PodcastWhere is humanity heading?
Here’s what he said:
The most complicated things in nature are not the biggest things, but living organisms. The complexity of nature is revealed on every scale and is a huge challenge.
We know from astronomy that we are almost certainly not the culmination of evolution. It’s taken four billion years for us to emerge, but the sun is less than halfway through its life […] And so there is a huge span of time during which post-human evolution can occur.
There is a long way to go before we can construct entities that are electronic, that can simulate the interaction of a human with the external world. So it may be possible one day, but that’s a long way to go.
I worry enormously that if we become very dependent as a society on networks of computers, as we already do for the electricity grid, air traffic control, and things like that, then we are extremely vulnerable to breakdowns.
We’ve got a trade-off between freedom, security, and privacy. We can’t have all three any more. This is crucial for our society, how we think, at least in the Western world, with liberties and freedom and privacy. So, we also have to rethink certain concepts as a society.
We can see evidence in the present universe of its early stages […] But we can’t understand the very beginning because, as you imagine extrapolating back, conditions get more and more extreme, denser and hotter, and for the very earliest stages, the conditions are beyond the range of any of our known theories […] So there’s a mystery right at the beginning, but I think we can say that we understand the broad outline of how the universe evolved.
