Transcript from video:
Tyrants love it when you’re pessimistic. Trump, Musk, Putin, guys like that, they want you to think there’s no hope, that nothing can be done, that humanity is just rotten to its core. If the whole world just sucks and everybody’s bad, then you can’t blame Trump for being corrupt. Everyone’s corrupt.
Optimism, of course, has sort of grown corny. You’re afraid if you sound optimistic, you’ll sound naive or you’ll sound ignorant. But it’s actually the opposite: pessimism is the naive thing. If we can look at the present moment and acknowledge all the huge problems, look at the past and acknowledge all the brutality and tragedy, but still look forward and say, yeah, we can make it better. Is that naive, or is it necessary?
Pessimists don’t fight. Pessimists don’t organize. Pessimism is giving up. It’s surrender.
A lot of people are pessimistic about the future. A lot of people are pessimistic about AI. I’m actually here, at the T-Street offices, editing a movie I co-wrote and I’m directing. It’s a thriller about AI for Netflix. So I pay attention. I hear a lot of pessimism about AI.
But pessimism helps the AI tyrants too. If we believe that it’s just all going to go bad, that it’s just going to stay under the total control of these oligarchs, these tech bros, these billionaires in Silicon Valley. If we believe that, then we don’t strive to change it. Pessimism is perfect for those in power who just want to concentrate more and more power. And AI will concentrate more and more power unless we set it up differently. Unless we build systems that don’t just work in favor of those in power, but work in favor of everybody.
But building things requires optimism. Anytime you set out to build something, especially something ambitious, you have to have a certain amount of optimism. You have to believe we can do this. And if we can get away from the so-called techno-optimists, who I think are naive, there should be a kind of a genuine optimism. Something that still has some hope.
Here in the United States, we still live in some kind of democracy, even if that democracy is under threat. You want to know one of the biggest threats to our democracy? Pessimism. If we’re pessimistic and we say the elections are just going to be corrupt anyway, how do you think they’re going to go?
It requires something more than pessimism. It requires not giving up. To say: no, we’re going to stand up and fight over these next few months leading up to the midterms. We’re going to fight for these elections to bring the change that the country needs.
And if we’re able to vote new people into power, there is, I think, reason to be at least cautiously optimistic about changing course with how the future is going and how AI is going. There are a number of lawmakers that want to, for example, build out sensible regulations on this new, super powerful technology. There’s fair reason to believe that’s possible. But it won’t happen if we let ourselves wallow in pessimism.
