Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I was thinking less about growth and more thinking of just the absolute level of the economy or welfare in the universe, in the future. Do you think at some point it’s just going to level off because we’ll have done everything we can? We’ll have grabbed all of the matter we can access, and we’ll have figured out the best configuration for it to produce value. And at that point, it’s just a matter of milking it for as long as we can. No, I think the world will end before that happens. I think at some point, there’ll be a new phase where we can directly make people in some way happier or more fulfilled or be more the people they want to be by manipulating something inside the brain. We do that in very crude ways today with antidepressants or even Viagra — not manipulating the brain, but it seems to make people happier. That will be an enormous breakthrough of sorts. It’s not right before us. I don’t even think it’s the next breakthrough, but it seems at some point it will be possible. Once we exploit that frontier, it seems to me the game will be about numbers — just having more very happy, very fulfilled people, and we’ll turn our attention to making higher numbers sustainable. I don’t see any obvious limit to that process. I do think the world will end before we complete that process, I don’t think we’ll ever leave the galaxy or maybe not even the solar system. But at some point it will just become a numbers game. Why do you think that we won’t leave the galaxy? And also, even if you think that that’s improbable, just given the fact that almost all of the potential value that we can generate is outside of this galaxy because that’s where most of the matter energy is. Shouldn’t we be pretty focused on that possible scenario where, in fact, we do leave the galaxy?…

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