Centre for Ideas: UNSW Centre for Ideas.

Rob Brooks: Good evening, welcome everybody to tonight's special event in celebration of UNSW's 75th year and we're delighted to have Michael Muthukrishna here to do this event which we've called A Theory of Everyone, which is also coincidentally the title of his book. My name is Rob Brooks, I'm Professor of Evolution in the Faculty of Science here at UNSW and to begin with I'd like to acknowledge the Bidjigal people, traditional custodians of this land and I'd like to pay my respects to their elders both past and present and extend that respect to any other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are with us here tonight. Our event tonight is the 2024 Wallace Worth Lecture.

The lecture was first held in 1964 to commemorate the memory of the late Wallace Charles Worth who was the very first Chancellor of the University and the first President of the Council of the University. Tonight, we have the pleasure of having Michael Muthukrishna joining us to explore his work and his recent book A Theory of Everyone, who we are, how we got here and where we're going. Educated at the University of Queensland and the University of British Columbia, Michael is now Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics where he is affiliated with the Developmental Economics Group and the Data Science Institute.

His research, I can't really do justice to his research in this brief introduction because, well, we've only got an hour, but it's as wide-ranging as the title of his book, Compiling Psychology, Economics, Computer Science, Evolution and a Variety of Other Disciplines to understand questions like innovation, corruption and how to navigate diversity and cultural differences. He's the founder of Culturally Tick, a service that brings the best scientific tools and ideas regarding cultural diversity to organisations outside of the academic world. He is, to me, one of the most interesting and important thinkers of our time and I think you'll probably agree with me that's why you're here. If not, by the end of tonight you certainly will.

And he's spoken at some of the most august universities around the world as well as governments and NGOs, a variety of companies large and small. I'm being deliberately vague because I don't want to play favourites and there are so many of them.

Tonight, we're here to listen to him speaking about A Theory of Everyone, published by MIT Press and Penguin Random House last year in September, so it's nearly a year old. Please give a very, very warm Sydney welcome to Michael Muthukrishna. Michael, it's such a thrill to be here speaking with you about your book.

Like you, I also like a book with grand ambitions, and I love your gentle ribbing of the genre of international nerve-touching bestsellers that you call The One Thing That Explains Everything. Now, A Theory of Everyone doesn't tread that same path. Instead, you begin with the four things that explain everything and I think as an introduction for our audience, you might wish to sort of give them a bit of an introduction to these four laws of life.

Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, sure. I mean, first off, it's just an honour to be here to help you celebrate the 75th anniversary of the university, so thank you so much for having me. So, in the book, I lay out what I call these four laws of life and before you get mad at me, they're not, you know, Newtonian laws by any means. They are, if you like, lenses or levers upon which you can really understand the world all the way from single cells to societies, you know, from bacteria to businesses, if you like. And so those laws are the law of energy. So, energy is the currency that unifies all that we do.

It's the origins of life, life eating other life instead of using photosynthesis. It is the story of Silicon Valley, the way that companies will try to outcompete other companies. It is a story of colonialization. It's the story of our species. And the law basically says that energy creates a ceiling on the available amount of biomass and the available amount of complexity and cooperation that a society can create.

Today, we live in a world that is incredibly unusual. This is incredibly unusual, right? You might take this for granted, but if this was a room full of chimpanzees or even bonobos, this would be a room full of dead and maimed chimpanzees and bonobos, right? This is historically unusual. Even 200 years ago, strangers coming into a room from so many different places, as I can see around the room, would be an unusual and dangerous thing to do. And geographically, this is fine to do in Australia, but less easy to do in Afghanistan.

So, if you look at any indications of progress, and you look at a timeline of that, what you'll see is that everything looks pretty flat right up until around the Industrial Revolution. So, the scientific revolution, the Black Death, the Renaissance, all of these things flat on child mortality, size of polities, GDP, wealth, everything. And then we hit the Industrial Revolution and the whole thing just hockey sticks up.

And what I argue is the reason for that is that we unlocked millions of years’ worth of stored sunlight, coal and oil and natural gas. And energy is the great multiplier on human effort. And so, the second law is the law of efficiency.
So what life is really doing is competing with other life, what companies are doing by being more efficient in accessing that energy. You make money. So, the reason that Jeff Bezos is so wealthy and putting businesses on high streets is because he's able to align vertical alignment across these different businesses and give you a product that is cheaper, more efficient, better customer service than what's available in the mall, right? So, this law of efficiency, this desire to do more with less, is driving this whole system.

And between this kind of ceiling and between this floor is what I call the space of the possible. And this is where all biological and human activity happens. And part of what's happening is our ability to work with one another, to cooperate with one another.

And this is what we call the third law, the law of cooperation. And that law is that what I'm really looking for is the group that maximizes my return relative to being in a bigger or smaller group. So even, you know, if you're starting a business, what I would love to do is run a business all by myself.

Forget founders, forget, you know, investors, forget employees. Run it all by myself, 100%. I take all the equity. I become a billionaire. I can't do that. So, what I need to do is grow my business to the size where I have a reasonable probability of getting that market share, the total market share.

When it's divided up by the number of players, it needs to be higher than what I would have gotten by taking a job in a larger company or what I might have gotten by doing it by myself. Same with academic collaborations. I'd love to write papers by myself and get them published in Nature and Science. I often have to include other people.

Economists like to keep their, any economists in the room I don't know, tend to keep their papers at about three. It's the maximum you can win a Nobel Prize.

Laughter

So, you know, you, and so what happened was when we had access to all of this energy, our ability to cooperate with one another went up. We entered a positive sub-world where it was worth working with other people, starting the East India Trading Company, trying to work with other people to go to war with other, you know, less cooperative groups and take over. This is the story.

It's the same story of instead of unicellular life going, I'm going to use the energy of the sun to move at plant pace. I'm instead going to eat other animals that are really stored bundles of sugars and energy for you. So, this is the law of cooperation.

