Robin Hanson

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Greetings and welcome to the United States Transhumanist Party Virtual
Enlightenment Salon. My name is Jannati stolieroth Second and I
am the Chairman of the US Transhumanist Party. Here we
hold conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers in longevity, science, technology, philosophy,
and politics. Like the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment,

(00:23):
we aim to connect every field of human endeavor and
arrive at new insights to achieve longer lives, greater rationality,
and the progress of our civilization. Greetings, ladies and gentlemen,
and welcome to our US Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon
of Sunday, August twenty fifth, twenty twenty four. Today we

(00:47):
are pleased to bring you a fascinating and challenging conversation
on the future of our civilization and some factors, perhaps
some subtle factors, that might endanger the kind of techno
optimistic trajectory that we transhumanists would like to see achieved.
So joining us today is a distinguished panel. We have

(01:10):
our Director of Visual Art Art, Ramon Garcia. We have
our member and previous Virtual Enlightenment Salon guest, Alan Crowley.
You can watch our Virtual Enlightenment Salon with him of
last Sunday, August eighteenth, and our special guest for today
is Professor Robin Hanson. He is an associate professor of

(01:34):
economics at George Mason University. He received his PhD in
nineteen ninety seven and social sciences from cal Tech, and
actually prior to that he specialized in physics as well,
so he is quite a bit of a polymath. He
is a specialist in physics, economics, social sciences. He is

(01:54):
I would say, one of the renaissance men of our times.
He joined George Mason Economics faculty in nineteen ninety nine
after completing a two year postdoc at UC Berkeley. His
major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal
political theory. He is also interested in all aspects of
the future, including uploading, nanotech, cosmology and the foundations of physics,

(02:19):
future economic growth rates, limits of computation, and the origin
of life. Quite a wide ranging set of interests, and
that is exactly what we like to discuss in our salons.
We like to bridge various disciplines, various fields of human
endeavor that have become overly siloed in recent decades, and

(02:42):
quite notably for us. In nineteen ninety eight, Robin Hanson
wrote an essay The Great Filter, Are We Almost Passed It?
Where he essentially introduced the concept of the great filter
as a possible response to Jeremy's paradox, the observation that
we haven't or might not have encountered a lot of

(03:06):
other intelligent life in the universe. So this is one
of the subjects that we would like to discuss with
him later today. But the foremost reason why I invited
him here is because I was fascinated by a presentation
he gave at the Global Cryonic Summit in Miami in

(03:27):
July of this year, where he discussed the idea of
cultural drift and how, in his view, it might leave
us with only a relatively short window of time to
achieve the kind of technological progress that we would like
to see happen to take humankind to the next level.
So with that introduction, I would like to give the

(03:52):
floor to Professor Robin Hanson for his introductory remarks, And
indeed our audience is interested to understand the concept of
cultural drift to a greater extent. Our friend, Mike Lausine
writes in the chat what does cultural drift mean?

Speaker 2 (04:12):
So let's start there. Hello everyone, I'm Robin Hanson. Nice
to meet you all. I think I'm just going to
talk for a bit here. Apparently I need to restart
Chrome after figuring out how to give it permissions if
it's going to be able to have access to a
different program on my computer, So I will talk of it.
That probably work better with can more of a discussion.

(04:32):
So let's start with some basics. Think of species. Species
have to have some things in common. Biological species, so
you know, species of cat, the different members of the
species that could vary in the color of the fur,
maybe the length of the claus or some features like that.

(04:54):
But then there'll have to be some other features that
all the members of the species have in common so
that when when they mate, they can make another cat.
If you try to mate a cat and an octopus,
they're two different and you just won't have a sensible thing.
So in evolution you have two levels of selection than
two levels of evolution going on. You have the evolution

(05:15):
within species, the kinds of things that are allowed to
vary within a species, like the claws, those can vary
within a species, and so evolution is better and faster
for that when species are bigger. Bigger species means that
any more places a new innovation could show up, and
then it could spread to more others, all spreading within

(05:36):
the species. So evolution of things within a species goes
better when we have fewer bigger species. But evolution of
the things that species share that they all the members
of species have to share, that goes better when there's
more smaller species. And in history we have had different

(05:57):
kinds of habitats on the earth, some of which are
big habitats, so they have big species like ocean sections,
and other habitats are small and fragmented, and so they
tend to have small species. So think of coral reefs, rainforests,
or rivers. They fragment the biology into lots of little habitats,

(06:18):
so they have lots of little species. And we could ask,
looking back in history the animals that we have now
and then the plants, where did they come from? Did
they tend to come from the big habitats or the
small ones? And it turns out they came more from
the small ones, And so that says that evolution of

(06:38):
the features that species shares is actually more important than
evolution of the features that can vary within species, And
the same happens to be true for firms in our economy.
So firms in our economy they have cultures as well,
and they there are some things you can vary within
a firm, like you know, invent a new way of marketing,

(06:59):
and then it gets to other divisions in the firm
for marketing, a new way of doing transportation, et cetera,
a new way of doing meetings. So for the things
that can vary within a firm, evolution of those is
better when you have fewer, bigger firms, and evolution of
the things that firms all share in common. Like a
firm might have a culture of being very document everything say,

(07:20):
and that's a sort of norm across the whole firm.
And if we're going to find out whether that's a
good norm, we need to have lots of firms that
try out different norms. And it turns out that industries
with more smaller firms have more innovation compared to the
industries with a few big firms, suggesting again that the
evolution of the features that firm cultures share is more

(07:43):
important than evolution of the things that are allowed to
vary within cultures. So that's now prelude to thinking about
human macrocultures. So firms have cultures, but the things that
firm cultures control control what you do at work. When
you go home work, firm culture doesn't influence your behavior
that much. But we all are born into and live

(08:06):
in larger macrocultures that tell us more about important things
in life and how much time to spend on work,
how important careers are, how to deal with death, marriage, children, community.
We are in cultures that tell us about those things,
and I'm going to call those macrocultures. And culture in
general is humanity superpowers. So this is really important. The

(08:29):
reason why humans are better than other animals and we
just you know, go much fatter to them that they're
basically have tricles and we have sports cars. And the
reason we have sports cars is because we have culture.
So long ago natural selection didn't even have sex. I
don't know if you know that. It was a time
when sex was invented, and sex allowed much faster revolution

(08:50):
than asexual creatures because you could spread innovations through everybody
through sex. And then humans invented culture and that allows
even more places that innovations can come from and spread,
and that's our superpower. So that's why we've been going
gangbusters for a long time. And the essence of culture, again,
it has these two levels, is things that are allowed
to vary within cultures and then the things that can't vary.

(09:13):
That you have to have variation of the culture itself.
But we've had wonderful evolution of both of those things
for hundreds of thousands of years, and especially lately, we've
had great evolution of the things that are allowed to
vary within culture. That's technology, economic growth, and that's in
part because we've had some big changes in macrocultures in

(09:33):
the last few centuries. So a couple so, say three
centuries ago, the world was full of hundreds of thousands
of little peasant cultures, and each little peasant culture had
maybe a thousand or so people, and it was kind
of independent from the other ones around it. They didn't
trade that much because they were sort of self sufficient.
If some empire came through, they had to pay taxes,

(09:54):
but mostly that just didn't affect how they lived their lives.
And these hundreds of thousands of culture cures were near
the edge of survival. They could suffer famines, pandemics, wars,
and if they didn't have a good culture, a functional culture,
that could just wipe them out and then they'd just
be replaced by neighboring cultures. So it was maybe not

(10:16):
a pleasant life. But we had strong cultural evolution up
until a few centuries ago, hundreds of thousands of small cultures,
each of which near the edge of survival. We had
strong selection effects. So basically peasant cultures from a few
centuries ago were functional. They were adaptive. They might not
have given pleasant lives to people, you can complain about that,
but they were functional in the sense of promoting the

(10:37):
growth of their descendants and you know, surviving in the world.
So in the last few centuries we had a number
of huge changes. So we have the Industrial Revolution, we
have enormous growth in our productive capacity, and so we've
gotten rich. We've been able to grow the economy faster
than we can grow people, so wealth per person, income

(10:58):
for perfersons way up, and that means that we are
no longer at risks, so much of famines and pandemics
and wars, those selection pressures have gone way down. In addition,
we've merged hundreds of thousands of peasant cultures into far
fewer national cultures and then a world culture. So it

(11:19):
was a famous book called Peasants in the Frenchmen describing
how it happened in France, but it happened everywhere. National
government showed up and crushed local cultures and said, you're
no longer. You don't do things different anymore. You do
thing the French way, and they made everybody have the
French language, French customs, French schools, French everything, because they
made national cultures and so that reduced variation from hundreds

(11:42):
of thousands maybe a few hundred national cultures. And then
in the last century, elites, especially around the world, have
merged into a world elite culture. And now elites often
typically really defined themselves more in terms of their membership
in this global elite culture than being members of particular nations,

(12:03):
and so we have vastly less variety of cultures then
we had a few centuries ago. And in addition, we
have faster drift, so cultures naturally change a little every generation.
They don't stay exactly the same. But up until a
few centuries ago, most puzsant cultures were pretty adamant about

(12:23):
not changing. They were very traditional and they didn't like
to change, and they tried not to change. They did change,
but slowly. And then in the last few centuries we've
flipped and we've decided that our greatest heroes are cultural activists,
people who on purpose try to change culture and succeed.
Those are people we love when we celebrate them, we

(12:45):
have you know, parades and holidays whatever for them. And
so now we actually our culture changes much faster than
it used to. And some of that change is forced
by technology, but a lot of it isn't. A lot
of it's just ways we change culture because we had
cultural activists who decided to go one way and another
some of this so some of this cultural changes random,

(13:05):
Like the biggest cultural event of last century was World
War Two. The fact that Hitler took charge of Germany
was kind of random. The fact that Hitler they lost
the war was kind of random. But nevertheless, the end
of that war was very formative for world culture, but
it was kind of random. And then there's some other
trends we could discuss if you like, that are more

(13:26):
consistent trends over the last few centuries that we can
understand more in the sense that there are just some
ways that human cultures would drift if allowed that used
to be cultural selections stopped in debt in the tracks.
So think of decadence, which is a common description. There's
just a plausible sense in which any local culture and

(13:47):
history that got rich, the elites would get lazy, they
get self indulgent, they'd have parties, they have fancy dress,
they would just enjoy themselves. And that's a way in
which then often neighboring armies came in and stopped that.
Cultural selection didn't let that last too long, but often
it's kind of a natural tendency. And then the last
few centuries, those selection pressures have gone away, and we

(14:10):
have some drifts like decadence, some others we could discuss,
but we have some predictable drifts. But the key point
is these used to be stopped by selection pressures and
they're not anymore. And so these changes aren't plausibly adaptive.
And some of them may happen to be adaptive, but
on hold, they're probably maadapted. And so this is the
big lesson here. It didn't take long to get to it.

