Speaker 1: You are a human being, and one day you will die.
Speaker 1: But when you die, you can take comfort in the
Speaker 1: knowledge that you're part of something larger than yourself. You're
Speaker 1: a member of the human race, and as long as
Speaker 1: the human race continues, in some ways, you do too.
Speaker 1: All of us, every living thing, are individual members in
Speaker 1: a cycle of life and death that began four billion
Speaker 1: years ago when that first single living cell divided into two.
Speaker 1: Two billion years after that, along came sex, and birth
Speaker 1: led to more sex, led to more birth, And as
Speaker 1: long as that cycle continues in a species, death can
Speaker 1: happen in the background. It must happen. Really. It may
Speaker 1: sound a little cruel, but in the bigger picture, the
Speaker 1: death of one thing is kind of meaningless so long
Speaker 1: as the species continues. Humans tend to divide life along
Speaker 1: the borders between species, and for good reason. It's not
Speaker 1: an arbitrary dividing line. A species is what makes the
Speaker 1: difference between eating a meal and engaging and cannibalism. Across
Speaker 1: the animal kingdom, individuals routinely do things that risk their
Speaker 1: own life to save members of their species. You almost
Speaker 1: never see that kind of behavior between different species. True,
Speaker 1: there are plenty of examples of species where eating one's
Speaker 1: own kind is an everyday act, and there are examples
Speaker 1: of adorable dogs adopting motherless lambs, But the chances are
Speaker 1: better than not that an animal will show preferential treatment
Speaker 1: towards a member of its species over others. Most importantly, though,
Speaker 1: any member of a species can combine their genes with
Speaker 1: another member and come up with new and fascinating ways
Speaker 1: to push the species further along the evolutionary path where
Speaker 1: it's better able to grow and flourish. Homo sapiens, the
Speaker 1: species that you, me and every human alive are members of,
Speaker 1: means in Latin wise human, and it's a bit of
Speaker 1: flattery since it is the name that we human beings
Speaker 1: gave to ourselves. But here today, so far removed from
Speaker 1: our ancient origins, it's easy to forget that the name
Speaker 1: is meant to distinguish us from other types of humans.
Speaker 1: As recently as fifty thousand years ago, we shared this
Speaker 1: planet with no less than three other human species. In
Speaker 1: the same way you might walk about the Earth today
Speaker 1: and come upon a lion, one species of cat, and
Speaker 1: tabby an entirely different species of cat. In the very
Speaker 1: recent geological past, you would have been able to meet
Speaker 1: with a Neanderthal in a French cave and a Denisovan
Speaker 1: in Siberia, and had you wandered on down to Indonesia,
Speaker 1: you would have been able to meet a tiny variety
Speaker 1: of human called Homo floresiensis, who stood four ft talls. Today,
Speaker 1: though there is only the one species of human us,
Speaker 1: Homo sapiens. We can't say for certain, but we strongly
Speaker 1: suspect that the ultimate reason why we are the only
Speaker 1: ones left is because of our intelligence. Perhaps the planet
Speaker 1: was presented with a series of tricky environmental challenges and
Speaker 1: we were the only ones intelligent enough to successfully negotiate them.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was the universally devastating step in the great filter,
Speaker 1: or maybe that's not right at all. We've only recently
Speaker 1: discovered that denis Ovans and Floresiensis existed, but we've known
Speaker 1: about Neanderthals for some two hundred years now, and over
Speaker 1: time we've come to realize that they weren't the dim
Speaker 1: wits we initially took them for. We now know that
Speaker 1: they used tools like us, and they may have mastered
Speaker 1: fire as well, and Neanderthals might have been the earliest
Speaker 1: humans to bury their dead, which shows the capacity to
Speaker 1: think about abstractions like an afterlife. Whether or not we
Speaker 1: were the only human species with the capacity for abstract thought,
Speaker 1: The one thing we can say for certain is that we,
Speaker 1: Homo sapiens, are the only ones left on Earth. To
Speaker 1: wonder at the immense responsibility we have to simply carry
Speaker 1: on is the one single remaining species of our kind.
Speaker 1: That responsibility to survive and thrive is big enough just
Speaker 1: being the only human species left on Earth, but it
Speaker 1: grows to overwhelming proportions when you consider the idea that
Speaker 1: we could be the only intelligent life and the whole
Speaker 1: endless universe. The precariousness of our situation begins to sink.