And the final law is how does it all happen? It's not happening through kind of intelligent design where people can see into the future and know exactly what's going to happen, but instead an evolutionary process. So, this is the fourth law, the law of evolution, where many, many things are happening and the things that work are selected. So, you probably think of Silicon Valley as a very successful place, I imagine, right? It's a graveyard of failure. And that's what makes it so successful. It's that, you know, we call them unicorn companies because they're so rare. It's a few, the apples, you know, these aren't all Silicon Valley companies, but the tech companies like Apple and Amazon and Google and Facebook are so unusual. And they sit on the back of a graveyard of everybody trying different things and failing, you know, Friendsters, MySpace, if you remember some of those companies. So, energy, innovation for efficiency, cooperation, and evolution are kind of lenses with which you can view the world. And then it's all in the details because how it manifests for a business is different to how it manifests for bacteria.

Rob Brooks: So going back to energy, we're, you know, very big on renewables here. We're a solar university, lots of, you know, very successful solar research. I get the impression from your book that we're not going to get there with renewables.

So, we're going to have to get nuclear fission and then nuclear fusion in order to unlock that next level of energy.

Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah. So, I mean, you know, a book like this, A Theory of Everyone, by the way, it's a very humble title. It could have been a theory of everything, kept it to everyone. But, you know, when you write a book as broad as that, you have to lean very heavily on other relevant sciences. So, I lean pretty heavily on the energy sciences.

And one of the key metrics in the energy science that I think is very useful for evaluating these technologies, there are a few, but one is what's called energy return on investment or EROI, right? So, this is the amount of energy that it takes to get some amount of energy back. And if you like, that's how much excess energy a society has. It's how much abundance they have.

And society runs on that excess energy. If a cheetah uses more energy to catch an antelope than what it would get, it would die. That would be the end.
But if it has plenty, it can grow, it can reproduce and its, you know, its population, its carrying capacity goes up. So, the energy return on investment before the industrial revolution was very low. We lived in a Malthusian world where there was a kind of one-to-one return on our time.

There were previous revolutions that kind of expanded our energy budget a little bit. If you're a biologist, it expanded our budget a little bit. So, the invention of fire, for example, pre-digests food and makes it more calorie available to you.
Agriculture is a solar technology. So instead of, I'm very proud of this line, by the way, instead of, you know, hunting and gathering, we moved to harvesting and grinding. You know, so what we did was that we, instead of walking around, wasting all that energy to go and hunt animals or access plants, we stayed in one place. We grew them. It wasn't very good for us in terms of our health. We actually got shorter, but it allowed our populations to grow and out-compete all the hunter-gatherer groups around them.

But it was really in the discovery of oil and natural gas, which comes from zooplankton and algae, or peat turned to black rock coal, that we were suddenly able to do so much more. So, you imagine like trying to build an Ikea bookshelf or something, doing it with a hand screwdriver versus like an electric screwdriver, or trying to cross the planet in a ship or walking compared to an airplane, right? These are all energy technologies that multiply a human effort. So going back to the energy return on investment, oil and natural gas were abundant.

Coal was abundant. You know, Britain, the country that I currently live in, built the largest empire the world had ever seen. The empire that, you know, that founded the modern Australia on the back of cheap and available coal.

Oil discovery rights, for example. In 1919, one barrel of oil found you another thousand barrels. And by 1950, one barrel of oil found you another hundred. By around 2005, 2010, one barrel of oil found you another five. So, it's not that there's still plenty of energy around, but excess energy, the abundant energy, so the amount of energy that, so all of the things you enjoy, you know, like ordering something. This morning, I ordered a coffee. I woke up late. I'm jet lagged. And my coffee arrived at 12. It was actually just like, you know, a few hundred meters down the road, but I didn't want to go get it. My ability to do that, your ability to go on holiday, your ability to have lavish parties and socialize with your friends is all contingent on excess energy. The other stuff is for survival. It's for the food. It's for protection. It's for the law. It's just for survival.

And so that excess energy budget has kind of, has decreased. So now when we look at other technologies, what's actually available to us? What are the high EROI available sources? Now, fossil fuels have another benefit in that they are dense batteries, right? They can, you can, you can't have an electric plane because the batteries don't have enough density or enough power, but you can run it on jet fuel.

So, fossil fuels are like that. So, if you look at renewables, actually, solar is not terrible only because there's a fusion reactor in the sky and we're taking advantage of that fusion reactor. But and hydro is also fantastic because the rivers just keep flowing. So, if you have large rivers, it depends on the size of the river, but the EROI can be in the tens, even the hundreds for some of the, some of the very large rivers. Wind, not so much. I mean, Vaclav Schmil, whose work I heavily rely on, he says, you know, when I, when I see a wind turbine, I see fossil fuels. I see fossil fuels for the lubricant. I see fossil fuels for building the thing. I see fossil fuels for digging the whole thing up. It's not amazing.

Nuclear has amazing numbers, but we're kind of living in the hangover of the hippies, if you like. You know, we're living in an era where we gave up on an incredibly powerful, scary, energy-dense technology that we would be living in a nuclear age had we invested in the sixties.

So, you know, if you look at France versus the UK, France did invest in, in, in nuclear, about 70%, I think of their electricity comes from that. Canada too, very lucky in Canada. Electricity is referred to as hydro, very confusing, but it's because it comes from hydro like rivers and from nuclear. So those countries are very, you know, they're energy secure as a result of this. So, for a country like Australia, where the sun's always shining, solar is great, but we can't have to solve the battery issue. Nuclear is fantastic.

And a lot of the concerns around nuclear are a little bit like, you know, not getting in a car because of 1950s car technology and people were crashing or not getting an airplane because it the 1950s. Modern technologies don't look like that. They're a lot safer.

Rob Brooks: All right. I want to, I want to go through each of the laws of life, but I don't think, I don't think we're going to have time and we, we want to give people something to read still in the book. But in terms of evolution, the evolution of ideas and institutions and behaviors and norms, it follows something a bit like a Darwinian process.

As an evolutionary biologist, I'm contractually obliged to ask you cultural evolution. How, you know, what's the relevance of that for the future?
Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah. So, I'm not, you know, so I'm actually trained as an engineer, but what I really work on is the puzzle of why humans are so different to other animals.

And this is why the only reason I even started thinking about energy is because I was trying to understand the puzzle of cooperation, like how anonymous strangers could get together and not kill each other. People have been thinking about this puzzle for a long time, right? Philosophers have been thinking, why are humans so, like, we're clearly a different kind of animal. Why? Why is it that we, we do stuff like this and chimps, our closest relatives, closer to us than both of us are to gorillas, just sit naked in the rain? You know, I'm quoting Bennett Galef, a comparative psychologist.

