Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal

*Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio"*

Today’s world

Transformative AI

Digital people
World of

Misaligned AI
World run by
Something else

or
or

Stable, galaxy-wide
civilization

> This is the third post in a series explaining my view that we could be in the most important century of all time. ([Here's the roadmap for this series.](https://www.cold-takes.com/roadmap-for-the-most-important-century-series/))
> * The [first piece](https://www.cold-takes.com/all-possible-views-about-humanitys-future-are-wild/) in this series discusses our unusual era, which could be very close to the transition between an Earth-bound civilization and a stable galaxy-wide civilization.
>  * This piece discusses "digital people," a category of technology that could be key for this transition (and would have even bigger impacts than the hypothetical [Duplicator](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/b7b1dec5-c6aa-4be4-9302-c47088dda3b2/) discussed previously).
> * Many of the ideas here appear somewhere in sci-fi or speculative nonfiction, but I'm not aware of another piece laying out (compactly) the basic idea of digital people and the key reasons that a world of digital people would be so different from today's.
> * The idea of digital people provides a concrete way of imagining how the right kind of technology (which I believe to be almost certainly feasible) could change the world **radically**, such that "humans as we know them" would no longer be the main force.
> * It will be important to have this picture, because I'm going to argue that AI advances this century could quickly lead to digital people or similarly significant technology. The transformative potential of something like digital people, combined with how quickly AI could lead to it, form the case that we could be in the most important century.
>

Intro
-----

[Previously](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator), I wrote:

*When some people imagine the future, they picture the kind of thing you see in sci-fi films. But these sci-fi futures seem very tame, compared to the future I expect ...*

*The future I picture is enormously bigger, faster, weirder, and either much much better or much much worse compared to today. It's also potentially a lot sooner than sci-fi futures: I think particular, achievable-seeming technologies could get us there quickly.*

This piece is about **digital people**, one example[1](#fn1) of a technology that could lead to an extremely big, fast, weird future.

To get the idea of digital people, imagine a computer simulation of a specific person, in a virtual environment. For example, a simulation of you that reacts to all "virtual events" - virtual hunger, virtual weather, a virtual computer with an inbox - just as you would. (Like [The Matrix](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/)? See footnote.[2](#fn2)) I explain in more depth in the [FAQ companion piece](https://www.cold-takes.com/digital-people-faq).

The central case I'll focus on is that of digital people just like us, perhaps created via [mind uploading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading) (simulating human brains). However, one could also imagine entities unlike us in many ways, but still properly thought of as "descendants" of humanity; those would be digital people as well. (More on my choice of term [in the FAQ](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#are-digital-people-different-from-mind-uploads).)

Popular culture on this sort of topic tends to focus on the prospect of [digital immortality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_immortality): people avoiding death by taking on a digital form, which can be backed up just like you back up your data. But I consider this to be small potatoes compared to other potential impacts of digital people, in particular:

* **Productivity.** Digital people could be copied, just as we can easily make copies of ~any software today. They could also be run much faster than humans. Because of this, digital people could have effects comparable to those of the [Duplicator](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator), but more so: unprecedented (in history or in sci-fi movies) levels of economic growth and productivity.

* **Social science.** Today, we see a lot of progress on understanding scientific laws and developing cool new technologies, but not so much progress on understanding human nature and human behavior. Digital people would fundamentally change this dynamic: people could make copies of themselves (including sped-up, temporary copies) to explore how different choices, lifestyles and environments affected them. Comparing copies would be informative in a way that current social science rarely is.

* **Control of the environment.** Digital people would experience whatever world they (or the controller of their virtual environment) wanted. Assuming digital people had true conscious experience (an assumption discussed [in the FAQ](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#could-digital-people-be-conscious-could-they-deserve-human-rights)), this could be a good thing (it should be possible to eliminate disease, material poverty and non-consensual violence for digital people) or a bad thing (if human rights are not protected, digital people could be subject to scary levels of control).

* **Space expansion.** The population of digital people might become staggeringly large, and the computers running them could end up distributed throughout our galaxy and beyond. Digital people could exist anywhere that computers could be run - so space settlements could be more straightforward for digital people than for biological humans.

* **Lock-in.** In today's world, we're used to the idea that the future is unpredictable and uncontrollable. Political regimes, ideologies, and cultures all come and go (and evolve). But a community, city or nation of digital people could be much more stable.
	+ Digital people need not die or age.

	+ Whoever sets up a "virtual environment" containing a community of digital people could have quite a bit of long-lasting control over what that community is like. For example, they might build in software to reset the community (both the virtual environment and the people in it) to an earlier state if particular things change - such as who's in power, or what religion is dominant.

	+ I consider this a disturbing thought, as it could enable long-lasting authoritarianism, though it could also enable things like permanent protection of particular human rights.

I think these effects (elaborated below) could be a very good or a very bad thing. How the early years with digital people go could irreversibly determine which.

I think similar consequences would arise from any technology that allowed (a) extreme control over our experiences and environment; (b) duplicating human minds. This means there are potentially **many ways for the future to become as wacky as what I sketch out here.** I discuss digital people because doing so provides a particularly easy way to imagine the consequences of (a) and (b): it is essentially about transferring the most important building block of our world (human minds) to a domain (software) where we are used to the idea of having a huge amount of control to program whatever behaviors we want.

Much of this piece is inspired by [Age of Em](https://smile.amazon.com/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth/dp/1536619590?sa-no-redirect=1), an unusual and fascinating book. It tries to describe a hypothetical world of digital people (specifically mind uploads) in a lot of detail, but (unlike science fiction) it also aims for predictive accuracy rather than entertainment. In many places I find it overly specific, and overall, I don't expect that the world it describes will end up having much in common with a real digital-people-filled world. However, it has a number of sections that I think illustrate how powerful and radical a technology digital people could be.

Below, I will:

* Describe the basic idea of digital people, and link to a [FAQ](https://www.cold-takes.com/digital-people-faq) on the idea.

* Go through the potential implications of digital people, listed above.

This is a piece that different people may want to read in different orders. Here's an overall guide to the piece and FAQ:

|  | **Normal humans** | **Digital people** |
| **Possible today** ([More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#are-digital-people-possible))
  | Yes | No |
| **Probably possible someday** ([More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#are-digital-people-possible))
  | Yes | Yes |
| **Can interact with the real world**, do most jobs ([More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#could-digital-people-interact-with-the-real-world-for-example-could-a-real-world-company-hire-a-digital-person-to-work-for-it))
  | Yes | Yes |
| **Conscious**, should have human rights ([More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#could-digital-people-be-conscious-could-they-deserve-human-rights))
  | Yes | Yes |
| **Easily duplicated**, ala [The Duplicator](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator) ([More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#basics-of-digital-people-repeated-from-main-piece))
  | No | Yes |
| **Can be run sped-up** ([More](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#basics-of-digital-people-repeated-from-main-piece))
  | No | Yes |
| Can make **"temporary copies"** that run fast, then retire at slow speed ([More](#productivity))

  | No | Yes |
| **Productivity and social science:** could cause unprecedented economic growth, productivity, and knowledge of human nature and behavior ([More](#productivity))
  | No | Yes |
| **Control of the environment**: can have their experiences altered in any way ([More](#virtual-reality-and-control-of-the-environment))
  | No | Yes |
| **Lock-in**: could live in highly stable civilizations with no aging or death, and "digital resets" stopping certain changes ([More](#lock-in))
  | No | Yes |
| **Space expansion:** can live comfortably anywhere computers can run, thus highly suitable for galaxy-wide expansion ([More](#space-expansion))
  | No | Yes |
| **Good or bad?** ([More](#would-these-impacts-be-a-good-or-bad-thing))
  | Outside the scope of this piece
  | Could be very good or bad
  |

Premises
--------

This piece focuses on how digital people could change the world. I will mostly assume that **digital people are just like us, except that they can be easily copied, run at different speeds, and embedded in virtual environments.** In particular, I will assume that digital people are conscious, have human rights, and can do most of the things humans can, including interacting with the real world.

I expect **many readers will have trouble engaging with this until they see answers to some more basic questions about digital people.** Therefore, I encourage readers to click on any questions that sound helpful from the [companion FAQ](https://www.cold-takes.com/digital-people-faq), or just read the FAQ straight through. Here is the list of questions discussed in the FAQ:

* [Basics](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#basics)
	+ [Basics of digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#basics-of-digital-people-repeated-from-main-piece)+ [I'm finding this hard to imagine. Can you use an analogy?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#i'm-finding-this-hard-to-imagine-can-you-use-an-analogy)+ [Could digital people interact with the real world? For example, could a real-world company hire a digital person to work for it?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#could-digital-people-interact-with-the-real-world-for-example-could-a-real-world-company-hire-a-digital-person-to-work-for-it)* [Humans and digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#humans-and-digital-people)
	+ [Could digital people be conscious? Could they deserve human rights?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#could-digital-people-be-conscious-could-they-deserve-human-rights)+ [Let's say you're wrong, and digital people couldn't be conscious. How would that affect your views about how they could change the world?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#let's-say-you're-wrong-and-digital-people-couldn't-be-conscious-how-would-that-affect-your-views-about-how-they-could-change-the-world)* [Feasibility](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#feasibility)
	+ [Are digital people possible?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#are-digital-people-possible)+ [How soon could digital people be possible?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#how-soon-could-digital-people-be-possible)* [Other questions](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#other-questions)
	+ [I'm having trouble picturing a world of digital people - how the technology could be introduced, how they would interact with us, etc. Can you lay out a detailed scenario of what the transition from today's world to a world full of digital people might look like?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#i'm-having-trouble-picturing-a-world-of-digital-people-how-the-technology-could-be-introduced-how-they-would-interact-with-us-etc-can-you-lay-out-a-detailed-scenario-of-what-the-transition-from-today's-world-to-a-world-full-of-digital-people-might-look-like)+ [Are digital people different from mind uploads?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#are-digital-people-different-from-mind-uploads)+ [Would a digital copy of me be me?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#would-a-digital-copy-of-me-be-me)+ [What other questions can I ask?](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#what-other-questions-can-i-ask)

How could digital people change the world?
------------------------------------------

### Productivity

Like any software, digital people could be instantly and accurately copied. [The Duplicator](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator) argues that the ability to "copy people" could lead to rapidly accelerating economic growth: "Over the last 100 years or so, the economy has doubled in size every few decades. With a Duplicator, it could double in size every year or month, on its way to hitting the limits."

