Hello, everybody. Welcome. I'm John Ciorciari. I'm the Director of the Wiser Diplomacy Center here at the Ford School, and I'm happy to welcome you to this Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation lecture. I want to thank the Towsley Foundation, which was established in 2002, with a policymaker in residence program that allows the Ford School to bring individuals who have a wealth of policymaking experience to campus, including our own Professor Sandy Levin. And so, please join me first in thanking the Towsley Foundation for this wonderful program. Today we're going to be speaking about the nexus between labor rights and trade, which of course is a crucial topic as U.S. and global trade agreements are being renegotiated. And it's a conversation between two experts who have worked for long periods of time to advance workers' rights in the context of global trade. Dr. Bama Atreya is a visiting policy expert here at the Wiser Diplomacy Center, whom arrived today, and who is going to be leading a number of sessions during the course of the week, including a three-part course for students related to the future of work, and also a session of my class next week in Values and Ethics. Dr. Atreya has worked for more than 20 years at the intersection of trade and labor rights. Her former organization, the International Labor Rights Forum, pioneered the inclusion of a labor clause in trade preference programs as an alternative to protectionism with the goal of using trade to promote a race to the top instead of a race to the bottom in labor standards. She now is an economic inequality fellow at the Open Society Foundations, where she's doing research on worker conditions and the digital economy. She's also an advisor to the Laudice Foundation, and most importantly, got her PhD in anthropology from U.M. So welcome back to Dr. Atreya, who is also on the Urban Institute's External Advisory Board. And of course, most of you already have the pleasure and privilege of knowing Professor Levin, Professor of Practice here at the Ford School with support from the Towsley Foundation. For over 35 years, Professor Levin represented residents of Southeast Michigan in Congress. He's been actively involved in essentially any major debate you can think of confronting our nation over the recent past, including welfare reform, the auto industry rescue, China's entry into the world trade organization, the Iran nuclear deal, and an old host of key economic policy issues. He was chair of the House Ways and Means Committee during the passage of the Affordable Care Act. He successfully fought against the privatization of social security. And very relevant to today's topic, he pioneered language to add enforceable labor and environmental standards and trade agreements for the first time. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in our conversation. Born in Detroit, he earned his BA from the University of Chicago, his MA in international relations from Columbia and a JD from Harvard. Between the two of them, they have decades of expertise in the area we'll talk about today. They'll begin by discussing historical challenges to including labor clauses in trade agreements and to enforcing them. And they'll also review some of the current dynamics, labor clauses in recent trade deals and how they've been interpreted and enforced and thinking about some of the keys to effective enforcement of these provisions going forward. One last note on format. We'll have a few of our students who are who are going to be walking around the room later with cue cards if you want to write down questions. And then we will also have a few designated questioners who will introduce themselves and then ask selected questions in our Q&A session. So with that, I'd like to get started. And the first thing that perhaps I could start with you, Dr. Atreia, is to set the scene a little bit by sharing with us how you got involved and importantly how you first began to intersect with Professor Levin as you were working in the civil society space and as he was working in official channels on a similar range of issues. Great. Thank you so much. And it's really a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation to be participating in this event today. I will say that Professor Levin and I are a little bit of an odd couple up here in front of you and maybe it would help to explain that. I really started out working on these issues of trade justice in the streets. And it was in the streets of Seattle in 1999 and that was in November of 1999 when tens of thousands of activists converged on the city from around the world to protest the World Trade Organization negotiations. And I start with that history because of course Professor Levin was the insider really trying to see what could be done with the rules. We were on the outside pointing out all of the flaws with the rules as constructed. And this brings me to just a few big picture points I want to kind of put out there and we'll probably keep coming back to over and over again just to remind us of why we're even in this discussion. And the one is there are days when it feels like we're in a very sort of depressing and hopeless time and we look around the world and we see what looks like incredible concentration of power and particularly corporate capture of governments. And so one of the things that I would say I reflect on as I think back about you know sort of where I and my trade justice colleagues and friends were 20 years ago and where we are today is that what was clear to us then and you know was one of the reasons why we pushed for these changes to the trade rules is still clear to me today. And that is this concentrated power that corporations have with respect to governments and rules really cannot be broken without the counterweight of organized labor movements. And so we have as much need today as we did then for that space for labor movements to organize and be that voice and that weight to really you know sort of think differently about the rules. The second big point I want to make and I'll keep returning to is that trade rules are not free right there's no free trade there never was free trade and I'm sure professor Levin will have his own comments on this subject. What there is is right heavily negotiated trade with you know hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and so what is important to keep in mind you know I think I've always been allergic to sort of this framing of free trade versus the you know it's sort of some of us some of some people wanted to label us anti globalization and that was never what it was. It was about fair rules rules that actually protected people and not just profit. So I want to disabuse this entire conversation of the notion that somehow there is free trade. What we are talking about is whether we like the rules as they are constructed or whether we think a different set of rules might give us some better balance in terms of the overall benefits that they convey. So you asked me to talk a bit about sort of you know my own trajectory in this work and so I'll now pivot to that from those major points. We when we were advocating around these issues again beginning for my organization back in the 1980s we were not seeking to end or curtail trade between nations. We were seeking to say if trade is being used and particularly with respect to developing countries if it's being used as a development tool it's being used as a tool to lift up economies there is no need to make a virtue of cheap labor right. And so back to my first point which was about creating that space for workers to have some agency to negotiate for fair terms and conditions of work. We said can these rules be written in such a way as to provide that you know not to do it for them and this is a third point that I think I'll probably end up you know coming back to over and over not as a magic bullet not as a solution the rules are not the end the rules are the means. Can we use the rules so that workers as they begin to organize have something to use as leverage to support their efforts to make those demands. And so that was the nature of what we were looking for in terms of the conditionality. What we did over the years is we were really very practical about looking at what we were able to gain and if we look at and you know I'm sure again I'll sort of wait for professor Levin to do some explanation of some of the instruments that we're talking about but whether it was trade preference programs multilateral agreements bilateral agreements we always got what I would consider half a loaf but I am going to be the person who's here to tell you that that is still better than not having gotten anything at all right and so it was incumbent upon us and my organization you know really took this as one of its its principal roles and reasons you know for a mission part of our mission was whatever rules there were to use them to bring cases on behalf of worker organizations around the world because we couldn't even you know really benefit from the the incremental gains in language in these agreements without the casework behind it bringing up the cases year after year after year and I think a little bit later in the talk we'll talk about some of the specific cases and what we were able to gain but I am the half a loaf and I think one of the things that just you know kind of quickly pivoting to the current moment that dismays me is I think a lot of that work that was done in the 1980s and the 1990s and into the 2000s is still there there's actually a body of work that took us three decades to build up but I think current day human rights and labor advocates have forgotten those instruments are there and at a time when we could be doing