So, welcome everybody for this second day of the workshop, Mechanisms and Antique Closetion in Life Sciences, the second workshop of the Loneco Life Group. We have the pleasure this morning to have the first candidate, Hazel Wood, our first speaker, that will give us a talk entitled, Unbearable Lightness of Intervening a Realist Metaphysics of Manifestivity Theories of Closetion. Thank you very much. Thank you, Alexandre and Charles, for organizing. Really happy to be here. Had a great couple of weeks at Le Van de Neuve. So, I'll begin by just saying that this is a collaboration with Yasmin Haddad. It's an especially fun one because it's a bespoke paper for this conference. We were really interested in the call for submission, so I just bring all of our attention to it, to remind us of it. So, the premise here is that interventionism as a theory of causation is ontologically thin or ontologically light, or I'm going to be using metaphysically light, ontologically thin. I'm going to be using these terms interchangeably. So, if anybody wants to quibble about the nuances between them, I don't want to do that. So, just understand that I mean the same thing. So, a lot of sort of heavy duty metaphysicians have complaints about the theory of causation called interventionism or under some other manipulationist banner. On the grounds that it's just strictly methodological. We'll talk about this more, but a lot of causal talk in the sciences and the philosophy of sciences, especially, has this heavier causal language. And so, we wanted to ask well what does happen if we were to take seriously this more metaphysically heavy language in the context of interventionism. So, today first I'm going to talk about interventionism and its metaphysical lightness and this should be, you know, pretty familiar stuff to everybody. And then I'm going to introduce what Woodward, James Woodward, calls as modest realism. And then I'm going to talk about Asok Chang's recent and comparatively immodest realism. That's my tongue-in-cheek term for it, not his. And then I'll show by putting these two together some interesting things fall out and then I'll use a brief case study of downward causation as an example of where we're going to get different verdicts in terms of the metaphysical robustness of the causal explanation. And the upshot that I'd like for you to take away here today is that by combining Chang and Woodward, Woodward's interventionism and Chang's realism, Yasmin and I get what we believe is we get this metaphysically heavy language about causation while being able to maintain our commitment to scientific practice. And we think this is a good thing. We think that it's good to not stray away from metaphysical language, from realism language and we think that Chang gives us a really nice arsenal to do that, a really nice toolbox to do that. And I'll also say that just as a hat tip, what I'm about to talk about, that tells very nicely with what Ray Lin and what Jonathan talked about yesterday. I think these two frameworks are very compatible. So first, a brief recapitulation of interventionism. It's a theory of causation establishing that causal relations can be exploited for manipulation and control. Now a key feature of interventionism is that cause and effect can be represented by variables. This is a stipulation for Woodward this has to happen. You've got to be able to represent the causal variable, the cause and effect, the causal rilada as variables. And according to Woodward in Making Things Happen, we say that x causes y if a change or manipulation and x causes or triggers or I like to say wiggles, a change in the value of y where x and y are properties that can be represented by variables. This is of course like a behemoth of a book distilled into one sentence, but this is the gist. There are all kinds of qualifying things that have to be taken into consideration when you start talking about independent fixability and invariance and stability and proportionality, but we don't need to get into all of that. The key is just to note that interventionism helps us sort of pick out causal relations by representing the causal rilada as variables and seeing if there are corresponding wiggles between those variables. Now by contrast, most accounts of causation, the ones that we know from our philosophy of science courses like David Lewis's for instance, or any other sort of metaphysically heavier accounts of causation taken to be distinct entities or events. And on those accounts, it's not just a matter of finding the causal relationships. It's a matter of being able to explain their nature, being able to determine the ontology, the true nature of causal relationships and what all causal relationships have in common. What is it that makes it a causal relationship versus something else? And so critics of interventionism who adopt these kind of metaphysically richer accounts of causation or aspire to provide one often state that it is metaphysically or ontologically light because it's an epistemic solution to the problem, right? It does not provide this ontology of causes that we're looking for. It does not give us a picture of the way the world really is. It shows us when causal relationships are happening, but it doesn't show us what's really going on. We don't get to look under the hood, so to speak. Good. And Woodward, you know, is okay with this. He argues for the methodological strength of interventionism. And he thinks that the methodological project is in and of itself valuable. He says that interventionism does not need to be tangled up in the metaphysics of causes to be worthy of being pursued. If you see the sort of flavor of his strategy, of his response here, he's willing to sort of sidestep metaphysics altogether. So he said in a recent paper that this is admittedly a thin notion of causation, both metaphysically or otherwise. I love this. He says for X to cause Y, it is not required that there be a continuous process running from X to Y that X transmit energy or Biff or Oomph or anything similar. Nor is it required that X and Y are variables that occur in some fundamental theory drawn from physics. These are often the kinds of things that those metaphysically richer adherents are looking for. And then in his entry on Maniculability Theories of Causation in the Stanford Encyclopedia, he says one complain is that if a counterfactual is true, it must be true in virtue of some truth-maker. Counterfactuals can't just be brute facts. They can't just be barely true, right? They've got to be true in virtue of something. And if they are true in virtue of something, something like laws of nature and possible worlds and initial conditions or marked transmissions or causal processes in the salmon sense or whatever, if they're true in virtue of some metaphysically richer thing, then we can eliminate interventions, right? Interventions help us epistemically find the thing to be explained by that metaphysically richer vocabulary, but he says appealing to interventionist counterfactuals is ultimately not necessary on this view once we take the account of these truth conditions seriously. Now his reply is to advocate for a kind of modest realism, but this modest realism has taken different shapes over the past few years and it's interesting to see how it has evolved. So at times he's offered this sort of modest realism where he says that it's the assumption that the difference between those relations that are merely correlational and those that are causal has its source out there in the world. So in his more optimistic moments Woodward is thinking, well, you know, these causal relationships do exist out there in the world and maybe interventionism can't explain whatever is deeply metaphysical about them, but it can pick out bona fide causal relationships and distinguish them from non-causal relationships. But more recently he's been rather pessimistic, rather cynical about metaphysics altogether in 2017 in a chapter where he engages in a dialogue with a fictional professor metaphysico. He says to professor metaphysico, I think it is worthwhile to do things that are of merely pragmatic interest. Philosophers such as Judea Pearl aren't trying to make contributions to metaphysics, capital M note. They are trying to do something else and similarly for me, you can do metaphysics and I'll do what interests me. And it goes on, it's a very entertaining dialogue and professor metaphysico is meant to be a caricature of an analytic metaphysician at a well-ranked philosophy department and Woodward is not shy about communicating his feelings about this kind of philosophy. So our question, Yasmin, my question is, okay, well, Woodward at times seems to be okay with a sort of scientific realism where the reason interventionism works is because it's tracking something real. Other times he just seems to sidestep and to shoot metaphysics altogether. So we want to know is there a heavier or thicker account of metaphysics available for interventionism? Is there a way that we can sort of marry this commitment to practice that interventionism has but also outfit it with a theory of metaphysics that allows us to say, yes it is metaphysically robust, yes it is metaphysically rich, yes it is real, we need not shy away from that kind of language. It's not just the Louisians and the sort of analytic metaphysicians who get this real estate. And that's why I turned to Chang's immodest realism compared to Woodward's modest realism. And I say immodest with nothing but admiration and respect for what he's done in this book, realism for realistic people. So in this recent monograph, in short, he defends an unflinchingly pragmatic account of realism. And for Chang, a concept picks out something real if the concept is central to the success of what he calls an operationally coherent activity or operationally coherent practice. Well, of course, we've got to define what is an operationally coherent practice. And he says it's a hermeneutical notion concerning a pragmatic kind of understanding, an understanding of how to do something. What is operationally coherent is what makes sense for us to do and sense here is framed by our aims. That's, to me at least when I first read it, a bit of a headscratcher. But you read through some of his examples, specifically his examples about phlegiston and caloric, right? We start to get a sense of what he's doing. So here's a simple example of operational coherence. Imagine that I want to determine whether putting the block of ice that I have over the fire is followed by the block of ice melting into water. I'm going to avoid using causal relationships here because, of course, that's what's at issue. So all I want to know is if I put this block of ice over that fire, will the block of ice melt? If I want to determine whether this correlation exists, it does make sense given my aims for me to take the block of ice and put it over the fire. But it does not make sense for me to take the block of ice and put it over another block of ice, right? Given what it is that I want to know. So this former practice, putting it over the fire, is operationally coherent. It makes sense given my epistemic aim to do what I'm doing, whereas putting it over the block of ice, putting one block of ice on another block of ice, does not make sense. It's operationally incoherent. If my target, if my epistemic aim is figuring out if this correlation exists. Right, so operational coherence just means that, you know, if I want