To mark the release of his memoir, Everywhere an Oink Oink, Florence Read spoke to Mamet about the death of storytelling, antisemitism in America and his zeal for Donald Trump. Here is a selection of his comments.

ON THEATRE:

In addition to having a Director, they have a Managing Director, and the Director is now called the Artistic Director. What was he before, if it wasn’t artistic? […] The theatre is not only dead, it stinks. […] It’s “culture”, right? Nobody likes culture. It’s nonsense. Now we have political commissars who say, in addition to the Artistic Director, in addition to the Managing Director, we have to have a Director of Diversity, who’s on top of everything. And we’re all going to pay attention to this person who tells us, you don’t have enough black women in the play, or you don’t have enough trans people. Whether you’re black, or trans, or gay, you have the right to hear a story. If somebody’s not telling you a story, then that theatre stinks.

ON AUDIENCES:

Broadway had a huge audience that was largely middle class and Jewish. And they were people who worked and lived in the city. So the only plays that were put on were those that reflected their experience. They only endorsed the plays that reflected their experience. But all those people have moved away. There is no more audience in New York. So who comes? People from out of town. So the two things that they can see are either trash or filth. They can see pageants. I don’t want to go to Disneyland to see a thoughtful roller coaster. Right? I want to go to Disneyland for a thrill. So New York is now Disneyland. I don’t want to see a play which is thought provoking. What the hell do I care? I want to have either a thrill or a dog-treat. And the dog-treat is diversity. Please, tell me I’m not a racist. I’m not a transphobe. These people are shaking the audience down.

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ON CRITICS:

Critics have always been a bunch of brainless whores.

The national press is completely co-opted — it’s Pravda. It’s absolutely Pravda. No one’s going to put on a play that’s not going to be approved by the press. And the press is there to approve the play. Right? What they’re doing is the equivalent of the Stalinist plays “Me and My Tractor”. One doesn’t have to worry about criticism, because nobody is going to put on a play which is not going to get a good review. And so what happens is the people on the Left enjoy having differences about minor points of doctrine. Because that makes them feel that they’re intellectually independent.

ON POLITICS:

In America, there’s no such thing as an independent voter. An independent voter is a liberal speech defect.

Western culture is completely bifurcated. What’s happening now is that the conservative side has said, “wait a second, what’s wrong with the Judeo-Christian ethic? What’s wrong with the laws? What’s wrong with judging people?” Martin Luther King said he had a dream that people would be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin. It was his dream and that dream came true to the largest extent. And then the wokists came in and said “no, we must judge people by the colour of their skin”. And the conservatives said, “you know what, I’d rather vote with Dr King”. The conservatives are done with the Left. We’re not looking for anything from the Left because there’s nothing there.

ON CANCEL CULTURE:

It’s called fascism. It’s my way or the highway. And cowardice is contagious, because we’re herd creatures. […] So if everyone is saying “Jesus Christ, x, y, or z might limit my ability to get ahead, I’m gonna hold my tongue”, we start limiting the things we can say. And then because we don’t want to feel like hypocrites, we start limiting the things we think.

Relationships are broken off in Hollywood, people lose your number. Your manager, your agent, they just go away. That’s unfortunate. Hollywood is dead.

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ON HOLLYWOOD:

It’s a phoney-baloney business. The movies have always been about putting images up on a bedsheet and selling popcorn. Right? The whole idea that there’s any sagacity in the movies is nonsense. There were a few magnificent works of art made in a hundred years, a whole bunch of really good movies and a lot of crap.

ON FILM SCHOOL:

Film school is warehousing. You learn nothing in film school. The only thing it fits you to do is to be an executive. Which is to say somebody who doesn’t know anything, hoping rather than to make a good movie to get the job that some other executive has. Because that’s what bureaucrats do.

ON ISRAEL:

If Hamas had not been voted in, Gaza would be the richest city in the world. It would be Singapore. What are the Jews doing to Gaza? Nothing. They said, take it. PS, they said, if you need medical help come across the border. PS, if you guys are gay, go to Tel Aviv, we’ll welcome you. We aren’t going to kill you, we’re glad to have your business. Gaza is at the end of the Mediterranean, and it’s right off the Suez Canal. It’s the most valuable real estate in the world. And they want to kill the Jews. It doesn’t make sense. The Jews are, and have always been, so happy to say: “For God’s sake, let’s be partners.” […] The most diverse country in the world is Israel. And they want to kill it. Because it works. The answer is “from the river to the sea”. You all have to die.

ON JUDAISM IN AMERICA:

We were second-class citizens. We always existed at the mercy of the country. […] So our answer was always to work harder. […] We had to figure out a way to do the thing that nobody wanted to do, because that was the only thing that was left. A good example is family law. And a good example is the movies. Jews have always been outsiders. What always happens, going back to the fall of Jerusalem, is that when things get tough, people turn on the Jews. It’s the equivalent of kicking the cat or screaming at the secretary.

I don’t see the Jewish culture anymore. People got into the habit of going to the temple the same way they went to the dentist. […] Go to an evangelical church, or go to a black Baptist church. Those people are praying to God ecstatically and with their whole hearts. So when you go back to these assimilated Jewish synagogues, it’s like taking a bath with your socks on and no water. They’ve got so effing woke. We don’t need some rabbi to tell us to be kind to black people.

ON DONALD TRUMP:

Trump was the best president since Abraham Lincoln. […] He brought peace to the Middle East. He closed the border. He made us an energy exporter. He had the best rating among African Americans of any president ever. And the country was at peace and prosperous in the world. All of a sudden, he gets kicked out. And the world is a mess. But because the liberals cannot defend their position, all they can do is indict Trump. He’s not generating anger. He’s talking to reason.

He’s got a big mouth, so do I. The question is, who do you like in a fair fight with your back to the wall? Who would you rather have: Joe Biden, who’s a senile old bag-man, or Donald Trump, who’s a scrapper and loves his country.

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ON FREE SPEECH:

I don’t think any speech should be banned. […] And it’s my right to make up my mind about what you say. […] The question is, who gets to say what counts as hate speech? That’s where the power is. […] The most terrible thing in the world was the idea that there were certain crimes which are hate crimes. The question is not what did the person do, but what do we think about their motives in regard to certain societal norms which we have today. There’s no such thing as a love crime. All crimes are hate crimes, right?

If you gave me all the fame and power, it’s still poison, it’s tainted. In return for what? In return for my conscience, in return for my soul, in return for whatever it has pleased God to give me as a gift for making up stories. I say thank you. I’ll play these.

One intellectual who anticipated these developments decades ago is Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher at Oxford University and director of its Future of Humanity Institute. He joined UnHerd’s Florence Read to discuss the AI era, how governments might exploit its power for surveillance, and the possibility of human extinction. 

Florence Read: You’re particularly well-known for your work on “existential risk” — what do you mean by that?

Nick Bostrom: The concept of existential risk refers to ways that the human story could end prematurely. That might mean literal extinction. But it could also mean getting ourselves permanently locked into some radically suboptimal state, that could either collapse, or you could imagine some kind of global totalitarian surveillance dystopia that you could never overthrow. If it were sufficiently bad, that could also count as an existential catastrophe. Now, as for collapse scenarios, many of those might not be existential catastrophes, because civilisations have risen and fallen, empires have come and gone and eventually. If our own contemporary civilisation totally collapsed, perhaps out of the ashes would eventually rise another civilisation hundreds or thousands of years from now. So for something to be an existential catastrophe it would not just have to be bad, but have some sort of indefinite longevity.

FR: It might be too extreme, but to many people it feels that a state of semi-anarchy has already descended.

NB: I think there has been a general sense in the last few years that the wheels are coming off, and institutional processes and long-term trends that were previously taken for granted can no longer be relied upon. Like that there are going to be fewer wars every year, or that the education system is gradually improving. The faith people had in those assumptions has been shaken over the last five years or so.

FR: You’ve written a great deal about how we need to learn from each existential threat as we move forward, so that next time when it becomes more severe or more intelligent or more sophisticated, we can cope. And that specifically, of course, relates to artificial intelligence.  

NB: It’s quite striking how radically the public discourse on this has shifted, even just in the last six to 12 months. Having been involved in the field for a long time, there were people working on it but broadly, in society, it was more viewed as science-fiction speculation, not as a mainstream concern, and certainly nothing that top-level policymakers would have been concerned with. But in the UK we’ve recently had this Global AI Summit, and the White House just came out with executive orders. There’s been quite a lot of talk, including about potential existential risks from AI as well as more near-term issues, and that is kind of striking.

I think that technical progress is really what has been primarily responsible for this. People saw for themselves — with GPT-3, then GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 — how much this technology has improved. 

FR: How close are we to something that you might consider the singularity or AGI that does actually supersede any human control over it?

NB: There is no obvious clear barrier that would necessarily prevent systems next year or the year after from reaching this level. It doesn’t mean that that’s the most likely scenario. But we don’t know what happens as you scale GPT-4 to GPT-5. But we know that when you scaled it from GPT-3 to GPT-4 it unlocked new abilities. There is also this phenomenon of “grokking”. So initially, you try to teach the AI some tasks, and it’s too hard. Maybe it gets slightly better over time because it memorises more and more specific instances of the problem, but that’s the hard, sluggish way of learning to do something. But then at some point, it kind of gets it. Once it has enough neurons in its brain or has seen enough examples, it sort of sees the underlying principle, or develops the right higher-level concept that enables it to suddenly have a rapid spike in performance. 

