Dave Coplin & Gaia Vince
Book Shambles
On today’s episode we have two guests whose books look at two different angles of human evolution. Dave Coplin’s The Rise of the Humans looks at our evolving and changing relationship with technology while Gaia Vince’s Transcendence looks at human evolution as it relates to culture and the objects we create. They both chat to Robin and Josie about their books, the state of humans right now, and why Robin is bad at video games…
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Chatting with Dave:
Email – absolutely! CC line – my coping strategy is that I use a rule to move all emails I am cc’d on to an FYI folder, that I never read. I’m copied, so have no action. They are deleted after 2 weeks. I tell people this is what I do, which creates a vaguely virtuous cycle. I find out there was one I should have read no more than once per month. It halved my email overload. But these days we are replacing pseudo-real-time chat in email with actual real-time chat in Teams etc. Not sure if that’s progress.
To some of your points, this removing of friction in interactions through use of technology has upsides and downsides. Frictionless surfaces are extremely dangerous…
Perhaps we need to find a way of minimising the friction to kindness, but increase it for toxic behaviour. AI might help with that (though there is something weird about needing machines to enable us to act in humane ways).
White Mirror – was just about to comment on Star Trek when you went there too. One of the reasons Picard was troubling is that it was a departure from the optimism that is mostly engrained in Star Trek.
I met Dave a few years back when he was ‘CEO’ for Microsoft. I haven’t met Robin yet, but seen him many times (at a distance).