THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast
John Dutton on Utopia & Nowhere
Beskrivelse
John B. Dutton [https://www.johnbdutton.com/] is Head of Creative Services at the National Film Board of Canada. He was previously Chief Creative Officer and Partner at Camden, a Montreal-based international advertising agency. He writes the Discomfort Zone [https://johnbdutton.substack.com/] newsletter and is the author [https://www.johnbdutton.com/] of the novel 2084 [https://www.johnbdutton.com/2084bookstore]. I’m not sure if you know this, but you may or may not know this, but I start every one of these conversations with the same question. It’s this big question that I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their story. And she’s got this question that is, there’s no better question that I found to start a conversation or get into a conversation. But it’s such a big question, I over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? Yes, and I was aware that this was a question, because I’ve listened to many, I don’t know, several interviews that you give. So I was well aware of this question. And this is going to take up the entire hour, so just so you know. We’ll both take a sip of water. Yeah, get ready. Here it comes. Because I did think about, I knew that you were going to ask, and I was like, oh, this is actually funny. And I don’t want to be literally talking about myself for an hour. But in a way, and this is going to sound overly mysterious, but in a way, the answer is nowhere. And there’s a reason for that, which is that the place I was born was in a county. You see, I have to use the past tense. It actually doesn’t, and this isn’t some story of a war-torn place. Loads of people must have this story. Mine is a very super benign version of this story, right? But basically, I was born in a county where they moved the border for various administrative municipal reasons about four years, three or four years after I was born. So in a way, it doesn’t exist anymore. But there is a bigger answer to why nowhere is the answer, which is that my parents moved from there when I was one year old to the south of England. I was born in the north of England, between Liverpool and Manchester, in a town called Warrington that back then was in Lancashire and is now in Cheshire. And they moved to the south of England. And for an American, for a Canadian, England is a tiny place, right? But back then in the 1968 or 67 or whatever year it was, that was going to the other end of the earth. So I grew up in the south of England, and that led to I was in the north just long enough to get an accent from the north so that I have literally had an accent my entire life. Because I went to school, so I would be teased at school for having an accent from the north because kids are kids, right? And then it became a bit of a mix, right, of accents if you’ve been in a place for long enough. But that also means that it’s an accent of somewhere and sort of undefinable. Then I moved to Montreal when I was 21. Of course, I had an accent then, right? And I don’t know what you think my accent sounds like now, but it’s probably mid-Atlantic-ish, right? And so the answer is nowhere because it’s a, I live, my parents moved a fair bit when I was young as well on top of that. So yeah, so I grew up living in a tiny town, the seaside, the country, a big town, and in London before I was finished being 18. Wow. Do you have a feeling that you’re, you sound different? Are you aware of your accent? Yeah, yes, and it comes and goes. And even in French, because I’m in Montreal, I work in French, minimum half the time. I have the French, the French I learned at school in England has a completely different accent from the French here. So I have to switch my French accent if I go to France because I don’t have to, but I just do because that was the first French I learned. Right. Just if I’m speaking on the phone to my family in England, I’m going to start reverting back to that accent. But even then, I don’t have the same accent as my sister, who’s not even, and even growing up, I didn’t. She’s not even two years younger than me, and we had different accents. Yeah. Literally pronouncing words differently, bath and bath, which I have trouble saying. It’s an effort for me to say that. Because that’s what she says, and that’s not what I say. So those vowels are carved in stone by the time you’re a one-year-old. That’s amazing. I don’t know if it’s amazing, but it’s the long-winded answer to your question. I’m fascinated by it. The awareness of this, of the accent, the placeless accent is really, that seems like an interesting experience, a phenomenon in a way. Is that worth going at? Yeah. There’s no way of not being aware of an accent in England, though, right? Because it’s still fairly class-based. It’s better than it was when you would struggle to get certain jobs if you had what would be called a working class, lower class accent. Now, that’s not really the case. BBC has all kinds of ranges of accents. When, 50 years ago, it was a thing that sounded like the Queen, a posh accent, basically, right? So at least in that respect, it’s a bit more democratized, but it’s still there. Still, you’re very, very aware of somebody’s accent the second they open their mouth in Britain. What do I sound like? You sound American. Well, I know where you live, you live down the road from Montreal. You don’t sound that much different from the Canadians around here, right? So you don’t sound that much different from me if I’m not paying much attention. The thing is that what I know, though, is that my accents, they come and go, just depending on context and without trying. Sometimes I would try, but obviously. Yeah. But I said, if I’m on the phone to my sister or my dad when he was alive, pretty much instantly somebody would listen and be like, wow, he’s doing an accent. But I wasn’t doing an accent. It was just that the context changed enough for me to click back into it. That’s really cool. I mean, but just the same way as you would click, if you did speak more than one language, you wouldn’t be thinking about it. You just change, right? The context would mean that you would just speak it that way. So it’s not that weird. And it could be potentially