FR: You write about the idea that we have to begin to teach AI a set of values by which it will function, if we have any hope of maintaining its benefit for humanity in the long term. And one of the liberal values that has been called into question when it comes to AI is freedom of speech. There have been examples of AI effectively censoring information, or filtering information that is available on a platform. Do you think that there is a genuine threat to freedom or a totalitarian impulse built into some of these systems that we’re going to see extended and exaggerated further down the line?

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NB: I think AI is likely to greatly increase the ability of centralised powers to keep track of what people are thinking and saying. We’ve already had, for a couple of decades, the ability to collect huge amounts of information. You can eavesdrop on people’s phone calls or social-media postings — and it turns out governments do that. But what can you do with that information? So far, not that much. You can map out the network of who is talking to whom. And then, if there is a particular individual of concern, you could assign some analyst to read through their emails. 

With AI technology, you could simultaneously analyse everybody’s political opinions in a sophisticated way, using sentiment analysis. You could probably form a pretty good idea of what each citizen thinks of the government or the current leader if you had access to their communications. So you could have a kind of mass manipulation, but instead of sending out one campaign message to everybody, you could have customised persuasion messages for each individual. And then, of course, you can combine that with physical surveillance systems like facial recognition, gait recognition and credit card information. If you imagine all of this information feeding into one giant model, I think you will have a pretty good idea of what each person is up to, what and who they know, but also what they are thinking and intending to do.

If you have some sufficiently powerful regime in place, it might then implement these measures and then, perhaps, make itself immune to overthrow.

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FR: Do you think the rise in hyper-realistic propaganda — deep-fake videos, which AI is going to make possible in the coming years — will coincide with the rise in generalised scepticism in Western societies?

NB: I think in principle a society could adjust to it. But I think it will come at the same time as a whole bunch of other things: automated persuasion bots for instance, social companions built from these large language models and then with visual components that might be very compelling and addictive. And then also mass surveillance, mass potential censorship or propaganda. 

FR: We’re talking about a tyrannical government that uses AI to surveil its citizens — but is there an innate moral component to the AI itself? Is there a chance that an AGI model could in some way become a bad actor on its own without human intervention?

NB: There are a bunch of different concerns that one might have as we move towards increasingly powerful AI tools and there are completely unnecessary feuds that people have between them. “Well, I think concern X should be taken seriously,” and somebody else says “I think concern Y should be taken seriously.” People love to form tribes and to beat one another, but X, Y, Z and B and W need to be taken into account. But yes, you’re right that there is also the separate alignment problem which is: with an arbitrarily powerful AI system, how can you make sure that it does what the people building it intend it to do? 

FR: And this is where it’s about building in certain principles, an ethical code, into the system — is that the way of mitigating that risk?

NB: Yes, or being able to steer it basically. It’s a separate question of where you do steer it — if you build in some principle or goal — which goal or which principle? But even just having the ability to point it towards any particular outcome you want, or a set of principles you want it to follow — that is a difficult technical problem. And in particular, what is hard is to figure out if the way we would do that would continue to work even if the AI system became smarter than us and perhaps eventually super-intelligent. If, at that point, we are no longer able to understand what it is doing or why it is doing it, or what’s going on inside its brain, we still want an original scaling method to keep working to arbitrarily high levels of intelligence. And we might need to get that right on the first try.

FR: How do we do that with such incredible levels of dispute and ideological schism across the world?

NB: Even if it’s toothless, we should make an affirmation of the general principle that ultimately AI should be for the benefit of all sentient life. If we’re talking about a transition to the super-intelligence era, all humans will be exposed to some of the risk, whether they want it or not. And so it seems fair that all should also stand to have some slice of the upside if it goes well. And those principles should go beyond all currently existing humans and include, for example, animals that we are treating very badly in many cases today, but also some of the digital minds themselves that might become moral subjects. As of right now, all we might hope for is some general, vague principle, and then that can sort of be firmed up as we go along.

Another hope, and some recent progress has been made on this, is for the next-generation systems to be tested prior to deployment to check that they don’t lend themselves to people who would want to make biological weapons of mass destruction or commit cybercrime. And so far AI companies have done some voluntary work on this: Open AI, before releasing GPT-4, had the technology for around half a year and did red-teaming exercises too. Research on technical AI alignment would be good to solve the problem of scalable alignment before we have super-intelligence.

I think the whole area of the moral status of digital mind will require more attention. I think it needs to start to migrate from a philosophy seminar topic to a serious mainstream issue. We don’t want to have a future where the majority of sentient minds or digital minds are horribly oppressed and we’re like pigs in Animal Farm. That would be one way of creating a dystopia. And it’s going to be a big challenge, because it’s already hard for us to extend empathy sufficiently to animals, even though animals have eyes and faces and can squeak.

Incidentally, I think there might be grounds for moral status besides sentience. I think if somebody can suffer, that might be sufficient to give them moral status. But I think even if you thought they were not conscious but they had goals, a conception of self, the sense of an entity persisting through time, the ability to enter into reciprocal relationships with other beings and humans — that might also ground various forms of moral status.

FR: We’ve talked a lot about the risks of AI, but what are its potential upsides? What would be the best case scenario?

NB: I think the upsides are enormous. In fact, it would be tragic if we never developed advanced artificial intelligence. I think all the paths to really great futures ultimately lead through the development of machine super-intelligence. But the actual transition itself will be associated with major risks, and we need to be super-careful to get that right. But I’ve started slightly worrying now in the last year or so that we might overshoot with this increase in attention to the risks and downsides. It still seems unlikely, but less unlikely than it did a year ago, that we might get to the point of a permafrost, some situation where it is never developed.

FR: A kind of AI nihilism?

NB: Yes, where it becomes so stigmatised that it just becomes impossible for anybody to say anything positive about it. There may pretty much be a permanent ban on AI. I think that could be very bad. I still think we need to have a greater level of concern than we currently have. But I would want us to reach the optimal level of concern and stop there.

FR: Like a Goldilocks level of fear for AI.

NB: People like to move in herds, and I worry about it becoming a big stampede to say negative things about AI, and then destroying the future in that way. We could go extinct through some other method instead, maybe synthetic biology, without even ever getting to at least roll the die with AI.

I would think that, actually, the optimal level of concern is slightly greater than what we currently have, and I still think there should be more concern. It’s more dangerous than most people have realised. But I’m just starting to worry about overshooting, the conclusion being: let’s wait for a thousand years before we develop it. Then of course, it’s unlikely that our civilisation will remain on track for a thousand years.

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FR: So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t?

NB: We will hopefully be fine either way, but I think I would like the AI before some radical biotech revolution. If you think about it this way: if you first get some sort of super-advanced synthetic biology, that might kill us, but if we’re lucky, we survive it, and then maybe invent some super-advanced molecular nanotechnology and that might kill us, but if we’re lucky we survive that, and then you do the AI, and then maybe that will kill us. Or, if we’re lucky, we survive that and we get utopia. Well, then you have to get through three separate existential risk, like first a biotech risk, plus the nanotech risk, plus the AI risks.

Whereas if we get AI first, maybe that will kill us, but if not, we get through that and then I think that will handle the biotech and nanotech risks. And so the total amount of existential risk on that second trajectory would be less than on the former. Now, it’s more complicated than that, because we need some time to prepare for the Ay, but you can start to think about optimal trajectories rather than a very simplistic binary question of: “Is technology X good or bad?” We should be thinking, on the margin, “Which ones should we try to accelerate and which ones retard?”

FR: Do you have existential angst? Does this play on your mind late at night?

NB: It is weird. If this worldview is even remotely correct, that we should happen to be alive at this particular point in human history — so close to this fulcrum or nexus on which the giant future of earth-originating intelligent life might hinge — out of all the different people that have lived throughout history, people that might come later if things go well: that one should sit so close to this critical juncture, that seems a bit too much of a coincidence. And then you’re led to these questions about the simulation hypothesis, and so on. I think there is more in heaven and on earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy and that we understand quite little about how all of these pieces fit together.

This week, Prof Nutt visited the UnHerd Club to discuss his latest research, the resistance he’s faced from the academic community and the transformative power of psychedelics. Below is an edited transcript of his conversation with Flo Read:

Florence Read: Instead of turning on parts of the brain, psychedelics can do something quite unusual, which is actually turn some parts off. Could you just explain a little bit more about that?

David Nutt: Obviously, Timothy Leary was wrong, these drugs don’t turn on the brain, they actually turn off the brain. Imaging work has shown that there’s a circuit in the brain called the “default mode network”, which controls how you think. Our research showed that network was being switched off.

You’ve probably heard of Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception. That book was written after a mescaline trip, but the phrase “the doors of perception” is taken from William Blake. And Blake said that: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” He was referring to people who aren’t artists, who see things in a very restricted way. Huxley used that quote, but he realised that what mescaline had done was open his mind, and then worked out that something must be closing his mind. What’s closing his mind? He said: the brain.

The brain is an instrument for focusing the mind. Psychedelics switch off the parts of the brain that control your mind. There was a group at Yale doing work in depression. They showed that the default mode network — the part of the brain that was turned off by psychedelics — is overactive in depression. If you scan the brains of depressed people, a greater amount of their brain is engaged in this internal, reflective, self-referential thinking. We thought: “Let’s see if we can turn it off in depressed people, and will they be non-depressed?” And lo and behold, they were.

We gave a single dose of psilocybin to people who had failed on other treatments. (They’d all failed on two antidepressants — somebody had failed on more than 10; they’d all failed on CBT.) They all got better. It’s the strongest effective treatment for resistant depression there’s ever been. Some of them are still well now, 10 years later. For the majority, the depression has crept back, and that tells us something else about the nature of how deeply embedded depressive thinking can be. But the fact that you could switch off the depression circuit, and lift people’s mood — that was a discovery.