to figure out whether x does something, then it doesn't make sense to do anything other than x. That practice would be operationally incoherent, given my epistemic aim. Okay, now obviously that opens up a lot of doors for things that can be operationally coherent, and that's a bullet that Chang's willing to bite, and we can talk about that later if you'd like. But of course the question at hand is what does any of this have to do with realism, right? And Chang's going to say, well, realism for realistic people means that recognizing the entities, concepts, and processes that are central to these epistemic activities as real. So in this case, we ought not to doubt the reality of the block of ice, the fire, or the act of placing the block of ice over the fire, or, spoiler alert here, the ensuing correlation that occurs when the block goes through a phase change over the fire. But of course the interlocutor asks, well, yes, fine, why should we call these entities the processes real? You might say, well, look, the block of ice appears as such to me, it appears real, but is it really a block of ice? Or is it really something else, such as a collection of subatomic particles arranged block of ice-wise, right? And this already starts to reflect the kind of dialectic that you see Woodward engaging in, right? Because you can imagine just replacing block of ice with cause and subatomic particles with sort of loss of nature, right? Is it really a causal relationship, or does it just appear to me as a causal relationship? Chang's answer is unequivocal. Yes, the entity picked out by our concepts really is a block of ice. It may also be an arrangement of chemicals and elements and subatomic particles, among other things, but it is also a bona fide block of ice, right? He's going to be very pluralistic about this. Why? Well, because we experience it as a block of ice. It's featuring in our operationally coherent practice as a block of ice. And here he invokes William James, right? So he's being, again, an unclenchable pragmatist. He says, the source of truth is experience, and it's futile to entertain any more grandiose notion. His metaphysics here is complete and relentless empiricism. Empiricism recognizes experience as the ultimate source of learning and refuses to acknowledge any higher epistemic authority. Very grand sentence. Well, that's all well and good, the interlocutor may say, but our experience is deeply informed by the concepts that we impose on that very world that we experience, right? So my experience of the block of ice melting over the fire is very much contingent upon the concepts that I, an embodied conscious agent, have constructed or inherited. And there is no reason to expect that my concepts should track the mind-independent, numinal world, right? Again, Alexander made the point yesterday that it's fun to watch philosophy of science. Just sort of, I'll be, you know, put notes to cotton as well, and as he, you know, sort of aligns himself with the Kantians here in talking about transcendental idealism. But right, so this is the kind of objection you might get from the analytic metaphysician to somebody like Woodward, right? Yeah, okay, interventionism shows us what look to be causal relationships, but are we really, is this really tracking what's going on under the hood? Is it tracking what's the sort of deeper metaphysical explanation? Chang's not worried about this, though. He writes that operational coherence is the anchor of the kind of realism that pragmatists and empiricists in general can embrace. So this, I think, is a very smart move, and I think it distinguishes him from other accounts that just sort of stipulate, well, look, we ought to just be realists. We should say that's real, right? And then we sort of get into it back and forth about what is real or what isn't real. He sort of throws down the gauntlet and says, look, any other kind of realism, one that is not grounded in our experiences and practices, is intractable, it's unavailable for scientists and philosophers who aspire to learn truths about the world they inhabit. And so he's here suggesting, he's here making a semantic move. He means to, it's kind of an ameliorative project, but not an ameliorative project for sort of the lay folk. It's an ameliorative project for philosophers. He wants to improve our use of the concept realism. And he says, he's proposing a change in what we mean by the very word real. He's not proposing operational coherence just as an indication of metaphysical reality, in the way that many scientific realists, realist arguments often work, like the No Miracles argument, for instance. Rather, he says, it's about what we mean by something being real. And he suggests there isn't anything else that being real means in an operational sense. It just means these concepts are central to our operationally coherent practices. So a concept picks out something real if the concept is necessary for the success of some aim-oriented operationally coherent practice. He immediately, of course, has to, to bite the bullet that reality will come in degrees, right? Because the more operationally coherent practices that feature into the X, the more real into the X is going to be. And this allows me to make sense of my demarcating intuitions to say things like, okay, fine, Hassach, you know, black bile might be real, but surely, like, hemoglobin is more real, right? And he's going to say, yeah, that's right. Well, why are we permitted to say this? It's because concepts such as black bile were at one time central to operationally coherent practices that have been superseded by practices that rely on concepts such as hemoglobin. And it makes sense for us to talk about hemoglobin. It makes more sense for us to talk about hemoglobin than it does to talk about black bile, given our aims. And therefore, we have to see hemoglobin as a better, more practical, and therefore, more real way of carving up the world. It doesn't mean, of course, that the grand march of scientific progress is going to relegate black bile to the netherworld of pseudo-scientific fictions, right? Where we say, okay, well, now we've got it. Now we've got the right picture. They were wrong. Thank you for your services, but now we've got the right picture of the metaphysical world. On Chang's account, when Galen drew blood into a vial and observed it stratifying into four different columns, it really was the case that the darkest, densest column at the bottom was black bile. But something being really the case is not a binary predicate in Chang's hand. It's really the case that Galen's dark column was black bile, and it's even more really the case that Galen's dark column is the sedimentation of red blood cells, right? So, of course, the metaphysician has a worry here. And it's that this is prima facie incompatible with one's belief that science and philosophy are oriented toward the truth. How can it be? I'm going to be pluralists about this. I said Galen was right about black bile, but my physician is right about red blood cells. Is Chang really arguing for such a radical, constructive picture of reality, one wherein we are able to legislate how the world is? And has he diluted the concept of what is real such that it is now just, it just hangs on nothing more than humankind's classictory whims? Well, at this point it's helpful to introduce his distinction, I think a very helpful distinction between mind framing and mind control. So mind control refers to the phenomenon that plays a role in the plot of science fiction and fantasy novels. The ability to control what happens in the external world with one's mind. So for instance, here's Hassan Chang controlling a cheeseburger with his mind. That would be really pretty cool. But unfortunately, that's not what he means. This is not what our scientific concepts do. Not even those who are vindicating, such as Galen's black bile, of course. Our scientific concepts are mind controlled, or not mind controlled, I'm sorry, but mind framed. And mind framing refers to the way that we observe, experience and describe and categorize reference that exists out there in the world. And so black bile is mind framed but not mind controlled. The concept picks out something real to an extent, because it tracks an observable entity with certain properties that behaves again to an extent according to some theoretical framework. But the good behavior of this concept eventually is going to break down. And we can't control that. We cannot will it to afford us better predictions of infection and disease than it actually does. The constraints of the concept are imposed by the world, not the observer. And as such, it is surely inevitable that other concepts will come along, concepts such as those that are central to the germ theory of disease. And those concepts, those new concepts are going to bring along with them a suite of operationally coherent practices that afford us better explanations and predictive power. Just noting that I've said before that nature can push back, I like this metaphor, nature can push back on a concept and render it unsuccessful. And to look for a phenomena that aren't understood through this kind of co-constructed, co-constrained relationship between the researcher and nature really ignores the undeniable role that scientists play in the features that they choose to emphasize in the way they frame their concepts. And so, you know, this came up yesterday. Okay, great, but why don't we just call this instrumentalism constructivism? You know, maybe I ought to just admit that people like myself and Chang are in the business of engineering concepts that do a better job of helping us navigate the world, but they're not helping us gain purchase on the mind independently. And I think, helpfully, here, Chang just looks back to Goodman and says, you know, it's true that our concepts are not asymptotically approaching the mind and independent world, but that by no means entails they're merely fictions. I think a great way of putting it is that for him, realism for realistic people is as real as it gets. And we make the world, we make versions of the world through our experience, our experiences, our epistemic touch point to what there really is. And there will be no access to the world unmediated by experience. And therefore, as far as our naturalized philosophy should be concerned, there can be no reality beyond that which we can observe or interact with and talk about. So, briefly, as I promised a case study, to apply this to interventionism, if you take those morals, right, these morals of sort of a radical empiricism about reality and you apply that to interventionism, well, it seems like it gives Woodward sort of metaphysically sturdy legs to stand on because we get to say, well, we get to say, for instance, that the causal relationships that are picked out by interventionism are very important for operationally coherent practices, namely, all of the experimental sciences, right. And it's interesting to see how different kinds of, different treatments of interventionism then will spit out different verdicts in cases such as downward causation. So, this is a diagram from Jagwan Kim that we're all probably very familiar with, but the idea is at the lower level you have physical events causing physical events and at the higher level, potentially, question mark, mental events causing mental events. The double arrow is the supervenience relationship. And the question is, if there are genuine