Speaker 1: In The family paradox appears to show that the entire
Speaker 1: future of intelligent life in the universe rests on the
Speaker 1: likelihood of us staying alive. The entire population of Homo
Speaker 1: floresiensis the species of tiny humans lived on a single
Speaker 1: island called Flores in modern day Indonesia. They lived there
Speaker 1: for almost a hundred and fifty thousand years, and then
Speaker 1: suddenly they disappeared. One current theory for their extinction is
Speaker 1: that a volcano erupted and killed them all off, which
Speaker 1: would have been relatively easy, since the entire species dweled
Speaker 1: only on that one island. We humans alive today call
Speaker 1: our island Earth, and we have to wonder what our
Speaker 1: volcano will be. Right now, there are about seven and
Speaker 1: a half billion of us humans alive. Seven and a
Speaker 1: half billion is an enormous number, to be sure, but
Speaker 1: it's a small fraction, tiny fraction of all the Homo
Speaker 1: sapiens who have ever lived. In the fifty thousand years
Speaker 1: since we emerged as modern humans early on and continuing
Speaker 1: for most of our species history, we had an extremely
Speaker 1: short average life expectancy, somewhere around ten to twelve years.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean that the average person died at age eleven.
Speaker 1: It means that if you take all the people who
Speaker 1: lived into old age and all the children who died
Speaker 1: in infancy or at birth, so many people died young
Speaker 1: that the average age of death was dragged down all
Speaker 1: the way into the tweens. Plenty of people lived into
Speaker 1: what we would consider old age. It's just that many,
Speaker 1: many more didn't survive childhood. And this is how it
Speaker 1: was for most of human history. That extremely high childhood
Speaker 1: mortality rate was eventually overcome. Through the use of our
Speaker 1: clever sapiens brains, we figured out things like germ theory
Speaker 1: and anatomy and nutrition, and all of them converged to
Speaker 1: create a world that a child could be born into
Speaker 1: where they had a very good chance of surviving into adulthood.
Speaker 1: We humans used our brains to help our species be
Speaker 1: better able to survive, and as a result, our population
Speaker 1: began to boom. Around two thousand years ago, there were
Speaker 1: probably three hundred million people alive on Earth. About three
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years ago, the human population had grown
Speaker 1: to five million. Thirty years from now we will hit
Speaker 1: the ten billion mark, So in just three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years we will have grown by nine billion, five
Speaker 1: hundred million people. All told, you can count yourself as
Speaker 1: one of the hundred and eight billion modern humans who
Speaker 1: have ever lived. An astronomical number, to be sure, But
Speaker 1: the number of humans who have ever lived, as immense
Speaker 1: as it is, is a drop in the bucket of
Speaker 1: the number of humans who haven't lived yet. This is
Speaker 1: philosopher Toby ord Our. Species Homo sapiens is about two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand years old UM, so that's about two thousand
Speaker 1: centuries that we've been around. If we could survive that
Speaker 1: long again, uh, you know, we'd see two thousand centuries
Speaker 1: of civilization. That's about twenty times longer than civilization has
Speaker 1: been around so far, with just wondrous things being created
Speaker 1: throughout that whole time that we can barely imagine. And
Speaker 1: that's even with relatively little in the way of fancy
Speaker 1: science fiction technological progress that we might imagine. Remember back
Speaker 1: when we talked about the possibility that we don't see
Speaker 1: alien life in the universe because they opted to stay
Speaker 1: home instead, Let's say that we humans have that same
Speaker 1: type of home body nous in our far future, sticking
Speaker 1: around on Earth rather than spreading out into the rest
Speaker 1: of the galaxy. So Earth remains the only planet where
Speaker 1: you can find a human population. And let's say that
Speaker 1: over the course of a billion years our population gradually
Speaker 1: lowers and stabilizes, that one billion people alive on the
Speaker 1: planet at any given time, And if our lifespans stick
Speaker 1: around where it is today, then by a billion years
Speaker 1: from now, an additional ten to the sixteenth power humans
Speaker 1: will have been born. That's ten with fifteen zeros after it,
Speaker 1: ten quadrillion, a million, trillion future human lives hundred and
Speaker 1: eight billion doesn't seem quite so big now. That ten
Speaker 1: quadrillion number is a low end estimate. If we do
Speaker 1: nothing but continue to plot along as a species for
Speaker 1: the next billion years, we could expect to reach it,
Speaker 1: But we might also increase the number of future human
Speaker 1: lives dramatically if we humans in a a as a species.
Speaker 1: One of the ways that most futurists expect we will
Speaker 1: innovate is by leaving our bodies behind and entering into
Speaker 1: a digital world, becoming what's called a post biological species.
Speaker 1: Imagine that we learned how to free the human mind
Speaker 1: from its bonds to the neurons and dendrites and axons
Speaker 1: that make up the functioning human brain. No real reason
Speaker 1: that the human mind should require our selves to think
Speaker 1: and to experience. What if the human brain is just
Speaker 1: one of many ways to produce what we call consciousness.
