“DO WE MAKE TECHNOLOGY OR DOES TECHNOLOGY MAKE US? EXPLORING TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM THROUGH RAY KURZWEIL”

UNITED Nations Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015 as a uni-versal call to action to end poverty and hunger, protect the planet, ensure inclusion, peace, and prosperity, all by 2030. Many people believe that this COVID global pandemic know make this unreachable, and actually, unreasonable. More-over, there are those who believe that this crisis provides an opportunity to reset the pathways, to achieving these global goals in new and previously unimagina-ble ways. What is certain, without active involvement across all borders and boundaries, neither Agenda 2030, nor Agenda 205, as set by the Paris Agree-ment is going to be capable of delivering wide-scale impact and results. So, we need to reach people in new ways that speak to them and offer this knowledge and vision in a form and content that allows them to engage. Enter stage right, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of many science fiction books and more important-ly, author of Ministry For The Future, a book that gives us a vision of an alterna-tive way of achieving a planetary, sustainable future. And how it might happen.

Claire:

I want to begin by saying that I fell in love with this book. How did you arrive at, The Ministry For The Future? Did you start with the science, or the story?

Stan:

I started with the story. I’ve been writing what you could call utopian science fiction, for almost 30 years. And taking different angles on it. But there were always angles, they were not hitting it head on, like where we are now and where we need to go. So, I thought let’s try that because I tried everything else. I read in the scientific literature, that when temperatures get high enough with humidity, you have what they call a wet bulb temperature, which is just an index of heat and humidity combined. People can’t survive it, they will die. Even if they’re indoors, even if they don’t have clothes on, even if a fan is blowing on them, their own internal temperature gets too high, and they die. So, you would need air conditioning and sometimes power systems go out when you need them the most. So this frightened me. It really did. I think it’s coming and I’m scared. Well, what can you say? The impulse of fright, the stimulus of fright that we’re headed towards a heat wave, mass death. Combined with an im-pulse of hope that if we did everything right, or if we did most things right, even against resistance, which is important. That you could get to a good place where you weren’t in that situation anymore. So that’s what I tried for.

Claire:

That is so really powerful. We know that science fiction storytelling, plays a role in how we anticipate and construct the future. All of your material is so thoroughly researched and well-grounded in science, from the politics of it to the sociology, to the brain chemistry -you could have written a great non-fiction book, but yet, it’s a story. What makes story really the best way to get these complex ideas across?

Stan:

Characters. And then, here’s what readers do when they’re reading fiction. It’s quite magical. It’s two science fiction powers that you’re given by reading fiction. One is time travel. You go to a different time and place, and you’re there. And the other is telepathy you’re in someone else’s mind and you can see how they’re thinking, and that is a rare quality in this life. And of course, both of these are our fictional experiences, but while you’re reading, if the novel has cap-tured you, fictional experiences can be extremely powerful. In nonfiction, you’re always outside it, you’re looking at facts and figures. It can be powerful, but not like fiction, when you have characters that you inhabit from inside.

Claire:

So that depending on who read the book, they’ll probably gone with something else. And that has its own, for me, complexity and beau-ty, but it’s like system thinking in a story. And the storytelling really does bring the futures to life. Would you say that from your perspec-tive, this particular story, because it’s so now, has it helped people to get more awareness of what it is we really are facing?

Stan:

I think so. Dystopian stories are more common. A story of us mak-ing it through in a realistic fashion, is an extremely rare. And then the title, The Ministry For The Future. Everybody who works for the generations to come, many people in this world already think they are part of some kind of Ministry for The Future. They see that title, they read the book. the response has been really good. I’ve writ-ten, about 25 books. Never have I gotten a response like this one.

Claire:

It’s like a book whose time was coming. I am actively an advocate for small island developing states (SIDS). There are 55 of them in the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), and, I really want to help advance this conversation on the need for futurist commissions, a real life Ministry For The Future in the SIDS. So, I wanted a scene about SIDS. What would you say about islands?

