Jeff Bezos: prediction

Transcript context

…Yes, that’s what I’m known for, is the humor. Okay. Can you explain what the 10,000-Year Clock is? Is? 10,000-Year Clock is a physical clock of monumental scale. It’s about 500 feet tall. It’s inside a mountain in west Texas at a chamber that’s about 12 feet in diameter and 500 feet tall. 10,000-Year Clock is an idea conceived by a brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the ’80s. The idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking. And you can kind of just very conceptually think of the 10,000-Year Clock as it ticks once a year, it chimes once every a hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out once every a thousand years. So it just sort of slows everything down. And it’s a completely mechanical clock. It is designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention. So the material choices and everything else. It’s in a remote location, both to protect it, but also so that visitors have to make a pilgrimage. The idea is that over time, and this will take hundreds of years, but over time, it will take on the patina of age, and then it will become a symbol for long-term thinking that will actually hopefully get humans to extend their thinking horizons. And in my view, that’s really important as we have become, as a species, as a civilization, more powerful. We’re really affecting the planet now. We’re really affecting each other. We have weapons of mass destruction. We have all kinds of things where we can really hurt ourselves and the problems we create can be so large. The unintended consequences of some of our actions like climate change, putting carbon in the atmosphere is a perfect example. That’s an unintended consequence of the Industrial Revolution, got a lot of benefits from it, but we’ve also got this side effect that is very detrimental. We need to start training ourselves to think longer term. Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long-term, that are impossible to solve if you think short-term. And we aren’t really good at thinking long-term. Five years is a tough timeframe for most institutions to think past. And we probably need to stretch that to 10 years and 15 years and 20 years and 25 years, and we’d do a better job for our children or our grandchildren if we could stretch those thinking horizons. And so the clock, in a way, it’s an art project, it’s a symbol. And if it ever has any power to influence people to think longer term, that won’t happen for hundreds of years, but we are going to build it now and let it accrue the patina of age. Do you think humans will be here when the clock runs out here on earth?…

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