- From the oracles of antiquity to the AI-driven tech giants of today, humanity's desire to foresee the future is longstanding.

But today's guest warns that predicting the future is not the same as foretelling the truth.

She's Carissa Veliz, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(lighthearted music) (lighthearted music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Carissa Veliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and a fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford.

She's the author of "Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI."

Carissa, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- I have to tell you that I devoured "Prophecy."

I couldn't put it down once I picked it up.

And let's just start with a quick overview.

Tell us a little bit about the book from that 30,000-foot level, and then we'll get into it in some detail.

- It's quite a quirky book.

(both chuckling) It's a book about prediction, and that makes it quite broad because it's about history, it's about how we use prediction in Ancient Greece and the Oracle of Delphi, and then medieval astrologers, and how we went from making predictions that were qualitative from quantitative to quantitative prediction.

So the developments of statistics and how we developed bureaucracy and how that went and developed into AI, and how we're using AI, and what is a prediction, what is the philosophy of prediction, and more importantly, whether there are things that we shouldn't predict, even if we could.

- Well, I found it sort of a fascinating tour of Western thought about a lot of these issues.

You mentioned the Oracle of Delphi.

Prophecy is not new.

It's been used throughout history.

Traditionally, before the digital age, how has prophecy manifested itself in society, in civilizations?

- Humanity has always wanted to know about the future, partly because it's nerve-racking not to, and we know (Jim chuckles) that things can go wrong, and we have this illusion that, if we can just see what's next, we will be able to avoid bad things from happening.

And so we've always wanted to know what the future holds.

And in the past, we used common sense and experience.

So for example, after a few years, you get the gist of that after the summer, there is the autumn.

And that is a kind of prediction and it allows you to be able to prepare for it.

And we learn how to read the stars so we could use the sky as a map and as a compass.

But we've also always had prophets, people who we think are experts and to whom we go asking for advice.

So in Ancient Greece, in addition to the oracles, there were seers and diviners and there were all kinds of methods, including reading animal entrails, and reading birds, and reading tea leaves, and other methods, to try to figure out what was the future going to be like.

And then we focused on reading the stars in a different way.

And we tended to think that the stars showed in the cosmos the reality of our world, and that if only we could read it, we could get a glimpse of the future.

And so one pattern that we see is that we tend to see prophets next to leaders.

So in, for example, the courts of the kings and queens of medieval times, there tended to be an astrologer or a diviner of some sort.

And to this day, we see that next to leaders, there tends to be someone speaking about the future.

- Yeah, does the desire to know the future, is that consistent across eras?

Is our desire to know the future now the same as the desire to know the future in antiquity?

- I don't know.

I think there are many assumptions there and many inferences.

My sense is, yes, there's always that desire, but it gets interpreted in different ways and partly depends on what's happening and how uncertain people feel and how afraid they feel, and it partly depends on how we interpret that uncertainty.

So when we see moments in which there can be war but it's right before the breaking of war, people get very anxious, understandably, and there is a push towards more divination, which has a very nefarious effect because it's a kind of vicious cycle.

The more people are afraid, the more they go to prophets to tell them what the future is, the more those prophets take the opportunity of the power grab and tell people what to do according to their own agenda, and they build the future that they want, not the future that is in our interest.

And so for example, in Ancient Rome, when the Republic starts to falter, astrology comes in very, very strongly and people start predicting imperial charts, that there would be an emperor.

And in a way, when people start believing that there will be an emperor more than they believe in their own Republic, that's when they lose the Republic, and the rest is just a kind of unfolding of things.

But it's the belief in the future more than the belief in the present that led to the fall of the Republic, arguably.

But however, even though you always see this desire to see the future, you can interpret it in different ways.

So one way is, I'm very scared, I want to know what the future holds, I go to an expert, I tell them essentially to ask them to tell me what to do, and I do what they tell me, and I believe what they say.

Or I can think, okay, there's a lot of uncertainty, it makes me anxious, but it's also an opportunity because it means that there is leeway, that there are different options, that the future is unwritten, so it's an opportunity for creation.

And so in a way, I don't know if you have this experience that right before you go on stage to give a talk, there's adrenaline, and you can interpret it as, oh, my God, I'm gonna panic, and I'm nervous, (Jim laughs) and this is bad, or you can interpret it as a moment of excitement.

Something exciting is about to happen.

You're going to share ideas with an audience.

And it can go wrong, sure, but it can also go very right.