more casework than ever I'm seeing less of it and I'm seeing advocates really not understand how to use the again the important leverage that we have built up to work in solidarity with those workers organizations around the world so you know I think I'll I'll stop on that for now and yeah that's great thank you I want to turn to professor Levin so a a very big and important slice in that half of a loaf that we do have is the language that you introduced with colleagues in 2007 to include labor and environmental provisions and trade agreements I wonder if you could take us back to 1999 when you were a few blocks away from from her in the battle of Seattle and talk about the progress over those eight years how do we get from Seattle 1999 and the conversations around NAFTA to lodging labor and environmental provisions in trade agreements as a normal matter of practice okay I wasn't sure how to proceed but maybe Seattle is a useful turning point we may end up talking about more recent events and the dean is here and we're honored you're here and I think it's a secret because I have a copy of what the dean wrote I'm dating you a bit almost 30 years ago right about NAFTA and I think everybody should read it including those who put together its successor maybe we'll come back to that so let me just talk briefly about Seattle and try to frame it in terms of how trade policy has evolved and I'm going to try to be brief it's very difficult for me to be brief about trade issues and I'm always I was always teased by staff because it's such an invigorating and important subject before Seattle labor and environmental rights really had a second place and the reason for that was basic trade ideology the idea ideology goes back to Ricardo even to Adam Smith the notion was more trade is better and that worked more or less when trade was between like economies it it was challenged 100 years ago when there was an effort in the 20s the 1920s to essentially involve labor issues not so much environment into the trade dialogue but that was washed away partly by smooth hauling which washed away all discussion of trade because it was so incorrect and temperate and tariffs became a historical not an anomaly but monster and so there was a notion going back to the 19th century more trade is basically better and it bumped into Japan but there it was between two economies basically that were very much alike right there were labor rights in Japan there was a market economy though it was a rigged one and what happened was that Japan took advantage of our open markets while they had a very closed market I was going to bring with me what I have in the office a universal joint that I bought for $11.40 in Detroit in Royal Oak Joe's Auto Parts Main Street of all places and it cost $105 in Japan the very and we could not export to Japan our our products so that's when it began to break down the kind of monolithic notion more trade is is better but there was there was a dialogue here to attribute to this university and I just want to quote it was in 1987 and this is what Clayton Yoder who was then the USTR said over the past 40 years all administrations and leaders of both parties in Congress have shared the conviction that expanding trade opportunities will bring higher living standards for all the key two words I think are for all it wasn't much longer when and this is forgotten Pap Yucannon challenged President Bush in the primary in 1992 over trade but that also was kind of washed out and Bush survived it and then of course next came NAFTA so I want to say just a word about Seattle and go on it's an interesting history because we began in the late 80s as a result of Japan to really say to President Clinton you need to look at the conditions of of trade and its impact and so after NAFTA he began to shift gears and he began to talk about the need to level up not level down Bill Clinton had a way with words level up not level down right so we pressured the Clinton administration to go to Seattle and set up a working group on labor in the WTO revolutionary he got carried away and while there was all this disturbance outside of the halls he proposed not a working group but enforceable labor provisions in the WTO and we said to him that isn't what we were proposing it was steps too far and and while there was all of the turbulence outside the hall inside the hall there was immense turbulence reacting to what the president said well Seattle blew up and we haven't had demonstrations about trade since then like that so just a few words what happened after that CAFTA happened afterwards enforce your own laws was the standard we came within two votes of defeating CAFTA and then of course what came afterwards you referred to as May 10th and for the first time there was in placed in trade agreements enforceable labor and environmental standards and to show how bifurcated it was the Bush administration which was still in place we were in the majority for the first time in seven and eight they refused to negotiate an agreement with May 10th in it so essentially two of us in the congress negotiated a free trade agreement it's not a good idea that's not supposed to be our function and we did so with Peru and I will just say a word about that because in addition to labor standards we included enforceable environmental standards and we laid out requirements of Peru as to the Amazon and what happened in the later administrations including the Obama administration they failed to enforce it they failed to enforce it so the most recent battle has been over USMCA and I think that's where I'll stop so that we can have some discussion about it in the course that I co-taught we didn't talk about USMCA I have some deep feelings about what happened in a way to pick up the threads of that forgotten Dean's article in a law review which I still have Dean so is that enough to start with and let's have a lot of vigorous discussion because my own judgment is is to USMCA that it just is the opening the opening kind of argument about what happens when you put together a developed country with a developing nation on its borders on its borders there are more automotive workers today in Mexico than in the United States a foreign auto company BMW opened up a plant not so long ago signed a phony agreement and the pay there is a dollar and a half an hour okay I thank you for that and I wanted to come back to this issue of the enforceable language and Dr. Threy as you mentioned these are tools for people to be able to implement in the defense of labor rights and don't necessarily ensure labor rights unless they are in fact enforced and be grateful for your comments on on how in fact some of the provisions that that that that representative Levin was so influential in in in lodging in trade agreements how have those been enforced what are your comments on recent developments in in particular with the Trump administration on but even in the latter Obama years and enforcing them in key cases like in Bangladesh or in in Sub-Saharan Africa right so I mean I think this is a great you know conversation because enforceability what is enforceability I think is really sort of a critical question I know one that you grappled with as a congressman for many years and we did as well again because we were bringing cases and I don't think there's a fixed answer to at what point you know you consider something is fully enforceable we would have said that even the earliest labor clauses the ones that I mentioned in the 1980s which were in unilateral programs trade preference programs were enforceable but were not enforced and so if we look at the trajectory from those early you know the first labor conditionality was in a program called well it was in the Caribbean Basin Initiative in 1982 and that was a single phrase the first full clause was in the generalized system of preferences program which is a unilateral trade preference program it's a benefit that we give by reducing or eliminating tariffs on products in a unilateral manner with developing countries and particularly with least developed countries again the idea being this is to give them a leg up and an ability to you know sort of enter our markets and improve their economies and I think you know professor Levin raises an excellent point about what happens when you've got that you know friction between a highly developed market and a really you know sort of poor developing markets such as Bangladesh or Cambodia countries that I had worked in and brought cases on and so there's that there was that labor conditionality that was introduced in 1984 and we tried throughout the subsequent decade to bring cases and there was total discretion because there were no rules as to what USTR the US trade representative needed to do with those cases and so we saw really widely varying responses to the cases depending on what our other equities were in the diplomatic relationship with the particular country and it came to a point by the early 1990s where my organization actually sued the Bush administration the first Bush administration under something called the Administrative Procedures Act for complete failure to enforce the law so fast forward then to the 1990s you know and actually I think we can jump around a bit I might even sort of I'll do a quick note on Cambodia and then just go straight to one of the free trade agreements a bilateral agreement with more binding standards after the May 10th deal that that Professor Levin just mentioned and how that looked in the late 1990s we my organization uh Brun I wrote a case on Cambodia Cambodia had just received benefits in 1999 under the generalized system of preferences program they did not yet have they remember they were coming out of basically a