FR: Among that cohort of treatment-resistant depressives, was there a common thread between them, in terms of their experience on the psilocybin? Or is it quite individualised?

DN: The content of a psychedelic trip is completely unpredictable. After that first trial, we set up a second trial, where we wanted to see if we could prolong the antidepressant effect of psilocybin by giving two trips, three weeks apart. And there was absolutely no relationship between the first trip and the second trip. Some people had a terrifying trip the first time, then a good one, and vice-versa.

What we try to do in therapy is get people to use the experience to deal with the thinking that is underpinning their depression. We asked them to try to engage with problems, to go back to issues in their childhood that might be relevant to their depression. Most of them don’t want to do that. One of the theories of depression — one of the theories about why your mind is so preoccupied in depression — is that you’re trying to resist re-engaging with those traumas. But we encouraged them to do that. It’s challenging, it’s difficult, they find it distressing — but they often get fundamental insights.

One of our patients on the first trial said: “I saw my father abusing me and I realised that was why I was depressed.” He realised: “I was blaming myself for the abuse. And in the trip, I was able to say to him, ‘That’s it.’” He got closure. He came out of the trip and he’s been well ever since. So people’s trips often focus on an individual trauma in their lives which they struggled to deal with. They have that in common.

FR: So given this level of success, why are these drugs not available for depressives in the UK?

DN: There are so many hurdles. Where to begin? The first is really weird. That initial study that we did was actually funded by the Medical Research Council. They put out a call for new treatments for depression and we got the grant. Getting the grant was the easiest bit. It took three iterations of the Ethics Committee to get permission to do this study. The ethics committee said: “It’s too dangerous; you can’t give depressed people psychedelics.” Why not? “Well, they might die.” That’s pretty unlikely — no one’s ever died on psilocybin before — but why do you think depressed people might die? “Well, they’re depressed.”

The third time we were going to this committee, I realised if we didn’t agree to do what they said, we would never get the study done. So in the end, they said: “You cannot do a controlled trial; you can do a safety study. Give 12 people it, see how they go. If none of them are dead in six months then you can come back and do a controlled trial.” So we said yes — in fact, the original trial was to see if people survived, which they all did. And the secondary outcome was whether their mood had changed. They could have got worse. They all got better.

So it took us a year to pass ethics. It took us another year to get hold of the medicine — the drug — because there’s only one place in the world that could make it. Then we had to get import licences and export licences. It took 30 months to get hold of the drug, and two more months to get permission from the Home Office to actually use it. That’s 32 months out of a 36-month grant — all because these drugs have been vilified for the last 50 years. The bureaucracy is so intense.

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FR: Is this a bureaucracy problem or is it a moral failing?

DN: It’s more than moral; it’s political. The reason psychedelics were banned in 1967 in the US and in 1970 in the UK was simply because psychedelics were allowing people to think differently about how they wanted to run international relations. The war in Vietnam was being protested. There’s this amazing photograph I have, of someone holding a placard that says: “Drop acid, not bombs.” They couldn’t ban the anti-war protests so they banned the drugs instead, thinking that would dissipate the protests. Of course it didn’t, and eventually, the protesters won.

The Vietnam War ended but by that time, the drugs had been banned. And one of the worst things about drug laws is that it’s almost impossible to remedy them. For example, in America, two-thirds of states have medicalised cannabis, and half of states have recreational cannabis, but it’s still illegal under the federal law. In fact, there’s only two countries in the world that have actually pulled cannabis out of the UN conventions, and that’s Canada and Uruguay. Every other country in the world, even America, still complies with the UN regulations, which still say that cannabis is an illegal drug. And no country has pulled psychedelics out of the UN conventions.

So everything we do, we do in the face of this enormous barrier. They’ve created this myth that these are very dangerous. Almost everything you’ve heard about psychedelics has actually been a deliberate misrepresentation to perpetuate this political decision that people shouldn’t use them.

FR: Would the power dynamic between a doctor and a patient change if this kind of drug became legalised?

DN: The medical profession isn’t really that progressive. And I can say that: I’m a doctor. I have become more and more disappointed by the inability of medicine — particularly in fields like psychiatry — to move with the times. I personally think that psychedelics will re-energise psychiatry. A lot of psychiatrists are very disillusioned. We haven’t had any real innovation in psychiatric medicine or psychiatric psychotherapy for 50 years.

FR: One thing under threat at the moment is the idea of holistic health — the idea that your mind and body have some sort of co-dependent relationship.

DN: We are quite top-down, paternalistic and autocratic in healthcare. There is very little scope to do anything that we’re not told to do from above — and, of course, that’s why I was sacked. Because even if you challenge — even if you just raise an intellectual question about the policy — they don’t like it.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that I’m quite a fan of Huxley. But my favourite book is not Brave New World or Doors of Perception. It’s actually Island, his last book. It is a roadmap to a society where you use psychology — you use dance, you use movement, you use exercise — and you use psychedelics to maximise quality of life. That’s what we should be doing. I was on the Good Read programme about six years ago, and Island was my Good Read. And two weeks later, I was in Parliament, at a group on drugs and drug addiction, and I was viciously attacked by a drug service provider for daring to talk on the radio about the use of illegal drugs to help people have a better life. That exemplifies our silos of thinking, which have become entrenched over decades. I don’t even think psychedelics could open their minds. 

FR: When people are having these transcendent experiences on psychedelics, are they finding something that we have all lost? Barely 3% of the country goes to church anymore; we’ve lost so much of our connection to the spiritual. Do you think they are recovering some of that?

DN: Yes, I have no doubt. Psychedelics increase connectedness — with the self, with other people and with nature. There’s a very interesting relationship between psychedelics and religion, because pretty much all religions emerged from groups of people using psychedelics. Hinduism came from a combination of mushrooms and Ephedra. South American beliefs came from ayahuasca and DMT and also from mushrooms. There’s a wonderful study going on in the States using psilocybin on priests who’ve lost their faith, and it’s working — it’s working for some faiths: I don’t think it’s quite as good for Islam as it is for Christianity — but there are priests coming out saying they have begun to find their faith again.

And of course, there was this remarkable experiment called the Marsh Chapel Experiment at Harvard in the Sixties. They took trainee priests on Good Friday — when they’re going to be in chapel praying and contemplating for the whole day — and they split them and gave 10 of them psilocybin in the same doses. And of the 10 given psilocybin, eight of them have this powerful mystical experience where they saw God.

So that does help make sense of the way in which religion or religious beliefs can be facilitated by changing the way your mind works. Of course, historically, people have done that in very different ways. In the old days, you used to starve yourself for days and nights, or kneel and pray for hours and hours, to get those kinds of mystical changes. And they would have been produced by alterations in biochemistry — due to stress — which are not necessarily very different from those that psychedelics produce. But psychedelics are just easier and probably more effective.

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FR: If these drugs did become widely available, how would we preserve this connection to spiritual well-being?

DN: There’s a really interesting experiment going on in the US now. Oregon has made magic mushrooms effectively a legal medicine. But more than that, they are authorising wellness centres, all around the state, to provide mushroom therapy, or mushrooms as part of wellbeing therapy. Now, that’s an amazing decision. It’s the first time anywhere in America that there’s kind of socialised medicine — using what it is now, and will be even when the therapy centres are open, an illegal drug. The purpose is to improve wellbeing in communities, and I think it’s going to work. 

FR: You’re a good advocate for psychedelics, but have you faced judgement from your academic peers? Do you find that you are in any way isolated in that community?

DN: About five years ago, I gave a talk to the Royal College of Psychiatrists and about psychedelics as the future of psychiatry. And after the talk, the room divided into three separate groups. There were about seven or eight men in the room older than me, who said: “Fantastic. I was there in the Sixties, we were using it. It was working fine. Thank goodness you’re bringing it back.” And the majority of the room were people from 35 to 60 who said: “This is rubbish. There’s no RCTs. They’re dangerous drugs.” And then there were about 50 trainees who said: “Fantastic — at last. Psychiatry has got something to offer me!” So credibility is very age-related.

Academically, I’ve been generally pleasantly surprised by the positivity. I think there are a lot of academics out there who realise that this is the way forward. They just don’t have the courage to stand up and do it because they don’t want to be vilified, they don’t want the Daily Mail writing about them. But they are on-side. There’s very little criticism within the scientific community about what we’re doing, because it’s good science. It’s published in the top journals. It’s very hard to argue with that.

FR: Let’s take some questions from the audience.

You spoke about shutting down the “default mode network” as a one-off event. Have you found that there’s a need to link therapy, psychotherapy, and a deep understanding of people’s trauma with the psychedelic experience, versus treating it like a neuroscientific event?

DN: What I find amazing is that both are true and that’s why it’s unusual. In fact, it’s kind of unique in psychiatry — to be able to do a brain imaging of someone who’s had a treatment, and see why it’s worked. What we see in people who’ve been depressed, who’ve had a psychedelic trip, is their brains are more flexible. And that accords extremely well with the cognitive experience of actually being able to think differently and not be locked into negative thought loops.

But I absolutely agree with you that the experience itself is what people want to talk about — and the value of that, in terms of helping them change their lives and move forward is, for the patient, absolutely central. Critics say: “Prove to me that what the patient thinks matters.” In fact, there are people who’ve said to me: “I’m not going to believe that psychedelics work until you give it to people under anesthetic, because it could all be placebo.” It’s surreal, because we don’t do any other kind of therapy under anaesthesia. People want to talk about why the experience is valuable to them. They want to get other people to engage with it. 