pretentious. I do know people who are from Canada, went to school in England and yet somehow still have a bit of a British accent. Right? It’s like, OK. Yeah, I’ve had that experience. It immediately comes to mind as an American who played soccer. We had an American who went to play football in England. And he had a British accent. And it was just, yeah, come on, stop. Well, coming back with it depends how long he was there. Yeah, I know. I’m forgiving. This is a child in me responding to this guy coming. Right, right. Exactly right. But that’s exactly what I was getting at about being made fun of for being teased for having an accent. But if he kept it for more than a couple of years, then that would be really, come on. Yeah. So you’re just trying to get the ladies probably, right? Yeah, because that works. That accent works over here. We’ve strayed a little bit. What did you want to be as a kid when you’re young, John, in the south of England? Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah, not far off what I ended up doing, because the first in terms of a specifically a job, it was journalist and I’ve never been a journalist, but I’ve been a writer and I’ve worked in TV. Now I work for the National Film Board. So it’s pretty adjacent to that. And the only reason I stopped having that ambition was because finally, once you become aware of what British, especially, what you would call the gutter press, the popular newspapers in Britain are renowned for being pretty. I don’t know what word to even use, just crappy. How far can the swear word me to go in this? Yeah, we’re here all the way. Yeah, all the way. OK, yeah. It’s crass at best. It’s f*****g shitty. The way they treat regular people, never mind celebrity. When I found out what it seemed like. Oh, that’s what journalists do. That’s awful. Growing up in the eight, being a teenager in the 80s, I was like, oh, I don’t want to do that. That’s terrible. Right. Of course, there’s loads of amazing journalists in Britain. Right. But that was what I would see on the tabloid front pages. And every day, right, is this absolute s**t. And so I stopped wanting to do that. And yeah. So but writing was obviously a thing all along. So yeah. And catch us up. Where are you now and what’s the work that you’re doing? So I’m head of creative services at the National Film Board of Canada, which is a storied organization. It’s been around for over 85 years. We just one of our films just won an Oscar two weeks ago. Congratulations. Thank you. I can’t take credit for the film. It won best short animated film, and it’s called The Girl Who Cried Pearls. It’s a stop motion film by a pair of directors who were previously nominated for an Oscar at least 10 years ago. And painstaking, stop motion takes a long time. This was years and years and COVID happened in the middle of it. So it was well over five years of work making this thing. And then the National Film Board, the NFB, has a lot of technical expertise to add to. They have a scene where it’s set in Montreal and Paris, this film. There’s a winter time. There’s some light snow drifting down, which happens in Montreal. And that was CG, right? That was computer animation, right? So there’s little touches that are added to this painstaking craftsmanship and all of the human element. They had real actors who performed the film that then they reproduce the actor’s movements with what are called puppets. But puppet doesn’t do service to the amount of artistry in the creation of these characters. Just an insane amount of work. Anyway, that one won an Oscar. And yeah, the NFB, the National Film Board is I believe the studio, if you want to call it that, although it’s not really that has won the most Oscars outside of Hollywood or been nominated for the most. I don’t want to I’ll be slapped on the wrist by somebody from communications if I’m not careful. But basically, yes, it’s a storied institution that is also a bit of a mystery, both at home and abroad, if you’re not careful, because it’s oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that. And there’s an allure that almost goes along with the National Film Board. And anyway, I am head of creative services, which means that I’m responsible for a team that is almost like an in-house ad agency and content creation team. So, yes, we produce ads for the institution itself. We help create advertising for some of the films. And we also create content on our social media channels, which anybody can go and find. And what is the mission of the NFB? What is its role? Yeah, that’s a good question. And so we’re part of the heritage ministry of the federal government. It’s actually not a separate. This is a strange thing for a lot of people to get their heads around. It’s because you’ll get public broadcasters in a lot of countries. And Canada has a public broadcaster, CBC. But this institution is unique in the world because there are funding organizations for film in the world and there are in Canada, too. There’s many. But this organization was created in 1939 by a guy called John Grierson, who was a Scottish immigrant who was asked by the prime minister at the time, basically, to set up a film board to culturally unite a country which is just huge, but not very populated, at least back then. I mean, now Canada has, I don’t know, 40 or 50 million people. It’s not as many as the US, but it’s still a reasonable population, but it’s spread pretty thinly or at least it’s concentrated in cities mostly. But if you think of back in 1939, it was really, how do people get news then? Yes. Newspapers. Radio was fairly established. But the idea was really to unite the cultural fabric somehow of a country which was still fairly young and growing. And if you’re living in the Maritimes, if you live in Nova Scotia, if you live in New Brunswick, something like that, how do you know what life is like in Alberta or Manitoba or British Columbia? Because that’s 3000 miles away. It’s a long, long, long way away. So that was the original goal. And then very quickly, what happened was the Second World War, because it was 1939. And then a different purpose was found, which was making newsreels. And just as Hollywood was co-opted for the same purposes, to basically make films to promote the