Episode 167 with Cecily Dickey and Rita Rogers
Embracing Limitations: Exploring Transhumanism and the Essence of Humanity
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Join us for an engaging episode that challenges conventional thinking and explores the intricate relationship between humanity, technology, and our natural world.
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If you're interested in learning more check out episodes 20 and 106 on the Boom Clap Podcast (linked below).
EPISODE 20: Bio-Digital Convergence
EPISODE 106: Transhumanism & Pushing Biological Boundaries with Steve Kim
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
167 CECILY AND RITA
Ginny Yurich Okay, here we go. Welcome to the 1000 Hours a podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I am the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I have two lovely women on with me today. Plus a baby, a newborn. Rita is here with her newborn rocking and weigh in. So Rita Rogers and Cecily Dickey from the Boom Clap podcast. Welcome.
Cecily Dickey and Rita Rogers Thank you for having us. Really excited to be here.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, so excited to have you. This is kind of a random whim, but I had seen a video that you'd posted about basically like a robotic woman who was granted rights in I think Saudi Arabia granted citizenship and the rights that came with it. And you know, this question about should robots be given personhood? And is this a path that I've gone down over the past several years because of books that I've read and I don't really have anyone to talk about with it, because some of the books that I've read, I've reached out to the authors to ask to be on the podcast. Some of the authors have passed away. So whether it's that other authors have just said no. So I saw your post about this transhumanism, the Neuralink, Elon Musk, all of this stuff that's changing, and I reached out to see if you would come on to talk about it. And you said yes. So thank you.
Cecily Dickey Yeah, I know. I feel like this 1000 hours outside community is very much our kind of community. Rita and I both homeschool. We really believe in being outdoors, and yet we also have this weird fascination with weird topics like transhumanism. So we've done a couple episodes on it ourselves, and we talk about just her and I like over Vox or we talk about this sort of stuff all the time. So you've been looking for someone to talk to. You have found your girls like this is this is the kind of stuff we love.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, it's super interesting. I think it's definitely something to be aware of. But before we get there, I'd love for you to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit more about you and the Boom Clap podcast.
Cecily Dickey You can go first, right?
Rita Rogers Yeah. So my name's Rita Rogers. I live in central Illinois with my husband and two daughters who are 12 and nine, and then this newborn little bundle of joy. He is six weeks tomorrow, so you can hear him probably making a little noise right now. But anyway, I started this podcast with Cecily. I think we're going on, what, two and a half?
Cecily Dickey Two and just over two years.
Rita Rogers Over two years. Yeah, but I was an ICU nurse for a long time, a cardiovascular ICU nurse for 15 years. I lost my job in 2021 due to complications with the rollout of the vaccine. I hope that's not controversial to mention on your podcast, but you know, everybody has their feelings about it and I wasn't willing to do some of those things. And the platform grew as I talked about those things and Cecily approached me. We had had some ventures together before and she's like, you know, we should start a podcast. And so we did. And really we talk about cultural issues as they relate back to our values, things going on in the world that people aren't thinking about, like transhumanism. I mean, it's something people are not thinking about and talking about. That should be because it's coming down the pike. And that's just a little bit about the podcast. Also, my husband's a farmer. We live in the middle of nowhere and likewise really enjoy being outdoors. That's what attracted me to you and I think I found you through the 2020 start of that fiasco.
Cecily Dickey And I am Cecily. I live in British Columbia, Canada. And yeah, fun fact, Rita and I have never met in person and we were going to meet in actually March 2020 and then I fell apart because cross-country travel became really, really difficult. Or intercountry travel, I should say. Anyway, yeah, I am married. I have a husband named Kyle and three kids and my husband's a public school teacher and we homeschool, which people always think is really ridiculous. But I mean, we homeschool for a reason and my husband is 100% on board, if that tells you anything. And yeah, we live on a small farm, like a hobby farm. We have pigs, we have ducks, we have chickens, we have cows, we have massive gardens. We love living the outdoor life as well, growing our food and enjoying time with our family. And yeah, when Rita and I connected years ago, which is crazy to think about, that's been years already. We we had mutual interests and mutual experiences. I come from a nursing background as well, and I released my license in 2020 and have moved on to other ventures since then. So yeah, and she kind of described the podcast really well, so I'll leave it at that.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, yeah. Yes, people can check that out. There's a lot of episodes on there and two in particular that really talk about what we're talking about today, this thing of transhumanism. So my story is that I love to read and I came across Nicholas Kadarius. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He's a Ph.D.. He wrote a book years ago called Glow Kids and Glow Kids is about how screens really are harming our children. So he said that for a while people were unsure, is this really matter? And he goes through the science behind all of it and the addiction and all of those things. So then he wrote about six years later, a follow up book called Digital Madness, which came out last year. He's been on our podcast to talk about both books. And Digital Madness is a phenomenal book where basically he's talking about the response now that we know that these things are addictive and his is more about social media. What should our response be? Such a great book. And at the end of the book, he starts talking about A.I. and transhumanism and virtual reality glasses for cows so that they think they're in a field and they produce more milk.
Cecily Dickey Oh, my goodness.
Ginny Yurich And what he talks about and this is the piece that I sort of always wondered, is if I was super rich, like an Elon Musk or Bill Gates or the Facebook guy, I can't think of his name anyway.
Cecily Dickey Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg.
Ginny Yurich If I was super rich, I would just be like throwing parties all the time. Do you ever think about, like, what you would do? I would love to have, like, real estate all over the world. I would invite friends, you know, we would give to charities and I would quit. I would quit. I'd be like, Look, if I've got this much money, I would quit. So I always had this thought of, like, why are they still working? You know, same thing with Amazon. Like, why is Jeff Bezos, why is he still working? Just go, like, live your life and enjoy it. And Kadarius touches on that in his book that he says it's basically it becomes like a God complex and that these tech gurus are trying to live forever. That's really sort of the basis of it. So that's what I read out of his, and it took me down a reading Rabbit hole toward a book called The Singularity by Ray Kurzweil, who my husband said, I shouldn't ask to be on the podcast. That I don't know. And then this guy named Jerry Kaplan, who wrote a book called Humans Need Not Apply about the rise of artificial Intelligence. And he wouldn't be on our podcast. He said he was too busy. So that's okay. And I've just read all these different books about these topics and I've had no one to talk about with it. So here we go with you. So tell me what initially interested you in it. So two questions. What initially interested you about the topic and what are some of your main concerns or things that you're seeing?
