November 7, 2018 • 39 mins
Humanity could have a future billions of years long – or we might not make it past the next century. If we have a trip through the Great Filter ahead of us, then we appear to be entering it now. It looks like existential risks will be our filter. (Original score by Point Lobo.)
Interviewees: Nick Bostrom, Oxford University philosopher and founder of the Future of Humanity Institute; David Pearce, philosopher and co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association (Humanity+); Robin Hanson, George Mason University economist (creator of the Great Filter hypothesis); Toby Ord, Oxford University philosopher; Sebastian Farquahar, Oxford University philosopher.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You are a human being, and one day you will die.
But when you die, you can take comfort in the
knowledge that you're part of something larger than yourself. You're
a member of the human race, and as long as
the human race continues, in some ways, you do too.
All of us, every living thing, are individual members in
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a cycle of life and death that began four billion
years ago when that first single living cell divided into two.
Two billion years after that, along came sex, and birth
led to more sex, led to more birth, And as
long as that cycle continues in a species, death can
happen in the background. It must happen. Really. It may
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sound a little cruel, but in the bigger picture, the
death of one thing is kind of meaningless so long
as the species continues. Humans tend to divide life along
the borders between species, and for good reason. It's not
an arbitrary dividing line. A species is what makes the
difference between eating a meal and engaging and cannibalism. Across
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the animal kingdom, individuals routinely do things that risk their
own life to save members of their species. You almost
never see that kind of behavior between different species. True,
there are plenty of examples of species where eating one's
own kind is an everyday act, and there are examples
of adorable dogs adopting motherless lambs, But the chances are
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better than not that an animal will show preferential treatment
towards a member of its species over others. Most importantly, though,
any member of a species can combine their genes with
another member and come up with new and fascinating ways
to push the species further along the evolutionary path where
it's better able to grow and flourish. Homo sapiens, the
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species that you, me and every human alive are members of,
means in Latin wise human, and it's a bit of
flattery since it is the name that we human beings
gave to ourselves. But here today, so far removed from
our ancient origins, it's easy to forget that the name
is meant to distinguish us from other types of humans.
As recently as fifty thousand years ago, we shared this
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planet with no less than three other human species. In
the same way you might walk about the Earth today
and come upon a lion, one species of cat, and
tabby an entirely different species of cat. In the very
recent geological past, you would have been able to meet
with a Neanderthal in a French cave and a Denisovan
in Siberia, and had you wandered on down to Indonesia,
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you would have been able to meet a tiny variety
of human called Homo floresiensis, who stood four ft talls. Today,
though there is only the one species of human us,
Homo sapiens. We can't say for certain, but we strongly
suspect that the ultimate reason why we are the only
ones left is because of our intelligence. Perhaps the planet
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was presented with a series of tricky environmental challenges and
we were the only ones intelligent enough to successfully negotiate them.
Maybe it was the universally devastating step in the great filter,
or maybe that's not right at all. We've only recently
discovered that denis Ovans and Floresiensis existed, but we've known
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about Neanderthals for some two hundred years now, and over
time we've come to realize that they weren't the dim
wits we initially took them for. We now know that
they used tools like us, and they may have mastered
fire as well, and Neanderthals might have been the earliest
humans to bury their dead, which shows the capacity to
think about abstractions like an afterlife. Whether or not we
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were the only human species with the capacity for abstract thought,
The one thing we can say for certain is that we,
Homo sapiens, are the only ones left on Earth. To
wonder at the immense responsibility we have to simply carry
on is the one single remaining species of our kind.
That responsibility to survive and thrive is big enough just
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being the only human species left on Earth, but it
grows to overwhelming proportions when you consider the idea that
we could be the only intelligent life and the whole
endless universe. The precariousness of our situation begins to sink.
In The family paradox appears to show that the entire
future of intelligent life in the universe rests on the
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likelihood of us staying alive. The entire population of Homo
floresiensis the species of tiny humans lived on a single
island called Flores in modern day Indonesia. They lived there
for almost a hundred and fifty thousand years, and then
suddenly they disappeared. One current theory for their extinction is
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that a volcano erupted and killed them all off, which
would have been relatively easy, since the entire species dweled
only on that one island. We humans alive today call
our island Earth, and we have to wonder what our
volcano will be. Right now, there are about seven and
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a half billion of us humans alive. Seven and a
half billion is an enormous number, to be sure, but
it's a small fraction, tiny fraction of all the Homo
sapiens who have ever lived. In the fifty thousand years
since we emerged as modern humans early on and continuing
for most of our species history, we had an extremely
short average life expectancy, somewhere around ten to twelve years.
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That doesn't mean that the average person died at age eleven.
It means that if you take all the people who
lived into old age and all the children who died
in infancy or at birth, so many people died young
that the average age of death was dragged down all
the way into the tweens. Plenty of people lived into
what we would consider old age. It's just that many,
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many more didn't survive childhood. And this is how it
was for most of human history. That extremely high childhood
mortality rate was eventually overcome. Through the use of our
clever sapiens brains, we figured out things like germ theory
and anatomy and nutrition, and all of them converged to
create a world that a child could be born into
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where they had a very good chance of surviving into adulthood.
We humans used our brains to help our species be
better able to survive, and as a result, our population
began to boom. Around two thousand years ago, there were
probably three hundred million people alive on Earth. About three
hundred and fifty years ago, the human population had grown
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to five million. Thirty years from now we will hit
the ten billion mark, So in just three hundred and
fifty years we will have grown by nine billion, five
hundred million people. All told, you can count yourself as
one of the hundred and eight billion modern humans who
have ever lived. An astronomical number, to be sure, But
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the number of humans who have ever lived, as immense
as it is, is a drop in the bucket of
the number of humans who haven't lived yet. This is
philosopher Toby ord Our. Species Homo sapiens is about two
hundred thousand years old UM, so that's about two thousand
centuries that we've been around. If we could survive that
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long again, uh, you know, we'd see two thousand centuries
of civilization. That's about twenty times longer than civilization has
been around so far, with just wondrous things being created
throughout that whole time that we can barely imagine. And
that's even with relatively little in the way of fancy
science fiction technological progress that we might imagine. Remember back
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when we talked about the possibility that we don't see
alien life in the universe because they opted to stay
home instead, Let's say that we humans have that same
type of home body nous in our far future, sticking
around on Earth rather than spreading out into the rest
of the galaxy. So Earth remains the only planet where
you can find a human population. And let's say that
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over the course of a billion years our population gradually
lowers and stabilizes, that one billion people alive on the
planet at any given time, And if our lifespans stick
around where it is today, then by a billion years
from now, an additional ten to the sixteenth power humans
will have been born. That's ten with fifteen zeros after it,
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ten quadrillion, a million, trillion future human lives hundred and
eight billion doesn't seem quite so big now. That ten
quadrillion number is a low end estimate. If we do
nothing but continue to plot along as a species for
the next billion years, we could expect to reach it,
But we might also increase the number of future human
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lives dramatically if we humans in a a as a species.
One of the ways that most futurists expect we will
innovate is by leaving our bodies behind and entering into
a digital world, becoming what's called a post biological species.
