12 The sorcerer's apprentice

Nuclear weapons, greenhouse gases, plastic soups, forever chemicals, genetically modified food, viruses and animals, artificial intelligence: since the dawn of civilisation, technology has been both a blessing and a curse. The parable of the Sorcerer's apprentice, who unleashes forces he cannot control, is thus a cautionary tale. But it is also a tale of apprenticeship, of curiosity and ambition, of learning by making - and correcting - mistakes. As we shape the future of humanity and our planet through technology and policies, doing many things for the first time, we are all apprentices.

Transcript

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Welcome to cornucopia, the podcast in which we examine what it means to live abundantly. My name is Karim Benammar. Today, I'm on the last of my Frigiliana walks.

Today, I want to talk about the tale of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, because I think it sheds light on the human journey, on human creativity and invention, on the human future. It’s an ancient tale, a tale that was told in Egypt, in ancient Egypt, a tale we find in the poetry of Goethe and others. In popular culture, it is famous because of its role in Disney's film Fantasia. It's a tale of a wise old magician, who can do remarkable things. He has control over inanimate objects, he can control things at a distance, he brews potions and cast spells. And he has a young apprentice that he's training in order to take over his art. 

Now, one day, the magician leaves, he says: “I have to go on an errand”. And he tasks the young apprentice with transporting water with the aid of buckets from a well to a different place. The young apprentice starts drawing a pail of water and transporting it, but it's quite heavy. At some point, he thinks: “well, why should I do this when we can get the objects to do this for me? Why get tired? This is exhausting. I've seen the magician get the brooms, we have brooms here and the brooms can actually carry the pails of water, and they can do the work for me. And so, he looks in the great book with spells, and he finds the spell, and he orders the brooms to go and fetch the water for him. And lo and behold, the broom has arms and catches two pails of water and starts carrying them. And the young apprentice is quite happy and can just watch all this work being done. 

Now in some versions of the story, he then falls asleep. And suddenly he wakes up, and it's all wet around them, because the broom has kept on carrying water, and the whole room is now flooded. The young apprentice needs to stop the process, but he doesn't know the spell. So, he tries to get the broom to stop. And he can't, and there’s still more water coming. He sees an axe, and he decides to chop up the broom. And so, he takes the axe to the broom. But the broom magically turns into two brooms, which are now drawing twice as much water. And then he tries again, and they turn into four brooms, and the whole thing floods and he's about to be swept away in his maelstrom of water, when the old magician comes back, and gets the spell, and the brooms stop and everything goes back to normal again, the water washes away, and the old magician scolds the apprentice. So that's pretty much the general version of the story. 

So what is the story trying to tell us? Now the moral that is usually drawn from it is that of a precautionary tale: don't mess with things that you don't understand. The Apprentice shouldn't have started using these spells that he didn't understand. Don't start a process if you don't know how to stop it. Playing around with knowledge that you don't understand is dangerous, and you're lucky to have the old magician to help you. And if we translate it to the current invention and creation and technological development of humanity, of course, we can see it as a precautionary tale.

There are some interesting analogies in the tale that are worth noting. For one, the magician can do things such as use inanimate objects, direct energy, do things at a distance, that are magical, but are quite normal in our world. We have machines that drive on energy. We have mobile phones with which we can talk at a distance, send data at a distance, communicate at a distance. And so, everything that is imagined to be magical in that magician’s world in ancient Egypt, and in all the retellings of the story, is actually the modern world that we've created today. 

The second point to note is that what the apprentice is doing, namely, getting the brooms to do the hard lifting for him, is what we basically do by outsourcing manual labour to energy. Human progress was powered first by the use of pack animals, horses and donkeys. And then the Industrial Revolution was powered by energy: by coal, and then oil, and gas. And our post-fossil world is going to be powered by solar energy, and nuclear fusion, and who knows what. So, the move to outsource labour to forms of energy - magic forms of energy - is really the signature move of the progress of humanity. That's why the sorcerer's apprentice, and carrying the water, and using the magic brooms to do it is such a beautiful illustration of what we've achieved as humanity over the last few centuries. 