FR: Placebo is a concept that’s totally vilified in the mainstream scientific arena. Do you think that there’s room for a good placebo effect?

DN: Half of everything any doctor does to you is placebo. It’s you wanting to get better. If you don’t want to get better, you won’t get better. If you want to get better, you can get better, and psychedelics allow you to get better — whether that’s a placebo, or whether it’s a drug effect. I think it’s a drug effect, but proving it’s a drug effect is kind of pointless, and probably impossible, and I’m not going to bother.

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I was a government minister in the Department of Health in 2018, when we rescheduled THC for therapeutic use. And probably the most important thing was having a cause célèbre. There was Billy Caldwell, and a number of children with horrendous, untreatable epilepsy — suffering dozens of fits a day — who were treated by these medicines. And the compassionate power, forced on people in positions of power, was irresistible. That is actually what led to change. So applying that to psychedelics — who will be the cause célèbre?

DN: Australia decided in February that, from the first of July, psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, and MDMA for treatment-resistant PTSD, will be approved medicines. And that was driven by an example: a woman who was actually a friend of the Prime Minister’s husband became severely depressed, begged for psychedelic therapy, couldn’t get it, and killed himself. And she made videos and she campaigned and she became the cause célèbre because of her dead husband.

We haven’t got that patient in Britain. But the sad thing is, we do have a lot of veterans who are medicating themselves. Some of them have been part of our studies. We’ve been working with them for eight years. They have been campaigning for this law change. And it’s not happening. These veterans are going to South America to get treatment — many of them can’t afford it; we’ve got senior members of the military arguing for this. But it’s falling on deaf ears. And I don’t know what the problem is. It may be because it’s not a child. The other thing about Billy Caldwell is that he was dying in St. Thomas’s, which is just across the river from politics. Parliamentarians could not avoid the fact that he could be dead within a few hours. So they had to do something. We don’t have quite the same immediacy.

I feel that cannabis has got stuck. It’s got stuck at this stage where unlicenced cannabis medicines are massively on the rise, but the NHS is not prescribing the licenced medicine. And it’s very hard to change. Even if tomorrow, the Home Office looked to reschedule psilocybin, we’ll end up in a similar place — where psilocybin therapy is only accessible privately because the NHS won’t endorse it. What’s your view on how we push past that?

DN: You’re quite right: for four and a half years cannabis has been a medicine, and there have been four prescriptions on the NHS. That’s almost as big of a scandal as having made it illegal in the first place in 1971. The NHS is not flexible and the mistake made was to insist that cannabis could only be prescribed by a specialist. And most specialists are old white men like me who spent their lives working on treatments which aren’t cannabis, and they don’t want to have to get out of their rut and learn about cannabis. The people that need to prescribe medical cannabis are the GPs and they’re not allowed to.

The other problem with the NHS is their budgets are controlled by pharmacists.You’d think pharmacists would be interested in pharmacology, but actually they’re not — they’re interested in money, and they’re really resistant to bringing in new treatments. So even with patients where it’s incontrovertible — the consultant says: “Medical cannabis has helped this person, please can we prescribe on the NHS” — the pharmacist says: “No because NICE hasn’t approved it.” And that’s why I left the NHS. That’s why now my work with ketamine is outside the NHS. Because it’s the only way we can actually use a psychedelic drug on patients. The same will be true with psilocybin or MDMA when they become available.

What we’re doing in the clinics that I’m working with — the awakened clinics here — is collecting data. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to go to the NHS and say: “100 patients with depression treated with ketamine therapy. Make NICE approve it.” We’re all campaigning to get NICE to accept that this real-world data for ketamine could be used — in the same way that real-world data for cannabis was collected.

I work at the Centre for Social Justice and we work with around 800 small grassroots charities, many of which are working in the addiction sector. And I have yet to meet a single one of those organisations that thinks legalisation is the answer. In fact, they actually think the opposite. We recently held a roundtable with a load of drug dealers, and we asked them what they thought about legalisation, and they said they were absolutely desperate for it, because it was going to significantly increase the number of people who will be buying drugs. And their response to that, they said, would be to undercut the legal drugs by making them cheaper, and then they can make them stronger or weaker, depending on what the clients want. And I wondered what you thought of that?

DN: Free markets are a problem, aren’t they? So my argument would be that we should decriminalise personal possession of all drugs. Criminalising people who use drugs is both immoral and ineffective. It would be economically sensible to have regulated markets for all drugs which are less harmful to the user than alcohol. Because reducing the use of alcohol would have a net beneficial effect on society. We’re beginning to see that now, in countries or states where medical cannabis has become legal: people are drinking less, and also using less opiates.

In our medical cannabis initiative — the Drug Science 2021 initiative, which you can access online — we had 3,500 people on medical cannabis, over 1000 of them for chronic pain. And they almost halve their use of opiates without even being asked to stop opiate painkillers. They’re just stopping because medical cannabis is better for pain.

In terms of treatment providers, the reason cannabis is a problem in Britain is because we tried to get rid of cannabis, in the same way that heroin is a problem in America because they tried to get rid of heroin. They tried to stop people using relatively mild forms of cannabis and what did the market do? The market just shifted to make stronger forms of cannabis. When we tried to clamp down on cannabis in prisons, what happened? We started making spice, and spice kills people; cannabis doesn’t. So our hostility to cannabis has driven the problem for cannabis. When we tried to stop the use of opium in 1910 by Chinese people in the East End of London, what happened? They stopped smoking opium; they started injecting morphine.

Almost every drug we’ve tried to control through prohibition has resulted in the use of stronger, more toxic alternatives, and lead to greater problems with addiction. I was in a huge conference in Orlando, speaking to 2,500 addiction service providers, last year. I started talking about using psychedelics to treat addiction and they were horrified. But it’s their business. The addiction business is a big business. A lot of people get their employment out of it, but they need addicts to keep the business going. And if we can get rid of addicts, they will be out of business, so they don’t want change either.

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When the default mode network is switched off, how does it come back? And if it comes back, how does it not cause the depression again?

DN: It comes back different, it comes back more flexible, it comes back less entrenched. Now why that is? We don’t know. One analogy is, if you keep thinking something, it’s like a cartwheel going along in a muddy field. It digs deeper and deeper and deeper. But then if you have a rainstorm or a flood, you can wash the ruts away and you can start again. But how that actually translates into neurochemical changes, or neurological changes in neurons, is still a mystery, and it is actually to my mind the big target at present. I would really like to understand how we get rid of it. Some people use the analogy of a snow field: once you’ve skied for a long time, you get stuck in a rut. Then the snow comes and you can see normally again. But eventually, for many people who’ve been chronically depressed, particularly from childhood, there’s a pressure to rut again. And what is that? I don’t know. And that’s one of the areas I’m really trying to get my head around intellectually, because then we might be able to design some experiments to test it.

FR: This comes back to this idea of neuroplasticity, which you have when you’re young and then you lose as you get older — do you think people have a fear of the general public becoming more neuroplastic?

DN: Yes and no. No one minds people with Alzheimer’s getting more neuroplastic. But young people thinking differently — that frightens society, or the establishment. But neuroplasticity — this is an ancient concept. Every time you do anything, you’ve grown a few synapses in your brain, you’ve consolidated some synapses, you’ve made them more efficient. Now, that process is very powerfully stimulated by psychedelics. It’s also stimulated by ketamine and MDMA. And from the insights you get during a trip, people often see things very differently, come up with new solutions to old problems. But they can consolidate those new solutions by neuroplasticity. 

The US Department of Defence has invested something like $27 million in trying to develop drugs which will produce plasticity, without being psychedelic, because they’re terrified of psychedelics. If you’re a vet in America, and you use an illegal drug to get better, you lose your pension, and you lose your access to healthcare. So rather than change the law, they’re trying to find drugs which will actually heal the brain through plasticity. I don’t know if that’s going to work. I think it might be useful. It might augment psychotherapy. But I think it’s going to be something you take every day. I don’t think you’re going to have a single dose of a neuroplastic agent and suddenly you’re going to wake up the next morning feeling un-depressed. But the research is going on, and we’ll find out.

What is monkey dust?

DN: Monkey dust is a new cathinone. Here’s a story. Just before the 2010 election, along comes mephedrone (“meow meow” or MCAT), a relatively weak cathinone that’s legal. It becomes very popular. But an election’s coming up, and Gordon Brown doesn’t want to be seen as soft on drugs. So mephedrone gets banned. And then, after a couple of years, we start to look at the data. And what we saw with mephedrone between 2008 and 2010 was as use went up, cocaine deaths fell, amphetamine deaths fell. Why? Because people were switching from an illegal, dangerous, harmful drug, to a legal, less harmful drug. So there were two or three deaths from mephedrone, and it reduced cocaine deaths by about 50%. It’s the biggest impact on cocaine death ever.

When mephedrone is illegal, and the dose and supply runs out, people switch back to cocaine because it’s a better drug. If everything’s illegal, why not use a better drug. Cocaine deaths have now gone up and up and they’ve now reached an all-time high. So for those two years, we saw that the drug market does have a lot of rationality. People want a drug that is fun but less harmful than the ones they’re using. So having banned mephedrone people said: “Mephedrone is pretty weedy. Why don’t we make a stronger mephedrone which we can sell in smaller amounts?” That’s monkey dust. Monkey dust is to mephedrone what fentanyl is to heroin. It’s just the product of having banned mephedrone.

Are there any studies on microdosing?

