Kim Stanley Robinson: From science fiction to climate action

tonight's event we have a brilliant hour and a half ahead of us and i'm delighted that we've got some an extraordinary panel an extraordinary speaker you'll be hearing more about those uh in just a minute i want to thank clifford chance for supporting uh the evening and all of you for for coming out i'm sure you'll have an incredible uh conversation ahead of us now and again a book comes along and in my job as a principal of a college you get given a lot of books not all of which you necessarily want but now and now and then a book comes along that turns your world upside down and makes you ask fresh questions about our role as academics our role as a university our role as citizens uh in a good society and this is one of those uh books and i think about six months ago annette mikes came into the office and said you need to read this today and i said you know we've got the treasury committee we've got the domestic committee and she said no no read it now i actually bought it for you and you even you left it on the table and i'm very very glad you uh insisted because this is really a book that will allow us to reframe uh our collective uh approach and maybe tonight this room becomes the ministry of the future this room becomes somewhere where we take these great challenges that kim stanley robinson has set us and try to apply the learning and the expertise the creativity the ingenuity of all of us to these huge challenges that face society so welcome on behalf of everyone at hartford college and i'm going to hand you over to the wonderful annette mikes thank you very much tom and thanks everyone for coming this is a big event for us because um rarely have i been present at any at a conference or seminar where people have been drawn so so many diverse walks of life so the excuse for us convening here is to meet a wonderful writer of fiction who is already on the screen i'm going to introduce him in a few minutes but it's the convening of this panel which makes this extra special to me so let's start with the composition of this panel and you get a sense of just the diverse backgrounds that we are from and behind every panelist here there is another academic who actually suggested this panelist to come here so we have got a it has been really a wonderful interdisciplinary communal effort to put this to draw this expertise together so i've got two hats at oxford university at the business school i'm a professor of accounting that's normally a conversation stopper so very quickly i move on to introduce myself as someone who studies risk management and the management fellow at hartford college and through my studies of risk management i came across with two particularly interesting environments and important areas where risk matters one is space entrepreneurship which is why this event was partly inspired by the oxford institute for space which is represented here by a number of people and also the risk management of one of our grandest challenges climate and through wearing these multiple hats it came together this idea that science fiction some of which is morphing into climate fiction has something to say about how we solve some of our grand challenges so this was the motivating idea and the ideal person to start these kind of conversations with is kim stanley robinson who is known not just as one of our greatest living science fiction writers but also one of the greatest writers of ecological fiction so in order to span the range that stan manages to span in this one volume we decided we actually need to call on various expertises here so with me uh we've got jillian professor jillian rose who is now head of geography the school of geography and environment jillian is a cultural geographer which means that among other things he studies how knowledge is come about by whom and why and with what consequences so the social construction of knowledge and we're going to be asking questions about the social construction of the knowledge is underpinning this wonderful novel on my right we have got roger luckhurst a professor of modern literature whose range goes from the gothic to the macabre i've just learned he also studies zombie novels but but the reason why you are here is not the half dead or the almost dead but your interest in science fiction and science fiction is in alternative mediums not just in conventional tax format then we have got a gordon clark economic geographer so an economist who is interested in right now sustainable investment the world of sustainable investment and trying to understand the behaviors and motivations of those actors very relevant for this book i'm saying that because when i first talked to stan he was saying for him the most exciting knowledge that he had to draw on for this book was economics and in fact it reads like a novel of economic ideas so we draw on a second economist on the panel rebecca henderson here from harvard university visiting the blavatnik school her recent work a recent book on reimagining capitalism has been out for a while you're touring with that book and i think you and stan have a lot in common as you are approaching our grandest ecological challenges and then we have got my professor mike woolridge whom uh i bracket called professor a.i you're studying something i never understood until i read your book the road to conscious machines which turns out to be a misnomer because you don't actually believe we are there at conscious machines but neither does kim stanley robinson and yet ai plays an important part in the future that he's the big thing here so this is just the width um of expertise we are drawing on so about kim stanley robinson i don't think i need to introduce him very much i think many of you in this audience came because you know his work what i would like to focus your attention now is this latest novel the ministry for the future which is very inspirational to us sitting here this is uh the work of somebody who is equally at home in the world of science and able to deploy moral thinking as he's contemplating our grandest challenges in the book he imagines or advocates the cause of the future generations those who are going to suffer because of our current actions and advocate on their behalf and by the end of the book you will see a complete road map to a more sustainable world so on that note i would like to hand over to stan he's going to take the stage for the next 40 45 minute minutes it's up to you stan and then we're gonna have some questions um drawn from the book inspired by you that we discuss together here over to you stan well thank you annette and uh thank you tom it's a real pleasure to talk to you all i wish i could be there in person um but the being here in davis california uh allows me to have this as my morning [Music] encounter may be the most interesting encounter of the day but after talking about saving the world i have to actually talk about saving an oak tree in my village and then also the preschool in the village which is turning into a wicked political fight and i like these shifts of scale which help to uh buttress the the other ends of the scale and indeed i'll talk for about 40 minutes had some very useful conversations with annette and tom leading up to this and i'm going to structure my talk around some prompts from annette that make me feel like she might be a really uh tough but interesting professor um i am to speak about um um and these all come out of my novel i have to admit and i want to also say thank you not just for myself but this meeting is um an acknowledgement of the power of the novel as a form and since the english novel it has such a a great tradition and that i'm well acquainted with i like the idea that the novel is still the place where we can organize discussions about what things mean and that's of course important indeed so um following and that's prompts i'm going to talk briefly about structure of feeling about a new economics about the question does technology drive history and then move on to some conclusions about these things so you know as uh as ralph while though emerson said skate fast over thin ice and i will skate fast so structure of feeling this is a term from raymond williams the great british marxist literary critic and theorist and it's um he points out there that although we have our animal emotions um that are biological in origin they are shaped afterwards by language and by culture and you end up in a structure of feeling that has been uh where your your natural animal emotions which are i think um mammalian and even reptilian in their bases um get put into a a taxonomy that helps you to understand them and control them in a social setting so the structure feeling of our time the time of climate change the time of the 2020s the time of the pandemic and russia's war on ukraine and so on this moment in in history the structure of feeling has to be i think identified with dread that the future is looking like a crash and we are on a trajectory toward a crash so there's this feeling of dread and now immediately to me the question becomes again is this cultural um in which way is it a aspect of capitalist realism that stuck in capitalism as we are this very useful phrase capitalist realism that we can't imagine anything but capitalism capitalism always invests in the highest rate of return it always externalizes um externalities that it can disregard in its um in its quest for a single algorithm which you need to talk about later of profit and shareholder value as the only goal which is wrecking people's lives and wrecking the biosphere in ways that are going to come to the crash so if we can't imagine anything but capitalism and we get stuck in capitalist realism then of course the dread becomes intensified because that turns into a feeling of doom that we are doomed and you see this talked about a lot and indeed when i talk to young people it's a very common emotional setting that of course impinges on everything else in life but the thing is is this an ecological realism to feel like there's no alternative and that we're doomed and here the scientific community can in fact be incredibly scary on this topic we're getting close to breaking certain planetary boundaries that um that if we break them and this has to do mostly with carbon dioxide but also with various biospheric practices if we break these planetary boundaries we are putting ourselves in a trajectory of physical changes geophysical changes in the earth system that heads towards what has been called hot house earth an ice-free planet uh and it's possible that we can lose control such that even if all of human effort was devoted to climb back to a more normal or or let's say more recent uh geophysical set