causal processes happening down here at the physical level, and we assume there are, then is it possible to say that the mental event at time one causes an event at the physical level, at the lower level at time two. Well, the metaphysical purist argues that this is in principle impossible, right. Why? Well, because the causal closure of the physical world and the absence of over determination in nature. These are a couple of principles that are often thrown around in defense of this idea that there can be no downward causation. And the appearance of downward causation just reflects a weakness in our causal concepts. But, you know, given these two metaphysical principles, there can be no downward causation. And this resistance abounds in biology. So, for example, Alex Rosenberg has written that downward causation is a commitment intolerable to developmental molecular biology. Now contrast that with a recent paper by Woodward in 2021 called downward causation defended. He uses several examples, the action potential being a favorite, but I want to talk about frequency dependent fitness because I think this is just such a beautiful and frankly, pretty clear example. But let's say I intervene on a population such that I make it overwhelmed with these red butterflies who are Batesian mimics. They are mimics of the butterflies in this little blue slice. By doing that, I've given the butterfly a fitness W. And then time passes and because the population's been overwhelmed with mimics, the birds catch on pretty quick and that's not good for the mimics. So they start to eat all the mimics and then the actual unpalatable birds, butterflies start to dominate the population. Well, this is going to improve the fitness of the mimicking butterflies because now they're a bit safer. Now, doesn't it just make sense to say that, well, we wiggled the variation in trade frequency here and there's a corresponding wiggle in the individual's fitness at time two. According to Woodward, you've got this intervention at time one corresponding to legally time two and if what you're looking for are just these kinds of causal relationships and on Chang's account, that's real, right? That is a metaphysically robust thing. There is downward causation. We can talk about that more. I just got the bomb. But the idea here is that Chang's framework, it's going to outfit interventionism, I think, with a set of metaphysically sturdy legs. Using interventionism to determine causal relationships isn't operationally going to practice if there ever was one. It's all over the sciences. And this is what it means for something to cause something else and countless scientific frameworks. It's not because our concept of causation is mind control, but because it's mind framed. Thanks very much. Question, comments. Yeah, so this was very cool. I have a comment about the way that you kind of pitched this and packaged it as a move away from a light metaphysics towards a heavy or immodest metaphysics. And when I hear happy or immodest, I would apply those terms to maybe what the hardcore scientific realists, like the traditional realists would present, or maybe what a hardcore analytic metaphysician would present. And I think I kind of get why you apply these terms to Chang's position in a way, because if Chang is right, this is the best that you can do. Anything beyond that that goes like the traditional scientific realist route or the analytic metaphysician route, like you can call that heavy or immodest, but like he would say what they're trying to do is impossible. So like this is the best thing that you can do. But at the same time, I just feel like slightly weird about labeling his view like a heavy view or an immodest. Cool. Great. Yeah, thanks. No, I think that's that intuition is I share it. And it's something that deserves some discussion in the paper version of this. But it's kind of in the spirit of what Chang's trying to do, right, which is like to retool the terms and to change the standards. And that feels, I just like, I like how provocative that move is, I guess. And if you think about it, right, the man is saying that phlegiston is real. So there's something pretty metaphysically heavy about that if you spend it the other direction. So I think you're exactly right. I think just framing it that way requires a little bit of explanation for the choice. Thanks. I think a problem with Chang's view, I think there is a problem with Chang's view. If it means that we can't say, oh, look, we got it wrong. This thing that we thought existed actually doesn't. And this other thing exists. And saying that we always get it right to some extent. As in there really is no such thing as black. And there really is no such thing as black fine. Yeah. Right. Well, right. So I think what he wants to do, right, is say that something like, okay, there's really no such thing as black bile, but is there really such a thing as red blood cells? Yeah. Right. So that's our intuition. We want to really say that we want to hold on to that. Of course, the pessimistic meta induction argument is immediately available. But also, just to say that the kind of thing that we're doing with red blood cells is exactly the kind of thing that was being done with black bile. And we're doing it better because the concept is better. It does a better job for our practices. But it's still a mind-framed concept. In the same way that black bile is a mind-framed concept. It's just framed in such a way that it affords us better predictions. The answer is yes. It's impossible to say that something does not exist completely. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. And you don't think that that is a problem? Well, you know. I mean, aren't many scientific advances about just proving the existence of things with previous things or existing things? Yes, but again, I think what's really interesting about this take is that it emphasizes the conceptual ladenness of anything we discover or disprove. So I think what Chang is doing is noting the scientific hubris that is involved with saying, ah, well now we've got genes, right? We didn't have them before, but now we've got them. Even the negative claim. Oh, now we know that it still does not exist. And it says, no, we don't. But yeah, that's the project. Well, yeah, absolutely. Is project, is it that? Yeah, no, I mean, it's intentionally being very provocative there. But I think it is to elicit exactly the kind of uncomfortable intuition that you're feeling and say, well, yeah, it's because he wants to reject this idea that we can keep going along saying, oh, we've got it wrong the last, you know, how many times, but this time we've got it. It's just that things are actually on this sort of empiricist spectrum and we are getting better and better in terms of our ability to afford predictions. But if we survive as a species, then probably we'll have concepts some time from now that do even better and are more real than red blood cells, right? On Chang's view. That's it? Well, I very much like the project and you had me on board throughout the talk. Excellent. The end of the talk hit me completely unexpectedly, which means that I would love to continue listening to you for much longer. But somebody left me with the unexpected ending was sort of, well, now where's the metaphysics? I mean, obviously, you're saying something about the reality of demonization. Yeah. And I think the argument is very compelling and very interesting. I just wonder is there going to be more metaphysics than just the claim that downward causation is real in that light sense you're elaborating? Right. So in other words, are you have any further thoughts that bring in well-known metaphysical categories such as event or process or possibly world or whatever? Perfect. So is that already the end of the project? And the goal of the project was just to establish the reality of demonization and elaborate the exact sense or is there more metaphysics to come? That's my question. Perfect. Thank you for that question. And it's something we discussed in the paper. The beauty of Cheng's framework is the pluralism, right? So interventionism and scientific endeavors are not the only operationally coherent practices. There are metaphysically operationally coherent practices. There are operationally coherent practices that metaphysical, the analytic metaphysicians use. They don't apply as often or as reliably to experimental science and as such will not be in the scientist's toolkit. Something like possible worlds is not going to be in the scientist's toolkit as readily as something like interventionism will be. But events in possible worlds and all of these things can feature and operationally coherent practices and therefore can also be on metaphysical par with interventionism. I think what's great about this approach is that we get a pluralism from that and now the question is not about which metaphysical picture is real or not real is metaphysically heavy or metaphysically light. The question is about what is relevant to your epistemic aim? Are you trying to just identify a causal relationship in which case interventionism is going to be a perfect metaphysical solution? What relationship is that which is picked out by Woodward's methodology? Or are you trying to determine, say, a mechanism for it, in which case if that's your explanatory target, then interventionism would be operationally incoherent to use interventionism to explain the mechanism because interventionism isn't designed to do that. So we can have more metaphysics if we want a different explanatory scope. But the other metaphysics are not at the expense of interventionism, I think. Does that make sense? Yeah, great. Kevin, a short question, short last question. Yeah, I wanted to go back. Thanks a lot, by the way. I read that whole project and I will go on with it as well. I wanted to go back to the question of localization and tolerance and how you can go back from that with metaphysics because one of the witness of the book is the one which has objection, but it was too quickly on that. And he was really to say that you should not put more, put a raised weight on the scientific beliefs that since he lacks a matrix to define how you should compare to a project, that's kind of written. One of the witness of the book that there is no matrix is how it's more successful and how it's more successful in general practice. And the concept of differential equivalence is too weak to allow a strong demarcation point, I think. So I wonder if you had some insight of that on how you should differentiate between the metaphysics that you should if written is true from science and the one from the science and how you should demarcate it. Yeah, that's a great question. That's a really great question. Right. That's a huge, big question for me to handle. Here I would love to discuss it with you later, but I think the first thing to say would just be you don't just want to do like absolute numbers, right? You don't just want to say, well, more scientists are using interventionism than philosophers are using mechanisms. So, but I think one thing we can at least get away with saying is there should be no question, at least comparatively, that interventionism is so central that we can hear it in practices. How to put them together, how to compare them, whether they can be put in commensurate measurements, I genuinely don't know and I have to think about it a lot more. Thanks. Thank you again, our speaker.