DN: Yes there are and we’ve done the best one. It’s very difficult to do because the problem with microdosing is: it’s illegal. And when we set up a microdosing study at Imperial, six years ago, we wanted to give a microdose — one microgram of LSD — to people twice a week for six weeks and see what happened. And the ethics committee said yes, but every single microdose had to be given in hospital, and they had to stay in hospital for 12 hours. We’ve never done the study because we couldn’t afford to do it.

So we did a citizen science study. We basically worked out a way of getting people to randomise their own microdoses, and that study was published last year. It shows that microdosing works — if you think you’re microdosing. So if you’re taking placebo, and you think it’s a microdose, it works. That’s the best study we have so far. It’s what you want it to be, in a way. So at present, we don’t know if microdosing works, but it doesn’t seem to harm you.

With antidepressants, you don’t know what it’s doing, but you feel better after it’s built up. With psilocybin, we can see the effect on the brain scan: it’s essentially an experience that changes the person. Are there any other drugs that are like that? 

DN: It’s like surgery. It’s like a cure. Are there any other drugs like that? I suppose with some anti-cancer drugs, you might get a relatively rapid cure. But not in terms of mental health. But the idea of a sudden cure is not novel in psychiatry. When I was on the Isle of Skye 30 years ago, there was a wonderful tale there about how they used to treat depression. They used to take depressed people to the blacksmith and put their head down on the anvil and the blacksmith would take out his massive hammer and bring it down right next to their head, but not hit them. And they would get better. That seems implausible, but it’s not completely implausible, because that is a massive stress.

Pavarotti suffered from depression. And he was talking about how he overcame his depression, and he was on a plane that crashed. He said: “That near-death experience lifted my depression.” And in fact quite a lot of people who have near-death experiences say not only that their depression goes, but that they feel more spiritual. Interestingly, the brain scans of people who have near-death experiences and those after psychedelics are very similar. So the final answer to your question is that it is a psychological experience, but fundamentally it’s a biological experience, changing your psyche, and that’s why it’s so powerful. Huxley was right: your brain controls your mind. If your brain gets it wrong, as it sometimes does, change your brain. Then your mind can be free.

This week, Lanier joined Florence Read to discuss AI, the possibility of machine consciousness, and why he still has faith in humanity. Below is an edited transcript:

Florence Read: You recently wrote an essay for the New Yorker with the seemingly phlegmatic title, “There is no AI”. Does that mean you don’t think recent developments are a problem?

Jaron Lanier: I actually have publicly stated that I think we could use the new technologies (as well as other technologies) to destroy ourselves. My difference with my colleagues is that I think the way we characterise the technology can have an influence on our options and abilities to handle it. And I think treating AI as this new, alien intelligence reduces our choices and has a way of paralysing us. An alternate take is to see it as a new form of social collaboration, where it’s just made of us. It’s a giant mash-up of human expression, opens up channels for addressing issues and makes us more sane and makes us more competent. So I make a pragmatic argument to not think of the new technologies as alien intelligences, but instead as human social collaborations.

FR: But as someone who works at Microsoft, at the heart of the AI revolution, is it not easier for you take the more pragmatic view over the hysterical?

JL: I have a really unusual role in the tech world. It shouldn’t be unusual; I think it should be more common. Essentially, I am speaking my mind honestly, even though I’m on the inside of the castle instead of on the outside throwing stones at the castle. In my opinion, both positions should be well-manned. I don’t think there’s any perfect way to handle anything. One is always somewhat compromised. Microsoft and I have come to an accord, where I have, what you might call, academic freedom. I speak my mind, I speak things as I see them but I also don’t speak for the company. And we make that distinction. It allows me to maintain my public intellectual life but also work inside.

I don’t necessarily find agreement with everybody I work with, nor do I find absolute disagreement. For instance, Sam Altman from OpenAI really liked my New Yorker piece. I don’t think he agrees with it entirely but he said he agrees with it mostly. That’s great. I think having some degree of openness within the big tech companies is a healthy thing. Within Microsoft, there are now a few other figures who at least somewhat speak their minds. I’m hoping that this demonstration that a tech company can be successful while allowing essentially free speech within its research community, can be a precedent that other tech companies follow. I’d like to see Google and Meta and Apple do a little bit more of that.

FR: What’s odd about the AI discussion is that so many of the people working on it — including Sam Altman — are also the ones sharing their deep existential fears about what AI will do to humanity.

JL: I have tried to understand that myself for decades. I think part of it is, we simultaneously live in a science-fiction universe, where we’re living out the science fiction we grew up with. If you grew up on the Terminator movies, and the Matrix movies and Commander Data from Star Trek, naturally what you want to do is realise this idea of AI. It just seems like your destiny. But then another part of you is thinking, “But in most of those stories, with Commander Data being the exception, this was horrible for mankind.” It feels responsible to acknowledge that it could be horrible for mankind, and yet at the same time, you keep on doing it. It’s weird, and I believe the approach that I’ve proposed of not thinking of what we’re doing as alien intelligences but rather a social collaboration, is the way through that problem, because it’s a way of framing it that’s equally valid, but actionable. But within the tech world, giving up those childhood science-fiction fantasies that we grew up with is really hard for people.

FR: Of course, we used to call the internet a “Wild West”, which played into this mythology — as though there’s a cowboy in every one of these computer scientists who wants to find this new frontier.

JL: I think that’s true too. I grew up in rural New Mexico in the Sixties, when it was still not that economically developed. So I actually got to experience a little bit of the tail end of the Wild West. And I can assure you that it was miserable, and it’s not something anybody would want, but the version of it in the movies is very appealing. And it does bring up a sort of a strange gender-identity connection. Recently, I was on a morning TV talk show in the US, and one of the hosts was a woman who said to me, “It just seems like there’s a lot of male fantasy in the AI world. Shouldn’t there be more women AI leaders?” And I said, “Well, there are some spectacular women AI leaders, and actually, there does tend to be some sort of a difference where the women seem to be a little more humanistic.” In the YouTube version of that, they cut out the whole exchange about women, and I called and asked about it and they said, “It just seemed like a niche question, so we cut it out.” And it’s not, it’s a very central question.

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FR: I do have a kind of sense that there is something Promethean about it, that for many men, this is the first time they’ve been able to create life from nothing.

JL: When I was a kid, I always used to say AI is really just womb envy. And having had a child and seeing what it’s actually like for a woman to bear child, I no longer have womb envy. I now appreciate it’s actually a rather difficult process for the mother and I didn’t know that when I was a young man. I will say that it’s not just men, but it tends to be men who haven’t had kids yet who might have that desire to create life in the computer.

FR: You distinguish between two types of AI, between this “alien entity” to which many of your colleagues seem to attribute the spark of life, and your version, which is, in fact, just a network of connections between humans.

JL: The term AI is very wiggly, and gets applied to all kinds of things. But usually these days when we talk about AI, we’re talking about these large AI models like the GPT programmes. What they are is giant mash-ups of human creations. If you ask one of these programmes to create you a new image — like, I’d like to see London as if it were a cross between London and Gurwat — it can probably synthesise that. But the way it does so is by using the classifiers that it uses to identify the images that match the components of your request, and mashing them up. Managing the whole scale so it can happen quickly is not so simple, but the basic idea is pretty simple.

Now, I happen to think that’s a great capability with a lot of uses. I love the idea of computers just getting more flexible. It creates the possibility of saying, “Can you reconfigure this computer experience to work for somebody who’s colourblind?” instead of demanding that people conform to computer design. There’s a potential in this flexibility to really improve computation on many levels and make it much better for people. But, if you want to, you can perceive it as a new intelligence. And, to me, if you perceive it as a new intelligence, what you’re really doing is shutting off yourself in order to worship the code, which I think is exactly the wrong thing. It makes you less able to make good decisions.

You’ve probably heard of the Turing test, which was one of the original thought-experiments about artificial intelligence. There’s this idea that if a human judge can’t distinguish whether something came from a person or computer, then we should treat the computer as having equal rights. And the problem with that is that it’s also possible that the judge became stupid. There’s no guarantee that it wasn’t the judge who changed rather than the computer. The problem with treating the output of GPT as if it’s an alien intelligence, which many people enjoy doing, is that you can’t tell whether the humans are letting go of their own standards and becoming stupid to make the machine seem smart.

FR: So we haven’t reached computational consciousness, a computer with sentience?

JL: The sentience of others is always a matter of faith. There’s no way to be certain about whether someone else has interior experience in the way that you do. I presume that you do, but I can’t know. There is a mystical or almost supernatural element in which we have internal experience — or at least I do, but I can’t make you believe I do. You have to just believe on your own that I do. That faith is a very precious thing and there’s no absolute argument that you should or shouldn’t believe that another person has interior experience, or sentience or consciousness, or that a machine does. Faith is not fundamentally rational, but there is a pragmatic argument, as I keep on repeating, to placing your faith in other people instead of machines. If you care about people at all, if you want people to survive, you have to place your faith in the sentience of them instead of in machines as a pragmatic matter, not as a matter of absolute truth.

FR: Is the only distinction between human and machine sentience, then, a faith in the power of the human soul versus the fact that that computer is just amalgamating information?

JL: It’s a matter of faith that has pragmatic implications. Just to say something is a matter of faith doesn’t mean that the choice of faith is entirely arbitrary, because it can be pragmatic as well. So, if not believing in people increases the chance that people will be harmed, I think the same is the case with this technology. Not believing that machines are the same as people increases the chance that people will be harmed. Cumulatively, we should believe in people over computers, but that’s not an absolute argument based on logic or empiricism, which I don’t think is available to us. There’s a bit of a skyhook thing here, like the problem of “why should you stay alive instead of committing suicide?” It’s applied to the whole species: “Why should we continue this human project; why does it matter?”

