#Technology

One of the best experiences of my life was a week-long camping trip. I am going to leave out any specific details of where it was, but all you need to know is that we spent a lot of time kayaking. Everything we had with us, which wasn't much because of the storage limitations, was in the kayaks in dry bags. Each morning we would wake up early, have breakfast, pack up the tents, put everything in dry bags, load them into the kayaks, and set out to our next location. We would stop for lunch at some point along the way, or have lunch at our final destination if we were kayaking a shorter distance that day. Once we arrived at our destination, we would unload the kayaks, set up our tents, and eat.

Depending on your idea of fun, my anecdote may have sounded very appealing to you. Even if it didn't, you were probably at least already aware that this kind of activity would be someone's idea of a good time. Why do I point this out? Because it doesn't make any sense. Well, not by the standard that most of us apply to our own lives and the lives of others anyway. This trip was hard work, and it was uncomfortable. None of us liked constantly packing and unpacking everything. Our arms were usually very tired when we had just reached our halfway point. My legs get incredibly twitchy when I don't move them for a long time, and keeping them under the spray skirt for hours and hours was far worse than even my exhausted arms. Many of us got sunburnt, making sleeping on the already hard, uneven ground with only the flexible bottom of a tent in between even worse. To anyone who enjoys camping and other challenging activities, this is just part of the experience, but even they will join everyone else in complaining that life is too hard, too stressful, and too annoying. Who wouldn't like to have a higher income to make their life more relaxed? Who wouldn't like to take some extra days off of work? Who wouldn't like to see technology continue to make our lives easier and more convenient? And yet we go camping. We train for and run marathons, requiring physical and mental endurance. We add extra work to our lives with passion projects, which are fun, but often leave us burnt out. We love to challenge ourselves, yet we wish our lives were less challenging. Why?

A lot of people are aware that a truly "perfect" life, a life where you get whatever you want whenever you want it, isn't actually all that appealing. I hear so many people say that this is because without the bad moments of life, you can never appreciate the good ones. Often, people refer to the concept of hedonistic adaptation, where you get used to a better life such that it effectively becomes the same as your old one. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/690806/) By this logic, though, shouldn't a perfect life be equivalent to a normal one, and not outright nightmarish? Take this Twilight Zone episode for example. The episode follows Rocky Valentine as he finds himself in what he thinks is heaven. By the end of the episode, he discovers that this is not heaven, it is hell. According to hedonistic adaptation, shouldn't this just seem no better but also no worse than his life on earth? How does paradise become torture? I am aware that this is just a TV show, but it is valuable as a thought experiment, and I think most of us would share Rocky Valentine's feelings in this situation. Here is where I'm going to make a bold claim: The results of the study on hedonistic adaptation were misinterpreted, and there is a different, more accurate explanation for both why the lottery winners and accident victims were equally content with their lives, and why the lottery winners took less pleasure from the same mundane events as the accident victims. The amount of money you have, or the tragedies that you have experienced, while important, are not the primary factors in happiness. It is something much more abstract–fulfillment–that actually determines happiness. Fulfillment, at least as I mean it here, is fundamentally in contradiction with perfect ease of living. The simple answer to why we do the things that I described in the previous paragraph is because they are fulfilling. A fulfilling activity (Once again, at least as I mean it here. There are a lot of interpretations of this word.) is one you are motivated to do independent of anything else, not in spite of, but because of the challenge that it presents. This kind of endeavor plays a crucial role in our lives, and yet when talking about what makes us happy, we hardly ever recognize it. Rocky Valentine was robbed of any opportunity for this kind of fulfillment, and this was his hell. As to the lottery winners taking less pleasure in mundane events? Another one word answer presents itself: Boredom. Lottery winners have all of the material things that they could ever want. Whatever "mundane events" they could have been exposed to would likely have been something that they could experience whenever they wanted. I feel inclined to believe that the lottery winners would have enjoyed a camping trip just as much as the accident victims.