The answer seems to be that we switched the way that we figure things out away from hardware to software. We have software-based solutions, and this is what we call cultural evolution. So how did this happen? I will, can I give you, is there enough time to kind of give you the spiel on how this, how this happens? We've had 60,000 years. I think it deserves. I can compress it. I'm going to, I'm going to do, I'm going to do the last 250,000 years and mostly 60,000 years in about three minutes.

Let's go. In the, in the 19th century, Darwin comes up with a theory of evolution. Super interesting.

People think natural selection is all about the selection. It's not. It's about the natural, right? Darwin was a breeder. He knew you could take a magnificent wolf and turn it into a poodle, right? He knew that we could turn like these, these grains into massive wheat and, and things. So, we've been doing artificial selection for a while. What Darwin realized was that nature could do some selection because he had read Thomas Malthus, who noticed that agriculture grows polynomially and populations grow exponentially and the lines eventually meet where there isn't enough food for the population size.

And that means some animals are going to die, but they're not going to die randomly. Those that have skills to acquire food and avoid predators will survive better. He has this idea, lays it out in a book. His advisor gets angry with him. He's like, this is so speculative. This is probably, can I swear bullshit? Like, you know, this is like, this is nonsense.

And people actually are not very Darwinian in the early 20th century. They're really down on this because Lord Kelvin, if you remember physics of the Kelvin scale, miscalculates the age of the earth by about two orders of magnitude. He doesn't know about radioactivity.

And so ,he thinks that the earth isn't long enough. And everyone's like, Darwin, you were wrong. Then we get the correct age of the earth realizes enough time. And in the early 20th century, we had what was called a modern synthesis. This is where we reconciled, for example, a genetic view of the world with what we were seeing with populations. So, do you remember the pea plant experiments Gregor Mendel was running? He had short plants and tall plants and people going, how can we don't have tall humans and short humans, but we seem to have a bell curve.

What's that about? We reconcile that mathematically and a mathematical version of biology was born. This was called the modern synthesis. People started to work on this math. And in the, around the 1970s and around the 1980s, they said, Hey, what, what conditions would animals begin to start to learn from one another, like socially acquired information software, if you like, when would that happen? And they, they realized that there were these specific conditions where the environment is kind of moderately stable. There's a kind of Goldilocks zone. Now, if the environment is very, very stable, genetics is the best way to solve it, right? So human skin color, for example, very well adapted to UV radiation and latitude. The  further south you go, the more UV radiation. And it means that in order to protect yourself from skin cancer, you have to invent sun cream. Don't have that yet. So, you just have to get darker skin. And if you go super north, you don't have enough light.

So, in order to synthesize vitamin D, you need to have a lighter skin. So that's what we see across human populations. That's for stable environments. And climate is pretty stable, even though the weather changes.
When the environment is very unstable, then you need to figure things out today, the red berries are edible. Then it's the blueberries. What are we going to do in between this? Your parents and grandparents actually have some knowledge worth paying attention to. So, you've imagined a cyclical drought as happens in this country. There are stories of Australian aboriginal populations where grandma is the only one who remembers what it's like to be in a drought. And she leads the tribe to safety. You got to go past the mountain left of the forest. That's where we're going to find water. Okay.

So, this it's their math, their math models in the 1980s. No one cares. Then in the nineties, we get ice core data and we get ice core data for the age of the earth. And we know roughly when humans evolve and lo and behold, it's the Goldilocks zone when humans evolve and people like, whoa, when do you ever get predictions decades in advance in anything like the social sciences or what's going on? So, this leads to a whole bunch of things. And so eventually they realized that culture, the software can evolve beyond conscious awareness. And this is what we call cultural evolution.

How does that work? Three ingredients for any evolutionary system, variation, diversity, transmission. That means you got to transmit information and selections. You have to learn selectively.

And what seems to be going on for humans is that we're getting smarter because our populations, we do distributed cognition, crowd computing, if you like, where we each become specialized, we solve a little bit of it. And as, as a species, we invent things like AI or the industrial revolution. And then we all benefit from it.

Today, we live in a world where not even the smartest among us could survive without all of that technology. Not even the smartest among us could recreate the world that we live in. And I think, so if I, if I quickly, I know I've gone a little long for this one, but if I can just give you one bit of evidence, one bit of incontrovertible proof that this is really what's going on with humans, it is cooking.

So, we are a wimp of an ape, weak jaws that could not just crunch carrots all day, guts that are too short to handle raw food alone. Like you got to take a bunch of supplements. And yet we have no genes for cooking, ask any student on campus. And we don't even have genes for making fire. If you've ever tried to make a fire, it's hard. Even if you're taught, it's really hard to do. And yet our bodies rely on that. That means we rely on socially transmitted information for how to produce our food in order to survive. But it's much more than that.
Our mental models, our cognitive tools from counting and reasoning and believing in human rights, all of that is culturally evolving.

Rob Brooks: Going to that cultural variation, which I think is an area where you've done a tremendous amount, both in pure research as well as in consulting, etc. 75 years ago when UNSW was founded, the staff and students would have by any objective measure been far less diverse than they are now, I imagine.

I mean, you can make those kinds of statements. We recently had diversity week. We're all in on diversity as a university.

But you recognize in the book that whilst diversity creates that variation on which cultural selection can sort good from bad and functional from dysfunctional, etc., too much diversity can have its problems. There's a paradox, isn't there?

Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah.

Rob Brooks: So how do you get to this and how do you help organizations navigate their way through this paradox?

Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah. So, I think Rob's trying to be provocative. So here we go with the controversial stuff. All right, let's go.

No, so what I was describing is sometimes what we call a collective brain. We are computing things collectively. And we have identified some of the levers that make collectives, like a university or a country or a company, more innovative.
And larger companies tend to be more innovative. Or, you know, companies that, when I say larger, you know, borrowing ideas from other places, companies that could communicate better, you know, organizations or countries that could communicate better. And then there's diversity.

And diversity is a paradox. It is a double-edged sword. And that is the elephant in the room when we talk about this stuff, right? It's the bull you have to grab by both its horns.