Stan:

The novel ‘Green Earth’ I wrote at the start of this century is about refugees from the Bay of Bengal, from the mouth of the Ganges, where their island,

Khembalung has gone under and is no more. So, they all moved to Maryland outside Washington, D.C., and inhabit a plot of land there. So, I have written that scene elsewhere. This is not my first climate fiction, but here’s the thing. The beaches of the world are doomed. The low-lying islands are doomed. One of the things I like about the Ministry for The Future is this plan to slow down the melting of the glaciers in Antarctica to slow down sea level rise. Sea level rise is going to happen, no matter how virtuous we are starting now, because the heat is already there and the sea is going to rise. Slowing down those glaciers is a huge step towards slowing down sea level rise to the point where we might be able to draw down enough carbon to reduce the danger, and maybe even save some of the beaches. Recently, Nature Magazine, in a 2018 ar-ticle evaluated that proposal in scientific detail, and said that it very well might work, and it’s not comparatively very expensive, and it has no negative repercussions. It’s geoengineering specific to Ant-arctica and Greenland. It doesn’t do anything to anybody else and it might save sea level. So, I’m even more excited now, about this, than I was when I wrote the book. Why? These things need to be discussed because we are going to have to try to save ourselves.

Claire:

As a geo-engineering critic, and a recent author of a book chapter on geo-ethics, I am curious about how we encourage dialogue about the need for a new way of thinking, a new global ethic through fic-tion. Your book really plays with that a lot. Let me ask you about the carbon coin, the central premise of the book. What kind of reception have you received over the carbon coin concept?

Stan:

Well, it’s been a broad band of responses. Some people trained in economics have said, that’s a good idea. There’s a group called, The Network for Greening the Financial System. It’s made up of 89 cen-tral banks including all the biggest central banks- Russia, China, U.S., European Union- working on recommendations of how you can change monetary policy to green the financial system. Money is crucial. You need capital to be invested in doing good things, rather than just keeping on exploiting the earth, and people, and making profit. This network put out a paper with nine recommendations for how they could do this. Now, is the carbon coin a symbol for these nine projects? Or is the carbon coin a 10th project, perhaps even more powerful than the other nine that they recommended? I can’t say for sure. I’m an English major. I read Delton Chen’s paper. I understood parts of it. I didn’t understand other parts of it, but I knew I could put it in a story.

Claire:

Well, it worked, because I am not a finance person either, even though I worked in international development and banking for all my life and my interest was piqued. I know some central banks are al-ready trying to play around with this idea of digital cash – like Bar-bados and the Bahamas. So, when you wrote, The Ministry for The Future, and you came across the Chen paper, you were inspired be-cause?

Stan:

I think money has to be coming from the Central Banks from gov-ernments so that people will trust it. Because money requires social trust. And if you have a cryptocurrency that has been made up by private individuals, it’s a private contract with people you don’t know, who might disappear. I don’t trust any of these cryptocurren-cies. I want ‘fiat money’, which is money made by Central Banks. Now, that can be digital, or it can be paper it’s not relevant. What’s important is it’s backed by the state. Delton Chen’s paper said that was so interesting, is that Central Banks will have to issue new mon-ey. Central Banks can make up several trillion more dollars, not a great huge amount compared to the world economy and give it to people who have sequestered carbon. So, instead of the gold stand-ard, you have the carbon standard. It’s not like money is just infinite, nor is it entirely fictional. It represents a ton of carbon that has been put in the ground or, that has been kept in the ground and, at that point, you’ve got one carbon coin. The value would float on the currency exchange, in Chen’s plan, and it would get a value by being backed by the Central Banks. It would never be pushed to zero or be just a game. It would represent real money.

And then people would say, I’m going to spend some money to se-quester carbon on my farm in the soil, or, I’m going to grow a forest in my backyard. They would have sequestered a ton of carbon, which gets them one carbon coin worth several thousand dollars. In-stead of spending money and losing it, you would actually be able to make a living by sequestering carbon. And we need a lot of carbon sequestration. Billions of tons of carbon have to come down out of the atmosphere. The more people are involved, and the more that you get paid for it to do it is the more it gets done. Rather than have to be virtuous, rather than have to give up your life and your living, you actually make your living. You have a job

which is bringing car-bon down. Well, to me, this flips from market capitalism where noth-ing matters but profit. To doing good work for the earth, and then you make your living at it. There’s not that many places in our social world where you can imagine one flip, changing a lot of things to-wards the good.

Claire:

The global carbon reward as Dr. Chen calls it, the basis for the car-bon coin in the book, do you think the public is ready for this carbon currency paradigm?