to the planet that we wouldn't be able to so this is high danger indeed the stakes could not be higher they really are existential so um on the one hand in our cultural set we have capitalist realism and and there's a feeling that of dread because we can't imagine alternatives on the other hand there's eco-realism that although we haven't yet broken these planetary boundaries and we still have the power and i mean the physical power in the world to get ourselves into a sustainable balance with the biosphere uh nevertheless we're we're coming very close and maybe the 2020s is one way to mark this that in this decade um we have to begin to make changes so that we don't break some of these planetary boundaries that will put us in a position we can't collab back from no matter if we try or not so um well this is dread indeed um and it's possible i think to freak out if you're in a race an intense a race with high stakes of existential stakes and you might win and you might lose it's not the time to say i give up you actually have to race harder you have to make the effort to win the race and you can give up after you lose but in the meantime in this decade it's not um appropriate to give up particularly since so many people in much less privileged positions than you and i are um doing their damnedest to um cope with the situation that we're in so uh hope then becomes a political position and i want to point out that you can define hope as being something quite biological happening even at the cellular level that when you're hungry you hope for food when a cell is moving around it's hoping for atp etc etc at its largest definition life and hope are almost synonymous and you have to hold to that um when you uh are are losing hope in the in the political system that we're in in our culture to think of it as a political weapon going forward and so this of course it's always appropriate to evoke gramsci who talked about pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will and the will is very important there you will this optimism that gramsci talked about as a as a club to fight with in the political arena so i would recommend a structure of feeling that in some ways is fueled by a certain desperation or dread but also is buoyed and kept focused on on the appropriate work the necessary work by uh um creating hope or willing hope as a as a willed political position so okay um annette in her prompts to me talked about an end to the other panelists talked about um stan dealing with a new economics and i want to immediately deny that with a groan of dismay um if i had a new economics we would all be very worried because a it wouldn't be good but b it would be impractical to apply in the 2020s we are in a certain political economy that is locked in by laws treaties and backed by armies it's the nation-state system international neoliberal capitalism these are the social systems we have to work with they are not well suited to a biosevere emergency but that is irrelevant they are what we have to work with and we have to manipulate them in ways that will make them better at dealing with the um biospheric emergency that we're in so not a new economics but simply [Music] keynesianism okay as an as an old american leftist the idea that i'm appealing to keynes is the most radical possibility of our time is a little dismaying i mean i was going to college in the 1970s so i come to you in a time machine from the deep past and at that time it would have been inconceivable that 50 years on i would been arguing intently for keynesianism because in 1970 that was what we were in but the neoliberal coup or counter revolution 1980 to 2020 of giving over the world's political economy and all human activity to the market was a bad move a simplistic and um harmful move for the most part although everything is a mixed picture and there has been enormous development in those 40 years but also a stupendous rise in inequality amongst humans and damage to the biosphere neither of those mattered in the neoliberal order in ways that are becoming obvious and indeed um scandalous i would say so back to keynes he said when when um the business world is in trouble there needs to be government stimulus that the government runs the economy and not private industries and the government at certain times has to take over now during the great depression that was tried in the united states and it worked sort of and then in world war ii it became a kind of a necessity and we'll come back to world war ii it's an interesting analogy to the current moment um what you can say in the current situation is that a keynesian response to this emergency would be what is now getting called carbon quantitative easing so quantitative easing is simply the creation of more money by the central banks it's fiat money it's not crypto money that needs to be emphasized in case people um misunderstand me by certain mistakes i made in ministry for the future in my vocabulary but at all points in that book i'm talking about central banks so this is fiat money created by government and backed by the whole state in ways that make people trusted and money is a medium of exchange a storage of value and a sign of social trust and it's crucial to remember that last part um we trust each other or else money wouldn't work at all and nobody trusts crypto so crypto coins now fail on all bases especially bitcoin um they don't do any of the things money does so this is a kind of a speculative bubble like tulips back to the central banks in 2008 about somewhere between five and ten trillion dollars were introduced into the economy this is where accounting would help and it's funny that we can can't be more certain about that and then in 2020 with the pandemic again some vast trillions of dollars were created and given out by governments this time a little more intelligently to to people in individuals and small businesses rather than just to the big banks says in 2008 who continued to make the mistakes that had gotten them in trouble in the first place so in other words the quantitative easing of 2008 was a little bit desperate and misguided in terms of just rewarding the banks that had gotten us in trouble in 2020 during the pandemic it was quite a bit more intelligent and democratic and targeted and effective now carbon quantitative easing would be this that again central banks make let's say all of them together for one thing we need we need the all this the biggest central banks to be in on this plan to support something this big creating two or three or four i've heard different figures trillion dollars per year per year that is spent first on on carbon drawdown on green projects let's put it that way anything that helps the biosphere is going to be paid for by new money from the central banks and then it circulates as keynes point out with a kind of multiplier effect into the general economy as just more money can that happen yes that can happen it and so it's interesting and there is a group called the network for greening the financial system it's at this point 90 or more central banks of the world including all of the important ones and they are studying this as a group of central bankers and they've put out a white paper you can find it online have nine suggestions for greening the financial system and truthfully the two of the nine i didn't understand at all the other seven i had to translate into my own english and and they are comprehensible and they do seem to add up to what is perhaps uh some forms of carbon quantitative easing so luckily i take great um comfort in this this idea is being pursued by the people who responsible for it then also the green new deal type plans this is legislation rather than central banks this is moving from monetary policy to fiscal policy legislatures can designate that public funds be spent on one thing or another and that's what the green new deal and the and also the green recovery in the european union you see these efforts being made and it's um quite uh plausible that china in its centralized uh central government is also pushing uh green recovery type spending which they can command from the top um you would compare this kind of spending to perhaps national defense in the defense of your country you also have to defend your biosphere and so as a function of national defense the legislatures would then designate a certain amount of funds for uh green work and that would mean spending it if you spend at the same scale as what national defense spending that we call military spending well already you're there and it could be argued that at this point despite the the necessity for military defense from some nation states making bad decisions and attacking other nations and of course we need to be prepared for that but for the most part the militaries of the world are on standby waiting to do something useful and now there's something useful to do so these are areas and i'm thinking that oxford is a beautiful place to discuss all these things because of the of the intellectual firepower uh the standing and the um intensity of the discourse there that is by necessity interdisciplinary because of it being oxford and so any a tendency to get into the silo of your own discipline which is always a tendency in in academy in academic settings gets a little bit blown up by by the name oxford and by the habits that you've established there as a community now um annette asked this question which i guess the ministry for the future kind of asks does technology drive history it's a it's the name of a good little book and in historiography theories of history it it always came up as a question it's a kind of eternal question but you know as with newspaper headlines with questions in them the answer is no no technology is not drive history and i say this because of the verb the verb is wrong okay technology is deeply intermixed with human history of course we evolved by beginning to use stones and fire we were pre-human when we became technological and in a co-evolution with our technologies we actually turned into human beings and if you regard language as a technology which i think is quite appropriate then a technology blew up our brains by a factor of three in just a couple of million years which in evolutionary terms is indeed like blowing up a balloon in this speed um so of course not only does technology have a close relationship with history but with human beings even in our biological essence but the verb is wrong because all along it was human and pre-human hopes that drove history so you want to be safer you want to not get eaten by another creature you want to defend yourself you want to not be hungry you want to be warm when it's cold um you'd hope to be healthy when you're sick these are all hopes