"we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the few things we can see one of which is our current date and so now that you have this living cosmology ..."

"robin hansen you are working on a book about quote grabby aliens this is a technical term like the big bang uh yeah so what are grabby aliens grabby aliens expand fast into the universe and they chang..."

"synonymously sometimes not gravity to me is a little bit more aggressive what does it mean to be loud what does it mean to be grabby what's the difference and loud in what way is it visual is it sound..."

"we'll talk about power we'll talk about linear increase so what is the technical definition of grabby how do you envision grabbiness and why are uh in contrast with humans why aren't humans grabby so ..."

"we are at the moment a sort of random sample of the kind of times at which an advanced civilization might appear because we may or may not become grabby but if we do we'll do it soon and so our curren..."

"look at the durations of the major things that have happened that suggests that there's roughly say six hard steps that happened say between 3 and 12 and that we have just achieved the last one that w..."

"between them will be roughly equal and the time remaining left over in the rest of the window will also be the same length so we at the moment have roughly a billion years left on earth until simple l..."

"before our window closed and the chance of that happening in that short window goes as that time period to the power of the number of steps and so that was where the power we talked about before it ca..."

"[Laughter] uh so it gets very unlikely very quickly and so we are the result of this unlikely chain of successes it's actually a lot like cancer so the dominant model of cancer in an organism like eac..."

"likely to happen regardless of whether i like it or whether we do anything about it and then once you see a rough picture of what's likely to happen if we do nothing then we can ask well what might we..."

"say for a medical patient right what's the chance that this treatment might help and what's the cost and compare those to each other and you might say this looks like a lot of cost for a small medical..."

"then people will be lying to you will be lying to yourself and you won't be as effective yes and achieving whatever good you are trying to achieve but getting the data getting the facts is step one no..."

"so you started to define sort of the the model the parameters of uh grabbiness right or the uh as we approach crabbiness so what happens so again when there's three parameters yes there's the speed at..."

"would be visibly different we don't see them can we pause for a second okay there's a bunch of hard steps that earth had to pass to arrive at this place we are currently which we're starting to launch..."

"growth exactly like the surface how fast the surface okay and so you're saying that there is some speed for that expansion average speed and then we can play with that parameter and if that speed is s..."

"huge stuff okay if they're expanding slowly we would see a lot of them because the universe is old as relative is old enough to where we would see that we're assuming we're just typical you know maybe..."

"this sphere will be about 3 000 times as wide as the distance from the milky way to andromeda okay this is fun it's huge okay it's huge um all right so why don't we see uh we're one little tiny tiny t..."

"life to show up so you had to show up now before that deadline okay can we break that apart a little bit okay or linger on some of the things you said so with the power law the things we've done on ea..."

"analysis you have a model that makes a prediction that's wrong then that helps you reject that model okay let's try to understand exactly where the wrong is so the assumption is that the universe is e..."

"this is both exciting and terrifying it is terrifying it's like watching a truck like driving at you at 100 miles an hour and uh right so we would see spheres in the sky at least one sphere in the sky..."

"and they could also be somehow traveling faster than the speed of light or i think we can exclude because if they could go faster than speed of light then they would just already be everywhere so in a..."

"and sun that is they could figure those things out actually by being clever enough and so similarly we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the fe..."

"an interesting thing to aspire to yes interesting is an interesting word is the universe of alien civilizations defined by war as much or more than uh war defined human history i would say it's define..."

"business and personal competition over the coming centuries and they may like that so much that they prevent interstellar colonization which would become the end of that era that is interstellar colon..."

"when they meet each other at the borders but whether that's military competition is more of an open question so military meaning destro physically destructive right so there's a lot to say there so on..."

"competition within our civilization for a while and that's an interesting choice whether to allow competition to reap to sort of regain its full force or whether to suppress and manage it well one of ..."

"but we could institute a regime of global governance that limited competition including military and business competition of sorts and that could prevent our expansion of course to play devil's advoca..."

"medical experiments or pandemic policy or nuclear power energy or regulating airplanes or just in a wide range of area in fact the world has very similar regulations and rules everywhere and it's not ..."

"walking toward global governance slowly strengthening various world institutions of governance but cautiously carefully watching out for the possibility of a single power that might corrupt it i think..."

"and so this is uh this is the positive of competition of not of having multiple power centers this kind of gathering of elites makes me very very very nervous the dinners the the meetings in the close..."

"choice too and it'll happen sometime in the next 10 million years maybe the next thousand but the key thing to notice from our point of view is that uh even though you might like our global governance..."

"it's easy to lose touch of reality i'm nervous about that in myself to make sure that you never lose touch um as you get sort of older wiser you know how you generally get like disrespectful of kids k..."