long period of conflict and um had the first democratically elected government that had just been stood up in that country and they really did not have a functioning labor law we brought a case in forward in 1999 timing is everything the bilateral relationship with Cambodia was such that this rose to the top of the priority list in that diplomatic engagement there was robust engagement of the Cambodian government around this case as a result of which the Cambodian government in 2001 I believe okay so first of all they passed a new labor code which was not perfect but was an improvement over you know the the old French law which was the only thing on the books uh they stood up an entity called the arbitration council which could arbitrate labor disputes and they put in place uh or allowed to be put in place a program administered by the international labor organization the ILO which monitored the entire brand new apparel sector which was the major export sector in the country just getting off the ground in 2000 2001 they were able to the ILO program was able to regularly monitor and audit labor conditions in all of Cambodia's garment factories now that was a long time ago and again you know time permitting we can come back to the what's going on lately because there was a very interesting as I'm sure you saw announcement last week that the EU is likely to suspend its benefits to Cambodia over human rights abuses so it'd be interesting for us to to maybe reflect a bit on 20 years later what did we really gain but that was one example a very effective use of a case to stimulate some very very specific things right they didn't solve that didn't Cambodia is not a workers paradise very poor country but there were some very specific outcomes from that case the labor code the arbitration council and the introduction of a really you know quite innovative new ILO program I'm going to just talk about one other case and then you know we'll sort of do some work back and forth and that is after the the agreement that professor Levin has described in the mid-2000s one of the bilateral free trade agreements that was passed was with Jordan the U.S. Jordan free trade agreement which had a labor chapter commensurate with the May 10th agreement and subsequent to the U.S. Jordan agreement being you know sort of passed adopted a number of U.S. apparel companies you know went to Jordan began sourcing apparel from Jordan and the selling point on this agreement one of the selling points had been creating jobs for Jordanian women in reality virtually all the women in those factories were imported migrant workers from Bangladesh Sri Lanka India even Burma you know so here you had an industry that had been stood up you know sort of in the shadow of this new shiny new agreement that had labor conditionality but all the workers were migrant workers and a labor rights organization exposed just a few years after the agreement had been passed exposed that many of these women had been trafficked so they were victims of labor trafficking and many had been victims of gender-based violence as well what was interesting was that in the wake of the expose again because of the existence of the labor chapter in the agreement there was rapid diplomatic engagement channels of communication between the U.S. trade representative and the Jordanian counterparts to say this is a problem for us we can't have this we you just negotiated this agreement with us and arguably an issue that without that labor chapter would have been way down at the bottom of the list for any sort of diplomatic engagement with Jordan think about Jordan think about what you know about where it sits its strategic importance it's you know it's importance as a long-standing place where we've had to have military engagement humanitarian engagement because of refugees from the region etc right all of that is so important and yet this trade issue about these you know couple dozen literally a few dozen garment factories rose to some serious diplomatic engagement around the issue and I will say I didn't say and it wasn't in my bio but I spent the past six years working for USAID and I mentioned that because I can tell you now you know sort of this is getting too just closer to the time when I when I joined AID although it's a little bit before my time that one of the very first things that happened and I sort of you know resuscitated this from the files was that USAID was ordered to come up with some funding to hire a consultant and go look and see what could be done to improve labor rights conditions in the factories which they did and through the course of the negotiations a few things happened one of which was a version of that same ILO program to monitor the apparel factories was stood up in Jordan so the Jordanian government agreed to you know several changes including changes in the law that made it possible for the first time for Jordanian unions to actually represent migrant workers so there was a legal change there was an actual change because those workers actually then had access to representation and there was the introduction of a monitoring program that assisted and facilitated to actually improve overall and raise up overall conditions in Jordan's apparel sector and so you know again I can talk more about that and you know sort of where things since then but yeah I would say those are a couple of examples of you know you you go in and you know as advocates we were always really very tactical about the use of these instruments the case itself wasn't going to solve the problem it was very important for other actors to come in and say here are some things some practical things that can be done as a result of which you know we can we can accept resolution of the case so I think I'll stop I've got lots of other interesting cases we can talk about as we go but I'll stop with those two for now I do think the Cambodian case is interesting for the point that you made about the diplomatic context and the broader equities what are the conditions under which the U.S. or other you know major players could advocate effectively for for labor rights and you know my my very brief time swimming in the same stream as the two of you was in the mid-2000s in the Treasury Department when we were working with Cambodian government on that in the context of other development and debt related negotiations and at that time 58 percent of Cambodia's exports went to the U.S. overwhelmingly apparel and so there was a high degree of U.S. leverage there was a relationship between the government that was still the Hun Sen government was not yet in full control and the royalist forces still had a major say in government and so there were the dynamics were very favorable for negotiating on that issue and I think you're right that in the early part of the 2000s Cambodia saw the emergence of some of the strongest labor unions anywhere in Southeast Asia as you as you also referenced more more recently it's gone the other way as the government has seen them as a as a source of political opposition and has carried out targeted assassinations against labor leaders and so forth but for a phase when the conditions were favorable it is I agree that it had a major impact on the on the conditions for workers in that in that country particularly in that garment sector which is such a major employer so let me just comment briefly on those cases very briefly as to CAFTA and as to Mexico a bilateral agreement can basically work if it's done right there we're in the same neighborhood and there isn't a way easily for producers to shift from Mexico or Central America including Dominican Republic someplace else so the challenge in a bilateral agreement is to really make it work and with CAFTA it was totally unworkable and force your own laws as bad as they are and I should point out I think one of the two major sources of immigration from Central America two causes one is violence and the other is our economic conditions so we paid a very heavy price in CAFTA for failure to have enforceable labor conditions a high price secondly in terms of other countries I think you have to have a a multilateral structure contrary to the view of this administration which wants to do everything unilaterally or bilaterally because Cambodia is a perfect example it was the only place where the labor movement of the United States became engaged and they supported our agreement with Cambodia the labor movement 20 years ago I can't remember the date exactly it's the only case I can remember where the American labor movement in those days were supportive of a trade agreement the problem was that once unions were allowed and working conditions got better the companies moved their production to other places especially to Vietnam so while a bilateral system will work in some cases contrary to the present notion opposed to any multilateral kind of structure that was critical as to Cambodia yeah on similar lines it was a pyrrhic victory for the the labor groups in 2019 got a new law finally passed on labor protections in Cambodia and the wages went up by something like 20 and a large share of the garment factories literally folded and and moved as you're suggesting and so there is a there is a pushing the balloon dimension to this that merits attention let's get some of your thoughts and questions and it looks like Michael's going to start maybe Michael you could introduce yourself and and share with us the first of the audience question no holds barred right I'm serious trade is such a vital and volatile issue that unless you you say no holds barred and people are totally frank we kind of talk around each other understood I'll do my best to pull out the questions first off thank you so much for being here