Cecily Dickey Well, for me, the the not the first thing, but I would say the main thing that really piqued my interest is I can't remember why Rita and I even started talking about stuff like this. This is just the kind of friendship we have. We find the most obscure things possible and like, go down these deep, deep, deep rabbit holes. So I don't know what brought it up in the first place, but I ended up stumbling across an article from Government of Canada website called Good Morning Bio Digital. And when I read through that coming from my government, I couldn't believe the way that they were looking at this very artificial future in a very positive light. And I just love thinking about these things philosophically know. I think there's so much that can be gained from having these philosophical conversations while realizing that for a lot of people, philosophy just lives in the mind. However, these things are very practical and actually happening in our everyday lives. And I was reading this morning actually about how a lot of these people with these transhumanist views, you know, they've always had this fascination with space and getting humans to space. And yes, like you said, living forever. And I think that a lot of that comes from, like you said, a God complex and also this underlying fear that they are not God. And so they're trying to do everything they can to get themselves to the position of God so that they can live forever, whether that's in a biological form, which we all know is not possible or in some sort of digital form, which is what many of them are going towards. So I just think as a mother who's homeschooling my kids to instill my values in them and to raise them to be strong, confident, happy, healthy individuals with a strong grounding, it's really important to be aware of this. I read this morning, I think I was going here earlier and then got sidetracked with my own thoughts that they figure that these merging of humans with technology will be widespread by the end of this century, but many are thinking it will actually be in the first third of this century, which we're rapidly approaching. So very interesting. But I just have to comment really quickly on I forget which book you said it was, but the cows in the field with the glasses on so that they'll produce more milk. That is insane to me. And it's something we talked about in one of the episodes that we sent you on transhumanism, our most recent one, where obviously for cows, they're not going to be able to determine that this is not reality, whereas humans, we should be able to determine that it's just an augmented per. Ception of reality and not a change in reality itself. And isn't it interesting how we're trying to manipulate nature to the point that we're pretending cows are in fields so that they'll produce more milk, trying to go against nature in order to try to extract more from it? Yeah.
Rita Rogers Yeah. So Cecily had sent me that Policy Horizons page that she was talking about. That was our first dive into this topic together. And when she sent me that, like, isn't this crazy? You know, I'm like, Oh, yeah, Darva, you know, the United States Department of Defense has an arm that has been researching this this stuff for years. And CRISPR technology, all of these things have been around. And so I'm like, yeah, let's talk about this because people need to know about it. And for me, I just think that so much of what we see, you know, if you're on social media, you see people talking about, quote, controversial topics all the time, trying to change the way culture is going and drive it in a different direction because we're going a direction that's very different than what a lot of us would say we value. But we're always behind the curve, in my opinion. You know, when people are willing to talk about things, by the time I'm not a weirdo talking about something, you know, it's too late. We're already there and now we're trying to backpedal. And so with transhumanism and bio digital, you know, these things are like Cecily said already here, and we're already experiencing some of those technologies in our life being used with humans, but we don't even realize it because it's such a slow boil, you know, And by the time it's actually here, full force, we don't have time for ourselves to think about it, to be able to interact and choose wisely how we interact, right? We need to be able to use wisdom in how we accept and uptake or don't accept and uptake these new technologies. And if we want to do that, we need to be talking about it now, not when it's right in our face.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, it's interesting. The books that I've read, The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. I mean, he really talks about biological bodies, 2.0 that we're going to be able to reverse age all of these different things. And he's sort of he's someone that has been projecting out into the future for a long time and at a fairly high rate of accuracy. And then some things are absolutely off. So in his book, he's talking about that, that we're going to hit this point where we don't even we can't even distinguish between virtual reality and real life. So these books are talking about kind of what's going on in the digital madness, talking about AI and and also the humans need not apply. The robots are coming. They're going to take over your jobs. This is what it's going to look like. But there is a book about philosophy, about the I think the philosophical part of it all that was actually written in the eighties, so long before the computers called Amusing Ourselves to death. And I actually think it's probably one of the best books out there by Neil Postman. I've tried to get in contact with his son because his son's written, his son is still alive. His name's Andrew, but I haven't had any success there. But in that book he talks about the like what happens when we live in a culture where everything is all about amusement and what happens to ourselves? Any kind of likens it to We're all looking for Big Brother. We're all kind of, I'm unaware of The 1984, that type of thing. But you talk about Huxley and with Huxley, it's about how we just like you said, we're like the frog in the pot of water that he says there's no reason to ban a book because no one's reading anymore. And we've sort of just learned to love our oppression. That's what he says. Yeah. So it reminded me, Cecily, of the Good Morning bio digital article that you read on your podcast, which I don't know if you have it with, you.
Cecily Dickey Bring it up.
Ginny Yurich But it's I mean, it's long and people could go back. You read the whole thing on your podcast and you have the link to it in your podcast as well. But just this thought of maybe you could read a couple parts of it. Sure. It really reminds me of this amusing ourselves to death that we're just slowly sinking into this odd world but loving it.