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/07/digital-people-feedback-loop.gif)Thanks to María Gutiérrez Rojas for this graphic, a variation on a similar set of graphics from [The Duplicator](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator/) illustrating how duplicating people could cause explosive growth.

Digital people could create a more dramatic effect than this, because of their ability to be sped up (perhaps by thousands or millions of times)[3](#fn3) as well as slowed down (to save on costs). This could further increase both speed and coordinating ability.[4](#fn4)

Another factor that could increase productivity: "Temporary" digital people could complete a task and then retire to a nice virtual life, while running very slowly (and cheaply).[5](#fn5) This could make some digital people comfortable copying themselves for temporary purposes. Digital people could, for example, copy themselves hundreds of times to try different approaches to figuring out a problem or gaining a skill, then keep only the most successful version and make many copies of that version.

It's possible that digital people could be *less* of an economic force than [The Duplicator](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator) since digital people would lack human bodies. But this seems likely to be only a minor consideration (details in footnote).[6](#fn6)

### Social science

Today, we see a lot of impressive innovation and progress in some areas, and relatively little in other areas.

For example, we're constantly able to buy cheaper, faster computers and more realistic video games, but we don't seem to be constantly getting better at making friends, falling in love, or finding happiness.[7](#fn7) We also aren't clearly getting better at things like fighting addiction, and getting ourselves to behave as we (on reflection) want to.

One way of thinking about it is that *natural sciences* (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology) are advancing much more impressively than *social sciences* (e.g. economics, psychology, sociology). Or: "We're making great strides in understanding natural laws, not so much in understanding ourselves."

Digital people could change this. It could address what I see as perhaps the **fundamental reason social science is so hard to learn from: it's too hard to run true experiments and make clean comparisons.**

Today, if we we want to know whether meditation is helpful to people:

* We can compare people who meditate to people who don't, but there will be lots of differences between those people, and we can't isolate the effect of meditation itself. (Researchers try to do so with various statistical techniques, but these raise their own issues.)

* We could also try to run an experiment in which people are randomly assigned to meditate or not. But we need a lot of people to participate, all at the same time and under the same conditions, in the hopes that the differences between meditators and non-meditators will statistically "wash out" and we can pick up the effects of meditation. Today, these kinds of experiments - known as "randomized controlled trials" - are expensive, logistically challenging, time-consuming, and almost always end up with ambiguous and difficult-to-interpret results.

But in a world with digital people:

* Anyone could make a copy of themselves to try out meditation, perhaps even dedicating themselves to it for several years (possibly sped-up).[8](#fn8) If they liked the results, they could then meditate for several years themselves, and ensure that all future copies were made from someone who had reaped the benefits of meditation.

* Social scientists could study people who had tried things like this and look for patterns, which would be much more informative than social science research tends to be now. (They could also run deliberate experiments, recruiting/paying people to make copies of themselves to try different lifestyles, cities, schools, etc. - these could be much smaller, cheaper, *and* more definitive than today's social science experiments.[9](#fn9))

The ability to run experiments could be good or bad, depending on the robustness and enforcement of scientific ethics. If informed consent weren't sufficiently protected, digital people could open up the potential for an enormous amount of abuse; if it were, it could hopefully primarily enable learning.

Digital people could also enable:

* **Overcoming bias.** Digital people could make copies of themselves (including temporary, sped-up copies) to consider arguments delivered in different ways, by different people, including with different apparent race and gender, and see whether the copies came to different conclusions. In this way they could explore which cognitive biases - from sexism and racism to wishful thinking and ego - affected their judgments, and work on improving and adapting to these biases. (Even if people weren't excited to do this, they might have to, as others would be able to ask for information on how biased they are and expect to get clear data.)

* **Bonanzas of reflection and discussion.** Digital people could make copies of themselves (including sped-up, temporary copies) to study and discuss particular philosophy questions, psychology questions, etc. in depth, and then summarize their findings to the original.[10](#fn10) By seeing how different copies with different expertises and life experiences formed different opinions, they could have much more thoughtful, informed answers than I do to questions like "What do I want in life?", "Why do I want it?", "How can I be a person I'm proud of being?", etc.

### Virtual reality and control of the environment

As stated above, digital people could live in "virtual environments." In order to design a virtual environment, programmers would systematically generate the right sort of light signals, sound signals, etc. to send to a digital person as if they were "really there."

One could say the historical role of science and technology is to give people more control over their environment. And one could think of digital people almost as the logical endpoint of this: digital people would experience whatever world they (or the controller of their virtual environment) wanted.

This could be a very bad or good thing:

[![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/06/matrix-bad-squarer.png)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWBntJAvTmY)**Bad thing.** Someone who controlled a digital person's virtual environment could have almost unlimited control over them.

* For this reason, it would be important for a world of digital people to include effective enforcement of basic human rights for all digital people. (More on this idea [in the FAQ](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#i'm-having-trouble-picturing-a-world-of-digital-people-how-the-technology-could-be-introduced-how-they-would-interact-with-us-etc-can-you-lay-out-a-detailed-scenario-of-what-the-transition-from-today's-world-to-a-world-full-of-digital-people-might-look-like).)

* A world of digital people could very quickly get dystopian if digital people didn't have human rights protections. For example, imagine if the rule were "Whoever owns a server can run whatever they want on it, including digital copies of anyone." Then people might make "digital copies" of themselves that they ran experiments on, forced to do work, and even open-sourced, so that anyone running a server could make and abuse copies. [This very short story](https://qntm.org/mmacevedo) (recommended, but chilling) gives a flavor for what that might be like.

[![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/06/matrix-good-squarer.gif)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guVAeFs5XwE)**Good thing.** On the other hand, if a digital person were in control of their own environment (or someone else was and looked out for them), they could be free from any experiences they wanted to be free from, including hunger, violence, disease, other forms of ill health, and debilitating pain of any kind. Broadly, they could be "free from material need" - other than the need for computing resources to be run at all.

* This is a big change from today's world. Today, if you get cancer, you're going to suffer pain and debilitation even if everyone in the world would prefer that you didn't. Digital people need not experience having cancer if they and others don't want this to happen.

* In particular, physical coercion within a virtual environment could be made impossible (it could simply be impossible to transmit signals to another digital person corresponding to e.g. being punched or shot).

* Digital people might also have the ability to experience a lot of things we can't experience now - inhabiting another person's body, going to outer space, being in a "dangerous" situation without actually being in danger, eating without worrying about health consequences, changing from one apparent race or gender to another, etc.

### Space expansion

If digital people underwent an explosion of economic growth as discussed above, this could come with an explosion in the *population* of digital people (for reasons discussed in [The Duplicator](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator)).

It might reach the point where they needed to build spaceships and leave the solar system in order to get enough energy, metal, etc. to build more computers and enable more lives to exist.

Settling space could be much easier for digital people than for biological humans. They could exist anywhere one could run computers, and the basic ingredients needed to do that - raw materials, energy, and "real estate"[11](#fn11) - are all super-abundant throughout our galaxy, not just on Earth. Because of this, the population of digital people could end up becoming staggeringly large.[12](#fn12)

### Lock-in

In today's world, we're used to the idea that the future is unpredictable and uncontrollable. Political regimes, ideologies, and cultures all come and go (and evolve). Some are good, and some are bad, but it generally doesn't seem as though anything will last forever. But communities, cities, and nations of digital people could be much more stable.

First, because digital people need not die or physically age, and their environment need not deteriorate or run out of anything. As long as they could keep their server running, everything in their virtual environment would be physically capable of staying as it is.

Second, because an environment could be designed to *enforce* stability. For example, imagine that:

* A community of digital people forms its own government (this would require either overpowering or getting consent from their original government).

* The government turns authoritarian and repeals the basic human rights protections discussed [in the FAQ](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257/#i'm-having-trouble-picturing-a-world-of-digital-people-how-the-technology-could-be-introduced-how-they-would-interact-with-us-etc-can-you-lay-out-a-detailed-scenario-of-what-the-transition-from-today's-world-to-a-world-full-of-digital-people-might-look-like).

