The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — and what we can learn from it

A conversation with film producer, historian, and DemNext Advisory Board member Robbie Stamp

This is the second in a series introducing members of the DemNext organization. If you missed the first one, a personal story from Project Leader on Urban Design James Macdonald-Nelson, check it out here.

Robbie Stamp is Chief Executive of Bioss International and a Senior Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Resilience and Sustainable Development. He is also a film producer who worked closely with the late Douglas Adams on the film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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How would you describe your background, and what brings you to participating as an Advisory Board member with DemocracyNext?

My background, I suppose, is quite a varied one, but I would go back to my undergraduate degree as a historian, because history has been a lifelong love.

Why did people do what they did? Why did that happen? This has been a wonderful, multifaceted lifetime quest. You end up with, in this vast ocean of unknowing, tiny little islands of knowledge — which, if you're lucky, there's the odd bridge between.

I've worked as a television producer, I've worked as a feature film executive producer. I've also been involved in running the company that my mother founded, a small boutique consultancy business, which has been fascinated with how people make decisions in the face of uncertainty and complexity.

How do you exercise your judgment, when you can't know what to do? If you know what to do and there are no variables, no chooseables, then you're not having to exercise your judgment. So judgment is inherently about uncertainty.

Those strands are also held together by storytelling. I was lucky to work with the late, great Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I think one of the things that runs through all of Douglas's work is a fascination with uncertainty, doubt, perspective and a deep understanding that everything is perspectival. With regard to Homo sapiens and our view of ourselves in the great scheme of things: How do we both celebrate ourselves at our most constructive, minimize our most destructive selves, and get over ourselves at the same time? That’s incidentally probably true for all of us in our private and public lives!

It seems to me that sortition and participative democracy is an example of a kind of radical center, a new kind of radical humility, where we can explore that paradox. It's trying to find spaces where we are not driven apart, pulled apart by the centripetal forces of extremes. How do we build these deliberative spaces to engage radically better with complexity, with the paradox of our constructive and creative selves?

Deliberation says that problems can’t always be solved with ‘your first yellow sticky session’. Because if you could do that, the chances are it would have been done. It is only because these are gnarly, difficult problems and you need to provide the time to create the epistemic conditions — the physical space, the emotional space, the facilitative space — to grapple with the complexity.

That’s a long answer, but it's an answer which is to say, I think that this is some of the most important work one could be doing.

We recently hosted an event with another of our board members, Hugh Pope, as well as the author Yves Sintomer, whose books show that democracy by lottery has been part of the democratic tradition for as many years—if not more—than elections. In your early learning about democracy, did democracy by lottery ever come up?

Only in the Ancient Greek context, really. I knew that it was by lottery, but I knew that it was among a narrow section of society and that it excluded key groups.

If I'm really honest, I didn’t think about it much until a moment on a Zoom call with [DemNext Founder and CEO] Claudia Chwalisz. What Claudia talked about touched on decision making and judgment and uncertainty and teams working together. I was struck because there were some quite counterintuitive things for me around the collective grappling with complexity. And she used that phrase, “epistemic conditions” — I know it sounds a bit geeky but I love it!

After Claudia appeared in the Exponential View community, we got to talking, and I learned more, and she sent me Hélène Landemore’s book and the OECD papers. I became fascinated by how fast the ideas were growing and how practical they are. Here is something that could make a real difference, already is.

On another note, because I have done a great deal of work with organizations and institutions, I can also be a bit of a sounding board for DemocracyNext itself and its own organisational growth. What are some of the structural stresses and opportunities that will land on your shoulders, can I help?

I visited Bioss' website and saw that you are working on the question of “cognitive diversity” and how that can be put to constructive ends. That phrase comes up in our work as well, in the sense that elections tend to elevate a narrow form of intelligence, while Citizens’ Assemblies are able draw on the strength of our cognitive diversity. Could you expound on that?

Really interesting question. So where to start? Some of Bioss’ deepest roots are in the work of the great cyberneticians and complex adaptive systems thinkers, such as Gregory Bateson and his daughter Nora Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby.

Ross Ashby talked about something called the law of requisite variety. I will do it great injustice, but at its simplest, what I take away, is the powerful idea that any organism needs within it a sufficient variety of response to deal with the challenges of its environment.

If the organism doesn't have a sufficient variety of response, it will be competed out. It's true of a relatively simple organism, from the individual human, the social group, a organisation, a nation, up to, you could argue, the species at a planetary level.

One of the things about cognitive diversity that we have found over the years at Bioss, is that different people sense their world, or make sense of their world, in different ways — not just necessarily religious or ideological, but some people think more naturally, comfortably, in the widest contextual and relational space and some people are superb at delivering what is needed in the here and now.

There are of course different kinds of complexity in between. And we have found over the years that people are “in flow” at different levels of complexity and uncertainty.

To take a slightly bizarre example, if you need 50 camels dressed in tutus for a video shoot in Trafalgar Square at 6:00 a.m in the morning, somebody will be naturally brilliant, in flow, at making that happen. They might of course be moonlighting as a camel wrangler but that “work” does not inherently involve having to worry about geopolitical shifts or the breakdown of civic space in democracies.

