Adam Becker: commitment

Transcript context

…And that's just not going to happen. Yeah. It's so interesting. And and this seems to be an example of folks that wants to maximize human agency. Maybe we'll get to the AI agency in a little bit. But it it's it's almost as you know, like Sam Altman the other day, he said, well, to succeed in the modern world, you need to be high agency. This seems to be the new term that's used in cinema. And and by the way, it's great that I'm talking to a physicist here because we love talking about the philosophy of agency. But but very very in a very basic term, you know, I think of it as the the ability to you yeah. You know, the the extent to which you are the cause of your own actions. So that the causal origination and possibly the extent to which you can control the future. So causal efficacy. But I'm talking to a physicist now, and and you know that we're not really the cause of our actions. Maybe we're a causal conduit. So they they they imagine a world where we could collectively basically imprint our will on the universe. We could escape our kind of causal, you know, the causal clutch es of of our embedding, and we can just go on forever and reach to the stars. What's wrong with that? So many things. I mean, you can get into questions about, like, free will and consciousness, and I'm not gonna do that. What I will say is, you know, I I I actually The thing about that that I wanna focus on, is the same thing I focus on in the relevant part of my book. They just don't understand that we are not going to be going out and imprinting ourselves into the cosmos at large. That is not the future of humanity. You know, there's a part of There's this book by Will McCaskill, this this effective altruist. Right? What We Owe the Future. And if you take a look, he's got this afterword for it that's on a website that he runs, but he's got a QR code for it at the end of his book. And he talks about how, you know, a good future for humanity would involve colonizing the observable universe and, you know, sending ships off to, you know, all the galaxies that we can reach in our universe and and like intergalactic colonization. And that is just not going to happen. Like, we're we're not leaving the solar system. The stars are simply too far away. It's too hard to get there and it is too difficult to get ourselves up to any reasonable fraction of the speed of light. And even if we did, the number of planets that are remotely like Earth appears to be pretty low. I mean, it's just space is such an inhospitable place. We've evolved to be suited for this planet, and there are not other places like it that are waiting for us. This is our only home. Yeah. I mean, I was inspired by James Lovelock's Gaia theory, which was, you know, kind of stimulating people to think about the Earth as a system rather than us as individuals. Yeah. There's a bit of a spectrum here. Right? Because some of them, perhaps in this case, they think that us as individual bodies, we can kind of disconnect ourselves from the system and go somewhere else. But it goes even further than that in Silicon Valley. They some of them think of us as causal patterns or as programs, memetic programs that could be uploaded to computers and and whatnot. But you you see you see the pattern though that what they're doing is is they're increasingly abstracting, us and our place in the system that that we exist in. Absolutely. Yeah. No. They don't want to be bodies.…

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