"life on earth and throughout other kinds of lives like what is really useful you mentioned competition seems to be a one fundamental i've tried to do analysis of where our distant descendants might go..."

"interesting thing that will that we can predict robustly eventually you know maybe a few centuries maybe longer eventually our descendants will care about the future can you speak to the intuition beh..."

"risk if there's something that would affect all of your descendants then if you take that risk you might have more descendants but you might have zero and that's just really bad to have zero descendan..."

"direct preference first of all your thicket is so clear i love it so mathematical and thank you for for thinking so clearly with me and bearing with my interruptions and and going on the tangents when..."

"concept so the they there is very is very interesting who this they are but the key thing is we're making predictions that i think are somewhat robust about what our distant descendants will be like a..."

"that has a very long tail that is there are rare very large wars so the average war is much worse than the median war yes because of this long tail and that makes it hard to identify trends over time ..."

"questionable because uh yeah well everything you said is correct the question is like what can we infer about the future of civilization threatening pandemics or nuclear war from studying the history ..."

"uh that that so it's it's a really important question to understand is are humans capable one human like how many humans on earth if i give them a button now say you pressing this button will kill eve..."

"you're looking at right right so if you say if you look at the history of war you know we've had a lot of wars pretty consistently over many centuries so if i ask if you ask will we have a nuclear war..."

"certain rate at which people are willing to make big destruction in terms of war yes okay and if you're willing to project that data forward that i think like if you want to ask over periods of thousa..."

"but the pressures that made foragers into farmers were part mediated by poverty farmers are poor and if they deviated from the farming norms that every people around them supported they were quite at ..."

"science fiction celebrates the star trek or the culture novels people like this image that we are moving toward this world we're basically like foragers we're peaceful we share we make decisions colle..."

"and that's when you think about large-scale wars they don't start learning they didn't have coordinated large-scale wars in the ways chimpanzees do chimpanzees do have wars between one tribe of chimpa..."

"so it's the simplicity of the recipient see i i tend to uh just to push back let's let's explore the possibility where that's not the case can we communicate with ants i find that um like this idea th..."

"have been expanding for millions of years they would have a very advanced civilization and then they would finally be arriving here you know after a billion years perhaps of expanding in which case th..."

"that is isn't it they couldn't just be right at the edge very unlikely that most likely they would have been around waiting for us for a long time they could have come here anytime in the last million..."

"they would move at different rates and most likely most of them would never you know reach an advanced level before the deadline but maybe one other did and maybe it did before us so if they did they ..."

"interaction between the elements of the cluster yes non-grabby alien civilizations like kind of primitive alien civilizations like us with others and they might be a little bit ahead that's so fascina..."

"try to do that through a global authoritarian regime or through something that's internal to that meaning it's part of the nature of life that it doesn't want as like an advanced political officer in ..."

"expansion that's a substantial competence let me think about this so you don't think there could be a barrier in 100 million years you don't think there could be a barrier to like technological barrie..."

"to convince us to not expand convincing quotes right through various mechanisms so obviously one thing we conclude is they didn't just destroy us that would have been completely possible right so the ..."

"let me see we're clever enough that we can figure out their agenda that is just from the fact that we're here if we see that they're here we can figure out oh they want us not to expand and look they ..."

"without being super advanced it was nevertheless resilient to the harsh conditions of space there's some graphs that i've been impressed by that show sort of the level of genetic information in variou..."

"we'll try to talk about other ideas of the origin of life but let me return to ufo sightings is there other explanations that are possible outside of panspermia siblings that can explain no grabby ali..."

"ask about conspiracy theories because you've written about institutions on authorities what um this is a bit of a therapy session but uh what do we make of conspiracy theories the phrase itself is pus..."

"that doesn't allow me to intuit the competence that humans are able to uh to uh achieve in uh constructing a conspiracy theory so for example one one thing that people often talk about is like intelli..."

"about centralized system of government how much conspiracy is possible how much the intelligence agencies or some other source can generate sufficiently robust propaganda that controls the populace if..."

"so if you can get a lot of people to think that supporting the comparison conspiracy is helpful then a lot more might do that and there's just a lot of things that people just don't want to see so if ..."

"and uh so the the the conspiracy theory is b would say that the businesses that sell you medicine don't want you to know that fact and then you're saying that there's also part of this is that people ..."

"and many people try to take that book as a self-help book where they're trying to improve themselves and and make sure they look at more things and that often goes badly because it's harder to actuall..."

"how are you self-deceiving yourself in this task and how are you being self how's your like why is the dictator manipulating you inside your head to be so critical like there's norms why do you want t..."