* The head wants to make sure that they - or perhaps their ideology of choice - stays in power forever.

* They could overhaul the virtual environment that they and all of the other citizens are in (by gaining access to the source code and reprogramming it, or operating robots that physically alter the server), so that certain things about the environment can never be changed - such as who's in power. If such a thing were about to change, the virtual environment could simply prohibit the action or reset to an earlier state.

* It would still be possible to change the virtual environment from outside - e.g., to physically destroy, hack or otherwise alter the server running it. But if this were taking place after a long period of population growth and space colonization, then the server might be way out in outer space, light-years from anyone who'd be interested in doing such a thing.

Alternatively, "digital correction" could be a force for good if used wisely enough. It could be used to ensure that no dictator ever gains power, or that certain basic human rights are always protected. If a civilization became "mature" enough - e.g., fair, equitable and prosperous, with a commitment to freedom and self-determination and a universally thriving population - it could keep these properties for a very long time.

I'm not aware of many in-depth analyses of the "lock-in" idea, but I elaborate further on this idea [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/weak-point-in-most-important-century-lock-in/). *December 2022 update: there is further analysis on this point [here.](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KqCybin8rtfP3qztq/agi-and-lock-in)*

### Would these impacts be a good or bad thing?

Throughout this piece, I imagine many readers have been thinking "That sounds terrible! Does the author think it would be good?" Or "That sounds great! Does the author disagree?"

My take on a future with digital people is that it **could be very good or very bad, and how it gets set up in the first place could irreversibly determine which.**

* Hasty use of lock-in (discussed [above](#lock-in)) and/or overly quick spreading out through the galaxy (discussed [above](#space-expansion)) could result in a huge world full of digital people (as conscious as we are) that is heavily dysfunctional, dystopian or at least falling short of its potential.

* But acceptably good initial conditions (protecting basic human rights for digital people, at a minimum), plus a lot of patience and accumulation of wisdom and self-awareness we don't have today (perhaps facilitated by [better social science](#social-science)), could lead to a large, stable, much better world. It should be possible to eliminate disease, material poverty and non-consensual violence, and create a society much better than today's.

**Next in series:** [This Can't Go On](https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/)

---

Footnotes
---------

1. The best example I can think of, but surely not the only one. [↩](#fnref1)- The movie *The Matrix* gives a decent intuition for the idea with its fully-immersive virtual reality, but unlike the heroes of *The Matrix*, a digital person need not be connected to any physical person - they could exist as pure software.

 The agents ("bad guys") are more like digital people than the heroes are. In fact, one extensively [copies himself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poLPKdc-zTY&t=130s&ab_channel=FlashbackFM). [↩](#fnref2)- See *Age of Em* Chapter 6, starting with "Regarding the computation ..." [↩](#fnref3)- For example, when multiple teams of digital people need to coordinate on a project, they might speed up (or slow down) particular steps and teams in order to make sure that each piece of the project is completed just on time. This would allow more complex, "fragile" plans to work out. (This point is from Age of Em Chapter 17, "Preparation" section.) [↩](#fnref4)- See *Age of Em* Chapter 11, "Retirement" section.  [↩](#fnref5)- Without human bodies - and depending on what kinds of robots were available - digital people might not be good substitutes for humans when it comes to jobs that rely heavily on human physical abilities, or jobs that require in-person interaction with biological humans.

 However, digital people would likely be able to do everything needed to cause an explosive economic growth, even if they couldn't do *everything.* In particular, it seems they could do everything needed to increase the supply of computers, and thereby increase the population of digital people.

 Creating more computing power requires (a) raw materials - mostly metal; (b) research and development - to design the computers; (c) manufacturing - to carry out the design and turn raw materials into computers; (d) energy. Digital people could potentially make all of these things a great deal cheaper and more plentiful:

	* **Raw materials.** It seems that mining could, in principle, be done entirely with robots. Digital people could design and instruct these robots to extract raw materials as efficiently as possible.

	* **Research and development.** My sense is that this is a major input into the cost of computing today: the work needed to design ever-better microprocessors and other computer parts. Digital people could do this entirely virtually.

	* **Manufacturing.** My sense is that this is the other major input into the cost of computing today. Like mining, it could in principle be done entirely with robots.

	* **Energy.** Solar panels are also subject to (a) better research and development; (b) robot-driven manufacturing. Good enough design and manufacturing of solar panels could lead to radically cheaper and more plentiful energy.

	* **Space exploration.** Raw materials, energy, and "real estate" are all super-abundant outside of Earth. If digital people could design and manufacture spaceships, along with robots that could build solar panels and computer factories, they could take advantage of massive resources compared to what we have on earth. [↩](#fnref6)

- It is debatable whether the world is getting somewhat better at these things, somewhat worse, or neither. But it seems pretty clear that the progress isn't as impressive as in computing. [↩](#fnref7)- Why would the copy cooperate in the experiment? Perhaps because they simply were on board with the goal (I certainly would cooperate with a copy of myself trying to learn about meditation!). Perhaps because they were paid (in the form of a nice retirement after the experiment). Perhaps because they saw themselves and their copies (and/or original) as [the same person](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#would-a-digital-copy-of-me-be-me) (or at least cared a lot about these very similar people). A couple of factors that would facilitate this kind of experimentation: (a) digital people could examine their own state of mind to get a sense of the odds of cooperation (since the copy would have the same state of mind); (b) if only a small number of digital people experimented, large numbers of people could still learn from the results. [↩](#fnref8)- I'd also expect them to be able to try more radical things. For example, in today's world, it's unlikely that you could run a randomized experiment on what happens if people currently living in New York just decide to move to Chicago. It would be too hard to find people willing to be randomly assigned to stay in New York or move to Chicago. But in a world of digital people, experimenters could pay New Yorkers to make copies of themselves who move to Chicago. And after the experiment, each Chicago copy that wished it had stayed in New York could choose to replace itself with another copy of the New York version. (The latter brings up questions about [philosophy of personal identity](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/febce3fc-87c0-4ceb-b0c0-13fdf75b9257#would-a-digital-copy-of-me-be-me), but for social science purposes, all that matters is that *some* people would be happy to participate in experiments due to this option, and everyone could learn from the experiments.) [↩](#fnref9)- See footnote from the first bullet point on why people's copies might cooperate with them. [↩](#fnref10)- And air for cooling. [↩](#fnref11)- See the estimates in [Astronomical Waste](https://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html) for a rough sense of how big the numbers can get here (although these estimates are extremely speculative). [↩](#fnref12)


Gallup website notes

Some years ago, I tooled around on the Gallup website for a while, and I was surprised at how many things I was surprised by. Here are some of the things I found interesting:

[People are quite satisfied with their jobs](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1720/Work-Work-Place.aspx#4). 95% are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with coworker relationships, ~80% with their boss/supervisor.

[~44% of people think they'd continue working in their current job if they won $10 million in the lottery.](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1720/Work-Work-Place.aspx#4) At the same link: people estimate that they waste an average of an hour a day at work, and that people at their workplace are closer to wasing 1.5 hrs (as of 2007)

[Environment](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1615/Environment.aspx): People rank environmental issues highly and even say that the environment should be prioritized above economic growth:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/07/gallup-environment.png)

[More Americans think we spend too much on the military as opposed to too little.](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1666/Military-National-Defense.aspx)

[~55% of Americans hadn't been on a plane in the last 12mo, as of 2015 (not a pandemic thing).](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1579/Airlines.aspx)

[~13% never used the Internet](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1591/Computers-Internet.aspx), as of 2013 - see "Do you, personally, use the internet at your home, place of work or school? That could be through a computer, smartphone, tablet or other device").

[~40% of Americans are straight-up Creationists](http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/Evolution-Creationism-Intelligent-Design.aspx).

As of 2005, [large numbers of people](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1612/Education.aspx#2) thought creationism (54% in favor, 23% unsure) and intelligent design (43% in favor, 35% unsure) should be taught in school. (Compare to evolution: 61% in favor, 19% unsure.)

What percentage of people think the taxes they're paying are too high vs. about right? Surprisingly (to me), it's [roughly a draw.](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1714/Taxes.aspx) That's a recent thing.

[~4% have had 20+ drinks in the last 7 days at the time of the survey (2019)](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1582/Alcohol-Drinking.aspx); ~35% answer "no" to "Do you have occasion to use alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine or beer?"

[Trust in media fell a lot between the 1970s and 2010s](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1663/Media-Use-Evaluation.aspx), though it's been surprisingly stable since then.

[~60% believe that cloning animals would be morally wrong.](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1681/Moral-Issues.aspx#2)

[~50% say religion is "very important" in their life](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/Religion.aspx) (I was surprised at how low this is, especially given that nearly half believe in creationism). However, [large %'s of people (60-70%) believe in heaven, hell, angels, the Devil.](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/Religion.aspx#3)

[Football has been (a lot) more popular than baseball for at least 35 years](https://web.archive.org/web/20180115020713/https://news.gallup.com/poll/1696/Baseball.aspx). Baseball and basketball were even as of 2008 (most recent).

Americans [would like to see big business have less influence, but are even more worried (by a lot, 67%-26%) about big government](http://www.gallup.com/poll/5248/Big-Business.aspx) (see "In your opinion, which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future -- big business, big labor or big government?")

