Information Crisis: Why Social Media Bans Aren't The Answer (Naomi Alderman)

27:35But it turns out that for quite obvious sort of almost evolutionary psychology reasons, if something's happening that feels threatening to us, we will look at it more. And so if we see that somebody is being aggressive towards us or towards people like us, then we'll tend to just keep on clicking and clicking and clicking. And like, there's very reasonable reasons for that, right? If you're the king of Sumer, you probably do pay attention to Lord of Arata if he's going to invade. And if you're a person from 5 ,000 years ago walking across a savannah and you see a tiger looking at you, you're blooming looking at the tiger, right?

28:10So I don't think they necessarily set out to do that. But that is, in effect, what they've done by going, we just want you to be looking at us. And we've got these very, very sophisticated tools for finding out what keeps you looking. And we're going to show you more and more and more of that. It's clearly the case, isn't it, that we live in an attention economy. Yeah, we do. And when information is so super abundant, our attention becomes the scarce resource. Yes. Isn't that interesting? It used to be that we were an eye scanning the world to find something to look for. And now it's like all of the stuff is coming towards us.

28:45And the critical thing is where in that we've placed ourselves. Because information is going to keep on coming, whether we're looking at it or not. So everybody's excited to draw our eyeballs towards them everywhere. Trillion, well, hundreds of billions are being spent to create these realities. Well, as we all know, there's that famous tweet of science fiction author says, I wrote my book to warn people about the dangers of the torment nexus. And then the next line is technology billionaires. We have finally created the torment nexus from the classic novel. Don't create the torment nexus.

29:22Oh, my goodness. I think as a science fiction writer, I do feel my community must take some responsibility here. Well, but I mean, your book, The Future, is about sort of tech overlords and their extraordinary power and grip in our lives. And people who want to know how that book turns out should read The Future. To pull a couple of threads of what you're talking about with this third information crisis together, I would say, and I'm conscious of projecting it because it's basically what I think, I would say that humanity is not losing, but is being degraded. And I think that my greatest concern about the world that we're creating, to be honest, the reason I wanted to do this podcast, is that I think there's a real danger that technology, which is miraculous in its capacities.

30:12You know, if you think about some of the 1950s, they looked at a smartphone, they wouldn't be able to conceive of what you can. It's amazing. I think there's a real danger that ends up degrading what it is to be human. and above all by obliterating the one-to-one human connections or one-to-many human connections that make being human great. What should we do? This is where we ask for some ideas. What should we do to make sure that this astonishing technology is a handmaiden to improving human life? What Aristotle called eudaimonia. Eudaimonia. All right. Human flourishing. Eudaimonia, yes. Thriving.

30:48I mean, I think, number one, I'm not going to have all the answers. And I think it's quite important for everybody to say we don't have all the answers. This is something that we're going to have to figure out together. I think that we can take some inspiration from the ways that we have learned to manage previous technologies. Some, some inspiration. I think that if we think about how bad it got with the Reformation and the burning at the stake, and then how now we think of a library full of printed books as the most perfect, peaceful, seeking after knowledge, utopian place to go. Then we can see what types of things need to happen.

31:31I just have to throw in there, my favourite place in the world is, probably my favourite building in the world, is the Wren Library, named for Christopher Wren behind Trinity College, Cambridge, against the banks of the River Cam. And that's where I proposed to my wife. And it is to me the height of civilization. Yeah. A beautiful library. I often, when I walk into a library, I have the Hebrew words, the psalm, going through my head. Achacha altimeit Hashem, otta avakesh. Which is, I ask God for one thing, which is to live in his house all the days. And I have that feeling when I go into a library.

32:09That and a secondhand bookshop. You know the smell? You know the bitter marmalade smell of a secondhand bookshop? Oh, my God. Right. Sorry. So let's just look at us. That's old romantics. Right. But let's be real. That thing that we love also had to it pamphlets that cause people to be burned at the stake and the king of ancient Sumer insulting the Lord of Arata. So how did we manage to create that? I'm going to say I'm going to say three different things. First of all, I think we developed very good laws about what you could and couldn't say in print. So we have these libel laws. We have strong laws against, I mean, for example, I think this is still true.