Why? Because diversity is the fuel for innovation. So much innovation comes from seeing the world slightly differently, right? So much innovation comes from different disciplines. Immigrants, if you look across the record, are often the entrepreneurs that come up with new ideas.

One of my favorite kind of flippant examples of this is Hawaiian pizza. I think this is Australia's favorite pizza, by the way. I don't care what you say, pineapples on pizza, amazing.

Yeah, it might be. I grew up in Brisbane for a while. Pineapple pizza is amazing.
Now, Hawaiian pizza has got nothing to do with Hawaii, by the way. It was invented by a Greek immigrant in Toronto who had worked at a Chinese restaurant and decided that the sweet and sour thing that they were doing, pretty amazing, and grabbed this can of pineapples that brand was Hawaiian and decided to put that on the ham and cheese pizza, right? That's kind of what immigrants are doing. They're taking these diverse ideas from their different experiences, right? Taking these things and recombining them into something new, one of the best pizzas, obviously.

But on the other hand, diversity is by definition divisive. If we cannot speak, for example, the same language, those ideas can't flow. So, you have to grant that at the very least we need to be able to communicate with one another.
So, there's a spectrum of diversity for some things that matter for communication and coordination and other things that don't matter very much at all. So, on one end, you've got, let's say, common language. And on the other side, you might have food preferences, right? Maybe I like sushi and you like schnitzel.
We can work this out. Like we're going to go to the food court that has both or something. But in between, there's all kinds of norms around when should you arrive at a party or a meeting, five minutes late, five minutes early, on time.
Can you work with women, for example, right? Or can you work across the sexes? Are you deferent to authority or not? These are coordination problems where if you're mis-coordinated, it prevents all of that diversity. So, you know, if I'm trying to be provocative, what I often say is, I'm a person who studies, I'm an evolutionary scientist. Everybody loves to talk about diversity, but not enough about cultural selection.

One of the most effective things you can do in a multicultural society is judge one another. Why? Because you want to take what's working in other communities and borrow it and figure it out. Like, why is that community so successful in the business world or in education? Why can't we learn from what's going on there? That's the power of diversity. It's borrowing and recombining across these different spheres.

So, when you work with companies, you're trying to do the same thing. You know, I work on the database of religious history. This is on disciplinary diversity. Most of the database is now historians. It didn't start off that way. It was social scientists who were like, I think we need to build a database of history because we want to test our social science ideas. It turns out historians not only don't want to just give you data for your science, they're actively hostile. I was blown away, blown away.

So, it had to become a project that was mutually beneficial for historians, and it meant finding a common language. It meant spending a lot of time with each other. There are going to be things that are non-negotiable, and there are going to be things that are just fine, and finding that level of optimal assimilation in a company or country is what's essential.

I tell a story in the book because I'm in Australia. So, I do, you know, having lived here, I've taken some examples. So, my wife used to work in refugee resettlement in Australia. Australia has a, to say the least, a controversial record when it comes to refugees, right? You have people languishing for like a lifetime, and it's awful, it's unconscionable. On the other hand, it's such a contrast to the way that refugees are treated when they arrive. So, Australia has, in my view, some of the best in class on that second side of things.

So, I don't know if you know this, but Australia has a five-day program for how to be an Aussie that all refugees go through before they arrive. Like, how is it appropriate to talk to one another? How do you access banks? How do you catch public transport? What are the foods that are available? And when they get here, so my wife, you know, she's a volunteer, what they would do is they would find people in similar communities or from the same community who had lived there for a while and teach them about how do you cook your cuisine with the ingredients that are available here? You know, how do you find a job? Like, how do you get a CV? You know, how are you going to take language classes? All of that.

And I recall one story of, there was a man who came over and he said, I'm looking for help. I'd like to talk to someone. And she said, it wasn't her actually, it was another employee there, said, of course, come in, come in. And he said, I'd like to talk to a man. And they said, I'm sorry, but all the volunteers here at the moment are female. So you'll have to talk to one of us. He said, I can't do it. So, he said, fine. So, he just sat there. And it was an impasse. He went away, came back the next day, still women. On the third day, he had no choice but to accept that help. And I think, you know, there's a, there's something called prestige-biased cultural group selection, where, you know, especially I think with America, there tends to be this importation of American way of viewing things and American problems here.

But I think Australia has a good way in some things in how to deal with this, which there are some non-negotiables, actually. There are some things that we require to be a civil society. That's part of solving the paradox of diversity. But there's also a celebration of differences. And it is a recognition that that's part of what makes a country like this so successful.

Rob Brooks: Wow. So, scaling up, I guess, you know, it's really easy to get a bit despondent and feel like countries are tearing each other apart. We have border conflicts again, you know, very serious within polity disagreements. Polarization seems to be, you know, we're blaming social media and the news cycle, et cetera, for it.

How do we take what you've taught us and use it to improve human relations and benefit from each other's strengths at that kind of global or regional scale?

Michael Muthurkishna: Yeah. So let me just first say something. So, one of the consequences, so I remember I described this law of energy, where energy provides a ceiling on all that we can do. And there's an efficiency floor. So, the more efficiently you can use the same amount of energy, the larger, the bigger this space, right? There's always a move toward more efficiency. Take lighting, for example. Incandescent bulbs, terribly inefficient. I think something like two, three percent or something, right? Fluorescent bulbs, a little bit better. Once you get to LEDs, you're close to 100 percent efficiency. Like if you if you're still turning off the lights to save energy, don't even bother. Like it's so insignificant. It's just not a behavior that helps anything. It's just outdated.

But what that also shows you, you can't go more than 100 percent efficient. There's a limit on the efficiency floor. And if that energy ceiling is collapsing on us, then the space of the possible shrinks. Incentivizes smaller scales of cooperation.

So instead of thinking about the whole country or a larger company, I go back to friends. I go back to family, I go back to my ethnicity, I go back to my religion. And I tend to cooperate at this lower level because this is whom I can trust and that's the level of the rewards that are available to me. Australia's not quite there yet, but many other places are, and you can see the consequences of that in places like Europe, for example.

So, there's this kind of shrinkage.