"it's always a bigger there's always a bigger page and then you'll be remembered by more yeah um also that explains your choice of colorful shirt that looks great in a black background so you definitel..."

"motivations uh you know convincing and pressing tyler cohen is not gonna help you get laid trust me i tried all right uh what are some notable um sort of effects of the elephant in the brain in everyd..."

"so now we're looking for puzzles in patient and voter behavior what are they choosing and why do they choose that and how much exactly and then we can explain that potentially again returning to the p..."

"respect to medicine we have millions of papers published in medicine over the years most of which give the impression that medicine is useful there's a small literature on randomized experiments of th..."

"just looking around us especially during this time of the pandemic there's been a growing distrust of authorities of institutions even an institution of science itself what are the pros and cons of au..."

"nothing so what you mentioned who the world's most beloved organization uh so you know this is me speaking in general who and cdc has been kind of i depending on degrees and right uh details just not ..."

"complained about that's that that's the idea of an authority that would be the good id where's the con okay so what's the negative how does that go wrong the con is that if you think of yourself as th..."

"a bigger con on authorities which is the human question this comes back to global government and so on is that you know there's humans that sit in chairs during meetings in those authorities they have..."

"human forces whenever you have an authority it starts getting to people's heads one of the most this me as a scientist one of the most disappointing things to see during the pandemic is the use of aut..."

"is core to sort of what it is to be an economist i'm a professor of economics there you go for the authority again no so it's about saying just joking yes we often have a situation where we see a worl..."

"i would agree with you that our information institutions that is the information institutions by which we collect information and aggregate it and share with people are especially broken in the sense ..."

"sort of i'm a romantic creature by nature i romanticize winston churchill and i when i think about nazi germany i think about hitler more than i do about the individual people of nazi germany you thin..."

"for me at least in the way i see it is a place of freedom of exploring ideas scientific engineering ideas engineering ideas more than a corporate more than a company more than a lot of domains in life..."

"you're an undergraduate student and you can do all kinds of wild things when you're a graduate student anyway all that to say you've thought about this aspect too is there something uh positive insigh..."

"that payment right so first of all they're students and the question is are students getting good value for their education and you know on each person is getting value in the sense that they are iden..."

"years ago i started studying this topic exactly because this was my issue and this was many decades ago now and i spent a long time and my best guess still is prediction markets betting markets so if ..."

"information on a topic if you want to induce an accomplishment you can create prizes and there's of course a long history of prizes to induce accomplishments and we moved away from prizes even though ..."

"prestige that is recent publications recent you know job affiliation institutional affiliations recent you know invitations to speak recent grants we are today taking other impressive academics recent..."

"intellectual progress so my proposal is we actually pay people in several centuries to do this historical analysis and we have betting mark we have prediction markets today where we buy and sell asset..."

"will say about them that's brilliant so this concept of idea futures can you elaborate what this would entail i've been elaborating two versions of it here so one is if there's a particular question s..."

"literal very cash very direct and literal yes so or well crypto is whatever yes true so the idea would be research labs would be for-profit they would have as their expense paying researchers to study..."

"other parameters that we want to decimate you don't think those markets would also respond to recency of prestige and all those kinds of things they would respond but the question is if they might res..."

"rank them and so i designed this other alternative based on historical evaluation centuries later just about who's how how good because that's what i think most of the customers really care about cust..."

"which are insights which dramatically change my world view your world view uh you write i loved science fiction as a child studied physics and artificial intelligence for a long time each and now stud..."

"a surprise what would you say is the catalyst for the for the view quake in in in theoretical physics in the 20th century what where does that come from so the interesting thing about einstein it seem..."

"same things is this something you believe yeah something yes so i think when you look at sort of just the history of physics in the history of other areas you know some areas like that there's just th..."

"so if you look at the details of course you know einstein did it for somebody else and it's well worth celebrating einstein for that and you know we by celebrating the particular people who did someth..."

"research that is when there's an area where there's lots of people working together you know who are sort of scoping each other and getting getting a result just before somebody else does you ask well..."

"well or are they you just clearly the biggest view quake in artificial intelligence is the realization of just how complicated our human minds are so most people who come to artificial intelligence fr..."

"is i think uh that's a good point but i think it's a it's a very early view quake it's when the uh uh sure done in kruger crashes hard it's the first realization that humans are actually quite incredi..."

"i can't i refuse to sort of know the the road on the road is full of surprises so long sure is an interesting like you said with the six hard steps that humans had to take to arrive at where we are fr..."

"to measure that journey in elon musk's that's the new uh well we don't get any less very often so that's that's a long time scale for now i don't know maybe you can clone or maybe multiply or even kno..."

"space right so um and you know sometimes like military technology there's a lot of military technology there's a lot of small ones but every once in a while a particular military weapon like makes a b..."

