Oz Veloshian

And corn is one of the many examples, but certainly one of the most profound, of corn yields just kept going up and not down.

And they went up faster than human population did, which means corn doesn't just feed people.

It feeds animals.

It provides fuel.

And there's a whole pushback to every single one of these.

Maybe it's not a good thing, and maybe it's not a good use of land.

But simply...

Parallel to that equation of we're running out of stuff, we just didn't run out of stuff.

We didn't run out of stuff whether it's oil, there was a whole peak oil theory in the 70s too, because our technology made it possible not to.

You couldn't have anticipated in the late 70s that corn yields would triple.

You couldn't have anticipated that you would be able to drill 20,000 feet under the ocean bed and find oil because the technology wasn't there.

And part of the problem today is because of the legacy of the 1990s, where the technologists promised everything and only delivered something, that sort of techno-optimism is in disrepute because it did overpromise.

So if you say today, I believe technology will solve some of the problems of global warming and climate change, that's a dismissible statement because in the past it was overpromised.

It shouldn't be nearly as dismissible statement because in the past we've

created technologies to solve for problems that human beings created.

I'm curious about the moment in technology as you see it.

You've also written a book about statistics and numbers and how we measure things called leading indicators.

Are you familiar with the concept of P-Doom?

No, but you're going to tell me.

P, open brackets, doom, closed brackets, is the probability that AI will kill us all.