who seek meaning in their lives, who ask hard questions of themselves and their world, and who dare to free their minds. In vigorous discussion based classes, students grapple with fundamental ideas by engaging with works by some of the world's greatest writers and thinkers, from Homer, Plato, Seneca and Euclid to Nietzsche, Einstein, Wolff and Baldwin. St. John's program of study includes over 200 great books from across 3,000 years of history, including philosophy, literature, politics, math, science and music. At St. John's faculty are known as tutors. And not professors. This is because they will never profess to know anything. Rather than telling you what to think, they will help you ask great questions. Questions like, how can human flourishing be maximized? What kinds of leaders do we want and need? Can personal peace exist when social chaos reigns? At St. John's you will learn to listen deeply and across perspectives, to speak and reason with precision, and to honor the value that each student brings to the conversation. St. John's graduates, who are systems thinkers in a world of specialists, go on to become writers, judges, diplomats, lawyers, school leaders, ethicists, linguists, scientists, researchers, and more. Explore 3,000 years of human thought in just four years or two for graduate students on St. John's two campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland. Learn about our robust financial aid and our academic programs at sjc. Edu. That's sjc. Edu.
[19:11]
Megan Garber
Professor Reichel, we've been talking about the web as an idea in large part, and now I want to ask you about the web as a physical place and a physical thing. It's easy to talk about the web as something endless, and it feels endless in so many ways, but it's also a very finite thing, right?
[19:30]
Hannah Reichel
The technological resources, we should not forget that they're also limited, right? A lot of these metaphors that we have of the cloud, they seem like these are disembodied, almost spiritual, transcendent structures, but they rely on very concrete material resources. Rare earths, server plants, metals, energy. There are hard stops to the expansion of that economy. It's probably already got to be pretty unsustainable in our lifetime, just in terms of the energy and the resources that it needs, let alone questions like climate effects and social and political inequalities and instability that it produces. So maybe this promise of, like, eradication of uncertainty and overcoming of finitude turns out to be more of an illusion at the end of the day, even.
[20:17]
Megan Garber
Though the cloud in reality is a series of hulking server farms scattered across the landscape, we experience the data it holds as almost metaphysical. And humans every day live out a version of that disconnect. You know, we want to be more than our bodies, whatever the more might mean for us. But we have to do that wanting, while knowing that our physical lives are also, in their own way, limited resources.
[20:45]
Hannah Reichel
Religion is fundamentally about grappling with contingency, right? With the fact that we have limited control and that we have limited lives, and that religion is kind of what provides mechanisms and practices and frameworks to not overcome that, but to come to terms with that. So we could think more generally about religion as having to do with this attunement to our affinitude that is temporal and in so many other ways also expressed. What, of course, is interesting is how technology itself, not just its creators, but the technologies itself, become an instrument of faith, or even an object of faith. Right. Tech will make us better. We'll achieve perfection. We'll overcome all these things. That kind of like tech, will save us from all the things as a religion in and of itself, that I think many of these founding figures actually believe in, which I think goes back.
[21:43]
Megan Garber
To the problem of definitions in a way. Right. Because when we're told that tech will offer us a form of salvation, it's not always clear what precisely we're being saved from, or really, for that matter, what the tech in question actually is. And that's partly because, sure, the tech itself is evolving so quickly and so chaotically, but I wonder whether it's also because we haven't fully articulated what we want the tech to be doing for us and where its limits should be.
[22:13]
Hannah Reichel
You know, regardless of the questions of actual interiority and consciousness and so forth, which I do think might probably not be so close as we think, but we actually build meaningful relationships with artificial beings.
[22:26]
Megan Garber
Right?
[22:26]
Hannah Reichel
Right, right. You know, I don't know whether we will ever be able to upload our minds into the cloud and live forever. Probably not, but we can, you know, train a machine to talk to us like the deceased loved one if we just have enough of their letters and recordings, and they will look and sound and talk like them, and we will feel like we relate to that being. And there's all these debates about what AI can do better than humans and what it can not. In many ways, it's maybe alien intelligence more than artificial intelligence. So we need to artificially make the appearance that this is artificial when it's actually, you know, programmed and fed and trained by human beings who have to make distinctions in data sets and so forth. So sometimes, and we know this also, right, There's a lot of reproduction of the same kinds of things that we see in human knowledge that comes out of AI, and it's sometimes even amplified. So all the biases and the original data set in our assumptions and expectations get reflected back to us.
[23:31]
Megan Garber
And then there's the question of what happens when those reflections keep going and when the biases keep scaling and really, at what point we meaningfully lose control over them. So many religious traditions have considered that question of overstep, basically, in the context of Humans relationship with the divine. And I wonder whether they might have insight when it comes to the relationships humans are building with our machines. How can we check this power that we've unleashed?
