YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Schmachtenberger

lines on the record: 278
first: 2021-06-14
most recent: 2021-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't think we can run, and the more powerful the tech is, we build it for reason X, whatever reason X is. Maybe X is three things. Maybe it's one thing, right? We were doing the oil thing because we want to make cars because it's a better method of individual transportation. We're building the Facebook thing because we're going to connect people socially in the personal sphere. It interfects with complex systems, with ecologies, economies, psychologies, cultures. And so it has effects on other than the thing we're intending. Some of those effects can end up being negative effects, but because this technology, if we make it to solve a problem, it has to overcome the problem. The problem's been around for a while. It's going to overcome it in a short period of time. So it usually has greater scale, greater rate of magnitude in some way. That also means that the externalities that it creates might be bigger problems.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, just like we can see that oil had these second order environmental effects and also social and political effects war and so much of the whole, like the total amount of oil used has a proportionality to total global GDP. And this is why we have this, you know, the petrodollar and so the oil thing also had the externalities of a major aspect of what happened with military industrial complex and things like that. But we can see the same thing with more current technologies with Facebook and Google and other things.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They weren't trying to build a democracy destroying app that would maximize time on site as part of its ad model through AI optimization of a news feed to the thing that made people spend most time on site, which is usually them being limbically hijacked more than something else, which ends up appealing to people's cognitive biases and group identities and creates no sense of shared reality. They weren't trying to do that, but it was a second order effect. And it's a pretty fucking powerful second order effect and a pretty fast one because the rate of tech is obviously able to get distributed to much larger scale, much faster, and with a bigger jump in terms of total vertical capacity. That's what it means to get to the verticalizing part of an exponential curve.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The application of exponentially more powerful tech not intentionally to try and beat an outgroup, but to try to achieve some goal that we have, but to produce a second and third order effects that do have harm to the commons, to other people, to environment, to other groups that might actually be bigger problems than the problem we were originally trying to solve with the thing we were building. When Facebook was building a dating app and then building a social app where people could tag pictures”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to cause harm for some outgroup, for some in group to win. But the outgroup is also working on growing the tech. And if they don't lose completely, they reverse engineer the tech, upregulate it, come back with more capacity. So there's the exponential tech arms race side of in-group, out-group rivalry using exponential tech that is one set of risks. And the other set of risks is”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now the war application is harm we're trying to cause or that we're aware we're causing the externality is harm that at least supposedly we're not aware we're causing or at minimum it's not our intention right maybe we're either totally unaware of it or we're aware of it but it is a side effect of what our intention is it's not the intention itself There are catastrophic risks from both types. The direct application of increased technological power to a rivalrous intent”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rockefeller in Standard Oil. And it looked like a constructive mindset to be able to bring this new energy resource to the world. And it did. And the second order effects of that are Climate change and all of the oil spills that have happened and will happen and all of the wars in the Middle East over the oil that had been there and the massive political cluster fuck and human life issues that are associated with it and on and on, right? And so it's also not just the orientation to construct a thing can have a narrow focus on what I'm trying to construct, but be affecting a lot of other things through second and third order effects. I'm not taking responsibility for.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there's just a probability space where it's easier to imagine that thing. So to say, how do we have a prototopic future? We have to say, well, one criteria must be that it avoids all of the catastrophic risks. So can we understand, can we inventory all the catastrophic risks? Can we inventory the patterns of human behavior that give rise to them? And could we try to solve for that? Could we have that be the essence of the social technology that we're thinking about to be able to guide, bind, and direct a new physical technology? Because so far our physical technology, like we were talking about the Genghis Khan's and like that that obviously use certain kinds of physical technology and armaments and also social technology and unconventional warfare for a particular set of purposes. But we have things that don't look like warfare.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a gradient where entropy is easier. And there's a lot more ways to put a set of things together that don't work than the few that really do produce higher order synergies. And so We look at a history of war And then we look at exponentially more powerful warfare, an arms race that drives that in all these directions. And when we look at a history of environmental destruction, There's a lot of ways the whole thing can break, like a lot of different ways. And for it to get ahead, it has to have none of those happen.