Tech Stories Out of Desperation – Sarah Rose Siskind 4/5

Sarah Rose Siskind and I talk about telling technology stories out of desperation—helping people see how inventions become meaningful, then disappear into ordinary life.

We move from Waymo, AI scribes, and the Sphere to global poverty, gratitude, and the case for celebrating human progress without pretending fear, tribalism, or nature have disappeared.

Transcript

Sarah: Being motivated by cuteness is weirdly not a bad motivation. Because it's a real feeling. It's not just aesthetic cuteness. The cuteness hits your soul.

Pablos: I didn't even know cuteness existed until I got with Blake. Sione's childhood is probably limited in some way by my lack of appreciation for cuteness.

Sarah: She's so cute now. She's great.

Pablos: She doesn't want me anyway. But Blake, her entire worldview is cuteness. Beauty or creativity or anything else is lost in her. Just cuteness.

Sarah: I would have totally looked down on that before having a kid. And then after having a kid, it's not just a visual thing. It's like a deep emotional, psychological thing. Because fundamentally cuteness is like something that needs your help a lot of the time. And that's a way to live a meaningful life. You're helping something.

Pablos: I think all that's true. And it's why we don't want to kill our kids.

Sarah: Wow. What a high bar, Pablo. You're a genius for not killing your kids.

Pablos: She was cute enough that she didn't get killed.

Sarah: You still don't deserve your daughter.

Pablos: Out of desperation. I just wanted so badly for people to see what I could see. These technologies, starting with the Apple II, could be meaningful for people. They had no conception. They had a good argument at the time. Apple II wasn't clearly a win. And so to be able to make that breakthrough and show people that this could help them was what drove me. And in some sense, I graduated from Apple II to nuclear reactors or whatever. But all along the way, I'm trying out of desperation to be able to get people to see what I see.

And you build a track record in some sense. I was right about Apple II. And I was right about everything since then.

In the sense that these technologies, as they develop, as we bring them to life, as they mature, as we get to have a real relationship with them, they do make things better. The way they make things better is when people just take them for granted. And we go through that cycle pretty quickly now. You can watch it happen in minutes in a Waymo. The first time somebody gets in a Waymo. It's incredible. They're like freaking out, holding on, like, holy shit, there's no driver. Watch this. And then five minutes later, they're just talking about where they're going for lunch. And you can just watch it.

We have a self-driving Tesla and we fucking love it. I just get in the car and I'm like, take me to Sandwich. And I just get on my phone, call people, watch YouTube, whatever I'm doing. I have no road rage. It's like having a chauffeur. But I think that you can see that transition once it goes from scary, new, and weird to take it for granted. You never quite get to the euphoria. It becomes mundane sometimes. And we don't celebrate. We never get to celebrate.

Sarah: That's exactly right. I want to celebrate. For example, nobody realizes we close the hole in the ozone. That was the existential issue of my childhood. We need a global pizza party. Because when I grew up as a kid, you would always have a pizza party. If, like, nobody did anything bad for a month, you'd have a pizza party. I think we need a global fucking pizza party. We banned CFCs. We closed the hole.

Pablos: We did it.

Sarah: But we suck. And you're totally right. People go from fear to mundane like that. Yesterday, I was at my OBGYN. She had been so resistant to AI for all of my pregnancies. I had come in for a year with her with a personalized question set from ChatGPT about my medical history. She hates me. Right? And now I go in. It's been a couple months since I've seen her. She's using an AI scribe. And she's like, I love it. Because I'm finally able to really talk to my patients without writing down what exactly is your blood type. I know I'll get it later.

And I was like, I've been trying to tell you this for a year, bitch. Most doctors know that Western medicine is amazing. It is very science-backed. It's very empirical. But we have specialties. And that's a trade-off. When you have specialties, you can go deep on an area of knowledge. But you're a bit siloed. And so we have this problem where the specialties don't really talk to each other. And to a hammer, everything's a nail. Everybody who's a hematologist thinks it's a blood problem. My OBGYN thinks I have a gynecological problem. Because I have this super bad anemia situation. And I can't get the two of them to talk. It's not a perfect expert.

But it's a really good expert in everything. And so it's holistic. It has that usefulness of Eastern medicine, which is very holistic. With all the benefits of Western medicine, which is all about specialties. And she was like, I never thought about it that way. That was like a tiny win I had.