Speaker 1: What if there are other ways that could produce the
Speaker 1: same thoughts, the same experiences, but with hardware instead of squishy, soft,
Speaker 1: extremely fragile material we call the brain. To understand how
Speaker 1: we could create consciousness inside a machine rather than a
Speaker 1: human brain, you should know a little bit about the
Speaker 1: hard problem. First, Back in The Philosopher of the Mind,
Speaker 1: David chaw Mers published a paper where he divided our
Speaker 1: attempts to understand consciousness into the hard problem and the
Speaker 1: easy problem. The easy problem of consciousness is how it arises. How,
Speaker 1: for example, light can enter the eye and be carried
Speaker 1: along as an electrical impulse to the brain, where it's
Speaker 1: analyzed and sorted into the image of a house plant.
Speaker 1: We generally understand how the various parts involved in this
Speaker 1: process work. We pretty much understand how the sights and
Speaker 1: sounds of the external world are perceived by us. There's
Speaker 1: no mystery to it. So although we haven't worked out
Speaker 1: every last detail of how consciousness arises from our brains,
Speaker 1: in Chalmer's view, we were well enough along that we
Speaker 1: basically had the easy problem licked already by the time
Speaker 1: he wrote his essay. The hard problem is how we
Speaker 1: subjectively experienced those sights and sounds. How all of those experiences,
Speaker 1: moment to moment combine and create what we think of
Speaker 1: as the experience of being human. Why is it that
Speaker 1: rather than simply observing the house plant and deeming it
Speaker 1: neither a threat nor food and simply disregard it, instead
Speaker 1: you might be reminded of your dear sweet mother who
Speaker 1: loved house plants, and maybe you'll also think about how
Speaker 1: perhaps a house plant might brighten up your own apartment
Speaker 1: and maybe put you in a better mood because you've
Speaker 1: been a little bit down lately. In other words, why
Speaker 1: should we experience the inner life that we think of
Speaker 1: as ourselves? More to the point, where does this conscious
Speaker 1: experience come from? We can point to the language processing
Speaker 1: parts of the brain to show how we humans understand
Speaker 1: what the other person is saying when someone tells us
Speaker 1: they love us, But we can't point to the part
Speaker 1: of the brain that creates the incredibly rich experience those
Speaker 1: words can arouse in us. That is the hard problem
Speaker 1: of consciousness. To some people, we will never figure out.
Speaker 1: The answer to the hard problem. Human conscious experience is
Speaker 1: too ethereal to ever understand. To those on the other side,
Speaker 1: we've already solved the hard problem. It's the same answer
Speaker 1: is the easy problem. All of those neurons and dendrites
Speaker 1: and axons that are responsible for communicating and sorting and
Speaker 1: storing the sensory input in our brains are also the
Speaker 1: same parts that are responsible for creating our conscious experience.
Speaker 1: We just haven't figured out how they do it quite yet.
Speaker 1: If that's true, and the hard problem really isn't a
Speaker 1: hard problem at all, there's a big implication in there.
Speaker 1: If consciousness is just an emergent property of neural complexity,
Speaker 1: like how tens of thousands of individual bees form a
Speaker 1: high mind that is larger than the sum of its parts,
Speaker 1: then we should be able to simulate consciousness by simulating
Speaker 1: neural complexity. Maybe not today, maybe not anytime soon, but
Speaker 1: the point is it would be theoretically possible, and given
Speaker 1: enough time in technological development, it's a pretty safe bet
Speaker 1: that we will figure out how to do it. If
Speaker 1: there is an organizing principle of life that takes hold
Speaker 1: once molecules begin to take an organic form, then perhaps
Speaker 1: the bio logical form. It's just one phase of evolution.
Speaker 1: Perhaps post biology is just another stage. If or when
Speaker 1: we become capable of uploading human minds on the computers,
Speaker 1: the number of future human lives will increase exponentially, and
Speaker 1: those lives can be expected to be exponentially better than
Speaker 1: the average life of those of us alive today. If
Speaker 1: we are the only intelligent life in the universe and
Speaker 1: That means that should we become capable of spreading out
Speaker 1: in our galaxy and then eventually throughout the rest of
Speaker 1: the universe, it will all be there for our taking.
Speaker 1: Though farther out we look in more detail, and the
Speaker 1: more clearly we see there's nothing at all alive anywhere
Speaker 1: in the universe, then it says we are really quite special.
Speaker 1: Not only that we are special for having, you know,
Speaker 1: created cars and televisions, we are just special for being
Speaker 1: on a planet that has life at all. Ah and
Speaker 1: the universe will remain dead until the life on our
Speaker 1: planet spreads. That was great filter theorist Robin Hanson. Once
Speaker 1: we spread beyond Earth, we will reach one of the
Speaker 1: largest milestones in the history of our species, in the
Speaker 1: history of life. Really, we will no longer be earth bound.