Imagine that we learned how to free the human mind
from its bonds to the neurons and dendrites and axons
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that make up the functioning human brain. No real reason
that the human mind should require our selves to think
and to experience. What if the human brain is just
one of many ways to produce what we call consciousness.
What if there are other ways that could produce the
same thoughts, the same experiences, but with hardware instead of squishy, soft,
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extremely fragile material we call the brain. To understand how
we could create consciousness inside a machine rather than a
human brain, you should know a little bit about the
hard problem. First, Back in The Philosopher of the Mind,
David chaw Mers published a paper where he divided our
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attempts to understand consciousness into the hard problem and the
easy problem. The easy problem of consciousness is how it arises. How,
for example, light can enter the eye and be carried
along as an electrical impulse to the brain, where it's
analyzed and sorted into the image of a house plant.
We generally understand how the various parts involved in this
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process work. We pretty much understand how the sights and
sounds of the external world are perceived by us. There's
no mystery to it. So although we haven't worked out
every last detail of how consciousness arises from our brains,
in Chalmer's view, we were well enough along that we
basically had the easy problem licked already by the time
he wrote his essay. The hard problem is how we
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subjectively experienced those sights and sounds. How all of those experiences,
moment to moment combine and create what we think of
as the experience of being human. Why is it that
rather than simply observing the house plant and deeming it
neither a threat nor food and simply disregard it, instead
you might be reminded of your dear sweet mother who
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loved house plants, and maybe you'll also think about how
perhaps a house plant might brighten up your own apartment
and maybe put you in a better mood because you've
been a little bit down lately. In other words, why
should we experience the inner life that we think of
as ourselves? More to the point, where does this conscious
experience come from? We can point to the language processing
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parts of the brain to show how we humans understand
what the other person is saying when someone tells us
they love us, But we can't point to the part
of the brain that creates the incredibly rich experience those
words can arouse in us. That is the hard problem
of consciousness. To some people, we will never figure out.
The answer to the hard problem. Human conscious experience is
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too ethereal to ever understand. To those on the other side,
we've already solved the hard problem. It's the same answer
is the easy problem. All of those neurons and dendrites
and axons that are responsible for communicating and sorting and
storing the sensory input in our brains are also the
same parts that are responsible for creating our conscious experience.
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We just haven't figured out how they do it quite yet.
If that's true, and the hard problem really isn't a
hard problem at all, there's a big implication in there.
If consciousness is just an emergent property of neural complexity,
like how tens of thousands of individual bees form a
high mind that is larger than the sum of its parts,
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then we should be able to simulate consciousness by simulating
neural complexity. Maybe not today, maybe not anytime soon, but
the point is it would be theoretically possible, and given
enough time in technological development, it's a pretty safe bet
that we will figure out how to do it. If
there is an organizing principle of life that takes hold
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once molecules begin to take an organic form, then perhaps
the bio logical form. It's just one phase of evolution.
Perhaps post biology is just another stage. If or when
we become capable of uploading human minds on the computers,
the number of future human lives will increase exponentially, and
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those lives can be expected to be exponentially better than
the average life of those of us alive today. If
we are the only intelligent life in the universe and
That means that should we become capable of spreading out
in our galaxy and then eventually throughout the rest of
the universe, it will all be there for our taking.
Though farther out we look in more detail, and the
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more clearly we see there's nothing at all alive anywhere
in the universe, then it says we are really quite special.
Not only that we are special for having, you know,
created cars and televisions, we are just special for being
on a planet that has life at all. Ah and
the universe will remain dead until the life on our
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planet spreads. That was great filter theorist Robin Hanson. Once
we spread beyond Earth, we will reach one of the
largest milestones in the history of our species, in the
history of life. Really, we will no longer be earth bound.
We will have become a spacefaring species with an entire
universe to explore and use for whatever we want. All
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of the resources material and energy in the universe that
we can reach before it inflates beyond our grasp is
there for our use in ours alone. This is what
an Oxford University philosopher named Nick Bostrom calls humanity's cosmic
endowment and The key thing about it is that it
looks like it's astronomically large. Every less scrap of accomplishment
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that we humans have managed to achieve in our relatively
short time here on Earth has been created with extremely
limited resources compared to what will be available to us
when we begin to spread out around the universe. If
things are the way they look that what we have
been able to play our hands on so far is
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a period of time maybe a thousand, ten thousand years
of human history and some hundred thousand years of prehistory.
That's kind of our species tenure so far, and we've
been confined to the surface of planet Earth, which is
this little crumb floating around in a huge style of
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material and energy and resources. So it's one planet in
one solar system out of a hundred billion solar systems
in this galaxy, which is it's so one of maybe
a hundred building galaxies that could be reached from our
starting point and then used for billions of years. So
if you add all of those orders of magnitude together,
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you find that by some very large number, it dominates
what exists today or has existed through human history. What
will we do with all that stuff? I don't know,
but it at least seems to me that protecting a
chance to do that is critically important. If, as a
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great many philosophers throughout history have believed the point of
life is finding happiness, then we could use it to
pursue happiness on a massive scale. If you, for example,
I think that happy people are our minds experiencing pleasure
or beauty or doing interesting things have value, then that
could just be a lot more like a lot more
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of those in the future, a lot more like a
quadrillion more, and that number could grow exponentially higher if
or when we reach that point of post biology, like
any post biological civilization, we would place a pretty high
value on converting all of that into computing power. The
science fiction author Ray Bradberry once estimated that the energy
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captured from a star could power tend to the forty
second computer operations per second. So Nick Bostrom took that
figure and he applied it to a post biological society
with access to all of the stars that we can
reach in the universe until they inflate forever out of
our grasp. If the human brain makes in the neighborhood
of ten to the seventeenth operations per second to produce
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our conscious experience, then it's a pretty fair bet that's
about how many computations per second we would require to
experience consciousness and digital form as well. So, considering those
numbers and more, Bostro included some other complex astronomical figures
as well, he arrived at the low end estimate, the
low end of ten to the fifty second power future
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human lives waiting to be lived expressed an American English
that is ten sex Deicilian lives. That's a real word.
A number is so astoundingly large it might be tried
to even mention that it is. And you could make
the case that in many ways, okay, essentially every way,
those humans in the far future will live better lives
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than those of us alive today, because natural selection and
didn't design us to be happy, discontent other things. Being
equal is adaptive and fitness enhancing. And there's a transhumanist
I very much hope that we're going to be able
to design a civilization based on to use a slogan,
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a triple ess, a civilization based on super intelligence, super happiness,
and super longevity. This is transhumanist philosopher David Pierce, who
is among the number of people who believe that humans
have a long and potentially bright future ahead of us.
Humans might use all of that power to simulate amazing
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new experiences for ourselves that we haven't considered yet and
that would be utterly impossible in our physical reality. We
would be able to expand and edit our consciousness, our faculties,
our ability to empathize with others, for capability to experience emotion.