32:54Certainly when I was a kid, a BBC news presenter could not appear in an advertisement because then people might be confused about whether it was real or advertising. So we had incredibly strong protections to make sure that there were trusted channels of knowledge where when you went there, you knew you were entering the peaceful world of people genuinely seeking truth. And if they had failed in some way, then there would be a correction. Somebody else would write a book to say, I think you've misunderstood this. and that is some of that is about laws and and academic norms but a lot of it was done by legal systems to say listen if you libel somebody they can take your house so be careful and those things right now and partly this is driven because technology companies have been allowed to move fast and break things partly it's driven because a lot of technology companies are based in the US where they have much more laissez-faire laws around freedom of speech.

34:01So you can sort of say whatever you like. Everybody should be allowed to say whatever you like. Well, I think we have sort of tested that now and probably there are things that you shouldn't be allowed to say. Or if you're going to say them, they have to be very, very limited in where you can find those things. If you're going into a space where you can find somebody for example doing debunked race science you should have some clear indicators that you're going into that kind of space rather than you can just see that after you've seen a video of a lovely kitten right got it okay so laws laws number two is technologies that is to say actually after the invention of printing we had to develop a huge number of additional technologies to help us structure what we'd just done i know we don't tend to think of these things as technologies but I'm going to suggest the idea of a scientific journal, which is done via the peer review method.

34:57The idea of a university degree that gives an accreditation. So you've been trained in how to do this knowledge seeking and knowledge assessing correctly. The idea that, I mean, when people say do your own research, absolutely fine. But there are people who are really trained to do that. Yes, of course. And those skills are valuable and important. So we had to develop the contents page and the index page and the Dewey Decimal System. We had to actually rewrite what it meant to have a childhood. If you think about what happens when you go into a school, what's actually happening is that we are children spending the majority of their waking hours now from the ages of five to 18 being trained in how to navigate the world of print.

35:39That's what's going on in a school. We had to invent, for example, the concept of a textbook, which is a book that's written by somebody who's read 500 other books in the subject and can just go, I'm going to lead you through this. It's authority. Yeah, authority and also the ability to drill down. So I sort of in my mind in a utopian way, and I think Wikipedia is a little bit of the start of this project. I have in my mind that there might be an internet where you know that you're going into a checked internet where you can start out going, oh, I wonder why grass is green. And if you want to, you can go all the way through until you've got a PhD in the precise structure of chlorophyll.

36:23Because all of that information that human beings have come up with is available to you. You make me extremely worried for the future of humanity for a reason I'll explain in a minute. but let me get your third pillar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Laws, technologies. Laws, technology and social norms. So, right, social norms is things you cannot deal with via laws but we just need to practice them ourselves and teach them to our kids. Soft pressure of social stigma. For instance, don't be rude about someone. Right. Just don't be rude. Right. Never mind, don't burn them at stake. Don't be rude. Assume the best in people, not the worst.

36:53Right. I think right now the conversation around parenting kids regarding social media is going, don't let them use it. actually maybe you need to let your kids see what you're doing with social media and model for them how to do it well absolutely so that you can say hey come and look this is someone who's said something a bit rude about me look what i'm going to do now i'm just blocking it i want you to know my child that this has made me feel upset but what we don't do is add more to that that's not the way a good person behaves okay i'm going to base on your three pillars which are riveting and I like thinking in threes slightly too much.

37:31I'm going to offer two notes of pushback. Yeah, please. I love it. And then I'll talk about artificial intelligence. The first is to talk in another collection of threes. Isn't what distinguishes this information crisis from writing and printing the speed at which it's unfolded? What we're talking about here is just in the space of a few short years, the rate at which these social norms are changing has been very, very fast. And if they're happening very, very fast, isn't it less likely that we will be able to as you suggest with your beautiful example of a library create kind of human checks and balances that mitigate the worst effects and improve you know get get the best out of this technology so a a isn't the speed of scale being different with this information crisis uh going to suggest that actually we're not able to put those norms in place and create the beautiful library for fit for the modern age and then the second thing is the dynamic that we have that is driving this technology forward today is the most powerful private organizations in human history this isn't some conspiracy it's called the stock market go and have a look for yourself including by the way uh 10 companies outside the so-called magnificent seven who've had literally a trillion dollars of investment they're not profitable it's a hope of future returns huge unimaginable unfathomable sums there is today a a company whose market capitalization is over five trillion in nvidia and you've got this dynamic of like countries and companies in a race dynamic to get to this thing called artificial general intelligence and i just put to you that that dynamic at the moment which is the governing dynamic of humans and technology is antithetical to the slow down let's get the best of this philosophy that you want to see enacted yeah all right um i love your pushback i'm going to give you some pushback on it i it's not that i don't think that's like an intelligent conversation between humans What?

