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Bad Idea #23 "These are the best of times" with Luke Kemp · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

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  Civilization is a term propaganda and progress in the
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  way it's told today is just a bad story justified.
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  When you have a more realistic appraisal of history, things
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  look very different. And so is this the best of times
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  or is this the worst of times when I.
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  First started this research. I was someone who believed that
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  humans weren't particularly good.
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  I was pretty down on humanity. I believe that during collapses
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  we most likely fell into kind of mass panic and disorder.
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  And I also believe that we'd be better off having some kind of
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  enlightened dictator who could solve things like climate
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  change. I've dramatically changed my
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  mind at all those things, and that's used to empirically
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  delving into history. Right now, the world's most
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  talented and smart people are getting paid to keep teenagers
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  glued to their screens and to make killer robots for different
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  militaries across the world. Again, is that progress?
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  I'm not so sure. Can we go extinct?
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  I don't see why not. There's numerous scenarios where
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  I can envision human extension. I think it's a very high bar.
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  We're incredibly resilient, adaptable species.
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  But if you're looking at, say, for instance, a world where you
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  have 4° of warming, you have a geoengineering system set up to
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  basically mask that level of warming, and then you have an
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  enormous nuclear war, I don't know.
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  I think that's a scenario where I can see extinction occurring.
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  Welcome to saving the world from bad ideas.
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  I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a few bad ideas in my time.
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  I used to go out in the night time to destroy GMO crops, and I
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  also opposed nuclear power. But then when I looked at the
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  science, I found I got it wrong. Oops.
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  I've learned the hard way that none of us are right all the
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  time. So now I'm here to challenge the
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  assumptions that we all too often take for granted because
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  the future depends on us getting it right.
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  So I'm here today with Luke Kemp, who's a research affiliate
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  at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and
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  the author of a really quite amazing new book called
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  Goliath's Curse, the History and Future of Societal Collapse,
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  which is out now and published by Penguin Viking.
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  And I just finished reading this morning.
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  This is a podcast about saving the world from bad ideas.
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  And I was trying to think what the bad idea is that you're
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  really combating in in your book.
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  Is it progress? Is it civilization?
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  Is it that things are getting better?
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  I mean, what? What, What would you really zoom
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  in on here? I would say it's all of the
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  above. Civilization is a term.
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  Propaganda and progress in the way it's told today is just a
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  bad story. Justified.
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  When you have a more realistic appraisal of history, things
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  look very different. And so is this the best of times
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  or is this the worst of times? A bit of both.
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  I think that we have eradicated smallpox, that people are
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  getting taller, and those are worthwhile great things.
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  But we also live in a time where human extinction is possible
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  when it wasn't previously, and that's due to the technologies
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  and structures we're creating. And while many of our lives are
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  improving in terms of material abundance, there's also evidence
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  that people are getting less happy as well.
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  And I think in the future we're going to have less democracy.
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  So it's not a clear cut picture, but I'd say this is the most
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  dangerous of times. So you're kind of an anti Steven
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  Pinker, it seems to me from having read this book.
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  You know, he was our first guest on our inaugural episode.
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  And you know, this is about saving the world from bad ideas.
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  And the bad idea that he was saving the world from was that
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  there's no such thing as progress.
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  And actually, it seems to me that your book argues makes the
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  reverse case that actually the arc of progress and history as a
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  myth. So perhaps the bad idea for you
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  is just progress, right? You're you do do you think
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  progress is a myth or do you think it's it's something that's
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  really happened throughout history?
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  I think it is real. However, I disagree with Pingo
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  in terms of when it happens and what's the driving force here.
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  There's definitely been progress for the last 200 years and
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  things in terms of things like civil rights, the eradication of
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  smallpox, growth and human hydrated, better nutrition, even
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  improving rates of of infant mortality and mortality.
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  There's been real genuine improvements there.
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  Where I disagree with Pinker is that this has not been something
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  that's happened ever since the first states, say 5000 years
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  ago. This is not something that has
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  happened primarily due to Enlightenment values.
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  When we first had the industrial revolution, we actually had
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  falling heights, worse health, worse nutrition and lower life
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  expectancy even in the UK. By heights you mean you mean the
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  stature of individual humans, right?
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  Precisely so. In archaeology in particular,
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  osteoarchaeology is called the study of bones.
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  We use heights as a pretty good general biophysical indicator.
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  Generally speaking, if people are healthier, they have an
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  excess of calories and they have a more varied diet or high level
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  protein, they tend to grow taller.
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  So height becomes a pretty decent proxy for how healthy
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  people are. During times of feminal disease,
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  they tend to be shorter. And what we see is that
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  surprisingly, in the wake of the Black Death, for instance,
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  people actually get taller. The big key thing here is that
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  there's less workers and hence they have more bargaining
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  ability with landlords, Lords in general, et cetera.
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  They get higher real wages, they become healthier, things get
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  better and short. Interestingly, in the industrial
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  revolution, it's kind of the opposite.
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  People actually get shorter and life expectancy is lowered as
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  well. What changes and the reason why
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  we get this big improvements, whether it be in sanitation for
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  instance, or the 40 hour working week, it's largely due to
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  collective struggle. So technological change in a lot
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  of environment values don't quite just lead to progress de
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  facto. You need to have shared
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  struggle. And historically we just haven't
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  had any clear evidence of continuous progress in the space
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  of 5000 years or anything like that.
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  Quite the country. A peasant in 16th century
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  England was about as well off as a Egyptian peasant 8000 years
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  ago. Wow.
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  Maybe give us your potted version of human history then,
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  right from the very beginning up until the modern day.
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  Asking the easy questions mark. We began as a species 300,000
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  years ago and we primarily existed as nomadic egalitarian
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  hunter gatherers and often the myth here has been that we lived
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  in these small ragtag groups that were mainly just families
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  and who pretty disconnected from each other.
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  This is a bit of a layover from Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century
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  philosopher who characterized the state of nature as being one
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  where human lives were solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.
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  He was mainly working on the basis of ideology.
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  He had a pretty hard life. He lived through a civil war,
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  and he just made a list of assumptions of how people were
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  like in the absence of authority instructions.
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  We actually have evidence through archaeology of apology
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  to look at what were people actually living like 300,200
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  thousand or 100,000 years ago. And it seems like it goes
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  against essentially everything that Hobbs said.
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  So rather than being solitary, we're social primates.
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  We actually love being around people.
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  And we see this in hunter gatherer bands as well.
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  They're constantly moving across different bands.
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  The bands vary in size not just from like 40 people, but often
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  up to 200. And in every band is actually a
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  pretty big diversity. So in studies in modern day and
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  American Galatarian hunt to gatherers, roughly 10% or less
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  of people are actually closely genetically related as family.
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  And you even have people who speak different tongues, for
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  instance. And while they often have these
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  small groups, they have very big societies.
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  So one individual for their life will know thousands of people
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  potentially. And we see this in the
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  archaeological record as well. So 160,000 years ago, Obsidian
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  was being traded to roughly 200 kilometers in terms of distance.
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  And we see these big bands of shared culture and technology.
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  So roughly, I believe 120,000 years ago, from the East Coast
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  to West Coast of Africa, we see similar musical instruments,
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  similar lithic technologies, and even evidence of basically genes
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  mixing across that entire area would suggest that you had
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  essentially mobile foragers who are constantly intermixing
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  across bands, sharing technology, sharing culture,
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  even sharing musical instruments all the way from one coast to
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  the other. You'll see this 48,000 years ago
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  in what's called the Oragnasian period across Europe where
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  there's kind of a shared culture, including things like
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  figurines and cave art. In short, the world was
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  globalized very early on. This is not a story of
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  individual groups just kind of fighting against each other in a
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  a war of all against all, as Hobbs would say, or as Pinker
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  Heck characterizes as well. And this goes against this idea
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  that we were innately violent. So Aaron Pinker puts forward
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  this idea that we have roughly a 50% violence rate when we don't
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  have authority structures. That is, for every 100 people
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  who die, roughly 15 of those die due to lethal violence.
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  One person is smashing another people's person's head in, for
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  instance. That doesn't really hold up to
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  scrutiny when you look at the ecological evidence here.
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  It varies massively. We have a range all the way from
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  the Bakara people in Brazil who have a 0% lethal violence rate,
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  through the Ache in Paraguay who have roughly 55% kill rate.
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  The problem here is that, as with the Ache, almost all those
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  those deaths are attributable to either colonizers, farmers,
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  ranchers, all the influence things like alcohol.
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  Not exactly a good analog to the Paleolithic.
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  Instead, we can look at archaeological evidence, which
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  Pinker tries to do. The problem is he has a data set
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  which only has one actual site from the Stone Age, from the
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  Paleolithic, and three of his sites are duplicates.
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  When you actually look at the best studies here, there's been
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  two systematic ones done here, including one by two
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  archaeologists called Hassan Pastelli, and they basically
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  take 3000 skeletons across 400 sites.
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  They find that there was only three sites with any evidence of
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  violence. Four of those are just
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  individual skeletons of things like projectiles broken off,
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  fractured in a cranial trauma that could have been due to an
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  accident. We don't know if that's actual
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  evidence of violence. One of those is a site with a
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  triple burial, but none of them have any signs of violence.
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  So again, not exactly a smoking gun.
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  There's only one site which actually has clear signs of
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  violence, particularly on mass. That's called Jabal Sahaba in
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  Sudan, and that actually happened around about somewhere
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  between twen 10,012 thousand years ago when the earth was
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  extremely Ice Age and entering the Holocene, this new warm
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  period of climatic stability in Sudan.
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  That was a very environmentally tumultuous time.
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  So it's not exactly a good predictor of what happened
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  previously. Genetic evidence similarly
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  suggests that we aren't very violent.
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  So if you look at the archaeological record, it comes
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  out down to roughly maybe 1.3% violence rate throughout the
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  Paleolithic. Genetic evidence suggests
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  roughly 2%. That's well below what Pinker
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  suggests to 15%, what others suggested in terms of often 25%.
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  So we're not particularly violent, we're very good at
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  cooperating and we're incredibly pro social.
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  That's a very different image to what most people think about.
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  And a lot of a lot of this comes down to the fact that we will
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  organize in a very egalitarian way.
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  So across the Paleolithic record, you see very few
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  evidence, very little evidence of any kind of large scale
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  persisting inequality between people's.
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  Part of that is simply we didn't have a surplus, so one person
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  couldn't hold it. And part of that also seems to
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  be that we enforce it. It's his work based on the work
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  of a guy called Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist, who
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  found that across many pneumatic egalitarian groups that have
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  these different mechanisms counter dominant strategies to
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  prevent one person from taking power from others.
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  These range from ridicule through the ostracism and
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  eventually in Group executions. The emerging image here is one
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  of groups who are highly pro social but also very
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  egalitarian. And that was necessary to
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  survive because if you have one male trying to raise an entire
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  big group of human babies who require lots of attention, need
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  to be giving different skills, it's a pretty losing strategy.