What we alive today might consider the high a state
of happiness, maybe the baseline happiness for all new humans
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born into a digital world, and so the humans of
the future would be blissed out all the time. Here's
an example one sees today the effects of a drug
like m d M A ecstasy or hug drug, in
which essentially people become loving, bonabo like warm, empathetic, jealousy,
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resentment evaporate UH. For evolutionary reasons, people aren't like that
all the time. But with the use of UH some
genetic tweaking, it would be possible to create people trans humans,
post humans who who love each other in the way
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that people fleetingly do today on the m d M A.
Just how likely this scenario is. I don't know, but
in the long run it's so be feasible because we
live in a world where we must compete with one
another and other life on our planet for resources. What
the future might be like in a world where scarcity
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doesn't exist is largely inconceivable to us. Suffice it to
say that life can be better than it is today
should we make it there. We can't forget the possibility
that between us and all of those countless future lives.
Since the Great Filter. Back in the summer of a
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space probe launched by NASA called Viking one flew over
Mars if photographed the planet's surface for the first time
in human history, and prior to landing on July, Viking
one flew over the Sidonia region, a bumpy transition zone
between the planets, cratered north in the flat plains of
the South. Within those images that it's sent back to
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its controllers at the Jet Propulsion Lab on Earth was
a particularly striking one. It showed what looked to be
a massive stone face wearing a ceremonial headdress. It looked
a lot like an ancient monument on the surface of Mars.
Is what it looked like It became one of the
more famous images in the world, the Face on Mars,
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and it stirred the imagination of earth bound humans about
a potential Martian pass where a great civilization once lived
and thrived. But when the Mars Global Surveyor flew over
the site with a far better camera than the Viking
one had on board, it was clear the Face on
Mars was just another mesa, shaped not by ancient Martian hands,
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but by Martian wind and erosion. But what if that
image had confirmed the wildest speculations and we had mounted
an expedition to Mars to investigate the governments of Canada, Japan,
and the United States, the three countries leading the International
Mars Expedition received a bundle of despat just from the
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astronauts investigating the Mars anomaly. Today, newly discovered structures that
appear to be ceremonial halls and temples built from a
yet unidentified metal, further confirmed the one time presence of
an advanced civilization on the red planet. President Clinton was
in New York today to news like this would not
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bode well for those of us living here on Earth.
As Nick Bostrom points out in an article, that ran
in Technology Review in two thousand and eight. If we
were to find evidence of other intelligent life elsewhere in
the universe, it would strongly suggest that the Great Filter
lies waiting ahead of us. News like that would tell
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us that it's not so tough after all to get
past all the steps that led to us. Other life
managed it too. We would learn that we are not
special and unique, and so the likelihood would be that
the Great Filter is not somewhere in our past, which
means that it must be somewhere in our future. Everything
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we've ever imagined that could go wrong is a candidate
for a future filter. Uh. So, you know, take out
all of your favorite um disaster stories and fears and
add them all up, and it might be in there.
It might be something we haven't imagined. If it is
the case that the Great filters in our future, then
the reason that there is no intelligent life in the
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universe other than us is because none of those who
came before us were able to make it through the
step that lies ahead. The more you learn about the
kind of risks we humans are beginning to take on,
the kind of make up the worst of those disaster
scenarios Robin Hanson mentioned the more convincing the idea that
we are now entering the great filter becomes m It's
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probably about here that you should meet Nick Bostrom, he
chimed in earlier, but what I mean to say is
that you should know more about him, as his work
forms a lot of the basis of this series. In Oxford, England,
there is a university among the world's oldest, where people
have been teaching since at least ten nine, nearly a
thousand years, and housed in a three story tan brick
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administration building called Little gate House is the Future of
Humanity Institute. The FHI was founded by Nick Bostrom, who,
as I said, is a philosopher, and it is a
center where people from a wide array of disciplines come
together to consider the ways that humanity could accidentally wipe
itself out in the near future, and also how to
prevent that, and also what we might do with ourselves
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if we're able to negotiate the very tricky near future
and actually survive into the far future. A great many
of the ideas in this series came from those collaborations
that arose at f HI. What Nick Bostrom mostly thinks
about our existential risks. Existential risks are threats to life
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that have consequences so sweeping, so utterly catastrophic, that should
one of them befall us, it would spell the end
of humankind. No more humans, and if it turns out
that we are the only intelligent life in the universe,
no more intelligent life anywhere at all. What makes existential
threats so dangerous, in addition to the catastrophe they bring,
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is that they are unlike any other type of risk
we're used to encountering. With virtually every other type of
threat posed to humans, we can reasonably expect that enough
of us will be left alive to continue our species
should one befall us. Take a disastrous change in climate.
For example, imagine that a couple of decades from now,
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we humans are caught totally off guard by a sudden
shift in the global climate far more pronounced and abrupt
than the warning signs were currently experiencing. A rapid rise
in sea levels drowns coastal towns around the world, sending
huge populations of people inland, which puts in a nor
restrain on the cities that absorb them. At the same time,
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massive droughts and floods break out, and virtually every food
producing region of the world. The ecological collapse leads to
social collapse. Food supplies dwindle, water supplies become salty. An
untold number of people begin to die, more than ever
have in human history. Even more are killed in wars
that break out over the precious resources that remain. In
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just a handful of decades, the entire human race is
reduced from ten billion to just one hundred million people
living in scattered settlements across the globe. As categorically awful
as such an experience would be, it would not spell
the end of humans. Even with just one percent of
the population left alive. We could reasonably expect that a
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hundred million people living across the world would be enough
to carry the human race along and eventually to rebuild.
To be sure, we would be set back substantially. All
of the progress that we had made as a global
civilization would be pushed back thousands of years, almost to
square one. Almost. There's a substantial difference between the perhaps
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fateful series of events that led to the discovery of
something like smelting iron and carbon into steel and having
people who remember learning that if you add carbon to
iron you can make steel, or that there's such a
thing as coffee, or that you can make wine from grapes.
And if you spin a magnet inside a spool of
copper wire, you can generate an electrical current. And if
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you pass steam through a turbine, you can use it
to spin that magnet, so you don't have to stand
there and do it yourself. The memories of all the
ideas and discoveries that accumulated to make up the general
knowledge base of the average human walking around on Earth
would remain and would provide an enormous advantage for those
left to rebuild compared to those who built in the
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first place. Consider that it was perhaps only ten thousand
years ago that we began organizing ourselves into complex societies
for the first time. Those early settlements in cities like
cattle Hook in Turkey and Mesopotamia in Iraq that served
as the earliest attempts at communal living, agriculture, government, law, trade,
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and everything else that forms the basis of modern civilization
or only about ten thousand years old. So even being
set back to the beginning, even with humanity suddenly dead,
we could reasonably expect that people could get back to
roughly the point where we're at today within about ten millennia,
which sounds like a long time, but remember we're talking
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about time on geological and cosmological scales. Ten thousand years
is a blink. Throughout our history, we humans have survived plagues, floods, droughts,
supervolcano eruptions, just about anything Earth could throw at us,
and we've always had enough of us left after a
catastrophe to continue on for forward momentum to slow sometimes
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but never to halt entirely, and those eons of experience
of disaster and recovery form the basis of how we
learn from the world, a process you may know as
trial and error. Imagine that you're a chemist working on
a new explosive. As this customary, you keep detailed notes
as you go along, and then one day you're in
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the lab when boom, you blow yourself up. You are
in a great many pieces, but your notes are intact,
and so other chemists can come along, consult your notes,
find where you went wrong, and then try again with
a slightly different formula. This process can continue indefinitely as
long as it takes until we master this new explosive
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so long as there are chemists who take good notes,
who are willing to risk blowing themselves up, and are
never all in the same lab at once. This process
of trial and error is so glaringly obvious that it
seems not even worth spelling out. But it is because
the process of trial and error is how we've gain
virtually all of human knowledge about the world to this point,
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and understandably so, because it works. But trial and error
doesn't work with existential risks. When it comes to other risks,
humanity is very good, actually at learning from trial and error,
and we have some failures and we rebuild. This is
Toby Ord, you've met him previously. He's one of Nick
Bostrom's colleagues at the f HI, and he's literally writing
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the book on existential risks. But when it comes to
existential risks, uh, failing even once means we've lost permanently
our potential for the future. So we can't have any failures,
which means that we can't use our our most successful
way of learning, trial and error. What separates existential risks
from all other types of risks is the outcome, the
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potential consequences of existential risks are so catastrophic that if
something goes wrong with them once, that's it for humanity.