- Well, so I think you just hinted at this, right?

That acts of prophecy are about power and assertions of power and will to power.

Unpack that a little bit for us because that's not something that I think I necessarily considered before I read your book.

- I think it's very intuitive to think about prediction as a kind of quest for knowledge.

But when you look at history and you see the public sphere today and you just analyze how predictions are used, you realize, oh, no, this is a power play very often.

And so the best illustration that I found in the literature is a story about King Louis XI who had an astrologer in court.

And one day, the astrologer predicts that a woman in the court is going to die within the next week, and she does.

So the king panics because he figures either this is a murderer who is willing to murder a human being just to prove himself right, in which case, I need to murder him because he can murder me, or he can actually see the future, and that is equally frightening because what if he sees my own demise?

And so I have to murder him either way.

But before murdering him, (Jim laughs) he asks him one last question, and that is he says, "Given your prophetic abilities, tell me about your own future.

How long will you live?"

And the astrologer, who was quite a smart cookie, didn't miss a beat and he said, "I will die three days before Your Majesty."

And of course, King Louis XI never kills the astrologer.

And that illustrates how predictions can be used to get yourself power.

Sometimes it's a life insurance, sometimes it's money, or sometimes it's selling a product.

So when a tech executive says that we will use his product tomorrow for everything, and if you haven't bought it, you're just behind the curve, he's doing marketing and very effectively because we tend to think like, oh, my God, this is a description about the future.

If I don't comply with it, I'm just gonna be kind of missing out on something.

When in fact, it is creating the future.

So one way to put it is that the future does not get predicted.

It gets produced, often through prediction.

- That is profound.

You describe data as the new oracle.

So what does that mean in really practical terms?

- We've been sold this idea that data can speaks for itself, that there are certain methods or decisions that are data driven.

And when you actually think about it and look at it, it's like, no, everything is driven by values.

And sometimes the value is profit, and sometimes that's fine, but we're not acknowledging it.

And so we're being sold this idea that data is just very neutrally describing what the future is, and there's so many things that are wrong with that.

First, there's a value of, why did we collect this data, who collected it with what purpose, and what are some data points that we might not be collecting that might tell a different story?

So there's that kind of aspect.

But furthermore, the assumption that we can use data to know what the future holds depends on an even greater assumption that the future will resemble the past.

And sometimes that's the case and sometimes that's not the case.

And it's precisely the times when the future does not resemble the past that things are more disruptive and that we have more of a need to know what the future holds, but that's precisely the kind of situation that is unpredictable.

- Yeah, so part of what I take from a lot of what you've written here is sort of the urgency of the human being in all of this and human engagement.

Do we surrender something when we rely on the data to determine what our decisions should be in any given context?

- We surrender so many things.

We surrender the ability to be truly creative because essentially what we're doing is we are perpetrating, or sorry, we are making the future resemble the past when it might not otherwise.

So we are perpetuating the patterns of the past.

So that's one thing that we renounce, the ability to be more innovative.

But we also are losing not only creativity, but also leadership and joy many times, because when we follow the data, we have a mentality of a follower.

And we're not actually following the data, we're following the agenda of the people who created the data.

And that, more often than not, is the tech executives.

But we're also losing in joy because we get sold this narrative that we're gonna use AI for all the boring jobs and we're gonna do the fun jobs.

But when we see at the world, (Jim laughs) AI is doing the fun jobs, like designing logos or images, and we're doing the drudgery of bureaucracy and stuff.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- So I worry that when we use large language models to create language, we're missing out on the joy and the meaning and the value of the process of writing.

Writing is not only about an output, it's about the process of thinking, is a kind of thinking enhancer, and it has beauty and it has rhythm.

And when we leave that to the chatbot, it's not only that we are essentially kind of leaving them democracy, because democracy is a kind of conversation, but we're missing out on the joyful creation of language.

- Well, so I wanna come to this issue of democracy and tyranny and the relationship between prophecy and democracy and the fate of democracies.

We're living in a time now where democracy is under stress in the West.

If you look at Freedom House rankings, democracy has been declined for almost 20 years now.

You note that it's not a coincidence that the rise of artificial intelligence and all of the data economy around that coincides with or happens at the same time as this backsliding in democracy globally.

What's going on there?

- I think two main things.

One is the reliance on surveillance.

And surveillance cannot be comfortably compatible with democracy.

When we increase surveillance to this amount that we've only previously seen in dictatorships, the practical question that we're asking is, how much surveillance can liberal democracy take?

