Jimmy Wales: disagreement

Transcript context

…Oh, it’s a really good reference to a lot of different philosophies about meaning. The 20th century philosophy in general, from Nietzsche to the existentialist, to Simone de Beauvoir, all of them have an idea of meaning. They really struggle with it systematically, rigorously, and that’s what the page … And obviously, a shout-out to the Hitchhiker’s Guide and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I think there’s no external answer to that. I think it’s internal. I think we decide what meaning we will have in our lives and what we’re going to do with ourselves. If we’re talking about 1,000 years, millions of years, Yuri Milner wrote a book. He’s a big internet investor guy. He wrote a book advocating quite strongly for humans exploring the universe, and getting off the planet. And he funds projects to using lasers to send little cameras, and interesting stuff. And he talks a lot in the book about meaning. His view is that the purpose of the human species is to broadly survive and get off the planet. Well, I don’t agree with everything he has to say, because I think that’s not a meaning that can motivate most people in their own lives. It’s like, “Okay, great.” The distances of space are absolutely enormous, so I don’t know. Shall we build generation ships to start flying places? I can’t do that. Even if I’m Elon Musk and I could devote all my wealth to build, I’ll be dead on the ship on the way. So, is that really a meaning? But I think it’s really interesting to think about. And reading his little book, it’s quite a short little book. Reading his book, it did make me think about, “Wow, this is big. This is not what you think about in your day-to-day life. Where is the human species going to be in 10 million years?” And it does make you sort of turn back to Earth and say, “Gee, let’s not destroy the planet. We’re stuck here for at least a while, and therefore we should really think about sustainability.” I mean, one million year sustainability. And we don’t have all the answers. We have nothing close to the answers. I’m actually excited about AI in this regard, while also bracketing, yeah, I understand there’s also risks and people are terrified of AI. But I actually think it is quite interesting this moment in time that we may have in the next 50 years to really, really solve some really long-term human problems, for example, in health. The progress that’s being made in cancer treatment, because we are able to at scale model molecules, and genetics, and things like this, it gets huge. It’s really exciting. So, if we can hang on for a little while, and certain problems that seem completely intractable today, like climate change may end up being actually not that hard. And we just might be able to alleviate the full diversity of human suffering.…

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