A History Of Existential Risk - Thomas Moynihan | Modern Wisdom Podcast 306

99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. So it's, extinction is the rule. Survival's the exception. That's an important thing to know is that, you know, potentially we have come close before. This isn't something that is completely, uh, unprecedented.

If we're worried about existential risks annihilating our future, why spend any time studying the past?

(laughs) That's a good question. Uh, so I, I, I hope as we talk through this, uh, that the true, uh, significance of what I'm about to say will, um, be elaborated further. But, um, I think that it's so easy to focus on, uh, the risks coming towards us, coming down the track. Um, and it's slightly harder to take stock and look backwards and see just how far we've come. One of the things I mean by that is that, uh, the very ability for us to even be able to see those risks ahead, uh, the risks on the horizon, uh, that's a massive achievement, uh, for, for humanity, um, for, for our knowledge of the world, for our knowledge of what is best to do within the world. Um, that's a massive achievement. And again, I hope that, you know, as we speak through this, uh, you know, um, the truth of this might, uh, hopefully kind of, uh, unfurl. Um, but, you know, some of our biggest achievements are almost in- invisible to us. Um, some of, you know, uh, some of the most profound, um, uh, breakthroughs of human knowledge are often invisible to us. Um, so, you know, I often point towards the fact, um, of, uh, well, take slavery, for example. For most, for the majority of human history, uh, people presumed that it was just part of the natural order of things. Uh, you know, um, it wasn't questioned. Uh, all of us these days kind of take it for granted that, uh, that's, you know, inherently wrong. Um, a- another example I like to use, uh, is, um, perspective, right? So, you know, think back to being a kid in school. Um, you'd learn to draw your first cube or your first, uh, uh, prism or, you know, triangle. Uh, pyramid, sorry. Um, it's so easy. It comes to you so naturally. Uh, rewind, you know, uh, six centuries, seven centuries, uh, it wouldn't have come naturally at all. Uh, you know, I was drawing cubes, I don't know what age, but pretty young. And that's not because I'm a genius or a prodigy or some da Vinci tier, uh, you know, mega genius. It's because of, uh, cultural osmosis, because the ideas that we just take for granted, we inherit. But someone had to come up with them and... Well, often lots of people had to come up with them. And it takes, uh, you know, centuries, decades of effort, of hard work and error correction, uh, of finding out the ways in which we are so severely wrong about the world. Um, and yeah, so to tie up my point, um, thinking, being able to even notice these risks, uh, the risks facing humanity or just the fact of how bad, uh, human extinction would be, um, those are really, uh, huge achievements. And they're quite modern ones as well. Uh, so yeah, I, I would say, I would put it like this. It's, it's a, it's a, uh, it's a cure for despondency, um, because like I said, it's easy to see the risks ahead, uh, harder to see how far we've come. So it's easy to be despondent. It's easy to despair. Um, but it's deceptively easy, because we have that kind of bias where it's easier to look straight ahead rather than look to the past.