I meet Daniel Dennett, the great American rationalist, on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, as good a day as any to contemplate the fragility of civilisation in face of overwhelming technological change, a topic he examines in his latest book.

Dennett is a singular figure in American culture: a white-haired, white-bearded 74-year-old philosopher whose work has mined the questions that erupt at the places where science, technology and consciousness meet. His subject is the brain and how it creates meaning and what our brains will make of a future that includes AI and robots. He’s in London with his wife, Susan, to mark the publication of his latest book – From Bacteria to Bach and Back – and I find him in a rented flat in Notting Hill, scowling at his laptop. “I was about to send a tweet,” he says. “Something like, ‘Republican senators are in an enviable position. How often does anybody get a real opportunity to become a national hero? Who’s going to step up and enter the pages of history?’”

I envy Republican senators. How often do people get a chance to be a hero without risking their lives? Be brave. Do the right thing. — Daniel Dennett (@danieldennett) January 21, 2017

Dennett has the intellectual heft for his pronouncements to have impact: a star speaker on the TED circuit and friend to many of the Silicon Valley elite, he’s also that rare breed, the mythical creature of publishers’ dreams – a writer of meaty, serious books that also sell.

It’s clear that his latest was conceived and written in a different time. Dennett, a close ally of Richard Dawkins (and a similarly quasi-militant atheist), had decided to look at culture from an evolutionary perspective. His last chapter, where he contemplates our technological future, was intended to be thought-provoking. Instead, it’s quietly terrifying: we’re only just starting to wake up to the potential outcomes of the technology that we’re inventing but increasingly don’t understand, he writes. Human co-operation and trust aren’t givens. They’re the byproducts of a cultural process that can be reversed. And civilisation is far, far more fragile than any of us want to realise.

I was thinking that perhaps philosophers are exactly what’s needed right now. Some deep thinking about what is happening at this moment?

Yes. From everybody. The real danger that’s facing us is we’ve lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it’s much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn’t matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you’re fake news. We’re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we’ve not experienced since the middle ages.

You wrote a paper a few years ago about how technology will bring transparency to both people and organisations, whether they want it or not, and the explosive impact of that. That’s what seems to be happening isn’t it?

Yes, I wrote it with Deb Roy, a brilliant young computer scientist and roboticist who is now head of research at Twitter. We compared it to the Cambrian explosion, which is regarded as a time of immense creativity. All these brand new life forms were created, but at the same time just as many were destroyed. It was an arms race.

So, you say there are all these fantastic tools that are going to be created…

Yes, and counter-tools.

And you suggest that will lead to an information war. By some descriptions, that’s exactly where we are, isn’t it?

Absolutely. I had been revelling in the information transparency because it was making it much harder for religion. But it’s not all good. It can be terrifying.

There’s a perception that philosophy is a dusty discipline that belongs in academe, but actually, questions such as what is a fact and what is the truth are the fundamental questions of today, aren’t they?

Philosophy has not covered itself in glory in the way it has handled this. Maybe people will now begin to realise that philosophers aren’t quite so innocuous after all. Sometimes, views can have terrifying consequences that might actually come true. I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts. You’d have people going around saying: “Well, you’re part of that crowd who still believe in facts.”

My understanding of postmodernism – and you’re a very prominent atheist – is that in the absence of a single meta-narrative, which is God, you had competing narratives…

Yes and one’s true and the others are false. One of those narratives is the truth and the others aren’t; it’s as simple as that.

The Trump phenomenon raises interesting questions about the way people think and how our brains work, which you’ve spent your life looking at. Is it affecting the way you think about things?

It is in the obvious way that I find that I simply must take time out from what I’d really like to be doing to think about the political near future and what steps, if any, I might take to fend off disaster. Political activism is not my favourite activity but sometimes one has to engage in it. I felt a moral obligation to write Breaking the Spell [Dennett’s 2006 study of religion as a natural phenomenon] because I was so concerned about the rise of theocracy in America and the overreaching of the religious right. What I’d really like to work on is some very exciting new developments in theories of consciousness, which has almost nothing to do with politics. I begrudge every hour that I have to spend worrying about political issues instead.

So is that what you’ll do next?

I’m an eternal optimist. Every Republican senator has an opportunity to grow a spine and stand up for truth and justice and the rule of law. My other hope is that if Trump has to choose between being president and being a billionaire, I think he may just resign.

This has the comforting quality of religion to me. It’s nice to believe there’s a heaven. It’s be nice to believe that Trump will resign…

Well, I told you, I’m an optimist.

But in your latest book, you ask if civilisation can fail and conclude that it can. You say there’s a huge and present danger because the modern world has become too complex to fix. Does that have a different resonance now than when you wrote it?

I suppose it does. When I wrote it, I thought it would be a hard sell for a lot of people. Whereas now, well, we’re all facing it, aren’t we? My optimism is well surrounded by very pessimistic thoughts, which are in some way probably more realistic.

You also talk about cultural evolution in the book. For most people, that suggests the idea of things becoming better. But that’s not necessarily true, is it?

Well, the view of things getting better is of course the view of those who survive. It’s sort of weak history. The same is true of culture. The striking thing is that we now understand more about how evolution works and we’re beginning to harness it. And this exposes the fragility of some features of our modern world. We now have to take care not to run off the cliff with our new technology, without looking closely at what its implications are.

You talk about memes, which is Richard Dawkins’s name for units of cultural transmission. Can you view Trump as a really bad meme, but a really successful one?