With these types of risk, there isn't any one percent
of humanity to carry on. There are none of us.
There's no trial and error with existential risks. It's more
like trial and sudden nothingness. We can't go back to
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the drawing board to figure out what went wrong and
try again. The drawing board will have been vaporized or
there won't be any people left to write on it.
And that's very different from many kinds of risk because, um,
first there's no redo. Um. If we accidentally trigger some
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sort of existential risk or are exposed to an existentially
destructive event, that sort of it for humanity. Um. But
beyond that, lots of the mechanisms that we used to
manage risks stop working. That was Sebastian Farquhar. He too
is a philosopher at Oxford, and he too is with
the f HI. Another name for existential risks is low probability,
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high consequence risks. Fortunately, the possibility of a bad outcome
befalling us from any of these risks is the remote. Normally,
we wouldn't give them much thought, or any thought at all.
But these aren't normal risks. The potential bad outcome is
so great that even though they have an extremely tiny
chance of happening, they are still worth thinking about and
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trying to mitigate. And that is just what Nick Bostrom
in the Future of Humanity does. Back in two thousand twelve,
in a paper on existential risks, Nick Bostrom included a
handy graph for categorizing different types of risk. Along the
X axis, the horizontal one. I always have trouble remembering
that is the severity of a risk, how catastrophic its
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outcome could be. Bostrom has ordered the severity from imperceptible
like losing a single hair off of your head, too
endurable like having your car stolen, to crushing like dying
in a car crash. All of those terrible events are
ones that happened to a single person, which is the
first category along the Y axis, the upward one, which
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is the scope or how many people that the event affects.
This category starts with personal and moves up to local, global,
transgenerational affecting more than one generation of people, and pan
generational affecting every generation. From that point on, graphs are,
of course, a lot easier to take him when you
see them rather than to hear about them. So let's
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just say that the upshot of all this is that
you can take any event and plot it on the
graph to find if it qualifies as an existential risk.
So let's do that. Take the death of a local
baseball mascot. We'll go with the Richmond Flying Squirrels for
no reason whatsoever. Let's say that the team's mascot was
doing his thing up at the top of the bleachers
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when he fell over the side all the way down
to the concrete below, dying instantly beside the ticket booth.
This would be a very sad day, not just for
the person who wore the flying squirrel costume, but also
for their family and maybe even a sizeable portion of
the Richmond, Virginia area. Yeah, so we can say that
this would be a local event since it affects more
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than just one person or one family, but it definitely
doesn't affect humanity as a whole. And since the Flying
Squirrels family and residents of Richmond will be able to
carry on, then we can say that it will be
an endurable event. So the tragic accidental death of the
Richmond Flying Squirrels mascot would be a local, endurable event.
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Let's up the stakes a little, shall we. How about
a global thermonuclear war. This would obviously be a global event,
and it would affect in some ways everyone alive at
the time, whether through fiery death or from radioactive fallout,
starvation during the nuclear winter, being forced out of one's
home to find a safer place to live. You can
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make a pretty good bet that a global nuclear war
will affect everybody on the planet, and depending on how
bad the outcome was, the after effects it has on
society could continue on for some time, affecting multiple generations
of people. Perhaps it would be transgenerational in its scope,
but it would be pretty unlikely that it killed everyone
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alive at the time and wiped humanity out of existence.
There would almost certainly be enough survivors to carry on, and,
as we saw with that climate change disaster scenario earlier,
they should eventually return back to where we were prior
to the nuclear war, and hopefully smart enough to avoid
doing it all over again once we got there. So
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for humanity as a whole, a global nuclear war would
be a transgenerational endurable event. But if you follow the
scale this handy graph up into the right, you will
find the point where existential risks live pan generational crushing events.
We don't make it through those, but those are exactly
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what's coming down the pike right now. We are creating
new technology that poses risks to humankind in a form
we've never encountered before, a kind that dwarf global nuclear
war and climate change, and we are wholly unprepared for them.
My hope is that this series, in some small way,
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will make us aware that we need to prepare. That
there is a safe path through the coming treacherousness, but
we have to plan for it now. If we can
make it through the process of mastering the new technology
that will define our world artificial intelligence, advances in biotechnology
and particle physics nanotechnology, we may secure a very bright
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and very long history for humanity, reaching long into the
far future and spreading across the universe. Technology that poses
an existential risk to us now is the very same
that can prevent existential risks from befollowing us once we've
mastered them, a point called technological maturity. We're entering the
most precarious period now the point between where those unprecedentedly
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dangerous technologies come into existence and where we have them
fully under control. Any time between those two points, one
single slip up, one single lab accident caused by one
single person, one single failure to plan, one single oversight,
could bring about the sudden, rapid demise of humankind forever.
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Turning our back on our destiny won't help us. The
dye is already cast. Some self imposed return to the
Dark Ages won't reverse our momentum. In the great filter
that we will go through, it has become inevitable. Even
during the actual Dark Ages, that period of modern human
history where we supposedly stopped progressing intellectually, was filled with
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pockets of people and entire cultures around the world still discovering,
still innovating. And so it would be as well if
we all foolishly banded together to try to halt the
progress of science for fear of the risks that poses.
We are not equipped to prevent science, and we would
not want to even if we could. It is science
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that will expose us to these risks, but it is
also science will free us from them forever. On the
other side, and It's not just us who we have
to carry on for, it's the entire future of the
human race. We're carrying all of those tend to the
who knows what power future humans on our shoulders as
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we walk this tight rope over ruination. The way to
ensure our survival is not to concentrate on what's ahead,
but instead to look down to plumb the void below.
The only chance we have of navigating existential risks is
to understand them. On the next episode of the End
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of the World with Josh Clark, the sun will basically
fill up our entire sky. You look out the window
will just be a big, de seething mess of of star.
We've lived with natural existential risks since the dawn of humanity.
When bad things happen to Earth, they happen to us
as well, and that will be so as long as
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we remain an earth bound species.
