days of wonder days of rage we're living through an information revolution as profound as any since good in bergen the printing press but are we the people the so called users using the tech or is the tech using us and for what  can we harness this particular transformation for good that's the question and we have some answers this week on the laura flanders show the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it welcome alexa siri are you out there just who is in our audience by twenty twenty one the research firm over them reports that there will be almost as many voice activated assistants on the planet as there are people while it took three from the printing press to the pilotless drone but does today's tech pose a threat or a promise as one of my guests today has written what if we thought of the future as a verb  it's ours at least until there's joining me today is douglas rushkoff host of team human the aforementioned writer he is the author of a new book by the same name technologist an abolitionist who's worked with the school for poetic computation about more later and last chance the fleet disability justice advocate and fellow with data and society working at the intersections of disability and technology welcome all  right so doug you lay out a pretty grim scenario of technology being as you put it anti human by design how so well i don't know that people come up with technolog anti human way you know and maybe even you know mark zuckerberg in the google boys they were first thinking we're going to make something that helps people complicate this or that but once they really have to make a whole lot of money with these with these technologies once they've taken on investment and they're expected to deliver a thousand x return what happens is the technologies end up really playing the people instead of people playing the technology you're talking about embedded in the actual code yeah now well if you think of an algorithm you know an algorithm on facebook is using data from your past in order to find out what you know psychological statistical bucket to put you in in order to know which behavioral finance techniques to use to get you to do what it has been told to get you to do and how different is that from other technology i mean as i've said we've had lots of new technology it's all changed our lives well i guess the main difference with these computational technologies is that they learn from what you do and adapt to your defenses so this is the first time i mean a television ad i guess they could see if it works or not and then next quarter try something  algorithm is going to try something else the next second the next second the next second then once it finds something that works it's going to tell all the other algorithms a look this works on this human you try it on your humans i mean and some of them are true i mean what these technologies learn to exploit are our painstakingly evolved social mechanisms all the mechanisms that we've developed to establish report with one another are our reciprocal altruism you know if they can figure out a way to make an algorithm cry like a little baby and a listen my maternal instinct is to heal it they'll use it and that's bad that is bad because the reason why it's bad is because instead of helping connect with other people it's helping corporations extract data from me extract money from me and get me to behave more predictably right so as the algorithms and smartphones get smarter about us we get dumber about them and our behavior becomes more programmed more automatic less human all right so you've heard this case chancing them below who wants to jump in here and the bill yeah i mean i think technology has a class character i mean i think i mean when i call myself a technologist i use the term very broadly like i consider writing of technology for example and like i trust the technology that i'm using right now a lot more than i trust my smartphone or my laptop different cultures have had and still have different technologies and the specific comput technology that we have today emerged from imperialism from from the u s and u k and other related imperialist powers military industrial complex they still retain great control over the infrastructure that underlies this what about the undersea cables that transmit data back and forth across the world the physical supply chains of manufacturing and so forth so i would say this technology is very much under the control of people who don't have the interest of me or my communities and i say that's still talks of the control chancy to you what about this technological existential threat i'm taking this out through the lens of accessibility i work with communities of disability many of whom like myself are happy to use all kinds of platforms whether it be computers smart phones braille displays slates and styluses which i that how louis braille i would have written braille analog and digital technologies many of us are comfortable with the diversity of those but there is this mainstream narrative and there is some some grounding for it that conversational interfaces like siri and alexa are gay creators for people who have disabilities that impact motor interaction impact typical workflows or impact someone's desire to avoid complexity so you mean like a gateway in not a gateway is really and i've seen with motor and speech impairments and memory impairments have a great deal of success with these interfaces but i'm troubled in a couple of ways for one thing that mainstream media narrative miss the fact that it's a small curated feature set that really hangs on habits of consumption more than habits of creation or even habits of communication it would be awfully hard to write a novel with alexa and by suggesting that folks in our community that are being challenged by the limitations in contemporary  contemporary technology design should just gravitate to these conversational assistance they are suggesting that because of the way we are embodied we ought to do less the other thing that i find a little bit problematic is that we don't actually need to submit our conversations to a server in order to have workable conversational interfaces and i think we need to disentangle this untangled the ability to use a different workflow from the necessity to submit ourselves and our lives to inspection by the developers of the club definitely from a technical perspective there's no reason of these analogies have to work in this way it's that google amazon want them to work in this way for their own data collection surveillance resource extraction and exploitation of us as consumers as workers so that's where our team human comes in re i mean it's really easy especially for those of us who are not data scientists or computer engineers it's really difficult for us not to accept these technologies at face value we think oh this is what the technology can do rather than oh this is what the shareholders of this company are allowing this technology to do if anything most of us look at the tech and figure oh it's just a technology so it's neutral right it's like go