my name is Michael vice I am a first-year MPP student focusing on international policy our first question is the U.S. has expressed its displeasure with the lack of accountability for the WTO appellate body what do you think could be possible reforms the WTO system to correct this problem well let's let's just answer that very briefly the WTO enforcement system it needs basic reform but the president is using the lack of it to make appointments approve appointments so the WTO enforcement structure is is today totally more bummed there's only one person I think and it requires three so and there have been we had lots of fights I won't bore you with the fights over the WTO enforcement they went way overboard at times it needs to be reformed democratized but the notion that you should do without it and destroy it well we just used an as an example hopefully the day will come when labor and environmental standards are part they are internationally enforced standards right because otherwise companies move I mean look what happened in central America I went to a place and I figured out how much the workers were making it it was three women's panties and it happened to have the price on it and where it was going five dollars they were making a dollar an hour when we figured out how much how much labor went into those that five dollars you could double the minimum wage that those mostly women and many single women with children were making and it would have increased the cost of the panties at that place in the united states from five dollars to five dollars and 25 cents doubling the wage that they were receiving it would have increased the cost to the consumer here of 25 cents so we need to have workable structures hi thank you for being here my name is Pisasha Wee Chan Chan I am a first-year dual degree student in master of public policy and master of science information um I have questions loudly so everybody can hear okay okay I have a question for both speakers the american labor movement is often portrayed as being insular protecting the benefits of particular workers in a specific industry is that characterization fair what is the best way to create solidarity between white male blue collar union members in the U.S. and immigrants in the in the U.S. working around the world okay so the type of basically the question is about when are we going to see more of what you described in Cambodia in which in which U.S. labor unions go to bat for workers rights conditions in in other parts of the world and and see them as part of the same effectively the same mission does either of you want to start with that I mean I can just talk about a couple let me talk about a couple of examples of again uses and cases I and I think it's important to you know recognize so first of all to recognize that labor movements are large membership-based movements and accountable to their members and that's fine right that's how democratic institutions work that being the case you know again I feel like it's a situation where you it depends on what you look at if you look at what statements the labor movement you know and it's representative organizations the AFL-CIO may have to make in a very high profile debate about whether or not to ratify a new trade agreement it is understandable why there's a certain political calculus that the AFL or another union might have to make in that circumstance it can be very different when you look at this very granular level at what is happening with worker movements in particular countries at particular times and I'm going to talk about two more cases and I'll just do this briefly the one is Bangladesh and I think if people know nothing else about Bangladesh most people know that there is a very large garment sector in the country and that it has been the subject of some incredible tragedies in recent years the most well-known tragic incident is the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 leading to the death of well over a thousand workers okay but labor groups in Bangladesh had been in touch with labor groups in the United States for many years and there were solidarity campaigns targeting some of the big buyers of the apparel from Bangladesh in 2013 there was a review of Bangladesh's benefits under the unilateral preference program the GSP and the AFL CIO for years prior to the Rana Plaza collapse year after year had been filing submissions to USTR I mean for many years saying Bangladesh's labor laws are inadequate they are not protecting these workers workers are not allowed to organize there must be reforms and in 2013 that case finally was taken up in a serious manner and I think Professor Levin had something to do with that as well and may want to comment and there was a suspension of of Bangladesh's benefits now that was a situation in which right the the US labor movement was very comfortable and had been comfortable for years pushing the US government to enforce labor conditionality in a way that showed solidarity with groups on the ground in Bangladesh I might stop with that I mean I'm I think you know there are some other recent cases I actually I'll just talk about one other case because people don't know about it and it's another really great case but again you know kind of a back to my point about Cambodia like a lot of this is about timing is everything and where we are in the diplomatic relationship Swaziland very little known case in country Swaziland had trade preferences under a program called the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act AGOA and as a result of AGOA guess what sector got stood up there yes the apparel sector I don't mean to just talk about the apparel sector but it seems to just be you know the thing that countries do when they get these trade programs in place well you know in the early 2010s the country is a it's a it's a monarchy it's very autocratic it's very repressive was getting more and more and more so and in the early 2010s actually went as far as outlawing basically all civil society organizations right to associate freedom of assembly wiped it out wiped it out and so that did not only affect labor movements in Swaziland it even affected business organizations you weren't even allowed to have a business organization in Swaziland right because it was an association all the human rights groups got wiped out church groups got wiped out you know again AFL-CIO brought a petition to USTR on behalf of its allies in the swazi trade union movement and the simple push was that the country had to reform its law and organizations to allow associations you know allow organizations to exist freely once more very successful case in the course of a few years right so I mean and USTR yanked the benefits they took away the country's AGOA benefits that was controversial people were like gonna hurt the workers they're not gonna have their jobs anymore the union was telling us you know what things are bad enough here that we'll take the pain we'll take the pain something has to change benefits were removed Swazi government reformed the law in the interval because you know many of us that were working with the Swazi labor movement including the US labor movement had put so much attention on the Swazi labor movement they were actually able to survive even through this period of incredible repression and hold open that space for the rest of civil society the human rights groups that had to go underground the church groups that had to go underground because they could exist because they were in the spotlight because of this case and so when the law was amended and it was possible to openly associate once more unions were able to you know it had been in the wedge in the door to open that door wider for other organizations and indeed I believe it was in 2018 we restored a GOA benefits to Swazi land so just a couple of examples where the labor movement was there and they were the ones bringing the case just a couple comments about labor the labor movement's going to play a more substantial role in the enforcement of USMCA that's been provided but I think the problem is going to be the way it's structured Mexico is the only democracy on earth which has the kind of structure it now has with tens of thousands of so called protection agreements that workers have never seen never voted on it's going to be very hard to make a dent in that and my concern is the way the law is constructed it will make it even more difficult because it relates to individual locations but let me just say a word about Bangladesh to the credit of the european apparel makers when they set up after ron applause that were 1100 people died they the european organization included the labor movement but the one that was set up by american companies did not and so while working conditions and you know more about this first hand than I do I haven't been there for a few years now while the working conditions in terms of safety have improved the other conditions for workers I don't think have so if you look at your clothing my guess is if we did it here now probably a few of us would have garments on that say Bangladesh and the workers there continue to be paid close to a dollar a dollar and a quarter an hour and how how can you live on that that's what this country needs to ask how can people live on it and the answer is to Central America they can't so they it's one of the reasons they leave that leads into our next question which is a focus for dr thria but I think please jump in now dr thria you've worked in the NGO sector in the private sector and in the US government where do you feel most effective in protecting workers and why so yeah there's I mean there's not a there's not a choice there there's not really a choice and it's