Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…But I don’t know if you still have the view that we have like an 800-year timeline for human civilization, but that sort of timeline implies that intelligence actually is going to be the. Because the reason we have an 800-year timeline presumably is like some product of intelligence, right. My worry is that energy becomes too cheap and people at very low cost can destroy things rather easily. So, say, if destroying a city with a nuclear weapon cost $50,000, what would the world look like? I’m just not sure. It might be more stable than we think, but I’m greatly worried, and I could readily imagine it falling apart. Yeah. But I guess the bigger point I’m making is that in this case, the reason the nuke got so cheap was because of intelligence. Now, that doesn’t mean we should stop intelligence, but just that, if that’s like the end result of intelligence over hundreds of years, that doesn’t seem like intelligence is always that good.…

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