Cecily Dickey Yeah. So I'm just bringing it up right now and I'll, I'll start reading it and you can tell me when you want me to stop. But interestingly, that Neil Postman book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Rita and I once did a whole episode called Orwell versus Huxley because, I mean, Postman's just really laid it out so well. And while I think there's elements of truth to both, you know, the predictions in 1984 and the predictions from a Brave New World, I really think we're kind of landing more on the brave new world side as far as yes, our amusements, our comforts are becoming an impression that we have grown to love, which is really interesting, but also really sad. Okay, so I have the Good Morning bio digital article here. Jenny, just stop me whenever you think it's been, All right? All right. I wake up to the sunlight and salty coastal air of the Adriatic Sea. I don't live anywhere near the Mediterranean, but my air, which is also my health advisor, has prescribed a specific air quality scent and solar intensity to manage my. And. Energy levels in the morning and has programed my bedroom to mimic this climate. The fresh bed sheets grown in my building from regenerating fungi are better than I imagined. I feel rested and ready for the day. I need to check a few things before I get up. I send a brain message to open the app that controls my insulin levels and make sure my pancreas is optimally supported. I can't imagine having to inject myself with needles like my mother did when she was a child. Now it's a microbe transplant that auto adjusts and reports on my levels. Everything looks all right, so I check my brain's digital interface to read the dream data that was recorded and processed in real time last night. My therapy app analyzes the emotional responses I expressed while I slept. It suggests, I take it. I take time to be in nature this week to reflect on my recurring Trapped in a box dream and enhanced, helpful subconscious neural activity. My A.I. recommends a forest day. I think. Okay. And my A.I. and neural implant do the rest. The summary of my bug surveillance footage shows how my apartment was safe from intruders, including other bug bites last night. But it does notify me that my herd of little cyber dragonflies are hungry. They've been working hard, collecting data and monitoring the outside environment all night. But the number of mosquitoes and lion carrying ticks they normally hunt to replenish their energy was smaller than expected with a thought. I order some nutrient support for them. My feet hit the regenerative carpet and I grab a bathrobe, although I don't need it for warmth. My apartment is gradually warming up to a comfortable 22 degrees as a cycle through a constantly shifting daily routine that keeps me in balance with the time of day and season. Building codes and home energy infrastructure are synchronized and require all homes. The auto regulated for efficiency because houses and buildings are biomimetic and incorporate living systems for climate control wherever possible. They're continuously filtering the air and capturing carbon. I check my carbon offset measure to see how much credit I will receive for my home's contribution to the government's climate change mitigation program. As I head to the bathroom, I pause at the window to check the accelerated growth of the neighboring building. Biological architecture has reached new heights, and the synthetic tree compounds are growing taller each day to ensure that the building can withstand even the strongest winds and to reduce swaying for residences on the top floors. A robotic 3D printer is clambering around the emerging structure and adding carbon reinforced biopolymer strengthening critical stress points identified by its A.I. supported sensor array. I am glad they decided to tree the roof of this building with fire resistant, genetically modified red cedar. Since urban forest fires have become a concern. While I'm brushing my teeth, Jamie, my personal, I ask if I'd like a delivery drone to come pick up my daughter's baby tooth, which fell out two days ago. The epigenetic markers in children's teeth have to be analyzed and cataloged on our family genetic blockchain in order to qualify for the open health rebate. So I need that done today. I replace the smart sticker that monitors my blood chemistry, lymphatic system and organ function in real time. It's hard to imagine the cost and suffering that people must have endured before personalized preventative medicine became common. Also, I'll admit that it sounds gross, but it's a good thing the municipality samples are fecal matter from the sewage pipes as part of the platform to analyze data on nutritional diversity, gut bacteria and antibiotic use to aid with public health screening and fight antibiotic resistant strains of bacterial infections. Supposedly, the next download from my smart sink will allow me to choose a personalized biotic mix for my chlorinated drinking water. Oh.
Ginny Yurich Sorry. Wild. No, it keeps.
Cecily Dickey Going like this.
Rita Rogers They're here. I'm sorry.
Ginny Yurich They're great. Baby noises are great. It's just that it's a mind blowing thing because you see that some of it's already happening. You see how quickly it could get there. And that's one of the things that Ray Kurzweil talks about is that technology has been doubling. It's this exponential rate of growth and doubling for however long with no end in sight. And so I think what happens is you can't really imagine what it will be. And then all of a sudden it's here. Yes. How could there be any more technology than there already is? And then you blink and it's here. And this article gives rise to that. So there's a couple of things that I know you talked about in your podcast that I noticed about it, too. But a lot of it seems to stem off of fear. Absolutely. And fear of our biological bodies. I mean, even just this where it says it's hard to imagine the costs and suffering that people must have endured before personalized preventative medicine became common. And certainly there are there is a lot of suffering and there is a lot of costs, but not all the time and not for everyone all the time. You know, in talking about that, there's this component. I think that when you look at Island neuralink that it always is about Alzheimer's and dementia and they seem to start there and capital is there. And the fear of aging. Is that sort of your thoughts? How are they going to sell it?
Cecily Dickey Yeah, I feel like that's with any major change that we ever see in society. It starts with playing on on the fear that people have, right? And what is everyone and I shouldn't say everyone, but the majority of the people, the big bulk of people, their biggest fear is suffering and death because it comes with this big, huge question mark, this giant unknown and this fear of like, what would it mean to not exist on the only planet that I've ever known? I can see that. That is scary. It's not as scary for me because as Rita and I were saying to you before we started recording really this conversation and why it's so important, it does boil down to world view. And when you come from the worldview I have as a Christian, you don't have as much fear of death because you believe the best is yet to come. And that's what really, you know, it's easy to think of these people in a sense as villains. But for me, coming from the worldview that I come from, when I see how much fear there is driving this whole movement, it actually makes me feel a great deal of compassion for them because I couldn't imagine having to face each day with that fear of death, with that fear of suffering. I really believe that suffering is what produces character and humanity. And I, like I said, I believe that the best is yet to come after death. But yeah, I just I really choose, instead of looking at them as villains, I choose to look at them with compassion while still realizing that we need to make sure that people are aware of what is being planned so that people can prepare themselves.
Ginny Yurich Right. There's even the I don't totally another word if it's cruel therapy or it's like you freeze your body. And so there's this sort of some of the wealthiest, most prominent people would freeze their body so that it could last long enough so that when they become this merger of biological and digital, that they can still be here and still be a part of what's going on. And in the singularity that I mean, that says a lot what Ray talks about, which is trying to make it to that point. Right.
