Robots and the Never-ending Quest of Inclusion with John D. Peters
A Philosophical Deep Dive With Probably The Coolest Professor at Yale
I’m very excited to release this interview.
If you read my last post, you would have gotten the backstory for these interviews. The short version: I worked on a documentary called Hear, Falcon and only wound up using a small fraction of my interview footage so I decided to release the full interviews podcast-style.
So who is John D. Peters and why did I interview him?
John is the chair of English and Film & Media Studies at Yale. I had followed John for years before we met in person for our interview in the fall of 2021.
John wrote a book called Speaking into the Air, which I read in 2018. The book is about the history of technologies of communication from writing, phonographs, and telegraphs all the way up to computers and robots. The book focuses on how we have idealized communication between people, imagining it to be a sort of psychic mind-meld that can be smoothed out with new technologies. John deconstructs that idea and offers an alternative: we stop fixating on understanding each other perfectly (which turns out to be impossible anyway) and start loving each other.
The book changed my entire worldview. When I finished it, I fanboyed out and emailed John to thank him for his work, and he replied. We have kept up a correspondence since.
John calls himself a media theorist/media historian, which in his own words is “an intellectual poaching license” to study and teach about anything that piques his interest. John is really the professor-intellectual equivalent of an MMA fighter. He pulls from whatever field he finds valuable during the course of his research and distills his insights with powerful clarity.
Not only is John brilliant, but he is also one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. When I came to visit him, he gave me a walking tour of Yale’s campus. He then invited me and my crew into his home for our interview and was very generous with his time.
You can tell in my interview that John is always playful, self-aware, and brimming with knowledge. It was like talking to an encyclopedia, with a much better sense of humor.
John and I talk about his book, about the role of reciprocity in relationships, Alan Turing and robots, the Transcendentalists and their relationship to nature, and more.
Apologies if our conversation is dense and a bit inaccessible. We had been in dialogue for years before we sat down together, and so we got right to the heart of the matter in person.
I hope you get some value out of it.