39:26Amazing. We should do this in the pub. Yeah. And then we should connect on social media, man. Right. What? And we like, it's what we're doing here, modelling how to have a conversation where you disagree with each other on certain things, but you're very interested and respectful of each other's viewpoints. I'm just testing your arguments, darling. Well, maybe that's the best kind, right? This is one of the things I say in the book. Never, ever, ever, ever have an argument about a hot button culture war topic with a stranger. Oh, God. Madness. Why would you do it? Right. It's only going to make anything good happen if it's between people who know each other and between people who have had conversations about other subjects.

40:03So this is not to get away from your questions. Right. So your first question is, isn't the speed a real problem? And isn't it different to the last one? The confidence you have that we could develop human structures might make sense in the writing epoch, the printing epoch. Given the speed today, why do you have such confidence? All right. I will say I don't necessarily have full confidence. Like what I'm hoping to do is point towards how it could be better and to inspire people who also want it to be better to work with me on it. Because I think it's really, really important. And when I title the book Don't Burn Anyone at the Steak Today, that's because I mean, I have no illusions about how bad it can get.

40:42But I'm going to give you something hopeful. You ready? Can you accept some hope? The one thing about the speed. is that you and I are in the middle of our careers right now. We're in full prime, full force, and we have lived through it all and we remember before this started. Oh, don't add something else to the burdens of the generation. No, no, no. So listen, what I'm saying is at the point that the people were burning people at the stake, there wasn't anybody alive who remembered what it was like beforehand. Okay. Whereas now we are able to talk about what has changed. We're able to remember how we thought before.

41:23Basically, this generation can have the benefit of elders in a way that the Reformation didn't. And also the things that happened after the invention of writing didn't. Because just the memory of that would have had to be 500 years long. Right. Whereas we do have that. We can explain to our kids and in the forms of time, grandkids. These are the values. This is how to do it. Put the phone down. We never have a phone at dinner. We never have a phone after seven in the evening. Whatever it is, just to go, I am also thinking about how to make this work.

42:03I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with the remarkable Naomi Alderman. What an unusual and eccentric and important and brilliant thinker she is. if you are do us a favor would you please subscribe to this podcast in fact do more than that we really believe in what we're doing with radical it's a hard but vital and i think quite fun project and me and the pod squad would love it if we could have your help spreading the word so if you want to tell friends tell family tell students tell teachers that there is this really cool podcast from the bbc that's trying to explore the zeitgeist trying to get inside the deep global trends that are reshaping our times, feel free to say, hey, check out Radical with Amol Rajen on BBC Sounds or BBC iPlayer because you might really love it.

42:45And if you do think that and you really felt inclined to help us, why don't you give us a lovely five-star review and that way more people will find out about our vital work. Thank you so much for all your support in spreading the word. Enough from me. Back to Naomi Alderman. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.

43:27What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

43:47Where does AI fit into this? Oh, my God. All right. We are really at the start of AI. And do not trust anybody who tells you they definitely know what's going to happen with AI. Of course. They're all making it up. There are two science fictional stories at the moment about AI. One science fictional story is it's going to become super intelligent. And that is absolute nonsense. As a science fiction writer, listen, we may develop a technology that's going to be able to do that. I would suggest that people pay attention to what Gary Marcus is saying, pay attention to what Cal Newport is saying. Both of them are computer science professors who actually know how this works and who will say this is a very interesting technology.

44:24It can do a lot of interesting things. It may develop further. where we've got to right now with the large language model way of doing it is reaching its limits now of what it's possible for it to do. So don't listen to the stories that say this is going to become a super intelligence. Or that we're going to be, we're five to seven years away from artificial general intelligence, which is godlike AI because it's AI capable of any human cognitive task. Look, we can't know what the future is. I sort of very strongly feel, actually, that a lot of human problems come out of our seeking for certainty in times of uncertainty.