war effort. To say, look, we’re all in this together. We’re fighting for these values, that kind of thing. So that was the first five years or so, that was what the National Film Board was doing. But then it really became focused back on its original mission of making documentary films. And then at one point, and I’m not the right person, I’m not the historian, we have a curator of our collection on my team who would be the person to interview about that. But you can go on our website, you can read the history. But at one point, there was a filmmaker called Norman McLaren, who started this animation unit. And I think he was the first person to win an Oscar for the National Film Board. And he is a pioneer of animation in cinema, just a very, very innovative thinker and creator. And he basically set up the second thread, as it were, to what we do in terms of weaving this cultural fabric. And then over the years, it’s expanded in different directions, contracted in different ways. But basically, we’re here to help Canadians, to help share Canadian stories to other Canadians and beyond our borders as well, whether it be through documentary, whether it be through animation, animated films, and also to promote Indigenous narrative sovereignty as well, because the Indigenous people of Canada were not even able to tell their own stories and their own history for the vast majority of the history of the country. And obviously, in the U.S., it’s a similar, if not maybe even worse situation. But who am I to judge? A big part of our mandate is to give voice to Indigenous storytellers, whether it’s documentary again or animation. And we have some amazing, amazing Indigenous-led content that is just incredible to watch. And I’ve learned such a lot. I mean, I’ve only been here 18 months. And even in these 18 months, I’ve learned such a lot. And working with these people is a privilege, whether they’re Indigenous filmmakers or not. Amazing. I have so many questions. I mean, the first question, well, there’s one question that’s got two parts, I think. One is where did this begin for you, this work? When did you discover that you could do this kind of work? And then how does it feel to be doing this for the country, in a way, versus the commercial work? You’ve been in agency, in creative direction, in the commercial space for a long time. But I’m wondering how it feels to be using those skills in this direction, and if there’s a way it feels different or operates differently. It feels great. I can tell you that. There’s so much in that, in what way does it feel great? Well, I mean, actually, so I think you were asking several questions or alluding to different questions. Yes. How is it, how did I, what exactly? So a little bit there was, what I wanted to ask is, so where you are now is you’re head of creative services, but you’re running an agency basically for Canada as a sort of a, probably. I mean, look, I don’t want to exaggerate. Yeah, I don’t want to overplay. I mean, yes, there’s the Canadian, the federal government of Canada has, and the provinces and the territories have their own communications that they do, and they may market different programs in different ways in terms of communicating them to the general public who are paying for them. However, we do have a responsibility to share the stories of Canadians to other Canadians and beyond our borders. Is it great when somebody stands on a stage or two people stand on a stage with Oscars in their hands in Hollywood and say the word Canada? Yeah, it’s great. And any country would say that. Every year you get somebody saying, I’m the first person to win from wherever or something. Yes, there’s definite value to that, but the main purpose is not that. The main purpose isn’t bragging rights overseas. It’s cool and nice and fun. And this is a time politically when clearly there are countries that are, I don’t want to say, well, I do want to say stepping up. I do want to say stepping up. I think Canada has stepped up and other countries that haven’t stepped up maybe as the world changes in terms of just making sure that the voices of their people are heard on a bigger stage. And is that what we are doing internationally? No, we’re not. We’re not in politics. We’re not a broadcaster either. We’re not journalists. So I can’t. What are you? We create films that share Canadian stories to Canadians. That’s literally what we do. It’s films. There’s long documentaries, short documentaries. We have a YouTube series coming out soon. There’s social media to reach younger people who maybe aren’t thinking of watching documentaries. Back in the day, meaning when I immigrated to Canada, NFB films would play in the cinemas because you would go to the cinema and there would be a short playing before the main feature. And often those films were either a documentary short or an animated short. And also our films would play on TV, which they don’t so much anymore. They do sometimes. But basically they fell off the radar a bit in terms of just the general cultural conversation, just because the media landscape changed. You don’t have that in cinemas anymore. Cinema attendance, I should say, has dropped. I’m almost certain since 1987. And then when you go there, what happens before a film is just loads of trailers and ads. Yeah. Whereas in the past, you would get trailers and ads, but also a free short film. You didn’t think about it too much. You just played and you were happy to watch this film, whether it was by the NFB or whoever. Pretty sure that wasn’t just in Canada. I think that was a thing. Yeah, that’s right. And that just stopped happening. But we have a streaming platform now and it’s for Canadians in the sense that I don’t think you can... Actually, it’s a good question. I don’t know if you’re overseas what you see exactly, because I’m not. But it’s free for Canadians. This is... That’s an NFB streaming platform? Or it’s a Canadian? It’s a free streaming platform for our entire catalogue. So if you’re in Canada and you’re sick of paying for this platform, plus that, plus that, plus that, and all the prices go up every six months, well, guess what? The National Film Board is free. I don’t believe a word you’re saying, John. Incredible richness of content there. You are guaranteed to find something on there that you will find interesting if you’re Canadian. I can’t say that if you’re from Albania, maybe not. