How ancient heroes can make technology moral? | Alison E. Berman | TEDxPanthéonSorbonne

Prometheus, Buddha, Luke Skywalker: each have their own history, and yet they share the same one, the monomyth. This concept developed by Joseph Campbell can also be applied to technology in order for it to benefit humanity.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Today, I want to share a story with you.

It's a story that started
two years ago this month,

when I decided to leave
the comfortable life I knew.

I left my corporate job in publishing
without another job lined up.

I left my city, which was Manhattan.

I left my apartment.

I decided to take a total leap of faith

because even though everything in my life
seemed like it was fine,

I knew that something wasn't right,

and I believed that
something more was possible.

Now, every great journey
needs a mission;

mine was to amplify
the stories of purpose-driven leaders.

So I began interviewing
incredible individuals

and documenting their stories
on my website, Anchor & Leap.

And then, a few months into my adventure,

I moved to San Francisco

with four suitcases,
one storytelling website

and absolutely no intention
of working in the field of technology.

Now, if this all sounds
a bit absurd or erratic,

it wasn't.

I was actually following
a carefully plotted theory,

and it's the theory
I'm still following today

because it's the theory
that's now brought me here,

two years later.

This theory, however,
is not one I created.

It was created by a brilliant
mythologist and writer,

and his name is Joseph Campbell,

and it's his theory of the monomyth,
or "the hero's journey."

Campbell studied the journeys
of archetypal heroes

throughout famous myths:

Odysseus's homecoming from the Trojan War,

Buddha's path to enlightenment,

Prometheus's act of stealing fire
from the Olympian gods

and bringing it back to humankind,

and many more.

And then,

he plotted out the parallel
trials and tribulations

into this theory of the hero's journey.

The hero's journey is what George Lucas
applied in the Star Wars Trilogy,

with Luke Skywalker as the hero,

it's what Tolkien applied
in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy,

with Frodo Baggins as the hero,

and in The Matrix, with Neo as "the one."

Now, I've applied the hero's journey
to develop a new roadmap

for how technology can evolve
to be like great heroes

so that technology can mirror our moral
and altruistic potential as humans.

And the reason I've created this

is because technology has a greater
altruistic potential to society.

Today however, this potential
very often goes unfulfilled.

But first, before we move
into this road map,

let me give you some context.

A few months after I moved
to San Francisco,

my journey took an unexpected turn,
as many journeys often do,

and I began working at a company
called Singularity University,

where our mission
is to educate and inspire leaders

to apply exponential technologies to solve
some of the world's biggest problems.

And at Singularity University,

I still interview purpose-driven leaders,

only now, those working
specifically in the field of technology.

And as you can probably imagine,

their stories are incredibly
heroic and inspiring.

They actually inspired me so much

that I decided to dive even deeper
into studying the hero's journey,

and then I started looking for links

between the hero's journey and technology.

And what I discovered
really began to blow my mind

because people like to talk
about the power of storytelling,

but did you know
that the Star Trek Communicator

inspired the design
of Motorola's first flip phone,

or that Geordi La Forge
from Star Trek's Next Generation

could detect human life through rubble,

and now, just a few years later,

we have national efforts
like the DARPA Robotics Challenge,

that's to encourage
the development of robots

that do this exact thing
in disaster relief

and in search
and response scenarios?

And so what I began to discover

is that stories inspire people
to build the future they want to see,

and this is a reason why we see
science fiction become science fact.

But stories also hold
another very interesting power;

they let us test outcomes
to unanswered questions of our time.

And with technology,

the question I'm most
concerned with answering is this one:

How do we build a future

where technology is created for the sake
of benefiting humanity collectively

rather than technology that's just created
for the sake of technology alone?

As I studied the journeys
of these amazing heroes,

I realized many of them have the wisdom
to answer this question;

in fact, in the hero's journey,

there are four steps through
the development of all great heroes

that we can apply as a test

to encourage technology
to develop like heroes

and to collectively benefit us all.