Because without privacy, you don't have a secret ballot, you can't have a confidential meeting with a lawyer, you don't have a confidential meeting with a doctor, you don't have investigative journalism for very long.

And those are very important pillars of democracy, not to mention the capacity to protest peacefully and anonymously.

So that's one thing.

But all of this surveillance only exists because it feeds the machinery of prediction, and that's the other piece of the puzzle.

When we rely on prophets, predictions end up working as a kind of co-opting of power because they set the agenda, they set what's possible, and they invite people to obey in advance.

So when we hear a prediction and instead of realizing that it's a prediction and it can never be a fact and we hear it as if it were a fact and we do as a prophet says, so if a tech executive says, "Oh, we're gonna use AI for this," and then you buy the AI and you use it for that, what you're doing essentially is obeying in advance in the sense of Timothy Snyder.

- So it's fascinating.

We're reordering vast segments of the economy.

We're rethinking the role of higher education, I think globally, because of the advent of AI.

But all of the real prognosticators are either, to your point, AI executives or people in the paid service of AI executives.

So I think one of the really important things that I took away is that prophecy and predictions are not about truth, they're about power.

- Yeah, and it's interesting how we change with AI because we think that AI is magic or we assume that AI equates with science, which is not the case.

AI is a tool and sometimes can be used in scientific ways and it can be used in very unscientific ways to the point at which we're not sure whether the development of AI is worsening science because now we have fabricated citations that we didn't have as many of before and we are in a sense diluting science.

But we would never have that attitude if the person were talking about shoes, you know?

It would be so obvious to us that they would be doing marketing, that of course the person who's selling shoes is gonna say that these shoes are gonna be the most commonly used in the whole world.

Well, he's selling it, of course.

But when it comes to AI, suddenly we think that we are being spoken to by these priests or like high scientists, when in fact they're doing marketing, too.

They're selling their product.

- Yeah, so I think every one of us meets a predictive algorithm almost every day.

If I'm texting something to my kids, it's gonna suggest words that they think ought to come next, right?

I think the tech companies would say, "But that's what consumers want."

Is it more than that?

- It's much more than that because you can't turn it off.

So for example, when I take a photo with my camera, it's being influenced by AI.

And sometimes I don't want the prettiest photo possible.

Sometimes I'm taking a photo of something ugly and I want that ugliness (Jim chuckles) to be there because I wanna keep a record of reality, and it's so annoying that I can't turn it off.

So it's a kind of imposition that gets sold to us as what we want.

And that's part of the prediction and that's part of the challenge to defy that, to say, "No, it's not.

This is not the future I want."

And one thing that really worries me related to your previous question is how Big Tech is buying off society.

It's buying government, it's buying academia, and it has so much money that it's even buying it for cheap.

And so it's co-opting all of these fears in life.

And so in a way, we don't get the non-Big-Tech perspective anymore.

But at the end of the day, one thing to keep in mind is that we're analog beings, and that means that the digital can only take you so far.

So in the times when Mark Zuckerberg was predicting that the metaverse was going to be a reality the following year, and happily, that seems to have failed, he was selling us the idea that we could buy incredible properties with incredible views on the metaverse.

And of course, that's unbelievably sad because a virtual apartment is not gonna keep you warm.

It's not gonna have a roof over your head.

It's a virtual apartment.

It's not an apartment at all.

That's not property.

Why would anyone be even remotely sold on that idea?

Because we're not doing good enough in the analog world because we don't have adequate housing.

And so in a way, the antidote to all of the prophets and all of what's wrong with the digital, it's partly grounding ourselves in the analog world and reminding ourselves that virtual water will never quench your thirst no matter how good AI gets because it's not water at all.

- Well, and I hear in that, also, and you write about this in the book, but I'm thinking of Pope Leo's recent encyclical where he reminds us that machines don't feel.

And you discuss the reality of AIs and feeling and whether or not they can ever be ethical.

Can AI, can artificial intelligence ever be an ethical artificial intelligence?

- So I have a paper about this that's open access called "Moral Zombies."

I think that an AI, as it's currently constructed, can never be a moral agent because it cannot understand what it is to inflict pleasure or pain on someone because it's never felt pain itself.

And how can you understand the significance of inflicted pain on someone if you can't feel pain yourself?

And that means that the best that we can hope for is to build AI in a more ethical way and to use it in ways that are more in accordance with our ethical principles.

