Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…We’ve been talking a lot about the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse here, and that is a somewhat trickier one to figure out how to solve. But you bring up climate change, where it seems like it’s a lot more tractable. It’s pretty clear what kinds of technologies you could work on in order to reduce the risk of really runaway climate change if we get unlucky. Do you think it’s particularly valuable for people to go and work on technologies that differentially reduce the risk of catastrophes like climate change? Oh, absolutely. I think, the last few years, a lot of those technologies have made more rapid progress than I would have thought — like electric cars, like fracking. Just the interest in China in cutting back on their air pollution, solar, nuclear. Some of it’s still on the drawing board, but I think they really intend to do it and probably will. So the progress in the fight against climate change, even in the last few years, is much higher than people think, even though we don’t see the results yet in terms of measurements of carbon emissions. I wouldn’t quite say I’m an optimist, but there have been big gains in the immediate past. Are there any other technologies that you’re excited about because they differentially improve civilizational stability?…

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