So of course, one reading is this Precautionary Principle. Don't mess with things you don't understand. In our world, in which we are understanding the code of life, where we're using CRISPR-Cas to rewrite DNA sequences, where we can clone animals and probably human beings (although we've decided not to), where we can adapt the constituent forms of the building blocks of life. This seems to make sense. There's dangerous knowledge, there are forces that we don't understand. And as apprentices, if we use spells and forces we don't understand, there might be lots of unintended consequences. And, if we don't have a wise old magician to save us, then we will have flooded our world. If we don't have a wise old magician to save us, perhaps we will have heated our world so that it becomes unliveable.

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I think there's nothing wrong with seeing The Sorcerer's Apprentice as a precautionary tale. After all, there are lots of processes, which could lead to runaway growth, which could lead to destruction, which could undermine our health or our future. And in all these processes, it's worth trying to get a sense of what the consequences are. If we decide, for example, not to clone human beings even though we might be able to, this is an ethical limit, a moral limit that we put to our human skills, to our human capacities. 

But I'd also like to explore some of the other elements of this story. And the first is, what would you have the apprentice do? If you think that the apprentice shouldn't have used the magical spells, that the apprentice should have just carried the water by hand, pail by pail, to fill up the reservoir? Is that what human beings should have done? Should we not have messed with gas, or oil, or coal, or even burnt wood, or had pack animals? Should we just have stayed in the situation that we were as hunter-gatherers? Should we not have tried any of this new technology, even though that has led to civilization and to our survival, and to health and wealth? 

And this goes a little bit deeper, because what do we think that the instruction of the old sorcerer was? On the surface, it seems that the instruction is: do this by hand. But remember, that this young apprentice is being apprenticed to a sorcerer. And the sorcerer conveniently leaves and leaves the young apprentice in charge. When you are training somebody, when you are mentoring somebody, you can tell them how to do things, you can supervise them, but there is a point in the training process where you have to let them try things on their own. You have to give them at least the impression that they're in charge. Perhaps you leave, perhaps you stay in the neighbourhood, perhaps you still observe from a distance. And you say to the apprentice,: “don't mind me, I'm gone. You're in charge now”. And you see how they do. Can they cope with the responsibility? Are they going to interpret your directions literally: “my master said to just do it by hand, so I will do it by hand”. 

Or, will the apprentice say: “well, this is a bit of a challenge here, of course, because now I'm being tasked with taking the water from the well and bringing it to the reservoir, but I have I'm being given very explicit instructions about how to do this, and so my creativity and my invention is, which spell can I use? How can I use my sorcery? How can I use my magic? What is the effective way? What is the lazy way? What is the smart, and not the hard way to actually transport all this water?” 

Because the task is a bit silly. It's not clear from the story what transporting this water from one place to another actually leads to. Why does it need to be done? There might be a good reason for it, but it's quite a stupid task. It's a dumb task. It's not very complicated. So, the question really is: if you have a dumb task, which only requires muscle and a little bit of hand-eye coordination, are you going to spend your time doing it, or will you try to invent a machine, or a method, or a spell, or a programme to do it for you? This whole idea of mechanisation, this whole idea of outsourcing human labour - in this case physical labour - is in the essence of what the apprentice does. 

Now, the beauty of tales like The Sorcerer's Apprentice is that we can read them in different ways. I'm not sure there is a correct reading, or a dominant reading. The reason the story is being retold for thousands of years, is because it speaks to something in our humanity, it speaks to something in our ambitions, in our view of ourselves. Apart from being a precautionary tale, I think it's also a teaching tale. I think it's a tale about invention and creativity. I think it's actually a tale about apprenticeship.