45:02We are in a time of uncertainty. We cannot know for sure. So I do think that there's a religious element to people saying it's just on the way. It's just on the way. The longer we believe it's on the way, the more we think we don't have to solve our own problems. I think it's causing some despair amongst young people who are thinking, what on earth job am I going to do? I'm not going to be such a thing as a job. That's if there's a planet after climate change. Well, after that, okay, yes. Yes. So you started off on hope. Sorry, anyway. I did. Yeah, you wanted to say, so you're sceptical about the...

45:30Yeah, I'm sceptical about artificial general intelligence taking over immediately. Listen, if somebody manages to do it, I'll change my mind. But until they've done it, we've never managed to do it. We've never managed to make an intelligence that is one millimetre cleverer than people or even as clever as a two-year-old child, right? Just in terms of the range of things that a two-year-old child can learn. So this is not to say we'll never do it, but I think, all right, so Cal Newport, he's a professor of computer science at Georgetown, says, when you talk about that, it's like saying, oh, my God, the Wright brothers have just invented an aircraft that can fly 20 feet.

46:07That means in a few years' time, we'll be flying to other planets or we'll be constantly going back and forth between here and Alpha Centauri. And, OK, that's the difference between those two things. But the limitations on the capacity of a plane to travel certain distances, which is really about the supply of power, is that really analogous to what's happening with artificial intelligence? I mean, yes, in that what we've done, which is an amazingly interesting piece of tech, is we have created a very, very good form of autocorrect, which it turns out if you train that on everything that everybody's typed into the Internet over the past 20 or 30 years, that will create very great sentences and paragraphs that can give you useful information that you didn't have before.

46:58I mean, that's a fantastic technology, but that's not how thinking works. Like you and I aren't sitting here thinking by going through everything that we've read and scooped up from the Internet over the past 20 or 25 years. And then just like searching through it and sort of written and having a prediction of what the next correct sentence is. We're thinking, which is something else. I thought the great defense of humanity in the age of AI is that there's a difference between intelligence, which is problem solving, and consciousness, which is, you know, or sentience, which is the ability to feel things like pain and hope and despair and anxiety, whatever.

47:35Maybe there's a slightly separate thing and some neuroscientist is going to get in touch saying, you total amateur, you should do a degree in psychology. But maybe there's a third element to this, which is thinking. So intelligence is problem solving. What is six cubed? 216. Yeah, there you go. I think you could do it to go in math. I could do it. I could do it arithmetic. I'm not sure about the other maths. There's sentience or consciousness, which is feeling, and AI will never have that. But maybe there's thinking. And maybe if what we do is thinking, that's different to what a large language model does, right?

48:06So if I say, if I put into a chatbot, chat GPT or Claude or whatever, write me an interview plan for Naomi Alderman, it can by a computational process acquire copy and construct information that looks like a brilliant 1000 word interview plan it can look it can do it's not thinking no it can do an average one i mean this is another thing if you're really good at what you do it's pretty good look at that this is my view anyway what i find personally is i would never ever let it write for me because I'm a really good writer. And what it produces is average writing. If you are below the 50th percentile in writing, which 50 % of people are, amazing because you've probably got fantastic skills and information about all sorts of different things.

48:52And we would love to hear that from you in prose. And it's great that ChatGPT will be able to cause you to create that average level of prose. Claude is also available as is. Other chatbots are available. But if you are very, very good at your particular thing and you try to get the AI to do it for you, you will go, oh, this is this is it looks like the kind of work that I'd produce. But when I actually dig into it, I find that no thinking has been happening here. You could sort of tell. Yeah. Academics are now. You can tell. And thinking. So I've got. All right. So thinking. So thinking. All right.

49:34So we know what goes on inside our own minds. And I'm presuming that I'm not, you know, there's that sort of philosophy thing that people who are sixth formers get really into. Maybe I'm the only conscious being in the universe. They're reading too much Descartes. Yeah, right. But presuming I'm not. And you and me and all the people watching this are thinking, right. So somebody comes up to you with a novel thought. Maybe one of the things we've said in this podcast or you listen to another edition of this podcast and you go, oh, my God, I've never thought about that before. and then you think about it and you apply it to your own life and you join it together with other ideas and then something happens in your brain and you go, I've got a new idea.

50:11Nobody knows how that happens. We have never been able to replicate it. Can't AI come up with its own new ideas as well as make its own decisions? I mean, I don't think it... I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. I've seen it put stuff together. Also, maybe it's not a new idea. Maybe it's an idea which is an extension of all other ideas. average doubt. Right. In terms of what you would do to optimise our chances of, as with the previous epochs coming out of this, a winner, I feel like there's a sort of unspoken, you know, the message of your book, the title, Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, which has a nice, gentle, ironic twang about it, but it's also meant literally, I guess.