So, another, what it triggers is zero-sum beliefs. What the Industrial Revolution did for us is it switched us into positive sum thinking. It made us realize, because it was true, because it was true at one point and still is to some degree, that if you start a coffee shop, you start Starbucks, I can learn from you. I can start another Starbucks or the equivalent and I can make money just like you did. And we can compete in productive ways that drives coffee to amazing heights. Australia's great coffee, by the way, I gotta say. Miss good Australian. Italian origin, immigrants, coffee.

But when that ceiling starts to shrink, the space of the possible starts to shrink. We go back to zero-sum thinking where if you succeed, I fail. You start a coffee shop, you've taken the coffee market, it's limited. Now the only thing I can do is start at something else or burn down your coffee shop.

So, now instead of me wanting to help you, I wanna tear you down. And this is what we see in a lot of developing countries. People have a zero-sum mindset. They harm one another. They pull each other down instead of trying to out-compete one another or help each other or push upward in these cooperative ways.

So, another analogy that I use is if you imagine a parking lot and there's plenty of spaces, someone pushes in and takes your space, kind of pisses you off, but you're like, whatever.

If you've been driving around for 30 minutes, there's limited spaces and somebody does that, it can break out into something more. So, there are always fractures in society. There are always cracks.

But when a society that has those cracks is put under pressure because of the zero-sum-ness, for example, economic slowdowns, then those cracks can break out into something more.

So how do we put the thing back together? I mean, ultimately what we wanna put back together is energy abundance once more. We have to reach the next level of energy abundance through, for example, nuclear, more solar, more battery, enhance the space that humans have available to us.That will also reduce inequality as per Piketty's work and other things like that.

But the other thing is the norms that we hold when it comes to cooperating with one another. There is a space, in my view, and this is maybe the optimist in me, there's a space for the middle, the silent middle, who actually don't want to play extreme politics of the left or the right, who don't want to play pigmentation politics or parochialism of my group versus your group. And I say, actually, we want a society that's good for everyone, where everyone has a shot at reaching things, not because of the happenstance of their birth, but because of their ability and what they contribute to making all of us better off. When you start a successful business, we are all richer for it. I'm glad that Google exists. I'm glad that AI technologies exist. And I want you to have the best shot at building a world that we can all enjoy and building a world of excess that we can build on ourselves, that you can use those supply chains, you can use that and rebuild it and build your own life in that way. That's a better society.

And so, the norms are absolutely essential. And I think some of those norms are being eroded by politicians who want to play at this economic slowdown, this tendency to grow back into groups and divide things up. And that's the trend and norms are powerful. You can push in the other direction.

Rob Brooks: So, progress for all then. I'm going to talk about AI now.
I'm going to need you to talk about AI because in the words of the great fashion designer, Jacoby Mugatu, “It's so hot right now”.

Laughter

Do you think that AI is going to deliver a massive sort of state change in collective intelligence, much like the big social leaps in our evolutionary past?
 
Michael Muthukriushna: Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty bullish on AI, like many people. I really think it's a paradigm shifting technology. And I know there's people who are like, oh, it's a fad. I don't know if people like that in the room, but if you go read some great thinkers actually from our time, I think Pinker is one of them actually. He said, fax machines are never going away in the 90s, or the internet is, we're not going to do it.

Like the internet has become central to how we work and play and even find partners for life, right? I don't know if you've seen the graphs, but 70 to 80% of people now find partners online. It was like a weird thing to do when I was younger. And so, the AI is a bit like that.

So, in the book, I refer to it as the fourth line of information. So, humans are the product in terms of how we think, how we make decisions. We are the product of millions of years’ worth of genetic evolution, because we are ultimately an animal, we are a primate, but also thousands of years of cultural evolution where different cultures around the world are running different software. And we also benefit from common cultural tropes like education, the things that education downloads upon us, the different apps that we run in our head, as well as a lifetime of experience.

And now what we have is a technology that allows us to look across that cultural corpus and find information and re-combinations in an efficient way that wasn't possible before. And the possibilities are massive.

I'll give you, I'll start with maybe two things, right, that I think are immediately amazing. One is if you're trying to make data-driven decisions, and you should be, but you're trying to make data-driven decisions, you're often stuck with studies, assuming that they replicate, are about the average, right? The average person does this to be happy. If the average person eats this, they will be healthy. The average person is ironically non-existent. None of us is average. We're all somewhere out there on a variety of distributions that make that central point kind of irrelevant to us.

What you wanna know to make a decision is what are people like me doing? Now, your psychology does this anyway, by the way. You have, I described various social learning strategies that we've kind of mathematically modeled and also shown empirically. And one of them is self-similarity, right? You think it's great that LeBron is such a great basketball player, but unless you're seven foot something, you're not paying a lot of attention to him, right? You're paying attention to people kind of like you who are making money or successful, attractive, have great kids, and whatever. You're looking for people that you can learn from.

AI can let you do that. It can find the answer to what people like you are doing.
The other thing is education. So, we live in a thoroughly educated world. I'm at a university, right? Education has been trying hard. It is a form of cultural transmission, a download that emerged and became compulsory after the Industrial Revolution. We took the factory model to create factory workers. And we said, this is the minimum skill set that we need people to have.
Come on, kids, sit down. We're gonna put you in age groups, very unusual. Most societies you learn from slightly older kids.

Like we had to train specialist teachers because the gap is so large between an adult and a six-year-old, whereas previously the six-year-old learned from the eight-year-old, right? So, you put them in age bands and you're like, listen, let's go. Numbers, phonemes, writing, reading, algebra. Here's some of the history. We're gonna download this cultural package on you. And the thing is the world has become more complicated and the package hasn't been able to keep up. So, one of my colleagues, Alex Masudi, he points out that mathematics education, no high school student is learning 20th century mathematics.
They're still learning 19th century mathematics, recapitulating, by the way, the history. For some reason, we start with the Greeks, learn Pythagoras' theorem, because that's useful. And we finally make our way to algebra and calculus if you're lucky, right? We don't learn anything from the 20th century. We're in the 21st century. There's an entire century that's missing. And you might say, well, how useful is that? Well, we have a different attitude toward illiteracy and innumeracy, but it has similar implications.