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John Wise here again with Comic Gettin bringing you another an old 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figure this time I choose Sakiya Jumbo the original baddy rabbit So here we have Usakiya Jumbo in his 1988 form I believe Now this is a weird figure here in and of itself because Usakiya Jumbo was known in the comics before he was Ever appeared on the Ninja Turtles cartoon series, but he did become popular until he appeared on the Ninja Turtles series Okay, now I bring that up because this particular figure looks nothing like The character from the comics or the cartoon series So I'm not exactly sure why they chose this particular appearance But they did so let's go ahead and go over All the cool little details paint jobs and articulation on this guy before I go over the accessories Okay, first off you can tell right away that he looks like one tipped off a rabbit We got the long years here tied With the little band that's kind of traditional of Usakiya Jumbo He has this one White eye over here for some reason The rest I remember the rest of the figure being pretty much the same We have samurai pads and samurai outfit Again not the attire we even saw him in in the cartoon animated series or the comic book So kind of weird We have a weird drawstring here that he would normally have assumed would wear If wearing a Samurai helmet, which he's not wearing he did in order he come with it Again really work, but we have the samurai pads. We've got the samurai Wisps back in Sierra knee pads now these were infamous for breaking off Kids would take them off. So it's really hard to find an Usakiya Jumbo figure With the pads still attached. So and these are glued in He has the black belt here. We have the pink pants as well as the sandals White bunny feet going around We've had unpainted strap here Which I'm not exactly sure what that strap is supposed to be holding up There's nothing on the front. So it's still a detail that I guess wasn't really necessary But is there anyway? Articulation wise pretty much your standard Ninja Turtle articulation in the 80s had moved right to left Arms moved up and down Most turtle figures their wrists move this one was weird as one arm for arm moved Right right to left the other one had a really weird Movement Yeah So and it made for his wrist doesn't move either probably be so bad for his wrist also moved, but it doesn't Just the elbow area Which and I'll show you this It made for posing him with cool with weapons cool His legs of course move the eyeball joint And he did come with a large array of weapons. He came with multiple he came with two different swords a dagger a Bladed staff and of course your standard like throwing stars and stuff like that. I have three out of those weapons I have the little dagger And I'm sorry the the middle sword not the dagger. I had the full blade sword and I have the staff The staff fits best in this hand here. I'm assuming maybe this is why his Articulation on this is the way it is so you can pose him with the staff like oops It's really hard Yeah, so it's really hard to give him to hold anything The right way So Yeah, I don't know The staff can pose here to help Keep him standing You can pose him with either sword in either hand But you'll see what I mean here when I say it makes it look awkward There we go now one sword This is like this or if you have his arm down like that, but you can't really bend it any further This one's okay because you can you know that way So yeah But with the Casey Jones review I've recently did plus you suck your jumbo figure these two or some of them work up With my favorite action figures growing up as a kid Turtles why so I ended up going on eBay and buying Usaki here making sure that I got the one with the full Samurai pads there They also made a another version Space Usaki ojimbo and at first I wasn't aware of what I wasn't I wasn't sure why they made that figure He never appeared in the anime series. It turns out that in the comic books Usaki did go to space and That was what they were based in a figure on except he basically had the same head just with a little bit of cybernetic gear on so again the figure wasn't an appearance based on a The comic book or the anime series. It's just their own design I don't know if they couldn't just get the rights to the designs or what but yeah So there we go though. We have the original Usaki ojimbo So thanks for tuning in. Hey guys if you liked this video make sure you smash that subscribe button and click on the little bell To receive notifications on all our upcoming videos hit the like button make sure and leave us a comment So we know how you felt about this video and don't forget to share with your family and friends until next time I'm Shannon come again. We're all geek culture collides


Good morning Good morning, will do a Salamat buggy This is our external brain It's our second brain and for some of our kids is the first brain Now this is going to move here and That's going to move here and then if Elon Musk has his way It's going to move here This machine will be a million times as powerful as it is today in ten years and the battery will last six weeks and We'll have nine billion people on the internet in 2030 the numbers are staggering So I'm going to talk to you about what technology means today Where things are going and I always like to say technology is going to change more in the next 20 years Than the previous 300 years. I know it sounds crazy. You know industrial revolution World War two the atomic bomb Right, but now technology is changing us Genomic engineering change in the weather Artificial intelligence thinking machines That's quite different than a steam engine Or or the railway So we're moving into a world where this is the new normal humans talking to machines Machines overlapping in our tasks machines telling us what to do Machines running our elections just kidding. I was different time But the question is how far do we want to go with this? I Mean if you can be superhuman, would you not want to be superhuman? I mean, I'm German But I spent 17 years in the US and The answer is pretty clear for a lot of people. Yeah, but I can be like becoming like God so to speak Yeah, I can be superhuman Why not and guess what it will make a lot of money to be superhuman I mean, it's clear you're going to be having advantage. So who decides what is the right thing to do? We're living in a world of algorithms An algorithmic society that's money is going digital right algorithm society We're living in a world where machines can do some of the thinking where the data economy is king, right? Some people call that the surveillance economy and Imagine when money goes digital we're gonna have even more of this and Then there's the things that on the other side. I call them the andro rhythms in my book the human things When we talk about intelligence with humans, we're not talking about processing power We're talking about emotional intelligence social intelligence Did you know that the research has shown that emotional intelligence is mostly embodied by women? today in a much larger way than men I Think Jack Ma said, you know, that's our future is to get the EQ and Psychologists have said that humans have about ten different kinds of intelligence and what kind of intelligence does a machine have? We'll talk about that later in our discussion. A machine has a binary intelligence zeroes and ones Data figures logic This is our intelligence. I Don't want the machine that does this and Why do we need it? We are very good at this compassion emotions creativity machines are not So here's the thing of course, you know that Basically replacing humanity makes a lot of money Look at the profits of big tech the most powerful companies in the world today are not banks or oil companies their tech companies and They're also the most unregulated Right Incidentally, so very powerful. What's happening here? I mean the stats are really quite clear We have algorithms technology and then we have and rhythms purpose curiosity passion imagination. That's what what defines us And what is the overlap? Will we still have passion or purpose when things are run by a machine? I Always say, you know relationships aren't downloads and happiness is not on a screen. I Mean, it's funny these days people have more relationships with their screens and they have with people I mean, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about here So I like to you know as a summary saying for this part of my presentation I think societies are driven by that tech and their science But defined by humanity imagine a society that is driven by technology But has no humanity in the sense of ethics values ideas what we want, right? That would be extremely scary So that's something we have to think about which way we're going and many people are arguing that humans are essentially technology We can take a vote on this later But you know being German, I don't believe that I live in Switzerland now same difference But in the US I keep hearing this argument organisms are algorithms We are fancy computers So in that case convergence of the two doesn't really touch us a lot of people say that this is basically what's gonna happen Because you know computers will take over our work.  I don't know how you feel about this. I Don't think humans are going to be useless if we're looking at this chart. You can clearly see what's happening with jobs and AI Yes, many jobs will go away because of technology Many other jobs will be boosted for example all the jobs in healthcare and scientific and communications And what are those jobs right ask yourself what those jobs are? They're human only jobs They're jobs that we do because we're human look at that when I zoom in you can clearly see these jobs are Not entirely just logic. They're about us as people So important to consider what's happening here the percentage of human only work That's where all of us are going Human only work means we give the work that can't be done by machines Which is increasingly more we give that to the robots and the software and We move up the food chain That will not be an easy transformation for a taxi driver or a call center leader Again as Jack Ma has said is the balance between EQ and IQ if you want to have a drop in the future You got a boost your your EQ your emotional quotient Assuming that you already have an IQ. That's why you're here But you know, this is something that's quite clear that's gonna happen. Oh, you know our kids think about our kids What do they really have to learn in the future? They have to be entrepreneurs. They have to invent. They have to understand people They have to know how to have feelings. They have to beat the machines not by being faster than a machine That's ridiculous right in 10 years. We can't beat the machines for anything Technology is coming. We're not gonna go back on it and put it back in the box This is the most important part when we talk about technology and humanity. It's not to reject technology. I Mean the idea of