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  And it's also a really bad way to develop culture.
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  You want kids learning from a whole bunch of different people.
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  That pretty much all changes once we start to enter the
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  Holocene takes a very long period of time.
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  This is not the agricultural revolution where you get access
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  to grain and suddenly everything changes.
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  There's a very long lag time, but nonetheless where you start
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  to see agriculture and certain types of agriculture appearing.
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  The world changes. In particular, once you get
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  access to certain types of grain.
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  You start to see people organizing in a very different
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  way. We're no longer nomadic
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  egalitarians. We start settling down.
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  The more importantly, we start to have social structures, which
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  are what are called dominance hierarchies.
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  Essentially, it's a ranking system where one person is based
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  is placed above others, and they enforce that placement both
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  across bloodlines, across time, and through the use of violence.
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  And this starts to look much more like the harems of gorillas
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  or the hierarchies of chimpanzees.
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  In the book, I call it evolutionary backsliding.
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  A lot of people like to call it civilization as this kind of a
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  big grandiose progress point in history.
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  It's actually in many ways us backsliding away from what made
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  us unique and away from what made us actually persist through
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  the ice edge. This is what I'm referring to,
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  of course, is the overrising of civilization.
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  The first states, I prefer to call it Goliath Civilizations
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  always had a lack of a good definition.
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  Here people have struggled to define it because I think
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  they've been uncomfortable actually identifying what
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  changes here. It's not particular
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  characteristics like writing or trade, etcetera.
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  Hunter gatherers had long distance trade of the space,
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  hundreds kilometers writing. You have big empires like the
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  Inca who don't have writing, for instance, and it's definitely
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  not advanced culture because that's pretty vague and it's
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  pretty biased against indigenous people.
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  What really changes across here, whether it's in the Yellow River
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  Valley, the Shah Dynasty, or the Near East with the first dynasty
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  to Egypt and work, What changes is you start to see kings,
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  bureaucrats, bureaucracies, military commanders.
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  You start to see the emergence of interconnected dominance
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  hierarchies. When you call these, you call
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  these Goliath, for is this the new coinage of yours?
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  I quite like the term because it's, you know, it, it sticks in
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  your head. And the idea, I guess, is that,
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  yeah, I mean, there's, of course there's the myth of David and
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  Goliath as well, which you should probably just quickly
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  remind people about. But Goliath was, you know, this,
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  this giant. So tell us the myth.
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  It's better, better for me than for me because I can't
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  completely remember it. Of course, it's a biblical tale
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  about essentially the Jews led by David, who would later become
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  king, facing off against a army of Palestinians.
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  And basically the Palestinians have one giant soldier called
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  Goliath who's essentially unbeatable, unstoppable until
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  they face David. David picks up a single stone
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  and slings it between his eyes, killing the giant and making
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  himself a later into king. I think Goliath ends up being a
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  pretty apartment metaphor here because what we're really
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  dealing with are big structures, large imposing structures built
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  upon violence, which are often surprisingly fragile.
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  And the reason I also like Goliath is it makes things seem
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  less abstract and ethereal. Ultimately, Goliaths are always
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  built upon people. It's interesting, though.
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  There's this Goliath, this sort of this like state formation.
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  I mean you, you, you almost. Say it is, it's, it's no
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  different from like the Godfather, is it?
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  I mean, every, you know, big criminal enterprise Oregon.
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  I mean, they're all basically dominance hierarchies, aren't
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  they? That humans seem to somehow form
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  in in pretty much every circumstance and and in every
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  culture? Yeah, what's striking is when
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  you look at the definition of warlord organized crime in
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  statehood, they all look pretty similar.
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  They all involve one group creating a monopoly upon
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  extracting resources, imposing rules in a given territory over
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  a certain population. The difference is in the case of
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  warlords and organized crime, they're not usually considered
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  legitimate until they are and then a big mistake.
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  And we see this even modern world.
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  There's a great example from a study where they look at the
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  Democratic Republic of Congo when there's spikes in both the
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  price of gold and coltan. And essentially what happens is
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  around gold mines and coltan mines, you get these militias
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  popping up who start basically charging the miners access, but
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  eventually even start setting up bureaucracies.
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  They basically start to become mini states in order to
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  basically extract rent from the miners who who are going in and
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  out and additionally to basically protect the area
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  around it as well. And they even start making deals
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  with with companies outside of their borders too.
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  But it's basically state formation in real time.
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  And the archaeological evidence suggests that this is pretty
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  much true that history is largely a story of organized
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  crime. So for instance, we have 5
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  undisputed original states where you basically have a state
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  popping up with no emulator, no one, it's kind of copying.
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  And those are in the Near East, the Yellow Valley in China,
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  Mesoamerica with Monterban and the Andes with Tiwanaku and
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  potential the Wahri. The interesting thing is each of
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  those have have agriculture, but they have a very particular type
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  of agriculture. So for instance, Egypt has
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  agriculture roughly the same time as Papua New Guinea does,
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  approximately 5000 BC. Papua New Guinea never has
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  Pharaohs and never starts making any kind of large scale
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  structures such as pyramids. And even when it has sweet
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  potato imported in the 17th century, they have these big
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  booms in population and kind of trading goods.
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  They still don't make a state. The key difference is that Papua
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  New Guinea has things like yam, Taro and bananas.
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  They're things which don't have a clear harvest period.
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  You can leave them in the ground for a long period of time and
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  more importantly, they can't be stored.
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  So tubers usually last roughly 6 months.
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  They're not exactly good for keeping long term.
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  By comparison, Egypt has wheat. Wheat, you know exactly when it
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  has to be harvested. It's very easy to see, and
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  additionally you can store it for decades.
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  It's what I call a lootable resource.
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  And this is what every single that cradle of civilization or
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  every single Goliath cradle has is lootable resources, resources
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  that can be easily seen stolen and stored.
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  And fascinatingly, even hunter gatherers become more
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  hierarchical. So there's groups, for instance,
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  on the Pacific West Coast of North America, both in Canada
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  and the US, who when they were first contacted by Europeans,
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  had slavery, that had hierarchies, that had war.
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  And the interesting thing was they all tended to have certain
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  resources. They had salmon, which they
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  would smoke and store, so that became a lootable resource.
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  But Goliath is built upon lootable resources, certain
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  weapons like bronze weapons, which can be easily monopolized
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  by a small group and usually caged land.
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  Mesopotamia, for instance, is Greek for the land between two
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  rivers. Egypt, of course, is stuck
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  between the Red Red Sea and the Nile.
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  Basically, people kind of escape, so they have to accept
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  servitude. So, Luke, is that why are there
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  no lootable resources in North America north of Mexico then?
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  Because you you don't seem to get state formation there, do
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  you? Well, interestingly you do.
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  It's just they fall apart. There's a great example here of
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  Cahokia. Which I've never heard of.
• 19:58
  I mean what? What is this?
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  Yeah, Cahokia is a site. It's basically 200 or so mounds
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  which were found roughly 500 kilometers southwest from modern
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  day Chicago on the outskirts of Saint Louis.
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  And Tahokia appears to have been America's very first city to
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  approximately 1050 CE. It grows into a city of
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  approximately 10 to 15,000 people.
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  That's a city by all means. The more, more than that, they
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  have huge structures. So some of these mounds which
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  are basically these kind of flat topped pyramids made from earth.
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  So literally people would carry mud and bake into these big
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  pyramids. Those can get pretty big.
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  So the largest one is actually Monks mound is told in the White
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  House. And inside many of those mounds
• 20:44
  you start to see evidence of human sacrifice.
• 20:47
  So one mound, mound 72 has over 200 victims of human sacrifice.
• 20:52
  1 burial has 53 women. 52 of those seem to be all of fertile
• 20:58
  childbearing age. They could have been virgins as
• 21:00
  far as we know. And at the very top of the
• 21:03
  pyramid are two men who were covered in a sheet of 2020
• 21:08
  thousand beats, I believe, actually.
• 21:10
  So it's very clear. You get the emergence for
• 21:12
  hierarchy. What we believed was a kind of
• 21:15
  elite class of priests who ruled over Cahokia and practiced human
• 21:18
  sacrifice. And this is common across state
• 21:21
  formation. The Shang dynasty, one of the
• 21:23
  earliest dynasties in China, sacrificed 13,000 people of the
• 21:26
  space of two centuries. It's a very clear way of
• 21:30
  asserting your authority that it's not OK to kill.
• 21:33
  Except when I do it because I'm a leader.
• 21:35
  So you don't see, you don't see human sacrifice in, in like non
• 21:39
  state society. You don't see that in, you know,
• 21:41
  Stone Age egalitarian bans or, or, or things like that.
• 21:46
  Not amongst in America egalitarians.
• 21:48
  It definitely does still happen amongst foragers, but there's a
• 21:50
  clear relationship here with state Groups which are more
• 21:53
  hierarchical are more likely to practice human sacrifice, and
• 21:56
  interestingly they're less likely to become non
• 21:58
  hierarchical. So human sacrifice seems to play
• 22:01
  some role in justifying a hierarchy.
• 22:04
  There's definitely a close relationship here.
• 22:07
  And Koku falls apart after roughly 100 or so years.
• 22:11
  So it has a very big boom and also a very big bust as well.
• 22:14
  And this is true of actually several sites around North
• 22:18
  America. So people don't realize that at
• 22:20
  one stage America was littered with these little kind of mini
• 22:23
  cities of sorts. We have the Pallone communities
• 22:26
  in Sat in the US Southwest who were the very first farmers of
• 22:29
  the US near to them in modern day Arizona, Abu Hogam who built
• 22:34
  ball courts and flat top pyramids.
• 22:36
  So they're very similar to the Maya had.
• 22:38
  And we have Moundville and the Appalachians, which is a a very
• 22:41
  big site similar to Cahokia. What appears to have happened is
• 22:45
  the three sisters, as we call them.
• 22:47
  So corn, beans, and squash were imported from Mesoamerica, so
• 22:51
  from the Zapotec and from the Maya, who had similar flat top
• 22:54
  pyramids imported up through the Southwest and up from
• 22:58
  Mississippi, spread through the US and eventually became the
• 23:01
  basis for these states. So interestingly, Cahokia
• 23:04
  emerges in 1000 or 1050 CE, which is approximately a century
• 23:09
  after corn arrives into the area.
• 23:11
  How do states then transform into empires?
• 23:14
  Essentially, they grow bigger and they swallow the communities
• 23:17
  around them. I mean I think the term empire
• 23:20
  is a pretty fuzzy one and scholars have always struggled
• 23:23
  to justify and defy. Modern empire is it's usually
• 23:26
  something the lines of one state conquering another state.
• 23:31
  But conquest is something that even these kind of smaller
• 23:35
  groups do you know Cahokia did take over communities around it.