and that drives everything else we end up hoping for things then we invent things then we start coping with the ramifications of the inventions and that feedback loop that dialectical circle that is so intense and fast and complicated is indeed if there's any driver to history then it would be that that the action of human hopes on the world we've been good at cooperating we've been good at in many things um this word innovation is a word out of capitalist realism i would say let's uh be cautious when using any such words as innovation entrepreneur scale um these are these are captured words that that fit within a structure of feeling that is maybe wrong we want more safety for ourselves and our relatives and our fellow humans and that morphs into a desire for more power so okay i would be safer if i had more power this is um somewhat true and then like many truths that can be driven too far into a zone of a more power eventually makes you unsafe because people would like to cut down your power but the drive to safety and is is tightly interbound with a drive to power and there you've got a lot of the story of what is driving human history but also we're always creating new technologies to hope to have more safety and more power which would include the technologies involved with killing other humans which would give you more power and in theory perhaps more safety that can obviously go wrong so okay um i want to move into my own zone here of doing a kind of a science fiction exercise and think about the 2020s i'm now thinking that from what i've seen since ministry for the future was published that there were two competing responses or to the climate emergency to the crash that we're facing to the mass extinction event for the other creatures of the earth the biosphere crash that we are um on the trajectory towards one with i'm going to call green capitalism because we are in the neoliberal capitalist order internationally there's a and there's an awful lot of private capital that so far has been going to the highest rate of return as a very simple algorithm like a replacement for thinking just get the highest rate of return and that by the way brings us to accounting why what's the highest rate of return why should extraction of value destruction of people's lives destruction of the of the biosphere why does that bring highest financial return well the accounting is wrong and this is an interesting place where uh at oxford um a more accurate more humane more uh safer and more powerful and effective accounting system of our of our uh this is a fundamental to an to a revised political economy that gets us through this emergency accounting itself and it and i'm very happy that annette mentioned she also works on risk assessment because that's somewhat of an accounting problem a cost benefit analysis that i i don't want to be too simplistic about this but risk um first you say to yourself when you're assessing risk and then moving to risk management which is somewhat different uh how likely is something to happen and that's a you can try to calculate that very hard and then if it does happen how bad would it be and so sometimes these are differentials you know something's not very likely to happen but if it did happen it would be catastrophically bad and then you have to try to avoid it uh even as long unlikely as it is you still have to spend human time money and effort to avoiding it because the results would be so bad so it's interesting to think about climate change as a risk assessment problem um how likely is it to happen 100 we're already there it's going to happen climate change to one extent or another so okay that part of the equation is simple enough how bad will it be well a mass extinction event in which billions of humans may die so as bad as it could get so it's it's it's almost 100 gonna happen um and it would be catastrophically bad we don't need to do much more risk assessment here we need risk management we need a response so this is what i'm seeing in monks private capital these are intelligent people who are now in control of trillions of dollars the central bank of china has in assets like five trillion dollars just in the bank biggest one on earth usa four trillion um mark carney who was the chancellor of the checker if i recall right gathered together a group at glasgow of asset managers which is to say banks investment banks and various kinds of asset managements to promise that they would invest greenlee only and now he said the assets there were 130 trillion so what i want to emphasize by this point is that there's a lot of private capital out there um and what this translates to is to money that can be paid to humans for humans to do things with their career so that instead of behaving virtuously and sacrificing some part of your economic value in life in order to help to save the biosphere you're getting paid to do it as your job and your career that's what this kind of investment translates to and so green capitalism i'm seeing a movement where asset managers of all kinds are thinking if the biosphere is destroyed then um it's bad for business we can't go on making profits and so therefore just as a function of of uh ordinarily operating capitalist success going forward into the future we have to actually figure out a way to make a green work biosphere restoration etc um profitable because that's been the measurement so far again that might be an accounting problem but the the notion would be that oh well we can make money but think about this we've got to draw down um perhaps 500 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere a gigaton is a billion tons um the the quantities involved are stupendous and it's a fun exercise to work out the volume like what kind of a mass does that represent um 500 billion tons of dry ice well someone do that for me that's a it would be an interesting quantity but the thing is nobody wants that dry ice so the ordinary function of capitalism of supply and demand you get a demand you supply it you make a profit well i can give you 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide nobody wants it but also nobody wants death by disease and so we have a sewage system so in other words we we actually give up a lot we pay a lot individually and as a society to keep our water clean to create sewage systems even though nobody wants sewage it has to be gathered processed and put back into the environment without wrecking things the same is going to be true of co2 so i'm in other words i'm dubious that the ordinary workings of our keynesian political economy which hopefully we're moving back into has enough stimulus from the profit motive to actually do the necessary at this point and so we get back to government government controlling and taking over the economy uh world war ii is an analogy here um england's getting bombed it could be invaded it could be conquered and wiped out as a nation and london is being blown up as well as the rest country and people are dying that sharpens the attention and pulls together the political will of a political community to the point where at that point the government for instance the treasury went to the bank of england and said you are no longer a semi a public private uh entity making decisions of your own you're no longer an instrument of capitalist power that is intruding into government affairs in order to make it better for capitalists we're taking you over because we're in a war and we need your resources and historians can help me on this but i believe that is a description of what happened and it certainly happened in the united states it's a history that i know better the united states even though not being bombed except at pearl harbor was organized into a war society where everything was subjugated to the government down to the details of which materials you used and how much gas you got per week what kind of foods you could eat this is really a quite authoritarian but it was democratically pushed the the populist agreed to it that it was a um the the the politicians advocating this takeover were elected and re-elected by big margins because it was generally agreed this is the right thing to do whether that kind of government um impetus can be gathered adequately to in this situation with climate change being a kind of bombs aren't falling on your head the people are dying elsewhere of heat strokes and storms but on the other hand where you live too is changing rapidly stresses in the system and also um the appearance in the world of millions of people displaced by damage in their place that will then impinge on you all these things are combining such that um we have got in the 2020s i think two competing models and and maybe they're not competing maybe they are going to make a new amalgam because one thing's for sure this is an unprecedented moment in history it is not as if analogies in fact analogies to the past are usually um contain so many inaccuracies to the new situation that they are very limited value uh whatsoever historical analogy but nevertheless we have to learn from history we have to use its examples to guide us now and so we look to these analogies think about the pre the similarities and the differences in the present situation and i'm wondering if we're going to end up with a situation where in the next few to several years there's going to be a growing discrepancy between what we know we have to do to avoid the crash and what we're actually doing in the political economy we live in now and as that discrepancy widens there's going to be more agitation more anger more catastrophe and possibly at that point there will if if we're lucky there will be a reaction amongst the people of the world pushing their political representatives to get it together to cooperate in a worldwide solution that would be indeed government-driven treaty-driven the paris agreement the fossil fuels non-proliferation treaty the paris agreement is the crucial space for for arguing about this now the the paris agreement that uh could fall apart it could become something like the league of nations a good idea that failed under the pressures of history but if it succeeds it will be the space in which we talk about many of these issues and because she's at uh oxford also if i understand it correctly i want to invoke kate roberts donut economics i thought of this at first as a kind of a there's a lot of pop economics out there of a very limited value but sometimes quite illuminating and in this case this image of the donut is silly as it is an inner circle and an outer circle with the human economy circulating inside those two boundaries the outside boundary are the planetary limits that we can't break the inside boundary is human immiseration is justice itself