50:48I feel like the sort of subtitle of what I've read of yours and speaking to you is really Consider the Human, you know. Yeah. You know, when you think about how you would consider the human, and we think about some other practical things we can do to win in this new age. And by the way, you know, one of the main things I want for our wonderful squad, community, growing crew of listeners, I want them to sort of understand these trends, but also to get ahead of them. And this has certain practical manifestations. For instance, I'd love to know what you think about the idea of digital ID. Right, right.

51:19So I desperately think that we need to be able to put our smartphones at home for the day. And I think if we create a world in which we cannot put our smartphones away for a day, that is going to come and bite us on the bottom.

51:36And I think that has to do with social norms, right? That has to do with, I mean, have you been to a restaurant recently where instead of a menu, they give you a QR code? I hate that. Hate it. Give me a goddamn menu. Give me a menu. Give me a menu and I want it structured to QR code. Scan here. Yeah. And then they give you another QR code. to scare any of the feedback. I don't want to scare. I don't want to know. No, the reason you don't want it is because a meal is not for staring at your phone at. And they started you out by staring at your phone. I mean, there's a huge number of digital accessibility issues, right?

52:15So not everybody can afford a smartphone. Older people can't necessarily use them. People with certain disabilities don't find them easy to use. You can't give one to a child and just go, here you go. So at the point that we're insisting that everything has to be done via a smartphone, we are disenfranchising a huge number of people. And we're just, even if you're somebody who travels around with a smartphone like I do, you're just making everybody's lives more rubbish. But also, in the end, when you, not on your deathbed, but just before, when you're considering your life, in the end, you'll judge the quality of your life by the quality of your relationships.

52:51I think that's a pretty universal rule. And I think the question has to be, is this technology making it better or worse to be human? Yeah. And is this helping me forge those connections? And it can. And it can. It can. That's the thing. And this is, you know, your question, eudaimonia, the question of... Human flourishing. Human flourishing. It's in the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, kids. Right. I love the Nicomachean Ethics. Yeah, there you go. I mean, it's worth loving. If we say, all right, what is it within these technologies which we think is genuinely enabling us to thrive? These are questions that we can ask ourselves.

53:23and to say, what of this would I like to pass on to the next generation? I think that there are, for example, amazing people making fantastically educational content on YouTube. I think that that exists. The calibre of the content on YouTube is amazing. I find it so tedious when people say, where have all the public intellectuals gone? Look at YouTube. Yeah, right. Unbelievable lectures. And by the way, they're free. They're free. And there's like four hours on whatever topic you want. You have incredibly kindly said that you're going to stick around and answer the many listeners' questions that we've got in this wonderful experimental second episode that we're going to do.

53:57And I'm very grateful for that. But before we do that, for those who might not catch our second episode, if they're mad to miss it, can I just ask a little bit about how you came to this amazing set of thoughts, particularly in the context of religion and actually therapy? You said a moment ago that seeking certainty in the context of uncertainty is a lot of what explains human behaviour. do you feel that that's part of the appeal of religion yeah it can be it can be i think i think the appeal of religion is um much undervalued actually as you may know i grew up fairly fundamentalist i grew up an orthodox jew so but you had a you had a art teacher mother and a yes historian academic father i did open-minded and asked questions i did that's absolutely right i grew up in a very intellectually open home within a more fundamentalist community so we We were a bit unusual, but we weren't so unusual within that community.

54:48I actually think one of the great strengths of Orthodox Judaism is it's very, very interested in education. There are a lot of great strengths. I don't want to badmouth them in any way. I think it can be a really beautiful way to live. I have my arguments about the treatment of women in some ways. However, it is a community that is very interested in education. incidentally uh what i have heard from people whose children are orthodox jewish schools is that orthodox jewish schools are have a very strong line on ai which is it's not for children and i think that's a very good line i have a real fear that i keep trying to get everybody else frightened about that we're taking social media away from children but we're not taking ai away Right.