• 23:38
  For instance, we have examples like the Colusa who and modern,
• 23:41
  modern day Florida. They were basically a group of
• 23:44
  hunter gatherers who relied upon fish, but actually built a
• 23:46
  Kingdom where they rolled over roughly 200 kind of communities
• 23:50
  around them and got tribute in the form of agriculture.
• 23:54
  Those were in some ways empires, right?
• 23:55
  They didn't take over other states, but they had a very
• 23:57
  similar approach of we'll conquer the groups around us and
• 24:00
  we'll extract resources from them.
• 24:02
  So I think what we're dealing here with is a very similar
• 24:06
  model of governance, and the only difference is empires get
• 24:09
  really big. And they get really big,
• 24:11
  presumably by continuing this process of extracting lootable
• 24:14
  resources from surrounding communities, which so then I
• 24:16
  guess invest in bigger militaries.
• 24:18
  And so the process kind of becomes self reinforcing.
• 24:21
  Precisely. I mean, I've often defined Rome
• 24:23
  as a pyramid scheme for exactly that reason.
• 24:25
  They basically conquer their neighbors and they say, hey, if
• 24:28
  you guys join us and help us out, we can conquer your
• 24:30
  neighbors and basically just keep on going like that for a
• 24:33
  long period of time. And of course the areas they
• 24:35
  conquer, they demand either a military levy or tribute used in
• 24:39
  the form of things like grain, but also soldiers.
• 24:42
  So it becomes a self perpetuating exercise.
• 24:44
  And I guess for the the issue of, you know, a bad idea of
• 24:47
  progress, we need to try and understand really what life was
• 24:51
  like for ordinary people in in these in these States and in
• 24:54
  these empires, right? Because obviously the kings and
• 24:57
  the Pharaohs and the czars and the Caesars and whoever were all
• 25:01
  doing fine and were, you know, conspicuously consuming vast
• 25:04
  quantities of wealth and huge feasts and, you know, plastering
• 25:07
  everything with gold and so on. But what about ordinary people?
• 25:10
  I mean, it didn't, you know, because we look back on, you
• 25:13
  know, ancient Rome as a period of civilization, which must have
• 25:16
  been good for, for people, right?
• 25:17
  They had concrete, they had glass, they had plumbing and
• 25:20
  they had hot baths and, and all of that.
• 25:21
  But you don't see that really, do you?
• 25:23
  For for the actual ordinary peasantry who were supporting
• 25:26
  these huge criminal enterprises. No.
• 25:28
  One of the problems here is that we have a 1% view of history, so
• 25:32
  it's most easily seen in the archaeological record are big
• 25:34
  monuments, for instance, And the records we have tend to be
• 25:38
  written by the rich, the wealthy, the powerful, the kings
• 25:41
  of the time. That's not a good indication or
• 25:44
  a good viewpoint of what is actually happening for most
• 25:47
  people. Even at the height of Rome,
• 25:49
  roughly 9% of people were probably agrarian farmers.
• 25:53
  When you actually look at what we can call progress, you can
• 25:56
  kind of draw some key indicators which can trace for time.
• 25:59
  So one of these is, as mentioned, human height.
• 26:01
  And it's pretty telling that in these groups, Pharaohs are
• 26:06
  substantially taller by a couple of centimeters, a couple of
• 26:08
  inches even, than the rest of the population.
• 26:11
  Similarly, in Mycene and Greece, the kings are taller than the
• 26:16
  rest of the peasants. This seems to hold true for
• 26:18
  punish every state based society.
• 26:20
  Interestingly, amongst hunter gatherers it's more or less
• 26:23
  equal. And interestingly, empires,
• 26:26
  despite being called Golden ages, aren't often good for
• 26:29
  people's heights. So before Rome, people were
• 26:32
  increasing in height once the empire starts to take hold.
• 26:35
  And when I say empire, here actually mean the Republic,
• 26:37
  because the Republic, let's face it, was an empire.
• 26:40
  It conquered millions of kilometers of territory.
• 26:42
  If that's not an empire, I'm not sure what it is.
• 26:45
  But Long story short, the growth in people's heights actually
• 26:49
  slows down dramatically. And interestingly, people
• 26:52
  outside the empire keep on growing apace, which leads to
• 26:55
  people outside the empire being taller and bigger.
• 26:58
  To this entire trope of the muscle bound big Germanic
• 27:02
  barbarian. There's some truth to it,
• 27:04
  because to the average Roman, they probably did look actually
• 27:07
  quite big. The Roman Republic falls to
• 27:09
  autocracy, presumably because it just becomes, you know, the
• 27:12
  dominance hierarchy just becomes too too huge and there's too,
• 27:15
  too many lootable resources at at stake, Right?
• 27:17
  I mean, it's basically A1A warlord.
• 27:19
  I mean, Julius Caesar, you know, as a warlord who, who controls
• 27:24
  the, you know, so many legions eventually crosses the Rubicon
• 27:27
  and, and seizes Rome. So that's was that an avoidable
• 27:31
  process or was it literally inevitable once you get a a a
• 27:34
  state which becomes big enough? One of the things I point to in
• 27:37
  the book is that lootable resources are important because
• 27:41
  they're a form of power which is fungible.
• 27:43
  You know, once you have enough wealth, you can start to
• 27:46
  transform that into other forms of power.
• 27:48
  You can do things like buying political office or what we see
• 27:51
  today, lobbying for instance. You can start to build up your
• 27:54
  own private militias and militaries, which is certainly
• 27:56
  something we see probably it's doing towards the end of the
• 27:58
  Roman Republic and Roman Empire. And you can even start to throw
• 28:03
  parades, celebrations, influence priests, etcetera to basically
• 28:07
  build your ideological power as well.
• 28:09
  So what tends to happen over time is inequality gets worse.
• 28:13
  That's both due to capital increasing and returns quicker
• 28:17
  than the wages do, something Thomas Piketty spoken about in
• 28:19
  the Capital 21st century. But additionally, because of
• 28:22
  this dynamic of once you have power, it's easier to accumulate
• 28:26
  more power with increasing wealth inequality, you also tend
• 28:31
  to get increasing concentrations of power as well, which is
• 28:34
  essentially what happens in Rome.
• 28:35
  You don't just have increasing wealth inequality, a gap between
• 28:38
  the rich and the poor. You also start to have
• 28:40
  increasing concentration of power in one individual, a
• 28:44
  monarch. Basically.
• 28:46
  This tends to happen. I wouldn't say it's inevitable.
• 28:49
  There's definitely reforms that have happened at multiple
• 28:51
  periods across different polities, but it's something
• 28:53
  which is very difficult to combat and very difficult to
• 28:56
  reverse. Let's talk about collapse as a
• 29:00
  phenomenon throughout history, whether that's good, bad, or, or
• 29:04
  actually some some ordinary people good as you, as you
• 29:06
  suggest. And then then kind of Fast
• 29:08
  forward to the to the modern world and do the Enlightenment
• 29:10
  and, and all of that. So tell us.
• 29:12
  Yeah, I mean, all of these, all of these empires do collapse at
• 29:15
  some point. And often that's followed by a
• 29:17
  period that we then refer to as a dark age, but you kind of
• 29:22
  invert that. So tell us a bit about your your
• 29:23
  take on this. One of the reasons we call in
• 29:25
  Dark ages is simply because we often have a lack of written
• 29:28
  records. To the modern eye, they do go
• 29:31
  dark. That doesn't mean things were
• 29:33
  necessarily worse. So I hate to go back to Rome,
• 29:37
  but I will just momentarily after the collapse of Rome,
• 29:39
  people get taller. They have less holes in their
• 29:42
  teeth, dental caries, and basically less traumatized
• 29:45
  bones, bone lesions, as I referred to that in basically in
• 29:50
  FERS in general, they were getting healthier.
• 29:52
  And the go to thing for most people is that's because so many
• 29:56
  people died that there's a survivor effect here.
• 29:58
  Like with the black deaf, there's fewer people, but that
• 30:01
  means their labor is more valuable and they tend to get
• 30:04
  more real wages and they tend to get healthy because there's more
• 30:07
  resources, there's more farmland, etcetera.
• 30:10
  It's hard to see that as necessarily being true.
• 30:12
  We don't have really good demographic evidence of this,
• 30:15
  but also you see things improving even in cases where
• 30:19
  you don't have large scale displacement or mortality.
• 30:22
  So modern day Somalia, that's a case study which almost everyone
• 30:25
  flags as being a modern state failure, a modern case of
• 30:28
  collapse. So the 1991, the Bahrain regime
• 30:32
  falls apart roughly A decade later.
• 30:36
  Maternal mortality is down by 30%, infant mortality is down by
• 30:40
  roughly 24%, and extreme poverty is down by 20%.
• 30:44
  Things, in short, get better. And funnily enough, it's not
• 30:47
  just because all of Africa is getting better.
• 30:50
  Even Somalia in comparison to its neighbors, progress is much
• 30:54
  more rapidly. Life was just simply better
• 30:57
  under local regimes and even local warlords than it was under
• 31:00
  a predatory regime like Bahrain. And the key thing here is that
• 31:04
  most regimes across history had been more similar to Somalia
• 31:09
  than Denmark. I think we tend to take a
• 31:11
  picture of Australia, the UK, Denmark, pretty good welfare
• 31:16
  states that provide lots of public goods and which project
• 31:19
  that into the past, when in reality they were usually much
• 31:22
  more predatory oligarchic cartels.
• 31:25
  Yeah, and we tend to assume that the cities, because these, it
• 31:29
  looks like they empty out, right.
• 31:30
  Rome goes from a city of a million to, I don't know,
• 31:32
  30,000. It's basically empty.
• 31:33
  Everything gets smashed, looted. You know, it looks like
• 31:36
  everyone's been killed, but. You're, you know, you suggest
• 31:39
  that actually people maybe just left because there's a better
• 31:42
  life elsewhere. Rome decreased in population for
• 31:45
  several reasons. And one of the most overlooked
• 31:47
  is that people are no longer getting free grain.
• 31:50
  That's what's called the Kira Nanai.
• 31:52
  Basically, once Rome grows large enough, in particular once it
• 31:54
  takes over Egypt, it can afford to subsidize grain.
• 31:58
  To the extent that everyone in the city of Rome gets free
• 32:00
  grain, that's a huge reason to stay there.
• 32:03
  And once they lose the Egyptian territories, the Jamaica
• 32:06
  mercenaries and barbarian Barbarians, they sever the cure
• 32:10
  in on eye. So suddenly you're no longer
• 32:12
  getting free grain to the city. That seems to be one of the big
• 32:14
  things that pushes people out the city.
• 32:16
  If suddenly you have a city which is getting sacked multiple
• 32:19
  times a century, which is having plagues and additionally you're
• 32:23
  no longer getting free grain, why wouldn't you move?
• 32:27
  And when we look at modern day civil wars, usually the rate of
• 32:31
  displacement to how many people move in comparison to how many
• 32:34
  get killed in conflict, it's roughly 20 to 30 times more
• 32:38
  people move. You see this both in Syria and
• 32:41
  Iraq, for instance. I see no good reason as to why
• 32:44
  that was different in the past. The key problem here is that
• 32:46
  when people move, in particular when they move back to rural
• 32:48
  areas, they become more archaeologically invisible.