You are a human being, and one day you will die.
But when you die, you can take comfort in the
knowledge that you're part of something larger than yourself. You're
a member of the human race, and as long as
the human race continues, in some ways, you do too.
All of us, every living thing, are individual members in
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a cycle of life and death that began four billion
years ago when that first single living cell divided into two.
Two billion years after that, along came sex, and birth
led to more sex, led to more birth, And as
long as that cycle continues in a species, death can
happen in the background. It must happen. Really. It may
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sound a little cruel, but in the bigger picture, the
death of one thing is kind of meaningless so long
as the species continues. Humans tend to divide life along
the borders between species, and for good reason. It's not
an arbitrary dividing line. A species is what makes the
difference between eating a meal and engaging and cannibalism. Across
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the animal kingdom, individuals routinely do things that risk their
own life to save members of their species. You almost
never see that kind of behavior between different species. True,
there are plenty of examples of species where eating one's
own kind is an everyday act, and there are examples
of adorable dogs adopting motherless lambs, But the chances are
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better than not that an animal will show preferential treatment
towards a member of its species over others. Most importantly, though,
any member of a species can combine their genes with
another member and come up with new and fascinating ways
to push the species further along the evolutionary path where
it's better able to grow and flourish. Homo sapiens, the
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species that you, me and every human alive are members of,
means in Latin wise human, and it's a bit of
flattery since it is the name that we human beings
gave to ourselves. But here today, so far removed from
our ancient origins, it's easy to forget that the name
is meant to distinguish us from other types of humans.
As recently as fifty thousand years ago, we shared this
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planet with no less than three other human species. In
the same way you might walk about the Earth today
and come upon a lion, one species of cat, and
tabby an entirely different species of cat. In the very
recent geological past, you would have been able to meet
with a Neanderthal in a French cave and a Denisovan
in Siberia, and had you wandered on down to Indonesia,
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you would have been able to meet a tiny variety
of human called Homo floresiensis, who stood four ft talls. Today,
though there is only the one species of human us,
Homo sapiens. We can't say for certain, but we strongly
suspect that the ultimate reason why we are the only
ones left is because of our intelligence. Perhaps the planet
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was presented with a series of tricky environmental challenges and
we were the only ones intelligent enough to successfully negotiate them.
Maybe it was the universally devastating step in the great filter,
or maybe that's not right at all. We've only recently
discovered that denis Ovans and Floresiensis existed, but we've known
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about Neanderthals for some two hundred years now, and over
time we've come to realize that they weren't the dim
wits we initially took them for. We now know that
they used tools like us, and they may have mastered
fire as well, and Neanderthals might have been the earliest
humans to bury their dead, which shows the capacity to
think about abstractions like an afterlife. Whether or not we
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were the only human species with the capacity for abstract thought,
The one thing we can say for certain is that we,
Homo sapiens, are the only ones left on Earth. To
wonder at the immense responsibility we have to simply carry
on is the one single remaining species of our kind.
That responsibility to survive and thrive is big enough just
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being the only human species left on Earth, but it
grows to overwhelming proportions when you consider the idea that
we could be the only intelligent life and the whole
endless universe. The precariousness of our situation begins to sink.
In The family paradox appears to show that the entire
future of intelligent life in the universe rests on the
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likelihood of us staying alive. The entire population of Homo
floresiensis the species of tiny humans lived on a single
island called Flores in modern day Indonesia. They lived there
for almost a hundred and fifty thousand years, and then
suddenly they disappeared. One current theory for their extinction is
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that a volcano erupted and killed them all off, which
would have been relatively easy, since the entire species dweled
only on that one island. We humans alive today call
our island Earth, and we have to wonder what our
volcano will be. Right now, there are about seven and
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a half billion of us humans alive. Seven and a
half billion is an enormous number, to be sure, but
it's a small fraction, tiny fraction of all the Homo
sapiens who have ever lived. In the fifty thousand years
since we emerged as modern humans early on and continuing
for most of our species history, we had an extremely
short average life expectancy, somewhere around ten to twelve years.
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That doesn't mean that the average person died at age eleven.
It means that if you take all the people who
lived into old age and all the children who died
in infancy or at birth, so many people died young
that the average age of death was dragged down all
the way into the tweens. Plenty of people lived into
what we would consider old age. It's just that many,
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many more didn't survive childhood. And this is how it
was for most of human history. That extremely high childhood
mortality rate was eventually overcome. Through the use of our
clever sapiens brains, we figured out things like germ theory
and anatomy and nutrition, and all of them converged to
create a world that a child could be born into
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where they had a very good chance of surviving into adulthood.
We humans used our brains to help our species be
better able to survive, and as a result, our population
began to boom. Around two thousand years ago, there were
probably three hundred million people alive on Earth. About three
hundred and fifty years ago, the human population had grown
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to five million. Thirty years from now we will hit
the ten billion mark, So in just three hundred and
fifty years we will have grown by nine billion, five
hundred million people. All told, you can count yourself as
one of the hundred and eight billion modern humans who
have ever lived. An astronomical number, to be sure, But
(07:08):
the number of humans who have ever lived, as immense
as it is, is a drop in the bucket of
the number of humans who haven't lived yet. This is
philosopher Toby ord Our. Species Homo sapiens is about two
hundred thousand years old UM, so that's about two thousand
centuries that we've been around. If we could survive that
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long again, uh, you know, we'd see two thousand centuries
of civilization. That's about twenty times longer than civilization has
been around so far, with just wondrous things being created
throughout that whole time that we can barely imagine. And
that's even with relatively little in the way of fancy
science fiction technological progress that we might imagine. Remember back
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when we talked about the possibility that we don't see
alien life in the universe because they opted to stay
home instead, Let's say that we humans have that same
type of home body nous in our far future, sticking
around on Earth rather than spreading out into the rest
of the galaxy. So Earth remains the only planet where
you can find a human population. And let's say that
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over the course of a billion years our population gradually
lowers and stabilizes, that one billion people alive on the
planet at any given time, And if our lifespans stick
around where it is today, then by a billion years
from now, an additional ten to the sixteenth power humans
will have been born. That's ten with fifteen zeros after it,
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ten quadrillion, a million, trillion future human lives hundred and
eight billion doesn't seem quite so big now. That ten
quadrillion number is a low end estimate. If we do
nothing but continue to plot along as a species for
the next billion years, we could expect to reach it,
But we might also increase the number of future human
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lives dramatically if we humans in a a as a species.
One of the ways that most futurists expect we will
innovate is by leaving our bodies behind and entering into
a digital world, becoming what's called a post biological species.
Imagine that we learned how to free the human mind
from its bonds to the neurons and dendrites and axons
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that make up the functioning human brain. No real reason
that the human mind should require our selves to think
and to experience. What if the human brain is just
one of many ways to produce what we call consciousness.
What if there are other ways that could produce the
same thoughts, the same experiences, but with hardware instead of squishy, soft,
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extremely fragile material we call the brain. To understand how
we could create consciousness inside a machine rather than a
human brain, you should know a little bit about the
hard problem. First, Back in The Philosopher of the Mind,
David chaw Mers published a paper where he divided our
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attempts to understand consciousness into the hard problem and the
easy problem. The easy problem of consciousness is how it arises. How,
for example, light can enter the eye and be carried
along as an electrical impulse to the brain, where it's
analyzed and sorted into the image of a house plant.