Speaker 1: We will have become a spacefaring species with an entire
Speaker 1: universe to explore and use for whatever we want. All
Speaker 1: of the resources material and energy in the universe that
Speaker 1: we can reach before it inflates beyond our grasp is
Speaker 1: there for our use in ours alone. This is what
Speaker 1: an Oxford University philosopher named Nick Bostrom calls humanity's cosmic
Speaker 1: endowment and The key thing about it is that it
Speaker 1: looks like it's astronomically large. Every less scrap of accomplishment
Speaker 1: that we humans have managed to achieve in our relatively
Speaker 1: short time here on Earth has been created with extremely
Speaker 1: limited resources compared to what will be available to us
Speaker 1: when we begin to spread out around the universe. If
Speaker 1: things are the way they look that what we have
Speaker 1: been able to play our hands on so far is
Speaker 1: a period of time maybe a thousand, ten thousand years
Speaker 1: of human history and some hundred thousand years of prehistory.
Speaker 1: That's kind of our species tenure so far, and we've
Speaker 1: been confined to the surface of planet Earth, which is
Speaker 1: this little crumb floating around in a huge style of
Speaker 1: material and energy and resources. So it's one planet in
Speaker 1: one solar system out of a hundred billion solar systems
Speaker 1: in this galaxy, which is it's so one of maybe
Speaker 1: a hundred building galaxies that could be reached from our
Speaker 1: starting point and then used for billions of years. So
Speaker 1: if you add all of those orders of magnitude together,
Speaker 1: you find that by some very large number, it dominates
Speaker 1: what exists today or has existed through human history. What
Speaker 1: will we do with all that stuff? I don't know,
Speaker 1: but it at least seems to me that protecting a
Speaker 1: chance to do that is critically important. If, as a
Speaker 1: great many philosophers throughout history have believed the point of
Speaker 1: life is finding happiness, then we could use it to
Speaker 1: pursue happiness on a massive scale. If you, for example,
Speaker 1: I think that happy people are our minds experiencing pleasure
Speaker 1: or beauty or doing interesting things have value, then that
Speaker 1: could just be a lot more like a lot more
Speaker 1: of those in the future, a lot more like a
Speaker 1: quadrillion more, and that number could grow exponentially higher if
Speaker 1: or when we reach that point of post biology, like
Speaker 1: any post biological civilization, we would place a pretty high
Speaker 1: value on converting all of that into computing power. The
Speaker 1: science fiction author Ray Bradberry once estimated that the energy
Speaker 1: captured from a star could power tend to the forty
Speaker 1: second computer operations per second. So Nick Bostrom took that
Speaker 1: figure and he applied it to a post biological society
Speaker 1: with access to all of the stars that we can
Speaker 1: reach in the universe until they inflate forever out of
Speaker 1: our grasp. If the human brain makes in the neighborhood
Speaker 1: of ten to the seventeenth operations per second to produce
Speaker 1: our conscious experience, then it's a pretty fair bet that's
Speaker 1: about how many computations per second we would require to
Speaker 1: experience consciousness and digital form as well. So, considering those
Speaker 1: numbers and more, Bostro included some other complex astronomical figures
Speaker 1: as well, he arrived at the low end estimate, the
Speaker 1: low end of ten to the fifty second power future
Speaker 1: human lives waiting to be lived expressed an American English
Speaker 1: that is ten sex Deicilian lives. That's a real word.
Speaker 1: A number is so astoundingly large it might be tried
Speaker 1: to even mention that it is. And you could make
Speaker 1: the case that in many ways, okay, essentially every way,
Speaker 1: those humans in the far future will live better lives
Speaker 1: than those of us alive today, because natural selection and
Speaker 1: didn't design us to be happy, discontent other things. Being
Speaker 1: equal is adaptive and fitness enhancing. And there's a transhumanist
Speaker 1: I very much hope that we're going to be able
Speaker 1: to design a civilization based on to use a slogan,
Speaker 1: a triple ess, a civilization based on super intelligence, super happiness,
Speaker 1: and super longevity. This is transhumanist philosopher David Pierce, who
Speaker 1: is among the number of people who believe that humans
Speaker 1: have a long and potentially bright future ahead of us.
Speaker 1: Humans might use all of that power to simulate amazing
Speaker 1: new experiences for ourselves that we haven't considered yet and
Speaker 1: that would be utterly impossible in our physical reality. We
Speaker 1: would be able to expand and edit our consciousness, our faculties,
Speaker 1: our ability to empathize with others, for capability to experience emotion.
Speaker 1: What we alive today might consider the high a state
Speaker 1: of happiness, maybe the baseline happiness for all new humans
Speaker 1: born into a digital world, and so the humans of
Speaker 1: the future would be blissed out all the time. Here's
Speaker 1: an example one sees today the effects of a drug
Speaker 1: like m d M A ecstasy or hug drug, in
Speaker 1: which essentially people become loving, bonabo like warm, empathetic, jealousy,
Speaker 1: resentment evaporate UH. For evolutionary reasons, people aren't like that
Speaker 1: all the time. But with the use of UH some
Speaker 1: genetic tweaking, it would be possible to create people trans humans,
Speaker 1: post humans who who love each other in the way
Speaker 1: that people fleetingly do today on the m d M A.