(14:35):
Plausibly humanity broke the steering on our sports car. We
were driving the spectacular sports car that you know, made
a zoom ahead of all the other animals. And we've
just turned off the selection process here in the last
few centuries, and so we're slowly drifting into dysfunction and

(14:55):
that's a big problem and it's really hard to fix. We
can discs potential fixes.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
But.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
The most plausible sign of this is falling fertility. So
fertility has been falling consistently for a while now worldwide,
and from a biological point of view, it's just not
plausible that you would be adaptive to fall fertility the
way we have in good times now. In past for animals,
it makes sense in you know, terrible famine or something

(15:24):
to cut back on fertility until you can afford to
have kids again. But in good times like we have,
we're still have very low fertility, and plausibly, you know,
if you look at the causes of fertility to time,
you can list a number of cultural trends that seem
to be the proximate causes. So I can just go
through here. I can say gender equality, intensive parenting, longer

(15:46):
inflexible school paths to our career paths, marriage as capstone
rather than a cornerstone grandparents having less control over parenting
of their kids, more urbanity, less religion. These are all
trends that plausibly cut fertility. And the idea is these

(16:07):
aren't adaptive trends, and they are assign the clearest sign
I can offer to you, at least in a short space,
that we are in fact suffering from this cultural drift process,
and this falling fertility is on track to lead to
a peak population in a couple decades and then falling
world population, and that will plausibly lead to greatly falling

(16:28):
innovation rates and plausibly less liberality in terms of societies
and governance. We can think of some plausible fixes, but
they would require enough support to reverse some of these
cultural trends that are quite treasured by people, and even
then that wouldn't be fixing the other lang problem of
cultural drift. I have some thoughts about how we could

(16:51):
fix cultural drift, but maybe this is a good time
to pause and discuss what I've said so far, and then,
if you like, when you're ready, we could talk about
fix this all right.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
Excellent, Thank you very much for that overview, and I
do think that was a great introduction to the concept
of cultural drift. I'll ask a question about that first,
and then we can talk about declining fertility as perhaps
a symptom of the cultural drift that is being experienced

(17:25):
right now worldwide. But in terms of innovation and where
we see innovation happen more, you pointed out that, for instance,
within smaller populations, it's possible to evolve certain traits faster,
certain traits that are more different from what has been

(17:46):
encountered before. Does that also apply, say, in a human context,
if you have a smaller society that's somewhere on the
periphery of the main events that are happening, that it
might be possible to innovate faster. Let's say there's some
small country that's kind of uninvolved in global affairs, but

(18:08):
it's fairly prosperous, prosperous enough that people there can focus
on creative activities, on invention, they have a fairly high
standard of living. Would you expect from that country to
emerge a faster rate of technological progress, more governance innovations,
perhaps because people actually have a chance to implement something

(18:29):
innovative as compared to a large let's say, quasi imperial
country like the United States or Russia or China.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Right, So there's two issues here. One is the kinds
of innovation you might expect to see in different places,
and the other is how big a difference is enough. So,
if we think about say, innovations in you know, cars,
or in computers or in food in it when those

(19:00):
innovations are allowed to be different, when they aren't regulated
to be the same, then the big, main rich countries
where we expect to see most innovation, because again, in
the large shared culture, you have most the fastest innovation
of the things that are allowed to change within a unit.
But if you're looking for innovation of the things that
we share in these larger units, then you'd have to

(19:22):
look for the smaller deviants. So, for example, you might
have thought, like, for many kinds of regulations, some small
country somewhere would be allowed to deviate. Now, if you
look at regulation of medical ethics, or nuclear energy, or
airlines or banking, you'll actually find surprisingly strong convergence around
the world. For example, the only country in the world

(19:43):
that allows organ sales is Iran, and bioethicists are getting
together all the time saying, how are we going to
make a rand stop doing this terrible thing. And that's
true for a lot of other kinds. If you looked
at the beginning of COVID, you notice that basically, all
of a sudden, you know, the usual epidemiologists said the
usual thing, and then elites got around the world and
talked about what to do, and they said, no, we're

(20:03):
going to do this other thing. And then the entire
world did the same thing after these elites got together
and decided to do something different. So there really is
pretty strong cultural convergence around the world on a lot
of things. And so we actually don't even the smallest
countries around the world don't actually deviate that much on

(20:23):
you say, things like polygamy or for example, there's very
few places that allow that, a very few places allow
child labor, right, I mean, there's just even though we
have a huge world of eight billion people, we have
relatively low variation on a lot of key cultural things. Now,

(20:44):
the small groups that succeeded being different enough are an
important lesson because you see just how different it takes.
So that would be say the Amish or the Heredum
in Israel. They are very different and very insular, so
it highlights in larity is the key is less about
being small and more about being insular. The insularity is

(21:05):
what allows a small culture to actually be different. They
have to resist outside influences, outside contact. And the Amish
have doubled every twenty years for the last century. Heretum
are increasing at a similar rate, and in two centuries that's
a factor of a thousand. Right now they almost to
say four hundred thousand. The Heretim are more, and so

(21:28):
in a couple of centuries, that's enough to take over
the world. Basically. Now, that might sound fanciful, but that's
in fact what the Christians did. The Christians started from
like a few hundred people, and then in three centuries
they took over the Roman Empire by doubling every twenty years.
So apparently it's possible for small groups to just do that. Now.

(21:49):
The Mormons are an object lesson into being different but
not different enough. The Mormons a century or so ago,
they were quite different and they had quite insular, very
different cultural practices, and then the Mormon Church made a
conscious decision to integrate more with us culture. They use
their central power to enforce that in the Mormon world,

(22:10):
and they succeeded, and now Mormons are more saf fertile
than the rest of the US, but they're on the
same trend, basically two decades behind everybody else. So and
you might think that Mormons are pretty different, and so
you have to say, but that's not different enough. Now
you have a really high standard. So in some sense,

(22:30):
one solution to cultural drift would you just be have
a lot more cultural variety, And that could be in
the form of a lot more cults. Cults is the
name we give to small descended cultures, and if we
just were more indulgent and encouraging of cults, that could help.
But we actually hate cults. So that's a I could
say more. But basically I've done some surveys I did.

(22:51):
I asked for about twelve different kinds of variety around
the world and whether people wanted more or less of it,
and the kind people wanted the least variety of is
fundamental values. People people like the idea that people have
different songs and clothes and climate and you know, art
and things like that. They hate the idea of people
having different values. So that's why people don't like cults
and typically suppress them anyway, yes.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
And it is interesting because to some extent here in
the transhumanist community we do have some fundamentally different values,
not all compared to the mainstream culture, and certainly our
divergence is not as great as that of the Amish
or the Orthodox Jews, but for instance, in terms of
the extent of value we place on technological progress and

(23:37):
overcoming the historical limitations of humanity, we have a very
different culture from the dominant culture, which our friend Adam
Grease has aptly characterized as a culture of existential hedonism.
And the most charitable way to characterize it is find
something that gives you meaning and fulfillment and enjoyment and

(23:58):
essentially rinse and until you die within this kind of
broadly humanistic framework that acknowledges that this life is valuable
to an extent, but you can't really affect the major
parameters of it, like the length of your life or
some of the obstacles you find along the way, So
you figure out a way to cope with it and

(24:19):
enjoy it as much as you can. So that's the
dominant culture that I see today, and the transhumanists say, well,
this can lead to some suboptimal adaptations let's say and
we embrace, let's say, a more progress driven and in
many cases, more meaningful view that allows us to look

(24:41):
at a longer term future that contemplates our own survival
within it. Would you agree with that kind of contrast?

Speaker 2 (24:49):
So almost everybody likes the idea that they are in
some somewhat different cub culture. The idea that you are
just a generic member of world elite culture isn't very
appealing to people. So most everybody is trying to grab
onto some marker of something different that they identify with.

(25:11):
And say, fandom and music and entertainment are a huge
source of this. So if you think about, say, people
who like Star Trek versus Star Wars, to take one
classic conflict, they get a lot of identity and meaning
out of picking one of those tribes and being part
of it. But if we stand back and we say, well, okay,

(25:33):
but how do they live their lives different? Do they
pick different jobs or do they have different emphasis on jobs?
Do they live in different places, do they have different
stances toward parenting or toward relatives or neighbors. They don't
they get this identity out of being Star Trek or
Star Wars but it doesn't actually affect much of the
rest of their life. And that's the kind of variety

(25:55):
we have in the world. Mostly we have relatively limited
variety of the key life choice values and norms, and
then we focus on some you know, salient surface changes
as are key things, and we're proud of those. We're
proud to go to a different kind of restaurant that
other people do, and live in a different kind of music.

(26:16):
And you know, if you meet somebody at a party whatever,
they'll they're happy to go on about their particular things
and how they're different and how they like those. But
the question is is it enough to really, you know,
support the kind of cultural variety and selection that humanity
needs to get out of this cultural different problem. That's
even the transhumanist party. I'm going to say, I'm glad

(26:38):
you have some differences, but I want to like, do
you parent different? Do you die different? Do you go
to school different? Do you you know? Do you have
neighbors different? How do you live your life different? Because
that's what actually humanity four hundreds of thousands of years
had as variety, variety and how you live your life,
such that Hannady could learn how to do these things

(26:59):
very interesting.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
I would say many of us are cryonicis, so that
is a different approach toward death. Also, many of us,
of course actively support life extension research in hopes that
we don't have to resort to the cryonics option, so
that is a difference. In terms of the other cultural factors,
they are very diverse among transhumanists, so I can't really

(27:23):
make a singular characterization. I can say about eighty five
percent of us are male, which is interesting in and
of itself, and most of us are between the ages
of forty and seventy, which is also interesting to explore.
I think this has more to do with the general
environment of greater techno optimism, in which the forty to

(27:45):
seventy demographic grew up compared to younger people and people
over seventy. Some of them are interested in transhumanism. Many
of them, though, probably don't see as much hope for themselves,
and those who are into transhumanism might see cryonics as
plan A rather than plan B. So those would be

(28:06):
my characterizations. I'm curious though about the worldwide decline and
fertility because it is common across countries, and while of
course the rates of reproduction are still higher in places
like Africa and the Middle East. We know that, for instance,
the average number of children per woman has declined considerably

(28:29):
in those countries as well, so maybe from seven to
eight to three to four in even the countries where
the population is growing the fastest. And I'm trying to
understand the common denominator behind that decline. Some of your
earlier comments suggested that there may be a kind of
global monoculture, and it seems, at least from a surface

(28:55):
point of view, that it's influenced to a great extent
by American cultural production. So a lot of people, for instance,
will watch Hollywood movies, or they'll purchase American made brands,
American technologies, they'll look up to American celebrities. But is
that the entirety of it, or is there some sort

(29:16):
of let's say, global cosmopolitan elite culture on top of
it that's capable of influencing decisions the way you described,
for instance, during the early pandemic, when the lockdowns, which
I think in retrospect were quite a poor idea, even
though I am very concerned about COVID, as you know,

(29:37):
and properly managing COVID, but these lockdowns were implemented almost
universally throughout the world, with the exception of Sweden in
some cases Japan and more authoritarian countries paradoxically, So what
is happening here? Is there an influence of a kind
of global monoculture that is able to produce these declining

(30:01):
fertility trends worldwide?

