Exidential risk is the subsuming of our substrait, or sub straits that make human civilization possible in the first place. Accidential risk is rivalrous dynamics: if i don't go after the attention of those preten social media users, and you do, then you'll win. And i'll lose. Excidential risk is technology that grows and improves expedentially. The greater the expedential power and technology, the more expedential risk is created. Daniel says that any civilization that doesn't address these three generator functions will inexorably self terminate.
We’ve explored many different problems on Your Undivided Attention — addiction, disinformation, polarization, climate change, and more. But what if many of these problems are actually symptoms of the same meta-problem, or meta-crisis? And what if a key leverage point for intervening in this meta-crisis is improving our collective capacity to problem-solve?
Our guest Daniel Schmachtenberger guides us through his vision for a new form of global coordination to help us address our global existential challenges. Daniel is a founding member of the Consilience Project, aimed at facilitating new forms of collective intelligence and governance to strengthen open societies. He's also a friend and mentor of Tristan Harris.
This insight-packed episode introduces key frames we look forward to using in future episodes. For this reason, we highly encourage you to listen to this edited version along with the unedited version.
We also invite you to join Daniel and Tristan at our Podcast Club! It will be on Friday, July 9th from 2-3:30pm PDT / 5-6:30pm EDT. Check here for details.