Let Them Be Gardeners - A Review of Michael Shermer's Interview with Martin Rees
Ninja's Rebel Meter: 3 out of 10
Review of The Michael Shermer Show - Episode 314 with Martin Rees
I have been a subscriber to the Michael Shermer Show and his magazine Skeptic for many years. Michael Shermer is a founder and Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, an organization dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For years, the society has been debunking the claims of conspiracists, questionable alternative medicine, and healthcare products. Shermer is also Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic Magazine. The editorial board consists of illustrious scientists and thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Bill Nye (the science guy),and Steven Pinker.
I mostly love Michael Shermer’s show. I think he tries to cover as many topics with as many respected, expert viewpoints as he can. He is a very good interviewer and most of his guests are interesting people and scholars in their fields. Today, I can’t stay silent about the interview he did with Martin Rees, author of If Science Is To Save Us. It started out very well as he talked about his predictions for the future in terms of climate change and other global threats, but much of it was very disappointing to me.
While I am quite sure that Martin Rees, as a cosmologist and astrophysicist, is one of these respected, expert viewpoints, I was dismayed to listen to someone who at points seemed not in touch with the social and cultural issues of the day. He sometimes spoke from a white ethnocentric perspective with little to no awareness of how revealing his ethnocentrism is. He suggests that a viable solution for people who will lose their jobs in the coming artificial intelligent robo-apocalypse is to become caregivers of the young and old (33:27). This solution struck me as uninformed. Was he willfully ignoring that most jobs in public health are notoriously low paying, hard, and thankless? But think of the good they will be doing for society. Those people doing menial, repetitive work or administrative positions targeted for automation, will just gently glide into these new jobs to be likely paid less than their old ones. How does he not know that care-giving is one of the most physically and emotionally demanding jobs in healthcare? When Shermer challenged him, he said impatiently, it seemed to me, that, well, those people could garden then. Reacting as though Shermer’s challenge was absurd, he sees it as evident that going from, say, a librarian or lawyer, to a gardener or caregiver is easy and entirely fair.
In talking about the pandemic, he says that it is his hope that we never find out the truth of its origin (48:44). If it was a lab leak, it’s far better that we never know, he says, for the good of global relations. This seems a little like hiding one’s head in the sand. The reality, given the current relations between the United States and China, is that we will never find out for certain whether the pandemic was natural, human error, or lab leak. I am in the camp that it was most likely a natural spillover event with a lot of human error in dealing with it. In IT, when there is a problem, I have gotten used to the notion that most people go first to intentional sabotage or malicious hacking. I have had to pull back support staff on more than one occasion to remind them to look for other causes first. Most problems in IT are caused by unintentional human error or software bugs (also, mostly unintentional). If those causes don’t pan out, then, by all means, check for a security event.
I listened for a little while longer until he tossed off another wild assertion. Poor whites, he suggests, are much worse off than other groups (58:27) in terms of opportunities. Which groups exactly I wondered? He then mentions that Indians and African immigrants are “way ahead of poor whites”, but I couldn’t figure out where he was going with this line of thought. Shermer doesn’t ask and Rees doesn’t elaborate. In fact, Shermer deftly shuts this discussion down, moving on to another topic. I was hoping Shermer would challenge him more, especially when tossing off statements about minorities or other ethnic groups being disadvantaged or not. Rees spoke without really thinking in my opinion.
I am normally suspicious of futurists, two of my least favourite being Michio Kaku and Ray Kurzweil. I am suspicious of them because they are little more than charlatans praying on people’s need to have answers. Rees might have to join this club. I’ll think about that. I did think at least one prediction Rees made had merit. He believes that in the coming catastrophes, humans won’t be completely wiped out. He thinks that demographics of the world will change but some, if not many, humans would survive, in pockets. He does not offer what the quality of that survival would look like. Maybe he does in his book. It seems reasonable to me that a disaster of sufficient size would scatter humanity, but hey the progression of my thoughts always goes to an apocalypse.