There's No Rule That Says We'll Make It

so there's a thing that i see people routinely fail to get and it's a little hard to express um i'm just gonna try there's no rule which says that we make it there's no rule which says that humanity has to survive this century or even this decade there's no rule that says that everything's going to be okay and when i say this to people they generally accept it most of the people i talk to anyway they say yeah of course of course there's no rule that says that we have to make it of course humanity could fail we could go extinct you know it could happen it's like they know it but they don't feel it they don't take it seriously as an actual possibility they kind of think okay we have these things that we have to do we have these challenges we have to overcome and so we'll do that you know we'll rise to the occasion we'll figure out what we need to do and we'll do it but okay this is a related concept there's no rule which says that the challenges we're faced with are challenges that we are capable of meeting think about something like an asteroid strike if a big enough asteroid hits earth we're pretty much done for right and i'm not saying that this is something we should day-to-day be concerned about because we're dealing with geological periods of time right regularly asteroids hit earth we're sort of due for one but what does that really mean sometime in the next million years or whatever it is so we have more pressing concerns but when people are prepared to take seriously the possibility of an asteroid strike usually it's because they're thinking about it like oh interesting okay so we have good telescopes we would spot the thing i wonder how long we would have would that be enough warning would that be enough time for us to build whatever it is that we needed to build to go up there and redirect it or blow it up or whatever so they're willing to think about the possibility from the perspective of tackling the challenge but the thing is as i said the periods of time that pass between asteroid strikes are so large that human scale time periods don't really matter the chance of an asteroid strike 200 years from now is more or less the same as it is now and similarly the chance of an asteroid strike 200 years ago is about the same as it is now and if you go back a few hundred years the question becomes very different could we see the asteroid coming maybe could we do anything about it no i mean pretty much just flatly no we didn't have the technology we didn't have the understanding of the thing necessary to build something that could deal with that if an asteroid were headed for earth a few hundred years ago that would just be it just game over humanity's done shame you know you didn't quite develop your technology fast enough to have anything that could deal with asteroids before one happened to hit you oh well there is no rule which says that the challenges the universe faces us with are challenges we can face and i hope that kind of gives some taste of what i'm talking about of like understanding the possibility that we could be currently faced with challenges that we will not rise to that we actually could fail but people just have a very hard time taking seriously the possibility that we could fail i think it comes from a few different places one place obviously is religion right if we were created deliberately by the creator of the universe we are important in the universe and so we're not going to be wiped out by some asteroid or whatever we're not going to be wiped out in some boring way religions they're often okay with the idea of an apocalypse of humanity or of the world ending but they're not okay with an accidental apocalypse they have a very hard time taking that kind of thing seriously in a religious apocalypse it's always part of the plan and so someone with a religious mindset when faced with a scenario in which humanity is wiped out in a way which is not part of the plan they have a very hard time taking that seriously and i would posit that anyone raised in a society that's primarily religious probably has a lot of this as well a lot of this kind of feeling that maybe we face very difficult challenges but we'll deal with them and if we don't then that's okay because it's all part of the plan even if they would not explicitly endorse this idea even if they claim to recognize the reality that there is no plan i think those lingering ideas don't just immediately disappear when you give up on the supernatural parts of your religious beliefs and your upbringing and it's not just capital r religion either right like anyone who believes that human beings have souls or that human beings are in some way special like fundamentally special that the universe itself has like a separate category for human beings because again there's this sense in which the universe on some level cares about us or even just recognizes us or acknowledges us as a thing and if you believe that again it's difficult to think about the situations in which we're wiped out in some boring way with no dramatic final test you know no heroic last stands no judgments no thrilling story to tell and nobody to tell it to so religion is one place that i think this comes from the other place that it comes from i think is fiction especially hollywood and especially science fiction and i'm not saying that people can't tell the difference between fiction and reality i'm kind of saying that i mean on a conscious level people can tell the difference between fiction and reality but i think on some level it's like people understand that whatever this fictional thing is it didn't happen to us it didn't happen here on earth but it sort of happened somewhere it happened in the world of the story and that still feels real it's kind of like say you have two people a and b and person a says you know alcohol is actually a really harmful drug i think we should ban alcohol in the uk and person b might reply well they did try banning alcohol in the usa in the 1920s and that didn't really work out at all the way they hoped it would and person a would reply well yeah but that was a different time it was a different place you know modern britain is very different from 1920s america and we could implement it differently and so on and person b would say yeah i mean maybe there are important differences but still the fact that something similar was tried and failed is evidence against the idea right that's useful information to take into consideration and that doesn't seem like an unreasonable position to take but then people will do the same thing where somebody expresses some something about ai and somebody else says yeah but think about what happened in 2001 a space odyssey or irobot or something and you say to them well that was fiction that didn't happen right that's a fictional example it's different from the real world it doesn't really make sense to use that and they'll say oh i know i know that it's fictional but still there's some sense in which this is like evidence right and no it's not i mean it's at best it's one dude's best guess and usually it's not even that because usually the person is not trying to be as accurate as possible they're trying to be entertaining so so clearly fiction affects the way people think about this it's interesting it seems like it increases the probabilities people assigned to bad things happening with ai but it also decreases the probabilities they assign to really really bad things happening with ai in the sense that they have in some part of their mind a whole bunch of examples in which bad things happened but then we were able to overcome them right and this is not just with ai this is any existential risk even asteroids for example coming back to them even though people often won't explicitly endorse this idea i think there's a part of people which says oh well i've seen the world threatened hundreds of times right and every time it works out there's some there's a brave hero or a plucky band of misfits or something comes along uh we figure out what we need to do and then we do it and i guess that's where we are you know and some of those people are even potentially helpful because they offer to join your plucky band of misfits but they're still not able to take seriously the possibility that we might lose because they've never seen that happen right i mean they've never seen it happen in fiction or very rarely seen it happen in fiction and furthermore they've never seen it happen in reality obviously that's kind of a difficult one because i feel like you should be able to use reality as evidence but uh i mean of course we've never observed humanity being wiped out wouldn't be here talking about it if we had and so it's hard to get people to really feel the reality of the situation which is that we the whole of humanity we are up here on this tightrope we've had no practice no dry run no rehearsal we get one shot and there is no parachute there's no safety net there is no rule that says that we have to make it we absolutely can fail and we will if we don't successfully tackle a series of hard problems and there's no rule that says that we're actually capable of tackling those problems and there's no rule that says that we have enough time to do so so we better get to work [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Robert Miles 2

Views: 35,013

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Id: JD_iA7imAPs

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 16 2022