00:00:00.000 I think we've been deprived of a lot more than flying cars and Mars colonies.
00:00:13.520 I think civilization is currently burdened by a debilitating pessimism.
00:00:19.120 Not just prophecies of doom, because they've always existed.
00:00:24.320 The term technological fix has become as pejorative as luddite used to be.
00:00:31.080 The aspiration for technological solutions is now widely regarded as naive, a fantasy that
00:00:37.400 ignores the inevitability of missteps and side effects.
00:00:42.440 And that naivety is labeled optimism, because optimism has come to mean something like
00:00:49.400 the assumption that the best will happen, or probably will, and pessimism that the worst will.
00:00:55.240 They're both false, as general principles, no one adopts them.
00:00:59.600 They're irrationalities that people accuse each other of having, and everyone classifies
00:01:05.160 themselves as somewhere in the middle, perhaps admitting to a slight bias in one direction
00:01:10.480 or the other, and therefore admitting to slight irrationality.
00:01:16.240 In fact, both ends of the spectrum and the middle are predictions of success or failure,
00:01:23.360 maybe probabilistic, derived only from an attitude or a principle, not from explanations
00:01:31.160 of why reality should match them, and prediction without explanation is prophecy.
00:01:39.320 Conventional pessimism is right that civilization has no guaranteed future.
00:01:47.960 The overwhelming majority of civilizations and species that have ever existed on our
00:01:53.560 extinct, including significantly, every one of our cousin species, every species that has
00:02:00.880 ever tried to survive by creating knowledge that was not in their genome, how to make clothes
00:02:07.880 and fire and farming, and to live the new ways of life that that enabled.
00:02:13.920 That is our biological niche to survive through the exercise of creativity, and we are
00:02:31.360 We conquer problems by creating knowledge or they conquer us.
00:02:36.800 So there's nothing new in our situation of all sorts of existential danger.
00:02:41.760 It's undeniable that the worst can happen because the very worst has already happened
00:02:47.680 many times, all those civilizations who believed that their famines and droughts and disasters
00:02:55.600 were divine punishment for their wickedness or whatever.
00:02:59.960 In reality, it was just that they didn't know enough about irrigation, medicine and
00:03:05.120 so on if the ancient Athenians had known about antibiotics or just about hygiene, they
00:03:14.200 could have prevented the plague that contributed to the fall of their nascent optimistic
00:03:21.960 If they had, then as Carl Sagan speculated, we might now be at the stars and technology
00:03:29.560 would be regulating trivialities like the planetary climate as automatically as it's
00:03:39.520 We know that's possible because of a momentous dichotomy that follows directly from
00:03:46.200 the rejection of the supernatural, namely every transformation of physical systems that
00:03:53.840 is not forbidden by laws of physics is achievable given the right knowledge.
00:03:59.000 And hence, the rational attitude to the future is what I call optimism, the principle
00:04:04.720 of optimism, namely that all evils are caused by lack of knowledge.
00:04:11.840 That isn't a prophecy of success, it's an explanation for failure.
00:04:16.800 If we fail at anything that's physically possible, it's because of some knowledge that
00:04:24.200 Admittedly, some of the dangers that we currently foresee are themselves side effects
00:04:32.920 But trying to slow that down won't help because what do you slow down?
00:04:37.400 In 1900, no one could possibly have foreseen that research in pure physics into the
00:04:44.240 esoteric properties of the element uranium would within 50 years become the centerpiece
00:04:50.560 of everyone's existential fear, or that another half century later, the centerpiece
00:04:58.800 In our future too, the greatest dangers will inevitably be unforeseen.
00:05:04.760 And the only type of knowledge that's capable of dealing with those is fundamental knowledge
00:05:13.600 Any area of fundamental research could suddenly become essential to our survival, biology
00:05:25.720 We also need knowledge of how to structure human institutions to retain the miraculous property
00:05:32.200 of keeping civilization stable under rapid change, traditions of criticism and error correction,
00:05:40.760 and we need wealth, meaning the ability to deploy technology in practice.
00:05:50.000 The world doesn't just contain optimists and pessimists, and wise and unwise technology
00:05:57.120 It contains enemies of civilization as well, and knowledge is impartial.
00:06:03.520 It can be used for good or evil, but the enemies of civilization all necessarily have
00:06:14.320 And so they fear error correction and truth, and that's why they resist changes in their
00:06:21.680 ideas, which makes them less creative and slower to innovate.
00:06:27.080 So our defense against the existential danger from malevolent uses of technology is speed.
00:06:34.840 The good guys must use their only advantage to stay ahead.