[Here's a chart of public opinion toward each industry](https://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/Business-Industry-Sector-Ratings.aspx). It's pretty much what you'd expect.

[Public opinion on ethical standards of people in different professions](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/Honesty-Ethics-Professions.aspx). Medical personnel (esp nurses) and schoolteachers top the list. The bottom looks like what you'd expect (car salespeople, members of Congress).

[Death Penalty](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1606/Death-Penalty.aspx): ~60% of Americans were in favor as of around 2010, even though a majority thought it had claimed innocent victims in the last 5 yrs (the figure was 59% as of the last measurement in 2009), and 64% thought it was ineffective as a deterrent. (As of 2020 the % in favor of the death penalty is a little lower, 55%; the other two figures I just cited haven't been updated.)

[~40% of Americans personally own a gun.](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1645/Guns.aspx)

[Marriage:](http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/Marriage.aspx) ~40% think sex outside marriage is immoral. ~10% disapprove of marriage between blacks and whites (as of 2013, the latest data point), down from ~30% (!) in 2002.

[The most admired man and woman of each year going back several decades](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1678/Most-Admired-Man-Woman.aspx) (3rd table down). Mostly just Presidents and First Ladies.

[~5% of Americans are vegetarian, 3% vegan.](http://www.gallup.com/poll/6424/Nutrition-Food.aspx) And again, ~40% personally own a gun. If you had any remaining doubts that your friends are not normal.

At a given point in time, [Americans consistently think they are worse off than a year ago, but will be better off in a year](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1621/Personal-Financial-Situation-Index.aspx).

[21% of Americans say they have a physical disability that limits their activity](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1648/Personal-Health-Issues.aspx#2) (as of 2004, the last data point).

[LGBT rights](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1651/Homosexual-Relations.aspx). Very big moves in the right directions, but as of May 2021 18% still think that "gay or lesbian relations between consenting adults should not be legal." (This number is falling pretty fast though.)

[Marijuana legalization support has soared](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1657/Illegal-Drugs.aspx) from ~16% in 1969 to about 68% today.

[~80% are satisfied with the way their lives are going.](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1672/Satisfaction-Personal-Life.aspx) Has been fairly stable over time. By contrast, [satisfaction with how things are going in the U.S.](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1669/General-Mood-Country.aspx) is pretty volatile.

[People seem to commute a lot](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1720/Work-Work-Place.aspx#3) - avg of ~50 minutes a day, ~20% at 90+ minutes.

[On smoking:](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1717/Tobacco-Smoking.aspx) of smokers, ~70% consider themselves addicted (as of 2013); 70% say they want to give up smoking; ~90% say they wouldn't smoke if they were to do it over again.


Track records for those who have made lots of predictions

I love it when someone makes lots of predictions and then we can see their track record after the fact. Here's a collection of links to track records for anyone/anything interesting that has them tabulated, AFAIK.

The basic idea
--------------

The basic idea is that someone can write down specific, public predictions about the world with probabilities attached, like "60% chance that X wins the 2020 election." If they make a lot of predictions, they can then come back and assess whether their overall body of work was "well calibrated," which means that things they thought would happen 60% of the time happened 60% of the time; things they thought would happen 80% of the time happened 80% of the time; etc.

This is done using a "calibration curve" (most of the links below explain how the curve works; [this explanation](https://electionbettingodds.com/TrackRecord.html) is pretty compact).

People with good historical calibration then have evidence of their trustworthiness going forward.

More on this general idea in the book [Superforecasting](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B015LYZGW6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) (and more briefly at [this Open Philanthropy blog post](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/efforts-improve-accuracy-our-judgments-and-forecasts)).

Good track records
------------------

* [FiveThirtyEight](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/)* [HyperMind](https://www.hypermind.com/en/can-hypermind-predict-the-future/), which contracts to create predictions.
 * A few individuals:
	+ [Scott Alexander](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results) (this links to year-by-year track records, though I wish all the years were combined in one place).
	 + [@peterhurford Twitter predictions](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xcgYF7Q0D95TPHLLSgwhWBHFrWZUGJn7yTyAhDR4vi0/edit#gid=0) (and [summary](https://twitter.com/peterwildeford/status/1361388809590611969)).
	 + [Gwern](https://predictionbook.com/users/gwern).

OK-to-pretty-good track records
-------------------------------

* [ElectionBettingOdds.com](https://electionbettingodds.com/TrackRecord.html), which forecasts elections based on prediction markets (unfortunately not updated for 2020 elections yet). Good overall, though it looks like events they score as 20-30% likely are more likely to happen than predicted. (I wish they would combine the 20-30% predictions with the 70-80% predictions etc., since a 20-30% prediction that something will happen is just like a 70-80% prediction that it won't.)
 * [Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/), a community forecasting site - skip to the last chart, which is the same idea as the 2nd chart from ElectionBettingOdds, though harder to read. Seems to be biased in the opposite direction from ElectionBettingOdds.com, i.e., overrating the likelihood of pretty unlikely events.
 * [All users in aggregate for PredictionBook](https://predictionbook.com/predictions) (a website that lets individuals track their own predictions) - well calibrated except at the very confident end. I'd guess this is a "wisdom of crowds" thing; it wouldn't make me trust a particular PredictionBook user very much.

Less good track records
-----------------------

[Track record for Scott Adams](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KiaNbaa1MJJbWeTC8MiYyc76cqkrmk1v8WA5WFUS_hI/edit#gid=2031713830), scored by someone other than Scott Adams (so not 100% reliable, though I checked a couple of them). It's really bad, probably easier to see from the "Predictions" sheet than from the chart. For example he [tweeted](https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1273823715977916416) "I put Trump’s odds of winning the election at 100% (unless something big changes) with a 50% chance of a successful coup" on 6/18/2020, [and](https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1273823715977916416) "If I had to bet today, Trump has the edge, 60-40" *two days after the election.* (He also [gave](https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1082622557365231616) 0% to Biden winning the nomination, earlier.) The reason I'm bothering with this (and probably the reason the maker of the spreadsheet did) is that Adams has gotten attention in some circles for his highly confident predictions of a Trump win in 2016, and I want to make the general point that a small # of impressive predictions can be very misleading, since the successful predictions tend to get more attention than the unsuccessful predictions.

2015 evidence that a [famous ESPN sports analyst](https://deadspin.com/espns-chad-ford-has-been-retroactively-editing-draft-bo-1681631642) had actually been editing his prediction-like statements (mock draft rankings) to make them look better with the benefit of hindsight.

Tangentially related
--------------------

[Independent analysis of Ray Kurzweil's predictions about 2019, made in 1999](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NcGBmDEe5qXB7dFBF/assessing-kurzweil-predictions-about-2019-the-results). He didn't give probabilities, and got more than twice as many wrong as right, though I think it's fair of the author to end with "I strongly suspect that most people's 1999 predictions about 2019 would have been a lot worse."

[Open Philanthropy's attempt to assess the general accuracy of very long-range forecasts](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/how-feasible-long-range-forecasting) mostly concluded that it's too hard to assess because of things like "People didn't make clear enough predictions or give probabilities."


The Duplicator: Instant Cloning Would Make the World Economy Explode

*Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio"*

> This is the second post in a series explaining my view that we could be in the most important century of all time. [Here's the roadmap for this series.](https://www.cold-takes.com/roadmap-for-the-most-important-century-series)
>
>
> * The [first piece](https://www.cold-takes.com/all-possible-views-about-humanitys-future-are-wild/) in this series discusses our unusual era, which could be very close to the transition between an Earth-bound civilization and a stable galaxy-wide one.
> * Future pieces will discuss how "digital people" - and/or advanced AI - could be key for this transition.
> * This piece explores a particularly important dynamic that could make either digital people or advanced AI lead to explosive productivity.
>
>
> I explore the simple question of how the world would change if people could be "copied." I argue that this could lead to unprecedented economic growth and productivity. Later, I will describe how digital people or advanced AI could similarly cause a growth/productivity explosion.
>
>

When some people imagine the future, they picture the kind of thing you see in sci-fi films. But these sci-fi futures seem very tame, compared to the future I expect.

In sci-fi, the future is different mostly via:

* Shiny buildings, gadgets and holograms.

* Robots doing many of the things humans do today.

* Advanced medicine.

* Souped up transportation, from hoverboards to flying cars to space travel and teleportation.

But fundamentally, there are the same kinds of people we see today, with the same kinds of personalities, goals, relationships and concerns.

The future I picture is enormously bigger, faster, weirder, and either much much better or much much worse compared to today. It's also potentially a lot *sooner* than sci-fi futures:[1](#fn1) I think particular, achievable-seeming technologies could get us there quickly.

Such technologies could include "digital people" or particular forms of advanced AI - each of which I'll discuss in a future piece.

For now, I want to focus on just *one* aspect of what these sorts of technology would allow: the ability to make instant copies of people (or of entities with similar capabilities). Economic theory - and history - suggest that this ability, alone, could lead to unprecedented (in history or in sci-fi movies) levels of economic growth and productivity. This is via a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which innovation leads to more productivity, which leads to more "copies" of people, who in turn create more innovation and further increase productivity, which in turn ...