nobody gets to be dropped through into the immiseration so this whole project has a human element to it that justice is indeed uh an ecological policy um it's it's both morally right and utilitarian in that it helps to get us to the creation of the outer boundary as well so these are both boundaries that will be legislated they have to be legislated the market creates neither and in fact the markets breaking both of the boundaries within legislation you could then maybe allow um a post-capitalist uh economy of businesses of private people making their own decisions but within those boundaries and so then the energies would circle around somebody said this is like a you know a cyclotron or a fusion creator an energy trapped between two boundaries circulating maybe it'll go fast maybe it'll be good but these should be legal boundaries hard limits so we don't crash the biosphere and we don't immisrate billions of people so okay uh i'm coming to the end here by thinking um hard about [Music] the what i what i'm loving about the uh the this panel that that will now take over is the breadth of knowledge and expertise brought to these questions i'm really looking forward to what people say um i haven't spent enough time because i've been diligent in in responding to a professor mike's questions but i would say also it's really important to think about land use and we have geographers here we have economists here and so geography is really the study of land's use by humans as i understand it this is why the term psycho psychogeography always cracks me up it's redundant all geography is psychogeography but in what i want to emphasize is that uh healing the biosphere dodging the mass extinction event is a question of how we interact with the land and these 30 by 30 plans that are happening in europe in california and in the u.s and hopefully elsewhere all over the earth these are spectacularly good plans for coping with the oncoming crash and dodging it the notion comes it was articulated by eo wilson in his book half earth and he was talking about we need to stay off of 50 of the earth's surface and maybe even the oceans to allow the rest of our wild cousins to survive and then prosper and at that point we confining ourselves to 50 of the land will also prosper because the rest of the planet and the other creatures in this biosphere are our extended body so it's a matter of self-help to take care of the biosphere um well i thought when i read this book 10 or 15 years ago this is as utopian as it gets a beautiful idea unlikely to happen and as a utopian science fiction writer i recognized it as a fellow work of utopian science fiction in a non-fiction guise that happens a lot but now 10 years later we have these 30 by 30 plans their government policy i've met the woman who runs california's 30 by 30 program she says california is at 24 it's an interesting question to look at great britain and think this is sometimes called rewilding there but uh could you take 30 of the land and give it over to the wild creatures it looks complicated at first but all the young people are moving to the cities villages are emptying out as structured conscious and voluntary emptying out of the countryside to make habitat corridors to make preservation areas um it strikes me that this is crucial work people could get paid for taking care for for not taking care of but um creating a space for creatures like wolf packs and um there were worlds in english and england once i presume there were bears whatever it's not that you don't have to focus on the charismatic mega species you can actually focus on uh biospheric integration biodiversity itself finding the biospheric hot spots protecting them to see the uh rapid uptake of an idea that good and that important it's a sign that the dread is leading to creative positive responses as well as just the freak out and so i take a lot of comfort in that in seeing that in action and i hope that more is done along that line so um not new economics just keynesian stimulus and you need a working political majority to in the representative democracy's democracies to get that to happen really you need a working political majority in every political system to push for that and i think it's possible and then that that new financial model that keynesian stimulus being paid for things like uh proper land use um greening the energy systems the the great transition of shifting off fossil fuels the the weird task of sucking billions of tons of co2 out of the air and putting it back in the ground or even using it for construction materials some small fraction of it these are the way forward and so i just end by saying that i wrote the ministry for the future in 2019 um some of the ideas that i've expressed to you are in that book others i've learned of since that was a darker time 2019 than now it looked like trump might win reelection the pandemic had not yet slapped us in the face with the knowledge that history is happening and we have to react to our biospheric emergency without those two things i wrote sentences like the 2030s were zombie years you know from my future historian well this is is now so far off and this is what happens to science fiction as roger can tell you you write it from the moment you're in your projective future it is really a map of the psychic present that you wrote in so someone like john klutz says he can date any science fiction novel just by reading the text without looking at the copyright date by internal clues and i think he can i think anyone can if they pay enough attention now ministry for the future is off the curve it's a novel from 2019 a darker time and so now i can honestly end with the with the the thought that i have more hope that we will properly cope with climate change and than i did when i wrote ministry for the future three years ago on the earlier side of a huge almost geological divide in history so with that i'm going to stop and turn it back over to annette and your panel with many thanks for to all of you and i hope to do this in person with you someday in the not too very near future but plans these days are extremely hypothetical and we'll just accept what we have today with with thanks thank you [Applause] so thank you stan for the real tour de force i think we're gonna take um a step-by-step approach and we sort of revisit the milestones that you travel through through your talk so shall we start with the structure of feeling of our time there is a wonderful passage or sentence in the book where you actually define it as a world that is unjust and unsustainable and massively entrenched and falling apart before our eyes and that structure of feeling changes by the end of the book which is of course projecting 30 years forward to something much more hopeful to something much more uh where people are a guy or planet guy or citizens and live in a global village i'm turning to jillian because she is the cultural geographer and so are you okay with with the diagnosis of the tide guys and in general you know you're also study knowledge creation the social construction of knowledge is so the diagnosis here of the cultural feeling and also of our unsustainable state of the world is based on a knowledge that's evolving and socially constructed by the way so we would love to hear from your perspective of where we stand here well thank you that is quite a tall uh a tall order i thought yeah um yeah i think i'd like to take a little bit of a step back perhaps and think a little a bit more about the trajectory that you just traced in the book from from sort of despair to hope which also struck me very much as i was reading it um and i thought i might also take a step back i think him at some point said he uh it was a kind of um time vault from the 1970s in some way i think i i'm speaking a little bit from the 1980s which is uh when i read a lot of the um scholars that were following from raymond williams and that idea of structure of feeling and and they were really interested in um very everyday kinds of knowledges uh things like novels films tv shows this is obviously pre pre uh uh digital media um and what they were really interested in tracking through was the ways in which everyday knowledges but also most uh specialized kinds were really quite tightly aligned with different kinds of social identities uh social institutions and organizations different kinds of languages and that that often produced but kind of conflicting accounts of what the world is and i think that that's why i would pause and actually step back and say the global zeitgeist i have no idea and i wouldn't dare to presume and i think that that sense of different kinds of knowledge is being generated in different concepts is something that's really important to uh to to bear in mind and i think it's also um an issue that many scholars have had with that notion of structure of feeling as well you know feeling much more kind of um intangible really powerful sense you know there is a kind of zeitgeist a mood at the moment or some of us feel a certain kind of mood dread hope um but to generalize that into a kind of planetary state is is i think quite challenging and i think i want to just make a couple of points um sort of spinning off from that uh differentiation that i think is necessary when we think about structures of feeling um one of which is i think to think about that the structure feeling of of the novel um which and i guess it it's an exceptional book in part because i think it does traverse lots of different kinds of knowledge domains i mean clearly you know demonstrate here in the panel and i'm sure in the room um you know it does an extraordinary job i think and a very unusual job in speaking across lots of different knowledge domains my view is that in that travelling it's lost a little bit of a sense of what it is to be and i i mean i read novels for leisure i want racy pacey stories lots of you know emotional it's not that quite this kind that kind of novel ministry for the future but i think that gives it a reach and a range that perhaps my preferred kind of novels don't necessarily um but for me trying to think about the structure of feeling of that novel that that feeling of hope is is and um kim's talk is very uh enlightening here i think it it really converts hope into a kind of technocratic problem that if we've got the you know that there's a problem and and hope is about finding the right solutions finding the right levers finding the right logics and processes and technologies and putting them into play um and i think that that particular approach to hope converting hope into a kind of a technocratic exercise or process i think it's a very particular kind of structure of feeling um and my second point would be then i guess to flag