Speaker 1: Just how likely this scenario is. I don't know, but
Speaker 1: in the long run it's so be feasible because we
Speaker 1: live in a world where we must compete with one
Speaker 1: another and other life on our planet for resources. What
Speaker 1: the future might be like in a world where scarcity
Speaker 1: doesn't exist is largely inconceivable to us. Suffice it to
Speaker 1: say that life can be better than it is today
Speaker 1: should we make it there. We can't forget the possibility
Speaker 1: that between us and all of those countless future lives.
Speaker 1: Since the Great Filter. Back in the summer of a
Speaker 1: space probe launched by NASA called Viking one flew over
Speaker 1: Mars if photographed the planet's surface for the first time
Speaker 1: in human history, and prior to landing on July, Viking
Speaker 1: one flew over the Sidonia region, a bumpy transition zone
Speaker 1: between the planets, cratered north in the flat plains of
Speaker 1: the South. Within those images that it's sent back to
Speaker 1: its controllers at the Jet Propulsion Lab on Earth was
Speaker 1: a particularly striking one. It showed what looked to be
Speaker 1: a massive stone face wearing a ceremonial headdress. It looked
Speaker 1: a lot like an ancient monument on the surface of Mars.
Speaker 1: Is what it looked like It became one of the
Speaker 1: more famous images in the world, the Face on Mars,
Speaker 1: and it stirred the imagination of earth bound humans about
Speaker 1: a potential Martian pass where a great civilization once lived
Speaker 1: and thrived. But when the Mars Global Surveyor flew over
Speaker 1: the site with a far better camera than the Viking
Speaker 1: one had on board, it was clear the Face on
Speaker 1: Mars was just another mesa, shaped not by ancient Martian hands,
Speaker 1: but by Martian wind and erosion. But what if that
Speaker 1: image had confirmed the wildest speculations and we had mounted
Speaker 1: an expedition to Mars to investigate the governments of Canada, Japan,
Speaker 1: and the United States, the three countries leading the International
Speaker 1: Mars Expedition received a bundle of despat just from the
Speaker 1: astronauts investigating the Mars anomaly. Today, newly discovered structures that
Speaker 1: appear to be ceremonial halls and temples built from a
Speaker 1: yet unidentified metal, further confirmed the one time presence of
Speaker 1: an advanced civilization on the red planet. President Clinton was
Speaker 1: in New York today to news like this would not
Speaker 1: bode well for those of us living here on Earth.
Speaker 1: As Nick Bostrom points out in an article, that ran
Speaker 1: in Technology Review in two thousand and eight. If we
Speaker 1: were to find evidence of other intelligent life elsewhere in
Speaker 1: the universe, it would strongly suggest that the Great Filter
Speaker 1: lies waiting ahead of us. News like that would tell
Speaker 1: us that it's not so tough after all to get
Speaker 1: past all the steps that led to us. Other life
Speaker 1: managed it too. We would learn that we are not
Speaker 1: special and unique, and so the likelihood would be that
Speaker 1: the Great Filter is not somewhere in our past, which
Speaker 1: means that it must be somewhere in our future. Everything
Speaker 1: we've ever imagined that could go wrong is a candidate
Speaker 1: for a future filter. Uh. So, you know, take out
Speaker 1: all of your favorite um disaster stories and fears and
Speaker 1: add them all up, and it might be in there.
Speaker 1: It might be something we haven't imagined. If it is
Speaker 1: the case that the Great filters in our future, then
Speaker 1: the reason that there is no intelligent life in the
Speaker 1: universe other than us is because none of those who
Speaker 1: came before us were able to make it through the
Speaker 1: step that lies ahead. The more you learn about the
Speaker 1: kind of risks we humans are beginning to take on,
Speaker 1: the kind of make up the worst of those disaster
Speaker 1: scenarios Robin Hanson mentioned the more convincing the idea that
Speaker 1: we are now entering the great filter becomes m It's
Speaker 1: probably about here that you should meet Nick Bostrom, he
Speaker 1: chimed in earlier, but what I mean to say is
Speaker 1: that you should know more about him, as his work
Speaker 1: forms a lot of the basis of this series. In Oxford, England,
Speaker 1: there is a university among the world's oldest, where people
Speaker 1: have been teaching since at least ten nine, nearly a
Speaker 1: thousand years, and housed in a three story tan brick
Speaker 1: administration building called Little gate House is the Future of
Speaker 1: Humanity Institute. The FHI was founded by Nick Bostrom, who,
Speaker 1: as I said, is a philosopher, and it is a
Speaker 1: center where people from a wide array of disciplines come
Speaker 1: together to consider the ways that humanity could accidentally wipe
Speaker 1: itself out in the near future, and also how to
Speaker 1: prevent that, and also what we might do with ourselves
Speaker 1: if we're able to negotiate the very tricky near future
Speaker 1: and actually survive into the far future. A great many
Speaker 1: of the ideas in this series came from those collaborations
Speaker 1: that arose at f HI. What Nick Bostrom mostly thinks
Speaker 1: about our existential risks. Existential risks are threats to life
Speaker 1: that have consequences so sweeping, so utterly catastrophic, that should
Speaker 1: one of them befall us, it would spell the end
Speaker 1: of humankind. No more humans, and if it turns out
Speaker 1: that we are the only intelligent life in the universe,
Speaker 1: no more intelligent life anywhere at all. What makes existential
Speaker 1: threats so dangerous, in addition to the catastrophe they bring,
Speaker 1: is that they are unlike any other type of risk
Speaker 1: we're used to encountering. With virtually every other type of
Speaker 1: threat posed to humans, we can reasonably expect that enough
Speaker 1: of us will be left alive to continue our species
Speaker 1: should one befall us. Take a disastrous change in climate.