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can kill an adult human in a second, but you can't get one in a second. It takes 20 years to grow one in a lot of things to happen right. I could destroy this building in a couple minutes with demolition, but it took a year or a couple years to build it.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a fair question to say to what degree is there just kind of perverse fantasy and morbid exploration and whatever else that happens in our imagination? But I don't think that's the whole of it. I think there is also a reality to the combinatorial possibility space and the difference in the probabilities that there's a lot of ways I could try to put the 70 trillion cells of your body together that don't make you. Not that many ways I can put them together that make you. There's a lot of ways I could try to connect the organs together that make some weird kind of group of organs on a desk but that doesn't actually make a functioning human.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exponential type technology and power that don't eventually blow themselves up, that make good enough choices as stewards of their environment and their commons and each other and etc. So it's easier to think of scenarios where we blow ourselves up than it is to think of scenarios where we avoid every single scenario where we blow ourselves up. And when I say blow ourselves up, I mean the environmental versions, the terrorist versions, the war versions, the cumulative externalities versions.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A happy evening. Well, it's because it's only a happy ending if we actually understand the issues well enough and take responsibility to shift it. Do I believe, like there's a reason why there's so much more dystopic sci-fi than protopic sci-fi and the some protopic sci-fi usually requires magic, is because Or at least magical tech, right? Tilithium crystals and warp drives and stuff because It's very hard to imagine people like the people we have been in the history books.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commercial drone with a homemade thermite bomb hit the Ukrainian munitions factory and do the equivalent of an incendiary bomb level of damage. That was just home tech. That's just simple kind of thing. And so the question is not does it stay being a small percentage of the population? The question is, can you bind that phenomena nearly completely? And especially now as you start to get into bigger things, CRISPR gene drive technologies and various things like that. Can you bind it completely long term? Over what period of time”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's something fascinating and beautiful about this. And it does have to do with some deeply pro social types of characteristics in humans. But when you're dealing with very large numbers, you don't need a whole lot of a phenomena. And so then you start to say, well, what's the probability that X won't happen this year? Then won't happen in the next two years, three years, four years. And then how many people are doing destructive things with lower tech? And then how many of them can get access to higher tech that they didn't have to figure out how to build? So, when I can get commercial tech and maybe I don't understand tech very well, but I understand it well enough to utilize it, not to create it. And I can repurpose it. When we saw that”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would also say that there are types. So the reason, the thing that gives hope about the orientation towards construction and destruction being a little different in psychology is what it takes to build really catastrophic tech, even today where it doesn't take what it took to make a nuke, a small group of people could do it, takes still some real technical knowledge that required having studied for a while and some then building capacity. There's a question of is that psychologically inversely correlated with the desire to damage civilization, meaningfully? A little bit, I think.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the thing that you're Looking at that, I do agree with that there's a psychological disposition towards construction. A psychological disposition more towards destruction. Obviously, everybody has both and can toggle between both. And oftentimes one is willing to destroy certain things. We have this idea of creative destruction, right? Willing to destroy certain things to create other things. And utilitarianism and trolley problems are all about exploring that space. And the idea of war is all about that. I am trying to create something for our people and it requires destroying some other people. Sociopathy is a funny topic because it's possible to have very high fealty to your in group and work on perfecting the methods of torture to the outgroup at the same time because you can dehumanize and then remove empathy.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of. I think most people would say that Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and Napoleon were effective people that were good at their job. That were actually maybe asymmetrically good at being able to organize people and do certain kinds of things that were pretty oriented toward certain types of destruction or pretty willing to, maybe they would say they were oriented towards empire expansion, but pretty willing to commit certain acts of destruction in the name of it.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seems like a long time, but it is really not. We get a short period of relative peace at the level of superpowers while building up the military capacity for much, much, much worse war the entire time. And then now we're at this new phase where the things that allowed us to make it through the nuclear power are not the same systems that will let us make it through the next stage. So what is this next post-Bretton Woods? How do we become safe vessels, safe stewards of many different types of exponential technology is a key question when we're thinking about X-risk?