Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Is it because when you were growing up, there was still a chance that humans had against computers while playing chess, and now that’s just over? No, I never thought about the computers, didn’t worry about them. There was a chess-playing computer back then called Tinkerbell. People lugged it around to tournaments. It was quite large. You had to pull on it. It was on a cart. You needed more than one person to pull on the cart. It was a standing joke. You had the option of not playing it, but you knew that if you played it, you would beat it. A very different mentality. At the time, I thought chess-playing computers — it was a very far-off thing that they would ever be good. Obviously, I was totally wrong. I didn’t understand how they would manage to copy intuition in different ways. I think that Borges’ notion of the infinite, unending system, the infinite library, is what really appeals to me. With the internet, I would have found that more quickly — indeed, in the internet itself, as I have, in a sense, now. Ben Casnocha once made to me the interesting point, I’m the last generation to have lived in both worlds in a significant way: with internet and without internet. I’ve lived 22, 23 years with a lot of internet, and then I lived well over 30 years without any internet at all. That’s just not going to be a thing anymore. I feel very privileged, actually, to have grown up in libraries and not the internet, but then to have had the internet. One of the things I want to ask you is, since we’re in San Francisco, and everything is Elon Musk, and we’re always talking about what we’re going to do when we end up on Mars. How do we screen or select for the first group of settlers? What are the interview questions we should ask them?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.