Joscha Bach
speaker
510 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2023
last heard 23 Jan
Joscha Bach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it's only when we have AI and become completely software that we become infinitely adaptable and we don't have this generational and species change anymore. So if you take this larger perspective and you realize it's really not about us, it's not about Eliezer or humanity, but it's about life on earth or it's about defeating entropy for as long as we can,
while being as interesting as we can, then the perspective changes dramatically. And preventing AI from this perspective looks like a very big sin.
There is no single answer to this. It's a question that depends on the perspective that I'm taking at a given moment. And so there are perspectives that are determining most of my life as a human being. And there are other perspectives where I zoom out further and...
Imagine that when the great oxygenation event happened, that is, photosynthesis was invented and plants emerged and displaced a lot of the fungi and algae in favor of plant life and then later made animals possible. Imagine that the fungi would have gotten together and said, oh my God, this photosynthesis stuff is really, really bad. It's going to possibly displace and kill a lot of fungi.
We should slow it down and regulate it and make sure that it doesn't happen. This doesn't look good to me.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much the story of the Club of Rome, the limits to growth. And the cliff that we are stepping over is at least one foot as the delayed feedback. Basically, we do things that have consequences that can be felt generations later, and the severity increases even after we stop doing the thing.
I suspect that the original predictions that the climate scientists made were correct. So when they said that the tipping points were in the late 80s, they were probably in the late 80s. And if we would stop emission right now, we would not turn it back. Maybe there are ways for carbon capture. But so far, there is no sustainable carbon capture technology that we can deploy.
Maybe there's a way to put aerosols in the atmosphere to cool it down. Possibilities, right? But right now, per default, it seems that we will step into a situation where we feel that we've run too far. And going back is not something that we can do smoothly and gradually, but it's going to lead to a catastrophic event.
I think it's possible, but it doesn't seem to be likely. So I think this model that is being apparent in the simulations that we're making of
climate pollution economies and so on is that many effects are only visible with a significant delay and in that time the system is moving much more out of the equilibrium state or of the state where homeostasis is still possible and instead moves into a different state one that is going to harbor fewer people And that is basically the concern there. And again, it's a possibility.
And it's a possibility that is larger than the possibility that it's not happening, that we will be safe, that we will be able to dance back all the time.
There is also a thing that AI is probably going to happen, and it's going to make everything uncertain again. Because it is going to affect so many variables that it's very hard for us to make a projection into the future anymore. And maybe that's a good thing.
It does not give us the freedom, I think, to say now we don't need to care about anything anymore because AI will either kill us or save us. But I suspect that if humanity continues, it will be due to AI.
I think human relationships are already fundamentally transformed and it's already very weird.
For instance, social media.
No, I think that, for instance, many people live in intentional communities right now. They're moving around until they find people that they can relate to and they become their family. And often that doesn't work because it turns out that instead of having grown networks where you get around with the people that you grew up with, you have more transactional relationships.
You shop around, you have markets for attention and pleasure and relationships.
It's also a question how magical was it before? Was it that you just could rely on instincts that used your intuitions and you didn't need to rationally reflect? But once you understand, it's no longer magical because you actually understand
why you were attracted to this person at this age and not to that person at this age and what the actual considerations were that went on in your mind and what the calculations were, what's the likelihood that you're going to have a sustainable relationship with this person, that this person is not going to leave you for somebody else, how are your life trajectories are going to evolve and so on.
And when you're young, you're unable to explicate all this and you have to rely on intuitions and instincts that in part you were born with And also in the wisdom of your environment that is going to give you some kind of reflection on your choices.
Showing 421–440 of 510 · page 22 of 26
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