I’ve come to something that’s a little bit like the argument attributed to Pascal — you might as well believe in God, just in case it’s real and there’s heaven and hell. I don’t buy that particular argument; I’m not concerned about heaven or hell. However, I do think that the continuation of us in this timeline, in this world, and this physicality, is something I’d like to commit to. I think we might be something special. And so in that way, I’d like to apply faith to us and give us a chance, and that does involve the demoting of computers. But when we demote computers, we can use them better. Demoting AI allows us to not mystify, and that allows us paths to explaining it, to controlling it, to understanding it, to using it as a scientific exploration of what language is. There’s so many reasons to demote it that are practical, that the faith in it as a mystical being just actually seems kind of stupid and wasteful and pathetic to me.

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FR: But can we demote something that has potentially more power than us already? Most of us are already subordinated to computers in our everyday lives.

JL: People are capable of being self-destructive, idiotic, wasteful and ridiculous, with or without computers. However, we can do it a little more efficiently with computers because we can do anything a little more efficiently with computers. I’ve been very publicly concerned about the dehumanising elements of social media algorithms. The algorithms on social media that have caused elevated outbreaks of things that always existed in humanity, but there’s just a little more: vanity, paranoia, irritability. And that increment is enough to change politics, to change mental health, especially in impoverished circumstances around the world. It’s just made the world worse incrementally. The algorithms on social media are really dumbass-simple — there’s really not a lot there. And so I think your framing of it as more powerful than us is incorrect. I think it’s really just dumb stuff. It’s up to us to decide how it fits into human society.

The capacity for human stupidity is great, and, as I keep on saying, it’s only a matter of faith whether we call it human stupidity or machine intelligence. They’re indistinguishable logically. So I think the threat is real. I’m not anti-doomist. I just ask us to consider: what is the way of thinking that improves our abilities and improves our thinking — that gives us more options, gives us more clarity? And it involves demoting the computer.

There’s a lot of work to do technically. We can create explanations for what so-called “machine intelligence” is doing by tracing it back to its human origins. There have been a number of very famous instances of chatbots getting really weird with people. But the form of explanation should be to say, “Actually, the bot was, at that point, parodying something from a soap opera, or from some fanfiction.” That’s what’s going on. And in my opinion, there should be an economy in the future where, if there’s really valuable output from an AI, the people whose contributions were particularly important should actually get paid. I believe there’s a new extension to society that’s very creative and interesting, rather than this dismal prospect of everybody being put out of work. Transparency in mash-up technology can only come from revealing the people whose expressions were mashed-up. But if policies are based on the idea that we now have this new “supernatural artificial entity”, there’s no sensible way to resolve that.

FR: You didn’t sign the open letter demanding a hiatus in accelerating AI development, which was signed by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Was that not appealing to you as an idea?

JL: My reason for not signing it is that it fundamentally still mystified the technology. It took the position that it’s a new alien entity. When you think it’s an alien entity, there’s no way to know how to help. If you have an alien entity, what regulation is good? How do you define harm? As much as the GPT programmes impress people, they don’t actually represent ideas. We don’t know how to define these things, all we can do is mash things up so that they conform with classifiers.

FR: So they can’t do the philosophical work of thinking?

JL: They could mash-up philosophers in ways that might be interesting. If you say, “Write an essay as if Descartes and Derrida collaborated”, something might come out that’s provocative or interesting. But there’s no actual representation inside there. And getting provocative or interesting mash-ups is useful, but you can’t set policy by it because there’s not actually any meaning. There’s no fundamental representation inside these things and we just have to accept that as reality. We don’t know what meaning is and we can’t represent meaning.

FR: Your argument relies on the idea that if we define this technology differently, then we will have more power over it, or at least we’ll have more understanding of it. Are we not just self-comforting here with a rhetoric about it being a human technology rather than something we can’t control?

JL: I don’t think that’s the case. It’s proposing a more concrete and clarified path of action. It’s very demanding of people and it’s not comforting at all. It demands that everybody involved on a technical or regulatory level do much more than they have. I suspect many people would prefer the mystical version because it actually lets them off the hook. The mystical version just lets you sit there and apprehend, and express awe at our own inventions. What I’m talking about demands action. It’s not comforting and it shouldn’t be.

FR: Do you think humans need to take more accountability for their part in developing a potentially malign form of AI? If it does go off the rails, wouldn’t it be because we’ve set it up to do so?

JL: One comparison is the disasters with the Boeing 737 Max. The flight correction module in it was the source of two terrible air disasters in which hundreds of people died. But what actually happened involved the way they sold it, the way they withheld information about it (depending on how much you paid them), the way they trained people for it, the way the documentation was created. It’s the surrounding stuff that created the disaster, not the core capability, which probably has been useful in general. In the same way, with this large-model AI, it’s not the thing itself, it’s the surrounding material that determines whether it’s malignant or not.

When you deploy it, under the assumption that it’s an alien new intelligence — that it’s a new entity with its own point of view that should be treated as a creature instead of a tool — you greatly increase the chances of a scenario similar to the one that that befell passengers on the Boeing planes. I think that’s a real possibility. The malignancy is in the surrounding material, not in the core technology, and that’s extremely important to understand. I don’t think anybody has claimed that the flight path correction module shouldn’t have existed. I think what people are saying is that the pilots should have been well-informed, well-trained, and the ability to control it should have always been included, not only for those who paid more. And if you have chatbots, and you tell people, “This is an intelligent companion, you should be able to date it, you should be able to trust it”, then the chances of something really bad happening increase.

FR: Isn’t the main worry then that this sort of technology might fall into the hands of someone who has malign intent against a group or country. I’m thinking particularly about the situation in Ukraine.

JL: Russia has one of the worst records on misusing the internet and algorithms. It’s documented that Russia created enormous numbers of fake accounts, of fake bots, in order to sow divisions within the US. And of course, it’s attempting those things in Ukraine. I worry a little bit more about China, because Russia doesn’t quite have the resources to pull off very large-model projects right now. It’s not that easy to do — you need huge computational resources. So I worry a little bit about China using, to be very blunt, data from TikTok on the morning of a Taiwan invasion or something like that. That’s imaginable. I’ve talked to a lot of people in the Chinese world, and I think almost all are actually much more conscientious and better-intentioned than we might imagine, but there’s always somebody in any country in any situation. I do worry about it, and the antidote to it is universal clarity, context, transparency, which can only come about by revealing people, since revealing ideas is impossible because we don’t know what an idea is.

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FR: We’ve established though that we already live with artificial intelligence. How has that already changed us?

JL: Our principal encounter with algorithms so far has been in the construction of the feeds we receive in our apps. It’s in whether we get credit or not and other things like that — whether we get admitted to university or not, or whether we’re sent to prison, depending on what country we’re talking about. Algorithms have transformed us. I would hope that the criticisms of them that I and many others — Tristan Harris, Shoshana Zuboff — have put forward have illuminated and clarified the issues with algorithms in the previous generation. But what could happen with the new AI is a worse version of all of that. Given how bad that was, I don’t think the doomerists are entirely wrong. I think we could confuse ourselves into extinction with our own code. But, once again, in order for us to achieve that level of stupidity, we have to believe overly in the intelligence of the software, and I think we have a choice.

FR: You’re a composer as well as a computer scientist. Do you think that there is going to be a shift in the way in which we prioritise organic or manmade art?

JL: We are entering a world of what I call “data dignity”. A musician might provide music directly, or might provide antecedent music that’s mashed-up within an algorithm, but that musician is still known and credited. And we’ve seen that already for decades now — somebody might provide the beats, somebody else might provide samples, etc. There’s already this sense of construction and mash-up, especially in hip-hop, but also just in pop music lately. That has not destroyed musicians, not as long as it’s acknowledged and transparent. I think, as with Boeing, it’s the surrounding material. If we choose to use mash-up algorithms to hide the people from whom the antecedent stuff came from, then we do damage. But the thing doing the damage is hiding ourselves, not the algorithm itself, which is actually just a simple dumb thing. I think there are a lot of good things about an algorithmic mash-up culture in the future. Every new instance of automation, instead of putting people out of work, could be thought of as the platform for a new creative community.

FR: Won’t that dull our eyes to the beauty of real art and culture?

JL: What I see in culture is, as long as people understand what’s going on, they find their way. Synthesisers haven’t killed violins. There was a fear that they would, and as long as people know the difference, as long as there’s honesty and transparency about what’s going on, we can go through seasons of things being a little more artificial and then less so. That becomes a cultural dynamic and I trust people to handle that well.

FR: I might sound a bit like someone booing at Bob Dylan going electric, but, if you take Spotify, it’s almost totally wiped out independent music. There have been major technological advances in music that have obliterated creativity at those lower, more maverick levels of the industry.

JL: You’re absolutely correct about Spotify. In fact, at the dawn of the file-copying era, I objected very strenuously to this idea. There was a cultural movement about open source and open culture, which was stealthily funded by Google and other tech companies, and the Pirate Parties in Europe. People thought everything should be a mash up and we didn’t need to know who the musician was and they didn’t need to have bargaining power in a financial transaction. That was a gigantic wrong turn, and it was a wrong turn that we can’t afford to repeat with AI because it becomes amplified so much that it could really destroy technology. I completely agree with you about Spotify but, once again, the availability of music to move through the internet was not the problem. It’s the surrounding material. What really screwed over musicians was not the core capability, but this idea that you build a business model on demoting the musician, demoting the person, and instead elevating the hub or the platform. And so we can’t afford to keep on doing that. I think that is the road that leads to our potential extinction through insanity.