How would you like to live in a future where everything is done for us? No one has to write another song because AI can do it faster, better, and cheaper. No one has to draw another drawing or paint another painting because AI can do it faster, better, and cheaper. No one has to write another book because AI can do it faster, better, and cheaper. No one has to invent anything because AI can do it faster, better, and cheaper. You don't have to do anything! Just sit back and relax! Finally you don't have to do any work! Oh, you went out of your way to write a song? What a strange thing to do! What a waste of time! After all, all the AI generated music is so much better than human created music now. How unpolished your music sounds. No one will listen to that! Oh, you spent hours on a work of art? Why would you use such unnecessary effort? You could have gotten a far more refined image off of your computer in seconds! No one is interested in that silly picture you just wasted so much time making, they would much rather generate their own images! Is this the world we want to live in? Do we really want to become Rocky Valentine?

This isn't a problem of the future; it's a problem of the present. Artists who don't want their artwork stolen only to be regurgitated in one thousand different forms by an AI, all for free, are met with claims that they are simply afraid of the next step in our technological development. AI music is beginning to develop, and as someone who values music as a method of deep human communication, I am worried about the impact that this could have. Perhaps even more worrying is the areas that are left defenseless because they are not recognized as an art form. AI game development is becoming a very real thing, and while I think that this could reduce the tedium of writing tens of thousands of lines of code, making it an invaluable tool for programmers, I don't think it should ever take over game development completely. Games like The Beginners Guide and Pleh are, like other art, a powerful and unusual form of human communication. In a world of exclusively AI game development, these games may never see the light of day again. Another such area is math. If the concept of math as an art is alien to you, and you associate it only with grinding through complicated algorithmic processes in school which you never really understood, I suggest you read A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart. We live in a world where the concept of mathematical creativity is not only bizarre to almost everyone, but where any natural intuition of it is crushed out of our youth. This makes me worried that the joy of math may become completely lost to time in the near future as AI solves the unsolved problems which humans once delighted in investigating. If math is seen as just a burden by the majority, then people such as myself (see my username) may be much more likely to suffer the same fate as I described for an artist and musician in the previous paragraph.

If this still doesn't feel very "here and now," let me bring social media to your attention. Less and less do people meet up with their friends at a coffee shop or a restaurant or simply take a walk together. I'm sure I sound old right now, but while I will not disclose my exact age, I think it is important that you know that I am most certainly not elderly. There is something so uniquely wonderful about just taking a walk through the woods with a friend, but now this kind of thing is often seen as too much effort. Why not just sit at home texting? Why not use Facetime? Why not just talk on Snapchat or look at your friend's latest Instagram post? Who wants to put in the time and effort to go for a walk? If you haven't noticed this is the exact mentality that I described a couple of paragraphs ago. If you thought that we could never fall into such a strange view of the world, you can now be quite confident that it can happen. That key phrase is repeated in so many places and in so many forms in the modern world: "I don't want to put in the effort." We are already forgetting the truest version of ourselves. We are already losing the beautiful parts of the human condition.

April 22,  2022

"Hello, Stanford. It is great to be in California and back in beautiful Palo Alto. Coming here always makes me want to go back to college, although an 18-year-old Barack Obama would not have gotten in. I got more serious, later.

I want to thank the Cyber Policy Center here at Stanford for hosting this event. I want to thank Tiana for that outstanding introduction, and for all the work that you are doing. I want to thank a great friend and a remarkable public servant and Ambassador of Russia, during very difficult times, and one of my top advisors, Michael McFaul, for being here.

Michelle and I set up the Obama Foundation to train the next generation of leaders, and I think you saw in Tiana, the example of the kind of remarkable leadership that’s out there, with the talent and vision to lead us forward, as long as old people get out of the way.

During some of the darkest days of World War II, American philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote the following, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

We’re living through another tumultuous, dangerous moment in history. All of us have been horrified by Russia’s brutal invasion of the Ukraine. A nuclear-armed despot’s response to a neighboring state whose only provocation is its desire to be independent and democratic. An invasion of this scale hasn’t been seen in Europe since World War II, and we’ve all witnessed the resulting death and destruction, and the displacement, in real time.