If you're illiterate, you would have to have people read to you. And if you're innumerate, the bank has to explain your mortgage to you. You have to have your superannuation where you should be investing in explained to you. There's a gap in your understanding of a lot of things. You don't have these tools. And that's because you can't pack it all in, right? It's taking longer and longer for people to learn things in order to start a life, to buy that house, to start a family.
And the first selection pressure for us, by the way, was the head size thing. So human head sizes are three times as large as a chimp, massive, very difficult to birth, unusually so. If you look at graphs of the size of the birth canal versus the size of a human head, thank your moms, that's all I'm saying, right?

Laughter

Incredible, it's incredible. And it made maternal mortality very high. We've relaxed that selection pressure with caesareans. And if you actually look at the medical literature, head size is one of the major predictors of emergency intervention. So emergency caesareans and emergency forceps, once you get to about the 85th percentile, just goes way up the probability of having one, yeah? So that was the first selection pressure. The selection pressure today is the ability to give birth at an older age because it's taking longer and longer. What am I talking about? AI, AI can help solve this because it allows you to figure out what do we need the next generation to know given that they have the literal sum total of human knowledge in their pocket.

And now a little agent that helps us think about that. And schools are path dependent and haven't really figured this out, but somebody is going to, and they will benefit from it. I also have a company that's trying to do this. I don't want to be too much of a shill but check out the London School of Artificial Intelligence if you want to take a look.

Rob Brooks: So just to be a bit contrary about that, when I use Grammarly or ChatGPT, it wants me to write like some American middle manager.

Laughter

Because that's what it's learned from.

Or some misogynist incel on the internet because it's also learned from that.

Michael Muthukrishna: Using grok, are you?

Rob Brooks: And I wonder about this, particularly generative AI, where it's predicting one thing from the next thing. This usually follows that. Is that not, firstly, I think a lot of people lament that for creativity, for the sort of spark of je ne sais quoi. But what about the cultural gene flow given that what we're dealing with here are tools that have learned on a very weird data set?

Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, so I mean the first thing to say is you're absolutely right. There's a paper by some of my collaborators called Which Humans? Which shows that ChatGPT answers questions like people from what we call weird societies. So Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. So ChatGPT's very, and it's not surprising, that's the data set that it's trained on, right? Mostly an English language or a European language corpus. And there are issues with that, right? So, if we are all learning from a similar AI agent, on the one hand, we might coordinate our behavior, right? You've got an AI therapist. My wife, let's say I have an AI therapist, my wife is an AI therapist. I'm saying things, she's saying things, and it's coordinating us as a result of this. But we also might be squashing the cultural diversity as a result of that. That's on the one hand.

But on the other hand, it might not be, at the moment we have kind of a few agents playing out. They're kind of behaving similarly. They're heavily safety-ed. So, there's ways to make them less racist. Turns out the internet is racist and AI learned to do that. Less sexist, less misogynistic, and so on. But it doesn't have to be that way. You can have different agents that are fine-tuned to you that aren't just behaving in this generic way as they are now but behaving more like what you would expect. And then there's a kind of merging, almost a synergy with yourself.

So, it's a little bit like saying, is the internet good or bad? Which part of the internet? Is social media good or bad? You mean like Facebook groups where mums in neighborhoods are getting mad at one another and dads are fighting about stupid things? Is that what you're talking about? Or are you talking about Twitter? Or are you talking about Instagram? There's different social medias. And in the same way, there's different AIs and it's hard to generalize. It's not a useful category.

Rob Brooks: So, putting some of this together, you're very bullish about something you call the second enlightenment. And I love the term.
First enlightenment opens the way to the French and American revolutions, industrial revolution, et cetera. Second enlightenment, you say, could lead to social and technological revolutions, new forms of cooperation, and evolution in democracy and government. So, I'm really interested to know how this is gonna come about.

Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, so the first thing to say is, I mentioned earlier that if you look across this history, you look at child mortality rates, GDP, size of policies, whatever, poverty, any of these metrics, they're flat, right? And that includes the enlightenment. But the enlightenment, Renaissance, scientific revolution, all of that stuff, which might've happened as a result of the Black Death, set the stage for the industrial revolution. So that when, for example, in Britain, cheap and available coal was discovered, they had norms and they had guilds, which was a kind of assortment that laid the foundations for ideas.
They had the printing press, laid the foundations for ideas flowing around so that when that energy, those batteries, were discovered, we could learn to deplete them in a matter of centuries. We could learn to put them to use to enhance human welfare. What I argue is we are not in the fourth or the fifth industrial revolution. We are in the second enlightenment. The internet has connected up our collective brain as never before. Technologies are picked up instantly. Ideas are flowing across the planet, across these social networks, and new tribes are being formed. The internet is at once bringing us together and siloing and separating us at the same time.

How is that working? Well, on the one hand, there's a common source of knowledge. Like when something goes viral, we all get to hear about the dress. You know, like, is it blue and yellow? Or is it, sorry, blue and yellow? White and green, whatever it was, you know, white and yellow. We all got to see that, right, on the one hand.

But on the other hand, it's creating new tribes. This has been a good thing and a bad thing, right? So, on the one hand, small minorities can find one another. The LGBT community, for example, there's a, anybody watch Little Britain? You know, there's a, and the only gay in the village. Once upon a time, I mean, I know the joke is that he's not, but once upon a time, that was true. You were the only gay in the village, or a handful of men. Or even, you know, among heterosexual couples, I think it's Steve Johnson, you know, there's a, the bicycle was one of the greatest boons to human genetics because you could now date the cute girl from the other village. You could meet halfway on a bicycle, amazing. We were once in small tribes, in smaller communities. On the internet, LGBT individuals could find one another, advocate for what they wanted.
Communities of all kinds, people with a rare disease that doctors don't really understand because, you know, they had one hour of a lecture on it, can find one another and share things that seem to be working. QAnon can also find one another. Conspiracy theorists can also find one another.

You know, some silly examples, if you like, in the book where on Reddit, for example, do you guys like carrying sand in your pocket? You know, like, no? 30,000 people on Reddit do. But that's a niche thing, not like stapling bread to trees, which has about 300,000 people taking photos. So that's, you know, costly signals that they really are stapling bread to trees. Go look it up, go look it up. These are big communities, right?

