Jerusalem Demsas: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Well, you look at cartoons from the 1960s, The Jetsons — they have a flying car. That’s where the expression comes from: “They promised us flying cars, and all we got was 140, now 280, characters on Twitter.” That was not a joke. I watched that as a kid. Everyone took it seriously. “Okay, I’m going to get my flying car. I just have to grow up a bit.” The idea that you could just apply reason and technology to problems, and things in America would keep on getting better was a very common view. And if you wrote a novel in that direction, it eventually became boring, but people wouldn’t laugh. Maybe there are other cultures who are writing utopias. I don’t know. You are the one who reads internationally. I don’t know of any, really. Asimov’s I, Robot — it’s not utopia, but things work out like, oh, you elect the robot president, he’s a pretty good leader. Different weird things happen, but you hold it all together, even though, at a micro scale, all the laws are violated. Today, I consider it a kind of fictional story, Eliezer: well, the AGI is going to destroy us all is obviously beyond dystopia. This is the end of everything. The people are like la-di-da. There was some investment bank. I think they issued investment recommendations, and they said, “Oh, this stock will go up. This stock will go down. And by the way, there’s a 40 percent chance the world will end in 10 years.” Then they started talking about currencies without missing a beat, and our world, to me, seems like that.…

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