## Ben Yeoh interview Paraphrase: EA / 80K injunction to think very carefully about your career is good and I agree with the exercise. But it can lead you to be constantly questioning yourself, preventing full commitment. I worry it may be self-undermining in that way. I actually think that motivation and drive and pure commitment is very important for a career. "The extended Tyler Cowen universe." Good that I went to US at age 15. Could learn work ethic and disagreeableness before getting too set in his ways. Thinks infrastructure is overrated. "Maybe better infrastucture improves quality of life but that's not what it's about, I mean who cares. Is this going to advance the things that are really important in the long term? No. In fact again, I think there's some value to having things be a bit harsher. Because I think if you make the quality of life to good, if you make it too hedonistic, then what are people going to do, they're going to spend their 20s going out and hanging out and watching too much Netflix, you know the Berlin version of this is like going clubbing every day. I want people to be generative and have ideas and work hard and you know, build a great civilisation." Americans glorify Europe because they get to visit Europe with American incomes. Concern about EA: a bit homogeneous, a bit too lock and file, a bit lacking innovation, and also perhaps a bit European in the lack of ambition. I don't think that Tyler's "growth is good" model clearly works if you have only a 700-800 year time horizon due to very fragile world. Maybe we really should slow down, so we at least get 1500 years or something. Most of the potential value of the future is in the moderately fragile world scenario. Astronomical waste argument. What if we don't just slow the growth rate but actually go to zero or negative. Like a new Dark Age. I think this is a realistic possibility. A few specific mechanisms that suggest this may actually be happening. Most important is declining fertility rates. Leopolds paper: faster growth is better because we get rich earlier then we care about risk more earlier so we invest more to reduce risk earlier so the time of perils is shorter. Counter arguments to that: - Transition risk: really all the risk is concentrated in the transitions, it's not mostly an annual thing. - You might think political coordination is what really matters but it runs slower than economic time so can't keep up. Probabily of climate change being an x-risk very low compared to synthetic pandemic, AI, nuclear war. That said roughly on order of natural pandemic, think we should do a lot more on preparedness etc. This is really a debate on the margins. Maybe climate is already on course to be solved. Elon doing his thing, lots of young people in EU and US very politically engaged about it. If things got really bad we could do carbon capture. It would cost us a lot but there's an insurance mechanism there. GPT-3 might get to human level language within 5-10 years. So then we have computers that are as good at language as they are at math. Lots of uncertainty but median view is that it'll be a big deal like the internet but still just a tool. Not 20% a year growth rate etc. Decine in fertility rates is very underrated. Could lead to economic stagnation. Ideas are getting harder to find so its crucial that we can throw more people at the task of finding them. I think it we go big on fixing it now we could solve it. But if we wait, we could get pretty locked in.