• 32:51
  It's more difficult to spot them in the archaeological record.
• 32:54
  But in most of these cases, there would have been some where
• 32:56
  you definitely have mass killings.
• 32:57
  But I think most of the estimated population loss during
• 33:02
  collapse is actually people moving rather than people dying.
• 33:05
  That could still be traumatic, but it's definitely not the
• 33:08
  scene of kind of mask death. OK, so let's move to the modern
• 33:12
  era. When do things start getting
• 33:14
  better? When does progress actually
• 33:15
  begin? So Steven Pinker has it in
• 33:17
  enlightenment now and probably in Better Angels of our Nature,
• 33:22
  starting with, I guess with the Industrial revolution, with with
• 33:25
  enlightenment thinking of philosophers and more sort of
• 33:28
  civilized values, if you like. Actually, you don't.
• 33:31
  You don't think that's what's happening, right?
• 33:33
  So I've focused on height the most right now, but it's also
• 33:36
  worthwhile briefly mentioning wages.
• 33:39
  So we have estimates of real wages across history, and this
• 33:42
  is usually boiled down to how much grain someone receives over
• 33:46
  the space of a year. That's a good way of comparing
• 33:49
  across cultures. And there's definitely
• 33:51
  variation. You are far better off being in
• 33:53
  ancient Athens, for instance, than you were in ancient Egypt.
• 33:56
  But there's actually not very big changes ever all.
• 34:00
  And this is the space of thousands of years.
• 34:02
  And you have the invention of things like the iron horse drawn
• 34:06
  plow. You have mirrors, windmills,
• 34:08
  water mills. And yet in on average most
• 34:10
  people don't end up better off. And again, human height, at
• 34:14
  least for males, is roughly 170cm or so across most of human
• 34:17
  history. So there's not a big change in
• 34:20
  health, there's not a big change in real wages.
• 34:23
  As mentioned, once we get to industrial revolution things
• 34:25
  initially don't look much better.
• 34:28
  And the UK both life expectancy and human heart drops.
• 34:32
  And you have some pretty horrible tales about children
• 34:36
  being essentially worked to death in minds.
• 34:38
  Horrible working additions with little girls basically being
• 34:41
  swept off the machinery and having every bone in their body
• 34:43
  crushed. It wasn't a particularly nice
• 34:45
  place to live. When you do seem to get this
• 34:49
  improvement, particularly in human health, which is usually
• 34:51
  associated with a couple of key things, I think we tend to make
• 34:54
  too much of the steam engine non enough of sanitation.
• 34:57
  Sanitation was probably the key driver of improving life
• 34:59
  expectancy, for instance. All of these things were enabled
• 35:03
  by technology, yes, but they happen after you get big shared
• 35:07
  struggles, usually through things like anarchist movements,
• 35:10
  civil rights movements, suffragettes, etcetera.
• 35:13
  The expansion of the votes and basically workers movements are
• 35:16
  the key drivers of progress rather than technology.
• 35:19
  Stephen Pinker doesn't talk about unions much or, you know,
• 35:22
  people fighting for the democratic rights as, as, as a
• 35:26
  sort of historical process that actually changes things
• 35:30
  significantly. I mean, this is about analysis
• 35:32
  of power really, right? This is about power relations
• 35:34
  within societies. Precisely.
• 35:35
  Even collapse itself I define as a power dynamic.
• 35:38
  It's about different power structures falling apart, and
• 35:41
  that has costs and benefits, winnings and loses.
• 35:44
  It's not necessarily apocalyptic.
• 35:45
  It can be bad, there can be definitely bad effects, and I
• 35:48
  think it'll be worse going to the future.
• 35:49
  But it is ultimately a change in power and technology can enable
• 35:56
  us to have more things, more calories, more energy.
• 36:00
  But if it's not widely shared and distributed through power
• 36:03
  networks, then people aren't going to be better off.
• 36:06
  Right. I mean that's challenging to us
• 36:08
  that we plan it, we're kind of pro technology, right?
• 36:10
  We want, you know, nuclear to solve climate change without
• 36:14
  basically having to upend everything and have a massive
• 36:17
  great global revolution and change how everyone lives and
• 36:19
  all this sort of stuff. We kind of posit that as a
• 36:21
  pragmatic way forward, but. I guess you're a bit skeptical
• 36:24
  of that. If you don't deal with power
• 36:25
  dynamics in in societies, then can things really change for the
• 36:29
  better? I think in any kind of lasting
• 36:31
  way, probably not. And importantly, even if
• 36:34
  material lives do get better, you're probably going to have
• 36:36
  other areas of life which are valuable and getting worse.
• 36:40
  So one thing we haven't spoken about actually is happiness.
• 36:43
  It was covered real wages, material prosperity.
• 36:45
  We've covered health in terms of heights, but are people actually
• 36:49
  happier? One of the most surprising
• 36:52
  studies I came across is there's been a few studies which try to
• 36:55
  compare numacalitarian hunter gatherers that exist today.
• 36:58
  So people like the Koi Sun and the Hatsa and compare them in
• 37:02
  terms of happiness against industrialized countries,
• 37:06
  including the US and Spain. Pretty staggeringly, hunter
• 37:12
  gatherers happier both in terms of, I believe life satisfaction
• 37:16
  reports basically talking about how happy they are, but also in
• 37:19
  terms of what's called life experiential, which is the more
• 37:21
  accurate one where you basically stop people of different points
• 37:23
  in the day and ask them how happy are you?
• 37:26
  And when you look at the ethnographic data here as well,
• 37:29
  there's just loads of examples of hunter gatherers.
• 37:31
  There's just spontaneously bursting into song and dancing
• 37:35
  all the time, etcetera, etcetera.
• 37:38
  And when we actually look at what we know tends to make
• 37:40
  people happy. So things like having lots of
• 37:42
  leisure time, having lots of exercise, having very close
• 37:45
  social connections is a huge one.
• 37:48
  Those are all things that hunt to gatherers have an abundance.
• 37:51
  I know how many material goods granted, and there's still
• 37:52
  definitely problems. Like for instance, infant
• 37:55
  mortality throughout the paralytic would have still been
• 37:57
  roughly 1 and 2. So only one or two children make
• 38:00
  it through the adulthood. That's horrible, of course, but
• 38:03
  those who do, they probably are happier than the average person
• 38:07
  in the world today, I'd say. I mean, if I had the choice
• 38:09
  between being randomly reborn on Earth or being reborn on Earth
• 38:15
  in the paralytic, I'd probably choose the paralytic.
• 38:18
  You know, I lucked out massively getting born into Australia with
• 38:21
  certain attributes of valued in society.
• 38:24
  But if I was reborn, statistically I'm much more
• 38:26
  likely to end up as a sweatshop worker in China or a peasant
• 38:30
  farm in India. And given the choice between
• 38:32
  that and an American Gala Terran Hunter Gabriel, I got the
• 38:35
  forager. Wow.
• 38:37
  I mean, what about in in industrial economies without
• 38:41
  sweatshops? I mean, you've still got high
• 38:43
  rates of suicide mental health issues seems to be, you know, I
• 38:48
  don't have numbers here, but it feels like there's an epidemic
• 38:52
  of mental health issues, particularly in younger people.
• 38:55
  I mean, can you say anything about that or is it, is it just
• 38:57
  a different issue? It's not something I'm too
• 39:00
  learned about. There's definitely other pet
• 39:01
  experts who can speak. But with this I do know that the
• 39:04
  US for instance, ranks incredibly high in both suicide
• 39:07
  rates and depression, despite the fact that it has incredibly
• 39:09
  high level GP in general. There's definitely an epidemic
• 39:13
  of loneliness across most OCD countries, including very rich
• 39:17
  ones like Japan and like the USI think there's a real question
• 39:21
  here of are people necessarily getting substantially happier
• 39:27
  past a certain level of growth? It's pretty good evidence if you
• 39:31
  look at, say, for instance, Portugal, which I think has
• 39:33
  what, 65% less GDP per capita than the US but essentially
• 39:38
  ranks better than the US almost every quality of life indicator.
• 39:40
  And personally, I'd much better to live in Portugal than the US.
• 39:45
  Again, lots of problems, but socially you're probably much
• 39:47
  better off. So I think this is a tricky 1.
• 39:52
  I'm not really sure if past a certain level of really making
• 39:55
  ourselves happier, improving our internal experience by getting
• 39:58
  much, much wealthier. So even if you put aside real
• 40:02
  wages and human height, I think the human arc here is actually
• 40:06
  one of most people today smaller and probably sadder than people
• 40:12
  during the paralithic. Wow.
• 40:14
  So, so you're a growth skeptic in terms of economic growth
• 40:18
  today and GDP, as you know, as a measure of progress.
• 40:22
  I believe the GDP up to a certain point can provide human
• 40:24
  progress. I'm definitely a fan of Ghana
• 40:26
  growing, for instance. I believe after a certain point
• 40:29
  you're better off from focusing what you're growing rather than
• 40:32
  focusing upon GDP in general. I would be a big fan of most
• 40:35
  places having less production of nuclear weapons, SUV's, private
• 40:40
  jet planes, advertisement, etcetera.
• 40:42
  I'd be a very big fan of making more affordable housing, better
• 40:45
  vaccines, renewable energy, et cetera.
• 40:49
  So I think we need to stop just focusing upon progress rather
• 40:52
  than GDP as a general metric. Progress, which this kind of
• 40:55
  makes sense. And most every other area of
• 40:57
  life, you try to measure and focus on the thing that you want
• 41:00
  to improve rather than taking a different measure and focusing
• 41:04
  upon that. So this is just simply being, I
• 41:07
  think much more targeted. And apart from that, I think we
• 41:10
  just to be much more honest to where our economy is as well.
• 41:12
  You know, GDP does not measure happiness, for instance, and it
• 41:15
  doesn't take into account things like environmental destruction
• 41:18
  or cultural destruction. Those are things which should be
• 41:21
  factored into the price. And suddenly I think once again,
• 41:25
  progress looks very different, particularly the last couple of
• 41:27
  decades. Yeah.
• 41:28
  And we, we seem to have become, again, I don't have the figures,
• 41:31
  but it has the 1% really got that much richer I think in the
• 41:35
  episode with Hannah Richie. And we're having our back soon
• 41:38
  so we can address this again. But that's kind of the one
• 41:40
  metric that's got quite a lot worse over the last couple of
• 41:43
  decades, right? We have got a lot less equal
• 41:45
  both globally and within certain countries.
• 41:47
  Yeah, it depends when you measure it.