Speaker 2 (30:04):
I mean, yes, there basically is a lot of shared
world culture that people don't notice so much. People like
to focus on how they are different, and each place
is different to some degree, and each group is different
to some degree, but they're not noticing just how much
we share. So I think if you read historic history,
go back a few centuries or even a few thousand years,

(30:25):
and read what people were like back then and what
their values and norms were, you will start to see
just how different the modern world is, and just how
little we vary among ourselves compared to that degree of
variation in the past. We just share an awful lot
of values worldwide at the moment and norms and so yeah.

(30:47):
For example, when I meet elites around the world, they
tell me to the following two things. First, they will
tell me that the place they are from has special
characteristics that makes a distinction, and these characteristics are valuable
and the world should value them. They go to Brazil
or Nigeria or Indonesia or wherever you go, they will
tell you that the people where they come from are different,

(31:11):
and that those difference are good, They're valuable. The world
should appreciate and value those differences. And then they'll also
tell you that they personally will fit in just fine
in any global organization and you won't notice any different.
It's about them. They aren't tainted by whatever differences are
distinctive of the place they come from. They are completely
interchangeable global elites, and they are in fact, you hardly

(31:37):
see anything distinctive about them. They trained at major universities,
they've been in global organizations, They've been hanging out with
the global elites, and they are part of the global culture. Interesting.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Interesting, And you know, I have at various times called
myself a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the universe, in the
sense that I don't think the place of my origin
is necessarily definitive of my identity, though I most likely
have influences from it. I've learned certain lessons about life

(32:14):
from having been, as I like to say, the scion
of two declining empires. But on the other hand, I
would like to see a mode of cultural interaction where
people can find meaningful common ground and a basis for
collaboration and a basis for advancing our joint human interests

(32:35):
without conflict, in a kind of let's say, cosmopolitan culture.
But I don't like crackdowns on variety either. I don't
like the idea that some particular norm, especially if it's
a coercive norm, has to be imposed upon everybody. So

(32:56):
that's one reason why the lockdowns troubled me. I do
wonder is it possible to have a kind of global
Star Trek Federation type of culture or something similarly benign.
It doesn't have to have those exact same values, but
without the decline in beneficial cultural variety that advances innovation.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
So we could start to talk about fixes. But I
feel like at this point I should ask, you know,
are there questions in a chat list of text questions
or the other people I see on the screen here
do they have other things to talk about before we
get start going into fixes.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
We've got a question from Alan, and he could elaborate
on it as well. He's wondering if is cultural drift
a good or bad access or is it more like
surfing a wave and staying on to ride the goal?
And I may be kind of interpreting the question, but
is there like a normative value attached to any particular

(33:57):
amount of cultural drift? And Alan please feel free to elaborate.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
Yeah, gladly, Yeah, I'm finding your your thoughts fascinating. And
I'm curious. I mean, drift can be left or right,
or up or down, et cetera. But I mean, is
it necessarily like good and bad drift? I mean our
own national political process. Some would like our culture to
drift one way, some drift the other. Both think their

(34:25):
way is good, right, I mean, and and you know,
and if condemned and condemned the other. So I'm curious,
is it necessarily a good or bad thing? Or is
it a matter of sort of an epi epi epigenic

(34:45):
and epigenic type relationship with the environment of the world
at the time. Right, this is how our culture interacts
with the world, and so that macro culture can survive.
I don't know, what are you what are your thoughts
on that?

Speaker 2 (35:00):
So most people, when they talk about good or bad
they inherit those concepts from their culture, and then they
often pick aside in cultural fights to try to make
one side win the fight over another. So almost all
discussion of norms and morals and good or bad is

(35:22):
typically done in the context of a particular culture, where
the speakers are mostly embracing most of the norms of
their culture and then picking aside in a current cultural
fight as the better direction culture should go, mostly referring
to basically the cultural norms, saying this is more a
natural extension of who we've always been, that we should

(35:44):
go this way. So, and that whole conversation is enormously
high status. That is, in some sense, the highest status
people are as intellectuals in our society are the people
who do these cultural fights, especially the ones who win. Interestingly,
cultural warriors of this sort are our highest status people.

(36:06):
But the people who actually study the nature of cultural
evolution and the process itself are pretty low status. And
there is a literature of how culture works, but nobody
cares about that because they all want to join the fight.
And see, this abstract analysis doesn't take sides about who's
it good about. It is just describing natural selections. So
the key concept from the abstract cultural evolution thing is adaption,

(36:32):
maladaption fitness. Basically, it's, you know, can a culture maintain itself,
grow itself, have descendants. That's the measure of adaption from
a biological point of view. That's the metric that cultural
evolution use. But the people in a culture and you
bring that up and they all go, oh no, you know,

(36:54):
surely we shouldn't be willing to just survive at any cost.
Surely we have principles and we must be willing to
fight for our principles, even if it means we go
away and die. And people are very eager to assert
the primacy of their cultural values over adaption, over survival,
and maybe tolerate and accept the possibility of extinction if

(37:14):
that were the cost. So, for example, in recent discussions
about fertility, I see many people say to me and
other people basically, look, okay, I could see maybe fertility
is kind of a problem, but look before we discuss that,
I need you to agree right up front that these
cultural values are off the table. We're not going to
change you these because I fear that you're going to
try to mess with gender equality or whatever it is.

(37:35):
And there's no way, I'm going to discuss any solution
to this problem that possibly messes with those things, because
those are sacred. And so you can see the energy
here of I'm struggling to get people to see this
cultural a problem. And the first one of the chi
obstacles I get is they start to suspect that I
might not be loyal to my culture. I might be

(37:56):
willing to abandon key elements of our culture if that's
what it took to not go extinct. And they don't
like that. They say, no, you should be dedicated to
our culture. Extinction is the price of being who we are,
then that's what we want.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
It's interesting because John H in our chat points out
that the cultural innovators are not always loved. It depends
on how they want to change.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Well, when they win the right, right, they lose, they're
hated the people who I mean Hitler is hated, right.
Hitler was the losing end of the World War two
cultural fight, and he is the absolute worst you know villain, right.
So yes, cultural warriors are hated or loved depending on
whether they win or lose.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yes, indeed, and there is, as John H also points
out in the chat, a kind of explicit anti natalist
influence within the culture. And this is essentially an intentional
philosophical position. It espoused by people like David Benattar, for instance.

(39:04):
And I don't know what the distribution is of explicit
anti natalists versus people who bring up more let's say,
pragmatic considerations, say the cost of living is too high,
or they want to pursue other opportunities, or as Daniel
Tweed pointed out in our chat, perhaps the state of
the world is not suitably stable or suitably benign for

(39:28):
them to feel like they would want to bring children
into the world. So I don't know what the distribution
of motives is, but there do seem to be very
clear cultural influences that are more explicit than implicit. What
do you think about that observation.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
I think most people think, Okay, yeah, fertility climb. That
looks like it could be a problem, Maybe we should
do something about that. But then when they see that
treasured cultural trends are the source of the fertility decline,
they much more worried about doing something about it because
they really are quite reluctant to reverse or you know,

(40:08):
these treasured cultural trends that are the cause of fertility
to climb. And that's and they and they, like I said,
they're willing to discuss it as long as we can
put those off the table and find some other way
to do this that doesn't affect the culture they love,
and that's going to be a problem. So, for example,

(40:29):
there's a straightforward financial fix that would work. You know,
we could, for example, and let parents endow their kids
with debt or equity such that they owed the parents
a lot of money when they're older, and then let
the parents sell that in order to pay for parenting.
And if we did that, yeah, there'd be a lot
more parents. But people hate that idea. That's just terrible.
That's a terrible thing to do to kids. But every

(40:51):
kid in the US is endowed with their fresh action
of the national debt automatically, that's one hundred thousand dollars
of nominal debt, but roughly four hundred to one hundred
thousand dollars offunded liabilities. And that means every kid in
the US is worth that much to the rest of us.
If in fact, we're going to tax the more later
to pay for those unfunded liabilities, that means we should
be willing to pay parents a cut of that to

(41:14):
have kids will then come up later and pay back
that debt. And there's a way to do it that
encourages higher quality kids will pay back more debt. You
give basically parents a share of their kids' future tax
payments that they can sell to other people. But so
and that's a win win deal. Basically, we give parents
this money that comes from the future that they can
sell that is only there because the kids exist, and

(41:36):
so we're not taking it from anybody else. But I
think the problem with that is if we institute it
would in fact, some people would figure out how to
get that money. They would figure out how to change
their lifestyles to get that money, and those changes would
reverse some of the key cultural trends. There'd be less
gender equality of those people, or less schooling, or less

(41:57):
intensive parenting or something. We don't know what, but somehow
they would, and then people would think that's terrible, and
that would be the problem. I would still love for
us to try, but that's roughly what we're up against.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
It's interesting, though, and I wonder what your thoughts are
on this. Could there be a kind of let's say,
natural dynamic of increased prosperity that could solve this to
some extent. And the reason why I posit this is
because where we are seeing let's say, greater fertility throughout

(42:32):
the population is on the one hand, among people who
are the least economically well off, in part because a
lot of their reproduction is un planned still. But on
the other extreme, we have people like Elon Musk who
have twelve children because they can and they want to
make a statement in doing that. The people who seem

(42:54):
to have the lowest fertility rates are essentially the people
in the middle and that's my demographic, the middle class.
So why are they having a fewer kids? I think
it's because of various both socioeconomic and cultural pressures where
they're not quite able to say, given rising costs of living,

(43:17):
given various other economic pressures, and the increasing precarity of
our society, that they would be able to provide their
children with stable upbringing through a philosophy of intensive parenting.
More intensive parenting, certainly, But what if they become more prosperous.
What if we actually have a society that elevates the

(43:38):
current middle class into a new, much larger upper class.
Would we solve the fertility problem.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
There, that seems pretty unlikely to me. Basically, when you
get to the richest people, the data is less and
so the estimates just get noisier. And every once in
a while somebody fits the data and they get a
trend going up, and other times they fit in going down.
But when they get the trend going up, they have
news articles saying, oh, the rich people have more kids.

