Everything You Know is About to Collapse - David Friedberg - #1084

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
You've said the future is going to be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried. How come?

**David Friedberg** (0:09)
I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future, because humans are programmed to be that way. We always were worried about some predator coming around the corner eating us, like we're tuned to survive, right? So we're tuned to always, there's always some existential threat to humanity. This goes back to biblical eras thousands of years ago. It was the Great Flood that was about to come. There was the plague. The plague is going to wipe us all out. There's starvation. The late 19th century population was outstripping food supply. There was this big belief that we were going to run out of food, and there was this rush to... The primary reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields off of the South American coast. These giant islands covered in poop. The Clipper ships would go down. They'd get all this poop, and they'd bring it back to Europe, and they'd use it as fertilizer to farm. If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less calories. The islands were kind of diminishing, and there was this big call to action. We're going to run out of fertilizer. The world's going to starve. We're going to die. And then there was this invention called the Haber-Bosch process, where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom, suddenly population skyrocketed. Every generation has these existential threats, climate change, COVID. There's always, and now it's AI. I think fundamentally AI is one of these most kind of like mind numbing, sort of unbelievable to understand kind of technologies. And when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok, that seems so overwhelming, like a plague, like running out of food, like COVID. We have a tendency to be very existential about it. Now, you compare that to the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground, people are living longer, they're living healthier, they're living better lives, across the board, across populations. And people can argue all day long about relative prosperity. Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead. They're doing really well. The rest of us feel left behind. But if you look at some of the metrics of like, hey, everyone has a home, everyone has a car, like everyone has some of these things that we take for granted today, that we didn't have a hundred years ago, that were really things to struggle to get.
Now, separate to that, there is an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally. Digitization of the physical world, and then our ability to kind of make predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of the tools that we call AI today, but it's really a long history of these sorts of tools where we take data and we use that to better understand the world and then say, hey, we could do this or we could do this, we could make this molecule to solve this cancer, we could do this thing and suddenly turns out we're right, we could build this machine that could get us to the moon. Oh yeah, we're right, we could do that. Like all of these fundamental tools start to compound and we're in this kind of exponential curve right now that I think, and we can talk about some of the things that I think are most exciting, but that are really going to kind of transform the trajectory for humanity. So I think that there's a risk of too much change, too fast, which is perhaps the thing that breaks social order.
And that's probably the phase that we're in right now. How much is the social order going to break? How hard is it going to be for people to adapt? How much of a dislocation will there be in social systems and economic systems? And people's expectations, when they shift too much and they have to kind of rethink, what do I have to do? They want to put a break on things. And I think that's kind of a moment that we're in the West right now. In the East, it's a little bit different. You go to China, they're very much embracing these technologies because there's so much more to gain than there is to lose. In the West, we have so much more to lose than there is to gain.

**Chris Williamson** (4:06)
Oh, that's interesting. A victim of your own success so far.

**David Friedberg** (4:10)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)