"dramatically right so when we get to ai now the now i can frame the question how big is ai basically if so one way of thinking about ais is just all mental tasks and then you ask what fraction of task..."

"well if you have a history of prior chunkiness that could be your best estimate for future chunkiness so for example i mean even at the level of the world economy right we've had this what 10 000 year..."

"versus and how large a fraction of that was that and i'd say mostly in computer science most innovation has been relatively small chunks the bigger chunks have been rare well this is the interesting t..."

"which is a remarkable coincidence but it would be explained by saying well there's all these better algorithms you can't try until you have a big enough computer to pay the fixed cost of doing some tr..."

"okay okay you pretty much need to emulate a full human brain is that obvious is that obviously pretty obvious i'm talking about like you know so the key thing is you're emulating various brain cells a..."

"but it could be that you know the first emulation costs a billion dollars each right and then we have them but we can't really use them too expensive then the cost slowly comes down and now we have le..."

"will slowly steadily get there or there could be these thresholds where we reach a threshold and suddenly we can do a lot better yeah that's a good i mean question for both i tend to believe that all ..."

"in the past well i do think there's um it's like um like kunyan like revolution type it it seems like the data especially on ai's is is difficult to um uh to reason with because it's so recent it's su..."

"more money to be made so there's a lot more incentive for markets to do a lot of kind of innovation it seems like in the ai space but then again there's a history of winters and summers and so on so m..."

"because that's the only thing most people ever see is the first one and so you know with ai the first one is just how big the problem is and but once you get past that you'll find others certainly for..."

"um that that's that's a view quick it's surprising it's you know it's not what you would imagine they thought that's one of the great i guess inventions of human civilization right that trust the mark..."

"people not agreeing on what the best thing to do is that's the wrong thing so that's what goes wrong that is when you say what's fundamentally behind most political failures it's that people are ignor..."

"and that's where they put all their energy like so somebody might be a a you know a statesman or an actor or something else and people want to interview them and they want to say like what are you beh..."

"uh thinker and i am the suit wearing uh idiot full of silly questions all right that said uh let's put on your wise sage hat and ask you what advice would you give to young people today in high school..."

"it i mean that's a lot of what people worry about is well there's so many options and if i choose a thing and i stick with it you know i sacrificed all the other paths i could have taken but i mean so..."

"to spend the time with the fundamental stuff and everybody's forcing you like everybody wants you to do it and like you'll never get that chance again to sit there even though it's outside of your int..."

"accomplish enormous things at the age of 18 or whatever i mean you might as well practice trying to do things but that's mostly about learning how to do things by practicing there's a lot of things yo..."

"why do you think kids children are so magical like raising kids because i i'm i would love to have kids and um whenever i work with robots there's some of the same magic when there's an entity that co..."

"it's just one of those things you just should have expected and it's not a surprise well uh to push back and sort of in terms of influencing the future as we get more and more technology more and more..."

"happened because some rejections were just very scarring at a scale in in what kinds of communities and they did the individual scale i mean lots of different scales yeah all the different many differ..."

"going to be true for like i presume most basketball players are still just people if you ask them what was the worst part of their life it's going to be this kind of thing that was the worst part of l..."

"somebody who's like a servant we don't seem to be necessarily drawn to somebody that satisfies all your needs or something like that so it's clearly something we want or need but we're not exactly ver..."

"remember that song associated with you need to remember that situation in some sort of complete package yes you can't just take one part off of it and then if you get the whole package again if you re..."

"that happens and do you think that makes your you less special if if you're cloneable like does does that make you uh the experience of life the experience of a moment the scarcity of that moment the ..."

"so rich of feeling i think if you think of a song that lots of people listen to that are copies all over the world we're gonna call that a more special song yeah yeah so there's a perspective on copyi..."

"being part of this couple which each of which is very similar now if you said will the world you know if we lose one of the identical twins will the world miss it as much because you've got the other ..."

"discussed that in the book age if i'm like say say you have a lover and you make a copy of yourself but the lover doesn't make a copy well now which one of you or are both still related to the lover s..."

"completely exactly the same so future technology might be able to revive me and in fact i would be mainly counting on the brain emulation scenario which doesn't require reviving my entire biological b..."

"with time does this correlate to you earlier suggested that the interest in the future increases over time are those correlated interests in the future versus interest in the past like why do why are ..."

"be that's not the actual process that's changed the world over history up to this point it has not been the result of us deciding what we want and making it happen in our individual lives we can do th..."

"in expanding aggressively out into the cosmos until we meet other aliens the timing isn't clear we might become glabby and then this happens these are grubbiness and this are both the results of compe..."