Speaker 1: For example, imagine that a couple of decades from now,
Speaker 1: we humans are caught totally off guard by a sudden
Speaker 1: shift in the global climate far more pronounced and abrupt
Speaker 1: than the warning signs were currently experiencing. A rapid rise
Speaker 1: in sea levels drowns coastal towns around the world, sending
Speaker 1: huge populations of people inland, which puts in a nor
Speaker 1: restrain on the cities that absorb them. At the same time,
Speaker 1: massive droughts and floods break out, and virtually every food
Speaker 1: producing region of the world. The ecological collapse leads to
Speaker 1: social collapse. Food supplies dwindle, water supplies become salty. An
Speaker 1: untold number of people begin to die, more than ever
Speaker 1: have in human history. Even more are killed in wars
Speaker 1: that break out over the precious resources that remain. In
Speaker 1: just a handful of decades, the entire human race is
Speaker 1: reduced from ten billion to just one hundred million people
Speaker 1: living in scattered settlements across the globe. As categorically awful
Speaker 1: as such an experience would be, it would not spell
Speaker 1: the end of humans. Even with just one percent of
Speaker 1: the population left alive. We could reasonably expect that a
Speaker 1: hundred million people living across the world would be enough
Speaker 1: to carry the human race along and eventually to rebuild.
Speaker 1: To be sure, we would be set back substantially. All
Speaker 1: of the progress that we had made as a global
Speaker 1: civilization would be pushed back thousands of years, almost to
Speaker 1: square one. Almost. There's a substantial difference between the perhaps
Speaker 1: fateful series of events that led to the discovery of
Speaker 1: something like smelting iron and carbon into steel and having
Speaker 1: people who remember learning that if you add carbon to
Speaker 1: iron you can make steel, or that there's such a
Speaker 1: thing as coffee, or that you can make wine from grapes.
Speaker 1: And if you spin a magnet inside a spool of
Speaker 1: copper wire, you can generate an electrical current. And if
Speaker 1: you pass steam through a turbine, you can use it
Speaker 1: to spin that magnet, so you don't have to stand
Speaker 1: there and do it yourself. The memories of all the
Speaker 1: ideas and discoveries that accumulated to make up the general
Speaker 1: knowledge base of the average human walking around on Earth
Speaker 1: would remain and would provide an enormous advantage for those
Speaker 1: left to rebuild compared to those who built in the
Speaker 1: first place. Consider that it was perhaps only ten thousand
Speaker 1: years ago that we began organizing ourselves into complex societies
Speaker 1: for the first time. Those early settlements in cities like
Speaker 1: cattle Hook in Turkey and Mesopotamia in Iraq that served
Speaker 1: as the earliest attempts at communal living, agriculture, government, law, trade,
Speaker 1: and everything else that forms the basis of modern civilization
Speaker 1: or only about ten thousand years old. So even being
Speaker 1: set back to the beginning, even with humanity suddenly dead,
Speaker 1: we could reasonably expect that people could get back to
Speaker 1: roughly the point where we're at today within about ten millennia,
Speaker 1: which sounds like a long time, but remember we're talking
Speaker 1: about time on geological and cosmological scales. Ten thousand years
Speaker 1: is a blink. Throughout our history, we humans have survived plagues, floods, droughts,
Speaker 1: supervolcano eruptions, just about anything Earth could throw at us,
Speaker 1: and we've always had enough of us left after a
Speaker 1: catastrophe to continue on for forward momentum to slow sometimes
Speaker 1: but never to halt entirely, and those eons of experience
Speaker 1: of disaster and recovery form the basis of how we
Speaker 1: learn from the world, a process you may know as
Speaker 1: trial and error. Imagine that you're a chemist working on
Speaker 1: a new explosive. As this customary, you keep detailed notes
Speaker 1: as you go along, and then one day you're in
Speaker 1: the lab when boom, you blow yourself up. You are
Speaker 1: in a great many pieces, but your notes are intact,
Speaker 1: and so other chemists can come along, consult your notes,
Speaker 1: find where you went wrong, and then try again with
Speaker 1: a slightly different formula. This process can continue indefinitely as
Speaker 1: long as it takes until we master this new explosive
Speaker 1: so long as there are chemists who take good notes,
Speaker 1: who are willing to risk blowing themselves up, and are
Speaker 1: never all in the same lab at once. This process
Speaker 1: of trial and error is so glaringly obvious that it
Speaker 1: seems not even worth spelling out. But it is because
Speaker 1: the process of trial and error is how we've gain
Speaker 1: virtually all of human knowledge about the world to this point,