Cecily Dickey Yeah. I think it's important that you mention wealth as well, because I was reading on a website this morning in preparation for this about what people can do if they want to prepare themselves to take on a transhumanism, like they are looking forward to being able to opt into that. And here's some of the things they said. Number one, live healthy and avoid unnecessary risks. Number two, sign up for a cryonics like you just mentioned. Three, keep abreast of current research and then here's the really interesting part and save money so that you can afford future life extension treatments when they become available. And then it says Support the development of transhuman technology through donations and advocacy. So you can see and this is something that Reed and I have talked about with Steve Kim on our episode on transhumanism, that it really is going to create more of a two tier society as far as like the haves and the have nots, those who can afford to pursue this technology and those who can not, which is really interesting when you think of the fact that we live in this society, in this culture, that is seek seeking, not equality, but equity on every single front, and yet we're going to move ourselves towards more inequity. Not that they would really ever admit that because they really are searching for a utopia. That's what they're trying to do. But it really interesting is that in that bio digital article that I read, I don't know if you guys picked up on the fact that she had bug bots that were searching for intruders and other dangers, and it's like, okay, so we're here, we are in this supposedly utopia. Yeah, we have bug bots that are still surveilling for intruders and problems because no matter how advanced we get, we are still living in a fallen world and we will never reach Utopia.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, right. Yeah. And that's a point. Well, even even just when we talk about the fear and it says, of course it says the Lyme carrying ticks, you know, that mosquito is, you know, these things that we're afraid of and trying to control it all. Another thing obviously, that sticks out from that article is this drive for comfort. And Michael Easter wrote the book called The Comfort Crisis. It's really opened my eyes as a parent to you know, I do think that we're in this realm of life where we're trying to shelter our kids. We're trying to make everything easy. No one's going to get a bad grade. No one's going to ever fall and get hurt. We're trying to keep them completely comfortable physically, but in the long run, that leads to a lot more risks. But that's something that you talked about as well, which is like this obsession with being comfortable and in the perfect climate. And it's going to guide our bodies through the day. You know, we're never cold. So what are your thoughts on that?
Cecily Dickey Yeah, I mean, you can easily see from even just reading a little bit of that bio digital article that it's very clear that if you lived in that environment where everything was catered to you, all you had to do is think and you could be in a different environment in your mind or you. It have the perfect temperature at all times, or your fridge would produce your food for you. You can see how easy it would become to become dependent on that, right? It seems like it's human nature to get used to our comforts and then never let them go. Right. And I see that as someone who's very comfortable myself, like, I don't like to be freezing cold. I don't like to not have food, you know, all of these things. So I can see that it would be very easy to become completely addicted to that comfort because I'm addicted to some comforts already, if I'm being honest. Right. So you can just imagine how once these things are happening, it's going to be very easy to adopt it as this is what everyone does. So this is what I do too. And I don't have to feel weird about it because this is just normal, which is a foreign concept. So if we think of our ancestors, it would just be like, what? Like, it's crazy.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, it's alluring.
Rita Rogers Yeah. Coming at it, though, from like, the perspective of how does this affect us and impact our quality of life. Would pleasure be at its peak be as good if we don't have those troughs? You know, and I just think about, you know, I'm holding this lovely baby right now and I love him so much and I'm so thankful for him. But if we hadn't eat, if it was a guarantee, if babies were a guarantee, and if, you know, like we had a loss we had a loss last year. And this is just what I'm thinking of. You know, if this baby was a guarantee and there was no heartache that ever went along with anything, would there be as much appreciation for what we have? And so when everything's comfortable, when everything's a complete guarantee, you know, if babies weren't miracles, would we appreciate it so much. You know.
Cecily Dickey That's. Like everything is given meaning by its opposite. Like, what is joy? There's no context for understanding what joy is without having some understanding of what suffering is. Right. There's no understanding of what evil is without some understanding of good or vice versa.
Rita Rogers And when we talk about like if we talk about eliminating suffering also and phasing out suffering, this is what a lot of it boils down to. Like you said, Cecil Utopia and eliminating suffering. But right before I got on here, I came downstairs to get on my computer because I hadn't been on it for the last four weeks or so. Right. And it wanted to update my resume and it kept failing over and over. Right? 930 we were recording at ten, so it took me 45 minutes to get my zoom updated that something that should have been like a two minute process. And so what I'm saying is technology is not infallible and we're replacing potentially panes of we might be eliminating human suffering, but we're going to replace it with the technological suffering because technology doesn't come without risk and doesn't come without failure. And we may just be trading one for the other. Right and right.
Ginny Yurich And it seems like mental suffering, too. I mean, this is not our ideal way to live. I just talked to Jill Winger. She has a book coming out about old fashioned on purpose. And she was talking about how when we work with our hands, that helps in depression. So that was an interesting thing, like a drawn to how life used to be. You would knit at night, you know, the fireplace or you would do some needle work or things like cooking all of those things, working with your hands. And so if you have these machines, I do it for you. What's interesting to me, here's what I think. It's sold to us, right? It's sold to us as out of fear your health. It's sold to us as you're going to be so comfortable that is alluring. And Michael Easter talks about that in his book about how we are driven for comfort, because it used to be that we had limited resources and so we couldn't have all this output all the time. So our bodies are naturally drawn to be comfortable, so it's sold to us. But in the end, what ends up happening is we are under complete control, right? Absolutely. Our stool samples are being monitored, data databases, and we're having to send in our tooth from our kids.
Cecily Dickey Yes.
Ginny Yurich In order. So it's just when you look at it from those two perspective. So if you go back to Postman and I just highly recommend that book, it's called Amusing Ourselves to Death, it's literally from 1983 before computers, before the Internet. And yet it gives you so much to think about, he says. At the end, he says no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. He says, to ask is to break the spell. So I love what you're doing on the Boom podcast because you're talking about it, you're asking the questions and that breaks the spell. So if we're talking about our kids, I think that is a big issue. It wasn't so much ten years ago or five years ago. It's a big issue that kids are not outside and that they're on screens for 4 to 7 hours a day and they're outside. The average is 4 to 7 minutes. That's within the Wildlife Federation had come out with a couple probably a decade ago. I think that statistic was out. So how do you think that that imbalance plays into the A? Adoption of things like this?