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you of all the different things that you do? Where’s the joy in it? That’s a multi-dimensional answer, I’m sure. Because this is... I mean, you were asking in a way how I got here to do this right now. So the joy is part of that career path where I’m somebody who likes to channel my imagination because I also write. I’ve written novels and screenplays. And so I think that I’m a creative person. I write nonfiction as well. Before working at the NFB, I was between jobs. I used to be a chief creative officer in a small international ad agency network. And in between those two jobs, I decided to launch a Substack newsletter. And I think that’s how we actually first encountered each other online. And write a bunch of articles on Medium and just keep my hand in. But not just for the sake of it, just because I really like it. I really like writing and creating. The cheesy term is content creation. But it is that. So anyway, I really like being able to channel my skill. I mean, I do have a certain skill for writing, for coming up with ideas and concepts. And so being able to channel that either non-professionally into things that I’m interested in or professionally into whatever I’m being paid to do is wonderful. Of course, I get a kick out of that. The interesting full circle thing is when I was at what would be the equivalent of the last, I don’t know necessarily the American terms for all these things, but in England, it’s just called college. So this would be the last two years of high school when you’re 17 and 18, I suppose. And I did a course called Communication Studies because I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. Having all that I had done up till then was your regular academic, studying English, studying history, geography, whatever. Math and science and stuff. And it was such a revelation, such an eye opener. And the very specific thing that got me interested in film was, and the teacher of that class was really good. I mean, I took this for two years. That’s the way it works in Britain is you decide on a thing for two years. Several different subjects. It was a film called Don’t Look Now from, I guess, 1973 with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, speaking of Canadian legends, Donald Sutherland, who is from Quebec. And the director of that film is called Nicholas Roeg. And in fact, Donald Sutherland named one of his sons. So not Kiefer. He has a, Kiefer has a brother called Rogue Sutherland, who is named after that director, Nick Rogue, R-O-E-G. And he was a genius filmmaker. And once this film was screened for the class and the teacher explained the editing, the symbolism, the way the camera moved, all these different aspects of filmmaking, which I don’t know, I was just a kid who watched films. It was, you just sat in front of the TV or sat in front of a cinema. And in fact, the town that I was living in, one of the towns I lived in between the ages of five and 11 didn’t even have a cinema. It was such a small town. So it was just what I was on the telly. I had no particular interest in film. And then this was a real eye opening and mind expanding moment or class or something. I was like, oh my goodness, the possibilities here, just human communication with this medium are unbelievable. So then I decided to do a degree in cinema. And that’s where it all finally came full circle because I became, when I moved here, I was a TV director and editor working in music television, which was, it was fun. Super fun. It was basically the Quebec equivalent of MTV. Amazing thing to do when you’re in your 20s. Incredibly fun. Meeting famous bands and artists and directing interviews and performances and stuff like that. Wonderful. But at one point it was time to do something else. But that one point was literally 10 years of doing that. And then I moved into writing and directing commercials for that TV station. And that’s how I got into advertising. And then basically rose to become a creative director. And as I said, this chief creative officer for this small international network before working at the NFB. So the National Film Board is where it came full circle back to film, to cinema. Oh, I see. Finally, I got to be in a job interview where actually one of the requirements was my degree, which had almost, well, I wasn’t, I hadn’t been in many job interviews, to be honest with you, but it was my third, second one or something. But still, many, many years later, it was what goes around, comes around. It was like, oh, finally, it’s coming in handy, my degree. I mean, that’s a silly way of putting it, because obviously it did come in handy in many, many ways. But yeah, so specifically, as far as this job is concerned, I love working with teams. As a writer, of course, you have to love working on your own. Otherwise, you couldn’t be a writer in any way. But I really love working with teams. I had worked with a team when I was a TV director. Obviously, I spent a period working freelance after that, where I was occasionally working with teams, because when you’re a freelancer and you get hired by an agency, suddenly you’re parachuted in and you’re working with a bunch of people, which is fun. But then working in that agency network, again, you have a team, you have a team of copywriters, designers, art directors, whoever. I really, I love the interplay of creative minds, I guess, I would say. And at the National Film Board, the filmmakers aren’t literally in-house. They’re not on staff. I mean, I think 70 years ago they were, but they propose a film and they may be, if they are, for example, animators, they may be here specifically in the head office in the building that I’m sitting in right now, because we have a lot of equipment to help create animation. There’s just, we have decades of history of all kinds, so many different kinds of animation. Some super wacky kinds of animation, like pin screens. I don’t know if you know what a pin screen is, but stuff you wouldn’t even think of. Those things that you can buy, even in souvenir shops where you can put your hand in and it makes these