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FR: It sounds like the answer to a lot of these problems comes down to human greed?

JL: I think humans are definitely responsible. Greed is one aspect of it, but it’s not all of it. I don’t necessarily understand all human failings within myself or anybody else, but I do feel we can articulate ways to approach this that are more practical, more actionable and more hopeful. That has to be our first duty. I think this question of diagnosing each other and saying, “This person has womb envy”, or whatever has some utility, but not a lot, and can inspire reactions that aren’t helpful. So I don’t want to emphasise that too much. I want to emphasise an approach, which we can call “data dignity”, and which opens options for us and makes things clearer.

FR: What is the best case scenario if we follow that route?

JL: What I like about the new algorithms is that they help us collaborate better. You could have a new and more flexible kind of a computer, where you can ask it to change the way you present things to match your mood or your cognition under your own control, so that you’re less subservient to the computer. But another thing you can do is you can say, “I have written one essay, my friend’s written another essay, they’re sort of different. Can you mash them up 12 different ways so we can read the mash-ups?” And this is not based on ideas, it’s based on the dumb math of combining words as they appeared, in order, in context. But you might be able to learn new options for consilience between different points of view that way, which could be extraordinary. Many people have been looking at the humanistic AI world, the human-centred AI world, and asking, “Could we actually use this to help us understand potential for cooperation and policy that we might not see?”

FR: So, oddly, it might break us out of our tribes and offer some human connection?

JL: It’s like if a therapist says, “Try using different words and see if that might change how you think about something.” It’s not directly addressing our thoughts, but on the surface level it actually can help us. But it’s ultimately up to us, and there’s no guarantee it’ll help, but I believe it will in many cases. It can help us improve our research, it can help us improve a lot of our practices, and, as long as we acknowledge the people whose ideas are being matched up by the programmes, it can help us even broaden participation in the economy, instead of throwing people out of work as so often foretold. I think we can use this stuff to our advantage, and it’s worth it to try. If we try to use it well, the most awful ideas about it turning into the Matrix or Terminator, become vanishingly unlikely, as long as we treat it as a human project instead of an alien intelligence.

In an interview with Florence Read, he explains his theory of the objects’ origin, why they were sent here, and how we should interact with aliens if we find them.

Florence Read: When was the first unidentified interstellar object detected in our solar system?

Professor Avi Loeb: It was spotted in October 2017 by a telescope in Hawaii. It was given the name ‘Oumuamua, which means “the scout”. And at first, of course, everyone thought it was a rock from another star that just happened to pass by.

The more we learned about it, the more it looked weird. It was tumbling every eight hours and the amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of ten as it was tumbling. So that meant that it had a very extreme shape. The best fit for the variation of reflected sunlight was that of a flat object, pancake-like, which is quite unusual.

And then, this object didn’t show any cometary tail — there was no evaporation from it visible — yet it exhibited an excess push away from the sun, by some mysterious force. I suggested that since the force is not the rocket effect of evaporating gases, it could be being pushed by the reflection of sunlight. But for that to be the case, the object had to be very thin, sort of like a sail being pushed by light. And, of course, if it happens to be that way, then it could be artificial in origin.

Nature doesn’t make sails that are propelled by reflecting light. In fact, the same telescope in Hawaii discovered another object which exhibited the same qualities as ‘Oumuamua: it was pushed away from the sun by reflecting sunlight, and had no cometary tail. And within a few weeks, the astronomers realised it was actually a rocket booster that was launched in 1966 by NASA, as part of a lunar lander mission. It was made of stainless steel, so it didn’t evaporate. It had thin walls, and that’s why it was pushed away by reflecting sunlight. Here’s an example of an object we know is artificial, because we made it. The question is: who made ‘Oumuamua?

FR: And your answer was: potentially extraterrestrial life?

AL: It’s a possibility. We don’t have conclusive evidence. My book, Extraterrestrial, describes the anomalies of ‘Oumuamua. But it didn’t come close enough to Earth for our telescopes and even radars to resolve it. We don’t know what, exactly, it looks like.

About a year and a half ago, I established the Galileo Project. One of the goals is to design a space mission that will come close to the next ‘Oumuamua. We have a “dating app” — the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile — that will start operations within a year. It has a camera of 3.2 billion pixels, 1,000 times as many pixels than you have in your cell phone. It will survey the southern sky every four days, and has a good chance of finding more objects like ‘Oumuamua. We can review them, and swipe most of them to the left on this “dating app” — but if we decide that one of them looks like ‘Oumuamua, we might come close to it and take a close-up photograph. And if we see that it’s a rock, so be it — but it could also show some bolts and screws on its surface, and even a label, made on an exoplanet.

I should say that almost four years before ‘Oumuamua was discovered, the very first interstellar object was discovered, in the form of a meteor. ‘Oumuamua was the size of a football field, but in 2014 an object roughly half a metre in size exploded in the lower atmosphere of the Earth. The US Space Command confirmed that this object is interstellar. The data indicates that this object survived all the way down to the lower atmosphere of the Earth, where it was subjected to very extreme stress — it was tougher than iron meteorites. In fact, it’s 10 times tougher than all meteors ever identified in the same catalogue.

So the question is: was it from some unusual source very different from the solar system? Or was it artificial in origin? Maybe it was made of stainless steel, and was a spacecraft from another civilisation. We’re going to find out the composition — we are going to the Pacific Ocean this summer to look for the fragments leftover from this meteor. By collecting them from the ocean floor, we hope to figure out their composition and tell whether they were just a rock or part of a spacecraft.

FR: If it’s artificial, where might it come from?

AL: Freeman Dyson — a British-born scientist, very well-known about 60 years ago — suggested that a very advanced scientific civilisation would not just rely on the amount of energy coming from its star to the surface of its planet, but would surround the star with a megastructure that would harvest the energy of the star. It is called the “Dyson sphere”: it’s a huge engineering project to imagine. It could be made of tiles that are hovering above the star, just like very thin sails. But there would be very high stresses on the construction, and therefore it would be made of very tough material. Once the civilisation loses interest in the Dyson sphere, it might not maintain it, and then asteroids would hit it quite frequently and could destroy it within a billion years. So the pieces of a broken Dyson Sphere could float in interstellar space and they could account for the materials that we found in the interstellar meteor.

FR: But your theory about ‘Oumuamua is different — in your report you argue: “An artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth.”

AL: A very good approach, to probe a large region of space, is to release many small probes — like a dandelion seeding its environment. If you have a probe visiting the habitable zone of a star like the Sun, the probe itself might be too big and move too fast to land on a particular planet. If you want to probe a lot of regions and a lot of planets, you might just spread dandelion seeds. In fact, just this year, we founded a new space corporation with my colleague, Dr Frank Laukien, that aims to use this approach for the Moon and Mars, instead of the traditional approach of using just one big probe and visiting one location.

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FR: How do they propel themselves?

AL: It depends on the nature of the engine. The only type of engine that we employ so far for interstellar probes are chemical rockets that can push a probe up to about a thousandth of the speed of light. But there could be much better schemes. For example, a very distinguished British cosmologist named Hermann Bondi wrote a paper in 1957, suggesting that if you have a negative mass — we are used to positive masses, but a negative mass in principle is possible to construct — then the negative mass will push away, if you put the positive mass next to it. And the positive mass will pull the negative mass with it. So together, they would accelerate indefinitely up to the speed of light. That is a type of engine that we have never constructed, and could potentially be engineered, if we developed the physics behind it.

FR: So should we assume that an alien species could have far more sophisticated technology than we do?

AL: Yes, and the way I think of it, it’s just like going on a date. You can learn from the other person. We should look at it as an opportunity; we shouldn’t be fearful of it. We are probably not sophisticated enough to be a threat to whatever comes to visit us. But we can make money from it — if we learn how to replicate [the technology] here on Earth. We can get a leap into our future.

As for what they might be hoping to accomplish — if you stay on your planet, then you might be annihilated or destroyed by a single-point catastrophe — we will not know until we observe them. I don’t think it makes sense to establish a committee of experts, and decide what the protocol is for responding to visitors. We should just try and figure out what they’re seeking. I spoke to Henry Kissinger just last year, and I asked him — because he negotiated with other nations, where the culture is very different — what is the realpolitik of interstellar communication? And he said that first you want to learn what the other side is seeking, and only then develop a dialogue with them.

FR: Is there any evidence from observatories or telescopes that these probes are actually entering our solar system?

AL: The Government collects data as a result of national security concerns and the sensors the government is using are classified. If there is high-quality data, it’s not being released to the public. But an extraterrestrial technological object has nothing to do with national security. It doesn’t adhere to national borders, and therefore any knowledge about it should be shared by all humans. It shouldn’t be the privilege of the President of the United States. We know that we are not at the centre of the universe; we know that there are billions of other Earth-Sun systems in the Milky Way galaxy alone. We are not at the centre of the stage, and we just came to the cosmic play at the end ,over the past few million years. The play is not about us.

FR: Tell me what it’s like being an expert in aliens. It must be quite an odd field to choose as your specialism.

AL: The way to think of me is as a farm boy. I’m connected to nature more than people. I have no social media. I don’t care how many likes I get. I’m just trying to do what sounds like common sense — something today which is not that common (especially in academia). There are many of my colleagues working on extra dimensions of the multiverse who do fancy mathematics — and it’s their way of showing off that they are smart. But if there is an object from another civilisation that could change the future of humanity, it may not take fancy maths to realise that it’s not a rock. When there is data about something unusual, we’re supposed to be curious. There is uncertainty. You can be wrong. That’s part of the job description.