that there is something about feelings uh being feel and and the kind of embodied feelings i think that many people have in many different ways and i'm i'm worried here i'm actually merging to the psycho geography that uh slightly dismissive what i feel uh but i think there is i know there's something about the kind of emotional tenor of of of feeling climate change that is also really important and really um uh challenging to get our heads around uh and in particular uh i'll stop here um it does strike me in lots of the kind of popular watching i do of kind of climate change and general kind of apocalyptic sort of popular culture this is an excuse to watch way too many sort of uh be standard you know streaming series and so on but at the moment there's uh i i think a very strong sense that if you're not technocratic then what drives you actually is a really strong kind of emotional drive to save your family i would argue uh and lots of popular culture i think does this whether you're looking at you know the walking dead or day after tomorrow station 11 there uh the road they're always kind of redemptive family narratives and i think we need to uh if we're thinking about the feelings of climate change i think we need to broaden that kind of um uh emotional narrative of what it is to feel and and be motivated to want to work for change uh as well and i think that's a different project i think from the one that kim does so brilliantly but i think for me at least it's also really a really important one generated by this notion of structure of feeling it's interesting how we moved from the discussion of climate science to the feeling of climate change um roger i think there was a nice wedge created for you with the zombies and the road has been involved and dreadful um you know the fiction of dread has sprung up around climate as well um where do you trace the origins of that and is it justified um well first thanks for the invitation it feels very subversive coming up from london to oxford it feels very exciting to be to be here i was very grateful for the invite i'm sure i'll get sent down by the end of the evening i'm glad to have it was interesting listening to um to stan use that that word dread because i think it goes straight back to what raymond williams says about structure feeling which actually there isn't one it's it's a conflict it's conflicted it's it's um what does he call it something like um yeah known complexities experienced tensions shifts and uncertainties and his point was the marxism in the 70s was incredibly over rational and no one was talking about feelings or emotions and these kind of conflicted things and my sense is that actually um what we need to pick up on is that sort of feeling of conflict i mean dread is not necessarily a bad thing the best theorist of um dread is um kierkegaard who talked about it as the dizziness of freedom so it's that feeling of of looking into an abyss kekkergaard being kierkegaard wanted to hurl himself off it um but there's a choice there also uh and there's a kind of a transcendent exhilaration to it as well and i think that's the kind of feeling that we get in fact in the ministry for the future there's this brilliant term called um the mask of the red death syndrome which is his discussion of this idea of i think conflicted structure of feeling so on the one hand if you know the pose story you're having the best party ever but you're having the best party ever because it's the end of the world because death is waiting outside and he's gonna arrive and and uh carry you off um and and so that sort of sense of conflict i think is is really important and for me as a as a literary person uh as a literature scholar it's it's ambivalence that we look for it's ambivalence that the novel can do that it can entertain these different kind of uh discourses it can even swallow them all i agree there's a question about whether it is in fact a novel and i would hope that it breaks the back of the novel which is why this panel can can come around and and talk about it is that it's it's a heteroglossic novel to use um bactine's term and i might come back to that one-legged marxist later um to kind of use him i think as a way of thinking about the future of the novel as well so i think i think what's great about the book is that it does really kind of explore these apocalyptic fantasies and rebecca and i were talking about how easy it is to do dystopia now and and the kind of standard line uh that i think is even in the in the novel you know it's much easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism which no one knows who first coined and there's a big argument about that could be jameson to whom this book is dedicated to um stan's former teacher of course uh so so it does that kind of apocalyptic stuff really amazingly well but at certain point it makes a choice in this dizziness of freedom in this dread to go for hope and that's much much harder and i think you know our sense of kind of um difficulty with it if we're experts you know economists or computer scientists or geographers is precisely the point it's forcing you to think through something positive whereas it's so easy particularly in academic discourse to be cautious and negative and kind of pull back i think so that sort of leap if you like halfway through the book where things go right um is is exactly what i think um the the last few novels that stan has been writing have made the choice to do you know that sort of sense of doing that and and that can only be applauded i think because as you say we then read that and then we go home and we watch series 17 of the walking dead which is the same as series one it's exactly the same story over and over again so so i think this is kind of a real attempt to breach all of that yes that's right i mean i think we talked to stan about the first eco-novel um erst khalimbox ecotopia which was banned in 1975 which dared to cut to create a hopeful and optimistic world it's not the best known novels of all time and it doesn't make an adventurous reading but it is a road map you know you know in the same sort of way as this is a road map to a more sustainable future one of the it's a festival of ideas as well um and many of those ideas come from economics so i'm going to turn to gordon and rebecca now and um can you give us some commentary on the kind of economics well we know keynesian economics that underpins this novel um yes we've been reminded keynesianism is not fashionable now but it is actually with us it's still living with us um so what is your take on this big change this structure of feeling uh that zeitgeist is changing among investors as well stan describes the investors of the olden days as shorting the planetary future now investors are going long on the planet meaning there is some sort of return uh to be earned on green capitalism so what's your take on this what drives this um and what are the challenges okay well thank you very much it was great to listen to the commentary from california i must say and it was a wonderful project to read the book i never encountered a book that has 100 chapters and 500 pages and you just go from chapter to chapter with this sort of sense of oh my gosh look what he's doing now it's really quite extraordinary so so about 20 years ago at oxford we sponsored a series of workshops with young investment groups who were very interested in building what is now called esg metrics 20 years ago we sponsored these events two big events bringing entrepreneurs and sort of well-meaning investors in the uk europe and the united states to oxford to talk about how you would do that yeah 20 years ago the market for esg next year or 2025 is reputed to be in the order of 50 trillion us dollars that is to say products investment products will have in some sense be badged or be framed by an esg metric or an esg goal so you've got to think to yourself well what happened over 20 years what is it that went from a niche area in finance to become actually mainstream notwithstanding those who dismiss it as pure green washing blah blah blah right what i think has happened is in part the realization that you can make a profit out of the environment you can make a profit out of the environment in terms of its reproduction in most importantly and that you can make a profit out of the long term through environmental stewardship which you couldn't have done 20 years ago and our author made some comment earlier on in his presentation about thinking of capitalism and thinking of markets and corporations as short-term oriented where they've exploited the environment for a profit and that's been warranted if you like justified by a theory of corporate governance that had it that the only purpose was short-term maximization of profit that's still with us it's still with us when we hear commentaries about capitalism when we hear sort of republicans uh people on the right in this country talk about actually what is the purpose of the corporation what is the purpose of making a profit in the long term but over 20 years i think there's been a confluence of counter-arguments think of it as standing on the shore of a large ocean big wave keeps coming in it's called if you like um it's called maximizing profit it's called if you like the essence of capitalism but there's these other waves coming in this giant tidal wave comes in and calls esg and that sort of changes some of the discourse as well so i'm in some sense over 20 years quite optimistic about actually the incorporation of these issues into decision making made by companies made by investors i'm also very self-conscious of the remarkable vitality of technology investing led by 20 year olds and 30 year olds not 50 year olds or 70 year olds the vitality of that market type investing that actually takes is given that sense of having a cake and eater too that is we're investing for a long-term profit but we're investing to do good and that's called impact investing so i'll make one last remark about this so i've sort of said that actually over 20 years i've seen a sea change in how the investment process has conceptualized i've seen a sea change in actually the application of metrics like esg to corporate decision making but i've also seen a sea change in what our students expect out of an oxford education that is to say they come to do our environmental masters programs from about 100 countries around the world and they think they have a chance to make a difference but they also are optimistic a sense of self a sense of possibility of themselves that they will in making a profit out of this they will also make something good about it and i've been stunned actually at the professionalisation of the cadre of students who come through our programs year