In this post, instead of directly discussing digital people or advanced AI, I'm going to keep things relatively simple and discuss a different hypothetical technology: the [Duplicator from Calvin & Hobbes](https://www.gocomics.com/comics/lists/1720937/calvin-and-hobbes-duplicator-comics), which simply copies people.

How the Duplicator works
------------------------

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/06/duplicator-1.gif)

The Duplicator is portrayed in [this series of comics](https://www.gocomics.com/comics/lists/1720937/calvin-and-hobbes-duplicator-comics). Its key feature is making an instant copy of a person: Calvin walks in, and two identical Calvins walk out.

This is importantly different from the usual (and more realistic) version of "cloning," in which a person's clone has the same DNA but has to start off as a baby and take years to become an adult.[2](#fn2)

To flesh this out a bit, I'll assume that:

* The Duplicator allows any person to quickly make a copy of themselves, which starts from the same condition and mental state *or* from an earlier state (for example, I could make a replica of "Holden as of January 1, 2015").[3](#fn3) Unlike in many sci-fi films, the copies function normally (they aren't evil or soulless or decaying or anything).
* It can be used to make an unlimited number of copies, though each has some noticeable cost of production (they aren't free).[4](#fn4)

Productivity impacts
--------------------

It seems that much of today's economy revolves around trying to make the most of "scarce human capital." That is:

* Some people are "scarce" or "in demand." Extreme examples include Barack Obama, Sundar Pichai, Beyonce Knowles and Jennifer Doudna.[5](#fn5) These people have some combination of skills, experience, knowledge, relationships, reputation, etc. that make it very hard for other people to do what they do. (Less extreme examples would be just about anyone who is playing a crucial role at an organization, hard to replace and often well paid.)

* These people end up overbooked, with far more demands on their time than they can fulfill. Armies of other people end up devoted to saving their time and working around their schedules.

The Duplicator would remove these bottlenecks. For example:

* Copies of Sundar Pichai could work at all levels of Google, armed with their ability to communicate easily with the CEO and make decisions as he would. They could also start new companies.
* Copies of the President of the U.S. could personally meet with any voter who wanted to interview the President, as well as with any Congresspeople or potential appointees or advisors the President didn't have time to meet with. They could deeply study key domestic and international issues and report back to the "original" President.
* Copies of Beyonce could make as many albums as the market could support. They could deeply study and specialize in different musical genres. They could even try living different lifestyles to gain different life experiences, all of which could inform different albums that still all shared Beyonce's personal aesthetic and creativity. There would probably be at least one Beyonce copy whose music people considered better than the original's; that one could further copy herself.
* Copies of Jennifer Doudna could investigate any of the ideas and experiments the original doesn't have time to look into, as well as exploring the many fields she wasn't able to specialize in. There could be Jennifer Doudna copies in physics, chemistry and computer science as well as biology, each collaborating with many other Jennifer Doudna copies.

(The ability to make copies for *temporary* purposes - and run them at different speeds - could further increase efficiency, as I'll discuss in a future piece about digital people.)

Explosive growth
----------------

OK, the Duplicator would make the economy more productive - but *how much* more productive?

To answer, I'm going to briefly summarize what one might call the **"Population growth is the bottleneck to explosive economic growth" viewpoint.**

I would highly recommend reading more about this viewpoint at the following links, all of which I think are fascinating:

* [The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/) (Slate Star Codex - reasonably accessible if you have basic familiarity with [economic growth](https://www.cold-takes.com/what-is-economic-growth))

* [Modeling the Human Trajectory](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/modeling-human-trajectory) (Open Philanthropy's David Roodman - reasonably accessible blog post, linking to dense technical report)

* [Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth?](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/report-advanced-ai-drive-explosive-economic-growth) (Open Philanthropy's Tom Davidson - accessible blog post, linking to dense technical report)

Here's my rough summary.

In standard economic models, the total size of the economy (its total output, i.e., how much "stuff" it creates) is a function of:

* How much total "labor" (people doing work) there is in the economy;

* How much "capital" (e.g., machines and energy sources - basically everything except labor) there is in the economy;

* How high productivity is, i.e., how much stuff is created for a given amount of labor and capital. (This is sometimes called "technology.")

That is, the economy gets bigger when (a) there is more labor available, or (b) more capital (~everything other than labor) available, or when (c) productivity ("output per unit of labor/capital") increases.

The total population (number of people) affects both labor and productivity, because people can have ideas that increase productivity.

One way things *could* theoretically play out in an economy would be:

The economy starts with some set of resources (capital) supporting some set of people (population).

![2 food units, supporting 2 people](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/duplicatorfeedbackloop-original-1.png)
Thanks to María Gutiérrez Rojas for these graphics.

This set of people comes up with new ideas and innovations.

![2 food units, supporting 2 people, each having an idea](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/duplicatorfeedbackloop-original-2.png)

This leads to some amount of increased productivity, meaning there is more total economic output.[6](#fn6)

![2 food units, supporting 2 people, each having an idea that doubles the amount of food production -> 8 food units](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/duplicatorfeedbackloop-original-3.png)

This means people can afford to have more children. They do, and the population grows more quickly.

![Same as previous graphic, with 8 food units now supporting 8 people](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/duplicatorfeedbackloop-original-4.png)

Because of that population growth, the economy comes up with new ideas and innovations *faster* than before (since more people means more new ideas).[7](#fn7)

![Same as previous graphic, with the 8 people now having 8 ideas](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/duplicatorfeedbackloop-original-5.png)

This leads to *even more* economic output and *even faster* population growth, in a self-reinforcing loop: *more ideas → more output → more people → more ideas→ ....*

![8 ideas, each 1.5x'ing the amount of food resources -> explosion from 8 units to 205 units of food, hence 205 people and 205 ideas ... ](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/duplicatorfeedbackloop-original-6.png)

When you incorporate this full feedback loop into economic growth models,[8](#fn8) they predict that (under plausible assumptions) the world economy will see **accelerating growth**.[9](#fn9) "Accelerating growth" is a fairly "explosive" dynamic in which the economy can go from small to extremely large with disorienting speed.

The pattern of growth predicted by these models seems like a reasonably good fit with the data on the world economy over the last 5,000 years (see [Modeling the Human Trajectory](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/modeling-human-trajectory), though there is an open [debate](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CWFn9qAKsRibpCGq8/does-economic-history-point-toward-a-singularity) on this point; I discuss how the debate could change my conclusions [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/a-note-on-historical-economic-growth/)). **However, over the last few hundred years, growth has not accelerated; it has been "constant"** (a less explosive dynamic) **at around today's level.**

Why did accelerating growth transition to constant growth?

This change coincided with the [demographic transition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition). In the demographic transition it **stopped being the case that having more output -> having more children.** Instead, more output just meant richer people, and people actually had *fewer* children as they became richer. This broke the self-reinforcing loop described above.

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/07/demographic-transition-nutshell.png)The demographic transition.

Raising children is a massive investment (of time and personal energy, not just "capital"), and children take a long time to mature. By changing what it takes to grow the population, the Duplicator could restore the accelerating feedback loop.

|  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Period** | **Feedback loop?** | **Pattern of growth** |
| Before the demographic transition
  | Yes: more ideas → more output → more people → more ideas→
  | Accelerating growth (economy can go from small to large disorientingly quickly)
  |
| Since the demographic transition
  | No: more ideas → more output → ~~more~~ richer people ~~→ more ideas→~~  | Constant growth (less explosive)
  |
| With the Duplicator
  | Yes: more ideas → more output → more people → more ideas→
  | Accelerating growth
  |

This figure from [Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth?](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/report-advanced-ai-drive-explosive-economic-growth) illustrates how the next decades might look different with steady exponential growth vs. accelerating growth:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/Different-possible-growth-trajectories--adj-Roodman-.png)

To see more detailed (but simplified) example numbers demonstrating the explosive growth, see footnote.[10](#fn10)

If we wanted to guess what a Duplicator might do in real life, we might imagine that it would get back to the kind of acceleration the world economy had historically, which loosely implies (based on [Modeling the Human Trajectory](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/modeling-human-trajectory)) that **the economy would reach *infinite* size sometime in the next century.**[11](#fn11)

Of course, that can't happen - at some point the size of the economy would be limited by fundamental natural resources, such as the number of atoms or amount of energy available in the galaxy. But in between here and running out of space/atoms/energy/something, we could easily see levels of economic growth that are massively faster than anything in history.

Over the last 100 years or so, the economy has doubled in size every few decades. With a Duplicator, it could double in size every year or month, on its way to hitting the limits.

Depending on how things played out, such productivity could result in an end to scarcity and material need, or in a dystopian race between different people making as many copies of themselves as possible in the hopes of taking over the population. (Or many in-between and other scenarios.)

Conclusion
----------

I think the Duplicator would be a more powerful technology than warp drives, tricorders, laser guns[12](#fn12) or even teleporters. Minds are the source of innovation that can lead to all of those other things. So being cheaply able to duplicate them would be an extraordinary situation.

A harder-to-intuit, but even more powerful, technology would be **digital people**, e.g.,the ability to run detailed simulations of people[13](#fn13) on a computer. Such simulated people could be copied Duplicator-style, and could also be sped up, slowed down, and reset, with virtual environments that were fully controlled.

I think that sort of technology is probably possible, and I expect a world with it to be even wilder than a world with the Duplicator. I'll elaborate on this in the next piece.

