Holden Karnofsky — History's most important century

**Holden Karnofsky** (0:00)
If we had AI systems that could do everything humans do to advance science and technology, that would be insane. We live in a weird time, growth has been exploding, accelerating over the last blink of an eye. We really need to be kind of like, nervous and vigilant about what comes next, and thinking about all the things that could radically transform the world. You just imagine a universe where there actually are some people who live in an especially important time. And then there's a bunch of other people who like tell stories to themselves about what, you know, whether they do.
How would you want all those people to behave? And it's like, to me, the worst possible rule is all those people should just be like, nah, this is crazy and forget about it.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:36)
All right, today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Holden Karnofsky, who is the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy. In my opinion, Holden is one of the most interesting intellectuals alive, well, given your role. So Holden, welcome to The Lunar Society.

**Holden Karnofsky** (0:51)
Thanks for having me.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:52)
Okay, so let's start off by talking about the most important century thesis. Do you want to explain what this is for the audience?

**Holden Karnofsky** (0:59)
You know, my story is I originally co-founded an organization called GiveWell that helps people decide where to give as effectively as possible. I'm no longer there, but I'm on the board and it's a website called givewell.org that I think makes good recommendations where to give to charity to help a lot of people.
And, you know, as we were working at GiveWell, we met Kerry Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz. Dustin is the co-founder of Facebook and Asana and started a project that became Open Philanthropy to try to help them give away their large fortune, again, to help as many people as possible. And so I've kind of spent my career looking for ways to do as much good as possible with a dollar or with an hour, with whatever resources you have, and especially with money. And so I've kind of developed this professional specialization in looking for ideas that are underappreciated, underrated, tremendously important, because a lot of the time, that's where I think you can find just kind of outsized, what you might call outsized return on investment, opportunities to spend some money and just get an enormous impact because you're doing something very important that is being ignored by others. And so it's through that kind of professional specialization that I've actively looked for interesting ideas that are not getting enough attention, and that I encountered the Effective Altruist Community, which is a community of people basically built around the idea of doing as much good as you can.
And so it's through that community that I encountered the idea of the most important century. It's not my idea at all. I got to it from a lot of people.
And the basic idea is that if we developed the right kind of AI systems this century, and that looks reasonably likely, that could make this century the most important of all time for humanity. So the basic mechanics of why that might be or how you might think about that. So one thing is that if you look back at all of economic history, just the rate at which the world economy has grown, you see acceleration. You see that it's growing a lot faster today than it ever was. And one theory of why that might be or one way of thinking about it through the lens of basic economic growth theory is that in normal circumstances, you can imagine a kind of feedback loop where you have people have ideas and the ideas lead to greater productivity and more resources. And then when you have more resources, you can also have more people and then those people have more ideas. So you get this feedback loop that goes people, ideas, resources, people, ideas, resources.
And starting a couple hundred years ago, if you run a feedback loop like that, standard economic theory says you'll get accelerating growth. You'll get a rate of economic growth that goes faster and faster. And basically if you take the story of our economy to date and you just kind of plot it on a chart and do the kind of simplest thing you can to project it forward, you project that it will go, that our economy will reach like an infinite growth rate this century. And the reason that I currently don't think that's a great thing to expect by default is that one of the steps of that feedback loop broke a couple hundred years ago.