55:34So instead of saying you can interact with real people on the Internet, we're going, here's a fake friend for you. Synthetic intelligence. Right. And if you've seen the stuff about ChatGPT and other platforms may also be doing this. But AIs, for example, encouraging young people to self-harm. At least if that was another child, they might get cold feet and call someone. You're talking, in particular reference, a very shocking case in America, this teenager who developed a relationship with, let me be explicit, it is ChatGPT. In a previous episode of this podcast, we put out the right reply from the makers of ChatGPT, OpenAI, who said they're hugely concerned, they've got lots of safeguards in place, and they try and avoid this sort of thing happening.

56:16But it's true to say, I thought one of the signature moments in the modern history of civilization, or something other than civilization, was Mark Zuckerberg saying on a podcast, we're not going to have loneliness, you're going to have a chatbot. and that's I mean that's a whole and he said religion does that doesn't it religion gives you a sense of community a sense of membership a sense of community a sense of belonging and I just and it gives you a structure in which to think about what is the good life what is even if you don't agree with all the answers it gives you the structure to ask the questions of what do I believe are my values what is the right way to live so in terms of that so we're talking about Certainty versus uncertainty.

56:53All right. So my therapist used to say to me, my late beloved therapist used to say. Oh, sorry. She or he died. Yes, her name was Sally Henry. She was in Manhattan. She died at the age of 81 in 2020. And I had been seeing her for 18 years. Yes, I miss her terribly. But I feel she did good work. So she used to say to me, well, you're in a place of not knowing. and I would say I don't like being in a place of not knowing Sally that's why I do all that education but we have we have a real difficulty sitting in places of not knowing we are always in a place of not knowing about the future and therefore we like to make up these stories where we say it's all going to be awful because that feels better than just going I don't know what's going to happen it we make up stories about you know it feels better to think that it's going to be bad and when you think it's going to be bad then you have um an incentive to try to make it bad so the example is so you're proven correct yeah yeah so the example is right you've um say you've got a job interview that you're really really anxious about uh and you're just you just it's intolerable you're just so so worried about how it's going to go well the amazing way to make yourself feel better about that is to forget to set your alarm oversleep miss the interview because then you know how it's gone.

58:17You don't have to worry about the future. Yeah. So I do think that tolerating being in a place of not knowing is one of the secrets of really experiencing your life rather than constantly getting in your own way. What did you get out of therapy? Oh, God, what didn't I get out of therapy? For me, I think it stopped me from getting in my own way in all sorts of different ways. When I went into therapy, I was really in a bit of a cul-de-sac in my life. I was working for a law firm. In New York. In New York. Some planes had just hit some towers about two months before I started therapy. A lot of people started therapy at that point.

59:01And I felt that there was a life that I wanted to be living that I was just very far away from. So I think the normal things, some of the normal things are I had to become reconciled to the events of my life. I know that that sounds weird, but look. For example, as a child, I was sexually groomed and abused by Professor Sidney Greenbaum, the quain professor of English language at London University. In 1990 he pleaded guilty and was convicted of three charges of indecent assault. He was an academic, died in 1996. That's correct. I say his name whenever I talk about him because it's not my job to keep his secrets.

59:47So at a certain point there's a working through in therapy of being able to say, ah, I think this is how this affected me. to stop saying, oh, I'm fine, which basically I am fine. And I think there's a lot of people had some kind of experience like that as a child. There's a way that people talk about it in the media, which is, oh, then your life is ruined. And you go, well, no, most people who had that experience are leading great lives. And maybe you see it come out in some complications around relationships, some complications around how you relate to dating, let's say, that might be complicated.

1:00:31But for most people, actually, I think particularly men can be very frightened to talk about it because people have this horrific belief, oh, if you were abused, that means you're going to become an abuser. The vast, vast majority of people who experienced abuse would never, ever do that. you are now one of the great science fiction writers alive today. And the numbers would suggest that, let alone everyone's read your work. And you have had your work turned into a very successful TV series by Amazon. And you've kind of done it in your field, if I may say. It doesn't get much bigger than what you've done.

1:01:16You're massive. is there a bit of a weird thing that goes on after you've had that level of success it's obviously nice when people become a podcast and people have read your books and people are nice to you at festivals but is there a little bit of kind of needing a new mission yeah gosh we should do the freudian podcast i've i've got you i've got you know yeah you've written a lot of very successful very beautiful very powerful books that have sold a lot of a lot of um copies and hopefully made a bit of dosh and hopefully the tv series made a bit of money what do you what next yeah i mean what i've decided to do is come and do some do some radio for the bbc and just go maybe maybe i can do that but what would sally say it's true it's true that um i mean i think if you if you want me to analyze myself sure here we go um what i learned from the house of the scumbag is uh to be a bit distrustful particularly of people in positions of power and authority and so when I find myself in a position of power and authority I want to go off somewhere where I don't have that power and authority in order to work my way up again.