saying that we we have a risk so we're not gonna do this is odd, right? But then so is the idea of saying well anything we can do we should do so let's all put holes into our skull and Connect to the internet That's also a bad idea so it's about the balance and you know who decides the balance that will be the biggest challenge Automation Mean the financial industry, you know that many of our jobs are going to be automated because machines are learning them Christine Lagarde said automation is good for growth But bad for equality And that's a fact we're gonna have increasingly automation call centers bookkeepers accounting auditing You know half of KPMG Automated Maybe So that's a question like what did we do about this and who is going to be in charge of equality? So in this world, you know, there's also the side effect of what technology does which is to make us Dependent on it. I think when you think of this image, what do you think of? What do you think of? social media We're in this world where we're being pulled by strings We don't even know they exist right to which I like to say too much of a good thing can't be a very bad thing Like drugs Do we not allow alcohol because people may drink too much? Yeah, we have restrictions, right? But we allow it. We have coffee. We have cigarettes. We have pipes, you know, whatever you can think of You know, we're even legalizing raga Rana now and now too much of a good thing is a very bad thing because when you do too much You know end up in a bad place So let me talk about this really important thing when it's about technology We're living in a world where technology is giving us amazing deals on convenience on content on communication Life is better because of technology and these companies here Are the ones furnishing it to a large degree at the top eight in the world American and Chinese But on the other end of the fantastic magic offering We do have some issues I call this the externalities right these externalities are as important as the externalities of oil and gas Which is climate change? Now we have tax avoidance. We have dehumanization manipulation. We have to address the externalities of technology How did we do that? Well Here's a suggestion. We should do this right? We should have a group of people in Every city in every industry and in every country and globally will be a lot of people Call this a digital ethics council People whose job it is to think about what the consequences of technologies are and how we deal with them I'm not talking about politicians or CEOs here, right? I'm talking about Thinkers I'm talking about people that would be on the level where they can be like, you know Socrates kind of think and this is happening in in Singapore. It's happening in Denmark It's happening in different industries happening at Microsoft. It's happening at Google. It's a very very important discussion digital ethics Is known the difference between what technology enables you to do and What is the right thing to do? Now I grant you that is a difficult discussion of what is the right thing to do right? I mean who decides we'll talk about in the panel. I'm sure we'll solve it very quickly Here's a short example Facebook is the new cigarettes. It's not good for you. It's addictive You don't know who's trying to convince you to use it or misuse it The government has to step in and regulate it and Facebook has proven that to us even since I said it over nine months ago Over and over and over again that they need to be regulated because they're not self-regulating Mark Benny off from Salesforce, right? They need to regulate be regulated because they're not self-regulating Think about that for a second. I mean you in the banking business, right have heavily regulated Do we need this for these platforms? Absolutely, and that discussion is raging because we don't want to end up here, right? You know we want to end up in a place where AI can help us build the value Not become the panopticon the global panopticon and here's the key question of that. Who is mission control, right? Who controls what happens? Right now the sector the top 20 companies in the world are largely uncontrolled. I Mean more more uncontrolled than any other industry ever was and this is a very very big issue So going forward, you know, this is one of the key issues that we're talking about which where we're going to go with this You know, we have sort of the externalities of climate change And and then we have the second pollution Which is digital? I'll cause a digital pollution, right? It's a way of you know messing up our thinking and thinking about stuff That we should rather do differently best example really is Facebook in their efforts of Undermining democracy And it's funny you can't say that they did it by purpose or that they are criminal You signed the user agreement But it's unethical and That is the problem of course with technology when we think about what this means and you know how they are Working on keeping us addicted to the feet of technology. Is that unethical? I think it is I don't know what your view is on this. I'm I'm certain none of you do any of those things anyway So AI all right same topic in principle is a great idea. I call this intelligent assistance. I a That's what you know in banking financial That's 98% of you. They're just fancy software, right? These machines are not thinking they're not Learning like we do right? They think like machines. How does the machine think 0 1 1 0 0 1 binary? You know it basically if this than that right they can learn yes But not like us I mean a human sees the world like this Machine sees the world like this, but has no limits on seeing it right now It's quite a different level of things and I think in this world. We should be very careful what we wish for Intelligent assistance artificial intelligence. Yes, but at the end ASI artificial general intelligence a gi I Probably not a good idea. I think we need to really figure out how we're going to Discuss what we do here. I think we're going to see a moratorium on this just like we have on nuclear weapons And I that will not be an easy task just like nuclear weapons So let me wrap up and I think we're moving into a world. That's I call this hell then yeah, it could be heaven it could be hell and And this has nothing to do with technology or silicon valley or China it has to do with how we govern technology Where the technology is used to dehumanize or to re humanize It's not the purpose of technology to decide technology is neutral until we use it It's not good or bad we make it good or bad and we have to think about how we govern technology Not just like government but also in terms of our own use and which way we're going with this So this is kind of quite clear, you know in this world Between the good and the bad of technology What are you gonna do say well don't touch it yeah You're gonna have to ask a different question and the question is not If we can do something or how we do it or how much money it makes that question is getting to be an old question This is the only question Why? What's the purpose when we have digital money and we will Why you know, what's the purpose and who can we trust would you trust a social media company with your money? That social media company Yeah, nice idea, but you know, I don't have to trust I don't know about you I think this is a very very big discussion, right and this world Everything that we do is moving to the cloud everything healthcare records music films television books banking insurance transportation cloud If we don't put this in the middle Human purpose That's not gonna be a good future We have to make sure that the companies that do this and here to a standard They actually are doing this and what I call the the the free future principles holistic business models The circular economy and humans at the center. I will not do business with any bank that doesn't have those three parameters That will be the new normal also in the stock market in the very near future So I'm gonna wrap up saying you know as I say in my book The biggest danger today is not that machines will take over and kill us There is a danger for that It's pretty far away In overall terms, you know 50 years maybe that is possible today the biggest problem is that we become like the machines We look at the customers if they were an algorithm. We're too lazy to do our own things We forget who we are we stop listening and we basically become technology So my call to you is say let's embrace technology and use it for all the stuff that it's good for But not become technology And I think this is also where Europe and the UK Has a leg up so we'll discuss in the panel. Thanks very much for listening. Thank you Good morning. Well, Gerd told me he was going to do this event and he wanted to represent the side of humanity So he said would you come along and represent the robots for me and fight against humanity? Of course, I'm not gonna do that. I am in favor of humanity. I'm a big fan of it But I want to tell you that the predictions that we've heard well Gerd's been reincarnated from some earlier eras because his message is not a new one The world we live in is changing and is new in every way But at the same time this question is very old and this question of whether we haven't held well I'm sure they debated it around these stones Saying this is going to give us a calendar and we're gonna have to do things on certain dates And we're gonna you know, it's gonna tell us when to have our big parties and I think that's gonna change what it means to be human But of course we've gotten used to the calendars We've moved forward to discuss this here in this city of slightly larger edifices that we stand among Nonetheless this debate goes back to the very earliest days this debate about heaven or hell Is not a dichotomy it isn't an escalator going one way or an escalator going up The reality is we're going to see both heaven and hell and we're going to try and make the best of it We're never going to get a perfectly good world or a perfectly evil world Now the first big decision that we had to make when we had this debate was this big question of should we come down from the trees? Because if we come down from the trees Will we lose our monkey-ness? All right, are we going to stop being monkeys? Are we going to to lose all the things that we value that make us monkeys? Well, of course we did and we got humanity instead and we don't seem to regret the decision Although I occasionally do run into people who do We also must have had this debate over fire now This is a slightly more modern version of fire for those of you who've been to Burning Man, but once again We didn't know what was happening. We argued about it and we ended up liking the result in the long run I actually do hear people today who debate whether agriculture was a good idea actually before agriculture as you know We were hunter-gatherers Some people think that lifestyle was very idyllic and you didn't have as many warlords and you didn't have kings and all those other Things but by and large