Thread by @IntuitMachine

OMG! This is a very sad clip for me. I was inspired by Carl Sagan's Cosmos when I was growing up. I just realized that decades of us have grown up without the same inspiration. They instead were inspired by an anti-science agenda.

If Carl Sagan is so critically important to the survival of civilization then why is it that we have so few Carl Sagans?

Because present civilization selects out the Carl Sagans of this world. Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard due to (1) his interests were too broad across many areas (2) his well-publicized scientific advocacy was perceived as borrowing the ideas of others. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

To be an advocate of science you have to be interdisciplinary. To be an advocate of science you must promote your ideas to the public. These two in combination is a recipe for career sabotage in science.

Sagan's cosmos aired on public television. It was the most widely watched series on American public TV until the 1990. The show was seen by 500m people in 60 countries. Where are the Cosmos equivalents of today? Perhaps locked in a paywalled cable channel (i.e. Nat Geo).

The 1980s were a very important time in that there were fewer media options and the world could come together with a common understanding. It is very different today with an overabundance of media. People are confused with information overload.

It does not help that science is so siloed and specialized that a unified perspective of human-aligned science has not come to the general public's awareness. What is understood as science is a cold mechanistic perspective of reality that is incompatible with humans.

Cosmos introduced the Fermi paradox and the notion of the great filter. In the 1980s the US and the Soviets were in a cold war. It was obvious that Carl Sagan's ideas were extremely relevant for the survival of the species.

What was not realized though was the danger of anti-science and collective ignorance. In the US, religion emerged as a counterbalance against the growth of technology and the changes in culture. Cosmos was an alternative worldview that competed against religion.

The two questions that I thought were important when I was young were (1) is there other intelligent life in the universe and (2) can we invent other intelligent life on earth. Despite wanting to be an astronomer as a child, I chose instead 2 as my research agenda.

Cosmos wasn't a series just about space, it was a series about biology and space. It was a series about evolution. AI is actually similar, it's not just about computation. It is about biology and computation. It's about evolution.

This is what we as a society have failed to do. We have failed to explain why AI is important. Instead, we have invested instead in a narrative that AI is deadly. It's almost like saying that we shouldn't search for extraterrestrial life because aliens likely may also be deadly.

But as Cosmos has shown us, the great filter exists not because it's an external reality. But rather it exists because we ourselves are our worse enemy. AI is dangerous because we have structured our economy in a manner that makes it dangerous.

In Cosmos, the great filter was the possibility that the US and Soviets would engage in a thermonuclear war. Destroying all of civilization but with the exception of the cockroaches. It was obviously clear that the political division of the world was the root of the problem.

AI is similar in that the root of the problem exists with our existing institutions. It is the global economy that is now the problem. The root cause of climate change and the problem of AI alignment is related to how we have structured our medieval institutions.

Where I have to quote Sagan "We might get away with it for a while but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is gonna blow up in our faces."

Humans continually are able to increasingly wield god-like powers. Yet we are stuck with paleolithic brains and medieval institutions. Unless we can frame civilization differently, we are doomed to carrying a very dangerous mixture that becomes more deadly with each passing day.

But why then do we not use these new god-like powers to solve the problems of humanity? We can only change our paleolithic brains through education. Abandoning medieval institutions leads to replacing existing hierarchical technologies replacing with fair decentralized ones.