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And especially in a world of increasing numbers of people feeling disenfranchised, frantic, whatever for different reasons. So I would say the Bretton Woods world doesn't prepare us to be able to deal with lots of different agents, having lots of different types of catastrophe weapons you can't put mutually assured destruction on where you can't keep doing growth of materials economy in the same way because of hitting planetary boundaries and where the fragility dynamics are actually now their own source of catastrophic risk. So now we're so like there was all the world until World War II and World War II is just from a civilization timescale point of view is just a second ago.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I shoot them? Do I shoot everybody? And so you get a three body problem, you get a very complex type of thing when you have multiple agents and multiple different types of catastrophe weapons, including ones that can be much more easily produced than nukes. Nukes are really hard to produce. There's only uranium in a few areas. Uranium enrichment is hard. ICBMs are hard, but weaponized drones hitting smart targets is not so hard. There's a lot of other things where basically the scale at being able to manufacture them is going way, way down to where even non-state actors can have them. And so when we talk about exponential tech and the decentralization of exponential tech, what that means is decentralized catastrophe weapons capacity.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That same catastrophe weapon is there's more countries that haven't, eight or nine countries that have it. And there's a lot more types of catastrophe weapons. We now have catastrophe weapons with weaponized drones that can hit infrastructure targets, with bio, with fact, every new type of tech has created an arms race. So we have not, with the UN or the other kind of intergovernmental organizations, we haven't been able to really do nuclear deproliferation. We've actually had more countries get nukes and keep getting faster nukes, the race to hypersonics and things like that. And every new type of technology that has emerged has created an arms race. And so you can't do mutually assured destruction with multiple agents the way you can with two agents. Two agents, it's much easier to create a stable Nash equilibrium that's forced. But the ability to modern and say, if these guys shoot, who do I shoot?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certain kinds of travel because of viral contaminants, but the countries doing agriculture depend upon fertilizer. They don't produce that is shipped into them and depend upon pesticides they don't produce. So we got both crop failures and crops being eaten by locusts in scale in Northern Africa and Iran and things like that because they couldn't get the supplies of stuff in. So then you get massive starvation or future kind of hunger issues because of supply chain shutdowns. So you get this increased fragility and cascade dynamics where a small problem can end up leading to cascade effects. Also, we went from two superpowers with one catastrophe weapon.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you also see that when you get these supply chains that are so interconnected across the world, you get increased fragility because a collapse or a problem in one area then affects the whole world in a much bigger area as opposed to the issues being local, right? So we got to see with COVID an issue that started in one part of China affecting the whole world so much more rapidly than would have happened before Bretton Woods, right? Before international travel supply chains, you know, that whole kind of thing. And with a bunch of second and third order effects that people wouldn't have predicted, okay, we have”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's just very obvious to say if you have a linear materials economy where you take stuff out of the earth faster, whether it's fish or trees or ore, and you take oil, and you take it out of the earth faster than it can replenish itself, and you turn it into trash after using it for a short period of time. You put the trash in the environment faster than it can process itself. And there's toxicity associated with both sides of this. You can't run an exponentially growing linear materials economy on a finite planet forever. That's not a hard thing to figure out. And it has to be exponential if there's an exponentiation in the monetary supply because of interest and then fraction reserve banking and to then be able to keep up with the growing monetary supply, you have to have growth of goods and services. And so that's that kind of thing that has happened.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the answer of let's do positive GDP is the answer rapidly and exponentially, obviously accelerated the planetary boundary side. And that started to be, that was thought about for a long time, but it started to be modeled with the Club of Rome and Limits of Growth.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It also brought us up into planetary boundaries faster, the unrenewable use of resource in turning those resources into pollution on the other side of the supply chain. So obviously that faster GDP growth mint, the overfishing of the oceans and the cutting down of the trees and the climate change and the mining, toxic mining tailings going into the water and the mountaintop removal mining and all those types of things.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extraction to the plastics and polymers and the, you know, etc. And so the idea that we made a world that could do that kind of trade and create massive GDP growth, we could all work together to be able to mine natural resources and grow stuff. With the rapid GDP growth, there was the idea that everybody could keep having more without having to take each other's stuff. And so that was part of kind of the Bretton Woods post-World War II model. The other was that we would be so economically interdependent that blowing each other up would never make sense. That worked for a while.