guns don't kill people people go you know this technology is just what it is but as we look at the algorithms in the way they what we find out is oh no they're not neutral at all these algorithms are racist you know they don't feel racism but they have embedded in them certain value systems whether they're extractive and they're going to do whatever we tell them to do and that's i mean sadly or not that's true of anything it's true even of speech of text you know the language we used to speak is imbedded with values but but they they don't quite change as dramatically and not as intentionally one thing that i've been thinking about is our kind of basic myth of around human evolution the sort of survival of the fittest model that is now being questioned at the level of evolutionary science how could we flip the script on how this technology develops going forward what could we embed cooperation not competition i mean absolutely if anything networking technology emerged as a collaborative that it was a way for terminals to share computing resources you know how we started with it and certainly we can flip the script on how we understand evolution all we have to do is read darwin and find out oh this isn't the story of competing individuals this is the story of how species learned to collaborate and cooperate is that poetic competition is that what the institute is all about yeah maybe to think a little bit about this very briefly so the school for cordic computation is an independent artist run tech school here in new york one of the things that we try to do if p c is we call it is if you had to think about the other possibilities for technology for our communities and for what could be done as opposed to only what has been done like for example i took before i took a two weeks of evening classes there one summer two thousand and seventeen and i made a rhyme generator based on the rise of my favorite rapper and of doing and i used a library file for library which is code that someone else has basically packed it up for use in your own program called pronouncing this pronouncing library with based on a pronouncing dictionary which was funded by the us government darpa like the internet and many other important projects in computing history and defense  dictionary only represents sed general american english and the lesser pronunciations for a given word which is not how this artist pronounce words for the most part and so it's like the biases that were embedded in this technology before i was born by the u s military ended up playing out in my art project so there's a lot of the ways that these things do tend to accumulate over time but like these decisions could have been made differently and even now it's it's not too early and chancy you and you're working dogs who just wanted to be part of the conversation and that's what would you like to see what we need are strong solid allies we need developers to really know something about accessibility and to challenge the notion that for example some things are too visual i'll give you an example at the new york public library where i work we have a program called dimensions and we can teach blind sighted people to work together to create maps and art and info graphics with race line graphics and anyone can come and learn and we do it collaboratively and we're travelling that notion that some things are just too visual any facial information we can render but if i spoke to a random person in a best buy or a graphic design school that i wanted to answer i think that they would tell me that i might be happier doing something else and i'd like that to stop the other thing that we really need is a strong core of people who can help you when your abilities are changing or when your ambitions are changing to understand how to use the technology you want rather than passively receive the technology you've been prescribed when you walk into a best buy when you walk into a computer lab in an average place and the way you use your tools is not average folks will tell you that they don't know how to help you and your path is probably hard but if you can find people who understand the workflows who have had the problems and knocked down the barriers they can show you how to do so another thing we do at the library is one on one coaching that's powered by peers who are native users of technology and we take the mystery away so  take the pick mystery away you can get on with your work this goes back to actual people right now when when i used to teach it and why use interactive telecommunications program and we started in a system technologies course there and what we very quickly learned was that as you make technology more friendly to potentially disabled people you make it more friendly to everybody and we are all potentially to say exactly that too but but you actually make the technology better and it's not just because it's  better user interfaces but because your orientation is changed from what can i do to this person with this technology to what am i allowed this person to do with the technology and that's not a bunch of organizers down in jackson mississippi which is a poor mostly probably eighty percent black city in the us deep south they have a whole range of initiatives around this quoting one of the community production initiative  and they're definitely funding in order to basically take a greater portion of the technology development away from silicon valley and away from some of these other entities and put it into the hands of their community serve their own it towards a different and perfect we're going to have to close it there but clearly we've just started this conversation that bill chancy thanks so much for coming in if you want to find out more about cooperation jackson you can at our website we were pretty as we've heard the new digital age poses as much of threat as a boon to our liberty and sense of self and society we're all suffering from what i guess doug rushkoff calls present shock an onslaught of anti human tech fortunately he says there is a solution and opportunity lies before us to create more space for people to be people by embracing and vivifying the present the choice is ours has stuck when i first encounter the internet i thought it was going to set us all free we were all going to work at home in our underwear trading things back and forth it was a world where anything was possible and we were going to do it in our own time but instead we strap these devices to ourselves and have them paying us every time somebody texts us or messages us as if we're supposed to respond to everything as if it's this real time emergency and that's what's put us in the state of present shock president john present shock to the human response to living in a world where everything happens now it's a real time always on existence without any sense a beginning middle or an end it's just now email inbox is trying to catch up with the moment as if the present wasn't something we lived in but the present was something we had to grasp onto and the problem for us is the inability to be in touch with any of the natural