FR: What if you are a young junior professor, at a university like Harvard, when stepping outside the bounds of what’s considered acceptable science is too risky?

AL: If you look at the career of Pablo Picasso, you will find that early on, he was a realist. He tried to draw in the style of traditional painting. After he mastered that, he invented cubism, which was disruptive. So as a young scientist, you don’t want to disrupt the system. You want to learn first of all the basic principles of physics, and apply them along the themes that are defined by senior people in academia, so that you can get a postdoc position after your PhD. Eventually you’re promoted to tenure.

But what happens after people get tenure is they are even more obsessed with their ego. They want to get honours, awards — to be recognised by their peers — and they conform to the beaten path. I say that the road not taken is the most interesting thing to take, because it may have low-hanging fruit. So I advise young scholars: if you’re interested in innovation, once you get tenure, start to be creative: innovate, because that’s the whole purpose of academia. Betray the slogan of the Party in George Orwell’s 1984, “ignorance is strength”. That’s what academia should be about.

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But unfortunately, it’s not. I heard, a few days ago, a very distinguished scientist, who said: “I don’t really want to know whether Covid-19 came from a lab leak, or the wet market in Wuhan.” Why would he say that? Because he doesn’t want the image of science to be tarnished, if it came from a lab leak. This is similar to arguing that “ignorance is strength”. Knowledge is strength, and the same is true about the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena, the nature of dark matter. Everything should be driven by our ambition to be knowledgeable, because then we can adapt even if reality doesn’t look as pretty as it should be. Let us see it.

FR: There is a genuine cohort of your colleagues who would say that there is 0% probability that aliens do exist. What do you think the probability is of life beyond Earth?

AL: Galileo was placed under house arrest just for suggesting that maybe the Earth moves around the Sun, and today he would have been cancelled on social media. If you were to ask those theologians, they would say there is zero probability that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe. Now, why would they say that? Because the church wanted to control people. There are always ulterior motives. I bet you that if we find a piece of technological equipment from another civilisation, people will say: “Of course, this was talked about for decades. There is nothing really new — we knew it all along.”

But if I had to guess, I would say not only that we are not alone, but that there were many technological civilisations before us that reached greater heights. We are probably not even close to the top half of their advances. They would have technologies that look like magic to us — like miracles in religious texts. It’s possible that that civilisation could create life in its laboratories. It would bring the concept of God, or something very capable, into reality — it will unify science and religion in some sense. I think it’s very likely that they were out there billions of years ago, maybe not right now. But they existed, and the only question is, when will we find the conclusive evidence beyond any doubt? And for that, we need to search. If there are objects of technological origin, we will find them.

***

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Last year, assisted suicide accounted for 3.3% of all deaths in Canada, a third more than the previous year. At the same time, deaths officially recorded as suicides fell to the lowest rate in two decades. The Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD, Act was passed in 2016, requiring that a patient’s condition has to be “grievous and irremediable”, and death “reasonably foreseeable”, for them to qualify for euthanasia. But the law appears to allow loose interpretations of these conditions.

As a child, Alan Nichols had suffered complications from surgery which affected his mobility on one side and left him with hearing loss. Still, he was living independently before his death. Physically, Gary says, his brother had been doing much better: “He was being treated for absolutely nothing, no illness.” But Alan’s mental health was volatile. “He would go through stages where life was good and then he’d hit a stage for a while, for a month or two, where he didn’t feel like living.” He was prone to paranoia and reacted badly to change: if Gary was getting ready to leave, Alan might say: “Are you going to leave me home with all these knives?” And Gary would have to say: “Alan, I trust you. If that’s what you want to do, I can’t guard you 24/7.”

He did guard Alan, as well as he could. After their parents died, Gary and his other brother Wayne took turns in helping Alan to do tasks that overwhelmed him, such as banking. But they both had their own lives, and Alan struggled to accept help from friends. In the months before his death, he had begun to feel increasingly isolated. His local network was coming apart: Wayne had decided to take a trip across Canada; a trusted neighbour was planning to relocate; his favourite shop had closed. His story isn’t unusual: of the 31,664 assisted deaths in Canada, 17% of the patients cited “isolation or loneliness” as a reason for wanting to end their lives.

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The week before Wayne was due to leave, Alan was found by paramedics on the floor of his apartment. The neighbour he trusted had raised the alarm after not seeing him for days. He was malnourished and clearly suffering a major depressive episode. He was taken to Chilliwack General Hospital.

Alan did try to resist being sectioned. Gary was told that his brother “was fighting not to go into the ambulance”. Gary rushed to the hospital to see his brother, who said to him: “If you’re not here to bust me out, you might as well leave.” Gary didn’t bust him out, a decision he now says he regrets. He trusted the hospital to look after Alan. When he called to get updates on Alan’s condition, the staff were optimistic: “The hospital would say, ‘Oh, he’s doing fine. He’s okay. Yeah, he’s eating.’” It made Gary think Alan was “getting back on track.” What the hospital didn’t tell Gary was that his brother had actually signed his own death warrant.

For some Canadians, assisted suicide is a peaceful alternative to an unpleasant death. Patients with terminal illnesses often point out that end-of-life care can be highly undignified, and appreciate the power to choose something else. Don Kent was assisted to die in Ottawa after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a blog post written before his death, he declared: “We euthanise our pets humanely, but it is only recently that we have started applying humane dying to our own species. I want medical assistance to ease my way out of this life — nay, I demand it!” His family describe the process as cathartic: “As he requested, Deep Purple’s ‘Child in Time’ was cranked up in the background. His death was completely on his own terms, just as he wished.”

But what happens when there is no terminal diagnosis? What if your family don’t support your wish to die? In the days and weeks following his hospitalisation, Alan refused to take visits from his brothers. Gary tells me that patient confidentiality meant that the doctors didn’t have to inform them about Alan’s application for assisted dying. The people who loved him didn’t find out about it until a couple of days before the procedure was scheduled. Gary sees the hospital as partly responsible for keeping Alan from his family. “The last two weeks, they were treating him for nothing. They were giving him room and board.” He could have gone home. When, later, Gary asked the hospital, “Why did you keep him there?”, they said: “Alan didn’t think he should go home because you guys would try to convince him otherwise.”

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Gary did, indeed, spend the last day of his brother’s life trying to change Alan’s mind. He winces at the memory: “I think we came really, really close to convincing him not to do this.” Aware that his brother felt isolated, Gary told him: “Alan, I’m contemplating retiring this year, and possibly coming back to Chilliwack. To give you a little more support and a little more family close by”: “He just looks at me and says, ‘Geez, I wish I’d known that.’” In Alan’s view, it was already too late to alter his decision.

Now, Gary wonders if his brother would have regretted his attempt to end his life, had it not succeeded. It’s common knowledge in psychiatry that most previously suicidal people do. One Harvard study shows that “nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date”. Gary says he feels utterly betrayed by the hospital, the Canadian government, the whole system that undid all his family’s hard work to keep Alan alive.

Other countries are taking tentative steps towards a debate on legalised euthanasia. Last year, Spain passed legislation stating that a person can qualify for euthanasia if both incurable illness and “unbearable suffering” are proven. In the UK, both euthanasia and assisted suicide are currently illegal. But in 2021 an Assisted Dying Bill was proposed to the House of Lords and in the same year YouGov polls showed 73% of citizens supported legalising euthanasia for terminal patients. Only 35% of MPs agreed at the time, but since then the violent suicide of a grandfather with debilitating prostate cancer revived the debate, which remains preliminary and cautious.

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Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, is barreling at breakneck speed towards near total liberalisation. The Canadian system is set to become similar to Belgium’s or Switzerland’s. In March 2021, adults with “incurable diseases” but no foreseeable death were made eligible. Now, the “Special Joint Committee on MAiD” is considering whether to expand the law to “mature minors” (no further clarification given) and offering assisted dying to those with solely mental health conditions. Both tweaks to the law could come into effect in Canada as early as 2023.

Evidence suggests that there is demand for these services. Rupa Subramanya recently reported, for Bari Weiss’s Common Sense, on an epileptic woman called Victoria, who was only 21 when she considered applying for MAiD to alleviate her family’s dire financial situation. Subramanya also told the story of 23-year-old Kiano Vafaeian, who is seeking MAiD for depression, and his distraught family. Alan’s MAiD form, which I have seen, only listed “Hearing Loss” as his reason for requesting to die.

The conflicts of interest here are troubling. A 2020 preparatory analysis of MAiD predicted that it could save $66 million in healthcare costs. And facilities that carry out assisted suicides are given government support. In Alan Nichols’s case, the nurse who approved his application was also the “practitioner” giving him the fatal injection. “It’s like you’re writing your own paycheck,” Gary says.

Gary suspects Trudeau will allow the laws to go even further. “Why don’t you just set up a walk-in clinic for it? Because that’s what’s going to happen: once the government opens the door, these physicians and medical teams are just going to open it wider.”

As we say our goodbyes, Gary remembers something:

“In 2008, my mum called me and said: ‘Alan didn’t show up for dinner last night.’ So I said: ‘Okay, I’ll go check on him.’

So, I went over to see him, and his door was locked and wasn’t opening. I called a locksmith who came and opened up the door, and we went in there and he was laying in his bed.

And he says: ‘I knew eventually somebody would come to see me.’”

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.