Lex Fridman: prediction

Transcript context

…000 different materials and figured out that actually it was like a very special kind of bamboo that burned for the right amount of time and said, “Boom, I did it. I made the incandescent light bulb.” The ability to have a machine accelerate the degree to which we understand what those 10,000 materials can do, or synthesize knowledge so people can combine it and say, we’re going to take a little bit of CRISPR over here and a little bit of cancer science over here to develop a gene therapy that targets a particular inhibitor that allows the immune system to attack a protein that is explicitly related to pancreatic cancer. I do absolutely believe that we might be on the doorstep of those kinds of breakthroughs. And that makes me incredibly optimistic because I think at base it’s like, what’s life about? What’s abundance about? Why housing and energy? Well, because we think they’re fundamental to living a good life. You need a place to live, and people deserve the freedom to live where they want to live. Energy is what powers the entire economy. And more energy would power technologies that we can’t even imagine or are just beginning to, whether it’s supersonic flight powered by clean fuel or fusion technology that basically gives us infinite solar energy, the sun’s actual energy in a particular location. These are beautiful things that can happen. But also I think the good life is about health. It’s about health and it’s about the wealth that comes, and the freedom that comes from finding health in your own life. And I am incredibly optimistic that we might be at the cusp of a real golden age in taking all these little ingredients that we’ve spent decades on, whether it’s genomics and proteomics and a little bit of AI. We’re at a moment right now, I hope, where we can have this explosion of combinatorial intelligence. And that hopefully in an optimistic way, AI could be useful in accelerating us toward that future. But I also think to the point of this book, we have to get institutions right too. These are discoveries that are going to happen inside of institutions. And how those institutions work and how they’re funded and the incentives that are created by law or by technology, really matter in terms of the world that we build. And so that’s why I think it’s really important to not only be obsessed with what the technology can do, but how it’s instantiated in the institutions that we have because it ultimately is institutions and individuals that build the world, not technology acting on its own. Yeah. And I should say that you make a really great case for investing in weird science, meaning stuff that doesn’t on the surface make sense. You said lizard venom. There’s all this popular criticism of scientific projects that sound like a waste of money when in reality, at least in the scientific realm, projects that seem like they don’t have any positive effect might actually end up being the ones that transform human civilization as we know it because of the unintended discoveries that happen and all the eureka moments. All the special discoveries happen truly, when you’re just passionately pursuing a cool thing in science, that’s how scientific minds work. And so it makes sense to invest in exploring weird shit, the weird mysteries of the universe. Anyway, Ezra, what gives you hope? I’m a less temperamentally optimistic person than Derek by a lot actually. And I would usually give a pretty similar answer to this question that Derek gave, which is technological advancement. We live in an age of marvels. I guess I’ll say from the realist perspective, that we live in a more liquid moment than many. That if one of the advantages of the ’90s of much of the life that I have grown up in, is that much of the structure of technology, of global governance was fairly stable. We could sort of like look at it and there were certain, not certainties but fairly reliable guardrails of what was and what wasn’t going to happen. And there were disruptions like 9/11 and the financial crisis. They weren’t small and slowly they broke that entire system. But I think one of the things people sort of miss, sort of feel about the way history’s accelerated is that things have just all gotten faster and less predictable. And they really have, I think gotten faster and less predictable. We’re in an age it seems to be more like the early 20th century, late 19th century than like the 1990s. And that means the possibilities range very widely. When you think about AI, when you think about biotech advances, when you think about energetic advances, when you think about the sort of shifting nature of global alliances, of the technological and political systems, we are in the most high variance period that I think has happened in a very, very, very long time. And that carries tremendous peril. Things could go terribly, and it carries tremendous possibility. What if AI is an incredible boon for humanity? What if we do invent and deploy the clean energy technologies that deliver energy abundance. Not just a kind of answer to the worst of climate change, but genuine energy` abundance. Unlocking new things like mass desalination. And what if we do… Like I’m an animal suffering person. I’m a vegetarian. I care a lot about animal suffering. What if we did figure out cultivated meat that we grow in breweries and on scaffolds, and we don’t have to kill tens of billions of animals that we’ve raised in unimaginable suffering every single year? What if we do figure out how to make government better and more responsive? What if that thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing does work out? But it’s not hope, it’s like that’s a future. You have to create a future. You have to call into being a future you’ll have to fight for. So it isn’t so much that I find myself hopeful about what America or the world would be like in 2030 or 2040. But I find that I believe in the possibility of enough remarkable outcomes, that it makes the present really worth being engaged in. And really worth trying to do your small part, to bend the arc of the time in the direction that you find more just.…

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