What does it mean to be an apprentice? An apprentice means: to learn. It means that when you do things, you have a master or somebody who's training you, or mentoring you. You're still young, you are learning your craft. You don't know many things. Sometimes you might be a little bit overambitious or arrogant and think that you already know everything. And certainly, the idea that you can start a process without knowing how to stop it is part of this arrogance. “Well, let's just get this started, and see what happens, and we'll deal with how to stop it later. There's definitely that kind of youthful exuberance, that youthful arrogance, that youthful carelessness involved in the tale. 

But really, how are you going to learn if you never make mistakes? How are you going to learn if you never try things? How are you going to learn if you're never confronted with a situation where the old sorcerer has gone and has left you to your own devices? How are you ever going to be in charge of anything if you're never put in charge of anything, because there's always somebody supervising you, or always somebody who's telling you to do it exactly in this way, to do it by the book. And so, as an exploration of apprenticeship, I think it's much more than a cautionary tale.

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The reason I like the Sorcerer's Apprentice tale so much, is that to me being an apprentice is at the heart of the human journey. Humans are creative entities. We are the curious monkey. We are the sometimes smart monkey, sometimes stupid monkey. But we're the lazy monkey that's trying to figure out what's the smartest way to do these things, what's the laziest way to move stuff from one side to the other. 

If we look at the history of humanity, the history of our civilization, the history of our evolution: we've built this world, the world around us, we've invented it, we've discovered it, we've created it. We have started understanding physical laws, in order to build arches, in order to build aqueducts, in order to build roads. We started reading the stars, in order to improve agriculture, with our knowledge of weather and the seasons. The whole history of humanity in the last thousands of years, whether it happened in the so-called West, or in the East, or in different societies and civilizations, has been one of invention and creativity. 

In a way we could say the pursuit of magic. Somebody said: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Imagine transplanting somebody 100 years into the future, or somebody from 100 years ago. And you talk on your smartphone, you check things on the internet, you pay with your face or your thumb or a bit of plastic. They would be very confused as to what's happening. Imagine you being transported 100 years into the future. And things happening then which don't make sense to you, which you don't understand, which seemed to be like magic.

In that sense, we're all apprentices to a magician, and our curiosity to unravel the story, our desire to learn spells. What is a programme, a computer programme, but a complicated spell? What is a formula for a medicine but a complicated spell? What is an mRNA vaccine, but a complicated spell? It's a formula, like a spell: do this in this order, do a little bit of this, and a little bit of an eye of a newt, and boil it, and then and inject it into somebody's arm and they will be protected against this new virus.

We can see that we're actually pursuing this apprenticeship. It's not just all the things that we have built. You can look at all the materials that we've created, like plastic. We are going to create new materials at the moment, we're creating graphene, which is a is a material made from carbon atoms, which are arranged in a very simple form. It's a very elegant way to arrange carbon atoms, but it's going to make very, very strong materials. Very light, very strong, capable of revolutionising the way we build, the way we carry things. And yet, of course, it's also quite dangerous, because the unintended consequences of the plastic in the ocean, the plastic that will survive for hundreds of years, or thousands of years in its current state, and that we only use for a reusable bottle or something like that. It's not just knowing the spell, knowing the technology. It's also what we do with it. With graphene, we're a little bit more careful actually, there are all kinds of rules about how we apply it and to make sure that it doesn't get into nature. 

So, we see the precautionary side as well. But we also see the inventiveness side. The other thing I want to point out is that it's not just physical things. Sometimes when we talk about human creativity, we can look at cities, like the village and the city in the distance I'm looking down on. We can see the cars, we can see the heating systems, we can see the communication systems, we can see the logistics systems, we can see the supermarkets, everything that makes this area of the world a vibrant area. 