**Next in series:** [Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/)

---

Footnotes
---------

1. For example, [Star Trek's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Star_Trek#21st_century) Captain Kirk first takes over the Enterprise in the mid-2200s. I think we could easily see a much more advanced, changed world than that of *Star Trek,* before 2100. [↩](#fnref1)- [Example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXLQaVgCP_Q&ab_channel=StarWarsSagaLatinAmerica). [↩](#fnref2)- This isn't quite how it works in the comic, but it's how it'll work here.  [↩](#fnref3)- The one in the comic burns out after a few copies, but that one's just a prototype. [↩](#fnref4)- Biologist who co-invented CRISPR and won a Nobel Prize in 2020. [↩](#fnref5)- Each idea doubled the amount of corn. [↩](#fnref6)- A faster-growing population doesn't *necessarily* mean faster technological advancement. There could be "diminishing returns": the first few ideas are easier to find than the next few, so even as the effort put into finding new ideas goes up, new ideas are found more slowly. ([Are Ideas Getting Harder To Find?](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180338) is a well-known paper on this topic.) More population = faster technological progress if the population is growing *faster* than the difficulty of finding new ideas is growing. This dynamic is portrayed in a simplified way in the graphic: initially people have ideas leading to doubling of corn output, but later the ideas only lead to a 1.5x'ing of corn output. [↩](#fnref7)- It's crucial to include the "more output -> more people" step, which is often not there by default, and doesn't describe today's world (but could describe a world with The Duplicator). It's standard for growth models to incorporate the other parts of the feedback loop: more people --> more ideas --> more output. [↩](#fnref8)- This claim is defended in detail in [Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/could-advanced-ai-drive-explosive-economic-growth#TheoreticalModels)? [↩](#fnref9)- We'll start with this economy:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/06/duplicator-spreadsheet-1.png)

100 people produce 100 units of resources (1 per person). For every 10 units of resources, they're able to create 1 more duplicate (this is just capturing the idea that duplicates are "costly" to create). And the 100 people have 5 new ideas, leading to 5% productivity growth.

Here's year 2:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/06/duplicator-spreadsheet-2.png)

Now each person produces 1.05 widgets instead of 1, thanks to the productivity growth. And there's another 5% productivity growth.

This dynamic takes some time to "take off," but take off it does:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/06/duplicator-spreadsheet-3.png)

 The #NUM!'s at the bottom signify Google Sheets choking on the large numbers.

My [spreadsheet includes](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z97ZB6ywbIwGHO90QsPaMNyq1mRiARZDxNcLFwSdqno/edit?usp=sharing) a version with simply exponentially increasing population; that one goes on for ~1000 years without challenging Google Sheets. So the population dynamic is key here. [↩](#fnref10)- As noted above, there is an open [debate](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CWFn9qAKsRibpCGq8/does-economic-history-point-toward-a-singularity) on whether past economic growth actually follows the pattern described in [Modeling the Human Trajectory](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/modeling-human-trajectory). I discuss how the debate could change my conclusions [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/a-note-on-historical-economic-growth/); I think there is a case either way for explosive growth this century.[↩](#fnref11)- TBH, I've never been able to figure out why these are better than regular guns. [↩](#fnref12)- Or of some sort of entity that's properly described as a "descendant" of people, as I'll discuss in the piece on digital people. [↩](#fnref12)


Phil Birnbaum's "bad regression" puzzles

If you've ever wanted to see someone painstakingly deconstruct a regression analysis and show all the subtle reasons it can generate wild, weird and completely wrong results, there is good stuff at [Sabermetric Research - Phil Birnbaum](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/). It's a sports blog, but sports knowledge isn't needed (knowledge of regression analysis generally is, if you want to follow all the details).

Birnbaum's not exactly the only person to do takedowns of bad studies. But when Birnbaum notices that something is "off," he doesn't just point it out and move on. He isn't satisfied with "This conclusion is implausible" or "This conclusion isn't robust to sensitivity analysis." He digs all the way to the bottom to understand *exactly* how a study got its wrong result. His deconstructions of bad regressions are like four-star meals or masterful jazz solos ... I don't want to besmirch them by trying to explain them, so if you're into regression deconstructions you should just click through the links below.

(I'm not going to explain what regression analysis is today, for which I apologize; if I ever do, I will link back to this post. It's very hard to explain it compactly and clearly, as you can see from [Wikipedia's attempt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_analysis), but it is VERY common in social science research. Kind of a bad combination IMO. If you hear "This study shows [something about people]," it's more likely than not that the study relies on regression analysis.)

Some good (old) ones:

* [Estimating whether Aaron Rodger's contract overpays or underpays him by making a scatterplot of pay and value-added with other quarterbacks and seeing whether he's above or below the regression line.](https://web.archive.org/web/20130524132245/http://www.advancednflstats.com/2013/05/point-counterpoint-on-rodgers-extension.html) The answer changes completely when you switch the x- and y-axes. Which one is right, and what *exactly* is wrong with the other one? (Birnbaum linked to this, but it's now dead and I am linking directly to an Internet Archive version. Birnbaum's "solution" is down in the comments, just search for his name.)

* [Deconstructing an NBA time-zone regression](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2017/08/deconstructing-nba-time-zone-regression.html): the key coefficients turn out to be literally meaningless.

* Do younger brothers steal more bases? Parts [I](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2010/05/do-younger-brothers-steal-more-bases.html), [II](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2010/06/do-younger-brothers-steal-more-bases.html), [III](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2010/06/do-younger-brothers-steal-more-bases_18.html) although I think it's OK to skip part II (and Part I is short).

* The OBP/SLG regression puzzle: parts [I](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2013/05/the-obpslg-regression-puzzle.html), [II](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2013/05/the-obpslg-regression-puzzle-part-ii.html), [III](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2013/05/the-obpslg-regression-puzzle-part-iii.html), [IV](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2013/06/the-obpslg-regression-puzzle-part-iv.html), [V](http://blog.philbirnbaum.com/2013/06/the-obpslg-regression-puzzle-part-v.html). This one is very weedsy and you'll probably want to skip parts, though it's also kind of glorious to see just how doggedly he digs on every strange numerical result. He also makes an effort to explain what's going on for people who don't know baseball. The essence of the puzzle: OBP and SLG are both indicators of a team's performance, but when one regresses a team's performance on OBP and SLG, the ratio of the coefficients is pretty far off from what the "true" value for (value of OBP / value of SLG) is separately known to be. I think the issues here are extremely general, and not good news for the practice of treating regression coefficients as effect sizes.


Honesty about reading

There’s way too much to read.

If I want to really understand a (nonfiction) book, I usually need to spend a lot of time with it. I generally spend at least as much time writing about it, and rereading it as I’m trying to summarize and dialogue with it, as I spend reading it in the first place. If I just moved my eyes over the words, I probably wouldn’t remember much other than the title. ([More](https://www.cold-takes.com/reading-books-vs-engaging-with-them/).)

I can’t do this for, say, a book a week. I need to be selective about what I’m reading carefully, which means skimming most things to look for what’s worthwhile, and often carefully reading part of a piece instead of more quickly reading it all.

At the same time, I feel soft pressures in the other direction. There seem to be vague social norms that "reading" lots of things is a great virtue. And I rarely see someone saying "I really enjoyed skimming \_\_\_ " or "Based on reading a few sections of \_\_\_ , I think ..."

It seems that a lot of people report reading enormous numbers of books - and also, that people often don’t seem to know much about a book they’ve “read” other than the title.

(I think similar points apply to articles and blog posts. From here I’ll lump nonfiction books, articles and blog posts together as “pieces.”)

I’d like to see a different norm:

* It should be normal and expected that people often do not read an entire piece, even when the piece is important to what they are saying.
* People should (a) try to find the parts of a piece that are most directly relevant to what they are interested in, and read those parts carefully; (b) get a lot of their information about a piece from critical reviews of and reactions to the piece (I believe this is a very efficient way to pinpoint the key debates around a piece and understand which parts are broadly accepted vs. disputed); (c) be open about what they’re doing. That is, they should say things like “According to [piece], \_\_\_ . Note that I haven’t read all of [piece]; I read sections \_\_\_ and \_\_\_ as well as critical reviews \_\_\_ and \_\_\_ .”
* People should, by default, frame their critiques of a piece as “things I think the piece does wrong, but I’m not sure since I haven’t carefully digested the whole thing.” Rather than as “Smackdowns of the piece.” This is a natural complement to admitting one hasn’t digested an entire piece, but I also think it would be a welcome adjustment across the board, since even people who have carefully read an entire piece can still easily miss key parts of it.
* And complementarily, authors should try to make life easy for readers who do not want to carefully read every word of their piece (at least, assuming it is more than a couple thousand words or so).
	+ They should have easy-to-find sections of their piece that summarize and/or outline their arguments, with clear directions for which parts of the piece will give more detail on each point.
	+ **They shouldn’t force or expect readers to wade through all their prose to find a TL;DR on what they are arguing, what their main evidence is, why it matters, and what their responses to key objections are.**
	+ When someone says “You have to read this piece, it really shows that \_\_\_ ,” and I find myself unable to see where and how the piece shows \_\_\_ without embarking on a 10,000-word journey, I close the tab and forget about the argument, and this seems like the right thing to do.