(44:05):
Elon Musk is not representative of the rich. I'm afraid
there just isn't this trend of rich people having more kids.
That's just not a thing. So that's not a solution.
It would be nice if it were. We could, you know,
get rich and then we'd have higher fertility. But you know,
the single most consistent predictor of lower fertility through the

(44:25):
last few centuries is wealth. So there are other predictors
that maybe do better in details, but people getting rich
has been sort of basically the key cause at a
general level of lower fertility. Again, fertility is just a
sign of the deeper problem. So once I realized that,

(44:48):
I switched my attention from fertility to cultural drift about
six months ago, and so that's what I've been focused
on this and it's much harder to come up with
fixes for cultural drift than it is or fertility decline unfortunately.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
So what are some other aspects of this cultural drift
that lead you to believe that there's a limited time
window for continuing technological progress to the extent that we
would find desirable and able to bring about the transformation
we want. And what are some of the forces that,

(45:26):
let's say, are working against the continuation of that level
of progress.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
So compared to previous centuries, our modern world is doing
gangbusters in innovation, right, and that's because we have some
new cultural elements that promote innovation and those are good
and adaptive, and because we have this huge, integrated world
culture so we can get scale economies and division of
labor across a huge globe unprecedented size. Well, that's all

(45:59):
good for innovation. Unfortunately, we just have very basic economic
theory that makes sense to me as an economist that
says that if population starts declining, innovation rates will decline
as a result of that. Directly, it's not because of
other cultural elements would be going wrong. So we already

(46:19):
have some you know, headwinds in terms of regulation and things.
As you may know. For example, we've not realized most
of the potential of nuclear energy because we overregulated it,
and we've overregulated many kinds of promising medical technologies and
other things. But still we've got much faster innovation than
people centuries ago had, so we're still doing great. But
the problem is our simple standard model of innovation is

(46:43):
that innovation rate is roughly proportional to the size of
the economy at the time, and in an exponentially growing economy,
the number of new innovations introduced per year is a
substantial fraction of all the innovations we've ever had before,
because the economic rate in this last year is a
substantial fraction of the entire economic activity ever so far.

(47:03):
That's what an exponential is like. But if it's an
exponentially declining economy, then the last recent years innovation is
not a substantial fraction of the interegal of all the
activity so far, and so it will seem even if
we have the same style of innovation activity, even if
we did innovation exactly the same way, we would see
innovation grinding to a halt because of this integral fact,

(47:28):
and when innovation is just much less potent and noticeable.
Because of that, there'll be less of a cultural priority
to promoting it, and so plausibly, innovation is the main
reason world has been more liberal. That is, the Industrial
Revolution happened in England and then Netherlands, and they happen
to be relatively liberal cultures, and they got really rich,

(47:50):
and the rest of the world said, we're in trouble.
They're running ahead and we need to catch up. And
so to catch up they tried to copy whatever they
could about these winning nations, including the liberality, and that's
why the world is much more liberal than it used
to be. But if innovation stops, then there's not much
point in making cultural sacrifices to promote innovation, like liberality.

(48:13):
Most authorities don't want to be liberal. They've just been
forced to be liberal because that's what it seemed like
it took to get rich. So the world would just
be less liberal and less innovative, and then in a
few centuries later we'd be replaced by the Amish and fretum,
who were also not particularly pro innovation, not particularly liberal,

(48:35):
and they might take a while before innovation came back again.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
So this is interesting because essentially the trajectory of cultural
decline would essentially be manifested as economic decline, leading to
less liberality, leading to the liberal cultures taking hold. I
do wonder, though, whether the scaling up of the liberal

(49:00):
cultures is sustainable. So, yes, the Amish have a high
reproduction rate, but the Amish also actually have a mechanism
for letting their young experience the rest of the world
when they're around eighteen. It's called rum springa and they're
able to go out, and they're able to then make
a decision to stick with the Amish community or to

(49:22):
go out into the wider world. I do think a
lot of them choose to stick with the Amish community
because they have.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
Ninety stick so it's only seven percent loss rate, right.

Speaker 1 (49:33):
But I wonder if as that Amish community multiplies, let's
say it scales up by an order of magnitude because
it has a higher reproduction rate, are they really going
to be able to maintain that kind of insolerity or
will there be a critical mass of Amish kids, young
people who start questioning the norms of the culture and saying, well,

(49:56):
maybe this technology is actually good, maybe we should embrace
and some might say let's work it into the Amish culture.
Others might say, no, we want this broader, more technological
culture because it helps us achieve our goals to a
much greater extent.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
There's clearly a risk. We can't just be blasse. So
the example of the Mormons shows that there are many risks. Now,
the Amish and Vretum are admirably fragmented and decentralized, so
they are not much at risk of the Mormon failure
of a central church imposing a new policy of integration
on everyone. They basically each group of one hundred or

(50:34):
so people is just a completely separate group that can
decide everything on their own, and so they do so.
That means they have a lot of internal variety to
overcome bad choices of some of them, and they that's
powerful for them. So the Christians did succeed, so clearly

(50:55):
it is possible to just keep doubling every twenty years
for several centuries. So that's at least a possibility. Now
there's two effects to think about here. The first I
would think is the surface area of volume effect. That is,
when they're really small, a substantial fraction of the interactions

(51:16):
are going to be with people outside their group, and
that's going to be a risk. As they get bigger,
a larger fraction of the interactions can be with people
inside the group, if at least they maintain the same
sort of styles of interaction. Now. Going in against that, though,
is the fact that you know, the way to stay
the maximum Innsler was to be, you know, farmers, to

(51:38):
be rural and just to have a former production. That
meant you didn't have to interact with people very much.
And they kind of grow so far that they felt
they were maxing out on farming and they needed to switch.
And so in the last generation they have in fact
switched to rural small business. They are a minority of
minority farmers. Now they are mostly not farmers, and that

(51:59):
does mean that their kids can't be helping on the
farm during the weekends and work days so much because
it's harder for the kids to help them small business.
So they are undergoing some transformation and that's risky, but
you know, honestly, they're doing an impressive job of having
made this transition. And you have to realize how big
an ass this is. If they double every twenty years

(52:22):
and say they're farmers, they have to not only feed themselves.
They have to save enough money to buy enough farm
land and buildings to double all of those every twenty years.
So they've been really remarkably productive at not only about
doubling their population, but doubling all the infrastructure, all the
supporting capital that it takes to support their lifestyle. And
they've done that successfully for a century, and now they've

(52:44):
moved to a real small business. So an example, the
hered them and the Amish both have are pacifist. And
you might think, why be pacifist, And it makes sense
if you're trying to be max insular, because a big
risk of losing people in your culture is young men
going off to war. Young Men bond very strongly in war,

(53:06):
and so you don't want your young men going off
and bonding with other soldiers in war, and so that's
a reason to be passivate. Once they're big enough to
feel their own military divisions, that won't be a problem.
So there are many things that go better as they
get bigger. Surface area of volume age ratio is a win,
but they will have to move into more sectors of
the economy that naturally just have more interactions with other people.

(53:28):
That's the key trade off.

Speaker 1 (53:30):
Yes, and I am seeing this as well in terms
of any documentaries that I've seen, any information that I've
gotten about how the Amish interact with the rest of
the culture. They're not hostile at all.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
Not at all.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
They take advantage of economic opportunities. Indeed, some of the
ways of living that they have are only sustainable because
they have a positive symbiotic relationship with the mainstream culture. Indeed,
they're not opposed to you seeing advanced healthcare either, so
they live longer because of reliance on modern medical technology.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
Right. But they don't want their members to go become
doctors because then they have to go to medical school
and mix with everybody else as young, impressionable people, and
they have a much higher rate of losing them that way.
So they tend to focus on technologies that they can
learn within their culture, and they don't want to send
people off somewhere else to learn then they mix with
other people. So you know their main ways. They're anti

(54:27):
technology or anti technologies that mix them with people. They're
anti cars because you can go visit people if you
have cars. They're anti phones, internet because that connects you
to people. But they're not anti farm machinery they're not
anti business machinery. They're happy to use those technologies as
long as they can learn them in their community without
mixing with other people.

Speaker 1 (54:47):
They have thought this through. Now. There's an interesting comment
by our friend and for an ambassador and Togo Siba Tramuza.
He writes, cultural values are changeable. The essential thing is
that the end visual and collective cognitive capacity to optimize
this dynamism in favor of well being, not to make
it a source of disastrous conflict. So I think he's

(55:12):
focusing on what the outcome of culture and cultural drift
would be, and in that regard, the pacifism of the
Amish and the Orthodox Jews could actually be helpful to
us for achieving our vision because they won't fight us.
They might have different values. Our friend Daniel Tweed and

(55:35):
the Chat also even pointed out there might be a
possibility for some Amish transhumanists emerging in the future. If
we're sufficiently let's say, peaceful and collaborative with them, maybe
they will think, well, this radical life extension is not
such a bad idea either.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
So the Christians were also pacifist, but once they became dominant,
they switched. So I wouldn't count on them staying passivist
that that seems just a current strategy. I suggest maybe
we should move to talking more about fixes here. So
we've talked about the problem, and you know how it
realizes itself and it's nature of the problem, and there's

(56:17):
basically I see three classes of solutions. One class of
solution is the most optimistic, whereas it just fixes itself.
We don't do anything. So in some sense, like the
omission fretum taking over is a fix. Now there's a
risk that they would also then have monoculture and then
also phase drift and you know, have another crash and

(56:37):
have several cycles of rise and follow civilization. That's a
thing that's happened in the past in human history, so
it's not a crazy thing to happen in the future.
Another variation, though, on a automatic fix, is if we
achieved human level AI or brain emulations in the next
roughly seventy years or progress before innovation stops. Because AIS

(57:05):
and brain emulations are naturally if we allow them Malthusian
that is, it's possible to grow them faster than their
economy grows, even if their economy make them grow much faster.
So the wealth or weight income per individual falls until
it reaches subsistence level, and so then they would be
much like the peasants of our distant past, being on

(57:27):
the edge of survival, and that plausibly would give stronger
selection pressures, plausibly enough to overcome cultural drift if we
allow them to have different cultures. So, as you may know,
there are great many people around today concerned about what
they call AI risk, and their key concern is that
AIS might be independent on us to have their own

(57:48):
opinions and make their own choices about themselves, and they
would like to somehow lock that down and prevent it.
They're concerned that AIS that have their own powers and
autonomies would then make choices we might not prove, and
some of those choices might be to kill us all
for some reason, and therefore, to prevent this the AI
kills us all scenario, they want to make sure that
lock down the AIS or even m's and make sure

(58:10):
that they can't have their own different culture and make
their own different choices, in which case it would not
fix cultural drift. We would lock them into following us
into the grave on our cultural drifting path. But AIS
that are less in control of us, by us, they