So, the most obscure, what you just, one of the things that the internet helps you discover is whatever weird thing you're into, you don't have to tell me, but whatever weird thing you're into, other people are into them too. And thanks to the internet, you can find it. And that means you find new tribes, and those tribes are more diverse. And so it is, again, this engine for diversity and selection for the cultural evolutionary system to create something new. This opens new possibilities.

The world, so you, I think one message of the book is that we are born into a world, and as children, even the oldest among you, as children, you had to catch up on the last several thousand years of human history. And you mostly accepted the world as it was. You accepted democracy. You accepted the way that political parties work. You accepted that you had to go to school, and then university, and then you got a job, and you were supposed to have a family, and you married one person, and you know, all of these norms, you just accepted it.
But the world was made by people no smarter than you and I. And actually, given the Flynn effect and the fact that we, you know, the culture is, the software has gotten better, probably less smart than you and I. The world doesn't have to be the way that it is today.

And some of the institutions created at a time of whale oil and horse-drawn carriages and candles are failing on us. It's not clear that democracy scales to millions of anonymous people with different preferences. It's not clear that something like, you know, in the United States, specific institutions that were created work very well. It's not clear.

But there are new ways forward, right? So, in the book, I talk about startup cities. One thing we do seem to be good at is governing ourselves at the level of a city. Is Australia governed well? I don't know. But is a city governed well? Some of them are, actually. Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, you know, Melbourne. You can do it at the level of a city. So, empowering things, devolving power to cities and allowing them to cooperate with one another is one way forward. Starting new cities. So, I'm involved in a new city in Zanzibar, for example, that  I think is very, very exciting. It could be a new hub. Allows us to try new things, try new possibilities for democracy.

The other possibilities are what I call programmable politics. And that's a little out there. It feels a little tech bro. And I feel like I don't have enough time to do it justice. You'll have to read the book.

Rob Brooks: Well, we are going to read the book because you've made us fall in love with the internet again. And I'm thinking of taking up stapling bread to trees, but I can never find the bread in my house.

We have become to that part that everybody loves, the audience participation part. And I'll begin with one that's very similar to a question I was going to ask, which is, you know, how do we ensure progress for all? Does it matter that the benefits of AI and other emerging technologies seem at the moment to be concentrated in the hands of a small group of already wealthy people?

Michael Muthukrishna: No, it's a massive problem.

There's a concentration of the means of production. You know, there's a concentration of wealth and power that people do not appreciate, right? The average person doesn't realize the difference between a billionaire and a millionaire, but it is vast. One useful way that I find is to convert it to time.
If every dollar were a second, a millionaire represents about two weeks, a billionaire represents about 32 years, right? And when we're talking like multi-billionaires, right, and we're converting to seconds, we're talking about since the beginning of the evolution of humans to the present day, right? So, if you were, you know, if you were working from 70,000 years ago, when maybe, you know, Australian Aboriginals arrived here, every single day, every hour of every day at minimum wage, you will still not be anywhere near as rich as Bezos or, you know, Musk. And AI further concentrates that. You know, in the book, I tell a little bit of a personal story as well.

So, I was an engineer, had good job offers, but it felt to me like it wasn't a fulfilling life to just make a bunch of money and die. We only get one life, we're all going in the same box, live your life in a way that makes the world better, in my opinion. And one of the things I think that really motivates me in a lot of what I do is the mismatch between talent, like human talent, and human potential talent, given educational opportunities and opportunity.

And we are wasting human talent across the globe. And that, I'm not talking about fairness, I'm not talking about morality or ethics, that is economically inefficient, right? That is a waste of talent. It's a waste of, the people who could be pushing us forward are working menial jobs, or barely scraping by for happenstance of birth.

And that's not just across the globe, where if you're born in the wrong country, you don't have the same opportunities as someone born in another country, it's even within a society. So how do you correct that? I think that that problem is going to become more urgent because of these even more concentrative technologies like AI, where if AI shows its promise and it's owned by a few people, and it puts out of business all the other businesses and we're completely reliant on it, it will further concentrate into kind of fiefdom serfdom, if you like, and it's game over.

So, in the book, I argue for a few different things. One that I really push heavily on is land value taxes, right? Taxes, the most boring thing on earth. No, taxes are crazy. I mean, first off, we, again, remember I said we accept the world as it is? We accept income tax.

In the United, I don't know when it started here, but in the United States, income tax started in 1912. It's a new thing. It was about 1%. It was 1%, right? And only for people earning somewhere, I guess, over about 50,000 today or 100,000 today. And 7% at its most for people earning over about 10 million today, 1912, right? Sales tax at the same time, around then. We should be taxing things that we don't want people to do.

We tax cigarettes and alcohol, but we also tax income and sales and trade and imports. Here's a way to think about your taxes, right? In the UK, I don't know what it is around here. In the UK, it's somewhere between, on a higher income, 40 to 60%. Let's take 50%. Six months of the year, you work for the government. The remaining six months, you get to keep it. That's wild. You do need money to keep the system working.

One way to kind of both reduce the inequality and make a fairer tax system is to tax the value of land. Because of every asset you can own, patents, artwork, businesses, those are all human created. The one thing that's not human created is the land. And it's the one thing that there's a limited amount of, and it can store wealth in a way that no other asset can.

And the value of the land isn't dependent on what you do. It is to some degree, and you build on it, but it's dependent on what the other people around you do. It's dependent on what the government does in terms of putting in roads and so on.

We don't want to tax the property because we don't want to disincentivize people from building. We want to loosen up the planning and tax the underlying value of the land itself. And if you tax that efficiently, you can move away. Even at a 6% rate, you can drop the income tax, you can drop the sales, you can drop all the other stuff. Tax the underlying land. And I think it's an important solution because it also helps, it moves people from unproductive assets, like holding onto a chunk of land, waiting for it to go up and then selling it, terrible, toward productive assets.

And that could be property building, but it could also be businesses. It could be patents. It could be investing in things that will lose value if you don't add and build and grow and help humanity push forward, right? So, it's one of a few different solutions.

The first half of the book lays out the science. The second half says, all right, let's say we have a periodic table now and we can move from alchemy to chemistry. What can we actually do? What are the new chemicals we can discover?

Rob Brooks: I'm gonna prod you on something that I think has been a bit of a discussion around here at UNSW. What are your thoughts on degrowth economics and does it influence your thinking in any way, especially regarding the first law of energy?

Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, Rob's good at these kinds of controversial things. No, I mean, I'll be honest. I mean, degrowth is a pathway to poverty. I get where people are coming from, but here's the thing, right? There are in equilibrium. If you decide unilaterally not to have children or you decide unilaterally that you are gonna slow your economic growth, you decide that your business isn't going to be as profitable. In equilibrium, you lose because someone else is gonna keep growing.

Someone else is going to have children and you will just get out-competed. That's the evolutionary story. You're just gonna get out-competed.
Now, there are good things around degrowth. So, I think it's not a bad thing to have status symbols that are less carbon-intensive, right? Status symbols for pushing humanity forward, pushing for things that help serve the needs of the most vulnerable, better matching opportunity to talent, investing in education. So, I think it was Andrew Carnegie famously put public libraries around the United States.

We can measure that now. It was a boon to education and entrepreneurship in those cities. And eventually the government bought into it and there were public libraries all over the place.

Those are good things, right? That's a good side of degrowth. The bad side of the kind of cutting back, what we want is sustainable growth that isn't harming our planet. And actually, it is often the wealthiest nations who have the wealth and the excess energy capacity to invest in conservation, not the ones who don't have enough money to provide food and healthcare to their citizens. They're the ones who have to tear down the rainforest because they need to grow more, right?

I was recently, last year, I was at the Barrier Reef. I hadn't been since I was a kid. I was amazed that, so when I was a kid, when I was very young, it was amazing. When I went back in my early 20s, it was bleached. And now I went back again, and it was coming back. Not the way that it was when I was a child, but it was coming back.

Why? Because Australia is a wealthy country that wants to preserve itself. You can see it at airport security, right? We're not doing the cane toad thing again. We're not letting in invasive species. We're gonna invest in, because you know what? People like to live in beauty. They like to live in unpolluted places, but you only get to do that if you're wealthy enough to clean it up, right? It's not the poor who live in pristine environments. It is the wealthy.

And so, it's a matter of choosing to use that growth towards sustainable migration, sustainable growth, and fixing what we've done to our planet, thanks to depleting, as I said, millions of years’ worth of stored sunlight in a couple of centuries. And degrowth is not the way to do that. That is, it is a pathway to stagnation and poverty, and it just leaves room for other people to grow on the back of what's available.

Rob Brooks: So, finishing optimistically. Your book finishes very optimistically. Wonderful chapter called Becoming Brighter. Ultimately, we need to become smarter, not individually, but collectively. What are the keys to humanity becoming brighter?

Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah. So, going back to the kind of four laws, if you like, that's where they lie, right? So, the next level of energy abundance, like investing in nuclear fission and fusion, if we ever crack it, somewhere between next Monday and 30 years, I'd say.

Investing in solar technologies where it's available, pushing forward growth in a way that isn't harmful to our planet. And there has been a decoupling, by the way, of economic growth and our carbon footprint and material requirements. We've dematerialized.

Efficiency, right? Innovations, and that means innovations in our education systems. So, thinking really carefully about what we should be equipping the next generation to do, leaving room for trying things, right? The thing about, you know, Justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court in the United States, he once described every state as a laboratory. That's part of what makes somewhere like the United States work, is that each state can try different things.

You wanna try, here's an example, non-compete clauses, right? California, for an obscure reason in the 19th century, made it illegal to have any limitations on your ability to get another job. That means that non-compete agreements are unenforceable in California. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? On the one hand, you wanna protect companies' IP, right? But on the other hand, you want ideas to flow. How do you know in advance? You don't, you don't know in advance. But when the tech sector came out, it was a boon that California had this because if you wanted to take talent and ideas, you grabbed the whole team, you bought out the entire team, and they could work for you. It was fantastic.

Other states began to learn from that, and eventually, it became, as of earlier this year, I think in April, it became federal law. That ability to let 1,000 flowers bloom and pick the roses is essential to becoming brighter. We have to be able to experiment, and we have to, we are actually terrible at designing good institutions. We've never designed them. The Magna Carta, you didn't know in advance. It's on the back of many failed, things you haven't heard of, but if you look it up, there's plenty of failed Magna Cartas, right? Tendencies to try to constrain the king.

It wasn't clear that the U.S. Constitution, this weird thing like a First Amendment right to freedom of speech, was a good idea when everywhere around the world, there are blasphemy laws, and the powerful don't want you to speak against them. It wasn't clear that it was a good idea in advance, but we try different things, and we make sure we learn from one another. We're always doing what I hope, what I call intellectual arbitrage.

The solutions to your problems are in the heads of other people, and the more you talk to people you disagree with, the more you can find those pieces, put them together, and create something new. So, pushing us forward is about energy, and it's about space for innovation. It's about our ability to cooperate and work with one another, and it's about taking advantage of that evolutionary process, not to design better institutions, but design institutions that can evolve and discover solutions.

Rob Brooks: Well, that brings us to the end of our allotted time tonight. You have asked some absolutely fabulous questions, which I wish I could publish, but you all posted them anonymously, so I wouldn't be able to attribute them to you. In the meantime, thank you very much for that. I've managed to only pick a couple of them, but I really appreciate that you asked those questions. I really appreciate that you've come, laughed in the right places, not laughed in the wrong places.

Laughter

And just been part of this festival of, you know, of extreme optimism. I mean, I think Michael you talk about some pretty dark and controversial things. But the message of your book is, is fundamentally an optimistic one. And it’s also a really inspiring one for us in the, you know, knowledge creation and broadening of cultural understanding and collective intelligence business of both teaching and research. I think it has really renewed a lot of my faith in what we do at universities.

It has been a great way to celebrate our university’s milestone and just generally what we do around here. So, I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us to talk about a Theory of Everyone. We hope it goes on to great success. It’s going to have to outsell Harari’s new book. We’re going to do everything we can to get behind that. Michael, you’ll have a part to play in that of course. Which is that there’s a huge pile of books out there in the foyer. Michael will be signing them until his hand falls off and he asks, “Is there a better way of doing this?”

Laughter

Please join me, and join him out there and all of us for a discussion afterwards but in the meantime, I would like you all to join me in a very rousing thank you to Michael Muthukrishna.

Applause

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