agriculture, which has fed the world seems to have been a pretty good decision And then the industrial revolution began first in textiles here in Bath And then later with industrial technology and iron also here in the United Kingdom And this is the one we often debate the most and yet it's the reason we are all here So what do we do about this? How do we answer this question when when we're talking about Machines that think cars that drive themselves Robots that act as people do or do things that people do The answer is that We have a very difficult time telling the difference between foresight and hindsight All of the arguments that were made about these other great decisions great singularities of the past Turned out to be wrong the people who said don't do it at least as far as I think most people in this room Would conclude turned out to be wrong, but we didn't know at the time how to decide We didn't know how to decide what was wrong and what was right Now the change of pace the pace of change is obviously faster and accelerating today The chart that you see on the left is a chart of the price of computing per dollar And this chart was put together by Ray Kurzweil and Catherine myronic and This is an exponential chart which means that each Dot on the left axis is ten times bigger than the dot before and they noticed when they built this chart that if you Plotted it back all the way to the beginning of the 20th century in 1900 It stayed on an exponential curve for now a hundred more than a hundred and twenty years You don't see the Second World War the Great Depression on this chart You don't see anything that people have tried to change about it or do anything about it or anything else that humans Have done deliberately over the course of this history It's happening and it's continuing to happen and we're now seeing of course the average company on the Fortune 500 Lasting a little more than 20 years instead of 80 years as it used to and on the right You see a picture of the first digital camera Invented by the Kodak company That company took a look at that digital camera in their boardroom and said I don't know what you're talking about We sell paper and chemicals. That's what Kodak does. Why do we want to make a digital camera? They decided not to sell it and of course they went bankrupt the same year They went bankrupt Instagram which knew what photography was actually about which was sharing memories with your friends Was sold for a billion dollars with 13 employees now That's the dramatic story of how much things have changed that 13 people created something that was worth a billion dollars That's happened now several times since then But the Kodak couldn't see it and it's because we're very bad at predicting when the world changes like this How will we be good at regulating? How will we good at deciding what the ethics will be when we are so bad at predicting? It is one thing to work out what the ethics should be about things. We've had for a decade Things like nuclear weapons and even things like Facebook, which we've now had for a decade It's very very difficult to think about what the ethics should be of things that barely exist and to even call for moratoriums on them as has been suggested Now there is a long history of this long before the talk you just saw this morning here You can see cartoons and books going back to 1878 where people put out this call They said machines are going to replace people. It's going to cause tremendous disruption and upset in our society And we're gonna have to do something about it now They didn't actually figure out what to do about it, but all the people who called for holding back So far we think they were wrong. We think that our society is Generally progressed and been pretty good and there's a lot of charts which back that up as more than just intuition Here's my favorite example in fact We discovered this example when a group of us held a conference on the future of computers and jobs and the question of whether or not Computers would take all the jobs and what we should do when we agreed that it was a very serious Issue that needed a lot of analysis and discussion and that maybe our group which had various erudite people as well as myself Should write a letter to the president because we all know the story of Einstein writing a letter to the president long ago about nuclear weapons in during the Second World War and So someone at the back of the room said we don't need to write the letter somebody already wrote it. I found it It begins dear president Johnson So in 1964 the triple revolution letter warned about these three revolutions the Cyber nation revolution as they termed it then the weaponry and human rights revolutions So here we go with people saying people in 1964 think about what computers were like in 1964 just step back even if you're not that old you probably have some Idea of what they were compared to the computers you have today They were scared to death of those computers in 1964 and if we go back the book from 1984 That's when an early Apple Mac was the best computer you could buy for yourself and it was going to be drastic change So this is our history of predicting. It's not a great one And it is no small risk to get these predictions wrong and this is the issue. We must face Everyone sees that there are problems because there are problems But how do you figure out how to decide? How do we? Try and understand that even though we see in hindsight what we might have done better in the industrial revolution But we might have done better in the agrarian revolution What we might have done better even in coming down from the trees in hindsight we see that we can know what it is but It is impossible as far as I can tell or figure out how to figure out who were the people who were right in Those days if we could have listened to them because I'm not saying that nobody saw The problems that we now know about in hindsight. There were the Luddites who said, you know, we don't want we want to smash the machines They're going to cause this social challenge. They turned out to be wrong. There were other people who were right We actually have metaphors for all these type of predictors, right? We have Cassandra who is right, but no one believes her and so there always are some Cassandras in every change and revolution Every singularity who are right, but we have not listened to them in the past And there's no evidence. We're going to suddenly start listening to them in the future There are chicken littles of course who say everything is falling down and they're wrong But sometimes we listen to them and we have boys who cry wolf who lie that something wrong is going on and then we finally ignore them What I couldn't find was a metaphor For people who keep saying that bad things are going to happen and they're wrong every time But finally the time comes that they're right and we regret that we didn't listen to them The closest thing was the boy who cries wolf. Well, these Problems as I've shown you have taken place throughout our history and every time we felt something really bad was going to happen and every time we've been wrong and Every time even the most recent times where we said and by the way, we've been wrong every time before But this time it's different and this time again. We were wrong. So how do we figure out how to be right? well We all are not particularly fond of this gentleman and what his company has done There's no question about that and so people say Why should this guy who built Facebook be in charge of what Facebook does because his interest is in making money And his interest is in building his user base and all these other things. It's not the public interest But if we are to have another decision-making process for how his company and the other companies will run Exactly, who will we trust to have the foresight other than the man who built it and not that he's anywhere near perfect Are we gonna ask for the crowd the public voters mobs? Will they be the ones to make the right decision? Will courts be the ones who make the decision about how our technology runs now many people say Why don't we get governments? Because we can certainly trust the people who run the governments in order to solve these problems and decide things now I think I figured out the answer which is of course. We should have bankers, but I thought that would get a better hand here perhaps No, it's not the bankers either. We don't know who it is and we already are transhuman. I Think those monkeys have came down from the trees certainly wouldn't recognize us and even the people at Stonehenge I don't think would recognize us as human and our lives as human and we don't love Humanity nearly as much as we imagine in the natural human state. I would been dead a long time ago I'm afraid I've taken the services of the medical establishment a couple of times as many of you have and So much of our lives in the past without the natural human life was you know, nasty brutish and short as Hobbes said We don't want to be natural humans. We want to be that in fact I'm going to ask you a question that may be central to all of this Because Gerd put up a lot of different Attributes about human thinking and style and said these are the things that make us human I'm going to tell you what I think is most special about humans. We are the one species that wants to be better than we are We want to improve ourselves. We want to change ourselves to make us not change to make us not become Inhuman from our definition that would be in human that would be Making us what we are not stopping relinquishing That would be the challenge and yet We already can see this in our generations. My father, you know, he thought this stuff was all crazy my nephew on the left he You know uses it as part of his daily life and my nephew on the right says you mean things are different They don't have any concept that anything has gone bad or wrong or is different from what they imagine it to be for us to relinquish these technologies is a huge decision All right, we're talking about technologies that will save billions of lives not millions of lives that will end disease That could end scarcity that could bring education to all that could reverse climate change and Give us the exploration of space to give us the resources we have for everyone can lead a good life That's a lot to relinquish because we're scared of the ethics. We must be sure we do this right and If we do relinquish if we sigh that there should be a moratorium on AI I Can tell you that this country here is working very hard in investing very heavily in building AI technology And so if there is no European AI or American AI there will be Chinese AI and I'm not saying the Chinese are evil I'm not saying that they're going to you know be nasty overlords through the world But they will have different ethics and different principles. There is no choice about whether this happens The only choice is how we make it happen and the only way to do this is not to say no to it But to say as in improvisation people say yes, and This is going to happen and we can maybe figure a way to do it better Thank you very much We're now going to move into a fireside chat to delve a little bit deeper into the issues so Brad you argue that you know we we need to lend progress Technology go ahead and then it could be dangerous or misguided to try to Govern it before we even know what it can do and Gird you are proposing data ethics councils Don't you think we have to draw a line before we we unleash all of this especially if you're right and Indeed we will be changing Humanity more in the next 20 years than we have in the last 300 Are there more dangers? Do we are we? Should we really make sure that we know what we're doing before we unleash this technology? Yeah, well, this is not a black or white decision, right?  