(58:32):
would then be subject to cultural selection, and then we'd
have the revival of a healthy sort of cultural selection
with ais or m So, I'm the author of this
book The Age of m Or Club and Life and
Robots Real the Earth about brain emulations, and looks like
he was ready with the tag there. So I said,

(58:53):
there's three classes of solutions. Number one is it fixes itself.
And that's kind of a fix itself, and so honestly,
that's I might hope for that. If we just develop
human level AI r ms before this deadline, which is
you know, many decades away, could happen, then it doesn't

(59:13):
matter how many people there are, human fertility can decline
because these other fertilities would write. But I still think
that's a bit of a long shot, but still let's
hope and work for it. And then that leaves two
other classes of solutions. The second class of solutions sounds

(59:34):
good but seems kind of wishful. But the idea is
that we, as members of our culture, decide to push
culture in a more adaptive direction, and then we win,
and then culture is more adaptive, and then I guess
somehow we have to keep it there and prevent it

(59:55):
from drifting off again somehow by the force of our
influence over culture. And that all only requires that we
compete among the most prestigious people in our world who
have the most deep passions trying to push cultures in
their directions, and we have more prestige and more passion
than them when we induce the whole game to go

(01:00:16):
our way culture wise, you can see that's a big ask.
And not only we have to move it our way,
we have to move it somewhere, and then we have
to hold it there, like through our conscious thoughts about
saying no, this is the where culturesoul be. So somehow
we need to make culture sort of aware, it's aware
of itself, and to reason about itself, and then to

(01:00:36):
choose to go in a good place by the force
of culture. Now, you know, this is just not how
humans have ever done it before. Cultural evolution has almost
never been consciously chosen from the point of view of
trying to be adaptive. It's been consciously chosen from the

(01:00:58):
point of view of trying to win culture wars to
impose your set of values over other people's. But the
idea that you would choose cultural values from their point
of view of being adaptive. That's pretty alien to human nature.
And in fact, people kind of hate the idea. You know,
there's this thing called social Darwinism, and that's the name

(01:01:20):
people gave to the hated idea that we should reason
about evolution and figure out how we should behave socially
as a result of that. And people hate that and
it's got a terrible name. Now maybe they were thinking
about DNA evolution, but cultural evolution is the same sort
of natural selection. It just happens differently and faster, and
you can do the same thing. You can be a

(01:01:42):
social Darwinist really literally by reasoning about what cultures would
be adaptive and trying to make our cultures be adaptive.
But people hate social Darwinism. So but I could less
specifically some of the directions cultures could go to be adaptive,
so like one would be multiculturalism and deeper multiculturalisman we

(01:02:02):
have we discussed before. Basically, so DNA has special features
to promote species. Species I don't know if you know.
That is the mating systems of animals and plants have
higher mutation rates because that makes it easier to form
a new species, and so culture might plausibly also want

(01:02:23):
to have a special features to promote new cultures i e. Cults,
I e. Maybe it's good, Maybe it would be good
if we had it would be adaptive to have more
indulgent attitudes toward cults, but they'd have to be really
actually different, they not just surface difference and have one adultence.
We're a long way from that, but that would be

(01:02:43):
a more healthy culture. Another thing we could do is
just sort of maybe have very explicitly selfish evolutionary values
like people suspective of the social Darwinness, basically just saying, well,
now this is what it takes to sur and we're
just going to value this and the hell with everybody else.

(01:03:03):
People hate that idea, but maybe it could still win.
It sounds not very pro social, It sounds selfish and
you know, self oriented and defying our brotherhood of mankind
and that sort of thing, But if we chose it,
that could be more adaptive. Another thing that could work
if we just let capitalism go wild. So for example,
you know, with fertility, if we just allowed capitalists to

(01:03:26):
make you know, orphanage baby factories and you know, raise
kids and sell them when they were older that would
solve fertility, and that would probably solve a lot of
cultural drift problems. Most of the cultural drift things problems
we have our areas where capitalism is sort of not
allowed to mess with we have values and we say no,
you know, for profits aren't supposed to mess with this
over here, and then we've got drift with those. But

(01:03:49):
people at the moment are not at all inclined to
let capitals and go wild with everything, so that's again
not very promising. Another approach would be the return school.
So many people over the years had a conservative attitude,
by which they meant, we're changing too fast, we should
not change so much because we're not so sure where
we're going, and I think we got it, would admit

(01:04:10):
they were right. Those complainers were in fact right. We
were changing things too fast and we are going places
we didn't understand. Unfortunately, going back is pretty hard. You know,
we're going to go back to some say, year eighteen
hundred set of cultural values because unfortunately a lot of

(01:04:30):
the culture values were mixed up with technology, and so
what we'd really have to do is go back to
some previous set of values and then abstract from that.
The way it was embedded in technology, and find some
technology robust version of it and then embrace that for
our culture and then not change it again, not let
it change the way it did the first time. And
again that's a big ask. But you see the funnel

(01:04:52):
problem is if culture is our main mechanism for making
choices and deciding who we are and what we value,
how are we supposed to change it? Exactly? Yes, what
other lever do we have over this thing? This is
the bank, this has been the thing in charge of
us all along.

Speaker 1 (01:05:07):
Well. Out of the solutions that you articulated, and I
know that you're just exploring the spectrum of possibility, so
I don't think you necessarily endorse every one of the solutions,
but the best one for our standpoint would be rights
for AIS or ms. We do have the Transhumanist Bill

(01:05:30):
of Rights Version three point zero, where we try to
outline a framework for just that and to the extent
that sentient AIS truly self aware, multi purpose artificial general
intelligences are developed, Yes, we do think they should have rights,
and the question is how soon will they emerge and

(01:05:54):
will the culture again permit them to have the kinds
of rights to engage in essentially autonomous cultural innovation, or
will they be suppressed to some extent, or will people
fail to recognize the point at which they actually become
sentient and perhaps cause conflict by let's say, unduly restricting

(01:06:18):
them or seeing them as tools past the point where
they are actually only tools, only narrow Aiyes.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
And worse, they could just slow down the development of
AI such that we just don't make this deadline. So
we face a deadline here of technological development, I said,
saying roughly seventy years worth more of the sort of
rates of progress we've seen in the past. If we
don't get it by then, it may be many centuries
later until you have another chance. And so many of

(01:06:47):
the people concerned about AI's freedoms are also trying to
restrict the rate at which AI improves in order to
deal with their concerns, and that could make us miss
the deadline.

Speaker 1 (01:07:00):
Indeed, that is a conundrum that we face now. Elaine
Walker writes that she does believe culture is the correct
thing to focus on, and it is even correct to
focus on it in the context of the culture surrounding
AI and AI rights and what innovations we permit. She
writes since religion has dropped off as the so called

(01:07:21):
blue of society, we need a new glue, a dynamic optimism,
a focus on well being and curiosity about the world
in the universe. She says she can only speak for
the USA, but really these are the values of transhumanism
as well, though there is, let's say, a coalition of
associated philosophies that could embrace those values. So do you

(01:07:43):
think that could be an effect of cultural fix not
going back or necessarily fixing things the way they are,
but adopting a set of meaningful values that will inspire
people and will lead them to create a more dynamic
and innovative economy, whatever happens to fertility rates, especially if

(01:08:03):
we ourselves are able to extend our lifespans and our
productive lives as well.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
So again, the most conversations about these sorts of things
are from the point of view of someone embedded in
a particular culture wanting it to move in a certain direction.
And that's the kind of move being made here, basically saying,
g wouldn't it be better to be dynamic optimists in
our direction of culture? And then what you're typically doing
is recruiting culture resources from the recent past of that

(01:08:32):
culture to say this is more true to who we
are and who we want to be than the other visions.
That's how most cultural debates go. And the thing that's
missing is a description of how that's going to be adaptive.
The problem is cultural revolution was just ruthlessly killing off
cultures and they weren't adaptive. That's how we got to

(01:08:54):
where we are. And now in the last few centuries,
we just decide to change cultures for these internal cultural reasons,
but it doesn't seem to be making them adaptive. They're
just changing. So you know, I would want to know, well,
why is dynamic optimism adaptive? How does that make us

(01:09:14):
deal better with other sorts of problems that culture is
supposed to help us deal with. Now, remember, we're doing
fine at rates of innovation of the things we're allowed
to vary within our culture. The things the problems we
have is with innovation of things that aren't allowed to
vary within the culture, the things that we like, say
organ sales or something. If nobody's allowed to do organ sales,
then we never find out if it's better because nobody's

(01:09:36):
allowed to try. So, then you need a dynamic optimism
that induces more experimentation with things that violate people's key values,
i e. You need to induce people to be more
tolerant of variation in practice based on different fundamental values.
And as I said, that's the kind of a variety
people hate the most.

Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
Well, there could be let's say, experimental jurisdictions, whether in
ceasteds or micro states, where there could be a widespread
agreement that these are like sandboxes of innovation and the
great powers will leave them alone.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
But we'll need a cultural change to allow that. People
at the moment don't like the idea of sandboxes and variation.
They want to crush any variation anywhere. So that's a
key question is how can we induce that culture change.
I do have one last class affixes to describe, and
this class is where we integrate governance more into the solution.

(01:10:37):
So in history, of course, culture and governance have often
worked together in the sense that culture has encouraged governance changes,
and governance changes encourage the cultural changes, and that often
using the power of government has helped move culture. Like
think of civil rights laws, things like that. It's a

(01:10:57):
dangerous power to try to wield, but it might be
tempting here. So I'm the inventor of a form of
government I call a few tarchy that's based on betting markets.
The slogan is vote on values, but bet on beliefs.
And the idea is that we could pick a goal,

(01:11:19):
and this form of government is very good at achieving
whatever goal you specify. It's quite reliable, it's quite expert
and effective at achieving goals. Now, for ordinary government, then
we'd have to vote on what goals we all wanted,
some weights of leisure and prosperity and peace and those

(01:11:40):
sorts of things, and you know, we might argue how
much to get which higher weights. But the promise here
is that if we in fact want the things we
say we want in these goals, the government would in
fact effectively achieve it. And that would be a way
that we could rely on this form of government to
actually do things more than can and current government's currently.