But it's also the invisible things, it's the virtual things. It's the money system, for example: we invented money, it's virtual, it doesn't really exist. They are signs, perhaps. We think that if they are coins, then they're worth something, or they're signs on pieces of coloured paper, or they are numbers in accounts, in ledgers. It's a big Excel sheet somewhere, being held in a special building with columns on the outside which we call a bank, or a central bank. We create these virtual systems. There is a system of law. Basically, everything that has columns outside: a court, or a bank, or an institute, or somebody who set standards, or a political place.

All these are also inventions, they're also creativity, they're also apprenticeship. The way we thought about money has changed. For example, over the last thousands of years, we've invented things like the stock exchange, we've invented pension funds, we've invented insurance, health insurance, we've invented derivatives and all kinds of other creative financial tools. And with all of these inventions, of course, we can see the capacity for abuse. We can see when a system goes out of whack. A financial system can get out of whack with financial crisis, or fraud, or monopoly building. There are all kinds of ways in things that we devise and discover and invent and create for a certain purpose can be misappropriated, misused for another purpose. That's part of creativity. You invent one thing for one goal and then, lo and behold, you can use it for something else. Sometimes it's a happy accident that you've invented something that has dual purpose or multiple purposes.

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All these virtual systems are also part of being an apprentice. We can imagine being an apprentice with political systems. We have representative democracy, where every few years we elect somebody to represent us, to make decisions, or to make laws, or to make financial decisions on our behalf. But there are other ways: people have experimented with citizen groups which examine a certain issue and study it. These are groups from the whole population, a cross-section of the population: they can give certain advice because they have studied it, rather than us following the soundbites that sounds good.

In terms of a family system, we used to have these large families with different generations living in the same place when we used to be much more agricultural. Now that half of the human population lives in cities, we've become more individualistic, we got smaller groupings. For about 70 years, we had the nuclear family - father and mother and two children, usually a girl and the boy, as the kind of ideal of the organisational structure. And now we're experimenting with different systems of composite families, and different generational arrangements. 

In our world of work, we've gone from working on farms, or being merchants or being artisans, to working in factories, to working in offices. Now we're discovering new ways of working, which are more independent, which might be working from home, which might be working from different positions, which might be a portfolio of work that we're doing for different organisations, rather than just spending a whole life working for one company. 

The human story has always been one of trying things out, has always been one of daring, in the sense of trying new things without the complete assurance that it will work out. Sometimes you don't know if something's going to work until you try it. You can project it, you can talk about it, you can tell other people that you're going to do it. But until you actually try it, and do it, and experiment with it - perhaps try it in a small bit, or in a bit that's kind of separated from the large system. 

If you're going to try a new monetary system, perhaps don't start at the root, but start in a subsystem. The people who started cryptocurrencies, for example, the idealists, they had this idea that we could actually agree on exchanging things with a decentralised system. And then, of course, the story is that it got taken over by speculation. But the idea of is quite good, the idea was inventive. The idea was revolutionary, the idea was radical. It tried to liberate ourselves from some of the things that we were struggling with, some of the organisational systems that we were struggling with, some of the social systems that were struggling with, some with the political system, some with the physical systems.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a story of apprenticeship. It's the story of: if we're tasked with moving water from one place to the next, how are we going to go about it? And yes, there is a precautionary side to it. I think that is definitely part of the story. Don't mess with things you don't understand. Don't start a process if you don't know how to stop it. But there's also this inventive side. There's also this mentoring side. There's also this learning side. There's also this stretching side. 

As I'm going on the last bit of the walk here, it's again a red glow over the sea, some clouds, can't see Africa today. With this story in mind, with this story of being an eternal apprentice. I would leave you on this path and ask you: what are you going to invent? What are you going to discover? What are you going to create? What aspect of your life are you going to be an apprentice in? What aspects of your life are you going to make easier for yourself? By not doing it physically, by not carrying the water? What spell are you going to work with? 

Thank you for listening. I will see you on the next episode of Cornucopia, which will probably be recorded in a different part of the planet. But for now, thanks for being with me on these Frigiliana walks.