Neal Stephenson on Depictions of Reality
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2019
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in crypto, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Though Stephenson insists he’s more often wrong than right, his technical sharpness has even led to a half-joking suggestion that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of bitcoin. His latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, involves a more literal sort of brain-picking, exploring what might happen when digitized brains can find a second existence in a virtual afterlife.
So what’s the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, whether we’re in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded June 14th, 2019
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:08.3 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:12.5 | Learn more at mercatis.org. |
| 0:15.2 | And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit |
| 0:20.4 | ConversationsWithTyler.com. |
| 0:22.4 | I am here today with Neil Stevenson, who is arguably the world's greatest author of speculative |
| 0:36.4 | fiction and science fiction. |
| 0:38.2 | Welcome Neil. |
| 0:39.2 | It's good to be here. |
| 0:40.2 | Thanks for having me on your program. |
| 0:42.1 | Let me start with some general questions about tech we will get to your new book. |
| 0:46.3 | How will physical surveillance evolve? |
| 0:48.2 | So there's facial surveillance, gay surveillance in China, coming to many airports. |
| 0:53.0 | What's your vision for this? |
| 0:54.4 | When you say physical surveillance, you just mean... |
| 0:56.9 | They record your face, they know who you are, they try to... |
| 0:59.3 | Actually, recording you while you're wandering around somewhere, as opposed to tapping your |
| 1:03.4 | phone, that kind of thing. |
| 1:05.1 | And if you J-walk, they'll find your bank account, and you'll get a text message two minutes |
| 1:09.0 | later. |
| 1:10.0 | Right. |
| 1:11.0 | I think, you know, it's just going to be based on what people are willing to tolerate |
... |
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