But at the end of the day, it's human beings who are the moral agents and who are to blame when things go wrong and are going wrong.

And for a product that wasn't designed with ethics in mind.

It wasn't even designed to be truth tracking.

It was designed for profit.

It was designed to engage us as much as possible and to profit from our data.

- See, when I think about sort of the introduction of disruptive technologies, I have a hard time thinking of anything in the modern era that comes close to what AI has the potential to do.

And what I wonder about is I look at sort of regulatory structures in the United States which are non-existent, especially in the Trump administration.

I look at what the Europeans have tried to do with some success in the European Parliament, but that still, I think, pales in comparison to what the enormity of the challenge is.

Is there a way to think about democratic resilience in the face of what AI means for our understanding of the truth, our own cognitive offloading in the face of these kinds of technologies?

- Yes.

I think that we tend to underestimate the power of culture.

And culture pervades everything, from the technology that gets developed but also what gets used and what succeeds and what fails, and how we implement law.

Because having good laws is not good enough.

You can have an excellent law, but if it's never enforced, it's just scribbles somewhere.

- Yeah.

- And that is both good and bad news because it means that there is no easy fix, but it means also that we have much more power than people might imagine.

And so for example, more than a decade ago, Google tried to sell Google glasses, and famously they tanked because people didn't like them.

And it wasn't only (Jim chuckles) that they were ugly, which they were, but it was that they were incredibly invasive and users of these glasses were called Glassholes.

And now Meta is pushing again (Jim laughs) for this same kind of technology.

And the question is, have they normalized surveillance enough that people will bear it and just kind of not complain?

Or are we gonna say, "No, that's not cool"?

And are we willing to say, with a lot of civility, with a lot of politeness, to someone wearing them, "That's not cool, and you're not respecting my privacy, and I'm not consenting"?

Because if we do, if enough of us do, they will fail.

And so it's partly about how we use the technology around us.

It's partly also about choosing the right technology.

So not every kind of AI and every kind of tech is invasive in the same way.

So I am on the board of the Proton Foundation, and I say that as a way of full disclosure, but also because I'm there because I believe in what they do.

And Proton is doing encrypted technology that is actually private.

So when you have an alternative, you should use it because it has much more of an impact than you might imagine.

Other companies are paying attention and saying, "Okay, people actually do care about privacy and it can be a competitive advantage."

So what I'm saying is the future is up to us.

- I've got two weeks' more of questions worth that I wanna talk to you about here.

I've got about three minutes left, so I wanna ask you this.

There are some who worry about an AI apocalypse, that the AI, the machines take over, right?

You're less concerned about that and more concerned about the harm that we might do with AI even before we get to a AI apocalypse.

Can you tell us what you're worried about?

- I'm much more afraid of other human beings than of AI, partly because AI is not that bright.

Whenever I try to use it (Jim chuckles) for something actually difficult, it fails miserably.

And then I think it must be me, but then I try with computer scientists and they can't get it to work either.

So I'm not as impressed as the marketing suggests.

That's one thing.

But secondly is that technology typically empowers us to do more things or things more easily.

And certainly, technology can empower us to destroy each other more quickly, but we're perfectly capable of that already.

I mean, we have nuclear weapons.

And so what I worry the most about is that AI can make it a lot easier for an authoritarian regime to gain much more power than they would because it's become so cheap and so easy to surveil and predict and try to influence behavior.

In fact, it's become cheaper to surveil than not to surveil because you can profit from it, which is exactly the opposite incentive than you would want in democracy.

However, I think people are becoming more savvy.

We are understanding better how tech companies work and the power that they wield.

I think people are also tired of feeling exploited and lied to and that there is a real opportunity for change here.

And change isn't only going to be technological, although it is partly technological.

And what I want is young people to see this and say, "I can do better.

I don't wanna work for Google.

I wanna build the next Google, which will be supportive of democracy."

But also, change is cultural and democratic and in governance.

And democracy is hard, it's imperfect, and it's slow, but it's building the world you live in.

It's not only voting, it's participating in your society.

It's getting off of the couch and stop doomscrolling and try to figure out what is the future that you want and how can we work together to make it happen, to build it together?

- Carissa Veliz, it's also, your book is "Prophecy."

It's remarkable and it's a wonderful tribute also to the study of philosophy in the humanities.

And I just wanna say thank you so much for spending some time with us.

But that is all the time we have this week.

If you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I wanna thank you for spending some time with me this week.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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