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the Bretton Woods, the series of agreements for. The nations would be able to engage with each other in a solution other than war was these IGOs, these intergovernmental organizations, and was the idea of globalization, since we could have global effects, we needed to be able to think about things globally, where we had trade relationships with each other, where it would not be profitable to war with each other, be more profitable to actually be able to trade with each other. So our own self-interest was going to drive our non-more interest. And so this started to look like, and obviously this couldn't have happened that much earlier either because industrialization hadn't gotten far enough to be able to do massive global industrial supply chains and ship stuff around quickly. But like we were mentioning earlier, almost all the electronics that we use today, just basic cheap stuff for us, is made on six continents, made in many countries. There's no single country in the world that could actually make many of the things that we have. And from the raw material.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've had lots of proxy wars during that time. We've had Cold War. I would say we're in a new phase now where the Bretton Wood solution is basically over, almost over.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the superpowers couldn't fight again. They couldn't do a real kinetic war. They could do diplomatic wars and Cold War type stuff, and they could fight proxy wars through other countries that didn't have the big weapons. And so mutually assured destruction and like coming out of World War II, we actually realized that nation states couldn't prevent World War. And so we needed a new type of supervening government in addition to nation states, which was the whole Bretton Woods world, the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, the Globalization Trade type agreements, mutually assured destruction that was how do we have some coordination beyond just nation states between them since we have to stop war between at least the superpowers. And it was pretty successful, given that we've had like 75 years of no superpower on superpower war.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was such a big deal that it changed the entire world in a really fundamental way, which is when you study history, it's amazing how big a percentage of history is studying war, right? And the history of war, as you study European history and whatever. It's generals and wars and empire expansions. And so the major empires near each other never had really long periods of time where they weren't engaged in war or preparation for war or something. Humans don't have a good precedent in the post tribal phase, the civilization phase of being able to solve conflicts without war for very long. World War II was the first time where we could have a war that no one could win.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the first time that we had tech big enough that could actually mess up everything at a global level. It could mess up habitability. We just weren't powerful enough to do that before. It's not that we didn't behave in ways that would have done it. We just only behaved in those ways at the scale we could affect. And so it's important to get that there's the entire world before World War II, where we don't have the ability to make a non-habitable biosphere non-habitable for us. And then there's World War II. the beginning of a completely new phase where global human-induced catastrophic risk is now a real thing.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first time that we were able to think about catastrophic risk, not from like a solar flare or something that we couldn't control, but from something that humans would actually create at a global level was World War II in the bomb.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's worth taking a historical perspective briefly to just kind of orient everyone to it. We don't have to go all the way back to the aliens who've seen all of civilization, but to just recognize that for all human history as far as we're aware, Were existential risks to civilizations, and they happened, right? Like there were civilizations that were killed in war, that tribes that were killed in tribal warfare or whatever. So people faced existential risk to the group that they identified with. It's just those were local phenomena, right? It wasn't a fully global phenomenon. So an empire could fall and surrounding empires didn't fall. Maybe they came in, filled the space.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they get to market first. And then they externalize all of the costs through limited liability or whatever it is to the Commons or wherever happened to have it. Other people are going to have to solve those, but now they have the power and capital associated. The person who looked at the risks and tried to do better design and go slower is probably not going to move into positions of as much power or influence as quickly. So this is one of the issues we have to deal with is some of the bad game theoretic dispositions in the system relative to its own stability.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I have to say I actually really respect Drexler for emphasizing Gregoo in engines of creation back in the day. To make sure the world was paying adequate attention to the risks of the nanotech as someone who was right at the cutting edge of what could be There's definitely game theoretic advantage to those who focus on the opportunities and don't focus on the risks or pretend there aren't risks.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can we understand that abstractly enough that we can make a civilizational model that isn't just trying to solve one type of failure, but solve the underlying things that generate the failures as a whole? Are there some underlying generator functions or patterns that would make a system self-terminating? And can we solve those, and had that be the kernel of a new civilizational model that is not self-terminating? And can we then be able to actually look at the categories of extras we're aware of and see that we actually have resilience in the presence of those, not just resilience, but anti-fragility? And I would say for the optimism to be grounded, it has to actually be able to understand the risk space well and have adequate solutions for it.