The Evolution of Evolution and the Evolution of Technology

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

markets rive innovation, and a as a result of they drive innovation. And the competition pressure is actually a healthy, good thing,. That's how we get higher quality of life for everybody. But one person to day with nuclear weapons or biote can really fuck a lot of stuff up. The system becomes very fragile when one person or one group has so much power relative to the entire system. Our technologies allowed us to up ratchit. We can't model ourselves as apex predators any more. If we keep competing for who'se apex predator in that way, but we can pl up miles of fish at once, we clearly debase the planet's ability to support us.

This week I'm speaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Daniel is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.

The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal.

Towards these ends, he’s had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.

Motivated by the belief that advancing collective intelligence and capacity is foundational to the integrity of any civilization, and necessary to address the unique risks we currently face given the intersection of globalization and exponential technology, he has spoken publicly on many of these topics, hoping to popularize and deepen important conversations and engage more people in working towards their solutions. Many of these can be found here.

We talk about the current state of the phase shift, whether we are past the point of no return for social collapse, Daniel’s three generator functions of existential risk, the definition of an adequate social architecture that avoids existential risk, how technology creates asymmetric advantage that debases the planetary life support system, why we need to create technology that leads to ‘metastability’, the pollution of the epistemic commons, why we need to define problems in a comprehensive way where the solutions don’t create worse problems, the vows Daniel made as a teenager, what progress is being made at solving the generator functions of existential risk, the auto-poetic nature of trauma, and the necessity of a mature relationship between certainty and uncertainty.