after year basically arguing we can make a profit out of capitalism and we will do that through our own careers and make a substantial difference to humanity as it comes so what am i i'm an optimist right i see both the capitalist system but i see individuals in the system as sort of embodying literally embodying that sense of prospect over the next 25 to 35 years so that's my answer to very difficult questions so there is still a large camp out there that sees a fundamental trade-off between people versus capitalism that sees the way how capitalism still externalizes some of those damages that it imposes on environments and social communities so the big question is environmentalists have identified these problems more than 50 years ago why did it take 50 years for capitalism this fantastic dynamic social creation to respond so i'm turning to rebecca because this is a question you are addressing in reimagining capitalism and you are urging us to think big because whatever changes we want to execute on have to happen faster absolutely and uh gordon i completely agree with you that there's lots of movement in the business space and lots of movement among the students but i think that that it's not enough and i think one of the truly exciting things about this novel is that it sort of puts you in place like what might the next 20 years really feel like and what happens is the as the climate starts to fall apart and and where does the driver of change come from and annette to answer your question i mean kim has this wonderful phrase in the book he says uh one principle for bankers in perilous times was to avoid anything too radical and untried and so they were they were all going to go down you know and uh i studied corporate change for many many years of my life and i i've been in these rooms that that kim describes which is that's very interesting rebecca but you know we only have a five year time horizon we're using a nine percent discount rate and it's not my job and so i want to call attention to three innovations in this book which i think are really interesting to call out and to ask you know is that what it would take so so let me let me call those out so kim talks about the tragedy of the time horizon and those of you who are in this space may have watched the head of sustainability for hsbc in public on a stage say guys climate risk is not a risk for us i mean really really not and when you unpack what he said you can see he's using a nine percent discount rate so money tomorrow is worth nine percent less than today and you you play that out in 20 years from now it's worth about zero so you know whole world may end but what's that to me so how does kim solve the tragedy of the time horizon well he does it through the invention of the the court the carbonaro yeah and one of the things he slips into the book and actually kim i thought this was brilliant is the carboni is a financial instrument that lets you go long it's a promise that if you invest for the long term you will get significantly high returns and that's a huge deal and what is in the book is we pay off all the fossil fuel companies to leave the money in the ground and use that resources to make positive investments instead and that's that's a lot more than just keynesianism that's like a big deal and i think it's probably correct it's very distasteful no one likes the idea that we have to pay the slaveholders to free the slaves but that's what it took so i think that's a very interesting innovation in the book i think another one and um annette's a good friend but i'm not saying this for this reason is there's a sort of unexpressed at one time he says well yes billions and billions of dollars and a huge bureaucracy went into new accounting and new measurement because if i'm going to pay people to put stuff in that leave stuff in the ground and use the money for something good i have to be able to verify they've left it in the ground and i have to verify they've used the money to do something good and we have this huge investment in accounting and monitoring systems and i think that feels exactly right to me that we won't make progress unless we can measure the progress we're making and unless we can hold everyone to account so that that sounds again that's you could say it was an extension but but kim is imagining like whoa you know enough work for hundreds of annettes for many years and i think that's the student that's the thing at the back i don't know i i think you know i say in my book i didn't realize that accountants were the likely savior of civilization but uh but now i've become more convinced and i i do think that and then the third thing that kim invents is violence and desperation and one of the ways he solves the tragedy of the time horizon is the book opens with an event in india where 20 million people are killed in a heat wave in a week and the indians say okay we get this this is not okay so for them it's not a long time horizon so he invents suggests a major body in the world that is completely committed to moving right now and doesn't want excuses and so the indians start doing all kinds of things and clean tech and so on but one of the things they also do is spawn a group called the children of kali which shoots down aeroplanes and blows up ships and and hulls fishing vessels and so this is a solution which is no no there's some things you can't do and and how do we do that at a global level super hard right how do we get rid of airline travel but again i think this is really interesting because i agree it's not new economics what we know about modern economics is that for all kinds of reasons we forgot that externalities were important and distribution was key they were just sort of left out you know but that's an idea in economics so how do we internalize economics uh externalities how do we remember distribution well one way we do that is fantastic political pressure and one of the things i really enjoyed in the book is this sense of how the desperation might build how this sense that no no excuse me this is not okay and uh and he ends with just this hint just a hint that there might be a creation of a world religion that you know that we might rediscover the sense of the sacred and the boundaries of what's appropriate behavior and i i you know if there's any time i i wish you would talk a little bit more about that kim because most major social change movements have been powered by a massive moral sense that there's a better way to do this and so i think that's also in the book and a very very interesting way to think about what might play out over the next 20 to 30 years yes it's very interesting interplay between moral reasoning and science and of course what you what you can do and cannot do with technology which is where we come to you mike because you know artificial intelligence has been touted as the technology that will solve all our remaining problems um it won't but it's always enough for the ministry for the future so can you tell us a little bit more of how it could be relevant at this moment sure okay well uh there's nothing like being on an interdisciplinary panel at oxford to remind you just how little you know um and actually stan it's interesting you made the comment right in the very beginning about oxford being one of those places in the world that's inherently uh interdisciplinary and it really is and that's an incredibly uh enriching environment in that respect it's what makes it such a rewarding place to study and work the very distinct downside of that though i have to tell you is that the place is stuffed full of people with very confident opinions about absolutely everything okay so i do not claim to be an expert on on the range of issues which you've you've all addressed so eloquently my area is artificial intelligence and there is this temptation to respond to everything in the book which i think we probably all that we all had so i'll restrict my comments to ai and if you'll indulge me stan i'm going to frame my comments uh through the lens of my um my second favorite science fiction author uh douglas adams and put forward a two two views of artificial intelligence and one is that what we might call the deep thought view of artificial intelligence so if you read the book uh read the books um deep thought was a computer obviously a fictional computer which was constructed uh with the goal of providing the answer to the ultimate question the answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything and uh of course the joke in the book is that the answer turns out not to be very interesting adams didn't realize it but actually he had quite some insights into the nature of artificial intelligence when he when he came out with that joke we are for example i think really genuinely on the brink of having machines which can pass comfortably past the turing test which for 70 years has been held up as one of the the key challenges in in ai but it turns out that's actually not necessarily very interesting in its own right or indeed necessarily very useful so the deep thought view of ai is that you build very very big ai systems very smart ai systems and you and you endow them with everything all the knowledge that you have about the world everything that you can give them and then you ask them questions and you hope that they can answer it so in the context of climate and i've been on a number of industrial panels and people have asked me quite genuinely could we build really smart ai and ask it how to solve the problem and the answer is no that's not realistic we're not uh not any close to doing that but there is a version of deep thought ai that's out there right now in the world if you haven't come across gpt 3 which is a an ai system uh which was built by openai which was basically trained by giving it everything that they could provide it that was written in english extracted from the world wide web so the entirety of wikipedia and english made up just about three percent of its of its training data unimaginable quantities of data and unimaginable resources that were thrown into training this and what you end up with there's a system which is genuinely very impressive you can you can go and google it and you can play with it and you can chat to it and indeed i did ask it before we came on i was playing with it earlier and i said how do we solve the climate problem and it came out with a very bland not wrong answer but well we need to restrain carbon news etc you know so there's there are versions of the big a.i uh dream the deep thought view of ai uh uh throughout science fiction and so in your book stand the one that i love is the aurora ai um the idea of an ai system which is controlling a very large complex um spaceship over a very very long