Technological Progress

“In some sense, like fertility is declining because the opportunity cost of this suffering is massive, right? It's a massive cost. Now it's totally worth it. I know the hackneyed thing you hear from parents, like all the time, like it's horrible. Also, it's gre…”

“So technological progress seems to have some odd marriage between engineers and technical people and innovators and entrepreneurs and wild promotional financiers. And that, that marriage between the two yields technological progress. But usually at great cost …”

“The reason to enumerate this stuff is that in the moment when all this stuff was happening, it wasn't immediately obvious that the world was changing. It was just kind of normal, like, oh, this new thing came out. Oh, that's cool. And even at the time, some of…”

“It's magical thinking to think that we get all the things we spent the first chunk of the video talking about, and there's nothing bad. That's magical. That's like, that's not being an adult.”

“I think in general, When we analyze these very powerful technologies, we conclude that nothing improves the human condition and the state of nature more than technological progress.”

“I think one reason people are pessimistic in general about technological progress is it's, there's an asymmetry in that it's very easy to imagine the jobs that are destroyed and very hard to imagine the ones that are created.”

“The more that, that goes we run the risk of just sort of conflating progress with computers and kind of stop, you know, stopping demanding it in all these other, you know, other contexts.”