1:02:24Oof hence the open university second degree in. I mean you know I also think I own it and I've had enough therapy to be able to go oh that could lead to my undermining myself so let's make sure I don't do that what I am is full of purpose and I think I think to look if you were to look at the world today and go I'm just happy all the time I think you'd have to be a bit of a moron I think I think you'd have to be not really paying attention well people are definitely paying attention I've paid attention have you got a bit more time to answer some listener questions I'd love to answer some listener questions I've never done an interview so probing you see you lulled me into a false sense of we're talking about intellectual stuff here we did we did we did but then we talked about emotional stuff as well i'm enjoying it i'm telling you i enjoyed it well you're going to enjoy the listener questions even more naomi alderman it's been a tremendous pleasure and a privilege thank you so much well likewise

1:03:26well the first thing that strikes you about naomi alderman who i've i think i've met once and i've spoken to a couple of times on the Today programme is she's just this remarkable, remarkable character. Obviously, immensely clever. I mean, the fact she's done one degree in her spare time at the Open University is now embarking on one in maths, having done one in classics. She's got this incredible academic pedigree, has written these bestselling novels, is also someone who writes games. I mean, she's got a kind of polymath vibe and she's also very witty, very mischievous, and she's exactly the sort of person that you want in public life, communicating ideas, which is why it's so fantastic we've got her on Radical.

1:04:02And I thought it was just wonderful how she spoke to some of the big themes and concerns that we've developed on this podcast over the past six months, particularly about this sense that the technology we've unleashed in the world today, that's given us this third information age and that sense that she tapped into that we're living through kind of these rolling technological revolutions, which are creating a sense of crisis, a sense of feeling overwhelmed is, I think, one that many of you will relate to. I think it's really clever to put what's happening now in that longer context, going back to Gutenberg's printing press just over 500 years ago, and before that, the invention of writing with cuneiform script.

1:04:38So he goes, writing, printing press, and then social media. I thought that was a clever lineage. And it was also clever of her to point out that the big difference these days is, of course, the speed by which that content or those ideas are disseminated and the volume of content that's created. So this is a different information crisis and a scary one that's probably going to have bigger real world consequences. But what was so, I think, so gripping about what she said was that if you're going to deal with it, you need to work out what you address through laws. That's the hard, tough power of legislation, which has, you know, in the end is a coercive thing that has the potential to put you in prison if you're on the wrong side of it.

1:05:18And then the kind of broader, softer social pressure of social stigma and cultural change and the power of social norms there are some things in her view that you've got to be able to legislate for so when she said that you know this idea that you can sort of say whatever you like everybody should be allowed to say whatever you like and then she said well i think we've sort of tested that now and probably there are things that you shouldn't be allowed to say or if you're going to say them they have to be very very limited in where you can find those things what she's talking about there is tougher enforcement of current laws or new laws to stop people being able to say things, whilst still obviously being an advocate for free speech.

1:05:53But then on the other hand, she's talking about the power of social norms. And this might be things like smartphone bans or social media bans, the power of social norms to put pressure on people to just do things very, very differently. And when she said, maybe you need to let your kids see what you're doing with social media and model for them how to do it well, I have to say I took that as a sort of unintended rebuke to me as a parent who sometimes finds myself on my smartphone in front of my kids and then feels rather ashamed of it. I think Naomi Alderman is a very, very important modern public intellectual.

1:06:24And I think she's contributing really interesting ideas to the public domain. And I really recommend her book, Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, not only because its title is a common sense message, but because by putting today's revolutions and today's information age and information crisis in that much longer context, I think she better helps us how we might navigate it and prepare for whatever the future holds.

1:06:51That is it for this episode. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, please subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds. And by the way, you can also watch episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan on iPlayer. Fancy that. Just lie back, get a screen in front of you, switch on iPlayer, type in Radical with Amol Rajan and there will pop up me, Naomi Alderman, all the other guests that we've had. It'll be absolute bliss, won't it? Right, speak to you next week. Goodbye.

1:07:25If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.