It’s Impossible to Predict the Future Growth of Knowledge

Stephen Hawking famously said, “People are nothing special; people are chemical scum on a very typical planet orbiting an average star in the outer suburbs of a very typical galaxy which is one among hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.”

This vision of what people are and of what the planet Earth is, it's true in a trivial sense, but it misses the point that people are a hub of a kind. We are, so far as we know, the sole place in the universe which is creating knowledge—an open-ended stream of knowledge that could transform the rest of reality in the same way that gravity is able to pull that galaxy into a particular shape.

Knowledge, in the future, will be able to shape the course of the planet, the solar system, and eventually the galaxy. We will have this profound impact upon everything that we can see around us, and there's nothing that the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, or even the laws of biology can predict about what is going to happen in the future.

The attempt to predict the future growth of knowledge is impossible; that's the nature of knowledge. Because knowledge creation is genuinely an act of creation, it is bringing something into existence that wasn't there prior. If you could predict it, you would have invented it already.

A lot of our deeply pessimistic worldviews come from a straight-line linear extrapolation of negative trends while ignoring positive trends. Positive trends mostly come through creativity and knowledge creation, and it's inherently unpredictable.

So every generation has its doomsayers and Cassandras: the modern Malthusians who say, “On this trajectory, we're all going to die.” They are very popular for the same reason that zombie movies and vampire movies are popular. But the reality is that they cannot predict what we're going to do in the future that is going to improve our quality of life and save us from inevitable ruin.

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