SDS 602: We Are Living in Ancient Times

(00:27):
James Clear recently drew my attention to a quote by the writer Teresa Nielsen Hayden that I find fascinating and mind-boggling… and that I also vehemently agree with. Here’s what she said. She said: “My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We’re hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times.” She goes on to say: “I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don’t know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue.”

(01:16):
All right, this is fascinating to me, this quote, because I often find myself thinking that we are so advanced — with our computing machines, our data science models, our A.I. systems — and yet from the lens of the coming thousands or millions of years of human life on this planet, we are actually living in ancient times. This is exciting because it means there is a lot more to discover and invent. It is also however, intense because the future of humanity depends on us ancient folks for their existence and we have recently developed — or are currently developing — situations that could render us extinct, whether it be via nuclear weapons, bioweapons, climate change, or an artificial super intelligence. This underscores a recurring theme on this podcast around the critical importance of ethical considerations with any new innovation such as A.I. ethics, A.I. policy, and A.I. alignment considerations for any new statistical or machine learning models we devise and deploy into real-world systems.

(02:24):
But assuming we don’t create a catastrophic disaster, then, this kinds of A.I. products that we are working on now, could be the seeds of incredible innovations that allow humans to thrive for many, many years to come. If you’d like to learn more about how ancient we likely are in the grand scheme of human life and how the octillion sextillion quadrillion people who are yet to be born dwarf the mere billions that have been born up to this point in human history, I recommend checking out the 12-minute YouTube video by Kurzegesagt called The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future. We’ve included a link to it in the show notes for your convenience.

(03:09):
All right, that’s it for today’s episode. I hope it blew your mind a bit and I’m looking forward to enjoying another round of the SuperDataScience podcast with you very soon.