interesting because most recently I've been in government and in government had the opportunity to see the flip side of cases I had brought when I was on the outside as an advocate you I we we had some very even in over the past you know couple of years right so we we have had some very good work by people in public service in the various US government entities that work on these trade cases you know with integrity bringing the cases forward but people in government can't do that without the outside groups who bring who find the facts bring the cases forward you know sort of put the information forward and so this gives me an excuse to come back to one of the very early points I made in in in the first few minutes and and that is I don't think groups on the outside quite realize the potential of what they could be doing with these cases and the appetite that people and particularly people who are just charged with enforcing the laws right not the politicals not the people who are making policy the people whose job it is just to enforce the laws that we have what they could do with more information on more of the conditions you know of what's really happening on labor and environment in more of these countries so you know I won't go on I will just say like that's just such a necessary compliment that you really can't choose between where you're more effective. As for the role of business it's that hasn't come up at all and so maybe you know sort of an interesting moment to take just a you know a minute to think about that and it just is a discussion you know sort of open up a discussion a lot of what I have observed and indeed what I also when I was working with private sector worked on was standing up systems to manage supply chain issues to mitigate risk in supply chains reduce the risk of the exposure of labor rights violations and those kinds of voluntary risk management efforts are you know fine but I feel they are a thing unto themselves and they don't really get at the heart of what is meant to be addressed with these labor clauses in the various trade instruments and the reason they don't get there is again going back to another one of the points I made early on because really what all of those instruments do is is create that wedge right wedge open that space as I had described with the Swazila just wedge open that space and then it's really up to workers and worker organizations at the end of the day who's really going to improve conditions right in any of these in of these supply chains I mean workers themselves if they have the agency to do so and I think the business side private voluntary programs I you know I think Professor Levin you you quite rightly point out that there are very few the accord which is the EU agreement that was stood up after Bangladesh is one of the very few that actually puts unions into the equation and you know considers them as a partner for the most part the rest of them are perfectly happy to work on health and safety you know they're perfectly happy to work on you know ending child labor but they will not go as far as actually creating that space to negotiate with workers. To its credit the university has a committee that works with the business community in terms of its purchases and I went to a meeting and I think it would be well for the university to talk further about how it how it is more effective it's a difficult issue but you know if we don't face up to this we're going to have demonstrations institutions need to step up to the plate if there were another round of plaza my guess is with all the vitality among students at this university you would see activity rightfully so 1100 people in the flash of a moment and by the way they did not want to go into round of plaza and they were told if you don't go in you're fired so that's kind of what's at stake in part so what's next a lot of back and forth eh what's the most controversial issue you can think of most controversial question I don't know if this is the most controversial but current labor laws in the U.S. struggle to adopt to adapt to new and different forms of employment such as the gig economy how did this affect labor right promotion both domestically and abroad say that again sure current labor laws in the U.S. struggle to adapt to new and different forms of employment such as the gig economy how does this affect labor right promotion both domestically and abroad yeah so I can I mean I could sort of start on that since I've started doing some research this year on digital economy issues and so there's we don't know I mean so we well but let me kind of take a step back to explain the question to people who are not you know kind of looking at the changes in the economy that are being brought as a result of our moving into what some are calling the fourth industrial revolution which is technology artificial intelligence you know in the ways in which it is really sort of changing the entire global economic landscape we are and one thing that I'm just going to observe and comment on is we are locked into a conceptualization of labor rights that dates back a hundred years it dates back to the formation of the international labor organization in 1919 right just after world war one and at a moment when governments were scared to death of what was happening in Russia you know sort of communist revolution and workers rising up and so we needed labor standards to deal with that world as it looked in 1919 and so we have our current modern day systems of industrial relations and we have our notion of core labor rights which are centered around the premise that people have formal employment what are core labor rights the right to associate the right to bargain collectively the right to a workplace free from discrimination the abolition of child labor and the abolition of forced labor okay great they're all still really important fundamental rights but we absolutely need to think about the ways in which work itself is now being mediated very differently and this is the subject of another talk and not this talk today and so I mean I think it's a it's a really interesting question because we have to ask ourselves how do we make those rights real and meaningful in a world where work itself is digitally mediated we had a discussion on that yesterday that's how contemporary this place is I think it was just yesterday was and the economy is changing so fast so we need to ask questions and by the way universities are in the center of this a rather well known institution on the east coast is very much involved in this very issue it isn't quite the same issue but it's these are not industrial workers typically and it's going to be even more so with I mean what uber is facing right so that could be controversial for another session I'm taking a step back and looking at history there's the korea korea us trade agreement that lasted nearly 10 years and despite extensive input vetting review and congressional oversight what is wrong with the process that does not take into account the principle that both of you present how can we alter the process to get such comprehensive views on the table why don't you answer that I mean the comprehensive issues about the broader relationship in which this is embedded it's not easy it's not easy to answer that succinctly but I will say that a part of it it's related to the points that my colleagues have made about multilateralism that it's difficult to imagine even in a highly favorable bilateral context of diplomacy to be effective in this space if the multilateral machinery is broken because as we all have mentioned in different points in the conversation most of the labor operations that we're discussing are for industries that are quite easily movable and therefore will move if their incentives to do that to find cheaper labor with fewer restrictions elsewhere and so I think that this is I guess where I would say is to start is to repair and strengthen multilateral trade institutions because without that no sum of effective bilateral diplomatic engagements is likely to resolve this problem sustainably now we need to get bilateral correct but to simply think we can go it alone that's another subject in a way has the trade war between the U.S. and China affect how labor standard are enforced have any particular sectors place pressure in negotiating these deals I'll just say a brief word about that because when Susan Collins and I put together our course trying to find two subjects which showed the huge bridge that needed to be built between strong academic learning and the challenges of implementing them we took unemployment insurance that hasn't been reformed in since its beginning really and China PNTR so actually that could be a very controversial issue for those of us who worked on China PNTR and eventually helped to construct it it was more than controversial labor issues were included but only in terms of the database on human rights which was which is now the strongest database that exists it included labor rights but you could ask a controversial question why are you so upset about labor rights in in mexico when you redid usmca but not china that's a legitimate issue right and the answer i think is multi manifold number one as is true for china there's a direct impact of labor standards in mexico in terms of jobs in the united states and that's true as to china finally economists kind of got off of the couch and some of them decided there were two to three million jobs in this country lost because of china's exports to the u.s. they've been less willing to cope with mexico though it had a clear impact in terms of the dual wage structure in the united states which we're just beginning which is now being modified so the honest answer