• 41:48
  I'd much prefer the what's called the Palmer ratio, which
• 41:51
  is basically the ratio of the top 10% relative to the bottom
• 41:54
  50%. Then what's called the Gini
• 41:57
  coefficient. The problem with the Gini
• 41:58
  coefficient is it's basically a relative measurement, which
• 42:02
  means if I earn $300,000 and someone else earns $1.00, if
• 42:08
  this year I double my income to 600,000 and they triple theirs
• 42:12
  to $3.00, the genie actually improves because on a relative
• 42:16
  basis there's actually less the gap.
• 42:19
  How On an absolute basis, I have way more money and way more
• 42:22
  power than they do, but the absolute level's actually
• 42:25
  getting worse. So I much prefer the Palmer
• 42:27
  ratio. And when you actually think
• 42:29
  about some of the other pernicious impacts of the rich,
• 42:31
  so for instance influencing democracies and part in
• 42:33
  politics, it tends to be that top one to 10%.
• 42:36
  Basically, if you're looking at that, then in the 1980's, the
• 42:41
  share in terms of wealth from the top 10% was roughly I
• 42:45
  believe 25% globally and it's grown to roughly 40% today.
• 42:53
  And obviously, as we all know, it's 81 billionaires own more
• 42:58
  wealth than the bottom 50% of humanity.
• 43:00
  It's incredible, isn't it? I mean, even if some of the
• 43:02
  billionaires generously give away that some of their wealth,
• 43:05
  that's not going to benefit the the bottom 50% as much as them
• 43:10
  having had higher wages and a a fairer share of that sort of
• 43:14
  global pie to start with, right? I mean, I wonder whether the
• 43:18
  rise of populism and anti democratic sort of politics in
• 43:21
  in the modern world is somehow is a result of of, of just how
• 43:25
  little improvement there's been in in the lives of so many
• 43:28
  ordinary people. I believe so.
• 43:30
  I mean, there's a a good body of work from, you may have heard
• 43:33
  from Peter Turchin, who's acute the curator of what's called the
• 43:36
  Seche database, the world's largest historical repository of
• 43:39
  information. And he's been a big pioneer,
• 43:41
  what's called structural demographic theory, which is
• 43:44
  essentially this idea that over time inequality tends to
• 43:46
  increase, but you get a wealth pump, basically transferring
• 43:50
  wealth and power from the lower classes up to the upper classes.
• 43:53
  The upper classes tend to grow increasingly in terms of size.
• 43:56
  And that leads to two key problems. 1 is popular
• 43:59
  miseration. So basically people get poorer,
• 44:02
  they tend to experience a cost of living crisis because things
• 44:04
  like land, etc, become too expensive for them, while
• 44:07
  there's too many rich people for a small number of high status
• 44:10
  positions. And what that means is you have
• 44:13
  a combustible mixture of a lot of people who are very upset and
• 44:16
  pissed off and a lot of people who are trying to exploit that,
• 44:20
  particularly through the use of things like Coos, rebellions,
• 44:22
  etcetera. Yeah, if you look at the USI
• 44:25
  mean it's essentially a full scale oligarchy.
• 44:26
  Now the country is run by billionaires, you know, both in
• 44:30
  terms of the the politics, the media, often the same people.
• 44:34
  Trump seems to have got rid of any notion of, of separation of
• 44:39
  of, of power and economic wealth.
• 44:41
  You know, so and, and everyone seems seems good with that.
• 44:44
  And there's this grassroots political movement in the
• 44:47
  Shekhar MAGA or whatever, which actually seems to celebrate the
• 44:50
  role of of these powerful billionaires and fight back, you
• 44:54
  know, and, and push back against any kind of egalitarian thing as
• 44:56
  being left wing and woke. Yeah, and there's two points to
• 44:59
  make here. 1 is that this is by no means unique.
• 45:02
  So one study of 28 societies across human history found that
• 45:06
  on average, there was 75%, so roughly 3/4 the way to the next
• 45:12
  level of theoretical inequality. And the maximum level, of
• 45:15
  course, is where you have one individual taking all the excess
• 45:18
  wealth where everyone else has left on sheer subsistence, just
• 45:21
  enough to survive and reproduce. That's pretty unequal.
• 45:25
  And I hate to say it again #5 Rome was roughly 3/4 the way
• 45:29
  towards that maximum level during the Howard's fall.
• 45:32
  What we're seeing, I believe, is just more or less a reversion to
• 45:36
  the mean. You know, we had a pretty unique
• 45:38
  nice period during the 1940s and 50s where you had, after the
• 45:43
  world wars, the expansion of the votes, increasing welfare
• 45:47
  provisions and democracies rising across the world.
• 45:50
  You had progress in terms of material standards, etcetera.
• 45:53
  But 1970s, eighties, wealth inequality starts to rise and
• 45:58
  then with a bit of a lag, suddenly you start to get
• 46:00
  democratic backsliding. Today, 5.7 billion people across
• 46:03
  the world live in autocracies. And as you're mentioning, there
• 46:06
  seems to be this increasing conflation of power.
• 46:09
  You know, Elon Musk is not just simply the world's richest
• 46:11
  person. He also owns X and has an
• 46:13
  increasing amount of influence over the government.
• 46:16
  Jeff Bezos not just incredibly rich, she also owns Twitch,
• 46:19
  Audible in the Washington Post. He's transferring economic power
• 46:23
  into information power. That's something which once
• 46:26
  again happens again and again across history.
• 46:29
  We're reverting to Maine here. And I think it's obviously not a
• 46:33
  good thing. But it also brings up another
• 46:35
  question of has there been much progress in terms of political
• 46:38
  ideals? You know, we tend to think of
• 46:40
  the modern world as, particularly in the West, being
• 46:42
  important because we're bastions of freedom and democracy.
• 46:47
  I not really sure how much we really value that.
• 46:51
  When you look at how much the UK or the US spends on innovating
• 46:54
  in democracy, improving representation of people, doing
• 46:58
  more experiments of things like diluted democracy, my guess
• 47:01
  would be I'm very confident this would be at least 10 times less
• 47:04
  than what we spend on facial recognition technology.
• 47:07
  It'll be at least 100 times less than what we spend in the
• 47:09
  military. That's what we call an economics
• 47:11
  revealed preferences. Follow the money and it tells
• 47:15
  you what the actual interests above the state and the powerful
• 47:17
  is. And it's not democracy.
• 47:19
  I mean, we could be using the revolution in AI and, you know,
• 47:24
  and all of the amazing connectivity of the Internet to
• 47:27
  actually improve the democratic nature of our societies.
• 47:30
  People could be involved in voting more or in making
• 47:32
  decisions about important things, and in a in a much more
• 47:36
  ongoing way than just from voting for a new oligarch set of
• 47:39
  oligarchs every four or five years.
• 47:41
  Precisely. And that's one of the thing that
• 47:42
  gives me the most hope that right now the world's most
• 47:45
  talented and smart people are getting paid to keep teenagers
• 47:49
  glued to their screens and to make killer robots for different
• 47:51
  militaries across the world. Again, is that progress?
• 47:55
  I'm not so sure. And we can look, think about
• 47:58
  this across history as well. I think we tend to fall prey to
• 48:00
  this myth of democracy, like progress in general is a fairly
• 48:05
  unique Western modern innovation, which just simply
• 48:09
  isn't true. That's confusing one very
• 48:12
  particular type of representative democracy with
• 48:14
  the idea of democracy rich, large.
• 48:17
  And democracy, of course, comes from demos and Kratos of people
• 48:20
  and power and Greek. And it is essentially about how
• 48:24
  inclusive is your form of governance, how much does it
• 48:28
  encourage free exchange of information, deliberation, How
• 48:31
  much power do people have in terms of actually making rules
• 48:34
  that affect them? And if you look towards nomadic
• 48:37
  egalitarian hunter gatherers, most of the decision making
• 48:40
  tends to be incredibly democratic.
• 48:42
  They tend to often make decisions by consensus within
• 48:44
  their group. For instance, they don't usually
• 48:47
  have an individual leader. Often when they do have a
• 48:49
  leader, it's more like a facilitator than having what
• 48:51
  someone who actually imposes rules upon everyone else.
• 48:54
  They're incredibly democratic. And actually, interestingly,
• 48:58
  there's been a big question of why do you see so much mixing
• 49:01
  across across groups? So how do you get that genetic
• 49:03
  of diversity which allows us to survive through the Ice Age?
• 49:06
  Because if we were sticking in small groups, we'd die out
• 49:09
  pretty quickly. And one of the best explanations
• 49:12
  is that there's equal decision making between men and women in
• 49:16
  terms of when they move to basically stay with a different
• 49:19
  family. And as soon as you have better
• 49:21
  models, suddenly you get this kind of very similar into
• 49:24
  genetic intermixing. If you have a situation where
• 49:27
  the men always stays with his family or the woman always stays
• 49:29
  with their family, suddenly start to get far less genetic
• 49:32
  diversity. But in short, there was probably
• 49:35
  a fair bit of gender egalitarianism, at least in
• 49:36
  political decision making as well.
• 49:39
  So I don't think this is a clear arc of moral history, Ivor, in
• 49:42
  terms of things get better with increasing democracy over time.
• 49:47
  And even when you think of our version of democracy, it's
• 49:51
  worthwhile bearing in mind that this comes from I think the 12th
• 49:54
  century of Alfonso the 9th, who was a Spanish leader.
• 49:58
  And basically Alfonso the 9th uses this as a way of creating
• 50:02
  an initial parliament of the rich warriors and bishops in
• 50:06
  order to basically raise taxes for the military to do the
• 50:10
  Reconquista, which is basically pushing the caliphate at Spain.
• 50:14
  It was never about trying to have mass representation or
• 50:17
  anything like that. And actually even that model was
• 50:20
  contested by other ones. Like Barcelona at the time had a
• 50:23
  model where you'd have an assembly basically give a
• 50:26
  mandate to a leader to a representative, who was then
• 50:30
  authorized to represent that mandate elsewhere.
• 50:32
  The thing was, if they deviated from the assembly said, they
• 50:35
  could be executed. It's a very different model of
• 50:38
  democracy and a very different represent model of
• 50:40
  representative democracy. So I think we're getting blinded
• 50:43
  by just one very historically contingent model, which was
• 50:47
  exported across the world for colonization.
• 50:50
  I thought democracy started in England with the Magna Carta.
• 50:52
  I got that wrong. At least in terms of
• 50:55
  parliamentary democracy, no, It starts with once the Knights.
• 50:57
  That's substantially early. The Magna Carta in England does
• 51:00
  have its own unique trajectory of course, but it seems to have
• 51:02
  been influenced by ideas elsewhere.
• 51:04
  And even in the case of of England is a good book called
• 51:07
  The Narrow Corridor by Down a Comerklu and James Robertson.
• 51:11
  And they basically trace the kind of stirrings of democracy
• 51:14
  in England actually in large part to the democratic practices
• 51:18
  of naughty peoples and Germans who basically migrate into
• 51:21
  England after fall of Rome. And they have things like tings
• 51:25
  which are basically small scale assemblies.