Stan:

Yes, I do. Everybody is feeling precarious. Many people are feeling doomed, and that the game is rigged against them. And that finance, and money, is this story of expropriation and of the rich exploiting the poor. One percent of the human population owns more wealth than the poorest 50% of people on the planet. The inequality and the inequity is stupendous. Even middle-class Americans, and everybody in America thinks of themselves as middle-class, but even they are precarious. They don’t have health care. They don’t have a pension. They can’t be sure that one disaster won’t wipe them out. We need a plan to turn money into a reward for doing good things for people and planet, rather than a reward for doing bad things. I think there would be broad support for policies and plans like that.

Claire:

You are correct. The needle of thought has to shift. This is why this book is important. It is helping to seed a more futures literate world. The Wales Futures Generation Commission is one of the groups that I’ve been watching, and they are something like a Ministry for The Future. So, people can read the book, and see there is a seed of an example in Wales already. If one wanted to set up a Ministry for The Future in real life, based on your research, what advice would you give people?

Stan:

I’ve learned more since I wrote the book but in chapter 85 in my book, there is a list of civil society organizations that already exist. At the government level, we have the example of Wales. They got legislation passed. In Ecuador, their forest has rights as a citizen. All around the world, you can find examples. That’s what I looked for when I was writing the book. Existing examples. There were prob-lems that they all have run into. Because, when you start taking fu-ture generations interests into your calculations, the calculations get harder. You get into discount rates, and technical stuff that impinge on every other department. So that suddenly, if you’re in govern-ment, with the ministry for transport, the minister for the education, and so on and I’m the minister for the future, what I say impinges on everybody else’s decisions. Nobody likes that.

Claire:

So, what we need is to have a paradigm shift where all the depart-ments of government have to internalize a future perspective. So, they aren’t competing against a Ministry for The Future that’s in their own government. They would have to internalize the principles of the future of ministry, into their own thinking and operations. Can that happen?

Stan:

Yes. It would take outrage and optimism, and any several of these advocacy groups. There’s power in numbers. What I would say is that you can find ways to persuade other kinds of decision-making groups to consider the future generations in everything that they do, and act accordingly. And that’s the thing that we haven’t been doing under the ordinary rules of profit. We’ve been discounting the future. We’ve been saying the future people can take care of themselves. They’ll be richer than us, all kinds of things that aren’t quite true. We need this change of values of taking the future into account. What happened at Bretton Woods to create the financial order we’re in? What is a carbon coin, et cetera? I was thinking blueprint, but then, because the book is a novel. I hung these all these possibilities from the spine of the story of Mary and Frank, the two main charac-ters. Their story takes up maybe 30% of the text and the rest of it are eyewitness accounts of good things happening or bad things happening which are examples that kind of looks like a map of the future landscape of our world.

Claire:

I see how Ministry for the Future presents a possible blueprint. One could deconstruct it, and back-cast a course of action. This certainly will serve as a propaganda bible for me, because we’re only four years away from 2025, when your story starts, and at the end of the book, it does not really end. The Ministry for the Future continues.

Stan:

It seemed to me important to say, it’s not going to come to an end. We won’t solve all the problems, not in our lifetime, not in our chil-dren’s lifetime. It will keep going on. And yet, you can still call it a good history, if we dodge the mass extinction event, if we get a han-dle on carbon, if we can bend the arc towards justice, then hand the baton on. Novels have endings, but history doesn’t have an ending.

Claire:

Stan, I just want to ask you one last question. What is your secret hope about, for this book, for readers of this book?

Stan:

I hope it helps people to see we can make a positive future, even given the nasty situation that we’re in right now. I wrote this in 2019. It was a dark time. The book suggests terrible things would have to happen like a heat wave in India, before we would get a grip and start working hard enough. Well, here’s one hope, I’m thinking that the pandemic slapped us in the face and has made us realize that we’re in one world, one civilization, and we have to act. Since the novel came out, I’ve learned that this seems to be happening way faster than I presented. So, one hope I would have is that peo-ple look at this book and say, well, it’s a very pessimistic book com-pared to what we really did. And maybe the book will have been one tiny shoulder to the wheel push, towards that better future.

Claire:

Kim Stanley Robinson thank you so much for this very insightful conversation on the world, and this powerful vision that is the Minis-try for The Future. Until the next time, as we say, in Jamaica, walk good and safe journeys.