I just try to stress that technology can be about connection, not atomization. I did a lot of work with the Sphere in Las Vegas. And I was consulting on the robots in the lobby. What tech they should use, what their personality should be. A little bit about the LLMs, but mostly about what they should be saying. I've been deeply inspired by all of you guys. This is how to tell the story of humanity and technology on a much bigger scale. And so I informed a lot of the robots in the lobby to tell this story. I'm really excited about it.

The point of the Sphere is that technology can atomize us. It can put us into our silos of our unique special interests, but it can also bring us together. And what is a better visual metaphor than the Sphere? It is the Earth. It is a way of including the most people in a space. It's literally the geometrical object that has the maximum volume for minimal surface area. It is a perfect metaphor for connection. And that is what a lot of technology is trying to do right now is actually bring us together, even though it has the capacity to do the opposite.

But I remember when I first used Skype, my sister was in Argentina for a year abroad and we had video calls. I Skyped with her in Argentina and my jaw was on the floor. My whole family, we were baking cookies at the time and we were like, “The only drawback is we can't give you a cookie right now. You can't smell them.” But I remember holding the cookie up to the camera and we had one of those clunky Skype add-on cameras. And I was just euphoric.

And I promised myself then, and I still hold this to myself now, I will never lose that gratitude, that appreciation. And that's the big difference between us and a lot of other people.

Pablos: Look, whoever you are, find one thing in the world that you're happy about, that humans made, that we created to make your life better or possible. And find a way to express some gratitude about it.

Sarah: A lot of therapy and a lot of meditation is trying to bring awareness to gratitude because of all of the humans that have ever been, we are so in the minority to be alive. The average person on planet Earth is middle class. We reached that milestone like 10 years ago. Nobody's talking about it. Extreme poverty, almost eradicated. There are problems in the world, no doubt, some even worse than they were before. But some of the biggest problems of humanity are now addressed. And nobody knows, nobody's talking about it, nobody's celebrating it.

And to your point, a lot of the time, we don't know the names of the inventors. We know Jonas Salk. But nobody knows the name of the person who came up with the RNA vaccine that helped cure COVID. And we should know that. We should celebrate them like we would celebrate Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin or Leonardo da Vinci. But nobody knows their names. Everyone hates Sam Altman. People want to just completely put down inventors wholesale instead of celebrating at least partway some of these inventions that are making humanity better.

Pablos: I think the lack of celebration—I'm as guilty as anyone, honestly. I remember reading this article one time. It was like a Rolling Stone interview or something maybe with Jay-Z. And he was describing how growing up in the hood, you celebrate every small win. You don't have a lot of other good stuff to pin things to. Kid down the street gets new sneakers. We're having a party. He literally said that. And I'm like, you've seen how many sneakers I got. None of them got a party. As soon as something good happens, I'm like on to the next thing. I don't think it's been a good thing for me and for my family and my friends.

I think we should have held on to celebrating small wins. If you don't do that, you're not going to be able to celebrate the big wins.

Sarah: This is why we need to take more psychedelics. Because it really does help you. I feel this with my baby because things like rolling over are celebrated. And so with children, I find that's a good inroad to appreciating health. I can't believe how coordinated my body is, how I don't think about walking at all. Through my child, I can appreciate my physiology. But it's much harder to appreciate the wins of humanity in some ways because it's less personal and direct.

It's just hard when I'm comparing myself to my social cohort and we're all thinking about, “Am I going to be able to retire easily?” And not as easily thinking about, “Wow, I never have to worry about being hot or cold.” Your experience going to India with those mission trips, my experiences with Habitat for Humanity style things. They help ground you or even just backpacking helps ground you in how abundant technology and progress has been. But I wish it was easier to remember.

Pablos: I think that one of the things I'm really excited about, if I extrapolate, we're going to be able to solve all the technical problems, the basic needs that people have. I've used like Maslow's hierarchy to show that we're going to be able to solve all these things. How do you feed people? How do you keep them alive and that stuff? And you would hope that the net effect of that would be okay. People can relax and just start working on being better people. We haven't evolved emotionally as much as we should.

Sarah: We're getting worse in some ways. I think we're so polarized. To be clear, there's way less violence. Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature. There's incredible data: we don't rape nearly as much anymore, which is great. We are way less prejudiced, I think. But there are these problems of unhappiness, like loneliness. Polarization in particular really bothers me that we've lost our ability for nuance. I almost feel like because we're less racist, our tribalism has instead become ideological. It's like this force that can't be quelled. It just goes other places.