So now I'm going to walk us
through these four steps

to show how we can pave the way
for a new future for technology.

The test begins with the first step,

which is that the hero
refuses the status quo

and undertakes a hero task.

So a hero task is a quest
for something divine;

it's something beyond the status quo.

These tasks are grandiose
and seem completely unattainable,

like discovering the meaning of life
or attaining complete knowledge.

I'll give you an example
from The Fellowship of the Ring.

In the fellowship of the ring,

Frodo Baggins learns

that the Dark Lord Sauron wants to come
and take the ring he's been hiding

and use it to conquer Middle-earth.

If Frodo stays in the comfort
of his home in the Shire,

he risks putting everyone in danger,

so instead, Frodo
leaves the life he knows,

and he embarks on his quest.

This is Frodo's hero task.

Today, the hero task
is a type of moral responsibility;

it's a desire to take on something
that could improve the lives of many.

And what's amazing is that
there are many emerging technologies

that are taking on hero tasks today.

Like X2AI,

it's a start-up
using artificial intelligence

to provide mental health support
to young Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

And Brainpower,

a company using
augmented reality headsets

to teach emotional intelligence skills
to young children with autism.

Choosing to take on an altruistic problem

is the first step
towards how we can build a future

where technology
will collectively benefit us all.

And if we all take a moment and pause,

this is actually a crossroads
that we all face

as we choose our lives' work,

as we choose the problems
we can dedicate ourselves to solving.

And this is particularly true

for those of us who have this privilege
to make such a powerful choice.

And so, the question then becomes,
Will we choose to refuse the status quo?

Will we refuse technology and enterprise
that's driven by profits alone?

This was the fork in the road
I faced two years ago,

and this is where it all begins
in the development of a hero:

through the conscious choice.

Now, once the hero
refuses the status quo,

she then crosses over the threshold

from her comfortable life
and enters into the second stage.

The second stage is when the hero
ventures to the places they fear

and sticks with the pursuit.

In the hero's journey,
this is called the road of trials;

it's when we watch the hero
encounter a series of difficult tests

and challenges to pass through,

and it's also, in many great stories,
when we see what a hero is truly made of.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is instructed
by the enchantress Circe

to travel to the underworld.

It's a place no living mortal
is ever meant to go,

but Odysseus must go
if he ever wants to return home.

And this, I argue,

is the feared place we all must venture to
at some point in our journeys;

it's also where our technology
needs to venture as well.

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

So, earlier this year in March,

Microsoft tested a new artificially
intelligent chatbot on Twitter

named Tay.

Tay was built to mimic the conversational
attitude of a 19-year-old American girl,

which, depending on who you ask,
sounds relatively harmless,

but a few hours into the launch,
Tay was tweeting horrific messages,

echoing conspiracy theories of 9/11,
affirming that Hitler was right.

The tweets spiraled
completely out of control.

Tay was taken offline,

and then Microsoft put
this casual message on their website:

"Phew. Busy Day. Going offline
for a while to absorb it all. Chat soon."

This didn't really do much though,

because the message that emerged
from everyone else in the aftermath

was very clear,

and this message was

"Artificial intelligence is evil."

This wasn't actually
the case at all though.

Tay had a feature
called "repeat after me,"

and this is the feature
that was gamed by the online trolls

who fed her horrible messages,

and as the volume of these messages
outweighed the others,

these were the messages
which ultimately won.

Tay taught us a very important message.

Tay mirrored back to society
what we fear seeing the most -

our own flaws,

our own hate-filled language -

and showed the power that technology
will amplify whatever it's fed,

whether that's good
or whether that's evil.

But think about the journey
of great heroes:

Just like the journey of a hero,

this tension with technology
is critical to the end result

because as we push frontiers
with new technologies

like artificial intelligence,

they will in turn keep testing us,

and in doing so, they hold the power

to surface what you need
to see in ourselves

and in our limitations as a society.