is you take these step by step and where you can really bring about change you do it as to china it was simply very difficult to really get at their labor practices through pntr there was no way to do it so it's a really good question and it's the kind of controversial issue that we should all discuss so i'll leave it at that and and someone may want to pick it up um can you speak to legislation or laws which give individuals in unions the right not to pay dues there's the new some state laws that are going in that allow people to be about what shape like right to work and the and the right for individuals in the union shop the right not to pay dues they can be part of the union the new law state that they can be part of the union without paying dues this relates to right to work and dues paying and also the supreme i think the supreme court case as well yeah maybe we should leave that to another time i mean it's related but it's you can imagine how many of us think how important it is but i think it'd be better this is such a juicy subject that we don't want to throw in another orange all right shifting gears a little bit please comment on the role of labor journalist and the union unionizing of media companies on the larger question of labor and trade so what are the roles of labor journalists and media companies on labor and trade key no i mean just look what's going on is to labor and everything else in this country today and there's a worrisome erosion of journalism in this country and that's again another subject for discussion very worrisome i mean it's journalists who pick out for example the issue is to us mca interestingly enough the best journalism was done by some american reporters in mexico there really wasn't a very good job done in my judgment but they're indispensable right in this in the closing of local newspapers so we can just leave it at that no i mean it's critical so climate change has played a major factor in a lot of the developing countries is affecting them the most now how does climate change policy in developing countries affect the labor market labor laws and international trade you can refer to your experience these are all such big questions okay so i always like to kind of speak by example we we do think there is a direct relationship with respect because and i i'm gonna go to a direct example on this and that is bungladesh bungladesh is a country with an enormous coastline has been identified as highly vulnerable highly vulnerable to climate risk and rising sea levels and that will displace increasing numbers of people we know already right we can forecast that that displacement will then put additional pressure on labor markets particularly urban labor markets as people migrate from vulnerable regions to cities in search of some kind of livelihood economic livelihood which in turn will likely depress conditions in those labor markets even further than they are already depressed and it's not obviously it's not just bungladesh it just happens to be a very big very populist country where all these things really it's like a petri dish you know where you can see what's going to happen i mean arguably you will see obviously very different but related impacts when you look at vulnerable communities particularly coastal communities in a number of developing countries Sri Lanka you know coastal regions of india indonesia philippines i mean i'm just sort of now still in southeast asia we haven't even gotten to other regions of the world yet and you know governments know this and they know they're already having to start to adapt to shifting their approach to their urban policy and urbanization because they can see that they're going to have to deal with increasing waves of what will call climate refugees i would argue that we are also not paying enough attention to climate refugees is a cross-border phenomenon we haven't talked at all except for a little bit about migrant labor in this whole discussion and migration most migrants in the world are economic migrants right they're looking for jobs they will also they have been on the rise and really exponentially on the rise over the past decade people moving across borders you know in search of economic opportunity with the changes again and and vulnerabilities and risk to communities posed by climate change you're going to see increasing levels of migration we're going to have to deal with that as a labor market issue so we're kind of off trade all together now so again you know lots of good topics coming up in these questions for future lectures but i think we need to think about then we haven't talked about what we are doing to manage migration flows i mean and i mean i don't mean like you know sort of just we're not talking about keeping people out we're talking about the fact that people are moving and goods move services move we have trade agreements let's have some sensible migration agreements in place this question pertains to technology and labor enforcement with the growing popularity of using predictive analytics to proactively enforce crimes in various us cities can this technology be applied to enforcing labor violations at least in high-income oecd countries do you see any drawbacks to this enforcement approach yeah i know i know i i'm all over this question because this was some of the experimentation that actually i got to you know i had the great pleasure of being involved with as my role at usa id we were particularly interested in highly vulnerable and invisible populations of workers that we knew were at risk of very serious violations and one of my personal obsessions was the young men and boys who work on fishing vessels around the world and who have now been documented to you know by a number of excellent journalists to basically be slaves at sea they are enslaved on fishing vessels around the world many of them again are migrants from very poor countries once they're on the vessels they're not able to get off so we knew that they were off the grid no labor inspectors could reach them right so and and they were suffering very egregious labor and human rights violations and so we were you know extremely interested in what could be done with technology given that there was no other way to get eyes and ears and you know in access to these young men and boys and so we invested in and we were not the only a id were not the only ones but there were you know sort of a number of us that were really seized with this question of whether we could use some combination of vessel monitoring technology and satellite technology to triangulate and identify where crew were most at risk so that given limited resources in the world you could better pinpoint and get the resources that you do have to the people who are most likely to be at risk you know jury is still out investments have been made I think it'll be interesting to see what comes to them I actually you know we can talk more about this but you know I think this is an area where there's promise and there's peril and the promise again is really finding people who are otherwise completely invisible and making them visible the peril has to do with you know and a subject that that I think more of us are becoming increasingly aware of and that is the the the nature of surveillance technology and the information it captures that should be protected private information and so this has come up even with respect to some of the things we've done to keep crew safe on vessels in Southeast Asia things like using biometric id you know on crew so that we know who's gotten on the boat who's gotten off the boat and it's been pointed out that there's some really serious privacy considerations and you know in potential violations and abuses of the data that has been collected by governments for the purposes of keeping crew safe but but anything you know sort of can be used and subverted and so that's I think a short answer to the question obviously I've got a lot more to say on this so but yeah but it's an interesting question you know it's more just briefly than technology because in many countries I know somewhat firsthand about those who who leave Nepal their passports are taken they're just taken and so we need that's why there also needs to be a multilateral structure relating to these problems can you imagine going to work and having your passport taken so you can't leave it happens all the time in many countries in Thailand and other eastern economies actually and just to make one more point to link it back to so completely agree that you can't just have you know tools or just tools you also need systems in place that protect people but just to tie this back to trade that particular this particular case of Thailand improving systems to you know there's a long way to go but at least track crew that are getting on boats in Thai ports happened at all because the EU the European unit brought a trade case against Thailand and so it's just you know linking it all back together some of these little things that we might think are good ideas you still need to create the political space for them to be adopted as well so and trade in that case a you know trade scrutiny did that let's take one more question and then we'll invite you to continue the conversation outside so this is in respect to leveling up back in the beginning of the conversation how far do we go to impose standards that we accept but are beyond the economic capabilities of the partner country further basic standards such as OSHA may face cultural obstacles so how do we develop a mutually acceptable leveling up strategy so how far do we go you know in terms of labor there's so much misunderstanding it isn't for us to determine the specific wage it's to make sure there's a