Patrick McKenzie: prediction

Transcript context

…A hundred years from now, if we were all to look back as historians and say, “Oh, the internet — that was, in fact, a big mistake,” what’s the most likely scenario that could bring about such a judgment? I do not have a super-developed point of view with respect to whether AI is going to end the world. Relative to most well-educated people, I think that can’t be dismissed out of hand. People who have spent a long time thinking about it have spent a long time thinking about it. The arguments advanced against them by people who dismiss it out of hand are clearly less than powerful arguments. But I wouldn’t put a very high percent chance at it, which I say to excuse the following. If the human race does not exist in a hundred years, it is almost definitionally because of some knock-on consequence of the invention of the internet. If the human race ceases to exist, and the internet was necessary in the causal path to get to there, then I would regret the internet. In every other case, I would not regret the internet. I have an ebullience and love for it in a way that people in our social class in the United States are aggressively socialized out of having ebullience and true love for anything. I think that the internet is the capital G, capital W, Great Work of the human race in a lot of respects, that it is magical. It is an encapsulation of the best things about our society that is also tremendously, instrumentally useful in making all the good things better and ameliorating all the problems over sufficiently long time scales. It seems naturally to me that this is extremely important. This is extremely valuable, and it seems extremely underrated by almost everyone, including people who would consider themselves great fans of the internet but say, “Oh, I’m a great fan of the internet, but I’m a great fan of penicillin, too.” I think, in aggregate, the internet is obviously more important than penicillin by many orders of magnitude. Is it more important than medicine? I will bite that bullet. The internet is more important than medicine, the entire institution of medicine, from time immemorial to reasonable extrapolations of what we can do right now. Is it more important than writing? You couldn’t have the internet without writing, so writing was very important to get to the development of the internet. That might be one of the most important things about writing, that writing got us to the internet. That sounds like a little bit of . . . I know people will take that full quote and say, “Oh, this crazy, nonintellectual person,” but I think that there is a reasonable case for it. When you ran VaccinateCA, which helped people in California get access to COVID vaccines, what is it you learned about talent?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.