Rob Wiblin
speaker
1,787 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard May 2025
Rob Wiblin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Okay, yeah, so so we should talk about the the synthesis, I guess, that you try to uh put forward in in in your thesis.
Like yeah, what are the circumstances under which we do have more autonomy and what are circumstances where it can be extremely hard to to change the course of history?
I guess I guess in recent times we're familiar with the debate about how designer social networks can greatly shift like the the tone of conversation and people's behavior.
People have pointed to, you know, the prominence of quote tweeting uh on on Twitter where you can like highlight something that someone else has said and then like blast them on it, uh potentially leads to more kind of brigading by like, you know, one political tribe against another one.
And if you got if you made that less prominent, then you'd see less of that behaviour.
Yeah, I I guess the extreme view would be to say, oh, well, we could have uh you know had electric cars or we could have gone down that I guess we did have electric cars in the twenties, I think, but we could have gone down that path uh in a more full throated way uh as early as that.
I guess the moderate position would be to say, well, no, that wasn't actually uh practical.
There were too many uh technological constraints, but we could have done it maybe five years or ten years earlier if we'd really if we if we'd foreseen that th this would be a great benefit and decided to uh make some make some early like costly investments in it.
Was there another school of uh technological determinism?
Jumping from one blender to another.
Yeah, there's there's definitely some some effect like that.
I I guess the the people who really highlight that, I think they're exaggerating um sometimes the scale of the negative side effects from technology, where I guess setting aside some particular cases that we're particularly focused on, it seems like the negative side effects of technology in general have gotten kind of smaller at each generation of technology that like we we do solve more problems than than than we create on average is kind of my take.
Yeah, shall we come back to the synthesis?
Sure.
Yeah.
And I guess even if there is an active war, kind of everyone's living in the the shadow of violence, I think is the term that they're they're anticipating that um there could be war in future.
And maybe if they don't play their cards right, then they would be would be vulnerable to aggression.
So that seems uh in a sense very obvious.
Uh yeah, w why do you think the constructivists were were missing this or um why didn't this kind of stand out to them as an important f uh you know effect?
Maybe because of my like background.
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