[24:01]
Hannah Reichel
I mean, I think you see this actually as a trope in many religions. So you have the story of Daedalus and Icarus, who harness the power of technology and fly too close to the sun and get burned. You have the idea of Prometheus who invents fire, right? You have the story of Pandora's box. Very ancient ideas that there's an unleashing of a power that is a created power that spirals out of control. And I think so many of our contemporary debates around technology ask this question, right? Like, should we try and have that power? It's a question that we asked around atomic power. It's a question that we ask. And I think it has something to do with this law of we always overestimate the short term effects and underestimate the long term effects. We are actually not capable of really estimating. Well, the actual consequences that some changes in technology will have. We just see that there are these landslide moments. And when that happens, it's difficult to put the genie back in the box. In the Jewish tradition, you have the legend of Rabi Loew who creates the Golem, right? And you have Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster. You have Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's legend of the magician's apprentice who bewitches the brooms and they start cleaning for him. And then there's just, you know, he can't control them anymore. They're good creative powers, but they can kind of spiral into ungodly forms, which has less to do with like, violating concrete moral codes or religious codes, and more with this understanding of like, leaving this position of what it means to be a creature that then does not result in punishment from God, but the thing itself creates its own punishment, right? Like the genie that runs out of control. The atomic power, the bomb, like the thing that we created enslaves us.
[26:10]
Andrea Valdez
What Professor Reichl just said, that's the big fear, right? That we create something to solve a problem or just to create something cool. And its consequence is more sweeping than we imagined. For me, one of the technologies I'm convinced will have wider ramifications than we're aware of is this idea of resurrection. Like, Megan, do you remember that hologram of Tupac performing at Coachella?
[26:35]
Megan Garber
Yes. Oh, wow. Yes, I do.
[26:37]
Andrea Valdez
Yeah. Yeah. So. So this happened in 2012, and since then we've had a few other Performing holograms of performers who have died, for example, Selena. And I just have to say, these things really creep me out.
[26:52]
Megan Garber
Yeah, yeah.
[26:54]
Andrea Valdez
As you were talking about with Professor Reichl, these tools where you can recreate a person who died using images, videos, recordings of them, they just feel very ethically dubious.
[27:06]
Megan Garber
I mean, even though you said that. Recreate a person. Oh, my goodness. And in one way, those are really rarefied ideas. Right? I mean, very few people will be converted into holograms, But I think they're also questions that we'll all need to grapple with in one way or another. And especially so with the rise of AI and the chatbots that Professor Reichel mentioned, which claim to allow their customers to, quote, unquote, chat with their departed loved ones. But then chatbots, like humans, can be error prone, you know, especially in their earlier iterations. And there have been stories recently about those types of bots that seem to have a problem with glitchiness. And one woman who was chatting, again, quote, unquote, with her deceased former boyfriend was told by him that he was in hell.
[28:00]
Andrea Valdez
Oh, my gosh.
[28:01]
Megan Garber
How awful.
[28:02]
Andrea Valdez
Well, you know, I'm just very intrigued by this idea of who gets to define or own a legacy or the memory of a person. Yeah, when you're thinking about someone's memory, it feels pretty harmless to theorize about what a person might say or think or do, you know, like if they were alive today, you know, that sort of thing. In the case of these, say, holograms, you know, they're attempting to push your fantasy onto a literal, projected reality.
[28:32]
Megan Garber
Yeah.
[28:33]
Andrea Valdez
So, I mean, it's one thing to daydream, and it's quite another to make those daydreams a manifested reality.
[28:40]
Megan Garber
And questions about how we treat the dead, I think, are often really questions about how we should be treating the living. And I think that's part of the fantasy idea that you're talking about. It's really easy to imagine a world where people's legacies become subject to so many of the things that we've been talking about throughout this season of the show, you know, to misinformation, to confusion, to this kind of uncertainty about where the person ends and the tech begins. Because I think, as with those other questions, a lot will come down to our ability to clarify the risks we're facing, and maybe even more importantly, to clarify the kind of world we want to live in before those risks become our reality. Professor Reichl, this season of how to has taken on a question that might seem philosophical at first, but I think is also becoming, in very practical ways, ever more urgent. How can we know what's real? How can we build a reliable sense of the world? And so far, we've looked at ways that new technologies are blurring the lines between fact and fiction in our relationships, in our informational systems, in our entertainment, really, in our daily lives. And I want to end by asking you how that question of what's real relates to spirituality, whatever form it might take for us. And if we're looking for meaning in the chaos, how can we know what's real?
[30:17]
Hannah Reichel
Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, and what is reality? Is also one of the oldest questions of humanity, right? What is real and what is illusion? And how do we even know that we don't exist in a matrix or in a cave? And it's just ideas, right?