We generally understand how the various parts involved in this
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process work. We pretty much understand how the sights and
sounds of the external world are perceived by us. There's
no mystery to it. So although we haven't worked out
every last detail of how consciousness arises from our brains,
in Chalmer's view, we were well enough along that we
basically had the easy problem licked already by the time
he wrote his essay. The hard problem is how we
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subjectively experienced those sights and sounds. How all of those experiences,
moment to moment combine and create what we think of
as the experience of being human. Why is it that
rather than simply observing the house plant and deeming it
neither a threat nor food and simply disregard it, instead
you might be reminded of your dear sweet mother who
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loved house plants, and maybe you'll also think about how
perhaps a house plant might brighten up your own apartment
and maybe put you in a better mood because you've
been a little bit down lately. In other words, why
should we experience the inner life that we think of
as ourselves? More to the point, where does this conscious
experience come from? We can point to the language processing
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parts of the brain to show how we humans understand
what the other person is saying when someone tells us
they love us, But we can't point to the part
of the brain that creates the incredibly rich experience those
words can arouse in us. That is the hard problem
of consciousness. To some people, we will never figure out.
The answer to the hard problem. Human conscious experience is
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too ethereal to ever understand. To those on the other side,
we've already solved the hard problem. It's the same answer
is the easy problem. All of those neurons and dendrites
and axons that are responsible for communicating and sorting and
storing the sensory input in our brains are also the
same parts that are responsible for creating our conscious experience.
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We just haven't figured out how they do it quite yet.
If that's true, and the hard problem really isn't a
hard problem at all, there's a big implication in there.
If consciousness is just an emergent property of neural complexity,
like how tens of thousands of individual bees form a
high mind that is larger than the sum of its parts,
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then we should be able to simulate consciousness by simulating
neural complexity. Maybe not today, maybe not anytime soon, but
the point is it would be theoretically possible, and given
enough time in technological development, it's a pretty safe bet
that we will figure out how to do it. If
there is an organizing principle of life that takes hold
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once molecules begin to take an organic form, then perhaps
the bio logical form. It's just one phase of evolution.
Perhaps post biology is just another stage. If or when
we become capable of uploading human minds on the computers,
the number of future human lives will increase exponentially, and
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those lives can be expected to be exponentially better than
the average life of those of us alive today. If
we are the only intelligent life in the universe and
That means that should we become capable of spreading out
in our galaxy and then eventually throughout the rest of
the universe, it will all be there for our taking.
Though farther out we look in more detail, and the
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more clearly we see there's nothing at all alive anywhere
in the universe, then it says we are really quite special.
Not only that we are special for having, you know,
created cars and televisions, we are just special for being
on a planet that has life at all. Ah and
the universe will remain dead until the life on our
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planet spreads. That was great filter theorist Robin Hanson. Once
we spread beyond Earth, we will reach one of the
largest milestones in the history of our species, in the
history of life. Really, we will no longer be earth bound.
We will have become a spacefaring species with an entire
universe to explore and use for whatever we want. All
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of the resources material and energy in the universe that
we can reach before it inflates beyond our grasp is
there for our use in ours alone. This is what
an Oxford University philosopher named Nick Bostrom calls humanity's cosmic
endowment and The key thing about it is that it
looks like it's astronomically large. Every less scrap of accomplishment
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that we humans have managed to achieve in our relatively
short time here on Earth has been created with extremely
limited resources compared to what will be available to us
when we begin to spread out around the universe. If
things are the way they look that what we have
been able to play our hands on so far is
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a period of time maybe a thousand, ten thousand years
of human history and some hundred thousand years of prehistory.
That's kind of our species tenure so far, and we've
been confined to the surface of planet Earth, which is
this little crumb floating around in a huge style of
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material and energy and resources. So it's one planet in
one solar system out of a hundred billion solar systems
in this galaxy, which is it's so one of maybe
a hundred building galaxies that could be reached from our
starting point and then used for billions of years. So
if you add all of those orders of magnitude together,
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you find that by some very large number, it dominates
what exists today or has existed through human history. What
will we do with all that stuff? I don't know,
but it at least seems to me that protecting a
chance to do that is critically important. If, as a
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great many philosophers throughout history have believed the point of
life is finding happiness, then we could use it to
pursue happiness on a massive scale. If you, for example,
I think that happy people are our minds experiencing pleasure
or beauty or doing interesting things have value, then that
could just be a lot more like a lot more
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of those in the future, a lot more like a
quadrillion more, and that number could grow exponentially higher if
or when we reach that point of post biology, like
any post biological civilization, we would place a pretty high
value on converting all of that into computing power. The
science fiction author Ray Bradberry once estimated that the energy
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captured from a star could power tend to the forty
second computer operations per second. So Nick Bostrom took that
figure and he applied it to a post biological society
with access to all of the stars that we can
reach in the universe until they inflate forever out of
our grasp. If the human brain makes in the neighborhood
of ten to the seventeenth operations per second to produce
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our conscious experience, then it's a pretty fair bet that's
about how many computations per second we would require to
experience consciousness and digital form as well. So, considering those
numbers and more, Bostro included some other complex astronomical figures
as well, he arrived at the low end estimate, the
low end of ten to the fifty second power future
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human lives waiting to be lived expressed an American English
that is ten sex Deicilian lives. That's a real word.
A number is so astoundingly large it might be tried
to even mention that it is. And you could make
the case that in many ways, okay, essentially every way,
those humans in the far future will live better lives
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than those of us alive today, because natural selection and
didn't design us to be happy, discontent other things. Being
equal is adaptive and fitness enhancing. And there's a transhumanist
I very much hope that we're going to be able
to design a civilization based on to use a slogan,
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a triple ess, a civilization based on super intelligence, super happiness,
and super longevity. This is transhumanist philosopher David Pierce, who
is among the number of people who believe that humans
have a long and potentially bright future ahead of us.
Humans might use all of that power to simulate amazing
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new experiences for ourselves that we haven't considered yet and
that would be utterly impossible in our physical reality. We
would be able to expand and edit our consciousness, our faculties,
our ability to empathize with others, for capability to experience emotion.
What we alive today might consider the high a state
of happiness, maybe the baseline happiness for all new humans
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born into a digital world, and so the humans of
the future would be blissed out all the time. Here's
an example one sees today the effects of a drug
like m d M A ecstasy or hug drug, in
which essentially people become loving, bonabo like warm, empathetic, jealousy,
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resentment evaporate UH. For evolutionary reasons, people aren't like that
all the time. But with the use of UH some
genetic tweaking, it would be possible to create people trans humans,
post humans who who love each other in the way
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that people fleetingly do today on the m d M A.
Just how likely this scenario is. I don't know, but
in the long run it's so be feasible because we
live in a world where we must compete with one
another and other life on our planet for resources. What
the future might be like in a world where scarcity
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doesn't exist is largely inconceivable to us. Suffice it to
say that life can be better than it is today
should we make it there. We can't forget the possibility
that between us and all of those countless future lives.