Cecily Dickey Well, I mean, I think a lot of it, it comes from parental fear, too. Like it can be scary to watch your kid climbing a tree or to climbing on where to? They were going to like a wild play adventure park. And I'm sure it's going to be really nerve wracking to watch my kids go up however high in the air to do these activities. But the thing is, that's what grows them, right? And I was thinking about transhumanism in relation to your podcast and your audience, and I don't think it matters to any group of people more than it matters to parents. At least it shouldn't, because what do we know? We know for sure. Scientific evidence has shown that screens, social media, TV, all of these things and it might sound alarmist to say harmful, but they are harmful to children when used in excess. They absolutely are. And what else do we know for sure? We know for sure that children benefit from being outside in creation. Like there is no evidence that says that that's a bad thing. Everything says that it's good and you don't even need to read scientific studies to know it. All you have to do is to know a child and to watch how they thrive when they have time to be outdoors and to watch how they shrink in on themselves and become questioning and confusing and confused, I should say, when.
Rita Rogers They are.
Cecily Dickey Stuck in a world that isn't real. Right? We are actually creatures as humans. We are creatures. We are creators as well. When we think of like we can create art and we can create works of literature and we can create all sorts of things, but we cannot create life outside of like, you know, a husband and a wife creating a child together. But still there is an external force that's making that possible. We cannot create life. We cannot create ourselves because we are part of creation. And that's why we need our kids to be outdoors. That's why we need to be outdoors because we are part of creation and we are not fully human unless, I mean, we we are I shouldn't say we are not, but symbolically, we're not fully human unless we're immersing ourselves into the creation that we're a part of. I just really, really, truly believe that. Yeah. And as far as, you know, parental fear, like I was saying at the beginning, it's become normal for us to use screens as babysitters. I don't mean us as sitting here, but in general, people to use screens as babysitters to let that be the safe place so that we don't have to constantly be vigilant. So it will be easy for parents to adopt all of these technologies if we're not willing to do the hard work of saying no and truly parenting.
Rita Rogers Absolutely.
Ginny Yurich Yeah. And for our kids, right. It's like I think that this is the slippery slope than they're used to it. If they're only outside for 4 to 7 minutes a day, but they're on their screen for 4 to 7 hours. This is an easy adoption for whoever wants to push it down. And so I think that's an additional reason why I want to get our kids outside and off screens is so that they have that baseline knowledge of what that's like. And it's interesting. There's this Dr. Jean twanging. She talks about generational changes. And so one of the things she says is that Gen X or millennials and really millennials, so born in 1981 or till 1995 there she calls them the first and the last. So they're the last to have had an analog childhood and the kids are born after that 1995 and later they have no understanding of that, that television is only on for part of the time and shows change and and that type of thing. And then they're also so they're the last to have an analog childhood, the first to be part of this technological age as it stands now. And so we have these kids that if not for the choices that we make and like you say, Cecily, it's not easy. It is not easy to get your kids outside. You have to pack step, you have to have the Band-Aids. You got little ones you got right clothes. No one else is outside. So you have to make friends with other people so that you can meet up. It's a tall task, but it is giving our kids what everyone else had before us, which is an analog childhood that otherwise they wouldn't experience. So, Rita, did you have something to say about it?
Rita Rogers Well, I was just going to say to Cecil comment that we can't create life. Yuval Noah Harari would disagree with you, who's transhumanist. He's trying to, quote, create life, but just experiential wise. My experience with this at my kids school because we homeschool now, but this is our first year home schooling. Prior to this, my kids went to a small Montessori Christian school and I volunteer, taught P.E. to the kids. And just in that school, the children watching the differences in them based on, like you said, the choices their parents were making. There's a physical and psychological component to sitting on a screen all day. And these kids, you know, you said keeping them safe, but we want to shelter them and keep them safe. And they were physically kept safe from getting an arm broken or a scratch, but they weren't physically kept safe. The sedentary lifestyle of sitting on a screen all.
Cecily Dickey Day so much more dangerous.
Rita Rogers Absolutely. And they weren't physically kept safe from the psychological standpoint of constant worry and anxiety of being injured. I mean, some of these kids, I breakout a dodgeball and they would tell me how they're going to get a head injury and be concerned because, you know, their parents had coddled them to the degree of anxiety. And one thing, Cecily, you had read from the policy horizons, you know that reading you did about what life would look like. And I think this part actually came from the World Economic Forum, which they had a similar write up. But there was a quote in there that says, When I and robots took over so much of what our work was, suddenly we had time to eat well, sleep well, spend time with other people. So when I and robots took over, their work shifted and they all of a sudden had time now to eat well, sleep well and spend time with others, but really think about it, that's like pushing it further down the pike when we have all this technology doing all the things for us. But right now we have phones in our hands and screens in front of our faces and we do have more time. We have tractors that drive themselves instead of, you know, a plow that you have to have horses hitched up to. And do we eat better, sleep better, or spend more time with other people? No, we don't do any of that. As technology has advanced, we do less of those things than we once did. So it's interesting that they're trying to sell it as more time to do the things to take care of ourselves. Well, but history has proven that we will do the opposite.
Ginny Yurich Wow. Yeah, that's such an interesting point. I think that's in one of Kadarius books where he said, if my great grandmother showed up and she was like, You have a washing machine, you have it, you know, you have all these things, you have running water. And you know what? How come you don't have enough time? But yeah, it's true. And the technology is not fixing those human problems. I think one of the interesting things that you talk about and it's something that I don't totally have a solid answer to, but it's this like, what does it mean to be? I mean, I do I have I have my thoughts on it, but like, what does it mean to be human? I think what's tricky about it is that the people who are running all the things, they'll come in and be like, Well, look, we can make this robot show emotion and they're trying to grasp all these pieces of what someone might like flip and say, Well, it's human if you are this, if it's human, if you can experience love and show love and and then they'll say, well, the robot can do it or whatever. So what do you think that boils down to is a big question.