Well, one of the most powerful and unsettling parts of Dawkins’s vision is that memes have their own fitness. In the same way that germs and viruses have their own fitness. That means that there can be a very, very successful meme, which is really dangerous.

The debate around fake news seems to be a microcosm of this…

Absolutely. I’ll tell you one thing that surprised me. There’s a higher order principle that I thought would be more important than has turned out to be the case. I’ll give you an example: why do advertisements cost so much at the Super Bowl? Answer: it’s not just that millions of people are watching but that millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, know that hundreds of millions of people are watching. And that gives it additional credibility. And the web isn’t like that. But when you’ve got Trump tweeting to millions of people at a time, they know that he’s tweeting to millions at a time. He’s getting one of the advantages of this credibility effect without the disadvantages. So the siloing effect is really very unnerving. This is one of the features of the new transparency that is most worrying. No sooner do we develop the hardware to give the globe a nervous system than we spoil it. We’re at great risk of going blind.

I’ve been writing about problems with Google search and one of the examples I found is that if you type “The Holocaust is” into Google, it will suggest, in order, “a lie”, “a hoax”etc. And if you click on “The Holocaust a lie”, you get 10 links to neo-Nazi sites that say: “Yes, the Holocaust is a lie”…

That’s very interesting. And disturbing. It’s part of this arms race of the tools made possible by transparency. This is going to undermine many good things and many bad things too. We’re entering a period of a sort of lawlessness.

Google is interesting because it’s not just our gateway to these facts but it’s also a cultural transmission device, it’s a meme machine.

Yes, yes, yes.

So, whatever is the top link disseminates fastest, becomes the most successful version of the truth, the meme that wins…



Yes, the underlying Google algorithm that made Google possible in the first place, that Larry and Sergey created, has been tweaked and tweaked and tweaked and they have some of the smartest people in the world trying to correct the flaws they see. Whether these smart and well-intentioned people can keep up is anybody’s guess but we do know they’re trying. I’m very glad that Deb Roy is the scientific person at Twitter. He and his team are working hard to try to understand and anticipate the problems.

You’ve been an influential figure among the Silicon Valley crowd?

Maybe. I sort of hang out with them, yeah.

Does the relationship between technology companies and the US government concern you? Seeing them all at Trump’s tech summit, for example?

I didn’t really follow it but it sits ill with me, yes. I don’t see what the right path is between keeping the technology as far away from government as possible. My friend Danny Hillis gave a TED talk where he pointed out that the vital services of the nation are much more dependent on the internet than they should be. If the internet went down, and a lot of people say it’s just a matter of time, it will probably take the power grid down, cellphones, radio, television – we’ll be plunged into electronic darkness. We’re not used to that. If you thought 9/11 was scary, this is going to be a tremendous panic-inducer. We should be planning what to do about that.

You say you’ve been surprised by the gains of AI and while you’re not concerned about us being enslaved by a race of robots, you have other concerns…

Oh, sure. The whole singularity stuff, that’s preposterous. It distracts us from much more pressing problems.

AI tools that we become hyper-dependent on, that is going to happen. And one of the dangers is that we will give them more authority than they warrant. We will let them advise us about things that we shouldn’t let them advise us about.

You quote your colleague who suggests the Google autocomplete, which uses AI and machine learning, could be controlling the way that we see the world. Is that what you think? That the robots are already controlling our minds in ways we don’t yet realise?

Yes, we’re beginning to furnish ourselves with technological oracles. We will be able to prove that they give very accurate results, results that we don’t have any other way of getting. We also know that we can’t understand how they do it. People talk about black-box science. It’s not just news. It’s not just politics. It’s science.

What’s the danger of a world where even the scientists don’t understand how this stuff works?

One of the big themes in my book is how up until recently, the world and nature were governed by competence without comprehension. Serious comprehension of anything is very recent, only millennia old, not even a million years old. But we’re now on the verge of moving into the age of post-intelligent design and we don’t bother comprehending any more. That’s one of the most threatening thoughts to me. Because for better or for worse, I put comprehension as one of my highest ideals. I want to understand everything. I want people to understand things. I love understanding things. I love explaining things to myself and to others. We’ve always had plenty of people who, for good reason, said, “Oh, don’t bother explaining to me how the car engine works, I don’t care. I just push the ignition and off I go.” What happens when we take that attitude towards everything?

Are we already in a situation where the technology is too complicated even for the people who created it to understand it?

That’s a worry and possibility. I don’t think that point has been reached, but that point could be reached. What’s interesting is that philosophers for hundreds of years have talked about the limits of comprehension as if it was sort of like the sound barrier. There was this wall we just couldn’t get beyond and that was part of the tragic human condition. Now, we’re discovering a version of it, which, if it’s true is sort of true in a boring way. It’s not that there are any great mysteries, it’s just that the only way we can make progress is by division of labour and specialisation. For example, the papers coming out of Cern with 500 authors, no one of whom understands the whole paper or the whole science behind it. This is just going to become more and more the meme. More and more, the unit of comprehension is going to be group comprehension, where you simply have to rely on a team of others because you can’t understand it all yourself. There was a time, oh, I would say as recently as, certainly as the 18th century, when really smart people could aspire to having a fairly good understanding of just about everything.

What are the implications of that?

Well that’s the fragility, the hyper-fragility of civilisation right there. We could all be bounced back into the 19th century.

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