I think first of all it's worth pointing out that we're actually at what is arguably the best period of time in human history. I'm not sure what time would be better. I think the world is actually pretty great right now, better than it's ever been. People ought to have some sense of perspective and realize that things are actually really freaking great. Let me put it that way, in terms of violence per-capita in the world we're at the lowest ever in history. You wouldn't necessarily know that reading the newspapers. Violence is definitely lower now - it's been sinusoidal, obviously in the 20th century there was some - there was some bad moments there in the 20th century, but - violence per-capita, lowest in human history today.
People are too negative really, people need to lighten up. I think one shouldn't ignore the negatives but I think one shouldn't ignore the positives either. There's a lot of talk about income inequality and what-not but I think we should also think about information equality. The amount of information equality that exists in the world is unbelievable as a result of the Internet. It's really phenomenal because if you go back say 30 years ago the President of the United States probably had the most access to information of any person on Earth, but today if you have access to the Internet you've got access to more information then the President of the United States had 30 years ago. You have access to all the world's information, you can go on Google and search for any book, any scholarly work. You know Wikipedia's actually pretty damn good, it’s like 90% accurate it's just not clear what 90%, but it's really incredible what you can learn and how connected you can be to people all around the world. I actually think there's lots of reasons to be optimistic, and that life is actually pretty good.
The daily news media tends to focus on the worst thing occurring in the world at any given point. A lot of the major newspapers seem to be trying to answer the question: “what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today?"
I actually think the magazines are pretty good. The magazines are more balanced, the magazines do more long form articles. There’s still a negative bias in some magazines but it's less negative than the newspapers.
I do think something needs to change about modern media, because it's like a misery microscope. I think there something in the human psyche that tends to place a weight on negative stuff more than positive. You want to react faster to the lion that's going to eat you, rather then ‘dinner is on the table’ Being dinner is worse than having dinner, so I think there's kind of an evolutionary reason, you want to prioritize danger over reward. If you get eaten by the lion it's “Game over” but if you forget where you left some snack it's OK. It's not quite the same with the risk/reward balance. We did evolve without newspapers and global media, so our brain is sort of having a fear response by a bunch of dangers that are extremely unlikely to ever affect us. If something terrible happened in some far away part of the world that kind of triggers the negative response in our limbic system, even though there's no way that actually represents a danger at all. It's not something you should really worry about, so I think it does so for a fundamental evolutionary reason, which is that we're trained to respond to dangerous things. But we didn't evolve to have global media, even though the news that you're reading doesn't affect you directly, it's happening somewhere else in the world, it still sort of has this negative visceral reaction.
Anyway, I think one can really have a severely negative biased view of the world reading newspapers, which is simply inaccurate. I do think it is something we collectively should seek to address. I'm not quite sure how that problem gets solved, but I do think the mood ought to improve. I think it's out of sync with the reality. Life is pretty good.
I think to some degree it's going to be at the personal selection front, where people will simply choose to get their news in ways that are not from the newspaper, unless the newspaper changes. That's the fundamental driver, it’s the action of all individuals who consume news that will drive the change. I think that is already happening, I mean I get my news from Twitter.
There will certainly be issues that we have to deal with. I think that the single largest macro problem that humanity faces this century is solving the sustainable energy problem. If we don't solve that in this century we're in deep trouble. But there’s sort of less than 1% chance of annihilation of humanity, by less than one percent I mean even if we do massively increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere it is unlikely to result in the annihilation of humanity. It could kill a few hundred million people due to rising sea levels and that kind of thing, which is obviously not good, but it is not an annihilation event. If you look at the fossil history there have been several annihilation events, mostly due to meteors of one kind or another. Possibly some due to super volcanoes and some due to who knows what, so we obviously suffer from some risk of a similar annihilation event and also potentially a manmade thing like a super virus or something. It could be something like with the CERN Large Hadron Collider, potentially we could see a press release saying, 'the good news is we've discovered a new law of physics, the bad news is there's a small black hole that's rapidly growing.' Now I think that's extremely unlikely, to be clear, but you know, we've discovered new laws of physics before.
Religious extremism is obviously a concern, if that grows over time. Particularly if it's a sort of Luddite form of religious extremism, anti-technology, anti-science. That's an obvious threat.
We should be concerned about demographic implosion. I think demographics is a real issue, where people are not having kids in a lot of countries. If you look at countries like Japan, China, and most of Europe the birthrate is only half of the sustaining rates. If you have an inverted demographic pyramid, if you look like at the pyramid and you got age striation, 60 year olds, 50 year olds, 40 year olds, 30 year olds, 20 year olds, sort of like a demographic pyramid, in some countries it’s like an upside down pyramid. It will sort of fall over, it will not stand. Very often they'll say ‘we will solve it with immigration’ immigration from where? many parts of Europe have an average of 50 to 60% what's needed for replacement. What we will actually have in those countries is a high dependency ratio, where the number of people who are retired is very high relative to the number of people who are net producers. The social safety net will not hold. We did not evolve for this, because we always sort of evolved to always pro-create, and there was no birth control or anything. It was like, have lots of babies and hope some of them will survive. That was like all of human history until very recently, and now you got like cases like Japan where adult diapers outsell baby diapers, and Europe is in a similar situation. China is headed the same way because they had the one-child policy, and even though they relieved the one-child policy, the social norm has become to have an average of one kid, so even when they relieved that requirement it didn’t change. China for that matter are at half their replacement rate. There’s one and a half billion people in China, where exactly are we going to find 600 million people to replace the ones that were never born? that’s like 3 Indonesias, it’s not gonna work.
The full gravity of this is not well understood, but will become a severe issue in the next few decades. I think people are going to have to regard to some degree the notion of having kids as almost a social duty. Within reason, I mean if you can and you are so inclined you should, otherwise civilization will just die, literally.
The birthrate is inversely correlated to wealth, inversely correlated to education, and correlated to religion. The more religious you are, the less educated, and the poorer you are, the more kids you will have. This is true between countries and within countries. In the US the highest birthrate is in Utah with the Mormons.
If you say what are threats to civilization? the lack of people is obviously a threat to civilization. We are going to face in the mid part of the century and particularly the latter part of the century a demographic implosion the likes of which we haven't seen, including the Black Plague. The math is obvious, when did China ever experience a 50% reduction in its population? never, I mean basically pre-writing, because no one has ever written about such a thing. Even the Black Plague was I think as much as a quarter but never a half, and yet Spain has a birthrate of 50%. It's as though someone went through and killed half of the population, or at least of the future population. There better something happen to turn this around because otherwise you have that inverted demographic pyramid. At this rate anything that will be left will be robots. Three generations of 50% replacement rate gets you to 12% from where you were. Those 12% all they are going to do will be taking care of their grandparents. Eventually there just won't be people at that rate.
Anyway there's always a chance that something calamitous could happen to Earth, either a natural or man-made catastrophe. Certainly we see that in the fossil record, and we have invented all sorts of ways of doing ourselves in that the dinosaurs didn't have. It is possible in the future that there is some global war that knocks us back many levels of technology, and certainly if it was a major nuclear war it would. The history of civilization does contain a lot of war. Then there’s the general decay of societies overtime, we see this throughout history with ancient Egypt or ancient Rome, they had reached peak technology levels and then for reasons that aren’t obvious declined. We also haven't managed to solve the astroid problem therefore our risk is higher. But astroids are a low probability existential threat on a time scale that's relevant to us... AI is much more urgent. I'm not sure if people realize this, but if you haven't solved the problems that caused the prior extinctions and you added new ones you have not improved the situation.
That is sort of where we are right now.