Cecily Dickey Yeah. And I don't even know if I'm going to answer this. Right. But when I think about the fact that robots all A.I., really, it needs to be programed by humans. All I can do is be programed by humans. All I can do is take data that humans are putting out into the world. That's all it can do. And yes, that's a lot of data like a robot. Or I can hold much more data inside their chips than we can hold in our brains. That is true, But all the data they hold comes from humans. And when we have questions of like, well, what does it mean to be human while a robot is going to get its idea of what it means to be human from the humans that have given it the data? Or when we ask a robot, what is love? Well, we're going to get the idea from the humans who have programed the robot about what is love, what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong. This is not coming from the robots own mind. This is coming from the minds of humans. A great breadth of data. But like we've said before, you know, in countries like China, even in countries now, unfortunately, like Canada, where we have Internet censorship, it's what a robot and what I can take in is becoming more and more limited by the very powerful people that believe that their information is the okay information for the world to have. So really, if we do end up being a society that is trans human, that is run by robots and AI, our society is only going to believe that what's good and bad, right and wrong is what the most powerful people, the people that are in control say is good and bad and right and wrong. And to be human is much more complex than that. You know, and this is why world view is so important. And I really think that a majority of population, they don't really think about world view, right? They just they don't think about their own world view. They have their beliefs, but they don't think about it and deeply. But these are the most important questions that we can ask ourselves. Why are we here? Why are we human? How did we get here? Right. Those are the most important questions that we can and should be asking ourselves, because those. Questions point to truth, right? And truth is what corresponds with reality. So we need to be asking ourselves these questions. And it's much like being addicted to comfort. While it's not comfortable to ask these questions, it's not comfortable to make ourselves. Especially in a social media world where we scroll and we see quick videos and quick bits and captions. It's not comfortable to think about these really deep, important questions, but as we're raising our children, we owe it to them to ask these big questions because otherwise the future is out of our hands. And I don't choose to live in a world like that. I choose to live in a world where I'm the one asking the questions and guiding my children.
Ginny Yurich Mm hmm. And that's what Postman says to ask is to break the spell. And I think that's really powerful because it does feel a lot like we're powerless and things are thrown around like Luddite. And there is this sense that you are less than if you are not adopting all of these different things and questioning some of the certain things, I think. And Ray Kurzweil has got a website and on there he talks about there was this article about this robot called Bret, and it's from Berkeley. It stands for it's like an acronym of the Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks. What a great name. Like, don't we all want to eliminate tedious math? Well, this robot can learn. And that's, you know, it's like the the A.I. and the technology is is starting to take on as many qualities of being as human as possible. Even, you know, it's made out of silicon and it's got 92,000 things that move and it's going to start to look and act and feel like that. But what's interesting is that one of the things that comes up is that one of the things that makes us human is our limitations.
Cecily Dickey Yeah.
Rita Rogers Yeah, yeah. Cecily had mentioned that robots can only do what humans have input in. Like you said, these robots are getting to the point that they can learn. And so the inputs initially will come from humans. But there's going to be a point where there's some somewhat of a takeover over.
Cecily Dickey Evolution over there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Rita Rogers So I don't know, we talked about that with Steve Kim. That limits can be a gift. And like we said earlier about phasing out suffering, you know, talking through that some of the suffering is a limit, right? And that can be a gift. Think about hunger cues. Those are painful, right? But those are there to protect us. Correct. And so if we eliminate some of these things, I was listening to a podcast, it was a Christian Transhuman podcast, and they were there's.
Ginny Yurich Something for everyone out there.
Cecily Dickey Isn't there?
Rita Rogers It was very interesting. I didn't get the Christian aspect of it at all during episodes I was listening to, but it was just very interesting, like you said, Jenny, nobody to talk to you about these things. And so you seek out these weird, obscure things just to listen to because it's interesting to think about and know what's out there. Because if we're not talking about it, there are other people talking about it for us, and this will come to us for us, and then we either uptake it or it's just shoved down our throats, but we haven't had time to think about it. But anyways, where was I going with this? Oh, on this podcast they were talking about phasing out suffering and I was just thinking about, well, because he was talking about eliminating pain and using CRISPR technology, which if you guys don't know about CRISPR technology, it's basically gene editing where you take out portions of a gene and fill it in with whatever you want. And I think in China, there were twins born. This may have been Cecily. Do you remember? It was like five years ago or.
Cecily Dickey I don't.
Rita Rogers Remember. I don't remember. But there were twins born where a scientist had taken it upon himself to eliminate the ability. It basically made them immune to HIV. And he was kind of taken someone. The government I don't remember the government or who, but he was taken to task for this because they were basically saying like, we don't know anything about this technology to the point of like editing humans with it. We don't know if this is okay. We've been editing plants and things, but edit editing humans is a whole other deal. But this gentleman on the podcast for Christian transhumanism was talking about eliminating pain and eliminating the pain response and making people more resistant. And I was like, Well, that sounds nice to not have pain, but what are the implications of that? You know, if you don't feel touching something that's hot, that's going to be harmful to you. If you don't have a cue to say you're hungry, that's harmful. And so there's implications on both sides, right?
Ginny Yurich Yeah, but limitations.
Rita Rogers And so limits are a gift, right? Just like I said on our podcast, limit can be a gift, right? Having pain can be a gift, right?
Ginny Yurich That the limits are part of what makes us human, that we are not expanding at this exponential rate or just how we are. And even that Ray Kurzweil was talking about in his book about how like we would get to this point where we could download, say. Lots of skills. So he writes. He says There is only so much room in our skulls. So although Einstein played music, he was not a world class musician. Picasso did not also write great poetry and so on. So he says, As we recreate the human brain, we will not be limited in our ability to develop each skill. We will not have to compromise one area to enhance another. So they start downloading, like how we download an app. Like I want to play guitar, so I'm going to download. But then you're like, Is that really what we want here? Then you just download and have the skill.
