How have our psychology and cognitive biases altered the course of human history? What would you do if you had to rebuild our world from scratch?

Lewis Dartnell is an author, researcher, and holds the Professorship in Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He researches astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. He also works as a scientific consultant for the media and has appeared in numerous TV documentaries and radio shows. Dr. Dartnell has won several awards for his science writing and outreach work. He has published five books, including The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch; Origins: How the Earth Made Us; and Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Based on your research in both astrobiology and the historical impact of our environment on human development, do you have any insights into what the next major evolutionary societal shift for humanity might be?

LEWIS DARTNELL

So I try to avoid making predictions as far as possible, but the challenges facing our society at the moment effectively are the unintended consequence of a solution we found in the late 1700s when society was running out of energy, we had no more timber, and we realized we could dig underground for ancient fossilized woodland, which is basically what coal is from about 300 million years ago. The consequence of burning all that coal and then oil was a release of carbon dioxide, changing our atmosphere and warming the planet. So, it's a problem born out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness, but I'm confident that we will find the solution out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness.

The Impact of AI on Society

AI is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It promises both enormous potential and capability from helping with medical diagnosis and catching cancer early or removing a lot of tedium and repetitive nature of many jobs. It can make a lot of great contributions. It's how we control that technology by making active decisions that can be the pathway to the future. There's been a lot of doomsday talk about artificial general intelligence and the Terminator-type outcome, and it's certainly not impossible, but I don't personally believe that is a probable outcome from where we are now. 

I think one of the things that AI is very good at is churning through and processing vast amounts of data, assuming that you've got your machine learning system set up correctly and trained properly and you're using it in the way that it was intended to be used. Machine learning and AI techniques are incredibly powerful in pulling out the important information in a sea of data, but to convert that information into new understanding, that is the role of humans in that process. And it will remain the role of humans in understanding what is important and how to implement that information once you've fished out this sea of data.

Cognitive Biases and Their Impact on History

The point I explore in Being Human is that humans have constraints, and we only have our capabilities and the human condition; therefore, the whole course of world history has played out in the interplay between those constraints and capabilities. Talking about the constraints of our cognition, our memories are clearly limited. And on the whole, that doesn't really affect our everyday lives. Our cognition and our psychology developed under very different circumstances in East Africa and the savannah and the grasslands. Our brain has evolved to make survival decisions quickly and on the whole effectively. There's a whole area of psychological neuroscience research to do with cognitive biases. How our brains, often unbeknownst to us, sort of hidden behind the scenes, make assumptions or rational errors in the decisions that they make. So there's a whole chapter about how we have these fundamental flaws in our cognition, sort of bugs in the programming code of our psychology, if you like, and how they come about and what might be the causes behind them, but also what some of the effects of those have been through history, through these cognitive biases. I talk about things like confirmation bias. We are very resistant to changing our minds, changing our opinion on something even in the face of mounting evidence that shows we were wrong. 

Writing for Different Audiences: Children vs. Adults

There are obviously very different approaches you take to writing for children as you do for writing for adults, which most of my books have been, but I think the common feature between all of them is just engaging a fascination that we all have with things we don't know yet. We are a naturally very inquisitive, curious, and exploitative species. And it's the trick, I think, in writing nonfiction is to trigger that innate inquisitiveness and play with it as you're telling stories. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the stories might be about historical events. They might be about how particular technology works, but at the end of the day, it's a story about people and our interactions with these things. We are natural-born storytellers, and that's how we interact with each other and engage with with new material.

The Future of Education

It seems that a lot of education is a little bit obsessed with training students to remember facts and figures. In the modern world, when every one of us has got the total of human knowledge in our pockets, it's much less important what you can hold in your head and what you can remember because you can just look it up whenever it becomes important, and it's now how you interpret or analyze or synthesize that information and developing skills and techniques in rapidly understanding and interpreting and analyzing information and making decisions based on information. The internet has changed a huge amount about what is important to our lives and simplified many things that would have been examined on otherwise.

It's in finding things out for yourself that is that deep spark of human creativity, which gives us the innovation and all the sort of creativity and designs that we can come up with. So I think that is something that you would absolutely want to try to continue nurturing yourself.

Photo credit: Shortlist/Paul Stuart

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Devon Mullins. One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).