The Hinge of History

It's funny to me that this idea is literally decades old, for one example from the 1940's (but by no means the first published), take CS Lewis:

“Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.”

For next q&a: What do you think of disjunctivism as a response to skepticism? Why is that the only really popular response to skepticism that you haven't made a video about?

Great video, thank you

Responsibility is less daunting when you don't think of every problem being on a global scale.
Regulating trade could do wonders.

Responsibility is less daunting when you don't think of every problem being on a global scale.
Regulating trade could do wonders.

The initial quote does not state or imply that this moment in history is more important than any to come. It merely states that it is the most important thus far, and if we survive it, the author casts a glimpse on the magnitude of that impact on the future. Nowhere does it state this is the last and greatest challenge to be faced, just faced thus far.

“If we act wisely”

I find it tough to imagine us going extinct just from people choosing to have kids. I mean even in rapidly declining populations you have some individuals procreating like crazy. So we'll just evolve to have whatever genes & memes lead to that behavior as those people's descendants repopulate the earth.

Thank you for providing accessible philosophical education for us <3

In the words of a famous poet: "I guess we'll never know"

This is absolutely f**** absurd because every period in history has been uniquely challenging and important so this a complete pile of f**** dog s*** this is not philosophy. this is sophistry.

One might call it an axis..

I once also thought our era is this "all-deciding hinge". But it turns out, we will miss the trajectory (for a galactical spread) with some margin. The pace of meaningful and relevant technological progress and the rate of expansion of industrial capabilities of mankind the past 40 years is simply too low. We are handily on the second half of the S-curve on the chart of progress (i.e. logistic curve. You may be more familiar with exponential curves, which we are not on).

Take spaceflight as an example. If we take the pace of progress over the last 40 years, and estimate where spaceflight could be in 160 years, it appears that, over 200 years, we would only make roughly a five-fold jump of the one "Space Shuttle to SpaceX Starship".

The same applies to other meaningful technologies, like gene-engineering and those relevant to transhumanism/anti-ageing.



You might ask "But don't we have time? In 200 years, a lot more tech will be researched and factories constructed. It's like comparing 1800 to 2000, it's invalid".

No. World population is stagnating and will be falling within these 200 years; we also have proven that a roughly 10 billion inhabitant planet Earth does not actually care much about reaching the stars. It does not produce enough such interest groups/investments.

The world populace also has too low an IQ too achieve much in that regard, even if it wanted. It would be different if the average IQ were like 130, because then, even with just a small population you have a good shot of getting quite a number of engineers/scientists that can produce space-tech. But the IQ density is too low; and because the world population is stagnating, it also means even in in absolute terms (rather than just relative) we will not get more high-IQ people than we already have.



Also, 200 years is enough time for various counter-tendencies to take hold. For example, we might get another destructive world war or two. Runaway AI could happen and destroy our productive capabilities. We can't even discount some novel societal/religious/cultural factors that would make such projects impossible.
We might, after 200+ years, simply enter a 'long tail' of very low population numbers/density, long timelines, cultural/political stagnation (which are both not inherently "bad", but it's not conductive for the galactic project), relatively advanced 'legacy' technology (which does not receive significant updates anymore), and a gradual settling into a low-intensity civilization that lacks the means to pursue that expansion of Earth-life onto a galactic scale, even if it desired.
For illustrative purposes, imagine a global population of 300 million who all live in ultra-luxury with robot butlers. Obviously, it appears that with such a low manufacturing/intellectual base, "the conquest of space" is not very viable anymore. We'd have missed the train.



Also, regarding AI, I think we will achieve AGI, but there will be no "technological singularity" and intelligence explosion. We'd have "missed the train" on that as well (which I'd consider desirable), because the AGI can't recursively self-improve.



[And no, I don't consider post-biological successors of humanity spreading to the stars to be a "success". By the same token, why wouldn't we then also consider the rats that breed in the sewers of our cities to be "our children"? It's the same dynamic. Just because we enable another species of being, doesn't mean their thriving is inherently meaningful. ]

The time of most rapid change was about 1905. People who were old then were born at a time when almost everyone was a peasant, living as they had for thousands of years. People who were born then had a reasonable chance of living to see the moon landing, and the transformation from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy and on to a service economy. By comparison to the early 20th century, things look pretty stable now.