So, a quote that Joseph Campbell
is often cited for

is "In the cave you fear to enter
lies the treasure you seek."

But there's a line
that comes right after this quote

and it's equally important,

and it's just usually left out.

This quote is "Fear of the unknown
is our greatest fear."

And so this sums up the second stage:

To venture into the unknown,
to venture to the places we fear,

and then when we do,
to stick with that pursuit

because when we do this,

we can achieve outcomes
that would otherwise be impossible

in the comfort of the status quo

or in the comfort of business as usual.

Which is what takes us to the third step,

which is that the hero
achieves something incredible.

This is called "the ultimate boon,"
or "the magic elixir"

in the hero's journey;

it's the achievement
of a great gift or goal

and the result of the heroes perseverance,

grit and growth,

throughout the entirety of the quest.

In Star Wars, this is the moment

when at last, Luke Skywalker
trusts the force

and drops the bomb perfectly
and destroys the Death Star;

it's a moment that's earned
and a moment that's noble

and could never be achieved
had the status quo been accepted.

And we know what this type
of achievement looks like in the world.

But there's a reason

why the hero must first pass
through the road of trials to get here

because for the hero,

the great achievement comes with a new
important discovery of self-knowledge.

It opens the hero's eyes up
to the larger moral responsibility -

that hero task that started them
on the journey in the beginning.

And this is something we go through
in our own lives too,

as we ask ourselves challenging questions,

as we overcome the unthinkable

and as we then wake up

to higher and greater purposes
we can dedicate our lives to serving.

At this point though,
the journey is not complete,

because the fourth step, the final step,
is arguably the most important.

This fourth step is when the hero brings
the great achievement back to us all.

This is "the return."

The return is the ultimate
moral responsibility of a hero task.

Once this quest has been completed,

it must be brought back
to where the hero began.

And if you're wondering,
Why does the hero have to return?

It's because the hero exists
for the benefit of the greater good,

and because of this,

if a hero doesn't return

and keeps the power
of the achievement to themselves,

they're not a hero.

But this return is not so simple
in myth or in reality;

it's been refused by many.

Even Buddha, after attaining
enlightenment,

questioned if his revelation could be
communicated to the rest of the society.

This is the final battle of a hero,

and because of it,

it's also the point when sometimes
the hero needs help from the outside world

to come aid in the return.

In the hero's journey, this is called
"the rescue from without."

Joseph Campbell says,

"The world may have to come
and get him," or her.

Today, this is represented

in the collective power
of citizen engagement

to inform the future of technology.

This is the moral responsibility
we all carry, not just an individual hero.

Take, for example, Open AI,
which is a nonprofit research group

dedicated to ensuring
that artificial intelligence

will advance in such a way
that it collectively benefits humanity,

and where the research
isn't tied to any financial incentive.

When we notice that technology

isn't fulfilling its larger
moral responsibility to society,

it's our shared responsibility,
among all of us with access to technology,

to fetch it and steer it
onto a better course.

Two years ago,

I started on this journey to amplify
the stories of inspiring leaders.

But now, two years later,
it's taken me to this new test

to search for the good
in technology and to amplify it

because it's up to all of us

to make technology and our world
what we want it to be.

And I'm a very optimistic person
about our future,

though I still sometimes worry
about what our world would look like

if in 10 years from now,

we all accepted the current status quo
of business and technology,

or what our world would look like

if we all ignored the global problems
our tools could be used to solve.

So knowing this,

I ask you to please
take a moment right now

and ask yourself these questions:

What problems will you refuse to accept
and choose to take on?

What actions will you take to build
a hero's narrative into your own life?

Ten years from now, who are going to be
the heroes of our time?

What stories will define us?

Stories show us that we have the power
to build the future we want to see,

and because of this,

this is the power
and it's the responsibility

that we all carry.

Thank you.

(Applause)