• 51:27
  For instance, Jamaica tribes have the same thing as well, and
• 51:30
  those end up being kind of grassroots examples of
• 51:33
  parliaments, which then picked up and scaled up as well.
• 51:36
  Yeah, there's one in Iceland doesn't know that claims to be
• 51:38
  the world's first parliament. Yeah, they actually nicely tried
• 51:41
  to have a more or less kind of mass produced constitution at
• 51:43
  one stage as well after the global financial crisis.
• 51:46
  What about the issue of existential risk, if we can move
• 51:49
  on to that? Because obviously you're at the
• 51:51
  Center for the Study of Existential Risk, and you look
• 51:54
  at that quite a lot in the latter part of the book.
• 51:57
  And so you've got this kind of global Goliath now.
• 52:00
  So these smaller States and empires have basically congealed
• 52:04
  through colonialism. And we've not talked about that,
• 52:06
  but into this gigantic global entity civilization, if you
• 52:11
  like, which is now running up against planetary boundaries.
• 52:15
  It's got nuclear weapons, so it can destroy itself.
• 52:17
  It's developing AI, which potentially is an existential
• 52:21
  risk as well. There's pandemics.
• 52:23
  There's all sorts of things. I mean, you, you don't sound
• 52:25
  very optimistic about the sort of end game for this global
• 52:30
  Goliath. So talk to us a bit about that.
• 52:32
  Spent seven years writing this book and interestingly in many,
• 52:36
  far more optimistic about people and far more pessimistic about
• 52:39
  the future, which I think is actually kind of the opposite of
• 52:42
  Steven Pinker, who seems very pessimistic that people are very
• 52:45
  optimistic about the future. And the key there is I think
• 52:48
  people are pretty good. I think we're pretty kind
• 52:50
  decent, and we get through the Ice Age because we can rely upon
• 52:53
  each other. We can, if we have a drought in
• 52:55
  one area, we have mutual aid, we can go visit a family member or
• 52:59
  a group elsewhere, and we're pretty peaceful, all things
• 53:02
  considered. And I think it's our
• 53:04
  institutions that actually amplify the worst of us.
• 53:07
  Well, I think Pink is kind of the opposite.
• 53:09
  He thinks we're pretty Hobson in a way.
• 53:11
  We're not very good at cooperating.
• 53:13
  We're pretty violent and things don't get better until you get
• 53:16
  authority structures who both impose rules upon people but
• 53:19
  also start adopting their particular types of technology.
• 53:22
  Can you tell us which who's right?
• 53:23
  I mean, empirically and you might say you're right, but
• 53:26
  like, just just like, can you can, is this, is this like
• 53:29
  literally a matter of your own psychology?
• 53:31
  Or can you can you take an empirical approach to history
• 53:34
  and actually have something useful that come out of it?
• 53:36
  Well, it's worth mentioning here that I wasn't always like this
• 53:39
  in terms of values. When I first started this
• 53:42
  research, I was someone who believed that human weren't
• 53:45
  particularly good. I was pretty down on humanity.
• 53:48
  I believed that during collapses we most likely fell into kind of
• 53:51
  mass panic and disorder. And I also believed that we'd be
• 53:55
  better off having some kind of enlightened dictator who could
• 53:58
  solve things like climate change.
• 53:59
  I was a lecturer back in Australia who was consistently
• 54:02
  frustrated by lack of action on climate policy.
• 54:05
  I've dramatically changed my mind on all those things.
• 54:07
  And that's due to empirically delving into history.
• 54:10
  And you know, some of this is things I've already mentioned,
• 54:12
  for instance. So it's pretty easy to say that
• 54:18
  what's pretty clear empirically that if you're looking at
• 54:21
  violence, humans don't seem to be that violent based upon the
• 54:24
  archaeological record. And you can supplement this with
• 54:26
  a Geo genetic record very similar.
• 54:28
  We don't seem to be particularly violent.
• 54:30
  And there's also other source of evidence here as well.
• 54:32
  When you look at, say, for instance, battle reenactments,
• 54:35
  analysis of guns and interviews of soldiers, they all point
• 54:37
  towards people being very reluctant to actually shoot at
• 54:40
  the enemy. And in some cases, over half of
• 54:42
  weapons are unused during a battle.
• 54:44
  And this is when you're literally under the threat of
• 54:47
  death. People still don't want to kill
• 54:48
  each other. To the extent that militaries
• 54:50
  have to really focus upon training killing and murder to
• 54:56
  be basically a second reflex, reflex of sorts.
• 54:59
  That's a reason why you have to do such intense both teamwork,
• 55:04
  but also training is not just to basically improve your military
• 55:06
  skills would make people willing to kill.
• 55:09
  If we were evolved to be killers and we killed off all the
• 55:12
  peaceniks and the killers basically monopolized
• 55:16
  reproduction, you wouldn't expect that and you wouldn't
• 55:18
  expect things like PTSD to be so common in surviving soldiers.
• 55:23
  In short, that's a very clear area where I think we can look
• 55:25
  at the empirics. The empirics have come out
• 55:27
  pretty clearly of humans don't like violence and we don't tend
• 55:30
  to have naturally high rates of violence.
• 55:33
  Likewise, if you think authority structures are really good for
• 55:36
  humanity, why is it that people get substantially shorter and
• 55:40
  seem to have pretty low real wages once you get the arising
• 55:43
  of things like agriculture, states, etcetera?
• 55:46
  And why is it that you don't have large scale improvements in
• 55:49
  human welfare across the population as you get much
• 55:52
  better technology across most of history?
• 55:55
  Pretty easy answer is there's certain times when you do get
• 55:58
  improved welfare, and it tends to be when workers get more
• 56:01
  bargaining power, like in the wake of the Black Death.
• 56:05
  So empirically, I naturally think I'm right here and I think
• 56:08
  there's a very good reasons to believe that humans are pretty
• 56:10
  good. Technology can be good depending
• 56:13
  upon how it relates to power structures, and there's very
• 56:16
  good reasons to be concerned about the future.
• 56:20
  Go on and tell us why you're so you're optimistic about humans,
• 56:23
  but they're not. We're not necessarily programmed
• 56:26
  to all start murdering and eating each other the minute
• 56:28
  that, you know, the veneer of civilization is removed.
• 56:31
  But what's making you pessimistic about the future,
• 56:34
  and are there any ways out? You've probably heard the quote
• 56:38
  from EO Wilson, the biologist who puts forward the fundamental
• 56:43
  human predicament. And problem is that we have
• 56:46
  paralytic emotions, medieval institutions and God like
• 56:50
  technology. I think he's wrong there.
• 56:53
  I don't think it's the fact that we have these outdated bad
• 56:56
  emotions. I think we work pretty well
• 56:58
  together as a cooperative species.
• 57:00
  We're very good at deliberating. I think the problem is our
• 57:02
  institutions tend to bring out the worst of us.
• 57:05
  A little spoiled experiment I like to give is imagine the US
• 57:09
  of Russia as a person. So you take the entire edifice
• 57:13
  of the government and you boil down to one person who's
• 57:16
  stalking outside in the streets. What are they?
• 57:18
  Like they someone you want to be friends with Mark?
• 57:22
  No, not really. I'm not keen to spend much time
• 57:25
  with either Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.
• 57:28
  I seem like horrible people, and because they're horrible people,
• 57:32
  they've ended up at the top of this power structure.
• 57:34
  Yeah, this is the key thing, right, is that our power
• 57:35
  structures tend to select for those who want status.
• 57:38
  So throughout the paralithic, if you're a status seeker, it was
• 57:41
  more likely to earn you an early burial than to earn your power
• 57:44
  today. If you're a strong status
• 57:46
  seeker, you're willing to basically sacrifice everything
• 57:48
  to get more power, you're much more likely to succeed.
• 57:51
  Secondly, it tends to select for certain types of people.
• 57:55
  And I don't want to stress this too much because it's
• 57:57
  psychologically I think we still need a bit more evidence.
• 57:59
  But in general the stronger status seekers tend to be people
• 58:03
  who rank higher in the dark triad.
• 58:05
  This is people of high levels of certain antisocial behaviors and
• 58:08
  traits, what's usually called narcissism and over inflated
• 58:12
  sense of self and ego, Machiavellianism, a willingness
• 58:16
  to manipulate others for personal gain, and psychopathy,
• 58:20
  a certain callousness and lack of empathy for others.
• 58:23
  All of those attributes tend to be very good for politics, and
• 58:27
  they tend to also lead to people who want to have power in the
• 58:30
  first place. And they're good for CEOs has
• 58:32
  gone right. Precisely.
• 58:34
  Yeah. So it's in psychopathy studies
• 58:36
  actually have this idea of unsuccessful and successful
• 58:39
  psychopaths. And the unsuccessful ones are
• 58:41
  basically the ones who end up in prison, the successful ones, the
• 58:43
  ones who end up in boardrooms and parliaments.
• 58:46
  And interestingly, if you're looking at this as a kind of
• 58:48
  demographic scenario, the best representation of psychopaths,
• 58:53
  the largest proportion of population, either prisons or
• 58:56
  once again, boardrooms and apartments.
• 58:58
  So the general population, roughly 1%.
• 59:00
  In prisons, I think it's somewhat close to 20% and
• 59:04
  studies vary dramatically, but it's usually somewhere between a
• 59:07
  minimum of 3% and a maximum of 20% and comes to higher
• 59:10
  positions. Well, but to get back to the
• 59:12
  future which is going to kill us, is that AI, climate, nuclear
• 59:15
  weapons? 1 error I think we make in the
• 59:18
  study of existential risk is we tend to start focusing too much
• 59:22
  on the individual hazards. So as you mentioned, climate
• 59:25
  change, AI, nuclear weapons, engineered pandemics, when you
• 59:29
  think about risk, risk is combined of four factors.
• 59:32
  It's the hazard. So the tsunami, for instance,
• 59:35
  the thing that's going to cause harm, your exposure, the fact
• 59:37
  that you're actually in the in the path of the tsunami, your
• 59:41
  vulnerability, the fact that you don't have the infrastructure to
• 59:43
  withstand a tsunami and your response however or not you run
• 59:47
  away, for instance. And when I think about risk is
• 59:50
  both of those four factors. But I'm also interested in why
• 59:53
  are we producing risk? What's the actual power
• 59:55
  structures that lead to production of risk?
• 59:57
  If I was studying existential risk back in the 1950s, there's
• 1:00:01
  only one thing I'm really worried about, nuclear weapons.
• 1:00:04
  We know that climate change and the greenhouse effect exists,
• 1:00:07
  but it's not really well studied.
• 1:00:08
  We don't know its global impacts yet.
• 1:00:10
  And yet today I have colleagues who study AI, engineer
• 1:00:14
  pandemics, climate change, planetary boundaries at large,
• 1:00:18
  et cetera. What is it in the system that is
• 1:00:21
  causing us to produce these risks?
• 1:00:23
  And I think the answer ends up being fairly simple.