I will try to follow these principles on this blog, both as a reader and writer. We’ll see how it goes.


All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild

*Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio"*

Today’s world

Transformative AI

Digital people
World of

Misaligned AI
World run by
Something else

or
or

Stable, galaxy-wide
civilization

>
>
> Summary:
>
> * In a series of posts starting with this one, I'm going to argue that the 21st century could see our civilization develop technologies allowing rapid expansion throughout our currently-empty galaxy. And thus, that **this century could determine the entire future of the galaxy for tens of billions of years, or more.*** This view seems "wild": we should be doing a double take at any view that we live in such a special time. I illustrate this with a timeline of the galaxy. (On a personal level, this "wildness" is probably the single biggest reason I was skeptical for many years of the arguments presented in this series. Such claims about the significance of the times we live in seem "wild" enough to be suspicious.)
>
> * But I don't think it's really possible to hold a non-"wild" view on this topic. I discuss alternatives to my view: a "conservative" view that thinks the technologies I'm describing are possible, but will take much longer than I think, and a "skeptical" view that thinks galaxy-scale expansion will never happen. Each of these views seems "wild" in its own way.
>
> * Ultimately, as hinted at by the [Fermi paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox), it seems that our species is simply in a wild situation.
>
>
>
> Before I continue, I should say that I don't think humanity (or some digital descendant of humanity) expanding throughout the galaxy would necessarily be a good thing - especially if this prevents other life forms from ever emerging. I think it's quite hard to have a confident view on whether this would be good or bad. I'd like to keep the focus on the idea that our situation is "wild." I am not advocating excitement or glee at the prospect of expanding throughout the galaxy. I am advocating seriousness about the enormous potential stakes.
>
>
>
>

My view
-------

This is the first in a series of pieces about the hypothesis that we live in the most important century for humanity.

In this series, I'm going to argue that there's a good chance of a productivity explosion by 2100, which could quickly lead to what one might call a "technologically mature"[1](#fn1) civilization. That would mean that:

* We'd be able to start sending spacecraft throughout the galaxy and beyond.

* These spacecraft could mine materials, build robots and computers, and construct very robust, long-lasting settlements on other planets, harnessing solar power from stars and supporting huge numbers of people (and/or our "[digital descendants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading)").
	+ See [Eternity in Six Hours](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576513001148) for a fascinating and short, though technical, discussion of what this might require.

	+ I'll also argue in future pieces (now available [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/#lock-in) and [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/weak-point-in-most-important-century-lock-in/)) that there is a chance of "value lock-in": whoever is running the process of space expansion might be able to determine what sorts of people are in charge of the settlements and what sorts of societal values they have, in a way that is stable for many billions of years.[2](#fn2)

If that ends up happening, you might think of the story of our galaxy[3](#fn3) like this. I've marked major milestones along the way from "no life" to "intelligent life that builds its own computers and travels through space."

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/06/fermi-aggressive-1.png)*Thanks to [**Ludwig Schubert**](https://schubert.io/) for the visualization. Many dates are highly approximate and/or judgment-prone and/or just pulled from Wikipedia (sources [**here**](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sTy7M48WkE6MQD_qA5UkPJ5WW5buWuyr3NDsm3PUE-I/edit?usp=sharing)), but plausible changes wouldn't change the big picture. The ~1.4 billion years to complete space expansion is based on the distance to the outer edge of the Milky Way, divided by the speed of a fast existing human-made spaceship (details in spreadsheet just linked); IMO this is likely to be a massive overestimate of how long it takes to expand throughout the whole galaxy. See footnote for why I didn't use a logarithmic axis.*[**4**](https://www.cold-takes.com/all-possible-views-about-humanitys-future-are-wild/#fn4)??? That's crazy! According to me, there's a decent chance that we live at the very beginning of the tiny sliver of time during which the galaxy goes from nearly lifeless to largely populated. That out of a staggering number of persons who will ever exist, we're among the first. And that out of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, ours will produce the beings that fill it.

I know what you're thinking: "The odds that we could live in such a significant time seem infinitesimal; the odds that Holden is having delusions of grandeur (on behalf of all of Earth, but still) seem far higher."[5](#fn5)

But:

The "conservative" view
-----------------------

Let's say you agree with me about where humanity could *eventually* be headed - that we will eventually have the technology to create robust, stable settlements throughout our galaxy and beyond. But you think it will take far longer than I'm saying.

A key part of my view (which I'll write about more later) is that within this century, we could develop advanced enough AI to start a productivity explosion. Say you don't believe that.

* You think I'm underrating the fundamental limits of AI systems to date.

* You think we will need an enormous number of new scientific breakthroughs to build AIs that truly reason as effectively as humans.

* And even once we do, expanding throughout the galaxy will be a longer road still.

You don't think any of this is happening this century - you think, instead, that it will take something like **500 years.** That's 5-10x the time that has passed since we started building computers. It's more time than has passed since Isaac Newton made the first credible attempt at laws of physics. It's about as much time has passed since the very start of the Scientific Revolution.

Actually, no, let's go even more conservative. You think our economic and scientific progress will stagnate. Today's civilizations will crumble, and many more civilizations will fall and rise. Sure, we'll *eventually* get the ability to expand throughout the galaxy. But it will take **100,000 years.** That's 10x the amount of time that has passed since human civilization began in the Levant.

Here's your version of the timeline:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/06/fermi-conservative.png)

The difference between your timeline and mine isn't even a pixel, so it doesn't show up on the chart. In the scheme of things, this "conservative" view and my view are the same.

It's true that the "conservative" view doesn't have the same urgency for our generation in particular. But it still places us among a tiny proportion of people in an incredibly significant time period. And it still raises questions of whether the things we do to make the world better - even if they only have a tiny flow-through to the world 100,000 years from now - could be amplified to a galactic-historical-outlier degree.

The skeptical view
------------------

The "skeptical view" would essentially be that humanity (or some descendant of humanity, including a digital one) will *never* spread throughout the galaxy. There are many reasons it might not:

* Maybe something about space travel - and/or setting up mining robots, solar panels, etc. on other planets - is effectively impossible such that even another 100,000 years of human civilization won't reach that point.[6](#fn6)* Or perhaps for some reason, it will be technologically feasible, but it won't happen (because nobody wants to do it, because those who don't want to block those who do, etc.)

* Maybe it's possible to expand throughout the galaxy, but not possible to maintain a presence on many planets for billions of years, for some reason.

* Maybe humanity is destined to destroy itself before it reaches this stage.
	+ But note that if the way we destroy ourselves is via misaligned AI,[7](#fn7) it would be possible for AI to build its own technology and spread throughout the galaxy, which still seems in line with the spirit of the above sections. In fact, it highlights that how we handle AI this century could have ramifications for many billions of years. So humanity would have to go extinct in some way that leaves no other intelligent life (or intelligent machines) behind.* Maybe an extraterrestrial species will spread throughout the galaxy before we do (or around the same time).
	+ However, note that this doesn't seem to have happened in ~13.77 billion years so far since the universe began, and according to the above sections, there's only about 1.5 billion years left for it to happen before we spread throughout the galaxy.* Maybe some extraterrestrial species already effectively *has* spread throughout our galaxy, and for some reason we just don't see them. Maybe they are hiding their presence deliberately, for one reason or another, while being ready to stop us from spreading too far.
	+ This would imply that they are choosing not to mine energy from any of the stars we can see, at least not in a way that we could see it. That would, in turn, imply that they're abstaining from mining a very large amount of energy that they could use to do whatever it is they want to do,[8](#fn8) including defend themselves against species like ours.* Maybe this is all a dream. Or a [simulation](https://www.simulation-argument.com/).

* Maybe something else I'm not thinking of.

That's a fair number of possibilities, though many seem quite "wild" in their own way. Collectively, I'd say they add up to more than 50% probability ... but I would feel very weird claiming they're collectively overwhelmingly likely.

Ultimately, it's very hard for me to see a case *against* thinking something like this is at least *reasonably* likely: "We will eventually create robust, stable settlements throughout our galaxy and beyond." It seems like saying "no way" to that statement would itself require "wild" confidence in something about the limits of technology, and/or long-run choices people will make, and/or the inevitability of human extinction, and/or something about aliens or simulations.

I imagine this claim will be intuitive to many readers, but not all. Defending it in depth is not on my agenda at the moment, but I'll rethink that if I get enough [demand](#survey).

Why all possible views are wild: the Fermi paradox
--------------------------------------------------

I'm claiming that it would be "wild" to think we're basically assured of *never* spreading throughout the galaxy, but also that it's "wild" to think that we have a decent chance of spreading throughout the galaxy.

In other words, I'm calling every possible belief on this topic "wild." That's because I think we're in a wild situation.

Here are some *alternative* situations we could have found ourselves in, that I wouldn't consider so wild:

* We could live in a mostly-populated galaxy, whether by our species or by a number of extraterrestrial species. We would be in some densely populated region of space, surrounded by populated planets. Perhaps we would read up on the history of our civilization. We would know (from history and from a lack of empty stars) that we weren't unusually early life-forms with unusual opportunities ahead.

* We could live in a world where the kind of technologies I've been discussing didn't seem like they'd ever be possible. We wouldn't have any hope of doing space travel, or successfully studying our own brains or building our own computers. Perhaps we could somehow detect life on other planets, but if we did, we'd see them having an equal lack of that sort of technology.

