Robin Hanson: prediction

Transcript context

…Will the onset of social memes and cues mean that we will evolve to be stupider over longer periods of time? You won’t need whatever Darwinian programming you might have and will tend to lose it, or not? The trend that I’m aware of is that when we have tools to help us do something, like remember phone numbers, we get worse at that thing because we offload the task onto the tool. Then, we get better at other things. We put more investment into other things. So plausibly, in whatever category we get better tools, we will simply reallocate our mental resources to other tasks that we don’t have tools for. There is a way of reading your book where you’re actually teaching us how to do it, kind of the reverse of Machiavelli, who pretended to be teaching evil rulers but actually was complaining about them in Straussian terms. What you’re doing is complaining about hypocrisy, but the Straussian or Machiavellian reading of your book is, you’re teaching us all how to be better at it but with a very long-term goal: that, eventually, we’ll evolve into beings that don’t do this at all.…

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