Tell us about the work you do, and what draws you to Telescope.
I work in a couple of different places. One is the Nuffield Foundation, where I'm the chair, and I also work with the Schmidt Science Fellows. What really interests me about what Telescope does is that it tries to make technology, particularly the important developments in technology, relevant to people today, and to make the best of them.
Where do you see technology changing fastest, and how does your work intersect with that?
Technology is changing very rapidly at the moment, and the areas I see changing most rapidly are research, education, and then also the impact on society more generally. What I've been interested in across all of these domains is making sure we understand what's going on: talking to the people who are most affected by it. So I talk to people doing research in the social sciences, to people who are teaching, and to people getting that information out to policy developers. That's my big role, really, and then guiding the other people I work with on how to make the best policy interventions.
Is there a particular idea you've come across that you think could really change things?
The main thing that's changing at the moment, at least as I see it, is the relationship between people. It's the way in which they deal with one another through technology. And the main thing I have, which is kind of hokey in a sense but I think is important, is that we should be focusing first on relationships, not just on knowledge and efficiency. What's been lost is the ability to empathize.
People talk about free speech, debate, and the like. The big thing that's dropping out is empathetic relationships and the capability to understand other people. So that is the thing I focus on: how do we develop (you can call it love if you like) between individuals who are going to work on these different platforms. It sounds a little bit religious, but I think it's absolutely critical, because as we move away from personal interactions, we're very vulnerable to all sorts of stuff.
Where have you seen that kind of empathy deliberately built?
One of the places where I see it very much is in the Schmidt Science Fellows, which was deliberately built as a community of scientists. That's rare. Most of the time, scientists work individually or in local teams. But having a community of scholars working across different disciplines and geographic dimensions is very powerful. What I've seen is them sharing not just science but the myriad problems that arise. Not just the use of AI or computing, not just the use of techniques, but actually developing instincts and ideas as a community. It's an old idea, but I think it's going to be even more important going into the future.
So as you build things, don't just build a platform, don't just build a thing. Think about how a group of not like-minded but disparate-minded people can interact and build each other up.
What would you say to someone just starting out in a world with less funding and more pressure to prove outcomes?
It is a more difficult environment for young scholars and professionals of all sorts. This is a tougher world, and the fragmentation of purpose, the difficulty of getting funds to do anything, is very powerful. So I'm going to come back to the idea of community: how are you going to build a community that enables your joy to rise up?
Most people actually need mentors and people they can trust, people who've gone that way before. So the first thing I'd say is that you're going to spend more time than you think having a cup of coffee with people, or, in our case, a pint of beer. Don't wait for a problem to come up and then go find a mentor afterward. Build a community around you.
What does the future you're working toward actually look like?
Talking about the nature of the place we want to be is very important, and very difficult, because we come from such different perspectives on it. I have a sort of quasi-religious viewpoint. I start from a Christian background, which emphasizes considering people in a community who are less fortunate and less able to look after themselves.
What I've found, though, is that the early-career people I work with absolutely buy into the idea that they want a society that will look after them when they fall back. And what you see at the moment, certainly among people you'd once have called safe and middle class, is a lot more experience of the precarious nature of life.
In the past we assumed that progress occurs sort of naturally, it just goes on, and everything will be fine. And now that's changed. So people are really keen to think through the different contexts. How are we going to build a better university? How are we going to build a better job environment? There are some big issues out there that people really want to grapple with.
How do we identify the best tools rather than the newest or most prevalent ones?
When it comes to the rapid changes happening, for example, the way LLMs are radically changing how people work, I don't think we know. We're very ignorant about what the consequences will be going forward.
So what I'd say is: how are you going to keep together as a group? What's happening at the moment is that different universities, different groups, different teachers are just going off and doing various things. There's a lot of "we'll just use it and see what it's got." And if you look at the changes in our use of LLMs over just the last year, we should be mildly terrified and mildly more inspired to work together, because what I hear are such radically different views of how it influences people's lives.
Is there anyone whose work particularly inspires you right now?
I couldn't say there's one person who inspires me at this stage, partly because there's an element of concern involved. They ask me a lot of questions. Is this good for us, Keith? Are things going to be better? The people who have inspired me in the past have been the ones able to see furthest, and at the moment, it's very difficult to see very far into what the impacts will be.
The contrast I've been thinking about a lot is this. On one side, you have the idea associated with Adam Smith, which is basically competition: you don't need relationships, you just need to look after your own interests. Then you have Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, saying no: the trouble is that it destroys relationships, and therefore nothing will happen. We don't yet have a new way to handle relationships in a new AI environment. It's going to have to be something of a folk movement, and I haven't seen too much of that yet.
And your advice to those early-career people, in an age of scarcity and of big money vacuuming up small, interesting ideas?
The ones I see doing this best are trying to work out the balance between the old style (learned knowledge, clever old white-haired people like me who've done a lot of stuff) and something that rapidly interrogates, LLM-style.
At the moment, I'd try to stay pretty loose. I'd be careful about investing too much in a single research pattern. What's really shaken me is how much the AI can be a wonderful scurrier-after-things. But I can still sit back and go, I'm not sure about that. Don't adopt a particular pattern of doing research too fast. Then work with others, see what others are doing, and get out a lot.
There's a story about the Rebbe in Brooklyn. People would come along saying, I want to learn about Judaism. And the Rebbe would touch his chest and say, "It's all in there," then he'd say, "Here's two bucks, go and buy someone a cup of coffee." That's a very good piece of advice at the moment for a young person. Don't panic. Trust yourself. But go out and buy some people a cup of coffee. Build those relationships, because they will be thinking the same things. And you will be so much better off if you're able to convince people to work together and spot things together.
We need to bring back the Parisian café and the university pub.
Yes. If you talk to my old research group at Oxford, is it because I gave them some great advice on solving a differential equation? They say no, no, it was five o'clock in the Lamb and Flag. That was the great time. Because in those environments, you talk about the difficulties, you talk about the sensitivities, you talk about the fears. And then you share them, and you think: maybe we could do this together. That's absolutely right.
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