pins stick out. Well, imagine you could move those. So the impression of the hand that you left, you could move those pins, take a picture, move them a bit, take a picture. It’s absolutely insane. But there’s entire movies of that that have been made here. So anyway, all that to say, even though the filmmakers themselves aren’t specifically part of the teams here, we do get to work with them because we create content with them. And it’s very interesting, but the people who are on staff here are just wonderful creative people who love films. And even if they’re in the finance department or the legal department or whatever. There’s a wonderful sense of belonging to this organization and an understanding of the value of what we bring to the country, to the culture. That’s beautiful. I wanna segue a little bit to talk about your writing and the novels. And there’s a little bit of a, yeah, I guess, yeah, tell me a little bit about your writing. You’ve got four novels that you’ve written. When did you start writing them? Yeah, actually five. Well, six if you don’t count the one that was never saw the light of day. But which I still have a soft spot for. But yeah, I just, if I have an idea to write something, the medium is whatever I feel it should be. So if I have an idea for a screenplay, none of my screenplays have ended up being made into movies. They’ve been optioned a couple of times. And this is par for the course if you’re a screenwriter. I think the vast majority of what screenwriters write doesn’t end up on screen. But made a bit of money out of those at one point. But at one point I had an idea for the first novel that did see the light of day was back, I started writing that in 2002, when blogs were a thing, were beginning to become fairly popular. And I had this idea for a fictional blog, this character, this young woman who was working in a bar in Montreal, very closely based on my favorite bar, that’s still my favorite bar. She meets this guy who says he has this extra sense, the book’s called The New Sense. And it’s a psychological mystery after that. But I wrote it, I gave myself this challenge of writing it in real time, of publishing, actually I set up a website actually, or a blog basically. This was back when they were called weblogs. This was the name, that’s what they were. They were weblogs. You had enough time to say the whole word. If you were cool, you called them blogs. And so I gave myself the challenge of writing her blog because she’s trying to find, she has ended up getting pregnant with this mystery, mysterious guy. She has this baby and he’s disappeared. And so she’s creating this blog to try to reach out to the world to say, hey, telling the story and saying, does anybody know where he is? Because he seems to have been captured by this nefarious organization. He says he has these powers. Does he really? So that was the setup for that, where it forced me to write. It’s that episodic writing. It’s if Dickens or whatever, whoever, if you knew you had to be published in the newspaper the next week, you had to churn out the stuff. So it’s a pretty good motivation, even though I wasn’t getting paid to do it. I had set myself the motivational goal of doing this thing and I did it. And the really cool thing was there were some, there were people who would email who were actually concerned, right? This young woman couldn’t find this guy. And of course, I did respond because there was an email. It was played for real, right? And I even faked a Photoshopped birth certificate. I basically forged it. It’s War of the Worlds, right? A little bit, I suppose. But I mean, obviously, if somebody wrote in and they were, I wrote back to them saying, thank you for your concern, this is fiction because I don’t want people to be actually perturbed in real life. But it was super interesting that, and at one point when self-publishing became a doable thing, I then published it as a- I had to rewrite a bunch of stuff to make it readable as a book. But I published it as a book called The New Sense, which I believe you can buy on Amazon. It must still be there. I mean, it’s a print-on-demand thing, right? You can see my forged birth certificate, my forgery skills. I will dig around. The other thing I want to mention is that when you and I met, we did meet, I think it was probably, it was Substack. It was your letter, right? Was it called The Discomfort Zone? Yeah, exactly. The Discomfort Zone. It’s still there, but when I got this job, I had to, eventually I had to stop doing it because I was just, it wasn’t, I couldn’t do it justice, basically. Yeah, it was a wonderful thing, but you invited me to contribute in a way. I don’t know why you did that. Yeah, there was an interview. There was an interview segment. Yeah, exactly. It was very nice. But if you remember, there was, you asked me this question about AI, and I think that you were in the middle of writing here because your most recent novel really is about AI, right? And so it’s a bit of a thought experiment around AI. So this is what I want to hear your thoughts on, because you didn’t ask me quite point blank. What would you say to a CMO to make them choose qualitative research in the age of AI and synthetic data? This was probably a year and a half, two years ago, maybe. Oh, this was more than that. Yeah, this was at least two years ago. So it was early in that thing, and I hadn’t really, anyway, and you know this, but the short story of the version is that I really thought about it, and I really had an existential crisis around it, really confronting the degree to which, and this is a little bit of a provocation for you too, of how I’ve heard actually since people call about, call AI the fourth Copernican trauma. Have you heard that? Do you know what Copernican trauma is? So I think this is a Freudian idea that humanity has been decentered over and over and over again, Galileo. Oh, I see. It was the first, and then Freud did it, Darwin did it, and then Freud did it. And then we’ve been celebrating ourselves for being uniquely intelligent all this time. But now we have this crazy technology, which has grown, right? We don’t really understand how it works. And it’s actually, it demonstrates that we were not alone in the ability to do this thing. That