time horizons um what does that mean in terms of actually concretely solving the the climate problem one could imagine for example attempts to do you know a city level or maybe national level probably not global level sort of optimization you know how do we optimally control make the best use of resources within a particular environment that's the kind of thing that you might imagine that ai being used to solve i am a bit doubtful i think there are all sorts of reasons that we probably don't want to do that i mean i dare say there are people thinking about trying to do that so what is the alternative then um douglas adams second version of ai in fact it's not ai in his book but we might call it the babel fish view of ai again if you remember the books the babel fish is this little thing you put in your ear it's a fish which automatically translates any language into your into your own language and babelfish uh with the time adams wrote it um was was a was a was a far off dream but now we have automated translation tools that can do basically that the babelfish view of ai is about little bits of ai doing tiny little things everywhere everywhere in our environment so imagine that every time you have to make a decision ai is helping you make a better decision every system that you use your car your washing machine everything is empowered with a little piece of ai that's optimizing its use and all of that adds up to uh potentially really quite a lot so the likeliest immediate use of ai i think and there is huge scope for it there is that version of ai ai being embodied everywhere making a smarter more efficient uh more carbon friendly world than the version that we uh uh the the version that we that we have at the moment um so i could go on but i say i think those are the two sort of you know there's the big ai view the idea of building very big very smart systems and then you know either handing over control of our cities or our or our countries or potentially our planet to those i'm skeptical about that for all sorts of reasons and it raises by the way all sorts of dangers which of course have been explored uh in in science fiction over the decades the more plausible scenario for me is this idea of ai just embodied everywhere just making a smarter more efficient world and that indeed is the the representation of ai in the book when we think that ai is the ai assisted design that brings that wonderful seven-masted solar panel schooner at the end at the end of the book that could be the alternative to cross-atlantic transportation stan i would like to give you the opportunity to come back into the conversation and talk to us talk to the panel ask questions it's your turn well thank you so much to everybody uh fascinating and i really appreciate it the um the idea that the ministry for the future but also the genre of the novel uh has been the stimulus for this and i would i would say of course the ministry for the future is a novel because we called it as such and and and roger mentioned heteroglossia the bactinian definition of the novel is very important um it's a a collection of voices in dialogue with each other and the hopefully the writer has gotten out of the way enough that the voices speak and this is um something i'm i'm i'm quite proud of as being my work in my art form to jillian's point yes this savior family narrative so repetitive is so frequent so much the default is easy because we all have those family feelings and the point of the utopian project or really survival now would be to remember that 50 of the dna inside your body is not human dna that you yourself are a forest and a collaboration an ecology that's going to fall apart it's so it's so ridiculously complex that it works at all as a miracle and it doesn't work forever but what that implies is everything alive is your family you share 978 base pairs of dna with everything living although i'm not sure about viruses but from for bacteria archaea on up we are all family and that's the new religion to acknowledge that that when you take care of the biosphere you're taking care of your family and therefore your own body right down to the insides of your gut microbiome which people are now calling your second brain and um the more you think about that the the the weirder and more interesting it becomes um and then i want to thank roger for reading my books and writing about them and thinking about science fiction seriously that's a a powerful cadre in the humanities and in literary studies i've watched it over my lifetime grow partly because of frederick jameson partly because of critics like roger and many others utopia as an expression of hope but what's great about what roger said is um existentialism and jameson started as a student of sartre and we have this choice we are in this dreadful freedom uh and we all need to choose what the meaning of our life is and have an existential project and here the project takes on a huge importance without a project your um you're caught in a world without meaning and in an absurdity and despair but uh with a project you can orient as with a compass or some kind of internal cognitive map everything that you do toward and suddenly life has meaning and you can make choices about what to do with your life important to have that project so i thank you for that and to gordon's point yes indeed it's wonderful to see this last 20 years of what you could call green capitalism which is maybe in some senses a flat contradiction or it was but on the other hand we need it badly and uh people are doing it what i would want to question is making a difference while making a profit is profit always in the current metric using the current accounting a sign that some people have been ripped off uh is capitalism at its very basis the power of the few over the many so that of course an oxford student can say i will make a profit but the people working in the fields will make a living if they can so there's still that massive class difference between people who sell their labor as their only resource and people who have capital and therefore can invest it and take a profit from it i would uh direct attention to the wage ratio the cooperative movement the u.s navy early china under mao the wage ratio would be one and that's the person getting the basic wage to something like three or five nine ten um the the co-op movement suggests one to ten it's easy to calculate in other words the the person getting the most money in the system makes ten times as much as the person getting the least and the least is adequate so that's an interesting bar if you have adequacy is the one ten times adequacy is already ridiculous uh luxury unnecessary but um you know easy to calculate then the wage ratio in america right now is one to 350 on average that means that the ceo is making as much in a day as his basic workers are making in a year you get cynicism despair and the intention to break things that break the system disbelief in the system of course who wouldn't and then i in the novel i talk about the us navy a race nation a wage ratio of one to eight well this is interesting and that's one of the most efficient and hardworking and effective organizations on earth and the admirals are only making eight times as much as the able seamen and they have good esprit de corps there are communications from the top to the bottom of that organization and in mondragon spain and in the co-op movement in general this is this issue of the wage ratio that the one has to be adequacy and that would be like the inner circle on the donut everybody on earth has adequacy and then the people richest people on earth have only 10 times that we but only once you begin to count it on your fingers an adequacy and then another adequacy and then another one you go up 10 times you realize the luxuriousness of even 10 times adequacy is rather astonishing and so then when you think about the world that we're in that becomes ridiculous scandalous obscene and stupid so um this is what capitalism has to come to terms with is a a post-capitalism that actually takes into account everybody and begins to crash that intense gilded age class ratio that neoliberal capitalism has brought us back to um i i have to say rebecca brought up points that are important to contemplate the the violence the string of violence in ministry for the future is rather appalling to me personally i wrote it because i thought it might happen in the same way that the catastrophe that begins the book happens as people begin to suffer the sharp end of the stick of climate change catastrophes they're going to get angry they'll see their families die and you're back to the narrative of the single family the survivors will be so angry it's not that they'll want justice they'll want revenge and it will be lashing out and incoherent it won't be uh targeted and and intelligent and avant-garde and a vanguard party changing the world by killing off a few billionaires it won't be that useful it will be incoherent messy and counterproductive so i put it in the book to make the book feel realistic to the way things are going to go if we don't come to grips with this problem but like many science fiction books it's kind of a warning um you know let's not go down this path there are better futures than ministry as optimistic as it is once you see the lay of the land of the next decade um you can say we can do better even than the future in ministry for the future and i hope that happens but thank you rebecca for bringing that up and also for bringing up the discount rate this is another way that capitalism rips uh other populations the in this case the humans to come in the centuries that will come you look over the time horizon a discount rate of nine is absurd a discount rate of ford uh four mr nordhaus got the pseudo nobel prize in economics for is still too high many economists say that the discount rate should be zero and of course that messes with economic calculations but it seems just so then what about a discount rate that starts at zero in the present and then you ratchet it up through the centuries so that it gets higher or maybe you started a relatively high discount rate like four and ratcheted down to zero as you go forward these are accounting games these are economic calculations that are quite important for deciding what to do right now and they're worth discussing in a way that they haven't been and then lastly to mike i enjoyed your book i real it's nice to have an ai expert who is not um drunk the kool-aid you might say uh who is telling us how it can really work and how it can really be helpful and so i think one way to do it is to take out this name or examine this name artificial intelligence yes of course it's artificial well maybe it has intelligence