Luke Burgis: belief

Transcript context

…Great. I have questions about your latest book and your thought more generally. Is the current age of pessimism and despair ending? I think it might get worse before it gets better. I hope it ends. There’s been a lot of talk among friends of mine who are very pro-tech accelerationists that the pope is going to really come down on tech in his new papal encyclical, which at the time of our conversation is not out yet. There’s been a lot of speculation about it. I think they’re absolutely wrong, for instance, in that case. I think he’s going to be very optimistic about what AI can do for humanity, of course, with some cautions about the way that it develops. I think that even among my tech friends, I’m seeing a lot of pessimism for what a thinker like the pope might say and not even giving him the benefit of the doubt that we might be entering an age where we can actually learn more about what it means to be human than less. That might lead to a renaissance in the humanities, for instance. I think AI is performing a kind of via negativa on the human person, maybe even the human soul, in helping us discover who we are. To me, that’s very exciting. I agree with you about the pope, but if social contagion is such a dominant force, how does the age of pessimism get turned around? What’s the mechanism by which things will flip?…

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