The most important election is probably the most important US election, given the importance of the US as a superpower. That in turn was probably 1828, which saw the emergence of political parties in the modern sense. Before that, we had coalitions of office-holders. We had the incentives of voters in a winner-take-all plurality voting system, so that there were usually two viable candidates on the ballot. But we didn't have political parties as institutions that maintained a set of electioneering apparatus and linked a long-lasting constituency with a coalition of office-holders. Of course, 1856 is also a strong contender in retrospect, because James Buchanan took the Civil War from a risk that we had long been facing to an imminent reality. That's based on the possibility that the Civil War was the hinge of US history. Before it, the United States were referred to in the plural, implying that they really were a bunch of states and were only nominally united; since the Civil War, the United States is a country.

I guess the true problem with the hinge of history view is that if we DO live in a hinge of history we either die out and then we in the future never realise that it was the turning point when the destruction could have been averted or we don't and then we will have too much history ahead of us to realise the importance of the true turning point.

The horror lies in the idea we could have already passed the hinge without knowing.

Great video

Hinge this

FWIW this was a niche fad already in the mid-1990s, cf. the "Doomsday argument" by Brandon Carter? and one or two books by John Leslie.

My Mum says I'm special.

The ability to like and comment is the true sign that we are at the hinge of history. Everything depends on everyone liking and commenting.

The thing with the "whimper" theory on humanity just going extinct by us not having children anymore is that this completely ignores the conditions that cause people to have fewer children, as well as future possibilities for increased human longevity.
When welfare increases, fertility rates decrease. This is true in every country on the planet. If you don't have things like pensions, and (child) mortality rates are high, you will just have more children so that you can ensure you'll have someone to take care of you when you're older. When you have things like pensions, social security, and low mortality rates you don't need children to take care of you in the future so you have fewer children.
What this means is that when welfare decreases fertility rates will probably go up again.


People are also living longer, some experts believe that the first "immortal" generation is already born, the first generation of people whose life expectancy will increase faster than time passes, so every year their life expectancy increases with more than a year. These people will live longer, and be healthy and active for a longer time, potentially for centuries or millennia.

I am always very warry of theories that claim that I am (or 'we' are) very important. These theories are very attractive, but not for the right reasons.

truly interesting times will arrive when humanity depletes some of the finite resources we use for this civilization of ours. maybe we'll be in time to switch to other planets maybe we won't. other than that i think the alarmist buzz of the media should be ignored, as it is only there for the sole purpose of maintaining the current power structures through fear

The 'we' is a form of leveraged 'we' of an identity constructed from a dominant institution that happens also to be a leader cohort within that dominant institution, and so by necessity excludes a vast swath of persons whose role to organise functions of any meaningful identity that correlates to world politics is negligible to the extent the person might as well be living in the Mesopotamian civilisation. However from a subjectivist point of history where the person functions as an identity is the most important pertaining to an internalisation of self. The identity persists through the many worlds hypothesis and if so entails myriad selves from that function being in pleasure or pain but not both. This amounts to a form of manifesting reality through identity projection. Here the frail identity is supreme for the identity is empowered to enforce the exclusion of the excluders by the excluded who govern the 'we'.

This video is interesting

The focus long-termists place on survival of the species and locking values over things like medium term liveability on Earth and survival of actual human beings supports that old idea that what people really want is immortality; those two conditions are necessary for the immortality of the reputation of the people (and billionaires) of the present.

This video is definitely at the hinge of your YouTube career :3

For the algorithm 😊

Every generation thought so. This is all going to end like it has always ended. Very disappointingly.

I wonder who's the most important person in history. Probably some random person 300 000 years ago. Even if we live or soon will live in the most important time in history, it's possible that we would have lived in a similar situation but in the year 1000 or 3000 if some person 300 000 years ago decided to do something different.

You haven’t spoken so much about EA people like Parfit and MacAskill before. What are your thoughts on EA as a general movement?

Well, yes. Especially since all the ones from before are dead now.
tavi.

Would be fun to see an overview of all technologies that were feared like AI. All change makes something superfluous, obviously. Thanks, Kane!

Great Video! I love these more "niche" topics in philosophy, keep doing them if you ask me, in addition to more general introductions. Are you planning to do something on moral progress perhaps?
I have to read a book on that for uni, but it's arguing for the existence of genuine moral progress, while I have anti-realist intuitions. I would like to have some good arguments against moral progress, but it's impossible if you're working with sentences that already entail morality and the existence of thick moral concepts..

There's something about the concept of "influentialness" that bothers me. It seems to carry some baggage around free will but I can't put my finger on it. I haven't thought this through yet but thanks for the thought provoking video.

Algormancy!

The arrogance to unironically think that we are more important than everyone else who lived before or will live after. And here I thought my ex was a narcissist 🙄

This reminds me of the Dune series where the God Emperor uses his ability to see potential futures to lead humanity down the golden path of perpetual survival by a means of oppressive totalitarianism that makes everyone suffer.

