Our Existential Risks
Don’t worry about it.
I mean, worry about it.
Because if you worry about it, ironically, it will be okay.
It will be a self-unfulfilling prophecy.791
Q: What period of history would you prefer to live in the most?
Right now. The present is the most interesting time in history—and I read a lot of history.
Let’s do our best to keep that going.792
I find history fascinating. A lot of incredible things have been done, good and bad. By learning about them, you understand the nature of civilization and individuals.793
There’s a lot of human history, but most of it is people getting on with their lives. Human history is not a nonstop war and disaster. Those are actually intermittent and rare. If they weren’t, humans would soon cease to exist. But historians write more about wars than peace. A normal year where nothing major happened won’t be written about much. Most people just farmed and lived their life as a villager somewhere.794
Life was tough for most of history. In most of human history, a good year would be one where not that many people in your village died of disease, starvation, freezing, or being killed by a neighboring village. If you only lost 5 percent of your village in a year, that was a good year.795
Not starving to death would have been the primary goal of most people throughout history. Just making sure they had enough food to last through the winter and not freeze to death.796
If you judge history from what is morally acceptable today, you’d give everyone a failing grade. I don’t think anyone would get a passing grade in morality if you look back to even three hundred years ago.797
Q: How does history help you understand the future?
I try to understand the rise and fall of civilizations. I’ve read a lot of history to discern the facts of what humans did.798
We take for granted that “it’s always going to be there,” but if you study history, you realize civilizations rise and fall.799
I was reading about the ancient Sumerians, who were arguably the first civilization. They were the first to develop writing, but eventually they died out. Then, nobody could read their writing at all. They were impressive in their time but they faded out as a civilization. The ancient Egyptians, the same thing. One after another. Ancient Greece had its day. There've been ebbs and flows in the Chinese and Indian civilizations over the eons as well.800
Only a tiny fraction of what was ever written in history is available to us now. Probably less than 1 percent. If they didn’t chisel it in stone or put it in a clay tablet, we don’t have it. There are a few papyrus scrolls that are thousands of years old because they were deep inside a pyramid. The little information we have shows many civilizations rising and falling. It’s wild. And the basics of human nature are more or less the same today.
We see patterns for civilizations as they go through a life cycle, like an organism does. A human is a zygote, fetus, baby, toddler, teenager, eventually gets older, and dies. Every civilization goes through a life cycle. No civilization will last forever.801
The birth rate might be the biggest single threat to the future of human civilization. Artificial intelligence (AI) gone wrong is a big concern. Religious extremism is a concern. There are quite a few important problems to solve.802
We should view our civilization as much more fragile than we think.803
We must keep civilization going onward and upward as much as possible and try to minimize the civilizational threats that occur.804