The Temporal Copernican Principle

what are the odds that you live in the most important period of human existence?

Daniel Immerwahr throws a little cold tepid water on the latest diatribes of Yuval Noah Harari, an immensely successful writer and to me straightforwardly a charlatan. Harari has effectively monetized a few very marketable qualities for a writer, principally a) constantly telling readers that they and we are on the brink of earth-shattering, humanity-altering changes in the imminent future while b) expressing both those changes and their imminence in sufficiently vague terms that he’ll never be proven wrong. Lately, Harari’s interest has (of course) been in AI, insisting as so many do that contemporary systems primarily used to generate B- essays for lazy college students and logos for fantasy football teams are, somehow, going to orchestrate the most consequential revolution in the history of our planet, and soon. This has become a very common claim, inescapable, but few who make it have Harari’s history of relentless, breathless hype-mongering.

What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let’s hope that it keeps going for awhile - we’ll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of human life. So let’s just throw out 300,000 years as the span of human existence, even though it could easily be 500,000 or a million or more. Harari's lifespan, if he's lucky, will probably top out at about 100 years. So: what are the odds that Harari’s lifespan overlaps with the most important period in human history, as he believes, given those numbers? That it overlaps with a particularly important period of human history at all? Even if we take the conservative estimate for the length of human existence of 300,000 years, that means Harari’s likely lifespan is only about .33% of the entirety of human existence. Isn’t assuming that this .33% is somehow particularly special a very bad assumption, just from the basis of probability? And shouldn’t we be even more skeptical given that our basic psychology gives us every reason to overestimate the importance of our own time?

Yes, it’s true that there’s more human beings living now than at any other time in human history. But the degree to which we’re concentrated in the present is in fact widely overestimated, thanks to old wives tales like “there’s fewer people who have lived and died at this point than those who are currently living.” This is orders of magnitudes wrong; only about 7% of the humans who have existed in history exist now. Also, claims that we know that we’re already in an especially important time right now, technologically, simply don’t hold water. Those graphs people throw around showing human technological or economic development, where the lines are flat for 10,000 years and then sudden skyrocket in the 1800s, are misleading because their scales don’t allow for us to clearly see the contemporary reality - that this period of immense technological and economic growth declined precipitously starting around 50ish years ago, and our recent developments pale in comparison to both quality of life improvements and economic growth of the past. The value associated with improvements to fossil fuel extraction, electrification, modern plumbing and sanitation and hygiene, drug development, motorized vehicles, germ theory, flight, telecommunications, etc, that were born from 1830ish to 1970ish are just immensely more consequential in human terms than the iPhone.

In cosmology, the Copernican Principle states that “humans, on the Earth or in the Solar System, are not privileged observers of the universe.” This principle is named after Copernicus because he was one of the first and most influential to challenge the millennia-old assumption that the Earth was the center of the universe. This assumption was primarily religious in character but also drew on a basic bias of human psychology: because our consciousness is the mechanism through which we understand everything, and thus our selves are always foremost in our perception, we are therefore naturally inclined to think that we must be special. The Copernican Principle says, no we aren’t - we have every reason to believe that we live in a largely-irrelevant backwater in the vast sweep of ordinary, unremarkable space. This has various important aspects for cosmology, as well as for the YouTube video essayist community when they’re trying to figure out if we’re secretly surrounded by cloaked Klingon Birds of Prey.

I would call for a Temporal Copernican Principle, an admonition that commentators on modern issues, especially AI, operate from the general assumption that we are not occupying a particularly important time period within human history. (To be clear, the ordinary Copernican Principle also has a temporal element, but that’s invoked in cosmological terms while I’m interested in human terms and a human timeline.) We should always operate from a stance of extreme skepticism that we live in a particularly important human moment, and especially when that claim is operating not on a level of politics or government or ordinary technological growth but on the level of civilization-altering, reality-overhauling change, as the AI maximalists so often endorse. Of course it’s not the case that we could never occupy a special time. But that would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence and an extraordinary effort to overcome our natural presentism and chauvinism, which are nearly universal and quite potent.

Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be. Because in 25 years, and in 50, and in 500, it’s almost certainly not the case that people will look back and say, ah yes, 2024/the 2020s/the first half of the 21st century was a key inflection point in human history. We’re all just part of a vast human mass, with no control over when we were born. Dust thou art, you guys, and to dust thou shalt return.