• 1:00:26
  When you think about the US or Russia or corporation as a
• 1:00:29
  person outside, they're incredibly self-centered.
• 1:00:34
  They spend less than 1% of their wealth upon the more needy, and
• 1:00:37
  they're constantly stockpiling weapons and looking to improve
• 1:00:40
  their status. And they tend to fall into
• 1:00:43
  certain traps of behavior. So corporations and militaries
• 1:00:47
  must always use the excuse of if I don't do it, someone else
• 1:00:51
  will. I've heard this literally from
• 1:00:53
  people high up in the Australian military of why we need to
• 1:00:55
  embrace killer robots. If we don't, China will likewise
• 1:00:59
  open AI. Their key argument is if we
• 1:01:01
  don't do it, the bad guy bug bad guys will in China first.
• 1:01:05
  Same thing happened of course during the Cold War.
• 1:01:07
  So I think that these institutions physical lives have
• 1:01:11
  amplified the worsenness. They also are more likely to
• 1:01:14
  fall into certain traps. So things like status races,
• 1:01:17
  just competing for more and more status over time, usually
• 1:01:20
  through conspicuous consumption, which is a a different area of
• 1:01:23
  history we can get into if you like races and also simply races
• 1:01:27
  for resources, races to the bottom as we call it.
• 1:01:30
  And these are things which the average person doesn't tend to
• 1:01:33
  fall into so much. You probably heard the tragic
• 1:01:36
  the Commons, for instance, since I did it to use the associate of
• 1:01:38
  Garrett Harden, that if you leave a common access resource
• 1:01:42
  resource like a pasture open to people, every individual has an
• 1:01:45
  interest to maximize their usage, but it leads to over
• 1:01:48
  exploitation. Hence the pursuit of individual
• 1:01:51
  self rational interest leads to collective ruin.
• 1:01:54
  The thing is, we don't have much evidence for that.
• 1:01:56
  When you put people in laboratory settings, as soon as
• 1:01:59
  you allow them to communicate, suddenly charge the comments
• 1:02:02
  doesn't happen. And shortly after Harden
• 1:02:04
  published his very popular essay, there was a big series of
• 1:02:08
  studies by Eleanor Ostrom basically pointing out that
• 1:02:11
  people have collectively and sustainably managed Commons for
• 1:02:14
  a very long period of time. You know the course.
• 1:02:16
  Some people have been in their environment for roughly 200,000
• 1:02:18
  years. They don't seem to have fallen
• 1:02:20
  into arms races, status races or anything like that or overuse
• 1:02:24
  the environment. So this is something that isn't
• 1:02:27
  just something that humans do, but it's something that
• 1:02:29
  particular types of humans that people are dark tried, for
• 1:02:31
  instance, are much more likely to defect in these games.
• 1:02:34
  But additionally, people who are taught in economics and finance
• 1:02:38
  who expect others to defect are much more likely to once again
• 1:02:41
  behave in a game periodic fashion.
• 1:02:43
  But the problem is, if you have the lives of improving
• 1:02:46
  technology, constantly competing in arms races over the space of
• 1:02:50
  decades or centuries, or constantly competing for more
• 1:02:53
  status and growth, once again the space of centuries, what's
• 1:02:57
  the end point here? I find it very unlikely that
• 1:03:01
  over 2 centuries we just managed to keep our luck when it comes
• 1:03:04
  to nuclear weapons, for instance, particularly for
• 1:03:07
  innovating. Exactly.
• 1:03:08
  Well, me too. I mean, I've written a book on
• 1:03:09
  this and the only conclusion I could end up with was that we
• 1:03:12
  needed to get rid of them all together.
• 1:03:14
  Otherwise sooner or later there will be a nuclear war.
• 1:03:16
  And that's a pretty much a collapse scenario for our whole
• 1:03:19
  global civilization. Nuclear war means yeah, are
• 1:03:23
  other are other threats likewise.
• 1:03:25
  I mean, I don't know about climate.
• 1:03:27
  I think that's solvable, but. And and, you know, we can adapt
• 1:03:31
  to smaller extensive warming, like 1, you know, 2° or so.
• 1:03:36
  But above that, I'm not so sure. I mean, I don't know what to
• 1:03:40
  think about AI though. I mean, can you tell us just,
• 1:03:42
  you know, give us a couple of minutes on why because you sound
• 1:03:45
  quite negative about it. And I'm a bit surprised.
• 1:03:47
  I thought AI was generally looking more more positive these
• 1:03:50
  days. The key concern than most people
• 1:03:52
  might feel to have read AI is this idea of alignment.
• 1:03:56
  And the concept here is that once you have an AI system that
• 1:04:00
  can code better than the average person and can essentially
• 1:04:03
  recursively self improve, it can improve its own code, rewrite
• 1:04:06
  itself and get better and better.
• 1:04:08
  That it could in a very short period of time become
• 1:04:11
  substantially more intelligent than the average person.
• 1:04:14
  It could become orders of magnitude more intelligent.
• 1:04:17
  And bear in mind, like differences in intelligence
• 1:04:19
  here, often pretty minor. So Albert Einstein had an IQ
• 1:04:22
  that was probably only less than 100 larger than yours of mine,
• 1:04:25
  for instance, an AI system. The theory is that if it could
• 1:04:29
  do self recursive improvement you could get 1000 times more
• 1:04:32
  intelligent very quickly. And if it's not perfectly
• 1:04:35
  aligned with human values then it could very easily end up in
• 1:04:39
  this kind of genie trap where whatever goal you give it, it
• 1:04:43
  will pursue but in such a way that's detrimental humans.
• 1:04:46
  The funny kind of straw man example it's always given here
• 1:04:49
  is the idea of the paper clip maximizer.
• 1:04:50
  So you get an AI system, a goal to maximize paper clips, which
• 1:04:54
  it does vary truthfully and diligently, But if you use
• 1:04:57
  humans as simply resources to be used for paper clips, so it
• 1:05:00
  turns the entire planet, including us into paper clip
• 1:05:03
  machines and factories and it spends foster cosmos building
• 1:05:05
  more paper clips. And you don't have to go that
• 1:05:07
  far. Of course, it could be something
• 1:05:09
  simple like you want people to be happy so it hooks us all up
• 1:05:12
  to dopamine machines, for instance.
• 1:05:15
  It's very hard to make sure you have a goal function embedded
• 1:05:19
  into machine which can't in some way be hacked.
• 1:05:22
  That's the kind of most out there extreme speculative
• 1:05:25
  scenario of super intelligence. And that's one reason why a lot
• 1:05:27
  of my colleagues are concerned. I am more skeptical, but to be
• 1:05:31
  frank, I can't rule it out. I can't write it off.
• 1:05:34
  When you look at the actual surveys here, like usually
• 1:05:37
  across people who do machine learning, it ends up being used
• 1:05:41
  in ballpark of what is it. People put an average of roughly
• 1:05:46
  5% or so of this resulting in kind of a human extinction,
• 1:05:50
  really bad level scenario, sometimes substantially higher
• 1:05:54
  as well. And the people who think we're
• 1:05:55
  actually going to reach this kind of level of super
• 1:05:58
  intelligence in the next 100 years tends to be usually above
• 1:06:01
  the majority. It's worthwhile noting surveys
• 1:06:04
  aren't a particularly good way of doing forecasting.
• 1:06:07
  And the actual range here is all the way from people who think
• 1:06:09
  we'll never build this through to people who think we'll build
• 1:06:11
  the next few years. That's one concern.
• 1:06:14
  What worries me potentially even more is simply that AI speeds up
• 1:06:19
  all the things we're doing right now, including all the negative
• 1:06:23
  things. And that includes things like
• 1:06:26
  the extraction of fossil fuels, for instance, energy demand.
• 1:06:29
  There's one paper which hasn't been published yet, but I have
• 1:06:31
  some colleagues working on it, where they tried to ask a large
• 1:06:35
  number of energy modelling experts how much they think AI
• 1:06:38
  is going to increase energy demand by 2050.
• 1:06:41
  And they basically asked them in a survey, got them to do a
• 1:06:45
  little bit of exercise or basically discussed it across
• 1:06:48
  each other, did another survey. And the end result was a range
• 1:06:52
  from somewhere like I think it was 5 to 50% increase in energy
• 1:06:56
  demand. It's going to be pretty hard to
• 1:06:59
  meet our climate goals if we're expecting that surge in energy,
• 1:07:03
  for instance. And on top of that, when you
• 1:07:05
  actually look at some of the main applications they are right
• 1:07:07
  now, it once again tends to be keeping people glued to screens
• 1:07:12
  and additionally use in militaries, obviously in the
• 1:07:15
  case of Ukraine, Russia, or do you actually have a large number
• 1:07:18
  of lethal autonomous weapons, Thrones hooked up to weapons
• 1:07:22
  which are often given the ability to kill that human
• 1:07:24
  oversight being used. They're being used, different
• 1:07:26
  algorithms being used in Israel. You've probably heard of the
• 1:07:29
  Lavender system, for instance. Yeah, It's basically a way to
• 1:07:33
  automate the selection of targets based upon some pretty
• 1:07:36
  sparse data of who could be a terrorist, Then just basically
• 1:07:39
  drop a bomb on them, usually with another algorithm called
• 1:07:42
  Daddy's Home, which tried to trace people to when they got
• 1:07:45
  back to their family homes. Because I'm more easy to hit
• 1:07:47
  with a bomb than. When you actually, which means
• 1:07:50
  you kill all all their family and their children, but never
• 1:07:52
  mind. About that precisely, yeah.
• 1:07:53
  So and there's been reports that within the Israel military,
• 1:07:56
  they're willing to happy to accept a collateral damage of
• 1:07:58
  roughly 20 to 1. So for everyone, potential
• 1:08:02
  military target hit and that again, based upon an algorithm
• 1:08:05
  we can't entirely trust, they're happy to kill 20 people again,
• 1:08:08
  unverified and IEF will dispute that, but it's something that
• 1:08:12
  inside of the same. But when you look at all the
• 1:08:14
  existing big applications of AI and where the money's going, and
• 1:08:17
  I haven't even started talking about mass surveillance, for
• 1:08:20
  instance, and facial recognition, they don't exactly
• 1:08:23
  point towards a better world. There's very little money going
• 1:08:27
  towards things like how do we improve democracy using AI as
• 1:08:30
  you mentioned, for instance. And sure, they can have some
• 1:08:33
  good things. I think alpha fold, for
• 1:08:36
  instance, the ability to fold, to predict how to fold proteins
• 1:08:39
  can be very useful across a range of medical applications.
• 1:08:41
  But I don't see these outweighing the negatives right
• 1:08:45
  now. Yeah, so, So what does, what
• 1:08:47
  does collapse look like in in the in our current world and
• 1:08:51
  what comes after? And and also we should wrap up
• 1:08:54
  now, but like, can we, can you extinct human species
• 1:08:57
  completely? The easy questions once again,
• 1:08:59
  Mark, you start with explain all world history and can you
• 1:09:03
  extinct the entire human species?