Since the Great Filter. Back in the summer of a
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space probe launched by NASA called Viking one flew over
Mars if photographed the planet's surface for the first time
in human history, and prior to landing on July, Viking
one flew over the Sidonia region, a bumpy transition zone
between the planets, cratered north in the flat plains of
the South. Within those images that it's sent back to
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its controllers at the Jet Propulsion Lab on Earth was
a particularly striking one. It showed what looked to be
a massive stone face wearing a ceremonial headdress. It looked
a lot like an ancient monument on the surface of Mars.
Is what it looked like It became one of the
more famous images in the world, the Face on Mars,
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and it stirred the imagination of earth bound humans about
a potential Martian pass where a great civilization once lived
and thrived. But when the Mars Global Surveyor flew over
the site with a far better camera than the Viking
one had on board, it was clear the Face on
Mars was just another mesa, shaped not by ancient Martian hands,
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but by Martian wind and erosion. But what if that
image had confirmed the wildest speculations and we had mounted
an expedition to Mars to investigate the governments of Canada, Japan,
and the United States, the three countries leading the International
Mars Expedition received a bundle of despat just from the
(22:00):
astronauts investigating the Mars anomaly. Today, newly discovered structures that
appear to be ceremonial halls and temples built from a
yet unidentified metal, further confirmed the one time presence of
an advanced civilization on the red planet. President Clinton was
in New York today to news like this would not
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bode well for those of us living here on Earth.
As Nick Bostrom points out in an article, that ran
in Technology Review in two thousand and eight. If we
were to find evidence of other intelligent life elsewhere in
the universe, it would strongly suggest that the Great Filter
lies waiting ahead of us. News like that would tell
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us that it's not so tough after all to get
past all the steps that led to us. Other life
managed it too. We would learn that we are not
special and unique, and so the likelihood would be that
the Great Filter is not somewhere in our past, which
means that it must be somewhere in our future. Everything
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we've ever imagined that could go wrong is a candidate
for a future filter. Uh. So, you know, take out
all of your favorite um disaster stories and fears and
add them all up, and it might be in there.
It might be something we haven't imagined. If it is
the case that the Great filters in our future, then
the reason that there is no intelligent life in the
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universe other than us is because none of those who
came before us were able to make it through the
step that lies ahead. The more you learn about the
kind of risks we humans are beginning to take on,
the kind of make up the worst of those disaster
scenarios Robin Hanson mentioned the more convincing the idea that
we are now entering the great filter becomes m It's
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probably about here that you should meet Nick Bostrom, he
chimed in earlier, but what I mean to say is
that you should know more about him, as his work
forms a lot of the basis of this series. In Oxford, England,
there is a university among the world's oldest, where people
have been teaching since at least ten nine, nearly a
thousand years, and housed in a three story tan brick
(24:16):
administration building called Little gate House is the Future of
Humanity Institute. The FHI was founded by Nick Bostrom, who,
as I said, is a philosopher, and it is a
center where people from a wide array of disciplines come
together to consider the ways that humanity could accidentally wipe
itself out in the near future, and also how to
prevent that, and also what we might do with ourselves
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if we're able to negotiate the very tricky near future
and actually survive into the far future. A great many
of the ideas in this series came from those collaborations
that arose at f HI. What Nick Bostrom mostly thinks
about our existential risks. Existential risks are threats to life
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that have consequences so sweeping, so utterly catastrophic, that should
one of them befall us, it would spell the end
of humankind. No more humans, and if it turns out
that we are the only intelligent life in the universe,
no more intelligent life anywhere at all. What makes existential
threats so dangerous, in addition to the catastrophe they bring,
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is that they are unlike any other type of risk
we're used to encountering. With virtually every other type of
threat posed to humans, we can reasonably expect that enough
of us will be left alive to continue our species
should one befall us. Take a disastrous change in climate.
For example, imagine that a couple of decades from now,
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we humans are caught totally off guard by a sudden
shift in the global climate far more pronounced and abrupt
than the warning signs were currently experiencing. A rapid rise
in sea levels drowns coastal towns around the world, sending
huge populations of people inland, which puts in a nor
restrain on the cities that absorb them. At the same time,
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massive droughts and floods break out, and virtually every food
producing region of the world. The ecological collapse leads to
social collapse. Food supplies dwindle, water supplies become salty. An
untold number of people begin to die, more than ever
have in human history. Even more are killed in wars
that break out over the precious resources that remain. In
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just a handful of decades, the entire human race is
reduced from ten billion to just one hundred million people
living in scattered settlements across the globe. As categorically awful
as such an experience would be, it would not spell
the end of humans. Even with just one percent of
the population left alive. We could reasonably expect that a
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hundred million people living across the world would be enough
to carry the human race along and eventually to rebuild.
To be sure, we would be set back substantially. All
of the progress that we had made as a global
civilization would be pushed back thousands of years, almost to
square one. Almost. There's a substantial difference between the perhaps
(27:13):
fateful series of events that led to the discovery of
something like smelting iron and carbon into steel and having
people who remember learning that if you add carbon to
iron you can make steel, or that there's such a
thing as coffee, or that you can make wine from grapes.
And if you spin a magnet inside a spool of
copper wire, you can generate an electrical current. And if
(27:36):
you pass steam through a turbine, you can use it
to spin that magnet, so you don't have to stand
there and do it yourself. The memories of all the
ideas and discoveries that accumulated to make up the general
knowledge base of the average human walking around on Earth
would remain and would provide an enormous advantage for those
left to rebuild compared to those who built in the
(27:56):
first place. Consider that it was perhaps only ten thousand
years ago that we began organizing ourselves into complex societies
for the first time. Those early settlements in cities like
cattle Hook in Turkey and Mesopotamia in Iraq that served
as the earliest attempts at communal living, agriculture, government, law, trade,
(28:17):
and everything else that forms the basis of modern civilization
or only about ten thousand years old. So even being
set back to the beginning, even with humanity suddenly dead,
we could reasonably expect that people could get back to
roughly the point where we're at today within about ten millennia,
which sounds like a long time, but remember we're talking
(28:37):
about time on geological and cosmological scales. Ten thousand years
is a blink. Throughout our history, we humans have survived plagues, floods, droughts,
supervolcano eruptions, just about anything Earth could throw at us,
and we've always had enough of us left after a
catastrophe to continue on for forward momentum to slow sometimes
(28:59):
but never to halt entirely, and those eons of experience
of disaster and recovery form the basis of how we
learn from the world, a process you may know as
trial and error. Imagine that you're a chemist working on
a new explosive. As this customary, you keep detailed notes
as you go along, and then one day you're in
(29:21):
the lab when boom, you blow yourself up. You are
in a great many pieces, but your notes are intact,
and so other chemists can come along, consult your notes,
find where you went wrong, and then try again with
a slightly different formula. This process can continue indefinitely as
long as it takes until we master this new explosive
(29:42):
so long as there are chemists who take good notes,
who are willing to risk blowing themselves up, and are
never all in the same lab at once. This process
of trial and error is so glaringly obvious that it
seems not even worth spelling out. But it is because
the process of trial and error is how we've gain
virtually all of human knowledge about the world to this point,
(30:04):
and understandably so, because it works. But trial and error
doesn't work with existential risks. When it comes to other risks,
humanity is very good, actually at learning from trial and error,
and we have some failures and we rebuild. This is
Toby Ord, you've met him previously. He's one of Nick
Bostrom's colleagues at the f HI, and he's literally writing
(30:26):
the book on existential risks. But when it comes to
existential risks, uh, failing even once means we've lost permanently
our potential for the future. So we can't have any failures,
which means that we can't use our our most successful
way of learning, trial and error. What separates existential risks
from all other types of risks is the outcome, the
(30:48):
potential consequences of existential risks are so catastrophic that if
something goes wrong with them once, that's it for humanity.