Anyway, MacAskill's definition of "influential" is awkward, but that's not really important. The argument more restss on the Bayesian analysis. I really like the idea of arguing that "both prior and posterior probabilities are low, so nuts to your argument!" But it seems that it doesn't work out here for the reasons described in this video.

Using the model presented here, the most influential population is the one that exists at the same time humanity ends. Thus, "influential" can simply be defined as the change in probability for the end of humanity that a population causes.

Now, to know this, we would have to know which doomsday scenario (if any) is going to be the one to destroy humanity. My carbon emissions don't matter as much if the end of humanity is caused by nuclear devastation.

Now we of course can use the expected value to find out how much we think our actions today influence humanity's termination. In this analysis, my carbon emissions might be contributing to the end of humanity through climate change or they might be helping society progress towards technology that avoids that fate. It's probably the latter.

People will do things when the benefits exceed the costs and through this mechanism humanity progresses. We are having less kids because the benefits of having kids to extract their labor for the family has decreased. Humanity figures out the optimal number of kids to have in a given moment naturally. We are having the right amount of kids for this period in time.

This is also true for carbon emissions, or would be if the market was less constrained. Every Malthusian prediction (so far) has been proven wrong because technology outpaces the problems. Technology increases quickly in unfettered markets and halts in social ones. Given that climate change is a potential humanity ender, we need to not limit ourselves in pursuit of fixing the problem, because that would be counter productive. After all, the effect on the probability a population can have on the end of humanity can be one that reduces the probability.

I really was not expecting this from you, but in my teaching I have developed some thoughts.

The development of net human intelligence, including the massive expansion of knowledge of the last 200 years cannot be accounted for by evolutionary biology. It is an accident of evolution that arises from how language works, particularly from the distinction between sign and signifier that is a function of primate neurophysiology. It is this that has enabled the accident of the development of writing. It is an accident that only some human societies stumbled across. These societies are not in any way special in an evolutionary sense. We know this because societies that did not develop writing have had no difficulty in adopting it. Nonetheless it is writing that has enabled the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge.


The big problem is that we are not evolutionarily adapted to the accident of an exponential development of knowledge. The implication is that there is some kind of 'hinge of history', but that we are unlikely to be able to cope with it. We could conclude that we, or at least most of us, are doomed; we can speculate, but we cannot be sure of when and how.


Incidentally, as an aside, I do not see how you can entertain this discussion without a commitment to epistemological (or scientific) realism.

Ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times"

Yes
I like that unhinged sh*t

Just commenting for the algorithm. (And to say that I always click on your videos as soon as I see them go up!)

the self-sampling assumption is completely insane, as seen by examples such as this one:

"Suspend your disbelief for a moment and imagine that there was at some point just two humans on the face of the Earth – Adam and Eve. This fateful couple gave rise to all of human history, and we are all their descendants. Now, imagine yourself in their perspective.
From this perspective, there are two possible futures that might unfold. In one of them, the two original humans procreate and start the chain of actions leading to the rest of human history. In another, the two original humans refuse to procreate, thus preventing human history from happening. For the sake of this thought experiment, let’s imagine that Adam and Eve know that these are the only two possibilities (that is, suppose that there’s no scenario in which they procreate and have kids, but then those kids die off or somehow else prevent the occurence of history as we know it).

By the above reasoning, Adam and Eve should expect that the second of these is enormously more likely than the first. After all, if they never procreate and eventually just die off, then their birth orders are 1 and 2 out of a grand total of 2. If they do procreate, though, then their birth orders are 1 and 2 out of at least 100 billion. This is 50 billion times less likely than the alternative!
Now, the unusual bit of this comes from the fact that it seems like Adam and Eve have control over whether or not they procreate. For the sake of the thought experiment, imagine that they are both fertile, and they can take actions that will certainly result in pregnancy. Also assume that if they don’t procreate, Eve won’t get accidentally pregnant by some unusual means.

This control over their procreation, coupled with the improbability of their procreation, allows them to wield apparently magical powers. For instance, Adam is feeling hungry and needs to go out and hunt. He makes a firm commitment with Eve: “I shall wait for an hour for a healthy young deer to die in front of our cave entrance. If no such deer dies, then we will procreate and have children, leading to the rest of human history. If so, then we will not procreate, and guarantee that we don’t have kids for the rest of our lives.” (https://risingentropy.com/adam-and-eves-anthropic-superpowers/)

If SSA were right, then Adam should believe a deer will die right in front of him. Which is of course utterly crazy.

Yes, in fact, no one is more important than me.