Cecily Dickey Yeah. Where is the need for community then, Right? Like, right. There's always been a dependance on the community. Like humans are essentially a herd animal, right? We have our herd that we rely on. We have our community that we rely on. And again, like from a Christian worldview, we meet each other, we meet each other skills. We need each other's gifts. We weren't all made the same, thank goodness, because how boring would the world be? So when you think of the fact that we could just download all these skills and we could all do these things. Well, what makes you different? What makes you unique? Why would you need to see your neighbor down the street or even have a use for your children or your husband? Because you are completely autonomous. You're essentially a post-human where your capabilities radically exceed that of what it would be if you were a human. But there's so much beauty in being a human. There's beauty and being a little bit weak and not being able to do everything and to being able to look at others and be like, Wow, you have an amazing skill that's really useful and I have this skill and we could put them together and do something great, but instead we become our own individual. We become our God essentially, right? And even when you look at that good morning bio digital thing that I read, everything was based on her. Could you imagine all of your bodily functions and levels were reported to you each day? We are all obsessed with ourselves to a degree already. Could you imagine if we were our own everything all the time and all of the data we were receiving were for our good and everything was about ourselves? What a disaster. What a disaster, a self-centered world that would be. And we're trying to teach our kids to be good and community and to love others. Well, well, when the focus becomes all about self, how can we even teach our kids that we are to love others because we're too busy loving ourselves?
Rita Rogers Think about what brings you the greatest joy in your life. You know, the things you're good at. And like. Cecily is a beautiful singer. She leads worship at her church and she's I love when she occasionally will send me a song or something. And I am an awful singer. Like I feel sorry for the people that sit in front of me at church because I'm so bad. And how much would I enjoy your singing, You know, like you said, community, how much would I enjoy that if I also could download something and make myself a good singer? But there is a degree of this that already exists. I just saw an artist complaining on social media, and I shouldn't say complaining because it was a legitimate complaint, but addressing the fact that there's already ability now for anyone to create art with this new like chat AI they can create art. And he was saying, you know, this is not art. They're still are real artists, but it's sort of eliminated the joy in his profession. Right. And the need for his profession.
Cecily Dickey There's talk about now like should these works of art by a guy do they have a right to copyright? You know like these are actual discussions that are happening. So when we think of Sophia, the robot gaining citizenship and all the rights that come along with it in Saudi Arabia, while women in Saudi Arabia still have very little rights. Yes. Now, now we're thinking of like I can absolutely create there's worship songs now being written like I will be sent songs like worship, songs written by a guy or art by a guy. And it's like, now we're talking about can this be copyrighted? Is it protected? Is it protected? ART Well, if it is protected, which is the debate that's going on, then is that what classifies as personhood? Again, this is why worldview is important. Can that classify you or not? You again, see, I'm giving a human pronoun to an AI thing. Does that classify it as being a person? These are the questions that.
Ginny Yurich A person has a soul. That's the answer. They the better. The answer is that. But you see that it just becomes this really tricky thing and whoever is doing the things is making it alluring for us, which is like, Hey, look, you know, I want to lead worship. I want to sing as good as that person's. It's alluring, but then you take out that whole part of growth, you know, like the things that you have learned to do, whether that's bake or you do or sour dough or your gardener or, you know, you play an instrument, all these things, your woodworker, you have this growth and then you have these moments where you get it and you've arrived and you're good at something. And you become a master and you learn other things. It's like, Well, that's all taken away. If you can just download it like an app. And that's all gone. But this is what's being promoted as like, Oh, wouldn't it be cool? And it's hitting. That sounds maybe a little bit of jealousy, a little bit of just want I want more. I want to be better. I want, I want, I want. So it's hitting all of these primal needs while also infusing control. So there's a lot going on.
Rita Rogers The thing is what we even care that we don't have the joy anymore. Because once we've allowed something else into our conscious, are we going to care and are we going to be in control of our thoughts enough to care? Or will that be care be eliminated by the technology? Because this is.
Ginny Yurich All.
Rita Rogers This is not separate. The bio digital and transhuman agenda is not separate from other agendas like the climate agenda and all of that. Those things are married together by the non-governmental organizations that are kind of overseeing this. And so when you look at who's controlling and who's trying to bring this technology to us, you have to understand the larger agendas at play and know that potentially some of our ability to think through this if we do take it up, will be eliminated to benefit the things that they say they want to benefit. Does that make sense?
Cecily Dickey Yeah. Well, and Rita, you said like, will we care? Will we have the ability to care? Right. But also, not only will we have the ability to care just from like a technological point, but also from the, again, addiction to the comfort that we now have addiction. Yeah, like I hate my phone most of the time, but I still drawn to it, you know what I mean? Like, that's just the way we are. Like with technology, it's the way we are. So when I Jeni, you have a book coming out later this year, right? What's it called? Until the streetlights Come on.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they couldn't I feel like it couldn't be more timely. It's so interesting because we changed our lifestyle. It's been in 2011 is when we changed our lifestyle to spend more time outside. It was just so that I wouldn't lose my mind with young kids at that point. That's more than a decade. I've learned that just spending time outside it helps with whole child development. So it helped me all of the different things. But more than that, now, in this rapidly changing world, it's giving our kids also opportunities to work on grit and resilience and flexibility and adaptability and all of those types of things at a rapidly changing world requires. But then even more than that, now, in this sort of first and last, it's like our kids. We have to give them an opportunity to have analog parts of life so that I mean, they're going to be the ones that are making the decisions in ten, 15 years. It is not that far down the road. Yes. And so there's that component. There really is a lot to it. There's more to it than I ever imagined when we first started spending more time outside. And I think it's partially because our world has changed so much, but our kids have to have that knowledge in their bodies, in their minds, in their souls that life is meant to be lived and not through a screen. And so the joys and the pains and the limitations and all of that are beautiful. And if they're only outside for 4 to 7 minutes, but they're on screens for 4 to 7 hours, they are not getting that concept. I think there's no way that they can be throughout their childhood. So I think to wrap it up, I mean, this is a big conversation, but I just love to ask is to break the spell. Neil Postman 1983 If you're looking sort of for the philosophy, it's a great want to read it with a group of friends. It's a fascinating book. It's pretty quick read and Ray Kurzweil has got the information on the other end where you can have your eyes open to the nanobots that they want to put in your bloodstream and Elon Musk neuro link with all of the things that are going to attach to billions of different synapses and all that stuff. Just to sort of be aware, you can go back to the Boom Clap podcast and I'll make sure I link to the two episodes that you sent to me because the one of them had a link to a bunch of really interesting articles, including if people are not going to read the whole thing. This bio digital Letter. Good morning, Bio Digital. It's super interesting, but there was other interesting articles that you link to as well. Like backpacks for dragonflies.