Speaker 1: and understandably so, because it works. But trial and error
Speaker 1: doesn't work with existential risks. When it comes to other risks,
Speaker 1: humanity is very good, actually at learning from trial and error,
Speaker 1: and we have some failures and we rebuild. This is
Speaker 1: Toby Ord, you've met him previously. He's one of Nick
Speaker 1: Bostrom's colleagues at the f HI, and he's literally writing
Speaker 1: the book on existential risks. But when it comes to
Speaker 1: existential risks, uh, failing even once means we've lost permanently
Speaker 1: our potential for the future. So we can't have any failures,
Speaker 1: which means that we can't use our our most successful
Speaker 1: way of learning, trial and error. What separates existential risks
Speaker 1: from all other types of risks is the outcome, the
Speaker 1: potential consequences of existential risks are so catastrophic that if
Speaker 1: something goes wrong with them once, that's it for humanity.
Speaker 1: With these types of risk, there isn't any one percent
Speaker 1: of humanity to carry on. There are none of us.
Speaker 1: There's no trial and error with existential risks. It's more
Speaker 1: like trial and sudden nothingness. We can't go back to
Speaker 1: the drawing board to figure out what went wrong and
Speaker 1: try again. The drawing board will have been vaporized or
Speaker 1: there won't be any people left to write on it.
Speaker 1: And that's very different from many kinds of risk because, um,
Speaker 1: first there's no redo. Um. If we accidentally trigger some
Speaker 1: sort of existential risk or are exposed to an existentially
Speaker 1: destructive event, that sort of it for humanity. Um. But
Speaker 1: beyond that, lots of the mechanisms that we used to
Speaker 1: manage risks stop working. That was Sebastian Farquhar. He too
Speaker 1: is a philosopher at Oxford, and he too is with
Speaker 1: the f HI. Another name for existential risks is low probability,
Speaker 1: high consequence risks. Fortunately, the possibility of a bad outcome
Speaker 1: befalling us from any of these risks is the remote. Normally,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't give them much thought, or any thought at all.
Speaker 1: But these aren't normal risks. The potential bad outcome is
Speaker 1: so great that even though they have an extremely tiny
Speaker 1: chance of happening, they are still worth thinking about and
Speaker 1: trying to mitigate. And that is just what Nick Bostrom
Speaker 1: in the Future of Humanity does. Back in two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: in a paper on existential risks, Nick Bostrom included a
Speaker 1: handy graph for categorizing different types of risk. Along the
Speaker 1: X axis, the horizontal one. I always have trouble remembering
Speaker 1: that is the severity of a risk, how catastrophic its
Speaker 1: outcome could be. Bostrom has ordered the severity from imperceptible
Speaker 1: like losing a single hair off of your head, too
Speaker 1: endurable like having your car stolen, to crushing like dying
Speaker 1: in a car crash. All of those terrible events are
Speaker 1: ones that happened to a single person, which is the
Speaker 1: first category along the Y axis, the upward one, which
Speaker 1: is the scope or how many people that the event affects.
Speaker 1: This category starts with personal and moves up to local, global,
Speaker 1: transgenerational affecting more than one generation of people, and pan
Speaker 1: generational affecting every generation. From that point on, graphs are,
Speaker 1: of course, a lot easier to take him when you
Speaker 1: see them rather than to hear about them. So let's
Speaker 1: just say that the upshot of all this is that
Speaker 1: you can take any event and plot it on the
Speaker 1: graph to find if it qualifies as an existential risk.
Speaker 1: So let's do that. Take the death of a local
Speaker 1: baseball mascot. We'll go with the Richmond Flying Squirrels for
Speaker 1: no reason whatsoever. Let's say that the team's mascot was
Speaker 1: doing his thing up at the top of the bleachers
Speaker 1: when he fell over the side all the way down
Speaker 1: to the concrete below, dying instantly beside the ticket booth.
Speaker 1: This would be a very sad day, not just for
Speaker 1: the person who wore the flying squirrel costume, but also
Speaker 1: for their family and maybe even a sizeable portion of
Speaker 1: the Richmond, Virginia area. Yeah, so we can say that
Speaker 1: this would be a local event since it affects more
Speaker 1: than just one person or one family, but it definitely
Speaker 1: doesn't affect humanity as a whole. And since the Flying
Speaker 1: Squirrels family and residents of Richmond will be able to
Speaker 1: carry on, then we can say that it will be
Speaker 1: an endurable event. So the tragic accidental death of the
Speaker 1: Richmond Flying Squirrels mascot would be a local, endurable event.
