EA - The Most Important Century: The Animation by Writer

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Most Important Century: The Animation, published by Writer on July 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a linkpost for the Rational Animations' video based on The Most Important Century sequence of posts by Holden Karnofsky.Below, the whole script of the video.Matthew Barnett has written most of it. Several paragraphs were written by Ajeya Cotra, during the feedback process. Holden Karnofsky has also reviewed the script and made suggestions. I made some light edits and additions.Matthew has also made some additions that weren't in the original sequence by Holden.Crossposted to LessWrong.------------------------------------------------------------------ A very unusual time period The celebrated science fiction author and chemistry professor Isaac Asimov once cataloged a history of inventions and scientific discoveries throughout all of human history. While incomplete, his effort still reveals something intriguing about our current era. Out of the 694 pages in Asimov’s book, 553 pages documented inventions and discoveries since 1500, even though his book starts in 4 million BC. In other words, throughout human history, most scientific innovation has come relatively recently, within only the last few hundred years. Other historical trends paint a similar picture. For example, here’s a chart of world population since 10,000 BC. For nearly all of human history up until quite recently, there weren’t very many people on Earth. It took until about 1800 for the population to reach one billion people, and just two hundred years later – a blink of an eye compared to how long our species has been around – Earth reached six billion people. Economic historian Bradford DeLong attempted to piece together the total world economic production over the last million years. By its nature, his reconstruction of the historical data is speculative, but the rough story it tells is consistent with the aforementioned historical trends in population and technology. In the millenia preceding the current era, economic growth – by which we mean growth in how much valuable stuff humanity as a whole can produce – was extremely slow. Now, growth is much faster. Bradford DeLong’s data provides historians a quantitative account of what they already know from reading narratives written in the distant past. For nearly all of human history, people lived similarly to the way their grandparents lived. Unlike what we expect today, most people did not see major changes in living standards, technology, and economic production over their lifetimes. To be sure, people were aware that empires rose and fell, infectious disease ravaged communities, and wars were fought. Individual humans saw profound change in their own lives, through the births and deaths of those they loved, cultural change, and migration. But the idea of a qualitatively different mode of life, with electricity, computers and the prospect of thermonuclear war – that’s all come extremely recently on historical timescales. As new technologies were developed, quality of life shot up in various ways. For ten year olds, life expectancy was once under 60 all over the world. Now, in many nations, a ten year old can expect to live to the age of 80. With progress in automating food production, fewer people now are required to grow food. As a result, our time has been freed to pursue different activities, for example, going to school. And it’s not just technology that changed. In the past, people took for granted some social institutions that had existed for thousands of years, such as the monarchy and chattel slavery. In the midst of the industrial revolution, these institutions began to vanish. Writing in 1763, the eminent British economist Adam Smith wrote that slavery “takes place in all societies at their beginning, and proceeds from t...