https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=j906TpFyfpo
I think there’s so many interesting lessons to right now, Jordan, from AI and from the effective altruism movement, many things that we can learn about the governance issues that just came out of OpenAI. And I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. But a lot of them, again, I think are highlight the principal points we’ve been making. Markets are important, let capital move freely, let there be innovation. As you know, the whole idea between OpenAI was to have an open source platform that everyone was contributing to, make it altruistic so that it could be done in a good way. And then they found out, well, we still need billions of dollars. How are we going to raise the billions of dollars to create the computational capacity that AI and chat GBT really requires? And they knew they had to have that in a for profit arm. If they did not have that in a for profit arm, they would not have found the capital. So important lessons, I think. Yes, of course, we need to be mindful, but there’s no way to build the world that we want to build where the needs and aspirations of the trillions of people yet to come. Because by the way, if you actually look at where homo sapiens sapiens are in the normal course, there are trillions of human beings yet to be born. This is the William McAllister arguments that you probably what we owe the future, a famous philosopher from Oxford University that you need to have on your on your show if you haven’t had him on yet. And so and this is something that the pope speaks about very, very eloquently also in the Dato si, which is that we do have in many ways, Jordan, we do have responsibilities to future generations. And we need to think how often do you think about your grandchildren? How often do you think about your grandchildren’s grandchildren? Do you care about them? Do you love them? Is the life of your great, great, great, great grandchild any less important than your life? No, it’s not. So let’s go about this process of thinking how it is that we’re going to create this sustainable planet. And I spent a little bit of time talking about, you know, the broad philosophy of Ra-Grajn. But where I have spent a great deal of my life and work is in Catholic social teaching. And I’d love to come to Catholic social teaching at some point on this podcast, because as I say, it happens to be extraordinarily resonant and pertinent for the times we live in, not because it’s Catholic. It just happens to be Catholic. It’s actually about 150 years old. And I think the broad principles of human dignity, subsidiarity, which you spoke about very eloquently from the stage, responsibility, personal responsibility, and then solidarity, the third principle of Catholic social teaching, which is that we are our brothers and sisters keepers. There are too many people, Jordan, that cannot take care of themselves. And it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak. It is the responsibility for those of us who have more capacities and more capabilities to give that hand up to those who do not have it. That is Catholic social teaching. And what’s interesting is that subsidiarity argument, you know, turns out the Declaration of Independence is right. All men and women are created equal. the image of God and they are entitled to a life of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their own fulfillment. But the simple fact of the matter is that that cannot be achieved without people taking personal responsibility and families taking responsibilities for their own families and then communities beyond that. That is how the system’s going to work. Subsidiarity and solidarity that are going to live in constant tension. We’re never going to have them resolved. There’s always going to be somebody else who needs to be helped. There’s always going to be somebody else who needs to have more responsibility. And that is that struggle uphill that you spoke so eloquently about time and again at AHRQ. So the idea of responsibility for future generations. Let’s wander into the Catholic social teaching domain for a moment. So I spent a lot of time recently writing this book, We Who Wrestle with God, and one of the chapters in that book deals with the story of Abraham. So Abraham is portrayed as the father of nations. And so my sense is that the story of Abraham contains within it the seeds of, what would you say, it contains within it a representation of what it means to live in the light of eternity. So imagine that you could adopt an ethos that set you up in the best possible manner to increase the probability that your children would survive and thrive. But then let’s extend that. Because that’s not sufficient. You could even make an evolutionary biology argument in this direction. You want to develop an ethos that not only increases the probability that you will have children and that your children will thrive and survive, but that establishes a pattern that increases the probability that their children and their children’s children will thrive and survive. So it’s an ethos that has to have a multi-generational implication. So that’s exactly what Abraham does. And the manner in which that’s to be done is actually laid out in the narrative. So the first thing that happens that’s very, very interesting, because it has to do with material satiation. At the beginning of the story, Abraham is already in the arms of the infantile utopia. Because Abraham has rich parents and he’s privileged and he has everything material that anyone could ever want. And yet this voice comes to him. It’s the voice of his ancestors and God. And it says, go out away from what is secure and have the adventure of your life. And there’s a call. That’s the calling. And Abraham attends to that calling and moves out into the world to cataclysmic end, right? Because he encounters famine and slavery and the connivance of the aristocrats to steal his wife and battles with his in-laws. Like the whole terrible array of potential catastrophes in life present themselves to Abraham. But he maintains a sacrificial attitude, right? That’s emphasized throughout the text. Because every time Abraham embarks on a new adventure, starts something new, he rekindles his affiliation with what is highest and moves forward in faith. And that’s presented as part of a multi-generational vision. And so one of the things that I find very exciting about the potential union of something like evolutionary biology and deep theology is the idea that if we oriented ourselves to the highest good, which is, by the way, the message that’s in the Sermon on the Mount, we would see in that good the manifestation of the pathway that would enable us to live in a way that would ensure that respect for multi-generational continuity that you just spoke about as the soul of sustainability. And so what that means is that it’s the adoption of individual ethical responsibility in the highest manner that constitutes the proper pathway to sustainability and not top-down manipulation of the political, economic, and social systems to bring about some form of what plans stability, which we can’t do, right? We can’t do that. No, well, you mean you said the mere fact that you said earlier, it’s like if you look at China and Russia and India, first of all, we have absolutely no right to tell them that they can’t take the same pathway to wealth that we took. And that was going to involve the use of coal and it’s going to involve the use of fossil fuels. And we might as well bloody well just get used to that because that’s going to happen. And then maybe in the Western countries, we could be laying the groundwork for a nuclear revolution and show the pathway forward for these countries that will have to transition through fossil fuel. But there’s no bloody way we’re going to be able to do that by imposing our idiot utopian views on China and Russia and India. They’re just going to tell us to go to hell, which is what they should do.