free labor market and there's often a misunderstanding of that there is no free labor market in Mexico they now have a progressive government that needs to face up to that they're increasing the minimum wage I think to 90 cents an hour that's an improvement but we need to be honest with ourselves and honest with others essentially in that case if I might use it it's a question of our neighbor which is a democracy now with a progressive government making sure that there is a free democratic labor market so it can then lift up it's setting the conditions and the same is true of all human rights right it isn't a matter of our dictating the results it's ensuring the opportunities and that's a very American idea isn't it that's a very American idea that's kind of what our country is all about right it isn't results it's opportunity that can affect the results and that's really what this issue is all about and so those who misdescribe it no one expects the garment workers in Bangladesh to be making five six seven dollars an hour when they're making a dollar an hour now it's providing the tools for people to utilize and it's so American it's so much a part of our of our creed that we need to simply be very very clear cut about what's at stake here and i don't know if we're ending but i mean we should be proud of what's happened in this country that helped to create the middle class it was a free labor market wasn't it and so that's really and now in in Cambodia i mean there's a dictator who's destroying the labor movement when i was there it was abominable and in Vietnam when we were negotiating TPP all we said to the Obama administration was just insist that Vietnam have moved towards a free labor market and when i went to Australia and met with a negotiator he said to me there will never be an independent union in Vietnam so and they had thrown in jail two people we met one there who had been in jail for four years for trying to form an independent union and what we needed to be it's very clear cut that there had to be real change as a condition in terms of opportunity in terms of structure so it's a good question in a sense it isn't simple to implement it but it's simple to state it and we need to be clear about that and it relates to kind of everything you're getting me carried away i met Aung San Suu Kyi when we went there and what a disappointment right and so now you have how many millions of hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their freedom and the freedom to organize in simple terms helped make the middle class of this country we should be damn proud of it and proud to incorporate it in a realistic way in what we propose thank you that's a very nice closing comment and let's thank the Towsley foundation the wiser family and of course our speakers Dr. Obama, Threa, and for our own professor Sandy Levin


Hello, I'm Edward Simpson, a professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS. I thank you for taking interest in our MA, Anthropology of Global Futures and Sustainability. This programme focuses on the big challenges of our times, offering you opportunity to explore, communicate and address the major trends in debate as engaged global citizens. The programme is suited to those who are interested in climate change, sustainability and global equality, and for those who want to find out how to influence policy and practice in places of power. Climate politics, mass extinction, inequalities, racial injustice and global health crises raise questions about how we currently live our lives and pose crucial questions about how we can build a sustainable future. We believe that SOAS graduates should be equipped with the skills to talk about what you've learned and to engage and make debate, not only internalise academic ideas. We ask fundamental questions about what it is to be human in a complex and ever-changing world, critically questioning existing assumptions and knowledge, and productively thinking about how to envision and create a more just and equitable and sustainable world. Hi, I'm Catherine Dolan. I'm one of the co-conveners in the MA of Global Futures and Sustainability here in the Anthropology Department. Topics we explore are wide-ranging and global in scope, from climate change, indigenous knowledge and racial justice to urban politics, alternative food systems and sustainable capitalism. The module includes both critical engagement with current academic debates and efforts to work together to shape alternative visions of the future. We interrogate the assumptions and taken for granted knowledges that are built into our global economic system. For example, how we think about economic growth, the value we attach to natural resources, issues of racial justice and gender equality, and the role of state and corporate power. But we also move beyond the status quo to explore how we might think about the future differently, asking questions such as, do smart cities represent the future of a healthier planet? How can the voices of black and indigenous communities be part of alternative food networks? And is sustainable capitalism possible? As we discover, there are no easy answers for any of these questions. But the module offers students the possibility and time to reflect, discuss and debate pathways to a more equitable and sustainable future.


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In terms of the math of the conscious agents, we're running what John Maynard Smith, this evolutionary game theory style, evolutionary simulations, and there's several components to it. And correct me if I'm wrong, and then if not, we'll have you elaborate on it. Would the first component being a category theory? And that basically being like the agents themselves and the multi-agent reinforcement learning we could say maybe. Then we have Markovian morphisms, the Markovian kernels. We have the explorations that are happening. We kind of called this the earlier you were talking about like a Monte Carlo tree search and a model-based reinforcement learning. Style for the agents to explore and morph. So the actual sets of the agents, those sets, those category sets they morph over time based on the experiences that the agents undergo. And then there's a replicator equation for procreation. So it's three things. So replicator creation, procreation. And I believe you said that you don't have the quasi-species model yet, which is for mutation, but that these are kind of, would you say that these are kind of the abstract components as the category theory, the Markovian morphisms, the replicator equation, the quasi-species model. Is that approximately in the right ballpark? Well, certainly that's true when we're doing our simulations just of evolution by natural selection, right? So John Maynard Smith transformed Darwin's idea into beautiful mathematics back in the 70s. And this is called evolutionary game theory. And so in fact, I use, I and my graduate students, Justin Mark and Brian Merrin used John Maynard Smith's evolutionary game theory to first run simulations. Before we had the theorems, we ran the simulations just to see if it was worth our time, right? And you just wanna see what's gonna happen before you spend your time on the math, especially when you have limited math talents like me. So we ran the simulations first and there we did find that, you know, organisms that saw reality, virtual organisms in our simulations that saw reality went extinct when they competed against ones that of equal complexity that saw none of reality and were just tuned to the fitness payoff. So that's what led me to then go to a real mathematician, Chaitan Prakash, and pursue the theorems. Now, in the case of the agent dynamics, I'm not wedded to evolutionary game theoretic kind of model of the dynamics of consciousness. I have to be open to a much wider range of possible dynamical systems, right? Interesting. It's in general going to be simply some kind of dynamics on graphs. So the general mathematical arena is these graphs and dynamics on graphs, which is a fairly recent and quite complicated branch of mathematics. Now, one constraint will be that whatever dynamics I come up with the conscious agents, when I project it into the headset into space time, I need to show why it looks like we get John Maynard Smith's specific kinds of evolutionary dynamics in the headset, right? That has to come out, but I don't have to put it in to begin with in the level of conscious agents. And that would actually be more impressive if I had some more general kind of dynamics or some kind of different dynamics. And that then very interestingly, when I project it, looks like evolution by natural selection and evolutionary game theoretic. So right now I'm just pursuing, but category three, I think will be a big part of it, right? Right now we're using Markovian dynamics on graphs, but we're thinking that for the bigger picture of how agents interact and combine to form new agents, we may have to go to a category theoretic representation that's more general than the Markovian dynamics that we're looking at right now. So maybe monoidal categories to begin with. It's so interesting. So the conscious agent theory, the conscious agent dynamics are occurring on graph. And that's kind of the, and then the conscious agents get ascribed that Alan conscious agent gets ascribed a category set of, for example, like your DNA may be in there, something like that. Maybe the morphisms that that agent undergoes may be like we described earlier, this most common morphism of drinking the water, which then enables the agent to live another day because they've imbibed water, versus having the, you know, the Rube Goldberg transcendent idea of a business that they build incessantly