Interview With Steven Kotler

FEATURE INTERVIEW
The future is upon us

Acclaimed author Steven Kotler speaks to Alex Katsomitros about the accelerating
convergence of groundbreaking technologies, the rise of technophobic conspiracy
theories and how Covid-19 will bring the future forward
S
teven Kotler and Peter Diamandis were Kotler is an acclaimed writer who along with serial
promoting their new best-seller in New York entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, the mastermind
the day China hesitantly announced the first behind Singularity University, XPRIZE and other
cases of Covid-19 – the virus that would soon engulf tech ventures, have authored Bold and Abundance,
the rest of the planet. They instantly recognised the two of the most authoritative tomes on how
danger: “A pandemic is an exponential, so we knew technology is transforming our societies. Their latest
exactly what was coming,” Kotler says. After all, brainchild completes this trilogy with the inevitable
their book deals with forces that start with a trickle conclusion that everything their previous books dealt
and, little by little, take over the whole world: “I said with is finally coming to fruition; a wide range of
to Peter that we wrote a book called The Future is technologies, from AI and virtual reality to quantum
Faster Than You Think and we think this is going to computing, are coming together in a smorgasbord of
accelerate. And that is exactly what we are seeing!” innovation that brings the future forward.
24 l www.the-european.eu
Lockdowns would normally condemn a book
brimming with optimism to irrelevance, but not
an example: “When they fully automated their plants,
efficiency went down. They had to put humans back
‘Pretty much
when it explores exponential forces that spread like in the chain to get the real benefits.” every industry
wildfire – just like a pandemic. In one of the most Another lesson corporations need to learn is
revealing chapters, Kotler and Diamandis discuss that staying future-proof is all about constant
will be re-
how technology is revolutionising healthcare by reinvention. Kotler and Diamandis use the example invented within
accelerating drug development and tailoring cures of Sears, which was once the US’s biggest retailer
to individual patients. “The changes in healthcare and went bankrupt in 2018, and the rise of Amazon the next 10 years’
that we thought would take a decade, if not longer, on the back of new (the internet) and old (mail- Steven Kotler, co-author of The
are coming now. The greatest proof of the power order catalogues, ironically pioneered by Sears) Future is Faster Than You Think
of exponential technology is that within three technologies to highlight the importance of adapting
weeks after Covid-19 was announced, there were to fast-paced technological change. One reason
71 vaccines in the pipeline,” Kotler says. “Nothing we tend to ignore disruption, they argue, is that
like that has happened before in history. That’s our brain is hardwired to treat our future selves as
converging exponential [technology] at work.” strangers, and therefore ignore calls for change as
alarmism. That’s not a risk we can afford to take in a
All at once world where Alexa can do your shopping.
What Kotler and Diamandis think will transform
the economy is the almost uncanny combination The great leap forward
of seemingly unrelated technological trends, from With all its optimistic bombast, The Future is Faster
nanotechnology and advances in materials science Than You Think has landed at an unfortunate time.
to 3D printing. “We believe that pretty much every Hasn’t the pandemic exposed a glaring disconnect
industry will be re-invented within the next 10 between the promised land of tech utopias and the
years,” Kotler says. They do not hesitate to tint harsh reality of our inability to defeat a microscopic
their predictions with a shade of sci-fi escapism virus? Isn’t Peter Thiel’s famous (and quoted in
that may seem incongruent in our giddy world, the book) aphorism that “we wanted flying cars,
still reeling from the shock of strict lockdowns. instead we got 140 characters” more pertinent than
“The wait is over... the flying cars are here,” they ever, since we were promised personalised medicine
enthusiastically proclaim in one chapter about and instead we got Netflix binge-watching?
the future of transport. Serial disruptors such as Grudgingly, Kotler concedes that technology has
Uber are taking to the skies, they explain, testing
miniature space-pod airplanes and new business
models that will render flying not less ordinary than
a visit to the supermarket. As they promise readers
in the US: “Sometime in the next decade or so, ‘off
to Europe for lunch’ may become a standard part
of our lexicon.” A slew of mind-blowing numbers
add a flavour of surprising precision: “In 2023 the
average thousand-dollar laptop will have the same
computing power as a human brain (roughly 1016
cycles per second). Twenty-five years after that, the
same average laptop will have the power of all the
human brains currently on Earth.” And if that is
not enough, the authors fuel every technophile’s
dreams with promises of robots delivering pizzas at
our doorstep, a trend the pandemic may accelerate,
according to Kotler.
It is easy to dismiss such wild claims as unabashed
futurism, a criticism often levelled at proponents of ABOUT STEVEN KOTLER
the so-called “Californian ideology”: an idiosyncratic
Steven Kotler is a bestselling author, award-
mix of technological determinism, free-market
winning journalist, and the founder and
mantras and new age spirituality. And yet, Kotler and executive director of the Flow Research
Diamandis are anything but. For example, they have Collective. His work has been nominated
a cautionary tale for business leaders who wish to for two Pulitzer Prizes, and has appeared in
harness AI before it’s too late. “The best combination over a hundred publications, including the
of forces is not just automation, but humans and New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly,
robots working together,” Kotler warns, using the Wired, Forbes.
recent predicaments of carmakers BMW and Tesla as
www.the-european.eu l 25
FEATURE INTERVIEW
exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities and created