The stakes are enormous, and the courage displayed by ordinary Ukrainians has been extraordinary and demands our support. Unfortunately, a war in the Ukraine isn’t happening in a vacuum. Vladimir Putin’s aggression is part of a larger trend, even if similar levels of oppression and lawlessness and violence and suffering don’t always attract the same levels of attention if they happen outside of Europe,

Autocrats and aspiring strongmen have become emboldened around the globe. They’re actively subverting democracy, they’re undermining hard-won human rights, they’re ignoring international law.

Worse yet, democratic backsliding is not restricted to distant lands. Right here, in the United States of America, we just saw a sitting president deny the clear results of an election and help incite a violent insurrection at the nation’s Capitol. Not only that, but a majority of his party, including many who occupy some of the highest offices in the land, continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the last election, and are using it to justify laws that restrict the vote, making it easier to overturn the will of the people in states where they hold power.

But for those of us who believe in democracy and the rule of law, this should serve as a wake-up call. We have to admit that, at least in the years since the Cold War ended, democracies have grown dangerously complacent.

That too often, we’ve taken freedom for granted. What recent events remind us, is that democracy is neither inevitable nor self-executed. Citizens like us have to nurture it. We have to tend to it and fight for it, and as our circumstances change, we have to be willing to look at ourselves critically, making reforms that can allow democracy, not just to survive, but to thrive.

That won’t be easy. A lot of factors have contributed to the weakening of democratic institutions around the world. One of those factors is globalization which has helped lift hundreds and millions out of poverty, most notably in China and India, but which, along with automation has also upended entire economies, accelerated global inequality, and left millions of others feeling betrayed and angry at existing political institutions.

There is the increased mobility and urbanization of modern life, which further shakes up societies, including existing family structures and gender roles. Here at home, we’ve seen a steady decline in the number of people participating in unions, civic organizations and houses of worship, mediating institutions that once served as a kind of communal glue.

Internationally, the rise of China as well as chronic political dysfunction, here in the U.S. and in Europe, not to mention the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008, has made it easier for leaders in other countries to discount democracy’s appeal. And as once marginalized groups demand a seat at the table, politicians have found a new audience for old-fashioned appeals to racial and ethnic, religious or national solidarity.

In the rush to protect “us” from “them,” virtues like tolerance and respect for democratic processes start to look, not just expendable, but like a threat to our way of life.

So if we’re going to strengthen democracy, we’ll have to address all of these strengths. We’ll have to come up with new models for a more inclusive, equitable capitalism. We’ll have to reform our political institutions in ways that allow people to be heard and give them real agency. We’ll have to tell better stories about ourselves and how we can live together, despite our differences.

And that’s why I’m here today, on Stanford’s campus, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where so much of the digital revolution began, because I’m convinced that right now one of the biggest impediments to doing all of this, indeed, one of the biggest reasons for democracies weakening is the profound change that’s taking place in how we communicate and consume information.

Now let me start off by saying I am not a Luddite, although it is true that sometimes I have to ask my daughters how to work basic functions on my phone. I am amazed by the internet. It’s connected billions of people around the world, put the collected knowledge of centuries at our fingertips. It’s made our economies vastly more efficient, accelerated medical advances, opened up new opportunities, allowed people with shared interests to find each other.

I might never have been elected president if it hadn’t been for websites like, and I’m dating myself, MySpace, MeetUp and Facebook that allowed an army of young volunteers to organize, raise money, spread our message. That’s what elected me.

And since then, we’ve all witnessed the ways that activists use social media platforms to register dissent and shine a light on injustice and mobilize people on issues like climate change and racial justice. So the internet and the accompanying information revolution has been transformative. And there’s no turning back.

But like all advances in technology, this progress has had unintended consequences that sometimes come at a price. And in this case, we see that our new information ecosystem is turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses.

Not all of these effects are intentional or even avoidable. They’re simply the consequence of billions of humans suddenly plugged into an instant, 24/7 global information stream. Forty years ago, if you were a conservative in rural Texas, you weren’t necessarily offended by what was going on in San Francisco’s Castro District because you didn’t know what was going on.