Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg The most important century (with Holden Karnofsky)
Aug 27, 2025
Holden Karnofsky, a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic and co-founder of GiveWell, dives into provocative topics about our future. He questions if we've hit 'peak progress' and whether ongoing economic growth is sustainable. Karnofsky discusses the risks of stagnation in innovation, the paradoxes of AI development, and parallels drawn between agricultural shifts and quality of life. He also reflects on the ethical complexities of aligning AI with human values, emphasizing the importance of responsible scaling in this transformative era.
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We Live In A Historically Unusual Moment
- Human history clusters most major technological and economic changes in the last few hundred years, making today unusually consequential.
- Extrapolating long-term exponential growth implies wildly different futures, so uncertainty about the next centuries is large.
Exponential Growth Makes Long Futures Implausible
- Sustained few-percent growth for millennia would demand implausible resource exploitation and output per atom in the galaxy.
- Thus long-run outcomes likely include stagnation, collapse, or transformative acceleration, not steady status quo.
Low-Hanging Fruit Explains Declining Per-Researcher Output
- Innovation often gets harder per researcher as fields mature because low-hanging fruit is picked.
- More researchers can offset that decline, but per-head productivity typically falls over time.