Pablos: I think that's what sports ball is about. For a while I thought that what destroyed Europe was soccer. If you go to Europe, people are just watching soccer basically every day of the year. And I thought the reason America was dominating was because our sports are only seasonal. Football's really only for a couple months there. It's only like a dozen games or so. And then you're done. Whereas soccer is endless. But now soccer is infiltrating America. And I think it's going to be the downfall of Western civilization.

Sarah: Wait a second. I know why you think this. We live on the same block, listeners. And the amount of horrible tourists that have been on our street because of FIFA being in New Jersey. And we're close to Port Authority, which takes them across. I think this is why you think soccer is the downfall of humanity.

Pablos: That makes complete sense. But I actually had the opposite experience with FIFA and the Knicks game. I forgot which sport that is, but they just had it. And I went out on the street and people were three lanes deep with lawn chairs, watching the game in front of a bar. It was like this amazing sort of community vibe. I thought it was pretty, kind of like a sports bar in Europe watching soccer.

Sarah: Only seven buses lit on fire.

Pablos: No, I think it's sickening. And look, society is trending the wrong way in a lot of ways.

Sarah: I have a diagnosis for society. The small becomes the big. When I get really good news, sometimes I start freaking out. And I talked to the therapist about it and he called it an upper limit problem. But if anything brings us out, we try to bring it back. This is why people who win the lottery default back to their sort of median level of happiness. And I think that when humanity experiences something really good, it's unsustainable to be euphoric. We have to find ways to be like, yeah, but fire is not so great. And also like being comfortable with the AC, what's that doing for the environment? We have to bring it back down.

Pablos: I think that's exactly right.

Sarah: It sucks though, because if we were emotionally accurate, if our emotions represented, I think, logical thought patterns, I would be simultaneously, I would say 85% euphoric about AI, 5% panic. Oh my God, what's going to happen, if these things become sentient—5% absolute dead panic. And then 10% an extremely ambivalent grouping of emotions about the trade-offs. Maybe my bipolarity is helping me because I do feel a little bit like that. I think because I'm such a contrarian, I hardly ever feel panic. I do feel panic a little bit about my son and what world he'll grow up into because I just don't know.

Pablos: It's going to be amazing.

Sarah: Could you bet me five bucks on that so I can hedge?

Pablos: You get five bucks. Let's do it. Okay. Then life is amazing. There's going to be a lot of good stuff. Over the next 50 years.

Sarah: You don't pay me back.

Pablos: I'll pay in advance. Because I could kick it any day now.

Sarah: You have to be around for the amazing part.

Pablos: But I think our kids will be. And it's going to be an incredible transition. But a big part of the process of what I think of as civilization, the word itself means to become civil. We need to overcome those natural instincts and replace them with a better framework.

And we've done that. We're not stealing each other's food. And we're trying to provide for even our neighbors to have food. And so those are better instincts. Those are the better angels of our nature. And so they do develop over time. And it is a process. And it is slow. And we're not done. We'll probably never be done. But now is the time for us to learn how to manage screen time. And now is the time for us to learn how to have a functional relationship with AI. We're dealing with different challenges than our ancestors.

They had to make much greater sacrifices than we do to overcome these instincts. And I think that it's okay to acknowledge that. I think it's okay to say, look, we're not perfect yet.

We've mostly stopped doing arson. And we should be thankful and celebratory about that. And we should take heart that our kids and their kids are going to look back on us as “the primitive asshole.” And I think it's immoral to vilify them for the sacrifices they made so we could get here. And we'll be thrown under the bus of history eventually. But the job is for us to do the best we can at trying to evolve ourselves. And we have to use our minds to do it now because biology is too slow. I think it's okay in that sense.

And I think our kids are going to get a world of abundance that most people can't imagine at all right now. And they're going to have to grapple with that. It's going to bring out some shitty other aspect of humanity. But we're going to get through it. And I think that's the only way out is through.

Sarah: There's a great E.O. Wilson quote: “Medieval institutions, primitive minds, and godlike technology.” And the comparison of those three things really is a great diagnosis of all the problems. In terms of tech storytelling, nature is not necessarily better: the shape of the male penis. Why is the head like that? A lot of evolutionary biologists think it's to suck out the sperm from the previous person who raped that woman. That's the single worst thing I've ever heard in my life. There's no way to prove evolutionary theories true or false, but you can make a big case for it. And that is who we come from.

We shouldn't say, “Oh, we should be more natural. We shouldn't use technology,” because nature can fucking suck.

Transcript

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