Ep. 68: Jim Pethokoukis on How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, Conservative Futurism and the Genesis Clock for Technological Progress

Jim Pethokoukis is a policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, and writes the Faster, Please! newsletter on Substack.

The subject of this conversation is Jim's new book "The Conservative Futurist - How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised."

Ray Kurtzweil said in 1999:

“The twenty-first century will be different. The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems of need, if not desire, and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a post-biological future.…The result will be far greater transformations in the first two decades of the twenty-first century than we saw in the entire twentieth century.”

However, this future seems distant and progress towards it too slow.

The covid-19 pandemic that took place against a backdrop of scarcity: "too little housing, too few immigrants, too few entrepreneurs, not enough clean energy, not enough slots at top colleges, and not enough high-quality infrastructure."

This conversation is about how to counter The Great Stagnation, an "Upwing" vs. a "Downwing" culture and the "Three Tailwinds" that could accelerate Upwing such as a revival nuclear power or productivity boost due to artificial intelligence (AI).

One idea to nurture that culture is the "Genesis Clock" as opposed to the famous "Doomsday Clock" from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Jim suggests the Genesis Clock to tell humanity how close or distant it might be to a period so different from modern life that it would qualify as a new beginning for our civilisation.

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