Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…The Founding Fathers were aware. John Adams has this great quote of the lasting importance that we build the institutions of America correctly because they may well not wear out for thousands of years. If they’re built incorrectly, then they will not return — except by accident — to the right path. So, I think they actually did seem pretty aware of the importance of what they were doing. I think two things. One, I think this should give us a lot of humbleness or humility in terms of taking actions today. It’s perfectly plausible to me, maybe even more likely than not, that in a hundred years’ time, people would look back and say, “Oh, wow, these are the people they cared about, AI and worried about bio weapons,” in the same way as I look back at John Stuart Mill at the end of the 19th century, who was fighting for future generations by trying to keep coal in the ground because he thought that we were going to run out of coal very quickly and that would impoverish future generations. I think that’s actually quite likely. I think that gives a good argument for trying to do much more robustly good actions or trying to build up the resources that will be very useful in a hundred years’ time. Increasing the number of impartially concerned and altruistically motivated and carefully reasoning thinkers, for example. But I also think we have much better evidence than those people in the past. We have a much better understanding of physics, a better understanding of social science, of probability, even of ethics, and I think that gives us — But say, foreign policy. We can’t predict anything. I don’t know anyone good at predicting foreign policy outcomes. Those are maybe the most important issues in the world. If we can’t predict foreign policy two years out, how well can we understand our own hinge-yness? Here’s a general argument for thinking that we’re at least plausibly at a very influential time, and I think this argument works. I don’t think it means we’re at the most influential time. That’s a substantially harder argument to make. It’s just that the rate of technological progress is very high compared to history, and also very high compared to what must happen in the future. The argument is just that if we had economic growth of 2 percent per year for 10,000 years, then we would be producing 10 to the 87 world’s worth of economic output. That doesn’t seem . . . We’d be producing that. There are 10 to the 67 atoms within 10,000 light-years. So, we would be producing about a trillion trillion current civilization’s worth of economic output for every atom within 10,000 years. That just seems like, okay, that can’t happen. Technologically delivered economic growth is going to have to decrease when we look to the future. That actually suggests we’re living at a time of unusually high technological change. This is actually a very tiny window. It’s only been like 200 years that we’ve gotten anything close to this level of tech progress. Ten thousand years is also a very tiny window compared to hundreds of thousands of years that we’ve been around so far, and the millions, billions, or trillions of years we could be around in the future. That just seems like a really pretty good reason for thinking, okay, there’s at least a decent probability for thinking we’re at an unusually hinge-y time. Again, maybe not the most influential time, but something that’s pretty distinctive if you tell the story of the whole of civilization, not just the past, also the future.…

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