Rob Wiblin: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, and let’s say your modal scenario is everything ends in 10 thousand years. That’s still a long enough time horizon where the long-term results of higher growth now are very significantly positive for billions of humans. That will play the dominant role in a moral calculus. But the idea that somehow we’re going to be sitting here three million years from now, and I’ll have my galaxy and you’ll have yours, and we’re not even human anymore. It’s not even recognizable as something from science fiction. I would bet against that if we could arrange bets on it. Why do you think that we couldn’t develop kind of self-replicating probes? I agree that humans are not going to travel to other galaxies — that’s way too hard. But at some point, we should be able to create intelligence that somewhat resembles humans — or might even be better than humans — in some form that’s easier to transport through space on computers or whatever the future example of computers is. That kind of intelligence would have a much better shot at spreading to the stars. It can travel much faster, it’s much more resilient, and then it arrives there and starts creating more copies of itself. We don’t see self-replicating probes from other parts of the universe. Now maybe we are those self-replicating probes, in some way, right? We were superseded. But the fact that we don’t, in an obvious way, see them, to me strengthens the case for pessimism.…

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