With these types of risk, there isn't any one percent
of humanity to carry on. There are none of us.
There's no trial and error with existential risks. It's more
like trial and sudden nothingness. We can't go back to
(31:09):
the drawing board to figure out what went wrong and
try again. The drawing board will have been vaporized or
there won't be any people left to write on it.
And that's very different from many kinds of risk because, um,
first there's no redo. Um. If we accidentally trigger some
(31:30):
sort of existential risk or are exposed to an existentially
destructive event, that sort of it for humanity. Um. But
beyond that, lots of the mechanisms that we used to
manage risks stop working. That was Sebastian Farquhar. He too
is a philosopher at Oxford, and he too is with
the f HI. Another name for existential risks is low probability,
(31:52):
high consequence risks. Fortunately, the possibility of a bad outcome
befalling us from any of these risks is the remote. Normally,
we wouldn't give them much thought, or any thought at all.
But these aren't normal risks. The potential bad outcome is
so great that even though they have an extremely tiny
chance of happening, they are still worth thinking about and
(32:15):
trying to mitigate. And that is just what Nick Bostrom
in the Future of Humanity does. Back in two thousand twelve,
in a paper on existential risks, Nick Bostrom included a
handy graph for categorizing different types of risk. Along the
X axis, the horizontal one. I always have trouble remembering
that is the severity of a risk, how catastrophic its
(32:38):
outcome could be. Bostrom has ordered the severity from imperceptible
like losing a single hair off of your head, too
endurable like having your car stolen, to crushing like dying
in a car crash. All of those terrible events are
ones that happened to a single person, which is the
first category along the Y axis, the upward one, which
(33:00):
is the scope or how many people that the event affects.
This category starts with personal and moves up to local, global,
transgenerational affecting more than one generation of people, and pan
generational affecting every generation. From that point on, graphs are,
of course, a lot easier to take him when you
see them rather than to hear about them. So let's
(33:22):
just say that the upshot of all this is that
you can take any event and plot it on the
graph to find if it qualifies as an existential risk.
So let's do that. Take the death of a local
baseball mascot. We'll go with the Richmond Flying Squirrels for
no reason whatsoever. Let's say that the team's mascot was
doing his thing up at the top of the bleachers
(33:43):
when he fell over the side all the way down
to the concrete below, dying instantly beside the ticket booth.
This would be a very sad day, not just for
the person who wore the flying squirrel costume, but also
for their family and maybe even a sizeable portion of
the Richmond, Virginia area. Yeah, so we can say that
this would be a local event since it affects more
(34:04):
than just one person or one family, but it definitely
doesn't affect humanity as a whole. And since the Flying
Squirrels family and residents of Richmond will be able to
carry on, then we can say that it will be
an endurable event. So the tragic accidental death of the
Richmond Flying Squirrels mascot would be a local, endurable event.
(34:25):
Let's up the stakes a little, shall we. How about
a global thermonuclear war. This would obviously be a global event,
and it would affect in some ways everyone alive at
the time, whether through fiery death or from radioactive fallout,
starvation during the nuclear winter, being forced out of one's
home to find a safer place to live. You can
(34:45):
make a pretty good bet that a global nuclear war
will affect everybody on the planet, and depending on how
bad the outcome was, the after effects it has on
society could continue on for some time, affecting multiple generations
of people. Perhaps it would be transgenerational in its scope,
but it would be pretty unlikely that it killed everyone
(35:06):
alive at the time and wiped humanity out of existence.
There would almost certainly be enough survivors to carry on, and,
as we saw with that climate change disaster scenario earlier,
they should eventually return back to where we were prior
to the nuclear war, and hopefully smart enough to avoid
doing it all over again once we got there. So
(35:26):
for humanity as a whole, a global nuclear war would
be a transgenerational endurable event. But if you follow the
scale this handy graph up into the right, you will
find the point where existential risks live pan generational crushing events.
We don't make it through those, but those are exactly
(35:47):
what's coming down the pike right now. We are creating
new technology that poses risks to humankind in a form
we've never encountered before, a kind that dwarf global nuclear
war and climate change, and we are wholly unprepared for them.
My hope is that this series, in some small way,
(36:07):
will make us aware that we need to prepare. That
there is a safe path through the coming treacherousness, but
we have to plan for it now. If we can
make it through the process of mastering the new technology
that will define our world artificial intelligence, advances in biotechnology
and particle physics nanotechnology, we may secure a very bright
(36:29):
and very long history for humanity, reaching long into the
far future and spreading across the universe. Technology that poses
an existential risk to us now is the very same
that can prevent existential risks from befollowing us once we've
mastered them, a point called technological maturity. We're entering the
most precarious period now the point between where those unprecedentedly
(36:53):
dangerous technologies come into existence and where we have them
fully under control. Any time between those two points, one
single slip up, one single lab accident caused by one
single person, one single failure to plan, one single oversight,
could bring about the sudden, rapid demise of humankind forever.
(37:16):
Turning our back on our destiny won't help us. The
dye is already cast. Some self imposed return to the
Dark Ages won't reverse our momentum. In the great filter
that we will go through, it has become inevitable. Even
during the actual Dark Ages, that period of modern human
history where we supposedly stopped progressing intellectually, was filled with
(37:36):
pockets of people and entire cultures around the world still discovering,
still innovating. And so it would be as well if
we all foolishly banded together to try to halt the
progress of science for fear of the risks that poses.
We are not equipped to prevent science, and we would
not want to even if we could. It is science
(37:56):
that will expose us to these risks, but it is
also science will free us from them forever. On the
other side, and It's not just us who we have
to carry on for, it's the entire future of the
human race. We're carrying all of those tend to the
who knows what power future humans on our shoulders as
(38:17):
we walk this tight rope over ruination. The way to
ensure our survival is not to concentrate on what's ahead,
but instead to look down to plumb the void below.
The only chance we have of navigating existential risks is
to understand them. On the next episode of the End
(38:37):
of the World with Josh Clark, the sun will basically
fill up our entire sky. You look out the window
will just be a big, de seething mess of of star.
We've lived with natural existential risks since the dawn of humanity.
When bad things happen to Earth, they happen to us
as well, and that will be so as long as
(38:58):
we remain an earth bound species.
The End Of The World with Josh Clark News
Host
Josh Clark
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