I never touch any of that some people do but most people don't But if you drink a bottle of brandy before you go to work on the morning a lot of people wouldn't approve of it So the question of technology is exactly the same question We we use technology for the things that we need it done We use IA and maybe AI, but we should not use a GI you know artificial general intelligence Because when we go on a level that is exponentially so much further out than we are currently at there's a loss of control as Application there's all kinds of issues. We don't agree on anything. So what I'm saying is not to go backwards not to Do any of those things. I'm saying we need to figure out what do we want from technology? I think Tim Cook said Three months ago at the European Commission. He said our technology can do great things But it does not want to do great things. It doesn't want to do anything And if we want technology to do great things, we have to make technology do great things So and we have to agree on what that is is living to be 200 years old a great thing Right is having super soldiers a great thing is beating cancer a great thing. I would say yes So this is what it comes down to that's that's my proposition So yeah You know we if AI has the chance or other technologies has the chance to help us Eradicate poverty solve climate change significantly improve human health, of course we have to go ahead but When we've introduced new game-changing technologies like the internet which you help pioneer We came up with a governing system that was different than just Government or somebody that we came up with I can right it was a new well I'm not saying it's perfect, but we came up with a new type of way to kind of Check how things are going to be implemented Can't we try something new like a data ethics council without? out Hurting the benefits of the technology so I've no problem with people discussing in fact I strongly approve of ethics councils to sit and examine the ethical issues and make sure people are aware of them Make sure the people building the technology both participate in the discussions and are aware of the issues and that we do it in concert with an understanding Society that's absolutely fantastic The question is when you get to the next level, which is to say that we are going to have decision making We're going to have moratoriums. We're going to have companies broken up We're going to that that is the thing we have to be very careful about when we start saying you can't do this We have a disagreement about whether you should or shouldn't do this and someone has to decide whether we should or shouldn't do that That is where the really hard challenge was But can I chime in I think you know it's quite clear in the next 10 maybe 20 years technology only virtually unlimited in power You know quantum computing 5G and what have you and at that point is Just as important that we decide on what we want to use it for as if we had decided what climate change does You know 10 years ago. We didn't so but we are not one entity Exactly are some people who are going to want to use it for this and other people who want to use it for that The question comes when one side says the other side must not use it for that Right now we're in a situation when it comes to AI and ethics where we have literally dozens of different groups and organizations who are working on AI and ethics and guidelines and most of them are Controlled or were initiated by commercial interests and good you have said in the past You know you've asked the question. Are we comfortable with handing mission control for humanity to Silicon Valley? you know do we want overworked programmers who are rushing to push out products to to Satisfy the shareholders make these kind of important decisions On the other hand companies have got to take responsibility because we will get to a point where The companies will not be able to a hundred percent predict what the AI they unleash does and this this actually exposes companies to To to to lawsuits and all kinds of other things. So what's the best way forward? How do we make sure that we make the best use of technology? But also protect society and even protect business itself I think first the story of the future what the future is should be taken away from the discussion of of technology and Silicon Valley and China on that level. It should be given back to people and citizens and Hopefully governments and thinkers Taken away from you know if you talk about a AI you talk about IBM If you talk about credit computing you talk about Microsoft and and they make the story of the future and that's great But it's not enough because they are profit their companies for profit And they it's none of their concern what the pollution of their product is so to speak right Even though they do start talking about it I have to challenge you on that and I was one of the people who helped convince Sergei Bren that they should not Collaborate with the Chinese and the repression of the Chinese people and providing information and he made that decision And it was a very expensive and difficult decision for him to make which has probably cost him more money than most of the companies in this room have ever made There are people making ethical decisions and having ethical thoughts in these organizations They're not these monoliths that you necessarily describe in fact perversely the ones that are led by individuals like Sergei Bren and Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and so on They actually are the ones that that get the time to think about this I agree with you on this. I mean I and I I have met many of people who are of that nature I just think the last two or three years We've had a bit of a mind change on this before their technology companies or my clients to a large degree Their mission is to say you know what we make it work We sell the Internet of Things and what people do with the Internet of Things is none of our business And that is a very very bad proposition That's like the gun companies saying you know people kill people guns don't kill people I mean the most ridiculous excuse for unaccountability you can imagine don't use that argument in the United States by the way No, I get shot So I think I think the one thing that perhaps we could all agree on is that the future does not have to be dystopian Technology is shaping the future, but so are we so is society so is business and Together we have to decide What kind of world we want to live in and then help shape the technology to ensure that that's the kind of future that we want I am convinced the future is amazing. I'm an optimist, you know, you may have not seen it from the slides, but but Basically what is happening is like we get we will have all the tools we need to do amazing things and to solve all kinds of problems technology will not solve Social-cultural political problems that will be left to us, but humans have been actually quite good at once There's a reason like nuclear bombs right to take action what I think is going to happen and I think it's Unlikely to happen very soon that we'll have incidents, you know For example on AI or the IOT that we're very detrimental and then we say oh wait a minute now We you know now we have to do something But I think that's I think that's a good thing right I think that Facebook Doesn't understand when they build it that it will be used for propaganda and to manipulate elections And I didn't know that they very there were very few Cassandra's there who actually warned about that and the people Who built Facebook didn't know it and now we see that and now people are working very hard to fix it And I actually think that's the system working I think demanding that somehow an ethics council would have figured out the propaganda dangers of Facebook when it was being built and Modified it to avoid them. I think that's a very Unprobable it depends on the price that we're going to pay you know I mean I predicted if Facebook doesn't really change in the next two or three years We're going to see a major incident not like Election manipulation, but up a notch of a thousand yeah, and if that happens then we're going to say oh god Now we have to do something but if something happens with the AI and we may have a loss of a million human lives You know that that's not something that we should necessarily take as a condition That would be better if we didn't have to take that you know So my view is that a little bit of foresight would be a good thing to have I picture a global council of Socrates kind of people and and they exist right we know So some of them are so to put actual resources into this not just to build technology But not build humanity you know that that's a very bad idea because we're going to end up in a world like this So I think that's a good note to to end on since we're out of time, but basically I think the message here is Don't Don't put the brakes on technology But think seriously about The consequences and with that I'd like to ask you to give a big hand to our panelists And let me just note first that Gurd will be doing a book signing Immediately following this session So if you want to meet him and you want to get a copy of his book, please come come over to the side of the stage Please give a big hand to our panelists. Thank you very much