[30:31]
Megan Garber
I just assume we're in a matrix all the time.
[30:33]
Hannah Reichel
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, one important question would be, like, what difference does it make? I mean, you know. But there's a tendency sometimes, right, to talk about the virtual as. Or there's different meanings of the term virtual. Sometimes we say virtual as in not quite real, right. Like, I was so close. I was virtually there. Or as make belief, right? It's not quite that, or it's just pretend. Sometimes we talk about virtual as like indistinction from material. And I think that's how sometimes this distinction now gets used when you ask, like, is this real? Because it seems disembodied. But so maybe in that sense, we need new techniques to better connect the materialities and the virtualities. Right? The hardware and the software and to kind of make visible how and where they connect. Because things are actually not disembodied. They're just often more spatially extended in their embodiment.
[31:34]
Megan Garber
Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah.
[31:37]
Hannah Reichel
Yeah. And in many ways, right, the virtual experiences, even what we think of as, like, their disembodied forms, are very real, right? They're actual experiences. They're actual relationships that I have formed on social media with people who. Actual professional collaborations and real friendships have emerged with people that I have never met and never touched. I would say real is what has an impact, what makes a difference in our lives. And reality, in that sense, can have different dimensions, Right. It can be more physical, material, spiritual, intellectual. And typically, all these things at some point will connect again in the way that they make a difference.
[32:23]
Megan Garber
Mm, I love that. And it occurs to me, too, that, you know, even though we've been talking primarily about religion as a way to connect to a higher power. Religion is also about people connecting to each other, right? It's community. It's faith in whatever form turned into something collective. And I wonder if that's part of the lesson here too. You know, community itself and the relationships that we build with each other, our reality, in this very direct and tangible and reliable way, they're the things we can trust even when so much else can feel unsteady. You know, images can be faked, information can be wrong, but other people, in this very basic way, they're there. They're real. I'm thinking back to our first episode when we Talked about Marshall McLuhan's ideas about media as extensions of man. And one thing I've been thinking about this season is whether extensions of man, as radical as that idea was in its time, actually might not go far enough. You know, because in philosophical ways, but also in really bluntly practical ones, I think it is becoming harder to know where we end and the web begins. And that isn't necessarily a problem. It's simply the reality. For millennia now, people have tried to make distinctions between the phys and the spiritual and between the sacred and the profane and the body and the soul. And now we're trying to understand the connection between our bodies and our data.
[34:03]
Andrea Valdez
I really like that. And Professor Reichl said, and it's worth repeating, that what is real is one of the biggest questions of all. And where we fit into things, that's what spawned 100 religions, a thousand works of art, I mean, in at least one podcast.
[34:24]
Megan Garber
But it's so true. That drive, I think, is such a powerful part of just who we are as humans, as a species. And because of that, it can be tempting to treat the world as its own kind of Magic 8 ball, basically, you know, to keep asking the same questions, and, you know, even if all we get is a, you know, reply hazy or an ask again later, we keep going. And, you know, I think in a way that that insistent curiosity and that drive to keep asking and wondering and trying to figure out our place in the world, it is so core to us. And it's one way that we try to make peace with what's probably one of the hardest parts of being human, really, which is, you know, we're finite beings who want so deeply to know what infinity feels like. And I think that desire helps to explain why it can feel natural to approach the web, this machine, in spiritual terms. It answers our questions, it responds to our desires, and it gives us a Chance to be, in a way, immortal.
[35:31]
Andrea Valdez
Mm. Well, you know, since this is our last episode, Megan, it has me thinking about endings. And, you know, to what you were just saying. One of the biggest trends in Silicon Valley right now has been this obsession with living forever. You know, the very famous technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, he famously talked about uploading our consciousness to the cloud. So even if that doesn't happen, it's this limitlessness, this idea of forever. That's what's so appealing. Yeah, and I mean, I get it, but there are so many sayings that suggest it's completely unattainable. You know, nothing lasts forever. All good things must come to an end. Even the idea of the Internet is forever. I mean, that's not quite right.
[36:18]
Megan Garber
Hmm.
[36:18]
Andrea Valdez
There's a move to legislate forgetting we'll run out of literal server space. The world and its resources, they're simply not infinite. Maybe something is real not because it's tangible or material necessarily, but because it will end.
[36:40]
Megan Garber
That's all for this episode of how to Know what's Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudia Nabaid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact checked by Enna Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smirciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of Audio is Claudina Baid, and the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.
[37:08]
Andrea Valdez
Thanks for listening to this season of how to. If you like what you heard, share this season with a friend, post a link on social media or leave a review.
[37:18]
Megan Garber
How to we'll be back with you before too long.
[37:34]
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