Everything You Know is About to Collapse - David Friedberg

You've said the future's gonna be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried. How come?

I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future because humans are programmed to be that way. We always were worried about some predator coming around the corner and eating us. Like, we're, we're tuned to survive, right? So we're tuned to always-- There's always some existential threat to humanity. This goes back to kind of biblical eras thousands of years ago. It was the, the great flood that was about to come. There was the, um, you know, the plague. The plague's gonna wipe us all out. Uh, there's, uh, starvation. You know, the late nineteenth century, uh, population was outstripping, uh, food supply, and there was this big belief that we were gonna run out of food, and there was this kind of rush to... And, and, and the primary reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields [chuckles] off of the South American coast. So these giant islands covered in, in poop, and they would-- The clipper ships would go down, they'd get all this poop, and they'd bring it back to Europe, and they'd use it as fertilizer to farm. If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less, less calories. So the, the islands were kind of diminishing, and there was this big call to action, "We're gonna run out of fertilizer. The world's gonna starve. We're gonna die." And then there was this invention called the Haber-Bosch process, where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom. Suddenly, population skyrocketed. Every generation has these existential threats, climate change, COVID. There's always... A-and now it's AI. I think fundamentally AI is one of these most kind of like mind-numbing, sort of unbelievable to understand kind of, um, technologies. And when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok, that seems so overwhelming, like a plague, like running out of food, like COVID, we have a tendency to be very existential about it. Um, now, you compare that to the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground, people are living longer, they're living healthier, they're living better lives a-across the board, across populations. And people can argue all day long about relative prosperity. Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead, and they're doing really well. The rest of us feel left behind. But if you look at some of the metrics of like, hey, everyone has a, a home. Everyone has a car. Like, everyone [chuckles] has some of these things that we take for granted today that we didn't have a hundred years ago that, that were really things to struggle to get. Um, now, separate to that, there's an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally. Digitization of the physical world and then our ability to kind of make predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of the tools that we call AI today, but it's really a long history of these sorts of tools where we take data and we use that to better understand the world and then say, "Hey, we could do this, or we could do this. We could make this molecule to solve this cancer. We could do this thing," and suddenly it turns out we're right. We could build this machine that could get us to the moon. Oh yeah, we're right. We could do that. [chuckles] Like, all of these fundamental tools start to compound, and we're in this kind of exponential curve right now that I think... And we can talk about some of the things that I think are most exciting, but that are really gonna kinda transform the trajectory for humanity. So I, I, I think that there's, um, a risk of too much change too fast, which is perhaps the thing that breaks social order.