new ones between digital glitterati and the rest.
‘Shutdown
However, he believes that the benefits outstrip the showed the
costs: “Exponential technology makes resources that
were once scarce abundant,” he says, pointing to
world that we
smartphones as an example of a gadget offering us can deal with
for free capabilities worth millions just a few decades
ago. We may not all live in mansions, but we are climate change’
nonetheless the richer for it: “Income disparity is
not the measure of standard of living it once was,
because we now get for free through technology so
many things that have massively improved our lives,”
Kotler says. Examples of the democratising force
of technology abound, from DNA scanning to the
use of surgical robots that were once affordable only
to the super-rich and are now standard healthcare
practices.
One idea that often crops up in this debate is
universal basic income. Kotler is a sceptical fan,
not because technological unemployment will
render its adoption inevitable, as many Silicon
Valley entrepreneurs predict, but because it may
be a springboard for more cool stuff. “Small scale
experiments show that, unlike other forms of welfare, Covid-19 made things worse: “The pandemic forced
it encourages innovation, entrepreneurship and the whole world to go inside where you can’t have
increases overall wellbeing and life satisfaction,” social connections. You get starved for dopamine,
he says. However, for those who think that robots which you get by spending a lot of time on social
will take our jobs, or even our lives, Kotler has one media and plugging conspiracy theories.” In an
piece of advice – think again: “The two big boogie era where trust in traditional gatekeepers such as
men over the past few years have been AI and mainstream media and science is diminishing, what
tech unemployment, and both are kind of silly, Kotler calls “the ingredients of panic”, namely fear,
rather than real.” Adjusting to automation is for anxiety and uncertainty, have become existential
him a “worker retraining problem”, as convergent threats. “These are separate things in the brain,
technologies hide many employment opportunities but when [they happen] together it’s almost an
that we don’t see yet, in the same way that we didn’t intolerable situation for most people,” Kotler says.
see the job-creating potential of app development. “You do everything you can to remove one or the
other. With anxiety going up, you want to get rid of
Dopamine junkies uncertainty, and that’s what conspiracy theories do.”
If there is something about technology that irks
Kotler, it’s the impact it has on our brains. As a Brave green world
neuroscience enthusiast with an interest in ways we Nothing causes more collective anxiety than the
can expand our learning capacities, he fears that the biggest challenge facing our planet: climate change.
reason we can’t put down our beloved smartphones In the book, Kotler and Diamond recognise that
is worrying – their use prompts our brain to generate technology has its limits when dealing with such a
generous doses of dopamine, the same chemical complex problem. And yet, there is scope for hope.
behind many forms of drug addiction. “We have He doesn’t pin his hopes on mega-engineering
managed to destroy the attention capabilities of a projects, but on things like vertical farming, meat
generation. We are not [natural] multitaskers, and production based on stem cells and solar energy
we fostered this addictive multitasking technology grids. “The technology is here, the problem is
before we were ready for it,” he warns. deploying it at scale,” Kotler says. “Small changes in
This also partly explains why neo-Luddite initial conditions can produce large outcomes.”
conspiracy theories about 5G technologies are all the Will our reliance on technology lead to
rage. Smartphones and social media have turned us complacency? A natural-born optimist, Kotler
into dopamine junkies, and conspiracy theories feed hates the thought. The world’s recent predicaments
that addiction. “When you have more dopamine prove that we can do better, he says: “The shutdown
in your system, you can see more connections showed the world that we can deal with climate
than others. But if you turn it up too high you see change. It was darkly wonderful in that it taught us
connections where they don’t exist,” Kotler explains. that we can collaborate at the global level.”
26 l www.the-european.eu

Interview With Steven Kotler

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Interview With Steven Kotler

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Interview With Steven Kotler

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

FEATURE INTERVIEW

The future is upon us

exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities and created

You might also like