obsessively over five years actually gets them a very serious long-term fitness payoff. So, and which gives them a better stance on the hierarchy for in the replicator equation, their genetics will mate with the better partners genetics. Is it taking in that level of processing? Eventually, of course, we're going to, I mean, that's what we see in the interface, right? We see this kind of evolutionary dynamics and we see genes, we see DNA, we see the replicator equation, we see reproductive success and failure. And so those are things that we'll have to show at least are the way from the point of view of our space-time headset, our interface, but that's the way this dynamics looks to us through that. But it may be that it's that that point of view deeply misses a lot. Yes. It really misunderstands what's really going on with this whole realm of conscious agents. So I don't want to in any way restrict my imagination about the dynamics agents to anything, even about sexual reproduction and fitness, the whole notion of fitness and reproduction and so forth may be only an artifact of our headset, just like space-time, space-time itself, the very structure of space-time is an artifact of our headset. It's not a deep insight into reality. So that's the weird thing. And the fun thing about the challenge of this is, so when I go after this theory of conscious agents, and then you're asking exactly the right questions to really expose what it means to try as a scientist to go to a level of theory that goes beyond space-time, right? You have to, on the one hand, be constrained ultimately by empirical things that we can measure inside our interface, like DNA and fitness and survival and so forth. But our ideas can't be constrained necessarily in this deeper realm. We really have to let our imagination go and ask the really tough question, which is first, what kind of deeper theory do we want to go after? So I'm going after a theory of conscious agents and consciousness. Others that I should mention tried to go a different way. I mean, so Seth Lloyd was looking for something beyond space-time and he proposed quantum bits and quantum gates. So that's mathematically precise. And there's this abstract world outside of space and time with these quantum bits and quantum gates. And he was able to show how with each quantum gate, the action of the gate corresponded to the curvature of little patch of relativistic space-time, gravitational general relativistic space-time. And he could get, he could sort of boot up general relativity from this deeper reality. Now you could of course ask him, why in the world should it be that this deeper reality is quantum bits and quantum gates? Who ordered that? And why? Why should that be the deepest reality? And we could scratch our heads about that. And that's a legitimate question. But I'm just saying that once you go and say space-time isn't fundamental, there's countless ways that we can go as scientists to look. And so for me, so it's a non-trivial choice to say, I'm looking for consciousness and my motivation was simply because I think I'm conscious. I think you're conscious. If I'm wrong about that, and I could be wrong about that, then why I'm wrong about pretty much everything. And so I decided I wanted to propose a theory in which consciousness is fundamental and see if I couldn't do the hard work of showing that space-time emerges as just a headset to represent all these, think about it as a big social dynamics, like the Twitterverse. So we're proposing this big Twitterverse of conscious agents. But since it's like the Twitterverse, there's tens of millions of Twitter users, billions of tweets. What do we do is that you can't interact with all the tweets or the Twitter users. We need a visualization tool to see what's trending in New York to LA. Zoom out. What's happening in the United States? What's happening in Europe? What's happening in China? Zoom in. What is Alan tweeting right now? So a good tool would let me zoom in to just Alan, zoom out to what's happening at the whole United States. That's what our headset is.  Just like if I have it in my headset, I've got something that's representing what's trending in the United States. Some red objects are doing something over here in green objects. It's not that red objects and green objects are conscious or Twitter's. That's just how my interface codes the stuff because it has to give up. But I'm not giving up so much when I interact with you. I'm actually interacting with a specific consciousness and you're interacting with my consciousness. And so our headset, in many cases, will just use really crude symbols that we call just inanimate physical objects. That doesn't mean anything deep. It just means that our symbols have to give up. Right, there's no, in this point of view, there's no fundamental distinction between living and non-living. We think it's a fundamental distinction in reality. It's just where our interface symbols are more or less insightful about the conscious agents that we're interacting with. So there's no fundamental principle distinction between living and non-living. And there's no way that life just boots up from the unconscious ingredients of our interface. So this changes the whole point of view. But to get right back to your question, what we have to do in this theory of conscious agents and this dynamics is not assume John Maynard-Smith's theory. We have to get it coming out as a projection of a deeper dynamics. And so we have to ask, and this is the really fun part and the creative part for scientists, you have to ask every theory has certain assumptions. What are, and we want to have as few assumptions as possible, right? Because everything you assume, you're not explaining. So every time you put something into an assumption, you're saying, can't explain that. So that's an assumption. So you want as few assumptions as possible. And so there's no theory of everything, right? There is no scientific theory of everything because every theory has some assumptions that will not be explained by that theory. So there are theories of everything except my assumptions. That's what science had. We have theories of everything except my assumption. And of course, then you can get a deeper theory which tries to explain those assumptions, but it'll have its own new assumptions, right? And so science always will have this limit that we only have theories of everything except my assumptions. And so my theory of consciousness is no exception. I will have a theory of consciousness except my assumptions. And so my assumptions are that there are conscious experiences like the taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic, the headache and that those conscious experiences can affect other conscious experiences. So they inform actions that affect other conscious experiences. That's it. I just want to say those two things. So I mean, so notice I'm not saying anything about a self or self-awareness or self-consciousness. I'm not saying anything about memory or learning or intelligence or problem solving. There's all these things that I'm not saying, they're not part of the kitchen sink that I'm throwing into my theory. These are all things that I'm saying I will have to explain. The only thing I'm going to let my self have is two things. There are experiences and experiences inform actions and the only actions are to affect other experiences. That's it. With those, so that minimal structure, my hope is to say, I can then give you a theory in which we build selves as data structures. We can build theories out of networks. So this is going to be the dynamics of graphs. It's going to be graph dynamics in which we show how to compute things like memory, learning, problem solving, intelligence and so forth. And by the way, it's a theorem from our mathematical statement of the assumptions that I just gave you. There are experiences and they can affect other experiences. By writing it down as Markovian kernels as we have, it's a trivial theorem that this framework is computational universal. And what that means is in principle, there is no limit. Any theory that we could build of learning, memory, problem solving or intelligence using computers, I can build as my theory of conscious agents. If you can do it on a computer, I can build a theory in this new language of conscious agent networks. So I know from the get go that I have an adequate but minimal set of assumptions that lets me build all these theories. I can build a theory of learning, memory, problem solving, a self and so forth out of this. The two assumptions that you made about experience being fundamental and also about experiences impacting each other agents that then impact their actions that those are pretty fundamental to ancient spirituality, perennial wisdoms around the planet which we'll talk about also later. So I appreciate how you say that there's many different ways to up the source code mountain. And okay, yeah, yeah, I like that a lot. There's a lot of like Brian Keating just had Stephen Wolfram and Eric Weinstein on and they were talking about the nature of mathematical reality and they were talking about the hopfibration and they were talking about how that vibrational data is a big deal and it's happening infinitely far away and then the emergence of it. And to me, that style of thinking and visualizing I think is also important. I don't know where that lands on the mountain towards the source code and where that would incorporate a conscious agents or if that would happen downstream or whatnot. So I really appreciate how there's many different ways up the source code mountain and that there's different ways to speak about and visualize it.


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