Speaker 1: Let's up the stakes a little, shall we. How about
Speaker 1: a global thermonuclear war. This would obviously be a global event,
Speaker 1: and it would affect in some ways everyone alive at
Speaker 1: the time, whether through fiery death or from radioactive fallout,
Speaker 1: starvation during the nuclear winter, being forced out of one's
Speaker 1: home to find a safer place to live. You can
Speaker 1: make a pretty good bet that a global nuclear war
Speaker 1: will affect everybody on the planet, and depending on how
Speaker 1: bad the outcome was, the after effects it has on
Speaker 1: society could continue on for some time, affecting multiple generations
Speaker 1: of people. Perhaps it would be transgenerational in its scope,
Speaker 1: but it would be pretty unlikely that it killed everyone
Speaker 1: alive at the time and wiped humanity out of existence.
Speaker 1: There would almost certainly be enough survivors to carry on, and,
Speaker 1: as we saw with that climate change disaster scenario earlier,
Speaker 1: they should eventually return back to where we were prior
Speaker 1: to the nuclear war, and hopefully smart enough to avoid
Speaker 1: doing it all over again once we got there. So
Speaker 1: for humanity as a whole, a global nuclear war would
Speaker 1: be a transgenerational endurable event. But if you follow the
Speaker 1: scale this handy graph up into the right, you will
Speaker 1: find the point where existential risks live pan generational crushing events.
Speaker 1: We don't make it through those, but those are exactly
Speaker 1: what's coming down the pike right now. We are creating
Speaker 1: new technology that poses risks to humankind in a form
Speaker 1: we've never encountered before, a kind that dwarf global nuclear
Speaker 1: war and climate change, and we are wholly unprepared for them.
Speaker 1: My hope is that this series, in some small way,
Speaker 1: will make us aware that we need to prepare. That
Speaker 1: there is a safe path through the coming treacherousness, but
Speaker 1: we have to plan for it now. If we can
Speaker 1: make it through the process of mastering the new technology
Speaker 1: that will define our world artificial intelligence, advances in biotechnology
Speaker 1: and particle physics nanotechnology, we may secure a very bright
Speaker 1: and very long history for humanity, reaching long into the
Speaker 1: far future and spreading across the universe. Technology that poses
Speaker 1: an existential risk to us now is the very same
Speaker 1: that can prevent existential risks from befollowing us once we've
Speaker 1: mastered them, a point called technological maturity. We're entering the
Speaker 1: most precarious period now the point between where those unprecedentedly
Speaker 1: dangerous technologies come into existence and where we have them
Speaker 1: fully under control. Any time between those two points, one
Speaker 1: single slip up, one single lab accident caused by one
Speaker 1: single person, one single failure to plan, one single oversight,
Speaker 1: could bring about the sudden, rapid demise of humankind forever.
Speaker 1: Turning our back on our destiny won't help us. The
Speaker 1: dye is already cast. Some self imposed return to the
Speaker 1: Dark Ages won't reverse our momentum. In the great filter
Speaker 1: that we will go through, it has become inevitable. Even
Speaker 1: during the actual Dark Ages, that period of modern human
Speaker 1: history where we supposedly stopped progressing intellectually, was filled with
Speaker 1: pockets of people and entire cultures around the world still discovering,
Speaker 1: still innovating. And so it would be as well if
Speaker 1: we all foolishly banded together to try to halt the
Speaker 1: progress of science for fear of the risks that poses.
Speaker 1: We are not equipped to prevent science, and we would
Speaker 1: not want to even if we could. It is science
Speaker 1: that will expose us to these risks, but it is
Speaker 1: also science will free us from them forever. On the
Speaker 1: other side, and It's not just us who we have
Speaker 1: to carry on for, it's the entire future of the
Speaker 1: human race. We're carrying all of those tend to the
Speaker 1: who knows what power future humans on our shoulders as
Speaker 1: we walk this tight rope over ruination. The way to
Speaker 1: ensure our survival is not to concentrate on what's ahead,
Speaker 1: but instead to look down to plumb the void below.
Speaker 1: The only chance we have of navigating existential risks is
Speaker 1: to understand them. On the next episode of the End
Speaker 1: of the World with Josh Clark, the sun will basically
Speaker 1: fill up our entire sky. You look out the window
Speaker 1: will just be a big, de seething mess of of star.
Speaker 1: We've lived with natural existential risks since the dawn of humanity.
Speaker 1: When bad things happen to Earth, they happen to us
Speaker 1: as well, and that will be so as long as
Speaker 1: we remain an earth bound species.