Now, neither perspective on the world, wrangling camels expertly or wrangling geopolitics is better or worse. There's no moral judgment.

Both kinds of work need doing, and not everyone could be “in flow” in every role—we don’t, slightly unfashionably, think that anybody can be anything they want.

An effective system needs to recognise, honour and build on those spaces where any person is most likely to make their most meaningful contributions. Indeed we would argue it is a duty of care to better understand that for each individual so that people are neither routinely underwhelmed nor overwhelmed in their ‘work.’

Over three decades now, we’ve enjoyed about 160,000 structured conversations around the world in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. We see that for those who do think most widely about the impacts of economic, social, political, technological and religious contexts, that it has nothing to do with heritage, nothing to do with, gender, education, nothing indeed to do with being a confident “well educated” person.

For example, we’ve worked with non-literate people in Australia who think in these wider contextual ways, have done for thousands of years and indeed find it hard to understand when others don’t.

So to make the link with the work of DemocracyNext, the crucial thing it seems to me is, How can deliberation enable all the different ways of perceiving the world in terms of complexity and uncertainty (back to requisite variety) to be surfaced, honoured and genuinely heard?

If we can get better at doing this, then we build on our collective intelligence as we grapple with complexity. Claudia [Chwalisz] has talked about how, in an assembly, you’re not there just to give your opinion, you’re there to inquire into something. How do we create those spaces?

I'm also a senior fellow at Cambridge University, part of the Center for Resilience and Sustainable Development, and we are just taking the first steps to create an action research centre, studying the future of deliberative space — the epistemic conditions, the physical spaces, the art of facilitation, the neuroscience of deliberation, the role of artificial intelligence, different cultural views on the nature and rituals of deliberation.

There is one core hypothesis: that the quality of the deliberation in any given context will create more sustainable policies.

We're talking about some fairly complex stuff, but let’s talk about something that many people are already familiar with: the franchise that you worked on, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It’s beloved for so many people. Could you talk about that experience and what connections, if any, you see between it and what you're working on now?

I was very lucky to meet Douglas Adams when I was a TV producer, and he was interested in doing a documentary series about evolution. We never ended up working on that, sadly, because he died so young. He was only 49.

But we did create a company together called The Digital Village, which created a computer game called Starship Titanic, which it would now be fair to describe as a ‘cult classic’. It is still played lovingly to this day. We also created h2g2.com, the Earth edition of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy together, so taking the idea of trying to expand the guide’s entry on Earth from Mostly Harmless!

As we discussed earlier, Douglas had an endless fascination with perspective. It's a theme that ran through all of his work, alongside his humour and his wit, his extraordinary intelligence. He was, I think, touched with genius.

This fascination with perspective also connects to what we were just describing, cognitive diversity. Douglas just thought about diversity in the universe. He wondered ‘What if there was a super intelligent shade of the colour blue?’ (a Hooloovoo for those in the know!). He was consistently saying, ‘Well, you think the world looks like this, but what if you put the camera over here?’

That’s such an important thing when we think about deliberating together, the acknowledgement of the possibility for alternative perspectives.

Stephen Fry, who I know quite well, once said something very smart about Douglas and his work: Every Douglas Adams fan knows there are lots of other Douglas fans, but every Douglas Adams fan thinks that Douglas was speaking to them just that little bit more particularly.

They felt that they particularly understood what Douglas was getting at. He was a writer and a philosopher. He was exploring perspective, time, space, relationship, in a way which made you laugh, because of its perspective and wit.

The relationship with participative democracy is sortition’s respect for perspective, but on reading Hugh Pope’s accounts of observing the recent Paris Assembly there is clearly plenty of space for humour too!

Of course, much of Douglas's work, for example The Vogons, was about power. Brutal power and thoughtless power — power that just does what power does. For example, We've got to get rid of the Earth because there's a hyperspace bypass being built and it's in the way and it's got to go, nothing personal folks.

Douglas also created a game called Bureaucracy about something simple like getting a bank to change an address, based on a real experience. It became this Kafkaesque game about navigating bureaucracy. So I think engagement with power in its blandness, insensitivites, thoughtlessness and its cruelties and violence as well — that was in the books too.

There’s a scene where the people ask a supercomputer for the answer to the meaning of ‘life, universe and everything’. And after thinking for a very long time he computer goes, well, that's not really a question. So the answer is 42.

Douglas is interested in, how do you get the question right? Again, think about deliberation. How do you frame the questions? Who sets the questions? Who has the power to? There are, the more we talk, so many Douglas touch points with these issues.

I gave a talk recently called ‘Puddles, Paranoia, Power, and Douglas Adams’. Douglas used to tell this great parable of a puddle that wakes up one morning and it looks around at the hole that it's in and it thinks to itself, this hole fits me very neatly. In fact, this hole I'm in fits me so neatly, it must have been made specially for me. The puddle continues to believe that the hole that it's in was made specially for it as the sun comes up and the puddle evaporates.