thing that we thought made us special doesn’t in fact make us special. And so now we’re caught to the degree that people are paying any attention at all in a trauma response around this thing. Yeah, and so you invited me to ask that question. I really struggled with it. I think it made you wait weeks to try to write this piece. And I came up with something which was pretty good, I think. But anyway, you’ve got this book and this novel, which is a thought experiment about AI. And I remember your response to my experience also being a little bit, come on, I think that you’re just taking all of this a little bit too seriously. So where do you, so tell me about, tell us about the new novel and in what way it was a way of exploring AI. And do you think we’re all out of our minds? Yeah, so I had mentioned that I’d written five novels. So there was a young adult trilogy in between, so I don’t need to go into that. Again, you can look it up online. But then I started working on this novel. I started working on it in 2016, something like that. And it’s called 2084, which, I mean, I didn’t choose that year randomly, right? 1984 is the ultimate dystopia, right? So basically I’m imagining a utopian society 100 years after that fictional dystopia that is, there’s a whole political and economic background story to it of how we end up where we end up. That things don’t necessarily go well for the United States in the meantime. And by the way, since I started, well, here’s the thing, right? So I start writing this thing. And this was, so I start writing this actually before AI was really on the radar. It was 2015, 2016. I mean, AI existed, but it wasn’t the LLMs that we, the chat GPTs that we know now. But algorithms were a thing. And corporatized life, let’s just say, is a thing. Capitalism is obviously a thing. And basically anybody who writes anything science fiction-esque or anything where you’re projecting into the future, let’s just say, right? You’re gonna say that it’s a what if question, right? You’re using your imagination, what if? Okay, what is the end point of where we are right now? And you let that play out. So I let something play out in terms of North American society where it gets to what an entity, I don’t want to call it a government actually. You’ll see why, because the ruling entity is called the, of where I live and where you live is called the United Corporations of Canada. Oh boy. So yes, right. So the United States of America no longer exist. There’s a country called a Mexico where a bunch of s**t happened. And a bunch of American states decided to join the country to the North. But then that country morphed for various reasons into this entity called the United Corporations of Canada. So this is, so everything is being run, basically all your needs are taken care of by what ultimately is AI. The thing is, after I started writing the book, then I got hired by this advertising agency to do a really important job. So I set it aside, then COVID happened and we all have more time on our hands. And I went, oh crap, if I don’t get this thing finished, reality is gonna overtake my imagination. And I’ve not been proven wrong about this. I should have called it 2030. No, I mean, I should, well, I don’t know. Anyway, let’s just say s**t’s gone down. And I genuinely hope that this future, it’s speculative fiction, right? So it’s speculative. I’m not predicting things, right? But just like Margaret Atwood with the Handmaid’s Tale, you can look at something and go, oh, there’s certain aspects of this that you can see becoming a bit more real than you had hoped. So obviously it’s a, clearly, otherwise the book wouldn’t be interesting in any way. The utopian future ends up not being as utopian as it seems. So you have to read the book to figure out what’s going on there, but there’s a dark underbelly at minimum. But I would contend that that dark underbelly is present in the world we live in anyway, in the West. I don’t want to say even necessarily capitalism, because I don’t want to make it a super political thing. But the world we live in is a world that’s basically run by corporations more and more, let’s put it that way. And that seems to be accelerating. And AI is now a bigger part of that. And in fact, in the last six months, the world has changed. Oh my God. In how AI is being used in our lives, whether it’s in relatively benign ways, making silly videos, or what you would call slop. And interestingly, last week, OpenAI discontinued their video creation tool called Sora. One day to the next, we’re cancelling that. Your guess is as good as mine as to what went down. But obviously, militarily speaking, there’s another story there. And how close corporations are to government has changed a lot in the last year to 18 months, two years as well. So yeah, all of that is what my book’s about. And there are characters in it who are trying to navigate their way in this reality. And bad things look like they might happen at one point as they dig. We’re near the end. Maybe there’s a question here that brings some of this stuff together. I mean, what is the impact of AI on creativity or on culture? Like what’s the overlap or the intersection between your AI and the work that you’re doing now? Or how do you feel about its impact on the work that you do? There’s very little intersection with the work that I do either personally or professionally, or almost none. Because to be honest with you, the National Film Board has such a legacy. When I said that the filmmakers who just won an Oscar, they spent six years or whatever, it was hand crafting, making the stop motion film with insane amounts, not just them, the art direction, everything involved in that was so human, right? It seems almost as far away from AI as you can get. Yeah, it really is. And there’s, and again, there is some CGI in certain aspects of that film, especially animating the mouths of some of the characters, because the film exists in English and French. So the mouths are animated differently for each language, which is, it’s an almost insane undertaking actually. And it came out, they did, my colleagues did such an amazing job. But all that to say, we have such humanity behind the work that we do, that that is our superpower. There’s no way