Joseph Henrich

So you can imagine getting the humans together because the humans have the big advantage of having stuff they care about, right?

There's stuff they want to invent.

So, I mean, the AI is still a tool at some point.

So I'm interested in that, but I'm interested in how these things like running out of training data is going to be dealt with, the value of making mistakes and serendipity, if you get rid of all those things, or how you're going to reintroduce them, those kinds of things.

Maybe there's a way to harness that, right?

But maybe we just didn't know how to harness it.

That's right.

Yeah, I know I don't have strong opinions about any of this, but I do think that one thing that in order to make all that work is, you know, humans are constantly getting hit with shocks, right?

So there's economic shocks, there's weather shocks, there's...

conflict with other groups.

There's pandemics.

And the shocks have big effects on how things go.

They inject new information into the system.

So I'd worry about a system that is too homogeneous and doesn't have enough noise-adding shocks and new challenges and things like that.

One of the things missing from our conversation is the kind of creativity that cultural evolution has figured out.

So to give you an example, at some point in human history, religions invented big, powerful, moralizing gods.

And this may have increased the

people's ability to cooperate.

Forget about the technological elements.

Some of the most important features of innovation over human history have been institutional and things that get people to cooperate.