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institutional decay, civilizational decay reasons. Baudrillard in simulation and simulacra looks at a very different way of looking at how institutional decay in the collective intelligence of a system happens and it becomes kind of more internally parasitic on itself. Obviously Jared Diamond made a more popular book called Collapse. And as we were mentioning, the anti-Catherer mechanism has been getting attention in the news lately, but it's like a 2,000-year-old clock, right? Like metal gears. Does that mean we lost like 1500 years of technological progress? And from a society that was relatively technologically advanced, So, what I'm interested in here is being able to say, okay, well, Why did previous societies fail”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any of the catastrophic risks happening is enough to keep that positive outcome from occurring. So, how do we ensure that none of them happen? If we want to say, let's have a civilization that doesn't collapse, so again, collapse theory. It's worth looking at books like The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. It does analysis of That many of the societies fell for internal”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There might be a bias in the nature of the assessment. I would also say there's kind of naive technopessim And there are Critics of technology. I mean, you read the Unibombers Manifesto on why technology can't result in our self-termination, so we have to take it out before it gets any further. Also, if you read a lot of the extras community, Bostrom and friends, it's like our total number of existential risks and the total probability of them is going up. So, I think that there are we have to hold together where are positive possibilities and our risk possibilities are both increasing and then say for the positive possibilities to be realized long term all of the catastrophic risks have to not happen.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, overconsumption of resource is just one way a thing can self-terminate. We're just kind of starting here. There are reasons for. Optimism and pessimism, then they're both worth understanding, and there's failure modes on understanding either without the other. As we mentioned previously, there... What I would call naive techno-optimism, naive techno capital optimism that says stuff just has been getting better and better and we wouldn't want to live in the dark ages and tech has done all this awesome stuff. We know the proponents of those models and this stuff is going to kind of keep getting better. Of course, there are problems, but human ingenuity rises to it. Supply and demand will solve the problems, whatever.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that if we don't understand why all the previous ones failed, we can't ensure that. And so I think it's very important to understand it well so that we can have that be a designed outcome with somewhat decent probability.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I might get an exponential curve and then hit a wall and then just collapse the exponential curve rather than do an S curve or some other kind of thing. So self-terminating system is any system that depends upon a substrate system that is debasing its own substrate that is debasing what it depends upon.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They terminated. Sometimes it seems like they were terminated from the outside in war. Sometimes it seems like they self-terminate. When we look at Easter Island, it was a self-termination. So let's go ahead and take an island situation. If I have an island and we are consuming the resources on that island faster than the resources can replicate themselves, and there's a finite space there, that system is going to self-terminate. It's not going to be able to keep doing that thing because you'll get to a place of there's no resources left. And then you get a... So now If I'm utilizing the resources faster than they can replicate or faster than they can replenish and I'm actually growing our population in the process, I'm even increasing the rate of the utilization of resources.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we look at Human societies historically, human civilizations It's not that hard to realize that most of the major civilizations and empires of the past don't exist anymore. So they had a life cycle, they died for some reason. So we don't still have the early Egyptian Empire or Inca or Maya or Aztec or any of those, right? And so”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complex. Complex stuff with biological type stuff and sociological type stuff. It more has generator functions and even those can't be fully explicated than it has, or our explicit occasion can't prove that it has closure of what would be in the unknown unknown set. We keep finding like, oh, it's just the genome. Oh, well, now it's the genome in the epigenome. And then a recursive change on the epigenome because of the proteome. And then there's mitochondrial DNA and then viruses affected. And fuck, right? So it's like we get overexcited when we think we found the thing”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are basically the application of models. And engineering is kind of applied science, science as the modeling process. But with”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complicated means we can fully explicate. The phase space of all the things that it can do, we can program it. All human Not all. For the most part, human built things are complicated. They don't self organize. They don't self repair. They're not self evolving. And we can make a blueprint for them.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complete description of what's happening in an artificial system that was the result of applying a model. So the model of a circuit board and the circuit board are the same thing. But I would argue that the model of a cell and the cell are not the same thing. And I would say this is key to what we call complexity versus the complicated, which is a distinction Dave Snowden made well in defining the difference between simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic systems. But one of the definers in complex systems is that no matter how you model the complex system, it will still have some emergent behavior not predicted by the model.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source