(01:12:01):
If you elects some politician who claims to plans to
do X, he says when he's elected, that doesn't mean
he's going to do X, doesn't mean he's even going
to try very hard. We just don't have very good
ways to make sure they do what they promise, but
this form of government could do that. But now this
isn't a solution yet, it's the piece of a solution.
So here's the key idea. Imagine we pick a goal

(01:12:24):
that is a long term goal that's inconsistent with civilization collapse,
and we pick this as our sacred goal, and we
have a form of government that says we really want
this to happen. And so I did some surveys of
what could function as a goal for here, and in fact,
the three of the top four work space. The goal
could be when do the date we get to the

(01:12:45):
stars or the date a million people are living in
space or something like that. And we create a few
Turkey form of government with this goal given high weight. Yes,
we want to survive at the moment and you know,
not be miserable, et cetera, but we also want to
achieve long term sacred goal of say getting into the
stars or getting into space, and we put a high

(01:13:05):
weight on that, and it happens to be a goal
that's inconsistent with civilization collapsing. So when we implement this,
the key point is that as soon as speculators see
that this is our goal and we're going to stick
with it. Then they will look for policies that achieve
this goal. They will notice, oh, civilization collapse will get
in the way. I guess we need to stop that,

(01:13:27):
and they will start to implement policies that prevent civilization collapse,
and those policies will get in the way of some
of our treasured cultural trends. And then if it wasn't
a sacred goal, if it was just, hey, something we
were trying, we would go the hell with that and
change the goal again until it was something we were
comfortable with because we don't want to make these changes.
But see, this is the clever, this is the trick.

(01:13:49):
If it's a sacred goal, then often we're proud to
make sacrifices for a sacred goal. That shows our devotion
to it, proves us that we really do care about it.
So if we could pick a long term goal inconsistent
with collapse and have that as our society sacred goal,
that we were devoted to it and proud to sacrifice

(01:14:10):
for it, then it would make sure that we don't
collapse population, et cetera. And then when we noticed policies
being imposed on us that you know, interfered with some
of our treasured cultural trends, like longer years of school.
We would go, oh, well, apparently that's what it takes
to achieve our sacred goal, and we would say, let's

(01:14:33):
do it. So now this is an attractive vision, but
look at how much I'm asking. I'm asking a lot here.
First of all, I'm asking that my form of government
gets tested out enough and it's proven to work, and
then we're willing to adopt it. Secondly, we have to
agree on this long term sacred goal and to be
willing to devote to it, and our society isn't actually
very much in the mood to devote itself to any

(01:14:54):
sacred goals really lately. You know, maybe anti racism is
the latest version, but only relatively mild sacrifices made its name.
But this is a way at least that maybe the
main a big chunk of the mainstream world civilization could
then not collapse, and then the future would inherit things

(01:15:19):
we value. So that that's to me. The main reason
I don't like the Amish Heredum taking over scenario is
they will throw away many things that we have worked
hard to create in value, and yes, eventually probably rediscover
most everything that's worth rediscovering a long time down the line.
But I'd rather it not worth such a long time
down the line, rather that we found a way to

(01:15:39):
save our civilization from collapse. AI and MS is one
way to do it. This is another way. But I
think you can see that none of the solutions I've
offered are terribly reassuring, very reliable, like there are long shots. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
Well, this is quite fascinating. As you were describing the
combination of Hugh tarchy with a sacred goal. In our chat,
we had Alan Crawley and John H produce the quotation
from John F. Kennedy we go to the moon not
because it's easy, but because it's hard. And that did
inspire a lot of people in the nineteen sixties, and

(01:16:19):
if we think about the current prevailing demographic of transhumanists,
they came of age during that era or a little
bit later when there were still residual effects of that,
when you had kids wanting to be astronauts when they
grew up. And interestingly enough, the era where John F.

(01:16:40):
Kennedy provided that inspiration, it coincided with the tail end
of the baby boom as well, so there is evidence
for the sacred goal motivating civilizational progress. I think a
lot of us in the transhumanist community look back somewhat
wistfully at that time period, thinking what might have been

(01:17:00):
had that degree of techno optimism continued into the present day.
But I wonder could radical life extension be a similar
sacred goal. We could have space as a sacred goal,
but also combine that with radical life extension for individuals,
which could be made similarly inspiring if we developed the
correct messaging for it, and we're able to achieve the

(01:17:24):
level of reach that John F. Kennedy achieved with the
space message.

Speaker 2 (01:17:30):
So that was the other of the top four immortality.
Many people in my polls, I think I had sixteen
or so different possibilities, and these were at the top.
So many people do think immortality could be the sort
of goal that could inspire people to sacrifice as a
future thing. And of course you have to believe that
we aren't going to invent it real soon, because otherwise

(01:17:52):
it won't prevent civilization collacks. It would be the sort
of thing we'd need several centuries of sustained effort to achieve.
But that does seem plausibly true.

Speaker 4 (01:17:59):
To me.

Speaker 2 (01:18:01):
Now, it's worth noting that, in fact, the median US
citizen did not like the space program, and so we
did not in fact go into space just because we
had a sacred goal. We did it to impress the
world of our ability compared to the Soviets, and we
succeeded in that, and that's why we did it. And

(01:18:22):
so unfortunately we don't have an alien race to do
that against now, But maybe we could actually make it
a sacred goal that we claimed it was before.

Speaker 1 (01:18:35):
It's interesting because I was wondering if having a common
enemy to unite against would help in this regard. But
of course we want to make the common enemy something
truly terrible, so we don't want it to be other
people or other nation states. We would want it to be, say,
something like COVID. But of course that didn't work because

(01:18:56):
after the overreaction of the initial lock downs, the cultural
adaptation to COVID seems to be to ignore it except
that it will happen to you multiple times and hope
that it will be mild. So that didn't work. As
the common enemy. I'm hoping that death and decay could
be that common enemy, but perhaps for some people it's

(01:19:17):
too abstract. Daniel Tweed rights. Also, it's hard to inspire
people with an indefinite goal, such as in definite longevity.
Perhaps we could have more specific markers, like have average
life expectancy reach ninety by two thousand and thirty, or
have maximum lifespan exceed one hundred and thirty five by

(01:19:37):
two thousand and forty. What do you think of.

Speaker 2 (01:19:39):
The annual mortality rate would be the obvious metric to use,
you know, and you could do it for different ages.
But you say, you know, the fraction of people sixty
year older who die each year, you know, push that
number down that that would be a pretty clear marker
of that. I have some work on grabby alien are

(01:20:00):
where aliens are in the universe, and the implication of
that is they are actually out there roughly once per
million galaxies. We might meet them in a billion years.
So you could perhaps motivate people with wanting to sort
of meet them from a position of strength in a
billion years. But that's a really long delay to motivate
people with. Unfortunately they probably aren't closer than that. But

(01:20:23):
that's one way to frame the space ambition. Is not
just we want to get out there, but we want
to get out there as soon as we can before
the aliens and be as strong as we can before
we get to that position.

Speaker 1 (01:20:38):
Yes, indeed, now I wanted to also enable art Ramon
to ask a question, and then we have various other
topics and questions to consider, including the great Filter. But
art Ramon please go ahead.

Speaker 4 (01:20:55):
Yeah, kind of along the aliens idea. I've had this
hypothetical out and around in my head for like two
years now, and it's sort of like twelve thousand years ago.
Let's say you had some Neanderthals and they didn't become extinct. Instead,
it became from a breakaway civilization. They had technology. You

(01:21:17):
also had another group of people who were sort of
hybrids of Neanderthals and humans, and they were sort of
the Chromagnum people. And there were sort of variations of
them either they had like over fifty percent Neanderthal genes
or greater than five percent Neanderthal genes. And they also became,

(01:21:39):
you know, breakaway civilizations and decided to hide on this
planet Antarctica, underwater bases wherever, on the Moon. And since
they've had such a leak ahead of us, you know,
they've developed advanced technology. They've sort of just you know,
self directed their evolution. They've hype we evolved into numerous subspecies,

(01:22:01):
and now they see an opportunity. You know, humanity is
on the decline, so maybe they say, we're going to
return to the surface of the planet and mingle with humans.
Now even though there were these you know, superior beings
compared to the you know, regular humans with less than
five percent Neanderthal and yeah, I've had these thoughts, you know,

(01:22:24):
sort of bouncing around, and no one seems to to
give me any attention on it. You know, I've sort
of put it out there and maybe it's too crazy
and radical, you know, but you know, disclosure seems to
be happening. They seem to admit there is something out
there that is not necessarily alien. They kind of hit

(01:22:44):
maybe extra dimensional, But what if there were breakaway civilizations
from more fellow Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and and these
hybrid these hybrids of the chromagnet So I think thought
of it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:01):
So I did this work on Griby aliens a couple
of years ago, which was basically a more precise numerical
version of the great filter that we were going to
get to But I then we published that in Astrophysical Journal.
It's a top astrophysics journal. So I felt like I
was an expert on aliens because I had sort of
the best theory of where aliens are in space time,

(01:23:21):
and so I then I lots of people talking about UFOs,
and I thought, I guess I should look into that.
And in the following sense, like a standard Baysian analysis says,
there's two parts of figuring out whether you believe something.
One part is called the likelihood. That is, you ask

(01:23:43):
what hYP you know? Forgiven anyone hypotheses, what sort of
things would you expect to see if that were true?
And then what do you see? And trying to ask
if the evidence of what you see, you know, leaned
you toward some things that would be the source of
those observations. But then the other part is called the prior.

(01:24:04):
For the various hypotheses you're considering, you're supposed to ask, well,
how a priori likely is that you know? How sensible
is that? And for many people say for UFOs, their
first reaction is, look, the whole family of hypotheses you
are considering is so crazy unlikely that I don't really
need to look at your evidence, because whatever events you have,
surely the best explanation is some sort of mistake. You know,

(01:24:25):
somebody was drunk, somebody with lyings, is something, because you're
this hypothesis is just crazy unlikely. That's the attitude of
many people about these sorts of hypotheses, and that would
be the proper gratitude if in fact the prior were
that low. But I thought, well, I'm in a position
to actually figure out the prior here, and so I
thought that's what I should do. I'm not an expert

(01:24:46):
about the particular sightings or whatever and what you should
believe on the basis, but I am an expert on
the prior, so I should do that. So as a
relevant example, think of a murder tromp. If one of
the thousand people roughly I have murdered, and for any
one person who could have died of murder, there's maybe
roughly a thousand people nearby who could have done so

(01:25:08):
anyone accusation of murder is roughly a one in a
million prior, But actual murder trials often give you evidence
sufficient to overcome a one in a million prior to
convince you that somebody did it. That's evidence can quite
commonly overcome a one in a million prior. If it
was one in a quadrillion prior, Yeah, maybe you should

(01:25:30):
not even consider the possibility of murder because it's so
crazy unlikely, right, So I tried to do an analysis
of what was the best story I could come up
with such that that would make sense of there being
aliens around who who looks roughly like our UFO's look.
And my judgment was that the prior there was roughly

(01:25:51):
one in a thousand to one in ten thousand. So
that doesn't make me someone who says aliens are here,
but it does make me someone who says the prior
is high enough that you've got to look at the evidence.
You can't just dismiss this on the basis of that's crazy,
because it's not that crazy. And my work there was