rhythms that underlie our human experience the ancient greeks had two words for time cronos which means time on the clock and kyra which means human timing so you could ask you know what time you crash the car oh i crashed it for a while but what time do you tell dad you crash the car for seventeen now you tell dad you crash the car after he's had his drink and before he's open the bill that's kairos it's the sense of readiness or human timing something that only people can understand as we move through the temp landscape of human experience the industrial age was all about kronos time is money do things faster increase your production over time and what we've ended up doing really is take the twenty first century technology and use it to reinforce the thirteenth century operating system this is really that the central problem of this stage this conflation and confusion between cairo soon kronos this use of technology really to take people out of the time that only people can understand are spending an increasing amount of our time on digital landscapes about which we know little or nothing and we treat the web and these devices as if they're preexisting conditions of nature but they're not promise you they're not sitting there thinking how are we going to help johnny maintain his friendships well they're looking at how are they going to monetize johnny's social graph and his big data this is why we're getting such unpredictable results with our technology we're incorporating them into our lives without any real sense of who made them and what they need them for you and if you don't know what a program you're using is for then chances are it's using  so i think the easiest way to contend with the present is to embrace the present find the present explore and reify the rhythms that are informing who you are as a person and as a human organism just living on the planet most people don't realize that each phase of the moon corresponds to a different neurotransmitter in the body the first week of a new moon a body to it's to be dominated by acetylcholine which is a very specific neurotransmit associated with new ideas and making new friends and being open minded if you're in the second week of a of a moon you tend to be dominated by sir town in which is all about getting things done and being industrious and reaching conclusions if you're in the third week right after the fall movie you're dominated by dopamine it's really the party neurotransmitter you want to relax in and enjoy people on not work great you're not about getting anything done if you're in the last week of a moon you tend to be dominated by norepinephrine to very analytical chemical one the sociate it with organizing things with moving above the situation and seeing what happens when how do i sequence this how should i plan my life where do i put everything it's kind of a cold or state that's not really about bonding with other people and much more about figuring out the structures underlying things the simplest things day and night seasons of the year phases of the moon these are how human beings grew up this is what predated civilization this is what makes us feel at home on planet earth and it's what can give us coherence to help find the rhythms by which people really live to connect to the rhythms that everybody else is living and no longer be victims of present shock and present shock is disorienting i get that whenever we move from one technological age to another there's bound to be a bit of wobble but this moment also an opportunity it's an opportunity to use technology and humanity really to embrace both kinds of time to really bring them together to create if anything a new focus it's in our understanding of time what are the rhythms what are the patterns underlying human experience and how can we live really in harmony with the rather than constantly trying to work against them i think that we have a choice here we can use these technologies in the wrong way i'd argue right to create ever more conformity more schedules more restrictions more regimentation one robotic activity for people so that we're more efficient and get more done or we can use these technologies instead to create more time more space for people to be people free ourselves and write programs  allow us to return to human time and not on machines take care of problems for us to restore the rhythms that give us coherence and that help us to rediscover one another culturally socially as a living organism rather than just causing the machine this could be the moment that we released ourselves from really two thousand years of understanding time is a understanding time is something that contains human beings and instead see it as a partner that we have clones to keep track of what's going on and we have kairos to actually live it if we can do that in this moment to present to be the moment remembered as the time that we set ourselves fre it's that time of year again when we're encouraged to celebrate black history and soon it will be women's history month the time when people like me what about the rest of the year this season black history month coincides with the start of the presidential primary campaigns on the democratic side we're already seeing journalists stretching for their pencils to be the candidates up so far the main divides they've identified seem to stem from which of the contenders lead with race and gender justice and which want to sock it to the corporations but those social versus economic distinctions are going to hold up for long when every last democrat for all of their faults as a civil rights paragon in contrast to the klan and doors to guy in the white house know this primary campaign is not going to be waged about where democrats stand on things like abortion and marriage and voting rights but rather on where they stand on property and public ownership and workplace democracy and taxes much as they are out of practice journalists are just going to have to grapple with economics so far this hasn't gotten more granular than asking candidates if they call themselves democratic socialists we're going to have to do a whole lot better than that just as we need to get beyond the superficial celebration of a few abolitionist heroes to take a long look at the ideas and assumptions that underpin white supremacy and patriarchy so to we need to look at the lens through which we think about wealth conveniently the questions aren't all that different are our life choices and outcomes determined by ourselves alone in an objective world free of bias our successes affected by our individual character or also by social structures things like systemic privilege if the former a few reforms will do if the latter we need to shake things up donald trump is already throwing around invective about socialists at the very least we need history or economic history month to sort things out many would do much better than that though we need to take a long hard look at the ideology that underpins the system we call capitalism amat like it or not the clock is quite clearly ticking so if we have to have such a long campaign season