I take that to be a plea for human beings to be cautious about believing we are the apogee of cognition, perception and intelligence. Douglas is on record as saying the whole import of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is every species in the galaxy thinks they're more central to the story than they are.

So it seems to me that sortition and participative assemblies are building that sense of trying to reach out to the other, do work that is inquiry, work through other perspectives, through the hard yards, with that kind of humility, in recognizing that one's own worldview is not the center worldview. Other people can think deeply and differently without being a baddie.

AI has recently been all over the news, but you've been working on this issue for some time as part of the British Standards Institute's National Standing Committee on AI. Do you think we should fear AI or be hopeful (or some mix of both)? How should this technology be governed?

Well.. “out of the crooked timber of humanity no true thing was ever made.” Kant’s quotation maybe speaks to a theme that has run as a thread through our conversation. AI will maximise the constructive aspects of human nature and also sadly the destructive too. So I am neither dystopian nor utopian about AI.

AI Systems are clearly already “manifest” in a wide set of complex relationships, and it is surely the job of the effective socio-technical governance of those AI Systems to understand just how those relationships develop over time, especially in relation to forms of power agency and autonomy. We need to put in place governance systems that deal with emergence, that monitor and consistently seek to understand - how is that working in society? Human affairs are messy and our relationship with AI system will be full of contradictions and messiness too.

As we consider these questions in relation to power dynamics and ask “what is this system intended to do?” and subsequently “how is it actually working out for us?” I think we should also be significantly more expansive in our consideration of exactly “who we mean by ‘us’.”

Which groups of humans are included in that “us”? Which groups are consistently excluded from the processes of design and review of our systems? Further still, should we also include consideration of animals or plants and the wider ecosystems on which we all depend in much broader conception of “us?”

And crucially we need to be significantly more inclusive of whom we are asking those questions in the first place.

I love the book, “Who Speaks for Wolf? - A Native Learning Story. The author Paula Underwood, is a lineal descendant of Tsilikomah, an Oneida (Iroquois) healer in Cascaskia on the Shenango River, and she makes a powerful call for systems thinking rooted in the conception of human subsistence in a rich web of relationships which include the more than human. She reminds us that human societies in many parts of the world through history, as they made their deliberations in the face of complexity and discussed where and how to place attention and resource, did so with a much wider conception of “us” than many power structures currently encourage or indeed permit.

So I see a clear role here for AI Assemblies whose standing role is a major contribution to the governance of this emerging relationship and the speed at which much is unfolding now means that the need for such is indeed an urgent one.

In your TED Talk, your poem on grief, you talk about pain not only being something we want to avoid, but remembering that it can be a place of “solace and connection.” In thinking about Citizens’ Assemblies, can that pain, or the common problems we face, be a source of connection? Can something good come out of that?

And as a last question, give us your thoughts on what the future may hold, ten or twenty years down the road.

That’s an interesting point about pain and connection. In a good deliberative process, you can say, look at what we created. In storytelling terms, in an assembly, you gather your travellers together, and then they enter their special world, which is the world of the deliberation with all of its trials and its tribulations and its moments of tears and revelation and pain and anger and confusion. We thought we were getting somewhere, and then we're not. All of those things happen. And then hopefully, you come out at the end with some important recommendations and suggestions.

There are also those moments in assemblies of perhaps seeing somebody dressed a certain way and thinking, well, I will never have anything in common with them. And you discover that actually you do. But equally, sometimes you really don't, because that's true too.

Finding and weaving those threads of connection is one of the roles an assembly can play. From a scaling point of view, the more times it happens, the more the movement builds, the more demanding people are of it, the more it can help us. If we grow the movement, the participation, the learnings, my goodness — think about the number of people, who have already been involved in assemblies throughout the world, whether at the local or national level, who we could learn from.

Whenever I talk about maximizing the constructive and minimizing the destructive, I always say the two things together. Because the opposition to this way of working will come. I suspect it will always be hard yards. Power very rarely relinquishes its power willingly. So how do we build this?

How do we help DemocracyNext and the proponents of Citizens Assemblies not be overwhelmed? Could we build a worldwide grouping of people who've been through these things, to do that alumni learning, of what worked, what didn’t? What happened when the results of the deliberation meet other forms of power?

I’m honoured to be part of what Claudia and Ieva and you and the team are building and long after I am gone, I hope I'll have been a contributor to a really thriving and core element to the functioning of healthy societies. DemocracyNext will still be doing the hard yards. But if we've got it right, this will be happening all over the world in many, many contexts, because of its sheer power and efficacy. That's the other thing: its sheer efficacy. This way of grappling with complexity does produce more sustainable, more resilient policies, which societies can live with, for a variety of reasons. They seem to have a legitimacy of a different kind; they are more resilient. That’s what’s working, and you’ve got to have this mix between being visionary and not giving anybody who doesn’t wish you well the chance to dismiss you as a bunch of hopeless utopians.