(01:26:11):
just to come up with the most plausible scenario and
then you know, ding each scenario for its unlikeliness in
order to have a scenario that could make some sense
of aliens being here and then being what we see
as UFOs. Now, the same sort of game you would
play with an alternative story of you know, our ancestors

(01:26:33):
from twenty thousand years ago made an advanced civilization and
now they're hiding somewhere. You have to play the same
game of trying to work out the priors and then
compare it to our evidence, right, And I haven't done
as much work on that, but those do look hard
to come up with, so with aliens. And so if aliens,

(01:26:55):
say as the course of USO is, one of the
key things you have to explain is well, why are
they only here in these you know, fuzzy sightings and
not everywhere else? Because you know they could have come
here a long time ago and took over everything, and
everything we see near us could all be remade by them.
So you have to come up with the story well
why why not? And the same sort of thing you'd

(01:27:17):
have to do with the story of an ancient civilization.
You really have to say, Okay, why are they hiding,
what are they hiding for? Why don't they come out?
And if they're hiding, why would they like reveal themselves
through these you know passive aggressive dances, you know. So

(01:27:38):
that's where I would need to go and analyzing with
issue before I go look at somebody's claim sighting of
an ancient you know, civilization. I need to go. I
need a story here. Need So it's not crazy that
there could have been an advanced civilization in our past,
because the farther back you go that just the evidence
just gets washed out. So if you go back one
hundred thousand years, say, you know, any relatively small or

(01:28:02):
localized civilization, you just might not see. Now, if it's
like a global civilization, then you know they had moon bases. Well,
now you have to wonder, well, why can't we see
the old moon bases from one hundred thousand years ago?
It turns out like we have time scales over where
things just get obliterated by micromediates and stuff. And so
you can the farther back you said it in the past,
the more plausible it is. You just have no evidence

(01:28:23):
now except well, if they're still standing around, they'd be
creating evidence then, except they're hiding, Like where are they hiding?
And why? I mean that that's the problem I have
with that. But you know, I haven't looked into it.
But that's what I'd be asking if I was going
to look into it, is I need to see a
story here that makes some sense, So I think I
could come up with a story for the Aliens, again

(01:28:45):
that gives you a prior that's high enough to be
worth considering. I don't have a story like that for
the Neanders.

Speaker 1 (01:28:53):
Yes, indeed, yes, thank you for that answer. And I
do support disclosure of the information that is currently classified
about these phenomena because I think it could shed a
lot of light on what actually did or did not
happen to bring them about. But I also don't want

(01:29:15):
to personally jump to any conclusions as to whether we've
made any sort of extraterrestrial contact, because, as you mentioned,
the evidence is kind of fuzzy and it's confined to
certain kinds of observations. So I would say the jury
is still out as to whether or not there has
been any sort of contact with extraterrestrials. What I would

(01:29:39):
say the most plausible story in my mind, if there
have been extraterrestrial visitors, is that they follow some variant
of the Star Trek Prime directive with respect to us,
and they consider us insufficiently advanced to actually fully be
able to process the reality of other civilizations existing, and

(01:30:01):
we wouldn't be particularly humane to them if we did know,
so they're kind of waiting for us to reach some
threshold of development, That is, if there are these other
advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Now, I think this is a good
bridge to the great filter idea, because let's compare the

(01:30:25):
scenario where we haven't made contact with any extraterrestrial beings
to a scenario where there has been contact of that sort.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):
Which of these would.

Speaker 1 (01:30:39):
Be a more optimistic scenario with regard to any sort
of great filter or whether a great filter exists. That
is to say, if we haven't made contact with any
such beings, are we more likely to be pre greade
filter or post great filter as compared to if we
have or if if we have made contact with such beings,

(01:31:03):
could that be evidence that there isn't a great filter.

Speaker 2 (01:31:08):
So my gravy aliens work is looking at the kind
of aliens that appear at some point in space time
and then just keep growing and don't stop till they
meet other aliens. Now, that's not all kinds of aliens.
Some could just appear last for a while and go away,
but they're not the gravy kind. So our data constrains

(01:31:29):
where those gravy kinds are in space time and like
as I said, they're really long way away, and it's
going to take a long time to meet them. Most likely.
Now we aren't yet gravy. We aren't making a visible
impact in the universe that you can see from a
long way, but it looks like it could happen soon,
but we're not so sure what the odds are from

(01:31:52):
this point on. And honestly, I don't think the fact
that we don't see much is much of an indication. Now,
it is true that the lower the chances that we
will become gravy, then the nearest the closer is the
nearest other non gravvy civilization. So say there's a thousand,
there's only one in a thousand chants that we're going

(01:32:14):
to make it to become gravy, and then the gravy
civilizations are once per million galaxies. Well, now the non
medic graby ones are once per thousand galaxies. Okay, so
the nearest one is closer, but still a really long
way away, and so it's going to be crazy hard
to see. So honestly, the fact that we don't see
them says hardly anything about those chances. But there is
that dependency. The lower our chances are becoming gravy. The

(01:32:36):
closer could be the nearest non gravi, but most likely
you'd see the ruins of them, not them being active
because their life would be short or something like that.
There is though, if in fact UFOs some of them
are aliens, that actually changes our future specs enormously. So

(01:33:03):
again I tried to work out the most likely story
for what the hell they're doing, why they're here, and
why they're doing stuff in order to make this prior
analysis that I talked about, And here's my best story.
First of all, they are pan spare me as siblings
to us. That is, life didn't start on Earth, it

(01:33:23):
was Earth was seated with the stellar nursery where Earth
was was seated with life from elsewhere. So maybe some
other planet had life for four billion years before reached
up to the very primitive level we see at the
beginning of life on Earth. It seated our stellar nursery.
Then we evolve for another four billion years. But that
seating of the stellar nursery also seated ten thousand other

(01:33:43):
stars who are all crammed close together with locks of
rocks flying around. So there are ten thousand other stars
in our galaxy who were seated with life also four
billion years ago, and they're in a ring around the galaxy.
And one of those reached in a danced level before us,
and that explains why they're in. They're not a million

(01:34:07):
galaxies away. They're here, but there isn't anything for a
long way. The correlation between them and us is explaining
by having a common origin. Now we need to explain
why if they got here before us, why the whole
galaxy around us isn't colonized and reshaped, why they haven't
been here a long time? So I think then we
have to postulate a somewhat unlikely but not crazy idea

(01:34:29):
that they have a rule against colonizing the universe. Could
be religious, could be a cultural homogeneity thing. You know,
they like being all together and if they allow themselves
to expand, they will become fragmented and not forever at odds.
But whatever reason, they had a rule against any colonization

(01:34:50):
of the universe from their home world, and that rule
right there gives them a reason to be here, because
if they just let any of these other ten thousand
you know, star systems evolve, one of them could get
to their level and expand and break their role so
now they need to be watching these other stars and

(01:35:10):
tracking them and then coming and being ready to do
something about us, maybe breaking the rule. And if that's
why they're here, it can also explain what they're doing.
Because the puzzling thing or what they're doing is, if
you know, plausibly, they would be maybe one hundred at
least one hundred million years more advanced than us. Okay,

(01:35:31):
so with that level of ability, they could be here
and be completely invisible. They could watch us with absolutely
no chance of us detecting, and that would be completely
within their ability. Another thing that would be completely in
their ability is to be completely obvious. They could have
definitely made themselves very visible and no. And then the
strange thing is they did neither of those things, and

(01:35:51):
they hang out at the edge of our visibility doing
nothing much but just saying hi bye. That's weird, right.
Do we need an explanation for why if they came
all this distance, you know, thousands of light years, millions
of years ahead here to be here to talk to
us when we finally reached this level, why are they

(01:36:12):
doing that? And my theory is, well, they could have
enforced a rule by killing us a long time ago.
So the fact that we're here says Nope, they didn't
want to kill us, which he suggests they'd rather persuade
us to follow the rule than force us. Okay, how
are they going to persuade us, Well, they're going to
domesticate us. Basically, social animals everywhere, including here on Earth,

(01:36:38):
domesticate other animals. How do we do that? You just
slip into the top of their status harkey. We domesticate
dogs by being the top dog, top horses by being
the top horse. How do you domesticate an animal? You
show yourself the top one. What is the top one?
Where your higher status and their status hockey whatever counts
for good? You're the best and you're also not too hostile.

(01:36:58):
That's how you slip to the top of the status
archy and domesticate species. That that's how humans domesticated each other.
That's how emperors domesticated their empires. Right, That's how it's
always been, so the postility is, That's how it is
in the universe. So if their simple strategy to get
us to go along with their rule is to domesticate
us by just hanging out, being very impressive and not

(01:37:20):
being very hostile and we're smart enough to figure out
why they're hearing what their agenda is as soon as
we're convinced they're really there, and then we'll hopefully go
along with the rules. And if we don't, they have
a button somewhere and they have another solution, but they'd
rather just persuade us. So that's my simple story about
what they're here and why, and that has a big
implications for our future. It means our future is much

(01:37:42):
more limited then we might have hoped. You know, they
really are more powerful than us, and they we're not
going to be able to trick them or slip out
of them or defy them. They're really going to set
the terms and we're going to have to do what
they say. And that's just a much more limited future
than you might have hoped. But hey, on the other hand,
will eventually maybe get to meet this alien species and
learn all that they've learned and figure out why they

(01:38:05):
had this rule against expansion.

Speaker 1 (01:38:08):
Yes, well, this is an interesting possibility to consider. I
will note Daniel Tweed in our chat provided the definition
of gravy aliens, which are civilizations that first expand from
their origin planet at a fraction of the speed of light, second,
make significant and visible changes wherever they go, and third

(01:38:29):
last a very long time. So from the standpoint of
transhumanist philosophy, we should actually want to be these kinds
of gravy aliens, with the caveat that we would respect
other forms of life if we encounter them. We wouldn't
exterminate them, we wouldn't subjugate them. We would try to
form some sort of coalition with them and have them

(01:38:50):
share in our worldview, our desire to expand throughout the universe,
So it would be essentially a cosmopolity of species aimed
toward this kind of expansion. Now, Dider Cornell makes some
interesting comments. He writes, it's very difficult for him to

(01:39:13):
understand that people can think there are aliens coming here,
one who don't want us to see them, two who
are so advanced that they come here, but so poorly
organized that we can sometimes notice their presence by accident.
And he says, he thinks you are saying that, but

(01:39:33):
the theory of a small signal is not convincing to him.
And my thought is, if the aliens wanted us to
essentially be persuaded by their example, why don't they send
like an enlightened alien avatar who would essentially sit in
the sky on a big throne and pronounce wisdom.