Rita Rogers Yeah, that's real. That's real.
Ginny Yurich Yes. Yeah. Backpacks for dragonflies and trying to. There was a lot of things there that you think okay it said honey bees. It said that honey bees could be equipped with Draper's technology to assist with pollination. You know, you're like, I don't know about that you know.
Cecily Dickey The help like really?
Ginny Yurich Right. But but it worded in such a way that these insects would be basically having on these teeny backpacks that would have steering neurons that attach to their spinal cord. I mean, it's it's called Dragonfly. It's a whole yeah, it's a whole company. So through your podcast, people can find those different articles just to be aware. But as a parent, is it the. Two things that are evident to me are comfort is not the main goal besides teaching world view, Right? That's incredibly important. That would be a top thing. But beyond that, in these sort of contexts is not falling into that comfort trap and also not falling into a virtual reality for the majority of our time, right? So we need to use our technologies. You two met through technology. We've now met through technology. So there's good parts of it, but just, you know, striving for that balance. Is there anything you wanted to add at the end? Any sort of final thoughts about. And then I have a last question.
Cecily Dickey But no, I don't really think there's anything I want to add. I think we touched on a lot. How about you, Rita?
Rita Rogers I mean, there's so much we could get into.
Cecily Dickey I know. That's why it's hard to like if I had anything special.
Rita Rogers Yeah, but yeah, for the sake of not going a completely different direction now. Thank you for having us.
Ginny Yurich I've got 14 pages of notes here just from Eileen, and we touch on, I don't know, like, it's such a small part of it, but just the converse, it's a conversation starter and something to be aware of because like I said, I wasn't totally aware of it until I read that book by Nicholas Kadarius. It just came out last year called Digital Madness. Start to clear things up, like, why is this actually happening?
Rita Rogers I guess I would just would just say, don't think of just this as robots. Don't just think about it going from human to robot. Understand that there's a lot of little pieces to this going on in the world right now, So don't be afraid to look at this thinking you're just going down some sci fi rabbit trail. It's very real and there are little things happening already that are leading us down this pike. So just.
Cecily Dickey That's a.
Rita Rogers Don't be afraid and don't think you're crazy or that you're going to be the crazy lady for looking into transhumanism and as a starting point so.
Cecily Dickey Well, and I would just add to that and don't worry, Jenny, this won't be long. I realize we've had this whole episode without giving people like a definition of what transhumanism is, because if you haven't been looking into it like we do right, then maybe it's like, well, is that like someone who's like, beyond human, like a post-human? Basically what transhumanism is? Is this an intermediary transition between human and future humans? So things like brain chips, right? Like things that augment our capabilities in any way that take us beyond human. That's what transhumanism is. It's not necessarily a destination, right? It's like it's a large ark. And that's when you look at it that way. That's how you know it's happening. And you think of evolution. It's always been there. Naturally guided process, like micro evolution has always been and naturally guided process. And basically what transhumanism is doing is it's seeking to take that from a natural process to a human guided evolution. Yeah, there we go.
Ginny Yurich Interesting things. I'm glad we talking about it. Here's how we always end our podcast, which is kind of a light much later end. What is a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside?
Cecily Dickey Oh, my favorite thing to do. When I was a kid, I actually just said this to Rita like yesterday or the day before. I was talking about how I was a big loner when I was a kid, just by choice. I enjoyed being alone. I enjoyed being outside just spending time either with my horse in the stable or up a tree. Like I would go climb a tree with a guitar in my hand and a Bible, and I missed the capability of being able to do that like it was no big deal. And I would do that all the time. I spent half my childhood up a maple tree in my front yard. So that is my favorite memory. That and climbing the mountain that's just down the road here. We spent a lot of time there. Yeah.
Rita Rogers My favorite memory. I really enjoyed walking in the woods and exploring in the woods a lot, but I would say my ultimate favorite memory. And I'm so glad I didn't know that you did this at the end as a question because it popped in my head so vividly and almost showed me. But my favorite memory was at my grandparents. I would go and help with chores a lot outside with the pigs. He had a hog farm, a small hog farm. And when I was done at night walking in, they had a walk out basement and there was it was kind of on a hill. And I would just walk out there and I would stand there for, I don't know, a couple minutes to 10 minutes and just look at the stars and imagine what my life was going to be like when I was grown up. And I don't know, that's that's my favorite memory, being outside, just looking up at the stars and knowing so much possibility was there.
Ginny Yurich Yeah. And that juxtaposition of hard work, I think is a thing. And and Linda McGurk talks about that. She has a book out called The Open Air Life. She's got a couple of books, but that's her newest one. And she says, look like, you know, there's nothing better than being outside. And, you know, it's like we all get this, especially especially up in Canada. It's like, you know, you go outside and you're freezing in the winter and there's nothing better than coming into a warm bowl of soup or some hot chocolate or a roaring fire. But you don't get one without the other and totally you don't get that. You talked about that earlier, Rita. It's like you don't get that joy. You don't get that fulfillment without having that other piece of it. And so we have to be. Leary I think of what's being sold to us. That's a big thing because they're playing on what our emotions are, what our kind of draws are, and what seems like it would be great. But the promise comes with peril. That's what they say. So yeah, thank you so much for being here. This has been a super interesting conversation. Maybe we'll come back to it at some point, but people can definitely further by going to the Boom podcast, all link in the show notes, which are the two podcast episodes that you have that specifically deal with this. And then they can also check your website, you can check the boom clap community dot com. Thanks for being here.
Cecily Dickey Thanks for having us, Ginny.
Rita Rogers Thanks.