But space expansion seems feasible, *and* our galaxy is empty. These two things seem in tension. A similar tension - the question of why we see no signs of extraterrestrials, despite the galaxy having so many possible stars they could emerge from - is often discussed under the heading of the [Fermi Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox).

Wikipedia has a list of [possible resolutions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox) of the Fermi paradox. Many correspond to the [skeptical view](#the-skeptical-view) possibilities I list above. Some seem less relevant to this piece. (For example, there are various reasons extraterrestrials might be present but not *detected*. But I think any world in which extraterrestrials don't *prevent* our species from galaxy-scale expansion ends up "wild," even if the extraterrestrials are there.)

My current sense is that the best analysis of the Fermi Paradox available today favors the explanation that **intelligent life is extremely rare**: something about the appearance of life in the first place, or the evolution of brains, is so unlikely that it hasn't happened in many (or any) other parts of the galaxy.[9](#fn9)

That would imply that **the hardest, most unlikely steps on the road to galaxy-scale expansion are the steps our species has *already taken.*** And that, in turn, implies that we live in a strange time: extremely early in the history of an extremely unusual star.

If we started finding signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, I'd consider that a big update away from my current "wild" view. It would imply that whatever has stopped other species from galaxy-wide expansion will also stop us.

This pale blue dot could be an awfully big deal
-----------------------------------------------

Describing Earth as a tiny dot in a [photo from space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot#/media/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png), Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan [wrote](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B004W0I3LW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1):

> The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a [fraction of a dot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot#/media/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png) ... Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light ... It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

This is a somewhat common sentiment - that when you pull back and think of our lives in the context of billions of years and billions of stars, you see how insignificant all the things we care about today really are.

But here I'm making the opposite point.

It looks for all the world as though our "tiny dot" has a real shot at being the origin of a galaxy-scale civilization. It seems absurd, even delusional to believe in this possibility. But given our observations, it seems equally strange to dismiss it.

And if that's right, the choices made in the next 100,000 years - or even this century - could determine whether that galaxy-scale civilization comes to exist, and what values it has, across billions of stars and billions of years to come.

So when I look up at the vast expanse of space, I don't think to myself, "Ah, in the end none of this matters." I think: "Well, *some* of what we do probably doesn't matter. But *some* of what we do might matter more than anything ever will again. ...It would be really good if we could keep our eye on the ball. ...[gulp]"

**Next in series:** [The Duplicator](https://www.cold-takes.com/the-duplicator/)

Notes
-----

---

1. or [Kardashev Type III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale). [↩](#fnref1)- If we are able to create [mind uploads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading), or detailed computer simulations of people that are as conscious as we are, it could be possible to put them in virtual environments that automatically reset, or otherwise "correct" the environment, whenever the society would otherwise change in certain ways (for example, if a certain religion became dominant or lost dominance). This could give the designers of these "virtual environments" the ability to "lock in" particular religions, rulers, etc. I'll discuss this more in future pieces (now available [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/#lock-in) and [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/weak-point-in-most-important-century-lock-in/)). [↩](#fnref2)- I've focused on the "galaxy" somewhat arbitrarily. Spreading throughout all of the accessible universe would take a lot longer than spreading throughout the galaxy, and until we do it's still imaginable that some species from outside our galaxy will disrupt the "stable galaxy-scale civilization," but I think accounting for this correctly would add a fair amount of complexity without changing the big picture. I may address that in some future piece, though. [↩](#fnref3)- A logarithmic version doesn't look any less weird, because the distances between the "middle" milestones are tiny compared to *both* the stretches of time before and after these milestones. More fundamentally, I'm talking about how remarkable it is to be in the most important [small number] of years out of [big number] of years - that's best displayed using a linear axis. It's often the case that weird-looking charts look more reasonable with logarithmic axes, but in this case I think the chart looks weird because the situation is weird. Probably the least weird-looking version of this chart would have the x-axis be something like the logged distance from the year 2100, but that would be a heck of a premise for a chart - it would basically bake in my argument that this appears to be a very special time period. [↩](#fnref4)- This is exactly the kind of thought that kept me skeptical for many years of the arguments I'll be laying out in the rest of this series about the potential impacts, and timing, of advanced technologies. Grappling directly with how "wild" our situation seems to ~undeniably be has been key for me. [↩](#fnref5)

- Spreading throughout the galaxy would certainly be harder if nothing like [mind uploading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading) (which I discuss in a [separate piece](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/), and which is part of why I think future space settlements could have "value lock-in" as discussed above) can ever be done. I would find a view that "mind uploading is impossible" to be "wild" in its own way, because it implies that human brains are so special that there is simply no way, ever, to digitally replicate what they're doing. (Thanks to David Roodman for this point.) [↩](#fnref6)- That is, advanced AI that pursues objectives of its own, which aren't compatible with human existence. I'll be writing more about this idea. Existing discussions of it include the books [Superintelligence](https://smile.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom-ebook/dp/B00LOOCGB2/), [Human Compatible](https://smile.amazon.com/Human-Compatible-Artificial-Intelligence-Problem-ebook/dp/B07N5J5FTS), [Life 3.0](https://smile.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B06WGNPM7V), and [The Alignment Problem](https://smile.amazon.com/Alignment-Problem-Machine-Learning-Values-ebook/dp/B085T55LGK/). The shortest, most accessible presentation I know of is [The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/21/18126576/ai-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-safety-alignment) (Vox article by Kelsey Piper). This [report on existential risk from power-seeking AI](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/HduCjmXTBD4xYTegv/draft-report-on-existential-risk-from-power-seeking-ai), by Open Philanthropy's Joe Carlsmith, lays out a detailed set of premises that would collectively imply the problem is a serious one. [↩](#fnref7)- Thanks to Carl Shulman for this point. [↩](#fnref8)- See <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf>  [↩](#fnref9)


First Post

Welcome to Cold Takes, where it's always fine to read the post later!

About
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Most of the posts on this blog are written at least a month before they're posted, sometimes much longer. I try to post things that are worth posting even so, hence the name "Cold Takes."

As of this writing (July 2021), likely initial themes include:
* **Futurism (the next 10,000+ years).** What can we say and do today about the very long-run future of the world?
* **Quantitative macrohistory (the last 250-10,000 years).**What can we say about very long-run trends in things like quality of life and pace of innovation?
* **Applied epistemology.**How should one decide what to believe, especially when (is as usually the case for important topics) one doesn't have time to digest even 1% of the relevant knowledge and arguments?
* **Applied ethics of donations, career choice, etc.**What ethical principles should we use to  consider actions like where to donate and what job to take (where there are no clear moral "rules," and instead a question of how to do more good vs. less good)?
* **Links I feel like sharing,** often quite old, because they seem important and/or just fun.

A general theme of this blog is what I sometimes call **avant-garde effective altruism.** [Effective altruism (EA)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism) is the idea of doing as much good as possible. If EA were jazz, giving to effective charities working on global health would be Louis Armstrong - acclaimed and respected by all, and where most people start. But people who are really obsessed with jazz also tend to like stuff that (to other people) barely even sounds like music, and lifelong obsessive EAs are into causes and topics that are not the first association you'd have with "doing good." This blog will often be about the latter.

I am the co-CEO of [Open Philanthropy](http://www.openphilanthropy.org) and co-founder of [GiveWell](http://www.givewell.org), but all opinions are my own.

Upcoming series
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Here are the main series I'm planning so far. As I put things up, I will update the [Themes/Highlights](https://www.cold-takes.com/themes-highlights) page to link to the pieces that have received the most "likes." (Note, though, that I'm the only person with access to the "like" button for this blog.)
* **[Most Important Century series](https://www.cold-takes.com/roadmap-for-the-most-important-century-series/).** A series of ~10 pieces laying out the case that the 21st century has a high probability of being the "most important" for humanity via the development of transformative AI. This includes discussions of why it looks like we might soon (in the next few decades) develop AI that can dramatically accelerate scientific and technological development, and discussions of why that in turn could lead to a radically different world (in particular, via [mind uploading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading)).
* **Has the world improved over time?** A series on whether life has gotten better over time and how we should think about the "state of nature."
* **Searching for Atlantis.** A series asking mostly, "Is the world doing something wrong, compared to the past, w/r/t innovation?" I emphasize "doing something wrong," not "slowing down" - most discussions online are explicitly about whether innovation is slowing down, but I want to address whether this is about something "going wrong" or just inevitable. "Atlantis" refers to the idea of a past, advanced civilization, now lost.
* **Applied epistemology.** Some posts about "how to decide what to believe." These  will include my take on the pros and cons of "explicit Bayesian reasoning" (literally writing down probabilities and values for use in decision making), on how to balance "thinking for oneself" with trusting experts and others, and on how far one should take "self-skepticism" (doubting one's own beliefs).
* **Utilitarian ethics.** I'm going to lay out the best case I know for a "hardcore utilitarian" approach to ethics - the basic philosophy-based case for "a large # of small benefits to people can outweigh even a huge harm," "helping enough animals could be better than helping humans," and "reducing risk of extinction, leading to more people getting to exist, could be better than either of those." I'm also going to talk about the weaknesses in this case.