My Conversation with the excellent Neal Stephenson

 [[{“value”:”Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary: In Neal’s second appearance, Tyler asks him why he sometimes shifts from envisioning the future to illustrating the past, the rise of history autodidacts, the implications of leaked secrets from the atomic age to today’s AI, the logistics of faking one’s
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Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

In Neal’s second appearance, Tyler asks him why he sometimes shifts from envisioning the future to illustrating the past, the rise of history autodidacts, the implications of leaked secrets from the atomic age to today’s AI, the logistics of faking one’s death, why he still drafts novels in longhand, Soviet idealism among Western intellectuals, which Soviet achievements he admires, the lag in AR development, how LLMs might boost AR, whether social media is increasingly giving way to private group chats, his continuing influence on technologists, why AI-generated art might struggle to connect with readers, the primer from The Diamond Age in light of today’s LLMs, the prospect of AGI becoming an unnoticed background tool, what Neal believes the world really needs more of, what lies ahead in Polostan and the broader “Bomb Light” series, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: How effectively could you stage your own death? You. Say you really want to do it, and you’re willing to do it.

STEPHENSON: To fake it or to actually —

COWEN: Fake it, but everyone thinks it’s real. I read about it in the papers. “Neal is gone.” I nod my head, I weep, and then I forget about it. I don’t mean I forget about you, but you understand what I’m saying.

STEPHENSON: Wait, there’s not that many circumstances under which all physical traces of someone can be obliterated. That’s a fairly hard thing to do. It would have been easier a hundred years ago, but now we’ve got cameras everywhere, and we’ve got DNA testing and other ways to prove or to disprove that somebody’s actually dead. I guess it would have to be something like a plane crash into the ocean.

COWEN: But then how do you survive it?

STEPHENSON: Oh, yes. Okay.

COWEN: To kill yourself is one thing, but to pretend you’ve killed yourself and stay alive seems harder.

STEPHENSON: You could parachute out if it was a small plane, not a jet airline full of people, but a single-seater. I guess that might work.

COWEN: So, hire a private plane, have it crash, parachute out into somewhere where you —

STEPHENSON: You’re witnessed getting into the plane and taking off, but then there’s no way to recover the evidence for some reason. It’s pretty hard to do. If someone really wanted to, if they were just determined to go and find the . . . You see the efforts that people have gone to to go down to the Titanic. Well, if you can go find that thing and check it out with a submarine, then it’s pretty hard to really find a place that can’t be accessed in that way.

I very much enjoyed Neal’s new book Polostan.  And here is my first Conversation with Neal Stephenson.

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