Welcome back, welcome back, especially to our online friends joining us streaming. I am Santana, coming to you live from WordCamp Lishboa 2023, track two, where it's at. One of my favorite things about the WordPress community is how international it is, and this next speaker gave me a run for my money this afternoon. This is the first time I'm introducing a speaker of the Galician language. I hope you really enjoy this talk. I'm a language nerd, so you learned that about me today. We have Jesus Amiero coming up. Jesus is an IT engineer and a member of the WordPress community. He works at automatic, where he focuses on localization. Welcome him for his talk in Galician, on building multilingual WordPress sites. Welcome, Jesus. Why do we need to create a multilingual WordPress site? Well, for various reasons. For example, we can have a place in the electronic market in Portugal, and we want to expand our trade to Spain, to France. The guys would set up that place in a language that they speak in that country, in Spanish, in French, in English, etc. We can do the same with e-learning. We have an online training academy and we want to expand other countries' frontiers. We can have a personal cooperative. At the moment we want to capture more customers in another country with a different language, or it will be normal to use languages in the countries where we want to expand. It also happens in cases of other countries, countries with languages, as it can be the case of certain regions in Spain, for example, Galicia, where we have two more official languages, which are Galician or Spanish, or countries like Switzerland, where they have four more official languages. In all these cases, many more, we need to build a multilingual site. As you know, WordPress supports different languages, we can translate them, both in the core, as well as in the plans and in the topics, but what doesn't support multilingual for or with you? In Core, so what we have to do is to see what alternatives we have in the market to be able to make this configuration, heteronoso site, working in several languages. First of all, some previous considerations that we have to analyze before implementing our site. Let's see, first of all, we have to make it clear today, do you need a multilingual site term? That is fundamental. Are you ready for a multilingual site? If you are Portuguese, I want to launch a site in Spanish, I am prepared for this new language. What are you going to translate these countries? I am going to be able to produce them in a continuous way. Who are you going to locate them every day? Who are you going to support the new clients that are in Spain? I have these people, not every day. That is very important. What are your projects? What technical requirements do you have? For example, if you are going to have a commerce installed, if you are going to need specialized SEO plugins, if you are going to use a visual constructor as an elementor, if you are going to have a multisite or a single multilingual site, we will go deeper into that later. Also, if both themes such as plugins that I am going to use have a multilingual support, they are translated, okay? Both things. Once we have all these concepts clear, we are going to see what we should translate so that our site has, as much as possible, the new languages that we are going to have. In principle, we should be able to translate and locate everything that we are going to be able to. That is to say, post-pacinas, media, custom post types, it makes no sense to have a video in portuguese, to mount this video in portuguese, not a pasina in spanish, it would be weird for a new client that is going to buy us a product. Or at least, tipe to the slack, I have counted those elements. It also makes sense to translate taxonomies, widgets, menus, it would make no sense to use a portuguese menu in a French site, contact formaries, so that they can contact us. Also, all those elements that we have in a slider, text, images, videos and links. It is very important that it is as familiar as possible, everything with what we have available for the final user, it is not your own language. Also important, define the domain structure that we are going to use. We can use a subdomain, for example, pt.myshop.com, it would be to attend online for portuguese, it is.myshop.conciliere para español etc etc. We can do it with a subdomain, myshop.pt, myshop.es, or it is more recommended that we use a domain itself, myyaloja.pt for a site in portuguese, mytienda.español, mytienda.gal, for a site in galego, etc etc. It is much more familiar for the final user. Once we have all these previous conditions, that we have to analyze before installing a plugin or start doing anything, once we have it clear, we are going to see how we do it. We have two clear alternatives, we can mount a single wordpress through a plugin with multilingual support, or we can mount a multisite, where each site of a multisite will have a different language. We are going to start with polo multisite. Multisites, basic characteristics, are that each language is going to be in an independent place, so it is easy to negate or remove languages, we simply negate or remove a new place, or that you do need to link them, to link or count, the different languages. Each of these advantages is a solution that is in nuclear, that is, we do not need a plugin or an element, although we are going to need something that we are going to see right away. We are going to execute multiple sites in the same installation and each site is going to be for a language. We are going to be able to share users, plugins, themes for the different sites, the different languages. Something interesting that we can give access to, or translator that is going to translate us to Italian, only Italian site, it is not going to have global access to be able to make other changes on other sites, not other languages. We are going to be able to have different themes in different languages, because that can be interesting to adapt to the culture of each site, of each country. Incomvenient, installation of a Multisite is a little more complex, administration or daily can also be a little more complex, and there are some plugins that do not work for Multisite, they should be the minimums, even you have to run those plans, but you can find this problem. Ok, we mentioned before that we had that problem of linking the different languages. This problem is going to solve our Multilingual Press, which is here in front of that plugin, who allows us to connect different sites within the Multisite network. The advantage of having this plugin is that there is no blocking, that is to say that if you remove everything is going to work as it was working, but we are going to lose the connection between sites. The solution recommended by GoogleCommerce, if you are going to think of an electronic company built with GoogleCommerce, maybe it is the right solution for this plugin using a Multisite in WordPress. Ok, another alternative, a Multisite, is a unique site. Why is it characterized as a unique site? Well, obviously because of the unique installation of WordPress, a plugin works, that plugin allows us to link or remove languages in a very simple way, and we do not need to link the different sites, because we only have one for the different languages. The advantages, it is easier to install in a normal WordPress installation, easy to use, it has very large communities, because if you want to save the public WordPress, most of these plugins have hundreds of thousands of installations, so the community that you see behind them is brutal. Calls are inconvenient, it is a little slower, because this plugin is going to slow down, but it is going to slow down WordPress. A very important problem, Eulokindo plugin, that is to say, if we want to get out of this plugin and use another multilingual plugin, we are going to have problems to do it. There are adapters and different tools, but an important problem is multilingual press. We are going to have incompatibilities with other plugins. This is important, because if you are going to download a plugin, go to the website of the manufacturer, you will see, for example, the support site for Elementor, for Google Commerc, etc., etc. And an important problem that everyone has access to, that is, a person who had permission from the administration will have permission to touch all their languages. If you hire a translator, he will be able to translate it into a single language. What alternatives do we have in the market? A lot of them. I imagine that the first ones you will know are KutraZade, KutraZadeX, KutraZadeXT. They are historical in the market. Nowadays, the last KutraZadeXT is in development, but I do not recommend it, because it does not have the correct support for Google Commerc, it is discarded. The following is Polylang, which has a premium version, WPML, which is a totally paid plugin, also very interesting, Wiglot, which automates all the translation through machine tools. The content is also very interesting to start a web with content translated into nothing, in minutes. And here we give you a few more that are also interesting because you will hear, for example, Translate Press, Smarting, etc. It is important to conclude that you have to consider if you need to have a multilingual site, that is, I have a site in Portuguese, I need to mount, or I have a site in Spanish, in English, in French, etc. Once I have it clear, I analyze all the technical needs of plugins, etc., that I need to install, and from there I analyze different options, both technical and economic, because most plugins have an annual cost, and obviously I will stay with the one that fits the most with all this. I am Jesús Emeiro, I am the developer of Senorino Automatic, and I will leave the presentation for anyone who asks questions that they want to ask me. Woohoo! Woohoo! Don't go anywhere. We have time for one question for Jesús. Woohoo! We have competing questions. No. No. Okay, that's a real question, so I'm going to come over here to this gentleman. Hola, Jesús. Van Español, por no hablo gallego. Dentro de estas dos opciones que planteas, a la hora de implementar un proceso un poco más automatizado que pueda llegar a escalar, cuál recomendarías? La de multicitio o la de sitio único? La de multicitio seguramente. Gracias. Es decir, te permita hacer un escalado a través de distintas tecnologías de escalado de salida más recomendable. Mucha una pregunta ahí. I think we have time if it's a fast question and a fast answer. Okay, fast, fast, fast. Gracias por la charra, Jesús. Muy chula. En términos de optimización, cuáles de las dos opciones, si en multicitio o un sitio único, cuáles crees que son las más... lo más fácil de optimizar, o por lo menos de hacer tareas de WPO, más o menos sencillas. Creo que en términos de optimización sería multisite porque no dependes de ningún plug-in extra que necesitas optimizar, sino que de instalación normal de Wordpress. Por tanto, creo que sí que sería más sincera de optimizar. Okay, is it you? Is it you? Okay, one more. Quick, quick. Hola, Jesús. Obrigado. Más de una vez, estás con nosco y por trazer-se o galego. O que eu te queria preguntar Eu percebo pela tua apresentação que na maior parte das situações tu irias irias para uma solução de multisite. Certo? Porque é que esta solução de multisite não é mais conhecida ou mais utilizada e porque é que não tem mais advogados como tu? Eu creo que por um tema econômico. O plug-in que se permite ligar aos distintos sites multilingual preso, único que é assim no mercado que é bastante conhecido, tem um preço elevado, bom, elevado entre comidas elevado para um projeto que está arrancando. Pero a gente que está dedicado a instalar Google Comer para fazer tendas online, é a solução que por aqui opta. Boa pregunta. That's all we have time for and that's the extent of my Portuguese. So I will say thank you e muito obrigada. We have this lovely gift for you and thank you for your contribution to the community. Take that. Big round of applause for Esu.