but what do we mean by that it what if we called it computers assisted science so that the word becomes science again and becomes human uh what if we called it a big data analysis well it looks a lot less dangerous and sexy but on the other hand it's really what it is and then of course machine learning the stuff that that mike and the whole um discipline is on the cutting edge of i just listened to an ai interview and ai it was it was quite plausible and hilarious and the and the voice uh creation was as human as uri in its sound so the turing test is indeed a low bar that's gonna that has already been passed but what about the usefulness of it um in and this is what mike pointed to we can know the world we can uh register it and record it and so big data indeed and there we need computers very very fast and powerful computers with really exceptionally ingenious algorithms written by humans to help us to know the world and then figure out how to dodge the mass extinction event so um with that all in my remarks um um it's uh but and just say again uh thank you um of course we needed a glaciologist on the panel but thank god we didn't have one because the glaciologists i know would have tried to explain that the whole thing depended on glaciers which is not quite true it's important but um and worth discussing but i'm glad that we kept it to the group that we have here and once again thank you thank you so tom principal uh your job was to monitor the structural feeling of the room and take over at this point and if you feel it's appropriate take a few question questions from the audience you can address it directly to stan or to the panel knowing that many of us are going to d camp to hartford college so you can meet this wonderful panel stand however will be prevented by distance so this is your chance yes um and wow i hope you're all stimulated and engaged and inspired by that conversation as as i was yes we are we are out of time uh not literally yet uh stan um but uh let's let's see some quick fire questions if you have them uh many of you in fact all of you are most welcome to come back with us to hartford in just a moment um for drinks and more conversation but i've got uh clive up here we're gonna do very quick questions uh to stand at this stage because everyone else will get a chance uh later on yeah clive thanks frederick [Music] if i could convince you that climate change was extremely unlikely to cause a mass extinction how would that change your risk assessment well i would it would take some convincing i i don't mean a mass extinction of human beings i think we are um capable through technological means of being quite resilient i mean that the extinction rate is already far above the normal rate to geological time and a lot of it is due to climate change but also biosphere degradation poisons in the water and air that we have created and put out there that can't be absorbed by the environment fast enough including the other creatures now we've already begun a mass extinction event so that would take some real convincing anymore quick fire here we go i'm gonna go one two um this is just picking up on in a way quite a small point you made um where did the idea of um so you know the driver of human history being hope but the idea of basically everyone wanting security wanting um safety and then that moving on into power and then that having its own kind of ramifications where did that come from where did you think of that well i want to say immediately that i am an english major but also that means i'm a history major and i don't have many original thoughts really i'm a student um i'm a reporter i'm a synthesizer and also a writer of dramatized scenes where my characters hopefully take over and then i see what they say so theories of history well this i had to study hard for a book called the years of rice and salt an alternative history in which all europeans died in the black death and world history goes on 700 more years that's when i ran into the book does technology drive history and a whole lot of other books by william mcneill and kenneth burke and hayden white whose meta history is very worth reading and of course my teacher jamison these these uh i guess i am um an un-theoretical person but an act but a an academic person novels are the way i think through this so i guess ministry for the future is a meditation that is much shaped by my earlier novels i must say that's why i could write it in six or eight months um it's built on my previous thinking such as it is in my previous reading so i would refer you to years of rice and salt and also to hayden white and also vico apparently jameson has taught us that his theories of history or eben khaldoon his theory of history is quite powerful and then also the socio biologists like yo wilson what do our fellow social primates do they try to stay safe it ends up being in power relations amongst themselves it's very important um sarah hurty is very good on this in terms of social biology what are we as social primates the female of the species has always and in every mammalian species exerted immense power so um social biology does not reinforce patriarchy which was a mistake of the 1970s it actually destabilizes and undercuts uh human patriarchy as a system by showing that it's it's not at all natural and the other social primates don't really follow it so so these all things all these thoughts kind of add up to my own rough and ready theory of history um so as a third year biologist myself i picked up on two things so first of all your um your idea that the capitalist structures that we see are the reality currently we have to work with them in our imagining of a future and then also what you came to later in your talk talking about preservation and increasing areas where you you don't profit off um and i was interested in your opinion on the value of so i think you were talking very much about a tragedy of the commons um and like depleting resources but they're the actual commons in the uk and and um you know land ownership and being forced to work on land that is not doesn't feel as tight a part of your identity and and the value of i guess small scale less capitalist ways of managing a land as opposed to just preservation by removing humans from the land i was wondering if you could speak to that yes and thank you for that because it brings up an important point um so when the commons were enclosed so this is uh english and british history in scotland then you got the the english revolution the english civil war you've got the french and american revolutions democratic government is the return of the commons in the virtual sphere of governments so in a macro history i would say that when ordinary people were immiserated by the enclosure of the commons by early capitalism they revolted and instituted democratic governments over the absolute and partial monarchies and so wherever there's a commons there's always a drive to enclosure so now the attempt to capture democratic governments to buy them to buy their politicians by way of lobbying and influence and outright money cash transfers is another enclosure movement of a commons that did quite well in certain ways for for the period of time when uh representative democracies were growing and then to your to your last point it's very important to not think about purity indeed humans are going to be on the land and all over this 30 by 30 movement is not to say humans never go there wilderness is not a pure category but a human space a human idea a land use a name for a certain kind of land use management that still includes humans going out there so um that is important to be mentioned to make sure that you don't get into some kind of weird zone of saying oh humans are bad or we should never go there it's more land use of making our our impact on those spaces less so that the wild animals can prosper and in that we would be steward and caretaker and maybe making a living off of it i would like to make a distinction between making a living and making a profit i think that's very important but if you could make your living taking care of wolves instead of beef cattle or i mean the whole ecosphere that wolves designate by being the uh top predator um that would be great and we need a a a post-capitalist economy that supports that kind of work brilliant i'm afraid i'm so sorry but that really is um all we have time for right now that normally at these events we say at the end we could go on all night i think tonight we really could uh there is a sense i've really been an event where people are so keen to stay behind and keep going keep going but we must we must stop there i'm afraid so apologies there will be a chance to carry on the conversation as i say back at hartford now i think we should um thank uh stan in this extraordinary panel for an absolutely brilliant um session you've taken us from a feeling of dread and doom i think at one point uh in the conversation through subversion and intensity of discourse and ended us in a place where we can imagine hope as a political weapon uh in the surface this was a great line in the service of a more humane safer political economy uh for future humans what a mission that that is and from my old world of of government and the un uh what we used to call maps and chaps i can say very clearly that we do not have the answers in that world but maybe tonight shows us that the answers are in rooms like this that would be such a great challenge for universities to take to take forward governments don't have the ideas the energy or the convening power but maybe this group will have that so it's radical and untried i think we said but if not here where should we do that so to be continued uh to be continued first over drinks all welcome but also i hope in the weeks months and years ahead by uh by this group but for now please join me in thanking annette for the extraordinary curation you can feel the quality of the curation and the direction uh tonight i know please also thanks dan i mean for the stimulation for joining us and also standing away for not flying over actually i mean it was absolutely brilliant to have you on the screen there uh on zero uh carbon emissions and then but also this high the plastic bottles yes we're learning we're learning um but also this extraordinary uh panel i mean what a what a base for conversation and and how much we could we love to hear much much more from all of you as well so please join me in thanking everyone involved in this evening's discussion thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Hertford College, Oxford

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Id: fESpAqhFFLg

Length: 99min 36sec (5976 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022