we should be trashing that. Like what would we have to gain from making AI, from using AI to create? Now, AI can be a tool for certain research. It’s not like we don’t have our heads in the sand. We’ve always been extremely technologically innovative at the National Film Board. So of course, anybody should be exploring the potential of any of this stuff. So anyway, the intersection is still pretty minimal, let’s just say, in reality. It doesn’t mean I don’t think about AI every day. And in my personal life too, it’s pretty minimal in terms of output. In terms of my thoughts about it, and the question I was asking you, and that you’re in a way throwing back at me, it’s extremely interesting because I’ve had a lot more thoughts over the last two or three years about not just intelligence, because intelligence is actually, it’s pretty hard to define. And there’s different, the chat GPT that people think of as AI is super different from the AI that can play chess. It’s a totally different thing, right? And it’s just the nature of conscious, what concerns me actually is discussions around AI being potentially conscious or aware or sentient. Like these are all words that are thrown around that don’t have an agreed upon definition. And I wrote an essay recently that has not been published anywhere yet about consciousness and how it relates to our socialization. So this might be actually a conversation for another time because I know from your anthropological background, I’m sure you can have, I’d be interested to know what you think about all this. But basically that what philosophers would call qualia, which is the phenomenological experience of the world that we have, when we feel pain or we experience the color blue, or we experience the taste of something or far more complicated things than that, which are like the color of our lives, basically emotionally and perceptually, that the basic assumption is that those qualia are individually instantiated, let’s just say, like you have your experience of the color red, it may not be the same as mine, but it’s probably pretty similar because one of us could have some mutation of our eye, retina or something that would mean that we experienced it differently. But averaging it out, it’s basically a similar thing from one person to another. Now there’s a philosophical question about how do you really know that? Well, okay, good question, fine. But if you’re just looking at purely the experience that would be called sentience, there’s my, sorry, a bit of a long-winded answer, but my current view of this is that the human experience of the world is actually unique compared to other creatures on the planet because it is based on our social interaction. I mean, no man is an island, right? Is an obvious way of looking at that. That’s nothing new to look at reality, our reality that way, right? But in my mind, we have a genome and a phenome, right? So the genome is your DNA, but then how it’s expressed and how you grow in the world is your phenome, how you turn out, right? That phenome is irrevocably social. We cannot escape that. But what I’m getting at in this essay is that it’s at down to the level of experience, pure experience of the world. If I’m telling you you’re experiencing the color red and you cannot escape the cultural definition and social definition, however you want to put it, of the color red, you can’t escape it. Yes, you’re seeing wavelengths of light and so is some other animal that can perceive that same spectrum, but their experience, and I’m not saying animals aren’t conscious or not sentient, that’s the point, is yes, they are. But we are in a qualitatively different way in the sense that flight, the evolution of flight for life forms was qualitatively different from what existed before flight evolved. The first animal that could fly properly, self-propelled flight, not just gliding, and obviously evolution happens over a long time and there’s in-betweeny, creatures and stuff like that, right? We have those flying squirrels and stuff, flying foxes or whatever today. Once you get flight, that is then a qualitative difference of experience in the world that evolved among completely different branches of the biological tree of nature or whatever it’s called, right? So reptiles can do it, but insects can do it, right? And obviously birds can do it, right? And humans can do it because we socially got together and built machines that could do it. We built technology, right? That you could not do as an individual, nothing. We can’t do a single thing as an individual. And I contend that if you were literally raised by wolves, you basically wouldn’t be human. Your genome would be, but your phenome would not be at all, your phenotype, forget it, right? You would see red, but you wouldn’t know what it was. You would have the experience, but it would be so basic, right? It would be just purely basic. So getting back to AI, my concern is that people think that AI will be able to do that. And who am I to say whether it can or it can’t, but the concern is that we would rush to anthropomorphize. I mean, we already anthropomorphize anything. That’s just a part of human nature apparently, right? Whether it’s clouds or your dog or something, right? But it’s so easy to do that. LLM is a program to fool us into thinking that they are being human. And to a certain extent, they can have conversations, right? That’s, hey, dogs can’t. So this must be more human than a dog. You could easily end up thinking. And of course it’s been fed with the entirety of human culture. So to a certain extent, it has been socialized, right? But the it is still just a very, very specialized algorithm, right? And what really concerns me when I hear, I hear it all the time or I read it all the time of, oh no, we should be careful because if AI becomes conscious, it becomes sentient, then we’re going to have to treat it really nicely or we’re going to have to give it rights or something, right? We’re going to have to, we can’t be cruel to it. And whenever I hear that, I think, oh my goodness. We kill so many sentient beings, billions every day. You’re worried about this, this thing that is made of silicon. That’s your concern. My other concern, in terms of cruelty, it’s like, yeah, good