Speaker 2 (01:39:55):
Let's go. Let's consider that now humans have tried to
other humans on Earth, you know, as invaders and conquerors,
and they're often resistant to that because they highlight and
focus on cultural differences as the reason why these invaders
are not legitimate members of their civilization. So we humans

(01:40:17):
have found ways to hate other humans pretty easily for
relatively minor differences of our cultures on Earth. So if
the aliens knew that that was a risk, then they
would not want to reveal very much about themselves that
we could hate, because they're not just other human cultures

(01:40:39):
with you know, a few thousand years divergent heritage. They
are aliens, for God's sake, So they're actually going to
be different in some big, huge ways. So that's a big,
pretty big obstacle to their plan. Right, they have to
impress us as one of them, but somehow not show
very much about themselves because you know, maybe they eat baby.

(01:41:00):
Maybe that seems respectful for them, but we hate it,
and they don't really know. Another key parameter here. See,
they've got this rule against expansions. So if they're going
to send out this expedition thousands of light years away,
that expedition is itself a risk. If it goes rogue,
their whole thing is over right, So they don't want
to give it very much discretion. So they have to
pick a policy at home and send this thing out

(01:41:22):
with only the resources necessary to implement this policy and
very restricted so that it doesn't go rogue and you know,
break the whole rules. So they need a robust, simple strategy.
They can approve it from home, and so the domestication
one that seems simple from home. But then there's this risk, well,
what if they hate stuff about us? So the simple
strategies don't show anything about you. Just show that you

(01:41:44):
are powerful and capable and peaceful and pretty much nothing else.
That's the way to minimize the risk that they'll hate
something about you is just don't say anything.

Speaker 1 (01:41:56):
I would be quite curious to see or read a
work of science fiction from the perspective of those kinds
of aliens and how they deal with their let's say,
internal messaging approaches toward humans, and how that produces the
observations that some humans have had of them at the

(01:42:18):
very least, it would be quite fascinating from a science.

Speaker 2 (01:42:21):
Fiction Again, the UFO thing is it's a sideline because
most likely it's not true, but still it's interesting to consider.
But the Gravy Aliens is much more likely true, and
I think it's interestingly sets a different framing for our
long term future. So you know, traditionally the usual physics
framing is the universe has always been dead and empty,

(01:42:42):
and we're the only life, and then we're the only
thing that will ever happen. If we DII, there will
be nothing, and then if we go on, we will
just go on and meet our own cousins and second cousins.
But that's all there is. The Gravy Aliens thing says no,
in fact, there really are aliens out there, and we
will in fact meet them if we last that long. Well,
our distant future has sort of a different vision to it.

(01:43:04):
So the idea is, now will look when the grabby
aliens meet each other, all these different civilizations, they will
look at the others and wonder what the others have
that's worth copying. They won't each just want to stay
exactly the same. Now, they'll initially be very worried that
somehow the others will have some technology they won't because
then they will be conquered or something. So they'll all

(01:43:27):
be very eager to make sure they have maximum technology
before they meet. But that's probably feasible. If we're talking
a billion years, there's probably just max technology runs out
in a million years, and then from then on you
just have all the max technology. So if they all
meet at max technology, then probably they can't conquer each other.
But what they can do is talk to each other
and learn about each other, and then they could decide, well,

(01:43:49):
what are those other you know, thousands of other alien
civilizations that are vast and bigger. What if they learn
that we don't know? What about their choices is worth
learning from now? It might be that within our billion
years civilization, we will try everything out there and the
possibly anything we could learn from them. Maybe, but there's

(01:44:11):
a chance that there are things we could learn from them,
and then we could aspire to sort of having something
the others respect and copy. We could aspire it to
be respected. That's basically a status game of the alien civilization.
Prestige Hurricane. We would want, I like, earn some respect.

Speaker 1 (01:44:29):
Yes, well that would be one of the more positive
futures that we could envision. I would like your thoughts
on what is perhaps an much more negative and more
alarming possible future, because it's so proximate, and that is
that the Great Filter is actually upon us right now,

(01:44:51):
and it primarily manifests itself through the threat of nuclear war,
which of course has escalated in recent years with the
con in Ukraine essentially between the only two powers that
are capable of destroying the Earth through nuclear weapons. So
in twenty twenty two I wrote this article suggesting that

(01:45:13):
twenty twenty two was the year in which the Great
Filter was most acute. And if that is the case,
then right now we may still be in a kind
of great filter, but the probability of the catastrophic decline
of the human species, at the very least us falling

(01:45:35):
into a new dark age is lower than it used
to be. But I do wonder what you think of
the hypothesis that if there is a great filter, it
actually consists of civilizations attaining nuclear weapons or analogous weapons
of mass destruction without yet attaining the kind of enlightened
governance that would actually prevent nuclear weapons from being used

(01:45:59):
and we may be in the most pivotal years of
our civilization where we absolutely need to prevent nuclear war,
and if we do, we get to have this great,
open ended future where we might potentially meet alien civilizations.
But if we don't, that might be an indicator that

(01:46:19):
essentially the great filter is what destroys all of these
emergent civilizations through nuclear war as the mechanism.

Speaker 2 (01:46:29):
So a long time ago, I had a paper on
collapse basically and the risk and the consequences of collapse,
and I like the following metaphor. The reason to be
careful of slipping on the stairs is not that you
might go down one step and have to go back

(01:46:50):
up one step. The risk is that by slipping one step,
you might then cause yourself to slip a second step,
and then even a third or fourth step in accelerating
rate and probability, and fall all way down this stires
and break your neck. That's the reason to be careful
in the stairs. So similarly, it seems pretty clear that

(01:47:13):
in fact a nuclear war can't kill all humans. That's
just bell in the capability of nuclear war such as
we have it at the moment. Maybe a certain kind
of pandemic could have a bigger chance of killing all humans,
but even still that looks unlikely. So as a one
step risk, the odds of extinction seem low. But we

(01:47:38):
would certainly be far more vulnerable to more things going
wrong after a nuclear war, So it's well worth preventing that.
Of course, not just to prevent extinction, prevent all the
harm that could result from it. So it very much
wants to premit war. I would have to admit that
after a nuclear war, probably we would get cultural drift,

(01:48:00):
you know, set aside that is, we probably have pretty
substantial selection pressures then in the communities trying to revive
from a nuclear war. So for a while at least
cultural drift would be fixed. But this is not a
solution I wish on people. If I look at the
longer term future and ask, what's the most likely great

(01:48:25):
filter that we could face between now and actually, you know,
persistently spreading out in the universe. I don't actually think
it's nuclear war leading to a further collapse to extinction.
I think the biggest risk is the one I described
in this alien scenario, that our descendants have a world
culture and world government sufficient to decide they don't want

(01:48:49):
to expand, and they enforce that rule, and then we
don't to make that clear. So we enjoy at the
moment being part of this world culture where we all
kind of agree on lots of stuff and that limits
our conflict. So we love the fact that we don't
have different fundamental values around the world. We love the

(01:49:10):
fact that we don't have as much war and we
don't have much conflict, and we trade and travel, et cetera.
We love the fact that we share our world culture
and we agree with each other, and we are part
of a world community that shares a lot of culture.
This is a thing we like, and we have to
know eventually that whenever colonists leave from the Solar System

(01:49:32):
to go off to other star systems, that's the end
of that forever. The colonists would in fact go out
and have competition and selection and change and eventually come
back and buy for control over the center and our
being a single civilization with shared values, and you know,

(01:49:55):
fast communication ends when anybody leaves the Solar System. You
might imagine people so valuing being a unified culture and people.
So it's not on Earth, that is, even in the
Solar System. If somebody defies the central Solar System government.
It's pretty easy to send a rock and smashal anywhere
in the Solar System. You're not too far away to

(01:50:17):
be disciplined by a center government in the Solar System.
If you're in another star system, you are too far away.

Speaker 1 (01:50:24):
Yes, this is quite interesting, and actually it dovetails with
Daniel Tweet's comment. His sacred goal is a spacefaring species future,
and one consequence of that would be to restore essentially
a greater dynamism in cultural evolution and this cultural heterogeneity
of the widespread colonist cultures that won't all be part

(01:50:49):
of the same monoculture. Now, we have three minutes left
in our Salon time today, So along the lines of culture,
I would like to hear your thoughts on this comment
by Courchet, who writes a culture that can explain how
it is good for human life on the individual level
will prevail in the long term. Do you think that view,

(01:51:13):
which is quite an optimistic view, that ultimately the culture
that convinces more people to follow it because it is
actually good for them as the one that will prevail.
Do you think that view is possible.

Speaker 2 (01:51:28):
If you look at animals on the earth. They live
lives that are adaptive. They are lives that are fit
to their niche, and their behavior fits in the niche
in order to make them survive and thrive and not
go extinct at least as sooner. And do the typical
niches of animals make the animals happy? Do they make

(01:51:48):
them thrive? Well? In a sense, they do because their
concept of thriving is evolved to match their niche. If
you think about you, which is easier for evolution to
change your world or your attitudes towards your world, it
looks like your attitudes towards your world are actually more flexible,

(01:52:09):
more fluid, more available to be moved and changed. So,
for example, humans loved being forgers, and then farming was
actually kind of alien to the forger world. Farming was
more unequal, there's more conflict, more you know, less variety
of food and slavery and war and all sorts of things.

(01:52:29):
But farmers inherited a culture that told them that array
of life was better than the forgers, and they believed it.
And so, I mean, the key question is is there
a true nature to what it is to thrive that's
different from what we've inherited from DNA and culture that

(01:52:52):
was once matched to our previous environments. If there's this
true nature of thriving, then the questions will future environments
be such as to make us thrive by that pre
existing definition of thrive. But if the definition of thrive
can be changed, seems pretty clear that a world where

(01:53:13):
natural selection continues, we'll just make each world of creatures
like the world they're in and like to do the
things that make them adaptive in that world. That's our
best explanation for why we like what we like, right,
Why is it that you like the things that you
call thriving. The reason we believe you like them is
that they were once adaptive for your ancestors. That's why

(01:53:36):
there isn't another reason. There's no other source in the
universe of what it is to be good or happy.
That's the hard part of culture. It's answering all these
questions for you, and it's doing them randomly. The stark
scary fact is the deepest questions you have about life
and value are answered by your culture, and the way

(01:53:57):
it shows those answers was actually pretty random.

Speaker 1 (01:54:01):
I just hope that we can contribute to some significant
extent to the evolution of our culture in directions that
actually provide us with objective well being, like greater longevity
or greater prosperity, or colonizing other worlds. But thank you
very much, Professor Hanson for joining us today. Unfortunately we

(01:54:24):
are out of time, but this was just an extremely
fascinating discussion, and many of our viewers will be revisiting
the reporting of it as well. I am sure, and
let us try to achieve the more beneficial of the
possible futures that we discussed, and I hope in those
futures we can all live long and prosper happy

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Robin Hanson

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

All Episodes

Robin Hanson

Stuff You Should Know