• 1:09:05
  You've got 90 seconds for that one.
• 1:09:07
  In the book I talk about the fates of Goliath.
• 1:09:09
  What are the different main trajectories we can head on and
• 1:09:12
  these aren't particular predictions.
• 1:09:14
  And more, given the way Goliath behave over time, what are the
• 1:09:17
  likely outcomes? I believe the most likely is
• 1:09:21
  self termination for exactly the reasons I said.
• 1:09:24
  If you're stuck perpetually in arms races with exponentially
• 1:09:27
  increasing technology, where is it going to end?
• 1:09:30
  It's likely going to be self termination eventually.
• 1:09:32
  Will that be a nuclear war, leave, autonomous killer rebel
• 1:09:35
  arm armies, or something else? If you have continuous status
• 1:09:38
  races where everyone's trying to compete for more and more
• 1:09:40
  conspicuous consumption, where's the end?
• 1:09:43
  Probably over consumption and the infringement of multiple
• 1:09:46
  planetary boundaries. So self termination I believe
• 1:09:49
  unless we have fundamental forms is how Goliath will end in the
• 1:09:53
  coming centuries or penchant, even decades.
• 1:09:55
  The other option is we managed to find a plucky techno fix for
• 1:09:58
  each of these issues or to have kind of muddling through small
• 1:10:01
  scale reforms we somehow get through with a bit of luck as
• 1:10:04
  well. But I think that does not end in
• 1:10:07
  a particularly nice world. It ends in what I call silicon
• 1:10:09
  Goliath, which is potentially a world of more material
• 1:10:13
  abundance, maybe less. But one thing is for sure, it
• 1:10:16
  ends in a world where you have more mass surveillance, you
• 1:10:19
  likely have more autocracy, less genuine democracy, and you
• 1:10:23
  probably have increasing concentrations of power as well.
• 1:10:26
  So it's a week of spoke about Goliath fuel, monopolized
• 1:10:29
  weapons, caged land, and little resources.
• 1:10:32
  Goliaths tend to change over time and evolve.
• 1:10:34
  And the silk and Goliath, rather than having grain as little
• 1:10:37
  resource, will still have grain, but it's going to have data as
• 1:10:39
  well. And rather than having cage land
• 1:10:42
  the forms of walls or rivers, it's going to have mass
• 1:10:45
  surveillance systems that are impossible to escape.
• 1:10:47
  And rather than having bronze swords and axes, it's going to
• 1:10:51
  have nuclear weapons and killer robots.
• 1:10:53
  And killer robots are potentially the ultimate applies
• 1:10:55
  weapon. Whoever owns the code
• 1:10:57
  potentially owns the entire army.
• 1:10:59
  And of course, in the case of nuclear weapons, we already have
• 1:11:01
  a thermonuclear monarchy where one individual has the ability
• 1:11:04
  to potentially destroy the entire planet.
• 1:11:09
  The last one is we'd potentially find some way to democratically
• 1:11:12
  reform and overcome slag life. And we find social arrangements
• 1:11:16
  was much closer to our Paleolithic roots than to
• 1:11:19
  dominance hierarchies. Can we go extinct?
• 1:11:24
  I don't see why not. There's numerous scenarios where
• 1:11:28
  I can envision human extension. I think it's a very high bar.
• 1:11:32
  We're incredibly resilient, adaptable species.
• 1:11:35
  But if you're looking at, say for instance, a world where you
• 1:11:38
  have 4° of warming, you have a Geo engineering system set up to
• 1:11:44
  basically mask that level of warming, and then you have an
• 1:11:49
  enormous nuclear war. And you've already some studies
• 1:11:52
  on nuclear war. The worst one would be if you
• 1:11:54
  have a full exchange between the US and Russia, which would
• 1:11:57
  result in roughly 150 teragrams of soot being pushed up into the
• 1:12:01
  atmosphere. You could have a nuclear winter
• 1:12:04
  of roughly 10° of the space of a decade, the best modeling we
• 1:12:08
  have right now, and granted still has problems.
• 1:12:10
  Yes, that 5 billion people could die from the knock on food
• 1:12:12
  effects. Now that could be overly
• 1:12:16
  pessimistic because it's not accounted for people trading.
• 1:12:18
  It could also be actually too rosy because there's a whole
• 1:12:21
  bunch of our effects of nuclear war.
• 1:12:23
  So for instance, you have EMP's electromagnetic impulses which
• 1:12:26
  fry electrical infrastructure that could shut off the
• 1:12:29
  Internet. Computers rely upon Internet
• 1:12:32
  Border Gateway Protocol, which basically means they rely upon
• 1:12:35
  there being a network to connect to, which means it might be
• 1:12:37
  really hard to restart the Internet.
• 1:12:39
  On top of that, you'll have huge amounts of people moving who are
• 1:12:42
  going to be potentially suffering from radiation
• 1:12:44
  sickness and weaken immune systems.
• 1:12:45
  It'll be a Petri dish for new emerging zotic infections.
• 1:12:49
  The ozone increases to roughly 25 to 35.
• 1:12:54
  You're not supposed to go outdoors and ozones higher than
• 1:12:56
  11. And of course, you can eat other
• 1:12:58
  things like ocean acidification. So there's a huge number of
• 1:13:01
  knock on effects from nuclear war that we don't consider.
• 1:13:03
  Which if you combine that with suddenly a bounce back of 4° of
• 1:13:08
  warming, so you destroy the solar engineering system and you
• 1:13:11
  get 4° of warming of this space for a decade or two after the
• 1:13:14
  nuclear winter. I don't know.
• 1:13:16
  I think that's a scenario where I can see extinction occurring.
• 1:13:20
  I don't think there's anything that's special about our species
• 1:13:23
  which makes SM into extinction. Well, let's end there on that.
• 1:13:29
  I look like we can't, we can't completely end that.
• 1:13:31
  You've got to, you've got to do a short, a short summary of like
• 1:13:36
  why that doesn't have to happen. The deep democracy sort of
• 1:13:40
  option that we've got. So we can, we can force our
• 1:13:44
  societies in a more egalitarian direction.
• 1:13:46
  We can rebalance wealth, we can rebalance power.
• 1:13:49
  These are still options, right? And these are the only way to
• 1:13:50
  avoid avoid the kind of collapse outcomes that you're talking
• 1:13:53
  about. Precisely when it comes to
• 1:13:55
  almost all the existential hazards and threats I speak of,
• 1:13:59
  they will have pretty obvious technical solutions.
• 1:14:01
  If you believe that we can build a super intelligent machine that
• 1:14:04
  can kill everyone, just don't build it.
• 1:14:07
  Pretty simple, just have a moratorium on actually building
• 1:14:09
  that kind of technology. You could do this in multiple
• 1:14:12
  ways. You could put a cap on the
• 1:14:13
  amount of compute, the amount of microchips, basically they get
• 1:14:16
  used. You can put a cap on energy that
• 1:14:19
  is used in particular algorithm, or you could actually just do
• 1:14:22
  the thing of paying people properly.
• 1:14:24
  Right now Open AI relies upon the fact they can have content
• 1:14:27
  moderators in Kenya who are paid $4.00 an hour to do some of the
• 1:14:31
  most horrendous work possible. Which is basically reading
• 1:14:34
  through text of just grotesque sense of essentially the worst
• 1:14:38
  things humans can do. But they're doing that in order
• 1:14:40
  to train the algorithm to basically filter those things
• 1:14:43
  out. If suddenly they were getting
• 1:14:45
  paid, you know, something close to like 100 or $500 a day, which
• 1:14:50
  would be more than fair given what they're having to go
• 1:14:51
  through, AI becomes far less profitable.
• 1:14:56
  And this goes for almost every existential risk.
• 1:14:58
  Once you actually start to address inequality and pay
• 1:15:00
  people properly, it's really hard to build these things.
• 1:15:03
  They're not really that profitable, but they're built
• 1:15:05
  upon systems and exploitation on top of that.
• 1:15:09
  I think we just simply need to re level all the sources of
• 1:15:11
  power. So I mentioned the power tends
• 1:15:14
  to be fungible, tends to be transferred across in the
• 1:15:16
  different forms. Power we have violent power, the
• 1:15:17
  control of lethal violence, political power, the controlled
• 1:15:20
  decision making, economic power, the control of resources and
• 1:15:23
  information power, the control of ideology, information to each
• 1:15:27
  of those we can find ways to level them.
• 1:15:29
  So in the case of political power, we've already discussed
• 1:15:31
  use technology to have things like citizens, assemblies and
• 1:15:35
  juries run a mass alongside different Dublin platforms where
• 1:15:38
  you can better collect the collective opinion of people and
• 1:15:41
  you can better encourage them to actually deliberate.
• 1:15:43
  Have better information as well. If you want to better control
• 1:15:46
  the military, then just have more transparency.
• 1:15:49
  It's really hard to regulate nuclear weapons or anything the
• 1:15:52
  military is doing if we can't see what it's doing in the 1st
• 1:15:55
  place. And similarly, if you want to
• 1:15:58
  not have billionaires messing around and democracies and
• 1:16:01
  making oligarchies, just cap well for $10 million.
• 1:16:05
  Have a wealth tax, have really high progressive taxation.
• 1:16:08
  In the 1950's, the US had the highest tax bracket of over 90%.
• 1:16:13
  These are all things that we know how to do.
• 1:16:15
  The problem is that power structures don't want us to do
• 1:16:18
  that. Speaking of someone who's below
• 1:16:19
  the wealth proposed wealth cap of 10 million, I'm entirely in
• 1:16:22
  favour of that. Look, we, we should, we should
• 1:16:27
  wind up now. But I've, you know, I loved your
• 1:16:30
  book and I'm aware that we've only got through a tiny
• 1:16:33
  proportion of all of the fascinating sort of subjects
• 1:16:36
  that you cover. And it's a, it's, I mean, it's
• 1:16:39
  sort of like a modern version of Guns, Germs and Steel, which
• 1:16:43
  was, you know, Jared Diamond's Seminole work really on a lot of
• 1:16:47
  these same kinds of processes. And probably, you know, you've
• 1:16:50
  got access to empirical data, which wasn't, wasn't available
• 1:16:53
  then. So it's really well worth
• 1:16:55
  reading for anyone who's interested in in the whole sort
• 1:16:57
  of Arc of human history and human nature and all of all of
• 1:17:01
  these fascinating questions. So thanks again, Luke Kemp, for
• 1:17:05
  joining us on saving the world for bad Ideas.
• 1:17:07
  And best of luck with your book and with the future of your
• 1:17:09
  work. Excellent.
• 1:17:10
  Thank you, Buck. Thanks so much for listening to
• 1:17:15
  Saving the World from Bad Ideas, a Weplanet podcast.
• 1:17:19
  Weplanet's a movement of citizens and scientists
• 1:17:21
  dedicated to defending the science and solutions we need to
• 1:17:23
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• 1:17:26
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