God. No, nobody’s more cruel than humans, right? Like it doesn’t come more cruel than a human being. And you can just benignly be munching on your burger or drinking your milk or whatever it is, right? Worrying about being cruel to the AI. And we’re worrying about being cruel to the AI. Oh my goodness. And I mean, forget about being cruel to people, right? Look at the news, right? So that is not something people should be concerned about. What they should be being concerned about, and this is what brings it back a little bit full circle to corporations and what I deal with in my book is, corporations have what’s called, legally personhood, right? So that was a probably understandable move at some point in history to in terms of liability, right? Like it enabled a lot of capitalism to create the world that we know today. And there are lots of advantages to that world, right? In terms of human suffering, for sure, lots of benefits. But it’s a tricky, slippery slope. It becomes very wriggly and you can’t get hold of a corporation really, because it’s, what is it? It just keeps on going, right? There is no, there’s no automatic lifespan to a corporation. And it just grows and grows. And hence in my book, it’s the United Corporations have taken over a country for very benign reasons. Everything’s great. They all want the best for everybody. But what concerns me, especially in terms of American law is, as soon as if AI had rights like a person and like a corporation, and maybe it is a corporation that is an AI, who knows? Then it would have, by definition, the right to bear arms in America. And that’s not, well, that film exists, right? That’s called Terminator, right? I didn’t invent that future of the AI becoming sentient, obviously. So that is, what concerns me about AI is what the people let the computers do, let’s just say, because I’d rather just call it computers because it is just computation at the end of it. Intelligence, whatever, is it intelligent? Yeah, it’s intelligent. Depends what you mean by intelligence. So are bees, so ants. There’s plenty of examples of intelligence in the animal kingdom. But our intelligence is distributed intelligence in terms of we are fundamentally social and AI does that a bit. And obviously the internet does that a bit. It’s distributed right now. So there’s never ending conversations can be had about that. But what do we do about it? I just think there’s huge red flags that are perhaps being waved and maybe even in the wrong direction, these flags. It’s no, no, don’t worry about being cool to the AI. I mean, so we’re right at the end of time, but I’m just to cross the T and dot the I. My view is that you’re not experiencing any insecurity about the humanity of the work that you do in the face of AI. No, not at all. Because if you want to write an email and you’re not that good at writing, use AI, go for it. If you are, it’s beautiful. If you’re from another country and you don’t speak English and you want to communicate what you have to share and convey your intelligence that you have, sure. It’s amazing. It’s in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the babble fish. It’s the thing you can put in, it’s the universal communicator device, right? That is a dream. That’s the thing that we dreamed of when we were kids. We dreamed of having a thing in our pocket that would give us the answers to all the questions. And AI is an extension to that. But when you push it far enough, it still averages out enough. It can’t see into the future. It can’t imagine the future. And if we were going to have another conversation, I would start off talking about imagination because that is the key thing. It doesn’t exist in time, right? It just is. You can turn it off and turn it on again. It has no awareness of time whatsoever. You can program in a clock, right? But it doesn’t mean anything. Time doesn’t mean anything to a computer or AI. It means something to us. And we are able to project into the future, which is one of our superpowers is this imagination. But even on a social level, because we hear something from somebody, we think about something that happened in history, we put it all together. And those are other people who are informing us as an individual. But even then, we’re going to tell, I’m telling you about it now. There’s other people listening, right? Who knows what comes out of this conversation? Somebody else is going to hear. That is what humans do. And that is not what AI does. It’s just something qualitatively different. But AI does a bunch of useful things, no question about it. But being replaced, yeah, if you’re doing coding, yeah, but that’s the same as saying that the motor car replaced the horse. Yeah, sure, some stuff will be replaced. But that isn’t, it doesn’t replace the thing that humans do that makes us human. I think that’s the key thing to hang on to. And I have kids who are going to be entering the workforce in the not too distant future. And we have conversations about this. You’ve got to be smart. You don’t want to be learning to drive the buggy in 1920, to have the horse and the whip and stuff. That’s probably not a great career path. So be smart, but don’t, I wouldn’t freak out about that specifically. But we could, yeah, this is a never-ending conversation. Yes, and I would love to do this again. Except it’s at the end. We’ll take, what’s that? It’s never-ending, but it is actually at the end. It is the end. We’ll announce the never-ending nature of this right at the end. But thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It’s so much fun talking with you. And I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. Oh, yeah, no, thank you. I really suspect I might have babbled on a bit too much. And I hope it’s interesting for somebody at some point. No, it was wonderful. And I would love to do it again. Imagination and that essay, I think you shared with me actually about— Oh, it’s true, I did. So we can do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is my little pet project right now. Who knows where that will lead? It’s beautiful. Cool. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you, Peter. Talk soon. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
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